Category: Books

Poems and Rhymes From Around the World

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Little too tired to blog much today. Didn’t get home from work until 8:30 and it was a crap day. All the more reason, I guess, to be excited about the first TIFF film I’ll be watching about 23 hours from now. I kick things off with Waltz With Bashir (tiff), ’cause nothin’ says “film festival” like an animated war documentary subtitled in Hebrew.

I don’t know how blogging is going to go, especially during the first few days. This Saturday and Sunday are my heaviest — 4 films each day, with MIdnight Madness both nights — so there might be some radio silence. I’ll probably mutter inanities on twitter while waiting in line, and try to save the blog for reviews and more substantial observations than “in line at ryerson again need to pee”. I’ll have my teeny tiny laptop with me so if I have a break between screenings and can locate some free wi-fi, I’ll do my best to keep up.

In other film news: yet another Chuck Palahniuk book coming to theatres near you. According to Paste casting for Lullaby is already underway, and Choke doesn’t even come out for another three weeks. I liked Lullaby more than Choke, so I wait with bated breath.

[tags]tiff, chuck palahniuk, midnight madness[/tags]

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

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A few notes before I slip back into MBA mode (last assignment woooot!):

.:.

I’ve acquired a metric shitload of reading material: I just bought And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris and The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. I also have the latest issues of The Economist, Toronto Life and Adbusters to get through. That issue of Adbusters is weird reading, since it goes from right to left, but it’ll be worth the effort when I get to the article entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Civilization”. Just a few pages in and I’m captivated by the story on China’s approach to global politics.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.

Right now, in between magazines and MBA cases, I’m reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Mark Kingwell said that “[p]reaching to the choir…is corrosive of courage and reason: it makes you soft-bellied and soft-headed” but sitting in the atheist choir is fun when it’s Hitchens at the pulpit.

.:.

Somehow Anya Yurchyshyn ties her hatred of marketing to a book about 20th-century totalitarianism in an article called “Adolf Hitler Was A Marketing Genius“.

Although I think advertising/marketing/branding are evil industries (that help to supply my paycheck), I’m not about to compare the people who work there to Nazis or fascists or even Satan’s gleeful minions. Some of my best friends work in advertising! But it is scary that there’s a superstructure that is trying to control us, and most people have stopped questioning it. Advertising is a part of the landscape; it’s weird when it’s not there.

Somehow I agree with her.

.:.

Toronto made Forbes’ list of the world’s ten most economically powerful cities.

Growth and quality are as important as size in our rankings, so smaller but briskly growing economies like Seoul, South Korea, and Hong Kong also make the list. North America, with relatively lower growth areas, still boasts a number of cities in the current power list, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, the latter of which squeezes past Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia and Mexico City, Mexico.

[via Creative Class, Accordion Guy and a slew of others]

[tags]joshua ferris, lawrence wright, adbusters, christopher hitchens, mark kingwell, anya yurchyshyn, forbes, economically powerful cities[/tags]

War socioeconomics war religion music

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It felt good to walk into Indigo today and buy five books, like it was some kind of preparation for September. Or maybe it felt good to cross things off my wishlist. Or maybe it felt good ’cause I got a Roots weekender bag with it. Who cares. It felt good.

I got:

  • Richard Evans . The Coming Of The Third Reich
  • Richard Florida . The Rise Of The Creative Class
  • Vasily Grossman . A Writer At War
  • Christopher Hitchens . God Is Not Great
  • Dan Kennedy . Rock On

[tags]richard evans, richard florida, vasily grossman, christopher hitchens, dan kennedy[/tags]

Teach your children…well, better than that

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Worrisome goings on in classrooms. From the Toronto Star (via Quill & Quire): “[Toronto District School] Board removes book on genocide.”

Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide had been selected as a resource for a new Grade 11 history course about genocide and crimes against humanity, but the book and the course came under review after they were challenged by members of the Canadian Turkish community.

And, more worrisome still, from MSNBC: “Creationism edges into U.S. high school classes.”

One in eight U.S. high school biology teachers presents creationism or intelligent design in a positive light in the classroom, a new survey shows, despite a federal court’s recent ban against it.

