Geist 95

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 95 · Winter 2014

F EAT U R ES

RINGS Michael Podgurney A bus encounter with a talker 36

STR ANGE WOMEN Connie Kuhns For an audience not used to dancing to their politics punk was a challenge and a rebuke 38

ARCTIC BREACH Michał Kozłowski The arctic photography of Bogdan Luca 50

LESSONS I’M GOING TO TEACH MY KIDS TOO L ATE Brad Yung 52

TOBACCO LIT CONTEST WINNERS Tales of the smoking life

54

Pg. 50. Sailing in constant daylight

The Geist Foundation. publisher : Stephen Osborne. senior editor : Mary Schendlinger. editorial group : Michał Kozłowski, assistant publisher; AnnMarie MacKinnon, operations manager. digital publishing coordinator : Roni Simunovic. reader services : Dylan Gyles. office admin : Brittany Huddart. proofreader : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. interns : Jennesia Pedri, Niklas SÖrensson. 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. published by

GEIST

A little bit of the ol’ recto verso

NOTE S & DI S PATC H E S

F IN D IN GS

CO LU MN S

Stephen Osborne Shaggy Dog Tales 9

20

AFTERLIFE OF CULTURE

Rum Row

Campus Confidential Stephen Henighan 18

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden Giller Filler 12 Eve Corbel Cooks Who Over-Identify with Their Equipment 12

What’s in a Name?

CITY OF WORDS

Guide to Better Cooking When the Bough Breaks

Monsters Alberto Manguel 59

Collage Under the Influence

NATIONAL DREAMS

Park in Progress Daniel Francis 61

Mary Schendlinger Meanwhile, in 1666 14

D EPA RT MEN TS

Susan Telfer Walking in Snow 16

Royal Pillow Talk IN CAMERA

Deal or No Deal

4 LETTERS

No Children

5 ENDNOTES

Warpath

64 OFF THE SHELF,

Uncle Bobby

NOTED ELSEWHERE

and more…

PUZZLE

70 71 CAUGHT MAPPING cover image :

The illustration was drawn by Britta Bacchus; it refers to “Strange Women” by Connie Kuhns, on page 38 of this issue. Britta Bacchus is an illustrator who lives in Vancouver.

Her work has appeared on album covers, posters and in Discorder, Capilano Courier and BeatRoute. See more of her work at brittabacchus.blogspot.ca. cover design :

72

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

Trans Canada Adult

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his past year I made several trips to photograph Trans Canada Adult Video on Macleod Trail SW, the largest independent adult video store in Calgary and one of a dozen or so adult movie

stores left here. Trans Canada Adult Video is one of the most popular adult video stores in the city; in the 1980s it used to bring in $1,800 a night. Customers paid a yearly membership fee of $60, $100 for a lifetime membership. It was a major stop for busloads of British soldiers headed south to the Canadian Forces Base at Suffield. Then a porn video chain opened up stores in Calgary, offering no membership fees and much lower prices; business slowed. The proliferation of porn on the internet in recent years has slowed business even more.

Today, the customers are mostly fifty or older, some are in their eighties and nineties. One of the clerks, a 64-year-old man named Jim who rents a room above the store, tells me he doesn’t watch much porn anymore, instead preferring Red Skelton movies, which he watches on the Turner Channel.

Trans Canada Adult Video carries 10,000 DVDs, available for rental or purchase. On one of my visits this past summer, not a single DVD was rented over the three hours I was photographing there; the only sale was a bottle containing a burgundy liquid.

The store’s best night in recent memory was the Saturday after the 2013 flood—revenue from rentals was over $2,000.

4 Geist 95 Winter 2014

—George Webber

GEIST

LETTERS

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basaric.ca

dreaming high

great un-offenders

Further to Stephen Osborne’s essay “Dream Counsels,” about Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the literature of dreams (Geist 94), a few months ago the Globe & Mail ran an essay by the PM—whose bio note read “Stephen J. Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada”—in which he mused on the Franklin find, calling it “a key moment in our country’s history.” He wrote: “I have said before that the land of the North is endless and so are the possibilities. Our biggest dreams are at our highest latitudes.” Huh? —Daniel Francis, North Vancouver Read “Who Cares Who Ate John Franklin” by Daniel Francis at geist.com.

In “Offend” (No. 93), Stephen Henighan claims that the primary responsibility of literature is to offend.

Surely not all great writers are great offenders: Tolkien, Toynbee, Fisk come to mind. Although Toynbee is now subject to objections that reflect more the standards and sensitivities of now than then, and Fisk is more respected than decried.

—Peter McCann, Hamilton

world wide ouija Loved Eve Corbel’s Yes No Good Bye comic about Ouija boards (No. 94).

I realize now how much I depend on my personal planchette and board— the mouse and the web—to divine answers for pressing concerns like “Find good mechanic” and “RDA of Vitamin D.” Woo-woo, indeed!

—Shelley Kozlowski, Lethbridge, AB

i love smoking Reading “Lucy, You Got Some Smokin’ to Do” by Dylan Gyles (geist.com), about how I Love Lucy was sponsored entirely by Philip Morris, reminded me of my own mother smoking Philip Morris cigarettes. The soft packages were left lying around our fifties bungalow in Toronto. When we became teenagers we noticed that Mum was just puffing, not ever inhaling. We teased her about this and, never one to be left behind by her kids, she began to inhale. Her cigarette consumption increased and she ended up being the only heavy smoker in the family.

—Sheila Koop, Elora, ON Read the winners of the Tobacco Lit contest on page 54 and at geist.com.

Letters 5

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telephone city

moose monomania

In Randy Reports, No. 94, Randy Fred mentions John Brant, the Mohawk chief. His name is actually Joseph Brant. He sided with the British in the American Revolution, 1776, not the Civil War, 1861. His Mohawk name is Thayendanegea.

Brant’s efforts to improve life for his people cost them control of their land in the Grand River Valley. That led to the Indian Act, source of troubles to this day. But Fred should not be criticized for the faulty history; the Brantford bus driver who told him all this should check up on his facts.

—Ross Andrews, Tillsonburg, ON

Greg Santos’s “Thinking About Moose” (No. 94) reminds me of Woody Allen’s classic stand-up comedy routine about shooting a moose.

After he straps the moose to the fender of his car, the moose wakes up, having been only wounded. Allen’s solution to the problem is to take the moose to a costume party, where he plans to ditch it. At the party, the moose becomes enraged when, in a best-costume contest, it places second to the Berkowitzes, a married couple dressed as a moose!

—Kevin McDonough, Vancouver

in memoriam: bill macdonald In 1996 Geist received a story from a writer in Thunder Bay called “Highway 587 Revisited,” typed out on a manual typewriter and purporting to be an account of the inauguration of the new gravel highway between Morgan’s Junction and Silver Islet Landing (on Lake Superior) on Dominion Day in 1932. This automotive feat is attempted by the narrator’s father, Felix, who in his Willys-Overland Redbird suffers a couple of flat tires and is overtaken by Beulah and Beryl Pigwiggen, spinster sisters and fierce drivers, in their 1927 Packard. Beulah and Beryl, “who believed staunchly that God is a celibate woman and haircuts in heaven are free,” arrive at Silver Islet Landing well ahead of Felix (and, incidentally, the Mayor) and are awarded the commemorative plaque. We were able to classify the story as fiction as soon as we realized that the narrator, unborn at the time, reports conversations between his parents that he could never have heard—but accompanying the text were black and white photographs of Beulah and Beryl Pigwiggen next to their Packard, and Felix in his velvet-collared car coat leaning against

6 Geist 95 Winter 2014

his Willys-Overland Redbird, that seemed powerfully to authenticate the story and to claim it as a “true” document of that historic event. It was this paradox that claimed our attention; the story was well wrought and highly entertaining, but it was also undeniably of this country that we all inhabit: an imaginary Canada with its notional “centre” somewhere in the depths of an almost impenetrable Canadian Shield, near great lakes and rivers, where stories are still told and snapshots exchanged of aunts and great aunts and uncles, and distant relatives, feckless sometimes strong men and strong sometimes feckless women.

The author of “Highway 587 Revisited,” and the curator of a particular literary landscape, was a writer named Bill MacDonald. Over the years we received and published several more wonderful stories from Bill MacDonald and came to see his work as a particular emanation of a Geistian mind.

In September 2014, Bill MacDonald died in Thunder Bay. Although we never met him in person, so to speak, we have always known him as kindred in spirit and imagination. He is greatly missed.

—Stephen Osborne

lie lay laid lain In a recent installment of Writer’s​ Toolbox (geist.com), Mary Schend­ linger clarifies the proper uses of lie, lay, laid, lain—thank you! The misuse of these words drives me wild. It seems that “to lay down for a nap” has become an acceptable phrase. I find it inexcusable that this and the common misuse of “lay” for “laid” has crept into print.

So thank you for highlighting this very easy-to-understand grammar rule!

—Carol Botting, Maple Ridge, BC

oops In Babylon / Hollywood (No. 93), Jean Harlow’s death year was given as 1926.

In fact, it was 1937.

—The Editors

randy reports Dear Geist, Without a language, there is no culture. This is sad when you realize the current state of Native languages in North America. The number of speakers is diminishing, their knowledge disappearing when they pass on.

This fall my wife and I traveled to Holbrook, AZ for the first ever Jehovah’s Witness Assembly in a Native language. It was held in Navajo. More than a thousand people attended. We drove out to the Grand Canyon. The first path we walked along I had a sensation of being up high. One does not have to see anything to feel how deep the canyon is. While driving back to the hotel we pulled over to check out different views of the canyon. Every spot felt different. The air and wind felt different. The foliage was different. The sunset apparently was quite stunning; I could feel the sun setting as the air started cooling.

There are about 200,000 Navajo living on the Navajo Nation reservation.

The language is so prevalent, even nonNavajo people are learning to speak it. Navajo is used in every setting; this helps preserve it and ensure its health.

There are tribes now in BC who have no fluent speakers left. Some are

adopting the language of neighbours in order to revive some kind of aboriginal culture. There is nothing wrong with this if it brings pride to their members.

The Indian residential school system brought much harm to Native languages and culture. The intent of those schools was to “tame the savage.”

The colonizers knew if they eliminated the languages they would have more control over the people. To a large degree they were successful. But since the effects of the Indian residential school system was brought to the attention of Canadians, vast amounts of money and resources are being invested in reviving, preserving and teaching First Nations languages.

Si’em Media Society, a media organization operating in the Hul’qumi’num language, with whom I am involved, came across Where Are Your Keys?, a language learning strategy developed by Evan Gardner.

We will be bringing Evan to Duncan to teach Where Are Your Keys? to fluent speakers and to learners of Hul’qumi’num.

Hul’qumi’num is not my traditional language, but because I live in a Hul’qumi’num-speaking territory I will learn it. Where Are Your Keys? uses American Sign Language to teach languages. I am totally blind so how can I benefit from this technique?

It will be interesting. I will document my learning of Hul’qumi’num so other visually impaired people can benefit from Where Are your Keys?

—Randy Fred

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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.

Letters 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES F RO M T H E N EW WO R L D

Shaggy Dog Tales ST EPH EN OSBO RN E

A parable for writers

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ccording to a Writer’s Guide available on the internet, writing a story is much like walking the dog: you have merely to think of the story as the dog and the plot as the route along which you plan to walk the dog. While walking the dog, of course, the Guide says, you have some general idea of where you’re going, a direction to follow to avoid getting

lost. You don’t want the dog to drag you around wherever the dog wants to go.

You have to decide where to go and when; especially when the dog or the story wants to veer off the path into the underbrush—and underbrush occurs in cities as a matter of course in dog-walking neighbourhoods—where there could be something interesting waiting to be found. At other times the dog or the story tends to lunge one way or the other from lamppost to fire hydrant, hedge to curb, conditionally at times, even subjunctively, sauntering in the imperfect, breaking away into the pluperfect and sliding back again into

the past—seeking a way through, no matter how helter-skelter, a way of its own, a path through the olfactory worlds of stories and dogs: you, the owner or proprietor of the story, and/ or the dog, or vice versa—by now we are extrapolating from the parabolic text (which can be found via Google if it hasn’t been deleted by now)—you, as we were saying, begin to whistle and call out to the dog or the story and sooner or later, with time running out for you and the story or the dog, neither of which are anywhere near your intended destination, there can no longer be any question that restraint is called for: at this point the leash comes metaphorically out of the pocket, and control is regained.

Notes & Dispatches 9

Dogs in the end, like stories, must be brought to heel, as this useful parable demonstrates, with a singular advantage to the story writer over the dog walker, for, as the Guide points out, if the story leads you to a dead end, you can always back up and start again, whereas the poor dog walker can never rewind from being dragged off a cliff.

Until a few years ago, professional dog walkers constituted a rare sign of urbanity in Canadian cities: lightly garbed muscular creatures in smooth clothing, slipstream coiffures, silvered sunglasses, headbands and running shoes that resemble tiny automobiles or large cellphones, conducting in one hand dogs on leashes numbering as many as half a dozen and more, streaming along the sidewalk with their professional walkers amongst them striding, leaning back, at times loping gracefully forward with the pack—troop or squad might be a more dignified term for these assemblies bearing little trace of the untamed, the wild, the fierce in tooth and nail as implied by the figure of the pack. These troops or squads have dwindled in size in recent years and at times resemble flocks of pigeons or lambs since the fashion for pocketsized dogs that can be inserted by their owners into bags and pockets and even, under firm rules of silence and continence, carried on buses, subways and here in Vancouver even on the SkyTrain, with the result that the profession of dog walker has been predicted recently by a columnist in the daily news as soon to be going the way of the dinosaur.

Official sanction of dog-walking culture can be seen in the emergence of dog parks designated by city hall for the running of dogs accompanied by human escorts equipped with the proper excrement-removal tools; an exemplary series of such parks in Vancouver can be followed through the West End, beginning at Sunset Beach Park and up Thurlow Street 10 Geist 95 Winter 2014

to Nelson Park, and then along Nelson Street toward Coopers Park past the stern facade of the Contemporary Art Gallery before pausing at the Walk–Don’t Walk signal at Homer Street, always careful not to disturb the streaming pedestrians strolling, sauntering, shuffling between the tall downtown buildings in which transpires so much urban business of a fiscal, administrative or sexual nature outside the scope of any single narrative let alone a single walk with a single dog.

For example, some years ago a visiting poet, well known in certain circles, returning from the site of the defunct National Grocery Museum in the 1300 block of Homer Street, paused among the dog walkers at the corner of Nelson and Homer in August long enough while gazing toward the sky to observe a businessman framed in a window on the fifth floor at 990 Homer Street remove his jacket and cufflinks and blue dress shirt, and a slender woman lean toward him as she unbuttoned her cream-coloured blouse; together they sank from view beneath the window ledge visible five storeys down from the sidewalk across the street—and pedestrians, as we were saying, stepping along to the bars and cafés of Yaletown, Davie Street, English Bay, etc., tourists in search of the National Grocery Museum gone from its erstwhile home on Homer Street (gone with it the vintage oatmeal in round containers, lurid soap boxes, familiar tins of Spork, Spam, Flash Brand Salmon; Dîner Kraft Dinner: all gone, into the past).

Walking several dogs at once, experts say, can be less troublesome than walking one dog at a time, as singular tendencies of dog or story to meander and veer away at random intervals tend in the aggregate to

cancel each other, with the result that each dog being a story of its own, or vice versa, according to the parable mentioned above, hustles along with little interference from other stories represented by the other dogs with their leashes of varying lengths. Such might be the case with plurality in general, any multitude of stories none of which are given a definitive weight in determining the final route, the socalled plot as defined by a well-known novelist in another online writing manual as events related causally and involving conflict leading to a climax and a resolution.

I

mplications of the dog-walking parable for writers can be extended from the world of amateur as well as professional dog walking into the world of sanctioned dog and story parks—

always of course with the approved tools and skill sets as defined in the appropriate regulations issuing from city hall, the grassy grounds of which in most cities are dog-free seven days a week. Our useful parable can be seen as well to encourage professional story writers to keep several stories on the go at all times, while maintaining an eagle eye for new leads, new plot twists hidden in the underbrush.

Another writer’s tip on the so-called World Wide Web suggests rather mysteriously, in terms perhaps more meaningful for writers well seasoned in the craft, that as a dog “conflates its pre-domesticated genetic memory of beating down the grass in the wild with its domesticated ritual of circling

before it lies down, the writer typically must circle the narrative numerous times.”

A few metres away from the corner of Homer and Nelson, where our visiting poet stands looking toward the sky, a blood-stained kitchen knife fell onto the sidewalk from a balcony on the tenth floor at one o’clock in the morning in December of 2002, as reported in a news item under the headline Trail of Blood Leads to Murder in Condo; the shiny Police Incident Van Command Centre Vehicle sat in the street for a day and half the night, and then the yellow crime-scene tapes disappeared and the Police Incident Van moved on to other scenes, other incidents.

For some weeks the metallic aftertaste of violent death clung to the molecules of the particular air of the intersection of the two streets named for Homer and Nelson, two sawmill owners who achieved high office, one a lieutenant governor and the other a high sheriff, their stories long since subsumed into the grid and equally disremembered by residents of the West End and the city at large, who associate the intersection today with, if anything at all, the marble column erected in Trafalgar Square in London, England, in the 1840s, or the ancient blind singer of the Odyssey.

As we allow the present narrative to circle around before settling down, we might notice a block farther north on Nelson Street the stubby twin towers of The Homer, an apartment block painted in the pastels named by expert colourists as Egyptian Sunrise and Harvest Cream, where they rise up bluntly before an immense facade of high-rise glass, steel and concrete. One of the towers is imprinted with the surname of the forgotten high sheriff mentioned above, and the other with the definite article elegantly inscribed in an elegant titling serif.

The two apartments in the The tower of The Homer were coveted at one time by another friend of ours,

an ex-director of the Art Gallery, and ex-adjunct professor of art history, seeking wall space on which to display his collection of Group of Seven counterfeits and composite photographs attributed to William Notman (considered by curators to be the inventor of the National Photography as well as creator of the original Photo ID-Card). On the ground floor the Homer Cafe could, until recent upgrades changed its name to the Homer St Cafe and Bar, be relied on for bacon and eggs over easy, rye toast, orange juice, coffee and a preread copy of the morning news and its hoard of near-stories, such as the item I found there in 2006 under the heading Body Parts Found, stating that on Saturday afternoon a citizen walking his dog in New Brighton Park, a dog-sanctioned green space on the east side of the city, had discovered a duffel bag containing what the police officer quoted in the item said may or may not have been human body parts. “It is certainly a suspicious circumstance,” said the officer in the item. “This is going to take a lot of forensic work.”

That same week, out on the west side of the city past Asthma Flats, sixteen garage fires had been set in a period of forty-eight hours: police in the news item were urging residents to watch for changes in the behaviour of family members. “So many things can trigger it,” said the officer, said the item: “physical, psychological, or alcohol abuse, as well as revenge or sexual excitement.”

(A Google run on the phrase “how to write” yielded 167 million hits on the second Monday of November 2014.)

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 in anthologies and periodicals—most recently “Dream Counsels” (Geist 94)—many of which can be read at geist.com.

Notes & Dispatches 11

Giller Filler DIA NA F I TZG ER AL D B RY DE N

Kisses, hugs, chumminess, elegance and the smell of success

T

here’s a smell in the room, hard to identify, but definitely there, in the Royal Conservatory’s gorgeously appointed Koerner Hall, all undulating wood and warm lighting and, as the website says, “spectacular glass lobbies.” At the main entrance, thronged with people waiting for their dates and checking their cellphones, a young man, tanned and sockless— brave in this brisk fall weather— sprints up the sloping hallway ahead and waves to one of the high-heeled women taking tickets. He flashes a white-toothed celebrity smile.

T­his is Between the Pages: the preGiller hybrid that’s neither a reading nor an interview, but a kind of sacrificial altar/beauty pageant for six Canadian authors tonight: David Bezmozgis, Frances Itani, Sean Michaels, Heather O’Neill, Miriam Toews, Padma Viswanathan. We’re drenched in soothing luxury and elegance, complete with a blues trio, tasteful onstage flower arrangements and an

12 Geist 95 Winter 2014

atmosphere that’s celebratory but also, well… a little weird.

Tonight’s agenda is simple: six celebrity presenters will read excerpts from the shortlisted books, to be followed by onstage questions for the authors from Carol Off, host of As It Happens on CBC Radio One. She greets each presenter with a kiss; including the tanned sprinter, who turns out, fittingly, to be an Olympic athlete, kayaker Adam van Koeverden. The other five are media and film people and Edward Greenspan, who gets a bonus hug from our host. Eddie, Carol Off says, and they purr together like cats over a bowl of cream. These effusions are part of the performance, like the musical flourishes introducing each “guest”: reminders that the evening is about surface more than content. On the Cover, rather than Between the Pages.

The chumminess between host and presenters has another effect, maybe unintended: it reinforces a conspiratorial, incestuous vibe. And here comes that smell again.

Once the writers come onstage, the tone changes: less talk show, more genteel Hunger Games. They sit facing the glowing hall and looking slightly

uneasy. Many of the questions come in pairs, drawing tenuous parallels between two disparate books; having been assigned reviews like this I know it’s an unforgiving job, trying to corral and tether unrelated works of art; Carol Off has her work cut out. Even so, I’m struck by how prescriptive tonight’s questions are; how rigidly tailored to elicit a desired response.

Anyone who’s watched 60 Minutes will recognize the technique. Q: “So the drone assault was a fiasco, wasn’t it?”

A: “It was a complete fiasco!”

