David Alexander is a pleasing study in contradictions; on the one hand, he is thoughtful, very well-read, likes poetry written after 1600 (madness), and is a real live activist. On the other hand, he is hilarious, likes hockey (he once forced me, his wife, an d my husband to sit in one of the scariest…
Month: September 2013
Jam and Idleness’s most favourite albums of all time, part two
Welcome to part two of my nostalgic round-up of the albums I’ve best known and loved. It’s here you’ll see some really huge gaps in my music-listening career. I missed years, nay lifetimes (all my own), of music in grad school. The 90s, however, I was right in there and this list shows it. The…
Ford Madox Ford’s Tricksy Soldier
Ford Madox Ford begins The Good Soldier with this: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” But what follows this simultaneously maudlin and cheeky opening gambit is not a story the narrator has heard, but one he claims to have lived. Is he kidding? I mean, you don’t hear your own story as,…
Love Letter to the Toronto Public Library: City Hall
I recently wrote a gastronomical love letter to my husband over on Food Riot to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of our meeting. (It was sometime between Sept. 12 and 16, 1998; I can’t remember exactly because I wasn’t trying to; it was supposed to be just a dirty fling. Ha!) It seemed appropriate to combine…
We wish to see your face: Irene Nemirovsky’s Jezebel
Irene Nemirovsky was a prophet. In 1936 she published Jezebal, a novel about a woman on trial for the murder of her young lover. Neither the trial nor even the crime are the real subjects of this novel; they are, rather, the outward signs of a life’s obsession, the inevitable results of an unrestrained need….
The Charles Kingsley method of frightening little children
When I mentioned on Twitter recently that I was reading Charles Kingsley’s classic children’s novel The Water-Babies (1863), the response was unanimous: everyone who’d read it, or had it read to them, as children had been terrified by it. I’m not being hyperbolic and I didn’t get the impression they were either. The Water-Babies is…
The absence of myth: Miri Yu’s Gold Rush
If you were to ask me whether or not I think Miri Yu’s Gold Rush (trans. Stephen Snyder) is a good book, I would sidestep that question. I would tell you that the story–of a 14-year-old Japanese boy who murders his father–is essentially compelling. I would tell you that Yu’s evocation of a child adrift…
Jam and Idleness 
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