The original mono recordings, now digitally remastered

I've posted, at long last, my back-catalogue of essays, magazine pieces and longer-form newspaper articles, going back nearly twenty years. Some of these were written on a typewriter, a useful data-input device (no external power block, built-in printer) which younger readers can ask their parents about. They're still in pretty rough shape -- I'll have to look up the publication dates, for example -- and in many cases have not aged well. But there you are: neither have I. What took me so long? Just the thought of having to organize and link them all, not to mention converting them into some sort of browser-friendly format. (They were in RTF, which my browser can read but others can't.) Fortunately, I found a couple of small apps that would do each of these tasks, albeit with some glitches. (The html converter seems to forget to close italics after it opens them, for example.) A sobering note: Several of the magazines I used to write for -- The Idler, The Next City, Cité Libre -- are now dead. I don't think it had anything to do with me, but the pattern is suspicious, isn't it? Anyway, have a read. Just click on Essays at the top of the page. They should be searchable in a few days, once Google has spidered them. POSTSCRIPT: I used to write all my university essays on an old pounder. As I was too lazy to write a rough copy, every one of them was perforce a final draft. Direct to disk, we called it. And as I could not be bothered to correct any mistakes in the typing -- typing "k" to start a word, for example, rather than "l" -- I would instead have to think of another word that did start with k. Sometimes the essay would veer off in a completely different direction by this serendipitous process. One virtue of composing on a typewriter, versus a computer, is precisely that it forces you to compose the sentence in your head -- which makes for clearer, shorter sentences. With a word processor, by contrast, you can just sail off into the sentence with no idea where it is headed. The results sometimes show. Something of the same explains the success of Lennon and McCartney as composers. I think I saw one of them say this in an interview somewhere: Because they could not read or write music, they had to be able to remember the tune if they wanted to work on it the next day. So the tunes that survived were, by definition, the ones that were most memorable. The computer obviously has its uses. So does writing longhand. Writing is an associative, intuitive process, and sometimes a simple change in technology will unblock the thoughts where nothing else will. I don't know why: it may be the emotional associations with longhand -- we still write out personal letters -- or it may just be the pace and movement. Could even have something to do with the circulation. But it works. MORE TO COME: I still have to put up my columns from the last half of 2004. Plus there seem to be a number missing from the 2002 collection. And some more comprehensible system of headings for my Southam columns is clearly in order. Plus if I'm feeling very energetic someday I'll post my editorials for the Financial Post and Globe and Mail: there are hundreds of them...