Geist 87 - Winter 2012

Erasure Poetry Contest Winners

The Nostalgic Map of Canada I AM HERE: THE PROJECT  THE GUTENBERG EFFECT JUSTIN BIEBER POETRY LITTLE COMRADES DIEFENBUNKER COTTONOPOLIS

FACT + FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA

NUMBER 87 WINTER 2012 $6.95

cold comfort Dancing with Dynamite  The Other 9/11 Alberto Manguel  Carmine Starnino  Connie Kuhns  Joe Fiorito Billy Collins Interviewed Onstage at Chautauqua  Moez Surani Bloody Saturday  Stephen Henighan  Laurie Lewis  Black Summer In Review: The Lynching of Louie Sam  120 Days of Simon  Economist Obituaries  All Roads Lead to Wells Tavi Gevinson  Brian Fawcett  Diana Athill  George Bowering  Marcello Di Cintio  Emma Straub

THE 9 TH ANNUAL GEIST LITERAL LITERARY

POSTCARD STORY CONTEST Winning entries will be published in Geist.

Winners and Honourable Mentions will be posted at geist.com.

D EA D L I N E February 1st, 2013

CAS H PRIZE S

D ETA I L S at geist.com

“Just about the most fun you can have at the writing desk.”

—a happy Geist Postcard Story Contest entrant

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n

•

North of America

GEIST

Volume 23

· Number 87 · Winter 2012 features

The Gutenberg Effect Michael Hayward 36

Jan and Crispin Elsted, life partners and letterpress printers extraordinaire

How Should a Person Erase?

48

Selective erasure of Sheila Heti’s latest novel, by Mark Petrie, Frank Beltrano and Patrick Grace

I AM HERE Connie Kuhns 50

Driving with Maurice Sambert to the Grave of Thomas Mann Moez Surani 53

published by The Geist Foundation. publisher : Stephen Osborne. senior editor : Mary Schendlinger. editorial group: Michal Kozlowski, assistant publisher; AnnMarie MacKinnon, operations manager; Lauren Ogston, web editor. circulation manager : Nicholas Beckett. reader services : Jocelyn Kuang. copy editor : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. associate editor : C.E. Coughlan. interns : Armita Farah Avar, Jesmine Cham, Billie-Jo Jenner, Heather Lea, Meaghan McAneeley, Jennesia Pedri, Uzma Rajan. accountant : Mindy Abramowitz cga. advertising & marketing : Clevers Media. web architects : Metro ­Publisher. distribution : Magazines Canada.

A writer/photographer’s riff on the social media version of “Wish you were here”

Road trip to Zürich with a poet who is preoccupied by graveyards and tormented writers

printed in canada by Transcontinental. managing editor emeritus : Barbara Zatyko. first subscriber : Jane Springer. contributing editors : Jordan Abel, Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Daniel Francis, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Jill Mandrake, Becky McEachern, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Patty Osborne, Eric Peterson, Dan Post, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito. support the geist writers and artists fund: geist.com/wafund

GEIST Ideas and culture since 1990 “Signs of literary life”

notes & dispatches

Stephen Osborne 8 Dancing with Dynamite Jeff Shucard 11 Hurricane Rachel Lebowitz 12 Cottonopolis Rick Maddocks 13 The Other 9/11

findings

19

Budge Cold Comfort

Really Important Modern Poetry Emergency Broadcast System

Little Comrades Bloody Saturday and more.

columns

Stephen Henighan Alberto Manguel Daniel Francis

16 58 60

Afterlife of Culture City of Words National Dreams

departments

Michal Kozlowski 4 In Camera Letters 5

Joe Fiorito 31 Surveillance

Carmine Starnino 56 Annals of Poetry

Geist staff & correspondents 62 Endnotes, Off the Shelf, Noted Elsewhere Meandricus 67 Puzzle

Melissa Edwards 68 Caught Mapping

cover design: Eric Uhlich Geist is printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

The inks are vegetable based.

cover image: The Hunting Lodge photo shoot is one of a series of annual photography events hosted by Meagan Schafer and Daryl Kirkham, each based on the creation of a tableau and special set. Past tableaux have included Alpine sled set; Santa’s workshop; the 1970s; a giant gift box filled with people; a manger. See page 4.

i n

c a m e r a

Hunting Lodge

T

he photograph on the cover of this issue of Geist was taken in the home of the artists, Meagan Schafer and Daryl Kirkham, in Vancouver during a photo shoot in November this year.

production notes set: living room; log cabin wallpaper (stapled); inch-thick log ends (stapled); fireplace (on site); lamp (on site); bear (taxidermied, on loan); animal skin rugs (bought for shoot).

props: axe; sled; leg cast; antlers (real); reindeer antlers (foam); handgun (plastic); pellet rifle; animal skins (purchased from Salvation Army); 4 Geist 87 Winter 2012

animal skins (brought from the North for shoot).

costumes:

(Canadian hinterland theme): toques; shirts (plaid, camouflage); sweaters; vests; caps (with ear flaps); ski pants; wigs; blankets; Little Red Riding Hood outfit.

catering: prosciutto (duck, bison); salami (elk); meatballs (wild boar); bacon-wrapped macaroni and cheese; tarts (spinach); signature drink (rum, spices, boiled apple). budget: props, costumes and catering: $500.

wrap: 2:30 a.m.; 528 exposures.

—Michal Kozlowski

The Hunting Lodge is one of a series of annual photography events. Meagan Schafer is a woodworker, teacher and jewellery maker. See her work at sprucedesignco.com and kozaimodern.com. Daryl Kirkham is a photographer who works with largeformat cameras, with particular interest in portraiture. Schafer and Kirkham build sets professionally in Vancouver, where they live; contact them at sprucedesignco.com.

r e a d e r s

GEIST

w r i t e

LETTERS T

too special

hank you for Alberto Manguel’s examination of the specialization of knowledge and how the resulting knowledge “scarcity” can promote a sense of inclusion or exclusion (“Being Here,” Geist 86).

I believe that specialization in limited domains creates greater alienation than cohesion within communities. Are we getting smarter overall by always following the path of specialization? At the very least, perhaps we need a system of checks and balances to allow knowledge to grow in more complex, rhizomatic and integrated ways, beyond the confines of specialization.

—Patty Holmes, Vancouver

M

anguel writes that the internet only gives us the illusion that a wide range of learning is at our disposal. “We can look into any scientific question,” he says, but “comprehension of the problems, let alone the solutions, must escape us.” I recently finished writing a book called Catching Cancer, which traces the history of an idea that has been brewing for a hundred years—that a significant number of malignancies are caused by infections. I am not a medical doctor—I’m a freelance writer who studied philosophy. I couldn’t have written this book without the resources of the internet. It helped me to find the key researchers and read their seminal papers. Admittedly, sometimes I struggled to plow through technical language, but with determination, curiosity and, of course, the help of scientists who were willing to explain their work to a layperson, I believe I

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

Contents copyright © 2012 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved.

have succeeded. When the book is published (it is scheduled for spring) the reader will be the final judge of that. I think the old knowledge silos are breaking down. Those of us without special training and knowledge are not, as Manguel maintains, “irredeemably condemned to hunger and thirst.” With some work and application to a topic, and the vast store of information now at our fingertips, it is possible to escape this fate.

—Claudia Cornwall, North Vancouver

J

memory and mimesis

ane Silcott’s essay “Mimesis” (No. 84), about beauty, mimicry and family, is so understated and evocative.

I’ve been in motels like the one she describes but not with Hells Angels partying next door. I loved the interior of BC in the summer. It was often our family’s getaway destination, where we would buy fruit and escape Vancouver for a short while. I was young then, and “Mimesis” reminds me of being young and excited to travel, and of the prospect of meeting girls and sailing our small hobby craft on the lake at top speed.

—Steve Fontain, Cyberspace Read “Mimesis” and other work by Jane Silcott at geist.com.

J

Subscriptions: in Canada: $21 (1 year); in the United States and elsewhere: $27. Visa and MasterCard accepted.

Correspondence and inquiries: subscribe @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 BC 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 BC 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 BC. 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 Canada Council, the BC Arts Council and the Cultural Human Resources Council. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

brewskis

eramy Dodd’s poem “CANADÆ” (No. 84) is fantastic. From now on, I will wash my car with Molson Canadian 67—“brewed with the best this land has to offer”—instead of drinking water.

—Carson Butts, Cyberspace Read “CANADÆ” at geist.com.

Letters 5

www.geist.com

down among the books

I

enjoyed “Man of a Hundred Thousand Books,” the profile of Don Stewart by George Fetherling (No. 80). Although it has been nearly thirty years since I lived in Vancouver, I still recall the ambience and engagement of Stewart’s store, McLeod’s Books,

one of my favourite stops in the city.

For those with time on their hands, the ability to disconnect from the wired-in universe and no particular agenda, McLeod’s Books is a magical emporium, a place to pause and reflect.

—Raymond Garford, Courtenay BC “Man of a Hundred Thousand Books” won the 2012 Western Magazine Award for Best Profile. Read this article and other work

by George Fetherling at geist.com.

psychotherapy blues

R

Anna Kozlowska enjoys Geist 85, the Summer Reading issue, at McGill University in Montreal.

GEIST

tablet edition

6 Geist 87 Winter 2012

egarding Michael Hayward’s review of Blue Nights by Joan Didion: Writing as psychotherapy? Writing to find out what one is thinking does not constitute psychotherapy.

It is evidence of intelligence and curiosity. It is evidence of life. Didion is meticulously honest and poetic in the intellectual endeavour that is this book.

—Rhonda Toth, Cyberspace Read Hayward’s review of Blue Nights and other works at geist.com.

I

cut-out lit

work in a big bookstore selling conventional books and ereaders.

Jonathan Safran Foer and his publisher claim that the idea for Tree of Codes (reviewed by Kelsea O’Connor in Geist 86), was to publish something that could never be an ebook.

Yet of the dozens of people I’ve spoken with who say, “I could never read on an ereader, I love paper,” not one has bought Tree of Codes. They are amused by it, but find it too hard to read. A clever programmer could make Foer’s book digital with a few clicks of a mouse—all the cut-out words deleted and the remaining text

shunted together to make it easy to read.

—Frank Beltrano, London ON

T

ree of Codes is to be savoured one page at a time—as we used to do before our attention spans were cut from minutes to frames. Tip: use blotting paper (found in curio shops) to protect yourself from the distraction of what’s coming next.

—Johanna Miklos, Cyberspace Read O’Connor’s review of Tree of Codes at geist.com.

Send your letters to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax 604-677-6319 #210 – 111 W. Hastings Street Vancouver BC 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.

Letters 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES f r o m

t h e

n e w

w o r l d

Dancing with Dynamite stephen osborne Bomb squads were called out to inspect bomb-like items along the SkyTrain line

L

ast November on a Friday evening in Vancouver a member of the bomb squad encased in an armoured bomb suit could be seen on the television news moving stolidly, intrepidly, along a stretch of elevated SkyTrain track, toward an object that from the distant helicopter view intercut into the news item seemed to consist of a bomb-like arrangement of cylinders and coiled wire lying in the guideway beside the track; it was later described by a police spokesperson as an “explosive device”

8 Geist 87 Winter 2012

that may or may not have been viable.

The object was detonated off camera, and its status as a bomb or a nearbomb was never clarified precisely. “It may have had to have been lit in some way before it went off,” said the police spokesperson, whose verb tenses tended to get mixed up as she strove to balance the known state of the world and the possible states implied by the existence of a bomb or near-bomb on the SkyTrain track. “It certainly has the potential to be a pipe bomb,” she

said; “at this point we are treating it as if it was real.” This might have been a time, grammatically speaking, for the subjunctive mood, good for expressing that which can be imagined, wished for or thought possible—in a word, to express hopes and fears—but the subjunctive is no longer in favour in public discourse, which couches itself these days entirely in the indicative, as if the world consisted only of facts.

In the hours and days following

photo: mandelbrot. broadway sky train station, vancouver

the incident, bomb squad members in armoured suits were called out to more stations along the elevated SkyTrain line as bomb-like items were discovered lying on the guideway or near the track: at New Westminster Station, a piece of pipe wrapped in black tape; at Gilmore Station, “a metal can containing tar”; at Metrotown Station, a “dodgy-looking” chunk of drainage pipe; at Main Street–Science World Station, a handbag with a

wrist watch dangling from its strap— later reported by police to have been thrown there in the course of “a domestic dispute between a man and his wife.” With each of these reports the sense of imminent danger to SkyTrain passengers was re-invoked and then quickly dissipated, and the story began to resemble a dream that repeats as it descends into goofier versions of itself. But even as elements of farce crept into the story, the spectre remained: SkyTrain, perhaps the

only structure in the city to carry any symbolic weight, was revealed to be vulnerable, an object of attention for pranksters, hoaxsters, bomb-watchers, bomb-finders and bomb-throwers.

T

he history of public bombing in Vancouver now extends to three episodes, none of them solved, all of which retain a certain dreamlike quality. At six o’clock on a Monday morning on March 20, 1933, a bomb thrown into the Royal Theatre on Hastings Street tore away the front of the building, shattered dozens of windows in nearby hotels and blew the proprietor and his wife from their bed in the apartment above the lobby.

The lead item in the evening news said that the bomb, which it named an “infernal machine,” had been hurled by Gangdom’s hand, and imputed the incident to a factional struggle within the projectionists’ union, although the manager of the theatre told police and reporters that a meeting of the Workers’ Unity League had celebrated the anniversary of the rising of the Paris Commune on March 19, 1871, in the theatre on the night before the explosion. The same edition of the paper reported a bomb-like device found six hours after the Royal Theatre explosion, in a streetcar on the No. 20 line; the City Analyst J.F.C.B. Vance, the item said, “found it to be an ordinary coconut filled with beans and peas that rattles like a time bomb when moved.

This ‘infernal machine,’ painted with a skull and crossbones, a wooden peg being driven tightly into one end giving a convincing bomb-like appearance, created no little excitement.”

In 1942, on a Tuesday in November, one of the twin stone lions on the steps of the courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery), described in the news report as majestic ten-ton symbols of British justice, was blown up with two “dynamite time-bombs” that sent granite fragments into the plaza and knocked out windows in

all of the neighbouring hotels; hotel patrons and employees thought the city had come under attack by Japan (with whom Canada was at war). The bombing was attributed to a “short man” seen running from the scene by a sergeant, who said in the item: “I saw a short man dash from the steps. I saw him in the light of the explosion as he started to run across the grounds.”

The short man was never apprehended, and no motive for the attack was ever adduced. “A lengthy piece of fuse and another length of wire found near the shattered granite lion,” said the item, “are to be examined by Inspector J.F.C.B. Vance,” the same man who had examined the coconut bomb in 1933, since promoted, and understandably the only expert in town. A piece on the op-ed page expressing an optimistic view of the explosion suggested that the courthouse lions were an eyesore whose time had come, and went on to recommend, as targets suitable for more bombs, the fountain in Lost Lagoon, the statue of Captain Vancouver at City Hall, the statue of Robbie Burns in Stanley Park, the stuffed sea lion in the city museum and the 16th Avenue streetcar. (Three years later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, a “radical plan” to deepen Vancouver Harbour by means of an atomic bomb “was considered,” according an unfootnoted caption in Vancouver: A History in Photographs, “and then rejected.”)

A

few days after the SkyTrain nearbombing, the spokesperson for the Transit Police appeared in the news to announce a program called TOMS, for Transit Order Maintenance Sweeps, which she said was the name of a protocol developed in New York.

Officers wait on the platform until a train arrives, she said. When the train doors open, the officers step inside and take a quick look around, then step back onto the platform.

Notes & Dispatches 9

And so New York City provides the template and the protocols for world-class disaster: for months after the Twin Towers came down in 2001, I recall many times stopping or hesitating on the sidewalk whenever I perceived an airliner passing overhead to be somewhat off the usual flight path; I had to stave off an impulse to scuttle for cover in a doorway or under an awning; I suspect that I was not alone in feeling a kind of naked vulnerability, a sensation that has returned, however faintly, when I ride the SkyTrain these days, and happen to remember the near-bomb event of November, while peering down into the city.

Behind the shadow of the hoax or the near-bomb, the false alarm, lies the history of bomb-throwing in cities, which begins in Europe with the birth of dynamite (in the laboratories of Alfred Nobel), and its celebration in song and deed by self-styled anarchists in Barcelona, Vienna, Rome and Paris (the best known of the songs of the French anarchists is “Danse Dynamite”), and with it the spectre of mangled bodies, smouldering ruins and, in this century, the collapse of the towers in New York—or, in the subjunctive, on a Friday night in Vancouver, the collapse of the pylons of the SkyTrain elevated railway. The figure of the bomb-wielder, invisible in the crowd (or in the aircraft overhead) was first postulated by Joseph Conrad in 1909, in the malignant figure of the Professor in The Secret Agent, strapped to his bomb, “lost in the crowd, miserable… his hand in the left hand pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the India-rubber ball.”

SkyTrain is a legacy of Expo 86, the world’s fair opened by Prince

Charles and Princess Di and intended to advance Vancouver to so-called world-class status by giving its citizens the right to drink alcohol on Sundays and to lose money in casinos twenty-four hours a day. SkyTrain, with its streamlined coaches and swooping roadbed and sleek pylons, was an expression of the future as dreamt of in the 1950s, and on a clear day continues to offer the pleasure of a family amusement ride: gliding at speed twenty feet in the air above sidewalks and streets, sweeping along curved trackways, above parks and parking lots and used car lots and vast acres of condominiums and across the Fraser River on a spectacular suspension bridge toward the end of the line in Surrey. At times you can look straight across through apartment windows into living rooms and dining rooms, and down into backyards, patios, balconies and decks: life goes on everywhere SkyTrain goes, which is not a quality of the so-called world class, where daily life has no purchase, so to speak; SkyTrain remains a modest symbol of the modern if not the post-modern, and thereby perhaps becomes a target for the disaffected and the near-bombers among us.

From my dining table four storeys above the street in a small apartment, I can look out and see, at eye level, the cream-coloured viaduct that carries the SkyTrain in and out of the city from west to east and back again, and I can hear the distant scrapingwhistling sound of wheels on metal growing nearer, and then a moment of urgency and a dragging sound of friction growing fainter, every few minutes a reassuring sign of urbanity, of there being a city out there in its dailiness, its patterns of destination

and departure, its manifold lives. In the evening the cars of SkyTrain glow from within, emitting warm light, and the shadows of the commuters standing and looking back at you glow as well; one never tires of the SkyTrain passing back and forth. During stoppages there is silence, which is ominous; has there been an incident, a jumper, a stumbler, someone pushed onto the tracks, the third rail perhaps?—you have never seen that happen, but you imagine it from time to time—and now you have more to imagine.

And then the music of SkyTrain after hours on cool summer nights: here comes one of those mysterious slow-moving cars with many lights, a ghost train not at all like the familiar transit cars; the sound of metal wheels, a distant rasping on metal, rising and falling, and then silence: it is 2:30 a.m. Then the slow approach along the viaduct of men on foot, bearing flashlights and metal bars, testing the track: theirs is a sullen, mysterious work, enormous shadows appear against the walls of the buildings on the other side of the track, the silhouette of a man swinging a bar and then the clang of metal on metal; you feel the allure and mystery of cities that you have yearned to know and rarely experienced; again you are reminded that we are wooed by cities, they tempt us away from ourselves; they draw us from the light into shadow.

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— most recently “Women of Kali” (No. 86)— many of which can be read at geist.com.

Read Osborne online The man who stole Christmas; the women of Kali; the lost art of waving; the strongest man in the world; the eviction of Malcolm Lowry; the lynching of Louie Sam; occupy movements; the tall women of Toronto; the genesis of the poppy; predicting the future.

10 Geist 87 Winter 2012

Read Geist at

GEIST com 

a f t e r

t h e

d e l u g e

Hurricane jeff shucard Four days after Sandy, my aged parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see me

W

ell, I drive down to New Jersey on Saturday November 3rd, four days after Hurricane Sandy, to rescue my aged parents from the cold and darkness. They are very frail now, just skin and bones, their minds here and there, the freezer leaking melted ice cream all over. Needless to say, they are glad to see me. My sister has been looking in on them, but she is in the cold and darkness herself with a huge tree down on her house. Luckily, my father’s love of antiques includes oil lamps and we light half a dozen of these, place them around the dining room and have a pleasant dinner of roasted chicken, some salads and a pumpkin pie I’d bought from a supermarket in New York state and brought along.

They are in good humour and very brave, having survived four days without Judge Judy and all their friends on Crime Scene. After dinner, I re-enact a somewhat surreal performance of the Fred Allen radio show (complete with a guest song from Fanny Brice) for their entertainment, and then get them packed up the best I can. I’m not sure in the dark if the pajama tops and bottoms match or if they really have what they need, or want, but at least the valises are full. All their various medications we pack separately. And, they have their passports. My mother,

who suffers from dementia, asks me about three hundred times where we are going. I answer three hundred times that she has to guess from three choices: Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada. She scores 100 percent. Then I go over to the neighbours’ to ask them to pick up the mail while my parents are away, and I give them a house key to look in on things once the power is restored. Of course, the neighbours are in the dark too. We chat for a while about the devastation and then I’m suddenly tired.

