Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I am a literary snob. There! I’ve put it out where everyone can see it. I”m not just a little snobbish; I’m steeped in the culture of snobbery. I am a complete and utter snob. When Plato talks about “forms” in the Republic, he uses me as an example of Platonic Snobbery. There I am, holding my nose up in the air, looking down at pulp fiction with the same disdain I hold for dog turds.
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.
Dear Mr. Comeau, Please accept my application for position of book reviewer. I thought I’d start with your epistolary novella, Overqualified, published by ECW Press here in Toronto. As you can see already, I have a basic grasp of the big words that literary types like to use when talking about the stuff that authors, you know, produce when they write stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obsolescence isn’t just an economic ploy to promote consumption, nor is it just a cause among many causes for environmental despoliation. Obsolescence is an attitude. The prevalence of this attitude is evidence of the contempt we bear for our own memories.
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 Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, tells the story of L.A. Times columnist, Steve Lopez, and schizophrenic musician, Nathanial Ayers. The film is based on Steve Lopez’s book titled The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.
I have been thinking about the personality of numbers. Until this moment, it never occurred to me that most people think of numbers only as tools for cataloguing quantity. But numbers have a distinctive life outside the numerically bland universe of human beings.
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.