Genre Drama, Cool Clutter, and Carols
Plus an update on the lobster wars
Illustration by Katie Carey
If you feel happy when gazing at your collection of tchotchkes and your overstuffed book shelves, congratulations, you’re trendy. Apartment Therapy suggests we embrace “recluttering.” In 2021, Mireille Silcoff saw the shift toward stuff coming, with “More Is More: The End of Minimalism”:
It does feel like the finger-wagging minimalism that informed the housewares and home design market for over a decade—lining everywhere from Ikea to Ethan Allen with sober greige pottery and righteously untreated wood—is losing relevance while its opposite is gaining currency. For a few years now, the rooms featured on popular decor sites and the homes of style influencers like Aurora James or Cara Delevingne have been wilfully diverse, drunk on self-expression, and packed with stuff—places where messy bedrooms are displayed as a sign of life rather than a problem to be fixed. [Read more]
A piece in the Guardian argues that we should abolish genres when it comes to fiction, calling the “literary fiction” label the worst offender. Snobbery and commercial success often come up in debates around book categories. In 2018, Mica Lemiski suggested thrillers and other popular genres deserve more respect:
Most of my friends and I are “literary folk.” Many of us have master’s degrees in creative writing, and we pride ourselves on our knowledge of books. Yet none of my friends had heard of Kelley Armstrong until I brought her up. Since reading This Fallen Prey, I’ve thought at length about this lack of knowledge. I wish I had read Bitten when I was a teenager. As a fifteen-year-old, I could have related to a character whose body transformed in a way she couldn’t control. Today, I don’t typically find myself drawn to fantasy, thriller, sci-fi or anything that feels “larger than life,” but sometimes I wonder if that’s because the inclination to read those books has been trained out of me by academia. [Read more]
Love ’em or hate ’em, Christmas carols are everywhere this time of year. Self-proclaimed Christmas music nerd Nora Loreto is firmly in the love camp. In “The Surprising History of Christmas Carols,” she delved into her favourites as well as what makes these songs so timeless:
Even though [the Pogues’] Christmas classic, “Fairytale of New York,” gets less love online, it instantly launches me into the holiday spirit. …Its protagonist spends Christmas Eve in a New York City drunk tank—a particularly appropriate way to spend the holidays if we want to get traditional about it.
Most people might not count “All I Want for Christmas Is You” or “Fairytale of New York” among the traditional canon of Christmas music. But both these songs, in their joyousness, expressions of love and longing, catchiness, and even the drunkenness of the latter, are closer to the origins of Christmas carols than you might expect. [Read more]
A constitutional challenge that could be pivotal for First Nations across the Maritimes is heading to court. Tensions between Indigenous fishers and government officials as well as non-Indigenous fishers have spiked in recent years. The conflicts centre around whether Indigenous fishers require licences or if their fishing rights are protected by treaties and the Constitution. For a primer, read “The New Lobster Wars” by Zoe Heaps Tennant:
The DFO’s routine seizure of traps, lobsters, and sometimes boats and trucks forces Mi’kmaw fishers off the water, at least for a time. “By charging people and taking them to court, you get them off the water,” says Simone Poliandri, an associate professor of anthropology at Bridgewater State University whose research focuses on Mi’kmaw rights and who spent the summer of 2000 on boats with Mi’kmaw lobster fishers. This approach by the DFO, says Poliandri, is similar to the tactics used in the United States, in the 1970s, by the FBI to suppress Indigenous activists in the American Indian Movement, which sought to address issues of systemic racism against Indigenous people. It has the effect of tying up their time and resources and taking them away from fishing, says Poliandri. If fishers are fighting charges in court and spending money on lawyers, they don’t have the time or the resources to fish. [Read more]