Sunday, February 12, 2012

Biblophile: Enough Canadiana to Bury You Alive Pt III

And here we are, 8000 entries in, and still in the HVs. And we're still in social issues: homelessness, drinking addictions, youth services. There's a lot on domestic abuse. I mean hundreds of entries. Man. The economic stuff was boring, but this is kind of soul-destroying. Then there's crime in general. For example:
Neighbourhood characteristics and the distribution of crime in Saskatoon [electronic resource] / by Mathieu Charron. Ottawa, Ont. : Statistics Canada, 2008
This book contains such cheery statistics as Saskatoon having the highest crime rate in metropolitan Canada (circa 2001). Most crimes are reported in the downtown area, Idlywyld Drive strip, and the Confederation Mall, which will probably be uninteresting to almost all of my regular readers, and no surprise to the others.

After that, we go from gun trafficking to gun violence to cyber-crime. There's a large amount of stuff on youth violence, and more than a few on Omar Khadr. Now we're finally out of the Hs, and the J begins with a focus on election participation and federal government policies. There's about a dozen books on senate reform. And some more on immigrant retention in Canadian cities. The general subject of immigration gives over for a section on legal aid. From there, we segue naturally into issue of law in general, from online access to ageism. 1000 or so entries later, we're onto educational issues.

I love you, Brad, but you reduce my student loan eligibility [electronic resource] : the perils of marriage in Canadian student assistance programs / Alex Usher. Stafford, Va. ; Toronto, Ont. : Educational Policy Institute, c2004
Oh, I like that title.


Further subtopics include literacy rates, post-secondary access, learning disabilities, adult learning, and then finally we're into the "M" section, and music studies. Unfortunately, I'm not typically interested in music and art, so we'll just keep moving.

Capital and affects : the politics of the language economy / Christian Marazzi ; translated and with an introduction by Giuseppina Mecchia. Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e) ; Cambridge, Mass. : Distributed by the MIT Press, c2011.
Mentioned because I thought Marazzi was one of the repeated scholars mentioned in Cary Wolfe's What is Posthumanism? That turned out to be completely wrong. He's actually a world-renowned scholar on the subject of Post-Fordist economies. It's not directly related to my studies, but if someone's interested in David Harvey type analysis, it would probably be a good read. (Not sure why it's in the literature section, but whatever. I suppose it's sneaking in under the subtitle label of "language.")

Kiss my relics : hermaphroditic fictions of the middle ages / David Rollo. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2011.
Heh.

Nazisploitation! : the Nazi image in low-brow cinema and culture / edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt. New York, N.Y. : Continuum International Pub. Group, c2012.
I like this, as a topic. I remember reading in a message board recently an impassioned argument that we've lost the ability to make fun of the Nazis as we move away from them, that we can't respond to their atrocities with anything but somber reflection, but this book seems to suggest that the mockery is alive and well. There's some of the usual suspects: Captain America comics, Inglorious Basterds. I was hoping for something on videogames, because Nazis rank behind zombies as the number 1 shooter villain, traditionally, but alas, it was not to be.


Stories : all-new tales / edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. 1st Harper Perennial ed. New York : Harper Perennial, 2011, c2010.
I'm not big on short story anthologies as a general rule, but Neil Gaiman as editor catches my eye. The concept here is that they're getting famous, respected authors to write something fantasy-based, and they've put together a pretty impressive collection: Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Adams, Jodi Picoult, Chuck Palahniuk, Gene Wolfe, and Joe Hill, among many others. Literature's not really my focus any more, but this one's almost too good to pass up. Make a mental note, self.

And on that high note, we finish the third part of the catalogue odyssey. Join me, if you will, for part IV... tomorrow. Or tomorrowish. Whenever.

Later Days.

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