Mind the Gap, part I, by Kenneth Radu
6 June 2012
The old trains and their stations are marvels of intent and mystery. No wonder so many films make use of them.
King's Cross-St. Pancras, London
Letter from San Francisco: The Introvert Advantage, by Guy Tiphane
10 May 2012
Ah, a book for me, I thought. Every time I have taken the Myers-Briggs test (or a variation of it), I have been on the 100% Introvert end of the scale from Introvert to Extrovert.
"I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement" -- Graham Greene
28 April 2012
This is the kind of man that young men of my generation and perhaps a younger generation must have wanted to be, especially young men who wanted to write.
Graham Greene, The Comedians (NY: Viking, 1965) is available from Abebooks.
This Wasn't the Day I Fell in Love with Montreal, by Laura Pellerine
19 April 2012
Who would do that in any other city? I thought happily. It seemed promising—but this wasn’t the day I fell in love with the city.
Rye Observations, by Kenneth Radu
18 April 2012
Why a town becomes a gathering place of the literati is a subject for literary histories. In Rye’s case, it may well have been the seductions of the past, which certainly seduced Henry James.
Conduit Street, Rye
Jack, Nathan, Brian, Tom – and the Media, Part II
9 April 2012
An Insider’s View of the NDP Leadership Convention (continued)
By Louise Tremblay Matchett
Jack, Nathan, Brian, Tom – and the Media, Part I
2 April 2012
An Insider's View of the 2012 NDP Leadership Convention
by Louise Tremblay Matchett
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The Sugar Sammy of Literature, by Linda Leith
29 March 2012
Amused, this morning, to see my reference to the Sugar Sammy of Literature has made the headlines.
Nicholas Hoare to close two out of three stores
16 March 2012
Very bad news -- and a sign of the times in writing and publishing. We here are going to miss you.
A “Grand Trunk of Thought”: D’Arcy McGee as Canadian Cultural Nationalist, by Linda Leith
12 March 2012
Locomotive 162, Grand Truck Railway
(Courtesy National Gallery of Canada)
The Embattled Life and Early Death of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, by Linda Leith
12 March 2012
The legacy of 11 September, the rise of radical Islam, and the persistence of revolutionary elements in some of Canada’s ethnic groups is likely to call forth the McGee who took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethnoreligious community, who challenged self-righteous political and religions certainties, and who argued for a broad, tolerant, decent, open-minded, and compassionate society in which people did not push others off the path.
A Literary Friendship: Hazzard on Greene, by Linda Leith
9 March 2012
Shirley Hazzard's book has the effect of sending us back to the novels of Greene and of Hazzard herself, but that has more do with the quality of her writing than with any literary genre. It also has something to do with her love of her subject.
Free Money -- Part II
2 March 2012
And here's Part II of the Free Money panel.
Free Money ? I don't think so... Part I of II
2 March 2012
Is it fair to call grants for artists and their organizations “free money”?
That’s the provocative title of this segment of the Tommy Schnurmacher show on CJAD 800 Radio, Thursday, February 1, 2012.
Books, in Guatemala?
27 February 2012
by Guy Tiphane
A visit to schools supported by Child Aid, an organization that sets up school libraries and reading programs in poor areas of Guatemala.
For a Literary Salon
21 February 2012
Contributing editor Marie-Andrée Lamontagne’s introductory text for the French online Salon .ll. argues that literature has never thrived as much as it does today, when it has all but disappeared from sight.
Translation by Jonathan Kaplansky.
Contributing editors Felicia Mihali, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, and Annabelle Moreau planning the
literary salon, October 2011.
The Best Company - 25 Years of the Public Lending Right Commission, by Katia Grubisic
21 February 2012
In the must and age and rainy days of those European libraries many moons ago, I was in a place that was mine; I was home. I might have been in another time; I was outside of time. Back then, I hadn’t yet published a line, and now I wait, along with thousands of other writers, for a slip of paper that reminds me not only that my words exist in the world, but that they are alongside countless other worlds. In libraries we are utterly ourselves, and we are in the best company.
Better than Downton Abbey: Nabokov's Ecstasy
8 February 2012
"This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love." -- Vladimir Nabokov
