En route to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies for a work retreat, he pursues enRoute, the in-flight magazine of Air Canada out of curiosity, and is surprised to see it filled with literary writing. This is what he copies into the note book he carries around in his pocket, starting with this very relevant gem:

"Spa V at Hotel Victoria offers a blackberry reflexology massage for the Blackberry addict"

Shyam Selvadurai attends the Annual Festival de la Correspondence in Grignan, France, and muses on what we might be losing as our epistolary habits shift from ink and paper to email:

“But apart from what is lost in historical value, what do we lose personally by not writing letters anymore? In this turret, as the cello concert gets underway, the answer comes to me. From rereading my own correspondence, I have met a self almost forgotten.”

Todd Swift is the world's only poetry impresario, who brings his impresario's touch that includes bands drinks performance artists and sword swallowers to your regular poetry reading. The idea is to turn poetry reading into a mass spectacle. The only question is his mind is if poetry turns to spectacle where would Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop fit?

Digital story telling may meet our need to “resocalize” somewhat but nothing will ever beat huddling up to a wrinkled grandmother with her hand caressing your back as she tells you another story - an old memory turned into a tale or a some tale from the rich storehouse of mythology, such the one on why the moon waxes and vanes - told in the dark

I had gotten back in touch with a girl (who once bore the burnt of my musings) earlier today, and she invited me to come out of my hotel-burrow to meet her and her husband. Given that I was cooped up all afternoon in my room, I had no idea that a mini snowfall was being brewed outside by the weather gods as I stepped out of the doors.

In the first instance, I was semi-leery of walking out into the steadily falling snow but when I returned to my room and put on my -20 C snow shoes expressly purchased for such weather conditions, I felt more confident as I wandered out into the windless snowfall. Few things I noticed or discovered as I was churning through the snow: the music of snow falling, the beauty of color white, the way other pedestrians loom in and out of the gray distances as if they were boats coming and leaving a harbor enveloped with mist.

Then as I got closer to my destination, the snow intensified, and I walked down a wrong street off Bloor, for a mile or so into a steady wind, which whipped snow off the street into the face, which obviosuly hurt like a bitch. And my glasses started getting crusted over with this white matter, and I realized I was pretty much random walking through snow drifts with a minor panic ringing in my ears.

I can now finally understand the Jack London-ish adage which roughly says it is not the cold which kills you as much as the panic that precedes it. At ths point, I took shelter into a helpfully placed public telephone booth and started Googling the address on my Blackberry. Of course by the time I got my bearings, my bare wet hands froze, and putting them back into the gloves involved these operations with the mouth.

Thankfully, I got to the meeting place without any further unintended detours, had some great beer and food with two very engaging conversationalists, always worth most snowy struggles, and walked back here, to my desk, on an absolutely still and snowbound Bloor Street. There is poetry in this but I don't have a muse tonight into whose ear I can whisper some of the fifty-two names (few which I looked up now: massak, mauja, qaniit) Eskimos have for snow*.

Goodnight.

* Even if this is a journalistic or a literary cliché, it is a lovely cliché.