Geist 94

GEIST 94

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Always a bridesmaid, never a moose • Ectoplasmic (some questions may never be answered)

“Elegiac and brave, Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song is mind-changing.”

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There’s something helpless in being a witness.

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Mink is a witness, a shape-shifter, who is compelled to follow the story that has ensared Celia and her village in Nuu’chalnulth territory on the coast of British Columbia. A double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries, and into the two-fold tragedies of her son’s suicide and the physical assault sustained by her cousin’s granddaughter. Celia must now regain confidence in her abilites as a seer, and unite the women and men of her family, in order to save the life of the child.

Celia’s Song, from the award-winning author of Ravensong, is a novel that matters. It speaks to the unspeakable, as well as of stories that must be told: of the resilience and strength of First Nations people to come together and regain their knowledge and traditions, and to heal themselves.

Celia’s song • A novel by Lee Maracle • Now available in bookstores ISBN 978-1-77086-416-0 • $24.00 • 280 pages

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THE 11 TH ANNUAL GEIST LITERAL LITERARY

POSTCARD STORY CONTEST Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.

D EA D L I N E February 1st, 2015 D ETA I L S at geist.com

CAS H ES PRIZ

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

—a happy Geist Postcard Story Contest entrant

GEIST Fa c t + Fi c t i o n

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North of America

GEIST

Volume 27

· Number 94 · Fall 2014

F EAT U R ES

THE WISE BABY Deirdre Dore It’s a baby, not Heidegger, who holds the answers to life’s questions 37

DER INDIANER Jen Osborne Capturing the European Indianthusiast craze 44

RINKSIDE INTELLECTUALS Stephen Smith The hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway 53

Pg. 56. Clip your toenails and other advice from the pros

Pg. 44. Deep in the Bavarian forest

published by The Geist Foundation. publisher : Stephen Osborne. senior editor : Mary Schendlinger. editorial group : Michał Kozłowski, assistant publisher; AnnMarie

MacKinnon, operations manager. reader services : Jocelyn Kuang. proofreader : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. interns : Leslie Chu, Dylan Gyles, Brittany Huddart, Jennesia Pedri, Roni Simunovic, Andrew Vaughan. accountant : Mindy Abramowitz cga. advertising & marketing : Clevers Media. web architects : Metro ­P ublisher. distribution : Magazines Canada. printed in canada by Transcontinental. managing editor emeritus : Barbara Zatyko.

GEIST

fact + fiction since 1990 “strenuous discourse”

NOTE S & DI S PATC H E S

F IN D IN GS

CO LU MN S

Stephen Osborne Dream Counsels 8

22

AFTERLIFE OF CULTURE

Dream Therapy

Iberian Duet Stephen Henighan 20

Paul DeLorme Escapist 10

The Hammer in Winter

Jerome Stueart Road Trip 14

Water Market

CITY OF WORDS

Pleasure Faire

Absent Mother

NATIONAL DREAMS

When Treatment Becomes Torture Daniel Francis 62

Dylan Gyles Floating 15 Eve Corbel Yes, No, Goodbye 17

Not Finishing Alberto Manguel 61

D EPA RT MEN TS

Mr. Peanut Goes to Washington IN CAMERA

Jan Feduck Hurricane Diary 18

Thinking About Moose

4 LETTERS

Elevator Going Down?

5 ENDNOTES

Sadiqa de Meijer Because There Was and There Wasn’t a City 19

The Tea Not Made

64 OFF THE SHELF,

The Best Gay

NOTED ELSEWHERE

and more…

PUZZLE

70 71 CAUGHT MAPPING

72 cover image: This image of the former NHL player Pavel Bure by Jeremy Bruneel

first appeared in black and white in Geist 51 with “Upshot,” a hockey story by Stephen Smith, who has written more hockey stories for Geist than any other writer.

It appeared again two years later in Geist 60, again in black and white, with the 2005 Haiku Night in Canada Contest winning entries.

Jeremy Bruneel’s work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Georgia Straight, Macleans’s, Rolling Stone and many other publications. He lives in London, Ontario.

See his work at geist.com and at jeremybruneel.wix.com/illustrator. cover design: Eric Uhlich first subscriber: Jane Springer. contributing editors : Jordan Abel, Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Philip Basaric, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Jesmine Cham, C.E.

Coughlan, 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

Ectoplasmic

D

r. T. Glen Hamilton was a medical doctor and member of the Manitoba legislature who became a devout spiritualist and paranormal researcher following an experience with a Ouija board after the death of his young son in 1919. He hosted seances in a room dedicated to the purpose on the second floor of his home on Henderson Highway in Winnipeg. The room was lit by a red ceiling light, and equipped with a cabinet, table and chairs, and a bank of twelve cameras arranged to capture spiritual phenomena as they occurred. One camera had a wideangle lens, another a quartz lens said to be sensitive to ultraviolet light; two were set up to produce stereoscopic images. The cameras stood with shutters open until Hamilton was instructed by a spirit (via the presiding medium) to set off a flash of

4 Geist 94 Fall 2014

magnesium powder that would provide enough light for the cameras to record the state of the seance in an instant.

Present in many of Hamilton’s photos of entranced mediums are images of ectoplasm, a substance maintained by spiritualists to be the physical manifestation of spiritual energy; it was believed to deteriorate in the presence of light. Instances of ectoplasmic manifestations were common in early twentieth-century seance photography. The ectoplasm in some of these photos was later declared by skeptics to consist of muslin, string,

tissue paper, photos clipped from magazines and concoctions of soap mixed with gelatin or egg whites.

Dr. Hamilton became well known as an expert in paranormal research: he travelled throughout Canada lecturing on the subject and displaying his photographs as evidence of the spiritual world. He conducted seances with such notable spiritualists as Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who, in addition to writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, was a spirit photographer).

—AnnMarie MacKinnon

photos: cameras used to photograph hamilton’s seances; ectoplasmic manifestations.

R E A D E R S

GEIST

W R I T E

LETTERS

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

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Belgrade, summer 2014. Photo by Philip Basaric

THE KILODNEY CONNECTION

T

he attention paid to Crad Kilodney in Geist 93 (“The Last Interview of Crad Kilodney”; “The Celebrated Crad” by Thad McIlroy) touched my heart. I think it was during the late 1970s that I used to see Kilodney standing in a doorway across from the Royal Ontario Museum, near the Bob Miller Book Room, hawking his selfpublished books. He didn’t push himself on people; he just stood still like a living easel upon which he suspended a book. And his eyes would follow you and you knew he was a little nuts. It is worth noting that he is at home in the same issue as an article about Kurt Vonnegut. The word on the street in late ’70s, early ’80s Toronto was that Kilodney was trying to be the incarnation of Vonnegut’s creation Kilgore Trout. And a slippery fish he was.

—Frank Beltrano, London, ON Read “Crad Kilodney: In Memoriam” and other pieces by and about Kilodney at geist.com.

BUG LIT

I

had brunch at a friend’s on the weekend. We had a great spread—homemade zucchini quiche, cherries, coffee spiked with amaretto (honestly, any

meal that has something spiked with amaretto is great). While we enjoyed our brunch, a wasp kept coming back and getting too close. It got to the point where the wasp was really getting up in our grill. My friend looked for something to end this annoyance.

She went for a magazine but realized that not just any magazine would do the trick—we needed something sturdy, robust, perfect-bound. Geist was the one. She grabbed Geist, folded it in half and smacked that wasp. All our problems were solved and we enjoyed the rest of our meal without any disturbance, thanks to Geist.

—Jocelyn McDonald, New Glasgow, NS No animals are harmed during the making of Geist. Apparently, though, there’s no accounting for what happens after the magazine leaves the printer.

Geist swaps its subscriber list with other cultural magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings.

Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC Canada v6b 1h4 Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazine 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.

OOPS!

I

n “Closer to Memory than Imagination” by Patty Osborne (Endnotes, No. 93), we misidentified the musicians with whom Guadalupe Muro recorded the “Intermezzo” section of the novel. The artists were the Argentine musicians Ana Lopez and Julian Muro, not Ian Ferrier and Damien Nisenson, as stated in the endnote.

Letters 5

www.geist.com

HOLLYWOOD GEIST

H

as Geist ever paid for product placement? Because I swear I saw the magazine in a movie—Words and Pictures—recently. In a scene in which Clive Owen gets drunk and crashes into his coffee table, something that could have been an issue of Geist slides out from under a pile of newspapers. I couldn’t confirm that it was Geist, but it looked a lot like the Listel Hotel ad on the back covers of

your older issues. As much as I want to see Geist on the big screen, is it a good idea to suggest that your readers include stereotyped “poets” like the Clive Owen character? If you paid for that spot, they could have at least shown the front cover. More importantly, if it was Geist, is this the first time a Canadian cultural magazine has appeared in a Hollywood film?

—Tamara Tanasiychuk, Winnipeg That is a copy of Geist (good eye!) and we didn’t pay for product placement. As far as we know, it is the first time a Canadian cultural magazine, or at least its back cover, has been in a Hollywood film.

OUR MAN IN SLOVENIA

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hilling with Geist 93 in Celje, Slovenia. After fourteen years, I still find it very cool that “my” town has a castle looming over it.

—Jason Blake, Celje

CONGRATULATIONS

Terri Upton of Frog Eyes enjoying Geist 93 before a gig in Toronto.

6 Geist 94 Fall 2014

Congratulations to Brian Kaufman for receiving the 2014 Western Magazine Award Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Brian is the founder of Anvil Press and subTerrain, as well as a founding board member of the Magazine Association of BC, a director of the Literary Press Group and a longtime friend of Geist.

RANDY REPORTS Dear Geist, n September I won the gold medal at the National Visually Impaired Lawn Bowling Competition, in Brantford, Ontario, in the B-1 category—that’s for those with no vision. What a crazy tournament! There were four of us in B-1. I played each of my opponents and beat them all with no mercy.

You win by getting 21 points or having more points than your opponent when the three-hour time limit is up or you’ve played enough ends.

My first two opponents scored only 1 point each to my 21. The third scored 9 points—we had to play again, assuming it was a playoff game for the gold medal. I started the game slowly.

He went up 14–2. Then I woke up and started gaining on him. It came to be 18–17 for him at the second last end. We throw four bowls during each end; we aim for a small white ball called the jack—you get points when your ball is closer to the jack than your opponent’s ball. On my last ball I was counting 3 points. One more point and I would have 21. I threw the ball and it hit the jack toward my opponent’s balls, scoring 2 points for him. On the last end I scored only 1 point. I am positive if we had one more end I would have scored 3 points to score 21. Instead, we ran out of ends and he won 20–18. My director, Don Sherry, and I congratulated him and his director for winning the gold medal—or so we thought.

The following day my director and I were informed that we had won the gold medal. It turned out that the last game had been an extra round robin game and scores were based on total tournament points. We were shocked.

Of course, we felt bad for our competition because they had been led to believe that they had won the gold medal. One player in another category left the tournament in great anger as his rating dropped from gold to bronze because of this method of scoring.

I

Letters 7

This was to be the last National Championship I would play in, but I heard that next year Calgary might host the tournament. If so I will go, because tournaments in Calgary are always fun and well organized. I don’t think I will play in Ontario again— every year we are put up in a bad dormitory or hotel with no decent place to eat within walking distance, and it was very hot and humid in Brantford. But we did have a very good bus driver who gave us some interesting history of the place. It is the home of the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky and the great Mohawk chief John Brant. The ford in Brantford is the spot where John Brant, along with five tribes, crossed the river after being run out of the USA for fighting with the English during the American Civil War. The gold medal this year makes me eligible to play in the world competition in New Zealand in February.

It will take a lot of fundraising to get me and my director there and back.

We have a story on www.fundrazr. com for individuals, companies and organizations to help us out. We need to raise $10,000.

—Randy Fred, B-1 Champ Randy Fred is a longtime contributor to Geist. Read a profile of Randy Fred, by Michał Kozłowski, at geist.com.

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.

NOTES & DISPATCHES F R O M

T H E

N E W

W O R L D

Dream Counsels ST E P HE N OSBO RNE

Hemingway, Harper, profiteroles and other dreams

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n August of 2014 the Prime Minister spoke out for the third time in four months on the subject of Dreaming in Canada, a motif often deployed by politicians when they have nothing to say, and indeed there was little of substance in what Mr. Harper had to say in his dream counsels, which might be interpreted as a set of covering remarks intended to discourage any kind of dream discourse in the country. In August, for example, 8 Geist 94 Fall 2014

while the Prime Minister was in Whitehorse renewing his claim to Nordicity, he reached out in a speech to dreamers among the so-called liberal elite, whom he advised to “Close your eyes, dream, but don’t ruin it by asking any hard questions.”

But hard questions are precisely what dreams bring with them, as anyone who remembers their dreams can attest, and as it takes time for answers to form, so it can take even longer in

dream logic for the hard questions to emerge. Among my own dreams I recall early one morning about a year ago hearing a voice speak out suddenly as if in a dream—and in fact I soon realized it was a dream, but there was nothing to see; the dream consisted entirely of a voice speaking in darkness—a familiar voice: authoritative, androgynous, authentic, not at all like the voice of the Prime Minister. This was a voice that would never fail to seize my attention: “Hemingway says there are six kinds of inhibitor sentences and six exhibitor sentences.”

Silence followed. For how long, I don’t know: I was still asleep.

Then the voice spoke again, in a milder tone, as if offering a hint: “Exhibitors are a kind of profiterole as well.”

I had never heard profiterole spoken aloud before, but I could see it spelled out in the air in front of me, in italics.

More silence and then the voice began to intone: “Inhibitors, exhibitors, profiteroles,” “Inhibitors, exhibitors, profiteroles,” “Inhibitors, exhibitors, profiteroles,” “Inhibitors, exhibitors, profiteroles…”

This incantation continued until I woke up repeating it myself, inhibitors, exhibitors, profiteroles, a chant or prayer that quickly lodged itself in that section of my memory that harbours the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer. I had no idea what a profiterole was, and let several weeks pass before learning through Google that a profiterole is collage: roni simunovic.

a cream puff, an unlikely element in a dream of Hemingway, but perhaps not if we consider Hemingway in his infamous exhibitionist, or exhibitor, mode—in his autobiographical writings, for instance, or his performance as a public figure, where the cream puff might have supplied just the needed corrective for bombast (no cream puff needed, on the other hand, in the great inhibitor sentences in Hemingway’s best fiction).

In the wake of profiterole resolution, of course, more hard questions begin to emerge: what might the two sets of six sentences, inhibitors and exhibitors, signify, I wondered: could they be the first two hexagrams of the I Ching—Yang and Yin, Heaven and Earth, embracing the entire cosmos: from them all the sentences of life might be derived? And just to offset the medium-high seriousness of the exhibitors, they can be switched over into cream puffs as required. A hard question that may never be answered.

Hard questions are what dreams deliver. The same voice, in a dream set in a room crowded with busy journalists, once said to me: “It will be necessary to obtain the advice of Professor Vitruvius.” A few days later I learned (via Google) that Vitruvius had been a Roman architect whose writings inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s well-known drawing of Vitruvian Man—a metaphorical squaring of the circle (geometrically impossible) by referring not to the laws of geometry but to the proportions of the human form.

In Winnipeg in May the Prime Minister encouraged the children of Manitoba to dream of travelling through space and piloting jets: “I

say you should dream big,” he said.

“Dream big and pursue your dreams,” while omitting to point out that dreams tend to pursue the dreamer and not the other way around. Flying dreams and “inflation episodes” are frequent in the literature of dreams: egos and intuitions flying, floating, climbing, and of course falling, falling and falling, bringing one’s feet back to earth, as a recent episode in my own dream life illustrates: I was following two bellhops burdened with my excess luggage through the hallways of a vast hotel. The bellhops were young and strong, and they pressed on at speed; I struggled to keep up with them; at one point I looked down and saw that I had lost a shoe. Then the shoe reappeared and the other shoe disappeared; eventually both shoes had disappeared and the bellhops were setting out over a rough construction site to a distant wing of the hotel. I didn’t want to cross over broken ground in bare feet so I turned into an office and asked to borrow some shoes. There were shoes everywhere in the office, but no one would give me any until finally a surly clerk handed me a pair of inflated shoes the size of bed pillows.

I managed to get my feet into them and then set out waddling toward the now-distant bellhops. Later that day, after waking up, I realized that even shoes, which keep me attached to the earth, can be inflated.

T

he heaviest burden of the dreaming life lies in the bottomless Shadow, as Hollywood well knows, and against it our hopes and conventions must be weighed. Such was the burden of

another dream of mine in which I was putting on a clean white shirt in front of a mirror when I realized that the shirt was inside out, and then, as I began to take the shirt off, that it was smeared with—as they say—excrement. It was disgusting but somehow necessary; at least it was odourless.

I considered turning the shirt right side out so that no one would see the shitty side, but that would put it next to my skin. I continued looking into the mirror as I pondered this dilemma.

The shitty side of the shirt is the great baggage of dreams: in his speech in Ottawa on Canada Day, the Prime Minister claimed that the so-called Fathers of Confederation had been dreaming of a “united country, prosperous, strong and free” (rather than dreaming of vast realms of real estate freed from its Native occupants).

Today the dream has mutated, he claims, and in its place, “this is their dream: Canada a confident partner, a courageous warrior, a compassionate neighbour.” But on the shitty side of the shirt, so to speak, in the shadow of the confident partner, lie the multinationals bent on pillage; behind the courageous warrior lie butchery, rape, suicide and madness; and within the compassionate neighbour lurks the snivelling minion to the powerful.

Dreams have at least one purpose: to wake us up.

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 “A Bridge in Pangnirtung” (Geist 93)— many of which can be read at geist.com.

Read more Stephen 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 9

W A L K I N G

W E S T

Escapist PAUL DE LO RM E

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next

T

he train was marked with a red cross painted on the roof. We arrived at night at another hospital called Gloster Haina, where I met two more Canadians from another company, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Woodcock, from Woodstock, Ontario, but no one from the SSR. Both were officers. I was there for eleven months.

I had surgery and electric treatment on my wounded arm. My doctor was called Dr. Barling, from Australia. During that time through the Red Cross, I learned that my wife Jessie had been delivered of a son, Paul Victor, on January 21st, 1943. I was then moved to Stalag IX C. I was shackled along with twenty-eight other Canadians. For a couple of months, I was not happy. There were police dogs on the loose each night in the compound area. This was a big camp. Each time when you wanted to go to the toilet, the dogs would chase you up to the door. Some time guys would not quite make it and would get their trousers ruined. I decided to volunteer for the work crew. My first job was with a small gang working in the salt mine.

There were about twenty men in the camp, two shifts per day, 8 to 4 pm and 4 to 12 pm. The gang included a couple of Canadian sergeants and corporals too. They were from Winnipeg.

The food was much better here than at IX C. I worked there for most of the summer. I escaped from this camp after a night shift work. I had met a Frenchman in the salt job who was much freer as he was living in the village. He provided me with a compass and small maps of the area. However, George (an Englishman, a Geordie) and I did not 10 Geist 94 Fall 2014

make it as per instructions. After the fourth day I lost my partner. He did not seem very interested in carrying on. It was chilly and wet. We were walking through heavy bush. We walked into a German man who called us to stop. I noticed he picked up a stick to swing at us. I was not prepared to stop for a swinging stick. I started to run and George was running behind me or so I thought. But after ten minutes or so I ran around a big tree and looked back.

I could not see George or the German, so I kept running. Then I stopped, lay down and waited. Soon it got dark. And I never looked back. I kept walking through the heavy bushes for miles. By 5 am I lay down near the open countryside, covered myself with leaves for the day. I had a couple of hard biscuits, a vitamin tablet, and a drink of water. I went to sleep. The next night I started to walk through a village main street. A few people were walking so I said “Heil Hitler.” They said “Heil Hitler” back.

Some German soldiers were also in the village standing with their girlfriends.

Soon I was out of the village walking in the dark for hours without meeting anyone. Just before daylight I found a bush-like area to hide for the rest of the day. A lot of people were around working the farms, mostly women.

Again by night I was off walking, hoping I would get to the French border.

I remember crossing a small river bridge. It was so dark. I just walked slowly and softly while listening for anyone on the bridge, such as a German on the watch. But I managed to cross it with no problem. Checking on my compass, I was still walking west on the German roads. I was now

six days on the loose. I slept in wheat and hay fields, eating vegetables along the route. I kept my hardtacks, vitamins and water as long as I could. I was able to get water from pipes in the farm fields. I knew I was getting near some big city for could hear big guns shooting in the dark at planes overhead. But there were no bombs to hear on this night. I kept walking westward staying mostly to the fields.

I had on prisoner overalls, which got to be rough and ragged looking. It was a good job I had extra underclothes, which I had put on when I went to work the previous week. I also had extra winter socks, which I changed each day because my feet would get wet walking across fields. To this day I don’t know how far I walked westward. I would stop in the morning for a sleep on open country farm fields.

