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published by The Geist Foundation publisher Stephen Osborne senior editor Mary Schendlinger executive director Patty Osborne associate editor C.E. Coughlan assistant editor Sarah Maitland advertising sales Trevor Battye office manager & reader services Kristin Cheung accountant Mindy Abramowitz, cga administrative assistants Alison Dowsett, Erinna Gilkison, Debby Reis interns Todd Coyne, Kate Reid, Josh Wallaert editorial board Kevin Barefoot, Jill Boettger, Marisa Chandler, Carla Elm Clement, Brad Cran, Laurie Edwards, Melissa Edwards, Mary Alice Elcock, Robert Everett-Green, Derek Fairbridge, Daniel Francis, Helen Godolphin, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Michal Kozlowski, Brian Lam, Sarah Leavitt, Thad McIlroy, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peterson, Leah Rae, Craig Riggs, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito, Kaleigh Wisman, Barbara Zatyko first subscriber Jane Springer web architects Ross Merriam, Ryan Weal cover Steffen Quong, Rebecca Dolen composition Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada printed in canada by Hemlock Printers

Volume 18

Number 72

Spring 2009

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Stephen Osborne 10 The Future Is Uncertain Country Michal Kozlowski 13 Pleasant Artistic Experience Rose Hunter 14 Big Red Linda Solomon 16 Nobody’s Fault David Albahari 18 Stroke of History Gina Partridge and 20 Paid Relationship Shelley Kozlowski David Koulack 21 Vacuum Guy FINDINGS

Andrew Nikiforuk, 22 Let Us Begin, Brave New Landscape, Andrew Emond, Old Man, Ven BegamudrĂŠ, At 30, Dupuy & Berberian, Charging to the Light, Gil Adamson, Work-in-Progress, Seth, Four Tiny Plays Craig Taylor SHORT LONG-DISTANCE WINNERS

Terri Favro 53 Stardust Christopher Geisel 54 The Other James Buchanan Shana Myara 55 Miracles, Plural Judith Penner 56 Misericordia COMMENT

Evelyn Lau 63 Love Song to America Alberto Manguel 65 A Fairy Tale for Our Time Stephen Henighan 66 The Colonized Investor George Fetherling 68 The Daily Apocalypse

DEPARTMENTS

6 Letters Eve Corbel 57 True Funnies Lu Qi 61 In Camera The Usual Gang 71 Endnotes Meandricus 87 Puzzle

geist.com

Melissa Edwards 88 Caught Mapping

FEATURES

Stranger Song 32 Close encounters with Cohen Ann Diamond October 1970: War Measures enacted by a flower-child prime minister, hallucinogens and armed soldiers in the street, Leonard Cohen in a black Volkswagen Beetle at the corner of Bishop and Sherbrooke; magic in the air.

Five Stories, Nine Selves 39 Endless reels of selves and selves and selves . . .

Sina Queyras She heads back down to her loft in the meat-packing district next to Julianna’s.

Or is it uptown to a tiny but perfect apartment where she lives with her lawyer husband and they take dancing lessons with a little old man, wiry as a yogi?

Memory in Belgrade 42 Photographing memory Goran Basaric A photographer returns to the city of his childhood, where everything seems new, even when it is familiar: streets renamed for old kings, new neighbourhoods bursting with new kids, the city buzzing with a new language.

The Obama Dreams 58 Political subconscious Sheila Heti In dreams the president has bright green dreadlocks COVER IMAGE

Geist Goes Green The new cover design is the work of Steffen Quong, with art created by Rebecca Dolen, and features several styles and weights of the Bodoni and Nobel font families. The issue number is set in Blender. Steffen Quong is a freelance designer in Vancouver; his website is steffenquong.com. Rebecca Dolen is an artist and co-proprietor of the Regional Assembly of Text (assemblyoftext.com).

With this issue, Geist moves to eco-friendly paper and vegetable-based inks: inside stock is Harbor 40 Offset (40% post-consumer fibre); cover stock is Harbour 100 Cover (100% post-consumer fibre).

LETTERS

GEIST

Readers Write

Geist is published four times a year by The Geist Foundation.

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Guidelines are also available at geist.com. issn 1181-6554.

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Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings.

Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #200 – 341 Water Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1b8.

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The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the B.C. Arts Council and the B.C. Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (pap) and the Canada Magazine Fund.

special thanks to the tula foundation

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Sleeping dogs in India. Photo by Barbara Small.

MOVI NG PI CTURES t’s a coincidence that Stephen Osborne’s piece about the tourist who in 1909 was hit and killed by Vancouver’s new auto ambulance (“Signs and Portents,” Geist 71) appeared in the same issue as the announcement for the release of the dvd City Reflections. Whenever we show the film, the ambulance incident seems to come up. The film was shot from the front of a moving streetcar, and horses, buggies, pedestrians and dogs can be seen darting across the streetcar’s path, so someone inevitably asks whether collisions occurred. Indeed they did; more frequently, buggies had to swerve to avoid streetcars, as did the brand-new ambulance in the 1909 incident.

Whenever we tell the ambulance story, the room erupts in laughter. Chuck Davis, the Vancouver writer and historian, tells it beautifully in that wonderful voice he has, and people always laugh out loud even though a man was killed. I’m sure readers had a good chuckle with Osborne’s article too.

Says something about our reaction to tragic events of long ago, doesn’t it?

—Wes Knapp, Vancouver Historical Society

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City Reflections is available off the shelf and online from Videomatica.com. Read “Signs and Portents” and other writings by Stephen Osborne at geist.com/author/osborne-stephen.

S I G NI FI CA NT T I M ES want to say how much I enjoyed and was moved by Alberto Manguel’s sympathetic and intelligent piece on Mahmoud Darwish (“In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish,” No. 70). It is a great shame that Darwish, a splendid poet and ardent supporter of the liberation of Palestine, is not better known in the West. His passion and compassion, the breadth and depth of his emotions, make him a truly great writer. What was significantly “un-Western” was the outpouring of grief and respect for Darwish upon his death. Perhaps this is an indication that for some people poetry really matters, that the poet is seen as someone who can make a difference in society—a view expressed hundreds of years ago by Ben Jonson, but not much noticed today in our consumer-driven world. Mahmoud Darwish projected far beyond his own experiences to a universality of suffering under the yoke of the occupier—military or

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LETTERS

cultural. Truly significant times need truly significant poets, and Darwish was one of them.

—John Butler, Winnipeg Read Alberto Manguel’s work online at geist.com/author/manguel-alberto.

hard as Slumdog Millionaire did— complicated or maybe intensified by the fact that I know something about the people who inspired the story. As they say, or used to say, you rule.

—Mike Matthews, Nanaimo BC

DOG DAYS esterday I threw Geist 71 into my bag as I ran out the door for an afternoon of errands and appointments, and while I waited to open a new bank account, I read “Elegy for a Poodle” by Gary Barwin.

It’s almost a year to the day that our black Lab died, and I miss him, but not as much as I thought I would (especially on those rainy Vancouver mornings). Barwin nailed it when he wrote, “I am also reminded that we have lost those times in the life of our family.” That’s what I miss too. Thanks for another insightful article.

—Barbara Small, Vancouver

I was pleased to find and read a great Geist article, “How We Imagine Ourselves” by Howard White (No. 13, published in 1994), especially because it mentioned my uncle George (Panicky) Bell.

He was married to my aunt Carolyn and logged with Frank White, Howard’s father. My father logged on the B.C. coast for many years too.

The old-time loggers like Panicky Bell, “One Corn Stan” (another of my uncles), and others had some great stories. Thanks from a peripatetic expat Canadian.

—Ken Bloomfield, Vonore TN Read Howard White’s article at geist.com/ essays/how-we-imagine-ourselves.

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GEIST G EMS his is the first time I have visited your web page and I really enjoyed “Kewpie Doll” by Lindsay Diehl!

—Ally Anderson, Ottawa Read “Kewpie Doll,” a runner-up in the 2nd annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest, at geist.com/postcards/kewpie-doll.

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I must say I felt a bit humbled by much of the content in No. 71. My cover image is outshone by “Beatrice Street,” Anne Grant’s portrait photographs from Vancouver East, and Albuquerque, 1972, the dog image by Lee Friedlander (a hero). Another great issue, I thought, as I paged through it.

—John Conway, Ottawa There were many fine things in No. 71, most of all “Dave Is Dead,” by Jonny Diamond. It is a marvel; it hits me as

POLE STARS he January edition of the newsletter for the film BLAST! opens with a photo of me reading Geist in Antarctica (see below), where part of the film was shot. The hut in the background, still stocked with food and tools, with a pile of hundred-year-old seal carcasses by

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Mark Halpern and Geist in Antarctica.

Photo by Jeff Klein.

the front door intended for food and fuel, is Discovery Hut, also known as Scott’s Hut, the depot for Robert Falcon Scott’s unsuccessful attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole.

We went to Antarctica to fly a telescope from a balloon, to look for starburst galaxies, which formed huge numbers of stars when the universe was just a kid—only one-tenth of its present age. Amazingly, the experiment worked.

—Mark Halpern, Physics and Astronomy, UBC, Vancouver ANACHRONISMS n her letter titled “The Oops Files” (Letters, No. 71), Marion Pilger mentions a mistake that was made in an issue of New Trail, the University of Alberta’s alumni magazine, in 1984.

Another “oops” that appeared in a later issue of the magazine is one I hesitate to draw attention to, out of respect for the then editor and the magazine, but in view of Mrs. Pilger’s letter I think I can disclose it at this time. Her husband, Rick, a long-time editor of New Trail, was kind enough to publish a piece of mine in the winter 2000–2001 issue. This article was humorous in nature (I hope), but an extra humorous element was unintentionally added: an illustration of me working on a laptop. Why was this funny? Because the article described where my wife and I lived after we were married—in 1960! Just think; the only laptop computer in the world, and it’s owned by an undergraduate at the University of Alberta. On the other hand, the illustrator also gave me more hair than I have ever had in my life, which was a boost to my ego, so I guess you could say that in this case two wrongs did make a right. Thanks again, Rick, for publishing my piece; all is forgiven!

—Charles Crockford, Waterloo

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LETTERS

FROTH I NGS was surprised to see that Geist published (Letters, No. 70) Patrick Larkin’s inaccurate (if not wacky) response to my essay “The Imprint of Foxes,” which appeared not in Geist but in CNQ (Canadian Notes and Queries). Any thinking person who reads the “The Imprint of Foxes” may find arguments inviting contestation, but surely she will see something more than the deformation Mr. Larkin tables. Of course he is free to suggest that the essay is “wrong” and “boring,” but this and other criticisms should be based (it goes without saying) in what the essay actually says, not in bizarre re-encryptions of it.

Larkin fails even to praise with precision: “I was excited,” he says, “by Kelly’s blatant disregard for the powers that be: Margaret Atwood hates men, what happened to Coming Through Slaughter, etc. [sic] We all know it’s fixed, right, Heather?” Comments such as this are so bent that they verge on the worrisome: nowhere does my essay suggest (neither would I or anyone have a rational basis for suggesting) that Margaret Atwood “hates men”; nowhere does my essay mention Coming Through Slaughter, never mind its curricular fate; nowhere does my essay mention “Heather” (Riesman, one presumes).

Dissatisfied with gross deformation, Mr. Larkin descends to ad hominem: I am, he suggests, a “wasp wannabe.” I have no problem with wasps. Neither do I have a problem with wasps. Never have I felt an urge to become one or the other.

From where does this bizarre accusation come? Given his fantastical digression on Yeats and Lady Gregory (he suggests that they were British secret agents and cultural genocidalists), I can only presume that Mr. Larkin has Irish-Catholic ancestors, and feels that I’ve betrayed my roots. Whatever the case, even to mention Yeats neutrally, as my essay does, is, says Larkin, “Nazi-like propaganda.” What? Perhaps Larkin

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LETTERS

takes as his totem animal not the fox but the parrot, and prefers to mimic professorial squawkings about Yeats’s politics. I do not sympathize, incidentally, with Yeats’s politics, or with, for instance, T.S. Eliot’s, but I’ll admit to taking pleasure in the best of their verses. In any case, the sentence that my essay spends on Yeats hardly merits Larkin’s derangement. Neither does my publication history or my motivation: I wrote “The Imprint of Foxes,” Larkin says, only because I have been “dealt an out card by the Canadian publishing industry.” That old chestnut?

Criticism of CanLit equals a sucking on grapes gone sour? For what it’s worth, I’ve been nothing but pleased with my publishers (Mr. Larkin will be chagrined to hear that CNQ has submitted “The Imprint of Foxes” for a National Magazine Award), and I have every reason to be optimistic about my creative and critical efforts, none of which involves trawling the internet for the purposes of slander. If there are sour grapes here, then they are stuffed to bursting in Mr. Larkin’s mouth, and I have to wonder if a magazine of Geist’s quality didn’t publish his ugly missive tongue in cheek. If not, then shame on you. Larkin barks and froths and whines up imaginary trees.

—Adrian Michael Kelly, Calgary To read Kelly’s essay “The Imprint of Foxes,” go to notesandqueries.ca. For more on the Salon des Refusés, a critical and artistic response to The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2008) by cnq and The New Quarterly, see an excerpt of “Savage Love” by Douglas Glover, geist.com/findings/savage-love, and “Urquhart’s Choice” by Stephen Henighan, geist.com/opinion/urquhart-s-choice.

STAN-ECDOTES Over the years, more than five hundred people have written to Geist with their memories of Stan Rogers and his music, and

we’ve shared some of these letters in past issues of the magazine. This year Stan Rogers would have turned sixty, and Geist is celebrating his birthday all year long by collecting even more memories of him: every day we post a story on our Stan-ecdotes blog. Visit geist.com/ stanrogers to submit your own story and to sign the petition to induct Stan Rogers into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

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y eight-year-old daughter, Annie Moriah, is captivated by Stan Rogers. She told me that he is the best singer and songwriter she’s ever heard. She is exposed to all of the popular songs that kids listen to today (2009) and yet recognizes the eternal, stand-alone specialness of Stan Rogers. I’m not surprised Stan passed on so young, when he still had so much more to give us. This world seems to have difficulty holding on to and caring for the good, the special, the inspirational. Stan doesn’t need to be inducted into any hall of anyone’s idea of fame. He doesn’t need to be made a trophy or given one. Once you’ve been touched by his specialness, his magnificence, his gift, he is forever inducted into your heart.

He will be held in the hearts and minds of those who recognize this gift to humanity.

No higher award need be given, as none exists.

—Gary Smith, Owings Mills MD OOPS his is driving me crazy! First BC BookWorld, now you. And I thought it was bad when a reporter on our local paper referred to a book that had won a non-fiction award as a novel. I refer to Patty Osborne’s review of Goodbye Buffalo Bay (No. 71). On reading the review I concluded that this is a book about a real person (author’s name matches protagonist’s) about his real experiences. So how come it is referred to as a “novel”? I’ve checked the dictionary about this many times. Novel

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= fiction. Fiction = made-up story. If Larry Loyie has, indeed, fictionalized his memories, then I think he ought to have gone all the way and changed the name of the main character.

—Anne Miles, Gibsons BC Geist, not Loyie, introduced the ambiguity.

Then again, we rely on Samuel Johnson’s definition, which remains unequalled by later lexicographers: “novel. A small tale, generally of love.”

CANADI ANOLOGI ES More additions to the Geist Cross-Canada Phrasebook-in-Progress, a word hoard recording regional variations in Canadian English. We’re working on a jam-packed interactive online version; meanwhile, take a peek at an ancient iteration of the Phrasebook at geist.com/phrasebook, and drop us a line with your own localisms.

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he phrasebook is a terrific idea, but one must be careful not to equate Toronto with the rest of Ontario. In Picton in the 1950s, a large marble was known as a tromboli. I wonder if that term is in use anywhere now?

—Fay Walke, Lucknow ON Growing up in Edmonton in the 1970s, we had a phrase that I thought must be used everywhere, at least on the Prairies, but apparently not (?): “Better than a kick in the head with a frozen mukluk.”

Perhaps we were just ahead of our time with Inuit-inspired footwear.

—Don Stein, Yorkton SK SEND YOUR LETTER S TO:

The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com / geist.com, Fax 604-669-8250, #200 – 341 Water Street Vancouver BC, v6b 1b8 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and taste. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 9

NOTES & DISPATCHES The Future Is Uncertain Country STEPHEN OSBORNE “Experts say it’s a whole lot different this time.” —Globe and Mail, January 2009

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hese days as prospects grow dim, men of high seriousness rise into the headlines, experts anointed as soothsayers, comforters, bearers of bad news.

In ancient days the oracle at Delphi responded to the question of what the future would bring with auguries suffused in barley smoke; today the question is put by pundits, columnists, editorialists, panelists, talk-show hosts and talking heads—the commentariat, proficient in the jargon of upswings, downswings, deepenings, contractions, corrections, hurts and pains, remedy and fraud; and a torrent of participles: plunging, collapsing, sinking, squeezing, etc. Oracles by tradition resist the questions put to them by responding with conundrums, brainteasers, non sequiturs, blatherings and bullshit. A bankruptcy consultant on the cbc Radio drive-home show pauses before making himself clear. “The future,” he says (ignorant or unafraid of the pathetic fallacy), “is not all that optimistic.”

Another expert observes that “forecasting is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” In the Globe and Mail, a real-estate mogul invokes the spectre of

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evolution: “What we are looking at is Darwinism,” he says. “And that is hard to predict right now.” A reporter restates the case for his lay readers: “The single factor that characterizes the current situation,” he writes, “is a lack of insight into what happens next.”

Who can be faulted for wanting to know what the future holds? We take our prognosticators, our hypothecators, wherever we find them, whether in headlines (experts say dismal numbers mean growth ahead) or sound bites (“As bad as things are, they can still get worse”).

“Clearly,” another expert on cbc Radio put it brightly at 9:15 one morning in the middle of February, “clearly, there’s a lot of crystal-balling going on.”

A lot of crystal-balling going on. When I heard these words I remembered a man

running for the number 10 bus thirty-five years ago as my brother and I, who were on the bus, watched him through the rear window. “That guy should stop running,” said my brother.

“This bus is not happening for him.”

The running man kept coming along as the bus doors closed and then the bus lurched out from the curb; as he stumbled to a halt on the sidewalk and flung his arms into the air, we could feel the future turning away from him, at least the future that contained the number 10 bus with my brother and me in it. The bus continued to move away and the man receded into the distance, a figure of despair suffering precisely from what the reporter in the Globe and Mail identified only (or finally) last February as a lack of insight into what happens next. photo: christopher evans

NOTES & DISPATCHES

The plight of the running man cast a shadow (or perhaps a light) on an experiment that my brother and I were carrying out under the guidance of an astrologer named Ray, a mild-mannered clerk who worked the late shift, checking the math on tax returns in the office where I was part-time manager. Ray had developed a method of calculating horoscopes with a precision that was bringing him ever nearer to his ultimate goal, which was, as he put it in words unusually strong for him, “to tell you when you’re going take your next piss.”

On the afternoon of the running man, my brother and I were on our way to the racetrack on the number 10 bus with betting horoscopes that Ray had prepared for us the night before. We had concluded after several trials that Ray’s calculations (which always came close to, and often succeeded in, predicting winning horses) increased in accuracy when the first race set off at its scheduled time of 6:00 p.m. If it failed to start precisely at six, we would have to make adjustments on the spot with the horoscope charts spread out on our knees (while around us punters scrutinized the Racing Form); the moon and sun, being nearer than the stars, were the vital agents of influence at these moments. As the evening progressed and the starting times of individual races drifted away from plan, the margin of error grew. This was our introduction to the classical problem of “initial conditions” that haunts scientists who try to deduce the future of the universe from a specific moment in time.

One of my duties as part-time office manager was to extinguish fires in the Xerox copier stationed in the bay window at the front of the office. In that distant time before computers, the Xerox, a large, lumbering, expensive machine, was the icon of leading-edge technology. My boss had installed the Xerox next to the key-cutting machine in

the window, where it would draw the attention of passersby, and, as he said to me confidentially, attract new business by acting as a loss leader: the sign in the window read: while u wait!—xerox copies 10¢—keys cut 50¢; and a sandwich board on the sidewalk promised Tax Returns: $5+UP. The concept of the loss leader lay at the core of the business, which was financed, to my great delight, by a Woodward’s Department Store charge card and a fleet of old cars that my boss sold back and forth between companies, each time with new bank loans (the ’52 Studebaker assigned to me had no reverse gear and no handbrake, but it was worth more than five thousand dollars on the books).

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he Xerox tended to overheat when more than a few sheets of paper were run through it, and the resulting fires, signalled by tongues of flame spitting from seams in the side panel, made a strong impression on the clientele and on anyone looking in the window. My job was (calmly) to pop the panel, haul out the burning sheet and drop it in the wastebasket. While performing this duty I met the well-known poet Earle Birney, who had brought in a sheaf of poems for copying; I was the only person who recognized him, and it was I who, to his great relief, put out the subsequent fire and appeared to have saved part of his oeuvre. I had met Ray the astrologer when a similar fire broke out as he was making copies of a blank horoscope chart (the cost of which, he assured me, would go onto his “personal account”); as soon as I understood the purpose of the charts I wanted to know more. Later in the season our shifts overlapped and I began spending time with Ray after midnight in order to talk about horoscopy, and I soon learned that he had been inducted into an order of Rosicrucians (to whom he had applied when he was a teenager, in

response to a notice in Popular Science) by a robed figure who appeared in the night at the foot of his bed. Further visitations from more robed figures resulted in astral journeys and the acquisition of several magical techniques, including a way of showing people their past lives in a mirror—a skill that became a party trick until, as Ray told me, he renounced party tricks after an unpleasant experience with a friend whose past lives had been, as he put it, “unfortunate.” We sat in the brightly lit office until well past midnight on many occasions: our reflections could be seen in the big bay windows, which had been transformed into mirrors by the darkness beyond; and often as he told stories of the occult life I was unable to look up at what might be reflected there.

Ray’s system of divining his own future had led him to conclude that he would never profit greatly from his astrology, but that he was entitled to small rewards such as the bingo jackpots that he picked up at least once a week after careful triangulation of his chart: sums of fifty dollars, a hundred, and once I recall a jackpot of a thousand, which he took by staying on until the eleventh game after winning a small pot in the tenth (ten and eleven had been dominant in his horoscope for that night).

