-
On the Real Way to Eat like a Caveman
Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [audio: issuetwo/dylan.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range…
-
Need-to-Know: On Area 51
Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [audio: issuetwo/matt.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days…
-
Everyone and I Stopped Breathing: William Basinski at the Met
Reviewed in this essay: “Remembering September 11,” a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 11, 2011. William Basinski’s epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops emerged in 2002 with two backstories. First, Basinski, a little-known classically trained composer, was digitizing analog tape loops of twenty-year-old recordings when…
-
On Learning How to Share: A Review of the Seven Billion
Hear this piece read by its author, Mary Albino: [audio: issuetwo/mary.mp3] With baby Danica’s Halloween arrival, the planet’s population officially reached seven billion. It’s an estimate of course—the margin of error is six months in either direction—but the point is humanity has reached a milestone: there are twice as many people alive as there were…
-
Poem: Sunday Afternoon Croquet
Hear this poem read by its author, Nyla Matuk: [audio:issuetwo/nyla.mp3] Sunday Afternoon Croquet Trinity Bellwoods Park I feel like a mad Roman emperor with a history of failures at miniature golf. I’ll play at being truly imperious, a Pimm’s-sipping sundowner in a striped sweater with the entitlement to be that individual, who can dismiss Torremolinos…
-
Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A
TRB: Released in the spring of 2010, Alice for the iPad became a huge, Oprah-featured hit that is credited with convincing reading publics of how book apps could be even more fun and engaging than paper books. How many times has Alice been downloaded by now? Were you surprised by its reception? How have traditional…
-
Beautiful Agony: The Online Amateur’s Authentic Orgasm
A woman’s head appears as she lies down directly below the camera, filling the frame with her face and shoulders. She stares into the lens as she adjusts herself, and we hear the sound of her unbuckling and unzipping her pants. We see her shoulders and upper body tense up as she begins to touch…
-
Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls
For this piece, Will Goldbloom, a theatre historian, and Zack Russell, a theatre artist, read Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s Gas Girls, published in 2011 by Playwrights Canada Press. They wrote up their thoughts separately, then the TRB recorded their first conversation about the play. Listen to their discussion: [audio: issuetwo/willzack.mp3] WILL: “Love for gas, gas for…
-
Poem: Blessed Cotillion
That grocery store he went to for a can-a-corn and maybe bread flashed right into a blessed cotillion and mister m turned to a produce boy just about fifteen years surprised (talking like a distant cousin) turned and said “excuse my frankness, but I have been removed.” Dropping that can from three of his weary…
-
Going to bed for the holidays…
Dear avid readers: Many books, back issues, and missed blog posts are crying out for attention, so the TRB is curling up in bed to read till January. Thank you for an immensely fun first few months on the planet. All the best for all your seasonable fests—and don’t forget to join us in welcoming the…
-
TRB’s Recap of Recaps: 2011 in Review
Along with a rousing chorus of debate, complaint, oneupmanship, celebration, a riot of hyperbole, and swells of self-congratulation and dismissal, the year’s end brings an avalanche of collective re-evaluation, listification and the general ordering of things that have transpired since the first of January. Rather than add another voice to the already bloated collection of…
-
TRB Podcast: Umberto Eco at the Toronto Reference Library
On November 16, the CBC’s Michael Enright interviewed Umberto Eco on his latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, at the Toronto Reference Library.* [audio:UmbertoEco.mp3] Unfortunately, our file is a little quiet—so you may prefer to watch the TPL’s video of the event. Meanwhile, see here for Talia Zajac’s TRB review of Eco’s new book. *Though we…