Now it’s morning and we’re ready to go. It’s a beautiful sunny day and the roads are free of traffic. We stop for breakfast, we stop for lunch. We listen to Mozart string quartets as we pass through Albany and Saratoga. My mother is in the back seat half asleep, probably still wondering where she is going, but her eyesight is sharp and her hearing is fine. My father sits with me in the front seat, twenty years old, flying his Piper Cub, and then we come to Lake George, where my parents stopped on their way to Quebec City on their honeymoon in June of 1949. My father remembers that they stayed at a charming place at Bolton Landing, where they went boating and were, I’m sure, very much in love.

My father starts describing the place and how much they enjoyed it,

and I suggest we turn off and go on a search, and see if by some chance it’s still there after sixty-three years. So off we go.

It’s about a five-mile drive from the highway to the village, which consists of a main street of charming cafés and boutiques, and guest houses along the lakeshore. We drive along slowly, but he doesn’t seem to recognize anything. He describes a large hotel/restaurant right on the water, with boat docks out front. I can see that my father is very keen on finding this place, it’s obviously very special to him, so I pull into the local market and he and I go in to see if anyone can help. The market employees are only kids and they have no idea what this ninety-year-old guy with a week’s worth of beard is talking about.

At that moment the manager appears, a gentle soul, maybe fortyfive, and she listens attentively and asks some questions. The problem is my father can’t remember the name of the place. He describes the location and the boat rentals, and then says there were some little tree-covered islands they rowed out to. Ah ha, now we’re getting somewhere. The store manager tells us where to look. We drive about a mile down the road outside the village to a place now called Chick’s Marina. Things have changed quite a lot over the years, I’m sure, but there’s a big grey building with an overhanging second floor, and the boat docks are still there and so are the little islands, just offshore.

My father’s eyes light up. He turns to my mother and says, I think this is it. She, who can’t remember anything further away than one second in the past, replies: It was white then.

Jeff Shucard was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended the Minneapolis School of Art and Franconia College. After a decade of foreign travel, he settled in Vancouver for twenty years and worked in education and music. Now he lives on a small farm in St. Cuthbert, Quebec.

image: boston public library. algonquin hotel, bolton landing, on lake george, ny

Notes & Dispatches 11

h e a r t

o f

t h e

e m p i r e

Cottonopolis rachel lebowitz Cotton on the noonday bread, fluff in the throat Cottonopolis was the moniker given to Manchester, England, during the Industrial Revolution, for its prominence in cotton production and trade, built on resources from all over the world, particularly Great Britain, Africa, India and North America.

map, fennel street A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes.

Swine packed tight in the hold.

Crates of bacon, sweet peas, wildflower honey, beef pour les rosbifs. Ninetyone thousand firkins of ’47 butter: Ballina, Ballyshannon, Kilrush, Killala, Tra-la, Tralee!

Then come the Micks. And oh, how they love their pigs! Their children play with them, ride upon them, roll in the dirt with them. Black snuffle, snort, stink. How happy this swarm of fat.

colonial teapot, silver and plate Try to keep up with the latest London fashions. At dinner parties, tie pillowcases to those slim white ankles to ward off muskitoes. Cholera belts should be worn at all times. The best one for nightwear is ordinary silk or woollen pugree.

Serve your guests food from British tins; shake out your books before reading. During monsoon season, take down the pictures or they’ll rot on the walls. I am sorry to report your hairpins will rust overnight. Place your kid gloves in a bottle with a stopper, your best dresses in boxes lined with tin.

The air will smell of dust. The sun will kill your roses. You will buy your 12 Geist 87 Winter 2012

cloth from the box-wallah: shawls from Kashmir, cotton grown in Bombay or Georgia and woven in Lancashire. The weavers here no longer weave. Some have no thumbs. And their bones, it’s said, are bleaching the plains of India.

No matter. Such a lovely dress: your durzi’s so skilled with his needle!

Fish the ants from the sugar bowl.

Warm the teapot. Boil the milk. Serve, stir, sip.

sketch And look at Cottonopolis now, holidaying on the Isle of Man. From this cliff, see the scavengers dart and weave about. The lambs of course are darling. Pay no attention to that soot on their coats. It’s nothing, nothing.

Almost five hundred chimneys in Manchester now. And in the seams, women with chains between their legs crawl on all fours, dragging coal.

Strike of iron into rock, of workers’ clogs on cobblestone streets. Cotton on the noonday bread, fluff in the throat. Emetics will clear that away.

And if not, not.

Look at this girl. Barefoot, bare head, bare breasts. Iron clinks between blackened, open thighs. Behind her, a cart of black gold. High above, black lambs on green grass. Seagulls wheeling in the western skies.

Rachel Lebowitz is the author of Hannus (Pedlar Press), shortlisted for the 2007 Roderick Haig-Brown Prize and the Edna Staebler Award. She is also co-author, with Zachariah Wells, of Anything But Hank!

(Biblioasis). The book Cottonopolis will be published by Pedlar Press in spring 2013.

c h i l e a n s

r e m e m b e r

The Other 9/11 rick maddocks Santiago, Chile—September 11, 1973

wrecked the table. They put us up against the wall, made us spread our arms and legs. Then they turned us around and went down the line, clubbing each of us with the broken pool cues. At almost the same time the planes came down and attacked La Moneda. It was big, you know, heavy.

Chaos. It all came down. Before that moment I was a kid; after that moment things were serious.

jorge velásquez astudillo

jorge benitez On September 11, 1973, the Chilean government led by Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military coup that initiated the fascist reign of Augusto Pinochet and his henchmen. Rick Maddocks was in Valparaíso, Chile, on September 11, 2012, and asked several people whom he met that day how they remembered the coup. For the most part, the people spoke English. He was assisted as necessary by Carolina Yañez, who provided impromptu translations.

Film Director I was a schoolboy, sixteen years old, in Santiago de Chile. Me and my friends, we were at the social club just down the street from our school. Maybe we should have been in class. We were playing pool late in the morning, just joking around, when the door flew open and los militares, these soldiers, came in and pointed their machine guns at us. We all put our hands up, our eyes big like this, yes? They broke all the pool cues over their knees,

photo: biblioteca del congreso nacional de chile. coup d’etat, 1973

Visual Artist and Graphic Designer I was eight or nine years old when the golpe, the coup, happened. I was living in the north of Chile, in Iquique. And I remember the windows and the front door of my house were closed. They were hardly ever closed. I heard the noise and I peered through the shutters and saw los militares pass down the street. And the machines and the tanks, they were made of iron, very loud, very noisy. Mucho ruido. And I thought, what is happening? Is there a war? On any other day I can play outside and it’s no problem, but now we have to stay inside. And I ask my parents, What is happening? What is happening? I don’t remember what they said. Later they sent me to buy food and I had to stand in line, and I was little and I had to wait. One hour, two hours. For bread, harina—flour— I remember that.

The friends of my father, they are—how you say?—los desaparecidos.

They disappear. We don’t hear anything about them anymore. Pisagua, it was a concentration camp. Here is Iquique on a map; here is Pisagua.

The people just disappeared. I was a kid and I didn’t understand. But I could see everything up close and I felt the fear. Susto. Scared.

laura moreno Restaurateur Very vivid. Even today, after so many years. It was on a Tuesday— the American September 11 was Notes & Dispatches 13

also on a Tuesday. We were still in bed. A friend of ours called us very early, around seven in the morning, telling us that in Valparaíso, where they lived, the navy was starting to do some strange manoeuvres. We’d been aware that something was going on for a long time, and then I remember we got up and—we lived right beside the Pedagógico, which was the education school of the University of Chile at that time, a very special place—and we didn’t know what to do.

Around ten in the morning someone knocked hard on our door. We lived in a four-storey building in Santiago, on the top floor, and we also owned the terrace on the roof. I opened the door and there were two military men with machine guns, saying, “Give us the keys to the terrace.”

There were ten or fifteen more men coming up the stairs with machine

guns. I gave them the keys and they stayed there, up on the terrace, because from there you could look down on the grounds of the university.

At that time the university was a real public university. Bernardo, my husband at that time, was a professor there and I was a student. When he went there that morning it was already surrounded by military. He was not allowed to go in. And then someone called him after he got home and said, “Get out of there.” They’d just published a list of professors that were supposed to go to some office and all these people had to go register themselves. “So get out of there.” Bernardo used to write for the newspaper.

He was a writer.

There was a radio station that they couldn’t shut down; it kept sending news of what was going on. So we were there, in the apartment, with the radio on. The TV and everything

was controlled by them, but not this radio station; it was on until probably midday, when La Moneda palace was attacked, or maybe a bit later. We were sitting in the living room, looking down on the university grounds.

You could see all the troops down there. And then we were talking to friends on the phone—“What’s going on? What are we going to do?” We thought it was going to be very short, that there couldn’t be a coup in this country. A coup could not survive.

I took my son, who was five months old, and we took some things and we left the apartment. The military were still there on the roof, but they didn’t bother about us.

You weren’t supposed to go out; it was really hard. We had a Citronetta, that French car, and we went with the baby, taking side roads from our apartment to my mother-in-law’s house in the country, in Santa Rosa.

There were a lot of stops along the way. It was usually a twenty-five, thirty-minute drive. Yet on this day, every ten minutes they would stop and search us and the car. But you know, last names here are very important, and also the way you look. So they were nice to us, because my ex-husband’s last name is a very old, classy name. They would look at the papers and say, “Okay, go.”

Even out in the country we weren’t allowed to go out for two days. On the third day we tried to go back to our apartment and it was horrible what we saw. All the way from my motherin-law’s place, about twenty minutes outside Santiago, we saw people dead in the streets. They put them there so you would see them and get scared.

So it was hard and then we started living underground. We started hearing that some friends of ours disappeared. They took them to the national stadium in Santiago. So we started thinking of getting out of the country. An uncle of Bernardo’s was close to the military, and one day he came to the house and said, 14 Geist 87 Winter 2012

“Bernardo, get out. You are on the list.

So get out.” Finally in December, we were allowed to get out of the country and we went to Sweden.

Why was it possible for us? At that time the ambassador of Sweden was a very special person and he helped a lot. Bernardo knew him and he talked to him. We were allowed to go thanks to him, but when we left the country, they stamped our passports with the letter L. That meant that if you came back, and they saw that little stamp on your passport, you went directly to jail.

You see, they were looking for other people at that time. Bernardo was on a list that was not the top list.

There was an intellectual list—people that wrote, people that were professors, things like that. Some friends of ours—poets, writers—they were sent to concentration camps.

Now, thirty-nine years later, I am back here in Chile, in Valparaíso, where it all began.

It’s important not to forget. We are what we are because we lived those years.

alberto lagos Commercial Photographer It was in the past time. In the very past time. I was eleven years old when it happened. It was maybe ten in the morning. Me and my friend, we have a club, a fort at the top of my building, with palos, sticks that we play with, and other toys. Two amigos, playing.

And we hear something, up in the air, but we can’t see very well at first. We step outside and see the attack, right there, from the top of my building.

And I see the plane with the rocket, this explosion. It’s very, very strong.

It’s very—well, I think, what is this? I am a little boy. It’s an adventure too.

But I don’t understand, you know?

And the helicopter went right over my head and went rat-tat-tat-tat-tattat. Very strong.

Our fort was on the roof and there was a trap door and a metal ladder we Notes & Dispatches 15

had to climb down to get back in the building. I run down that ladder. I run and run and run and run, down from the top of the building. There is no elevator. You need to take the stairs, you know? But I jump maybe two metres at a time, down one flight of stairs, then another, four floors, all the way down to my floor to escape.

My sister was in our apartment with our nanny. My father and my mother were at work, like usual. They came home maybe at noon. I remember watching TV and listening to the radio. And I see the soldiers from my window. They weren’t walking; they were like commandos, crawling on the ground. Because in another building they think there are terrorists.

That is just on the first day. I never go to the top of the building after that.

Our building faced the National Stadium. I lived two or three years— I don’t know—next to the camp de

concentración. That’s where they kept the political prisoners. And so all that time for me, as a boy, there was always the rat-tat-tat.

[Alberto breaks off when his son, a boy of about eleven, comes in to ask if the internet is up and working yet; Alberto says “No, mañana.”]

This is my boy. This is the boy most beautiful in the world!

Rick Maddocks has been widely published in anthologies and magazines. He has also written and performed music with The Beige, an atmospheric roots quintet whose second album, El Ángel Exterminador, was released in 2010. His experimental gospel funk opera, The Meal, premiered at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in 2011 and was restaged in Spring 2012 at Pacific Theatre. He is the author of Sputnik Diner (Vintage).

a f t e r l i f e

o f

c u l t u r e

Chariots of China stephen henighan A bestselling author stokes and assuages fears of the rise of China

I

n 1968 a Swiss hotel employee who was serving a prison sentence for embezzlement published a book that changed my perception of the universe. I remember this with embarrassment, not because the author was a convict—such logic would rule out reading Dostoevsky or Jean Genet—but because of the book’s claims. Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? asserted that many ruins of the world’s ancient civilizations were relics left behind by extraterrestrials. In an era when the news was dominated by the Apollo space program and everybody watched Star Trek, the idea that lines in the Peruvian desert were an ancient airport, or that likenesses of helmeted individuals in Egyptian or Mexican pyramids were portraits of astronauts from Alpha Centauri, struck the European and North American public as far more plausible than the possibility that “Third World” peoples could have built cities, or developed sophisticated responses to astronomical phenomena, on their own.

During his imprisonment, von Däniken completed a second volume of speculations, Gods from Outer Space. By the time he left jail the next year he was a wealthy man; his books have now sold a reported sixty million copies. Sloppily written, illustrated with photographs that are sometimes cropped in ways that give deceptive impressions, stuffed with assertions that he later had to modify or retract 16 Geist 87 Winter 2012

after they were proved wrong, von Däniken’s books should not have persuaded anyone. “I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of von Däniken,” the astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote. It didn’t matter: the public loved the idea that we were not alone.

Like many adolescents of my generation, I encountered von Däniken’s speculations in the 1973 television special “In Search of Ancient Astronauts,” which was based on his first two books. The show caused excitement among my schoolmates: we all had seen it and we all believed it. As the history of civilizations other than those of Western Europe and North America was little taught in Canadian schools at the time, we had no information about ancient Latin America or the Middle East to counter von Däniken’s caricatures.

Back then few people, if any, pointed out that von Däniken found evidence of extraterrestrial visitation mainly in countries whose ancestral inhabitants were not of pale complexion. While Europeans had built

their own ruins, with the exception of mysterious Stonehenge, people elsewhere in the world, according to von Däniken, had not been up to this task. To youngsters such as me and my classmates, von Däniken’s concentration on civilizations with which we were unfamiliar contributed to the frisson that made his fantasies enticing; the ethnocentric assumptions remained veiled. Yet in other parts of the world, as I would learn, it was precisely this ethnocentrism that fuelled the ecstatic response to von Däniken’s work. In my early twenties, when I arrived in Peru as a backpacker besotted with the Incas and eager to read every book I could find about their civilization, I was startled to discover that the Inca sections of Peruvian bookstores were dominated by Spanish translations of the works of von Däniken. To certain coastal Peruvians, who considered themselves superior to the indigenous people of the mountains, yet felt upstaged by foreigners’ admiration of the Inca archeological heritage, von Däniken had become a folk hero. “You should read von Däniken,” they would tell me, when I said I was going to Machu Picchu. “He proves that Indians never could have built those cities!”

My memories of the von Däniken phenomenon were stirred last summer, when I got stuck on a long plane trip with a terrible book. For fifteen hours, from Hong Kong to Toronto, I had nothing to read but

image: j. jansson, atlantis majoris quinta pars, c. 1650.

Gavin Menzies’s 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which, having mistaken it for a work of serious history, I had grabbed from a paperback rack on my way to the departure gate.

Menzies’s proposals are as outlandish as those of von Däniken, but in fascinating ways, they are tailored to meet the anxieties of the twenty-first century. His ideas are not credible, but their popularity—1421 was a New York Times bestseller—is revealing.

A retired British submarine commander, Menzies charts the journey of the Chinese admiral Zheng He, who, most historians agree, sailed through Southeast Asia to East Africa. Menzies, however, asserts that Zheng went farther, visiting North and South America, and that one of his associates established Chinese colonies in Australia in the fifteenth century. In a neat updating of von Däniken, Menzies finds ancient buildings or artifacts

everywhere from Peru to rural New England that he claims are of Chinese construction; in a later book (which I have not read) he contends that the European Renaissance came about as the result of a visit made to Italy by a Chinese fleet.

Historians point out in vain that there is no evidence for these claims: Menzies’s books keep selling. Where the pessimism of the 1970s found hope in the prospect of being saved by aliens, today’s mass readership awaits the arrival of the Chinese—who, we are told, will control the twenty-first century. Anxiety over the declining influence of the North Atlantic world is assuaged by the assertion that it was the Chinese who started us on the road to modernity. Menzies appeals to fears of Chinese superiority at the same time that he offers a hope of connection across cultural barriers. People read his work, I suspect,

as a way of simultaneously titillating and coming to terms with their own anxieties about China’s rise. Menzies plays upon Caucasian racial unease and panders to Chinese triumphalism; he perpetuates von Däniken’s popular denigration of indigenous American civilizations by erasing their cultural achievements. But Menzies’s bizarre speculations are at least confined to planet Earth. As a successor to von Däniken in the what-if genre, Menzies epitomizes a generalized shift in mentality, an understanding that there will be no salvation from Alpha Centauri and that we must either face and solve our problems here on Earth, by working together, or fail as a species.

Stephen Henighan’s translation of the Angolan writer Ondjaki’s novel Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret will be published by Biblioasis in 2014. Read more of his work at geist.com and stephenhenighan.com.

Afterlife of Culture 17

FINDINGS

The Diefenbunker: Cafeteria, 2007. By Blake Fitzpatrick. From The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2011.

Fitzpatrick is a photographer, curator and writer. He lives in Ontario.

Cold Comfort gil mcelroy From Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War, by Gil McElroy, published by Talonbooks in 2012. McElroy was born in Metz, France, grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States, and now lives in Colborne, Ontario.

I

t’s 1972 and I’m sixteen years old. I have on near-permanent loan from my high-school library The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of information on living alternatively in the world. I desperately want to be a hippie. Part of it stems back to an incident in the summer of 1967, when we lived with my grandparents in Windsor. Every summer of our time in Tacoma my father

would take me down to a barbershop when school let out for the summer break and have my head shaved. I spent those summers in hateful crew cuts my father forced on me during our summers in Tacoma. When we moved and my father left us in Windsor with my grandparents, I saw my chance. I asked my mother if I could let my hair grow out. She agreed, and I went to a

barbershop by myself for a trim, where the barber didn’t listen to my instructions but instead sheared my head. I left the shop in tears, and outside, sitting on a wall, encountered my first hippies.

I remember only one of them vividly: a young man with long, shoulder-length blond hair and round metal-framed granny glasses. I vowed that would be me someday. It was. Cut back to 1972 and my dalliance with The Whole Earth Catalog. By then I was determined to be a writer, and I was going to be a writer who lived an alternative lifestyle as a hippie in what all hippies lived in: a geodesic dome, of course.

By the mid-1960s, the dome had Findings 19

become, for a lot of us, synonymous with the back-to-the-land movement.

We’d forgotten—or more likely never knew—that the dome had a previous life as a piece of military technology.

Oh, Buckminster Fuller didn’t devise the dome for the military per se, but he quite successfully marketed it to them. The geodesic dome entered the world of the military via the Marine Corps, who first showed interest in its military application, and moved along the chain to the Strategic Air Command of the US Air Force. Not long afterward, the American State Department took a great interest in it as well, and domes ended up being used as American pavilions at international trade fairs, like the one held in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1956, where the dome erected there (a last-minute replacement for the temporary tents usually employed) became wildly popular with visitors. The US government saw that Fuller’s dome could be used as propaganda—could be contextualized so as to be rendered synonymous with the idea of American freedoms and ingenuity—and so domes began to sprout up everywhere. The most famous was probably the American pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, a dome which still stands. I would argue—and I’m in no way the first—that Buckminster Fuller’s clever engineering of geometry is itself a pretty potent symbol of all that was the Cold War. So in 1972, at the age of sixteen, I sit on my bed with the library copy of The Whole Earth Catalog resting in my lap dreaming of dome days. I would sit in my own dome, and there be a writer.

