Geist 89 - Summer 2013

GEIST 89

The National Map of Sherlock Holmes

Postcard Contest Winners

GEIST

YOGA POSES FOR EDITORS  GABOR SZILASI A NEW CANADIAN MY TH REPORTING THE WARS THE END OF FILMS SONG OF THE OLD DOG

FACT + FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA

NUMBER 89 SUMMER 2013 $6.95

FACT + FICTION  NORTH OF AMERICA SUMMER 2013

spots before your eyes The Leopard Skin Art of Kate Craig and Eric Metcalfe

Stephen Henighan on Not Reading Stephen Osborne on the 1957 Pontiac Pathfinder Deluxe GEIST.COM

GEIST SUMMER 2013 $6.95

Sheila Heti  David Collier  Don Kerr  Holy Dying Dora  Sara Cassidy Eve Corbel  Daniel Francis  Jesus Hardwell  Laura Trethewey  Alberto Manguel  Sarah Selecky In Review: Julian Barnes  Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility  Don McKay Essays on the Art of Poetry Brad Cran  Bee Trading Card Series 1  Alison Pick  121 Short Pieces by Jim Christy  William Wallace Cook

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

GEIST

Volume 25

· Number 89 · Summer 2013

features Winners of the 9th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest 31

The image-inspired short stories that took First, Second and Third prizes in the 9th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Contest

Spots Before Your Eyes Michal Kozlowski 35

Over-the-top leopard print—clothes, photos, saxophones, buildings—by Kate Craig and Eric Metcalfe, a.k.a.

Lady Brute and Dr. Brute, Vancouver, c. 1972

The Ghost of James Cawdor Bill MacDonald 46

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle keeps a promise to the living by speaking with the dead

departments

AnnMarie MacKinnon 4 In Camera Letters 5

Eve Corbel 15 True Funnies

Geist staff & correspondents 57 Endnotes

The Wall 62 Off the Shelf, Noted Elsewhere Meandricus 63 Puzzle

Melissa Edwards 64 Caught Mapping published by The Geist Foundation. publisher : Stephen Osborne. senior editor : Mary Schendlinger. editorial group : Michal Kozlowski, assistant publisher; AnnMarie MacKinnon, operations manager; Lauren Ogston, web editor. circulation manager : Nicholas Beckett. reader services : Jocelyn Kuang. proofreader : Helen Godolphin. fact checker : Sarah Hillier. designer : Eric Uhlich. associate editor : C.E. Coughlan. interns : Jesmine Cham, Meaghan McAneeley, Jennesia Pedri, Jacquelyn Ross, Lee Wyndham. a c c o u n ta n t : Mindy Abramowitz cga. a d v e rt i s i n g & m a r k e t i n g : Clevers Media. web architects : Metro ­Publisher. distribution : Magazines Canada.

printed in canada by Transcontinental. managing editor emeritus : Barbara Zatyko. first subscriber : Jane Springer. contributing editors : Jordan Abel, Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Daniel Francis, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Jill Mandrake, Becky McEachern, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Patty Osborne, Eric Peterson, Dan Post, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito. support the geist writers and artists fund: geist.com/wafund

GEIST

fact + fiction since 1990

notes & dispatches

Stephen Osborne 8 Pathfinder Deluxe David Collier 11 The End of Films Sara Cassidy 14 Gravitass Devon Code 16 My Prizes: A Memoir Alexandra Dragland 17 Holy Dying Dora

findings

21

New Canadian Myth Book of Unknowably Obscure Words

Grandpa’s Fries Dwindling Crew

Song of the Old Dog Reporting the Wars

Sandcastles Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Geist Alerts and more

columns

Stephen Henighan Daniel Francis Alberto Manguel

19 52 54

Afterlife of Culture National Dreams City of Words

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

cover image: from Leopard Realty, a series of four postcards made in 19711972.

Eric Metcalfe (Dr. Brute) created this series of altered postcards of a city skyline as part of an intended animation series showing the progressive leopardization of the city—thereby claiming the city for Brutopia. These images also reflect Kate Craig’s interest in both the organic and artificial surfaces of objects. Kate Craig (Lady Brute) referred to herself as “...not a ‘professional’ artist in the sense that I feel responsible to the history of art.”

See page 35.

i n

c a m e r a

The Banal Becomes Beautiful

Nun at Dorval Airport, Montreal, August 1959, by Gabor Szilasi. Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa.