My brother and I arranged to make the experiment with the horse races using calculations that Ray would prepare the night before. We made several excursions to the track but often misread planetary angles as the evening unfolded, so that horse number 3 would come in when we expected horse number 2, and so on. All of our failures were attributable to an unsteady hold on initial conditions. Everything depended on the timing of the first race—even a fiveminute difference would affect the angular relations of subsequent moments.

We soon began to experience the world at large in this way, as a kind of clockwork mechanism ticking away inside the Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 11

NOTES & DISPATCHES

events of the mundane sphere. We were frequently stymied by initial conditions in our attempts to get to the track on time (an empty gas tank or a full parking lot, to name just two), and then the whole evening would go out of whack and we began to suspect that our own horoscopes might have to be calculated in synch with the racetrack chart if we were to succeed in winning consistently.

The experience of the man running for the bus seemed to consolidate this rather wearying sense of a clockwork universe: we were learning to see or feel that well before he started running for the bus, it was already “too late” for the running man; in fact it had been too late for him since before he was born, since before the universe started. By virtue of the same lack of insight into what happens next that we had perceived vaguely to be his fatal flaw, he was spared the knowledge that everything that is going to happen is going to happen. Such was the mystery behind future-seeing that my brother and I faced as we strove to predict the outcome of a horse race.

I continued meeting with Ray for most of the summer. I wished to grasp his understanding of the nature of reality: he was patient with me, and he freely if slowly recounted his nightly travels with his astral guides and his initiations into higher levels of arcane understanding.

He described his learning as a series of elevations—a procession through and toward ever higher levels, but never high enough to know (or at least to tell me) how many more levels there might be in the process. As I pressed him on this question, he began describing the universe as a kind of construction: a tower or skyscraper to be ascended, floor by floor.

Was the tower a metaphor or was it just a tower, I wanted to know, and eventually he said that he thought it was just a tower: the levels were real, and from each level more levels could be seen.

In the end the figure of the tower was Page 12 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

all that Ray could offer me, and when I realized that my aesthetic, if not my philosophy, required more, I soon let my attention slip away from the clockwork turning of the zodiac and the spiralling towers of astral lives, and my brother and I fell again into the slapdash willy-nilly existence of the man running for the bus, the plain world so easily obscured by the garbled utterances of experts. In the world of income tax, as I discovered in my job as assistant manager, the future is protected for the few—investors in oil companies, for example, are compensated in advance for the eventual disappearance of the oil that is already making them rich, through the ludicrous provision of the depletion allowance.

Years later, after my boss had saved his business from bankruptcy in a few breathtaking showdowns with men in suits, and I had moved into other enterprises, I received a postcard from Earle Birney, with whom I had had no further exchange after the fire in the Xerox. He had fallen from a tree somewhere in Ontario and broken an arm or a leg; the message on the card contained a short, triumphant poem written in celebration of his fall.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us in The Human Condition that just as we are given the faculty of forgiveness as the sole means of undoing deeds of the past “which hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation,” so also are we given the ability to make promises (and to keep them) as our only means of creating, in the ocean of uncertainty that lies just beyond the next moment, those “islands of security” without which there would be nothing durable in our relations with each other.

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-in-chief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com/author/osborne-stephen.

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Pleasant Artistic Experience The best and worst of Whitehorse, during the Available Light Film Festival, February 2009 MICHAL KOZLOWSKI

Weirdest advertisement at the festival: Telefilm Canada: “Just watch it.” (You know, like Nike, except Nike dropped that line years ago.)

RIP: A Remix Manifesto: “I just pretend I’m somewhere else. You know, we’re in Whitehorse, you do what you have to, to survive.”

Best example of eastern European humour in an eastern European film: A character from Slepé Lásky (directed by Juraj Lehotský): “We wish you a pleasant artistic experience.”

Second-worst evaluation of Whitehorse, uttered by a store clerk during the purchase of a letter opener made of moose antler: “So, it’s a letter opener or a weapon of self-defence.” (nervous laughter) “So if you get mugged, you know what to do.” (stabbing motion) “It’s the Yukon, you never know what can happen.”

Best blogging line, by the narrator of the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto, directed by Brett Gaylor, about the mash-up artist Girl Talk: “He dropped ac/dc in the middle of Black-Eyed Peas. People were blogging about it for weeks.”

Best synopsis and review of Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan (the film did not play at the festival), heard in a bar in Whitehorse: “So this kid wins a hundred million rubbles or whatever. The movie’s based on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?—you know that one? You know it’s funny to hear it in East Indian. But I got to tell you, it was time well spent.”

Most palpable expisode of drunkenness on the streets of Whitehorse: Man walking ten feet behind woman: “Hey, hey!”

Woman: “If you’re gonna act like a drunk, I’m gonna treat you like a drunk.”

Man: “Hey, hey!”

Worst evaluation of Whitehorse, uttered by a woman at the screening of

The three weirdest events at the Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous Festival, running at the same time as the film festival: axe toss, wife-carrying contest, and hairiest legs competition (women only).

Best solo played by the guitarist in the military band near the baggage carousel at the Whitehorse airport: “Free Bird”

by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Dumbest thing said by a guy with big muscles on flight 525 from Whitehorse to Vancouver, referring to the exotic dancers flying home from the Sourdough Rendezvous: “Jesus Christ. Look at that.”

Michal Kozlowski was born in Krakow, grew up in Winnipeg and now lives in Vancouver. He works in residential care for adults with developmental disabilities. He is also a Geist editorial board member. His writings for Geist can be read at geist.com/author/kozlowskimichal.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 13

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Big Red There was a note of something crazed in his voice, possibly homicidal. I got in the van.

ROS E HU N TE R

A

heavy-set man in a dusty uniform tapped me on the shoulder. “Where’s the rest of you?”

I looked down to see if I was missing my skirt, but no; it was still there. It dawned on me that he was the shuttle driver, and he meant where was my luggage?

“Oh, it didn’t arrive,” I said. “They think it may be in Philadelphia, but no one really knows.”

“Well all right then,” he said. “Get on in.”

There was a note of belligerence in his voice: something crazed and possibly homicidal. I got in.

Then he began driving in circles around lax, too fast.

“I gotta go round a coupla times,” he announced from his seat: fuzzy dinosaurs dangling above his head, crumpled take-out coffee cups on the tray beside him and others crushed underfoot, Styrofoam clamshell containers, smeared napkins and a walkie-talkie, an antique-looking cell phone.

He slowed when he approached a pick-up point, but the ticket agent shook her head and waved him on. He cursed and accelerated away.

“I gotta get one more fare,” he shouted. “At least. Otherwise. You think you’re smart.”

I tried to protest that I didn’t, particularly, but he continued. “Do some math for me. If you give me fourteen dollars and they take seven, and I gotta pay seven for gas—how much I got left?

Huh?”

Page 14 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

He took the corner in a wide arc, ignoring the lane markings. Horns blared.

“Uh,” I said. “Zero?”

“Zero is right!” He whacked his palm on the dashboard. “That’s why I gotta keep going round. You feel me?”

“I feel you,” I said, feeling slightly nauseated. “I don’t mind.”

As a distraction I turned my thoughts to my suitcase, which had been misplaced (not lost, I hoped). I had not put any essential supplies in my carry-on, an omission that had clearly tempted the luggage gods.

Every vital thing in a checked bag from Toronto with a connecting flight through a northeastern U.S. city in the depth of winter . . .

“What you think I get her a pot,” the driver barked.

“What’s that now?”

“For Valentine’s Day.” “Oh, Valentine’s Day. I’d forgotten about that.”

“It’s today,” he said. “I guess you’re not expecting anything.”

His tone was accusatory, as though this were my fault, but I let it slide. It was probably true anyway.

“A pot,” he repeated. “That’s a good gift right.”

“You mean like a potted plant, do you? Instead of flowers?”

“No!” he screamed, bludgeoning the steering wheel as he slowed and then careered away from another empty pick-up point. “A big red pot—with a chicken in it.”

“A chicken?”

“How often have you said to yourself,

NOTES & DISPATCHES

I need a good big red” —he spread his arms out over the steering wheel, presumably to show the dimensions of this vessel— “pot? You cook, right?”

“Kind of.”

He glared.

“That is to say not really, no, in the technical sense, I’d say not much.”

He slammed the steering wheel again. “Well that’s why you’ve never thought of it.”

H

e braked sharply and pounded on the horn. Another pick-up point. No one.

“But still, you think it’s a good idea.”

Pause. “Well?”

“Uh,” I said. “That depends. You say there’s a chicken in it?”

“Surely!”

“A cooked chicken?”

“Not a cooked chicken. A frozen chicken. It’s a nice . . . big . . . frozen . . . chicken!”

“Um . . . in that case I don’t know.”

The shuttle lurched and I gripped my stomach. “She’s supposed to cook it for you, is that the subtext?”

“Hey—lady. Anyone would be happy with that. It’s a big, red—” “Pot, yes,” I said desperately, as we braked and rocketed away from another stop. The face of the ticket agent blurred past.

I braced myself in my seat. A glittering orange sun was settling between the palm trees and the parking garages, and we were circling, again.

Rose Hunter has had short stories and poetry published in various journals and magazines, and her story “Animal Planet” won honourable mention in the 2007 Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. She lived in Toronto for ten years and is currently teaching in Mexico. For more, see geist.com/author/ hunter-rose.

Spring 2009 • G E I ST 72 • Page 15

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Nobody’s Fault In the face of death, no one is a stranger LINDA SOLOMON

“W

e Caucasians will be fighting for minority rights in ten years,” said my friend, quoting her father.

“In the world?” I asked.

“In Vancouver,” she said.

“Good,” I said.

“No, really,” she said.

At the café, a young Asian couple fuss over an older woman in a wheelchair. The man carefully puts a lavender knit wool cap on her head and green knit gloves onto her hands. Then he unfolds a blanket and tenderly places it over her knees. The young couple look at each other over the woman then back at her, checking to be sure she’s comfortable. They murmur to one another as they tuck the blanket around the woman’s ankles, then the man runs his hands along the edges to make sure it’s snug. Carefully they push the woman out of the café.

The cairn terrier leapt out the window of the station wagon while I was driving down Fourth Avenue with my sons in the back. I had slowed down to make the left turn into Jericho Park from Fourth when the dog jumped out of my son’s lap.

“Mom, Tommy jumped out of the car,” he screamed.

“What?” I said.

He said it again. He had just turned ten.

I pulled over to the first place I could stop, which happened to be the opening in the median, which I was about to drive through so that we could let the dog run free in the park. Maybe he smelled the other dogs romping in the meadow by the road. Maybe he saw a rat dart off into the trees. Maybe he was insane. One quick look behind me told me he was

Page 16 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

dying. I had held this dog in my arms, spent hours upon hours walking him and training him. Only seven months old and there he lay, twitching in the street. I ordered the kids to stay in the car and not to look. I went to the dog.

Pookie, our new dog, is almost housebroken, but not completely. At times she pees on newspaper I leave for her in the corner of the kitchen. One afternoon I knelt down to pick up the soiled paper, stuff it in a plastic bag, tie the bag and throw it down the garbage chute, and noticed that she had peed on the front page, on Saddam Hussein wearing his tailored overcoat and his noose.

As I crumpled up the paper and prepared to stuff it in the trash, I asked myself: If Hussein knew that dogs would pee on his photograph at the end of his life, would that have changed things?

Did he deserve to be humiliated by a dog thousands of miles away from the place where his life ended?

Death is sacred. Even elephants know that. When they trample humans, they cover them with branches.

Spectators taunted Hussein. He deserved it. He was a murderer. He killed thousands of people. He was set up by the United States. He dug his own grave.

To have a photograph taken of a person about to be executed is primitive enough. To allow it to be peed on by foreign dogs seems profane. I shouldn’t have used that piece of newspaper. It was utterly insignificant that I had. Hussein

was dead and couldn’t care less. People who respected him would never know.

His grandchildren would never see that piece of newspaper.

I threw the page in the plastic bag and caught a last glimpse of Saddam Hussein’s eyes before I tied it shut.

Dark blood pooled on the pavement around the dog’s head. A car pulled over and stopped, and a white woman with blond hair got out. She had a kind face.

“My neighbour’s daughter plays flute,” my friend was telling me. “I asked her if she was playing in the high school band.

She said, no way, the Asian kids have been playing since they were two. They have the entire band locked up.

They hang out together. There’s no way to be friends with them.

They get the best grades.”

“They aren’t a them,” I said. “They’re individuals.”

“I know they’re individuals,” she said.

The kind woman put her hand on my back. She asked if I was okay. I wasn’t okay, I said. I told her that my son in the car was hysterical. She offered to stay with the dog while I went back to comfort him. I looked from the twitching dog back to the car, where my child was hunched over in grief.

I looked back at the dog. His eyes turned up and the spasms stopped. I ran back to the car. My younger son said he wanted to go home. My older son shook with sobs. He held his face in his hands. I opened the back door of the car and climbed in. I hugged him.

“I was holding the leash, Mom. And he jumped. And I let go of the leash. If I hadn’t let go, he wouldn’t have jumped.

It was my fault.” photo: mandelbrot

NOTES & DISPATCHES

“It isn’t your fault,” I said, over and over. “If you had thrown him out the window, it would have been your fault.

He jumped. He was mentally ill.”

It was my fault, not my son’s. I should have made the dog ride in the back compartment of the station wagon. I should have kept him in his kennel. I knew how precious he was, how painfully symbolic of our fragile lives.

A few more cars had stopped. Drivers had gotten out and were standing around the dog. A transit authority van stopped and the driver put warning signs around my car so that there wouldn’t be any more accidents. The kind woman offered to call the spca to come and get the dog.

An East Asian man in a jogging suit stopped and took it all in. It was nobody’s fault, he said. I asked him to explain this to my son. He went to the car. “You’ve had a big loss, but you didn’t have anything to do with it,” the brown man said to the white boy. “Your dog’s in a better place now.”

My son sobbed. He nodded and looked up at the stranger.

Time moves on. It was propelling us forward, leaving Tommy behind. The crowd dispersed. The kind woman covered the dog with a towel she had found in her car. Now she had to be going, she said. “Keep the towel, please,” she said and touched my arm.

The spca arrived in the person of a short Asian man with a weather-worn face.

With eyes full of compassion he said, “It’s hard to lose a dog,” and for the first time since Tommy had leapt out and fallen under the wheels of the car, I wept.

We looked at the dead dog, this new stranger and I. He told me he could take the dog away and have him cremated.

They would provide an urn, and I could go and pick up the ashes. It would cost $100. Or, the dog could be cremated for free. I wouldn’t get the ashes, but . . . I was laughing, and he smiled. Cars sped Spring 2009 • G E I ST 72 • Page 17

NOTES & DISPATCHES

past. The air smelled of the ocean and decaying leaves mixed with wet earth.

Across the street in the park, a Labrador bounded after a mutt. A cluster of small dogs ran round and round, as their keepers stood talking and looking out at the sea.

“People really save their dogs’ ashes?”

I said.

“Do you want to keep the collar?” he asked.

Linda Solomon, publisher of the Vancouver Observer (vancouverobserver.com), is a Pulitzernominated journalist who has written for the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other periodicals. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, and she was a finalist for a 2007 CBC Literary Award.

Bl

Stroke of History

into

Sejny and St. Nazaire share a borderland, although they are a thousand miles apart

VER

DAVID ALBAHARI

and pick pick und pick the poet han T sym kitch then de s A appe hear and blad Hop Wh you in t Her puff

W

hile I lived in the former Yugoslavia, I never thought of visiting Poland or any other country in the Communist bloc. Go west, young man, was what I was interested in. Why go east, to the monochromatic world of the totalitarian regime, when I was free to travel west with my Yugoslav passport? Despite my great admiration for the literature and movies of the eastern part of Europe, I did not want to go there. Most of their best writers lived in exile anyway, and those who stayed were subjected to rigorous censorship. The place was definitely no paradise.

It still does not look like paradise, I realized during my recent trip to Poland, but it is part of Europe and it is going through some important changes. At least that’s what I heard from the people I met on the train. I was on the train a lot. Actually, I spent most of my time on the train, going from one city to another as one of the participants in a literary festival. The idea of the festival organizers was to have writers read in as many cities as possible. So I arrived in Warsaw one day late in the evening, and early the next morning I was on the train going to Sejny, all the way to the east. It took five hours to get there. Next morning I went back to Warsaw, where I had to change trains and go to Krakow. Altogether I spent almost eight hours on the train that day. The following morning I went back to Warsaw (another three-hour train ride) for the final reading and round-table discussion.

At first I thought that the festival must have been sponsored by the Polish railway, but when I asked my hosts, they Page 18 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

all laughed. It was not such a bad idea, I told them. Actually, the whole festival should take place on many trains, and writers should read their poems and stories to audiences commuting between those beautiful Polish cities that the writers would never see. More laughter.

I tried to tell them that I was serious, that writers had no need for reality anyway, they had their imagination. No laughter after that. It is not easy to talk about reality in Poland, I guess. Perhaps it is not easy to talk about reality anywhere in the world. I know it’s not easy in Alberta, with house prices going down, jobs disappearing and tar-sands projects being postponed or cancelled. In Sejny, however, we did talk about reality because it meant talking about dreams and ghosts.

T

he town of Sejny is very close to the Polish–Lithuanian border, which makes it a perfect place for the Borderland Foundation, devoted to helping and documenting borderland culture in general. Sejny is also a Jewish ghost town, one of many, I suppose, in that part of Europe, and some of the Foundation’s activities take place in the old Jewish synagogue and yeshiva. The Documentation Center of Borderland Cultures, which is the very heart of the foundation, is in the old Jewish high school building. The main activity of the Center is collecting cultural products from the former eastern Europe as well as the former Yugoslavia and other Balkan states. It is a beautiful, welldesigned place with large collections of books, magazines, videos, cds, records,

A

NOTES & DISPATCHES

newspaper clippings and old Krzysztof’s. One of them, I thought, photographs. Since most of them come must be wrong—but which one? The from these former places, I felt “former” one coming from a democracy or the one too when they found some of my early coming from a dictatorship? And, I books on one shelf. I promised to send thought, what if both of them are right? them some of the new ones, although, I After all, negative feelings toward told them, I do not live in a borderland members of different cultures are not territory now. Or perhaps I do?

There are several First Nations reserves around Calgary and so there is a sort of shared borderland between them. Wherever two cultures lie next to each other, there must be a sort of cultural borderland that they share. Imagine it as a semipermeable membrane: some things pass through and are accepted by both cultures, while other things remain with their orginal creators.

It is the sharing part, the things that pass through the membrane, that interests Krzysztof Czyzewski, the president of the foundation. However, in order to share, people from different cultures must first talk about it. Dialogue is vital for borderlanders, argues Krzysztof, and if there’s no dialogue, there’s no sharing. That’s why he and his wife Malgorzata are so keen to transform yet another of their Train from Katowice to Wroclaw, Poland. dreams into reality. It involves the manor that belonged to the family of the necessarily the product of the political great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Once system itself. They are, rather, the the big house in Krasnogruda, in the for- product of our feeling that these est, is renovated, it will host the Interna- newcomers are going to deprive us of certain benefits we get from our system. tional Dialogue Centre.

At that point I realized that there In one of his articles Krzysztof wrote that he became interested in borderland was a symbolic borderland between culture when he realized that citizens these two places even though St. from former Communist countries are Nazaire and Sejny are in two opposite less open-minded to other cultures. I areas of Europe: St. Nazaire is on the remembered his words a couple of weeks Atlantic coast, almost as far west as later. During a conversation in St. possible, and Sejny is close to the Nazaire, France, where I took part in eastern European border. Both of them another literary meeting, somebody said believe in the importance of dialogue. that citizens from countries with long For their cultural and educational democratic traditions tended to be less activities they use buildings deserted open-minded to immigrants in general. after World War ii. In Sejny, where It was almost the same sentence as there are no Jews left, they use the photo: joni karanka

synagogue and other Jewish buildings, and in St. Nazaire, where there may be a small number of Jews, they use parts of a huge concrete submarine base built

by German troops during the war. The concrete walls and ceilings are so thick that no bombing could destroy them; and it would be too expensive to demolish them now.

So, it’s all about history once again. Although Sejny and St. Nazaire are completely different, it is the overwhelming presence of history that unites them. The silence one hears inside the synagogue in Sejny is not the same silence that one finds inside the submarine base in St. Nazaire; after all, they come from different sides. And yet, in a strange way, I felt the same in both buildings: very small and lonely, with an enormous sense of loss, and my heart began to play some kind of syncopated rhythm. The bossa nova of history, I thought at first, but bossa nova is too gentle. My heart played the hip-hop rhythm of history among grey concrete walls, and soon I was dizzy and breathless.

A young woman stopped and asked me something in French. When I didn’t reply, she said in English: “Are you sick?”

How do you explain to somebody that your heart has just experienced a stroke of history? There are no words for that. I looked at her and lied: “No, I am not. I feel fine.” But she did not believe me. She disappeared for a moment, returned with a blanket in her hands and just stood there, ready to cover me in case I fell asleep.

David Albahari is the author of twenty published books in Serbian; six have been translated into English, including Snow Man (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005) and Leeches (forthcoming from Harcourt in 2010). He lives in Calgary. Read “Bird in the Willow” (No. 70) and his other Geist work at geist.com/author/ albahari-david.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 19

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Paid Relationship I was crying all the time and it wasn’t just the hormones GINA PARTRIDGE AND SHELLEY KOZLOWSKI

Y

ou remember I mentioned about eighteen months ago I was crying all the time, and you said hormones and all?

You were right, but the thing is it did not go away—ever since I stopped smoking in 2006 I have been miserable—the week after I quit, someone who helped at an important time was killed in a hit and run and I never got over it—we were not exactly close (she had been my cleaning lady on and off for about eight years— including the time of the breakup with Benno, when it felt like Lusinde was the only other adult interested and involved in my home and children—of course it was a paid relationship but I always thought of her as a workmate or colleague). She had been working with us for about a six-month stretch when she was hit—crossing the road to get to a new client that a friend of mine had recommended. She was thirty-seven, married, and had an eight-year-old son and a fourteen-yearold daughter. She was Polish—she and her cousin used to swap jobs and homes every month—one would stay in Poland and look after the two families and the other would clean houses in Berlin from seven in the morning—often until ten at night—six days a week— eight euros an hour tax-free. It worked for them—a crazy system but they seemed to enjoy it in a way—all the cleaning ladies lived together in a small flat—I think they sometimes had fun. Her other cousin won Page 20 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

the green card lottery and went to the U.S. about six months before Lusinde died.

Took her family and husband with not a word of English between them—Lusinde could speak English and some German.

