Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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.
Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social media universe. One story from the UK: soul singer, Amy Winehouse, had died at the age of 27.
It’s fascinating to observe what counts as news. Posts on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog counted as news when they were sensational. When they sold papers. Amina’s posts ceased to count as news when they ceased to be factual.
The Piss Christ scandal reminds me of the chocolate Jesus scandal, only this scandal has gone one better … or two … or three. In the case of the chocolate Jesus, the scandal was the work itself.
My name is Dave and I am a Disneyholic…Hello, Dave. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and your struggles with Disney addiction?
In grade seven, I started going to a new school, a junior high school which sat immediately north of the hydro field. I lived immediately south of the hydro field and could see the school from my back yard if I climbed on top of our tree house.
The problem with atheists is not that they don’t believe in God, but that they don’t believe in belief.
Toronto has just witnessed the largest police funeral in Canada’s history, with 12,000 in attendance and a 2 1/2 hour procession through the downtown core to mark the death of Sgt. Ryan Russell who was killed a week ago when a man ran barefoot through the snow, seized an idling snowplow, and went for a joyride through the city streets.
There is nothing worse than a glib thirty-year-old academic who has absolute confidence in the possibility of certainty. Reading Ivor Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism, I was seized every five pages by an impulse to hurl the book at the wall.
As I was walking my dog this morning, I found myself reflecting on a few of the many ways prejudice infected my childhood and how political correctness saved me.
Culture is not an industry. It is not a sector of the economy. Culture is a condition. It is the social trailings of my solitary consciousness.
While flying across Canada, I read Roland Barthes’ best-known book, Mythologies. As I waited in Toronto at Pearson International Airport, I read the translator’s note, the two prefaces, and his essay on wrestling. Somewhere over Lake Superior, I read about Roman haircuts in movies from the ’50’s.
Technology can be frustrating. ou may remember reading a news item from July, 2009 about a 17-year-old Kindle user named Justin Gawronski who was reading George Orwell’s 1984 for a school assignment when the book disappeared from his device.
More than a year ago, in a post titled “The Nipple Exposed,” I wondered why our public morality has grown increasingly prurient in its fascination with open displays of nipples.
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.