Donation of the artist. © Gabor Szilasi, 2009

G

abor Szilasi was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1928.

As a student in the late 1940s he was imprisoned and blacklisted for attempting to flee the incoming Communist regime. He could not return to school, so instead decided to pursue his interest in photography. Szilasi purchased his first camera, a Russian copy of the Leica IIIF model, a Zorkij, in 1952 and began learning to take photos and to develop film in the bathroom of his family’s apartment. He used his growing skills to document the failed Hungarian revolt to Soviet incursion in 1956.

In 1957, Szilasi and his father escaped Hungary (his mother had died during World War II) and immigrated to Canada. Szilasi worked as a photographer for l’Office du Film du Québec from 1959 to 1970, which allowed him to travel throughout the province and record on film his adopted home of Montreal as well as more rural areas of southern Quebec. During this time he moved away from his beginnings in pictorialist photography and, with the fresh perspective of a newcomer, began working in a more photojournalistic, social documentary style. He shot 4 Geist 89 Summer 2013

portraits of individuals, domestic and commercial spaces, townscapes and landscapes—the stuff of every day—to document over time the social, cultural and economic conditions of what was “here” and “now” at the time each photograph was taken; he maintains this practice in his work today. His photography continues to be largely concerned with change and how it can be demonstrated through images of the commonplace.

In an interview with the National Gallery of Canada for his exhibit The Eloquence of the Everyday, Szilasi said, “The everyday, the ordinary can be banal, and that’s OK. But to show the banal in a way it hasn’t been seen before, I think that’s important. And that can make the banal interesting. And if the banal is photographed in a very precise timeframe and angle, point of view, then it doesn’t become banal anymore. The banal becomes beautiful.”

The Eloquence of the Everyday will be shown at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto until August 25, 2013.

—AnnMarie MacKinnon

r e a d e r s

GEIST

w r i t e

LETTERS I

STARING

got a kick out of “Roadblocks” by Veronica Gaylie (Geist 88), about an awkward job interview where the interviewers stared. And stared. And stared. And I felt nothing but sympathy for the interviewee with her cringeworthy wardrobe malfunction.

I once interviewed a young man for a job. He came in late, sporting a perfectly waxed handlebar moustache, and started out by mixing us up with a different company. When asked why he wanted to work with us, he said, “Well I don’t, not really, but see…”

The other interviewers and I just sat and stared. And stared. And stared.

I could feel that same awkwardness dripping off Gaylie’s page.

—Emma Foss, Stittsville ON Read “Roadblocks” and other work by Veronica Gaylie at geist.com/topics/ gaylie-veronica.

R

PASSING

eading “Welfare” by Sheila Gilhooly (No. 88), about her posing as a work-today-get-paid-today male labourer, reminded me of other tales of women passing themselves off as men, which have intrigued me since girlhood. While devouring P.C. Wren’s books, I considered the French Foreign Legion as a career option (the flattering uniform, the horses, the travel) until the peeing problem dampened my enthusiasm. Just how did that girl posing as a male legionnaire manage to relieve herself in the desert? And those girls posing as boys who joined the navy or became pirates? How did they go without revealing their gender? Gilhooly’s story satisfied my curiosity.

—A.M. Coid, Vancouver Read “Welfare” by Sheila Gilhooly at geist.com/topics/gilhooly-sheila.

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

Contents copyright © 2013 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved.

APOLOGIZING (OR NOT)

S

ue Goyette’s piece “Canadian Apology” (No. 88) made my blood boil. Who is this “we” she talks about?

It surely doesn’t include me. In the first place, I’ve yet to hear a Canadian from any part of our country pronounce about as “aboot,” unless he’s just off the boat from Glasgow. In the second place, then, is she an American? Only Americans think Canadians pronounce about as “aboot.” Untrue, biased, unfunny. Goyette doesn’t like “us” Canadians much.

—Marian Morgan, Mississauga ON Read “Canadian Apology” by Sue Goyette at geist.com, and weigh in!

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RELATING As a member of a dysfunctional family, I was very interested to read Jocelyn Kuang’s notes on books by “The Jonathans”—This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper, and The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Endnotes, No. 88). I am going to check out Tropper’s book, which

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.

Declan Wiffen, working at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in the Marais District of Paris, holding a copy of Geist 77. The Red Wheelbarrow closed in September 2012.

Letters 5

www.geist.com

Kuang preferred. I’ll soon be heading home to Winnipeg to see family—maybe Tropper’s characters have some insight to help me cope!

