-
Instruments for the Elevation of the Soul: The Plight of the Book in Twenty-First Century Paris
Paris conjures up many images. Some visualize the Seine and arching footbridges; others see patisseries shaded by plane trees or a five a.m. street crêpe; others still, think of books. Writers and writing infuse the city’s marrow, from contemporary stars like Muriel Barbery to the 1920s icons Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, and James Joyce, and…
-
Cloud Cartography: On Tubes by Andrew Blum
A review of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet (Ecco, 2012), by Andrew Blum When U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, speaking in opposition to net neutrality in June 2006, infamously described the Internet as “a series of tubes,” he was ridiculed for being out of touch with technology. The phrase was quickly absorbed into the…
-
Not Himself: On Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary
A review of Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary (Yale, 2012), translated by Lillian Vallee. The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires in August of 1939 on the maiden voyage of the trans-Atlantic liner Chrobry. He had been able to use his minor notoriety as an avant-garde writer in Poland to receive a free ticket on the…
-
Yerevan, Armenia: World Book Capital
When Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2010, reviews in the Globe and Mail and the National Post commented at length about the beautiful book produced by Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press, where books are printed by hand, carefully bound, and often include letter-pressed dust jackets and patterned end papers. These volumes…
-
Suicide as a Sort of Present: The Cult of DFW
A review of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D. T. Max (Viking, 2012). For the flawless. [Editor’s note: Hover over the footnotes to read them, or scroll to the bottom of the essay.] You are, unfortunately, a scholar1 of the works of the late David Foster Wallace…
-
Not Nothing: A Review of Artist’s Statements
[British artist] Damien Hirst What do you mean, an artist’s statement?[Art writer] Sarah Borusso Just a statement of purpose or… it’s up to you really, we run them just to give a context to your work… It’s kind of up to you. DH OK, I can do one now. SB OK. It’s a kind of separate thing from the…
-
Editor’s Note: Issue Five
This season we watched deep cuts to Library and Archives Canada begin to take effect as we learned how the archives cached by web browsers make websites load more quickly. We said goodbye to the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and Douglas and McIntyre, Canada’s biggest independent publishing house. We witnessed our sometime newspaper of record, the…
-
An Editorial Occupant
Readers rewrite the books they remember. We occupy the books we’ve read, just as books occupy places, and places occupy books, ideas, and readers. Recently opening a book I took to the west coast in 2005, I flipped to the back page and found the old inscription left there for me by a traveller on…
-
Mask Panic: Past and Present
Listen to the author read this essay: [audio:issue4/reid.mp3] On January 7, 1514, the Parlement of Normandy, the royal court of appeal for that prosperous French province on the Channel coast, issued a decree banning the wearing and owning of masks. “It is prohibited for all persons […] to wear or purchase any false visage, mask,…
-
Occupy The BBC: The Work of Adam Curtis
A million acts of reportage, programming and documentation have left the BBC with the planet’s most complete video archive of the twentieth century. BBC writer and documentarian Adam Curtis’s technique is to obsessively sift through these uncountable hours of footage looking for connections. He shuffles through the BBC’s memories like its regretful conscience, imbuing each…
-
Occupying Prisons: Canada and the Future of Incarceration
Films reviewed in this essay: Herman’s House (Canada, 2012, 81 min.), directed by Angad Singh Bhalla Hunting Bobby Oatway (Canada, 2004, 45 min.), directed by John Kastner As the Canadian government prepares to close Kingston Penitentiary, the oldest pen in the country, Whiggish history-telling has already begun to frame its wake. Virtually all the major…
-
100 Years of Occupation: Leacock in Orillia
Robertson Davies’s Salterton was inspired by Kingston, and Mordecai Richler immortalized St. Urbain Street. It’s hard to imagine these books set elsewhere: Duddy Kravitz could never come from Vancouver. But no place takes as much pride in being a setting as Orillia does in its starring role in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little…