And while I did this, my father was several thousand miles farther north in the Arctic, there essentially because a geodesic dome made the ideal shelter for the radar that was keeping an eye out for anything Soviet and incoming across the polar ice cap. It was an irony I wouldn’t appreciate—or even notice—for another thirty-seven years.

in my dreams (237.3 km) mercedes eng From The Enpipe Line: 70,000 km of poetry written in resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal, published by Creekstone Press in 2012. Eng read her poem at the launch of the book, held in front of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipelines office in downtown Vancouver. She is a teacher at Coquitlam College.

She lives and writes in Vancouver. in my dreams the duress the mess it don’t belong to the ladies and their people

and me hearing their cries you hear my warrior cry its sound so loud this earth shakes the blood and bones recompose they rally they call war and they win

instead the duress the fear is yours cause my arms are just that strong and wide these arms blood and bone not pipelines, not prisons, not cops, not judges, not ministries of what-the-fuck-ever, not residential schools, not rezs, not truth and reconciliation in my dreams i slay you with my electric guitar made of unceded wood powered by woman blood and bone in earth its sonic edge reverberates through tailing lakes i kill the fascist within whenever you try murder of this ground and the people who own it

the oil rigs me and my baby brother saw as we drove all over Alberta visiting our dad in the provinces correctional facilities the institutions where you house the nation i take them extraction machineries gathered in arms of blood and bone up up up the northern lights guide my way and i hurl them at all the prisons that held my daddy and made me ashamed when people thought i was one of those brown bodies prison industrial complex explodes but all the right people live i write poems all over your pipelines directing the oil back to the ground and the blood and bones in this ground is yours in my dreams i lay you motherfuckers down in my dreams 

instead of you raping women in ancient trees

 20 Geist 87 Winter 2012

spot illustrations: eric uhlich

Budge tom osborne From the novel Budge, by Tom Osborne, published by Anvil Press in 2012. Osborne is an illustrator, author and publisher. He lives in Maple Ridge, BC.

I

n the town of Wetaskiwin, Alberta, about a half-hour’s drive south of Edmonton and at four thirty in the morning, stands a very angry man.

On the other side of the counter in the town of Wetaskiwin, Alberta, and facing the first angry man stands another angry man. One man is of Burundian descent (the Hutu tribe to be exact) from the small African country of Burundi that borders the other African countries of Rwanda, Zaire, and Tanzania. The second man is of possible Irish-Ukrainian descent but is a naturalized Canadian citizen, from Canada, a larger country bordering the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the United States of America.

The one immigrated to Canada from Burundi in 1998 to escape a violent civil war in that small African country; the other has lived in Canada all his life. One was an economic adviser for agricultural development before being forced to immigrate and take a menial job such as all­-night clerk in an all-night Petro­Can gas station convenience store on Highway 2A in Wetaskiwin, Alberta. The other has never really bothered to work. One is well educated; the other is “educated enough,” he supposes. One is forty­ seven; the other is thirty-seven. One has a gun; the other has not.

Outside the store and waiting in a car with the motor running is another man, also a naturalized Canadian of possible Irish-Ukrainian descent and younger brother to the angry naturalized Canadian standing in the store.

This third man, the naturalized Canadian brother, is not angry, however.

This third man is, well, a dreamer.

Butch Truman, younger brother to Gordy Truman, one of the two 22 Geist 87 Winter 2012

From the graphic novel Bloody Saturday, by Adam Campbell and Carly Campbell, about the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. Published by Blurb in 2012. Adam Campbell

angry men in the store. Butch Truman dreams. He dreams of having things, all kinds of things, things he thinks will make him happy. In fact, that’s why he and his brother are in Wetaskiwin in the first place, home of the famous Wetaskiwin Water Tower (“the oldest functioning water tower in Canada”); they’re here because of his dreams. That’s why they’d checked out Wetaskiwin’s Dan Simpa Used & Collectible Auto Mart the afternoon

of the day before after driving down from Edmonton, and that’s probably why they are now at this all-night gas station convenience store: some part of some part of one of his dreams.

That and the fact they’d scored some crack earlier, smoked it, scored some more, smoked that and so on, and now they are needing another part of another part of one of his dreams. And Gordy had said he’d take care of it.

Inside the all-night convenience

works in public relations and communications. Carly Campbell is an artist and illustrator. Both live in Winnipeg. Visit them at bloodysaturdaycomic.com.

store, Claver Hakizimana, Burundian immigrant, is looking at the gun in Gordy Truman’s hand.

“You want all the money?” says Claver Hakizimana.

“That’s right,” says Gordy Truman.

“Just give it an’ let’s be done.”

“All the money…” says Claver Hakizimana.

There is tension. (Gordy Truman will later tell brother Butch he could almost see it in the air, just like

described in books.) But this tension is not the normal prescribed tension that’s part and parcel when you pull a gun on someone; this tension is something different, more palpable, Claver Hakizimana reaching into the till.

Gordy Truman watches, sees bills in the store clerk’s hand.

“Now look see…” says Claver Hakizimana. “I now have all the money in my hand. And you know how much money this is in my hand?

It is fuck-­ all money in my hand because we keep fuck-­all money here just in case of fuckheads like you and now you want to take it?—” “Look, asshole—” says Gordy Truman.

“And now,” says Claver Hakizimana, “I have this money in this hand and in this hand—” The machete appears already raised, slicing down across the Plexiglass countertop. A jagged crack appears across the faces of assorted scratch-and-wins displayed underneath it, Gordy Truman stepping back, extending his arm full length and aiming the gun.

“I’ll blow your fucking head off !”

“And I,” screams the store clerk, “ will cut yours fucking off, you fucking asshole…”

A pause here in the proceedings, the two angry men facing each other across the counter, an imposing display of red veins pulsing along necks, purple ones rippling across foreheads.

Gordy Truman: “Look, just give me the fucking money!”

Claver Hakizimana: “I have seen the blood of my people soak the water reeds along the fucking Rurubu River! What have you seen, you fucking ass-­punk?”

Gordy Truman at a loss for a reply, the gun still pointing. Claver Hakizimana staring now not at the gun barrel but at Gordy Truman. The gun trembling, a methodic tick-­tick from the hot­ dog rotisserie turning slowly on the counter. The Slurpee machine gurgles from the back wall.

Gordy Truman sees the store clerk’s shoulders slump, just a bit. Muscles begin to relax, the dark eyes soften.

“Look,” says Claver Hakizimana, “we are both reasonable if unhappy men. Believe me, a bullet in the head would not be the worst thing that could happen to me right now. And I can easily see that you, yourself, are leading an equally unrewarding exis­ tence irrespective of the advantages you may have had and obviously ignored. I have thought this through, Findings 23

and this is what is going to happen, my sorry friend. I have two hundred and thirteen dollars only in my hand. I am going to give you only sixty-five, no, sixty fucking dollars, and I am going to keep the rest and blame the whole robbery of the two hundred and thirteen dollars on you. The fucking cameras are not working, so that will not be a problem. I will give an accurate description of yourself to the police, but I may lie about the make of your car, which I assume is the one sitting out there with the engine running with another asshole at the wheel. You will leave Wetaskiwin and be grateful for small mercies. You may be a little disappointed by this outcome, but disappointment, I believe, is not something new in your miserable life.

This experi­ence has given me an idea whereby I may make some improvements in my own wretched existence and for that I may even thank you, some day. Here is your sixty, no, fifty fucking dollars… Now fuck off.”

Butch Truman sees brother Gordy coming out of the store, not running, not frantic, Gordy Truman opening the passenger side door and sliding into the passenger seat. Some bills visible in one hand, a bag of potato chips in the other.

“The guy gave us these,” says Gordy Truman handing over the potato chips.

Butch Truman taking the bag and crinkling the cellophane, crinkle, crinkle, but doesn’t drive.

“Gordy?”

Gordy Truman looking straight ahead. “Some people are just fucking crazy. Let’s get out of here…”

Butch Truman releasing the brake, easing the car out onto the highway.

“What’d we get?”

“Fifty bucks,” says Gordy Truman.

“Fifty bucks?”

But Gordy Truman is done talking and remains so. And leaving the town limits, a hint of dawn low on the prairie sky as the Truman brothers roll out past the gold-­ skimmed 24 Geist 87 Winter 2012

Really Important Modern Poetry From The Anthology of Really Important Modern Poetry, edited by Kathryn and Ross Petras, and published by Workman Publishing in 2012. Kathryn and Ross Petras are siblings and the authors of The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said. Read more really important modern poetry at reallyimportantpoetry.tumblr.com.

after winning an oscar for the film titanic James Cameron This is for a real event that happened when real people died and shocked the world in 1912 and I’d like… to do a few seconds of silence in remembrance of 1,500 men, women and children who died.

You really made this a night to remember in every way.

Now let’s party ’til dawn!

the biebs hearts emily dickinson Justin Bieber Let’s be Real—the way a girl smells is Very Important— to a Guy!

my unique reflections on my unique self Avril Lavigne I have my own style that happens to be different from everyone else in Hollywood.

My inspiration is me.

farmlands, fields of wheat, canola, barley. Sugar beets, dairy cattle, hogs, and cotton­-batten bundles of sheep, the rich warm colour imparted freely by the rising sun and painting all in the weave of a perfect picture postcard of abundance, beauty, and prosperity. On the seat between them, a brochure, Wetaskiwin’s Dan Simpa Used & Collectible Auto Mart, a small blurb printed along the top on

what i like Justin Bieber I really like… girls… girls… girls… girls… girls… girls… girls…

There are lots of things l really like besides girls.

Like pizza…

And CHUCK NORRIS.

thoughts on a dumb blonde stereotype Pamela Anderson I guess ignorance is bliss— When I do interviews people always say, “Aren’t you upset that people make fun of you?”

And I’m like, “Are they making fun of me?”

I guess I just don’t get it. 

the meaning of the word Wetaskiwin, from the Cree meaning “the hills where peace was made,” this peace made long ago between the Cree and the Blackfoot goes the story, and now for all intents and purposes appearing to repeat itself in the small encounter between two simple and angry men, two simple and angry men who, too, are but the random products of two mismatched tribes… 

Little Comrades laurie lewis From the memoir Little Comrades, published by the Porcupine’s Quill in 2011. Lewis is the editor and art director of Vista, the magazine of the Seniors Association in Kingston, Ontario. Visit her at laurielewis.ca.

W

hen there was a meeting or when our parents talked about someone who wasn’t there, they’d say Comrade Paul or Comrade Ted, so that it was clear they were talking about the person’s political identity.

My father was Comrade Lawrence and my mother was Comrade Ellen.

When it was time for my parents to go underground, Andy and I were sent to the home of Mrs Sketchley, across the street from a large open park or woodland, up a hill about three blocks from a streetcar line. Ellen had asked a druggist on the other side of the park if he knew anyone who took in boarders and didn’t mind children.

That’s how she got Mrs Sketchley’s name. Ellen’s success in getting this information from someone who didn’t know who she was convinced her that she had left no trail. It wasn’t a boarding house, Mrs Sketchley just took in lodgers occasionally to make a little money. She wasn’t a comrade so we always called her by her formal lady’s name; so did Ellen.

My mother explained everything to us. The RCMP was looking for my father, so he had to hide, and she had to hide so that they couldn’t make her tell where he was or put her in jail, and we kids had to not know anything so that we couldn’t tell anything. We had to be very grown up and responsible, she said, and behave ourselves. That was the best thing we could do for the Party in these difficult times. She took us to Mrs Sketchley’s on the streetcar and then went away and we didn’t know when we would see her again.

Mrs Sketchley liked children, she said, and had a grown-up daughter of her own who came to visit sometimes.

Her husband was dead, I think. She took in boarders in her spare room, so

Andy had that room and I slept in the bed with her. That was not something I liked. She was very fat and I’d never shared a bed with a big person before, only occasionally slept in a bed with my mother, who was very small and thin. I was very small and thin too and I was afraid Mrs Sketchley would roll over and squash me. She liked puddings and said she was really glad to have someone who appreciated them the way she did. Sometimes she made small pancakes for a special Sunday tea, little flat golden ones about three inches across and sprinkled with sugar. I never had so much pudding in my life.

Across the street at the edge of the hill was a dug-out cave where Andy helped me make a house. We dug ledges for us to sit on and dug niches into the dirt wall, like shelves to put things on. I put up pieces of broken dishes, or I picked

some flowers and put them in a medicine bottle, and we made books out of folded-up school paper and put them on the shelves. Andy wrote messages in the books in a secret code he made up, in case anybody found them. It was like our own underground, where we could share our parents’ lives, the spiders and centipedes, the damp and fragrant earth, even though we didn’t know where they were. That was a good discovery, the cave. It made the unknown underground less frightening.

In the spring there were flowers that came up all over the hillside, crocuses, purple and yellow like the ones in Vancouver. Here in Calgary they were covered with a soft white fuzz, like a fur coat to keep them warm in the cold Alberta spring.

When we were at Mrs Sketchley’s I met the RCMP in person at last. I had heard about them for years, just listening to my parents talk, listening to the comrades. Andy and I were playing on the street outside the house and the two men came up to us, one talking to Andy, the other to me. I knew right away they were RCMP. It was almost as if

Sewing Acronyms shelley kozlowski Seamingly useful abbreviations from the sewing crowd, gathered from sewing websites and blogs. Kozlowski is a writer and freelance editor whose fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Geist. Read her work at geist.com.

EBA – enormous bottom adjustment FART – fabric acquisition road trip OOAK – one of a kind; has unique characteristics PIGS – projects in grocery sacks SBAMIPCA – started, but a more interesting project came along; see also UFO SWAG – sewing with a grudge (to sew for someone when you don’t want to) SWAP – sewing with a plan

SWHW$#%&@ – something went horribly wrong; see also OOAK TGIF – thank God it’s finished!

UFO – unfinished object; former WIP; collective noun is the-cupboard-we-don’t-mention WHIMM – works hidden in my mind WIP – work in progress; project status WISP – work in slow progress  Findings 25

my mother was right there warning me. It was just like she said, they wore careful suits with shirts and ties like men did when they were dressed up for not going to work. They wore hats and had shiny shoes. They were not ‘working men’, I could see that. The one who talked to me was tall and thin; everything about him was thin, a long thin nose, a thin moustache over a thin mouth. And a thin blue tie. When he was talking to me he bent over but I couldn’t really see his face then. He was the size of a real person and I was just a little girl looking his tie in the face.

He asked me where my father was and I told him ‘I don’t know’ because I didn’t, but I knew I mustn’t tell him anyway. And my mother, where was my mother, he asked, and it was the same answer for the same reason. But the next question was trouble. I knew as soon as he said it. ‘When did you last see your mother?’ I didn’t know how to answer it, since I had seen her just three or four days before, when we had a secret meeting on the streetcar at the bottom of the hill.

Mrs Sketchley took us down the hill that day but she didn’t say what for. ‘It’s a surprise,’ she said. And we waited at the streetcar stop. She told us then, ‘Your mother will be on the streetcar. You have to be very good and not call attention to yourselves.

Just get on and walk to the back as if you see her every day.’ One streetcar came along and she said, ‘No, not that one,’ and then another, and I saw she was looking at the last window when it stopped. A long red streetcar with the electric pole reaching up to the cable line overhead.

‘This one,’ she said and she put streetcar tickets into our hands and pushed us up the steps. We were very quiet and good, like we knew how to be, and walked right to the back of the car. Andy led the way and I don’t think anyone noticed us at all. We were just ordinary kids. We sat with our mother 26 Geist 87 Winter 2012

and talked. She said she missed us very much and asked us about school and how we were and that sort of thing.

I didn’t tell her about getting Ds at school, I was too ashamed. I sat on one side of her and Andy sat on the other side and we talked together all the way out to the end of the line. The streetcar turned around and we went back along the same street. Then my mother said we would have to get out at the next stop and Mrs Sketchley would be there to meet us. She told me, ‘Now don’t cry! You mustn’t make a scene or I won’t be able to meet you this way again. The RCMP is still looking for us.’

Andy and I got off the streetcar when it stopped and there was Mrs Sketchley. I ran to her and tried to stretch my arms around her big body.

She hugged me, but it was no good, I really needed to cry.

So now there was the RCMP tall guy right in front of me asking me when was the last time I saw my mother and I couldn’t tell him, but I knew he’d keep on asking me, and I was scared. I might tell on my mother by accident, I might become a stoolie by accident. I knew I had to stop him from asking me again. I looked at his face up there above the tie and I started to cry. ‘I want my mother.’ I let my emotions loose and sobbed at him, ‘I want my mother, I want my mother.’

He started to back away from me.

I could see he didn’t know what to do with a crying girl. So I just kept crying, not little sniffly sounds like I usually make, but big strong noisy crying.

I just opened the gates to hysteria. I could see Andy out of the corner of my eye wondering what was going on. He’d never seen me do anything like that before. And then he started being a kid too. ‘You leave her alone, you big bully.’ Ten years old and he started pounding my tall guy’s chest.

‘You leave my sister alone.’

The two guys left. ‘Okay, kids, forget it, just forget it, okay?’ they said.

Andy and I stood close together

and I kept on gulping and wailing while we watched them walk down the hill, talking, looking back at us.

When they were out of sight, Andy and I looked at each other and sort of smiled. He put his arm across my shoulder.

‘Good going, comrade,’ he told me.

‘You too, comrade,’ I told him back. 

How Our Bodies Experience Time jessa gamble From The Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time, published by Viking Canada in 2011. Gamble is a science writer whose work has been published in Scientific American, Walrus and Canadian Geographic. She lives in Yellowknife.

T

he Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s search-and-rescue protocol is based on a profiling system.

According to the statistics, a hunter will be found heading downhill 83 percent of the time; in contrast, a “despondent”—someone de­p­ressed after a marital breakup, for example— is likely to be sitting on a prominent outcrop, a high point of land where he or she can survey the scenery.

Children under three years old have no concept of being lost, and they may be in or under objects, perhaps asleep. Officers have to keep in mind that six-to-twelve-year-olds in the woods might be sulking and may not respond to their names being called— some younger kids have admitted they thought searchers were monsters.

And when a man is not found at the hunting cabin he told his wife he’d be at, one of the first RCMP processes undertaken is what’s called “the bastard search.” The man is often found at a motel or house with another woman. 

Billy Collins Interviewed On Stage at Chautauqua marilyn gear pilling From The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010, edited by Lorna Crozier and published by Tightrope Books in 2010. Pilling is the author of two books of fiction and three books of poetry, including Cleavage: A Life in Breasts. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Billy Collins says you can’t have people in your poems.

It can only be you and your reader.

You think of all the people in your poems:

doing nothing that you turned around and asked a row of strangers if anyone had extra reading glasses; the woman behind you lent you her brand

That’s right, reader. Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States of America is sitting here on stage saying poetry is optional. And you

your Aunt Evelyn, your mother, your friends Linda and Dick and Ross. John Porter.

Your mother, your mother. Billy Collins says your job as poet

new pair. But he’s back on pleasure.

He says how you give your reader pleasure is form.

Dusty old form! Grade ten sticking-to-your-varnished-

thought people died for lack of what is found there.

Wait a minute. Something’s happening on stage. Billy Collins is fed up. Billy Collins is leaving.

is to give your reader pleasure.

You thought giving pleasure was your job in sex.

Your reader’s crotch is the one thing you never worried about. Billy Collins says sometimes he takes his penis off when he writes a poem.

You wonder what his penis does when it knows its master is writing. Goes to bars? Appears for Margaret Atwood as a remote-signature pen?

Billy Collins says strangers don’t care about your thoughts and feelings.

You want to put up your hand, tell him about the woman behind you: you came an hour early to sit in the front row and discovered you’d forgotten your reading glasses; you were so desperate at the prospect of an hour

wooden-seat iambic pentameter!

You’re still mulling that when Roger Rosenblatt asks Billy Collins why he didn’t become a jazz musician.

Billy Collins says he wishes he had become a jazz musician, he wouldn’t have to be on stage answering these questions. So much for that egg-over-easy persona of the poems, eh? Now he’s saying no decent poet ever knows the ending of a poem he’s writing.

You think sadly of all those endings you thought of in the shower, even though you know Billy Collins won’t care about your feelings and you know you shouldn’t use an adverb in a poem. Then Roger Rosenblatt asks Billy Collins: What is the importance of poetry?

Billy Collins sits up straight and says, Poetry is optional.

Unclipping his wings. They’re black, just so you know, like his suit. Billy Collins has the wingspan of a frigate bird. There he goes— rising, rising, riding the currents of institutionalized sublimity. Beating his way across the ceiling beneath the track lighting, brushing the Stars and Stripes aside. He’s off to find his roving mojo. You sigh and think about going home.

You’ll have to rub out all those people in your poems. You’ll have to have a cold shower whenever you feel an ending coming on.

You think sadly— okay, adverbially—about your Aunt Evelyn.

How much you loved her. How proudly she wore her moustache to church. 

Findings 27

Emergency Broadcast System george murray From the collection of poems Whiteout, published by ECW Press in 2012. Murray is a poet whose previous works include Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, The Rush to Here and The Hunter. He is also the editor and operator of Bookninja.com.

