-
CanLit Canon Review #8: Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. As For Me and My House, published in 1941, is a beautifully moody novel about weather and a terrible marriage. The book is written as a series of diary entries over 13 months during…
-
On the Canadian National Exhibition: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
This is the fifth and final piece in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. In my first report from this year’s CNE, I quoted Vincent Massey’s opinion from 1952 that the CNE tells the story of Canadian achievement more graphically than any book, and I expressed some puzzlement about what kind…
-
On the Canadian National Exhibition: Down on the Farm
This piece is the fourth in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. In a previous post I alluded to the CNE’s status as an essentially urban fair, but with all the animals and farm displays it would be just as accurate to call the CNE rural. As Shawn Micallef observed in…
-
Bookishness: Week of September 3, 2012
Happy Labour Day! Here’s hoping your day involves at least an hour or two (or seven) of reading somewhere pleasant. Look, a new thing “Personal publishing is like voting. In theory, it’s the very definition of empowerment. In reality, it’s an excellent way for your personal shout to be cancelled out by someone else’s shout.” 13…
-
On the Road in Jack Kerouac’s Hometown
Last summer, as part of a longer circuit of New England and Québec, my girlfriend and I decided to spend a couple days in Lowell, Massachusetts, a riparian city of just over 100,000 north of Boston. Home to numerous textile mills, some dating back to the 1820s, Lowell is known chiefly as beleaguered emblem of…
-
On the Canadian National Exhibition: Food Mania
If there’s one thing that’s kept the CNE in the headlines in recent summers, it’s food, and especially the stunt foods that keep getting more and more outrageous. First there was deep-fried butter, then the Krispy Kreme hamburger, and now this year there’s a bacon funnel cake, which weighs half a kilo and contains more…
-
Bookishness: Week of August 27, 2012
Proustian paint chips Decorate like the stars (famous authors — the best kind of celebrity) with these literary colour palettes. Bradbury Landing NASA has announced that the Curiosity landing site on Mars will be called Bradbury Landing. “There will always be a place for disposable things.” Ellis Hamburger interviews Little Printer creator Matt Webb. 500…
-
On the Canadian National Exhibition: The View from the Sky Ride
This piece is the second in a series of reports from the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition. The first report covered the opening ceremony. A frequent complaint about the CNE is that it’s always the same, year after year. And it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of truth to this complaint. The architecture of the…
-
Tradition and the Debut Talent: On David Balzer’s Contrivances
Reviewed in this essay: Contrivances, by David Balzer. Joyland/ECW Press, 2012. Towards the end of “Laura,” one of the punchiest short stories in David Balzer’s sterling first collection Contrivances, Whitney looks on the work of her artist mother and muses that “it seemed to draw on precedent just enough to be legible.” That allowance for the…
-
On the Canadian National Exhibition: Day One, The Opening Ceremonies
This piece is the first in a series of reports from the Canadian National Exhibition that will be appearing in Chirograph over the next two weeks. I’ve been working on a book about the history of the Canadian National Exhibition for several years now, but to the best of my knowledge I’ve never seen the opening…
-
Bookishness: Week of August 20, 2012
It was a terrible and overwrought sentence This year’s Bulwer-Lytton winner. The Pussy Riot reading list The literature that inspires Pussy Riot. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures Ira Glass (coming to Toronto in October) on books and reading and movies and more. “I didn’t actually finish the book.” An interview…
-
David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: A Guide to the Vexed
Reviewed in this essay: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey. Verso Press, 2012. The scale and frequency of the urban protest movements of the last two years has overshadowed anything since the 1960’s. It was perhaps simpler then than it is now to conceive of what…