Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
It’s difficult to decide what The Film Club is. It purports to be literary non-fiction and was nominated for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Gilmour himself identifies the book as “true” and notes, in an afterword, the challenges of writing honestly about people you are in a relationship with — presumably because, if you write too honestly, you may jeopardize the relationship.
How many times have you heard someone say: “But it’s only a metaphor”? While this phrase can crop up in conversations about any discipline, it seems to make itself heard most often in complaints about Christian fundamentalists who have chosen to interpret one or another Biblical text in literal terms.
Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, Bezmozgis came to Toronto with his parents when he was six. His collection of seven stories is, according to one reviewer, loosely autobiographical and presents us with a series of vignettes from the point of view of his fictional alter-ego, Mark Berman.
In A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul offers another account as to why we find it so difficult to engage one another without recourse to polarizing habits. In brief: Canada has inherited from both France and England a colonial perspective. In fact, Canada is doubly colonized when one considers Trudeau’s statement that living in Canada is like sleeping beside an elephant; in subtle ways, we have been culturally and economically subjugated by the U.S.
“She looked back and felt a shiver as she caught sight of him in the throng. Their gazes locked across the crowded room. His expression alone sent another shiver through her. There was both challenge and promise in his eyes. It left no doubt. He had recognized her.”
As a compulsive bibliophile, I like to browse through used book stores, yard sales and church rummage sales in search of the unusual, the rare, and the weird. For the most part, I’m interested in what lies between the covers.
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
The American type designer, Frederic Goudy, is reputed to have said that “[a]ny one who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” That is the source for the title of a wonderful book on type design by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger: Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works.
From the age of twelve until I started university I took piano lessons from a man named Alan who loved to read and always had a book in hand when he rode the subway. I remember after one lesson, maybe in ’78 or ’79, when we were chatting about — who knows — life, the universe and everything — when Alan laughed and told me he was reading Death in Don Mills, by Hugh Garner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A meme has been floating around on facebook and in blogs that refers to a list of 100 books compiled by the BBC. Presumably they are must-reads.