She had a way of saying Hannnnah with a long n that used to tear my heart out—at the time I was getting a lot of stress from the kindergarten, who said Hannah stood out as an unsociable, unteachable, intolerable child because she was so uncoordinated that she knocked over the other children’s toys and bumped into tables and was messy eating her lunch. Lusinde only saw her once every two weeks but Hannah always trotted along behind her from room to room . . . So I was sad for a long time—and I still am— it’s like I never cared about what I lost before—grandparents have died on me and an uncle and some acquaintances— but this is the first time it hit me and now I think it is not going to go away—I am not trying to be dramatic, I just mean I am not the same and I don’t think I can go back.

“Paid Relationship” is an excerpt of an email that Gina Partridge, who lives in Berlin, sent to her lifelong friend Shelley Kozlowski, who lives in Vancouver. Their friendship has been documented in notes passed in class, long letters, postcards, Christmas cards, birth announcements, wedding invitations and, most recently, a eulogy via email. photo: patty osborne

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Vacuum Guy The only machine in for repair is an old Electrolux DAVID KOULACK

“T

he large bags, right?” the vacuum guy asks.

“Yeah, for the orange Samsung.”

He gets out four packages of bags instead of the usual two from the box behind his chair and puts them on the table. “I’ve gotta tell you something,” he says. “I’m closing this store on December first. I’ve been losing money.” He gestures toward the wall, which used to be cluttered with machines in need of repair—now there is only one, an old Electrolux. “No one brings their vacuums in to get fixed any more, and why should they when they can get a new one for a hundred bucks.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“I got a job at Future Shop. My stepson told me about it. He said, ‘Dad, you ought to go see the manager at the Regent Street Future Shop. He’s got something for you.’ So I phoned the manager. No, not the manager, the team leader, that’s what they call them now, and I made an appointment to see him. And he told me that he wants me to run the appliance division of the store.

“They’ve got a huge appliance division at Regent Street. They sell name brands—expensive stuff. Some of those refrigerators, the ones that make ice and have triple doors, cost more than three thousand bucks.” The vacuum guy says that the inventory in that one store alone,

counting computers and cameras, is about thirty-three million dollars, give or take a million or so. “But the trouble is, and this is what the team leader told me, that they only have young people there and they need people like me who have some experience to teach them how to sell.

“There’s no more hard sell these days, no bum’s rush. No, now you just go up to the customer and ask him if he needs any help and then tell him where he can find you if he has any questions.

“So that’s the story, that’s why at age sixty I’m closing up the store to start a new job at Future Shop. I can tell you, it makes me nervous.”

“You’ll do fine,” I tell him.

“That’s what the wife says. I hope you’re both right.

Now how many packages of vacuum bags do you want?

They won’t go bad, you know.”

“I’ll take six,” I tell him.

The vacuum guy throws in an extra package. He walks out to the stoop with me as I’m leaving. We shake hands.

“You’re a nice man,” he says.

David Koulack is the author of To Catch a Dream: Explorations of Dreaming, and shorter works published in the Guardian, London Sunday Times, Globe and Mail, Dalhousie Review, Canadian Jewish Outlook and Matrix. He lives in Winnipeg.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 21

FINDINGS L E T U S BE G I N Andrew Nikiforuk From Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk, published by Greystone Books in 2008. Andrew Nikiforuk’s work has appeared in Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Report on Business, Georgia Straight, Equinox, Harrowsmith and other periodicals. He lives in Calgary.

T

I

he world’s oil party is coming to a dramatic close, and Canada has adopted a new geodestiny: providing the United States with bitumen, a low-quality, high-cost substitute.

character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers. Inadequate environmental rules and monitoring have allowed unsustainable mining to accelerate.

Feeble fiscal regimes have enriched multinationals and given Canada a petrodollar that hides the inflationary pressures of peak oil.

Canada now calls itself an “emerging energy superpower.” In reality, it is nothing more than a Third World energy supermarket.

V

II

Northern Alberta’s bituminous sands, a national treasure, are the globe’s last great remaining oil field. This strategic boreal resource has attracted nearly 6o per cent of all global oil investments.

Every major multinational and nationally owned oil company has staked a claim in the tar sands.

Investment in the tar sands, including pipelines and upgraders, now totals approximately $200 billion. The tar sands boom has become the world’s largest energy project, the world’s largest construction project, and the world’s largest capital project. No comprehensive assessment of the megaproject’s environmental, economic, or social impact has been done.

III

Neither Canada nor Alberta has a rational plan for the tar sands other than full-scale liquidation.

Although the tar sands could fund Canada’s transition to a low-carbon economy, government has surrendered the fate of the resource to irrational global demands. At forecast rates of production, the richest deposits of bitumen will be exhausted in forty years.

IV

Nations become what they produce. Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the Page 22 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

VI

Thanks to rapid tar sands development, Canada now produces more oil than Texas or Kuwait.

Since 2001, Canada has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the largest single exporter of oil to the United States. Canadian crude now accounts for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. oil imports. If development continues unabated, Canada will soon provide the fading U.S. empire with nearly a third of its oil, while half of Canada’s own citizens remain dependent on insecure supplies from the Middle East.

FINDINGS

VII

Rapid tar sands development has become a central goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (spp), an elite plan to create a North American economic union. U.S. energy policy openly advocates for more pipelines and transmission lines to ease growing shortages in energy supply for U.S. citizens, who currently consume 25 per cent of the world’s oil.

Representatives from the Mexican government attended meetings in 2006 in Houston, Texas, about rapid tar sands development. Rapid energy integration will inescapably lead to political integration in a North American union dominated by the United States.

River is a fraud. Canada has no national water policy and one of the worst records of pollution enforcement of any industrial nation.

X II

The tailings ponds, located along the Athabasca River, leak or seep into groundwater. For the last decade, the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan has documented rare cancers.

X III

To mine or steam out bitumen, the tar sands industry burns enough natural gas every day to heat four million homes. At this rate of consumption, the project could severely compromise the nation’s natural gas supplies by 2030.

VIII

Bitumen is a signature of peak oil and a reminder, as every beer drinker knows, that the glass starts full and ends empty. Half of the world’s cheapest and cleanest oil has been consumed. The reality of depletion now demands the mining of the dirtiest.

It takes the excavation of two tons of earth and sand to make one barrel of bitumen.

X IV

The rapid depletion of natural gas in the tar sands is driving Canada’s so-called nuclear renaissance. Canada may well become the first nation to use nuclear energy not to retire fossil fuels but to accelerate their exploitation.

XV

IX

Each barrel of bitumen produces three times as much greenhouse gas as a barrel of conventional oil. The tar sands explain why the Canadian government has spent more than $6 billion on climate-change programs for the last fifteen years and met not one target.

X

Bitumen is one of the world’s most waterintensive oil products. Each barrel requires the consumption of three barrels of fresh water from the Athabasca River, which is part of the world’s third-largest watershed. Every day, Canada exports one million barrels of bitumen to the United States and three million barrels of virtual water.

XI

Industry in the tar sands uses as much water every year as a city of two million people. Ninety per cent of this water ends up in the world’s largest impoundments of toxic waste: the tailings ponds.

Industrial water monitoring on the Athabasca

Bitumen development will never be sustainable.

The megaproject will eventually destroy or industrialize a forest the size of Florida and diminish the biological diversity and hydrology of the region forever.

XVI

Oil hinders democracy and corrupts the political process through the absence of transparent reporting and clear fiscal accounting. Alberta, a classic petrostate, has one of the least accountable governments in Canada as well as the lowest voter turnout.

X V II

Without long-term planning and policies, Canada and Alberta will fail to secure reliable energy supplies for Canadians, to develop alternative energy sources for the country, or to create valuable resource funds for the future. Unlike the governments of Norway and Alaska, the government of Canada stands to leave its citizens a singular legacy of exponential neglect and watershed destruction.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 23

FINDINGS

BR AV E N EW L ANDSCAPE

Andrew Emond

From “Bored New World,” a series of photographs that highlight the soothing but eerie simplicity of the Canadian suburban environment. Andrew Emond is a Montreal photographer whose work focuses on the built environment.

X VIII

A business-as-usual case for the tar sands will change Canada forever. It will enrich a few powerful companies, hollow out the economy, destroy the world’s third-largest watershed, industrialize nearly one-quarter of Alberta’s landscape, consume the last of the nation’s natural gas supplies, and erode Canadian sovereignty.

glamorous. It will be humbling, yet rewarding.

Our tasks, as social critic Wendell Berry has noted, “will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.”

X X II

We must begin today.

X IX

The destructiveness of the tar sands is not inevitable. But Canadians and Albertans have become too tolerant of the politicians who compromise the nation’s energy security as well as the next generation’s future. Instead of liquidating the tar sands for global interests, Canada can use the resource for transition to a low-carbon economy.

XX

Every Canadian who drives a car is part of this political emergency. And every Canadian can be part of the solution.

XXI

The real work of transforming Canada’s fossil fuel–dependent economy will not be big and Page 24 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

O L D MA N Ven Begamudré From Vishnu Dreams, copyright © Ven Begamudré, 2008, and reproduced with the permission of Gaspereau Press, Printers & Publishers. Ven Begamudré was born in south India and immigrated to Canada with his family when he was six. He lives in Regina.

H

ere you are at the end of the board, your toes gripping the edge—please don’t let me slip—and the Old Man’s high and dry on the pool deck. His paunch sags over his belt.

“Dive,” he yells. “Can’t you simply dive?” Not

FINDINGS

His photographs of vacant industrial workplaces will be featured in a forthcoming book. Currently he is making his way through Montreal’s sewer system and documenting his finds at undermontreal.com.

yet. Here you are, knees bent, body bent in half, arms above your head, chin tucked, right hand over left, ready to launch yourself forwards and out and down into—what? It’s only water. Waiting to cushion your fall. No, it won’t. It will suck you down that tiny drain.

Slurp. Suck. Gone. No wonder he never learned to swim.

You take a chance. Swivel your head to the left, look past your upper arm. The underside of an arm so pale, you must be turning white. Just what you need: brown boy turns white on diving board. Turns yellow. No, not that, you’re just not ready. But look at that face. The Old Man’s face is one big snarl. Silent words bubble out to fill a cartoon balloon: Can’t you do anything right?

Not that he would ever say such a thing—a high class Brahmin, a gentleman. Durga says so. Says he wasn’t like this once. He was loving and kind.

Proud when you were born. That, she must have heard from Ma. Durga’s frozen like you, hasn’t said a word.

You can’t see her, but she’s sitting on the pool deck, off to the right, waiting to save you. Not like the kids on the other side of the fence, their fingers curled through chain links.

Duncan McArthur, grade four. His kid sister, Flora. Her best friend, Kate Holloway. Tommy

Jones, grade five. No one from your class, thank God. Not one kid from grade six to watch you sweat and shiver, your nose wrinkled from chlorine. Even if you shut your eyes, you know they will sting.

“Don’t look at me,” the Old Man says. You’re not, and he can’t see the others, way behind him.

“Keep your eyes on the water!” If only he knew.

Duncan and Flora, Tommy and Kate—all their eyes on him. Look behind you, Pa. See the cartoon balloon. Poor Subhas, they’re thinking. His old man’s crazy. Cripes, an Indian sicko. “Eyes on the water!” he yells.

Okay, okay. Only it’s not even water any more. Can’t he see it’s not water? Can’t anyone?

Durga can. She must. She sees everything. It’s not water now. It’s glass.

Last week in science, a film. Oh, goodie.

“The Making of Glass.” You’re safe in the dark during films.

Float glass—that was your favourite. Sand and soda, lime and cullet. That’s scrap glass broken into teeny, tiny bits. Mixed in a mixer, poured in a furnace. Goes all gooey like hot honey treacle—this cherry red molten glass.

Slowly cools in a lehr. You looked it up, l-e-h-r.

Next, all the things you can do with glass: blow it, draw it, press it, cast it, roll it, float it. That’s Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 25

FINDINGS

AT 3 0 Dupuy & Berberian

From Maybe Later, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2006. Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian are French artist-writers who have collaborated on comics for many years. Maybe Later is a behind-the-scenes look at their years-long creation of the series Monsieur Jean, a bestseller in France and winner of the Angoulême Alph’Art Award for best book of the year.

the best: floating. A new way of working with glass, less than ten years old. “Developed in 1959,” the voice on the film said, “by Sir Alastair Pilkington.” Smart man. You looked him up too.

Bet he never screamed at anyone.

Now the Old Man’s taking a bird. He’s shaking his fists. “Dive, I say! Dive!”

Awoo-gah, woo-gah, battlestations. Oof— In mid-air, there’s nothing to hold you up, you’re not flying, this is no dream. You fall.

Page 26 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

You’re a brown, stone boy shattering the water.

But stone can’t be hurt. Not like flesh. Fangs of glass scrape the flesh from your ribs. And down you go. Down, while the water closes in like you’re not even there. You are, though. You’ll never make it to the top. Ever. The chlorine stings your eyes. Stop that flailing. You’re losing your breath. Can’t cram it back in your lungs, your squishy balloon lungs letting out Morse code bubbles, S-O-S, they spell. Mayday. May—

FINDINGS

C H ARG IN G TO T H E L IGHT Gil Adamson From The Outlander, published by Anansi in 2007.

The Outlander, Gil Adamson’s fourth book, won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2008.

She lives in Toronto.

T

he widow realized she had been only half listening. She glanced at her benefactor, expecting to see her lost in her own thoughts too. But there was the feral face, watching intently, the eyes moving back and forth as if reading a book. The old woman only talked so that she could observe.

“It was dark much of the winter, and cold. We women spent time in our beds after the chores, just to keep warm. We sat together with the sheets pulled up to our chins, and the dogs lay at our feet and the cats crawled in under the blankets. We all had fleas. You simply lived with that fact.

“One spring, we went off to Winnipeg to buy a new stove. We had a cart and two massive oxen that together could pull almost a ton. They had the ridiculous names of Maxwell and Minnie. I was terrified one of them might step on me and kill me. As they walked past you, the ground shook. My father had purchased this pair of monsters from a man outside Russell. They were tremendously stupid, gentle animals with huge woolly heads. They looked prehistoric.

Well, we lumbered along all day and through the dusk into night. There was no moon overhead, nothing to show us our way, but we all trusted in my father. I remember we were lying under many blankets, and the moon was completely blurred by mist, and beautiful, you know? So I went to sleep. Now, when I awoke, it was to the most terrific uproar, my parents shouting, the other girls screaming, and the cart leaping as if the ground itself had begun to tear apart. I realized that we were speeding through the trees at top speed, the oxen apparently gone mad. It was all I could do to seize my younger sister and hold us both to the floor of the cart.”

“What was it?” the widow said.

The bird lady smiled to see how well her tale had taken hold. “Well, I peeped my head over the

railing and realized the oxen were charging toward a small light, a house perhaps, I couldn’t tell at first.

And then I could see it was a barn. Alone on a frozen field, surrounded by trackless forest, was a farm, and the oxen had found it. In fact, it was their home. This was the very same farmer who had sold them to my father. Without the moon to guide him, my father had drifted too close to Russell, and the oxen had smelled home and made for it, with a vengeance. A pair of oxen can move pretty quickly when they see oats in their future. It makes sense now, doesn’t it?

“The farmer and his wife were nice people, but perhaps a little childish. They put us up for the night and fed our oxen. The wife gave us biscuits and told my sister ghost stories that failed to frighten her but kept her up all night pondering the mysteries of death. She wouldn’t let me sleep, and I was at my wits’ end to shut her up. I remember sitting up and hissing, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and die then, and let me sleep!’ Finally, in the morning, my mother’s beloved cat could not be found. We all went searching without success for almost an hour, until finally a plaintive mewing was heard, and we found him pressed between our hosts’ mattresses. The wife had hoped to keep him.

I still remember her tears as my mother carried the miserable, limp animal to the cart in the frigid morning and placed him in his cage.”

Magic Time Real fortunes from weirdfortunecookies.com.

Life is not a struggle. It’s a wiggle.

Do onto others as you wish others to do onto you.

You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness.

The rubber bands are heading in the right direction.

Everything is not yet lost.

Your eyes will soon be sparking, keep them open.

You have an unusual equipment for success, use it properly.

Magic time is created when unconventional person comes.

Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom.

An alien of some sort will be appearing to your shortly!

You may attend a party where strange customs prevail.

You are what you think about all day long.

Someone can read your mind.

To enter the Geist Fortune Cookie Contest go to geist.com/fortune.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 27

ol u

a e 8

FINDINGS

WORK-IN-PROGRESS Seth Detail of George Sprott (1894–1975)—Chapter 13, 2007, pencil, ink and coloured pencil on paper.

Reproduced in krazy!, edited by Bruce Grenville and published in 2008 by Douglas & McIntyre in conjunction with the exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art. Photo by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. Seth is a comics artist, illustrator and book designer, author of Wimbledon Green, Clyde Fans and the series Palookaville, among other books. His award-winning artwork has been exhibited and published internationally. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

FOU R TI N Y PL AYS Craig Taylor From One Million Tiny Plays About Britain by Craig Taylor, a book published by Bloomsbury/Penguin in spring 2009. Contents copyright © Craig Taylor, whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Guardian, New York Times and Geist (most recently “Punch” in No. 48). His book Return to Akenfield was published by Granta in 2006.

(Two cars have collided at a roundabout in Watford.

The drivers face each other.) debbie: . . . to have the courtesy to maybe get off the phone. tre: I’m not on some phone, innit? debbie: To just have some sort of courtesy.

Because some people— Page 28 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

tre: And you’re being all full of courtesy now, are you? debbie: Some people might get off their phone. tre: Am I talking into it? debbie: In a situation like this. tre: It’s a headset, yeah. It don’t mean I’m on the phone. It’s on my head. debbie: And it’s no wonder you did this, frankly, with that noise. tre: Am I talking into my phone now, yeah? debbie: It’s no wonder you weren’t concentrating with your bass making a godawful noise. tre: You were the one stopped for no reason. debbie: With your bass playing so loud. You can’t even think. It’s not as if I can’t hear it. tre: You talking about my music now, yeah? debbie: Oh, do you want to call it music?

Don’t you think it was distracting you? tre: Your radio’s on.

FINDINGS

debbie: Don’t you think it draws your attention from the road? tre: Your radio’s on right now, yeah? debbie: I am listening to Radio 4, all right? It’s people speaking. tre: It’s radio. You’re not concentrating. debbie: It’s English people speaking. I don’t know— tre: Oh, and I’m not listening to English people. debbie: Listen, you little boy— tre: Boy? Now you call us boy, yeah? debbie: Young man, I will take photographs, young man, as evidence that you weren’t concentrating, that your music was loud. tre: And you stopped for no reason. debbie: And you hit me. I will take photos on my phone right now. As evidence. tre: Then do it. debbie: I’m going to do it.

tre: Then take a photo on your phone. debbie: I just did, all right? I won’t be bullied.

I won’t be— tre: You’re texting. debbie: What? tre: You’re not taking a photo. You’re sending a text. debbie: (pause) Oh. tre: You got to use that button there. And hold your arm steady.

(A woman stands near the revolving door of an office block in Holborn, London, Pret sandwich in hand.

She speaks into a mobile phone.)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 29

FINDINGS

Yeah. Oh yeah. (pause) (laughing) Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. (pause) (affronted) Yes. (confirming) Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Aw. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. (pause) Yeah.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

Yeah. (pause) (concerned) Yes. (concerned) Yeah. (concerned) Yeah. (concerned) Yeah. (sympathetic) Yeah. (sympathetic) Yeah. (pause) (resolute) Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. (with finality) Yes. (pause) (skeptical) Mmmm, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. Just, um, trying to eat my lunch.

I know it is.

No, I wasn’t chewing into the phone. (She puts the sandwich down.) I won’t.

Page 30 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

We only get a half hour.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. ok, Mum. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bye. Yeah.

Yeah.

Bye. ok.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. Bye. Bye.

(An older man checks in at Heathrow Airport.) joe: I’ve got my whole life here in these bags. becca: Big trip then? joe: I’m a mule, a pack mule. becca: And if I could just see your ticket. joe: Whip me with a cane says the mule. Whip me on the behind. becca: I’ll just take that ticket from you. joe: I’m going to live with my daughter. becca: I’m sure that will be nice. I’m just checking availability. joe: It won’t be nice. She’s been in America twenty-five years. She’s a small, worried American now. becca: It’s lovely when families are reunited. joe: It’s only because I broke my ankle. She leaves all these bloody messages all day on

FINDINGS

the answerphone. She sounds like my bank manager. becca: And did you happen to pack your passport in all of that? joe: Yes. I’m sorry I can’t read your nametag without my glasses. becca: Becca. joe: Becca. Lovely. Have mercy on the photograph, Becca. becca: And did you pack your own luggage today? joe: Yes. All these bloody tablets. Four messages about my tablets. Don’t forget, she says. becca: Have you left your luggage unattended at any time? joe: No. You are a Mediterranean beauty.

Your parents are Spanish, aren’t they? becca: Not exactly Spanish. A bit further east.

Now here’s your boarding pass. joe: Then it’s goodbye to England, isn’t it? becca: You’ll be back. A healthy fellow like yourself. joe: I have to be in good shape to carry all this.

My whole life. Like a pack mule with all my belongings around me? A Jew in one of those war movies, aren’t I? becca: I’m sorry? joe: Have you ever seen those films? I could be in Schindler’s List. becca: (pause) Next. joe: Is that goodbye then? Wish me luck? becca: Next.

(Two employees stand in the kitchen of an office in Reading.) mary: Well, someone should have warned you is all I’m saying. jay: It’s fine. I’ll dash out. I’ll get a sandwich. mary: We’ll pay for that. Or could you save your receipt instead? jay: I’ll keep my receipt. mary: But we will pay you back. I’m almost sure we have money for that in the budget. jay: It’s just my sandwich was ruined. Soaked through.

mary: This happened to the last intern too.

