I used to think the words for book and freedom were related. That’s not so far-fetched. Liber is the Latin word for book. Looks a lot like liberty, no?
Category: Head
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
Sampling Joshua Cohen’s Witz
I’ve finished part III of Joshua Cohen’s Witz, no small feat given that I’m now more than 300 pages into an 800 page novel in which 1 page of Witz represents 2 pages of any other self-respecting novel. In other words, it’s a long book.
Things Fall Apart when white liberals read Chinua Achebe
Here I am, doing my well-intentioned liberal-white-guy best to discover other voices, and (adhering to my resolution to read at least one African author each month) I start with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
The Social Significance of a Humungous Public Funeral for a Fallen Toronto Police Officer
Toronto has just witnessed the largest police funeral in Canada’s history, with 12,000 in attendance and a 2 1/2 hour procession through the downtown core to mark the death of Sgt. Ryan Russell who was killed a week ago when a man ran barefoot through the snow, seized an idling snowplow, and went for a joyride through the city streets.
Story: Four Billion Year Old Water
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.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in John Gould’s Kilter
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.
Resisting Church
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”).
Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz
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.
Barney’s Version: Novel vs. Film
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.
Why I am not a Progressive Christian
The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek, of course, with a tip of the hat to Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture “Why I am not a Christian.” I don’t intend my own reflection here as an argument for or against a position; instead, I intend it to elicit a curious (and accidental) lesson from Russell, a lesson which is lost on most proponents of Progressive Christianity.
Principles of Literary Criticism, by I. A. Richards
There is nothing worse than a glib thirty-year-old academic who has absolute confidence in the possibility of certainty. Reading Ivor Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism, I was seized every five pages by an impulse to hurl the book at the wall.
Ten Storey Love Song, by Richard Milward
I was first attracted to Ten Storey Love Song because it began on the cover and continued to the end as a single 286 page paragraph – a quiet challenge to our assumption of what a book should look and read like.
Toronto the Whore and Michael Redhill’s Consolation
There was a time when fiction writers from Toronto were self-conscious about setting their stories in Toronto. Our city was too provincial to be real. It was urban enough, but had no credibility. It was still too close to its parochial roots.
Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Literary Critic
The Associated Press reports that earlier today, the Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in absentia. The last time this award was bestowed in absentia was 1936 when Hitler prevented Carl von Ossietzky from traveling to Oslo. No doubt China is smarting at the nasty association with Nazi Germany.
Particularity in Jeff Latosik’s Tiny, Frantic, Stronger
I have volumes of poetry that once belonged to my grandfather and which had belonged to his aunt before him. Some are more than 100 years old, mostly falling apart, with fake gilt lettering on the spines – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow. Back then, the rules for poetry went like this.