One afternoon in 2017, while visiting Alberta’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, I took shelter from the rain in Glyde Hall, the visual-arts building. Deep in the basement, near the ceramic and paper-making studios, I came across something odd.
Rock, from the nearby mountains, was coming out of the floor. Not a wee chunk but a huge shelf of limestone, tall and wide enough for at least six people to climb onto without feeling crowded. This, in the middle of a workspace. Embedded in the rock, I later learned, are around 300-million-year-old fossils: stromatoporoids from a reef environment of the Paleozoic era, back when Banff was undersea. Tectonic forces brought the limestone up to where it is now. What I was seeing was an architectural hack: they built the basement around the rock to save having to blast through it. But the effect was deeper and weirder, science-fictional as if the rock had pushed into the building like the Blob, oozing through a crack in the floor.
Bu hikaye The Walrus dergisinin April 2020 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The Walrus dergisinin April 2020 sayısından alınmıştır.
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MY GUILTY PLEASURE
I WAS AS SURPRISED as anyone when I became obsessed with comics again last year, at the advanced age of forty-five. As a kid, I loved reading G.I. Joe and The Amazing Spider-Man.
The Upside-Down Book
In her new novel, Rachel Cusk makes the case for becoming a stranger to yourself
Pick a Colour
BACK HERE, I can hear a group of women trickle in. Filling the floor with giggles and voices.
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The Briefcase
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Blood Language
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Dream Machines
The real threat with artificial intelligence is that we'll fall prey to its hype
Invisible Lives
Without immigration status, Canada's undocumented youth stay in the shadows
My Guilty Pleasure
"The late nights are mine alone, and I'll spend them however I damn well please"
