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Cage Match: Jonathan Franzen vs. Ursula Franklin
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...Where is the Church in the Occupy Movement?
17. October 2011
A question about the Occupy Movement: where is the Church? October 15th was supposed to be a global day of action, and by all accounts, it was successful, drawing crowds in cities all around the world. But where was the Church in all of this? The question was posed in Religion Dispatches nearly two weeks [...]
Continue reading...Occupy Wall Street – But Keep It Simple
12. October 2011
As the Occupy movement creeps ever closer to Toronto, we who support it brace ourselves for the inevitable backlash, not only from voices of power, but also from an eerily complacent middle class. Toronto had a foretaste of this more than a year ago when the G20 leaders came to town and those who spoke [...]
Continue reading...We Can’t Af Ford This
11. October 2011
After being away for a month, I returned home to Toronto with a question burning on my lips: So how’s Rob Ford’s War on Graffiti going? On Friday, I went downtown to get some answers. I can’t speak for the city at large because I sampled only a narrow sliver of streets downtown. The reason [...]
Continue reading...Who Has Seen The Wind (and it blows)
25. August 2011
I’ll soon be setting out on a road trip that takes me through the Prairies. I prepare for trips like this, not by planning where to stay or by careful packing that anticipates every possible weather situation, but by reading books from the places I expect to visit. I’m mostly interested in packing my mental [...]
Continue reading...Geoff Dyer, Antidote to the Supermodern
23. August 2011
As someone who claims to blog thematically about “the power of words” but occasionally interrupts his wordiness with photographs, I find it heartening that Geoff Dyer should open his latest collection of writings with a section devoted to photographers and their work. Whatever his rationale, I want to adopt it. In his introduction, he notes [...]
Continue reading...United Church of Canada – Anti-Israel Conspiracy Cult?
5. August 2011
There is a fascinating article by Joanne Hill in this week’s Jerusalem Tribune, a Toronto-based weekly published under the auspices of the B’nai Brith Canada. It purports to be an interview of Jonathan Kay as he launches his book, Among The Truthers. Jonathan Kay, a managing editor for the National Post, has written an exposé [...]
Continue reading...Mental Illness Stereotypes, Amy Winehouse, & Anders Behring Breivik
24. July 2011
Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social media universe. One story from the UK: soul singer, Amy Winehouse, had died at the age of 27. [...]
Continue reading...New eFiction from David Allan Barker
Hogtown is my gift to the Occupy Movement. Download from Smashwords for free.
Sex With Dead People is an ebook collection of short stories. Download from Smashwords for free.
The Land is an enovel. Preview here or buy for your favourite ereader. Also available as an audiobook.
From The Gallery
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1. February 2012
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