Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson...
Full Post • Posted December 20, 2015
This summer when the Beav and I went down to Concord, we took a day to go see the renovated...
Full Post • Posted December 19, 2015
Unless you are Oedipus or David Copperfield, your story should probably jump to the interesting stuff right away rather than...
Full Post • Posted December 16, 2015
I didn’t realize it was possible to have so many orientalist paintings on display without having at least aspects of...
Full Post • Posted December 15, 2015
The speech I love is a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth; a speech succulent...
Full Post • Posted December 14, 2015
I watched this because Max Riemelt was playing gay and after watching him in Sense8 I was a bit crushed...
Full Post • Posted December 13, 2015
A book about a kid who wants all the wrong things and gets most of them. I only barely liked...
Full Post • Posted December 12, 2015
I read this book late. Gay marriage is legal in North America. The politics denounced by Warner have won in...
Full Post • Posted December 11, 2015
The best show that I saw this past summer was of David Altmejd’s sculptures at the Musée d’art contemporain. Each...
Full Post • Posted December 10, 2015
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to...
Full Post • Posted December 9, 2015
I’ve been wondering what to say about this book. So much rightful praise has been written elsewhere, and there’s no...
Full Post • Posted December 8, 2015
I’ve read and taught this novel many times, and so reading it now is often an exercise in curiosity: what...
Full Post • Posted December 7, 2015
When I first saw The Guild it was a revelation. I was playing World of Warcraft with my family every...
Full Post • Posted December 3, 2015
I am a pretty good writer and a pretty good editor and a pretty good businessman but I find it...
Full Post • Posted December 2, 2015
The follow up to Mistborn: The Final Empire offers the best second act I’ve read in a long time. Very...
Full Post • Posted December 2, 2015
Oh hell, she said, listen I am fairly well known for saying things about anyone and anything, I say them...
Full Post • Posted December 1, 2015
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton engages with the realist novel most obviously through its stable of peculiar characters and its...
Full Post • Posted November 4, 2015
A book about a network of women building lives in those spaces left open to them by political conflicts and...
Full Post • Posted November 1, 2015
I rematched this series of movies for the first time since they were in the theatre. (I’d seen the first...
Full Post • Posted October 31, 2015
On a second viewing this film holds up well. The plotting is much tighter than I remembered and, as a...
Full Post • Posted October 30, 2015
I liked this when I saw it because of the moments of magical realism. They walked a tight rope between...
Full Post • Posted October 29, 2015
I don’t know what it is, but I just don’t like the story of Madame Bovary. This adaptation, which is...
Full Post • Posted October 28, 2015
A film that documents the massive renovations of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Even after extensive cuts, it’s a long film,...
Full Post • Posted October 27, 2015
The Hollywood trope of intelligence as a disability is the mirror image of the Hollywood trope of intelligence as a...
Full Post • Posted October 26, 2015
Watched the director’s cut of Aliens, which I’d never seen. Realized two things. First, the story of the longer version...
Full Post • Posted October 25, 2015
I disliked Alien 3 when it came out and have never watched it a second time. My brother convinced me...
Full Post • Posted October 24, 2015
^include(Fight Club Cover Image)^The movie hews close to the novel everywhere except where it counts: the end. The novel is...
Full Post • Posted October 23, 2015
Pretty guys taking turns running through Shelob’s lair. Back in camp they spend their time keeping the bad seed from...
Full Post • Posted October 22, 2015
Abercrombie people playing ironic British spies in an episode of TLC’s What Not to Wear. This film sits halfway between...
Full Post • Posted October 21, 2015
I find François Ozon’s embrace of his influences fascinating. Hitchcock and Sirk are powerful ancestors and many filmmakers would run...
Full Post • Posted October 20, 2015
This movie is better on repeat viewings. It’s a hard bright gem of a movie dressed up as a genre...
Full Post • Posted October 19, 2015
Turner barely speaks, mostly grunts. I’d like to see the script. People walked out as the movie played. An odd...
Full Post • Posted October 18, 2015
Wim Wenders filming dance. It’s breathtakingly beautiful to watch and deeply moving....
Full Post • Posted October 17, 2015
Edmund White’s biography of Proust is like his fiction: dense, intellectual and gossipy. He always seems to be watching you...
Full Post • Posted October 16, 2015
A French queer sex-on-a-beach drama. (Yes, that’s a thing apparently.) This one feels like a scary version of Presque bien...
Full Post • Posted October 15, 2015
I like Thomas Hardy and have a weakness for costume drama. So I won’t try to be objective about this...
