Geist 88 - Spring 2013 by Geist Magazine

the 3rd annual

Geist Erasure Poetry Contest

Winning entries will be published in Geist. Winners and honourable mentions will be posted at geist.com. Big cash prizes and the coveted Geist Erasure Poetry Trophy!

your Name

Deadline August 1, 2013 Details at geist.com/erasure

GEIST Fact + Fiction ď ? North of America

GEIST

Volume 24

· Number 88 · Spring 2013

features Glenn Lewis: The Artist As a Fraud David Wisdom & Stephen Osborne 37

Flakey Rrose Hip, a performance artist whose media include flour, sand, kim chi, Rice Krispies and shark fin swimming caps

Encounters that would never happen in a Drifters song

Life After Virginity Connie Kuhns 48

Poems for Maria Chekhov, keeper of the archive

Chekhov’s Sister Susan Paddon 52

departments Michal Kozlowski 4 In Camera Letters 5 Eve Corbel 21 True Funnies Geist staff & correspondents 58 Endnotes, Off the Shelf, Noted Elsewhere Meandricus 63 Puzzle Melissa Edwards 64 Caught Mapping

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. proofreader : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. associate editor : C.E. Coughlan. interns : Armita Farah Avar, Jesmine Cham, Chris Gal-lang, Billie-Jo Jenner, Meaghan McAneeley, Jennesia Pedri. accountant: Mindy Abramowitz cga. advertising & marketing: Clevers Media. web architects : Metro Publisher. distribution : Magazines Canada.

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

fact + fiction since 1990

notes & dispatches

Stephen Osborne 9 Everything Is Perfect Robert Everett-Green 12 Licorice Roots Marilyn Bowering 15 Hotel Ven Begamudré 16 Memory Game Veronica Gaylie 19 Roadblocks

findings 25 Looking for a Loving Home Welfare Swabbing the Deck Car Whatever Canadian Apology Mr Mustard boarding house poetry Queen Street Parkade Geist Alerts and more

columns

Stephen Henighan Alberto Manguel Daniel Francis

22 54 56

Afterlife of Culture City of Words National Dreams

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

cover image: Arnaud Maggs Arnaud Maggs (1926–2012) was a Canadian conceptual artist and photographer. This image, entitled Pierrot the Photographer, is part of a series called After Nadar, which exhibited at the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto in 2012. Maggs’s work has been shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, among many others. Maggs was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts in 2006 and the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2012. See page 4.

i n

c a m e r a

After Maggs

rnaud Maggs was born in Montreal in 1926. As a young man, he studied typography and drawing and worked as a graphic designer in Montreal, New York, Santa Fe, Milan and Toronto. He took up photography in the mid-1960s and became a portrait and fashion photographer, during which time he was commissioned to photograph Canadian business people, politicians and artists. Within ten years Maggs gave up on his business, sold his Hasselblad camera and went on to study drawing at the Ontario College of Arts in Toronto. In the mid-1970s, at the age of forty-seven, Maggs turned away from commercial design and dedicated himself to becoming a full-time artist. He had to purchase a new camera, and his first major work, entitled 64 Portraits, featured frontal and profile portraits of thirtytwo men and women, naked (at least from the shoulders up), against a neutral background. The photographs were presented in a grid. Over the next several decades, Maggs produced similar work—portraits in profile and frontal views against neutral backgrounds, presented

in grid formation. One of his most prominent works is a series entitled 48 Views, for which he photographed Canadian artists, each forty-eight times. Maggs produced some eight thousand images for 48 Views. By the 1990s, Maggs was focussing his attention on photographing objects: The Complete Prestige 12" Jazz Catalogue, a series of photographs of numbers identifying recordings from the Prestige label; French envelopes from flea markets with black X marks on them (the X signified that the letter was announcing the death of a loved one); Eugene Atget’s address book. The photographs above, Pierrot Turning, and the photograph on the cover of this issue, Pierrot the Photographer, are from After Nadar, a series referring to work by Nadar, the nineteenth-century French photographer and caricaturist. In this series, Maggs cast himself as the character and posed as Pierrot the Archivist, Pierrot the Photographer, Pierrot the Painter and others. The poses refer to Maggs’s own interests, and they represent his most autobiographical work. Arnaud Maggs died in November 2012. —Michal Kozlowski

r e a d e r s

GEIST

w r i t e

LETTERS were it the subjunctive

loved Stephen Osborne’s dispatch “Dancing with Dynamite” (Geist 87) for its explorations of the Vancouver SkyTrain. I’m not a Vancouverite, although I was born there and spent my early teen years fitfully at General Brock School. But I am rather fond of “elevated” rail lines—I lived in Manhattan for many years and often rode on the Third Avenue El and the railway lines entering the city from the north on their way to Grand Central Station. The other perfectly enchanting part of Osborne’s article was his disquisition on the subjunctive. I am a great fan of the subjunctive, and finding it double-danced here was a delight. In one of my other lives I am learning to speak Spanish, which has allowed me a look at the wonderful inventiveness of our species in considering the need for the subjunctive mood and using its peculiar structure to indicate, as he says, “that which can be imagined, wished for or thought possible.” The thing that has intrigued me about the subjunctive, in Spanish and in English—and, I believe, in other languages—is the subtle use of the deliberately incorrect form of the verb. (In Spanish, one

uses the ending of an er verb with an ar verb and vice versa.) And so we indicate to each other that there is something wrong with what we are saying, a linguistic wink we must pay attention to. I think this is a brilliant solution to a linguistic subtlety. I wish I could congratulate the entire human species for figuring out this little game. I regret the disappearance of the subjunctive from our language, and appreciate Osborne’s observations. —Laurie Lewis, Kingston ON Read “Dancing with Dynamite” and other works by Stephen Osborne at geist.com.

n “Dancing with Dynamite,” Osborne omits mention of the 1894 bombing of the Café Terminus in Paris, where a student, the anarchist Émile Henry, threw a homemade bomb into the “petit bourgeois” crowd at the café, saying, “This pretentious and stupid crowd of employees earning from 300 to 500 francs a month, more reactionary than their bourgeois masters…” And that brings to mind an incident about ten years ago, when the Broadway SkyTrain station in Vancouver was shut down for hours while the authorities picked up someone along a three-block stretch of tracks. —Bob Smith, Burnaby BC

I Mark Petrie, winner of the Second Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, poses with the sought-after trophy filled with erasers.

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

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.

everything is optional

loved Marilyn Gear Pilling’s poem “Billy Collins Interviewed Onstage at Chautauqua” (No. 87). Yes—as Collins said, poetry is optional. Art is optional. Participation is optional. What a freeing thought. A poet’s audience is looking for pleasure, and they don’t care about the poet’s thoughts and feelings. How true. Caring is also optional. Being familiar with Collins’s Letters 5

www.geist.com

work, I’ve received a lot of pleasure from this poetry. —Kent Suss, Winnipeg

read Pilling’s brilliant and hilarious poem at the end of a long, ambiguous day and went to bed happy. I reread it during a sad day and laughed out loud. —Anne Miles, Gibsons BC

t upsets me that someone who does not know Billy Collins is allowed to write a negative piece on him. Even sadder, you published it. —D.N. Simmers, Delta BC Read “Billy Collins Interviewed” at geist.com.

scanning the obits

s Thad McIlroy says in “Death and the Economist” (Endnotes, No. 87), obituary writing is becoming a lost art, especially in major newspapers. You have to scan established

6 Geist 88 Spring 2013

papers around the world to find a good one. —Rob G. McEwen, Port Dover ON Read “Death and the Economist” and other essays and stories by Thad McIlroy at geist.com.

new world publisher

epitaph for elberg

n “New World Publisher,” a profile of the Tseshaht elder Randy Fred, Michal Kozlowski mentions Randy’s award for distinguished service to publishing. My wife and I were two of the ninety people who attended the dinner at which the award was

any thanks to Alberto Manguel for “Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam” (No. 87). His introduction to Elberg, a luminary of Yiddish literature, is invaluable to all interested in modern Jewish identity. I am fascinated by how it has survived so many great losses, especially with respect to cultural memory. May we never forget the voices that crafted our languages, histories and minds into a solidarity of heart and toward greater freedoms in life. L’Chaim! —Matt Hanson, Calgary Read “Yehuda Elberg” and other essays by Alberto Manguel at geist.com.

Thanks to Frank Beltrano, who placed second in the Second Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, for the Geist display at Chapters in London, Ontario.

presented, and it was a privilege and an inspiration to hear Randy’s speech. —William Milliken, Nanaimo BC Read “New World Publisher” at geist.com.

what dreams may come

oved the excerpt of Anakana Schofield’s book Malarky (Findings, No. 85). I can imagine the thoughts and dreams of the widow in the story, not all of them bad. The poor counsellor, Grief, apparently doesn’t know what’s coming at her. —Katherine Krige, London ON Read “Malarky” at geist.com.

skipped tracks

uch as we appreciate the Geist maps in general, and the National Playlist Map in particular (No. 84), we were shocked, not to mention appalled, when we noticed that the following Canadian songs had been left off the map:

• “Going Back to Rustico,” Lennie Gallant, • “When the Plane Touches Down in Deer Lake,” Roy Payne, • “The Blue Canadian Rockies,” Wilf Carter. —R & B Ellenwood, Toronto

write to geist

Thoughts, opinions, comments and queries are welcome and encouraged, and should be sent to: G

The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Snailmail: #210 – 111 W. Hastings St. Vancouver, BC, V6B 1H4 Letters may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist map suitable for framing.

Letters 7

zeit GEIST The

The Zeitgeist is Geistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s free e-newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox every week. Sign up at geist.com.

weekly advice contest updates exclusive deals photo essays poetry fiction geist news reviews

GEIST tablet edition

NOTES & DISPATCHES f r o m

t h e

n e w

w o r l d

Everything Is Perfect stephen osborne

In 1946, a young bride writes home about her month-long sea voyage to her new home on Baffin Island

ate last year I received an email from Pangnirtung on Baffin Island with news that brought strongly to mind an image of my mother as I had never known her, but as I had tried many times to imagine her: in Winnipeg, at the end of World War II, when she was a tap dancer with the Victory Dance Troupe and a clerk at the Manitoba Wheat Pool. Three weeks after her twenty-first birthday she married a medical student interning at Winnipeg General Hospital; they moved into a one-room apartment nearby and shared an extension cord with fellow interns rooming down the hall, who were often drunk on grain alcohol acquired from the hospital dispensary. Nine months later, in August 1946, she flew north with her husband to the port of Churchill on the coast of Hudson’s Bay to

board the supply ship Nascopie, on the first leg of a journey across Hudson Bay and around Baffin Island to the mouth of the Northwest Passage, and eventually to Pangnirtung, where her husband had been assigned a post at St. Luke’s Hospital. Pangnirtung, my mother once told me, was as far away from her parents, especially her mother, as she could hope to imagine; “it was like the other side of the moon,” she said. She filled out her husband’s application form and sent it to Ottawa herself. “A housewife can take her skills anywhere in the world,” she said. On her first day in Churchill she began keeping a diary in a clear hand trained in the MacLean’s handwriting method; in the next few years the diary grew into a series of notebooks in black covers that she bundled into packages

and shipped home at intervals to her domineering parents, who would have no other way to communicate with her except by leaving messages on the Northern Messenger, the shortwave service of the CBC. “The plane ride was really perfect,” says the diary on the first page, but Churchill is disappointing: “rocky and irregular and altogether quite depressing (we saw it all in half an hour!).” Most of the diary is upbeat (“more darned fun!” is a frequent aside) and tends to conceal the introspection or doubt that a young person might wish to conceal from domineering parents. The contingent of passengers in Churchill waiting for the Nascopie to sail numbered more than forty; they were assigned bunk beds in separate men’s and women’s quarters, and included “two doctors, a dentist, Notes & Dispatches 9

a Film Board Man, a Mountie, lots of Americans, H.B.C. men, a pair of newly-weds, a couple of nurses” and an Inuit baby boy being returned to his family in Chesterfield Inlet. Within hours of arriving in Churchill, my mother and an equally young nurse assigned to the hospital in Pangnirtung had taken charge of him, “feeding the baby and changing his pants!” Soon they are buying baby clothes, bathing and powdering the baby, and feeding him “pablum and soup and vegetables, orange juice and vitamins. I don’t see how that kid could have been in a hospital,” she tells the diary. “He was practically starved! Now he’s really thriving, and he’s so darned cute—we’re getting quite attached to him.” On their first night in Churchill the diary records a visit to the “local cinema” in a Jeep belonging to “a sergeant-major Macklen” to see A Close Call for Boston Blackie, one of a series of popular movies based on the character of a handsome jewel thief turned detective. “The reel only broke twice, so all in all it wasn’t bad, but the ride in the Jeep was freezing.” When they got back to the Nascopie they were met by an American sailor whose forehead had been torn open in an accident; he was bleeding heavily and his face was covered in blood. (“I never in my life saw such a gash. His whole eyebrow seemed to be gone.”) He had been sent over by his own ship’s doctor, who was too drunk (“stewed” says the diary) to treat him. The Nascopie doctor had disappeared with the keys to the medical cabinet, so my mother was assigned to the galley to boil up a darning needle and some black silk thread; and then her husband, with the aid of the nurse, pulled the sailor’s brow together and put in a dozen stitches. At some point the Nascopie doctor appeared and tried to intervene, but as the diary reports, “he was so drunk that he had to be thrown out! What a performance! What a day!” Five days later 10 Geist 88 Spring 2013

the Nascopie, fully loaded with coal and supplies for a dozen outposts, and overloaded with passengers, set out to sea.

he voyage to Pangnirtung took thirty-one days; at Chesterfield Inlet the Nascopie sat at anchor for several days in a pattern that would become routine: the doctors and the dentist went ashore to examine the inhabitants for TB, and to administer vaccines and perform other medical and dental work. Here, the diary notes, “we saw our first real Eskimos. Gosh, it’s almost unbelievable. They are exactly like the pictures in the geography books.” The children are rosy-cheeked, mothers carry their infants in the deep hoods of their parkas. The water along the shore is “livid” with the blood of three whales that were taken that morning and butchered at low tide. Then it was back to the vast rolling sea, where Henry Hudson perished with his teenaged son in 1610: “We stayed up on deck quite late just talking about the wonder of it all, to be so far out on the water, and no land on either side!” Organ-playing, singsongs, bridge tournaments and frequent parties provided diversion in the evenings, with dancing to jazz records (“another swell time!”); on Sundays there were hymn sings in the dining room: “I asked for ‘Take me to the lord in prayer,’ and even felt a bit homesick for our little services at Gull Lake.” Most of the passengers eventually fell sick from the terrific unending roll of the ship. My mother remained strapped in her bunk for three days, as noted in the diary by rare strong language: “another damned dawn!”; her husband never succumbed. She recovered and ironed five shirts in an afternoon (“good practise!”) for her husband and the other doctors. In Davis Bay she saw an iceberg up close and wrote that it “resembles an airplane crashed into the sea.” They crossed the Arctic Circle

and entered the icefields of Baffin Bay, riding the foredeck for hours at a time, rising and falling, crashing slowly through the ice. At Fort Ross on Somerset Island, seventeen husky dogs were taken on and lashed to the deck (“they are already raising Cain”); an Italian cook named Tiny—“an all round good fellow,” says the diary—who weighed 250 pounds and “speaks Inuktitut with an Italian accent,” guided my mother and a few other passengers up the mountain to the cairn erected by Leopold McClintock in 1859 during his search for the Franklin expedition. My mother added a note to a bottle inside the cairn: “we the undersigned, passengers on the Nascopie, passed here on September 10th, 1946” and signed it with her new married name (the note is now in the Archives of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife). “From where I was standing,” she said many years later, with fresh excitement, “I could see right into the Northwest Passage.” By now she was studying the Eskimo Phrasebook every day, but none of the natives could understand a word she said. When Pangnirtung was ten days away, my mother and her husband were assigned a cabin to themselves: “we’re almost overcome!” says the diary. The sea was placid and the evenings glowed in the afterlight of the midnight sun. Volume One of the diary concludes in a rush after the arrival in Pangnirtung, in time to send it back with the Nascopie, which lingered in the fiord for a few days before disappearing early one morning. Now the doctor’s house is seen for the first time: “the cutest little place I’ve ever seen!” and described in detail (kerosene lamps; checkerboard curtains; a fold-up bathtub); the hospital staff, the church family, the HBC family, the Mounties—all are introduced. The family of Eetowanga and his wife Newkinga, hired to support my mother and her husband, remain at this stage on the periphery of her field

of vision. “Everything is perfect and I know we’ll be very happy,” says the diary at the bottom of the last page.

