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Letters
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Editorial
CONTENTS
commentary
subTerrain A LITERARY MAGAZINE EDITOR Brian Kaufman
4 22 30 49 68
MANAGING EDITOR
featured artists
Jenn Farrell
EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Peter Babiak, Nadine Boyd, Sharon Bradley, Jenn Farrell, Hilary Green, Karen Green, Day Helesic, Brian Kaufman, Kate Lancaster, Pat Mackenzie, Jim Oaten, Paul Pitre, Robert Strandquist
L AYO U T HeimatHouse
PROOFREADING
The Potemkin Province BY DANIEL FRANCIS Sea, Sulphur, Mountains BY GRANT BUDAY S’cuse Me While I Kiss the Sea-to-Sky Highway BY MARK LABA Wordsworth on Grouse Mountain BY PETER BABIAK Hunkamooga: Musings on the Literary Life BY STUART ROSS
17 Slimy Chic Beasts Stroking Nature BY SHAWN SHEPHERD 26 Vancouver Condo Projects Reimagined as Experimental Media Art BY KATE ARMSTRONG 32 Against the Night BY RICHARD TETRAULT Text BY BUD OSBORN 51 Spatial Dichotomies BY DEREK VON ESSEN
Janel Johnson, Pat Mackenzie
fiction
ADVERTISING Brian Kaufman, Janel Johnson
COVER DESIGN Derek von Essen
8 Still Life with Grandmother BY ANNABEL LYON 40 The Agony of Things BY RYAN FRAWLEY (Vancouver International Writers
I L L U S T R ATO R S / P H OTO G R A P H E R S
Festival Contest Winner)
Kate Armstrong, Dave Barnes, Derek von Essen, Louis Netter, Shawn Shepherd, Richard Tetrault
B OOK REVIEW EDITOR
field notes
Karen Green
INTERN
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Janel Johnson subTerrain Magazine P.O. Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 Canada Tel: (604) 876-8710 Fax: (604) 879-2667 e-mail: subter@portal.ca website: www.subterrain.ca P r i n t e d i n C a n a d a by H e m l o c k P r i n t e r s
Life Cycle BY KIM GOLDBERG
memoir 44 The Beauty and Treachery of Memory BY PATRICK FREISEN
poetry 16
Brother, My Brother, Let’s See What You Got BY ELIZABETH BACHINSKY
43 Light Transit BY SUSAN STEUDEL (Vancouver International Writers Festival IMAGE DETAIL: SHAWN SHEPHERD
Contest Winner)
issue 50
48 The Night Market BY EVELYN LAU 59
book reviews
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Mail Room subTerrain FAC T U M
GENERAL GUIDELINES Fiction: max. 3,000 words Creative Non-Fiction & Commentary: max. 4,000 words Photography, line art and illustrations welcome: hard copy or electronic submissions to the address below; Poetry: no unsolicited poetry submissions
f i n a l ly d e c i d i n g to d o i t
m a k i n’ t h e s w e e t d e a l
Hello, I read a sample copy of subTerrain when subTerrain hosted a booth at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences when it was held at the University of Saskatoon—and I loved it! I have been meaning to subscribe for quite some time now and came across this special offer I had saved and decided that now was finally the time to do it! —David Gamberl, Victoria, BC
Hi! I read the deal about a free back issue and couldn’t resist, especially since Magpie Magazines is having their closing sale and the only ones left I already have. Loved the photos of Chinatown from #46. Keep the killer stuff comin’! And a giant thanks! —Chantelle Rae B., Vancouver, BC
h ave n s f o r i n d e pe n d e n t l i t e r a ry vo i c e s
LETTERS ARE WELCOME We encourage your comments about what you find between our covers. Letters become the property of subTerrain Magazine and may be edited for brevity and clarity.
B O O K S TO R E S & R E TA I L O U T L E T S subTerrain is available in Canada from Magazines Canada (416) 504-0274 and in the U.S. from International Periodical Distributors (IPD) 1-800-999-1170.
f r i e n d ly i n t r o d u c t i o n s Dear Brian Kaufman, Great magazine—a friend from the Vancouver Film School introduced me to it; seems you have a loyal following there! —Michelle Demers, West Vancouver, BC
WWW.SUBTERRAIN.CA Sniff the ether
ISSN: 0840-7533 Volume 5 no. 50 • publishing since 1988 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the B.C. Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts. We acknowledge the assistance of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program toward our mailing costs, and the Canada Magazine Fund for marketing and promotional initiatives.
IMAGE DETAIL: SHAWN SHEPHERD
subTerrain is published 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter) by the sub-TERRAIN Literary Collective Society. All material is copyright of subTerrain, the authors, 2008. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: INDIVIDUALS: Canada/U.S.: One year $15.; Two years $25.; Lifetime: $150; Elsewhere: One year $25.; Two years $38. INSTITUTIONS: One year $18; Two years $36. MANUSCRIPTS AND ARTWORK are submitted at the author’s or artist’s own risk and will not be returned or responded to unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope bearing sufficient postage for the submission’s return. Those submitting material from outside Canada must include sufficient International Reply Coupons to cover the material’s return. Please allow 4 – 6 months for a response. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the American Humanities Index (AHI). Canadian Publications Mail Products Sales Agreement No. 0361453. PAP Registration No. 9322. Postage paid at MPO, Vancouver, B.C. Date of issue: Summer/Fall 2008. All correspondence to: subTerrain Magazine, P.O. Box 3008 Main Post Office, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 CANADA TEL: (604) 876-8710 FAX: 879-2667 email: subter@portal.ca. No e-mail submissions— queries only, please.
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i t ’s a l l a b o u t t h e l o n g w h i n e Welcome to my universe, Stuart Ross: Get outdoors, for Sunshine D and stand barefoot, feeling the earth feeding the flowers in The Allan Gardens. Forget your long whine (subTerrain #49) for pity—which is just a poorly disguised pat on your own back. Come see the foxgloves with the deer sauntering by on Bowen Island! —Bernice Lever, Bowen Island, BC
editor’s note: This is the same “whine” that caused New York Times online reviewer Dwight Garner to comment: “But I’ll pick up subTerrain again, not least for its prickly back page column, called Hunkamooga, by Stuart Ross, a Toronto writer. Ross’s column bears the excellently sad-sack subtitle “Up Since 5:30, Down Since 1959.”
Dear Editor, I am very grateful for the existence of your magazine. Havens for independent literary voices such as your publication are much needed in the United States. Nick Mamatas of Clarkesworld, a sci-fi/horror magazine, told me that the “existential angst” in my short story “Free Range Humans” would be a good match for you. I would like to thank you again for being there for aspiring writers such as myself. —Sebouh Gemdjian, New Brunswick, NJ
g u ts y, t ru e , a n d b e au t i f u l Dear Editors, To me, subTerrain is the gutsy publication that Canada needed, while still blalancing truth and beauty. The stories and pieces of writing contained within are new and different. —Jess Taylor, Caledon, ON.
summing it up just so Editors, I just discovered your magazine and loved its brave, irreverent style. “Strong Words for a Polite Nation” so sums it up. —Jorma Kantola, Vancouver, BC
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EDITORIAL
British Columbia: A McDestination hile Beautiful B.C. can confidently boast one of the most temperate climates in all of Canada, and can possibly get away with the claim that the grass truly is greener over here, it is nothing short of hyperbolic spin to declare this fine stretch of rocky pasture north of the 49th as the Triple-A, top-of-the-list spot on the face of the blue planet. Admittedly, our coastlines form a spectacular tract of geography (a cartographer’s dream—or nightmare), the lakes are plentiful and still reasonably stocked with edible fish, the mountains rarely fail to inspire awe after a fresh dusting of snow, and we haven’t sent anyone to the gallows in sensational British Columbia since 1959 when Leo Anthony Mantha swung for murdering his male lover. Yes, B.C. is a magnificent place, but so are thousands of locations around the globe. The Best Place On Earth? Come on. If you set about to call any one place “the best place on earth” it won’t be long before you’re sniffing delusional at the skirt hem of grandeur. I cringe every time I drive behind cars with license plates emblazoned with our new slogan. I wrack my brain trying to devise ways of never surrendering my current “Beautiful British Columbia” plate—which already sounds humble and kitschy. It is only the arrogance of youth that can utter such statements with unabashed hubris, so perhaps we can forgive the undoubtedly young marketing savant that trotted this one out at the brainstorming session. After all, B.C. (colonial B.C., that is) is only now celebrating its sesquicentennial, one hundred and fifty years old this year. Youthful, as outposts of human habitation go. And in that short century-and-a-half we have become so much more than a “rain-sodden outpost of meagre civilization.” Yet the prosperity that we “settlers” have experienced during that period has been reaped by the systematic commodification of this land’s indigenous resources (mining, logging, fishing) and the exploitation of the region’s natural splendours. And now that industry and corporate interests have liquidated these riches to near paucity (though the glory days of offshore oil drilling are yet to come!) our diligent and creative leaders have turned their focus on the last remaining commodity—the very land itself and its people. In a collective denial of our exploitative past, our elected representatives are actively participating in the Disneyfication of our landscape, making British Columbia (well, Vancouver at least) a virtual McDestination: safe, predictable, shiny, colourful—and more than a bit prefab and garish. A place to visit, play, and—hopefully—invest your money. And in this respect, British Columbia is quite a spectacular place, as billionaire real estate speculators such as Li-Kai Shang have found out. Yet, even though most of the new architecture foisting its Mecanno-like assemblages across the Lower Mainland looks cheap, recyclable, and temporary, B.C. also shines proud with the most inflated housing prices in the country. As Kate Armstrong points out in her piece “Vancouver Condo Projects Reimagined as Experimental Art”: “We are watching a new city being turned into a new city, for no real reason.” It is the Potemkin Province that we live in, as Dan Francis expounds in his essay of the same name, a landscape of “false fronts and pretense … obscur[ing] a history of pillage and environmental embarrassments.”
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—Brian Kaufman, Editor
issue 50
ILLUSTRATION: DAVE BARNES
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The Potemkin Province DANIEL FRANCIS I L LU S T R AT I O N BY D AV E B A R N E S
The story goes that in 1787 the Russian general Prince Grigori Potemkin erected the façades of village buildings along the banks of the Dneiper River. When his former lover, Empress Catherine the Great, passed by on a tour of her Crimean territories, she was fooled into thinking that the mock villages actually existed and was impressed at the value of her new acquisitions and the accomplishments of her Prince. Ever since, the phrase “Potemkin village” has been used to indicate a situation where a false front disguises or distorts a less pleasant hidden reality. With the widespread use of the latest tourist slogan, “The Best Place on Earth,” British Columbia has elevated itself to the ranks of a “Potemkin Province,” a place of false fronts and pretense, marketed to the world as a beauty spot of unlimited abundance in order to obscure a history of pillage and environmental embarrassments.
any British Columbians see themselves as living in paradise, the envy of the world. As our homegrown humorist Eric Nicol once observed, “British Columbians like to think of their province as a large body of land entirely surrounded by envy.” While many outsiders think of B.C., when they think of it at all, as a rain-sodden outpost of meagre civilization, a province with too much geography and not enough industry, we who are privileged to live here insist that it is, well, the best place on earth. This smug and grandiose delusion is of relatively recent vintage. There was a time, long before the invention of tourism, when visitors to British Columbia saw it as the edge of nowhere, home to cannibals and some of the foulest weather on the planet. “This Coast is as Silent and Solatary [sic] as the House of death,” moaned the captain of one early-nineteenth-century trading vessel, “and I wish that I was as Clear from it I would take Verry good Care that no man Should Ever Catch me in this part of the world again.” Early traders called the interior of the province “The
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Siberia of the Fur Trade,” a reference to its isolation and forbidding winters. Later colonists huddled in their scattered settlements, fearful of the local Indians, occasionally dispatching gunboats to enforce their notional authority. They appreciated the wealth that B.C. offered in the form of plentiful natural resources, but they never would have thought they were living at the centre of the world. That was still London or San Francisco. As the twentieth century began, British Columbians, or at least those involved in the tourist trade, began to feel the need to elevate their rhetoric in order to attract visitors to the mountain parks and coastal hideaways. Once they had conjured up a place that was more playground than province, they inevitably began to believe their own publicity. Tourist brochures presented a fabricated image of the place, accompanied by breathtaking photographs of the wild coast or the majestic Interior, usually with a totem pole somewhere in the foreground. Early slogans that were used to sum up life here included “The Evergreen Playground,” “Always Cool, Never Cold,” “The Playground of North America,” and, until very recently, “Beautiful British Columbia.” Of course these phrases give a partial, cartoonish character to the province. One does not look to the literature of tourist promotion for subtlety or accuracy. Still, to call oneself “The Playground of North America” or even “Beautiful British Columbia” is a far cry from the triumphalist bombast of “The Best Place on Earth.” For the use of the superlative we must thank the Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell which began deploying the phrase as the focus of an advertising campaign in 2004. British Columbia is unique in claiming that it is the “best” any-
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thing, anywhere. None of the other Canadian provinces feels the need for such a boastful slogan. The state of New Mexico appears to go one giant step further than B.C.; it bills itself as “The Best Place in the Universe.” But presumably this is a sly reference to the infamous alien spacecraft that supposedly crashed near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and is done with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The government of British Columbia, on the other hand, displays no sense of humour whatsoever about its claim. The Liberals firmly believe that our province is the best place on earth because they have made it so. (I suppose we should be thankful they did not decide to call us the best people on earth.) To the rest of us, it sounds a bit like the answer to one of the CBC’s sophomoric competitions, doesn’t it? Who are the ten most significant Canadians? Where are the three most important places in Canada? What is the Best Place on Earth?
n reality, of course, British Columbia is not a playground. Behind the billboard façade of ski slopes and totem poles, the Potemkin Province is a resource frontier and always has been. The earliest fur traders who arrived in the 1780s found the coastal kelp beds full of sea otter whose thick pelts they obtained from the local First Nations. It is estimated that before the trade laid waste to coastal waters, as many as 300,000 of these cuddly creatures inhabited the North Pacific basin. Within a few decades, otter skins had become a rare commodity and the newcomers had to turn their attention to other resources. Beginning with the sea otter, we have a long history of intolerance and waste when it comes to marine animals. Large whale species such as humpback, minke, and gray were hunted from shore-based whaling operations starting in the 1860s. Humpbacks are a case in point. The last of these great behemoths were massacred on an August day in 1952. “I will never forget that day,” recalled fisherman Billy Proctor, the venerable sage of Echo Bay in the Broughton Archipelago. “I was trolling in the mouth of Knight Inlet, and I seen the old Nahmint coming out towing all the old whales alongside. I just about cried...That was the last of the humpbacks in the mainland.” The Nahmint was a thirty-metre steel catcher boat belonging to the last whaling station on the coast at Coal Harbour in Quatsino Sound on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. Most of the whales it relied on came from outside waters, but during the 1950s it mopped up the remnant populations in the inner waters inlet by inlet until there were no survivors. The station closed in 1967, but by then there were no whales left anyway. They have only recently begun returning. Seals and sea lions also fell victim to human predators, shot for their skins or because they were thought to be pests that threatened the commercial fishery. Between 1913 and 1969, more than 200,000 harbour seals were killed in B.C. for pelts and bounties. Sea lion rookeries were blown up with dynamite in the name of predator control. The recent book Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of B.C.’s Gentle Giants (New Star Books, 2006), has documented how basking sharks, the second-largest fish in the world, were all but eradicated from the coast by fisheries officers hunting them down and slicing them in half with a giant knife mounted on the bow of a boat.
