Geist 80 - Spring 2011 by Geist Magazine

www.geist.com published by The Geist Foundation publisher Stephen Osborne Volume 20 Number 80 Spring 2011 senior editor Mary Schendlinger publishing assistant N OT E S & D I SPATC HE S Michal Kozlowski associate editor Stephen Osborne 11 Mr. Tube Steak and the Schoolteacher C.E. Coughlan David Mitchell 15 Imaginary City executive director Edith Iglauer 17 Perfect Bite Patty Osborne circulation manager Tanis MacDonald 18 The Boyfriends Kristin Cheung Sharon Thesen 19 Robbie King (1947–2003) editorial assistants M.A.C. Farrant 21 The Outlook for Quirky Chelsea Novak, Sarah Hillier administrative assistants Jordan Abel, Jenny Kent, Kazuko F I N D I N GS Kusumoto, Daniel Zomparelli interns Carmine Starnino, 27 Pugnax Gives Notice, Concord Andrea Bennett, Becky McEachern, Gerard Brender à Brandis, of Sweet Sounds, Bundle of Desires, Lauren Ogston, Jennesia Pedri, Dan Post Fly, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Gray editorial board Kevin Barefoot, Bartosz Barczak, Trevor BatRay Hsu, Whale, After Wallace Stevens and tye, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Eleanor Wachtel, Ending With a Line From Rilke, Robert Everett-Green, Derek Fairbridge, David Collier, Chimo, Whipt cream on top, Daniel Francis, Erinna Gilkison, Helen GoBetty Lambert, Were You, When Did, Could You? dolphin, Leni T. Goggins, Lily Gontard, MiTaylor Brown-Evans, Shriek of Freedom, Fyodorable, chael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Sarah Leavitt, Sarah Maitland, Thad McIlroy, Ken Babstock, A Brochure, I Hate Paying Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peter Kristina Knappett, a Dollar-Forty to Ride the Bus—Who son, Leah Pires, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Charles Mostoller, Has Exactly a Quarter, a Nickel, a Dime Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Earle Birney, and a Loonie Anyway? Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Anna Swanson, Live from the Rapid Lake Reserve, Villeneuve, Kathy Vito Jonathan Ball, Canada: Case History: 1945, accountant Brad Cran The Moment, Haiku Horoscopes Mindy Abramowitz, cga advertising & marketing Clevers Media CO M M E N TS cover Steffen Quong Stephen Henighan 72 Canada for Spartans web architects Alberto Manguel 74 Burning Mistry cascadiamedia.ca composition Daniel Francis 76 Inventing the Lazy Indian Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada D E PA RT M E N TS printed in canada by 6 Letters Hemlock Printers first subscriber Mandelbrot 4 In Camera Jane Springer The Usual Gang 79 Endnotes managing editor emeritus Meandricus 87 Puzzle Barbara Zatyko

Support the Geist Writers and Artists Fund: geist.com/donate

Melissa Edwards 88 Caught Mapping

FEATURES The Life and Death of 41 Our grandfather’s story, spanning centuries, Zadie Avrohom Krolik was still to be determined Hal Niedzviecki The family tale of the escapee, the survivor, the hard-working peasant who laid the foundation for us to live in prosperity—was true, but it was also a lie. From Snowy Mountain 47 Still photography proves that time is composed Christopher Grabowski of moments What do ancient Greek ceramic pots have in common with souvenir snapshots taken during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics? More than meets the eye. Elementary 55 The playground, the report card, the popular Jill Mandrake kids smirking That was the first time I’d heard someone cry “Mummy, Mummy” when in danger. I didn’t know kids really said that. Man of a Hundred 58 Books are crammed into every niche, alcove and Thousand Books corner George Fetherling Don Stewart is not just the proprietor of MacLeod’s, the largest, strangest, most diverse of antiquarian bookstores. He is the keeper of, well, an institution.

Verticals 68 Hoban—my gentle, hungry, twitching, teasing Sara Cassidy Appaloosa

When he died, I cried for days, so many tears that the skin around my eyes weakened and small scabs rose where it broke. COV ER A N D PRO D U C T I O N N OT E S

On the cover: One of a series of photographs taken by Christopher Grabowski during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, collected in “From Snowy Mountain,” page 47.

Cover design by Steffen Quong (grafolekt.com). Geist is printed with vegetable-based inks, on eco-friendly paper manufactured by Grays Harbor Paper.

IN CAMERA

SOUVENIR

hen Billeh Nickerson, poet and occasional contributor to Geist, was twelve years old, in 1984, his mother gave him a photograph of her father talking to Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor who had become famous as “the Gipper” in the football movie Knute Rockne, All American, and who was now the president of the United States, remembered by many for his role in Bedtime for Bonzo. The photograph had been taken in Halifax during the 1940s, when Reagan was on his way from Europe to New York. Nickerson’s grandfather had been a reporter for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald; his meeting with Reagan had taken place during an assignment for the paper. In 1984, Nickerson was in grade 6, and an enterprising collector of autographs. In his collection were several top figure skaters, among them Karen Magnussen, the Olympic skater; and several TV stars of the time: Susan Richardson from Eight Is Enough, Lou Ferrigno from The Incredible Hulk, David Hasselhoff from Knight Rider, Lynda Carter from Wonder Woman. He saw immediately in the photograph of his grandfather and the president of the United States the opportunity to enhance his collection. He mailed the

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photograph to the White House with a request that the president sign it and return it to him A few weeks later the photograph came back to the Nickerson home in Langley, B.C., bearing the presidential signature, which has the effect of adding lustre to the image and another dimension to it, as if the actor had been able to reach forty years into the future to sign his own image as president. The Reagan autograph turned out to be the high point of the collection. Within a year Billeh Nickerson, whose father was an airline pilot, developed a collector’s passion for air sickness bags found on commercial aircraft and known colloquially as barf bags. The barf bag collection eclipsed the autograph collection, and it continues to grow today. (As this story goes to press, Nickerson has just acquired a mint specimen of the Iranian Airlines barf bag.) A selection of his barf bags can be seen at Narwhalmagazine.com. —Mandelbrot

Billeh Nickerson’s first book of poetry, The Asthmatic Glassblower, was shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. The poems in his recent collection, McPoems, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, are based on his years working at a well-known fast-food restaurant.

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Readers Write Geist is published four times a year by The Geist Foundation. Contents copyright © 2011 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved. Subscriptions: in Canada: Individuals $24 (4 issues); Institutions $31; in the United States: $32; elsewhere: $32. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Correspondence and inquiries: subscriptions@geist.com, advertising@geist.com, letters@geist.com, editor@geist.com. Include SASE with Canadian postage or IRC with all submissions and queries. #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1h4. Submission guidelines are available at geist. com. issn 1181-6554. Geist swaps its subscriber list with other cultural magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings. Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1h4. Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazines Association of B.C. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the B.C. Arts Council and the B.C. Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) for our publishing activities.

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COUN TIN G LITE R ATURE n writing about how the dominance of book sales data can endanger literary culture, Stephen Henighan (“The BookNet Dictatorship,” No. 78-79) is not alone. Here is another important book on the disaster of the publishing industry: The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by André Schiffrin (Verso, 2000). Sadly, the bean counters and efficiency experts have destroyed other things that determine the quality of life and civilization. Education has been lost to job training, universities to badly run businesses, medicine to greedy pharmaceutical companies. And pure research has almost been lost to humanity. How nice it would be if we stood up to the top-heavy world of administrators, with their fat paycheques for paring culture down to nothing. —Lisa Morriss-Andrews, Kingston ON

I am grateful to Stephen Henighan and Geist for publishing this very important article. I see about a hundred works of fiction from B.C. writers every year. Those published by the larger Ontario branchplants get by far the most respect/attention. We have gone backwards: first Chapters, then BookNet. It’s a numbers game, but quality is subjective and can’t be measured. —Alan Twigg, BC BookWorld, Vancouver Is Henighan suggesting that in a highly competitive industry, the distributor should be promoting the author’s more mediocre works with the promise of better things to come once the author has had enough Page 6 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

practice? Come on now. Tell me in what industry there are no judgements based on previous standards of performance. The BookNet sales data program is essentially a tool by which independent retailers can evaluate the likelihood of product sales based on past performance. It’s risk management 101. Perhaps the target of your scathing article should be the retailers who choose not to promote crappy writers with the potential to get better. This article feels to me like it is shooting the messenger. —Joanna Holley, Toronto The gist of the article is that commercial interests are overriding artistic concerns. When has that ever not been the case? Publishing is a business, and while it gets into trouble when it tries to act like any other business, it would be foolishly shortsighted to ignore sales data and an author’s past performance altogether. It would be lovely if all great writers could have wealthy patrons like Alfred A. Knopf, free of financial constraints and dedicated to Art with a capital A, but that isn’t a terribly practical (or common) model. The problem isn’t BookNet sales figures; the problem is relying on sales figures to the exclusion of all else. But equally problematic would be ignoring sales and market analysis entirely. You might publish some great work, but you would need a lot of luck, or a lot of money to burn, to stay afloat. Publishing needs to find a balance, with an eye on the bottom line but also on taking risks. The BookNet sales data program needs to be one tool of many. —Fred Coppersmith, Westbury NY

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There is an elephant in the room: ebooks. Chapters might control 70 percent of the market when it comes to bricks-and-mortar but they’re a fart in the breeze when compared to Amazon. The book-buying market is changing, and increasingly it is online. BookNet sales data might be a threat to an author’s prospects, but a greater threat is the centralization of book buying under the great Amazon tent. —Sean Cummings, Saskatoon Thank you for this illuminating article. It seems that art, as a commodity, loses its essential art-ness by pandering to sales statistics. Where is the reverence for the art itself? Perhaps the answer lies in a revolt by artists, where they take control of the message. Henighan writes that “in contrast to the indie musician, who can build a career without dealing with a record company, selling CDs at gigs or through web sites, writers still need publishers.” I disagree. In the doit-yourself media age, anyone can stage a public (in person or online) event, self-publish and sell their own books. I know this route is often pooh-poohed— people confuse self-publishing with vanity publishing, which is not a pretty label—but what choice is there when the big machine breaks down? Follow the advice of Peter Gabriel: DIY. —Gina Leola Woolsey, Vancouver Thanks for this cogent analysis. It was long overdue. I hope publishers and agents will read it, and remember why they went into this business in the first place. —Susan Glickman, Toronto, ON Read “The BookNet Dictatorship” and Stephen Henighan’s other Geist work at geist.com. T U R N I N G T W EN TY n between bites of milk-soaked semi-stale Oreo cookies, I perused the Collector’s Issue of Geist (No.

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78-79). Twenty years, eh? I had been impressed with the few issues I’d read, so to get a retrospective issue was like, well, eating milk-soaked (not stale) Oreo cookies, a bit of a divine double whammy. Then, after stirring homemade chicken soup and picking up my daughter’s pink soother from the floor for the three hundredth time, I happily tucked Geist under my arm, like the companion it would become until I read it cover to cover, and carried it to the basement to settle in for the eve of a new year. A few poems later, I felt at home. I sniffed the thick pages to make another sensory connection. I love the smell of paper. I read: “She would get up at 4:00 a.m. and write until her children got up” (in “Eye for Detail,” the profile of Edith Iglauer by Annabel Lyon), and the words struck my heart like a jellyfish sting. That’s me. That’s what I do. This story is about me. So thank you. That’s all—just thank you for existing for twenty years, and profiling

amazing writers, and publishing amazing writers. —Vanessa Shields, Windsor ON Read “Eye for Detail” at geist.com. DE -SE LE CTING (or not) his weekend my husband and I started going through magazines that we’ve accumulated over the past ten years, trying to “de-select” some for recycling. But when I got to Geist, I couldn’t bring myself to discard a single issue. Instead I took to rereading them, struck not only by the gorgeous images but by how many now-well-known (to me) but unheard-of-then names appeared: The Weakerthans, Karen Solie, Sarah Leavitt. And actually, it’s your Weakerthans issue (No. 45) that I’m writing about. Our copy is stained right through with brownish-yellow stuff, which we know is pee from our three-years-dead-but-still-beloved cat Black Guy. It’s still readable but I’d love a pristine copy. Do you have any lying around that you could put

LETTERS

on my tab and send to me? Lastly, I’d like to re-subscribe. My husband let our subscription lapse and he was, unfortunately, quite hard on your representative who telephoned one evening at suppertime. I told him it was okay to be rude if the bank or the phone company calls but he should be nicer to Geist. —Colleen Alstad, Nanaimo BC WATC HI N G KOOKUMEN TARY hanks to Debby Reis for her blog post about the documentary film Cat Ladies. Kookumentaries (yes, this is a real term!) are so popular these days. A while back I saw one called Cinemania, about people who watch movies all day every day in the repertory cinemas of New York. The purpose of the film seemed to be to shock the viewer with how weird the subjects were; it made a spectacle out of them. Is it the same with Cat Ladies? —Gosia Juszkiewicz, Vancouver Read Debby Reis’s blog at geist.com.

P OST I N G agree with Dan Post’s blog about the disturbing new public appetite for “homeless talent.” I befriended a homeless guy that hangs outside a strip mall where I often go to pick up my lunch. Sometimes I buy him a coffee or give him a few coins, but he never, ever asks me. He just seems happy to talk and not be sneered at or given the cold shoulder. He’s a good guy, just down on his luck. Having been briefly homeless once, dirt poor and not sure where my next meal was coming from, I can empathize with him. Everyone should try being poor for a week, just to see what it’s like to have nothing. —Robert Paege, San Leandro CA Read Dan Post’s blog at geist.com.

OO P S haven’t read the book Eat, Memory: Writers at the Table, ed. Amanda

Hesser, reviewed by Michael Hayward (Endnotes, No. 76), but I have met Yiyun Li, one of the contributing writers. She’s a she. —Bruce Silverman, Portland OR A passage in my dispatch “Saint Baby Jesus Credit Union,” originally published in No. 30 and reprinted in the anniversary issue (No. 78-79), reads “I tell him one hot, two cold and soup . . .” instead of “I tell him one hot, two cold and soap . . .” While I remember this particular laundromat as being magical, especially since the proprietor looked like Elvis, it wasn’t magical enough that it also offered soup. —Billeh Nickerson, Vancouver send your letter to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax 604-677-6319 #210 – 111 W. Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., v6b 1h4 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing. Artists in this Issue Russ Beinder has been taking photographs for thirty-five years, having started at about age six with a Charlie the Tuna Instamatic camera. He lives in Port Coquitlam, B.C., and at beinder.com. Brian Howell’s photographs have been shown across Canada and internationally, and published in the Guardian, National Post, Reader’s Digest, Western Living and Maclean’s, as well as in Geist. His most recent book is Fame Us: Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame (Arsenal). He lives in Delta, B.C. Brian Jungen is an artist who creates sculptures from ordinary objects such as plastic yard furniture and Nike footwear, referring to aboriginal culture without obscuring the original meaning of the objects. His work has been exhibited across Canada, in the U.S. and Korea, and in Europe, Australia and Iceland. He lives in Vancouver. Keith McKellar is a street artist who has undertaken urban vagabond walking jour-

neys in North America and Asia. His work has been shown at the Vancouver Museum, and published in a book of drawings and writings, Neon Eulogy: Vancouver Café and Street (Ekstasis Editions). McKellar divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. For more, see laughinghand.com. Marv Newland’s illustrations have been published in the Georgia Straight, Vancouver Magazine, Discorder, Outside Go, Travel, Geist and many other periodicals. His artwork has been exhibited in Canada and France. Newland also makes animated films with International Rocketship Limited, Vancouver, and the National Film Board. Fabrice Strippoli is a photojournalist and fine-art photographer who brings a contemporary outlook to street photography in the city. He lives in Toronto, at fabricefoto.com and at the newly established Contrast: Canadian Photographic Works (contrast-photo. com), launching at the Contact Photo Festival in Toronto in May 2011. His most recent photo essay for Geist was “Fleuve” (No. 75). Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 9

NOTES & DISPATCHES Mr. Tube Steak and the Schoolteacher STEP H EN OS B OR N E

At least one hot dog vendor in Vancouver is a former Iranian teacher who escaped Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guard in 1982

wenty-nine years ago in Fanuj in southern Iran, Mehrar Arbab, a high school teacher who today operates the Mr. Tube Steak hot dog stand at the Broadway SkyTrain station in Vancouver, escaped from the Revolutionary Guard of Ayatollah Khomeini, when they took twenty-six teachers from the school at which Mehrar Arbab taught English, history and geography, and killed them all. Mehrar Arbab and five of his colleagues were attending discussion groups in the nearby city of Iranshahr; when the killing squad came looking for them at the wrong house, they fled into the foothills of White Mountain and lay low for three months among the sympathetic B aluch

opulation before crossing into Pakip stan with the help of a professional smuggler. Since that day in 1982, Mehrar Arbab has never been back to Iran. In early February 2011, while he prepared an All Beef Smokie for me, with fried onions and a little extra toasting on the bun, he pointed out that of the executions in Iran, which had been taking place at the rate of three a day since the beginning of the year, one-third of the victims were from his home territory of Baluchestan, where the oppression, which began under the regime of the shahs and intensifed under the Ayatollah, has never ceased. I went around to the other side of the stand to dress my Smokie with

photograph: mustard, ketchup, onions, relish . . ., russ beinder

sauerkraut, relish, mustard, sliced peppers. Zahra Bahrami, the DutchIranian woman who had returned to Iran after an exile of some twenty-two years, had just been hanged in Tehran after a farcical trial: she had been protesting the rigged elections of 2009. That is why I never go back, even after twenty-nine years, he said; they will kill me just like they killed her. Mehrar Arbab has five children, some of them grown up with children of their own. The youngest is in grade 9; the eldest have graduated from university. He and his wife own a large house in Coquitlam, where three generations of their family live together. When he fled to Pakistan in 1982, he had to leave his wife and two children in Fanuj; eventually he was able to move them to Islamabad, Pakistan, and then he had to move on alone to Dubai to find work, and to begin saving money for foreign travel papers. He was twenty-seven years old. He had a younger brother of seventeen, who was picked up by “recruiters” during the Iran-Iraq war and put into uniform along with several other young men from his neighbourhood, transported into the mountains and shot to death at the side of the road; photographs of the corpses were exchanged for bounty money supplied by agents of Saddam Hussein. Mehrar Arbab’s eyes filled with tears as he told me this story. I searched several times on Google Earth for the city of Fanuj but failed to find it until I discovered the correct spelling, and even then I could never get down to Google Earth street view without the image breaking up into pancake-like fragments. Apparently Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 11

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there are no Google cameras working at street level in Baluchestan, which renders in Google Earth as an undulating sea of brown and grey mountains, ragged plateaus and what appear to be dry riverbeds. The web page IranTourOnline names several winds of Baluchestan, among them the seventh wind, the 120-day wind, the south wind and the north and west winds, and the humid wind from the Indian Ocean; there is very little water in Baluchestan, which seems from a distance to be a country scoured with wind and dust. Mehrar Arbab speaks warmly of the Fanuj of his youth and the nearby mountains: a very beautiful country, he says; he has never mentioned the wind. His attachment to his homeland is evident in his face whenever he speaks of it. His family and the extended Arbab clan had been farmers in Baluchestan, he says, for more than three generations, growers of dates, figs, pomegranates, melons, grapes, rice and vegetables. Google Earth provides a hallu cinatory rendering of the Broad way SkyTrain station and the umbrella that marks the Mr. Tube Steak stand: a corona of red and white petals resembling a bull’s eye from the Google viewpoint in the sky; even the baseball cap worn by Mehrar Arbab can be seen clearly as you zoom down in Google Earth to street level, where the Mr. Tube Steak stand reappears faceon beneath its colourful umbrella. A small group are gathered before it and Mehrar Arbab can been seen tending the barbecue, but there are only a few passersby in the picture, no sign of the thousands of passengers moving through the system every hour at the SkyTrain station; the nearby eateries can also be seen from the middle of the street: McDonald’s, Quiznos, Fresh Slice Pizza, Megabite Pizza, Uncle Fatih’s Pizza, A&W—all conjoined by Page 12 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

a few stretches of grey concrete and black asphalt. Mehrar Arbab worked at odd jobs in Dubai for ten years to raise the $4,500 he needed for papers and passage to Sweden. When it was time for him to depart, complications led to the flight being cancelled; his ticket agent, or smuggler, had taken a liking to Mehrar Arbab, he says, and found him a replacement package for Canada—which normally would have cost $10,000—at no extra charge. The smuggler’s route took him to Sofia, Bulgaria, and then non-stop to Ottawa, where, in April 1992, Mehrar Arbab was awarded refugee status. Later that year he moved to Edmonton, where a friend from Fanuj, another exiled schoolteacher, ran the Mr. Turtle’s Pizza near Northlands Coliseum, where Mehrar Arbab found his first employment in Canada. In Edmonton, his sinuses deteriorated in the cold weather and a doctor recommended that he move west to Vancouver, which he did in 1994, twelve years after leaving his hometown of Fanuj, and on March 31 of that year, a day that he refers to as the happy day, he was reunited with his wife and children at Vancouver International Airport. They found an apartment on Broadway near Main Street, and then a house on Beatrice Street near Kingsway. Mehrar Arbab worked as a gas station attendant and then at the Knight & Day Restaurant on Kingsway. Sixteen years ago he moved into the Mr. Tube Steak franchise and went hard to work, some would say relentlessly to work at the SkyTrain station. He can be found there today six days a week, rain or snow, a father, husband, grandfather, homeowner and entrepreneur. Absent from the Google Earth view of the Mr. Tube Steak stand at the SkyTrain station are the street people to be found in great abundance on a sunny