Since we’re talking books here, not drone strikes, the questions are less sensational: “You both feature very strong women in your work, don’t you?” or “You use your main characters to embody political events. Tell us about that.” There’s an implicit assertion of a common ethos to the works, a common idea of what constitutes art: socially meaningful, with historically accurate details and dollops of humour and pathos, and a kind of cozy, we-all-share-the-same-values Canadianness. The flattening of all these books into one mega-book, not too sharp-edged, appropriately rightminded, does a disservice to the individual effort and imagination of each writer. Am I overstating it? Isn’t this just the nature of this kind of media

event, not to be taken too seriously?

Maybe. But why does it feel so particularly dodgy tonight?

The question-and-answer setup is enough like a student council election to induce high school flashbacks, and I’m not the only one squirming on the authors’ behalf. None of them (none of us, as writers) can afford not to care about a life-changing award, and it’s impossible, perhaps, for them to resist the homogenizing effect of their host’s questions, though there are moments (“I’m trying to hear a question in there,” Miriam Toews says, genially, at one point). My favourite exchange is when Carol Off says to David Bezmozgis: “So your main character [an Israeli politician] supports the Settlements. That’s kind of an unusual view, isn’t it?” Bezmozgis deadpans, a little testily: “Not in Israel.”

The excerpt read by Deepa Mehta from Padma Viswanathan’s book, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, turns on its head the kind of assumptions embedded in a question like this, as an apparent incident of racism turns out to be a shy woman’s expression of deeply felt sympathy for a stranger’s violent loss. And there’s Frances Itani’s response to the suggestion that she intends her characters to personify political history.

She’s kept a stoic mask for most of the evening; now she looks irritated, briefly, before reminding us that she’s invented these characters and their stories, tried to make them real, not symbolic.

There’s something unavoidably gladiatorial about the spectacle of six authors vying for one enormous prize that does provide a queasy kind of entertainment, but also raises serious questions: about why we write— rarely for prizes—and how authors are expected to jump through all these hoops for just a little attention and the shot at a ridiculously huge purse that, to appropriate the hyperbolic caps of texting, ONLY ONE OF THEM will get! Sure, they may enjoy some of the hoopla, however ridiculous or embarrassing, and OK, they get free drinks and a few good meals, but they’re also co-opted, like it or not, into a story about what it means to write a book, and what that book itself is supposed to mean in the wider culture. Near the end, Carol Off says to the authors with arch mock-seriousness: “So I have one very profound question for you all and I want you to give it your most considered attention.” (David Bezmozgis’s eyes begin to roll back in his head. The others look glassy-eyed.)

Dramatic pause. “Who’s going to win?” Once again, Bezmozgis plays it straight-faced: “The book with the strongest woman, of course.”

And how ironic. Because looking at the glossy program, it hits me like a slap—the thing that’s given the evening at least some of its gamey flavour. On the back page is a familiar face: Rick Mercer, the hastily assigned replacement host for the award presentation to take place a week from now. Only days ago I would have been looking at a photograph of Jian Ghomeshi. He would have been among the white-toothed media people here tonight, exchanging air-kisses and downing sparkly drinks in one of those spectacular lobbies. Did they have to reprint the programs? How much would that cost? The drama of Ghomeshi’s downfall in the past few weeks, its overt and submerged notes of accusation and complicity, lies and pain and chaos—and satire, with the Soviet-style replacement of icons at CBC—has been carefully purged from tonight. There’s no doubt we should be focusing on the writers and their books: David Bezmozgis: The Betrayers; Frances Itani: Tell; Sean Michaels: Us Conductors; Heather O’Neill: The Girl Who Was Saturday Night; Miriam Toews: All My Puny Sorrows; Padma Viswanathan: The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. But in these books, I’ll bet, will be found heat and ugliness and trauma, beauty and generosity. Comedy as well. Something, anyway, closer to the vividness of scandal than all this geniality. Hard to get a sense of that tonight, and maybe that’s unavoidable. This event is more about glamour than blood, sweat and tears. But I think I’ve identified that smell, finally: corpse, still warmish.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden writes fiction, essays and poetry. She is at work on her second novel, Tunapuna, and a book of essays, The Impostors.

Notes & Dispatches 13

the Lord Mayor and order him to “spare no houses”: that is, to create firebreaks by demolishM ARY SC H END L I NGE R ing buildings, the most Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel drastic and effective firefighting technique of Pepys’s account of the Great Fire of London the time. Pepys finds the Lord Mayor in Canning Street, exhausted and n a toasty Saturday afternoon defeated, crying out “like a fainting in August, aboard the SkyTrain woman” that workers are pulling down in East Vancouver, we are about half buildings, but “the fire overtakes us a mile from the Science World stafaster than we can do it.” tion when the brakes screech on the SkyTrain Control comes scratchtrack under us and we come to a ing through the speaker again, tellfast, grinding, wrong-sounding stop ing us that steps are being taken to that ends with a clunk. A few pasattend to our “Problem Train,” which sengers yelp in alarm. Then we sit is now heating up in the sun. Behind in silence—no motion, no ventime a young man and woman brightly lating fans, no conversation—high reassure their children, aged about above the street. A tinny voice comes three and five, that we’ll be at Science through the wall speaker, identifying World real soon. Why do we have to itself as SkyTrain Control and saystay here? says one. I’m hungry, says ing that there is a problem with our the other. A middle-aged man a few train and it will be resolved as soon as seats away, wearing a dress shirt and possible. A few other SkyTrain inciskater shorts, stands up with his bulgdents have occurred in the last couple ing briefcase and begins pacing up of weeks, generating news snippets and down the aisle of the car. such as “serious malfunction” and Meanwhile, in 1666, central Lon“five hours of commuter chaos” and don is chaos. All around him, Pepys “independent inquiry into SkyTrain sees “every creature coming away stoppages?” I open the book I have loaden with goods to save, and, here brought along, a sixty-four-page postand there, sick people carried away in card-size paperback of Samuel Pepys’s beds.” The river is full of boats and journal entries on the Great Fire of rafts, also laden with people’s stuff, London in 1666, and begin to read. and “all over the Thames, with one’s Pepys’s account opens on Sunday face in the wind, you were almost morning, September 2, 1666, when burned with a shower of fire-drops.” he rises to hear that a fire has started There is nothing to do but watch in a bakery in central London around the firestorm in horror. “It made me midnight, has consumed hundreds of weep to see it,” he writes, “and a horhouses and can now be seen clearly rid noise the flames made, and the from his home just northwest of the cracking of houses at their ruine.” At Tower of London. He walks to the 4:00 a.m. on Monday, September 3, Tower and climbs up to see “an infia hired cart arrives at the Pepys resinite great fire” roaring toward Londence in Seething Lane to carry away don Bridge with a brisk wind behind their “money, and plate, and best it. Buildings are breaking and falling, things.” Pepys supervises the transand people are screaming through fer, “riding myself in my night-gown, the streets with whatever possessions in the cart.” By Monday afternoon they can carry. Pepys reports to King much of the City—the area enclosed Charles, who sends him off to find by the stone wall built during the

Meanwhile, in 1666

O

14 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Roman occupation—is in flames, and the waterfront is on fire. The only way out is through one of the eight narrow gates in the wall, which is twenty feet high and eight feet thick.

People panic as they struggle to get their families and carts and wagons through the bottlenecks.

On the Problem Train, the pacing man sets down his briefcase by the sliding doors, jams both hands into the crack where the two doors meet and yanks hard, forcing the doors open. In one motion he grabs up the briefcase, steps out of the train and pushes the doors shut behind him.

Then he sets out on foot along the track—fifty feet above the street— toward Science World. For a few seconds no one else moves. Then it dawns on me, and probably everyone else, that SkyTrain Control doesn’t know about the debarking man, because they see the Problem Train and its passengers only as a point of light on an electronic chart in a technology-filled bunker somewhere. After another minute, a good citizen passenger gets up and goes to the speaker and presses the red button. SkyTrain Control responds at once, scratchily saying that they are working on the situation. Good Citizen reports that a man has left the train and is walking west along the track. Control says that it is very dangerous to leave the train between stations, and that no one should try to disembark or open the doors, and—No, no, says Good Citizen, someone has already done it, pried open the doors and walked away.

Control explains that parts of the elevated track have high voltage and leaving the train can cause serious injury, so please do not try to open the doors or exit the train. Good Citizen has no choice but to raise his voice. You’re not listening to us, he shouts into the speaker. It’s already happened! A guy got off the train and he’s—Please stay on the train, says Control, for your own safety.

The London fire is still raging two days later, on Tuesday, September 4, 1666, when Samuel Pepys arranged to have his important papers, his wine and his “parmazan cheese” buried in the yard. “Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower Street,” he writes. The usual way to pull down buildings is manually, with firehooks—long poles with hooks, rings and pulleys—but this fire is so large and fast and hot that it is creating its own weather, so the Tower of London garrison has brought out gunpowder to speed up the firebreak demolitions.

Over the next twenty-four hours the fire is calmed by these measures and by shifting winds. Smaller fires erupt from time to time, giving rise to rumours that the fire is sabotage perpetrated by the French and/or Dutch; Pepys’s comment that “it hath been dangerous for any stranger to walk the streets” understates the panicky

beatings and even lynchings that are going on day and night. He and some associates walk along a burnedout street one morning to look at the devastation, “our feet ready to burn, walking through the town among the hot coles.”

In the Problem Train the power has been off long enough that we remaining passengers are feeling the effects of being stuck in a sealed glass and metal box under the noonday sun at the peak of a hot summer. We fan ourselves with books, papers, flyers, tissues, scarves, phones, tablets— whatever we’ve got. The younger child weeps a bit while his mum and dad ransack their bags, working out who forgot to pack the snacks and water bottles. A woman toward the back offers them a box of orange juice. But what’s this? Another train pulls up on the track next to us, and stops. Two or three people are aboard,

one of whom—wearing overalls! hooray!—emerges and walks along the guideway beside us, stopping occasionally to peer at the bottom of our train and its track. He does not look at us or say anything. Who is that man, the kids ask, speaking for all of us. What is he doing, why doesn’t that train have any people on it, are we going to ride on that train? Some of us begin to gather up our possessions. But no, the man goes back into the other train and it trundles away.

SkyTrain Control crackles in again, now referring to us as a “failed train,” advising of a further delay and saying, in what seems a reproachful tone, that the problem has been “compounded by the fact that passengers broke out of the train.” We are shamed even more when a different Control voice—deeper, and more stern— comes through the speaker, informing “all SkyTrain passengers” (emphasis

Notes & Dispatches 15

his) that a Problem Train is “causing delays throughout the system,” and Control is working very very hard to get things moving again. A minute later, the power comes back on. Then another train rumbles by, full of passengers who peer in at us with the mix

of curiosity and pity one usually sees on people visiting the zoo.

By Saturday, September 8, 1666, six days after the fire started, London is full of talk about the fire—how it started, whether sabotage was involved, how the city will be rebuilt—with

Walking in Snow SUSAN T ELF ER

After Robert Kroetsch’s “Sounding the Name” In this poem my father is not drunk.

He does not phone me this December night and beg me to invite him for Christmas.

I don’t pause beside the sliding glass door with phone in hand and watch the snowflakes sink, and hope to get snowed in just once to be safe.

He does not tell me I must accept him passing out on my couch before dinner in front of my young children, scaring them; he does not call me narrow-minded and I don’t have to say I don’t want another generation harmed.

I do not hang up on him, don’t wheel the baby stroller up the hill, don’t stare at flakes of snow under streetlight cones of light like galaxies plunging.

I do not wish he were dead.

In this poem my father is not drunk.

He’s sitting on the couch, reading aloud a picture book to his grandchildren.

I’m mashing potatoes in the kitchen.

My father shows me how he stirs gravy.

I overcook the turkey just a little.

Susan Telfer is the author of House Beneath. She won the Vancouver Writer’s Festival 2013 Poetry Contest. Oolichan Books will publish her next book in spring 2015. She lives in Gibsons, BC.

16 Geist 95 Winter 2014

not much to go on except hearsay: the post office is gone, and so is the London Gazette building, having succumbed shortly after the Monday edition went out. Months will pass before the losses are totted up and some will never be counted. Officially the fire has taken fewer than ten human lives, but in those days poor and middleclass people were barely kept track of, and many bodies must have been burned to nothing in a fire that was hot enough to melt the iron bars of the local prisons, and there was no enumeration of those souls who died in the winter—of cold, or hunger, or sickness, or grief. Some survivors have earned a bit of money packing up and carting the goods of wealthier people; over dinner, Pepys and his cronies denounce with equal heat the workers who stole things, and the rich men who underpaid labourers or haggled over the price as London burned. On Sunday morning Pepys writes, “many and most in the church cried, specially the women.” A week later, and two more times before the month is out, he reports terrifying “dreams of fire, and falling down of houses.”

About forty-five minutes after we became the Problem Train, a low rumbling noise starts up under us, and then we are moving—slowly and gingerly, but steadily. No one makes a sound for a few seconds, then whoosh—breathing, nervous laughter, wild cheers from the two kids, the peep-peep-peeping of thirty or forty text messages being composed and sent. When we have stopped at Science World and the doors have slid open, we stampede off the train and down the stairs as politely as possible. I am almost at street level when the distant voice of SkyTrain Control comes through the speaker one last time: This train is out of service. Please do not board.

Mary Schendlinger is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and publishing courses. In another life she is also Eve Corbel, maker of comics. She lives in Vancouver.

A F T E R L I F E

O F

C U L T U R E

Campus Confidential ST E P H E N HE NIG HAN

Hounders, gropers and bullies: Professor Jennings is out of luck

“W

hat’s it like teaching at a university?” a male writer friend asked.

“All those young girls. I mean, do you—?” When I said I didn’t, he looked not only disappointed but frustrated, as though I were withholding an undeniable fact of my existence. My friend was convinced that sex between professors and students was a staple of campus life. In this he resembled the makers of popular culture, who have frozen the university’s public image in the 1960s. Many films or novels with university settings include an affair between a male professor and a female student. In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House. In fact, neither today’s undergraduates, who are stressed out from supporting part-time jobs on top of full-time study, student loans and career worries, nor the current generation of professors, who were educated in feminism and power dynamics, and are overstretched by funding cuts and bureaucratic interference in their jobs, have much time for campus affairs.

These days, the careerist power grabs of academic administrators, who are replacing professors as the central figures in university life, produce more drama than campus sexual relationships. Which is not to say that such liaisons don’t occur.

Some people I know believe that a professor can be fired for having an affair with a student. This 18 Geist 95 Winter 2014

is a myth. On unionized Canadian campuses, firing a faculty member requires years of reports, committee deliberations and appeals. More importantly, society has stopped condemning consenting adults for private acts; it’s not feasible for universities to wage war against consensual sex, provided that both participants are of age. In Canada—different standards apply elsewhere—I’m aware of professors who have been fired for two sexual misdemeanours: harassment of younger women by older men; and the use of an office computer to download child pornography. The latter offence is uncommon, but there remains a fringe of older male professors—holdovers from the Professor Jennings era—who make women’s lives unbearable. Regarded as pariahs by their colleagues, these hounders and gropers are not very likely to have actual sexual relations with anyone; rather, they bully young women.

Their victims are frequently graduate students or younger female professors. This kind of aggression could morph into an abusive relationship; but these days it is usually rebuffed, and often reported.

The 1960s, the sordid heyday of the campus affair, presented unique conditions: sexual liberation and the availability of the Pill, combined with the persistence of patriarchal assumptions from the 1950s. In Canada, the massive expansion of the university system to serve the baby boomers resulted in the importation of squads

of male professors from the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. Many of the young women who entered university as undergraduates came from towns or neighbourhoods where almost everyone had the same culture: foreign-born professors exercised an exotic allure. Having been hired with master’s degrees and a promise to finish a doctorate at a later date, many of these instructors were barely older than their students.

Neither the mainstreaming of feminism that began in the 1970s, nor the awareness of power dynamics introduced by critical theory in the 1980s, had yet made their impact on campus consciousness. Most of the privileged minority who attended university did not need part-time jobs; professors were not yet labouring under “publish or perish” injunctions. Everyone had time on their hands. The mayhem that ensued was engraved on the minds of baby boomer students, who recapitulated these situations in movies, novels and newspaper columns over the next decades.

The university, meanwhile, chan­ ged beyond recognition.

W

henever twenty thousand people are brought together in a single place, many of them pair off into couples. Not all of these couples unite people of the same generation or institutional category. Power dynamics may be unequal, as in many workplace romances, yet often the two partners are insulated in separate departments

or divisions. Contemporary university demographics are complex. In my department, nearly two-thirds of the professors are women; not all of the men identify as straight. Campuses now host a higher percentage of mature students and international students, and far more administrators.

Women, once a vulnerable minority referred to as “co-eds,” now account for 60-65% of undergraduates on most Canadian campuses. Many undergraduates, taught by graduate students and part-timers on yearby-year contracts, often in enormous lecture courses, rarely meet tenured professors. Of the last two campus affairs of which I became aware, one involved a forty-year-old female professor who was dating a thirty-something male graduate student from a different department; the other united a senior administrator in his sixties, who had been married to his wife for decades, with a male graduate student

in his mid-twenties. Even when the older man-younger woman pattern occurs—and though no longer common, it does happen, usually to a female graduate student—the dynamics are not those of the 1960s. Contemporary students are aware of their rights, wired and worldly; in a reversal of past dynamics, today’s students are more culturally diverse, and accustomed to managing cultural diversity, than their professors. Dating a professor may leave a young woman (or man) feeling powerless; alternately the prof may be one more check mark on her (or his) list of conquests, or even the source of a meaningful relationship. Until 2014 the student association on my campus included “Sleep with your professor” on the list of “101 Things to Do Before You Graduate” that it handed out to incoming undergraduates. Most of us were glad when this item was removed, yet its jesting inclusion indicates that the subject of

sexual relationships is less awe-inspiring to contemporary undergraduates than it was for earlier generations.

Last year a twenty-three-year-old seminar leader came to tell me that he and an undergraduate woman in his seminar had decided that they wanted to date. He asked to have her assignments graded by someone else. After we had arranged this, they went out together. Sex on campus is not going away. The present, though, is witness to the advance of awareness, sensitivity, irony and negotiation, and the retreat of Professor Jennings.

Stephen Henighan’s book A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change (Linda Leith Publishing), which began as a column in Geist, recently appeared in German translation from Alouette Verlag. Read more of his work at stephenhenighan. com and geist.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHenighan.

Notes & Dispatches 19

FINDINGS

Arts and Crafts, by Biliana Velkova, comes from Silver Centre Series (2008), a found photo project exploring seniors’ leisure activities.

Rum Row DA N F R A N C I S

From Closing Time. Published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2014. Daniel Francis is an award-winning author. He has written two dozen books, principally about Canadian history.

W

hile rum-runners on the Pacific Coast worked directly from Canada, on the Atlantic side of the continent they used convenient foreign ports where alcohol could be received for transshipment into the 20 Geist 95 Winter 2014

US. The Bahamas, Cuba, British Honduras (Belize) and Bermuda all served as conduits for booze from Britain and Canada. Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, boomed in the early years of prohibition. Daniel Okrent points

out that in the two years before America went dry, 914 gallons of Scotch entered the Bahamas; by 1922 that amount had jumped to 386,000 gallons. Another historian estimates that as much as ten million quarts of liquor passed through Nassau in a year. Of course, so much liquor was not meant for Bahamians. As quickly as it could be transferred to the rum-running vessels it was on its way again, up the coast to “Rum Row,” the off-shore marketplace between Boston and Atlantic City.

Velkova’s work explores consumer culture, diaspora and social identity. She is originally from Sofia, Bulgaria and now lives in Vancouver.

Rum Row was said to be the invention of a former merchant mariner named Bill McCoy. In 1921 McCoy acquired a 90-foot (27.4-metre) fishing schooner, loaded it with 1,500 cases of whisky he acquired in Nassau and sailed to the coast of Georgia where he sold the entire shipment. A few weeks later McCoy returned with another load, this time to the vicinity of New York where he waited offshore for word to spread among the bootleggers that he had arrived and

was open for business. So successful was this venture that he upgraded to a larger vessel, the 114-foot (34.5metre), two-masted schooner Tomoka, capable of handling 5,000 cases at a time. McCoy is credited with another invention adopted by the rumrunning fleet: the “burlock.” Smugglers commonly removed bottles of alcohol from their wooden crates and repacked them in burlap sacks for ease of handling. McCoy’s innovation was to take six bottles, surround

them in a protective jacket of straw in the shape of a pyramid, then wrap the whole package tightly in burlap. The result, known also as a “sack,” made economical use of stowage space and could be handed over the gunwales with ease.

At this time the Coast Guard was not yet a serious impediment to business and the atmosphere on Rum Row was relaxed and friendly with customers coming out in all manner of boats to make their purchases. Boaters out Findings 21

for a day cruise might arrive just to buy a bottle or two for personal consumption and there were reports of rum vessels hanging price lists over the side like vegetable vendors at an open-air market. One enterprising yacht owner hired a band, put some waiters in uniform and established a floating speakeasy just beyond the three-mile limit. Eventually this maritime shopping mall evolved into a more permanent fleet of large vessels, floating warehouses that remained off the coast more or less permanently, careful to stay beyond the three-mile territorial limit, while smaller vessels re-supplied them from Nassau and the other ports.

In 1922 another seaport opened to the rum-running trade. The tiny island of Saint-Pierre and its neighbour Miquelon, anchored in the

North Atlantic just south of Newfoundland, had been claimed for France in 1536 by the explorer Jacques Cartier. Over the years, ownership of the sparsely populated islands had bounced back and forth between France and Britain as the spoils of their colonial wars until finally the Treaty of Paris in 1814 left them in French hands for good. Following World War I the government in Paris had banned the importation of alcohol into all its overseas possessions, including Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, as a way of preserving foreign exchange, but in April 1922 Paris lifted the ban and the islands, located so conveniently close to the Eastern Seaboard, were set to become the liquor entrepôt of the North Atlantic.

