Geist 86-Fall 2012

GEIST 86

Skid Road Lit

Twilight Zone Map of Canada BOOMTOWN WINNIPEG  WOMEN OF KALI RETURN TO HERNIA HEAVEN FALSE RECOGNITION HOODIE YOGOURT, CULTURE, ADORNO HOW AMERICANS PERCEIVE CANADIANS

FACT + FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA

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Warrior Nation

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The Hockey Annals • Street-corner Surveillance Joe Fiorito • Eve Corbel • Jean-Claude Germain • M.A.C. Farrant • Guy Delisle • Lily Gontard & Family Alberto Manguel • Mercedes Eng • Stephen Henighan • andrea bennett • Raymond E. Biesinger In Review: Joan Didion A Life Less Ordinary Jonathan Safran Foer Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn Madeleine Thien Hannah Arendt Biography Shag Carpet Action The Search Engine Ambient Findability San Francisco Atlas

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North of America

GEIST

Volume 22

· Number 86 · Fall 2012 features

Boomtown Photographs of L.B. Foote 36

Last Amphibian Flees M.A.C Farrant 42

Local Lit Jim Ryder, Kevin Mcdonough, Fran Diamond 44

Adorno, Sarasota andrea bennett 51

Sweet Lorenzo Stephen Smith 52

In the photographs of L.B. Foote, we see Winnipeg mutating from a frontier town to a prairie metropolis

Chicken funerals; the oxygen tank incident; a woman’s fur explodes

Writing from the Inner City: “Talk Therapy,” “Organic Curare,” “Nothing Happening,” by the winners of the 2012 Downtown Eastside Writers’ Jamboree Writing Contest

Theodor Adorno visits bennett in the bathtub; bennett visits her nana in Sarasota

The Hockey Annals: the greatest ever hockey player suffered from skittishness, lightning burns and his teammate’s betrayal

published by The Geist Foundation. publisher : Stephen Osborne. senior editor :

printed in canada by Transcontinental. managing editor emeritus : Barbara Zatyko.

Mary Schendlinger. editorial group : Michal Kozlowski, assistant publisher; Chelsea Novak, managing editor; Lauren Ogston, online marketing manager. circulation manager : Nicholas Beckett. copy editor : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. associate editor : C.E. Coughlan. interns : Jeff Groat, Billie-Jo Jenner, Jocelyn Kuang, Kelsea O’Connor, Jennesia Pedri, Uzma Rajan. accountant : Mindy Abramowitz cga. advertising & marketing : Clevers Media. w e b a r c h i t e c t s : Metro ­P ublisher. d i s t r i b u t i o n : Magazines Canada.

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Kevin Barefoot, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Daniel Francis, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Jill Mandrake, Becky McEachern, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Patty Osborne, Eric Peterson, Dan Post, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito. support the geist writers and artists fund: geist.com/wafund

GEIST Ideas and culture since 1990 “The emanation of an unknown country”

notes & dispatches

Stephen Osborne 8 Women of Kali Jill Boettger 12 Born in the Caul Thad McIlroy 13 Hernia Heaven, Part 2 Sarah Pinder 15 Ativan Eve Corbel 18 False Recognition Hoodie

findings

21

Timeline of US–Canadian History Reflections on My Social Life

Jerusalem The Night of the R-100

Lost at Sea Skid Road and more.

columns

Stephen Henighan Alberto Manguel Daniel Francis

19 62 64

Afterlife of Culture City of Words National Dreams

departments Mandelbrot 4 In Camera Letters 5

Joe Fiorito 29 Surveillance

Geist staff & correspondents 66 Endnotes, Noted Elsewhere, Off the Shelf Meandricus 71 Puzzle

Melissa Edwards 72 Caught Mapping

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

The inks are vegetable based.

cover image: Canada and the Call, 1914, by J.E.H. MacDonald This poster, designed by a founding member of the Group of Seven, advertised an art exhibition that toured Canada in support of the Canada Patriotic Fund. The exhibition comprised paintings and sculptures donated by eighty-two Canadian artists; it showed in Toronto, Winnipeg, Halifax, Saint John, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Hamilton in 1914 and 1915 and raised more than $10,000. The Canada Patriotic Fund was established in 1914 to raise funds for families of soldiers at war.

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c a m e r a

Stealing Beauty

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hese portraits are part of a series made by the photographer Brent Lewin during the last two years in remote regions of South Asia. The woman on the left belongs to the Apatani people of the Ziro Valley in northeast India. Her tattoo is in the traditional pattern of a line down the middle of her face and a set of short lines on her chin; the nose plugs are also traditional, and vary in size. The woman on the right belongs to the Chin people in the mountains of southwest Myanmar; she bears a full facial tattoo in a traditional pattern unique to her tribal group.

Similar legends among the Apatani and the Chin, who are separated by language and by several mountain ranges, attribute the origins of facial marking to a time when the local women, renowned for their beauty, were at risk of abduction by more powerful tribes; “disfigurement” rendered them unattractive to potential kidnappers, and in time came to be perceived as a beautifying adornment. Such stories are possibly the creation of outsiders wishing to rationalize what they saw as “defacement,” rather than a veiling that conceals and reveals at the same time.

Some of the women whom Lewin photographed had apparently not seen pictures of themselves before. When he showed them their images on the LCD screen of his camera, he says, “Many of them became really emotional, they touched the screen, some cried.”

—Mandelbrot

4 Geist 86 Fall 2012

r e a d e r s

GEIST

w r i t e

LETTERS I

time and motion

t seems Stephen Henighan’s main contention in “Against Efficiency” (Geist 85) isn’t against efficiency per se, but against government cuts labelled “efficiency.” If the new bus routes worked better, there would be no problem. But they aren’t better, they just cost less to operate.

The inevitable efficiency squeeze is unpleasant, but is there an alternative? I’m not asking this rhetorically—I share Henighan’s concern, but what else is there? I don’t picture efficiency suddenly going out of style among people who make more money from it. What structure of globalized finance doesn’t value efficiency?

I agree with the thrust of the article and, like Henighan, I don’t think there’s an answer.

—Jeff Halperin, Toronto

W

hy is the word efficiency in its current popular usage used only as a measure of short-term, domestic microeconomics? Why can we not extend its definition, and our conversations about efficiency, to include the value of things that cannot be immediately measured in dollars? For example, what con­­stitutes an efficient community? How do we evaluate it vis-à-vis a dollar? Or, do we? Same goes for environmental concerns. How do we construct an operating model for society that places equal value on community, environment and economics? The more we converse and question, write about and delve into these issues, the more likely it is that politicians will sit up and take notice.

—Patty Holmes, New Westminster BC

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

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fter being let go from a long-time job at the age of sixty, due to company “efficiencies,” and unable to find employment, I decided to do frackall. Now I can read whatever books I want, watch whatever TV I want.

Go for nice, leisurely bike rides in parks, pursuing my bug photographing hobby. Why worry about getting another job? I will be dead soon and efficiently charred to ashes to make room for more efficient humans.

—Phil Menger, Abbotsford BC Read “Against Efficiency” and other work

by Stephen Henighan at geist.com.

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oh, cbc

aniel Francis presents a far bettertempered assessment of the klutzy Richard Stursberg, former CBC head of English services, than I would have been capable of (“Boob Tube,” No. 85).

As for Stursberg’s belief that audience and popularity are measures of virtue, all I can say to that yardstick of vulgarity is this: Hitler was popular and had a big audience too. We CBC lovers and viewers are well rid of that meddlesome self-promoter.

Francis also points to the real danger: an anti-CBC prime minister who seems destined for another four destructive years at the wormy helm of Canada.

—W. Casselman, Ontario

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Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC Canada v6b 1h4 Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the Magazines Association of BC. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University ­Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council and the Cultural Human Resources Council. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

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asn’t Richard Stursberg a Har­ per appointee? That would ex­­ p­­lain why he doesn’t believe in public broadcasting, investigative journalism or the lessons of the past.

—Bryan Smith, Woodstock ON

S

tursberg was a disaster for the CBC and Canada. But now that he’s gone, why is the CBC still on the same track? If we insist on copying Letters 5

www.geist.com

the Excited States, let’s at least have the CBC copy PBS, not ABC. —Wayne Robbins, Toronto Read “Boob Tube” and other work by Daniel Francis at geist.com.

amo, amas, amatoria

I

enjoyed Alberto Manguel’s essay “Power to the Reader” (No. 85), about the power of literature. I should point out, though, that when Ovid referred to a poem (carmen in Latin) getting him in trouble with the emperor Augustus, who sent him packing into permanent exile, he was most certainly referring to a specific poem, the lengthy mock-didactic “Ars Amatoria,” i.e. “The Art of Love,” the entire text of which we still have. The “Ars” offered advice to both men and women (the fact that women were included was especially scandalous to socially conservative Romans such as Augustus) on how to find and keep lovers. Although Ovid had denied at the beginning of his poem that he was counselling adulterous affairs, the poem was readily understood as such, and the fact that the “Ars” came out at about the same time as Augustus’s only daughter, Julia, was convicted of adultery with numerous men and subsequently packed into (also permanent) exile by her furious, unforgiving father, must have roused the emperor’s ire all the more. I should note that Ovid also blamed his punishment on a serious mistake (error in Latin) he had made.

What this “error” actually was has led to a lot of speculation over the centuries. The most likely explanation is that Ovid had gotten wind of some sort of palace intrigue damaging to Augustus’s interests but had failed—out of fear?— to report it to the emperor.

—Beert Verstraete, Professor Emeritus of Classics, Acadia University, New Minas NS Read “Power to the Reader” and other work by Alberto Manguel at geist.com.

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island duds

hanks for remembering Frank Ney, a former mayor of Nanaimo,

6 Geist 86 Fall 2012

BC, on Vancouver Island, and his very cool Full Nanaimo look in “Hub to the North” (Michal Kozlowski, No. 85). Not as hip as the Full Nanaimo, but worth mentioning, are two other island looks. The Saanich Tan is cultivated by retiring early and hitting the bottle pretty hard to perfect a nice rosy glow. (Wine and hard liquor both work.) Sadly, this look is less often in evidence these days because most of the wearers are no longer with us.

The classic Sooke Dinner Jacket is a blue and red plaid flannel work shirt in which dirt and rips are mandatory.

If the wearer is married, it is doubtful how often the jacket actually gets to the dinner table. It should be noted that these two fashion statements can be combined to good effect for a true if somewhat dated south-island look.

—M.L. Ogilvie, Victoria Read “Hub to the North” and other work

by Michal Kozlowski at geist.com.

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summer drift

truly enjoyed reading Stephen Osborne’s “Reading in Summer” (No. 85), about the pleasures of reading outdoors. I was taken back, sharing similar memories of bookstores, and of being captivated by a book and drifting off to another place and time.

—Chelene Knight, Vancouver Read “Reading in Summer” and other work by Stephen Osborne at geist.com.

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remembering

onnie Kuhns’s “Last Day in Cheyenne” (No. 84) is a great essay. My grandfather, who was like my dad, died four months ago. I cry occasionally. I try to be strong, to remember the good parts. I remember him every day, and though I’m not religious, I pray for him.

—Verónica Watt, Santiago, Chile Read “Last Day in Cheyenne” at geist.com.

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heartbreaks

here are heartbreaks in every line of Karen Connelly’s “The Speed of Rust, or, He Marries” (No. 84).

I admire how Connelly spans the globe—puts suffering in perspective— in all her work. She is one of Canada’s best and most versatile writers.

—Caroline Woodward, Lennard Island Lighstation, Tofino BC Read “The Speed of Rust, or, He Marries” at geist.com.

wartime wireless

I

f brevity is the soul of wit, then “Wireless” (No. 84), Libby Simon’s memory of radio news during World War II, is both witty and informative.

The closing paragraph—particularly, “What else would they have to talk about?”—is a powerful and authentic ending. Although I don’t remember the war itself, I do remember hearing folks talk about it—incessantly, in fact—for many years afterward.

Indeed, well into the 1950s.

—Norm Asher, Winnipeg Read “Wireless” and other work by Libby Simon at geist.com.

brilliant bookseller

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on Stewart, the owner of McLeod’s Books in Vancouver, was a sweetie forty years ago when I knew him, and when I saw him recently, he was still a sweetie, with a terrific bookstore. George Fetherling’s profile of Stewart, “Man of a Hundred Thousand Books” (No. 80), is a great article about one of the great bookstore institutions in BC. —Heather Kennedy-MacNeill, Courtenay BC “Man of a Hundred Thousand Books” won the 2012 Western Magazine Award for Best Profile. Read this award-winning essay and other work by George Fetherling at geist.com.

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form fight

can’t believe Geist is running the Erasure Poetry Contest again, in which entrants “write” a poem by deleting words from a longer text. The form is so lame. It may have worked for a one-off, but do you plan on doing this every year?! Why can’t Geist just

have a normal poetry competition like every other magazine? Only it would be better, because it is Geist.

—Joel Clinton, Cyberspace

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can’t believe the form. (so lame.)

It may have worked for a one-off. (do you plan on doing this every year?!)

Just have normal poetry. (only better.)

—Tavish, Cyberspace

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rasure poetry is a cool idea for a contest. Writers who prefer “normal” poetry contests can find dozens to enter. Kudos to Geist for thinking of something a little different.

—Kate Thompson, M’Chigeeng ON Visit geist.com for more information on the 2nd Annual Geist Erasure Poetry Contest, and to read last year’s winning entries.

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for the record

eorge A. Walker, the extraordinary book artist and wood engraver, wrote and illustrated The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson (Porcupine’s Quill). We praised the book to the skies in Geist 85, but got the author’s middle initial wrong.

The full title of Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, mentioned in No. 85, is Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. A poem by Calvin Wharton, from his new book The Song Collides (Anvil Press), was published in No. 85 under the title “Superman You Prick.” The poem is actually titled “Joke.”

Send your letters to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax 604-677-6319 #210 - 111 W. Hastings Street Vancouver BC V6B 1H4 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist map, suitable for framing.

Letters 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES f r o m

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Women of Kali stephen osborne A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh

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n the course of conversation with Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence, on a Saturday afternoon last July, and for some weeks following, I felt or sensed, like an occasional distant rumble, the movement of History, or perhaps the undead hand of Empire, reaching from deep in the past into the present moment, a slightly absurd sensation, disconcerting, discombobulating at times, easily muted by the routines of daily life, but never silenced. Urvashi Butalia is a well-known writer, historian, feminist and publisher; she had travelled from Delhi to Vancouver as a guest of the Indian Summer Festival, where she was to speak about the making of The Other Side of Silence, a major work of oral history, analysis and commentary, subtitled Voices from the Partition of India, which I had not yet read.

I knew Urvashi Butalia slightly, at least in a manner of speaking: we 8 Geist 86 Fall 2012

had been introduced twenty-four years earlier in 1988 in Vancouver at a conference of Pacific Rim book publishers paid for by the Canadian government. Urvashi Butalia was the founder of Kali for Women, the first feminist book publishing house in India, operating from a friend’s garage in Delhi, and much too tiny a firm, she said at the time, to be invited to an international conference; nevertheless she had managed to hitch rides with a “legitimate” firm for herself and her publishing partner Ritu Menon, and they had been assigned rooms in the Four Seasons Hotel along with the big publishers from Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines. I represented the tiniest Canadian house present, a press on the literary fringe, which I had been running for seventeen years in a series of decaying warehouses.

Kali for Women was at the stage in fringe publishing when survival itself is the primary goal; not only were these women inventing a milieu, they were inventing the writers and the writing that the milieu called for.

Such had been the condition of cultural publishing in Canada in the ’70s, a decade that had extended well into the ’80s and was perhaps only ending then, in 1988. I recall wishing to explain to the women of Kali for Women, and perhaps I tried to, that publishing in Canada at that time had entered a period of relative calm; politicians had ceased imputing to publishers, and their writers, crimes of immorality, obscenity, terrorism and sedition; gay, lesbian, feminist and Aboriginal voices were finding places on the fringe among the literary and social issues publishers; book and magazine distributors were (briefly, as I recall) not going bankrupt; the photos: mandelbrot

world of bookselling was not yet hollowed out (I say now, in hindsight): there were plenty of independent bookstores in the country. It was precisely this optimism (short-lived, as it turned out) that encouraged the sponsoring publishers in Toronto and Vancouver and their allies in the federal government to undertake a gathering of this scale, the aim of which was to jump-start a new trade fair for the Pacific Rim along the lines of the Frankfurt Book Fair (the biggest in

Kali, the fierce Tantric goddess, is known as the black one, a figure of time, change, annihilation and death, and as the mother and protector of the universe. You don’t want to get too close to Kali, is what I remember Urvashi Butalia or Ritu Menon saying to me at the Pacific Rim conference, with the result that I wished to go to India immediately to join forces with the feminist publishing fringe.

When I left the final reception at the Four Seasons Hotel, late at night and full of wine, I carried a familiar dream of India as given by the movie Gandhi, the poem “Gunga Din” and a few lines from the Bhagavad Gita, to which the goddess Kali had been added as demiurge to the feminists of India.

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the world), and, by a kind of coup de main, break the hegemony of Frankfurt. The opening session, which neither the women of Kali for Women nor I attended, was addressed by the Lieutenant-Governor, the local representative of the Crown and vestigially of the Empire that had once joined Canada to India and the other pink parts of the globe.

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n fact, I had only a cynical interest in the Pacific Rim conference, and my attention was easily diverted to the women of Kali for Women, who manifested new publishing energy and a readiness for the challenge that they had taken up, which stood as a rebuke to my own world-weariness— and by whom, I confess, I was somewhat dazzled. When I asked them to explain Kali to me, they said, be careful with Kali. Later I discovered that

ow Urvashi Bu­­ talia had returned to Vancouver as the guest of the Indian Summer Festival, and after twentyfour years I had not yet been to India. Did we recognize each other? I couldn’t say: within moments Urvashi Butalia seemed completely familiar to me, and we seemed to be quite at home with each other. Her connecting flight from Seattle to Vancouver had been inexplicably (but not, for some of us, surprisingly) cancelled by Air Canada, leaving her stranded at the Air Canada “information” counter, at the mercy of stony-eyed clerks who dispensed a “number to call” and no other assistance; she waited on hold on her cell phone for forty minutes, she said, surrounded by her fellow strandees, some forty or fifty in number, all on their cell phones, all waiting to get through to the same number. Finally she broke away from the embrace of our national airline and found a shuttle bus to carry her Notes & Dispatches 9

over the border to Vancouver; five hours later she was ensconced in the Pan Pacific Hotel. Before meeting with me, she had gone across the city to visit a family whose relatives in India had not been in touch since 1947, when Partition divided India into two nations. In the course of her research, Urvashi Butalia said, she had often acted in this way as an instrument of reunion and reconnection amongst survivors of Partition, which was a catastrophe of immense proportions, as you probably know, she said. Before I could formulate a response excusing my ignorance of Partition (and of India), a terrifying scene from the movie Gandhi sprang unbidden to mind, in which columns of refugees, deportees, displaced persons, women, children, old people, entire extended families, whole villages in carts and on foot, are streaming across the screen in opposite directions when marauders from each side fall upon each other with machetes, swords, knives and rocks— a scene that has stayed with me since seeing the movie some thirty years ago, and I confessed to Urvashi Butalia that that single image was all I knew of Partition. Within moments she had enlightened me with basic statistics: twelve million people made homeless in a period of months; at least a million slaughtered; seventyfive thousand women raped; untold numbers of women and children abducted. She had learned some of these numbers in school; they were in the history books, she said, where they were understood more or less to be the history of Partition, along with lists of politicians, British administrators, dates and political decisions.

The word partition had no particular resonance for her until 1984, she said, when as a young woman she joined a citizens’ group assisting victims of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 in which thousands of Sikhs were murdered in Delhi and other parts of India, many of them burned alive, in 10 Geist 86 Fall 2012

the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. During this period of terror she heard older victims say that “nothing had been this bad since Partition,” and stories that she had heard as a child, stories of atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, and which, she said, had seemed to belong to the world of fairy tales, began now to take on the aspect of reality. None of these stories had entered the public realm; they were private memories. She began to seek out stories of Partition, beginning with her mother, who had not seen her brother or her mother for forty years. Slowly Urvashi took on the immense project of listening to survivors who would agree to speak, asking questions, writing things down and listening again.

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s Urvashi Butalia described her early search into Partition, the image from the movie Gandhi continued to linger between us like a billboard on the highway. I could hear her clearly and I could see her on the other side of it, describing the effects of Partition that continue to churn through the cultures of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which put me in mind of the destructive force that lay behind the bland language of a bureaucracy closer to home: internment, residential schools—neutral labels seeming to signify rest or domesticity, supplied by those who make and remake the maps that control and divide peoples, cultures, classes, castes, families.

The voices of Partition that Urvashi sought out, and that began to seek her out, and can now be heard in the pages of The Other Side of Silence, were the voices of women not accustomed to speaking publicly, or at first unwilling to speak at all; the voices of men who had killed their own children, wives, mothers, brothers and parents for fear of capture by the “enemy,” and now lived with replacement

families, children and grandchildren, carrying their crimes within themselves; the stories of women and children throwing themselves into wells to drown and suffocate; stories of women abducted, rescued, abducted again; the voices of children now grown up who witnessed the murder of parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, and were left to fend for themselves; children abducted; and thousands of children “unclaimed.”

“It became difficult to continue,” she writes, with “stories so harrowing, so full of grief and anguish that often I could not bear to listen.” Many of the women and men who chose to tell their stories to Urvasha Butalia did so reluctantly, even though in many cases the details were known to other family members and neighbours. To this day, she writes, she has not solved the ethical problem of transcribing voices that might otherwise choose to remain silent, from shame, from fear of reprisal (even today) or from a simple desire for privacy, and instead trying to find a place for them in history.