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day such as the day in May depicted in Google Earth street view, who along with the usual stream of commuters seem to have been removed or airbrushed out of the picture: the panhandlers and sidewalk sitters with their large sleepy dogs; silent Jehovah’s Witnesses holding up copies of the Watchtower, elderly anti-abortionists with their placards and handouts, evangelists holding out their tiny brochures, the vendor of used books in plastic bags set out against the wall of the Bank of Montreal; the Aboriginal artist who displays his cards and paintings against the wall of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the skinny guy pacing up and down, riffling two or possibly three packages of cigarettes through the fingers of one hand as if they were playing cards, intoning without emphasis: smokes five bucks a pack, smokes five bucks a pack. Some days a tall man strides through the crowd with a pigeon on his head; one afternoon I observed him break off a piece of a hot dog purchased from the Mr. Tube Steak stand and pass it up to the pigeon. Mehrar Arbab is often visited at the Mr. Tube Steak stand by fellow Baluch, dignified men who shake hands when introduced; Mehrar Arbab keeps a stack of All Beef Smokies at the back of the grill for his Muslim clients, who like them well done, he says. In 2009, during the street demonstrations in Iran, he told me that he thinks of himself as Baluch as much as he might be Iranian. Persian is my second language, he said. I prefer Baluchi. What will you have, dear, he says to all who approach the stand, and here you go, dear, he says when he hands over the Tube Steak in its bun and paper wrapper, with a napkin. He suggested that I look into the life and death of Daad Shah, a prominent Baluch rebel who had opposed the Shah of Iran in the 1950s. Mehrar Arbab’s necessarily Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 13

fragmented accounts of the history of his country, which I obtained during many brief conversations interrupted by customers buying Smokies, Tube Steaks, soft drinks and fruit juice, or passersby asking directions, implied that the CIA had figured in the fall of Daad Shah, whose death was ordered by the Shah after the assassination of a CIA agent. Daad Shah was killed in 1957 in a battle between Baluch factions struggling for position under the regime installed by he CIA in 1953, during Operation Ajax, when Mehrar Arbab was one year old. Operation Ajax was a botched intervention that should have failed; its accidental success led the CIA on to further interventions, as Mehrar Arbab put it, in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador and the more recent fiascos that punctuate U.S. foreign policy. All of that began in Iran, he said. Mehrar

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Arbab was kin to the wife of Daad Shah, herself a heroic figure of resistance who lived into old age; one of Mehrar Arbab’s brothers-in-law was nephew to a leader of the opposing faction, who was killed in the opening salvo in the factional battle of 1957. A history of the CIA in Iran written by James Risen and published in 2000 in the New York Times confirms the fragmentary account that Mehrar Arbab provided me during my visits to the Mr. Tube Steak stand over the course of a year. The skepticism that Mehrar Arbab and his friends felt toward the likelihood of democracy ever emerging in Iran were founded in recent history: the CIA, the Mossad, the agencies that invented the torture squads and the secret police under the Shah of Iran, would never allow democracy, he said; they want their own strong man. The oppression in Iran today is as bad as or worse than ever; the only hope that Mehrar Arbab feels for his homeland these days is in the Iranian proverb “There is fire beneath the ashes”—the power is still with the people, he says, and he points to the barbecue. Under the layer of ash, the fire waits to break out. Mehrar Arbab drives into the city every morning in his Nissan van, hauling the Mr. Tube Steak trailer, which contains the barbecue, side burner, propane tank and distinctive red and white umbrella; a few days a week he stops at Costco to renew supplies of condiments, buns and hot dogs; the other sausages he picks up as needed from specialty suppliers. He unhitches the trailer and pulls it into position in the shade of the SkyTrain tracks at about ten and raises the umbrella; by ten-thirty or eleven the battery-powered refrigerator and the cooler filled with pop and dry ice are in position beside the trailer; the condiments are set out: ketchup, hot Page 14 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

sauce, three kinds of mustard, chopped onion, relish, sauerkraut, mixed sliced peppers. He switches on the barbecue, lays out sausages on the grill, spreads onions in the frying pan. He plugs his iPod into a fur-covered speaker designed to look like ET. The iPod is loaded with pop music selected by his oldest son, who refreshes the selection every couple of months. Mehrar Arbab will still be there under the SkyTrain station at seven or eight in the evening, as long as the demand lasts. When he gets back to the house in Coquitlam he puts in a final hour cleaning the equipment and the utensils. Then he is ready, he says, for another day. Partisans of the Mr. Tube Steak style of hot dog can be found on the I Love You Mr. Tube Steak Facebook page, which lists three “officers” in Vancouver and one in New York City, and a “creator” in Victoria. Many are devoted to the Smokie filled with cheese and jalapenos: “the greatest jalapeno and cheese sausage hot dog on the street,” writes one fan; another says, “Oh I love you Mr. Tube Steak.” Mehrar Arbab takes his own lunch to work every day: vegetables, cheese, flatbread made at home on the stove. But he too is a partisan of the jalapeno cheese dog; every two weeks he allows himself one Spicy Smokie smothered in fried onions, sauerkraut and pepper slices. In February this year he watched a Persianlanguage documentary of an Iranian engineer who fled from the Revo lutionary Guard and landed in Germany, where he is now a vendor of hot dogs on the street. Mehrar Arbab was pleased to report that the title of the documentary is The Engineer and the Hot Dog Man. Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.

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Imaginary City DAV I D M I TCH EL L

The nervous system of my imaginary Vancouver is North American, but its eyes are oceanic

ecause the imagination abhors a vacuum, it serves up a mashed simulacrum of a not-yet-visited city before we arrive there, assembled from clichés, stereotypes, facts, anecdotes, errors and whatever flotsam and jetsam has drifted our way down the years. Once we’ve arrived in the real city, of course, the imaginary city is erased by every real street, genuine face and actual view— so thoroughly, in fact, that pretty soon we no longer have an inkling what our imaginary city ever looked like. A bit of a shame? To protect my imaginary Vancouver against reality, I described it in my notebook during the long flight from London. From a distance, my imaginary Vancouver sits along the glossy water, more a model of a city than a city. Its skyscrapers resemble extraterrestrial chessmen, and rise above large, echoing family-run department stores. Closer up, my imaginary Vancouver is scoured by the cold Pacific (as much an oxymoron

image: joe’s, from NEON EULOGY, keith mckellar

as “hot Atlantic,” where I’m from) and in need of a fresh lick of paint, like any working port. Ferries lit like Christmas trees plow the harbour, and snow-carved mountains encircle a stained-glass-atnight sky. My imaginary Vancouver is herded and sloping, like Hong Kong. Its nervous system is North American but its eyes are oceanic, like Auckland, Mumbai, Valparaíso and Perth. Bristol, Shanghai, Saint Malo, Yokohama, Pusan and Glas gow are to be found in my imaginary Vancouver’s DNA, and its family re semblance to Seattle and Portland is striking. Melbourne is its long-lost twin. Cities, whatever Hemingway said, are not actually moveable. As I arrive in my imaginary Van couver, the taciturn taxi driver answers my questions in five-word sentences and a not-yet-American inflection. The staff at the Hotel Midway behaves as if I’ve been staying there for years. There are big, heavy, hushing curtains everywhere. I sleep much better than a

baby (I’ve known two babies intimately, and can testify that they don’t sleep well at all). So I sleep like a very tired middleaged man, despite dreams of bickering with my wife about the mildewed tulip bulbs I never got around to planting. (Put that in your pipe, Dr. Freud.) I rise, rather than just get up, the following morning. The shower neither scalds nor freezes me. In the downstairs café I find a quiet window corner protected by jungly ferns and a stuffed moose head and think, Wow, I’m actually in Vancouver, and most of these people are Canadians, actually going about their business, and thinking in Canadian. All those ice hockey scores! All those Rush songs! I watch the commuters, tugs, beatup pickup trucks and floatplanes. I order a tomato and mushroom omelette from an amiable, worldly and pregnant waitress who looks like my mum did when she was forty. I don’t mention the pregnancy, just in case it’s not a fetus in there but maple-syrup donuts and Pacific salmon pie. The omelette’s the jointbest omelette of my life, equalled only by the goose-egg omelette I shared with my “first real girlfriend” during a fortyeight-hour bus ride in Himalayan India. I overhear Vancouverans—whom I have not yet learned to call Vancouverites— speaking French. Atavistic anxieties about boyhood French tests are triggered. I go for a stroll in my imaginary Vancouver, and a passing, rumbling bus shows me momentary faces in reflections and glass: a crack addict’s cratered face that hasn’t eaten since McDonald’s closed yesterday midnight; a well-fed face, pallid behind a pair of art critic’s statement-glasses; and a face that houses dim memories of the Aleutian land bridge. The bus passes, and traffic lights squeak metallically as they sway in the mauve and khaki morning. When my feet ache I find a backstreet cinema, pay a couple of cheerful Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 15

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banknotes and sit in the dark waiting for the film—a remake of the wholesome ’70s TV show Grizzly Adams—to start. I wonder what evolutionary advantage the virtual—this imagined future tense— gives us. Do we need it to invent tools, or store nuts for winter? Later, I find a park bench in my imaginary Vancouver, and see a dad throwing a baseball to his son, and my heart vibrates to minor chords. Did Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or Neil Young ever grace these very slats of painted wood, I wonder? This leads me to wonder about the life expectancy of park benches. What we park our derrières on will likely outlive us. It’s getting dark. There are bridges, residential streets, and gardens tended to by maintenance companies. An enchanted lamp glows in a small window in the deeps of a ferroconcrete forest. It beckons, but I’ll never get there: if you’re lucky enough to be loved, that lamp is unreachable. Waiting for a DON’T WALK to turn into a WALK in my imaginary Vancouver, those bright iconic striding men and warning hands you find on stoplights at so many longitudes and latitudes, I half-zone out for a few beats. Without grasping anything to take away with me, I sense the future tense in the grammar of the now. I think of Douglas Coupland, William Gibson and Wayson Choy, and I think, What a place, and am filled with an intense desire to be twentyseven again, and buy a house here, and see if I can make fewer mistakes a second time around. But then the iconic striding man is firing his penetrating beep my way. “Hey, buddy, c’mon, walk! You can’t stand there navel-gazing all day . . .” David Mitchell is an English writer, author of five novels, most recently The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and Black Swan Green (2006), and numerous shorter works. He lives in Ireland. In October 2010 he visited the real Vancouver, as a guest of the International Writers and Readers Festival. Visit him at thousandautumns.com. Page 16 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

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Perfect Bite EDI TH I G L AU ER

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth

y mother was determined to make me perfect, including perfect teeth, in the early 1930s while I was still in high school. This required weekly after-school visits to an orthodontist, a cheerful woman named Dr. Goethe. She fastened metal braces, with tiny hooks attached, to straighten recalcitrant teeth. Small rubber bands applied to the hooks increased pressure on the braces. I relieved my aching jaws by snapping the rubber bands with my tongue, especially at night, when I often lay awake aching and snapping. Right after my sixteenth birthday I demanded that all my braces be

removed. Dr. Goethe took everything off—what a relief!—except the metal bands around my two front teeth. Grandma Good, my maternal grandmother, had a lovely face, but her smile was spoiled by a gap between her two front teeth. When my second teeth arrived, I had the same space, and Dr. Goethe dedicated our dental appointments to closing it. That spring an attractive ‘‘older man”—two years my senior, known as Junior—invited me to a dance at the local country club. I was thrilled. It was the first time he had asked me for a date. He had a reputation as a good dancer and I loved to dance. There Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 17

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weren’t that many opportunities to whirl around a dance floor, especially to the tunes of the well-known orchestra hired from New York for the occasion. Dating for me and most of my friends was an innocent pastime. The boys’ parents knew our parents, and usually we went to the local movies. Your date called for you promptly after supper, driving his parents’ car.

y the day of the dance, all my braces were gone except, unhappily, the ones most visible, and Dr. Goethe was making her final assault on those two front teeth. She put an extra little hook on the front of each of the two banded teeth and threaded them with tough dental string. Then she pulled the ends of the string as hard as she could, and made a double knot. I could actually feel my teeth moving toward each other. Dr. Goethe held up a small mirror and said, “Open your mouth so you can see for yourself.” I was confronted with the glint of metal, and white strings hanging from the offending teeth. “I’m sixteen years old, I’m too old for braces,” I wailed. “Please take them off.” Dr. Goethe patted my shoulder. “We’re making great progress,” she said. “You’ll be so pleased with the results!” She was smiling as she helped me out of the chair. “Make an appointment to come back every week so we can keep those strings tight.” That night was a special occasion; I was going to a real dance. While I was getting dressed I kept looking in the mirror. “How disgusting can you get?” I asked Dr. Goethe’s braces. I must remember to keep my mouth shut. I had recently acquired my first lipstick, and I carefully used it now to

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The Boyfriends TA N I S M AC D O N A L D

They are everywhere, and they look more like themselves than ever

he boyfriends are everywhere in this city, even though you left them years ago. They are getting good notices in the local press. They are teaching social studies, and sometimes gym. They are rinsing out the gutters. They are walking home late at night and not bothering a soul. They are writing sensitive dramas that are translated into three different languages. They have become sensitive on an international level. They are doing voice-overs for cartoons and tell you how their training in the theatre made it all possible. They are posting their photographs of their trip to the Argentine Pampas on Flickr, but not for you to see. They have figured out how to make money by looking vulnerable. They are gaining weight and looking like Paul Sorvino on the third season of Law and Order. They look more like themselves than ever. They sit in bars; their wives don’t understand them. They are seducing your lesbian friends. They have discovered the secret to skipping out on a bill. They think that feelings are for losers. They have the faces of Easter Island idols. They are not reading this.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of several books, most recently Rue the Day, a collection of poems (Turnstone Press), and shorter works published in CV2, Arc and other periodicals. In 2003 she was awarded the Bliss Carman Poetry Prize. She lives in Waterloo, where she teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University. “The Boyfriends” is part of a longer work-in-progress, “Absent: Friends.” Visit MacDonald at tanismacdonald.com.

paint along the line of my lips. The first time I had worn lipstick my father stepped up to the door as I was leaving and wiped it off. We hadn’t spoken for a week, until he promised never, not ever, to do that again. Mother

explained to me that he had to get used to my being grown up. “We must try to help him,” she said. Junior arrived on time. I had read about dating etiquette in the “girls’ pages” of a magazine, so I kept him

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Robbie King (1947–2003)

S H A RON TH ES EN

obbie I remember you coming over to the house for dinner on West 6th near Balaclava, one of those Mission-style bungalows with the dark beams and built-ins worth millions now, you’d have an ounce of coke for my boyfriend Steve who took it up one nostril then the other morning, noon, and night from a tiny jade jar on the dresser, there was no problem, Steve was always kind and sweet and you were polite & after a while throwing tremendous chords out the upright as Steve counted the measures & lifted his horn. Steve careful on unaccustomed icy front steps in ankle-length black leather coat and fedora, ex-wife and daughter living on the North Shore, red Alfa convertible parked on the street. And you, Robbie, I’d hear your voice on the phone and we’d laugh about something, but you were always a bit distracted, a bit elsewhere, and I liked you that way, stroking your moustache while I made steak with Marchand de Vins sauce from the Time-Life French Provincial cookbook.

“Robbie King (1947–2003)” is from Sharon Thesen’s forthcoming collection, Oyama Pink Shale, copyright © 2011 by Sharon Thesen. Reprinted with permission of House of Anansi Press, anansi.ca. Thesen’s other titles include A Pair of Scissors, winner of the Pat Lowther Award, and The Good Bacteria. Steve Douglas was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

waiting a few minutes before gliding down the stairs to join him. We arrived at the club, and when I left my coat in the ladies’ room I was startled to see a middle-aged woman sitting there on a chair, wearing a white nurse’s uniform. “Are you really a nurse?” I asked. “Yes, I am,” she said. “Is someone sick?”

“No, but there is a lot of drinking at these dances and the club management likes to be prepared for emergencies. Some of the women get real sick. I take care of them when they throw up.” She laughed when I made a face.

was too young to have seen a lot of drinking. The boys I dated were

not old enough to drink legally, and we had attended the same dancing classes since we were twelve. My parents only served liquor at home when they were hosting a dinner party. Before the guests arrived my father laid a written cocktail recipe on the table and collected all the ingredients into a silver shaker. After all the guests were seated in the living room he made a great show of shaking the contents. My sister Jane and I peeked through the kitchen door when he poured the cocktails from the shaker into small glasses for the guests. A maid hired for the evening passed around a plate of delicious appetizers, which we had sampled in the kitchen beforehand. If wine was served with dinner, I never saw it. When I came out of the ladies’ room at the club, the party was in full swing. Junior was waiting for me, and we walked through the two reception rooms to the big dining room, which had been cleared for dancing. All the tables and chairs had been pushed back along the walls and windows. The musicians were taking a break. Right at the edge of the dance floor a beautiful dark-haired girl in a lowcut evening dress, with her skirt up around her waist, was “riding horse” on the back of a young man in a tuxedo, down on all fours. She was shrieking and very drunk. I recognized her; she was the daughter of some friends of my parents, several years older than me. I had seen her once or twice in the daytime, coming in from the golf course, very smart in white golf togs. She always looked so sophisticated and sure of herself, and I had always wished I could be like her. But this scene was so distasteful. I was shocked. Seventy-five years later I can still see her, so beautiful, so out of control. We stood and watched her bouncing up and down on the Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 19

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unfortunate man’s back until the orchestra started up again. People returned to the dance floor, and the girl dismounted and sat down at a table of noisy drinkers.

unior was a very good dancer. We danced through several music intervals, switching partners occasionally and having a very good time. Because I am five feet one inch tall, my face usually rested on the chest of my dancing partner. I would talk through the dance and still be talking as we walked back to our seats. I felt it was my duty to entertain my partners by talking. At the end of the last dance, when the music stopped, all the dancers separated from their partners— everyone but me. I had been talking to Junior, and when we tried to draw apart, I found that my face was trapped in his tie. I tried gently to disengage, but I was hooked. “What’s the matter?” Junior said. “I’m stuck,” I mumbled. “My teeth are caught in your tie.” “What do you mean?” he asked. “The braces on my teeth have hooks,” I said. “I can’t get them out of your tie!” By this time people were beginning to leave the dance floor, and all I could do was stand there with my head and teeth buried in his chest. Junior began to laugh. He tried to help me, while other dancers gathered around to watch the fun. “Listen, Junior,” I muttered from below. “Maybe if we get off the dance floor we can work it out.” “But we can’t just walk off the dance floor like this.” “I guess you’d better take off your tie,” I said. “If you can.” He couldn’t. My head was in the way. By then quite a crowd was watching

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us, laughing. We slowly manoeuvred to the edge of the floor. A friend of Junior’s slid up to us and said, “What seems to be the trouble?” I pointed toward Junior’s tie. Junior said, “A couple of Edith’s teeth are caught in my tie. Help us out.” His friend leaned down and flipped the tie off the hooks. Junior and I stood apart and chorused, “Thank you!” I could hear trouble in the ladies’ room before I got in the door. The nurse was administering to a drunk guest in a toilet stall who was sick to her stomach. I thought, if this is what it’s like to be grown up, I don’t want any part of it. A friend picking up her coat at the same time said, “What was going on between you and Junior at the end of the dance?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” I was mortified. I was still embarrassed on the way home even though Junior and I laughed about the ludicrous scene we had made, thanks to Dr. Goethe. When he left my house I marched upstairs. My mother was wide awake, waiting to hear about the dance. “Tomorrow,” I said. “All my braces come off. Tomorrow. No matter what.” And they did. After that evening, Junior and I always greeted each other as old friends. By silent, mutual agreement, we knew that one date was enough.

Edith Iglauer is the author of five books, including Inuit Journey and The Strangers Next Door, and many articles in The New Yorker and other publications. Read her most recent piece in Geist, “Red Smile” (No. 77), and more of her work at geist.com.

