LONDON, ONTARIO – Having stretched myself quite fruitfully with my reading of The Divine Comedy on the occasion of Dante’s 750th birthday, I more recently decided it was time to finally immerse myself in the writings of St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) and read the two works for which he is best known, Confessions and The City of God. If you require a significant milestone to jog your historical reading, then by all means take advantage of this 1665th anniversary of his birth to acquaint yourself with this incomparably influential ‘Doctor of the Church’. After sacred scripture and documents produced by various ecumenical councils, no authority is cited so frequently in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as St. Augustine.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Some forty-five years ago I impulsively picked up a book on a remainder table at the East London branch of Robert’s Holmes Book Shop for the princely sum of 99 cents. I’d never heard of its author before (or since) and its utterly bewildering title, Inglorious Wordsworths, was the product of some cross-referential convolution that soared clear over top of my then 20 year-old head.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Watching the Canadian film Whale Music at the old New Yorker Cinema many moons ago, I had one of those sobering moments of crystallization when I suddenly recognized the depth of contempt our society harbours for Christians who won’t shut up about their faith. Adapted from Paul Quarrington’s comic novel and featuring a killer soundtrack by The Rheostatics, Whale Music was loosely inspired by the creative, psychological and marital travails of The Beach Boys’ resident genius, Brian Wilson.

LONDON, ONTARIO – When Elvis Presley died in 1977 at the age of 42, sitting on a Graceland toilet in dyspeptic agony after ingesting one too many deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, his imitators all of a sudden went from occasional, freakish novelty acts to entertainment mainstays. With the great original prototype dead and buried, pretending to be Elvis (if you did it well enough) could be the making of a fairly lucrative performing career. It would, however, be a career that came with a soul-threatening, Faustian catch.

“I sometimes pant a little in my efforts to keep up – and as for ‘next week’, ‘next year’ – they are in God’s pocket as Gran used to say.”
– Nella Last, in the diary she kept for Mass Observation, 14 July, 1943

LONDON, ONTARIO – I’ve always had a special place in my heart for stories and accounts of how the British people coped during the German bombing raids of World War II. What attracts me to such narratives is the wild and yet oddly reassuring disparity that exists – not just between the diabolical inhumanity of what was being hurled their way and the no-nonsense manner in which these would-be victims resisted their annihilation and got on with their lives as best they could – but between the accounts that are given of that time by those who governed and by those who were governed.