Edmund White’s Own Story

I One of the more useful ways to think about gay writing and its most important writer, Edmund White, is to first locate them in relation to the trajectory of contemporary gay political and literary history. It’s more than a quarter-century since gay writing emerged from the rights’ movement that noisily burst onto the North American scene with the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York (an event at which Ed White, then 29, was present). As White wrote to friends during the semi-accidental birth of... 
[Read more...]

Disappearances

Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws, and other stories from the age of extinctions (Viking Canada, 318 p., $35, 2006) As I was re-reading the title chapter of Terry Glavin’s Waiting for the Macaws, an episode that takes place in the forests of Costa Rica, a blackbird landed in the feedbox on the balcony of my apartment and began poking around for the last crumbs of yesterday’s bread. The feedbox, an unused planter hanging from the balcony railing, is also periodically visited by neighbourhood sparrows,... 
[Read more...]

Conquest for Dummies

George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 467 pages, $36.50, 2005) More than three years ago now, in March 2003, I was marching in the streets of downtown Vancouver, in the company of about 100,000-or-so like-minded people, to protest the impending American invasion of Iraq. Maybe “marching” puts it too strongly: it was more of a duty trudge, since the war was by then inevitable and most of us understood that our protestations were unlikely to have significant impact.... 
[Read more...]

Blind Man’s Bluff

Ryan Knighton, Cockeyed: A Memoir (Penguin, 263 p., $25, 2006) Ryan Knighton is my first blind guy. He’s 33-years-old, has a shaved head, frequently wears a black porkpie hat, has a gym-developed hard-body, sports some this-generation tattoos, teaches English at Capilano College in North Vancouver, B.C. (which is where I also work), and taps around the universe with a long white cane. Knighton has retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a genetic eye disease that’s progressively reduced his sight to about one per... 
[Read more...]

Atheists in Foxholes

Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 119 pages, $US 9.95, 2003) I The other night, while watching the American network CBS’s version of the evening news, I saw what has to qualify as an early contender for the most macabre and nutty “strange news” item of the nascent year: military funeral protesters! Apparently, there’s a Christian fundamentalist minister named Fred Phelps, who runs the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist... 
[Read more...]

Feasting with Oscar: from De Profundis to Post-Queer

I In cell number “C.3.3” — it almost sounds like an e-mail address, C-dot-3-dot-3 — on the third tier of Reading Gaol, a prison about 60 km. west of London, in the early winter months of 1897, 42-year-old Oscar Wilde, serving a two-year sentence for the curiously named crime of “gross indecency,” began to write what would become one of the remarkable documents in the history of prison literature as well as one of the most memorable... 
[Read more...]

About Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

I Robert Creeley’s last book, If I were writing this (New Directions, 2003), begins with a “credo” poem, “The Way.” Given that Creeley’s particular “way” ended on March 30, 2005, with his death from pneumonia in a hospital in the obscure outpost of Odessa, Texas, at age 78, that credo poem is as good a place as any to start. “The Way,” and much of what follows, brings us up to date on Creeley’s position with respect to both being-in-the-world (as well as leaving it) and the subject... 
[Read more...]

Reading Philosophy (2): Richard Rorty and Contingency

For about 15 years now, I’ve been reading and re-reading Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), and all of his previous and subsequent writings. I think he’s the most interesting philosopher of the last quarter of the 20th century, at least in America, if not further afield. Rorty is the object of controversy and considerable misunderstanding, both within and outside of philosophy, but his ideas are absolutely relevant to our time, so it’s worth taking a look at some of them. In... 
[Read more...]

Reading Philosophy (1): True Confessions

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy (Phoenix, 603 pages, 1997) A friend of mine in the philosophy department where I work, Yolande Westwell-Roper, mentioned to me a couple of years ago that she had read Bryan Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher and thought that I would probably like it. Since I’d heard of Magee –- he’s a fairly well-known populariser of philosophy who hosted a series of TV programs in Britain in which he interviewed prominent philosophers... 
[Read more...]

2004: Book of the Year

Orhan Pamuk, Snow (tr. Maureen Freeley, Faber and Faber, 436 pages, 2004) I was just about to take a pass on producing one of those standard “Top Ten” books-of-the-year lists when I read the Globe and Mail’s roundup (Dec. 24, 2004) of the favourite 2004 books of a couple dozen writers, critics, and other readers. Well, as they say in “Globespeak,” I was “shocked and appalled.” Most of the picks were distressingly idiosyncratic and/or trivial. Several readers had nothing more to say about 2004... 
[Read more...]

« Previous Page — Next Page »