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I just finished George Murray‘s Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, and it’s so good I’m going to back and read it again. Each aphorism is a fortune cookie of apocalypse. Here’s the full review I posted over at Goodreads: “George Murray’s Glimpse is an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object in your mind. Forget five stars […]

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I’ve already got an iTunes account, so I joined Ping. Just search for me by name.

I’ll be making an appearance at Vancouver’s Word on the Street, Sunday, Sept. 26, at 3:40. I’ll be at the Authors Tent, in between readings by Susan Juby and Lee Henderson, who are both great writers and awesome people. It’s going to be an interesting hour! The WOTS readings are longer than most literary readings [...]

previous |  index |  next I took this photo in Hawaii. I thought I was capturing the sunset, but it turns out it was just a U.S. military experiment.

The New York Times has an interesting article about ads that stalk you online. I had to change my cookies and login to get away! The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site. Then the [...]

For those readers who like The Warhol Gang, you may also enjoy this selection of quotes by Jean Baudrillard. One of my favourite bits: “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in [...]

Another nice review, this time from Shelf Monkey, who calls The Warhol Gang “a rallying point for a new generation of young fans crying out for a satire to call their own.” Hear, hear.

You can now read The Warhol Gang e-book on the Kobo service, as well as on Apple’s iBookstore. A Kindle version is in the works, I think, and should be available soon. Soon we will have taken over every digital service, and then the revolution will truly begin. (Thanks to Monica Murphy for the tip.)

I’ve scanned my two books into the StickyBits service and attached a few bits. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, go over to StickyBits and check it out. In short, it’s a social sharing service of sorts that allows you to attach files to bar codes entered into the system. I’ve attached a [...]

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The way I see it, the image of 90% of all Canadians, took a terrible beating. Most Canadians feel a tremendous sense of defilement. Most Canadians are proud of the way our country has responded to the worlld be it in 2 world wars, or in the United Nations peace keeping services, or by the representation of Canada in the UN, or by the way […]

You have to be really careful with airport security. They don't mess around there especially after the 9/11 attacks. You can get in huge trouble for even messing around. Just don't do it.

Yeah, but think how much more I'd spend on beer.

Any sort of joking about security at the airport has long, long been something that can get you detained or arrested. It happened to my grandfather in the early '80s. They do not mess around.

Are they building it _above_ the ubiquitous clouds that shroud Burnaby Mountain?

Peter, I think newspaper editors make a smidge more 'n that in Charlottetown and Summerside. And the housing's way lower!

Absolument desolee d'apprendre vos difficultes et votre fermeture. N'y aura-t-il donc plus un seul endroit ou acheter vos livres en francais a Vancouver?? Desolee pour vous. Et pour nous. Merci infiniment pour votre presence dans le passe, services efficaces et plaisir chaque fois renouvele lorsque je pouvais me permettre de vous rendre visite en v […]

How do we get rid of the BEANCOUNTERS in the CBC management ? If CBC radio did not exist, there would be only silence in my house.

I wonder if Indigo is some kind of Stephen Harper New World Order plot to destroy book culture in Canada. After all the independents are destroyed, every Indigo location will switch into a Pottery Barn.

I was resisting the Onion angle, but it really is irresistible, isn't it? I can understand the desire to broaden the business when the core of it is shifting to digital files. But I don't really get how a cultural centre would move into products that have little or anything to do with culture. It's abandoning your own identity, and they'l […]

Dear Steve, Like most people in office environments, I am forced to work in close proximity to a person with no concept office decorum. This work neighbour is a passive-aggressive know-it-all who indiscreetly eavesdrops while watching CPAC on his computer with the sound blasting. His personal hygiene is questionable and perhaps worst of all, he hoards suppli […]

That's a question the framers of Canada's Bill C-32 are going to have to ask themselves after a recent Federal Court of Appeal decision to support a 2009 tariff certified by the Copyright Board of Canada. The tariff was under review at the request of all provincial Ministers of Education (except Quebec's) and a number of individual school boar […]

Since the introduction of Bill C-32, I have consistently argued that the digital lock provisions are far more restrictive than what is required under the WIPO Internet treaties.  Now two recent developments in the U.S. demonstrate that the Canadian proposal is also considerably more restrictive than what is found in the U.S. First, a significant new appellat […]

