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Suddenly, Etgar Keret Knocks on the Door
Etgar Keret has a new collection of short stories out and it’s called Suddenly, A Knock At The Door. They are great stories. You can read all about them on other web sites. You can learn about how they combine the ordinary and the bizarre in the same sentence. You can read about how short [...]
Continue reading...Disaster Capitalism as a Publishing Business Model
26. April 2012
Since the rise of Amazon, the Kindle, ibooks, the iPad, etc., it’s hardly news that the publishing industry is struggling to cope with radical change. The latest, and perhaps most ludicrous, is an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Apple & the Big 6 U.S. publishers alleging that their agency model is, [...]
Continue reading...Doing Violence to Denis Johnson
25. April 2012
Denis Johnson is a dirty realist. I imagine a homeless guy pushing a grocery cart full of empties and muttering it to himself—dirty realist, dirty realist, dirty realist—as if Denis Johnson had done him wrong. A dirty realist writes about mid-western white trash junkies who flirt with violence and describe it in first person narratives. [...]
Continue reading...Titanic, Cats and Karma
18. April 2012
I went last night to see James Cameron’s Titanic in Imax 3D. At least a couple times, I found myself dodging things that appeared to leap from the screen. There were the ice bergs, of course, and there were Kate Winslet’s tits. I use the word ‘tits’ deliberately. It seems more appropriate than boobs or [...]
Continue reading...Advertising & Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying
16. April 2012
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.” So says George Orwell. I don’t know where I first saw the quote. Maybe on Twitter. Maybe on someone else’s blog. Wherever it was, I immediately snapped it up for myself and used it in defense of my decision not to monetize my blog. Isn’t [...]
Continue reading...My Struggle With Sexuality
9. April 2012
I’m puzzled by the warning that appears before a lot of TV shows: The following program contains scenes of violence, language and sexuality; parental guidance is advised. The violence warning I understand. The violence is the stuff that hurts people. The language warning is more obtuse. Of course the program contains language. The program’s actors [...]
Continue reading...Review: Cataclysm Baby, by Matt Bell
4. April 2012
I was present at the birth of both my children. To bastardize R.E.M., it was the end of my world as I knew it. Both children arrived via C-section. More than two decades later, my wife still complains that I gave her no support through the deliveries because I was so mesmerized by the surgery. [...]
Continue reading...Learn to Write a Novel in Just 2 1/2 Hours
2. April 2012
I found a flyer in my mailbox advertising a piano lesson. Not piano lessons. But a single lesson. It said I could learn to play the piano in 2 ½ hours. The flyer made me angry. My parents had forced me to start piano lessons when I was seven, but they didn’t send me to [...]
Continue reading...Where did you read your favourite books?
29. March 2012
I have discovered that I develop strong associations between the books I read and the places where I read them. I don’t know why, but it helps me remember my books, especially the books I’ve read in distinctive places. Here is a sampling of books and the places I’ve read them, offered in roughly chronological [...]
Continue reading...Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins
31. January 2012
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 [...]
Continue reading...Did Julian Barnes Invent Google?
18. January 2012
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 [...]
Continue reading...10 Reasons to Like Li’l Bastard by David McGimpsey
10. January 2012
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 [...]
Continue reading...Murder in the Cathedral
2. November 2011
No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive). My aim is to take [...]
Continue reading...Hogtown – my gift to the Occupy Movement
14. October 2011
Toronto had a dry run for the Occupy Movement. It was called the G20 Summit. There’s the same feel to things now as last year. Frustration. Disbelief. Anger. Overwhelm. A confrontational rhetoric that threatens to explode. A painfully disengaged middle class more inclined to sidle up to power than trouble itself with issues or long-term [...]
Continue reading...Thanksgiving: a turkey of a holiday
8. October 2011
I took this photo at the petting zoo in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. This is one ugly creature. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have [...]
Continue reading...New eFiction from David Allan Barker
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9. May 2012
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