Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
The protagonist, Raskolnikov, is an impoverished ex-student living in St. Petersburg. His chief supporter is fellow student, Razumihin, who earns a few roubles here and there translating European works. It is Razumihin who dreams of setting up his own publishing business.
In yesterday’s post on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I asked a question which I never answered: “And can we make anything more of it [the Tropic of Cancer] 75 years after its publication?” That’s a question about Miller’s legacy.
The expat Yank living in Paris in the late 20’s and early 30’s. The oblique references to an American wife named Mona who has sent him off to Paris without a care for his sexual proclivities. The plotless meandering. The indiscriminate drinking and fucking. The largely useless attempts to write a novel.
Graham Swift’s The Light of Day opens with all the promise of a standard detective potboiler. We meet an ex-cop private investigator named George Webb and Rita, his trusted assistant.
After reading Making An Elephant, I’m of the opinion that Graham Swift isn’t really interested in writing; he’s interested in people and writing is the pretext he uses to satisfy that interest.
One of the worst things that can happen to a marginalized group is to go mainstream. When the revolutionaries become the ruling party, you know you’re fucked.
The conservatives said they were going to introduce new copyright legislation within six weeks. That was back on May 05, 2010 and true to their word, they introduced Bill C32 — the Copyright Modernization Act on June 2nd.
Introducing the latest poetry magazine to show its face in Canada—this one from Vancouver: it’s called Poetry Is Dead. Irony abounds. For example, on page 1 we have a (moderately graphically altered) excerpt from John Donne’s 10th sonnet. Ironic because an avant garde poetry magazine is opening its doors with a work from the classical…
This evening marked the 10th annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Prizes were awarded to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (international) for The Sun-fish and to Karen Solie (Canadian) for Pigeon. Read the Griffin Trust’s press release here. Learn more about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin here. And read a review of The Sun Fish in The Guardian. Learn more about…
There’s a traditional view of how a poem relates to the world that has been with us for almost 2,500 years. This view is a reflection of an equally traditional view of how our world is organized. Although we’d like to describe ourselves as up-to-the-minute advanced scientific creatures, this ancient view is still with us in subtle ways.
Last night me and my camera walked a section of Yonge Street to see what we could see. I walked from Cummer Ave. south to Empress. I like Yonge Street because there’s lots of traffic and lights. In other words, it’s visually interesting.
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.
Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh were joint recipients of the 2010 Dan David Prize which includes a cash purse of $1,000,000.