When Atoms Collide

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011).   In Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, the renowned Shakespearean scholar and Harvard prof tells a fast-paced intellectual detective story about how, in 1417, an Italian Renaissance book-hunting humanist, Poggio Bracciolini, rescued a key work of ancient Roman thought from a remote German monastery and delivered it to a world that was on the verge of becoming “modern.” The nearly-lost work in... 
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Username: Literature

Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (Pantheon, 2011). 1. The first thing Marjorie Garber talks about in The Use and Abuse of Literature is the decline of reading. Or, rather, the first subject that Garber, a Harvard English professor and prolific Shakespearean and cultural studies scholar, seems to address in her book about the current state of “literature” is the general decline in “literary” reading. That’s a plausible enough topic. After all, if readers of literature... 
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Letter from Berlin: Ashes to Ashes

It’s been the weirdest couple of weeks in Europe that I can remember in quite a while. The odd natural phenomenon that grabbed everyone’s attention is a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. It blanketed Europe and shut down all aviation traffic over the continent for an unprecedented six days (twice as long as the shutdown of American air space after “9/11″). Toward the end of the week, planes were mostly back in the air, and airline officials in London, Paris, and Frankfurt were scrambling... 
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Naomi Klein’s Excellent Adventures

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Picador, 2007); No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999/2000; 2010, Fourth Estate). 1. If you’re a teacher, what your students are wearing tells you something about what’s going on in the culture. In the 1980s and 90s, I noticed that walking into a classroom was like hitting a stretch of highway crowded with advertising billboards. The students were wearing T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other paraphernalia that brazenly bore... 
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Letter from Berlin: Secret Germany

It’s the dead of winter in Berlin. Or at least it was all the way into mid-February. Temperatures steadily in the minus-4 to minus-14 degree range ever since Christmas. Coldest winter in recent memory. Plenty of snow, icy sidewalks, frozen mud and slush, the very weather that the Winter Olympic Games organizers in Vancouver are presumably longing for, instead of the Gothic fog, rain, and premature spring that they’ve got. Here, public discourse has been reduced to earnest debates about the relation... 
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Decline and Distraction

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Knopf Canada, 232 pages, 2009) One recent end-of-the-semester morning, while taking attendance in the “philosophy and literature” course I teach at Capilano University, I checked off the name of a student who had missed the previous class. “Where were you last week?” I asked. Since attendance-taking is a desultory ritual, I try to liven it up with some low-level banter. But this time, instead of the... 
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Is Mark Kingwell Getting Dumber?

University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell was sitting in his office last week. It was the end of term, graduation time at post-secondary institutions across the country and he was thinking about how perople at this time of year are always asking him, “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?” The media-ubiquitous philosopher suddenly had an inspiration for a clever op-ed squib that he could dash off and post to the Globe and Mail’s opinion pages. Kingwell’s thinking... 
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Homeland Alone

For the United States, and parts of the rest of the world, the day of infamy in the first decade of the 21st century was September 11, 2001 (or “9/11,” as it came to be known). That was the morning when four teams of an Islamist terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, based in distant Afghanistan, seized four U.S. commercial airplanes while in flight, crashing two of them into New York’s World Trade towers, another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and one more, intended for a target in Washington,... 
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Robin Blaser, 1925-2009: Death’s Duty

The poet Robin Blaser died of a brain tumour on May 7, 2009, in Vancouver, at age 83. One of the first poems of Blaser’s to which I paid attention, published in editor Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960), was an untitled sonnet-like work that begins, “And when I pay death’s duty / a few men will come to mind.” I was fascinated by the triple-pun-like meaning of the second line. In Blaser’s imagining of his own death, written at age 30 or so, in... 
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Heroes

1. The very first thing that Javier Cercas tells us in his novel, Soldiers of Salamis (2001; translated into English by Anne McLean, 2003), which I re-read recently, is that he initially heard the Spanish Civil War story “about Rafael Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad” in the summer of 1994, a half dozen years before the writing of the book we’re reading, and more than a half century after the events depicted in that story. So, this is going to be a story about a story, an investigation... 
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