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Orcas, or killer whales, are a special case because they are considered the iconic animal of the coast, with visitors coming from around the world to get a look at one in the wild. Yet forty years ago they were shot on sight or captured for sale to American aquariums. The hunt was stopped just this side of extinction. Basically, it was open season on any marine animal that seemed to interfere with the salmon fishery or had some commercial value of its own. The experience of the sea otters and the whales has been repeated time and again on the coast. No sooner has a resource— animal, mineral or plant—been identified as valuable to the outside world than it is harvested to the point of extinction. Whether it was the old-growth forests or salmon streams destroyed by logging, the pattern was the same. Nature was commodified and the commodities were harvested without thought for the future. Nor does this attitude belong to the past. The newspaper brings daily reminders that in the Potemkin Province, development trumps conservation. A few months ago local politicians were on the verge of allowing the construction of a housing development at the mouth of the Adams River, a project which would have threatened one of the most plentiful salmon runs in the world. Local protest stopped the project just in time. Similarly, fish farms are allowed to threaten wild salmon stocks on the coast, while it is only a matter of time before the government gives in to the economic imperative and allows drilling for oil in offshore waters. Add to this the devastation of the pine-beetle plague in the Interior and it is hard not to conclude that the best place on earth is looking the worse for wear.
any British Columbians are nature worshippers, happiest when they are kayaking down a white-water rapid or bounding along a mountain trail. They may approve of the slogan because they believe it. The rest of us are expected to swallow our embarrassment and go along with the illusion. Since the government began using its bloviated catchphrase, at least one online petition has sprung up asking that it be rescinded. The petition calls it “embarrassingly arrogant,” “vague and mostly meaningless,” “presumptuous and distasteful,” and “shockingly pretentious.” They get no argument from me. But in the Potemkin Province, there is little hope that saner, less swollen heads will prevail. Of course, B.C. is a beautiful place. Many places are. But the best place on earth? Not likely. No place is. At the same time, it is our place, a unique place, and it is our responsibility not to wreck it. To date we haven’t been doing a very good job. The most irritating thing about the Liberals’ slogan is that it tries to put a happy face on failure. We’ve been given a part of the world to look after and collectively we should be ashamed of ourselves for the clumsy way we have mishandled it. What we need from our government is a call to action, not an excuse to be complacent. ■
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FIELD
NOTES
Life Cycle Kim Goldberg
caterpillar (or larva) - Its first meal is often its own eggshell. As it grows, it will shed its inelastic skin 4-6 times. (March 27, 2007)
ĺ
Ĺ
eggs - A single female can lay up to 1,600 eggs in her lifetime. Preferred substrates include recently gray-washed surfaces. (May 21, 2008)
pupa (or chrysalis) - During this quiescent phase the individual restructures herself. (December 30, 2007)
Ļ
ĸ
adult - The pupal skin splits open near the head to allow the newly formed concept to emerge and take flight. (March 21, 2008)
(The ubiquitous Graffito urbanitus, common to both hemispheres, is an extremely hardy species resistant to nearly all known pests, killjoys and paint-rollers. This specimen was photo-documented over a 14-month period behind the Cambie in Nanaimo’s designated Red Zone. The species is typically found clinging to concrete, brick, shiplap, steel and other vertical sidings, and exhibits a special affinity for dilapidated downtown cores.)
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Still Life with Grandmother A N N A B E L LY O N I L LU S T R AT I O N BY D E R E K V O N E S S E N
When the men from the gallery come to remove the wall of her spare bedroom, Jane Arnott asks Lee Gagnon over to watch. As building manager he is entitled to come whether she invites him or not, but after twenty-two years she’s still trying to set a tone. Open, friendly, willing to make amends.
“More trouble,” Lee says of the mess that’s accumulating. They’ve seen the men meticulously photograph and measure off the wall, and now they’re watching the one with the improbable blond hair make three long incisions from ceiling to floor with a hand-held laser saw, dividing the wall into a triptych. They’ll take the wall down in long panels to get it out the door. Drywall dust gathers in egg-timer piles on the floor, but the painting is surprisingly unblemished: this is good news. Dash worked in oils and there was some worry about flaking and feathering, but so far the cuts are clean. Jane’s feet hurt her. She and Lee have already been standing here for an hour, and she spent another hour before that on her own, pushing all the furniture to the side of the room and shrouding it in bed sheets against the dust. Seventy-three years old, and Lee a couple better. They should be sitting down, the pair of them, but how could they leave? Lee winces as the other two men start to prise up the paintspeckled floorboards, revealing the whiteness of the wall where the colour ends. “It must be worth a lot to somebody,” he says flatly, a question.
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“You know what I’m paying you to let them do this,” she says, “so you know it.” They study the painting, whole in the place of its creation for the last time. “Is that us?” Is that supposed to be us, he could have said. She knows the part he means. “They tell me so.” Lee shakes his head. “I never liked that grandson of yours.” ■ ■ ■
Dealers came to Dash’s funeral; death made him hot. Jane picked the young woman with the hair, the one she recognized. “Outsider art,” Jane said. “That’s the term, is it?” “That’s one of the terms,” she said. They were strolling through the West Vancouver cemetery, sere yellow lawns and dying trees, the dealer pretending to weep allergies into a handkerchief. Despite her pink nose, she put her face together very well, this Micah, very cunningly and prettily, and her
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clothes looked expensive. She had that pretty head of hair on her, too, a long dry sweep signalling her wealth—it took a lot of water to keep that much hair clean. Jane, in contrast, was conventionally shaved. Her stubble was iron grey. “I want to tell you again how much I admire your grandson’s work,” Micah said. “You’re sure, now, it’s just the one painting? There’s nothing else hidden away?” “Oh, you were hoping for a cache.” Jane used the voice she used to use after sex: brusque, almost harsh, the opposite of the typical lover’s melting murmur. Emotion didn’t make her sleepy or stupid or child-like, so why should she act as though it did? “I’m always hoping,” Micah said. They arranged to meet at Jane’s apartment, for Micah to appraise the work. She also wanted to interview Jane for a monograph she was preparing on Dash’s brief career. The day came and Micah arrived early. They talked politics for a while, the heat waves, the water shortages, and Micah could do that; then a recent court case concerning the line between pornography and art, an interesting precedent, and she could do that, too. Jane asked her what she studied at university. “If I told you agriculture?” she said. “If I told you I was from Saskatchewan?” The dust bowl. “Then you know better than to indulge in that.” Jane flicked a finger toward her hair. Micah lifted away a flesh-coloured corner of her forehead to show it was a wig. “Ha,” Jane said, pitying in spite of herself. She took Micah to the guest bedroom to show her the painting. A lengthy silence—ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—while Micah did the work of looking. Jane watched her recognize herself amongst the figures, watched her blush. “You’re sure about that monograph?” Jane said. “He wouldn’t sleep with me,” Micah said. “I begged him.” She got down on her hands and knees, nose almost touching the paint. Then: “How much do you want for it?” “I was going to destroy it.” Jane saw the look on the other’s face. “Well, you can see why, can’t you?” The dealer went in close and leaned down to study, again, the offending inch in the bottom lefthand corner, near the floor. She nodded. “I also thought about painting over just that bit,” Jane said. “But then the rest wouldn’t make any sense, would it?” “No,” Micah said. “It wouldn’t, no.” “I’ll be damned if I’m going to live with it, though,” Jane said. “No,” Micah said again. “I can see that.” She backed away to view the painting whole, then went up close a third time. She was carefully not looking at Jane. “Any idea what you’d like for it?” “You tell me.” Micah named a figure. Jane, thinking of Dash, didn’t answer. “Would you like me to leave?” “No,” Jane said. “You’ll eat with me? We’ll celebrate.” “The monkey off your back,” Micah offered. “Transferred to yours, I think,” Jane said. In the kitchen, Micah ate while Jane asked desultory questions about her family, her education, the gallery, enough to tease out the main thread of her personality: rebellion against the privations of a mid-twenty-first century prairie upbringing, the shock of the big city the year she went away to agricultural college, the crowd she fell in with, bohemians, she soberly called
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them, but allowed an eye-rolling smile when she saw Jane’s carefully impassive face, I know, she said, I know. She abandoned her own vain and clotted attempts at artistic self-expression the night she discovered her genius for promotion, at a party she had thrown for an artist friend. She had arranged her apartment like a gallery, invited the right people, and secured three sales, including one corporate. Dash had wandered into her gallery one day, eighteen months ago now, with his portfolio under his arm, and she had fallen for him. “Absolutely unrequited,” she said, looking Jane straight in the eye. “But I’ll always have my monograph.” Cool, worldly, poised, though olives seemed foreign to her, Jane noticed with amusement: she sucked one briefly, puckered in dismay, and discreetly spit it into a napkin. Jane offered her a dessert: one of half a dozen small cakes, fluffy with white icing, wrapped in supermarket plastic. Her grandson would have known this for a kind of lie, knew how she really ate: black market, expensive. Organic, they called it when she was young; now they called it unsafe, uncontrolled, impure, illegal. Enough to rock a straight Saskatchewan farm girl to her core. Though ‘black market’ was an exaggeration; grey market might have been more accurate. Food raised by an individual for her own consumption was tolerated, though such foods might not be sold: the way cannabis used to be. She got most of her groceries through trade with friends, bartering the tomatoes and herbs she grew year-round in the guest room under gro-lamps, before Dash’s return, for unshapely vegetables, buggy salads, wormy apples, and grains she had to wash and pick over for dirt and pebbles. Acceptable meat was almost impossible to come by, so she did without. Nuts and seeds, nuts and seeds. At her age it was arrogance and vanity to care what she put in her body, but old habits were hard to break. Micah accepted the cake gratefully. Little prairie girl, Jane thought. Little animal with her sweet lick. Thumbing white frosting from the corner of her mouth, Micah asked about Dash’s parents. She had pulled a small recording device from her pocket and laid it on the table between them, next to the water bottle she had taken from her bag at the beginning of the meal. So, now: “I don’t like art,” Jane said. Micah ate the last bite of her cake and Jane offered her another. She accepted. “I guess you know that much,” she said. “I guess you probably think I wouldn’t be selling Dash’s last painting if I did.” “It might not have been the art.” Micah started into the second cake more slowly, raking up specks of sweetness on the tips of the tines of her fork and bringing them to her tongue. “It might have been this painting, I mean, rather than art in general? Capital-A art?” Is that supposed to be us? “It’s not that I’m offended by it,” Jane said. For a moment Jane thought Micah was going to say something, but instead she did a curious thing: she set her fork down and took another olive. This time she made herself eat it, made herself taste it, chewing and sucking to the pit. “How old are you?” Jane asked. “Twenty-eight.” Jane understood this was code. Forty-three, forty-four? and still greedy for the salt as well as the sweet, for what she didn’t know as much as for what she did.
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“Dash’s parents.” Jane took one of the nasty white cakes for her own plate, for the symmetry of the gesture. “Well, they’re dead. You know that, I’m sure. Dash never knew them.” “You did, though.” “Dash’s father was my son,” Jane said. “My only child. He died when Dash was about eighteen months old. He and Dash’s mother overdosed while Dash watched from his crib. A neighbour heard him crying for two days and finally called the police. I feel sure you know all this.” “How old were you then?” “Fifty-six.” Too old, she did not say; too old to go through it all again, the diapers and feedings and tantrums and night terrors, the messy, thankless mothering. “I understand Dash’s parents were very young.” “Sixteen,” Jane said. She remembered meeting the girl: a studied waif, with her thrift store clothes and exaggerated makeup. There was no sense calling her pretty or not pretty. She was sixteen, slim and fresh despite the habit that had already smudged circles under her eyes—tragi-chic—the habit that had not yet consumed Jane’s son. She had sat at Jane’s table and sighed and not tried to make conversation. When she stayed the night Jane could hear her moaning through the wall and it could have been the sex, the drugs, the unhappiness, the anything. Pregnancy filled in her tummy and sapped the rest of her. Her skin went bad, she complained of her back and her legs, her nerves went jittery with withdrawal. She accomplished that, at least, for the necessary months. Jane fed her scrupulously during this time and watched with mounting horror her son’s descent, via the girl’s needle hoard, into the sensations of his own body. After the baby was born the couple turned on Jane, finding an apartment of their own and shutting her out of their lives. When the police called and she was sent to identify the trio, the living and the dead, she didn’t recognize Dash. She had last held him in her arms when his hair was thin as duckling-down and his upper lip had a perfect sucking blister. Now he had teeth, and words: milk and moon and bear, fix and bitch. “What was he like when you first got him?” Micah asked. At first Jane treated the little boy like a pet. That worked all right. When her friends expressed awe and doubt that she had taken him on, she told them to pretend she had adopted a dog. That Jane! Such a card. The little boy had his mother’s brown eyes, had his father’s heat and rage. She had had to fight for him; it had taken over a year. She remembered the day the elevator door opened and the two social workers got off at her floor with him, the day they handed him over, and how she had immediately wanted to wipe his mouth hard. He had misbehaved right from the first, screaming and clinging to the social-worker woman and kicking at Jane, vicious three-year-old kicks. After the social workers left she tried to take his filthy water bottle away and he bit her. Fair enough: someone had taught him that, at least. She had tried everything to calm him down, feeding him, putting him to bed, reading to him. A pacifier worked briefly; he sucked like a monkey. The tv was best of all. She let him watch whatever he wanted, press whatever buttons he wanted. The tv got sticky and eventually the stickiness killed it, but she still had her books. She put his food on a plate and left him to it; she took him outside and let him romp. He got dirty, dirtier than other children. Young mothers at
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the park disliked Jane and Dash, perceived them as chaotic. That was a laugh. Jane thought the young mothers were the crazy ones. Their voices, gentle but firm, Gentle But Firm™! They were completely out of control. “Is he staying?” Lee Gagnon asked. They were in the lobby. Lee was on a ladder, polishing the security camera’s black eye with a lens cloth. Jane, gripping Dash’s wrist, was trying to go shopping. Dash locked his knees, wanting to watch Lee, and refused to walk. “You know he is,” Jane said. “I’m making an exception for you,” he said, shaking his head. “This is an adult building. I’ve had complaints, you know.” “You have not.” Jane yanked Dash’s wrist to get him upright and he screamed. “Come for coffee, Lee,” Jane said. “Come see how we live. He’s much quieter in the apartment, I promise.” Lee declined. Jane’s former husband came to visit. That too was a laugh. “It’s just a suggestion,” he said. Still, even cowed, he looked hopeful. She wanted to crush the hopefulness out of him, the way his eyes still followed her around the room. “Disgusting goat,” she said. He looked pleased with himself. Impossible! “Get out,” she said. “It suits you,” he said, meaning motherhood. “It suits you, I mean it. You always had this side to you. I don’t know why we never got along better. I used to love watching you with our son.” “My son,” she corrected him. They had split up while Dash’s father was still an infant, but her former husband had lingered at the fringes. Somehow she had never got him out of her life, never persuaded him she had moved on. “Please go,” she said. “How are you coping at work?” her former husband asked. Coping, that was the kind of word he used. Jane was an engineer. “Don’t patronize me.” “I’m trying to help.” He held his hands out in front of him like he was offering her everything. “We made it work once. We could do it again. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use the help.” Occasionally he stayed the night, and she suspected that was what he wanted now. A quick flyover past fatherhood, putting the child to bed and getting him up in the morning, leaving for his own work with an immense feeling of protective love and accomplishment. She could deny him that, at least. “Then let me baby-sit every once in a while,” he said when she had finished abusing him. “He’s my grandson, too. Really, you know, you forget we ever got along, but we did. You still love me.” “Fuck off home,” she said. She took him up on the offer, once a month, so she could visit her friends. In fact she was coping at work; work she had jiggled so that she could do almost everything from her computer at home, usually late at night, once Dash was asleep. Plans for highway overpasses, glowing in the night. But her friends were her own age and older, and took little interest in Dash. They had passed that time in their lives and didn’t want to be dragged back. Dash did not play well on his own; you could not park him in another room and expect him to be pleased with blocks or snacks, only rarely peeping his head around the corner with a quick, fragile smile. That was not her grandson. He screamed and smashed things and got on intelligent people’s nerves. You really couldn’t take him anywhere. “Oh, fine,” Jane told Sam and Leah. “He’s lovely.”
