nouspique.com

The G20 and the Middle Class Novel

It’s been a year since the Toronto G20 fiasco with its billion dollars of security, 19,000 police officers, secret laws, smashed windows, mass arrests, lack of accountability, etc.  As a witness to much of this nonsense, and blessed with my very own illegal search (which I’ll use to regale my children and grandchildren for years [...]

Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass

I’ve set up a new tag, Dzanc, for books from the small press, Dzanc Books.  After reading Matt Bell’s How They Were Found (reviewed here), I signed up for the Dzanc Books ebook club.  For $50, you get 5 titles up front plus a 6-month subscription for a grand total of 11 ebooks.  First up [...]

Private Label Rights Sludge

Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing.  The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights.  I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the water the Morlocks drink in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – an underground toxic sludge.  Content farms crank out articles in a [...]

Why Do Journalists Hate Tom MacMaster?

It’s fascinating to observe what counts as news.  Posts on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog counted as news when they were sensational.  When they sold papers.  Amina’s posts ceased to count as news when they ceased to be factual.  A different news rushed in to fill the vacuum:  Amina had been created by Tom [...]

Review: Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor

Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs.  I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium.  I feel bound by an unwritten contract:  I blog Toronto books in [...]

7 Online Literary Journals You Should Follow

The way we encounter words is changing daily. To call this shift in our literary landscape “tectonic” understates the situation. It feels more like a collision with an asteroid. Clouds of ash have darkened the sky. Mass extinctions will follow. And, of course, new life will arise even in the midst of the destruction. We [...]

Review: Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross

This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks.  Previously, I’ve recommended ebooks by Jiri Kajane, Laura Ellen Scott, and Matt Bell.  Here’s another:  Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross.  It’s a chapbook of seven short stories, available as an ebook from Smashwords [...]

Paul Quarrington’s Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall

Imagine you are an inmate of the Cahuenga Federal Penitentiary awaiting a hanging (not your own) while your mother, a religious zealot with a sizable following, protests outside the prison walls, and the warden, a great admirer of your work (you have starred in numerous 2-reeler silent films, including Bald Mountain Men whose title belies [...]

Parent Seeks to Ban The Wars, by Timothy Findley

According to the Walkerton Herald-Times, the parent of a grade-12 student has filed a complaint with the Bluewater District School Board calling for removal of Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, from the curriculum.  According to the article, Carolyn Waddell, a professional counselor, alleges that there are parts of Findley’s novel which are “depraved”.  She states [...]

Did Doris Lessing Influence David Foster Wallace?

Did Doris Lessing influence David Foster Wallace?  The question occurred to me as I read Lessing’s Shikasta, the first in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series of “space fiction” novels.  Shikasta is a planet subject to Canopian “supervision”.  Canopus is a galactic empire.  Their rivals are the Sirians, but the real thorn in their flesh [...]

Smashwords, Mark Coker and the Gears of Big Publishing

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine.  This is a reference to Mario Savio‘s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech.  In the case [...]

If Copyright Lawyers Wrote the Rules for Baseball

The Anthropocene Age: The Drowned World & J.G. Ballard

According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent geological record.  Naturally, the first order of business is to give our recklessness a name.  What strikes me most [...]

Dream Sequence #2 – The Litigation Lawyer

Unlike my Dream Sequence #1 (The Lost Bowling Alley of Atlantis), this is someone else’s dream, which I am mining for fun and profit.  Yesterday, I was walking down St. George Street, on my way to pick up a book I had ordered, when a man dashed from a doorway and joined me.  He was [...]

The Most Unlikely Movie Scene Ever

The most unlikely movie scene ever in the history of Hollywood (at least in my humble opinion) has to be the closing scene of Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on a short story by Stephen King.  Maybe you remember the film.  It’s a quest/coming-of-age story about four boys in Smalltown, U.S.A. circa [...]