One day when l got up a man on horseback approached me and took me prisoner again. l was marched to a house where they spoke French. Then another man on horseback appeared.

They talked to me in German. I was left there in the house with this one man to look after me until German soldiers could come and pick me up and take me to their camp. This man had a small handgun on my back. He was trembling. I was just as shaky as he was, as he could have shot me as I was standing there with my face and hands up the wall. He asked if I was a soldier.

I said, “Yes, a Canadian.” As soon as I said that he relaxed and started to talk to me in French. Now we were both happy. He put his revolver down and made me a lunch, while keeping watch for the Germans to come and pick me up. Four German soldiers in a truck came along about half an hour later.

They made me sit in the centre of the truck. A soldier sat in each corner of the truck box. We drove for hours to Hanover. I was kept there in a camp for three weeks with prisoners from the Ukraine and the USSR. Finally one guard came from Camp IX C and took me back there.

The German commandant sent me out to work for ten hours a day in another salt mine. Instead of being down in the mine, I worked on top in a big shed shovelling salt downwards from the deposit pipe, ensuring that it did not get plugged up. This was okay for me as I was out in the fresh air. After four weeks I was put to fire a steam engine in the yard that was hauling in the salt to main line railway. This was okay too because l gained a lot of experience with steam engines. Again, l ran away but this time I didn’t get too far.

I was picked up after a couple of days and nights out because this area did not have enough bushes to hide in and l was seen walking just before daylight into a little bush. This time l was taken to the local German commandant. He was an old soldier and he could speak English. He said they were waiting for me to appear. He said that escaping was no longer a sport and pulled out a bullet. He told me that next time whoever escaped better get home or they would get the bullet. He ordered me on top of a box about eighteen inches high and had one of the soldiers cut off my curly black hair, in front of all the POWs. After that I was taken to a different camp. It was a stone quarry. There I worked ten hours a day and must have loaded ten tons of rocks each day. I was there about three months. While I was there two Canadians were shot near the camp. Both came from Winnipeg. The Germans knew these two were planning to escape, because they checked us out before going to work and found that these two men each had extra packs of food on them.

The Germans simply put extra soldiers in the bushes that surrounded the stone quarry. While coming back to camp after work the two took off for the bushes. It was only a few minutes before shots rang out. The two had been killed in cold blood. One of the men had been shot through the palm of his hand and through the neck, which proves that he had given up and still they shot him. We Notes & Dispatches 11

buried these two men next day rolled in black tar paper at the bottom of the stone quarry. I had a picture given to me by the German to show that they had paid their respects by standing before the burial, shooting up in the air as a salute.

From this camp I was moved to another salt mine where I worked until the end of the war. We were all Canadians in this camp except for one Pole in a German uniform, plus three German guards and a German corporal. We had a Canadian interpreter in charge of our Red Cross food boxes. We knew something was happening when the Germans did not want us to go to work anymore. Next thing we knew all the Germans had left the camp with all their belongings and the gate was open. OnIy the Pole and his gun remained. We could hear gunshots in the distance, so the Pole ordered us to go into the underground shelter. There were about fifteen or twenty of us. We used to do our own guard while the Pole got his sleep. We had only been in the shelter for two nights when a group of German officers came along and told the Pole that we should move out quickly.

We had used most of the perishable food and flour while in the shelter but we packed all the canned foods in our packsacks and started walking westward. During our eight days, we ran out of food. We walked mostly during the night. The Pole was just as scared as we were in case the Russians caught up with him in a German uniform.

There was an air battle going on and we were shot at while going along the roads. We would all scatter off the roadside into the bushes until the planes had passed over then we would continue walking. We could see bullet holes in the dirt road. We came upon an abandoned German truck. It was full of bullet holes and half burned. I looked inside and found some brown bread. The men soon cleaned it out.

We kept walking, until we came near to a small village. We all hid in the 12 Geist 94 Fall 2014

hills near this village. There were many planes lying about. Some of the men were using mirrors to flash at the planes, which they said were English planes. Anyway, we stayed on this hill for a couple of days. It was cold and about three inches of snow fell. I went running and jumping down the hill to get water. Suddenly I came upon two German soldiers sleeping just below a cliff. I sure got frightened plus I frightened the two soldiers also. They put their hands up and I grabbed the German soldier’s rifle. It was empty so I threw it aside. They were obviously no threat to us and they were starving. So I coaxed them to come with me up the hill for we still had bread and tea. We made tea and coffee over a fire in the bush. The two Germans were happy to meet the Pole and they had long talks together. They also stayed with us overnight. One of the German soldiers looked very sick and got really sick by the next day. The Germans went to a farmhouse to get help, but it was too late and the soldier died. His partner stayed at the farm. We knew now that the Germans were on the run.

By that afternoon, a white flag was flying in the village. We entered the village and slept in the schoolhouse.

While we were looking for food in a store, a German soldier suddenly jumped out of a barrel and ran out the door. He was just a kid. The villagers told our guard, the Germans had ended the war and the Americans had arrived in the village. We were all taken prisoner by the Americans, until we had properly identified ourselves.

Our poor Pole was taken away to a US POW camp and we did not see him again. We stayed in the village for a day and a half before a US truck took us to a camp where we all stayed overnight.

We were free to do what we wanted, and we got new clothing, American uniforms. The next day the Americans drove thirty of us to an army airport, where we met up with another group of fifteen Canadian and English

soldiers who had been walking too. We boarded a big American bomber and flew from Germany to Belgium. The plane landed on its belly as we touched down, but the pilot was able to control it and take off again, making a circle around before finally landing properly with the wheels down. In Belgium we met some English soldiers who wanted us to go to their camp. I remember a few Canadians went along but I refused and instead went into a hotel in Brussels. There I was welcomed and stayed free. The manager said free food, drinks and hotel for any Canadian that wished to stay. The English sergeant wanted me to go with them and told me that I would get courtmartialled if I disobeyed his orders. I told him that I was sorry, but the war was over and I was staying in the hotel.

So he walked off and I never saw him again nor did I hear anything about his threat. The next day I left the hotel well rested, after a good sleep in white sheets, a bath, and a good meal… the works! I walked to where I saw a Canadian flag flying. It was the Canadian paymaster’s quarters. A young man said, “What can I do for you?” I told him I needed to be paid for two and a half years. I should have some money in my account. “You must be in the wrong place, sir,” he said, because I was wearing an American uniform. I looked at him and said, “Milt Berdahl, Paul DeLorme.” We both had a good laugh. Milt and I had first met at assault training in England. Milt never forgot that day. Fifty years later, he would still mention to the guys about me asking for one hundred dollars. (Poor Milt, he was about four years younger than me and he died in 1995.) He did not go to Dieppe because he was too young.

He got on a ship and it was too late to send him home so they kept him as a clerk until he came of age. Anyway, Milt paid me one hundred dollars in pounds sterling. I had a haircut and a manicure and went back to the hotel to pick up my packsack. Our group of thirty who had been in the POW camp

finally was back together again. We Jessie, my wife, was teaching school at were taken to the same old bomber.

Cleveland Road, Ilford, and my son, Its pilot was a Canadian officer. After young Paulie, was at his grandparwe were all loaded, the ground serents’, Mr. and Mrs. Mack at the Villa, geant told the pilot that the plane was Haynford, Norwich, Norfolk, Engnot safe to fly because it had a flat rear land. I took a train from Liverpool tire. But the pilot said he had been flyStreet to Norwich. There we all met ing it like that for a few days already. for the first time since August 15th, The sergeant said he had warned him 1942. After a few days at Jessie’s parabout it. The pilot ents’ place we went said, “Okay, we will by train to Glasgow, be off. You can fix Scotland, to visit it after our return.” a couple whom I The pilot ordered had met when we us all to sit near the first arrived in Engfront to make things land in 1941. I met lighter for the back them when a friend, end. We had to sit Frank Emyotte from on our canvas backFort Qu’Appelle, packs on the floorSask­atch­ewan, and I boards, as this plane went to Glasgow to had no seats at all. visit his girlfriend.

Paul DeLorme (left) and another liberWe finally landed at These people used ated Candian POW heading home, 1945.

Aldershot, a Canato write to me while dian camp in England. The Canadian I was a POW in Germany. Jessie, Pauarmy officials had us all form up in lie and l stayed in Scotland for a week. three groups for fumigation and interThe old couple welcomed Paulie. I rogation. Some of the men were later wish l could remember their names. taken away by the military police for They moved to Chicago, Illinois, in collaborating with the Germans, so we 1947, and we never heard from them heard. The rest of us had to take our again. I made it back to camp on time. clothes off and to be fumigated, which The regiment was soon destined for took about an hour. We were loaded Canada by ship. We arrived in Regina onto trucks and driven away. After July 12, 1945, and I was transferred about a half hour, a motorcycle came from the South Saskatchewan Regialong from the airport and stopped our ment to my original regiment, the convoy. We were all taken back to the Regina Rifles. All the remaining memairport and interrogated. They wanted bers of the South Saskatchewan Regito know about the plane we came on. ment were then discharged from the It had taken off from Aldershot with a army. The SSR were the Second Divicrew of six officers destined for Brussion, the Regina Rifles were the Third sels. Fifteen minutes after take-off, the Division. I was given leave for thirty plane had crashed and exploded with days. So l went to Rocanville, and got a all personnel killed. After our reports job on a farm for thirty days. I earned to the officials, we proceeded to our $100 cash for doing tractor cultivating. camp. We had to get checked in again After returning to camp l did guard and to different quarters. Some Engduty until November 28, 1945. lish got taken to their own camps and other soldiers to different units.

Paul DeLorme has told his story to The We were issued with Canadian uniMemory Project (thememoryproject.com) forms. We were not allowed to wear and to CBC. He attends Dieppe rememAmerican uniforms. We all received brances in France. He lives in Essex, UK, thirty-day leaves and passes to travel. with his wife Joan.

Notes & Dispatches 13

S K E T C H B O O K

Road Trip J E RO M E ST U E A RT

Jerome Stueart embarked in the spring of 2014 on a Greyhound bus trip from Ohio to Ontario and back, to visit his birth mother, teach a workshop, visit a publisher and do a short story reading. He sketched the people and places he saw along the way. Jerome is a writer and artist. He lives in Whitehorse.

14 Geist 94 Fall 2014

S E N S O R Y

D E P R I V A T I O N

Floating DY L A N GY L E S

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said

A

t Float House on Cordova Street in Vancouver you float in a tank filled with two hundred gallons of warm water and nine hundred pounds of Epsom salt. A session costs $75 and lasts an hour and a half.

The Float House website suggests that on float day floaters should eat light, stay hydrated, avoid smoking and drinking coffee; men should avoid shaving within six hours before the float and women should avoid shaving within twelve hours before the float; and all floaters should use the bathroom before floating. The website also says to expend pent-up energy. So I rode my bike to the spa.

A guy in a stretchy purple shirt sat at the front desk, eating crackers and almond butter.

—You’re Dylan, right? First float, right? Would you mind taking off your shoes?

He slid an iPad and a pair of large headphones across the desk. The

video on the iPad showed a slender man with long hair climbing in and out of the tank. A calm female voice narrated the video. The man with the long hair demonstrated how to float with your arms around your head and then how to float with your arms at your sides. “Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said, and the long-haired man closed his eyes and continued to float with his arms by his sides. Then the voice said that any anxiety or claustrophobia can be pacified by wedging a pool noodle in the tank door to keep it open. The long-haired man wedged a blue pool noodle between the door and the tank.

When the video ended, mellow music was playing in the lobby. The attendant in the stretchy purple shirt scraped out the last of the almond butter from the jar.

You’ll be in tank 3 today, he said.

He placed a laminated sheet of

paper on the desk. It was a waiver stating in vague legalese that drowning in the tank was impossible due to the buoyancy of the water, but if the impossible happened, Float House was released from liability. The attendant handed me a red dry-erase marker. I signed the form. He photographed the form. Then he wiped away my signature with an eraser brush.

A middle-aged man in loose-fitting jeans and a faded black T-shirt emerged from the hallway, fresh from his float, hair still wet and slicked back. He looked a little tired, as if he had just finished a day at the pool. The receptionist waved him over.

—How’d it go?

—Good, said the man.

—A lot different then the first time, huh?

—Yes, much different, said the man. He was trying to slip on his sneakers without using his hands.

I tiptoed down the hall in my socks, avoiding small puddles on the floor, and opened the door to tank room 3. Tank room 3 was lit with soft blue light. Perfectly folded towels were fanned out on a stool and a silver kidney-shaped dish containing a few sets of foam and silicone earplugs rested on top. A fresh white terry cloth bathrobe and a large ornate mirror hung on the wall. A maze of pipework ran in and out of the far end of the tank. The tank was the size of a luxury bathtub and made of high-gloss white plastic with chrome grab bars. It looked like a coffin for astronauts.

I hung up my clothes and showered, lathering with the soap labelled “pre-float.” I began to dry off, out of habit, and then stopped. I inserted the earplugs in my ears. Then I climbed into the tank on my knees and ducked my head while I pulled the hatch shut above me.

Absolute darkness. The water lapped against the walls; I could sense the limits of the tank. The air tasted sour.

Floating was effortless, but staying in the centre of the tank was Notes & Dispatches 15

difficult. Any movement generated small waves, pushing my body into the wall. I pushed off and knocked myself into the opposite side. In the video, the long-haired man had centred himself by spreading his limbs against the sides of the tank and then retracting them. It was a tricky manoeuvre, but when I got the hang of it, the water became calm.

I was drifting in an endless ocean, with some sense of motion but not of direction. It was like sinking while remaining still. I waited to hit bottom, but the impact never came.

Sounds echoed in the tank, long droning hums and light trickling taps. Whether my eyes were open or closed, I saw deep blues and pulsing green flashes, shadows passing over shadows.

Concentrating was like trying to flex a muscle I no longer had. Every thought spilled into another.

A bead of colour appeared in the

16 Geist 94 Fall 2014

vast blackness. I stared into it and it began to grow. When it grew large and close enough, I recognized it as my uncle’s room at our family cottage. Dark green shag carpet, stained by cigarette smoke and sand from the beach. A brown bed, sagging heavily on the edge with a sleep apnea mask hung from the headboard. The shelves were filled with science fiction books and the VHS tapes—each with two or three movies on it—that we often watched together. One of them was Altered States, a movie about a scientist who experiments with hallucinogenic drugs in a sensory deprivation tank and emerges as a devolved primordial monster.

Faint music began bubbling up through the water. It didn’t seem like an hour and half had passed, maybe less or maybe more. I climbed out of the tank just as the long-haired man had demonstrated, both hands firmly gripping the chrome bars. The room

seemed darker than before. I showered, this time with the soap labelled “post-float.” I could not tell if it was any different than the pre-float soap.

The receptionist waved me over.

—So how’d it go?

—Good, I said.

—Was it what you were expecting?

—No, I said.

—It never is, he said.

The empty almond butter jar sat on his desk.

It was raining lightly outside. I felt like I had just awakened from deep sleep. I could feel the rain on my skin, the sound of it on the pavement. I noticed everything.

Dylan Gyles is a writer and barista. He writes short fiction and creative non-fiction.

He is originally from Winnipeg and now lives in Vancouver. His blog “Notes from the Ashtray” can be read at geist.com.

T R U E

F U N N I E S

True Funnies 17

S T O R M S

A T

S E A

Hurricane Diary JA N F E DU C K

Waves bang against the ship. Was it like this with the Titanic?

W

aiting at the ferry at Cap aux Meules in the Magdalen Islands, heading home to Ontario. The sun coming up over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. $192—plus fuel charge. The sky clear.

CBC Radio says Hurricane Arthur is approaching, or what’s left of it.

Most of the cars in the lineup are from Quebec. The sports coupe behind us has Ontario plates. Hope we make it through the hurricane, I say to the Ontario guy. He huffs me off.

Park on the ferry, grab laptop, books, Sudoku, pencil. The ferry goes to Souris, PEI, takes five hours.

Watch for whales. Whales that live in the St. Lawrence: beluga, killer, northern bottlenose, sperm, humpback, minke, northern right, fin, blue, other kinds too.

Give up looking for whales after three minutes. You could watch for hours and not see a single one. Do whales live in the St. Lawrence? Bison roam plains. Caribou migrate on tundra. The northern bottlenose floats? swims? exists? in the St. Lawrence.

Find a seat, comfortable enough.

Start writing an article for my blog, Dining Out with History, about the Fromagerie Pied-de-Vent on Havre aux Maisons, where cheese makers use the milk of Canadienne cows, cross between Bretonne and Normande cows brought over from France in the seventeenth century.

The black Canadienne is the oldest breed of cow in Canada.

Waves swelling. The sky clear and bright. Must be the beginning of the storm. Walk over to the cafeteria, looking for a cheap sandwich. Food reasonably priced, a tad Frenchish, but still 18 Geist 94 Fall 2014

ferryish. Will wait for a better lunch when we land on Prince Edward Island.

The boat rises and then plunges down, rises and plunges.

Frenchish?

A calm male voice speaking in French over the PA system at some length. Woman sitting across the aisle tilts her head and opens her eyes really wide. Try to appear concerned.

Then the voice says in English, “This is your captain speaking,” etc., etc.

Then: “There is heavy wind in Souris of between 90 and 110 kilometres per hour. We will do our best to land. But this may be impossible.”

Ferry sinkings around the world: Greece, South Korea, Zanzibar.

Sit still, look out the window. Everyone very still; some sleep.

Wake up and the shoreline is close enough to jump out and swim to. Waves high and raucous.

People on shore watching us; hair and clothes flapping in the wind. Waves crashing against the dock and against the ferry and spraying up on the ferry.

Ferry takes a wide swing and heads back out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. People calling out: “Qu’estce qui passe?” “What is he doing?”

“Calice!” Silence.

Then the same male voice on the PA—less calm—comes on, in French.

Then in English, “Ladies and gentlemen, we were unable to land in Souris due to high winds. We are sailing for

sheltered waters,” etc., etc., “until the wind changes. The winds are expected to shift at nine p.m. We may be able to attempt a landing then.”

More silence for a long time, a cough here and there. A woman begins to wail, “I don’t want to die out here.” She walks over to the corner and pukes. Sunburned guy wearing a Tilley hat pukes on his seat. Several more passengers puking. Two men in cute uniforms, with rags, sponges, spray bottles and bags. Brows furrowed. They look out the window.

Then continue to the puke spots.

Waves banging against the ship.

Was it like this with the Titanic? “I should have brought my violin,” I say to husband. Husband goes for a walk.

Returns, having discovered a band playing in the bar, country music, with a drum machine. Twelve hours since we left.

In the dining room bar no one orders food; an air of social sophistication. The ballroom on the Titanic, stiff upper lips dancing the night away.

I start writing for my blog about bagosse, a homebrew made of sugar, yeast, water, then flavoured with whatever one wants.

Each family on the Magdalen Islands has their own recipe, passed down from one generation to the next.

Residents of the Magdalen Islands are called Madelinots.

The sun is falling toward the horizon. A couple playing Scrabble, laying down words in French.

Histoire. Sortie. Eau. Regle. Ost. Rompe. Eh. The clock on the wall shows 9:00 p.m. The man at the Scrabble game leaves, comes back with two thick grey blankets. A group of men playing cards. Others playing board games. Some read.

Two couples in the corner eating lobster sandwiches and drinking

wine. Husband off to find blankets, comes back with one. Competition is stiff, he says. Dark outside, very cold inside. How much extra fuel does this thing have? Four women in their forties or fifties barge in and start to sing in French. Drunk. Others in the bar and dining room begin to sing.

A waiter wakes me up. A female voice over the PA says Freedom Writers will be showing soon. Dubbed in French. Our chairs are big and plush and in the middle of the boat. Hilary Swank plays a new teacher in a high school with gang and violence problems. She inspires her students to write. Heartwarming.

Past midnight, wandering around looking for a place to sleep. Bodies covered in grey blankets, lying on the floor, stretched out on seats. Find a spot on the floor between two seats.

Heavy breathing, snoring all around.

In university, wrote an essay on The Raft of the Medusa, painted by Théodore Géricault in 1819, depicting the strong, standing against the waves at the front of the raft, and at the back of the raft are those who have given up, dying, slipping off the raft into the sea.

The male voice again in French, then English over the PA, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” etc.

“Please remain seated until we have landed,” etc. The sun just rising over the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Storm still raging, the waves slapping the boat.

How is he going to land in this?

The dock now visible. Twentythree hours since we sailed from Cap aux Meules. Perky female voice over the PA says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching Souris,” etc., “return to your vehicles.” As if nothing ever happened. Passengers rush down to the car deck. Ontario guy leans against his sports car. Enough adventure for you? He grunts.

Jan Feduck writes about historic sites and culinary history on her blog diningoutwithhistory.com. She lives in Elora, Ontario.

Because There Was and There Wasn’t a City SADIQA DE M E IJE R

D

aydream of the homesick general with a gourd gut. Grounds of the narrow beef-broth river. Expanse of barracks and fairgrounds, cathedral malls, bright jeeps. Namesaken, swollen town.

