Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2012

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Stories That Connect

Karen Solie Billie Livingston Fred Stenson Rodney Jones Jennifer Cockrall-King Jessica Johnson Tim Lilburn Jonathan Garfinkel

SPRING 2012

Taliban Child Soldiers

Turning Lives Around

Going Brazilian

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

The Tantric Marshes

New fiction from Giller winner Linden McIntyre

JUST A GAME? Timothy Taylor on Sport and Faith

LITERARY ARTS

DIRECTOR, STEVEN ROSS SMITH

MOUNTAIN AND WILDERNESS WRITING

WRITING WITH STYLE FALL PROGRAM

August 14 - October 15, 2012 (off-site manuscript development)

September 9-15, 2012

October 26 - November 16, 2012 (on-site residency) Faculty: Tony Whittome, Marni Jackson Delve into a writing project that focuses on adventure, history, or the environment with individual consultations, discussions, and access to Banff Mountain Book Festival activities.

Program director: Elizabeth Philips Faculty: David Carpenter, Janet McNaughton, David O’Meara, Dianne Warren If you are seeking an intensive week of writing and opportunity to work with an established writer in your genre of writing, this workshop is for you.

1.800.565.9989 arts_info@banffcentre.ca www.banffcentre.ca/writing

WIRED WRITING STUDIO October 1-13, 2012 (on-site residency) October 31, 2012 - March 30, 2013 (online residency) Program director: Fred Stenson Faculty: Peter Behrens, Don Domanski, Charlotte Gill, Jessica Grant, Barbara Klar Immerse yourself in a creative community of artists, then return home for 20-weeks of mentorship through online consultations, discussion forums, and posted readings.

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SPRING 2012

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Byron Dauncey

– E. M. FORSTER, HOWARDS END

FEATuRES THE GAMES WE PLAY

Timothy Taylor

22 Ya Gotta Believe

Why do we care about sports?

ON THE RECORD

Jonathan Garfinkel

32

Theatre of War

A Canadian playwright in violence-rocked Pakistan attempts to remain calm.

IN PROFILE

Curtis Gillespie

40 The Populist

Hart Hanson thought he’d end up teaching college on Vancouver Island. He was wrong.

FICTION

Linden McIntyre

50 The Tantric Marshes

An excerpt from the new novel Why Men Lie.

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3

Welcome to Arcadia, David Janzen

span

Billie Livingston Richard Haigh

07 Sea Hitler Skank

A funny thing happened on the way to Rochester.

10 Bards of the Bench

The verdict on judges who fancy their way with words.

Fred Stenson

12 The New Karoo

Lynn Coady

16 Publish Then Perish

Jessica Johnson

What a remote book festival says about the new South Africa.

The sorry state of the digital age author.

18 The Hairs About Our Secrets

Tearing a strip off Brazilian-style beauty norms.

MIsCEllanY

Clive Holden David Janzen

35 Can•Icons: The Beaver 45 Can•Icons: The Beaver 65 Solo Show: Room 65 COMIC sTRIp

Cameron Chesney

39 Fetal Position pOETRY

Tim Lilburn Jen Hadfield Rodney Jones Karen Solie

13 30 43 47

Turtle Mountain Calvatica Strays Rothko via Muncie, Indiana sOUnDInGs

Daniel Baird Scott Messenger Jennifer Cockrall-King Paul Matwychuk

57 No Ideas But In Things

A Jack Chambers retrospective.

59 Kicked Off Your Pant Leg Abandon Hip!

61 Occupy Your Assets

A locavore investment strategy.

63 Taking Her All In

The long reach of Pauline Kael.

BRIDGEs

Madeleine Thien

EIGHTEEn BRIDGEs SPRING 2012 WWW.EIGHTEEnBRIDGEs.COM

66 My Father’s Bridge to Timbuktu Oh, the places you’ll go.

EDITORS’ NOTE

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SPRING 2012

EDITOR Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Lynn Coady CONSULTING EDITOR Paul Wilson VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Sean Caulfield GUEST POETRY EDITOR Karen Solie DEPT. OF FACTUALITY Head: Craille Maguire Gillies Body: Nicole Leung, Antonia McGuire, Jay Smith, Olivia Smithies, Kim Tannas ASSISTANT EDITOR Connie Howard CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Deborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio Craille Maguire Gillies Lisa Gregoire Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson Lisa Moore Timothy Taylor Chris Turner CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Joyce Byrne Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson GRAPHIC DESIGNER Andrew Forbes wEBSITE Gunnar Blodgett & Duncan Kinney

Frontiers In our back page essay this month, the peripatetic Madeleine Thien remembers a bridge from her childhood that led exactly nowhere, but represented, to her, impossible distances and endless possibilities. This issue of Eighteen Bridges is all about writers peering beyond their national borders and experiencing the thrills, pleasures and apprehensions inherent in striking out into foreign territory. A playwright travels to Pakistan and tries to keep his head while interviewing three locals who have defiantly made themselves at home with terror. A wouldbe Canadian novelist wakes up one day to find himself the hottest property in American television. A Vancouver writer hits the Boston bar district on Super Bowl Sunday. A nice Toronto girl embarks upon a hair-raising flirtation with Brazilian beauty culture south of her own personal comfort zone.

More than ever, the interests of Canadians are the interests of the world—we feel this particularly keenly here in Edmonton, sitting, as we do, so close to the oil sands. The internet, too, is still a relatively new frontier, redrawing traditional boundaries, both cultural and economic, and bringing the various solitudes together with unprecedented intimacy and immediacy. It’s an exciting time for the curious, for explorers like our readers and writers. Our mantra—the words of that passionate traveller E.M. Forster: “Only connect!”—has never had more resonance.

The Editors

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carriere BUSINESS MANAGER Erin Berney Eighteen Bridges is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta.

The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, was provided by Venture Publishing Inc. Subscriptions are one year for $25.95 plus GST. Please visit www.eighteenbridges.com ISSN 1927-9868

* put FSC LOGO HERE

A THANK YOU: EB4 could not have happened without the contributions of many people and organizations, and we owe them a great debt of thanks – Ruth Kelly, Joyce Byrne, Lesley Cormack, Kim Larson, Craille Maguire Gillies, Cathy Condon, Kathleen Leclair, Stephen Leclair, Timothy Caulfield, Todd Anderson, Carl Amrhein, Catherine Swindlehurst, Marie Carriere, Erin Berney, Blaine Kulak, John Mahon, the Edmonton Arts Council, Stephen Mandel, Patricia Misutka, Ryan Barber, Paul Pearson, and Eric and Elexis Schloss.

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EIGHTEEN BRIDGES SPRING 2012

CONTRIBUTORS

A few of our contributors…

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BIllIe lIVINGSTON is a fiction writer living in Vancouver. Her recent book, Greedy Little Eyes was a Globe and Mail Best Book and winner of the Danuta Gleed Award. Her new novel, One Good Hustle, will be published July 2012.

JONaTHaN GaRfINKel is the author of a book of poetry, Glass Psalms, and the plays House of Many Tongues and The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret. He also wrote a memoir, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide. The play he describes researching in his story “Theatre of War” will premiere at Alberta Theatre Projects in Winter 2013.

pg 18 JeSSICa JOHNSON is a former fashion editor of The Globe and Mail and the former books editor of Saturday Night magazine. She has written about style and culture for The Walrus, Lucky, and The Wall Street Journal.

pg 50 lINdeN maCINTyRe grew up in Cape Breton and lives in Toronto where he works for CBC Television. Why Men Lie is his third novel. He also published a memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, and co-authored a non-fiction title, Who Killed Ty Conn.

And the rest of them…

KaReN SOlIe is the author of the poetry collections Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, and, most recently, Pigeon. lyNN COady is a novelist and senior editor of Eighteen Bridges.

Her most recent book is The Antagonist, published in 2011 and nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

ROdNey JONeS is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest collection of poetry is Imaginary Logic.

TIm lIlBURN’S latest book of poetry is Assiniboia.

JeN HadfIeld is half-English, half-Canadian. She lives in

Shetland. Nigh-No-Place, the second of her two collections published by Bloodaxe, won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2008. She is currently the Creative Futures Reader-in-Residence with the Shetland Library. She blogs intermittently at rogueseeds. blogspot.com

fRed STeNSON is the author of a trilogy of historical novels: The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo. The Trade was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 2000, and The Great Karoo was a finalist in 2008 for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

He directs the Wired Writing Studio at The Banff Centre and writes a regular column for Alberta Views Magazine.

RICHaRd HaIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school.

He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law.

daNIel BaIRd is a Toronto based writer on art, culture, and

ideas. His last piece for Eighteen Bridges was “Have A Little Faith” in the Spring, 2011 issue.

CURTIS GIlleSPIe is the editor of Eighteen Bridges. His next book, Almost There: The Family Vacation, Then and Now, will be published in May 2012.

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CameRON CHeSNey is a cartoonist, illustrator, actor, playwright, and cheerful retail employee from Edmonton. His graphic novel, Daphne, will be serialized in Perfect Elixir.

PaUl maTwyCHUK lives in Edmonton, where he works as the general manager of NeWest Press. He is also a writer, actor, playwright, and puzzle constructor, as well as the resident pop-culture columnist for the CBC Radio program EDMONTON AM. His weekly podcast, TRASH, ART, AND THE MOVIES, is available for free through iTunes and Stitcher.

JeNNIfeR COCKRall-KING is a writer from Edmonton who travelled Cuba, Europe, Canada and the US for her book Food and the City: urban agriculture and the new food revolution.

SCOTT meSSeNGeR lives in Edmonton, where he’s a full-time

writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician.

ClIVe HOldeN is best known for two multi-disciplinary art projects: Trains of Winnipeg (2001 to 2006), and the on-going U Suite (2006 to 2020). Born and raised on Vancouver Island, he splits his time between there and Toronto.

TImOTHy TaylOR is a Vancouver-based novelist and journalist.

His first novel Stanley Park was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Writers Trust Fiction Prize, as well as both the Vancouver and BC Book Prizes. His latest novel, The Blue Light Project, has recently been nominated for the CBC Bookie Award.

madeleINe THIeN is the author of three books of fiction, including her most recent novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, published by Granta Books this year and translated into eight languages. She is a previous winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the Ovid Festival Prize, awarded each year to an international writer of promise.

SPAN Reporting back

SeA hITleR SKANK

A

bbie Hoffman, social activist and professional shit-disturber of the nineteen-sixties once said, “The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” Since my godmother, Karen, is manifestly a child of the Sixties, I’ve decided to blame Hoffman for her recent stealth exercise in social agitation—though Karen says it all began with her Catholic school nuns and their emphasis on civil rights and justice. I support those goals. The problem is that my godmother is unruly and prone to obsession.

Prior to her current fixation, she at least had a couple of altruistic projects from which to choose. There was the neighbor whose grip on reality was so fragile that she quit her job because she thought that colleagues were trying to poison her through the office air conditioner. Karen went to the woman’s apar tment ever y few days bearing groceries and sympathy only to be deployed as a back-up snif fer for a phantom gas leak. Not only did Karen

pay the unemployed woman’s rent, but she also agreed to pay for an inspector to verify that the apartment was free of toxic gases. Competing with the neighbour was my godmother’s recently adopted A fghan hound, an incessant barker and biter of unfamiliar butts. Many a visit to Karen’s house was hijacked by back-to-back episodes of Dog Whisperer.

Eventually, with the help of Cesar Millan and the judicious use of pharmaceuticals, the dog settled down into something hairy but manageable. The needy neighbour, on the other hand, was uninterested in a “pack leader” or pharmaceuticals—but soon moved out of town.

Like nature, Karen abhors a vacuum.

Her humanitarian impulse moved on to a project with former school chums at Simon Fraser University who were at work on an anthology of essays about little known atrocities of the twentieth century. When the group began hunting for a publisher, both Canadian and American editors repeatedly singled out

one sticking point: an essay on the displacement of the Palestinian population from the new state of Israel. As a result, Karen’s spotlight landed squarely on what seemed to be the forbidden issue.

Obsession kicked in. Suddenly, no dinner was complete without the word Nakba.

“The Nakba!” Karen repeated into my blank face. “In 1948, 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

Today, the Israelis have blockaded the Palestinian territory of Gaza including its seaport, making it the largest outdoor prison in the world!”

Soon, whether drinking morning coffee or talking over dinner, all roads led to Gaza. Mention of air travel, for instance, would lead to America’s interest in an Israeli airport security model, which would bring us to the inevitable: “Imagine if you were Palestinian.”

Must I? Again?

I have gamely attempted to bring up other atrocities: famine in Somalia, child soldiers in Uganda, or the forgotten people in Canada’s poorest postal code, Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. But, much like her A fghan hound with a stranger’s tush in his teeth, Karen will not let go of Gaza. I suppose I should have seen this coming forty years ago.

IN 1970, wheN I wAS fouR yeARS old, my mother moved us into her boyfriend Michael’s house on Fourth Avenue in Vancouver. Michael had a plate in his head. The Korean War, my mother said, had messed him up—he couldn’t help his outbursts, the fact that he bellowed all his words. It all came to a head the night that Bruce, Mom’s former beau, showed up looking for her, and Michael chopped off the man’s finger with a butcher knife.

I can still see the blood on the linoleum floor and remember my desperate wish not to be there in that kitchen, but with the hippie girls who lived next door.

Twenty years older than I, those hippie girls, Karen and Marilyn, watched from their window, and saw the blood that led down our front steps and onto the sidewalk. They saw the ambulance at the curb, and my mother and I loaded into the back of a squad car. They had witnessed Mom’s black eyes, her split lips—but this WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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particular episode brought dark possibility to a whole new level.

Karen and Marilyn became my constant companions. They introduced me to tie-dye sessions and the beauty of the poncho; to protest music and the importance of smuggling draft dodgers into Canada; “Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!” and “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

At home with Michael, things got bad enough that my mother finally wised up.

One day while he was out, she packed our bags.Without a word to anyone we hopped a plane to Toronto and never saw Michael again—or Karen and Marilyn.

Until 2000, that is, the year I published a novel called Going Down Swinging.

In a bookstore in Vancouver, thirty years after losing contact, that title leapt out and grabbed hold of Karen. Days later, I came home to a phone message: “Hi, my name is Karen. I knew you when you were a very little girl. My friend Marilyn used to call you Billie Badoodle…”

The first time we spoke, she told me about baths we all took together—the only way that she and Marilyn could check me for bruises. “And I need to tell you about your puppy,” she said.

Puppy?

“You called her Mrs. O’Malley From Down the Alley. We heard Mike kicking her one night. We were scared he might kill her. So, we lured her to our side of the fence, and then took her to our friend’s farm. We were afraid of how bad it might get over there so we planned to kidnap you, too. But then…we decided we couldn’t play God.” Living just a couple of miles from my Vancouver apartment, Karen and I have since become inseparable. Marilyn is now in Oregon and we cross the border to be with one another whenever we can. In 2008, before I married my husband, Tim, I was baptized Catholic. Karen suggested I be baptized at her house and hold our wedding reception in the backyard.

Marilyn drove up to join us. In Karen’s living room, as the three of us held hands through the baptism ritual, memories of their long-haired Sixties determination to rescue Mrs. O’Malley and me rippled through my chest. Thirty

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years later and we had picked up right where we’d left off. I was lightheaded with adoration and it was hard to keep the tears in my head as Karen and Marilyn became my godmothers.

Cut to 2011. GodmotheR KaReN, afteR yeaRS of selling real estate, had retired and returned to her activist roots with a vengeance. Each morning she and her husband, John, scanned the Internet for stor ies t hat involved Israel or Palestinians. They attended meetings and marched in protests. Around the house were stacks of leaflets and big yellow signs mounted on sticks: “Stop the Occupation of Gaza” or “Free Gaza Now!” They boycotted Israeli products, and planned fund-raisers for the Canadian Boat to Gaza, a group assembled with the intention of breaching Israel’s naval blockade.

When the Boat to Gaza group reached its financial goal of approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the committee purchased a ship and christened it Tahrir, Arabic for “liberation” (as in Tahrir Square, epicentre of the Arab Spring).

As Karen and John made plans to travel to an undisclosed location in the Mediterranean for several weeks to join supporters of the international flotilla, headlines of the past year flashed through my mind. On May 31, 2010, nine people in a flotilla of six boats were killed when Israeli Defense Forces commandos boarded a Turkish boat in international waters off the coast of Gaza. Turkish forensic teams later identified nearly 250 bullet holes in the body of the ship.

I wanted a promise from her. “You’re not going on that boat, though. Right?”

Participation on board the Tahrir, she said, was reserved for high profile advocates. “I’m not famous enough,” she assured me.

Because Tim and I were about to give up our apartment, Karen invited us to housesit and take care of the Afghan ass-biter. It was shortly after we moved in that the boat committee asked her to sail to Gaza. John would stay on land to act as a communications officer.

“You said you wouldn’t!” I hollered, bug-eyed with exasperation.

“Don’t worry, Binky,” she said. “The IDF doesn’t beat up women.”

“Says you!”

Karen spent the next month being trained in “non-violent resistance.” The afternoon she left for Greece, I reminded her, “You don’t have to go on the boat.”

I had a powerful urge to grab her by the lapels and shout, “Who is this going to benefit? Why can’t you give the money to The Red Cross?”

In July 2011, the Freedom Waves to Gaza Flotilla—ten ships, carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists from several countries—was docked in various ports in Greece. Israel referred to the group as “The Provocation Flotilla.” Two ships eventually withdrew, alleging the Israelis had sabotaged their vessels. Greece, meanwhile, in the midst of an economic meltdown, bowed to external pressures and prohibited members of the flotilla from sailing. The Tahrir attempted to make a run for international waters and was swiftly overtaken by the Greek coast guard who turned the ship back to port. I received a mass email from Karen that read: “Just know this—that 8 nautical miles we travelled on our boat were the best 8 any of us have ever travelled! Yes, we know the difference between determination and obstinacy. It appears Israel has crossed from obstinacy to obduracy. In Greek drama, this is known as a tragic flaw. In solidarity, Karen.”

Marilyn phoned. “Did you read that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sounds like 1968 and she just stormed the Columbia library.”

The Flotilla disbanded, vowing to try again. Karen and John returned home, tanned and vivacious, burbling with tales of Greek adventure. Maybe, I thought, it’s out of their systems now.

In the fall, Karen announced a trip to Rochester, New York, her hometown. John had business associates there and Karen would visit with family. But flight details seemed murky. Suddenly, the two of them began spending a great deal of time murmuring behind closed doors. It occurred to me that perhaps Tim and I had outstayed our welcome, so I let her know that we would look for a new apartment. “I’m afraid we’re getting a little underfoot,” I said.

“No!” Karen exclaimed. “You’re not!

I mean I know I can’t keep you forever, but November and December are shitty months to move. January, too.”

Days after they left for Rochester, I received a mass email from John. “As I write from Göcek, Turkey, Karen is aboard the Tahrir, now headed toward Gaza and being tracked by the Israeli Navy.”

I pounded out a note to Karen. “Liar!”

“A funny thing happened on the way to Rochester,” she wrote from the ship.

“I’m sorry. We were sworn to secrecy.”

As instructed, I watched the online news. About seventy kilometres off the coast, still in international waters, the Israeli navy intercepted the Canadian vessel as well as its Irish sister ship.

According to Israeli news, the arrest was peaceful. Activists on board maintained that they were hit with water cannons, which caused a collision between the two vessels. Nearly two-dozen armed commandos boarded the Tahrir. Once the boats had been towed to the Israeli Port of Ashdod, some passengers refused to disembark, and were subsequently kicked and dragged off. The group was then photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated. They would be released for deportation only if each signed a statement declaring that he or she had entered Israel voluntarily and in an illegal manner. Since the statement was in Hebrew, none of them could read the actual text.

Several declined to sign.

Meanwhile, the public relations war raged through the blogosphere.

Palestinian supporters condemned the arrests as an act of piracy. Pro-Israel bloggers referred to the Tahrir as The Sea Hitler and its passengers as “ditch pigs” and “leftard bozos.” Several sites featured photos of Karen and dubbed her “Sea Hitler Skank.”

“Although faded,” one commenter lamented, “this woman is rather beautiful, and quite good at talking to the camera.

Does she strike you as a failed actress?”

Though she had f lown from Vancouver, another poster answered, “I ran into her at the Sea Hitler Send-Off at Toronto’s airport, the camera was very kind.” Yet another commenter said he’d come across Karen in Kingston, Ontario.

Like Elvis, she was everywhere.

Eventually, Karen received a deportation agreement written in English. After crossing out several clauses and rewriting others, she signed with a fictitious name and, then, through a consul, got word to John who bought her a ticket to meet him in Turkey.

The following day she contacted me through Skype from a hotel in Istanbul.

Sitting on her bed with John, she told me how the Israelis had searched and re-searched her luggage, and how she had watched as a male guard picked up her panties and sniffed them.

“You’re coughing,” I said. “You look like hell.”

“I’ve got a cold,” she explained. “We were wet from the water cannons. There was frost on the ground outside the jail and they left the cell windows open.”

Guards, she said, ordered all prisoners to their feet for a head count every couple of hours, so there was little sleep to be had. Because the lights were often left on twenty-four hours a day, Karen and her cellmates protested one night by banging spoons on the metal door. A guard stormed into the cell wielding her ring of keys in their faces. They were animals, the guard screamed, not even human.

When the group pointed to the list of prisoners’ rights posted on the wall, she informed them that since they were not Israeli, they had no rights. ‘“We make the rules’,” Karen quoted. ‘“You do not get anything I do not give you, see?’”

The prison’s rules would change constantly, she said. “Like with food— they would wheel it into the cell on a cart.

We were allowed to serve ourselves the first day. They gave us a couple of loaves of stale bread and a can of tuna dumped on an old aluminum TV dinner tray.” The next meal, the guard barked at them, “You do not take. I give you food.” The following day, Karen was told to pass her plate to her cellmate who would get food for each of them. She told them to keep their food, and refused further meals.

When she asked a guard for drinking water, she was handed a used plastic water bottle, and told to rinse it. “Constant mind games. They said I could make a call when I got there and then wouldn’t let me use the phone for two days.”

As she neared the end of her story, Karen described the man who sat next to her on the flight back to Turkey, an Israeli who had emigrated from New York. “He didn’t know much about Gaza. He said he wasn’t very political.”

I was sympathetic, but frustrated and looking for a target. “Bullshit! Moving from New York to Israel is political.”

“Whoa! Keep talking like that and you’ll be on the next flotilla to Gaza.”

I responded with the worlds of the old beat poet, Gary Snyder: “The most radical thing you can do is stay home!”

KaReN RetuRNed beaRING GIftS of coNtRItIoN: a Turkish carpetbag and a pair of harem pants from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

She was elated and verging on manic her first day home, running errands and dashing several kilometres on foot. When the adrenaline wore off, she crashed into a heap and it took weeks to recover from what turned out to be a respiratory infection. My anger dissolved to guilt. I brewed hot water with chunks of peeled ginger and lemon, and stirred in dollops of honey. I brought her laptop to her room, showed her how to get into my Netflix account and download movies in bed.

When she was back on her feet, she seemed to slip into a kind of sadness.

“What’s wrong with me?” she wondered out loud. “I feel sort of depressed and I have no right to be. What happened to me was nothing compared to what they face in Gaza.”

I could hear the echo of her long ago self: the girl who taught me to tie-dye, the girl who saved Mrs. O’Malley. “It’s just that… we raised all that money and then we lost the boat to the Israelis. And, what changed?

Every time I read the news, it’s worse.”

I wished I could think of the right thing to say, the nurturing thing—the thing that Karen would say.

If I understand it correctly, in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. Yesterday I googled the words “Volunteer,” “Vancouver,” and “Homeless.” In solidarity.

– Billie Livingston WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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BaRdS oF THe BeNCH

S

urely, many of us have played the old parlour game of “who would you rather have over for dinner” with literary figures: Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen?

Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway?

William Butler Yates or Bob Dylan?

Michael Ondaatje or Ian Binnie?!

Wait a minute. Ian who?

Unless you are a Canadian lawyer, you can be forgiven for not knowing that Ian Binnie is a former judge of our Supreme Court, who sat from 1998 to 2011. So, while I’m guessing the more common response would be Michael Ondaatje, I ask you not to be too hasty to decide. Some judges, given their love of language and literature, can surprise.

A passion for words can make judges appear more humane and accessible, and, yes, even interesting. Most people, unfortunately, are not familiar with their literary abilities, which means that they aren’t aware that some judges may be worth having over for dinner. The best might even give Ondaatje a run for his money as the preeminent Canadian literary dinner companion.

Our lack of knowledge about judicial traits is generally a good thing. Judges are supposed to be fair-minded, intelligent and, of course, honest; at the same time, they should be a little aloof, above the fray.

We might even want to appoint those who are somewhat boring, dry, uncool and humourless, because these are character traits that allow them (or that are thought to allow them) to appear both impartial yet engaged, in the same way a chartered accountant might conduct an orchestra.

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But judges, at least those at the appeal levels of our courts, are really just very specialized essay writers. What they do for a living is listen to arguments, then write lengthy decisions about what the legal answer should be. If all they had to do was announce a winner and loser in a case, they could simply do what all parents do when deciding whether a teenager’s clothes are appropriate. (Flip a coin?) In fact, appellate judges spend a lot of time thinking about how to justify their decisions. Then they spend even more time crafting the answer, based on reasons, into an essay.

For some judges, these essays aren’t just dry, legalistic decisions. These rare judges pen opinions that are stories; they employ well-crafted turns of phrase; their decisions contain gems related to popular culture; in some cases, they are actually laugh-out-loud funny. The judges who do this, do it to remain grounded, to use literature as a way to “sell” a legal story, to show some humanity, and to make themselves seem less lofty.

Take the idea of judge as storyteller.

In the Anglo-Canadian legal world, a universally admired literary judge is Lord Denning, former Master of the Rolls in the United Kingdom. His style is unmatched.

The first paragraph of his judgments usually tells us everything we need to know—setting, character and conflict are established, as he narrates a brief, humanistic story, and signals where he thinks justice will lie. In the case of Lloyds Bank v. Bundy, in which an unsophisticated gentleman farmer is out-maneuvered by the big, mean bank, Lord Denning begins: “Broadchalke is one of the most pleasing villages in England. Old Herbert Bundy was a farmer there. His home was at Yew Tree Farm. It went back for 300 years. His family had been there for generations.

It was his only asset. But he did a very foolish thing. He mortgaged it to the bank.

Up to the very hilt.”

Or consider the case of Hinz v. Berry, famous for establishing the concept that one family member can obtain damages for the shock of witnessing a tragedy befalling others in the family. Denning has the reader in thrall after just a few lines: “It happened on 19 April 1964.

It was bluebell time in Kent. Mr and Mrs Hinz, the plaintiff, had been married some ten years, and they had four children, all aged nine and under. The youngest was one.… On this day they drove out in a Bedford Dormobile van from Tonbridge to Canvey Island. They took all the children with them. As they were coming back they turned into a lay-by at Thurnham to have a picnic tea.

Mr Hinz was at the back of the Dormobile making the tea. The plaintiff had taken Stephanie, her third child, aged three, across the road to pick bluebells on the opposite side. There came along a Jaguar car out of control driven by Mr Berry, the defendant. A tyre had burst. The Jaguar rushed into this lay-by and crashed into Mr Hinz and the children. Mr Hinz was frightfully injured and died a little later.

Nearly all the children were hurt. Blood was streaming from their heads. The plaintiff, hearing the crash, turned round and saw this disaster. She ran across the road and did all she could. Her husband was beyond recall, but the children recovered.” The only surprise is that a Hollywood agent never had the foresight to contact Lord Denning.

