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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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Jazz, journalists, bpNichol, and the roaring 1920s: T.O. Events for June 6 – June 20, 2013
Coach House Books is celebrating the release of a new collection by bpNichol, entitled a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts. The night will be hosted by the book’s editor, Stephen Voyce, and features readings by Margaret Christakos (What Stirs, Multitudes) and Paul Dutton (Aurealities), plus a short-film screening by Justin Stephenson. 7PM. June 6. No One Writes to…
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Library lawns, misspelling bees, and naming your book disorder: Bookishness for June 3, 2013
Professor Old Skull Lynda Barry “strip[s] away the stiffness of adulthood and plug[s] people into their creativity.” Everyone steal this idea I’d like to visit a library lawn in every city ever, please and thank you. Every misspelled word in the 2013 Scripps spelling bee Including so many words I have never, ever heard before. BUT Was…
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Dinner Parties, Moral Porn, and Papal Book-Binding: New Books of Note: May 30-June 6, 2013
Much-anticipated, curious, or simply thrilling, here are some new and notable books out this month. The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions) by Roberto Bolaño — The Chilean poet and novelist’s five short stories and two essays, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews, contain intrigues about “a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive…
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Colonial India for a post-colonial world: A review of the ROM’s latest photography exhibition
The scores of photographs in the newest exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) are all the more revealing because we know what happened in the century after they were captured. Between Princely India & the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal records nineteenth-century colonial India but tells a story that continues long after Victoria’s imperial rule. Raja Deen…
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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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Andrei Tarkovsky’s photos, Augusten Burroughs’s boyfriend, and Daniel Pink’s work habits: Bookishness for May 27, 2013
The Economist asks… How does copyright work in space? Tarkovsky’s mysteries The polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky. Hyperlocal Wayne Chan’s Epicycles of Time won the public vote in the Canada Writes Hyperlocal contest. The grand prize winner will be announced this week. Being Daniel Pink Lifehacker asks Daniel Pink how he works. “Language Police 1, Gay…
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Love Letters to a City: Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Epistolary Project
A woman in her late 20s is walking down Queen Street and stops in front of a bicycle. She opens her bag and pulls out an airmail envelope. There is a hole punctured on the side with a piece of string attached, the woman crouches and ties the string to the handle. The next morning…
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Stars, Sistahz, Ed Keenan, and Thomas King: T.O. Events for May 23-June 6, 2013
The largest event of its kind, the CONTACT Photography Festival brings together local and international artists at over 175 venues across Toronto. This year’s theme, Field of Vision, focuses on how photography affects imagination and our apprehension of the everyday. May 1-31. Various Venues. Free. Just like its name, rock.paper.sistahz is a dynamic, multifaceted festival…
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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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Last weeks to make CONTACT 2013: A few crucial final events
Victoria Day long weekend may be over, but we can still enjoy two more weeks of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Throughout your commute across Toronto over the last few weeks, you may have noticed unusual sights such as the gallery of photos replacing ads along the platform of St. Patrick Station and new visuals lining the…
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China behind the headlines: Lou Ye and the vitality of Chinese independent cinema
Canadians are daily inundated with news reports concerning the “rise of China,” as visions of that country’s latest economic mega-project flood our television screens. Universities and governments have flocked to China, both literally and figuratively, producing mountains of discourse concerning the new “global superpower” and how Canada should interact with it. Yet how can an…