Copper-top towers of insurance magnates, medical hall of fame. City of remaining maples, snuffed neon, pensioners ruminating over donuts.

Someone keeps the kitchen light on for me there. The half moons under her eyes hold my fingerprints.

Blue boxes, black walnuts, aftermath of skunk. A tunnel I threaded my bike through. On summer nights, the howls of monkeys caged in an aging amusement park gave chase.

City, I can almost see you. City, I have a flawed allegiance. My founding father is the doctor mopping classroom floors.

City of benign industries, warm gusts of cornflakes and beer. In pauses, the river itself—slick muck, still turtles, rot. A volunteer on scaffolds faithfully repaints Return to Your Fortress, O Prisoners of Hope.

City of my sudden lankiness, your clouds spark with plus and minus signs, drenching restored Victorians, forgotten laundry, the path where my name is an absence in a park bench.

Sadiqa de Meijer’s first book is Leaving Howe Island. She lives in Kingston. The title “Because There Was and There Wasn’t a City” is from the work of Jamelie Hassan, an artist.

Notes & Dispatches 19

A F T E R L I F E

O F

C U L T U R E

Iberian Duet ST E P H E N HE NIG HAN

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

F

ew languages that are as similar as Spanish and Portuguese have speakers who regard each other with such indifference. The modern forms of both languages, their structures descended from Latin and their vocabularies nourished by Classical Arabic, evolved in northern areas of the Iberian Peninsula and moved south during the Middle Ages. Their spread accompanied the re-conquest of Iberia from the Moors, who had occupied the peninsula’s southern half since 711.

Colonialism carried Spanish and Portuguese overseas, where they developed Latin American, African and Asian outposts. Today Spanish is the official language of twenty countries and Portuguese of nine countries. In addition, both languages are spoken by significant immigrant communities or remnant colonial populations in countries where they are not official. Eight hundred million people speak one of these two languages as either a native or a very good second language. When a speaker of Spanish meets a speaker of Portuguese, the question arises: can they understand each other?

On the page, the two languages’ vocabularies look similar. The heart is el corazón in Spanish and o coração in Portuguese. The infinitives of most common verbs are similar or identical.

20 Geist 94 Fall 2014

Yet in their spoken forms Spanish and Portuguese differ. Spanish is a rigorous, phonetic language whose letters are pronounced in the same way in every situation; Portuguese vowels, and even some consonants, are capricious, their sounds altering according to their position. Spanish has five vowel sounds; Portuguese, according to most linguists, has thirteen. The Portuguese of Lisbon, in particular, is a thick-tongued, closed-mouthed slur that can sound more Slavic than Latin.

In The Winter in Lisbon, the Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina sends his protagonist to Portugal, where “he learned that when they spoke to him quickly, Portuguese was as indecipherable as Swedish.” It is easier for a speaker of Portuguese to understand a speaker of Spanish than the reverse.

To the Portuguese ear, Spanish sounds

over-enunciated; to the Spanish speaker, Portuguese is a blurry parody. Yet the softness of Portuguese, accentuated by its archaic grammar—more complicated than that of Spanish—exerts an irresistible charm. “At the risk of offending or dismaying my many friends who speak Spanish,” wrote Gregory Rabassa, the English translator of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, “I must admit here and now that I prefer Portuguese, especially in the Brazilian oral mode with all its unique sounds and rhythms.”

Whether in Europe, Latin America or Africa, communication between speakers of the two dominant Romance languages cannot be taken for granted. On the border between Portugal and Spain, I heard a Portuguese security guard explain to a Spanish tourist that the attraction he wished to visit was closed. The guard repeated the word “closed,” fechado (in Spanish it is cerrado), three times without the tourist understanding what he was saying. The tourist was haughty, the guard dismissive. When goodwill exists on both sides, communication works better. In an upmarket Buenos Aires café, I watched in fascination as four elegant businessmen, two Brazilian and two Argentinian, discussed the importation of Brazilian merchandise into Argentina. One of map: mapsof.net

the Brazilians would make a presentation in simplified, hyper-correct Portuguese. A pause would ensue while the Argentinians consulted with each other. A reply would then be delivered in an equally wooden, unnatural Spanish. By each returning to the textbook form of their language, the two sides were able to negotiate.

It is common, particularly in Brazil, for Spanish speakers to be interviewed on Portuguese-language television without subtitles or translation. The reverse rarely occurs: Portuguese is normally translated for Spanish-speaking audiences. An audience that is well educated or knowledgeable may find such intervention superfluous. When the Mozambican novelist Mia Couto spoke at a literary festival in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2013, he was accompanied onstage by an interpreter. After a few minutes, audience members began to shout, asking the interpreter to stop translating: the Colombian audience understood Couto’s Portuguese without difficulty. Bad blood, by contrast, stymies cross-linguistic conversation.

I once watched a Uruguayan soccer player being interviewed on Brazilian television. The player received questions in Portuguese and replied in Spanish. The discussion rolled along, until the interviewer asked why Uruguayan soccer teams had a reputation for dirty play. “I don’t understand your question,” the Uruguayan said.

“I don’t understand Portuguese!”

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility creates a culture of mutual ignorance. Long having deemed it unnecessary to study each other’s languages, speakers of Spanish and Portuguese know less than one might expect of one another’s cultures. Spanish intellectuals evince blank looks at the mention of the major writers of nineteenth-century Portugal; the Portuguese know more about the literature of France than that of Spain; few Spanish American writers are well informed on contemporary writing Afterlife of Culture 21

from Brazil or Lusophone Africa. But in the last decade, these barriers have begun to yield: in 2005, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva decreed that every Brazilian schoolchild would study Spanish; Alfaguara, the conglomerate that dominates Spanish-language publishing, now also publishes in Portuguese; the translation of literature between the two languages has slowly increased. Study is necessary because cross-linguistic conversation is bedevilled by false friends. In Spanish a desk is an escritorio, but in Portuguese an escritório is an office, which in Spanish is an oficina, which in Portuguese means a garage.

In spite of these snares, the two languages sometimes engage in a disorderly mingling known as Portuñol. In the 1980s, this indiscriminate blending of Portuguese and Spanish was spoken by Cuban teachers, doctors and soldiers in Angola and by Chilean exiles in Mozambique. Today

Portuñol is used by Brazilian evangelical preachers to convert Bolivians and Peruvians; it is heard in certain border regions of Spain and Portugal, and is strongest along Brazil’s southern border with Uruguay and Argentina. This South American version of Portuñol has been used to write novels; it features prominently in the 2008 road movie Carmo, Hit the Road.

Yet Portuñol remains a regional oddity. Meaningful conversation between speakers of the two major Iberian languages, as between all cultures, will not flourish from an assumption of sameness, but from an understanding and appreciation of difference.

Stephen Henighan’s most recent book is Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940–2012 (McGill-Queen’s, 2014). Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com and geist.com.

FINDINGS

From the series “Shot” by David Campion. “Shot” was part of Thru The Trapdoor, an exhibition at VIVO Media Arts Centre,

A Kind of Dream Therapy JACO B W R E N

From Polyamorous Love Song. Published by BookThug in 2014. Jacob Wren is a performer, artist and writer. His other books include Unrehearsed Beauty and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed.

A

nd my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community. Instead they are those individuals most willing to exploit their own creativity and inspiration, most willing to gain personal profit from their unconscious and its emanations, those with the most missionary zeal for the dissemination of their own idiosyncratic perspectives. Questions of pure creativity clearly lay elsewhere.

Like most of us I once knew someone who was one of the most creative, strange, deeply interesting people I would ever meet. I’m not 22 Geist 94 Fall 2014

sure he actually liked me very much but I admired him and therefore he humoured me. Before beginning this book I emailed him to ask if it would be all right for me to write about him and also to write about some of the things he has said to me over the years. He said no, that it was not all right. I then asked if it would be all right to write about him if I were to avoid any mention of his real name.

Once again he said no, he would not be comfortable with such a situation.

I then asked if it would be all right to write about him if I were to avoid using his real name and also alter key details of his story so as to render it

virtually unrecognizable. Once again he said no, and also mentioned that he hoped I would not come to him with any further requests. He was easily one of the most creative people I have ever met, his thoughts and work far more compelling than that of most of the other, allegedly more professional, artists I have encountered over the years. I am tempted to explain more about him in what follows, which would of course be absolutely contrary to his clearly stated wishes.

However, then I would not only be exploiting my own creativity, I would also be exploiting his. And he has clearly told me not to. Sadly, the theory I proposed in the first paragraph will have to remain unillustrated.

Sometimes when I run out of ideas I attempt to write down my dreams.

In one dream, which has visited me sporadically over the course of many years, often arriving on nights when

Vancouver, in April 2014. Campion’s work has appeared in Canadian Geographic, Adbusters, the Globe and Mail and Geist.

I least expect it, or on nights when I have completely forgotten I have ever had such a dream in the first place, there is a secret society the existence of which only circulates in the vaguest of rumours. Of course immediately I want to join. This desire to join is so strong within me it rapidly becomes something of a piercing obsession. It remains unclear to me if the organization I so desperately want to join is an organized group that runs things from behind the scenes or only a group that makes the lives of those people who actually run things somehow more difficult. I make many enquiries and eventually come to understand what I have to do. There is a door and you knock on the door and someone eventually opens it. You explain to the man that opens the door that you have new ideas that will contribute greatly to the secrecy and

efficacy of the organization and he asks you what exactly these ‘new’ ideas are. And this next part is incredibly important: You must absolutely refuse to tell him. No matter how much he asks or how much he pleads you continue to say nothing. In this way you create a sense of mystery and a desire, on his part, to know more. It seems like a stupid strategy but within the strange logic of the dream you are surprised how well it actually works. Then there is a period of several years when you are somehow aware that you are loosely associated with this secret society even though you have yet to witness any concrete evidence of its existence. Still, you have made the first step, a certain degree of progress, and you continue to have hope.

I am very nervous to write down my dreams, somehow plagued by a nagging feeling that one’s unconscious

should not be exploited for artistic ends. This was one of the topics I often used to speak about with Paul (not his real name, and I’m sorry Paul, I know you didn’t want me to write about you and I am writing about you anyway— but I suppose this will be neither my first nor my last betrayal). Because art itself is a kind of dream and to portray a dream within a work of art or to transform one’s actual dreams into works of art seems redundant. But not only redundant. For in many ways one’s dreams represent aspects of one’s deepest self, and there is no reason to publicize such things carelessly.

There is a kind of dream therapy in which one takes turns placing oneself inside each of the different characters within a remembered dream, since each of these characters simply represents different aspects of the self. So if you were to have a dream in which you were beaten by a police Findings 23

you would have to stop your own affair, which you seem to be enjoying immensely, but also because then your only real lead, your one opportunity for further advancement within the secret sect, would rapidly evaporate. You are afraid that if you raise the question with your wife she will misunderstand you, think that you are only confronting her in order to force her to break off the affair. And somehow you have to do all of this without letting on that you are aware of the existence of the secret society, since you are not sure whether she knows about it, and if you were to reveal it to someone who is not supposed to know, it would once again harm your chances for further advancement.

Fortunately, one night while you are still paralyzed by indecision, unsure how to breach the topic, your wife assists: First she tells you that she knows you are having an affair but that it is perfectly all right since she is also having an affair and, if you agree, she proposes that you both continue. You instantly agree.

Then she tells you that, although she doesn’t understand why, the man she is having an affair with would like to invite you to a meeting. She gives you the time and address and for a few hours you couldn’t possibly be happier.

Paul had a motorcycle. (Actually he didn’t, but it is my hope that this detail will render those who know him unable to identify who I am referring to since, as I have already mentioned, that is his explicit wish. More specifically, since I have already defied his most explicit wish, I am hoping this is the next best thing: a compromise he will still disagree with but have to settle for.) I would see Car Wash, Hamilton, 2011 was part of Hamilton, a project spanning seven years that was him on his motorcycle, driving shown at the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto in May 2014. Image courtesy Stephen around at night, consequently lost Bulger Gallery, Toronto and Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton. Joseph Hartman is a photographer. He lives in Hamilton. officer, you would put yourself in the place of the police officer and intuit what he thinks and does as if such thoughts and actions were only other aspects of your self, and as if within your unconscious you are never only the one being beaten but also the one doing the beating. Just like in life one is never wholly innocent, one must continually feel implicated, always take on aspects of the collective guilt.

So several years passed and, though I felt confident I had remained implicated within, if not the inner circle, at least the periphery of the global secret society, I still had no further concrete or factual information as to the intricacies of its machinations. Occasionally I would hear something, a snippet of conversation from the next table in a restaurant, or read something, a note left in my mailbox at work or a single sentence in a larger unrelated article that subtly hinted at some ongoing,

OH, THE IRONY  Google Alert results for “Irony”

24 Geist 94 Fall 2014

hidden network. But you realize that you have been told to wait and therefore all you can do is wait, confident, or at least cautiously hopeful, that sooner or later they will call upon you and you will be given the opportunity to slip upwards in the ranks towards an eventual goal of penetrating the inner circle.

In the dream you are married and having an affair. And your wife is also having an affair and you begin to suspect that the man your wife is having an affair with is in fact quite deeply implicated in the secret society that you remain a casual, loosely affiliated member of. At night, in bed, you think of confronting her about this—not about the affair, but rather whether she can use her sexual connection with this man to help you, her husband, advance within the ranks. You most certainly don’t want her to stop having the affair, not only because

IRONY:

The term people love to use—incorrectly. THE NEUROSCIENCE OF IRONY: It’s a lot more complicated than

rain on your wedding day.

WHY THE NEW INTEREST IN BEAR? ITS IRONY AND SLY HUMOUR (AND THE BEAR SEX):

Trigger

in his own spiralling thoughts, as if trying to figure out a complex problem that was meant only for him and him alone, or perhaps thinking nothing, his inner world merely the distant, idealized projection of what I might be thinking if I were him. Sometimes, on these nights, I would flag him down and we would talk for a while. Or go for a drink. Or he would park his motorcycle and we would walk. He would tell me things and I would listen, and everything he said would strike me as brilliant and alluring. And yet at other times I would let him ride by, certain that he had not noticed me, not wanting to interfere with what I assumed were his endlessly fascinating inner monoThis untitled image appeared in Dollarton Pleasure Faire, 1972, curated by Bill Jeffries logues, since in the end, even and exhibited at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver, June–August 2014. Bruce when we were to drink or talk, I Stewart is a photographer, painter and medical illustrator. He lives in Victoria. couldn’t help but feel his thoughts were meant only for himself, were being shared with me reluctantly, almost against his will. decisions being made actually perabout your idea “which would conOne time he asked me this: If you tained to. tribute greatly to the secrecy and were to take all of your thoughts, all So you start drinking, as you often efficacy of the organization” and to of the thoughts that you’d ever had, do in uncomfortable situations, as whom you refused to tell anything. At and divide them into two piles, with you often do in dreams, and soon you this point in the dream you can barely one pile being all the thoughts that realize you are extremely drunk. It is recall how many years ago that was you’ve had that were helpful and proonly this ridiculous drunkenness that but are certain that you have noticeductive, and the other pile being all the allows you to stand up and make the ably aged since that time. And you are thoughts you’ve had that were unhelpfollowing proposal: at a meeting where important things ful and counterproductive, and assum“Hello everyone. This is my first are being decided, important things ing both piles were of approximately time here. And I’m drunk.” There is for the future of the secret society equal size, would more of the group of a smattering of amused applause at and important things for the future of thoughts that emanated directly from your drunkenness. “But I was thinkhumanity. And you are having great your unconscious be in the helpful pile ing, I mean, I think that everyone difficulty following the exact meanor more be in the unhelpful one? here can’t help but wonder why…” ing of the discussions since they are And you go to the rendezvous with No, of course you are not that making reference to many things you the other man, the man who shares drunk. There is probably not enough don’t know anything about or know your wife’s bed when she is not with alcohol in the world to make you get about in only the vaguest of terms. you, and he takes you to a large room up in front of a room full of strangNonetheless, you are extremely full of people you somehow recognize. ers, strangers you respect and admire excited to finally be at the centre There are several well-known artists and for some reason wish desperately of it all, where things are being disat the table as well as the man who to be included among, and propose cussed and decisions are being made. once opened the door, who inquired something chosen almost at random.

If only you could understand what the

warning: the following deals, pretty much exclusively, with a book about a woman having sex with a bear. JOURNALIST MICHAEL DRESSER FINDS OUT HE IS ALLERGIC TO NEWSPAPER INK:

Baltimore Sun politics reporter Michael Dresser said “the irony just overwhelms anything else”. OH, THE IRONY: There’s an app to tell you when you’re addicted to

Findings 25

However, that night you meet a couple and, because you are so drunk you cannot even remember where you live, they take you home with them.

At first you think they are planning to propose sexual activities between the three of you but when you arrive at their home, a rather large modernist house overlooking a river, you realize that in fact they have something quite different in mind.

The last time I saw Paul was a little bit harrowing. I always felt that the main source of tension between Paul and myself was that Paul, consciously or not, resented the fact that I was a mildly successful mid-career artist while he, though he was clearly much more talented and brilliant than me,

had no art career whatsoever and, to the best of my knowledge, had never produced anything or, at least, had never attempted to show anything or get published. And because I felt this way, and suspected that he had also felt this way for many years, in fact almost the entirety of the time I had known him, one night I decided to ask him about it. And it wasn’t really like I was asking him anything, it was more like a direct confrontation, like I was accusing him of being a lifelong coward, accusing him of wanting to make and show art but being too afraid. He bristled at my accusation. “Artists are lepers,” he said to me. “You, your friends, the entire world culture of artists and bohemians, it’s like you have some

Water Market M AU D E B A R LOW

From Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever. Published by House of Anansi Press in 2013. Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, has written sixteen books, including Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Threat of the World’s Water (co-written with Tony Clarke) and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. She lives in Ottawa.

I

n the past two decades, trading of water rights become an emerging business in the United States, Chile, Spain, and Australia as landowners, farmers, and speculators buy and sell water rights and transport the actual water over long distances. Water trading has emerged as a dangerous new form of water commodification.

(This market model of water trading is not to be confused with traditional water sharing or with indigenous water exchanges in communities in the Middle East, New Mexico, Africa, India, Latin America.)

The argument put forward by economists, business schools and some politicians in favour of water trading is that it will promote more efficient water allocation because a marketbased price acts as an incentive for users to reallocate resources from lowvalue to high-value activities. In practice, however, water trading allows big agribusiness, bottled-water companies, and other big water users to buy up water rights to use themselves or sell on the open market to domestic and foreign investors. Water that was once a commons and a public trust is now

strange sort of leprosy. All you want is people to look at you and look at what you do and think you’re special and talented. You want it so badly that you think there’s something wrong with those of us who don’t.” I nodded solemnly, feeling guilty as he continued, “Trust me, I don’t need fan letters to tell me my thoughts are valid.

I’m confident… My life has its own path… My thoughts are their own reward.” And then he turned around and walked away, not looking back for even a second. I have to admit I didn’t completely believe him. And of course now, when he passes by on his motorcycle and I try to flag him down, he no longer stops, just keeps driving.

In the living room the couple offer you green tea before revealing a secret

separated from the land and watershed and traded between buyers and sellers—a short step away from a full and open water commodities market.

In the United States, water trading is more prevalent in the western states, where the history of water law is based on “prior appropriation,” or “first in time, first in right.” Water rights were used in the American (and Canadian) West to encourage early settlement and farming. Shiney Varghese, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, says that prior appropriation in the west established not only the quantity of water a farmer could claim but also the purpose for which it could be used. This allowed the rights holder to decouple water rights from land rights, and those holders could treat water as a commodity. The separation of water from land allowed those who inherited water rights to sell their surplus to newer users, creating one of the original water markets.

other apps; Pig breed serves as ideal model for human obesity research; The oldest pyramid in Egypt is being destroyed by its own restoration team; NYT publisher dodges reporter at first amendment dinner; Google labels NSA data centre a “backup service.” WHAT IRONY THAT ORGASM DAY COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR: That’s right, none

26 Geist 94 Fall 2014

panel in the wall, behind which sits a single book on a stand. The couple tell you the book is like a key to the secret society, it contains all its doctrines, strategies and histories. It was written by many people over many generations. The book is called A Dream for the Future and a Dream for Now and the moment you read the title you become aware of the fact that you are only dreaming and moments later you leave your own body, your own perspective, and enter into the bodies and perspectives of the couple whose home you are in. You enter both of them at the same time (don’t ask me how this is possible) and you understand how they see you: They have let you into their home only to lead you astray, you are a nothing, a poser, some stray dog

sniffing around the margins of their organization, and they are showing you the book only because it is a complete fake. The book is a broken map, a false lead they are providing only to distract you, to send you down wrong alleys in your misguided search to get closer to the heart of the organization. And then you are back in your own body, back in the part of the dream that is fully occupied by the character within the dream you identify as yourself, and you look at this couple who have invited you into their home, who have offered you green tea and hospitality and sympathy, but who have done so only because they feel scorn for you and wish to lead you astray. And all you are able to feel towards them is a delicate and infinite tenderness. 

