Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
In the forward to What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order, Ronald Wright points out that his book arises from the final chapter of an earlier work, A Short History of Progress. There, he planted the seeds of a simple thesis with far reaching consequences. It is his latter book which expands upon these consequences.
This is the second in a series that looks at reviewers who diss the Best Picture Oscar contenders. While Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, has received favourable attention from both the New Yorker and The New York Times, not all reviewers see it as Oscar worthy.
With the approach of the Academy Awards ceremony on March 7th, I’ve decided to take a look at films nominated in the Best Picture category. Watching a whole batch of commercial American films is a bit like locking yourself overnight in a candy factory.
It’s difficult to decide what The Film Club is. It purports to be literary non-fiction and was nominated for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Gilmour himself identifies the book as “true” and notes, in an afterword, the challenges of writing honestly about people you are in a relationship with — presumably because, if you write too honestly, you may jeopardize the relationship.
How many times have you heard someone say: “But it’s only a metaphor”? While this phrase can crop up in conversations about any discipline, it seems to make itself heard most often in complaints about Christian fundamentalists who have chosen to interpret one or another Biblical text in literal terms.
In A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul offers another account as to why we find it so difficult to engage one another without recourse to polarizing habits. In brief: Canada has inherited from both France and England a colonial perspective. In fact, Canada is doubly colonized when one considers Trudeau’s statement that living in Canada is like sleeping beside an elephant; in subtle ways, we have been culturally and economically subjugated by the U.S.
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
The American type designer, Frederic Goudy, is reputed to have said that “[a]ny one who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” That is the source for the title of a wonderful book on type design by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger: Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works.
I am a literary snob. There! I’ve put it out where everyone can see it. I”m not just a little snobbish; I’m steeped in the culture of snobbery. I am a complete and utter snob. When Plato talks about “forms” in the Republic, he uses me as an example of Platonic Snobbery. There I am, holding my nose up in the air, looking down at pulp fiction with the same disdain I hold for dog turds.
Dear Mr. Comeau, Please accept my application for position of book reviewer. I thought I’d start with your epistolary novella, Overqualified, published by ECW Press here in Toronto. As you can see already, I have a basic grasp of the big words that literary types like to use when talking about the stuff that authors, you know, produce when they write stuff.
Clear Heart Open Mind is a reflection on the Tibetan meditative practice of Chenresig. Those who follow my blog or are aware of my sometimes hyper-rational predilections may wonder why I’m reviewing a book about mystical practices. I beg your indulgence.
The election of Barack Obama has been accompanied by a mood of optimism: America (and the whole world for that matter) might at last enjoy some respite from the reactionary politics of George W. Bush and his caterwauling coterie on the extreme right.
While conservative Christians are hostile towards atheists, Harris laces his book with such invective against Islam and reaches such extreme conclusions that there must be at least a few Fundie preachers who take secret delight in his writing.
I tried. I really did. In my continuing quest to plumb the mind of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian (FEC for short), I tried to read Glorious Appearing, the 12th and final installment of the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer winning second novel, Gilead. I think she will forgive me for taking so long, since she herself has no particular regard for the passage of time. It has been more than twenty odd years since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping. And the prose itself proceeds in a way that is more aligned with things timeless than with things urgent.