—Clayton W., Vancouver “The Jonathans” by Jocelyn Kuang, and notes on many other books, can be read at geist.com/topics/reviews.

BARING It upsets me that I can no longer read Geist in public. Why would I need to see a row of men’s behinds in a literary magazine? (“Glenn Lewis: The Artist As a Fraud,” No. 88.) I hardly consider this art, and I feel as though I must tuck the issue out of sight when my family comes over.

—Jo Hargrave, Edmonton Read “The Artist As a Fraud” at geist.com.

criminalizing their activities than providing them with a secure and legitimate space to work. I applaud the women who rallied across Canada recently in support of sex workers’ rights, and I await with interest the Supreme Court decision in the Bedford et al. case. We owe these courageous women our support.

—Lynn Myerson, Vancouver Read more by Daniel Francis at geist. com/topics/francis-daniel.

I

TAGGING

was intrigued by “A Brief History of Tags” by Alberto Manguel (No. 88), about the organizing and categorizing of texts through history. I’m a web guy, and to me tags are pure logic and structure—closer to math than poetry.

Parts of Manguel’s essay stuck with WORKING me, like the words we jot down when reading that strike a chord and may applaud Daniel Francis for his have little to do with the book as a thoughtful appraisal in “Come whole. But I was disappointed that he to the Cabaret” (No. 88), about the didn’t make a connection with techPenthouse strip club and the missing nology and how tags are used today. women in Vancouver. It may be tenuIn HTML, tags take simple words ous to link the closing of a nightclub and assign them meaning, structure with Robert Pickton’s murders, but and importance. Take <em>, the tag Francis brings to light an important used to italicize a word—it’s short for issue: the failure of governments to “emphasis,” and it helps convey the keep sex workers safe. Even now, offiway a speaker changes tone. The tag cials are more concerned with keepisn’t just decorative typography. It tells ing these women out of sight and a person using a screen reader, someone who can’t see the text on screen, that the word has extra importance. These little tags are more important than ever now that content is increasingly being delivered on electronic devices.

—Terry McGrath, Winnipeg Read “A Brief History of Tagging” and other essays

by Alberto Manguel at geist.

Jocelyn Kuang reading Geist 85 at Shibuya Crossing, com/topics/manguel-alberto.

Tokyo, Japan, 2013.

I

6 Geist 89 Summer 2013

“N

FALLING

ext Door Café” by Carmine Starnino (No. 87) is spectacular. I have fallen in love with the flow of the sentences and the solid images.

I want to drink this poem.

—Chelene Knight, Vancouver Read Carmine Starnino’s work at geist. com/fact/poetry/next-door-cafe/.

write to g e i s t

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

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

a rtists in this issue

David Collier is a cartoonist and creator of Portraits from Life, Collier’s Popular Press and Just the Facts. His most recent book, Hamilton Illustrated, won the Doug Wright Award for best experimental comic.

Eve Corbel is a writer, illustrator and comix maker. Her drawings graced the covers of several books in the Little Books series (Arsenal Pulp), and her illustrations and true funnies have been published in Geist and in miscellaneous zines, books and periodicals.

Alec Dempster is a musician and artist who has had solo exhibitions of his work in the United States, Canada, Mexico, France and Spain. He lives in Toronto.

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.

New from Borealis Press

STONE STAIRS & STEEPLE BELLS The Short, Shocking Life of Fugitive Leonard Roche

BILL MACDONALD If life is a journey, then buckle up, because Leonard is behind the wheel and on the run, and we have a full tank of gas.

191 pages, Paperback ISBN: 9780888874429

At better bookstores everywhere.

Or at www.borealispress.com borealispress.com

Letters 7

NOTES & DISPATCHES f r o m

t h e

n e w

w o r l d

Pathfinder Deluxe stephen osborne

A young man acquires a 1957 Pontiac with a big Strato-Flash V8 engine, whose purpose is purely to go—Glenn Gould-style

O

n a Monday afternoon in May I walked out of the Burrard Health Centre after a disquieting session with the ophthalmologist on the fourth floor, with my pupils dilated and my eyes tearing up in the sunlight. As I peered into the street and across to the alley that runs into Burrard Street from Thurlow, I remembered the 1957 Pontiac sedan given to me in the spring of 1972 by Richard B. Simmins, ex-director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, as payment for a spurious debt of twenty-five dollars, and as I waited in front of the Health Centre for my vision to clear I remembered guiding the great bulk of that vehicle, a Pathfinder Deluxe with a Strato-Flash 283 V8 engine, power steering, Turbo-Glide transmission, four-speaker radio, whitewall tires and

8 Geist 89 Summer 2013

enormous chrome bumpers, down that same alley from Thurlow into the Friday night traffic on Burrard Street, looking for a place to park.

