An assortment of cagey, interesting, scathing, and downright inspirational links.

— Our friends at Edmonton’s Lit Fest are winding down their festival this weekend. You should check the schedule for this weekend’s events.

— Carmine Starnino was gracious enough to post a transcript of Susan Glickman’s introduction at the launch of Sumptuary Laws, a new collection of poetry by Nyla Matuk. The last paragraph is especially great. Anybody in E-Town read Suptuary Laws yet? Here’s the Amazon link.

— Todd Babiak has a new website: Magpie Town. It is a wonderfully written and insightful blog about living and working in Edmonton. It is, in short, an answer to the question, “why do we live here?”. To wit: His latest post, Hot Rum Optional, poses a question to all Edmontonians: What are you doing to celebrate our winter? I propose a toga party with parkas instead of togas, live-streamed from Churchill Square. Big bonfires and giant vats of hot toddys. Wooden clubs and lots of yelling would also be involved.

Interesting idea from the Virgina Quarterly Review:

This month, a new experiment in digital storytelling has launched: The Silent History. Described as a serialized, exploratory novel for iPad and iPhone, this stand-alone app delivers brief installments to your iOS device over a period of six months. The app itself is free and comes stocked with two brief videos as well a prologue to get you hooked. After that, you pay per volume ($1.99) or for the entire series ($8.99) to start reading.

The future of storytelling? Atwood, what say you about that?

— An interesting post from Scott Berkun on the idea of “being spiritual” as opposed to be “being religious”. A binary choice? Is “being spritual” a cop-out?

— If you read one restaurant review this week, make it this wonderfully scathing screed by Joshua David Stein on Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant in New York, “a restaurant that would be indicted for crimes against humanity, if only that crime fell within the Department of Health’s purview.”

— We here at PoFest central try to stay on-topic and Canadian, but this one made the rounds on FB and Twitter and it’s worth linking to. After the last presidential debate, American pundit and shit-stirrer Ann Coulter posted a tweet that referred to Barak Obama as a “retard”. Here is a response from Tim Shriver of the Special Olympics. Dignified, restrained, and deeply charitable.

And that’s all for today. Thanks for reading.