Author Archives | David Barker

David Barker - who has written 816 posts on nouspique.com.


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Flash Fiction: Old School

Friday, February 3, 2012

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George found it amusing, Martha’s attachment to old technologies. There was the grandfather clock in the living room with its big brass pendulum and the Latin inscription on its face—tempus fugit—or as Giuseppe the barber liked to say: Time, she fly. There was the old electric typewriter and pack of postage stamps at her work [...]

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Cage Match: Jonathan Franzen vs. Ursula Franklin

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

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It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice. And so … in this [...]

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Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

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Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum. Redshifting is the opposite; it happens when the source of [...]

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Poem: There’s a thread runs through everything

Friday, January 27, 2012

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There’s a thread runs through everything and a seamstress with a camel the size of a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eye that worries me, but the other end, a steel point that runs me through like the pin the entomologists use to fix their bugs to the mounting board. The Fates don’t clip [...]

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Graffiti Mural Time-Lapse in Victoria

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

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I recognize this wall from a visit to Victoria last September. At the end of the video, the camera pans the wall and you can see a face by the KWOTA crew on the side of the building. That tipped me off that it’s near Douglas and Bay St. There used to be circus themed [...]

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Can Farm Animal Pasta be Vegan?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

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Friends who know about my intolerance to gluten (and my love of irony) brought over a box of gluten free Farm Animals Rice & Corn Vegetable Pasta which is a vegan product. But is it really vegan? Once you cook it up and put it in a bowl, aren’t you eating animals? And how do [...]

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Short Story: Harlan’s Finger

Friday, January 20, 2012

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The vacuum cleaner wasn’t working. After three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the [...]

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Pico Iyer, Multiculturalism and Toronto

Thursday, January 19, 2012

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I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era. To my chagrin, I discovered that Iyer’s is not a new voice; [...]

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Did Julian Barnes Invent Google?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

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Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer. The novel starts as a straight-up realistic account of a woman named Jean Serjeant [...]

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Box of Books

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

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While walking my dog, I passed a box of books by the curbside. As is my habit, I paused to scan the titles and three caught my attention, not because I want to read them, but because my heart goes out to anyone who needs to. All three concern bereavement for the death of an [...]

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My Neighbour’s Christmas Tree

Monday, January 16, 2012

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Early last year, I had posted a photo of a neighbour’s lawn done with astro turf. The grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence, even in winter. However, he has put out a real Christmas tree for the chipper this year. I would have thought a man who has an astro [...]

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Thanks a shitload, Karen Armstrong

Friday, January 13, 2012

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Thanks a shitload, Karen Armstrong. I mean, I’m happy for your diagnosis and all. I mean, not knowing is worse than floating in medical limbo. I get the stigma of epilepsy: how people can be cruel, even smart ones, with puppy words that never bite, at least not until they grow teeth. “No Karen,” she [...]

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My iPhone Addiction

Thursday, January 12, 2012

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During the Christmas holidays, I had my comeuppance. I had to face my family and confess that I had lost my iPhone. Two weeks earlier, while moving my daughter home from university for the holidays, she lost her Blackberry. She hadn’t even owned it for a month and it vanished in the parking lot of [...]

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Writing advice from Bo Catlett (Elmore Leonard)

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

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Almost two years ago, The Guardian published 10 Rules of Writing from Elmore Leonard. Leonard is famous for his allergy to adverbs and his advice in The Guardian includes the usual harangue. But Leonard goes further and issues a fatwa against the word “suddenly” and against adverbs that specifically modify dialogue words like “said”. Being [...]

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10 Reasons to Like Li’l Bastard by David McGimpsey

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

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and by “Like” I mean “Like” as in feel great affection or affinity for, as opposed to “Like” as in click an up-turned thumb on a Facebook page. 1. The titles. Many of McGimpsey’s “chubby sonnets” should not be read without first pausing to savour the title. For example: “Song for Cardigans and Assholes.” Or [...]

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