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Everyone’s A Synesthete
1. My wife sings in a community chorus. As a dutiful husband, I went to her concert last Saturday and listened. Typical of me, my mind wandered. I like to say I have a nimble mind, but when I’m being honest, I confess that “nimble” is a euphemism for “easily distracted”. While I listened to [...]
Continue reading...Can Alcohol Make You a Better Writer?
3. May 2012
More than a decade ago, it came as a great blow to me when my doctor phoned with the results of a biopsy. I had celiac disease. No more gluten. So what foods have gluten in them? I asked. Well, the doctor said, bread for one. Anything with wheat in it. No pasta. No pizza. [...]
Continue reading...Review: Shopping for A Better Country, by Josip Novakovich
2. May 2012
When I first learned that Josip Novakovich was a Croat American writer living in Montreal, I assumed he was an exile who had fled the violence of the war for Croatian independence, or had escaped before that when the former Yugoslav Republic was just another Soviet satellite. He had escaped to the West where he [...]
Continue reading...The World’s Ugliest Woman
23. April 2012
This is a post about the dangers of book reviewing. But if you want to hop onto that boxcar, you’ll have to ride with me for a while on a different track. My monkey brain can’t leap to book reviewing without first crouching beside a different bunch of bananas. (I apologize, too, for mixing my [...]
Continue reading...Review: Measured Extravagance, by Peg Duthie
20. April 2012
Two lines in a (chubby) chapbook of 35 poems is pretty damn good. That’s, oh, maybe an average of one in 350 lines or 0.29 % of the chapbook. I’m talking about Peg Duthie’s poetry chapbook, Measured Extravagance, from Upper Rubber Boot Books, and the number I’m citing is the number of lines in it [...]
Continue reading...Review: Amen by Gretta Vosper
11. April 2012
When I was five, my dad sat me down in front of an Ouija board and told me to ask it some questions. Whatever I wanted. Anything at all. My dad was a good church-going soul and the son of a theologian, but a five-year-old doesn’t care about apparent inconsistencies. I set my fingers on [...]
Continue reading...Review: My Only Wife, by Jac Jemc
28. March 2012
I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances [...]
Continue reading...Cage Match: Jonathan Franzen vs. Ursula Franklin
1. February 2012
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 [...]
Continue reading...Pico Iyer, Multiculturalism and Toronto
19. January 2012
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; [...]
Continue reading...My iPhone Addiction
12. January 2012
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 [...]
Continue reading...Darkling – An Experimental Opera by Anna Rabinowitz and Stefan Weisman
9. January 2012
Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darkling which they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records. The libretto draws upon a book-length poem of the same name which Rabinowitz published [...]
Continue reading...1Q84 – A Complete Waste of Brain Cells
4. January 2012
I bookended 2011 with two large novels. In January, I read Witz, by Joshua Cohen, a sprawling brilliant novel which I would set on my shelf beside the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. In December, I read 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, also a sprawling novel which at least one critic has likened to [...]
Continue reading...Review: Death Wishing, by Laura Ellen Scott
10. November 2011
Death Wishing is the debut novel from Laura Ellen Scott whose chapbook, Curio, I featured here earlier this year. It’s hard to know how to classify Death Wishing. Magic realism, perhaps, although it behaves much like science fiction, with a single wild premise producing conflict that drives the action, and characters who reveal themselves as [...]
Continue reading...Poetry in the Afterlife
8. November 2011
I dreamt I died and went to heaven. When I got there, they told me there was no such thing as print media. They said: books are physical things, but we, as incorporeal spirit beings, have no fingers to turn the pages. I asked if they had heard about digital media. They laughed at my [...]
Continue reading...Demystifying Camp
31. October 2011
My wife is an active alumnus of a summer camp in Longford Mills on the north eastern shore of Lake Couchiching. Every fall, staff, alumni, and friends of the camp gather for a weekend of work and fun. The object is to close down the camp for the winter, taking in docks, storing boats and [...]
Continue reading...New eFiction from David Allan Barker
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10. May 2012
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