Geist 93 - Summer 2014

GEIST 93

GEIST

NUMBER 93 SUMMER 2014 $6.95

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“From the font to the cover design to the paper grade, it is a stunning object … it’s just like Anvil Press—the press that comes closest to being Canada’s answer to Brooklyn’s Soft Skull fiction line —to care about the book as art object time and again.”—GLOBE & MAIL “one of the country’s most enduring venues for audacious writing.”

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CanLit with a distinctly urban twist!

I’M NOT SCARED OF YOU OR ANYTHING

HYSTERIC

THE DELUSIONIST

MIRROR ON THE FLOOR

a novel by Nelly Arcan

Stories by Jon Paul Fiorentino Illustrations by Maryanna Hardy This collection of comedic short stories and exploratory texts features invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, competitive pillow fighters, drug runners, and, of course, grad students.

Translated by David & Jacob Homel

a novel by Grant Buday Vancouver, summer 1962.

Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are both seventeen and they’re both falling in love. The Delusionist is a funny, sad, and heart-warming novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history.

a novel by George Bowering Originally published in 1967

by McClelland and Stewart, and out of print for many years, Mirror on the Floor was the debut novel from an emerging young writer named George Bowering. Now with over 100 publications to his credit, we are proud to be reissuing Bowering’s fi rst novel.

“I’m sure something scares Jon Paul Fiorentino, and maybe it drives him toward the deadpan magic he wields so masterfully in these pages. This is a daring and funny collection.”

In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair.

Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Hysteric chronicles life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs, and Internet porn.

“This book is one of my favourite reads in ages.”

“A tremendously strong current runs through this story. A music of breath, and the desire to reach down to the bone and discover the truth about relationships between men and women.”

—CHIP ZDARSKY

—JOCELYNE LEPAGE, La Presse

$20 • 176 pages • Colour Illus.

978-1-927380-94-9

$20 • 168 pages 978-1-927380-96-3

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“Buday’s writing is lean, crisp, thoroughly engaging, and incisive…an exceptional talent.”

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“Vancouver, the smell and feel of its fog, the beaches, the bridges, Stanley Park, the sleazy bars of the dock area are all absolutely there in a way that has been curiously diffi cult for other novelists to capture.”

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$20 • 256 pages 978-1-927380-93-2

$18 • 160 pages 978-1-927380-95-6

—QUILL & QUIRE

“…a great storyteller.”

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Dragonflies is “Deeply imagined and exquisitely written.”

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GEIST

Volume 27

· Number 93 · Summer 2014

F EAT U R ES

HOLLY WOOD / BABYLON Michael Morris Platinum Blonde in Cibachrome 36

P OS TC ARD CONTES T WINNERS Maritime history; pot-smoking habits; soldiers in the sand 38

THE A SYLUM KEEPER AND THE P OE T Daniel Francis Richard Maurice Bucke: asylum keeper, religious mystic, devotee of Walt Whitman 42

THE A SHTRAY Rolli There's an idea in every cigarette, if you can find it 51

TH EORY OF NORTH Jeremy Stewart You will try to confront The North, but when you go to find it, it will have paid your bill and left 55

CONFESSIONS OF A CIRCUS PERFORMER R. H. Slansky Three-ring excerpt from the winning Three-Day Novel 58 Pg. 8. The art of Elisapee Ishulutaq

The Geist Foundation. p u b l i s h e r : Stephen Osborne. s e n i o r e d i to r : Mary Schendlinger. e d i to r i a l g ro u p : Michał Kozłowski, assistant publisher; AnnMarie MacKinnon, operations manager. reader services : Jocelyn Kuang. proofreader : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Jesmine Cham, Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. associate editor : C.E. Coughlan. interns : Leslie Chu, Dylan Gyles, Jennesia Pedri, Roni Simunovic, Andrew Vaughan. accountant : Mindy Abramowitz cga. advertising & marketing : Clevers Media. w e b a rc h i t e c ts : Metro ­Publisher. d i st r i b u t i o n : Magazines Canada. p r i n t e d i n ca n a da by Transcontinental. m a n ag i n g e d i to r e m e r i t u s : Barbara Zatyko. p u b l i s h e d by

GEIST

fact + fiction since 1990 “not too shabby”

NOTE S & DI S PATC H E S

F IN D IN GS

CO LU MN S

Stephen Osborne A Bridge in Pangnirtung 8

24 ff

AFTERLIFE OF CULTURE

Gender Failure

Offend Stephen Henighan 22

Myles Wirth Hibakusha 12

The Ghomeshi File

Veronica Gaylie London Double 17

The Last Interview of Crad Kilodney

CITY OF WORDS

Persuasion Desk

NATIONAL DREAMS

We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs Daniel Francis 64

Christopher Gudgeon Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ 18 Eve Corbel Odds Are 20

A Novel for All Times Alberto Manguel 62

D EPA RT MEN TS

Über-Indian Canada, More or Less

IN CAMERA

Bill C-38 Counter-Spells

LETTERS

4 5 ENDNOTES

Surrealist Weapon Sounds

66 OFF THE SHELF,

and more…

NOTED ELSEWHERE

70 PUZZLE

71 CAUGHT MAPPING

72

cover image:

Hollywood / Babylon: Jean Harlow, by Michael Morris, part of Port Rem, a multi-artist exhibition at the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver in spring 2014.

The first and only other Geist celebrity cover appeared twenty years ago in Geist 15, featuring an image of Marilyn Monroe; Monroe emulated Jean Harlow’s look and bleached her hair platinum blonde when she broke into Hollywood, twenty years after Harlow. See more from Hollywood / Babylon on page 36.

Cover design: Eric Uhlich

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, Lauren Ogston, 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

I N

C A M E R A

Dying Light

Darkroom, Niamey, Niger, Michel Campeau

T

he photographer’s darkroom, with its iconic red light, has long been favoured by makers of thrillers and mystery movies. When a scene is lit in red, a number of motifs are readily invo­ked, ranging from the forensic to the magical, from the voyeuristic to the sensuous. Clues are created in darkrooms as well as discovered there, and they are just as easily altered in the darkroom; revelations emerge under the red light, where science and technology mingle with alchemical secrets: where there was nothing, soon there will be something. The authenticity of the portrayal of darkrooms in movies is rarely in question: the red light is enough to signify everything or anything, and is usually left on all the time, even when there is no one in the darkroom.

The darkroom illuminated by its so-called safelight also

4 Geist 93 Summer 2014

carries intimations of the diabolical and echoes of demonic nightclub scenes that are invariably bathed in the same red light, the colour of rubies or blood leaking out from dark corners; the promise of sexuality, the home of the devil: the cellar filled with demons, blood and birth and an endless range of associations, too many to recall at once, but all to be lost now that the darkroom is falling into disuse as chemical processes are replaced by digital procedures. The Canadian photographer Michel Campeau has travelled the world photographing the last darkrooms of Toronto, Mexico City, Havana, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Niamey, Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo. The results can be seen in Photographic Darkroom / Photogenic Obsolescence, published in 2013

by Kehrer Verlag.

— Mandelbrot

R E A D E R S

GEIST

W R I T E

LETTERS I

THIS LITTLE PIGGY

did a double take when I saw the photograph of the group at Au Lutin Qui Bouffe restaurant (“Table Service,” Geist 92). I recently acquired an old photograph of my grandparents at that same restaurant, also bottle-feeding a piglet, and it was strikingly similar. Cool coincidence.

—Erin Kirsh, Vancouver

T

he Two Tarts would like to thank you for the Spring issue of Geist (No. 92). The only other mail we get is from Revenue Canada (Snoresville) or Shaw Cable (equally Snoresville).

—Natasha and Jane, Vancouver PS: Not quite Au Lutin Qui Bouffe, but…

Natasha Moric and Jane Hambrook run the Two Tarts Café in Vancouver. Read “Table Service,” by AnnMarie MacKinnon, at geist.com.

SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM

I

read through many emails every day on serious, often life-threatening subjects.

The Geist newsletter is like a breath of fresh air, with your humour and your fearless creativity. The Tobacco Lit Contest made me laugh with its unexpectedness, and its lists going from the highs of smoking to the worst of its consequences. What a great Geist idea!

—Janet E. Smith, Edmonton There’s still lots of time to enter the Geist Tobacco Lit Contest! See details at geist.com and on page 1 of this issue.

W

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

Contents copyright © 2014 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved.

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

ANOTHER ZADIE

e knew Zadie, Hal Niedzviecki’s grandfather (“The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik,” No. 80), as Abie, our dear landlord. We lived upstairs from Zadie and his wife Theresa from 1982 to 1986. Niedzviecki writes that Abie was “a poor man who loved to gamble, tip, haggle.” He was generous—that’s why he wasn’t rich! We were too broke to pay a babysitter, so we would open our door and he would open his and we would go out for tea, while he made sure the girls stayed asleep. My husband Glenn had a new job, requiring business clothes, so a friend in Toronto donated clothes and Abie would tailor them to size— for a song. He was thrilled to have our girls play in the yard. My baby girl would go to Zadie’s place, to get secret chocolates from him! Knowing we were practising Christians, Abie always called us down to watch Billy Graham with him, and we took him and Theresa to a Graham crusade in Montreal in 1983. Abie was deeply moved, but mindful of what nonJews had done to him and his people during the war. We had many great theological discussions. It was wonderful. He kept the rent down to keep us as tenants, and when we bought a house and moved, it was a sad day.

Over the years we stopped by to see him when we could. We got thinking about Abie today, Good Friday 2014, because we signed our first lease with him on a Good Friday, during Passover—it seemed a good sign of a long friendship.

—Sandy Smith, cyberspace Read “The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik” at geist.com.

Letters 5

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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.

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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.

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ISLAND NEWS Randy Fred ear Geist, Do you remember Lisa BirdWilson? You published one of her stories several years ago. This year I was on the jury for the Aboriginal Section of the Saskatchewan Book Awards, along with two other jurors. I had the very last and deciding vote for the Book of the Year award and I chose Lisa’s book, Just Pretending. I went with it because I felt it was so true to the aboriginal psyche.

The stories are great and they capture the essence of modern aboriginal life.

Five of us (me, Edith, Ralph, Teoni and her husband) were in Thailand all of February. It was great! They don’t know what Canadian Indians are there. The pork, chicken and fish were the best I have ever tasted. We did lots of stuff there and had loads of fun. Teoni has already been to Mexico since we have been back home and she and her husband are heading off to Cuba for a week in June. Edith and

D

Jocelyn Kuang in Australia

G

write to geist

Thoughts, opinions, comments and queries are welcome and encouraged, and should be sent to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Snailmail: #210 – 111 West 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.

6 Geist 93 Summer 2014

I are planning a holiday in Maui next January. We are working on cleaning up our house to get ready to sell it.

Teoni and her husband live in a small bedroom upstairs and it is time for them to spread out in their own place.

We might buy a duplex.

Ralph will be marrying a Thai girl and Edith and I will be inheriting a five-year-old Thai grand­​daughter.

Edith has a full-time line at the hospital. She works shifts and I hate it when she works graveyard as I can’t sleep.

I’m busy setting up an internet radio and television station for the Hul’qumi’num language. It’s coming along nicely. There are a dozen of us involved with it. It looks like I will be learning the Hul’qumi’num language, which is spoken in central Vancouver Island. The Salish people in the Fraser Valley, Lower Mainland, southern Vancouver Island and northern Washington State can understand it but they have their own dialects.

Hope all is well with you.

Randy Fred is profiled in Geist 83. Read the profile, and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s story “Blood Memory,” at geist.com.

CRAD KILODNEY In Memoriam rad Kilodney, writer, self-publisher and grandfather of literary street vendors, died April 14, 2014, in Toronto. Kilodney wrote more than thirty books and chapbooks, published by him or by tiny presses and released in small runs. He sold most of the material himself, standing on Yonge Street, advertising his business with signs that he wore around his neck: Rotten Canadian Literature, Nazi Gardening Stories, Boiled Cat Stories and others.

His books include Lightning Struck My Dick, Excrement, Putrid Scum and others.

Kilodney was an activist in the literary scene. In 1988 he submitted a number of stories by famous writers—Chekhov, Hemingway and others—to the CBC Radio literary competition under absurd names; all were screened out by the jury.

C

He once submitted an application to the City of Toronto to hold a book-burning in the street, stating that the city was so anti-intellectual that it might as well embrace its culture of censorship.

Kilodney sold some 35,000 books at two or three bucks a pop; he ended his street vendor career in 1995. He inspired a generation of young writers and publishers to take up DIY publishing. The day after his death, his closest friend, Lorette Luzajic, launched (with his prior agreement) The Crad Kilodney Literary Foundation, the sole purpose of which is “the preservation and promotion of the literature of Crad Kilodney.”

“The enduring memory many people hold of Crad is the vitriolic curmudgeon, the sworn enemy of all official literature, its writers, publishers, reviewers, and booksellers (unless they also carried his books). Rereading his straightforward aspirations surrounding the publication of his ‘first “real” book,’ Lightning Struck My Dick, I feel

I’m encountering a different Crad, one with the same hopes as any other young writer, and a desire not to be hurt.”

—Thad McIlroy, (Kilodney’s publisher on several projects) “In the ’80s, I would sometimes see him glaring at passersby, reserving his deepest scorn for anyone who would not buy a copy of, for example, I Chewed Mrs. Ewing’s Raw Guts, And Other Stories or Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards! or Foul Pus From Dead Dogs.”

—Joe Fiorito, Toronto Star “I suspect Crad is a pariah in academic circles, and certainly commercial circles, and those are powers that determine lit-taste. But through his streetselling, he inspired a lot of young people who were disgruntled about CanLit.” —Stuart Ross, bloggamooga.blogspot.ca

Letters 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES F R O M N E W

T H E

W O R L D

A Bridge in Pangnirtung STEPHEN OSBORNE

Collecting Elisapee

I

n the spring of this year I acquired two stone-cut prints that I had been admiring since shortly after meeting the artist Elisapee Ishulutaq in 2013, on the hottest day in August, at the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver. The occasion was an exhibition of work by eight artists from Nunavut for which I had received an email invitation. Recognizable as the guests of honour were Elisapee Ishulutaq, who is from Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, and Mary Ayaq Anowtalik, who is from Arviat, on the west coast of Hudson Bay; they were the oldest people in the room, dressed distinctively if rather anomalously in winter parkas, leggings and mukluks. It was warm in the gallery and the temperature continued to rise as more people arrived. The two guests of honour, both of them grandmothers, seemed to be the only ones not wilting in the heat, although like many of the onlookers they fanned themselves continuously with copies of the exhibition notes, which had been printed on a convenient weight of cardstock.

They sat in chairs on one side of the gallery, a well-lighted ethereal space filled with art and crowded with 8 Geist 93 Summer 2014

Downtown Vancouver, Elisapee Ishulutaq

people; there were prints on the walls and along a hallway, and small sculptures here and there.

I was uncertain of the protocols of the private gallery, where I felt more like a rubbernecker than a legitimate patron; I hesitated at the back near the street door before making my way through the crowd toward the artists. In another moment I was bending toward Elisapee Ishulutaq and

shaking her hand and speaking to her rather awkwardly as I didn’t know whether she spoke English. A young man appeared at her side and identified himself as her grandson, and with his help I was able to introduce myself as a Pangnirtungmiut; that is to say as someone who was born in Pangnirtung. Elisapee Ishulutaq smiled and said that she remembered my mother, and that she remembered me too.

Bridge in Pangnirtung, Elisapee Ishulutaq

Some years ago, my mother had given me a beautifully toned stone-cut print that she had purchased in Pangnirtung in 1980, from Elisapee Ishulutaq: it was an image of the caribou hunt: a seated figure in a field of white, a shadow of a caribou in the distance and the form of an arrow hovering in the space between them.

As the speeches began I retreated to the rear of the crowd, and as the

speeches went on I studied some of the art on display and felt, briefly, and in some confusion, the challenge that certain works of art can present, at certain times and in certain places, when the object of one’s scrutiny, so to speak, seems to pre-empt perception and to present a challenge of its own, or an admonition, at the least a species of reminder. I was inexperienced in art galleries, and equally unsettled

looking at the art and at the people around me: patrons, clients, collectors no doubt, well-wishers and passersby who happened to drift in through the open door: like some of the art on the walls, they too threatened to look back. When the speeches were done and the artists had been suitably applauded, each of them sang a song in Inuktitut by way of welcoming the audience assembled to welcome them; Elisapee Ishulutaq, I recall, sang a song about a man (according to her grandson) who turns to stone.

After the songs, I allowed myself to drift out to the sidewalk, where it was cooler and where I could return to the invisibility of civilian life. I walked north for a few blocks, onto Granville Bridge to where the bridge rises in the middle, and looked out over False Creek at the myriad condominium towers sheathed in turquoise glass and concrete slabs, above which in the distance could be glimpsed the proprietary view of mountain peaks unconcealed from sight by the View Protection Guidelines of 1989 (expressed in the formula Hx = ((Dx) (Lr-Lv)-LBx-Lv)/Dr); in fact, I was standing at the intersection of View Cones number 10, 12.1 and 12.3, and therefore had a clear view of the peaks of Hollyburn, Grouse and Seymour mountains respectively, and above the fringe of mountain peaks, the blue sky and the white fleecy clouds.

A few days later I found some of the work of Elisapee Ishulutaq online, at the website of the Uqqurmiut Centre on Baffin Island, where I came upon images of the two stone-cut prints that seemed immediately to speak to me, and that I would eventually “acquire” for myself: one was an imaginary urban scene called Notes & Dispatches 9

Downtown Vancouver and the other was an Arctic village scene called Bridge in Pangnirtung; they were both produced in 2010 in editions of twenty-five. The Vancouver print was the first Inuit rendering of an urban scene that I had seen; the Pangnirtung print reflected an image of my birthplace that I could almost recognize but for a strange truss-like structure, the bridge named in the title, which looked like it had been dropped into the scene from another world. The image of Vancouver had seemed instantly familiar to me as a glimpse of a city no longer to be seen: colourful low-rise apartments, smoke rising from chimneys, distant mountains obscured in the haze; these days there are few colourful buildings in Vancouver and no chimneys: all is shades of beige, cement grey and toothache-inducing turquoise.

Nevertheless, I thought that perhaps the artist had in mind certain parts of the West End, an old neighbourhood near English Bay, and over the following months I walked several times through the West End looking for configurations of older high-rises that might fit the image by Elisapee Ishulutaq that I had seen online. I could find nothing that matched, but the image of Downtown Vancouver, which I returned to again and again, seemed with each viewing to adhere more closely to a dimension of Vancouver that persists in the phase space of the optative, what might have been or what ought to be: a ramshackle assembly of colourful buildings with an appropriate sky and mountains that serve only as backdrop to much more interesting foreground; in fact, not at all the city that I know but a city that I would like to know: the city that I had been seeking on my walks through the West End. I printed copies of the online images from my computer and pinned them to the wall as a memento or perhaps a reminder of something I meant to do, but at that time I 10 Geist 93 Summer 2014

couldn’t say what that might be. I have many photographs of Pangnirtung taken by my parents when I was three years old and younger; none of them has a bridge in it. I had last been in Pangnirtung when I was thirty-five years old and passed a month there in the summer watching the sun circle the fjord beneath iron cliffs and the fringes of the distant glacier; the land remained in full colour twentyfour hours a day, awash in warm light that made details of rock, grass, tundra, ocean, snow and ice stand out in bold relief. Nothing had prepared me for the shimmering air of Pangnirtung: the particular colours and the shapes of the land, or the green and blue undulations of a melting iceberg that lay stranded in the shallows. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at paradise, a tropical paradise as painted by Henri Rousseau, whose imaginary jungle scenes in their lushness and attention to detail could stand as a sign for Pangnirtung in the summer, or at least, I suppose, for “my” Pangnirtung in the summer.

