Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
While flying across Canada, I read Roland Barthes’ best-known book, Mythologies. As I waited in Toronto at Pearson International Airport, I read the translator’s note, the two prefaces, and his essay on wrestling. Somewhere over Lake Superior, I read about Roman haircuts in movies from the ’50’s.
Technology can be frustrating. ou may remember reading a news item from July, 2009 about a 17-year-old Kindle user named Justin Gawronski who was reading George Orwell’s 1984 for a school assignment when the book disappeared from his device.
In my review of the Kobo eReader, I acknowledged that pre-release reviews complained about problems adjusting font sizes, but I stated that I didn’t encounter these problems myself.
Mt. Allison University, one of Canada’s premiere undergraduate universities, has found itself at the centre of a controversy for its decision to confer an honourary doctorate on Heather Reisman.
I shot this photo beside the entrance to the George Ignatieff Theatre on the U. of T. campus. Mounted on the wall is a sculpture made of iron rods, creating a mesh that’s ideal for bird nests.
As a convenience to my readers, I’ve lumped together some small collections from Gutenberg. Just click on the links to download relatively small zip files.
Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh were joint recipients of the 2010 Dan David Prize which includes a cash purse of $1,000,000.
Facebook has taken some hits for repeated changes to its privacy policy that seem to compromise user privacy to the benefit of advertisers.
Kobo, the offshoot of Canada-based Chapters/Indigo, released its eReader in Canada at the beginning of May and so I scurried out and bought myself one, reasoning that, at CDN $149, if it sucks, I won”t feel as bad as I did when I bought a Dell desktop computer.
Something unusual happened as I was reading Michael Helm’s new novel, Cities of Refuge. I stumbled upon a couple paragraphs which I realized alluded to real events. At least I thought they alluded to real events.
Michael Geist reports that PM Stephen Harper has resolved a dispute between Industry Minister, Tony Clement, and Heritage Minister, James Moore, by siding with Moore and opting for DMCA-style copyright legislation. This would bring us more in line with American policy notwithstanding the fact that copyright consultations last summer suggested that popular opinion favoured something less stringent.
The reed leans into the windas if listening for a secret,an image which stirs the eye withinthe eye within, and no less real for the fact that it happened hereat a pine table in a suburbankitchen with not a reed for miles,but a pen poised over a scratch pad leaning, steep, like a reed into…
The Guardian reports that a Congolese man, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, now living in Belgium, has applied to the Belgium courts to have Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo banned. He alleges that it is racist. Hergé created the cartoon in 1930 when the Congo was a Belgian colony.
I have now officially removed The Huffington Post from my news feed and have stopped following it on Twitter. Not because it’s too left or too right. But because it’s too vapid.
I note that the psychoanalyst, Alice Miller, has died at the age of 87. You can find her obituary in the New York Times. One of my funnier moments—though you’d have to be a complete nerd to appreciate the humour—happened fifteen years ago when I gave my mom a copy of Miller’s book, The Drama…