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The Outlook for Quirky M . A .C. FA R R A N T

I turned over, he said on the phone, and I fell out of my skeleton

—bumps and lumps and all sorts. You keep getting these different pieces of information and you don’t know what they mean. For this reason I’ve created a new word—symptomaniac. He ends each call with Cheers for now.

e is fond of quotes. During one telephone conversation he said he’d found a good one from Pascal, which he read to me, the one where Pascal says the sum of all evil would be greatly diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. This means younger men, he told me, not someone who’s just turned eighty-eight, but then, he said, I don’t spend a lot of time sitting quietly in my apartment and any evil I commit is of the modest kind such as with the bank teller today who wouldn’t let me close Brigit’s account without providing her will. Look, he told the woman, I am in the business of dying and you are obstructing my course and whether you like it or not the world is full of old people who are in the business of dying and soon enough you will be one of them. He got his way about closing the

image by marv newland, from MARV 2000

account and that pleased him but also left him feeling troubled that he may have upset the woman by reminding her she would eventually die. This feeling brought to mind, he said, another quote, one by the aphorist Eric Hoffer, the statement that the three ways to get through life are by realizing your talents, keeping busy and identifying with something apart from yourself—cause, leader, group, possessions. A fourth way might be to obliterate and repress, he said, as Don DeLillo wrote in White Noise, but that, he believed, was the coward’s way. He also said during this call that he thought he had early Alzheimer’s disease because he’d forgotten whether he’d taken his morning pills and was afraid to take a second dose in case he had. When you’re at this stage of life, he told me, your body keeps changing

e and Brigit got together in their forties having run away from their marriages. They were like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, living the intellectual life. Brigit spoke five languages and when they were first together got a job at the university library; he gave up his job delivering heating oil to play drums in a trio and do odd jobs, and then enrolled in university at age forty-six. They lived on boats. He has four friends from that time who have remained close—three men and a woman, me, his executor. All of us are at least twenty-five years younger and he has formed us into a legal group to administer his bequest. I have no family I care to bother myself with, he has said, you four are my family. During a late afternoon call, he told me he’d been cleaning out bank accounts, giving things away, visiting his lawyer, and doing further planning about his bequest. When I go, he said, I want nothing left in the apartment but dust. Then he quoted an elderly Stephen Leacock—Old men live in a world of horrors—adding that there is nothing funny about that. Keep moving, is my advice, he said, that way you’re more efficient at dodging bullets. And there are many bullets, he said. I have the apnea problem, the blood chemistry problem, the water in the lung problem, the kidney problem. I’m deaf as a post. Although, he added, there are no alarms on the horizon today. He’d just returned from picking up Brigit’s ashes from Telford’s Burial & Cremation Centre. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 21

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She’s inside a small cardboard box that’s sitting on the bookcase, he said, and she’s with me now! In one morning call he told me he had fallen out of bed in the night. His exact words were I fell out of my skeleton. I turned over, he said, and my hip appeared to fall out of its socket. This is what happens to our bodies. It’s like being an old car on blocks and disintegrating bit by bit. I awoke with a sore ankle too. I’d been dancing in my dreams with a lithesome woman at the community hall who called me a naughty boy. He quoted Dr. Johnson— When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. And he laughed. Once when I missed his call there was a message on my answering machine that sounded like haiku. Unable to contact you my life flashed before me as a series of recorded messages. The message from another missed call said I have some surprising new information for you. This turned out to be his reading of a book on string theory and being taken with the brilliant and beautiful authorscientist. For his eighty-eighth birthday he and three of his four friends had lunch at a Greek restaurant near his apartment. One friend was a retired longshoreman, one worked in arts education, one was a writer. The fourth, a former probation officer, had had a stroke and was confined to his townhouse. Of his birthday cards he liked the one from the arts education friend the best. It contained a quote from Gertrude Stein: There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. I’ve spent my adult life, he told us, believing God is dead and now I want confirmation of the fact before I die. He made it clear again at this lunch that after his death his and Brigit’s ashes are to be mixed together and Page 22 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

interred near the sea, one of his many instructions. Absolutely no religious component to the funeral service is another. No mention of souls or ascension or descent for that matter. No hymns. No mention of anything everlasting, not even, he says, memories because that’s a lie; memories dissipate like smoke. Music will be allowed at the service, though, something by the Ramsey Lewis Trio he suggests. He then told us Brigit had joined him in a dream. They were strolling along the seashore; it had been eighteen days since she’d died. She was on his left, taller than she had been at the end, and wore a hooded sweatshirt, the hood covering her head. She told him that the peace had entered her and so she came. He asked her what it was like when she died and she said it was like a jet plug which, he told us, he took to mean that the change had been explosive, sudden. Next in the dream, they were in a hotel room, high up, with a stunning view of mountains, sea and sky. They lay on the floor of this room and embraced, he said, and then Brigit left, descending some stairs with a group of strangers while speaking to a man in this group. Remind me, she told the man, to get your son a new pair of boots. Then she was gone, having come into the world, he reminded us, in the Shanghai International Settlement in 1925, as did J.G. Ballard five years later although they never met but whose writings she later admired, especially Empire of the Sun, a copy of which she had given to each of the four friends, friends who had been Brigit’s as well as his. When asked his opinion of the world on the day of his birthday he said as usual the world’s affairs were absolute bullshit which was what we expected he would say because he had told us many times that he found the world to be a sad domain of conflict and contradiction. He then stated

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that an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard but couldn’t remember where the quote came from. Nevertheless he was trying, he said, to take the quote to heart even when it came to Yolanda, the administrator of the seniors’ health centre who treated him, a man who graduated in philosophy and reads physics for fun, and who has spent much of his adult life reading and thinking and talking and arguing about what he thought, like a simpleton.

ne morning he called very early to read out a quote by Eduardo Galeano that he’d found in Galeano’s book Upside Down. I’d answered the phone still holding my toothbrush. God, he quoted, sold the planet to a few companies because in a foul mood he decided to privatize the universe. Isn’t that rich? he asked, and then read something he’d written himself: the God search is the unending creation of the fictional world which reduces merely living to a second class temporary existence while casting envious glances at the magnificent world of the spirit. During this call he said he’d begun writing essays and that God was to be his first topic even though God, or the human worship of the unknown as he called it, was the thing that made him most angry. In his will he has stated that the funds are not to be used as mercy money or speculation money, but used in the service of democracy and in the interest of knowledge, science and the dissolution of the heavenly kingdom. The four friends must agree on the allocation but he hopes the money will go toward some branch of scientific research, even though one of his friends would prefer setting up an annual grant that would be available to a visionary poet or prose writer. Often I call him. In one conversation Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 23

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he laughed about a newspaper headline he’d read that day. Just a minute, he said, and went looking for it. The outlook for quirky is grim. This headline, he said, not only summed up our position on the planet, but described his personal situation to a T. He then mentioned he’d thrown the I Ching that morning and it turned out to be Ko, The Judgement—fire in the lake. Thus the superior man sets the calendar in order, he said, and makes the seasons clear. This is what I am obviously doing, he said, while trying not to suck the essence out of each day by dwelling on what is to come. During a recent call, and before signing off with Cheers for now, he told me about a run-in with another bank official and said there are no wrong questions, only wrong answers and I could quote him on that. He also said, right now I am at your disposal, but soon I will be for your disposal. The word call as it pertains to you and me, he has mentioned, means telephone conversation and not an incitement to action such as Stephen Hawking recently made by saying the only hope for the survival of the human species is escape by space travel within the next hundred years, an indictment, he said, that left him outraged. Space travel is merely another attempt, he said, to form a new world religion based on suffering and everlasting life and which completely ignores our present predicament. He also said, I’ve heard music in my head for fifty years. Today, though, the music changed, became stuck on a Fats Waller tune. I had to work hard to erase it. Over and over I hummed the opening to the 1812 Overture. That did it. M.A.C. Farrant’s latest book, The Strange Truth About Us—a novel of absence, will be published by Talonbooks in fall 2011. Read her Geist work at geist.com. Page 24 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

FINDINGS

PUGNAX GIVES NOTICE Carmine Starnino From The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009, edited by A.F. Moritz (series editor Molly Peacock) and published by Tightrope Books; and This Way Out, published by Gaspereau Press (2009). Carmine Starnino is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays, A Lover’s Quarrel (Porcupine’s Quill). He lives in Montreal.

e’s done with it, the tridents and tigers, the manager’s greed, the sumptuous beds of noble women who please their own moods. He’s done with dogging it for the crowds, the stabbing, the slashing, the strangling, the poor pay, the chintzy palm branch prizes. Make no mistake. Pugnax is a real fierceosaurus. Winner of 26 matches, a forum favourite. Yet his yob genes have, it seems, gone quiet. Fatigue has called his soul back to his body. Circles under his eyes; he sleeps badly. Late-night cigs lit from the dog-end of the last, cutwork of the clock nibbling him small. In the barracks around him his friends snore, lucky returnees of the last hard hacking, dead to the world, free of a weapon in the fist. Priscus face-down in the crook of his arm. Triumphus flung open, caught on a bad turn. Verus collapsed, whacked, against the cot. Flamma, doomed by down-thumbing shadows, lies in a stain of his final shape and size. Pugnax loves them all, chasers and net-fighters, fish-men and javelin-throwers, carefree despite punishing practices, screaming orders, despite limbs trained to turn lethal for mobs unable to bear the thought of two men clinging to life, but here it’s only the thock of wooden sword against wooden sword,

the racket as they fall on each other’s shields in joy. Pugnax’s heart breaks for them. Understand, he has inflicted pain and felt pain, but now wants to go native, move into a flat, experiment with fashionable clothes, dawdle at the baths, tame his nights with tea, be spellbound by the smell of soap, find a wife. Our boy dreams of joining the crowd, shouting himself hoarse as some bonehead gets knocked down and the blade pushed through his chest, stapling him to the ground. At intermission, he’ll watch as the blood is raked over with sand, thinking chore thoughts: yard work, paint jobs, weekend projects.

en facts I couldn’t fit into the poem. The “thumbs down” response—the audience’s declaration of the death for a wounded fighter—is a myth (decision was left to a single judge). Most gladiators who died were between eighteen and twenty-five. Not all gladiators were bumped off; only criminals, the superstars were too profitable to die. Out-of-work Romans signed up to gladiator schools for the free food, clean lodgings, and medical care; in exchange, they agreed “to endure branding, chains, flogging or death by the sword.” The Colosseum floor was sometimes flooded to create conditions for a sea-fight with gladiators fighting on the deck of ships. According to one story, twenty depressed gladiators committed group suicide rather than enter the arena. Emperor Trajan is responsible for the Colosseum’s largest imperial show, which spanned 123 days and included 5,000 pairs of fighters. The gladiatorial games got their start as funeral rituals: combats were staged in honor of the deceased. Action figures of popular fighters could be purchased outside the arena. Some Romans believed gladiator blood cured epilepsy. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 27

FINDINGS

CONCORD OF SWEET SOUNDS Gerard Brender à Brandis From Concord of Sweet Sounds, published by Porcupine’s Quill in 2009, featuring art by Gerard Brender à Brandis and text by F. David Hoeniger. Gerard Brender à Brandis is a wood engraver, printmaker, illustrator and bookwright. He is best known for his floral engravings and watercolours, many of which can be seen in galleries across Canada and in the U.S. He and F. David Hoeniger also collaborated on A Gathering of Flowers, in which Brandis’s engravings depict the flowers of Shakespeare.

bugle

BUNDLE OF DESIRES Ray Hsu From “Asian, Whatever That Means,” an interview with Ray Hsu by Krissy Darch, which first appeared on The Vancouver Observer (vancouverobserver. com) in November 2010. Ray Hsu is a poet and postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His latest collection of poems is Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, published by Nightwood in 2010. Krissy Darch is a writer and a teacher in the UBC Creative Writing Program.

teach the Asian Canadian Writing course [at UBC], and the most common question I get asked is: “So, is everyone in the class Asian?” And I say, “No. Whatever that means.” And then they say, “Is everyone in the class Canadian?” And I say, “No. Whatever that means.” Then they say, “So, is everyone in the class a writer?” And I say, “No. Whatever that means.” Page 28 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

horn

I think a lot of people inherit uncritically an essentialized notion of what the category of “Asian Canadian” might mean. And that’s the thing that I fight against in and around the class. There’s a whole set of questions that people ask me, and many people don’t realize that they ask a similar set of the same questions in the same order. That’s an inheritance of the blunt instrument that is Canadian multicultural policy. In attempting to recognize and respect everyone’s happy compartment, under Canadian multicultural policy, it’s like hey, it’s the time of the year we can break out this festival in which everyone can wear their ethnic clothes and eat their ethnic food. Let’s say “white” folks understand Asianness as something that’s essential, sacred, and cannot be touched, when in fact that’s wrong. It flattens so-called asians into cartoon characters, as if we’re all the same and as if we share some sort of essential experience. We’re all different. We’re as varied as any other artificial group, like “white” people. “White” people are very varied, partly because

FINDINGS

organ

it’s an artificial category. It’s a convenient category. We could theorize it further and say the category of “Asian” makes sense because it’s in resistance to the category that lumped together various groups worth discriminating against under immigration law. This is not to say the category should then be tossed out. My colleague Tetsuro Shigematsu and I are very different from each other. I’m “Chinese” so to speak. He’s “Japanese” so to speak. What we do share is that somewhere down the road, people we were related to were treated differently under immigration law. It’s a social construct, but it is something we share— differential treatment by the state. That’s not meaningless. It’s not as if we share an essential experience like food or costumes or whatever— it’s the fact that this social category continues to have effects on us. We can turn that around and use it as a rallying point. The other point being the question that everyone always asks: “Is everyone in the class Asian Canadian?” It’s almost exclusively “white” people who ask me that. It seems that to a lot of “white” people, what it means to be Asian

bagpipe

Canadian is perfectly clear. It has to do with a phenotype. Is it that easy to tell? People could be biracial. There is such a thing as “passing.” What’s more, because no one stops to question the category of asian, no one stops to question the fact that not even everyone in the class is Canadian. Because everyone is so obsessed with the phenotypical questions about what it means to be “asian,” they don’t ask questions about what it means to be Canadian, about citizenship itself, or writing as a practice. In fact, the name of the class is—in quotation marks, with a question mark: “Asian Canadian Writing?”—and it’s for people who have investments in any part of that category. The questions that people ask about the class are a form of control. For one man I spoke to, it was an interrogation, and when I came up with an explanation for the class that he was satisfied with, he let me off the hook. He assumed I was coming from an essentialist position. And he’s a “white” man who teaches in Asian studies. Which makes it all the more astonishing. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 29

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THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A GRAY WHALE, AFTER WALLACE STEVENS AND ENDING WITH A LINE FROM RILKE Brad Cran From bradcran.com/vancouver_verse/, the website of Brad Cran, Poet Laureate for Vancouver, 2009– 2011. The poem was inspired by two gray whales that swam into the harbour in downtown Vancouver in 2010, one in May and one in August. Brad Cran is a writer, photographer and accountant. He is the author of The Good Life, a collection of poems; and co-author with Gillian Jerome of the award-winning book Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

1 An armoured lung, a living castle of barnacle and bone; a peaceful leviathan moving with the ease of a dark cloud. 2 The child knows more about the gray whale than the adult. When given crayons the adult says he does not know how to draw. The child is already drawing the gray whale with blue and pink. 3 In the world of opposites the gray whale is an ocean cave populated by sea otters. 4 No I didn’t see the whale but the man behind me at Starbucks did. Everyone was talking about it and someone said “did you see the whale?” his eyes danced and he shouted across the store I did, he kept saying. I did. I saw the whale. Page 30 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

5 And the whale said Behold the natural world. 6 The woman died and the man grew frail and ashen. His life slowed to the pace of the gray whale. 7 Forget the secrets of elephants. The gray whale thinks in music. 8 In the Oregon aquarium, the children sit below the skeleton of the gray whale drinking cola. 9 The thing is, my dad doesn’t like people much. We saw the whale on the pier outside the market. Even after the whale had gone, my dad wanted to stay and talk to everyone else who had seen it. 10 Do not live in habit. Do not take the most basic assumptions for granted. Consider the city of whales. If you seek it with your eyes you will never find it. It lives only in the symphonics of the ocean. Its music is to the ear as the pavement is to your foot. 11 Can you believe it’s August. Can you believe there is a whale in English Bay. How lucky we are to walk through Stanley Park. My heart beats at the speed of birds. I’ve stopped believing in loneliness. Here we are. It’s summer. I want to be in love. 12 Some were trying to decipher what the whale was telling us. Others already knew. 13 And there you were below the mountains in the heart of the city gazing at the gray whale. You must change your life.

CHIMO by David Collier

From Chimo, published by conundrum in 2011. The book is an autobiographical account of Collier’s decision to re-enlist in the Canadian army and go through basic training again at age forty, with the hope of being posted to Afghanistan as a Canadian war artist.

David Collier is an artist and writer, author of The Frank Ritza Papers, Portraits from Life and other books featuring his signature “comic strip essays.” He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Read his other Geist work at geist.com. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 31

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WERE YOU, WHEN DID, COULD YOU? Eleanor Wachtel Questions and prompts offered by Eleanor Wachtel during an interview with Seamus Heaney that was published in Brick 86 (Winter 2011). A version of this conversation was first broadcast on the CBC Radio program Writers & Company. Heaney is an Irish writer and translator, author of poetry, prose and plays. His most recent collection is Human Chain (Faber and Faber). Wachtel has hosted Writers & Company since its inception in 1990. She has published four books, most recently Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields and Original Minds. Visit her at cbc. ca/writersandcompany.

ou were the oldest of nine children, and I wonder if you could read your poem “A Sofa in the Forties.”

Your father was a cattle dealer. Can you tell me a bit about him? So he didn’t say that much? By overstated you mean stated. You mention that this foundation was so strong regardless of the secularization that occurred later, but were you a believer at the time? Sex. Could you read your poem “A Call”? I have to ask you, did you ever say to your father that you loved him? You’re right. Guilty as charged. When did you first become interested in poetry?

What frightened you about frogs spawning? What effect did it have on your family, to move to the Republic?

Picturing Canada Paintings by Dorothy Knowles found in Land Marks: The Art of Dorothy Knowles, published by Hagios Press in 2008. Fields and Sky Two Bluffs at Dusk Near the Creek The Edge of the Lake Wind on the River Rapid River Dark Hill Grey Skies Clouds Coming Up The Bow River Autumn Leaves Setting Sun at Nokomis Summer Day Fences, Roses and River Summer View October Colours Hills North of Macklin

Page 32 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

Black Shadows The Point Reflected Grey Sky, Grey Water Cadmium Green Lilies at Anglin Lake Still Water Distant Mountains Gentle Shadows Lake O’Hara Green Wild Asters on a Grassy Bank Wheatfields in June Red Rock, Red Trees Lonely Prairie Mountain Lake Stream in the Mountains Silent Winter Bright Blue Sky

How do you see the responsibility of poets to the politics of their time? And when you look back now, not that you need to spend much time revisiting it in your own work, but do you feel you walked the right line? How do you feel now? How do you see the future for Northern Ireland? I’m wondering, how does a poem start for you? You had a stroke in 2006, which you say wasn’t exactly a brush with death. What was it? And you didn’t lose speech and it didn’t affect your mind at all? You wrote a poem called “Miracle.” Could you read that?

FINDINGS

WHIPT CREAM ON TOP Fly From Peops: Portraits & Stories of People, published by Soft Skull Press in 2003. Fly is a cartoonist and musician who has travelled extensively, touring with bands, presenting her own spoken-word and art shows, and drawing everyone she meets. She was born in Halifax, where, in her words, she “came flying out of the womb on skates with a half-full sketchbook in her hands screaming that she had too much work to get done & complaining about the cold.” See more of her work at flyspage. com.

Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 33

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SHRIEK OF FREEDOM Betty Lambert From Crossings, a novel first published by Pulp Press (now Arsenal Pulp Press) in 1979. Betty Lambert (1933–1983) was a prolific writer of plays for stage, radio and television, as well as long and short fiction. In December 2010, the Vancouver Public Library hosted “Crossings: A Return,” an evening of tributes and readings from the book, organized by Anakana Schofield with readings and contributions from the writers Renee Rodin, Annabel Lyon, Julianne Okot Bitek and Claudia Casper, and the performance artist Lori Weidenhammer. A new edition of Crossings will be published in 2011 as part of the Legacy Books Project, sponsored by the City of Vancouver and the Association of Book Publishers of B.C.

took the cats and flew up to the island. All the time I was getting ready to go, packing, neatly, like a lady, I felt frozen. As if the trembling had frozen into a single shrieking note, high-pitched on a violin, so high that no one could hear, only the mad dogs of the universe.

Nice Old Ladies Don’t Chew Excerpts from a list of bird mnemonics, one of the many means employed by birdwatchers to distinguish one species’ call from another. The full list can be seen at caculo.com/ mnemonics.htm. Bittern, American bloonk-a-doonk Blackbird, Red-winged konklaree Blackbird, Yellow-headed don’t you dare Bunting, Indigo fire, fire, where, where, here, here Chickadee, Black-capped chickadee-dee-dee and cheeseburger Dove, Mourning Hoo-la-hoop, hoop, hoop Flycatcher, Olive-sided quick, three beers! Nuthatch, Red-breasted ink, ink, ink Owl, Barred who cooks for you, who cooks for you all? Rail, Virginia gidick, gidick, gididick Sandpiper, Semipalmated tweedle dee dee Sparrow, White-throated poor Sam Peabody Thrasher, Brown drop it, drop it, pick it up, pick it up Warbler, Connecticut whip it, whip it up, whip it good Waterthrush, Northern nice old ladies don’t chew Page 34 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

And I moved calmly, neatly, precisely, like a lady, a small poised smile on my face, cold with that shriek of terror. I was putting myself in his hands. I was going to his territory. I was going beautiful, a sacrifice. “You can’t destroy me,” he had said. “I’ve been destroyed by experts.” I rounded up the cats and put them, yowling, into the big Mexican basket. I put my typewriter in the case. I took enough paper for the last story. The big plane flew low over the water and we came in. This was the end of the world but there was still another plane to catch. When the man opened the luggage compartment, Peter spat at him. He had gotten out of the Mexican basket. Sally and Lolly were still inside, huddled, afraid, frozen. But Peter was enormous, puffed out to twice his size with indignation. “I’ve got a tiger in my tail,” said the man and everyone laughed. I laughed too, and gathered Peter up, stroking him, saying, “It’s going to be all right. It’s all right, it’s going to be all right.” I found a taxi. He seemed to know all about it. We drove to the sea. I went down the ramp as if it were the most normal thing in the world. There was a man in a hut, at the bottom of the ramp. A little hut with calendars and a telephone. I hired the man to fly me to the island, as if it were something I had done every day of my life. I had just locked the door and walked away, leaving all my things, the fake sarukhan rugs, the Renoir reproduction, all my stories, the bills that were going to come through the mail slot. I had walked away, as other people did, as Mik had done all his life. A shriek of freedom in my head. So this was what it was, freedom. To walk away and leave everything behind, to go to a man and say Kill me. A week before I had phoned him. It was a radio telephone and he had to take the call in the cookhouse. Everyone in the cookhouse could listen in. Everyone on all those lonely islands could listen in. “It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing,” I said. But he didn’t understand. “What? What?” he said, his voice strange and crackling through the lost northern air.

