A Message from the Camosun College Student Society: September 9, 2015

Welcome to a new semester at Camosun College! We look forward to meeting you this year! Students often ask what it is we do, so we thought this would be a great time to introduce ourselves. The purpose of the Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) is to make Camosun a community rather than just an […]

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Lit Matters: John Gardner on monsters and men

American novelist, essayist, poet, and critic John Gardner is perhaps best known for his novel Grendel, in which he constructs the world of Beowulf from the perspective of a sensitive, curious monster. Grendel, who has a love/hate relationship with his terrible mother and hangs out with a philosophizing dragon, gives us a unique chance to […]

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Lit Matters: The fantastic humanity of Bohumil Hrabal

“I was always lucky in my bad luck,” quipped Bohumil Hrabal, a Czech writer famous for his lovable characters and raucous plots. In his novels, a wastepaper compacter quotes philosophy, a man narrates a whole book in a single sentence, and an innocent, clumsy young train-station attendant manages to blow up a Nazi munitions train, […]

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Lit Matters: Umberto Eco and the power of learning

“To survive, you must tell stories,” wrote Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar and novelist best known for mind-bending intellectual thrillers like The Name of the Rose. Eco, born in 1932, is a titan of 20th-century intellectual history and continues to make scholarly contributions to a boggling array of disciplines; his personal library includes some 50,000 […]

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Lit Matters: Sjón and the natural history of poetry

“I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!” So declares a character in The Blue Fox, a novella by the Icelandic author known by his pen name, Sjón. The statement is typical of Sjón, who is as interested in the natural world as he is in the world of poetry and myth. Sjón […]

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The Prodigal Planeswalker: Let’s not forget Timmy

In a previous column I delved into the different player archetypes of Magic: The Gathering. I exalted the virtues of being a “Johnny” player and how my 60-card deck is an expression of my creativity, versus the “Spike” player with their in-it-to-win-it competitive nature. But it’s common to forget about “Timmy.” According to Magic: The […]

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Ability’s Muse: Searching for authenticity

Have you ever gazed upon a portrait of a person and had the figure stare back at you? Did it give you a creepy chill or a warm sense of belonging? That effect is the kind that organizational culture has on us. A truly diverse organizational experience should be much like a painting; every brush […]

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Bite Me: Garrick’s Head tops the English-style pub heap

In Victoria we have so many options for places to go to experience the traditional English pub atmosphere, but my top choice out of them all would be the Garrick’s Head Pub. Garrick’s has been a local fixture since 1867, is known as one of oldest English-style pubs in Canada, and is located in the […]

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Lit Matters: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s flights of fancy

‘‘All grownups were first children, but few of them remember it,’’ wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French novelist and pilot who is best remembered for his moving children’s fable The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry was an aviation pioneer in the 1920s and 1930s, flying at a time when being a pilot was a rough and adventurous […]

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20 Years Ago In Nexus: April 1, 2015 issue

Usually bathroom graffiti is much more intelligent: The main cover story in our April 3, 1995 issue, “Hate graffiti sparks student outrage,” was about how graffiti targeting “people with disabilities, women, ethnic groups, and homosexuals” had been popping up around campus. “It’s scary that people have these ideas,” said student Nick Yaremchuk, who brought the […]

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