He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

This is only a test. At the long tone we will begin. At the long tone we will end.

At the long tone it is time for the news.

At the long tone you may begin to write.

When the bell rings you may rise to leave.

When the bells ring you may choose to flee.

The strike of the clock marks another birth.

The strike of the clock leaves welts shaped like hands.

Striking the clock marks another morning.

As the short tone sounds, events will unfold.

As the short tone sounds, the time will be right.

At the bell you will begin to salivate.

The experiment will begin when the toll reaches all ears. The experiment will begin when the topless lady wrings out the last of her clothes. The experiment involves pealing and will be double blind.

There are two strips of cloth for each ding you hear.

Please put them on, then record and report.

Ignore the mewl of the cat in the box.

The mewl of the cat in the box has no relevance. Whether alive or dead at the end of the experiment, you must ignore all complaints from the cat.

Your first responsibility is to the sound of the tone. Forget the cat.

Focus instead on the topless lady.

You have been provided with paper for notes.

You must take only the notes that are sung to you. If you cannot hear the notes, you may be shocked by the provided visuals.

The visuals will provide some context,

Black Summer sabrina stoessinger From Dogzplot, an online flash fiction literary journal, July 2011 issue. Stoessinger’s work has also been published in Corium, Filling Station and Contemporary Verse 2.

28 Geist 87 Winter 2012

T

but will be shocking for some audiences.

The boom of the howitzer may make you jump.

The boom of the howitzer will connote importance. The silver trumpets’ peal will announce a king arriving or leaving.

The chime will call you in for tea and cake.

The chime is pleasant, but cannot be ignored.

As the chime sounds, birds will fall dead from the trees.

The chime will signal your imminent passing from one bicycle lane to the next.

The klaxon will sound loudly in warning.

The klaxon also cannot be ignored.

The klaxon will note the start of the baggage carousel. The horn will give you the fright of your life. The ringing of metal means swords have been drawn. The ringing of metal can never be good. The trolley’s clang might remind you of something fond and sweet.

The trolley’s clang might remind you of your forgotten suitcase. The whistle of the train means all are aboard and accounted for.

The whistle of the train used to be in the distance. The whistle of the train now comes with a bright light. At the long tone, the experiment is set to begin.

At the long tone you may begin to run.

Each pulse of your blood will count for one beat.

Each beat of your blood will be considered a long tone. For today’s purposes, each pulse of your blood will be a starter pistol in the distance, through water, and echoed. Remember, this is only a test.

here was that one night when me and Sonny went down to the lake and dug ourselves down into that great big sandbar that had come up a ways off shore. The water was so shallow and warm and we waited there real quiet and still for what musta been hours until the minnows finally swam up and nibbled on the tips of our bodies. I liked how they tickled me; it felt

magic and electric like little pin pricks all over. Sonny, he said the minnows wouldn’t touch him, that they were scared of him just like everyone else.

But I checked. Those minnows were there trying to feed on his pieces too.

I told him they were there, hundreds of them, but Sonny said he couldn’t feel a thing. 

Looking for Excitement This Winter?

Kersti Nebelsiek, Wikimedia Commons

Geist is an inexpensive and entertaining way to get you through the winter freeze.

You can get Geist for yourself and all of your reading friends.

Geist Winter Offer

NEXT PAGE

YOUR INFO...

I HAVE ENCLOSED $_____ for _____ subscriptions.

Cheque enclosed OR please charge my

Visa

MC

Credit Card # Expiry

Signature

GIFT FROM Address City Province

Postal Code

Email

Telephone

PLEASE START my own subscription

instructions

GIFT CARD

RENEW my own subscription Send gift cards to me by mail Sign cards…

From and mail directly to recipient(s)

GIFT TO: Address

Prov

Postal Code

Email

Telephone RENEWAL GIFT

Address City Prov

Postal Code

Email

Telephone RENEWAL GIFT

GIFT TO: Address City Prov

Postal Code

Email

Telephone

NEW GIFT

give your reading friends the Gift of Geist Geist Winter Offer ONE SUBSCRIPTION

TWO SUBSCRIPTIONS

THREE OR MORE SUBSCRIPTIONS

$21

$16

$14

each

each

Mail the form to: GEIST #210, 111 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC V6B 1H4

GIFT TO:

NEW GIFT

and

Your own or a gift

City

NEW GIFT

FILL OUT THIS FORM

  

geist.com 1-888-434-7834 subscribe@geist.com

Note: gift rates apply to one-year subscriptions only. Postage and tax included.

RENEWAL GIFT

GIFT TO: Address City Prov

Postal Code

Email

Telephone

NEW GIFT

RENEWAL GIFT

US & International: add $8US/sub for postage Geist does not share phone numbers and email addresses but we sometimes share snail 30with Geist 87like-minded Winter 2012 mail lists other organizations. Check here if you do not wish us to share your address.

GI86

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n • N o r t h o f A m e r i c a

s u r v e i l l a n c e

Friday, August 19, 2011 joe fiorito Joe Fiorito continues his sojourn near the corner of Victoria and Queen in Toronto.

Part One of this report appeared in Geist 86.

5:30 P.M.

On the streetcar, headed for Queen and Victoria. The forecast: clearing this evening. Low 18º.

Four children in yellow T-shirts, a young man with headphones, a girl with long straight red hair, a man with a plaid shirt and a shaved head. A family: mother and daughter in sparkly saris, father and son dressed like me.

The girls in the yellow T-shirts stare at the girl in the sari. On the forearm of the girl with red hair: a carp.

I like to see a big woman with a stroller when the stroller is filled with toys, when the toys are still in their boxes.

In the news shop in the middle of the block, a man in scrubs buys lotto tickets for his group, the soft trill of his voice, his companions. Somali?

Metropolitan United Church, among the chess players. A man with a flame on the bill of his cap.

I can predict his moves, but not the moves of his opponent, who, playing black, treats a bishop like a knight while fleeing a pawn. A brilliant move.

Illegal. A bishop cannot jump.

One table over: speed slap, chess slap, quick slap, moves. Two dozen men surrounding four tables. Three women ride by on bicycles; they are moved by unseen hands on the diagonal.

The street is shaded now, also on the diagonal.

A man with a brush cut walks by carrying a long case; such a case is made for a stringed instrument, one spot illustrations: eric uhlich

with a long neck. The case has a bulbous tip. For a small resonator, like a penis.

A boy reservist passes by in camouflage; we see him in spite of his camouflage; his duffel bags are as big as he is. He seems embarrassed.

A girl with a yoga mat strapped like a quiver to her back; a huntress, she holds her boyfriend’s hand.

Oh, please, Diana.

No one in the park is going to the theatre. The park is the theatre.

A crack addict spends a long time lighting a smoke. He walks along with quick half-steps, getting nowhere doubly slow. A young woman gives him a wide berth. His left leg is stiff, his right knee buckles, his left hand holds a sack, his right hand holds his smoke. He waves his right hand as he walks as if some, but not all, of his strings have been cut.

There are seventeen cigarette butts on the manhole cover.

A man with animal-tail hair enters the burger joint on the corner; the light at the corner changes, bird-whistle chirps.

Two men dragging dollies loaded with extension cords, ladders, lamps, acetylene tanks and torches. A long day.

6:00 P.M.

A man with a flaming cap is being pressed at the chess table; his game is being crushed. Across the street, the man with animal-tail hair yells,

“SMILE!” As if, or else.

The man who is winning the chess game sits in a scooter with an awning and considers his moves.

Two sirens. The flaming cap man wears a satin jacket, black, All-Star Truck Brokers. A woman approaches him without a word and gives him fifty cents for a smoke. “Someone robbed McDonald’s!”

There is a cop car at the curb. The cop is writing a ticket. Where is the animal-hair man?

A man approaches a tree. He pushes his hips forward, unzips, and pisses against the bark. His smoke, his business, dangling.

A woman says: “She was slower than the coming of Christ. All I wanted to do was use the washroom.

I wasn’t going to steal it.”

No one is in a hurry now. Dates have started, and the dateless have no need to rush; the 501 is full both ways. The drivers ring their bells as they pass.

The fellow I thought was a crack addict with bum legs is a woman, walking across the street as if wading in a neck-deep river, the current pushing her sideways, the muck sucking her feet.

The tension leaks out of the city, a balloon losing air.

Four girls, arm in arm.

A street saxophone in the distance.

Girls: if the odds are that one won’t find one tonight, what are the odds that four will find four? Or do the three protect the one?

Surveillance 31

ON YONGE ST.

A man with a porkpie hat carries two large lampshades home. From the street sax, a song in the air: “Que, Sera Sera”? Hard to tell. Soprano sax?

Hard to tell.

A tourist with a camera.

“Where is City Hall?”

“A block or so that way.”

“Oh, thank you.”

And all the Chinese kids: I want to tell them that in grade school, the nuns told us the last secret revealed to the children at Fatima was this: the yellow race will rule the world. I am ashamed.

A boy with a cast on his right hand. The street has a pulse: a small woman, pulse, blue shirt, pulse, grey bag, red slacks, pulse.

Safety orange nails: We are platelets in the bloodstream of the city.

An Asian boy, his T-shirt: I  big butts. His girlfriend has a small one.

A man in a group of men: “I have fifteen different accounts.”

A clerk in a sack dress unlocks her bike at the lamppost and walks it down the street.

I was right: the musician with the brush cut is playing a soprano sax. I was wrong: the peculiar case with the swelling at the tip is not for a resonator, nor for a penis, but for the bell of the sax.

Heavy on the hook, the player wears white sneakers, a tan ball cap, green strides, a white shirt with blueand-white stripes, buttoned at the collar.

“The Way We Were.”

A thug rolling by in a truck playing rap: rap is the way we are.

The sax man adjusts his reed for a medley: “Comin’ Thro’ The Rye,” “Love Is Blue.” No one pays him, or pays him any mind, until a man on a scooter—“My Heart Will Go On”— drops some coins in the case; whatever will be, will be.

I buy a four-dollar cup of orange juice and drink it while watching 32 Geist 87 Winter 2012

a woman, well-dressed, with wellpacked shopping bags, going through the trash.

A woman with a broken foot. A slim man with highlights in his hair and knee pants and cherry espadrilles, stared at by those big-hipped girls. A green Wasteco truck, racing south, a young worker hanging off the back with one hand, leaning out into the breeze, in safety orange.

No one sits on downtown balconies tonight.

Five cleaners sit between the statues of five rusting men; then one cleaner stands and says something and all the men but the rusted ones laugh.

8:10 P.M.

If you aren’t doing it by now on Friday night, you won’t do it at all.

I can’t sit still.

Metropolitan United Church: “This Cathedral of Methodism was designed by Henry Langley in the High Victorian Gothic style. The cornerstone was laid by the Rev. Egerton Ryerson, D.D., in 1870 and the church was dedicated in 1872. It replaced an earlier structure at the southeast corner of Adelaide and Toronto Sts. The first missionaries from Canada to Japan were commissioned in this church on May 7, 1873, The inaugural service of the Methodist Church of Canada was held here September 16, 1874, blah, blah.

Also the first gay marriage in the country, here. There should be a plaque for that.

The faint sound of the soprano sax: Ochi chernye, “O Dark Eyes.”

The street lights are on. The man with the flaming cap loses a game; he was strangled as slowly as he strangled others. The victor: “Another game?”

Flaming cap lost with white, so he sets up the black pawns without a word.

A father with his son has custody of a sack of takeout food.

Three young women in a row, a

fourth, fifth, sixth. “Greensleeves.” A seventh.

Two men pushing a floor polisher, carrying a bucket, holding two bottles of spray: the tools of the evening.

A triplet of burkas.

A man sits next to me, smoking a furious cigarette; he is ordinary in appearance—sneakers, cut-off jeans, a muscle shirt, a red beard—but he is wearing red satin devil’s horns. He wants me to notice.

I don’t.

Two reservists, girls, in camo; one eats ice cream from a dish, the other carries a cold drink.

There is the woman who was going through the trash; she has found two pieces of good cardboard, her mattress for the night.

The way we talk at night, and the way we walk: slowly, with easy gestures.

FRAN’S

I need a bite to eat. Fran’s, the banquet burger. What else would anyone eat at Fran’s, other than the grilled cheese—fuck you, Glenn Gould—or the meat loaf? I cannot say the words “banquet burger.” The words are without irony. Instead, I point at the menu, and ask for a ginger ale as well.

At a banquette: an old man drinks coffee next to a woman wearing shades: her skin is tight on her face, her hair is pulled back hard; she eats an ice cream. They sit side by side; he is far enough away, but he is expansive enough to suggest that he owns her. He has a fierce face, like a hawk or a dying man.

At the table in front of me, a family of four: the two boys have their mother’s long nose, and brush cuts.

The banquet burger is as it always was. The couple with the kids lean into each other with intimacy and affection; it is good for kids to see love. The kids order sundaes, elaborate and cherry-topped; when the sundaes are delivered, the kids look quickly sideways to see if anyone else

can see how lucky they are. I know that look: luck, and hunger.

Fran’s shares a washroom with the piano bar of the hip hotel next door; the girl singer is good—I can hear her as I unzip—but the piano is out of tune.

Outside again: Motorcycles, like loud insects. And muscle cars, like eaters of loud insects. The cleaners unload their gear in the alley beside Massey Hall. One of the chess players has left the game and is going home.

A girl buys juice; a boy buys coffee.

Four minivans in a row.

9:50 P.M.

The floor polishers have polished their floors. There are six empty cardboard coffee cups on the bench that holds the rusting men.

My Fran’s mint: green and white stripes, mint.

Six teens, singing Italian pop songs, heading for the subway, carrying their backpacks. A tour bus. An ice cream truck.

A woman with dreadlocks asks if I have any change; when I hesitate, she offers to sell me a subway token for $3. A cash fare is $2.75. “Are you looking to score?” “I’m looking for food.”

She is too tired, and maybe too hungry, to be grateful for the fiver I give her. “How come you’re jammed up tonight?” She says, “That’s me on the wall of the hospital.” An angel, in a jam.

The juice joint closes. The church bell rings.

Two big bearded men sit on the planter across the street where I was sitting yesterday; now they stand, they stretch, they spit and they look up, and they sip their drinks through straws. They hold bags of burgers.

They shake hands, pick up their briefcases and go home.

The juice joint girl yawns as she cleans up. I, too, yawn.

A couple with twins in a carriage come for doughnuts in the coffee shop; the twins are alert. A man in shorts and sandals, a cast on his right hand, a cell phone in his left, in the darkness.

501 EASTBOUND, 510 WESTBOUND, JAMMED

If you sit still long enough, you will notice that you are noticed.

A man asks for money with an eyebrow. I answer with a shrug: the angel has my money.

When I was young, at a dance, stoned on acid, I thought if I stood in one place long enough I’d see who was passing by, who was looking for whom. And I would steer them toward happiness. I couldn’t. I can’t.

A man pulls up in a car; a woman, in heels—where was she, who is she?—gets in.

In the distance, in the darkness, a big happy woman aims herself at me as surely as an arrow on a lazy sunny day. “Dear, have you got a token?”

“A token?” “I’ve been drinking, they took away my keys.”

I give her the token I bought from the angel. She sits down and exhales.

“You’re a dear.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“I’m celebrating. It’s my fifty-fourth birthday.”

“Happy birthday. You married?”

“Yes.” “Where’s your man?”

“He’s home. I slammed the door on him. I got the menopause. I get upset so easily. I told him I was kicking him out, and then I left.” She’s laughing as she says this.

“What’s his name?”

“Joe.” “My name’s Joe.” That makes her happy. She catches her breath. She is not sweating or perspiring; she’s blushing. She says she works as a baker: gets up early mornings, drives to Peterborough with the windows

open, even in the winter.

“How long you been married?”

“We’ve been married thirty-five years.” She pauses happily. “And, to this day, when I run the bubble bath and say I want to cuddle, he still comes.”

She says she is Oneida. We talk about menopause, and the heat comes over her in waves. Does she have a doctor? She says she does.

She says her doctor won’t give her anything but herbs for menopause, which is why, close to midnight, near a streetcar stop, the city columnist and the Native woman begin to talk about hormone replacement therapy.

I say, “You have to live your life.”

She says she will look into that.

She says her sister is troubled, and will come to live with her soon. She says she comes from a big family. She says she will make room. She says Joe won’t mind.

She tells me she knows someone who is in jail for killing eight bikers and stuffing them into the trunk of a car, and she mentions his name, and I remember his name, and this is not a thing you hear every day, after a conversation about menopause. I’m sweating now, and change the topic.

“Do you and Joe have kids?

“We have got thirteen kids and none of them are in jail, for which I kiss Jesus’s ass. Excuse me, God.” She says, “I have to pee and get a cup of coffee, use the washroom, take the streetcar home.” I wish her happy birthday. She shakes my hand and kisses my cheek. I love a happy woman.

Just then an addict, hand out, looms. “It’s my birthday, do you have any money?” She and I say no. The addict turns away. She says, “I saw him on the corner doing crack.” And then she says, loudly, to his back: “Hey, I’m sorry for your lifestyle choices, pal.” We hug again, and her cheeks are flushed. I remind her: “HRT.” “I’ll look into that.” “You got to live your life.” “You do. I do.”

“Good night.” She goes. I stay.

Surveillance 33

The street is almost empty. A boy and a girl, drunk; they argue until she walks across the street and hails a cab.

He follows and tries to get in the cab with her. She pushes him back, they quarrel. A cyclist stops, turns in his saddle: “Hey, you need a cop?” The girl gets in.

The boy backs off. The cyclist pedals home.

Click, click: high heels. A girl with a topknot, long earrings, gaudy makeup, tights, a loose black top, a big black shoulder bag, a bottle of Pellegrino in her hand. She makes a call with her cellphone. She smiles at me. She could be a working girl, or she might work in the theatre. A man approaches, leers in her direction, veers over and asks her if she has the

time; she steps back, shakes her head.

He asks me. I tell him.

IT IS 11:25. QUEEN CAR EAST, STANDING ROOM ONLY

She drops her Pellegrino on the pavement. The water spills; the bottle does not break. She stands in the puddle until a big silver car makes a U-turn, pulls up to the curb, and she gets in. I hear Latin music as the door opens.

She leans into the driver as he pulls away. A showgirl, then.

A quick last walk around the block.

A black man on the sidewalk has a technicolour tattoo on his left arm.

An ad on the streetcar shelter: Peace Of Mind. The chess games continue in the park. One of the players smokes

GEIST

in the classroom 101001011DIGITAL0EDITION001101011

a joint.

Three men in hospital gowns, asleep in wheelchairs under the gaze of the angel.

The water on the sidewalk evaporates.

MIDNIGHT

The end.

Joe Fiorito writes for the Toronto Star. He is also the author of five books, most recently Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto (McClelland & Stewart). He won the National Newspaper Award for columns in 1995, and his novel The Song Beneath the Ice won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2003.

SIGN UP NOW FOR FREE CLASS SETS OF THE GEIST DIGITAL EDITION To teachers of writing, publishing and kindred subjects: You can get free digital copies of Geist for you and your students with the click of a mouse. The Geist Digital Edition is just like the print magazine: the same great content, on any web-ready device with interesting links, zoom capabilities and crisp digital display.

To order a FREE class set of the Geist Digital Edition, please email gic@geist.com or phone 1-888-434-7834 For more information on the Geist in the Classroom program, please visit www.geist. com/gic PS. If you’re a student, hand this to your instructor!

34 Geist 87 Winter 2012

p r o f i l e

The Gutenberg Effect: Living a Handmade Life michael hayward Crispin and Jan Elsted, proprietors of Barbarian Press, print and publish works on paper, carrying on traditions and practices that date from the fifteenth century

ome years ago I learned how to make a book the way Johannes Gutenberg did in the fifteenth century, at a letterpress printing workshop taught by Jan and Crispin Elsted of Barbarian Press, at their home and press room in Mission, BC, about thirty-five miles east of Vancouver along the Fraser River. Before then, my knowledge of typography had come entirely from desktop publishing, through computer programs such as PageMaker, which offered a meagre selection of digital fonts. My relationship with publishers and books was that of a consumer: books were objects produced by others. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might publish one myself.

36 Geist 87 Winter 2012

photos: brian howell

The workshop began on a Sunday morning. In the kitchen, Crispin led us through a history of typography—examples of Egyptian hieroglyphics; Roman inscriptions carved in stone; calligraphic scripts on vellum. We passed around a framed page from Polychronicon, a history of the world written in the early fourteenth century by Ranulf Higden, an English Benedictine monk, and printed in 1484 by William Caxton, the first English printer of books. The Elsteds had purchased the page from an auction in London some years before, and Crispin explained to us that it was an example of incunabula, a Latin word for “cradle” and “incubation,” which refers to books printed in Europe before 1501. We leafed through stacks of modern fine press books, volumes that Crispin had chosen from the extensive collection in their library. Turning the heavy rag-paper pages, I ran my fingertips lightly over the paper’s surface and felt the slight indentation left by the type.