The tools of feminist historiography, she writes, often allowed her to listen to that most unheard-of thing, silence itself: that which is left unsaid in the stories told to her, or the silence of those who remain mute. One comes to understand silence, she says, even to work with it.

The Other Side of Silence reveals the uneasy relationship between history and memory. Often the writing of history pulls a veil over the lived experience of events, and the stories people tell each other—that is, the memory of events—are pushed to and beyond the margins of public discourse: the depths of memory are not accessible to traditional historiography, whose role is to narrate events rather than to memorialize experience. But once memory finds a way into history, Butalia proposes, the look of history is changed: we are invited, challenged, not only to ask what happened but also what happened to you? and to

seek out answers—from this woman, that man, this child. The smooth surface of history slips to the side.

The partition of India precipitated the largest dispersal of human beings in history; twelve million people were rendered homeless (in 1947, the entire population of Canada was twelve million). Similar catastrophes of dispersal on different scales are to be found in Canadian history: the dispossession and imprisonment of Canadians of Japanese descent in the 1940s, an event known as internment, and the serial abductions (a species of hostage-taking) of 100,000 Aboriginal children over a period of a hundred years, known as residential school, the effects of which will continue to shudder, seen or unseen, through “history” for generations to come. “Abducted children posed the greatest challenge of all,” writes Urvashi Butalia. “How do we make sense of the experiences of children?”

Kali for Women became a leading publisher in feminist theory and practice, and a publisher of fiction and stories of and for people on the “margins.” In 2003, after twenty years, the founding partners developed separate imprints with extensive lists of their own: Women Unlimited, under Ritu Menon, and Zubaan Books, under Urvashi Butalia.

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he cover of Time magazine for Partition Day, October 27, 1947, carries a “colourful rendering” of the goddess Kali, depicted with four arms, wielding two swords and a burning torch, and holding a bleeding map of India above the caption “INDIA: Liberty and death.” 

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works— most recently “Reading in Summer” (No. 85)—many of which can be read at geist.com.

Notes & Dispatches 11

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p o r t e n t s

Born in the Caul jill boettger According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight

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t is April in Alberta. Three days’ worth of snow accumulates on the front walk. The snow keeps falling, and the robins sing their song of spring and confusion from the heavy branches of the snowy cherry tree in the backyard. Peat pots filled with soil and seeds are lined up in a window in my daughter’s bedroom—the sunniest corner of the house—and the first sprout appeared yesterday: the shoot of a pumpkin plant, its skinny green neck unfurling in our warm bright house in this winterspring. Steve has gone backcountry skiing, and Sylvie decorates Easter eggs at my parents’ house.

Ben sleeps. This morning he tromped through the living room singing the song of a new walker: guttural, euphoric and drooly. In two weeks he will be one year old. The story of his birth is part myth: born in the caul, the midwives say, which means my water never broke. When I pushed him out he arrived still held in the amniotic sac he’d been swimming in inside of me. The sac was intact— strong and translucent—and the midwives punctured it with their fingers and peeled it away in one quick motion. He was wet and wriggly in my arms. He started to cry and then hunted for my nipple, his little mouth puckered and strong.

12 Geist 86 Fall 2012

Earlier, crouched on the floor between contractions, I’d asked my midwife if I should be worried that my water hadn’t broken. “No,” she said.

“It’s rare, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Supposed to be good luck. Sailors say a baby born in the caul will never drown.” Some days after Ben’s birth this curious prediction stayed with me, and so I looked up “born in the caul” and discovered a whole world of prophecies. A baby born in the caul will always be able to find water underground, know when weather patterns will change, predict plentiful food supplies. They are destined to be witches, midwives or kings. They possess the second sight.

Faced with a rich history of omens and fables, I felt a kind of poverty about my own cultural tradition. I am Canadian, and my lineage traces back through a mishmash of mostly European ancestors. My parents raised me to have faith in myself, not a singular deity.

And my experience of elder figures sharing their wisdom and stories is limited to summer holidays visiting my grandparents on the west coast. My history with history is a flawed romance. With no one tradition to draw from, what is destined for my little caulbearer?

Sylvie slept through Ben’s birth.

The next morning she padded down the hall to our bedroom. When she came through the door I said, “Sylvie, the baby came out of Mommy’s tummy!” He was swaddled and tucked in bed between Steve and me. She was cautious. She walked to the bed slowly, but when she caught sight of him her face opened like a window.

One baby, two babies, now we are four.

Magic weavers, story stealers, we are what came before. 

Jill Boettger lives with her husband and two small kids in Calgary, where they collect old stories and imagine new ones. She teaches at Mount Royal University. Read more of her Geist work at geist.com. photo: christopher grabowski

a n a t o m y

l e s s o n s

Hernia Heaven, Part 2 thad mcilroy In “Hernia Heaven, Part 1,” McIlroy was admitted to Shouldice Hospital and scheduled for hernia surgery on his left side and then on his right side, and he attended a hockey game to pass the time. Shouldice Hospital, in Thornhill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, was described in The New Yorker as the best place in the world to get a hernia repaired.

I

’m awake. Lights on.

There’s a way of waking that happens in hospitals, the juncture of surprise and dread, magnified by lack of sleep.

A short, dark woman is standing near the foot of my bed, glaring. She holds a small white pail in one hand and a disposable plastic razor in the other.

“I’m going to shave you for the operation.”

Shave me. Down there. For the operation.

“They might not operate today,” I mumble.

“It says nine o’clock.”

“They don’t know if I have a hernia. They have it on my left side but it’s really on my right side but yesterday the doctor said that he can’t find it there either so they don’t know if they’re operating but they said to stay here last night anyway. I’m waiting for the surgeon.”

“I’ll come back.”

illustration: eric uhlich

She turns to my roommate in the bed closer to the door.

“You had your operation,” she says, with the hint of a question.

“Yeah, I’m going home today.”

“Good.” She looks over her shoulder and gives me a brief scowl as she exits the room, turning off the overhead lights.

Two weeks may have passed when the lights come on again. Through the double curtains I can see that it’s nearly light outside. A serious and solid grey-haired man stands near the end of my bed, arms folded.

“What seems to be the problem?”

I look at him, shielding my eyes.

“They had the wrong side for my operation and then the doctor yesterday said he couldn’t find the hernia on my right side.”

“Get out of bed, please. We’ll have a look.”

A moment later he’s squeezing and I’m squirming.

“You the surgeon?” I say.

Notes & Dispatches 13

“Yes.” “Good.”

More pokes. Some prods.

“There it is,” the surgeon proclaims, a hollow-sounding triumph in his voice. “Yes there. Right side.”

“You’re sure?” I say. He looks straight at me. I don’t think people often ask him that. “I mean yesterday the doctor checked really thoroughly and had me cough a lot and he couldn’t find it. Three squeezes and you say it’s there.”

“It’s there. Here, you feel it.” He takes my right hand and pushes it against my groin. Then again. “Feel that?” he asks.

“Nope.”

He moves my hand a little lower, then up and a little to the left.

“There?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s there. They don’t always protrude. Sometimes they’re small.”

“You’re saying that even though the doctor yesterday spent about ten minutes checking and couldn’t find a hernia that you’re sure it’s there? I don’t want you slicing me open just for the hell of it.”

“It’s there. If you don’t want the operation, you can go away and come back when you’re ready.”

“No, no, I’m not saying that.

You’re the surgeon and you say I need hernia surgery so I’m going to believe you.”

“Believe me. It’s there.”

“OK, let’s do it.”

“See you downstairs.”

A

wake. Lights, bright. Not pain exactly, soreness, down there.

There’s pressure on my left hand. I turn my head slightly and see a young woman, smiling, one hand holding mine, the other on my left forearm.

“There you are,” she says. I say nothing. I don’t know where I am.

She wears a crisp blue uniform. Her face is kind but the outfit makes her seem formal. I start to say 14 Geist 86 Fall 2012

something but forget what I want to say before I can make a sound.

Down there. A cross between a cramp and a tickle. I look down, moving my head slightly. There’s a partition blocking a direct view but beyond it I can clearly see two men, one on the left side of my bed, the other on the right. They’re ignoring me, staring intently at something way down there. No, they’re doing something to my body. It kind of tickles. Or hurts. I can’t tell for sure.

I hear myself say “ouch.” Then “ouch. Stop that.” I feel a tight squeeze on my left hand and hear a voice. “Does it hurt?” The woman’s voice.

“What?” I ask.

“Give him another shot of. . .”

Lidocaine? Prilocaine? Something. I can’t see the nurse’s reaction.

I’ve figured out that she must be a nurse. It’s the only explanation.

Which makes the man on the right a doctor. So who’s the guy on the left? He looks up at me and smiles.

“How’re you doing?” he asks. A sidekick. “OK,” I reply, overwhelmed by the seeming crowd gathered around me.

“Got it?” he asks the nurse. “Got it,” she replies.

The two men return to what they were doing. I see heads bobbing and elbows making brief appearances above the divider. They’re talking quietly to one another. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like the way doctors talk on TV. There’s no alarm in their voices, no call to arms. They could be reliving a recent golf match.

Music. Music playing. Where’s that coming from? I’m listening, but can’t connect. The voice is distantly familiar, something from AM radio, but from a long time ago. The words aren’t connecting.

A hum. Down there. Then a voice singing. Maybe that’s what I’m hearing. The doctor, singing.

No, he’s singing along to the music.

Ativan sarah pinder I’ll tell this story to myself all night, the legend of your attempt to row across the grey, sainted river to Michigan, past the pulp mill and the refinery churning out their insistent plumes.

The wild orchestra of your body, the water, the two oars flapping.

From this shore, which is now a parking lot, it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous prospect— America in yelling distance, the appeal of double-wides and young, manicured trees.

You started rowing somewhere in the season where you razed your healthy teeth for dentures, just to make order.

No money, never money, but cigarettes and other people’s habits.

I think I know how it is, rage like old neon, a near-broken circuit that seizes into connection occasionally, shimmering out.

Sarah Pinder lives in Toronto. Her first book, Cutting Room, is published by Coach House Books in fall 2012.

Kentucky woman. Where the heck is the music coming from? She get to know you. This can’t be the kind of place where people listen to music.

Goin’ to own you.

There’s a vintage ghetto blaster on a bookshelf at the back of the operating room. Two small speakers provide a tin can sound.

“Is that Neil Diamond?” I say.

“Yeah. Great, eh?”

“He sounds good. I haven’t listened to him for years.”

“This is a recent CD. Revisiting his big hits.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. You want another shot?”

“No, I’m good.”

Hernia operations usually last about three-quarters of an hour. With Neil Diamond and the right kind of

drugs, maybe ten minutes.

Shouldice prides itself on making patients walk to their wheelchair following surgery, part of the au naturel mystique. I sail to my wheelchair, a doctor in place under each arm.

After three nights of R&R I’m home. Lickety-split; nothing to it.

H

ealing progressed easily in the late Toronto fall. I pushed myself to walk several miles every day along Broadview toward Danforth, the sun sloping over the Don River valley.

A week after the operation I felt a dull pain in the area of the wound. You’re still easily spooked at that point, and unsure what’s posttraumatic type stress and what’s a real problem.

Notes & Dispatches 15

Three days later the pain in my groin was joined by another sharper pain in my right ankle. My stroll became a limp, and then a full stop. I took the Carlton streetcar downtown toward Yonge. I limped into a large Shoppers Drug Mart and bought an elastic ankle support. As I struggled to pull it on, the pain on my right side got worse. But the support felt good when I rose and paid the cashier at the front of the store.

When I stepped outside, the walk signal was flashing at the intersection. Lots of time to cross. I took a step and tumbled, landing half on the curb and half on Yonge Street. Several people stopped, with looks of surprise or concern on their faces. Someone tugged on my arm, pulling me up.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked a young man in a ski jacket and a Blue Jays baseball cap. He looked worried.

“I think so,” I said. I pulled myself upright with his support. “Yes, I’m fine,” I said.

He was off immediately. “Thank you,” I called out. The other people resumed walking their separate ways.

I felt old, foolish and in pain.

I kept going that afternoon, stopping to buy some vegetables in the grocery store beneath College Park, then walking a few more blocks south toward Dundas. I called it quits as darkness fell and I boarded the streetcar home.

Then I got fever. My appetite disappeared and I slept sixteen hours straight. Two days later, on a Monday, I got an underemployed friend to drive me back up to Shouldice.

A very old gentleman in the waiting room seemed upset.

“I go home,” he said, “and the first time I use the toilet, you know, sit down on the toilet, I reach behind me to flush and boom, my intestines are in the bowl.”

“That sounds painful,” I say.

“I was scared,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. My wife drives me back here. Now I’m waiting two hours.”

16 Geist 86 Fall 2012

“I got an infection,” I told him.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” he said.

“It’s nothing… I’m sure they can fix me up.”

“I hope so for you. Good luck to you.”

“No, good luck to you.”

My name was called. A nurse directed me to the anteroom, where I waited ten minutes. There were four of us in five chairs. Then a tall, dark-haired man in a doctor’s smock appeared, staring intently at a clipboard. “Thaddeus McIlroy?” I was in.

The doctor introduced himself and ushered me into a small office.

He looked directly into my eyes.

“What seems to be the problem?” he said.

I was about to answer when a voice interrupted me. “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” I looked over at the doctor’s desk. The speakerphone on the far side of it was on.

“You’re waiting for an operator?”

I said.

“That’s OK,” he said. “I’ll be on hold for ages.”

The voice broke in again. “Thank you for continuing to hold. Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.”

Halfway through, the doctor reached over and turned down the sound a bit.

“I can wait outside,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“It’s OK. What seems to be the problem?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather have your full attention.”

“You’ve got my full attention.”

“Hello. This is Julie. How can I help you?”

The doctor grabbed the handset. “Hello?” he said. I got up and returned to the anteroom. The very old gentleman was sitting on the far side.

“Not good,” he said. “I waiting too long.”

“Yes,” I said.

A few minutes later another doctor, older, compact, grey hair, appeared and called my name. I followed him to another office at the end of the corridor.

“So you’ve got a fever,” he said.

I told him about the pain and the fever, and he scribbled a few notes. He did a quick exam and took some more notes.

Then he leaned back and began to speak. “Yes, it could be an infection.

That’s possible. We could find out, but it’s more trouble to find out than it is to just assume that it is an infection. If it is an infection I would prescribe an antibiotic. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Oh good,” said I. “I’m not saying it is an infection,” he said, now looking straight at me.

“I’m saying it could be an infection.

Do you understand the difference?”

“Yes. You aren’t sure that I’ve got an infection but you’re going to give me an antibiotic in case I do have an infection.”

“Exactly. The antibiotic is a prophylactic only, in case you’ve got an infection. You may not have an infection. I’m not saying that you do.”

“That’s OK, I’m not blaming anyone. I just want it fixed.”

“There’s no one to blame.”

I returned to the waiting room and gathered my driver friend and my overcoat. As we left, we passed the old gentleman standing near the exit. He looked somehow lighter.

“Everything OK?” I asked.

“Oh yea, is good. They gonna fix my problem, no sweat,” he said.  Thad McIlroy is an electronic publishing analyst and consultant, author of more than two hundred articles and several books on the subject. For three years he has been named one of Canada’s fifty most influential people in graphic communications. He lives in Vancouver and at thefutureofpublishing.com.

Notes & Dispatches 17

18 Geist 86 Fall 2012

a f t e r l i f e

o f

c u l t u r e

Tigers’ Anatomy stephen henighan When Canadian leaders look to the economic policies of Asian Tiger nations, we must be wary that they aren’t trying to exchange democracy for economic growth

I

t is a habit of participants in national debates to illustrate their points by invoking other countries as examples to be followed or avoided. In this way, other nations become the property, often unfairly, of defined ideological tendencies. During the Cold War, Western conservatives evoked the Soviet Gulag as a warning; liberals who contested this outlook alluded to apartheid in South Africa, or US-sponsored right-wing violence in Chile or El Salvador. Since the rise of the cult of Japanese management in the 1980s, Asia has belonged to the pro-business right. In the 1990s, as Japan’s economy faltered and the country’s culture turned inward, the emergence of the “Asian Tigers” of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and, eventually, China, took over this role.

Asia became a useful stick with which to beat the welfare state over the head.

We must cut taxes and social and cultural programs, Canadians were told, or we would not be able to compete with Asia. The current prime minister of Canada, in ideological terms the most conservative individual ever to hold this post, is rearranging the country’s infrastructure to supply Asia with raw materials and replicate an authoritarian, minimalist state. These beliefs filter down to the local level, where, for photos: evelyn kuang

example, the languages department in which I teach was ordered to add Mandarin Chinese to its offerings when our university launched a business school. Business and Chinese, the university administration decreed, were synonymous.

S

uch prejudices are unfair to Asia.

Accustomed to travelling in European, Latin American or African countries—whose histories I’ve studied and with some of whose languages I’m familiar, I’m wary of drawing sweeping conclusions from my first

trip to Asia, where my preparation was more limited. Yet three weeks in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia—all former British colonies where English is widely spoken—allows an observer to understand that the depiction of Asia as a libertarian nirvana is a sham. Experiencing the realities of these societies threw into relief the contrary expectations that had been inculcated in me by government pronouncements and Canada’s two national newspapers. Where I expected to find societies that revered private property, I found exquisite parks and gardens and scrupulously maintained public facilities. Even the public washrooms put ours to shame. Jurisdictions whose systems our leaders evoke to justify cutting public investment, in fact, pride themselves on their public services. On busy Hong Kong Island, pedestrians skirt the hectic traffic by striding from building to building on elevated walkways, a planning measure that would be welcome in many packed North American downtowns.

Though Hong Kong is expensive, a journey of over thirty kilometres from Kowloon to Lantau Island in the speedy rapid transit system costs less than $3. The return journey allows the visitor to survey the massed towers of subsidized public housing Afterlife of Culture 19

projects. In late 2011, as his last public act, Hong Kong’s outgoing governor, Donald Tsang, who ruled the territory on behalf of the People’s Republic of China, to which this former British colony has belonged since 1997, renewed his commitment to public housing policy. Public housing in Hong Kong is like health care in Canada: it is, as John Lanchester points out in his novel Fragrant Harbour, one of the territory’s defining characteristics.

I

n Singapore the distinctively Asian roots of the care for public welfare are presented as the expression of a “Confucian” culture. (Whether Singapore’s paternalistic policies accurately reflect the writings of Confucius is a separate question.) By placing a premium on caring for the poor and maintaining social order, Asian paternalism eludes Western efforts to categorize countries on a left-right spectrum. In a city-state where life revolves around enormous shopping malls, it is startling to learn that Lee Kwan Yew, the stern leader who transformed Singapore from an impoverished swamp riven by ethnic strife into a multicultural capitalist success story, at the cost of quashing basic civil liberties, described himself as both “antiCommunist” and “socialist.” In the turbulent 1950s, one of Lee’s first policy successes was to promote subsidized public housing. The Confucian approach is not without a price that belies the glitz of the malls on posh Orchard Road: local intellectuals complain that Singaporean young people, unless they have studied overseas, display a stultifying conformism and a reluctance to challenge received opinion.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Asian societies I visited is that the free market thrives at the expense of other freedoms.

Both the Straits Times in Singapore and the New Straits Times in Kuala 20 Geist 86 Fall 2012

Lumpur, Malaysia, are newspapers that print government propaganda.

English-language radio announcers in Malaysia refer to the country’s prime minister, unironically, as “our beloved leader.” In contrast to manicured Hong Kong and Singapore, Kuala Lumpur is a rough-edged boomtown where the reflections of shanties shimmer in the glass panels of the new high-rises and squads of motorcycles blast down the sidewalks to circumvent the snarled traffic. Yet Malaysia, too, recognizes the value of public investment: monorails and elevated light railways whisk pedestrians over the traffic chaos. The airport-like bus terminal is of a grandeur, cleanliness and efficiency that no North American city can match.

In spite of this public investment, the tigers’ fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. In Singapore and Malaysia, complaints are muted. Yet the day prior to my arrival in Hong Kong, 400,000 people marched in protest at the swearing-in of the new Chinese governor; three weeks later more protests erupted against the imposition on Hong Kong schools of the educational curriculum of the People’s Republic of China. These one-time British subjects, now ruled by a Stalinist party that embraces capitalism, do not wish to barter away democratic freedoms in the name of the free market. When our own leaders endorse the Asian tigers as models, we should ask them difficult questions. Are they pursuing our economic well-being, or do they simply yearn for the day when our media, too, will be obliged to refer to the prime minister as “our beloved leader”? 

Stephen Henighan is the author of the short story collection A Grave in the Air (Thistledown) and the translator of Mihail Sebastian’s novel The Accident (Biblioasis).

Read more of his work at geist.com and at stephenhenighan.com.

FINDINGS

How America Sees Canada. From America, But Better.

Timeline chris cannon and brian calvert From the book America, But Better. ©2012 by Chris Cannon and Brian Calvert.

Published by Douglas & McIntyre, an imprint of D&M Publishers. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Cannon is a former US Marine Corps sergeant and now teaches at the University of British Columbia. Calvert is an actor, writer and director.

Both live in Vancouver.

1775: “Awkward Autumn” becomes the theme at the annual British Empire family portrait when America and Canada show up wearing the same flag.

1776: America signs the Declaration of Independence, kicking their war with Britain into high gear. Canada, not wanting to offend anybody, fights for both sides.

1776–80: Thousands of British Loyalists in the US move north to Canada, still largely a British colony.

A fur trapper is trampled to death at

the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first ever Boxing Day sale. Bryan Adams begins his music career.

1789: Pennsylvania ends its prohibition of theatrical performances, allowing the signing of the Constitution and the centuries of drama it would incur.* 1812: A young America acts out its own colonial fantasy and invades future-Canada, then retreats, realizing a new driveway is not worth the roaming charges.** 1814: British forces capture

Washington, DC, and burn it to the ground, although the pubs and bordellos remain curiously untouched.