Apologies to CSN&Y for this post’s title.

[tags]toronto district school board, censorship, msnbc, creationism[/tags]

Currently…

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reading: The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles Hill and Gareth Jones. Eye Weekly and Now Magazine every Thursday. Toronto Life once a month.

listening to: Saul Williams by Saul Williams, though any minute now I’ll move on to Death Cab For Cutie‘s Narrow Stairs or Visiter by The Dodos.

watching: almost nothing. I’m paying only marginal attention to sports (go Pens! go Celts!), The Office and 30 Rock are done for the season and The Shield hasn’t started yet. All that’s on right now is Battlestar Galactica, and even that’s on 2-week hiatus.

scanning: 190 news feeds, averaging about 509 articles per day. Of course, these are only my personal-interest feeds; I have just as many work feeds. I mainly skim the headlines here, and pay attention to maybe 50, flagging 5-10 to read later.

browsing: 6-7 websites per day. I rarely have a need to visit particular websites now (see ‘scanning’, above) but a few are applications (e.g., Google Analytics) or snapshots (e.g., the weather) that don’t work in an RSS channel. There’s also Bruce MacKinnon’s editorial cartoon every day which, despite my best efforts, I cannot wrangle into a Yahoo Pipe. Again, this is personal-interest only; there’re other work sites.

running: 3-4 times per week, 3 miles at a time. On a treadmill. Half flat, half slight incline.

eating: penne with sundried tomato pesto. Well…an hour ago, anyway.

looking forward to: our rockies/BC trip in June; Euro 2008; visiting Nova Scotia twice in August, once to visit with family and once to wrap up the MBA.

wondering: why the hell I started writing this blog post in the first place.

[tags]angel riots, ibi kaslik, toronto life, saul williams, death cab for cutie, narrow stairs, dodos, visiter,  google reader, bruce mackinnon, yahoo pipes, euro 2008[/tags]

In which the word "halcyon" enters my head

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In spite of having the day off, I got up at 8:00. Or rather, I was forced to get up, since our cleaning service comes at 9:00 on Fridays. I considered transplanting myself to the den and putting up a “keep out” sign on the door so I could keep sleeping, but this seemed silly and impractical, cleaning not being the quietest of activities.

I showered and went out for some breakfast at Fran’s, then walked down to Church & Front where I sipped hot chocolate and read my book at the Second Cup. A little after 10:00 I walked over to Nicholas Hoare and spent an hour perusing, finally settling on The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik. I needed a new book as I just this morning finished A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, which has been sitting on my shelf for…8 years, maybe? I have tons of non-fiction I want to buy, but I’ve found I’m less interested in them as long as I’m also reading a textbook.

My plans for the rest of the day involve catching up on work email & news feeds, tidying up a bit and possibly tormenting the cats. I’m starting to dig the idea of a 4-day work week.

[tags]fran’s, second cup, nicholas hoare, ibi kaslik[/tags]

Things I feel it's important for you to know

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  • My favourite word for today: solipsism. No idea why. I’m sure it’s related to some kind of deep and brilliant observation that I made earlier today and shall force you all to hear about. Gosh almighty I notice that the definition of solipsism sounds an awful lot like blogging geez whod’ve thunkit.
  • A new poll suggests that the Montreal Canadiens are considered “Canada’s team.” The results were met in disbelief both in Montreal (where they’ll believe it when the CBC assigns announcers to Canadiens games who can actually identify their players and correctly pronounce their names) as well as in Toronto (where they were, quite frankly, shocked to find out that other Canadian cities even have hockey teams).
  • Any smoker who justifies throwing butts on the ground by asking sarcastically, “Where are we supposed to put them?” is a premium unfiltered asshole. Why not apply the same logic to empty beer bottles? Used syringes? Diarrhea? Just because there isn’t a conveniently located receptacle into which I can dispose of the byproduct of whatever unhealthy habit I may have, I haven’t the right to discard butt, bottle, needle nor shit wherever I please. It’s bad enough that you smell bad; try not to be so lazy too.

OK, back to your regularly scheduled solipsism.

