Comments for nouspique.com

Comment on Flash Fiction: Old School by Glen

Glen — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:57:02 +0000

Tite(r)

Comment on Flash Fiction: Old School by Louise Broadbent

Louise Broadbent — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:44:02 +0000

Tight.

Comment on Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins by » Blueshifting Upper Rubber Boot Books

» Blueshifting Upper Rubber Boot Books — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:27:25 +0000

[...] collection like this, we’ll grant her that indulgence.” — David Allan Barker, “Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins,” nouspique, 31 January [...]

Comment on Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins by » With poem titles like Making Time, Devolution, Entropy, Relativity, Dark Matter, and with an epigraph from Carl Sagan, and references to Mastodons, petroglyphs and quantum states, one might expect to find a collection of science-nerd poems. But sc

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:23:36 +0000

[...] nouspique reviews poetry chapbook Blueshifting by Heather Kamins! [...]

Comment on Graffiti in Victoria by David

David — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:21:16 +0000

Thanks Scott. I’ll pass this along.

Comment on Graffiti in Victoria by Scott Amos

Scott Amos — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:14:57 +0000

Hi,
I thought that you might be interested in a film screening at the Victoria Film Festival. It is called Vigilante Vigilante.

Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression
Thursday • February 9th 2012 • The Vic Theatre • 9:30
Director: Max Good USA • 2011 • 86 min • Digital
Canadian Premiere
A new breed of crime fighter now stalks the urban landscape: the anti-graffiti vigilante. These dedicated blight-warriors stop at nothing to rid their cities of street art, stickers, tags, and posters. Yet several of these vigilantes have become the very menace they set out to eliminate. In their relentless attempt to stamp out graffiti they’ve turned to illegally and destructively painting other people’s property.

tickets here: https://boxoffice.victoriafilmfestival.com/film.php?id=430&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=550&width=660&noIframe=1

If possible, could you please send this information out to any members or mailing lists you may have to help it receive the audience it deserves. Thank you. There are many other films listed in the Festival guide that can be found at http://www.victoriafilmfestival.com, if you’d like to take a look.

Thanks.
S>

Comment on Review: Kobo eReader by David

David — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:30:45 +0000

@JonB Yeah, more and more I’m hearing bad things about their customer service. Not like when my iPhone broke. Took it to the apple store. They looked at it and said: “Oh, it’s not working. Here, have a new one.” Although it’s expensive, I’m thinking my next ereader will be an iPad.

Comment on Review: Kobo eReader by JonB

JonB — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:04:34 +0000

DO NOT BUY A KOBO eREADER…
Worked OK until it bricked on January 9th.
Sure, technology sometimes breaks – understood.
What is not acceptable is that it is now January 25th, and all Kobo can say is “I cannot give you an ETA on this one”… “but someone will definitely get to it”.

Unless you are feeling lucky I suggest you steer clear of Kobo.

Comment on Principles of Literary Criticism, by I. A. Richards by David

David — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:07:46 +0000

Thank you for you considered comment. It’s reassuring to see that there are still people who feel passionately about matters of aesthetic judgment in literature. On reflection, I think your “viciously cynical and dismissive” assessment of my post (or at least its first two paragraphs) is accurate. It might have been fairer of me to evaluate Richards on his own terms, as a critic writing between the wars when the promise of a scientific methodology in other areas of endeavour seemed to offer a similar promise in matters of interpretation and literary judgment. At the same time, your “viciously cynical and dismissive” characterization may say less about me than it does about the milieu I inhabit and whose habits I have internalized. As Richards in his milieu, so me in mine. Maybe your strong response to my post has less to do with our differing opinions of Richards than it does with our differing opinions on the nature of the universe and what can be said of it for a certainty. In my ideal universe, Richards would be right and you along with him. We would be able to assert with certainty the meaning of a poem and the quality of the aesthetic experience it arouses in us. But I’m filled with doubts about such a state of affairs, and as yet, I am unable to quell those doubts. They give rise to what you call “easy textual indeterminacy” which I take to mean that it’s become commonplace to subject any text to postmodern critical tools and turn it into mincemeat. I don’t think it’s easy at all. Collectively, it took us 2500 years to develop the capacity to read texts in such a way. But, like an optical illusion, now that we see the trick, it’s nigh impossible to return to our original mode of seeing.