Otherwise I have only a distant connection to Pangnirtung and to Arctic scenes: like anyone from the south, I see the North with southern eyes. I couldn’t remember a bridge like the one in the image designed by Elisapee Ishulutaq; what I could recall were a couple of simple beam bridges, mere extensions of the two roads crossing the river that runs through the village.

Several months passed and at Christmas I received as a gift from my partner another print by Elisapee Ishulutaq, made with the grease pencil technique, of a snow goose in flight, and sometime after that it occurred to me that I might look into acquiring, obtaining or collecting Downtown Vancouver and Bridge in Pangnirtung to add to my collection of (so far) the two prints given to me as gifts. And so in the spring of this year I returned to the Marion Scott Gallery on Granville Street and learned that prints from both

editions were still available for sale and at a reasonable price. I placed my order, and in conversation with the curator and assistant curator I spoke of my attempts to find the site of Downtown Vancouver, and learned that Elisapee Ishulutaq had created her design in 2010 before she had ever seen Vancouver, a fact that made the print even more desirable, and made me think that the condominium view to the north of Granville Bridge might in fact be the appropriate analogue to the stone-cut version. I had only recently discovered that visibility in Vancouver, like the

View Cones, is a volatile issue at City Hall, and that “visibility management” has become a matter of growing concern: a recent study by Environment Canada placed the cost of a single “poor visibility event” (as measured by a “visibility index”) at $4.03 million in lost tourist revenue; the struggle to limit these negative visibility events constitutes for some a civic duty of a high order.

A negativity event of another order is reflected in the blue trestle bridge depicted in Bridge in Pangnirtung, which, I have since learned, was assembled with great urgency in 2008,

when the two beam bridges over the river were destroyed by a flash flood that tore “pieces of permafrost the size of refrigerators” out of the tundra and carried them to the sea; it was the first such event on record, and in the dawning age of global warming, certainly not the last.

Stephen Osborne is publisher of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works—most recently “Phantom Ride with Schopenhauer” (Geist 93)—many of which can be read at geist.com.

Read more Osborne online The lost art of waving; the strongest man in the world; the eviction of Malcolm Lowry; the lynching of Louie Sam; occupy movements; predicting the future; the coincidence problem; saving the day Glenn Gould-style in a Pathfinder Deluxe; illicit fascinations with feckless bureaucrats and many more at geist.com.

Read Geist at

GEIST com 

Notes & Dispatches 11

12 Geist 93 Summer 2014

This summer, Give the Gift of Geist to your reading friends.

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Notes & Dispatches 13

14 Geist 93 Summer 2014

Notes & Dispatches 15

16 Geist 93 Summer 2014

U P S T A I R S ,

D O W N S T A I R S

London Double V E R O N I C A G AY L I E

LAMP MAN LONDON

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more…

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Lamplighter”

D

eep in the basement of the department store, in the lamp section, I ask for a lamp.

Lamp? asks the lamp man.

Surrounded by lamps in blue, red and black, he asks: Lamp? He shakes his head like I asked for a bank.

I say, Lamp?

Lamp? he asks.

Yes, lamp, I say.

No, he says. No lamp. Light bounces off his head. Lamps surround us as far as London Bridge.

Light seems to stream all the way to Westminster.

Lamp? he asks.

Yes. Lamp? I ask. I look at lamp. I ask for lamp.

Lamp? he asks.

Yes, lamp, I say. I point to lamp.

He looks at my hand as if the world ended there. He checks the computer.

No. No lamp, he says in the light of a lamp he swears is not there while I, a foreigner, stand and glare, invisible in this city.

THAT THERE'S A BADGER

O

n the top floor of the London department store, I carry a pillow with a picture of a bear to the till.

The cashier says: Oh, that’s fancy.

I point to the cover.

Bear, I say, lightly.

He says, Oh no. That is a badger.

I say, Oh no. It is a bear.

He says, No, it’s a badger.

I say, No, it’s a bear.

He says, Luv. Vat ver’s a badger. I know.

I say, I’m Canadian. And that’s a bear.

He says, I’m English. And vat’s a badg-ah.

Look at the round ears, I say.

Look at the long nose, he says.

I say, That’s an artist’s interpretation of a bear. A cubist bear. An imaginative take.

He says, Look at the white stripe on the nose.

I say, That’s moonlight. That’s a bear in moonlight.

He stops. He looks. Vat ver. Is a badger. I’m an artist, he says.

I’m an artist! I say. And that is a bear.

He pauses. He looks.

Vat ver is a badger. Let me tell you what they do to badgers in this country. They breed lovely pit bulls to go

down holes and, well, you don’t want to know what vey do to badgers in this country. He shakes his head. Vat ver’s a badger.

It’s a bear.

He shrugs. He begins to look like a badger. Grey hair on the sides, white face down the middle. Hair grows out the round ears. He’s almost a badger in moonlight.

That’s a bear, I say.

Do you like dogs? he asks.

Yes. What kind?

Cocker spaniels.

I like cocker spaniels. And Labs.

But then, Ralph. Good old Ralph. He was a pit bull. He found me. One of me cricket mates had a baby and well, pit bull is a big breed. So, he gave him to me. Lived seventeen years. I did an oil painting of him and he ended up on a postage stamp. And a rug. So he’s been well acknowledged. I loved me Ralph.

When Ralph died I thought I’d never recover. Nothing will ever replace him.

He picks up the cushion and puts it aside.

He looks at me with two dark eyes.

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.

Notes & Dispatches 17

F U L L

U P R I G H T

P O S I T I O N

Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ… in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan C H RIS TOPH E R GU D GEON

Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge

Assdeep in chair, Molsoned, enGlobed, my hands Purelled, clean, my heart unfibrillating, I touch nothing.

My hands are clean, I have washed myself of It, the dirty thing, that cannot be seen, prokaryotic microorganism, that invisible thing that makes me shit unwinding, violent rivers of shit, praying to God in Marriott bathrooms when I would rather be meeting with the Western reps in Milwaukee or Scottsdale or Denver or Calgary, when I would rather stand and wait in the buffet line at the Hilton President, Kansas City, contemplating Danish and omelette, when I would rather be waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. My hands are clean.

I touch nothing.

Mostly, we are silent and we are celibate and obedient and we have eschewed material comfort and want for nothing. God watches over us: he is delicious and savoury; he is

18 Geist 93 Summer 2014

a slice of Kraft cheddar or Edam, he is a saltine and a Pringle and a package of trail mix. This beer is his blood.

We’re surrounded by sacrament, assdeep in the wonder of his works. And when we rise above the clouds, we promise to not look down on him in his heaven, instead, to memorize the location of the nearest exits, and to keep our tables and trays upright and in the locked position for takeoff and landing.

There are other martyrs in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The bumped and unAeroplanned, the old men and women whose baggage exceeds their carry-on allowance. We do not look at them. They are in God’s hands now. We look instead outside the window, past the iron birds, the metal angels, to the aspen parklands, Martensville, Prince Albert, North Battleford, past the teetotalled boundaries set by the Temperance Colonization Society, devoted to sober industry and land speculation, from Clark’s Crossing to Moose Woods; we look beyond to the graves of frozen Indians, Chief Rainin-the-Face and Big Wampum, Running Bear

and Tonto, naked graves for the frozen smiling heathens, Rod Naistus, Larry Wegner, Neil Stonechild, cold happy martyrs, tourists, frozen in time, reminding us that all things come to those who wait, especially if what they are waiting for is death.

Inside the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I check the departure screen, I reread my boarding pass. Heather will call my row number soon, and I will think of her husband Roy back in Winnipeg, who does or does not have lung cancer (the doctors are not yet sure). Time is running out. I want to be forgiven, but I am comfortable. I want to wash in Your grace, but the incoming passengers are already deplaning. I will cleanse my hands again, destroying microscopic connections, and wait for my turn to stow my carry-on luggage safely on the floor under the seat in front of me or in the nearest available overhead compartment. And when the rapture comes, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, to the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, have mercy on me, a sinner, for I have listened to the pronouncements and have restricted gels and liquids, I have snapped my safety belt, I have ensured—hallelujah!— that my seat is in the full upright position, I have promised that, in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, I will place the oxygen mask over my mouth and nose, and breathe normally, and that if I am travelling with a small child, I will secure my mask first, and then help the child secure hers. And so I wait as the pimpled security guard checks his iPhone, and wipes his hand on his shirt sleeve and tries to stifle a yawn as he wishes he was anywhere but here.

Christopher Gudgeon writes regularly for radio, television, film and print. Two of his non-fiction books, An Unfinished Conversation: The Life and Music of Stan Rogers and The Luck of the Draw: True Life Tales of Lottery Winners and Losers, are national bestsellers. He lives in Victoria. Read more of his work at geist.com.

Notes & Dispatches 19

T R U E

20 Geist 93 Summer 2014

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

Offend STEPHEN HENIGHAN

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend

Miguel Ángel Asturias, photographer unknown

T

he emergence of a major writer in a culture is an uncomfortable event. A highly original writer may be a creator of memorable phrases or characters, but before all else he releases his private demons into his society, insisting that his surroundings are as he perceives them to be. The distinguishing feature of the major writer, in contrast to one whose work leaves a less enduring mark on the mind, is that she makes her version of the world stick. For a certain slice of the society she writes about, her imaginative rendering becomes reality, to the aggravation of those who hold a conflicting vision of the same social territory.

Great literature is always national in essence, generating its most profound artistic resonances from the history of a community that defines itself as a nation (regardless of whether it is a legal nation at the time the author writes about it). Features that are later praised as “universal”— portraits of loving couples, dutiful

22 Geist 93 Summer 2014

sons, feisty grandmothers, plucky heroes—may popularize the author’s work elsewhere; yet for the national reader these features meld into the shadow of the writer’s statement about her society: by how her work understands what it means to be from this place. Tourists who stumble around Dublin, tipsy from Guinness, in search of the bronze James Joyce statue at the corner of O’Connell and North Earl Streets, do not perceive Joyce as the Irish do. Informed visitors may be aware of the nationalist anger that propels Joyce’s fiction, just as they know that in the centre of Dublin today one is as likely to hear conversation in Polish or Yoruba as in Irish-accented English; yet in neither case is this what the visitor goes to Ireland to experience. In neither case does the foreigner’s perception match that of the local reader. The view from afar obscures the fact that Joyce never wrote a book in which the nineteenth-century Irish nationalist

leader Charles Stewart Parnell, the “uncrowned king of Ireland,” did not appear. Parnell is there at the beginning of Joyce’s work, in the opening chapter of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and he is there at the end, as one of the models for the central character in Finnegans Wake (1939). Parnell is discussed by characters in the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and in the novel Ulysses (1922), in which his brother is a walk-on character.

For the reader brought up in Ireland, it’s impossible to read Joyce without being beset by debates about Irish history. The international reader who turns to Joyce to study Modernism may view the Irish history as local colour, yet for the author’s compatriots (as for the author himself) history is a book’s emotional core and the facilitator of Modernist pyrotechnics. The way in which the history is depicted shapes the national reader’s reaction to the author and his fiction.

Even when a significant writer is riding a populist tide—even if every reader in Ireland agreed with Joyce’s assessment of the significance of Parnell—with time the tide will turn, leaving the writer’s creative vision vulnerable to attack from old or new enemies. The Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias played a significant role in the liberal, democratic governments that tried to reform Guatemala between 1944 and 1954. His major novels, The President (1946) and Men of Maize (1949), published during these years, employed avant-garde techniques to forge a national mythology, integrating the indigenous Mayan people into Guatemala’s national fabric. For many years after 1954, when the liberal government was overthrown by a US-organized military coup that burned his books in the streets, Asturias was a hero in Latin America, where Men of Maize was regarded as the Ulysses of the Maya; to his own country’s racist oligarchy, he was a villain. By the 1980s, elite views on Asturias were softening, while young Mayan intellectuals began to object to the fact that in order to make the Maya fit into his vision of an integrated nation, Asturias, an upper-class Spanish-speaking ladino of mixed racial background, had smothered the indigenous people’s cultural distinctness. Today, mention of Asturias’s name is capable of angering Guatemalans of all political persuasions and cultural backgrounds. His novels are an ongoing provocation. They remain the prism through which much of the literate foreign world understands Guatemala, yet every Guatemalan reader will find something in them to object to. Long after his death, in 1974, Asturias continues to be the target of attacks.

Like Asturias, the Nobel Prizewinning Australian novelist Patrick White, who died in 1990, is criticized by progressive opinion today for having elided the cultural differences Afterlife of Culture 23

of Aboriginal peoples in order to enshrine his vision of national coherence. Yet White’s shimmering Modernism, which in his later novels haloes both post-colonial nationality and gay male relationships in glowing images, still rankles conservatives. The response stirred up by the work of novelists such as Asturias and White is mirrored in national reactions to other significant figures. Mention any internationally renowned writer in her country of origin and grumbled complaints pour forth. (In South Africa, where I’m writing this, the internationally admired works of Nadine Gordimer, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee elicit this response.) Good books are unsettling, not reassuring. Literature is a declaration of what the world, as viewed from the author’s national sphere, is. The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility. Major writers’ statements irritate more readers (and

even non-readers, who learn a writer’s views second hand) than do those of minor literary figures. But this is no excuse for the minor writer to abstain from the obligation to offend.

In fact, the failure to offend is one of the central lapses that limits a minor writer’s achievement. The hesitation in projecting one’s inner world out into the public sphere for fear of being criticized or contradicted is a telltale weakness: a defining trait of those who lack the audacity to realize their creative vision in words. Offence alone is not artistic achievement; but without offence, no serious art can flourish.

Stephen Henighan is the author of a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940–2012 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com and geist.com.

FINDINGS

Gender Failure I VA N C O Y O T E

From Gender Failure. Published in 2014 by Arsenal Pulp Press. Ivan Coyote is a writer, storyteller and performer. They live in Vancouver.

I

was so nervous, the secretary at the reception desk looked at me with softening eyes and told me everything was going to be okay. I had barely spoken to her, but it was just that obvious, I guess.

First of all, it didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening. Nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them, a psychologist’s appointment, a psychiatrist’s appointment, a psychological assessment, two doctor’s appointments, several letters back and forth between doctors and 24 Geist 93 Summer 2014

shrinks and bureaucrats, phone calls, more phone calls, twenty months since I had actually cranked the whole machine into gear, and here I was.

Meeting the surgeon. He was fourteen minutes late. But who was counting?

He was handsome and tanned in January, and his assistant was tall, blonde, and wearing grey leather stiletto boots. Looked pretty much like what I thought a cosmetic surgeon and his assistant would look like, not that I had ever spent much time wondering. I have to fill out forms, of course: no, I don’t smoke or have

hemophilia, and no, my religion does not forbid me to have a blood transfusion. The letterhead on the forms is for a cosmetic surgery clinic. I am reminded that most people think that is what this is. Elective. Cosmetic.

Unnecessary. My period is due today.

My tits are at their biggest, and most tender. I can feel the binder pinching under my arms where it does.

Turns out the doctor and I both studied music at a small community college together in the late eighties. I do not remember him, and he would not recognize me. I ask him if he studied jazz piano just in case this whole cosmetic surgeon thing didn’t work out for him, you know, so he had something to fall back on. I make jokes like that sometimes when I am nervous.

From Jen Osborne’s Wig Outs, a series of ten photographic diptychs, taken in 2010, of women before and after they dress for the day. Osborne arranged and paid for each of her subjects to pose for portraits in studio. Each diptych reveals, Osborne writes, the way the subjects “physically present themselves to the world in order to feel safer or get what they need to survive.”

At the time, most of Osborne’s subjects were residents of the Portland Hotel Society, which provides housing, addiction treatment and health services to more than 1,000 inhabitants of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver.

In spring 2014, Portland Hotel Society founding members and executives resigned.

The Province of BC had given them an ultimatum—step down or jeopardize PHS services—after an audit company raised concerns over PHS administration costs and perks for staff.

Jen Osborne is a freelance photographer whose work has appeared in publications all over the world. She lives in Berlin and at jenosbornestudio.com.

He asks me a lot of questions.

Why am I not on testosterone? Do I intend to go on testosterone in the future? What do I want my chest to look like when he is done? Do I care more about what my chest looks like, or whether or not I will be able to feel my nipples afterwards? I tell him a little of both. This surprises him.

He tells me it is mostly only women who care about nipple sensation after surgery, and that most trans men only care that they have a masculine appearing chest after. He looks at his assistant, is she getting all of this down? And she nods back just a little, yes, she is.

Throughout this entire bureaucratic maze, I have wanted to not like the doctors, the psychiatrist, the surgeon. The gatekeepers. I have been

waiting for one of them to be callous, or say something phobic or use the wrong pronoun, or write the wrong thing down on the wrong form. But everyone has been so… nice. Even though I still care about whether or not I can feel my nipples afterwards.

I never quite feel like they truly

understand me, but that doesn’t seem to get in the way of them completing the task at hand.

I have to strip my upper body and put on a blue gown. The surgeon measures my chest extensively. I haven’t worn a typical woman’s bra in my entire life, and I don’t mean there

noises that space weapons make From Lexikon der Onomatopöien. Published by Fricke in 1991.

Adab Bleek Boop Bort Burble Chortle

Cork Crash Croak Fonk Foont Frub

Groap Rr… Ratrt Rroo Roar Rop

Ror Swosh Vavoom Vro Vroap Vrom

Vrop Vrou Vroum Woo Wrom Zip

Findings 25

is any such thing as a typical woman, let me be clear, what I mean is a bra-type article of clothing typically worn by a woman, anyway, I have never owned or worn one, ever since I was nineteen or so and they finally appeared on the scene uninvited, I have always tried to mash them down, disappear them, never lift and separate, so I actually have no idea how big they really are. Turns out I have a forty-two-inch chest, a number that seems surreal to me, nearly impossible. I explain to the surgeon that they didn’t used to be this big, just since I hit my forties, my body is changing, and if he performed double hipectomies I would be signing up for that, too. He is calling out measurements

and observations to his assistant. My breast tissue is dense and firm, he states. She scribbles on her notepad.

My nipples are big and will have to be removed completely from my body and resized and grafted back onto me.

He remarks that my breasts exhibit very little ptosis, which is a medical term for sagging. This makes me feel oddly proud, considering I am here to have them removed. Kind of like waxing up your car so you can take it to the wrecker, or petting a puppy before you leave it out in the cold.