Once again it is Bill McCoy who gets credit for recognizing the

Soldier Boys A R L E E N PA R É

From Lake of Two Mountains. Published by Brick Books in 2014. Arleen Paré is a poet and novelist. Lake of Two Mountains won the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She lives in Victoria.

Bobby grew up into a boy.

Wrong decade. He left for the War, Second World, returning years later, a box-camera snapshot in hand: foot soldiers, himself and four friends lined up in front of a broken-down fence.

Boys drowning in greatcoats.

At the cottage Bobby slept in a cot on the screened-in veranda, half in, half out of the house.

Old army blanket, and all night the wind off the shore raked his hair.

OVERUSED WORD ALERT  Google Alert results for “literally”

22 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Mornings, he’d sprawl on the wharf or sit in a lawn chair, slathered in baby oil,

remembering what?

His fiancée married while he was at war. He never did.

Later—the house finally his—he glassed in the porch, wintered in his red velvet chair, cradling the snapshot: five soldiers, all boys, in the palm of his hand. 

extra-legal possibilities of SaintPierre. As the story goes, in the spring of 1922 his vessel Tomoka, dodging the authorities and in need of repairs, was waiting off Halifax for permission to enter the harbour.

Because the schooner had on board a shipment of liquor from Nassau, permission was denied. A frustrated McCoy, who had come to Halifax to meet his vessel, fell into conversation with a merchant from Saint-Pierre named Folquet who was staying at the same hotel. When Folquet learned of the rum-runner’s predicament he offered not only to fix the boat but to act as McCoy’s agent on Saint-Pierre, an island the American did not even know existed. Once McCoy paid his first visit, he recognized immediately that he’d found a perfect place to do business. The writer Damon Runyon called SaintPierre “a little squirt of a burg.”

Prior to prohibition it served mainly as a port of call for the French fishing fleet. Its population of fewer than four thousand inhabitants was in decline as the exodus that had begun during the war continued for lack of economic opportunities. In this situation the rum-runners were welcome when they came offering jobs, incomes and adventure to a population hungry for all three. It was not long before Saint-Pierre was challenging the southern ports for preeminence in the Eastern Seaboard liquor business. (The Bahamas and Havana remained the main suppliers to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.)

Within a year the Saint-Pierre waterfront was transformed into a bustling metropolis with cargoes of Scotch arriving from Scotland, Irish whiskey from Ireland, champagne from France, rum from Demerara, and rye and bourbon from Canada.

While vessels waited to take on a

LOUIS HEAD EXPLAINS: I DIDN’T MEAN “BURN THIS B**** DOWN” LITERALLY:

Good to know, because it certainly looked dif-

ferent last week when the grand jury decision got announced.

THIS COUPLE’S WEDDING WAS MOVING. LITERALLY.:

load their crews took advantage of the several bars on shore to drink and gamble. The demand for warehouse space soon outstripped the supply and every available building on the island was commandeered for storage.

So many jobs were available loading and unloading the crates of liquor and working on the launches that carried the booze down to Rum Row that the locals abandoned the fishery altogether. Eventually the fish-packing plant had to close; it became a liquor storehouse instead. In 1923 more than a thousand vessels left SaintPierre for Rum Row carrying six million bottles of hooch.

Most of the large liquor dealers from Canada established warehouses in Saint-Pierre. Consolidated Exporters, for example, represented United Distillers, a prominent Vancouver distillery. Consolidated Traders did business for the Montreal liquor giant Canadian Industrial Alcohol Ltd., owner of Corby’s. Another agency, the Great West Wine Company, represented the Reifel interests in SaintPierre. The Bronfmans had their own subsidiary as well, the Northern Export Company, which grew to become the largest trader on the island; at one point there were seventy people working at the Northern Export warehouse and office in SaintPierre. As time went on, a few Canadian distillers came to handle most of the liquor that moved in and out of the island port. One reason that the liquor merchants appreciated Saint-Pierre was that the French imposed only a four-cent-per-bottle tax, less than fifty cents per case, much lower than the six dollars per case exporters had to pay in the Bahamas. For Canadian dealers, Saint-Pierre also was convenient because they did not have to go through the charade of finagling the customs documents. Shippers from

Warpath J O R DA N A B E L

From Injun. Published by Jackpine Press in 2014. Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer living in Vancouver. His debut book, Place of Scraps (Talonbooks), won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

a)

k)

he played injun in gods country where boys proved themselves clean

just the just the

dumb beasts who could cut fire out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail where girls turned plum wild garlic and strained words through the window of night he spoke through numb lips and breathed frontier b) he heard snatches of comment going up from the river bank all them injuns is people first and besides for this buckskin why we even shoot at them and seems like a sign of warm dead as a horse friendship and time to pedal their eyes to lean out and say the truth all you injuns is just white keys

warpath all time disgust

ringing rescue acts for the boys and injuns for the nights

all misdeeds at the milk house all heap shoots by the sagebrush

all the grub is somewhere down in the hungry bellies

of drunks all the dog cries

are announced

at the backdoor

o) injun s mu st

straigh t bl ack arrows

hang

o ff their

sh oulders

an d be tha ankf ul and b e faithf ul a nd be tr ustful

of si lver and

lu ck 

Hector Irakliotis and Tatyana Sandler were married Friday on the N train as it crossed from Brooklyn into Manhattan. REMEMBER ‘GANGNAM STYLE’? IT LITERALLY JUST BROKE YOUTUBE:

Remember “Gangnam Style,” the 2012 earworm by Korean pop star PSY with the amazing music video you couldn’t stop watching? Well, it just broke

Findings 23

Canada, such as the Bronfmans, Gooderham & Worts and Hiram Walker, were required to put up a bond equal to double the cash value of a shipment, refundable when proof was provided that the shipment had reached its declared destination of Cuba, Nassau, or wherever. The easiest way of getting around this requirement was to send the paperwork to an agent in the destination port who had been bribed to confirm that, yes, the shipment had arrived. When the signed documents arrived back in Canada the shipper got the bond payment back and the liquor went on its way into the US pipeline. Now Canadian shipments could simply be exported to nearby Saint-Pierre, receive all the legitimate signatures and customs stamps that freed up the deposits, and be rerouted down to Rum Row. 

Children Not Prohibited DAV I D A L B A H A R I

From Learning Cyrillic. Published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2014. David Albahari is the author of many novels and short story collections.

F

or three months now there has been a sign in our neighbor’s front yard advertising that the house is for sale. This is the house of our neighbors to the left. The house on the right was recently renovated, so they certainly are not thinking of selling it, at least not for now. The house to the left, however, has seen better days, and this is the main reason, or so my wife thinks, that they have not been able to find a buyer for such a long time, though our papers are repeating day in and day out that the available real estate in Calgary is not enough to meet the vast demand. Every two or three days an agent from a real estate

Guide to Better Cooking CARIN MAKUZ

Found poetry from Pillsbury Kitchens’ Family Cookbook. Published by Pillsbury Kitchens in 1976. Carin Makuz plays with text, reviews books and chats with writers at www.matildamagtree.com. She lives in Whitby, ON.

agency brings around people who are looking for a new home, but we are already into the fourth month that the house is for sale, and the sign is still there, unchanged.

It doesn’t bother me. I even find it engaging to observe the potential buyers from behind the curtain, their bold stride and grinning faces as they get out of their cars and follow the agent, and their plodding stride and glowering expressions after they have finished touring the house and go back to their neatly parked cars.

There are sometimes children with them, and a dog. The children run, call to each other, make noise, and the

h er b s , s pi c es a n d s ea s o n i n g s Please one year with ancient freshness. Blend blending amount and develop pleasantly powdered aroma to 4 servings. Generally taste storage after a pinch of common art.

how to measure 1. Use only spray-on poultry.

2. Sticking, straight-edge products with short times containing fish custard… may cause high altitude moisture—change is necessary.

3. It is recommended you continue broiling or roasting at eye level.

4. No need to remember oven custard and cream.

5. Remember cheese fillings immediately (and firmly press using only solid meat, solid shortening or leftover temperature).

6. A recipe for food, or foods should be refrigerated if you live with a standard metal spatula or greasing change.

7. 350º may have to make adjustments.

sp e cial o c c a s i o n mea ls Try to time your guests casually— working family looks just right. Gracious, carefree food (most popular), seems to share with taste and ease.

m ov i n g t owa r d m et r i c s i n t h e k i t c h en Available devices, and certainly teaspoons, in Grandmother’s kitchen hasten confusing weather reports. Do they mean a library? Indeed!

The usual conversion: 500 available, freezing familiarity, 100 degrees exposure (mL) .001 plus metric nesting instructions, as always are labeled.

The difference is: weight change will occur between home economists. 

YouTube. BEING POWERFUL LITERALLY CHANGES YOUR VOICE, SCIENCE SAYS: A recent study from the Columbia School of Business found that when people were put in positions of power, their voices automatically rose in loudness variability and pitch, but lowered in pitch variability, becoming more monotone. CASINO PATRON LOSES PANTS,

24 Geist 95 Winter 2014

From When the Bough Breaks, a collection of comic strips produced between 2002 and 2004 by Eric Uhlich. See more of his work at oktober.ca.

dog, just in case, starts marking the new territory and leaving its spoors.

“I don’t get it,” I said one day to my wife when new buyers arrived on the neighbor’s lawn with their dog, “why do people take a dog along with them and not a cat when they are looking at a house. Don’t cats care where they will live?”

“You’d be advised,” my wife said while she peered over my shoulder, “to start thinking about what we’ll do if a family moves in with little kids.

It’ll be easy with the dogs, that is our least worry.”

My wife does not hate children, she simply does not like to have them in her immediate vicinity. She told me so as soon as we met. Then I didn’t care; later I hoped she’d have a change of heart; afterwards I learned that there are some things a person cannot hope for. When we bought our house, after all, my wife demanded that there be no children in the houses on either side of us, on both sides of the street.

That is why we settled on this neighborhood, where most of the residents were retired. After a while, some of the retirees died, others went to homes for the elderly, and now children of various ages could be often seen and heard. Our part of the street, until recently, according to my wife, was the last haven of peace and quiet,

LITERALLY:

but now, to her horror, this haven is being threatened with the danger that it may disappear.

First, as soon as the sign announcing the sale went up, she called our lawyer to ask whether she could forbid the sale of the house to families with little kids. The lawyer informed her that she could sell her own home to anyone she wanted, she had no need for a formal prohibition, but when my wife explained that she wasn’t calling about our house, but about the house of our neighbors to the left, the lawyer asked to speak to me. I listened patiently to his complaint, during which he informed me of how many times my wife had called him the last two weeks.

“Twelve times,” said the lawyer, “and her demands included suing your supermarket for rotten potatoes, seeking a ban on bringing young children in public transport, reporting the woman from a nearby street because the grass was too long in her backyard, and yesterday she insisted that I write into your will that the funeral must not be held in the rain.”

“Whose funeral?” I asked.

“Yours,” said the lawyer. “Her funeral is not even mentioned in the will.”

I said nothing to my wife. After all, when she decides something, there is

no force powerful enough to prevent her. “Did she make plans,” I asked the lawyer, “for where I would be buried?”

“You will be cremated,” the lawyer answered, “and then she is taking the urn to Belgrade, where there will be a memorial service.”

“And that is when it shouldn’t be raining?”

“Right,” said the lawyer, “the day must be beautiful.”

“Wasn’t I smart to think of that?” my wife said proudly when I complained to her about this. “That way no one will get mud on their clothes or shoes, not like back at Bežanija cemetery when they buried my aunt during a downpour. My poor uncle slipped and sat down in the mud,” she said, “and our godfather got his shoe stuck in his galoshes and he almost couldn’t find it. After all,” said my wife, “it will be nicer for you, too, in the sun than in the rain.”

That’s true. I have hated the rain ever since I can remember. I called the lawyer and said that I agreed with my wife’s request regarding the funeral. The lawyer sighed and hung up the phone without a word.

Meanwhile, my wife had come up with a new strategy for the people considering the house of our neighbors to the left. She found a “Beware

It was not a good night at the casino for a Dayton woman. The report says she became combative when officers tried to put her in handcuffs and load her

into a police cruiser. It says she lost her pants in the process. SOME CALL SECURITY LINE LITERALLY A MILE LONG AT MIDWAY: Thanksgiving travel took its toll at Chicago’s Midway

Findings 25

of Dog!” sign and added the words “The Dog Bites!” to it in red lettering, and then she hung the sign up on the low fence that separated our front yard from the neighbor’s.

Two days later, a young married couple got out of a brand-new van and went over to the neighbor’s house. By the hand the wife was leading a little boy who had only just learned how to toddle, but the moment she caught sight of the sign on the fence, she swept the boy up, spun around, and while her husband ran after her, she fled back to the van. Her husband tried to convince her to get out, but then he got into the van, and soon they were gone.

The next day the neighbor knocked at our door. My wife asked me not to open it to him, and when I refused and started walking toward the door, she locked herself in the bathroom.

“What is this?” asked the neighbor.

“Since when have you had a dog?” He was holding my wife’s sign.

“We don’t have it any more,” I said. “It was biting, so we returned it to its previous owner.”

My neighbor shoved the sign furiously into my hands, looked me up and down in a rage, and marched out of the yard.

My wife came out of the bathroom and said that she was proud of me.

She wanted to call the lawyer immediately and submit a request for compensation for suffering and fear. She had had to sit down on the toilet, she explained, because her legs were shaking so badly and her heart, look, was still pounding. I told her to lie down, and, just to be safe, I unplugged the phone.

After that my wife changed her tactics. She found a horrendous old hag mask at a store, probably left over from Halloween, and then,

whenever she caught sight of potential buyers with small children, she’d put the mask on. The mask had a knobby nose with several revolting warts, protruding teeth and long, gray matted hair. My wife would wait for the buyers to go into the neighbor’s house, then she’d put on a shabby house dress, grab a broom and go out into the back yard. She wouldn’t do anything special in the yard, she’d just stand there in the corner of the back porch, easily visible from the kitchen of our neighbors to the left. Sooner or later, someone would come to the window—people are sure to be interested in the view from the kitchen, especially if there is a sink nearby—and catch sight of my wife, and then there would be a fuss and a panic, and you could see the frightened people through the neighbor’s window as they gesticulated and quarreled. All of that with the audible cries and sobs of children.

This time the neighbor didn’t come knocking, he called the police.

The police car pulled in and parked in front of our house on Wednesday afternoon. The policeman who rang was young. He smiled when I opened the door and said that they’d received a report that a mentally disturbed woman lived here who was putting on masks and attacking children.

“Nonsense,” I said, “my wife wouldn’t hurt a fly. She was trying on that costume,” I added, “to get ready for Halloween.”

“Halloween is six months away,” the policeman said.

“My wife is a perfectionist,” I answered.

The policeman was insistent. He asked if he could see her.

“She has gone off to a game of bingo,” I said. “She plays bingo every Wednesday but she never wins anything.”

The policeman said that he played Lotto, but he, too, had never won anything. He asked to see her costume. “I assume,” he said, “that she hasn’t worn it to play bingo?”

I asked him to wait. I went up to the room, put on the mask, wrapped the shabby house dress around me and grabbed the broom. When I appeared suddenly in front of the policeman, he was startled and his hand flew to his gun. “Hey,” he said, “that is one dangerous mask.” He reached over and fingered the wart on the nose. He sniffed his fingers.

“They seem almost real,” he said, “they even smell of pus.”

“The hair is real, too,” I replied, “it isn’t synthetic.”

The police rubbed some of the hairs between his fingers. He said that the mask would appeal to his wife, and he asked where we’d gotten it. He took out a pad and jotted down the name of the shop. While he was writing, over his shoulder I noticed our neighbor: he was wiping the For Sale sign with a damp cloth.

By that time the policeman had written down the address, tucked his pad into his shirt pocket, said goodbye and left. As the police car pulled away, I saw a new van pull up to the neighbor’s house, and out of it came a husband and wife, three small children and two dogs. I closed the door and hurried to the back porch. The bathrobe tripped me up, but still I got out onto the back porch just as the faces of the young married couple appeared in the kitchen window.

A little later they were joined by the face of our neighbor. All three of them stared at me, their eyes bulging. At first I felt a little awkward, and then I remembered my wife, and slowly, ever so slowly, I raised the broom in greeting. 

International Airport, creating unusually long security lines particularly early Sunday morning. JAMES TOBACK RECALLS WATCHING DANCE ICON FIGHT FOR TAXI—LITERALLY: James Toback says he saw dance icon Rudolf Nureyev get in a fight once.

26 Geist 95 Winter 2014

LITERALLY, WE CAN’T:

Making ‘Blurred Lines’ sound like a comforting nursery rhyme, his track

Under the Influence DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

From “A Nervous Race: 222 Brief Notes on the Study of Nature, Human and Otherwise,” in By the Book by Diane Schoemperlen. Published by Biblioasis in 2014. The collages displayed here were constructed with materials taken from Seaside and Wayside: Nature Readers 1 to 4, by Julia NcNair Wright, published in 1887.

Diane Schoemperlen has published several collections of short fiction and three novels. She lives in Kingston.

“Literally, I Can’t” has shook the Internet with controversies of misogyny, resulting in arguments of feminism. MANY AMERICANS ARE LITERALLY ADDICTED TO TEXTING WHILE DRIVING:

Compulsion—even addiction—are appropriate terms for the nearly irresistible urge to respond to a text message, even while driving, an expert said. HIT BY A

Findings 27

Royal Pillow Talk L I N DA G R I F F I T H S

From The Duchess. Linda Griffiths was a multiple-award-winning playwright, actor, and producer. Maggie and Pierre, which toured Canada and played Off Broadway, was her first major success. She died in 2014. The Duchess will run at the Cultch in Vancouver in April 2015.

(Blackout. In the darkness we hear squeaking bedsprings, heavy breathing, then silence. Lights up) I’m sorry, Wallis. Better luck next time. wallis Talk to me. edward About what? wallis This. edward Oh. Well, I… better luck next time. And so on. wallis Your Highness, Americans aren’t so stuffy about these things. edward Please call me David, all those close to me do. The world thinks of me as a great lover, but the truth is, I’m not. wallis Please don’t think I’m too forward, sir. David. But I learned a few things when I was in China. edward The real truth is, I’ve rarely… actually… fully… done it… Well, once or twice. wallis Premature ejaculation? edward I seem to be highly excitable— wallis Sir. David. Have you ever heard of the art of Fang Chung? edward Fang…? wallis Chung. It’s a skill, practiced for centuries, which involves, among other things…

(WALLIS straddles EDWARD and begins to touch him) relaxation of the male partner through a prolonged and carefully modulated massage of the nipples… edward Yes…? wallis The stomach… edward Ohhhh, yes… edward

TONNE OF BRICKS—LITERALLY: A

The thighs… and after a deliberately protracted and titilatingly unbearable delay… edward Yes…? wallis The genitals. edward (breathing heavily) I’ve always liked the Chinese. wallis Do you like to play games? edward Games? wallis (taking off her long black gloves) Sometimes when we’re intimate, we like to feel big and powerful, sometimes small and… dominated. edward I remember my nursery…

Mamma was the Queen… never there at all, really… and my Nanny would… wallis Trust me. edward She would… she would pinch me… and spank me… and— wallis Spank you… like this?

(She whips EDWARD with her gloves) edward Oh yes, don’t stop. wallis She’d say you were bad. edward Yes… wallis A naughty boy! A bad, naughty, dirty boy! edward Yes! wallis Say “I’m not a bad boy.” edward I’m not… a bad… I’m not bad… wallis Say, “I’m the King of England, and I can do as I like!” edward I’m not King yet, you know, I’m only Prince of— wallis Say it. edward I’m the King of England and I can do as I like! wallis Louder! wallis

I’m the King of England, and I can do as I like! wallis Again! edward I’m the King of England…

I’m the King of England… I’m the King of England… and I… can… do… as… I… like!

(HE climaxes) wallis Just this once, you might want a cigarette. (lights a cigarette for him) But in return, you have to tell me about your work. edward My work? You’re the first woman I’ve ever met who was interested in my work. wallis Oh there’s nothing better than pillow-talk politics. What do you think of the Communists? edward I think they’re a bunch of lying vipers. wallis So do I. And what about Europe? Is it possible for there to be peace? Do you think women are secretly more lethal than men could ever be? Will there always be rich and poor, and it doesn’t matter what anyone does? Where is the power? Do you have power? edward Will the workers always be exploited? Why are they saying God is dead? Do you believe in God? wallis No, do you? edward I think yes. wallis Sometimes I think of Europe as this great dark rock, and every few years someone raises up the rock, and worms crawl out and begin to feed on each other. edward Yes! That’s what it’s like— only this time it won’t happen.

And do you know why? edward

driver lost control of his 22-wheel lorry at Senoko Drive on Thursday afternoon, causing it to fall onto its side and its cargo of bricks to spill

onto the road. PERUVIAN ACTIVIST MARRIES TREE IN COLOMBIA: We mean that literally. Richard Torres loves trees. So much, he married another one last week. HOWIE MANDEL

28 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Deal or No Deal by Shuvinai Ashoona. Black Pentel pen and pencil crayon. Exhibited as part of Dorset Seen at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Spring 2014. Shuvinai Ashoona has shown her work in many national and international exhibits. She is represented by Dorset Fine Arts.