You see, we all just know better. jay: So, what is this liquid in the fridge? mary: Oh, we don’t know that. Do you mean its physical makeup? jay: It was dripping. It looked quite viscous. mary: Quite what? jay: Quite thick. mary: I don’t think anyone’s actually touched it. We just know not to put sandwiches on the shelf below. jay: Because the container leaks? mary: Yes. He’s been bringing in that container for years. jay: No one tells him it leaks? mary: Oh no, no one could tell him that. He is management, after all. We just avoid him in the fridge. Keep your own sandwich to the side and you’ll be all right. jay: Does he not see the pool of liquid below? mary: It’s not our concern. jay: And he eats whatever’s in the container? mary: Yes, every lunch hour. The office door shuts and he comes out an hour later. jay: Is that what that terrible smell was? mary: Which smell was that? jay: Yesterday. On my first day. mary: I don’t remember smelling anything. jay: It was as if an animal had died. mary: I’ve been working here for a while, though. I wouldn’t notice a little smell. jay: It was in my nose the whole day and on my clothes. mary: Interns sometimes have a problem in this environment. jay: Will that puddle be at the bottom of the fridge tomorrow? mary: Oh no. It gets taken care of each night. jay: By who? mary: By someone else. I mean, it can’t be too bad. He eats it, after all. jay: I’m going to say something to him. For all of us. mary: Oh. We’d all prefer if it wasn’t an intern who mentioned anything. He does have seniority. And there is plenty of room for your sandwich. To the side.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 31

Stranger Song How I (finally) met Leonard Cohen

Ann Diamond

Leonard Cohen, Montreal visitor #2, 2007, pigment print on paper.

I

n 1966, when I was fifteen years old, I saw Leonard Cohen sing “The Stranger Song” on Canadian television. Not long afterwards, I took the subway from the dormitory suburb where I lived with my parents, into downtown Montreal and to Classics Bookstore, where I bought my first book of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth, for which Cohen had won much critical praise. Magic was afoot.

Page 32 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

illustration: courtesy drabinsky gallery, toronto

I

n 1968, when I was starting university, I went to my first poetry reading. At the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Stanley Street there was standing room only as Patrick Lane, visiting from out west, read his poems, and then called out to a figure hunched in a corner near the bar. “Ladies and gentlemen, Leonard Cohen is here in the audience and I’d like to invite him up on stage to read for us.”

Applause. A slight man in a dark jacket approached the stage, head down, and spoke to Lane for a moment, then melted back into the crowd. Lane told us Leonard Cohen had declined to read—he had come only to listen.

The audience groaned in disappointment. In the interval a madman suddenly stormed the stage, grabbed the mike and began to rave and weep.

No one knew what to do, except Patrick Lane, who embraced him like a brother. The man returned to his seat and the crowd composed itself to listen to the next reader, but everyone kept looking around for Leonard Cohen, who had vanished.

The following week a letter appeared in the pages of the student newspaper for which I was news editor. It was signed by one of the poets who had read that same evening. Reaching back into the recent literary history of Montreal, the poet built a case accusing Leonard Cohen of “selling out.” What exactly had been sold, and to whom?

What had he done to deserve this ranting assault?

At seventeen I read hidden knowledge, and no small amount of envy, between the lines.

O

n a rainy night in October 1970, when the Canadian armed forces had occupied Montreal, I crossed paths with Leonard Cohen. To my magical way of thinking at the time, that accidental meeting under Measures of War was the climax of a spiralling descent that had begun when I fainted in my Romantic literature class during a lecture on the cosmology of William Blake.

I wish I knew the exact night it happened. I would like to situate that street corner moment in the context of historical events. It was a warmish rainy night, but nights can be warm in Montreal even into November. Was there

tension in the air? Had I seen soldiers during my walk? Was I afraid? Had Labour Minister Pierre Laporte’s body already been discovered in the trunk of a car? All I know is that on that night, I was out testing the limits of my new-found personal liberty.

A few weeks earlier, at the beginning of an honours program in English literature, I had discovered I hated English literature and the students who studied it—a prissy, blinkered bunch of bookworms who could not read a poem without first consulting the critical literature.

Besides, I wanted Russian novels and Polish poets! Not endless annotated sonnets by Herbert Spencer.

Downtown in the bars, all the talkers were excited and on edge. To hear them go on, they were on first-name terms with the principal players in the political drama. They lined them up like bottles—soldiers and cops on the right, politicians in the middle, nationalists and separatists over to the left with their backs to the wall.

Montreal was in a state of apprehended insurrection. Our flower child prime minister had proven he had an iron fist in his velvet glove.

The Indian beads and trips behind the Iron Curtain had never really softened a personality that came of age during the Second World War. Add to that our collective state of induced schizophrenia, thanks to the hallucinogens flooding the streets.

I had been getting my feet wet in more ways than one. In late September, as the leaves rustled in anticipation of autumn, I had spent the night with a minor poet—handsome, bearded, neurotic, charming, the son of a cardiologist. He was twenty-five, an older man—but at least not yet decrepit like the thirty-four-year-old sociology prof who had recently asked me out. To boot, he’d published poems. I liked his private-school manners and studied aura of privilege, the way he took everything so lightly—me included— viewing life as a crooked game in which the dice were mysteriously loaded in his favour.

In my mind I relived our meandering walk back to his place through a tangled forest along a dried-out canal inside the stone walls of the Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 33

“I

KNOW

WHO

YOU

ARE!”

Sulpician monastery on Sherbrooke Street; then the turn onto the avenue where he lived— monastically, I thought—and wrote his verses, then our night together in the big bed in his windy flat overlooking a park.

Magic is unrepeatable and always recedes, like a wave, leaving us beached with the dried-out relics of imagination. As a way of coping with the vacuum left by my first night with a poet, I decided to become a poet myself.

A few days later I was caught red-handed, revising a poem in thick blue magic marker on the wall of a stairwell at the university. The first draft, also on the wall, had been photographed and shown on the front page of the student newspaper—my first publication. Seeing it in print, I’d found it incomplete and had returned to the stairwell to add a coda. That’s when I was apprehended by a rent-a-cop who was stationed nearby.

He marched me down to the office of Dean Magnus Flynn, whom I knew by reputation. I’d been news editor of the student paper at Sir George Williams University after student activists occupied the computer centre, set up camp and began holding media conferences. Magnus Flynn had emerged as “the enemy”—superficially charming, deeply devious, as we said at the time, after many of the students went to jail and others were beaten in back rooms by Montreal police. I had never met Magnus Flynn face to face during those weeks when my colleagues were plotting counter-tactics in the newsroom.

After all, weren’t we at war with everything he represented? Now, two years later, Flynn looked old and tired, or perhaps bored. Until that day in the stairwell I had maintained a 4.0 grade-point average, but mirrored in his eyes I saw not a silly girl from the suburbs who had recently stumbled in love, but a ragged representative of a generation that was going berserk.

Magnus Flynn threatened me with expulsion

Page 34 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

I

C A L L E D.

“AND

for defacing university property, but I headed him off. Fine with me, I said—I was planning to quit anyway, out of sheer boredom, and would be happy to leave that very minute. We were both surprised. Write a poem on a wall, drop out of school and ruin your life in a single bound. I didn’t care what Magnus Flynn thought of my decision to take to the streets with the rest of my generation. We were going to rattle society to its foundations. That same week I withdrew from my courses and began my new life, free of institutional commitments and constraints.

What would my parents say when they found out their daughter was a university dropout? I postponed telling them the exciting news and awaited instructions from the gods of coincidence, in whom I placed my trust.

In those days, it was easy to join the revolution. You could sign up on any street corner. “Into the streets!” was where you went to find like-minded children with weird hair and clothes. I had been in the streets a lot that year, marching for this and shouting slogans against that. The future would sort itself out, as simple as breathing. Until then, I’d lived inside books. Now that I was free, I went for endless walks, and read the pavement like a concrete poem, a symbolist scroll unveiling my concerns, obsessions and fears. I waited for a map of my future to surface on those strolls, taken in the spirit of Stephen Dedalus patrolling Dublin’s beaches in search of the “uncreated consciousness” of his race.

I

shared a three-room, $42-a-month unheated cold-water flat with my new friend Charlotte, recently back from a year at the Sorbonne. Or rather, Charlotte and I paid the rent, and her boyfriend David slept over. In Paris, they had been tear-gassed in a minor uprising, and the experience had radicalized them. David was twenty-three, a handsome young Leon Trotsky

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! ” LEONARD COHEN SHOT BACK.

whose main occupation was filling our heads with political theories and attempting to convert the neighbours to the revolutionary struggle, when he wasn’t fighting with Charlotte in the kitchen, where they shared a creaking cot.

On that October night in 1970, I was in a state of emergency. I had gone out searching for the minor poet, who had rejected me. I believed we could sort things out and I wanted a word with him about all that had happened since our night together. Normally on a Friday, he could be found at the Bistro, a well-known hangout for intellectuals and artists, journalists and drunks.

Leonard Cohen also drank at the Bistro in those days, and a few years earlier, Pierre Trudeau had been a regular.

I was testing the power of coincidence. If the poet and I were meant to meet, he would appear.

And if not? Something would fill the gap.

As often happens in James Joyce stories, just before the epiphany, it began to pour rain. Having walked without an umbrella several kilometres from my flat near Parc Lafontaine to the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts, I was deep downtown, soaking wet.

In my drenched jeans and worn-out sandals, with my long stringy hair glued to my head, I arrived at the corner of Bishop and Sherbrooke.

And sure enough.

A little black Volkswagen Beetle stood paused at a red light. At the wheel was a handsome man with an illustrious nose and a full head of dark hair. Next to him in the front seat sat a stunning dark-haired woman, elegantly dressed and made up. She stared blankly ahead, but the man’s eyes watched me from the space between his windshield wipers.

His window was rolled down. Nothing between us but warm, wet air. I squinted through the rain to get a better look at the face I recognized from television, book jackets, newspapers.

Reaching the sidewalk, I turned around and

called: “I know who you are!”

“And I know who you are!” he shot back. For a moment I believed him.

“Why?” An impossible question. I should have said, “Who?” He might have obliged with a ready answer I could repeat later in the bar.

“Leonard Cohen called me a—” Drowned mermaid. Travelling lady of the night. Some useful phrase that would anchor the lost wreck of a young woman.

Instead, the light changed to green. The man behind the wheel smiled grimly, shook his head and stepped on the gas.

Seven years later, at his kitchen table, I would ask him if he remembered our first encounter.

He would not. Right now, though, I’d had enough for one night’s glimpse of the future.

And I’d learned an important lesson: one poet leads to another. The universe provides for the pure in heart. On a street corner I’d had a flickering encounter with a mythical figure whose novel Beautiful Losers was one of the sacred texts of the day.

On the walk home, I felt exalted and breathless.

I was floating above my occupied city like Kateri Tekakwitha, at one with all the Mohawks and other disembodied saints. I was hovering over unmarked graves, deciphering an unwritten novel on the facades of old stone buildings. Weaving through closely guarded streets, I covered the thirty blocks back to Panet Street, not a fashionable area then, but cheap and bordering on quaint.

My roommates were sleeping. I fell into bed and wrote in my notebook for a while by the light of the street lamp outside. Someday I might run into Leonard Cohen again and share my life story, the song of a Mohawk saint stranded in revolutionary times.

When the War Measures Act was declared, much of the air was forced out of our dreams and hopes. David fled to Berkeley one night, after hearing that his friends had been arrested and

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 35

“ H E L L O

A N N ?

T H I S

I S

L E O N A R D

were being held at Parthenais Prison as suspected terrorists. Our crowded flat seemed colder and emptier without his long speeches.

Before he left, he told us the police were arresting people on suspicion of being “Cubists”— Castro supporters. In a city that had little going for it but poetry, it was suddenly unsafe to be a surrealist.

I was unemployed and living off savings from my recent summer job, groping for a way through a world that appeared to be disintegrating. It always is, but how could I know that then?

In self-defence, I began writing down all my dreams.

T

he second time I failed to meet Leonard Cohen was in the summer of 1972. I had returned to university but was addicted to drama. I lived in a commune that was the headquarters of the local women’s liberation movement, and had managed to get arrested with a group of students protesting the demolition of old houses in our neighbourhood.

On this hot night in July we were celebrating our night in jail, and had gone out dancing. Now we were weaving our way east along Sherbrooke, past the Ritz-Carlton Hotel west of McGill.

Out of nowhere, the name “Leonard Cohen” was spoken inside my head by a deep male voice.

The effect was so powerful, I stopped and turned ninety degrees. On the opposite side of the street, a little black Volkswagen waited at a traffic light.

This time the passenger seat was empty, and the driver seemed to recognize me. Of course that was impossible, but he was waving. A beckoning gesture. Was he suggesting I cross the street and get into the car with him? I hesitated, then called to my friends, “Hey look, everybody!

It’s Leonard Cohen!” In the glare of the streetlights, there was no mistaking him. Was he

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C O H E N .

saddened, even offended, by my light, mocking tone? I hurried to catch up with my friends, with the sinking feeling that I was running from a great opportunity. For the rest of the way home I wondered why I didn’t just climb into the Volkswagen and see what happened next.

Later that summer, Leonard Cohen showed up at an event at the University Settlement on St. Urbain, where a group of musicians and actors from Ann Arbor were giving a performance. He walked in with a friend toward the end of the evening. A visiting performer recognized him and whispered that Leonard Cohen was there. I assured him this stranger was only a look-alike, yet another local poet and Cohen impersonator. I was so sure of myself that I hesitated to join the circle that formed around the fake Cohen—until someone handed him a guitar and he began to sing. That voice erased all doubt.

The fourth time I didn’t meet him was in the summer of 1975. Late one afternoon I was walking through the McGill ghetto and Leonard Cohen passed me at the corner of Hutchison, riding on a moped. He slowed down to stare at me and I ignored him. By then I had heard a few stories that made me feel I didn’t want to meet him after all. A minute later, he buzzed by again, still staring in an irritating way. I walked on. He circled the block once again. I thought, If he does that one more time, I’ll speak to him. But he didn’t.

O

ne day in 1977, I was pushing my bicycle down the sidewalk near my apartment off the Main when Leonard Cohen appeared a foot or two away. Then, as often before, I decided to put off meeting him until the time was right. A friend of mine, a carpenter named Peter, was renovating one of Cohen’s buildings on rue St. Dominique, and I told him about my close encounters, which were beginning to weigh on

W E

H A V E

T O

S T O P

my conscience. Peter offered to handle the introductions. A day or two later, Peter told him about a woman who wanted to meet him, and that she was very tall. “The girl with the bicycle?

How tall is she?” asked Leonard Cohen, jumping in the air several times to demonstrate his readiness to meet a giant.

One evening at about 9:00 my phone rang while I was all twisted up in a yoga pose. A deep male voice said, “Hello Ann? This is Leonard Cohen. We have to stop meeting like this.”

He lived a few blocks away, opposite a little park on rue Vallières. I put on sneakers and ran the five blocks to his door, which he opened by pulling on a cord from his second-floor apartment. He was conservatively dressed in dark velour trousers and a sweater. Every room of his place was decorated with the same ugly red Persian carpet, reminiscent of an old brothel or gambling den.

In the kitchen he made tea, which tasted Russian although there was no samovar. I was nervous. After half an hour, I asked if I was boring him yet. He said people were always boring one another—that was the nature of human life. I asked him how old he was. He seemed to resent the question. “Forty-three.”

Elvis had died a few weeks earlier, and Leonard was reading his biography. They had some things in common, he said. For example, Elvis’s mother had nurtured her son’s genius from early childhood.

Leonard turned on the radio and mournful gypsy music poured out. He called it “the complaint of a man who is not a bird.” His mother called on the telephone and asked him what he was doing. “Reading, Ma. Yes, I’m just here alone, studying.” She talked for a long time, and he interjected the occasional “Yes, Ma. No, you’re not going to die, Ma.” He put the receiver to my ear for a minute. “It won’t be much longer now,” she said in a shaky voice.

M E E T I N G

L I K E

T H I S . ”

After he hung up, he sighed. “My mother is the most boring person in the world. Now she’s got cancer.” He got out his guitar and played “Red River Valley,” insisting that I sing along.

He said I had a beautiful voice, and that “Red River Valley” was his all-time favourite song.

Could either absurd statement be true? I thought not.

He put the guitar away and showed me the little room off the hallway where he said his three-year-old daughter always slept when she visited with her older brother. On the wall was a print of the Annunciation. I knelt on the bed for a better look at the angel and the dove descending, as he watched me from the end of the bed. I said, “I feel like a little girl.” He said, “You are a little girl.”

The next morning when I arrived at my temp typing job in a downtown bank, I was dazed, delirious. Leonard phoned me that night and said he felt the same way. “Let’s get together, later in the week. Or whenever you want. Just phone me anytime, darling. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

There are times—mainly in youth—when we believe ourselves deserving of exceptional blessings. Times when fate reaches a hand down into the aquarium where we’ve been circling, and offers us a glimpse of a world beyond. Are we really meant to breathe air? Or to end up gasping on the floor?

My tiny room now seemed like a vestibule on the steps of a vast mansion I was destined to explore. Starting out from my little room, I would write. Writing would be my ticket home.

“Stranger Song” is an excerpt of a work-in-progress. Ann Diamond’s most recent book is A Certain Girl, a memoir about the MKULTRA program of secret Cold War experiments. Read her Geist work at geist.com/author/ diamond-ann.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 37

Five Stories, Nine Selves Sina Queyras A Story by Alice Munro Is Recounted

I

t was the earlier ones I liked best. You could see her with pedal-pushers on,

walking the dusty roadsides. And her mother with the bibles in the trunk.

That’s what I liked. A looking back that filled in details, like how she put the ice in the pitcher of lemonade; I could hear it clink all the way up in Grande Prairie, where I was reading the story. And those aunts! How they arrived, one fatter than the other. That’s what I like in a story: ice cubes, hot afternoons, women talking around a kitchen table. That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you. You go back to the farm, you’re walking, and you have a bouquet of stinkweed, and the night is sweet as cut hay, and you don’t have asthma, and there is no war—not here, not yet—and your husband is still alive, and, if you think real hard, if you slow it all down, you can hear your mother in the kitchen flipping cards. You might understand it’s temporary. It might have always been, but for a moment it was real. It was a place you could inhabit.

Colony Collapse

O

ne morning they woke up to find all the stores ravaged: honey pots

upturned and pawed out, flowers with the heads bitten off, anthills sculpted into elaborate centrepieces, trees overturned to distinguish one mosh pit from another, millions of fish in heaps, flung across oceans and lakes, deer skins in piles, bat wings in piles, dogs in corrals, corals in jars, eyeballs in oil, all of it catalogued, the sky, demarcated, clouds in nets like poker chips lined up, elbows on the great green table, dealers off and on, bow ties, even the cataloguers with bar-coded necks, themselves the very next items to be scanned.

A Difficult Moment

I

didn’t know what to do, he said. I’ve never had to follow naked women but

there they were, having just read an essay buff. It was a hard act to follow and I confess to feeling a little upstaged. Naked women are all very well in one’s head, but not on stage, not with words, not with full sentences and sentience.

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Her Nine New York Selves

S

he is walking under Macy’s big screen where the children of Belsen are

being carried out on stretchers. We have come to, we are so, some of us, she thinks, turned around. The children hang in the balance like shekels. She pauses, fishing in her bag while bodyguards frisk. Overhead the red streaks of a Target ad and she thinks of that kettle, that kettle, the designer one, she meant to buy it on the weekend. She had been in the diner on Sixth, the one that Isaac Mizrahi frequents (blt no mayo). She hadn’t seen him, but had been scowled at (deliciously) by Fran Lebowitz. Men in camouflage, men in suits, there is an orange alert today and she has lost her lipstick. Off to a cocktail party in Gramercy Square, but not without lipstick, into Macy’s, to the Mac counter for Miss Dish, or is it Mac Red? They are always changing the name of her shade. Everything overstocked, she cannot sell or save—but there is no tax this week to celebrate the Grand Old Party doing its dirty in town. Please, she thinks, adjust your dial, tune out and tune in, the moment is a frieze of scent and cashmere and the most delicious lips in the world, all here, smiling and lipstick is not political . . . She is not convincing herself, cool as a bottle of spring water in Chelsea on a Saturday afternoon before she heads back down to her loft in the Meatpacking District next to Julianna’s. Or is it uptown to a tiny but perfect apartment where she lives with her lawyer husband and they take dancing lessons with a little old man, wiry as a yogi, who kids with Liza, who winks at you too, as you both wrap your knees. Everything is luscious Hudson Valley greens and Tiffany blues in rooms the colour of Arctic char, that latte waiting for you around the corner when you tire of your own company (rarely . . .). But at that moment she remembers that she lives in Brooklyn and needs print cartridges from Target, not a kettle, and will probably buy some street meat from the vendor on Atlantic, where lithe tattooed boys in white tees sneak out with dvds, and oops, no, she is still at the border waiting for paperwork, about to take a job at a state college in New Jersey, a small one no one has ever heard of at which she will be of little use and make no mark, but think of Williams as she drives through to the city for her weekly culture fix. Or she is that person who eagerly attends poetry readings at the Ear Inn (where a basset hound paddles past her), and over the beer, her ear, over the bear, her ear, strains to hear something off of Spring Street, something a little more Soho, more like the Grand, where she sits of an afternoon working on a screenplay, modest, with a role for Björk—a feature art-avant-garde sort of MoMA thing, abstract, but still completely commercially viable with multiple soundtracks depending on the cinema you see the movie Page 40 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

in . . . Or now, jerking herself into the street, not exactly into oncoming traffic but surfing a sea of New York taxis riding the afternoon tide down Fifth Avenue bustling with so many versions of herself she feels them mingling with other versions of other people, small, compact projectors flashing through the streets, endless reels of selves and selves and selves and selves and selves . . .

A Story Filled With Unnecessary Tension

T

he train came to a stop mid-tunnel. She knew it was mid-tunnel because

at a certain point the energy of Manhattan begins to act as both magnet and relaxant, both buoying and energizing. They had just reached that moment.

And stopped. Silence. Only the Verizon phones worked under the tunnel. She had gone with another service and so could only cling to her cell and breathe, which she did. Which they all did. Several minutes passed with only the sound of the man trading stocks, he was worried about devaluing. He should be, she thought, and wondered, as she knew they all must be wondering, if this was another attack, whether at any moment a ball of flame would shoot backward from the city, or whether, when they finally climbed back out of the system, there would be anything left of either side. And then, “I have no contact with either end,” came a voice, a little shaky. “I repeat. No contact with either end.”

She thinks of the bodies falling, closes her eyes and walks backward in time to the island, where her golden retriever is waiting for her to throw a stick. The beach is deserted. It’s winter. The arbutus have shed their bark, the leaves glisten and the air is sweet. She can see fires across the strait, on Lasqueti. All is well in the world despite the sense of something about to, about to . . . The woman beside her gets more anxious by the moment, the failed attempts to call her daughter who waits at Penn Station (is there still a Penn Station?) and the mother with her two young sons who have been silent this whole time.

“Check. Still no contact with either end.” Why, she thinks, as the dog stops and turns to see if she is still there, and suddenly there is heavy cloud cover and a wind from the north, why won’t they reassure us?

