by Wex | Apr 8, 2014 | News
I’ve long been delighted by the fact that, along with Maria Muldaur, Barry White and Syracuse’s Sam Young, I share a birthday with Maurice Chevalier and H.L. Mencken. I’ve long liked to think of myself as a sort of combination of these latter two...
by Wex | Apr 2, 2014 | News
I can’t think of a better guide to adult behaviour than the beginning of Sam Spade’s explanation of why he’s going to turn Brigid O’Shaughnessy over to the cops in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s dialogue is so...
by Wex | Apr 1, 2014 | News
There aren’t too many people who can be said to have put a whole new spin on kvetching, but Eddie Lawrence, who passed away last week at the age of ninety-five, was unquestionably one of them. Only briefly as well-known as he should have been, Lawrence deserved...
by Wex | Mar 26, 2014 | News
I spent far too long last night listening to a self-described “cultural catalyst” tell me that, since Yiddish is irrelevant, I’ve wasted my entire life. Same thing, apparently, for Lester Young fans, too. Kenneth Rexroth’s deathless put-down...
by Wex | Mar 25, 2014 | News
Back in graduate school, I used to enjoy tormenting a friend (who’s grown up to be Professor Alan Filewod of the University of Guelph) by opening any of the dozens of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks that littered his rooms at Massey College, reading...
by Wex | Mar 19, 2014 | News
The fourteenth book of Augustine of Hippo’s De Civitate Dei, (The City of God) is largely concerned with Augustine’s attempts to prove that such sex as Adam and Eve enjoyed before eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was entirely free of lust and that...
