Instant Coffee Saturday Edition 2001-2003

2. Caroline Mosby’s Forwarded Jokes | Timothy Comeau

What is it about creativity that turns some of us into Shakespeare and others into designers of porno sites? I am really rather enthralled by the diversity of expression available to us both as creators and “consumers of creative products” to put it in a contemporary way. The old boring debate about low-brow and high-brow has a new dimension now that people are actually spending a considerable amount of time producing animated gifs and other photoshop kitsch.

Last fall I was added to the mailing list of Caroline Mosby, who would appear to be a node in the network of forwards and replies. Since September I have been occasionally receiving sexually suggestive animated gif’s and jpegs, which I often don’t find that har-har funny, since my sense-of-humour is more attuned to Kids in The Hall type absurdity and deadpan understatement. However, I still really like seeing what’s out there, and some of them have been worth noting.

The highlights:

Review – The covers of the books nominated for the Booker Prize (British Editions) | Timothy Comeau
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The cover features an aerial shot of a tiger at one end of a boat, while a figure in the fetal position is at the other end. The view is from directly overhead, and one sees a school of sharks with a couple of turtles swimming beneath. The colours are muted, and it almost has the feel of a medieval fresco.

This cover would not make me want to pick up the book, let alone read it. The art is somewhat crude. The fetal position silhouette screams some kind of philosophical sentimentality, and the presence of the tiger makes no sense. The fact that these are details that the text takes care of seems beside the point. I wouldn’t want to read a story about a tiger lost at sea, but that’s just me. Rating: 5/10

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
I find this to be a very attractive cover. The title text is in a purple or a blue (scanning usually distorts colours right?) and the author’s name is in red. It is a photograph of someone looking out over the sea; the allusions to Freidrich’s paintings are obvious. The fellow is wearing a gray hat and a matching coat, and is holding an umbrella. We see him from behind. He is also wearing white pants that are short and we can see his bare ankles. The details of his shoes are lost in the darkness at the bottom of the photo. Overall, you have a composition divided into three: the sky/water, the top of the concrete, and its side. The man straddles all three and dominates.

With the hat and the umbrella combo, an anachronism today, the picture is evoking a 20th Century romance and the aesthetics of Beckett, with his tramps in bowler hats. Beckett had said that Freidrich’s paintings helped inspire his work, especially “Waiting for Godot”. This image brings the 19th Century romantic and the 20th Century existentialist together under Mistry’s theme of emigration (Mistry emigrated to Canada from India when he was 20) which seems to embody the existentialist doctrine of determining one’s fate while at the same time alluding to the romance of travel and adventure. Freidrich’s characters confront nature with their independence, while Beckett’s are crushed by nature’s indifference. The 20th Century wrestled with those two concepts in wars that proved man could control nature, but which also showed that nature couldn’t care less about our pettiness. In uniting these two disparate philosophies, this cover is excellent. I’d pick up the book and want to read it. Rating: 10/10

Unless by Carol Shields
This image at first glance evokes nothing of what the potential contents could be. It is a black & white photograph of mostly tree, but then you notice a girl in the lower right, stooping to pick up (?) or push (?) a ball. She has a bag at her waist, but it looks old as if it could be made of leather. You can also see that her hair is tied in a pony tail, and that she is wearing a white shirt with a skirt. The message conveyed is that she is either on her way or coming from school. Has she found this ball? Is she picking it up to toss it back to an afterschool soccer game?

The tree is an oak, and by it’s size one can see that it is very old. A creature of endless centuries next to one so delicately young. A picture from the 1930’s or something. I wouldn’t be inclined to pick up this book. The image is a sentimental evocation, and the author’s name is bigger than the title. At the bottom one reads that she won the Pulitzer Prize: obviously now the author is a literary Midas and if she wants to bore us with some sentimental memoir cast as fiction, than the publishing industry isn’t going to stop her, because, hey, it might get nominated for the Booker Prize or something.

