interviewmagazine.com Jeffrey Eugenides began his new novel, The Marriage Plot, with a single idea: his female protagonist, an English student at Brown University in the early 1980s, is discovering love while the postmodern theorists she reads in her classes are deconstructing the very concept. The book, as he conceived it,[Read More…]
Articles by Ricky Kreitner
For a ruthless criticism of everything existing
I started writing Pinata Diplomacy three and a half years ago in the McGill Daily. I had included in my columnist application a few clips from high school, where I used my position as opinion editor of the student paper to complain about the many hypocrisies of my suburban New[Read More…]
This is what university looks like
It’s always been unclear to me on what grounds those T-shirts labeling Harvard “America’s McGill” seek to compare the two universities. Clearly, they’re a response to people labeling McGill “Canada’s Harvard,” but that doesn’t answer my question. The implication is that the two universities are comparable in things such as[Read More…]
The filling of a bucket
Despite the obligatory pledges to myself that precede every semester, promising that this time will be different, I always end up choosing one or two classes to prioritize over the others. I track down interesting texts mentioned off-handedly by the professor. I start researching the day an assignment is announced.[Read More…]
Exploring Montreal
freelargephotos.com Ryan Reisert When Mark Twain visited Montreal in 1881, he told guests at a banquet held in his honour that it was his first time visiting a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window. He reported hearing of plans to build one more: “I[Read More…]
Arguably hits hard
Living alone in first year, pushed strongly toward my introverted side by the solitude, I found a strange kind of comfort watching the YouTube videos of essayist Christopher Hitchens lecturing and debating the opposition. An overweight, potentially drunk, white-suited, occasionally bearded, smart-aleck British ex-pat eviscerating rabbis and theologians, dropping opinions[Read More…]
Revolution: the dress rehearsal
Imagine my frustration—reclined in shaded grass next to Redpath Museum, newspaper folded in hand—at being subjected to the croaky, amplified ramblings of some student “leader” exhorting the loyal troops to, say it with me now, “Stand up, fight back!” I couldn’t concentrate and, with no classes in the afternoon,[Read More…]
Nothing to look foward to in looking back
Though stuffed into only 150 pages, Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending, is a very big book. This thin volume trades in themes one might only expect to find in a real doorstopper of a book, a fat Bildungsroman, a sweeping history of a life. Barnes’ book[Read More…]
Pay no attention
It was the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw who first compared writing a column to standing under a windmill: as soon as you’ve dodged one blade, another is rounding the bend and heading straight for you. As a writer, I find the comparison apt. As a reader, however, you should[Read More…]
Crossing the line
Unless, out of sympathy for international labour, you’ve rigged some kind of Rube Goldberg-esque device that delivers the Tribune straight from our printer in Saint-Leonard to your doorstep, it’s safe to assume that you picked this newspaper up somewhere on campus. That means you probably crossed the MUNACA picket line[Read More…]
Maurice Richard sets Quebec ablaze
charlesforan.com Rare is the athlete whose cultural impact transcends the sport he or she plays. Charles Foran, the author of a new book on Maurice Richard for the Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, says his subject fits this select category. In the same sense that Jackie Robinson didn’t set out to[Read More…]
More dimensions than the five dollar bill
warmuseum.ca Andre Pratte, the author of a new mini-biography of Wilfrid Laurier for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, complains that the man on the five-dollar bill has been mothballed by myth. “Laurier’s fame today is confined to old books on the shelves of public libraries,” he writes. It is the dual[Read More…]
U.S.-Canada relations conference draws prominent politicians
Alice Walker Alice Walker Last week, the Omni Hotel on Sherbrooke hosted the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada’s annual conference, this year titled, “Canada and the United States: Conversations and Relations.” The conference brought together high-ranking decision-makers from the U.S. and Canada to engage in conversation with the[Read More…]
Renowned scholar talks on Yiddish and political power
Matt Essert Dovid Katz, a world-renowned scholar of Yiddish and self-described “charismatic lunatic,” delivered a lecture in the Ferrier Building on March 14 called “Yiddish and Power.” In a room filled with mostly Jewish studies professors and elderly civilians, Katz explored how the development of the Yiddish language has been[Read More…]
Averting meltdown
The first item listed in a recent story on the Atlantic Wire website, “The Worst Reactions to the Japanese Earthquake,” was an awkward construction from P.J. Crowley, a U.S. State Department spokesman, on his Twitter page: “We have been watching a hopeful tsunami sweep across the Middle East. Now we[Read More…]
Mere penarchy
It is a dark world out there. A state of war, each against each. You are all alone. It is mere penarchy. Despite all our progress as a species, despite our eminent legal institutions and our many esteemed documents banning torture, protecting free speech, prohibiting the wearing of a fake[Read More…]
In Goethe-inspired opera, a fatal attraction
Opera of Montreal Shortly after the curtain rises on Opera of Montreal’s production of Werther, a young boy wheels a bicycle across the stage, laughing and carousing with his friends. The bicycle remains onstage through the first act, occasionally pedaled by the boy but mostly left in a corner, untouched[Read More…]
Rewards of Being a Tribune Columnist
Last winter, my friends and I were at a bar off St. Laurent when one announced his desire to get some fresh air. Upon return, he said he’d been standing on the corner and struck up a conversation with two McGill students. They asked who he was with inside the[Read More…]
What’s the “right opinion” on Wikileaks?
