Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
In an accompanying note to Haven, Emma Donoghue acknowledges that while she conceived of the novel before the pandemic, she executed it in the thick of things. While not explicitly a Covid novel, it nevertheless takes on features of the experience in tangential ways. We learn, for example, that one of the characters, a monk named…
I’m not sure how to react to this novel. Part of me balks at the saccharine sentimentality that drips from some of the passages. At the same time, part of me stands in utter awe of Mary Shelley. She was, perhaps, the first person to offer up a full articulation of the idea that human…
As an intrepid street photographer, I make a point of documenting urban life in my little corner of this pale blue dot we call home. I make an annual habit of culling my observations to the best 100 or so photographs and printing them in a large hard-cover glossy format so that I have a…
Historically, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella has been read either as a quasi confessional reflection on male (homo)sexuality, or as a reflection on beauty and the author’s responsibilities. Gustav von Aschenbach, an established writer of some renown, widowed with an adult daughter, decides that he would benefit from an extended holiday. After a false start, he…
I have a special pile of books, purchased with the best of intentions, which nevertheless go unread. What lurks in the background is, perhaps, a species of gluttony. I want to read everything. I want to swallow it whole, digest it, ruminate until I pass it into my second stomach, break it down and draw…
He had the impression the three drivers were in communication, waving to one another through their frosted windows. Then followed a succession of clicks as each unlocked his door; a sound of rushing air…
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, Laura Spinney (London: Vintage, 2017) The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2020) Published in 2017, Laura Spinney’s historical investigation of the 1918 pandemic could not have anticipated what was to follow in three years. And yet Spinney notes that…
Stepping away from the cubicle, I saw that it served a small construction site. A man stood on the sidewalk eating a fruit cup for breakfast and I realized he was probably the foreman. He smiled at me and asked how my day was going. I smiled at him and hiked up my pants and said it was going well thank you; and how’s it going for you?
I return again to the image and wonder if an older man wearing a mask and carrying a book about grief isn’t emblematic of our times. During the pandemic, there are ways in which we all have experienced loss.
Sometimes, when I’m out walking, the city seems to buzz. Thanks to the pandemic and the lockdowns it has required, I haven’t had that feeling for a couple years. But this Sunday was different.
The very fact that we allow them to march down the main thoroughfare of our city gives the lie to their complaints. Admittedly, one of the marchers lost his freedom when he was arrested. But that was because he bit a police officer.
As buildings approach this ultimate dissolution, they undergo a shift from human time to geologic time, no longer measuring the transformation in human heartbeats, but in the barely discernible rhythm of tectonic rumbles.
While she waited for the water to boil, Amanda stared at her tiny head reflected back to her in the curved metal surface of the kettle, and she considered that maybe her life was beginning to feel as warped as it appeared to her in the kettle.
The thing is: this worry is not something that happens in my head. Whatever happens in my head is only a symptom of something more pervasive that overwhelms my body. I feel it in my shoulders. By the end of a day, it feels as if I’m carrying a massive weight that bows me down.
Before there were germs, there was miasma. Bad air. Billows rolling off the bogs and fens. The stench of swamp gas. The rot of ferns and trees fallen to decay in stagnant pools. Fetid. Rancid. Odoriferous.