Why? National Socialism. wallis Yes! edward You know of it? wallis It’s all anyone is talking about in Washington. edward The most exciting social experiment of this century. Hitler is a great man. He’s brought his people from desperation to prosperity with the speed of lightning. wallis Yes. And what will you do when you’re King, and in charge of all those areas of the map coloured pink? edward I will be the first modern wallis

edward

WATCHES LITERALLY EVERYTHING ON TV:

King. The first to pilot an airplane, to dance to jazz, to speak without that plumby accent, the first to visit ordinary people in their homes. I want to… to loosen the buttons of the monarchy. I am very concerned about housing for the poor. wallis I know about the poor. I used to be one of them. edward We ignore the gulf between rich and poor at our peril. wallis So the rich must give up a little. edward I want to do something with my life and with my reign. I want to have the power to…

The power to…

The power to… there’s so much… Would it be considered unmanly if I asked to put my head in your lap? wallis My lap is here for you anytime.

(EDWARD lays his head in WALLIS’s lap. She strokes his golden hair) edward Don’t go away. wallis Shhhh, shhhhh, shhhhhh… there there. edward I’ve been so alone. wallis There there, my little one, my little boy, there there.  wallis

edward

It gives me the headlines. I follow the news outlets from CNN to Fox to USA Today to TMZ to The Hollywood Reporter, Variety,

Deadline. MIKE KINSELLA OF OWEN AND AMERICAN FOOTBALL SHARES A (LITERALLY) KILLER PLAYLIST: As a founding member of Cap’n Jazz and American Football, Mike Kinsella is

Findings 29

Live Better

Barriers

K AT E H A RG R E AV E S

S T E V I E H OW E L L

From Leak. Published by BookThug in 2014. Kate Hargreaves is a writer whose work has appeared in Descant, The Antigonish Review and others. She lives in Windsor.

From [Sharps]. Published by Goose Lane Editions in 2014. Stevie Howell’s work has appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, the Globe and Mail and others. She lives in Scarborough.

W

hat is your waist to protein rahrah ratio? Fill in box 32 with your daily calamine intake. Where can I find your hipbones? Be precise.

How many days of the last 21 did you engage in strenuous physical activity?

(For a complete definition of “strenuous,” please see appendix four. Note that sexual activity only records as strenuous in the circumstance that both partners break a sweat. For a complete definition of “partners,” see appendix sweat). How many grams of complex carbohydrates—how can you eat this shit it tastes like cardboard?— Chart your height on the wall of your childhood kitchen and copy out into the new apartment in pen. Graph your weight with this pie. Three slices for a gain subtract the crust and start again in the bathroom. Order egg whites at the Lumberjack. How many times a month does 1% reduced sodium cottage cheese go on sale at Shoppers Drug Mart? Bike six miles to the clinic for knee x-rays. Wrap unwrap re-tense pre-tensor. Forget your nutrition guide in a downtown Toronto condo.

How many days do you have to return that bikini for store credit? Can’t you reach your toes? Big girls can bend but I guess you get credit for licking your own nose. After the warm-up before the stretch check your heart rate with your official team monitor your consumption of peanut butter banana—can’t make it through the gritty mess to the squirrels—where— where water—At what point do you pause to pee? You should only discontinue use if you feel dizzy. Or sore. 

Canmore smokeless coal afforded war destroyers their stealth. Stealthier. Carved out coal beds, the town eroded, as a cough strip-mines and deepens.

The mine was shuttered in the seventies.

An open-mouthed, boomerang valley. The Olympic Luge was going to save it all, they said, but the price was dear. Up on that peak, it is coiled and asleep.

They used it for that film about the Jamaican bobsled team, Cool Runnings.

Now the wealth is folks clamouring in who aren’t allowed to buy a home in Banff. They come to ski or hunt and try to stay—royalty, celebrities, you name it.

But you have to own a business in town.

One woman, a doctor, schemed and plotted: promised she’d open a medical office. Council said yes.

She bought a chalet up the side of a hill, leased a storefront on Buffalo, placed a desk and phone inside, and never crossed the threshold again. A bitter pill.

They filmed Brokeback Mountain on the Three Sisters. Little Big Man. See those rocks there, those fingers of rock like ribs? They say it’s a man reclined. The Edge was filmed up on that range. A terrible film, we can agree.

Alec Baldwin, his grimace and spittle—coated crescendos, beseeching Sir Anthony Hopkins: How the fuck are we going to get out of this hellhole? At the free screening for the residents, we screamed: Look behind you, you idiot! At the highway!

They dug animal tunnels beneath the road, like a colliery, and paved animal bridges above. Cougars stalk their prey from the bridges. Chain-link along the road discourages animals, but doesn’t repel completely. Years ago, the big fire cut us off from Banff. Wilder than anything Hollywood could dream— smoke hurling bears, wolves, elk out of the woods— ursus jaws, saber teeth, antlers, nautilus claws, fur for miles, pummelling the fence, droving their own hearts into the wire. 

widely credited as one of the architects of the “second wave” emo sound that’s currently undergoing a revival, and with his long running solo project Owen, he’s earned a reputation as a sensitive singer-songwriter. A NIGHT IN WITH OLLY MURS SOUNDS LIKE LITERALLY THE ACTUAL WORST THING EVER: As you can imagine, we get a lot of emails. In the

30 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Name of the Father L E E M A R AC L E

From Celia’s Song. Published by Cormorant Books in 2014. Lee Maracle is a member of the Sto:lo nation. She is the recipient of a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and a 2014 Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

C

elia recognized her gramma’s grandmother: the first Alice. The other girls called her “Alice.” Every time they said “Alice” they laughed as though it were the most ridiculous and meaningless sound they had ever heard. It seemed preposterous to the girls that this sound should become this girl’s name. The name “Alice” did not suit this girl who told stories of exquisite quality while they picked berries. Not this girl who could shrink time and enrich even the most ordinary moments with stories of such alacrity that the picking hardly felt like work at all. Celia’s Gramma Alice must have been named for her gramma.

They were rolling around the story of Alice’s name between fits of laughter. “This man Father McKilty runs about naming the world, naming himself ‘Father,’” and they laughed harder, as though some man naming his world were about the funniest thing they had ever heard. Today they had all received new names.

“Christian names,” McKilty called them. He threw water at them, and then named them. The girls took water from their gourds, threw it at one another, and renamed themselves even more ridiculous things, like “See-yah,” “Schokem,” “Hoschem,” and other berries. They mimicked the sound the priest made, Alice became “eh-ternal,” Mary became “for-effer,” and they laughed some more. Alice had to run off behind a bush and squat someplace far from where they picked, unable to hold the water from her body as the laughter shook it loose. This caused more

squeals from the girls. Picking finally stopped as each emptied her water.

All the while, the young man stood unmoving; with his eyes he swept the hillside, watching for any possible threat to the girls.

Alice’s grandpa sat still on a bench outside his longhouse, talking to the interpreter who was standing next to

the black robe. He wanted to know what the names meant before he let McKilty in the house. The priest had no idea what he was asking and the interpreter had no way to make the old man understand the priest.

McKilty kept telling him the names meant the girls would be saved, they would enjoy eternal life, they

Apostrophe JA N E M U N RO

From Blue Sonoma. Published by Brick Books in 2014. Jane Munro’s work has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award and the Macmillan Prize for Poetry. She lives in Vancouver.

So you come stinking to high heaven with all the foulness of your worn-out stories— je me souviens.

Bunions. Spittle. Squint.

You have yet to crack a smile, your eyes wind tunnels.

And maybe you’re what I get— the rush to destruction, that whistling maw.

Eros exiled.

Bloody Time, you old cannibal with your necklace of skulls.

By the scruff of your neck I hoist you—toss you out.

Hose you down.

Drenched, you glitter.

Now, in my arms, in your nightgown, you’re just an old woman— frail, beset, bedraggled— familiar as my kitchen.

How long for this world?

I reinsert you in the captain’s chair.

Across the table we take each other in.

You tear off a chunk of baguette, toss it my way.

Got your goat, eh? 

last month, we’ve had an email about a Christmas dog, an email about plastic animals and an email about celebrity poo. The Day Stars Fell On Alabama—Literally: You might think “Stars Fell on Alabama” is nothing more than an old jazz standard, but ask residents of Sylacauga, Ala., in the ‘50s and they’ll tell you the truth is, in fact, stranger than

Findings 31

would live forever in the lap of Jesus Christ. Grandpa thought McKilty quite mad. He could not picture any of his daughters living forever on some man’s lap, much less all of them. He said as much to the translator.

The translator told him that he thought McKilty meant the men too. Grandpa doubted any of the men would want to sit on a man’s lap at all. Besides, humans have to leave. They can’t stay here forever.

Maybe that’s why these people had to leave their home: there was no room there. He pictured a land of useless old men and women sitting on some guy’s lap—well, surely they took turns. What kind of a man wants to have women sitting on his lap forever? And what kind of men and women would want to stay on anyone’s lap for all eternity? How big is this Jesus man?

How can he hold so many?

Grandpa repeated the words to the translator to be sure he got them right. McKilty answered that they would sit on Jesus’s lap in heaven, next to God. The old man looked around. Who is this God-man? He couldn’t picture anyone wanting such a lazy eternity. The old man was beginning to suspect that the interpreter was not getting it right, that he could not do his job, so he carefully explained to him what he meant and asked the man to have another go at it. McKilty went into some fervent tirade about “fire and damnation,” which was completely off topic in Grandpa’s mind.

The translator was now red in the face. He had no way to bridge the gap between the vastly disconnected

Loop Without End G E O RG I A W E B B E R

meanings each man held around the same words. Grandpa wasn’t satisfied and the translator told McKilty this.

Frustrated, McKilty’s eyes flashed fire and his teeth clenched tighter than usual. “They mean your granddaughters will be baptized,” he said. “Without

fiction. AN APPLE A DAY COULD LITERALLY KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY: 5 Healthy Reasons to Eat an Apple Today.

baptism they cannot have medicine against our diseases.” McKilty then looked oddly at Grandpa. Grandpa thought Father McKilty looked like a foolish boy who had stabbed himself while playing with his father’s fish hook and lacked the courage to thread

THERE CAN LITERALLY BE ONLY ONE KIM JONG UN IN NORTH KOREA:

North

Korea forbids people from using the name of their Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. QUEENSLAND SCHOOL OF THE AIR KIDS COME FROM MILES AROUND (LITERALLY) TO STAGE MUSICAL:

32 Geist 95 Winter 2014

From Dumb. Self-published in 2014. Georgia Webber is a comics artist, guest services coordinator for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and Comics Editor at carte-blanche.org.

it through and remove it quietly without saying anything to anyone—and especially lacked the courage to tell his father. Grandpa couldn’t figure out what such a look was doing on a grown man’s face, but he recognized the word “medicine” and understood the threat.

He also knew that names committed a person to something or someone and the names being given to the children committed them to this man Jesus who was the Son of God, whoever that was, and this would change them and change their commitment

to themselves. Names also meant something in and of themselves; they shaped children in some way. He was uneasy about having his daughters and granddaughters commit their lives to strange names that meant nothing to his people. He was also unsure of committing his children to this man, this arbiter of Jesus and God, who did not seem to be all that mature or sane. But he also knew that the villagers needed medicine to get them through the diseases these white men brought: baptism, names, and medicine or no baptism, no names, and no medicine. He turned all this over in his mind and failed to understand why anyone would put his people in such a position. Why would anyone bring disease and then withhold medicine so they could rename you and then commit you to some stranger who wanted you to sit on his lap?

He stared at Father McKilty.

This man was more than odd.

He introduced himself as the old man’s father. He talked nonsense about sitting forever in the lap of Jesus and forever-life in some place the old man did not recognize. Was he going to take the children there? Grandpa wondered at the arrogance it took to name yourself the father of someone who is clearly twice your age. He shrugged; clearly they were not speaking the same language. Grandpa did not know enough about these people to dig up the question whose answer would settle his mind. He finally accepted that he would never understand this father and waved his hand at the priest saying, “Baptize and name who you will.” 

Distance and drought have proven no barrier for children from isolated stations across Queensland’s outback who have come together to stage a musical production.

THIS POOCH NEEDS A BELLY RUB. NOW: She’s

literally begging—yes, by putting her paws together—for a little lovin’. 

Findings 33

MARKETPLACE

Sister DJ’s Radio Band

Wishes you a Happy New Year Drop in at:

sisterdjsradioband. bandcamp.com

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Go to geist.com or call 1-888-434-7834.

photo: romain pelletier

S H O R T

S T O R Y

Rings MI C HA E L P O DG URNE Y

“I can’t feel sorry for every unfortunate bastard I come across.”

A

s always, the bus was late. The first snow of the year had fallen, and a crisp, silver halo had begun to form around the full moon, whose blue light shone brightly, even through the glow of the yellow street lamps. I switched my cigarette to the other hand and put the cold one in my pocket.

I gazed at the city skyline and took a big, long draw of smoke, thinking of how peaceful the snow makes everything. The longer I had to wait for this bus the more frustrated I became, until I just told myself that this was nobody’s fault and to relax, to bottle up the anger. I began to think of everything I was going to say if I ever made it to the Red Moose in time for dinner. As I was standing there in my half dreaming state I saw the figure of a man approaching from down the road. He was limping a bit, and moving slowly. He looked drunk. By the time he got to where I was standing I had sized him up thoroughly, and thought that if he was going to start something I could easily take him.

I wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t look right, either. He stopped close to where I was and said hello, turned around once, twice, and stood staring out into the night with his chin pointed upward, his jaw slack and his arms akimbo.

I supposed that he was waiting for the bus.

Another minute passed, and still there was no sign of the 52, so I took out another JPS and popped it into my mouth. I noticed that the man had done the same thing, at the same time—with the same twist of the wrist I had learned in Poland, as if he was miming me. I brought out my lighter, gave it a flick and lit my smoke. He jerked toward me and gave me a start. Got a light? he asked. Sure, I said, and handed him my lighter. When he finished lighting his Matinee Extra Light, he held the lighter out to me and said Hi, I’m Jim. I took my lighter and said Hey, Mick.

36 Geist 95 Winter 2014

He put his hand back on his hip, and turned and stared out into the night.

I really wanted to mind my own business. I was content in my warm thoughts, and wanted nothing more than to forget my freezing hands and numb toes and lateness. I looked down at my boots and kicked some snow onto the street. As I turned to look for the bus down the street, I saw Jim smoking. In no more than three puffs the cigarette was down to the filter. I was enraptured by his approach: smoke billowed out of his nose, his mouth, his ears, out of his hat.

His eyes seemed to be focused on a point somewhere in the distance. He pinched off the tip of the cigarette, put it in his pocket, pulled out another cigarette and put it in his mouth. Then he pulled a handful of lighters from his coat pocket. His coat was nothing more than the shell of an old ski jacket over a green, black and red woolen pullover. Not zipped up, but flapping loosely by his sides. He lit the cigarette. Before I’d taken three puffs, he had destroyed two entire cigarettes.

The bus appeared down the road. The bus is early, he said. No, it’s late, I said. It’s scheduled to come at six fiftynine, he said, and pulled his coat sleeve over his wristwatch.

It’s only six fifty-three. Yeah, I shrugged. I’m going home, he said. Where you going? For dinner, I said.

The bus rolled up to the curb, with its squealing brakes and huffing engine. I got on first. As I walked to the back I kept saying to myself, please don’t sit next to me, please don’t sit next to me. I figured Jim for a talker, and I wanted some solitude. There was one other guy on the bus, way at the back. He looked kind of shady, so I took a seat in the last row of forward-facing seats. Jim was standing at the front of the bus. You’re early, he said to the bus driver, who said, No, I’m late. It’s not good to be late, Jim said.

I’m never late, he continued; I smoke three cigarettes in the morning after breakfast and I’m right to the bus stop at seven-fifteen. I can’t afford to be late, I have a regimen. Being early’s not so bad. The driver ignored him. Jim went on until the driver said, listen, buddy, sit down. Just sit down, I have to drive the bus. Jim stood there for a moment with his mouth open. He moved to the seats at the front and was making to sit down—he bent his legs and placed his ass above a seat, but the bus screeched to a stop and he tipped over sideways and hit the floor with one knee. Ahh, he said. The floor was mucky with slush and his pants got soaked. Ahh, bugger, he said loudly. He walked back up to the front of the bus. The driver said, you gotta make sure you’re sitting down or holding on, buddy. What do you want me to do? Jim said. He looked angry, as if he might yell at the driver, or hit him, but he turned around and went back to where he had tried to sit, and sat down.

He looked to the back of the bus and caught my eye.

He was a little red in the face and I looked away quickly. I was just minding my own business, and nothing there concerned me. Still, I felt like I had walked into some unavoidable tragedy. I shook my head and laughed inside. These things always happen to me. I always fall into bad situations. I’m too sensitive. Whenever I see somebody struggling I begin to get lonely and heartachey. My own troubles seem superficial. I hate feeling sorry for people, because the world isn’t perfect and I can’t feel sorry for every unfortunate bastard I come across. I don’t like this unstable environment. My imagination starts to run through all the scenarios. Beatings, armed robberies, blood and guts: this Jim fellow might have had some notion to smash the bus driver’s head in or follow me off the bus and brutalize me. illustration: roni simunovic

The longer I looked at my own reflection in the window the more uncomfortable I became. I looked at Jim and saw that he was now staring straight ahead of him, out the side windows. His face was still flushed, but he seemed calm.

Good, I thought. No need for anyone to get violent.

A minute passed in silence. I noticed that Jim looked a lot like my friend Darcy. That’s not so bad, except that Darcy is a woman. I found myself staring at him again. I saw his reflection in the window and imagined that rather than staring out into the dark he was watching me stare at his reflection. He had a cool expression in his eyes.

I thought maybe he was lost in thought, or that he was just some vacant idiot, but then he turned toward me and smiled; it felt really awkward. I froze. He got up very slowly without taking his eyes off of me and walked to the back of the bus. I looked out the window. My heart raced.

He stopped at the back door. I could see his reflection in my window, looking at me, with that smile on his face. He rang the bell. The bus stopped and the back door opened.

It felt like he stood there for an eternity, looking at me with the door open. I turned to him. Thanks for the light, Mick, he said, and got off the bus.

Shit, that was my stop. I rode to the next one so I wouldn’t run into him. I pulled the little green box out of my coat pocket and began to fiddle with it. The silver ring inside was sparkling like a bejeweled moon. My heart sank.

Just the night to be late, I thought. Why did I take the bus?

Michael Podgurney works as a waiter and music promoter. He plays in the folk-swing-jazz-country band The Whiskey Sheiks—whiskeysheiks.bandcamp.com. “Rings” is his first publication. He lives in Edmonton.

Short Story 37

T H E

A N N A L S

O F

P U N K

Strange Women CONNIE KUHNS

The Dishrags, the Zellots, the Persisters, the Moral Lepers and the Animal Slaves are just some of the revolutionary women’s groups that came of the culture of the 1970s— a time when it was a radical concept to claim a musical space for women, when coming out as a feminist was a daring admission, and came with consequences

P

unk was not unique, and I say that with great respect. It sounded different; it was louder and faster. For an audience not used to dancing to their politics, who preferred the black sounds in the gay discos, or harmonies and endless free-form drumming, it was unlistenable.

Punk was difficult. But it was also similar to what had gone before. The scene could be violent, it could be angry. It most certainly included drugs. The desire to “stick it to the man” was not that different from the discrimination felt by hippies, and beats, and any other outsider group who rejected the lifestyle and political choices of their time. And no one trusted the police. Punk was also a boys’ club. Its sexism grew out of the same misinformation and blurred vision as every other institution. It shared the same historical prejudices. Women had been making music since the beginning, but it was within punk that women stood up and screamed.

The “do it yourself” dictum was already in motion in the women’s movement.

In 1972, anti-war activist Holly Near started Redwood Records in California as an outlet for her political beliefs. A year later, an east coast lesbian collective, Lavender Jane, began work on Lavender Jane Loves Women, an album written and produced exclusively “by and for lesbians.” That same year, 1973, while being interviewed on an early feminist radio program, songwriter Cris Williamson, who had released an album on Ampex Records (a label shared with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Todd Rundgrun and Gil Evans), suggested a “women’s music” label be formed.

That label was Olivia Records, a launching pad that soon became a landing strip as many musicians who were already in the business, working in isolation, arrived at the door in California to offer their services.

They produced and engineered albums, played backup, arranged music, raised money and packed boxes. Women taught each other. This was the big idea.

38 Geist 95 Winter 2014

The Annals of Punk 39

A QUILLA 11 NO FRILLS

THE PARACHUTE CLUB

KEY CHANGE DEMI/MONDE LILLIAN ALLEN BAND CO

By the mid-1970s a renegade network of women’s coffee houses and bookstores, women’s centres and festivals supported by other women-run recording labels, women’s production and distribution companies, publicized by a growing number of female music journalists and historians (the late Rosetta Reitz of Rosetta Records and others) began spreading throughout the western world. It was mail order and word of mouth and longdistance calls on Sunday when the rates were down.

The first women’s music festival in Canada took place in 1974 in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, an area described by a provincial tourist bureau as having “a reputation for seclusion…several generations of settlers have found a safe haven here from the anxieties of religious persecution or social unrest.” The two-day festival featured local and regional musicians, workshops on witchery and crafts, a film festival, square dancing and an arts and crafts fair. It was open to both women and men.

Almost every city in Canada had a women’s coffee house or an area set aside for women only: Clementine’s and the Fly by Night in Toronto, the Powerhouse Gallery and Co-op Femme in Montreal, the Women’s Building in Winnipeg, the Guild in Regina, and a place down an alleyway in some guy’s dance studio in Dalhousie. In 1972, after returning from her first women’s liberation meeting, Rita MacNeil wrote her first song.