CaNadIaN judGeS aRe GeNeRally moRe circumspect, yet they, too, occasionally loosen up the tabs on their judicial robes.

Justice Binnie is one of those who loves an elegant turn of phrase, as evidenced by his words regarding a lawsuit involving Danier Leathers, where “the warm days of spring are not a blessing for everyone, it seems. As temperatures rise, the sales of leather clothing can lag…” In another instance, he deftly overturns a lower level judicial colleague: “the sentencing judge commented that ‘hard cases make bad law and this is a hard case’,” Binnie tells us, relying on an oft-quoted legal syllogism, which in this case led the sentencing judge to agonize over what form of sentence to assign to the accused. In overturning the lower court judge’s ultimate decision, Binnie’s gentle rebuke, elegantly, but almost inexorably, followed: “[i]n my view, with respect, it also made bad law. I would allow the appeal.”

Another is Justice Morris Fish, also of the Supreme Court. He explores the

earth and the heavens through his love of language. The “seeds of this dispute were sown in a thick layer of manure spread by the appellant on a strip of his land,” he writes in one case, while in another, he notes that “in any constitutional climate, the administration of justice thrives on exposure to light and withers under a cloud of secrecy.”

Some of the more literary American judges, perhaps reflecting their national character, can be tough and in-yourface. In one instance, invigorated with the approach taken by the plaintiff’s law yers seeking to approve a class action before the Christmas recess, Judge Buchmeyer decided to flex his literary muscle. “The acronym for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service— AAFES—rhymes, albeit very poorly and Ogden-Nashedly, with the words “gave us” (or, more correctly, “gafe us”)”, he begins. Recognizing that the plaintiffs felt frustrated by the delays of the “hardworking but overburdened Cour t,” Buchmeyer relates next how a balloontoting messenger was sent to his court to seek information in song (to the tune of Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow).

“Oh the case is Shafer v. A AFES/We

“ ’ Tis some lawyer,” I mut tered, “TRO’ing at my chambers door — Only this and nothing more.”

Then he partially turns the screws, but lets them off at the end: Ghastly grim and ancient Falcon wandering from the Vuyanich shore — Tell me whether the Fifth, the Circuit, will approve class actions, do outpour.

And, quoth the Falcon, “Nevermore.”

Tell me truly, tell me truly, I implore Are there—are there no class actions?— tell me — tell me, I implore!

Quoth the Falcon, “Nevermore.”

Except in Shafer v. AAFES, and you should probably let them know.

WhIle judIcIal PoetRy IS about aS commoN as a talking falcon, judges do frequently rely on popular music lyrics. As might be predicted, Bob Dylan probably wins out as the most often quoted songwriter.

What does the rule on expert testimony have to do with Dylan? Well, the favoured lyric for many judges is “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” This captures the legal notion perfectly: lawyers shouldn’t mess around and play games by subpoenaing an expert when the point they are seeking to

a judgment is a form of literature. recall the trial you gave us/Do you remember, yes or no?/Let us know/Let us know/Let us know.” Buchmeyer responds as Oscar Wilde might have. Relying on two precedent cases, the first from the U.S. Supreme Court called Falcon and the second from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals titled Vuyanich, the remainder of his judgment is written as a poem, titled “The Falcon” in homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” The first few lines read: Once upon a backlog dreary, while I wrote on, weak and weary, Opinions in class actions filed long ago, in days of yore, While I pondered, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chambers door.

establish is obvious. Dylan’s allusion becomes the basis for an evidentiary rule.

Finally, there are the judges who play law for laughs. In this respect, one of my favourite judgments is from Texas, where the judge offered a caustic rebuttal to a big city lawyer complaining about the parochial conditions in Galveston: “Defendant argues that flight travel is available between Houston and San Antonio, but is not available between Galveston and San A ntonio, aga in because of the absence of a commercial airport. Alas, this Court’s kingdom for a commercial airport! The Court is unpersuaded by this argument because it is not this Court’s concern how the parties get here, whether it be by plane, train, automobile, horseback, foot, or on the back of

a huge Texas jackrabbit, as long as they are here at the proper date and time.” In a withering aside, the same judge notes that he expects the Defendant will be “pleased to know that regular limousine service is available from Hobby Airport, even to the steps of this humble courthouse, which has got lights, indoor plummin’, ‘lectric doors, and all sorts of new stuff, almost like them big courthouses back East.”

Or take the Canadian example arising from a rather nasty family dispute involving a cuckolded man named Larry, his ex-wife Catherine and her new lover Sam. Justice Joseph Quinn sounds a little like American Idol’s Simon Callow in full flight: “Larry, who regularly drives by the residence of Sam and Catherine, ‘often shoots the finger’ at Sam and, on about three occasions has yelled ‘Jackass, loser.’

A finger is worth a thousand words and, therefore, is particularly useful should one have a vocabulary of less than a thousand words.”

the juRy IS StIll out oN What theSe lIteRaRy efforts mean for justice. We might cherish judges who tell stories, who speak to the people, who employ humour, and who make pithy observations and witty quips.

But at the same time, a judge’s job is to decide legal disputes; any pretensions to literary stardom should be set aside if they interfere or obscure a correct decision. Nevertheless, a judgment is, in the end, a form of literature, and depends on many of the same rhetorical devices and narrative techniques other writers employ.

At the pinnacle, developing our very own Canadian Lord Denning would, I believe, help humanize the judicial system.

But I’d settle for less—maybe for a judge to venture away from nasty sarcasm in a family dispute, while still painting a vivid picture of failed promises. Imagine if she wrote a line or two cobbled together from Dylan: “the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, didn’t take long to realize her mistake, since her husband always had one hand tied to a tightrope walker while the other was in his pants.” I’d have that judge over for dinner, unless it was between her and Dylan.

– Richard Haigh WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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The NeW KaRoo

I

t began with a phone call. Peter Baker, a Canadian veterinarian with a small animals practice in Johannesburg, South A frica, wanted me to come to Bookbedonnerd III, a literary festival in the Great Karoo Desert village of Richmond.

Peter’s partner in the festival, Darryl David, had located my novel The Great Karoo (about western Canadians fighting in the Boer War) online. I assumed this meant he liked the book, but in fact it was so thoroughly unavailable in South Africa, neither Peter nor Darryl had physically seen it. It was a Governor General’s Award for Fiction finalist in 2008, and named for their desert: good enough.

Would I come?

While organizing the expedition, I was called upon—by my family and my potential funders—to explain how attending a book festival in a largely uninhabited desert on the far side of the planet was going to enhance my career. They wanted something more substantial than my book’s title and the desert having the same name, and I was able to satisfy most concerns with the attendance numbers of the first two Bookbedonnerds (and in the end it did result in my book becoming available in South Africa). But another set of questions had sprouted in my own mind: Why was I so determined to go?

Why did so many South Africans drive hundreds of kilometres to attend a desert festival? For that matter, why had Peter and Darryl created such a logistically demanding event? It’s hard enough to get people to cross their own city, let alone a 12

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large country, to attend a book festival.

When I boarded the jet for Johannesburg, I was still foggy on several points.

Even the meaning of Bookbedonnerd wasn’t clear. Book was book, but the Internet was having problems with bedonnerd. The only place I could find it was in a glossary for Athol Fugard plays, where it was translated as “beaten into the ground.”

Books beaten into the ground. Was this definitive? Promising? Worrying?

On the far side of the world, Peter Baker’s son William picked me up at the Johannesburg airport in the family “buckee” (pick-up), and we sped south into the prairie that comprises most of the fourteen hundred kilometres separating Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The Great Karoo Desert is a four hundred thousand square kilometre patch in the middle of that expanse. My novel was about western Canadians who came here in 1900 to fight for the British against Dutch South A frican farmers. T he Canadian cowboys left home in winter, arrived in African summer, and probably felt lucky until they entered the blast furnace of the Karoo and realized there was nothing there for horse or man to eat or drink. After seven hours of driving, Will and I also entered the Karoo, and, in the failing light, I saw a Canadian flag flying from a rocky hilltop. “Dad put that up to welcome you.”

Everyone calls Peter Baker ‘Baker’, including his w i fe. T he moment I stepped out of the buckee on mainstreet Richmond, Baker lifted me off

the ground. A ready grin in a pliant face, wild eyes: a likeable human being. Next I met his wife Beth: fit and pretty, with a lovely British-South African drawl. No antiseptic air-kissing here; she gave me a proper buss. Then I was in their restaurant’s back lounge, and the youngest Baker, Rob, was introducing me to South African beer at twelve rand (two dollars) a bottle. A convivial blur ensued.

What morning revealed next day was a well-treed dorp with curlicue gables and fretwork verandas in the old Dutch style. Richmond has its fair share of razor wire, iron bars and serious guard dogs, but it struck me as much less security obsessed than most South African towns.

This was my second trip, the first being a novel-research journey in 2005.

By the time I took my first walk in the village, I knew the story of how the Bakers and R ichmond had become united. When their daughter went to Stellenbosch University, Beth and Peter drove down regularly to visit, breaking the trip in Richmond at an old Karoo couple’s B&B. Richmond had a problem; it was dying. Houses had become so cheap that people were tearing them down for the rare yellowwood.

The Bakers bought one place, then more, and more, until they had a significant stake in Richmond. When Peter met Darryl David, who was interested in launching a Booktown in the Great Karoo, the two partnered. The Booktown movement started in 1961, with Hay-OnWye, in Wales, near the England border.

At the time Peter and Darryl met, there were Booktowns on every continent except Africa. The challenge was clear.

Darryl (South Africa’s only Indian professor of Afrikaans) would concentrate his considerable diplomatic skills on wooing the Booktown organization, while Peter made sure Richmond had enough bookstores to qualify. Richmond made the grade: Africa’s first Booktown.

The Bookbedonnerd Festival followed.

The heaRT of The feSTIval IS a hIGh-ceIlINGed former library on Main Street. As I entered, Darryl was making a welcome speech about why he’d entitled this year’s festival, “The Coolie Odyssey.” He wanted

tURtle moUNtaIN A Stranger, Dionysos, early morning, lower reaches of the mountain, speaks The first time I worked through here --see how little I knew– first gorge West of the Livingstone Range, I was calling Into badger holes, poking sticks down the throats For Irish monks.

Pitted, pine snow a vinegary bulge against wet rock At 5,000 feet, burnt trees to the top, Turtle Mountain, from Lost Creek Fire, sun A fingernail scrape in bachelor kettle aluminum, And through it, the mountain’s pig neck and back Appeared to move.

Now rain bloom bear-sways up The blade of the north hump.

Dendrites – they lived in trees, another crew Rode bulls.

Each would light candles below the tilting night of soil.

Sheep came down from the snowline.

The mountain, half of it fell away, 1903, Seventy killed in the valley, Northeast face, a diamond mark sickening between its horns.

The women stayed back On the Pike Lake acreages, living out of converted grain bins, Herding a common drawer of knives.

I came through here, Blackfoot country, And took it up, the bad-angled company of dead people, My ear slipped in and took the teat In the bedroom of glaciers, it was looking for the Angel, the Twin.

–Tim Lilburn

to focus on Indian writing in South Africa, and the title was to suggest the racism East Indians had endured. There was a mild argument among the Indian writers present, most of whom felt ‘Coolie’ was a term best left on history’s ash heap.

At that stage, I got nervous. My first presentation was later that morning, and I wondered how a Canadian novel about a 110-year-old British-Afrikaaner war would go over. Was the Boer War something else the new South Africa would be happier leaving behind? When my turn came, I started reading a scene set in

the Great Karoo. As I was rolling along, I checked my watch and realized my time was running out. I had pre-timed the reading, but hadn’t allowed for Peter’s generous introduction. Now I was on the verge of going over, not the kind of first impression I cared to make. I was floundering in search of a way to stop when an elderly man walked by me and out of the building. Seconds later, the whole audience jumped up and gasped. They could see the old fellow through the window, and he’d suddenly collapsed.

Peter and Will Baker raced out and

went to work. Peter took his pulse; Will administered CPR. A nervous stretch later, the man revived. The family gathered around Peter for an explanation.

In his blunt style, he said, “You died.

William got you going again.”

After the dust of this had, literally, settled, a few people said they were sorry my reading had been cut short. I kept my mouth shut. Basically I’d been rescued, albeit shockingly.

That night, at Bakers’ Supper Club, while the festival-goers were living it up, a couple of men from the adjacent African town entered and sat at the bar for a beer.

The Baker boys greeted them warmly but the men seemed ill at ease. They had come for a reason beyond a drink, and, when I was introduced as a writer from Canada, they decided I would suit their purpose, which, it turned out, was to make a socio-political point. After small talk, the spokesman of the two said he thought the festival was good for the town but wasn’t it ironic that, just over there—and here he pointed toward his village—“Most of the children cannot read.”

FRom the momeNt oF aRRIval, I had beeN looking for some overarching principle that held the festival together. Darryl’s theme, “The Coolie Odyssey,” suggested a racial harmony agenda, and, to my innocent Canadian ears, that meant a focus on the old racial strifes and how the country could heal from them. Several festival presenters and guests were well suited to speak to that subject, especially Ahmed Kathrada, who had spent eighteen years jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Also on hand was Denis Beckett, the man who’d run the anti-Apartheid magazine Frontline in Johannesburg through the bloody nineteen-eighties.

Beckett’s magazine lambasted hypocrisy in all directions and offended most everyone, but he was never shut down. Also present was Frontline contributor Rian Malan, an international journalist whose book, My Traitor’s Heart, had laid bare his nation’s (and his own) contradictions with rare and harsh candour.

Near the end of the second day, Chris Nicholson gave a talk about his new book Papwa Sewgolum: From Pariah to Legend. As I sat down to listen, I had only WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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just learned that Mr. Nicholson was the judge who had heard the Jacob Zuma corruption trial. A key moment in the trial was when Judge Nicholson had allowed possible political manipulation of the evidence against Zuma to be argued by the defence. That led to acquittal and removed the final obstacle to Zuma’s presidency.

If there was a person on the hot-seat of current South African politics, it was Chris Nicholson, but he wasn’t in Richmond to talk about Zuma, nor did anyone try to force him. His Sewgolum biography is the true story of an Indian South African golfer. Selftaught, he had an awkward reverse grip that caused people to dismiss him, even after he began to dominate coloured tournaments. He was excluded from national tournaments under the rules of Apartheid, and that was his fate until an entrepreneur, Graham Wolf, (the inventor of Oil of Olay) took up his cause. Under Wolf’s patronage, Papwa Sewgolum went on to win two major tournaments in Holland and to defeat Afrikaans hero Gary Player in a national championship.

P robably it was through Chr is Nicholson that I started to tumble to the deeper, truer meaning of the Richmond festival. If it was about the big issues of South Africa, then it was doing so on an equal footing with regional and personal causes. Side by side with Ahmed Kathrada’s recounting his ordeal in prison and his role in the first African National Congress (A NC) government, there were presentations about Karoo architecture, the endangered African wild dog, Afrikaans poetry. South Africa has been talking (and fighting) about its big issues of race and poverty for decades, but Bookbedonnerd represents something the nation has been less able to do until now, which is to talk and joke about all manner of things, great and small, and to do so in the absence of aggression and fear.

The fellow in the bar with his comment about illiteracy in his village was also right. The festival would lack something until the people of the African village could read its books and otherwise fully participate and mutually enjoy. But perhaps that is to be the festival’s future, not its present.

Saturday was the festival’s last day.

When I took part in a panel on my novel that morning, there was a pleasant surprise in the audience: Geoff White, a friend from university days in Calgary.

Geoff, a former journalist, now works with the Canadian High Commission in Pretoria. We had communicated by email, but his visit to the festival was unexpected.

Richmond, a dusty dorp in the Great Karoo, was sustaining a village full of them.

I think I got the message. For decades, South Africa was a place where things like Karoo villages often died, from fear and insecurity. A revived Karoo village is like a flock of a critically endangered birds found bathing in a pond. In Richmond, book people from Johannesburg and Cape

Bookbedonnerd has been accomplished by beautiful lunacy.

Later that day, Geoff was called into diplomatic action. During one of the final sessions, Ahmed Kathrada aired a serious gripe against Canada. Of all the countries he had visited as a touring author, only Canada had impeded his entry. Invited for a book tour in 2006, he was told by the Canadian High Commission he needed police clearance to get a temporary visa. Later, the High Commission compounded the problem by saying there would be an exception made for him. Kathrada told them to do him no favours. As long as formerly imprisoned South African freedom fighters needed police clearance to enter Canada, he would prefer not to go there.

The minute the session ended, Geoff went forward to conciliate. It was a dramatic moment and a reminder that Canada’s light has dimmed in recent years. The Harper government that impeded Mr. Kathrada in 2006 still harbours MP Rob Anders, the man who once called Nelson Mandela a communist and a terrorist.

IN the fall of 2011, wheN BookBedoNNeRd time rolled round, I was at home in Cochrane, Alberta, and full of longing.

Though it made no sense, I wanted to be back in Richmond, taking up a post at the Dinner Club bar, soaking up the highrollicking fun. Instead, I wrote Denis Beckett to get his perspective on the festival to help me write about it. He wrote back immediately and said that, for him, the key meaning of Bookbedonnerd is that it rescued a Karoo village from death by yellowwood hunters, and that it was “all from books.” While the big cities of South Africa were having difficulty supporting independent bookstores,

Town can gather with the folks of the Karoo and talk avidly about things that would have gotten them killed in the nineteen-eighties, and, in so doing, help fashion the new South Africa. For Denis Beckett, this has been accomplished by “beautiful lunacy.” A South African Indian teaching university-level Afrikaans and a Canadian veterinarian get together and rescue a desert dorp through the currency of books—what could be more beautifully lunatic than that?

Such things matter, because the situation there changes every day. Even as I was finishing this piece, interesting news came from South Africa. Irwin Cotler, a Canadian Liberal Member of Parliament (and former Justice Minister in the Martin Government), had been to South Africa and had met with the country’s foreign minister, Ebrahim Ebrahim. Mr. Ebrahim was another ANC freedom fighter long imprisoned on Robben Island, and he and Cotler discussed the “criminal record” rule that was impeding South Africa’s former freedom fighters from visiting Canada. Cotler vowed to go home and launch a private member’s bill to change this rule, and, first thing back, he had a press conference in which he announced this intention. There are early signs the Harper Government might be willing to back the change.

As a postscript, I now know what Bookbedonnerd means. According to the Afrikaans language scholar Darryl David, bedonnerd means “crazy about.”

Bookbedonnerd means “crazy about books.” David did admit, however, that there is another connotation of bedonnerd, which is “fucked up.” Asked how this has affected things, he said it has caused him “a lot of uphill.”

– Fred Stenson WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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PUBLISH THEN PERISH

A

s I write this, CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi is on Twitter tweeting (crowing?) about the success of Canada Reads 2012. For the first time in the elevenyear history of the Survivor-esque bestbook competition, every one of the five books under discussion ended up on The Globe and Mail top ten list of Canadian best-sellers. This is all the more remarkable when you factor in that Canada Reads focused the competition exclusively on non-fiction this year, a genre that, in this country at least, in terms of the glitzier prizes shimmering across our publishing landscape, is often outshone by fiction.

TERRY FALLIS, WHO WON THE COMPETITION in 2011 for his novel The Best Laid Plans, affi rmed on his blog that Canada Reads “sells more books in this country than anything else, except the Scotiabank Giller Prize,” so the CBC’s decision to work with non-fiction writers this year was greeted, by those writers and their publishers, with jubilation. At last, the tremendous hoard of PR wealth represented by these two prizes would be shared between writers of fiction and non-fiction alike. And make no mistake, neither the word “tremendous” nor “hoard” amounts to much of an exaggeration. Terry Fallis goes on to describe the effect that winning Canada Reads had on the fortunes of his book and, subsequently, his publishing future. “Sales immediately shot through the roof, as The Best Laid Plans surged to the top of the charts of Amazon, Chapters, Indigo and Kobo. It sat on The Globe and Mail bestseller list for more than six months…I signed with McClelland & Stewart for a third novel, which incidentally, I’ve just finished… invitations to speak and read at libraries, book clubs and literary festivals flooded my inbox and are still coming in.”

The trickling noise you may be hearing in the background even now—kind of like 16

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a burbling stream—is the sound of thousands of Canadian writers’ jaws simultaneously going slack and spilling forth drool.

This is perhaps not so pleasant an image to a reader. That is, if you like to imagine authors as men and women of dignity and gravitas, focused only on their art and, as Keats put it, “the truth of the imagination.” Similarly, it’s not so nice if you are an author yourself and have always wanted to think of yourself in that Keatsian way.

The ‘above-it-all’ writer has always been an ideal, of course, and something of a ridiculous and unfair one, especially in these recessionary times, the assumption being that any writer worth his salt can (and somehow should) exist in some pure elevated ether, high above the groundlings of commerce. Would that it were so.

ALREADY IN THIS ESSAY I HAVE MENTIONED Twitter, CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, and quoted from an author’s blog which references Amazon and Kobo. I will soon have a few things to say about Facebook.

The ratio of references made to “traditional media” versus what’s now called “new media” is indicative of something important— something the CBC was figuring out right around the time they instituted a major change to the Canada Reads competition (that being 2011, the year Fallis won).

That decision was to get listeners directly involved in the competition itself through social media.

A CBC producer working on the competition that year told me the decision was made for a number of reasons, “all dealing with increasing audience engagement.”

Although Canada Reads is a one-week show on the radio, she explained, “months of research and content goes into the website; yet the number of site visitors didn’t reflect the amount of work that was going into the site. We all agreed that social media could have an important part to play in generating conversation in that sense.”

BEFORE IT TURNED SOCIAL MEDIA TO AUDIENCE engagement purposes, Canada Reads was a fairly popular radio program that involved five panelists—authors, actors, politicians, athletes, public figures—each championing a Canadian novel supposedly close to their hearts. Goodness knows even this format attracted its share of detractors. Some people were troubled

by the explicit modeling of the competition on the American television show Survivor—books being “voted off the island,” as it were. It can be difficult for writers, as well as the most passionate book lovers—that is, people who sit around thinking critically about literature all the livelong-day—to listen to radio panelists dismiss a book for having, say, “unlikable characters” or a “slow pace.”

It’s not that these qualities don’t make an honest difference to a reader’s experience, it’s just that people who agonize for hours about the placement of a comma cannot stand to hear about such things.

Then again, so what? Canada Reads was guilty of not pleasing all of the people all of the time, but it certainly pleased a lot of them, particularly the writers and publishers lucky enough to have their books anointed by the five panelists.

And CBC was pleasing them, it should be noted, during a time when other ‘traditional’ media outlets were mostly abandoning the conversation about Canadian books (leaving most of the labour to those who were willing to do it for love—bloggers).

Take television, for example. Where once there were nationally broadcast programs eager to feature authors as guests— Dini Petty, Vicki Gabereau, Midday, Hot Type—as of 2005 or so there was…well, a whistling void. 2008 was a bad year in general, of course, but it was a particularly bad year for print media. In desperation, The Globe and Mail revamped itself, and a casualty of that desperation, surprising no one, was its stand-alone Saturday book section. At the same time, the Toronto Star halved its book coverage from four pages to two. Meanwhile, the Postmedia Network, having shored up ownership of most other Canadian newspapers of note, would often run a single review or profile of a given author in everything from the Victoria Times-Columnist to the Ottawa Citizen. That is, one journalist, representing one opinion, would write a single review, which appeared in multiple venues across the country.

THE FALLOUT FROM THESE VARIOUS ECONOMIC forces must now be acknowledged.

Certainly it’s not news to anyone that print media has been undergoing a seismic shift over the past decade. Sometimes it feels as if a rampaging giant has gathered up all the remaining scraps of

print culture and flung them up into the stratosphere. Those of us with a stake in the outcome have spent the last few years in a holding pattern, gazing upward, mouths open, wondering when the pieces will fall back to earth and where on earth they’ll land. A very funny satirical essay by Ellis Weiner appeared in The New Yorker in October 2009, purporting to be an email to an author from a publishing intern named Gineen. Gineen began by announcing she had been brought in “to replace the publicity department here at Propensity Books.” Ha ha ha! sobbed writers and publishers, desolately forwarding the link to one another, posting it along with a wry remark or two on their Facebook pages. It was so funny because it was true—so true it wasn’t even funny.

Publicity departments were not only being slashed, but entire publishing houses were joining independent bookstores in the graves that had been dug out for them courtesy of the superstore retail model, as represented by Chapters and Borders.

For writers who believed they had enjoyed solid, affectionate relationships with their publishers, the 2009 fall out was so severe that if you were not Stephanie Meyers, or at the very least touting yourself as the next Stephanie Meyers, you really couldn’t expect to have your calls returned.

The New Yorker’s satirical “email” went on to skewer the new normal in publishing—specifically the offloading of much of the traditional work of publishers onto any remaining authors lucky enough to land a book deal (tellingly, the book under discussion is titled Clancy the Doofus Beagle: A Love Story). More often than not, that work was expected to take place in the exciting (inexpensive), new (baffling) world of the web 2.0.

“Do you blog?” asks Gineen. “It would be great if you could post at least 600 words every day until further notice…

Don’t worry if you think you’re not on Facebook,” she continues, “because you actually are. Jason enrolled you when you signed the contract last year.”

Finally, after instructing the hapless author to “spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein” and “tabskim your readers’ comments” via “Twitter, ChittchaTT or Nit-Pickr,” the intern asks the author to make sure, “When you reply to comments, try to post at least one photo per

hour of you doing everyday tasks around the house, such as answering comments and posting photos.”

In short, the essay provides a satirical snapshot (or should I say screengrab) of the terror encircling those whose fates were enmeshed in the world of publishing in 2009 and the extent to which that terror was tied up with the rapidly transforming world of digital media.

Because things have been so bad in publishing for so long, it’s hard to talk about the digitally-driven changes happening now without sounding as if you are bemoaning them, or blaming the internet itself for the bad. But it seems to me that the fabric of publishing in North America and the UK has been fraying and threadbare for quite some time, mostly thanks to the above-mentioned superstore model that took over in the early aughts—a corporate strategy that had nothing whatsoever to do with the web. That digital culture would steal in to patch those holes, or replace entire patches in the quilt anew, surely amounts to an inevitability.

Now we cIRcle back to late 2010 wheN the CBC announced its new twist to the Canada Reads competition. In honour of the contest’s 10th anniversary, Canada Reads decided to compile a long-list of “40 essential Canadian novels of the decade” from which the final five would be taken, and, this was the kicker, those forty books would be “chosen by you,” CBC listeners and devotees of the show.

Except everyone realized more or less immediately that you didn’t have to be a CBC listener or a fan of Canada Reads, or even someone who likes to read very much, to go the CBC website and cast a vote, an anonymous vote. Writers took to the internet and launched campaigns for their books—some playful, jokey and self-deprecating, others abject and desperate and a little hard to watch. Yet the initiative was a PR masterstroke and a stroke of significant good fortune for Canadian publishing—not only had the CBC launched a galvanizing, wildly popular showcase for Canadian fiction, they’d come up with a way to garner attention for, not a mere five books this time, but forty. What’s more, writers could now effect the very outcome of the competition.

So what if they were driven completely out of their gourds in the process?

To understand the immense pressure this new format placed on Canadian writers, one needs to understand the elusiveness of what we call literary ‘success’ in this culture. First of all, literary success looks nothing like what we would consider success in any other industry.

It involves neither significant amounts of money nor widespread recognition.

It guarantees no future in particular.

Canadian publishing is so small—our tribe of readers being devout yet demographically humble—that the only real benchmark of success when it comes to being a writer in Canada is the simple act of getting one’s book published. What in any other industry would constitute the first rung on the ladder, is, for most writers, alpha and omega.

