Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
A writer’s experience shapes her work; it cannot be otherwise. But inevitably that experience happens in the context of personal relationships. In terms of privacy, what does a writer owe to the other people in those relationships. If a right to privacy were absolute, no one could ever write anything.
On the evening of June 6th, protesters toppled the statue of Egerton Ryerson which stood on Gould Street on the campus of Toronto’s Ryerson University. Since that date, I have passed the site almost every day and have noted incremental changes.
It’s like an Arctic Spring: a winter of desolation and then, suddenly, an explosion of life. Young people with money. Old people out for a stroll and leaning on their canes. Sirens blaring. Schizophrenics screaming at the cars. Things are starting to feel normal again.
I think there’s something offensive about the longstanding tradition that art has a redemptive quality which can magically elevate a man’s misery. Too long it’s been used to justify apathy in the face of unjust social relations.
What distinguishes this downspout is the fact that it’s caked in a layer of bird shit—pigeon shit if specificity is important to you. Pigeons sit on the eaves overhead and, whenever one takes flight, it lightens its load by excreting on the downspout below.
[T]he function of a statue is only marginally tied to history; its primary function is to serve as an object of reverence. Statuary (of historical figures) is an expression of idolatry that serves the universal religion of our age: the dominance of capital over everything.
Stepanova celebrates the commonplace, whether she finds it in the stories of the people she remembers, people who never make it into history books or bear honorific titles or even professional designations, or in the objects she examines which are never the pristine articles that find their way to glass cases in museums but are the worn out items of daily usage.
When the quarry was first excavated, it exposed a local geological record going back 130,000 years, right down to a bedrock of shale that, itself, is probably half a billion years old. Near the bottom, at the 130,000 year mark, the geologist, Arthur Philemon Coleman, discovered the tooth of a giant beaver.
The very fact that we allow them to march down the main thoroughfare of our city gives the lie to their complaints. Admittedly, one of the marchers lost his freedom when he was arrested. But that was because he bit a police officer.
The scene paralyses me. My mind reels at the enormity of the contrasts. I feel called to respond but don’t know how. I make my shot and walk away, head bowed because I know it’s a great shot, but so what?
As buildings approach this ultimate dissolution, they undergo a shift from human time to geologic time, no longer measuring the transformation in human heartbeats, but in the barely discernible rhythm of tectonic rumbles.
We watch discrete acts of consciousness unspooling themselves on every page. Like you and me in mid-thought, there is less attention to grammatical propriety. Instead, we have choppy bits. Subjects gone missing. Or implied. More fidelity to emotional states and to memory than to the logic of algorithmic prose.
He bangs his mallet on his guitar, the lid from a plastic bin, and then his head, all in quick succession, like he’s a drummer in a band. I step up and shoot a quick burst. How can I not?
Bergen is willing to investigate the quiet moments that stitch together experience while eschewing the tendency to give greater weight to the momentous events.
People in Toronto are fortunate because the city has grown up over a network of ravines that provide easy escape from the usual urban traumas of concrete and vertigo.