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MAKE MINE CANADIAN
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“A lovely lad,” Sam said. They drank white wine on the terrace in Sam and Leah’s plastic garden. It was truly life-like, the plastic garden, with plastic herbs and ferns and a Japanese maple sapling, all appropriately scented and requiring no watering. It was the latest thing. Jane tried to relax. She had brought a live tomato seedling as a gift, a scrawny thing in actual dirt, embarrassing everyone. Now she leaned back in her chair and brushed her hand against the feathery tips of a plastic dill, making the fronds tremble. “You hate this, I know,” Leah said. “We just missed gardening so much.” Jane smelled her hand. “Look how they make some of the leaves yellowish, like it’s just past its prime,” Leah said. “You can buy dying plants, dead plants, all plastic, just for verisimilitude. You put them here and there amongst the healthy ones and worry over them like they’re real, I guess.” Leah started to cry. “What’s happened to all of us?” she said. Jane shook her head and looked at her watch. She would have to go soon. Her monitor was linked to Dash’s and kept track of how much time she spent apart from him. This information was recorded, alongside her medical chart, in files at the insurance agency and the Ministry, a legal requirement of the adoption. “Thank you, guys,” Jane said. “You keep me sane.” At home she found her former husband giving Dash his spongebath. “Get out,” she said. “You know, we used to get along.” “Get the fuck out,” she said. “Bye-bye,” Dash said. “Yeah, you’re cute,” Jane said. “Plastic plants, Christ Jesus.” She decided to try to teach Dash to speak French. She read him the bilingual labels on boxes of food, breakfast cereal for instance. “Raisins à la folie,” she read. Raisins to the point of madness! But Dash was not interested in French. When she decided to try full immersion and refused to speak anything else to him, he didn’t really seem to notice. She took him to the doctor to ask about developmental delay. “Well, of course,” the doctor said patiently. He tapped Dash’s milk-pale temple, gently. “After such trauma, can we imagine what it’s like in there?” he asked. “Of course we cannot.” “Oh, come on,” Jane said. This did not sound medical to her. “I’ll give you some brochures and literature,” the doctor said. Intensive therapy began. The brochure she selected had promised initial improvement in four to six months, and certainly Dash had learned the names of the vegetables on his flashcards with commendable promptness. He made eye contact more, often by pressing his forehead against Jane’s, like he was trying to bore into her brain. He even laughed occasionally when it was appropriate to do so, when Jane made the broccoli do a little dance or said horrible things to her former husband in his presence. “What about school?” Micah asked. “Well, yes,” Jane said. She had sent him to school, though he didn’t thrive. He was disruptive in class and at play, hitting and biting the other children when he got frustrated. His teacher devised a harness to keep him in his seat, which frankly Jane didn’t have a problem with, but one
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of the young mothers saw it and went to the school board, outraged on Dash’s behalf. At the climactic hearing the young mother brandished the harness in the air (she had righteously removed it from Dash’s seat the day she was volunteering in the class) and denounced it in a quivering voice as a violation of Dash’s fundamental human rights. No doubt it was her finest hour. Human rights were gamely discussed and then the harness was found to be a hazard in case of fire. Jane, meanwhile, had befriended the teacher, for the process of that pragmatic woman’s disgrace was not as quick as the telling of it, with many meetings and phone calls and even a flurry of coverage in the local news, where the two women’s friendship was portrayed as sinister and collusive. “I think he liked the restraint, frankly,” the teacher told Jane one day, not long after her suspension, over coffee in Jane’s kitchen, while Dash played on the floor. “He told me once it was cuddly. Can you imagine how that would’ve played out, if I’d told them at the hearing?” The women laughed. Dash, absorbed in something, glanced up at them and then back at the floor. “They used to burn women like us at the stake,” Jane said. “What’s that, Dash?” His former teacher got down on the floor beside the six-year-old to look over his shoulder. He didn’t answer or look up. “Dash?” “He draws,” Jane said, without looking over. “It’s his latest thing.” “Can I have this one?” The former teacher removed one of the pages from the pile beside him. Together the women studied it. “Have you told anyone about this?” the former teacher said. The drawing showed the women as they had been minutes earlier, in a quiet moment, each absorbed by her own thoughts. He had drawn them mountainous, monstrous, great rolling women on tiny chairs with coffee cups like thimbles in their hands. “What was the teacher’s name?” Micah touched the recording device, made sure it was still going. “Oh, she’s dead, dear,” Jane said in her brightest voice. The woman had devoted herself to Dash, finding him a place in an experimental fine arts school, buying him paints, framing his work, building up his sense of himself. When Dash was twelve, ten years ago now, she had eaten an unwashed pear and died. “His painting changed after she died,” Jane said. “His personality changed.” He seemed to get smarter all at once; that was the best Jane could describe it. Though puberty was good for him, too, no doubt—he was a handsome boy with a twist of hurt to his mouth, and it might just have been popularity awakening the parts of his brain that had slept for so long. Suddenly he could sustain a conversation, make a joke, flirt, talk about the future. He told Jane he would go to art college, probably in New York. He would have girlfriends and gallery shows. He would become shockingly rich and buy her all the wormy, buggy food her heart desired. (There it was: conversation, joking, flirting, future, all in one). He went out with his friends and came home late and sat up with Jane in the kitchen, drinking home-made mint tea and telling her everything. At fifteen and sixty-eight, they were on their honeymoon. (This was Lee Gagnon’s dry phrase. Insomniac, he had taken to joining them for tea when he saw Dash come in on the lobby video display, which he could watch from a bank of monitors in his apartment. Dash, in turn, honed a deadly impersonation of the building manager, which involved much sighing and head-rubbing and pretend sipping—Lee
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JACQUES GODBOUT OPERATION RIMBAUD
translated by PATRICIA CLAXTON
1967. Revolution in the air. A Jesuit priest. Haile Selassie. The original tablets of the Ten Commandments. Intrigue. Satire. Graham Greene on speed.
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Two tales from the land of The Iliad and The Odyssey. In one, a man faces the life he could have had. In the other, two women come to terms with the lives they have chosen.
PAN BOUYOUCAS
AEGEAN TALES translated by SHEILA FISCHMAN
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never actually touched his tea—and sudden suspicious peering at microscopic bits of dirt.) “You said his art changed,” Micah prompted. It changed; it got smaller. The former teacher had given him a book of Persian miniatures that lived in his knapsack now, and Jane herself bought him a reproduction of the Book of Kells. This particular fascination culminated in a series of brightly-coloured erotic postage stamps—he even perforated their edges and drew pretend cancellation marks across them—that he mounted in an unused stamp album Jane’s former husband had given him, witlessly, years before. Dash was reluctant to let Jane see this particular project. This did not trouble her, as she simply did what she always had and went in his room when he was out and found it under his mattress. She had always understood his artwork as a continuing kind of therapy, and monitored its progress the way she might have monitored his intake of a medication. If he would not share it with her, she reasoned, it was her duty as a guardian to find it anyway and thus follow the state of his health. She was unprepared for the tiny, poised sexuality of the stamps, their strange beasts and colours, their emphatic adultness shading into grotesquerie: the swollen, pendulous organs that could have been penises or breasts, and the fiercely fucking creatures’ tender, suffering faces. She returned them to their hiding place, and the next time she went to look for them they were gone. “I never saw them again,” Jane said. “I regret that, actually. I thought I understood him better, for those few moments when I had them in my hands.” Micah nodded but wouldn’t look her in the eye. “You have them, don’t you,” Jane said, and she nodded again. Jane continued: a kaleidoscope shift: same colours, different pattern. One night Lee arrived before Dash, so that he and Jane were already deep in conversation about the building when Dash came in. “Dash,” Lee said. “Gag,” Dash said. “Don’t call me that,” Lee said. “Gag,” Dash said. One night Dash was too pissed for tea and went straight to bed, leaving Jane and Lee alone with Lee’s air conditioning woes. One night Jane realized she’d known Lee for twenty-seven years, and told him he could use the bathroom if he needed to. “Dash and I started to fight after that.” Jane began to stack their dirty plates, scraping the other’s olive pits—a small pile, now— onto her own uneaten white cake. “He became secretive. He locked his bedroom door, stayed out all night, wouldn’t talk to me. He never showed me anything he was working on.” “You had a relationship?” Jane set the plates by the dry sink. “You and Mr. Gagnon, I mean.” “I know who you mean,” Jane said. “And I understand the assumption. You saw the filter on the toilet, and you noticed I didn’t offer you anything to drink. The leap from one kind of physical intimacy to another—it’s one Dash made too, I think. No, as a matter of fact. No relationship. Just, those few times, tea.” “Could I talk to Mr. Gagnon, do you think?” Jane pressed a button on the security console on the wall. “Jane?” Lee’s voice was as clear as if he was sitting with them. She
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could picture him in his apartment, at his desk, facing a bank of monitors, receiver clipped to his ear, fingers poised, splayed over his computer keyboard. He liked to wire himself to every part of the building—audio, video, everything—like a spider. “She’s here,” Jane said. “She wants to talk to you.” “Yes,” Lee said. “I saw her come in. I’ll be right down.” Moments later they heard his soft knock at the door. Jane saw what Micah must have seen: a small, neat old man in mended clothes, face gone soft with age, watery brown eyes, freckled pate like a browning fruit. A whiff of bleach. Micah suggested the three of them go look at the painting together. Lee looked at Jane and away, a sideways glance that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Dash’s last painting was a play on the famous illustration of the evolution of man: a line of figures, tiny and hunched at the far left, all the way up to life-size and standing at the far right. The standing man was Dash himself, and the line—dozens of figures—comprised, Jane guessed, everyone who had ever meant anything to him. Immediately to Dash’s left was a weeping Micah, breasts bared, wig slightly askew. Past her came a parade: Jane’s former husband, Dash’s grandfather, hands hanging heavily at the knuckle, with a goofy grin; Dash’s old teacher, the one who died, looking burdened rather than monkey-like. Jane was pleased to see he had accorded her that dignity. There were Dash’s parents, copied from an old photograph (Jane recognized the clothes), bowed down in shame like Adam and Eve chased from heaven. And more: Leah and Sam, the family doctor, friends from school—everyone ever who had touched his life—dwindling from adult- to child-size, doll-size, insect-size. At the far left, like figures from those home-made postage stamps, were Lee Gagnon and then Jane herself, dead last, her nose to the ground beneath Lee’s buttocks, licking up a few drops of his cadmium yellow urine. Lee made a sound in his throat—derision, revulsion, or perhaps just a bit of phlegm. Micah looked at him expectantly. “These moralists and their astronaut toilets,” he said, jerking his chin at Jane. ■ ■ ■
Jane invited Lee along to the gallery opening, several weeks later. They stood in front of the wall, mounted now on another, larger wall and rendered shadowless with pinpoint spotlights. Wall, it was titled in the catalogue. “That was good drywall,” Lee said, shaking his head. “You remember my husband,” Jane said. Lee and Jane’s former husband shook hands. Now there were three of them standing in front of the wall. “Can you believe she kept this from me?” Jane’s former husband said. “I would have,” Lee said. Jane’s former husband turned to Jane. “Our little Dash.” He sobbed once. “Our little grand-boy.” “Pull yourself together,” Jane said. Dash had moved out when he was twenty-one; like his father before him, he refused to tell Jane where he had gone. She, in turn, refused to look for him. They had fought; he had told her she was smelly, pathetic, disgusting. She had told him he was selfish and possibly brain-damaged. The usual unforgivable, not like they hadn’t done it before, but this time he had taken his paints. Some-
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how, Jane guessed, he must have figured out she had found the stamp book, and was refusing to forgive her. One year later, scant weeks before his death, Dash moved back in. He seemed to have aged decades: he had a tremor, he wet the bed. He asked Jane to cut a hole in the guestroom door so she could pass food in to him and he would not have to come out. When she refused, he installed a deadbolt so he could open the door no more than the necessary inches. Sometimes he sat in the kitchen with her like old times, but she would hear him in the bathroom afterwards, retching up the few sips of home-made tea he had been able to get down. She knew he was working, could smell the paints and see the evidence on his clothes and on the colourful traces he left around her apartment—the toilet handle had a perfect blue thumb print on it still—but nothing ever left the guestroom. When she asked him once what he was doing, he giggled—a high, kinky, unpleasant sound from a grown man— and blushed. Jane learned Dash had died when the insurance company phoned to tell her his monitor had stopped working. The agent on the phone asked if she had a visual on him at that moment. She told him no; the door to the guestroom was closed, as usual. Two days, three days? “Open it,” the agent recommended. The bolt popped right off the wall when she gave the door a heavy bump with her shoulder. She should have known Dash wouldn’t have had the strength to install even a drywall screw properly. He lay on the bed, dead of dehydration, beneath his very own evolution of love. When Dash’s file came from the insurance company, after the autopsy and the funeral, Jane realized their monitors had never been separated, and the insurance company had tracked his location every minute for the year of his absence, information that had been freely available to her if only she had thought of it. At first what she read confused her, for it showed he spent his nights in her building. She confronted Lee. “He said he needed some time to himself for a while,” Lee said. This was in the stairwell, where he was batting dust from ceiling corners, filling the air with motes. His voice was muffled by the disposable surgical mask he wore. “No one ever uses that guest suite. I barely saw him myself.” “You must hate me.” Jane grabbed for the broom, trying to get his full attention. He jumped away from the touch of her hand. “Stop,” he said, fumbling for the bottle of disinfectant in his apron and smoothing it on the side of his hand like salve on a burn. “You expect too much from people, Jane. I put a roof over his head. Can’t that please be enough?” “Oh, take that damn mask off,” Jane said. “You’re not going to die. You’re a cockroach, like me.” Lee’s builders arrived the day after the men from the gallery and restored the wall to what it had been before Dash: plain as egg cream, not a spot of colour on it anywhere. The floorboards disappeared smoothly under a new, speckless moulding in a shade of off-white slightly lighter than the wall. The gro-lamp days were over. Lee himself helped Jane push the furniture back and hang a few tasteful black and white photographs, the stark landscapes she had once favoured. She had been inclined to leave them down this time but Lee was insistent. “You need to forget about that other,” he said. Jane hesitated before the pristine blankness, nail in one hand,
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hammer in the other. “You’ve made Dash’s wall look like Moby Dick.” “My wall, lady,” Lee said. “You’re a renter.” At first, in the aftermath of Dash’s death—the arrival of the paramedics, the brief police investigation, her grief—Jane couldn’t bear to examine the painting closely and didn’t even notice she herself was a part of it. When she did bend down with a magnifying glass to examine the last two figures, there was Jane’s enduring, useless passion for Lee Gagnon—a tiny, still corner of Dash’s life—for all the world to see. “It’s a triumph,” Jane’s former husband was saying. Jane saw Lee pretend to sip his wine, then set his glass down on a table and look at his watch. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Jane said. Micah’s gallery had a single unisex cubicle done up in black tile, with a framed photograph of Duchamp’s signed urinal facing the toilet. No filter. Jane took a bottle from her bag instead and held it under her skirt. Her love for Lee, her love for Dash, her fierce, frightening, inarticulate love for every person she had ever known expressed itself in a small stream. At home she would purify it and label it and add it to the growing store she would share with anyone desperate enough to ask. Then she was back out in the big room, abusing the people around her, searching their politely averted faces, waiting for the next small relief from the great drought that would not end in her lifetime. ■
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POETRY
Brother, My Brother, Let’s See What You Got ELIZABETH BACHINSKY
What’s the status with Ralph? Do we still like him now that he lives in a doorway? Where will we go for dinner? What are those women going on about? Meh meh meh . . . We don’t have enough public sex. If only I had a back yard . . . O god. Today is pedophilic. That man will travel to Thailand. That man will pay for brown boys. Unspeakable acts all around us. What is it? It is the Number Four. You are never alone. Get it straight. Now that you are famous, someone will always spot you. Specifically. Specifically in the moment when you drop your wallet or stand up and say don’t touch me. Speak to no one. Now is not the time for pleasantries. Read the magazine. Read the advertisements for colleges and universities and upgrading and schools which specialize in English as a second language even if it’s your fourth. There’s the woman with the brownish-red burns on her face, half her hair given to fire. That man is drunk. That man is drunk and pissing on his seat. That man is drunk and standing in the alcove and pissing up a wall. That man is shouting at pedestrians. There is the roadwork. There is the pit in the ground. There are the trendy stores. Categorize your body in this way: which kind of pornography suits it best? Spit your gum with such force it sticks to that BMW. No, that top in the window will not fit you. Such tits! No tits? Then brother, my brother, let’s see what you got.
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ARTIST
Shawn Shepherd Slimy Chic Beasts Stroking Nature
I have always admired that some cultures do not have a word for art in their vocabulary. Art is so engrained in all aspects of the society in which those people live that it is not an extracurricular activity for them. For those people art and life are not separate. I strive to be like those people. I make an effort to avoid drawing lines between my artistic modes and my life. My art supports my life. I paint because I want to and also because I have to. Art is what I have come to understand best and it is sometimes simple and other times complex. Without art, societies would have nothing. No music, stories, or imagery. The world would be cultureless, dead. The piece I have made for this anniversary issue examines the lovely ridiculousness of how folks living in Victoria and Vancouver are in such close proximity to vast wilderness and natural wonder. When I first moved to Victoria there was a cougar spotted running around downtown and I thought to myself, “This is a great place.� Shawn Shepherd is a versatile artist living in Victoria, British Columbia. He has exhibited both locally and abroad, and his work has appeared in numerous newspaper articles, magazines, posters, books and movies. Shepherd’s paintings, prints, and sculpture are in private collections throughout the world.
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Sea, Sulphur, Mountains G R A N T B U DAY P H OTO G R A P H BY D E R E K VO N E S S E N
The barred owl was perched just outside our bedroom window on a fir branch. We’d heard its call, who...who cooks...you-all… It was seven in the evening in June, the sunlight tilting through the trees that surround the house we rent here on Mayne Island. We stepped out on the porch for a better view and helped our seven-year-old son Sam train the binoculars on the owl. There it was, grey-brown feathers providing perfect camouflage. It was about two-and-a-half feet tall and as solid as a jug of milk. A sturdy bird with enormous eyes. He was watching the robins, pine siskins, junkos, goldfinches, and towhees that were feeding in the trees and salal. The owl also seemed interested in one of our cats, a lithe female that would have made a good meal. Then without warning it was planing off through the forest. We looked at each other. The owl sighting was a gift, and it made the evening light even more richly radiant and the forest more alive. British Columbia, Beautiful British Columbia, so our old license plate said. I don’t generally pay attention to license plates. Beautiful British Columbia, Alberta’s Wild Rose Country, Quebec’s Je Me Souviens are about as many as I can list offhand. Like the cars to which they are attached—which have pretty much styled themselves into anonymity—they don’t interest me. To snag my attention, they have to be antique or outlandish, plastered with placards or stickers symptomatic of the eccentric within. But who couldn’t notice our new plate: British Columbia The Best Place on Earth? My response was to cringe. Even if we secretly believe it’s true, to say it is bad form. Worse, to emblazon it on a license plate for all the world to see, and gag at, is tacky. Besides, what about Australia and New Zealand? What about Scotland (where university education and dental care are free)? And what of all those progressive European countries we’re always hearing about, like
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Holland and Denmark, Norway and Sweden? Modesty may well be one of the smaller virtues, but shouldn’t B.C.’s superior qualities speak for themselves? For most people, B.C. means Vancouver. Until moving to Mayne Island six years ago, that’s pretty much all it meant to me as well. The Interior? That began just past Port Coquitlam. The Kootenays? That was a type of pale ale, wasn’t it? Having gone rural, I decided I was overdue for a fresh look at the biggest city in The Best Place on Earth. After all, Vancouver is regularly rated in the top five cities in the world for habitability. I rode the cable car up Grouse Mountain. It’s a treat to have forested mountains anywhere, but to have them so close to a city of 2.5 million is truly rare. So far, I had to admit that The Best Place on Earth was living up to its pr. The alpine air was clear and quiet. Unfortunately, there was too much pollution to see the city down below. It was all haze. Since I couldn’t actually see it, I’ll quote a scene from a small gem of a novel whose first chapter is set on that very spot: “The city looked as if it had been poured from a trash bin, spilling off the land and into the lead-grey sea. The place looked like so much rubble, and it lay beneath a pall of fumes that suggested a smouldering bog.” It so happened that in the midst of all that smog a man named
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thanks subTerrain for supporting great literature for 20 years!
