Musing on Melville’s Poetry
I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is…
literature
Little Dorrit: BBC Drama
We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere…
Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or…
The Pulp Renaissance
In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf…
The Missing Lines
The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins…
Profundity
In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote one of the most profound poems in the English language: The Red Wheelbarrow. It reads like a Japanese Zen haiku: so much depends upon…
Enter Christopher Marlowe – Again
Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.…
The Consolation of Literature
For Boethius, it was the Consolation of Philosophy*. For me, it’s literature. Not to write about it so much as to read it. Consolation from the act of reading. And…
Jack Kerouac’s On The Road In Film
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; © 1953, 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, photographed by Allen Ginsberg in his East Village living room,…
10,000 words too many
Been working the last two-and-a-half months on my latest book for Municipal World. A bit of a challenge, actually – trying to combine marketing, branding, advertising, public relations and communications…
Scaramouche
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. That has to rank among the best opening lines in a novel, up there…
Perfect Sense
I have always liked sandbox stories; tales in which the author could stretch his of her imagination, place ordinary characters into a seemingly normal situation, then see what happened when…
Albert and the Lion
A recent comment on Facebook – “You just can’t resist poking the bear…”* made me remember a poem by Marriott Edgar that I enjoyed as a child in the 1950s:…
S.E.C.R.E.T: Canada’s Answer to Fifty Shades of Grey
by Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive, Feb. 6, 2013: Last year, a still-unpublished erotic Canadian novel created quite a stir at the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair. The Toronto Star…
Chimpanzee Literature
I appear to be becoming somewhat of a literary one-hit wonder (defining “hit” rather expansively, of course). While most of my short stories continue to suffer delays and rejections (ain’t…
Another day on the job in Paradise… chapter one
Mayor Ralph “Bosco” Hearne, whistling softly “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” under his breath, gazed at the wood-and-polished-brass, 19th-century front doors of town hall and nodded slightly in…
Homer (not Simpson) and the Kaopectate Kid
The doctor diagnosed young son Leo recently with the stomach flu — which is colloquial shorthand for a condition which isn’t the flu, per se. (The most recent editor of…
Rereading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
There are many books weighing down my bookshelves into soft, drooping curves, but not many of them have the privilege of tenure. Only a handful have travelled with me for…
The Bedside Library
When the books stacked beside the bed get tall enough to hold not only a cup of tea at easy reach, but a plate of toast with no threat of…
Bram Stoker
Always a fan. Honourable Google doodle. (5) Trashy, Ottawa, Ontario