Another way of thinking about the narrative is to treat it as a neurological drama: the author (recto) and the blue clerk (verso) are metaphorical ways of reflecting the bicameral structure of the human brain.
Tag: Books
2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominees
Polar Vortex, Shani Mootoo (Toronto: Book*hug, 2020) Polar Vortex opens with a dream. Priya, a lesbian of Indian descent, immigrant from Trinidad, now settled with her white spouse, Alex, in white bread Prince Edward County, awakes from the riotous colours of an Indian wedding ritual which culminates in sex with a man, not with any…
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, by Olivia Laing
As in The Lonely City, Laing views today’s funny weather as a continuation of gusts we felt in the early days of AIDS when the Reagan administration chose not merely to do nothing but actively to make life miserable for hundreds of thousands of those infected.
Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
This tetralogy is a remarkable achievement, offering a clear-eyed view of the times without resorting to the usual maudlin emotions—outrage, disbelief. Instead, through her wise art, she offers us reassurance.
The Origins of Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump
There is a temptation to treat Arendt like the American Psychiatric Association’s DSMV: if an authoritarian leader meets enough of the documented criteria, then we can diagnose him with the political disease called totalitarianism.
Microbe Hunters Then And Now
Through offhand remarks which strike us today as thoroughly gratuitous, de Kruif allows his own personality to infect his stories with sexism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and a wide assortment of other bigotries that, were he alive today, would make him the darling of Trump’s White House.
Yours, for probably always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters
This is a curated collection of letters both from Martha Gellhorn and addressed to her from a variety of correspondents, most notably H. G. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt, interpolated with Janet Somerville’s contextual notes. The overall effect is much like a tragic epistolary novel of grand dimensions.
Zadie Smith and Intimations of “Real Suffering”
Popular discourse has thought closely about privilege, but is utterly vapid when it comes to suffering. While it’s true that writers almost universally address suffering as an experience, almost none address it as a discursive category.
A Letter to Harper’s Magazine
The requirement that you conform to white expectations as a prerequisite to conversation about racial injustice is itself an enactment of racial injustice.
On Color, by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing
On Color is organized into 10 chapters—one chapter for each colour of the rainbow (arbitrarily set at seven by Sir Isaac Newton) plus a chapter each for black, white, and grey. Each chapter engages us in a wide-ranging, often erudite, and largely aleatory meditation. It is the work of a mind at play.
The Image of Whiteness, ed. by Daniel C. Blight
The task before me—a task which Daniel Blight sets not only for photographers and artists, but for light-skinned people generally—is to decolonize my seeing.
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
The title shares its name with a 1936 musical featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. One of the numbers is a Jerome Kern tune “Bojangles of Harlem” in which Astaire appears in blackface.
The Innocents, by Michael Crummey
Through The Innocents, Michael Crummey creates a microcosm in which the triangle of isolation, innocence and ignorance can be spun out as an allegory which speaks to us precisely in the here and now. He wrote it before Covid-19 so he could not have anticipated its salience to our current situation.
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
The latest instalment in my pandemic reading list speaks to all arts organization who find themselves in a state of limbo: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.
A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe
Already, we engage in public conversations about returning to normal life. More than 350 years ago, the people of London learned a hard lesson which screams to us down the centuries: do not do this!