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The Civil Side of Genocide: Powell’s Barbaric Civilization
Reviewed in this essay: Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: a Critical Sociology of Genocide, McGill-Queens University Press, 2011. What does calling someone a monster accomplish? At a recent human rights panel I attended, a scholar described a series of personal interviews he’d conducted with a group of war criminals—men who had brutally tortured and killed numerous people.…
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How Faber’s App Rescues Eliot’s Masterpiece from the Waste Land of Print
Reviewed in this essay: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land for iPad. Faber and Touch Press, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/hammond.mp3] It is difficult to describe the shock I experienced this summer on receiving an email informing me that (a) the venerable and comfortably out-of-touch publisher Faber and Faber had teamed with…
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Darwinian Wonder
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/reader.mp3] “Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!” ~Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone I Charles Darwin liked to roam through national galleries smelling paintings. He did not get…
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SPRING: A Poem
Listen to the author read this poem: [audio: issue3/surani.mp3] (i) You visit each day in a different dress, a clear umbrella for the rain. Coffees. And one day this week, with a daisy whose stem you sawed with a kitchen knife (ii) Only the magnolias have squandered their colour. Their shells convalesce over the…
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Disappearing Bookstores: a Letter from Sweden, Toronto, and Iran
I returned to Toronto in May 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. When I find Sweden (where I am resident) uninhabitable, and Iran (where I was born) too dangerous, I take refuge in Toronto, undoubtedly, the most ethnically diverse city in the world. I rented a suite on the southern fringe…
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The World’s Greatest Art Museum is in Hobart, Tasmania
Reviewed in this essay: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/smiley.mp3] Visit the permanent collection of any national art museum and you will likely find an Impressionist room, with a Cezanne, a Monet, a Manet, and maybe a Pissarro. There will be an Abstract Expressionist…
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Trombone Shorty and the Three Jazzes
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/nolan.mp3] In December 2011, Downbeat magazine awarded Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew “Historical Jazz Album of the Year.” What kind of tradition creates an award “of this year” for something from its distant past? Contemporary jazz. In its most commonly known modern iteration, jazz is mostly good, but not…
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On “Combative Love”: Q and A with Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, Mr. Fox, turns a critical eye on literature’s fascination with menacing heroes and imperiled women. The book takes its name from the fairytale of Mr. Fox, a variant of the Bluebeard story: Lady Mary famously discovers that Mr. Fox, her betrothed, keeps “a room filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead…
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Ask Me Anything: How Reddit Perfected the Message Board
Reviewed in this essay: reddit.com‘s AMAs (Ask Me Anything). Buried somewhere under Web 2.0’s endless “personal branding” astroturf, under the rubble of busted dot-com shell companies, and under the dense bedrock of pornography, there lies net utopianism. But all is not lost. If McLuhan were around today and needed new grounds for optimistic futurism, here’s…
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Short Forms: When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/syms.mp3] When my short story “Jenna on Twitter” was published by Joyland Magazine last year, I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s a story about a woman with a crush on a gay male singer who fantasizes while watching his YouTube videos. She uses her iPhone to…
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Old Codes for Modern Woes: The 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac
Reviewed in this essay: Robert Thomas, 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac, Thomas Allen, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/vanmeermass.mp3] Every fall in supermarkets across North America The Old Farmer’s Almanac appears at checkout stands, sitting incongruously amid tabloids and recipe magazines. The Almanac’s antiquated woodcut cover is the first indication that this cheaply bound…