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Canada’s Messy History of Big Ticket Airport Projects, from Mirabel to Porter and Pickering
Porter Airlines made news last year by announcing its purchase of a dozen Bombardier CS-100 jets that it intends to fly from its hub, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport (BBTCA). Next month City Council will vote on the plan. Last June, the federal government decided to revive the Pickering airport project, first announced in 1972…
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Brecht Resurrected in Toronto: Sarah Sheard’s Krank
Reviewed in this essay: Krank: Love in the New Dark Times, by Sarah Sheard (Seraphim Editions, 2012) Gestalt therapist Ainsley Giddings just wants a sabbatical year free of entanglements to write her book. The protagonist of Toronto writer Sarah Sheard’s fourth novel – her first in over a decade – has recently left a difficult…
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Culture Hawker Chronicles: Charles Barangan and B.M.V. Annex
In this series, Trevor Abes gets to know the people behind the counter at Toronto’s music stores, book shops, and art galleries. A Torontonian since 2009, Winnipeg-born Charlie Barangan wrote for the second season of the web series Clutch and co-founded Irradiated Panda Films, the group behind the IPF-funded Asset premiering this week. He works at…
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A Personal History of Indigenous Education: Verna Kirkness’s Creating Space
Reviewed in this essay: Creating Space: My Life and Work in Indigenous Education by Verna Kirkness. Published by the University of Manitoba Press (September 2013). In 1950, children on the Fisher River Indian reserve went to residential school after grade eight. One child on the reserve, however, had to stay behind. Residential schools only admitted status…
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Long Live the New Flesh: David Cronenberg’s Evolution
A progenitor of a genre typically referred to as body horror, Toronto-born and world-renowned auteur David Cronenberg remains one of the most audacious narrative directors working in cinema. Citing literary influences as diverse and incendiary as Vladimir Nabokov and William S. Burroughs (Cronenberg adapted Burroughs’s Naked Lunch), Cronenberg’s films continually blur the line between corporeality and…
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The Small, Strange Worlds of Karine Giboulo
The artist statement is a most dissatisfactory document and Karine Giboulo’s is no exception: “Karine Giboulo creates colourful miniature worlds in which depictions of reality and flights of fantasy mingle.” Granted, Montréal based Giboulo does create miniature worlds, but to simplify her work down to a mingling of reality and fantasy is one of those…
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Santa’s Choice Zine Fair, Leslieville Gallery Crawl, and Long Winter Takeover: T.O. Events for Dec 20 – Jan 3
Storyteller Ariel Balevi will be performing stories by the 13th-century Sufi mystical poet Rumi at La Boheme Cafe. 7:30 PM. Dec 20. Free. Come by the 4th annual Santa’s Choice Zine Fair and check out zines, comics, small presses, prints, t-shirts and tote bags, jewellery, crafts, and other handmade goods by local artists and designers.12 PM.…
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Fifty Shades of Mild Canuck Humour
Reviewed in this essay: Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black, Douglas & McIntyre, 2013 Fifty Shades of Black collects the latest humour by Arthur Black, an ex-CBC broadcaster and two-time Stephen Leacock award winner. Mostly reprints from his syndicated column, these 82 essays showcase the same colloquial style and easy wisdom of his fifteen…
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Cherries and Gems in Eat It: Sex, Food and Women’s Writing
Reviewed in this essay: Eat It: Sex, Food & Women’s Writing, edited by Nicole Baute and Brianna Goldberg. Feathertale, 2013. There are some gems in this mixed-genre anthology from Feathertale, an offbeat Canadian writer’s collective. The pieces are varied in tone and style, taking the form of short fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, letters, and poetry.…
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Julie Maroh, Michael Ignatieff, and a new Brick Anthology: T.O. Events for Dec 5 – 19
Julie Maroh will be signing copies of her graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color, which was adapted into the Palm d’Or-winning film of the same name. 7 PM. Dec 5. The Central. Free. Join the fine people at Brick Magazine for the launch of their second print anthology, which features the best of the magazine’s…
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Bad Sex in Fiction and Many Kinds of Love
Let’s take a minute to talk about bad sex. On Dec. 3, a group of literary men and women gathered at the In & Out Club in the district of St. James, central London, united with this single-minded purpose. They were gathered to announce the winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.…
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Community Strangeness: On Fredericton’s Owl’s Nest Bookstore
Owl’s Nest Bookstore, 390 Queen St., Fredericton, New Brunswick. “If nothing else, we add some strangeness to the community,” says Debbie of Owl’s Nest Books, Fredericton’s principal secondhand bookstore. And indeed, with its endless rooms and motley décor, the store glows with haphazard charm. Owls hang on the walls. Q plays on the radio. Room after…