I had driven the Pontiac over from Chinatown along Pender Street to Thurlow under the guidance of Richard Simmins, who had given me the keys and the registration in the Delightful Foods Cafe; I dropped him at the Felix Apartments on Melville before setting out as, as Richard Simmins put it, the operator of a bona fide land yacht of my own. My intention was to leave the Pontiac in the street near the Windermere Apartments on Thurlow, where I was living, and go down to the beer parlour on foot, but it was early Friday night and there was nowhere to park, at least no space big enough in my estimation to squeeze

the Pontiac into: my parking experience at the time was limited to Volks­ wagen Beetles, Morris Minors and a 1952 Studebaker with no reverse gear.

After circling the block I turned into the alley beside the Windermere, rolled down to Burrard Street and made the right turn across from the Health Centre, where I was now standing at three o’clock in the afternoon waiting for my eyes to clear; I let the Pontiac take me over to Davie Street and the left turn down the hill and across Granville Street and into the parking lot behind the Cecil Hotel beer parlour, where, when the Pontiac had come to a halt between the white lines on the asphalt, I slipped the big gearshift on the steering column into P for Park, as instructed earlier

by Richard Simmins, jammed on the

emergency brake with my left foot, turned off the lights, switched off the radio and rolled up the window. Then I went into the Cecil through the back door, to let my friends know of my strange good fortune.

Richard B. Simmins was my father’s age, a secretive man given to tweed jackets and corduroy trousers.

The Delightful Foods Cafe was his favourite restaurant, brightly lit as I remember it, and filled with patrons speaking quietly at tables with Formica tops and chrome trim amid the clang of pots and pans and loud talk eman­ at­ ing from the kitchen, where men and women and at least two children often seemed to be arguing fiercely.

We ate fried noodles and prawns in black bean sauce and slices of barbecued pork dipped in hot mustard, and pickled cabbage and bamboo shoots, and more small dishes ordered in a whisper by the man who had taught me among other things how to cook a bratwurst sausage in a frying pan in a quarter inch of water. His goatee and moustache were always beautifully trimmed; a friend once asked me for an introduction to Richard Simmins so that he might obtain advice on growing a beard of his own. Often at these meetings in the Delightful Foods Cafe Richard Simmins had an announcement to make, or a confidence to share—intended, it seemed to me, perhaps unfairly, to thicken the aura of mystery about his person. On this Friday evening in 1972, he spoke at length of his admiration for Glenn Gould, the classical pianist whom he may or may not have known as a friend, and about whom I knew nothing at all. Glenn Gould, besides being one of the great pianists of the world, Richard Simmins said, liked to cruise the highways of northern Ontario alone in his Lincoln Continental while listening to pop music on the radio, a pastime, Richard Simmins said, in complete confidence, that he himself had taken up, in the 1957 Pontiac with the Strato-Flash V8 that he had acquired in emulation of

the much wealthier Glenn Gould, and for months now Richard Simmins had been driving out of the city on his own, he said, along the secondary highways up to Squamish, Pemberton and Lillooet and through the Fraser Canyon to Spuzzum, Yale, Spences Bridge and Boston Bar. As we neared the end of our meal, he changed the subject to an old debt of twenty-five dollars that he had claimed to owe me from time to time, and of which I had no memory; and there may have been favours that I had done for Richard Simmins that I have forgotten now; in the event, the keys to the Pontiac appeared on the table and in another moment I was the owner of the 1957 Pontiac with the Strato-Flash V8 and the fourspeaker radio, and inheritor of the spirit of the great Glenn Gould.

I

left the Cecil beer parlour at closing time and waited in the Pontiac for the last drinkers to clear the parking lot before switching on and rolling out to Davie Street, and then instead of driving back to the Windermere I swung left onto Granville Street and powered up onto the Granville Bridge and over the bridge to the intersection at Broadway, made the left turn and crawled along for a couple of blocks to Denny’s, the twenty-fourhour diner where my friends at the Cecil had said they planned to meet after the beer parlour closed; I spun the wheel and let the Pontiac roll smoothly over the curb into the parking lot, slipped it into Park, set the brake and switched off the ignition.

