Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
On July 31st, 1703, Daniel Foe (who came to call himself Daniel DeFoe) was arrested for seditious libel and sentenced to stand in the pillory for three days. Queen Anne had just ascended to the throne as Queen of England and was intent upon rooting out Nonconformists e.g. Roman Catholics (among the most despised in England), and people like DeFoe, the son of Presbyterian Dissenters, who, although Protestant, nevertheless refused to acknowledge the primacy of the Church of England.
The first book of my January Book Project is Pathologies by Susan Olding. Pathologies looks something like a memoir, something like a collection of literary essays. As essays, they are connected and follow a roughly chronological sequence. Although each could stand on its own, taken together, they produce something like an autobiography.
In chapter 32 of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë offers a curious passage, in which St. John Eyre Rivers offers Jane a volume of poetry. The volume, it turns out, is Scott’s Marmion, which was published almost forty years before Jane Eyre.
A couple weeks ago, as part of Glasgow’s Doors Open Day, volunteers offered tours of the Necropolis. Located behind Glasgow Cathedral, the Necropolis is a crumbling celebration of Victorian Glasgow’s elite.
It’s a Sunday in September, and as an act of revenge against all the construction companies snarling Toronto traffic with their new condo builds, books take to the streets. Pavilions go up all around Queen’s Park Crescent diverting traffic east to Bay & Yonge and west to Huron & Spadina.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was five, my dad sat me down in front of an Ouija board and told me to ask it some questions. Whatever I wanted. Anything at all. My dad was a good church-going soul and the son of a theologian, but a five-year-old doesn’t care about apparent inconsistencies.
Birth and revelation, death and ultimate destruction. These have been bred into the DNA of Matt Bell’s slender collection, Cataclysm Baby, twenty-six delicious tales (one for each letter of the alphabet) about fathers and the more-often-than-not grotesque children they bring into a dying world.
I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances of an abstraction. We recognize a particular horse in the real world because it corresponds to a form we carry around in our heads.
It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice.