Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
In debates about copyright and piracy, one hears a lot from copyright law advocates on one side (tough laws, digital rights management, enforcement with teeth), and cultural libertarians on the other (broad fair dealing provisions, open source, lenient enforcement). However, one hears little from economists.
I don’t know what to make of the novel, Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn. I suspect my difficulty with this novel has as much to do with my personal expectations as with the novel itself.
I first heard of E. M. Forster’s novel, Maurice, as an undergrad English student, not through one of my courses, but on a visit to my grandparents. At that time, my grandfather was a retired clergy and a staunch member of the Community of Concern, a group hellbent on keeping the dreaded homosexual out of United Church of Canada pulpits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The title for this post comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, a landmark piece on mindfulness and the art of living well. Why (I ask myself) can the same principles of mindfulness not also be applied to the art of reading well?
Periodically, I like to feature local books which, in the case of nouspique, means books with a connection to Toronto and environs. I do this, not to tout the virtues of my hometown, but to help cultivate the local in a global medium. I feel bound by an unwritten contract: I blog Toronto books in exchange for the pleasure of reading about other people in their locales.
This is yet another installment in my ongoing and idiosyncratic effort to curate decent indie, DRM-free, (did we mention decent?) ebooks.
Imagine all this and what you have is the late Paul Quarrington’s wild Flying W of a novel, Civilization and Its Part in My Downfall, whose most notable feature (apart from its good-natured fun-poking tall-tale yarn-spinning, is its sheer delight in language.
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…