Mostly Happy a novel from Pam Bustin $18.95 / 978-1-897235-39-3 Bean E. Fallwell stores mementos of positive events in a red Samsonite Saturn suitcase that keeps her from spiralling into the dark worlds of her beautiful, screwed up mother and the men she attaches herself to. There are intense and cruel moments in Bean's family life, but as she is battered and almost broken by them, she also learns to cope, recover, and laugh. For more information on this and other great titles visit thistledownpress.com
Paul Connett was going to be speaking downtown, against Wasteto-Energy Incineration. It was a public forum entitled: Landfill in the Sky. Paul Connett is executive director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. He’s been lobbying against incinerators in the U.S. for decades, and he’d come up to B.C. to say that he doesn’t believe that burning garbage is good for The Best Place on Earth. He says it entrenches the wasteful behaviour that has got us into such an environmental mess in the first place. We’ll only keep on with the mining and oil refining that deplete the earth and pollute the air. The people behind these incinerators, Plasco Energy Group of Ottawa, disagree. They claim their technology burns clean and will improve the air. Adopting their technology will actually make The Best Place on Earth visible again. And they’ll build their facilities for free. That’s right, free. All they want is our garbage. Industry enthusiasts, working with local politicians, are busy pushing these furnaces through City Council at this very moment. They’re not even bothering the citizens of The Best Place on Earth with all the aggravating details. To make it easy on us, they’re just going right ahead and doing it. (The same way the fine folks who made up the license plate did.) Metro Vancouver is proposing to build up to six incinerators as part of the new Solid Waste Management Plan. They’ll be able to burn everything: household garbage, compost, furniture, poo, polystyrene, and plastic. Their process will yield electricity which can power industry. And as far as they’re concerned it’s all clean. But the facts say otherwise. Along with mercury, cadmium, and lead, the incinerators emit highly toxic fly ash, difficult to dispose
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of bottom ash, vitrified slag, and dioxins. Dioxins cause cancer. The U.S. National Toxicology Program states that “there is no known safe dose of dioxins or threshold below which dioxin will not cause cancer.” It also notes that the “major source of dioxins in the environment comes from waste-burning incinerators.” Even the performance statistics on Plasco Energy Group’s own website don’t claim they will burn dioxin-free. Nor do they deny that dioxins remain suspended in the air and drift on the wind, so even if you’re miles away you will be exposed. And once you are exposed you will remain that way, if you are a male. The male body has no means of getting rid of dioxins. Females have two ways: they can pass them on to their fetus, and pass them on via their breast milk. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. My tour of The Best Place on Earth required taking a ferry from Mayne Island to Tsawwassen on the mainland. In the greater scheme of things $7.25 isn’t that much to pay, though the fare is expected to double by 2011, not counting the fuel surcharges. They recently refitted the noble old Queen of Nanaimo which plies the Gulf Islands run. The comfortable seats have been replaced by uncomfortable ones. You used to be able to stretch out and doze off. Not anymore. They’re too small and too crammed together. Plus they got rid of the children’s play area with its slide and replaced it with a smaller one that has a tv. Now, instead of playing the kids stare like zombies at cartoons, no interest at all in the splendid scenery of Active Pass, or the pods of Orcas that glide through during the summer. I never tire of watching whales. Like owls, they’re visitations from another realm, reminders of other worlds. And all right here in Beautiful British Columbia. I rode the bus into Vancouver. At a stop on south Granville Street, three men in B.C. Transit uniforms swaggered on and began demanding to see proof of payment. They started at the front of the bus and worked their way to the back, scrutinizing every single ticket. The last time anything like this happened to me I was going through a military checkpoint in Mexico. The three stuck close together, rather than splitting up and, more efficiently, working from either end of the bus. Their defensive/aggressive formation showed that they anticipated a confrontation with some criminal freeloader bent on defrauding B.C. Transit of the equivalent of the price of a small cup of coffee. Likely they had been drilled beforehand on how to deal with various scenarios they might face “in the field.” When this squad reached me I handed over my ticket, and while it was being examined, I noted the Taser on the belt of the toad-like leader, a short tubby guy with a pimply neck and greasy goatee. He was clearly enjoying himself. And why not? He was packing a serious piece of hardware. Was I wrong, or was the Taser giving him an erection? Certainly his twitchy fingers betrayed his eagerness to use that Taser on someone, to lay them out and see them writhing on the ground. What a tale he’d have for Mom that evening while they watched The Biggest Loser and ate their Kraft Dinner. I got off at Granville and Broadway. Confession: I still miss The Aristocratic cafe, which for decades occupied the southwest corner. The food was lousy, the coffee worse, but it had a great atmosphere, friendly staff, and enormous booths and windows from which you could gaze out at the world. Now it’s an outlet for Danielle Steele novels. For all the calm of rural life, I enjoy hitting the city for a day or two and feeling the concrete under my heels. I also like the
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endearingly absurd pageantry of well-dressed urban people strutting about as if they’re perpetually on camera. Strolling northeast, I reached Cambie Street and paused where the tunnel under False Creek for the Canada Line comes out. The Canada Line will connect downtown with Richmond and the airport. The tunneling was done mostly by foreign “guest workers” from Latin America. To show how hospitable we are here in The Best Place on Earth, we were paying them as little as four dollars an hour until a labour relations committee went to their defense and got them fourteen. In May, sixty new workers were brought in by SELI tecnologie, a subcontractor, and the men are being paid, on average, five dollars an hour for working eleven and twelve hours a day, six days a week. I crossed Cambie Street Bridge toward downtown. Directly below, some people rowed by in racing sculls. Whenever I see those boats I remember that old detective series Banacek, starring George Peppard. Banacek was Polish. But he rowed one of those sculls, which meant that despite being a Polack he had class, because sculls are associated with elite British universities like Cambridge and Oxford, and here they were in False Creek. Off to my left was Yaletown and the newly developed waterfront. People jogged along the sea wall, threw Frisbees, and collected their dog’s poop in plastic bags. Not having a dog, I wondered what a plastic bag full of warm poo felt like. Actually, I didn’t want to know. What I wanted was a coffee, a good coffee, so I headed for the Abruzzo on Commercial Drive. When I got there I settled in to watch the soccer game on the wide-screen tv, as well as watch the people and listen to the accents. I could have been in Naples or Mexico City. It was delightful. Walking is the best way to see any place, certainly The Best Place on Earth, so eventually I headed back downtown through the historic neighbourhoods of Strathcona and Chinatown. The smell of urine and exhaust kept me from lingering in the Main and Hastings area. Whenever I happen to wander through here I think of the infamous plague banquets of the Middle Ages, people drinking and fucking and laughing and dancing because they’re doomed and they know it. Advertising for the Winter Olympics to be held here in 2010 was everywhere. The project is already tens of millions of dollars over budget, a debt which the taxpayers of British Columbia will have to pay. But we will get a bobsled run out of the deal, and we’ll be able to burn the cubic tonnes of polystyrene generated by the great event in our new incinerators. I caught the SeaBus for the North Shore where I intended to take the bus up to Grouse to get my view of the city. It’s a good service, the SeaBus. Off the port side were Lion’s Gate Bridge and Stanley Park. As we chugged across the oily water of Burrard Inlet I admired a bright yellow pyramid of sulphur and, towering behind it, the forested mountains. What a panorama. Sea, sulphur, mountains. I wasn’t the only one gazing in admiration. Judging by the diverse faces on the boat, The Best Place on Earth must have something going for it to draw so many people from so many countries. And I have to admit that the crass promotional vainglory of our ridiculous new license plate notwithstanding, I have yet to find a better place to live either. I caught the bus and we were soon winding our way up toward Grouse. It was a pleasant ride, a chance to reflect after my day in the biggest city in The Best Place on Earth, and best of all no one packing a Taser got on. ■
issue 50
RAT BOHEMIA Sarah Schulman A new edition of Sarah’s award-winning 1995 book. “Rat Bohemia blows the traditional novel off its hinges.” –Edmund White, NewYork Times Book Review
HOPE IN SHADOWS Brad Cran & Gillian Jerome The story of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, in its residents’ own words and photographs.
Building communities one book at a time. arsenalpulp.com
Muybridge’s Horse a poem in three phases Rob Winger
“One of the most impressive Canadian Ca poetic debuts in recent years.” Sonnet S o L’Abbé, Globe & Mail
Finalist F inalist for forr the 2008 2 Trillium Trillium Book Book Award Awarrd for for Poetry Poetry and ffor or the 2007 Go Governor vernor Gene General’s ral a ’ss A Award warrd ffor or P Poetry oetry .. . .
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It is commonly accepted by people in the City of Vancouver that we are living in a messy, decades-long renovation, and there is enough commentary about the fact that we are watching a new city being turned into a new city, for no real reason.
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But I had been thinking about the One Percent for Art program, a tactic for cultural development which mandates that large building projects must put one percent of their total budget toward the production of public art, and I just thought for a moment: What if it wasn’t just one percent for art, but one hundred percent for art? What if, in fact, there was no condominium at all, or if the condominium was the art? What if instead of a tower there was a giant artwork, as monumental, and strange, and affecting as the buildings that are going up in our city? I did the math. Take a condominium that costs around fifty million dollars to build. That’s a big art budget. If an artist had that to spend, what could they make? Of course the exercise is speculative, like all great Vancouver endeavours, and involves an inversion of scale. I probably couldn’t design a fifty-million dollar art project that occupies a whole city block at the intersection between, for example, Robson and Richards Streets in downtown Vancouver. But I can make a list.
R bson @ Cambie, Bob Rennie & Associates
from Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art (Anvil Press, 2008)
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Scotia @ East 7th, The Eden Group
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Cambie @ Broadway, Bob Rennie & Associates
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:eCW_d Main @ 12th, Holborn Developments
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South Granville, Polygon Homes
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S’cuse Me While I Kiss The Sea-ToSky Highway MARK LABA I L LU S T R AT I O N BY LO U I S N E T T E R
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think there are still convicts out there somewhere churning out license plates in the prison factory. I know, I know: in this day and age it’s more likely they’re taking down your credit card number and booking your family vacation or trading stocks on the vse but imagine if you will a small penitentiary, forgotten by modern technology and still in the business of stamping out plates for the dmv.
Now imagine they’ve got the B.C. government contract. Our old plates read Beautiful British Columbia, and I have no argument with that—unless of course you’re living in Whalley—but our brand-spanking-new plates, and everything else Gordon Campbell and his Liberals could get their talons on, now read “The Best Place On Earth.” Not second best, not even tied for first, but the best bar none. You might wake up in the morning and find these words shaved into the fur of your household pet or have an x-ray and discover the phrase engraved on your spleen, or hire one of the hookers who are already buying bus and plane tickets to the city for the 2010 Olympics and hear her yelling it out with all the passion of a hard-earned dollar while you’re navigating her nether regions. There’s no telling where this pr campaign is going to pop up next.
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But back to the big house. If you’re one of the prisoners working the old sheet-metal cutter and stamping machine and you read these words, then I would guess you’d say to yourself, “Hot damn, when I get out of here that’s where I’m heading.” I mean, if it’s the best place on earth, why go to Tahiti or Minnesota or New York or L.A. or Winnipeg or Poughkeepsie. Nope, you’d head straight to this fantastic destination by the sea where the salmon leap from the rivers straight onto the bbq, the mountains are alive with the sound of music and lost hikers screaming, and the bongs are bubbling twenty-four hours a day with that B.C. crop that’s helped many a young entrepreneur or aging biker put down a mortgage on a million-dollar West Van house or gated Surrey estate.
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Best place on earth? Hey, Nickelback moved here from Calgary— what more proof do you want? Four guys producing the musical equivalent of hiding in a closet and huffing the crotch of your exgirlfriend’s acid-washed jeans while stroking your nunchuks have rocketed to glory on the wings of hard-rock mediocrity, thanks in no small part to our beautiful province. And the B.C. roofies industry has much to thank them for too, since, as my friend Clint Burnham says, “It’s music to date rape to.” Now if you’re on the more unfortunate end of the economic spectrum, take heart. With burgeoning wealth splitting the seams of the city, junkies and crackheads have far more options these days when it comes to expensive cars and suvs to break into. It’s a veritable cornucopia of car parts ripe for the picking and whether the destination is the chop shop, the pawnshop, or just a quick sell on craigslist, the money’s as good as in your pocket.
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It’s been said that Vancouver is now also a top-notch dining destination for culinary jetsetters. So if you’re a dumpster diver and know the right Smithrites to hit, chances are you’ll be chowing down on a four-star meal minus the fancy plate presentation, unless of course you’re the creative type. And with the recent spate of shootings in spiffy restaurants as gangs hack up a few sods in turf warfare, behind the dumpster in the alleyway ain’t a bad place to be when you’re dining out. Not to mention you don’t have to pay the damn corkage fees. For visitors to our fair province it should also be noted that nowhere else can you get Tasered by the rcmp in the morning, just for asking for directions in another language, and if you’re still alive, hit the beach for a swim in the afternoon and then ski in the evening. Beautiful B.C.—Best place on earth? Not quite yet, but once all the ex-cons and hookers arrive, you bet. ■
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Richard Tetrault Against The Night
Since the late 1970s, I have lived and worked in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Although travels take me elsewhere for periods of time, this community continues to sustain my work. From living on Powell Street in the ’70s, (over top of a glass shop and beside a Dickensian foundry), to teaching portraitdrawing and life-drawing at Carnegie Centre through the ’80s, to mural-painting and collaborating throughout the ’90s, I continue to find visual inspiration in the ‘original’ Vancouver. Living in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver has shaped both my choice of materials and the focus for my work. I have been influenced by my involvement in this community, and in the desire to reveal its numerous sides. This immediate urban environment provides me with the starting point for most of my paintings and prints. The shifting dynamics of the street is a collage of images and encounters that are both edgy and full of a primal vitality. This is more compelling to me than the desire to ‘document’, however, and I improvise freely on observed reality. I am interested in exposing the layers that can be found within the seemingly commonplace, emphasising the mythic within the mundane.
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the War on Terror War on Drugs War on the Poor are afflictions and affliction means causing pain and suffering and I am a human being like so many who have known affliction in my family in my nerves in my thoughts in my heart and in the community of the poor indeed this global economy turns its hand against me again and again all day long and it has besieged and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship with isolation and self-destruction and self-centredness this global economy has made me live in powerlessness
All text by Bud Osborn (from Signs of the Times, with illustrations by Richard Tetrault)
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they pass through the Downtown Eastside and shake their heads but were we not once children born beloved of life and now become no better than objects to be kicked and manipulated? social failures to be whipped by this cruel system? and our good friends our enemies they say â&#x20AC;&#x153;we are swallowing up the Downtown Eastside we will drive the low-life out this is the day we wait for
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to make our city a city for tourists and corporations this is the day we work for when we drive out the bad poor and drive out their agencies except for the good poor who will live quietly and intimidated in enclaves of social housingâ&#x20AC;? and our enemies gloat over how easy it is to destroy our community
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a binner approaching a bin anticipates something valuable will be found among the discarded rejected trash and useless objects of our society
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va n c o u v e r i n t e r n at i o n a l w r i t e r s f e s t i va l contest winner —fiction—
The Agony of Things R YA N F R A WL E Y
Beneath grimy Victorian window arches, Paddington station is cold and black. Under the disinterested eye of a pair of obscenity-crowned policemen, stray herds of travellers wander like ants. Signs blink in dirty orange dots, a flickering list of drab British place names: Redditch, Moreton-inMarsh, Northampton, Hull. Grim towns of grim people, where life bleeds slowly in the rain. No one smiles. The pa system chimes, belching unintelligible gobbledegook in an alien tongue.
