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CBC Arts tells us that " An American publisher is pulling a novel from the shelves after its author, Kaavya Viswanathan, admitted borrowing material from other books".
Sam Shepard wrote an interesting play called 'Curse of the Starving Class' that illuminates the decrepitude of poverty. How unfortunate that 'borrowing' begets fame and acclaim while the unchosen of this world slip perennially into an abominable poverty of mind, body and spirit.
Robert Frost is both an American original and a poet to the throngs of people who grew up in the country, whether in New England or Newfoundland or the pastures of Eastern Ontario:
The well was dry beside the door,
And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
To seek the brook if still it ran;
The Globe reviews Margaret Atwood at The Globe and Mail: A desperate housewife in ancient Greece and has some surprising comments that seem out of place when made about Canada's purportedly leading author:
"And this makes one wonder: In the end, is The Penelopiad a product of Atwood's or the publisher's inspiration? As Atwood says jokingly, Byng, in particular, cornered her into contributing to the series."
Could imagination, originality and inspiration all be in short supply these days on the higher plateaus of Toronto's Annex.
PARNELL came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
“Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.”
The Presidency Repelled
The Monarchy, the Queen of England,
Is what protects us from
Adrienne Clarkson.
The ancient and tenuous ties
To the history of absolute rulers
Serves as our Canadian Shield.
We are saved
From the ambitious grabbing
Of a pretentious elite,
By our fortunate ownership
Of the Queen of England.
Long live the Queen.
NPR : Roth Rewrites History with a 'Plot Against America':.
"In Philip Roth's new novel, things turn out very differently. The Plot Against America imagines what might have happened if flying ace and staunch isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeated Roosevelt in 1940. Instead of going to war, an anti-Semitic Lindbergh signs a peace pact with Germany and Japan, and his policies create an atmosphere of religious hatred."
The revision of pivotal history into the imaginary horror of a Nazi America is fiction that has a basis in the uncertain reality of the United States in 1940. Fascism and isolationism had its supporters then just as there are many now, in the United States and here in Canada, who would abandon the still festering issue of anti-Semitism and leave an orphaned Israel to defend itself alone.
The whys of art by Robert Conquest:
"Over the ages, the condition of the arts has been seen as a part—a striking and important part—of the exercise of the critical imagination, of the human mind, in their broader compass. And the record of those faculties has seen contractions and contortions as well as periods of progress....Even if its proponents did not say that all obscurity is profound—and some came near to saying that—they certainly implied that all profundity is obscure. But a muddy puddle may pretend to any depth; a clear pool cannot..."
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?-- William Butler Yeats
"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often--at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough--that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."--George Orwell, Collected Essays
Speaking truth to power was a Hayek staple long before it became a hackneyed phrase misused by the very strata of society he criticized.
The late, great Mordecai Richler coined the term "Canada's counting house" to define Toronto, the city that Marg Wente calls home. For this and many other things , we remain in the debt of this truly world-class writer.
Mordecai Richler- CBC Archives.
"Barney's Version, revolves around an aging writer obsessed with his failures, his estranged wife, and his failing body. It is hailed as Richler's finest work. In this CBC Radio interview, Richler discusses his fiction and non-fiction work, the one lawsuit he evaded, his recurring cast of characters, and his constant theme of trying to discern "how to live with honour in a time when there's no agreement on values."..."