A little later we crowded into the press room—a barn-like outbuilding a short distance from the Elsteds’ house—to observe a demonstration of typesetting by hand. From a tray of metal type, Crispin selected cast-metal characters, or “sorts,” and built up lines of text—upside down and reversed—in a handheld metal composing stick. The tray, or case, of type is divided into compartments, one for each letter. Capital letters are in the top half of the case, small letters in the bottom (hence “upper” and “lower case”); frequently used characters such as e and a are assigned larger compartments than those less frequently used.

Miscellaneous symbols are assigned spaces on the perimeter of the tray: ligatures, punctuation marks and metal spacers of varying widths—from “thins” to “ems”—which are used to adjust the spaces between words. On the composing stick, each line of type is separated from the one below by a thin strip of

metal (traditionally made of lead, hence “leading”). Once Crispin finished setting lines of type in one stick, he did the same with several more. Then he laid the composed lines of type into a wooden frame and clamped them down to form a page—called a forme—to be proofed and printed.

Throughout the next day, Jan and Crispin helped participants design their projects, select papers and choose fonts. My project was to print a pair of my own poems in chapbook format. I’d designed a tall, narrow page; I’d picked a typeface, Goudy Old Style, and paper, Cortlea Ivory. I planned to stamp an ornament into black cover stock, stitch the booklet with linen thread and wrap it in a jacket of moss green Canson Ivy paper.

Jan, who does all of the press work for the company, demonstrated the printing process on the 1850 Albion hand press, one of the oldest presses in the Elsteds’ collection.

The Albion is about seven feet tall and made of cast iron. It has two vertical columns connected by a crosspiece that supports a heavy press head above the press bed, essentially a waist-high metal shelf on rails. You turn a crank to roll the press bed out from under the press head, and then hinge aside a two-layer “sandwich”—the tympan (a padded piece of cloth that will hold a sheet of paper), and frisket (a metal frame that will secure the paper and mask off sections of the page)—so that the forme can be locked into place on the press bed.

Jan scooped a dab of thick, oily black ink onto a metal spatula and plopped it onto a glass slab on a work table. She rolled a rubber brayer over the ink until it reached the proper “tackiness” (as gauged by feel and by ear) and then carefully ran the inked brayer over the forme prepared by Crispin, coating the letters with ink.

Then Jan positioned a sheet of paper on the tympan, hinged the frisket back into place, and then lowered the frisket and tympan onto Profile 37

the forme she had just covered with ink. She cranked the press bed back under the press head, and then pulled a metal lever to apply pressure—press head against tympan against paper against inked type. And then the same steps in reverse: release, roll out, unhinge, remove the printed sheet of paper and inspect it for imperfections. Finally, she set the page aside to dry.

Most of our time at the Elsteds’ workshop was spent assembling lines of type, composing pages, rolling ink and operating the press. I spent several late nights bent over the presses, and at the end of five days I held a completed chapbook in my hands. he Elsteds have been operating Barbarian Press for more than thirty-five years. In that time they have done commercial work, such as stationery and cards, and fine press work, including broadsheets, pamphlets and forty books. They’ve published classic authors—William Shakespeare, Edm­ und Spenser, John Keats—and contemporary ones, such as Theresa Kishkan and Tim Bowling. They have created, and live, what might be called a handmade life, carrying on traditions and practices that have remained unchanged in their essentials since the fifteenth century, when Gutenberg modified a grape press in Mainz, Germany, and used it to print a bible. They are now among the most senior and respected members of a very small group of people worldwide (the Fine Press Book Association’s website lists just 118 member presses), people who have their own professional organizations, use their own arcane jargon and attend their own annual gatherings and book fairs. The Elsteds have also raised two children.

A couple of years ago, about ten years after I took my workshop with the Elsteds, I arranged to spend an afternoon with Crispin, and set out late one morning to drive to the Elsteds’ home. Close to my destination I pulled over, 38 Geist 87 Winter 2012

and while I scanned the notices on the Steelhead Community Board, a small car pulled up at the adjacent Canada Post “Super Mailbox” and Jan Elsted emerged.

Jan—who bears a slight resemblance to the mid-1960s edition of Betty Crocker, with threads of grey now visible in dark curly hair— was returning home after a morning teaching English Literature and Shakespeare in Performance at Meadowridge School, an independent private school in nearby Maple Ridge.

I followed her up the street to the Elsteds’ small, weathered home, tucked among the trees. We found Crispin in the kitchen, with a loaf of bread baking in the breadmaker, and he showed me around the house.

A small wallpapered study serves as a de facto working library for the press. It contains, among other reference materials, archival copies of every Barbarian Press publication—forty books, plus an assortment of broadsides and ephemera; a full run of Parenthesis, a trade magazine published by the Fine Press Book Association for its members; an extensive collection of publications from other fine press printers from around the world; and examples of work—chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets— produced by participants in the Elsteds’ annual fiveday workshop.

A larger home might have contained such a collection within a single dedicated room, but here it feels as if the library has invaded and laid claim to the entire house. Floor-toceiling bookcases filled to capacity line the entry hallway, and additional cases are distributed without apparent order throughout the house. There are hundreds of albums on vinyl and CD, from bebop jazz to classical to grand opera with stops at most genres in between; DVDs and video tapes—any feature film of merit you’d care to name, and what looks like box sets of every serial drama produced by the BBC. Well-thumbed Grove Press paperback copies of books by Henry Miller share shelf space with hardcover volumes of

Anthony Trollope in the handsome Folio Society editions; first editions of Charles Dickens’s novels next to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu— there appears to be a copy of every book that Jan or Crispin has ever read and might wish to read again.

This is Borges’s vision of a book-lover’s Paradise made manifest, one’s entire home “a kind of library,” a residence that complements and sustains a way of life based on creativity and collaboration, and a working relationship where each partner’s work complements the other’s to produce beautiful objects by hand—objects that will outlive their makers.

After we toured the house, Crispin put on a kettle and we sat down at the kitchen table to talk. Physically Crispin is a cross between Robertson Davies and a trimmed-down version of Orson Welles as Falstaff; during the Christmas season small children mistake him for Santa Claus.

In conversation his sentences unspool in perfect classical formation. The thousands of volumes that line Crispin’s study above the press room include the twenty-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Crispin says that when he is not pressed for time he will occasionally pull one of the volumes onto his desk and browse through it for pleasure. rispin was born on May 31, 1947, to Dennis and Isabel Elsted, and spent the early years of his life in Fernie, BC, where his father was beginning a career in the Anglican church.

Before training for the ministry, Crispin’s father had worked as a singing teacher and, during the Depression, as the night desk clerk at the Patricia Hotel in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Crispin’s mother, Isabel, was born on Salt Spring Island, BC, and raised in Hood River, Oregon. “She had a private school education,” he says, “but never attended university.”

At first he demurs when I ask for additional details of his early life—“It’s another life, or several other lives”—but eventually

he offers glimpses of a colourful adolescence that included a first job tending the bears in the Vancouver zoo, and a later job at the CBC, where he worked “in various minor capacities” such as script editing and preparing interviews.

For two summers in the late 1960s he was part of an itinerant repertory company and toured with the troupe through the western and midwestern United States, performing

Shakespeare in high school gyms, college auditoriums and even hotel lobbies. Crispin has played drums in a rock band and vibes in his own jazz quintet, and in the 1960s he jumped boxcars on two prolonged jaunts through the States. “I saw a lot of country and worked on ranches and farms when I needed to earn some travelling money,” he says. “In those days there were still small spur lines which covered much more of the country than trains do now.

Mostly I was finding my feet before going back to university, where I met Jan.” Jan was born Jan Allison on October 16, 1950, and grew up in West Vancouver with two brothers, one older and one younger. Both of Jan’s parents grew up in Vancouver’s West End during the 1930s. Jan’s mother, Vivien, was the youngest of five children, with “an absent father” and a mother—Jan’s grandmother— who took in boarders to make money. Jan’s father came from a relatively affluent family who owned and operated Allison Logging, an independent logging company with a sawmill in North Vancouver and a logging camp up north in Bella Coola. After Jan’s mother graduated from high school, she worked as a Profile 39

secretary, “and then she met my father,” says Jan, “and they became married. And it’s not that it wasn’t a match of love, but I think for her it was also a matter of achieving a sense of security.”

Jan earned top marks through high school and engaged in a wide range of sports, including golf (“We used to have a family foursome”), expressions of what Jan describes as the “conservative side” of her personality. “But inside was a whole part of me that wasn’t being expressed,” she says, and as Jan was drawn more and more toward the arts—“I listened to classical music, I was the only one who read seriously”—it was her mother who supported her decision to study English at university, as well as Jan’s later decision to give up her career in academia for an uncertain future in fine press printing. “It isn’t that my father disapproved necessarily of my going into the arts, he just didn’t understand. If I’d been male, it would have been a real concern, that I wouldn’t have been able to support myself.”

In Hoi Barbaroi, a bibliography published in 2004 to mark a quarter century at Barbarian Press, Jan describes herself as standing “somewhere between my practical, driven father and my lyrical, unconditionally loving mother.”

She credits her mother—who used to write an “Edwardian, perfumed kind of poetry”—as the source of her own inclination toward the arts.

When Jan completed a memoir of two years that she and Crispin spent in England, she dedicated it to her mother and to her maternal grandmother. “I think that sometimes my voice is their voice as well, that I’m speaking for them.” an and Crispin first met at the University of British Columbia during the fall of 1971 while both were enrolled in third-year honours English. They ended up in the same seminar on Romantic Literature, just a half dozen students crowded together in the professor’s office.

40 Geist 87 Winter 2012

Neither can recall who first took a shine to whom, but something clicked between them and they began to meet after classes. For Jan their conversations were an affirmation of her interest in the arts. “With Crispin I just felt that a world was opening out in front of me,” and this recognition of a kindred spirit finally led her to make a move. “I was sort of hippie-ish in those days, so I decided to go a little more upmarket with a skirt that had a slit all the way up the side.” She gestures. “And boots. I simply crossed my legs, and somehow or other I got a phone call after that.”

Crispin embellishes this retelling with a Goon Show reference: “She flashed her insteps at me shamelessly.”

Their first proper date was January 31st of 1972, and on February 10th Crispin proposed. “I’m slow,” he says. “It took me ten days to make up my mind.” They were married that September.

In 1976, after completing their MAs at UBC, the Elsteds moved to England to work on their PhD theses and eventually settled into a small flat above a doctor’s surgery in the High Street of Boughton Monchelsea, a village in South Kent.

Living in England gave Jan and Crispin an opportunity to explore their particular passions—for the graphic arts, for poetry, for beautifully made books—and to make connections with others who shared those interests. There was really no need for them to be in England to do their thesis work (Jan’s thesis was on the American poet Marianne Moore, and Crispin’s was on Gertrude Stein); but the decision to move to England was the first in what Jan describes as “a whole chain of fateful decisions,” a course of action that would eventually lead them to abandon their quest for PhDs and to consider wholly different lives as fine press printers and publishers.

You might say that the real shift in their thinking began with a poem.

Crispin wrote the poem for the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Harry and Frances

Adaskin, who had been Jan and Crispin’s music teachers at UBC, and who became their close friends. “Jan and I didn’t think that we would be able to go back to Vancouver for the event,” Crispin explains, “so we’d decided to send the poem.” They decided that letterpress was the only way to go.

With no printing skills of their own, they turned to one of their English friends, the graphic artist Graham Clark, who put them in touch with a printer named Graham Williams.

According to the Elsteds, Barbarian Press was founded on the morning of January 1, 1977, when they walked into a pub named The Shant in the village of East Sutton, about fifteen miles from their flat, looking for Williams.

Jan describes the scene in her memoir: “We found Graham in a corner sipping the hair of the dog & trying to light his pipe. We had a proposal for him: in exchange for £6o, could he print a few copies of a five-page poem in ten days? in handset type? on a handpress? & perhaps on handmade paper? Knowing nothing of hand printing in those days, we could not know that our offer was absurd. Graham eyed us & puffed reflectively. ‘On one condition. You’ll have to help me.’”

With Graham’s guidance they struggled to meet their deadline—through late nights seasoned with “the smell of ink and wood smoke, the sound of the roller sucking up the ink, the sight of the printing, rich and black, sitting on the page.”

Jan wrote: “For the first time in my life I felt the exaltation which comes from continuous work bringing both crushing exhaustion and intense satisfaction. There was never any question of what we had accomplished: it was there before our eyes, page by page. Though we constantly realized the pressures of our deadline, time as portioned out into separate units of twenty-four hours ceased to exist for us: there was only the continuum of working, broken by occasional meals & sleep.” The result of their great effort was the first publication from Barbarian Press: Five Decades for Harry and Frances Adaskin.

Jan and Crispin began acquiring the tools of their new trade. The printing industry was then in the process of a long, slow overhaul of its technologies, replacing mechanical hand presses (some of which had been in continuous operation since the Victorian era) with more modern machinery. London had long been the centre of English printing and publishing, and hand-operated presses

were available at minimal cost. Knowing that it would be impossible to find as broad (or as reasonably priced) a selection of vintage presses back in Vancouver, Crispin purchased three big nineteenth-century hand presses, plus a couple of smaller table-top presses, and about a thousand pounds of type in forty or fifty cases—which they packed tight with foam mats and carpet—and arranged to have everything crated and sent to Canada by boat and train. The whole shipment weighed over a ton.

In the summer of 1978 the Elsteds returned to Vancouver, where Crispin had secured a job as a sessional lecturer in the English department at UBC. Stymied in their attempts to find suitable accommodation in their price range in Vancouver, they began to look farther and farther out of town. At the end of one long day filled with disappointments, they ended up in the community of Steelhead on the outer edge of Mission, BC, where they were shown a simple house built in the 1940s, with a pole barn—basically a roof held up by studs, with no enclosing walls—tucked into one corner of a five-acre lot. “It was like an English country Profile 41

garden,” Crispin recalls. “There was a pond, as well as lattices, and trellises with roses. There were dahlias… It was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. So we just fell in love with it, and agreed to buy it right then.”

The barn was not closed in at all, says Crispin, “and the top area was full of lumber and other stuff which had been stored up there. The only way up was by ladder.” After some renovations, that space served as their press room for the next ten years. Heat was provided by a small wood stove; all the press work had to be carried into the house to dry. rom the very beginning, Jan and Crispin had talked about starting a family. “Such is the insouciance of youth,” says Jan, “that we never dreamed that we would go through the heartache of miscarriage and infertility, and that adoption would become our only means of having children.”

They were told that a local adoption would take seven years, so they began the process of international adoption. In 1984, Crispin flew to Seoul to meet Kim Eun Sub (renamed Jude Nicolas Sijo), an eight-month-old baby boy, and bring him home. “It was love at first sight for us both,” says Jan. Four years later Crispin flew back to Korea and returned with their adopted daughter Park Jong Mee, a five-month-old girl who they named Apollonia Felicity, or “Polly.”

As Jan points out, “We were fortunate in that we essentially work at home, with the press room a short walk across the garden.” During those years Crispin was still teaching part-time; a dear friend, Hetty Versavel, took on the role of “Oma” to Jude and Polly, and together the three of them somehow managed to stay on top of the press work and the childcare.

“As far as the children were concerned,” says Jan, “the press room was part of their daily 42 Geist 87 Winter 2012

experience of home. They watched, and sometimes helped out in small ways, and were integrated into the rhythm of our lives. For Crispin and me, there were many late nights in the press room, after the children were in bed, in order for the work to get done. When she was in grade four, Polly decided that she wanted to be home-schooled, so teaching her became another daily dimension of our lives.” n 1988, Jan and Crispin converted the barn into a proper workshop with a press room for their growing collection of presses and a composing room along one wall. In 1996 they added a small hand-bindery, and today the press room is a 1,000-square-foot wunderkammer for typophiles.

Windows at head height provide a view to the yard beyond, and in summer, dappled sunlight filters through the leaves of a large walnut tree that overhangs the roof. The printing presses are distributed about the floor of the press room; the newest are a pair of Vandercook Universal motorized proofing presses from the 1950s, the oldest is a cast-iron hand press built in London, England, in 1833. A set of large shelves in one corner holds a selection of handmade papers that can be cut to size with the Elsteds’ industrial-strength paper cutter.

Along one side of the composing room is a phalanx of deep wooden drawers—a couple of hundred of them in total—holding the castmetal fonts that Crispin and Jan have collected over the years, each drawer with a neat label identifying the typeface inside: 30' Bembo Roman; Festival Titling 48' / 60' / 72'; TwoLine Pica Caslon Antique. A full case of metal type can weigh as much as eighty pounds; the aggregate weight of these drawers, then, is considerable. A portable CD player sits on a workbench beside a bookcase filled with reference books on typography, and nearby, several shelves jammed with CDs offer an eclectic selection of “music to set type by”: Ella Fitzgerald singing selections from The Rogers and Hart Songbook Vol. 1; Jerry Mulligan trading saxophone riffs with Stan Getz on “Scrapple From the Apple.”

an and Crispin publish only works that they themselves would like to read, with a particular focus (to quote Jan) on “books which celebrate wood engravings as an art form.”

Although they have published and will continue to publish contemporary poetry and prose, a significant number of their forty titles spring from the classical tradition: Keats’s poem The Eve of St. Agnes, Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion & Epithalamion, as well as their most recent publication, a twovolume edition of Shakespeare’s Pericles, one of their biggest projects to date. What distinguishes the Barbarian Press edition of these classics from dozens of previous editions is the care spent on details of design, and the high quality of the materials and workmanship.

Crispin has strong views on the proper use of type, taking great care to select a typeface appropriate to the material being set. A few of them—Eric Gill’s Joanna, Bembo and Poliphilus (which Crispin describes as “probably my favourite of the classical faces”)—have become de facto “house faces”; other typefaces—Univers, for one—are rigorously avoided.

Jan does most of the press work. “Crispin doesn’t usually cross over and do the printing because he just really doesn’t like it much,” says Jan, “and I don’t cross over into the typesetting very much. But each of us can do the other. After all these years we work in a very collaborative way. In fact, often we don’t even need to talk about what needs to be done.”

Jan is considered by their peers to be a master of the highly specialized craft of printing engravings from wooden blocks. Irregularities in the engraved blocks can cause unevenly inked impressions, so the process is fraught with complications that do not arise in printing type alone. When Jan prints from an engraving, she might spend hours trying to ensure a perfect print, making microscopic adjustments to her “make-ready” shims—slips of paper torn to size and positioned behind the page—to compensate for points where the surface of the

engraved block is just a hair’s breadth too low.

The Elsteds also split the paperwork for their business. Crispin takes on most of the press’s editorial work, correspondence and invoicing, and Jan looks after all the other paperwork and the financial side. “Jan does all the financial stuff,” Crispin says. “I don’t know how it works. I’m like Stephen Leacock: banks rattle me.”

Jan considers the two of them to be “very, very lucky” to have found a balance between their married life and their roles as working partners, equal participants in the publishing side of the endeavour. “In the printing world there are other couples who work together, but there isn’t usually the same marriage of creative and technical input as there is with the two of us.” hen the Elsteds are in full production mode there is no such thing as a typical workday. “We have five cats and a dog for a start,” says Crispin, “plus two children, one of whom visits quite often, and at the beginning of Pericles they were both still around half the time.”

When school is in session, Jan’s workdays are taken up by her teaching duties at Meadowridge School, so Crispin typesets pages ahead, allowing Jan to fit in a run of printing whenever she can.

In Crispin’s opinion, hand-setting type is the most ignored of the skills practised by fine press printers; not many take the time to get it right. “Type can be hand-set beautifully Profile 43

or badly, and people are no longer inclined to spend the time to look at type and realize which is good and why, and which is bad and why. Computer typesetting, and the fact that everyone now considers himself a typographer because he knows the word font and can name three or four typefaces, has really militated against good typesetting.”

Crispin will often stay up late to set type or to write in his study above the press room.

His writing is as important to him as the press work, and a collection of his poetry—Climate of the Affections: Poems 1970– 1995—was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1996. “Sixteen years later I am nearly ready with another book of poems,” he says; two more collections—one of essays and another of translations—are approaching completion.

Over the years the Elsteds have had occasional disagreements, but “working so closely together has been a cohesive factor rather than a potential source of friction,” says Jan. “I mean the only thing we ever fight over is that Crispin figures out how to cut paper differently than me. I’ve stopped doing it now, but I used to sometimes say ‘OK, I think we need to order this much paper,’ and he calculates it completely differently, and I don’t understand what he’s doing, and he doesn’t understand what I’m doing. In the moment it seems pretty heated, but you just kind of shake it off. We just do it differently. But that’s about as serious as it ever gets.” he first discussions about publishing The Play of Pericles took place about a decade ago, when Jan and Crispin were in New Castle, Delaware, for a book fair. The illustrator and engraver Simon Brett was also present, and one evening the three of them went for a stroll beside the Delaware River and began to talk about projects that they might work on together. The relative obscurity of Pericles made the prospect of publishing it appealing, and Crispin’s extensive experience with the play (he has acted in three separate 44 Geist 87 Winter 2012

productions, directed one production and written music for another) would help them to unravel the text for publication.