Full Post • Posted October 14, 2015
Science giving Nolan a reason to tell a story out of order again. Pretty great movie despite the fact that...
Full Post • Posted October 13, 2015
A movie about entertainment that is profoundly intellectual. I walked in knowing nothing about what I was seeing—the Beav had...
Full Post • Posted October 12, 2015
No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter ...
Full Post • Posted October 10, 2015
An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and...
Full Post • Posted October 4, 2015
This is a Terminator movie. So I knew what I was getting into. The story structure was fixed by the...
Full Post • Posted October 4, 2015
Gura’s book paints a portrait of the brahmins behind the Brahmins in antebellum Boston. Or, to say it differently, this...
Full Post • Posted September 21, 2015
I've wanted to read Montaigne's essays for awhile but the sheer size of the volume has been an obstacle to...
Full Post • Posted September 20, 2015
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle for those who want to learn. — Cicero, Montaigne: The...
Full Post • Posted September 20, 2015
It is good that he should have his pupil trot before him, to judge the child’s pace and how much...
Full Post • Posted September 20, 2015
It sounds like a Chinese dish but is actually a video....
Full Post • Posted September 7, 2015
Tinderbox is a great place for good intentions....
Full Post • Posted September 7, 2015
An oddly non-mythological fantasy novel that reminds me of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi (think The God Makers rather than Dune). It’s...
Full Post • Posted August 29, 2015
When I lived on the island, I could get to work by foot, bike or metro. The walk was long,...
Full Post • Posted August 17, 2015
This was the very best of the movies I saw as part of the Blockbuster Marathon. The stakes here are...
Full Post • Posted August 16, 2015
Mark Bernstein has a long post collecting various thoughts and questions about writing with links. In the longest segment of...
Full Post • Posted August 12, 2015
This movie was terribly enough written that I almost walked out. I didn’t, because blockbuster marathon, but when it was...
Full Post • Posted August 11, 2015
I’ve never liked Jane Austin’s novels. Every sentence always seemed to be written perfectly straight up and down without passion,...
Full Post • Posted August 9, 2015
The Faulkner hypertext that I’ve been making in Tinderbox and that I’ve spoken about a few times is now online....
Full Post • Posted August 8, 2015
^include(Cartier-Bresson-Dummondville-Photo-Museum)^The Beav and I were in Drummondville, he had something to do, suggested I might be interested in the photo...
Full Post • Posted August 8, 2015
I love Glenn Close too much not to have finished this series, but I hated it more and more each...
Full Post • Posted August 7, 2015
I take back everything I’ve ever thought or said about Tinderbox export. It is quite simply magical. I’m stunned. More...
Full Post • Posted August 7, 2015
…I’ve completely revised and updated a website that saw light of day for the first time early this evening….. …I...
Full Post • Posted August 7, 2015
Marvel has been everywhere these pages few years (and years and years) and have been hard at work importing a...
Full Post • Posted August 7, 2015
It’s hard to comment on the explicit content of an 800 page history. What I’ll say instead is that I...
Full Post • Posted August 6, 2015
I almost didn’t watch this one because I really wasn’t interested, but I forced myself because it was on my...
Full Post • Posted August 5, 2015
I almost didn't watch this one because I really wasn't interested, but I forced myself because it was on my...
Full Post • Posted August 5, 2015
The second week of my Montreal vacation, I decided to see all the summer blockbusters I’d never drive into the...
Full Post • Posted August 4, 2015
I’m working on Faulkner. That text is an argument but also a description of a situation and a history of...
Full Post • Posted August 2, 2015
Some friends who live in the heart of downtown Montreal went away on vacation and asked the Beav and me...
Full Post • Posted July 29, 2015
Another movie about a man afflicted by an intelligence that is a disability. This sort of thing is the mirror image...
Full Post • Posted July 26, 2015
Last year was a busy one at school and I had to set the Faulkner hypertext I was working on...
Full Post • Posted July 23, 2015
L’Espace Go, an experimental theatre that takes risks, staged A Streetcar Named Desire this past winter. Their production was defined...
Full Post • Posted July 22, 2015
For nine years, HenriCat shared our home. When I arrived in the evening, he met me at the door. When...
Full Post • Posted July 15, 2015
I didn’t know much about José Saramago as a writer other than that I’ve read without liking his novel Blindness. This...
Full Post • Posted July 14, 2015
I didn't know much about José Saramago as a writer other than that I've read without liking his novel_Blindness_. This...
