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Bookishness: October 29, 2012
All of the books “Saddling another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro.” Joe Queenan’s 6,128 favourite books. (image via flickr user zen) Poems for Pussy…
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A monthly dose of culture: Reviewing the AGO’s First Thursdays
If a regular person ever wanted the chance to feel like a cultural blue blood, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)’s First Thursdays are the time to do it. The series, which began in October and will continue the first Thursday of each month, is an after-hours gallery party complete with music, special exhibits, talks…
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With voices raised: Tamil artists get their due at the TPL
It is appropriate that Saturday’s event was named Tamil Literary Voices, in the plural, because in a cross-section of some of the language’s more prominent Torontonians, it was indeed a remarkable spectrum of voices—both in terms of political perspective and artistic media alike.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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TRB Podcast: Richard Stursberg’s Tower of Babble
On April 24, Richard Stursberg joined Don Ferguson of the Royal Canadian Air Farce in conversation at the Toronto launch of Stursberg’s new book, presented by This Is Not a Reading Series, D&M Publishers, the Gladstone Hotel, and the Toronto Review of Books. In The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC, Stursberg…
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Bookishness: Week of April 30, 2012
A “bipolar rabbit hole of past and present” This Findings interview with Brainpicker Maria Popova about the future of reading taught me about fifteen things, as any encounter with Popova is wont to do. In other doings (she lives in hyperdrive): Popova’s book spine poetry (inspired by National Poetry Month and the delightful Sorted Books). On the intimacy of Draw Something “Draw…
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Bookishness: Week of April 9, 2012
What we like to read in bed E-books, apparently. According to a just released Pew study of e-reading, American readers now favour e-books as their preferred method of reading in bed (at 45%, with books just behind at 43%). Books to be devoured While the idea of eating a book after reading it makes me cringe,…
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Bookishness: Week of March 26, 2012
The enchanted e-forest Exploring twitter, where rotating skulls live alongside kittens and bunnies, with Margaret Atwood. “Application opposed” with “likelihood of confusion” Facebook attempts to claim the word book. As commenter uno2tres states: “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” and all combinations, permutations, derivatives, and modifications of “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”, including but not limited to modifications such as “ñ” , “ò”, and “ö” are trademarks of…