Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I don’t know why I’ve never bothered with Richards. I’ve heard of him. I’ve seen his books on the shelves of my local bookstores. Maybe I’ve overlooked him because the critics and reviewers have overlooked him, and so I’ve never felt any of the urgent hype to take up his books. I have no idea…
Earlier this month, CNN White House correspondent, John Harwood, called Donald Trump a “dishonest demagogue” while on the air. In short order, his employer showed him the door, citing a need for the press to maintain political neutrality in its reportage. A day later, the CBC reported that Adrian Monck, an official from the World Economic…
Delphi is a Covid novel. We’ve read earlier novels that use Covid as part of the contextualizing furniture. Ali Smith’s Summer and Companion Piece both allude to the pandemic, but neither is what I would describe as a Covid novel because neither treats Covid as central to the story. But with novels like Sarah Moss’s…
It’s 1985 and the Roman Catholic church still has a hold over daily life in small towns like New Ross in the southeast of Ireland. Bill Furlong, who has a modest business providing coal and other combustibles for heat, finds himself in demand as Christmas approaches and the weather turns cold. Against all expectation, Bill…
In 2015, Ali Smith compiled a collection of short stories as a response to the UK’s cost cutting measures that targeted its public library system. Interpolated between the stories, we find statements by ordinary members of the public reflecting on what libraries have done for them and how those libraries have enhanced their communities. Although,…
Note to Reader: This story is 4,100 words and takes about half an hour to read. Although the characters share names with me and my wife, these are fictional characters. That should be apparent from the fact that the fictional David Barker is tall and lean. David Barker, tall and lean, beige sport jacket draped…
Where The Light Fell is a “Covid-aware” memoir, which is to say that even though the book narrates and reflects upon earlier times, it keeps one of its bookish eyes on the present moment and, while barely saying so, draws a line of continuity from past events to the present lunacy that grips America today….
Apropos of nothing Apropos of nothing, I note the following quote from p. 12 of DFW’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity: “One thing is certain, though. It is a total myth that man is by nature curious and truth-hungry and wants, above all things, to know.” (Italics in original.) In the accompanying…
Something To Do With Paying Attention is the title editors gave to this novella after they pulled it from the wreckage of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published (but unfinished) novel, The Pale King. It stands alone and apparently even David Foster Wallace considered that it might do well on its own. The narrator is a self-described nihilist…
It’s almost a given in any discussion of Middlemarch that it begins by citing Virginia Woolf’s opinion that it’s one of the few books written for grown-up people. Here I am, fully grown-up, the same age as Virginia Woolf when she stuffed her pockets with rocks and stepped into the River Ouse, only now getting around to…
1. As far as I’m aware, Mary Shelley is the first person ever to give serious attention to the idea that the human race might be headed toward extinction without prospect of redemption. She gave this idea imaginative force with a lesser known novel, The Last Man, published in 1826 while she was still in her…
I’m not sure how to react to this novel. Part of me balks at the saccharine sentimentality that drips from some of the passages. At the same time, part of me stands in utter awe of Mary Shelley. She was, perhaps, the first person to offer up a full articulation of the idea that human…
Etiology This book entered my life when I was at the gym riding a stationary bicycle (technically a unicycle), pretending I was being pursued by a horde of hungry zombies, and listening to a CBC Ideas podcast in which Nahlah Ayed interviews Andrew Potter for an update on his book, On Decline. In the interview, Potter…
I bought Premee Mohamed’s second novel at the ECW Press booth at Word On The Street. A girl was holding a copy of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow and I told her that I’d enjoyed it. The ECW girl standing on the other side of the table said: well, if you like that,…
As an intrepid street photographer, I make a point of documenting urban life in my little corner of this pale blue dot we call home. I make an annual habit of culling my observations to the best 100 or so photographs and printing them in a large hard-cover glossy format so that I have a…