Nik Beat’s collection of poetry, The Tyranny of Love (Seraphim Editions), is the first of a stash I’ll be sampling over the next few weeks. As mentioned in my previous post, I found this book at The Book Band booth at the Mill Race Folk Festival.
Category: Head
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
Ebooks And PED
In debates about copyright and piracy, one hears a lot from copyright law advocates on one side (tough laws, digital rights management, enforcement with teeth), and cultural libertarians on the other (broad fair dealing provisions, open source, lenient enforcement). However, one hears little from economists.
Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn
I don’t know what to make of the novel, Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn. I suspect my difficulty with this novel has as much to do with my personal expectations as with the novel itself.
Maurice by E. M. Forster
I first heard of E. M. Forster’s novel, Maurice, as an undergrad English student, not through one of my courses, but on a visit to my grandparents. At that time, my grandfather was a retired clergy and a staunch member of the Community of Concern, a group hellbent on keeping the dreaded homosexual out of United Church of Canada pulpits.
Coming Out as an Author
I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the conservative wave wash over me, so I went to law school instead.
Sense of Place in Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still for as Long as Possible
Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For As Long As Possible is a novel about queer youth in Toronto. I’m not a queer youth in Toronto. I’m a straight middle-aged guy in Toronto. (I leave for another time the debate about whether straight people can identify as queer.) So I don’t feel acutely qualified to pronounce upon…
August Farewell, by David G. Hallman
On Friday August 7, 2009, William Conklin and his partner of almost 33 years, David Hallman, learned that William—Bill—had pancreatic cancer. Within 16 days, Bill was dead. David wrote quickly of those 16 days, fearful perhaps that if he lost the memory of them, it would compound his sense of loss.
Wringing The Author Out Of Middle Class Fiction
Although Barthes quietly proclaimed the death of the author more than 40 years ago, the sudden rise of the ebook is moving people to shout this news from the mountaintop. Blogging pranks, ehoaxes and spam ebooks have produced a reversal of our natural presumption. Instead of giving authorship the benefit of the doubt, we assume that a written work has been manufactured by a process—that there is no “real” person behind the author.
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
Someday I would like to write a dissertation. I would use big words and quote great minds and when I was done I would tell people that I had made a definitive statement: a philosophy of the banal. I would write it in the spirit of Albert Camus who offered the world a philosophy of the absurd. Only I would do Camus one better.
The Guardian’s 100 greatest non-fiction books
Almost as if in answer to my “Full Catastrophe Reading” post of June 13th, The Guardian published “The 100 greatest non-fiction books” on the following day. In my post, I had suggested that, to read well, we must be fully awake to the texts we encounter.
Full Catastrophe Reading
The title for this post comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, a landmark piece on mindfulness and the art of living well. Why (I ask myself) can the same principles of mindfulness not also be applied to the art of reading well?
Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor
Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs. I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium. I feel bound by an unwritten contract: I blog Toronto books in exchange for the pleasure of reading about other people in their locales.
Speaking in Fake English
What is Tom Waits saying in his song Kommienezuspadt? It sounds vaguely German, but as far as I can tell, none of it is real.
Charactered Pieces, by Caleb J. Ross
This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks.
Paul Quarrington’s Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall
Imagine all this and what you have is the late Paul Quarrington’s wild Flying W of a novel, Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall, whose most notable feature (apart from its good-natured fun-poking tall-tale yarn-spinning, is its sheer delight in language.