Full Post • Posted July 14, 2015
This piece set the story of John Coltrane, Jean Cocteau and a Quebecois voice actor spinning around each other on...
Full Post • Posted July 8, 2015
An adaptation of the Diary that focused on the physical book rather than its author and, so, made Anne recede...
Full Post • Posted July 7, 2015
There’s nothing more brutal than a gang of angry men. — Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries...
Full Post • Posted July 6, 2015
The Hobbit movies all fail but this is the best of the three. (The first was awful, the second left...
Full Post • Posted July 5, 2015
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and...
Full Post • Posted July 4, 2015
I stopped watching this series early on, and then, encouraged by my brother who loved it, and the positive attention...
Full Post • Posted July 1, 2015
Everything in Rachel Kushner’s book is carefully written–the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters–and yet the ideas and action of the book...
Full Post • Posted June 30, 2015
John Wick is violent, simple, and flashy, and so it feels very contemporary. Yet, it is also–in a way that...
Full Post • Posted June 29, 2015
Imagine: A Rainbow Flag....
Full Post • Posted June 28, 2015
Lots of great political news coming out of the US Supreme Court this week, but the decision on health care...
Full Post • Posted June 28, 2015
The museum at St. Hillaire has a small gallery space attached to the library and often shows interesting collections. This...
Full Post • Posted June 27, 2015
^include(A Wise Man's Fears Cover Image)^I’ve tried three times, and I can’t get through this book. It’s the sequel to...
Full Post • Posted June 26, 2015
This was a completely random purchase at the bookstore. I’d never heard of it but read the first few pages...
Full Post • Posted June 25, 2015
The first season of House of Cards was extraordinary television. Frank’s and Claire’s ambition, their intelligence and their controlled advance...
Full Post • Posted June 24, 2015
A great read, but the memoir is better than the writing advice I think although (0r perhaps because) those recollections...
Full Post • Posted June 23, 2015
A short novel that with allowances for changes in dress and economics feels like it could have been written yesterday. I...
Full Post • Posted June 22, 2015
When I was a kid, I loved book series, and one of my favourite book memories is reading Lloyd Alexander’s...
Full Post • Posted June 21, 2015
Dune was one of the most important books I read in my early teens. I reread it, studied the appendices,...
Full Post • Posted June 20, 2015
An archive novel organized without persistent characters. It’s an assemblage of moments that compound into an account of an event...
Full Post • Posted June 19, 2015
Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for...
Full Post • Posted June 1, 2015
When the new photo app dropped, I decided to try out the iCloud photo library. This meant upgrading my iCloud...
Full Post • Posted May 23, 2015
Stars live by the river. They gather at night to watch cities burn orange beyond the horizon. ...
Full Post • Posted May 11, 2015
A line is not a circle. The difference between my old apartment and my new home....
Full Post • Posted May 10, 2015
Poetry is a Destructive Force That’s what misery is, Nothing to have at heart. It is to have or nothing....
Full Post • Posted May 9, 2015
A novel about the life of the lone surviver of John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid as told by the survivor,...
Full Post • Posted April 25, 2015
So I've been reading (more on that later) and I have a dilemma: eBook or paper? The options are pretty...
Full Post • Posted April 22, 2015
I saw this play in translation. It was well done and interesting. Yet, somehow, the actors delivered lines in a...
Full Post • Posted April 18, 2015
Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. — Stephen King, On Writing...
Full Post • Posted April 17, 2015
So, every piece of paper in the world has been signed (in triplicate), and the Beavand I are now homeowners....
Full Post • Posted March 29, 2015
Almost impossible to watch because I hate all of the characters except Glenn and Michonne. I end up rooting for...
Full Post • Posted March 29, 2015
A book that feels alive and current and that is so much better than I remembered it. Just as important:...
Full Post • Posted March 23, 2015
In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes...
Full Post • Posted March 4, 2015
When you're stuck, how do you tidily copy out a draft of a blog? For me right now, it means...
Full Post • Posted March 2, 2015
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what...
Full Post • Posted March 1, 2015
Blogging has been scarce these past weeks. Initially the hiatus was about travel: a vacation followed by holidays with family...
Full Post • Posted January 27, 2015
I’d never actually read this novel, so around Halloween I picked it up. I liked it, especially the late confrontation in...
Full Post • Posted January 14, 2015
I can't think of the last time I've travelled so much is so short a time. It's been really great...
Full Post • Posted January 13, 2015
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