I was walking down the street thinking about a friend I hadn’t seen for some time, and when I looked up, there was my friend standing at the corner with his wife and he was looking at me in some surprise, for as it turned out they had been speaking of me in the same moment that I had been thinking of him, and so we congratulated ourselves on having arrived there at the corner at just the right moment for these facts to be revealed to us.
These photographs depict a performance by William Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins outside the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in September 2002. The tableau vivant consisted of three ten-minute poses loosely based on the 1928 René Magritte painting entitled The Lovers.
Childhood photographs are merciless, and state the passing of time with inarguable clarity. We dig them out of our archives, learn how we were as children, as young women, and too often we do not recognize each other. I ache with the pain of seeing what we were long ago, when every one of us was beautiful with the beauty of a child or a young person full of careless energy.
The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.
You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the covers may be the best place to browse through this amusing mix of taxonomy and suggestive wordplay.
W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Vintage Canada) is a serious European novel. This translation (by Anthea Bell) still bears more than just a trace of the heaviness and denseness of the German language, which may discourage some readers.
The most comprehensive DVD (and the most fun) to hit my machine lately is the special edition release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. There are so many reasons to have this DVD in your library I hardly know where to start.
The Historical Atlas of Canada by Derek Hayes (Douglas & McIntyre) contains reproductions of more than three hundred antique maps, which comprise a true history of the occupation of a continent. This is a beautiful book, almost impossible to put down.
Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the subject of Cyberman (2001), a fascinating film by Peter Lynch. He is also a cyborg, a concept he explains in Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (Anchor Canada), written with Hal Niedzviecki.
Sheila Heti, author of The Middle Stories (Anansi) has received much praise in the Globe and the National Post, all of it deserved. The stories in this little volume are very short and very good: formidable might be the right word.