Ducking low under the roof, a pigeon glides down through the iron rafters, sweeping through the spiralling thermal jets of cooling trains, cupping its wings against the air as it twists downwards, narrowly avoiding a middle-aged woman running to make her train. Its scaly claws skid on the dark tiles as it lands. Suddenly lost in a forest of thudding footfalls, it scuttles, head bobbing, between thick wandering legs, around a tall iron column, past a set of black-shoed feet crossed at the ankle, and on into the darkness, chasing food and sex and a safe place to sleep. Anthony uncrosses his feet and stands upright, freeing himself from the iron pillar he had been leaning on. Amongst the cogs and wires, the fading sparks of youth, Jealousy works there is a sharp hum in his head like like strychnine, the static feedback of an idle ampliall my nerves fier. Caress the details. Dry wood ending in poison. piled up in the dark, waiting for that Every time I see one fatal spark. Winding through frowning businessmen and chatterher I get sick. ing German backpackers, he heads for his platform. It was like this in the early days in Vancouver, too; a strange familiarity in the faces of strangers, the rising flame of incredulous recognition—“You? Here? But how?”—
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stamped out by the turn of the head, the change of lighting, the unexpected eye colour or jawline melting an acquaintance, maybe even a friend, into a scowling stranger. God, or nature, or whatever, shows a surprising lack of imagination. Or else the mind can only conceive of a few hundred individuals before it begins to merge them together. Even her, maybe. The features of the one who came before reincarnated, reshaped, but undeniably recurring in her. The pale shell skin and the candle glowing through it; the heavy black hair, a moat of pitch defending heaven from the assaults of hell. But the golden sunburst of the iris, though; the spokes of radial glory like faultlines of gold in a sea-washed granite rock— those were hers alone. The impossible black pupils, darker even than her shadow-shaming hair, like a black hole swallowing the sun—that was her, alone. The first three cars of the train are first class; every seat in the next two is reserved, a ticket sitting in the headrest of each one like the crest of a military unit. This fucking country. Anthony carries his bag down the aisle, through sliding doors and luggage racks, finally finding a narrow seat on the window side of a corpulent old degenerate eating a store-bought ham sandwich. Two girls sit directly in front, loudly discussing their menial jobs—chambermaids or cleaners or something. People keep piling on. Silently willing the train to start moving, Anthony pushes his headphones into his ears and tries to pretend he is somewhere else. Alone.
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FICTION
He was supposed to feel it, the tiny explosion of hollow bones breaking in his hand, but he didn’t. The fluttering body span suddenly from him, spiralling through the newly hostile air and collapsing on the shit-streaked floor. Revulsion opened his murderous fist, and the head dropped like a stone, its beak opening as it fell in a silent scream of horror, unable to comprehend the inevitability of its own destruction. He watched the body struggling to right itself, balanced on feet and outstretched wingtips, trembling in helpless agony. Dark, oily blood geysered from its orphaned neck, great fat gobs of it rolling stickily down its matted breast. Then, at the raw limit of pain, it arched its back, red vertebrae rising from the tortured stump as though it were trying to escape its own ravaged body. In slow motion, it toppled over backwards, wings folding over itself, into its own blood. Seagulls screamed from the parapet, calling one another to the gory bacchanal, the smell of blood jagged and metallic in their nostrils. Scooping the pieces of the pigeon into a garbage bag, he dropped the remains down the laddered shaft and climbed down after it. Outside, a hairy hobo of indeterminate age and sex sat in the sun, cutting its toenails on the sidewalk. He tossed the tied bag into a dumpster and drove away.
I’m taking back what’s mine: my heart, my blood, my eyes; the things she can’t imagine I have seen. The wild bare solitude; mine. She was never as beautiful as the orange streetlight on a rainstudded window in a lonely room high above the world.
Outside of dark London, green fields and hedgerows roll past, clanking. Sheep and cows grazing dully in the fields, the yellow scream of—too much? All right then, the yellow fields of rape bright against the grass. Still think mine was better. On the far side of a hill, I don’t care. I don’t Anthony, travelling backwards, care what the vermin sees a huge horse carved into I slaughter each day the side of a hill, the white chalk beneath the turf standing think of me; and I out against the shifting green of don’t care what she the valley below. They’re all thinks of me. I live over the place, these hill only to taste her figures—horses and giants and blood in my mouth. geometric shapes, carved fuck knows when by God knows who. It was something that would have interested him once, maybe. But he’s different now. His eyes have been branded by blue mountains and green forests, grey spires of rock tattooed with perpetual snow, ancient trees groaning in the foam-flecked wind from the sea. The moss grows thick in the innocent gloom.
issue 50
As soon as he lifted the hatch into the attic, he knew there was something there. The eerie blue flashlight swept around the darkness, taking in tunnels carved through the insulation by successive generations of rodents, the dark dried-out pellets of rat shit scattered like seeds in a fresh-ploughed field. Gloved hand on a beam, breathing through his mouth, he hauled himself inside. His flashlight picked out a trap, flipped upside down with the violence of its steel spring mechanism, a fat furry body visible beneath the wood. The familiar death-stink hung in the air. That, and a million dancing particles of fibreglass dust, warming themselves in the molten bolt of sunlight that cut a ragged shape out of the darkness, the attic’s permanent night stabbed by a spear of day. He turned the trap over, the rat’s heavy body and scaly worm tail trailing watery blood and effluent. Behind bared yellow teeth, its mouth was wet with chocolate syrup. The thick metal arm of the trap was almost buried in the fur at the back of the rat’s snapped neck. A good clean kill with a mouthful of sweetness; we should all be so lucky.
There is a whore in Amsterdam who sings, lilting Mandarin ballads ringing in her small room while she bounces on top of another stoned tourist. There is a girl awaiting death in an Iranian prison, scratching pictures on the wall with her fingernails. There is an Indian woman who travels the world, hugging strangers. There is a woman in the earth who died the night her husband was taken from her.
The miles roll past, green and flat. All of it owned by someone. On the flight over, the sky was clear over arctic Canada, and Anthony had looked down from the edge of space on hours of wilderness, brown earth dotted with hundreds of frozen lakes. Not a city, building or road in sight. A thick bar of night, rushing west, met You can only love what you the plane head-on in the middle of the can’t have; anything else is Atlantic, and a few just laziness. Love is just lust hours later, the sun rose with scars. in an empty English sky. Fields, roads, cities; microscopic cars hurtling along shadowy motorways—everything owned. Not an inch left unclaimed. Every time he comes back, it gets worse. The naked hostility. Every race under the sun gathered here, and everyone hates each other. Police clutching machine guns in underground stations. Gangs of marauding teenagers filming random beatings on their cellphones. The signs, everywhere you turn: “No Smoking”; “No Loitering”; “Private Property”; “No Spitting”. The train clatters on, cutting endless dull miles towards a city he hated long before he left. Worn out but not defeated, neither willing the train forward nor missing what was left behind, he leans his head on the window and listens to the howl rising in his skull. ■
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va n c o u v e r i n t e r n at i o n a l w r i t e r s f e s t i va l contest winner —poetry—
Light Transit SUSAN STEUDEL
The child that you’re handed is natural, wrapped in a blanket a thousand times bleached. Placed in your arms for keeping safe, a perfect wedge between waking and death. You think in this moment of difficult entry the same death waits in household things; the key that drops silently out of your pocket, a booklet of matches in with the socks. A shackle is something that hooks up inside you, the vending machine of a body that hums yet is natural that boys should sweat through their collars. These are the structures that tug at you now. His collar is quilted with little wet stars and it is natural to wonder how. The girl that you used to be must have come down to learn to hang from her knees—those silver half moons of hers ready to fall—still, how many times have you done it yourself. A girl, you think, could bend at the elbows, reach up and touch her bare, thin lobes. At home your hand is the rag you loosen to set up the plates to dry. Some children are with you inside this room. One reads a book, a quiet. The other peers into the back of a spoon. Look, mom, the metal eye.
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MEMOIR
The Beauty and Treachery of Memory PAT R I C K F R E I S E N I L L U S T R AT I O N BY D AV E B A R N E S
Calling somewhere the “best place on earth” is either a personal opinion or a civic slogan. There can be no such objectively recognized place. Still, the phrase nudges one along little paths of thought. If I take the phrase seriously, two things occur to me immediately. The first is that this, obviously, has to be a place I have some familiarity with, a place I have experienced firsthand. I can’t claim Lhasa as a best place on earth because I haven’t been there.
Secondly, I wonder about the word “earth.” It seems to me the best place on earth should actually be broken into two categories, the best place on earth and the best place in the world. If I’m writing about the best place on earth I’m dealing with a natural place on this planet. In that case, one could argue about various places on earth and, certainly, Vancouver’s setting would be one of those places. Vancouver has been at the top, or near the top, of numerous lists of best places. If we’re talking about the best place in the world, that’s another story. Many people would call some place a best place because of its aesthetic beauty, because of its climate and the richness and security of its environment. But there is another, less objective, aspect; there is the matter of a person being born from, and into, a place, just as one was born from and into time. Wouldn’t this be the place where one was born and lived as a child? The place that absorbed me, and which I absorbed as well, is the southeastern area of the prairies, in Manitoba, an area that
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is extremely flat, though the bush cover hides that fact to some degree. Like prairie fire, the poplar, or thistle, I belong there. On the other hand, I could quite easily say the North Shore Mountains and Burrard Inlet form the best setting on earth. It is easy to experience a sense of the spirit world when the low clouds drift in and out of the trees on the mountain slopes. The place is stunning with its mountains, water, and mild climate. Vancouver, undoubtedly, is a best place on earth. But there are other possible best places on earth, like the hills of South Dakota, let’s say, or the isthmus at Mismaloya. The best place in the world, however, has to do with human habitation, with what humans are and what they have done with the natural environment they live in. It’s not just a matter of space, but time as well. One place in one time may be brilliant, but a decade later a slum. And if one leaves a place, what remains is memory, often nostalgia. What is the best place in the world? It could be Granada in Andalucian Spain. I’m thinking of the
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gardens of Generalife with flowers and shrubs and a thousand sounds of water, Al Sacromonte white-washed, sloped and riddled with caves, the old walls of the Alhambra always visible above this old part of the city. It’s a fine place, an example of what humans can build when they work together instead of letting religion and politics send them to war. The Moors built much of the old part of this city, but they did it with the cooperation of Jews and Christians. This beauty, and the peace it arose out of, are arguments for it being the best place in the world. But, then, it could be Italy. Trieste, more Austro-Hungarian than Italian in its architecture, its squares leading to the sea where the
years I was astonished daily by the mountains at the end of The Drive. It took that long to become somewhat innured, for my eyes to see the same sights but not be conscious of them. I used to wonder on the Broadway bus, as I looked down toward downtown and Burrard Inlet, about perspective. Being from the prairies, I was not used to always looking down or up no matter where you were. Perspective was different. Art, literature and music could be different because of this. One’s life could be different. But I did get more or less used to the physical environment. What grew and still grows on me, is the human city of East Vancouver. I learned something of the history of Commercial Drive, the immi-
This is where I live, what I know. Is it the best place in the world? Yes. I love the people here; Johnny nodding from the open window of Bouzyos, Fortunato selling cheese in his shop, Frank Sr. and Frank Jr. serving friendly cappuccinos, Raymond upstairs with the good smile, sad Maria whose daughter died, Anna with her cane. This is a most excellent place, where I have found serene rhythms of conversation, silence, and walking, rhythms of greetings and friendliness. I like humanity here while I don’t care much for it on a larger scale.
wealth and destruction of an empire lay, with its twentieth century history of d’Annunzio and his biplane, Rilke and the Duino elegies just down the coast, and James Joyce with his cheap, small apartments, his favourite drinking holes and the whorehouses he frequented. This could be another best place in the European world. Most of my life has been lived in Manitoba, first in a small town in the southeastern corner of the province, then in Winnipeg. The former was formative with its lilac shrubs, backyard bike paths, its secrets and hiding places, its sugar trees and poplars, and the wreckage of a yellow plane in the undergrowth near the creek running through the heart of the town. Objectively, there was nothing really unusual or dramatic about this physical location, but it was where I was born and grew up. In my mind I go back there constantly. Then I spent thirty years living in Winnipeg, a city I love for many reasons. It has, though, become largely a city of memory for me, a memory that’s very alive and instructive, but I’m not at all sure how it relates to the real city today. My memory provides context, but the fusion of memory and experience is fallible. After fifty years on the eastern prairies, a lifetime of weather, of shifting clouds, the sky completely changed while you looked somewhere else, a lifetime of varieties of snowfall and violently arriving thunder storms, a lifetime at the edge of the shield, I left. I moved to Vancouver, East Vancouver to be specific, and this is the point, one needs to be specific. East Van is where I have lived for the past twelve years, just off Commercial Drive. The first two
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gration pattern, the ceaseless changing of ethnic groupings. Europe meets Asia. Small business, labour, and artisans. Salt of the earth, we used to say. I run into writers and painters I know, and there are many I don’t know. Dancers. All kinds. What makes it unique, I think, is the unmasked aspect of this street, the raw and plain. There’s not a lot of pretense or posturing. I spend a lot of time on my second floor balcony watching the human traffic. One hot summer the bench in front of my place was the scene of drug transactions. Some of the people lived in my building. One of them had an accident and his suite went up in flames. He was carried out naked by the firemen, screaming incoherently. The drug scene didn’t last long, just the one summer, though I know it carries on quietly as it does all over the city. Homeless people beg just around the corner. Sometimes one of them spends the night under the shrubs across the street. They are a fact of life. Their numbers increase every year. You never get used to their lined faces, the evidence of their hard lives. I have watched lovers in the evening kissing on the bench. Tired old people often use the bench as a rest station on their way home from the grocery store. Children climb all over the bench now and then. There are specific people who have passed by for many years. My neighbours, though I usually don’t know their names or even what they do with their lives. There’s the man with the dyed black hair I used to think of as the retired hit man. He has a quiet authority. His pleasure in life seems to be his clothes. A different
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suit every day, brilliant shirts and shimmering ties, he slowly paces down the sidewalk. Yesterday it was a dark blue suit with a red silk shirt and red tie. Other times it’s a white suit with a black shirt and white tie. Sometimes he has white shoes on. I know he has at least a dozen different suits. And he does combinations very well. But I doubt he’s a retired hit man; now, I think he’s a retired undertaker. He has that slow, deliberate walk, not the feral walk of a hit man, none of the implied quickness and alertness you’d expect there. No, he looks as if he’s leading a casket into a church. He’s always alone, never speaks to anyone, except for once every three or four months when he promenades past with a much younger woman on his arm. I’ve never worked out a story for this. Who is she? His impassive face has a hint of pride when he walks with her. A Buddhist nun lives a few blocks down the street. She sways from side to side as she walks by, with age or a hip problem, fingering her beads. Returning, she usually carries a bag of groceries. I love the burgundy and saffron she wears, and I love her wide peaceful face. Emerging only occasionally from my building is a glassy-eyed middle-aged man. He always says a slurred hello to me, a friendly guy. He’s doped up against his extremes. I wonder what it’s like to live that way. There are several people like him, people on medication, in my neighbourhood. I think of their quiet desperation, but they may not be desperate at all. There was a man on medication in the building opposite who, a few times a year, very late at night, would wake the neighbourhood with four or five mournful trumpet notes. They didn’t really hold together, but you could tell he was trying. Once, someone must have phoned in a complaint, because the police showed up. I heard three of them standing in a knot beneath a tree, laughing. One said, “He’s had a bad night,” and they drove off. Some time later, having finally fallen back to sleep, I woke to the scream of “Fuck you, assholes!” I knew who it was. He’s gone now, the trumpet player. Was he one of the ones, covered with a blanket, carried out from the building over the years? He disappeared. As did the Vietnam vet in my building. Always in a hurry, with a far-off look in his eyes. When he disappeared for a while you knew he was on a bender. It was the travel agent down the street who told me his story. Both of them had fought in Vietnam. The one that nags at me most, though, is Vladimir, the artist. He lived down the street, but it wasn’t there I used to see him. On summer days he set up a stool either in front of Bukowski’s or Bouzyos restaurant on The Drive, his dog beside him, and painted. I never saw him sell a painting, but sometimes people stopped to watch him. He was good. Johnny, the owner of Bouzyos, hired him to sculpt a few stone plinths with figures on them, just to help him out. One day I saw a notice in the window at Bouzyos; a photo of Vladimir and the time, date, and location of his funeral. He had gone by his own hand. Johnny thought it was his despair at not making a living as an artist. I don’t know. This is where I live, what I know. Is it the best place in the world? Yes. I love the people here; Johnny nodding from the open window of Bouzyos, Fortunato selling cheese in his shop, Frank Sr. and Frank Jr. serving friendly cappuccinos, Raymond upstairs with the good smile, sad Maria whose daughter died, Anna with her cane. This is a most excellent place, where I have found serene rhythms
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of conversation, silence, and walking, rhythms of greetings and friendliness. I like humanity here while I don’t care much for it on a larger scale. The best place on earth? This place, now. I am in a chosen point of pivot; I’m moving. The face of this transition shows that I have lived in East Vancouver for twelve years. I came with my memories, my brain and body memories, of Manitoba, Steinbach originally, then Winnipeg, and I’ve been adding memories of East Vancouver all this time. Grids of memory, on top of each other, like an anthropological dig. It’s what I hold just as I make a choice to move to Vancouver Island. The beauty and treachery of memory I know about. In transition, memory is partial in that it’s still being formed; it’s fresh, but already it offers the context of time. It is this nexus of time and place that works for me. I’ve already moved most of my belongings across Georgia Strait, but I’m not quite there. That’s still future, very near future. I am turning here on East Third. I’m kicking dust off my shoes, but it doesn’t all fall away. I understand, at this time, that I’ve really just arrived in East Van, a place I’ve gotten to know well enough to call home and to say something about before I arrive where I’m not known, a place I don’t know. Already a bit of a stranger to my balcony, I see these everyday people in a more fleeting way now. They won’t be physically before my eyes, or in my ears, soon. They are becoming memory. But they were, of course, busy becoming history all along. Now, though, I am sharply conscious of it. Images of these people move through my brain, a kind of summing up of my experience of their lives, how I saw them in this space during a specific period of time. I will be stepping out of that space and that time. And then I’ll find out about the best place in the world. ■
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POETRY
The Night Market E V E LY N L A U
In the night market, a woman with filthy hair and clothes dripping with threads stares at the vats of curried fish balls and braised tripe as if at a storefront window in Beverly Hills, her face squeezed by hunger. Around her, hordes of families and couples, lips shining with grease, reach for the next rewardâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; even the teenage girls on diets pinch skewers of quail or scallop between manicured nails. I wish I could feed this stranger like the baby seagull we found one day in the bushes by the water, so docile or damaged it let us put our hands on its body, suffering our touch with eyes blank as beads in exchange for a morsel. I could buy her a meal and not miss it. Instead we gorge on dumplings and waffles, the starch sloshing in my stomach like wet cement as the crowd roars past, goldfish mouths flapping, the sky raining down bitter black ash, soot in my nose and throat from the cooking fires. This is the Richmond Night Market on a Saturday night, our stomachs straining at our waistbands, bodies bathed in smoke and spices, the sunset a tanker explosion spilling across an oil-soaked sea. I stuff shrimp gyoza, squid tentacles, kimchi pancakes into my mouth as if into someone starving, someone I am trying to save.