The fact that the novel isn’t a sentimental memoir set in the 30s is why this cover ultimately fails semiotically. The image is a nice enough photograph and it would look nice in a hallway I guess (the hallway of some dreary bourgeois). In the way it freezes the dynamics of the scene it leaves me uncomfortable, which creates a dynamic nonetheless. Rating: 7/10

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
For some reason, amazon.co.uk doesn’t have a “see larger photo” for this title, so I have to work from the unclear image provided on it’s sales page. At first glance it looks like the stone markers of some prehistoric Stonehenge-like ring, though through squinty eyes, one can make out the ripples of sand on a beach. This image then is perhaps the weathered and eroded wooden stumps of on old pier at low tide. Both the initialy percieved image and the one actually present convey age, and the handwritten title, white against the gray-blue sky, also implies a story set in an era before typing was so common.

The sea sure is popular with these cover designers. The use of handwriting points to an historical story. The book begins in the 1920s, so this is effective. But the use of the sea image is so generic, and in the context of the other nominated books, clich? (it’s clich? anyway but worse when next to 3 other books with the same subject matter) but the designer cannot be faulted for that. I’m bored by this cover and wouldn’t pick it up off the shelf. Rating: 4/10

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Is the text set in the 19th Century, or are these the gloves of an archivist? They have buttons, so I doubt it. Perhaps these are servant’s gloves? The title’s font features an elaborate “f” and the rest of the word is a little shaky, like something that came from an oldschool press with a metal typeface.

This cover would entice me to pick up the text, though, I must say at this point, reviews always reflect the bias and predilections of the reviewer, and just because I have a thing for old documents and the dust of archives can’t necessarily translate into your wanting to pick it up too. I’m just sayin’…that because of my interests, this text featuring an image of white gloves on an old table top lying next to a patterned something or other which looks like some book from the 19th Century, would pique my interest.

The online review at amazon.co.uk describes the text as “engrossing lesbian Victoriana”. In communicating the era, this image is effective semiotically, though it still looks a little prissy, and the author’s name is printed too large and with too much kerning. Rating: 8/10

Dirt Music by Tim Winton
This image conveys a youthfulness that comes across in somehow framing another sentimental sea image (it’s like a rule in book design or something: all novels must have sentimental covers to tug at the heart strings of nostalgia…but then again, I shouldn’t talk, considering the covers of some of my bookworks…). It conveys this youthfulness through the use of the title fonts and the framing. If they’d used a more standard “Times New Roman”-esque serif font, this would have been sentimental. But the use of a sans-serif font speaks to younger folk, and in the way the title is italicized gives it sarcasm. The youth, afterall, are dripping with sarcasm and irony.

Ugh. I thought post 9-11 irony was dead. I was thankful for that, but no, it’s like aspirin, (a cheap and simple miracle drug): there is no better defense against the bewildering stupidity of the status quo than the roll of the eyes. The humor-irony formula is what gets us through the CNN days. That, and turning off the TV to read books with covers of beached boats, seen from the front, with waves gently in the background, the text hovering above the horizon line sans serif, simply conveying author’s name and title.

I’m attracted to the subversion of what could have been another sentimental image. But gawd, another fucking sea cover. I’m in the bookstore browsing and I’m getting seasick. This is absurd… Rating: 7/10

Winner: You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can judge the cover. This year’s winner of the Booker Prize was Life of Pi but my winner is Family Matters.

TOP

1. Pope Mass Sunday 28 July 2002, Downsview Park
by Timothy Comeau I got up at the time that I usually go to bed and took the TTC with people who were all dressed in their Sears best. I arrived at the grounds at 7am and walk into the crowd. It rains. Umbrellas go up. The boys choir begins to sing, and I shiver hearing Vivaldi’s “Gloria” which of course reminds me of the intro to the Frontline Pope documentary that was one of the reasons I wanted to see him in person. They also sang Handel’s Hallelujah, and this was entertaining while we waited. Then Elvis entered the building.

The Pope’s helicopter flew over the crowd and people got excited. The Pope is like a Santa Claus who dresses in white and doesn’t have a beard. I guess this was the adult version of the Santa Clause parade. People were yelling, “close the umbrellas so we can see!” Enough people did this, so that I caught a good glimpse of him. When he drove by I saw him from his bad side (cause with his illness he leans to one side, so I saw him from the side he leans away from) so I didn’t really see his face, but it was more than a little awe inspiring. I got caught up in the moment, with people yelling; “wave!” and I waved. The excitement was intense. I was awed and joy filled to see him, which felt a little embarrassing, but then again, that’s why I was there, to see in person this man who I feel has had a influence on my life.

