Pióro

For some reason, I have this image of Russell Smith at a public talk advising that you shouldn’t read the back-cover of a book to find out if you’d like it, but to read the first few pages. In the absence of my own reviewer’s copy, I’ve done something similar: a first-chapter critique. Each week [...]

Everybody knows Jesus helped win the 2004 U.S. election for Bush. Last November, I had no idea—like most of my Daily Show watching demographic—how conflated church and state really is in the States. I wanted to know more. As the first anthropologists were intrigued by economic systems or matrilineal kinship, I was curious about these [...]

Years ago, maybe five, I set myself up for a productive failure. I started building my web-based literary empire. The venture taught me all I know now about programming for the web, about PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. I think I finished the empire two years ago, the code at least. I had spent so much [...]

Traditional literary journals learn slowly, and The New Quarterly is one of them.
Often lit journals have web sites that are little more than poorly designed pamphlets. The largest frustration is that they give no samples of the writing they carry. This situation will lead any web surfer to ask, “What’s the point?” as there’s so [...]

Take German techno and mix unemployment. Take a Portuguese community centre and fade it into a club for Mods. Take a dance-floor and drop in a crowd of people who want to be there, young men who didn’t have to change before coming and women from backless tops to sweaters. Ladies’ choice. One woman looks [...]

I was nearly killed last Thursday. It’s happened before and it will probably happen again. But this time, I decided to get the police involved.
Despite being on a bike decked out in flashing lights and reflectors, I was nearly hit by a car last week. The driver made a left in front of me. I [...]

Pierre Berton passed away earlier today.
A few weeks ago, I and my house-mates found ourselves in the odd position of trying to explain Pierre Berton to a German grad-student. I don’t remember what we said about Berton, whose works are on our parents’ books shelves and maybe some of our own, even if we haven’t [...]

Of The Globe and Mail Books section Jay said, “I don’t read it, but I like the idea of it.” I too love the idea of it, but most of its fiction reviews are unreadable, which leads me to ask why this section of the paper is simply a flyer, a glorified ‘advertorial’ or skinny [...]

A day after Wayson Choy—who I thought was a shoo-in—found out he’d have to be content with only the “2004 Giller Shortlist” stickers on his book, I saw in him in the local Book City book store. The trooper was there signing books. And who should come in after for her own book signing? None [...]

My ESL students are just average Canadians when it comes to the US election. The students have a knee-jerk support for Kerry even if they have never heard of him.
I started my conversation class with the question, “Who do you think will win the election today?” My students looked at me as if I was [...]