Which, for the record, I would never do. I love puppies. But even talking aloud about it all felt kind of like that for me, like I was closing a door on a room I really loved, only because it

Cooked to Tears SU E G OY E T T E

From Ocean. Published by Gaspereau Press in 2013. Sue Goyette has published three collections of poetry and a novel, Lures. She lives in Halifax.

We had laughed at first. At the thought. Like it was a joke. Imagine, the ocean basting us. But how often had we walked into its salted air then licked our arms to taste it later? We were being seasoned. Lightly. Of course we rebelled, refusing to be in its roasting pan. But we had never encountered anything so stubborn. It was worse than a mountain, its altitude ranging in the upper echelon of I know you are but what am I? And it was stoic, like a four-year-old la, la, la-ing. I can’t hear you, it said.

The artists claimed it was the quintessential canvas.

Call it love, they insisted, and look how love persists. The widows said: call it death or call it loneliness. Whatever it was, it was vast and swam in its lane at the edge of our town without ever resting. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise then, at how tender we were all becoming and how close we were cooked to tears. 

OVERUSED WORD ALERT  Google Alert results for “Iconic”

26 Geist 93 Summer 2014

THE ICONIC IRMA HARDING RETURNS:

was the one way I knew to keep going.

He pulls out a blue Sharpie and makes several marks on my chest, then stands back and surveys them.

Like you would if you were trying to hang a picture level on a wall. Then he takes a camera out, snaps several pictures of me from the neck down, and then puts it away.

He explains to me that I will need a double incision/bi-lateral mastectomy, and that my nipples will be rendered insensate. He delivers this news deadpan, like he’s had a lot of practice saying these words without any affectation or emotion whatsoever. Insensate. I looked it up after, later, when I got home. It has two meanings: 1: lacking physical sensation. And 2: lacking sympathy or compassion, unfeeling.

The surgeon narrows his eyes at my copious chest hair. “You have never taken testosterone?” he asks me again. I shake my head, no. “Well, there is something going on for you here, then,” he tells me.

“Positive thinking,” I tell him, and he smiles, like this can’t be true, even though I am pretty sure it is.

He measures my nipples from tip to tip, lets out a low whistle. “Wow,” he says, sounding impressed. “Thirteen inches.” His assistant raises her head, looks over at us, writes it down. I have no idea what this means, whether this number is impressive because it is so small, or so big.

“Yep,” I state. “That’s right. Thirteen inches, uncut.” We all crack up.

My nipples are standing on their tiptoes now, maybe from the cool air in the examination room, maybe from brushing up against the measuring tape, maybe from fear. Hard to say.

I did and still do wonder why he wasn’t using the metric system of measurement. Thirty-three point zero two centimetres sounds way more

Those of you who remember International Harvester (IH) farm equip-

ment may also recall the company’s fridges and freezers—and maybe Irma Harding, too.

ICONIC ACTOR TO

accurate somehow, even though the metric system is decidedly less sexy.

Maybe that is why the United States stubbornly holds on to the standard system of measurement. Its undeniable erotic potential. Thirteen inches seems impressive, especially when it is a body part of any sort. And ninety miles an hour sounds so much hotter and faster than one hundred and forty-four point eight four kilometres ever could.

The next morning, I looked long at myself in the mirror. Tried to imagine my new chest. Touched my exquisitely sensitive nipples.

Imagined them small, and dull to touch, and stitched back on.

I have done this a million times before. But this time there were two blue marks, in the soft crease there, dead centre below my nipples.

I had scrubbed and scrubbed at them in the shower, but they wouldn’t come off, they had hardly even faded.

The ink the surgeon had used had been very, very permanent. 

The Ghomeshi File JIAN GHOMESHI

Jian Ghomeshi's lists from 1982. Published by Viking Canada in 2012. Jian Ghomeshi is a broadcaster and the host of Q on CBC Radio. He lives in Toronto.

•• Words that did not exist in 1982 •• Lawn sprinklers that were available in Thornhill in 1982 •• Things that were cool and then not cool and now are cool again •• Colour combinations that were available in the Adidas gym bag in the early ’80s •• Six best moments of “Under Pressure” and the times at which they appear in the song •• Some Clash T-shirt designs that were available for purchase •• Favourite Beatles, in descending order •• Items that were once considered better if they were bigger but are now considered better if they are smaller

•• Things boys liked in 1982 that were not appreciated by girls •• New Wave acts from the early 1980s that featured members who would never be seen smiling •• Some of the physical positions that David Byrne contorted himself into during the Talking Heads set at the Police Picnic in 1982 •• Occupations that most middleclass Iranians would like their kids to pursue •• Worst pop duets of all time •• Kinds of people who might wear a trench coat in the early 1980s •• Songs that appeared on Side A of the mix tape Ghomeshi made for Janelle in the fall of 1982, including the year Bowie released each song

Persuasion Desk GA R RY THOM A S MORS E

From Rogue Cells/Carbon Harbour. Published by Talonbooks in 2013. Garry Thomas Morse writes fiction and poetry and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for poetry. He lives in Regina.

“H

ave you read Persuasion?”

“Never heard of it.”

Aleph asked everyone who came to his desk. It was important to him, since he had been hired on the basis of his acute comprehension of the text. Every interstellar organization, even the most withered branch of Foreign Objects, required a department that dealt exclusively with matters of persuasion. He affirmed the signature code authorizing a sector shakedown and a few more lobe

RELEASE METAL EP:

probes. Then Lux Operon appeared, pulling a whimsical face, and he asked her. She lit up at once.

“Yes! I love Persuasion.”

“I love Persuasion as well.”

“Anne is so smart… smarter than everyone!”

“Generally, I love how she gets everyone to conform to her will. It’s excellent company reading.”

Aleph let his eyepiece rove. A fellow in the corner felt his knees buckle under the tremendous force of that

glare. It was obvious his feedbreak was complete.

“Wow, you persuade as well!”

“No one is unpersuadable. No one.”

At that instant, two persuaders appeared and stunned Aleph. They covered him in a jammy paste and rolled him into a froot stretchie before dragging him away. Lux Operon laughed as usual, but there was no one around to say nervously. 

Okay, remember when Pat Boone decided to do a “heavy” metal album? Yeah, no one else does either. ICONIC WORLD CUP MOMENTS: From the hand

of God to the headbutt, iconic moments from past World Cups. ICONIC CARS: These Iconic Animated Series Cars are memorable and fascinatingly beautiful for all

Findings 27

The Last Interview of Crad Kilodney C R A D KILODN E Y

Crad Kilodney was a writer and self-publisher whose titles included Lightning Struck My Dick, Terminal Ward, Simple Stories for Idiots and many others. He died April 14, 2014. This story appeared in Only Paper Today in 1981.

“Crad Kilodney? He’s in the terminal ward,” said the head nurse to the pimply high school student in the red school jacket. The back of the jacket announced fiercely: GOLIATHS. “I’m doing an essay for my English class.”

“Oh, you’re the one. Now I remember. Just come this way, will you?” she said, with a mandatory terminal ward smile.

Two weeks before, the student had been told to write an essay on “a famous and important contemporary writer, Crad Kilodney,” whom he had never heard of. He was failing the course and would need something special on this assignment. How fortunate, therefore, for him to have noticed the small article on page 40 of the Toronto Sun headed “Lit Star Kilodney Close to Death” and to have recognized therein a wonderful opportunity to get some inside dope straight from the author.

The 40-year-old author was sitting up in bed smoking a cigarette and answering his fan mail, which came mostly from the United States. He was the only occupant in the bright three-bed ward. Golden light poured through the window. A single red rose in a pewter vase stood on the bedside table. Next to it lay a Pez candy dispenser, a tiny rubber kangaroo and a button that read “Support Mental Health or I’ll Kill You.” The nurse left the student at the door. He stepped into the room. “Hi, Mr. Kilodney?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Phil Miasma. I called you about my essay for school. East York

Collegiate, remember?”

“Have a seat.”

Phil picked up a chair and approached the bed, stopping suddenly. “Are you contagious?”

“No, bring it up close. It’s okay.”

He put down the chair, removed his jacket, draped it over the back and sat down, pen and pad at the ready.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m dying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Brain abscess.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A bit.”

“How long until you, uh—” “Croak.”

“Yeah, croak, ha ha.”

“Around nine o’clock tonight.”

“What! How do they know?”

“They have very exact methods.”

Phil looked at his watch. “About six hours. Hey, you shouldn’t smoke. It’ll shorten your life span.”

“It’s okay, they’ve already taken that into account.”

“Oh, okay. Well, um, I got these questions I thought up myself, like for my essay. I gotta hand it in tomorrow.

I always put off essays till the last minute because I hate them so much.”

“Me, too.”

“I didn’t know who you were when the teacher gave me the assignment.

Everybody got somebody different.

I only had time to read one of your stories because of basketball practice, but I bought the Coles notes. They explain everything.”

“Yes, they’re pretty thorough.”

“But I thought, shit, I need

something extra on this, like stuff from you personally to jazz it up, like and nobody’d know where it came from. The teacher would really be impressed.”

“I get it. Okay, shoot.”

He clicked his pen. “What do you use to write?”

“A pen.”

“What kind?”

“Ballpoint.”

“What do you write on?”

“Paper.”

“What kind?”

“White with blue lines on it.”

“Wow, this is far out!” Phil scribbled furiously. “I know I’m gonna get an A. I wish I could get my paper all wrote up and marked by the teacher before you die so you could see what he says. He’s a real jerk. His name’s Mr. Voronoff.”

“Uh huh, I see.”

“How do you, like, get your shit together to write a story?”

“No problem. I just wait for inspiration.”

“How long does it usually take you to write a story, on the average?”

Kilodney stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “An hour.”

“Basically, like, what is the message in your writing?”

“What do you think?”

“I was going to write that it’s that the whole world is just crazy, like, with people acting crazy all the time, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“So, should I put that?”

“Sure.”

Kilodney reached for the buzzer to summon his nurse. “What school did

of us to cherish our old days. ICONIC IMAGES OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS: 73 years ago today, a campaign of sustained bombing of the UK by Nazi Germany, lasting over 8 months, came to an end. PERHAPS THE MOST ICONIC BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE OF ALL TIME! CLASSIC!!: Do you remember the first time you saw Michael

28 Geist 93 Summer 2014

you say you were from?”

“East York Collegiate.”

“What does it say on the back of your jacket?”

“GOLIATHS.” “Goliath was a Philistine, you know.”

“I heard he was a giant.”

“He was, but he was also a Philistine.”

“Hey, our basketball team’s in first place, and I’m on it. I also play football.”

The nurse appeared at the door, smiling. “Yes?” “Morphine.”

She nodded and left.

Phil flipped a page. “Who is your favourite author or the one who influenced you the most?”

“Henry Miller is my favourite.”

“What did he write?”

“Tropic of Cancer. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

“Oh, yeah, that dirty one, heh heh.”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s your opinion of pornography? How far should a writer go?”

“I never thought about it.”

“You don’t use too many dirty words in your writing, I notice.”

“No.” “I read Playboy and Penthouse. My father’s copies. They have some really good articles. You’d be surprised.”

The smiling nurse appeared with a syringe on a tray.

“Excuse me,” said Kilodney to his interviewer. Phil turned away and pretended to look out the window.

“You can turn around now,” said the author.

The student scanned his note pad for a moment. “Ummm, what do you think is the importance of your work for Canadian literature?”

“I don’t know.”

“What makes your work Canadian then?”

First Pluck V I V E K S H R AYA

From God Loves Hair. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2014. Vivek Shraya is an artist working in music, performance, literature and film. He lives in Toronto.

I

learn a lot about how to be a boy from my brother and the lessons he learns in school. Not in the classroom but in the gym change room. Lessons I miss because I change in the corner, facing the teal-tiled wall, so that no one can accuse me of a wandering eye. I listen intently as he tells me how the boys discuss the pros and cons of shaving their pubic hair and other regions of their body. Girls don’t like hairy. He even purchases his own trimmer. I hear a sharp buzzing coming from the washroom as he mows down his legs and chest. But I am in no hurry to follow his lead. No one is going to see me naked anytime soon. I am more preoccupied with eyebrows.

I’ve watched my mother pluck her eyebrows hundreds of times. Whenever she is in the washroom, she is armed with tweezers and concentrating on her reflection. Once she spots where to strike, her hand lifts mechanically, tweezers tighten, and she precisely pulls the bad hair from its root. Her mind is somewhere far away. She is calm, comforted that there are things, however small, that can be

removed, that can be changed. When she is summoned back by the sound of the garage door opening or remembers that she has to drive my brother to basketball practice, she puts down the tweezers and pencils thin almondbrown arches over the surviving hairs.

My own eyebrows look like a variation of Bert’s from Sesame Street, two furry caterpillars forever headlining my face. So I pluck. And pluck. It’s hard to stop. My face is changing, my eyes seem to be getting bigger and brighter, my face narrower. People say tweezing hurts, but I like the pain. Like when you floss your teeth for the first time in three weeks. I try to reciprocate with my brother, imparting to him my new lesson. He is surprisingly dubious.

When my mom tires of me constantly borrowing hers, we head down to Zellers where she buys my first pair of tweezers. She splurges on the fancy gold-plated ones. She hands them to me in the parking lot. Thanks, Mom. This passing of the torch has to be a sign. A sign that she knows my secret and loves me just the same. 

“I’m dying in Canada.”

“Right,” said Phil, writing the answer and underlining it. He turned back a page. “Oh, I forgot this. I thought of writing this in my essay.

Tell me if it’s good. ‘He writes with a deep power in his words but obtains enough mildness when necessary.’

How’s that?”

“Not bad.”

“I was thinking of being a writer myself some day. They give courses

at York. I might go there. They have a good basketball team too.”

“Good idea.”

“Say, I was wondering. Could our English class come to your funeral?

I’m sure it would be something they’d remember for the rest of their lives.”

“There isn’t going to be any funeral. My body is going to the U of T Medical School for students to dissect.”

“Ugh! Disgusting! Of course, you’ll

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Findings 29

be dead so you won’t feel a thing.”

“Precisely.”

“Maybe they’ll find out…” Phil paused, eyes wide. “Hey, I just thought of something!”

“What’s that?”

“What if your crazy ideas all came from your brain abscess? What if your brain was sick from the beginning?”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Then there was no talent involved.

I mean, no offence. Like, shit, if you can be healthy and think up crazy ideas, that takes talent, but if they come automatically because of a diseased brain, it’s like cheating almost.

You see what I mean?”

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe I’d better not write that in my paper. I don’t want to ruin your reputation.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“I hope nobody else thinks of it.”

“Me, too.”

Phil clicked his pen. “That’s it. I got no more questions. Thanks a lot.

It was a great interview.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He stood up and put on his jacket.

“Have you thought of what your last

words will be?”

“No, not yet.”

“How about, umm… Lemme think… How about ‘Fuck you, world’? or ‘Get ready, God, here I come’! No wait, I got it! ‘Quick, bring me a lady Eskimo’! Gee, it’s hard thinking up clever things to say.”

“I know.”

“If I get some ideas before nine o’clock, can I call you?”

“Sure. You can leave a message with the head nurse if I’m sleeping.

She’ll wake me up in time to die.”

“Okay, great.” He replaced the chair. “It’s been great meeting you.

Sorry you gotta go. I’m sure the world will miss you.” He was already backing toward the door.

“Sure.”

“I promise to read all your books when basketball is over.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, see ya.” And he turned and left, the back of his school jacket flashing before the author’s eyes for a split second. Kilodney smiled. Phil Miasma had provided him with a last word after all.

GOLIATHS. 

killer freebies Swag distributed by participants at Seattle Book Fair as described by David W. Brown on The Véhicule Press Blog at vehiculepress.blogspot.ca. Published April 18, 2014, at 14:06 by Carmine Starnino. David W. Brown is an editor for The Week and Mental Floss. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Tea bags; fortune teller miracle fish; the kind of bite-sized candy you get at Halloween; refrigerator magnets; Olivia Newton-John-style sweatbands; lead pencils; matchbooks; chewing gum; rubber bracelets; fake tattoos; cupcakes; licorice discs; fortune cookies; oranges; lanyards; bottle openers; lip balm; coffee mugs; tote bags; cigarettes; 2" toy rubber frogs, green; adjustable measuring tablespoons; tape measures with integrated bubble-level; pistachios; coasters; Teddy Grahams in a large communal bowl; a chocolate cake; chocolate rocks; squeeze balls; cereal bars; and clothespins.

GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOS UP FOR AUCTION:

Über-Indian D A N I E L H E AT H J U S T I C E

Excerpt from “Fighting Shame Through Love: A Conversation with Daniel Heath Justice,” which appeared in Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood, edited by Sam McKegney. Published by University of Manitoba Press in 2014. Daniel Heath Justice is the author of many books including Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History and a trilogy of Indigenous fantasy books published by Kegedonce Press. He lives in Vancouver.

W

hen I was about three, my dad—there was a friend of his that was Lakota, a truck driver who came to visit. And I guess—I don’t remember any of this, this is the story my parents tell—we were at a restaurant, it wasn’t even in that town, it was in another city my parents were living in before they moved back to my mom’s hometown. But we were at breakfast with this Lakota guy and the whole time I was glaring at him— ’cause he was very phenotypically Native. My dad’s dark-skinned but has a buzzcut and “not the Indian you have in mind” kind of thing. But I was glaring at this Lakota guy through the whole meal, just with absolute hate, and Mom knew I was going to say something—I was always a very verbal child. But she couldn’t very well spank me before I said anything!

So she was going to take me to the bathroom to go pee, and I went over and I poked him. And I said, “Hey! My daddy doesn’t like Indians.” And, of course, they all started laughing and laughing and thought it was the funniest thing, and Mom said, “Your daddy is an Indian.” And I guess I started throwing a walleyed fit in this crowded restaurant, “My daddy

For a photographer, there is scant validation in the world that tops landing a picture in National Geographic magazine and know-

ing that millions of readers across the globe will be able to gaze into a world they might never have otherwise seen. 4 ICONIC MOVIE ROLES PLAYED BY DIFFERENT ACTORS:

30 Geist 93 Summer 2014

is not an Indian! My daddy is not an Indian!” Just screaming and crying and just horrified that my daddy was an Indian, and Mom kinda shook me and said, “Yes, he’s an Indian, and that makes you an Indian, too.” And I guess the story is, I kind of looked at her, snot running down my face, and I said, “I’m a little Indian boy?” Mom said, “Yes.” And I said, “Oh.” And I was fine. I was fine.

What interests me about that story is why at three would I have been so horrified that my father was an Indian? Three years old: I had already internalized so much anti-Indian imagery, so much antiIndian rhetoric. You know, I knew what Indians did to little boys and their mamas. My dad loved watching Westerns, so I knew Indians killed people. They killed nice people. My daddy wasn’t one of those. My daddy was a nice guy. You know, by the time I was old enough to really think about it, I had become a complete Anglophile. I wanted to be as far away from being a mixed-race Cherokee hillbilly with kinda ambiguous sexuality and gender norms. I wanted to live in the England I read about and saw on TV. I wanted to go to Oxford and wear tweed with patches and smoke a pipe and sit in oak-panelled drawing rooms and talk about big ideas with other sophisticated, cultured, civilized people. I’d watch Merchant Ivory films and just salivate, because I didn’t want to be from where I was…

I didn’t see anything of value where I was from until I was in university.

