Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Richard woke from a flying dream. It wasn’t the flying that bothered him. It was the landscapes whizzing by beneath his wings. Instead of green forests and golden wheat fields, he zoomed over alien mountains that glistened pink and purple. With all the zooming, Richard gasped and it woke Ellie beside him.
While I listened to the chorus, I found myself distracted by two women sitting ahead of me and to the left. Their heads bobbed up and down but not in time to the music. I wondered if they were playing a game. I leaned forward and strained to see what they were doing. They were resting sketch pads on their knees and drawing their impressions of the concert.
Etgar Keret has a new collection of short stories out and it’s called Suddenly, A Knock At The Door. They are great stories. You can read all about them on other web sites. You can learn about how they combine the ordinary and the bizarre in the same sentence. You can read about how short they are, how economical his approach.
Ralph Meriwether led the tactical team that stormed the Cheetos factory. He had vowed never to move without proper intelligence, but after a hundred days, he knew little more than he did when the terrorists first seized the plant. There were ten of them. That much he did know. And they were well-armed and heavily organized.
Janine was in the bathroom when a guy sat down at the next table. The waitress took his order right away, but he was particular about his omelet and gave confusing instructions. It took a couple tries before the waitress got it right.
It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan…
Novakovich’s writing exemplifies the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. The world can get on very well without nationalism. As for patriotism, I suspect that, like trust, it must be earned. The U.S. has no more entitlement to a citizen’s patriotism than any other country.
He ran over the baby in his driveway. It was dark and he had been on his way to the grocery store for some potato chips. He liked having something to munch on while he watched movies late at night. The grocery store closed at eleven and he got into his car at ten forty-five. It was going to be tight, whether or not he made it in time to buy his potato chips.
Since the rise of Amazon, the Kindle, ibooks, the iPad, etc., it’s hardly news that the publishing industry is struggling to cope with radical change. The latest, and perhaps most ludicrous, is an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Apple & the Big 6 U.S. publishers alleging that their agency model is, in fact, price fixing.
Denis Johnson is a dirty realist. I imagine a homeless guy pushing a grocery cart full of empties and muttering it to himself—dirty realist, dirty realist, dirty realist—as if Denis Johnson had done him wrong. A dirty realist writes about mid-western white trash junkies who flirt with violence and describe it in first person narratives.
This is a piece about the dangers of writing book reviews. But if you want to hop onto that boxcar, you’ll have to ride with me for a while on a different track. My monkey brain can’t leap to book reviewing without first crouching beside a different bunch of bananas.
The man suffered. His suffering was average. His suffering wasn’t acute: no terminal brain tumour that left him writhing in agony and screaming for the sweet release of death. But his suffering wasn’t trivial either: no hangnails or gastro-intestinal discomfort. His was a modest suffering that allowed him to smile when he met his friends, but filled him with a private foreboding.
Two lines in a (chubby) chapbook of 35 poems is pretty damn good. That’s, oh, maybe an average of one in 350 lines or 0.29 % of the chapbook. I’m talking about Peg Duthie’s poetry chapbook, Measured Extravagance, from Upper Rubber Boot Books, and the number I’m citing is the number of lines in it that drive me crazy.
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.” So says George Orwell. I don’t know where I first saw the quote. Maybe on Twitter. Maybe on someone else’s blog. Wherever it was, I immediately snapped it up for myself and used it in defense of my decision not to monetize my blog.
For as long as I can remember, my parents told me stories of my uncle John, a knight errant who had slain a dragon. He was a man who ventured forth on noble quests to defend the honour of great ladies.