1815: Britain finalizes the Treaty of Ghent after losing a round of Beer Pong. Well played, America. Well played.

1830–60: Tens of thousands of American slaves “emigrate” to Canada via the Underground Railroad, which is sort of like a Disney ride with less racism.

1861–65: American Civil War. Canada invents popcorn and takes to the sidelines.

1867: Three British colonies unite to form an independent Canada. American newspaper headlines exclaim: “Whatever.”

1901: A government census shows 3.5 percent of Canadians were born in America and 1.6 percent of Americans were born in Canada. When asked Findings 21

By Raymond E. Biesinger. From 100 Black on White Illustrations, published by the Belgravian Press in 2008. Biesinger is a

Reflections on My Social Life

why they emigrated, the majority of respondents on both sides checked the box marked “Looking for hotter women.”

1907: The USS Nashville sails into the Great Lakes without asking. Canada apologizes for getting in the way, pays for dinner.

1921: Canada develops a defensive strategy to repel a US invasion. Canadians are instructed to “act normal” to avoid detection.

1939: Canada calls King George VI, politely asking permission to declare war on Germany. The king replies, “Who is this?”

1941: America and Canada cooperate to send 133,000 of their citizens to internment camps as part of a Japanese Community Outreach Program.

1945: At the end of World War II, Canada possesses the fourth-largest air force and third-largest naval surface fleet in the world. America giggles, calls it “cute.”

1958: America and Canada finally agree on the curtain color for the NORAD underground bunker.

1960s: Canadians, having already experienced a Toronto garbage strike during a heat wave, avoid entering the Vietnam War. Fifty thousand Americans move to Canada, giving rise to bong-craft’s “Glazed Age.” 1972: Canada realizes Richard Nixon is a Dick.

1974: America realizes Richard Nixon is a dick, pretend they noticed first.

1988: Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky is traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings. Canada mourns, and learns that California has a hockey team.

1994: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) encourages trade between America, Canada, and Mexico. Canada and Mexico discover neither of them has anything the other wants.

2008: Canadian Justin Bieber is discovered on YouTube, instantly becoming an international celebrity— a far cry from his high-school nickname of “Singing-and-Dancing Pussy Boy.” 2010: Canada defeats the US in Olympic men’s hockey, winning the gold medal in overtime. Awesome.

2012: Canada is elected President of the United States. Global warming abruptly ends as the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases are blown into space when the entire planet exhales a collective sigh of relief.  ————— *Although drafted while medicine was theoretical and man-tights all the rage, it is still referenced literally in modern American law. ** Exactly two hundred years later we get around to writing this book.

 

singing. what will happen to strangleroot geist?: Strangleroot Geist with a +1/+1 counter from

GEIST ALERT  Google Alert results for “Geist.”

22 Geist 86 Fall 2012

alex pugsley Originally published as “Reflections on My Social Life at the Toronto International Film Festival After Seeing a Documentary About an El Savadoran Refugee’s Escape from Guerillas” by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the daily updated literature and humour site. Alex Pugsley is a writer and filmmaker, originally from Nova Scotia. He is the co-author of the novel Kay Darling and shorter works published in numerous periodicals, and in 2012 he was nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for fiction.

W

e’re at the after-party, thinking about going for a cigarette, looking for our friend, when the waiter comes over with the menus and he’s like, Take the chipotle with the lime chili.

And I’m like, I don’t have my own choice about what to do with my salad?

And he’s like, No, you don’t have a choice. If you don’t take the chipotle with the lime chili, you and your date will die.

So I go, Can I have some more time to think about it?

And our waiter’s like, No, it’s not negotiable.

morgan geist news: Once a year, we are blessed with a new track from producer Morgan Geist and subway-

self-taught illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, GQ and Dwell. He lives in Montreal.

And I start freaking and my date starts freaking and they drag us to the rooftop patio and they point kebab sticks at me and my date and they say, Either you agree to the chipotle with the lime chili or you and your date die right here on this rooftop.

So I take a dessert fork and push it to my date’s throat and say, You want to kill her? Fine! I’ll kill her for you right now!

And the maître d’ comes over and he’s like, What’s the problem here?

And I say, We’re asking for a little more time with our salads, like five more minutes to decide.

So the maître d’ looks at us and goes, Okay, in five minutes we’ll be back.

So my date and I are going crazy because they’re going to kill us if we don’t take the chipotle with the lime chili. And she’s screaming, We have to get out of this after-party! We have to go! They’re going to kill us!

We run into the kitchen where the sous-chefs are plating up a bunch of salads, the chipotle with the lime chili, but they don’t know the waiters want to kill us. They don’t know us from Adam.

And I’m like, we want to tip the head chef—can we do that?

So this busboy says yeah and goes to find the chef and I’m looking for the fire exit and my date’s talking to

this dessert guy like, Oh, what are you making?

The dessert guy’s heating some kirsch in a pan when the busboy returns with the maître d’. He hasn’t seen us yet.

And I’m staring at my date like, Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

So she throws her lighter in the kirsch and—boom!—it’s on fire, flames everywhere, I throw the pan on the maître d’ just as he sees us. He’s wiping at his face, falling into the tray of salads—bouncing all the plates into the air and that chipotle with lime chili is just everywhere, in my date’s hair, all over her laminate, in my eyelashes— everywhere. And I’m standing there shocked like, This is my life? This is my life?

And my date screams, Run! Just run! So we crash out the exit door, she’s clacking down the fire escape in her heels, I look back at the maître d’, he’s throwing anything at us—stuffed pork loin, carmelized pea-snaps, hazelnut spätzle, arctic char—it’s just brutal.

On the sidewalk, we catch up with our friend and cab it to like eight different places, Foxley, Spice Route, Czehoski. Finally we end up at this restaurant opening at last call, so totally shaking I can barely light her cigarette.

That shit is in my head like it was just yesterday. 

Skid Road (Establishing Footage) my name is scot From V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, edited by John Mikhail Asfour and Elee Kraljii Gardiner and published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2012. The poem features lines taken from film production posters in the DTES. My Name Is Scot works with text, installation, video and performance to explore issues of agency and authenticity.

He’s lived and worked in the DTES for the past twenty years and his most recent project, Evergreen, features twenty-six site-specific texts installed throughout the neighbourhood. See more of his work at evergreen26.blogspot.ca.

City Hall: The City of Vancouver has given us permission to film scenes for the television movie late at night, on Monday.

Life As We Know It: Filming will begin in Oppenheimer Park.

Supernatural: In the daylight and then at dusk.

40 Dys and Nygts: Water will fall down over the sidewalk area.

undying attacks. This means Strangleroot Geist is put into the graveyard at the same time as the +1/+1 counter is removed, meaning at the last moment he was on the battlefield, he still had the +1/+1 counter on him. new jersey man finds pythons in yard twice in 4 days: James Geist has spotted pythons twice within days in

Findings 23

Intelligence: Filming Vancouver as Vancouver.

The Collectors: Our Filming will take place outside of the Dugout Drop-in Centre.

They Wait: We will have some extras walking in front of the door and along the street.

Quality of Life: Our interior scenes involve dialogue between our actors in a “loft”style apartment.

Locked Out: Exterior dialogue scenes on the pier at “CRAB Park.”

The Butterfly Effect: A scene of two actors talking while sitting on the curb. we realize that your neighbourhood entertains its fair share of filming. our filming will be very low impact. residents can expect to see: Rain towers placed on the roof.

There will be a building façade across Columbia House. There will be two lighting cranes with bright lights, 80–100 feet in the air aimed at 120 Powell Street. More lights on stands, and also perhaps on scaffolding eight to twelve feet high, will be focused on the exterior, although other lights may shine along the 200 block of Alexander and up to the sky to create a mood for night-time filming. The special effects will be limited to a scene of breaking glass onto the sidewalk and water hoses spraying onto the window to create rain. A rain tower will be set up with a camera mounted on top. please note: we can only film if it is not raining. During the night scenes, there will be a lighting lift positioned on the south side of Alexander near Main Street directed toward Gore.

This will make the area brighter than usual. It will not be focused on any of the businesses. We will also be doing a scene with several police cars with

Jerusalem. By Guy Delisle. From Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, translated by Helge Dascher, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2012. Originally

their emergency lights on, pulling up to the property from all directions.

During our work, we will use a camera crane that will be placed on the west side of Carrall Street near the Gassy Jack statue. Exterior scenes of an actor walking past 90 Alexander and another stunt scene with three actors fighting. While filming in the laneway, we will place a fake wall at

Columbia Street. There will be minor special effects of fog and a wet-down of the streets for these scenes. The south side of 100 block of Columbia Street to 52 Alexander will be dressed and decorated for the 1920s and the 1940s. We will park period vehicles and have horse carts parked as well.

We will film a scene in the lane of the 200 block of Alexander as two

his West Milford yard. Geist, 46, was reading on his deck when he thought he saw a branch move on July 23. He soon realized it was a snake. “I freaked out and called up the West Milford police,” said Geist. Police arrived with two snake handlers who told Geist the branch was a 15-foot albino python. Geist said the snake was huge,

24 Geist 86 Fall 2012

published in French by Editions Delcourt. Delisle is an animator and comic book author.

He lives in Quebec City. 

characters chase a man in a gorilla suit down the lane during the daylight hours. To further obscure the modern world, we will have steam effects sporadically placed according to each scene. Preliminary preparation of the street includes power-washing the alleys and relocating the garbage bins to the alley loading bay of 151 West Cordova. To accentuate the existing

architecture, we will place period decorations in various business windows and add advertising hoardings to cover views of modern buildings.

Some gunfire will be heard during the hours of filming along with some street scenes that include cars crashing. note: To minimize communication sounds, our crew will be wearing headsets during our work. Vancouver

Police will be on hand to perform a temporary road closure when necessary during the filming of these scenes. There will be ambulance vehicles and police cars on set for picture and a lighting crane on the 100 block of Carrall Street.

The Killing: The location will be dressed as a night club with partygoers gathered in front.

Light Years: The scenes to be filmed are of daily life in the neighbourhood in these eras and of our lead characters as seen in flashbacks.

Still Life: We will be filming one small scene on the northwest corner of Carrall Street and West Hastings Street in “Pigeon Park.”

Fierce People: Some of these scenes have choreographed stunts of actors having an altercation.

The Squad: “Police Officers” in uniform with holstered weapons and “Police Cruisers” will be visible.

Reaper: Scene of an actor walking from the Gassy Jack statue southwards on Carrall Street.

Life Unexpected: Two actors discuss the discovery of a dead man in the lane.

Vice: Blood Alley will be restricted to local traffic only.

Psych: A stunt and car crash scene.

Fringe: A foot chase down the alley to Cambie Street.

Just Cause: (yelling) Asshole! (yelling) Fucking fucker!

The Butterfly Effect 2: We will pack our trucks and quietly leave the neighbourhood. 

thick and docile. earthquake clusters do not exist: A new analysis by Tom Parsons and Eric Geist of the US Geological Survey (USGS) published in the journal The Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on August 2, 2012, and reviewed at the Eureka Alert web site on the same day, concludes that earthquake clusters do

Findings 25

The Night of the R-100 jean-claude germain From Rue Fabre: Centre of the Universe, translated by Donald Winkler, published

by Véhicule Press in 2012. Germain is a playwright, author, historian and Quebec icon.

A

city dweller defines himself today by his smartphone, his condo, his townhouse, or his loft. There was a time when a Montrealer was proud of his stretch of the street, his attachment to a parish, the character of his neighbourhood, his parochialism East or West, or the cosmopolitanism of Saint Lawrence Boulevard. Only seasoned explorers could boast of having set foot on both ends of the island, or having scaled the two slopes of the “Mountain,” the everyday name for Mount Royal.

During the war and after, we lived in a time of horses, streetcars, and trolley buses, and to reach the four cardinal points on their island’s horizon, Montrealers still took trains. In day-to-day life, a Montreal pedestrian rarely covered more than the square mile surrounding his house, aside from the trip, often rather long, to and from his place of work. The wartime factories were for the most part on the city’s outskirts.

The urban population did not like straying far from its cement sidewalks, and would only bring itself to cross the city’s bridges for an important outing: the annual visit to relatives in the countryside, or the occupation of a summer cottage at vacation time.

During the 1940s my aunts still spoke with great excitement about the visit of the R-100 fifteen or so years earlier.

On the morning of August 1, 1930, more than 40,000 automobiles set out in search of the airship, crossing— most for the first time—the Harbour Bridge. This was the administrative name Archbishop Gauthier had

bestowed on it two months earlier, but the new span, under construction since 1925 and completed since December 1929, was already more widely referred to by the name the newspaper Le Devoir had chosen for it. The title “Jacques Cartier Bridge” would become official only in 1934.

On that morning the South Shore was under attack on two fronts. Ten thousand Montreal drivers had made the detour over the Victoria Bridge to add to the 40,000 arriving from the Jacques Cartier. All were heading towards the Saint-Hubert aerodrome, guided by the British “flying watermelon” visible far off in the air, securely anchored to a 210-foot mast erected for the occasion. The presence of nearly a half-million people in the vicinity made for the first monster traffic jam of the century.

One of my aunts, thanks to her connections in the world of radio, was able to boast that she had taken the elevator as far up as the passenger gondola of the “great skyfish,” where, from an imperialist vantage point, she could look down on the crowd pushing and shoving at the foot of the mast. But the memory that marked her most was of the night following the visit, which she spent under the stars.

One week after the event, the country roads around Saint-Hubert were still littered with cars abandoned by their owners right where they had broken down. My aunts pretended, with the same false candour each time, not to know how it was that their sister Bée found herself abandoned and

alone as well, in high heels, in a cow pasture, in the middle of the night.

“What on earth persuaded you to leave the car? Other than going to beaches and dance halls, you never liked nature!”

Bée, who was a city-girl spinster from head to toe, enjoyed reliving the night of the R-100 just as much as her sisters. With a twinkle in her eye that suggested things unspoken, she argued that “a coupe, that’s not made to lie down in!” She had therefore accepted her escort’s proposition and had stretched out with him at the foot

Lost at Sea A true story told by Mary Hunt (née Way), a ninety-two-year-old retired Avon representative who lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The story was written down by her grandson, Rob Fritz, and brought to Geist by her niece, Lily Gontard, a contributing editor.

M

y father, Stephen Way, was a First World War veteran and a fisherman who not did not like fishing very much but did like the sea. Around 1930 or ’31, when I was ten or eleven years old, he decided to spend some more time at sea and joined a schooner, Mona Marie, boarded with dry cod fish and bound for Portugal. The captain, Moses Pelley, had his four sons with him—Jonathan, Baxter and two others whose names I do not remember. All the crew were from Trinity Bay except my father, who was from Flower’s Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.

The ship arrived in Portugal after a voyage of twenty-three days, which was long but not unheard of at that

not exist. huffington post article uses diaper fetish site as primary source: Update by Zack “Geist Editor” Parsons. The comatose body of journalism might currently be filling its diaper, but this isn’t the first time Huffington Post has done something dubious. locals share fond hamlisch memories: Altoona

26 Geist 86 Fall 2012

of a tree to wait for the sun to rise.

“A lucky thing that we had a big woollen blanket because, you know, I’m afraid of ants.”

Usually worked into this part of the story was the incident on the beach at La Plage Idéale that featured the intrusion of red ants into her bathing costume.

To escape the traffic jam, the two castaways had taken what seemed to them to be a shortcut. They had run out of gas, the water in the radiator had boiled away, and the vehicle had given up the ghost in the middle of the fields.

In short, in the interests of more practical amorous arrangements, the automobile was taken out of service, to be replaced by what nature had to offer.

The gallant gentleman—whom everyone agreed was a “swell guy”— had removed his jacket and had slipped it over my aunt’s shoulders.

Everything would have been dandy— with the two of them together under the starry dome—had a dark bush not suddenly loomed out of the shadows and begun to expand in size with everincreasing speed.

Bée’s ants had gone up in the world

and had been transformed into an enormous beast: a bull that was charging, head down, straight at the suitor’s white shirt aglow in the shadows. Bée’s most romantic sister never understood why her sweetheart had not used his jacket to strike fear into the bull.

“In that situation it would have taken flashing lights like those on the R-100 to see it in the dark,” shot back Bée, who was much more down-toearth. “Anyway, when you shake a cloth in front of a bull, it doesn’t calm him down, it excites him.”

With the bull in hot pursuit, the

time. On their return they lost the schooner near St. Philip’s on the east coast of Newfoundland. The owner, Angus Genge, a businessman from Flower’s Cove, bought another schooner, the Cote Nord. With the same captain and crew, the ship made another voyage to Old Porto, Portugal, and took about the same length of time as before. By now the September storms were settling in, and this ship was not the best ever to set out to sea.

On the return trip they stopped at Barbados and took on a cargo of molasses, then started out for the stormy voyage through the Atlantic Ocean. The Cote Nord met with many storms and could barely weather the gales. The ship and crew arrived off the Virgin Rocks, about a hundred miles off St. John’s. The vessel was supposed to go over the rocks, but the water was not deep enough in the storm. The men lost their steering gear and rudder and started drifting.

The ship drifted in the North Atlantic for fifty-four days. The men ran out of food and drinking water— and, worse, precious tobacco. They

made cigarettes by rolling tea in bits of brown paper bag, and when that had been consumed, they shredded finely cut rope and smoked that. The crew took turns keeping watch, two at a time in four-hour shifts, and tied themselves to the ship so as not to be washed overboard. Never at any time did they see a sign of life.

One night in October, in a severe storm, the Cote Nord sprang a leak and started taking in water. The engine room filled up and the gas engine failed to operate. News went to Captain Pelley, who told them all to come to his cabin and wait for the ship to sink. “In the meantime we’ll sit around and say a few prayers,” he said. After a while, he suggested a couple of boys go and look in the hold where the molasses had been before they discharged all of their cargo into the sea. On the men’s return they announced, “We are about threequarters full of water.” Everyone sat around again. The captain said, “My biggest regret is that I have taken all my boys; there is neither one left to take care of their mother.”

Around dawn, they were still afloat.

Again the captain sent two men down to see what was happening. They came back and reported that the ship was empty of water and all the floors were dried up.

That day a Scandinavian ship spotted them and picked them up. The crew were taken aboard the ship, and the Cote Nord was towed safely to Barbados. From there the men were sent to Halifax on the SS Lady Nelson, and they took a ferry from Halifax to Deer Lake. My Uncle Dan, my father’s brother, went to Deer Lake by dog team and brought my father home. It was Easter week.

The men had been gone for so many days that almost everybody thought they were lost, and so the Reverend Canon Richards wanted to have a memorial service. All five of my father’s brothers, Uncle George, Matthew, Thomas, Daniel and Elijah, believed it was time for the memorial service, but my mother had said, “Not yet, I have faith that he will return.” 

native Jeannie Geist said the career of composer Marvin Hamlisch can be summed up by one of his song titles: “Nobody Does It Better.” A former board member of the Blair County Civic Music Association, which disbanded in 2001, Geist recalls Hamlisch’s performance and persona from when he took the stage during the group’s

Findings 27

gentleman took to his heels and headed for the opposite side of the field without giving a thought to his girlfriend, who fortunately did not follow his example. Bée got back on the road, and like a good city girl set her sights on the next intersection, where, she figured, she could follow the fence one road down, and by retracing her steps find her gallant suitor all in one piece. She had estimated the distance to be more or less the same as that between Saint Lawrence Boulevard and Saint-Denis Street. Except that the logic governing the disposition of country roads was not the same as that ordering the streets of a big city.

She followed the field for what seemed like hours, and at the first crossroads, decided to wait for someone to come by. To navigate the dirt road Bée had removed her high heels, but had kept her silk stockings. She was found at about four in the morning by some market gardeners on their way to the Saint-Jacques market. They installed her atop their load of vegetables, and entertained themselves by teaching her a door-to-door ditty improvised just for the occasion: For sale, a pretty girl!

Not too big, not too small!

Ten cents for her sweet eyes!

A quarter for a soft kiss!

Bée was the spitting image of the 1920s. Tall, slender, flamboyant, with narrow hips and a tomboy’s chest, she was born to wear a cloche hat and dance the Charleston. She was spirited away in her early forties by a heart murmur. But that morning she crossed the Victoria Bridge like a queen, on a cart drawn by a white horse.

“It was like Cinderella coming home, only I’d lost my Prince Charming!”

And she concluded with an unrepentant laugh: “That’s the story of my life!” 

The Debit Slips julie vandervoort From The Perimeter Dog, published by Libros Libertad in 2011.

Vandervoort is a writer and environmental activist. She lives in Halifax.

T

he best time to ask my mother for something was around four o’clock in the afternoon when she was just waking up. She was a night nurse and her schedule fixed mine—come home from school, put the kettle on, and take Mom a cup of tea. So far the four o’clock strategy had achieved some fairly major things, including her signature on a cheque for a cherry red Kawasaki motorcycle. I had the money, I just didn’t have a chequing account. And I wasn’t about to go off to the city carrying a wad of cash, jeez, what if I got in an accident?

Fully awake, my mom might have tried arguing against it. She worked emergency and knew. I was only sixteen and therefore passionate about formal justice. I knew only this: Tony has one. Paul had one. I sat there holding out eight one-hundred dollar bills and her pen. I was hell bent.

At seventeen I’d fallen off the bike twice, gotten scraped by gravel. Burned too, by falling under the exhaust pipe.

The bandage was barely off when I carried a cup of tea over to the bedside table and suggested to my mother that I get what I couldn’t live without that year—a Spanish-speaking exchange student from South America.

Here’s what she might have done: spilled the tea on herself, thrown it at me, chosen an immediate sleep relapse. She could have slowly put the tea down and explained her take on the request: “I drag myself up that goddamn hill every night to feed the kids I already have. You may not have noticed but your brothers, when they are not killing each other, are going

through one loaf of bread a day. Each.