I had faith that the rain would stop for the Mass, and it did. Throughout, I would follow those who were trying to get closer. For the most part the Pope was a green dot on the stage, and I watched the screens, but by the end I did get close enough to see the white of his hair. People were busy chatting and looking for lost members of their group and taking photographs, so it had this odd mix of solemnity and rock concert. With all the mud I thought of Woodstock, and one of the papers had described it as Popestock earlier in the week, and that seemed really appropriate that day. I felt bad when I had to squeeze past a couple of girl’s who praying during the benediction of the host, and I realized that I interrupted them in their moment. The Australians were on their knees at that point, which reminded me of the passage in the Bible where Jesus says, dont pray in public because then you’re just showing off and not honoring God, rendering the act sacrilege.

Rating: 8 out of ten

My rating for this is 8, cuz it was a once in lifetime experience and it was memorable. But that’s being totally subjective. If I wanted to pretend to be objective, I’d give it and the week surrounding it a 4 or even a 3, because the Catholics were weirdos, they trampled the grounds into mud, clogged up the drains so that business got flooded with sewage; preached their usual bullshit about how sex is bad and that all men had a duty to fatherhood, “whether spiritual or physical”, protested in front of the abortion clinic, clogged up the TTC, sang sing-alongs on the Go Trains, (especially that abysmal theme song, ugh) and generally drove me nuts with their fairy tales and “spontaneous discussion groups” on whether or not it was ok to marry Jews or Protestants. What an embarrassment to 2000 years of history and thought. (Timothy Comeau)

Cremaster 1 & 4
directed by Matthew Barney
at The Bloor Cinema, April 19 as part of the Images Festival
by Timothy Comeau

There was a time, almost ten years ago, when Cremaster, like MS Windows 3.2, was cutting edge. Yet, by now, mainstream video media as caught up with it. For example, the checkerboard dream sequence in the Big Liebowski, which came out two years later. It is slick and straightforward, easy to recognize as a dream sequence vignette, and in the use of chorus line girls, reminding me of Cremaster 1. But Barney’s work remains famously ambiguous, rather lushly endowed with production values that make his narcissistic narrative intriguing. While these films seemed a little Windows 3.2, they still benefit from its non-linear artiness.

Cremaster 1 (1995)
This one seemed like an apocryphal segment of a the 1986 James Bond film, “A view to a Kill”. The Sexually Suggestive Named Female Lead (SSNFL), is an Aryan goddess, part of a world wide conspiratorial enlist Nazi movement, who despise the more conventional white supremacist punk skin heads as being too proletariat. Trapped aboard one of Zoran’s blimps, one of two which hovers over the football field in Boise Idaho where Barney played college football (while he studied pre-med with ambitions to be a plastic surgeon) SSNFL considers escape, and stretches to keep her muscles from seizing up. In typical James Bond fashion, she’s absurdly trapped under a fruit laden table. Evil stewardess’ smoke and look out the windows, mindlessly obedient to Christopher Walken’s character, who is busy with Grace Jones and the planned flooding of Silicon Valley. SSNFL remembers radio grapes that are planted amongst the cornucopia, and gets a hold of them while the stewardess’ aren’t looking. Activating them by passing them through her shoes, they fall to the floor, and she begins arranging them, signaling choreography to the elite Nazi chorus line below. I think the plan must have been to entertain the world to death, or put everyone to sleep with the waltz music. This was certainly evident in the theatre, for when intermission came, everyone awoke from their daze, yawning and stretching.

As she communicates with the chorus line, she daydreams of taming Roger Moore’s cheatin’ ways. She imagines herself as the ultimate controller of his testicles, which are symbolized by the blimps. They are helium filled balloons to her, and she holds them by the leash.

Cremaster 4 (1994)
This was the first Cremaster film, made way back when OJ Simpson went from being and ex NFL player to becoming the scandal of the decade. Filmed on the Isle of Man, which is famous for its motorcycle racing, this one featured Barney as a tap dancing satyr dressed in white. He lives out on a pier. He tap dances around a white plastic tile. He wears a hole in the tile and falls through to the ocean below. Meanwhile, two motorcycles equipped with sidecars, race around the island.

