Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I celebrated Canada’s 155th birthday a week early. At the beginning of the year, I got my fill of people wrapped in Canadian flags and shouting at me about their freedoms. “God keep our land glorious and free” they sang, and I witnessed first hand just how close is the ground that marks out religious and…
Caught is a bit of a departure for Lisa Moore insofar as it is more plot driven, less concerned with the investigation of interior experience. One might go so far as to say it is more commercial, and this is confirmed by the fact that the cover of my edition declares that Caught is now…
The Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a storm in February of 1982 and all 84 members of the crew went down with it. Under the subheading “Aftermath” in the Wikipedia entry for the Ocean Ranger, Lisa Moore’s novel, February, gets a mention. I misread the note about Lisa Moore’s novel and took…
I noted that last month House of Anansi published Lisa Moore’s fourth novel (fifth if you include her young adult novel, Flannery). It’s titled This Is How We Love and I have every intention of reading it. However, I am embarrassed to report that I said the same thing in 2005 when I bought her…
I showed up late to the Zadie Smith party. I don’t know why that is. Given my reading habit and the way I indulge my bookish pursuits, you’d think I’d notice when an amazing new voice appears on the horizon (I authorize you to sort out that mixed metaphor any way you please). Maybe it…
I’m not one to jump on bandwagons but, in the case of Ali Smith, I’m willing to make an exception and declare myself a fan. In the past few years she has produced some extraordinary work and Companion Piece offers us one more in a growing succession of extraordinary works. Ali Smith distinguishes herself in…
Although I’ve intended to read this collection of reviews, occasional pieces, and cultural criticism since its publication 4 years ago, I have been overwhelmed by the torrent of new material that publishers daily crank out. I feel like I have my face under a spigot opened full bore. So I play catchup as best I…
Historically, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella has been read either as a quasi confessional reflection on male (homo)sexuality, or as a reflection on beauty and the author’s responsibilities. Gustav von Aschenbach, an established writer of some renown, widowed with an adult daughter, decides that he would benefit from an extended holiday. After a false start, he…
Dream Sequence is ostensibly a straight-forward story of a lonely woman, recently divorced, who stalks a B-list movie star whose career is on the ascendancy. When she contrives to meet this man of her dreams, her fantasy world undergoes an abrupt collision with reality. The collision produces no insight, not at least for the characters….
Reading A Mouthful of Air, by Anthony Burgess, I finally reached the chapter titled “Should we learn foreign languages?” By “we” he means unilingual people who speak English. And by “foreign” he means anyone who wasn’t born into an English-speaking household. Although the question could be read as contentious, I think Burgess means something more benign. In a…
A couple years after my dad completed an M.Ed. at Syracuse University, a colleague of his enrolled in the same program and, like my dad, uprooted his wife and children for the duration. I remember going to visit them over the winter holidays, driving past the jerry-built townhouses where we had lived, then on to…
Toronto’s weekly anti-vax rabble were out in force again this Saturday. I stumbled upon them by accident. My wife and I had run out to get a few groceries. When we reached the corner of Church & Bloor, we could see flashing lights in the distance and realized that it was police blocking an intersection…
I offer the following remarks about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in close proximity to my earlier remarks about Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier because the two novels feel like companion pieces. They deserve to be read together. The butler of a once-great English house takes the idea of English reserve almost…
I’ve intended to read The Good Soldier for some time because it ends up on all those top 100 lists. I’ve always been skeptical of those lists as they tend to come from anglo portals like The Guardian and their mere existence raises questions about process. I imagine a coterie of silver-haired pipe-smoking waning white…
While reading, I frequently catch my mind in the act of wandering off. I call it back to the text: Focus! damn you. Self-recrimination is an integral part of my reading experience. I compare myself unfavourably to history’s great readers. Samuel Johnson would never have let his mind wander off like this. Surely Northrop Frye…