In high school, when we would have pep rallies, there would be contests, and I was always very artistic and so I was the one designated in my class to draw posters and stuff. And there were a few times our team, the CC-V Pioneers, was competing against Indian-themed teams, like the

My father, sucking bones C A R A - LY N M O R G A N

From What Became My Grieving Ceremony. Published by Thistledown Press in 2014. Cara-Lyn Morgan is a Metis artist and writer whose work has appeared in a variety of national literary magazines. She was born in Regina and now lives near Toronto.

Sucking marrow from his chicken bones, spitting the splinters on the rim of a white china plate, he cracks the knuckles of his index fingers, first one then the other, belches quietly into his fist, eyes closed on another place a different table a two-room house its rusted roof the palm in neighbour’s yard, a splinter in the meat of his heel from shimmying its ragged trunk. Leotha, his mother, digs it out with her eyebrow tweezers, blows soft on the wound, her ribs hidden in layers of mother-fat church dress, apron. Roughs the sand from his skin with her hand, cuffs hard his small ear, settle boy, settle. Shows the sliver, shaming his tears with the click of her tongue. Her children all left home young, four girls, three boys, my father. Strayed fast from Trinidad to Harlem Boston Rosthern, Saskatchewan abandoned the taste of fried doubles buljoul dasheen turmeric green iguana and how Leotha delighted in shark-and-bake on Sundays. And she, poor and afraid to fly, stayed in the red-roofed house, a whelp of aging bones a voice on a long, long-distance line. My father breaking a thigh bone in his teeth rubs his tongue down the cracked leg bone and licks it whistle-clean. 

Lamar Savages or something. And I distinctly remember drawing really nasty stereotypical pictures of Indians scalping people and stuff and, in retrospect, it’s just the most mortifying thing to think that I participated in that, and I did it without a second

thought until I was about sixteen or seventeen and started being a little more attentive. And it really wasn’t until I was about twenty that I had a bit of a turnaround, and then I sort of became an über-Indian and then I kinda pulled away from that. 

In an often repeated critique by moviegoers and critics alike, it seems that Hollywood is just about all out of ideas. ICONIC WILLIE NELSON BAND BUS GETS ON THE ROAD AGAIN:

The iconic Willie Nelson Family Band tour bus that spurred a frantic worldwide bidding war will return to Texas highways as a mobile piece of music history,

Findings 31

Canada, More or Less Z ACHARIAH WELL S

From Career Limiting Moves. Published by Biblioasis in 2014.

Zachariah Wells is a poet, reviewer and essayist whose work has appeared in periodicals and anthologies throughout North America. He lives in Halifax.

Define Canada?

You might say the home of McSorley Or Ron Hextall Who inspired innovative use of the hockey stick as lethal weapon But we’re more than just aggravated assault And salt-of-the earth goons In wheat-growing and steel-making towns Some say what defines us is our excessive consumption of over-proof beer And our friendly-to-a-fault willingness to give strangers directions Even if it’s just “Ya can’t get there from here” Or some other bum steer We are so friendly to strangers We greet them at the YVR airport—with Tasers!

We are vegans and seal-clubbers We are seamen and land-lubbers We are loggers and tree-huggers We are dipsomaniacs and abstemious tea-chuggers We are a land of such equal opportunity That not only our politicians, but our serial killers too Can be hog farmers or Air Force brass (That they are drawn still from the ranks of white men Is a matter of some concern, but we’re working on that, let me assure you) We are constantly taking it up the ass From our neighbour, for which we say not only thank you But please sir, could I have some more?

Because we are more We are the global economy’s friendliest whore We are vast tracts of pristine land We are pipelines, tailings and tar sand We are exporting asbestos to India Our number one motto’s “Buddy, get it inta ya!”

We are raping our fish stocks and when we reap our forests We replace ’em with fast-growing stands of future bum paper We’re melting, we’re melting And all the while we’re belting out smug odes As we keep putting the rubber to the road We campaign from the left and govern from the right We turn off the light and take back the night We are getting tough on crime And we’re doing it on your dime Think art grants expensive, how ’bout hard time?

We are universal healthcare—if you’re in the right province We are kernels of truth and nuggets of nonsense We are paying recompense in monthly installments We are a ragged patchwork of problematic diversity We are in debt to our eyeballs for going to university We just can’t decide We were perpetrators of genocide But we don’t call it that and we feel really bad about the whole thing We have interned innocent citizens and taken their belongings On a dérangé le peuple Acadien Comme tout le monde, on dit merci et de rien Mais une fois à la maison, on donne un coup de pied à notre chien We are one Jew too many We are not two solitudes, but as long as the knackered nag still knickers, might as well flog ’er We are a game of Don Valley Parkway frogger We are a pedophilic diocese We are increasingly obese We are plus-sized and disingenuously self-deprecating We are eating where we are defecating We are doing your dirty work, as long as it pays We are not the sum total of our feel-good clichés But you need more than an upbeat demeanour to sweep garbage away Saying “we are more” is just one more trite meme We are still trying to forge what we mean And what this means is We made our bed But we must change the sheets if we want to make it clean

thanks to a pair of Austin entrepreneurs. ICONIC ST MARY’S CHURCH WEATHER VANE BACK WHERE IT BELONGS: This golden weather vane will shine out over Merton as an iconic church reaches a restoration landmark this week. FLASHDANCE: Iconic Film Turned Musical Opens in Toronto 30 Years After the Movie’s Release: “It’s the thing

32 Geist 93 Summer 2014

The Prime Minister, receiving ectoplasm from Texas

Counter-Spells

I

n the spring of 2014 the Vancouver artist Bill Jeffries conjured a “counter-spell” to reverse the effects of Bill C-38, the budget bill in which environmental protection and labour laws are further eroded, passed by the Harper government in 2012.

To create his counter-spell, Jeffries altered thirty-eight “spirit photographs” of Prime Minister Harper taken by an Ottawa photojournalist.

The images “show a rather unrecognizable Prime Minister of Canada at moments when he is believed to be channelling ‘ectoplasm’ from his sources in Texas,” Jeffries says in his artist’s statement. He reversed the photographs into colour negative

“to ascertain whether photography is magick, and whether supernatural means can effect a change in Mr. Harper’s thinking and ideology.” Specifically, Jeffries tried to test “whether this conjuring will cause Mr. Harper to reverse his position on a range of issues, especially protection of the environment.

“Now that C-38 is law, Canadians want to know what the future holds. The auguries foretell that the tar sands’ end-of-the-world landscape will spread across the country and that in 100 years Canada will have no birds, no polar bears, no wild fish runs—if you look deeply into these photographs you will be able to divine the source of the devastation.”

According to Jeffries, Bill C-38 (425

pages long, containing 753 clauses) is also literature: “its text is a Kafkaesque metalanguage; all ‘narrative codes’ as described by Barthes in S/Z. Barthes claimed that symbolic codes link specific actions to abstract concepts, such as ideologies. Symbolic codes reposition the arrangement of signifieds by inversion and antithesis, which is what C-38 did. Now, many of Canada’s previous laws have been reversed out of existence and exist only as ghosts in the rhetoric of C-38.”

Jeffries’s spell, entitled Bill C-38 Omnibus Counter-Spell, was exhibited at a nightclub in downtown Vancouver for several weeks in March–April 2014, and is currently seeking venues in Calgary and Ottawa.

—Michał Kozłowski

that won’t go away,” says journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-playwright Thomas Hedley Jr. of his most famous work, Flashdance. 15 ICONIC SONGS ABOUT NEW YORK CITY:

From the Brill Building to CBGB to the Queensbridge projects, New York City has been at the center of popular music in America for more than a century.

Findings 33

Sticks & Stones SUZ ANNAH SHOWLER

Excerpts from Failure to Thrive. Published by ECW Press in 2014. Suzannah Showler’s work has appeared in Hazlitt, Walrus, Maisonneuve and Joyland. She lives in Toronto.

i) I Know You Are, But What Am I? I have to say, these strangers form great cognitive maps. There they go, good and oriented, marking their way from cheese shop to florist and never once losing a stranglehold on their rowed-up ducks, no matter what they’ve seen coming or going.

They purchase whatever comes in glass bottles, and sometimes, in the break between adventures, there’s spinning to do.

Look, I don’t have a strand in this hairball, and if I put something down on the odds of things turning upright, I still feel it was money well-waylaid. Next thing you’ll be asking how it is I sleep at night, and the answer is the same as the answer to most things: it’s a trick of the light. ii) Why Don’t You Go Home and Cry About It? I have a feeling about a very slow apocalypse where we are all drawn back to our hometowns by something like a magnet that attracts whatever inside us is most mediocre and true.

So, when the world begins to end, if you have a minute, please promise to tell me more about all the other people you’ve fucked, how they had skin almost too firm to register touch, how their pussies were basically luminescent, and, in particular, I’d like to know in what order their clothes came off when they undressed, because I’ll need something to think about when I am caught, post-apocalyptically, in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada, where my parents still live. 

34 Geist 93 Summer 2014

MARKETPLACE

All Star Wrestling

Sons and Fathers

  

Sister DJ's Radio Band Copies of this rare 45 rpm are still available at Vinyl Records.

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Daniel Goodwin “A wild, page-turning ride through a harrowing collision of family, friendship, politics, and love.”

— Terry Fallis

www.lindaleith.com

P O R T F O L I O

Hollywood / Babylon The accidental celebrity photography of Marcel Dot

H

ollywood/Babylon: Jean Harlow,

by Michael Morris, once known as Marcel Dot, is a series of eight photographs of a poster of Jean Harlow—the first “platinum blonde” in Hollywood history—floating in a swimming pool in Los Angeles at a party that Morris attended in 1965.

Morris shot the original images on colour slide film; thirteen years later, in 1978, he printed the images as Cibachrome prints, a polyester-based printing method that preserves colour longer than other photographic print processes. Around 1980, Morris put the prints into storage; the slides were lost. More than thirty years later, in 2013, the prints were found in Morris’s storage boxes by Wil Abbale, a Vancouver curator and art collector, and then framed and exhibited as Hollywood/Babylon at the Burrard Arts Foundation Studio in the spring of 2014.

The term platinum blonde was coined for Jean Harlow by the publicity team of Howard Hughes, Harlow’s first director. Harlow’s hair was made platinum using bleach and ammonia—a combination that can produce lethal fumes. Jean Harlow starred in more than thirty films; she died of kidney failure in 1926 at age twenty-six.

Michael Morris is a painter, photographer, video and performance artist and curator. He is the co-founder of Image Bank and the Western Front Society. His work is represented in collections all over the world.

—Michał Kozłowski

36 Geist 93 Summer 2014

photos: dennis ha and wil aballe art projects

Portfolio 37

L I T E R A L

L I T E R A R Y

Postcard Lit Winners of the 10th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest FIRST PRIZE

Nettie, Rose, Daphne and Ginger JA M E S M AC S WA I N

T

hey are all ghosts now, Nettie Rose Daphne and Ginger.

Poor Ginger we always teased her calling her ginger ale because she hated it. Perhaps that’s the reason that once she got her high school she ran away to Vancouver and never came back here to Nova Scotia. I heard she had a kid but no husband of course that was Ginger she couldn’t get enough of the movies with all those femmes fatales she used to moon over and she was the first to put on lipstick. Rose and Daphne were scandalized they were always so practical back then and swore they would be good Christians and always be doing good deeds and they married young and had long courtships like you did back then. Rose’s husband worked on the Abegweit from Cape Tormentine to PEI and used to be away for days which Rose took advantage of. Well she was the pretty one and that fellow that sold the new fridges she got one out of him if you know what I mean.

Well we all get bored with doing the dishes and hanging the laundry. She had no kids so it was especially hard doing nothing. Of course Daphne was scandalized and never spoke to Rose again and it was rumoured that she was the one that told Rose’s husband about the goings-on. What a fuss that was with him all teary eyed and begging her to come back after she ran off to Moncton with the fridge guy 38 Geist 93 Summer 2014

and then she left him and last I heard she was in Fredericton with some French guy who had money. Of course Daphne wasn’t a saint herself no sirree not by a long shot if you know what I mean. Oh those two were at each other like demons accusing each other of fraud and infidelity at one point which was ridiculous since I doubt if they even knew what infidelity meant. Well Daphne’s husband did die in mysterious circumstances. One day he was fit as a fiddle, then he up and wasted away to a skeleton. We all whispered it, cancer? Some new-fangled wasting away that scared us all to death. Daphne up and got a nursing degree she was so angry about how her husband had died in such pain and she turned out to be a really good nurse. They even gave her a medal or some such thing at the end of her career. Of course Nettie had married up. Some lawyer in Antigonish and she went to the university there and got some learning. Her husband ran for the Liberals in the late forties but didn’t get in so he took a gun and shot himself dead. What a terrible sin and him a Catholic. Well we’re all dead now and ghosts so I’ve been told and Rose and Daphne are still not speaking. It’s a damn shame pardon my language but it really is a damn shame.

James MacSwain is a media artist who has worked in film and video. He won the 2011 Portia White Prize for outstanding contribution to Nova Scotia arts and culture. He lives in Halifax.

SECOND PRIZE

Do You Have a Lighter?

ERIN KIRSH

M

y doctor told me that when we are grieving, our lungs are the first thing to notice. He told me this with a stethoscope to my heart and a hand under my left breast. He asked me again if I was positive I didn’t smoke.

Just pot, I replied, mostly sure that this was true.

My doctor told me that I had the lungs of a sick person.

I said, Maybe just a sad one.

He grimaced, and moved the instru-­ ment across my shirt. He paused, then continued, Are you sad?

I said, Of course, who isn’t?

He suggested I exercise more.

I told him I didn’t want to appease the masses and get any skinnier because then men have won.

He asked me if I thought I was depressed. I said I wouldn’t know how to tell, and he spluttered, Well, do you like yourself?

I said, Like myself, no of course not, who likes themself?

He said, I like myself.

I said, Well, you shouldn’t.

He said, Well, I think we’re about done here today. You come back if anything starts bothering you.

I assured him I’d let him know if anything stopped bothering me.

He shook his head. I put on my coat. It was easy to do up, because there were only two buttons left on it.

When I got home I sat at the kitchen table with my bong. I broke a hard lump of nug into a dusting of tiny leaves. I stuffed the glass bowl full, pushed the green down tight.

My roommate crossed from his room to the bathroom in only a towel.

He spotted me on the way. He said, Hey. How was your appointment?

I said, Do you have a lighter?

He said, I have one of yours, actually. He retrieved it from his room and handed it to me. I cracked the window and lit up. The afternoon cool rushed in; the glass chamber filled with medicine. I extracted the bill piece and sucked back the smoke.

How was your appointment, he asked again.

I have the lungs of a sick person, I said, exhaling a heavy grey cloud into our kitchen.

Oh. He said.

I didn’t say anything.

I’m going to have a shower, do you need to use the bathroom?

I idly flicked the lighter.

No. Remember to hang the bath mat up when you’re done, I said.

He hesitated, then flat-footed it to the bathroom. I noticed his overpronation as he walked. I emptied whatever was left in the bowl, but it was mostly ash.

Then I went into my room and got undressed. The main light didn’t work, so I turned on the lamp, got into bed and pretended to read.

I don’t know who I was trying to fool. I was the only person in the room.

Erin Kirsh is a writer and performer living in Vancouver. She tours original work across North America.

Postcard Lit 39

THIRD PRIZE

Sand D. M. LONG

I

t’s like you never really wake up here. Funny how being in a heightened state is like sleepwalking in a way. Vigilance is exhausting. You’re firing on all cylinders, energy seeping out of every pore, propelled by instinct like a somnambulist with no real time for rest.

And the graveyards, they’re here, but no running green lawns, no flowers, no headstones or markers to point out the day’s tragedies. Not like you’re used to.

You don’t have to take a special trip with your mother and your sisters in the family station wagon on a Sunday in early summer with Neil Diamond playing on the car radio as you traverse the circular paths to see Aunt Hattie, or Grandma, who used to bake you cookies for no reason.

Because they’re everywhere. They’re all around you. They’re on the sides of the road in the morning as your Humvee travels through the sand on patrol and sometimes you can still see a few of them moving, quietly amidst the dust of the others. But you’re not allowed to stop because it could be a trap. He told us we might as well jump out and lie down beside them on the road, if we had any inclination to do that. Or better yet, he’d drive us somewhere right now and throw us out himself, rather than one of us jeopardizing his safety and everyone else’s.

Yes, there are graveyards, the sand blowing like pounded flour into every crevice of your body. I’ve been spitting it from my teeth all day. Each tiny grain of it moves along the line across my asshole. I can’t tell anybody this because it will sound vulgar and crazy, like I’m missing the point somehow, given what we’ve all been through. But honestly, it’s the only thing I can think about. In this place, you find crevices and orifices, routes you didn’t know your body took inward. Ones you never knew you had.

The sand is everywhere. It inhabits your dreams. It leaches into your food. You pack it into your letters home like tiny emissaries that stick to the pages. Emissaries that your loved ones transfer to their own spaces, under their fingernails, into the bed where you’re not sleeping, on the coat of your dog who you think about every day, even though you never write him a letter. And finally it metamorphoses into the landscape of your life, a part of your soul and the soul of this place that is being lost day by day, blowing away like grains of sand. Sand that is pieces of us, pieces of them.

Yes, there are graveyards. They ride around on the wind here. I hope they’ve cleaned it all up when I get home, if I get home. I wonder how many showers I’ll need to take before I’m sure it’s all gone and I’m not afraid of sand anymore.

D.M. Long is a writer and poet living on Cape Breton Island.

40 Geist 93 Summer 2014

C O S M I C

C O N S C I O U S N E S S

The Asylum Keeper and the Poet daniel francis Religious mystic, asylum keeper, Whitman obsessive—the career of Richard Maurice Bucke confounds what we think we know about the drab conservatism of the Victorian era in Canada

Dr. Bucke, asylum keeper AFTERTASTE OF HEAVEN

Richard Maurice Bucke, a thirty-five-year-old Canadian doctor vacationing in England, was riding in a horse-drawn buggy through the streets of London late one night in April 1872 when the Infinite embraced him in a flame-coloured cloud. Bucke was returning home from an evening spent with friends reading the poetry of Walt Whitman and the English Romantics—Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. “For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city,” he later wrote, describing his experience in the third person; “the next, he knew that the light was in himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning flash of the Brahmic splendour which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven.”

42 Geist 93 Summer 2014

photo: western archives, western university

The account of this life-altering moment comes from the introduction to Bucke’s book, Cosmic Consciousness, which appeared in 1901, the year before its author’s death (and the same year as Sigmund Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), and has been in print ever since. The book is an attempt to explain what happened that night. Having had a glimpse of what he took to be eternal truth, Bucke spent the next thirty years pondering what it meant.

His conclusions are summed up in the first section of the book, in which he describes two mundane levels of consciousness, the animal and the human, and a supreme or cosmic level of consciousness, which he describes as an awareness of “the life and order of the universe.”