Concerns over conservation and the environment cannot change the nature of these private rights. Even in times of drought, as long as there is water in the water source, the senior rights holders are able to use or sell their full allocation of water. Varghese writes that while water transfers were minimal in the early years, by the late 1970s all viable options for additional water supply in the western states had been exhausted, and water banking, leasing, and trading started in earnest.

In the two decades between 1987 and 2009, more than 4,400 water transactions were recorded in the twelve western states.

However, until recently, water trading in the United States took place within districts, mostly among farmers—but no longer. In watershort California, some farmers are letting their fields lie fallow and are selling water as a cash crop to local municipalities. The state is now facing

proposals to allow farmers to sell their water to developers, piping it long distances from its watershed. Two farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are proposing to sell their water rights to a developer for $11.7 million. In 2009 the Dudley Ridge Water District sold $73 million worth of water to the Mojave Water District. Aside from the obvious concern about letting good farmland be taken out of production, the government has already subsidized most of these farmers for the water they now want to sell for profit.

In 2011, Texan billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens sold 16 trillion litres of water rights he had bought from the Ogallala Aquifer to a Texas water supplier for $103 million. His company, Mesa Water, has come under strong criticism for hoarding water and selling it for profit in an area desperate for water. Pickens compared the deal to “buying and selling a motor boat.” 

Absent Mother P R I S C I L A U P PA L

From Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother. Published by Dundurn Press in 2013. Priscila Uppal is the author of The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern. Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General’s Award. She lives in Toronto and at priscilauppal.ca.

ten things i can check off my trip to brazil list so far 1. Meet Runaway Mother for the first time in twenty years.

2. Buy Brazilian poetry books and attempt crude translations.

3. Go to a movie with Mother.

4. See a Brazilian musical.

5. Swim on a São Paulo rooftop.

6. Spark first fight with Mother.

7. Visit Brazilian art museums and exhibitions.

8. Encounter an elaborate display of giant rabbits in human costumes amid a field of chocolate eggs.

9. Discuss divergent religious views with Mother.

10. Try cashew juice.

Not bad for just a handful of days. I squeeze my mother’s arm. I am having a wonderful time, I tell her, in part to convince myself and in part to thank her for all the bustling about she’s been doing on my behalf. It’s my version of an apology and she seems placated.

To Paulista shopping centre, she announces like a black-and-white film diva to Soares, who is reliably waiting for us, contentedly eating hot dogs grilled at the back of an old woman’s car trunk. Soares explains she has served her famous hot dogs

of that three times a week bollocks—an orgasm is officially an annual event. ROAD-WORK IRONY: Traction work on hold because… crew couldn’t get traction. THE IRONY OF TOOTH BRUSHING:

Even the best dentist can’t recommend the best way. INDIANS, IRONY AND IDENTITY: Cultural appropriation beyond the hipster-headdress: Stereotypes,

Findings 27

to presidents and movie stars.

But that is second-class shopping, Soares argues.

Maybe we can afford it then, I banter back.

Mr. Soares no understand why you no live here, the hot-dog lady admonishes, waving a bony finger at my nose. If you like country, you stay. He try make you like country.

That’s sweet, I reply, and smile at Soares as he caresses his full stomach.

My mother tilts her face toward me and whispers: Don’t eat the hot dogs.

As we drive along Paulista Avenue, a street Soares states is “paved with money,” he points out that all the intersecting streets are named after countries, including a rue Canada.

Brazil is the second biggest country in the world, not Canada. Your mother has a big heart, bigger than Brazil, he says.

My mother explains it is very common for Brazilians to claim Brazil is

Mr. Peanut at Vancouver Court House, 1974, on display at the Belkin Gallery in Vancouver in fall 2014, as part of an exhibition on the fortieth anniversary of the Mr. Peanut for Mayor Campaign. The exhibition coincides with the Vancouver municipal election on November 15, 2014. Mr. Peanut was a persona assumed by Vincent Trasov, a Vancouver artist and co-founder of Image Bank and Western Front. The Mr. Peanut for Mayor Campaign was devised by Trasov and John Mitchell, a fellow artist. Mr. Peanut received 3.4% of the votes. Photograph by Bob Strazicich.

the second biggest country because in Canada we have too much land that people don’t actually live on but in Brazil people live everywhere.

It’s not that we can’t live there, we don’t want to, I counter, and Soares finds this incredibly amusing, chuckling to himself about it for the rest of the ride.

In Brazil, if you find a hole in the road, and throw a seed in it, by morning you’ll have glorious fruit. That is Brazil.

I look at my mother, who beams from Soares’s declaration. I thought if there was a hole in the road, Brazilians built another road. I suppose this is another option. Good. I sincerely hope he is right.

At the shopping centre (another plaza where she’s already seen every movie currently playing) my mother buys me several items of clothing: a playful leopard-print sheer blouse, a sci-fi-inspired turquoise off-the-shoulder evening dress, and elegant black dress pants with a sheer black sash. (I will end up wearing all three for years to come.) My mother likes colourful, artistic prints, designs of flowers or circles or wavy lines. She does not wear black and does not like to see anyone in black, in honour of her father who hated the colour. But she buys me the black pants nonetheless, because, she concedes, I am Canadian and Canadians mistakenly think black is a colour.

I am constantly offering to pay, but she won’t hear of it. This is all I get to do for you, she sighs, and since she is somewhat right about this, I accept the gifts.

I cannot hide the fact that I do love clothes and Brazil is one of the centres of world fashion. Here clothes are central to the personality of the country.

It’s one of my only complaints about Canada; with the exception of the French in Montreal, Canadians dress without imagination, thinking only of shelter from the elements and comfort, like postal workers. 

especially those that appear in marketing materials, have a way of reducing complex cultures down to their simplest and most conveniently sellable representations. ERIC SCHMIDT ERECTS MASSIVE MONUMENT TO IRONY: This

28 Geist 94 Fall 2014

just popped up on everyone’s least favorite social network. THE IRONY OF RELIGIOUS CELIBACY: As an 18-year-old Methodist

Obsession JA N E R U L E

From Taking My Life. Published by Talonbooks in 2011. Jane Rule is the writer of novels, essays and collections of short stories, many of which have been nominated for and won awards, including the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. She died in 2007.

I

n February, a month before my seventeenth birthday, I enrolled as a student at Mills. Mother came down from Reno to take me to Hink’s to buy the furnishings for my room. I had been at home with her for the week before, buying more clothes than I’d ever imagined owning. Never having gone to college herself, Mother enjoyed all the preparations even more than I did, and laughed when she later read the instructions to parents that she shouldn’t have come with me and influenced my choices.

Mother has always been a follower of the dictum, “When all else fails, read the directions.”

I did not settle easily into my first term of college. I was not as grateful as I should have been for my “provisional” status, proud of my academic record and still righteously indignant at what had happened to me.

But I was not as confident of myself as I tried to appear. I had read nothing but required texts, some poetry and books about the lives of doctors.

I had to bluff a background assumed for those students professing an interest in literature until I could, with years of all-night reading, make up for my earlier indifference. At that time, I was a slow reader though I had a good memory for what I had read. I couldn’t spell.

I not only didn’t know what was expected of me in assignments, I didn’t know that anything in particular was expected. Asked to write a character sketch, I wrote three pages on Ann’s hands. The paper was returned with every line crossed out and a question

mark at the end. In a humanities course which was supposed to challenge our cliché-ridden young minds to some originality, I was simply suspicious of questions like, “Does a drowning man really drown?” I didn’t want to be made a fool of by a bunch of condescending, smart-aleck male professors. In a course on religions of the Far East, the other students were all seniors in religion and philosophy with a vocabulary I didn’t understand

at all. At the final exam, the kindly professor said, “Miss Rule, if you don’t understand the question, just write what you know about the main words in the sentences,” advice I followed for an hour of the three allotted. I had no more to say.

The remedial reading course I was required to take because of my low test scores was taught by a woman with a bad stammer which at times reactivated my own. Her advice, to read the first and last sentences of a paragraph and guess what was in between, was beyond my skill at reading poetry and religion texts, political argument and history.

I did not, of course, accept my failures humbly. I blamed the courses,

Thinking About Moose G R E G S A N TO S

From Feathertale’s Big Book of Exquisitely Egregious Poetry and Diverse Versification and So Forth and Such, edited by Corina Milic. Published by Feathertale in 2012.

Greg Santos is the author of The Emperor’s Sofa (2010) and Rabbit Punch! (2014), both from DC Books. He is the poetry editor for carte blanche. He lives in Montreal.

A moose a day keeps the doctor away.

Which came first, the chicken or the moose?

Kill two birds with one moose.

Don’t count your moose until they’ve hatched.

A moose in the hand is worth two in the bush.

It’s raining cats and moose.

There are many ways to skin a moose.

Burn the moose at both ends.

One goose, two geese. (One moose, two meese?)

Best thing since sliced moose.

Caught with your hand in the moose.

Big moose in a small pond.

A rolling moose gathers no moss.

Keep your friends close and your moose closer.

Always a bridesmaid, never a moose. 

from North Carolina, visiting Rome for the first time, I marveled at the sidewalk traffic of beautiful young priests. TODAY IN IRONY: AOL sues former employee for billing them for crappy services they didn’t want, need. HOW MAVIS GALLANT’S IRONY, CONTEMPT AND UN-CANADIANNESS IS HUMOROUS: There’s something unique in her voice that feels

Findings 29

the teachers, the texts, venting my anger and frustration on anyone who would listen, from impatient teachers, to my adviser, to the dean.

My complaints were not limited to my academic experience. I was amazed and appalled at the restrictions under which I was expected to live, signing in and out of the dorm, having to get signatures if I was to be away for the night. Because the only room available was a single on

senior corridor, I was daily reminded of my lowly status and lack of privileges compared to the students I lived among. They were a friendly group, willing to sympathize with me and occasionally smuggle me out with them for a beer drinking evening. They’d grown restless, too, with the hall meetings at which we had to vote on such things as whether we’d wear cotton dresses and sandals; skirts, sneakers and loafers; or formal

Elevator Will Not Fall From Elevator Stuck?, a sign in an elevator at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. The statements are numbered approximately according to the system devised by Ludwig Wittgenstein for his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book comprised of numbered declarative statements intended to describe the relationship between language and reality.

Don’t panic.

You will be fine.

There is ample ventilation.

The elevator will not fall.

In the event of power failure, emergency power generators will restore power.

4. HAVE YOU TRIED PRESSING THE ‘OPEN DOORS’ BUTTON? 4.1 If this doesn’t work, press the emergency call button and await a response from switchboard.

4.2 Advise: 4.21 Which elevator are you trapped in? (see ID Plate next to emergency call button) 4.22 and the floor you are stuck on or between; 4.23 of the number of people in the elevator; 4.24 whether urgent medical attention may be required for any occupant.

1.

1.1 2.

2.1 3.

If urgent medical attention is requested a medical professional will contact you a.s.a.p. to offer and to determine whether the fire department should be called to effect immediate rescue.

5.1 The switchboard operator will immediately contact the elevator service person.

5.2 Advise whom the operator should call on behalf of those in the elevator to advise of their delay.

5.3 You will be advised of the estimated time of arrival of the elevator service person.

6. You may call the operator at any time by pressing the emergency call button.

6.1 Of course we apologize for any inconvenience.  5.

dresses, stockings and high heels at our next open house.

Though I was an independent spirit, I was a domestic infant. I not only didn’t know how to do my laundry (I sent my clothes out all through my years at college), but Mother had always washed my hair. I came from so private a household that the casual nudity in the washrooms was actually embarrassing to me. I contrived to find times when everyone else was out to use the facilities.

The suspicion, apparently so often entertained by so many people, that I was a sexual adventurer, seemed the more ludicrous for someone as young and physically shy as I was.

I did make friends of sorts. Alette, a Dutch girl who had spent three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies, lived next door to me. When I was at my most impatient with the restrictions and requirements of my new life, she would counter my complaints by comparing the college to the camp.

She would point out the abundance of quite good food, of hot water, the freedom to walk about the beautiful campus, to play tennis, ride, swim. The restrictions were, after all, only silly, not cruel. She wasn’t pious about it, simply detached and realistic. She was herself marking time until June when her fiancé would arrive from Australia and they would be married. She spent a lot of time writing letters to him.

Occasionally, she’d talk about her experience in the camp, being in charge for a time of rationing rice, a grain at a time, to the other women and children. She said she’d never again be as close to people as she had been then; it was a closeness with a price too high to pay voluntarily.

Sometimes I made her laugh. Perhaps that was why we could be friends.

She could temper my bewildered

entirely un-Canadian. It’s her permeating sense of irony that proceeds from an almost molecular level. THE ULTIMATE IRONY: Many posts on this thread truly belong on the People’s Cube, hence this topic. IRONY OF DIGITAL GOVERNMENT RUN THE ANALOGUE WAY: During the campaigns last year, the word “digital” went viral, as those Twitter tweets

30 Geist 94 Fall 2014

anger, and I could distract her from a deep, private mourning. Thirty-five percent of the women had not survived. Fifty-five percent of the men in the adjacent camp died. Alette’s father had been beheaded.

Just behind the Mills campus was Oak Knoll Naval Hospital where Libby had been. Now it was filled with men in the final stages of rehabilitation, learning to use artificial limbs. Mills students were asked there as volunteers.

I went once or twice, but I had no idea how to deal with their bitterness, the pressure of their need to be reassured sexually. I was afraid of them and ashamed to be. I could not as easily dismiss them as the sexually confident, socially ambitious Mills students did, as “creeps” and “weirdos.”

Our own self-obsessed and sheltered life in that oasis of beauty and luxury seemed to me peculiar and unreal. I took as many weekends as I was allowed to visit my grandmother and, therefore, Ann. The baby was born shortly after I arrived at college and named Carol after Ann’s favourite sister. When I was with them, I shared Ann’s preoccupation with her.

In a way I didn’t much think about, Carol seemed somehow mine as well.

At her christening, however, I listened with some dismay at my duties as her godmother concerning her spiritual life.

Among the seniors, there were others like Alette announcing engagements, planning weddings. Most of them were also working hard to prepare for comprehensive exams and, if they were music majors, proficiency concerts. My corner room faced the music building. Perhaps some of the confusion of my own preparations had to do with nightly listening to the sounds from practice rooms: harpsichord, flute, piano, harp, voice.

The seniors had time, too, for parties: receptions after concerts, major dinners with each faculty, engagement parties, balls. Sometimes I was included, but often I felt like a wardrobe mistress backstage, preparing all those attractive young women for their parts in a public show which had nothing to do with me. I did not usually mind.

As I had in high school, I invented a male figure for myself, this time called Sandy rather than David, far away not in the war but in New York. I received enough letters from Ann, addressed in her bold, androgynous hand, to make my story credible and excuse me my weekends without dates. The few details

I offered about him, that he lived in a basement apartment two blocks from the Empire State Building and was an artist, were facts about Ann. Perhaps I should have invented him near at hand for Ann who still pressed me toward a required initiation into heterosexual life. I resisted on moral grounds, but, in fact, I had no gift or taste for men, except as friends.

Never having technically made love with Ann, thinking of her always as Henry’s wife and now Carol’s mother, I had no concept of being faithful to her, but I was both too preoccupied with her and too uncertain that anyone else would understand those feelings to wish any sort of intimacy. 

Tea Has Been PAU L V E R M E E R S C H

From Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something. Published by ECW Press in 2014. Paul Vermeersch is a poet, editor and teacher. His work has been a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the K.M. Hunter Artist Award and the Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

Filter Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” through several random languages in free translation software, and then back into English.

Call it “Tea Has Been.”

Twice, leaving the yellow tree, I’m sorry, I cannot move.

And to the passenger, long will I stay for a while Searching For where a band can keep weed After the concert, with the excdeption of Some necessities, and it cannot be That this is grass, and it’s all used up.

Not That this isn’t exactly the same thing and the price is too, And in the morning also, and The leaves are.

Oh, I kept the first day once!

When you know how to do it, I’ll be back, no doubt about it.

I say this with a sigh, Forever after.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I have travelled a little.

What’s the difference. 

would say. IRONY AT ITS FINEST: Oil refinery threatened by rising sea levels, asks government to fix problems. MAN LAUNCHES KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN TO MAKE KENNY LOGGINS PLAY HIS LIVING ROOM: Continuing

Kickstarter’s slow evolution into an entirely irony-based enterprise, a man named Erick Sanchez has launched a crowdsourcing campaign

Findings 31

The Best Gay

Phototeria

V I V E K S H R AYA

M E AG S F I T ZG E R A L D

From She of the Mountains.

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

T

he first time he said the words aloud, I think I’m gay, he ducked, expecting retribution from his brother or the ceiling or the walls around them.

Oh. That’s cool, Shanth said.

It is? He looked up.

I mean, you’re my brother. I love you. It doesn’t change anything.

It doesn’t?

It just means now you can tell me if my butt looks good in jeans.

After telling his brother, each time he said I’m gay it felt a little easier. He found that all of the characteristics that had set him apart from the other boys were conveniently explained and compartmentalized under I’M GAY Tori Amos fan/Watches Beverly Hills, 90210/Wears eyeliner/Shops at The Gap/Likes to cook/Adores Mom/Has mostly female friends/ Sings all the time No justification necessary. Just a simple I’m gay. There wasn’t much more that anyone wanted to say or do to him once he used their language.

When he told Sophie Reinhart, I’m gay, she squealed as though she had unwrapped her dream present on her birthday, and said he had to meet her friend, The Only Other Gay in Edmonton.

You will have so much in common!

The Only Other Gay loved being

gay. The Only Other Gay had his own apartment and his own gay boyfriend and a stack of gay jeans that hit the ceiling. This made him feel even more self-conscious about his single pair of Levi’s. Orange Tabs. Social suicide.

The Only Other Gay knew everything about being gay. Conversation generally centred around words like

top, bottom, cut, uncut and questions like Who does your hair? and What is your favourite Madonna CD? He found out that he was a bottom because of his slender build and feminine features and would get used to having penises up his bum even if the thought terrified him.

He wondered how gay he could really be when he couldn’t relate to anything

to have Kenny Loggins play his living room. GQ KILLS IRONY AS TONY BLAIR WINS PHILANTHROPIST OF THE YEAR: Satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, said Tom Lehrer. Now irony has followed it to the grave. BOTTLED WATER IRONY: Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There’s a good chance that your water comes

32 Geist 94 Fall 2014

From Photobooth: A Biography. Published by Conundrum Press, 2014. Meags Fitzgerald is a Montreal artist and storyteller. Photobooth is her first graphic novel.

he was learning about his supposed self. For instance, what did circumcision have to do with being gay?

He also learned that a gay with no community is a lonely gay. This had to be true because he often felt incredibly lonely, even for friendship. Community meant going to The Only Local Gay Bar every Saturday night, where

apparently, even more gays existed.

It wasn’t until he went to The Only Local Gay Bar with The Only Other Gay and watched as head after head turned and eye after eye stared at his new friend that he understood exactly why The Only Other Gay loved being gay. This place was the exact opposite of the world outside the bar—here it

was possible to be liked.

Since he had been given the impression that The Only Local Gay Bar was exclusively for men, he was surprised to see women there.

She is pretty … I kind of want to talk to her, he said.

About what? Where her shoes are from? The Only Other Gay snapped.

Do you think she likes boys? he asked, ignoring The Only Other Gay’s sarcasm.

The Only Other Gay laughed.

Honey, we all liked girls at one point. But the Bi Highway always leads to Gaytown.

Perhaps The Only Other Gay, who was clearly an expert on Gaytown, was right. He never mentioned women again. Instead, he focused on becoming the best gay he could be: his T-shirts got tighter and brighter, and he hoped that he too could one day command the same approval The Only Other Gay received.

Lately, though, something was happening inside his body, despite the I’m gay. He didn’t immediately recognize it as attraction because transitioning from you’re gay into I’m gay had also allowed him to stop having to think about, question, and sometimes be ashamed of his desires. I’m gay simplified them, reminding him that he desired boys and could wholeheartedly trust his renewed centralized hardening as The Measuring Stick.

But his body walked a bit faster every morning, the closer he got to work, hoping that the office would be empty so he could enjoy a private, deep inhale when he was welcomed by the lingering citrus scent of her perfume. 

from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record. BATTLE OVER DOLLAR STORES ERUPTS WITH IRONY: There’s a dollar store at the end of the street on which I live. I sometimes shop there.