appiness, and its promise of lasting ever after, comes at the end of stories we tell ourselves and stories we tell to children. The day the Nascopie left Pangnirtung Fiord with her diary, my mother looked out her new kitchen window and saw nothing where the once-so-solid ship had been. Years later she said that she felt then that her world, which had been filled with motion, had come to a halt. In the second volume of the diary, she becomes practised at cooking a hundred doughnuts at a time, for her husband to take on long komatik journeys over the ice, guided by Eetowanga, who with Newkinga and their family begin to occupy the centre of her new world; on Valentine’s Day she saw sunlight for the first time “reflecting out on the fiord,” and she walked with her husband over the ice until they could feel the sun on their faces. That week the diary reports that one of the nurses has married one of the Mounties; a week later, the Mountie is to be courtmartialled (for getting married) and the nurse is in the hospital with pleurisy. The entry for March 11 is written “in an igloo in the middle of no-man’s land” after a long day crossing the ice, running, falling, climbing and riding the komatik behind the huskies spread out at the ends of their long traces. In further entries, Eetowanga guides the dogs with a long whip and drags the equipage with rope on the downhill; her husband helps build the snow houses that they sleep in each night; they are on the trail for nine days. On the return journey the dogs plunge over a rise down onto a frozen waterfall; the two men manage to jump clear, but my mother is thrown over and slides down the waterfall on her stomach. At the bottom, “we all sat there laughing our heads off—at what, I can’t imagine.” On the ninth day, in

a “howling storm,” she is picked up by the wind and blown onto the ice. Once home again, she confides to the diary in a PS: “I’m three months pregnant, but Eetowanga didn’t know that!” This is the first mention of her pregnancy. In June my mother and her husband take in a nine-pound Inuit boy named Jessie, who has been in the hospital and whose family will come in for him after freeze-up; the diary contains a full account of the fostering. At the same time, the nurse with pleurisy goes into labour, which lasts five days; the baby is born dead and the diary notes that “it makes me apprehensive about my own.” The mother requires blood transfusions and stays for several weeks in the hospital. Years later my mother tells me that this was the one time she saw her husband weep. On July 14 she discovers that her own baby has turned over “and was now in breech—that is, buttocks first and legs outstretched.” Line drawings in the margin illustrate the problem. A week later the Nascopie, on its return voyage, hits a reef in Hudson’s Bay and sinks. A year’s supplies gone to the bottom, but the mail is saved. One of the nurses has a vision of an American aircraft carrier coming to rescue them. The news from Pangnirtung that I received late last year was that Rosie Veevee, step-daughter of Eetowanga and Newkinga, had just died. She was seventy-nine years old. At the age of fourteen, in 1947, Rosie appears in my mother’s diary for the first time on the day that she began caring for my mother’s new baby for a few hours a day. He was a boy, born right side up. Rosie and my mother became good friends, and their friendship, over a great distance of culture and language, lasted a lifetime. Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. “Dancing with Dynamite” (No. 87) and other dispatches can be read at geist.com. See his Endnote in this issue on “A Close Call for Boston Blackie”, the film mentioned in this piece, on page 58. Notes & Dispatches 11

c o n f e c t i o n s

Licorice Roots robert everett-green

An acquired taste for serious licorice takes a writer back in time and halfway around the world

n Banff one summer a few years ago, I opened a book of stories by Colette and read the following: “I had a sudden desire to buy those squares of licorice called ‘Pontefract cakes,’ whose flavor is so full-bodied that, after them, nothing seems eatable.” Colette in life was a famous gourmand, so it seemed odd that the semi-fictive self in her story, “The Rainy Moon,” would crave sweets that, as she said, “give such a vile taste to fresh eggs, red wine and every other comestible.” What was the appeal? And why did these vile, desirable treats have such an odd name? There was (and is still) an oldstyle sweet shop in Banff called Welch’s Chocolate Shop, that had a long counter covered with big glass jars of soft and hard candies, sold by weight. I went in with just a touch of anticipatory swagger, and asked the woman behind the counter if she had ever heard of Pontefract cakes. “How 12 Geist 88 Spring 2013

much do you want?” she said without hesitation. I left with 100 grams. The only serious licorice I had ever tasted until then—I’m not counting Twizzlers or Licorice Allsorts—was a Dutch kind that was dry, salty and bitter. But these Pontefract cakes, named after the north English town where they are made, were glossy, rich and sweet. They looked like thick coins, or wax letter-seals, with a lattice-like stamp on the face. When my 100 grams were gone, I bought more, and over the course of the summer I too became addicted to Pontefract cakes. Much later, when I was back in Toronto and my addiction was in remission, a friend gave me a black kitten that I named Pontefract. When my mother heard the kitten’s name, she said: “Did I ever tell you that your grandfather was born in Pontefract?” My grandparents’ fractious marriage blew apart when my mother was five years old, and she had little or no

contact with her father or his Pontefract tribe after that. But after she died in 2007, I found in her papers a file of tidbits about her father’s side of the family. The file included a wedding photograph taken in 1910, in which my grandfather John Hamlett, who was then twenty, stands next to the bride, his thirty-two-year-old aunt Cissie. They share the same foxlike facial structure, and both give the impression that something is being held in under pressure of an important moment. The groom, Joseph Black, wears a placid look, a starched white collar and a double-breasted coat that magnifies his blacksmith’s physique. Next to him is Cissie’s brother Thomas, a good-looking serious priest, nicknamed Towser at school and known to his Benedictine order as Dom Denis. Seated in front of Towser is John’s sister Gertrude, in a huge Edwardian hat with flowers heaped around the brim; she holds a bouquet of flowers as big as the bride’s. Five years after this photo was taken, Gertrude got married in the same church, in Cissie’s wedding dress.

icorice is a tall perennial plant whose extensive deep roots have been dug up and used as folk medicines for hundreds of years. It was first planted in the sandy loam around the Yorkshire town of Pontefract sometime before 1600, and distilled into curative extracts by monks. Medicinal licorice became so popular that in 1701 the municipality banned sales of licorice root outside the town in order to limit competition. In 1760, a chemist named George Dunhill mixed sugar and a gummy binding agent with licorice extract, and developed the soft coin-like lozenges that transformed licorice from medicine into candy. Pontefract cakes were a cottage industry till Dunhill’s competitor Wilkinson opened the first factory in 1888; by 1900, there were

at least twenty-eight local manufacturers. In Yorkshire, there were two main career paths for the working class. “The lads worked at the pit and the lasses in the factory,” as one woman says in an oral history of the licorice works. The stuff the lasses worked with was called “Spanish,” perhaps because it was thought the licorice plant originated in Spain. John Hamlett’s family was originally from County Kerry in Ireland. His grandfather John Hamlett was a soldier who moved to Yorkshire and died there at age forty-two. His father, also named John, was a colour sergeant at Pontefract who died in barracks in his early thirties. His mother Joanna, a midwife, was twenty-two at the time; John was four months old, and his sister Gertrude was three years old. My grandmother Freda told me that Joanna, her mother-in-law, was “real Sinn Fein Irish”—not a compliment in England—even though Joanna was born in Yorkshire. She sometimes stayed with her midwifery clients for up to six months if they were well off. I don’t know whether she was allowed to keep her children with her on these extended visits. The most laborious part of making Pontefract cakes by hand was caking and stamping. The worker would grease a large tray, roll out the boiled licorice paste, cut it into pieces, lay the pieces out (about 240 per tray), flatten them with the palm into cakes, stamp each cake, remove the tray to a drying rack, grease another tray— and so on, a dozen trays an hour, eight hours a day. Traditionally, Pontefract cakes were stamped with an image of Pontefract castle, the ominous fortress where in 1400 the deposed Richard II “was hack’d to death,” as Shakespeare put it in The Tragedy of Richard the Third, in which the town is called by its Elizabethan name, Pomfret. Oliver Cromwell called it “one of the strongest inland garrisons in the kingdom.” It was besieged several times during Notes & Dispatches 13

the Civil Wars, and by the time hostilities ended, it was a ruin. John Hamlett became a soldier, briefly, during World War I and was recuperating in a military hospital when he met my grandmother Freda. They married, had four children, and made each other miserable. Freda told me her husband was “pathologically jealous.” When they split up in the mid-1930s their four children, my mother among them, were scattered in all directions. John earned his living as a postman and mail-sorter, and had some musical talent—my mother recalled seeing him play a Wurlitzer in a cinema. He died—of drink, according to Freda—in 1959. John Hamlett’s sister Gertrude, of the huge flowered hat, also married unhappily. She went to the altar late, by the standards of the time; at age twenty-eight, she married a thirty-eight-year-old printer and soldier named Trevor. Thirteen months after his wedding, on July 1, 1916, he died with 20,000 other British soldiers during the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Gertrude had no children, never remarried, and spent her life working in children’s foster homes. The shock of her sudden widowhood, and the background trauma of the war’s butchery, reverberated in the names of the next generation. My mother’s middle name was Gertrude, and her youngest brother is called Trevor.

n 1953, John Betjeman rhapsodized the fields of Pontefract in a famous poem that begins: “In the licorice fields at Pontefract / My love and I did meet / And many a burdened licorice bush / Was blooming round our feet.” But the licorice works were already in decline, and the last licorice roots were ripped from the soil 14 Geist 88 Spring 2013

a decade later. The global market in chocolate had undermined the local integrated business of licorice candies, which now survives only on extracts of licorice root imported from southern Europe. Over 90 percent of the world licorice crop is used today to flavour tobacco.

n 2002, my mother and I and two of my sisters travelled from London to Yorkshire by train to meet a few dozen descendants of Cissie and Joseph, the couple in the wedding photo. Cissie’s grand son Johnny, who worked at the mines but not in them, picked us up at the station in a low-slung sports car. The gathering at his house a few miles from Pontefract felt more like a reunion than a first meeting. Our Yorkshire relatives’ sense of humour turned out to be eerily similar to whatever we had been nurturing in the colonies. We drank and laughed in Johnny’s backyard till it was too dark to see faces. In Pontefract, we tried to find the house where my grandfather was born, but though my mother could remember the street, the number in her mind didn’t match any on the nearly identical cottage-style houses. We took pictures of each other standing in the empty road, looking confused. Pontefract Barracks, the castellated nineteenth-century garrison where my great-grandfather the colour sergeant paraded and died, still stands, but the last soldiers departed in 1963, and the brick building is now filled with commercial offices. I could find only two companies that still make Pontefract cakes. We went to the licorice works of what used to be Dunhill’s Confectionary, housed in a brightly painted old building at the bottom of a steep curved road. Dunhill’s was bought

p o e t r y

Hotel marilyn bowering That was the year of hotel rooms Bad judgment, some salesman with a model contract In Prince George And I was all about irony: a mini-skirt Hair like a veil, but my home was the library My home was the library, not a cheap bedspread and Some guy with a moustache saying, My wife can’t understand me I had only been curious In the dark, the yellow bedside lamp Was damp and furious: my mini-skirt fell off And the Vietnam vet in the next room cried: Don’t worry We don’t carve up chicks Personally God said—it was God’s voice on the radio—in the guise of My school friend, Tom—a DJ— God or Tom—said on the radio: Please call So I leapt up, all reasonable and not confrontational Not at all stoned, and I phoned Dear Tom, wherever you are I’m telling you now Then I ran down the hall. The policeman who stopped Me driving said I’d been going too slow. Oh There was also the year of the knife, the year of the gun The year when God’s voice whispered, again and again What are you trying to do Kill yourself? But this was the year of hotel rooms When I looked into corners nobody swept and felt Their pull; when I wore my hair like a pall And didn’t know how lovely I was at all Marilyn Bowering is an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, the Orange Prize and the Prix Italia. She lives in Sooke, BC.

out in 1994 by the German candy firm Haribo, which in German fashion tightened up standards and closed the automated factory to visitors. A middle-aged security guard said from his side of a grilled window that there was nothing I was allowed to see but

the tiny room in which he was sitting. But when he heard I had come all the way from Canada, he went away and came back with a slim paperback called Talking Spanish: Voices From the Local Liquorice Industry. He slid the book under the grille and said: “Don’t Notes & Dispatches 15

tell anyone I gave it to you.” In the factory shop next door, I bought two bags and a tin of Pontefract cakes. In London, I gave my uncle Trevor one of my bags of Pontefract cakes. My pleasure at his delighted reaction was crimped by the realization that my mother had planned the same gift, and that I had inadvertently spoiled that part of the occasion for her. She never saw any of her English family again. Recently I bought a bag of Haribo Pontefract cakes at Sweet Thrills, a candy store on Roncesvalles Avenue, near my house in Toronto. The label says that the contents are “genuine,” and prints the date of Dunhill’s original recipe in an old-timey font, but something has changed. These cakes are more square and much less glossy than the ones I remember, and the words “Haribo original” have been added above and below the castle stamp. They taste about the same, but I can’t eat them with the pleasure I once did, ever since a friend I shared some with pointed out to me, a vegetarian, that they contain gelatin, made from animal bones. I also find that knowing about the broken family histories from the town of the broken bridge has changed my feeling for this candy, which I first encountered in a sunlit French story. Pontefract cakes are linked for me now with the military husbands who died young, with my grandfather who disappeared in a cloud of jealous ill-will, with those women and children of four generations who found their families suddenly without a man. I still have the licorice tin I got at the Haribo shop in Pontefract. It’s good for storing tea bags. 

Robert Everett-Green is a feature writer at the Globe and Mail. His most recent dispatch, “Ordinary Weekly Deaths” appeared in Geist 74. He lives in Toronto. Read more of his work at geist.com. 16 Geist 88 Spring 2013

r i s k

f a c t o r s

Memory Game ven begamudré

The Golden Years: Three diagnoses and two trips to Emergency

turned fifty-five on March 13, the same day as Donald Duck. I kid you not. He’s older. I’m a senior and I’m okay… A week later I spent seven hours at Emergency while the doctor on call treated more serious cases; then he finally ordered blood tests and a CT scan for me. Just below the belt. I didn’t mind waiting because I kept dozing off. Plus, when I had the chance, I kibitzed with Nurse Joanne and her colleague, Nurse Cathy. Finally the scan revealed that, yes, I was trying to pass a kidney stone all of 2 millimetres long—just long enough to cause anyone a lot of pain. Finally, they put morphine into my saline IV drip. This is still my favourite cocktail: fifty milligrams of Gravol followed by anywhere from five to ten to fifteen cc’s of morphine. Heck, when you’re travelling to the edge of the universe and back, who needs cable TV? Flashback to three Christmases ago—to December 2007, when I flew home to spend Christmas Day and Boxing Day with close friends. I’d been teaching creative writing at Iowa State University and here, back in Regina, I visited three doctors in four days. The diagnoses came one on top of another: one, two, three. First, I had developed type 2 diabetes, which is not dependent on insulin.

So this was why I’d kept drinking so much water. While preparing for class in my furnished apartment, with its forced-air heating. While leading my workshops the way I do now: pacing in front of the blackboard. I call these talks “chats”—these mini-lectures that can last up to twenty minutes. And most of them are off-the-cuff. Second, it wasn’t my imagination, after all; I really was developing a memory problem. Not to worry, though; it’s not early onset dementia. I know because my psychiatrist at the time, who happened to be Muslim, gave me fairly simple tests. Most of which I failed. What I have is a specific challenge called Benign Memory Loss, which means that I can remember what I’m doing today, half of what I did yesterday, and nothing at all for the weeks that came before this one. But my long-term memory is quite good and, well, look on the bright side: I get most of my movies on DVD from the public library. Six months later I can watch the same movie and it’s still brand new to me. Clouds, don’t you know? Silver linings, too. Don’t ask me why it’s called Benign Memory Loss. I know that if I do something silly like try to fit a milk carton onto the pantry shelf where the

boxes of tea sit, if I try to do this and can laugh about it within fifteen minutes, then all is right with the world. My world now. You can see why I gladly gave up driving. True, left turns can be tricky, but when right turns became just as tricky—and when I finally noticed that a baby boom was underway—I gladly handed over the keys to my new used car. This was nearly sixteen months ago now, in the deep freeze of a Regina winter. At the latest Writers’ Guild Christmas come-and-go someone asked me, “What do retired writers do?” “We read,” I said. But life is never this simple. Last year I spent eight months teaching myself to read complex material again. I started with illustrated non-fiction books from the children’s library; to these I added graphic novels, which depend so closely on the relationship between visuals and text; then I added poetry and fiction—like Rumer Godden’s 1945 novel Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time. Margaret Rumer Godden, the English writer who’s probably best known for her novel The River. So this is the prime of life, prelude to the Golden Years. Freedom Fiftyfive. Talk about false advertising. Still, just as we decide what kind of writer we’re going to be, then we reap the benefits and pay the price—so we often face the question of what kind of life we’re going to lead. Then we reap the benefits and pay the price.

mentioned there had been a third diagnosis in that week leading up to Christmas 2007. The same psychiatrist who had diagnosed my Benign Memory Loss also diagnosed me with a Bipolar Spectrum Disorder— what used to be called manic depression. Between the type 2 diabetes, the memory loss—even a certain amount of hearing loss—I had quite enough to think about. The Christmas before I turned ten, my mother finally left what these days Notes & Dispatches 17

This spring, give the Give the Gift of Geist to your reading friends. Gift subscriptions can be ordered at geist.com/gift

we call a verbally abusive relationship. She was also physically afraid of my father because he’d always been athletic, something she had never been. Something I would never become. She couldn’t take me with her because she had her own mental illnesses to battle: also a bipolar disorder, but one in which she struggled with a deep and dark depression that rarely lifted from her sad, brown eyes. Three weeks ago I stayed up too late while drinking coffee and watching science fiction horror films—the kind of films it’s usually a better idea to watch in the afternoon on a day off work. By sunrise I was high on caffeine and convinced that the world was coming to an end. I phoned my therapist to tell her this and other amazing predictions I could suddenly make. Then I phoned a close friend. My therapist alerted the mobile crisis unit; my friend phoned 911. The mobile crisis unit arrived before the ambulance and before long I was back at Emergency. Not in a curtained-off cubicle this time but in my very own room, with a door on either side— one with a large window. I spent two nights there, until a room freed up in the mental ward upstairs a couple of doors down from a room with padded walls and a mattress on the floor. But back to that room in Emergency. It took me an entire day to realize that I was under suicide watch. Not because I had talked about or planned to commit suicide but because our health region’s computer network allows professionals in various fields to see a patient’s notes. One of these notes says that my mother killed herself. It might even say that her mother, before her, had also killed herself. My mother died in late January 1978, about seven weeks before my twenty-second birthday. We were both back in India, though for different reasons. I’d gone back because I hadn’t seen it in the fifteen years since I’d left, as a boy of six. She’d gone back after her first suicide attempt 18 Geist 88 Spring 2013

a few weeks before Christmas. Her psychiatrist and her few close friends had decided that, yes, returning to our hometown in South India might be a good idea. It was not. January 21 was a Saturday and I went to a movie theatre in the afternoon. This detail is significant because it’s quite possible that my mother was also at a movie theatre on the afternoon that her mother killed herself. An old friend of mine calls this ritualization. She would know: she was once a psychiatric nurse. Fortunately I have far more supports than my mother had. People in the writing and publishing community, the arts community beyond, the New Age community, my favourite shops and cafés. Half a dozen friends phone me long-distance and often we chat for an hour or more. My healthcare supports include my family doctor and her colleagues; then there are my pharmacists. My therapist, you’ve met. Then there’s my new psychiatrist, who also happens to be Muslim. You can see why, with all the chances I’ve had to settle in places like Scotland or Bali or the States, I still call Regina my home. These health problems aside, over the past few years my life has become even more complicated and yet—and yet—how simple it has become. How happy I am to lead the simple life I now lead. Finally, it’s hard to know how to end a talk like this, and so I’ll do what many writers do when they’re not sure how to end a rather difficult story. I’ll just stop. 