Anything that comes after that—high-profile reviews, award nominations, a second book deal—is gravy.

The problem is that, for many, the gravy never gets passed to their end of the table. This has always been the case for some writers—often those publishing with smaller houses, who accordingly command smaller PR budgets—but over the past decade, as radio and television shed one book-friendly program after another and newspapers shed page after page of books coverage, the playing field has become smaller and smaller. Until finally, as of late 2010, it had been winnowed down to the two single pinpoints identified above by Terry Fallis: the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Canada Reads.

So with Canada Reads seeking forty “essential books of the decade,” writers were faced with an unprecedented opportunity. Moribund careers could be revived. Flagging sales revitalized. A novel that fell flat six years ago—either because Atwood, Ondaatje and Munro all had books out that year or because one’s publicist turned out to be a secret drinker—could be magically repackaged and re-presented for the public’s delectation.

Canada Reads 2011 offered every writer in Canada a second chance—another chance to stake out a corner of the rapidly disappearing PR landscape.

But first they had to get on that top forty list. And for that, they needed the votes. They took to Facebook. They took to Twitter. They took to YouTube. They ransacked their email contacts list. “It’s writer- ducking season again,” sighed WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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journalist Shannon Rupp in an article published in The Tyee entitled: “Why Call it Canada Reads? Should be: Authors Beg.” Yet nobody who understood anything about a writer’s reality in Canada could blame them for it.

Meanwhile, the CBC enjoyed levels of “audience engagement” the likes of which no one had ever seen. Here we should pause for a moment of genuine appreciation at what the CBC has accomplished via this competition. Suddenly, radio listeners—the most combative of old-media footsoldiers—willingly and decisively followed their beloved CBC online. It seems to me the Mothercorp stands head and shoulders above other traditional outlets in terms of how successfully it has integrated with and adapted to the rapid advances in digital culture (example: two days ago I downloaded their music app, today I wonder how I ever lived without it). In early 2011, Canada Reads was taking place as much on the web as it was on the radio— more, really—their website abuzz with commenters, a streaming video broadcast of the debate available on CBC.ca complete with a live-stream audience commentary matching the discussion beat for beat. Not to mention a frantic hoard of writers doing the CBC’s PR work for it in ensuring that every last person in their social network became aware of the competition.

And now it’s 2012 and CBC Radio is coming off its most successful Canada Reads to date. It also happens to have been its most controversial, a result of one of the judges taking the ruthless, reality TV pedigree of the program perhaps a bit too much to heart. Dispensing with the Canadian kid gloves, she forwent a discussion of the nonfiction books themselves in favour of personal attacks on the authors. One writer, having penned a memoir about her revolutionary activities under the Pinochet regime, was called a “bloody terrorist.” The other, another memoirist recalling her teenage arrest and imprisonment in Iran, was accused of simply making her story up. It made for something of a scandal, to be sure. Many listeners were outraged. The Twitterverse was abuzz. Facebook discussion threads were long and heated. “Audience engagement” was no doubt at a premium.

What’s tricky for those ink-stained anachronisms among us to grasp as we attempt to negotiate the passage from newsprint and radio waves to the happy land of 18

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zeros and ones, is how social media obliges each of us—from fourteen-year-old Facebookers to top executives at Google—to pretend we’re all just friends at one big online party. The bigger the corporation, the more useful it is to stamp the social media smileyface on practices like, for example, Facebook’s harvesting of its users’ personal data or Jeff Bezos’ recent attempts to ‘eliminate the middleman’ (that being bookstores and publishing houses) for the supposed benefit of up and coming new authors and pennypinching readers. Sure, most of us at the party have business cards tucked away in our purses, but no one wants to be caught dead overtly plying their trade. That’s so old media. So we link, we ‘like’, we RT—we hold contests on our sites, inviting ever one to play along. And everybody does play along.

Those who don’t are swiftly left behind.

– Lynn Coady

THE HAIRS ABOUT OUR SECRETS

T

he first time I went for a bikini wax, I had no idea what I was getting into. Friends with standing appointments and a landmark episode of Sex and the City had prepared me for pain, but—now in my thirties and having survived the various types of pain a feminine life can bring, short of childbirth—I thought I’d be able to handle it.

What happened next is mostly a blur.

I was led, by a gentle woman about my age, into a salon where Toronto’s affluent husbands ritually send their wives for Queen-For-a-Day retreats. If you’re going to entrust your private parts to a hot-waxbearing stranger, so I thought, you want to know you’re in good hands. (And whatever differentiated a discount wax joint from a top-drawer one, I didn’t want to know.)

It still amazes me to think that, in spite of having worked as a fashion editor for a national newspaper, I didn’t

know exactly what I was in for. The semiotics of bikini waxing are tossed around in women’s magazines, but rarely defined. In a time when everyone seems to have at least a functional understanding of how Viagra works, regardless of age or gender, ignorance and euphemism abound when it comes to intimate depilation. Gee Beauty, a go-to salon for Toronto socialites, offers a link on its website that leads to a page (“Down Below”) with abstract filigree whorls and curlicues representing options called “Upper Management”, “Houdini”, and “GIG” (the airport code for Rio de Janiero).

This spa of record proposed a Traditional bikini wax ($37), a French wax ($57), and a full Brazilian ($88). I went with the French partly because I have long trusted that country’s approach to fashion and food and assumed this might represent some universal quality of goodness (French toast, French braid). In other words, I had chosen the pubic equivalent of a pair of Louboutins or a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

Reader! I am a w iser, worldlier woman now.

In a treatment room, I lay covered from thigh to armpit by a towel. The first cue that we had left behind any pretense to bodily inhibition was the lack of a “privacy thong.” In most spas, this item will be offered where nudity arises, even as a token. Apparently I had checked my modesty, and who knows what else, at the door.

The aesthetician lifted the towel, assessed my pubic area with a professional’s dispassionate interest, and went to work.

With quick, practiced movements, she took fabric strips, pressed them down onto the wax she had applied to my thighs and front, and tore them off. Recalling the home leg waxing efforts of my teens, it wasn’t bad at first. But she had to crook open my legs to continue, and I felt suddenly bad without quite knowing for whom, or what I had done.

When you grow up in a country like Canada, chances are the only people who see your pudenda are your lover and your gynecologist. If you are a nice girl, your own mother may not even have seen your “private parts” since you were in preschool. Certainly, you haven’t flashed your BFF in some college bar. I wasn’t sure

what was more disturbing, the eye-watering rips of the waxing strips or the sure way the aesthetician knew to lay flat her palm against my genitalia to minimize the pull. I had no precedent for an experience so equally intimate and clinical by nature.

When she began to wax my actual vulva, I realized that life as I knew it, which generally consists of a pleasant triangle between a job, an apartment, and Whole Foods, was revealing another universe. I thought of the network of designer shops outside and its professionally blow-dried shoppers who drink Prosecco in the afternoon. As if I had been granted X-ray vision, I could now see what most of them must do, too. Below the enviable perfection of the surface, there was something so undignified about this ritual that it seemed to discredit its own worth. I wondered what drove them to it.

At a certain point the aesthetician asked, “Do you want me to do the back?”

I didn’t know what might remain to be done, but I recognized another euphemism when I heard one. “Just do whatever you normally do,” I said. “Give me what most people get.” It was clear at that point that this might be my life’s one bikini wax—it made sense to go the whole hog.

Counter to the era of blog-influenced and confessional journalism we live in, I don’t want to describe what happened next. But the emotions of it mirrored the testimonials of those who have been abducted by aliens—violated, disoriented, a sense of time loss. Afterwards, in the lounge area, the soft burble of a water fountain and the atmospheric lighting seemed unduly harsh. My arms and legs shook as if I had delivered a speech.

As a waiting attendant handed me a cup of soothing tea, I spotted an actress friend.

Alex was reclining in a spa robe, waiting for a massage. “What did you get?” she asked.

I told her that I had just been for my first bikini wax. She winced.

“I had that once,” she said. “I thought, if someone’s going to do that to my asshole, they should be paying me.”

The obvIouS queSTIoN IS, Why? hoW caN a painful, cumbersome and expensive practice be so much better than a hairy vagina?

Waxing has repercussions that may last for weeks—repercussions that, more than any other argument against it, call into question

its sexiness. As the bikini wax grows in, ingrown hairs require frequent, decisive first aid. I was astonished to discover after my first wax that the mechanics of urination, something I can’t remember having thought about, had changed; it was impossible to go to the bathroom without making a mess. Some of the wax can linger from the procedure, causing the buttocks to adhere to each other. If you fart (and I was surprised to discover how much I fart; perhaps they’d previously gone unnoticed) it sounded like a couple of wooden boards clapping together. In attempting to become as sexy as possible, I had become appalling to myself.

The history of hair removal is not a straight line. Many of us think of the nineteen-seventies as a kind of Golden Age in pubic hair, as typified by the au naturel illustrations in The Joy of Sex. It would be logical to assume that it’s all gone downhill from there, at least in square footage—first from a bit of shaving in the nineteen-eighties to the full Brazilian wax, as it became known after it was imported to New York City by seven Brazilian sisters, and which has since become the porn industry’s new normal.

But at different times in history and across cultures, attitudes about hairiness have waxed, so to speak, and waned. In an eighteenth-century text, the critic John Dryden wrote disparagingly of “that effeminate Custom now used in Italy, and especially by Harlots, of smoothing their Bellies, and taking off the Hairs which grow about their Secrets.” The ‘natural’ look of the nineteen-seventies—as with men’s beards, which are also seeing a resurgence in these heritage-oriented times—may have been a trend (a reaction, perhaps, to the relatively groomed and plasticized ideals of the generation before). Let’s not forget the spirit with which post-WWII women, endowed with shorter skirts and the availabilit y of mass-market nylons, practically to a woman, began to shave their legs.

The current cultural climate of waxing is something of a war. A few years ago, the state of New Jersey proposed banning Brazilian waxing to discourage infections brought on by unlicensed practitioners.

Last fall, The Atlantic published a long essay, “The New Full-Frontal: Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?” Noting the normal-

ization of waxing among college-aged women, it speculated that waxing may reflect the influence of pornographic images on a generation raised with laptops and WiFi. In Canada, Perla Porto is a legend in bikini waxing, recognized as much for her painless technique as for her bedside manner. She was referred to me by a number of people.

“We are trying to change” the image of waxing, said Porto, a petite, stylish young woman who still remembers her first Canadian client as having asked her to please “not touch my vagina too much.”

It struck Porto as contradiction in terms: wanting an end without the means.

“In Brazil, it’s so normal for us to go for waxing,” said Porto. She thinks part of the reason is a difference in attitude about touch. “I’m going back in a few weeks to visit. My mother and my sisters will be waiting for me hairy.”

Six years since that first reticent patron, Porto now has twenty-seven hundred clients and sees an average of twenty women a day. Her oldest client is seventy-two and her youngest client is twelve. She pointed out that waxing has a different profile in her home country, land of tiny bikinis and water sports, and is associated with hygiene. She studied three years to become an aesthetician; courses included history, anatomy and how to identify sexually transmitted diseases. By her definition, an aesthetician’s role falls somewhere between that of a hairdresser and a public health nurse.

Por to’s work suggests that the sexualization of waxing is relatively subjective; in her country, the practice is more akin to what leg shaving is here—basic everyday grooming. “We are hairy girls,” she told me. “In Brazil, we don’t look at if a woman is fat or has a good body, but we always look at if the woman is hairy.”

I put to her the “what’s happening to our daughters?” concern raised in The Atlantic and forever lurking, I think, in the background. To a certain kind of feminist, the removal of pubic hair is misogynist and, in the case of a full Brazilian, flatly unacceptable. At worst, it signals the infantilizing of the womanly body—at the very least, the pornification of the bourgeois bedroom. “You are not a little girl, and you won’t feel like a little girl,” Porto replied, flatly.

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ONe Of the mOSt PeRPlexING thINGS abOut waxing is the ubiquity of the “landing strip,” a feature of my own wax, and visibly on parade, in various states of regrowth, at the gym. Why do so many of us think that a vertical, domino-shaped patch of hair resembling nothing that came from nature is superior to none?

Is it an abstract reminder that one could grow hair? That we are still “women,” whatever in a hairy context that might mean? Or is it a fear to bare all, in a literal sense—not letting your hair down too much? What, in essence, does pubic hair mean?

“I think it ’s a photographed aesthetic,” Leanne Shapton, a visual artist in New York City, told me. “It’s not a real aesthetic.” Shapton runs her own publishing company, J&L, and the assessment makes sense—repeated viewing overwrites the specifics of an image with its context. Just as Wile E. Coyote’s latest ACME kit symbolizes schadenfreude, so the French bikini wax stands for sexy, in our culture, without having to be anything.

In the midst of my own first wax, there was a brass light fixture on the ceiling in which I could see my reflection—a woman going through a transformation.

The ripping apart, all the things that followed—the ingrown hairs, the feeling of being a plucked chicken—seemed like a small price to pay for validation as an indisputable sexual being. At the time, I was in a relationship that had floundered, and I thought that if I became a sexier woman—maybe a woman unlike the woman I was—it might help. I don’t know why it translated into that form of expression; waxing was in the air. In the discovery that some of my friends had done it and always done it, I wondered if I had missed out on some essential aspect of female grooming. A form of pubic pressure takes hold. It was a surprise to discover that the wax improved nothing so much as my idea of myself, and that’s what made me go back for a couple of years after.

When I asked friends why they did, or didn’t, wax, what emerged was not so much a pubic mosaic of 2012 (waxed, shaven, or as the women’s website xojane. com recently dubbed it, “’70s Bush”), but how hard it is for everyone to discuss how hers got to where it is. The 20

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people I thought would be most forthcoming—women who have waxed for years—spoke of convenience, cleanliness. Meanwhile, the people who do it aren’t necessarily the people you’d think.

I discovered that my friend with the fourinch Manolo heels never shaves, but my friend the hockey player routinely denudes. Regardless of her pubic situation, I think everyone feels a bit judged: judged for having an opinion, judged for having acted (or not acted) on it. Who knew? In this country, what turns us on might genuinely be one of the last taboos.

Matt Pollack recently made a documentary about his relationship to pornography called Run Run, It’s Him. It’s a chronicle of his years spent (secretly) watching porn for hours a day and the corollary sense of shame not only about the time that passed but what it said about him. I asked him to comment, not about the morality of bikini waxing so much as for a critical opinion, having seen so many naked women, about what the attraction is.

Pollack thinks there’s some merit to The Atlantic hypothesis about the co-dependence of porn and waxing (simply to make it easier to see genitalia), and its normalizing effect on people’s pubic expectations. But the more poignant appeal of waxing comes from the real world.

He called it the “psychological intent”: unlike film’s pliant and enthusiastic partners, real-world women are “like sexual gatekeepers,” he said.

“I have to jump through hoops and make witty conversation to get to that point. But the fact that she took the time and went to the effort and spent the money—that’s the turn-on.” In other words, a woman’s bikini wax is an message to her lover that he’s worth the pain.

Like many men I spoke to, Pollack said he is just grateful for what he can get.

“I’ve only really seen, like, ten vaginas,” he told me. “When someone decides to let you see that at all, it’s like, so shocking, or a miracle.”

ONe Of the fOuNdatIONal mythS Of claSSIc feminist theory is that from a patriarchal viewpoint, the female body is threateningly out of control: puzzlingly in tune with the phases of the moon; an emitter of blood; a site for casual pleasure but also (just as truthfully, almost sneakily)

of babies. Waxing illuminates just how much this vessel is an enigma to women ourselves. Like the choice to eat with a knife and fork, or buy a gym membership to sculpt the body with exercise, waxing takes something that could be left freeform in hand, applying form and control.

Another symbol of mankind’s triumph over nature, even if the triumph is fleeting at best. As with lawn care, it’s a fight against weeds and ingrown hairs, trims and re-growth; “success” being an idealized condition rather than an absolute place.

My own relationship with waxing is less troubled than it was—demystified, waxing seems less about symbolism than about whimsy. It strikes me that in order to be truly liberated it needs to not matter either way: to care about the presence or absence of pubic hair is to suggest that there is a right way to groom.

Increasingly, a Brazilian wax strikes me as a pubic cliché, a trend to leave to the Kardashians and the Ugg-wearing, text-messaging demographic. In the last season of Entourage, a bellwether show about celebrity cool, a real-life porn star, Sasha Grey, playing the main character’s girlfriend, walked nude (and, by certain standards, insufficiently ‘kempt’) across the screen. “That’s what a grown woman looks like,” she tweeted to a wave of ‘anti-bush’ protestors. “I’m happy to contribute to making it OK again :). All ‘fashions’ have their cycles!” In the context, it seemed avant-garde.

Grey positions herself as a thinking woman’s porn star—reading philosophy between takes, commenting on US politics. In a sea of Brazilians, having oldfashioned pubic hair might be a way to distinguish oneself; classy, even. In that light, I went back to the same question I’d been asking since the beginning. Why do we think it looks attractive to have no pubic hair? I asked Perla Porto.

“Oh, I don’t think it looks good,” she said. “It’s not beautiful. I think it feels good.” In a swirl of opinions about waxing’s significance (visual and otherwise), sensuality was the one thing nobody had mentioned. Desire, and the desire to improve desire—that’s something men and women alike have always been willing to suffer for.

– Jessica Johnson

The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne presents...

Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Now in its sixth year, this annual lecture has featured some of Canada’s most talented authors, including Annabel Lyon, Eden Robinson, Dany Laferrière, Wayne Johnston and Joseph Boyden.

This year’s lecture:

by

Lawrence Hill Credit: Lisa Sakulensky

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 7:30 pm Timms Centre for the Arts 87th Ave. & 112th St. Edmonton, AB

Introduction by Ted Bishop. A reception & book signing will follow the lecture.

All are welcome to attend this free event. No RSVP required.

The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada, 2007), Lawrence Hill’s most recent and wildly successful novel, was inspired by a little known historical document of the same name. A former reporter with The Globe and Mail and The Winnipeg Free Press, Hill has also written several non-fiction pieces, including The Deserter's Tale: the Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (2007, co-written with Joshua Key). His award-winning writing has captured the attention of readers around the world, and his bestselling memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (2001), continues to influence the discussion on racial identity in Canada today. His other novels are Some Great Thing (1992) and Any Known Blood (1997).

For more information, please visit our website, at: For morewww.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/ information, please visit our website, at: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/

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T HE G AMES WE PLAY

Ya Gotta

BelIeve B y T im o T h y Tay l o r

DavID BRookS wRote a SPoRtS-RelateD

PHOTOS BYRON DAUNCEY

column in The New York Times in February of this year. I took special note of it because I was thinking a lot about sports at the time. In fact, days before the Brooks piece was published, I’d been in Boston watching the Super Bowl with rabid New England Patriots fans. I was watching them watch the game, in effect. Brooks happened to be writing about basketball, NBA star Jeremy Lin specifically. But he would have been wide of the mark no matter what sport he was talking about. “Jeremy Lin,” he wrote, “is anomalous in all sorts of ways.

He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.”

Why do we care about sports?

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Since religious pro athletes are literally everywhere—the NFL playoffs themselves had for a time been dominated by coverage of the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow (since traded to the New York Jets), whose take-a-knee moments of prayer had spawned their own epi-phenomenon referred to as “Tebowing”—Brooks got dog piled online for being a pencil-necked geek who obviously didn’t understand anything about pro sports. Deadspin blogger Tom Scocca replied to Brooks with a post headlined: “David Brooks has written the dumbest Jeremy Lin column so far.”

But what my visit to Boston had proven to me was that Brooks’ bigger error was his central thesis, which came a little further down the column. “The moral ethos of sports,” Brooks wrote, “is in tension with the moral ethos of faith.”

I had to sit back after I read that, because I found myself wondering if Brooks had ever spent time with real hardcore fans. He certainly couldn’t have done what I had just done, sitting with those Pats fans in the blue and flickering light of The Four’s bar in the Gardens area of North End Boston, all of our faces upturned to the hanging monitors above the bar as they meted out the information we craved about the very immediate future. What will happen?

Brooks couldn’t possibly have spent any quality fan time in The Four’s—or in any of the other sports bars scattered through the area: McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beer Works, Hurricane O’Reilly’s—because if he had he would have seen that sports in fact reveals and arouses something deeply and innately religious in fans, something that has nothing to do with the world’s official religions, with Tebowing, or with thanking your preferred saviour after hitting a three-pointer to win. In The Four’s, what was reflected in all those upturned faces was something small “r” religious in structure, something crystallized in what is asked of fans and what they get back for their allegiance, hunkered over burgers and beers in sports bars and living rooms across the world. All holding their breath.

Of course, sports bloggers might well take offense with this idea, too. But I’m convicted, ladies and gentlemen. I went to The Four’s, and I believe.

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BoStoN waSN’t my fIRSt whIff of thIS Idea.

It had been simmering for at least a decade, during which time I’d written dozens of magazine pieces about sports, from boxing to football (soccer, that is) to auto-racing. In fact, the very first time I sensed something inherently religious in sport was in October 2000. I was at the Mohegan Sun casino, in Uncasville, Connecticut, watching a fight: heavyweights Kirk Johnson and Oleg Maskaev. Johnson was a gentle-voiced and mild-mannered fighter from North Preston, Nova Scotia. I’d spent a little time with him over a couple of days, in sidebar conversations between the ritual waypoints that precede a prize fight: the press conference, the weigh-in, the pregame routines, the hand taping, the silent moments before the fighter’s names are called when, if you watch closely, you’ll see the combatant retire to an inner place where he is more truly alone than perhaps anyone who has not been a prizefighter will ever understand.

Johnson was a riddle in pro boxing at the time. At 6’ 2 ½” and 232 pounds, with enormous shoulders and long muscular arms, he was remarkably fast, able to combine punches in flurries more like a lightweight than a heavy. Yet something lingered over his reputation, a sense of “reluctance,” in the words of ring announcer Jim Lampley just prior to the bell. When I button-holed famed boxing analyst Larry Merchant before the fight, he told me, “Johnson just seems like the perennially promising heavyweight. But people are waiting to see him beat a real, significantly ranked opponent.”

Oleg Maskaev fit the bill. Johnson had a couple of pounds on him and a few inches of reach. Maskaev’s numbers weren’t legendary either at twenty wins and two losses, with fifteen knockouts to his credit. But the Russian born fighter, living in West Sacramento, had fought better opposition than Johnson. More importantly, he seemed to be improving.

Less than a year before, he’d fought the 31-1 Hasim Rahman (a man who’d once KO’d Lennox Lewis). In the eighth round of his fight against Rahman, Maskaev, behind on the score cards, knocked Rahman clean out of the ring, through

the ropes, where he crashed onto the ringside press tables in a pile of papers and computer monitors and scattering journalists.

Maskaev was proven tough, in other words. And he looked tough, with muscles like plates of armor and a head like an artillery shell. Merchant didn’t have anything bad to say about Johnson, but he spoke of Maskaev in graver tones.

The thirty-five year HBO veteran told me, “Maskaev is exciting. And I took one look at that jaw and thought: here’s a guy you cannot knock out.”

Of course, boxing is supposed to be fifty percent mental. Cus D’Amato, who trained Mike Tyson in the early years when he was unstoppable, famously said: “In the last analysis, mind triumphs over matter, and the will to win is more crucial than the skill to win.”

In other words, Johnson could win if he desired it enough. But when I talked to him after the weigh-in, that seemed like an open question. He told me he was nervous. More than that, he was scared.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It goes up and down to the fight. Sometimes I just want to throw myself off a bridge.” He’d been praying twenty hours a day, from the time he got up until he went to bed. And when it came to strategy, Johnson merely shook his head and said, “Well I can’t slug with him. No way I’m going to knock him out.”

We went through the tape up. I watched that strange and intimate action between Johnson and his trainer Curtis Cokes, both men staring fixedly at the hands that might or might not do the job. And when Johnson knelt in the corner of his enclosure to pray one last time, a thin sheet hanging for this final privacy, I felt real anxiety. I liked the man for his honesty, his kind demeanor, for the way he pulled a younger family member close for a few words, those taped fighter’s hands so huge and ungainly as they shaped themselves for the hug. I was worried for Johnson’s family, who were there in large numbers. But I was more worried for Johnson.

Out into the thunder of the event itself, into the glittering shards of light, the strobe of cameras, the hail of noise and cries, boos and cheers, a maelstrom, a dervish, a tornado of senses. The first

three rounds I stared so intensely from my seat at the press tables that I wasn’t sure I was even taking any of it in, although the story itself was plainly unfolding: Johnson was losing. Maskaev was stalking and closing, out-jabbing Johnson, snapping his head back with chopping right hands.

When Johnson returned to his corner between the third and forth rounds, Cokes scolded him: “I need a little more work out of you!” To which the bewildered-looking fighter responded like a chastened schoolboy: “Okay.”

Out they came for the fourth and the sense was strong that the final punch was on its way. And it came quickly: short and sharp and brutal. Only it wasn’t a right hand in the end, but a left. And it wasn’t

held him, the Russian’s head cradled almost tenderly in his arms.

Johnson stood in the ring with his arms raised, haloed in light, transfigured, transformed.

What oN eaRth had We juSt SeeN? tRaNSfoRmation. Something not quite of this earth, but visited upon it: something previously impossible made possible.

That interpretation is plausible or absurd, depending on your world view.

Cus D’Amato, who clearly believed in the potency of the human will to bend the future to its purposes—more specifically, the potentially lethal human agency embodied by the young Mike Tyson—would probably give you a differ-

johnson stood in the ring with his arms raised, haloed in light, transfigured, transformed. thrown by Maskaev, but by Johnson, fifteen seconds into the fourth round—a two-three combination, an overhand right then an upwards carving left hook that Johnson landed with laser precision to the tip of Maskaev’s massive jaw. But I doubt a single person present actually experienced it as a technical accomplishment. It was an event made instead of different stuff than training or mechanics, physical strength or mental calculation.

It was something Johnson had created, forging it with brute will power out of literally nothing.

Bang-bang. The bulletproof Russian was down. He bounced up quickly, furious. He was still Oleg Maskaev, after all.

But Kirk Johnson had become someone else. And that person stepped in and finished Maskaev, backing him up to the ropes, swarming him. Maskaev undone: unconscious first, then blown through the ring ropes, just like his victim Hasim Rahman those short months before.

Maskaev crashed down through the collapsing press tables, papers flying, computer monitors toppling, only saved from hitting the concrete f loor by a photographer who caught Maskaev and

ent answer in this regard than American philosopher Alex Rosenberg, whose new book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, is surprisingly germane to the discussion of what exactly is being experienced in watching sports and what it means to identify yourself as a sports fan. Rosenberg’s book isn’t only the latest title in a growing canon of new atheist writing, it’s the culmination of that canon, in that he blows past the hedging of previous atheist tracts and states the matter plainly: the universe is completely and unapologetically material. Everything is matter, fermions and bosons specifically, and every event preceding or following us is explained and governed by the inviolable laws of physics in a way that is both causally closed and causally complete. Rosenberg’s universe, in other words, is wholly deterministic. Reality is nothing more or less than physics at work in all its glory. And physics just is. As a predetermined set of phenomena, past and present, none of what any of us are doing, or anything we experience, has any purpose or meaning. And given that, can there be free will or individual agency?

“Not a chance!” writes Rosenberg.

Sports fans, religious or otherwise, might sense a difficulty in the brilliantly closed circle of this world view.

Is it coherent? It is indeed. Rational?

