Author: August

#4 – Century, by Ray Smith

August Leave a Comment

The wonderful Dr. Sarah Tolmie, whom I’ve mentioned at least once before on this blog, was a professor of mine at the University of Waterloo—my Honours Essay supervisor, in fact (what we at UW referred to as the “Undergraduate Thesis”). In addition to teaching me a great deal about my field, she directed me toward the work of Iris Murdoch, and later, an obscure little novel called Lord Nelson Tavern. She recommended it to me while I was spending a summer alone in Sudbury. My girlfriend was up North working, while I had just moved into a new apartment, and didn’t even have a telephone or Internet connection yet. I was, however, making effective use of the Sudbury Public Library. Lord Nelson Tavern, as it turns out, was by Canadian author Ray Smith, and though I promptly forgot both his name and the title of his book, I never forgot… Continue Reading →

#3 – Generation X, by Douglas Coupland

August 6 Comments

I first read Generation X when I was fifteen (so, 1994), a blue collar kid in a blue collar town. I don’t remember much about it except for my reaction. I hated it. “Hate” might even be too mild a word. I don’t know that I’ve ever had as strongly negative a reaction to a book as I had to this one, and I’ve had some pretty strong negative reactions. My thoughts on it then could be summarized in this statement: yuppies who think they aren’t yuppies complain about how hard their lives are. But fifteen years is a long time, and panelist Roland Pemberton (aka Cadence Weapon) has chosen to defend Generation X on Canada Reads. I’ve revisited other books from my past with positive results, why not with this one? And the verdict is in! I still hate Generation X. I still hate it a lot, in fact.… Continue Reading →

#2 – A Mixture of Frailties, by Robertson Davies

August 2 Comments

As Kate mentioned here, A Mixture of Frailties is the book where Robertson Davies finally, firmly made the shift from dramatist to novelist. Not to get all “no true Scotsman” on you, but I think, given how his next eight novels play out, a case can be made that A Mixture of Frailties is the first “true” Robertson Davies novel. That’s not exactly the case I’m going to be making here, but this will be setting the pattern for most of the remainder of these books. In my comments on Tempest-Tost I discussed the first of the three elements Davies brings together in constructing the identities of his aristocracy of the spirit: self-knowledge. In my discussion of Leaven of Malice I discussed the second element: the conceit. I’m not certain I was clear in how conceits fit in to the framework I’m talking about, as I also spoke about how… Continue Reading →

Canada Reads

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I’ve never participated in Canada Reads before. I’d like to say that sometimes my reading schedule doesn’t allow for it, or that I’m not interested in the books, but the truth is that, while I really believe in the value of my job and the project I work on (which I’d rather not discuss the specifics of), I don’t make very much money, and buying all those books at once is far and away beyond my means. Not unless I can find them used or remaindered, of course, and good luck with that. Toronto’s used bookstores are picked clean the day after the titles are announced. Usually. This year things are different. Kerry Clare is running a concurrent programme, called Canada Reads: Independently, in part as a response to the criticism that this year’s lineup for the CBC event only features books that have already received considerable attention here in… Continue Reading →

The National Post, Champions of Equality

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This is the one post I never wanted to write. People who know me, and regular readers of this site, will already know that I am not a feminist. I am, in fact, quite critical of feminist theory at times. I resist making this a big issue on this site for two reasons: first, emotions can often run high when it comes to identity politics (of which feminism and feminist theory can play a significant part), making it very easy for a poorly-worded sentence to cause a colossal misunderstanding, and second, feminism remains a useful movement, and feminist theory a useful set of tools for a variety of fields; I don’t like limiting my tools, and criticizing something too much on the Internet can do that. But this thing, this stupid, stupid, embarrassing disgrace brought to us by the Editorial Board at the National Post has left me no choice… Continue Reading →