From a talk delivered at Luther College, University of Regina, in May 2011, during the Year of India in Canada. Begamudré and three other Indian writers spoke about what they were writing. Ven Begamudré’s latest book is the novella Vishnu Dreams (Gaspereau Press, 2008). He writes mainly magical fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He lives in Regina.

r e a l i t y

c h e c k

Roadblocks veronica gaylie Shiny bras and worn-in sweaters— the clothes do make the woman melon balls in space

I smile, say hello. They stare, and stare, and stare

t smells like nothing. A wine region, a resort town. Paradise. Stinks bad. The kind of nothing that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Like golf courses. Like golf clothes. Like condos. Like plastic siding on milliondollar homes. Like carpets unrolled down hallways in LEED-certified buildings built on pine forest clearcuts where owls used to nest and deer used to roam. Like the grey plastic latches made to look like metal on office windows where the birds who used to nest there fly in. It smells like the email that was sent to inform you of this. (Close them.) It smells like the Old Pond Trail the day after the university bulldozed it and cut the ribbon to open it. Dusty. Where is the lake? Nowhere. Billboards in front of it advertise it. I see a $350,000 Bentley. The cab driver points it out, including the price. Pink stucco mansions on dry hillsides—that kind of town. Doctors, drug dealers, no recycling. I arrive at the university. I am thirsty. The secretary tells me to make myself at home. I go into a coffee area, take a mug from a shelf and turn on a tap. I see two professors. They talk in hushed, hurried tones. Like prisoners, they know I am there. They stare. And stare. And stare. Is it their mug? I say hi. They stare. And stare. Ah, it dawns on them. The new recruit.

Fresh meat. They sniff. One says: Take an apple from the basket. Feel free. They’re from my orchard. I reach for it. She says: They’re a dollar each. You can put it in my mailbox. She smiles. The no-smell of nowhere is ongoing. It’s Valley of the Dolls or Village of the Damned. I replace the cup on the shelf and remember the blond kids from the horror movie. Who stared. And stared. And stared. (Brick wall. Brick wall.) I walk back down the hall. I cross the quadrangle to the library to prepare for my interview. The buildings look religious. Pointy A-frame atriums atop brick. The crowded fountain in the centre of the courtyard also smells like nothing. Is it the smell of salvation? What is the next to go, the nose? I see a bake sale. The lineup crosses the quad. Everyone is white. There is no one here who is not white. I feel sick. I remember the water. It too tasted like nothing. Will I die? I walk into the interview room. I smile, say hello. They ignore me. I open my folder and arrange papers on the table. They ignore me. In between their own conversations, they stare. And stare. And stare. One man stares at my shoes. My shoes are purple today. No one takes notes. It is warm, I take off my jacket. Things improve. I get their attention. The jacket was the problem. Now they look at me and nod. My talk goes well. I have it memorized. Down. They do not ask questions right away. First they stare. And stare. And Notes & Dispatches 19

THE NUB

stare. Like with the coffee mug. The man who stared at my shoes before, stares at my shoes again. At the break I go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and see, through my white blouse, a blue bra shining out. I dressed in the dark in the early morning to catch the flight. Blue bra. Wonder Woman. It looked white in the night. I remember the word for bra in French is soutien-gorge. I imagine myself river rafting out of here over the whitewater of BC, back to the sea. Or the other way, over the hills; portage the prairies to Ontario, Quebec or Corner Brook. I return to the room. I head straight for my jacket. I put my jacket on now. I stare back at them. And stare. And stare. And stare. They bring out a fruit plate. I say I want to build a garden. The men ignore me and start eating grapes. I say I would like to grow kale and turnips. Root vegetables. Maybe get them into the cafeteria. Get the students involved and… a woman interrupts: Are you pregnant? Or, ha, do you plan to be? Is that a wedding ring? I did not hear you say. After all, someone says, you are from Vancouver! They each repress a chuckle. They reach for plastic tongs. What neighbourhood are you from? asks another woman, who looks exactly like a witch, reaching for a bear claw. What church do you go to? All I see are hands, reaching; mouths, asking; 24 karat crosses, hanging. The questions. The tongs. The fruit plate. The melon balls from Mexico served since the ’50s. Faded orange and green. Always the last to go. Long after the end of the world, someone in space will still be finding melon balls no one ate. They tell me to take a break while they deliberate. I walk down the hall. I finally see a person who is not white. He talks loudly to a brick wall. I know you’re in there! I know you’re in there! he says. 20 Geist 88 Spring 2013

We stand together and wait. Nothing. He says, I have to keep working. Back outside, same old smell. I breathe deep. Nothing. It reeks.

cowichan sweater

You had to sleep in it and fall in love in it

ake Cowichan sweaters you could spot a mile away because they were thin and stringy, they unravelled easily and the pattern was 1-D. No thunderbirds or bison. The real ones were three inches thick. They took five years to break in. If you started in grade 8, they’d be comfortable by grade 12. To break one in took parties and hockey games and camping and cigarette burns. It needed to have jumped railway tracks. It needed to have gone through a few roadblocks. It had to have gone to parties at Wreck Beach where the cops arrived by hovercraft. It had to have been seen. It would have been to the Yale, the Rover and St. Paul’s Emergency. It would have been to Empire Stadium, to the PNE, and hung upside down on the Zipper. (Oh yeah, no pullovers.) It had to have been on buses on Christmas Eve, never mind New Year’s. You had to have used it as a hat, a mat, a rag and a pillow. It had to have been used to clean up beer, or worse. You had to have slept in it. You had to have fallen in love in it, said goodbye to someone in a bus station in it. Then it would soften. Become part of you. You became it. Like the thunderbird on the back. 3-D. 

Veronica Gaylie is a writer and professor from Vancouver. Her work has been published in many periodicals, including Grain, Ditch, Room, Lake, Carte Blanche, thetyee.ca and Geist. Read more of her work at geist.com.

t r u e

f u n n i e s

True Funnies 21

a f t e r l i f e

o f

c u l t u r e

Language and Nation Now stephen henighan Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

he Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Weimar, Germany, is an innocuous-looking building of whitewashed walls and dark, vaulted roofs. The church resembles anything but the cauldron from which modern ideas of nationalism spilled into the world. Yet it was here that the philosopher, theologian and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder preached from 1776 to 1803, the period during which he refined his praise of ancestral folk-cultures as the source of human identity, and languages as the natural boundaries of nations. Herder’s ideas, and the place where he propounded them, are rife with contradictions. Herder opposed Prussian nationalism, the strongest German-language political force of his day, on the grounds that it divided German-speaking people. After his death, when Romanticism spread his belief in essential differences between peoples to minorities elsewhere in Europe, the revival of half-forgotten peasant tongues such as Czech and Slovenian, and their elevation into aspiring national languages that were used to write books and newspapers, diminished the influence of 22 Geist 88 Spring 2013

German, the former educated lingua franca of those areas. This development, which reduced German’s scope as a language that straddled cultures, had tragic long-term consequences. Herder’s ideas underlay Adolf Hitler’s justification of his invasion of Central and Eastern Europe to bring German-speaking minority populations “back inside the Reich.” One of the many disastrous consequences of this assumption that all speakers of a language must live in the same country was that after 1945, Germany was divided, reducing Herder’s beloved Weimar to a provincial outpost in rural East Germany that was cut off from Western Europe. This was not the only occasion when Herder’s claim that language and nation strode arm-in-arm would be contradicted by history. If Herder’s ideas were problematic in Europe, where their long-term repercussions continue to be felt in forces such as the Catalan separatist movement in Spain, or sometimes emerged in unpredictable ways, as in post-1989 former Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins defined themselves as irreconcilably

different from one another on the basis of speaking local variants of a common, mutually comprehensible tongue, their coherence dissolved utterly when applied to nationbuilding on other continents. Spanish America’s Wars of Independence, between 1806 and 1824, were continental in scale and led to a rupture into many nations, which regarded themselves as irreconcilably different even though they all spoke the same language. Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from modern colonialism, in 1957, built national unity across ethnic lines and adopted the colonial language, English, as its common currency. Most other African countries followed suit. In Portuguese-speaking Angola and Mozambique, for example, African languages are called “national languages,” to distinguish them from the international language that holds the nation together. The paradox that the nation is united by a global language, such as English, French or Portuguese, that did not originate in the country, while the languages that are called “national” are, in fact, regional and tribal—those which

image: europa polyglotta0 (1741), by gottfried hensel

Herder saw as the core of a nation— is shared by those parts of Asia that were extensively colonized by Europeans. In India, the Philippines and Singapore, various languages percolate beneath an overarching concept of national belonging. China, Japan, Korea and Thailand, by contrast, which resisted European colonization, adhere to Herder’s concept of an ancient, uniform national language charged with resonances of an immemorial past (even though the realities on the ground may be more complex, particularly in China, where southern regions of the country spurn the official language of Mandarin, or in Korea, a country divided by history in spite of sharing a common language). This sketch, of course, is incomplete: nations and their languages cannot be cleanly divided into Herderian and anti-Herderian camps. What to make of Swahili, the rare African language that has become “national” in the way Herder understood the term (as the co-official language of Tanzania and Kenya), while it also remains a transnational lingua franca—as German was in the eighteenth century— that facilitates communication across East Africa? How would Herder classify the innate bilingualism of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, where the dialects used on the street remain influenced by ancestral languages that prevailed prior to conversion to Islam, and the Modern Standard Arabic of the mosque, the newspaper, documentary television and national literature is, in fact, the language of a supra-national religious tradition? And, finally, what would Herder make of countries where two languages of colonization overlap? The four major national languages of the Americas—English, Spanish, Portuguese and French—are all imported and international, and possess limited power to evoke ancestral belonging to our soil. By returning to Herder, we can see the error of the common shorthand of equating

Canada with Belgium or Switzerland, where the official languages that overlap are ancestral to the nation, or even with Cameroon, which is also bilingual in the colonial languages of French and English, but where indigenous languages are much stronger than they are in Canada, and immigration is not a significant factor. As with many countries, Canada’s linguistic composition is in perpetual flux. For nearly a century, our two most important unofficial languages were German and Ukrainian. Western Canada, in particular, was awash in local newspapers, churches and community organizations that functioned in these languages. By the 1980s, though, fewer young people spoke German or Ukrainian; Chinese languages emerged as the new third force. Now these languages, too, are beginning to dissolve through assimilation. The 2011 Census identifies Tagalog, from the Philippines, as the emerging champion of unofficial Canadian languages. Even as globalization bolsters immigrant languages by allowing children to talk on Skype with their grandparents in the old country or watch satellite television in their parents’ language, increased urbanization heightens the imperative to adopt the language of the street. If Herder returned to preach in the St. Peter and Paul Church in the twentyfirst century, he might remark that each nation is characterized by its own unique yet transient medley of languages, and that in most of the nonEuropean world it is international languages that define the nation and ancestral languages, whether those of immigrants or aboriginal inhabitants, that challenge the unity of language and nation. 

Stephen Henighan’s books include The Streets of Winter, A Grave in the Air and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com and geist.com. Afterlife of Culture 23

FINDINGS

Newspaper Conveyor System, Surrey, BC, from PRESS, a collection of Brian Howell’s photography of press plants and equipment, exhibited at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver in spring 2013. brianhowellphotography.com

Pinboy george bowering From Pinboy, published in 2012 by Cormorant Books. George Bowering writes fiction, literary criticism, history and poetry, and he writes for theatre. He founded the literary journal Imago. He lives in Vancouver.

just have the vaguest images of Polly’s face left in my memory bank, and even less of her mother’s. What I do have might be invented from whole cloth, or from the images I do have of the cloth that covered just about their whole bodies but in

such a way that you might prefer that to nakedness. I see long light brown hair blown in the breeze around their faces or moist with sweat and lying across their cheeks. So their long thin dresses, wind or sweat. I see that roundish Russian beauty

you can’t help associating with potatoes and warm beds and tractor mud. While I was entranced by Moonbeam McSwine, she was no Russian and I never saw her legs move up a ladder. When you are a fifteen-year-old boy, or at least when I was a fifteenyear-old boy, even the women in the newspaper comics or comic books could turn you on in a second. I was a mountain-climbing kid, and there were times when I onanized on the pine needles on the forest floor, except that we did not really have a forest—it Findings 25

was more like a tree, then some dry couch grass, then another tree, then some rocks, then another tree. As to the women in the comics, there were some good ones in Terry and the Pirates, though I can’t remember their names. The Dragon Lady was kind of scary, and showed up transmogrified to an empress in one of my recurrent dreams. I’d be on a sloping tile floor, sweating in my torn clothing, trying to crawl uphill toward this magisterial and cruel figure who was probably going to have me whipped if I reached her feet anyway. Al Capp was the best, though. Daisy Mae was pretty well as pulchritudinous as Moonbeam McSwine, even though she was blond and did not hang out in the pigsty mud. Stupefyin’ Jones had me a little scared. Betty and Veronica didn’t raise much more of a buzz than did Miz Beasley. Wonder Woman was an interesting prospect, and though I did not know why, I approved of her high red boots and golden lasso. And Sheena

of the Jungle? Those torn shorts, and all those vines! I pictured her in my orchard.

waited for it to get moderately dark. Daylight Saving Time was hanging on by its fingernails. I put my pile of Sport magazines in chronological order. I went around the house and emptied all the ashtrays into an old coffee can. I read one chapter of The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt. This was before I knew that A.E. van Vogt was a Canadian, from a Mennonite town in Manitoba. Finally, it got dusky enough, and out I slipped into my old hightop sneakers, black with a white star over the ankle bump. I stopped at Frank’s pool hall, picked up a Sweet Marie chocolate bar for survival rations, and yucked it up on my way into the back room where the tables were. This way Frank would provide me with an alibi, just in case. I went out the back door and turned right, headed for Sawmill Road.

Advice julie paul “Advice” first appeared in Prism 51:1. Julie Paul is the author of The Jealousy Bone, a collection of short fiction. She lives in Victoria, BC, and at juliepaul.ca.

ake the daughter slap the mother. Make the plates break. Make the tablecloths fly and the crumbs turn back into cake. Make the love turn into something solid and entirely impermanent, like ice. Make that day on the island in Lake Ontario, when she crossed the frozen water along a path marked by Christmas trees, central to your predicament. Make someone look into

GEIST ALERT Google Alert results for “ Geist.”

26 Geist 88 Spring 2013



the jade depths as if it were an oracle. Make all the hair in the world fall out. Make everyone obsolete. Make French fries healthy and Swiss chard not. Make all the holes whole and the halves holes. Make a story true by not including aliens. Make a story real by alienating everyone. Make shit up. Make it and make them take it. Open their mouths: make them sing. 

My shoes crunched on gravel. Machines in the packing house and the cannery and the juice plant and the box factory had gone quiet for the night. There was the occasional truck up on the highway, gearing down as it became Main Street. I heard a woman’s loud laughter from a shack among the toolies. A little acid pain made itself known in my stomach. For less than a second the image of Jeanette naked except for an arm cast flitted behind my eyes. But no, no for a certainty, that was not what I was interested in when I was interested in Jeanette. I wanted to know whether it would seem all right for me to want to protect her if I could. I was not thinking of a reward. Along with everything else, I was still a personal voluntary Christian boy in secret, trying to do mysterious good and disappear without a sign. She hadn’t even offered an explanation. Surely, when a girl appears at school after the summer vacation with a cast on her arm, someone will ask her what happened. I didn’t have the nerve to, but surely someone would, some less complicated person. Maybe a teacher. She would have had to tell a teacher if the teacher asked, wouldn’t she? I supposed that no one had asked. That, it struck me as I crunched gravel alongside Sawmill Road, was sad. In my head, as was my private custom, I was an anonymously heroic secret agent behind the lines, looking for an angry fox. Not knowing who he was made my job harder and more worthwhile, nearly enjoyable. I stepped into the tall couch grass beside the road, bringing the crunching to a sudden stop. I stood still, straining to hear anyone who might be straining to hear me. It was as quiet as can be. The river slid by without a sound. I could barely hear myself step further down into

does a geist’s threshold restrict “flavor text” traits? I don’t know how much this matters, but does a Geist’s threshold limit what kind of effects death had on him that aren’t directly tied to combat?

the weeds, headed for the water, planning to come to Jeanette’s house from the side and then the back. It had been months since I’d been crouching around there. The Sweet Marie was melting in my shirt pocket. When I got to Jeanette’s house there was a light in the kitchen but nowhere else. I stood up straight in order to look for her. I heard a sudden intake of breath, so I turned to look into the illuminated greenery behind me, but something—a baseball bat, a lead pipe, a two-by-four—smashed into the arm I had put in front of my face. A voice pronounced most of the unpleasant words I knew. I was on my face in the wet weeds, my left hand holding my right arm.