FINDINGS

“I’m not pregnant,” I said. And everyone heard. He was humiliated. The men went into the forest and the women stayed in the compound. It was forbidden to go into the forest if you were a woman. Once I climbed the road into the forest, the cats leaping in and out of the trees beside me, running ahead and then dashing back, suddenly elemental, or following me, as dogs do, then rushing away again, their tails fluffed absurdly, scuttering back to the forest and leaping at me, the prey, arched-back, stiff-legged, doing the sideways daring dance of Siamese. I walked up into the forest until I saw them, the men, in their great yellow machines, grunting and roaring, tearing at the earth, ripping and gouging. I hid behind a tree and watched them, men alone in their secret world, and I was afraid. Men engaged in their mysterious rites, tearing great holes in the earth. The ground shook beneath them. I felt the shudder in the tree I was hiding behind. Like creatures from some fantastic world, the men moved, grunting, laborious, in metal helmets and thick boots. No one human could have such large feet, it was impossible. But that was later. Now I was going to the island, I was putting myself into his hands, great thick hands, hands that grasped you and brought you down, hands like weapons. Not fists. Nothing that looked like that could be called “a fist.” A fist is small, with knuckles, the bones shine whitely through the skin. Thin and delicate. Mik’s hands were weapons. “You can’t destroy me,” he had said. “I’ve been destroyed by experts.” Sometimes at night I cry God God and before my mind can stop it, He comes and holds me. Over each nipple is a tattoo: one says Cream and the other says Coffee. Later, that day in the forest, I crept away, unseen. I went back to the compound and had tea with the boss’s wife. She made doilies. “How do you get them to stand like that?” I said. It was all mysterious to me, the world of women. Women who wait in compounds for men. I belonged nowhere. “You starch them,” she said. They were curved and bowed into elaborate

arches and scallops, and they were everywhere, on the backs of the chairs, on the back of the sofa, on the arms, on the radio, on the side tables, everywhere. In their centres were ceramic fish or ashtrays, bowls and figurines. They said “Campbell River, B.C.” or “Victoria, B.C.” But now the little plane is taking off. In-

FYODORABLE Taylor Brown-Evans

A Dostoyevsky Valentine’s Day card, one in a collection of drawings of famous people in compromising positions. Others include Sartre and his Wookie, Suzuki v. Narwhal and Hemingway: Sasquatch Hunter. Taylor BrownEvans is a writer and comics artist who lives and works in Vancouver. His comic “The Centre” was published in Geist 78-79. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 35

FINDINGS

side it is wired. The chair I am sitting on is actually wired to the floor. Peter is yowling in the back. Lolly is mewing plaintively. Sally is stoic, resigned. I think, Held together with baling wire, just as the books have promised. This is “baling wire,” and I am delighted to meet it at last. You never meet a brickbat for instance. “But what is a brickbat?” I said, nineteen and clever, all those years ago. The old Marxists looked at me with scorn. But they never told me. The world below us stretches deep and green and blue, miles of forest and sea and mountains. We thud through the great empty sky, and the white and the blue and the dark green ignore us. The man beside me is chewing a match. He drives the plane as if it were a car, as if it were nothing, as if every day he took someone like me to the island to be killed. The wings go up on one side and down on the other. My stomach lurches, as if my body still cares for itself, as if it can still remember, and I am amused, as one is at a child who cries out in the dark. “There, there, it’s all right,” but the child too will die, one way or another. Like a swallow we come down towards the inlet. The forest rises to meet us, alerted now. The sun glints sharply through the glass and the man curses, ducks his head. I am wearing my grandmother’s wedding ring. And here we are, an insect of wood and metal, moving calmly through gentle ripples to the dock. Mik comes down the path to meet us. But he was not waiting. He must have heard the plane circling, but he is not waiting for us. He comes down the path now that I am on the dock. The man with the match hands out the typewriter, the Mexican basket, the suitcase. Mik is filthy. Unshaven. Dressed in unfamiliar khaki and great tan boots. Even his face is grimy, streaked with grease. I know. He is so like me. I know everything. He wouldn’t clean up, he wouldn’t shave, he would not come down to the dock when he heard the plane circling in the sky. How could he? If he shaved, if he cleaned up, if he came running down, it would not be me. It would be someone else. I would not have come. Page 36 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

A BROCHURE Ken Babstock From Airstream Land Yacht, winner of the Trillium Award, copyright © 2006 by Ken Babstock. Reprinted with permission of Anansi Press, anansi.ca. Babstock is also the author of Days into Flatspin and Mean. He lives in Toronto.

hen the belt of penury tightened further and whether from hunger or a need to lash back, we started dreaming of weeks of slack; a hammock of days nailed between trees rooted in the old loam of obligation. The names of God all sounded like ‘vacation.’ And the trips we summoned shimmered with a nimbus of the definitively unreal: moored on the Seine in a houseboat the best feature of which was the wrought iron collapsing front gate on the lift descending to a fully equipped laundry room. Earning our rent on a loom, at our leisure, for a cave with a/c dug into a cliff at the edge of the Mojave. A month of Sundays of naps in New York, NY. The chance to collapse into ourselves or blow apart during monsoon season any place monsoons happen. It was just as she was uttering ‘Saturn’ that I felt my compass returning to that cabin capped in thick green felt I’d seen outside Oslo— not felt, really, a meadow doing its placid best as a living quilt.

FINDINGS

The earth on the roof. Voles over shingles. Seven kinds of moss softening the gables And inside, each step a ride on the backs of sea birds to a bed on a floor all sky.

I HATE PAYING A DOLLAR-FORTY TO RIDE THE BUS—WHO HAS EXACTLY A QUARTER, A NICKEL, A DIME AND A LOONIE ANYWAY? Kristina Knappett From the Claremont Review 37 (Spring 2010). Kristina Knappett is a poet who loves to spend time outdoors.

hate neon churches. Guys who list the reasons they love you. The smell of lamb. The white crud under toe nails. Eating too many blueberry pancakes in the morning. Walking too far without insoles. Losing my favourite new button. Like the Aladdin Sane pin with David Bowie’s glitter-trashed face I lost yesterday. I hate yesterday. The clumps of hair and soapy grime extracted from shower drains. Shower drains. Waiting too long for the crosswalk to change. Furry boots . . . furry collars. . . fur. . . I mean, who are you, the Abominable Snowman? Just grow some chest hair for pete’s sake. Snowmen: they won’t stop smiling, STOP SMILING. Flavored water. People who think daisies are weeds. I hate my gardener. I hate burnt noses. I hate hate itself for making me hate things in this world that I should be appreciating with delectable adjectives. I hate that I don’t know any delectable adjectives other than delectable, and I hate being ignored on the bus, like the lady I’m sitting next to as I write this poem. I think she hates me.

LIVE FROM THE RAPID LAKE RESERVE Charles Mostoller From Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada, published by New Star Books in 2010. Charles Mostoller is a photojournalist and writer who has worked in radio, print and alternative journalism in North America and Mexico. He is a member of Barriere Lake Solidarity, which works with the Algonquin of Barriere Lake on territorial and other aboriginal rights.

ourtney and I showed Norman and Angelo how to set everything up, and then they flipped the switch. We set the transmitter to 107.9 FM and Norman started to speak into the mic to test the signal. We had a boom-box set up, and the sound was coming out loud and clear. Norman got in his car and drove around the reserve to see how well the signal carried, telling people to turn on their radios while he was at it. When he returned, he said that the signal was strong throughout the reserve. We put on some country music, and then Norman got on the mic again, speaking in Algonquin to invite the community to come up to the station and to keep their radios tuned in. Soon the classroom filled up with children of all ages, who ran straight to the microphone, giggling and pushing each other out of the way to be in front of it. “Can I say something?” one girl asked. Norman told her what to say, and timidly she stepped to the microphone to repeat it before running away laughing with her friends. Courtney was trying to get some of the other kids to say something, but most were too shy. As quickly as the room had filled up with kids, suddenly it was empty again. Norman put on some hip hop. I went outside and climbed up on the roof to check on the antenna. The sun was setting over the forest, beaming pink and yellow rays through the icy needles of the pine trees. When I climbed down, a black pickup truck pulled up in front of the school to say hello. As I walked towards it, the window came down and I saw Norman’s brother Terry. “Turn on the radio, 107.9!” I shouted. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 37

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“Already got it on,” he said, as he turned up the volume on his stereo to blast the hip hop Norman had going. “What time are you doing training tomorrow?” he asked. “Two o’c1ock,” I responded. “Alright, see you later then,” he said, before driving off. I walked back inside, surprised, to tell Courtney and Norman. “Everyone’s already got their radios on,” I said. But before they could respond, someone behind me shouted for Norman. It was Luisa, an elder. She said a few words in Algonquin, before saying sharply, “No more Rap! Put on some Country! We want to dance!” And then she turned away, heading outside to her truck and driving off. Norman translated. Luisa said that lot of people, including lots of elders, were over at her house hanging out, and they were sick of listening to hip hop. So we put on a large selection of country tunes, set the playlist on repeat with some of the prerecorded station IDs mixed in, locked the door to the school and headed over to Marylynn’s house. Cramped into Marylynn’s tiny living room,

Page 38 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

a group of elders and young adults sat around a small table covered in a flower tablecloth, listening to Hank Williams on the radio. Some young children were running around, prompting Marylynn to tell them to go to sleep in the next room. Norman, Courtney and I took a seat with the others and began to joke about our day at the radio. “So how many people showed up?” asked Marylynn. “Just me and Angelo!” responded Norman. “More will come to tomorrow’s training, I hope.” For a moment, the music was interrupted and a station ID came on the air, one that Marylynn had recorded before with some other women. “Oma nogom ki ne deta naba mitchikinabiko’inik nodaktcigen”—“This is Radio Barriere Lake, ‘the Voice of the Forest’, broadcasting live from the Rapid Lake reserve, Kitiganik.” As the music resumed, Marylynn started to laugh, and joked in Algonquin to her father Albert, seated across the table from her, who began to laugh as well. “I’d never heard that before,” she said to me, laughing and apparently very flattered. “I hadn’t heard my voice on the radio!”

FINDINGS

With some prodding from Marylynn, Albert offered to tell a story for the radio. I grabbed the portable recorder and handed it to Norman. Putting on the headphones, he activated the mic and checked the levels. After pressing record, he asked Albert to begin his story. I listened in fascination to the tigweygan (drum) story, even though I only understood a scant few words. After fifteen minutes or so, Albert ended the story and Norman packed up the recorder. As I turned the volume back up on the radio, somebody opened a case of beer and passed a few around. For the next few hours, we were trading stories and laughing the night away, all to the backdrop of Radio Barriere Lake. All over the reserve, people were gathered around together doing the same thing. The frozen night got even colder, and ol’ Hank wailed through the speakers of dozens of tiny radios, as if asking the moon to slow its course so the party could go on just a little longer. The next morning, Marylynn’s husband Clayton woke me and handed me the telephone. On the other end was Sonny—a youth who was very enthusiastic about the radio but was in jail at the time for having participated in the peaceful blockade of a nearby highway.

CANADA: CASE HISTORY: 1945

He doesn’t like books, except about bears, collects new coins and model planes, and never refuses a dare. His Uncle spoils him with candy, of course, yet shouts him down when he talks at table. You will note he’s got some of his French mother’s looks, though he’s not so witty and no more stable. He’s really much more like his father and yet if you say so he’ll pull a great face. He wants to be different from everyone else and daydreams of winning the global race. Parents unmarried and living abroad, relatives keen to bag the estate, schizophrenia not excluded, will he learn to grow up before it’s too late?

THE MOMENT Anna Swanson From The Nights Also, published by Tightrope Books in 2010. Anna Swanson’s poetry has been published in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope Books), and in PRISM, Grain, Prairie Fire, Malahat Review and other periodicals. She lives in Vancouver, where she works as a children’s librarian.

Earle Birney From One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems, edited by Sam Solecki and published by Harbour Publishing in 2006. Earle Birney (1904–1995) was a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, critic and scholar, author of more than twenty published books of poetry. Sam Solecki is a writer, editor and professor at the University of Toronto.

his is the case of a high-school land, dead-set in adolescence; loud treble laughs and sudden fists, bright cheeks, the gangling presence. This boy is wonderful at sports and physically quite healthy; he’s taken to church on Sunday still and keeps his prurience stealthy.

hen the world says Go. When everything turns green: the neon signs, the on-ramps, the sun rising like an oversized traffic light across the highway. I’ve left the muffler on the side of the road. I’ve cut off the roof. I’m speeding down sunburnt tarmac. To have a body. To move from inside the skin. I remember now. To pivot around a paddle into white water. To somersault, to hipcheck, to handspring. To nail a baseball into a glove. To reach past safety and smack against joy. I remember. To jackknife off the wharf into cold water. To wake up. To wake up and want to start the day. This body: the green sap rising. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 39

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Jonathan Ball

GEMINI (May 21–June 20) Sadly, the rise of Our robot overlords will Cramp your dating style

From Grain (Fall 2010). Jonathan Ball is a writer and filmmaker, author of Clockfire (Coach House) and Ex Machina (Book Thug). See more haiku horoscopes at haikuhoroscopes.com, and still more of

CANCER (June 21–July 22) Don’t count your chickens Before they hatch sinister Plans to dethrone you

HAIKU HOROSCOPES

Ball’s work at jonathanball.com.

RIES (March 21–April 19) Say goodbye to your Sense of self-worth and hello To my horoscopes TAURUS (April 20–May 20) The monster under Your bed disqualifies you For life insurance

Titanic Malfunction From canadian-titanic-society.com. Parade starts sharply at 8:30 a.m. The TITANIC model/float will be in this year’s, OKTOBERFEST PARADE** Come and see the parade, or watch it on TV!! Sorry, but the “Stutz Bearcat” will NOT be there! NOTICE! We apologize for the Titanic’s whistles and propellers malfunction. I did find the problem with the whistles etc., but not in time for the parade. It was a battery problem, and had I known in enough time before the parade, we could have repaired it and had everything working properly. However, in the pre-parade testing, everything WAS-in-fact, working, and therefore no reason to suspect that there would be a malfunction. I am now in the process of designing a back-up for the battery, and any other things that could possibly go wrong, so a malfunction of any type will NEVER happen again. This IS the first time in eight years of parades that this has happened, so now the problem will get rectified and backup procedures put into place. Thank you, Norm Lewis Page 40 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

LEO (July 23–Aug 22) You will learn the true Meaning of pain when you buy A dictionary VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22) It won’t make sense now But pack some cheese down your pants And await your fate LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22) Get ready for a Season of great weather and Morbid irony SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21) Let go of the past But don’t let go of that guy Hanging off the cliff SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21) As preparation For his next role, Daniel DayLewis will kill you CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19) Barracuda! With That said, it’s time to invest In mutual funds AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18) You have disobeyed Willy Wonka’s simple rules And now you must die PISCES (Feb 19–March 20) Let’s get serious For a moment—it’s not right To eat that baby

The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik Hal Niedzviecki He was a storyteller, a raconteur, who dealt in the epic—risk, reward, heroism. But did we really know him?

Zadie Krolik (front row, third from left), with co-workers in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The photo was taken when he was about forty years old.

he memorial service for my grandfather, Zadie Avrohom (Abraham) Krolik, was held in the old Jewish cemetery in Montreal in June 2009, a few weeks before he would have celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday. Aside from the rabbi, who had never met Zadie, I was the only one who addressed the small crowd. I spoke confidently on that perfect summer day, having been well schooled in my grandfather’s story. I informed the gathered mourners that Zadie had been born in Poland in 1915, smack in the middle of the First World War. His father

returned from the army to attend his briss. He lived through the Spanish influenza, the Great Depression—and then the horrible aftermath of the Depression, World War II. Zadie grew up in Zuromin, a small town in central Poland, 120 kilometres northwest of Warsaw. Zuromin was a shtetl, straight out of a Sholem Aleichem story, and Zadie’s first language was Yiddish. His was the last generation to be born and raised in the kind of town where boys got their education in the cheder, a shack that was boiling hot in the summer, freezing in Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 41

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the winter and policed all year by the town’s rabbi, a man who drilled his charges endlessly on the abstractions of the Talmud and never hesitated to smack them on the back of the head should their attention wander. Zadie’s rabbi teacher, like almost all of his childhood family and friends, died before his time, murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators when the Germans overran Zuromin in the early years of World War II. But not Zadie. A young man trained by his father the tailor to continue the family trade, a young man taught to recite Torah and patiently await the Messiah, Zadie, almost alone, chose to flee everything he knew. This was the story I told of my grandfather: the escapee, the survivor, the hard-working peasant who laid the foundation for us to live in prosperity and peace. It was a true story. But it was also a lie. For Zadie’s story is full of gaps, holes in the narrative that nobody, not even my mother or my lawyer/amateur historian older brother seems able to fill. Under a hot morning sun, we murmured the Mourner’s Kaddish and said our goodbyes. Funerals are about endings. But the man I had described was not necessarily the man we buried. His story, spanning centuries and generations, was in many ways still embryonic, still to be determined. My grandfather was a hard-drinking, heavysmoking, barely educated autodidact who espoused theories on history and politics in a Yiddish-inflected growl. He was always stoic, but happy only when he was the centre of attention. He was a poor man who loved to gamble, tip, haggle and ultimately avoid having to pick up the tab. My father thought he was a pain in the ass. My mother could never figure out how all the money she sent him disappeared so quickly. We projected on him. We told others about the sweeping arc of his life. But in the end, we didn’t really know him. The questions begin with the Nazis approaching Zuromin. Zadie, in his twenties, recently married, flees the town of his birth Page 42 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

H A R D - D R I N K I N G,

along with his young wife, my Bubby Theresa, who all of us came to call Little Bubby because of her diminutive size. Why do they leave when almost all the others stay? We’ll never know. Zadie never told us. From here, the picture falls apart, like a face etched in sand slowly decomposing in the wind. We know that the couple travelled by rail to the Russian border. We know that at some point a German soldier called Zadie a dirty Jew and hit him on the head with the butt of his rifle. And we know that Zadie and Little Bubby walked for hours and hours in the forest (where? why?) before finally reaching Russia. And we know that at twenty-four years old, on the cusp of a new life in a new country, he was never to see his mother, father, two brothers—Moshe and Wolf—and two sisters—Leah and Gena— again. But we don’t know how he managed to overcome or what he really felt about such total erasure. The important part of the story was always the result: the survival of my grandparents. Yet it seems unbelievable that after all the times I heard Zadie recount the story, all the times I asked him about exactly when and where things happened, in the end there was such opaqueness. Zadie was, or seemed to be, unclear on the wheres and hows and even the whys of this journey. If you pressed him, he would shrug and change the topic. Or he would become agitated, bang the table with his hands and rattle the saucers, and insist that it had happened—the German had hit him on the head. Here, he’d say, putting his hand on his temple. There was blood here. Once inside the USSR, Zadie befriended a Russian major. No surprise there: Zadie bubbled with charm and quickly made lifelong friends of anyone willing to stop for a chat. Again, we don’t know exactly how the friendship came to be. All we know is that the major sympathized with Zadie in his predicament, living hand to mouth on the border, and decided to help him avoid the fate of many Jewish refugees—a stint in a Siberi-

H E A V Y - S M O K I N G

an gulag working the mines. The major arranged for Zadie and Bubby to become Russian citizens and move to the city of Chelyabinsk, a distant outpost just east of the Ural Mountains. Chelyabinsk made sense as a destination: in World War II, the city boomed as one of the USSR’s most important industrial centres. It was far away from the German front, and it boasted the most important factories in the sprawling territory, including the giant tank plant where Zadie was put to work. Zadie test-drove tanks for the Russian army. He joked about it in a remarkable speech he gave when his family and friends gathered for his ninety-second birthday in 2007. “Can you imagine,” he said mirthfully, “a little guy like me driving a Russian T34 that went top speed 60 kilometre [sic] an hour?” The world was in turmoil and his family had been slaughtered, but it was a period of relative calm for Zadie. He settled down with Little Bubby and they had three children, all born in Chelyabinsk. My mother was the eldest. Then came my uncle Victor, followed by my aunt Luda. When the war ended, Zadie got a job at a clothing factory and then became manager. He worked there for almost a decade, during which the USSR became an increasingly uncertain place for Jews. Jewish intellectuals were disappearing and Stalin was ramping up his campaign against what he described as “corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists.” At least two more decades would pass before Soviet Jews were set free. But Zadie wasn’t planning to sit around and wait. The story—another famous bit of Zadie lore involving another mysterious benefactor—goes like this: he was taken aside by someone. A higher-up in the army. A friend. (Could it have been the same major who helped him years earlier?) This unnamed man told him to gather his family and get out of the USSR. Zadie argued with him. Things were good. The war was over; there was food on the table, steady work. But the unnamed benefactor

A U T O D I D A C T

convinced him. Go, the man said. Go while you still can. Zadie went. Why? I want to know. Why did Zadie leave when, again, almost everyone else stayed? Zadie wasn’t given to self-reflection. He was a storyteller, a raconteur. He dealt in the epic—risk, reward, heroism. I craved details, but Zadie did not particularly like to be interrupted. At forty-one, after almost twenty years in the Soviet Union, Zadie took Little Bubby and the three children back to Poland. He returned as a refugee. He had spent every cent he had bribing Soviet officials to allow him to leave the country. The Polish government settled him and his family in a small town. Which one? Nobody seems to know. To Zadie, it didn’t matter: he hadn’t returned to Poland to sit around sewing pants and waiting for the next Holocaust. As soon as he was able, he applied to emigrate to Israel. He was stalled by the Polish government, then under the control of Stalin, who did not like the optics of the Jewish population of the Soviet bloc leaving en masse for Israel. The proxy government of Poland said Zadie would have to wait at least two years before being allowed a permit. So Zadie applied to go to Canada. Six months later, almost three years after returning to Poland, Zadie arrived in Montreal with his wife and three kids. The family spoke Yiddish, Russian and Polish, but not a word of English. They were straight off the boat. My mom, the oldest kid, was already a teenager. Here’s a rare detail: according to Zadie, the family’s only resource was a single American five-dollar bill tucked into his pants pocket. Times were tough in 1960s Montreal. Broke, Zadie worked long, gruelling hours in the schmatta factories that lined St. Lawrence Boulevard, work that paid $70 or so a week. He once told me that the Jewish bosses he had at that time were the worst bosses he ever worked for. Slaving night and day in what was the Canadian equivalent of a sweatshop, Zadie pondered his future. He had become the man Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 43

