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Danger Music: On the Intimacy of Screaming
Reviewed in this Essay: Dick Higgins’s “Danger Music #17” performed by Jenn Cole and Didier Morelli for The Future of Cage: Credo conference at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Oct. 26, 2012 Didier Morelli said that when he plunged his head into his kitchen sink to recite Dante’s Inferno,…
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Book sculptures, Dickens, and 10 rules for writing: Bookishness for Dec. 10, 2012
2012’s most looked up words Capitalism and socialism. Five new works Edinburgh’s mysterious (and delightful) book sculptor is back. 10. Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except him). “Just as nobody can really teach you how you like your coffee, so nobody can really teach you how to write.” 10…
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TRB Podcast: Naveen Joshi on South Asian Canadians Finding Marriage Online
On September 29, Humber College presented the 2012 Liberal Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Conference, at which Professor Naveen Joshi presented his paper “It’s About the Parents: Second-generation Indo-Canadians and an Online Matrimonial.” Professor Joshi’s talk draws on interviews with 30 second-generation Indo-Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area, examining why they use Shaadi.com, the world’s largest…
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A brief literary history of cocktails: The Mint Julep
Since the time of Homeric libation rituals and Plato’s wine-soaked Dionysian revels, alcohol has been an abiding fixture in the works and lives of many of our greatest writers, poets and philosophers. Their liquid inspiration and sustenance—to say nothing of ruin—has played a surprisingly major role in the development of literary history. Our new series…
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Sex, Bugs, and Schizophrenia: A review of Poison Shy
Reviewed in this essay: Poison Shy by Stacey Madden. ECW Press, 2012. Sex, bugs, and schizophrenia form an unlikely trinity, it is true. And yet they converge with surprising semblance in Stacey Madden’s first novel, Poison Shy. Told through first-person retrospective narration, Poison Shy is the story of a love triangle between two heavy-drinking late…
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Jimmy Carter wonders what happened to the Canadians in Argo
Nobody should expect the movies, or novels, or monographs by political scientists, to be the last or only word on the past. The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001) offer at best a partial view of the Second World War while telling us more about the times and places in which…
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Bookishness: Dec. 3, 2012 – MOMA, trees, the gay revolution, and more
Glad day to night “I often refer back to a quote from author Christopher Bram that I once jotted down in a notebook: ‘The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.’ The same could be said about many great revolutions. This is why we should care about Glad Day, and the similar (indie/niche/speciality) bookshops beyond…
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TRB Podcast: John Gruesser on the Challenges of Editing Early African American Texts
On November 9 and 10, the University of Toronto hosted the Forty-Eighth Conference on Editorial Problems: Editing Early African American Literature. In the penultimate session of the conference, John Gruesser delivered his paper titled, “The Challenges of Editing Early African American Literary Texts in Serial and Book Form.” Listen and enj0y! [audio:2012.11/Gruesser.mp3] John Gruesser is…
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Ready, set, read: CBC launches Canada Reads 2013
The CBC Broadcast Centre’s cavernous atrium was filled to capacity Thursday as fans gathered for the official launch of Canada Reads 2013. Q’s Jian Gomeshi, who hosted the day’s events, introduced this year’s five panelists, conducting short, loose interviews with each of them.
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Starting the conversation: A review of First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People
Reviewed in this essay: First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People, by Lynda Gray (Adaawx, 2011, 275 pages). I’m a First Nations survivor of the ’60s and ’70s “Scoop”, the government-imposed movement that took hundreds of Aboriginal children away from their families, culture, traditions and heritage. I was…
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Chasing Cures: A Review of Erin Knight’s Chaser
Reviewed in this essay: Chaser by Erin Knight, House of Anansi Press, 2012. Without experiencing the discomfits of illness, we cannot benefit from the advancement of knowledge and understanding that accompanies diagnosis and healing. Erin Knight’s second book of poems, Chaser, released last spring, explores this fascinating contradiction, as well as the pathologies that affect…
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Bookishness: November 26, 2012
Mystery Dictionary.com‘s word of 2012 (image by craigdfreeman). Joan Didion on keeping a notebook “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I…