“The fuck out of here,” said the dark shape above me. I moved for a while on my knees. Then I got up somehow and felt my way back to the road and headed for home, holding my arm. I wanted to kneel down again but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back up. I walked all the way home, and got inside the house without my parents’ seeing me. They were in the kitchen playing cribbage. I had pissed in the yard, so I went straight to my bedroom and lay on the bed without turning on the light or taking off my clothes. I lay on my back with pain possessing my arm from the shoulder to the fingers. Then shock put me to sleep.

l.m. montgomery and annmarie mackinnon Selected snippets from The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, compiled, edited and annotated by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, and published by Oxford University Press in 2012. L.M. Montgomery is a trademark of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc.

friday, sept. 19, 1890 Mr Mustard had a cranky fit on— he takes them occasionally although between times he never makes any attempt to secure order—and nearly snapped our heads off we spoke a word… thursday, dec. 4, 1890 Presently a knock came at the door and when I opened it there stood Mr Mustard himself. And he is such a bore! He stayed until I thought he would never go.

friday, feb. 27, 1891 Mr Mustard had one of his “bad days” to-day and as a result there was not much fun going. monday, mar. 9, 1891 Mr Mustard was terribly cross… thursday, apr. 9, 1891 That detestable Mustard came again to-night and stayed until 11.30… if Mr Mustard calls again for a fortnight I will even fall upon him and rend him limb from limb!!!!



Mr Mustard

monday, sept. 1, 1890 Mr Mustard—what a funny name!

monday, feb. 23, 1891 Mr Mustard was furious with me today because he caught me exchanging notes with Will.

wednesday, jan. 7, 1891 Mr Mustard has been dreadfully cranky for a week and to-day his illhumour reached a climax. thursday, jan. 8, 1891 I didn’t thaw out towards Mustard at all and he kept me in again to “explain,” saying that his action had been prompted by his “sincere friendship” for me. monday, jan. 26, 1891 This evening when I went to answer the door, who should stand there but he himself… I had to sit there the whole evening to entertain him.

monday, apr. 13, 1891 Well, it is nearly 12 o’clock and I am just boiling over with rage. Mr Mustard was here again to-night. monday, apr. 20, 1891 I hate to be alone with Mustard! It makes me simply furious! monday, apr. 27, 1891 In the course of the evening I found a chance to put the clock on half an hour, so M. left at what he fondly believed to be 10.30, whereas it was only 10. saturday, june 6, 1891 This evening Mr Mustard came shuffling along at nine and stayed till eleven. I don’t know how I kept from laughing right out in his face. thursday, june 18, 1891 Mr Mustard was here this evening and was limp as usual. monday, june 22, 1891 I’ve never been half decent to him. I’ve snubbed him times without number! I’ve made fun of him to his very

jim kershner’s this day in history: A Colville jury found Springdale town marshal C.E. Bartholomew not guilty of the murder of saloonkeeper C.H. Geist. The defense had argued that Bartholomew shot Geist in self-defense after a confrontation with Geist escalated into gunplay in the crowded saloon.

Findings 27

face and he knows it—and yet he comes and comes! sunday, june 29, 1891 There is something about the man which makes me feel so self-conscious and positively ashamed. wednesday, july 1, 1891 Mustard actually mustered—oh, forgive the pun. It just made itself—up enough courage to put his fate to the test this evening. He did it about as awkwardly as possible but he did it. “Do you think, Miss Montgomery, that our friendship will ever develop into anything else?” “I don’t see what else it can develop into, Mr Mustard.”

thursday, dec. 3, 1891 I had a letter from Mr Mustard today. It was a frightfully dry epistle. thursday, june 8, 1893 I had a letter from Mr Mustard to-day. It was a very incomprehensible epistle. thursday, oct. 26, 1893 I had a letter from Mr Mustard today. Poor mortal—he seems to have an uncomfortable sort of temperament—always torturing himself and others on the rack of self-analysis. tuesday, sept. 4, 1894 Mustard is a by-gone. I stopped writing to him last winter for I simply could not be bothered any longer with him. 

monday, oct. 19, 1891 I had a letter from Mr Mustard today. It was as dry and poky as himself.

Welfare sheila gilhooly From Mistaken Identity, published in 2012 and available at Smashwords.com. Sheila Gilhooly has told her story of being locked up in a mental hospital for being queer, in the lesbian classic art show and book Still Sane, produced in collaboration with the sculptor Persimmon Blackbridge. She lives in Vancouver.

hen I first moved to Toronto from Ottawa, the job I had lined up fell through. I had a place to crash, but no job, no cash. I had heard about these work-today-get-paidtoday jobbers who picked up crews of male labourers for a variety of physical work around the city. They had certain corners and alleys where they were known to do pick-ups. They required very little ID and they paid up at the end of the day. I had heard that one of their mustering points was behind Honest Ed’s, near where I lived. It took me three days to get up the

nerve to get in the line, sign on the clipboard and get into the back of a pick-up truck with two benches down the side and five pretty down-and-outlooking guys already seated. I was nervous, sure they would “catch me” as a woman, wondering without much of a clue what guys would talk about. But I needn’t have worried as they said not a word to me—or to each other. We drove way into the outer suburbs of Toronto to where they were clearing an old trash landfill. Old electronics, beds and their mattresses, a million old paint cans, tons and tons

of slowly disintegrating drywall, all made for a hazy stench which caught in the throat and stung the eyes. We were sent by grunts and motions in two’s or threes to where we would put the crap into the dumpster bin parked by the pile. As the pile got cleared, the forklift moved the bin on to its next pile, with us in its wake. If the bin was getting full we were expected to jump in the poison and tamp it down. By mid-day the problem of how to

In closing arguments, Bartholomew’s attorney told jurors that “Springdale was a hell hole on the day of the killing, the drunken mob of lumberjacks congregating around the saloons of Geist and Herndon.” morgan geist news: One of the first things out of New York City DJ/producer Morgan Geist’s

28 Geist 88 Spring 2013

Queen Street Parkade, Toronto, 2012, by Fabrice Strippoli, from Dark City, published with Art Actuel in 2012. darkcitybooks.com

pee was starting to be a concern. There was a port-a-potty but it was way down where the trucks were parked. Besides, nobody used them and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Besides no privacy, there was very little cover, except for the piles and the dumpsters and people milling all over them. Suddenly I was saved. There was the loud sound of a car horn honking wildly. All the guys stopped immediately and bolted towards the sound.

It was the canteen on wheels, friend of all construction sites, and I had my choice of secluded spots. I scored an afternoon pee break when the boss sent me on an errand over to a real building with a real toilet, only a fifteen-minute walk. I figured the second day would be easier. I knew the ropes, knew when the canteen would come. I had held my end up, but followed the pace of the group, and nobody had spoken to

me except in grunts about the work. But the second day wasn’t easier. The guys were different, more hard and mean than the down-andout types from the day before. They swore and grumbled at each other nastily and I felt their curiosity about me grow as the day wore on. We were at an even more secluded site and the stuff was wetter and ickier, so they gave us rubber gloves. I was not the only one using them but it started

mouth after he answers the phone has nothing to do with dance music. “Congratulations on Rob Ford,” Geist says with a gleeful chuckle. geist’s era comes to an end at north schuylkill: An era of football that at times was filled with instability has come to an end for one Rick Geist at North Schuylkill

Findings 29

this whole razz about whether I was too sissy to get my hands dirty. I was no longer afraid of being caught as a woman, but was now pretty sure I would be beaten for being a fag and then I would be discovered as a woman. I volunteered for a pile off to the side that needed only one person and kept to myself till the day ended and I got my reward of being paid. On my way home on the subway I resolved that I had to find a real job. At the same time I was using my teeth to open a wrapper and my front tooth broke. I was freaked and I looked like hell. I needed assistance. I phoned the welfare office and, though it took a half day to connect with “information,” a woman was actually helpful and told me that in the case of need or emergency like my tooth, and being new in town, I was eligible for a one-time assistance of $200 which I wouldn’t have to repay if I didn’t apply for welfare (the real welfare) for at least six months. I just needed to go to my nearest welfare office and explain my situation. Bring some identification. So I dressed nice and polite and went to the welfare office. There was one woman who seemed to be running the desk and a bunch of people ahead of me. Finally it was my turn. I smiled, cleared my throat, and began to explain my situation. “You can’t be here,” she announced. “But…” I protested. “You are single,” she said. “Yes,” I agreed. “You need to go to the welfare office shelter on Jarvis Street for single men.” “But I’m not a man,” I said, presenting my driver’s licence. She looked at it and said, “Where did you get this from? It’s illegal to use somebody else’s identification, even if they let you. Who did you steal this

Canadian Apology

e’re sorry we’re so sorry but we are sorry. It’s a Canadian thing like tourtière or Irving. Picture a moose trudging through tundra towards another moose, antlers grazing maple trees that haven’t been cut down yet, the snort of exertion, the clomp of intent. That’s us trying to find each other in this wilderness so we can apologize for something: standing too close, standing too far. Being hard to find in the appointment thicket of our days. We’re sorry one of us invented frozen fish fillets because single-portion frozen dinners invented a new loneliness and the lonely bone, they say, is connected to the drinking bone. The rest, well, the rest is history. Our apologies are welcome mats and engagement rings. The tiebreaker in overtime. Pierre Berton’s bow ties. Meaningful. We take an eternity to back into a parking spot and then feel sorry for all the unparked cars still circling; we’re even sorry for feeling a little lucky. And though having a pocketful of loonies is a good thing here, it sounds like something we should apologize for. We roll up the rim to win at

the same place we see Jesus miraged on the wall beside the drive-thru window. We are sorry though for our ehs, our toques, about/aboot. We’re sorry for the poutine (but not for our beer or Leonard Cohen). We tap our trees and drink from there. We understand then what it’s like to blossom though we don’t speak of this. The sky is such a choir here. We’re sorry how scared we get when our love sees its own shadow, how we disappear for a long season. We wish we could but often, we can’t. Désolé, désolé, we try. Our apologies are foghorns in the great sea of social gatherings where we pass each other like tankers gliding by the shore of an all-you-can-eat buffet. I am truly sorry for that last line. The poet John Thompson said we are brave at our kitchen tables, brave in our beds but cowards under the moon. We are sorry for that as well. The moon has a way of calling us out from our homes and we stand beneath its whiteness, stripped of nerve. The trees are an endangered silence then, witnessing. Winter is a mystery. The night breathes us in and waits for what we have to say for ourselves. The shift must happen now. Transformation. Our apologies braver, migrating into the realm of reprieve when we hear ourselves say: forgive us and then what can we do? 

ID from?” she suddenly barks at me, doing good cop/bad cop and completely freaking me out, but still I tried to argue with her, to explain, to make her help me. I missed her special signal but all at once I was being pressed on either side by the two burly security guards posted at the door. They came

up behind me with their billy clubs drawn. The lady behind the counter told me I had to leave now and not make any more trouble, or they—she gestured to the burly ones—would have to detain me. If I really wanted help I should go where they could help me, with the other single men. 

sue goyette From the book Outskirts, published by Brick Books in 2011. Sue Goyette is a writer and teacher who lives in Halifax.

High School. For whatever reason, Geist went on a tirade at halftime of the North Schuylkill–Panther Valley game in Lansford with his team in front Oct. 26. german joys: Comrade, Study the Geist of your Volk! As part of the Gleichschaltung of the German nation behind National Socialism, universities were

30 Geist 88 Spring 2013

Looking for a Loving Home zsuzsi gartner Eleven Orphaned Short-Story Openings (circa 1996–2012) Looking for a Loving Home from Five Dials 25, edited by Craig Taylor and published by Hamish Hamilton (fivedials.com). Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the short-story collections Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth, and many shorter published and broadcast works. Her writing has brought her numerous awards and nominations. She lives in Vancouver. The Time I Tried Then there was the time I tried to get my life made into a television series but failed. Everything ordinary happened to be in great demand. “Let’s hear what the ordinary people have to say,” that anchorman, the one everyone trusted, would say. Karl You would think they’d talk about money all the time. That’s what you’d think. All the time, endlessly, like a broken record, non-stop, ad nauseam, infinitus spiritus amen. But they don’t. They talk about anything but. You have to make them sometimes. Get them to confront the incredible magnitude of their good fortune. Shove their faces into the enormity of it. But gently. That’s Karl’s job. Sperm Donor The first time he saw the child he was startled that the boy looked nothing like him. My son. Corner Office Things were supposed to be different with Corner Office, brudder. Just wait ’til Corner Office, I kept telling Twyla as her tears dripped on to the suction line offa l’il Felix’s shunt (every-so-often the generator goes and then it’s DIY), everything will be better when I get to Corner Office. If you could see l’il Felix now, with his flappy hands and cruxifying smile, oh your heart would surely urk.

The Third Sister I The barbarians are chewing. Chew chew chew all summer long. Blood pools on their plates, just the way they like it. The mothers wear halter tops; the fathers take off their watches; we run barefoot in the street, a thick seam of tar bubbles in the centre of the road and sticks to our feet. There are no boys on this block, except for spindly Johnny Falconi, who hides his shovel teeth behind his mother’s orange curtains. Girls run rampant, no boy could survive here. We run low to the ground, knees bent, hands dragging like monkey paws so that they don’t see us. They are the barbarians. We see them through their haze of cigarettes and BBQ smoke and choked laughter. We watch our backs. After Almodóvar What grown man can say that he married his own mother, and that although heartbreak was involved, no one disapproved? St Elizabeth of the Miracle of the Roses Anastasia Nagy is on a rampage. The boy, honestly he’s just a boy, they’ve chosen to play Zoltan is horribly unsuitable. It’s like casting Macaulay Culkin to play Heathcliff. She claims she can see the peach fuzz still gleaming on his cheeks. She writes fire and they give her green fruit! She burns up the telephone lines and is truly inconsolable.

Chastity Sometimes they appear in great bunches, screaming down the street like a circus parade. Sometimes just out of the corner of your eye, when you’re not thinking about anything much. The women and their wild beasts. Can’t they give it a rest? The nuns are the worst. The BBQ Nun She came to us from Kansas City with smoke in her habit, shorn hair glinting copper. She came with her guitar and her firm belief in penance and her expertise in all things eschatological, although the latter was more of a private preoccupation than a part of her duties at Sacred Heart. She came with her talk of judgement, but there was always a kind of smile on her face and she even made the idea of Hellfire seem like fun. The Third Sister II The third sister with her bare skull like a crystal ball, but milky blue. When Betty and Lydia want to touch it she makes them pay. Sometime in pennies, in blood. Lawn Boy They say that if a house is on fire and a woman has to choose between her child and another—her husband, her lover—she will choose the child. What if I told you I would choose differently? What do you think of me now? 

gradually purged of political unreliables, and all university fraternities were progressively banned or co-opted into the National Socialist German Student’s Union. attorney: wife ‘protected herself’ when she allegedly shot husband to death: Amalia Mirasola, who is accused of murder, shot her husband, Carl,

Findings 31

Car Whatever mike heffernan From The Other Side of Midnight: Taxicab Stories, published by Creative Publishers in 2012. Mike Heffernan is the author of Rig: An Oral History of the Ocean Ranger Disaster. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

learned pretty quickly that part of driving the night shift was hustling to make a dollar off the meter. I often had prostitutes in the car. Sometimes I’d drive them over to Confederation Building, and they’d take buddy with them and go lie down in the field for fifty bucks. They weren’t up there with

those fancy girls, the call girls, or whatever it is you call them. They were at the bottom of the ladder—they were desperate. There was a whole load of them around Bulger’s Lane. The Portuguese and Japanese fishermen would come off the boats and they would give you fifty bucks for lining them up

with a prostitute. Every driver knew where they were to, them and the bootleggers. If those same fishermen wanted a bottle of rum after eleven o’clock, you would bring them up to Shea Heights. If they wanted a woman and a bottle of rum, you’d take them up to Shea Heights and then back to Bulger’s Lane. Then he’s got his bottle of rum and his woman.

ack in the ’80s, all the old guys who were sixty and seventy grew up during the Depression. In the 1930s, if you’re twenty-something

Swabbing the Deck patricia young From Night-Eater by Patricia Young, published by Quattro Books in 2012. Young has published ten collections of poetry. She lives in Victoria, BC. This evening the swabbies are out on the deck, swabbing its speckled gray surface: mold, bird shit, a fine layer of grit. They are canceling each other out, their feet are bare. What mysteries slip through the swabbies’ minds—plop— like turtles into a pond? The stories they tell stretch as far as the koi can see. The continents they travel lead through the gazebo and over the bridge. What should we call them— Swabbies of Life? Swabbies of Death? Engrossed in swabbing, they don’t see the ruby-throated hummingbird drop faster than sorrow.

