Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
It’s difficult to decide what The Film Club is. It purports to be literary non-fiction and was nominated for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Gilmour himself identifies the book as “true” and notes, in an afterword, the challenges of writing honestly about people you are in a relationship with — presumably because, if you write too honestly, you may jeopardize the relationship.
How many times have you heard someone say: “But it’s only a metaphor”? While this phrase can crop up in conversations about any discipline, it seems to make itself heard most often in complaints about Christian fundamentalists who have chosen to interpret one or another Biblical text in literal terms.
Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, Bezmozgis came to Toronto with his parents when he was six. His collection of seven stories is, according to one reviewer, loosely autobiographical and presents us with a series of vignettes from the point of view of his fictional alter-ego, Mark Berman.
The on/off switch. The transistor. The basis of binary code. What if it’s all wrong?
In A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul offers another account as to why we find it so difficult to engage one another without recourse to polarizing habits. In brief: Canada has inherited from both France and England a colonial perspective. In fact, Canada is doubly colonized when one considers Trudeau’s statement that living in Canada is like sleeping beside an elephant; in subtle ways, we have been culturally and economically subjugated by the U.S.
Google’s Street View has gone live in Toronto. As I blogged in May, Google’s cars were tearing up the streets of Toronto to capture street level images of … well … of whatever happened to be there.
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
From the age of twelve until I started university I took piano lessons from a man named Alan who loved to read and always had a book in hand when he rode the subway. I remember after one lesson, maybe in ’78 or ’79, when we were chatting about — who knows — life, the universe and everything — when Alan laughed and told me he was reading Death in Don Mills, by Hugh Garner.
The Canadian government is holding a national copyright consultation from July 20th until Sept 13th, 2009. It’s happening under the auspices of the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages.
Let’s revisit the question I posed in my “Quitters Are Winners Too” post: what is it about American life that increases the prevalence of depression? Americans are more depressed than any other group in the world.
I had myself a fun read with Dr. I. M. Levitt’s 1956 offering, A Space Traveller’s Guide to Mars, a book which consolidates all the very latest knowledge about the planet Mars – or at least all the latest knowledge in the McCarthy era, when science could promise anything, including certainty, and Buck Rogers was more real than Ho Chi Minh.
The Guardian reports that a Banksy Paddington Bear mural worth £5,000 got grey-washed by overzealous Glastonbury council volunteers who were trying to rid the municipality of that dreaded blight — graffiti.
John Beckham offers a short essay in Granta, “A Vacation From Myself”, which I take as anecdotal evidence in support of a claim I’ve been making for some time: mental health therapies (Wellbutrin in Beckham’s case) often come with a cost — a loss of the self — and we need to be more circumspect in the way we value such therapies.
I’ve finished writing a novel (tentatively titled Clouds On Wall) and expect to complete the editing/polishing/paring by the end of the month. The looming question is: what next?
How do we answer those who apply doubt to sway public opinion in favour of irrational views? How do we respond to the well-orchestrated media campaign that encourages people to doubt the credibility of evolutionary biology in favour of supernatural fiat?