to move up and down
Various charts and graphs drawn by Sarah Lazarovic to remind you of the month that was.
Sarah Lazarovic charts the highs and lows of the month of March!
The Quantified Month: Sarah Lazarovic’s highly unscientific account of the things that mattered in January
And one more look back before we move on.
Sarah Lazarovic charts November’s facial hair and impromptu park dwellings.
Live Chat: Margaret Atwood discusses In Other Worlds
Join us at noon on Monday, November 28 for a one-hour live chat with Margaret Atwood. The celebrated Canadian author will discuss her latest collection of essays, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Signal Books) and answer reader questions.Writing in the National Post, Zsuzsi Gartner called the book “a kind of encyclopedia: a quirky and admittedly personal primer on ‘imaginative writing.’” Read Gartner’s review of the book here.
Click here to read more about the book.
And click here for details on how to win the complete Signal Books library and a chance to see Atwood live in Toronto. (Illustration by Steve Murray)
Better know your Margarets: A visual guide for the Ford brothers
Earlier this year, Doug Ford admitted he wouldn’t know Margaret Atwood if she were standing beside him on a street corner. Earlier this week, his brother said the TV character Marg Delahunty didn’t identify herself during an ambush at his home for an episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Clearly, the Fords are having difficulty recognizing famous Margarets. With that in mind, Emily Innes provides a cheat sheet on five others they might want to keep an eye on.
Atwood knits up extinct bird for U.K. exhibit She’s arguably Canada’s greatest writer, but novelist Margaret Atwood has taken an unexpected public foray into a new artistic genre — knitting — as her woollen representation of an extinct great auk is set to be one of the showcase works at a unique, multimedia art exhibition opening next week in Britain.
Margaret Atwood: How a love of comics started a love of reading
I learned to read early so I could read the comic strips because nobody else would take the time to read them out loud to me. The newspaper comics pages were called, then, the funny papers, although a lot of the strips were not funny but highly dramatic, like Terry and the Pirates, which featured a femme fatale called “The Dragon Lady” who used an amazingly long cigarette holder, or oddly surreal, like Little Orphan Annie — where were her eyes? The funny papers raised many questions in my young mind, some of which remain unanswered to this day. What exactly happened when Mandrake the Magician “gestured hypnotically”? Why did the Princess Snowflower character go around with a cauliflower on either ear?
Where did we kids discover the knowledge of flying capes, superpowers, other planets, and the like? In part, through the primitive comic-strip superheroes of the times, the most popular of which were Flash Gordon, for space travel and robots; Superman and Captain Marvel, for extra strength, superpowers, and cape-based flying; and Batman, who was a mortal, with a non-functional cape — one that must have encumbered him somewhat as he clawed his way up the sides of buildings — but who nonetheless shared with Captain Marvel and Superman a weak or fatuous second identity that acted as a disguise. (Captain Marvel was Billy Batson, the crippled newsboy; Superman was Clark Kent, the bespectacled reporter; Batman was Bruce Wayne, the very rich playboy who lounged around in a smoking jacket.)
Excerpt from In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination Copyright © 2011 by O.W. Toad Ltd. Published by Signal, imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd. (Photo: (Tyler Anderson/National Post)
Related:
Margaret Atwood: The stories we tell
Book Review: In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, by Margaret Atwood