Sina Queyras is the author of Lemon Hound (Coach House), which won the 2007 Pat Lowther Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, Expressway, is published in spring 2009 (Coach House), and a collection of essays is due in fall 2009 (BookThug). The pieces here are excerpted from a work-in-progress, A Story With Severe Anxiety and Other Stories.

Visit Sina Queyras at lemonhound.blogspot.com.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 41

THE MEMORY PROJECT

Memory in Belgrade Photographing the past in its best light

Goran Basaric In the summer of 2008, Goran Basaric returned with his camera to the neighbourhoods of Belgrade that he had known in his youth. Since 1994, when he and his wife moved to Canada, he had been photographing the Vancouver cityscape—in particular, the parks and public spaces that their son, Philip, who is now thirteen, came to know as he grew up. A portfolio of these Vancouver photographs was published in Geist 52 in 2004. The images presented here extend Basaric’s project into memory places of his own past, in the country once known as Yugoslavia.

M

y father, Djuro, was born in 1925 in Bosnia. When World War ii started in 1941, Croatian fascists burned down the family home.

My father joined the anti-fascist Partisans and

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spent the next four years hiding from the Germans and fighting them in the forests and mountains. After the war he continued in his military career until his retirement.

THE MEMORY PROJECT

False Creek, Vancouver, looking north, 2004.

Novi Sad, eighty kilometres north of Belgrade on the Danube. The Petrovaradin Fortress was built by Austro-Hungarians. My friends and I used to make movies in its tunnels and catacombs.

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THE MEMORY PROJECT

Small business in New Belgrade. During the war in the early 1990s, what with food shortages and the collapse of the market, newsstands began turning into corner stores, skirting trade laws and licensing requirements. They were monuments to the vitality of small entrepreneurship and black-market principles.

Knez Mihajlova Street, the main pedestrian zone of Belgrade. Its neo-classicist architecture was a sign of cultural alignment with western Europe. The first public library, the first school of fine arts, the National Bank and the Serbian Academy of Sciences lined the street, along with the best cafĂŠs and restaurants in the city.

My mother, Milica, was born in Kragujevac, an old capital of Serbia and the birthplace of the Yugo automobile. Her father was a skilled toolmaker who worked in a gun factory. In 1941, he and seven thousand other men were taken hostage and shot by German soldiers in reprisal against the Partisans. My mother never got to know her father, and she carried this deep sorrow through the rest of her life.

She worked as an administrative clerk in various institutions, and after she married, she devoted her life to our family. My older brother and I have happy memories of our childhood in Belgrade.

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I

n Belgrade these days, everything seems to be new, even when it looks familiar. Streets have been renamed for old kings and commanders; the government has new agencies; new neighbourhoods are bursting with new kids; the city is buzzing with a new language. The old Belgrade used its courtyards to hide from prosperity and modernity during the years of socialism, and to guard small shops where local merchants, locksmiths, barbers and shoemakers were still servicing the old bourgeois. The result was a peculiar symbiosis of the capitalist past and socialist present. When I returned to those courtyards in 2008, hoping to find the old shops, I could see

THE MEMORY PROJECT

The Kalemegdan Fortress, now the main city park. The fort, situated at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, was a strategic point for centuries, meeting armies of Celts, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Serbs, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans and anyone else wanting to take over the city.

A bomb shelter in New Belgrade. Every block had its own shelter, and as we grew up we were taught to be an army of defence and to expect nuclear bombs to be dropped by imperialist forces. Today the shelters serve as hoardings for political posters and entertainment ads.

that our past had been conquered by the forces of globalization: internet cafés, over-designed foreign banks, MaxMaras and Benettons.

My wide-angle camera, a Soviet-era Horizont with a moving lens, is more suited to photographing large, open spaces like parks and oceans than the density of big cities. The camera needs light and space, and it takes time for the lens to travel from one side of the frame to the other. Urban centres move constantly and quickly and don’t wait for me to reframe. In Belgrade I had to be patient with my panoramic camera—I passed hours near riverbanks and in parks waiting for people to enter the scene.

Often I would position my own shadow somewhere in the frame and wait for something to happen.

In 1968, when I was six years old, my family moved to the newly developed district of New Belgrade. When I wasn’t in school, I spent my time playing with my friends, building cities of wet sand. New Belgrade was a giant sandbox in those days—high cranes and construction crews were everywhere, building over the swampland.

My neighbourhood was called Block 37 and consisted of nothing but huge apartment buildings.

There were no corner stores or markets. My elementary school was heralded as the most Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 45

THE MEMORY PROJECT

Slavia, the biggest and busiest city square in Belgrade. Municipal and provincial governments, architects, artists and activists have struggled to change it into a meaningful, attractive urban space, but nothing has worked—Slavia Square

A prime example of the small-business heyday. This enterprise has survived at the corner of Block 44, New Belgrade, since the 1990s.

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THE MEMORY PROJECT

remains as chaotic today as ever. The taxi driver asked me what was I photographing. “Nothing special,” I said. “Oh, you mean some art?” he replied.

Billboards around the House of Youth, now under reconstruction. It used to be a centre of student unrest and a home to B92, a legendary independent radio station. B92 broadcast the song “Fight the Power” into the streets to support demonstrators who confronted Milosevic’s police on March 9, 1991.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 47

THE MEMORY PROJECT

Block 62, near the neighbourhood where I grew up, as it looks today. When we were kids, my friends and I spent hours at the playground, unattended, playing on the swings and seesaws. Nowadays, mobile amusement parks that look like the Dino-towns of North America move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, wherever families live.

Airport City in New Belgrade, a modern business centre and the home of foreign-owned corporations. This is where everybody with a university degree wants to work these days, or so it seems.

Middle-European architecture in the Zemun district of Belgrade. I always liked this style better than the modern concrete buildings of New Belgrade, where my family lived.

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THE MEMORY PROJECT

Inexpensive carnival-style entertainment in Belgrade. Places like this seem to be frequented less by kids and more by parents who need a break and some cheap fun.

The most beautiful view of Belgrade, overlooking the Sava River flowing into the Danube. The building below the walls is a planetarium, converted from an old Turkish bath. Next to it is the Charles VI Gate, built in 1736.

The Speedo swimsuit, no longer seen in North America, remains popular at the beach.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 49

THE MEMORY PROJECT

Posters of Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the recent war. Karadzic was arrested in my old neighbourhood in summer 2008, during my visit to Belgrade. The

modern school in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. An English princess visited the school, but she wore no crown on her head.

When the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity opened, we were sent out to stand along the road for hours, waiting for President Tito to pass by on his way to and from the airport. We waved national flags and sang songs about revolution and brotherhood and unity. I took my first photograph in Block 37 in the fall of 1977.

When I left Belgrade in January 1994, inflation was running at 400,000-billion percent (fifteen digits). The National Bank was printing new banknotes every Monday, and there were no paycheques—only cash, and tons of it. By Friday all that cash was worthless, unless it was exchanged for foreign currency on the black market.

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I lived in Belgrade for twenty-five years. I worked and played there, slept there and breathed in its rhythms, studied and later lectured on cinematography at the University of Arts in Belgrade, and I can still slip into the city’s patterns when I return for a visit. Everything feels familiar and predictable, even if it is different on the surface.

I have always felt that there is much about Belgrade that everyone could learn to love, if only I could show the city at its best—or, as we would say in Serbia, to show it in its best light. Last summer I returned to Belgrade to photograph and write about the place of my past and of the present as well; to remember and honour the city, and to chase the magical light of early morning and late afternoon.

THE MEMORY PROJECT

The beach at Ada Lake, in the centre of Belgrade.

Goran Basaric is a photographer, cinematographer and photojournalist who lives and works in Vancouver. “Memory in Belgrade” is part of a work commissioned with the assistance

of Arts Partners for Creative Development. Basaric’s most recent piece in Geist was “City Pastoral” (No. 52). For more, visit geist.com/author/basaric-goran.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 51

SHORT LONG-DISTANCE WINNERS

Time Zones Winners of the Geist Short Long-Distance Writing Contest—stories that unfold in two or more Canadian time zones

Stardust Terri Favro

Y

ou’re lucky. I only checked my messages because I came into town for ibuprofen and marshmallows. What’s up?

—Legal has a problem with the Mountain Pure Water brochure, Bobby.

I need a rewrite.

—Lou, I’m camping with the boys on Lake Superior. No Wi-Fi. —I’m on my knees. Production says we must be on press by 12:01 a.m.

—So I have over an hour to find an internet café.

—No, you have fifteen minutes. I’m in Edmundston.

—Edmonton? That gives me an extra two hours.

—Edmundston, New Brunswick! An hour ahead of you. We found a printer here that uses enviro-ink.

—Don’t push me, Lou. I’m parked outside the Wawa iga. The boys are at the campsite, waiting for marshmallows.

And I have a killer headache.

—This’ll be quick. Legal only had a problem with “Crystallized for 100% purity right down to its dna.” They were cool with everything else.

—The whole concept was built around that headline!

—We can’t say “100% purity” or

Canada Goose, Wawa, Ontario

“dna” without a scientific study and a shitload of fine print.

—The integrity of the creative depends on that line, Lou! How about “Crystallized to taste as pure as . . . as . . . a baby mountain goat.”

—I’ll pass it by Legal.

—Legal is in Edmundston?

—No, Legal is in Toronto at Mamma Mia but she promised to keep her pda on vibrate. I’m qwertying her now from my other handheld.

—Lou, I may have taken my last marketing brief. I’m thinking about moving up here.

—What are you going to do in Wawa?

—Teach, maybe? Write poetry?

—That’s commie talk, Bobby. You’re like those dogs in Florida that run like hell when they hear a bell. You can’t not create promotional material.

—You’re wrong. The boys and I watched the Pleiades meteor shower last night. It was a holy experience.

—Hey, Legal just texted “l-s g-t.” She wants us to lose the goat.

—Fuck! It’s a metaphor, not a product claim! Shouldn’t she be defending murderers instead of killing headlines?

photos: henri robideau, from CA N A D A ’S GIGA N TIC (summerhill, 1987)

—She isn’t the type of lawyer who cuts deals with Crown prosecutors. Her job is to stifle creativity. How about just “Crystallized pure”?

—That’s a shitty headline, Lou. —We have two minutes to get on press.

—Could you qwerty Legal my pov?

—Too late for points of view. Let’s get this sucker printed before Cinderella leaves the ball.

—You’re right, Lou. I’m an award-winning creative director but my opinion is irrelevant because I didn’t go to law school.

—Your work is done. Toast marshmallows. Take something for that headache.

—Can’t. The iga just closed. Give me an hour and I’ll come up with a better headline. Let me find a media room where I can work.

—In Wawa?

—I wanted to reach for the stars for Mountain Pure, Lou. —You can’t monetize the stars, Bobby. ’Night.

“Stardust” won a first prize in the 1st Annual Geist Short Long-Distance Writing Contest.

Terri Favro lives in Toronto.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 53

SHORT LONG-DISTANCE WINNERS

Mountie and Horse, North Battleford, Saskatchewan

The Other James Buchanan Christopher Geisel

F

or thirty-eight years, all I knew about my daddy was his last name: Buchanan, same as mine, and that was all right with me until Mama died. The station gave me three days for bereavement, exactly how long it took me to find an envelope of uncashed cheques in a box of her odds and ends. That’s when I found out my daddy’s first name: James, same as mine.

The last cheque was from 1988, the year I graduated from The Comp, Lloydminster Comprehensive Secondary. The address was over on the Saskatchewan side of town, a street named Fall Creek that spelled farm country.

I found him in the phone book and sipped whiskey until the end of Leno. I called him. He didn’t sound surprised when I told him Mama was dead. He agreed to meet me at Maggie’s at 7:00 the following evening for proper introductions.

The restaurant was only half-full when I stepped inside at a quarter to.

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I ordered a Blue and drank it before my watch said 6:59. The tv over the bar had scores from a Saskatoon station. The clock in the corner of the screen read 8:01, Saskatchewan time.

I asked the waitress if a man had been in here about an hour before, but of course I couldn’t describe him. A working man, I thought. Or a businessman. A cowboy hat, I was sure, though I couldn’t say why. Sweat ran down my back when she gave me a smile reserved for drunks, children and the insane, and she promised to ask around. A different waitress brought me a beer, and I drank it all before 7:20, when my daddy walked in.

He was windburnt and lean, with lines around his mouth like knife cuts.

His shirt was the cleanest pressed denim I’d ever seen and he apologized when he shook my hand.

“Hope you didn’t think I’d come on Central Time,” he said.

My laugh came out louder than I’d

meant it to. “Wouldn’t that have been funny,” I said. “It sure would have,” he said, and we laughed again when the waitress came by and we found out my daddy and I drink the same beer.

It was no great thing, really, since everybody drinks either Blue or Canadian around Lloyd, but it felt like proof of something. I looked at the mirror over the bar and saw a thinner-cheeked version of myself and forgot all about the eighteen slips of paper in an envelope in my pocket.

But then I drank a few more beers and asked him why she never took the money.

“Your mother, God bless her, always was a stubborn woman,” he said, and winked. I sipped my beer and just like that, I could tell we were in for a hard time.

“The Other James Buchanan” won a first prize in the 1st Annual Geist Short Long-Distance Writing Contest. Christopher Geisel lives in Vancouver with his wife and daughter. He blogs at litfarm.com.

SHORT LONG-DISTANCE WINNERS

Crème Glacée, Rigaud, Québec

Miracles, Plural Shana Myara

G

od forbid he’s watching over her at this moment. God forbid he’s taken pains to come watch over her right now and she’s just sitting on her ass on the couch staring at the cereal crumbs stuck in the corner of a notebook. God forbid he’s aware that she got this notebook from the kitchen cupboard that stores their family’s crappy miscellany— candles, shoe polish, jar lids, crumpled road maps of Vancouver Island—and that this is the dirty notebook in which she plans to summarize his life: The dog wanders around the house trying to find a spot to pee. His bladder is full of stones and he whimpers and forces droplets of piss onto the basement carpet. She’ll take him to the vet tomorrow and the vet will tell her that he has to cut open Frisco’s bladder and empty it and stitch it back together again. It’ll cost a thousand dollars.

She’ll say to him that she can’t swing it, not right away, there is no money now.

But it doesn’t matter, because the next day he’ll tell her they can’t operate after all, it’s worse than he thought. She’ll hold the dog while he puts the needle in and she’ll ask, how long will we have now, and he’ll look startled by her naïveté and say to her: quickly.

In Outremont, Oma pays her building’s janitor fifty dollars to drive her to the airport. The janitor guides the old woman to the elevator, to the lobby, to his wide Parisienne. At the airport, she takes an Ativan for her nerves. The funeral is today and this day will be shorter by three hours because of the travel. A small mercy.

There are crumbs—crushed cereal flakes and oats in the notebook’s crease.

The daughter uses the lefty pen with the soft, rubber-lined base. Her scrawl tilts

to the right, and her vowels become flat lines connecting consonants together, as if her lazy hands are emulating Hebrew or Arabic script and her mind is willing her to guess at these words later on.

Much of the text is scratched out—trite phrases and explanation: that Nissim, her father’s name, is the plural of nes, or miracle. Last week, she gave him a small bag of marijuana for pain relief and he rolled the little cigarettes himself and smoked them slowly.

The page is smooth. She pushes harder, etching the words in. Oma’s plane is landing and it’s almost time. She looks up, so that if he can see, he can see her better.

“Miracles, Plural” won second prize in the 1st Annual Geist Short Long-Distance Writing Contest. Shana Myara is at work on a collection of short stories and is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 55

SHORT LONG-DISTANCE WINNERS

Misericordia

Cow Heads, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Judith Penner

I

t’s usually her mother’s story: what she was wearing, who came to visit, what kind of flowers were sent, the weather in Winnipeg. In that month of ripening sometimes there isn’t enough rain, sometimes too much. But on this hot August morning of someone’s arrival, others are waiting: having breakfast, reading books, making zwieback, looking for somewhere to live. In Transcona her uncle is measuring the height of the wheat, praying for a bountiful crop this year so all the bills will get paid. The truce isn’t signed yet but he’s hoping the boys will return.

Her mother checks into the Misericordia soon after the contractions begin, her father asleep out West. By the time he eats breakfast in Chilliwack, a doctor in Winnipeg has decided to intervene.

Her father wakes up early, thinking at first that he has to milk the cows and then, amazed that he has time, shifts himself upright and grabs the book on the night table to read a chapter (Willa

Page 56 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

Cather, or something by Schweitzer) before going down for coffee. He can smell fresh bread—his mother has been up since sunrise, punching down the dough and twisting the domes for zwieback. There will be eggs from the henhouse out back, already wiped and washed. Perhaps today there will be a telegram. If it’s a boy, his second name will be Gerhard, or perhaps just George.

You could call her Odessa, his aunt says, caught in an old life.

He has decided to rent a tiny house behind a house, just a few blocks down from this home of his parents, but closer to the school where he’ll teach, close enough to ride his bicycle. It will be a few more years and a bigger salary before he drives a car for the first time, the day he takes the Austin off the lot. One day he’ll be a professor with a Mercedes, and when he dies his family will dream of him gliding along in its grey elegance, still at home in the red leather seats.

What if he knew—they’ve put the

mother out now and the doctor has picked up the forceps—that after his death the Mercedes will be bought by a man on the far edge of this family to come, some ex-partner of somebody’s son’s girlfriend’s mother, with a connection to this girl being born too complicated to explain? A mechanic, not a scholar, takes the car apart, puts it back together and, in the pain of being cuckolded, drives away.

Her father is rereading Death Comes for the Archbishop when his daughter is born in Winnipeg. When he turns on the radio later that day he hears that the Americans have dropped a bomb on Nagasaki and the war is pretty close to being over.

“Misericordia” won third prize in the 1st Annual Geist Short Long-Distance Writing Contest. Judith Penner is a writer, editor and yoga teacher in Vancouver. She has also worked in journalism, film and bookselling, and has taught yoga in Europe, North America, Africa, India and Mexico.

TRUE FUNNIES

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 57

DREAMLAND

The Obama Dreams

Then they left, explaining they had to be on their way.

In dreams, the president wears blue striped boxers and has bright green dreadlocks. Collected, curated and blogged by Sheila Heti

I

n the early months of 2008, when the Democrats were trying to decide whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama should be the candidate for president of the United States, a close friend and collaborator of mine, a painter named Margaux Williamson, told me this Hillary Clinton dream she’d had where she was shopping for Tupperware with Hillary. It was so funny and weird, and I thought, I bet people all over the country are having dreams about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and maybe it’d be interesting to put them all on the web because the web should have everything that could possibly exist on it.

So for about six months I continued to get dreams, and I ended up with about eight hundred dreams from people—more dreams about Barack than Hillary by a slight margin, and also the tone of the dreams about Barack was pretty messianic and Barack was like a great basketball player, whereas the Hillary dreams tended to be a bit more like she’s a castrating bitch type of thing, so it was pretty clear from reading the dreams that Barack was going to win that fight.

People started demanding a website for John McCain because Republicans felt left out of the whole thing. So I put one up, but there weren’t so many McCain dreams, I think because the liberal media covered the website more strongly than the conservative media. I think that’s the only real reason why.

I edited the dreams a lot because people aren’t good at knowing what’s interesting about their dreams and what’s not, so I would sometimes leave details out or reorder things and put them in my own voice because I wanted them to be easy to read and all somehow sound similar to each other stylistically.

Page 58 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

Included here are dreams about Barack Obama that were selected from the website.

—From an interview with Sheila Heti in Vancouver, November 2008. The Obama dreams can be seen at geist.com/obama.

K

Keanu

eanu Reeves was voted in as the next president of the United States. He was giving his acceptance speech, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. He looked good, but we were all shocked.

How did he win? Did we even know he was running? I set about urgently painting him a sign, twelve metres long, with a too-dry paintbrush, reminding him of all the things he had to remember: Prioritize education. Provide Medicare. Cap corporate profits. The environment! There were two brief interruptions as we fielded interviewed reactions from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They were equally stumped. They didn’t know he was running, but they were gracious losers.

B

Godiva

arack Obama stopped by with Lorna, a woman I used to work with. They were just standing there, he in a white shirt and dark pants, she stark naked with her long red hair covering her shoulders like she was Lady Godiva. He had brought her to pick up the baby, which was in the other room.

He was explaining to me that she would be taking care of it. I was quite surprised because Lorna is an unmarried woman in her late fifties and has no children, and I couldn’t understand why she would be caring for his—her?—infant.

B

See-Through

B

Speed Stick

B

Plans

arack made a campaign stop in my hometown. Someone had booked him into a hotel that had a bathroom made entirely of glass, so you could see from the outside what he was doing in there, but it was clouded glass so you couldn’t see anything clearly. Someone made a video of him showering and posted it on the internet.

Of course, this caused a hailstorm of controversy and everyone demanded that Obama explain why he would book a hotel with a see-through bathroom. He countered by explaining that it really wasn’t a big deal because it was clouded glass and you couldn’t see everything.

arack was the new youth minister at my university. As a gesture of welcome, a group of us invited him out for the night for beers. The evening was a success, and we returned with him to his faculty apartment for some late-night meaning-of-life conversation. We were getting comfortable when Barack excused himself to go to the restroom and came out lighting his Speed Stick gel deodorant on fire and huffing the fumes. His adeptness with the deodorant/lighter technique and lack of self-consciousness implied that this was simply his standard nightcap.

arack and I had plans to drive to the outlet mall that afternoon. As we left my house and walked toward my husband’s Ford Explorer, we laughed like two old friends. He gave me a playful nudge and said, I just love you! This made me ridiculously happy. When we reached the car, he had trouble fitting into the passenger seat because his legs were so long. The

DREAMLAND

back seat was down and needed lifting. I was afraid he would make me lift it by myself, but he helped me. Then we drove to the mall.

I

Too Far

am standing in the front row of a large, packed arena. The crowd is going crazy in anticipation waiting for Barack to come out, the atmosphere more rock concert than political rally. Barack finally emerges, only he has long, bright green dreadlocks and he’s bouncing around on stage in jeans and a white T-shirt, getting the crowd fired up. He passes up the podium and goes straight to the crowd, ripping off his T-shirt along the way, and gives everyone in the crowd a high-five.

The crowd is loving it, but I find myself filled with anxiety, thinking, Wow, I’m glad he has finally found his confidence, but I think this is taking it a bit too far.

