Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Spleen, is for posts that make us angry.
Do you think that I, like Jeremiah,had come to give your soul an enema?I don’t even know the proper orifice.I only wanted to box your ears,smack you upside the head,vent my rage at all you did and said.But those Jews with their predilectionfor over-interpretation, theycalled it something else, something noble.They hoisted me on their shouldersand…
Barack Obama is our latest Nobel Laureate. The world (or at least that part of the world that thinks the Nobel prize has more credibility than the medal the Wizard pins on the cowardly lion’s chest) is abuzz with the news. Opinions vary.
The American type designer, Frederic Goudy, is reputed to have said that “[a]ny one who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” That is the source for the title of a wonderful book on type design by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger: Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works.
A suberbug is coming,an evolved pathogenwith tougher DNA,a variant, a strain.We delude ourselves (they say)to believe we grasp the highestlink of the food chain. I am resistantto the idea that microbesborne on the currentsfrom a spluttered sneezecould abbreviate my teemingPetri dish thoughts. Is penan antigen? Or more the disease? The subject line: SARS andSwine flu…
I cut through the parkand there, tucked in the grasswas a banana, freshfrom the local grocery store,unripe, green tending to yellow,with a label stuckto its thick skin. I felt for a minutethat the sky had crackedand through the crack the wholeweight of recorded timebore down upon me thereand stomped me to the ground:a bug smushed…
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.
The twitterverse has been abuzz with talk of Amazon’s decision to delete Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its proprietary e-reader, Kindle. As a consequence, Kindle owners woke up on Friday to discover that those two titles had disappeared and the purchase price had been credited to their accounts.
Yesterday I went to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which the ROM has mounted with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority and which will continue until January 3rd, 2010. As an educational experience, it’s first-rate, top-drawer stuff, the perfect follow-up to last year’s Darwin exhibit. But then again, being the perverse person that I am, I don’t think I got out of the exhibit quite what the exhibitors intended.
Nothing stirs up controversy like debates about female anatomy, especially the bits to do with reproduction and sexuality. We saw this in Canada with last year’s induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada.
I paid a visit to Pages Books & Magazines yesterday, kind of a farewell book-buying junket, a personal ritual of mine to acknowledge that one of Toronto’s last great Indie booksellers will be closing its doors on August 31st. I happened by while an emergency vehicle was parked outside. Unfortunately, the patient will not be revived.
What do the British Museum and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have in common? Not much it seems. Certainly not much when it comes to thinking about culture-as-collaboration and online file-sharing.
I think of Payback, Margaret Atwood’s analysis of the mythic grounding of debt as a cultural phenomenon, and I wonder if, in the long run, MJ’s hold on the popular imagination will come to be understood through his extraordinary indebtedness.
Rob Ford’s graffiti Nazis are fanning out like pesky little rodents through all the streets of Toronto. I just saw my first “Stop Graffiti Vandalism Now” sign. We have our very own war on terror, but scaled down for the suburbs.
The alarming thing about the so-called swine flu is the number of variant viruses it has produced.
Today’s big literary news is NOT the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer winners, but the fact that all the major winners were published by companies owned by media giant Bertelsmann.