Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, with a section devoted to photographers and their work.
There is a book I read at the beginning of the summer that I can’t remember having read. I must have read it because it says so in the notes I scribble. It mustn’t have been a bad book.
Nik Beat’s collection of poetry, The Tyranny of Love (Seraphim Editions), is the first of a stash I’ll be sampling over the next few weeks. As mentioned in my previous post, I found this book at The Book Band booth at the Mill Race Folk Festival.
I don’t know what to make of the novel, Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn. I suspect my difficulty with this novel has as much to do with my personal expectations as with the novel itself.
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 United Church of Canada pulpits.
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…
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.
Although Barthes quietly proclaimed the death of the author more than 40 years ago, the sudden rise of the ebook is moving people to shout this news from the mountaintop. Blogging pranks, ehoaxes and spam ebooks have produced a reversal of our natural presumption. Instead of giving authorship the benefit of the doubt, we assume that a written work has been manufactured by a process—that there is no “real” person behind the author.
Knuckleheads is a guy book. Knuckleheads is also a derogatory term. But here, Kass uses it in a more generous spirit to describe your average straight male who has enough insight to know that his sexuality demands more work of him than it does of a silverback mountain gorilla, but not enough wisdom or experience to know how to begin that work.
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 the absurd. Only I would do Camus one better.
Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs. I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium. I feel bound by an unwritten contract: I blog Toronto books in exchange for the pleasure of reading about other people in their locales.
This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks.
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 the hunger of a glutton.
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, and the rest – as they say—is money.
If David Bezmozgis’s novel, The Free World, were a drink, it would be a scotch, not peaty or smoky, but smooth and well-aged. It would have none of the surprising roughness of Laphroaig, tending more to the clean finish of Highland Park. As a drink, it would be safe, conventional, respectable.