It was three o’clock in the morning when I got back into the Pontiac and applied the Simmins procedure for the third time: ignition, lights, brake, transmission, gas pedal. Again the Pontiac shivered into life and began to roll, backward a half turn, then forward to the sidewalk, where I halted to wait for a pedestrian to pass, a woman alone and unsteady on her feet, who faltered

as she stepped into the headlights and put a hand onto the hood of the Pontiac. She was dressed in a black jacket and jeans; she held the other hand up to the side of her face; she may have been drunk, but when I got out of the car I could see that she had been beaten up. I remember glancing over my shoulder as if expecting something or someone to be there, along that bleak stretch of Broadway illuminated by the lurid neon of the BOWMAC car dealership and the fluorescence leaking from the windows of Denny’s, but there was no one, no ambulance, no police car, no assailant in sight.

I opened the passenger door and she got in, and I closed the door and went around to the driver’s side and slipped the Pontiac into Drive.

We swung left onto Broadway and I touched the gas pedal and in another moment we were rolling down Granville Street back the way I had come, over the bridge to Davie and then left up to St. Paul’s Hospital on Burrard, across the alley from the Windermere Apartments. I pulled over near the Emergency entrance to prepare for the U-turn in the parking bay. I’ll take you in here, I said to my passenger, who had been silent the whole time.

Now she was shaking her head and I had to lean over to hear her. I have to go home, she said. Can you take me home, please. I could see only the side of her face; she turned toward me and lifted her hand to reveal a smashed cheek, a swollen eye, a broken lip: she had been wounded. No hospital, please, she said. She lived in North Vancouver, on the Reserve, she said, which was a long drive away, half an hour through Stanley Park and over Lions Gate Bridge; any misgiving I felt was countered instantly, I remember clearly, by the mere fact of the Pontiac itself, so recently acquired, and the purpose of which was purely to go somewhere, to go.

We continued down Burrard and took the left onto Georgia and cruised through the intersections at 29 miles Notes & Dispatches 9

per hour; once onto the causeway through Stanley Park, I felt something like the open road calling as we swept along under the shadow of the big firs flickering in the chemical light of the street lamps, and then a hint of what eight cylinders can do as we powered over the big span of Lions Gate Bridge across Burrard Inlet; we made another two miles along Marine Drive and I took the left fork away from the ocean and told my passenger that I couldn’t take her home without checking in at a hospital, Lions Gate Hospital, up the hill from the Reserve. I know people there, I said, and I told her that I would wait for her. She didn’t protest, and when we pulled into the driveway at Emergency and stopped the car it was clear that she was in pain; I tried to ease her way into the hospital and into the wheelchair provided by an attentive nurse. Another nurse, or perhaps an attendant, took down what details I could give her and seemed confused when I explained

that I didn’t know the injured woman.

She went away and came back and told me that I ought to take my passenger back over the bridge to a hospital downtown. I refused. At some point a Mountie came into the ward and wanted to know why I had picked up this woman at such a late hour and brought her such a long way. Finally I told the nurses behind the counter that my father was the chief surgeon at Lions Gate Hospital, a confession that I would have preferred not to make, and that if they did not attend to the injured woman, I would call my father and get him down here to do it himself.

I was left alone on a bench for an hour or two hours; I had a copy of City Life by Donald Barthelme, which I recall reading all the way through in the waiting room of Lions Gate Hospital as I waited for news of my passenger. And then one of the nurses appeared and said that my friend was asking for me. They had found

a bed for her for the night, she said.

She took me down the hall and into a small room in which the woman lay in bed under immaculate white sheets. Her face was partially bandaged and she was quite beautiful as she managed a crooked smile and put her hand out to me. I stood there for a while holding her hand. She was very handsome, with her hair spread out over the white pillow. I would like to know you, she said.

W

hen I powered up the Pontiac for the last time there was light in the east and the night was beginning to vanish. I had the radio on, and something on the hit parade was playing and I had the window open. When I crossed back over Lions Gate Bridge, I swung off the causeway onto Stanley Park Drive, a narrow paved road through the forest, and motored on past Prospect Point, Third Beach, Siwash Rock, the Hollow Tree, Ferguson Point Tea Room, the grave of Pauline Johnson, Second Beach and finally the tennis courts and English Bay. I could hear birds. I don’t recall thinking about Glenn Gould.