Vancouver’s early women’s community caught fire during this time. Coffee houses rotated between the basement of the New School (the Gay Alliance Toward Equality did child care), the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore on Richards Street, Ariel Books in Kitsilano and finally the Full Circle at 8th and Main. Laurine Harrison, in her communal house off Oak Street, started Womankind Productions, hosting women-only dances at Simon Fraser University and producing concerts for many high-profile musicians coming out of the feminist movement in the US. Womankind also took a turn at hosting a 40 Geist 95 Winter 2014

women’s music festival. Local musicians Susan Knutson and Wendy Solloway worked with artistic director Gary Cristall to integrate the stages of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival with feminist-themed music (they went as talent scouts to the newly happening Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival), and in 1976, Ferron, one of the most prominent singer-songwriters to emerge from this era, released her first album on her own label, Lucy Records.

(More than ten years later, she performed with Holly Near at Carnegie Hall.)

It cannot be overstated how radical a concept it was in the 1970s to actually claim a space just for women. With the exception of outdoor festivals and concerts, it was still unacceptable in many clubs and bars for a woman to dance alone or with a female friend. It took a lot of courage to walk into a lesbian dropin or attend a consciousness-raising group at the Vancouver Status of Women on West 4th Avenue. To come out as a feminist was a daring admission. There could be repercussions.

The music during this time was exclusively about the story. The personal was political. It was the lyrics that mattered most. In the tradition of the troubadour, abuses, struggles and triumphs were documented and shared. An enemy was identified. Although many of the songs could be joyful and healing—Elaine Stef, a guitarist with the Moral Lepers, once described the genre as music for women to hold hands and sway—the words were also raw and bleeding. The delivery was crucial.

Even the angriest protest song was sung a cappella or with an acoustic guitar. It was the only form of music that was acceptable.

In this way, the women’s movement mirrored the biases of society. Girl groups of the ’60s, blues and country singers of decades past, and “straight” folkies were wrongly dismissed and discredited as being mix-and-match drugaddicted victims of their men, or skinny perfect blondes pining for Jackson Browne. No one clued in that Karen Carpenter played drums or that Bo Diddley had Peggy Jones behind him on rhythm, or that the guitarist Ellen McIlwaine had jammed with Hendrix

ONTAGIOUS THE MORAL LEPERS THE PERSISTERS JITTERBUG PERFUME MODE D’EMPLOI M’ATCHUM

or that she even existed. But it may not have mattered. All would have been seen as pawns of the male-controlled music industry. Generally, the women’s movement did not respect women who played any kind of rock ’n’ roll. It was particularly problematic if you came from a jazz or rhythm and blues background and wanted to express yourself in that way. Plugging in was seen as male-identified. It was a curse like no other.

It must be said that no history of women’s contributions to music was being taught.

There were no special university courses.

There were no books or magazines in the library. Obviously there was no internet. Any piece of information about a woman playing music was most likely found in a bin in a used record store. The radio “rule” was no more than two female singers in a row. This held true even for the earth-shattering FM format, which blasted great music to hungry minds barely weaned off transistor radios. (When my mother was a cleaning lady for a small radio station in the American Midwest, she used to save all of the demo 45s for me that had been thrown away. Most of these records were by women: the band Fanny, country singer Skeeter Davis, Aretha Franklin’s sister, Erma, singing “Piece of My Heart.”) But even among leftists there was an assumption that women weren’t making music. In 1981, when I went on the air with Rubymusic, a radio show specializing in this very subject, even my radical (and very supportive) radio station, Vancouver Co-operative Radio, was concerned that I might not be able to find enough music by women to fill half an hour every week.

T

he emergence of women players in Vancouver came in fits and starts and was largely invisible. Although it coincided with the early punk scene in Vancouver, the two political communities did not mix and they had no real awareness of each other’s existence or importance.

Ad Hoc was a familiar band in the leftwing and feminist communities. They played at least a hundred benefits, rallies and dances,

beginning with their first gig on International Women’s Day in 1978. They were a very politically conscious mixed band with an equal number of men and women. They struggled publicly to overcome sex roles, which at that time included the difficult fact that most women did not have the technical knowledge needed for set-up or sound production.

Even the act of carrying one’s equipment or getting a beer for a male band member could be viewed through a political lens. American recording engineers Karen Kane and LeslieAnn Jones notwithstanding, the shortage of trained female sound personnel was a problem everywhere throughout the early women’s movement, brought home when it was “discovered” that the female tech on some of Olivia’s feminist and lesbian-focussed albums had previously been a man.

Sapphire, an all-woman band produced by Womankind, came together in 1976 in Vancouver for a few dances but has disappeared from memory. Contagious was another matter. So rare was it to see a band made up of all women that Contagious was constantly referred to as “that women’s band,” the assumption being that there was only one. The women first got together in 1977 at drummer Jorie Cedric’s old house on Alberta Street “to see what would happen,” and the band stayed together for three years. As was typical of the era’s politics, they functioned as a collective.

They worked hard to create a sound and image that they saw as different from the music they considered created and produced by men. At one point they debated whether to let a good male friend be their manager and first sound engineer. (They did, although it was uncomfortable at women-only dances. Jin Hong later trained for the job.) So sensitive was the issue of technical ability that when one of the musicians commented from the stage that they (the band) didn’t know how to use microphones, she was reprimanded by other band members who didn’t want to reinforce the image of women not knowing anything about sound equipment (an issue that also surfaced in punk music). Everything was new.

The Annals of Punk 41

SITORS THE DISTRACTIONS PERFECT STRANGER INDUSTRIAL WASTE BANNED TIN TWIST JUNCO RUN/T

Janet Lumb, a founding member of Contagious, recalls: “It was through this band that we learned to call ourselves musicians. The realities of a collective band: touring and performing hungry, cold, sick, exhausted, vulnerable, pissed off at someone, and the show is on. On the road, we were seven women including the sound person, one van, one Volkswagen bug, three children and two dogs.” On one tour, “we arrived at a gas station that had a phone booth, filled up on gas and parked. Wendy [Solloway] pulled out our box of food supplies, bulbs of garlic, veggies, crackers, bread, water and fruit. We fed the kids and ate. Everyone at the gas station stopped in awe and disbelief to see Jin, our car mechanic and sound person, under the hood fixing the radiator amidst a troop of women, kids and dogs in two vehicles packed to the brim. We phoned the venue organizers to say that we were on our way. They’d already heard.”

The emotional attachment felt by the women’s community for this band was so deep that more than four hundred people (mostly female) showed up for a farewell concert on March 17, 1980, at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. A music critic for the Province newspaper wrote at the time: There was once an all-woman band from Vancouver that had the germ of an idea. They called themselves Contagious… These ladies didn’t want to be confined to the traditional female role of vocalists; they had to play instruments, too.

If there is one lesson these women might take with them as they go their separate ways, it is: This kind of music (swing, be-bop, or whatever you want to call it) requires much discipline. It looks easy and easy-going when people like Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks are doing it, but don’t be fooled. To get to that point, you need to sweat and swear and wear your fingers to the bone. Anyway, Contagious has made its point. Let’s see more brave women spreading germs on the musical front.

The same week that Contagious ended their run, the Dishrags went into the recording studio. Contagious had not been the only band of women in town.

42 Geist 95 Winter 2014

W

hen Contagious first began defining itself within the women’s movement, other women in Vancouver were also forming bands or joining with men they knew. But this time the women were not openly connected or supported by feminism or even aware of an established feminist community. They were young musicians answering a different call, and their escape from their bedrooms was into the basement practice spaces of the very harsh and very male world of punk rock. It was emotional anarchy combined with a desire to play—loud and hard.

A trio of Vancouver Island teenagers crossed the water. Mary ran away from home.

Sue yelled out her bedroom window at Kim, “one of the only other girls in my school who was into punk.” Heather and Conny placed an ad, and Ebra was asked by her guitar-playing boyfriend to scream.

In a flash it had begun. The Dishrags, the Devices and the Zellots became bands. Mary, renamed Mary-Jo Kopechne (after the young woman left to drown in a submerged car by US Senator Ted Kennedy), took up guitar with Wasted Lives and then the Modernettes. Ebra Ziron and Nathan Holiday, calling themselves Tunnel Canary, stood downtown at the corner of Georgia and Granville, and with Nathan playing his electric guitar, Ebra wailed like a banshee. “It was like plugging into a very creative stream of energy that we thought was quite beautiful, not frightening,” Ebra said years later in an interview with Allan MacInnis. “Like a thunderstorm would be beautiful.”

In an article in Kinesis, the Vancouver women’s newspaper, in 1982, Janie Newton-Moss wrote: “For the majority of us growing up in the 60s and early 70s, fantasies about performing in a rock band were quickly obliterated when it became apparent that our role was to be consumers not producers of rock music.

Like it or not, we had to content ourselves watching brothers and boyfriends experiment in garages or basements and listening endlessly to the radio.”

It has been noted occasionally that some of these young women had connections to male

THE WORK PARTY THE ZEALOTS ANIMAL SLAVES LIQUID WRENCH ROCKING HARRY AND THE HACK JO

relatives, boyfriends, husbands or ex-husbands who were musicians in the scene, as if this explains and justifies their presence. It could also be said that when the door was open, they walked right in.

“We felt very strongly about what we were doing,” says Scout Upex, the drummer with the Dishrags and later Blanche Whitman. “I was thrilled to be able to express how I felt.

It was like all the oddballs joining the same club—artists, writers, musicians, all feeling encouragement from one another, often trying out each other’s mediums. In the beginning, it was a love fest.” She was just sixteen when she gave it up for rock ’n’ roll.

Barbara Bernath also hit the Vancouver streets as an underage drummer a few years before the birth of the band Bolero Lava (in 1983) and played with a “wild-n-wonderful cross section of other creative people, ranging from hardcore-speed-punks and exotic-eastside strippers, to scholarly-experimentalists and downtown-art-boys.” She remembers: “The time was all about brave manifestation.

You had to be fully committed to the moment in every way. You had to show your stuff, walk your walk, talk your talk. And you had to do it live.”

In addition to her band 50% Off, Barbara played (again, underage) in the Braids & Arthur, aka the Sweet Shadows, “a self-assembled group of exotic female dancers I met downtown who worked the big strip clubs like No. 5 Orange and the Marr during the day and then played as musicians at night in various warehouse parties and off-the-grid events.

This was way before the current burlesque revival, and another example of women in the scene who were bold and unapologetic toward mainstream life.”

Heather Haley, a founding member of the Zellots (with Conny Nowe, Jane Colligan and Christine DeVeber), having returned to Vancouver from working and studying music in Edmonton, also entered the punk scene searching and ready, “just as young people were becoming fed up with staid, institutionalized, inaccessible and barely rock music, I was photo: courtesy barbara bernath

floundering, confused, aimless. Punk brought rock back to its roots, its essence, with a vengeance and provided me with a catalyst, direction and drive.”

“We asked the Subhumans and DOA if we could use their practice place if we swept up after their rehearsals,” says Susan MacGillivray of her days with the Devices. “Kim [Henrikson] and I would move our gear using a skateboard and onto the city bus.” The girls were seventeen and fourteen years old. “The scene moved very quickly back then. I was given a guitar from a youth centre and started saving for my first Gibson, purchased later that year. The Devices were born out of a group effort in naming our new band. IUDs was suggested.”

Me (to Kim): “Were you aware that it was unusual for young women to be playing in a band?”

Kim: “Not at all. It was normal to us.”

For the bass player Mary-Jo Kopechne— who, one music critic wrote, provided some The Annals of Punk 43

LIAN ALLEN AND THE VANCOUVER RESISTANCE MAMA QUILLA 11 NO FRILLS THE PARACHUTE CLUB

“much needed glamour” to the scene—punk provided something more: “I was a runaway from age thirteen. I had nothing and no one. I went to an east end party. Victorian Pork was playing and I danced the dance of the devil to them. Party’s over and I went back to the house that was keeping a roof on my head. I heard voices; the guy hosting the party told the Pork where my head laid. They found me, took me away and were my father son brother sister mother guiding light. I was saved from a life of desperate prostitution. I was fucked without them and they took me in like I was their little sister. I went from a go-go girl dancer to a ‘hey wait a minute if they can play so can I’ girl.”

There is a scene in Susanne Tabata’s 2010 documentary Bloodied but Unbowed in which the Dishrags are on stage and a voice is heard in the audience shouting an obscene demand.

Tale as old as time—those same words could have been said to Janis Joplin. (They were most certainly repeated years later to the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill.) It is a brief but potent moment, a reminder that these young women, while immersed in a raging joy, must be put back in their place. They need to be reminded.

It’s an irony not lost on the Dishrags when 44 Geist 95 Winter 2014

they were denied an opportunity to compete in a 1978 Battle of the Bands, yet were asked to play backup for the other bands competing.

“We dressed differently from other girls,” says Jade Blade, guitarist and singer. “We wore leather jackets and T-shirts and torn jeans—in other words, we dressed like boys, and people found that shocking. We were the novelty group. People would come and see us but not take us seriously, and would often berate us or hurl other kinds of verbal abuse (and the occasional beer bottle). The punk scene in Vancouver was pretty good to us, given the usual attitudes of the time. It was when we played to non-punk crowds that things often went off the rails—that was when people, mostly guys, but sometimes women, too, would yell horrible things at us, often of a sexual nature; we really made ourselves vulnerable, simply by the act of strapping on instruments and getting onstage. I’d like to think that doesn’t happen anymore.”

Nancy Smith (aka Rita Ragan), one of the few certified women sound engineers in Vancouver during that time and a valuable member of the Dishrags team (“I had something a lot of the other local musicians didn’t have: a car”), remembers a night in Seattle when the Dishrags were opening for the Ramones.

“The girls had already played a couple of songs and the audience was enjoying the music, pogo-ing, waving their hands. All of a sudden, the manager of the club came out onstage, stopped the Dishrags mid-song and announced that Joey Ramone was sick and the band wouldn’t be playing. The angry audience starting hurling their bottles at the stage, beer and glass shards flying everywhere. The backstage crew worked fast, hustling the girls offstage. Shortly after that, the City of Seattle made it illegal to sell beer in bottles in clubs; it had to be served in plastic or paper cups.”

“One afternoon at the Smilin’ Buddha,” recalls Jane Colligan, the guitarist with the Zellots, “the RCMP and a bunch of plainclothes police rushed in and busted a bunch of innocent punk bands, sound men and friends, in the middle of the afternoon. It was our first photo: the dishrags, courtesy gayle scott

KE

EY CHANGE DEMI/MONDE LILLIAN ALLEN BAND CONTAGIOUS THE MORAL LEPERS M’ATCHUM THE PE

taste of police brutality and totally unprovoked. John McAdams rushed me out of the back door to an alleyway and hid me on the floor of a car, but I saw an undercover cop dragging Chrissy [the Zellots’ bass player] out by her hair. She was handcuffed behind her back and slammed face down on the hood of a cop car. Her crime? She couldn’t produce enough ID. If I wasn’t particularly anarchistic before that day, I sure as hell was after.”

“Like many of my peers,” Heather Haley says, “it was a struggle to survive, find work, pay the rent. Sexism, being condescended to, left out, left off, despite a lot of forwardthinking punk rockers. The status quo largely remained in place. Many record companies and radio stations were reluctant to promote female artists. Violence. At various times I was harassed, stalked, raped, nearly strangled to death. It was a dangerous time, often. One had to be aware. I adapted.”

But they were not out there alone. Uncontrollable, appalling sounds were coming out of the UK. The Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks and the Clash rolled over the landscape like a tank, but when the Slits walked out on stage in 1977, they didn’t break ground, they broke rock. At the time, their unconventional looks and deliberate rejection of traditional roles was shocking. Not only did they claim the same rights as men in the punk movement— such as the right to learn while doing—they called themselves by that name! The Slits were too disturbing to be dismissed and they were often the target of violence at clubs and on the street. (Ari Up, the lead singer, was stabbed twice.) Others enlisted: the Raincoats, Eve Libertine, Poly Styrene, the Bodysnatchers, Delta 5, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Vi Subversa, the Au Pairs, Mo-Dettes and Pauline Black. They shouted out their abuses, struggles and triumphs. In Vancouver, the Visitors were soon to follow.

M

arian Lydbrooke met Jill Bend outside the Paddington Street police station in London, UK, in 1978.

They were both protesting the arrest of a

group of so-called anarchists (dubbed “Persons Unknown”) on conspiracy charges. Jill was in London as an “associate” for the Vancouver anarchist newspaper Open Road. She was also very active in the anti-prison movement. Marian was getting ready to travel to North America.

“I’d come from the squats in London, where Nazi gangs roamed the streets outside at night,” she says. “There was the AntiNazi movement and Rock Against Racism and bands like the Clash, X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse, Gang of Four, and women’s bands like the Raincoats and other agit-prop women musicians playing at feminist conferences. I’d seen Holly Near play at a women’s conference in London and loved the lyrics (at the time).

When I arrived in Vancouver, I was exhausted, exhilarated and angry.”

Although Marian had seen “large, colourful Open Road posters in every anarchist squat in London” (by Dave Lester, a graphic designer and one half of the future Mecca Normal), they didn’t meet until she got to Vancouver.

She rented drums, moved in with Dave and his brother Ken (later the manager of DOA) and started jamming. She was joined by Rachel Melas, a bass player from an all-woman bar band, the Distractions, and by guitarist Bonnie Williams. “And then Annie [Moss] came around with some songs she’d written, I added some of mine, and voilà!” They called themselves the Visitors. Their coming-out party was at the Windmill on Granville Street. “The gig at the Windmill was a watershed moment,” says Marian. “It was the first feminist punk gig to hit Vancouver. I sang ‘Suicide’ [co-written with Dave Lester] and ‘Witches in the Wood,’ which was a big hit with the more adventurous radical dykes who’d heard we’d be playing and packed the place.”

The Visitors played a few other gigs, including the men’s prison at Matsqui (“I told them we are musicians. We are not ‘pretty girls’ ”) and benefits for Betsy Wood and Gay Hoon, activists who had been charged with attempted murder and complicity during a bungled escape attempt at the BC Pen The Annals of Punk 45

STERS JITTERBUG PERFUME MODE D’EMPLOI THE VISITORS THE DISTRACTIONS PERFECT STRANGER

while they were visiting inmates. (They were acquitted.)

At one of these prison benefits, Contagious and the Visitors shared the bill. It was an alltoo-common culture clash. A member of Contagious let it be known that they considered the Visitors too aggressive and male-identified. Janet Lumb of Contagious remembers: “The conversation flew back and forth with the Visitors responding to what Contagious understood as punk, versus the history, movement and principles of punk, which the Visitors believed in, stood for and was fighting for. In the end, an understanding was laid out and initiated. In the end, I became a punk and still consider myself to be a punk.” As the Visitors sang in “I Can See Right Up Your Nose,” “Don’t give me all that feminist crap / if all that it leads to is another trap.” Janet later joined the reformed Visitors when they became the Moral Lepers.

“It was a time in Vancouver when there was an incredible political community,” Marian says. “The Open Road anarchist paper was incredibly well organized and had an amazing office and a mailing list of thousands from all over the world. So much was going on. But the people working in social justice, food coops, rock and folk bands, bookstores, radical presses, rape crisis centre-type places weren’t too enamoured with the punk scene, which up to that time had been mostly male.

“There was a certain hostility from feminists around sexism in the punk community, understandably. Some of the feminists who came out to see the Visitors were still suspicious of rock music. They were reeling from the real sexist part of rock music that had happened in the ’60s. Seeing women up onstage being able to do it and being angry and strong changed their minds to some extent.

“Also, some of the male music community in Vancouver hadn’t really rubbed shoulders with lesbians and feminists. The Visitors (and particularly the Moral Lepers) started bringing more of those people together.”

When Jill Bend returned to Vancouver and to her work with the organization Women 46 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Against Prisons, she had been pushed further into battle by her meetings with the Clash in London and by “the militancy of political activism” she had encountered in the UK. She called an open meeting of all women musicians in the scene. The idea was to come together to raise money for a bail fund for women in prison. (“A First Nations woman in Vancouver, Geri Ferguson, had been working with Women Against Prisons on her case, which involved charging a male guard from the Oakalla Women’s Prison with assaulting her while locked in one of their isolation cells.

She’d been picked up on a minor charge and needed bail. We had to get her out!”)

By all accounts between fifteen and twenty musicians showed up. “Ideas were flowing and combinations of instruments, personalities and genres tossed back and forth,” Jill says. “Some rejected, some embraced and out of that confusion and madness came a kind of natural selection. It had seemed like an unlikely project, that what normally needs months of time and space to create even one band, could coalesce in one meeting. But that spark can ignite something greater and I guess it was one of those nights when more happens than you had expected.”

From that night came a short-lived reggae band called Lionchild, a funk band with women from Ad Hoc and Contagious called the Persisters, and the rebirth of the Visitors as the Moral Lepers. Bail was raised.

“Moral Lepers were a huge influence on me,” says Jean Smith of the duo Mecca Normal (with Dave Lester). “Even though I didn’t see them live, hearing their record brought an entirely new vantage point to my awareness. Being in a band had potential. For me.

There was always something of a comprehension barrier watching guys in bands. I didn’t imagine myself in DOA, for instance, but it was different somehow with women. The configurations they played and sang—their intensity—seemed accessible to emulate, in a way.

Likely it’s because of the Moral Lepers that I ever dared to take a chance on singing feminist themes with an electric guitar.”

INDUSTRIAL WASTE BANNED TIN TWIST JUNCO RUN/THE WORK PARTY THE ZEALOTS ANIMAL SLAVE

“We were Moral Lepers,” says Marian, “which was attractive to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. We were very conscious of the lyrics we were writing, really working hard on our instrumentals. Working together collectively. In a sense we were like a political and cultural statement in ourselves.”

