Patrick Lohier – Page 3 – Fiction, reviews, essays and ideas

The Normalization of Mass Surveillance | Sep 16, 2014

In early September, following the release of a video showing NFL running back Ray Rice hitting his wife Janay Rice in an elevator, the Baltimore Ravens terminated Rice’s contract and the NFL suspended him indefinitely from the league.

This follows an event in April, when an audio recording of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend V. Stiviano not to bring black people to games was made public. Sterling was banned from the NBA and the league is currently working to finalize the sale of the team to a new owner.

The following month Solange Knowles, the younger sister of Beyonce Knowles, appeared in a surveillance video attacking her brother-in-law, rap impresario Jay Z, in an elevator following the Met Ball. The footage exploded onto both gossip and news sites and sparked a storm of conjecture about what happened that night.

You’ll see a pattern here. Continue reading “The Normalization of Mass Surveillance | Sep 16, 2014”

Review of the graphic novel ‘Sugar Skull’ and interview with Charles Burns for Boing Boing | Aug 22, 2014

For over 30 years, Charles Burns has quietly carved out a reputation as one of the most talented and compelling cartoonists of his generation. In 2010, X’ed Out appeared, billed as the first installment of a trilogy. The second installment, The Hive, appeared in 2012. The last installment of the trilogy, Sugar Skull, is due out this September from Pantheon. Read my review of Sugar Skull here.

Review of Monia Mazigh’s novel ‘Mirrors and Mirages’ for the National Post | Jul 25, 2014

To some in the West, the traditional clothes of Muslim women, the hijab and the niqab, are symbols of “the other,” anxiety-provoking obstacles. For many, the clothing incites curiosity: what are the unique experiences of Muslim women? In her newly translated novel Mirrors and Mirages Monia Mazigh reveals the personal and intimate lives of an ensemble of Muslim women in Canada. Read my review of Mirrors and Mirages here.

Review of ‘Roth Unbound: The Writer and His Books’ for Harvard Review | Nov 27, 2013

Philip Roth has been firmly ensconced in America’s literary pantheon for over fifty years. In her new book, Roth Unbound: The Writer and His Books, New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us an excellent survey of Roth’s life and work. Read my review here.

Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013

Over the past few months, millions of Americans have discovered that their government is willing and able to spy on them as well as on the populations of other countries. This comes as a surprise to many.

For the nearly 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the majority of Americans have enjoyed strong legal supports of our civil liberties. We have lived with Constitutional amendments and legal requirements for due process designed to bar or at least curtail undue search, seizure, surveillance and other intrusions on our persons, property and privacy. These rights were perceived as congruent with our most basic tenet, that we are all equal, that no one has the right to intercept our emails, or invade our privacy other than with a legally obtained warrant, obtainable only after establishing probable cause. Many of us had come to believe that these protections were ironclad and non-negotiable.

But at some point unnoticed, or simply obscured by the fog of over a dozen years of the War on Terror, the rules changed. Our confidence that we enjoy inalienable rights to privacy is evaporating. Although every once and a while we are made aware of secret executive orders, directives and programs that delimit our civil liberties, it’s still unclear how we lost so much so fast. Continue reading “Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013”

Review of Steven Millhauser’s Story Collection ‘We Others’ for The Globe & Mail | Sep 7, 2011

Steven Millhauser is a master at creating fantastic and enchanting stories task management tool. His novels and stories are often preoccupied with oddities: circuses and carnivals, sideshows, nickelodeons, magicians, and builders of automata, zoetropes and other animating and esoteric technologies. Read my review of his short story collection We Others here.

Review of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life’ for The Common Review | Mar 20, 2010

Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life is the third installment of J.M. Coetzee’s memoirs, following on Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002). Summertime pursues further the themes touched on in these earlier volumes: maturation, solitude and alienation, family dynamics, the outsider and the artist in society, South African politics, racism, sex, ideas of home and homeland, and exile. Taken together, the books offer a multivolume portrait of the artist.

They follow an arc across decades from Coetzee’s boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s through his maturity in the 1970s. Over this period he struggles to define himself as an individual, tries to make his way in the world, pursues grand literary ambitions, tallies up unsatisfying love affairs, makes compromises, and suffers humiliations and setbacks. A complex, enigmatic, and creative human being emerges in Coetzee’s own account. Continue reading “Review of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life’ for The Common Review | Mar 20, 2010”

Review of ‘Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters’ for The Georgia Review | Jan 30, 2010

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia University in 1944. Thereafter, they kept in contact through an urgent, almost frenzied exchange of letters. Among the distinguishing features of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, is that two-thirds of the 182 letters gathered here have never been published before. Continue reading “Review of ‘Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters’ for The Georgia Review | Jan 30, 2010”

Review of Thomas Trofimuk’s novel ‘Waiting for Columbus’ for The Globe & Mail | Aug 28, 2009

Late in Thomas Trofimuk’s novel, Waiting for Columbus, one of the main characters, a psychiatric nurse named Consuela Lopez, notices a group of patients where she works at the Sevilla Institute for the Mentally Ill, in Spain, working together to solve a puzzle: “There is a small gaggle of puzzlers across the room, patiently placing puzzle pieces, rotating, trying again and again to make the picture complete.” Read my review of Waiting for Columbus here.

Review of Mohsin Hamid’s novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ for The Globe & Mail | Apr 14, 2007

Novels are uniquely suited to depict the complexities of mind and motivation behind events such as 9/11: John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and a few others have set their sights on the personal perspective in a post-9/11 world. We should now add to this growing list of ambitious writers the lesser-known, but very talented Mohsin Hamid. Read my review of his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist here.