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COMMENTARY
Wordsworth on Grouse Mountain PETER BABIAK
In the neighbourhood of latitude fifty north, and for the last hundred years or thereabouts, it has been an axiom that Nature is divine and morally uplifting. — “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” Aldous Huxley
They looked like people who should have been in an art gallery. The two men were dressed in black—one in a Prada jumper and the other with a mandarin collar—though it was June and warm. Prada wore rectangular black-framed glasses iconic of the urban property-owning professional set. The two women were in yoga wear more indicative of an excess of leisure time than stretching and sweating. They were eating lunch, looking out of the windows, and talking about home—somewhere around Chicago—but every so often one of them would make one of those tourist affirmations which require no response. What a beautiful view. Is Stanley Park ever big. Look how green everything is. UBC smells like camping. It was charming, listening to their innocuous praises of Vancouver from the next table, where I sat with my own tourist, a niece visiting from Ontario, who had begged me to take her to “do The Grind.” She heard about it from a friend who had been here and done it before, decided it couldn’t be that hard when I pointed out Grouse Mountain on the way from the airport and told her it was three kilometres long and three thousand feet up. She managed to make it up that afternoon, wheezing and cursing for the hour she trailed behind me. She hated it, but of course when we were sitting in the cafeteria at the top she assured me “No, it wasn’t that hard,” and then, after I told her that this “Grind” is such a walk in the park for locals— only steeper—that it even has its own Facebook page, she said she didn’t care and would never do it again.
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She didn’t seem to notice when Prada launched into an impromptu poetic reverie about the slices of low-level clouds pushed up against the trees and how “mystical” this made the atmospheric perspective. Mystical. It sounded so very important when he said it. It occurred to me that Prada had obviously read what Kant and Burke had to say about the sublimity of nature. He seemed so convinced that this was no ordinary skyride to an ordinary mountain at the far northern edge of a coastal suburb—this mountain has a soul—that, momentarily, I felt tempted to turn around and say, try explaining that to her. She just climbed up here for the first time and didn’t like it at all. A hiking friend of mine who also happens to be an English professor calls these “Wordsworth bungles.” He came up with the idea from an obscure 1929 essay by Aldous Huxley, who debunked the Romantic poet Wordsworth’s near-mythical belief that Nature is pretty much benign, beautiful, and inspirational, just like he found it to be in well-gardened England in the 1820s. Once, after we sat for a long time looking out at the view of Vancouver from the
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Lions’ Peaks, he fell and gashed his ankle. That was one such Wordsworth bungle. It’s when romantic ideals of “nature,” whether in poems or tourist brochures, run up against the inconvenient reality of sharp rocks, trees and bugs, and long hikes back down. Naturally, I didn’t say anything to show up Prada’s Wordsworth imitation. When in the summer I linger at the top of the mountain longer than any local really should and find myself among visitors who pay to get up there, I tend to feel self-consciously superior. “Yeah, I just walked up here,” I feel like saying, “and it wasn’t even that hard.” As much as I know that visitors like Prada from bigger, flatter and oceanless cities make all kinds of hyperbolic claims about Vancouver that can be demystified with minimum effort, there is a
experimentation, a plurality of voices, and a mingling of cultures and traditions”? It’s awfully pretty to think so, but is it true? And how to decode the many, many sentences in the dossier which come right out and claim that Vancouver’s natural geography is vital to its literary lifeblood—“Its stunning natural environment of mountains, coast, and sea inspires local and visiting artists and writers”—as if all that’s needed for literature to happen is a mystical junction of water, a rapid shift in elevation and trees? Did the writers intend what they wrote to be read literally, or is this metaphorical public relations poetry that needs to be read allegorically with the broadest possible interpretive arc? Or are they performative sentences that don’t really describe anything
Take Vancouver’s literary scene, toss in vague ideological mystifications about its super-natural natural environment, and you are left with intelligent “bling” for the global creative class. part of me that likes hearing these little tourist fictions because I have managed to hallucinate that they must reflect on me, too. I thought of Prada and that Wordsworth moment a few weeks later when a colleague sent me the weblink to a draft proposal to have Vancouver designated a “World City of Literature” by unesco. The organizers behind the initiative—a group led by the founding director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival—submitted this stirring dossier to unesco’s Creative Cities Network, whose mandate, as far as I can tell, is to give cities “with established creative pedigrees” the opportunity to “share experiences and create new opportunities ... notably for activities based on the notion of creative tourism.” It’s not just about getting more tourists, in other words, but getting smarter and creative ones. Perhaps like Prada. Vancouver applied for the designation “City of Literature”— other cities apply for categories like film, folk art, gastronomy, and so on—and is in competition with Amsterdam, Alexandria and Krakow for the honour of getting this noble brand conferral. The dossier, a fetching fifty-seven pages put together by TurnerRiggs Strategy Marketing Communications, brims with positive information about B.C.’s literary history and culture. As glossy and readable as a Denny’s breakfast menu, it aims to show the people at unesco headquarters in Paris that Vancouver, which the marketing lyricists assign the twin monikers “the Natural City” and “the Literary City,” is “ready to reach out and contribute to the global literary community by becoming a World City of Literature.” I realize that documents like this—if the genre had a name, it would be called the administrative sublime—are meant to be ratified without having been read, not read and certainly not thought about. But I can’t help think that a proposal to have a city designated as “literary” by the global authority which hands out these honours really should count on some “literary” criticism fired at it, given that “Literature”—if it has anything useful to offer the world, besides tourism—teaches us about the many wonderful and wonderfully shifty things that can be done with words. So how, I wonder, should I read sentences that declare there is a “buzz, energy, and excitement” in Vancouver’s cultural scene or that its literary community is “characterized by an openness to
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that exists “out there” in real Vancouver at all but rather intend to produce the things they describe just by describing them that way? I have no idea. It leaves me linguistically bafflegabbed and cognitively flummoxed, much like the provincial government’s pre-2010 pr mantra: “British Columbia: The Best Place on Earth.” What kind of narcissistic delusion is that, anyways? The only thing I can say for sure is that reading the unesco proposal requires a willing suspension of disbelief greater than any I have ever mustered when reading any literary text, Wordsworth’s poetic venerations of daffodils no less than a surrealist novel. I imagine some purists getting a hold of the document—especially if the Vancouver proposal wins—and pointing out that it marks a further erosion of literary culture in our late capitalist era, and they may have a point. The text imagines a cultural makeover in which the orthodox definition of “literature” as a field that is at odds with “economics” morphs into just another consumer item—in this case, a catalyst for tourism. Take Vancouver’s literary scene, toss in vague ideological mystifications about its super-natural natural environment, and you are left with intelligent “bling” for the global creative class. And yet, the proposal is less an imaginative makeover than a statement of the obvious, isn’t it? I mean, really, whoever still thinks Literature is a sacred object set apart from consumerism and the laws of supply and demand just hasn’t caught on to the fact that what counts as culture is a lot more than books and magazines that a handful of people read. Maybe the “World City of Literature” proposal is a work of unusual genius because, in its shameless romanticization of Vancouver as the “natural” and “literary” city, it has managed to understand that consumerism is our daily culture, right on par with sushi, jogging, and trips to Grouse Mountain. And maybe that’s what we want to think of ourselves, too. Just like the view from Grouse Mountain has everything to do with idealizing the city and very little to do with nature, the proposal presents us with an image of our ego-ideal. It’s not about how we really live—not exactly—but about how we would like to be seen by others, as likeable and liveable. And literary. ■
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F E AT U R E
ARTIST
Derek von Essen Spatial Dichotomies
My work often focuses on the juxtaposition of the natural, unkempt world against our man-made, constructed environment, highlighting the changes which occur over time. Horizons + Intersections, a photo/video/sound collaboration incorporates digitally manipulated environments, while the photo series Wredcked was created through an in-camera accident. Yet both draw attention to the impact our existence has on our surroundings. Vancouver, B.C. has a mild, temperate climateâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a sea breeze under big skies and a protective shoulder from the North Shore Mountains. As an artist, these surroundings stimulate my creativity and allow me to work with an openness I can attest to location. I am not crowded by skyscrapers, nor gasping on city fumes. I feel connected to my home city and have a sense the place is in meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not the other way around.
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PHOTOGRAPHY
North Shore View
Suzan Down at the Docks
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Frame 343 from the series, Horizons + Intersections
Wredcked #2 issue 50
Wredcked #7
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Do Not Enter View
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PHOTOGRAPHY
Financial District
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Timber Rescue
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Park Excavator
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In 1950s Bethlehem a woman feigns madness after killing her abusive husband
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www.secondstorypress.ca
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REVIEWS
Reviews My Unwritten Books by George Steiner New Directions, 2008; 209 pp.; $23.95 US Apart from librarians, grad students, and word nerds, there probably aren’t many people who think reading a book by a professor with a title like “Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge” can be an erotic experience. But My Unwritten Books, a collection of seven essays on subjects George Steiner always wanted to write books on but didn’t—for good reasons—is suggestive and at times even scandalous. Like most readers, I’m hot-wired to spot salacious bits of prose when skimming, and in this book they are in “The Tongues of Eros,” an essay on why language matters in libido: What is the sexual life of a deaf mute? To what incitements and cadence does he or she masturbate? . . . The sounds which accompany orgasm, often poised at the threshold of verbalization, sometimes seeming to echo back to the prehistory of language, can be deliberately mendacious. . . . How enriching it might be to have nightmares or wet dreams in, say, Albanian. If it’s true that eroticism is not in nakedness, but in the flash of skin glimpsed in the gap of a garment, then I’d say the same is true of Steiner’s writing; these sudden thrills are ever so discreetly laid out in scrupulously-crafted sentences which, if you can control your carnal imagination and read patiently, deliver a captivating argument. Steiner’s argument is that your sex life— although neurophysiologically pretty much like everybody else’s—is determined by all kinds of factors, like history, tv commercials, and electronic communication. But mainly it’s controlled by language. Anatomical size and measurements might matter to the person you are sleeping with, but not as much as how well you did in French class—or German or Spanish. That’s because a person who knows more than one language “seduces, possesses,
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remembers differently.” Polyglots have different—and better—sex than monoglots because language doesn’t just describe what people do in bed together, it does things. In German, for example, sex is— like the tongue—often based on extremes: either abstract or base, sublime or filthy, but rarely in between. In Anglo-American English, sex is much more democratic, but it has been spoiled with the banalities of “pre-packaged” film, tv, and commercials, which has stripped the language and left it without eroticism. “Much of the rest is now texting, oral or electronic.” As for the passionate French, their language of sex is known for its “formality”: “Ceremonies of syntax attend on French intercourse.” Intriguing. But then reading about sex is only fun until someone gets hurt, and reading an erudite academic write about sex can be painful and unappealing to those outside the language fetish community. Perhaps this is why Steiner’s explanation of the “generative reciprocities” between language and libido is punctuated by what can only be called money shots, where— faster than you can say “talk dirty to me”—he slips into first-person accounts of his own sexual indiscretions with lovers in different languages. So, one night in Paris he addressed his lover “V.” with the informal tu, only to be rebuked: “How dare you address me as tu? panted V. even as I parted her comely legs: comment osez-vous?” One of his Viennese lovers “mapped out her opulent physique” with place names, including the name of a streetcar line, which was code for gentle anal penetration in the local German tongue. And the Italian, A-M., she “took pride in the thicket of her ‘burning bush’” and its particular need for lingual encouragement. This is the flesh and blood man behind the chin-stroking academic. As weird as it may seem, Steiner’s point seems simple enough. If you think about sex—and who doesn’t?—as opposed to just feel it as a primal narrative of squelch-
ing noises and rhythmic monosyllabic utterances inserted into two-word sentences, then you already know language is not only a big part of seduction and foreplay, but an authentic player in the drama. Once, in the heat of the moment, a lover said, in one of those affirmative announcements that accompany the crescendo, “It’s so … slidey.” It was the end of the act, but it was, in a sense, the beginning of the sex, at least to the extent that her creative neologism became the subject of remarkable pillow talk and is now intimately attached to the memory of the act itself. Maybe you had to be there, but that to me is what Steiner means by the reciprocal relationship between words and sex. But this is just one of seven essays. Steiner didn’t write a book about Eros because “the hurt it would have done to that which is most precious and indispensable”—obviously his wife, family and friends. Which makes it that much more interesting to read. As for the others, there is a moving essay on animals and pets—including his dogs— which he “did not have the guts” to write because it would require narrative skills and emotional detachment he does not possess. There is an essay on teaching, where he says what many people already know—that literacy and thinking go only so far in educational systems, which underpay teachers; he did not write this book because his suggestions are too “anarchic.” And then, there is an essay on God, which in some ways is the most touching; he didn’t write this one because it was futile: “Strictly considered, all theology,” he says, “is verbiage.” What ties all seven topics together, besides the obvious fact that Steiner considers them unwritable, is the role of language in each. In each case, it’s “the entrancing melodrama inherent in language” that matters more than what we like to think that the language points to. In other words, no matter what we are talking about—God, pet dogs, sex in different languages—it all boils down to the words we apply to make sense of them. And that’s what makes My Unwritten Books so erotic. You don’t read it just to arrive at some message or factoid—that’s pornographic reading. You read it to involve yourself in the melodrama of its language. —PETER BABIAK
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Dance Hall Road by Marion Douglas Insomniac Press, 2008; 480 pp.; $19.95 When a small Ontario town suffers a strange tragedy, all the inhabitants struggle wildly to put the town, and their lives, back together. In Dance Hall Road, Marion Douglas specializes in vivisecting that mix of weird and banal that is the special export of small-town life. Although the book never takes the reader outside of the claustrophobic confines of the town of Flax, Douglas creates authentic narrative interest by intertwining two parallel timelines—one that takes place before the tragic event and one that takes place in the aftermath. This is a novel that should be read in the late summer or early fall; Dance Hall Road perfectly captures the nervous energy of anticipation, dread, and hope that children feel just before they return to school because it manages to corral a group of aimless people and arrange them in a way that is touching and meaningful. Many of Douglas’s characters, children and adults alike, seem stuck in that familiar middle ground between laziness and productivity, stability and change. In fact, the novel’s most rewarding metaphors explore that painful and exciting situation; the school children take care of unfertilized chicken eggs for a school sex-ed project, becoming attached to them in the process despite the knowledge that their eggs will never hatch. A single father has a fascination with electric chairs and a deep fear of the dark. A teenage boy faithfully arranges marbles and gumballs in order to “influence” future events. As Douglas draws each of the townspeople closer to the centre of the tragedy, they seem to expand and contract, warped by their now-uneasy relationship with the future. As with Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, I spent most of Dance Hall Road waiting (and occasionally hoping) for the characters to be violently confronted with their own failings and forced to reconcile their small-town beliefs with their big-city ambitions. Unlike Toews’ volume, however, Dance Hall Road has uneven pacing and occasionally slows down to a crawl, which means that although the book is rewarding and the characters memorable, it often seems too long and too self-interested.
