Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
What is it about storytelling that turns the storyteller into a threatening figure for those who hold power? That is the case for Wole Soyinka, playwright, novelist, poet and Nobel laureate, who spent most of a 27 month prison term in solitary confinement.
I need to stop eating weird things before I go to bed, otherwise I wake up remembering dreams like this:
When you break a silent vow, does it count? I silently vowed I would never mention Charlie Sheen on my blog. It just seems too crass, too exploitative, too easy. But then I discovered that Sheen had self-published a book of poetry in the 90’s and all my integrity went out the window.
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.”
Three more days until the Oscars and four more Best Pictures nominees to get through in my “Dissing the Oscars” series. If I’m going to look at them all before the winner is announced on Sunday, I’ll have to double up my reviews. So why not lump together the “quirky” films from the “quirky” directors?
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?
In June of 2008, I heard the Art of Time Ensemble perform with Steven Page at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. It was part of their Songbook series, an annual event where Andrew Burashko and the Art of Time Ensemble invite a well known Canadian artist to select a handful of favourite songs.
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.
In grade seven, I started going to a new school, a junior high school which sat immediately north of the hydro field. I lived immediately south of the hydro field and could see the school from my back yard if I climbed on top of our tree house.
I used to think the words for book and freedom were related. That’s not so far-fetched. Liber is the Latin word for book. Looks a lot like liberty, no?
The problem with atheists is not that they don’t believe in God, but that they don’t believe in belief.
I’ve finished part III of Joshua Cohen’s Witz, no small feat given that I’m now more than 300 pages into an 800 page novel in which 1 page of Witz represents 2 pages of any other self-respecting novel. In other words, it’s a long book.
Here I am, doing my well-intentioned liberal-white-guy best to discover other voices, and (adhering to my resolution to read at least one African author each month) I start with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Toronto has just witnessed the largest police funeral in Canada’s history, with 12,000 in attendance and a 2 1/2 hour procession through the downtown core to mark the death of Sgt. Ryan Russell who was killed a week ago when a man ran barefoot through the snow, seized an idling snowplow, and went for a joyride through the city streets.