News & Reviews
In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against “the author of the Satanic Verses book,” arguing that the book “is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.” The Ayatollah continued, “all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them…
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I first met Stan Persky in 1976, when he gave a poetry reading in Prince George. The reading was at the College of New Caledonia, where I taught, and it was organized by our creative-writing instructor, Barry McKinnon. Before the reading, Barry told me that Stan had been one of the instigators of the Georgia…
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It’s common knowledge, in western democracies, that banning and burning books, and shaming, beating or burning those who read them, signals a nation’s descent into anarchy or tyranny. Book-burning was a common practice of the German Nazi party. Mao’s Red Guards featured it during the Cultural Revolution. And the Khmer Rouge destroyed just about every…
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Review of Jon Swainger’s The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909 – 25. UBC Press, 2023. $32.95. Swainger sets out to prove four points. The first is that the early history of Prince George shows how the town quickly (by 1910 – 11) acquired a reputation for its “alcohol-fuelled…
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Unlike painters, lyric poets don’t do self-portraits. That would be redundant. But they do sometimes create alter-egos: Pound’s Mauberley, Olson’s Maximus and Berryman’s Poor Henry. Talking about yourself, in the third person, may have something to do with getting outside of the (Wordsworthian) repetition of settings, personal circumstances and attitudes, allowing for more objectivity. …
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Viv and I lost an old and good friend, Barry McKinnon, in October of this year. He was one of the founding faculty of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, and among those who hired me to teach there in 1972. I was immediately caught up in the whirlwind of his literary activities.…
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Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre called the Hunka affair “the biggest single diplomatic embarrassment in Canadian history.” I’m not sure if he’s correct, or even what he means exactly, but Putin was gleefully able to use the affair to argue that there seem to be a lot of Nazis in Canada, and that maybe, if Canadians…
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Dickson, Lisa, Shannon Murray and Jessica Riddell. Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. University of Toronto Press, 2023, 198 pp, $29.95C. This book is a sort of transcript of a series of reading-club meetings. The club has three members, and they are discussing four Shakespeare plays, King Lear, As You Like It, Henry…
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A Review of So Help Me God (Simon and Shuster, 2022) By John Harris Mike Pence is no thinker. So Help Me God is more interesting for its contradictions and lacunae than for what it says. It’s an emotive appeal to Pence’s base, a celebration of the profundity and efficacy of his religious and political…
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I’m a big fan of the Times Literary Supplement that, no longer content to be associated in the public mind with a periodical focused on ephemera (news and public opinion), now calls itself by its acronym alone: TLS. For us bespectacled eggheads with an obsession with books, a love of elegant prose, and an intimate…
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Vancouver Opera’s The Pearl Fishers (October 22 – 30, 2022) has a prologue wherein a screen projection informs the audience, in writing, of the exceedingly obvious fact that Bizet and the “Frenchmen” who wrote the libretto were privileged men absolutely ignorant about the opera’s setting (Ceylon) and about the culture and religion of its characters.…
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