B

Gold

arack came to our town to hold a rally in a small room in a wooden house. He stayed a long time and there were many side events. His handlers kept failing to show up to whisk him away, but he took it all with good humour, enjoying his interaction with ordinary folks. At one point we all rushed out to a local furniture store to see the two gold sofas Barack had just purchased. He said he had been looking everywhere for sofas that were really gold—not yellow or orange. We were proud he had found them in our humble town.

I

Drawers

was at Barack’s house preparing a party for him and his supporters. It was a huge atrium-like modern space with thirty-foot ceilings and a balcony running along the sides. Instead of setting up, my friend and I decided to look inside the closets and drawers at all of Michelle’s legendary couture clothing. We pulled out all these

Gucci, Prada and Valentino dresses. One drawer was entirely filled with beautiful gloves. Unfortunately, people started arriving and we had to stuff all the clothes back into the drawers and closets. All throughout the party I kept worrying because I knew that she would know we had been through her closets and drawers.

I

Ceiling

was at a planning meeting with Barack and his handlers. They were talking about a televised town hall program they were going to participate in that night. I decided to fly up to the ceiling to see what Barack’s reaction would be. He kept talking with his handlers and pretty much ignored the fact that I was hovering over him. They grew more animated as they discussed a woman who was going to be in the audience. She had contributed a lot of money to the campaign and Barack wanted to be able to answer her questions during the show, but he needed a way to identify her. Someone suggested they paint her face bright red. I thought that was too obvious and suggested they just paint a red X on her neck.

They liked that idea.

T

Boxers

hen he is in my bed wearing blue striped boxers. I have a perfect apartment in Harvard Square (not so in real life!).

The room has a bohemian look, all earth tones and Indian prints. The afternoon sun is coming through the window above the bed. I remember the intense conversation we shared, and think about how I offered him my bed for a nap. We’re talking less intensely now. I’m reclining on the side of the bed, not touching him, but am very close and the attraction is palpable. We fall silent and our eyes meet. Then we kiss very softly. I can feel his desire to relax, to be himself, to lose himself here. I realize this could never be kept a secret. I know how disastrous it would be for the man about to be our

country’s first black president to have an affair with a white woman twenty years his junior. I cannot risk any chance of being the woman who will cost our country his presidency. I put my hand on his chest and say, This is getting really dangerous really fast.

I

Kayak

I

Bus

am rowing in a kayak on a cloudy day.

I feel tired, humiliated and discouraged.

The other rowers can’t believe how bad I am. In a moment alone, my trainer, Barack Obama, approaches me in his grey-blue track suit, puts one of his sneakers on my kayak and places his hand on my shoulder. He gives me a good pep talk about determination and not backing down. He also says, You shouldn’t even be this tired, and gives me proper rowing techniques. Then I feel better. Even if I am going to lose that day, I at least have the sense that I tried my best.

was on a bus coming home from university and Barack came and sat beside me. I don’t know how I knew it was him, because I don’t follow the election at all.

He was wearing a dirty suit and smelled bad. I was reading and he asked me what I was reading. I showed him the book: The Lord of the Rings. I’ve never seen that movie! he exclaimed. Then he gave me his business card from his wallet. It was really cheap, like something printed off a school computer, and Senator was misspelled. He got up to get nachos from the bus concession and I put my backpack on his chair so he wouldn’t sit by me again.

Sheila Heti is the author of The Middle Stories, Ticknor and many shorter works.

She lives in Toronto and at sheilaheti.net.

Read her Geist works at geist.com/author/ heti-sheila.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 59

IN CAMERA

Pentimento

I

n every one of the prints from a roll of film I shot at the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, two images overlap each other like shadows, or ghosts. In one picture, a friend holds her camera up to photograph me, and she is overlaid by rows and rows of skulls in the monument at the Killing Fields. Another friend gazes out of the frame amid clothes, bones and teeth protruding from the ground around a tree stump.

Cambodian children flashing smiles in front of mass graves are superimposed on pages of my journal. The effect is so eerie that it takes me a while to realize I am looking at double exposures—I must have put that roll of film through my camera twice.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about two overlapping pictures? Do the words from each image conjoin, or do they distort each other, creating one intangible and meaningless image?

A photograph is a record of the light that passes through the shutter of a camera at a given instant. Our memory does that too, but it also makes and stores a fabricated record of the instant, a collection of translucent images that stack up over time, and we can “see” them all at once. Did the June bug land on my hand before or after dinner?

Who walked with me down that winding trail? The many overlapping images preclude the accurate recall of a particular moment, but the effect of the layers is much more true to my memory of the trip to Cambodia.

—Lu Qi

Lu Qi is a Canadian photographer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His photograph of the Bangkok airport appeared in Geist 71. To see more of his double exposures, visit geist.com/pentimento.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 61

A Well-Mannered Storm:

lan(d)guage

The Butcher of Penetang

The Glenn Gould Poems

Poetry by Ken Belford

Short fiction by Betsy Trumpener

Poetry by Kate Braid “In this fascinating, very personal, and highly original collection, Kate Braid finds new pathways into the work and mind of this eccentric, difficult, multifarious musician.”

—Kevin Bazzana, author of Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

“In lan(d)guage, Ken Belford becomes the poet—the compass ahead of us—one of the few to trust and follow as he guides us deeper and deeper into the unknown.” —Barry McKinnon

“Exquisitely crafted glimpses into the beauty of our fragile human lives.”

— Susan Musgrave

Caitlin Press www.caitlin-press.com Distributed by Harbour Publishing

IN MEMORIAM

Love Song to America John Updike illuminated experience like no one else

Evelyn Lau

W

hen the news of John Updike’s death came on January 27, 2009, I was in a room on the fifteenth floor of a hotel in Ottawa. I walked over to the window and looked out at the city, the onyx gleam of the office tower opposite, its obsidian windows gone blind for the evening. It was 16-below and a scrim of ice crystals had frozen across the glass in a snowflake pattern. A lone figure hurried down the frosty sidewalk and turned the corner out of sight. I switched on the television and surfed the news channels, catching the scroll at the bottom of the screen. His name, his death at seventy-six that day from lung cancer. His face, mottled with age yet more distinguished than in his youth, with the abundant white hair; the prominent nose once awkward, now patrician; the glowing smile hinting at a surfeit of good humour. It was all wrong—Updike should be on the news because he had at last won the Nobel, his eyes flashing with delight at the achievement, instead of dissolving in a slow fade from the screen as Peter Mansbridge intoned his passing.

I wondered what time it had happened that day, a Tuesday. Was it while I was sitting in arts council meetings, perhaps at the very moment when I was praising a piece of writing as being almost Updikean? Or scurrying past the Parliament Buildings in the shocking cold, the blood in my body seeming to congeal to a kind of slurry, clothes crunching and crackling with every step?

Or wandering the shops in ByWard

illustration: jeremy bruneel

Market, scrutinizing the souvenirs—ice wine tea, soaps in the shape of maple leaves? It amazed me that I hadn’t felt the moment when he left the world, that there hadn’t been a shudder in the air like a minor earthquake, that things had continued on as they do—the federal budget had been handed down to much discussion, a man in California had shot his wife and five children before committing suicide, a group of tired but thrilled doctors were fielding the media’s questions about the delivery of octuplets the day before.

To say Updike was my favourite writer doesn’t come close to conveying the position he occupied in my life. Yes, the pleasure I took in reading his sculptural sentences bordered on the ecstatic, the pleasure of watching a master at the height of his powers. His influence on me and myriad other writers was incalcu-

lable—the prodigious output, intellectual range and unparalleled eye for detail were models for what we hoped to accomplish when we sat down at our own desks. Updike was the bravest of writers, the one who never censored his most reprehensible thoughts or indelicate observations; he was capable of illuminating experience like no one else, reproducing moments most authors could only clumsily sketch.

But more than all that, he was my constant companion of the past two decades—while relationships sparked and fizzled, friendships formed and dissolved, technology took over and the world changed, Updike’s body of work continued to grow. I considered it a tremendous stroke of luck that we were occupying the planet in the same span of history, and never took for granted the privilege of reading his prose so soon after it was written.

Lying in bed on a desolate morning, rain battering the windows, I would attempt to rouse myself by ticking off a list of things to be grateful for, and Updike’s writing would make it into the top ten. When I crossed the border into the States at the start of a road trip down the coast, I’d prop my naked feet on the dashboard and think happily, I’m heading into Updike’s country! His books are a love song to America. In the midst of some personal or collective experience, however mundane or unusual, I’d find myself thinking, How would Updike describe this? Is he observing the same news item I’m watching at this moment, the same political scandal or natural disaster unfolding?

What does he think of it, how is it going to figure in his work?

I realize now that I always assumed our paths would cross one day, even if, as in the case of my partner’s colleague, words were never exchanged. Years ago, standing in front of a painting in an art museum in Washington, she glanced over at the man next to her, and there, Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 63

IN MEMORIAM

pondering the same painting, was John Updike. It was a moment I looked forward to, perhaps an entirely private moment of joy, because I couldn’t imagine actually speaking to him. What on earth would I say? “Mr. Updike, I’m your biggest fan!” I imagined myself in the same room with him somewhere, at a reading or lecture, or passing him by coincidence, the air electric, tongue-tied in his presence.

Once, our lives did intersect, in a way.

I had dedicated my first novel to him, and a publicist at Random House impulsively placed a copy of it in his hotel room when he travelled to Toronto for a reading in 1996. He signed one of his books for me in return, thanking me for the “most gracious and surprising dedication.” Now I hold it in my hands, press a finger to the place where his pen scrawled the page. It is inconceivable to me that his readers will never again eagerly riffle the pages of The New Yorker in search of his byline, to see what he thinks of a new book or work of art— that his great self-consciousness has vanished, and the last thing he wrote will be the last thing he ever writes.

I remember a prank that was played on the eminent writer John Cheever, in 1976—someone called him in the middle of the night, claiming to be a journalist from the cbc, informing him that John Updike had perished in a car accident. Would he care to comment? A distraught Cheever wrote in his journal, “I think him peerless as a writer of his generation; and his gift of communicating—to millions of strangers—his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by an immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition . . . his loss is indescribable.”

Evelyn Lau is a Vancouver writer whose most recent book is a collection of poetry, Treble (Raincoast, 2005). Read her Geist work at geist.com/author/lau-evelyn.

Page 64 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

COMMENT

A Fairy Tale for Our Time As in the fairy tale about Clever Elsie, we have been called upon to bemoan a tragedy that has not yet taken place

Alberto Manguel

F

airy tales have a way of surreptitiously explaining much of what is dark and frightening in our world. Our skeptical nature has lent them the connotation of falsehoods, wishful and illusory, but something deeper than incredulity won’t allow us to forget that the remedy to a curse may be a hundred years’ sleep and that something vicious and toothy may be lying expectantly in our granny’s bed.

During the recent panic provoked by the announcement of the (all too real) world economic crisis, there stirred in the back of my mind the vague memory of a Grimm’s fairy tale called “Clever Elsie,” read far away and long ago. I looked it up to see why it was nudging its way to the foreground.

“Clever Elsie” tells the story of a girl promised to be married if she proves to be not only clever but also careful. During the meal to which her parents have invited Hans, her husband-to-be, Elsie goes down into the cellar to draw some beer. She notices a pickaxe stuck in the ceiling beam just above her head and thinks: “If I marry and have a child, and it grows up, and I send him into the cellar to draw beer, that pickaxe might fall on his head and kill him!” Panic-stricken, Elsie bursts into tears. In the meantime, her parents, worried that Elsie is taking so long to return to the table, send the maid down to see what has happened.

Elsie tells the maid about her fears and the maid joins her mistress in the weeping and wailing. A servant boy is then

sent down to inquire about the maid, the mother follows the boy, the father follows the mother, and they all lament most pitifully the fate of the son who might one day be born. Finally, Hans joins the family in the cellar and announces that Elsie is indeed “clever and careful,” and the marriage is arranged. The question of the beer is entirely forgotten.

We too have been called into the cellar to bear witness to something imminent and to bemoan a tragedy that has not yet taken place—instead of, for instance, removing the pickaxe that seems to threaten the life of a nonexistent child. There is a difference between grave concern about the state of things caused by a corrupt and greedy economic system, and the imposed sense of impending doom for which no one is held criminally responsible. Terrible things have indeed happened. Around the world, countless people have lost their jobs, their homes, their sustenance in this crisis. But these things have occurred not because of a pickaxe that might one day fall, but because of the deeds of a number of immoral men and women, and because of the panic created by irresponsible politicians and journalists.

The panic has proven, for some (including those guilty of causing the

illustrations: raymond biesinger, from 100 BLACK ON WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS (belgravian press, 2008)

crisis), extremely useful. Thanks to the growing fear, companies with huge profits have been able to fire their employees, banks with gargantuan capital to foreclose mortgages, factories led by millionaires to shut down branches, and governments that normally allow minuscule budgets for education, health and housing, to pour vast sums into the corrupt financial system. Fear is an excellent instrument of power, as we are told in another fairy tale, “The Youth Who Couldn’t Shiver or Shake”: it allows our leaders to take measures that would never be allowed to pass in more serene times.

“Why did no economist foresee this disaster?” is the question most ordinary people ask. The truth laid out by political economists has always seemed to me (a believer in the truth of fiction) a fictional truth; that is to say, a forceful proclamation of wishful thinking meant to encourage stock-market gambling. The motto of political economists is I believe because it’s impossible; that of fiction readers, I believe because it’s true. I marvel at the faith of those who, like readers of tea leaves in a cup, scrutinize the strip of numbers running below the tv announcer and make out in it our future. I prefer to follow the avatars of Hansel and Gretel (a warning to indiscriminate consumers) and Clever Elsie, and to see in them our present. Not one but innumerable pickaxes loom on the beam above our head, and we have options other than panic.

But what will happen if, like Elsie, we persist in this so-called cleverness? What will happen to us, responsible citizens, if we give up on sane reflection and allow ourselves to be drawn into a mindwashing state of panic, no longer able to act as individuals? The fairy tale offers a cautionary ending. After marrying Elsie, Hans sends her into the field to work.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 65

COMMENT

But Clever Elsie decides first to eat and then to nap, so that when her husband goes to fetch her, he finds her fast asleep amidst the uncut corn. To punish her, he covers her with a bird-net decked with little bells, and leaves her to her slumbers. Elsie wakes, sees that it has grown dark, hears the bells tinkling and begins to wonder whether she is really herself.

Bewildered, she returns to her house and knocks on the window. “Is Elsie home?” she calls out. “Yes,” answers her ruthless husband. “She is in.” Then a great panic comes over Elsie. “O dear, so I am not I,” she cries, and runs away, far beyond her village. And no one has seen her since.

Alberto Manguel is the author of hundreds of works, most recently City of Words, based on his Massey Lecture in 2007, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography. Read more of his Geist columns at geist.com/author/manguelalberto.

The Colonized Investor When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors

Stephen Henighan

T

en years ago I joined the Canadian middle class. After years of travel and study abroad, odd jobs, itinerant language teaching, freelance writing and short-term contracts, I became a salaried resident of southern Ontario suburbia. Earning a salary meant learning about rrsps, mortgages (I soon bought a condo) and planning for the future. Members of the middle class, it seemed, lived for the future. This puzzled me; prior to acquiring a salary, I had lived in the present, with long glances back at the past.

Realizing that I needed professional advice, I signed up for a financial planning workshop offered by my employer.

The workshop leader, a representative of a local investment firm, opened the day with what I assume was his standard speech for such occasions. He was talking about rrsps when a middle-aged couple waved him to a halt.

“What’s an rrsp?” the husband asked.

They were Americans. Having just moved to Canada, they weren’t familiar with some of the terms.

The workshop leader stood to attention like a private in the infantry. “Sir,” he said, “first, I want to tell you how much I respect Americans. Americans know how to hold on to what’s theirs. That’s a lesson we need to learn in this country.”

With this reference to the lower income taxes in the United States, the workshop essentially ended. We Page 66 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

remained in the room for six more hours, punctuated by a dry-sandwich lunch, but little useful advice was dispensed. For the rest of the day the workshop leader prefaced every statement with a nervous glance at the American couple and vehement assertions of the superiority of the U.S. banking, income tax, educational, insurance or health-care systems. He spent so much time telling us how much better everything worked in the States that he became unable to advise us on managing our financial lives in Canada.

The assumption I took out of the workshop was that with which I’d gone in: that I should plan for the future.

With this in mind, I went to the local office of a well-known national firm and made an appointment to speak to an investment advisor.

The advisor, Frank, was a tall, lean young man. He had a short, neat haircut and wore an elegant suit. A reassuringly domestic photograph of an attractive young woman adorned his desk. Frank’s long, curled sideburns suggested that his respectable façade masked a certain restlessness. I arranged for a small portion of my salary to be invested with Frank’s company each month. Having recently returned to Canada after more than six years in Europe, I believed that the European model of applying higher taxes to fund higher social spending was the most certain guarantee of sustainable

COMMENT

growth. Frank was offended when I told him I wanted to invest in European funds.

“The United States is the greatest engine of growth in the world today. I won’t represent you unless you put at least half your money into the U.S. And it should be three-quarters.” Finally, I agreed to divide my investments between Europe and the United States.

In my quest to acquire middle-class credentials, I began going to the bank every winter to buy an rrsp. The rrsp salesman was young and pudgy: simultaneously consoling and innocent. When the foreign-content rules were relaxed, he urged me to diversify away from my tiny collection of low-risk Canadian rrsps into something racier. “There’s this guy named O’Shaughnessy. He’s American and he’s really smart. You invest in O’Shaughnessy’s funds and you’ll never regret it.”

By this time Enron had imploded and the U.S. had invaded Iraq. The cracks in the financial edifice were evident. But I was fed up with fighting these guys and their American obsessions. For three consecutive years I plunged my rrsp contribution into O’Shaughnessy’s adventurous funds and walked out of the bank relieved to have kept the salesman happy.

The next time I saw Frank, two years later, the atmosphere was rife with robberbaron capitalism on the brink of decadence. There were lines in Frank’s forehead; his wicked sideburns had grown longer and thinner. The photograph of the young woman on his desk had been replaced by a framed portrait of George W. Bush. Frank’s lips curled as he talked about the women he was dating. A Bush-Cheney re-election poster covered the back wall of his office. A survey of my (modest) investments revealed that although the European portfolio had held its own, the American mutual funds were stagnating. I ripped into Bush’s irresponsible tax cutting, his imperialistic foreign interventions, his huge trade deficit.

How could Frank believe that these policies were conducive to growth?

“Cutting taxes is the best way for any society to grow. You just have to look at America . . . I believe that firmly.”

“I can see you believe it,” I said. “That doesn’t mean you’re right.”

I pondered moving my investments but never got around to doing it. To give Frank credit, when the crash came, he did a respectable job of protecting my miserable little stash. My O’Shaughnessy rrsps, by contrast, lost 60 percent of their value.

All across the country, Canadians were paying the price for the colonized mentalities of their investment advisors. An objective assessment of conditions in the United States would have prompted a sensible advisor to get out years ago. Even in a global crisis, there are better and worse places to invest one’s money. Yet most members of our “investment community,” conditioned by years of slavishly aping the rhetoric of the U.S. right in order to voice their alienation from their own liberal society, betrayed us. When the Canadian middle class stares at its ransacked investment statements, part of what it sees is the cost of a lack of cultural self-confidence.

This crisis should teach us that we can’t be free riders on a system based upon values from which most of us modestly dissent. We would be better off putting our money where our social liberal mouth is. Can we learn this lesson? I haven’t given up hope. The last time I saw Frank, he had shaved his sideburns. His manner was sober and subdued. There were no photographs on his desk; he spoke of a new marriage and a baby. “We have to look at this crisis as Canadians,” he said. As we reviewed the state of the economy, I realized that, for the first time, Frank and I agreed.

Stephen Henighan (stephenhenighan.com) is the author of A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (2008). Read his Geist work at geist.com/author/henighan-stephen.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 67

COMMENT

The Daily Apocalypse Deliberate inaccuracy, bad writing, horizontalism—it’s all part of the newspaper wars

George Fetherling

T

hese days the phrase newspaper war could refer to the newspapers’ war to continue to exist, at least in printed form as well as in digital. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the fifth of his clan to be chairman of the New York Times, is on record as saying that the paper may be an online-only affair in as little as five years’ time. Of course he may have to revise the date of the apocalypse now he’s sold a big chunk of equity to a Mexican zillionaire. That happened the same week that the Rothemere family in Britain, who still own the Daily Mail, sold, for the sum of £1, the Evening Standard, a perfectly healthy newspaper were it not for a huge debt. The buyer is a nouveau riche from la nouveau Russie: a former kgb agent who quickly accumulated a fortune once the ussr transmogrified into the Russian Federation.

The long list of other newspapers on the ropes these days includes the technically bankrupt Chicago Tribune, which for generations identified itself on its nameplate as “the world’s greatest newspaper” (a phrase that explains the cable station wgn). For decades it was owned by Col. Robert R. McCormick, whose money originated with his grandfather, the inventor of a farm implement known as the McCormick reaper. The colonel was an isolationist with fascistic tendencies, a blustering fellow who once threatened to punch George v in the nose for being British. His nemesis was the equally moderate William Randolph Hearst, who owned Chicago’s Herald-Examiner. In the first decades of the twentieth century, these Page 68 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

two tried to out-report, out-dramatize and out-spend each other while resorting to such tactics as hiring associates of Al Capone to set fire to the other company’s trucks and rough up newsstand operators who dared offer customers both papers rather than only one.

In his beautifully written book The Uncrowned King (Random House Canada), Kenneth Whyte, editor-in-chief of Maclean’s, examines how, in 1895, a far younger Hearst perfected his technique.

At the time he was in many ways a semi-progressive trust-busting Republican of the sort later characterized by Theodore Roosevelt. He bought the derelict New York Journal and declared war on Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World: a war for circulation and advertising as well as for

simple facts and the melodramatic scoops that sometimes proved spurious.

Whyte came to everyone’s attention a decade ago as the founding editor of the National Post. Lord Black had no sooner picked him to edit this new venture than the pair of them went up against the Globe and Mail—a genuine enough newspaper war, too, one that the Post survived but only in a much-weakened state. People think of this recent outbreak as the one that defined the term newspaper war, for by now society has erased the memory of Canada’s most remarkable one.