Supremely, I’d say. Does it, however, accommodate any of the fundamental particles of fan experience? Here we might have some problems. In a determinist universe, it’s not only free will that is a fanciful illusion. So too is desire, inspiration, even anxiety at the possibility of a bad outcome. Each of these is mere fancy in a world where matters are predetermined. Indeed, why talk at all of what is “possible” and “impossible” when the future is set? We are the billiard balls and the big bang was the break. What is possible this nanosecond is merely what was made possible the nanosecond before. Every particle, and so ultimately every planet and every person, moves in lockstep along this causal chain.

There’s no swerving from the path much less any chance of creating new possibilities that didn’t exist previously. To argue otherwise, to believe that the future can in any way be affected by our conscious choices in the moment, is an essentially religious habit of mind, as Rosenberg takes pains to point out. It’s a world view dependent on nonmaterial particles, those which cannot be found in the physical realm, a crucial one of which, familiar to sports fans, would be hope.

Not all high-profile atheists measure up to this rigorous materialist standard, it has to be said. Christopher Hitchens clung to the idea of personal morality, if not absolute then relative. He even argued for the “moral necessity” of atheism. Hitchens was passionate in his views, another state of mind familiar to sports fans. But that he would think one set of ideas is better than any other, and that he would be gripped with the conviction that minds could be changed through persuasion, reveals a lingering faith in agency, reason and the possibility of change. Hitchens was never a pure enough atheist to understand what Rosenberg exhorts us to understand: that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that morality and sacred codes are a fiction, and that there are no moments beyond.

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I waSN’t alwayS a SPoRtS faN. I Recall speaking up once when a junior high gym teacher berated our class for not signing up for intramural sports teams. I said: “Well, you know, not all kids are into sports. Some of us are more into academics.” That teacher carried a grudge that lasted the rest of my middle school years.

“I’m going to give some team news now,” he’d say, glowering at me. “Feel free not to listen if you’re more into academics.”

Nevertheless, arriving at Queen’s business school some ten years later, I suddenly discovered sports. The New York Giants, no less, who play out of Rutherford, New Jersey. They had a blue collar reputation, and a blood and guts approach to the game. They were defined at the time by a linebacker named Lawrence Taylor, 6’ 3” and 245 pounds, who anchored a defense known as the Big Blue Wrecking Crew. Taylor was known for a cocaine problem and a frightening gameday intensity that allowed him to shred through offensive linemen en route to tearing the opposing quarterback’s head off.

Queen’s B-school circa 1986 didn’t have much of a Lawrence Taylor vibe. It was the era of button-downs and power ties, ribbon suspenders and tassel loafers.

And of course business students, especially finance students, were supposed to be too busy for sports anyway. But something had happened to me, arriving at Queen’s.

I’d realized I didn’t want to be there. And I was acting out my disaffection. I was skipping classes, reading more fiction than finance. I was living way north of Princess Avenue (Kingston code for “wrong side of the tracks”), a detail about which I grew lopsidedly proud as time went by.

And that pride illustrates the relative game I was playing. Somehow out of step with the culture of B-school, I was opting to define myself contra B-school. But by revealing a keen interest in what other students thought about me, either way, the contrarian strategy was no different than being a copycat.

The decision to suddenly start caring about sports, I now understand, came about in exactly the same way.

Only in spor ts there was an added catalyst: a new roommate. Like me, he was a B-school student just slightly 26

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out of step. But unlike me, at least in my mind, he carried this off with great élan. Against the pretensions of the era, he advanced an everyman persona on all fronts. He wasn’t going into finance (despite being a near-savant in math). He wanted a job in sales. He liked Creedence Clearwater Revival, dive bars, bourbon, and poker, which (believe it or not) was seriously infra dig in the mid-eighties. He was also, crucially, an NFL fan.

The truth doesn’t always flatter on the topic of desire. To think that we catch

down the field twenty yards, including future Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott.

How could any of these events have mattered to me? My thirteen-year-old self would have said they simply didn’t.

My twenty-three-year-old self, I now realize, had started to see the benefits of allowing yourself to care. By submitting to mimetic effects—specifically, my absorption into a communion of likeminded fans, bonded by these arbitrary cares—I had freed myself from the straight jacket of determinism that must otherwise

the ritual itself fails as it become a transaction. our interest in sports like we might a common virus seems somehow demeaning.

But it’s quintessentially human. And here we’re in debt to the thinking of French philosopher and historian Rene Girard, a retired Stanford professor (now one of the forty “immortals” who make up the elite L’ Académie francaise), who argues that all non-instinctual desire is mimetic, or triangular. There is a subject (ourselves) and an object. But there is also a model, whose own interest in the object is what ignites the flame of our desire. In his seminal book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard lays out how all the great novelists seem to have understood this dynamic: Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky. None of those writers wrote much about sports, as far as I’m aware.

But the same principles apply.

My roommate liked the Chicago Bears, as I recall, whose awe-inspiring team had stomped their way to winning Super Bowl XX the year before. But in the ’85/’86 season, the New York Giants were the story. And what a season they had. Taylor was sacking everything in sight. Tight end Mark Bavaro was proving himself to be the toughest man on the planet, at one point playing half a game with a broken jaw. I remember a game late in the season when Bavaro caught a pass from quarterback Phil Sims, then dragged seven San Francisco defenders

have rationally prevailed. The sports fan embraces irrationality. I wouldn’t have phrased it that way at the time, but I think even then I understood I was at a moment in my life when I was singularly disinclined to be rational.

aS I waS mImetIcally abSoRbed INto that society of fans, I was assimilated into an essentially religious habit of mind that does not accept that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that sacred codes are a fiction and that there are no moments beyond. Fans screaming in their living rooms all over North America were not accepting a determined future.

They were living instead in a universe shaped by non-material particles that, while undetectable in even the Large Hadron Collider, nevertheless responded to the force of human will. Events on those distant gridirons did indeed matter to me, they had meaning, but only because the guy who’d been raised a sports atheist had become a believer and had in the process, unconsciously or otherwise, accepted the utility of hope. And so I gathered weekly with fellow members of that society, ritually restating each Sunday morning of the season that we did indeed believe. I gathered with others around that flickering flame of theoretical hope—Will Simms complete the pass? Will Bavaro score a

touchdown?—and so was wordlessly reassured that broader hopes in my life might have some grounding. Specifically, that business school might not be the end of my story.

French sociologist Emile Durkeim wrote: “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which makes its unity and its personality.

Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.”

He was talking about the religious impulse. But I read that now and find mysel f t hi nk i ng about a ser ies of Sundays in 1986, all leading up to one really big game.

Of cOuRSe, SuPeR BOwl XXI waS a GReat game: we won! We, because I’d absorbed the Giants’ desire to win and it was now my own. I was one of them. And what drama. We trailed the Denver Broncos 10-9 at the half but came storming back.

There was a fake punt and a quarterback sneak. There were touchdowns for Bavaro, Joe Morris, Ottis Anderson and Phil McConkey. Simms came through big time, throwing for thirty second half points and completing eighty-eight percent of his passes (a Super Bowl record that stands to this day). I distinctly remember the feeling afterwards: it was as if order had been restored. As if in the frenzy of the contest there had lingered (all season and in that final game) a profound threat of the future going wrong. With John Elway’s Broncos vanquished—players literally lying on the turf, like union soldiers on the slopes of Bunker Hill—it felt both deliciously good and incredibly right. All Giants fans would have been joined in that moment.

Years later, Bill Parcells described the locker room feeling of that win in sacramental terms: “It’s like a blood transfer.

You get theirs and they get yours.” The metaphor is intense, but perfectly apt.

Sports are indeed a matter of the blood, but in two distinct ways. There’s the

blood of the fans and the team, mingled through identification. Then there’s the blood of the opponent, which must first be spilled before the mingling can deliver its communal benefit.

Girard is helpful here again as he points us towards an anthropological truth: that in virtually every ancient culture of which we’re aware, communities maintained internal harmony through the use of sacrificial rituals. Turning on one victim united everyone else and therefore served to keep the peace. Of course, we cringe to think about that today because we understand scapegoats to have been innocent of any real crime.

Sacrifice offends our modern sense of individual freedom and equality, and concern for victims has arguably become the single moral certainty of our day.

But if we can’t use sacrifice and we don’t replace it with something, how will the blood of the community be mingled? How will we keep the peace? How will chaos be prevented? Girard argues that chaos isn’t being prevented, or not very well. History is getting more violent and conflicts more intractable around the world, in part because the efficacy of those archaic sacr if icial r it uals has been destroyed. Girard doesn’t want to re-invoke them. But others have certainly considered it. Hobbes, Nietzsche and Machiavelli each worried in their own way that the modernizing mind, while unleashing a sense of individual equality and freedom, also rendered ancient peace-keeping mechanisms ( like sacr i f ice) inef fect ive. T hese thinkers believed that modern concern for victims was the legacy of JudeoChristian narratives, something Girard agrees with. But unlike Girard, they also harboured ideas for a man-made solution to the problem of this inheritance. Hobbes’ absolutist monarchy, Nietzsche’s assertive superman, and Machiavelli’s bid to return to paganism shared a common root in this regard: they were bids to restrain the evolving modern mind, to keep its chaotic ideas about individual freedom and equality somehow in check, in order that the community might be more accepting of the rituals required to bind it.

That concept—the restraint of something modern in us which carries the seeds of chaos—has a name in mythology: the katechon. The Egyptian god Horus was called katechon drakonta, the binder of the dragon, an image that also shows up in the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible. A katechon is, in essence, a mechanism that deploys episodic violence to contain the chaos that might result if ritual were lost entirely.

A katechon, in this analysis, replaces sacrifice. The Spanish Inquisition was a katechon, as Dostoevsky discloses in The Grand Inquisitor, showing a church turned aside from a (politically anarchic) Christian message of individual freedom and equality, embracing instead a realpolitik of manipulation and control. The Roman Empire, Charles the Great, the twenty-first century War on Terror… each of these have had a katechonic function, cathartic violence deployed (in cycles of increasing rapidity and seeming pointlessness) with the idea that peace might somehow be restored despite our modern tendency to turn aside from the rituals that previously sustained it.

This returns us to Bill Parcells’ blood transfer, which can’t complete itself without the spilled blood of the enemy. It will seem blasphemous to many to suggest that sports offers a secularized katechon to fans, serving up some kind of Sacrifice 3.0., but I think it does. We vilify the enemy in sports, something outsiders often observe as they watch fans watching the action. Chelsea fans scream abuse at Wayne Rooney just as MMA fans will know the feeling of hating a man who is in the process of pounding your favourite fighter’s face into a bloody pulp. That hate is not metaphoric. It’s real in the moment. It’s real and, more to the point, it’s permissible.

As Humber College philosophy professor and Girard scholar Kent Enns pointed out to me in an email: “Sports is one of the few domains where it is understood as intrinsically good to triumph over opponents/rivals…One need only imagine a (literary) author proclaiming himself to be ‘the best’ to glimpse the flip side of a culture that is simultaneously skeptical of excellence and (over-)achieving and WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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which views the embrace of victims as one of the defining features of its morality.”

We still need our sacrifices, in other words, but we need them subtle. And in that, we reveal the surviving religious impulse. Girard writes: “Play has a religious origin, to be sure, insofar as it reproduces certain aspects of the sacrificial crisis.

The arbitrary nature of the prize makes it clear that the contest has no other objective than itself, but this contest is regulated in such a manner that, in principle at least, it can never degenerate into a brutal fight to the finish.”

That sense of peace I felt after the Giants win in 1986 wasn’t permanent. My life hasn’t been, since then, governed by a sense of conflict resolved, balance restored, my actions and devotions aligned in perfection and perpetuity with a central purpose or community. But it was for a moment, perhaps even a day.

Life was perfectly stable for as long as the sacrificial spell of the event lasted, until the rightness of my (our) victory was dispelled and made arbitrary again by the return of the world and my modern sense of self, free to desire, to envy, to dispute and escalate, to will myself into my own individually chosen chaos.

The RITual dePeNdS oN SecReT codeS. aNd codes are always cracked. The Grand Inquisitor eventually lost his grip.

Hobbes’ absolutist power was deployed in variations all over the world. But it’s a hard sell, lately, without brutal force, cracking in places we never thought it would, crowds of socially-networked free individuals marching through the world’s Tahrir Squares, a sense of justice and concern for victims flowering and spreading like Moon Vine and Morning Glory.

Sports, insofar as they depend on belief, will face oddly similar pressures. Not from the new atheists, or at least I doubt it. The determinist universe challenges our fascination, mocking human agency, aspiration and hope. But it’s so technical a construct—and quantum physics is adequately understood by exactly how many of us?—that sports fans will continue to live as if human will and autonomy do exist, no matter what the brightest and largest pulsing brains among us try 28

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to sell in books billed with all due humility as our “Guides to Reality.”

For some sports, instead, it will be that concern for victims that threatens the ritual. Brain scans will tell us that football and hockey players and boxers (and potentially MMA fighters) are dying from brain damage later in life, and I think most fans will immediately agree that the ritual is not as important as the individual. Legislation will change these sports. Meanwhile, all sports will continue to be decoded and de-ritualized by commerce. I almost hate to write that, so easily is it mistaken for the agenda of Naomi Klein, Kalle Lasn and Occupy.

Corporations are not the guilty parties here, in my analysis. We’re all far more culpable than a Voltarian reading of consumerism allows. We all partake, through our own mimetic desires, and in doing so, we hold out our wrists for the cuffs those nasty corporations would snap into place. The more crucial undoing of sports by this means will be de-sacralization. If sports were ever sacred, ever able to mingle our blood with others, those powers will be undone by our uncanny current-day ability to turn any locus of human attention into a marketplace. You can’t have money lenders in temples.

They tend to dissipate the sense of deeper meaning, of joined purpose, that ineffable (and religious) air of common spirit.

Phil Simms sensed that when presented with the new Disney campaign in 1987. He declined at first, remembering his resistance later: “That was messing with the football gods, the karma of the game.” But when the Giants won, the cameras were waiting. Simms said the words, his pretend-enthusiasm already flagging: “I’m going to Disney World!”

Everybody knew he wasn’t, which was no problem at all for Disney. But it was for sports fans, as the game was desacralized one increment further. Don’t blame Phil Simms. The world was moving around him. Go to a hockey game now and you can hardly see the ice surface for the thicket of sales messages. I remember interviewing Chelsea football fans in a pub off Kings Road in London in 2005. They lamented the passage of the game from tribal to commercial (I was

evidence of the commercial, we all understood—a Chelsea fan from half a world away). At the same time, one fellow noted, “… in the old days the stands were full of garbage and piss.” Plus, they could all agree, being bought by a Russian oligarch (no deep West London family connections there) was about to give them the first title they’d seen in fifty years.

What was unsaid, of course, is that the spectator endlessly lambasted from all sides with player salaries and trading prices, team payrolls and television viewership statistics, cannot help but come to interpret the game in easier and more material terms than previously. The blood transfers and moments beyond quietly fade. The ritual itself fails as it becomes a transaction. And when the community understands itself to be merely a customer, the jarring outcome may still produce intensely mimetic effects, but these won’t be positive.

The blood will not be mingled. And in those moments we might well expect to see more generalized violence going forward, to see seemingly inexplicable bursts of all against all. Mailboxes through department store windows. Police cars burning outside the Vancouver Post Office.

In 2003, I went to Memphis to see Tonya Harding’s first professional fight.

She stepped into the ring with Samantha “Booker” Browning, top fight on an undercard opening for Mike Tyson’s last win. A cheap transaction, that one. No ritual in it. But, in a way, I was glad to be there, to have the bookend experience to the one I’d had in the Mohegan Sun casino three years prior. There were no believers in the Memphis Pyramid. We hardly blinked when Harding got her ass handed to her by the gal from Mantachie, Mississippi, who looked like she could handle herself well enough in fights that didn’t involve rings and gloves. Afterwards, Harding stood in the hallway talking to the smirking members of the press corps, and her thin lips trembled with rage and indignation. She never believed the story would turn out any differently. Transformation had never crossed her mind or ours.

I visited with my ex-roomie from Queen’s that same trip to Memphis.

He’d landed in the South, as I suspect he

always wanted. He was perfecting a good ol’ boy routine and a mean technique for slow cooked brisket. We reminisced a bit, not overly. But we did touch on Super Bowl XXI. My ex-roomie remembered an interesting detail. He recalled how after Mark Bavaro’s touchdown, the tight end touched his knee to the end zone in a moment of prayer. The memory did not please my ex-roommate who said: “I never liked him after that.”

My admiration remains undimmed, however, as I think of that knee touch as something that all fans do internally anyway, whether they turn their face skyward to a god whose name we’ve heard or to some trace element left in the universe that still grips us, those non-material particles.

A fter B-school, I fell out with the NFL and the New York Giants. I missed entirely that the Giants won Super Bowl XLII in 2008 in a thriller that crushed Patriots fans, whose team would have finished the season an unprecedented 19-0 if they’d won the trophy. The game revolved around what surely would have

also noted, of course, that Tebow was a Bronco, that long ago foe whose defeat had once seemed so righteous and proper and personal.

The playoffs un-folded. Super Bowl XLVI rose on the horizon. The field winnowed out to two teams: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.

Once upon a time there would have been no question where to go watch with the hardcore, on-the-ground fans. But by 2012, I hadn’t been a New York Giants fan in twenty-five years.

So I went to Boston, where the fans pack in around the Gardens on Pats game days, into bars like McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beer Works and Hurricane O’Reilly’s. I went to The Four’s, once rated Best Sports Bar in America by Sports Illustrated, where the history of Boston professional sports hangs on the walls and ceilings. Photographs and rowing shells, and jerseys of course, those talismans of careers gone by: Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, Cam Neely. Before the game there was

been a “moment beyond” for those watching live at the time: the so-called Helmet Catch by reserve wide receiver David Tyree. Down 14-10 with just over a minute remaining, quarterback Eli Manning slipped three tackles before spotting Tyree up the middle. The pass was high, but Tyree climbed up and snagged it with one hand, pressing the ball to his helmet as he crashed to the turf. The drive was alive and New York went on to win 17-14 in what was considered an upset.

But this past season, I started watching football again like a lot of other nonactive fans, because an overtly religious Tim Tebow grabbed the headlines for awhile. Tebow took Mark Bavaro’s quiet moment to a whole new media-saturated level, irritating some, thrilling others. To me, he merely served as a reminder of what I think still struggles to be the heart of these games, despite safety concerns and the impingement of the commercial explanation: that act of the human will against what reason tells us the universe is supposed to allow. That we matter. I

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impressive craziness in the streets, a Celtics game just out and the most watched game in American television history about to begin. The police were putting up barricades already that would gate and corral us after the game, down designated streets and away from any area where a large crowd could gather.

I took a seat at The Four’s bar, ordered a burger and beer. I waited for the mimetic effects as they might unfold within me. Would I become a Pats fan, energized by the excitement of the fans around me?

Or would something in my psyche recall 1986 and channel the requirements of that long ago moment?

Neither, as it turned out. Instead, it ended up being the strangest sporting event I think I’ve ever watched.

I was not particularly vested. I was not bonded mimetically either to the desires of those around me or those three hundred and sixty kilometres to the south. But I was more alive to the force of human will than I’d ever been, released in a way by not being mesmerized myself. I could feel the will more purely somehow, for my own hopes not being aroused, my own blood not overly mingled.

You probably know the outcome, so I won’t dwell on recounting it. Only this: as the fourth quarter began, the Patriots ahead 17-15, there was in The Four’s a palpable fear. Quarterback Tom Brady, who will surely go down as one of the great quarterbacks in NFL history, had been here before, leading the Giants in the fourth quarter in Super Bowl XLII. The question hung in the air, in each face turned upwards, reflecting that flickering blue light of the monitors: will history be overturned, or has some rigid pattern in history just now been detected? The room pulsed with the collective will for the future to be different this time than it was those four years prior. But it wasn’t to be.

A turnover, a punt, another punt. And Eli Manning had the ball in his seemingly favourite position: deep in his own half with time running out.

30

CALVATICA I. (The pursed turf blowing bubbles.)

(A broken string of freshwater pearls or molars impacted in a grassy gum.)

(Firm, the female smell on your fingers) , (edible, packed with cool, white roe; the fried flesh a savoury foam).

(It roosts on its byssus of fine, mycelial hair, and scans the rare vapour-trails and glimmers in the dark– ening, and ripens in its socket.)

II. Full of foul mycenean air it squats and rocks in its stoor of blinding business.

Sheep assay it with their yellow teeth, a gassy sump of moolah.

More faux pas than supernova, its gob gapes, a puckered sphincter, a blackened blowhole, toxic stoma.

A toff forever brewing buboes, it slips its anchor, and bowls across the clifftop, rifting out its spores.

–Jen Hadfield

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The Giants won. I felt the moment for them, remembered the feelings I would have felt. But I didn’t cheer. I walked out with the defeated instead, into the cold Boston air. Back across the North End to the Fairmont Battery Wharf where there was a Super Bowl party winding down, women in pearls and men in corporate casual, quietly considering how the future had eluded them. This time.

Manning was giving his interviews, telling people he was off to Disney, as I sat down to a lobster roll at Aragosta. The bartender said, “Yeah, we’re on suicide watch about now.”

I walked down Hanover Street later, taking the air. I heard voices all round

me, strangled and angr y. Someone yelled, an inarticulate garble of rage.

Someone else. And then someone else.

It was real, the air alive with genuine anguish. The voices were joined in the moment.

An hour later, the air had turned.

Quiet descended. Peace and restoration.

I thought of Kirk Johnson in the glittering halo of ring lights, transformed. Boston, in its loss, was transfigured, too. Super Bowl XLVI had passed. The new season had already opened ahead with its new potential for passion, for the mystery of its embedded codes, for hope. There was hope in the smoky Boston air. New hope, from nothing. EB

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ON THE RECORD

By Jonathan Garfinkel

TheaTRe of

WaR

A playwright in violence-rocked Pakistan attempts to remain calm

fRIday NIGhT, The LevI’S SToRe, h-MaRkeT, LahoRe, PakISTaN. I’d tried on five pairs of jeans already. Why I needed five pairs of jeans I wasn’t exactly sure. But the Levi’s Signature Editions were eight bucks a pair and they seemed to fit pretty well. They were also taking my mind off things. I’d been having panic attacks ever since the blast in Karachi. Two days before, a one-tonne bomb went off in the downtown area, killing thirtyfive people.

“Were you terrified?” I asked Samiya Mumtaz, a Pakistani actress I’d been working with the past week. She had immediately become a good friend and a gauge of all things dangerous.

“Not at all,” she said. She had landed in Karachi thirty minutes after the blast. “What was there to be afraid of? I missed it completely. The police were everywhere.”

She could tell that I was more afraid than she was, and I was twelve hundred kilometres away, safe in Lahore. Only later did Samiya mention that her hotel was directly across the street from the attack. She’d discovered this when she arrived at the Pearl Continental and the manager offered her an upgrade to a junior suite.

“But what about the room I reserved?” she said.

“Your room,” said the manager, “no longer exists.”

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“That’s two bombs in ten days, Chris,” I said to Christopher Morris—theatre director, actor and playwright—reminding him of the mosque attack north of Peshawar near Swat.

Chris wrapped his woolen shawl around his face. He’s Irish-Canadian but looked Pashtun with the thick red beard he’d grown for the trip. He said, “Don’t worry, we’ll avoid the mosques.” We were taking all precautions.

“Whatever happens, I don’t want to be tortured,” I said. I had decided a bombing was okay, a kidnapping wasn’t.

Chris listened patiently.

“What the hell are we trying to understand?” I said. “That evil exists? That a few fundamentalist crazies want to kill people so they can live happily in the land of seventy virgins? Where’s the news in that?”

It was November 2010. In the year I traveled through Pakistan on a tourist visa, over five hundred bombs rocked the country, killing more than fifteen hundred people. Only a year before I arrived, the Pakistani Taliban occupied the Swat Valley. Daily drone attacks by the US army were landing in Waziristan.

The porous Afghan-Pakistan border let in god-knows-who, the ISI—the Pakistani CIA—was funding you-know-who, and Osama bin Laden was living comfortably in his Abbottabad compound, smoking shisha and watching porn, if we’re to believe the reports.

I’d come to Pakistan with Chris to write a play about the way the “War on Terror” was affecting families of the military, namely, the Pakistan Army, the Afghan National Army and the Taliban.

We’d already spent a month in Petawawa, Ontario, doing similar interviews with Canadian military wives. Pakistan was a totally different world, and a different set of circumstances. Chris and I were seeking out families of the Taliban. I wasn’t prepared. Hell, I was afraid to just walk down the street.

I was dying for a drink, but of course there aren’t any bars in Pakistan. If we wanted to drink booze, we’d have to get a license, something we were entitled to, thanks to our non-Muslim identities.

Somehow it just didn’t seem worth the bother. Instead I smoked a Gold Leaf 34

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cigarette. On the front of the package a government warning showed a vivid and grotesque cancer of the lips—a jaundiced lip blossoming into tumour. It was disconcerting but also reassuring. To die of cancer. How utterly and terribly normal.

We drove past a mosque. Past rows of tak-a-tak, brain masala, prepared at the side of the road, with the chop-chop of men and their sharp knives. The sounds and smells of Lahore are confusing, sinister and delicious. I reminded myself that I wanted to be here: the opportunity to see the Pakistan not in the headlines, the Pakistan not-of-the-imagination, was one I didn’t want to pass up.

The problem with Pakistan, I decided, wasn’t that there were bombs going off everywhere. It was the randomness of the blasts, the unexpectedness of the kidnappings that got me.

“Ninety-nine percent of this country is open, beautiful and warm,” Daniel Lak, a former BBC correspondent said to me.

But what about the crazy one percent?

How do you get them out of your head?

How do normal Pakistanis live with the random violence?

The rickshaw driver pulled up outside a shopping plaza. We were to wait for a friend of a friend. I had no idea what he looked like, but he wanted to introduce us to a Pakistani icon: Tariq Amin. A group of men gathered around a blazing trashcan and glared at Chris and I. Who were they with? What did they want? Did they want to welcome us or kill us?

TaRIq amIN waS a welcome SIGhT. he waS with two other men, late thirties, decked out for a Saturday night. We were upstairs in a Mexican restaurant called “Maya.” At the door we were greeted by a Pakistani man in a cowboy hat, tight blue jeans and a bandana around his neck. There was no one else in the restaurant, no tequila, no crooning mariachi, but plenty of salsa and tostadas and enchiladas. There were even fake cacti and Santa Fe art and Mexican desert scenes. And there was Tariq Amin.

“Give me a night with your hair,” he said to me, “and I’ll make you beautiful.”

Tariq Amin—known throughout the country simply as Tariq—is forty-some-

thing, flamboyant, and totally outrageous.

He lives and dies for fashion. Though married with two kids, he is rumoured to be gay—not an unusual dichotomy in Pakistan. Tariq is a celebrated hairdresser, and was in Lahore to conduct auditions for Islamabad Fashion Week 2011.

“They need to be tall, slim and young,” said Tariq, explaining the criteria. “We get so many who come in, five foot eight, five foot nine, and I’m like, ‘Honey, I can make you look fabulous, but I can’t make you six foot one’.” Tariq lit up a cigarette.

From what I could gather, Tariq was Pakistan’s number one fashion icon. But he was clearly more than a fashion connoisseur—he was the guru of all things beautiful. I noted his silver hooped earrings, his black and white Prada buttondown, and his black eyebrows that a Time magazine reporter once described as “two hissing cats.”

Tariq first gained renown thanks to the hair salon he opened in Islamabad (he had originally trained in hotel management in Boca Raton, but when he returned to Pakistan he learned that he stood to make more cutting hair than working in a hotel). His salons are famous all over Pakistan, and amongst foreigners.