Do I look like I need another teenager in this house, especially one who’s seventeen and probably looking for trouble like all of you—and doesn’t speak a word of English?”

Instead she passed the tea back to me, struggled upright, and said, “Hand me my cigarettes.” She inhaled with purpose. I helpfully found the ashtray then immobilized myself, sitting close but not too close, rigid with wanting but not knowing. I looked at the books on her bedside table. She didn’t have time to go to the library, she said, and so read whatever I brought home.

The seventh exhale was the lucky one. She sighed. But she said okay.

That summer I went off my motorcycle a third time, rolling stunned and sideways on the road, the Kawi skidding after me like a panicked dog.

Rain and traffic pounding in my ears.

I sold the bike, to my next-youngest brother. And then I shrugged it off, the ignition, the kick-start, the speed, the abrasions. It was over. But I have Spanish in my tongue and hands forever, part of my body’s memory, an untransferable ownership.

Intercambio. It means exchange but I wanted more—I wanted inside the experience until Spanish and English were interchangeable, inner changing worlds. And now I had a way. Hosting a student now meant I’d get to go to South America a year later when I finished high school. Perched on the edge of my mom’s bed, I imagined a dark-haired girl in summer clothes going to her mother carrying a cup of coffee and a scheme in her heart. 

1989 season. She said he was “ever gracious” and “just such a kind gentleman.” david cronenberg’s son, brandon, has directed his own tale: After becoming infected with the virus that killed superstar Hannah Geist, Syd March must unravel the mystery surrounding her death to save his own life.

28 Geist 86 Fall 2012

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

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 joe fiorito Women, children, joggers, smokers, hot dog sellers, construction workers, pigeons— the whole world passes you by when you stand on the street corner long enough

QUEEN AND DOWLING 5:40 A.M.

At the streetcar stop, in the warm and clean and early air, a Tibetan woman is holding an insulated cup containing tea, probably tea, likely tea with milk. She wears blue pedalpushers, flip-flops and a blue sweatshirt. Next to her is a young man wearing knee pants and sneakers; his T-shirt, red. Next to him a pretty girl with wispy red hair in ringlets, wearing tights and a loose white top. Her shoes hurt her feet. We all have shoulder bags. When the streetcar arrives, we board in this order: her, him, her, me. A man is already on board, so we are five as we ride. I know this streetcar. I’ve ridden it before. I recognize it by the black stain on the aisle seat—the sheen, the shape of it.

Overhead: an ad for the public library; an ad promoting affordable funerals; an ad for a pink stomach remedy. Out the window: Bargain Mart. The Sizzling Grill. An internet café, empty because those people stay up late and get up late; this is early.

A man boards the car and thanks the driver for his transfer; the transfer is mandatory. This is not Venice, the Queen car is not a vaporetto, the street is not a canal; we don’t trust each other here. Across from me is a man with a scowl who keeps his bag beside him so that he won’t have to share the seat with anyone. Out the illustrations: eric uhlich

window: a big young girl in a sun dress—no sun yet—over a pair of tight black jeans. Queenglad Pawnbrokers Buy Sell Trade. A man with a dragon T-shirt.

The forecast: A mix of sun and cloud near noon. Wind becoming south 20 kilometres late this morning. High 28°.

UV Index 8, or high.

The headline in the free paper: Doughnut Debate Heats Up. A yellow bicycle is chained to a tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park: yellow seat, yellow chain, yellow handlebars, yellow tires. Yellow art.

Three white people board the car: a white woman and two men, all carrying cups of coffee, likely double doubles.

A thought occurs: if the paper cup was soaked in coffee flavour, all you’d have to do is fill it with hot water.

A girl in heels—it’s too early for heels—tiptoes, ouch-ouch-ouch, into Super Queen’s Market.

Two men sit up front: grey brushcuts, short-sleeved shirts, speaking softly.

“Yeh, yeh, ah, yeh.”

Queen and Spadina, where the cop car burned. Past the Horseshoe Tavern where I saw Charley Pride in 1967. I had never seen anyone famous up close until then.

Two backhoes on Soho; one car in the parking lot; six men pouring

a concrete sidewalk; a cop in a limegreen vest. The girl with the wispy red hair gets off at University, looking as if it hurts her to be pretty. It’s the shoes.

The Opera House: a Land Rover parked in the window. City Hall: two men sleeping on benches, one man sleeping on the walkway, all sleeping men in sleeping bags, all sleeping bags look like cocoons.

6:10 A.M. VICTORIA AND QUEEN (HER NAME, HER JOB, HER CORNER)

Five giant statues—men, tall and rusted, stand guard on the northwest corner. On the wall near the door of the coffee shop there is a plaque to honour the artist and explain the statues. Peter Von Tiesenhausen. Full Circle 2002. Cast Iron and Granite.

“The iron figures in ‘Full Circle’ are direct casts of five wood originals that were carved”—the sound of a streetcar—“and blackened in a fire on the Canadian prairie. From there began a journey that took them 35,000 kilometres through every province and around every territory. From Newfoundland they navigated the Northwest Passage to Tuktoyaktuk.

Down the Arctic Ice Road through the mountains of the Yukon and Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. ‘The Watchers’ returned to the plains five years later. Having nearly traced”—a sparrow, and Surveillance 29

another—“the geographical boundaries of Canada”—a man walking his dog—“they had come full circle.” The iron men are rusted. Rusting.

I have seen the photos of them when they were wooden, and burning on the prairie; the photos are not on display. Rust is a form of fire.

The granite on which the rusting figures stand is shaped like the almondsweet, sugar-powdered ricciarelli of Siena; on it someone has written, in a neat hand, with a felt marker: 5 Star.

A nurse buys a cup of coffee. That’s not coffee. Across the street someone sleeps on a grate next to a traffic cone; too soon to say if it is man or woman. An office worker, high style, Toronto style: ponytail, print shirt, dark skirt, sneakers, high heels in bag, on her way to work.

The sleeping figure sleeps like I do, and I sleep on my side. A well-dressed man with a dolly pulling two carry-bags full of papers. A man with his ID tag around his neck.

THE LONG BRANCH CAR HEADS WEST, MOSTLY EMPTY

A slim man in a red T-shirt whose expression suggests he thinks it’s funny that he’s up so early. His hair is water-combed. He talks to himself.

“Oh.” O-roony. A young man wearing paint-stained jeans cycles west, and then another.

I think the sleeper is a woman.

A streetcar, westbound, covered in plastic wrap. Pictured: spoons; a restaurant ad.

The hospital, of course, with its blue angel. A man with a barbed wire tattoo on his biceps talks to himself.

A pigeon, and another, and another.

Banks in this neighbourhood, a park, some restaurants; shops selling voice recorders, cell phones, electronic gadgets; a couple of shops selling papers, magazines, cigarettes and gum.

The public square around the corner is not rimmed with cafés, where you can while away the time with an 30 Geist 86 Fall 2012

espresso or a glass of beer. A woman in a runner’s costume holds her coffee like a torch. A Wheel-Trans van, one occupant. A man stoops to tie his shoe. A taxicab, a meat truck, a plumber’s van. A man with a cane and a limp has a teddy bear secured to the zipper of his backpack and a cup of coffee in his non-cane hand. The sidewalk is clean.

Another man with a shopping cart full of bottles, his cart is orange. That sound, the same bottle-rattle over every break in the sidewalk. He also has a big pressurized aluminum can.

His nose is flattened. There is a fresh scar on his forehead.

Three mountain ash trees are planted around the rusting men. A man being pushed in a wheelchair is clutching his crutches. The woman pushing him is his wife.

6:40 A.M.

Long Branch car, heading west, full.

Another man with a barbed wire tattoo circling his bicep. A woman with hot pink toenails and flip-flops and a business skirt. A bullet-headed white man in a shiny black truck: wraparound sunglasses, turning north on Victoria, tapping ashes out the window, glaring at me.

QUEEN CAR EASTBOUND / LONG BRANCH WESTBOUND, BOTH FULL

Now I am sure the sleeper is a woman: her hips, her bare feet are too slender to be a man’s.

Turtle Island Recycling.

A young man with a shaved head, loudly: “Go fuck yourself.” I’m tempted to ask if he’s talking to me.

Down the street is Massey Hall.

I saw Frank Zappa there in 1967 or ’68. There is no reason to be here, on this corner, except that there’s no reason to be anywhere else. A boy with a skateboard and a Maltese cross on his T-shirt.

The sleeping woman is using her sneakers as a pillow. She has a bowl of something and a cup of something by her head. No one stops to ask if she’s okay. I do. “Sweetheart, you okay?”

No answer. “You still alive?” “Fuck off; can’t you see?” Alive, then. In proof of which she waves her hand at her bowl, and her cup—milky coffee in the cup, white pap in the bowl.

“What are you doing, sleeping on a grate?” “I’m homeless.” “How come you’re homeless?” “Because I haven’t got a place to live. Have you got any money?” I hand her a fiver. “Thank you, sweetie.” A street-vac passes by.

She rolls over and closes her eyes.

A big woman, coffee and smokes in her left hand, cigarette in her mouth, lighter in her right hand, bends her head to the flame, fires up, takes a drag, starts her day. You have to walk if you want to smoke.

A man with a guitar and curly, shoulder-length hair: a bum, or a Christian on the prowl. The sun appears at the corner of the hospital. The Queen Street subway stop is pushing people onto the street. Two dump trucks, empty, at the light, facing the sun. This is a hard town in the morning if you live west and work east: you get light in your eyes at both ends of the day.

A nurse in lime-green scrubs and sensible shoes. One small brown man to another: “Oh, stupid, though, isn’t it? The subway’s a big headache.” There are homeless shelters nearby. The sun hits my eye.

A woman gets out of a car.

She doesn’t speak to the driver.

He watches the light. She closes the door. He drives south on the green. She steps into the coffee shop.

A man with a white beard and a briefcase, sunglasses, suit and tie; he checks his fly with his left hand and carries on. A man in work clothes pushes a wooden bin on rollers. A woman wearing a head scarf looks

at the five rusted men, looks at me, looks at the sky. Her dress covers her ankles. Her scarf covers her hair.

“It’s music to the pope,” says a man who shields his face from the sun with his briefcase.

7:05 A.M.

Steps quicken, late for work.

I see the sleeping woman. I see her bowl. I see her cup of coffee. I see people pass her by. I see a pigeon. The pigeon gives the woman a wide berth, nods with a jerk at the cup of coffee, walks close, looks both ways, walks back, pecks at the bowl, steps away, pecks again, decides it is good to eat, eats until it is full, then steps back and walks away.

QUEEN CAR EASTBOUND, FULL, FOLLOWED BY AN ORANGE MOTOR SCOOTER

An Asian woman heads for the hospital, wearing salmon scrubs.

Right-handed tea carry. I can tell it is tea. I can see the Red Rose bagstring, dangling. The Toronto Star in a man’s hand, folded.

We look tender in the morning, vulnerable, sad. One half-ton pickup, then another. The first half-ton is blue, clean. The second is green, dirty, topped with a ladder: one for show, one for go. A shaky jogger, smoking, spits.

No one asks the sleeping woman if she’s ill. A security guard: cropped hair, wraparound shades, hands in pockets, legs planted wide. Grey shirt, impeccably pressed, with red patches; the black pants are balloon drapes pegged at the ankle, low on his hips.

Skinny black shiny shoes. Hip. Purple scrubs, slate-blue scrubs.

A bike with a squeaky brake. A fly investigating a crack in the sidewalk.

A cigarette butt. Many people carry two bags; some people carry three.

McCaul car, heading west. An old smoker jaywalks. A cement truck. A Greyhound bus. A man carrying his

hard hat in one hand, and a three-step ladder in the other; caulking compound in his bag, a tattoo on the back of his neck. A man with earbuds, chewing gum, his jaws alive under his porkpie hat. A City cab, rare downtown.

A woman in blue scrubs, ponytail, earbuds, coffee in her left hand, bag on her right shoulder, second bag in her right hand. A woman pushing a trolley carrying three trays of sandwiches. A tall black woman, older, with white cornrows, green shirt, white pants, red handbag, grey satchel, and gold hoop earrings. A bum in a slouch hat talks to himself.

A flatbed truck, air brakes snorting.

A young black nurse wearing light green scrubs, her hair piled girlgroup high, heartbreakingly beautiful. A young white man with a yellow hard hat, earbuds, black T-shirt, left arm tattooed heavily.

A woman with a book. A girl with a cup of coffee who stumbles at the curb and does not spill a drop.

A streetcar wrapped in an ad for green tea; the tea is available in plastic bottles. A fire truck in no hurry, nevertheless with its siren. A man with a cane and a guide dog. The man pats the guide dog’s head.

The dog is placid. The man squints, bends, puts his Thermos between his knees, lights a smoke. A yellow-and-blue city dump truck. A shy man with a walker and a cup of coffee. Two paramedics walking toward their ambulance. They walk like sailors or Wild West cowboys, with a rolling gait.

A fellow with a shaved head stands close, but not too close, to the sleeping woman. He yells at the top of his voice, not at her. She wakes up. She glares. He is no threat. She turns over.

The sidewalk is hard but it is warm. A backhoe heads east and a woman with an orange apron assumes a position on the corner and begins to hand out free newspapers.

“Sir, have you got any money? My dad’s in the hospital. He’s dying of

pneumonia.” She is fiftyish. Her haircut was good two months ago. Now it is uncombed and unwashed and ragged at the edges.

“I called my sister. She gets mad when I call. She’s a teacher, sir, she’s retired. She had breast cancer. It spread to her ovaries. She doesn’t want to talk to me.” She can’t stand still. Her hair is short. Her eyes are seeking something. Her chin is wet.

“Is your dad in St. Mike’s?” “Sir, no, Scarborough. I love him very much, I don’t want him to die.” “You should visit him.” “I can’t, my sister.

I’m afraid. I come downtown. I don’t know why. I left my man, he’s my best friend, I don’t know why. He yells at me. Why do I come downtown? I’m trying to think with my mind.”

A motorbike honks at a car. A man wears a T-shirt with the map of Africa on his belly. Someone says “You want a coffee?” Someone says, “Nah.” “Sir, I have schizophrenia. I don’t want my dad to die. I’ll remember him always as good. Is that right? To remember?” “You should see your dad. You should tell him.” “Sir, I can’t.

I was good growing up. I got good grades. I studied French at school, a French school. I didn’t neck with the boys. I got prizes in acting and fitness. I was in drama. I was a negligee model.” Why does she tell me that?

What does she mean?

A big round woman in an orange dress carries a tray of dainty tarts. A woman, Latina, is taking snapshots: she holds the camera the way we do now, with her arms extended in front of her face. The picture she takes is of a building with no particular significance. What does she see? A man sits on the other side of the granite bench.

A woman asks me if she can buy a smoke. I do not smoke any more. She moves to the other man, who is smoking. “Sir, can I buy a smoke?” He gives her one.

My new friend: “Sir, I don’t know what to do.” “You should call your Surveillance 31

man. He’s your best friend.” “He’ll yell. I don’t know why I come downtown.” “You should see your dad.”

“He’s dying.”

Many people wear ID tags with pictures. I remember once, not far from here, seeing a man who had his own face tattooed on his shoulder. We are all of us labelled. We are all of us dying. The people we know are aware that we are dying. We are not aware, ourselves, of such a thing.

7:55 A.M.

For a brief moment there are no cell phones in sight. A woman carries a pair of sneakers in a plastic bag. The sneakers in the bag are white. So are the ones on her feet. The headline in the free paper: Family First.

501 CAR WEST

The call and response of car horns. A boy wearing a do-rag delivers a load of freshly laundered uniforms.

505 DUNDAS, TURNING NORTH ON VICTORIA, RINGING ITS BELL

A man in black sweatpants holds a map and waves at two women across the street. He is wearing shower sandals. They are wearing head scarves. A tall man in a good suit with a zippered briefcase, cowboy boots, ponytail: oh, a lawyer. A dwarf on a bike. A woman wearing a sleeveless dress carries a clutch purse tucked under her armpit.

An old man in a coat who misjudged the weather. A boy in a suit on a bicycle. I hate the sound of flip-flops.

Two street sweepers with brooms and dustpans, wearing lime-coloured reflective vests; they are deaf, and they sign to each other merrily.

The sun is blocked by a tall building. A fat grey-haired man wearing a white shirt and pink pants, carrying a briefcase. One of the street sweepers carries a cardboard tray with two paper cups of coffee.

A woman on a bicycle. Her 32 Geist 86 Fall 2012

ponytail emerges from under her helmet; it is as thick as a hawser on her bare shoulder—the effect, strangely erotic. A transport truck, long and white, parked by Massey Hall, and another, and another. A grocery van.

A man on crutches with his keys around his neck. Coffee, coffee, Thermos, water, coffee, bicycle, bicycle.

A court services van, filled with men on their way to court. A man on his phone: “You do whatever you want. I have no say in what you do.” A man from a shelter is wearing a reindeer sweater.

8:15 A.M.

There is a pillar near the woman who is sleeping with her head on her shoes. There is a drop cloth at the base of the pillar. There is a tray of paint and a man painting the pillar with a roller. The colour of the paint is no colour.

A cyclist confronts a jaywalker: “Hey!” Two Native guys laugh at the futility of anger, and the futility of haste in the morning. Motorcycle, bike, bike. Three bikes chained to one pole.

505 DUNDAS WEST, 502 MCCAUL EAST

A grocery truck. A tour bus, southbound, with a fleur-de-lys on the side, under the windows; the bus is empty.

501 HUMBER, PICKING UP AND DROPPING OFF

An old man pushes an old woman in a wheelchair. A young man with a fresh cut on his cheek. A fat biker with studded leather saddlebags on the side of his hog. The first walking texter.

A hospital worker pushes a rolling bin in the parking lot.

Two women smoking, drinking coffee; one of the women says, “I’m deeply ashamed.”

At least forty people on the corner now. The pace is quickening: you can be late for work at 6:00 a.m., and

you can be a little late at 7:00 a.m. but you should not be late at 8:00 a.m. and never late at 9:00 a.m. Not downtown.

The sleeping woman wakes up, sits up and crosses her legs as if she were sitting in front of a campfire. She picks up her coffee and she drinks.

She takes the spoon and she eats from the bowl of pap in which the pigeon has pecked.

An eco-taxi. A girl whose youth is the cause of her pain. A van with a woman in a wheelchair.

The woman who was sleeping, having eaten what the pigeon ate, gets ready for the day: she puts her shoes on her feet. No laces in her shoes.

A parcel van, a city maintenance truck, two cyclists.

And somehow, the sleeper vanishes. Her coffee and her bowl remain.

All the streetcars are crowded.

Earbuds, sunglasses. Earbuds, sunglasses. Earbuds, sunglasses.

A woman: “They apologized to me profusely for making me wait twenty minutes.” A yellow panel truck. A homeless man wearing an investment company baseball jersey. A food truck on delivery. A man with a tiny dog on a leash; the dog is afraid of cars and won’t go near the curb. A man with a cane and an open shirt kisses his wife without a word. They part without looking at each other. A mobile truck whose purpose is to shred documents.

Two male nurses, wearing pea green scrubs and white running shoes, off to work. A father pushing his son in a pram with his right hand, carrying a coffee in his left hand.

A soft young man with his soft hand out, in a soft voice: “Change for a coffee? Ha? I’m just going to McDonald’s.” A white woman in an orange dress with a white shoulder bag, white runners and a large cherry-coloured drink in her left hand. A truck full of construction workers.

A family of Sikhs who look lost.

The Sikh father carries a note in his

hand. His turban is black. His beard is black. His children, a boy and girl, do not look lost. They are with their father. His wife does not look lost.

She looks concerned.

A truck stacked with folding chairs.

A young man with two skinny white cords between his teeth; the cords go from his teeth to his ears.

One girl says to another, “I told him yeah, okay, whatever, right.”

A bus: Youth For Human Rights.

“That is not what I would say,” says the other girl. Behind me, an old man and a young woman. He says to her, “I said to Norman, let’s just do it. That’s the only picture we took.” A picture of what?

A court services truck. A tourist bus, jitney-style, empty. A man carrying a stuffed briefcase wearing a blue and white striped shirt, smoking what we used to call a cigarillo. A man, on his uppers, with a neck brace, wearing a T-shirt with the words “Tzu Chi.” This occurs to me: “Hey, buddy, you’re the fifth one of those T-shirts I’ve seen so far this morning; what’s the deal?” “There was a tai chi meeting in the park yesterday.” This is how we clothe the homeless.

The sun escapes the building. A family of four—motherfatherdaughterson—at a table in the fast food joint, drinking iced cola for breakfast.

9:10 A.M.

Metropolitan United Church. A man takes a snapshot of the spires. A man sleeps on the grass. Another man sleeps on the steps of the church.

Four chess tables. Someone has chained an insulated cooler to the park bench where I sit.

Four men who are not watching the chess games are watching the cars go by. They watch a woman with a yoga mat go by on her bike.

Pigeons, sparrows, grackles. Or­­ ange peels, cigarette butts. Feathers.

Dry leaves. Twigs. Backpack, handbag, fanny pack, plastic sack. Doughnut

box, paper cup. Tissue, dirty. Glass, broken. Squirrel, black. Rubber band.

On the sides of passing cars and trucks: Toronto Ride, Rona, Royal Taxi, Druxy’s, Penske, Wheel Trans, St. John’s Bakery.

A bodybuilder rides up on a bicycle, sits on the bench next to me; big biceps, muscle shirt, sweatpants, sunglasses pushed up on his head, orange juice in hand; he lights a smoke. A van pulls up to the curb, pulling the hot dog cart of J. Maciak.

A man, perhaps it is J. Maciak, or the son of J. Maciak, or his delegate, unhitches the cart.

The van pulls away.