From conception to completion the project has taken almost a decade, and with the possible exception of Endgrain, their 1995 survey of wood engraving in North America, Pericles has been the most complex project that Jan and Crispin have ever undertaken.

The book’s design, which incorporates more than one hundred engravings by Simon Brett, required extensive discussions between Crispin and Simon: choosing which scenes to illustrate, where to place the illustrations within the text and how best to flow the text around the image blocks was a process they describe as “staging” the play upon the page.

All copies of Pericles (125 copies of the standard edition at $2,200 each; 12 copies of the deluxe edition at $3,600) were spoken for before the printing and binding had even been completed, and the book received a Judges’ Award at the 2011 Oxford Fine Press Book Fair. While Jan considers Pericles to be their magnum opus to date, she still seeks to improve her work. She told me that Pericles came as close as anything to satisfying what she and Crispin were trying to achieve in conception, design, integration of illustrations and the printing itself. She said it felt like they had moved to a new level of accomplishment: “In a way, it won’t ever be like that again.”

In addition to winning numerous prizes for book design, Jan and Crispin’s work has earned them recognition on a larger stage. In 2011 they gave a talk at the Museum Meermanno in the Hague, a museum dedicated to the history of the printed word—an experience that Jan found humbling: “Here we are, surrounded by all this history—the museum has got Gutenbergs, illuminated manuscripts—and here’s this little Canadian girl standing here talking about her life… and then I just decided that all I can do is talk about our history.”

Jan and Crispin are now elder statesmen within the local fine press community, with brilliant reputations as craftsmen and as teachers. Their annual letterpress workshop

is always full. Jan describes these workshops as both a responsibility and a great pleasure, their contribution to the traditional apprentice-based transmission of the printing craft.

Typically some of the workshop participants are already active fine press printers, wanting to improve their skills through oneon-one instruction; others are neophytes, exploring a personal passion for typography. Many participants in the Barbarian workshops have gone on to found independent presses of their own.

Every two years or so, members of the local fine press community gather at the Wayzgoose Printers’ Fair (the term is an ancient one for an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen). The event is organized by the Alcuin Society, an organization of Vancouver bibliophiles “who care about the past, present and future of fine books.”

When I visited the 2009 Wayzgoose I found the Barbarian Press table to be a focal point, where many participants spent time speaking to Jan and Crispin, or examining a mockup copy of Pericles. Standing at a nearby table, Andrea Taylor of Cotton Socks Press gestured to the room full of exhibitors. “Half the people you see here would not be here if it were not for Jan and Crispin.” Jason Dewinetz of Greenboathouse Press suggested that every exhibitor present had been influenced and assisted—and some had been personally taught the basics of letterpress printing—by the Elsteds or by Jim Rimmer (1934–2010) of Pie Tree Press, another influential and respected figure in the local fine press community. t can take many months—sometimes years, as was the case with Pericles—for a book to be completed, and at times Jan and Crispin have struggled to deal with an erratic cash flow.

Income from sales comes at the end of the process, but all of the production expenses must be paid for in advance: the ink, the paper, the type, the binding (the regular edition of Pericles—125 copies—cost roughly $40,000 to bind, and binding the deluxe edition cost $700 a pop).

“We had to up the price for Pericles when we realized how many engravings there were going to be,” Jan says, and toward the end of 2011, “we only just finished paying off the leather.” Many Barbarian Press subscribers (who agree to purchase a copy of every

book from the press) pre-pay, but without the income from Jan’s teaching position, the Elsteds would have difficulty riding out the lean periods. rispin remains optimistic about the prospects for fine press books, despite demographic shifts and the rising popularity of ereaders and tablet devices. “It worries me philosophically and culturally,” he says, “but it doesn’t worry me particularly in terms of the press, because we don’t publish enough copies for that to be an issue. We can find and have always been able to find a hundred, a hundred and twenty people to buy whatever it is we produce.”

The Elsteds have been living this somewhat improvised “letterpress life” for thirtyfive years now, and Jan says that they have no desire to stop. “Just the other day I was talking to Polly about the craft of printing, and that I’ve never tired of it or stopped learning, trying to get a little bit better. There’s always perfection that you’re aiming for and you never Profile 45

achieve it—even with your very best thing, which would be Pericles so far. It’s always just a little bit out of reach. It’s that shiny thing that you’re striving for.”

But: “We’re getting on,” says Crispin. “Jan has bursitis in her shoulder, and asking her to print another fifty copies of a book is a fair whack of work.” When I ask Jan about retirement, she responds with mock horror: “Retire?

We can’t retire! We’re going to die before our mortgage is paid off.”

Toward the end of my visit, I sat with Crispin in his study above the press room, with its leafy prospect into the walnut tree through leaded windows.

From one of the crowded shelves above his desk he extracted a battered vestpocket-sized notebook from 1977 and began to leaf through it, pausing to puzzle out some of the entries. There were notes to Jan, prefaced with “Small” (“I’m Big; she’s Small,” Crispin explained), ideas for poems, and the names of those who were to receive a copy of that first Barbarian Press publication, Crispin’s poem for the Adaskins’ fiftieth anniversary; and there were dozens of ideas for books that he and Jan hoped to publish in the future that was beginning to unfold. Some of those early goals have fallen by the wayside; many have been achieved, and Crispin’s enthusiasm is evident as he talks about the work ahead.

Jan and Crispin are now at work on several new projects: a volume devoted to the ornamental typography of the Curwen Press, two more volumes in their series on the work of individual engravers, and smaller projects such as four chapbooks collecting classic poems on seasonal themes. These will help to keep cash coming in while the Elsteds plan and prepare for their next major project: an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, “two, possibly three big volumes,” says Crispin, to be bound in vellum and illustrated with wood engravings by Peter Lazarov, the Bulgarian engraver whose work was featured in volume three of the Endgrain Editions series.

Polly has shown an interest in fine press printing, and with her parents’ help has 46 Geist 87 Winter 2012

published a pair of chapbooks under her own Horse Whisper Press imprint as a way to help cover the costs of stabling a horse. She has many of her parents’ enthusiasms—for Shakespeare, and for printing (she has a third book in process). “I know she would like to see Barbarian Press continue in some way,” says Jan, although “the difficulty with this line of work is that it’s almost impossible to do on your own. The fact that there are two of us means that we’ve been able to do really well with it.

A person working on his or her own, it’s such a struggle.”

Crispin expects the number of fine press printers to diminish over the next fifty years. “Part of the reason for that is simply the availability of the equipment; people are not going to start building letterpress presses again.” As for their own printing equipment, “the ideal thing would be to find a couple or a person who was about the age we were or younger when we started,” says Crispin, “and who was as keen as we were, and just give them the whole lot.” But, he adds, “It would have to be more than just someone coming to the door and saying ‘I really want to print.’”

“For us,” says Jan, “there is no separation between work and home: one informs the other, and the whole fabric of our lives is woven of our love for one another and our children, and for all of the work we do, whether typesetting, printing, teaching or writing. We do not have a ‘career’ in the usual sense; we have a life, and this is what we have made of it.”

And as long as there is ink, and time, and metal type, they hope to continue living their handmade life on the outskirts of a digital world.

Michael Hayward’s reviews have been published in Geist and at geist.com for many years. He is a regular contributor to the work of the Vancouver International Writers Festival and the Word on the Street Festival, and he is a member of the Editorial Board of Geist.

“The Gutenberg Effect” is one of a series of Geist profiles commissioned with the assistance of Arts Partners for Creative Development.

Erase How Should a Person Be? Winners of the Second Geist Erasure Poetry Contest

E

rasure poetry works with an existing text from which letters and words are erased in such a way that the words left in place take on new shapes and meanings. For the 2nd Annual Erasure Poetry Contest, the existing text taken from How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti’s experimental novel about celebrity, friendship and the struggle to be an artist, writers were invited to erase until they found a poem somewhere inside the text.

The judges found that certain words and phrases from Heti’s text were retained in many entries: specks of dirt, ballerinas and firemen, heaven. Sheila Heti writes: “I think there is something of the original text kept in these erasure texts; some kind of disposition toward the world; a kind of regret or weariness or knowing. There’s more knowing in these texts than in mine, I think.”

Prizes were awarded to poems that stood out for their quality and the unique way in which they interacted with the original text. The following three poems were chosen from more than 250 entries.

FIRST PRIZE Always the Procreant Urge of the World Mark Petrie

I. I hear firemen singing, twenty-five bathers saying, We do whatever we feel.

Fawns answer, Like this: rollick; now, in the heart.

II. I am alive— but not too much— unchanging, and man, no one has anything, and no one has to know the deal; there are no deals.

III. I smell lime, iron, amber— the nteenth odor is excited flesh, the erection of sweat —America, season three, time.

IV. I ugh & wane & eye forever (I’m hiking) and Christ, I’m giving in.

Mark Petrie hails from Arizona and now lives in New Orleans. See his recent work at ithacalit.com.

48 Geist 87 Winter 2012

SECOND PRIZE 22 Tofu for Who are You on the Way to Heaven Frank Beltrano

Tell a lot of people Tofu Margaux’s going to Tofu To to to Margaux complements me in interesting ways We do what we can To tofu Taboo Tofu Tofu Too mu fu Too f fu Tofu Tofu Tofu Off to For who I am For who I appear to be For who who I am.

We are all specks of dirt, earth, people Tofu To o blow fu

I know Tofu What I can to too much Touch the soft flesh Tofu Try to breathe through My nose Throw up Vomit Tophu The vomit was Tofu Kiss me Toghu Through with it Sore ass genius Tophu To to mo fu Toghu To Tofu And you is you Tophu While I’m in heaven.

Frank Beltrano is an active member of the poetry community in London, Ontario. He has taught the erasure poem form in his creative writing classes, and this time he decided “to have the fun rather than just teach it!”

Third PRIZE Details Patrick Grace

Old people want it, too conversation, non-stop complements they wonder about it, love the simple examples of undying fame

but you’re not too interested in the details of life famine, war, the nineteenth century it’s all bingo to you, sore ass, more gin deals to sneak into heaven

Patrick Grace is a creative writing student at the University of Victoria. He was born and raised in Vancouver.

Erasure Poetry 49

p o s t c a r d s

I AM HERE connie kuhns

…in Cherie’s kitchen

These photographic images are taken from I AM HERE, a series of postcards made by Connie Kuhns between 2010 and 2012. Each card had a short identifying phrase in the message area; the messages are reproduced here as captions.

M

y grandmother used to send me postcards. They were from places I never expected to see: the Manhattan skyline, LaSalle Street in Chicago, the Moffat Tunnel in Colorado, highlighted by the emerging silver stream of the California Zephyr. Even the two-storey LeRoy Hotel-Motel with its “Modern and Plain Rooms” in Custer, South Dakota, seemed exotic when featured on a picture postcard arriving in the mail. I have them all, along with a postcard my mother received from the Selznick Studio 50 Geist 87 Winter 2012

when she wrote a fan letter to Shirley Temple. Getting a postcard in the mail was an event.

The postcards in I AM HERE were designed and mailed in 2012, in the spirit of another time. It was my own private performance art, as I addressed each card by hand and mailed a new one every day for two weeks to a small selection of friends. I used different post offices in my neighbourhood and kept track of the details. The postcards arrived unannounced and unexplained. To me, they were my simple response to the social media convention of reporting in from wherever we are, moment by moment, no matter how insignificant our actions or locations. If there is a message, it may be about remembering how to anticipate, or how to wait just long enough to ask whether something is worth telling.

To say I AM HERE could sound boastful and self-important, but for anyone who still dreams of trains and big cities, it is confirmation that the sender is not lost. However, it remains a solitary thought and a generation away from “Wish you were here,” a very important social convention in its day. With these postcards, each moment can be held. It can be put under glass or on the refrigerator. The image can even be posted on Facebook. But by the time the mail arrives, as I wrote on my final card, I will have left. Where I am right now doesn’t really matter.

Connie Kuhns is a writer and photographer living on the west coast. Her story “Last Day in Cheyenne” was published in Geist 84, accompanied by “On the Highway,” which is included in this photo essay.

…in God’s country

…working on a puzzle

…in a rented condo

…riding in a taxi

…in the bathroom at Quizno’s

…on the highway

Postcards 51

52 Geist 87 Winter 2012

…listening to the radio

…waiting for Aretha

…outside a bar

…at the pier

…in front of this house

…on the west coast

s h o r t

s t o r y

Driving with Maurice Sambert to the Grave of Thomas Mann moez surani “I wanted to write a book about authors’ graves,” he said, “but someone who is much more famous than me just published one”

I

t has been a month since I drove with Maurice Sambert across Switzerland and along the Zürichsee to a hill south of the city to visit the grave of Thomas Mann.

Even though we were both young and interested in writing, we were not immediate friends. His preoccupation with graveyards, with writers who are tormented—his word, not mine— seemed excessively romantic. We lived for a month in a villa north of Zürich, on arts residencies with another artist, a German, who was feeling her way through the early stages of a project involving scissoring up Swiss maps.

One night in February, Maurice and I saw a movie together, which he chose. Leaving the theatre, walking in the rain across our small town to the old Sonne restaurant where we had a reservation, Maurice Sambert was

photo: fafner from wikimedia commons

unhappy. He disliked the movie, he disliked sports and he disliked American sentimentality. He waved his free arm, his left hand held his umbrella, and he was yelling his opinions in the rainy street.

We entered the restaurant and climbed the stairs. Wait staff dressed as peasants greeted us and pointed to our table for three in the corner. Maurice Sambert told me how he despised French films. It is all talking and feelings, he said with a shrug. We each ordered a beer and waited for our German friend, Anett, who arrived late but cheerful in a black skirt. She ordered a beer of her own, and we all shared fondue and a large salad. Maurice Sambert talked about his book, The Hues of the Night, which struck me as an absurd title. “It is about a man,” he said, “who is my age, and who walks

around Prague for a night thinking.”

In his broken English he compared it to Ulysses, then to Dante. “It is the first part of a trilogy,” he explained.

“And the second?”

“The second night is in Paris,” he said defensively, leaning back. “His lover has died in a plane crash on the way to San Francisco. Paris is his purgatory.”

“Where is paradise?” I asked. I had a hunch it was Florence or Rome, but I could tell immediately that he had thought about this and that the question haunted him.

We ordered more beer and passed the salad around and dipped our bread into the fondue. By this time we were talking about other writers, and because of the strain of my own project, I was admittedly drunk. In the corner of the restaurant, Maurice and Short Story 53

I castigated each other while Anett sat delighted, rocking with laughter on the bench. Maurice and I left no middle ground. He took out what I assumed was a pack of cigarettes. I reached across the table for one. “But they are cigarillos,” he said sadly.

A week later, on a Friday afternoon, Maurice Sambert and I drove together to visit Thomas Mann’s grave on a hill outside of Zürich. I knew nothing about graves. I had drifted through them in many cities, but lacked the thing that made them resonant. I liked cemeteries for their gardens and their peace.

Maurice and I had become friends by then. We laughed about ourselves and our lives. As he drove, we talked about Thomas Mann, and Maurice told me conspiracy stories about Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich.

He talked about the graves of other writers he had visited and compared the cemeteries of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Baltic countries. “Paris is too easy,” he said.

“Everywhere you go it is another famous writer. It is no fun.” He listed the writers whose graves he had seen (Borges, Éluard, Joyce), his hand leaving the steering wheel to squeeze his forehead when the writer was someone who had been tormented. “I wanted to write a book about authors’ graves,” he said moodily. “But someone who is much more famous than me just published one in the fall.” We drove on in silence. “But when I am eighty,” he whispered, “maybe I will publish mine. I have already visited many more graves than him.”

We drove through Zürich and into the hilly countryside. I had Maurice’s cartoon map unfolded on my lap, but because I was looking at the scenery around us, we lost our way and entered what felt like an eternal tunnel. He drove faster and faster.

The longer it went on, the more we laughed. We went crazy. There was a set of steel ventilating fans near the beginning, then two long, clear lines 54 Geist 87 Winter 2012

of fluorescent lights. It felt as though we were plunging through some perspective painting, and that it was not simply winter in Switzerland.

When we emerged from the tunnel and the signs made it obvious that I had made a mistake, Maurice reprimanded me and compared the map’s cartoon rendering of the countryside to the world around us. He wanted to do a three-point turn but there was no opportunity, so he made a number of turns onto successively smaller and smaller roads, until we rolled to a stop on a gravel path with a forest beside us. He looked at me. “My clutch is not good,” Maurice Sambert said.

We drove through Zürich again.

The city looked fresh and historic.

The grand buildings were painted in pale colours and the streets were clean and busy. Everyone looked polite, polished and upbeat. Determined to redeem myself, I shouted when I saw the lake between some trees. “Yes,” Maurice whispered. He swung his car around. A beautiful U-turn in downtown Zürich and we followed the Zürichsee. We drove along Seestrasse, with the lake on one side and the land rising sharply on our right.

At the Kilchberg village train station, we hopped out and stared at the map on the wall.

“There is the church!” Maurice Sambert cried.

We drove up the winding road to the hilltop.

Maurice pulled over and we got out again and looked up and down the two-lane road. It was sunny, and we were on the hill with the church and a bell tower above the Zürichsee, surrounded by the Alps. It was bright and pristine. We were the only ones there.

The sun shone on the water and the snow.

We passed through the black metal gate and wandered through the sloping cemetery. When we found the grave of Thomas Mann, Maurice clicked a photo, and I looked at the odd things that were on the

tombstone. There were modest tributes. Pebbles, a branch with some burrs, a pine cone and a dry leaf. They were arranged together as an homage. I found a stone and set it there too. His dissident daughter was buried beside him. His grave did not have the ostentation of some of the others. There was no statue or elaborate cross, or even a space for a small garden in the summer. His tomb was an austere block: thomas / mann /

mdccclxxv / mcmlv / katia mann / mdccclxxxiii / mcmlxxx.

We left the cemetery in a more sombre mood and drove into Zürich.

I looked at the buildings, the waterways, the churches and cafés. Maurice Sambert walked alongside me, smiling. He had been to Zürich many times. None of this was new or fascinating to him.

Inside the Café Odeon, Maurice and I had beer and nachos and Maurice talked about his year living in Prague, when he taught literature, and when he was unhappy. Sitting with a second beer, I lamented to myself what would be lost. I wanted to remember Maurice Sambert’s Prague with fidelity. It was strange, tragic and lonely, but it has passed into and out of my memory. It seems to me now as though his whole Prague was tinted yellow. It was an imaginary city, as all of our representations are, though no less valid for that. “It is possible to be sad in Prague,” he said. “There is no sea. None,” he pouted. “In the summer, all of the tourists come and still I was sad.” He had a theory about Kafka, about his work and the specific terrain of Prague, but even that I have lost.

When we left the Café Odeon, we walked through the rain to find our restaurant. That morning he had just finished writing a review of the theatre in Paris. “Paris is ruined by the Parisians,” he murmured, relishing the cliché.

“Why do you love graves?” I finally asked him. He turned back to me in the darkness of the street with

a look that expressed his shock at my not knowing and his apprehension at its consequences. I felt embarrassed for lacking sensitivity. He waved me under his umbrella. “You didn’t bring a jacket or an umbrella,” he said. “It is February in Zürich. You are too much in your project.

“We spend all of our years living in different places,” he explained.

“We live in different houses, in different cities, we travel around, trying different cultures, and all we are looking for is the place where we want to die. Then we stay there and wait for it. We wait to be taken. For these writers, it is the final decision they make.” I understood the full aesthetic implication of what he was saying. That last decision was the one that would resolve all ambiguities and hypocrisies. My own view of writing and reading was very different. I did not believe in the same accumulation of meaning, from book to book, and I did not believe in progress and pinnacles as Maurice Sambert did. I did not even believe that ambiguities

were there to be settled, but rather that they were equivalencies, and should be left that way. I believed that works came from long epiphanies of sustained attention and effort, and that writers did not sweeten with age. I couldn’t think of anyone who peaked with their final effort. Most writers I could think of became more banal, commonplace or dilute at the end. For novelists, the power and risk was in middle age. We stopped at the restaurant door and faced each other.

“Where they chose to die—it is their final judgement,” he said with a pout.

We went inside the restaurant where it was loud and lively. The right half was a bar and the left half had tables that were shared and covered in red and white checked tablecloth. Maurice Sambert wrestled his umbrella shut and we joined a round table that had four people already sitting at it. Using his menu as a shield, Maurice pointed at the dish across the table that he wanted. Both of us ordered a beer. A couple of vegetarians sat down next to me.

