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The End of an Institution: Saying Goodbye to the Toronto Women’s Bookstore
After withstanding protests, a bombing and two recessions, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore is one tough broad. But on Oct. 9, it was announced that the store would shut its doors for good after 39 years. At the end of November, Toronto will lose a space that has been precious to many. “Harbord street is very…
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With voices raised: Tamil artists get their due at the TPL
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Tamil literary voices: An event in preview
“We were shivering. We were locking our doors and waiting. You could hear people shouting and houses burning.” Appadurai Muttulingam’s words express an experience too common to many Tamils, a people forced out of Sri Lanka in droves over the last four decades after facing rioting, killing, and oppression. And while sweeping statements like “great…
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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
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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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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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Toronto’s first “Kula”: a Review of Vanguard of the New Age: The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891-1945
Reviewed in this essay: Vanguard of the New Age: The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891-1945, by Gillian McCann. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. On 26 March 1891, some of Canada’s early avant-garde artists, labour activists, and feminists sat in the parlour of an esteemed Spadina Avenue home to discuss “The Key to Theosophy on Karma.” Spurred by…
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Toronto, January 2012: a Poem
For JP Here is a curbed and censored winter— its skies are blank as paper. So instead we read the sidewalks sanded bone-white by a wind made fast and loose on northern highways. They draw chalk lines over crabgrass relapsed since November. “Never mind,” they say, “This is no bardsung city of love, just the…
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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…