August 2013 – Jam and Idleness

Brain/Food: “Anything by Ayn Rand” is the correct answer

Sheetal Lodhia and I met in grad school. We both did Very Serious academic work studying the English Renaissance; we had the same thesis supervisor. Which makes it extra funny that I don’t recall ever talking to Sheetal about the Renaissance, even when we found ourselves at the same conference in Toronto one year. (I…

Twerk it, girl: some thoughts on America’s Miley Cyrus-induced moral aneurism

So, the internet absolutely lost its morally outraged shit this week. Miley Cyrus performed at some big music award show and apparently broke every single taboo left in the whole world, invented a few more we’d never heard of, and then broke those too. Accusations of moral laxness and mental illness abound. There’s a hilarious…

An urban squirrel triptych

I don’t think I knew the difference between squirrels and chipmunks until I moved to southeastern Ontario. I grew up in Nova Scotia where the only urban wildlife on my radar were seagulls, rats, mice, crows, and spiders bigger than God’s boots. What a joy to move here and discover all of the above as…

Love Letter to the Toronto Public Library: Riverdale

I’ve been a fool. For at least five of the ten years I’ve been in Toronto, I’ve lived no more than a half hour walk away from the Riverdale branch of the Toronto Public Library. I never went inside before yesterday. Let us, for a moment, quietly contemplate just how goddamned lame that is. How…

A bunch of smelly fishes and one maguffin: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Five Red Herrings

I love Dorothy L. Sayers but not really for the mysteries she wrote. I feel certain she could have written anything in the world and I would want to read it, all of it. Sayers was a great stylist, she was brilliant at creating really engaging dialogue, and she was funny. The complete package, really….

Wilkie Collins’s sensationally uninteresting Haunted Hotel

It’s been years since I read any Wilkie Collins; I thought he was probably pretty great, even though I barely remember either The Woman in White or Little Novels, and also in spite of the fact that I found The Moonstone‘s plot to be incomprehensibly complicated. Why did I think he was great? I must have…

A failure to communicate: the absurd mating (mal)practices of the urban pigeon

I am very much a fan of watching urban wildlife in action. That there is so much wildlife in a city of 2.5 million makes me both hopeful and nervous. That beasties of all sorts can continue to make lives for themselves in such over-peopled areas is encouraging. But, of course, bad things also happen…

All my life, I cherished the possibility of escape: Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake

Near the beginning of The Lake, Banana Yoshimoto’s narrator, Chihiro , reveals that “All my life, I cherished the possibility of escape.” Although she insists her unconventional upbringing wasn’t particularly painful–her parents remained unmarried, her mother a club owner and her father a businessman–Chihiro is happy to sever all unwelcome ties to her past: Sick…