Canada Post. Beck Taxi. City of Toronto. Ontario NDP. J. Maciak unfurls a filthy awning, circus red and yellow, and erects it over the cart to give himself shade.

A man sits at a chess table with a newspaper.

Yellow things: Downtown Camera, Gino’s Pizza, an Automart newspaper box, a pawnbroker’s awning.

Red things: a mailbox, and the collar of the shirt of the man at the table with the paper.

Over there: The sleeping woman— the one who was sleeping on the corner, the woman who unwittingly fed the pigeon, the one who told me to fuck off but who took my five bucks, is there, cutting across the grass. She doesn’t know me. She’s had a shower.

She’s come from breakfast at a shelter. She’s carrying a free paper. Her hair is combed. She looks angry. She looks okay.

A cyclist rings a bell. A Beck cab is orange and green. A school bus is empty and yellow. A Co-op cab is yellow and red. We carry bags over our shoulders, in our hands, under our arms, on our backs; they dangle from our handlebars as they did for Perec in Paris. All the pigeons fly into a tree.

J. Maciak sells hot dogs to two construction workers not ten minutes after he has unfurled his umbrella

and lit his grill. A cop car in a hurry.

A chess player wears a blue shirt, blue jeans, a blue ball cap. He wipes a chess table with a cloth. He has a beard.

He wipes a second table. He’s with a skinny man. There are sirens.

10:00 A.M.

The skinny chess player wears red pants and a black windbreaker. He sits at one of the clean tables, and breaks out his chessmen: plastic, Staunton, black and white. The wiper sits across from him and plays white. P-K4.

A church worker sweeps debris from the sidewalk, picks it up with a dustpan, empties it into a bin. The players trade knights. Tzu Chi again. The skinny man is motionless, knees together, angled to the left, leaning into the board. He swaps his queen for a queen. The bearded man swaps a rook for a bishop.

Dominion Roofing, says the cap of a man with a black bag, yellow pants, red shirt, black sneakers, white socks, orange pop.

The bearded man topples his king.

On the covers of the magazines in the window of the Maison de la Presse Internationale: Jessica Chastain, Ryan Gosling, Sarah Jessica Parker, The Guide to iPad 2, Stars of 2011, Best Clothes Ever, Exodus to the ’Burbs, 100 Girls 99 Bikinis.

On the corner where the woman slept: I see now that her bowl contained oatmeal. I’m hungry, and the rusting men have company, people basking in the full sun as if they could store it for winter.

To the Senator for breakfast. I wash my hands downstairs. In the single cubicle, to the left of the urinal, a man sits behind a closed door with his pants down around his ankles, talking on his cell phone to a woman. What did she hear when I ran the water?

The other diners have come for a bite to eat before the matinee across the street: a musical about a dancing boy. A peameal bacon sandwich.

Surveillance 33

An espresso. On the way out, a dish in heels opens the door in a hurry for two women, perhaps her mother and her mother’s friend. The mother refuses to be hurried.

She says, “Food any good in here?”

I ask, “What are you going to have?”

“A salad.”

“Lady, life’s too short for salad.”

“What do you recommend?”

“I had the peameal BLT.” “Any good?”

“Not bad.”

“Not good?”

“Best in the neighbourhood.”

“I heard they were good.”

“You from out of town?”

“If Mississauga is out of town, ha, ha.”

It is.

A woman sits in my spot, smoking.

Four punks pull up in a blue sedan and stop at the light; one spits out the window, all four stare at her. The light changes. They stare. The truck behind them honks. They race off.

She exhales.

My first pregnant woman. A woman, into her cell phone: “I’ll handle it.” A young man, wearing a duster and a do-rag, pushes a shopping cart full of rags and metaphorical bones; a first, for me: he is young, homeless, black, and a hoarder.

A man on a scooter rolls by. The scooter is jury-rigged with aluminum tubing, and fitted with an awning against the sun. Four girls in front of the juice joint, youthfully awkward, two of them wearing patterned stockings, all of them wearing short skirts, with their shoulders hunched forward as if they were trying to hide the fact that they have breasts. One of the girls has a tattoo on the back of her thigh.

She’s a heavy girl. She will regret the tattoo, or use it to test others: fail the test, earn her scorn.

Heels, loafers, flip-flops. Sneakers, oxfords, sneakers. Sneakers with white ankle socks. A man in a Henry’s shirt: “Let me get to the office and see what the status is, and call you.”

Men in short pants look like boys.

The man in the Ocean View Sea Dragons T-shirt looks like a boy; he spits in the trash can under the plaque that explains the rusted men. He leaves. His place is taken by a handsome man who pours excess tea from his cup on top of the spit, and then makes a call on his cell phone.

510 EASTBOUND

“Excuse me, can I get a light, please?”

A woman hands over her lighter, expressionless. “Thank you.” “You’re welcome.” His smoke was half a smoke that he’d smoked and stubbed before he’d finished smoking.

A yellow Vespa. A white woman: tights and a billowy, leopard-print shirt, clutching her handbag to her breast. A black woman: yellow pedalpushers and turquoise T-shirt, twotone hair: lacquer black, ink-blue hair.

Court services truck. Crown cab.

Beck taxi. An Asian woman with a parasol.

He has a cup of coffee in his right hand and a fresh pack of cigarettes, still wrapped in plastic, in his left. He taps the pack against the heel of his left hand. Sharp taps, fifteen taps. It is unbearably hot. His coffee cup has a lid. He does not spill a drop while tapping. He removes a cigarette, holds it, unlit, in his left hand, and takes a sip of coffee.

A man wheels a tray of fruit salad

More surveillance: Read “Stakeout” by Sheila Heti at geist.com.

34 Geist 86 Fall 2012

on an aluminum cart. A truck rolls by; the bed of the truck is stacked with the kind of forms you use when you pour concrete. A woman with bowed legs and bunched calves in a purple shirt-dress on the phone, her hair cinched in a top-knot.

At Massey Hall: a white cube van, a white rental truck, a white tractor trailer, another van, another tractor trailer, and a couple of half-ton trucks, black. Ritz Caribbean Foods. Being Erica.

Near the corner where the rusted men stand: a coffee shop, a shop for sensible shoes, a pen and gift shop, a print shop, a place to buy newspapers, a foot clinic. The hospital. A financial services building. A juice joint, another coffee shop.

The Bay, Eaton’s. Down the street, City Hall. A jogger in the heat, a fool.

A city bus. We come, we go, we bisect a tangent. We are prepared, or not.

C&A Refrigeration. A wizened man on a bike, nut-brown, his black T pulled up to show his belly, a long vertical scar bisecting his chest. A cop car, the cop watching me take notes.

Officer Bubbles!

A fruit platter on a trolley. A husky on a leash. A grey sedan; the four men who sit inside have suits and beards.

A woman who smells of dung, perfume and sweat.

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

Read more Geist at

GEIST com 

p h o t o

e s s a y

Boomtown the photography of l.b. foote L.B. Foote’s photographs of Winnipeg in the early 1900s deliver the combined energy of a burgeoning polyglot city and the Aboriginal struggle to retain land and rights

L

Traces of the Aboriginal struggle to retain land and ewis Benjamin Foote (1873–1957), perhaps the bestrights emerge in Foote photographs, in staged scenes in known Winnipeg photographer, claimed that he ran away which politicians and figureheads (such as the future King from home in Newfoundland in order to avoid a life of fishof England) associated themselves with the “disappearing cod. He travelled through the Atlantic provinces and ing” peoples that the European culture was supplanting: worked as a farmhand, cleaned printing presses, hawked Aboriginal leaders in traditional garb pose with British Christmas cards and silverware, and held many other jobs. royalty at celebratory events and in performance in front In Nova Scotia he sold coupons for sessions at the Cogs­ of white audiences, almost never in the absence of whites. well Photo Company, mostly to young military men and These images are evidence of Aboriginal protest as much their girlfriends and to working-class families; he made as they might be seen (by non-Aboriginals) as indica$1,200 in his first three months. At this time he began to tive of subservience: they are proof that a people who are work with a photographer, shooting community events. presumed to be vanishing are indeed alive and well; they He developed a scheme to sell portraits of clergymen to provide one of the few public venues in which Aboriginal members of their congregations, and he and his wife conpeople are allowed to appear with dignity. tinued moving west (possibly in pursuit of the clergyman-­ L.B. Foote, as he was known, took his first photographs congregation market) until 1902. That year they settled in at the turn of the twentieth century, a mere sixty years after Winnipeg, where Foote continued photographing clergythe camera was invented. His motivations were mainly men for a Winnipeg studio. In 1909 he opened his own commercial, and he taught himelf photography by simply studio on Main Street. He worked there until 1932, when a fire destroyed the building.

Foote arrived in Winnipeg during a huge boom, some twenty years after the Canadian Pacific Railway linked the city to the east. Winnipeg had about 50,000 residents when Foote arrived; within twenty years it was bustling with a population of 180,000. Aboriginals, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and working-class Canadians of various other origins flooded into Winnipeg, mostly into the North End, which then, as now, was separated from the rest of the city by class, language, religion and the massive CPR railyard. The expansion of Winnipeg came at the expense of Aboriginal populations struggling to maintain their presence in the Red River area, identified as Metis and the Treaty 1 First Nations—the first treaty signed by the Canadian government—comprising Hudson’s Bay Company 250th anniversary pageant, Lower Fort Garry, 1920. Archives of Ojibway, Cree and other nations.

Manitoba, N2456.

36 Geist 86 Fall 2012

archives of manitoba, n2703

Edward, Prince of Wales, 1919. Archives of Manitoba, N7231.

Salvation Army Major Louise Payne with triplets born at Grace Hospital, Installing copper sheathing on the Fort Garry Hotel, Broadway Avenue, 1912. Archives of

1916. Archives of Manitoba, N2489.

Manitoba, N2554.

John Hanz with his son and daughter, 370 Sherbrook

Northeast corner of Portage and Main, 1920. Winnipeg Free Press.

Street, 1944. Archives of Manitoba, N7376.

Photo Essay 37

going out into the city and taking pictures. During the boom years he turned his camera on new building developments, busy sidewalks, weddings, funerals and wealthy families who commissioned portraits, as well as poor families in the North End—all imbued with the energy of a burgeoning city. His early photographs reflect inquisitiveness, an eagerness to engage with photography and with his new home. He was drawn to a wide range of subjects, locations and experiments with technique. Some of his early photographs anticipate the urban photography that came to define much of the look of the twentieth century: his photograph of a man crossing tram tracks at Portage and Main is reminiscent of the photography of Cartier-Bresson thirty years later; his photograph of a group of people viewing a corpse bears close resemblance to Eugene Smith’s Women Mourning at Wake of Juan Larra, taken years later. Some of Foote’s photographs can be seen as precursors of the city photography of Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and other photographers.

Foote’s later photographs are more staid. He seems to have photographed the entire Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 from a second-storey window, far away from the clashing police and strikers. His photographs of Prince Edward emanate from a standard template of portrait photography rather than an encounter with his subject. Photographs of munitions factories and bus depots, of Winnipeg during World War II, resemble postcards rather than evidence of life. By then Foote had been photographing Winnipeg for more than forty years, and Winnipeg had long passed its heyday; building slowed down, the Great Depression hit hard; the population grew by only 50,000 from 1920 to 1950. As the boomtown energy faded from the city, so did it fade from Foote’s photographs.

These photographs were selected from Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote, written by Esyllt Jones, to be published this fall by University of Manitoba Press. The photos in Imagining Winnipeg came from the Archives of Manitoba, which houses a collection of more than two thousand Foote photos. While compiling the book, the University of Manitoba Press started a blog project called the Lost Foote Photos, and invited Winnipegers to send in their own stories about Foote photographs, most often about their relatives who appeared in the photos. The blog can be read at lostfootephotos.blogspot.ca.  —Michal Kozlowski

Congregation outside “Bishop” Seraphim’s church, popularly known as the “Tin Can Cathedral,” King Street, north of Dufferin, c. 1906. Archives of Manitoba, N2394.

CNR railway porters’ band, outside the Bank of Montreal, Portage and Main, 1922. Archives of Manitoba, N1891.

Unidentified group in blackface, c. 1916. Archives of Manitoba, N2721.

Bardal Funeral Parlor, 843 Sherbrook Street, 1919. Archives of Manitoba, N1728.

Legislative Building lawn, 1944. Courtesy Fred Knight / Archives of Manitoba,

Arctic Ice Company employees “testing the water� on the Red River, 1929. Archives

N2657.

of Manitoba, N1703.

Diamond anniversary for Anastasie and AndrÊ Nault. He was Louis Riel's cousin and a member of Riel’s

Duke of Connaught and party, fishing on the Nipigon

Provisional Government. St. Vital, 1910. Archives of Manitoba, N2397.

River, 1918. Archives of Manitoba, N2775.

Baseball game at Wesley Park, Balmoral Street and Ellice Avenue, c. 1920. Archives of Manitoba, N2654-1.

Winnipeg General Strike. Mounted police charge strikers, Main Street at City Hall, June 21, 1919. Archives of Manitoba, N2760.

t h r e e

s t o r i e s

Last Amphibian Flees m.a.c. farrant

T

chickens and us

hey sing in a foreign language like opera I’m told. A squawk is a kind of aria fugata.

Mostly they’re like old men gathering beside the meal replacement shelves at Safeway. That’s why Emily Dickinson crossed the road, to speak with them about death.

Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken’s chemical makeup was hilarious. It reacts as if it were some kind of puritanical harbinger of death, he said, and that’s why it keeps crossing the road. Kurt Vonnegut did a drawing of a chicken’s asshole that has since delighted many.

Chickens will peck each other to death. They can’t help themselves once there’s a wound. They’re like us that way. They love the smell of blood.

Although shaped differently, the chicken’s beak works similar to a human’s mouth, ingesting one small truth at a time.

Chicken Little Syndrome is the

42 Geist 86 Fall 2012

condition of hysteria that results in paralysis. This happens when the sky falls on a chicken, another way in which chickens are like us.

At a chicken funeral sad music is played while a chicken relative carries the dead chicken wrapped in tinfoil toward a brightly lit fast food restaurant where a rotisserie awaits.

Unlike us, a chicken is without a love interest or a dog.

A chicken’s brain is about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Like our brain, it’s not big but sufficient for the chicken’s needs.

In my day, my father said, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road.

Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Ernest Hemingway said the chicken crossed the road to die. In the rain, he added, and wrote several novels about this.

I cross the road because even though I am a boiling fowl I am still able to cross the road.

There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world and only one billion roads. What will happen next?

I found this question in a magazine: How do you know if you’re a birder?

The answer: You are a birder if you have ever faked your own death to attract vultures.

Someone must know about Hugh ­and me.

last amphibian flees calgary airport

M

other died of pneumonia one week after her spare oxygen tank was taken away during our flight to Toronto. An attendant said it didn’t have a regulator. Mother was sixtyseven years old, had emphysema and cardiopulmonary disease. She’d been on oxygen for ten years.

Our boy Alvin, who is huge, got nasty. There’s a hole in Alvin’s nature big enough for a truck to pass through. He got convulsed by a violent aversion to the flight attendant.

You don’t just take away a person’s spare oxygen tank! They put us off the flight in Calgary.

So we were all worked up about that. It took everything out of us, and we were just about dying from hunting down hope, and trust, and gleaming promise, not to mention another oxygen tank. So there was failure.

Then Charlie took off after the Last Amphibian, which is what he calls Alvin on account of his turning from a sweet baby into a twelve-yearold canister of woe. Alvin was heading for god knows where. My stepfather Jimmy went with them.

I could not go on. I could not continue these explorations. A local man gave Mother and me cherries and a few roasted almonds while we waited for them to return, which they eventually did, Alvin with two double cheeseburgers, his usual reward for compliance.

I could not know then that I would contribute to Mother’s death. I should have known about the regulator rule but I didn’t. Mother’s tank ran out and we had no spare. I was too worried about Alvin to worry about Mother.

She seemed happy enough sucking on cherry pits.

It was next day in Emergency when I got another tank. By then Mother had pneumonia.

D

smooth

uring the night I burst out of my fur, which had previously covered me from head to foot. It came off in an explosion; chunks of brown fur lay on the sheets, the bedroom floor, the dog’s crate in the corner of the room.

The force of the explosion woke me

up. I was sweating but quickly realized the significance of what had happened.

Losing the fur was an enormous thrill. It was beyond a thrill; I have never known such happiness. I had to tell someone. It was quarter past three in the morning; I woke up my husband.

“Feel my arm!” I cried. He didn’t stir. “Wake up! Feel my arm! It’s smooth!”

He rolled over. “What the hell?”

“Feel my arm! Feel my skin!” I was hysterical with joy. “There’s no fur.

I’m free of it at last!”

He threw an arm my way and mumbled, “Yes, yes.”

“Now feel my neck!” I urged.

“There’s no fur there either!”

He pawed my neck. “Do you realize what this means?” I cried. “I am now a completely smooth woman!”

He touched my head. “Your head is bald, Olivia,” he said. “Bald as an egg.

Better check your pubes.”

“This is just like you to spoil my happiness,” I cried. “I finally achieve something of real importance in my life and you don’t even congratulate me.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “But you’re still bald.”

“Do you realize how long I’ve waited to lose my fur? How important it’s been to me? How hard I’ve worked? All the books I’ve read? All the visualizations I’ve done?”

“Is that what you were doing Saturday mornings?” he said.

“You know what I was doing Saturday mornings! I was attending my Shedding Your Fur Workshop. Susan

down the road lost her fur ages ago.

And Martha, and Mary, and Lynette, none of them have fur anymore. How do you think it’s been for me, the only one of my friends still walking around fully furred? Can you even begin to imagine the pitying that’s been going on behind my back? Can you?”

He was completely awake now, as was the dog, who’d come out of her crate and was sniffing the fur on the floor. “I’ve always liked you covered in fur,” he said, raising himself on one elbow to look at me. “That’s the woman I married. I’m too old for change. Did you check your pubes?”

“Raymond!”

“Well, did you?” he said.

“Here, on the most profound night of my life, when I have at last reached a furless state of being, all you can think about is my pubes?”

“I’m going to miss your fur,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it,” I said.

Then he got out of bed, picked up several patches of fur and, together with those lying on the sheets, arranged them on his pillow. “I think I’ll go back to sleep now, Olivia,” he said, nuzzling the fur sadly.

Too excited to sleep I lay in bed for the rest of the night thinking about tomorrow. Oh, the world was now mine! 

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of over a dozen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Her play My Turquoise Years premieres with the Arts Club Theatre, at Granville Island Stage in Vancouver, from April 4 to May 4, 2013.

Three Stories 43

l o c a l

l i t

Jamboree Winners Winners of the 2012 Downtown Eastside Writers’ Jamboree Writing Contest The writing contest, open to all residents of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, was part of the 4th annual DTES Writers’ Jamboree, a jam-packed day of panels and workshops, ending with an open mike session, in April 2012. The Jamboree was organized by the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, with support from the Carnegie Community Centre, the Vancouver Public Library, People’s Co-op Bookstore and the Geist Foundation. The Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver is known as Canada’s poorest postal code. It is also the site of vigorous community activism, and home to many writers.

Organic Curare jim ryder

T

ake a moment now And cop a listen To something I just gotta get Outta my system I’m sitting here Getting mucho pissed And right annoyed again Complaining to myself Making that noise again A big-ass Bad-ass poet But my name’s not Koyczan If you want introductions: I’m Persona non Grata Sneaking ’round town Like Rushdie Avoiding a fatwa And after You’ve read the reports And seen the data You’ll find me sitting here Head down, hat off Another Downtown loser And Eastside jack-off Trying to decide Whether I’m going to

44 Geist 86 Fall 2012

Kick it up a notch Or just fucking back off Tighten up the noose Or let that fucker slack off I might just Light up a joint and chill Like I’m on sabbatical It causes brain damage In my case grammatical Makes my words confused Morose and fanatical Yet I’m not convinced My thinking’s that radical I’m restrained by the Strongest of manacles Born in the wrong century I’m composing canticles And symphonies Having epiphanies with Girls named Tiffany Coming to the conclusion: Life’s not stiffing me But I won’t willingly Abandon my negativity So know that The song I sing Will never be:

“Oh lucky man!”

You’ve heard of “the palace of my shame”?

Well, welcome to Buckingham!

Please, spare me your pity That’s a marker Not worth A good “Goddamn!”

Believe me I’m doing the best I can To improve my situation I’ve got a front row seat On an endless vacation Going up on stage Engaging in verbal masturbation The forecast called for Rayne But, I’m inundation I’m always On the bus When I wanna drive Ferrari

Smoking weed when I wanna do adrenochrome And organic curare Living alone when I wanna go back in time and Marry my childhood sweetheart Angela Miuri I’ve come so far But I’m still prone to worry You say: “Easy does it!”

But, Fuck it!

I think it’s best to hurry Now, let me restate my case In case it’s getting blurry: My life’s a shitstorm That tends to come in flurries And I’m fleeing a fictitious conviction From an uptight suburban jury ’Cause my shit doesn’t play there Not even out in Surrey 

Jim Ryder started writing in 2008. A frequent contributor to Megaphone, he has also self-published two chapbooks of verse.

The most recent, (pronounced: shame us), was published in 2012.

ovaltine cafe i: adam hogarth. from this is east van: a community photography project , 2011.

Local Lit 45

Talk Therapy kevin mcdonough

I

t was unfathomable that my sorry broke ass was worth a thousand dollars daily. Yet, courtesy of the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, that was the case. Perhaps I’ll meet a celebrity at a Betty Ford, I thought. And didn’t Richard Dreyfuss check into a California rehab recently? Shit, Dreyfuss knew Spielberg—I’d just written a screenplay that’d be perfecto for Steven. Despite all the misery I had endured due to my abuse of cocaine, things were apparently looking up.