There was something I wanted to know. Now that we were friends, I felt I could ask him. “You have lived in Brussels for five years now.”

“Yes.” Our dinner plates arrived. Maurice compared his plate unfavourably to the plate of the man opposite him. He did not mask his disappointment. He disliked his chicken.

“Do you want to die in Brussels?”

I asked.

I considered everything I knew about him. I knew he considered publishing and writing in Belgium to be a war, but less of a war than it is in Paris.

And I knew that he liked his apartment, and that his neighbourhood was like a village, which appealed to him.

The vegetarians beside me struggled with the menu. They finally settled on a plate of french fries.

“I don’t know,” Maurice Sambert cried out.  Moez Surani is the author of two poetry collections, Reticent Bodies and Floating Life (Wolsak & Wynn). He lives in Toronto.

Short Story 55

a n n a l s

o f

p o e t r y

The Knock Knock of Unregarded Hours carmine starnino

N

ext Door Café is an actual bar in Parc Extension, a formerly Greek north-end Montreal neighbourhood.

Home to many of the city’s poorest, “Parc Ex” was a crime-ridden no-go zone until the late eighties. But over the last decade, its streets have been bustling with new immigrants (Sri Lankans, Sikhs, Pakistanis) and young renters (students, hipster couples, young families) pushed northward by skyrocketing rents in über-gentrified Mile End. My wife and I were part of this Plateau exodus, and moved into the area in 2003. Soon after, Jennifer began bartending part-time at Next Door Café, a testosterone-rich drinking hole where old and new—lifelong Parc-Exers and Mile-End expats— rubbed shoulders.

Next Door Café was a carpe noctem kind of place. I don’t mean it came alive after dark, but that nighttime was when the regulars drifted in. It was an astonishing pileup of undesirables: near-derelicts, loners, bullshit artists, showboaters, blue-collar professionals and whack jobs. Their stories—as relayed to me by Jennifer, in the early morning after one of her shifts as we walked back home—were stock tall tales, the kind that tee up a confrontation with cop, or wife or boss, and feature the killer comeback. They were the kind of stories told by men who long ago were forced to settle for who they were but came to the bar to fictionalize better stats (humiliations endured: zero). These were men who wanted to establish a rep for no retreat, who wanted to be on record for owning a gumption always ready 56 Geist 87 Winter 2012

next door café We were bored, so we stayed. The days knocked deep into other days. A glacialness set in, and life kept pace with the dried fruit in the jar. Brushed steel gave back our pissed-off bits, our doubled selves so drained of disguise we forgot where it was we were hoping to go, holed up all summer in a corner so dark you’d half expect bison chalked on a cave-face every time we cadged a light.

It was the kind of place where morning fell for everyone but harder for some, where bad decisions were lived counter-clockwise, and endlessly refitted to finish up flush, where afternoons were a gradual squander of sobriety, shot glasses lamped with whisky on cue and empties were the crags of a quandary drunkenness clung to.

Tables where, outside the shrieking reach of the talkers, can’t-sleeps stayed and night-shifters cooled heels attended by soul-tools: cellphone, lighter, cigarette.

Nights of middle-aged men enduring middle-aged men in their cups, buying rounds, half-cusped on high stools.

Sun-up found a few run aground, upshouldered hulls, while our own lives were an endless keel-scrape where the pluperfect errand was the errand always deferred.

A kind of time travel, I guess. We sat back and watched the future screen its clichés of us: those besuited and briefcased, with their died-and-gone-to-heaven whistle when handed a pint; those done-to-a-turn divorcees in duffle coat and boots (wine-sipping casualties of the wife wars); those who, smashed, stand too suddenly slewing into you, and those who, if you join, you join uninvited.

to move up a gear. Though you also knew they were men who woke up to the knock knock of unregarded hours, and lay there—dry-mouthed, perspiring—seized by an up-late, can’t sleep, who's there, name-writ-on-water kind of feeling.

I hope the poem captures some of their shtick and sadness. Mixed into my effort were also memories of my

own barfly days. Younger, my friends and I loved nothing better than to hole up in some off-trail establishment. Far from being antidotes to loneliness, or houses of company and community, bars seemed to us the saddest places on earth. Of course, we had absolutely no business being there. We were well-fed, mother-pampered Italian boys, with good homes and large

families. We didn’t have a clue what it meant to be down on your luck. Those bars gave us a crash course. Unsurprisingly, we became obsessed by their rough-patch mood, the heartbreak hanging in the air, the sense that life was now too late for wish-fulfillments or third-act redemptions. The experience—surrounded by heads bent over drink or tilted up in quiet talk—was a lot like sitting in a Sunday pew. The solitude enforced by the sum of all those second thoughts heightened my senses to everything around me: the low light, the TV screen, the sounds of ice clinking, the glasses being placed beside me on the plank of polished wood (it was, on reflection, the beginnings of the prepoem creative “zone” poets enter when excited by events).

Unlike church, however, the ritualism was devoted to the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit.

How apt that, in some US states, pub owners once doubled as undertakers.

“Next Door Café” sprung from those dead bodies, men idling in a borderland existence between one condition and the next. It led directly to the poem’s style: compressed, noun-heavy, with cautious, slightly energy-sapped enjambments. What rescues the languidness of those lines, in my opinion, is the way the language stands and looks. The descriptions seem to me to have a compound-eyed quality: they try to see around and behind the various male codes on display. And while the poem is ultimately about unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes (“where bad decisions were lived /counter-clockwise, and endlessly refitted to finish up flush”), the poem also appears to be tracking an insight. By degrees, and through repeated sounds and words, the speaker is figuring something out.

We see that in the gallery of alternative selves being tried on for fit. It’s poetry as method-acting: the speaker’s

inner life condensed and generalized into sundry portraits of guyhood. The poem could be read as a kind of a miniBildungsroman that tries to square up the many sides of the speaker’s personality. The voice, as some have told me, is difficult to situate, which I guess underscores the most difficult trick of all: to pose as yourself.

As for the poet, here’s what he figured out: a poem will often bear witness to predicaments for which it can offer no consolation. That realization only surfaced when I wrote the last line and could go no further—though I doubt it’s the sort of “click shut” ending Yeats had in mind.  Carmine Starnino has published four critically acclaimed volumes of poetry. His most recent, This Way Out (Gaspereau), was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He lives in Montreal, where he is poetry editor for Véhicule Press and a senior editor for Reader’s Digest Canada.

Annals of Poetry 57

c i t y

o f

w o r d s

Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam alberto manguel His quiet writing poses colossal questions and hints of an answer

S

ometime in the tenth century, continuing an already long tradition of fleeing persecution, the Jewish population of northern France migrated to the Rhineland, which at the time held a vague reputation for tolerance.

In order to communicate with their Germanic hosts, who spoke what we now call Middle High German, the Jews quickly learned the new language and later carried their version of it to other European countries on their everlasting peregrinations. From the very beginning, however, the language of the Rhineland Jews had its own characteristics. It was rich in Hebrew and Aramaic elements, it contained numerous Romance words brought over from France and it was written in the Hebrew alphabet. When, under the name of Y iddish, it finally extended to most Jewish communities in central and Eastern Europe, it also acquired a number of dialectical differences in the West, in the East and in the area known as Mitteleuropa. In spite of these variations, from the midthirteenth to the sixteenth century, Yiddish became a fairly uniform literary language from which only a handful of poems, Biblical translations and bureaucratic documents have come down to us—including an Arthurian romance, the Artushof, in which Arthur is a Jewish prince and Merlin a wise rabbi. The Yiddish of today owes much to these early transformations.

Language and its incarnation, the Book, lends Jews a sense of place, a fixed point carried through time, from country to foreign country, from pogrom to pogrom. And of all the

58 Geist 87 Winter 2012

languages spoken by the Jews, including Hebrew, it is perhaps Yiddish that best expresses the uncertainty of this life. On October 19, 1921, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary: “Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.” It is this heroic quality of failure that Yiddish (in its wise humour, its skepticism, its sense of ultimate justice) reflects.

And the Yiddish writings of Yehuda Elberg, available now for the first time in French translation, preserve that ancient quality in the language of the Jewish resurrection.

There are writers for whom the world is the circumscription of their room, experience and memory lined up as objects on the singular shelf above their bed; for others, the universe is not vast enough, and their subject is both the farthest star and its reflection at their feet. A rarer breed transforms the immediate and private space into the cosmos, so that everything they tell is both firmly centred and yet generously distant. Pascal’s famous definition of God as a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere applies to this breed of people. Dostoevsky, Joyce and Goethe are among them. So too, I believe, is Yehuda Elberg, whose deceptively quiet writing poses colossal questions and whispered hints of an answer.

Yehuda Elberg was born in Zgierz, Poland, in 1912, heir to a long line of rabbis dating back to the celebrated Rashi. Though ordained a rabbi himself, Elberg never followed the calling and worked instead as a textile engineer until the outbreak of World War

II. He became a member of the Polish underground and later, after the war, took part in the Hapala Action, spiriting Jews away to Palestine from behind the Iron Curtain. In 1947 he arrived in Paris, where he became the managing editor of the prestigious Yiddish literary magazine Kiyoum. A year later he travelled to the United States as a delegate to the international Congress of Jewish Culture, and in 1956 he moved to Montreal.

In the 1980s, he received both the Israeli Prime Minister’s Award for excellence in literature and the Itzhak Manger Prize, presented to him by Golda Meir.

Underlying all of Elberg’s writings is the knowledge of the universe’s coherence. Disparate events and disparate fates connect or intersect unexpectedly, but with utter precision. It is as if, for Elberg, the whole of time were a grid on which human destinies are played out according to rules of which we are not aware, but that are rules nevertheless.

In what is, for me, Elberg’s best book, The Empire of Kalman the Cripple, the hero is the grandson of the respected Reb Jonah Swerdl of Dombrovka, Poland, and on his shoulders fall the expectations of a long and honoured line of sages. The grandson, Kalman, has no recollection of his earliest years—of what illness it was that crippled him, what he felt for his father, who left when he was still a baby, or for his mother, who died shortly afterward. From his grandfather Kalman learns discipline and piety, from the town rabbi, kindness and scholarship.

But out of these instructive elements, Kalman brews his own spiritual concoction. He has grown into a loveless, vengeful, cunning scoundrel, and his sense of discipline becomes harsh, his piety unorthodox, his kindness selfcentred, his scholarship profitable only to himself. But Kalman’s indulgence is not what makes him guilty; according to a Talmudic proverb, “A man is to give account in the Hereafter for any permissible pleasures from which he abstained.” If guilty of anything, Kalman is guilty of surviving against all odds, becoming the most feared and most powerful man in the Jewish community of Dombrovka, and causing havoc among the well-to-do and the poor, the fools and the sages, even among the gentiles.

Throughout Kalman’s inexorable progress, Elberg contrives in shifting the reader’s sympathies: pity for the crippled child turns to outrage at his deviousness, which in turn becomes, through a twist in the plot that is absolutely right, pity once again, and even admiration. At the root of Kalman’s saga is the relentless Jewish reminder that our wits rarely allow us to perceive the truth before us, that the events we see tell a different story from the one we think we are following, and that God’s wisdom is always greater than His mystery. In this sense, every Jewish story is the story of Job. The world to which Kalman belongs (the world he imagines he controls and that he attempts to define) is that of Elberg’s better-known fellow writer, Sholem Aleichem, who died barely four years after Elberg was born. But in these pages, Aleichem’s bittersweet shtetl is anything but picturesque: the Leave It to Beaver quality of Aleichem’s stories is violently changed by alarms of rape and murder, and through ambiguous characters and ambivalent conclusions. The very ending of the novel, when the reader has apparently been reconciled with Kalman’s dubious career, celebrates in birth the promise of a future, in a

circumcision party given on a Tuesday, “a lucky day,” announcing that Kalman’s legacy has found an heir. This particular Tuesday, the last paragraph tells us, is January 31, 1933, the Tuesday on which Reich Chancellor Hitler became Germany’s new leader.

Ultimately, Elberg seems to say, there is a meaning to all this—except that the meaning must remain obscure, incomprehensible, a light burning in the face of a blind man who can feel its warmth but who cannot guess its illuminating nature. God’s word is, to our imperfect ears, of infinite ambiguity.

Language, the words we are made of, reflects that uneasy state of being both explicit and implicit, surface and concealment, and the source of constant light just beyond our understanding.

The Empire of Kalman the Cripple has unsuspected echoes of Dostoevsky’s great Christian novel, The Idiot.

But while in Dostoevsky the hero is set apart from the rest of society by his fatal innocence, Kalman (and here Elberg harks back to the earliest Jewish mystics) reflects or contains all the qualities of his society, a receptacle of both its innocence and its corruption, becoming thus both its victim and its executioner.

Yehuda Elberg died in 2003, forgotten by almost all. Even so, I find it surprising that such a writer, whose work, according to Elie Wiesel, “no doubt will have a place among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust,” should still remain unknown to so many readers. And yet I’m confident that in the future, readers perhaps wiser and more literate than we are will grant Elberg his much-deserved place among the keenest, most affecting witnesses of our horrible times.  Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) A Reader on Reading, All Men Are Liars and The City of Words.

He lives in France. Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

City of Words 59

n a t i o n a l

d r e a m s

It’s a Free Country, Isn’t It? daniel francis So many reds, so many beds! The federal government has been spying on almost all of us, almost all of the time

D

uring the 1950s the RCMP security service employed a machine to root out homosexuals working for the federal government. Individuals suspected of being gay were hooked up to this bogus device, the so-called “fruit machine,” and exposed to pornographic images. Their physiological responses were assessed and a sexual identity conferred. Once identified, homosexuals were purged from the public service. Ostensibly it was the Mounties’ job to look for Communist 60 Geist 87 Winter 2012

spies, but since homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail because of their illicit lifestyle, they too represented a risk to the security of the state, or so the argument went. More than one hundred civil servants lost their jobs because of the “gay squad,” which expanded its efforts beyond the civil service by opening files on thousands of gays across the country. Clearly it was homosexuality that was being policed, not subversion.

In their new book Secret Service:

Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (University of Toronto Press), the historians Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey and Andrew Parnaby describe the fruit machine as “the single looniest venture” in the history of the security service. But they had a lot to choose from.

What their book reveals is that any Canadian who has ever held unorthodox political views or even led what might be considered an unorthodox lifestyle could take it for granted that illustration: huan tran

the government was watching. The origins of this intrusive surveillance go all the way back to Confederation, when John A. Macdonald placed Gilbert McMicken in charge of a force of special agents to keep a watchful eye on the activities of Fenian sympathizers along the Canada–US border.

But the surveillance state really got organized at the end of World War I, when the Royal North West Mounted Police was remodelled as an internal security force—the modern RCMP— and deployed to spy on labour leaders and left-wing agitators who the government believed were plotting a Bolshevik revolution in Canada.

In the 1930s the security service was asked to fulfill Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s promise that he would grind Communism under “the heel of ruthlessness.” It was “open season on Communists and suspected Communists,” write Whitaker et al., as the political police rounded up hundreds of radicals and even deported a number who were recent immigrants. “They simply came and took him away,” said the wife of one of the men. “They had no right to do such a thing.”

Picking up the story two decades later, our authors call the 1950s “the deepest Ice Age of the Cold War.” It was not just homosexuals that the RCMP singled out for persecution; they also encouraged purges of the National Film Board, the foreign service, labour unions and universities.

In a variety of ways, write Whitaker et al., public policy was made hostage to “Cold War fantasies.” Worse, they present a portrait of a country “honeycombed with secret informers,” people who were not attached to the secret service but gladly helped spy on their friends and associates on its behalf. “What is quite extraordinary about the vast collection of dossiers on Canadians and Canadian organizations… is the amount of complicity shown by large numbers of people in police surveillance of their own associations and activities.” To a

disturbing extent, we had become a nation of spies, and by the early 1980s the security service had compiled files on ten thousand suspected subversives and had made plans to round up and incarcerate them in the event of an unspecified “national emergency.”

The authors do not go so far, but the picture of Cold War Canada that emerges from the pages of their book seems every bit as sinister as East Germany under the Stasi.

This is the hidden history of the RCMP, which until 1984 had responsibility for secret policing. Much of the story is already known, though Secret Service brings it together in a convenient and compelling synthesis. But it is hidden in the sense that it contradicts so much of what the public is asked to believe about the Mounties: that they are the stalwart defenders of law and justice; that they are respecting our rights, not undermining them; that they make the country a safer place. This version of the Mountie has been purveyed for years in movies, histories, tourist brochures, comic books and novels. Famously, the force even hired out its image-making to the Disney Corporation. The result of all this massaging and spin-doctoring has left Canadians thinking that our souvenir police force was on our side. Yet behind the scenes, which is where Secret Service takes its readers, the RCMP’s agents have been violating the rights of Canadians from the very beginning of the force.

It was in Quebec where the RCMP security service finally came a cropper. During the 1960s and ’70s, agents engaged in a series of “dirty tricks” aimed at sovereigntists in that province. They broke into journalists’ offices to steal documents; they opened mail; they stockpiled dynamite to use in furtive operations to discredit separatists; they stole records from the Parti Québécois, a perfectly legitimate political party; they fabricated communiqués from the Front de Libération du Québec;

and so on. All this illegal, clandestine activity eventually led to a Royal Commission, which in turn persuaded the federal government to transfer responsibility for national security policing from a discredited RCMP to a new agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in 1984. Which didn’t end the RCMP’s problematic involvement in terrorism matters. In 2002, when the Americans kidnapped Maher Arar, a Canadian computer engineer, and sent him to Syria to be tortured, it turned out to have been the RCMP that provided the dubious “evidence” on which the Americans had acted. (Arar was later exonerated and received an apology from the Canadian government, along with $10.5 million.)

CSIS has had its own problems, of course. Whitaker et al. call the cockup over the 1985 Air India bombing “the worst intelligence failure in Canadian history.” But Secret Service is not simply a chronicle of police scandals and mistakes. As befits academics, the authors are extremely judicious in their treatment of individual incidents, and the result is a thorough, even-handed catalogue of most of the major security-related cases in Canada down to the present post-9/11 world. Few would argue— certainly Whitaker and his colleagues do not—that there is no role for security policing to protect Canadians from foreign espionage and terrorist violence. However, what the history shows is that as often as not, it is the police who have been the subversives, violating the rights of innocent individuals and legitimate organizations whose only “crime” was to challenge the status quo.  Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, among them Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp Press). Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

National Dreams 61

ENDNOTES death and the economist Thad McIlroy

T

he art of the obituary is well established but mostly fading in these days of newspaper cost cutting. I haven’t read any of the famed London Times obits in years, as they are protected behind a stern paywall. Obituaries in Canada’s Globe and Mail are now just Deaths, with the occasional soppy family memoir appearing under the heading Lives Lived, and all this went behind a paywall in mid-October 2012, not much to be missed. I get my bittersweet pleasure of lives lived in at least an interesting fashion from The Economist magazine. In the varying menu of politicians, business magnates, writers and rogues who have passed on, as often as not the deceased is as obscure as any recent winner of a Nobel prize. Economist entries this past autumn included Eric Hobsbawm, “the last interesting Marxist”; Edwin P. Wilson, “gunrunner and manager of CIA front companies”; and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. My current favourite, published on October 13, was the note on Nguyen Chi Thien, a Vietnamese poet who died in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, on October 2, at the age of seventythree. Back in July 1979 he ran through the gate of the British embassy in Hanoi with four hundred poems stuffed under his shirt. He left them behind and was arrested outside the embassy. Then in 1985 his collection Flowers of Hell won the International Poetry Award. He remained in various prisons through 1995, allowed no pen, 62 Geist 87 Winter 2012

paper or books. So he memorized each one of his hundreds of poems, “carefully revised it for several days, and mentally filed it away. If it didn’t work, he mentally deleted it… Walking out to till the fields with his fellow prisoners, many of them poets too, he would recite his poems to them and they would respond with theirs. Some of them counted the beats on their fingers to remember. He never did; memory alone served him.” The image remains in my mind: a field full of poets, reciting their work as they pass one another, pulling verse from memory.

They sank me into the ocean Wishing me to remain in the depths.

I became a deep sea diver And came up covered with Scintillating pearls.

pinspotting

B

Jill Mandrake

efore I get to the contents of George Bowering’s memoir, Pinboy (Cormorant Books), I’d like to credit the interior text design. Pinboy’s chapter headings are like minimalist neon signs from the early 1950s, skilfully replicated and entirely suited to this tale of growing up in smalltown British Columbia (specifically, Oliver, in the sizzling desert of the Okanagan). The narrator, to earn a little pocket money, sets up pins at the local bowling alley. His other identities include school boy, detective boy, Okanagan boy, noble romantic boy, writer boy, Hit Parade boy, and boy who believes his classmates’ sexual adven-

ture yarns. The focus is mostly on three significant women in the narrator’s life (not counting his easygoing mother, whose taciturn wisdom shows up from the sidelines here and there).

