Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the conservative wave wash over me, so I went to law school instead.
Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For As Long As Possible is a novel about queer youth in Toronto. I’m not a queer youth in Toronto. I’m a straight middle-aged guy in Toronto. (I leave for another time the debate about whether straight people can identify as queer.) So I don’t feel acutely qualified to pronounce upon…
On Friday August 7, 2009, William Conklin and his partner of almost 33 years, David Hallman, learned that William—Bill—had pancreatic cancer. Within 16 days, Bill was dead. David wrote quickly of those 16 days, fearful perhaps that if he lost the memory of them, it would compound his sense of loss.
Yes, you read that rightly. The famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, had his introduction to leather SM in Toronto. He discovered bathhouses here too.
Today marks the 144th anniversary of Canada’s confederation, a time to celebrate national pride. I would describe myself as fiercely Canadian (the word fierce is cognate with the French word for proud), but I’m also fiercely ambivalent about being a Canadian.
After they peeled the tape from the door frame and pulled her head from the oven, the cop came at me, hat in hand, with the obvious question.
Although Barthes quietly proclaimed the death of the author more than 40 years ago, the sudden rise of the ebook is moving people to shout this news from the mountaintop. Blogging pranks, ehoaxes and spam ebooks have produced a reversal of our natural presumption. Instead of giving authorship the benefit of the doubt, we assume that a written work has been manufactured by a process—that there is no “real” person behind the author.
Writing stories is not a recent obsession for me. It began in my early teens with a story about the end of the world. Planet Earth gets sucked into a black hole. Balls and holes. The scientist who announces Earth’s fate to his colleagues does so while standing beside a pool table holding a cue stick.
Explanations follow new phenomena like tails follow dogs, or so Dean claimed as he did his loquacious best to pitch the idea of a symposium to the chair of the English Department. Dr. Fenton was a portly man twice Dean’s age who had a reputation for driving his underlings to the point of collapse then stepping in to assume credit for their toils.
Knuckleheads is a guy book. Knuckleheads is also a derogatory term. But here, Kass uses it in a more generous spirit to describe your average straight male who has enough insight to know that his sexuality demands more work of him than it does of a silverback mountain gorilla, but not enough wisdom or experience to know how to begin that work.
Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing. The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights. I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the water the Morlocks drink in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – an underground toxic sludge.
Someday I would like to write a dissertation. I would use big words and quote great minds and when I was done I would tell people that I had made a definitive statement: a philosophy of the banal. I would write it in the spirit of Albert Camus who offered the world a philosophy of the absurd. Only I would do Camus one better.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that, in writing my novel, The Land, I used my brother-in-law’s organic farm as a rough model for the setting. And while the characters — husband, wife and two boys — bear a superficial resemblance to my brother-in-law and his family, it doesn’t take too many pages before any resemblance evaporates.
To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC: Virgin Alerts Infected Customers.
Almost as if in answer to my “Full Catastrophe Reading” post of June 13th, The Guardian published “The 100 greatest non-fiction books” on the following day. In my post, I had suggested that, to read well, we must be fully awake to the texts we encounter.