The Toronto Telegram was a devoutly Conservative voice that, when it finally closed in 1971, had spent more than fifty years in cutthroat competition with its Liberal rival, the Toronto Star, a paper some claimed Mackenzie King read in order to find out what his current policies were. The two publications were so fiercely competitive that the Star would send ten reporters racing to the site of a story when the Tely sent one, or else, to show its contempt for its enemy’s judgement, would dispatch only one when the Tely sent eight. Much of this activity took place in a world in which the word television was never used in certain newspapers (a prohibition not extended to radio, because publishers felt they had already neutralized that threat). Even I can recall when Canadian newspapers, with deliberate inaccuracy, always referred to cigarettes as “cigars,” mainly because cigarette manufacturers advertised on television incessantly. No, really. But then I also remember when fire-reels, chesterfields and escapers were common in Canadian papers, whose classified sections had column after column of “Flats to Let.” Such words and phrases sound so antique now, but they persisted in common usage in the still somewhat British Canada that seemed to survive until (if one must pick a date) the Pearson era melted into the age of Trudeau.

Were I responsible for stemming the current spread of poor newspaper prose,

COMMENT

I would mandate elimination of dangling participles (and other dangly bits) that don’t modify what they believe they’re modifying. An example might be: “Climbing all 3,000 steps, the cn Tower afforded me a wonderful view of the city below”—as though the tower were somehow trudging up its own stairs. This construction is now ubiquitous even among people who know better. Its banishment would improve the quality of life.

I would also change the policy on the comma between two adjectives. For years, editors had what was called the “And Test” drilled into their heads in order to prevent such misuse. In certain situations, you see, a comma is a shorthand substitute for and.

Thus “a big red barn” requires no comma, because the phrase “a big and red barn” sounds ridiculous. This error is so common that I have given up counting instances before I’ve finished a news story.

The problem is so acute that it makes the fillings in my teeth hurt. The Globe and Mail, which should set a better example, is among the worst offenders.

A third monster is the policy of tiny artificial paragraphs (not “tiny and artificial”—see?) instead of organic ones covering one complete subsection of the article.

The theory is that paragraphs must be chopped into bite-size bits to relieve pressure on the reader’s attention span. The one-sentence paragraph has a long if not especially distinguished history. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe was fond of it. But it became a thoroughgoing and insulting cliché thanks to people such as Hearst. It has been given free rein in recent years, even as the proportion of white space has grown.

Coming along with that trend has been a slow movement toward horizontalism in design, so that a really big news story or a feature can sprawl, leisurely or dramatically, across a page. The result can more closely resemble a magazine spread than an old-fashioned newspaper page with column after column of type lined up like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, set in what we

used to call “eight-point Gideon.” These days, newspaper pages are designed to look like printed television screens, or web pages—a fact that returns me to the story of Canada’s most vicious and drawn-out newspaper war.

Newspapers have long been a difficult environment for contextualizing adverbs. Were there an underground market for adverbs in the U.S., one could make a fortune smuggling them across the border, past the welcoming signs that say: “Please drive safe.” As for adjectives, it is because of the advertising business, which sprang up to serve newspapers and has served every new medium since then, that people believe that terrific, great, fabulous and wonderful all mean the same thing, though the intended meaning is nothing more than “extraordinary.” Conversely it is newswriting that has most affected verbs, so that readers willingly accept “Slated to kick off fact-find mission” as a legitimate sentence.

Headlines can often symbolize this process of rot and wide acceptance.

During their long wrestling match, both the Star and the Telegram tried to be first even with details of the most penny-ante robberies and assaults, the sort that ended up in what until 1969 was called magistrate’s court (now known as Ontario provincial court).

Even when bunched together to make a piquant roundup, these stories were often only one column in width—too narrow to accommodate the word magistrate. So the papers tacitly agreed to use cadi instead. Cadi was said to be an old Arabic word for magistrate. As indeed it was, and is—a certain type of Muslim judge being a qadi or kadi. At first, citizens must have been puzzled when coming upon a headline such as “Yegg sentenced / in cadi court / to five years.” In a short time, however, these readers, who already knew that a yegg was a burglar, understood what the other word meant as well. Indeed, they Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 69

had come to expect to see it. Thus one instance of how newspapers affected people’s perceptions, usually for the worse.

Stories about national politics are usually bigger than crime stories, but even so, they too are often one column wide. In such cases, Canadians rely on the utilitarian PM in headlines: yet another advantage of parliamentary democracy. This avoids the American practice of using leaders’ initials, such as fdr, jfk and lbj. The only exception I recall was a failed campaign in the 1970s by the Toronto Sun, a Conservative paper, to generate acceptance for PET. Perhaps the Sun was motivated more by ideology than by journalistic need, for pet is a mild obscenity in French.

George Fetherling’s novel Walt Whitman’s Secret will be published later this year (Random House). Read his Geist work at geist.com/ author/fetherling-george.

ENDNOTES Reviews, comments, curiosa

Writing the Nation

teenth round?” he asked. His take on Korea

Pierre Berton was Canada’s first modern celebrity

reads very much as if he were writing today about Afghanistan.

Daniel Francis

In 1963 Maclean’s dropped his column, ostensibly because of his views on teenage

P

robably the most famous line Pierre Berton never wrote was the definition

of a Canadian as someone who can make love in a canoe. The line is attributed to Berton in the Oxford Dictionary of Quota-

tions, as well as Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, but it turns out, at least according to Brian McKillop’s new biography of Berton, that the legendary British Columbia newspaperwoman Ma Murray may well have said it first.

If Berton did not write the canoe quip, it was just about the only thing that he didn’t write. McKillop’s book, Pierre Berton: A Biography (McClelland & Stewart), makes clear that Berton was prolific to the point of incontinence. At one point during the 1960s, he was writing a daily newspaper column for the Toronto Star, starring in his own television interview show, appearing weekly as a panelist on the quiz show Front Page Challenge and daily on radio with a brief opinion piece, as well as producing a book a year. The most astonishing example of his productivity? He wrote the first draft of his railway history, The National Dream, in a month, the time it takes most authors to organize their thoughts. When the cbc

turned his railway books into a historical

sex (he did not condemn it), but McKillop thinks the firing had as much to do with Berton’s then-controversial views on public

docudrama, Berton himself was the presenter. He once had three books on the bestseller list at the same time, and periodi-

medicine (he supported it). Whatever the reason, Berton would not pull his punches to save his job. Later he co-founded the

cally he dropped by Rideau Hall to pick up another Governor General’s Award. Just reading about his output left me exhausted,

nationalist Committee for an Independent Canada, a group of media and academic

not to mention green with envy.

To be honest, until I read McKillop’s book I had never taken Berton very seriously. I considered him faintly embarrassing, in the way that fathers are often embarrassing to their sons. The billowy side whiskers, the floral bow tie, the absurd safari jacket he wore to host the television series, the corny repartee on Front Page Challenge: these were the affectations of a self-satisfied old fogey. Or so it seemed.

What McKillop’s biography reveals is the activist side of Berton’s career. For example, his 1951 coverage of the Korean War for Maclean’s was remarkably critical for the time. When he returned from the battle zone, instead of cheerleading for the troops, Berton wrote an article that questioned the whole basis of the war. “Can you win a war in this tragic year of 1951 as you win a prize fight, by brute force in the fif-

heavyweights who despaired at the country’s dependence on American capital and American culture, and he was a charter member and longtime supporter of the Writers’ Union of Canada. In other words, Berton was a passionate guy who was unafraid to put his opinions into practice.

He used his celebrity—and McKillop argues that he was “Canada’s first modern celebrity”—in the best way, in support of causes in which he believed. (He also used it to bed the girls, but that’s another story.)

Berton’s reputation as a “popular historian” rests on his fine history of the Klondike gold rush, the railway books and a shelf full of other histories of varying quality. He was not a deep thinker or a particularly fine stylist, but he was an energetic spinner of tales, and it was his ability to create memorable characters and weave them into robust, romantic stories that won him so many readers.

His popular success earned him the Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 71

ENDNOTES

resentment of many academics, some of whom dismissed his books as “mere storytelling.” I always considered this sniping between popular writer and academic to be a sign of our cultural immaturity. Other countries seemed to be able to tolerate books by amateur historians alongside books by their ivory-tower brethren. Not in Canada, however, where a writer like Berton was attacked for making his books interesting (and, one suspects, for the size of his royalties as well). Happily, that debate has faded and the country is full of post-Berton popular historians who feel no pressure to apologize for what they do.

Still, the critics had a point. The essence of “popular” writing in any genre is that in the end it does not challenge accepted conventions. Berton was no exception. He belonged to the “a nation is a group of people doing great things together” school of historical writing. He presented his subjects warts and all, but in the end he wanted Canadians to feel better about their country. “Even as he went about puncturing some Canadian myths,” writes McKillop, “he did so in a way that

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heightened historical awareness and bolstered Canadian pride and spirit.”

I can’t imagine that any serious historian, academic or otherwise, would be interested in “bolstering Canadian pride”—at least I hope not. Perhaps this is why so many popular writers slip into obscurity within a generation.

Who recalls Thomas B. Costain, also an editor at Maclean’s, or Frank Underhill, who in their day were every bit as popular with book buyers as Berton? The status quo changes course, leaving the popular writer awash in its wake. At least that is the argument with which those of us who do not enjoy Berton’s sales figures console ourselves.

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Daniel Francis is a writer and historian. His latest book is Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales (Harbour, 2007). Read his Geist work at geist.com/author/francis-daniel, and his blogs at historywire.ca and knowbc.blogspot.com.

Page 72 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

ENDNOTES

HISTORIES OF THE WEST

Ronald Wright, the author of What Is America? A Short History of the New

Jill Mandrake

World Order (Knopf), concedes, “The

G

eorge Bowering’s novel Caprice

(Penguin) is currently out of print, so this Johnny-come-lately review is my way of saying, “Reprint it, already.” When it was first published in 1987, Caprice set the trend for the next wave of stories set in the West. It’s as wistful and rugged as

Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, but hetero. Caprice would make a good mainstream film, dubious as that compliment sounds. The protagonist is an independent woman of the Wild West who is tracking the bad guys who murdered her brother. But this is a duster with a twist: instead of a cowboy riding off into the sunset, we’re deserted by a cow woman riding off into the sunrise. Do you recall Richard Brautigan’s genre Western, The Hawkline Monster? At face value, it looks like Bowering is also trying his hand at a Western, although his book is even suggestive of Sanctuary by William Faulkner. (Faulkner claimed he wrote Sanctuary as a “potboiler” only. But what a brilliant potboiler! I guess he could call that great work anything he wanted.)

The point is, Caprice is impossible to categorize. If anything, it’s a poetic, insightful eulogy for the classic Western landscape: “By the 1890s the west had started to shrink . . . it shrank with every word that was sent back from the dry country across the mountains and over the Atlantic Ocean . . . The more one looked around in the west the more it seemed obvious that it was the past hanging on for a while.” Bowering doesn’t write in the Zen-story fashion of Brautigan, but the voice in Caprice is pleading for a plainer, more spiritual time.

question ‘What is America?’ could fill a library and a lifetime.” Since space is at a premium in this captivating study, Wright makes his points succinct and eloquent, without resorting to the glib Yank-

bashing tone heard all over the media.

For example, in his chapter “The Winds of Fear,” he summarizes how George W. Bush got elected: “But for Bill Clinton’s dishonourable discharge on an intern’s dress, the 2000 election might not have been close enough for George W. Bush to steal.” Wright encapsulates the frontierexploiting mindset of the 1800s in this sentence: “‘Manifest destiny’ was on every patriotic tongue—a reissue, in broader currency, of the old Puritan (and new Mormon) belief in Americans as the Chosen People.” He indicates how this outlook has persisted on various levels through the centuries: “Today America’s poor are consoled—some say deluded—by the notion that the economic pie, however unfairly sliced, is always growing, that one day it will be their turn to win the lottery, that they are not an exploited proletariat but, as John Steinbeck put it, ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’.” Wright’s analysis of how our southern neighbour formed its identity reminded me of Howard Zinn’s

trailblazer of the 1980s, A People’s History of the United States. One aim of Zinn’s book was to present American history from the point of view of marginalized or oppressed people who were normally excluded from mainstream histories.

Wright’s book, by contrast, has a more immediate purpose: attempting to explain why we’re all in the current social and economic muddle.

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 73

ENDNOTES

FIGHTING MEN Patty Osborne

U

ntil I read The Great Karoo by

Fred Stenson (Doubleday), I was unaware that in 1900 a bunch of cowboys from the prairies joined the Canadian Mounted Rifles, loaded themselves and their horses onto ships and sailed to South Africa to fight the Boers. This story, about a low-tech war where people get shot at but don’t often get hit, centres on Frank Adams, a young man who is allowed to enlist in this

“white man’s war” by keeping his mixed heritage a secret (his mother is Metis and his father is white). Frank grows into manhood while he and his troop wander from camp to camp and occasionally engage in battle. The most interesting part of the book is not the exotic location or the questionable strategies of the military; it’s the intimate portrayal of Frank as he experiences first love, hero worship and disappointment—lots of disappointment, in both himself and those close to him. We seldom get to see inside the mind and heart of a man, fictional or otherwise, and this is why The Great Karoo stayed with me long after the details of the battles slipped from my memory.

Another unlikely participant in the Boer War was James Jones, a prospector who worked claims on the west coast of Vancouver Island until he, along with twenty-five men from Victoria, made the journey to South Africa to fight for the British. James’s story is a small part in Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of

Page 74 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

ENDNOTES

Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899–1929

by Margaret Horsfield (Salal Books), an exhaustive account of the history of the area, gleaned in large part from priests’ diaries and letters sent to Walter Dawley, the main shopkeeper in the area and the one person with whom almost everyone had to communicate. This beautifully designed book covers all aspects of life during the period: birth, death, marriage, disease,

residential

schools,

rivalries

between shopkeepers, the business of sealing and the business of saving souls, and its anecdotal style and numerous photos and reproductions of documents welcome the reader into the interesting lives of these early settlers.

THE LITERARY LIFE Michael Hayward

A

ll biography is a form of literary voyeurism, and the Paris Review inter-

views are no exception. Do we really need to know whether Ted Hughes reordered the poems in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel? Or that Evelyn Waugh believed the seventeenth century to be “the time of the greatest drama and romance”? Probably not; but sometimes this eavesdropping can be fruitful: I was so taken with the wit and intelligence displayed

by John Cheever in his 1976 Paris Review interview that I knew I would enjoy his writing too. How can you not feel fond of an author who defines a good editor as one who “sends me large checks, praises my work, my physical beauty, and my sexual prowess, and who has a stranglehold on the publisher and the bank”?

The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III (Picador) is the latest in this excellent series of talks with leading novelists,

Spring 2009 • G E I ST 72 • Page 75

ENDNOTES

dramatists and poets, selected from the

some of the sardonic humor and most of

archives of the legendary literary maga-

the witty art disappeared . . . occasional bits of whimsy and doggerel survived.”

zine. These sixteen interviews were selected from many others that appeared between the years 1955 (Ralph Ellison) and 2007 (Norman Mailer, interviewed just months before he died). In her introduction, Margaret Atwood—whose 1990 interview is not included in this or the previous two volumes—states what most would agree with: that this series of interviews is the “gold standard” against which all author interviews are to be measured.

The Chicagoan folded in 1935—which perhaps proves that the exact ratio of these four ingredients is critical. Leafing through this book made me even more appreciative of The New Yorker itself, which somehow—luck? alchemy? divine guidance?—seems to have stumbled on the perfect blend.

Pie Tree Press: Memories from the Composing Room Floor (Gaspereau) is the first stab at an autobiography by the

In a perfect world, every town and city would have a high-class magazine to celebrate itself and the cultural life of its citizens. The pundits of Prince Rupert would

British Columbia type designer and privatepress printer Jim Rimmer. I say “first stab” because he left me

publish their jeremiads in The Rupertite; Halifax would have The Haligonian (whose boilermaker-fuelled editorial meetings

wanting more, and I have the feeling that there are untold stories where these came

would probably be held at the Midtown Tavern & Grill).

Beginning in June of

from: his fifty years working in the printing trade from Van-

1926, citizens of Chicago had The Chicagoan, a magazine cast

couver to Williams Lake. Rimmer was witness to, and participant in, incredible changes in the industry. He got his start in

so obviously in the mould of The New Yorker as to tempt a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Initially a biweekly, The Chicagoan was eventually forced to cut back to a monthly schedule, and also tried reducing its subscription price as it struggled

an era when all books were routinely typeset by hand, one letter at a time (or, as he puts it somewhat wistfully in his conclusion, a time when the printing trade was “in its sunset years after five hundred years and more of life”). He worked in the trade more or less continuously until the present day, when most press lines are entirely digital and letterpress publishers such as Rimmer are seen as “high priests” who practise and preserve the rituals of a vanished art. This Gaspereau edition is the trade version of what was, in its first appearance, a limited-edition letterpress original, and it is a neat little package indeed—clothbound, with a smattering of colour reproductions and photographs— one that reflects the high standards of its author.

to stay afloat. The Chicagoan (University of Chicago Press) is a gorgeous coffee-table volume that looks back at this “Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age” with a rich selection of period cartoons and articles, a glossy insert that collects many of the magazine’s Deco-style covers, and one issue of The Chicagoan reproduced in its entirety. In his introduction, Neil Harris comments on the magazine’s evolution, noting that “while

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 77

CONTRIBUTE YOUR

Stan-ecdotes Memories of Stan Rogers and his music Canadian folk music hero Stan Rogers was born on November 29, 1949. He would have turned sixty this year, and Geist is celebrating his birthday all year long by collecting stories of how Stan and his music have affected people’s lives.

We’re also collecting names for a petition to have Stan inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

To participate, visit

geist.com/stanrogers

ENDNOTES

SECRET TO SUCCESS Lily Gontard

W

e have been duped, or so suggests

Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company). Success is not based on merit, possibly not even on talent. It’s all about opportunity, coincidence, the number of births in a year (and therefore the competition for jobs, etc.) and the ten-thousand-hour rule. Institutions that we believe to be meritocracies, such as the

born between January and March, and the best soccer players between August and December?

tical information, coincidences and cultural predispositions. It might get you reconsidering when you want to conceive your offspring (or fill you with regret for the choices you’ve already made), if you envision being the parent of an nhler. Those who prefer a child to be a mathematician might consider moving to the Pearl River Delta in China, where the family can learn the value of meaningful work while tending to their rice paddy. The bonus is that not only will their daughter understand the connection between hard work and reward, she will also learn the engineering skills needed to build the complex structure that is a rice paddy; and she will grow up with a language that uses a simple word system for numbers, which will make it easier for her to learn math. In fact, Gladwell is so persuasive in the first fifty pages of his book that you don’t really need to read any farther—but you may just feel compelled to. How can it be true?

Why is it that the best hockey players are

Page 78 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

doesn’t

seem

fair.

Gladwell uses examples of success from popular culture to prove his point and hook the reader’s interest: the Beatles, Bill Gates. But he also uses masterful storytelling techniques: he introduces his subjects, he hints, he suggests, he presents case studies you care about, he unravels individual stories. It’s a good read and a quick one, and what I came away with is that the secret to success is complex, but the connection between it and

the

support

successful

people

receive from family, friends and coworkers cannot be denied.

nhl, are not. It’s a child’s date of birth and physical size at a certain time of year that determine whether he gets to play for the Stanley Cup. Gladwell argues this case quite convincingly in his latest exploration of statis-

It

COLD SCIENCE Kris Rothstein

A

nna’s Shadow by David Manicom (Véhicule Press) is the story of a

bored diplomat assigned to debrief the beautiful, brilliant Russian scientist who seeks asylum inside his Moscow embassy.

It sounds like just another post-Cold War thriller about the deterioration of the Evil Empire, but it’s actually a thoughtful and nuanced Canadian literary novel. Adrian Well, the hero, is a junior diplomat who knows more about wheat prices than particle physics or shifty spies. Anna Mikataev’s research involves the bending of light, which could enable cloaking and invisibility technologies, and attracted attention even when she worked in her obscure Siberian lab. The novel evokes early 1990s Moscow, including changing loyalties, the growth of global corporate interests, constant coups and the restructuring of Soviet bureaucracy.

The story skips between present-day csis

ENDNOTES

agents who are trying to discover Well’s

trees and wood.” The quest begins in

Walnut Tree Farm is the name that Roger

exact role, the growing relationship between Well and Mikataev as he ques-

Deakin’s own home in Suffolk: a four-

Deakin gave to his restored Tudor farm-

hundred-year-old oak-framed farmhouse that was in ruins when he found it, and the

house in Suffolk, England; in his book The

repair of which put him

ish nature writer Robert Macfarlane

Canadian protection. The science is engaging, and the plot builds suspense-

“on terms of greatest intimacy with all the

describes Walnut Tree Farm this way: “It was as close to a living thing as a building

fully to an unexpected ending.

beams, posts and pegged

could be. [Deakin] kept the doors and

joints in the place” (by his count “some 300

windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through

trees were felled to build

one door and out of another, and bats flit-

[the]

tions her in the embassy basement, and the events in Siberia that led Anna to seek

A READING LIST FOR HYPOCHONDRIACS, ET AL. Michael Hayward

T

hink of all the valuable time we’d save

small

ted in and out of windows, so that the

wood”). Deakin, a writer, broadcaster and filmmaker, describes himself as part of an

house seemed almost to breathe.” The passages that make up Notes from Wal-

“extended

a

of . . . quasi-hippies

nut Tree Farm (Hamish Hamilton) have

our doctors if there were a copy of The Complete Manual of Things That

[who built a rural culture] during the 1970s and early 1980s, based firmly on

been gleaned from the exercise books in which Deakin recorded his “daily life,

Might Kill You: A Guide to SelfDiagnosis for Hypochondriacs (Knock

the values of the Whole Earth Catalog, Friends of the Earth, Cobbett’s Cottage Economy and John Seymour’s The Fat of

work, thoughts and memories” during the last six years of his life (he died in 2006 at the age of sixty-three). The entries have

the Land.” Wildwood is, in effect, a tour through what remains of that rural culture. Deakin goes “to talk willow with

been arranged chronologically from January (“a mauve, misty penumbra across the fields under a duck-egg

Brian White on his withy beds at Kingsbury Episcopi”; he stops at an oak cabin “in an old oak wood in the valley of the

sky”) through spring and summer (“Everywhere I go, in Devon, or in

Teign near Drewsteignton, [where] until

Somerset, the men are

about eighty years ago the whole oakwood had always been coppiced for the charcoal the tin smelters needed on Dartmoor.” Later, Deakin visits the chestnut forests of the Pyrenees, then heads to Australia, a continent where (in words that seem an ominous foreshadow-

out in the churchyards mowing every blade of grass in sight”) and back again to winter (“The moat is frozen.

Leaves are frozen in it like ash in amber”).