LABOR DAY IRONY: THE ONES THAT HAVE TO WORK: Grover

Cleveland established Labor Day as an official holiday in 1894 to recognize the

Findings 33

Sackcloth Missionaries E A R L E B I R N E Y A N D A L P U R DY

From We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987. Edited by Nicholas Bradley and published by Harbour Publishing in 2014. Earle Birney and Al Purdy were two of Canada’s best-known and influential poets. Nicholas Bradley has published numerous critical essays and reviews. He lives in Victoria.

October 5, 1982 Dear Earle: Greeting. Yeah, sorry we never got to talk. I had the GG’s aides de camp at my table on accounta not enough Purdy subscribers. I drank fast to get the uniforms blurry.

What’s this record stuff? You now a recording artist?

Yeah, Peter [Trower] phoned some time back, and I said (he in B.C.) come down. Didn’t even know he was east.

I’m writing little besides autobio stuff. Got to 50,000 words and bogged down.

What do I say, talk about, etc?

Some two or three poems that seem worthwhile in last few months. Never get another book at that pace. And if I’m not writing stuff I think “decent” then I get depressed at myself. So writing is a kinda drug.

You live your life doing it, and the withdrawal symptoms are terrible.

I didn’t have dinner clothes, so my clothes were what they were. What’ll I do at the Order of Can. investiture on the 20th? Rent clothes? Seems too much. Met Jim Houston before the Tor. shindig, and he rented clothes.

Luv to both of you, and do get a car and come down, —Al October 15, 1982 Dear Al Don’t rent, don’t worry about Jim Whoever, don’t streak, just wear whatever you’re wearing, & so uphold the uniqueness of Poets—I resisted all attempts by Aide de Camp followers & wore my only matching coat & pants (dark & 10 years old)—at my shindig there was an Albertan cowboy in chaps & Stetson, & a missionary in sackcloth. Only poetaster finks wear monkey suits & medals—be Al Purdy for christ’s sake.

N atural B orn L eaders A list of non-human electoral candidates: • Tuxedo Stan; cat; 2012 Halifax mayor; disqualified due to lack of birth certificate • Boston Curtis (R-WA); brown mule, 1938 precinct seat; elected 52–0 • Cacareco; rhinoceros; 1958 São Paulo city council; disqualified

• Pulvapies; foot powder; 1967 Picoazá, Ecuador mayor; won a majority • Bosco the Dog; black LabradorRottweiler mix; 1981–1994 Sunol, CA, mayor; elected • Stubbs; cat; 1997 Talkeetna, AK, mayor; elected • Dustin; turkey; 1997 Republic of Ireland presidential election; disqualified

October 21, 1982 Dear Earle, Thanks much for record. You did three of em? I hope they sell really well. Should’ve had your picture.

Just got back from Ottawa. Wore black jacket and charcoal pants, and bought a pair of black shoes for 25 cents from a thrift shop. I was not the most fashionably attired person present. However, I saw no cowboys nor sackcloth missionaries.

Talked with Trudeau a coupla minutes, ate a lotta good food, and drank some good wine. I wore no medals.

Think they’re a bit ostentatious, especially if you don’t have very many like me. I would say my jacket was much over ten years old.

Anyway, the investiture part was a dull and boring period.

I bought a book of erotic art that would make a dildo wilt.

We snuck out today (Eurithe was there too) into whimpering rain. Glad to be gone. And back to the goddam autobio, which sticks me in middle age and unable to grow old by more than a page at a time.

Oh yes, also talked with the guy—a lieutenant in the navy who’s also an aide de camp—who printed Layton’s unpublished poems in Valley Editions. I haven’t read them anyway.

Man named Thomas, yclept David.

(Beautiful word, yclept!)

Take care of yourself (and Wailan in some fashion) —Al

working class of America—while some people are traveling home or shopping for labor day deals—many people have to ironically work during this holiday. HOW NUMBERS HELP US SPOT METAPHORS AND IRONY:

34 Geist 94 Fall 2014

“Human communication,” he says, “is rife with nonliteral language that includes metaphor, irony, and hyperbole.” 10 MORE PHOTOS

Occam’s Depilatory FORD PIER

From a 7" single by the band Strength of Materials on the Kingfisher Bluez label. Ford Pier is a musician who has played on his own and with his bands, the Vengeance Trio and Strength of Materials, as well as with Veda Hille, the Rheostatics, DOA, Neko Case and many others. He lives in Vancouver.

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

I do.

Things aren’t better than the things that they replace just because they’re new Our standards are our standards because they’re deeply felt and we owe it to our standards that they should be upheld Or what’s the point in having standards for?

The

Crad Kilodney Literary Foundation 797

These fellas went to work on me on changes they would like to see but I remained unmoved Things aren’t an improvement just because they’ve been improved Dude said, “Check it out, this shit’ll get you loaded faster than the fastball of Ryan exploded!”

But I don’t get that wasted anymore It doesn’t hold the appeal that it did before Oblivion taught me everything it can Well, anyway, it tried but I was usually too preoccupied Making a friend or formulating a plan and some of them were good, and some of them were fun Every day I come up with at least one great idea, though telling you so wasn’t necessarily one So now I’ve got a Facebook page Like every other twat my age And I’m complicit in what I once despised And by that, I feel victimized And I hear the Smashing Pumpkins might bury the hatchet, reunite Is that why our grandfathers went to war?

The sole purpose of the foundation is the preservation and promotion of the literature of Crad Kilodney.

Who gives a fuck about a split infinitive?

I most certainly do. 

797 cradkilodney.com

SIZZLING WITH IRONY: CIENCY: A

It’s like a “no smoking” sign on your cigarette break in Hell. URBAN DICTIONARY: IRONY DEFI-

common deficiency in which the brain cannot process humor that contains irony.

 Findings 35

MARKETPLACE

THE DODGEM DERBY

Jill Mandrake

For this and other fine titles, contact Ernest Hekkanen at: New Orphic Publishers 706 Mill Street Nelson, BC V1L 4S5 Copies still available at the discount price of $10 (including postage & handling)

$ 10

M O U T H S

O F

B A B E S

The Wise Baby DE IRDRE DO RE

Did the baby understand? Not just ‘go potty’ or ‘bad boy’ but circular concepts of loss and betrayal and identity and love?

I

was lying in bed, running a low-grade stress-induced fever, copying passages into my notebook from Heidegger’s Being and Time, when someone knocked at my door. A tall woman with pale skin stood there with a baby stuffed into a Snugli on her front. Her hair hung down in a thick brown braid that reached her waist, and she wore a pair of baggy

jeans, a grey wool Stanfield and thick-soled worn hiking boots. I recognized her as the woman who had moved into the unit next to mine a few months back. There were six of these units in a row, sharing one long, leaky roof, each with a small yard separated from the others by a rotting wooden fence. The baby’s arms were squeezed into the sling against his body and his face was covered in a bright red crusty rash.

Hi. Is Darryl home? she said.

I said, No. A few nights before, after I got off shift, I had come home and found Darryl lying on the couch, smoking a joint. I took off my shoes and threw my clothes into the washing machine. I am a philosophy student-slash-server.

He is an artist-slash-server and was my boyfriend for four years. He painted large female nudes in oil and hoped to get noticed one day.

Busy? Darryl asked.

Slammed, I said. If I wash my shirt now, do you think you can iron it for me in the morning? I really really need to sleep in.

Darryl said, Vivian? Listen up.

He had two things to tell me. One, that his art was the most important thing in his life. And two, more important even than his art, he might be gay. I laughed. I said, Oh great, I’m thirty-three years old, ready to start my life and I’m stuck with a boyfriend who is having a heterosexual meltdown.

Being gay is one thing. Not being gay is one thing. But not knowing, that’s something else.

I told him, Do me a favour, go sort yourself out somewhere else.

The next morning he moved up the mountain to his parents’ condo in Whistler, to paint, wait on tables, snowboard and sort himself out, somewhere else.

I didn’t mention any of this to the woman on my doorstep, who introduced herself as Deb and said she had come

to return a stamp she had borrowed from Darryl.

She put her hand in her pocket and kept it there. After a moment I said, Anyway, I’m Vivian, nice to finally meet you.

She smiled and said, And this is Caro.

Caro and I made eye contact.

Hi Caro, I said. Caro farted.

Oh, he’s having a poo, Deb said.

I started thinking about the root of ontological and the root of ontical and wondering how long I could let Darryl suffer before I phoned and invited him back. Thing was I was writing a paper on Heidegger’s Dasein for my PhD and found that having Darryl gone was actually a blessing.

I had a lot more time to concentrate and the deadline for this preliminary paper was coming up quickly. I was desperate to nail a unique perspective, something that hadn’t been done before, and it was starting to look like everything had been done before.

Not to mention I was on shift at the Copper House six nights this week.

Deb said her husband, Johnny Rain, was having a caffeine withdrawal fit and could she borrow some coffee. She told me she had met Johnny in Campbell River a couple years before; she was fresh off the fishing boat and he was getting headshots done. Now they were married. With a kid. She told me her husband was the guy in the latest beer commercial and asked me if I’d ever seen it. I told her I didn’t have a TV. She said, He’s the guy at the bar who’s drinking the wrong beer.

The Wise Baby 37

I remembered then that I’d seen the commercial during an après-ski up at the mountain last season with Darryl. In the commercial, Johnny Rain is standing at the bar, holding his beer in the air in a beckoning way, his hair combed down flat, gelled and parted neatly on the side. He looks good but dorky, and when the beautiful blonde walks by, giving him a look, we see that she is actually looking at the man behind him.

I dumped a half-cup of coffee beans into the grinder and pulsed them. The baby jerked.

Drip or French press, I yelled.

Deb yelled, Drip.

I handed her a baggie of freshly ground coffee and the baby curled his tongue out of his mouth, then pulled it back.

Little boy? I asked. I tried not to notice the raging war zone on his face.

Yep, all boy, Deb said. Caro means dear in Spanish.

As in expensive? I asked.

That too, she said.

You’re not Spanish, I guessed.

Actually, I’m a Newfoundlander, Deb said.

The expensive baby was staring at my hair, which I was absentmindedly twirling.

He loves blondes, Deb said.

I stopped twirling.

Your baby, I said. Ummm, it looks like his arms are trapped.

Yeah I know, she said. I’ve got his sleeves pinned to his sleeper so he doesn’t scratch.

Oh. Cute kid, I said.

Yeah, you should see his little pecker. He’s gonna be quite the lady-killer.

When I phoned Darryl later at his parents’ condo a guy answered and I hung up. When I phoned back, there was no answer.

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself... And only that which is unmeaning can be absurd.

The next day Deb phoned. It’s on! It’s on!

She was talking about the beer commercial. I told her again I had no TV. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof of the latter.

I put Heidegger down, I couldn’t concentrate.

Out in front of the units was a communal play area, a few benches, shrubs, a swing set, a slide.

As far as I knew Caro was the only child in the development.

Once I’d looked out and seen Johnny lounging on the bench with his shirt off, leaning back 38 Geist 94 Fall 2014

with his arms behind his head, soaking up the sun.

The baby was tied into a swing, back and forth, a ridiculous grin on his face. Deb was licking Johnny’s armpit. Sometimes we could hear them yelling. Asshole, bitch. They really had the hots for each other.

Deb later told me that Johnny insisted that they put Caro in the teepee when they were fighting or loving or doing both. The teepee took up their entire yard. She told me that when she was pregnant she used to lie down in the teepee and listen to Bob Dylan.

I was deep into One’s state-of-mind is therefore based on thrownness when Deb knocked on the door again.

She had Caro on her hip and his face was buried in her hair, which was braid-free and hanging loose like a wild animal’s, almost to her waist.

Caro was biting it and twisting it and generally smothering himself in its tangles, sucking at it as if it held the answers to all the questions of life.

Deb: Sorry, sorry to bother you again. I lost my hairbrush. Do you have one? Johnny usually brushes it for me, but he’s gone for an audition.

Johnny was trying to break into the film scene. So far he had landed the one commercial.

When he wasn’t acting, he was window washing. I handed her the brush.

Me: Is Johnny Rain his real name or stage name?

Deb: Real name. He’s Native. Can’t you tell?

Me: I wasn’t sure, I thought he might be Greek or Hawaiian or something. Squamish Nation?

Deb: Yeah. Three-fifths.

Me: Three-fifths? How can he be three-fifths?

Deb: What are you, the fraction police?

Then she shifted gears. Vivian, do you think he’s hot?

Me: Well, he’s pretty hot. I mean, not my kind of hot, but I can see where Caro gets his looks.

Deb: Oh really? Well just so you know, Caro is not his baby.

Me: You kidding me? He’s a carbon copy of him.

Deb: Look. If I say he’s not Johnny’s baby, then he’s not Johnny’s baby.

Then she said: It’s just that, my first kid, I lost him. Me and Iggy just come in from eight days of trolling Seymour Narrows, fighting like cats and dogs and the worst haul we’d had in three years and the weather just sick and Isaac had this nasty diarrhea the whole time and I was bitchin’ about the bilge pump and he was bitchin’ about the dirty

Pampers and throwing them overboard and I smacked him and said he was polluting the harbour and he said I don’t need this shit and he picked up Isaac—he was two years old—and got back in the boat and headed north to the Charlottes and I ain’t seen him since. Which would have been just right except he took my baby. So I figured out then that the only way to make sure I never lose another is to keep certain factoids to myself. Like who’s your daddy, eh? Who’s your daddy, Caro? It drives Johnny nuts, but that’s the way it is.

Then Deb said, Would you mind brushing it for me?

I began brushing Deb’s hair. Starting at the bottom, pulling the tangles. Her hair was stubborn, electric and snarled.

Deb: Don’t get the wrong idea but when Johnny does it, it really turns us on.

Johnny came round the next day to use the phone and sat Caro on the front doorstep. I asked him how Caro was doing.

Johnny: Little better today. I got him smeared up with Vaseline. Deborah’s decided not to take him to work anymore, she thinks he’s allergic to dog hair.

Two weeks earlier Deb had landed a job at Pet Fabulous in the mall, shearing and brushing dogs while Caro played with a doggie toy in an empty crate.

Caro’s face looked like a slice of watermelon, glistening with petroleum jelly. He lit up when Darryl’s cat jumped off the couch and pranced up to him. You could tell that Caro really really really wanted to touch the cat but he was in his usual straitjacket. His struggle was fruitless and unnerving. He kept crashing over on his side as he reached with his head. Darryl and I had talked about having kids, but we weren’t ready. Caro rubbed his bruised forehead on Johnny’s pant leg.

Outside it was raining like a bastard. In three hours I had to be at work. I had seven days and four thousand words to go. I glanced at my notes.

Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its own-most being thrown.

Johnny said there wasn’t much window washing now that it was turning cold and he never got a callback on the Cialis audition. He was holding an apple up to Caro’s mouth letting Caro gnaw away on it. We talked about the strata fees and the roof. Can I borrow a skirt?

Oh man, I thought, not him too.

He scowled, I mean for Deb. It’s our first

anniversary and she’s got shit for clothes and I want to take her out someplace nice.

The only thing I had that might remotely fit was a stretchy teal blue knit. She was at least thirty pounds heavier than me. Maybe more. I sighed and handed it over.

As they were leaving, Johnny was intoning Skwxwú7mesh-ulh at Caro, encouraging him to repeat it. Ain’t this kid something, he said.

I had time for one more chapter. Dasein is never simply what it presently is, but is “existentially that which it is not yet.”

When the day came I should have expected

I WAS BITCHIN’ ABOUT THE BILGE PUMP AND HE WAS BITCHIN’ ABOUT THE DIRTY PAMPERS AND THROWING THEM OVERBOARD that the restaurant they would pick to celebrate in would be mine. They had married on Halloween and this anniversary night the place was packed and half the diners were in costume. My hair was sprayed gold and spread in huge rays around my head. I was the Tiger-Sun. I scrambled to find them a table and a high chair.

Johnny was wearing a T-shirt that read No Olympics on Stolen Native Land and he had his hair done in the same way as in the commercial, flat, gelled and neatly parted to the side. He ordered the boring beer. Deb was in my long teal knit skirt—stretching out the elastic waistband and making lumps in the ass—and a floral blouse that really didn’t match. Caro was dressed as a ghoul. His eyes were circled in black and he had long red wounds or tear marks painted on his face. I couldn’t tell if the blood was real or fake.

Deb whispered, I know, it scares me too, but it was Caro’s own idea, I wanted him to be a baby vampire.

His sleeves were firmly pinned to his tattered ghoul costume.

When he started fussing, squirming in the high chair, the other diners started to notice, and muttered amongst themselves. The manager asked me The Wise Baby 39

if I knew those people. When I said, Yes, slightly, she said, Deal with it. I took their beers to the table and said, Caro’s rash looks a little better.

Deb sighed, Oh, it comes and goes.

Does he still scratch?

Of course not. He can’t.

They studied the menu and ordered sweet potato fries, saying they weren’t very hungry. I made the kitchen double-size them on my tab and throw in two salads.

Then a party of eight showed up, everybody in costume, couple of old white people wearing fake

THE COLD FRIES, THE FAKE BLOOD, THE OLD PEOPLE IN THEIR INDIAN SUITS, HEIDEGGER Indian suits, complete with feathers in the headband and beads and faux leather, and Johnny was ready to bust right out of his skin at this point.

By the time I got them seated, Deb and Johnny had both gone to the washroom and left the tiny bloody ghoul howling, unable to scratch himself, and I couldn’t put food down in front of empty seats and when they came back, Johnny’s hair looking even more like the losing end of a beer commercial than before and Deb with flushed cheeks, the super-sized fries were half cold. Deb sent them back to the kitchen for reheating.

The next morning Deb knocked on my door at eight. Vivian? Do you have any extra Tampax?

I freaked.

Don’t you ever go shopping?

I told her to look in the bathroom and lay down again.

Deb stood stock still for a second then spun around and left. Caro glared at me from the Snugli on her back.

When I knocked at their door ten minutes later, with a box of Tampax in my hand, Deb slipped out into the hallway. Inside her place were empty Mason jars, a taxidermied pygmy owl, a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. She picked up Caro and set him on the boot rack.

Then she took the Tampax, opened the door and tossed it inside.

40 Geist 94 Fall 2014

She put her hands over Caro’s ears and said, I wish I’d never had this baby. I wish I could go back to the ocean and haul fish.

I said, Come on Deb, that’s crazy.

Deb said, Not so loud, he’ll hear you.

I whispered, That’s crazy.

She said, It’s not crazy, it’s true.

I said, Well why not let Johnny Rain have him, then? Then you could do what you want.

Deb said, I didn’t say I wanted to give him up, I said I wish I never had him. There’s a difference.

You’re the philosopher, you should know that.

I asked her if she ever expected to get custody of Isaac again and she said, Who? Then she said, Oh, Isaac. A long pause and in that pause Caro threw up, a volcanic milky eruption.

While she cleaned herself and the baby she said, Isaac wasn’t mine. I lied.

Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself in itself as something that it is not.

I went to bed with Heidegger.

Or still, something good which looks like, but “in actuality” is not. Φάινόμενον άγαθόν.

It was three o’clock in the morning. A full moon outside.

How the worldly character of the environment announces itself in entities within the world.

I could see the shadow of their teepee in my yard.

The manifest. That which shows itself in itself. Φάινόμενον. Phenomenon.

It was so wrong, I mean, nice, but wrong. It was a cliché. The Squamish Natives didn’t use teepees, they built longhouses.

And in my dream Deb said, What are you, the teepee police?

I said, But why? Why do you lie to Johnny?

She said, Because I want him to be with me because of how we feel and who we are and not because we feel obliged to love.

The next day Deb needed to borrow five hangers.

Caro was not in her arms. Deb without Caro looked less grounded, less sure of herself. Even I felt unmoored.

Where’s the baby? I asked.

With Johnny Rain, Deb said. He took him to the barber’s for a haircut.

The barber’s? He’s eight months old. He doesn’t even have hair.

Johnny needed to do some faux father-son

bonding. They’ll never come back. Or they’ll return for the wrong reasons.

I pulled a couple of Darryl’s crisp white serving shirts off two hangers and dropped them on the closet floor. I handed Deb five wire hangers.

How’s the essay coming? Deb asked.

Slowly.

Read me something.

I started reading. “Appearing is a not-­ showing-itself—” Deb interrupted. So did you tell Johnny?

Tell Johnny what?

You know, that Caro really is his baby.

Deb was squinting at me, searching my face.

It’s none of my business, I said.

Then she asked if I had a pair of scissors. I found some heavy-duty shears. She was holding her thick braid in her hand.

She said, I want you to cut this off.

But why?

Because I need to know if Johnny loves me only for my hair.

Nobody loves someone because of hair, I said.

And even if he does, at least he loves you. You don’t test love, Deb, you don’t question it.

She let the braid drop. She sighed. I better not. Last time I trimmed my hair Caro was inconsolable.

Deb told me that Caro understood everything. I said, don’t be paranoid, he’s only a baby.

But Caro seemed to be staring out the window, toward the teepee, in such a self-conscious way that I felt a chill run down my neck. Did he understand? I mean, not just phrases like go potty or bad boy but concepts, circular concepts of loss and betrayal and identity and love?