Hmm… did I say my abuse of cocaine? Really now, hadn’t cocaine abused me? After all, while I’d remained loyal and consistent and obedient as a dog, that coca bitch turned vicious and unpredictable, her amity transmuting into enmity almost overnight. (The bestowal of personhood on a drug was symptomatic of a bizarre anthropomorphic paranoia of mine back then. It got so bad that I believed machines—all the gadgets and gizmos extant—were trying to fuck me over because of my admiration for Ned Ludd.)

The hospital was in San Diego, very near Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base renowned for its production of full metal jacket killing machines, three of whom were drug addicts currently in the same rehab program as me.

Vietnam veterans they were. (I wondered if they knew Oliver Stone— I had a script for him too.) I vowed to watch my language around these high-strung combat vets; I certainly didn’t wish to rile them with any leftwing-peacenik rhetoric. One of them was an erstwhile Navy SEAL, and I’d

46 Geist 86 Fall 2012

heard that SEALs can kill you eleven different ways with just a goddamn Q-tip. The SEAL in my group looked like he probably knew a twelfth way.

Group therapy. Can’t say I cared for group therapy. It was partly the group part and partly the alleged therapy part. Like Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Don’t like clubs, don’t like groups, don’t like teams. I feel diminished by membership. As far as talk therapy goes, I’m Irish. And you know what Freud said about the Irish, at least according to that guy in The Departed—that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis. If Freud really said it, no one knows why, but I’ve no doubt that it’s true.

“You know what you are?” the Navy SEAL said to me one day in Group.

“Why, no,” I said pleasantly. “What am I?” The guy scared the hell out of me, let me tell you.

“You’re a fringe dweller,” he told me in his uniquely wild-eyed, battlescarred manner.

I gulped—fearful he was getting ready to unveil a Q-tip. “Is that… y’know… a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Normally, I’d say it’s a bad thing,” he told me. “But these days, the world can use more fringe dwellers. Guys who go their own way, don’t complain, mind their own fuckin’ business. Guys who don’t wanna lead or be led. I was taught to hate guys like you.

But I was taught wrong.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant

it. I seriously meant it. After goddamn Group I went directly to the washroom and locked the door and bawled for maybe ten fucking minutes. Very suddenly emotional I was.

It was exceedingly strange—not like me at all. Yes, very goddamn strange indeed.  Renowned as an inveterate loner and a remarkably cheerful misanthrope, Kevin Mcdonough is trying to gain some traction these days on a hopefully profitable and prolific career as a man of letters.

Nothing Happening fran diamond

S

he lifts the receiver to her ear. Her hand feels slippery, but her mouth is dry. The buzz of the dial tone seems to pick up the buzz at the back of her head, obliterating the carefully invented and rehearsed explanation.

No air in her lungs to push out the words anyway. The phone clatters back into its cradle. It wasn’t the first time. At the cottage she was ironing the kids’ shorts and T-shirts. They were out with their mom—shopping or something—so nobody else was around. He had strolled through the

kitchen. Into the bathroom. Closed the door. Two or three beats. Opened the door and walked back down the hall to the bedroom. All with his bathrobe hanging open. Wearing nothing but skin underneath. Nothing said.

No eye contact. Passing, barely an arm’s reach, nothing but the ironing board between them.

The first time she pretended nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had. Maybe it had just been her imagination. Or a moment of careless nonchalance on his part. Just one time.

Less than a minute.

But what had happened this past weekend was not carelessness. When he called her up the stairs from the kitchen, he was crossing the hall from the bathroom to the bedroom. With his bathrobe hanging open. Wearing nothing but skin underneath. He’d sat down on the bed, feet apart, robe falling along the outside of each leg, and asked her to bring him a towel.

I’m sorry Mr. Bellman, I can’t right now. I’ve got something boiling on the stove and Mrs. Bellman will be home any minute now with the kids wanting their supper.

I can’t go back there. She picks up the phone again.

Mrs. Bellman? It’s Cindy. I’m sorry to give you such short notice, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to come on the weekends any more. I’m just getting too far behind in my schoolwork—I have a term paper due next week and I’ll have to work on it all this weekend to get it in on time. I’m really sorry…

The voice on the phone is cold. It says, Well, we were thinking of letting you go anyway.

She never told her parents. She never told anybody. Weekends for a very long time had an undertow of slippery, dark danger that she could never quite put her finger on.  Fran Diamond was a long-time resident of the Downtime Eastside. She now lives on the Sunshine Coast and frequently commutes to Vancouver. Her poetry has been published in Thursdays 3.0: These Words, and the SFU Writer’s Studio has chosen her as a participant in the DTES Manuscript Coaching Project.

ovaltine cafe ii: adam hogarth. from this is east van: a community photography project , 2011.

Local Lit 47

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Adorno, Sarasota andrea bennett theodor adorno entered my kitchen. He stood over the failed pot of yogourt and said decisively, The culture is not strong enough.

I tried to tell him my mother never made yogourt (my father didn’t either), but he’d gone.

I put another pot in a warm bath, set it in a spot not too hot or cold. Addressing an audience filled with ancestors, I said, The trick is to start with a good yogourt and whisk a bit into the milk when it reaches room temperature.

After the second pot failed, I put myself into a warm bath. Adorno sat on the toilet seat, watching my breasts float at the surface. He didn’t say anything as my skin blushed with heat, kept quiet when the bath cooled, did nothing but watch as my nipples hardened from pride or chill.

a bird on the beach in sarasota snaps its beak shut—the clasp of an elegant clutch. It’s a tern, toeing its way through the red drift. And two men are walking the beach, legs thin as gulls.

Nana turns to watch a boat being lowered into the harbour. I’ll bet you they’re going fishing, she says.

Another man clears his throat and reaches for his cooler—lounger keeling starboard.

Thirsty, he says to the woman beside him, want a Busch? The cooler is the kind where you push a button on the side and the lid slides back.

Later, my nana and I will watch the news and they’ll pan a beach, saying epidemic and heart problem. Filming people from the neck down, walking—or lounging, belly up.

Portion sizes.

What do you fancy for supper? asks Nana. I watch the tern pecking, pulling threads from its patch of seaweed. I don’t know, I answer, I don’t really mind. And she clucks and says the wind’s picked up—we’d better get going. She folds up her chair. Not a blummin’ pelican, she says. I can’t believe it. Not a one.

We leave the beach, drive away in a sand-coloured Toyota. I press my face to the window glass. See the gull-legged man visiting the man with the Busch—clearing his empties. See that news shot of torsos torquing, feet grubbing their way through the sand.

andrea bennett’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in several Canadian magazines and anthologies. She is an associate editor at Adbusters. Visit her at andreabennett.ca.

Poetry 51

t h e

h o c k e y

a n n a l s

Sweet Lorenzo stephen smith Lorenzo Sweet, the greatest ever hockey player, suffered bouts of skittishness, burns from a lightning strike and heartbreak

S

weet Lorenzo they used to call him, and to those who skated with him as teammates, he was the best there ever was. Ever? “You bet,” Bus Bimble told me during the time I spent with him in 1991. “How much do you want to bet?” But I only had a five-dollar bill on me at the time, and Bimble didn’t think that was enough. “That’s an insult,” he said. “I’ll lend you something. How much?”

Better than Albert Squirrel? What about Earl Tootikian? Considering, also, Lorenzo’s own friend and trusty winger, the all but unstoppable Orris Glemmon? “No contest,” said Bus Bimble, who skated with them both.

“Lorenzo, it was like he was playing another game altogether, with its own rules, that he refused to explain to the rest of us.”

The only son of bookkeepers, he grew up understanding exactly how poor the family was. He never forgot his father sitting down with him at the rough kitchen table to take him through the big ledger where the family accounts were kept, the long columns of starving zeroes, all those wretched ones. “They always had very poor clients, my parents,” Lorenzo once told an interviewer. “Their great dream was to find some richer ones whose books they could cook to their own advantage.

All they wanted was one chance. It was the one they never got.”

The Toronto of Lorenzo’s childhood was grimy and loud, iron clanging on iron, clouds of smoke and ash drifting in the streets, noisy trains screeching their brakes. Down at the docks great stacks of lumber were always crashing down. It was an era of screaming babies and hollering newsboys, according to Lorenzo, of men who felt the need to shout their business up and down the streets. The 52 Geist 86 Fall 2012

peace he found in the hushed hallows of High Park’s elm forests always led him, in his memory, downhill to where snow was falling on the ice of Grenadier Pond. The children who skated there hour after hour had a silver glow to them, like angels. “They never did allow any joiners, though. You had to have been born right there in the bulrushes, I guess, to get in on their game.

They’d chase you off for even hanging around and watching,” Lorenzo recalled.

“Block after block they’d keep after you, you’d be running and you’d hear the skates tchk-tchking on the sidewalk, coming on.

I assume they wouldn’t have killed me if they’d caught me, but that’s what they said they meant to do.”

He’d always claim it was a black-andwhite world back then, just like in the old movies.

Did he go to school? He could never remember yes or no. “Could be I wasn’t the schooling kind,” he told an interviewer in 1965. Still, at twelve, he knew enough to have quietly replaced the real family ledger with an altered duplicate that showed them to be doing not too badly after all—an act of mercy, he called it, and of love, that his parents managed to miss.

At fourteen he joined the infamous Brown & Brown Browns, one of the only teams willing to take a chance on a nonskater, and he rewarded their confidence by scoring fifty-one goals sitting in a kitchen chair. It was Gully Mackerran who got him skating, finally, and took him to Picton in 1929 to play for the ! in the old East Central Punctuation League. Lorenzo came back to Toronto a little older and twice as

A young Sweet Lorenzo: fifty-one goals sitting in a kitchen chair.

tough, with all the tricks the fans would soon be flocking to see him perform at the Mutual Street Arena: the eyebrow ruse, his kick trick, the sleight-of-puck routine known as Two Turk Brothers.

He could have played for anyone, Cedars, Mintos, Sons of Ireland, but it was the legendary Percy Nos, Mr. and Mrs., who stepped up and got him to sign next to the big X on

one of their notorious many-claused, tiny-­ paragraphed ninety-nine-year contracts.

Bus Bimble recalls Lorenzo’s first year as a time of soul-searching and painful self-doubt for the team. “He made you embarrassed with all that skill he had, the confidence. You wondered why you even bothered to play.”

It was Bus who put me on to Princeling Nurse, not a name I knew. When I looked him The Hockey Annals 53

up there wasn’t much. “No, he never really played,” I was told. “At least—he had to give it up.”

I found a mailing address. I wrote. A letter came back and I replied: “Mind if I come for a visit?”

This was in 1991, September, while I was getting into Bus’s debt in Bracebridge. He dropped me at the bus station with carrot sandwiches his wife had made, and I rode down Highway 400 to Orillia. Princeling Nurse was waiting at the terminal. He was in bright golf

Legendary coaches: the Percy Nos, Mrs. and Mr., at the summit of their influence.

clothes, with spikey white shoes and a straw hat on and hands he left in his pockets. “Call me Prince,” he said. On the bus a treeplanter in the seat behind me had accepted my sandwiches, eating them slowly, no thank-you, no nothing until he said goodbye with what seemed to be tears sliding down his face. “I’ve been lonely,” he said.

P

rince needed a haircut so I went along with him. “My grandfather,” he said, “all his life, whenever he went to his barber, he used to collect up all his cuttings and take them home with him. I have them all, down in the basement in a suitcase. Remind me when we’re at the house.”

It was more of a cabin, in fact. He was up from Oakville closing up for the coming winter. “How much beer did you pack?” he said.

“Any steaks?” No, none. We were left to poke into cupboards for our supper, brown sugar on beans with a side of tuna from the tin. The bedrooms were stacked with faded life jackets, fishing rods. In the morning we drank our

54 Geist 86 Fall 2012

coffee looking out at loons on the water.

Prince was hardly even eighteen years old in 1933, working as a gardener’s mate, wrangling pucks in his spare time at Mutual Street, hoping for a chance to show the Nos what he could do on the ice. “I’d spend all day in the dirt and then over I’d go and chase down pucks while the boys practised.” It was hard work and—according to Prince—“the pucks were much heavier then.” He wasn’t supposed to talk to the players. “That was one of the rules. If you looked at them, it had to be with your face blank.”

When his big break came it wasn’t the one he’d been expecting. “Mr. No wondered if I could help out with some trouble Lorenzo was having. I said I could try.

I didn’t know what he meant.”

The problem Lorenzo was having was skittishness. His first two years back in Toronto, with Orris Glemmon by his side, he’d burned up the league. “No one could slow them down,” Prince told me.

“They were unbelievable. Then—I don’t know.”

Prince: “The end of the 1933 season Lorenzo was at the point where someone would skate at him and he’d just shoot the puck away. You didn’t have to touch him. He couldn’t have anyone around. He was fine at practice. People gave him room. But he didn’t have the nerves in a game. So the coaches were worried. The Nos were. I think they gave him—I guess they let him finish the season before they called me in and Mrs. No told me the job. They said it wasn’t going to be easy. They wanted me to think hard about was it a job I could do.”

It wasn’t like anything Prince had done before. “I didn’t know there were jobs like that one. It wasn’t gardening. What they wanted was, I had to go everywhere Lorenzo went that summer and really be on him and get in his way and just be stymieing him the whole time all hours of the day no matter how bothered he got, including waking him up in the night, including when he was trying to eat, including everything. Is that a word, stymie?

I wasn’t meant to touch him. There was none of that—no pushing or grabbing or anything.

It was just the scrutiny that was going to help him. He wouldn’t like it. Mrs. No told me that.

She said, Let me assure you, and her saying that,

believe me, I was assured. Just living with me at such close corners he would get used to it, he’d have to, and that would take away the skittishing. Mrs. No said it was noble work.

Are you ready for this? She said that. Do you have enough scrutiny? She didn’t know. I was the one who had to know. If it sounds like a tough go, it was. It was the hardest job I ever did.”

The first week he started slowly. “I’d be there at nine to start the day, then done by five.

The first week, it was talking and that’s about all. We sat and we talked. We had a nice week.

But that wasn’t helping. I think we both realized talking isn’t really the cure for skittishness. It’s not enough scrutiny.”

Week two Prince slept on the sofa in Lorenzo’s living room. “He had a little coldwater apartment up on Bathurst, very gloomy.

I remember it not having any windows but that doesn’t sound right, does it? It was dim.

The sofa was this very expensive blue sofa Lorenzo had bought with his first hockey money that everybody was supposed to recognize the name of the designer when he told you and ooh and ahh. I didn’t know anything about sofas. I still don’t. It was very blue, which for a gloomy apartment with no windows was not the right colour scheme. The sofa was no good for sleeping. I had trouble with my face sticking to it.”

T

hings changed once Prince was in the apartment. “We didn’t really do too much talking after that. No time. Once I moved in, I was pretty much in scrutiny mode full-time.

Involving? Involving I would howl in his ear.

I was chewing a lot of gum, I would be right up by him and chewing in a deliberately, you know, wet and raucous way and then I would just let out a howl. If he started to walk across the room I’d be there blocking his way and he would have to do his best to get around me without breaking into fighting—obviously, that’s a penalty. Whatever was a penalty on the rink was a penalty on Bathurst Street, too, that was the agreement. He wasn’t supposed to complain. The whole idea was the obstacles I put up he had to find a way around them.

Anger wasn’t any answer. He had to break his anger—that was something they always talked about, the Nos. Lorenzo did it, too. It took some time, but he did it. I guess I can be proud

that I was the one he broke it on.”

Everything was going well. “We were making great progress,” Nurse told me. The only problem was Annie Pottle.

“He had just met her and they were getting to know one another and then in May Lorenzo told me that he was going to take a break and I said I didn’t think we were taking breaks for the simple reason that Mrs. No hadn’t mentioned any to me. Well, said Lorenzo, maybe what you’d better do is you’d better go off and ask Mrs. No again. I said, Well, no, she would have told me for sure. Well, he said, best to check with her, run and ask her. And pushed me right out the door.

I had to go everywhere Lorenzo went that summer and really be on him and get in his way and just be stymieing him the whole time.

“Of course I knew that Mrs. No was not askable, which is to say she and Mr. No spent their summer months at a fishing camp they had up in Haliburton without a telephone or even, I don’t think, any road going in. But I went off at a march toward the Nos’ city apartment as though maybe Mrs. No would have left me instructions tacked to the door. But when I got there, of course, no, nothing.”

“When I got back to Lorenzo’s apartment, he had left a note on the door, which was one of those rare notes that’s one half apology and the other half bitter abuse. He was sorry because of the trouble he knew I would be in now with the Nos but on the other hand, I was a bore of a person who never washed a dish and my breath was a plague and the damage I had done to his sofa with my night-­drooling was not something he would soon forget, let alone forgive. He had very beautiful slanty handwriting, Lorenzo, I remember.”

Prince was, as he told me, in “a mix-up” of emotions. “On the one side I was proud of the job I had done of getting under his skin, while on the other I had let him get away. It took some quick work and more than a few dollars to find out where he’d gone: north. I was on the next train. Would you say if he’d lost enough of his sheepishness to run out on me The Hockey Annals 55

maybe he was cured already? I needed to ask Mrs. No is who I needed to ask.”

Nobody on that train was in a welcoming mood—not in third class, at least. “They didn’t want me there, those people. I do not intend to give them the satisfaction of describing their poor manners and loud cackling laughter and oily food and soups that they didn’t think to share other than slopping them on me, and also their babies, who not only refused to sleep but seemed uncommonly hostile to strangers. You’d think there would be one charming baby out of so many but it was not the case.

Maybe you would say I did not know those babies well enough to judge whether they had a good future or bad and maybe so, but let me

I remember looking around and they were all staring at me, maybe ten or a dozen babies, with just terrible intent. say this: they did not know how to behave on a train. Where were they headed in such numbers? That train seemed to gain babies as we went along, more and more of them crowding into the car as we headed north. At one point, Washago, I remember looking around and they were all staring at me, maybe ten or a dozen babies, with just terrible… intent, is what it seemed like. Of course I was not too worried—they were babies, after all.”

Prince’s information was exactly right.

At dusk, when he walked into the old Royal Muskoka Hotel, there was Lorenzo, standing in the middle of the lobby. “I have never been one for awkward moments,” he said, “and so I didn’t mind introducing myself to Miss Annie Pottle, who was an extremely graceful, friendly girl with magnificent brown hair and a smile so kindly—and this is not just me saying so— birds were drawn to it out of the wild.

“I probably do not have to tell you that Lorenzo was far from happy and glared and scoffed at the idea that I would be staying and acted very frustrated and put-upon. Miss Pottle told him to be calm and said maybe would I care for some supper and called me Mr. Nurse and all the while still smiling. A man from the hotel asked if everything was all right and 56 Geist 86 Fall 2012

Lorenzo explained the situation in a manner that seemed very reasonable to the innocent ear though in fact it contained terrible lies concerning myself and a blackmail plot and I am sure that I would have been thrown out of the Royal Muskoka Hotel or even arrested and jailed by the local authorities but for the interventions of Miss Pottle and a kind-hearted older lady who joined in on my behalf.

“I did not like to embarrass Lorenzo by bringing up the spectre of Mrs. No but at this point I felt I had no choice and did raise the spectre.” Lorenzo wouldn’t hear of sharing his room with Prince. “Miss Pottle finally convinced him that it was the only way and would take nothing away from their holiday, by gum, and if it did then she would know the reason why and at this point she did something with her smile that I do not know exactly what it was except to say it was very personal and exciting and left me blinking and off my balance the same as if a big light had been flashed in my face.

“So I was in Lorenzo’s room with him and Miss Pottle next door with her mother, Mrs. Pottle, who was the older woman, and also her stepfather whose name I did not ever entirely trust to be what everybody called him: Mr. Darkness. Having left the city in a rush I did not have any luggage to unpack, which situation I explained to Lorenzo once we were in the room together, later, to which his reply: Do I look like someone who travels with a second pair of pyjamas?

“I was a new person in the morning. I felt like I was. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d opened my mouth and I’d had an English accent. Lorenzo was back to his old self, and ready to get back to work, which we did. So that was all right. At breakfast, I was back in his kitchen, just like before. So to speak—we were actually eating out on the verandah, not far from the buffet.”

Was it harder in public? I wondered. No, Prince told me, not a bit. “I just went about my business,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I was physically attacking the man. That wasn’t it at all.

The trick of it is you have to not touch the person at all. It’s more about being a presence, really. You have to stay as close as you can, just aggravating him at every step. Breathing on his eggs is fine. Blinking—you’d be surprised, but it’s very upsetting if you’re doing a lot of it an

inch away from someone’s face. He hated me looking in his ears. That was the one thing he really couldn’t stand. If he got up to get more toast I’d go with him, dog his steps. A victory for him was to get his toast and get back to the table despite me.”

It wasn’t easy for Annie and her mother.

Mr. Darkness didn’t take too much notice—he spent all day reading the newspaper. “I never did know too much about him,” Prince said.

“He was pretty private.” For people in the wider dining room, they were perturbed to see one of their fellow guests so hounded. Maybe they thought they were next. The hotel management didn’t like it, either. “They thought Lorenzo was under duress,” Prince recalled.

“The assistant manager thought he was under my spell. That’s what he said. He suspected that I had Lorenzo held fast in some kind of spooky thrall, if you can believe it. Held fast, he said. He told me: We don’t allow that sort of voodoo here. We have a policy.

Prince asked Lorenzo to put in a good word, explain their arrangement, but Lorenzo wasn’t willing. It wasn’t his concern. “I was walking a pretty thin seam,” said Prince. “On the one hand I had to do my job. On the other, I didn’t want to get kicked out of the hotel.

That’s what the assistant manager threatened.

He was watching me closely. The night manager watched, too, but he was pretty sleepy.”

Annie Pottle couldn’t have been nicer. She knew what was going on. She understood.

