Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
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 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 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…
I’ve always assumed that Scots are just naturally hospitable. Then I read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and stumbled on a passage (you won’t find this scene in the film) that causes me to wonder if maybe I haven’t met the right Scots yet.
The Roman Catholic Church appears to be in crisis with the continued outing of homosexual pedophile priests and revelations of abuse. The sad thing about this is that the abuse is not the crisis. Given that abuse has been happening since the days of St. Peter, one can hardly call the status quo a crisis.
We tend to think of reading as an advanced form of cryptography. At least that’s the default approach for a rational soul like me. The poet has a thought or feeling he wishes to communicate, so he takes that thought or feeling and wraps it in a coded packet called a poem.
The Other Sister is a story of twins and, perhaps necessarily, a story of personal identity. It concerns Julia, a freshly admitted resident of Evenholme, a home for the aged. At 97, Julia is sound in her mind, but growing frail in her body. Her daughter, Rachel, has given her a laptop computer and so Julia reluctantly agrees to spend a little time each day typing her recollections on this new machine.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if Franz Kafka had written William Goldman’s The Princess Bride? Neither have I but I just thought I’d ask.
Do you remember Michael Apted’s documentary Seven Up! He follows fourteen kids from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and poses (to the viewers) a simple question: is there truth in the Jesuit dictum “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”
I note three things distinctive about the writing style of Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist monk and founder of the Order of Interbeing): The first is its simplicity.
In the forward to What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order, Ronald Wright points out that his book arises from the final chapter of an earlier work, A Short History of Progress. There, he planted the seeds of a simple thesis with far reaching consequences. It is his latter book which expands upon these consequences.
I had never heard of Regina Spektor until my daughter asked me for a lift downtown to a concert on Queen’s Quay. I asked who Regina Spektor is and my daughter loaned me a CD called Soviet Kitsch. It was one of those odd occasions when I encountered something in pop culture without realizing it was a literary reference.
When Lois Wilson submitted a request to transfer her church membership, board members of the receiving church asked the minister: “Who is Lois Wilson?” The minister, Rev. Doug Norris, answered: “She”s 90 pounds of piss and vinegar.”