Third in queue at a Barclays bank in central London during winter break, I read through squinted eyes the BBC’s announcement that Julian Assange, the controversial founder of Wikileaks who was wanted by Interpol for alleged sex crimes in Sweden, had been arrested at a London police station after turning[Read More…]
Walking the streets of Mordecai Richler
Holly Stewart Holly Stewart Few hipsters, biking furiously down St. Urbain Street in Mile End, notice number 5257, an unassuming second-floor apartment in a small, pinkish-beige brick building on the east side of the street. It’s uglier and noticeably younger than other buildings on the block, with no sign to[Read More…]
Talking terrorism in Times Square
I had an hour to spare this past Sunday while waiting for the bus from New York to Montreal. Pushing through the crowds of 42nd Street, I found my way to the metal chairs and tables in Times Square, which, for better or for worse, is America. I sat watching[Read More…]
Re-opening the files of A Film Unfinished
If A Film Unfinished were nothing but 60 minutes of raw Nazi propaganda footage filmed in the Warsaw Ghetto, it would still be the most affecting film viewers have seen in a very long time. If the five silent reels found in an East German bunker nine years after the[Read More…]
Journalist or jester: Is Jon Stewart relevant anymore?
On Saturday, October 30, Jon Stewart hosted his Rally to Restore Sanity
on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Today, two Tribune editors face off on whether
Jon Stewart has anything important to contribute to American political debate.
Trivial Pursuit: a McGill student competes on Jeopardy!
babble.com In 1856, John C. Fremont ran for President as the first candidate of the newly created Republican Party. He lost to James Buchanan, the 15th president of the United States and the only lifelong bachelor to have ever occupied the White House. I relate these facts from memory. Anyone[Read More…]
Bookworms in paradise at 40th annual McGill Book Fair
Sophie Silkes Redpath Hall was filled with book lovers searching for rubies in the dust at the 40th annual McGill Book Fair held late last week. Founded by the Women’s Association of McGill in 1971, the Book Fair is now run by an independent group of volunteers, mostly elderly women[Read More…]
Talking to Quebec’s delegate to New York
John Parisella, Quebec’s delegate-general to New York and a McGill alumnus, recently spoke to the Tribune about the Tea Party, U.S. congressional elections, and the prospects for high-speed rail travel between Montreal and New York. Parisella was kind enough to answer some questions before heading having dinner at his home[Read More…]
Obama harshing on my mellow
Reclining on my couch a few nights ago after a long day at the Trib office, I exhaled deeply upon reading the news that the Obama Administration will continue enforcing federal drug laws in the state of California even if its voters next month pass Proposition 19. If passed, this[Read More…]
Sufjan Stevens: not half as enslaved
Sufjan Stevens is a master designer of atmospheres. You would want to be a Jim Carrey-type character in a world of his design, and at the end of the movie you would ultimately choose not to escape through the hidden door. At will, and in bizarre, repeating cycles, he lulls[Read More…]
Literary launch lacks laughs
Local literati were out in full blazered regalia on October 5 for the re-launch of Montreal humourist Jonathan Goldstein’s first novel, Lenny Bruce is Dead, originally published by Coach House Books in 2001. The 41-year-old Goldstein, author of two books, contributor to Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, and host[Read More…]
Exile Above New York
The view at night from the roof of my sister’s apartment building in midtown Manhattan is like looking down from one of the higher clouds in heaven at the other angels living out their merry lives below. There are no problems up there, nor does there seem to be any[Read More…]
The Hidden Difficulties of an 8:30 Class
There seems to have occurred in the past week a strange increase in the percentage of my daily conversations revolving around the subject of where on campus is the best place to make poop. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least four conversations of that[Read More…]
Amtrak Blues: A Journey Across America
My second night in Denver, I skipped dinner in favour of a smooth $10 cigar. Crossing right leg over left on a bench in the 16th Street Mall—the city’s downtown commercial strip—I enjoyed a long smoke and listened to the music swell from one of the many painted pianos on[Read More…]
OFF THE BOARD: Confessions of a Renegade Cyclist
To those whose misfortune it may have been, at two p.m. on any given weekday at the beginning of this summer, after my logic class ended, to have found themselves somewhere along the most direct route – and I mean the most direct – between campus and my apartment on Rue St.
PIÑATA DIPLOMACY: Ricky’s regret
If I regret any of my columns from this year, it would be February’s “Middle-class guilt.” My regret isn’t so much over the views I tried to express, but over the fact that I haven’t yet negotiated a comfortable balance between the nuanced views I try to maintain and my emotional writing style, which tends to be excessive and – as my mother complains – angry.
PIÑATA DIPLOMACY: Obama’s declining support
From the time I arrived on campus in August 2008 to the U.S. presidential election that November, I didn’t meet a single John McCain supporter. I don’t think this was because I had a disproportionately Obamaniacal group of friends. Nor was it because we viewed him as somehow the lesser of two evils – the tone of his supporters during the campaign was hardly reflective of that kind of aw-shucks-he’s-the-best-we-have mentality that you get with someone like Michael Ignatieff.
PIÑATA DIPLOMACY: Reforming ourselves
What the hell was that? My first General Assembly is, of course, today’s topic. But don’t go! I understand your weariness – the front page article, the editorial, and all the guest commentary pieces from student politicians with an overestimation of their own importance, as if we the constituents waited impatiently all weekend for their straight-talk account of things.
PIÑATA DIPLOMACY: Middle-class guilt
Social organization, for all its clumsiness and evil, has accomplished far more and embodies more good than I do, for at least it sometimes gives justice. I am a mess, and talk about justice. I owe the powers that created me a human life. And where is it! Where is that human life which is my only excuse for surviving! – Saul Bellow, Herzog I live in the Global North.
PIÑATA DIPLOMACY: That evaluation you requested
You may recall many professors, in the last days of the fall semester, prostrating themselves before Canada Goose-clad undergraduates, begging shamelessly for feedback – any feedback – via Minerva-submitted course evaluations. A philosophy professor offered to bring in cookies of indisputable quality should at least 60 per cent of students submit evaluations.