Having fallen through to the ocean, he makes it back to the shore, boroughs under the beach, until he reaches the rocky cliff. He finds a tunnel through which he can make it up to the cliff top. This tunnel is shaped like the contour of a daisy. Squirming up the tunnel, he encounters vast amounts of Vaseline, which Barney has stated is a metaphor, a way of lubricating between concepts and scenes. He considers his films to be sculpture, something which must be viewed in many directions, and which moves slowly. I kept thinking of how long it would have taken to wash all of it off, yet Jon Sasaki, whom I saw the film with, more astutely summarized it as, “Matthew Barney as a giant sperm”.

In the meantime, the racing motorcycles converge as a ram. Their testicles, which had moved away from their bodies, and become characters of emotion and thought (like Sesame Street????s orange and black striped Wormy), remind us adults of spending our early lives watching and empathizing with puppets. The racers converge on and are replaced by the figure of a ram. The satyr emerges unto the grass of the cliff top, greeted by his smiling attendants. At the end, the satyr is enthroned triumphant at the pier, his attendants are as happy as always, and bag pipe music swells to a painful level as the credits roll.

I feel that Barney’s films benefit from their exclusivity, by the fact that we’ve all read about them, but not all had the chance to see them. Like the dream sequence in the Big Liebowski, they would become trivial rather quickly if Barney exposed their ambiguous symbolism and made them available at Blockbuster. Movies with line-ups rule, cause at that point they’re an event. These two had quite a lineup, and participating in this must see aspect I found more enjoyable than the films, which were mediocre.

Rating: 6 out of ten

(orginally published in the Instant Coffee Saturday Edition)

1. Trudeau, CBC television, March 31-April 1 2002, 8-10pm
By Timothy Comeau

Rating: eight out of ten

3. Review – Canada vs. USA Gold Medal Game, Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Sun 24 Feb 2002
by Timothy Comeau

Rating: eight out of ten (ten of ten if I’d been drunk in a bar downtown and then wandered around with a flag in the streets saying wuhu).

2. Lecture Review – Takashi Murakami, Harbourfront Centre’s Brigatine Room, 14 February 2002 7pm
by Timothy Comeau

Related Links
http://www.parco-city.co.jp/dob/
http://www.jca-online.com/murakami.html
http://www.hiropon-factory.com/plofilenew/murakami/index-e.html
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/takashi.html
http://www.carnegieinternational.org/html/art/murakami.htm
(more through google search – http://www.google.com)

Lights On Lights Off Sucks and Ain’t Afraid to Say So
“Work No. 127, Lights Going On and Off” (2001), Martin Creed

I wanted to write about Martin Creed’s piece, which won the Turner Prize this year. It consists of an empty room where the lights go on and off every 30 seconds. A version of it is currently showing at the Art Gallery of Hamilton as part of their Contemporary Projects Series.

I want to say that I hate this piece, and I don’t feel any responsibility to defend it – I say that because that’s what I feel is going on. Too many critics are talkin’ about how good it is, which it seems they have to do to justify their education and the establishment represented by the Tate Gallery. I also want to say that just because I hate this work, doesn’t mean I have anything against Mr. Creed personally. I can well imagine us bonding over the inside joke nature of this controversy. The work does have its merits. The part of me taught to be politically correct and open-minded can find some reasons to like it. I’m especially drawn to Creed’s statement about how he didn’t want to clutter up the world with more stuff.

However, that being said, I resent being in the position where because I’m supposed to be an artist with a modicum of intelligence, I am supposed to line up and defend the committee’s decision to give the prize to what I think is an insignificant work, to fulfil my duty in educating a misguided public. While I have no problem with Creed’s right to express his idea, what I really have a problem with is that it was awarded the Turner Prize and that it was part of the Turner exhibition. It’s a minor work that doesn’t deserve to be given hierarchical status by the Tate gallery. They could have gone with his “Half the Air in a Given Space” (2000) which consists of balloons filled up with just that. A better work it seems to me, mostly because it involves something and requires some effort of execution.

Now if only they had The Clapper installed in the room where they gave out the award, so that the applause would recreate the piece, then I would be ecstatic. That would have been great. It would have been dependent on the audience’s participation and presumably the lights would have flashed on and off much more rapidly. It would also have echoed the original work, and made it instantly more complex.

