News & Reviews
James Pew, a Canadian historian and Woke-Watch commentator, is a reluctant Jeremiah. He is convinced that the pro-Palestinian protests in the western world indicate the beginnings of a war of Christians against Muslims, in which war the Jews, in particular the state of Israel, are Christian allies. He views the protests as indicative of the…
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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.…
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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…
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“Recently I was interviewed by the CNC Student Association” said Graham Pearce, Creative Writing instructor and co-ordinator of the English Program at CNC. “Damon Robinson and Anubov Sharma asked me how I developed my teaching style. I told them my formal education had some bright spots, but, overall, the postmodernists had taken over the classroom. “When I…
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I first met Brian Fawcett during a visit to Vancouver for Expo ’86. I was a reporter for The Medicine Hat News at the time. Earlier in 1986, during a trip back to Medicine Hat, I had picked up a copy of The Globe and Mail in an airport newsstand. I was fascinated by a review in it of…
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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…
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Prince George recently suffered the loss of its best-known literary chronicler. Chickenbustales plans to celebrate his life and capture his spirit in a series of reminiscences, articles, and snippets of poetry and prose, material that is both fresh and archival. We start with reminiscences by Barry McKinnon. Brian left Prince George in 1966, after…
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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…
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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…
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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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I understand that Paul Strickland’s recent review of the northern arts magazine Thimbleberry has raised some controversy in Prince George’s arts scene concerning not just how much a reviewer can quote from the original texts, but also whether reviewers can quote at all from this magazine. I think the sane responses to such attempts at resisting scrutiny are a)…
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