AUTHORS

Norbert Ruebsaat

ABOUT

Norbert Ruebsaat has written many articles for Geist. He lived in Vancouver and taught at Simon Fraser University.


Norbert Ruebsaat
Dispatches
Horror Show

When we hitchhiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dashboards flickered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imagined, knew everything there was to know about electricity.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Essays
Media Studies

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Dispatches
Ursula

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Dispatches
Berlin Diary

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neigh

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Eros the Bittersweet

Ann Carson has written a sensual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can't theorize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to theorize about desire) that

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Gentle Northern Summer

Recently I was thinking about the difference between Brecht's poetics and Rilke's. Brecht seems to be entirely ironic.... This conundrum came back to me when I read George Stanley's Gentle Northern Summer (New Star), which is a beautiful and powerful

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Golden Voice

Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Hello, I Must Be Going

In August 2006, in a former miner’s hall in Silverton, B.C., across Slocan Lake from New Denver Glacier in the Valhalla Range, a group of us listened to Bessie Wapp’s one-woman show, Hello, I Must Be Going, which recalls to life the voices of four Je

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Ice & Fire

Over Christmas I read my friend Stephen Osborne’s book Ice & Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press), which is also a Geist Book, and felt I was reading a handshake: familiar and new.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
The Emigrants

In “Ambros Adelwarth,” the third story in The Emigrants (New Directions), W. G. Sebald quotes long excerpts from the titular character’s purported diary, and this character’s diction and cadences duplicate Sebald’s so exactly that one feels uneasy w

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Women With Men

Richard Ford (who I always think is John Ford) writes stories in the third person which read like stories in the first person, and I wanted to find out how and why he did this. I read the first story in his book Women With Men (Little, Brown) in Aust

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Slow Man

The ending of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (Secker & Warburg) is disappointing only because the rest of the novel is so good. The main character, Paul Rayment, suffers a crippling bike accident, becomes infatuated with his care nurse and declares his lov

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
The Reader

My friend wrote that the first part of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Vintage) is "brilliantly erotic, hauntingly poetic and very romantic." Part Two, my friend wrote, is "a hideous trial of Germans by Germans. Post-war youth condemned their parents

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
The Salt Men of Tibet

After the salt men pass a certain rock they all speak the salt language. Women are not allowed to hear this language, nor are they allowed to look in the direction of the lake where the salt language is spoken....The film is called The Salt Men of Ti

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
The Short Version: An ABC Book

Stan Persky’s The Short Version: An ABC Book (New Star Books) is a “miscellany” that Persky defines as a book “composed in alphabetically arranged entries of indeterminate length that can run from an aphorism to a complete essay or story.” Persky got

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Then We Take Berlin

Stan Persky has been hailed as a great prose stylist. He has also been hailed as a possible pervert (the word wasn't used, but that was the implication) for his interest in young boys. Young men, rather. Male prostitutes. Both statements are true. Th

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Topic Sentence: A Writer's Education

I first read Stan Persky’s essay/story “Topic Sentence” in

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Travels in the Skin Trade

Thai prostitutes offer love and affection as well as sexual gratification to their Western clients, and it is this combination, I learned while reading Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (Pluto Press), that causes the farangs (a Thai word f

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna

Adolf Hitler is the second man examined in the film Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna by Manfred Becker, which played recently at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver. Both the narrator of the film and the psychologist who spoke after the scree

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case

Stan Persky and John Dixon ask important questions in their book On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (New Star). Is possession of a photograph depicting a criminal act a criminal act?

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Modern Egyptian Art

It seems ironic that an authoritative history of modern Egyptian art should be written on the west coast of Canada, until one reads Modern Egyptian Art by Liliane Karnouk (American University in Cairo Press) and realizes that Egyptian artists, citize

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Boyhood: a Memoir

J.M. Coetzee has written a boyhood memoir in the third person, and this is no mean feat; nor is it a postmodern "novel." This could have to do with the fact that Boyhood: a Memoir (Vintage) is set in South Africa, a country where life and history sti

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
British Columbia, a Natural History

Natural history writers often write as if nature were a nineteenth-century corporation. Species “colonize” territory left bare by glaciers; these “pioneer species” establish “dominance,” only to be “displaced” by “opportunistic newcomers” who “invade

Norbert Ruebsaat
Essays
Burma Media Event

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Dispatches
Caleb and Opa on Holiday

Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Errata

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews George Bowering's Errata (1988).

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Elizabeth Costello

In Coetzee’s most recent book, Elizabeth Costello, the main character—“she, Elizabeth Costello”—wonders if she is “a light spirit,” and I like this idea. Elizabeth Costello is not called a novel either, although on the dust jacket Coetzee is describe

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
A Chorus of StonesA Chorus of Stones

Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones (Anchor Books), is a long meditation on war. She takes war into her self, into her body, and in writing about it she seems to give birth to it.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
A Reading Diary

A few years ago Alberto Manguel reread twelve of his favourite books and kept a monthly diary in which he wrote about what he was reading and about the life events surrounding the reading; the result was A Reading Diary (Knopf), and I didn’t notice u

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
A Short History of Progress

The most disturbing section of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (House of Anansi) is the story of the Easter Islanders who, three hundred years before contact with Europeans, felled the last tree on their formerly verdant island and in so

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Adaptation

I went to see the film Adaptation because it was recommended by a friend who thought I would like it because it was multilevelled, and I have been trying to find a way to tell him why I didn’t. Adaptation is about a Hollywood scriptwriter who tries t

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Almost a Childhood

The editor and friend who told me to read Hans-Georg Behr’s Almost a Childhood (Granta Books) gave me good advice: Behr remembers things I can’t imagine being able to remember, and offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between memory and

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Autobiography of a Tattoo

Norbert Ruesbaat's Christmas book was Stan Persky’s Autobiography of a Tattoo. He read it twice, and then went back and read many parts a third time.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Private Confessions

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Real World Happiness

Norbert Ruebsaat learns that true happiness requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour” in Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness.

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Norbert Ruebsaat
Gaza 2
Norbert Ruebsaat
Reflexive Polyphony
Norbert Ruebsaat walks through George Stanley’s Vancouver
Norbert Ruebsaat
Gaza
Norbert Ruebsaat
Poetry and Truth 3: Smart People
What kind of smart are you? A blogger and his grandson discuss the mysteries of the brain.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice II: Call and Response
The Poetry and Truth blogger takes up the question of “pop” vs. “poetry.” Join the discussion in the comments section.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice
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