Oh, these barefoot swabbies, they are too much trouble and tears, too many nerve endings. Imagine a swabbie’s joy as she goes about her business in rolled-up jeans, hair in curlers. As she pushes broom and soapsuds across a vinyl surface. Imagine an island draped in green, nozzle turned to jet. An hour ago the deck was a sheet of dirty winter ice but now it’s a summer of cattails and millet puffs, it’s seven reclining chairs. Swabbies, swabbies! Put down your mops and lift up your eyes. Can you see the stars climbing into the night? Can you see the ghost-dog padding across the horizon— whoosh— like a blue-eyed wind?

Sometimes the swabbies lose their mantras among the river stones. Sometimes they kick small fires out the back door. They are hopeless and useless and want another drink. “during a confrontation where she was threatened,” her attorney, Kalman Geist, said in Superior Court in Morristown. The couple had been arguing over a number of subjects, including money, Carl Mirasola’s alleged insensitivity to his wife’s medical condition and the fact that she had just hired a divorce lawyer, Geist said.

32 Geist 88 Spring 2013

years old, what’s your biggest priority in a depression? Putting food on the table. You’re fucking right, buddy. You got to eat. If you got a family, they got to eat. What do you do? You worked. Do you get an education? No, sir. That’s the last thing on your mind. You’re in Grade 2? Get out and go to work! And there are guys who will tell you that. For the guys who grew up in the Depression, all they were interested in was eating. So back in the ’80s, these old guys were driving around town. They knew the streets, not by their name, but by location. You see what I’m getting at? They knew where New Cove Road was. They knew where it started, and they knew where it ended. But they couldn’t read the sign. It might’ve been May 24th. It was a holiday weekend. I remember it was

a cold night, but there was no snow, or anything. The dispatcher sends this old guy up to Cherry Hill Road. It was just up from New Cove Road there. I think it was maybe number sixteen, or something. The dispatcher gives out a few more jobs over the set. About a half an hour goes by. He said, “I got that lady on the phone. Are you up on Cherry Hill Road?” “Oh, yes,” the driver said. “Well, I got her on the phone, and she can’t see you.” This driver got little or no education—he can’t read. “Well, I’m here.” “Are you out in front of sixteen?” “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m out in front of sixteen.” “That lady can’t see you. You got to be on the wrong street.” “No,” he said, “I’m not.” “Go to the end of the street, and

spell the street name.” A minute later: “Go ahead, Bobby. I’m here.” “Spell out what’s on the sign.” “S-T-O-P.”

never had a clue how to taxi. The only thing the broker told me was that I couldn’t wear jeans. He didn’t give me a map book, he didn’t give me anything like that. I was sent out on a Saturday morning. He told me who the dispatcher was. He told me that when I push the button on the radio to say car whatever and tell him where I was to. He drew all the stands out on a piece of paper. He sat in the car and held onto my finger like you would a child and pushed the buttons on the meter, he let it go, and he said, “Now you do it.” Then he basically patted me on the arse and off I went. 

Mrs. Tobin rodney decroo From Allegheny, BC, published by Nightwood Editions in 2012. Rodney DeCroo is singer, songwriter and poet. He lives in Vancouver.

She ran a boarding house on Doman Street in South Vancouver. The boarders, all men, lived in the basement two to a room. My father had moved up north and I’d come to the city

That evening, my new roommate Ken took me to the Cobalt to watch strippers and to have some beers. Before we left the house he showed me a baseball

alone on a bus from Cranbrook. I found her ad in the classifieds and took a cab straight from the station to her house. I had enough money to cover the first month’s

card, perfectly preserved, from 1967. It featured a young Ken, in a Detroit Tigers uniform standing on the dugout steps with a bat resting on his shoulder, a huge grin

rent and moved in that afternoon with my belongings stuffed in a bag. She was a large woman with a red face and dyed hair. Her husband had been

spread across his broad face. I played two seasons until I broke my back in a motorcycle accident. I couldn’t play after that. I’ve got arthritis now.

a master sergeant, but died a year after he retired. When she asked my age I told her I was twenty-one, but she laughed and said, Don’t lie to me honey

It hurts all the time. But fuck it eh? I’m lucky to be alive, so ain’t no point in bitching. Ken was on disability and three or four times a year

or you can find somewhere else to live. So I told her the truth, that my dad had left me to go up north and I’d quit school to come to the city

got paid to carry cocaine in a backpack via bus to Montreal or Toronto. He had a gambling problem and spent his meagre winnings on prostitutes,

to live on my own. The next day she took me to the welfare office and argued with a case worker and a supervisor until they

but Mrs. Tobin liked him and he always paid his rent. At the bar Ken walked me past the bouncers who nodded their heads as we

agreed to pay my room and board if I went back to school. Mount Baker had been a semester school and there were two in the Lower Mainland.

passed. He called a waitress by name and ordered a pitcher of draft. When she left he said, I got you in, so you can buy the drinks. Okay? I nodded my head and paid

Mrs. Tobin took me to them both that day. Magee was for the city’s rich kids and turned me away, but New West Secondary said I could start classes the next morning.

the waitress when she returned. Three hours later I was throwing up in a urinal. A man shoved me as I swayed toward the sinks to wash my face. I slipped and fell

34 Geist 88 Spring 2013

against the filthy tiles sleek with piss and water. I got up and puked again into a sink. At the table Ken was gone and so were our drinks. I sat down and watched the stripper. A power ballad began to blare through the speakers. She was nude and her breasts hung and gleamed with sweat

It shivered then flashed into a hole beneath the faded boards of the wall. She was standing, her dark hair wild against her face. She was

as she bent over to pick up a folded quilt at the edge of the stage. She flung it outwards and dropped it open on the floor. She walked a slow circle around it,

pointing at me. I looked at her eyes and she screamed Don’t touch me you fucking freak! You don’t touch the fucking dancers! Get the fuck

grinding her hips. I was drawn to the perfect blankness of her face. I stood up and walked toward the stage. I felt I was the only person

out of here! A deep warm voice spoke into my ear, it made me think of the murky water we would dive into off the banks

there besides her. The singer’s voice peaked at the chorus of the song, but no words were being sung, there were only sounds that moved across her like the stage lights

of the river. Okay, buddy, it’s time to go. Come on. A hand gripped my arm just above the elbow and guided me between the tables

that pulsed and crisscrossed against her body. She laid her belly against the quilt, and began to grind her hips into the floor. Her hand flickered between her legs

toward the bouncer at the front door. He pushed it open and pushed me through it onto the sidewalk. Go home pal, you’re covered

like a small trapped bird as she mocked playing with herself. On her left ankle I saw a blue tattoo of a heart with wings. I reached out to touch it.

in puke, he said and pulled the door shut. The air was a thin drizzle of rain against my face, headlights slid like the blurred tails of comets

Her body whipped away from me the instant my fingers touched her skin. I saw a garter snake I had tapped lightly with a stick behind my uncle’s barn.

through the dark. I reached into my pockets but they were empty. I lowered my head and stepped off the edge of the world.

Findings 35

SIGN UP NOW FOR FREE CLASS SETS OF GEIST If you are a teacher of writing, composition, literature, publishing or any kindred subject, you can get free copies of Geist for you and your students, just by asking for them, and free access to the Geist Digital Edition is included! Geist is always looking for new writers and readers. Teachers are always looking for good readings. Geist in the Classroom puts us together. PS. If you are a student, hand this to your instructor.

For details: geist.com/gic or call 1.888.434.7834

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n â&#x20AC;˘ N o r t h o f A m e r i c a

p e r f o r m a n c e

Glenn Lewis “The Artist As a Fraud”

Artist Trying on Cézanne’s Hat, 2008

“ a b s u r dity

heightens rigour ”

At noon on a Friday in July 1968, in a corner of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the artist Glenn Lewis, described in a press release as a sculptor and environmentalist, raised an umbrella that he had filled with white flour and opened it over his head. He was wearing shorts and a cloth cap and he was barefoot: the rain of flour transformed him into a ghostly alter-persona. Then he took a bamboo garden rake

and raked the flour into a pattern of flower petals. The audience of a few dozen applauded enthusiastically. He named the event Dusty Worker in Flour Piece. The gallery called it a “media environment experimentation.” Today it is remembered as “probably” the first performance art event in Canada. A few weeks later, at Intermedia Gallery in Vancouver, Glenn Lewis employed more foodstuffs in

text by

David Wisdom & Stephen Osborne The Artist As a Fraud 37

Thinker at Piano in Rice Krispie, 1968

Thinker at Piano in Rice Krispie, which opened with the artist as “thinker” sitting sideways at a piano, pensively smoking a cigarette; he allowed an elbow to clunk against the keys. An assistant—Gathie Falk, a well-known ceramics artist who describes her work as a “veneration of the ordinary”—emptied several boxes of Rice Krispies onto the floor. Finally, Glenn Lewis got up from the piano and stomped slowly in his gumboots through the cereal on the floor, emitting a satisfying crunch with each step. Snap, crackle, pop. s p onge dance

Dusty Worker in Flour Piece, 1968

38 Geist 88 Spring 2013

Glenn Lewis is a founding member of the Western Front, an artists’ gallery and workspace founded in 1973 and continuing today as a studio and exhibition venue for artists working

outside gallery tradition in mediabased, musical and ephemeral art forms. The Front has always been a crossroads of persona and performance. In its first decade, Vincent Trasov, in the persona of Mr. Peanut, ran for mayor; Eric Metcalfe and Kate Craig emerged as Dr. and Lady Brute, denizens of Leopard Reality and Brutopia, and Michael Morris was crowned Miss General Idea. Glenn Lewis adopted the name Flakey Rrose Hip (from a suggestion by Gary Lee Nova, with elements taken from Marcel Duchamp) and created the mail-art exchange group known as the New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver—part of a network of artists that included General Idea in Toronto, Ant Farm in San Francisco and the New York Correspondence School under Ray

New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver Swimmer, 1973

Johnson. The NYCSDSOV camouflaged its meetings as performances at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, public events witnessed by bemused fellow swimmers, featuring synchronized aquatic routines and shark fin swimming caps designed by Kate Craig (a co-founder of the Western Front). Splashy visuals of the events surfaced in art magazines, and in August 1974 Esquire ran a photo essay called “Their Arts Belong to Dada,” identifying the West Coast “oddball” arts scene as an “emerging movement.” A photograph of Flakey Rrose Hip identifies him as the “Esther Williams of Art.” Lewis has received many awards; he has performed in many cities in Canada, the US, England, Europe and Japan. He has travelled through India and the Middle East. His large ceramic mural, Artifact, an array of

Nude Sharkfin Swimmers, 1973

The Artist As a Fraud 39

salt shakers in the form of penises, was commissioned for the Canada Pavilion at the Osaka world’s fair, and then judged “too profane” and locked away from the public eye for sixteen years. the artist , the mask

Performance art, as these “experimentalist” events soon came to be known, derives from the anti-art, anti-theatre works of the Dadaists of the early twentieth century, and Marcel Duchamp, who strove “to deny the possibility of defining art.” Performance events are singular and indeterminate: they have

Script Writer for Deccadance, 1973

Hitler on Coffee Break, 1974

Hitler Speaking Against Building Road on Wreck Beach, 1974 40 Geist 88 Spring 2013

Potter Taking a Break, 1962

Cézanne Overlooking Mont Ste Victoire, 2007

no outcomes, they leave only traces in memory, film or video. The audience too is indeterminate and might consist of, for example, passersby, in Surveyor Putting Blue Tape Around City Block, noticing Glenn Lewis in the person of a surveyor encircle a city block with surveyor’s tape; or, in Hitler Speaking Against Building Road on Wreck Beach, nude sunbathers who happen to be on the beach below the disused gun turret from which Glenn Lewis in the person of Adolf Hitler delivers a speech against a proposed freeway. In 1969, in TV Chef Making Japanese Pickle at New Era Social Club, Glenn Lewis was filmed in a Mickey Mouse ski mask, demonstrating (in a frantic “Julia Child” voice) how to make Japanese pickle. For Chef Demonstrating Chinese Rice Garden, he ordered a Chinese takeaway meal and converted it into a garden before a tiny audience seated on the floor. At an exhibition in 2010, his artist’s statement took the form of Chef Making Kim Chi—a demonstration of kim chi preparation.

“The mask that we each wear mediates between the self and the Other.”

Pygmy in Paper Forest, 1978

The Artist As a Fraud 41

Chef Demonstrating Chinese Rice Garden, 1974

Teacher Showing Students How to Make 400 Yards of Paper in a Square, 1968 and 2010 42 Geist 88 Spring 2013

art com e s to t h e eve ry day

Glenn Lewis has been working for close to six decades; he has appeared in some two hundred solo and group exhibitions. The first art he remembers making was an oil painting called La Laundresse, a domestic portrait in the manner of Degas. After high school (in Kelowna, BC) he went to the Vancouver School of Art on a scholarship and worked with some of Canada’s most renowned artists, among them Jack Shadbolt, Don Jarvis and Gordon Smith. He spent three years in Cornwall in the sixties, studying ceramics under Bernard Leach, the well-known studio potter whose practice combined Western and Eastern crafts and philosophies, and inspired in Glenn Lewis an abiding interest in simple forms, in botany and horticulture, in food preparation and the everyday aspects of life. Lewis’s work has extended to photography, film and video, ceramics, poetry, collage, sculpture, correspondence, horticulture and performance, and it embraces street parades, craft fairs, paper burnings, cooking demonstrations and a wide range of measurings and mappings. Linnaeus at Fragrant Flora with His Two Lilium Cultivars “Ocean” and “Albatross,” 2003

“Found materials carry all kinds of cultural styles, meanings and memories that an artist could not even begin to express directly.”

Chef Making Kim Chi, 2010 The Artist As a Fraud 43

Sweeper Back and Forth, 2007 too profa n e

In September 2012, Glenn Lewis opened three exhibitions at the same time in separate galleries in Vancouver. One of them, The Artist As a Fraud, from which the images on these pages are taken, is a retrospective of his conceptual and performance work and consists largely of images of the artist in masks, or personae, adopted over the last thirtyfour years. The necktie sculptures he included as “part of, and a remnant of, traditional male disguise.” The earliest trace of persona-making is a photograph from 1953, Time Off for Salad Cook in Banff, in which Lewis at eighteen can be seen enacting the reality of a summer job.

“The artwork is a type of explanation and doesn’t really need to be translated by the artist.”

Vanity, 2012 44 Geist 88 Spring 2013

Sweeper on Shaw Dundas Spadina Queen Dalhousie Dundas Spadina Queen, 2007 i won ’ t take your hand , monsieur manet

Parade Participant in Downtown Eastside, 2010

“Artists are often reluctant to discuss why they produce particular works, and with good reason.”

In 2007, Glenn Lewis performed an elaborate homage to the painter Paul Cézanne, one of the “instigators” of modernism, by appropriating not only the person of “Cézanne” but also the twenty-seven fountains of Aix-en-Provence, in each of which he performed a hand-washing ritual (in reference to the greeting Cézanne is said to have made upon meeting Édouard Manet, another leading instigator of modernism). I Won’t Take Your Hand, Monsieur Manet, I Have Not Washed in Eight Days is recorded in a “temporal” series of video loops viewable on several monitors at once: the effect is lyrical, humorous and disorienting: by “collapsing the past and future into the present,” as he puts it in an artist’s note, Glenn Lewis nicely entangles the viewer in the postmodern experience. (We are all together at the birth of modernism.)

New York Corres Sponge Dance School of Vancouver Swimmer, 1973 The Artist As a Fraud 45

Glenn Lewis is seventy-eight years old, in good shape (still swimming) and a natty dresser in a rumpled, bohemian sort of way. He has a crammed closetful of tweed jackets and coats, probably more than a hundred ties, and piles of hats. Pretty well all of them come from a Value Village near his home in East Vancouver. He makes art every day. “To use ourselves, our mask, to play at life is to be open to the tides of wonder that ebb and flow around us.”

“The Artist As a Fraud” and “I Won’t Take Your Hand, Monsieur Manet, I Have Not Washed in Eight Days” were exhibited at the Trench Gallery and the Trench Gallery Annex in Vancouver in 2012. David Wisdom worked for thirty years as a host and producer of many programs for CBC Radio. He has also played in bands and written extensively about popular music. Wisdom has exhibited his photographic works, curated exhibitions and presented multimedia shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Teck Gallery, Charles Scott Gallery and other Vancouver venues. He lives on Salt Spring Island, BC. Stephen Osborne is the publisher of Geist.

Time Off for Salad Cook in Banff, 1953

46 Geist 88 Spring 2013

I Won’t Take Your Hand, Monsieur Manet, I Have Not Washed in Eight Days, 2008

Geist will always hold your attention.

Geist offers a sumptuous mix of fact and fiction, photo essays, weird cartography, insightful reviews and little-known facts of interest, delivered to your door 4 times a year. Order your Geist subscription at geist.com today.

