Too exhausted for words yesterday, and so I went for a walk in my hood and partook of a spiced pumpkin latte from a certain upstart coffee bar known to all. This is part of what I saw….ah, Brooklyn. Gotta love it. Click here for slideshow.

Students discussing a certain Rutgers Poli Sci Professor:“So, every week we read a little bit more about Kant and then we talk, and she riffs, or she riffs, and we talk. Then she goes back to her Kant reading group in the city which she has been going to for like, years, and then the...

Published last year from Nomados, and the winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook award, Lisa Robertson’s Rousseau’s Boat, is a meditation on solitude and walking. More than any other art form of our time, it seems to me that poetry has something urgent to impart to our production—or at least consumption—obsessed times: how to be...

About Mrs. Dalloway: “The only good thing to say about this “literary” drivel is that the person responsible, Virginia Woolf, has been dead for quite some time now. Let us pray to God she stays that way.”Well, at least the book made it onto the list of Time Magazine’s 100 all time best novels.

People have been asking me about the Meat Painter. Does he really exist? Does he really paint meat? Would I lie to you? Aren’t poets morally obligated to tell the truth? Well, yes, yes, and no: yes, the meat painter exists, yes he paints meat, yes, I try to lie as much as I can,...

“Oh, she’s pretty sarcastic. But think of her situation.” So says Atwood of Penelope in the newly published Penelopiade, which I will flex my credit card muscle in purchasing this week and get back to you on. It’s this marketing ploy that’s of interest to me. Books of ideas, theories, history, and now myth have...

Here’s a quirky little link. Sheila Heti blazed into the spotlight with The Middle Stories, a wonderful collection of fable-like prose pieces a la Lydia Davis, or Diane Williams, or dare-I-say, Sheila Heti-ish, first published by McSweeney’s. She’s a Canadian original, a breathe of fresh air in a land of prose paralyzed by Alice Munro....

Jesus anyone? What can one say?

Intriguing piece on multi-tasking and interruptions in the workplace in this weekend’s NY Times Magazine featuring one Professor Gloria Mark and her work on soft technology. When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11...

Didn’t find this item in the NY Times, but it was the headline story for Canada’s Globe and Mail as of 3:40 pm, this fine Tuesday, October 17th. There’s something wonderful about grandmothers out there protesting. It almost breaks through the thick shellac of “doesn’t matter what we do, they won’t stop clear cutting till...

Erin Moure nominated for Little Theatres! You can find one of my favourite poems from the collection on an earlier post. It’s a fabulous book and a well-deserved nomination. I haven’t seen or read MacIvor’s latest play, but he has produced some excellent, innovative theater and House remains a favourite one-man show. In fact we’re...

I had to go back and see the rest of Candice Breitz’s show at Sonnabend this weekend as I had somehow completely missed both Mother and Father. This isn’t difficult to do as it’s dark in the room and you can’t see that there’s another room, and then once you’re in Mother, it’s entirely possible...