Results tagged “reading”

Why travel? Especially in a city like Toronto, where we can experience so many cultures just by walking through any of the dozens of ethnically-diverse neighbourhoods? What, at its essence, makes traveling to Italy different than drinking prosecco in Little Italy? What’s the difference, really, between hanging with the Dutch and eating Dutch chocolate ice cream?

Photo of Julie Wilson, courtesy of Julie Wilson.

Photo of d’bi.young.anitafrika and her son, Moon, courtesy of Women’s Press.

The amount of events this week are bursting at the seams. Keep Toronto Reading is kicking it into full gear this month with various readings across library branches, Lit Lunches, and various One Book events. There are just too many to list here. Visit the KTR calendar to see all event details and plan out your literary excursions. And if you have any kids, you can join Gisèle from TVOKids for various library tours, as well as kids' events at the ROM and Science Centre.

Next Monday, February 4, Keep Toronto Reading will launch its One Book program at the Toronto Reference Library. There will be performances by Soprano Mary Lou Fallis, who will sing popular songs from the 1850s, and Ross Manson who will perform two dramatic readings from Consolation. The event will be hosted by Tina Srebotnjak, who will interview Michael Redhill, author of Consolation. You can check out all One Book events here.

As part of the always interesting (and now delicious) This Is Not A Reading Series, U of T history professor Steve Penfold and noted food writer Christine Sismondo are joining forces this week to discuss snack food patriotism and Canada’s unofficial deep-fried culinary icon, the donut. All this in celebration of Penfold’s new book, The Donut: A Canadian History.

Photo by Stig Nygaard.

As the subject for a serious music book, Céline Dion––amazing or not––seems like an odd choice. In the latest book in the 33⅓ series, however––a series which typically looks at albums like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds or Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures or the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St.––Carl Wilson, probably Toronto's pre-eminent music critic, takes it upon himself to "[strive] to understand Céline's global popularity," in the process "fac[ing] the question of what drives personal taste––and whether it's possible to change it." Wilson, needless to add, is a brave, brave man.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

Over the past little while, Torontoist has been quietly absorbed in The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader. Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson, The Alphabet Game is an essential anthology for any reader of bpNichol, and is a great starting point for those who have yet to discover his work.

"Read a Book"

Photo by Larsz Tonight the Art Bar poetry series will host its last event for 2007. Ending the year off with their annual Dead Poets Society night, this year's event will be hosted by David Clink and feature poets Ian Burgham, George Elliot Clarke, Karen Connelly, Barry Dempster, and more. Readers will cover poets such as A. R. Ammons, Margaret Avison, Cheng Sait Chia, Robert Herrick, Irving Layton, Dylan Thomas, and others. Reading series...

It's the holiday season, which means that stress is high and we're not always thinking when we spend our money. But this time of year is also a busy season for fraudsters, who love to take advantage of people's holiday forgetfulness. Paying by debit is one of the easiest ways of paying for your goods, but it's the easiest to compromise. We know several people who have had thousands of dollars drained from their...

Ever marvel at the architecture of Casa Loma, Osgoode Hall and the Ontario Legislature in Queen's Park? Those lovely red-brick buildings, dear friends, are the legacy of Toronto's vernacular building material—sweet slabs formed from the banks of the Don herself. From 1889 to 1980, the Don Valley Brick Works made some of the highest quality brick in the land. Why, in 1893, the Don Valley brick was crowned Best Brick at the Chicago World's...

Rheostatic Dave Bidini read his new book Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs (see Torontoist's review) in the window of Pages Books yesterday. Over the course of five hours Bidini read the entire book—except, teasingly, for the last few lines—and played songs to shifting crowds gathered on the sidewalk. More photos after the jump....

An overflowing pile of books by paolo_dlk from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Originally published by Viking Press in 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road has been wearing holes in the back pockets and floppy canvas knapsacks of gaggles of come-find-yourself road trippers and college-aged who-am-I types ever since. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of its publication, Wednesday night will see the Gladstone play host to something of a symposium on the life and legacy of their main man, Kerouac. Authors Ray Robertson and David Creighton will be in conversation with CBC Radio One’s Jian Ghomeshi to discuss our ceaseless cultural infatuation with the famed Beat writer.

It is forgivable to forget that Toronto is the prevailing backdrop to the stories and poems collected in the anthology TOK: Writing the New Toronto. The anthology itself is not exactly about Toronto—devoid of any superficialities of Toronto pride and a "what Toronto means to me" mentality—choosing instead to showcase a continually shape-shifting Toronto.

Eight months after Torontoist, Reading Toronto, Spacing, and BlogTO all banded together to solicit reader comments to improve the TTC's website and after Adam Giambrone agreed to re-open the Request for Proposal (RFP) to allow for "a more ambitious and exciting project," there has finally been some news to report of late. Last week, Adam Giambrone told Torontoist that the website would launch sometime in the fall, and would definitely feature everyone's top request––a trip planner. Yesterday, in the process of a godammed-extensive breakdown of his grievances, transit nut Joe Clark synthesized some details about the way that the TTC wants its new website to run. Plausibility aside, the TTC's wishlist for it's site designer gives us a look––albeit a very incomplete one––into the general idea of what we'll get come fall when the TTC's website fills our hearts with joy and delight.

LitTO Summer Reading Pick: check out Prose Karen from Neitzsche’s Brolly.

Michael Winter's next novel, The Architects Are Here, is set for serious serial hype on Facebook. Beginning today, Michael will make forty-seven posts with chapter summaries, commentary, and notes until the book’s publication in September. Each installment will include videos and photos of the people and places that inspired the novel's characters and settings.

Photos of trey anthony, Dawn Whitwell, and Gein Fence courtesy of Get Your Lit Out.

bill bissett is Canada's world champion hippy poet freak. Best known for his phonetic (funetik) spelling, it's fair to say that bissett's poetry anticipated the text messaging age by several decades. What once seemed like an avante garde approach to language now seems like the inevitable evolution of communication. He's the poet laureate of SMS.

If headliner Christian Bök can’t do it, no poet can. Christian is the author of two outstanding poetry collections from Coach House Books: the 'pataphysical encyclopedia, Crystallography, and the best-selling Griffin award-winning Eunoia, which employs only one vowel in each of its five chapters. From Chapter E (for Rene Crevel):

Birth control pills can decimate wild fish populations if their presence in waste water is not treated more effectively. The synthetic estrogen in birth control pills decimates the sperm count of male wild fish, especially smaller fish like minnows. Odds that said waste water will be treated more effectively in Canada any time soon: probably quite low.

Tonight, DRAFT Reading Series presents its season finale with an impressive list of writers: George Elliot Clarke, Flavia Cosma, Phyllis Gottlieb, Pasha Malla, Merle Nudelman, and Ottawa's rob mclennan.

Get on over to the east end tonight for Exile Editions' Spring Reading. New books will bloom this eve, and others will be ripe for picking throughout spring and summer. Exile Editorial Board Member Chris Doda gives us the layout for tonight’s garden of authors:

The good news: tonight, there are three great literary events happening in our fair city. The bad news: you’re going to have to choose.

There are as many types of poetry as there are different styles of music. Books of poetry are usually confined to a shelf or two at a local bookstore, but if you want to buy a CD, you visit an entire store dedicated to music. When someone professes to like poetry, the reference is probably to a favourite type of poetry, and not all poetries—just as a jazz afficionado might dislike Country and Western, or a pop music fan might hate Metal.