"Years ago, after a plane trip spent reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Weight Watchers magazine, Woody Allen melded the two experiences into a single essay. ‘I am fat,’ it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?).’ It was 1968, when most of the world’s people were more or less ‘height-weight proportional’ and millions of the rest were starving. Weight Watchers was a new organisation for an exotic new problem. The notion that being fat could spur Russian-novel anguish was good for a laugh.
That, as we used to say during my Californian adolescence, was then. Now, 1968’s joke has become 2013’s truism. For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike."
— David Berreby, aeon Read more...
"There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that 'this world is but canvas to our imaginations,' that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Middlemarch and Augie March, and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an 'eternal and irrepressible freshness,' in Pound's apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: 'Language charged with meaning.' How charged was the last novel you read?"
— William Giraldi, in a New York Times review of Alix Ohlin's Inside and Signs and Wonders Read more...
"No one can write books like Inside – a novel – and Signs and Wonders – a short-story collection – unless she grew up watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen films (not a wild guess since Alix Ohlin is the daughter of Peter Ohlin, one of the world’s great authorities on Bergman). But Ohlin is so completely herself as a fiction writer that you don’t have to have seen any Bergman or Allen to get what she’s doing – all you need is a lot of smarts and a wry sense of humour."
— T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail Read more...
"[...] He distilled his genius, including phrases that became and remain part of the daily lexicon, such as 'the medium is the message,' into sometimes puzzling aphorisms, an early form of the sound byte. [...] In honour of the centenary of his birth, take this special Globe and Mailquiz, assembled by Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, co-chair of McLuhan100 and director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology at the University of Toronto."
— The Globe and Mail Read more...
"One of the most charismatic, controversial and original thinkers of our time whose remarkable perception propelled him onto the international stage, Marshall McLuhan is universally regarded as the father of communications and media studies and prophet of the information age."
— marshalmcLuhan.com Read more...
"Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a visionary educator of mass media. 'The medium is the message,' perhaps his most often quoted phrase, was one of his many advanced perceptions. In media, he studied both their overriding effects on society and their character as extensions of the senses of the individual."
— Digital Lantern Read more...
"As boys at bedtime in the dark, Marshall McLuhan and his brother Maurice huddled listening to the crystal radio set Marshall had built. Even as a child living in Edmonton, Marshall was always interested in the latest technology, recalls Maurice about his brother."
— CBC Digital Archives Read more...