The Turner Prize has become associated with rewarding shock art, to such an extant that the Channel 4 website (co-sponsors of the Prize) list a chronology of Shock Art in order to make the point that “the shock of the new” is old school. What we/they/whoever accept as the banal establishment, was once controversial. So the agenda seems to be set: the award goes to what pisses off the “ignorant” and media jaded public.

It seems so glaringly obvious that he won only because his work was the most controversial. Before Creed was announced the winner, people were already complaining about it. The works by the other artists, Richard Billingham, Isaac Julien, and Mike Nelson, had more going for them aesthetically, if not conceptually. (Personally, I like Billingham’s photos, so I was rooting for him).

But my discomfort is not merely the disappointment of my fave losing. It’s because the winner is so literally vacuous. This work is too easy. It’s too easy to explain as something wonderful. This is a pure bullshit piece. It is too easy to defend using bullshit. It is too easy to say stuff like ‘it represents the dialectic of good and evil ‘ (Christ is often metaphorically referred to in relation to Light, right?) too easy to say that it encapsulates in a silent (and therefore poetic) way the relationship between life and death. And extending this life vs. death concept, is it too much to say that “Work No. 127, Lights Going On and Off ” reminds me of Buddhist teachings of what happens in death – the question being where does the soul go when we die? The answer: do we ask where a flame goes when we extinguish it? F-off I want something more substantial!

The National Post stated in its Commentary page “Mr. Creed literally made nothing. He has achieved the logical end of art, for if anything and everything may be regarded as art – even a room devoid of anything except a light bulb – then nothing is art. This is obviously all to the good. The practitioners of contemporary art can all go home – and we can all ignore them”.

“For if anything and everything may be regarded as art – than nothing is art.” Isn’t the Post the very paper run by capitalists that want anything and everything to have a price? I suppose then, in the end, nothing will have a price? If I pulled this argument on them they’d shake their heads and call me a stupid artist. I could say that this twisted argument is thus far the most convincing in favor of neo-liberal economic theories. Open markets will make everything in the end free, for if an empty room is not art because it is art, than Winnona Ryder is not guilty of shoplifting, since she already owned those clothes.

Not so far fetched actually. One of the Buddhist mailing lists I’m on had a quote by Zen master, in which he stated that the whole world belonged to us. His glasses for example – we let him wear them because we knew his eyes were bad. They didn’t belong to him, and they didn’t belong to us. They represent an act of mutual agreement, rather than of ownership.

I appreciate this piece in the sense that it is able to inspire someone like me to consider what I feel is valuable in art, but “Work No. 127” is like a naked Osama streaking through Time Square – an obvious and glaring target. In this case, x marks the spot for this kind of cynical and nihilistic criticism lobbied by people who don’t care about art to begin with. Instead of going with the “everything can be art” and suddenly digging Fluxus and Yoko Ono, and appreciating the wonderful variety of life (that’s what it does for me anyway) they have to go with “…therefore nothing is art and we can ignore artists”. Nothing is art anyway, just like nothing has a price – these are just constructions we cherish for whatever stupid reasons we humans have. These jerks have been ignoring artists all along, and are seizing this masterpiece as the proof that they were right – just like I seize on the fact that that free trade is rotten if it requires CSIS investigations of the Ragging Granies and Jaggi Singh (while Montreal terrorists plan to blow up the Los Angeles airport) to be implemented on a hemispheric scale. Does that mean I get to ignore evils of capitalism?

My attitude may suggest he should have censored himself, to know better than to provoke the right wing. To me, it’s no so much about censorship as it is deciding what’s worth one’s time. It’s not worth the time of the right wing because they’ve got their golf business meetings. Golf isn’t worth my time since I’ve got openings to go to. But I hope that the opening is going to be rewarding in some way. If I thought about making a piece consisting of lights going on and off, I’d think I could do better than that. I don’t want to waste the gallery’s time, or the audience’s, with something so vacuous. And I don’t feel that driving down to Hamilton to see this work is worth my time or the gas. The context that the gallery provides doesn’t do enough for this piece – I still feel that if I want to experience it I can just play with a light switch.