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When reality finally hits the people of East Flax, however, it hits hard, and Douglas writes deftly about the many ways in which people adapt and cope. The best part of Dance Hall Road is undoubtedly the relationship between Adrian and Randy, two learning-disabled teenagers who are written with equal parts wit, affection, and empathy. Marion Douglas is at her best when she explores their strange relationship and the combination of shame and pride that comes with being categorized as “l.d.” Marion Douglas has a kind of Canadian ambition; this novel is an attempt to explain the unique grandiosity of the small town and the hugeness of emotion contained in a single, unimportant person. Although the book is at times frustratingly slow, the characters of Dance Hall Road will take up residence in your mind, perhaps mingling with the ghosts of whatever small town you came from and are trying (too desperately?) to forget. —AIMEE OUELLETTE
Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories by Dave Margoshes NeWest Press, 2007; 238 pp.; $19.95 The other day, I was talking to a friend about Dave Margoshes’ last novel, Drowning Man—she was asking to borrow it and I was touting its merits. She asked too, about his latest collection, Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories, which I was having a hard time setting aside, stealing clandestine moments with it when I should have been doing other, more responsible, things. She wanted to borrow it too, and asked me to describe it. I casually said, “Margoshes has this way of reaching a dénouement in each story— what seems totally ordinary is actually a crisis moment for his also-ordinary characters. They reach significant crossroads in seemingly boring ways—maybe just like we all do in real life.” A few days later, while stealing more secret reading time, I considered the front cover, which features an Alex Colville painting I particularly like, Pacific, in which we see the backside of a man’s torso, as he looks out the window at waves crashing onto the shore, a gun sitting on a table behind him. It’s a good painting for this book, simply because it reflects what I said
above—this man is watching the tide as a 9-mm revolver sits behind him, as if this is completely normal. We will all agree, I’m sure, that a 9-mm revolver sitting on the table, casual as a mug of coffee, is not normal—at least not for most of us. And Margoshes’ literary style is much like Colville’s; everything is almost literal, very realistic, but if you look a little more closely, you’ll see the subtlety there, the things that could be lost if you don’t pay attention. He makes a study of all that people miss, the small things that change the landscape in an instant. But, if we aren’t paying attention, we’ll never grasp that a small, seemingly inconsequential action can be the impetus for great change. The title story, “Bix’s Trumpet,” sets the tone for the collection. The protagonist, Leo, gets to know Bix at college—Bix, who was named for the great jazz cornetist, likely because his dad acquired Biederbecke’s horn in lieu of a fifty dollar marker in a crap game. They keep in touch on and off well past college, spending weekends together here and there. During one such weekend at a rented condo in Lake Tahoe, Leo and Bix share drinks in the hot tub on the deck while they wait for their wives to join them. Bix casually tells his friend of an affair with his secretary— and they both realize that the slide door was open, and the women have heard Bix’s tale. While the men continue to casually keep in touch in the years that follow, their friendship is fundamentally changed. Eventually, Cathy, Bix’s wife, writes with news of Bix being in a rehab clinic, and the sadness Leo feels at the news is not strong enough to make him pick up the phone and call her. Margoshes has skilfully turned excitement around an artefact cornet into the mundaneness of today’s Bix and the all-too-common problems that plague humanity. In “Pornography,” upon her stepfather’s death, the protagonist learns that his jottings were pornographic in nature. Her mother reveals this to her during her grieving—along with the fact that his professorial postings always ended in disgrace because the writings were discovered, once by his secretary because he left them unattended on his desk. When her mother dies, she willingly takes on the task of cleaning out the house. When she finally finds the pornographic manuscripts tucked in a box among love
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letters to her mother and a serious volume of passable poetry, she decides to burn it all, preserving her stepfather’s dignity where she can. When she reads the pages of pornographic material, she recognizes her own titillation. Margoshes forces his characters to accept their humanity—and forces his readers to understand that they might not be so dissimilar faced with similar circumstances. Margoshes also explores self-acceptance in other ways. In “Promises,” the main character looks back on a life of poor marital choices, courageously admitting her inability to read people. When two of her children are sexually abused by her partners, and her future choices measure poorly in other ways, she finally accepts that yes, she has made bad decisions but that she has bounced back—and will continue to. “And what’s the worst that could happen?” she asks. Here, Margoshes chooses not to focus on his character’s foolishness but rather on her inherent strength, her ability to be happy despite her mistakes. With this collection—in which every single tale fires for me—Margoshes proves once again that he is a powerful storyteller.
His innate ability to set out the intricacies of human nature for our dissection knows no bounds—but here he teaches us empathy in the process—because we cannot help but recognize and accept our own folly as we read about the follies of others. — C A R O LY N E V A N D E R M E E R
Gerbil Mother by D.M. Bryan NeWest Press, 2008; 208 pp.; $19.95 In a culture that fetishizes pregnancy, babies, and motherhood to an uncomfortable degree, Gerbil Mother provides a stinging antidote to all that bump-watching and radiant-celebrity-mom coverage in certain other magazines. Narrated by a foetus named Gerbil that isn’t sure if it wants to be born, and starring Maeve, already a sullen mother to two-year-old hellion Nick, this novel explores the gritty realities of modern urban parenthood. The device of having the foetal Gerbil narrate the novel requires the reader to suspend plenty of disbelief to buy the idea that Gerbil can see and hear everything that
is going on—including both sides of phone conversations and characters in other places. Sometimes the narrator is partially involved; sometimes it’s omniscient. Unfortunately, as with many novels using this kind of narrative style, Gerbil Mother never develops much personality for its voice. When Gerbil does comment, it’s either flip and irrelevant or tired and deflating. About halfway through the novel, just when I wondered if anything was going to happen in this book, Gerbil says, I’m looking for a more playful sort of language, trying to keep up this exhausting narration... Say it, Gerbil. This novel never develops any discernible storyline. Nick gets bratty and makes messes; Maeve, trapped in her apartment with a toddler, lumbers about pregnant and resentful. For the first couple of chapters, she appears to be a single mother; then we discover that she is married to Mahon, the father of Nick and Gerbil. Mahon is absent because he’s on the road with his bar band, but after his introduction, readers are treated to several scenes of Maeve ragging on the guy for whatever it is he’s not doing right.
~ Highlights from Brick Books ~ Night Work The Sawchuk Poems Randall Maggs Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate protective equipment and no player representation. “Through his marvelous, moving poetry, Randall Maggs gets closer than any biographer to the heart of the darkest, most troubled figure in the history of the national game. This may be the truest hockey book ever written. It reaches a level untouched by conventional sports literature... His Sawchuk is real.” – Stephen Brunt, Globe & Mail
Publishing new and established voices in Canadian poetry since 1975
www.brickbooks.ca
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All Our Wonder Unavenged Don Domanski Winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and 2008 Atlantic Poetry Prize “Each poem, beautiful, bewitching, unfolds with crystalline clarity and with a music that is both lush and subtle. Don Domanski’s poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English.” – Mark Strand “Poetry renews itself with each generation, but there is a source of poetry older than all the languages. Don Domanski writes close to this source, where autobiography is necessarily transpersonal, and the variegated finery of existent things is both secular home and sacred text. Each of his books, but especially this book, is a mirror for the inexhaustible.” – Roo Borson
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Coach House Books congratulates subTerrain on 50 great issues
Girls Fall Down The new novel from Maggie Helwig is both a thriller and poignant love story set against the backdrop of a city stricken with fear – Toronto.
Blert In this audacious poetic project, Jordan Scott spelunks into the mouth of the stutterer to find the ‘blort, jam and rejoice’ of speech.
You can understand why Gerbil would be having doubts about being born to such a woman, although the question “If handling one child is so difficult, then why produce a second?” is never asked. Gerbil prudishly declines to go into the potentially interesting details of conception: I won’t pander to extra-natal voyeurism. I won’t produce pornography for the gyno-curious. Nor will I cater to those of you with special tastes, with literary appetites for innuendo, for sexual metaphor. I won’t pimp to word lust, to lexo-lechery. I won’t, I’m better than that … Besides, I was asleep. I missed the whole thing. No sex please, we’re Canadian? I don’t think anyone will mistake this book for a Harlequin Romance. The closest Gerbil Mother comes to setting up tension (besides the grittedteeth variety) and drama is when Maeve’s neighbour Darcy enters the story. The scene of Maeve answering the knock on her door is so drawn out (nearly two pages of knock-knock-who’s-there action) that I hoped the suspense heralded the coming of some dreaded social worker, or cop, just for some conflict! Instead, in the latter-half of the book, mama Maeve is mirrored by child-free Darcy. Young Darcy is an artist who lives with her boyfriend Jay, the potsmoking owner of a boom car. It’s fairly obvious that this couple is meant to reflect what Maeve and Mahon might have been like in happier days, before the coming of Nick. You’re not sure whether to empathize with Maeve about her lost possibilities or to hope Darcy doesn’t fall into the same trap. Gerbil Mother’s droning, sing-song style of sentence fragments and lists of three (Da-da, da-da, da-da. Da-da, da-da, dada) sounds like a nagging mother heard from the apartment next door. You can’t make out everything she’s saying, but you know what she’d likely say anyway. —CHRISTINE ROWLANDS
Hagiography With her trademark wordplay, Jen Currin illuminates life’s barely hidden strangeness to uncover a world of ghosts, witches and tigers.
Coach House Books www.chbooks.com
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Chameleon Hours by Elise Partridge House of Anansi, 2008; 68 pp.; $18.95 Reading through this book again, I can’t help notice that the most frequently used word seems to be “hoard.” But maybe that’s a good word to describe this smallish book.
The poems tend to be on the quiet side, glancing inward even as the poet is looking outward, as in these lines from “Chemo Side Effects: Memory”: groping/ in the thicket,/ about to pinch the/ dangling/ berry, my fingerpads close on / air. Apart from the section that deals with Partridge’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, there aren’t a lot of ligatures holding these poems together. But I like this aspect of the book—I’d been beginning to wonder whether every new book of poems had to be plotted as tightly as if it were a screenplay. For the most part, Chameleon Hours is a book that can be opened at random, and the reader is still likely to find a poem that will provide some satisfaction on its own. Another aspect that sets this book apart is the way Partridge employs form. She sometimes seems at her best when she depends on the weight of metre and rhyme to provide structure. One of my favourite poems—for the complexity revealed by its simplicity—is one that appeared in 2005’s In Fine Form. Editors Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve used Partridge’s “Vuillard Interior” as an example of a modern triolet. In part, it reads: the servant bends over the coverlet she mends draped across her broad brown skirts knotting, nodding, the servant bends into the coverlet she mends. While not all of the poems are as successful, I found it refreshing to read a book where individual pages of work can stand alone, its own shining jewel in the hoard. —HEIDI GRECO
Backup to Babylon by Maxine Gadd New Star Books, 2006; 148 pp.; $18.00 Subway Under Byzantium by Maxine Gadd New Star Books, 2008; 128 pp.; $18.00 Maxine Gadd has published two strong poetry collections within two years: Backup to Babylon (2006) and Subway to Byzantium (2008)—her first collections since Lost Language in 1982. Gadd, who moved to Canada from the UK during her
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childhood, and who has long since been a resident of Vancouver’s much-known Downtown Eastside, is often associated with the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), the writers from which she herself credits as having inspired her work. Gadd wrote alongside many of them during the tenure of the KSW’s journal, Writing, which ran from 1980 to 1991, and has since been resurrected as W, an online publication on the KSW website. This association has led her to be grouped with a clan of Vancouver poets who were—and still are—concerned with socialist movements and the notion of contemporary daily work. In addition, both the school and the journal put a strong emphasis on twentieth-century poetics to express these themes—and Gadd fit well among them. Even now, Gadd is concerned with connections— and her own personal connection—to work, neighbourhood, and community. Backup to Babylon comprises three shorter collections, “Greenstone,” “Cabin on the Shore,” and “Backup to Babylon,” all composed between 1972 and 1987, and all previously published in limited editions. In each of the three sections, Gadd focuses on different themes: “Greenstone” pits the city against rural life and considers utopianism, while “Cabin on the Shore” is concerned with the intersection of culture. “Backup to Babylon” takes a close look at Vancouver during the 1980s, when socialism in B.C. took on a very particular flavour. With almost scattered words, Gadd is able to powerfully conjure images; her poetry is sometimes wildly inaccessible and readers are wise to approach it with an open mind, letting the words, jumbled, wash over them. Her goal of pitting city against country in “Greenstone” is stark—and by setting out the frameworks of suggestion and the mere feathery notion of a concept—as is often done in poetics—Gadd is able to illustrate both the flaws and beauty of each. In “Old Joe,” the almost hillbilly nature of the ungentrified country folk becomes palpable—we wonder about Old Joe’s sanity only because we cannot communicate with him on his own level. In “Suburb,” one woman knits the bustle of the city into her garment, which will shield her from its dangers. This scattering of words becomes yet more erratic in “The Cabin on the Shore,” in which Gadd’s poetry takes on a visual quality—with the regularity of stanzas and
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verses replaced by words seemingly orderless, but which in fact draw us toward ideas and notions in their very placement. In this section, Gadd considers legend and its importance in various cultures and sets these against contemporary life. Her “Two Views of the Western Journey” is a brilliant example of this; here she explores white settlement on the Gulf Islands of B.C., the European conquering of the West and the desire for unification against the ancient settling of these lands by various native groups including the Cowichan nation and the Hopi. In “Backup to Babylon,” Gadd looks at man’s modern-day struggles against technology, against burgeoning cities and an ever-harkening back to simpler days—her reference to Babylon cleverly suggesting that our ability to hold dialogue and to understand is still plagued with imperfections. “stumbling along in paradise,” the first poem in this section, prefaces the pages that follow appropriately, capturing the essence of not knowing much more about where we are headed than about where we have been with: try to teach us what we’re hot for/ the old time liars need a new dream daily/ it’s always there/ sometimes there is nothing. With these final lines, Gadd sets out her plan with “Backup to Babylon”: to show what mankind refuses to admit—that our goals are not always evident, and that indeed, we may have dreams but they may turn up nothing. Subway Under Byzantium is the second volume or “act” in this series, billed as a continuation of the exploration of the Gulf Islands and the Downtown Eastside. It too, is broken into several sections that Gadd describes as “Five sets of apocalyptic poems from the end of the twentieth century …: ‘Loon,’ ‘Lac Lake,’ ‘Boatload to Atlantis,’ ‘Styx,’ and ‘Subway Under Byzantium.’” The opening section, “Loon” is arresting in its power, telling multiple stories of “bobby”—her various journeys through places, seemingly real and imaginary, and her unions with people, also real and imagined. bobby travels westward through mountains, encounters Sandy, Pride, and Aunt Hedda, spends time in an asylum or camp, has dreams or hallucinations, all while trying to find herself. Gadd uses language that mesmerizes—long litanies of words that have cadence and colour. We are easily lost in bobby’s world, arrested
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by words such as “comet haired, nova eyed, volcano mouthed,” and coaxed cleverly into a dream world of wordplay with: I wake to a day i have only dreamed of; brought here/ by the Night Mare, a white horse becoming a grey/ horse becoming a black horse becoming This same wordplay dominates the other four sections, with myriad references to history, myth, religion and politics as she interprets her immediate landscape as well as the world around her. From Hastings and Main to the Bay Area to Theocritis, Caesar, George Bush, and Saddam Hussein, Gadd explores the local and the world stage, using hard-to-access innovative forms to decipher what she clearly feels is indecipherable, almost as if to suggest, “it will make more sense this way.” Gadd’s work is challenging to read, difficult to penetrate—and tough to review in such a short space. Two approaches are possible: let it wash over you; Gadd’s message is powerful enough to get through. You will discover her message despite
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yourself. Or read it closely; piece it together like a puzzle. Either way, its richness will surprise and overwhelm you. Both collections need to be “experienced”—which is completely different from being read. — C A R O LY N E V A N D E R M E E R
Imagining British Columbia: Land, Memory & Place Edited by Daniel M. Francis Anvil Press, 2008; 214 pp.; $18.00 The past few weeks have seen me away— to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, even Washington state. So coming back to B.C., the time seemed right for looking at a book about British Columbia, the place I’ve called home since 1970. Long-time editor Daniel Francis has done the sort of job you’d expect, and selected a broad-ranging batch of work from members of the Federation of B.C. Writers. He’s chosen highly readable pieces that treat on many aspects of the elements
