News & Reviews
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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I first met Brian Fawcett during a visit to Vancouver for Expo ’86. I was a reporter for The Medicine Hat News at the time. Earlier in 1986, during a trip back to Medicine Hat, I had picked up a copy of The Globe and Mail in an airport newsstand. I was fascinated by a review in it of…
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You can’t, grammatically, have more than one best friend, but Brian Fawcett was one of my best friends. I met him in 1973, when I arrived in Prince George to start work as an instructor at the college. We were introduced by another of my best friends, Barry McKinnon. Brian was bigger, better-looking, and…
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Prince George recently suffered the loss of its best-known literary chronicler. Chickenbustales plans to celebrate his life and capture his spirit in a series of reminiscences, articles, and snippets of poetry and prose, material that is both fresh and archival. We start with reminiscences by Barry McKinnon. Brian left Prince George in 1966, after…
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Michael Walzer’s piece in the February 28 Persuasion is a timely caution against “Woke” historical revisionism — against, to use one of Walzer’s examples, the idea that Thomas Jefferson was not a hero but a moral monster because he owned slaves and took one as a mistress. The revisionists tend to argue that, because he…
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In the Foreword to The Answer to Everything, editor Rob Budde says he hopes that his selection of the poems of Ken Belford, “is chosen by future scholars as a representative introduction to his work.” Those future scholars might so choose, but not readers familiar with Belford’s work. This is because Budde and his co-editor…
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Anger be now your song, immortal one, Achilles’ anger, doomed and ruinous, That caused the Greeks loss on bitter loss. Those lines from the Iliad refer to a difficult time for the Greek forces in the final year of their decade-long siege of Troy. Their hero Achilles, blessed by the gods with invincibility, was…
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I understand that Paul Strickland’s recent review of the northern arts magazine Thimbleberry has raised some controversy in Prince George’s arts scene concerning not just how much a reviewer can quote from the original texts, but also whether reviewers can quote at all from this magazine. I think the sane responses to such attempts at resisting scrutiny are a)…
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The latest (Spring 2021) issue of ThimbleBerry, Art and Culture in Northern B.C., provides a cross-section of literary accomplishment, artistic creation, and aesthetic thinking in the region. For the magazine’s editors, Rob Budde and Kara-lee MacDonald, these accomplishments are vital to “societal well-being.” Their introductory “Letter from the Editors,” which starts in first-person plural but…
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According to Robyn Curtis (11 May 2021) the problems of Exploration Place go back to its origins. Like all museums, it was started by “elite men.” These men were racists. Saying that men were the creators of museums doesn’t tell us much. Most civic institutions, through all time and across all cultures, were started…
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In his article “Speaking Out” (The Walrus, June 2019), John Semley tells the story of the Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who made international headlines when she was censured by a University examining committee for creating an unsafe learning environment for transgender students. The committee consisted of her thesis supervisor, Nathan Rambukkana,…
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