There’s no reason that Creed need censor himself, but I thought the whole jury process involved in getting an exhibition helps guard against works that waste our time. Unfortunately, given that I haven’t heard a lot of glowing reviews of much of anything in the art world lately, it seems the juries aren’t doing their job – leading to an attitude that says “we might as well have lights going on and of in a room, and might as well give it a prize”.

This type of thing was done much better 40 years ago by the Fluxus crew – and their legacy set the stage for this work. As the headline for the artnewspaper.com article, (link below) says, it’s “as exciting as hearing old jokes retold”. As such then, it’s the perfect artwork to end this stupid year, full of foot and mouth disease, kamikaze terrorism, and a war, crises that haven’t been examples of the best thinking. From now on, I’d like the Powers That Be to have more brains, which would include awarding the Turner Prize to something more deserving and not necessarily controversial. In the meantime, I have to make a salad.
– Timothy Comeau

Related websites:

http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20011212/858202.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/arts/newsid_1706000/1706637.stm
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/turnerhome.htm
http://www.channel4.com/turner/NoFlash.htm
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=8410
http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.on.ca/current.htm

Contemporary Art Project Series: Martin Creed continues at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until Feb. 3.

(originally published in Instant Coffee Saturday Edition)

Lecture Reviews by Timothy Comeau
(Wherein the reviewer reveals his bias):I didn’t know who Mik was and am still unsure how to say his name.
Aernout Mik, Harbourfront Centre’s Brigatine Room, 20 September 2001 7pm

Normally for Power Plant lectures in the Brigantine Room, the room is full of chairs, but this evening, a week and three days after the proverbial shit hit the fan, there were half as many, and of that, barely half were filled. The works presented by Mik were oddly au courant given the circumstances. The first video he showed, depicted stunned stockbrokers sitting around a trading room, their computers off and papers scattered everywhere. Even though the video was made much earlier, was this not the scene experienced the previous week’s Tuesday?

And that weighed on the lecture. Aernout Mik gave a subdued performance. He chose not to stand on the stage, but to walk around the front of it. He wore a lapel mike, which made him appear less like a celebrity at a genre-convention (which is exactly what he was–wasn’t he?) and more like a member of the audience. Mik sat at the edge of the stage while showing examples of his video works, which depicted fictive scenes that caricatured disaster. He remarked that he was uncomfortable and was not sure how he felt about the works. His uncertain nature diminished his authoritarian role, erasing the relationship of dictator and dictated to. It was as if he was also experiencing his own work for the first time.

There’s been a lot of community spirit in the last few weeks, which is at least one silver lining in the cloud of paper and ash — a scene Hollywood has depicted a thousand times, but still fails to give the lasting impressions of handicam images of a doctor hiding behind cars saying, “I hope I live, I hope I live.” Fade to black.

Rating: Eight out of Ten

I have admired Kingwell for some time.
Mark Kingwell, Aesthetics PHL 285, University of Toronto, 27 September 2001 12-3pm.

What is beauty anyway, especially now? Kingwell’s subject of the day was Kant’s views on beauty, that elusive something that supposedly gives us a glimpse of higher forms of being. Kingwell displayed his intellect with logical diagrams, that may have lacked Beuysian beauty, but displayed Cartesian design. (I thought that overhead displays would have been great, but then again maybe they would have just been distracting and in bad taste).

Kingwell is so good, I wish all my teachers were as great. He knows his subject matter as if he made it all up himself. And, most importantly, he knows his audience. Instead of boring us with the stupid old “What if a demon were deceiving me” bullshit that is the usual when explaining Decartes, he used a contemporary example: “The Matrix”. (An aside if you will – I hated The Matrix because I feel it is too amateurish. It is such high school stoner philosophy. What if reality is all in our heads? Gee, not that sophisticated. But until then, I hadn’t connected Decartes to what has become amateur in our time).

The mastery of the performance was not matched by the set design. Like a good wine served in a paper cup, the architecture of a cement block room can suck the life out of any good material. I was left feeling like a stressed out student rather than an enriched human being, though the mastery of Kingwell as a teacher did leave me feeling somewhat more able to understand the relevance of this stuff.

Last word: It is so nice to be in a group where one can say the word “canonical” and not have to stop and explain it. Instead, that privilege was saved for the word, “belletristic”.

Rating: Ten out of Ten

(originally published in Instant Coffee Saturday Edition)