Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Spleen, is for posts that make us angry.
According to the Walkerton Herald-Times, the parent of a grade 12 student has filed a complaint with the Bluewater District School Board calling for removal of Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars, from the curriculum. According to the article, Carolyn Waddell, a professional counselor, alleges that there are parts of Findley’s novel which are “depraved”. She…
It isn’t exactly news to point out that publishing is in crisis. Now that digital text can be delivered in a format which offers a viable substitute for the physical book, there are fears that the publishing industry will experience an upheaval of biblical proportions.
Almost as if to illustrate my two previous posts that propose a new poetics of authenticity, the latest issue of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine came careening through my window. To bring you up to speed, I have previously described “authenticity” as the 21st century’s favourite yardstick for measuring the worth of a poem. The notion of “authenticity”…
It started with Richard Klagsbrun who drew attention at the National Post and on his own blog to an OISE student named Jennifer Peto and her Master’s thesis titled “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education.”
My name is Dave and I am a Disneyholic…Hello, Dave. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and your struggles with Disney addiction?
If you click on the little audio thingy, you can listen to a story about the Federal Communications Commission or FCC (pronounced “fuck”).
I wrote this poem just the other day in anticipation of all the captains that will be zooming into town this weekend. Can any of them inspire the kind of adulation Walt Whitman felt for his captain? I’m inclined to think today’s captains do what they do without accountability, not because they are deliberately deceptive, but because they operate under the cover a world filled with distraction.
It seems that every week plays host to its very own censorship controversy. Last week, it was an American publisher proposing to replace Huckleberry Finn’s 219 instances of the word “nigger” with the word “slave”. This week it’s the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council nixing the word “faggot” in the Dire Straights 1985 single, “Money For Nothing”.
Toronto’s new mayor, Rob Ford, wants his city to be a graffiti-free zone. Back in October, when he was still just a candidate, he spoke to the Board of Trade about how he wanted Toronto to be clean and safe, how he wanted Toronto to sparkle for the 2015 Pan Am games.
NewNorthByNorthWest Inc., a publisher of literary classics for use in secondary school curriculum, has announced that a new edition of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in the works and is expected to be available in time for the 2011/12 school year. A staple of English curriculum even a generation ago, Shakespeare’s tale of love and usury has appeared in fewer and fewer English programs as parent teacher associations increasingly raise objections to the work.
There’s a book you’ll never persuade me to read. Maybe you know it. A man has a stroke that leaves all his faculties intact but paralyses him except for one eye which he can blink. Using his blinks to indicate letters, he dictates an entire book — his memoir. Understandably, it’s a slim volume. After all, the man has had to measure his words.
Dear Mr. Disney, I went to the local movie theatre and saw your latest offering called Tron Legacy. Part way through, I had to pick the wax out of my ears. Did I hear what I thought I heard? Did you have your main character, played by Jeff Bridges (the older one), say: “Information wants to be free?” WTF?
Life on earth could thrive. Life on earth could soar. Right now things seem stuck. What holds us down? What keeps us from a higher living? I’ve offered a couple suggestions. What flags would you put on those mooring lines?
My thing is not your thing;your thing is not my thing.Particulate things enclosed in force fields,bouncing off each other and brick walls,marbles flung from a sling shot. Talking through string between tincans, graduating to Morsecode on flashes of light betweenbedroom windows, semaphores,made-up codes, rudimentaryencryption. Now everyone’s talk is coded.The keys have gone missing: an aphasic blare,…
Every now and then, you read a blog post that pisses you off. What makes the piss-off quotient worse is that everybody else thinks the post is wonderful. You start to doubt your opinion. More than that, you start to doubt your hold on reality.