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Bookishness: Week of April 23, 2012
SlushPile Hell Ever wondered what’s going through the mind of the literary agent-not-to-be as she reads your work? You probably don’t want to know. Listen carefully and you can hear handcuffs clicking in the background Erin Balser and Becky Toyne on Fresh Air discussing 50 Shades of Grey. Bonus: includes Canadian smut recommendations. How to edit…
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The Oscillating Universe: A Review of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s “Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang”
Reviewed in this essay: Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell. HG Publishing, 2011. For some time, scientists have been marshaling their knowledge and resources in an effort to answer some of the biggest questions about the universe. With each grandiose experiment, however, science seems to be little closer to solving…
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On Rob Benvie’s Maintenance
Reviewed in this essay: Maintenance by Rob Benvie. Coach House Books, 2011. Rob Benvie, author of The Safety of War, offers in his second novel, Maintenance, an important investigation into the relationship between place and despair. Benvie’s characters bleakly exist in suburbia — Mississauga — at the turn of the millennium and while they want…
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The Sublime Object of Ideology: Understanding Undefeated
Reviewed in this essay: Undefeated, directed by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin. Starring Bill Courtney, O.C. Brown, Montrail “Money” Brown. Running Time: 113 minutes. Early on in Undefeated we witness Bill Courtney – the head coach of the Manassas High School football team – address his players. Courtney, a white local businessman who coaches a predominantly…
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TRB Issue Three Now Live!
It’s here. TRB’s Issue Three woke up in Toronto early this morning and decided to stay, bringing flamboyant style and irresistible appeal to a city already awash in charms. To take appropriate notice of this new arrival, join us tonight, April 17, at Poetry in Kensington Market, 224 Augusta Ave, 8pm on. Why not read TRB Issue…
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The Civil Side of Genocide: Powell’s Barbaric Civilization
Reviewed in this essay: Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: a Critical Sociology of Genocide, McGill-Queens University Press, 2011. What does calling someone a monster accomplish? At a recent human rights panel I attended, a scholar described a series of personal interviews he’d conducted with a group of war criminals—men who had brutally tortured and killed numerous people.…
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How Faber’s App Rescues Eliot’s Masterpiece from the Waste Land of Print
Reviewed in this essay: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land for iPad. Faber and Touch Press, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/hammond.mp3] It is difficult to describe the shock I experienced this summer on receiving an email informing me that (a) the venerable and comfortably out-of-touch publisher Faber and Faber had teamed with…
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Darwinian Wonder
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/reader.mp3] “Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!” ~Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone I Charles Darwin liked to roam through national galleries smelling paintings. He did not get…
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SPRING: A Poem
Listen to the author read this poem: [audio: issue3/surani.mp3] (i) You visit each day in a different dress, a clear umbrella for the rain. Coffees. And one day this week, with a daisy whose stem you sawed with a kitchen knife (ii) Only the magnolias have squandered their colour. Their shells convalesce over the…
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Disappearing Bookstores: a Letter from Sweden, Toronto, and Iran
I returned to Toronto in May 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. When I find Sweden (where I am resident) uninhabitable, and Iran (where I was born) too dangerous, I take refuge in Toronto, undoubtedly, the most ethnically diverse city in the world. I rented a suite on the southern fringe…
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The World’s Greatest Art Museum is in Hobart, Tasmania
Reviewed in this essay: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/smiley.mp3] Visit the permanent collection of any national art museum and you will likely find an Impressionist room, with a Cezanne, a Monet, a Manet, and maybe a Pissarro. There will be an Abstract Expressionist…
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Trombone Shorty and the Three Jazzes
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/nolan.mp3] In December 2011, Downbeat magazine awarded Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew “Historical Jazz Album of the Year.” What kind of tradition creates an award “of this year” for something from its distant past? Contemporary jazz. In its most commonly known modern iteration, jazz is mostly good, but not…