“She’d say to Lorenzo, Hey! You think he’s doing this for fun? You think this is for his benefit? She had a breeze associated with her that people always noticed and really enjoyed. I’m not sure how to explain it and cannot say with any certainty whether she herself generated this breeze or it merely followed her, other than to say she was not actively blowing, as some people assume I mean. I don’t. You’d stand there in front of her and it would be fresh and breezy and you’d find your eyes blinking—in a good way. She was concerned that I wasn’t getting enough to eat. She’d bring me plates of— I don’t know, slices of pear, cheeses. She’d say I was like a fugitive she was hiding. She thought I was doing a grand job. She’d tell me not to be discouraged.”

“Lorenzo was playing a lot of golf. Every morning he’d be off to the course. I guess you’re not going to give me a break to swing a little stick,

are you? I guess that’s probably too much to expect?

I wasn’t answering him at this point, just as another way of testing him. I’d still be right on him, inches away, but now I’d be silent, just staring and being there. Which had to be very disconsettling.

“No one wanted us in their foursome, obviously. I didn’t blame them. Lorenzo said he didn’t mind, but I don’t know. That was the saddest I saw him, looking at other people golfing.

It was hard to miss the longing from so close up. Would I let him play just one round on his own? That was his big campaign as we got into the last week at the Muskoka. Just one round! Have a heart, man! And of course I wouldn’t answer. I’d be sneezing as he swung, coughing, clearing my throat but as far as talking, nothing.

“Wednesday night I Happier times: Princeling Nurse at ease. was in the room with Lorenzo ­­when Annie came by. Well—Lorenzo was in the commode.

I didn’t follow him in there. People wonder about that. Annie had brought a dish of noodle casserole. I don’t know if she’d had some wine, but she was in a good mood. I was tired so I was not—to tell the truth, I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open. I wasn’t too hungry, either, but she kept spooning up casserole for me, feeding it to me. It was very—I don’t know my herbs too well, whether it was sage or… chives, but it was generally very herby.

Did I think her mother was pretty? That was the next thing. She was laughing and talking, feeding me casserole, sitting on the arm of my chair. The breeze was up, if I can say that.

What was I supposed to say? A woman asks you is her mother pretty you say, Yes, ma’am.

I wasn’t following too well. She was telling me that Mr. Darkness was just a friend, and a strange one at that, and if people thought they were romantically involved, then people were The Hockey Annals 57

wrong, wrong, wrong. What was the matter with people? Were they mad? A woman as vibrant as her mother settling for someone as drab as Mr. Darkness? What, and she would marry him and spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Darkness? Did that make any sense? Her mother had the energy of ten women. She had the complexion of a twenty-five-year-old. Had

I helped a lot of people win the war on skittishness. That’s something. It’s not nothing.

I ever seen her in her bathing costume? She was like a swan—ask anyone.”

Prince said he doesn’t have a clear memory of what happened next. What he remembers is Annie leaning in to take him into her confidence—to share some precious secret about her mother, he guessed, that she felt needed whispering into his ear. “I was barely awake,” he says.

His memories of those moments remain as a collection of single images, like photographs strewn across a table: a big glistening spoonful of casserole, Annie Pottle’s rubious lips, Lorenzo’s sudden appearance, his surprised face. “I honestly don’t believe she was going to kiss me,” he told me, “but I don’t doubt that Lorenzo thought that’s what he was seeing.”

T

hursday, Lorenzo was back on the golf course with Prince dogging his steps. “We didn’t talk about what had happened. Lorenzo was—the same. He was fine. He took his time selecting his clubs. He didn’t say anything about any of it—Annie, the casserole. I did give him a little more room, an inch or two.

Maybe I was feeling remorse. For him, it was like I wasn’t there, which I was pretty proud of. Not that I took the credit. The credit was his if it was anyone’s. Anyway. The fourth hole.

I don’t know what to tell you. It was a bit of a dogleg, bunch of birch trees up to the left, sort of a bunkery lowland by it. I don’t remember Lorenzo swinging. Apparently he hit the ball clean—his best drive of the day. All I knew about it was when I woke up on my back, I

58 Geist 86 Fall 2012

thought, he must have just smoked it. Turned out to be me, of course—I was burning.”

A bolt of lightning had blown Prince ten feet sideways. “People say bolt—to me, it was more like a truck knocked me down, I can tell you. I didn’t see it. The fellows behind us saw the flash and came running. It wasn’t raining, but it was cloudy. I had actually looked at that cloud and wondered.”

Lorenzo was lying not too far away. “I know what you’re thinking,” Princeling said, “and no, he wasn’t smoking. He had some charring, pant cuffs and shirtsleeves. He did look redder, I guess. I was very red, they told me. My shoes were gone—vanished, or vaporized. The fellows who found us thought I was a goner, the way they were talking to me. Someone put their coat over me.”

We’d stayed up late talking on the cabin porch, emptying a bottle of ancient sherry Prince had discovered in a broom closet. The next-to-last big job of the weekend was getting the boat ramp up and out of the lake.

“I do this every year,” Prince said. “You’d think I’d remember how.” I thought there was probably some kind of rig somewhere in the boathouse, blocks and pulleys, but no, we couldn’t find any. “Who needs engineering?” said Prince. Without it, there was a lot of cold, wet heaving, some swearing, a bit of blood. “You’re not much help,” Prince said, “and neither am I.” I’d been doing my best to get as close to him as possible without alarming him or myself. I tried not to be too obvious about it.­ I did my best not to look into his ears. I guess I could have asked him outright but I chose the stealthier route. I’d read all the stories about the heat he supposedly produced, which no doctor could explain, the oven mitts he was supposed to have to wear. (I never saw any of those.) I didn’t want to insult or anger him.

Even if you had the ability to cook an egg on your forehead and bacon on your forearms, would you?

“I know what you’re wondering,” Prince said. “I don’t mind. Go ahead, feel my head.

What do you think? Not so hot?”

Not really. Nothing unusual. He’d heard all the scientific talk. The lightning was supposed to have raised both his and Lorenzo’s bodily temperature, though to different

degrees. Lorenzo’s new warmth was said to be just enough to melt the ice under his skates, lending him a speed he’d never known before.

For Prince, hotter still, the result was disastrous. When he took to the rink for the first time that fall, he might as well have wheeled out a smelter with him. The ice puddled under him—two strides and he was splashing on concrete.

He wouldn’t confirm any of this to me— though he didn’t deny it, either. He struggled to find language that would do justice to the injuries he’d suffered from the lightning. “They weren’t very graphic,” he said. “I’m sorry, but they weren’t.” No electrical burns or terrible sores did he have to show for having been struck, no oozing pus. “We were exhausted, me and Lorenzo, both of us, that was one of the big things,” he told me. “Also we smelled pretty sooty for about a week.” The doctor who came over from Port Carling didn’t think they needed a hospital, so long as they stayed quiet and rested and the hotel nurses kept them cooled. “That was the other part—the heat on us, it was like we had two fevers each. We couldn’t have regular pillows. They’d be sprinkling us with water, laying on the ice. They had to keep us pretty much soaked down to keep the sheets from getting too hot. Lorenzo kept calling for newspapers, but they wouldn’t give him any. They told me that later.”

Lorenzo was up and about in a week, and he was gone two days after that. “Just left,” said Prince. “No goodbye. He didn’t owe me anything, I guess.” Did it make him mad? “What?”

That—I don’t know. That Lorenzo had gone on to become the Sweet Lorenzo our fathers loved so well, and pasted into their scrapbooks, whom we all read about and cheered for, the greatest scorer of them all, and the least skittish?

Prince winced and smiled and shook his head and—nodded. The weeks passed. He was hot and he was cold. Some days he slept right through, all the way, waking up as night fell, taking a few mouthfuls of cold beef soup, drowsing away again. He dreamt it was Annie Pottle at the other end of the spoon, with her breeze blowing on him, which, in fact, it turned out to be for real, no dream. It was hockey season again by the time he was well enough to understand why she’d stayed. By

the time he was up and walking—it was wintertime, now—she’d told him she wasn’t going anywhere without him, ever.

I asked Prince about never playing hockey again: how hard was that? He shook his head.

“I had a great career. I helped a lot of people win the war on skittishness. That’s something.

It’s not nothing.”

“It is,” I told him. “I mean—isn’t.” We’d finally wrangled the boat ramp up onto the grass by the cedar hedge. “I think this is where it goes,” Prince said. He gave it a kick. Late in the summer there’d been some kind of beach party down at the shore, with many paper cups strewn to commemorate—Prince couldn’t tell me just what the occasion was. Someone’s birthday or anniversary? The end of summer? Prince shook his head. “It was lots of us, I can tell you that. It was a pretty big bonfire.”

Whatever it was, they’d seen fit to toss all their beer cups and empties into the sand, their corncobs and stir sticks. There were stir sticks, it should be said, in their hundreds.

We worked fast. After we’d swept up all the debris, all the sad bedraggled remnant balloons, we went back and scooped up all the stray branches and leaves and a lot of the smaller rocks, too, and driftwood—all of which, in the end, didn’t feel right, so we put all the natural stuff back. With our rakes we left the beach with the furrows of a huge lakeside Zen garden.

I asked Prince whether he and Lorenzo had ever talked, made their peace. He shrugged and squinted. If that was a tear that started down the side of his nose, then it evaporated with a tiny sizzle. “Annie used to say where most people had sympathy, with Lorenzo it was just more cartilage. We thought about inviting him to the wedding. I wanted to, but then we decided just family. Mr. Darkness gave Annie away, which seemed wrong—still does.

Though, of course, I didn’t argue at the time.

I took her.”  Stephen Smith’s stories about five-dollar bills and courthouse fires have appeared in Geist and McSweeney’s. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Canadian Geographic, Outside, Quill & Quire and the New York Times Magazine.

He lives in Toronto. Check out his hockey culture blog at puckstruck.com, and his Geist work at geist.com.

The Hockey Annals 59

tablet edition

c i t y

o f

w o r d s

Being Here alberto manguel In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” —Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

N

orthrop Frye once told the now well-known story of a doctor friend who, travelling on the Arctic tundra with an Inuit guide, was caught in a blizzard. In the icy cold, in the impenetrable night, feeling abandoned by the civilized world, the doctor cried out: “We are lost!” His Inuit guide looked at him thoughtfully and answered: “We are not lost. We are here.”

“Here,” however, is a concept more easily pronounced than apprehended. The terrible Heisenberg uncertainty principle, stating that the object observed is changed by the presence of the observer, applies to ourselves and to the place we live in. Of all the marvels in the world, “here” and “I” are the only two things of which we cannot speak with certainty because, every time we look upon our self or our home, what we see is inhabited by our presence.

It requires physical energy, intelligence and technology to explore the uncharted territories of outer space, but a greater determination and recalcitrance to investigate our face in the mirror and the neighbourhood in which we live. We can hardly be surprised by our ignorance of the universe; what we don’t know about our village is always astonishing. In spite of what we might suppose, we are more cognizant of our macrocosm than of our microcosms.

62 Geist 86 Fall 2012

Our histories seem to follow this pendular motion between the vastness of which we have a more or less objective knowledge and Rimbaud’s “dear bit of the world,” which is overwhelmingly subjective. From moments in which we perceive the world as a galaxy of interconnected illuminations,

to others in which each point seems an island unto itself, we proceed as if our learning kept changing its scope to include or exclude as much as possible. If the Athens of Pericles saw itself as a compendium of all the arts and sciences, the rightful domain of every citizen, a century later the Alexandria of the Ptolemies decreed that its celebrated library would serve individual scholars individually, each specializing in a different area of knowledge.

The ecumenism that Paul proposed in Ephesus became the divided territory of the Churches of East and West, and later the many litigious

subdivisions of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

The much-vaunted Renaissance man, with a finger in every area of human experience, was whittled down to the specialist exalted by the Enlightenment, when singular tools demanded singular craftsmen who could wield them with authority and expertise. Closer to our time, the omnivorous nineteenth century, with its Casaubons and Ruskins, as well as its Bouvards and Pécuchets, set no limits to exploration and inquiry, and glorified its cabinets of curiosities as models of the multi-faceted world, while the twentieth century saw not only an accelerated subdivision of scholarly subjects but also an increase in specialized jargons, in both the sciences and the arts. And while today Europe proclaims itself a conglomeration of equal nations, each village seems to vaunt its private identity, distinct from all others, even those lying a stone’s throw away. As in the ancient Talmudic illustrations that show our position in the universe, passing from the small circle of the earth to the vast circles of the skies, we swing from macrocosm to microcosm and back, closing in and out and in again, from the spectacle of the outer world to a recondite place we call home.

Today I find it impossible to decide whether we are in a period of inclusiveness or exclusiveness. On the one hand, the Web has given us the illusion that we are all Athenians, and that all available knowledge, on every matter whatsoever, is at our disposal.

“map of a woman's heart”: margaret kimball

On the other hand, the vertiginous progress in every area of science, demanding further and further specialization, and the increasing confidentiality of the arts, restricting aesthetic understanding to a small circle of cognoscenti, far surpasses in its restrictions any measures adopted in Alexandria. A curious observer today is confronted simultaneously with the unlimited expanse of the electronic playing field and with the exclusive enclosures of creativity and investigation. We can navigate cyberspace, but unless we are technological wizards, we are constrained to follow established programs and visit authorized sites. We can look into any scientific question but unless we train long and hard, comprehension of the problems, let alone the solutions, must escape us.

We can visit solid or virtual museums and libraries, but unless we have the latest lingo (in the case of the arts) and the ability to read effectively (in the case of literature), we might as well be deaf and blind. Maybe we inhabit unrevealed wonderlands and magic kingdoms, tiny settlements in which at this very moment men and women are making discoveries and thinking new thoughts that will change our threatened future. We (I mean those of us who lack the special training and knowledge) are like King Midas, whose ability to turn everything he touched into gold irredeemably condemned him to hunger and thirst.

Perhaps no literary work better reflects this tension between inclusion and exclusion than Dante’s Commedia.

Dante wrote the Commedia in exile, banished from his beloved Florence by political conspiracies and petty acts of revenge. He died in Ravenna in 1321, leaving his work seemingly incomplete. However, some time later, the last thirteen cantos of Paradise were discovered by Dante’s son Jacopo, who said that his father had appeared to him in a dream and had pointed to a niche in the wall in the poet’s last bedroom, where the end of

the poem had been hidden. It is fitting that a dream revealed for us the end of literature’s greatest dream.

After descending into Hell and climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante is miraculously transported to the first circle of Paradise. Here he finds himself confronted by several blessed souls who, faintly at first and with dazzling clarity afterwards, greet him with beatific smiles. His beloved Beatrice explains that while all souls in Paradise are not touched by the same measure of grace, all experience their portion of grace with equal bliss, and therefore inhabit the same place as God in Heaven. But in order to appear before Dante’s human eyes, the souls have politely assumed different places in the nine-step cartography of Paradise. Commentators have long mused on this divine uneven-handedness and its resulting democracy of feeling, but few seem to have noticed that Dante, in having the souls come forward in shared bliss but according to their degree of beatitude, has given each soul a symbolic home, distinct from God’s all-inclusive empyrean. It is as if, aware that all souls (all saved souls, in this case) have by divine decree a common place in the macrocosm, Dante also remembered that although he was made welcome in a number of places in Italy, he always longed for just one place, his house in Florence. Seven centuries later, another otherworldly wanderer would sum up this sentiment upon returning from the Land of Oz to her aunt and uncle in Kansas: “There is no place like home.” Dante’s Paradise illuminates Dorothy’s cliché by lending it the weight of a symbol: a small, private “here” for the self in our overpopulated universe.  Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) A Reader on Reading, All Men Are Liars and The City of Words.

He is also a prolific editor and translator.

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

City of Words 63

n a t i o n a l

d r e a m s

Warrior Nation daniel francis Goodbye, Peaceable Kingdom—the Conservative government is re-spinning Canada as a Warrior Nation in which a muscular military is the ultimate expression of national identity

A

n argument can be made that John Buchan is the Leonard Zelig of Canadian history. At least that is the impression one gets from reading the new book Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Between the Lines). Zelig is the chameleon-like title character in the Woody Allen movie who keeps popping up at momentous historical events, and Buchan too seems to have a knack for ubiquity. As the co-authors of Warrior Nation, Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, point out, Buchan supervised a British concentration camp in South Africa during the Boer War, Canada’s first foreign war; then he was a chief propagandist for the Allied efforts during World War I; then he served as governor general of Canada from 1935 to 1940 (when he founded the Governor General’s Literary Awards); and then, most recently, he appears in the Harper government’s revised citizenship guide, Discover Canada. In this latest incarnation, Buchan—or 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, as he was known—is shown in full Imaginary Indian getup wearing a First Nations feather headdress and robe. The guide includes a quote from 64 Geist 86 Fall 2012

a speech Buchan made in 1937 extolling the virtues of a multicultural society in which immigrant groups retain their “special loyalties and traditions”

while at the same time contributing to “the national character.”

As McKay and Swift point out, however, Buchan is not the role model for a multicultural Canada that the government wishes he were. In

his many works of popular fiction— Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps and Prester John, along with other swashbuckling potboilers—he reveals himself to be an advocate of the White Man’s Burden school of imperial outreach. In his view, Blacks and Asians were “lesser breeds without the law” who needed the wise governance of what he called “white man’s democracy” to deliver the benefits of civilization. Oops. It looks as though in its enthusiasm for re-emphasizing Canada’s historical ties to Great Britain, the Conservative government has elevated an apologist for racist imperialism to our pantheon of national heroes.

Discover Canada is a seminal document for McKay and Swift. They call it a beginner’s guide to the Warrior Nation in which the history of Canada has become essentially the story of wars, fought and won. “Of thirty images in the section on ‘Canada’s History’,” they write, “twenty depict plainly military events or figures.” What’s more, “the images of war are profoundly romantic, cleaned-up Victorian images of battle reminiscent of the Boy’s Own Annual.

No blood, refugees, or bombed-out

image: from the canada department of public information, 1942.

cities in sight. Going to war looks like a lot of fun.” Meanwhile, mention of peacekeeping, which used to define our role in the world, is reduced to a half sentence.

McKay and Swift are not the only historians who have taken exception to the contents of Discover Canada.

The appearance of the guide sparked a bit of a “history war” in which many critics complained that the primer gives a distorted view of the country’s past, emphasizing its military and monarchical heritage while ignoring the various struggles for social justice. (“The Liberals had medicare and the Canadian Pension Plan,” explains one senior Conservative strategist quoted by McKay and Swift, “and we needed to have our brand on something. We chose the military and the RCMP…”) Last year two of these critics, the Manitoba historians Esyllt Jones and Adele Perry, even published their own alternative manual, People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing), a French-language edition of which is being published in fall 2012. Still, McKay and Swift are the first to mount a sustained critique of the Conservative government’s attempts to revise the country’s history and rebrand Canada as a “Warrior Nation.”

Until recently it may not have occurred to many Canadians that Warrior was one of the images we had of ourselves. Of course Canadian soldiers fought in two world wars and Korea and did themselves proud. But they were simply citizens who took up arms in moments of crisis and returned to their normal lives when the crisis was over. In common with other members of my boomer generation, whenever I thought of Canadian soldiers, which I didn’t very often, I thought of blue helmets and peacekeeping. It was the Americans who militarized their public events with martial displays of weapons and warfare; Canadians lived in the Peaceable Kingdom.

McKay and Swift believe that those days are over. Prime Minister Harper, they argue, wants to move the image of the soldier to the centre of the Canadian story. He, along with a select group of military leaders and right-wing scholars, wish us to understand that Canadians are warriors now and always have been. The Afghanistan adventure is not some break with the past, and possibly a horrible mistake, but a continuation of our heroic military traditions, traditions that must be rescued from the neglect and distortions of left-wing peaceniks. As part of this project, previous wars are memorialized as noble crusades in defence of civilization rather than the messy imperial conflicts that McKay and Swift believe them to have been.

World War I, for example, in which more than sixty thousand Canadians died, along with fifteen million others around the world, “was never a war for democracy, freedom, or ‘Canada’, but a war fought between empires,” they write. The glorification of Vimy Ridge as the heroic battle where Canada found its nationhood is part of this militarization of the Canadian past.

“Rather than remember the Great War as a complex historical event,” the authors complain, “we are enjoined to commemorate it as Canada’s finest hour.” And so it goes for all the other martial episodes in our history right down to our present intervention in Afghanistan.

Hand in hand with the glorification of war is the denigration of peace, or at least peacekeeping. During the Cold War, Canadian soldiers took part in more UN peacekeeping missions than any other country.

We thought that peacekeeping was the best way for a middle power like Canada to make a contribution to stability in the world. But times have changed. For the new warriors, peacekeeping is wimp’s work, “a poor substitute for real wars in which real men could prove themselves against evil enemies.” They wish us to play a more

muscular role internationally, and to this end they wish to inflate our past military accomplishments.

Revisioning Canada as “Warrior Nation” requires a fair bit of spindoctoring. The Conservatives have lately been conscripting all sorts of public events into the campaign to revise the national narrative. We now see uniformed soldiers appearing at citizenship ceremonies, hockey games given over to supporting our troops, roadways renamed as “highways of heroes” and, most provocatively, history being rewritten as a series of battlefield successes, this year’s $28-million celebration of the War of 1812 being a case in point. McKay and Swift believe that when Canadians elected a Conservative government they got a lot more than a new tenant at 24 Sussex Drive. They also got a regime that is intent on reinterpreting Canadian history to reflect its own ideology. Many of the characteristics we used to think defined us—socialized medicine, bilingualism, the welfare state, public broadcasting, global citizenship—are being replaced by other notions of Canadianness, most notably, argue McKay and Swift, an inflated role for the military. “Nations are narrations,” the culture theorist Edward Said once wrote. The stories we tell ourselves form the national narrative—in the parlance of modern marketing, the national brand.

What McKay and Swift see happening, under the guise of patriotism and a get-tough approach to security, is a major rebranding of what it means to be Canadian. 