I would eventually know: charming, impatient, demanding, funny, easily angered, attuned first and foremost to the survival instinct. He hadn’t come all this way just to work himself to death in a Montreal sweatshop. He saw an ad in a newspaper: a valet business was for sale because of the illness of the proprietor. Right then and there, Zadie made up his mind. He would buy the shop. He had no money, but again his charm came to his aid. Another bit of Zadie lore: somehow he persuaded the owner to accept a monthly payment of $127 in lieu of any cash up front. The total cost of the business: $2,000. The next day he went alone to the little shop on the corner of St. Mathieu and Ste. Catherine and received the keys. He unlocked the door, walked in and fell to his knees and thanked God. Now Zadie had another problem: he needed money to make the promised payments, not to mention turn on the gas and electricity. Without that money, he couldn’t open the business. Again, a benefactor—a random human being fallen under the sway of Zadie’s considerable charisma. This time it was Solly, who owned a newspaper stand on a nearby corner. Somehow Zadie persuaded him to go to the bank with him and co-sign a loan for $500 (about $3,500 in 2011 dollars). Why Solly would do such a thing for a total stranger we’ll never know. Zadie worked twelve hours a day cleaning and repairing clothes. After eighteen months, he had paid off all his loans—the $2,000 he owed for the shop and the $500 he owed the bank. He closed the shop for two weeks and took his family to the Laurentians on their first and only official summer vacation. My grandfather laboured in the shop for the next twenty years. Most of that time, Zadie and Bubby lived on Mountain Sights Avenue, a few blocks from the main drag of Décarie, and only four doors down from my dad’s mother. On weekends we would drive over from Ottawa, where my father worked for the federal government. My brother and I roved back and forth between the two houses. At Zadie’s house, we drank tea from the samovar, ate rock-hard sugar cookies and listened in fascination as Zadie grumbled a mixture of Yiddish and English insults at my grandmother and at Hockey Night Page 44 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

in Canada. By then, Zadie had become a true Jewish Montrealer—a perpetually frustrated Habs fan well versed in the ins and outs of language laws, various Quebec politicians and the price of a burial at Paperman’s, the only kosher funeral home in town. When I was a bit older, say ten or so, Zadie liked to beckon me into the kitchen right before breakfast and offer me a bissle vodka, still cold from his freezer. That’s not to say that Zadie spent time with my brother and me, exactly. He didn’t take us to the park or the zoo or out for ice cream. A few times he took us to his shop, and occasionally he paraded us down the sidewalk in front of his house. After he retired, he would take us into his basement workshop where the Hassids in the neighbourhood came to get their pants let out. Zadie encouraged them to pinch our cheeks, and forced them to watch as he demonstrated how he could still put one of us in a bear hug and lift us off the ground, a manoeuvre he was still attempting well into his eighties. Zadie was almost as proud of his grandchildren as he was of his cars. He treated them the same way: as things to be taken around and shown off. Of course Zadie never actually owned a new car. Part of the ritual of our visits to Montreal was for Zadie to insist that my father go out to the curb with him to admire his latest jalopy. My mother would shoot my father a look that said, You better go, if you know what’s good for you. We kids trailed along. Zadie would pop the hood of some ten-year-old Ford he’d managed to get his hands on for a song. Then, all the while describing the deal he’d concocted, he’d slip into the driver’s seat and rev the engine while my incredulous father looked on. In his late seventies and still terrorizing the drivers of Montreal—which is no easy task— my grandfather once took me out for breakfast. With the increasingly diminutive Zadie barely cresting the wheel, we tore through the byzantine avenues of Montreal, often going the wrong way down a one-way street, and then hurtled onto a busy road. My heart leapt into my throat as Zadie lurched at full speed right onto the sidewalk, slammed on the brakes and threw his clunker into park. I could almost step right out of the car and into the diner, our ap-

parent destination. The Québécoise waitresses all knew Zadie. He flirted with them by demonstrating how he could raise me a half inch off the ground. They brought us both the $2.99 breakfast special without even asking. Zadie made a big show of paying. At Zadie’s memorial service, these are the stories I told of the man I knew. They made the assembled mourners chuckle as they slipped off my tongue. Even as I was speaking, I had a sense of déjà vu—I’d said these same things in the same way many times before. But now it occurred to me that for a long time, for years before his death, we had been talking about Zadie as a kind of fictional construction. At some point in his long life he had become for us a living, breathing character. (He would have fit nicely into a Mordecai Richler novel.) And he was complicit in this reduction. It was his ultimate survival strategy. He kept his own deep hurts at bay by living large at the centre of his much-mythologized whirlwind of sound and fury. Despite all that was remarkable about his life, Zadie had accomplished, in the material terms of our society, very little. He was estranged from one child, a burden to the other two. He was always poor, and when he died he had all of $500 in his bank account. Survival was his sole legacy. He clung to it, endlessly retelling the stories of his adventures. What else could he do but relentlessly position himself as an everlasting character, the bridge between what had been, what was and the world to come? But his compulsive self-obsession kept us from understanding who he truly was. Ultimately, a will to survive defined him, but also consumed him. Zadie rarely talked about his parents, his siblings or even Little Bubby, who passed away when I was in university. He wanted his audience to admire his strength, his courage, his smarts, his capacity for survival. It was an approach to life that left little room for vulnerability. Maybe that’s why Zadie never spoke about his three children, how he felt when they were born, what they were like as kids, what they went through in Montreal as teenaged immigrants schooled entirely in Slavic tongues. On the morning before the funeral, I went for a short walk with my Uncle Vic, a burly

heat-and-air-conditioning contractor who had moved from Montreal to Windsor during that city’s car-manufacturing heyday. We talked about Zadie. Did he ever play with you when you were a kid? I asked. Uncle Vic looked at the cracks in the sidewalk. No, he said. He thought about it some more. Never, he said. There were only a few times when Zadie hinted at what he kept inside him. Once, when I was in my early twenties, we were looking through a cheaply printed half-Hebrew, halfYiddish paperback devoted to the memory of his childhood village (one of many similar books that sought to memorialize the grim demise of these tiny outposts, once the heart of Eastern European Judaism). Suddenly, Zadie jutted a thick thumb into a grainy picture. My brother and I peered at a fierce-looking elder, a rabbi with a beard, earlocks and a round fur hat. That, Zadie said sombrely, was my teacher. Despite everything, we loved Zadie. We talked about the party we’d throw when he turned 100. We joked about the interminably long speech he would insist on giving. But it was not to be. Bed-bound in a rest home, constantly poked and prodded by well-meaning caretakers, he lived in increasing solitude. Most of his friends had passed on and his family, taking advantage of the opportunities he had made possible, had long since moved away from his adopted city. In the end, there was no one to listen to his stories, no one to try to fill in the details, no one to break through the well-practised patter. Zadie was finally silenced. “Nina,” he said to my mother during his final stint in the hospital, a few weeks before he died peacefully and of no particular cause in his rest-home bed. “Nina, it’s time. I’m ready to go. I’m ready. Let God—and Paperman’s—take me.” Hal Niedzviecki is the publisher and fiction editor of Broken Pencil: The Magazine of Zine Culture and the Independent Arts. His book of short stories, Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened, will be published by City Lights Books in spring 2011. He lives in Toronto, and online at smellit.ca. Read his Geist work at geist.com. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 45

From Snowy Mountain Photographs by Christopher Grabowski

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othing complies better than still photography with the argument of the ancient philosopher Zeno of Elea that time is composed of moments. At the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, Library and Archives Canada mounted an exhibition of large-scale photographs of Olympic athletes along Railspur Alley on Granville Island, a former industrial park that is now the site of craft shops, galleries, artists’ studios, theatres, an art school and a public market. The name of the exhibition was Portraits in the Street. At one end of the alley an elaborate gold frame was set up in front of a backdrop depicting Whistler Mountain under a thick layer of snow. Passersby were invited to take pictures of each other posing within the frame. The ancient Greeks would surely have sympathized with this impulse to mark one’s presence at the right place in the right time. Some of our earliest images of Olympic athletes are the black figure decorations found on ancient ceramic pots known as amphorae. These images are the result of a complex firing process in which reddish iron oxide, hematite, is reduced chemically to pitch-black magnetite, a technique invented by Corinthians around the time of the first Ancient Olympics, roughly 2,700 years ago. When the Olympic games were revived in 1896, classic black-andwhite photography was already refined and widespread. Like the ancient Greek amphora technique, black-and-white photography relies on chemical reduction: in this case, the reduction of silver salts to black metallic silver. But film-based photography lacks the durability of Greek pottery, and it is unlikely that any original film-based photographs of the modern Olympic games will exist 2,700 years from now. By the second half of the twentieth century, digital photography had been perfected and made widely affordable. Digital cameras do not record images directly but rather write and save their binary DNA code, from which the images, or moments, can be reborn either as print-outs or projections—making it possible that some digital photographs, short of a global catastrophe, will endure almost forever. As far as I could tell, all of the passersby taking pictures of each other in the big frame on Granville Island were using digital cameras. I doubt anyone who posed was looking for pictorial immortality beyond the life span of a family album. Nevertheless, some of these images may endure: someone may look at them closely 2,700 years from now and notice how diverse a bunch we were at this moment in Vancouver.

Christopher Grabowski’s photographs and articles have been published in the Globe and Mail, Washington Post, Financial Times, Utne Reader, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Maclean’s, Ottawa Citizen and TheTyee.ca, as well as Geist. His awards for journalism and photojournalism include the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for investigative journalism. Grabowski’s photographs have been exhibited in North America and in several European countries. See his Geist work at geist.com.

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Elementary Jill Mandrake When Ronny was in grade 8, his teacher wrote on his report card: “Ronald has lost interest in everything except girls and Elvis Presley”

i. we called it the merry-go-round A classic piece of playground equipment stood near the primary wing: a circular platform that revolved when enough of us kids pushed. In order to get on board you had to take a running jump. At lunchtime, that thing was more crowded than the school bus. We’d play a game where one kid was the conductor. He’d holler, “Where to?” and someone else would answer, “Chilliwack” or “Calgary” or “the Ponderosa.” We’d push that merry-go-round till everyone agreed we’d arrived. One day a girl answered, “Texaco!” No one made fun of her, even though most of us knew she couldn’t have meant the gas station. The weather must have been sweltering that day because her cheeks were flushed. “Okay, we’re going to Texaco,” said the conductor. We began spinning around faster than ever before. The girl who’d said “Texaco” flew off and was partially dragged under the revolving floor. This was the first time I’d heard someone cry “Mummy, Mummy” when in danger. I didn’t know kids really said that. The conductor and his friends managed to bring the merry-go-round to a halt before the girl had hollered “Mummy” more than three or four times. She got back on as though noth ing in the world had happened, and we all went someplace new. The conductor that day was a kid called Greg. In class that afternoon, Miss Tudor caught Greg eating his sandwich when he thought no one was looking. She got the strap out from her desk, took Greg to the cloak room and hit him with it. The strap was a classic piece of teacher’s equipment; black leather with a red pinstripe down the middle. It had the same design as the red racer snakes we’d see on the way home. The red racer isn’t poisonous. ii. ronny’s report card When Ronny was in grade 8, he was afraid to bring his report card home. His teacher, Mr. McMurray, had written in the comments Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 55

Kids with Coca-Cola, 1959. Photo courtesy Jill Mandrake. Page 56 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

s ection: “Ronald has lost interest in everything except girls and Elvis Presley.” If McMurray had taught Ronny the fol low ing year, he would have written: “Ronald has lost interest in every thing except girls and the Beatles,” but this was the year before the Beatles played Empire Stadium. When Ronny handed his report card over to Mum, she read McMurray’s comments out loud in a disgusted voice: “ . . . girls and Elvis Presley.” “Nah, that’s not true,” Ronny muttered, before he was sent to his room. Later that evening, I was listening to my radio and one of Ronny’s favourite songs came on. It was a lesser-known Presley tune, with a rollicking, uplifting refrain: “I gotta know, gotta know, gotta know.” Ronny’s room was next to mine and I wanted to cheer him up, so I cranked the volume as loud as it would go. The volume wasn’t loud, but laughably feeble, if you compare it to what’s playing now. iii. snack bar at the drive-in On Labour Day when I was eight years old, I wondered why the teenage tough guy would not go back to school for another lousy year. He didn’t answer the question; he only gave half a shrug. He wore a leather jacket with cracks in it, as though he’d spent a lot of time in the rain. Craven M tobacco smoke blew from both his nostrils. He was ahead of me in the queue-up at the drive-in snack bar. Another guy in a leather jacket, with his girlfriend tagging along, shoved ahead of me and said, “Brent, are you going back to school tomorrow?” “Nope.” “Did you pass?” “Yep.” “Everything?” “Yep.” “Then why not go back for another lousy year?” His friend tried to sound nonchalant, but I could tell he was disappointed. The man behind the snack bar, wearing the sort of chef’s toque you rarely see any more, leaned over and asked me what I wanted. I wanted a candy bar that I’d had only once, and couldn’t think of its name. I gave half a shrug, in

complete imitation of the teenage tough guy. I later discovered, when asking around, that what I’d wanted was an Eat-More. iv. popular Why did all five of us pile into the car, just to go to the store for milk, eggs and bread, and maybe butter? Dad said, “We’re out of milk, eggs and bread, and we’re low on but ter.” Mum was away somewhere that day. Dad got in the car, followed by me, Grampa, my brother Ronny and my friend Henry. The ride was bumpy for half a block. Dad stopped the car and got out. “Flat tire in the front,” he said. Then Grampa, Ronny, Henry and I got out and stood around while Dad got busy. He bent over the trunk. A few drops of rain fell. “This spare tire is for some other car,” Dad shouted. Two girls and a boy from my school were walking past. The boy, who was extremely pop ular, looked in our direction and groaned. Then he smirked. The two girls, who were almost as popular as the boy, didn’t look at us. One of them was casually swinging a transistor radio. The music wafting in our direction was “Yes, I’m Ready” by Barbara Mason. Ooh, I loved that song. It took a painfully long time for the three kids to walk past, as though I were dream ing them. Then I guess the car was pushed back to our driveway. I wouldn’t have been required to push, being a girl. Henry wouldn’t have been required to push, being so young, but he would have wanted to. Grampa wouldn’t have had to push because he was frail. Dad would have said, “Oh no, Frank, you don’t have to push.” He might have even said that to Ronny, too, just to be nice. We would have all jumped in and lent a hand anyway, pushing it home.

Jill Mandrake is a Vancouver writer whose short memoirs would almost fill a book. Read “Lovetime,” “Reunion” and her other Geist work at geist.com. Follow her blog, The Jill Report, at geist.com/blogs/jill. And drop in on her band, Sister DJ’s Radio Band, at radio3. cbc.ca/#/bands/Sister-DJs-Radio-Band. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 57

Man of a Hundred Thousand Books George Fetherling Don Stewart is the neat, smooth proprietor of a rather unkempt and chaotic bookstore, where leisurely browsing is addictive and almost mandatory

on Stewart, the owner of MacLeod’s Books in downtown Vancouver, takes coffee most mornings at the Caffè Buongiorno on the northwest corner of Pender and Richards streets. He always sits at the same table, facing the door. This way he can keep an eye on the entrance to his place of business across the way. Sometimes he will jump to his feet and tear across Richards if he sees someone entering the shop who’s best dealt with by him and not his staff: a wealthy out-of-town collector, say, or a talking-to-himself addict with trouble written all over his face. Or some lively but bedraggled political pamphleteer. Or any of the famous authors to be found there when they happen to be in town: the travel writer Paul Theroux, for example, or Barbara Kingsolver, the novelist and essayist, or Simon Winchester, the author of The Professor and the Madman. It won’t suffice to say that Stewart is the proprietor of the largest, most diverse and generally most important bookshop in the city (for that would be faint praise when, in Vancouver just as everywhere else, the oncevibrant bookstore scene has thinned out, withered and turned brown). Rather, he is the keeper of, well, an institution—a rather unkempt and chaotic one in a century-old building whose windows lure in book lovers with clever book displays and posters for all sorts of local cultural events. Inside sits most of his inventory of perhaps a quarter of a million used and antiquarian books (more than 100,000 titles), and some new ones as well. Books are crammed into every niche, alcove and corner of the building’s ground floor. In the narrow aisles between shelves, piles of them teeter ominously. Overly sensitive browsers might well give in to their claustrophobia or ataxophobia. The basement is even more hazardous. Things are no tidier at the small satellite shop a few doors to the east on the south side of Pender (“by appointment only”) where most of the more expensive items are kept. At any one time, Stewart also has one or two warehouse spaces jammed to the gunnels with books that have yet to enter the system (and maybe never will). The stuff just keeps arriving. The shop is made even more kaleidoscopic by the way Stewart insists on revamping the floor plan, punishing entire subject headings by banishing them to the cellar, rewarding others by giving them prominence Page 58 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

portrait: brian howell

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PROFILE

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near the door. Recently, books about Vancouver have been shelved near the entrance, where mysteries used to be, and literary fiction has been pardoned and now snakes back and forth, in rows, on the west side of the room, while just a few horrible old poetry books lie on the ground floor (in a dark corner or alcove closest to the former Niagara Hotel), where they form a kind of arrow, pointing to the hundreds and hundreds of good poetry books in the cellar. Once when I stopped in to browse but found Stewart out on a book call, it took me an hour, I think, to discover what he’d done with the section marked CHINA. The �� clientele is as jumbled as the goods they browse through. People seeking a half-remembered favourite book from childhood jostle with students behind on their essays and—most numerous of all—ordinary citizens who read for pleasure but don’t want to pay new-book prices. If the shop is charmingly and sometimes maddeningly untidy, Don Stewart himself is the opposite. He is a tall, slender, broad-shouldered intellectual, grey at the temples. He typically wears sharply pressed short-sleeved cotton sport shirts. He doesn’t smile carelessly yet is capable of enormous charm. Such charm is an attribute in a profession in which one might be called on, in the course of a single day, to soothe a visiting psychopath, converse with the landlord, deflect creditors, conduct a few delicate business negotiations, and worm one’s oleaginous way into one of those Shaughnessy mansions hidden behind tall hedges that one drives past en route to Vancouver International Airport. Not to mention the bread-and-butter matter of dealing with customers looking for the common and mundane. He is also extremely articulate, speaking in what sounds more like transcribed prose than casual conversation. In short, he is neat and smooth as he sits behind eye-high piles of books and paperwork in a place whose exact state of bedlam takes on a slightly different configuration each day. Page 60 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

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Shops such as MacLeod’s (there are no other ones like it nearer than Russell Books in Victoria or Powell’s Books in Portland) are complex social organisms. People who deal seriously in out-of-print books aren’t like those who buy and sell second-hand appliances. Their shops— the most rewarding ones, anyway—are clearinghouses of information, knowledge, culture and art, in addition of course to being where people go merely to pick up something to read for less than they would pay at Indigo and more quickly than they could on amazon.com. The places are also deliciously odd little independent businesses that often operate far outside accepted commercial logic. I often join Stewart at the Caffè Buongiorno and hear some stories about what takes place on the other side of the desk. One morning he told me an extraordinarily complex not to say convoluted story of a self-storage locker full of antiquarian and “good” modern books in North Vancouver, and the small-time fence and grifter who has been trying to get control of them and indeed has managed to siphon off quite a few. Another day he told me of a friend of his named Tony Grinkus, who was the model for Peter Kien, the crazy scholar/hermit in Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fé (1935), or at least, as I said to myself, could have been. Grinkus always said that Don would “get” his books when he died. Don naturally thought this meant that his shop would buy them from the estate. In fact, Don as an individual has inherited them under the terms of the fellow’s will, along with his literary and personal papers. So far there are seven hundred cartons, each one numbered according to some master key, which no one has been able to find in the deceased’s house. The fellow was trained in classics, and there is a great deal of Greek and Latin. Also, some seventeenthcentury books that Don said are in “countryhouse condition”—clean and crisp, as though they have been in the same spot for generations. Among the papers are huge files and, Don es-

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timates, a thousand books about the Kennedy assassination. D�� on’s grandfather, also named Don, emigrated from Scotland. He lived in Vancouver and ran an insurance business at Hastings and Richards, virtually within sight of the present MacLeod’s Books. His son, the second Don, was a gunner in the Second World War who later joined his father’s firm. His wife Joyce, who served in the RCAF, is a Christian socialist, the daughter of one of the CCF’s first organizers in B.C. After the war, the couple moved to pre-boom Calgary, which had a population of only a hundred thousand or so. There the third Don—Donald Charles David Stewart (he has three names, like a nineteenth-century Frenchman)—was born in 1951. He has a much younger brother who is a furniture refinisher and an elder sister who raises cattle on the B.C.-Alberta border. When he was growing up, his mother ran a shelter “for new immigrants— exiles. One of our family friends was a draft dodger from the Algerian war, and there were some Spanish Republican refugees and later a lot of Hungarians who came in 1956.” Such people made for “a different cultural picture” than his schoolmates possessed. In other ways, too, he felt himself conspicuous in Calgary as it was back then. His parents were bookish and used to take him along to second-hand bookstores when he was a young boy, for he had learned to read quite early. He would search these shops for comic books. Soon he progressed to Classics Illustrated and finally to adult literature. The family and its interests were where he found comfort. The outside world, not so much. When Stewart was in grade 11, an especially creative social studies teacher acquired a copy of a test designed by the U.S. State Department a generation earlier to determine people’s political orientation, and had the students fill it out. “Everybody else in the class came out as a conservative,” he says, “and I came out as a raving

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communist—according to the test.” At the University of Calgary he took political science and economics but knew he “was in trouble twelve days into economics, because we were supposed to talk about the different factors that made up study of the economy, and labour was not one of them.” He was working on the campus newspaper, the Gauntlet, when the War Measures Act was invoked in October 1970. “The first thing I did was to go to the library and read the legislation and make notes on it so I could write an article.” The other student journalists, he says, found little relevance in events taking place in Quebec. Such views, however, were evidently not unanimous throughout the UC community because “a whole group of us at the lunch hour that first day tried to organize. We were speaking in the rotunda of the student union building. There were fistfights.” As he became more politically aware, he stopped attending classes. One dean, himself a well-disguised former radical, didn’t want the institution to lose such a bright student. But Stewart dropped out and spent a year reading books, supporting himself with a menial backoffice job in an oil company. “I used to smoke dope down in the basement with the janitor,” he recalls. “We were the only alternative people in the ten-storey building.” When the United States invaded Cambodia, he remembers, there were only three demonstrators outside the U.S. consulate in Calgary—Stewart and two other fellows, watched over by eight police officers. Disillusioned and needing a break, he hitchhiked to Vancouver. In a hostel he met two young women from Boston who invited him to San Francisco. By the time he got back to Calgary in the autumn of 1971 his job at the oil company had evaporated. He got wind of an opening at a second-hand bookstore “run by an old cigar-smoking Englishman with no education to speak of.” It was the sort of establishment that sold used Harlequin romances for ten cents each or twelve for a dollar. But it also Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 61

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sometimes took in decent hardcover books that it didn’t quite know what to do with. Stewart began buying some of the most promising ones himself, though he was living in a communal house and saving his money for a trip to Latin America, determined to see the reforms that Salvador Allende was making in Chile. “Travelling with different people at different times,” he moved around Mexico, learning enough Spanish to get by. There one day, in the jungles of southern Mexico, an idea came to him. �� “When I returned I wanted to be politically active and not beholden to any job. I would go to Vancouver and open a used book store and that would be my life.” That was in August or September of 1972. He was twentyone. He continued south, down the Pacific Coast of South America, reaching his goal of Chile and finding surprisingly good resalable books in Valparaiso, Santiago and other cities, and sending them home by mail. He was gone nine months in all and spent only $2,000.

