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A Review: Giles Benaway’s Ceremonies For The Dead
Reviewed in this essay: Ceremonies for the Dead by Giles Benaway. Published by Kegedonce Press. Poetry never ceases to amaze me. I began my writing career with pieces of poetry published here and there, but then with time, I discovered short stories and turned my attention to them. I don’t know if I will ever go back to…
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Sensing Silence: Ars Mechanica’s “Show and Tell Alexander Bell” at SummerWorks
Reviewed in this essay: Show and Tell Alexander Bell, Ars Mechanica. Ran August 8-18, 2013 at the SummerWorks Performance Festival. I need to start this review with an apology to Mary, the lovely telephone operator played by Sasha Kovacs who politely, if a little desperately, asked for my digits upon entering the theatre. I obliged,…
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Life According to Ai Weiwei (at the Art Gallery of Ontario)
Reviewed: Ai Weiwei: According to What? at the Art Gallery of Ontario, August 17-October 27 2013 In 2011, ArtReview magazine named Ai Weiwei the most influential person in the art world (he beat out the likes of Larry Gagosian for the honour), and though he’s effectively been under house arrest since 2011, when authorities in China took…
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Not So Far Away: David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Reviewed in this essay: David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House Publishing, December 2012). In a recent essay about his late friend, Jonathan Franzen laments the way in which Wallace’s (September 2008) suicide “took him away from us and made the person into a very public legend.” Released this winter, David Foster Wallace:…
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Coming Home through African-Canadian Literature: George Elliott Clarke’s Directions Home
Reviewed in this essay: George Elliott Clarke’s Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature. In 2011, Toronto city councilor Doug Ford dismissed Margaret Atwood’s rally to protect some 99 library branches, adding insult to injury when he said, “I don’t even know her, if she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” Assumingly…
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Scandals behind the stage: A review of Deidre Kelly’s “Ballerina”
Reviewed in this essay: Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, Deidre Kelly, Greystone Books, 2012. Following the recent acid-attack on Bolshoi Artistic Director, Sergei Filin, and the scandals unfolding in its wake, the cracks in ballet’s veneer of perfection have never been more visible—or as puzzling—to those outside of the discipline.…
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Wild Food Spring #5: Fäviken
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Fäviken by Magnus Nilsson, Phaidon Press, 2012. Chef Magnus Nilsson, at “the world’s most isolated and daring restaurant,” deep in the heart of the northern Swedish wilderness, has been called “part Viking lumberjack and part Shaman.” Rebelling against…
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Beginning With a Diminished Thing: Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books
Reviewed in this essay: Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012). Part social and cultural critique, theological dialogue, and literary exegesis, When I Was a Child I Read Books is comprised of ten short essays Marilynne Robinson refashioned from lecture tours and lessons over the past decade. Long-time readers of her work…
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Wild Food Spring #3: A Feast of Weeds
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini, University of California Press, 2012. Field guidebooks often overwhelm me with their formidable erudition. First in each entry come the botanical descriptors, identifying features of leaf and root that mostly escape…
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Wild Food Spring #2: “They Can’t Ration These”
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: They Can’t Ration These by Vicomte de Mauduit, Persephone Books, 2004 [1940]. Foods foraged from the wild are this year’s hot culinary trend, and all that limelight makes it easy to forget one fact: in much of history,…
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Futuristic species love irony too: A review of Marie Chouinard’s “The Golden Mean (Live)”
Reviewed in this essay: The Golden Mean (Live), Compagnie Marie Chouinard, which ran May 8 – May 12, 2013 at Canadian Stage Canadian Stage recently welcomed Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live), a repertory piece first mounted at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad. This was the first presentation of a major Marie Chouinard work in Toronto…
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The no-spin zone: A review of Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons
Reviewed in this essay: A Thousand Pardons, by Jonathan Dee. Random House, 2013. Lance Armstrong could have used a hand from Helen Armstead, the inexperienced public relations guru at the heart of Jonathan Dee’s novel A Thousand Pardons. Whereas Armstrong’s stone-faced mea culpa was undermined by years of deceit, Helen would have had him prostrate…