News & Reviews
Review of Jon Swainger’s The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909 – 25. UBC Press, 2023. $32.95. Swainger sets out to prove four points. The first is that the early history of Prince George shows how the town quickly (by 1910 – 11) acquired a reputation for its “alcohol-fuelled…
Read More...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…
Read More...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…
Read More...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)…
Read More...The latest (Spring 2021) issue of ThimbleBerry, Art and Culture in Northern B.C., provides a cross-section of literary accomplishment, artistic creation, and aesthetic thinking in the region. For the magazine’s editors, Rob Budde and Kara-lee MacDonald, these accomplishments are vital to “societal well-being.” Their introductory “Letter from the Editors,” which starts in first-person plural but…
Read More...According to Robyn Curtis (11 May 2021) the problems of Exploration Place go back to its origins. Like all museums, it was started by “elite men.” These men were racists. Saying that men were the creators of museums doesn’t tell us much. Most civic institutions, through all time and across all cultures, were started…
Read More...In his article “Speaking Out” (The Walrus, June 2019), John Semley tells the story of the Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who made international headlines when she was censured by a University examining committee for creating an unsafe learning environment for transgender students. The committee consisted of her thesis supervisor, Nathan Rambukkana,…
Read More...Writer’s Block sessions, led by Marcus Sinclairus and Andrew Burton, have (since Covid) drawn good participation through Zoom technology. Sinclairus is a College of New Caledonia sociology instructor. Andrew Burton is the author of Daymares and other poetry collections, and a freelance creative writing instructor. Burton organizes the local Word Play literary reading events and is founder…
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