Saturday Night In the skin of an elephant: literary daredevil Barbara Gowdy has a reputation for making the bazarre seem perfectly normal. Now she’s written a novel about the extradordinary adventures of ordinary African elephants Nickson, Elizabeth. Saturday Night. Toronto: Sep 1998. Vol. 113, Iss. 7; pg. 56 Abstract (Summary) Not exactly fully formed out of Zeus’s forehead. Her first novel, the “atrociously titled” (as Gowdy herself puts it) Through the Green Valley, published in 1988, was a capable historical romance written with the financial support of ...

The National Post How I got real in ’80s SoHo:; When We Were 20 Elizabeth Nickson. National Post. Don Mills, Ont.: Nov 15, 2003.  Abstract (Summary) It was a distinctly non-verbal culture. Jay McInerny and Tama Janowitz were late arrivals, and arguably never found another subject. It was all about how you looked, and what you made: music and art, design and fashion that threw the culture back in its face. Everything had to subvert. Andy Warhol, the Prince of Subversion, ...

The Globe and Mail Diana: saint or slut? A year after her death, ghouls of various stripe keep digging at the grave of the late, and moistly lamented, Princess of Wales. For some, like Lady Colin Campbell, she was a deceitful nymphomaniac; for others, like Julie Burchill, she exposed the hypocrisy of the upper class.  Elizabeth Nickson. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont. Abstract (Summary) Lady ’s gluttonous sexual ...

Tatler Crisis looms in sun-kissed Monaco. With the Monegasques crying out for a Grace Kelly figurehead, Crown Prince Albert is still having difficulties with girls – like Elizabeth Nickson. The warmth emanating from the phone was palpable. After all, Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, the Marquis des Baux, Crown Prince of Monaco has been overshadowed, public relations-wise, by the torments and triumphs of their Serene Altesses Caroline and Stephanie. Nadia LaCoste, the acid-breathing dragon who has guarded ...

Harper’s Magazine A Northwestern island doth suffer a sea change Prologue Just off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, twenty sea miles and an entire dimensional journey from Seattle, lies an island known as Salt Spring. It is the largest of an archipelago of several dozen such islands that reaches from Seattle toward Alaska. In the United States these islands are called the San Juans; in Canada they are called the Gulf Islands. The archipelago travels up through ...

National Post Abstract (Summary) Four years ago, Sammy Morita, the son of the founder of Sony, bought a traditional fishing lodge on a big, old barge, which every summer was towed out of the harbour at Prince Rupert to Barnard Bay, a couple of hundred kilometres south. Then Sammy proceeded to spend money, US$5-million to be more or less exact. And he turned the old fishing lodge into a staff lodge and built another, much more luxurious, ...

National Post Abstract (Summary) Will she ever abdicate in favour of , Her True Story, she was said to be thinking of it. At the time, researching a profile of the Queen for Chatelaine, I called around various courtiers and friends of the Queen to ask just that question. They avoided me, or hung up on me, until one finally said, thoroughly exasperated, “Don’t ...

Humans do everything badly. The ideas start out well – full integration of Black people into the culture – which almost immediately end with knife fights and a race war in the streets. On television these days, which I only watch walking by the tv room, almost all the people in ads are black and most of the couples are mixed-race. Same with the current throwaway entertainment on the subscription networks. In ...

Last night I am watching American Idol with Jamie who is irritated because I am giggling like a five year old at Instagram Reels or TikTok while he is trying to have a lovely sentimental moment. What stops me is this ginormous black kid with the voice of an angel who starts Stand Up!, the Oscar winning song from Harriet, the biopic of Harriet Tubman, undisputed heroine of the Underground Railroad. I tried to ...

For the past year I’ve engaged in a process of withdrawal from violent or frightening-in-any-way-television. I haven’t been to the movies for years. The last I remember were the televised National Theatre productions beamed out to us provincials in the netherlands where non-progs and pencil-necked turkey farmers live. Last one was Kenneth Branagh playing Macbeth in a set that looked like a barn. It was not fun. And the tragedy was buried under so many ...