Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darklingwhich they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records.
I bookended 2011 with two large novels. In January, I read Witz, by Joshua Cohen, a sprawling brilliant novel which I would set on my shelf beside the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. In December, I read 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, also a sprawling novel which at least one critic has likened to War and Peace and Infinite Jest.
Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful.
Death Wishing is the debut novel from Laura Ellen Scott whose chapbook, Curio, I featured here earlier this year. It’s hard to know how to classify Death Wishing. Magic realism, perhaps, although it behaves much like science fiction, with a single wild premise producing conflict that drives the action, and characters who reveal themselves as they confront the conflict.
No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive).
We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions.
When I was nine, my brother and I climbed into the back seat of our parents’ Ford LTD station Wagon, the model with the fake wood paneling on the doors, and we spent the summer driving across Canada and back.
I’ll soon be setting out on a road trip that takes me through the Prairies. I prepare for trips like this, not by planning where to stay or by careful packing that anticipates every possible weather situation, but by reading books from the places I expect to visit.
As someone who claims to blog thematically about “the power of words” but occasionally interrupts his wordiness with photographs, I find it heartening that Geoff Dyer should open his latest collection of writings, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, with a section devoted to photographers and their work.
There is a book I read at the beginning of the summer that I can’t remember having read. I must have read it because it says so in the notes I scribble. It mustn’t have been a bad book.
The Kardashian sisters, whose sole claim to fame is that they are famous, can now claim novel-writing as another of their accomplishments.
In my grade 12 English class, I had to read T.S. Eliot’s ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I took nothing from the class except the line: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” which I repeated over and over when we went down to the cafeteria. Sitting in my jeans, I paid no attention to the preceding lines: “I grow old … I grow old …/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
Nik Beat’s collection of poetry, The Tyranny of Love (Seraphim Editions), is the first of a stash I’ll be sampling over the next few weeks. As mentioned in my previous post, I found this book at The Book Band booth at the Mill Race Folk Festival.
Moby Dick is one of those classics everyone knows but few have ever read. We know it because it has given us iconic images that have sunk to the rock bottom of our culture: the whale; the whiteness of the whale; Ahab’s rage; Queequeg worshiping before his idol; and the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”
Toronto City Councillor, Doug Ford, has found himself in a battle of wits with local area resident, Margaret Atwood, who has mounted considerable opposition to his efforts to close branches of the Toronto Public Libraries.