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The Season – On Football Books and Football
The referee blew the whistle, the ball went to our centre-back. He passed it out wide to me. Quicker than I expected. I took a quick step out toward the ball and twisted my ankle as I landed. I even thought I heard a snap as I fell down on to the turf. I limped…
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After the Prophet: Leigh Fondakowski’s Stories from Jonestown
The paradox of utopias is that while their failure is assured, their appeal is eternal. 800 years ago, tens of thousands of ordinary people left their homes, their families, and the innumerable small ties which made up their lives to march on Jerusalem and retake it in the name of God, in the deadly mass…
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What is What is Man? On Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man
Few recent works of academic cultural criticism have received such rapturous, widespread, and indeed almost universal acclaim as Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man has over the last several months. Lorin Stein in The Paris Review calls it “exhilarating.” Adam Kirsch, in The Tablet, says that it’s “a brilliant contribution to the…
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The Razor’s Edge: The Erratic Brilliance of Martin Scorsese
It all begins in a bloody bathroom. A young man shaves at a mirror, his body arched over a porcelain sink. With each new stroke, a torrent of blood gushes down his cheeks, streaking across the tiles in a crimson cascade. A romantic ballad floats over the soundtrack and the young man’s gaze is as…
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Canada’s Messy History of Big Ticket Airport Projects, from Mirabel to Porter and Pickering
Porter Airlines made news last year by announcing its purchase of a dozen Bombardier CS-100 jets that it intends to fly from its hub, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (BBTCA). Next month City Council will vote on the plan. Last June, the federal government decided to revive the Pickering airport project, first announced in 1972…
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Nowhere Land: Writing Eastern Europe in Canada
When I was a child reading Batman comics and Hardy Boy books in the fifties and early sixties, it seemed as if Canada was a nowhere land compared to the United States. Nothing happened here, and never would. If a man had put on a Batman cape in Canada, he would have been arrested. If…
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Agreeing on Fables at 1812.gc.ca
A slick commercial appeared on Canadian television last year, featuring redcoats and period warships, with narrator intoning: “Two hundred years ago, the United States invaded our territory.” It’s 2013 and the invaders are long gone, but our leaders have set to work driving any ambiguity out of our collective memory. As we enter year two…
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Translating Challawa: Pakistani Writing Between Urdu, English, and Lesbian Erotica
A small but vibrant literary scene has emerged in Pakistan over the last decade. After the events of 9/11 pushed their country into the media’s spotlight, many authors wanted to write their own narratives rather than have them transposed from elsewhere. Big names soon garnered global fame. Among multiple other awards and nominations, Mohsin Hamid’s…
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The History Wars in Canada
Jack Granatstein’s 1998 jeremiad Who Killed Canadian History? was the opening shot of the History Wars, a fierce conflict about the meaning and purpose of our nation’s past. Academic historians, he satirically concluded, had abandoned traditional military and political history in order to specialize in topics like “the history of housemaid’s knee in Belleville in…
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A Long Strange Trip: Travels Through The North Coast with Denis Johnson
“This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California.” -Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic On a bright, sultry afternoon at the tail end of last August, my wife Jill and I sat at a picnic table in the spacious courtyard of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville, California. The town…
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Getting Into It Through The Guns: The Thomson Collection of Ship Models at the AGO
French prisoners of war held in Britain built some of the ship models in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Cream-white as if carved in ivory but made from bones in the prisoners’ rations and other humble materials like straw and human hair, the “Prisoner of War Models” are masterfully crafted…
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If Netizens United: Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked
A review of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012), by Rebecca MacKinnon Chinese journalist Shi Tao was jailed in 2005 after Yahoo provided Chinese state security agents with emails he had sent on a Yahoo China account. The emails had alerted a New York web editor of a recent…