Cosmic consciousness, Bucke argues, exists in a heightened state of “moral exaltation” experienced by the individual in a flash of illumination and an insight into the Walt Whitman, poet true nature of the world, including an awareness of immortality. “Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence—would make him almost a member of a new species.”

The occurrence of ecstatic religious states was nothing new when Bucke set out to explain them. His innovation was to apply the notion of evolution to the spiritual world. At present, he argues in the book, only a few individuals have achieved cosmic consciousness and they have done so only briefly. This is how he explains his own experience in London. But humankind is evolving toward a state of bliss, he says, in which cosmic consciousness will replace self consciousness as the permanent

photo: matthew brady

condition of everyone. By Bucke’s own calculation, the experience of cosmic consciousness was already occurring with greater frequency among more people.

Bucke becomes almost ecstatic as he contemplates a future that, he writes, “is indescribably hopeful.” “The human soul will be revolutionized,” he declares. There will be no poverty, no boundaries between people. Conventional religion will disappear, replaced by the permanent knowledge of eternal bliss. He ends on a triumphant note. A “new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.”

As evidence for his theory, Bucke devotes a large chunk of his book to case studies of individuals whom he identifies as members of this “new race” because they have experienced cosmic consciousness themselves: religious leaders such as the Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, poets like Dante, William Blake and Walt Whitman, and others. (None of his case studies were women; Bucke believed that cosmic insight was denied the weaker sex.)

Bucke was no crackpot. Though Cosmic Consciousness was dismissed by many of his more conservative medical colleagues, his ideas were not that unusual. Spiritualism— a belief in an afterlife and the possibility of communicating with it—was much more mainstream in the nineteenth century than it is today. (Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, took guidance from the spirit world.) Bucke did not consider himself to be a spiritualist but he did not discount the paranormal. He thought that communications with the spirit world were a proven reality, though he interpreted

The Asylum Keeper and the Poet 43

London, Ontario, where he seemed to have found his vocation. During the subsequent twenty-five years of his life, until his death in 1902, he rose to become one of the leading psychiatric practitioners of his day, recognized not just in Canada but in the United States and Britain as well.

When he entered the world of the asylum, Maurice Bucke was a forty-year-old general practitioner with no experience, or even much interest, in the care of the mentally ill. Indeed, he had been a qualified doctor for barely ten years. He had arrived in Canada as a one-yearold child in the arms of his parents. His father, CULT OF CURABILITY Horatio, had been a Church of England cleric, but in Ontario the family settled on a farm he second great turning point in Bucke’s near London. Though Maurice, the seventh of life occurred four years later. He was living in ten children, did not attend school, his father Sarnia, Ontario, with his wife amassed an extensive library of classics in and their children, working as which to browse and taught his youngsters to a small-town doctor. The study BUCKE BEGAN TO read in several languages. Following the death of “man’s moral nature” (it was SUFFER ANXIETY, of his stepmother when he was fifteen years the title of his first book, which PANIC ATTACKS old, Maurice left home and wandered footwould be published in 1879) still AND DEPRESSION loose around the United States for the next preoccupied him, but otherwise few years, picking up work as a farmhand in he was finding existence in a proOhio, a stave cutter in the cypress swamps of vincial backwater stultifying and Louisiana and a deckhand on a Mississippi rivdull. His life, he confided to his erboat, and driving oxen in a wagon train to diary, was “so monotonous that what is said for Utah. In the autumn of 1857 he was in Gold one day answers for every other day.” To make Canyon, south of Reno, working a silver claim matters worse, he was suffering from recurring owned by the Grosh brothers. Though no one bouts of acute anxiety (“nervous dyspepsia” in yet knew it, the Groshes were sitting atop the the language of the day), manifested in sudden origins of the famous Comstock Lode, the panic attacks and accompanying depression, first important discova condition that not ery of silver ore in the even his ecstatic expeUnited States. That rience in London had November Bucke and relieved.

Allan Grosh set out to Seeking a way out walk across the Sierra of this professional Nevada to California and personal impasse, in search of capital to Bucke turned to his extend their operations. friend, T.B. Pardee, a During the harrowlocal lawyer and influLondon Insane Asylum grounds ing trek Grosh died of ential provincial cabinet exposure and starvation. minister, who obtained Bucke lost one foot and most of the other to for him a posting as medical superintendent frostbite, and barely survived. For the rest of at the Hamilton Asylum for the Insane when his life he walked with a pronounced limp and it opened in February 1876. A year later, he endured almost constant pain. took over the same position at the asylum in them as latent abilities that in time everyone would possess. Bucke was at pains to differentiate his spiritual insight from irrationality or pathology. He was a man of science seeking to explain a state of consciousness, much like Freud was proposing the importance of the unconscious.

But on the night the city of London erupted in a flame-coloured vision, this was all ahead of him. It required years to make sense of his experience. Meanwhile he returned to Canada to continue his medical career.

T

44 Geist 93 Summer 2014

photo: archives of ontario

first permanent mental facility, the Provincial When Bucke returned to Canada following Lunatic Asylum, opened just west of downthis misadventure, he was, in his own words, town Toronto at the beginning of 1850. The “a cripple, a wreck.” With a small inheriGlobe newspaper hailed it as “a monument to tance, he enrolled in McGill College medithe Christian liberality cal school in Montreal, of the people.” following in the footsteps of two of his older brothers. Despite his lack of formal schoolhe new asylums ing Bucke turned out were considered to be to be an adept student the hallmarks of a proand after four years gressive, enlightened graduated with honcommunity. They were ours. Following two conceived as instituPostcard from London Insane Asylum years of postgraduate tions in which a new study in England and kind of therapy could France, he returned to Ontario and to Sarnia, be put into practice. Known as moral treatwhere he took over the medical practice of his ment, or the humane method, it brother Edward, who recently had died. was not treatment in the medical LUNATICS WERE The Canadian mental hospital, or lunatic sense at all, but rather a combiCARED FOR BY asylum as it was more commonly known, was nation of compassion and genTHEIR FAMILIES, only forty years old when Bucke began his tle persuasion. The idea was to HELD IN JAIL OR career as a “mad doctor.” Prior to 1836, when treat mental patients with the LEFT TO WANDER the first facility devoted solely to the care of same dignity and respect as anyAT LARGE the mentally ill opened in the basement of a one else. No longer shut away one-time cholera hospital in Saint John, New in lonely cells, chained to walls Brunswick, lunatics were cared for by their or strapped into straitjackets, families, held in jails or, if they were no troupatients in the asylum instead lived openly as ble to others, left to wander at large. There members of a compassionate community in a was little incentive to incarcerate the insane. system of structured activity where the shatConfinement was expensive, and had no theratered mind could experience the tranquility it peutic effect anyway since no one really underneeded to find its way back to wholeness. stood the conditions they were dealing with.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, The British North American colonies were the humane asylum had sparked what has been predominantly rural societies in which the called “the cult of curability.” For the first time, family and the community were called on to practitioners and members of the public were care for the indigents in their midst, which convinced that the puzzle of mental illness had for the most part they did in their own rough been solved. The new asylums reported cure way. Only at the end of the eighteenth century rates approaching 90 percent. Dorothea Dix, did attitudes toward the mentally ill begin to the American social reformer, proclaimed that change. In several countries in Europe, reforminsanity was “as curable as a fever or a cold.” ers began to view the mad not as dumb beasts In Ontario the new optimism led to a flurry of who were best locked away from the world but asylum building, and by the 1880s the province as unfortunate victims whose disturbed minds had a network of four large institutions houscould, with humane care, be won back to reaing more than 2,600 patients and consuming son. These ideas migrated across the Atlanclose to 20 percent of the government budget. tic and took root with social reformers and It was in this context of hopeful reform that progressive doctors in the United States and Maurice Bucke took up his position as medical then in British North America. In Ontario the superintendent at the London asylum.

T

photo: western archives, western university

The Asylum Keeper and the Poet 45

strong impression on everyone who came into The medical superintendent was the linchcontact with him. pin of the moral method. Inasmuch as the new Bucke was an enthusiastic proponent of asylum resembled a large family, the medihumane treatment. He removed all mechanical superintendent was its patriarch. It was cal restraints from the his responsibility to London institution ensure that the instiand discontinued the tution ran smoothly. use of alcohol, which All authority centred was widely used to on him. He was less a pacify mental patients. doctor than a father: He introduced female his most important attendants to the male function was to set a wards (widows only; moral example, discisingle women were plining and instructing Male patients in farm field not thought ready for his “children.” Though the scandalous sights most superintendents they might see there) with the hope that it of the Canadian asylums did have medical would encourage the men to behave civilly to training, they had little need to the women and to each other. Most notably, use it. They were administraWHEN BUCKE he initiated an “open door policy,” allowing tors, role models, loving parRETURNED TO most patients the freedom to wander at will ents and sometimes tyrants. The CANADA FOLLOWING role of the medical superintenaround the buildings and the grounds. The HIS MISADVENTURE, object of treatment is the rehumanization of dent, writes the asylum historian HE WAS "A CRIPPLE, the patient, he wrote. Not only were patients Andrew Scull, was “to rule like A WRECK." granted freedom of movement, the asylum petty autocrats over the miniaitself opened its doors to outsiders. “The asyture kingdoms of the mad.” lum is full from morning to night of people Bucke seems to have been to see friends and people to see through the chosen by central casting to play this role. institution,” Bucke observed approvingly. In Large in both physique and personality, he his view, members of the public had a distorted administered one of the most populous asyidea of the asylum, viewing it, he once wrote, lums in North America. The London Psychias “an immense prison, full of all sorts of horatric Hospital had 900 patients along with a rors.” By keeping the door open he hoped to staff of 130, most of them attendants but also dispel the stigma attached to the institution, an extensive roster of indoor and outdoor to its inhabitants and not incidentally to the employees necessary to keep such a large instiprofession of asylum keeper. tution functioning smoothly. Most of these For all his reforming zeal, Bucke was notopeople lived at the hospital, which included rious, even in his own day, for carrying out the main building, four smaller buildings for surgical procedures that seem more barbaric “refractory” and chronic patients, Bucke’s own than humane. In the nineteenth century madbrick residence where he lived with his famness was considered to have many causes, ily, lodges for the employees and a variety of but chief among them was any form of illicit workshops and farm buildings. The entire sexual activity. Masturbation, for instance. complex was on the scale of a modern suburAs much as one half of all mental illness was ban gated community. As became a monarch, attributed to “the solitary vice,” which was Bucke’s manner sometimes was described as thought to weaken the body and make it sus“imperious.” Sir William Osler, the famed ceptible to collapse. Shortly after he took medical theorist, remarked that in later years over as medical superintendent in London, Bucke looked like “a venerable seer.” With his Bucke began inserting a length of silver wire fulsome beard and imposing stature, he made a

46 Geist 93 Summer 2014

photo: western archives, western university

through the foreskins of the most incorrigible male masturbators. In all he “wired” twentyone patients before abandoning the practice as ineffective. “There are no cases given in which the habit was arrested and no improvement took place,” he was forced to admit.

But instead of abandoning the link between sex organs and madness, Bucke switched his attentions to his female patients.

I

t was widely accepted that many if not most of the mental maladies afflicting women were attributable to their reproductive systems. The regular life changes that women experienced— menstruation, childbirth, menopause—were all thought to drain the vitality, not to mention the blood, necessary to maintain mental stability. During these episodes, women were susceptible to mood changes, morbid thoughts and extreme behaviour: susceptible, in other words, to losing their minds. A catchall diagnosis for this loss of control over the emotions was hysteria, a term derived from the Greek word for uterus. It was treated with a variety of pills, tonics and rest cures, but some doctors, viewing hysteria as a stepping stone to full-on mania, chose to experiment with more dramatic methods, and Bucke was among them.

He began by authorizing the asylum surgeon, Dr. A.T. Hobbs, to perform uterine surgery on a patient known as SQ. When SQ recovered, not just physically but mentally as well, Bucke and Hobbs began operating on female inmates on a regular basis. Between 1895 and the beginning of 1901, when Hobbs left the hospital, more than two hundred operations took place to remove diseased ovaries and repair other abnormalities of the reproductive organs. Bucke was careful to point out that operations were intended only to relieve physical problems, but he was convinced that there was a connection between gynecological health and mental health, and he reported that over 60 percent of the women who had been operated on showed some mental improvement.

Wendy Mitchinson, the historian who has paid most attention to the operations, has questioned this success rate. She suggests that

candidates who were chosen for surgery were patients who were most likely to recover their mental health regardless, and concludes that the evidence that surgical intervention had a positive impact on mental recovery is doubtful. Most medical opinion at the time rejected such a dramatic form of treatment. With the exception of Dr. Ernest Hall, who operated on twelve female inmates at the BC Provincial Asylum, no other Canadian doctor followed Bucke’s lead. It would not be the last time, however, that doctors used patients in mental hospitals as guinea pigs in experimental surgical procedures—one has only to think of lobotomies, insulin comas, electroshock therapy—and it remains a stain on Bucke’s reputation that he was such an enthusiastic proponent of what one of his colleagues called the “mutilation MEETING WALT WHITMAN of helpless lunatics.”

TURNED OUT TO Part of what motivated MauBE THE LAST rice Bucke may have been desGREAT TURNING peration. By the end of the POINT OF nineteenth century it had become MAURICE BUCKE’S obvious that moral treatment LIFE and the asylum were not the silver bullets an earlier generation of reformers had believed they were. Plagued by economy-minded legislators, ill-trained staff and overcrowded facilities, asylums abandoned the high ideals of their founders. Within a few years of being established, their halls were overflowing with long-term patients—the so-called chronics—for whom little hope of cure existed, and the asylums had become much like the prisons they had replaced. Bucke himself was forced to the conclusion that “insanity is essentially an incurable disease.” Perhaps he turned to sexual surgery out of frustration that more conventional treatments were having no effect.

THAT OUR EYES

G

SHOULD BE OPENED

rowing impatient with the routines of asylum administration and frustrated at the lack of therapeutic success, Bucke increasingly sought fulfillment in the work and eventually in a friendship with Walt Whitman. A friend

The Asylum Keeper and the Poet 47

introduced Bucke to Whitman’s epic and—to many—scandalous collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, in 1867, and Bucke had been reading Whitman the night of his transcendent experience in London, but the two men did not meet until the summer of 1877. Bucke was visiting Philadelphia on medical business and took the opportunity to cross the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman was living in an upstairs room in a house occupied by his brother George Dr. Bucke with family and his family. This encounter only lasted a few minutes, but for Bucke it turned out to be the third great turning point of his life. “If I tried to say how much he impressed me you would probably put it down to exaggeration,” Bucke wrote to a friend, recognizing that he sounded like a star-struck teenager. “He is an average man magnified to the dimensions of a God…” Bucke compared his meeting with Whitman to falling in love and then again to a “spiritual intoxication.” “I not only felt deeply in an indescribable way towards him, but I think that the short interview has altered my attitude of my normal nature to everything—I feel differently, I feel more than I did before.”

In an instant, Bucke had joined the adoring cult of apostles who believed in Whitman’s genius and devoted their own lives to spreading the word about it. He credited his new friendship with curing his panic attacks, and photographs suggest that he went so far as to model his own appearance on Whitman’s: he soon cultivated a fulsome beard that covered his chest and a mane of swept-back hair that curled over his shirt collar.

For his part, Whitman seems to have been of two minds about Bucke. No doubt he was fond of him and respected his medical skills, but he also found the hero-worship a bit too zealous, the enthusiasm a bit extreme.

48 Geist 93 Summer 2014

“There are times,” he wrote to a friend, “when [Bucke’s] boisterous vehemence gets on my nerves.” But they were friendly enough that Whitman journeyed to London, Ontario, in the summer of 1880 and stayed at the asylum with Bucke and his family for several weeks.

The two men travelled together down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec, where they visited Montreal, Quebec City and the Saguenay.

Bucke’s wife Jessie was less enthusiastic about her husband’s new friend. She feared that Whitman’s notoriety as a free thinker would do no good for the career of a prominent medical doctor. (These events are the focus of a 1990 movie, Beautiful Dreamers, starring Colm Feore as Bucke and Rip Torn as Whitman. While it gets many of Bucke’s biographical details wrong, the film nicely conveys the influence Whitman had on Bucke’s thinking and the unsettling effect he might have had on pious nineteenth-century Ontario society.)

W

hatever his wife’s reservations, Bucke’s friendship with Whitman deepened during the London visit. He soon conceived the idea of writing the poet’s biography, and for the next couple of years the two men collaborated on the project. (It is unusual to co-author one’s own biography, but Whitman wanted to be involved, in part to restrain Bucke’s tendency to identify Whitman’s work with his own sweeping vision of religious transcendence.)

After the book, Walt Whitman, appeared in 1883, contact between the two became less frequent.

Then, five years later, Whitman suffered a series of strokes and Bucke, who happened to be in Philadelphia at the time, supervised his recovery. Whitman was convinced that Bucke had saved his life and the relationship became

photo: western archives, western university

M

close once again. They exchanged letters several times a week and Bucke frequently visited aurice Bucke died late in the evening of Camden, where Whitman by this time occuFebruary 19, 1902. He had just returned from pied his own small house and was cared for by a dinner party with friends. Stepping outa live-in housekeeper. side to view the clear When Whitman died, night sky, he fell and in 1892, Bucke was suffered a fatal head one of five speakers injury. His wife and at the cemetery; the son heard him collapse others—two lawyers, onto the front porch. an academic and a He did not recover poet—were friends of consciousness.

Whitman from PhilaBucke expected delphia and Camden. that posterity would “The Christ is dead!” remember him as the Bucke wrote in a letter. defender/explainer “Again we have burof Walt Whitman, or ied the Christ!” As one perhaps as a progresWalt Whitman in his home of Whitman’s literary sive asylum reformer. executors, he devoted In fact, the legacy for the remainder of his own life to solidifying his which he is best known turned out to be Cosmic friend’s position in American letters. He had Consciousness, probably the most influential found a calling that surpassed his professional book on religion written by a Canadian. Cited interests and allowed him to proselytize for the approvingly by both the American religious spiritual ideas he would articulate in his magscholar William James and the Russian metanum opus, Cosmic Consciousness. physician P.D. Ouspensky, it has been in print Bucke saw in Whitman the living exemever since its publication. It was immediately plar of his evolutionary theories, a messiah, a taken up by theosophists and other adherents of prophet, a spiritually enlightened being who non-mainstream religious thought. For examdwelt on a higher plane than other mere morple, Mackenzie King kept a copy of the 1926 tals. “Walt Whitman is the best, most perfect, edition in his library, and Cosmic Consciousness example the world has so far had of the Coswas an important influence on the artist and mic Sense,” he wrote in Cosmic Consciousness. theosophist Lawren Harris, who called it “the He identified what was for him Whitman’s greatest book by a Canadian.” Many of his procentral teaching: “that the commonplace is fessional colleagues thought Bucke’s foray into the grandest of all things, that the exceptional religious speculation a bit eccentric. However, in any line is no finer, better or more beautiful successive generations of readers of Cosmic Conthan the usual, and that what is really wanting sciousness have continued to discover in it if not is not that we should possess something we an actual blueprint for human evolution, at least have not at present, but that our eyes should an affirmation of the transformative power of be opened to see and our hearts to feel what mystical experience. And that is a message that we all have.” For Bucke, this made Whitman never loses its timeliness. the first person to fully integrate a knowledge of the transcendent with the everyday self; to integrate the sacred and the profane, the spirit with the flesh. He possessed, thought Daniel Francis is the author of two dozen books and is Bucke, a truer understanding of man’s spiricurrently at work on a history of the Canadian mentual nature than the Buddha, or Saint Paul or tal hospital. Read more of his work at geist.com and even Christ himself. danielfrancis.ca.

photo: thomas eakins

The Asylum Keeper and the Poet 49

T O B A C C O

L I T

The Ashtray rolli When you’ve smoked as long as me, smoking and thinking are the same

“S

moking is prohibited, Mrs. Crane.” “Your second warning, Mrs. Crane.” “The Silver List of Regulations…”

“Give me that cigarette!”