Of the three women, two are his peers at high school: Wendy Love, from the prosperous side of the tracks, and Jeanette MacArthur, literally from the other side. The third woman is Monica Verge, teacher of business and home economics, who shockingly challenges the narrator’s sense of romance and nobility. His life quickly splinters into multi-layered confusion, from comic-book-devouring sports hero to private eye in the pornographic shadows. “I hope that you will agree,” he writes, “that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony. After some US popular psychologist claimed that comic books were turning kids into criminals, parents all over the place tried to keep them out of our hands. Nowadays, when teenagers carry cocaine in one pocket and a cell phone you can download fellatio movies from in the other, comic books don’t seem so scary.” The author tends to use warm and conversational ways to compare a not-so-innocent past with a dumbed-down, chaotic present.

Maybe that’s the only way he (and his readers) can piece together the lifealtering, often confusing experiences that he couldn’t share with anyone in the Oliver milieu of sixty years ago.

Near the end of the story, the author’s agent warns him against writing something too unconventional, lest his works become unpopular: “Come back when you have a good idea for a nonfiction bestseller.” Well, thoughts are things, and I’ll hazard a prediction that Pinboy will be George Bowering’s most provocative work.

simply simon

T

Lily Gontard

he autobiographical graphic novel 120 Days of Simon (Top Shelf Productions) by the Swedish cartoonist and rapper Simon Gardenfors can be summarized in three words: sex, drugs and hip-hop, possibly in that order. Though the title echoes a much darker novel by the Marquis de Sade (120 Days of Sodom), Gardenfors’s tale of taking to the Swedish road for four months is helium light, even during its most earnest moments. The premise for 120 Days of Simon is that Gardenfors decides to travel around Sweden over a period of 120 days with two restrictions: he can’t spend more than two nights in the same location and can’t return to his apartment in Stockholm until the end of his journey. Sweden has a reputation for a certain kind of open-mindedness not found in North American society; off goes Gardenfors on a chain of couch surfing, a festival of sexual exploits with a variety of woman, young and not-so-young, and lots of drugs. There’s very little to like about him. He’s hedonistic, obnoxious, selfish, shallow and ignorant—an unrepentant rogue who displays no evolution or personal development. So why read 120 Days of Simon? Because his idiosyncrasies, his negative personality traits and his character flaws combine in a surreal journey that is often quite funny. Do I want to have a drink with Gardenfors, or let him sleep on my couch, let alone on my block? No. But I’d probably read another of his graphic novels if one crosses my desk, because he’d make me laugh.

communes and commies Patty Osborne

I

n the late 1960s, the dying mining town of Wells, BC, was invaded by a

wave of young people, many from an affluent neighbourhood in Vancouver, who squatted in abandoned houses and cabins and tried to figure out how to survive, despite the deep cold of the area’s gorgeous winters. Not all of the three hundred people who were living in Wells at the time welcomed the newcomers, but thanks to a few communitybuilding events put on by the “hippies” (a party for the kids and a turkey dinner for the old folks), plus a mutual dedication to beer that won over the loggers and the “geezers,” an atmosphere of tolerance prevailed. In the end it was an almost complete lack of knowledge of how to “live off the land” that was the hippies’ biggest adversary—and the source of the funniest anecdotes. In All Roads Lead to Wells (Caitlin Press), Susan Safyan, who moved to Wells in the late ’70s, has collected reminiscences and photos from the people she knew there and turned them into a warm and welcoming book. It will either bring back your hippie days (because you probably can’t remember them) or make you wish you had been part of a community like Wells, where, as the author writes, you could feel “absolutely, completely, unquestionably safe.”

dividing lines

I

Jennesia Pedri

n just three days and 285 pages I travelled to the Western Sahara, the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Israel, Palestine, India, Bangladesh, the Arizona borderland, Belfast and Montreal, in Marcello Di Cintio’s Wa l l s : Tr a v e l s Along the Barricades (Goose Lane).

In introducing some of the world’s most volatile man-made borders, Di Cintio unearths the human

preoccupation with erecting walls and what they mean for the people who live alongside them. He traverses the complex histories and incredible stories of people who hold fast to hope on eboth sides of walls, challenging the well-known maxim that good fences make good neighbours. A perfect mix of fact and vivid first-person narrative leaves you feeling that you’ve witnessed death-defying acts of bravery, and fallen ill with Wall Disease. Di Cintio also reminds us that Canada is not without its own history of drawing lines to separate here from there, and us from them. Walls is a humanizing history of the world’s barricades that we need now more than ever.

Two essays published in Geist, “The Great Wall of Montreal” (No. 82) and “Wall of Shame” (No. 74), both posted at geist.com, became part of Walls.

real world happiness

A

Norbert Ruebsaat

ndré Gide once warned writers that “there is nothing more dangerous than your own family, your own room, your own past... you must leave them.” In his memoir Human Happiness (Thomas Allen), Brian Fawcett ignores this advice and gives us a story of family life, love, strife, multiple dysfunction and, yes, happiness.

We’re in Prince George, in the middle of British Columbia, in the post– World War II “Golden Age” of North American prosperity and hope, in a time when transnational corporate greed has not yet bulldozed regional lives and local economies into the marketized present. Hartley and Rita Fawcett achieve “the Good Life,” a condition not available to post-war boomers and Xers, who might lead “a, but never the Good Life.” The two raise a family, create “a Business Empire” (as Hartley, a self-made man Endnotes 63

of his time who favours speaking in capital letters, puts it) and, even as globalized capital tightens its grip on local matters and pressures the marital and home front, the family holds on to happiness. Human Happiness is the most powerful BC memoir I’ve read. I learned that true human happiness is “glimpsed in flight,” and requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour,” that memory and history, a text and its context, can be expertly linked by an honest story, and that such a story is achieved when the writing is accurate and empathetic, and not compromised by sentimental “personal memory” foolishnesses, Gidean terror or high-minded analysis. The recounting in Fawcett’s book is true and intelligent, heartfelt and critical, balanced and beneficent in the face of an often painful tempestuous reality spiked with sparkling beauty. I was happy while reading Human Happiness and I plan to give it to all my siblings for Christmas.

rookie kaleidoscope

R

Mary Schendlinger

ookie Yearbook One, edited by Tavi Gevinson (Drawn & Quarterly) is a big, wild, jam-packed 352page salute to North American teenage girl culture, consisting of some 125 writings and an explosion of photos, collages, drawings and graphic miscellany that puts one in mind of costume jewellery.

Oh—and a page of stickers, a Crown of Love to snip out and wear, and a bright red vinyl 45 bound into the article “Life Skills 101” (Haggling, Scaling a Fence, Throwing a Punch, etc.). The content is drawn from the first nine issues of RookieMag.com, published during the 2011–12 school year, and RookieMag grew out of Gevinson’s first blog, Style Rookie,

64 Geist 87 Winter 2012

which she started at age eleven. The confessions, interviews, taxonomies, playlists, rants, advice to the lovelorn and the gawky shine out from a youthful space in which the worst thing that can happen is a breakup with a female friend. Teenage girls who like themselves—who knew? This is the home of “My First Feminist Action” and “Mod Makeup in Like Five Minutes” and “How to Bitchface” (Dip your head down and stare up from under the very tops of your eyelids), and the feature “Literally the Best Thing Ever,” which appears every month without qualification. Only the Drawn & Quarterly team could take an exuberant, visually rich periodical born and bred digital, and translate it into print and make it look as if it started there. “Wear Knee Socks with Everything!”

pioneer justice

I

Patty Osborne

n 1884 two teenage boys watched as another teenage boy—a Native named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback into Canada from the US to seek their own style of justice for the murder of one of their countrymen. It has since been proven that Louie Sam was not a murderer, and in The Lynching of Louie Sam, a novel for young adults by Elizabeth Stewart (Annick), we see how a few wrong assumptions, some questionable evidence and mob mentality can turn a group of family men into executioners. The narrator of the story is fifteen-year-old George Gillies, one of the teens who witnessed the execution; and since George’s family is friendly with their Native neighbours, his naive acceptance of Louie Sam’s guilt and then his gradual awakening to the possibility that the adults around him were wrong, show us how easy it can be to persuade people to

follow their leaders on the wrong path.

The story lags somewhat when George assumes a more grownup voice and fills us in on historical background that may or may not be necessary for our understanding of the story, but the rest of the writing is lively and interesting. The idea for this book came from “Stories of a Lynching” by Stephen Osborne, published in Geist 60.

literary lives

D

Michael Hayward

iana Athill’s life as a writer is almost an afterlife, having begun late in her career (of more than fifty years) as a respected literary editor at the British publishing house Andre Deutsch. In the introduction to Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (Persephone), she describes how the idea for her first short story hit her “one January morning in 1958.

Until that moment I had been handmaiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer.” Athill is known primarily for her memoirs, particularly Stet (Granta, 2000), which covers her years at Andre Deutsch. But her first publication was this collection of short stories, which appeared in 1962 under a different title.

Many of the stories in Midsummer Night in the Workhouse are re-imaginings of events lived or observed by Athill. For example, the central figure in the title story is clearly based on Athill: at a writers’ retreat centre somewhere in the British countryside, she recalls at one point that “when she had begun to write—stories at first, then a novel which found a publisher at once—she had felt like the ugly duckling bending his neck for the first time to his own reflection.” There is undeniable skill in the writing, but for me the stories feel somewhat dated now, half a century after their first appearance.

terribly human

O

Kelsea O’Connor

ther People We Married (Riverhead Books) is a collection of charming stories by Emma Straub about contemporary relationships and loneliness. The characters in these twelve stories are searching for something more out of their relationships: by hiring a pet psychic, inviting a gay best friend along on the family vacation, hanging out with a squirrel-shooting neighbour or just trying to figure out who their love belongs to (hint: it’s not their student, roommate or bird-watching instructor). Straub’s style is spare and graceful, allowing subtle feeling and wisdom to take centre stage. In each story, characters struggle to resolve the awkwardness that comes with loving someone too much or not enough, suggesting that the world is a place of kindhearted tyranny in which the best you can expect is disappointment.

artists in this issue 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. He is the author of five books, most recently Fame Us: Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame (Arsenal). He lives in Delta, BC, and at brianhowellphotography.com.

Huan Tran is an artist and illustrator whose work has appeared in Brick, Canadian Wildlife, and Macworld magazines. See more of his work at leakingfaucet.com.

Eric Uhlich, who designs and composes Geist, is an illustrator and graphic designer. He created the artwork for the graphic novel Green Skies and for several shorter comics. Visit him at oktober.ca.

Endnotes 65

w a l l off the shelf A zombie fights with his boyfriend and misses auditions in Corey Redekop’s Husk (ECW); a family trip to Disneyland goes wildly off course in Henry’s Game by David Elias (Hagios); and a young BC boy discovers his sexuality—and his high school teacher’s whip fetish—in George Bowering’s Pinboy (Cormorant). Bongo the moose adopts a lonely man in Doppler by Erlend Loe (Anansi); shaman magic battles arrogant humanity in Firewalk

by Katherine Bitney (Turnstone). A notary, a seer, a fabricant (clone), a vanity publisher and others occupy a relay of stories in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Vintage Canada); on the prairies a stubborn man challenges the Norse gods in Thunder Road by Chadwick Ginther (Turnstone). Jamie Sharpe officiates an arranged marriage between man and beast in Animal Husbandry Today (ECW); art confronts Darwinian science in Notebook M by Gillian Savigny (Insomniac); and smart teenagers take on popular culture in Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Yearbook One (Drawn & Quarterly).

Circus freaks call on supermodels to become beautiful in Bradley Somer’s Imperfections (Nightwood) and the Prime Minister of Canada invokes religious freedom to bring back the death penalty in To the Stoning: Leftist Erotica by Patrik Sampler, (Landfill Publishing). Stalin lives happily in a seminary and Hitler dreams of being an architect in Anton Piatigorsky’s The Iron Bridge (Goose Lane); the twenty-first-century man tries to eat the world in Robert Colman’s Little Empires (Quattro); a guilty hospice worker deals with her trivial problems alongside the dying in Blood Secrets by Nadine McInnis (Biblioasis). Learn to estimate how much urine there is in a public pool, in Guesstimation 2.0: Solving Today’s Problems on the Back of

66 Geist 87 Winter 2012

o f

t y p e

a Napkin by Lawrence Weinstein (Princeton); listen in as Joni Mitchell recalls heartbreak and adoption in Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell by Katherine Monk (Greystone).

A young tomboy befriends a surly, drunken neighbour in Mister Roger and Me by Marie-Renée Lavoie, translated by Wayne Grady (Anansi); the history and rise of all things cute— Hello Kitty, Katy Perry, etc.—are explored in Hello, Cutie! Adventures in Cute Culture by Pamela Klaffke (Arsenal Pulp). Insomnia frustrates Sleeping Beauty in JonArno Lawson’s Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box, with papercuts by Alec Dempster (Porcupine’s Quill); bored doctors play tic-tac-toe in C.P. Boyko’s Psychology and Other Stories (Biblioasis); and a son starts a book club with his dying mother in The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe (Knopf Canada). An emotional ex-soldier takes a job as a coroner in Confined Space by Deryn Collier (Simon & Schuster); polite table talk turns political in Dinner with Catherine the Great by Vladimir Azarov (Exile); a feminist ballerina rethinks her chosen career in Deirdre Kelly’s Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection (Greystone). Congratulations to the 2012 ReLit award winners! A horny Christian housewife is cockblocked by her home-schooled children in Greg Kearney’s Pretty (Exile); mental-hospital patients merge smooth jazz with the Bible in Patrick Friesen’s jumping in the asylum (Quattro); nerds can finally order unicorns online in Monoceros by Suzette Mayr (Coach House).

noted elsewhere Quill & Quire calls Chris Gudgeon’s Song of Kosovo (Goose Lane) a novel that “rages against corrupt leaders and global power plays.” ABC BookWorld says it is “a sly, frequently

amusing and penetrating distillation of estrangement and social chaos,” which may “come as a surprise for anyone who might have underestimated him.” The Georgia Straight says of The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon (Random House Canada): “Sexy equestrians aside, there are no clichés in this coming-of-age fable.” The National Post says “Lyon’s managed to animate a fictional Aristotle who was both humanly believable and a pleasure to be around,” and the Star gives credit to Lyon “for trying to flesh out a woman who does seem viable.”

One Globe and Mail reviewer “kicked myself for not having come up with the same imagery” produced by Marcello Di Cintio in Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Goose Lane). The Edmonton Journal notes: “it’s nowhere near objective, and never pretends to be,” and Margaret MacMillan says Walls contains “a lovely sense of humour” and “a fascination with the human race.” J. Jill Robinson’s debut novel More in Anger (Thomas Allen) “makes Anna Karenina seem uplifting,” according to the Star. From the National Post: “Even two world wars don’t seem to mean much to these characters.” The Globe and Mail says that “Character and the overt ways in which ridicule and mistreatment shape the psyche are where Robinson overwhelmingly succeeds.” Congratulations to Alice Petersen, nominated for the 2012 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize for All the Voices Cry (Biblioasis), a collection of short stories. The Winnipeg Review writes that Petersen “brings to life each and every short story with her fresh prose style” and that the work is “above all a collection of decisions.” Quill & Quire writes that Petersen “turns what turns what might have been a mournful lamentation into a beautiful tribute to human fragility.”

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #87 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 Mom, ice won’t take out that red stain, at least in theory 4 Joe always took fright at the bullfight (2) 8 “I thought Nick and his family had been dispatched some time ago,” she demurred 11 In short, Vlad’s young friends are the majority 13 If one of those things is ready for the barbecue, then shake up the Coke 14 In short, we saw that Harry and Ron are good friends of the girl who had dental parents 15 Even though it needles me, she can’t stop wearing that black dress 17 When he’s not playing with Jerry or Arnie, Kevin watches numbers on the hill (abbrev) 19 The tail is confusing but allow our people to discuss this and bring it out into the open (abbrev) 21 Sounds like Pete wanted us to change direction and follow a bird 22 The non-fiction writer sits easy as she tries not to get confused 23 Last night he tossed and turned and got no kip because his radical friends were calling his name 25 You’re making a mistake by putting that strange ringer on your cellphone 27 Sounds like the Chair read about cars in a little chick mag (2) 31 The fourth red one goes scouting around (abbrev) 32 Well bowl me over, they’ve got balls but they’re not the CFL (abbrev) 33 I rang because you were sanding that way 35 The group with firearms often gets together in West India 36 Why are you whining about the overturned boat? Let’s just have a drink!

37 Excellent! That’s perfect 40 Zero, zip, nada 41 For heaven’s sake, Flo, let go of that grudge and just feed the baby 42 Karl and Fred made the class of inmates work hard to come up with that report 45 Oh God, Ma, if you forgot the code again they’ll never believe us!

46 Werner wanted you to change your mind but since you were in Halifax you served your regular sentence 47 The point is that 180 is too much and 90 is too little (abbrev) 48 The real patriot is classier than that wage slave

1

2

8

3

9

4

5

10

11

6

7

12

13 14

15 19

16

17

20

18

21

22

23

24

25 27

28

29

30 33

26

31

32

34

35

36 37

38

39

40

41

42

45 47

43

44

46 48

DOWN 1 Oh brother, I don’t belong at this party!

2 In spring, the helmsman collected his dimes and took the penguins for a long walk 3 The duke organized a party in the US and served sandwiches 4 In China that little squirt will attack the happiest sympathizers (2) 5 What did Lillian say is the nickname of that chanter who became a knight?

6 After they passed through the mountains with the officer, they lined up 7 To avoid confusion, please note my original promise was borrowed 9 She fawned over his first sound 10 They got lost but they finished the relay in good time 12 He was cold and unconscious when they opened the closet 15 Every morning he receives, possesses and ingests two coffees 16 I get confused when extending the rules imperils developers 17 It’ll be delicious but you’ll have to duck when the English start talking about China 18 He mounted and then took his unbroken saw to the football game 20 In the Balkans, Marshal got out of line 21 There’s nothing old or monarchic about this rag (abbrev) 24 Ron, I’ll smooth things over and get the club straightened out 26 Freedom was the union’s last song 27 When he sees nerds, I’m thinking again about mystifying events long past 28 We grieved when he deviated and went out of line

29 The great helmsman and his crew made a single jump (2) 30 It’s no secret that Mom’s land was policed (abbrev) 31 After lunch the idol smoked at the show 34 To begin with, Roland and Napoleon go shopping and then do it themselves 38 Can you do us a favour and play these pieces in groups of twos?

39 There was a bang when the flyer sent the projectile to ground (abbrev) 42 When we played cards at 17, our leader told us that the rules were secret 43 In North America, did we agree on unrestrained winds or unfettered greed? (abbrev) 44 Après the runner reached the bottom, she partied There was no winner for Puzzle 86.

S E P T E M B E R L U N C H

P E L L I A R R A R U S S L E T E S P I N I L O O A T A N E C E S S B A D I B B R C L Y M P H E O O O M E W O

N G B Y R O M E O W T B A N L I S E L E M I D I S U N H O M S A T T S I M B E R K

I N D E O S C A U N C L E A T T A F E A R O T E E R O O I R A N C D B A E X A M

R A T I O N A L N U M B E R S

Puzzle 67

c a u g h t

m a p p i n g

Glory Days The Nostalgic Map of Canada

by Melissa Edwards

Goodchild Lake Teardrop Lake

Trophy Lake

Reflection Lake

Grandmother’s Bay Livelong

modified Geistonic projection

Misty Island

Camp Farewell

Best Point

Point Separation

Token Lake

Paradise Valley

Yesterday Lake

Youth Creek

Relic Creek

Mount Joy

Backsight Hill

Forlorn Gorge

Solace

Bluesky

Happy Valley

Looking Back Lake

Lac de la Maturation

Old Friend Creek

Lac Sansregret Photograph Point

Golden Days

Change Islands Comfort Cove

Forgetmenot Pass

Heart’s Desire

Saturday Night Lake

Rivière-la-Madeleine Lac de la Nostalgie

Throwback Mountain

Lac Proust Homeville

Sepia Mountain

Christmas Island Garden of Eden

Lac le Jeune

Longs Creek Melancholy Mountain

Memory Island

Utopia

Old Glory Mountain

Monument

Rosebud

Mourners Delight

Lac Yore

Legend Romance Archive Forget

Halcyon Cove Ideal Old Tuxedo

Blue Sans Souci

History Lake Filter Creek

Lac de l’Heritage

Lac Once Go Home Memoir Lake Lac de l’Infaillible Lake Souvenir

Memento Island Summers Oldmans Pocket

Lac Antique

Backward Lake

Missing Lake

For more geist maps and to purchase the Geist Atlas of Canada, visit geist.com.

68 Geist 87 Winter 2012

GEIST WINTER 2012 $6.95