Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
My reading life is full of coincidences. Last month I read The Old Curiosity Shop. A month later, I find myself reading what I take to be Charles Dickens time-traveled and teleported into 21st century North Carolina. What that means is that, while Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing is a good novel, it doesn’t…
I have a special pile of books, purchased with the best of intentions, which nevertheless go unread. What lurks in the background is, perhaps, a species of gluttony. I want to read everything. I want to swallow it whole, digest it, ruminate until I pass it into my second stomach, break it down and draw…
I was curious to know if there would be a repeat performance of last weekend’s Freedom Convoy protest in Toronto. However, on Saturday when I got to Bloor and Avenue Road, it was apparent that the police had assembled a more comprehensive grid of road blocks. At Bloor & Avenue Road, there was a lone…
Another author whom I willingly read even as I claim to despise his writing is Charles Dickens. Here, my distaste is not specific to Dickens but directed generally at Victorian novelists and, because it is directed generally, is more obviously a function of taste than of an objectively grounded theoretical claim.
I went out at 11:30 am, starting my adventure at the intersection of Bloor Street West and Avenue Road. I had thought I would walk south through Queen’s Park Crescent and the tractors I’d seen the night before, then on to the Medical Arts Building where health care workers were planning a counter protest. However,…
I went out shortly after 3:30 pm February 4th, ultimately to meet my wife down at her office in time to lug her laptop back home. Toronto Police Services had issued a notice that they were closing College St. west to University and University south from there in anticipation of tomorrow’s trucker protest which is…
He had the impression the three drivers were in communication, waving to one another through their frosted windows. Then followed a succession of clicks as each unlocked his door; a sound of rushing air…
I sat chilled and stinking and anxious and repeated it to myself like a mantra: Fuck the police. Fuck the police. Fuck the police.
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Laura Spinney (London: Vintage, 2017) The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2020) Published in 2017, Laura Spinney’s historical investigation of the 1918 pandemic could not have anticipated what was to follow in three years. And yet Spinney notes that…
Berger’s writing has a quality about it that I call opacity. It is language that conceals as much as it reveals. It is the opposite of hashtag writing or search engine writing, irreducible in a way that algorithms can never parse.
When I cracked open the book and started in on George Melnyk’s forward, I was a bit startled to read his confession that “[t]his book contains poems of great sophistication and it also contains doggerel.”
This is a collection of short pieces—a follow-up act to Known and Strange Things—organized around the three pieces which form the Berlin Family Lectures. It’s natural, when reading a collection of disparate pieces, to seek for a sense of coherence, thematic threads that you can draw from cover to cover (apart from the obvious thread…
One girl was on the phone to her mother, almost in tears, saying “Mom, I really fucked up this time.” Others had their heads buried in cell phones trying to book Uber rides which, because of the sudden spike in demand, were priced in the stratosphere.
More than 10 years after the publication of The Matter with Morris (2010), David Bergen has revisited the characters from that slender novel to create a slender companion, Out of Mind. Taken together, the two novels offers us a single substantial portrait of middle-class life in the early 21st century.
Certain fire hydrants suffer from performance anxiety, praying each time they hear a siren that the fire truck doesn’t pull up in front of them: “Oh please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. The last time a fire truck stopped here, I pissed a river and had a bladder infection for three weeks.”