The name of my care home is Champagne Meadows. They have one fir tree and you can’t even drink. They don’t allow smoking.

“Can you give me anything for the cravings?”

No, they couldn’t. I threw everything I could think of the first week.

I asked Bernice for cigarettes and she brought them, but they saw the towels under my door.

I ordered cigarettes, but it was the same thing. Bernice had an aneurysm.

Dad smoked. The ashtrays were built into his armrests, one on each side. I’d sit on his lap when he smoked, always. I picked up the cigarette butts and pretended to smoke them.

When he went to the kitchen, I picked up his burning cigarette.

“It’s a dog’s ass,” he said, catching me.

Dad was not the kind of man to kiss anyone’s ass, or any dog’s.

I tasted it.

I have been a smoker now for eighty-one years.

I did not want to go to Champagne Meadows. I’d heard things from Bernice. I wanted to go to Emerald Mansions, but Janet, my eldest, convinced me it was too expensive. Plus she’d looked into it, she said, and I could definitely smoke at Champagne Meadows, in the Smokers’ Lounge.

The Ashtray 51

I liked the sound of that. On the first day when I asked them which way it was to the Smokers’ Lounge, they just laughed and took my cigarettes. They don’t even let you smoke outside, because it’s on the Silver List and they don’t question anything on it, no matter how stupid.

I sulked in my room for a week. When my daughter came I jammed a chair against the door. I wrote a note and slid it under the door.

“What’s your name?”

“Bree.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Is that old enough?”

“It is if someone’s with me.”

I don’t understand these things. Frank always did the driving. She looked believable.

She picked a scab on her elbow.

WHEN THE DO-GOODERS TAKE OVER, THE WORLD WILL BE It said, “At the Smokers’ Lounge.” Janet didn’t think it was funny. She has a degree.

I got bored of sulking. When you’re ninetyfour, you can’t waste too much time on anything. I still missed my oldest friends alive, my cigarettes. I kept trying. The worst was when they took the pack Bernice smuggled in and threw it into the campfire. They light a barbecue once a week and call it a campfire. The ones on oxygen sit farthest away. You’re supposed to sing along. The fat one strums a guitar. “I can’t hear you, Mrs. Crane,” she said to me. I wanted to say, “You don’t feel like singing when you’re watching your friends turn into French fries.”

The boss lady said we could have lawns or gardens. We voted. It was gardens.

April, my granddaughter, was planting spinach in the front one day. I was sitting in a lawn chair watching. A young guy in a Buick kept driving by too fast.

I moved closer to the sidewalk. When he drove by again in his Buick, I threw a stone at it.

He slammed on the brakes. He backed up.

“What the fuck did you throw at my car?” he said with his neck out the window.

“My car,” I said.

“What?”

I pointed at the sign in the window, FOR SALE, 1000 OBO. “Fuck, you wanna buy it, ma’am?”

I said, “April, get my chequebook.”

The first girl who answered the ad was shy and skinny.

52 Geist 93 Summer 2014

“What does it pay?”

“Ten bucks a week and all the second-hand smoke you can eat.”

I laughed. She asked for fifty. I hired her.

Frank was a lousy driver. I didn’t learn to drive, I learned to squeeze the armrests. He was an enraged driver before it was popular.

When he’d say, “Let’s go for a ride, Ruth,” I’d throw cigarettes into my purse. By the second pack, I hardly minded. I relaxed my grip. In ’86, he just dropped dead.

Bree came every day before school and after school. She came on the weekend if I asked her. I just had to pick up the phone and say, “Bree, get the Ashtray” and she’d fetch the Buick from guest parking and pull up to the front door.

The first time, I sat in the back.

“Would you rather I sat in the front?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“No?” I said, lighting up.

She pointed in the mirror. “It bothers my asthma a little.”

“You have asthma?”

“Just a little.”

I thought she might get sick. But with the window open she was fine.

Bree was nerved-up. It wasn’t me, it was her way. She needed to relax. She was one of those skinny girls who can’t relax. She leaned on that steering wheel and squeezed it like a rapist. She always brought coffee, which I thought was a mistake. A good driver, even though she braked hard. Frank may have

been angry but he braked gently. I never once dropped my cigarette.

I don’t think Bree talked for a month. I didn’t mind, I smoked to myself, that was the whole point. I always asked, “How was your day, Bree?” and she answered, “Good.” Always “Good.” I always said, “That’s good.” Then I put my feet up and smoked away.

Smoke is wonderful. It’s a peace pill. I’m

Pretty soon Bree was driving with one hand. She wasn’t braking as hard. I didn’t have to hold onto my cigarettes as hard. She even phoned me sometimes, things a girl would ask her mother, if her mother wasn’t drunk. Always looked happy to see me, but always looked sad too. I never quite understood this girl. She was a nice girl.

Heaven is something good that lasts.

FULL OF PEOPLE NOT SMOKING WHILE THEY KILL EACH OTHER a militant smoker. When the do-gooders take over, the world will be full of people not smoking while they kill each other. If I can put my legs up and smoke at the end of the day, it was a good day. I could be covered in dirt, but I’m the First Lady. It’s a green Buick but it’s ecstasy.

One time when Bree got in the car I asked her how she was and she said, “Bad.” I smiled a little. Told her to tell me about it. I don’t even remember what she said, it was dumb teenage stuff. I don’t know what I told her. I’m not a fountain of wisdom, I’m a fountain of smoke.

She told me and she seemed more relaxed.

Blood went back into her knuckles. Then the next week when she jumped in she said, “Fucking awful,” without waiting for me to ask. I thought, the smoke is working.

On Sundays we drove all afternoon. I smoked, she talked. She asked, I answered.

I really started listening and thinking.

Remembering. She had a lot of problems, this girl. She was a nice girl but she had a bad home life. Her dad did Elvis puzzles in the basement. I smoked and put her life together.

When you’ve smoked as long as me, smoking and thinking are the same. There’s an idea in every cigarette, if you can find it.

If Bree was having a bad day, if her mom hadn’t come home, the smoke got pretty thick in there, even with the windows open. Then she had to lean her head out the window like a dog, or stop and open the doors for a bit. But she always got right back in, and kept listening and talking.

Then Bree hit the fire hydrant when she was backing out of the gas station. The plates were expired. The guy who sold me the Buick didn’t tell me that. The policeman said I didn’t count because I didn’t have a valid driver’s licence. He took away her learner’s permit. We both got tickets.

I never heard from Bree again. She never called me again. I phoned once, but whoever answered hung up.

I couldn’t find any other girls. There were too many other jobs out there, or they were lazy. I gave up on it.

It was hard for a long time. I couldn’t get my hands on anything. No one would bring me anything. I asked the new guy if he could get me cigarettes and he said, “That’s against policy.” The damn Silver List.

My health’s not so good now. That’s mostly boredom. You’re not bored when you’re smoking, you’re smoking. I do puzzles in the lobby.

Half the people in Champagne Meadows wish they were dead, or would be better off dead. I thought I could smoke forever. If I could get some cigarettes, I could still live forever.

A Buick is better than Heaven because you can smoke in a Buick. You can put your feet up and smoke.

Rolli is a writer and cartoonist. He is the author of God's Autobio and Dr. Franklin's Staticy Cat. His cartoons appear regularly in Reader’s Digest, Harvard Business Review and others. He lives in Southy, Saskatchewan, and at rollistuff.com.

The Ashtray 53

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T H E

C A N A D A

P R O J E C T

Theory of North jeremy stewart Once The North becomes your home, it is in your body, like an accumulation of very small particulates

T

he North will not be accounted for by a theory of The North.

The North does not exist.

The North is there, waiting, when colonialism stumbles over that last ridge, parched and starving, continuing only because it cannot choose to die.

The North will fuck you over.

Yes, The North is more beautiful than other places, but maybe you can’t see it.

The North isn’t for or against you.

You may be from The North. How’s it going?

Sometimes, in the gutter, I can’t tell the ice from the broken glass.

Don’t hitchhike in The North.

Yes, I have hitchhiked in The North.

You will try to confront The North, but when you go to find it, it will have paid your bill and left. No, it’s not in the bathroom.

The North is sometimes a Greyhound experience: uncomfortable, expensive, sleepless, and surrounded by wolves.

Polyrhythmic music, tie-dyed sarongs, mud.

You have fucked over The North.

He met her just north of where you lost sight of him.

Once The North becomes your home, it is in your body, like an accumulation of very small particulates.

No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any change.

photo: jesse and kathy clifton

This is a mosquito bite; this is a blackfly bite; this is a nosee-um bite; this is a horsefly bite.

The North says it doesn’t care, but you better believe it cares.

Mom tried to drive us to school. We got about halfway there when the car got stuck in the snow for the second time.

“No, this is nuts,” she said. “School just isn’t that important.”

The North comes with 2 fried eggs any style, 3 hotcakes, your choice of toast and your choice of bacon or sausage, with a little piece of orange as a garnish, but usually only before 11 a.m.

You will start to tell stories about The North, but you will end up telling stories about yourself.

The North is a place of smoke—every kind of smoke.

You came to The North for a job, but that contract is over.

Hitting a deer in the road.

The fact that there are those who would tell you there is no need for a theory of The North is a strong indicator that there is actually a pressing need for a theory of The North.

When I turned on the tap, the water was full of rust particles. “Oh, those ain’t gonna hurt ya. Drink up.”

On the day of the first snow, everyone forgets they’ve been driving in the snow for years.

First you must grasp that North ain’t up.

Strange literacies emerge as from ice fog.

Dark months, light months.

Theory of North 55

Small-town newspapers: free as in free beer, not as in freedom.

What is North of all the clichés about The North?

Debates about where The North begins as you head North—those who live farther North than you will tell you that their place is the real North and yours isn’t.

Everyone’s laughing at you because your car has no block heater.

You made mixtapes of bands no one you know had ever heard of, which you learned of from magazines you subscribed to that no one you know had ever heard of—this was all before the internet.

Downstairs, we found moose steaks and homemade grapefruit hooch in immense quantities.

The rush of green life into a gap in the winter; the hasty retreat of green life from the gap as the winter fills it again.

“Lots of exciting outdoor recreation opportunities,” they said—but they didn’t add “for the survivors.”

Trucking across the blank map.

They’d buy riverfront lots on the Nechako, but by the time they showed up to build on them, the land would already have fallen into the river.

Easier to imagine no people from here.

Rotting fruit in your yard attracts bears.

Couldn’t see a thing—the screen was all snow. “Turn up the contrast!”

They promised us jobs—and if there were no jobs, they promised us relief; if there was no relief, they promised us booze—and we’re out of booze.

We got potholes in our potholes, but no road.

No, the hat doesn’t suit you.

Don’t put The North to the test.

Don’t believe everything people say about The North.

Once you’ve been in The North for a long time, you can say you’re from The North if you want to.

The North is sometimes a Walmart experience: empty and claustrophobic at the same time, nothing you want but something you’re going to pay for.

Last gas for 200 clicks.

There is not much you can do to help The North; better just get out of the way.

Cold enough for ya?

When they found her, they said the cause of death was The North, but they were only half right.

The North is sometimes a Denny’s experience: it’s gonna take all night, but that’s okay, ’cause you’ve got all night, ’cause you’re in The North.

You and all your friends grew up with peasant vision in The North.

Bureaucracy in The North is like other bureaucracy, but more so.

The North is better than you expected, and you will probably end up staying.

56 Geist 93 Summer 2014

The North has a hard time retaining management talent.

The North is not as straightforward as it may appear.

The Northern hangover: much philosophy has occurred, and much will follow.

I hear The North is a great place to raise kids.

A shovel will come in handy in The North.

You are somebody else’s problem in The North.

If I ever own a hotel, I will call it The Great Northern, like the hotel in Twin Peaks.

The North is sometimes an RCMP experience: they will have taken the tape out of the security camera, contradictory testimony from the partner will avail nothing, and you will always have been the one trying to do something violent to the uninjured officer when you yourself are dead.

Fall off the trampoline backwards in The North, land in the saskatoon bushes.

What is it about The North and these oddballs?

The North is what happens when you’ve already blown your other options.

I had a dream about The North: there was a terrible dark mountain silhouetted against the blue night; I could see inside the mountain—there was an underground maze or shopping mall, where sad, dead-eyed fish floated in the air near the end of the narrowing tunnels.

The North has changed from the way you remember it.

The North and lack of consumer choice.

You and me in The North, drinking that church coffee out of Styrofoam cups, real early in the morning.

In case we don’t make it back, I just wanted to tell you… never mind.

Tell me again about how you lost your thumb.

The North in the way so much water clings to the fireweed.

The North does not try to explain itself, but people are always trying to explain The North.

The North and its large administrative areas.

He goes out walking on the lake most days.

The North as an obstacle to self-actualization, apparently.

Carolyn Mark in The North telling me she wanted to become “a moose whisperer.”

The North and its anecdotes.

People have been bored in The North. Well, fuck ’em.

The North—stolen—and yet, tragically, yours, mine and ours.

The North and everything you give up for The North.

“The North moves North.” —Ken Belford

Jeremy Stewart is the winner of the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. His second collection of poems, Hidden City, is forthcoming this fall, from Invisible Publishing. He lives and writes in Prince George, BC.

T H R E E - D A Y

L I T

Confessions of a Circus Performer r.h. slansky An excerpt from Moss-Haired Girl: The Confessions of a Circus Performer by Zara Zalinzi,

by R.H. Slansky, the winning entry in the 2013 International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest.

Slansky’s winning novella will be published by Anvil Press in summer 2014.

M

any of Father’s friends and business acquaintances paid their respects upon his death, and I

was moved to see the number of people who had admired and adored him. But the person I was most glad to see was the showman, who seemed genuinely aggrieved by my father’s passing. He confessed that his visit was two-fold: to offer his condolences and to extend an invitation to join a tour of Great Britain that he was in the final stages of planning.

After hiring a former museum worker to assist him, I left Father’s clerk in charge of the shop and packed my trunk. Soon I was travelling first class on a steamer bound for England, reunited with many of my dear friends. The Giantess was there along with a giant who the showman was billing as her mate (special quarters had been modified for their comfort),1 the Skeleton Man had brought his wife and the three hale and hearty boys he had sired that he was so proud of, my dear armless friend greeted me with kisses in lieu of an embrace, and of course there was the showman’s star attraction—his beloved midget. I smiled so with fondness at the sight of the Bearded Lady that she was momentarily disarmed. My errant husband, the Lion of Caernarfon, was also there, and took a moment alone with me to say that he had been a beast and would understand if I refused to resume our former act as a family and would make the matter clear to the showman if I so desired. Feeling this was the wisest course of action, I requested that he do so and he agreed to the terms with no sign of animosity.

At first sight of the Strong Man, I was at a loss. I found myself happier to see him now than I had ever been at the sight of the Lion. I had not laid eyes on him since he had rescued the baby and myself from the flames, and, despite the length of our acquaintance, words had never passed between us. But once again, as our eyes met, it seemed we didn’t need them.

The voyage was a merry one, full of remembrances and news of other performers who were not on the tour. The joy of being in the bosom of true friendship once again was almost unbearable. Even the Lion was on his best behaviour—the prettiest of passengers seemed enthralled by his thick auburn hair and fine dress, but not a single one seemed to turn his eye. At first I forbade him to see the baby, but there was such a pain in his eye whenever someone asked after him, or he spied me taking him for a walk on the deck, that I soon relented. The Lion was a perfect

Mabel Birch, the Giantess, and General Magnus, the giant, though life-long friends, were never a couple. It was not for lack of trying on his part, however. According to his autobiography, 1

58 Geist 93 Summer 2014

he proposed to her on a weekly basis right up to her death, and though he lived thirty years more, he never fell in love again.

gentleman to me and made no advances. By voyage’s end, we were almost as good as a family again and I had reversed my position on our act. I did, however, require that we keep separate rooms on our travels. The Lion agreed that was for the best.

It was a grand tour. Between engagements it was quite easy for me to slip out unnoticed—all I had to do was twist my hair under a hat and don a modest outfit—and so I saw much of the country on foot. Of our many stops, perhaps the most memorable was the visit to the palace, where I was reunited with the very man whose entrance to the showman’s museum I had once barred and whom I had astonished by holding out my small hand in demand for a ticket. Once the showman had provided his introduction to our exotic musical family and we had performed “God Save the Queen” in perfect harmony, he and the princess applauded and he stepped forth. Like the regal sovereign of the mountains I was, I held out a hand, and he bent to kiss the back of it, pausing for a moment as he looked into my eyes with a half-remembered recognition, then shook it off.

The royal visit was a smashing success, and the raves of the prince and princess ensured sold-out performances for the remainder of the tour. But there was one who could not seem to enjoy our acclaim. The Bearded Lady had been told by the prince, who had intended it as a compliment, that her facial growth was heartier than his own, and enviously so. Having felt her whiskers a plague ever since they appeared, this was another stab to the hidden tender heart beneath her haughty manner.

One night, I awoke to find her looming over my bed in the darkness, a pair of sharpened scissors gleaming in her hand. I heard the snip and felt the hair fall on my cheek. Screaming, I pushed her from me.

“Come sister,” she entreated me. “Allow me to cut it, then you may cut mine.”

I assured her I would do neither, nor should she, for our respective hairs were our source of livelihood. She began to weep and said she cared not, swore she could not live with it any longer.

Holding the scissors out, she implored me to take them and free her of her whiskers. By now, those who had heard the screams were outside the door, calling out to be let in. The Bearded Lady’s eyes took on a frightening gleam. She charged at me, the scissors held out like a knife. I caught her by the wrist as she fell upon me, and we tumbled to the floor, struggling, as I cried out for help. The baby screamed from where he cowered in a corner. I was nicked by the blade more than once before I finally heard the sound of a frantic key scraping the lock.

The door opened at last. In came the Strong Man, who set to work prying the wild woman from me. When the Bearded Lady recognized my rescuer, she became even more enraged and turned her wrath upon him. Screams emanated from her that raised goose pimples all over my skin; the screams of an animal. It took four men to subdue her, and, in the fray, the Strong Man was also cut

Three-Day Lit 59

by the flashing scissors. In time, orderlies arrived from a local sanatorium to take her away.2 My wounds, which were thankfully superficial and would be covered when I was in costume, were dressed, as were those of the Strong Man, who required more attention, and we found ourselves alone in my room. The baby had cried himself to sleep in my arms. I looked to the man who had saved my life three times over, and could no longer be silent.