Photo: Christopher Grabowski, Geist 80

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n â&#x20AC;˘ N o r t h o f A m e r i c a

d o w n

t h e

r o a d

Life After Virginity connie kuhns A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock

am a girl who couldn’t speak. My words were so hidden I remember the first time I heard my own voice. Dave had asked for his class ring back. We were standing at my front door under the porch light. The words came from so deep inside me that it shocked us both. I managed to hold on to his ring for another day. No, I said. No. There was supposed to be an order to things. First you got his class ring. You wore it on your left hand wrapped in mohair or with little pearl beads glued underneath. It would be heavy and you would feel the weight of it every day (but in a good way). For Christmas you would give him a Speidel ID bracelet, engraved with his name, which he would give back to you to wear. It would knock against your desk during exams and slide up and down your arm as you teased your hair in the girls’ bathroom at school. You would spend the day making sure it didn’t fall off. Next 48 Geist 88 Spring 2013

would come the pearl. It could be a double or a single, black or white or both. If you were in college, a pearl could be followed by a pin. Pearled and pinned and then the white picket fence. It all made sense. It was a path that every girl, no matter how she looked, no matter what part of town she came from, would take. And eventually it would be required that she take it with somebody.

illy was the boy I picked in the aftermath of failure. He was simply there and I was completely without a here and now. He was part of a gang of hoods that lived in the shadow of the college. I was damaged goods, as they used to say. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a choice on my part, more a matter of just letting him. I was a drinking, crying college girl, previously unattainable. Yet I still had sex with him at the end of my period so he would think I was a virgin.

Some nights after curfew, he and the boys would cruise past Conrad Hall and yell up at my window. I suspect it made my dormitory sisters uncomfortable (unlike generations of famous frat boy panty raids, which were finally banned). Most evenings I could be found in the common room painting a huge psychedelic poster. Our Land is Hood Land it said in bright swirling letters, as I tried to claim an identity. I walked the tree-lined streets surrounding the campus imagining myself married to him and living the ever after. I was wearing Avon’s Regence when I lost my virginity. I was wearing Hawaiian White Ginger when I dreamed the ridiculous. It would be over soon enough.

n a recent trip down the west coast, I noticed how the highways have become dotted with crosses marking the spot where someone’s life has come to a tragic end. On Highway 30 in Oregon there were three small crosses on a piece of muddy incline, barely holding on, I thought. A cross on Highway 101 in California was large and decorated with military medals. How long had “Josh” stayed alive after surviving the war? Not far away was a simple cross, bright white, framed in a perfect rectangle of daffodils. Some go by so fast they are easy to miss. One day I saw a cross with bowling pins at its base. I cried a bit after seeing that one, as my son used to be a bowler.

t was the end of term. There was a live band from Oklahoma playing out in the country. We started drinking early, getting ready to go. Sam was driving. It was a big dance that I had been waiting for all week. I was in the back seat as we started to pull away from the curb. For reasons not understood even to this day, I asked Sam to stop. Suddenly I didn’t want to go. Later I told friends it was if I was being pulled out of the car. I can still see Leslie running across the front yard to take my place. “I’ll go!” she said, as she climbed in. Within the hour they had collided with a moving train. Sam’s back was broken. Leslie was killed. She was a kid. She had had a fight with her mom and was crashing at my place. I had just moved off campus with some girls from my dorm, and her boyfriend had asked if she could stay.

I walked around the block several times in the dark that night before I had the nerve to knock on the screen door and speak to her family. I was among the last to see her alive. As I sat at the kitchen table stammering out some kind of incoherent whatever, Leslie’s mother stood at the kitchen sink in such distress, staring at me with such feeling, like a Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange photograph only with a thousand times more misery. Meanwhile, Leslie’s sister held her tone steady as she kept thanking me for dropping by, wanting me to get the hell out of their home. Leslie’s boyfriend sat in my living room for hours playing “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (their song) on the record player. I was frozen and silent in my room. He didn’t think I understood. I’m sorry I didn’t make Leslie go home and work things out with her mom. I’m sorry that I got out of the car. How do you dream about something that you have never seen, that you can’t even imagine, that may not even exist, that has no words? What is out there on the horizon, on the cliff at the edge of the world? The next time I spoke was the night I knew I had flunked out of college. I had slept through my English final that morning, my last chance. A bunch of us were hanging out at the turnaround in the Safeway parking lot down on Main Street watching the cars drive by. I was leaning against Gilbert Molina’s maroon Impala when I said it. I’m going to California on Monday. Does anybody want to come?

met Danny in a downtown park, the kind of place where anybody drifting west found themselves upon arrival. I’ve written East Lansing, Michigan next to his name. That’s all. The Apollo 11 astronauts were barrelling to the moon, a dairy farmer’s field was being converted to host Woodstock and Charles Manson was preparing to kill. Meanwhile, I had just driven thousands of miles to the west coast in a ’59 Chevy that I bought for sixtyfive dollars the night before I ran away. Danny was also on the road but he wasn’t running. He was casual and confident, a professor’s son. I was in shock at what I’d done. That very first day he took me to “a happening” near the university where Canned Heat was playing. All around me, beautiful Life After Virginity 49

girls danced alone. They spun in their flowery dresses swinging their long, straight hair and waving their slender arms. Couples were getting together among the trees and in the open. Men walked past me, long-haired, tanned and bare-chested, their drawstring pants hanging so low I had to turn away. It was a child’s garden of grass. As I stood in that park in my red-striped knit tank top and matching shorts outfit from Bobbie Brooks, which I had worked so hard at the bakery to buy, with my hair actually pulled back into pigtails and wearing my little black glasses, I had but one thought. It’s all true. Everything they ever said about California is true. Danny gave me acid. He had orange dots on pieces of paper and tiny orange barrels wrapped up in cloth, which he unrolled with much ceremony. He guided me on a trip the way it used to be done when you turned someone on for the first time. “Look. The walls are breathing.” I had never even smoked a joint. We wandered up and down the beach all night, falling and laughing, as the ground heaved beneath us, looking (to me) like a stuffed turkey at Thanksgiving. Strange men sat on top of the Riviera Hotel where chimneys used to be, waving at us with their heads in their laps. The lights from the distant amusement park were so bright I had to go hide in the weeds. David Lynch could do no better. By dawn I was alone on the sidewalk, watching a tall circular apartment building wake up while staring at the roots of palm trees, which looked like little wiggling arms and legs. I found safety in a head shop that had just opened its doors. It was starting to get hot. I bought a “sparkling” peace symbol necklace, which I still have, and the guy at the counter gave me some reds to help me come down. There were no more rules. Danny was red and freckled and soft and pink. We had sex a couple of times in my car, where I was sleeping until it got a flat tire and was towed away by the city. I remember certain 50 Geist 88 Spring 2013

things about being with him, not because it was significant, but because it wasn’t. The word unpleasant comes to mind. He tried to tell me how to give him a blow job, without much success on my part. It just didn’t make sense to me at the time. (My friend Barbara told me that the first time a guy asked her to give him a blow job, she actually blew on it.) He didn’t stick around for very long. In August he had to go back to Michigan to get ready for school. I found out at the free clinic that I was pregnant. The doctor left me exposed on the table and told me to come back in six weeks. A nurse covered me up and tried to be kind. I still remember walking down Magnolia Street through pools of night-blooming jasmine, stricken with disbelief. This was a death sentence. Although I wouldn’t know her for another twenty years, my friend Gina was also pregnant that summer. She was driven to Tijuana and dropped off alone on a corner to be picked up by a courier and taken to a secret location away from her friends. No one knew where she was. She was returned hours late and bleeding. She would never be pregnant again. During that time—as I was reminded recently at a reunion of old friends—four girls were arrested coming back into California from Mexico after having gotten “illegal” abortions. By comparison, I got off easy. I drank a bottle of castor oil and pounded on my stomach. I miscarried in the bathroom of an apartment over a laundromat. It floated for a moment and then it was gone. I saw it. It was about the size of my thumb. My friend Linda, who heard me cry out, asked if I was all right. I told her I had just started my period. I continued to want to believe that for many years.

think making out has probably become a lost art. Imagine being in high school, driving around on country roads, listening to Motown on the radio while looking for a place to park

and then spending hours kissing. Drive-in movies were made for boys, and balconies were couples only. Girdles were in fashion, which probably added to the suspense. Mick Taylor was the first guy to feel me up. I wasn’t very good at making out and he had to have the neighbour boy talk to me about how I should at least move around a bit and make a little noise. Who knew? We were together the summer before I went into the ninth grade. He was way older and had just moved to town from Chicago. He was the only guy around with skinny jeans and real Beatle boots. He gave me my first Rolling Stones album and worked at the local radio station. Now that was a turn-on. I never advanced beyond letting him unfasten my bra, nonetheless I wrote a fictionalized version of our summer together, and bound it in a yellow binder, which got passed around my high school and almost ruined me. I called it “The Secret World of the Summer People.” Jerry was known as a great kisser. He made a girl feel deeply. He came recommended by another neighbour’s older sister. But he was also spoken for. He married Faye on horseback before people did such things. Eddie was a really good guy but his kisses were a bit sloppy and my blouse would always get wet. I did try to sleep with him once, in college, the night before he left for Vietnam. I wore a pair of see-through shorty pajamas as we made out on my couch. (He didn’t know that I was no longer a virgin.) Why I thought having sex with me would keep him from leaving is beyond me, but he was ever the gentleman. He was a better man than me as I later abandoned him to the jungles, ignoring his letters and his pleas. But I had run away from home and I didn’t know where I was. I tried to reach him one night from a pay phone in Albuquerque before he shipped out. I told the operator that he was probably playing pool somewhere on the base. She found him, but not before I had run out of change. I heard him say hello. I ran into him years later at Dude’s Steak House Bar and Grill back in our hometown. He told me he’d like to “twist my tits.” He hated me. He died a few years ago of Agent Orange-related illnesses after drug addiction, a failed marriage, prison and years on the

street. I located the woman he had been living with at the time of his death and let her know I was sorry. There were others who slipped away over the years, although with less guilt on my part. I met Lee at the Pike, that glistening, dancing amusement park down on the beach, full of bells and whistles and screams and smells and the longest hot dogs I had ever seen. I got a job selling tickets at the Glass House. When I got off my shift, I would hang out at Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo Studio watching sailors and bikers get tattooed. (One night Lyle Tuttle stopped by, the man who had become famous for tattooing Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, who were all still alive at that point.) Lee was a sailor. When he found out I was a runaway, he let my friends and me crash at a house he shared with some other guys from his ship. When summer was over we coincidentally ended up living in the same apartment building. Whenever his ship was in, we would make out on the fire escape. On one particularly cold night after we’d been out there for a while, he said, “You’ve got to fuck me or suck me.” I froze. You would never hear that kind of language in a Drifters song. Plus, I didn’t know exactly what he meant. I was also kind of hung up on numbers. By that time I had already slept with three guys (none of whom I had married). However, where Lee was concerned, I probably should have said yes. Even on that cold metal fire escape, on an October night chilled by the Pacific Ocean, he in his peacoat and I in my poncho, to paraphrase Bonnie Raitt I think he would have loved me like a man. Eventually Lee took my silence as rejection. He climbed back in through the window. He lost interest in me after that. Then one day, his ship sailed, for real.  Connie Kuhns is a writer and photographer who lives in the Gulf Islands of BC. She has also worked as a music journalist for print and broadcast, interviewing such luminaries as Etta James, Koko Taylor and Ronnie Gilbert; producing an award-winning radio documentary on Janis Joplin; and hosting Rubymusic, a CFRO radio show on music by women, for fifteen years. “Life After Virginity” is an excerpt from a work-in-progress. Read more of Connie Kuhns’s Geist work at geist.com. Life After Virginity 51

p o e t r y

Chekhov’s Sister susan paddon c h e k hov ’ s sister ,

1873

belaia dacha

Two legs deep in the water, there was this girl, Maria, beside her brother, fishing. She—the sister— held a blanket so that he wouldn’t drown.

When the uniformed men arrived at the white house in Yalta, stomped their boots on the porch overlooking the flowering fig and quince, Maria Chekhova was already three days hungry.

Before drying him off, she checked his scrawny body, big head, for leeches. And he hardly noticed her there among the brambles, the bracken.

With her brother now long gone, she’d hired a girl to stay by her side in the raids. And there was even less food to go around with the incessant mewing of cats by the door.

They walked along the train tracks home, single file together, as lovers do in tired moments, kicking up dust, both of them, deliberates. She, there to keep him company, not to tell the others he needed her.

Maria gave the intruders rules upon entry. Mostly they did as they were told. They washed their hands after using the toilet, stubbed out their cigarettes in broken clay pots and picked the horse shit from their boots with sticks from the garden before coming inside. She was lucky. Everybody had heard what had happened to Dostoyevsky’s house. The looting would always go on for a period. They often took even more than her stale supplies. Shots rang out in the night, broke windows and whispered a kind of violence. But not the bandits, nor the anti-Bolsheviks, nor the Whites would go into his room. When it happened again with the Germans, she had a few days to prepare the house. She hung Goethe where Gorky had been, set out photos of the dachshunds, and German translations of her brother’s work.*

Susan Paddon lives and writes on Cape Breton Island. These poems are from her first collection of poetry, Two Tragedies, to be published by Brick Books in the fall of 2014.

52 Geist 88 Spring 2013

What I know of war is a certain kind of prison. Maria couldn’t get the words out of her head. I too am like a prisoner. But what is this prisoner like? *I am indebted to W.D. Wetherell and how he imagined Maria’s response to the German invasion of the house.

easter day

maria ,

Church bells, distant canticles called him to the street. He could walk through everything.

Because it was a summer of brothers. Because Taganrog was a stinkpot in July. Because they were five for the holidays with their parents gone on a pilgrimage (Moscow, holy relics, Polytechnical exhibition, rich cousins in Shuia).

Like the alleys of Petersburg, ill-dressed because the show wasn’t going his way. Maria’s ivory cross no longer around his neck. She was always the first to search, to drop everything, refuse to sleep until he came back home. The others thought they knew better. Leave him to wallow in success for a while. But they’d turn to her first. We need a Chekhov play! A sister can work magic on a stubborn man— for you he’ll do anything, Maria! So she sent searching prayers off

1878

But really because Maria would remember the names of backstreet brothels, the then foreign stench of lust and sweat on her brothers’ coats, the stories she could never get clean. And because later, much later, she would hate it, and want it and, even later, dream it again, and all over again.

in convoys, looking for him and on behalf of him, knees to the floor next to her bed. And he never stopped counting on this. He was good to her, her brother. Save that July when a syllable couldn’t be managed to put her mind at ease. Still, if she had been born the walker. Someone who could get away on foot. Who loved to roam the empty streets at night, the church bells, the distant canticles.

the night before she died

Maria Chekhova dreamed of the yard in Yalta. All of the fruit trees were crying and she didn’t know why. The dogs were there. Olga too, just back from America, eating a giant pumpkin pie in the shade. Maria sat down in the middle of the lawn and began to laugh. She laughed so hard her stomach cramped and then her feet began to rise up beyond her control. The movement continued to her knees and hips, and before she knew it, she was floating upside down, her dress billowing in the warm breeze and still she was laughing, utterly and uncontrollably now. The trees stopped crying to look at her and all at once, they began laughing too.

Chekhov's Sister 53

c i t y

o f

w o r d s

A Brief History of Tags alberto manguel “Tagging” is human nature—to separate a book into parts, then rebuild it in memory as a kaleidoscopic whole

y son, an expert Googler, tried to explain to me the nature of tags. Since I’m by and large electronically illiterate, it took longer than he had expected, but in the end, I think I got it. In fact, I think I may have been able to track tagging back to its primordial roots. The motto of human knowledge seems always to have been “Divide and Conquer.” Confronted with the bewildering, intricate reality in which we ourselves are enmeshed, our oldest ancestors must have tried to distinguish in that strange creature we call the universe, made up of trees and tigers and rivers and stones and stars, 54 Geist 88 Spring 2013

the separate entities that we call stars, stones, rivers, tigers and trees. Perhaps this need to see the parts in the whole is what lies behind the story in Genesis, of God bringing His creatures to Adam in order to be named. Perhaps God knew that Adam was incapable of perceiving in the tumultuous herd of fur and feathers and claws the singularities of God’s creation until each dog, each nightingale, each hippopotamus had received a proper name. Perhaps language is merely a tool for classifying the universe in order to see its parts. A library, as Borges has taught us, is one of the names we give the

universe, and shares with it its Gestalt quality. The earliest recorded libraries were born from a clash between two opposing ambitions: the ambition to collect and the ambition to categorize. As volumes piled up in the earliest Mesopotamian libraries, the earliest librarians struggled to find categories under which to list the books for identification. One of the oldest libraries we know of, an archive dating from the second millennium BCE, was discovered in 1975 by the archaeologist Paolo Matthiae. It stood in the city of Ebla, south of Aleppo, and was destroyed at least twice before 1600 BCE. Here, among photo: paul joseph

the ruins, Matthiae found lists or catalogues of the volumes collected, divided into myriad subjects such as kings of Ebla, commercial agreements, geographical sites, birds, metal and wooden objects, animals, gods, fish, professions, proverbs… We don’t know if these categories obeyed a hierarchy, but they certainly must have helped locate a specific volume on a specific subject. The history of libraries is the history of the tagging of libraries. Whether by order of importance, as in the abbatial libraries of the Middle Ages where the Holy Scriptures occupied the first and supreme section, or in personal libraries, such as the mid-thirteenth-century collection of Richard de Fournival, who organized his books as in a flowerbed, starting with the blooms of philosophy and its offshoots; whether in the tenthcentury Baghdad library catalogued by Ibn al-Nadim that included among its categories “The virtues and faults of all writers,” “Arab and foreigners” and “Existing in the Arab tongue,” or in Melvil Dewey’s late nineteenthcentury decimal system in which God has the number 231; whether in the Cefu Yuangui, a Chinese catalogue prepared by a contemporary of al-Nadim’s, ordered according to bureaucratic status, from the Emperor downwards, or in the changing order established by Aby Warburg for his library in the early twentieth century, an order that followed the free associations of his wandering mind—all our labelling, without an accompanying explanation of its raison d’être, can be read as dreamlike poems composed by a reader in a trance. Sometimes the logic behind such bibliographic categorizations can be

glimpsed—alphabetical or chronological orders, by country or literary genre—but most of the time the reader’s tagging obeys rules that no one, sometimes not even the tagger, can explain. The endpaper pages of my books, where I jot down references I want to remember, consist of exactly such incoherent lists. Who can deduce that these tags—laughter, piano, wind, time, view or mirage, memory (lack of)— followed by page numbers, belong to my tattered copy of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe? Who could connect the words first violence, mirror, library, beauty of beloved, duchess, cock and come up with Don Quixote, Part I ? And yet, in these seemingly mad sequences of references, my reading (at least one of my readings) lies revealed. Names, titles, labels attempt to do the impossible: select and encompass a book at the same time. “The swan of Avon” defines and does not define Shakespeare, just as the identification King Lear points at but fails to grasp the complex entirety of the play and just as Shakespeare’s summation of the Iliad, “the story of a cuckold and a whore,” is no doubt fair and yet tells us almost nothing about the book’s multitudinous contents. Perhaps tagging is what all readers do: take apart the book in countless kaleidoscopic pieces and rebuild it in our memory as an ungraspable kaleidoscopic whole. In this—and my son agrees—lies our pleasure. 

