What I’m Reading Now – Page 17

Empire of Illusion and the End of Literacy

I don’t know whether to feel vindicated, delighted, frightened or depressed as I read through Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Much of what he says reflects many of my own observations and opinions. I started reading this book in part as research for my upcoming conference speech on social media, but it has kept me mesmerized, like seeing a train wreck before your eyes, something you can’t quite turn away from. I suppose we like to read books that reinforce our world view (those of us who read, that is ……… click below for more ↓

Three Archy poems by Don Marquis

2013-09-07 2013-09-07 Arts / Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / My Writing / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

pete the parrot and shakespeare i got acquainted with a parrot named pete recently who is an interesting bird pete says he used to belong to the fellow that ran the mermaid tavern in london then i said you must have known shakespeare know him said pete poor mutt i knew him well he called me pete and i called him bill but why do you say poor mutt well said pete bill was a disappointed man and was always boring his friends about what he might have been and done if he only had a fair break two or ……… click below for more ↓

Archy and Mehitabel

2013-08-27 2016-05-25 Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / Language & Grammar / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

I can’t recall exactly how old I was when I first cracked open Don Marquis’s book, archy and mehitabel, sitting there among the other books in the basement, black spined, stiff, yellowing pages. That old book smell. Perhaps I was 11 or 12, but not much older, because we moved from that house in the summer after my 12th birthday. But I still remember it well.* The book was one of those oddities on our basement family bookshelf. I ignored it, at first, then looked at the pictures – cartoons by George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat . Long ……… click below for more ↓

The Thousand and One Nights

2013-08-03 2026-03-29 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Language & Grammar / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

I had no idea it was this sexy. The Thousand Nights and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka The Thousand and One Nights – it’s really wonderful, steamy stuff. Every tale is a cliffhanger and you keep wanting to read just one more to see how it turns out. Of course, that was the point of the collection.* The backstory is rather complicated, but to simplify it: the Sultan beds a virgin one night, then kills her the next day. When Scheherazade’s turn comes, she asks for her sister to be able to say good bye. Then she begins to ……… click below for more ↓

Hell 2.2

2013-07-29 2013-07-29 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Faith / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Might be time to recap my reasons for writing this series. New readers could get confused about the content in the Hell posts, of which this is the fourth. They’re all the result of a convergence of several recent themes and activities in my life; a lot of which have to do with recent reading and research. I started reading several books, more or less simultaneously this summer, some of which I’ve blogged about. One of them is Dante’s Inferno (I’m currently reading Mark Musa’s translation in the Penguin edition, but also have Pinsky’s and a few others). Another is ……… click below for more ↓

Hell 2.0

2013-07-22 2013-07-22 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Literary pretensions / Religion / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I left you last time after finishing the letter D, in Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell. I’m back in book form to take you through a few more entries in her exploration of the afterlife. But first a couple of additions to your reading material. First on the list is Alice Turner’s 275-page The History of Hell. It’s an illustrated guide to how Westerners have come to think of Hell, It starts with the ancient influences – Egypt, Greece, Rome and Judaism – but its main focus is on the evolving Christian imagination. She has a lot to say ……… click below for more ↓

What in Hell…?

2013-07-19 2013-09-16 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Hades, you know, isn’t a place. It’s a guy. The Greek god of the underworld. His territory consists of a bunch of domains, including the rather unpleasant Tartarus, where souls – called shades – suffer eternal punishment. Hades wasn’t a fun god. If you weren’t getting your skin ripped off in Tartarus, life sucked in other ways. You moped about in the other domains, lethargically meandering around the afterlife without much purpose. Sort of like former politicians or local bloggers. That’s the sort of thing you learn when you read books. And the sort of thing that gets me labelled ……… click below for more ↓

The sum of all knowledge

2013-07-16 2013-07-16 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Literary pretensions / Psychology & Sociology / Uncategorized / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

In his 2004 book, The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs tells of his quest to become “the smartest person in the world” by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover. Right away, you can see the fly in this intellectual ointment: knowledge doesn’t equal intelligence. Jared Diamond, in his introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel, credits the barely literate, ill-educated tribespeople of New Guinea as being the smartest people he ever met. Not because of their ability to discourse, as Jacobs says, on the intricacies of the Phoenician legal system, but rather because their daily life is such a struggle. ……… click below for more ↓

Putdownable books?

2013-07-13 2013-07-13 Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

A recent article in The Independent said that J.K. Rowling’s new book and the abysmally-written 50 Shades of Grey were among the books most put down by readers as unfinishable. Putdownable. A description no author or publisher relishes. They joined titles like Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Ulysses, Lord of the Rings, Moby Dick, Atlas Shrugged and Catch 22 as books readers gave up the struggle to finish. Personally, I hesitate to put 50 Shades in the same category as anything even vaguely literary, let alone the likes of Joseph Heller and J.R. Tolkein. But we’re talking statistics here, not ……… click below for more ↓

Believing is Seeing

2013-07-11 2013-07-11 Books & Reviews / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Faith / Municipal Politics / Psychology & Sociology / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once,” wrote Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, from Paris, France, 1785), “finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.” Anyone following the ups and downs of federal and provincial politics would have no trouble believing Jefferson’s words. We often believe – without any evidence to ……… click below for more ↓

Troilus and Cressida

2013-07-09 2013-07-09 Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / Provincial Politics / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

I’ve always found Troilus and Cressida a difficult play. The characters all seem jaded, cynical, opportunistic, stuffily sanctimonious, lecherous or simply underhanded. Some are merely unpleasant, others are despicable, reprehensible. All seem self-serving, more concerned with their own gains and goals than that of the greater war around them. It’s difficult to understand why it was listed as a “comedy” (although oddly placed in the folio, between the histories and tragedies). Even Harold Bloom calls it “difficult” and “elitist” (although he later qualifies it as Shakespeare’s “most sophisticated” and “intellectualized” play). And Joyce Carol Oates called it, “…that most vexing ……… click below for more ↓

The Game of the Book of Thrones

2013-06-29 2013-06-29 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Humour & Satire / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

No, it’s not about that heavyweight book series by George Martin, or the TV series based on it (or even about how you really need to read the books to understand anything that is happening in the TV series). It’s about the other throne, the porcelain one. And what books are best for reading thereon. Yes, reading on the toilet. Don’t tell me you just sit there and stare vacantly into space. This is important time. Those few rare minutes when we really have uninterrupted time to ourselves; quality time with our bodily functions unhampered by TV, by the phone, ……… click below for more ↓

Midway in our Life’s Journey…

2013-05-23 2013-05-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions. My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw. But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue: Midway in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Melville’s Poetry

2013-05-22 2013-05-22 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life. Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found ……… click below for more ↓

Little Dorrit: BBC Drama

2013-05-18 2013-05-18 Arts / Books & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere 30 minutes, and almost every one of them ended in a cliffhanger fashion that made you want to watch just one more. You might not think of Charles Dickens that way, but much of what he wrote was for serial publication: in weekly or monthly magazines. To keep his audience hooked – and buying the magazines – he wrote cliffhangers. Not perhaps as gripping as, say, episodes of TV’s show ……… click below for more ↓