[tags]solipsism, montreal canadiens, canada’s team, cbc, cigarette butts[/tags]

35 years later, Bobby Francois is still a dick

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Today, because of the transit strike, we walked all the way up to Bloor & Bathurst to see today’s documentary, Stranded, I’ve Come From A Plane That Crashed In The Mountains (hot docs). It took us longer to get there than we anticipated, so just as we walked up to the theatre we joined the end of the line that was entering. Good timing…no standing in line and we still got excellent seats.

Seeing documentaries at the Bloor just always feels more like Hot Docs for some reason. I know that for the first few years we went that was the only location, but it’s more than that. Crowds there seem more animated, and the neighbourhood feels more a part of the festival for some reason. In general Bloor Street was jumping tonight…I guess beautiful weather and no subway will get the masses out. Anyway.

The film was good. I’m quite familiar with the subject matter — the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which would became the basis of the book Alive and film of the same name — so there was nothing new for me, but I still thought it was well done. Unlike in Air India 182, historical recreations were used well here, just to provide accent and context to the survivor’s interviews. There’s still so much emotion in the men’s voices as they talk about those ten weeks, what they saw, what they suffered.

If you haven’t read the book by Piers Paul Read, you should, and you should watch this documentary too.

[tags]hot docs, stranded, piers paul read, uruguayan air force flight 571[/tags]

News flash: area introvert craves more emotional attachment

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While I sat at Fran’s eating breakfast I read a few pages of Catherine Gildener‘s Too Close To The Falls. After a few pages a woman, maybe a few years younger than me, who’d been sitting across from me with (I assume) her boyfriend/husband, came over to my table. She told me she’d read the book and loved it, but had never seen anyone else reading it before. I told her I couldn’t take credit for unearthing the obscure find, that it had been recommended by my writing instructor Michelle Berry years before (who I believe had reviewed it for the Globe) and after keeping it on my shelf for six winters I was finally getting around to it. We talked about the fantastic stories Gildener told of her childhood, and wondered how such tales could be real. She apologized for interrupting my breakfast, told me she hoped I would enjoy the rest of the book as much she did, and went back to her table.

This, to me, is the real benefit of the paper book. I see no advantage to the convenience of the medium, compared to an e-book or reading online, but what I’ve found is that people will often come over and talk to me about a book, because they see it as a shared emotional experience. Normally, as an introvert, strange people striking up conversations with me is akin to getting mugged, but in these cases the conversation is about the book, not about me or them, so I don’t mind.

In fact, I wish there was an equivalent for music. Each day on my way to and from work I see hundreds of people with headphones snaking out of their bags and pockets and I wonder what they’re listening to. I assume they’re all listening to the same formulaic, familiar music that infects radio and most iPods, but what about the exceptions? For every Rainer Maria Rilke you spot in a sea of John Grisham and Deepak Chopra there must be a similar musical outsider. How great would it be to see that the baby boomer in a golf shirt is listening to the new Frightened Rabbit? Or that the punk girl carrying a skateboard is listening to Blind Willie Johnson? Or that the accountant with the CostCo briefcase is listening to T-Rex? I feel like every day I’m missing a dozen shared emotional experiences contained in pairs of headphone wires.

[tags]catherine gildener, michelle berry, rainer maria rilke, frightened rabbit, blind willie johnson, t-rex[/tags]

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit

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From the Quill & Quire’s blog: Mommy’s New Rack.

In the latest sign of the impending apocalypse, ABC News has posted a story about a new children’s book called My Beautiful Mommy, written by the Florida-based plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer. The book is an attempt to explain (and to justify) plastic surgery to children.

My soul…it weeps.

“Why are you going to look different?” asks the daughter of her mother in the car ride back from the doctor’s office.

“Not just different, my dear — prettier!” exclaims the mother.

On the outside, maybe.

Actually, not even then. The wonder that is high definition has made it very clear which actors and actresses have had work done, and it just never looks good. Latest exhibit: Mary McDonnell, who’s acquired a Joker-grade rictus for season four of BSG.

[tags]plastic surgery, mary mcdonnell[/tags]