Books & Reviews – Page 25

Of Type and Typography

2013-09-16 2013-09-16 Arts / My Writing / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Humans have remarkable ability that is shared by – as far as we know – no other animal. We can turn abstract images and symbols into meaning. Words are, of course, the prime example, as old as our history. We can turn a word like dog, tree, table or vacation into a broad and deep understanding of what that word means to us. Of course when I write “dog” and you read it, they’re not the same thing. I need to add qualifiers – adjectives, descriptions, anecdotes – for you to come close to appreciating my meaning. Even then, it’s ……… click below for more ↓

In Wildness is the Preservation of the World

2013-09-14 2013-09-14 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Environment / Urban Design & GrowthLeave a comment

The title of this post is a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Walking, published posthumously in 1862, but which he wrote and rewrote during the 1850s. I was thinking of that line this week when Council officially opened the new Black Ash Creek Park, in the northeast of the Georgian Meadows subdivision.* I was thinking of it not in terms of the park – a pleasant, family-oriented, structured space with playground equipment, a small pavilion, basketball court and a chess table – but rather about the untamed green spaces around the park. It is this small patch of wildness ……… click below for more ↓

Empire of Illusion and the End of Literacy

2013-09-13 2013-09-13 Arts / Critical Thinking / Culture / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

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 2.3

2013-08-02 2013-08-03 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Literary pretensions / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Before I carry on with my exploration of Miriam Van Scott’s Encyclopedia of Hell, I wanted to note that I just got my copy of her other book – the Encyclopedia of Heaven, from Abebooks. It’s dated 1999, so it’s a year later than her book on Hell. Yet it has many related topics – like Goethe’s second Faust. And it has lots of pop culture – like movie references – but nothing post 1999. Miriam, why not consider a revised, updated “Encyclopedia of the Afterlife” to combine everything in one book? Lots has happened since the last editions. I’d ……… 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 2.1, a small update

2013-07-27 2013-07-27 Atheism & Spirituality / Books & Reviews / Faith / Literary pretensions / Personal Reminiscences / ReligionLeave a comment

I left you in my exploration of the Encyclopedia of Hell pondering which version of the Faustus story was better: with or without his final redemption. Personally, I prefer without, because it offers greater dramatic opportunities. I also don’t like the notion of redemption: it seems like a “get out of Hell free” card. Christianity is the only religion I know of that offers this particular way out of your bad deeds: accept Jesus as your personal saviour and you’ll get diverted from Hell. So basically you can be evil until your deathbed, not take responsibility for your actions, then ……… 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 ↓

Kill the Apostrophe? Rubbish! Keep it!

2013-07-21 2013-07-21 Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Language & Grammar / Memes; Internet & Social / My WritingLeave a comment

A site has popped up with one of the stupidest ideas about English I’ve read in the past decade or two. It’s called Kill the Apostrophe. Subtle. At first, I thought it was a joke, a spoof. After all, how can one realistically get rid of perhaps the most significant element of punctuation based on the rantings of a website lunatic? And some of the counterpoint sites like Humbleapostrophe seemed created in a sense of camaraderie humour. But no, on further reading, it’s as real as any of the other wingnut sites, from chemtrails to “psychic” readings to UFOs. Most ……… click below for more ↓

Teddy’s Words of Wisdom

2013-07-20 2013-07-20 Books & Reviews / Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsLeave a comment

I’m not a great student of American history – my tastes run to other places and people: Napoleon, Casanova, Elizabeth I, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, China…. but I do read about it. Most recently Rick Perlstein’s history of the American Sixties, Nixonland. And in that book I came across a powerful, moving quotation from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt that I wanted to share because it still resonates today: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The ……… 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 ↓