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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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Art and document: A review of the ROM’s “Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia”
In 1975, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot began purging the country of citizens accused of undermining his Khmer Rouge party. By 1979, over 2 million people had been arrested, tortured and killed. During that time, 14,000 men, women and children had been filtered through Security Prison-21 (S-21), an old high school-turned-prison used for interrogating detainees. Of…
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On Novels of Ideas: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
Michael Da Silva takes a pause from his account of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s list of the best novel of ideas to examine her most recent novel.
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CanLit Canon Review #9: Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 masterpiece, sets out to do nothing less than explain Quebec to the rest of Canada and harmonize the dominion for future citizens. MacLennan attempts this with a generations-spanning soap…
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Visions of Conservative Triumph: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises
Reviewed in this essay: The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan. Running Time: 164 minutes. With a quarter of a billion dollar budget, nearly three hours of screen time, and creative carte blanche, one could not but hope for a masterpiece from Christopher Nolan’s long awaited The Dark Knight Rises. One is sad to…
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A look inside the best basketball team ever: Jack McCallum’s Dream Team
Reviewed in this essay: Dream Team by Jack McCallum. Ballantine Books, 2012. The Dream Team is one of the most iconic teams in sports history. It was packed with household names like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, not to mention Michael Jeffrey Jordan: the centerpiece of the team and just maybe the most…
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All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel
Reviewed in this essay: All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel. Translated by Miranda France. Penguin, 2012. Continuing the perspectivist tradition of Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and William Faulkner’s four ways of looking at the Compsons, essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel gives readers five ways of looking at an enigmatic…
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The Wit and Wisdom of Misha Glouberman
Reviewed in this essay: The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti. Faber and Faber, 2011. You can tell the publishers weren’t quite sure what to do with Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s book The Chairs Are Where the People Go because the explanatory subtitle, “How to Live, Work, and…
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The Nightmare: On Life is About Losing Everything
Reviewed in this essay: Life is About Losing Everything by Lynn Crosbie. House of Anansi, 2012. Last year I wrote a blog post about how rotten I felt getting older. I laid bare my fear of being alone and acknowledged losing the power that youth gives women. I quoted Anne Sexton: “Live or die, but…
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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…
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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…
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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…