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ANDY WARHOL
CATHOLIC AND CONFUSED . . . WHEN I ENTERED the Catholic Church in 1984, my decision to convert was at least partially influenced by the testimony and example of people I admired who happened to be Catholic – particularly writers as temperamentally and politically diverse as John Henry Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox, Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Day. Continue Reading . . . |
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MY INTRODUCTION TO THE PROFESSION NORM IBSEN WAS the first editor I encountered when I started to write as a freelance journalist in 1979. My literary background to that point was in fiction - novels and short stories, hundreds of bad poems and a couple frustrated stabs at play scripts. Continue Reading . . . |
ROSS WOODMAN
HAROLD NICOLSON and
VITA SACKVILLE WEST 
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A TRANSFORMATIVE TEACHER AND A GREAT SOUL WRITER, ENGLISH PROFESSOR, art patron and critic, Ross Woodman died quietly in his sleep on the first day of spring in his art-filled north London home that was once a convent. Though he was 91 years old and for the last 20 of those years had been known to occasionally answer the question, “So what are you doing lately?” with the single word, “Dying,” family and friends were nonetheless shocked by — or at least totally unprepared to face — his passing. Continue Reading . . . AN UNCONVENTIONAL MARRIAGE WORTHY OF AFFIRMATION THERE IS PRESSURE FOR ALL OF US to vocally affirm a simultaneously expanded and watered down definition of the ancient institution of marriage but there is no attendant sense of compulsion – even after the birth or the adoption or the medically assisted concoction of children – to actually participate in it one’s self. Continue Reading . . . THOSE FOLKS UP AT WESTERN AREN'T VERY SWIFT ARE WE LIVING IN AN AGE so hopelessly literal and credulous that satire has become, if not impossible, then too dangerous to allow? I fear it may be so, at least in one environment - a university campus - where you might like to think that satire really ought to have a fighting chance of being received for what it is. Are they doing any reading at Western University at all? Continue Reading . . . |
DAVE CLARK FIVE
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I'M FEELING (THUD, THUD) CONFLICTED ALL OVER THOUGH IT SEEMS UNFATHOMABLE in retrospect, 50 years ago the Dave Clark Five were considered neck and neck with The Beatles as the hottest band on the globe. The DC5 had an enormous impact on my 11 year old psyche when I first saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show. Continue Reading . . . |
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ALAN DAYTON LONDON'S PORTRAITIST ALAN DAYTON on why he settled in London Ontario: “I didn’t know Jack Chambers or his work at all. I walked into the gallery and was really quite moved by it . . . I liked all the blue sky in the paintings, the feeling he expressed for his community. And that was London." Continue Reading . . . |
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NICK DRAKE CAN A TALENT THIS TENDER POSSIBLY ENDURE? IF HE COULD SOMEHOW be resurrected for a day, what would this unusually private and gentle soul make of the nearly 500 page monument to his life and career and influence that his sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake (most famous at our house, at least, for playing Inspector Lynley’s mum, Lady Asherton) has lovingly assembled and published this year as Nick Drake: Remembered for a While? Continue Reading . . . |
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MERLE TINGLEY THE CIVIC BLESSING AND INSPIRATION OF TING IN THE FALL OF 1947 Ting pulled into London to try his luck at the London Free Press. By then he was so discouraged and broke that he was considering taking on a job selling men’s clothing. “They’d never had a cartoonist of their own,” Ting told me. “They weren’t quite sure what cartoonists did or how they could use one.” Continue Reading . . . |
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MAURICE STUBBS
LONDON ART PIONEER GETS HIS DUE THE PUBLICATION last month of Maurice Stubbs: Intuitive Painter, a stunningly beautiful art book (tied in with a retrospective exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery) is cause for celebration on several fronts. Continue Reading ... |
Novelist, literary biographer and critic D.J. Taylor
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BOOKS FOR THE HOPELESSLY BOOKISH ABOUT A HALF CENTURY AGO, a handful of British writers swam against the tides of specialization, academicism and politicization – then still rising towards the intimidating stature they’ve achieved today - and dared to produce sweeping histories or outlines that charted the overall development of literary culture. The first of these that I encountered, taking on the largest canvas of all and therefore not probing so deeply as the others, was prolific novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley’s (1894-1984) Literature and Western Man (1960); an intelligent, non-academic (the word ‘phallocentric’ doesn’t appear once) study of writers from Machiavelli, Montaigne and Cervantes to James Joyce, William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. Continue Reading . . . |