“Thank you,” I said, simply.

He smiled. The gloom lifted from his gaze. “De nada,” he replied.

The Siberian strong man was Spanish!3 We laughed a moment, then the mood turned serious once more. He took my hand in his and solemnly declared his love. My father had taught me enough Spanish that, between what I knew of his tongue and he knew of mine, we had no trouble understanding one another. Tears spilling from my eyes, I returned his declaration in kind, but remembered to him my wedding vows. He nodded, gently releasing my hand. Before withdrawing from the room, he tenderly caressed the baby’s brow and assured me that his heart had been true ever since I was a ticket girl at the showman’s first museum, and that it would always be so. As the door closed behind him I wept softly, understanding at last that I felt the same.

In the morning it was discovered that the Lion, having never returned to his room after stepping out for a walk in the night air, had missed the melodrama of the previous evening. When he was still missing at our next engagement, we all began to worry. By the second missed performance, the showman had put the word out to the police that he was missing.

He turned up again just in time for the next performance, drunk, dirty, with a terrible black eye and cut lip, steadying himself by the arm of a girl of questionable repute.4 The showman nearly fired him on the spot, but, fearing for the happiness of our child, I implored him to give the Lion a chance to shape up. Reluctantly, he allowed it, but made it clear to the Lion that there could be no more incidents. At that moment, it became just as clear to me that the Lion would never be the husband I desired. Still, I honoured our vows and was chaste in my interactions with the Strong Man.

The breakdown that terminated Madame Anya’s (the Bearded Lady) stint on Putnam’s tour of Great Britain (and seemingly her career as a performer) is documented, though not in detail.

Papers reported a variety of speculative stories as to what happened that night—some said she had gone after her own child, some said she had tried to kill herself over an unresponsive lover, and one even put forth the possibility that she was really a man and had finally cracked up over living a lie. Interestingly, all of the reports agreed on one thing­—Anya had incurred some frighteningly bloody wounds herself, and witnesses in the crowd that had gathered outside the hotel were doubtful she would survive. It seems possible that either Zarah or Ivan fought back more fiercely than Zarah relates here.

Madame Anya disappears from the records for a long time before she shows up in the 1920 US census, curiously enough, married 2

60 Geist 93 Summer 2014

to a railroad engineer in Ohio. It is not known what became of the child, the side effect of whose birth was the impetus of her sideshow career.

3 Zara is the only source for Ivan the Great’s (the Strong Man) supposed true nationality. Because she never reveals his given name, and he is not referred to anywhere in print or memory as anything other than Ivan the Great (with the exception of his later incarnation as Prince Zoltan), his nationality, as well as his identity, remains a mystery.

4 Write-ups in local British papers on three sequential performances of the tour mention Hughs’s (the Lion) absence due to “another engagement,” suggesting he had been on the bill but not been in attendance. If he was, indeed, reported missing and found to be just on a bender, it is a testament to Putnam’s relationship with the press that the incident does not appear in print.

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

C I T Y

O F

W O R D S

A Novel for All Times A L BE RTO M A NGU E L

Dickens’s Jarndyce family, Melville’s Bartleby and Kafka’s K were anticipatory shadows of a great satiric novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

A

sk any Turkish reader for the name of the most important Turkish novelist of modern times and very likely the answer will be Tanpinar.

Now, thanks to the loving endeavours of two translators, Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, English readers too will be able to delight in the work of one of the most talented and ingenious writers of the twentieth century. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar was born in 1901 and died in 1962.

He was a poet, a literary historian (he wrote a remarkable History of Nineteenth-Century Turkish Literature) and the author of incisive travelogues and memoirs, but his celebrity rests on his two novels: A Mind at Peace, a Proustian evocation of family life that Orhan Pamuk called “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul,” and The Time Regulation Institute.

Literary fame is mysterious: how can it be that it has taken half a century for this extraordinary novel to reach a public outside the Turkish language? Perhaps certain books have to wait for the world of their 62 Geist 93 Summer 2014

readers to mirror the world their pages describe; certainly Englishlanguage readers who discover The Time Regulation Institute today will feel a shock of recognition. Largely thanks to electronic technology, our world has seen the bureaucratization of every aspect of our life. Bureaucracies, always absurd, have now lost all semblance of dignity; financial institutions, always loathed for their greed, have become openly dishonest; administrations, always suspect, have proven themselves to be intrusive and inefficient. Earlier writers had caught a glimpse of the oncoming clerical nightmare. Dickens’s Jarndyce family and their Chancery lawyers, Melville’s Bartleby and his Dead Letter Office, Kafka’s K and his hallucinatory trial, were merely anticipatory shadows. These forerunners are incarnated in Tanpinar’s hero, Hayri Irdal, a naïf who is more forthcoming than Bartleby and less anguished than K, but who is held captive in that same world (now grown more confident and spread over a wider canvas)

of absurd rules and regulations. “I would go as far as to say that it is an age in which bureaucracy has reached its zenith, an age of real freedom,” declares the founder of the Institute, Halit Ayarci—without irony—to the accommodating Hayri.

The Time Regulation Institute is an organization that, according to Ayarci, defines its own function: to save time lost through issuing fines for malfunctioning timepieces, bringing order and meaning to a dissolute society—an idea judged “one of the most remarkable innovations in the history of accounting by our esteemed financiers.” The system of fines set up by the Institute specifies the collection of a certain sum for every clock or watch not synchronized with any other clock in view. “However,” Hayri explains, “the offender’s fine would be doubled if his timepiece differed from that of any other in the vicinity. Thus the fine might rise proportionately when there were several timepieces nearby. Since the perfect regulation of time is impossible—because photo: spngsambigpants, flickr

of the personal freedom afforded by watches and clocks, something that I was naturally in no position at the time to explain—a single inspection, especially in one of the busier parts of town, made it possible to collect a not insignificant sum.” It should not astonish us that society embraces such a system and the Institute that restricts the free measuring of time.

“This love of liberty,” Hayri says, approvingly quoting the words of the founder, “is nothing more than a kind of snobbism. If we really needed such a thing, or if we truly felt passionately about it, then wouldn’t we have grasped onto one of its many avatars and never let it out of our sight?” In these times of increasing restrictions on civil liberties everywhere—and, in particular, Prime Minister Erdogan’s Turkey—Tanpinar’s novel proves salutary reading.

As suits a story about the attempt to harness time, Hayri’s narrative

or confession is full of magnificent digressions. There are the stories of the three timepieces that marked the stages of Hayri’s progress toward the Institute: the ill-fated grandfather clock bought by his father to furnish a never-to-be-completed mosque, a small clock that sang popular tunes and reminded Hayri of the brevity of life, and his father’s pocket watch with a compass whose needle showed the direction of Mecca, with a mechanism so abstruse that no clockmaker could mend it. There are the stories of Hayri’s relatives and acquaintances: Nuri Efendi, master craftsman, whose knowledge of clocks and the nature of time provides many of the aphorisms quoted at the Institute, such as “The Great Almighty made man in his image, and men made watches in theirs”; Seyit Lutfullah the Mad, “a mask on loan, a living lie,” who spent his days in a dilapidated medrese and once believed himself to be the

Messiah; Hayri’s aunt, who holds the family’s purse strings and who climbed out of her coffin after she’d been mistakenly declared dead; Abdüsselam Bey, a Tunisian aristocrat who lived with countless relatives and servants in a sumptuous villa, only to be abandoned by all except a handful of old women whose names he has forgotten.

Penguin Classics has done English-speaking readers a great service by allowing us to discover in The Time Regulation Institute one of the great satirical masterpieces of modern times.

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) All Men Are Liars, A History of Reading and The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor. He lives in France. Read more of his work at alberto.manguel.com and geist.com.

City of Words 63

N A T I O N A L

D R E A M S

We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs DANIEL FRANCIS

Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true

E

very Canada Day, Canadians are treated to a form of ritualistic self-flagellation. Amid much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, the media release a poll revealing, yet again, that as a nation we are historically illiterate. Usually it is high school students who carry the blame for not knowing the name of the first prime minister (hint: he was once so drunk at a campaign event that he vomited onstage) or the date of Confederation or some other factoid from the past.

But the inference is plain that results would not differ much if the same questions were put to adults. Canadians, we are told, just don’t know their own history.

But is this actually true? Does a set of random questions asked of teenagers reveal anything useful about the way Canadians engage with their past? I’ve always thought the answer was Not Much. Now I have the evidence I’ve been waiting for. A group of seven university historians calling itself the Pasts Collective (Margaret Conrad, Kadriye Ercikan, Gerald Friesen, Jocelyn Létourneau, Delphin Muise, David Northrup and Peter Seixas) has published the results of a series of surveys they and others conducted to determine the interest Canadians take in their own past.

Canadians and Their Pasts (University of Toronto Press) provides answers to the three questions that I think are at the heart of this debate.

64 Geist 93 Summer 2014

First of all, do Canadians know much, or care much, about their history? According to the professors, the answer is a qualified yes.

Canadians, they say, are “profoundly interested” in their own past. “Have people lost contact with the past…?” they ask. “We say, emphatically, no.

Do they express any interest in Canada’s history? Yes, quite clearly they do.” But this interest is not necessarily reflected in a way that shows up in polls that ask about specific events or personalities. We tend to think that the study of history is something that occurs in the classroom and involves the memorization of

names and dates. “Those who do not remember the past,” the American writer James Loewen once joked, “are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.” But in daily life there are multiple ways that people engage with the past. They read books and watch movies and television programs; they visit museums and historic sites; they trace ancestors on the internet; they compile a family archive; they research the history of their own houses; they attend lectures; they visit heritage fairs; they protest the destruction of old buildings; they play video games. All of these activities reflect an interest in, and imply a knowledge of, the past. Not surprisingly, survey results reported in the book show that family history is the most popular way that Canadians manifest this interest. Many of us are involved in genealogy, especially given the increase in the availability of resources on the internet. Nonetheless, of the people interviewed, fully 90 percent ranked national history—i.e., the history of Canada—as somewhat or very important to them.

Hardly the result one would expect from a nation of historical amnesiacs.

“Who killed Canadian history?” Jack Granatstein asked in his polemical book of that title sixteen years ago.

Apparently no one; according to the authors of Canadians and Their Pasts, it is alive and kicking.

But surely Canadians today are not as interested in history as their parents or their grandparents were. This is another truism that leads the more excitable among us to despair not just of the younger generation but for the future of the country. For the alarmists, history is like broccoli: the more we consume the healthier we’ll be.

They believe in the power of history to heal and unite the country. This belief dates back many years. In 1970, to take just one instance, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism declared in its report that “if Canada is more than ever before threatened with schism… we must look for the cause very largely in the manner in which today’s citizens have learned the history of their country.” Yet according to the authors of Canadians and Their Pasts, there is no evidence that contemporary Canadians are any less knowledgeable than previous generations.

What has changed is the kind of history we care about. Not so long ago we all sang from the same hymn book. There was a narrative about Canadian history that we all more or less accepted, a narrative that was summed up in the familiar phrase “colony to nation.” The story of Canada was our gradual evolution from a dependent colony to a selfgoverning nation. As this master narrative fractured into competing, or at least multiple, narratives, the story became more complex. It was no longer the story of triumphant elites; other groups that felt excluded from the conventional version had muscled their way to the front of the stage. For most people Canadian history is no longer the “colony to nation” story, it is rather the story of family, diversity and community. But this reimagining of our history has not been accepted by everyone. The complaint that Canadians don’t know enough about their history is in many ways a lament for the death of the old, outdated master narrative.

National Dreams 65

A third truism subverted by Canadians and Their Pasts is that Canadians know far less about their history than other people. Sometimes it is argued that we are too young to have developed a historical consciousness, sometimes that we are too large and diverse to sustain a common story. For whatever reason, we believe ourselves to be not only ignorant of our history but uniquely ignorant. Americans and the British, we tell ourselves, are walking encyclopedias of their own past. Why can’t we be more like them?

Again, the Pasts Collective says not true. First of all, other countries share the same concerns about the historical illiteracy of their citizens. This is not a Canadian issue; it is an international one, and probably has more to do with the anxieties associated with modernity than with the failure of our education systems. Second, based on earlier surveys done by researchers in other countries, it seems to be the case that people know a lot more

about the past than they have been given credit for. “History matters,” conclude the Collective members, whether you are American, British, Australian—or Canadian.

It is important that youngsters learn history in school, that historic sites be maintained, that major events be commemorated and that all the other things be done to foster a sense of the past. But at the same time it seems safe to conclude that Canada is not facing a national crisis of ignorance when it comes to our history.

The authors of Canadians and Their Pasts have done us all a great service by proving that it is time to retire that tedious old cliché.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, among them Selling Canada: Immigrants, Soldiers, Tourists and the Building of Our Nation (Stanton, Atkins & Dosil, 2011). Read more of his work at geist.com and danielfrancis.ca.

ENDNOTES Reviews, comments, curiosa THE CELEBRATED CRAD

Crad Kilodney has always been a divisive figure in the Canadian literary community, and the division has never favoured Crad. Standing on the streets of Toronto through much of the 1980s, Crad wore provocative signs—“Slimy Bedtime Stories”; “Literature for Mindless Blobs”— intended to draw attention to his self-published books, books with titles like Putrid Scum and Blood Sucking Monkeys from North Tonawanda; even Crad’s supporters were challenged to mount a defence. Yet attacking his work is the easy part. Defending it takes guts.

Celebrating his writing, as Lorette Luzajic does in her self-published Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories (CreateSpace), is in a league of its own. “In Kilodney’s work you find the heart laid bare,” she writes. “His writing reflects the depths to which all men can sink, but Crad alone among us had the courage to put the ugliness unedited onto the page.” And: “Crad exposes all of it with searing honesty, skewering himself publicly on a bed of coals with his unpardonable ideas. In a way he takes the blame for us, for all of us who self-righteously deny relating to what he is saying.” The book jumps around from interviews with Crad to considerations of his influences, self-reflection by the author and an account of Crad’s last major writing project, “Shakespeare for White Trash,” completed just before his death on April 14, 2014. This is the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing. Luzajic, who became a close friend to Crad, projects her own struggles as an artist onto Kilodney’s 66 Geist 93 Summer 2014

work and arrives at an unexpected appreciation of his oeuvre.

—Thad McIlroy

SCUMBAGS BEHAVING BADLY

If you’ve ever jumped to a brash conclusion, acted desperately while crawling through rush-hour traffic or even contemplated killing your spouse, Behaving This Way Is All I Have Left by Gonzalo Riedel (Insomniac Press) will make you laugh, and maybe cry a little too. I laughed inappropriately aloud at the many last-ditch attempts made by the characters in this collection of short stories to save face in the middle of some disastrous episode. I cried when it was all over because of the special breed of empathy you have to feel for these deadbeats and scumbags who can’t help but make mistakes. Riedel’s aptly titled collection is populated by characters who, in amazing denial, cling to hope where any right-minded person would just give up; for instance, the woman who, almost feeling regret for poisoning her husband, pleads with him to stop thinking only of himself and to just give up and die already.

How Riedel makes such horrific episodes so perversely funny remains a mystery. Maybe, though we’d rather not admit it, we all know someone who resembles pathetic characters like the restaurant owner turned arsonist who, caught in his own lie in the interrogation room, lunges for the exit as if he might escape. Each story in Behaving This Way Is All I Have Left reads like a short, vivid scene plucked

from a motion picture in which the plot twists until tragedy finally strikes.

I turned each page in suspense, wondering what fate awaited our character, like waiting for the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. You go from asking, “How could this possibly end well?” to “How could this possibly get worse?” Reader be warned: there are no happy endings here, but I dare you not to laugh and cry for more as Riedel describes hitting rockbottom over and over again.

—Jennesia Pedri

PUNKS AND BEATS

Issue #80 of Razorcake, a mag that is “an honest reflection and catalyst for DIY punk rock,” has some wacky typefaces and the bad image reproduction that one gets on cheap newsprint, yet I couldn’t put it down because the stories were so damn good. The mag opens with a small rant lamenting how DIY punk rockers are voiceless, and one of the feature stories, “We Were There: Voices from LA Punk’s First Wave” by Alice Bag (who got into punk in the late ’70s), refutes claims by the Smithsonian that early punk in east LA was racist. For a punk rock newbie, this story was an interesting history lesson. There’s also a poignant story about the deaths of both a thirty-year-old CD player and a slightly older brother-in-law, a well thought-out article on how both liberals and conservatives in the US education system support discrimination against the working class, an interview with Sara Hendren (ablersite.org) about demedicalizing the design of

assistive technologies, along with several profiles of bands (some of which have puked in unexpected places), comics about craft beer, hobo dreams and yoga for musicians, plus short reviews to rival those of another wellknown mag. I’m more of an interested party than a punk rock convert, but I look forward to future issues and future concerts, like the one I recently attended (with earplugs inserted) in a vinyl record store in LA. Tom Tom Magazine is for and about female drummers, but feminists of all genders will get a kick out of the strong and joyful women of the drumming world. Number 16 is the religion and spirituality issue, which means we get to read about how to get into the zone with drum meditations, drumming in church, drumming as a spiritual practice and shamanic drumming (shamans used to be women). A long interview with Palmolive, who was around at the beginning of punk rock rage, hung out with some famous male musicians, lived in squats, then left the scene and is now a mother, grandmother, teacher and activist, paints a picture of how things were then. In the shorter article, “Devotees of Shred,” we find out that not only do all-girl tribute bands have great names (Mistallica, Lez Zeppelin, AcéDShe) but they also rock hard, play loud (and well) and swing their hair. Several drummers are profiled, including Kiran Gandhi from MIA, who has some great advice for how to get and keep a good gig, and BoPah the Mini Beast from Sledge Grits Band, who is a pre-teen drumming dynamo; and for those readers who are drummers, there are some Linear Drumming exercises and a piece called “The Philosophy of Tikadimi Takadimi,” both of which include what looks like drumming notation. A funny, energetic and well-written mag that’s filled with great action shots.

—Patty Osborne

Endnotes 67

FAIL TALES

I

n spring 2014, Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote embarked on a cross-Canada tour of Gender Failure, a music and storytelling show, and launch for their book of the same name (Arsenal Pulp Press). Chapter and song titles include How to be a Transgendered Indie Rocker, Do I Still Call Myself a Butch? Drag Failure, Girl Failure, Man Failure, Top Surgery, How to be Gay when the Gays Won’t Have You, Prairie Gender, My Body Is a Spaceship, What Do You Think I Am? and about a dozen other personal pieces about navigating a world that constantly demands that you declare your gender and then gets all awkward when you don’t nicely fit the part of male or female. The Gender Failure tour began at the Rio

Theatre in Vancouver, in front of a crowd of several hundred rowdy audience members. Spoon and Coyote told stories and sang songs for over an hour, with Spoon on guitar and Coyote on melodica, synth and percussion. Spoon is an excellent musician and songwriter. Coyote’s stories go straight from their mouth to your gut. The crowd laughed and cheered throughout. Intermittently a video was projected of Spoon and Coyote as superheroes in plaid capes, knitting, flying around, saving cats from trees. The show ended with Gender Retirement, a piece by Spoon about deciding to refuse to identify within the gender binary and to go by “they.” Their retirement has been largely ignored by the world: no gifts, no pension plans, no gender retirement community in Florida—at least not yet.

