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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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OF NATURE: A Poem
a murder in The National Gallery the corpse evidence or art a bloodied face attracting files
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The Impermanence of the Ordinary: Full Frontal T.O.
Listen to the author read this essay: [audio:issue4/meermass.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Full Frontal T.O. (Coach House, 2012), photographs by Patrick Cummins, text by Shawn Micallef Cities have been photographed since the birth of the medium, but camera lenses have tended to focus on urban life: its characters, opulence, industry, and grime. Where architecture was…
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Made in Occupied Japan
Recently an acquaintance I’ll call Eric gave me a chrome-plated naphtha lighter similar to a Zippo. The lighter was manufactured by Atomic. Engraved on the bottom were the words, “MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN.” Shiny as a trophy, at 60-plus years, the relic still functioned like new. Inquiring as to how he came to possess the…
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Christopher D’Arcangelo’s Occupations
In recent months, the Occupy Wall Street splinter group Occupy Museums staged an alternative, barter-based art fair outside New York’s annual Armory Show, and released a fake press release under the guise of the Whitney Biennial disavowing the exhibition’s corporate sponsors and apologizing to the exhibiting artists “for allowing them to be exploited by the…
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Occupy the Right: Ezra Levant and the Redefinition of Canadian Character
Reviewed in this essay: Ezra Levant, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. McClelland & Stewart, 2011. Ezra Levant’s jeremiad, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr, is not actually about the eponymous Pakistani-Canadian, but rather about Toronto and the “professional protestors of the anti-war left.”…
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Two Poems
Transnational marriage A tongue from a developed country Fallen into a developing mouth It discovers, the sanitation there’s a bit problematic The dentists are very irresponsible A cotton-ball from many years ago Still exuding residual warmth in some cranny It sheepishly wishes to make an exit But is clamped onto by the tips of incomplete…
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The Land of the Trinity Ad Infinitum: Diaspora Culture in Port of Spain
I Twenty years ago, quixotically pursuing a doomed romance, I moved to Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Part of what decided me to go was the time I’d spent among the malcontents of the city’s Woodford Square. On any given day there was a Dickensian cast of cranks, madmen and impassioned…