Elaine Stef says: “We were a hardcore feminist, political band. We were strange women who were fairly unpredictable.”

By now, the spectacularly developed early feminist music network, which had heralded a new musical revolution, began to fray, particularly in the US. The debate as to what constituted “women’s music,” as it was now officially called, was in full force. It was a black hole. Although there were extremely significant songwriters and musicians in the movement, the genre remained artistically narrow. It had also evolved into a politically separatist scene, with its own subsets, divisions and concerns.

For a growing number of musicians, regardless of their sexual identification, “women’s space” was fast becoming a ghetto. Goodwill gestures by mainstream music festivals to have a “women’s stage” only served in the long run to isolate women musicians from the rest of the festival lineup, even though in the beginning it seemed like a solution to a problem.

In 1986 the artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Rosalie Goldstein, disbanded the women’s stage. “I did so with the most loving care,” she said at the time, “because I believe it’s important for women to be dispersed throughout the entire body of the festival. I would not put up a tent at the festival and say ‘here are all the blacks’ or ‘here are all the Jews,’ and that’s exactly what was happening with women. I don’t think it shows off women to their best advantage.”

Elizabeth Fischer, for ten years the force behind the artistic punk trio Animal Slaves, says: “I considered myself a feminist, of course, although probably of a different variety than most, at that time. I considered myself perfectly equal and I always had, in brains, in

talent, in ability, in potential. I refused female ‘roles’ as much from women as men. Men and women [as] equals, which also manifested itself in Animal Slaves, and in any other band I have played with since…I never felt that artists should be ghettoized. I felt that artists were a necessary brick in the village.”

B

y the early ’80s, there were dozens of women musicians in Vancouver inspired by punk and its offshoots. In addition to the Dishrags, Devices, Zellots, Persisters, Moral Lepers and Animal Slaves, the bands Junco Run, Perfect Stranger, Twin Twist, Work Party, Bolero Lava, Playdough Republic, Industrial Waste Banned, Quantum Leap and Liquid Wrench were sharing bills and musicians. Kitty Byrne and Danice Macleod were part of U-J3RK5. Emily Faryina was out there solo with her Casio keyboard. Mecca Normal was on the cusp. Even Katari Taiko, Vancouver’s first Japanese taiko drumming group, formed with women at the core.

In December 1983, the anarchist newsletter BC Blackout featured a cover story, “Play It, Don’t Spray It!” on the “emerging women’s new music scene.” They noted that “along with such familiar staples as war, eco-devastation and mindless consumerism, women musicians are insisting that a range of topics from sexual stereotyping to porn and child abuse get serious attention.” The newsletter questioned whether these women were indicative of a “full-blown movement,” but noted: “They have played alongside men in a variety of mixed bands, they have written their own songs and arranged their own gigs (no boyfriends or brothers to haul the speakers), they have swapped expertise and equipment and they have put together a number of bands that have already started to make a dent across Canada.” The newsletter gave the Moral Lepers and Industrial Waste Banned as examples.

There was also a notice that the “all-women” Persisters would be playing for their final time that month. There was no mention of whether the Persisters would be carrying their own equipment.

The Annals of Punk 47

D WRENCH ROCKING HARRY AND THE HACK JOBS LILLIAN ALLEN AND THE VANCOUVER RESISTANCE MAM

In 1984, when Bolero Lava won the “Hot Air Show,” a Battle of the Bands at the University of British Columbia sponsored by radio station CITR, not much had changed in the way women musicians were regarded. Like Contagious, they were “that women’s band.”

“Being an all-female band like Bolero Lava was a blessing and a curse,” says drummer Barbara Bernath. “We were overly adored in some ways, and then fully disrespected in other ways. Either way, being female always seemed to be our primary tag and identity. I remember one gig in Victoria at the New Era Social Club, we dressed in reverse-drag as an ‘all-male band’ to show the irony of our situation. I mean, what male band of any genre is ever referred to as an ‘all-male band’?

“It shows intrinsically what we were dealing with every day as women publicly expressing our musicality. I also remember constantly having to prove ourselves as musicians in ways that men would never have to—especially in a scene that was supposed to be non-conformist. (I always loved sitting down for the drum 48 Geist 95 Winter 2014

check and knocking the socks off an unsuspecting soundman who was expecting me to not be able to play.) Sexism was definitely all around us, but we blasted onward, enjoying each other and the thrill of doing something as a team of stunning underdogs.”

Christine DeVeber, bass player for the Zellots, says: “We knew that the ‘all-girl’ initial draw was only good for the first few minutes.

We had to back it up with strong original material, and in the back of our minds, wanting to be taken seriously as artists, we embraced hard-to-play or sometimes challenging musicianship because of this. We could have played it very simple with three-chord rock and that would have been fine, but at the time, we liked challenging ourselves and came up with a little more sophisticated songwriting, while keeping the basic energy of punk as the mainstay.”

Echoing these experiences, Nancy Gillespie, bass player in her band SHE, a group that played regularly at the Town Pump and shared the stage with DOA, the Sons of Freedom and the Scramblers (and who also played at the Matsqui prison), says: “We worked really hard to be good musicians and to have a strong, clear sound, which was sometimes held against us as that was seen as being too professional. But as women musicians we wanted to be fierce and to be taken seriously. Thus we were not as raw as the riot grrrls, but we had a solid, driving edge. And we were a little ahead of them historically. Being a woman musician was a little bit more difficult then, I think. We were a band on our own, in between the waves so to speak, in between significant historical moments, and not part of a ‘scene’ so we often get forgotten about, fall through the cracks of history.”

By the end of the decade, the Moral Lepers had become a perfect seed band spreading out across the country. Marian Lydbrooke and Elaine Stef were part of Demi/Monde in Toronto and Janet Lumb joined Matchum in Montreal. Rachel Melas teamed with Animal Slaves in Vancouver and later was reunited with Elaine Stef and Conny Nowe, to play the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival with photo: scout upex, courtesy bob strazicich

MA QUILLA 11 NO FRILLS

THE PARACHUTE CLUB

the Lillian Allen Band and multiple individual projects. Two Devices became Dishrags (“Sue’s songs were epic,” Scout remembers).

Heather Haley went to LA with the Avengers and the remaining Zellots re-formed back east. Bolero Lava changed musicians, Danice Macleod became BAMFF, Elizabeth Fischer regrouped and Mecca Normal kept on playing, becoming an early inspiration (along with Toronto’s Fifth Column) for the incoming riot grrrls. In 1988, in Vancouver, a newcomer named Nadine Davenport produced a women’s music festival. The bands Cub and Maow, and Bif Naked, were still to come.

Unfortunately, the riot grrrls of the ’90s fought the very same battles for visibility, credibility and access as their mentors in the punk scene and their sisters in the early women’s movement. The debate over women’s stages and the general lack of representation of women musicians on the Warped Tours and other heavy metal punk-like festivals is still loudly contested. The musician Shira crashed the 2004 Warped Tour with her pink box truck (named the Shiragirl Stage) and hosted more than two hundred female-fronted bands.

She continued to do this for several years.

“There is always the argument of ‘Why is it separate?’ But it’s either that or nothing,” she said. “No one else is coming in and fighting for the women”—a sentiment lived first-hand

by Canadian musician Sarah McLachlan during her three years, 1997–1999, producing the all-woman Lilith Fair concert tours.

CBC music blogger Holly Gordon recently wrote: “Dear Canadian Music Festivals. Show Us the Women,” as she tabulated the percentages of women performing at festivals across Canada, finding that the numbers came up short. Even in the UK, the punk music mothership, artists and writers point out with regularity that punk still has a problem with women.

As for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, now in its fortieth year, the booking policies have opened up to include performances by the “queer punk” bands, and former Bikini Kill Kathleen Hanna’s band Le Tigre.

KEY CHANGE DEMI/MONDE LILLIAN ALLEN BAND C

F

or those first musicians in the late ’70s and early ’80s, punk had been the new world. For a woman (or a girl) whose soul was wrapped up in the chaotic, physical thrill of punk music and the political issues it championed, there was no better place to create, to be in control and to be fully oneself.

It was natural. Not since the all-female jazz bands of the ’40s did so many women musicians storm the barricades en masse. To the BC Blackout, yes, it had been a “full-on movement,” full of contradictions and turmoil and opportunity. Without exception, every woman interviewed for this article who was on the scene during those years is still involved in music, the creative arts or community activism almost forty years later. Not bad for a girl.

“When I got involved in music, punk meant more than just testosterone-fuelled guitar-drum bashings,” Elizabeth Fischer says.

“It was a social movement, both political and creative, and it was inclusive of many different voices, people experimenting, redefining and creating new musical expressions. And importantly, there were the women: women playing instruments, angry women, intelligent women, thoughtful women, who presented themselves as equals in every way to the hitherto mostly male-dominated musical community. That community was politicized, redefined. That was truly revolutionary.”

Connie Kuhns is a writer and photographer who lives on Salt Spring Island, BC. She worked as a music journalist for twenty years, including fifteen years as the producer and host of Rubymusic, a program specializing in music by women, on CFRO in Vancouver. She was a concert emcee, lecturer, columnist and host of the Rubymusic stage at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Her essay “Last Day in Cheyenne” (Geist 84) was a finalist for a Western Magazine Award in 2013. In preparation for this article, Kuhns interviewed twenty-four women and one man, and consulted her extensive personal and professional archives. Read more of her work and see her photographs at geist.com. “Strange Women” was produced with assistance from the City of Vancouver.

The Annals of Punk 49

P O R T F O L I O

Arctic Breach The arctic photography of Bogdan Luca

T

hese photographs of arctic glaciers and islands were made in June of 2014 by the Toronto artist Bogdan Luca during an Arctic Circle Residency in which Luca and twenty-nine other participants—artists, writers, architects, musicians, scientists—voyaged in a tall ship for two weeks and in constant daylight around northern Scandinavia. Each day they went onto the land—preceded by armed guides on bear watch—in order to study the landscape and develop art projects.

The Arctic world only occasionally breaches the surface of our global consciousness. Early Arctic exploration inspired the Romantic literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley (Dr. Frankenstein pursued his monster onto the ice floes, where he perished). “These nineteenth-century works shaped my view of the Arctic,” Bogdan Luca writes in his artist statement. “It was only when I

50 Geist 95 Winter 2014

traveled there that I learned about the intense whaling that brought the right whale to the brink of extinction by the end of the eighteenth century. The Arctic surfaced once more in our imagination when Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909. Today we know that the melting of the ice cap will significantly affect sea levels. Melting ice clears the way for constant use of the Northeast and Northwest passages. Furthermore, retreating sea ice makes it much easier to drill for natural gas and oil in the Arctic Ocean.”

Luca made these photographs using long exposures (usually associated with night photography); he used a piece of cracked welding glass as a filter. He also buried a time capsule containing work by several Toronto artists in an ice cap in the Svalbard Archipelago. See more of Luca’s work at bogdanluca.com.

—Michał Kozłowski

Portfolio 51

P E D A G O G Y

Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late B R AD YUNG

lesson #1 be curious about the world around you I want to buy a house.

And build a secret room in it.

And not tell the kids about it.

Until we’ve moved out.

It would just come up in casual conversation one day.

Oh, we kept that stuff in the secret room.

“What secret room?” they’d ask.

The one in the old house on Elm Street.

“Oh my god! Where was it?”

Just off of the living room. You’d pull a certain book out of the bookshelf and the whole case would swing out, revealing the hidden room.

“That sounds so cool!”

It was.

“Why didn’t you ever tell us about it?”

Well, obviously because we didn’t want you going in there.

“What was in it?”

Stuff we didn’t want you to know about. Birthday presents, valuables, alcohol…

“Aw,” they’d say, “we wish we had known about it.”

Well then, you should have spent more of your childhood looking for it, tapping on the walls, jiggling the fixtures and pushing on all the rocks in the fireplace.

Like I did.

lesson #2 strive to be a better person “Why can’t you be more like Barney?”

Barney was the kid two doors down who was, evidently, perfect. He was polite, well behaved, the best son in the history of good sons.

52 Geist 95 Winter 2014

“He’s so obedient.”

“You make him sound like a dog.”

He spat when he talked, had a really bad bowl haircut, wore the tackiest thrift-store clothing and cried at the first sign of discomfort. On his sixteenth birthday, he found out his uncle was actually his real father, and that’s why his other father hated him so much. Years of abuse finally made sense. He stopped crying so much, but he didn’t smile anymore, either.

“Why can’t you be more like Gordon?”

Gordon was the kid who destroyed the curve.

Straight As, top of the class, won all the scholarships.

“You have to study more, then you could catch up.”

“I can’t, I’m falling asleep walking to school.”

He had coke-bottle glasses, a creepy laugh, arrogance to spare and the world’s worst posture. In his third year of university, he was caught hacking into the school’s mainframe. His defence in court was that the security was so poor that it wasn’t really hacking. Virtually unemployable after his expulsion, he maintains his innocence to this day.

“Why can’t you be more like Danny?”

Kind, generous, helpful and compliant.

“Danny’s so good, never any trouble.”

“Danny’s never anything.”

He let his parents control his life, make all his decisions for him. They told him what to wear, what to eat, what to do, when to do it. He just turned forty and still lives at home, huddled in the cold basement surrounded by years of old newspapers, clipping coupons and watching TV. My kids will never hear the phrase “Why can’t you be more like…” I’m not going to compare them to other kids.

They’ll stand alone, comfortable and confident, no insecurity or doubt tracking their steps. I want them to grow up happy, humble and out of the house.

And that’s where they’ll find out they’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

lesson #3 nothing is as important as a good education Just before he died, my grandfather gave my mother a homemade, handwritten book containing our family history. Unable to read Chinese, I asked my mother who our ancestors were and what they had done. “They were mostly scholars,” she said.

Mostly scholars.

That is exactly not what a young boy wants to hear. A young boy wants to hear that his ancestors were at least remarkable. Great explorers, perhaps, or pioneers of something. To know that he is descended from brave and fearless warriors is to know that some of that heroic blood may be coursing through his veins, that he too may be destined to do great and heroic things someday.

Mostly scholars.

I’m descended from people with book-smarts. My ancestors went to school and studied various topics in the library. Maybe they became authoritative experts in some field and dispensed knowledge to younger students.

And so, like them, I went to school, and studied hard, and went on to higher learning. And, as I grew older, I gradually pried more stories from my mother’s loosening grasp.

There was my father, who died when I was very young, who came over when he was twelve and lived in Vancouver’s Chinatown when it was still closed in and dangerous.

He was part of the gang of Chinese kids who protected it, with secret calls and whistles to alert the others that the white kids had come down to make trouble again, to gather the troops to drive them out.

There was my great uncle Loy, who taught hand-tohand combat to Canadian soldiers during World War II. A martial artist so accomplished, there wasn’t a belt black

enough for him. To harden his hands, he would slap a brick every day—his hands were as tough as leather and the brick was smooth all over and half the size it had been when he started. If a Chinese family anywhere in Canada was having racial problems in their community, they could write Loy and he would travel to their town and try to negotiate a peace. Failing that, he would beat up their tormentors, warning them that if there were any more problems, he would come back and beat them up again.

And there was my grandfather, a poet and a dreamer.

His wife hated him and his lack of ambition, his idiotic musings and his worthless writings. He would see a leaf fall in the backyard and then spend a whole afternoon composing a poem about it. When he died, as is the custom, his wife burned all his possessions, probably with glee. The homemade, handwritten book is the only thing that he wrote that still exists, and it’s probably not his best work.

Mostly scholars.

Here, son. My grandfather gave this book to my mother, she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it to you. I have no idea what it says exactly, but it contains our family history.

Apparently, your great, great, great, great-grandfather was a pirate or something. Pretty cool, huh?

“Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late” is part of a book project, in progress. Brad Yung’s comic strip “Stay As You Are” appeared in Geist for many years and can be read at geist.com. Brad lives in Toronto with his partner and young son. He can be reached at bradyung@gmail.com.

Pedagogy 53

T O B A C C O

L I T

Smoking Life W I N N E RS O F T HE O RI GI NAL G E IST TO BACCO L IT CO NT E ST

f i r s t p l ac e

Father Suite PATRIC I A YOU NG

I

n my father’s shirt pocket, always a pack of Gitanes. I loved that package. Wanted to be the Spanish lady when I grew up. Shake a tambourine.

Ah, my father. He built chimneys for a living. The chimney is the feather in the cap, he’d say, his accent stubborn. He laid brick, stone, concrete blocks. Climbed ladders to the sky.

He was king of flues and updrafts.

Tossed his little girl into the air. So proud of her English. How she pronounced spark arrestor, wall thimble, vent pipe, back-puff, directional cowl. I grew up, polished and pretty. At sixteen landed a bit part in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. On closing night, kissed my hero backstage inside the folds of the velvet curtain (what did my father see? how could he know?). When the applause stopped, so did my life. I was shipped off to Hungary to die like the grasses, rot in the earth.

Squatting before the hearth, my grandmother ate meaty potatoes out of their skins. Scrubbed the floors of her little Budapest apartment with a vile-smelling soap. Squirted vinegar on the windows. Wiped them down with crumpled newspaper until the glass squeaked. Sometimes I’d catch her looking at me as though she understood my fundamental flaw (sex). Her words were foreign and disjointed and pierced with disappointment. At night she wept. The delicate sound of her sadness was as hard as 54 Geist 95 Winter 2014

nails. She still longed for her son, my father. All those years later, she still missed the man I now hated. And such hatred! Ferocious.

Operatic. Hatred that rattled my bones.

My mother’s letters took months to cross the Atlantic. She’d taken a young lover, she said. He was like the arch of a stone bridge, necessary and pleasing to the eye. After dark, she’d feed raisins and almonds to the raccoons that slipped down from the trees. Rabies, my father’d warn, but she’d push him aside and hold out her hand to the baby ringtails trooping toward her. My father loved his child bride. What could he do but stand back and watch?

Twelve years later I returned home to find him asleep on the front porch, a big grey wolf guarding the door. An empty bottle of plum brandy tipped on its side. I shook him. Nudged his leg. He was still handsome in an aging playboy sort of way. The cab driver was watching from the street, waiting to see me safely inside. I slid down beside my father and began to talk about my life in Budapest. How I stopped eating. Took up smoking. Grew to love my grandmother. I talked about my

soul-deep passion for the backstage boy who’d painted the backdrop of Don Magnifico’s rundown mansion. You almost killed me, I said, and pulled a blue and white cigarette package from my purse. My father roused. Opened an eye. He looked at the faceless gypsy woman with a clinical and tender curiosity.

Patricia Young has published eleven collections of poetry and one of short fiction. She lives in Victoria, BC.

s e c o n d p l ac e

The Flower Lights Up A play in one scene, based on a true story K EV I N M C D O N O U GH

Scene Montreal, during the Canada Cup training camp Time Summer, 1981 Characters Guy Lafleur: dynamic, handsome, virile superstar of the Montreal Canadiens. Lafleur, 32, beloved by all, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and drives like a maniac. Author and hockey fan Mordecai Richler once remarked that Lafleur possesses the charisma of a European film star, combining the glamour of Alain Delon with the everyman appeal of Gérard Depardieu.

Wayne Gretzky: effete, homely, eminently jejune goal suck of the Edmonton Oilers. Gretzky, 21, can’t even bench press his own puny weight, yet somehow, perhaps due to a conspiracy (is it really credible that a guy can play twenty years in the NHL and not get his nose broken at least once?), he has managed to usurp Lafleur as hockey’s greatest star. Mordecai Richler once said of Gretzky that he was perhaps the most boring man he’d ever met.

Lights up (Thunder, the pounding of heavy rain and the screeching of tires. lafleur and gretzky are inside an overturned car on a lonely stretch of road.) gretzky My God! My God! My God! lafleur (sighs) Not again. You okay dere, Wayne? gretzky Yes, I’m not injured.

Thank God, nothing’s broken.

Not a scratch. I hate getting hurt, Guy, I just hate it. That’s one of the reasons I love hockey so much.

I know I’ll never get hurt playing hockey. lafleur Not a scratch here, either.

Dis is a nice soft ditch. It’s always been good to me. gretzky You mean this happened before? lafleur (as he lights a cigarette) Yeah, twice. I s’pose dis makes it a Hat Trick, eh? Heh, heh. gretzky Are you lighting up? We just got into a car accident! lafleur You seem upset, Wayne.

Here, have a cigarette, it’ll calm your nerves while also giving you da strength to help push da car back onto all its wheels. gretzky No, I keeping telling ya, I don’t smoke. I don’t think an athlete should smoke. How many do you smoke a day, anyway?

Two to t’ree packs a day.

Dat’s not as much as it sounds because, you must remember, I never sleep. gretzky Never? That’s impossible. lafleur Ask Steve Shutt and my wife—they’ll tell you. gretzky Steve Shutt? lafleur Shutty’s my roommate on da road. gretzky Jesus, Guy, how can you live like this? lafleur Wayne, don’t take dis the wrong way, but you need to do somet’ing about dat bug? gretzky What bug? lafleur Da one up your ass! Heh, heh. Bob Gainey fell for dat one just like you did. Now, c’mon, let’s get dis car back on da road. Show me you’re stronger than you look.

You sure you won’t have a cigarette? It builds muscles! g r e t zk y (sighs) Okay, Guy, I’ll try one. lafleur

(blackout) (end)

Kevin McDonough is a writer who lives in Vancouver. His story “Talk Therapy” won second prize in the 2012 Downtown Eastside Writers Jamboree Writing Contest, published in Geist 86.

Tobacco Lit 55

t h i r d p l ac e

Real Smoking Pleasure JA NNI E EDWAR DS

“A

merican divorcée.”