The Pontiac shot smoothly up the hill on Davie Street and soon I was back where I had started, looking for a place to park near the Windermere on Thurlow Street.

During the drive to the hospital I had asked my passenger her name; she told me but I have forgotten it. I told her that I had just acquired the Pontiac and that this was the first time I would be taking it over Lions Gate Bridge. I recall her saying to me in a whisper, “Indians like Pontiacs,” and nothing else as we drove through the night.

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editorin-chief of Geist. He is also the awardwinning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works—most recently “Everything Is Perfect” (No. 88)—many of which can be read at geist.com.

10 Geist 89 Summer 2013

p r o j e c t i o n s

Notes & Dispatches 11

12 Geist 89 Summer 2013

Notes & Dispatches 13

h o m a g e

Gravitass sara cassidy

I would love to have a man’s ass, which is less bottom than top, a firm bulb on sprung stems, like garlic, but only a couple of cloves.

Men have the best butts, I think, studying a photo of nude men (in a literary magazine, ahem), as my soft bottom yields beneath me where I lie in bed, anxious again, realizing that these days I’m afraid of the moon. And once I was in love with the moon, knew it personally, it was mine and kept being mine, over and over, punctuating the sky whether I was drunk or reading a poem so brilliant I’d have to look up from the page as out a window.

I suppose I discovered at some murky point that everyone loved the moon, everyone was embroiled in the same affair. Wisdom is frequently humiliating. But I’ve learned to translate humiliation into maturity, which assures me now that everyone fears the moon! I reach for my magazine again, adjust my glasses, which are cheap, Made in China, assembled on the unseen side of the world, probably worse for my eyes than good, but does it matter?

I imagine going blind and the picture sucks: no, I’d rather not go down that hole that will never be dug. Once an employer said, as I squinted over the contract, when you’re regularized you’ll get

14 Geist 89 Summer 2013

great eyeglasses. That was years ago and I remain term faculty. The term term sticks in my throat, no longer a glowing, ripening season but a chip of something stony. Terminal, termite, termagant.

If my bottom weren’t so soft, maybe things would be different. I would have upwardness, lift, less gravitass.

A sigh sounds through the house, small bellows wheezing at a fire. It seeps from one of my children asleep in his or her bed. Oh, wealth. My wide, ample stores of love kindle for my offspring, who fill my days with the unknown labours of the single mother, and all the joys of motherhood. I remove my bad glasses, extinguish the lamp, put my head to my softish pillow and bravely glance at the moon, that constant bulb– perhaps I could win back its hard love, after all.

Sara Cassidy is the author of two chapbooks, Sardines (Greenboathouse Press) and Ultrasound of My Heart (Reference West), and many shorter works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry published in Geist, Prairie Fire, Grain, ottawater, the Malahat Review and other publications. “Gravitass” was inspired by the photograph Nude Sharkfin Swimmers (1973) in Geist 88, in an article about Glenn Lewis (a.k.a.

Flakey Rrose Hip). Read more of Cassidy’s work at geist.com.

t r u e

f u n n i e s

Notes & Dispatches 15

a c c o l a d e s

My Prizes: A Memoir devon code

An account of the circumstances surrounding seven literary honours bestowed on me

E

very time I review my curriculum vitae I am pleasantly reminded of my small accumulation of literary awards and distinctions. But a CV is, by definition, only a summary. I offer here a fuller account of the circumstances surrounding the various honours bestowed upon me in the years since my career began. t h e aeon award

In 2006, I was awarded third place in the Aeon Award Short Fiction Contest. The winner of the Aeon Award receives £1000. As third-place winner, my story was published in an Irish magazine of science fiction, fantasy and horror, for which I received a £5 honorarium. Then, in 2009, my landlord contacted me to inquire whether I was in fact the same person who had been awarded third place in the 2006 Aeon Award Short Fiction Contest. I informed him that I was. He purchased a copy of my short story collection, in which the thirdplace story was reprinted. The price my landlord paid for my short story collection was approximately twice as much as I had been awarded as thirdplace winner of the Aeon Award 16 Geist 89 Summer 2013

Short Fiction Contest, or one onehundredth of what I paid my landlord for my monthly rent. the most likely prize

In 1999, the editors of the Prince Andrew High School yearbook deemed me the graduating student “most likely to be published.” I shared this distinction with Elizabeth C., selected by the yearbook editors as co-recipient. I have no recollection of Elizabeth C., nor do I know if she has been published as the yearbook editors predicted. the royal canadian legion annual literary and poster contest prize

