Alex Boyd's Blog, page 21

NPR update: interview, poems, reviews

Northern Poetry Review is updated with three new reviews, an interview with Johanna Skibsrud by Alessandro Porco, and poetry by Sandy Pool.

NPR update: interview, poems reviews

Northern Poetry Review is updated with three new reviews, an interview with Johanna Skibsrud by Alessandro Porco, and poetry by Sandy Pool.

Review: Bookmark Now, Writing in Unreaderly Times

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2006

Editor Kevin Smokler explains in his introduction to Bookmark Now that the voices behind these essays were encouraged as a response to Reading at Risk, a National Endowment for the Arts report that warned literary reading is in sharp decline in favour of the internet, TV and video games.  Responses were swift and alarmed, but not often complex or useful: literary types should regroup and push on with the idea of convincing people to read, as...

The Sound of History

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music looks like an interesting title, and there's a good review by Brian Hayes to be found here.

Both the book and the review begin with a fascinating quote:

"The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device...

Really? Lansdowne and Bloor?

I've been getting out to an area I don't normally see — Lansdowne and Bloor, where the neighbourhood is beginning to change. Aside from more galleries in the area, Starving Artist (on Lansdowne, north of Bloor) is a waffle house that serves up innovative and likable dishes, like a burger between two lightly-made waffles. And Calico (on Bloor, east of Lansdowne) is a vegetarian restaurant with a great menu of freshly prepared food. Both places can boast friendly service and a good atmosphere...

Review: The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2007

Nobody can accuse Nick Horby of failing to be himself.  A collection of fourteen months of his essays from Believer magazine, The Polysyllabic Spree is honest, smart, and down to earth.  Every month he lists what he bought, what he read, and everymonth the list of what he bought outgrows his reading despite steady efforts, occasionally thrown off when he's caught up in football matches, or his children.  Readers knows there's always a crowded...

And So

A somewhat convoluted but well-written review of And So, poetry by Joel Brouwer, comments on the "startlingly flat beauty of a narrative surface," and "the essential detail that pricks the viewer in such a way that a hidden element leaks out but cannot be fully understood."

I assume reviewer Ron Slate is speaking generally about poets when he says the poet "feels the pinch, caught between the language of living a decent life ("please pass the salt" or "wanna go to the movies?") and the...

Raaskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

Intimidated by Russian novels that have over a thousand pages, and afraid the translation might include five guys named Nikolai? As a new review suggests, the great names in Russian literature do indeed cast a long shadow, though Raaskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, reviewed here, presents 21st century short fiction, allowing for a fresh approach.

Elsewhere, the new Alice Munro collection Too Much Happiness gets a thoughtful review that begins this way:

"The novelist Benjamin Cheever once...

Year in Review: 2009

I've written something recently for the Globe and Mail about some of the reasoning behind wanting to start up Best Canadian Essays, and was mentioned in an article by Mariko Tamaki. Finally, I recently answered the Rob Mclennan 12 or 20 questions, opting for 12 only, and it ended up posted to Open Book Toronto.

As far as a year in review is concerned, I didn't manage many current film reviews over at Digital Popcorn, but I'm happy with my reviews of Star Trek, and Watchmen.

Having been friends...

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer is "a curious and objective narrator," in Eating Animals, reviewed recently by Scott F. Parker, who begins with some very pointed questions:

"What do we value more, our morals or our pleasure and convenience? Or try this formulation: is having inexpensive meat worth the torture of billions of sentient animals a year, the destruction of the environment, and the proliferation of disease and ill health? That's what's at stake in our diets these days, and that's what...