“…while always travelling seriously, he was always travelling light.” (Williams, 1971, p. 88) The serious traveller who always travelled light was George Orwell; writing in 1971, socialist critic Raymond Williams unravels Orwell’s multifaceted history and reveals aspects of his life and work I had not known about, in under 100 informative pages. I took the […]
A village in rural West Bengal, India, where as early as February the temperature goes up to 35 degrees Celsius or so every day, with no prospect of rain until April or May, is about as far from a Montreal winter as one can imagine. It’s where I have just spent four weeks working with […]
One of the highlights of our academic August here in the critical sociolinguistics world in Montreal was the LPP2022 (Language Policy and Planning) conference, hosted in hybrid mode at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. BILD readers had a foretaste of that last week, when we started posting again for the 2022-2023 academic year, The […]
This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text. The wall was the wall of the waiting room in the Winnipeg CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) station, sometime in the 1890s, perhaps. Here is the […]
…or, how is translanguaging like macaroni? “Yankee Doodle” is, for me, the most American of patriotic songs, despite its ridiculous lyrics (“stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”? Really?). South of the border, the Yankee Doodling this week has been on or about presidential ballots—a tangled mess of spaghetti still on the […]