In 1996, I placed third in the intermediate category of the Royal Canadian Legion Annual Literary and Poster Contest for the jurisdiction of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. No cash prize was associated with my thirdplace award in the municipal jurisdiction. My story then advanced to the provincial jurisdiction, where it was awarded second prize, for which I received a certificate of recognition and a cheque for $35.

l a s t

w o r d s

Holy Dying Dora alexandra dragland Exclamations, interjections, expletives from my grandmother, age ninety-three Ahh pfff shh Bi-gully Bi-jeepers Bi-the-thundering-Jesus But hey Damn it all to hell Hey Jesus Murphy Hey lookit Him there, he’s a loud mouth Holy bald-headed American Holy cripes Holy lifters Holy Moses Holy sufferin’ cats Holy dying Dora Holy shit mother I can’t dance, you take the baby and I’ll try it I’d fart right in Luongo’s face If that wouldn’t skin you alive It was all blind pig I need that like I need a sore hole Oh the death of Christ

Let me tell you, I should know Left them laughing in their beards No sir-ee No you listen you shit Only half a pound of butter on the ass Put the kibosh to that Sabonican Bogus Sentimental Jesus Such is life Sure as shit There’s no two ways about it You bet your butties You easy you Well no Well yes Well all right What’s cookin’ t’day?

the book r e a d i n g p r i z e

habits. I won this prize and went on to win the Book Reading Prize twice more, accumulating a total of $45 in bookstore gift certificates before I myself was disqualified. Unlike my classmate’s disqualification, mine was honourable: I had demonstrated that my reading prowess was entirely without equal. My own disqualification, like that of my classmate, came as a relief, for it allowed me to read books of greater length and complexity.

Of all the literary prizes I have ever been awarded, the Book Reading Prize, which I won in 1992, was the most embroiled in controversy. I was awarded a $15 bookstore gift certificate for being the first student in my grade 5 class to read ten books and report on them to our teacher.

During the competition, a classmate was disqualified when, after a heated exchange with the teacher, he admitted to having reported on books he had read before the competition had officially begun. This incident was for me a tremendous relief, for I had subjected myself to considerable strain in attempting to equal what I understood to be his prodigious reading

Alexandra Dragland grew up in BC and Alberta. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches EAL.

the relit awards

In 2008, my debut short story collection appeared on a longlist for the ReLit Awards, a literary prize of which I had no prior knowledge. The other titles on the longlist for the 2008

ReLit Awards included Up on the Roof; The Goldfish Dancer; Seven Openings of the Head; What Belongs; The Breakdown So Far; The Penance Drummer; Black Rabbit; Bix’s Trumpet; Boys; At the Bottom of the Sky; Six Ways to Sunday; One Day It Happens; A Feat of Longing; Long Story Short; The Woman Who Walks on Glass; All in Together Girls; Long After Fathers; The Reckoning of Boston Jim; I, Tania; The Outlander; Shelf Monkey; Orphan Love; The Milk Chicken Bomb; Glass Voices; Macdonald; Dirtbags; Homing; The Flannigans; Dohaney; The Silent Time; The Convictions of Leonard McKinley; A Place of Pretty Flowers; Brother Dumb; Big White Knuckles; As Good as Dead; Be Good; Coureurs de Bois; Bottle Rocket Hearts; The Book of Beasts; Where White Horses Gallop; Correction Road; Smuggling Donkeys; 74 Miles Away; Post; White; The Skin Beneath; Room Tone; Soucouyant; Be Wolf; Snow Candy; Stealing Nasreen; The Housekeeping Journals; Planet Reese; The Prison Tangram; Crown Shyness; The Flush of Victory; Delible; Pulpy & Midge; The Hole Show; Made Beautiful by Use; The Bindery; Natural Disasters; My Mother Agrees with the Dead; ths is erth thees ar peopul; Falsework; Vermeer’s Light; Going Around with Bachelors; Full Depth; My Etruscan Face; The Stone Skippers; Erratic; Accidental Animals; The Shovel; Loyalty Management; All Things Said & Done; Sitcom; Two Hemispheres; Selected Portraits; Thin Moon Psalm; Rental Van; Muybridge’s Horse; High Speed Through Shoaling Water; Songs for the Dancing Chicken; Impersonating Flowers; The Discipline of Undressing; Combustion; Quotidian Fever; Domain; Torch River; O, Clytaemnestra!; Soft Geography; I Cut My Finger; Earth’s Crude Gravities; Adagio for the Pressured Surround; Red Bird; I’m Not Going to Lie to You; Beatitudes; Making Bones Walk; Cleavage: A Life in Breasts; The Sweet Fuels; Found; More to Keep Us Warm; Woodshedding; Broken Vessel; Old Winter; The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder; The Tablecloth Trick; Last Water Song; AEthel; All Our Wonder Unavenged; The Bone Broker; Notes & Dispatches 17