nce upon a time, downtown Vancouver was rich in second-hand and other independent bookshops, including, for example, Ahrens’ Books at Hornby and Davie, run by the socialist John Ahrens, and Bond’s Books on Dunsmuir, not far away, run by Ed Bowes. A number of newer ones have sprung up in recent years, such as Criterion Books, almost directly opposite MacLeod’s; it is a splendidly general shop but particularly rich in literature. Most of the others, however, are scattered all about the West Side and East Vancouver. By contrast, Mac Leod’s, under a succession of owners, has been on West Pender (or within coughing distance of it) since the long-ago time when that street was at the centre of a bookselling community as varied as it was vigorous. To illustrate the area’s lost heterogeneity, consider the 1970s, when it was home to both White Dwarf Books, which dealt in science ficPage 62 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

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tion, and the Anglican Bookroom. Not to mention Richard Pender Books, next door to the present MacLeod’s; Terry Rutherford Books at Pender and Homer, specializing in mystery and detective fiction; a used-books-and-furniture store at Homer and Nelson; and the original Spartacus Books, the left-wing bookshop and meeting place on Hastings. Jim McIntosh’s Colophon Books, an antiquarian shop, was a few steps north, on Cordova, atop a former nightclub named Pharaoh’s. One could go on. The point is that in Vancouver as all across North America there has been a huge net reduction in independent and speciality bookstores. Or at least, in those visible from the street. You would never get an antiquarian bookseller to admit that business is booming, for as a group they are notorious for their poor-mouthing. But the truth is that bookselling, after pornography and banking, is the sector that has benefitted most from the digital revolution, despite—and because of—the fact that its old business model is being supplanted by a new one. A major turning point came when entrepreneurs in Victoria, of all places, created ABE, the Advanced Book Exchange, which is now called AbeBooks and is owned by Amazon. As members of AbeBooks, many thousands of dealers round the world (including, for a time, Stewart) display their goods in a common searchable database, where they try to undercut one another’s prices. As a result, the sale of out-of-print books has increased dramatically, as buying online is convenient and economical, if also infuriating. The online sector of the trade is now polluted, overrun and practically ruined by self-ordained dealers: part-time amateurs lacking even the most basic understanding of bibliographical description and generally without a clue about a book’s content. Smart customers never pay more than a few dollars for a book if they don’t know what it will actually turn out to be when delivered. With this shift in the marketplace, many or

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most trained dealers, already hobbled by rising rents, began working from their homes or small offices, “quoting” books to people from their computer screen, admitting a few individual customers now and then but only grouchily and by prior arrangement. Stephen Lunsford Books, located in an office high up in the Dominion Building on Hastings, is an excellent example. A large, well-stocked “open” store such as Mac Leod’s, where leisurely browsing is addictive and almost mandatory, with a knowledgeable staff hovering in the shadows, is fast becoming a rarity, something to be cherished. The old Vancouver with its numerous antiquarian bookshops was also of course a city with highly individualistic booksellers running them. One of these was Don MacLeod, who had grown up in the antique business. In 1964 he opened MacLeod’s Books on the southeast corner of Pender and Homer. I remember the inventory as being steadfastly miscellaneous and the atmosphere as one that writers such as Al Purdy found welcoming. MacLeod, a gregarious fellow, urged such chronic visitors to write greetings or lines of poetry on one of the walls. In time, he sold the business to Van Andruss, who ran it for a few years before deciding he wanted to go to Paris and write a novel (but instead founded a utopian community near Lillooet, B.C., and became an important environmental activist). Stewart bought the shop from Andruss and took over behind the counter on May 4, 1973. “It was obvious that I was inheriting a very interesting customer base,” Stewart says. “The art school was just a block away. Artists, many of whom are very well known now, would drop by. There were also these roving poets and writers who would come through.” They still do—ones as different as George Elliott Clarke and Umberto Eco commingling with all manner of B.C. writers such as Timothy Taylor, Joy Kogawa, Michael Turner and Douglas Coupland. Ownership of MacLeod’s also gave Stewart member-

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ship in a highly charged collegial circle. “The bookselling trade was very much politically fraught,” he says. And quite boozy as well. Stewart liked to hang out at the Marble Arch beer parlour, and “a lot of drinking in those days took place at the Alcazar” on Dunsmuir and the Niagara on Hastings, though there was a competing Bierklatch at the Cecil Hotel on Granville. Writers, political types and booksellers had their own little cliques. Among the dealers, the one with the most seniority was Stephen McIntyre, who Stewart always considered “one of the best booksellers in Vancouver, but he was tragically self-limited by alcohol” (in a typical working day, McIntyre would consume a case of beer, a twenty-sixer of liquor and four packs of cigarettes). To take one example, McIntyre spent years assembling a fine collection of Henry Miller only to sell it for a song to a grad student while drunk. Going from a wheelbarrow full of books to a series of fully stocked stores to, finally, a tiny office across from MacLeod’s, McIntyre was an accomplished book dealer who managed to support himself, in some fashion at least and through numerous marriages, from the 1930s to the early 1980s: a remarkable achievement. If McIntyre was the fading star of the local book trade, the rising one was William Hoffer, a prominent ranter, raver and feudist who despised the field of Canadian literature in which he specialized. The son of Dr. Abram Hoffer, a pioneer of the alternative health movement, early LSD experimenter and founder of the Journal of Schizophrenia (later renamed the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine), Bill Hoffer was a former postal worker who fought loud crusades against the very existence of the CBC and the Canada Council for the Arts. Each of the catalogues he issued was a little encyclopedia of insults hurled at particular writers and writers in general. Stewart, though a straight arrow in his interpersonal and commercial relations, became Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 63

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a somewhat wary protégé. He is among those— those in the best position to judge—who say that Hoffer was a brilliant bookseller. Certainly Hoffer (who kept trying to pry out the wall in the Pender Street shop that all the poets had scribbled on) taught him much about the business end of bookselling, while, some have suggested, encouraging him to shift his own primary interest away from literature and toward history. Stewart doesn’t deny that Hoffer was difficult but tries to provide context. Hoffer’s doctors, he says, “thought that most of his crazy behaviour came from ill treatment of his diabetes. He drank like a fish, ate everything that was wrong, self-medicated all the time and pushed himself mercilessly in his work. I would be with him on a [book-] scouting trip and he would be almost catatonic because he would start to suffer insulin shock.” In time, as might have been foreseen given his personality, Hoffer broke with Stewart, as he did with most of his other friends. As though hearing the pounding hooves of the digital age that would rob him of the pleasure of denigrating customers in person, he closed his open store in Gastown (one of the previous ones had been upstairs above a sex shop on Granville Street) and moved to Russia, which, he said, he found a more congenial society. In a few years he was diagnosed with cancer and returned to B.C., where he died in 1997. He was fifty-three.

wo of the dependable staples of Stewart’s conversation are the decline of literacy and the death of book culture generally. But he is a most practical and disciplined individual. In 2004 he pulled MacLeod’s Books out of the ABE deal, claiming it was becoming too expensive, in both money and time. Then he did what Hoffer, a person utterly impervious to compromise, never would have done. At no sacrifice to his regular collectors or the big walk-in trade, he

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began quoting special books to specific individuals and institutional buyers by computer. For this he employs a knowledgeable jitney named Phyllis, who works out of the tiny but dark and no less cluttered high-end satellite store across the street. As in any large, open bookshop, most of the day at the MacLeod’s mothership store is taken up with buying and selling generally rather ordinary stuff drawn from every conceivable subject category. It’s not unusual to find the place full of lunch-hour browsers, asking questions. The exact composition of the staff changes fairly often but is sure to include Kim Koch, calm and soft-spoken, a violinist, who also repairs damaged books; Rod Clarke, who came to MacLeod’s after Granville Books on the Granville Mall went out of business; or, a more recent addition, Don Young, who started out as a customer (he collects the works of Timothy Findley) and finally went to work there. On such a hypothetical typical day, one could well find the other Don fighting with Visa by phone while coping with a new lot of, say, thousands of art books and exhibition catalogues in great scattered piles. Quite often, though—oftener than you might suppose—he has the chance to handle some really remarkable things. At this writing (it may not be true by the time you read this) he is sitting on a letter, signed and with the royal seal affixed, sent by Charles I, then in Oxford, to the Scottish parliament, appealing to its members to avoid the blandishments of Westminster. At present there is also a passport signed by Queen Anne to allow one of her servants, a Huguenot, to return to France to die; a letter signed by Queen Isabella of Spain was recently sold. Over the years Stewart has casually shown me such other goodies as a promotional brochure aimed at prospective passengers on RMS Titanic, featuring a large foldout floor plan so that travellers could choose the cabins they preferred. Another time he had a fascinating exchange of correspondence to,

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from and about Mark Twain (who mentioned in one letter that he was considering getting one of those newfangled telephones). He buys at auctions and estate sales, from fellow dealers and from the strange little subculture of professional book scouts, who are regulars at garage sales and places like the Salvation Army, looking for whatever they can resell to dealers at a small profit. One day Stewart regaled me with the research he was doing into some newly discovered unpublished photos of Bill Miner, the train robber, for he is a scholar trapped in the role of bookseller. This claim is made for many antiquarian book dealers, but for him it’s actually true. Such is his temperament. A surprising amount of his finest material, particularly the non-Canadian kind, walks into the store on two feet. Vancouver likes to brag about how diverse and multicultural it is; such boasting is a socially acceptable way of confining others within neat categories. But the city doesn’t often care to acknowledge its role as the home of expats, exiles and refugees: the sort of people who have brought interesting books and documents with them. MacLeod’s Books has long benefitted from, for example, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1930s and the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war the following decade. For the most part, the gems Stewart acquires in these ways are most interesting as tactile bits of history rather than instruments of research and learning. They are thus in contrast with the personal collections that he himself has spent decades patiently building—and absorbing. These all but overwhelm the small, neat house that he and Ann Webborn, a visual artist and occupational therapist and his spouse of twenty-one years, share in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area of East Vancouver. There he keeps three thousand publications on “nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchism, particularly American anarchism, but also French, Spanish, Italian and Mexican.

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Mostly period pamphlets and magazines, but sometimes modern academic books relevant to the subject.” This isn’t an accumulation but rather a collection, in which the content of each item, and the details of its publication, relate to that of all the others. The result is a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts, however remarkable some of the individual items may be. To take an example, he has unpublished letters by the Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, the person who made anarchism into a philosophy rather than a set of ideas and notions. And there is an entire sub-collection of printed material by William Godwin, the putative father of English anarchism, and another of Godwin’s scapegrace son-in-law, the freedom-shouting poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Why does one gather this material? Because when you see it all together, you can get a greater understanding of what makes up a movement, of all the people who were involved in it, all their contributions . . .” At present he also has an extensive George Orwell collection and a smaller one of B. Traven, the German anarchist who ended up in Mexico and wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “At one time,” he says, sadly, “I had a very large Spanish Civil War collection, but I have only parts now, the parts that have to do with the art and literature and with the International Brigades and the anarchists.” Similarly, he once had an immense collection of material concerning the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, the anarcho-syndicalist organization that called itself the One Big Union and promoted workplace democracy. But most of it went to the rare books library at the University of Michigan. Now another institution is nibbling at Stewart’s collection of Louis Riel/ Métis/North-West Rebellion material, which has its origins in the fact that Stewart’s parents took him to Duck Lake and Batoche when he was a child and he met one of the last survivors of the fighting, then in his nineties. At other periods he has built up collections—for Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 65

PROFILE one constructs them as an architect might—of E. Pauline Johnson, the Mexican muralists and Latin American literature in translation. These are personal projects, reflecting deep private interests and suitable for retirement purposes.

tewart began expanding MacLeod’s Books within two years of taking it over, even while struggling to pay rent of only $375 a month. By 1981 he was ready to execute a big leap, leasing far larger premises at Hastings and Cambie streets. On one side of his shop stood the old Province building, on the other the local headquarters of a cult-like left-wing organization that revered Enver Hoxha (1908−85), the Marxist-Leninist leader of Albania. In June 1982 an American military veteran, believing the group and its store were a front for Soviet communists, went a trifle odd and attempted to torch the building. It failed to ignite. A few nights later he tried again and was successful. The flames were carried to MacLeod’s next door and ran across the false ceiling. Stewart was in Harrison Hot Springs and returned to find his shop and its contents a total loss. “I lost thirteen years’ work,” he says. When it was safe to do so, he was lowered by rope into the section of the ruins where his stash of money and many of his rarities had been. All that remained was a letter from Peter Verigin, the Doukhobor leader, and a William Morris cane chair. All the other good stuff was gone— his entire reference library, an extensive collection of early West Indian literature “all fine in dust jacket,” even the diary of his Latin American travels. Months passed before an insurance settlement came through. Until then, Hoffer and his colleagues were “tireless in organizing help from other book dealers. Many forwarded things they didn’t need.” A benefit was organized by local poets and held at the Western Front artist-run centre. By September, MacLeod’s was back in business at today’s address. By now, it’s difficult to imagine it being anywhere but at 455 West Pender Street, though Stewart, like virtually all other antiquarian booksellers I’ve ever known, does not own the building he is in and is constantly at risk of relocating. Until that day Page 66 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

arrives, he dances with successive landlords and puts up with ancient plumbing, periodic renovations and all the rest. Carpe diem.

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once had the pleasure,” Stewart says, “of providing a set of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past to Katharine Hepburn.” Like many other antiquarian dealers in Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere, he occasionally supplies prop books for film and TV productions. Once or twice he has even rented out the shop for location shoots. The disruption this entails is much greater than the reward. Still, it’s worth mentioning as an illustration of just how complex an economic organism a place such as MacLeod’s is, though you get a clearer understanding by looking at a couple of sample deals, one successful, the other not. Vancouver has had quite a few book collectors on the heroic scale—people such as Dr. Wallace Chung whose extraordinary donations are the backbone of the wonderful if little-known library at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Another of the great figures was Dr. Edward Margetts, an eminence in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. “He was one of my long-time customers, a fascinating man,” Stewart says. “We used to sit in his study drinking G&T and talking about books. He was trained in Montreal and went to Kenya in the early 1950s, during the Mau Mau period, becoming one of the pioneers of psychiatry in East Africa. This sparked his interest in putting together over the years a large collection about Africa and its history.” That description, however, barely scratches the surface. “His main focus was gathering information about how mental illness had been treated in all cultures, in all periods. His view was worldwide. He was one of the great experts on trepanning [drilling holes in the skull, an obsolete medical treatment], and he had gathered primitive potions and amulets as well. He was also very interested in every kind of deviancy imaginable. His house was arranged in such a way that you would find, for example, a shelf or several shelves on religious extremism. Nearby would

PROFILE be a shelf on alcoholism, another on shell shock in the First World War, yet another on drugrelated matters.” He was interested in books on the occult, and in censored books, particularly those that had been censored for sexual content. “Because he read in German and French as well as English, he was able to assemble quite a range of material,” says Stewart, who sold him many unusual books over the years and—as is common in dealer-collector relationships—sometimes sold things on his behalf, or attempted to, on a commission basis. (“I tried to sell his microscopy collection at one point. We got close, but the customer, who was in Australia, shied away at the last moment.”) By the time of Margetts’s death in 2004, age eighty-four, his collections had been whittled down to a mere ten thousand books, all of them described on file cards and with his pencilled notes on the flyleaves. One day Stewart got a phone call from a real estate agent to say that Margetts’s daughter was putting the house on the market and had found a MacLeod’s Books business card and wondered whether . . . “That was the most I had ever paid for a collection of books, something over seventy-five thousand dollars. I came up with a down payment of about thirty thousand. I had some money put away and I managed to borrow more against some paintings I had. Then I made payments twice a month.” A somewhat similar story but with a less happy ending had its origins in a Stewart acquaintance who had been a career CIA officer in Saigon during what the Vietnamese call the American War. He likely had served in Africa as well, for after leaving the agency he became a book dealer specializing in rare Africana. In time, having retired from his first career, he retired from the second as well, and asked Stewart whether he would like to acquire his inventory. Stewart regrets having agreed. The books were located in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, 150 cartons of them. Stewart bought them but even now, years later, hasn’t found a simple way of getting them over the border. Bureaucratic problems with Customs. When he told me this story I was surprised to hear of him doing business with someone

who had been an American intelligence professional. But Stewart is more relaxed now than he once would have been. As a very young fellow he had helped to found Calgary’s first abortion information centre. Once settled in Vancouver, he devoted considerable time to protesting, “organizing anarchist study groups” and writing for small radical newspapers and journals. He stayed at my place once when I lived in Toronto. He was passing through on his way to a conference in Kingston, Ontario, where he also paid a visit to Brent Taylor in prison. Taylor was one of the so-called Squamish Five, who in 1982 bombed the Litton Industries plant in Toronto, where parts for U.S. Cruise missiles were made. “When I was younger,” Stewart says, “I defined myself for many years as a Marxist, but the Marxists said, ‘You’re an anarchist, not a Marxist.’ Finally I re-evaluated who I was in political terms. These terms no longer really make sense in that a lot of these old issues and boundaries have broken down—and for good reason.”

ong ago I was a partner in a Toronto antiquarian bookshop where one day I had a lengthy conversation with an MBA who was curious about how we operated. He was flabbergasted to learn that some of the most stubborn inventory takes twenty years or more to turn over and even then is often given up only reluctantly by dealers who hate to part with books they have become fond of through time. Like many others before him, he concluded, correctly, that antiquarian booksellers are a strange lot, drawn to the field in kamikaze fashion, or like mosquitoes attracted to a bug-zapper on a suburban patio. In that sense, the arc of Don Stewart’s story is quite predictable, though all the particulars are peculiar to him alone and to the indecipherably selfabsorbed city where he’s chosen to make his life.

George Fetherling is the author, most recently, of The Sylvia Hotel Poems and the novel Walt Whitman’s Secret. He lives in Vancouver. Read more of his work at geist.com. “Man of a Hundred Thousand Books” is one of a series of profiles commissioned with the assistance of Arts Partners in Creative Development. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 67

Verticals Sara Cassidy Hoban was more than a pet; he kept me as much as I kept him, some crystallization of friend, sibling, lover, parent and (possible to imagine now) child

2:06 a.m. I have forgotten how to sleep. The clock is silent, deviously so. It doesn’t hum thickly as mine does at home, woolly, soothing. The headboard of Evan’s antique bedstead ticks strangely, repeated clicks like light—very light—machine gun fire: the echo of a once upon woodpecker? Or of the parent tree itself, nibbling carbon dioxide. The bedstead is American Craftsman, simple, elegant, modestly solid. I sized up its beauty last night, it being the frame of the site of my first—our first— Weevils? Termites? I bury my ear in the pillow to muffle the sound. I am on my side, Evan asleep on his back, both of us naked. In our birthday suits! My left arm, slung over the barrel of Evan’s chest, rises and falls as he breathes. His hip presses into the bowl of my own hips. The length of my leg shadows the length of his. There is no bumper, no buffering of air between us. We are as close as slick layers of kelp on the beach, as double yolks in a single shell, as organs. (Mom says that when she rose from the hospital bed after my birth, she felt her organs free-fall—clunk—into the void I left behind.) Liminal. The word swims in. I speak its limber shadowiness into the night air. Liminal. I detect a slight detachment in the letter n, as tongue lifts from alveolar ridge: a tick slight as the termites’ calls. Fly in amber. Sand in engine oil. Fear infecting intimacy. Ignore it. Laminitis. Disease of the hoof. Evan snores a short rolling grunt at the start of each inhalation. I touch his nose experimentally. He brushes at my fingertip, his hand clumsy, mittened in sleep. I tug a lock of his bangs. He shakes his head, snorts. I study his eyes for the pendulum of rapid eye movement. None: only the still roundness of eyeball subtending eyelid, pea in a pod, candy in its wrapper. His ears are filled with blond, friendly fuzz, the nose hairs more severe, sharp with intent. He shaved freshly for our date; he worries about scratching me, as if my skin were me. Well, it is my largest organ. What am I to it? Connective tissue? I am my organs. Page 68 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

2:22 a.m. The evening was kind. It held us thickly as water holds swimmers, binding sharp edges. Evan made a vegetable curry with brown rice. Between our plates, a cool moon of yogurt. For dessert a bakery box with butcher’s string that I playfully untied. Ta-da: petits fours, which we fed each other. Even the ruining food in his mouth beautiful. We moved to the couch. The fire was low, but we didn’t add wood. We watched the coals dim, held each other closer as the air cooled. Upstairs next, kissing on the top step, undoing snaps, zippers. I unbuckled his belt—thrilling—then stickily removed his socks. We turned back the blankets, opened ourselves. By now, bristle has pierced his cheeks and his chin. The stubble scrapes audibly against the palm of my hand. Hoban. Hoban! My small body, curved for Evan these years later, convulses. Tears sluice from my eyes and photo: camargue xii, fabrice strippoli, contrast-photo.com

splash onto Evan’s bare shoulder. Loss fills me, swarms its rightful place, warmer than emptiness. It has been eight years since I said my clever good-bye to Hoban, my gentle, hungry, twitching, teasing Appaloosa. A surprise gift for my ninth birthday, he was more than a pet; he kept me as much as I kept him, some crystallization of friend, sibling, lover, parent and (possible to imagine now) child. Two, three times a day, I hurried down the grey road to our neighbour’s barn to brush, feed, water, bridle and ride him. I’d recite French verb conjugations into his velveteen ears, practising for a test, or rehearse my indignant speech for the grade 8 boy who lifted me by my underarms in the school hallway, rubbed me against himself, then dropped me to the linoleum floor. I’d list the competitions we would win: Saanich Fair, Olympics Grand Prix. When I braided his Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 69

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forelock or tail, he would shake his withers with good-natured annoyance. In summer, I would sometimes ride him bareback, my bare, brown legs against the close pile of his hair, rounding his taut barrel. Rain would strike my bedroom window and I’d leave my homework, hurry out the back door in rubber boots cut down for such quick exits, to throw a blanket over him. Other girls stewed about their parents, all that they were not allowed to have, whipped up dramas of loyalties and betrayals, but my thoughts were on Hoban. I nursed him through equine flu, lameness, hives, cuts, sole bruises and—laminitis (aha). I would press my ear to his flank and diagnose the health of his digestion, take his pulse, check his hydration. He liked me on his back; he would whinny when I saddled him, nicker pleasurably when I mounted. If I arrived with the lunge line for training, he’d pin his ears, but I could calm him quickly, put a hand to his muzzle, whisper in his ear: mangeons, mangez, mangent. He feared work and his anxiety took the form of laziness, but then he warmed quickly, stepped into it, held his own. “Be proud,” I’d say, but I was also thankful that he wasn’t. He would hold a grudge if I was openly angry, which I was a few times when he failed us at events, once whinnying and bucking during a simple canter transition, another time spooking while jumping verticals, galloping right out of the ring—he had been startled by a man in the stands shaking out a large black coat. We celebrated six birthdays together. His we marked with molasses cake, making birthday candles of shaved-down carrots. Then the lethargy set in. It was more than laziness. I would often find him lying down. I’d crouch to him, get him to his feet, walk him around the ring, think today we’ll get the saddle on, but it started to feel cruel even to hope. One day he was worse than sick. It was as though he had frozen on the inside. He was Page 70 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

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remote, as if he didn’t know me. I rubbed my hands furiously against his coat, but he seemed not to feel it. Sometimes he would slowly turn his heavy head and nuzzle my shoulder, but it was mostly accidental: he was in a stupor. I was sixteen years old, jockey small, light as a leaf. But now it was Hoban who grew small, retreating from the large body that I brushed and hugged and spoke to. Sang to, shouted at: Come back! Be proud! I stroked his velvet nose, rubbed my face against his. One afternoon I put my finger into his nostril, stroked the warm, damp inside, and then scratched at it, to shock him, to wake him. Or to claim him. But soon he lay down and wouldn’t get up. We covered him in blankets, in afghans my mother and grandmother had crocheted. I shovelled extra piles of straw into his stall, to cushion him. I went in to see him for the umpteenth time that fall day, after supper. His eyes were open, his head terribly low, his neck bent oddly. He didn’t move. I lay down, my arms around him, but his chest was still. The velvet of his muzzle had gone stiff. 2:56 a.m. I cried for days, so many tears that the skin around my eyes weakened and small scabs rose where it broke. At my mother’s insistence I saw the counsellor at school, who nodded and shoved a box of Kleenex at me. I half thought my tears would bring him back, that they would flow to him, remind him of me. I walked everywhere, moving slowly without him. I would follow our regular trail on foot, but I would end up on my knees, sobbing. A little farther each day, that was something. I never got as far as the spot where the trail widens and enters onto a field. I could not get into that field. Those days, my brother was tutoring Antu. Antu was from Bangladesh, and illiterate, though my brother explained that the correct thing to say was that Antu had low literacy skills, because Antu could recognize the Coca Cola symbol and the Canadian flag, which counted.