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, most recently Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped the Nation (Stanton Atkins & Dosil, 2011). Read more of his Geist work at geist.com. For more on the implications of Discover Canada, see “Canada for Spartans,” by Stephen Henighan, at geist.com.

National Dreams 65

ENDNOTES Reviews and comments by staff, editors and correspondents

more than ordinary

writing in blue

Stephen Osborne

Michael Hayward

T

he life of Baby Halder, the author of A Life Less Ordinary (ZubaanPenguin), has been summarized in the international press: she was born into poverty in West Bengal, abandoned by her mother at age seven and married at age twelve, walked away from an abusive husband with her three children and went to Delhi, where she entered a harsh life as a poor single mother and domestic worker.

The story of her life, her acquisition of literacy and her discovery of narrative writing are movingly told in her compelling memoir, which became a best-seller in India and has been translated into twenty-three languages (the English translation is by Urvashi Butalia). Baby Halder’s narrative skill is astonishing; she tells her story conventionally and skilfully in the first person, and employs the third person to render states of altered reality, such as giving birth to her first child at age thirteen, or lingering in the precincts of memory: “Baby remembers her childhood, she savours every moment of it, licks it just as a cow would her newborn calf, tasting every part.” A Life Less Ordinary is a hard life, and much of it is painful to read; but the book itself is evidence of an extraordinary flourishing that may be within reach of those who seek to understand themselves in the world.

The last paragraph of the book contains a blessing (in the third person), and is itself a blessing on those who read it. This is a book that wants to be owned, and given away to friends.

66 Geist 86 Fall 2012

I

n Blue Nights (Knopf), Joan Didion struggles to deal with the death of her thirty-nine-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana Roo. Quintana died just twenty months after the sudden death of John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband of more than forty years, a loss about which she wrote so eloquently in The Ye a r o f M ag i c a l Thinking (2005).

Because of these two tragedies and their terrible adjacency there is an enormous melancholy at the heart of Blue Nights, a recognition by Didion that she now stands on the threshold of the final stage of her own life: “This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my thoughts turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.” Throughout Blue Nights, Didion confronts her persistent doubts: Was she too fearful in raising Quintana? Did she fail her?

There is a tinge of obsession to her repeated self-examination, and a detachment that at times feels clinical, almost cold—as if there were no other way to manage her grief. Yet Didion also recalls occasions of great joy: Quintana’s wedding; and the moment in 1966 when Didion and Dunne “had been handed this perfect baby, out of the blue, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She could not have been more exactly the baby I wanted.” Didion has famously claimed that she writes “entirely to find out what I’m

thinking” and Blue Nights offers additional evidence of this compulsion to “write out” what consumes her: it is writing as psychotherapy: Didion’s attempt to make sense of, and to come to terms with, circumstances beyond her control.

cut-out lit

T

Kelsea O’Connor

ree of Codes (Visual Editions) by Jonathan Safran Foer is a striking example of erasure literature. It is an unremarkable-looking trade paperback that opens to reveal a latticework of die-cut pages, each page a ladder with words clinging to the rungs.

Foer’s work is an erasure of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, a collection of short stories originally published in Polish in 1934. Foer preserves the position of the words in the erasure text but literally cuts out the words he did not select. The story itself is told by an unidentified first-person narrator who blames his/her mother for his/her father’s descent into dementia. Tree of Codes is described as a work of fiction, but it is more poetry than prose and more art than book. For all its beauty, though, the book itself is difficult to read: every page must be lifted to be read, and must be turned carefully so as not to snag the words on the pages below; and it is distracting to glimpse the layers of words underneath the page being read. It’s a book I love flipping through but not one I enjoy actually reading.

absolute centre

O

Patty Osborne

ne of the questions asked by an Alzheimer’s patient in Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart) is whether there is “any part of me that lasts, that is incorruptible, the absolute centre of who I am?” and this is the question that Janie, a Cambodian refugee and the main character in the book, is compelled to consider. In 1975, when the civil war in Cambodia ends, the triumphant Khmer Rouge begin recording detailed biographies that will be used to tear away everything and everyone that might inhabit those biographies. Families are split up and sent to work camps to die of exposure, starvation and/or disease, and more than a million people are executed because of who or what they might or might not know or have known; survival can depend on assuming an identity without a past or a future. This is what Janie leaves behind when she escapes and is sent to Canada at the age of twelve. But thirty years later, memories of the horror push their way to the forefront of her mind again, and Janie leaves her husband and young son and travels back to Cambodia in order to come to terms with her own survival and the losses that fill her memories. Janie’s story, and that of her friend Hiroji, who himself has been displaced by the bombing of Japan, is told without sentimentality and with an immediacy that pulls us into the story and keeps us there.

hide-and-seek

I

Thad McIlroy

was searching online for information on how search engines work. We tend to take them for granted and don’t stop to think about how tough it is to find something hidden among

several trillion pages in only .32 seconds, which is how long it takes Google to find a listing for Kathleen Ossip’s poetry collection The Search Engine (American Poetry Review), winner of the APR/ Honickman First Book Prize. Seek and you shall find.

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Media) points to the bilateral nature of online search. As with hide-and-seek, there comes a point where you’ve hidden yourself too well and the person who is “it” says “I give up,” and you crawl out from underneath the neighbour’s front porch and stand up tall. “Here I am, I’m here,” you yell, and she finds you.

You’ve got to be findable, or hideand-seek won’t work. And a search engine can’t find your book of poetry if you forget to include the title. Morville posits that what we find changes who we become. A phrase like that will either intrigue you or annoy you, which can also happen when you read a book of poetry like The Search Engine. It turns out that the book has nothing to do with Google or Yahoo or even the public library. It holds forty-six of Ossip’s diverse poems, selected and introduced by Derek Walcott. One of the poems is also called “The Search Engine.” It’s closer to hide-and-seek than to the internet. It begins: “In the city, something beyond me—/ I need to know so much./ I scan the boulevards./ I want to find you: where?” Morville tells us that findability is a noun meaning “the quality of being locatable or navigable.” There’s a difference between locating and navigating. The reader will find Ambient Findability loose in its definitions but rich in ideas about creating online visibility: how to stand and be found.

The Search Engine concludes: “I want to find you: where?/ Please, leave your address.”

psycho-geographic guide Michael Hayward

I

took a copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press) with me on our recent road trip to California. While it proved to be an impractical guide to that fabulous city by the bay (it’s too large to lug around all day; it has no index and no practical details on museums, hotels or restaurants), it works very well as what you might call a “psycho-geographic” guide, off­ ering a selection of full-colour two-page city and regional maps that you’ll find nowhere else.

One is titled “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo.” It pinpoints and annotates the sites where Eadweard Muybridge lived and worked on his pioneering photographic studies of motion, combining these with locations featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo (a film that was just named “the greatest film of all time” in a British Film Institute poll, deposing the perennial champ Citizen Kane). Another map, “Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960 and the Remnant 6 AM Bars,” illustrates a period when “there were far more fishermen than tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf [and] workers stopped off for a drink on their way home from working the graveyard shift.” A third is titled “Death and Beauty: All of 2008’s Ninety-nine Murders and Some of 2009’s Monterey Cypresses”; the murder sites are indicated by red dots, the cypresses by green. Each map is accompanied by a thoughtful essay— Solnit is credited with nine of the twenty-two essays and serves as editor—and a selection of smaller illustrations are scattered throughout the text. This is an amazing and thoughtprovoking book that brings many of Endnotes 67

San Francisco’s previous incarnations back to life, and highlights the forces—political, economic, demographic—that will shape its future.

Every city could use such a guide.

contraband that binds Uzma Rajan

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hrowing caution to the wind and ignoring the well-meant advice of concerned friends, an adventurer named Jamie Maslin sets out to travel the Silk Road and ends up in the Islamic Republic of Iran. What he finds in this country, so often depicted as oppressed, fanatical and everything in between, is a warm, open group of people with a sense of humour and an odd love for the Argentinian-­b orn Irish crooner Chris de Burgh, of ­“ The Lady in Red” fame.

How bad can Iranians be if their musical taste leans toward cheesy ballads? In Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn: A Hitchhiker’s Adventures in the New Iran (Skyhorse Publishing) Maslin proceeds to deconstruct the stereotypes Westerners have of post-1979 Iran. Using his thumb and his wits, he befriends men who insist that he stay with them and their families rather than in a hostel.

He encounters taxicab drivers who prove invaluable in exploring Iran’s famous and historical locales, all the while denouncing the government that employs them. And he connects with men and women his own age, at illegal parties, where dancing headscarf-­free and dressing in Western clothing is the order of the night.

In a land feared for its autocratic government, Maslin learns that things are definitely not what they appear and that nothing bonds young men quicker than pirated porn and bottles of booze.

68 Geist 86 Fall 2012

action

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Chelsea Novak

n November 2011, I attended the Vancouver launch of Shag Carpet Action (Anvil), Matthew Firth’s fourth collection of short stories. Firth, who lives in Ottawa, was in town attending a conference for his day job with an international trade union. As it happens, the novella in Shag Carpet Action, “Dog Fucker Blues,” is about members of a local union fighting over a strike vote. All of Firth’s stories are firmly grounded in reality, though one hopes most of them aren’t based on his personal experience. Sex and violence wind their way through every story, more pervasively in some than in others.

“Action,” which Firth read at the launch, is about a woman watching her neighbour masturbate with an action figure and thinking about her relationship with her husband—specifically, about having his head on a stake. After hearing the story out loud, I had to buy a copy of the book. Firth is also the co-editor and publisher of Front & Centre, a literary magazine that shares the sensibilities of Shag Carpet Action.

Pick up a subscription, or read the book, or take a look at a chapbook from Firth’s micro-press, Black Bile Press.

thinking dangerously Stephen Osborne

T

he American poet Randall Jarrell was a great friend of Hannah Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, and included them, disguised as an immigrant couple named Rosenbaum, in his novel Pictures from an Institution. The English speech of the Rosenbaum husband is described as a “pilgrimage towards some lingua franca of the far future,” or in Rosenbaum’s words, “vot ve all speak ven de

Shtate hass viderdt away.” The Rosenbaum wife “looked at the world like a bird, considering, and you too considered; but you could not make up your mind whether she was a Lesser Bird of Prey or simply a song-bird of some dismaying foreign kind.” Her smile “was an unqualified, forthcoming, outgoing smile, a smile like spring: you could not believe in it, but it was so.” Hannah Arendt’s husband (with whom she escaped the Nazis in 1933) emerges as a remarkable person in Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness by Daniel Maier-Katkin (Norton). Other remarkable persons present among the friends of Hannah Arendt in this account are Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Karl Jaspers, W.H. Auden (who appeared at her door a few weeks after Blücher died, looking “like a clochard,” and offered to move in with her, “even to marry her”) and Martin Heidegger, with whom she fell in love in 1925. She was eighteen and his student; he was thirty-four and already famous; he was to remain a galvanizing force throughout her life. Her troubled relationship with Heidegger the philosopher and part-time Nazi, an endless subject of speculation among the commentariat (some months ago she was vilified on CBC radio as a Germanist and anti-Semite), is here treated with dignity and imagination: we see Hannah Arendt grappling in her personal life with the large issues that illuminate her greatest works: On Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind. Hannah Arendt was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, and the internet is adrift with quotations from her work: “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” Daniel Maier-Katkin has served her well with this book.

Endnotes 69

NOTED ELSEWHERE Recent News of Geist writers and artists, gathered from here and there.

According to the Georgia Straight, Daniel Zomparelli’s Davie Street Translations (Talon) “doesn’t shy away from laying down a younger, more urban take on sexual behaviour…” CanadaArtsConnect.com wrote that the book “has all the high-octane things we love in poetry: sex, booze, drugs, Beyoncé, gyms.”

VancouverWeekly.com says that Ivan E. Coyote’s One in Every Crowd (Arsenal) is “a great boon to those who feel uncomfortably different, and a great reminder to those who feel exclusively normal.” Quill & Quire wrote that “Coyote’s hope is to reach just one or two kids—those whose lives may be changed forever because they met someone like her; like themselves.”

Susan Steudel’s New Theatre (Coach House), the Telegraph-Journal writes, is: “facts delivered from centre stage.” Literatured.com says that “It’s my hope that her first book’s quality is not merely a product of beginner’s luck, for her next collection will have great difficulty in succeeding the talent displayed in New Theatre.”

According to Kirkus Reviews, All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel (Penguin) is “a beguiling exercise in metafiction, one that tells an engrossing story from various perspectives while undermining the possibility of truth in storytelling.”

The Guardian commented that “Alberto Manguel is a liar. Or so the reader of this book is invited to think.” An Amazon. com customer named B. Burke called All Men Are Liars “dark and complex, like a fine piece of chocolate.”

OFF THE SHELF Books received at the Geist office.

Singing returns to the shower in To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal (Back Bay Books); vitality is confirmed in You Exist. Details Follow. by Stuart Ross (Anvil); and balance abounds 70 Geist 86 Fall 2012

in Waking in the Tree House: Poems by Michael Lithgow (Cormorant Books).

Calli Barnow, amateur boxer and lesbian detective, infiltrates a Toronto advertising agency in Oranges and Lemons by Liz Bugg (Insomniac); Pig Boy visits a cave full of dinosaurs in Britt Wilson’s Greatest Book on Earth by Britt Wilson (Conundrum); and a Hollywood hack gets stranded in Toronto and stumbles into a career as a CBC programming executive in Easy to Like by Edward Riche (House of Anansi).

Death no longer means the end of romance in Dave Williamson’s Dating (Turnstone); bears learn how to ice skate in Elaine McCluskey’s Valery the Great (Anvil); and the dark underbelly of being a ballerina is exposed in Deirdre Kelly’s Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection (Greystone).

A heist goes wrong and a double cross goes wrong in Never Play Another Man’s Game by Mike Knowles (ECW); a gene responsible for the human soul is discovered in Kingdom by Anderson O’Donnell (Tiber City); and a Swedish detective must uncover the mystery behind the sixty-year-old murder of a nurse in Night Rounds by Helene Tursten (Soho).

Leaving Now by Arleen Paré (Caitlin) finally arrives; The Cookie Sutra by Edward Jaye (Workman) delivers exactly what it promises—graphic cookie copulation; and The Receptionist by Janet Groth (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) chronicles the life and times of a career receptionist at The New Yorker.

Short stories are told through the perspectives of both a seventeenth-­ century female dwarf and a race of superior chickens in The Weeping Chair by Donald Ward (Thistledown); poems are written from the viewpoints of movie stars and mystics in What’s the Score? 99 Poems by David W. McFadden (Mansfield); Aristotle’s daughter gets the sequel spotlight in The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon (Random House).

A teenaged immigrant follows the mob who hanged Louie Sam into

Canada in Elizabeth Stewart’s The Lynching of Louie Sam (Annick), and Ken Klonsky gives a first-person account of a man wrongly jailed for murder (Life Without, Quattro Books).

First Spring Grass Fire by Rae Spoon (Arsenal Pulp Press) tells a story of being Church-reared and queer; Stickhandling Through the Margins by Michael A. Robidoux (UTP) looks at First Nations hockey; Song of Kosovo by Chris Gudgeon (Goose Lane) urges the reader to look at both sides of the Balkan wars.

ARTISTS IN THIS ISSUE Eve Corbel is a writer and comics artist. Her short and long works include “Guide to Literary Footwear,” “Some Lesser-Known Phobias of Writers” and other comics published in Geist, as well as the gone-viral “LesserKnown Editing and Proofreading Marks.”

Christopher Grabowski’s award-winning photographs have been exhibited in Canada, Poland, Holland and Germany. His photos and articles have been published in periodicals and anthologies in North America and Europe. See more at mediumlight.com and at geist.com.

Adam Hogarth has been a film location scout in Vancouver for fifteen years. For the past six years he has worked mainly on the TV series Supernatural.

Margaret Kimball lives and teaches in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work has recently appeared in Defunct, DIAGRAM and Copper Nickel, and in summer 2012 she was a resident at Yaddo, an artists’ community in New York.

Evelyn Kuang is a photographer and graphic designer, studying Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. See her photography at flickr.com/photos/evrtrn.

Brent Lewin is an award-winning photographer whose work has been published in National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and Geist, among many other periodicals. He is represented by Redux Pictures.

For more on Lewin’s work with the Chin and Apatani, see brentlewin.com.

Mandelbrot is a photographer who has been writing about photography since 1990. In another incarnation, he is Stephen Osborne, publisher of Geist. See more of his work at geist.com.

Eric Uhlich, who designs and composes Geist, is an illustrator and graphic designer.

He created the artwork for the graphic novel Green Skies and for several shorter comics.

Visit him at oktober.ca.

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword

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Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #86 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist magnet.

Good luck!

ACROSS

1 After reading those letters, it’s clear we should sell ping-pong balls 5 Keep those papers, they may make the ring obligatory 8 It’s tragic that we’re always looking for one romancer (2) 9 Get outta here—some of that jazz sounds like crap 12 Let’s us get disorderly and fight those guys 14 It’s higher but is he learning to be single? (abbrev) 15 If they prohibit that exam you can go to the beach and get the best tan (2) 17 I read that she drank Caesars with Julie but later she left with Mark 18 That little number from the ’70s???

19 I can’t stand still paying that for that concentrate (abbrev) 20 The papers loosely covered the fall of the unbound 22 In bed or from a bottle, I want a light brown one (2) 23 Lear was a real equal 24 When you’re little, one small cavity can really break up the morning 26 I do it because he’s not that smart 29 Penny was no good 30 Toronto Sun???

31 Not-so-free free state is dedicated to books (abbrev) 32 Check that the last plate is in attendance in its chamber 33 Central work lamppost is international (abbrev) 35 Girls, if you want to hear a hymn, step into my etchings gallery 38 However did that Cretan manage to spell?

42 Make sure she secures the garden area 43 Sidle up so you can practise while you drink 44 That preppie knew that force times distance makes the fourth plate 45 Questions, questions, questions!

Can’t you just give me checkups?

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1 We’re learning that even Ludwig probably returned in the ninth 2 The colonels are onto them and will make sure they’re all listening 3 I don’t care—I slip Ron beers even though they make him confused 4 In high school she periodically exercised her right to be excused 5 She may be a good little scout but watch out you don’t get caught in her iron web 6 They always vote for the negative ones 7 Be reasonable, those lottery performances are symbolic (2) 8 This little brew is good for what ails you 10 Follow me—I believe I can take you to the moon 11 Neat, fearless jump (2) 13 They couldn’t relax even when they walked on high 16 Let’s face it, your mark is spot on 17 Help yourself and then eat under the facia tree 21 That group of old Yanks came to Canada to collect money (abbrev) 22 Sounds like, at 16, Otto really wanted one (2) 25 Let’s go out and see if anything falls away 27 A couple of these can be dynamic

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28 One of his sentences occupied his buddy even though he doesn’t mean it 31 If you plan to eat, you’ll need a kit, a bag or a bucket 33 Olivia’s grub will curl your tail 34 On a cold night no creatures will mix up their sticks 36 Sounds like she won’t talk about her flower, even in May 37 OMG, she was surprised by my dirty bloomers (abbrev) 39 Make sure the protective extremity was not left at the ball game (abbrev) 40 Five hoops get together freely in the countryside (abbrev) 41 In short, Jim’s avatar got around to converting and finally toed the line There was no winner for puzzle 85.

D U N E T I P E D A S H I L V F L I P E O N E V E N E S H A A A T L S S U T U I T E R S U R F

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

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

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

E R O M E P P E S R O R C S A T S O H A A D Y

Puzzle 71

c a u g h t

m a p p i n g

Sight, Sound, Mind The Canadian Map of the Twilight Zone

by Melissa Edwards & Jill Mandrake

modified Geistonic projection Twist Point Paradise Creek

Air Force Island

Mystery Lake Meta Incognita Peninsula

Wicked Point Desperation Lake

Bradbury Island

Point Separation

Lac Irony Boundary

Time Lake

Shadow Lake

Lac de l’Imaginaire Half Hour Pond

Summit Pass

Punishment Pond

Isolation Lake

Twillingate

Rod Lake

Goblin

Fable Lake

Tomorrow Lake

Hole-in-the-Wall

Lac Hugo

Foresight Creek

The Monster

Close-to-the-Edge

Launching Point

Star Grey

Dark Lake

Desolation Sound

Whipple Point

Fiftynine Creek

Mystic

Sasquatch Park

Franklin

Macabre Tower The Bugaboos

Creepy Lake

Night

Midnight Lake Weirdale Surprise McCarthy Park Neptune Odd Fellow Lake

Trip Lake

Bierce Creek

Battle Lake Justice

Psyche Island Astounder Island

Amulet

Strange

Twilight Lake Superstition Lake Little Chill Lake Sleeping Giant

Cayuga Science Hill

Limbo Lost Lake

Devil’s Glen

Zone

Spooky Hollow

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

72 Geist 86 Fall 2012

GEIST 86

Skid Road Lit

Twilight Zone Map of Canada BOOMTOWN WINNIPEG  WOMEN OF KALI RETURN TO HERNIA HEAVEN FALSE RECOGNITION HOODIE YOGOURT, CULTURE, ADORNO HOW AMERICANS PERCEIVE CANADIANS

FACT + FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA

NUMBER 86 FALL 2012 $6.95

FACT & FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA

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FALL 2012

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The Hockey Annals • Street-corner Surveillance Joe Fiorito • Eve Corbel • Jean-Claude Germain • M.A.C. Farrant • Guy Delisle • Lily Gontard & Family Alberto Manguel • Mercedes Eng • Stephen Henighan • andrea bennett • Raymond E. Biesinger In Review: Joan Didion A Life Less Ordinary Jonathan Safran Foer Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn Madeleine Thien Hannah Arendt Biography Shag Carpet Action The Search Engine Ambient Findability San Francisco Atlas