Archive | Pure Water RSS feed for this section
Ebooks and PED
In debates about copyright and piracy, one hears a lot from copyright law advocates on one side (tough laws, DRM, enforcement with teeth), and cultural libertarians on the other (broad fair dealing provisions, open source, lenient enforcement). However, one hears little from economists. Sure, there are sweeping claims from the tough-on-piracy camp that illegal downloading [...]
Continue reading...Maurice, by E. M. Forster
15. July 2011
I first heard of E. M. Forster’s novel, Maurice, as an undergrad English student, not through one of my courses, but on a visit to my grandparents. At that time, my grandfather was a retired clergy and a staunch member of the Community of Concern, a group hellbent on keeping the dreaded homosexual out of [...]
Continue reading...Coming Out As An Author
12. July 2011
I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the [...]
Continue reading...Sense of Place in Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still for as Long as Possible
8. July 2011
Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For As Long As Possible is a novel about queer youth in Toronto. I’m not a queer youth in Toronto. I’m a straight middle-aged guy in Toronto. (I leave for another time the debate about whether straight people can identify as queer.) So I don’t feel acutely qualified to pronounce upon [...]
Continue reading...Review: August Farewell, by David G. Hallman
6. July 2011
On Friday August 7, 2009, William Conklin and his partner of almost 33 years, David Hallman, learned that William—Bill—had pancreatic cancer. Within 16 days, Bill was dead. David wrote quickly of those 16 days, fearful perhaps that if he lost the memory of them, it would compound his sense of loss. The result is a [...]
Continue reading...Wringing the Author out of Middle Class Fiction
29. June 2011
In the introduction to Otherwise Known As The Human Condition, Geoff Dyer writes of how he first broached the idea of an essay collection with his editor: [H]e asked if these pieces would be linked, if there might be some way of passing off these bits and bobs as a coherent book organized around a [...]
Continue reading...Unwanted Erections and Adolescent Writing
28. June 2011
Writing stories is not a recent obsession for me. It began in my early teens with a story about the end of the world – planet Earth gets sucked into a black hole. Balls and holes. The scientist who announces Earth’s fate to his colleagues does so while standing beside a pool table holding a [...]
Continue reading...Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner
21. June 2011
Someday I would like to write a dissertation. I would use big words and quote great minds and when I was done I would tell people that I had made a definitive statement: a philosophy of the banal. I would write it in the spirit of Albert Camus who offered the world a philosophy of [...]
Continue reading...Full Catastrophe Reading
13. June 2011
The title for this post comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, a landmark piece on mindfulness and the art of living well. Why (I ask myself) can the same principles of mindfulness not also be applied to the art of reading well? Mindfulness is a Western adaptation of Zen Buddhist practice. It seeks [...]
Continue reading...Feeding the Trolls
8. June 2011
I’d wager that virtually everyone of Western European descent remembers listening when they were children to the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Although Norse in origin, this story of goats and a troll spread far beyond the borders of Norway. It was the medieval equivalent of a viral video. Do you remember how [...]
Continue reading...The Importance of Shit Lit
7. June 2011
If you’ve followed my blog for any time at all, you may have noticed that I have a scatological fetish. Or, to be more prosaic about it, I have a fascination with shit. You can smell traces of it in poems I’ve squeezed out. In stories. In parables. In essays. In criticism. And in literary [...]
Continue reading...The IARPA’s Metaphor Program
1. June 2011
The Atlantic Monthly reports that a tiny secret U.S. intelligence group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), has inaugurated The Metaphor Program with the mandate to develop a computer program which can scan large chunks of text and, regardless of the text’s language, generate an evaluation of the author/speaker’s mindset based upon their use [...]
Continue reading...Netsuke, by Rikki Ducornet
10. May 2011
Netsuke, by Rikki Ducornet – Coffee House Press. The psychoanalyst is not well. He could benefit from some of his own therapy, but lacks the insight to seek help. Perhaps we might best describe his difficulty thus: he confuses desire and obsession; what he takes for passionate feeling is something more mechanical and needless, like [...]
Continue reading...Stop Graffiti Vandalism Now – Or Not
9. May 2011
Rob Ford’s graffiti Nazis are fanning out like pesky little rodents through all the streets of Toronto. I just saw my first “Stop Graffiti Vandalism Now” sign. We have our very own war on terror, but scaled down for the suburbs. If municipal projects have patron saints, the anti-graffiti campaign must have St. Jude, the [...]
Continue reading...Review: How They Were Found, by Matt Bell
29. April 2011
If I were a seasoned and astute investor, maybe I’d regale you with tales of how, way back in 1977, I heard about a kid named Steve Jobs who was looking for a few private backers, how I cut a cheque for a couple thousand dollars, how the kid took his company public in 1980, [...]
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
Social Links
23. July 2011
0 Comments