We decided to test him.

I said, Dog. Caro didn’t react at all.

Deb said, That’s insulting, try something harder.

I said, Global warming.

Caro looked at me.

I continued. Is climate change a result of carbon emissions caused by human intervention or a naturally recurring phenomenon based on sunspots and earth tilt?

Caro yawned and closed his eyes.

Deb put her hands over his ears. She whispered, I need to borrow your car.

I handed her my car keys.

She whispered, It’s Caro’s eight-months birthday, I want to get him a xylophone.

But can he play with it? I asked. I mean with his arms pinned.

Probably not, she said sadly.

He’s sleeping, I whispered. Why are we whispering?

He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending, she whispered.

Caro snored then, a small delicate snore. His mouth dropped open and a bit of dribble slipped down to his chin. Deb swooped it up with her thumb and put it in her mouth. Besides I have to go to the doctor. I think I might be pregnant.

Caro yelped. His eyes flew open and darted around madly, looking for something to soothe him, and he finally focused on one of Darryl’s large oil female nudes, very buxom. He immediately relaxed, closed his eyes and apparently fell asleep. But he wasn’t kidding anybody anymore.

He dreams about things you can’t even imagine, Deb said.

What kind of things? I asked.

A lot of times I think he dreams that he’s a rabbit.

Sure enough Caro’s nose started to twitch, and Deb covered his ears and said, I told you he was faking.

I asked if he always struggled in his restraints and she said, Sometimes he’s still, but I know he’s only trying to trick me into believing he won’t scratch. Regular babies can’t feel pain you know, Deb said.

I wasn’t so sure.

I mean they feel it but they don’t know where it’s coming from. But Caro knows. He knows exactly where it’s coming from.

Caro sneezed.

He’s coming down with something, Deb said.

I gotta get him in bed and put some onions in his socks to draw the fever.

I went to the cupboard. Is one enough? I asked.

Sure, she said and left with my car keys and one onion.

I phoned Darryl. I really needed to unload.

The anniversary dinner, the cold fries, the fake blood, Johnny confronting the old people in their Indian suits, Heidegger, the onion. I was gonna tell Darryl I was ready for him to come home. I knew we could work it out, I missed him a lot. A lot, lot. He told me he was going out with Melanie, the bartender at Milestones.

That night I cried my eyes out, and the next and the next. I needed twenty minutes of teabags and The Wise Baby 41

ice cubes on my eyes before I could go to work.

I thought about suicide. I thought about Europe.

I thought about razors and pills and lighthouses in New Brunswick. I thought about climbing up the Angel Crest trail to the top of the Chief and jumping off. I wrote imaginary notes to Darryl: Dear Darryl, Go fuck yourself. I thought about all those nights he had stayed up late to cook pad Thai for me because he knew how sick I was of eating fried sweet potatoes at the restaurant.

Deb called to tell me the commercial was on.

I hung up on her. I was getting a fever. I called Deb back and left a message, Where’s my fucking onion? I felt hot and sweaty. My unit was so damp the walls leaked. A mushroom was growing in the corner of my rug.

I called in sick and the manager said, Oh don’t even come back. I emailed my prof for a deadline extension. He emailed back, R U serious?

Then one day Johnny Rain phoned and said he needed me to babysit. Deb was running late, grooming a spoiled shih tzu, and he was going to an anti-Olympics demonstration. I told him I was in no condition to babysit. He said he’d wash my windows in payment. I said, for chrissake I wouldn’t charge you for it, I’m just saying I can’t.

I’m not reliable, I’m not safe to be around babies or sharp objects. He hung up.

I soaked in a burning hot bath. I cried and watched myself in the mirror, crying. I looked so good I couldn’t figure it out. I hacked my hair off with the shears. I stuffed it all into a manila envelope and addressed it to Darryl. I wrote a note that said, here’s a souvenir, Asshole. Love, Vivian. I glanced over at Heidegger lying open on my desk. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Beingwith. Then the light dimmed. I looked up to see Johnny Rain outside my window, standing on the top rung of an aluminum ladder, smearing sudsy water in a looping pattern on the pane. Caro was strapped on his back in a baby carrier, blinking at me through the smudged wet glass.

When I stepped outside later, on my front step were a box of Tampax with four missing, three quarters of an onion, my can opener, five hangers, my car keys, my skirt, my hairbrush. Even one fifty-nine-cent stamp.

Johnny Rain was sitting on his bike in the street, revving it. When he saw me, he took off.

In their apartment Caro was seated on the floor, surrounded by puzzles and hammers, things that popped and whistled and dinged and swung. His arms were pinned to his sleeper and his face looked 42 Geist 94 Fall 2014

like a topographical map of Russia in pink. The TV was on, playing a tape of the beer commercial.

Caro was staring at the commercial, watching his dad get passed over by the gorgeous babe because he was drinking the boring beer. Caro had a note pinned to his shirt that said, Vivian, there’s mashed avocado in the fridge for when I get hungry.

I laid Being and Time on the floor next to a pop-up Sesame Street.

I found the coffee I had lent Deb three weeks before, but no coffee maker. I sat on the floor next to Caro and watched the beer commercial, then rewound it and played it again. And again.

I told Caro about my plans to climb to the top of the Chief. I told him that cliffs were hard and air was thin and gravity was almighty. I explained to Caro that Darryl had semi-sorted out his sexuality and was now dating Melanie the bartender at Milestones. I told Caro how hard it was for me to even say her name out loud. I told Caro that it doesn’t matter what beer you drink, it will never help you get the right girl. I told him that his mother was working late at Pet Fabulous and as soon as he was big enough she’d take him fishing on the ocean. I told him he’d outgrow his rash. I told him that the question of the meaning of Being must be formulated. I told him that it was snowing on top of the mountain and what I wanted more than anything was to climb up the slope with my snowboard on my back and then stand at the top of fifteen hundred vertical metres and look away through the clouds to the Pacific in the distance and then slide and curl and bank down as fast and furious as I could until I was scared to high heaven and drenched in fine snow. I told him that Johnny Rain was his one true father. I told him Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. I told him fear has three aspects: what we are afraid of; fearing; why we are afraid.

I unpinned Caro’s arms.

When Deb came home she looked at Caro and said, Oh, you told him.

She started kissing Caro’s wounded face and his eyes closed in feigned sleep or bliss, and when she lifted her head away from him and turned to me her lips were bright and vivid with his blood, as if she had smeared them with lipstick, as if she were going somewhere.

Deirdre Dore writes short fiction, poetry and plays. She won a Western Magazine Award in 2011 for her short fiction piece “Sappers Bridge.” She lives in Nakusp, BC.

44 Geist 94 Fall 2014

C A M P

S I G H T I N G S

Der Indianer photos by jen osborne

“I

ndian hobbyism”—the practice of imitating the culture and lifestyle of North American aboriginal groups—became a movement in Germany in the late nineteenth century. It was born of the literature of Karl May, whose Wild West novels about Old Shatterhand, a German pioneer, and Winnetou, an Apache chief, were the most popular stories of the time, and of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West vaudeville show, which played to thirty thousand people a day during its European tour.

The Wild West show featured dramatizations of real events, as imagined by the show’s organizers, in which Indians attacked stagecoaches, battled US troops, tortured white prisoners and always, in the end, were defeated by Buffalo Bill and his cowboys. Indian characters were usually played by aboriginal actors, most of whom were paid, a few of whom were forced to participate in lieu of jail time, and some of whom were very famous at the time, including Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Gabriel Dumont, Black Elk and Chief Joseph.

The first Indian hobby club was formed in Germany in 1896. Clubs proliferated in the 1920s and spread to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Russia, Bulgaria and other European countries; clubs are active in most countries in Europe and North America. In Germany alone, Indian hobby clubs have a membership of forty thousand participants, who call themselves Indianer.

When Jen Osborne, whose photographs are displayed here, moved from Vancouver to Berlin a few years ago, she began to look into the Indianer movement. She learned that Indianer organize retreats where they set Der Indianer 45

up teepees and dress in the ancestral garb of aboriginal groups of their choosing—usually Plains Indian groups, though younger Indianer now tend to adopt the look of Woodland groups—and for a few days or a few weeks live the way they imagine aboriginal people lived several hundred years ago. Jen Osborne set out to photograph the Indianer camps, keeping in mind the question: Is imitation the highest form of flattery?

The first time Jen Osborne visited a hobby camp she wore an improvised costume of moccasins and a cut-up leather dress; the hobbyists laughed at her and then outfitted her in a calico dress in the “Plains Indian” style. Over the next three years, Osborne attended a dozen camps in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Germany and the Czech Republic. She found that the German Indianer were knowledgeable in the history and languages of the aboriginal groups they imitated and they seemed interested in making their camps appear authentic, though she did encounter Indianer munching on chips and chocolate bars in their teepees. Of all the Indianer that Jen Osborne encountered, the Czech seemed the most concerned with the cultural accuracy of their clothing, teepees and artefacts; in fact, Czech Indianer are known to be some of the most dedicated imitators of North American aboriginal culture. The Hungarian Indianer were more concerned with ceremonies and spiritual practice. Their camp was held on a massive chunk of woodland, with “nations” spread out in different camps: the “Blackfoot” camp lay a forty-five-minute walk from the “Crow” camp, farther beyond were the “Pawnee” and “Assiniboine” camps; the “nations” battled each other using soft weapons. The Indianer camp in Poland was the smallest; the camp in Russia had little to do with Indian hobbyism—the campers mainly partied, many in their city clothes.

Some Indianer indicated to Osborne that they feel uneasy about what they are doing, for fear of being accused of cultural appropriation. And yet they persist. Many believe themselves to be protectors of traditional North American aboriginal culture and have criticized aboriginal people for not upholding the culture of their ancestors.

Some aboriginal writers consider the hobbyist movement trivializing, damaging, disgusting; others consider it misguided, strange 46 Geist 94 Fall 2014

and comical. In a 1990s documentary called If Only I Were Indian, three elders from Manitoba travel to a hobbyist camp in the Czech Republic. After the Czech hobbyists perform a ceremonial dance in honour of their guests, one of the elders suggests flying the dancers to Manitoba in order to teach them to dance properly. Another elder says, “I’ve never been so proud to be a Native Indian as I have been with these Czech Indians.”

—Michał Kozłowski

note on terminology: Aboriginal here refers to the original people of North America. The term First Nations is not widely used among aboriginal people outside of Canada.

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N A T I O N A L

O B S E S S I O N

Rinkside Intellectual ST E PHE N SM IT H

They fire at you from all directions, jab you with sticks, trip you up, knock you down—boy, this is real rough

H

ockey befuddled the French semiotician

Roland

Barthes

the first time he saw it in Mon-

treal in 1961. Hubert Aquin was making a documentary for the CBC, and Barthes was brought in to cogitate on the meanings of bullfights and bicycle races, and what makes us pursue pucks. He was confused by the offside rule, which to him “dominated” the game. Children who seemed to be fighting, he observed, were merely learning how to inhabit their country.

William Faulkner’s first game was Rangers and Canadiens at the old Madison Square Garden in 1955. Babe Ruth saw the same two teams play as early as 1926. He’d even played a bit before that, in Baltimore. And? Loved it. It looked hard and fast. In baseball, you knew where the ball was coming from. “Here,” he told a reporter at Madison Square in 1930, “they fire at you from all directions, jab you with sticks, trip you up, knock you down—boy, Rinkside Intellectual 53

this is real rough. Did you see that goalie get kicked in the face by a skate?” Still, if he tried it again, goal would be his preferred position. “But I’d play behind the net instead of in front of it.” Okay, great, Babe. Anything else? Just that fighting is, quote, apple pie to hockey. He wanted to mention that, too.

Faulkner can be excused for ignoring hockey in 1918.

That was the year he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was so new at the time that it wasn’t Royal yet, or formally called the Air Force. It was summer when he arrived in Toronto, and on into the fall he was busy with training, so there wouldn’t have been time for hockey even if they’d been playing. By November the war was over and Faulkner was demobilized, and while he was waiting to leave, a lot of the city was in quarantine, trying to avoid the Spanish flu, and anyway, that was a year of disarray for the fledgling NHL. Another Nobel Prize winner, Ernest Hemingway, is truly problematic, given how much he would have had to disfavour hockey to avoid it so entirely when he was in Toronto two years later. Hemingway was working as a reporter at the Toronto Star, where his good friends included Morley Callaghan and Greg Clark. Are you telling me they never took him to a St. Pats game at the Arena Gardens on Mutual Street, barely a mile’s walk from the Star’s offices on King Street West? This was in 1920 and into 1921, when the Ruthian Babe Dye was playing for the St. Pats, leading the league in scoring, and the defenceman Harry Cameron, about whom I knew nothing at all until I looked him up, was his teammate. The man who curved his shot, let the record show, before anyone was curving a shot. And Sprague Cleghorn! Sorry, but if you know anything about the man, you know that the exclamation mark is automatic. Apart from how great his name is to say aloud, Cleghorn! was one of hockey’s best players and also, truly, one of its worst.

Just the name in and of itself sounds like two hockey words, sprague cleghorn, maybe a serious though seldomcalled penalty, or else a medical condition occasioned by a stick hitting your skull. When you read about the man himself, many times it’s in association with words like melee and (truly a hockey adjective) fistic, and also the phrase he’d kick your balls off. Sentences that begin with Sprague Cleghorn sometimes go on to report that on February 1, he almost wiped out the Ottawa team single-handedly. A fearsome, fascinating character. I can’t believe that Hemingway could have resisted writing about him, if he’d seen him. Grace under pressure? The great Spanish bullfighter Manolete, whom Hemingway met and championed and hung around

54 Geist 94 Fall 2014

and wrote about in Death in the Afternoon—I’m sorry, no disrespect, but Hemingway would have had exactly no use for Manolete if he’d come across Cleghorn. All I’m saying is, if Hemingway had discovered Cleghorn! in Toronto, I think he would have stayed, and if he’d stayed, soon enough he would have run into Eddie Shore and the rest would be history, except that it isn’t. Since I can’t believe that Hemingway didn’t go to a hockey game, the alternative might be that he went and it left him cold. Hemingway saw hockey in Toronto and turned his back on it.

Faulkner had it almost as good. In January of 1955 he was commissioned to write a hockey essay for Sports Illustrated. Maybe you know it. Certainly it’s one of the most anthologized pieces of hockey prose, which isn’t surprising, given how rarely Nobel Prize winners write about hockey.

Looking at a hundred years of laureates leading up to Alice Munro, it may in fact be one of the unwritten Nobel codes that in order to be considered for recognition from Stockholm you have to have avoided the game entirely. Faulkner ignored the ban; of course, he already had his Nobel, and what were they going to do, grab it back?

“An Innocent at Rinkside” the essay is called. For all its anthologification, I’d never read it. I guess I expected big things, though if I’d thought about a bit more, I could have worked it out. If the result of Faulkner’s exposure to Rocket Richard and the rest of the powerful Habs of the 1950s had been enchantment—well, we’d all know that, wouldn’t we?

Faulkner would have hurried home bearing the seed for a hockey trilogy in which he’d chronicle the up-and-down exploits of the Yoknapatawpha Unvanquished, their changeable fortunes in the old Southern Broiler League, and that’s how hockey would have filled his last years before his death in 1962 with late-blooming joy. Faulkner’s eighth novel, Pylon, sounds like it should have some hockey in it (nope).

Same with The Sound and the Fury (zilch). Best of all, though, would have to be Go Down, Moses, which might be the greatest goalie novel never written, the story of a stand-up netminder grown weary of watching the low shots sneak by.

Whereas, in fact, nothing of the sort. If I was looking for a model of hockey disenthrallment, I found him in Faulkner.

His piece starts promisingly enough. “The vacant ice looked tired.” That’s not bad. Then the game starts and Faulkner gets the hell out of there. Unwilling to implicate himself, he hands the narrative to the third person: To the innocent, who had never seen it before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools.

Did you catch that? The dismissal followed by the sneer capped off with the kick? You’re still dealing with discorded when you hit the word that really hurts—inconsequent— and then he lays on bizarre. And he hasn’t even reached the insects yet. The weightless bugs. The bugs of no weight whose outlandish skitterings have no significance. And that pool of theirs, also? A brackish pool like that is nothing to be proud of.

There’s a specific hockey word for what Faulkner’s doing and here it is: deking. Because as soon as he swerves at you, right away he’s swerving the other way and then, before you can think too much, Faulkner’s gone around you. Forget about ugly Nature. Hockey speaks to him, it’s urgent and important. It’s a dizzying turnaround, but that’s what we like about hockey, isn’t it, one of its virtues. Actually, no. Faulkner starts to discern meaning, but just like that, it’s gone. He catches a pattern, a design “which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.” He doesn’t appear to mind too much. Easy come, easy go. This is the moment in which hockey loses Faulkner. Truth and importance are right before him, playing hard to get, but he doesn’t care to play.

Maurice Richard catches his notice. That’s the next thing. But only briefly the Rocket holds him and here’s what he says—get ready, because it’s his high note, the best thing Faulkner will write when it comes to hockey, all in a fragment of a sentence: Richard with something of the passionate glittering fatal alien quality of snakes.

And that’s it, done. Geoffrion gets a mention after this, and so does Edgar Laprade from the Rangers, but really, though Faulkner has another eight hundred words to work through, as far as the hockey goes, he’s lost, as they say, the plot. Doug Harvey is playing in this game, Jean Béliveau, Jacques Plante. These are Dick Irvin’s Canadiens Faulkner is watching, and later on in the year they’ll play the Detroit Red Wings for the Stanley Cup. I didn’t even mention Mosdell or Olmstead. Not that Faulkner does, either.

Who’s to blame? Faulkner himself might have claimed it was the cigarette smoke that ruined the game for him.

He certainly has a lot to say about this. His innocent eye follows the tiers of seats up and up until they vanish into the pall of tobacco smoke trapped by the roof. To Faulkner, the haze that fills the rink represents more than the promise of future cancers. While the hockey plays out in front of him, Faulkner worries about exhaust, not just of air but

of violence being stirred up on the ice. This is hard to follow, but after many re-readings I think I’ve got it. It seems that the attention of New York fans is, to Faulkner, as palpable as the smoke of their cigarettes. Faulkner sees it: “All that intent and tense watching,” he writes, blending with the smoke. The resulting brew rises to the roof and then, trapped, drops back down iceward where it comes in contact with—stay with me, now—the violence. The violence, which Faulkner identifies as a byproduct of hockey’s speed and motion, has nowhere to go. Without the roof, the smoke and the watching would float free, apparently. And this, as it turns out, is Faulkner’s whole point. He brings in sloops and lions and little Norwegian boys after this, and then (no kidding) there’s a beauty pageant and Miss Sewage Disposal takes a turn while the hockey fades out of focus.

I was worried that the blow that Faulkner was getting ready to deliver was that hockey isn’t worthy of anybody’s notice, let alone a Nobel laureate’s. But Faulkner was never interested in hockey, not in Toronto in 1918, and not in distractingly smoky New York thirty-odd years later. Sports Illustrated would have done better to hire T.S. Eliot, the 1948 Nobel winner in literature, or better yet, Sir Winston Churchill, who won in 1953.

It wasn’t all Faulkner’s fault, I guess. Hockey does have to shoulder some of the blame, the hometown Rangers in particular. They were awful that whole year, in fact.

Asked what he needed to help the team, coach Muzz Patrick replied, “A pistol.” They’d won just one of their previous eighteen games, and with the crowds dwindling away, management had come up with an answer: start the losing earlier. At Faulkner’s game, instead of 8:30, the puck fell at 7:00. It worked, too, in its way. Instead of their usual six or seven thousand, the Rangers that night had 13,607 smokers and intent watchers in the stands. With Montreal winning 7–1, the masses began to boo and stamp their feet—and laugh. It was a shame that so many youngsters were there, a columnist commented next day in the World Telegram. “Judged by what they saw,” he wrote, “they will not become the customers of tomorrow.”

From Puckstruck: Distracted, Delighted and Distressed

by Canada’s Hockey Obsession, by Stephen Smith. Published by Greystone Books in 2014. Stephen Smith has written for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Canadian Geographic, Outside, Quill & Quire, and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Toronto and at puckstruck.com. See more of his Geist work at geist.com.

Rinkside Intellectual 55

“Don’t get disgusted with your performance.”

—Johnny Bucyk “Refrain from smoking.”

—Toe Blake “Of course a fellow’s got to know how to skate a bit, and not mind being roughed a bit, you know. The rest comes with practice.”

—Ralph Henry Barbour, Guarding His Goal (1917) “Let’s face it, you’ll never be a good hockey player unless you are a good skater.” —Ken Hodge “You can’t take any fudge from anybody and be a hockey player in Canada.”

—Derek Sanderson “In Canada, it is customary to eat a good thick steak about 3½ hours before the game.” —Doc Brodrick “Do not listen to remarks from the spectators. It is a habit, particularly at the general admission end of the rinks, to call all kinds of things at the goalkeeper and he cannot listen to them and keep his mind on the game.”