At a hundred bucks a pop, Tariq coiffs thecrème de la crème of the country. Soand-so of ABC news claimed she couldn’t wait to get back to Pakistan so Tariq could “spend some time with my hair.” Even though he’s a fashion icon and celebrity— appearing in some of the hippest and more controversial videos of the contemporary Pakistan music scene, including scenes of bondage and flogging—Tariq still cuts hair every day, from 10 to 6, in his Islamabad salon.

“It’s what I’m passionate about,” he said. “Cutting hair isn’t just about a hair cut. It’s about making people feel good about themselves. I love to make people feel good.”

We ordered a round of nachos and sodas. I asked him about the bomb in Karachi, and he looked at me like I’d just ruined the party. “So there was a bomb in Karachi,” he said. “So what? Let’s talk about things that are positive. Fashion is positive. Hair is positive. It’s a requirement, the way you require a dentist or

someone to fix your eyes. People need to look good.”

I could tell my line of questioning was making everyone uneasy. Fortunately Chris changed the subject.

“Do you know any good parties in Lahore?” he asked.

Tariq took the bait. “Honey, there are five thousand parties happening right now in this city. You tell me what you want, we get it.” He explained the party network, which took place mostly in people’s houses. It involved anything and everything. “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll baby. Whatever you want, you can get it right here in Lahore.” He is the Mullah of Partying, the Maestro of Good Times.

Tariq told us stories from life in the fashion industry; drug-addled gatherings full of people partying the night before Ramadan, trying to cram in as much coke and booze before the fasting began. In his telling, I could see that he thrived on the contradictions of his country, and the contradictions in himself. I wasn’t quite as comfortable.

“But what about the extremists?” I asked. “Aren’t there threats against you?”

I’d heard rumours of a fatwa on his head.

He was annoyed by my questions.

“I’m trying to be positive and think about the bigger picture and not the repercussions of a small minority group.

If people want to kill me, let them kill me.

Tariq Amin can’t be a hypocrite.” He lit up a cigarette and stroked his goatee. “He can only make you beautiful.”

The next morning Chris and I packed up for Islamabad. On our way to the bus we stopped at Hotel One; auditions for Islamabad Fashion Week. Outside the hotel, the military checked our bags for possible explosives—Eid was approaching and security was particularly intense. Inside, a poster by the front door read, “Tariq Amin wants you for Islamabad Fashion Week.” A dozen or so twenty-something men in chic designs, all by local designers, waited their turn to be called. Tariq and two other fashion experts sat at a panel, á la American Idol, waiting for the men to strut their stuff.

Tariq barked out orders: “Strut, strut!” “Show me your six-pack!” “That’s it, honey, you’re beautiful!”

I asked one of the models what makes Tariq special.

CAN.ICONS the beaVeR The Canadian beaver is famous for its mighty dams, its once-coveted fur, and its flat, paddle-shaped tail (used to signal danger by slapping the surface of the water).

The beaver is Canada’s official national animal. Its pelts were once a form of currency, and their trade drove the early exploration of the country. The animal’s hard work, strength, peacefulness, and fortitude in a cold climate are often associated with the Canadian people. The beaver is also compared to the iconic Canadian lumberjack.

Beavers build their dams across streams and in lakes. The animal’s lodge is located in the resulting pond, its entrance is underwater but inside it’s warm and dry above the water line. The largest known beaver dam, located in northern Alberta, is visible from space.

Once near-extinct in North America, beaver populations have rebounded and they now compete with humans for habitat. At the same time, beaver dams have become highly valued as part of a cost-effective strategy to maintain healthy river systems and watersheds, thereby providing incalculable benefits to fishing, lumber, and other natural resource-based industries.

A Canadian Senator recently launched a campaign to oust the industrious rodent from its seat of national honour and replace it with the polar bear. She complained that some beavers had been a nuisance at her cottage. Greenpeace expressed skepticism.

And The Beaver, one of Canada’s oldest magazines, re-christened itself Canada’s History in 2010. The publishers were concerned because the word had become slang for female genitalia, and their emails were being blocked by spam filters.

– Clive Holden

“He understands what it takes,” said the eighteen-year-old, looking nervously at his shoes.

“And what does it take?” I asked.

“To be tall, to be thin,” said the young man. “And to have a sense of inner faith.”

There were no tourists, no terrorists, at least not beside us. But there were condemnations coming in on the news: Pakistan Harbouring Evil. Pakistan Not Doing its Job. Drone Attack Kills Fourteen in Waziristan. A rickshaw picked us up and we sped forward into another world.

ChRIS aNd I weRe waItING foR a RICkShaw by Mall Road when a stranger grabbed my arm.

“Please,” said the stranger. I realized he was missing an arm. His breath smelled like spoiled meat. “Tell the world we’re not all crazy terrorists. We don’t want to blow everything up. Tell the West we want to live.”

“waR makeS PeoPle CloSeR to God.” Esther, Sampson and Sharon Sarmas were gathered in their living room beneath a wall of photographs depicting Esther’s husband, Major Rauf Sarmas, killed in the line of fire by a Taliban RPG in Waziristan in 2007. Major Sarmas WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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was the first Christian “Shaheed” (martyr) in the Pakistani army. He had been unarmed, helping his fallen mates into ambulances, when the RPG fell. A large piece of shrapnel hit him in the back and the head; he died of a brain hemorrhage.

The room was crammed with photos of the Major. In each photograph he was wearing his military uniform. He had a thick black moustache, closely shaved face, handsome dark hair and fierce eyes.

A small plaque on the coffee table read, “Eighty-three died for the love of Pakistan.”

In another corner, a sticker: “Jesus Protects this House.” A letter from the army, in both English and Urdu, praised the Major and his devotion to Allah—after all, he was a Shaheed, even if he was also Pentecostal.

“I go to school not knowing if I’ll come home alive,” said the daughter Sharon, talking about the violence that had penetrated the once peaceful Lahore. “That’s just the way it is. One gets used to these things.” Sharon was seventeen, serious, and had plans to be a dentist. She spoke evenly, without affect: you expected sorrow but instead you got a smile and a plate of gingerbread cookies. “Would you like some more chai?”

“It was God’s will,” said Esther, mother and widow, talking about Major Sarmas’ death. “My husband saved sixty people. He was told by headquarters, leave your post, run and save your life. But he said, ‘I will not leave my men. I will not abandon them’.” When Esther smiled it was like make-up, a new face. “Jesus took my husband at the moment he was supposed to be taken. I am lucky my husband died in this way.”

Esther recounted the story of how her husband was killed. She showed no signs of remorse, sadness or fear. The children were particularly level-headed and well-adjusted. The moment was bizarre and fascinating: a life insulated from fear through faith.

A few days previously Chris and I had traveled to a small village south of Lahore to listen to the stories of women who’d lost husbands or sons in battle. The last image of that trip was a ninety-two-year-old grandmother weeping by the shrine of her grandson, smearing the dirt of the grave on her wrinkled face. The Sarmas’ response 36

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was completely different, and something I wasn’t altogether comfortable with. But who was I to say how people should respond to a loved one’s violent death?

Does it matter how we find solace? Maybe the rules are different in a war zone.

Sampson, the eldest, said, “The main point is my father was the first person in Pakistan history to be a Christian martyr.”

“Jesus Christ died for the whole of humanity,” said Esther, smiling again.

“My husband died for his country. It was a martyrdom, big sacrifice. My husband knew he was going to die. He prepared us for it. Every time he left he said, ‘I might not come back.’ God took my husband’s life. It was his wish to die.”

We ate buns and biscuits, drank milky tea. The morning sun warmed the room.

“All sickness is a result of sin,” Esther told me. “If you cast away your sins, then you will be healed.” I’d told her I couldn’t eat her sugar cookies because I’m diabetic. So all I needed to do was believe in Jesus to save thousands of dollars in medical expenses?

My f riend Samiya Mumtaz, the actress, asked Esther, “Aren’t you angry with those who killed your husband?”

Esther said, “I’m not angry at anyone. My husband wanted to die for his country.” “ W hat about Musharraf ?” asked Chris. In 2007, before then-President Pervez Musharraf had officially decided Waziristan was in big trouble, he’d sent soldiers like Major Sarmas to the front lines without ammunition.

“How can I blame Musharraf?” said Esther. “It was God’s will.”

“But surely someone made a decision to send him to the front lines,” I said, taking my chances on a cookie.

Nobody said anything. Uncomfortable looks were exchanged. Finally Sharon spoke up.

“One day we were interviewed on Pakistan national radio. The announcer gave a summary of my father’s life. It turns out my father had volunteered to go to Waziristan. We didn’t know. His tour of duty had ended but he asked to stay on.”

Esther said, “He wanted to be a hero.

He loved the army. Maybe more than his family.”

Sampson told us a recurring dream: he shoots the shit out of the enemy and their bullets never hit him. In his dreams he is strong, immortal, huge. In reality he’s been an expert marksman since the age of nine.

“Who is the enemy in your dreams?” I asked, half-expecting him to say it was the men who killed his father. But he didn’t. He said, “Anyone who attacks my country.”

Samspon confessed that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the infantry.

“I want to be a warrior,” he said. “I want to defend my country.”

His mother shifted in her seat.

When we asked Esther how she felt about her son following in his father’s footsteps, she shrugged her shoulders.

She was resigned to it. “If it’s God’s will, then he will fight.”

Samiya, a mother of two, was incredulous. “Really? You’d let him fight?”

“I cannot stop him.”

“Of course you can,” said Samiya.

“You’re his mother.”

“If God wants him to fight, he will fight.”

Sampson leaned forward. “The point is we cannot stop these people from killing. We must fight back. I must defend my country.”

“War is unavoidable,” said Esther.

Like Samiya, I had trouble believing Esther would let her son join the army, or that she wouldn’t at least be tormented with worry. I imagined her alone in bed, unable to sleep at night, her son traversing the same dangerous border regions as her late husband. How could she endure it? And why endure it at all when she could say, Enough. Or could she? Maybe Esther was right. Maybe war is unavoidable. We only have to give it some kind of meaning; otherwise we’ll go crazy.

Esther admitted she didn’t like that her husband had joined the army. Twenty years ago she asked him to quit so they could move to America. But Major Sarmas didn’t want to. And now Esther was forced to return to the same refrain: He died for his country. He died for Jesus. He was a hero. Maybe she’d said it so many times she had finally come around to believing it. Sharon, the soon-to-be dentist, brought out more cookies.

Later, Sampson pulled out his tablas

and played a song. He sang it in Urdu, over and over again. Esther explained that her husband wrote this psalm and would sing it for hours at a time on his harmonium, or with no accompaniment, only the wind, as his fellow soldiers recounted him doing for three hours straight the evening before he died. I asked Esther if it wasn’t incredibly hard when the Major died.

“My relatives and me were crying. I cried because I missed him being with me. But my children were very strong, they did not cry. My son was saying, ‘Why do you cry? We don’t cry.’ So I stopped.”

Sampson continued to sing: Jesus will watch over me Jesus will take care of me He will hold me when I fall….

EF—A ChIld’S NARRAtIvE: It was decided to train EF as a suicide bomber. He was reluctant. EF received detailed training. This training lasted approximately one month, following which he was taken to the location where he was supposed to execute this task.

He reached the location a day before the act was to be carried out. EF was equipped with a gun in his right pocket and a hand grenade in his left. The jacket was to be blown up by him—apparently this time there was no remote control, which is usually with the “handler.” His colleague dropped him off at the mosque. EF stated that he was fearful at the time. EF stated that he was willing to execute this until a night before the act, when he had a nightmare: if he were to carry out this mission he would burn in the fires of hell.

The next day he felt very nervous upon reaching the mosque. EF stated that he went into the mosque and noticed the guard was staring at him. EF watched the guard leave. EF stated that he was unable to either shoot the guard or any other person who approached. The instructions were to throw the grenade to the left. When people rush to the opposite side of the grenade blast, then he could throw himself in that crowd and blow himself up.

Standing at the entrance to the mosque, EF was plagued with more doubts. He did not feel it was right to execute so many people, and wondered about the teaching

Student art from Sabaoon School, Pakistan

that he would go to heaven and receive beautiful virgins. EF was transfixed on that spot, no doubt looking strange.

During this time, the guard had already alerted the local police who came and arrested him. People who had gathered at the mosque for prayer started to beat up EF. In the scrum, EF remembers feeling ashamed and embarrassed. He states that he did not feel the need for revenge. He felt he deserved to be reprimanded for considering carrying out this act.

At Sabaoon, EF has adjusted very well and participated in his academic and vocational curriculum with zeal. He feels that he is in heaven now. Next year EF will be sent to a boarding college.

EF is seventeen years old.

dR. FERIhA PERAChA mAy bE SmAll ANd delicate, but she’s a forceful presence. Her eyes blinked rapidly as she fired through various child narratives like EF’s, all of them interviews compiled by her and her mental health team. “This boy is amazing,” Dr. Peracha said, pointing to her computer. “He was trained to put on a suicide bomb jacket and walk in front of a militant, so if he were in danger he’d blow himself up. The army brought him in. Do you see the way he uses red in everything? Look at that house!”

Chris, Samiya and I were in Dr. Peracha’s house in Lahore, looking at paintings created by the boys from Sabaoon school. The paintings were stunning, disturbing and heart-breaking. They were part of the children’s art therapy.

“You have to understand,” Dr. Peracha said. “This is not a religious issue. It is about wanting a better life. Paradise.

Who can blame them? They come from such poor families.”

Dr. Peracha is a psychologist on a dangerous, one-of-a-kind mission: she runs the Sabaoon school in Swat.

Sabaoon was created by the Pakistan National Army following the takeover of Swat Valley from the Taliban in 2009. The idea was to rehabilitate boys between the ages of ten and eighteen who had been abducted by the Taliban (families were given the choice—hand over your sons or one hundred thousand rupees, an amount no one had). The majority of the children at Sabaoon were suicide bombers who were either captured or surrendered before blowing themselves up.

The school started when the army apprehended a number of child militants.

A general in command at that time, known to Dr. Peracha from the relief work during the earthquake in Kashmir, requested that Dr. Peracha interview and profile the first twelve child militants they’d apprehended from the camps of the Taliban.

“For me it was something I could not say no to,” she said. “I was curious and it was also something that bothered me a lot: how can children get involved in militancy? Of course I was afraid to do this, too. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous?” I asked.

“Of course it was dangerous,” she said, recalling the first time she met the kids. “Throughout the journey, I kept thinking, they’re militants! But as soon as I met them they were just children.

They were so vulnerable.”

She showed us photographs of bunk beds tucked in with baby blue sheets, paintings by the students as part of their art therapy, and the beautiful surroundings of the school.

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“I take them into the mountains and show them how beautiful their country is.

I try to teach them that this is their paradise, that paradise isn’t somewhere they go to when they die.”

It’s a major point for Dr. Peracha and a core part of the rehabilitation therapy at Sabaoon school: a humanistic teaching of Islam. “ T he kids, they come here, and they don’t understand anything about the religion. So I teach them what jihad means—the inner struggle, not some war with America. I say to them, math is your jihad. Family is your jihad. It doesn’t mean you kill people. Nowhere in the Koran does it say that.”

It was hard to take this all in: a modern, humanist Islam taught by a woman to former Taliban child suicide bombers?

“Of course, these boys have such terrible male role models,” she said.

“They need someone like me. I’m like a mother to them.”

I couldn’t help but notice Dr. Peracha shaking when she talked. Hers is a dangerous job and it was no wonder she was on edge. Dr. Mohammad Farooq Khan, a Muslim scholar, psychiatrist and philanthropoist, as well as former vicechancellor of the Swat Islamic University in Mingora, used to teach at Sabaoon. In the summer of 2010 he was shot to death in his office by Pakistani Taliban. A wellknown and highly respected voice of the moderates, Dr. Farooq Khan wrote articles and books that denounced suicide bombing as well as the Taliban. Dr. Peracha’s family was rightfully concerned for her safety.

But, she told us, she can’t stop with her mission. She feels an incredible obligation to the children. By the time I’d met her in 2010, several dozen children had already come and gone through the school (and since the time of our initial i nt e r v iew, clo s e t o t wo hu nd r e d boys have attended Sabaoon; in May 2012 the school will be transferring to a smaller venue with the remaining child militants of the Swat area).

A nd while the therapy was intense, involving a re-learning of the tenets of Islam, as well as sports and art therapy, the larger problem has been how to 38

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reintegrate the children back into their communities. Once they expel the v iol e nc e — i f i nde e d t he y c a n do that—then what? How do the children not get sucked back into the hands of the militants? How can one school reform a region, a country, compel it to leave violence behind? The rings under Dr. Peracha’s eyes said it all. If the militants didn’t get her, the stress would.

Dr. Peracha got up from her desk and paced the room. She was revved up, ada m a nt t hat we u nder st a nd t he violence was not a compulsion of religion.

“It’s about going to heaven, a desire for a better life,” she said. “Because they’re so poor, they’re of low socio-economic strata, and they are told if they blow themselves up they’ll go to paradise.

That’s why these kids do this. For the children it’s nothing at all about Islam.

You kill someone and then you go to heaven. The real problem is there’s just nowhere for them to go.”

She argued that the entire situation would be different if there were jobs for the kids. “Make Swat like Bangladesh,” she implored. “Give us a free market, build some factories, put in some industry, give these people something to live for, something to do.”

Listening to Dr Peracha, it seemed hers was the only sane course of action— there was no option but to tackle the violence at its root; starting with the children.

“We’re connected to Swat, all of us,” she said. “These children are the next generation, the ones who will or will not become terrorists. We need to affect that fate.”

Dr. Peracha showed us one boy’s canvas, which stretched the length of the room: black footprints were the ones that led the child into the school and his coloured footprints the ones with which he hoped to use in leaving. A nother boy painted a house without doors or windows. Many of them painted snakes, phallic symbols, Dr. Peracha suggested, though to me it seemed more the shadow, the sinister, the venom trapped in their veins. The most enduring image was how the boys painted the backgrounds. At

first, it appeared to be black rain. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that it was a rain of mortar.

Samiya of fered to massage Dr. Peracha’s shoulders. When the doctor let Samiya touch her, we all breathed, I think, for the first time.

LahoRe, the oLd CIty. SatuRday NIGht. IN a teahouse by the ornate seventeenthcentury Badshahi mosque, Samiya, Chris and I talked about how to help Dr. Peracha. Belief, despite the consequences, or with the hope of better consequences; I supposed this kind of thinking is infectious in this part of the world. It’s only a question of which idea, which conviction, you latch onto.

Two men in the corner of the teahouse, I noticed, in shalwar kameez, were watching us, smoking. One of them chatted incessantly. The other sneered.

Back in the car, Samiya drove us through the city streets. Suddenly she gunned it and we were careening, going faster and faster.

“Those men,” she said, matter of factly.

“They’re following us. They think I’m a prostitute.”

I twisted around in my seat. It was the two men from the teahouse. They were metres behind us in a white sedan, weaving in and out of traffic. I tried to gauge their expressions through the windshield.

Were they laughing or screaming?

I had a sudden memory from earlier that day when we met with an artist who paints prostitutes of the red light district. He said he’d been receiving death threats lately from the extremists. Then he confessed: he had produced a painting so dangerous no one could ever see it.

“Why paint it then?” I asked.

“Because I had to,” he said. And the way he said it, I could see: painting, survival, belief—it’s as natural as breathing.

Samiya coolly navigated our way through the city streets. She sped up, blowing through a traf fic light and veering abruptly onto an onramp. Soon enough, we’d left the ogling men behind, though by then I wasn’t quite sure where we were or how we were going to reach our destination. eB

FETAL POSITION

By c a m e ron c he s ne y

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HART HANSON ON THe SeT Of Bones.

In profIle

How did a guy who wanted to teach college on Vancouver Island end up a giant of American television?

By Curtis Gillespie photo: Dan Sackheim

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The fIfTy oR So buIldINGS oN The SPRawlING Fox Studio lot in Beverly Hills, California, take three primary shapes: the sleek glass and steel of the executive offices in the southeast corner, the giant airport hangarlike sound stages in the middle, and the low-slung two-storey apartment-style production offices along the west edge of the lot. Strolling through this environment is an exercise in compulsory humility. Were you to ever feel insecure about how much money you make, how good-looking you are, or how much clout you have, you would be well-advised to meander elsewhere.

Funky and purposeful technical people criss-cross the avenues and grassy areas.

Tall executives in gorgeous shoes and designer labels strut about exhibiting their minxy locks, toned flesh and flawless teeth (as do their female counterparts). Creativelooking types—writers probably, though they could also be gardeners—loll around dressed in carefully rumpled clothing.

Phalanxes of studly, stubbly assistants wear designer jeans and tight T-shirts.

Even the aging Ecuadorean waiter at the cafeteria exudes the class and rectitude of a Spanish James Mason. We haven’t even come to the stars. Being gifted the sight of Sofia Vergara, in heels and a tight skirt, mounting the short staircase to the Modern Family sound stage is to abruptly have one’s inner Neanderthal made flesh. Your flesh.

Amidst this live catwalk of the rich, hip, and gorgeous, there is one person who appears oblivious to it all. He isn’t gorgeous, doesn’t signal wealth and can’t be bothered to even learn what passes for hip.

He is neither tall nor short. He wears plain glasses that are frequently askew. It is possible he’s modestly hiding rippling abs under a wrinkled and baggy T-shirt—a T-shirt that looks suspiciously like the one he wore the day before—but the available physical evidence suggests otherwise.

And Temperance “Bones” Brennan, the main character of the popular Fox show Bones, wouldn’t need to deploy even the most basic of her forensic skills to conclude that the man either cuts his own hair or pays someone else to create the effect.

Yet when this same man stops to chat, people stop to listen. When this man approaches the cafeteria door, the maitre’d does not direct him to the change room to don a busboy’s uniform, but instead sweeps the door open and greets him 42

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obsequiously. When this man steps into the kitchen of the production office, people do not presume that he is delivering fruit and pastries, but instead try to secure even a second’s conversation.

Why do they do these things?

The obvious answer would be because this man is Hart Hanson, one of television’s most influential and successful creative minds, the Canadian creator of the longrunning TV hit, Bones (a comedic crime procedural about a brainy female forensic anthropologist and an all-action male FBI agent), and its popular spinoff, The Finder (a frothy crimedy about a decorated but lovably damaged Iraq war veteran who can find anything anywhere). But the real reason people do these things, the reason why people appear to be drawn to Hanson and treat him more like a friend than a power player, more one of the guys than the guy, might just be because there are days, many days, when Hanson still can’t quite believe it himself. He laughs often and uniquely, a laugh so infectious it should come with an antidote, and he’s just as likely to stop and talk for ten minutes to the guy who really is delivering the fruit and pastries as he is to the network executive wanting to discuss a sixty-five million dollar season order. People pay attention to Hart Hanson because he’s a powerful show runner, but people fuss over him because he himself can’t understand what the fuss is all about, although if you follow the entertainment news, you will know that due to recent events there almost wasn’t a Hart Hanson to fuss over at all.

On January 3, at approximately nine a.m., the fifty-four-year-old Hanson was riding his motorcycle south along the Pacific Coast Highway between his home in Malibu and the Fox lot. He was in the fast lane, heading inland onto Highway 10 doing sixty miles an hour, when the pickup truck he was following suddenly jammed on its brakes and swerved wildly to the right to avert a car stopped on the left side of the freeway. Hanson had no escape path. The bike went under the car and he went over it, cartwheeling down the pavement like a gymnast on acid. He dislocated both hips and a shoulder, and broke his left ankle. Labelling it a close call is akin to observing that Charlie Sheen likes the occasional night out; Hanson knows it was a brush with death.

Though he is not the brooding, philosophical type, Hanson enjoys those rare moments when he gets some downtime to think or write or read; he got a lot of those moments sitting in the hospital recovering.

As he did so, many in the world of popular entertainment were wondering a few things about Hanson and his creative arc. First, how long will the incredibly popular Bones run (it was recently renewed for an eighth season), and, more to the point, how long might Hanson choose to remain at its helm?

Second, how successful could the Bones spinoff, The Finder, ultimately become? (As recently as early April, no decision had been made on renewing it for a second season.)

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there is the question of what Hanson— who is certainly one of the most successful Canadians in the history of television; to date Fox has supplied him with nearly half a billion dollars to create his shows— might do next, regardless. Yes, he might keep doing Bones. Sure, he could keep doing The Finder. He could even, and might even, do both while also developing new network shows. Or, more tantalizingly, he could turn all or part of his creativity towards the darker, edgier world of cable, a move he acknowledges would satisfy part of his storytelling brain.

“Hart happens to be on network now,” his good friend, the SCTV alum Dave Thomas told me one bright morning in late January, as we sat outside at a Malibu coffee shop. “But Hart is an artist. He’ll be on cable one day. The most exciting part of watching him as a friend is wondering what he’s going to do next.”

I asked Hanson, the next day, if he cared to share his thoughts about his future. “I’m a network asset,” he told me.

“The network owns whatever I produce right now, so it’s kind of a non-issue.”

When, I asked, did this state—his personal “overall” deal at Twentieth Century Fox, that is—expire?

“I don’t necessarily think of it that way,” he replied. “Partially because I really like the actors I’m working with. We’ve created these shows together.” He sat back in his chair. “But since you’re asking, my deal is up in June.”

haRT haNSoN’S offIce, IN buIldING 1 oN The far northwest corner of the Fox lot, is a spacious, low-slung room with brown

carpet, a large desk, and some punchedup couches and chairs. Hanson can usually be found behind his desk, strumming his fingers either on the desk top or lightly over one of the many guitars he keeps behind his desk, as he chats with, primarily, one or all of three people: his executive assistant, Nick Larsen; his manager of creative affairs, Josh Levy; or Stephen Nathan, the executive producer and head writer of Bones, and Hanson’s longtime friend and collaborator.

If any of these three are in Hanson’s office, particularly Nathan (who owns an air of wearied experience so profound you sense that even the appearance of the Devil before him would elicit nothing but a shrug and a “meh”), business may ensue, but it will be preceded, interrupted, and postscripted by stories, jokes, anecdotes, gossip, and expletive-laden debriefings of disparate events. In one such meeting between Nathan and Hanson, ostensibly to talk about how to overcome a plot glitch in one of the final Bones episodes of the season, Nathan (a showbiz vet who launched his career by originating the role of Jesus in the musical Godspell off-Broadway in 1971), first offered up donuts baked by his chef daughter, and then launched into the protracted, highly physical telling of a joke he’d heard from Carl Reiner the night before, about two elderly Jewish gentlemen sitting on a park bench, one of whom keeps trying mightily, and failing, time after time after time, to simply get up, all of which caused Hanson no end of merriment. The punch line (“What’s the rush?”) was funny, but wasn’t nearly as funny as Nathan’s performance of the joke. Upon the conclusion of the joke, the two discussed an episode plot point for approximately fourteen seconds before Nathan stood up, a radical action that seemed to spark in Hanson a note of tender concern for his friend. “…Is this a pajama bot tom day, Stephen?” Hanson turned to me to explain. “On tough writing days, when he’s just got to knuckle down and break a story, Stephen has been known to put on his pajama bottoms. It’s the only way he can work sometimes.”

Nathan shrugged. “It’s not at that point yet.”

StRayS Dogs of the world, anonymous wanderers, moral conundrums, I find them by the road, scavenging milk cartons thrown from the bus: feist pups galled with mange, old hounds, blind and lame, at the end of their utility.

Such I once whispered secrets to and begged to keep and was commanded to lead into the woods to execute and bury.

And my father was not a bad man.

And Saint John Perse wrote, “I had a horse. Who was he?”

Do animals have souls?

My favorite channels the spirit of Veronica Franco.