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I don’t know how Antu ended up in Canada, alone, at twenty-two. Antu joined my family for holiday suppers and birthdays. He came to Hoban’s memorial, which was held just hours after Hoban was cremated. It was a group cremation, which is cheaper: we got the ugly cardboard box with the symbolic handful of ash and bones—other horses in there, not just Hoban; in fact it was mathematically possible that there was not one iota of Hoban in the box. A few weeks after the memorial, my mother gave Russell and Antu tickets to a local theatre production. But the night of the play, my brother had a bad cough; he offered me his ticket. Antu and I hadn’t spent time together just the two of us. I was nervous and so was he. I was careful not to dress as if for a date. Looking back, I realize that Antu more likely felt familial, protective. I was faintly embarrassed to be with him because he was so nervously careful of me, taking my faded jean jacket to the coat check, guarding the chit in his own pocket. The play was about a struggling East Coast fishing family, whose salty grandfather was dying. At first Antu sat deep in his chair. But soon he moved up to the edge of his seat and watched intently, following the characters with large movements of his head. He laughed loudly at the bits of physical comedy. Then Antu started to speak. At first he only sighed, oh, or uh-oh, when something went wrong. But then, during a scene where the grandfather, cleaning a fish, begins to cry, Antu spoke out soothingly: “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” The actor glanced at Antu. His look was one of both reproach and curiosity. I was mortified. And too young to take matters into my hands and explain to Antu the conventions—at least, the western conventions— of theatre-going. Perhaps in Bangladesh, it was all right to shout out. I knew that some plays—street theatre, pantomimes, plays for kids—allowed it. Or perhaps Antu had never

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been to a play; he did not seem to know about the separation, like the screen of a television, between the audience and the stage actors. To him the boundary, the fourth wall, was porous. In the final act of the play, the grandfather dies, alone in his bed. Antu reached out with both arms and rose from his seat, then sat again, shaking his head helplessly. To me, the man’s death was interesting. The actor carried it off quite well. The sound engineers cleverly replaced the old man’s last ragged breaths with the lapping of water against the side of a steel dory. I fiercely wished that Hoban had died like that, in a story, at a remove. And then I decided that that was exactly how I would think of his death—as “staged,” his large, spotted body high on a mound of straw, behind a curtain of crocheted afghans. I nearly laughed out loud, such was the relief. Hoban’s bulk lifted from my heart, and moved up to my brain. My tearless brain. 3:11 a.m. I’ve held Hoban like sculpture in my tearless brain for five years. Now, in a strange bed, sleeping for the first time with a man, the wall comes down. I press closer to Evan, cry openly. Evan wakes—I may have wanted him to; surely it is a forgivable transgression. He startles, raises his head onto a wobbly hand and takes me in with sleepy concern. It’s nothing, I say. Evan holds me close, lets me cry. I laugh, too, a chortle, whisper thanks. Evan doesn’t ask why I’m crying, doesn’t throw it back at me. Dawn dusts the darkness like ash. Time to sleep, with one arm around Evan, already breathing deeply again. The termites have gone quiet.

Sara Cassidy is the author of Windfall and Slick, both published by Orca Books. Her poetry, fiction and journalism have appeared in many periodicals. She lives in Victoria and at saracassidywriter.com. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 71

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Canada for Spartans In the government guidebook Discover Canada, required reading for people seeking to become Canadian citizens, the word “war” appears thirty-five times, and Ontario and Quebec become a single region

Stephen Henighan

ast winter, when my partner applied for Canadian citizenship, an envelope arrived at our home containing the government study guide for the citizenship exam. Like any document where a country describes itself, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (2009) makes for revealing reading. Yet as my partner shared passages, I was gripped by the disconcerting feeling that the country this booklet evoked is not the Canada in which I, or anyone else, was raised. I soon realized that this fantasy was deliberate. If I did not recognize the land described in Discover Canada, that was the volume’s intention: to drive a wedge between old Canadians and new Canadians; between me, who Page 72 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

did much of my schooling in Canada, and my partner, who arrived here as an adult; between the liberal, statist, internationalist culture of the past and what the authors hope will be the conservative, decentralized, militaristic culture of the future. The project of changing the ideological orientation of coming generations of voters was heralded by a government press release that proclaimed this booklet “should be in the hands of . . . every high school student in Canada.” High school students will not find the Canada they know in these pages. Medicare, the policy that Canadians sometimes identify as defining our country, is bypassed in a fleeting reference to the Canada Health Act.

Tommy Douglas may have been voted “the Greatest Canadian” in 2004, but his name does not appear here. The CBC, government aid agencies such as CUSO and CIDA, the right to unionize, gay and lesbian rights—all vanish. (In late 2010, the government announced that a sentence acknowledging the legalization of gay marriage would be inserted in future printings of Discover Canada.) Peace keeping receives one grudging mention, devoid of any reference to the Peacekeeping Monument in Ottawa that enshrines this heritage; in this volume, which uses the word “war” thirty-five times, Canada is a bellicose nation, adamant about its “Christian civilizations” and fixated on “the rule of law.” Discover Canada is not so much Canada for Dummies as Canada for Spartans. In spite of the volume’s militaristic tone, its most radical revisionism appears in the Conservative policy of regionalism. Most people reared in Canada learned in school that our country is made up of ten federated provinces with equal legal rights and two (after April 1999, three) territories. New Canadians will have to memorize the five regions of Canada, each of which is introduced as having a distinct culture. The delineation of these regions betrays the fact that the lines on this new national map were drawn by a party that is strongest in Alberta. Ontario and Quebec, for example, become a single region. My partner, having made the difficult transition from living in French in Quebec to living in English in Ontario, knows that these two provinces do not share a regional culture. The majority of residents of both provinces—which is to say, more than half of Canada’s population—would also reject the notion that they form a single region. New immigrants, however, will be

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obliged to affirm that this is the case. Discover Canada’s militarism and its propagandistic presentation of history are intertwined. The only two waves of political refugees identified by the guide are Hungarians who “escaped Soviet tyranny” in 1956 and Vietnamese who “fled from Communism” after 1975. My partner, like other aspiring citizens, is acquainted with some of the tens of thousands of Canadians whose families fled military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970s, or right-wing death squads in El Salvador or Guatemala in the 1980s. She is aware that among my family’s circle of friends are men who came to Canada from the United States as refugees from the Vietnam War, and women who accompanied them. These immigrations were just as transformative of Canadian society as those of the Hungarians and the Vietnamese, yet Discover Canada writes them out of history. To include them would be to violate the booklet’s starstruck reverence for men in uniform. The dignity of General Pinochet takes precedence over an accurate account of the origins of Canada’s population. The bottom of the opening two-page spread on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship is emblazoned with photos of happy soldiers. The accompanying text concedes that military service is not a formal obligation of citizenship, but suggests that it is “a noble way to contribute to Canada and an excellent career choice.” Web addresses are provided for both the Armed Forces and the cadets, a privilege that these pages grant to no other organization. Would-be citizens must study the names of all Canadians who have won the Victoria Cross, and are expected to be conversant with a little-known military unit called the Canadian Rangers. The volume consistently militarizes our history. When I was in

high school, the two Riel rebellions were taught as a constitutional crisis that pitted Louis Riel against Sir John A. Macdonald in a dispute about representative government. Discover Canada tilts the emphasis toward the battlefield, summarizing the conflict with portraits of Sir Sam Steele, “Mounted Policeman and Soldier of the Queen,” and Gabriel Dumont, “the Metis’ greatest military leader.” The Canadian tradition of opposition to militarism is censored: the long sections on the two world wars contain no reference to the 1917 Quebec City anti-conscription riots, the division of Parliament along linguistic lines during the war years, the second conscription crisis or Mackenzie King’s response to it. Various passages broadcast Conservative ideology: the first section on the economy, entitled “a trading nation”—a phrase coined by Tory strategists for Brian Mulroney’s 1988 election campaign—makes free-trade deals a Canadian trait; by contrast, Macdonald’s National Policy, which built the nation, is omitted. Tory gunlovers can thrill to a photograph of a gun-wielding hunter (who, unassail ably, is Inuit). Discover Canada’s effort to induct new Canadians into values that will lead them to support militaristic right-wing policies should be obvious to many who study the booklet. The most enduring lesson my partner and thousands of other citizenship applicants can learn from this volume is that Canada is a country whose government misrepresents its past in order to deprive them of the information they need to engage in debate about its future.

Stephen Henighan (stephenhenighan.com) recently translated into English Mihail Sebastian’s novel The Accident (Biblioasis, 2011). Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 73

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Burning Mistry Readers should remember that it is often the censor who draws our attention to the hidden virtues of a text

Alberto Manguel

n one of the earliest instances of book burning we know (but certainly not the first), in the year 213 BCE, the Chinese emperor Shih Huang-ti issued an edict ordering that all the books in his realm should be destroyed. In one of the latest instances (but certainly not the last), in September 2010, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey was burned at the gates of Mumbai University by students belonging to the right-wing Shiv Sena party. Between the Chinese emperor’s edict and the Mumbai students’ action lie twenty-two centuries of books set Page 74 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

on fire. If proof were needed of the essential power and value of literature, this long line of burning pages should suffice. Nothing less vigorously alive could elicit such fear. Fear of what? we ask. Among other things, of the truth. Over half a century ago, Jorge Luis Borges suggested that one of the reasons for Huangti’s action was the fact of his mother’s adultery, which the emperor wished to erase from Chinese memory by erasing Chinese history itself. (Borges noted that his case was similar to that

of a certain king of Judea who, wishing to kill one child, ordered that all children should be killed.) The burners of Mistry’s novel complained that Such a Long Journey depicted right-wing politicians, and particularly the Shiv Sena party, in a less than flattering light, and assumed, like their remote Chinese ancestor, that by reducing the story to ashes they would eliminate the fact. No doubt somewhere, in the hundreds of thousands of pages that constituted the corpus of Chinese literature prior to the third century BCE, a mention might have been found of the emperor’s mother’s peccadillo, but if Huang-ti’s reason was indeed to erase such a fact from public memory, his colossal task of destruction had the contrary effect, since the towering flames signalled, even to those quite uninterested in the affairs of the Chinese court, that there was something rotten in the Middle Kingdom. The Shiv Sena students have now achieved much the same thing. As a keen reader of Mistry’s books (having once written an afterword for a school edition of Such a Long Journey), I think I have a fair recollection of the events and characters in the novel. I must confess, however, that I had not paid particular attention to the presence in it of the Shiv Sena party, and had to go back to the book to refresh my memory. Yes, there is a mention (on page 298 of the first edition) of “dutiful Shiv Sena p atrols and motley fascists who roamed city streets with stones at the ready, p atriotically shattering windows that they deemed inadequately blackedout.” Mistry writes in a deceptively plain style, with great elegance and quiet humour, and his fiction is infused by a belief in what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the ultimate decency of things.” But if I were to offer a selection of outstanding examples of Mistry’s writing, I suspect the Shiv Sena passage would not be one of them: there are far subtler,

woodcut by michael wolgemut and wilhelm pleydenwurff, germany, 1493

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stronger, deeper lines in the novel than this efficiently documentary one. (Here is one, for instance, describing what a father thinks of a hammer that belonged to his own father and that he hopes his son will one day inherit: “He will add his gloss to the wood.”) However, now that the irate students have drawn my attention to the appearance of their grouplet in the book, the passage carries for me all the vigour of a political manifesto. We readers should always remember that it is often the censor who draws our attention to the hidden virtues of a text. But there were two other consequences to the book burning that are, if not more outrageous than the act itself, then certainly as distressing. One was the response of the Mumbai University authorities. The other was the lack of response of the Canadian government. In India, when the leader of the Shiv Sena students was interviewed by a television journalist, he said that Mistry was lucky to live in Canada: if he lived in Mumbai, they would burn him as well as his book. He then added that his group demanded the removal of Such a Long Journey (prescribed reading for years in the university’s MA and BA courses) from the syllabus. After several days, the vice-chancellor of Mumbai University, Dr. Rajan Welukar, did as he was told. The decision, he said, was not his, but that of the outgoing Board of Studies who, with one foot on the stirrup, d eclared that Such a Long Journey should no longer be taught. Dr. Welukar r esponded, of course, in accordance to a time-honoured bureaucratic tradition, according to which, in such cases, the person responsible must always pass on the blame, preferably to someone departing or departed. Fortunately, I ndia’s readers reacted otherwise. In colleges and universities across the country, in individual blogs and in the public press, readers expressed their outrage at both the burning and the banning.

In Canada, where indignation is rarely expressed above a polite “Oh, you shouldn’t,” the response was more subdued. The Globe and Mail dutifully reported the incident, the National Post noted it briefly, CBC Radio mentioned it on an international program dealing with Canadian matters abroad, PEN Canada, the Writers’ Trust and the Toronto Reference Library issued statements of protest, and Mistry’s publisher sent out a stern press release. From the government of the True North, Strong and Free, came not a whisper. We must not forget that India has become a vital economic partner for Canada and it would not do to bring up anything that might upset business negotiations, whether in the electronic or the tourist trade. The silence of Harper’s government should therefore not surprise us, nor that of the Honourable Michael Chan, Minister for Tourism and Culture of Ontario, Mistry’s province: as the minister’s title indicates, one industry takes precedence over the other. However, for those with the long view, there is consolation in the fact that book burnings never quite succeed in their purpose. Huang-ti’s determination to condemn to oblivion the three thousand years of books that preceded him, failed, as these things always do. Today we can still read the sayings of Confucius and the parables of Chuang Tzu and the medical books of the Yellow Emperor, just as we will continue to read Such a Long Journey, to revisit its passionate pages or to discover what made it so powerful that a fanatical mob and a cowardly vice-chancellor believed that it merited the flames. Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently A Reader on Reading, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, City of Words and The Library at Night. He lives in France. Read more of his Geist work at geist.com. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 75

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Inventing the Lazy Indian Every Indian in B.C. who could and would work was employed, yet Aboriginal people were defined as lazy and irresponsible

Daniel Francis

n March 15, 1843, the fur trader James Douglas arrived at the south end of Vancouver Island on board the steam vessel Beaver to establish Fort Victoria for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The arrival of Douglas and his men occurred on the exact day that a bright comet with an extremely long tail appeared in the sky. Known to posterity as the Great Comet of 1843, it was so brilliant that it could be seen in daylight and it was visible for more than a week. It is not known whether the Lekwungen (Songhees) people who inhabited southern Vancouver Island associated the arrival of strangers with the sudden bright light in the sky. They had been having intermittent contact with Europeans for some time and must have known the newcomers were not mysterious gods. On the other hand, as John Lutz points out in his book Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (UBC Press), Lekwungen cosmology did propose that the first human had fallen from the sky in the form of a meteor. The local inhabitants might well have given special meaning to the coincidental arrivals of comet and pale-skinned intruders. Contact between Aboriginals and whites in British Columbia, as in North America generally, was fraught with misunderstandings on both sides of the cultural divide. Early fur traders were fearful of the coastal First Nations, suspecting them of great ferocity, even cannibalism. Douglas himself wrote that he expected trouble on his arrival because the natives were “numerous Page 76 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

and daring, having as yet lost no trait of their natural barbarity.” Yet the Lekwungen greeted Douglas and his comrades warmly and co-operated with them to build their fort. As it turned out, it was the Natives who had much more to fear from the newcomers than vice versa. Smallpox, measles, sexually transmitted disease, tuberculosis and in fluenza arrived with the Europeans and

took their toll among the Lekwungen, reducing the pre-contact population of 1,624 to 182 within thirty years of Douglas’s arrival. Still, Lutz contends that contact was not the unmitigated disaster for the First Nations that it is often made out to be. The indigenous people were active participants in their own history, not its victims. They found many ways to take advantage of the new economic opportunities presented to them. After

all, they formed the majority of the population in British Columbia until at least 1885. White settlers could not have got along without them. Far from being excluded from the new economy, Natives provided the labour that made it possible. In the beginning they kept the trading posts going; later they worked in the canneries, as farm labourers, as miners in the Island coal mines, packers, sealers, road and railway builders, hop pickers, sawmill workers and loggers, deckhands on river steamers, domestics and longshoremen. So how did it come about that the indigenous people acquired a reputation for irresponsibility and laziness? Lutz explains that it was first a matter of definition. When Euroamericans asked themselves what an Indian was, they answered using the familiar stereotypes of the wilderness. An Indian was someone who hunted, fished, explored the woods and lived off the land. When an Indian held down a regular job and took home a paycheque, as many did, he or she was, by definition, no longer an Indian. As Lutz writes, “real Indians did not ‘work’.” Much of Makúk is spent overturning this myth by showing just how extensive was the involvement of Aboriginal people in the British Columbian eco nomy following initial contact. As one government official remarked: “Every Indian who could and would work—and they were numerous—was employed in almost every branch of industrial and domestic life, at wages which would appear excessively high in England or in Canada.” Yet for the most part, this record of work achievement disappeared from the historical record and was replaced by the myth of the lazy Indian. One of the reasons that Aboriginals were considered to be shirkers is that they did not have to put up with low wages and harsh working conditions. They had alternative, more traditional ways of making ends meet. When

image: prototype for new understanding #8, sculpture by brian jungen, from the cover of MAKÚK: A NEW HISTORY OF ABORIGINAL-WHITE RELATIONS (ubc press).

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employers complained that they could not rely on Aboriginal workers, what they meant was that the Aboriginal workers were not dependent on the white economy. Lutz makes this point by comparing Aboriginal people to British Columbia’s immigrant Chinese population. The Chinese were dis criminated against in many ways, but in the workplace employers invariably found them to be more industrious and reliable than Aboriginals. What this meant was that because of their marginal social situation with few ways to make a living, Chinese workers accepted starvation wages and terrible working conditions. In the eyes of their employers, this made them ideal employees, unlike the Aboriginals who could, and did, walk away from jobs they did not like. As time passed, Aboriginal partic ipation in the economy declined. But as Lutz observes, this had less to do with a disinclination on the part of Aboriginal people to find wage employment than it did with a variety of political and economic factors. As salmon canning consolidated in fewer and fewer plants, for example, the industry provided fewer jobs both for inside workers and commercial fishers. Hop picking in the Fraser Valley, which used to give seasonal employment to thousands of Aboriginals, went into decline. As logging operations came to be dominated by large corporations, hiring of loggers became centralized in the union halls of Vancouver, and Aboriginal loggers living up the coast lost out. And so it went, for industry after industry. But the de-employment of Abori ginal people was also government policy. Lutz describes a series of laws that eventually marginalized the First Nations. He concludes that the features that characterize the Aboriginal economy today—high unemployment and chronic welfare dependency—have only arisen in the past fifty years. We

have taken this contemporary situation and written it back into the history as the stereotype of the “lazy Indian.” John Lutz reminds us that boundaries between “races” were, and still are, like fences. First of all the fence is constructed to create a difference between us and them; then it must be maintained by constantly reinforcing the characteristics that put someone on the other side of the fence to begin with. Lutz suggests that it would be better to talk across the fence, or tear it down altogether. A good place to start would be to acquire a more accurate view of the role of Aboriginal people in our shared history. Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, most recently Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). Read more of his Geist work at geist.com. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 77

Write poetry with your eraser.