—Percy LeSueur “I have a theory that a goal-tender ought to have red hair.”

—Ralph Henry Barbour, Guarding His Goal (1917) “The most valuable of the backhand shots is the flip.” —Bobby Hull “You’ve got to cheat on face-offs because it’s too difficult to win them fair and square.” —Derek Sanderson

56 Geist 94 Fall 2014

“Boys—hockey is a ‘He-Man’s’ game, and my long association with this fastest game in the world has shown me that a really great hockey player is a real man from head to heels.” —Tommy Gorman “The man with eyes for nothing but the puck will never be a high-class hockey player.” —Mervyn (Red) Dutton “I never plan how I’m going to shoot when I go in on a goaler. I just get in there as fast as I can and look for a spot.”

—Maurice Richard “A priest once told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said that you can have two of the following three things —hockey, social life and education. You must have an education—so that leaves a choice between a social life or hockey.”

—Gordie Howe “I place emphasis on shoulder pads.

Some players seem to think they can get along without them but that’s foolish.

The better the shoulder pads the more confidence you’ll have.”

—Bill Quackenbush “Before a game we all pay a visit to the dressing room commode to make ourselves as light as possible.”

—Keith Magnuson “I recommend ping-pong and tennis.

These sports develop swiftness and good reflexes. They improve your coordination and they use the same muscles which a goalie needs in hockey.”

—Vladislav Tretiak “No between-meal snacks if you want to keep your stomach happy. As for smoking, I do not indulge at all except for an occasional cigar.”

—Maurice Richard

COMPILED BY “I go easy on pickles and pastries. A steak dinner is the thing not less than three hours before playing a game.”

—Black Jack Stewart “Frankly, I haven’t any great dread of the slap shot. A very large percentage of slap shots hit you or miss the net. Usually a slap shot ‘telegraphs’ itself; you know when a player is winding up for one. I have found the best strategy is to go out to meet the shot and take a chance since, at best, it is an inaccurate type of shot.” —Bill Durnan “To avoid unnecessary pain when the puck hits the end of your boot, keep your big toenails short. Do the same for your fingernails.” —Jacques Plante “Don’t fight the puck.” —Bill Durnan “When I was a defenceman I always tried to make an opponent stick­handling at me look me in the eye. If he was skating up the ice toward my goal and I could make him look me in the eye, I felt I had him.” —Mervyn (Red) Dutton

“In many ways, fighting is almost like shooting the puck, since I want to get as much power as possible behind my punch. To set up, I turn the blades of my skates to the outside, pointing them to about a ten minutes past ten position.

By doing that, I will have better balance and probably won’t slide too much. As I throw my punches, I lean forward— practically on my toes—and throw my body behind the punch.” —Bobby Orr

STEPHEN SMITH “The best recipe I’ve discovered to date is to withhold the shot until within eight to ten feet of the net, then shoot for the corner.” —Howie Morenz “If I get slashed by someone, I slash him back, right away. Then I forget about it.”

—Pavel Bure “On the ice I normally don’t say very much to anyone, except when I am backchecking, and even then I keep my words to a minimum and try to use proper English and good grammar.”

—Bobby Orr “The fans may boo you when too many goals go in. Be prepared for it. You won’t like it, but a goalie has to learn to live with it. It goes with the job.”

—Jacques Plante “If I were to send my son out to play goal for the very first time, my advice would be to have fun. Have fun.”

—Grant Fuhr “Pick the guy up, get the elbow across the head and slam him into the ice.”

—Mick Vukota

“Keep your hockey stick and a puck in the basement and on rainy days practise shooting at a small target on the basement wall.” —Tommy Gorman “What makes a good goaltender? Many things, really … You must have intestinal fortitude or, to put it bluntly, the guts of a burglar.” —Emile (Cat) Francis “You’ve probably had lectures about smoking. I’ll make mine short. Very early my coach told me that it wouldn’t do me any good to smoke cigarettes so I never tried them. It was as simple as that.

So I can’t say how smoking might have affected me. All I know that when I see a boy smoking, I know that he’s either a little shot trying to be a big shot or he’s gone over to the social side and really doesn’t want to be a hockey player, and that’s all we shall say about that.”

—Gordie Howe “Many youngsters (and even men) think there is some secret way to avoid bodychecks or the less punishing stickchecks.” —Frank Mahovlich “Basically, if you can skate and can walk, you can play.” —Phil Esposito “Worrying about getting hurt is the surest way to cramp your style and get yourself injured in the process.”

—Rod Gilbert

“It’s important to a hockey player’s performance that he plays on an empty stomach.”

—Johnny Bucyk “Smoking? I haven’t found smoking particularly harmful. I stick to cigarettes only.” —Sid Abel “There’s nothing like a good crime story or a play on TV to help you get over a bad game. You get so absorbed you forget the tensions you took home.”

—Gump Worsley “I’ve watched players embrace and hug each other every time a goal is scored. All it takes is one slip and the whole group will go down with skates flying in all directions. A skate blade can cut an arm or leg just like a knife. Sometimes even more serious injuries can result. When I was a kid in Winnipeg I once saw a boy lose an eye in one of those hugging demonstrations. Give the scorer a pat on the back or a yell of encouragement. You can show spirit with foolish mauling which can lead to disaster.” —Andy Bathgate “I wish I knew the secret to scoring goals. I don’t.” —Ken Hodge “Don’t stand around. Don’t watch. Get involved.” —Mike Babcock “The drop pass is an enticing little devil; it looks very pretty when executed right, but is in reality a very dangerous pass that can create a lot of damage when it backfires. If you must drop a pass for a teammate, simply leave the puck where it is and let him skate up behind you to pick it up while you move ahead.” —Red Kelly

Rinkside Intellectual 57

58 Geist 94 Fall 2014

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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

Not Finishing AL BE RTO M ANG UE L

To labour, to explore, to read, to enjoy the knowledge of what took place on the page, this is all part of the art of the reader

I

am not prone to incompletion. A meal half-eaten, a room half-tidy, a promise unkept, a trip interrupted on a whim—these are not in my nature.

In my library, however, things are otherwise.

To begin with, no library is ever complete: like the poem in Paul Valéry’s definition, a library is never finished, only abandoned. Neither is a book ever read fully. When we reach the last page, something has been added to the text in our reading (our knowledge of what took place, a literary web of coincidences and correspondences, a feeling of sympathy or disgust), and therefore it is a new book that lies now before us, asking that we go through it again and for the first time. We never enter the same book twice.

The voluntary interruption of reading is something else. I make my acquaintance with a book gradually. I’ll inspect the cover, glance at the blurb, skip or not the introduction, and start to read. If I like the book, or if the book likes me, we shall proceed happily together to the end. But sometimes, after just two or three pages, if the book doesn’t interest me I give up. Books, however, are extraordinarily patient and will wait for us for as long as it takes, and so there have been times when I’ve come back to an abandoned book and find that I like it after all, maybe because I have changed or the book has changed. What I don’t believe I’ve

ever done is read a book I don’t like halfway through and then stop. If two or three pages don’t convince me I know that, for the time being at least, the rest won’t either. I can’t think of a single book whose first paragraphs I’ve hated and which, reading on, I judged a masterpiece. Like falling in love, I judge my books at first sight.

Incompletion is double-edged. On the one hand, not to finish something may mean that we have pronounced judgment and found it faulty, not worthy of our efforts to reach its conclusion. On the other, it may be due to the endless postponement of something so wonderful that we dare not attain it for fear of it ending forever.

Coitus interruptus or the blissful frolics without orgasm promised to the faithful in the Surah Al-Waqi’a of the Koran: these too are the opposed facets of an act of interrupted reading.

Christian dogma (whose Paradise excludes both having sex and reading fiction) demands that anything undertaken in good faith must be finished; giving up, for followers of St. Paul, is considered self-indulgent and therefore bad. The internet, which requires from us only brief and multiple periods of attention, has transformed the Christian sin into a virtue. Snippets, not volumes, are its ordinary fare, and no one is expected to scroll through its seemingly endless documents from beginning to distant end.

Against the strict Pauline norms, Robert Louis Stevenson, born in the

Presbyterian mists of Edinburgh, declared that “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” To labour, to explore, to read, to recall what I have read, to enjoy the knowledge of what took place on the page just before the climax, this is all part of the art of the reader.

No doubt, abandoning a book before reaching the last page requires a certain self-discipline. There are books I have left off reading very near the end in order not to enjoy it all at once. Close to the conclusion of Joseph Conrad’s Victory, I postponed the last chapter indefinitely because I knew this was the last of his books that I had left to discover, and I didn’t want the promise of an unread Conrad to be fulfilled so soon. Likewise, I waited weeks to finish Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Roberto Calasso’s La letteratura e gli dei, Peter Nadas’s Parallel Lives. These unfinished books sat faithfully by my bed during the time of waiting, like presents not to be opened before a certain date. In Spanish this is called el placer de las vísperas, the pleasure of the day before.

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 61

N A T I O N A L

D R E A M S

When Treatment Becomes Torture DA N IE L FR ANC IS

Many people who have encountered the mental health care system over the years have survived a variety of mistreatments, including the tragedy of coerced sterilization

S

everal years ago I attended a conference on mental illness and the community at Simon Fraser University. Many of the participants identified themselves as “psychiatric survivors,” a term I had not heard before but which I learned was a self-descriptor used by people who had been through the mental health care system. Initially the term seemed presumptuous to me, even offensive, for its implied comparison of mental health care to torture and mental hospitals to concentration camps. I know that “survivor” has become a word of empowerment in the health field, but in this case it was not the illness that had been survived but the treatment, which was being compared to abuse.

Instead of being grateful, these survivors seemed to resent the care they had received.

As I began to learn more about the history of mental health care, however, I came to acknowledge my own naïveté and admit the accuracy of the term “survivor.” People labelled mentally ill have routinely been abused, even tortured, by the professionals charged with their care. Images of the poor lunatic trussed up in a straitjacket or chained to a wall haunt the history of mental illness. Of course, those were the bad old days, but even after the most outrageous forms of physical restraint were abandoned, different therapies used the mentally ill as guinea pigs for experimentation.

62 Geist 94 Fall 2014

During the 1930s it was insulin shock therapy, by which patients received doses of insulin to induce hypoglycemia and a deep coma during which the brain supposedly “rewired” itself.

In fact the patient’s brain cells were dying. By the 1940s more direct assaults on the brain were in fashion.

Patients were mutilated by lobotomists or zapped with high-voltage electricity to induce convulsions.

All these so-called “shock therapies” intentionally induced harm, in the form of brain damage, in order to achieve hypothetical results. Is this not a reasonably accurate definition of torture?

Which brings us to yet another episode in this long assault on the minds and bodies of the mentally ill: the story of the eugenics movement and more specifically the sexual sterilization of what used to be called the “feeble-minded.” In Canada sterilization was pursued most aggressively in Alberta. The details of that story are the subject of a new book, Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization and the Politics of Choice, by the historian Erika Dyck (University of Toronto Press).

It is conveniently forgotten that between the World Wars the positive benefits of eugenics were a part of conventional wisdom in Canada, as they were elsewhere. Until Adolf Hitler and his Nazis gave it a bad name, eugenics, the science of

selective breeding, was approved of by almost every progressive person.

It was widely believed that society was deteriorating under the influence of large-scale immigration and the proliferation of the feeble-minded.

Both groups were thought to pass on undesirable flaws to their offspring.

By allowing them to reproduce, Canadians were said to be committing “race suicide,” a popular expression at the time. Dyck defines it as a fear “that the better classes would be subsumed by the lower classes.”

The answer to this perceived crisis was to control fertility among certain groups, eradicate their deficiencies and improve the quality of the human stock. Eugenicists often compared population control to animal husbandry. Dyck quotes Irene Parlby, a leading advocate of eugenics in Alberta, from a 1924 speech: “Curious, is it not, that we cull our flocks and herds, allowing only the finest and most physically perfect to breed, and yet when it comes to the human race we allow the mating of the most diseased and imperfect both mentally and physically.”

As Dyck shows in her book, icons of early feminism such as Parlby and Emily Murphy were particularly drawn to eugenic theory. Women, they argued, were the “mothers of the race” and had a particular responsibility to oppose the degeneration of the stock. This meant targeting

the mentally ill and disabled but also the immoral (e.g., single mothers), even the socially inferior (e.g., immigrants from eastern Europe).

Of course feminists were not alone.

Tommy Douglas, premier of Saskatchewan and first leader of the federal NDP, wrote a university thesis warning about the social and economic costs of unrestricted childbirth among the “subnormal” members of society. And Dyck cites the president of the University of Alberta, R.C. Wallace, lamenting in 1934 that “nature’s weeding-out process” was not allowed to take its natural course and stating that “children of the professional classes make a higher contribution through intellectual ability than those of the classes inferior in intellectual training.” For all its support among progressives, eugenics at times sounded like just another name for class warfare.

In 1928 Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act, the first such legislation in Canada. It came into effect in January 1929 and involved the creation of a provincial Eugenics Board consisting of an academic philosopher, two surgeons and a recording secretary. Within a year the first person was sterilized under the terms of the legislation. The law remained in effect until 1972 and during that time Alberta sterilized 2,822 people, slightly more women than men.

Most were residents of mental institutions. Many did not give their consent. Though eugenics and its related mental hygiene movement were popular across the country, British Columbia was the only other province to make sexual sterilization public policy; between 1933 and 1972, BC sterilized almost two hundred people.

The history of Alberta’s sexual sterilization law came to prominence in the 1990s with the case of Leilani Muir, to which Dyck devotes a chapter. Muir is an Alberta woman who successfully sued the provincial National Dreams 63

government for sterilizing her when she was a fourteen-year-old resident of the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives back in the 1950s.

Told she was having her appendix removed, the young Muir also had her Fallopian tubes snipped. Doctors did not request permission, at least from her, and she was not told what had happened. Only years later, when she was a married woman attempting to start a family, did Muir discover the truth. In 1996 a judge ruled that Muir should be compensated for the loss of her civil rights, and she was awarded a million-dollar settlement. Her case attracted international attention and was the subject of a National Film Board documentary. As Dyck writes, Muir went from being labelled a “mental defective” in her youth to becoming a “human rights heroine.” Following her legal victory, several hundred individuals with similar grievances

joined a successful campaign to force compensation from the provincial government.

At the training school, doctors had labelled Muir a “moron” (i.e., having an IQ below 70), yet testing at the time of her court case showed her to have an IQ of 95, well within the average range. Her case, along with others presented by Dyck, is a cautionary tale, reminding us of how many people in the mental health care system have survived misdiagnosis and abuse in the name of one crackpot theory after another, and often endorsed by the most progressive voices among us.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, including his latest: Closing Time: Prohibition, RumRunners, and Border Wars (Douglas & McIntyre). Read more of his work at geist. com and danielfrancis.ca.

ENDNOTES Reviews, comments, curiosa

ALL MY TROUBLES SEEMED SO FAR AWAY

A

ccording to one online essayist, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was once “one of the most popular writers of the early 20th century all over the world, with translations into 30 languages.” Nowadays Zweig’s novels are little-known—though a recent resurgence of interest can be attributed in part to the release of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel: Anderson claimed that his script had been inspired by Zweig’s body of work, which provided him (and provides us) with a window into the vanished world of the AustroHungarian Empire. The World of Yesterday (University of Nebraska Press) is Zweig’s autobiography, translated by Anthea Bell and written in the early 1940s while Zweig and his wife were living in exile, two of the many thousands of Jews whose way of life had been destroyed by the rise of the Nazis. It is indescribably poignant to read, in Zweig’s foreword, of the complete destruction of a world in which little had changed for generations, a world where Zweig’s father and grandfather could expect to—and did—live “one and the same life from beginning to end, without many vicissitudes, without upheaval and danger, a life of small tensions, imperceptible transitions, always lived in the same easy, comfortable rhythm as the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave.” Zweig came to feel that Europe, “the true home of my heart’s desire,” had become lost to him “after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars.” His exile took him 64 Geist 94 Fall 2014

first to England, later to New York City, and ultimately to Rio de Janeiro, where, in February 1942, shortly after delivering the manuscript of this book to his publisher, Zweig and his wife committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.

—Michael Hayward

BIRD METAL

D

uring a conversation about Polish folk-metal at the Geist office, I was reminded of something a friend told me: that there was a metal band with a parrot for a vocalist, but the parrot was killed by a dog who was the lead singer of a different metal band.

I looked it up and found Hatebeak. Hatebeak is a death metal band from Baltimore, Maryland, and their vocalist, Waldo, is a 15-year old African Grey parrot. The band plays loud, aggressive death metal that includes a parrot making aggrieved bird sounds, which is disappointing because male African Greys are capable of speech.

However, the part about Waldo being murdered by the dog vocalist of another metal band is incorrect. A dog-fronted band does exist—Caninus is a deathgrind band from New York with two female pitbulls, Budgie and Basil, as vocalists—but the two groups are on excellent terms, as I imagine the only two metal bands with non-human vocalists would be.

—Roni Simunovic

wild woman

I

discovered Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed (Vintage) in my car last March after a 2,500-kilometre road trip from semi-wet Squamish, BC, to semi-arid Whitehorse, Yukon.

This copy of Strayed’s memoir about a summer spent solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail travelled by car from Lloydminster, Alberta (not Saskatchewan), to Calgary, Alberta, where it boarded a plane to Vancouver, BC, then caught a lift in a car to Squamish, where it strayed from its original owner’s possession into the trunk of my hatchback. A promising start for a book about being lost then found. Strayed’s journey on the PCT is a response to her mother’s sudden diagnosis of cancer and quick death thereafter at age forty-five, the self-destruction of Strayed’s marriage, the dissolution of her family and other traumatic events.

All this before she was even twentyfive years old. It’s a heavy burden for a young woman to carry, but she does, fumbling, scrambling and fucking up along the way. Strayed redeems herself not by being “good,” but by acknowledging her flaws and pressing on as best as she can. I probably won’t read another memoir about a woman recovering from grief or a crisis by going on some life-altering journey— at a certain point I thought I was back in the pages of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. But Gilbert and Strayed are very different narrators. While Gilbert was practising abstinence in her memoir, Strayed is on the verge of jumping the bones of just about every

manly hiker she comes across. I’m exaggerating slightly, but this smart woman did start her hike with a family-size pack of condoms in her backpack. Her struggles to overcome the physical and logistical demands of the PCT—not to mention the challenges of her emotional landscape—will resonate with backpackers. The spectacular prologue will have any backpacker whose feet have been blistered or broken by the hiking boots that are supposed to save their feet cry out loud, “Damn those boots!” Last time I saw my copy of Wild, its pages were dogeared and it was asking a woman with a shopping cart for directions to the Greyhound station.

—Lily Gontard

still stupefying

I

n 1991 I wrote a review for Kinesis (a national newspaper that focused

on women’s issues) of Holley Rubinsky’s first book, Rapid Transits and Other Stories. The author was available for interviews, and I was so blown away by the powerful content of her stories that I went to the interview feeling somewhat stupefied. Four books later, South of Elfrida (Brindle & Glass) is just as absorbing as Rubinsky’s earlier work, although the backdrops are different—most of these stories take place along the routes of the southwestern USA. This collection is about loss and regret, or, in the memorable phrase of Flannery O’Connor, “the land of guilt and sorrow.” Rubinsky pulls you into this land straightaway, with stories like “Stronghold”: “Just back from a recent trip to Indonesia, I went in for gallbladder surgery, picked up a hospital superbug, spent

time in isolation, and nearly died.” A winsome feature of Rubinsky’s storytelling is her connection with children and with all kinds of animals, as in this description of a five-year-old’s developing mind, from “Little Dove”: “He knows things but doesn’t know too much. He knows when you’re really fed up or just pretending to be.

He has the grace to go along with you, not argue when he knows you’re sad.” And you can’t help but love the little guy. This book reminds me of something John Lennon said about a photograph of himself, in which he is leaning against a building on a busy street in Hamburg. Lennon said this image captured “the beauty and spirit of the Beatles.” I feel as though South of Elfrida captures “the beauty and spirit” of a middle-aged woman on a solitary road trip. Thankfully, we can ride along with her for a while.