I don’t know what this means, but I have no trouble connecting my mother’s cryptic label with the glamorous woman on our ship. Much later, I pin down the exact flavour of her tone: judgmental with a frisson of salaciousness. I’m six. I have only a vague idea of American, and absolutely no context for divorcée. I know enough to know that I can’t become American; in fact I desperately want to be Canadian, which is where we are heading to begin our New Life, sailing from Durban to Montreal in late September 1957.

I decide then and there that when I grow up, I will be a divorcée. Smoking.

Red high heels and lipstick. Tight red dress. Boobs. Platinum blonde.

In my cramped ship’s cabin I roll up a piece of paper and play-smoke in front of the mirror, my cigarette held languorously between fingers that I fantasize taper perfectly in long redpolished nails. I savour the sultry deliciousness of divorcée.

Inhale. Slowly, slowly. Exhale through pursed red lips. How do you do? I’m a divorcée. A Canadian divorcée.

I can’t get enough of it.

At nine, I smoke the DuMauriers and Players my friends steal from the packs in their mothers’ purses.

We sneak them in the tall grass out behind Charlie’s, whom most everyone in Alliance, Alberta calls “the Chinaman’s.” I am forbidden to go there because that’s where the teenagers hang out in between bouts

56 Geist 95 Winter 2014

of driving around in cars smoking, drinking and necking. On TV there’s Fred Davis, the host of Front Page Challenge, his hair Brylcreemed, driving a convertible sports cars that he smooths round sweet coastal highway curves while the jingle spools out like melted Velveeta cheese: Smoke DuMarier, for real smoking pleasure.

DuMaurier, the cigarette of good taste.

A mild cigarette with the best filter yet.

That’s why the trend today is to DuMaurier.

In high school, I’m drawn to the outlaw girls smoking in the bathrooms.

In university classes, we smoke up a thick fog along with our draft dodger professors, while Paris and Watts burn and Pierre says, Just watch me.

I become a mostly secret smoker, a habit I continue throughout my adult life. I quit while I’m pregnant with my

three daughters, but when the first is born in 1978, I go with my friends to the hospital smoking room for my first cigarette in nine long months.

One of my daughter’s boyfriends, a young man whose father was a matador in Spain, tells me I smoke like a porn star. I’m shocked that he’s so forward, but I get it. I tell him I smoke like a divorcée.

At sixty, I finally quit. I discover a brand of nicotine and tobacco-free cigarettes made in California. Ecstasy.

We buy them from Hav-a-Cigar, run by a scowling, smoking woman with a thick Eastern European accent we call “the Slavtron.” We keel over laughing reading the list of ingredients: Damiana, wild lettuce, catnip, light & love.

Jannie Edwards is a writer whose most recent book of poetry is called Falling Blues.

She lives in Edmonton.

Break the ice early this year‌

Kersti Nebelsiek, Wikimedia Commons

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Monsters AL BE RTO M ANG UE L

We believe in monsters, but do we want to take responsibility for them?

“Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

monsters ever seen, compared to which the centaur and the basilisk are more than tame and obvious animals.

Life on earth begins with monsters, not with the common shapes to which we are accustomed.

The word monster derives from the Latin verb mostrare, to show or point with a finger. The monster is the prodigy, the freak, the unusual, the unexpected, that which is seldom or never seen. Horace, to depict something monstrously impossible, speaks of black swans, not knowing that at that very moment, flocks of black swans are darkening the skies of Australia. There is always the possibility, however small, that what we call a monster is lurking

right now in an obscure corner of the universe.

Because we don’t have the ingenuity of Nature— who, Dante tells us, “doesn’t repent of her elephants and whales”—our monsters are bigger or smaller versions of what Nature has already imagined, or mere combinations of bits and pieces that can be seen in any zoo. Fish or bird or lion paired with a woman, horse or bull, or snake paired with a man; stallions and serpents that can fly, theological inventions with many arms like Shiva or a triple personality like the Trinity; dogs with three heads or people with none: our imaginary bestiaries are little more than versions of the cadavre exquis, the game invented by the Surrealists that consists of drawing, on a piece of paper folded over many times, a section of a body without seeing the other sections drawn by previous players. The results are often curious or funny, but rarely as astonishing as a giraffe or a platypus. As God says to Job with a touch of the braggart in His voice: “Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?” ( Job 39:13).

And yet, certain monsters imagined by our ancestors are solid enough to persist throughout time. The centaur and the mermaid, the dragon and the

a cadavre exquis (exquiste corpse) by marc m. gustà, bernat m. gustà and irene alcón.

City of Words 59

T

he Royal Tyrrell Museum is justly famous for its dinosaur collection. But perhaps its strangest exhibit is not the colossal skeletons of beasts that roamed when humans were not around, but a display showing enlarged forms of microscopic marine animals, called plankton, that were not destined to survive more than a very brief moment in the vast time scale of prehistory 300 million years ago. Floating in a gloomy sea of Plexiglas, their transparent bodies represented in white, luminous contours many times larger than life, these failed sketches of living creatures seem to the untrained eye nightmarishly askew and asymmetrical, half-hearted efforts to depict things that might have been, as if an artist had doodled shapes with his eyes closed and then, realizing what he had done, erased them forever.

These never fully accomplished phantoms are among the most terrifying

griffin, the gorgon and the satyr still roam our world. The Middle Ages lent them the same symbolic value as to those creatures we call real. In the medieval bestiaries we read that the lark is capable of judging the fate of a patient, whether by staying in the room if he will die or flying out the window, carrying the illness with it, if he will survive. And on the next page we learn that the savage unicorn can only be captured by being lured into a maiden’s lap, where it will fall amorously asleep. No distinction is made between the creature observed and the creature imagined: both are part of the mind’s fauna. So ingrained is the belief in monsters that Christopher Columbus, observing three manatees close to the mouth of the Orinoco, stated in his journal that he saw three mermaids swimming in the sea but, he added with scrupulous precision, “they are not as beautiful as they are reported to be.” Our monsters exist

because we want them to exist, perhaps because we need them to exist.

Who are our monsters today?

Those we cannot bear to include in the human fold, those at whom we point a finger (mostrare) to accuse them of what we believe to be “inhuman” acts. Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Bashar al-Assad, serial killers and rapists—all have been called “monsters” because they have done things that we’d like to imagine no human being could possibly do. The ancients were wiser. Their gods and their monsters had supernatural qualities and defects, but they had human qualities and defects as well: Polyphemus was a dupe, Cerberus was greedy, the centaurs were wise, the mermaids seductive; Pegasus boasted of his speed and the Minotaur of his strength. These monsters are memorable because, like us humans, they can feel pride and hate and lust, and envy and weariness too, because beyond fear they elicit respect as fellow creatures of

this earth, desiring and suffering as we desire and suffer. Cocteau suggested that the Sphinx met her end because she herself whispered the answer to the riddle to Oedipus, with whom she had fallen in love.

Unlike the age of our forefathers, ours is both credulous and skeptical.

We profess to be rational and scientific, and yet we believe in little green men from outer space (the St. Lawrence Agency of Altamonte Springs, Florida, offers a policy against alien abduction), in the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness Monster (tours are organized that offer visitors possible sightings), in vampires (as recently as February 2004, in Romania, several members of the Petre family feared that one of their deceased relatives had become a vampire; they dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it). The ancients sacralized their monsters, and also felt responsible for their existence: the Minotaur was born because of the lust of Pasiphae, and the Sirens existed to prevent men from going beyond the forbidden limits. As the historian Paul Veyne so clearly showed, “Of course they believed in their myths!” But did they think them true? “Truth,” answers Veyne, “is the thin layer of gregarious self-satisfaction that separates us from the will to power.” Today we believe in monsters but we don’t want to feel responsible for them. For us, their existence is no longer a question of truth but of evading the truth, of refusing to admit that we are capable, each and every one of us, of the most wondrous deeds and of the most abominable crimes.

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.

60 Geist 95 Winter 2014

N A T I O N A L

D R E A M S

Park in Progress DANIE L FR ANC IS

Vancouverites have always disagreed about how far they should meddle in the development of Stanley Park, their precious urban oasis

O

ne of the great contradictions of the Vancouver cityscape is the presence of a high-speed commuter route running through the heart of Stanley Park, the city’s beloved urban green space. The Stanley Park Causeway connects the downtown core to the North Shore via the Lions Gate Bridge, and every day seventy thousand motor vehicles rumble along it, spewing gas fumes and violating the pristine sanctuary of the park. Back in the 1990s, when the provincial government proposed cutting down some trees to widen the causeway, the result was an outraged reaction from park defenders who demanded that not a single tree be lost to roadway expansion, an indication of how precious the park is to many city residents. But if trees and wilderness are so sacred, how did the causeway get built in the first place?

The story of the causeway is emblematic of Vancouver’s conflicted relationship with its most treasured landmark. Created in 1888 and dedicated the next year by its namesake, Governor General Frederick Arthur Stanley, “to the use and enjoyment of peoples of all colours, creeds and customs, for all time,” the park was considered an oasis of wild nature where harried urbanites could find peace and rejuvenation. Yet as the York University historian Sean Kheraj points out

in his book, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History (UBC Press), the park is far from pristine. It was inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years before the city was created, it was logged selectively from the 1860s, and since becoming a park it has been managed and “improved” in ways too numerous to mention (though Kheraj’s book makes a good attempt at it). In other words, visitors to Stanley Park are experiencing not a natural wilderness but a manicured cultural artifact the meaning of which is constantly contested by different interests in the city.

The causeway first was proposed in 1926 when the municipality of West Vancouver offered tax advantages to any private contractor building a bridge across the entrance to Burrard Inlet, known as the First Narrows.

Because Stanley Park is located between the Narrows and the downtown, a bridge required a road through the park, and at the time the voters of Vancouver rejected the idea in a public plebiscite. However, minds were changed when the issue came up again during the Depression.

With unemployment high, the construction of a causeway and bridge was sold as a much needed make-work project. This time the bridge was financed by a British consortium, including the Guinness brewing interests, which hoped to provide access to its British Properties real estate development in West Vancouver. In a second plebiscite, in 1933, Vancouver voters chose overwhelmingly to allow the project to go ahead.

It was, suggests Kheraj, a “Faustian bargain.” Vancouver, he writes, “in a moment of weakness, had permitted a private corporation to drive a major highway through Stanley Park.”

The causeway is just one of many changes to the park, some man-made, some the result of natural forces, which have led to its present configuration. The grooming, or in Kheraj’s National Dreams 61

word, the “invention,” of the park had earlier required its depopulation.

It is hardly remembered today—or at least it wasn’t until Jean Barman’s path-breaking 2005 book Stanley Park’s Secret (Harbour Publishing)— but a variety of communities once occupied the park. There were First Nations settlements, principally at Whoi Whoi, what came to be called Lumberman’s Arch, dating back millennia. There were families squatting at Brockton Point and on Deadman’s Island, and had been for generations.

There was a small village of Chinese at Anderson Point, and a community of Kanakas (Hawaiians) occupied the south shore of Coal Harbour.

Attempts by civic authorities to evict these people began as soon as the park was created. The Park Board considered their homes to be eyesores and their presence a contradiction of the pristine wilderness narrative that it was imposing on the peninsula. The Chinese were burned out in 1890; the First Nations were sent to live on reserves elsewhere; the squatters were evicted following a series of legal trials in the 1920s. The invention of the park required the erasure of its earliest inhabitants. (Curiously, once the First Nations people were gone they were replaced by an ersatz “Indian village” at Brockton Point, now a collection of totem poles that ranks as Vancouver’s most visited tourist attraction.)

“A park is an idea imposed upon the land,” writes Kheraj, and the idea changes with time. The original advocates for Stanley Park envisioned a retreat from the modern world where people would come in search of what

Kheraj calls “passive leisure.” This attitude, endorsed by the social elites in the city, gave way to a demand from working people for more active recreational spaces. The addition over the years of playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools, lawn bowling greens, an athletics field and a cricket pitch suggests the triumph of advocates for “active leisure,” but the two visions are evident still, for example in clashes on the seawall between pedestrians (passive) and cyclists (active).

Kheraj shows that the purpose of Stanley Park has not been to preserve a natural setting but actually to improve on nature, to create an idealized version of what the natural world should be. The most obvious example in the park is Lost Lagoon, which was an unattractive marshland before it was transformed into the beautified artificial lake it is today. In 1915 the Vancouver Sun described the park as a place “where nature has been allowed to go about her business,” but this was never really the case. The wildness of Stanley Park has been groomed as fastidiously as a prize poodle. The forest has been managed to maintain its health and appearance. Certain animals have been added: “attractive species of gentle demeanour,” as Kheraj puts it. Mute swans were imported from Victoria, for example, and grey squirrels from Pennsylvania. At the same time other animals, especially large predators, were unwelcome.

Kheraj tells the story of an unfortunate cougar that was preying on the collection of animals in the zoo in 1911. The Park Board hired three hunters to track down the big cat. It

took them two weeks to find and kill it; in the meantime newspaper readers were treated to a steady diet of stories about the “terror of Stanley Park.”

For a brief moment, actual nature upstaged the carefully crafted version on display in the park.

The City of Vancouver has always existed in tension between two ideas of itself. On the one hand it strives to become a “world-class city,” attracting outside investment to help it grow and develop, staging mega-events such as the 2010 Winter Olympics to draw attention to itself. On the other hand it is the “livable city,” making the most of its natural setting to maintain a slower lifestyle, the birthplace of Greenpeace and the concept of the ecological footprint. Stanley Park embodies this tension. Since its creation 125 years ago, Vancouverites have debated the limits of improvement. Some want the park maintained as a nature preserve, untouchable (“Hands off our trees!”), inviolate, with only limited accommodation of the human population that surrounds it. Some believe the purpose of the park is the opposite, to serve the population not hide from it.

As Sean Kheraj shows in his fascinating book, it is between these two poles of opinion that Stanley Park has been invented.

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.

Read more Daniel Francis online Who Cares Who Ate John Franklin? Identity in a Cup; an examination of the canoe as a Canadian fetish object; RCMP surveillance; Boob Tube; Deviance on Display; Nova Scotia: bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland; Re-hanging the National Wallpaper; A history of the Penthouse; An account of Canada’s brush with revolution.

62 Geist 95 Winter 2014

Read Geist at

GEISTcom 

ENDNOTES RE V I E WS , CO MMEN TS, C U R IOSA

TORONTO THE GOOD

I

n the introduction to his new book, Toronto: Biography of a City (Douglas & McIntyre), Allan Levine writes that “the story of Toronto is really the story of Canada. Like it or not, the adage ‘as goes Toronto, so goes Canada’ is all too true.” So obvious does this claim seem to Levine that he does not even bother to prove it. From the get-go, then, this book is bound to irritate a reader like myself who lives not at the centre of the Canadian universe but on one of the lesser planets apparently orbiting around it (i.e., Vancouver).

However, once you have swallowed your bile at Levine’s breezy arrogance, there is much here to amuse and instruct. For example, where did that idea of “Toronto the Good” come from? According to Levine, it was William Howland, mayor during the late 1880s and a crusading moralist, who first used the phrase. And it certainly seemed to fit, at least for a while. A series of puritanical business leaders (Timothy Eaton, Hart Massey, Joseph Flavelle) dominated local society, and so renowned was the city for its strait-laced probity that when George Drew, Toronto politician and Ontario premier, allowed cocktail lounges to open, the backlash from the moral brigade sent him down to defeat in the 1949 election. It was 1961 before movie theatres were even allowed to open on Sunday. Of course, Toronto is a different place today, as the Rob Ford Show illustrates, and Levine’s book does a good job of showing how the arrival of immigrants from all over the world changed the character of the city.

64 Geist 95 Winter 2014

This was not a peaceful transformation. Toronto’s history has been surprisingly violent, not because of criminality (an aspect of the city about which Levine is disappointingly silent), but because of religious and ethnic animosities spilling over into street brawls and rioting. Toronto the Good? Not so much, not if you belonged to one of the minorities struggling to establish itself against the ingrained prejudices of the smug majority. In that sense Levine is correct that Toronto is a model for the rest of Canada. All our cities have gone through the same transformation and it is interesting to read how the largest one (mis)handled it.

—Daniel Francis ARTISTS BEHAVE BADLY

L

ast year a triptych of portraits by the famed British artist Francis Bacon, became the most expensive artwork ever sold when it fetched £89.6m at auction. The subject of those paintings, the artist Lucian Freud, is also the subject of a fascinating memoir, Breakfast with Lucian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which gives us a biography of Freud as seen through the lens of his late-in-life friendship with The Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig.

Greig draws upon his own experiences as a member of Freud’s inner circle, and on conversations with many others who knew Freud throughout his lifetime, to create a frank and unflattering portrait of a man who would be condemned—were he not (as the book’s subtitle reminds us) “Britain’s greatest modern painter”—as a

misogynist and an appalling boor.

And yet what a fascinating life! The index of Breakfast with Lucian reads like a Who’s Who of Britain’s upper (as well as lower) crust: Sigmund Freud (Lucian was his grandson); the notorious Kray twins (their loans helped underwrite Lucian’s gambling addiction); Stephen Spender (whose influence helped Lucian to get some early media exposure); Andrew Parker Bowles (Camilla’s first husband, and the subject of a 2004 portrait by Freud). Breakfast with Lucian is Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson with the gloves off; it is Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe rewritten for an age of celebrity gossip. Freud’s reputation as an artist of genius seems unassailable; this book, though, forces us to inquire into the nature of genius, and to ask how much we are willing to forgive and/or overlook in the name of art.

O

ne weekend last summer I stopped in at a used-book sale where I paid $1 for a copy of the first edition of It’s Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent (Dodd, Mead & Company); it’s probably the best $1 I’ve spent in quite a while. It’s Me O Lord was absolutely absorbing. I’ve admired Kent’s book illustrations for many years. Kent is probably best known for the illustrations in a bestselling 1930 edition of Moby Dick (many of them can be seen at book-graphics.blogspot.ca). But I knew little about the details of Kent’s life. I did not know, for example, that Kent was a staunch and outspoken Socialist from his early years, an allegiance that cost him dearly as American society

began its inexorable swing toward the right (Kent was called to testify during the McCarthy hearings; It’s Me O Lord was published shortly after those hearings concluded). I did not know that Kent had a deep and unshakeable attraction for the polar extremes: he spent five months exploring Tierra del Fuego in a small boat; he lived for a couple of extended periods in Greenland; he overwintered with his nineyear-old son in a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska; Kent even lived in Brigus, Newfoundland, during the winter of 1914–15—until he was kicked out on suspicion of being a German spy (Kent’s time in Newfoundland is the subject of an excellent novel by Michael Winter: The Big Why). It’s Me O Lord purports to be a “warts and all” self-portrait, and Kent’s bull-headedness—and his infidelities—are indeed on full display. But as Kent’s fame grows, so does his ego, to the point where he seems to feel no

need to accommodate his behaviour to the lives of others—an attitude that made life quite difficult for his family and his friends.

—Michael Hayward SOMETIMES THE REVIEW IS LONGER THAN THE STORY

I

reviewed David Arnason’s earliest work a good thirty years ago, so reading his latest collection feels like crossing trails with a long-lost friend.

If readers are hoping for recently written material, they might be disappointed: There Can Never Be Enough (Turnstone Press) consists of previously published stories, except for three new ones at the beginning.

As it turns out, those first three stories are the best. Besides containing Arnason’s always-welcome humour, they are the most insightful. The premier story, “Getting It Right,” is one in which the narrator recounts a dream.

Uncannily, it’s a dream shared by almost all my middle-aged contemporaries, even if the various relics differ: “Lately I have begun to dream of houses with secret rooms that contain artifacts from the nineteenth century, gas lamps and old irons and lockets with pictures of beautiful women carved in ivory. I am unreasonably happy in these dreams, and when I waken from one of them I am desperate to recover it.” When the narrator went on to say that he’d be willing to live his life over, similar to watching reruns on the classics network, I felt relief: I’m not the only one whose life flashes before my eyes on an unexpected but regular basis. From his earlier, selected stories, I find two that are exceptional. “Girl and Wolf” is the type of story Alice Munro might have written, if she’d tried her hand at

Endnotes 65

minimalism. It has the unmistakable Munro theme of two very different beings inexorably drawn together.

“Do Astronauts Have Sex Fantasies?” presents a series of questions that pick up where Holden Caulfield left off.

Instead of asking how the ducks and fish of Central Park can survive, Arnason’s narrator asks how everything across the cosmos can survive. I tend to classify Arnason’s work, at least the shorter pieces, as prose poetry, with his affable combination of dreamscape, tragicomic monologue and philosophical musing.

—Jill Mandrake ALL MY LITTLE WORDS

S

tephin Merritt’s 101 Two-Letter Words (W.W. Norton) is a collection of illustrated poems based on all the legal two-letter words playable in Scrabble. Merritt originally began writing the poems as mnemonic devices during downtime while on

tour with his band, the Magnetic Fields. Each four-line rhyming poem is accompanied by a humorous illustration by the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast; running themes include sloths, songwriting, Scotland and vampire dogs. Perhaps my favourite was OH, which proposes new curses (“oh, cheesemongers! oh folk art!”) or RE, which is a take on different pronunciations of the word (“Re: about, in memos / Rays: how microwaves make pork”). Merritt’s poetry is like Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies for Scrabble lovers: a witty, charming, slightly macabre ode to language. (“All My Little Words” is the title of a song written by Merritt for the Magnetic Fields; it appears on the album 69 Love Songs.)