Enter the Geist Erasure Poetry Contest. Prizes include cash and a literary trophy. Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com. Deadline: July 1, 2011 Details: geist.com/erasure-contest or call 1.888.434.7834

ENDNOTES

Reviews, comments,curious DANY LAFERRIÈRE À LA JAPONAISE Stephen Osborne

hen Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan’s (now classic) book of prose narratives, appeared in the late ’60s, a reviewer in San Francisco wrote: “when we are old, people will write ‘Brautigans’ just as we now write novels.” In his new “novel,” I Am a Japanese Writer (Douglas & McIntyre), Dany Laferrière, the black novelist from Haiti now living in Montreal, has succeeded in writing a brautigan just in time, as those of us who recall the ’60s are growing older and fewer in number. Laferrière’s brautigan shares with the original a penchant for the louche, the dispossessed, for male characters with strong anima problems, men who (descended via Vonnegut via Hemingway via Bukowski, etc.) encounter women archetypally, so to speak, as dream-like forces or emanations of a world that itself seems to emanate from literature, from Mishima, Kafka, Proust—and Basho, the Japanese poet whose classic work The Narrow Road to the Deep North is re-informed by Laferrière’s journey north from the Caribbean to Canada. One is encouraged by short chapters to dip in and out of the text, but one begins to yearn for a table of contents in which the chapter titles might be seen together (as they are in Brautigan). A few of them can be listed: A Hotel Room, A Splendid View of the River, The Sorrows

of Mr. Tanizaki, The Trojan War, Metamorphoses; and then: Richard Brautigan’s Cowboy Boots, a chapter most worthy of this most worthy of brautigans.

READING ON THE SLY Kris Rothstein

eading Book Ends: A Year Between the Covers (Poplar Press) made me want to sit down and have a conversation about books with the author, Naomi Beth Wakan. She responds to a year’s worth of reading and boy, does she ever cover a lot of topics, from D.H. Lawrence to biographies of Sylvia Plath, from Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels to a book on compact Japanese culture. She also takes on some big literary subjects, like what are the books that every reader should tackle and what is the point of reading at all. She breezes through some books while others pop up in the narrative for several months. To be fair, one of these is the monumentally long Tale of Genji, which she is reading for the umpteenth time. Some titles, much loved, evoke little response, while others are much more provocative, stretching her to think and reply. Wakan also brings her lively Gabriola Island community to life, particularly with her notes analyzing the local library’s magazine subscriptions. Book Ends is chatty, disarming and sweetly sly, and all insatiable readers will find something enticing in its pages.

The stories in wax boats by Sarah Roberts (Caitlin) portray the rhythm of life in an island community, not a lyrical and staid idea of rural life but one full of humour, embarrassment and mishaps. Some stories are a little obvious but most are good yarns, with sympathetic characters and a lively energy. Roberts’s style is nothing remarkable, but she makes her words work to create a solid sense of place and reflect the delightful grumpiness of the locals. In the fabulous first story, “he knows where to find water,” the narrator describes the circumstances of her own birth when, after eleven months, her mom decides the baby has got to come out. The other most memorable piece is “hammersmith,” in which a new resident is introduced to local colour when he joins the eccentric Scout troop. After a bizarre accident the Scouts prove that they’ve learned their motto well. In fall 2010, the Vancouver book launch for The Selves by Sonja Ahlers (Drawn & Quarterly) was packed with people who like everything from high art to seedy pop culture, and the discussion was more eclectic and animated than at your average literary event. The Selves is full of Ahlers’s girly and weird collage art, published in full colour for the first time. Ahlers is drawn to images that tell stories about the tightrope of femininity—the soft and innocent (fluffy bunnies) with touches of the demented (Sybil). Her sensibility is profoundly affected by icons of female style and influence from the ’80s—the young Princess Diana, the heroines of teen romance Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 79

ENDNOTES

ovels, young Michelle Pfeiffer—juxtan posed with her own words and drawings, which are sweet, strange and devastating. The Selves is a twisted and funny fairy tale in which little girls lost in the woods come into their own power.

SQUEEZED Stephen Osborne

ne afternoon in the fall I paused while walking up Commercial Drive in

Vancouver to look over a selection of books for sale, set out in plastic bags and arranged against the wall of the Bank of Montreal. Several literary titles were on display, and one of them, The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock (Doubleday), I had seen in the Geist office a few months earlier and then it disappeared before I could read it. This one was an advance reading copy from the publisher; I took it out of its bag and opened it to find the Geist date stamp on the front page: this very copy had made its way from our reviewing desk (it was reviewed and excerpted in Geist) to new life on the street. The vendor in front of the Bank of Montreal told me I looked like “either a reader or a writer,” and one way or the other, he said, it was a wonderful day for Nicholas Ruddock, the young author whose book I was buying from him for four dollars. “These young writers get squeezed out at the top,” he said. “It’s very hard for them to find readers. So today is a good day for this young writer because now he has another new reader.”

FINE FEST FINDS Michael Hayward

ne of my discoveries at the 2010 Vancouver Writers Festival was Barnacle Soup (Blackstaff Press), a

Page 80 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

ENDNOTES c ollection of oral stories from the west of Ireland. The stories are jointly credited to Josie Gray (“a County Sligo painter and father of eight”) and the American poet Tess Gallagher: “a teller and a writer, coming together from separate cultures, Irish and American, with complementary talents, to do something that could not have been done without the other.” The two met in 1994 during one of Gallagher’s frequent trips to Ireland, and Gallagher took an instant liking to Gray’s “gentle, unpretentious way of allowing a story to simply unfold, no fuss or bother.” Gallagher read from Barnacle Soup at the 2010 Festival and had the audience in stitches, with tales like the one that describes “the night Tommy Flynn wound up with twenty-two women, lined on stools around his dank cupboard of a kitchen, and himself sitting in the middle, like a little green bull’s eye.” It’s not that the stories contained in Barnacle Soup are particularly comical; they aren’t “jokes,” and the “characters” are obviously drawn from Gray’s own life. But as you read them—or, even better, as you hear the stories read aloud—you’ll find that each is the work of a born tale-teller, rich in the details that help a reader/listener visualize the setting, and told with the rhythms and pacing of successful anecdotes, to snag a listener’s interest and keep it, effortlessly, to the story’s end.

Dejima—in Nagasaki Harbour, in the year 1799. During an extended period when access to Japan was forbidden to westerners, Dejima was the one place where commercial trading was allowed, under the strict control of the emperor. Mitchell’s story centres on the cross-cultural relationship (doomed, needless to say) between Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, and Orito Aibagawa, the daughter of a samurai doctor and a (somewhat anachronistic) midwife in training. Mitchell is particularly good at capturing idiomatic speech, and at giving his characters individuating traits that bring them to life. The novel includes a few bravura set pieces, starting with a lengthy and visceral description of childbirth; later there’s a splendid sequence describing a silent assault upon an isolated mountain shrine. Mitchell is one of a number of younger writers (Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Díaz are others) who pay homage to the genre fiction of their boyhoods, but who have the confidence and the writing chops to avoid that particular literary ghetto. What makes The Thousand Autumns stand out from other novels with a similar setting (James Clavell’s Shógun and Tai-Pan come to mind) is the apparent effortlessness of the writing; the way Mitchell tackles and tames genre after genre (there are traces of Patrick O’Brian’s naval tales here, as well as a hint of ninja lit) is dazzling. I can’t wait to see what he tackles next.

Another highlight of the 2010 Vancouver Writers Festival was David Mitchell, reading from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Knopf). A change of pace from his earlier, more experimental work (which includes a pair of Man Booker shortlist titles: number9dream and Cloud Atlas), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a historical novel set on a man-made island—

HOME AND AWAY Carrie Villeneuve

ountry Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins) was a topical gift from a friend. He Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 81

ENDNOTES

Noted Elsewhere Recent news of Geist writers and artists, gathered from here and there. Anything else we ought to know about? Tell all: geist@geist.com. Walt Whitman’s Secret, by George Fether ling (Random House), was described in the National Post as “an extraordinary achievement, a novel cannily constructed, with judicious amounts of suspense, stripped to the bone, a dark, brooding but not depressing meditation on, among other things, art and artistic discipleship.” Daniel Francis’s new book, Seeing Reds, The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp), was described in the Georgia Straight as “astonishing,” and “valuable for anyone who wants to understand the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, the red scare of the 1940s and 1950s, and recent media frenzies against Muslims in Canada.” Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, a graphic memoir by Sarah Leavitt (Freehand Books), was

shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust NonFiction Prize, and was included in Maisonneuve’s 2010 Top Ten list. The reviewer at Maisonneuve said the book “just about broke my heart,” and tells her readers to “pick up this book.” The National Post reviewer put it “at the head of a list of illuminating and much-needed artistic responses.” Tangles will be published by Jonathan Cape in the U.K. in 2011. Annabel Lyon’s novel The Golden Mean (Random House) was shortlisted by the Literary Review for the 2010 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. A reviewer in The New Yorker wrote: “Lyon’s evocation of the ancient world is earthy and immediate.” The Daily Beast wrote that its “pleasures are close to those of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, or even the historical pot boilers of Ken Follett.” The Boston Globe praised it as “a novel brave enough to raise the universal questions about how a man should live his life.” It has been published in the U.S., the U.K., Taiwan, Brazil and Spain.

who follows his journey across the alpine, coastal and interior territories of the Pacific Northwest will discover his amazing ability to bring into focus the tiniest of flowers, the softest of petals, the ones that can be overlooked when you are gazing up at the imposing trees that dominate our understanding of this landscape. The images are rich with meaning, and the few lines of text that accompany each image, filled with delightful names like pixies’ helmets, fawn-lilies, foxgloves, owl-clover and phantom-orchid—become found poetry on the page.

LIQUID BREAD: DELICIOUS REVIVER Becky McEachern

gave it to me because I’m going to China, and when he visited China a few years ago, he loved it instantly. He then attempted a solo bicycle tour through the countryside, but didn’t make it out of the first town before he was robbed of everything but his bike. He still speaks fondly of that trip, but this book changed his perspec-

roads, old and new, city and rural. I read the book slowly in order to savour every word, every red Sinomap line, every conversation with hitchhikers, every step through a car factory, every scrap of story of the Great Wall.

tive on all things China, and might have

SQUASH AND WILDFLOWERS

prepared him better as he embarked on his half-baked notion of a casual tour. Having lived in Asia, I’m skeptical of travel writing by Westerners about the continent—too many accounts with a distasteful “West Is Best” tone—so I started Driving reluctantly. But this book is, quite simply, fascinating. After five years of living and learning Chinese, Hessler, a journalist, obtained a Chinese driver’s licence. Armed with a vague idea of a road trip following the Great Wall, some outdated Sinomaps and a rented City Special, he traces China’s recent rapid economic growth through its

Lauren Ogston

Page 82 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

discovered my Christmas reading this year a day early, unwrapped, on my neighbour’s coffee table, by spilling Hubbard squash pie on the front cover. I was mortified to have ruined the book, an elegant collection of photographs. Then I found my name inscribed on the front endpaper along with a salutation from the author. Wildflowers: Seasonal Splendors of the North American West (Greystone) was a treasure map to the world beyond the white picket fence. Graham Osborne, the author, grew up in the suburbs of the Fraser Valley, where window boxes and bedding plants abounded. The reader

book about beer might seem an odd choice on a holiday visit to my parents’ place considering my whole family is still pushing to bring back Prohibition, but in fact Brew North: How Canadi ans made beer and beer made Canada by Ian Coutts (Greystone) tells such a rugged, woodsy, good ol’ hard-working history of Canadian beer and beery Canadians that the result feels downright wholesome. That’s not to say that it’s a dry historical account. In fact, the old photos, advertisements and labels on every page are what drew me to it. One of my favourites is a beer from the Saskatoon Brewing Company marketed as “Liquid Bread.” The graphic really is a loaf of bread; calories and carbs were still a good thing in the 1800s. Some of the illustrations date from the time when advertising was considered a trustworthy source of good advice, and before our attention spans shrank to three nanoseconds. A 1930s O’Keefe’s ad, for example, says, “When you come home all tired

ENDNOTES out, a bottle of O’Keefe’s ‘Pilsener’ will take the tiredness away. [It] is concentrated strength, vigour and refreshment. As a food-tonic—as a strength-giver and reviver—nothing surpasses this delicious, sparkling lager. Keep it in the house.” A man in a suit is pictured seated alone at a table with a glass of beer. He seems content enough, but what a difference from most contemporary beer ads, where confidence, sex appeal and social acceptance are all but included in the list of ingredients. Anyway, regardless of your family’s stance on alcohol consumption, I don’t recommend cracking open a cold one to accompany this particular book. I needed all of my few functioning brain cells alert and at the ready just to absorb all the content. See the “Beer Map of Canada” at geist.com, and more at geist.com/atlas.

CANADIAN NEVERLAND Dan Post

omething tells me that Grant Lawrence’s Adventures in Solitude (Harbour) isn’t going to spur the same kind of Oprah-induced travel frenzy as Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2010 book club phenomenon, but with all the quirky stories, lovable characters and serene coastal landscapes found in Lawrence’s coming-of-age memoir, his book might just do for Desolation Sound, B.C., what Eat, Pray, Love did for India. As a travel guide, Lawrence’s book does little to encourage a family vacation. Captain George Vancouver, when first laying eyes on Desolation Sound, called it “dreary and unpleasant,” a sentiment shared by Grant at age six, when his father first took the family there for a getaway. But the way that place, with its cast of kooky “shrubbies,” changed a bespecta-

cled little city kid into a machete-wielding outdoorsman, had me longing for a set of childhood memories that were not my own. From Bernard the German to Handy Candy, a whole commune of eclectic elders were available from whom the impressionable young Lawrence could draw wisdom, homemade liquor and fishing secrets—a Canadian Neverland fantasy that I’d love to slip away to every summer. If I thought for a second that it was possible, I would pack my car, head up the coast, board a series of ferries to carry me away from the mainland, then travel by tiny skiff through the choppy waters that nearly killed Vancouver’s crew and Lawrence’s sister, out to a cabin, where I would while away the quiet summer, free from the clutches of the big city. But the truth is, Desolation Sound will never be mine. It belongs to Lawrence, and to his father, who had the vision to stick with what Captain Vancouver was so quick to dismiss, and all the real hippies who have made it their home—not just another half-hearted city slicker like myself trying to escape the rat race. So, every time I feel the weight of city life on my shoulders, I can pull Lawrence’s book down off the shelf and disappear quietly into someone else’s adventures in solitude.

GIRLS GROWING UP Patty Osborne

ridget is a teenager in small-town Nova Scotia, where everyone knows everyone’s business and no one wants anyone to change. She lives in a chaotic household that includes her somewhat demented grandmother, who, when she isn’t cursing like a sailor, talks like a Robbie Burns poem; her mentally disabled uncle, who can’t stop asking questions; and her outspoken father, who feels that there are

“certain codes of conduct that the average human being is supposed to act in accordance with.” What else is there to do but party? Until you get pregnant and end up in the psych ward, where at least you get some downtime to contemplate your life. Lynn Coady’s first novel, Strange Heav en (Goose Lane), follows Bridget as she stumbles toward what we can only hope is a small awakening from a dark struggle— or what would be a dark struggle if it weren’t for the fact that the people who drive Bridget crazy are, to those of us who only have to read about them, hilarious. I missed Strange Heaven when it was first published in 1998, but I’m happy that I caught up to it when it was reissued in 2010. An Irish friend of mine tells me that the recent financial crisis will cause Ireland to lose another generation of young people who will leave to find work—bad for Ireland but not always bad for the young people. The same thing is going on in the 1950s when Eilis Lacey, the main character in Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Brooklyn (McClelland & Stewart), is pushed by her older sister to leave her small town in southeast Ireland and go to Brooklyn. There she lives in a little Irish enclave, and only ventures away from the watchful eyes of her landlady and the local priest in order to work and to take night classes. When she meets a young Italian man she begins to move slowly into a larger world in which she will no longer have to do as she is told. Tóibín’s matter-of-fact language reflects perfectly the outlook of an obedient young woman who has no big dreams or ambitions but who, after two years away from the constrictions of her birthplace, discovers that she can and must make her own decisions. Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 83

ENDNOTES

POLISH NOIR Stephen Osborne

ike all great noir movies of the 1950s, the Polish movie classic Diamonds and Ashes, available on DVD in public libraries, can be understood as an orchestration of vast quantities of cigarette smoke, skillful wieldings of Zippo lighters, and continuous maintenance of perfect haircuts throughout the action scenes. The shadows in Diamonds and Ashes are deep and rounded, and could be taken directly from The Third Man by Orson Welles; the protagonist, a charismatic young man who keeps his sunglasses on at night, bears an uncanny resemblance to James Dean but gets himself into a tangle with the forces of history and love in a way that James Dean would never know. The action takes place in an unnamed Polish town on the day of the German surrender, May 8, 1945: the rising Communists, backed by the USSR, are confronted by their one-time allies against the Germans, the non-Communist fighters who are ineptly continuing the armed struggle for the homeland. Scenes of over-the-top drunkenness and slapstick are juxtaposed with scenes of brooding heaviness and angst; at one point a white horse appears on the screen: clearly a symbol, but of what? The director, Andrzej Wajda, in an interview made decades after the movie, speaks exuberantly of the white horse as just that: a free-floating symbol. He is equally enthusiastic about the influence of The Third Man, Orson Welles and James Dean, as he reflects on the sense of liberation that noir films offered Polish filmmakers when they first saw them in the fifties. The stories told in this film extend to Polish fighters confronting the Germans in Italy at Monte Cassino, and the Fascists in Spain during the Civil War, where, as one of the nostalgic survivors remarks in passing, “Grabowski died in the forest.” Page 84 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011

CROSSWORD

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword

address to: Puzzle #80 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist magnet. Good luck!

ACROSS 1 Be constant and, for the sake of the children, cough behind you 3 Why are you sniffling? Did you get lost in sunny Reno? (2) 8 The other night she took quite a ribbing 9 Those little guys from that city south of Toronto toot their own straight horns 10 Oh God, when I wear my bathing suit in Norway, everyone starts fighting 12 That germ fighter always tears up when he gets confused, especially in Paris 14 That old person’s friend took him away through all the congestion 17 Don’t get mixed up, steal that magnetic unit and let’s meet in the square 18 That certainly alleviates the pain without difficulty 19 You should meet the best guy for staggered starts—it’s Ron 20 That little flyer can sound vulgar when it’s near a woman 21 In Canada, they’re making a list and checking it twice but all those trees can get in the way (abbrev) 22 No matter how funky he is, I definitely smell a rat 26 That phrase puts me in mind of a place where I left my olive cat 29 Sorry, I’m all out and I can’t remember a thing (abbrev) 30 Pip was single when he had that easy win 31 We found the men so dry that we couldn’t figure out their symptomatic pattern 33 Bill had a problem with the spicy mixture (2) 37 Stop at 30, okay? 39 Take 2 and call me in the morning (abbrev) 40 Don’t irritate me by claiming your horse won or you’ll be forcibly expelled 41 That little glory box smells good 43 It’s cool to smoke a cigarette and read a fashion mag 46 You’ll ruin the threads if you don’t put that on (3) 47 They’re just going to overthrow those regimes and then leave 48 First she directed the show and then she made a cut and took off 49 How did a perfect human end up having fun in plain view? 50 Let’s see, were J.R.’s little fighters as ferocious as Gramps? 51 Inhalations may be harmful, but there will be no strings attached

8 10

Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and

21 24

33 38

40 44

29 31

39 41

47 49 51

52 He’s looking at you while you’re threading that needle DOWN 1 There’s no magic in those transports so cover them up 2 Since she went to those do’s, she looks good but never stops waving 3 My inner I pulls back when you tell me to hold my horses (2) 4 What was he sitting on when he wrote those red letters? 5 My nose got messed up when we were chosen 6 Sounds like a single foot will be needed to sing along with Jim 7 I hear that each era has a sore point 10 I listened as his Portuguese test ended up sounding like a male organ 11 In Hong Kong, it sounds like they’re speaking but not to me 12 In Madrid, I think they put up a parking lot in my backyard 13 Quit your bellyaching, I can’t bear it 15 In Edmonton they’re practically scientific, really (abbrev) 16 Shortly, it sounds like you’ll be sick in the chimney again 23 I approve of that soporific country 24 It’s unnatural how inquisitive he is, but even though he never conks out, he’s no crooner 25 Don’t upset the resistance or the group may not help you get well (abbrev) 27 At 26 she was smart as a knotted whip 28 Sounds like that grey guy was holding the ball when they started

48 50 52

1 I’m afraid that hot girl has the shakes 3 32 She satisfies me in St. Louis 34 We had a gas when we had to adorn 86 of them 35 Funny, the Canadian version flew since 1970, then crashed and burned (abbrev) 36 Chuck, we’re putting it up in the bag 38 The Brits took a couple of quick looks while they were in India 40 Those comic characters sang so sweetly, didn’t they? 41 Magic pig-maker made the trip much longer 42 When is the 7th Greek due? (abbrev) 44 Don’t moan about being king—you’ll have all the oil you need 45 Sounds like the Swedes genetically modified that little place The winner for puzzle 78-79 was Bill Kummer. That’s two in a row! Congrats.

Spring 2011 • GEIST 80 • Page 87

CAUGHT MAPPING

Speculations on a Nation t h e s c i -fi ma p o f ca n a d a by Melissa Edwards

Romulus Lake Lands End

modified Geistonic projection

Gravity Ridge

Probe Lake Astro Ridge

Omega Bay Big Pod Rock

Opposite Island

Hugo Lake Star City Contact Creek

Spock Lake

Dune Creek Lac Nano Clones Cove

Exploration Peak

Lac de L’Imaginaire

Vader Creek

Time Lake Lac de la Regénération Lac du Vortex

Starblanket

Lac Futura

Robinson Atomic Lake

The Terminator Colony Point

Transmission Pond The Beamer

Paradox Creek

Wyndham Lake

Lac Alien

Saucer Lake

Planet Group

Lac du Robot Clarke

Space Point Peak

Visitors Island Orwell Marvin Lake Outer Black Point

Swamp of the New World

Wells Stranger Lake

Wookey Lake

Battleship Cosmos Heights

Speculator Point Lac des Chrysalides

Hitchhiker Peak

Lac Éloi

Galaxy Lake Mount Andromeda Predator Ridge

Lac Électron

Huxley

Lac de la Force

Hubbard

Lac Khan

Bradbury River

The Gateway

Burgess

Starbuck Adams

Gilliam Creek

Lac Jump

Vulcan

Ray

Shelley

Needler

Kirk

Moon River

Dent Firefly Lake

Tribble Lake

Darkness Lake

Morlock Island

Gibson Atwood

Science Hill

Scully Warp Bay

For more Geist maps and to purchase the Geist Atlas of Canada, visit geist.com. Page 88 • GEIST 80 • Spring 2011