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Banachek’s The Alpha Project and the One-Person Theater Show
Reviewed in this essay: Banachek’s The Alpha Project, The Fleck Dance Theatre, Luminato Festival, 8-10 June 2012 Do certain individuals have the ability to see the future, to read the thoughts of others, or to communicate with the spirit world? Whatever your answers to these questions might be, in his show The Alpha Project an…
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A Manifesto for Averting Global Collapse
Reviewed in this essay: Humanity on a Tightrope by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. For many, humanity’s position on Earth appears to be growing more precarious by the day. The threat of global pandemics and nuclear war hangs over our heads; the population odometer continues to rise; the forward agents…
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Our Neoliberal Inheritance: Visions of Crisis in Detropia
Reviewed in this essay: Detropia, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Running Time: 94 minutes. Screened at Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival. Toronto general release in September. 91 minutes. All non-fiction seeks to use a close engagement with a specific subject as a lens to tell a story about larger, abstract issues. Filmmakers have no choice:…
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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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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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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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Kim Thúy’s Ru
Reviewed in this essay: Ru by Kim Thúy. Random House, 2012 Ru by Kim Thúy is a deceptive book. It is a slim volume, but hardly a light read. What it lacks in pages it more than compensates for in breadth and complexity. This is a big story pared down. Thúy lays her narrative of…
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On Goldstein’s Novels of Ideas: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
This piece continues a series of reviews highlighting philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s list of the best “novels of ideas”. Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince was the fourth entry on her list. Reviewed in this essay: The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics, 2003 (Originally published: 1973) The Black Prince is the story of Bradley Pearson,…
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The World Absurd
Reviewed in this essay: Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened by Hal Niedzviecki. City Lights Books, 2011. Hal Niedzviecki’s Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened, will perturb you if you like to think the world is mostly a predictable place if you play your cards right. In each of…
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The Literary Revolution That Gave Birth to a Social Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram. Twelve Books, 2012. Way before popular television shows like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk, there were a handful of gay American writers who introduced gay lives to mainstream America. Gay novelists, poets and playwrights of the 1940s and…
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Keys to The Gift: Yuri Leving’s Guide to Nabokov
Reviewed in this essay: Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving. Academic Studies Press, 2011. I was a student in Yuri Leving’s Survey of Russian Literature class at Dalhousie University in 2007. He got me hooked on Nabokov, so I was excited when Leving’s new book on a major…
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A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez
Reviewed in this essay: A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez. Algonquin Books, 2012. Throughout her travels into Haiti and Port-au-Prince, novelist and memoirist Julia Alvarez is haunted by the question, “Once we see a thing, what then is our obligation?” She sets out to answer the question in her new memoir, A Wedding in…