“Mark Jarvis, Prophet”, An Excerpt

August 3 Comments

The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopaedia of Crypto-Anthropology, 2nd Canadian Edition, published in 2005 by The Society of Canadian Crypto-Anthropologists, Ottawa Chapter, compiled and edited by S.F. Jameson and E. Forrester-Pratt. Reprinted with permission. Jarvis, Mark Samuel. born March 12th, 1963 — missing December 2nd, 2003 Mark Jarvis was a Canadian businessman, venture capitalist, and prophet. He was born in the small Northwestern Ontario village of Sioux Lookout to parents Samuel David Jarvis, electrician, and Ethel Marie Jarvis (née Hermann), nurse. Jarvis was born with a teratoma, a kind of tumor, usually benign, characterized by the growth of tissue associated with parts of the body other than where it is found. In males teratomata most often present at birth and tend to manifest as fleshy lumps on or about the coccyx or the neck. The tissues most commonly found in such tumors are from the lungs, brain, and… Continue Reading →

Bits and Bobs

August Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading through the Caustic Cover Critic‘s archives at work (hey, I have that kind of job), and I just noticed this evening that David Drummond, the book designer I mentioned in a post this weekend, actually has a blog, where he looks at some of the approaches he takes to designing covers. His comments aren’t as in-depth as I would like (they tend to be limited to only a sentence or two), but it’s still a pretty cool “inside baseball” kind of thing for those of us, like myself, who geek out over both books and graphic design. I’ve mentioned this on Twitter, but since I know most of you aren’t following me there, I thought I’d mention it here. A.L. Kennedy on Writing is seriously the best writing column on the Web. I know you aren’t reading it (I know you aren’t, don’t give me that look),… Continue Reading →

Ghosts in a Burning City, by Red State Soundsystem

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The 1980s was not exactly my favourite decade, musically speaking. The disturbed geniuses who brought us the spartan soundscapes of post-punk had discovered island rhythms and African beats. Those influences softened their edges, muted their anger at the largely urban disenfranchisement that originally fueled the punk movement. The resulting mess of genres, usually lumped together as New Wave, became little more than a massive John Hughes soundtrack, eventually devolving into cheesy synth-pop before finally dying of auto-erotic asphyxiation, here in Canada at least, with World On Edge’s 1991 self-titled debut. And yet there was a Moment, ever so brief, just as New Wave was about to topple into the realm of AM radio self-parody, when bands like Talking Heads, the darker Depeche Mode, and a handful of others made some really great records. To me those albums seem to have a shorter half-life than those produced at other high points… Continue Reading →

Updates on the Updates

August 4 Comments

So ten hours later, I’m only half-way through the process of updating the software. I have successfully updated to from MovableType 3.34 to 4.33, but was unable to make 5.01 work, for reasons that are entirely unknown to me. According to their knowledge base, the errors I was having do not exist. After spending a couple hours bumping my head against that particular brick wall, I decided to give up on 5.01, and revert to the 4.33 upgrade I’d made earlier in the evening. The result was close to three hours of downtime as I tried to figure out why Firefox was giving me 404 errors for files that were clearly on the server. Because I’d been at it for far too long, I was too tired and burnt out to realize the obvious, that the permissions had gotten messed up. A four-second fix turned into a three-hour nightmare. This… Continue Reading →

Upgrades

August Leave a Comment

Tonight (and possibly even tomorrow, depending on how long this takes), I will be attempting to upgrade the blogging software that runs vestige.org. It’s been, well, close to three years since a database failure forced me to upgrade, and in the meantime I’ve missed at least two major updates to the software. According to the instructions provided, I’ll have to upgrade from version 3 to version 4 before moving to version 5, which is the latest release. This will be a tremendous pain in the ass, but hopefully it will allow me greater flexibility for dealing with comment spam and various other housekeeping issues. I’ve been blogging at vestige.org since February 2000, and I haven’t had much luck with upgrades. I’ve lost bits of the database at least twice, the search function was unworkable for close to four years, and I’ve had to rebuild the entire file structure three times,… Continue Reading →