Literature
Privileged Eavesdropping: Herzog, McCarthy, Krauss
by Nick Glossop on April 9, 2012
A physicist, a novelist and a filmmaker walk into a bar…
If I had been asked to name a few notables whom I would most like to overhear in conversation, Cormac McCarthy and Werner Herzog would certainly have made the shortlist. And here they are, along with physicist Lawrence Krauss and host of Science Friday, Ira Flatow having a chat about science, art, the insignificance of humanity and stuff. …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 67 – The Imp Of The Perverse: From Freud To Poe To Cheap Drugs
by Marty Schwartz on March 12, 2012
So you’re looking for an excuse for why your life is the way it is. You’ve made sketchy choices, unconscionable decisions, slept with partners of questionable ethics and species. That’s okay, you’re not alone. As with any E-Z diagnosis (especially one on the internet, especially-especially one from this site), you are not responsible.
Blame the Imp. The Imp of the Perverse.
If you’ve ever thrown your Mountain Dew …
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Contemporizing Coriolanus
by Fawnda Mithrush on February 29, 2012
Fiennes’ Directorial Debut With Obscure Shakespeare Is Risky, But Worth It.
From the speculative storm kicked up by Anonymous to the popular release of Stephen Marche’s How Shakespeare Changed Everything, public curiosity in the Bard’s work was piqued just in time for Ralph Fiennes’ directorial shot at Coriolanus.
Granted, this is not one of old Bill’s popular plays. Still isn’t. It was his final tragedy, and also one of his …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 55 – Pretending I’m Well-Read – The Books Of 1955
by Marty Schwartz on February 27, 2012
Wikipedia has a number of groupings by year – births, deaths, I even wrote about the news events of 1927 in one of my less memorable practice articles months ago. I was not aware, however, that they grouped the events in the literature world year-by-year. Now I am. So are you. I think you can see where this is heading.
1955. It was the year that gave us …
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Mini Polis And Its Shovels
by Nick Glossop on February 26, 2012
Six hours in a mid-western airport
Mini Polis, Mini Sota, the blandest circle of Hell where those who have sinned against style serve their termless time.
Mini Polis, densely thicketed with the commonsensical Scandinavian,
cheerful without humor,
affable without warmth,
acquisitive without enthusiasm.
Just as given to obesity as other species of American; they carry their bulk on somewhat longer legs, and are pleased to do so.
Here reign the …
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Did Borges Visit A Small Toronto Branch Library?
by Michelle Lovegrove Thomson on February 15, 2012
Tucked inside a translation of Plato’s Republic since 1978, an aged and crumpled thank you note has fallen into an intrepid librarian’s hands:
A Librarian at Toronto’s Agincourt Public Library believes Spanish-language note may be evidence of a visit from metaphysical Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges.
Written below the slightly illegible signature is a series of numbers that resemble Dewey call numbers. The Librarian looked up the books these …
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“The Only Way To Be In Love”
by Craig Elliott on February 14, 2012
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Letters of Note has this flowery response from Ayn Rand to a fan who had a question about a particular line in The Fountainhead – “To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I’.”
Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent
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“Whose idea was it anyway?”: revisiting M. Nourbese Philip
by Michelle Lovegrove Thomson on February 13, 2012
Several years ago I read a moving piece by Toronto-based poet and writer Marlene Nourbese Philip, entitled Whose idea was it anyway?.
The nine-page text is a meditation on—-can you guess?—-an idea so excruciating, awful, gargantuan… One tries to evoke the man who hit upon the task first; one attempts to imagine the moment, the bristling of hairs on his neck…
Philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, economics—no discipline would
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I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Read Me a Letter
by Malcolm Parker on February 6, 2012
One of the things I do at work is try to get people to write simply. I like to use letters by people who know how to write to disabuse people who don’t know how to write of the notion that complicated writing is smart writing. Fortunately, I found Letters of Note. It’s full of gems, like today’s 1996 letter from Nick Cave to MTV, politely declining their nomination …
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Tweet Fiction (Micro Spores)
by Andrew Loewen on January 31, 2012
Where interface is, there art shall be. In addition to books and essays, Jeff Noon publishes (if that’s the right word) 140-character stories on Twitter, fifty of which have been reworked and assembled on one page here.
37. You will climb inside the punctures in Lady Diana’s flesh and travel back in time to emerge from JFK’s head wounds. Tickets now on sale.
6. Robot tongue for sale,
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>1000
by Malcolm Parker on January 17, 2012
This week’s New Yorker has Roberto Bolano’s story about this snapshot.
It begins:
They’re seated. They’re looking at the camera. They are captioned, from left to right: J. Henric, J.-J. Goux, Ph. Sollers, J. Kristeva, M.-Th. Réveillé, P. Guyotat, C. Devade, and M. Devade.
There’s no photo credit.
They’re sitting around a table. It’s an ordinary table, made of wood, perhaps, or plastic, it could even be a marble table on metal
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Darkness at Noon or Anytime
by Malcolm Parker on March 19, 2012
I have seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker once, maybe two decades past. I have yet to stumble across it in the DVD bins here as I have with Solaris, but I am hopeful. I want to confirm my still vivid memories of its beauty, the tracking shot on the rail car, the tossing of the rock with the red ribbon in the zone, and the shattering ending which tears to the …
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