—Michał Kozłowski

TEARY-EYED TESTOSTERONE

There’s an old Irish saying that all our wars were merry and all our songs were sad. I don’t care for merry wars, but I rate my music on its ability to encourage a cascade of tears. Now I’ve found the perfect poetry anthology to add breadth to my collection of the melancholic. Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them (Simon & Schuster) sounds hokey, perhaps a poor excuse to pull together some ragged and obscure verse. But when you get to the strong list of contributors, read some of their brief but ohso-precise introductions to their favourite weepers and then fall into the chosen poem, a different sense emerges. The list of contributors is exceptionally strong, ranging from the very literate—John Ashbery,

Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg (revealing also the British leaning of co-editors Anthony and Ben Holden)—to the often interesting (think of Stephen Fry, Christopher Buckley and Christopher Hitchens), to the “I’m not quite sure why they were invited,” which would include actors Daniel Radcliffe, Patrick Stewart and Barry Humphries, who manage to surprise with their poetic passion. The poets are a solid if somewhat predictable group, including Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Hardy and Wordsworth. W.H. Auden is the most represented with five poems. Seen through a lens of the full expression of exceptional sorrow, some familiar poetry can take on a startling nuance. One of the most intriguing outcomes of this anthology is a small but somehow perplexing fact: of the one hundred selected poems, only fifteen are by women.

—Thad McIlroy

BASED LOOSELY

The hot pink cover of Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti (House of Anansi) threw me off, but I picked it up anyways, and moments like the washed-up soap star Augusta Price (not her real name) parting crowds “like a vindictive and half-dressed Moses” kept me reading. On a trip from Britain to California to stop Augusta’s exlover from writing a tell-all memoir, Augusta and Frances Bleeker, a meek and unsuccessful tabloid journalist, try to scrape their lives back together while battling unemployment, public embarrassment and substance abuse. What at first read like a made-for-TV movie—simple and funny, but kind of trite—developed into a hilarious and bizarrely fascinating look at functioning drug addiction. I couldn’t put it down.

—Roni Simunovic

FAMOUS FOODS

What is the collective noun for “food writers”? A gobble? A feast? And what primitive instinct compels these exotic creatures to migrate annually to the south of France? If these are among the questions that keep you awake at night, I would draw your attention to Provence, 1970 (Random House), Luke Barr’s discursive investigation of the winter when, “more or less coincidentally, six major culinary figures, including Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher, found themselves together in the south of France.” Barr (Fisher’s greatnephew) structures his book around his discovery of his great-aunt’s diary— “a pale green spiral-bound notebook with the year ‘1970’ written on the front in ballpoint pen”—which turns 68 Geist 93 Summer 2014

out to contain not only “a minutely observed account of her changing relationship with France,” but also (conveniently for Barr) “an inside-out version of the very story I was researching, about American food and cooking finding its way from beneath the shadow of France.” This makes Provence, 1970 sound like crack cocaine for anyone with a trace of “foodie” or Francophilia in their genes—and it does indeed satisfy those specific cravings. Where the book falls short is in Barr’s repeated attempts to position the winter of 1970 as a pivotal moment in the history of American food, a moment “when the democratization of cooking and taste became part of the national conversation in America.” In short there’s too much Barr and not enough M.F.K. If you want a stronger hit of the real thing, track down a copy of Fisher’s Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964), or her Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991).

—Michael Hayward

CLOSER TO MEMORY THAN IMAGINATION

In her book Air Carnation (BookThug), Guadalupe Muro starts out writing about growing up with hippie parents in Bariloche, Argentina, winter weather, a job she had in a bar when she was fifteen, books and writing, falling in love and losing a shoe, and she admits that she always writes about herself, “in an exercise closer to memory than imagination” and that she would like her imagination “to produce something brand new.” Then she tells us she has decided to write a love story about Rita and Simón and, after an “Intermezzo” of poems called “Songs for Runaway Girls” (which, a visit to bookthug.ca reveals, have been turned into songs that are Endnotes 69

performed by Muro along with the spoken word artist Ian Ferrier and the musician Damian Nisenson), Rita’s story begins. Even though it is written in the third person, the story is as intimate and compelling as Muro’s story had been, and after a short time it feels more like a fleshing out of Muro’s story than “something brand new”: both stories involve a novel-inprogress, a rock climber boyfriend and hitchhiking around Bariloche, although in Rita’s story, the boyfriend is the one who loses the shoe. Muro’s narratives wander around and go off on tangents as she connects the events in her life with ruminations and memories, and it is a pleasure to follow her. Don’t let the uninspiring cover keep you from diving into this funny, poignant and absorbing book.

—Patty Osborne

ARTISTS IN THIS ISSUE

Michel Campeau’s work has been exhibited and published internationally. His exhibition Darkrooms was shown at the New York Photography Festival in Brooklyn, the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles and Robert Morat Gallery, Hamburg. Campeau lives and works in Montreal.

Elisapee Ishulutaq began carving and drawing in 1970 and over the past forty years has become best known for her art depicting traditional ways of camp life. She is a member of the Order of Canada. She lives in Pangnirtung, Nunavut Territory.

Bill Jeffries has directed galleries in Vancouver for thirty years, most recently the galleries at SFU. He “retired” in 2012, and now makes art and independently curates exhibitions.

Myles Wirth is a freelance writer and artist whose work has been published in The Tyee. He hails from Portland, Maine; lives in Vancouver; and blogs at infinitecascade.tumblr.com.

T H E

W A L L

OFF THE SHELF

and get your grotesque failure out of the

says that Artificial Cherry by Billeh Nick-

Sometime between the loss of his grade

way in Make It Mighty Ugly (Sasquatch

erson (Arsenal Pulp Press) “meditates on

3 sweetheart and the fist fight with a rich

Books). Interviews between Regina prairie

the nature of art and artifice, and on the

dwarf in the drunk tank, Jonas fell through

dogs and the photographer Robert Adams

unpleasantly compelling power of popular

a Jonas-shaped hole in the world in Chris

are recorded in The Trouble with Beauty by

culture the author mines for his material”;

Hutchinson’s Jonas in Frames (Goose Lane

Bruce Rice (Coteau Books). Geoff Pevere

according to Canadian Poetries the author

Editions). Broom Broom by Brecken Han-

attests that Hamilton, Ontario’s almost-

“occasionally milks a great cheap joke to

cock (Coach House Books) teaches a his-

famous punk band Teenage Head still

the full extent of his power.” School by Jen

tory of the bathtub that will haunt you.

practises that traditional form of guitar-

Currin (Coach House Books) is described

In Versions of North (Caitlin Press), G.P.

drums-bass-vocal amplified noise deliv-

by Claudia Keelan as a “passage from an

Lainsbury thinks writing poetry about

ery that hits you right in the solar plexus

old language to a newer one wherein intu-

Auschwitz is barbaric. In Us Conductors by

in Gods of the Hammer: The Teenage Head

ition and dream refuse to be bound by

Sean Michaels (Random House Canada),

Story (Coach House Books). The circus is

the imposed authority of the sentence”;

the inventor of the theremin falls in with

an Edwardian photograph of cross-dress-

the Telegraph Journal says her poems “give

Russian spooks. Adam Nayman may be

ing midgets with shotguns, whose limbs

instinctual instruction on how to experi-

the only person in the world to argue that

are being devoured by tigers that are actu-

ence life and love.” Quill and Quire calls

Showgirls is a masterpiece in It Doesn’t Suck:

ally people in Claire Battershill’s Circus

Grayling by Gillian Wigmore (Mother

Showgirls (ECW Press). A young boy tries

(McClelland and Stewart). Sarah Yi-Mei

Tongue Publishing) “awkward at times,

not to do “it” so God won’t steal his hair

Tsiang is making mountains out of Face-

and meandering at others”; Pickle Me This

in God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya, art-

book statuses in Status Update (Oolichan

says “Wigmore’s writing is incredibly sen-

work by Juliana Neufeld (Arsenal Pulp

Books). Sex workers and the RCMP are

sual, her prose vivid with bodies and their

Press). In André Alexis’s Pastoral (Coach

coming for tea in 7 Ways to Sunday by Lee

feelings”; Caroline Woodward praises it for

House Books), Father Christopher Pen-

Kvern (Enfield & Wizenty). Women need

its “pitch-perfect language and brilliantly

nant has his faith shaken by the small town

men like fish need bicycles in P.J. Wor-

paced unspooling of the plot.”Broken Pencil

of Barrow, where mayors walk on water,

rell’s Proudflesh (Thistledown Press). It is

says that Designated Mourner by Catherine

gypsy moths think and sheep talk. Accord-

the end of the world and Mum is going

Owen (ECW Press) “manages to deftly

ing to Joanna Lilley in The Fleece Era

to do whatever she wants in For Tamara

sidestep the temptations to idealize or to

(Brick Books), however hard we try not

by Sarah Lang (House of Anansi). When

wallow”; Publisher’s Weekly claims that it

to hurt anyone or anything, we’re going

Philippe’s hairdresser is found hanged, the

“fails to capture the immediacy that a grief

to fail. James Franco is full of advice on

possibility of murder comes as a relief in

narrative requires, leaving only a vague

how to avoid Lindsay Lohan in Directing

Guyana by Élise Turcotte, translated by

emotional landscape in its wake.”

Herbert White (House of Anansi). Law-

Rhonda Mullins (Coach House Books).

CONGRATULATIONS

rence Feuchtwanger no longer knows

Panic is not encouraged, but people do it

To Sue Goyette, whose poetry collec-

what he means when he says “my coun-

anyway in Sweet Affliction by Anna Leven-

tion Ocean made the Canadian shortlist

try” in Refugee Song (Signature Editions).

thal (Invisible Publishing). Maggie Pren-

for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize; to Gil-

Diane Tucker would like to spend a day

tice is haunted by a creature composed

lian Wigmore, who was shortlisted for

as your rib in Bonsai Love (Harbour Pub-

of her fears and misheard Bob Dylan lyr-

the Great BC Novel Contest for her first

lishing). E.D. Blodgett asks “What is the

ics in The Walking Tanteek by Jane Woods

novella, Grayling; to Michael Prior, who

what of what it is?” in As If (University of

(Goose Lane Editions).

was a finalist for the 2014 Prism Interna-

Alberta Press). Birds of prey meet birds of

NOTED ELSEWHERE

tional Poetry Prize and the 2014 Malahat

prayer in As if a Raven by Yvonne Blomer

The National Post calls I Was There the

Review Open Season Award; to Russell

(Palimpsest Press). C.R. Avery wants only

Night He Died by Ray Robertson (Bib-

Thornton and Renée Sarojini Saklikar

covers of Kenny Rogers’s Greatest Hits at

lioasis) “an absorbing and hilarious read,

for being shortlisted for the 2014 Doro-

his funeral, in Some Birds Walk for the Hell

despite the most tragic of narratives”; the

thy Livesay Poetry Prize; to Jane Silcott,

of It (Anvil Press). In A Second Chance by

Winnipeg Review writes: “Robertson art-

whose essay collection Everything Rus-

Felicia Mihali (Linda Leith Publishing),

fully skirts the pitfalls of cliché even while

tles was shortlisted for the 2014 Hubert

a woman uses her husband’s stroke as an

his narrative waltzes through some rec-

Evans Non-Fiction Prize; and to Douglas

excuse to dig into the buried secrets of her

ognizable steps”; Quill and Quire says that

Glover, Lynn Coady and Lisa Moore,

marriage. Kim Piper Werker urges you

“If there’s one thing Robertson gets just

who were all nominated for 2014 CBC

to pick up your pen, paintbrush or scissors

right, it’s heartbreak.” The Vancouver Sun

Bookie Awards.

70 Geist 93 Summer 2014

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword

1

2

3 10

Prepared by Meandricus Send a copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #93 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist keychain. Good luck!

ACROSS 1 That guy who’s always in the kitchen, isn’t he a descendent of Epicurus?

4 Our agents were not intolerant cows— they just wanted to increase production 10 Who were those batty musicians who played with saucers? (abbrev) 12 She signed up to plan the scenery (abbrev) 13 BTW, those excellent desires are mine (abbrev) 14 The coffee was so full-bodied that we threw our bras out 16 The minister had to mop lice while arguing theology 18 To get away quickly, drop and separate 19 Suppose I give my opinion and then we’ll see what she can tell 20 I’ve a curdy cheese that will suit your body type 22 Pipe down and stop with the bad jokes or I’ll blow away your straw house 23 It’s going to be a mean Feb because of that traditional complaint about his cows’ diet (2) 26 Harold ended the conversation with Dave because it served no purpose 27 Her old letter from Germany is magical 28 While eating sandwiches, those active US boarders love to make things crummy by striking a bad note (2) 31 Those electrical waves are sure taking a beating (abbrev) 32 It sounds alarming but she manages to make a living 33 Our pet canaries prefer fish with their vegetables 39 Barb liked to follow the Argos while her husband was in Iran 40 In the US, John always went for a big auditory communication company (abbrev) 41 Loretta’s sister used to have light brown eyes but when she cried during the exhibition they turned blue (abbrev) 43 Dennis writes poems in a sheltered place 45 Winnie’s little friend’s mum is always accompanied by vegetables 46 Sounds like I need to take a breath before I proceed

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Those berries taste a bit rummy My other name is Che (abbrev) She often has loam tea in the morning Be certain to drink those liquid breakfasts

DOWN 1 Jonathan’s parrot got into a real tizzy at breakfast 2 Why do those bikers like eggs so much?

3 Baby, that sounds good 4 Robert’s crab owl was not sweet on the white stuff (2) 5 There are plenty of horns in those bodies 6 That capsule just goes round and round 7 After eating only quinoa, Celia escaped with the dough (2) 8 A seed often lessened one’s bellyache 9 During recess, scan for what’s barely there 11 We watched Ephrem look in the many drawers of the nation (abbrev) 15 In Siam they used to exercise before circulating energy 17 Oscar used to make a lot at the start of the show 21 Bobbin often drinks, then dances around 23 Jackson did not feel good 24 Even at Green Gables it was a shitty job 25 During dessert, the whites definitely exhibited a gene lack but once they mixed in a bit things lightened up (2) 26 That tribe sang well and was not tonsured 29 Things seem to be a bit dry ‘tween us 30 Start eating when you get to London and then learn the lingo

3 He may be fit but he eats like a caveman 3 34 Bring along a drink to Sarah’s party 35 Let’s cancel the contract and go our separate ways 36 It was easy to picture what would happen when it was made public 37 She was simply eatin’ protein when she was onstage 38 When raised in India, they are often flat broke 41 Would you believe it? She’s got a long nose and she’s wearing hot pants!

42 How did your jeans get mixed up with Dan’s (abbrev) 44 What a time it almost was—when the correct change was almost made in the US The winner for Puzzle 92 was Alice Gradauer.

Congrats!

B L O W I N G S N O W

L A R C T C I C L O E C I E A I N C C I V F L A L Y C

C K O Z P O A N C L E P B A L T A C E S

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

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

B E R E T E X H A O R M N N E R G C S U V E R O W Y E E S S L U K E N

Puzzle 71

C A U G H T

M A P P I N G

“Made” in Canada The National Map of the Mob

by Melissa Edwards

Wise Point Investigator Island

Enterprise Little Chicago

modified Geistonic projection Harden Lake

Prohibition Creek

Crew Lake

Traffic Mountain

Ness Creek

Dogpack Lake

Siegel Lake

Copper Gulch

Lac Rivals

Plug Creek

Lac Loan

Moonshine Lake

Lac de l’Entrepreneur

Big House Pond Godfather Cove

Little Rat Lake

Bugs Pond

Triad Creek

Skimmer Cove

Gambling Lake

Yardie Island

Bribery Islet

Power

Heater Harbour

Shank Lake

Rumble Beach

Moneyhunters Cove

Snakehead Lake

Mount Goodfellow Mad Moll Reef

Defrauder Creek

Hell Rackets

Protection Island

Gang Runs

Launders Creek Predator Ridge

Lac Fixem

Family Lake

Witness Creek

Payment Lac Mob

Syndicate Creek

Territory Peak Control

Hood Shooter Hill

Lac Thug

Graft Lake

Rowdy Lake

Tough Creek

Smugglers Cove

Lac Clubhouse Chippy Lake

Vice Lake

Hooch Lake Mug Lake

Broads Bay

Bootleggers Bay

Kneecap Lake

Turf Lake

Capper Lake

Machine Gun Lake

Gin Rocks

Booze Island

Streetsville

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

72 Geist 93 Summer 2014

“From the font to the cover design to the paper grade, it is a stunning object … it’s just like Anvil Press—the press that comes closest to being Canada’s answer to Brooklyn’s Soft Skull fiction line —to care about the book as art object time and again.”—GLOBE & MAIL “one of the country’s most enduring venues for audacious writing.”

—BC BOOKWORLD

CanLit with a distinctly urban twist!

I’M NOT SCARED OF YOU OR ANYTHING

HYSTERIC

THE DELUSIONIST

MIRROR ON THE FLOOR

a novel by Nelly Arcan

Stories by Jon Paul Fiorentino Illustrations by Maryanna Hardy This collection of comedic short stories and exploratory texts features invigilators, fake martial arts experts, buskers, competitive pillow fighters, drug runners, and, of course, grad students.

Translated by David & Jacob Homel

a novel by Grant Buday Vancouver, summer 1962.

Cyril Andrachuk and Connie Chow are both seventeen and they’re both falling in love. The Delusionist is a funny, sad, and heart-warming novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history.

a novel by George Bowering Originally published in 1967

by McClelland and Stewart, and out of print for many years, Mirror on the Floor was the debut novel from an emerging young writer named George Bowering. Now with over 100 publications to his credit, we are proud to be reissuing Bowering’s fi rst novel.

“I’m sure something scares Jon Paul Fiorentino, and maybe it drives him toward the deadpan magic he wields so masterfully in these pages. This is a daring and funny collection.”

In this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair.

Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Hysteric chronicles life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs, and Internet porn.

“This book is one of my favourite reads in ages.”

“A tremendously strong current runs through this story. A music of breath, and the desire to reach down to the bone and discover the truth about relationships between men and women.”

—CHIP ZDARSKY

—JOCELYNE LEPAGE, La Presse

$20 • 176 pages • Colour Illus.

978-1-927380-94-9

$20 • 168 pages 978-1-927380-96-3

—SAM LIPSYTE

“Buday’s writing is lean, crisp, thoroughly engaging, and incisive…an exceptional talent.”

—GOODREADS

“Vancouver, the smell and feel of its fog, the beaches, the bridges, Stanley Park, the sleazy bars of the dock area are all absolutely there in a way that has been curiously diffi cult for other novelists to capture.”

—PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH, Saturday Night

$20 • 256 pages 978-1-927380-93-2

$18 • 160 pages 978-1-927380-95-6

—QUILL & QUIRE

“…a great storyteller.”

—DANFORTH REVIEW

Dragonflies is “Deeply imagined and exquisitely written.”

anvilpress.com

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