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Sex, Bugs, and Schizophrenia: A review of Poison Shy
Reviewed in this essay: Poison Shy by Stacey Madden. ECW Press, 2012. Sex, bugs, and schizophrenia form an unlikely trinity, it is true. And yet they converge with surprising semblance in Stacey Madden’s first novel, Poison Shy. Told through first-person retrospective narration, Poison Shy is the story of a love triangle between two heavy-drinking late…
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Jimmy Carter wonders what happened to the Canadians in Argo
Nobody should expect the movies, or novels, or monographs by political scientists, to be the last or only word on the past. The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001) offer at best a partial view of the Second World War while telling us more about the times and places in which…
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Bookishness: Dec. 3, 2012 – MOMA, trees, the gay revolution, and more
Glad day to night “I often refer back to a quote from author Christopher Bram that I once jotted down in a notebook: ‘The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.’ The same could be said about many great revolutions. This is why we should care about Glad Day, and the similar (indie/niche/speciality) bookshops beyond…
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Ready, set, read: CBC launches Canada Reads 2013
The CBC Broadcast Centre’s cavernous atrium was filled to capacity Thursday as fans gathered for the official launch of Canada Reads 2013. Q’s Jian Gomeshi, who hosted the day’s events, introduced this year’s five panelists, conducting short, loose interviews with each of them.
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Starting the conversation: A review of First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People
Reviewed in this essay: First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People, by Lynda Gray (Adaawx, 2011, 275 pages). I’m a First Nations survivor of the ’60s and ’70s “Scoop”, the government-imposed movement that took hundreds of Aboriginal children away from their families, culture, traditions and heritage. I was…
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Chasing Cures: A Review of Erin Knight’s Chaser
Reviewed in this essay: Chaser by Erin Knight, House of Anansi Press, 2012. Without experiencing the discomfits of illness, we cannot benefit from the advancement of knowledge and understanding that accompanies diagnosis and healing. Erin Knight’s second book of poems, Chaser, released last spring, explores this fascinating contradiction, as well as the pathologies that affect…
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Bookishness: November 26, 2012
Mystery Dictionary.com‘s word of 2012 (image by craigdfreeman). Joan Didion on keeping a notebook “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I…
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Hunting and Gathering Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books
Dear readers, dear writers: Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books is percolating through your thoughts as I type. If you suspect you have a part of the issue in your head, waiting to spit itself out on screen, be in touch. We’re looking for essays, both shorter (800-1000 words) and longer (1500-2000 words),…
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Appadurai Muttulingam: An interview with the prolific Tamil short-story writer
Appadurai Muttulingam grew up in the Sri Lankan village of Kokkuvil and has produced hundreds of short stories in his native Tamil—a collection of which, Inauspicious Times, has been translated in English. After publishing his first collection of stories at 25, he got a degree in chartered accountancy and emigrated to work for the United Nations…
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Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre
Reviewed in this essay: “Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection,” Ryerson Image Centre inaugural exhibition. Ryerson University recently became home to the Black Star Collection, a massive archive of photojournalistic prints (over 292,000 objects) that together document the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th century. To mark this significant acquisition (the collection was…
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People We’ll Never Meet: A dance on the topic of strangers
Eiden: Eidos See: Know Hail, Mary, Jean-Luc Godard’s film about the immaculate conception was banned by the Vatican because it imagined what it might have been like to be Mary. I saw a woman lay her head over the streetcar tracks. We spy on strangers. Bodies leaping from…
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Bookishness: November 19, 2012
Quill and Quire visits the Bibliomat The Monkey’s Paw’s new invention. Is this even possible? “Nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality, for example, by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity. Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.”…