Veronica Franco or Marie Duplessis.

She is orange, small, and elegant, a golden-lab beagle mix— I do not know why she comes to me.

I do not feed her and she is not my dog.

– Rodney Jones

“That’s a relief,” said Hanson.

Nathan departed. Later that day, I came across him in Building 1—he still had his pants on.

It RemaINS uNdeteRmINed If GyPSy blood courses through the Hanson line, but it would hardly come as a surprise to find it so. Given the famed impermanence of the Los Angeles lifestyle, it’s surprising to learn that his time in L.A. has by some considerable measure been the most stable period of Hanson’s life, at least in terms of physical movement. Hanson was born in 1957, just outside San Francisco, to a Canadian mother (who passed away two years ago) and an American father. They were about to return to Victoria, British Columbia, but decided to wait a few days, given Hanson’s imminent arrival.

Hanson’s father worked as a travelling salesman most of his life, and the family (Hanson is the oldest of five children) moved frequently, living in Victoria,

Va ncouver, K a mloops, Ca lga r y, Winnipeg, and Toronto. The family history is equally all over the map, and it’s no accident Hanson grew up to be a storyteller. His father, for instance, was such a fine track athlete in his day that Hanson’s grandmother used to claim her son’s high school had once won the state track championship, even though her son, Hanson’s father, was the only person on the team. Hanson assumed this was family hyperbole until many years later when he happened to see some old newspaper clippings from the Potlatch, Idaho daily, which noted that Hanson pére had indeed won every single event at the state championships. “Except the relay,” deadpanned Hanson in the retelling.

Hanson’s mother also had a sense of the fantastic about her. The first time she visited him after his move to L.A., she was standing on the Fox lot with him, taking it all in, marvelling out loud at the magic and strangeness of it all.

“Well, mom,” said Hanson, “what do you think?”

“I guess everybody has to try this once,” she said. “I did it when I was here in L.A. working as a chorus girl dancer.”

“You WHAT?!”

She looked back at him, all 4’11’’ of her utterly nonplussed. “Sure, I was a dancer, a chorus girl, and I lived in Wittier, and I always took the bus up here to this studio and the other studios.”

“Those are just a few of the stories about my family that I thought couldn’t be true,” said Hanson, as we spoke on his sunny patio high above Malibu beach.

“Only thing was, they were.”

PoSt-PRoductIoN SuIte 12 at the SoNy lot calls to mind the sort of movie theatre a wealthy cinephile might place in the basement of his or her mansion; a large screen runs the show in loops up front, much as an ordinary cinema might, but at each of the room’s three tiers are banks of computers and screens and keyboards and motherboards, each manned by a sound expert of some variety. It is the job of the seven people in the room to ensure there are no glitches in the show and that the music and sound effects match onscreen WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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events. “I’m in awe every day of every one of these people,” Hanson told me later. “Of everyone. The stars, the directors, the technicians. Not a day goes by where I’m not in a meeting or sitting in some room and it hits me that I’m the least intelligent guy in the room.”

Dan Sackheim, the director of the episode, sat munching grapes while offering suggestions and self-mocking criticisms. After each run-through of an act in the show, the technicians would stop and solicit feedback. A sample: Sackheim: “Hart? What about you, anything from that segment?”

Hanson: “Yeah, at 18:15, that moment where Walter unlocks his underground vault. When he unlocks it and pulls it up, there needs to be a different sound. It’s too light. Too…I don’t know what I mean.

What do I mean?” Here Hanson looked to Sackheim and various technicians in turn. “There’s a sound. I can’t describe it. It should be more a clicky sound, like clangy tumblers turning in a giant safe or something. That sound. You know that sound? Anybody know what I’m talking about? I don’t even know what I’m talking about! Somebody, help me. Please. The longer you let me keep talking, the more I’m going to prove I shouldn’t be running this show!”

Technician: “I think I know what you mean.” Knobs were twirled, buttons were pushed, and in under a minute the loop was replayed; this time the vault door, which sat like a manhole cover on a road, unlocked and was lifted to the sound of crisply metallic spring-loaded sequential unlocking noises. It was a radically different sound to the previous one, and gave opening the vault a deeper and somehow more playfully mysterious overtone.

Hanson: “Magical!” To Sackheim: “How come you didn’t suggest that? Why do we keep you around here anyway?”

Sackheim, laconically munching another grape: “I’ve often wondered that myself.”

Hanson: “We keep you here so that somebody smart can run the show when they fire me.”

Sackheim: “That’d be a mixed blessing.”

Hanson: “You’re my hero.”

Sackheim: “I accept that.”

The next day, I spoke with Bruce 44

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Margolis, the executive in charge of production at Twentieth Century Fox. Margolis puts Hanson “in the same league, on the same pedestal,” as Howard Gordon, the famous show runner of 24, who is currently receiving accolades for his new conspiracy drama, Homeland.

“I give Hart sixty million dollars a year and he’s never let me down.”

I asked Margolis to account for Hanson’s apparent popularity amongst the dizzyingly diverse strata of people he necessarily has to interact with whilst extracting maximum performance from them all. “Easy,” said Margolis. “He’s successful. He’s efficient. He’s accessible.

He holds a point of view. He’s a model show runner. There isn’t anything to not like.”

“He’s a normal guy,” Emily Deschanel, the co-star of Bones, told me the next day, when I spoke with her in her trailer between scenes. “He drives around in a car with no doors! He’s still the same guy as when I met him seven years ago when I auditioned for Bones. I’ve seen new layers of him unfold, but his success has not changed him at all to the core. He’s kind of goofy. The guy is just real, and in this town that’s very, very rare.”

The trouble with the picture being created by these friends, collaborators, executives and stars, of course, is that it can’t be complete, since it would be humanly impossible for anyone to achieve so much while alienating so few.

Where, I wondered, as I criss-crossed the Hollywood landscape researching Hanson, was the coke, the hookers, the doublecrossings, the spurned starlets, the financial malfeasance, the backstabbing, the alcoholism? Anything? An OxyContin addiction? A weakness for the ponies? A diet low in fibre? Anyone? Anything??

“I heard he kicked a squirrel once,” Emily Deschanel told me, her voice lowering a shade. “But I didn’t actually see it.” Confirming this with Hanson in lieu of alerting the SPCA, he told me that he was merely testing the hypothesis he’d understood growing up in Ontario — and which he shared with Stephen Nathan as they walked on the lot outside the squirrelfriendly Building 1— that it was impossible to kick a squirrel due to their lightingquick reflexes. The hypothesis failed at the test stage; shoe met squirrel. “Either the theory is a complete falsehood,”

Hanson told me, “or California squirrels aren’t as spry as Ontario squirrels.” The squirrel in question appeared to suffer no lasting damage; upon landing, it resumed the chestnut hunt it had been carrying out on the other side of the lawn.

I finally asked Hanson himself how he’d managed to achieve his current status without making any enemies, or, even more incredibly, while managing to have people actually seem to like him. Surely it couldn’t be legitimate? Where was his dark side?

“I have one,” he finally confided, as we sat in his office near the end of a long day on set. “I swear a lot at people, especially the suits. A lot.”

Anger management issues, I wrote in my notebook.

“The only thing is, I wait till I’m alone in the car. Then I really let loose at people.

It’s even better when it’s just me inside my bike helmet. Then it’s like it really is inside my own head.”

Of course, there is always the conspiratorial brand of black humour he shares with Stephen Nathan; together, they bleed off a lot of the pressure that would otherwise get sprayed over other people.

During the third season of Bones, Hanson was in Nat ha n’s of f ice when t hey happened to take a call from an executive Hanson declined to name. Hanson put the executive on speaker phone as they tried to decipher what the suit was saying; something to do with the tone of a show.

“The point is,” said Hanson, “Stephen and I were making faces, shaking our heads, doing everything we could to not swear or laugh, so that we could, you know, keep our jobs.”

Near the end of the conversation, the suit made a suggestion Hanson strenuously objected to, but which hierarchy and diplomacy compelled him to respond to with: “Okay…that’s an interesting suggestion…I guess we could always consider that.” However, as he’d uttered these words, he’d stood up, extracted his penis from his trousers and begun to whap it against the phone, against the cradled handset, against the number buttons. Nathan did all he could to contain his laughter until the call ended a few seconds later, at which point he and Hanson laughed so hard their stomachs hurt and tears formed. But then, as if

CAN.ICONS the BeaVeR The DHC-2 Beaver bush plane is often credited with opening up the Canadian North. It was manufactured by de Havilland Canada in Downsview, Ontario, between 1947 and 1967, yet it remains a common sight throughout the country due to its rare abilities. It’s easily recognized by its very loud “Wasp Jr” engine.

Beavers have been called the workhorses of the North. Still used as air taxis between small communities and hunting and fishing lodges, they’re also used to ship heavy freight, and were even designed to carry external loads (such as canoes or household furniture strapped to the outside).

At the end of World War II, de Havilland Canada decided to design a rugged plane suited to the extremes of the North. They asked bush pilots across the country what they needed and the answer was lots of power, combined with STOL (Short Take-Off and Landing) performance and a design that could be fitted with skis or floats. Other suggestions included doors wide enough to accommodate forty-five gallon drums, located on both sides to facilitate loading no matter how the pilot tied up to a dock.

All de Havilland Canada aircraft were named after animals at the time; after some debate, it was decided the new bush plane was much like the hardworking beaver.

Hollywood’s Harrison Ford flies his own Beaver and sings its praises.

– Clive Holden

governed by a switch, Nathan stopped laughing, his face suddenly an ashen mask. He stopped laughing because he remembered they were seated in his office. And that that was his phone.

By the tIme haNSoN waS Ready to atteNd university, he was hearing the call of Vancouver Island. He enrolled at the University of Victoria, where one would think the logical thing for him to study would have been literature or the performing arts or perhaps Roma history. Which was why he chose physics and calculus.

“Yeah, that didn’t work out too well,” he told me.

Over the next few years, Hanson managed to complete a bachelor of arts at

the University of Toronto, while his wife, Brigitte, pursued biochemistry (though she would eventually attend and graduate from art school). He worked part-time at the Christie’s biscuit factory and ended up giving up on his dream of becoming a rock musician due, ostensibly, to an unfortunate incident with a fondue fork which caused paralysis in two fingers.

“Luckiest break of my life,” said Hanson.

“I wasn’t that good.”

Hanson began to pursue his passion for writing, though he had no idea what direction that passion was leading him in (after graduating he did technical writing for his father-in-law, among other clients, as well as columns for the Toronto Sun on such diverse subjects as Toronto bars

and a cycling trip across Canada). “Those were actually really great times,” he said.

“We didn’t have kids,” added his wife Brigitte. “We thought we were rich!”

“We had an apartment,” said Hanson.

“I had a gig writing about bars. It’s probably the richest we’ve ever been.”

But the key step had already been taken; Hanson had had the fire of writing ignited in him while in the final year of undergrad. He’d been scribbling away at some short stories and had a nascent idea for a novel. Then one day he saw that there was a reading later that night on campus (held, believe it or not, at a U of T arts think-tank called Hart House), by the esteemed Canadian novelist Jack Hodgins, whose work Hanson knew and loved. That was when everything changed.

Jack Hodgins (who has won nearly every literary prize worth winning in Canada and who has produced exceptional writing for close to five decades now) was, in 1981, probably the kind of figure Hanson imagined, or hoped, he might someday become: a recognized novelist producing works of lasting literary value. Hanson attended the reading, and joined the party at a local pub after the reading. Hanson approached Hodgins at one point, carrying a copy of Hodgins’ CanLit classic Spit Delaney’s Island, and announced himself a fan. “I’d been teaching for quite a while by then,” Hodgins—a famously generous editor—told me in a recent email, “and I knew an enthusiast when I saw one. He finally confessed to me that he wanted to write fiction.”

Hodgins offered to read some of Hanson’s work, and Hanson later sent Hodgins a short story. “I recognized true promise in what I was reading,” said Hodgins. “I gave him some feedback and eventually invited him to consider attending a workshop I was scheduled to teach in Saskatchewan.” Hanson applied, got in, and spent two weeks in Hodgins’ fiction workshop, an experience that helped give him enough writing time, and confidence, to apply to the graduate writing program at the University of British Columbia, to which he was accepted. Hanson also set to work on a novel that he eventually finished, a novel, says Hodgins, “that a major Canadian publisher took a long time admiring and considering” before eventually turning down.

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Still, a corner had been turned; Hanson has always held Hodgins in great esteem, and he honoured Hodgins, in his own winking way, so many years later, by naming T. J. Thyne’s character in Bones Dr. Jack Hodgins…and by giving the character fantastic private wealth, three doctorates and boyish good looks. The feeling is mutual; when Hodgins was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2010, he invited Hanson to join him in Ottawa for the ceremony.

While at UBC, however, Hanson was taking a variety of courses. One of these was screenwriting, taught by Jake Zilber.

Hanson had never really given much thought to the idea of writing for television or film, but he enjoyed the class with his friend, Scot Morison, the respected Edmonton television and film writer.

Zilber, through his connections to the Canadian television industry, offered an internship every summer, and Hanson told me that Zilber offered the internship to Morison, but that Morison had already accepted a summer job writing for a magazine back in Alberta. Hanson was Zilber’s second choice (“Because Scot was the really talented one in the class,” Hanson told me), and he said yes.

“Honestly,” said Hanson. “I had no interest in becoming a screen writer until then. It was that internship that allowed me to meet Brian McKeown, the guy who ran The Beachcombers. When Brigitte got pregnant and we needed some money, I just started faxing story ideas to Brian. I got to write an episode of The Beachcombers, and then he hired me as a story editor.”

That was in 1989. By 1992, he was writing episodes of The Road to Avonlea, by 1994 he was writing for North of 60, and by 1995, he’d developed Traders, a show that ran for eighty-three episodes from 1996-2000, and which attracted the attention of Hollywood agent Matt Solo.

“I called him up out of the blue in 1998,” said Solo, his mouth creasing into a wry smile as we sat in his eighth f loor of f ice at the W illiam Mor r is Endeavor offices on Wilshire Boulevard (WME is the template agency for the popular HBO comedy Entourage). “And he never returned my calls. Ever.”

Perplexed, Solo (whom Hanson calls He Who Works Alone) continued to try to reach Hanson, with no success. “I 46

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couldn’t figure it out,” Solo told me. “I was working with David Shore”—of House fame—“at the time, and he’d taken over running this show called Traders because Hart was sick.” (Hanson was off work for many months due to a kidney infection.)

“I always wanted to meet the guy who’d created Traders, but I’d call him and he’d never answer any phone calls. I finally ended up going to Toronto for a film shoot, so we met, somewhere really ridiculous, like a Red Lobster or something.”

Solo (who, with his untidy hair and disheveled dress, looks more like an overworked legal aid lawyer than a killer Hollywood agent) was impressed that Hanson put on no airs and expected no favours. “He just agreed to pick up sticks and come, but the thing was that no one in L.A. had ever heard of him. Everything he’d done in Canada counted for nothing.

You almost have to start over. And so I had to ask him, this guy who’d created shows and won awards, to write a spec script to show people in L.A. what he could do. He didn’t complain. He just did it.”

Solo invited Hanson to stay at his house when he came down to L.A. for their first set of meetings with the network suits. The only thing Hanson brought with him was a spec script. It was his take on Ally McBeal. “To this day,” Solo told me, “it remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. It was just fantastic, really absurd and really funny, and yet the guy who wrote it was sleeping on the couch at my old house. As soon as I sent the script out, people were crying laughing, and he got a job almost instantly.”

Hanson set to work as a writer on shows like David Kelley’s Snoops and a show run

by Rob Thomas called Cupid, establishing himself as versatile, reliable and easy to work with. The Cupid experience was invaluable, Hanson told me, because, due to a falling out between Thomas and the two show runners, Thomas ended up as the last man standing…except for Hanson, who happened to be standing there, too.

“Suddenly, Rob is the show runner, and he makes me the co-executive producer.

Overnight, I’m sitting in on meetings with studio bigshots, and I’ve only been in L.A. for a few months. I learned so much those first six months. Even though the show only lasted fourteen episodes, at the end of it I was a co-executive producer!”

Which led to higher profile gigs with shows such as Joan of Arcadia and Judging Amy. Another project, which ended up not getting made, led to him meeting the producer Barry Josephson, known for getting movies like Men in Black and Enchanted made, but also for being linked to the Heidi Fleiss prostitution scandal in the mid-nineties. Hanson, being an equal opportunity kind of guy, was happy to meet Josephson, who gave Hanson a documentary on a forensic thriller writer named Kathy Reichs. Hanson took it home and watched it and said to himself, “Okay, there’s a show there.”

This speaks to a rather common misconception about Bones, which is that the show is based on Reichs’ books; it is not. It’s based purely on Hanson’s interpretation of the work and life of a forensic anthropologist according to what he saw in that documentary. He read the books later, of course, and adopted many of the characters. But early on, Hanson expressed a fear to Josephson that would recur as a problem after the first year of production, namely that the studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and the network, Fox Television, would want to make it into a CSI-style forensic show, rather than the relationship-based crime comedy Hanson envisioned. Josephson endorsed Hanson’s approach, and so did the studio, more or less. Dana Walden and Gary Newman, high-ranking studio executives, were at that first pitch meeting, along with the head of network development, Jennifer Nicholson Salke, and as a unit they listened to Hanson hum and haw and twitch and fidget.

“You have to understand,” Hanson told me of that meeting. “I’m the world’s worst pitcher. These people laughed at me.

They looked at each other. I kept talking, not even sure what I was saying. They interrupted me and said, ‘Umm, Hart, is it going to be…an hour long show?’ Yeah, yeah, I said, right…an hour. Sure, it’ll be an hour. ‘And can you say something about, you know, the tone, maybe?’ Right, the tone, right, yeah, well, it’ll be, well, like me, like my personality. They looked at each other. ‘Okay, can you perhaps quantify that in some way?’ Well, you know, it’ll have some humour, some pathos, some bathos.

But I’m not doing a CSI show. That’s not me. I’m not your guy on that kind of show.”

ROTHKO VIA MUNCIE, INDIANA The 1980s. Beginning of the long decade, the century’s late works. Snow on the grid, field bisected by a late model John Deere’s progress in low gear with a front-end load of straw bales. Its operator’s daughter dons her brace, thinks her scoliosis the devil’s work on her, a not-good-enough Christian. Her mother talks scripture on the phone in the kitchen and the kitchen smells of coffee and it smells of dog. Christmas lights strung along the eaves of bungalows, vehicles moored to bungalows by their block heater cords. Rumours of drunkenness and corruption sunk the Democrat’s bid for mayor: For we favour the simple expression of the complex thought. The large shape’s impact of the unequivocal. Flat forms that destroy illusion, reveal truth. Now the union’s eye has twilight in it, and the city dump will stay where it is.

Evening falls, or rises, or emanates from the figures.

The SportsPlex and Model Aviation Museum, the Muncie Mall and both quadrangles of Ball State University shed their associations, perform an unknown adventure in unknown space. Halogens illuminate an anecdote of the spirit. You won’t see his face around here again.

The violet quarry hosts a greater darkness further in, the White River sleeps in its cabin of pack ice.

Among the graduating class an abstract feeling develops, an inclination to symbolism born of the fatal car wreck on New Year’s, a spike in requests for Bob Seger to the call-ins from a quasi-religious experience of limitless immensity. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be misunderstood. Their lives take on the dimensions of the fields, the city, its facades and its plan, whose happiness will be their own. Rent, food budget, sweaters indoors. Basketball, basketball, and a second marriage.

– Karen Solie

The three studio executives assured Hanson they supported his vision, as did, initially, the network executives. They ordered thirteen episodes, the show went into production and that’s when the problems began.

“It became clear very early,” Hanson told me, “that despite everything, they really did want a CSI-style show. I just kept telling people, ‘I’m not going to do it’. Honestly, I thought I was going to lose my job a few times.” The pressure to change the show was coming from every corner, but Hanson closed his ears and kept working. “I kept saying I wanted it to be about the characters, and people in suits kept saying things like, ‘You haven’t earned it yet with these characters. It has to be more plot-driven’.”

The network kept moving the show, which premiered September 13, 2005, all over the timetable map, which wasn’t helping, but the fourth episode, in which a bear was opened up to find it had ingested most of a human arm, proved popular with the audience. Also, the network found that no matter where they moved the show—Monday night, Tuesday night—there were always seven or eight million people who managed to find it.

The show was resonating with viewers, surprising the network, surprising the studio, surprising even Hanson somewhat, given the fact that it was not being given preferential or even stable time slots. Then, perhaps due to the positive reviews of an episode just before Christmas, the show made a quantum leap.

Just over seven million people watched Episode 9 of Bones in Season One. Nearly eleven and a half million people watched Episode 10. The day those numbers came in, the pressure started to ease.

“I think it was Preston who first came to me and said, ‘You know, there’s something about this show. No matter what happens to it, you just can’t kill it’.’”

Hanson is referring here to Preston Beckman, the Fox Network Executive Vice President of Strategic Program Planning and Research who is one-third of the three-person team that decides what gets made and where it goes on the schedule. I met Beckman in the soft glass and brushed steel of Building 101 on the southeast corner of the Fox lot. I asked him what it is that has made Bones and Hanson so successful, and he noted first that network success is usually defined by ad sales, whereas cable defines success through critical reviews and subscribers. “Still,” he continued. “What’s notable about Bones is how shockingly consistent the ratings have been over the years. But it’s a smart, funny, fun show that leaves you feeling good and good about yourself. You don’t finish an episode feeling like you want to kill yourself.”

As for Hanson, he said, “I think there’s a modesty there, a bit of a twinkle in his eye, that maybe he doesn’t take it all too seriously, although he’s very passionate about what he does, of course. I get the feeling that he probably hasn’t changed all that much from when he started. And I think he can distinguish between what he does for a living and what his personal tastes might be. He understands what his job is, and who he is appealing to.”

Executives like Preston Beckman and Bruce Margolis applaud Hanson’s work, but there is still the view held by some that his shows are the pack animals of network television doing the heavy lifting of bringing in the numbers so that the sexier, edgier work can be done by more highprofile Emmy-bait. Hanson’s friend Dave Thomas sees it that way. “I don’t think Hart’s shows are treated with the respect they’re due by the network,” he told me.

“Hart’s shows are the bread and butter of television, and they wear their learning and humour lightly, whereas something like Terra Nova is a failed experiment in network indulgence. Shows like Terra WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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Nova hit you over the head with a baseball bat, but people respond to Hart’s shows because they’re good, smart, and, most importantly, don’t insult me by overstating everything. I’m telling you, Hart couldn’t write stupid if his life depended on it.”

The makING of eveN a SINGle ePISode of a network TV show is a logistical nightmare; any given set at any given moment is crawling with dozens of extras, directors, assistant directors, directors of photography, assistant directors of photography, makeup artists, producers, assistant producers, executive producers, carpenters, electricians, lighting crew, sound crew, prop masters, caterers, agents, personal assistants, and even occasionally one or two of the stars. And all of these people have opinions and egos. Someone needs to be there to make the trains run on time while also steering the creative vision. That’s the show runner. He or she has to be a cross between Stalin and Mother Teresa.

But Hart Hanson on set appears to be neither. He looks and acts like a sound technician, like some guy hanging around waiting for someone to tell him what to do and when to do it. This would be okay, except that he’s the guy who is supposed to tell everyone else what to do. Walking from the Bones set back to Hanson’s office one day, I asked him what it was like to be in charge of shows that tens of millions of people watch every week, whether he felt that conferred any particular status or power. He shook his head vigorously.

“Absolutely not,” he said. He took a hand off one of the crutches he was using to support his broken ankle and waved it around the Fox lot to indicate the entire operation. “What I do, what we do, these are passing entertainments. My show, it just glances off people. Someone who writes a great novel—take a novel by Jack Hodgins—that is a piece of work that might literally change someone’s life. A great novel is part of someone’s mental furniture forever. Maybe he sells ten thousand copies of a book, I don’t know, but every single one of those people is going to remember that book, and probably be changed by it. Millions of people might watch my shows but an hour later they can’t remember what it was about. What I do…it just glances off people.”

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Hanson’s modesty in this regard may simply reflect the tension he feels between what he’s doing (entertaining millions), and what he might think he ought to be doing but isn’t (creating lasting works of art). “I’ve heard Hart imply that he considers what he does to be somehow ‘inferior’ to writing great novels,” Jack Hodgins told me. “But I think he says that only because of the short life-span of a show in series television.”

Assigning cultural value can be a bit of a mug’s game anyway, as Hanson’s friend Dave Thomas noted when I spoke with him in Malibu: “I remember talking with Marty Short about this sort of thing one time, and he was agonizing about whether he should take this part or take that part, and I said to him, ‘Marty, Jesus, in the Year 2500 all show business will be remembered in one paragraph with a picture of John Wayne. It doesn’t fucking matter’.”

Maybe not in the Year 2500, and maybe not even in the greater or even the smaller scheme of things, but it might matter to Hart Hanson, if only because at every crossroads in his career, when faced with a choice—leaving the sciences in university, moving to UBC to study writing, taking the internship with Jake Zilber, making the no-safety-net move to L.A.—he’s taken the bold step. And then, when he was finally given the opportunity he’d waited so long to realize, the kind of opportunity that so few get and that so many in the entertainment business would not just sell but would subdivide their first-born to get—namely, being given sixty million dollars by a major network to create your own show—only to have the network turn around and almost demand that you change the entire tone and thrust of the show, Hanson simply said no. “I’m just not that guy,” he told them.

Hanson’s next step may, again, be the bold one, but the trick is going to be figuring out precisely what the bold step is; sometimes the hardest thing to do is to remain in the right place. In Stardust Memories, Woody Allen, via his alter ego Sandy Bates, meets a group of Martians, and he asks them what he should do with his life and talent, the implication being that comedy, film, art, all of it, is pointless in the face of human tragedy. “Shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that

counts, like…like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?” “ You want to do mankind a real service?” says the spokesalien. “Tell funnier jokes.”

Hart Hanson tells funny jokes. He tells them to a mass audience. He might carry on with Bones and The Finder, he might move to cable, he might even quit and go find a publisher for the novel he wrote thirty-two years ago. But whatever he does, we should ignore him when says his work glances off us. He Who Works Alone seconded this notion. “There’s every chance that Hart could alternate between the kind of work we’re aware of and the kind of work that will surprise people. I wouldn’t be shocked to see him go in a complicated character direction in the future, even though he loves the work he’s doing now.”

“What’s going to happen in Hart’s career,” said his friend Dave Thomas, “is that people he worked with will tell people, I worked with Hart Hanson. Because the next thing he does is going to be better, and the thing he does after that is going to be better still. And people are just going to be hoping some of it rubbed off on them.”

One evening, a f ter a shoot for The Finder, set in a church where the lead character Walter and his brother infiltrate an A A meeting to help them find their long-lost mother, I asked Hanson if he truly wants to do something different, something darker or with more complicated characters, or if he’s happy and content making people laugh and giving them an hour’s entertainment once a week.

“What I know I’m good at, is that I can work fast,” he said. “Which is a good thing in network television. But I’d love to find out what would hap pen if I didn’t have to work fast. On cable, to do fewer episodes, to have the luxury of having all your scripts done before you even start shooting a season, wow, I wonder what that would be like?

On network, a season is just a track you’re sprinting on and there’s a train closing on you. All the time, and faster and faster towards the end of the season. I guess I’d be a bit worried about cable. I mean, what if I found out all I had going for me was that I was fast?” Hanson paused, thought about it for a minute. “But still, it’d be nice to work without hearing that train coming at you all the time.” eB

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he knew that she was late, and her anxiety increased as she read the notice on the window of the pub: “Closing early.