Although it may lack the cohesiveness of Deakin’s Wildwood (2007), Notes from Wal-

ing of the brushfires of 2009) the Aboriginal people had always “manipulated and changed their environment on a massive

nut Tree Farm is a wonderful gloss to that earlier book, crammed with insights and vivid imagery from a life lived slowly and

scale through the use of fire.” In the book’s penultimate section, Deakin explores “the wild fruit forests” of

in harmony with the land.

Read Michael Hayward’s endnote on The Wild Places at geist.com/arts-books/wild-places.

Knock) in every home. Instead of the usual vague complaints (“Not been feeling quite myself . . .”; a furrowed brow, the voice trailing off into ellipses), patients could go to their physicians with a neat list of direct questions in hand. Is my flatulence due to gastroparesis (no known cure; feeding tube necessary in extreme cases) or irritable bowel syndrome? My runny nose: Hodgkin’s disease? Or relapsing polychondritis?

Neatly organized by body region and further subdivided by symptom, with a rich selection of quotes, vocabulary builders and helpful factoids in the margins of every page (did you know that flying on an airplane with an ear infection can result in imploded eardrums?), this handy guide is perfectly designed to enable even the healthiest readers to quickly and efficiently discover their own—hitherto undetected, yet inevitably fatal—diseases.

In Roger Deakin’s introduction to Wildwood (Penguin), he describes his book as “a quest for the residual magic of

family

house:

Wild Places (reviewed in Geist 69), the Brit-

Kazakhstan, ancestral home of the domestic apple, and the vast walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan, where “the walnut trees dwarfed any I had seen before.” At such moments, and in such settings, it is almost possible to believe that Eden still exists on earth.

Green Integer Books, an English-language press based in Copenhagen, publishes small-format (4¼ x 6¢¢) books that feel good in the hand. According to the press’s website (greeninteger.com), their list includes “Essays, Manifestos, Statements,

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 79

ENDNOTES

Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic

books on the subject. All three were

Jottings, Narratives, Natural Histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings,

funded in part by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism—which also brought us those terrible commercials that tried

Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.” Which may explain

the

slight

tremolo of confusion I experienced while trying to decode Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, a collection of cryptic aphorisms from the acclaimed director of Mouchette, Au Hasard Balthazar, and other modern classics of French cinema. At first reading, these notes are as impenetrable as Zen koans: “Movement from the exterior to the interior”; “It is in its pure form that an art hits hard”; “Equality of all things. Cézanne painting with the same eye and the same soul a fruit dish, his son, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire.” Taken together, though, they provide a handy guide to the strict philosophical principles of the purest— and perhaps the most influential—of the French “new wave” filmmakers.

BIG AND LITTLE Leah Rae

W

hen I showed my friend The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland (Brick Books) to impress upon him the enormity of the task of reviewing such a large book, his eyes widened and he laughed and said, “What the fuck?” The Echoing Years, edited by Stephanie McKenzie, John Ennis and Randall Maggs, contains nearly twelve hundred pages of Irish and Canadian poetry—and this is the third in a series of what must be equally hefty

Page 80 • G E I ST 72 • Spring 2009

to entice travellers east with promises of kitchen parties. Despite the size of the book, though, few of

DISLOCATIONS Michael Hayward

W

hen G won the 1972 Booker Prize

author John Berger donated half of the £5,000 prize money to the Black

the poems stand out as writing you can really hang your hat

Panthers as a protest against the Booker

on or marvel at. Some are good; others are fair. Even the poems

book (long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker

by my favourite poets aren’t jaw-droppers. I didn’t feel the urge to read any of them out loud to a

insurgent, by A’ida, his lover, who runs a

friend, which for me is the acid test of

details from her daily life,

good verse. Some of the work is in

A’ida attempts to build for Xavier a vision of hope for a future beyond the prison

French with no translation (there seems to be an explanation for this at the front of the book but I’m not sure because it too is en français). Other poems are in Gaelic with no translation, which means that the whole book can only be read by

McConnell corporation’s history of exploitive trading in the Caribbean. His new prize) is From A to X (Verso); it takes the form of letters sent to Xavier, an imprisoned small pharmacy in an unnamed village nearby. Through a gentle accumulation of

walls, a future in which Xavier might hold a loaf of bread still hot from the

those who are fluent in all three languages.

oven or where he might catch a glimpse of a fox down the street.

Berger sets the story of Xavier and A’ida in a

What I didn’t find in The Echoing Years—some really “wow” poems—I did find in a much slimmer book, Jen Currin’s newest collection, Hagiography (Coach House). Hagiography (the word literally means the biography of a saint or venerated person) starts with death and ends with life.

Currin’s verse is mysterious, full-blooded and packed with juicy lines.

Here the world is populated with fortune stockings, blood dancers, bruised hats and paper brides.

At times her poems are too mysterious— I would have appreciated a small amount of narrative to string the fresh imagery together—but no matter. These are good poems.

landscape that has been deliberately shorn of detail: the oppressive regime that has imprisoned Xavier is never identified, nor could I discover on any map the various towns: neither Suse (where Xavier’s prison is said to be located), nor Crocodilopolis (where friends of A’ida and Xavier come under mortar fire), nor Sucrat (the town to which A’ida is forced to move her pharmacy) have precise geographic coordinates.

This lack of specificity creates a sense of dislocation in the reader, one that parallels the deracination experienced by A’ida and Xavier themselves; it also allows Berger to speak (through his characters A and X) on behalf of everyone who has been condemned to, and who struggles against, a life of poverty and oppression. The Black Panther Party may be no more, but Berger’s anger—at the many injustices of global capitalism—remains.

ENDNOTES

named Ralph who attends a Catholic

MISFITS

boys’ school in Hamilton. At school Ralph

Patty Osborne

is the butt of his classmates’ jokes, and out of school he must cope with his mother’s

I

n Frankie Styne and the Silver Man by

serious illness (she slips into a coma early

Kathy Page (Phoenix Books), the characters who seem least likely to be able

in the movie). But he remains an optimist, and when, as punishment for smoking on

to manage “normal” life end up finding

school grounds, he’s assigned to the

ways to do so, while the characters who seem to be leading “normal” lives make

cross-country running team, he sets out to win the 1954 Boston Marathon even

some impressive wrong moves. The story

though

centres on a pair of terraced houses whose inhabitants include Frank, a reclusive writer

scrawny grade nine kid.

He gets no support from

of gory thrillers who has a large red

anyone except a man dressed as Santa Claus,

birthmark over one side of his face; Liz, the nineteen-year-old single mother of a

he’s

just

a

who appears to Ralph in

newborn developmentally disabled son who

the darkest hours, and

likes to pretend she is a visitor from another planet and who is watched over by Mrs. Purvis from social services (who is about to

Dennis Longboat, the author of the book Secrets to Marathon Suc-

experience a crisis of her own); and Alice and Tom from next door, who are desperately trying to make a baby and can

hill and dale and who is rumoured to have gone mad. Eventually a priest from the

be heard arguing and making love through the party wall. There is nothing too unusual in this cast of characters, and their lives at first seem bleak, but I kept reading long enough to realize that things might not turn out as I had feared, and my curiosity carried me through to the unexpected conclusion of the story. My only quibble with the book is that the cover and the inside pages are uninviting (I wouldn’t have picked it up if I hadn’t recognized the author’s name). The blame for this must go to Random House, which originally published the book in 1992, since this is a reprint of the original layout and design. The new edition was made possible by a Writers’ Union of Canada program that helps writers revive their out-of-print titles. What a good idea.

Saint Ralph (Odeon Films) is a cornball movie about a fourteen-year-old boy

cess, whose voiceover follows Ralph over

school, who happens to be an exmarathoner, becomes Ralph’s trainer and it’s all uphill and downhill from there.

The terrific soundtrack features Ron Sexsmith, Blue Rodeo, Joel Plaskett and Gord Downie (who sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as Ralph fights to the finish). I won’t tell you how it all comes out except to say that even the cranky old headmaster (played by Gordon Pinsent) comes around. The film is an uplifting evocation of the 1950s, when people had time to listen to a two- or three-hour marathon on live radio (okay, that’s a bit of literary licence), and it will leave you wishing you had been there— and if you were there, it will leave you wishing life had really been like that.

FOOD SPORTS Leah Rae

I

f television shows like Iron Chef and Hell’s Kitchen have failed to convince you

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 81

ENDNOTES

Robb, a biographer and historian, makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, and knows how to balance the scholarly with the anecdotal (you can detect a novelist’s pleasure in his account of how, on “a summer’s day in the early 1740s . . . a young geometer on the that cooking is a spectator sport, The Chicken, the Fish and the King Crab, directed by José Luis López-Linares, will confirm that cooking is indeed the new hockey. The cooking competition in this film, the Bocuse D’Or, is the most elite in the world. What these chefs can do with food is truly extraordinary—chicken skin as thin as paper, crabmeat smoked with chamomile stuffed into a halibut (albeit a farmed halibut, much to the horror of the foodie audience at the Vancouver International Film Festival last fall—there were actual gasps). The film follows Jesús Almagro, a Spanish chef, for about ninety minutes as he tries to win the trophy, and if you don’t think that watching someone bake can have you on the edge of your seat, you’re in for a big surprise.

JOURNEYS AND JOURNALS Michael Hayward

E

very Francophile worth their sel de Guérande will enjoy The Discovery

of France (Norton), Graham Robb’s fascinating examination of the processes by which the France of two centuries ago became the France of modern times. At the Revolution, much of provincial France was unknown and effectively inaccessible to the citizens and administrators of Paris.

Those who ventured out of the major urban centres—Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux—and into the country’s interior had great difficulty understanding the local dialects; strangers were greeted with suspicion and sometimes with violence.

Page 82 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

Cassini expedition [to produce the first accurate map of France] was hacked to death by natives”). Robb is also an enthusiastic cyclist and claims that this book “is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library.” In a lyrical passage near the beginning of the book, he extols the many virtues of the bicycle, including its ability to re-create, “as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars.”

A first edition of Baedeker’s guide to Paris can be just as effective as a Flaubert novel in re-creating that long-vanished, premodern city. Tourism in the nineteenth century had not yet become the culturedistorting enterprise it is today; apart from a few well-travelled routes between the centres of culture, each trip abroad required extensive preparation and an iron constitution. Today we think of Edward Lear as a writer of nonsense verse, but in his day he was also considered an “artist of great promise,” a celebrated English landscape painter who lived in Rome for more than a decade. Edward Lear in Albania, edited by Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie (I.B. Tauris), is Lear’s account of his travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848, the first stage of what was to be a fifteen-month exploration of the countries around the Mediterranean prior to his

ENDNOTES

years, and that one of the book’s essays, “Squeezing a Spiral into a Square Hole,”

they don’t understand English very well.” ecw Press has been quick to respond in

discusses the work of the master typogra-

Canada, where many speak English

ing: “Previous to starting, a certain supply of cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and

pher Robert Bringhurst. Most of these

already, by publishing An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama,

forks, a basin &c., must absolutely be purchased, the stronger and plainer the

Lanka and Tbilisi, to Amsterdam (where she now lives) and the mountains of

better; for you go into

B.C.—but they are not travelogue; they

lands where pots and

express a persistent desire to get beneath the surface of a place. The title is a Portuguese

return home. In the introduction to the book, Lear offers this advice to any who might be considering a similar undertak-

pans are unknown, and all culinary processes

essays are rooted in See’s travels—to Sri

word that describes “a feeling of longing for

are to be performed in strange localities, inno-

something that is now gone.” That longing is evident in the reading of Saudade, for in

cent of artificial means.”

each of the book’s varied locales we sense

In addition, “a good supply of capotes and plaids should not be neglected; two or

See as a thoughtful, keen-eyed observer, but one who is always aware that there is so

three books; some rice, curry-powder, and

much more to see.

to have missed out on all our modern travel conveniences: the fuel surcharge and the one-suitcase luggage allowance, the compact hair dryer and the gps.

One evening during a stay at the Hollyhock retreat centre on Cortes Island, B.C., while we waited for the dinner gong to ring, each guest was doing a little “show and tell” on the books that we’d been reading. I passed around my copy of Anik See’s Saudade (Coach House), a collection of ten essays on “The Possibilities of Place,” and before anyone had read a single word of it, the book was a hit for its cover design alone: French flaps, deep purple cover stock printed with silver ink, embossed title.

A colophon points out that Saudade’s design is also the work of See, which makes sense once you learn that she has operated a small letterpress for many

volume that turns out to be hard to put down, even for people who don’t need an English language guide. These speeches bear only a superficial resemblance to the speech-like utterances that emanate from Ottawa and other speech- generating venues. For one thing, they contain real narrative sentences and real narratives; they are imbued with history and politics and there is almost no bafflegab in them. Even cynics hardened by decades of speechifiers tend to keep turning the pages, just for the

cayenne; [and] a world of drawing materials if you be a hard sketcher.” Lear began his trip during an outbreak of cholera—which explains his insistence on “some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this).” Poor Edward,

subtitled A Primer by David Olive, a hefty

OBAMA FOLKS Stephen Osborne

W

sheer wonder of hearing a real person speaking about real things. This is a revealing document of America, profoundly embedded in a discourse of

ithin two months of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the selected

speeches of Barack Obama had sold 400,000 copies in Japan, where they have become a great hit with people learning English. “His speeches are so moving,” said the publisher to a Reuters reporter.

“And he uses words such as yes, we can, change and hope that even Japanese people can memorize.” Stephen Harper’s speeches, on the other hand, have sold no copies in Japan or anywhere else, as far as can be determined through Google. But then, none of those key words are to be found (for example) in Stephen Harper’s Canada Day speech of last year, or in his speech of apology to Aboriginal people. The other ingredient of Obama’s popularity in Japan, according to the publisher, is emotional: “Readers have sent in postcards saying that when they heard the speeches, they were so moved and cried even though

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 83

ENDNOTES

liberty, religion and militarism, refracted

is more usual at a wedding reception or

but not deflected by the Obama lens. In these speeches we see clearly that America

Madonna

is another country: a place where people are referred to as folks, a genteelism that seems to carry a note of political correctness—like “comrade” in the days of the

concert.

Shared

happiness

mixed with nostalgia fuels the songs on this cd, which I was still humming days after the party. Two weeks later, I visited the home of the Breakmen’s banjo player in East Van for another kind of acoustic

Communist bloc, and citoyen during the French Revolution.

experience—to lend an ear to New Old

Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Obama’s inauguration refrains from addressing

house, and some peo-

Stock. About forty of us crowded into the ple had brought a few extra chairs. The name

“folks” directly but strives nevertheless for the plain, the non-pretentious, the anti-intellectual note that folks who boast of being plain folks might appreciate; others might call it fatuous, empty, bathetic. Some might even describe Praise Song for the Day (Graywolf Press) as a cringe toward the utterly mundane, though it’s not clear what else an inaugural poem can be. Certainly the blatherings of Maya Angelou and Robert Frost written for previous inaugurals are no more stimulating than those of Alexander, who asks—rhetorically, we presume (but who can be sure?): “What if the mightiest word is love?”

of the band conjured for me a group of hootin’ and hollerin’ bluegrass old-timers with washboard, broomstick bass, moonshine jug and a few dirty kids, so I was surprised by the number of chairs—I thought we’d be stomping around—but the four musicians were young, clean and solemn. Once they started playing, however, they proved they had the talent and experience to support their name, and the collaboration of banjo, cello, five-string fiddle and hammered dulcimer produced music that was expansive and rolling, like the background score for a documentary of the hills of Scotland or wild horses charging across a dusty plain—which created a cerebral experience rather than a physical one.

STEPPIN’ OUT THE ENVELOPE PLEASE

Carrie Villeneuve

W

hat was once St. James Church, in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, is now a fantastic acoustic venue for folk music—traditional, bluegrass, Celtic, Roots, and every other kind and combination. That’s where I saw the Breakmen, five harmonizing guys with three guitars, a mandolin or two, a banjo, a stand-up bass, a slide guitar, a harmonica and various noisemakers and shakers (I said five guys, right?). At the release party for their cd When You Leave Town the capacity crowd had a diversity of ages that Page 84 • G E IST 72 • Spring 2009

Thad McIlroy

I

saw Slumdog Millionaire on the recommendation of a good friend—the best advertising there is—and she wasn’t wrong. I was thrilled by the film, for a host of reasons. It’s ultimately a fairy tale, nearly as grim as Grimm’s, although the closing sequence will leave a boost in your heart for some time to come. But then I heard stories that people in India protested against the movie, and I began to wonder if this was another instance where we well-off North Americans fall

ENDNOTES

in love with an inaccurate depiction of a less-privileged group, smugly declaring ourselves informed and sympathetic. So I sought the opinion of another friend, born in the United States but well travelled in India and well versed in the culture. He sent this reply: “I love how it turned the traditional Bollywood scheme on its head: instead of a marriage story about a rich family, Danny Boyle [director of the film] took on the often untold story of a slumdog and showed what is going on in India. The trickle-down effect leaves everyone hungry. India has tasted wealth and wants more. The underprivileged feel like they are missing the party and so the expansion of the drug trade, mob activity and sex exploitation are often an invite to the party.

The zippies (Thomas Friedman’s term for the young, energetic Indian generation that have money) also are forced into a dilemma: to embrace Western culture, to keep to their own culture or to attempt a hybrid. The soundtrack matched the hybrid approach with songs

by M.I.A., who blends Western beats with some Indian themes, and the music of A.R. Rahman. After seeing Slumdog, I wonder if I am missing out on the party here in the U.S., as our education system, economy and housing go to shit. I wonder if the real opportunities are in India—a place my parents ironically left long ago for better opportunities in Detroit.” If you can’t leave your cynicism at home, avoid this film. Otherwise move through it, at a pace set as much by the actors as the cinematographer and director, and wait for the transcendent closing sequence where Hollywood meets Bollywood.

Spring 2009 • G E I ST 72 • Page 85

ARTISTS I N THIS I SSUE

Raymond Biesinger is an illustrator who has drawn for the New York Times, Monocle and the tiny, trashy and (in some opinions) indecent zine the Zolan. He lives and works in Edmonton and at fifteen.ca.

Jeremy Bruneel is an award-winning illustrator whose work has been published in Seattle Magazine, Canadian Business, Saturday Night, B.C. Business, Vancouver magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Georgia Straight and other periodicals. He lives in Toronto.

Christopher Evans is a photographer from Vancouver who specializes in toy and pinhole cameras. Find more of his photos at christopherevans.ca.

Joni Karanka is a photographer who lives in Cardiff, Wales. View his portfolio at jonikaranka.com.

Mandelbrot is Stephen Osborne, the publisher of Geist, in another life. He is also a photographer and has been writing about photography since 1990. Visit his website, phototaxis.ca, and see more of his work for Geist at geist.com/author/mandelbrot.

Henri Robideau is a photographer, a writer and Canada’s foremost Gianthropologist.

He was born in the usa, so his first language was American. He came to Vancouver in 1969 and has since learned to speak in Canadian, though he still can’t bring himself to say Van Coover.

Patty Osborne is a frequent contributor to Geist. Follow her blog at geist.com/ blog/pattyo.

CROSSWORD

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus

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Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #72 GEIST 341 Water Street, #200 Vancouver, B.C. v6b 1b8

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The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist key chain. Good luck!

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ACROSS 1 I have some interest in gaslights and ivy on account of my time away from the dark continent (2) 9 That oak tree is in perfect condition (abbrev) 10 The final payback was lacy 12 In the south that little boat sounds like you 14 What you call that area where a plane came down (2) 17 The high priest tends to emulate him 18 On me, she always predicts the next billboard 21 Don’t sit in the draw seat when you go toward Halifax from Toronto 22 Pusher sometimes does it with a wink 23 Settlers sometimes break the pattern by 3 getting off 24 Sounds like the end of that poor dog 4 would make a great story 27 Are there twenty-four in a standard school 5 area in the fourth dimension? (2) 29 Travelling by air can be out of this world 6 7 when you put your teacups there (abbrev) 8 31 Hey, buddy, one toke while you’re on the board and we’ll take your gold!

11 32 Because of her negation, the 13 ill-conceived princess must die 34 Good lord, don’t put the peas in that 15 niche 35 Olive, that colour’s a bit dull 38 Recently she hasn’t gotten here on time 16 (2) 19 39 While you’re doing that, imagine the sun moving along that line 20 42 Those birds came down on the tail 43 Remember to put that line into the pool 44 You’ll get zero time for anything in that 24 London neighbourhood 25 49 At the end of the day we’ll have to go 50 Don’t feed on the worry that the acid 26 will consume you 28 51 Not in Scandinavia either 52 He’s seven-tenths sure he never saw 30 stars in that domain (4) 31 DOWN 1 The nog lady didn’t cut it short, she kept 33 going through the whole rotation 2 I heard that game nerd found copper in 34 Nice

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Put that wire through water to place that bug She loves to take this puzzle out What’s the other name for Alias Grace? (abbrev) He’s not apt to be awkward, is he?

1990s merger made the good even larger (abbrev) Detective used shovel to capture Humphrey Kids love cuddly stuffed undergarments.

She called out, not locally, but came to a nostalgic end (2) Sounds like the whole class got roles in the play If we go there we’ll have to start 30 minutes later You have to plan ahead to get that dispatch reported (abbrev) The redactor sometimes leaves red marks Oodles of things weigh 240 lbs more in Britain Let’s fill the pot before your mom’s sister goes Don’t lie about that exotic garland Suddenly, with a little strike, the food is cooked!

It’s scary when those puppies flare up We searched haphazardly through the sale Happy one not always long one in this period (2) One opinion of one vista can make a point (2)

37 Occasionally he bites me early in the morning 40 It sounds like it should be one of those noteworthy successions 41 When he was too captivating, she divorced him 45 Don’t tell her to fix it with a long-tailed comb 46 This town’s networking system doesn’t get out much (abbrev) 47 On the 25th there wasn’t any room there 48 Boney hated that divine domain (abbrev) The winner for puzzle #71 was Bill Kummer of Newmarket, Ontario. Congratulations.

D O W N U N D E R

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G E R I D O O A T H E R F O R F E L F A I R D D S T D K S W A L K U O H N P R O O F S E U D O A A R M V E G H E O B E R C R U N R A D A B I L L O O

B A E C O I N A B B A S T E M C H M O A B

A I T L T O A S T E K U M N O U T C N E K E R A S I T E E I N G M A O N G

Spring 2009 • G E IST 72 • Page 87

CAUGHT MAPPING

If Bob’s Your Uncle t h e c a n a d i a n ma p o f b o b by Melissa Edwards

modified Geistonic projection

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