Category Archives: Introductions

Inhaling

Posted on February 28, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Bonnie Marranca in her preface to a collection of food writing entitled A Slice of Life offers this anecdote. [T]wo summers ago in Nova Scotia, we stopped by the side of the road to have a picnic lunch with our … Continue reading →

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Policy

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Michael Pollan in the introduction to his Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual has a take on policy that can be generalized from the case of rules applied to eating. He writes: Policies are useful tools. Instead of prescribing highly specific … Continue reading →

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Gift of Navigation

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Michael Riordon in fine form in the preface to Eating Fire: family life, on the queer side We live in a relational universe. […] Moving through our lives, we define ourselves not only as the insular I, but in relation … Continue reading →

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An Apology for Intellectual History

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Francois Lachance

James Hoopes, editor, Sources for The New England Mind:The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller (1981), provides in the introduction this brief characterization of Miller’s position on intellectual history: Miller was not an intellectual determinist in the sense that he believed … Continue reading →

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Seeding the Long Tail

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Francois Lachance

It’s an active form of writing that honours the art of contemplation. In a way it is living a mandarin style in the open. The genre is the familiar common place book. A gathering. The gesture is simple (and thereby … Continue reading →

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Discards from A Preface

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Francois Lachance

from sometime in the mid 90s A gay man asking “why make babies” risks being unheard. Gay people pretend he is addressing straights. His question is aimed at closet cases so claim straight folk. The sophisticated lesbians have him talking … Continue reading →

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Timbre, Smile-Stamped

Posted on July 2, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Of the many facts found in Angus Tremble’s introduction to A Brief History of the Smile this one makes me close my eyes and listen and attempt to project myself into a different sensory experience of the world. Blind people … Continue reading →

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Another F-word

Posted on June 19, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Indulging again in the prose of Adam Mars-Jones. As an introduction to the anthology Mae West Is Dead, Mars-Jones is doing a close reading, a dissection, of the protagonist from Nathan Aldyne’s detective novel Vermillion (and other characters too). Daniel’s … Continue reading →

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Trapdoor

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Barbara Godard in the introduction to Tessera Volume 9 observes This position for the feminine as the spoken subject, rather than the subject of enunciation or subject of the utterance, poses difficulties for the woman writer. The French version differs … Continue reading →

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Displacements

Posted on March 23, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Lines gleaned from Paul Monette’s 1987 introduction to Love Alone, a collection of elegies in honour of his lover Roger Horowitz if only a fragment remained in the future, to fade in the sulfurous rain, it would say how much … Continue reading →

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