covered in the book’s title. Land, memory and place converge in nearly every piece, and the writing covers just about every kind of geography the province offers. As would be expected, there are tales of mountains and grizzlies; the pursuit of both salmon and gold play a role too. But it’s the imagination- and memorybased aspects of British Columbia that set this book apart, making it so much more than another travelogue. Of several pieces recalling childhood, M.A.C. Farrant’s seems the most vivid—or maybe she just prompts my own memories of long family trips in the car: Elsie was squished between Ernie and Billy in the front seat. “Shoot, we’re stuck together like pigs,” she laughed, pulling a damp arm away from Ernie’s shoulder. Her flesh was as white as lard. I can almost taste the soft underbelly of flesh on that rounded little arm. Luanne Armstrong may offer the clearest assessment of the obvious importance of words in story. Writing of the storytelling tradition she grew up in, she remarks that: … the men have all the best stories. Their language is full of edges and danger; they reshape things as they talk. Among them, the world is dug up and beaten into shape; things—machines, animals, nature—are fought, defeated, fixed, made to work properly. And that’s what the words in this book do—they work properly. Most of the pieces are testament to the fact that the genre of creative non-fiction is thriving. The book is filled with stories and images that notch themselves into the brain, and not all of them are particularly pretty. The edgiest piece, by Trisha Cull, in part recalls the experience of being injected with cocaine. Leo takes my hand, a syringe pressed between his lips. He holds my wrist between two fingers and ties a rubber band around my arm above the elbow. He puts the needle in for me because this is my first time and I can’t do it. “God, I hate needles,” I say. A moment or an hour passes. “Can you feel it?” he says. “No, I don’t feel anything,” I say, extending my arm. A light rain falls. I am Adam like this, limp and listless, my fingers dipped downward. I stretch across a basilica of sky. He is coming—God, smouldering across the harbour. “Oh yeah, I can feel it,”
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I say, and my head falls back. There are tamer delights too—from taking the Alaska cruise to building a house. And not surprisingly, a number of the book’s pieces deal with the sea, such an integral part of the B.C. landscape. Like being at a poetry reading, where more than one poet reads a line sounding something like another’s, I couldn’t help but notice shared language in two pieces about fishing boats. Writing about his first job on a boat, Trevor Carolan says, “The Hesacut moved out in the channel with a rolling gait, side to side like a shifty hooker.” Later, Joan Skogan describes a trip on the Lana Janine: She rolls wallowing into the waves’ trough and riding high in the spray. She rolls when the main engines are running, and when they are shut down. She rolls on both rising and following seas, and she rolls on no sea at all, on flat calm water. Only one of the men speaks against her for this. Roll, you bloody whore, he shouts. Roll your guts out. I’m not sure who might be insulting whom here; just one of those references that stands up and waves as the reader passes by. It doesn’t seem coincidental that editor Francis is the same person who wrote The Imaginary Indian, the book that posited white culture’s notion of “Indian” as being largely a construct of its collective imagination. It’s possible that Francis has done something of the same sort again, only in reverse—that this time he may well have created the imaginary British Columbian. If that’s the case, I’m glad that he did, as it’s made me glad to at least imagine myself back home. —HEIDI GRECO
The Order of Good Cheer by Bill Gaston Anansi, 2008; 391 pp.; $29.95 The Order of Good Cheer maintains a precarious balance between comedy and tragedy. It is tragic because most of the novel is mired in the ennui of not one but two winters of discontent. It is comic because it describes what is necessary to combat the listlessness, depression, and sickness that often accompany such a season—namely, good food and drink, the love of friends and family, and sex. Based on actual events and historical fig-
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Congrats on 20 years! Gifl[ kf Y\ jlYK\iiX`eËj gXike\i `e gi`ek K_\p [\Ôe`k\cp gi`ek c`b\ k_\p d\Xe `k
ures—Samuel de Champlain prominent among them—author Bill Gaston provides a fictitious account of the French experience of winter in what is now the Annapolis Basin of Nova Scotia in the early seventeenth century. This scenario, in alternating chapters, is presented against an invented description of present-day British Columbian port-town Prince Rupert. Wishing to avoid a repeat of the previous winter where “the scurve” laid to a slow wasting death dozens of men, Samuel de Champlain has ways “to survive the winter that is almost upon them” upright in his mind. What Champlain is thinking of is nothing short of a party, many parties in fact, intended to ward off sickness. What he wants is for the men to know that it is not this night only, and not the next night only, but rather a feast that does not stop. A state of good humour, of thanks and of appreciation, ongoing in its effect. Similarly, but less urgent than Champlain’s more poetic attempts to ward off immediate death—and also separated by the span of
400 years—are Andy Winslow’s efforts to enliven the oppressive atmosphere of a northwest coast winter. Andy Winslow’s winter is particularly daunting. Accompanying the return of Andy’s long-lost love Laura Schultz to her hometown, are the vagaries of Andy’s annoying proverb-spouting and charmless mother, his mid-life crisis afflicted “best friend” Drew, and Andy’s own subtle sense of failure and lack of ambition. Behind all this is Gaston’s astute and timely commentary that focuses on the anxieties plaguing our own peculiar epoch. Gaston beautifully renders Port Royal (Nova Scotia) using the bare essentials of land, sea, forest, and sky—underneath which mingle in an odd co-dependence, men from the old world and their indigenous observers: … on this path, amid all these glistening and seemingly beckoning leaves, shoots, cones, curls, pods, hoods, mosses, of which at least half he is ignorant, the savages’ knowledge of what here is food seems like wisdom of the most miraculous kind. And at the same time that the French
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need the knowledge of the Mi’qmah to survive in the wilderness, the native people, particularly the “sagamore” Membertou, covet membership into the white man’s strange and powerful religion. Although the horrors of death by the scurve are graphically depicted, the heightened and formal language, with which Gaston writes of Port Royal, gives the reader both a compelling and almost idealized account of the first Europeans’ experiences of North America. Cluttered by comparison is Gaston’s portrayal of contemporary Prince Rupert, where the myriad anxieties pressing on its characters seem to drag down the pace of the novel. Throughout the chapters dedicated to Andy’s (our) time, there regularly appears, direct, and not so direct, references to global warming and other environmental worries. When we are first introduced to Andy and his community we are presented with a mysterious die-off of fish—the fresh bodies of which have washed up on the shore of Prince Rupert, leaving residents to contemplate whether or not the fish should be consumed for fear of poisoning. In a subtler poke at consumer culture and the necessary damage it inflicts upon the environment and those that buy into it, Gaston writes: He gave Dan Clark’s car “the inch” as he passed it … holding thumb and forefinger an inch apart whenever a Hummer went by, showing the driver how large his penis must be for wanting such a car. The ongoing social commentary in these chapters is no doubt specific to the cultural moment and many readers will be appreciative of Gaston’s sharp eye, but the details of modern times seem to read like accessories, which detract from the characters and the mostly enjoyable narrative of which they are a part. All the swirling anxieties that the novel dredges up lend a sense of despair to The Order of Good Cheer. However, the novel is more geared toward that which its title suggests. Side character, seventeenth-century carpenter Lucien and his experience of sexual intimacy with “savage” Ndene, along with Andy and Laura’s longing for each other, pulls the story out of the sadness and anxiety where it seems content to wallow. Obscured by storms of sorrow and doubt, in the end, The Order of Good Cheer clings to hope and believes in love. — PAT M A C K E N Z I E
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Not to be missed My White Planet By Mark Anthony Jarman Thomas Allen Publishers, 2008; 232 pp.; $22.95 From the beginning, the reader is thrown into Jarman’s rush of long rhythmic sentences, associative language, and visceral descriptions. Jarman doesn’t dwell on the emotional back-stories of his narrators, wanting us to learn who they are through the sound of their voices, their patterns of thought, and their fixations (women, escape, safety). These are stories wildly varied in setting and situation, but in each, it is not a traditional story arc that creates atmosphere and tension, but the language. In these stories, Jarman’s at his best when working with material that gives him the opportunity to depict—with extravagant detail—settings that dovetail with the intense experiences of his speakers. This isn’t pathetic fallacy—the old trick of thunder rumbling when a character has a crisis—but careful world building with the aim of creating moments of intense resonance between characters and language. In the title story, “My White Planet,” seven men watch bad tv in an Arctic research station and live apart from the world, so distant that the narrator wonders: Is everyone erased in a war or did a budgetconscious computer take us out in a bureaucratic oversight? The sense of drifting slightly outside of a world that may or may not exist pervades the story, which is bound together by imagery of ice, the men’s location a “garden of stone and ice.” When their only visitor arrives, a woman washed to shore alive but frozen, the narrator looks down at “her skin ice-water tight, her hip, her perfect white shores.” As she revives and relearns the world, the woman becomes the men’s
fixation, their only possibility for sex, connection, for new information from the outside. When she leaves, the narrator is returned to the complete silence of the ice and Jarman achieves a perfect state of language and landscape containing emotion. The Arctic has become the narrator’s home, that “strange pliable word,” and his newly realized lack of desire to leave is also the impossibility of his being with another human, making contact outside the cold. “Night March in the Territory” (winner of this year’s best story award from The Malahat Review) begins abruptly, “Post-battle march, stormy sky, no light,” and maintains a steady, agonizing pace through the everyday hellishness of foot soldiers using bayonets to “scissor strips of skin from the ribs of our dead horses (that sound!)” and longing for regular things—daylight, milk. Like the men in “My White Planet,” these men exist in a counter world so violent in its emotional (and, for the reader, linguistic) force that it casts into doubt the outside world. Leaving the battlefield, the men are “newly created,” brutalized into a new shape. Jarman’s ambitious material has a purpose—to show, through the living of these visceral paragraphs, how far a human can be twisted before he breaks: What a mad thing a mind is, a humming miracle, a thin baked cracker that can snap, a horse still standing with seven wounds. These pieces might be dismissed, due to their focus on the rhythms of language, as prose poems but that would prevent understanding of what Jarman is working to achieve here: short stories that integrate swift, challenging language with experiences that press at the limits of human experience, throwing jagged paragraphs at lust, physical agony, and loneliness. —ALEX LESLIE
Reviews issue 50
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HUNKAMOOGA « Musings on the Literary Life from Stuart Ross »
Live Sex and Air-conditioner Repair It’s tough to decide what to grouse about this time: the Spoken Word Pandemic or Open Mic Disease. I mean, they’re related. One of the causes of both of these terrifying afflictions is the Blind Encouragement of Shit. Another cause is a seeming disdain for reading contemporary poetry, and an insistence on exposing oneself only to other open mikers or other spoken worders. I sat through another open mic set last night at the Art Bar Poetry Series in Toronto. Why do I repeatedly put myself through such punishment? I went to hear one of the “features” (Gawd, I hate that word! And it’s pretty much used only at series that have open mics), and she was on third, and immediately thereafter the open mic began. Why did I stay? Why do the feature readers sit through them? Are any of us paid enough for such waterboarding? I think we’re just too goddamn nice. Oh yeah, and the other week I was at the Plasticine Poetry Series, because I wanted to hear Paul Vermeersch read. Then Carey Toane, a really good young poet, was going to read in the open mic, because occasionally that happens: someone good reads at an open mic. You know, you’re stringing up a noose to hang yourself from the rotating fan on the ceiling, and suddenly you hear a couple of lines that indicate that the reader has actually read, oh, I dunno: John Ashbery? Karen Solie? Wislawa Szymborska? So, okay, I figured I’d stick around. But get this: just before the open mic begins, a few of these spoken wordy characters come slinking in. They’ve missed the “features,” but they’ve clearly just read at the Art Bar open mic down the street, and now they want to inflict their shit on yet another audience. (Carey was great.) And who reads the most dreadful abominations at these open mics? It’s the spoken worders, the slammers— the “air poets.” It killed me the first time I heard them call us “page poets.” Anyway, they pontificate that they are following in the tradition of oral writers like Homer and Billy Shakespeare. And then they recite stuff like: “Poetry is great, it’s my freight, it gets me dates…”
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OK, I just made that up. Let’s see how a master does it, like Tomy Bewick, in his poem “Do You ’Fro?”: “Do I ’fro? / How am I supposed to know? / I’m white, and I don’t have an afro. / Mind you, I do have a flow / And to be honest I’m always attempting to progress spiritually as I grow.” Clever AAAAA rhyme scheme. Someone call AAAAA Towing Company to drag this guy off the stage! And then there’s all that spoken word stuff that’s political and socialconsciousnessy. Godawful, didactic two-by-fours by people who have clearly not taken “show, don’t tell” to heart. An opinion, stated loudly, dramatically, and in rhyme, is not literature. This is the lesson spoken word seems incapable of absorbing. Spoken word lacks subtlety, lacks nuance, and usually lacks imagery. It certainly lacks word play, except for rhymes and puns, typically delivered with a raised eyebrow and a “Do you get it?” glance, head tilted suggestively. I’m probably lucky I live in Toronto, as opposed to “The Most Beautiful Place in the Milky Way Solar System,” because I get the idea that Vancouver is practically run by spoken worders, like Montreal. Even the language poets, whose empire crumbled after the ’80s, have to meet in secret and try to pass in public, with a Shane Koyczan book tucked under their arms. (It’s really just a Koyczan cover wrapped around a Lisa Robertson book. Don’t worry.) But even here in Toronto, as Vermeersch pointed out on his blog, there seems to be this movement among the series organizers that an air poet has to be included in every reading, because just having page poets would be too elitist. So I go to see Jenny Sampirisi and Jenn LoveGrove read, and I have to sit through Valentino Assenza. (Actually, I went out onto the bar’s patio for most of him.) And a guy there asked me if I would “feature” at his reading out on the Danforth. I said yeah, but then decided that when he emails me the confirmation, I’ll make a condition that there are no slammers on the bill, because I really don’t want to subject my friends to that. Besides, when was the last time George Bowering or Alice
Burdick were invited to read at a spoken word event? Poetry and spoken word on one bill. It’s sort of like selling seats for a football and crocheting event. Or a live sex show with a lecture on air-conditioner repair. Okay, but back to open mics. I think there’s this misguided theory that poetry should be democratic, and open mics are somehow democratic. But what other art form pairs up people who haven’t studied the art form with people who take it seriously? Film doesn’t do it, nor dance, nor video installation, nor classical music. Of course, there are exceptions. There are talented writers, like Ali Riley and Sandra Alland, who manage to straddle the two worlds, but I always prefer their work on the page, anyway. And, like I said, there is the occasional gem in the open-mic set. But if I consider the hundreds of hours of my life I’ve spent in the presence of open mics, I weep. And this is the worst part: the crappier the open-mic poet is, the greater the applause: because the applause is compassion and encouragement, rather than reward for good writing. “Aw, she tried so hard!” “That was straight from the heart!” “He really misses his grandmother and her cat!” And when I hear the spoken word fans cheer on the guy reading “Poverty Sucks,” I think, “Okay, there are all these people who like it. Does that mean it’s good?” Then I remember I live in a society where McDonald’s gets voted the Best Fucking Hamburger in “progressive” entertainment weeklies’ Best of the City polls. When I started writing this column (about 20 minutes ago), I thought to myself, “If I publish this, all these spoken word people are gonna boycott my books.” Then I remembered: they don’t actually read poetry. Stuart Ross is the author, most recently, of Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books) and I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press). His collection of Hunkamooga columns, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, is also available from Anvil. Stuart lives in Toronto, and online at hunkamooga.com. ■
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“All those who wonder what is a classic, or who simply wish to re-establish contact with the sources of the Western narrative tradition will find here a work of great depth, magnificently written.” —Georges Leroux, Le Devoir
EMPIRE OF DESIRE THE ABOLITION OF TIME Empire of Desire, the second volume of Thierry Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition, completes the work he began in the first: Truth or Death. It traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuries—from Molière to Proust, by way of Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, Melville and Joyce—ending in 1922, coincidentally the year Ulysses was published and Marcel Proust breathed his last. Thierry Hentsch presents “modern man”—freed from the imperative of transcendence—as a creature who “desires to desire, moving without cease from one object to another, in a state of self-imposed oblivion,” the Western narrative tradition reaching its apotheosis with the work of Marcel Proust, in whose exquisitely crafted prose, desire has become the artist’s instrument of choice—the vivisectionist’s scalpel.
Thierry Hentsch Translated by Fred A. Reed
$29.95 Available in bookstores October 2008. 978-0-88922-587-9
Talonbooks Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada 800-663-5714
www.talonbooks.com
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(!%%% ^c XVh] eg^oZh The winning entries in each category will receive a $750 cash prize (plus payment for publication) and will be published in our Winter ‘09 issue. First runner-up in each category will receive a $250 cash prize and be published in our Spring 2010 issue. All entries MUST be previously unpublished material and not currently under consideration in any other contest or competition. Entries will NOT be returned (so keep a copy for yourself ). Results of the competition will be announced in the Summer/Fall issue of subTerrain magazine. All entrants receive a complimentary one-year subscription to subTerrain.
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