Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum.
I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era.
Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer.
Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darklingwhich they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records.
Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful.
Death Wishing is the debut novel from Laura Ellen Scott whose chapbook, Curio, I featured here earlier this year. It’s hard to know how to classify Death Wishing. Magic realism, perhaps, although it behaves much like science fiction, with a single wild premise producing conflict that drives the action, and characters who reveal themselves as they confront the conflict.
A year and a half ago, Toronto-based Kobo launched a bare bones eReader to give its biggest competitor, Amazon, a run for its money. It was a decent offering supported by a decent library (2.2 million titles and counting) especially when you consider the behemoth it was battling.
No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive).
This morning you may have heard the starting gun for NaNoWriMo or the erroneously named National Novel Writing Month. It really should be GloNoWriMo, substituting Global for National. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world try to write at least 1,666 words each day for 30 consecutive days at the end of which (theoretically) they will have completed a 50,000 word short novel.
We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions.
I’ll soon be setting out on a road trip that takes me through the Prairies. I prepare for trips like this, not by planning where to stay or by careful packing that anticipates every possible weather situation, but by reading books from the places I expect to visit.
As someone who claims to blog thematically about “the power of words” but occasionally interrupts his wordiness with photographs, I find it heartening that Geoff Dyer should open his latest collection of writings, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, with a section devoted to photographers and their work.
There is a book I read at the beginning of the summer that I can’t remember having read. I must have read it because it says so in the notes I scribble. It mustn’t have been a bad book.
In my grade 12 English class, I had to read T.S. Eliot’s ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I took nothing from the class except the line: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” which I repeated over and over when we went down to the cafeteria. Sitting in my jeans, I paid no attention to the preceding lines: “I grow old … I grow old …/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
There is a fascinating article by Joanne Hill in this week’s Jerusalem Tribune, a Toronto-based weekly published under the auspices of the B’nai Brith Canada. [Site defunct.] It purports to be an interview of Jonathan Kay as he launches his book, Among The Truthers.