Christmas Eve. Have a wonderful holiday!” It was December 24, 1998, and that morning JC had called and asked her to meet him for a drink at Dora’s at five.

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She knew Christmas Eve would be quiet at the university, so she’d gone to the office to confront a backlog of administrative paperwork, then lost track of time.

JC was waiting at the bar, the pint in front of him half finished. She placed a hand on the back of his neck, and when he turned, kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No urgency,” he said. Then he ordered each of them a double single malt.

“Doubles?”

“We’re celebrating. Isn’t it close to our first anniversary?”

“How so?”

“We missed it, actually. It was on the nineteenth, one whole year since our encounter on the subway platform.”

like that, mother and daughter, having grown up together, as Cassie liked to say.

At DoRA’S JC wAS RelAxeD, A PleASANt change, she thought. For weeks he’d been on edge whenever the subject of work came up, obviously troubled by the story he’d been working on since early summer, the case of a condemned man awaiting execution in a Texas prison.

“When will it be on?”

“Last week,” he said.

“Sorry. I haven’t been following the news,” Effie said.

“You aren’t missing much,” he said.

“Remind me. I know he got in the way of our summer and that he’s been haunting you all fall.”

they didn’t see the young man approaching, didn’t notice the aggressive, shambling gait. the blow caught her by surprise.

“I think more of the encounter Easter Sunday,” she said.

“Well, yes. But I still remember that first time. The innocence, maybe?” He grinned. “I’m probably more sentimental than you are. Something clicked on the subway platform.”

“True,” she said.

As they sipped their drinks, they turned to generalities. He asked her about Cassie. A nd she told him her daughter was up north with the new man in her life, meeting family. They planned to stay in Sudbury until after New Year’s.

“Sounds serious,” he said. “Who’s the guy?”

“His name is Ray.” More than that she didn’t know. He frowned.

Her daughter was, like him, a journalist, and they had hit it off the moment Effie introduced them. In fact, Cassie was unsubtle in her hints that her mother and JC should live together. Maybe more.

Effie would just smile and swat the notion down, suggesting that Cassie should focus more on her own love life. They were 52

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“He writes to me, quite an intelligent guy. Sam Williams. From Alberta, originally. Was in on a gruesome murder in east Texas, years back.”

“But you don’t think he did it.”

He shrugged.

“It’s coming back to me,” she said.

“But he writes to you?”

“We stay in touch.”

“Is that advisable?” she asked.

“He doesn’t have anybody,” he said.

“He’s needy, but he’s hardly any burden where he is. Plus, I’m quite convinced that he got shafted by the system.”

“Aren’t you setting yourself up for grief?”

He laughed. “Me? Grief?”

“He’s going to die. We’re talking about Texas.”

“It isn’t quite that simple,” JC said.

“But let’s not worry about Sam.” She studied her drink. “What is it about him, then?” she asked at last. “Why would you stay in touch?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing, really.” He smiled at her. “What about tomorrow?”

“Ah yes,” she said, returning to the

safety of her glass. “Tomorrow. Christmas Day.” They left Dora’s just after seven and decided to walk to his place on Walden Avenue. The night was cold, with a penetrating dampness. Across the Don Valley to the west, the city loomed, glittering and silent as if abandoned for the holiday. They walked hand in hand, shoulders touching.

The sky was dull with amber streaks.

“Christmas should be in the country,” she said. “I miss stars and snow.”

“Maybe someday.”

She was looking at him, waiting for elaboration, but he kept walking, staring at the ground. So they didn’t see the young man approaching, didn’t notice the aggressive, shambling gait. The blow caught her by surprise, the shoulder slamming into her shoulder as the stranger hurried by. She knew it was deliberate, or at least an act of boorish carelessness.

“Asshole!” she called out.

It was only when the stranger stopped and turned to face them, fury blazing from his hoodie, that she felt afraid. JC moved between them.

“Sorry, brother,” he said softly. And there was something in his tone, the way he’d turned and placed himself between them, both hands now raised, with palms turned outward. “Let’s all just keep on having a nice Christmas.”

The young man wavered. “Fuck you, man,” he said, but he turned quickly and strutted away, shoulders lurching in his haste.

“Well done,” she said.

JC shrugged. “Who knows what’s going on in that poor bugger’s life.”

Just inside the door, the floor was littered with envelopes, mostly Christmas cards. He scooped them up and dropped them in a large bowl, which was already full of keys and change. A cat trotted down the stairs, meowing urgently.

“You aren’t going to open them?” she asked.

“Another time,” he said. “They make me feel guilty. I never sent any.”

He squatted to receive his greeting from the cat.

“Who do you get them from?” she asked, poking through the envelopes.

“Here’s one from the States.”

“That’ll be from Sam,” he said, and stood.

Then he was kissing her. And she nestled into the embrace and kissed him back, with a sudden yearning that dispelled all of her anxieties.

“I think I’ll stay awhile,” she said, shrugging off her coat.

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Something just came over me.”

“What’ll you have?” he asked.

“I’ve had enough to drink for now. I’ll make some tea.”

“Make it a one-bagger,” he said. “I’m going to indulge myself some more.”

They were settled at the kitchen table, she sipping an herbal tea, he savouring a small puddle of old whisky, when the phone rang.

“Let it ring,” she said.

“I’d better get it.” He reached for the receiver, said “Hello,” listened for a moment. “When did you blow in?”

She knew immediately from his tone who was on the line. She waved a hand to get his attention, mouthed, “Don’t tell him I’m here.”

“We’re having Christmas dinner here tomorrow,” he said. “Why don’t you come?

It’ll just be me, Effie and Duncan.” He winked at her. “Noooo. Don’t be foolish.

They’ll be thrilled to see you. That’s all water under the bridge.”

He laughed. “I can guarantee it,” he said. “You’ll be perfectly safe here.”

Then, after a long pause, “Well, bring her with you. I have a massive turkey. Is it anyone we know?”

Another pause. “I see. You’re a hard man to get ahead of.”

He looked at Effie. “Well, actually this isn’t a good time. I’m going to have a nap, then go to midnight Mass. Maybe we could meet up there.”

Another wink at Effie. “Understood.

We’ll see you tomorrow. Call when you’re ready to come over. I’ll give you the directions then.”

He put the phone down, drained the last of his drink, then stood and poured another. “He’s got a new girlfriend,” he said. “A student.”

“A mature student, I assume.”

“Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much.”

Early Christmas morning Effie went home to change, wrap the gifts and prepare mentally for a long and complex day.

The city seemed empty. There was a bitter chill. She flagged a solitary cab on Broadview, and the silent driver made her nervous with furtive eye contact in the rear-view mirror. She thought about how much simpler life might be if she and JC just lived together. But she quickly felt the stirring of anxiety that always came when she contemplated any loss of independence. She’d lived with three men, had grown with each of them but had also paid a psychic price that made cohabitation something she wasn’t eager to repeat.

At home she sorted through her mail.

A clutch of flyers promising unprecedented bargains on Boxing Day, a Christmas card from her life insurance company and another with her name and address written in a hand she recognized immediately—John Gillis’s.

John’s resolute indifference. It seemed to be a silent confirmation of what she wanted to believe: he never really cared for her; she had been a temporary refuge in a storm of personal disintegration, grasped the way a drowning man would grab at flotsam. His father had killed himself and he had needed her, but only for a while. But isn’t that the way with all relationships? They’re really only for a while. The story of her life.

This seasonal greeting was exceptional. She slipped the card back in its envelope and stood. Enough.

The afTeRNooN of ChRISTmaS Day They worked together in JC’s tiny kitchen, both wearing aprons. There was music playing. Candles flickered. By three o’clock the bird was stuffed and in the oven.

Sitting with a drink, she was surprised when, after what seemed like a long silence, JC proclaimed, “My problem is that I was always basically in favour of the death penalty.”

“Did you say death penalty?”

his father had killed himself and he had needed her but only for a while. but isn’t that the way with all relationships? They’re really only for a while.

She sat slowly, with her coat still on, and opened it. It was a simple, rustic scene: a small, snowbound house by an untracked country lane, wisps of smoke rising from a chimney, a festive wreath hanging on the door. Inside the card, the simplest of messages: “Seasons Greetings.” And below it, handwritten: “Sincerely, J.G.” She felt a flash of grief, and in its wake, confusion. In the twenty-eight years since she’d abandoned him he’d never written. Not once. No letter of recrimination. No questions. All the practical inquiries involved in ending their marriage came from lawyers. There had been no acknowledgement of birthdays.

W hen her father died, there was no sympathy, but that was understandable, given what he knew about their history.

For a long time she found comfort in

“Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about poor Sam. Where he is on Christmas Day, that it could be his last Christmas.”

The phone rang and he stood.

“That’ll be himself, looking for directions.”

The DooRbell STaRTleD heR eveN ThouGh she’d been bracing for the gong. She stole a glance at her reflection in the window of the microwave. She smoothed her skirt but then rebuked herself for caring what the bastard thought, remembered all the treachery and settled down to what she believed was a level of calm objectivity.

Sextus looked, for lack of a better adjective, happy. She’d seen him briefly in Cape Breton in the summer looking haggard and needy, probably from guilt.

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him he looked fit, that he’d obviously been taking care of himself for a change.

He revealed that he’d taken up jogging.

She suppressed a bitter comment, turning to the young woman who was with him.

“I’m Effie.”

“Sorry,” Sextus said. “I’m slow with the introductions. Susan Fougere. This is the famous Dr. MacAskill-Gillis I’ve been telling you about.”

A jolt of anger. Smile. Extend the hand. Susan seemed to be no more than twenty-two years old. Pretty face, nice figure, cleavage likely all the way up to just below her creamy throat.

“Welcome,” Effie said. “We’re thrilled that you could come.” Savoured the “we.”

Susan smiled as Sextus turned to struggle out of his coat. When he turned back, Effie asked, “And how is our John?”

Sextus frowned. “To tell the truth, I haven’t seen him lately. Saw him at the mall about three weeks ago. He was in the distance, but I didn’t think he looked well. Skinnier than usual. Face kind of sunken. He’s fanatic about the running, John.”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“I lost sight of him. I called later, but there was no answer. I tried to get in touch before I left to come here, but again . . . no answer. You know the way he is.”

“I had a Christmas card,” she said.

He twitched with surprise. “No shit?”

Susan’s eyes flicked back and forth between them in perplexed curiosity.

“I’m sure you’ve met his cousin John,” Effie said to her. “My other ex-husband.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” Susan said.

“But I’ve heard about him.”

Effie couldn’t discern from her tone just how much she might have heard.

The wily Sextus had likely been creative with the details of their peculiar history and all the intermingling that might have been off-putting to one of tender years and limited experience.

Then JC was asking for instructions regarding drinks.

DuNcaN aRRIveD DuRING the SecoND RouND, accepted a Scotch and insisted that he wasn’t hungry. He’d spent the day work54

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ing at a homeless shelter, had handed out 479 plates of turkey and felt like he had sampled some from every plate.

Effie put Sextus beside Susan, Duncan directly across. She and JC, at either end of the table, kept busy with the carving and the serving, he liberally pouring wine. Duncan accepted a small plate of vegetables so as not to seem unsociable but insisted that he couldn’t stomach another bite of turkey. He managed to extract from Susan that she was a journalism student at Ryerson; Sextus volunteered that he’d met her at a weekly paper in Cape Breton. He was an occasional contributor. He encouraged her to raise her sights, consider journalism school. She had a gift. She was clearly flattered.

“I became a kind of mentor,” Sextus said.

There’s another word for that, Effie thought as she exchanged a discreet smile with JC. Susan had grown up near the causeway and was looking forward to moving back home. She found the city edgy in a good way, but she missed her friends. Effie, now up and standing by the stove, saw Sextus squeeze her thigh.

Then Sextus asked JC if he was working on any interesting stories.

“The odd one,” said JC. Duncan wondered out loud if he’d had any news from Texas.

“We’ve been corresponding,” JC said.

Effie was surprised. “You know about this Texas stuff?”

Duncan and JC exchanged what seemed like nervous glances.

“I filled him in on some of the basics,” JC said. “Old Sam is pretty religious. I thought maybe Duncan could drop a line some time.”

“Who are we talking about?” Sextus asked.

“Nobody you’d know,” said Duncan, coldly. He turned to JC. “This petition you were mentioning. It’s quite likely that the Vatican will take a position. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve spoken to the office of the nuncio.”

JC was nodding.

“Is this about that Canadian guy on death row in the States?” Susan asked.

“The guy they’re going to execute?”

“JC’s in the media,” Duncan said.

“He’s done stories on that case. I did a little research on canon law, about the death penalty.”

“I’ve been following it,” said Susan.

“But what’s your involvement with canon law?”

“Duncan here is a sky pilot,” Sextus said, smiling.

“A what?”

“A priest,” Sextus said. “From back home, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh,” said Susan.

Duncan suddenly seemed uncomfortable. “So where are you from, exactly?” he asked.

“Havre Boucher,” Susan replied.

JC inquired about the drinks. Did anybody want a refill?

“So you’d have been in Father Allan’s parish,” Duncan said.

“Well,” said Susan. “We actually left the church. Because of him. I don’t know the whole story, though. I think there was something about my younger brother.”

She blushed. “They say that Father Allan was . . . different.”

“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t one of yours,” Sextus said to Duncan.

Duncan flashed a warning glance his way, but Sextus didn’t notice.

“Duncan was the guy who put a stop to all that shit. Weren’t you, Duncan?

He was the guy the bishop would send out—” “Dessert’s ready,” Effie announced.

afteR DINNeR they maDe Small talk about home. Safe gossip, old stories that were mostly funny. Effie realized that she was drinking too much wine too quickly. She calculated that she’d consumed three stiff Scotches before the wine. Fuck it, she thought. It was one way to cope, not to care about the reefs and shoals so near the surface of every subject that came up.

JC proposed a toast: “To the secondlast Christmas of the millennium.”

They all murmured excitement at the vastness of the thought.

“Here’s lookin’ at 1999,” he said. “A last great year.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Sextus.

“Every year is a great year.”

“You know what I mean,” JC said.

“Nooo,” everybody said in chorus.

“We don’t know what you mean!” “ W hatever,” he sa id. A nd t hey clinked glasses merrily.

“So how long do you plan to be around?” Effie asked Sextus.

“Who knows,” he said. “I’m playing it by ear. We should get together for a coffee, or a drink. Catch up.”

Right, she thought. As if. But she said, “Absolutely. Give me a call. I assume you still have my office number.”

“Know it off by heart,” said Sextus.

“Have you been talking to our daughter lately?”

Sextus looked at her, pointedly, it seemed. “Ahhh, the darling daughter.

On the phone, before I left. She said she

at the table, she heard a word that sounded like “fidelity.”

“Fidelity,” she said. “Now there’s a topic I could write a book about.”

There was a sudden silence, but she didn’t really care. Everyone was piss-gillshit-faced. “I have one basic rule about fidelity,” she added merrily. “JC can sleep with anyone he wants to as long as she’s older than I am.”

She was the only one who laughed. She turned toward the kitchen counter, lined up the coffee mugs, turned again. Saw four round, blank faces staring at her.

“One rule only, that’s all,” she repeated.

“Older than me . . . she has to be. That’s the bottom line.”

“Well, that kind of narrows it down,” Sextus said.

Susan giggled.

“Please,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.” “about what, exactly?” she replied. “everything,” he said. “tonight. last year. 1977.” was going to be away. Probably just saying that so she could avoid me.”

Susan caught his hand, squeezed it loyally and said, “I doubt that.”

“She’s away but back a week tomorrow,” Effie said. “Did she mention anything about the new guy in her life? This Ray?” Sextus looked surprised. “Not a boo.

Who is he?”

“Haven’t met him yet. But it seems serious.”

“Well, there’s another reason to stick around,” he said. He was clasping Susan’s hand in his.

Effie’s head was buzzing. Thoughts and words were scrambling to be heard, but she knew it would be prudent to keep most of them inside. JC was overgenerous with his booze, she noted. She’d speak to him. Hospitality isn’t entirely about how shit-faced everybody gets.

She smiled at “shit-faced,” a word her students liked to use. Her father would say “pissed to the gills,” and that too was apt. She was just about to offer coffee when, in the babble of words and laughter

The room was suddenly and overwhelmingly hot.

“Excuse me,” Effie said.

IN the bathRoom She StudIed heR face IN the mirror but saw a stranger looking back.

Older woman, well turned out but plain.

Face pale, hair needing care. Maybe I should cut it, she thought. She squinted and the image became sharper. Maybe I need glasses. Then she told herself, Stop fretting about your looks. Think of aging as maturing, growing wiser. What did Daddy used to say? No point getting older if it doesn’t make you smarter. But still she wondered. With an extended finger, she stretched the skin below an eye. What else did Daddy say?

Overwhelmed, she dove toward the toilet.

She RINSed heR face, ReStoRed heR lIPStIck, then went to sit for a while on the edge of JC’s bed, head light but stomach feeling better. Loud laughter came from downstairs.

She sighed and stood. Her head spun, then stabilized.

In the darkened hallway near the top of the stairs, she saw Sextus standing, hands in pockets, a concerned look on his face. When she tried to brush by, he blocked her with a suddenly extended arm.

“Please,” he said. Then placed his forehead on her shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“About what, exactly?” she replied.

“Everything,” he said. “Tonight. Last year. 1977. My screw-ups, one and all.”

Then he was facing her, hands gripping her shoulders. She just stared at him. At that moment her entire life seemed to occupy one clear, sharp quadrant of her brain, like a Mozart composition, one of Einstein’s theories. Fully formed and ready for articulation.

“I just wish I could explain,” he said.

“There was nothing—” “Move, please,” she said.

He d ropp ed h is a r ms a nd she brushed by him and walked downstairs steadily, suddenly dead sober.

The next day being Boxing Day, she spent the night. ~~~ The battering wind seemed to scream, flattening the high brown grass in the marsh of Tantramar—the tantric marshes, Sextus called them, laughing wickedly; the wind pushed their small car onward and away from yesterday and toward tomorrow, a force as reassuring as the grass they’d smoked in a service station toilet back in sober Amherst, dispelling fear and purging all misgivings. She was singing farewell to Nova Scotia, the sea-bound coast, with the brown marsh grass undulating all around them and the sky dipping and swirling and clouds racing headlong with them toward an unseen finish line, the future. Laughter throbbed in her veins, the fear and anger falling far behind; faster, faster, through the Isthmus of Chignecto. “Isthmus be love,” she screamed, and wrapped her arms around his head so he could hardly see to drive, and the Chignecto wind now hurried them on, now tried to turn them back, as if it knew the future. eb WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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SOUNDINGS Taking the measure Borghese or the Metropolitan Museum, but rather from engaging with what is outside one’s window or front door, wherever that may be, and that the world of childhood creates not just memories but categories of mind from which one cannot really escape. Travel is a diversion, perhaps an important one. But I think one would be just as well off, as Thoreau would have it in his essay “On Walking,” sauntering around one’s own neighborhood with eyes wide open. From that point of view, strip malls and gothic cathedrals are aesthetic equals.

WheN the tWeNty-tWO-year-OlD Jack chamberS (a SUrvey Of

ART

No Ideas but in things // By DANIEL BAIRD

W

hen I was entering my teen years in the lower middleclass doldrums of Los Angeles, California, I was embittered by what I imagined was the misfortune of growing up in a place that was brutally ugly and devoid of either history or culture. Never mind that I was fifteen minutes from the Pacific Ocean and not all that much farther from wooded canyons and mountains and desert, my immediate surroundings were nearly identical ranch-style houses hastily assembled over razed orange and avocado groves, supermarkets, gas stations, fast food restaurants, strip malls, and vast parking lots. The monumental concrete freeway onramps at least promised the possibility of escape at very high speeds.

The most interesting thing we could think of doing on Saturday nights was sit in the grade school playground drinking Bacardi 151 straight and wondering whether we could sneak into the nearby Pussycat Theater, where Deep Throat played for my entire childhood.

During those years, I spent endless hours reading the biographies of artists and writers who lived in beautiful places I thought more conducive to creativity than the one I had arbitrarily inherited: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in Paris, John Keats and Percy B. Shelley in Rome, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko in New York. The romance of those places, those lives, cast a spell over me, and helped me endure isolated years in a world I found desolate. What I didn’t understand then is that art and vision don’t really spring from the beauty and glamour of Paris, or Rome, or New York, or from contemplating the masterpieces in the Louvre or the Galerie

whose work, Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life, is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario through May 13), headed for Europe in 1953, he undoubtedly imagined he was leaving behind his drab London, Ontario, past. Chambers famously dropped in unannounced at Picasso’s villa in Vallauris in the south of France, asking the master where he should go and study art. Not surprisingly, Picasso told him to go to Barcelona; Chambers ended up at the Escuelo de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. He didn’t return to London until his mother fell gravely ill in 1961, and even then he didn’t expect to stay.

The sojourns of North American artists to Europe have more often than not resulted in pale imitations of the European fashions of the moment, whether that was impressionism or cubism or surrealism, and one can see the results on the walls of the less distinguished corridors of places like the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and even the Metropolitan Museum of New York; these are works whose idiom and style feels disconnected from anything like lived experience.

Though an immensely gifted draughtsman, the work Chambers created in Spain—influenced by figures whose paintings he would have seen in the Prado in Madrid, like El Greco, Jusepe de Ribera, and Francisco de Zubaran—seems ill-suited to his temperament, and not a little juvenile. In “Man and Dog” (1959), for instance, a huge, muscular man rendered in fierce blacks and grays, sits with his head in his giant hands, menaced on one side by a ravenous dog, and the nearly abstract “Surrealist Composition” (1960) is haunted by a skull faintly glimmering through the dark glazes in the painting’s upper right hand corner. These are allegorical works bursting with spiritual torment and longing (Chambers converted to Catholicism while in Spain), but it is the spiritual torment and longing of seventeenth-century Spain, not that of a southwestern Ontario boy in 1960. While art may be universal, individual works need to be true to the experience of a time and a place; art is a way of speaking, and real conversations are live and in person.

Chambers’ work of the early nineteen-sixties shifted abruptly from the chiaroscuro athleticism of his years in Spain to a kind of hallucinatory domestic realism gravitating around his Spanish wife, the beautiful Olga Sanchez Bustos, and their young children. In the stunning ink on paper drawing “Olga and Mary Visiting” (1964), the two women are on a couch, Olga nervously perched on the edge of her seat sipping tea, Mary leaning back, legs crossed. Rather than using dramatic contrasts, Chambers deploys a pointillist style familiar from WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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Jack chambeRS’ maJoR bReakthRouGh aS a PaINteR came wIth the advent of what he called “perceptual realism.” Inspired by the writings of the French phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty, “perceptual realism” is not about the photographic depiction of the world, but rather about the instantaneous impact of the world on the perceiver; it is more akin to revelation and experience than to any superficial conception of reality.

The iconic “401 Toward London No. 1” (1968-1969) is a luminous panorama. A wedge of dark green wood sits in the middle ground of the canvas, with the nearly empty highway extending out to a low-slung horizon. The painting is dominated by a cathedral sky, pale and swept by white clouds. “Victoria Hospital” (1969-1970), the hospital where Chambers died of leukemia in 1978, is a study in winter grays, the foreground dirty snow and a single leafless tree, the hospital spooky and crepuscular, the cloud-grey sky bleak. In both of these paintings, the flat landscape is dwarfed by the soaring—and menacing—sky.

Chambers’ domestic scenes of the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies are intense, anxiously impersonal, and radiant. In “Sunday Morning No. 2” (1968-1970), for instance, his two sons sit watching television, a teddy bear on the otherwise conspicuously clean and empty floor. Still in their bathrobes, the boys sit uneasily on their chairs, while thin, winter light floods in through the window behind them.

And in the famously unfinished “Lunch” (1969), Chambers’ family enacts a kind of last supper, with the artist himself at the head of the table, his two sons gazing uneasily toward the viewer. Like “Sunday Morning No. 2,” the painting is dominated by a window onto a winter scene, the sky the same expectant blue. In both of these paintings, the family seems incidental to the cold sky and the light in a way we’re meant to understand spiritually; these are works charged with the anticipation, and dread, of a messianic arrival.

Chambers is torn between an instinctive attraction to the consuming absolute and the reality of a life actually lived, a life of highways and hospitals and Sunday mornings. Part of the power of works like “Victoria Hospital” and “Lunch” is their gut-wrenching ambivalence: while celebrating the city of his birth and family life, he also repudiates them, reminding us—ruthlessly—that they and we pale before the indifferent eternity of time and light and sky. Chambers is an artist intensely uncomfortable inside his own existence; it’s easy to see why he wanted to run away to Spain.

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In his 1967 film “R-34”, Chambers’ tribute to his friend and fellow London, Ontario, artist Greg Curnoe, one finds Curnoe hunched over in his congested studio, exacto knife in hand, making collages. Chambers and Curnoe were in most ways opposites: Curnoe was hugely influenced by neo-Dada and conceptual art, Chambers was an ardent classicist; Curnoe was obsessed with the details of time and place, Chambers embraced the immediate as a way of pursuing transcendence; Curnoe’s “View of Victoria Hospital, First Series” (1968) consists of descriptions of Victoria Hospital as seen from his studio window, Chambers’ “Victoria Hospital” is a gloomy gothic landscape painting with a huge, cloud-filled sky. But what both Curnoe and Chambers grasped in different ways was that substantial art arises from location and memory and community, and not directly from larger philosophical orpolitical ideas.

these are works charged with the anticipation, and dread, of a messianic arrival Following the contemporary art world, one would get the impression that art is a global conversation circulating between cosmopolitan capitals like Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and maybe Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, big-ticket events like documenta in Kassel, Germany and the Venice Biennale, and supplemented by the endless opportunities for access and conversation provided by the internet.

While this idea can evoke utopian feelings (everyone, after all, wants to be part of the “global conversation”), it’s worth keeping in mind that this is an illusion. If art and thought are rooted in deep, lived experience, then there is no such thing as the global art world (except perhaps in the economic sense) or global conversations; there is only an engagement with the things and people that immediately surround us. This isn’t provincialism, either: the provincial implies limitations created by ignorance, whereas engagement with that which surrounds us is really about the primacy of actual experience, of actual conversation, of real communities. It’s always better to contemplate a mediocre landscape painting that one can actually stand in front of than a reproduced masterpiece; it is always better to think about gloomy hospitals one has spent one’s life around than soaring cathedrals one has visited for a few hours; it is always better to talk about life and art with hangers-on in the local pub or coffee shop than with great philosophers and artists in town for the evening. To be involved with one’s actual world is to be involved in one’s own life and the ideas, images, and words that live there, and to take them seriously. “No ideas but in things” said William Carlos Williams.

He was right, at least with regard to art and literature: when we make art or write about things we aren’t connected to by real experience and history, we quickly slip into empty fantasy. Jack Chambers was an artist with as high and tragic a spiritual ambition as Ribera and Zubaran, but he had to come home to London, Ontario, to pursue it. eb

Jack Chambers, Lunch, 1969.

Georges Seurat’s charcoal drawings, suffusing the scene with a subtle, swarming, eerily radiant light. In the closely related oil on wood painting “Olga Visiting Mrs. V” (1964), Olga is feeding an infant in her arms, while the elderly Mrs. V. sits on a chair behind her. The whole painting, frame included, is slathered with a sickly, rumpled yellow glaze. While the virtuoso light effects of “Olga and Mary Visiting” make the drawing both distant and ecstatic, its theme not family but light, the yellow coating in “Olga Visiting Mrs. V.” bathes the painting in anxiety.

