Dear breakers-out of cocoons, How to confront tough issues compassionately? This is a question that I keep asking as I prepare for our seminar and reflect on my own literary and actual journeys across cultures. Together, we’ll explore two books by two very different women, Egyptian Alifa Rifaat (1930–1996), and […]
Tag: Toronto Pursuits
GUEST POST – Spare Beauty and Epic Literature in Iceland with Mark Cwik
Iceland is stark and stunning. It’s everything the travel brochures say it is: beautiful in a way that’s hard to imagine without visiting. When I travelled to Iceland a few years ago, I couldn’t get enough of the glaciers, waterfalls, geysers and gorges, the vast lava fields and the miles […]
GUEST POST – Happy Year of the Horse from Lisa Pasold
Gung Hei Fatt Choi! (or Gong Xi Fa Cai in Mandarin) Happy Lunar New Year, and welcome to the Year of the Horse! I’m celebrating by rereading two fascinating memoirs about twentieth-century China: Anchee Min’s Red Azalea and Jan Wong’s Red China Blues. With the seminar “Living the Red Revolution,” I’m looking […]
GUEST BLOG – Don Whitfield invites you to engage in friendly argument about David Hume
There are many, many books that seek to communicate the complex philosophical ideas of great thinkers by presenting them in language that the authors feel is easier to understand than the original works. Some of these books are very successful in doing so – the original works are sometimes written […]
GUEST BLOG – Taking Henry James at his Words
Henry James took novels seriously. He believed that a good novel gave us unique access to depths of experience, and enabled us to explore how individuals work out their destinies in specific times and places. This seriousness of purpose has irritated more than one reader of James’ work. Most famously, […]
GUEST BLOG – Betty Ann Jordan on Looking at Photographs with Susan Sontag
“Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate, and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.” –Susan Sontag In Susan Sontag’s essay collection On Photography, every sentence is a zinger, and almost every idea a game-changer. Written in a […]
GUEST BLOG – Nella Cotrupi’s 5 reasons to choose Lucretius
Here are Five of the Many Reasons Why You Should Take My Seminar on Lucretius and the Rediscovery of his Masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, as described in Greenblatt’s The SWERVE – How the World Became Modern: 1. Stephen Greenblatt is a very talented writer/storyteller and a courageous scholar […]
TORONTO PURSUITS – Not the Usual Suspects in 2014 (The West Gives Way to the Rest)
We are fairly familiar with the concept of “the golden thread*,” the ongoing conversation that winds its way from the Ancient Greeks and Hebrew scribes through centuries of Western civilization, right up to the present. Indeed, pop culture is reliant on common references to the Bible and Shakespeare, even if […]
GUEST BLOG – Thou Shalt Not with Gary Schoepfel
Thou Shalt Not… The Decalogue The Old Testament “thou-shalt-nots” are deeply dyed into the fabric of Western Culture. I may hesitate when it comes to obeying those prohibitions, but I rarely pause to consider just what they command and why. “Thou shalt not murder.” “Thou shalt not steal.” They seem […]
GUEST BLOG – Ghazals – erotic & spiritual, by Lisa Pasold
The ghazal is my favourite poetic form—even though it’s less familiar than the sonnet or the haiku. A sonnet gives us a glimpse of the formalism and beauty of 12th century Italian literature, where that form was invented. Similarly, we study a haiku and discover an enduring Japanese spirit. English-language […]