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author, editor and translator of hundreds of works. His most recent writings in English are A Reader on Reading, All Men Are Liars and The City of Words. He lives in France.

Read Manguel online In Praise of the Enemy; Van Gogh’s Final Vision; Art and Blasphemy; Dante in Guantánamo; Hospital Reading; Detective Samuel de Champlain; and more.

Read Geist at

GEIST com 

City of Words 55

n a t i o n a l

d r e a m s

Come to the Cabaret daniel francis The Penthouse, Vancouver’s number one strip club, has welcomed some of the brightest stars in entertainment, and it also has links to the tragic story of the city’s missing women

he Penthouse Nightclub, the kind of place the tabloid press usually describes as “notorious,” was known to be a centre of prostitution in Vancouver when, in the summer of 1975, the police launched an operation to shut it down. After a lengthy investigation involving wiretaps, hidden cameras and undercover surveillance, the vice squad came calling just before Christmas and arrested the three Philliponi brothers, who ran the club, along with three other employees. The doors were padlocked, the business licence was revoked and the city’s most infamous night spot—the Vancouver Sun columnist Allan Fotheringham once called it “a minor league equivalent of the Eiffel Tower”—went dark. Nine months later the trial of the “Penthouse Six” began. The Crown charged that the club was a hotbed of sex and depravity, and the Philliponis (or Filippones; to confuse matters the brothers spelled their name differently) were nothing but pimps and procurers. The trial was labelled the “Charge-sex trial” after the Chargex credit cards that were used by patrons to buy sexual services. The court heard lurid testimony from underage girls who claimed they had gone to the club to turn tricks; from a prostitute who appeared on the stand in wig and sunglasses for fear of being beaten by her pimp; from another seventeenyear-old prostitute, who testified that before she could use the club as a rendezvous she had to perform oral sex on one of the brothers (this testimony

56 Geist 88 Spring 2013

was later refuted when she proved unacquainted with the penis in question). Meanwhile, one of the undercover detectives admitted to getting drunk at the club and dating one of the dancers. All of this splashed across the front pages of the newspapers day after day, keeping the city titillated for weeks. There hadn’t been so much excitement since the decrepit film star Errol Flynn died in the arms of his teenage inamorata in a West End apartment seventeen years earlier. In one sense the Penthouse affair, which is detailed in Aaron Chapman’s lively new book, Liquor, Lust, and the Law: The Story of Vancouver’s Legendary Penthouse Nightclub (Arsenal Pulp Press), reads like a comical episode from a Damon Runyon story. Certainly the lead actor, Joe Philliponi, feels like a character out of The Sopranos, with his flamboyant personality and eccentric fashion sense—one reporter wrote that his wardrobe “looks as if it was pulled at random out of a spin dryer.” Testimony at the trial showed a widespread use of the club as a place where sex workers met their clients. The Philliponis could hardly deny this was the case, but they argued that they could not be held responsible for everyone who visited the club. Their lawyer pointed out, accurately, that no tricks were turned on the premises and management took no share of the women’s proceeds. “It was just a question of boy meets girl,” Joe Philliponi told the judge, portraying the strip joint as an innocent

lonely hearts club. But the judge was unconvinced. He convicted five of the accused of conspiring to live off the avails of prostitution and sentenced Joe and one of his brothers to jail. Ultimately an appeal court overturned the convictions and the Penthouse got its business licence back. But the air had gone out of the balloon. Attendance at the club fell off and the Penthouse, perhaps because of the publicity surrounding the trial, began to seem more vulgar than glamorous. It was said that the Philliponis were linked to the mob, a rumour that gained strength in 1983, when Joe was murdered in his home next door to the club during an amateurish robbery. Then, improbably, burlesque made a comeback and so did the Penthouse. Today the club is thriving under the management of Danny Filippone, son of one of the brothers. It was Filippone the younger who discovered the hidden cache of old photographs that makes Liquor, Lust, and the Law such wonderful browsing. Harry Belafonte, the Mills Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Joe Louis, Billie Holiday, Victor Borge, Les Brown and his Band of Renown, Louis Armstrong—their photographs all adorn the pages of the book, as they do the walls of the club, along with my personal favourite, the four Ladybirds, “the world’s first allgirl topless band.” But the Penthouse trial was much more than a nostalgic episode from Vancouver’s golden age of nightclubs. It had important implications

that reverberate in the city today. By closing the club and others like it, police flushed several hundred working women into the streets to find their customers. Chapman quotes a retired police officer: “As far as I was concerned, the Penthouse was never a problem. I knew what was going on. But it was controlled there. After the trial, the hookers poured out into the streets all over the city, and it became like trying to capture quicksilver to manage it again.” The decade that followed was marked by an intense debate about prostitution in the city as the on-street sex trade flourished first in the central downtown and then in the West End. Finally residents rebelled and, with violence threatening, the city obtained a court injunction to clear the prostitutes out of the west side. But this was no solution. Prostitutes simply shifted their activities from one neighbourhood to another. Ultimately they were forced into the darkest corners of the city’s downtown, where they were easy victims for sexual predators. By coincidence, at almost the same time as Chapman’s book appeared, so did the final report of Wally Oppal’s months-long inquiry into the police investigation of the Robert Pickton case. As I hope no one needs reminding, Pickton is the predator convicted in 2007 of the second-degree murder of six women at his Coquitlam pig farm and accused of killing at least twenty more. (The Crown decided not to proceed with prosecution on these latter charges, having already sent Pickton away for life.) In a nutshell, Oppal’s report, titled Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, concluded that the police—both city police and the RCMP—had botched the job of hunting down Pickton. “The missing and murdered women were forsaken by society at large and then again by the police,” Oppal wrote. With the benefit of hindsight, many people have drawn a direct connection between the Penthouse raid

in 1975 and the series of murders and disappearances leading to the arrest and conviction of Robert Pickton many years later. In his book Aaron Chapman seems to agree, quoting one of the club regulars: “The girls were safe there, and under cover. Big deal if the Filippones grabbed an end, but why shouldn’t they? They paid the taxes and kept the place safe. If some weirdo like Pickton would have come in, [they] would have remembered him and known what cab number he and the girl left in. They kept an eye out for people.” In other words, it was the police and the laws they were asked to enforce that pushed the missing women into the arms of a serial killer. The Penthouse raid was not the only enabling factor in Pickton’s string of murders. Public hysteria and hypocrisy about street prostitution; the failure of civic officials to contemplate ways of keeping the women safe, not just out of sight; federal laws that encourage unsafe practices among sex workers—all these things allowed a predator like Pickton to do what he did for so long. Still, the link to the Penthouse raid cannot be denied. Before 1975, no sex workers were known to have been murdered in Vancouver. Then, inexorably, the number began to climb until finally in the 1990s the press and the public realized there were dozens of unsolved murders and disappearances among the city’s street prostitutes. This is the real significance of the Penthouse Nightclub to the story of the city: that it was the place, in the mid-1970s, where the seeds were planted for the worst episode of violence against women in Canadian history.  Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, among them Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade (Subway Books, 2006). Read more of his Geist work at geist.com. National Dreams 57

ENDNOTES squirmworthy

Mary Schendlinger

he February edition of SayWha?!, a monthly evening of “readings of deliciously rotten writing” held at the groovy Cottage Bistro on Main Street in Vancouver, was emceed by Sara Bynoe, a lovely young woman in a sleek white dress who was brash and funny and dropped a lot of F-bombs. She warmed up the already highenergy audience with choice bits from TextAppeal—for Girls!—The Ultimate Texting Guide by Michael Masters, a “douche-bag author” (Kindle), including his advice on questions such as Why isn’t he texting you back?? and quotations from Amazon customer reviews, such as “Any woman armed with this knowledge will certainly have a TON more SATISFYING dates, with a TON more men.” Bynoe then passed the mike to Brad McNeil, a comedian, who read some excruciating passages from The Woman I Was Born to Be, a memoir by Susan Boyle (you remember), and pointed out that she need not have structured the days before that first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent as a cliffhanger. McNeil then produced Miley Cyrus’s autobiography (hoots from audience members— autobiog? Cyrus was seventeen when the book came out), pointed out the first chapter, titled “Before the Before” (groans), and read a few items from Cyrus’s bucket list, including “Dig a well in Indonesia” and “Get married/ Have kidz” (screams of agony). And so on, with fine food and glasses of beer. All in good fun, though one hopes never to be a subject of it. At one point Bynoe invoked past targets—including, said she in that OK-you-will-not-

58 Geist 88 Spring 2013

buh-leev-this voice, an old Canadian novel about a woman making out with a bear. Eek! But then, as Will Rogers (or someone) said, everything is funny when it happens to somebody else. Take a look: sarabynoe.com/shows/ say-wha/.

long story short

Lauren Ogston

ags for The Tartar Steppe, a novel by Dino Buzzati (Godine, 2005; first published in 1940): youth time vanity facade arrogance tradition mirage batman

boston blackie

Stephen Osborne

Close Call for Boston Blackie, the tenth in the popular series of movies about Blackie, a jewel thief turned detective, is the one my mother saw in 1946 in a Quonset hut in Churchill, Manitoba (see “Everything Is Perfect,” page 9 this issue). It can now be seen on the internet: a standard genre film featuring men in fedoras who exchange wisecracks and gunfire, a blonde with a heart of gold, a brunette with a heart of brass, reality effects supplied by cigarettes, cigars and telephones—and a McGuffin in the form of a baby acquired illicitly by the brunette (an old flame of Boston Blackie’s) who has a scheme to pass the kid

off as heir to a fortune. Much of the action is given over to Boston Blackie’s sidekick, Runt, a short man in a peaked cap who dashes off at intervals with the baby to avoid the bad guys, the brunette and/or the police, while Boston Blackie works at breakneck speed to avoid a frame-up, in a series of hotel rooms, office rooms, doorways, hallways and the interiors of speeding automobiles. Several fedorawearing men are shot dead at close range by other fedora-wearers; one of them is the father of the fraudulent baby, who appears in a single scene long enough to say, “How do I know I’ll get the kid back?” His body is dragged across a living room and stuffed behind the divan; his feet remain visible for the rest of the scene. The baby’s mother is neither seen nor mentioned. When Runt thrusts the baby into a utility closet, Blackie reprimands him: “You don’t fold a baby up like a shirt!” The dumb cop, who keeps a handful of cigars under his fedora, asks: “Whose baby are you hiding and how does it tie in with this murder?” The fraud and the fraudulent baby (at one point Runt says, “Hey, the kid’s a ringer!”) are exposed by a vaccination mark revealed in a lengthy closeup of the baby’s arm that could be part of a public education film. Forged signatures are supported by a birth certificate, also displayed full-screen long enough for the audience to become familiar with a legal document and to discover that the baby’s name, never uttered aloud, is Donald. At one point in the action, Runt turns a pack of big dogs on long traces loose in a hotel room filled with policemen: all hell breaks loose. In the end, the dumb cop decides to take the baby home to live with him.

dear patient

the skinny

finish me

Jesmine Cham

Jill Mandrake

Lily Gontard

re we defined by our parents? That is: are our personality and temperament established the moment we emerge from the womb? Or can we escape the flaws of our predecessors and the legacy of the cruel acts they’ve perpetrated, and create new, bolder identities for ourselves? The ageold nature vs. nurture debate is at the heart of Ellen Ullm a n ’s n o v e l B y B l o o d ( F a r r a r, Straus and Giroux), set in 1970s San Francisco—a period when the Zodiac Killer and Patty Hearst loomed large. A university professor relocates to a downtown office after a scandal forces him to take leave. Through the thin walls, he eavesdrops on the psychiatric sessions of a conflicted woman, unhappy with both her adoptive family and her critical girlfriend. Both the professor and the woman’s therapist, haunted by their respective family histories, seek to alleviate their distress through the patient. One of them hopes that the patient will embrace a tabula rasa perspective of her genetics; the other encourages her to find her birth mother. The professor’s role as intrusive narrator—a voyeuristic substitute for the reader—injects a sense of pervasive unease as he worries about being caught, never again to hear “my dear patient.” Since he serves as our only guide, the narrative occasionally strains to provide him with opportunities to pick up key moments of the patient’s story. Ullman, herself an adopted child, offers a sympathetic portrayal of the unnamed patient, who is insecure and at times prejudiced, but whose desire for love and acceptance, and whose harrowing journey, make her a heartbreaking heroine and the book a compelling and worthy read.

he genre of “flashes” (short-short stories) is different from “vignettes” in that flashes are required to have the elements of conventional fiction: plot, characters, tension and, most imperative, a beginning, middle and end. (Although let us keep in mind what Federico Fellini said: “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”) There are differing views as to how flashes ought to be written. The most common method is to first write the story with no space restraints, and then methodically remove any gratuitous or inessential words. But how about the opposite: write a story using merely one or two sentences, adding the necessary padding afterwards? (If “padding” can be used in skinny fiction.) The point is to utilize the white space: have the blank parts of the page expose the story too. I’ve read too many flashes that appear to be crammed into the allotted margins, obviously pared down from a much longer original. One of the best current venues for this kind of microfiction is the biannual literary journal Flash, from Chester University in the UK (http://www.chester.ac.uk/ flash.magazine). The latest issue (v. 5, #2, October 2012) contains three outstanding stories: “Sex Ed” by Charles Haverty (which contains not just a twist ending—often a central component of microfiction—but a downright beatific twist); “The New Year” by Pamela Painter (which depicts, rather unconventionally, the one-sided anguish that follows a broken relationship); and “Beaky” by Paul Blaney (which displays compassion for unfortunate souls, primarily between the lines, as does his “Not Nothing,” which appeared in the previous issue of Flash). Flashes are sudden and compelling vehicles for sudden, compelling insights. Flash magazine is worth tracking down, for its high-quality examples of such work.

have excuses: I’m manic, I’m hormonal, I may need to talk to my handsome doctor about a prescription. I’m in the middle of chapter 20 of One Day by the British writer David Nichols (Hodder & Staughton) and I’m bawling my eyes out. I’ve had to put the book down. Light from my reading lamp reflects off the embossed blue metallic print: ONE DAY, in caps, shines from the cover. “Finish me,” it encourages, a bit menacingly. In part 1, I was uninterested in the main characters, Emma and Dexter (Em ’n’ Dex, Dex ’n’ Em), and I’m not sure why I kept reading. But in part 2, I developed a collegial friendship with them, and they made me laugh out loud in a coffee shop (a friend referred to me as the crazy lady reading the book in the corner). In part 4 I got bored and began skimming over sentences and paragraphs.The book chronicles the lives of Emma and Dexter, who meet up and make out on their university graduation night. It’s July 15, St. Swithin’s Day, and every chapter that follows takes place on July 15 and tells of Dexter’s, Emma’s or their shared life, which continues for decades as a deep and loyal friendship. The book was made into a movie starring Anne (if you squint, I could be Audrey Hepburn) Hathaway and Jim (who?) Sturgess. I am still a bit confused by the reference to St. Swithin’s Day, a weather-watching day with a saint who is associated with apple crops. St. Swithin, apples, forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve, garden of Eden, Dex ’n’ Em… Postscript: I dried my eyes and finished chapter 20 and the rest of the book. Dex ’n’ Em and I are friends again, and I recommend that you get to know them, too.

