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On Why Trilling Matters
Reviewed in this essay: Why Trilling Matters, by Adam Kirsch. Yale University Press, 2011. Lionel Trilling was a major figure in his times: revered, loathed, and full of contradictions. He was—with perhaps only the exception of Edmund Wilson—the most well-known and respected American literary critic throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties. He was the first…
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Reviving the ‘Radical’ in Canadian Theatre History
Reviewed in this essay: Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada, by Alan Filewod. Between the Lines, 2011. Alan Filewod, arguably the most prolific scholar of leftist political theatre in English Canada, has skillfully analyzed the history of radical performance in this country, from the mid-nineteenth century to the most recent G20 demonstrations,…
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Kate Beaton: Canada’s Cartoonist
Reviewed in this essay: Hark, a Vagrant, by Kate Beaton. Drawn and Quarterly, 2011. On the web at harkavagrant.com. If you haven’t heard of Kate Beaton until lately you’re a little late to the party. Since Drawn and Quarterly released a collection of her work last fall, the cartoonist has exploded in popularity: a book…
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Where’s the Beer? And Jamie Fitzpatrick’s You Could Believe in Nothing
Reviewed in this essay: You Could Believe in Nothing, by Jamie Fitzpatrick. Nimbus Publishing, 2011. Until a few weeks ago, I thought I knew hockey culture. Like many Canadians, I grew up playing the game, and put in my time watching Don Cherry in the 80s and 90s. And, like Derek in Jamie Fitzpatrick’s fine…
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Have We Dreamed so Big?: A Review of Rebecca Rosenblum’s The Big Dream
Reviewed in this essay: The Big Dream, by Rebecca Rosenblum. Biblioasis, 2011. Have we dreamed so big, only to awake small, suburban and fragile? Rosenblum’s collection of linked short stories is a chronicle of the disappointments of waking/growing up, only to find that the golden palace of your dream is a squat, square low-rise commercial…
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. At Wellesley College in 1941, before he secured financial independence with Lolita (1955), Nabokov was a one-man Russian literature department. Lectures on Russian Literature collects his lessons on Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki and Dostoevsky from that period, including after he…
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On the Real Way to Eat like a Caveman
Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [audio: issuetwo/dylan.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range…
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Need-to-Know: On Area 51
Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [audio: issuetwo/matt.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days…
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“Hatred Warms the Heart”: Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery: A Novel
Reviewed in this essay: The Prague Cemetery: A Novel by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery is a novel about hatred, and about why people love to believe conspiracy theories, which confirm their worst fears about groups they fear or resent. “In some…
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Tattooing The Heart Of Darkness: a Review of Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
Reviewed in this essay: Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, by Ashley Little. Tightrope Books, 2011. Though no babe in the woods himself, when Anthony Ant Young, the redheaded protagonist in Ashley Little’s brief debut novel Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist initially enters a Victoria tattoo parlour seeking an apprenticeship, his questionable virtue is unblemished…
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Fashion Designers At The Opera
Reviewed in this essay: Fashion Designers at the Opera, by Helena Matheopoulos. Thames & Hudson, 2011. Season after season both fashion designers and opera producers have to contend with the fact that their work will be hotly debated by the masses. Much of the scrutiny they receive comes from that greyest of all grey…
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A Boozy Reader’s Guide to Decadent Duos
It’s that time of year again: you step outside at 5pm and it might as well be midnight. The sky is black and starless, the air is bone-cold, and before you know it, seasonal affective disorder has you held fast in its goblin’s grip. What better way to fend off the dreary winter blahs than…