The Love, Saskatchewan festival takes place at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto this weekend. All this week, authors from the prairie province will be guest editing The Afterword. Today, we hear from Trevor Herriot, the award-winning author of River in a Dry Land, which was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and Jacob’s Wound, which wa […]

Hat tip to Torontoist: a wonderfully thorough map, made by U of T geography PhD candidate Ben Spigel, of identifiable Toronto locations in the Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels, all cross-referenced to Google Street View. It includes oddball locations like the Ossington railway bridge, and specific houses on Marchmount (near Shaw and Davenport) and [... […]

via Consequence of SoundEight covers will be available for purchase with the release of Arcade Fire's new album 'The Suburbs' The eight album covers for The Suburbs have been unveiled and Arcade Fire is staying true to their suburban theme. Each cover reflects a different point of view from an unnamed suburban neighbourhood with everything fro […]

NOW magazine and the City of Toronto today begin hosting a three-day conference of the Asssociation of Alternative Newsweeklies conference. The association represents 130 alt-news organizations from across North America, with a combined weekly circulation of over 6.6 million and 17 million in print readership. The keynote speaker today is Maher Arar, and a r […]

Dear Steve, I am 24 years old and live with my boyfriend of four years. I have a good, full-time job and am going to law school every night. My boyfriend also works for the same company, so we get to spend some time together each day. But ever since we began working together last year, I’ve noticed something: He’s a complete slacker. Every morning for months […]

As is the case for many music fans, I stumbled onto Kathryn Calder because of her talents as a collaborator. I think the first time I heard her was playing with Carl Newman on his solo tour @ Lee’s Palace, but since then I’ve seen her fill out melodies and hooks for The New Porns & The Immaculate Machine.   As talented as she was – and is – never did I t […]

Call it fate, or kismet if you will, but it’s quite a coincidence that the very same week I post an OSM related to Miles Davis, the Tom Fun Orchestra releases a new song entitled Miles Davis. I know, right, how crazy is that? Well, not that crazy at all really. But it does provide a handy little seque into this post, and an opportunity to post Tom Fun’s new […]

An interview with the expert tar sands journalist who will be writing here about 'Energy and Equity.'

Shane Neilson is the author of Complete Physical (The Porcupine's Quill). In his answers to the Proust Questionnaire, he tells us his dream of happiness, his chief characteristic, his principal fault and more. The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The […]

Atom Egoyan is looking at a picture of himself standing next to Sonny Bono, and reminiscing. The flashback is not pharmacology-related. Egoyan is thinking about the bizarre connections and friendships you make on the festival circuit, an increasingly focused group of filmmakers who are finding themselves pushed to the fringes once again.

Judging by And All The Tigers, The Hoof and The Heel don't yet quite know who they want to be as a band. Over the course of just seven songs, they go from bouncy synth-pop ("Let's Hangout"),to tender ballads ("King Finds Out" and "Fall Apart"), to moody, acoustic rock ("Save Us From"), to...well, something th […]

I pirated this image I posted a suggestion to Heritage Minister James Moore the other day in response to him calling copyright reformers “radical extremists”. The name calling didn’t shock me at the time because I had heard similar rhetoric from a CEO of a major Canadian publishing house. But what I didn’t realize last week when I floated my suggestions to t […]

Quebec's DJ darling Maxime Morin has publicly revealed he has leukemia, a form of blood cancer.

Sarah Selecky's stories have been published in Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has been teaching creative writing workshops in her living room for the past ten years. Her short story collection, This Cake Is for the Pa […]

By Lia Grainger, National Post I think a large proportion of the general public assumes poetry is boring,” Toronto poet Katherine Leyton says. “That, or they’re afraid of it.” She’s sitting in Plaza Flamingo restaurant on College Street, where an hour earlier Spain’s 2-0 World Cup victory over Honduras prompted the herd of red jerseys congregated around TV s […]

It did not attract much attention, but last week the CRTC ruled that it is extending its Internet Traffic Management Practices framework to wireless data services.  The ITMP framework address some net neutrality concerns.  The CRTC had previously indicated that it expected wireless companies to comply with the framework, but the decision (which is effective […]

By Jeet Heer Imagine an essay on the global economic crisis that described our dire prospects and then zeroed in on villain Fred Witherspoon, a banker in Winnipeg who is a bit too reluctant to hand out loans. Such an article would be laughed at for its inherent implausibility, but as an argument it would be no different than André Alexis’s essay in the curre […]