Endnotes 59

when i’m 64

the jonathans

Michael Hayward

Jocelyn Kuang

ou pick up Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (McClelland & Stewart) because you’re ready to give Auster another shot (you’ve found his recent work uneven, but his New York Trilogy—a dazzling postmodernist take on the detective novel genre—is still high on your list of all-time greats); against all reason you think that you might be in the mood for an introspective memoir about aging. You note that Auster began Winter Journal exactly one month before his sixtyfourth birthday, an age when many seem to become preoccupied with thoughts that “time is running out, after all.” At first, Auster’s use of the second person throughout Winter Journal feels awkward and strained: you can’t think of anyone who uses the second person in their journal; but eventually you get used to this stylistic quirk. You like the fact that Auster does not order events chronologically but interleaves incidents from different periods of his life. Memories from his boyhood (“you are five years old, crouched over an anthill in the backyard”) rub shoulders on the page with events from later years (“in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met”); it seems to you that this is exactly the way that memory works, time tumbled by our rummaging. Winter Journal ends with a memento mori, a dark foreshadowing of the inevitable end: “You are sixtyfour years old. Outside the air is grey, almost white, with no sun visible. You ask yourself: how many mornings are left? A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life.” You decide that it is time for a mug of hot tea. 60 Geist 88 Spring 2013

f Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You (Plume) and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (Harper Perennial), two books about family relationships and dysfunction, I’d say my preferred Jonathan is Tropper. Both novels are built on a quest to bring a family together one last time, in hopes of mending fractured relationships. In The Corrections, the mother, Enid, attempts to gather the three kids for one last Christmas in their childhood home. Franzen tells the story by exploring each person’s life and the complications leading up to the family gathering. It is hard to like Franzen’s characters—all of them, especially Enid, got on my nerves. This Is Where I Leave You, Tropper’s book about mending family relationships, starts from the death of the father, which brings everyone back home to mourn his passing. The story is told by Judd Foxman, who has sunk to a low point in his life because he is in the midst of getting a divorce and now his father has passed away. Judd is a character who invites sympathy, and his observations of family dynamics as well as the disintegration of his personal life, kept me reading to the end.

red scare

Canada where school principals expelled children because their parents were Communists and where the RCMP followed and questioned children in the hopes of discovering their parents’ whereabouts. Laurie’s father was a violent man and a heavy drinker who put both his carousing and his Party work before his family, and even though the Party had a hand in many aspects of Lewis’s life, dealing with alcoholism and abuse seems not to have been part of their mandate. In 1946, when Lewis was sixteen, she and her mother left her father and ended up in New York City, where members of the leftie community loaned them money, helped them find accommodation and gave her mother work. Lewis and her mother each experienced a coming of age that included automats, cold-water walkups, writers’ groups, the FBI, the loyalty oath (“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any organization that supports or advocates the overthrow of the government by violent means”) and, after her mother had fled to Canada because “the problem was not what they asked you about yourself, but what they asked you about your friends,” the Rosenberg trial. Thanks to Lewis’s smart, concise, humorous writing, this account of a unique upbringing is a pleasure to read.

Patty Osborne

n 1939, Russia and Germany signed the Warsaw Pact and the Canadian government made it illegal to be a member of the Communist Party, so Laurie Lewis’s parents, who were both active members, went into hiding. They buried incriminating books in the backyard and left Laurie and her brother in a boarding house run by a woman who didn’t ask many questions. In her memoir Little Comrades (Porcupine’s Quill), Lewis paints a picture of a small-minded

a second piece of pi

Jennesia Pedri

first read Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (Vintage) in my grade 12 English class—which may explain my lack of appreciation for an adventure fantasy about a writer who seeks out a man named Pi Patel in order to tell him a story that will make him believe in God. When I heard they were turning the book into a movie, I had serious doubts, and apparently I wasn’t the

only one. Before Ang Lee’s film won Oscars for best director, visual effects, original score and cinematography at the 85th Academy Awards, the director himself had admitted to thinking that Life of Pi was “unfilmable.” To me it seemed even more impossible that I would ever want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days following a shipwreck that leaves a sixteen-year-old boy stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with only a tiger for company. Whether it was the film’s visual effects that finally brought the book to life for me, or the fact that I had now graduated from high school, on rereading the novel I was able to suspend disbelief and to appreciate the story of Pi’s loss, his survival, and his indiscriminate faith in God.

walking with giants Dennis Mills and Peggy Thompson

e are old friends, both senior citizens who have suffered heavy losses in the last few years. In spite of that, or because of it, we went online and bought tickets to the 2012 dream tour of two musical giants— Patti Smith, the original punk poetess, and Neil Young, playing with his greatest musical foils, Crazy Horse. They were playing only a few eastern North American cities, and one of them was Montreal, in November 2012. Both artists had released albums earlier that year: Banga (Patti) and Psychedelic Pill, a double album (Neil,

with Crazy Horse). Both of them had recently published memoirs. These are not artists who “play the hits.” They approach every new project as their muses direct them, which has led to periods of great creativity and experimentation. Neil had suffered an aneurysm in 2011, and Patti had lost her good friend Robert Mapplethorpe; her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith; and her original piano player, Richard Sohl. Fortunately for their fans, 2012 was also one of the most creative years of their lives. Dennis: Patti Smith came onstage at the Bell Centre in Montreal waving to her fans like the Queen. She has long grey hair now, and was wearing her signature androgynous white shirt, vest and suit jacket. She introduced her band, including her son Jackson on the guitar. And she gave us everything we came for. Prayers to the Great Mother, white light/white heat, mom dancing; she shook the family tree. She confessed her love for all things Neil, invoked Native American ghosts, gave shout-outs to the poets who forged the alchemy between sea and sky, stretched out her long, white, glowing fingers and moved in sync with the magic drones and melodies from our youth. As she launched into “Gloria,” she released a sustained stream of consciousness—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” She leaned on the parking meter and we all held our breath as she took the big plunge. But I’m here to tell the world that oh she looked so good, and oh she looked so fine. She is timeless and ageless. She is P-A-T-T-I. Peggy: In 1978, I saw Patti Smith perform and I interviewed her for the Georgia Straight weekly. She was only seven or eight years older than me, but at the time it felt like interviewing someone from another planet. I didn’t know that I was talking to a poet, who speaks in poetry, a language of beauty. In 2012, in Montreal, she sang old songs and new. “Dancing Barefoot,” “Because the Night,” “April Fool.”

Her voice was strong, with chanting rhythms and tones that reminded me of monks. A few songs in, she took off her jacket, socks and shoes. At the end, when she sang “Gloria”—which in 1975 had become an anthem for lesbians and punks and punk lesbians everywhere—the teenagers all around us danced in their seats and sang along. So did we. Dennis: When it was time for the Main Event, the Music Heavyweight Champion of the World, lights came on and we heard the opening lines of a Beatles psychedelic classic: “I read the news today, oh boy…” The stage filled with middle-aged mad scientists, white hair and white lab coats, arranging Fender amps twenty or thirty feet high and a large microphone with scarves hanging off it. On came the band, and Neil, in his plaid shirt, T-shirt and jeans, opened with “Oh Canada”—in Montreal. The microphone lit up to become a giant “psychedelic pill.” The sound was perfect, an alchemical blend of high tech and primitive noise, loud enough that we could hear the distortion but not loud enough that we could feel it, noise for the mind, not the body. Neil goes back more than forty years, but this is no nostalgia act. His music with Crazy Horse is alive, interactive and bursting with piss and vinegar. He is still writing and performing new works. Hendrix is gone, Neil survived. Nirvana blew up, Neil thrives. Sonic Youth exploded, Neil Young is sixty-seven and he is still Young. Peggy: That afternoon, outside the Ritz Carlton, we talked with one of the mad-scientist roadies, a welltravelled man in his sixties with long white hair and beard. He told us that a few nights ago when they were playing one of the new songs, “Walk Like a Giant,” he had a moment of revelation: “Being in your sixties is like being in the Sixties—you just don’t give a fuck!” This was not an excuse for not caring; it was a message of freedom. Endnotes 61

t h e off the sh e l f

A journalist exposes contradictory stories about a well-known writer and wonders if we can ever really know someone in Alberto Manguel’s All Men Are Liars (Penguin); amnesia is no match for a man’s past in Commander Zero by David Neil Lee (Tightrope Books); conspiracy abounds when the life of a man, found unconscious and without identification in the Paris Métro, comes to light in Murray Pomerance’s Tomorrow (Oberon Press). A young boy uncovers his family’s secret past in pre-World War II Johannesburg in The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert (Knopf Canada); another lad discovers family secrets and sees a woman for the first time in The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (Biblioasis). A young girl recovers secret messages from her deceased composer father that help her avert danger in Katie Be Quiet by Darcy Tamayose (Coteau); another young girl holds her tongue about the girl in the candy apple red jacket in The Dodgem Derby by Jill Mandrake (New Orphic). Poutine, Ikea, knitting and thinking replace sex in Archive of the Undressed by Jeanette Lynes (Wolsak & Wynn); bumps of cocaine are scored and snorted inside of twenty minutes in The Other Side of Midnight: Taxicab Stories by Mike Heffernan (Creative Publishers); a psychedelic Winnipeg rock band, whose guitars do not gently weep, plies jailbait between sets in Steve Noyes’s Rainbow Stage-Manchuria (Oolichan Books). Dora, who may or may not be real, arrives unexplained and unannounced in the life of Jamie Faraday, a former World War II pilot, in Robert Harlow’s Faraday Comes Home (Xlibris); a young Austrian deserter starts out in search of his lost love and ends up in a concentration camp in Banff in Blood and Salt by Barbara Sapergia (Coteau Books); a Russian aristocrat recounts life from the greatroom to the gulag in A Countess in Limbo by Olga Hendrikoff (Inkflight). Kathryn Mockler offers poems in which Buddha joins Weight Watchers, 62 Geist 88 Spring 2013

w a l l

and Hurt Feelings and Anger take a joint vacation, in The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books); Ed Macdonald’s plays take down the high-and-mighty and, well, consumer capitalism itself in Mutant Sex Party (Anvil Press); the short stories in The North Yorker by Alain Mercieca (Maison Kasini Canada) grapple with the good, the bad, the suburbs and the shopping malls. Bootleggers and prostitutes hustle behind the closed doors of the Garden City in Eve Lazarus’s Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens (Anvil Press); exotic dancers and murderers enliven Vancouver’s infamous Penthouse night club in Aaron Chapman’s Liquor, Lust, and the Law (Arsenal Pulp Press); Mark Schacter takes pictures of lakes for Sweet Seas: Portraits of the Great Lakes (Fifth House). Jacqueline Turner’s poetry takes on the Apocalypse in The Ends of the Earth (ECW Press); Christopher A. Taylor’s poems in This May Sound Strange (Friesen Press) invite the reader to start out, slow down, get disrupted, grow sullen and try again; Libby Simon’s anecdotes and essays in Life Is Like a Pot of Soup (Ahava Press) say as much about Winnipeg from the ’30s to the present as they say about the author; Evelyn Lau remembers Updike, bungles an interview, hears the music of wreckage and swims in the sea, all in verse, in A Grain of Rice (Oolichan Books); Agony by Steven Zultanski (BookThug) considers life, love and self-mutilation. Short stories about: everyday people by Mary Hagey, Castles in the Air (Signature Editions); people’s weaknesses by Théodora Armstrong, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility (House of Anansi); key moments in the life of Simon McAlmond by David Helwig, Simon Says (Oberon Press). n ot ed elsewhere

According to SaltyInk.com, Whiteout (ECW) by George Murray offers “prophet-like insight” and LemonHound.com suggests that “the poems offer too few answers or resolutions.”

According to NowToronto.com, Dark City “unsettles” yet “like the late Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fabrice Strippoli uses light to catch perfect moments, moods and reflections that keep viewers doing a double-take.” WeirdCanada.com refers to Raymond Biesinger’s Black and White Illustrations as “a surreal diary, scribed in cryptic hieroglyphs, bound in a beautifully embossed cheek-soft cover” and the Edmonton Journal says “Though enjoyable to an illiterate, the ‘topics’ of the book flail wildly.” NumeroCinq.com advises not to “look for thematic unity” in Steven Heighton’s The Dead Are More Visible (Knopf Canada), and The Toronto Star says: “a couple of elements that have remained consistent throughout his work are again front and centre.” Carmine Starnino’s style in Lazy Bastardism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Poetry (Véhicule Press) “roils into hyperbole, and loses some of its persuasive charm,” says Quill & Quire, and the Winnipeg Review notes “Hostile readers often overlook the shiny veneer of Starnino’s style.” Congratulations to M.A.C. Farrant, whose suite of short stories “The Last Amphibian Flees,” published in Geist 86, will appear in Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction. 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. Paul Joseph is a librarian and photographer. He lives in Vancouver. 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.

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #88 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, BC 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 tote bag. Good luck! ACROSS 1 We found our pet beside that stone on the edge of the country (2) 4 Gordy was a rowdy man who tried to get away from her by going due south on the power play 9 Don’t go in there, they’re on strike 10 She let out a piercing cry when she saw the moon shining in the east 12 She gasped when she heard about that darn win 14 Comedones and pustules, who needs ’em? 15 Even though they are so similar, it took a ten wind to bring those two together 16 Funny how that fish company was always after those children in the corridor 20 In Ottawa, the usher uses a black one so he can see where to fly 21 We all know that gals sin, especially when they see smoke 22 There is no grey area—those sandwiches can definitely slur speech 24 I’m afraid I just don’t recognize those buns 25 My French friend gave them to me in Spain 28 In the US, that great but aging band refuses to play for the queen (abbrev) 30 Do you think those guys were smart enough to buy me swine or is that not precious enough? 32 It’s cruel when dirty money gives you an ulcer 33 The finances of that uni in the city could be tighter (abbrev) 34 Should Ricky Porter get an A in ranting? 36 Strange how that funny drink kept us hopping 37 Which person deals with the wellness of members everywhere? 38 I did not bring you up to sit down there 40 Diners are not fans of Old MacDonald 42 He won it with his entourage right behind him (2) 44 Take note of the first syllable of the tone 45 When Red dies, don’t put him down, it’ll be too confusing 46 Sir, it makes me mad when you pull that

9 10

14 15

17 20

24 25

32 33

35 38

36 39

43 44

DOWN 1 Put the whole collection on the telly, why don’t you? (2) 2 Grannie is mixed up because she isn’t on the dole anymore 3 Eighty-four had funerals to arrange once the lone one of the sea went down (2) 4 Marg took just 22 minutes to grab her sword and crown Rob in the driveway (2) 5 The land of yes-men 6 Sounds like the big man likes to surf in the south of Spain 7 She approximated that her period would arrive soon (abbrev) 8 Speaking of Belle, she found a cod wagging around in her boot and said it was delicious 11 They say his wife was dying to play in the shade in Greece for part of the year 13 That intro never gets old 17 If Diana’s golden globe melts she’ll be left with supreme scoria 18 Be kind, don’t monopolize that stream on the west coast and remember to rob no rocker at the intersection (2) 19 This sounds detestable but in ancient times they paid nickel to get in 21 Out east, the last dad joined that little club in 1948 and then he ran the show 23 Did someone request a singer in the house? Most excellent! (abbrev) 26 The driver got all emotional when his dogs left

27 That winter, diamonds in the frosting were the end of me (2) 29 The old bag made astonishing noises while siphoning gas 31 Out east, Rick and Mary are famous for their wee fins 35 List the top ones for the cardinal this decade 39 24-7 (abbrev) 41 Oh my, what a surprise it is to encounter the supernatural 43 Can you stickhandle 20,000, without letting them go east? (abbrev) The winner for Puzzle 87 was Amar Vutha from Toronto. Congrats! C O M M I E A A O M U R D E R E C O A L R H E R H A E L T A D E S S A Y I S T R E D B O O K I N G E V E B M I D E A L M N U R S E A D O G M A P R O S S E

R E D S C A E U O B O L S D B U A B I T P I M T E P I N K T E R R I M R O N R A I N G O T A N I L A N I F E S E S T K L E T A R I

R E T H Y M B O R N O N G C L O A S N T O S A T

Puzzle 63

c a u g h t

m a p p i n g

Behind the Mule The National Map of Hard Work by Melissa Edwards

Hercules Peak Pressure Point

Adversity Bank

modified Geistonic projection

Frustration Bay

Strivewell Island

Breakleg Creek

Perseverence Point

Gauntlet Peak

All Night Lake

Lady Job Harbour

Difficult Creek

La Grande Demande

Scrapes Lake

Lac Vigilant

Defeat Lake

Lac de l’Action

Guts Lake

Lac des Employés

Drill Lake

Lac Handy

Enterprise

Little Good Enoughs Pond

Mule Hill

Fosse Double Trouble

Pushup Lake

Strugglers Pond

Moonlight Creek

Picket Pond Jump Up and Go Down

Ambition Mountain Reward

Bread and Butter Cove

Ruisseau du Travailleur

Trade Islets

Pushthrough

Toil Mountain

Anvil Brook

Hardship Mountain Lac Try

Sisyphus Mountain Port Hardy

Union Corner Haulover Ledge Diligent River

Scramble Creek

Neverfail Cove

Overseer Mountain

Old Sweat

Rough and Tumble Mountain

Burden Cove Lac Whip

Longslog Mountain

Lac Force

Driver

Treadmill Ridge

Deeds Creek

Carry the Kettle

Armstrong

Hardtime Lake

Holdfast

The Ironman

Albatross

Fatigue Lakes Weary Creek Gap Tough Creek

Stress Lake Belabourer Island Strain Uphill Tedious Lake

Buckles

Endeavour

Pulling Lake

Cram Creek Grindstone Point

The Big Stretch Work

Seven Days Work Cliff

Reach Busy Bee Corner

Hammertown

Routine Lake

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

64 Geist 88 Spring 2013