—Jill Mandrake

Endnotes 65

harrowing

I

n 1974, Susan Sontag’s film Promised Lands, shot in 1973 in Israel during the weeks following the Yom Kippur War, and which might be called an encounter with Israel at war, was panned in the New York Times by a reviewer who objected to Sontag’s refusal to interpret the war, to summarize the conflict or to offer any of the nostrums so necessary to “serious journalists,” and instead to offer a direct record of her encounter with charred corpses, charred battlefields, charred machinery, people in the streets, markets, fields and pastures, the faces of the mourners at a mass funeral, the spiritual terrors of a traumatized soldier. The Times reviewer sniffed in conclusion that the war is “just too factually complex to be

treated as a tone poem,” and in fact the spectrum of the film is as necessarily wide and as limited as an outsider’s viewpoint can allow it to be: there are few women and few Arabs, and the only commentary is provided by two academics who articulate opposing positions on the war. The Times critic complained that “the Sontag film won’t increase your understanding of Israel”—which is precisely why the power and validity of Promised Lands remain undiluted forty years later. This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening (to use a rather tired term from the art world of the seventies), and every moment is fully compelling. The closing episode records a therapy session in a psych ward: two psychiatrists treat a soldier suffering from PTSD with the latest in “shock” therapy by assaulting him with the sounds and motions of the battlefield:

pounding on the bed, screaming at him, slamming the furniture, playing tapes of bombs exploding. The patient screams and moans; he could be praying; he weeps; he writhes and throws himself to the floor. The effect is terrifying and unforgettable, an image of war relentlessly destroying the living. Promised Lands is a harrowing experience, especially in front of a theatre audience. On its first release it was banned in Israel. It has been recently remastered and can also be found on YouTube.

—Stephen Osborne

Second Chances

W

hen I was in high school, I waited impatiently for each new volume of Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series to come to our one small local comic shop. Four years later, waiting for his new book, Seconds (Ballantine Books), was no different.

But O’Malley was surprisingly secretive about Seconds prior to its publication—even through social media and his strong online presence, he showed readers little more than occasional drawings of main characters and single-panel sketches, keeping the novel’s plot a mystery. Because of this, I skipped the dust jacket teaser and dove right into the book, and I’m glad I did—Seconds is an incredibly suspenseful read. The story is about getting second chances, whether you deserve them or not. Katie is an intelligent but hapless restaurant owner who never manages to do the right thing, so when she sees a weird figure in the bedroom above her restaurant—her waitress and new friend Hazel tells her it’s a house spirit—and it offers her a do-over following a particularly bad workplace snafu, she takes it. The spirit says she only gets 66 Geist 94 Fall 2014

one chance, but Katie realizes she can fix everything that’s wrong with her life if she has enough revisions … right? To make a 336-page story short, it doesn’t work out the way she plans. Seconds is a long read, beautiful and captivating, and as much as I loved Scott Pilgrim, this new book is a far cry from O’Malley’s previous work in a very, very good way. It has all of his usual wit and cleverness inside a fascinating, entertaining and at times frightening fable. If I had to pick one comic to be stuck with on a desert island, it might be Seconds. I want to read it a thousand times.

—Roni Simunovic

Technology Creeps On

I

n the last few years—through Edward Snowden’s disclosure of NSA’s email surveillance practices and Wikileaks’s release of intelligence documents—the public has been alerted to governments’ habit of spying on people. Yet we remain unaware of how much everyday technology can exploit our most private information, leaving us vulnerable to our neighbours’ and corporations’ prying eyes. In Technocreep (OR Books/Greystone Books), Thomas P. Keenan seeks to enlighten citizens about the dangers of invasive technology, providing fascinating examples such as Google Glass’s covert photo/videotaking feature and 3D printers’ ability to make copies of almost anything, like car keys and armed weapons. Keenan astutely notes that we’re slowly conditioning ourselves to publicly relinquish intimate details of our lives in exchange for discounts and, contradictorily enough, quicker access to more information, and that in turn, a refusal to comply with this new social agreement is now viewed as suspicious. Much of the book, however, rides a fine line Endnotes 67

between necessary consumer education and simply scaremongering, with extrapolations on how current technology can be used against you in the future. You may be tempted to fashion yourself a protective tinfoil cap, but before you do so, consult the final chapter on how to guard yourself against unwanted attention. And if you are the type to liberally share and tag personal photos on Facebook, read this book to understand how technology is taking advantage of you.

—Jesmine Cham

Strange things come from the woods

T

hrough the Woods by Emily Carroll (Margaret K. McElderry Books) is a collection of short folktale-flavoured horror stories woven into a graphic novel. The stories allude to and invert classic fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood,”

“Bluebeard” and “The Velvet Ribbon,” and her illustrations set an eerie atmosphere in greys, blues and reds.

“The Nesting Place” twists together the best parts of the wicked-stepmother tale with a fresh take on the monster-in-thewoods/monsterwithin duality to stand out for me as Carroll’s creepiest story. The sentence that best sums up the collection comes from “His Face All Red”: “[It] came from the woods (most strange things do)”— which, in this volume, includes but is not limited to ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands. Folk tale and horror enthusiasts will enjoy the strange things that come from Carroll’s mind, and might think twice next time they venture into the woods.

—Kelsea O’Connor

Philosophy and Chloroform

I

n his new novel, Dave Eggers grapples with the concerns of modernday violent, psychotic youth. Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

(Knopf) is the story of Thomas, an angry young man disillusioned with his family, his country and the universe in general and who, in search of answers, kidnaps several people and takes them to an abandoned naval base for questioning.

His victims include an astronaut with whom he went to college, a state congressman with two missing limbs, an elementary schoolteacher who may have molested him, his recovering alcoholic mother and a policeman who shot his only friend.

Thomas’s interrogations read like philosophic thought experiments, with

68 Geist 94 Fall 2014

captor and prisoner working together to reach some metaphysical truth. The characters are poorly developed— they exist only to provide answers to Thomas’s questions, including: What good is the American dream of becoming an astronaut now that America has no space shuttle? Still, Your Fathers is an enjoyable read: it is short, composed entirely of dialogue and written with a dark sense of humour. I read this novel in one sitting and, if nothing else, I got a few cathartic thrills out of Thomas’s cosmic investigation.

I’ve got some questions of my own for the universe, but unfortunately I don’t have access to chloroform, a stun gun or an abandoned naval base.

—Dylan Gyles

Smoke and Mirrors

I

n American Smoke (Faber and Faber), the UK psychogeographer

Iain Sinclair takes an extended road trip across North America in search of the lingering traces of his literary heroes: “the American Beats and their fellow travellers.”

Sinclair’s pantheon of heroes includes the usual suspects— Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder et al.—but the edges have been blurred a bit to include other, less obvious figures: Roberto Bolaño, Malcolm Lowry, Charles Olson. Sinclair begins in the east, with a visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts, the one-time home of Charles Olson, “poet, scholar and last rector of Black Mountain College.”

I was tickled to find a chapter titled “Dollarton” (Sinclair visits the site of Malcolm Lowry’s beachfront shack in Cates Park, North Vancouver, and carries away with him as souvenir “a

yellow-gold beer cap, Corona Light, with rusty serrated rim and a black crown”) and another titled “Vancouver.” While in Vancouver, Sinclair gives a reading at Spartacus Books, an anti-capitalist bookstore then on West Hastings Street (“the sort of generously overstocked, musty cave that London no longer possessed”) and lunches with William Gibson.

Over lunch Gibson tells Sinclair of a meeting with William S. Burroughs many years earlier, Gibson confessing that he had peeked inside Burroughs’s shaving kit while using the bathroom in Burroughs’s room at the Sylvia Hotel, and found “a rusty flip-lip Elastoplast tin, looking as if it had come safely through a combat zone. Inside were two black coins stamped with Nazi insignia. Curiosity made Gibson take his chance, when Burroughs was out of the room, to ask one of the minders, the young men in white tennis shoes, about the swastika coins.

‘Bill takes them everywhere. They’re going onto his eyes when he passes over.’” I wonder if they did.

—Michael Hayward

SEIZED

T

he death of Doris Pilkington (Aboriginal name Nugi Garimara) in April 2014, at age seventysix, is a good reminder of her book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (University of Queensland Press) and the film adaptation, Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Doris’s mother, Molly, was fourteen years old when she and her younger sister and a cousin—“half-castes” (mixed Aboriginal and white heritage)—were forcibly taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931. They (and many other kids) were installed at the faraway Moore River Native Settlement, essentially an Endnotes 69

internment camp. Days after arriving, Molly hatched an escape plan and the girls set out to find their way home by following the rabbit-proof fence, a barrier built right through Australia from north to south to protect crops. For weeks the girls endured heat, cold, dust, rain, hunger and infected feet and legs. Molly’s cousin was recaptured, but somehow Molly and her little sister kept going and even eluded an expert tracker dispatched by the authorities. Nine weeks and 1,600 kilometres later, the two girls got home to Jigalong.

There the story ends, in the book and in the film, by which time you have run out of fresh hankies. But in real life there was more. Ten years later, when Molly was herself a young mother, her children—Doris, age three, and Anna, age eight months— were torn from her and shipped to Moore River. Molly wangled a job there and eventually absconded with

the baby, but could not reach Doris and had to leave her behind. Doris grew up at Moore River, trained as a nurse, struggled with the racism she had learned and finally was reunited with her family. In 1996 her account of her mother’s escape became a published book, which became a film, which became an international success. Her next book, Under the Wintamarra Tree (Queensland, 2003), is her own story of growing up as part of the “Stolen Generations” and of her journey—physical, emotional, metaphorical—to her birthplace under the wintamarra tree. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to Aboriginal Australians on February 13, 2008, for four minutes. Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada’s aboriginal people for similar abuse on June 11, 2008, for fifteen minutes.

—Eve Corbel

T H E off the shelf

Brenda Peterson and Sarah Jane Freymann want to help you write down the story you’ve been telling for your entire life in Your Life is a Book: How to Craft & Publish Your Memoir (Sasquatch Books).

Dr. Dale Dewar and Florian Oelck contend that dilution is not the solution to pollution when it comes to ionizing radiation in From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You (Between the Lines). No one knows why the hole of the living exists or where it leads, they just try to keep busy and avoid thinking about it in Universal Bureau of Copyrights by Bertrand Laverdure, translated by Oana Avasilichoaei (BookThug). Michael Lista remembers playing Super Mario Bros. 3 and watching Terminator 2 during the murder of Kristen French in The Scarborough (Signal Editions). Harold’s wife is engaged in an emotional affair with the word “salient” in Life Without Death by Peter Unwin (Cormorant Books). If girls hockey was easy they’d let boys play it in Interference by Michelle Berry (ECW Press). Alex has some posthumanist mommy issues in Sophrosyne by Marianne Apostolides (BookThug). Steven Artelle writes odes to the mythic hotel, prayers to the lord of parking spaces and hymns for the muses of sex, death and roller derbies in Metropantheon (Signature Editions). Andrea Macpherson cautions you not to sleep on your stomach or you might breathe in another person’s dream in Ellipses (Signature Editions). That dude from Iron Maiden steals lines from Captain Kirk in I’m Not Scared of You or Anything by Jon Paul Fiorentino, illustrated by Maryanna Hardy (Anvil Press). The man with the speedboat, God, your sister and Mohawks argue over who owns the lake in Lake of Two Mountains by Arleen Paré (Brick Books). Karen Enns sings a suite for hoes, shovels, wheelbarrows and harnesses in Ordinary Hours (Brick Books).

Earle and Al discuss the inevitable yakyak and ego-food of university jobs in We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of 70 Geist 94 Fall 2014

W A L L

Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 edited by Nicholas Bradley (Harbour Publishing). Language is a machine that has swallowed an alien object and cannot go on in Intimate Letters by Bruce Whiteman (ECW Press). Paul Vermeersch combines transcriptions from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Michael Bay’s Transformers in Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something (ECW Press). In Cloud by Eric McCormack (Penguin Books) a businessman travels to the small Scottish town of Duncairn, haunted by the legend of the Obsidian Cloud. Doris Gregory recounts her tour during WWII in How I Won the War for the Allies: One Sassy Canadian Soldier’s Story (Ronsdale Press). Tomorrow expects that when it comes it will be more like today in Loose to the World

by Henry Rappaport (Ronsdale Press).

Malcolm begins his school year by accidentally decapitating another student in Halving the Orange by Michael Hetherington (Passfield Press). The Lord can’t believe everyone is still talking about that time he knocked up a Jewish girl two thousand years ago in God Telling a Joke by Dave Margoshes (Oolichan Books). Natalie Simpson reminds us that home is how hard you eat your heart out in Thrum (Talonbooks). An aging ex-Playboy Bunny has her foot bitten off by a myth in Bunny and Shark

by Alisha Piercy (BookThug). Cecily Nicholson speaks for the tree, for the trees have smallpox in From the Poplars (Talonbooks). noted elsewhere

Prairie Fire Review of Books says that Gary Barwin’s Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press) teaches us to see “with the eyes of a child.” Canadian Literature says that the denseness of Barwin’s mythic poems “opens up to sparkle with an alluring beauty” and the Winnipeg Free Press writes that Barwin “expresses a near-religious faith in poetry’s transcendence.” Quill & Quire describes Summertime Swamp Love

by Patricia Young (Palimpsest Press) as “a mishmash of human perversions and

existential ruminations projected onto unsuspecting creatures”; author Ruth Roach Pierson says it “bursts with crackerjack verbal velocity”; the Winnipeg Free Press says that Young’s voice is “rich in linguistic foreplay.” Publishers Weekly calls Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton (Blue Rider Press) “a provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood” and Interview says that it “is the pulchritudinous addendum to Mr. Twain’s famous quote—‘clothes make the woman.’ ” The Boston Globe says that “women and clothing is an impossibly large subject.” The Georgia Straight writes that Canoodlers by andrea bennett (Nightwood Editions) brings out “the awkward garage-sale contents of our own personal inventories” and Contemporary Verse 2 says it “shows how the familial has become one with consumerism.” Sylvia Legris writes “ca’noodlers n Oodles of ooze and fleshsmack.” The Winnipeg Review equates Jonas in Frames by Chris Hutchinson (Goose Lane Editions) to “navigating the miasma of endless possibilities of Google search results” and author Alaya Munce says it “short-order-cooks, pillpops, cubicle-hops and jump-cuts its way through parallel realities”; the author Michael Turner says it’s “tomorrow’s writing today.” congratulations

To Michael Hetherington, who won the gold medal for Best Fiction in the Canada West Region of the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards with his novel The Playing Card; to Jeremy Stewart for winning the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for his manuscript Hidden City; to the 37th Annual National Magazine Awards nominees Suzannah Showler, Sarah Selecky, Leanne Simpson, Marcello Di Cintio, Lynn Coady, Karen Solie and Sina Queyras; and to Daniel Francis, who was named honoree of a City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award in Literary Arts, and to Michał Kozłowski, who was named emerging artist in the same category.

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus

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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 I’m relieved that you’re going to go in there and get Mister Gil to straighten things out with that little woman (3) 10 Who owns the house that the cat sings about?

11 For a cop, I can see you’ve come quite a distance on your trek (abbrev) 12 Seems like something’s cooking at 8 14 I have a belt for the dance class, but I’m not interested anymore (abbrev) 15 How come that guy never shows up to help me with my cobbler?

16 I’m positive that tiny speck was from Saturn 17 Who roams around in public in a convenient place?

18 The French do like embellishment, don’t they?

19 It’s better under there where it’s wetter 20 If she finds out who told, she’ll go by bus to eliminate them (3) 24 Council had to eliminate the secret compartment 25 Dorothy loved the little marks on the old kite 26 He sometimes pees very gradually 27 Stanley’s group was all about icy fields and dart lines (abbrev) 29 Thomas’s favourite fitting 31 Merle had 16 but he still couldn’t repay his loan 34 Drop by at any time to pick up the piece or the whole collection of his work (2) 37 Sounds like she’s feeling icky and sheepish 38 In Israel the sixth is a rad month 39 Sounds like this guy was praying for us to get the vote 40 My friend Don loved to bicker in court 41 In spite of being short, he doesn’t sound odd

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Send a copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #94 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319

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42 Lottie regularly dumps on the throne 43 To avoid the mess, let’s not stay in our home when we get back Down 1 Don’t skip a visit to Riel’s place 2 How can a little plastic thingy control the start? (abbrev) 3 My close friend Leon had an explosive running style 4 What’s the angle here? Is the rhythm on the radio causing a genome riot?

5 You don’t have to be an eejit to not understand that hidden meaning 6 Wilf liked strawberry but he named his horse Nora 7 It pisses me off that we can’t pay one cent anymore (3) 8 Yes, he went to the loo. In fact, I can sense it 9 Karl, what a story, you mixed up with a bunch of Irish storytellers 13 In the audition, most of the repeaters are red 17 Yes, Carlo tweets with relief, now that he’s out of the bog (2) 19 When you leave that spot, wink or I won’t know you’re gone (2) 21 Sounds like that foul deposit was brownish green 22 Don’t despair just because you misplaced the other seal

23 Don’t drink that, it will make you sick 28 When we got to the rental, I needed to get wasted 30 In Colorado I caught a lot of lobsters and got, like, totally wasted 32 Type out those lyrics and give them to Joy 33 I’ll run around the block and get some mystery meat 34 I told Abe, no gas on that tab 35 Bye bye God 36 Put on your jeans, we’re off to the competitions 40 That violinist hasn’t always made good choices on Wednesdays The winner for Puzzle 93 was Paul Smith of Delta, BC. Congrats!

F L A P J A C K S P A L E O

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

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

S C A R C E N E S S D N A S

Puzzle 71

C A U G H T

M A P P I N G

Oddlandia The Canadian Map of Oddballs and Misfits

by Melissa Edwards

Nonsuch Reduce Lake

Strange Lake

Divergent River Batty Bay

Stringbean Lake

Outcast Islands

Lac des Troglodytes

Little Forehead Lake Solo Creek

modified Geistonic projection

Irregular River

Lac Idiot

Doodad Lake

Troublesome Pup

Lac Alien

Self Lake

Lac de la Solitude

Lonely Bay

Kookoos Island

Lac Unique Fosse Comical-John

Dogface Lake Shorty Creek

Queer Island Freak Island

Blue Sheep Creek

Three Legged Beaver Pond

Gypsy Creek

The Bachelor

Toodoggone Peak

Heretic Hill

Peerless

Three Necked Pond

Hermit Lake

Visitors Land

Cone Head

Left Hand Leg

The Pretender

The Monster

Obstreperous Ridge Deviation Peak Plain Lake

Albino Dome

Rousseau des Malcontents

Singleton Lake

Remarkable Cove

Outside Annies Shoal

Brain

Iconoclast Mountain

No Mans Friend Brook

Pioneer

The Squarehead

Two Tongue Lake

Character Cove

Shunabit Mountain Slapfoot Beach

Spurn Head

Awkward Cove

The Bookworms

The Little Punk

Reluctant Dragon Cove Humpback Ridge

Emo

Weirdale

Lac des Vagabonds Lac Original

Geekies Point

Missinglink Mountain

Lac Rebel

Oddfellow Lake

Outlier Ridge Maverick Hill Stand Off

Lac Boheme

The White Elephant

Baie des Alternances

Misfit Lake

Lac Hobo

Big Virgin Island

Lonewolf Lake

Lone Loon Lake

The Crank

Trailblazer Lake

Bucktooth Island

Little Quirke Lake Freedom Island

Runaway Island

Dorking

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

72 Geist 94 Fall 2014

“Elegiac and brave, Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song is mind-changing.”

— Smaro Kamboureli

There’s something helpless in being a witness.

Publishing 2.0 — TiPs and TraPs Professional DeveloPmenT WorkshoP for WriTers in all Phases of Their Careers Coming to a city near you! Presenters Caroline adderson & Mary W. Walters discuss writing in the digital age.

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Mink is a witness, a shape-shifter, who is compelled to follow the story that has ensared Celia and her village in Nuu’chalnulth territory on the coast of British Columbia. A double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the village decades earlier, has left his terrible influence on Amos, a residential school survivor. The occurence signals the unfolding of an ordeal that pulls Celia out of her reveries, and into the two-fold tragedies of her son’s suicide and the physical assault sustained by her cousin’s granddaughter. Celia must now regain confidence in her abilites as a seer, and unite the women and men of her family, in order to save the life of the child.

Celia’s Song, from the award-winning author of Ravensong, is a novel that matters. It speaks to the unspeakable, as well as of stories that must be told: of the resilience and strength of First Nations people to come together and regain their knowledge and traditions, and to heal themselves.

Celia’s song • A novel by Lee Maracle • Now available in bookstores ISBN 978-1-77086-416-0 • $24.00 • 280 pages

visit www.writersunion.ca/pd-workshops for more information, and to register online today!

CORMORANT BOOKS

The Writers’ Union of Canada

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writersunion.ca

• www.cormorantbooks.com • Twitter @cormorantbooks • facebook.com/cormorantbooks

GEIST 94

In the developed world, the creative economy is contributing to increased wealth and employment faster than any other sector. This expanding field requires people who combine social insight with entrepreneurial vision, creative energy, leadership, and an understanding of industry trends and practices.

Canadian Map of Oddballs and Misfits HIS WORSHIP, THE LEGUME  METIS MAN GOES TO WAR VITRUVIAN BUS DRIVER HATEBEAK: AVIAN SUPREMACY PHOTOTERIA: A GRAPHIC HISTORY HARPER, HEMINGWAY, PROFITEROLES, FALLING and ALBERTO MANGUEL on NOT FINISHING

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