Comment on My Neighbour’s Christmas Tree by Richard

Richard — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:31:58 +0000

There’s got to be something “real” in everyone’s life!

Comment on Darkling – An Experimental Opera by Anna Rabinowitz and Stefan Weisman by David

David — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:00:17 +0000

Duly corrected. Thank you for picking that up. A confusion of Thomases.

Comment on Darkling – An Experimental Opera by Anna Rabinowitz and Stefan Weisman by Jaime

Jaime — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:40:48 +0000

There is an egregious error in this wonderful piece. David attributes “The Darkling Thrush” to Dylan Thomas and not to Thomas Hardy.

Comment on Review: Kobo eReader by Julia Mac

Julia Mac — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:38:33 +0000

Kobo is the worst. I loved the reading experience, but the battery is horrible, by 3 months of use, it held about 3 minutes of life, and wouldn’t take a charge. When I sent it back, I got a totally defective one that didn’t work at all. Sent that one back, got a new one that worked greaat for 3 months before freezing completely.

Now, since I’ve used up my 2 free replacements, they want me to pay $60 to get it fixed. I told them that one of my replacements should not count, as it was entirely their fault that they sent me a dud, and that I expected a replacement at no cost.

Conveniently, they don’t have a record of the second kobo as defective.

Funny that they know I’ve sent back 2 kobos, but only have one incident report and don’t think there’s anything weird about that.

I am now waiting for a call from Tier 2 support, but from what i hear, I shouldn’t hold my breath.

I would suggest no one buy a kobo ever, it is a defective product with a defective support staff.

Comment on Principles of Literary Criticism, by I. A. Richards by tneveca

tneveca — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:33:01 +0000

Your response to Richards’ groundbreaking and imaginative work is visciously cynical and dismissive. I found this book both intrinsically fascinating and refreshing, especially after having had my sense of literary judgment slowly corroded through relentless exposure to relativistic platitudes these past 20 years. The truth is, Richards’ was right in attempting to ground literary value in psychological experience, because there is no other framework of relavence for the aesthetic apart from the well-being of conscious creatures. Political and sociological considerations are useful in getting a grasp of a literary text, but they cannot serve as a foundation for the aesthetic without eviscerating the category. Once we accept the proposition that literature worth reading essentially promotes emotional and intellectual self-completion, then we are left with the task of responsibly mining the these values out of the work through careful close reading. Richards was the first English critic to use this reading technique, and we now take it for granted. What has been lost over the years, however, is a sense of the importance of close reading, because we no longer have a framework of value in which to convince ourselves or our students that it is a worthwile activity. Picking apart a poem for the sake of deconstructive paradoxes, queer subtexts, and class consciousness is waste of time because you can discover these things in almost any text. A work of art, however, organizes experience and thus restores us to ourselves, provided we don’t fail as readers. Just because literary value is extremely difficult to state does not mean there is no truth of the matter at the heart of things. The difficulty of forming aesthetic judgements is part of the challenge of reading, and I venture that those who dare to take the risk are more authentic readers than the typical glib relativist seeking refuge in easy textual indeterminacy and extrinsic theoretical approaches that turn works of art into fodder for pet politics.

Comment on Review: Kobo eReader by James Dean

James Dean — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:52:22 +0000

Great review. Unfortunately, I never got past the “download eBooks” phase and customer service hung up on me numerous times, so off to the Kindle I go … my review:

KOBO — terrible product and terrible customer service. After getting my new Kobo I attempted to download new e-books. I received the error message: “There was an error connecting to the server.” My Wifi is fine, I tested it. Then I called Kobo’s customer service. After 20 minutes, a recorded message said I was calling during peak hours (11 a.m. EST) and then it hung up on me. I tried that several times with the same result. I will return my Kobo. I will get a Kindle. I will give my kids Kindles for Xmas. I’m very surprised Kobo is still in business. Anyone else have similar issues?