Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
It’s been years since I rode in a yellow school bus, the kind that bounces three feet in the air every time it hits a bump, the kind with cracked vinyl seats and a crotchety driver, the kind that can’t stop except with a lurch; and lurch we did when the driver stopped the bus in front of the main building at the Glengrove Nature Preserve.
In John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, one of those fictions, called kaNsas, tells the story of how a grad student from an unnamed Mathematics department meets a grad student from a similarly unnamed English department.
On Friday I did something I haven’t done in a while: I went to church. I’m a lapsed church-goer. Over the past couple years, I’ve attended a grand total of five religious services (not including funerals which typically are an insult to the term “religious”).
Sometimes, book reviewing carries risks. You’ve already seen how one negative review resulted in a threatening email from the author along with a puzzling photo of mating lions. But that’s nothing compared to the next review. After I shared my thoughts about Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, I was contacted by the FBI. Seriously.
A mummy pulls into a gas station and says: “Fill it up.” The attendant steps around to the driver’s side, unscrews the cap, and starts pumping gas. When he’s done, he says to the mummy: “That’ll be fifty bucks.” The mummy is annoyed and says: “I said to fill it up. You’ve only done half…
It seems that every week plays host to its very own censorship controversy. Last week, it was an American publisher proposing to replace Huckleberry Finn’s 219 instances of the word “nigger” with the word “slave”. This week it’s the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council nixing the word “faggot” in the Dire Straights 1985 single, “Money For Nothing”.
Toronto’s new mayor, Rob Ford, wants his city to be a graffiti-free zone. Back in October, when he was still just a candidate, he spoke to the Board of Trade about how he wanted Toronto to be clean and safe, how he wanted Toronto to sparkle for the 2015 Pan Am games.
To the extent that we think about themes in contemporary writing (assuming themes even exist outside high school English classes) one of the most familiar themes to trouble the contemporary reader’s brain is alienation.
NewNorthByNorthWest Inc., a publisher of literary classics for use in secondary school curriculum, has announced that a new edition of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in the works and is expected to be available in time for the 2011/12 school year. A staple of English curriculum even a generation ago, Shakespeare’s tale of love and usury has appeared in fewer and fewer English programs as parent teacher associations increasingly raise objections to the work.
There’s a book you’ll never persuade me to read. Maybe you know it. A man has a stroke that leaves all his faculties intact but paralyses him except for one eye which he can blink. Using his blinks to indicate letters, he dictates an entire book — his memoir. Understandably, it’s a slim volume. After all, the man has had to measure his words.
Dear Mr. Disney, I went to the local movie theatre and saw your latest offering called Tron Legacy. Part way through, I had to pick the wax out of my ears. Did I hear what I thought I heard? Did you have your main character, played by Jeff Bridges (the older one), say: “Information wants to be free?” WTF?
Barney’s Version, this afternoon. Yesterday, I finished rereading Mordecai Richler’s novel. Now, I’m sitting here with a glass of 14 year old Oban single malt scotch whisky and am toying with the idea of lighting a Montecristo while I reflect on the differences between the film and the novel.
It gets better. At least that’s what Dan Savage says, and he’s persuaded millions of people to repeat it often enough that it sounds true. He—and they—and I—want teens and twenty-somethings who are struggling with issues of sexuality and identity to bear up under the burden of loneliness and hatred; we want them to look beyond the immediate fear of bullying to a time in the not-too-distant future when they will feel free enough to be themselves in the open.
I’m meeting a friend for lunch. She used to work for the city as an employability specialist. The way I understand it, her job was to help homeless people develop the skills they’d need to get back to work. My impression is that her job was overwhelming. A cup of resources. An ocean of need.