John Metcalf, as I’ve said more than once, is both a great writer and a great editor. On my bookshelves I have scores of novels and short story collections edited by Metcalf, by writers such as Russell Smith, K.D. Miller and Annabel Lyon. These books maintain a level of quality unmatched in modern publishing: the [...]
Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category
Metcalf is back
Posted in Literature, tagged John Metcalf on November 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Philip Marchand’s Reading Life
Posted in Literature, tagged Philip Marchand on November 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The National Post, formerly my employer and still an occasional publishing outlet for my stray essays, is rather like a Dickensian heroine: abandoned by a feckless father (a jailed genteel social climber no less, rather like Little Dorrit’s dad) the paper lives an orphan’s precarious existence, fending off creditors, the poorhouse, and even death itself. [...]
Super Poems
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, History, Literature, Media, Popular culture on October 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In a plot line inspired by Robert Frost’s poem Road Not Taken, fictional character Archie Andrews has already proposed to Veronica and will propose to Betty next month. I wonder what it would be like if other comics were inspired by poems…(imagine dreamy music and blurry vision.)
On His Blindness—John Milton
Spiderman is blind, worries about his [...]
Flat Out Like a Lizard Thinking
Posted in Literature, tagged Australian slang, Benjamim Franklin, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare on July 2, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
FUN WITH SLANG: READ THE WHOLE THING TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN WIN A PRIZE!
I just got back from a trip to Greece, where I befriended a lot of Australians. The best thing about Australians, besides their good looks and superior drinking abilities, is their slang. I learned a lot of great [...]
Listen to Metcalf
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, tagged John Metcalf on June 22, 2009 | 1 Comment »
John Metcalf.
As I often note, we at Sans Everything are nothing if not eclectic in our passions: animal rights, free trade, and anti-imperialism are all causes taken up by the blog. But there is one particular flag that unites us (or at least most of us): John Metcalf, the extraordinary Canadian writer and editor. A.M. [...]
Tennis Vagabond: a story of tennis, evil and everything else
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Film and documentary, Literature, Media, Personalities, Popular culture, Uncategorized, tagged commodification, death, drugs, evil, Illuminati, Kerouac, O'Rourke, physics, Sachs, sex, Tennis Vagabond on June 21, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Sans Everything depends not only on its writers, but also its readers. Given the huge difference between daily site visits and replies to our posts it is clear that the vast majority of visitors to the site are content to read quietly, which is perfectly fine with us. We are also delighted, however, to have some regular [...]
Hebrides Holiday
Posted in Literature on June 4, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Sam Johnson: A great dictionary-maker and fun on a road-trip.
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
The History Channel’s new show Expedition: Africa follows a group of travelers recreating Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 journey through Africa to find Dr. Livingstone. It (ok, an article in the Times about it) has got me wondering which historical trip I would want to recreate.
I [...]
Introducing Sophie Pollitt-Cohen
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature on June 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Blogs are driven by passion, and a notable feature of Sans Everything is the cacophony of competing obsessions that regularly bubble up here. Aside from my own interest in comic books and conservative intellectuals we have the various hobby-horses of A.M. Lamey (animal rights and immigration policy), Ian Garrick Mason (movies, foreign affairs), John Haffner [...]
In the keep of the tree
Posted in Environment, Literature, tagged brig o' turk, robert selby, sycamore on March 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Plants, it is well known, have a remarkable ability — born, perhaps, of their immense patience and gradualism — to physically merge themselves with elements in their environment. Ivy will bind fast to brick, beans will curl around poles, and trees… well, consider the iron-eating sycamore of Brig o’ Turk, a village in central Scotland [...]
In Honour of Musa Khankhel
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Asia, Foreign affairs, History, Literature, Media, Personalities, Philosophy, Uncategorized on February 20, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As with all his writing, Kafka’s masterful story Ein Brudermord (A Fratricide) can be read on many levels. Most immediately it is about the inexplicable murder of Wese by Schmar, with the neighbour Pallas a passive observer to the scene; Wese’s wife arrives too late, only to discover her husband is already dead. Yet on a deeper [...]