MUSIC

Kicked Off Your Pant Leg // By SCOTT MESSENGER Dear Tragically Hip, I wish I didn’t feel the need to write to you, but since learning the news, I can’t let it go. It’s not Alan Cross’s fault; he was just doing his job. It’s not Paul Langlois’ either. I’m not sure why musicians open up to Cross so easily (maybe the last name invites confession?), but Paul certainly did in that January 2011, in an interview on exploremusic.com. There to talk about his debut solo record, your rhythm guitarist was soon pressed for news about the future of the Hip. The band was back at work, he eagerly reported. He praised recent jams as “fresh” and “new,” the overall mood “great.”

Did I detect surprise in his voice? Maybe. This didn’t help either: “Let’s get better,” he said. “Let’s make a really killer record.” As if everyone in the band had recognized the undertones of strain in We are the Same from 2009. Nevertheless, Paul claimed things were going well enough to release a new album in a year, your thirteenth studio effort. That means it could happen any day now, if it hasn’t by the time this reaches you.

I’m writing to say I won’t be there for you this time. I can’t risk more disappointment. I wish I could accept the new you, good or otherwise, but my memories of what you were keep me from being fully present with you now. It’s hard. For so long, you were my band. You were Canada’s band.

Maybe we should be able to get through this. We managed to overcome a rocky start, after all. When a friend introduced us in 1989, we were all just kids, and all still figuring ourselves out. You were wobbling out of your barroom rock phase with Up to Here, your first full-length album, testing us with quirky poetics and a song about an Ontario prison escapee, a track that announced your intentions to produce unabashedly Canadian content and forfeit American success. It wasn’t love at first listen, but it felt like you’d reached under the table and laid a tentative hand on mine, and I didn’t pull away.

I was tempted: I knew I’d have to share you with so many.

Sure enough, the national love affair was consummated in 1992 with Fully Completely, a record in which you gave yourself to us whole-heartedly. You sang for iconic Hugh MacLennan, for wrongfully convicted David Milgaard, for legendary Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko. The rest of the world could have gone silent. You were shocking and enigmatic, breaking out of the chrysalis of corporate CanRock and unfolding wings capable of great heights and grace, but, it would turn out, as fragile as those of a butterfly.

That was just the beginning. Remember August 1, 1993?

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grinding through the vestigial New Orleans is Sinking, your best-known single to this day, you broke hard with the past.

The song paused for Gord Sinclair to shift into the brooding opening bass line of Nautical Disaster, a haunting track that set the tone for 1994’s Day for Night. “I was in a lifeboat designed for ten and ten only,” you sang. “The selection was quick, the crew was picked in order, and those left in the water got kicked off our pantleg, and we headed for home.” It felt like a shared epiphany then; it saddens me a little now. I’d never have dreamt I’d be one of those left behind.

you, that way you had of making us feel, all over again, like you were just then opening up to us. These might be the album’s best songs, but they are also the saddest, which is worrying— they spark more nostalgia than excitement. The rest of the record broke my heart, showing disregard, contempt even, for the reinvention that once was second nature for you. Jaunty Coffee Girl is radio-friendly and expendable. Other tracks are marred by bloated, dated guitar solos. Currency and innovation feel faked, like on The Depression Suite, a nine-minute stumble through a jumble of loosely related movements, and which is oddly acquiescent. “And I’m thinking, just in passing,” you sing, “what if this song does nothing?”

it felt like you no longer trusted us with your art.

Whether or not this letter means much to you, i suspect you

Sorry. I’m getting maudlin. But Day for Night, moody and wondrous and strange, bound me to you in a way the other records didn’t. It compelled me to defend you to critics who said you’d lost your edge. They didn’t get you. I liked what you’d become. Loved it, in fact. You were smart, serious, poignant, risky. Trouble at the Henhouse proved it in 1996, comfortably balancing rock and art without straining to combine them.

Creativity was exploration to you then, and, yes, perhaps it steered somewhat inward, but for me it grew more exciting with every track, peaking in 2000 with Music @ Work, one of your most experimental and brilliant albums—a fact possibly borne out by its fractional sales compared to Fully Completely, now diamond certified with more than one million copies sold.

Your old lovers, attracted by the grit and swagger of earlier records, were backing off like they hoped this phase would break like a fever and return you to your old self, easy and uncomplicated.

Over time, I think it got to you, making you dissatisfied with yourself. You’d tried something on, but then treated your admirers as a mirror and fretted over the reflection. So you went to those first records for guidance, trying to once again inhabit the old self you thought we all wanted. Not all of us did. It felt like you no longer trusted us with your art, that you decided to withhold it. It felt like you just gave up on us. You remember, Gordie? That was when you started out with Coke Machine Glow, the first of three solo records—new receptacles for the eccentricities that had once enriched the Hip. When we hooked up again in 2004, I had trouble recognizing the band. You’d regressed. In Between Evolution was simple, and abrasive, and absent of challenge, as if you preferred to update my memories of you rather than supply me with new ones. By 2009, it was over. With We are the Same you gave up on me, whether I deserved it or not. I suppose the album showed glimpses of what we once shared, like the lovely opener Morning Mirror, with its distant, country twang.

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saw it coming. In 2005, you were inducted into the Canadian Hall of Fame. This honour may have come at a low point for us, but I was still happy for you because it recognized what you gave us, not what you became. You knew it, too. “We find ourselves in the curious position of having to compete with our own past,” guitarist Rob Baker said at the time. “If we would have known that, we would have made the first seven albums really shitty.”

The past can do that; it can keep us from enjoying the present, even from looking forward to the future. Sometimes, though, it’s the other way around; the present obstructs our view of some cherished past. Sometimes even the future threatens it. I know that sounds strange, but I think that’s us.

I don’t want a new record. All I want from you now are memories. The problem is, Rob’s right: those memories are only going to compete with what’s still to come. That doesn’t seem fair to you. You’ve got your own direction. It’s pointed away from me now, but it’s still a direction. Younger, I may have had the resilience to follow, but not now.

I’ll be okay on my own, flipping through old albums.

There’s joy there for me still. One favourite in particular promises to help me through this. Like you did with Fully Completely, on 1998’s Phantom Power you encouraged Canada to love itself as much as it did you. Sure, you sang of small-town Ontario and mythologized hockey. But what really stays with me is the way you sang of spring, framing it in the oppressiveness of a hard Manitoba winter in a song called Thompson Girl: She says springtime’s coming Wait til you see It poking through With them shoots of beauty It’s the end of rent-a-movie weather It’s time to end this siege together With that, you made it a season to unify a northern nation with its relief and release, its gifts of renewal and freedom, its visions of verdant futures. No one else could have made it sound like you did, and I don’t believe anyone will again. Not even you. Not anymore. eB

consumption

Occupy Your Assets // By jennifer cockrall-king

I

know shockingly little about money, especially where it goes once it leaves my fingertips. And each spring, my anxiety spikes with tax time, RRSP deadlines and the like.

I am overwhelmed by the amount that I do not understand. I suspect I’m a lot like the majority of people, so ignorant and embarrassed about my financial illiteracy that, every year, I hand over my meagre savings to a financial advisor with a computer and a necktie. I utter vague instructions of not to “lose too much of it, if possible.” He puts my money into mysterious things called the stock market, mutual funds and RRSPs. I end up owning very small pieces of very large companies that I know nothing about. It’s called investing. We’re told that is the right thing to do with our money.

But then I think about my friends, Mary Ellen and Andreas Grueneberg, of Greens, Eggs and Ham, a busy, productive market gardening and mixed-farming business. They’ve been in business for thirteen years. They grow beautiful heritage veggies like baby squash, purple carrots, mustard greens, sorrel, kale, mizuna, potatoes of all colours, and other unusual vegetables on their four hectare mixed farm near Leduc, Alberta. They also raise duck, geese, turkey, Cornish game hen and guinea fowl. They have a line of charcuterie that includes duck prosciutto and they are known for their fresh duck eggs, sought out by cooks, bakers and those with allergies to chicken eggs.

Mary Ellen, Andreas, and their daughter Ariana, who manages the farm, are smart and tireless. But their business has been constrained to the same sales levels for the past decade. They sell about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars per year, but if they could get their hands on some capital to invest back into more flocks of duck, more seeds, and some labour, they figure they could build to one million in sales. Mary

Ellen tells me that they leave five to ten thousand dollars worth of vegtables in the ground every year just because seasonal labour rarely sticks around after the September long weekend.

The catch is that banks and other lending institutions don’t lend to artisan farmers and market gardeners, no matter how successful. “Because we’re not commodity farmers, we’re seen as ‘not-viable’,” says Mary Ellen. So instead, the Gruenebergs have decided to appeal to their customers and community for loans. They figure that they can pay a six percent annual return (half in food as it comes out of the ground, half in cash at the end of the year.) They want to find locals to invest directly with their sustainable farm that feeds the local community. They’re done with the banks, so they’ve borrowed a page from Woody Tasch, the founder of the Slow Money movement in the United States and author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered.

Fed up with lack of access to capital through banks, all sorts of small and medium businesses, not just farms, are going back to the models of co-ops and community-funded investing. Ask your grandparents. It used to be the norm: local investment in local businesses and ideas that bring return on investment into the local community. Dollars spent locally continue to circulate in that community, creating cash flow for local businesses. The 2012 translation? Occupy your assets.

I knew that Mary Ellen and Andreas would be presenting their Slow Money idea at the Local Money Summit in Edmonton, which was being organized by a twenty-nine-year-old writer aspiring to get elected to his credit union’s board of directors.

I decided it was time to take my financial education seriously, so I shuffled down to the basement of the downtown library that evening.

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Maybe because the exaMples were real and the stories were being told by the people themselves, I learned more in one evening than I had from all the financial books I’ve ever read, combined. Dan Ohler and Jeff Senger spoke about an idea bearing eye-popping returns on investment and tasty meat products in the small hamlet of Sangudo, Alberta, about an hour’s drive northwest of Edmonton. Ohler and Senger are members of the Sangudo Opportunity Development Co-op (SODC), a multi-project community-based microfinancial coop investment society. The SODC originally set out to fund arts programs in the hamlet, but it quickly turned its attention to financing business startups; the banks make it difficult for anyone in the community to borrow because projects were going to be deemed too small or risky, or both.

we unwittingly fuel an economy shown to decrease our happiness when we could be financing the next season of heritage salad greens and duck charcuterie.

Senger, armed with financial and business experience (as well as with his neighbour Kevin Meier, who had retail meat-cutting qualifications and a wildly optimistic belief in their little community), decided to bid on Sangudo Custom Meat Packers, a business that had been unable to find a buyer after almost four years on the block. Senger and Meier felt strongly that their shrinking hamlet of three hundred and sixty four residents couldn’t take losing another business.

They appealed to the banks for a loan, but were turned down, as expected. They recrafted their pitch for the SODC, and within ten minutes had garnered support for a deal in which the SODC would buy the land and the building, and Senger and Meier would upgrade the facilities and run the business, while paying rent and royalties on gross sales. Because the investors in the co-op were shareholders, they supported the business and encouraged their family and friends to do so as well.

Today, in its second year of operation, Sangudo Custom Meat Packers is thriving as a business, with seven full-time employees and seven part-timers when work allows. Over the last twelve months, it averaged thirteen percent gross returns back to the SODC. Senger and Meier are on track to buy the land and building by next year, returning the original investment capital back to the SODC for more entrepreneurs to access.

I also learned at the Local Money Summit that giving, not just investing, is getting a rethink. Nadine Riopel, a former professional charitable fundraiser and now a consultant, made a compelling case that smart philanthropy and charity should consider moving closer to home. Riopel proposed that we 62

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consider donations within our own community because we generally understand the issues better and can judge for ourselves whether our dollars are making a difference. “There are very few examples of people in one part of the world solving the problems in another part of the world,” said Riopel. She noted that in the professional fundraising world, the term for longdistance well-intentioned but uninformed givers is “Whites in Shining Armour.” And it’s passé.

And finally Mark Anielski, author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth, a former senior economic advisor for the Government of Alberta, and now an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta’s School of Business, cut to the heart of the really big questions we should be asking ourselves. What’s an economy for? And how is it that our main progress indicators as a society, such as gross domestic product, don’t actually measure societal well-being and happiness?

When we invest our money in traditional banks, that capital flies out to speculative markets on Bay Street and Wall Street, generally to finance Fortune 500 companies and multinational corporations. We end up investing in insurance companies, defense contractors, or big box retailers that enable our overconsumption of cheap, disposable consumer goods. We unwittingly fuel an economy shown time and again to decrease our overall happiness as GDPs rise, when we could finance the next season of delicious purple carrots, heritage salad greens and duck charcuterie.

Anielski finally called out the absurdity of the assumption we’ve all bought into, that a rising GDP tide floats all boats.

One of his central questions at the Local Money Summit was “How come I can’t buy a local GIC?” He’s done a back-of-a-napkin calculation about the amount of money invested annually and believes that there is one and a half billion dollars invested in RRSPs in the Edmonton area every year. “Why can’t part of that be local?” he asked. “At five percent of that total, there would be seventy five million into the local economy.”

I called Mary Ellen up a few weeks after the summit to see how they were doing. She was buoyant. They already had eleven (and now have thirteen) out of the required fifteen investors required to start growing Greens, Eggs and Ham beyond current sales. They were even working on a framework to help pair local investors with other local farmers. It seems to be getting some traction.

So maybe I’m not the only one on a financial education journey. Already there has been a grassroots movement of people pulling their business from traditional banks and moving them to the more community-minded co-op credit unions.

(November 5, 2011 was “Bank Transfer Day.” Remember?)

Perhaps I’m just part of an increasing awareness that every dollar that flies out of our pockets actually goes somewhere.

And if I paid just a bit more attention to where those dollars were going, I could be a small agent of change in our community. For now, I’ll start by asking my local banker why I can’t buy a local GIC. And letting him know that I might have to go elsewhere if I can’t. eb

film

Taking Her All In // By paul matwychuk

SlaNt maGaZINE

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’m writing these words on February 11, the same date that storied film critic Pauline Kael published her final column for The New Yorker in 1991. Hobbled by illness and, worse, uninspired by the crop of movies coming out of Hollywood—her final column was devoted to brief takes on Awakenings, L.A. Story, and the Julia Roberts thriller Sleeping With the Enemy, a far cry from the nineteen-seventies landmarks like Nashville and Last Tango in Paris and Mean Streets that used to inspire two-thousand- word torrents of jazzy praise—Kael couldn’t be faulted for calling it a day.

There were occasional transmissions from Kael’s home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the years that followed, most notably a Q&A that appeared in a special 1994 moviethemed issue of The New Yorker, and an informal “final interview” with jazz critic Francis Davis published in 2002 in a slim volume called Afterglow. But that was nothing like the deluge of fresh Kaeliana that has been released during the last four months. In addition to The Age of Movies, an anthology of her best writing, published by the Library of America, Kael fans have two more books to feast on: Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, the first major Kael biography; and Lucking Out, James Wolcott’s lively evocation of his youth in nineteen-seventies New York, in which the future Vanity Fair culture critic devotes a long, affectionate chapter to his friendship with Kael.

Taken together, these books provide the most rounded picture of Kael’s personality away from the movie theatre that’s ever come to light. In her introduction to her career-retrospective anthology For Keeps, Kael famously wrote, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” But Kael’s reviews constitute a very circumspect memoir. Such details of her private life as the romance with the gay poet and filmmaker James Broughton that produced her daughter Gina, or her

intimate, borderline-unprofessional friendships with toughguy directors such as James Toback and Sam Peckinpah, or her failed stint in the late-seventies as a creative consultant for Paramount Pictures went understandably unexplored in her writing. However, they get a full airing from Kellow.

When we first meet Kael in Kellow’s book, she’s the precocious daughter of a Jewish chicken rancher in Petaluma, California, with vague ambitions towards a career in the arts, perhaps as a playwright, perhaps as some kind of literary critic. It’s easy to forget that Kael didn’t land her job at The New Yorker until she was nearly fifty, and she spends the first hundred pages of Kellow’s book knocking around the bohemian scene in San Francisco and New York, often sponging off her older sisters while trying to put together a livelihood managing movie theatres and submitting articles to low- or non-paying film journals.

By contrast, when she pops up in Lucking Out, arriving late to a press screening of Bob Fosse’s Lenny and immediately sucking up all the oxygen in the room, she is already a legend, basking in her fame and influence, her reward after all those long years of professional frustration. (Indeed, the articles Kael wrote before The New Yorker hired her were peppered with resentful takedowns of the opinions of the New York literary establishment. When editor William Shawn demanded, upon taking her on, that she quit using the pages of his magazine to throw eggs at her fellow critics, it was supposedly the only stylistic concession he ever won from her in all their years of working together.) In Wolcott’s account, Kael comes across as one part mentor and one part pal, not just the toughbut-inspirational teacher but also the delinquent classmate with whom you share private wisecracks while huddling together at the back of the school bus, smoking shoplifted cigarettes.

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Kael didn’t appear in my own life until the mid-eighties.

I was fifteen and slowly working my way through the two shelves’ worth of film books stocked at my local library; Kael was the woman whose face stared out from the cover of Taking It All In with the level, serenely intelligent gaze of a Tolkien elf. I can’t remember if I borrowed it because I connected with her picture, or because it was the most recent book of hers and therefore contained reviews of movies I’d actually seen, like E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I added it to the pile of books I brought with me during my family’s annual two-week sojourn in northern Ontario cottage country. Maybe it was the setting, but I particularly relished Kael’s skewering of On Golden Pond, a film that had been a particular favourite of my mother’s, but which Kael found cloyingly manipulative. I read and reread her review’s most merciless lines (“The movie is like a striptease without nudity—it’s a death tease”), delighted to feel every bit as sharp and wised-up as she was.

After an operation, Kael heard the surgical team talking about Matthew Modine. “He’s never any good,” she whispered.

The feeling didn’t last long. About a hundred pages later came Kael’s triple-decker review of Gandhi, Tootsie, and Sophie’s Choice, all of which had opened within a couple of weeks of each other, just in time for the 1983 awards season. Her opening salvo remains a pomposity-puncturing classic: “Leaving the theatre where I saw Gandhi, I felt the way the British must have when they left India: exhausted and relieved.” Gandhi won the Oscar that year for Best Picture, but the world has since come around to Kael’s opinion that it’s a respectfully made bore, and rare indeed is the person in 2012 who voluntarily sits down in front of the Blu-Ray player to watch it. Sophie’s Choice, however (and especially Meryl Streep’s performance), remain sacred cows to this day, and Kael’s dismissal of the film as “an infuriatingly bad movie” and her assessment of Streep as an overly self-conscious, “neck-up” actress incapable of physically inhabiting a role, are startlingly contrarian even today. The reviews scandalized me.

These were the kinds of films teachers showed us in class as examples of “important” moviemaking, often literally so. One afternoon, our drama teacher showed us Sophie’s Choice, and the entire class made quite the show of sitting silently in our seats throughout the closing credits, all the better to impress upon him how shattering we had found the whole experience.

If there was one thing Kael hated more than the sentimentality of On Golden Pond, it was the reverence that so many supposedly intelligent people felt obligated to pay towards dreary exercises like Gandhi and Sophie’s Choice. For Kael, true artistry was to be found in movies like Tootsie, which she put in the same category as Bringing Up Baby and Pat and Mike and Bombshell with Jean Harlow, “films that were factory products and commercial as all hell but took off into a sphere 64

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of their own... that continue to give so much pleasure that they have a special glamour.” Kael often praised her favourite movies for their “nose-thumbing” qualities. Perhaps my favourite sentence in all of Kael’s work is from her essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” where she observes, “An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.”

Yet, for all her vaunted influence, surprisingly few of the films Kael endorsed most passionately have ascended into the canon: the New York première of Last Tango in Paris did not, as she hoped, become the cinematic equivalent of the night Le Sacre de Printemps was performed; Robert Altman’s Nashville did not become the through-the-roof box-office smasheroo that she predicted; and Brian de Palma’s Vietnam drama Casualties of War, the last film she really campaigned for in print, is now virtually forgotten.

But if Kael’s writing didn’t necessarily change the way that people reacted to specific movies, it did affect how people reacted to movies in general. Her jazzy, idiomatic voice; her allergy to even the smallest trace of stuffy academic jargon; her unapologetic appreciation for low-down comedy, trashy thrillers, operatic melodramas, and ripely sensual actresses (“Oooee,” she whooped upon seeing Anjelica Huston in Gardens of Stone, “she’s a harlot, she’s a princess!”); her willingness to speculate upon the inner lives of actors and directors as reflected in the images they projected onscreen; the relentless forward energy of those long, long paragraphs... it is an intoxicating brew.

When Kael writes a line like, “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best; it’s an inhuman position, and I don’t believe them,” you want to sigh with relief and gratitude to have a person in such a position of critical authority give you permission to enjoy a little bit of trash once in a while.

But then, just as quickly, she yanks back on your leash with a reminder that this permissiveness doesn’t extend to The Sound of Music or Dances With Wolves. (Hey, there’s trash, and then there’s crap.)

I found Kael’s tastes bewildering during that initial reading of Taking It All In, but she expressed them with such confidence and verve that I was wholly seduced. I inhaled the book, little realizing how completely her voice would ventriloquize through mine when I began trying my hand at criticism not long after. To this day, my writing remains shot through with Kaelisms—quick asides shoved into the middle of sentences with em-dashes or tucked between parentheses and paper-clipped to the ends of paragraphs. I can’t stop addressing my reader as “you” the way Kael liked to do.

Kael was famous for nurturing a close circle of young moviecritic protégés, so-called “Paulettes” like David Edelstein and Elvis Mitchell, whose prose style and aesthetic tastes so closely mirrored Kael’s that one often had to wonder if agreeing with Kael was a condition of their friendship. In truth, though, Kael’s voice was so persuasive that you didn’t need to be a Paulette to find yourself thinking and writing about movies the way she did.

As Salon film editor Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote, “When I was a younger critic and someone accused me of writing like

Kael, I was enraged and responded that I’d never read her, which was almost literally true. When I did read her, I had to admit the guy had a point: I had absorbed some elements of her style and outlook without realizing it, as if through osmosis, because they were so ubiquitous in film criticism.”

Back in the day, your Paulette membership card was seen as an easy pathway to a career as a movie critic, but Kellow and Wolcott’s accounts of life with Kael make it clear just how hard it was to stay on the great woman’s good side. There are numerous stories in these pages of Kael breaking off contact with onetime colleagues for failing to follow her career advice, or disassociating herself from friends for expressing unacceptable opinions about certain movies. Wolcott quotes the ex-girlfriend of a critic friend as saying, “I think Pauline cooled on me after I told her I didn’t like Yentl. In retrospect, that was the Beginning of the End.” Talk about inhuman positions! Once, after an operation to relieve a congested carotid artery, Kael heard the surgical team talking about Matthew Modine. Still groggy from anesthesia, Kael still felt compelled to chime in: “He’s never any good,” she whispered. Another time, during a conversation with Kael, the writer Craig Seligman mentioned the challenges of becoming an editor. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he said, “how many people who call themselves writers actually can’t write.” To which Kael replied, “Yes—they say things like ‘It never ceases to amaze me’.”

Kael died in 2001, just as the era of online film criticism was taking off, and it... er... never ceases to amaze me how

no truly towering Kael-like figure has yet emerged among internet movie writers—even though the internet is probably the only medium nowadays where a film critic might get the freedom and the unlimited space that The New Yorker bestowed upon Kael. Critics like Some Came Running blogger Glenn Kenny and the New York Press’ Armond White have some of Kael’s combative, argumentative spirit, but they don’t have Kael’s ability to challenge the reader while keeping her common touch—White’s tastes, especially, are so perversely, alienatingly contrarian that his reviews often seem like pieces of performance art. Bloggers like Dennis Cozzalio (Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule), Sheila O’Malley (The Sheila Variations), and Kim Morgan (Sunset Gun) write about film with a witty, iconoclastic joy that Kael would have heartily approved of, but, without the imprimatur of a publication like The New Yorker, their reviews and essays have but a fraction of the reach and influence Kael enjoyed at her peak.

In his own tribute to Kael, Cozzalio himself speculated how Kael might have fared in the rough-and-tumble world of the internet. “Maybe she wouldn’t have survived as well in an online world,” he writes, “where her every argument would be subject to round upon round of contrary opinion.” That’s what makes paging through The Age of Movies such a bittersweet experience: I’m not sure that the movies have gotten worse since Kael stopped writing, but I definitely think that audiences have. Who reads a movie review anymore expecting to have their minds provoked, let alone changed? EB

S o l o S h o w: R o o m 6 5

DAVID JANZEN

Lumber PiLe, 2011

PanoPticon, 2005

David Janzen was born in Toronto in 1959 and has lived in Alberta for most of his life. Having trained at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, he now resides in Edmonton. Although his work flows out of the landscape tradition, his visual vocabulary is deeply influenced by the industrial growth (and its detritus) he’s witnessed during Alberta’s boom and bust cycles. His paintings, with their unflinching gaze, employ natural history as a scenic foil for visual descriptions of recent human activity.

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EIGHTEEN BRIDGES SPRING 2012

65

BRIDGES

My Father’s Bridge to Timbuktu F

or a time, when I was very young, my father drove my sister and I to school. We lived in East Vancouver, and at a certain left turn, my father would wave his hand toward the windshield, shake his index finger at a small, rising hill and say, “Never cross that bridge. That bridge leads to Timbuktu.”

“What is Tim buck two?” I asked.

“It’s Timbuktu,” he said.

My father, emperor of the joke-recyclers, always pronounced these words whenever we came to this dangerous intersection: “East Hastings and Clark Drive. Timbuktu!” he would say, as if we were hapless tourists. “I hope we don’t cross it by accident!”

I held on, fearful I would be sucked in without my realizing; the bridge would dislodge itself and mutter away like a powerboat, detaching me from Vancouver, familiarity, family, and food.

Timbuktu, I later realized, was used by my father in the same way that French settlers once imagined China: the far side of the Island of Montreal, in other words, Lachine. The point where an intrepid explorer might trip off the edge of the world and find himself surrounded by silk, eunuchs and dynamite. A dreamer named Robert de La Salle attempted to map a passage to China through the rivers of the Canadian north, and he and his band of inland wanderers were nicknamed les chinois. Timbuktu, a city in Mali, was as mysterious as the Borneo my father, himself, came from, and maybe the Timbuktu of his daily punchline was in fact the exit ramp from North America, a ship that would carry one home, and maybe

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// By MADELEINE THIEN

the joke was on us, imagining there was a way back from the other end of the world.

I never even walked on the same side of the street as my father’s bridge to Timbuktu. I approached it as one would approach the edge of a roof, lightened by the irrational feeling that if I stepped too close, I might be all too pleased to step right over, as if the sky itself exerted a magnetic force. In fact, the bridge wasn’t a bridge, it was only an elevated road that led cars down into the labyrinth of the Vancouver docks. Still, my father would signal far in advance, and then turn, both hands gripping the wheel, as if the old Buick might have ideas of its own, as if every object jumps toward freedom and the open sea if given half the chance.

In 2006, a British survey found that sixty-six percent of young people believed that Timbuktu did not exist, that it was a myth, hoax, or poetic turn of phrase; an outlandish idea.

“For some people,” said the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, “when you say ‘Timbuktu’ it is like the end . . . but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you that we are right at the heart of the world.”

Despite having traveled, many times, to distant shores, I have never crossed my father’s bridge. Maybe the familiar road is the most difficult to traverse: the mythical, outlandish, true place that exists right here. Maybe the other side of the world is a place that, rather than being a flyover that bypasses the noise of life, is the road we pass everyday and elaborate with our fears, projections and fantasies. If only we drove straight, and stopped ourselves from turning away, we would reach it. EB

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