—Kelsea O’Connor

CULTURISM

T

he subtitle of Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) is “A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures”—a precise summary and a massive understatement. In 1985, in California, a baby girl named Lia Lee begins to have tonic-clonic (formerly “grand mal”) seizures. Her parents go to the community medical centre to get help, in spite of a lack of interpreters and the family’s deep reservations about western medicine: the Hmong, a Southeast Asian group, have spiritual taboos on surgery, organ transplants, drawing of blood and other practices. The Lee family struggle to understand and incorporate western treatments; the American medical people work far above and beyond the call of duty to treat Lia; friends, relatives and advocates are eager to help. But it’s not enough for everyone to mean well. The family believes that a sudden loud noise has caused Lia’s soul to “flee her body and become lost”; in Hmong culture this condition is treated by engaging a shaman and sacrificing an animal. But to Lia’s American doctors, “an electrochemical storm inside their daughter’s head has been stirred up by the misfiring of aberrant brain cells.” To compound matters, it often takes weeks of tinkering with meds to control seizures; in this process Lia is prescribed fourteen pharmaceuticals with varying instructions, and on her chart the phrase “non-compliant mother” occurs over and over. So… why did the Lees choose to be strangers in this strange land? During the war in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, the Hmong, who had had to abandon their farms, were recruited to fight for the Americans in an area where by treaty the US could not deploy 66 Geist 95 Winter 2014

ground troops. As soldiers in the “Armée Clandestine” the Hmong men were fierce, effective warriors. Then their CIA-backed sponsors withdrew, leaving them to their fate as traitors.

The Lees got out, and then their little girl developed epilepsy, a condition with plenty of baggage in any culture.

Anne Fadiman is clear, compassionate and universally empathetic in presenting Lia Lee’s story. She does not assign blame, nor does she excuse anyone. And it’s a cracking good read from start to end.

—Mary Schendlinger CANADA’S DARK DEPTHS

F

rom Oberon this season are two solid short-story collections that are full of grittiness and Canadian place names. In The Modern World

by Cassie Beecham we get bad relationships (or worse, bad relationships in winter), women making fools of themselves over men, sex, suicide, mental illness, date rape, bedbugs and angst, and places like Nelson, Castlegar, Mississauga and Cabbagetown.

To lighten things up a bit, Beecham includes hippie parents, fencing in Dublin and the classic CBC radio show, Finkleman’s 45s.

In The Secret Life of Fission by Paul Carlucci we get more winter and more sex, plus Deep River, Ottawa, Montreal, Parkdale, a deviant girl who becomes a bored and drunken housewife, nuclear fission, a dead dog, an escape from Goose Bay, dingy beer parlours and a cutthroat political struggle for the directorship of the ice arena in Port aux Basques, lightened up with hipsters having bad relationships and drinking microbrew.

The writing in both collections is sparse and concise, with a minimum of description, and the stories are strong enough to carry the reader through the occasional rocky bits (although thanks to an unfortunate Endnotes 67

font choice, I had to look on the copyright page to figure out one author’s name). If you’ve had it up to here with the Vinyl Cafe, it’s time to take a refreshing dip into the dark depths of our Canada.

—Patty Osborne FOLLY OF WAR

D

uring the summer of 1914, when war seemed probable but not yet certain, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey remarked that if it came, “it will be the greatest catastrophe that the world has ever seen.” He was right. World War I claimed sixteen million lives, almost seven million of those civilians, and brought famine and disease that claimed tens of millions more. It toppled dynasties, sparked civil wars and launched revolutions. Yet today, as the

Canadian government ramps up its centennial commemorations, we are being asked to remember it as a moment of glory when Canada “came of age” as a nation. Looking for a useful antidote to this patriotic narrative?

You could do worse than to pick up a copy of All Else Is Folly, a novel by Peregrine Acland first published in 1929 and now reissued by Dundurn Press with a useful introduction by Brian Busby and James Calhoun.

Acland was a clerk in the Department of Finance in Ottawa when the Great War began. He volunteered and was in action in France by May 1915. Sixteen months later he was severely wounded. He was lucky to survive and the novel gives an account of what he went through. After recuperating, bedridden, for five months, he returned to Canada, though it was several years before he fully recovered. Acland was decorated for “conspicuous bravery” but he saw nothing heroic in what he did. His novel was

widely acclaimed as a vivid portrait of the front-line experience of ordinary soldiers. By the time it was written the romantic view of the war as a noble cause was beginning to be qualified by a more negative attitude, even a revulsion, against the incompetent generals and callous politicians who, it seemed, had wasted an entire generation of young men. This view prevailed for many years and it is only recently, with the arrival of the centenary, that the more triumphalist view has been heard again. All Else Is Folly is not an anti-war novel but neither does it glorify the conflict. As the editors write, it occupies a middle ground somewhere between the “extremely naïve and jingoistic” and the “pessimistic and realistic,” respecting what the soldiers suffered and accomplished without buying into the heroic myth. As part of a sober reassessment of the war, it is good to have it back in print.

—Daniel Francis

BEATNIK GLORY

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robably the most notorious episode in the lives of the writers known collectively as The Beats was the death by misadventure of Joan Vollmer, the common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, as the two were doing their “William Tell act” during an extended drinking binge at a friend’s apartment in Mexico City on September 6, 1951. As Jorge Garcia Robles recounts in The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico, translated by Daniel C. Schechter (University of Minnesota Press), Vollmer and Burroughs had been drinking “Oso Negro gin with lemonade” when Vollmer “picked up a halffull glass—a small one—and placed it on her head. [Burroughs] aimed at the glass [with his Star .380 automatic pistol] and pulled the trigger.” Robles situates this rather sordid tale in its

social and cultural context: the lives of relatively privileged expatriates in a country where the outcome of a trial could be influenced through the judicious application of money and political pressure. The book is grimly fascinating in a 1950s, “noirish” way— and I don’t think that the translator can be blamed for the cheap psychological theorizing or the occasional passages of execrable prose, of which I offer two examples: “Joan wanted to die and Bill served as her escort to the final precipice”; and this clunker: “At that very moment [when Burroughs pulled the trigger]—as he was to discover years later—an addiction to writing penetrated his body.”

O

nly the most dedicated fans of Beat literature are likely to know that Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg’s lover of more than forty years, had a small book of his own poetry published in 1978 by City Lights Books. That book, Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, is long out of print, but a new book by (and about) Orlovsky offers a unique perspective on the American literary scene from the mid-1950s until Orlovsky’s death in 2010. Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words (Paradigm Publishers) is made up of excerpts from Orlovsky’s letters and journals, which offer a fascinating glimpse into bohemian life as lived “on the road” in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, Mexico, Paris, North Africa and India. These extracts are stitched together with transitional passages from the book’s editor, Bill Morgan. As Morgan puts it, Orlovsky was “the original ‘flower child’ in the Beat group.” Orlovsky lived most of his adult life in the shadow of Ginsberg, who had been the first to encourage him to write. Mental illness ran in the Orlovsky family: both of Peter’s brothers, Lafcadio and Julius, were institutionalized for long periods of time, and 68 Geist 95 Winter 2014

toward the end of Peter’s life a longtime drug habit eventually “took its toll on his body and mind, and he slipped into his own hell of addiction and mental illness.” He died on May 30, 2010.

—Michael Hayward EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

A

t 823 pages and two inches thick, and weighted down by hefty awards—a Booker and a Governor General’s—The Luminaries (McClelland & Stewart) by Eleanor Catton is a doorstopper of a book, threatening a potentially dense and impossible read. The novel sat on my bedside table for more than a few weeks as the questions arose: a) Would I be able to get through it? b) How long would it take? c) How boring would it be? (See answer key at the end of this endnote.) Despite Catton’s protests (and methinks she doth protest way too much), this story of mega-proportions is set up like a good old-fashioned mystery in the style of Ms. A. Christie (genre-fiction readers rejoice!). The Luminaries begins in a rough, scrubby gold town on the west coast of South Island, New Zealand, in the mid-1800s. Three discoveries are made: the murder of a recluse, the disappearance of a prominent and wealthy citizen, and a well-liked prostitute unconscious in the middle of a road outside of town. Twelve characters assemble to disclose what each knows and how each is connected to the unsavoury events. Like any good mystery novel, the plot of The Luminaries unfolds through tantalizing clues and the revelation of relationships between characters; the investigators (the twelve first assembled in chapter one) often wander in the wrong direction. The characters are likable and flawed, and some are just plain dastardly. In the end, it all ties up very neatly. Answers: a) Yes. b) Two weeks. c) Not at all.

A

nother award-winning book you’ve probably never heard of (in 2008, the Prix France-Québec; in 2009, the Prix Senghor du Premier Roman francophone; in 2010, the Prix du Club des Irrésistibles), is The Douglas Notebooks (Goose Lane Editions) by Christine Eddie, translated by Sheila Fischman. This slender book tells the story of two strangers who reject the smalltown homes in which they were raised and choose lives connected to the natural world: Romain becomes a forest dweller and Eléna an apothecary. The pursuit of a deeper connection to the natural world because the civilized (or unnatural) world is an unwelcoming place is ageless. People have left cities to reconnect to nature as long ago as the time of the Roman Empire and as recently as this year when my twenty-threeyear-old friend rejected second-year university in favour of learning cultural and traditional practices with a First Nations elder. The Douglas Notebooks is compact in size, but it is a story of epic love. Romain and Eléna find in nature and in each other what was missing from their family homes: security, beauty, simplicity and love.

Together they create a paradise in a rural landscape where place names honour saints and animals: SaintePalmyre, Saint-Lupien, Rivière-auxOies. Living in nature without modern conveniences is constant work: hauling water, tending to gardens and animals and, in Canada, preparing for the next season or seasonal act to come.

Living a back-to-the-land life is not romantic, though the experiences can be. Romain and Eléna live romantically and completely within their paradise. As in all Eden stories, the heroes experience a fall. It is their human fallibility that begins the unravelling of the lovers’ Utopian life. Though they escape the community, it is a community of people who ultimately offers

them hope and a way for their love to live on, even though it’s transformed.

—Lily Gontard AMOR AETURNUS

W

e’ve seen modern vampires in television and movies do a lot of things: murder, sparkle, play piano, attend high school, run businesses, run for mayor, et cetera. Despite the variety, it’s a challenge to keep a single subject interesting. However, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) is more than the typical anguish and fangs. It’s a well-written and visually stunning film that bit to the core (so to speak) of my sensitive romantic self. The movie centers on a wed and undead vampire couple: Adam (Tom Hiddleton) and Eve (Tilda Swinton.) The story begins with Eve, who senses her husband’s off mood and flies from her home in Tangier to his decrepit mansion in Detroit. Adam is so depressed with the human world of consumerism, ignorance, and environmental destruction he doesn’t want to “live” in it anymore. Eve discovers a gun and wooden bullet under the bed.

She demands of him, “...how can you live for so long and still not get it?”

The beautiful sets, props, and costumes of the film infatuated me, but I fell in love with the critique of our own culture and passionate themes.

Jarmusch’s hyper-sensitive vampires thrive on the most important things in life for most creatures: love, nature, and creativity. (The scene in which vampire Tilda Swinton holds polite conversation with a mushroom will steal your heart.) Eve reminds Adam, (and the audience,) that the time we spend on earth is precious and best “lived” with gentle curiosity.

—Brittany Huddart

Endnotes 69

T H E

W A L L

off the shelf

Books). Rita lumbers through the shadow

hopes”; the Globe and Mail says that despite

Jesse Patrick Ferguson’s Mr. Sapiens

of her husband’s ex-wife, carrying two-

the novel’s grim tone, the author “denies

(Buckrider Books) may contain traces

hundred-and-eighteen-point-five pounds

the fatalistic view, offering room for hope

of gunpowder, 100 watts of sunlight,

of emotional baggage in Rita Just Wants

instead.” According to the Coastal Spectator,

jugs of brackish water, sacks of bleached

to be Thin by Mary W. Walters (Tall Pop-

Pull of the Moon by Julie Paul (Brindle and

white flour and diarrhea pills. There are

pies Media). Jack Zipes contends that the

Glass) is “frequently disturbing and always

no words of love without white spaces in

organic poetry of Hansel and Gretel was

illuminating”; FreeFall Magazine says that

Corrado Calabrò’s Text Me, translated by

integral to the European civilizing pro-

for all her directness, Paul “misses oppor-

Genni Gunn (Signature Editions). Ted

cess in Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of

tunities to delve below the surface-level”;

Dyck reminds you that the trout’s name

the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales (Princeton

the Globe and Mail describes her writing as

is your name and its death is your death

University Press). Road trips across the

“consistently quick off the mark in charac-

in Cutthroats and Other Poems (Turnstone

prairies help Shelley A. Leedahl under-

terization and establishing scene.” Accord-

Press). The avian inspiration for Rossini’s

stand why Columbus thought the Earth

ing to Quill and Quire, What I Want to Tell

overture feasts on roadkill, mosquitoes and

was flat in I Wasn’t Always Like This (Sig-

Goes Like This by Matt Rader (Nightwood

dung in Magpie Days by Brenda Sciber-

nature Editions). At the annual Singularity

Editions) wavers back and forth “between

ras (Turnstone Press). Susan McCaslin

Summit, Adam Pez discusses nanobots,

moments of great subtlety and dry peda-

pays tribute to the woman who became her

downloadable consciousness and human-

gogical cataloguing”; the Coastal Spectator

mentor in the ways of the cosmic Christ in

ity’s inevitable co-mingling with artificial

praises his “gift for teasing out the con-

Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna).

intelligence in The Silicon Rapture: Close

tradictory and incomplete aspects of the

An archivist hunts across decades for a

Encounters with Artificial Intelligence and The

human mind and spirit”; The Navigator

man who doesn’t know that he is missing

Singularity (Nonvella). Harlan moonlights

claims that Rader “monkeys with time.”

in The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Mar-

as a sideshow freak in a prairie-touring

Publishers Weekly says The Freedom in Amer-

tha Baillie (Pedlar Press). Christopher

carnival to break out of his ordinary-as-

ican Songs by Kathleen Winters (Biblioa-

Levenson watches endless newsreels try-

soup life in Barker by Wayne Tefs (Turn-

sis) “offers empathetic examinations of

ing to cauterize the wounds of history in

stone Press). The God who is everywhere

people who don’t quite fit”; Quivering Pen

Night Vision (Quattro Books). The wind’s

and does not exist reveals itself in every

commends its “unusual sensuality”; The

incessant hum emanates from God’s

stranger who walks by in The Hundred Lives

Star says that “nature entwines itself kama

refrigerator and if you listen it gets louder

by Russell Thornton (Quattro Books). A

sutra-like” throughout Winters’ stories.

in House Dreams by Deanna Young (Brick

landmine mangles Sgt. Hugh Kubbie and

The National Post describes Sweetland by

Books). Pale plastic beasts engineered to

ends his military career, but with a face

Michael Crummey (Random House) as

outlast our kids dominate the era of the

like stroganoff, he’s a shoo-in for Hol-

“a paean to a life and a history”; The Tele-

RV in Invasive Species by Claire Caldwell

lywood horror movies in I Am Currently

gram writes: “the Newfoundland environ-

(Buckrider Books). Brenda Hasiuk heeds

Working on a Novel by Rolli (Tightrope

ment and culture is also fully realized”;

Cree legends, Ukrainian superstitions and

Books). Morbid Santa dolls and doctored

ayoungvoice.com calls Crummey’s prose

famous Metis last words in Boy Lost in Wild

bottles of Mrs. Dash plague the Pleasant

“delicate, yet sea-worthy.”

(Turnstone Press). Jeffery Donaldson lik-

Inn in Many Unpleasant Returns by Judith

ens poetry to taking a stick from over there

Alguire (Signature Editions). James Gif-

congratulations

and placing it in a circle over here in Echo

ford discovers the generation that went

To Matt Rader, who was the 2014 recipi-

Soundings (Palimpsest Press). Ces’ sud-

missing somewhere in between the Brit-

ent of the Canada Council for the Arts’

den illness forces Lynette into the role of

ish High Moderns and Kitchen Sink Real-

Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for literature; To

full-time caretaker for the woman she has

ism in Personal Modernisms (University

Miriam Toews for winning the Rogers

finally decided to leave in Lynette Loep-

of Alberta Press). The dead do not come

Writers’ Trust Prize for fiction with her

pky’s Cease (Oolichan Books). An Italian

riding dark horses, but arrive like turnips

novel All My Puny Sorrows; To M.A.C.

girl with the same name and hyper-reac-

pulled from the soil in Washita by Patrick

Farrant, who won the 2014 Victoria But-

tive properties of a newly discovered ele-

Lane (Harbour Publishing).

ler Book Prize for her micro-fiction col-

ment haunts Michael Kenyon in Astatine

lection The World Afloat; And to Anna

(Brick Books). The lawyers of Iran, without

noted elsewhere

Leventhal and Sina Queyras who won

office or courtroom, transcribe the miser-

Quill and Quire calls Celia’s Song by Lee

the Concordia University First Book Prize

ies of the poor on ribbons of ink in Nilo-

Maracle (Cormorant Books) a novel

and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry at this

far Shidmehr’s Between Lives (Oolichan

fraught with “painful truths and fragile

year’s Quebec Writer’s Federation Awards.

70 Geist 95 Winter 2014

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 He doesn’t vote but he likes to add up golf scores when he’s sober 6 Either a hypothetical subatomic particle or a guy with a bottle in a bag 8 One of those middling days that Bill warned about 9 The third one always leaves the big guy wanting more 10 Before we can have a drink, Roger will start with a train song 11 What’s the soonest she’ll probably get here? (abbrev) 14 We have to go but feel free to skip on over 15 To get a good reception, bring a special recipe 16 It’s staggering how thirsty one gets when playing I Spy 20 The cat’s mother and him toured America 21 Sounds like Bo could have been our spiritual guide 22 A rude remark provides quite a send off 25 My teacher’s favourite support group (abbrev) 26 Lou’s velvet tones were just ducky 27 He got mad because he had too many jobs 28 It’s a rum day when dilution occurs 29 Drink up so we can set sail 32 Hush little baby, don’t say a word 34 It sounds like the introduction should rhyme, doesn’t it?

35 Woody liked to drink from a bucket 37 Simon paid a high price for continuing to mix his drinks 40 I can’t get behind that pompous organization 43 We like to concentrate on cereals while drinking 45 See, Ikea spas tap into loose talk but it’s too bad they’re illegal 50 His own is all one person will get 51 When she said goodbye to the American version it was like a hit in the face 52 Her good faith in her pet remedy gives me a fuzzy head (4)

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Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #95 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319

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DOWN 1 Because of her thighs, it looks like her skirt’s kinda small 2 On the last one we usually party with our acquaintances 3 They’re not even feeling strange 4 I’m not sure the Betty should drive the Ford to the centre 5 When Tories hug people, they don’t seem immoral 6 Mary Jane often works in the garden 7 Never mind how he’s getting home, get Noah a drink—of water! (3) 12 I know this is a good party, but don’t pass by the spires 13 Don’t fiddle around with that crazy Canuck or you’ll get burned 17 I can get there in two but I may have to drive illegally 18 It sounds like there was some jamming at the treaty talks.

19 She’s mad about pumpkin cocktails 23 No offence, but can you make a note of that boring place?

24 It will be a hard go but I hope it cures my hangover (2) 30 On Tuesday Ruby sang about part of a small bottle of rye (2) 31 That molecule has got us 71% covered (abbrev) 33 Even if you like him, don’t get familiar with that minister (abbrev) 34 Is it freezing or is it time to go on stage?

36 Okay, don’t blow it with senseless behaviour

38 She couldn’t stop looking at the way to heaven 39 Sometimes you’ll find me in France 41 We’ll have to resort to getting fit in Belgium 42 It won’t take a minute to dry off my French braid (abbrev) 44 Hurry up and down so we can exchange toupees 46 The doctor says I get better visualization with vocalization 47 Why not write about my automatic injection device? (abbrev) 48 That little one could do better at looking (abbrev) 49 Sounds like the fifth piggy was a seamstress There was no winner for Puzzle 94.

L I T T O U R O D O U T W A S H A T A K E E A R K C R A P L O O T S U F F E U T O I L

L E G O R N E I R O O E M A L E D O T S E P E R H E R A G R E T

I D I O M A L E B E A N O

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

O M A L A O R K V Y H L A R T A R C I E N S E

Puzzle 71

C A U G H T

M A P P I N G

Beach Blanket Pingo The Canadian Map of Fun in the Midnight Sun

by Melissa Edwards

Beach Blanket Pingo (a day at the beach) Sandfly Lake Starfish Lake Picnic Lake

Charcoal Lake Basket Lake

Paddling Lake

modified Geistonic projection

Skin Lake

Cabana

Family Lake

Bathing Lake

Seahorse Point

Bright Sand

Shark Fiord

Venice

Sandcastle Peak Fairweather Lake

Neverfreeze Lake

Zinc Creek

Barefoot Lakes Hawaiian Lake

Swim Lakes

Bare Butt Bay

Tropical Creek

Sweatman

Fireside

Lac Parasol Lac Sarong

Bluesky

Lac Goggles Burnt Arm

Sandal Lake

Les Dunes

Exposed Inlet

Turn of Bald Head

Surf Inlet

Kelp Shade Hills Pink Bottom

Soda Creek

Naked Man Shoal Sea Side

Raft Cove

Mermaid Seafoam

Flipper Glacier

Ripples Paradise

Popsicle Peak

The Ocean

Malibu Shorts Point Frisby Ridge

Blanket Hill

Half Tide Rock Ogle

Beachcomber Bay Fall of the Waves

Belly River

Suntan Lake

Wade

Jellyfish Lake Miami

Milkshake Lake

Lido Plage Caliento Coca Cola Falls

Concession Lac Bondi Lac Limbos Lac Monaco

Pringle

Pail Lake

Ice Cream Creek

Rockaway Lake Oil City

Towell Lake Hotspot Lake

Balm Beach Sunset View Frolic Reef

Lively

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

72 Geist 95 Winter 2014