Author Archive
Posts by John Harris:
Dickson, Lisa, Shannon Murray and Jessica Riddell. Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. University of Toronto Press, 2023, 198 pp, $29.95C. This book is a sort of transcript of a series of reading-club meetings. The club has three members, and they are discussing four Shakespeare plays, King Lear, As You Like It, Henry…
A Review of So Help Me God (Simon and Shuster, 2022) By John Harris Mike Pence is no thinker. So Help Me God is more interesting for its contradictions and lacunae than for what it says. It’s an emotive appeal to Pence’s base, a celebration of the profundity and efficacy of his religious and political…
I’m a big fan of the Times Literary Supplement that, no longer content to be associated in the public mind with a periodical focused on ephemera (news and public opinion), now calls itself by its acronym alone: TLS. For us bespectacled eggheads with an obsession with books, a love of elegant prose, and an intimate…
Vancouver Opera’s The Pearl Fishers (October 22 – 30, 2022) has a prologue wherein a screen projection informs the audience, in writing, of the exceedingly obvious fact that Bizet and the “Frenchmen” who wrote the libretto were privileged men absolutely ignorant about the opera’s setting (Ceylon) and about the culture and religion of its characters.…
In Prince George, Brian Fawcett is considered royalty, a scion of the family that owns Kelson Group, one of the largest owners of rental property in western Canada. The company started here, and the town is thickly sprinkled with Kelson apartments. He is also the town’s most famous writer. Since much of his writing is…
You can’t, grammatically, have more than one best friend, but Brian Fawcett was one of my best friends. I met him in 1973, when I arrived in Prince George to start work as an instructor at the college. We were introduced by another of my best friends, Barry McKinnon. Brian was bigger, better-looking, and…
Michael Walzer’s piece in the February 28 Persuasion is a timely caution against “Woke” historical revisionism — against, to use one of Walzer’s examples, the idea that Thomas Jefferson was not a hero but a moral monster because he owned slaves and took one as a mistress. The revisionists tend to argue that, because he…
Kluane National Park Interpretive Center Yukon, August 2021 For Kim Henkel The reason you’re in my office has got nothing to do with the fact that you and your friends are camped in the bush at the edge of the parking lot and using the washrooms. Or with the herd of donkeys grazing…
In the Foreword to The Answer to Everything, editor Rob Budde says he hopes that his selection of the poems of Ken Belford, “is chosen by future scholars as a representative introduction to his work.” Those future scholars might so choose, but not readers familiar with Belford’s work. This is because Budde and his co-editor…
Anger be now your song, immortal one, Achilles’ anger, doomed and ruinous, That caused the Greeks loss on bitter loss. Those lines from the Iliad refer to a difficult time for the Greek forces in the final year of their decade-long siege of Troy. Their hero Achilles, blessed by the gods with invincibility, was…
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