Dear Canadian MP, I’m concerned about the degree to which party discipline in our parliamentary system impinges upon the rights of MPs to speak their minds, vote their consciences, and represent their constituents’ interests. And I don’t like your leaders’ silence on this matter. Regardless of whether or not it affects his capacity to ‘rule’, [...]
During the past 3-4 weeks, while unpacking and re-shelving my library, I’ve taken to listening to CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition with Michael Enright. What an enjoyable experience! Organizing and admiring my stimulating, stylin’ collection of books to the strains of stimulating, engaging interviews and their stylin’ musical accompaniments. Appealing this is, on many levels: emotional, [...]
I’ve just finished listening to a replay of Eleanor Wachtel’s [2000] conversation with Susan Sontag. It is overwhelmingly good. One of the best interviews I’ve ever listened to. It hits on the human level. It informs, and it moves. Sontag speaks most of the time – gently and sparingly guided by Wachtel. Her description of [...]
As much as anything, Remembrance Day should remind our leaders that war is terrible – and that every effort should be made to avoid it. Here’s How to Kill by Keith Douglas Under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in [...]
As Michael McNay put it in the man’s obituary last month, Robert Hughes wrote “the English of Shakespeare, Milton, Macaulay and Dame Edna Everage…His prose was lithe, muscular and fast as a bunch of fives. He was incapable of writing the jargon of the art world, and consequently was treated by its mandarins with fear [...]
After a year or two of living over at wwwliterarytourist.com, my Nota Bene Books blog now, again, has, here, it’s very own domain. What this means is that posts will once more feature “musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews from The Biblio File radio [...]