Why Are You So Sad?; Last Scattering Surfaces; Hands Reaching in Water and Floors of Enduring Beauty.

No cash prizes are associated with the ReLit Awards. the crazyhorse fiction prize

In 2008, I was one of six finalists for the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, for which there were approximately 900 entries. The winner was awarded $2,000 US and publication in the literary journal Crazyhorse. When I did not win the prize, the editors of Crazy­horse informed me that my story would nevertheless be considered for publication. Several months later, the editors decided to reject the story.

In the years that followed, the story that had been a finalist for the Crazy­ horse Fiction Prize was rejected an additional fifteen times before it was eventually accepted for publication. the journey prize

In 2010, I was awarded the Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Since winning this prize I have received no further recognition from awards juries or content judges of any kind. Because I did not know I was to win this prize, only my wife accompanied me to the awards ceremony. The Journey Prize consists of a certificate of recognition and $10,000. With the prize winnings I paid off the balance of my student loan and purchased a large television set. I also promised to take my wife to a fine restaurant. I have not yet honoured this promise, which does not matter, since my wife has since forgotten.

Devon Code is the author of In A Mist, a collection of stories. In 2010, he was the recipient of the Journey Prize. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario, and at devoncode. ca. “My Prizes: A Memoir” is inspired by Meine Preise (My Prizes: An Accounting) by Thomas Bernhard, essays about his literary prizes.

18 Geist 89 Summer 2013

a f t e r l i f e

o f

c u l t u r e

Not Reading stephen henighan What we do when we absorb words from a screen— and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading

R

eading a book is an act of concentration that abolishes the world. As the type on the page dissolves before the reader’s private re-creation of the people, images or ideas that the ink evokes, reality is enhanced by insights, emotions or perceptions that were not there before. This compensatory quality is the product of concentration; it arises because reading is linear, reeling us along sentence by sentence toward a series of revelations. Reading a book remakes the temporality of the physical world. The shapelessness of experience yields to a chronology whose internal symmetry feels superior to the disorder of life. Bookbased transcendence fuelled the three ancient Middle Eastern monotheisms that became the core religions of the early modern period in the West and on its fringes, and which were exported to other continents; all were “religions of the book.”

The book’s sacred status survived the secularization of society.

The words of the imaginative writer,

particularly the novelist, invested specific social configurations with mythic resonance: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, García Márquez’s Macondo, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo. The act of reading not only dramatized existing reality; it nourished the urge to implement alternative forms of social organization. In societies that were colonized, formally or informally, even the most fanciful tale inspired acts of rebellion simply because the story lent imaginative autonomy to reality. Fiction became the tissue of revolutionary spirituality. In the Argentine writer Liliana Heker’s novel The End of the Story, a torturer complains to a leftist guerrilla he has captured: “In every house we go into—Do you know what we find there? Books, thousands of books. You’d have to be Superman

to classify them, to find out what those books did to you, why they messed up your brains like that.”

The inseparability of books and revolution is axiomatic; no insurgent cell was complete without its manifesto—or its library. Linking the end of the Cold War to the advent of digital society, the French revolutionary fellow traveller Régis Debray classified the Third World Marxism of the period between 1959 and 1990 as “the last religion of the book.”

More than a decade ago, when I moved to the university town where I teach, it was common to see students reading books on municipal buses.

Now, with the exception of the occasional nerd stuck into a fantasy novel, or a diligent student poring over a diagram-filled textbook on her lap, this sight has disappeared. The students travel in stooped postures, jabbing their cellphones with their thumbs.

Most of this jabbing is texting, or playing solitaire; but even when the students are browsing online course Afterlife of Culture 19

readings, what they are doing is not reading, because they are not performing an act of concentration, but rather one of perpetual distraction.

As Marshall McLuhan perceived, the medium is the message. Reading is an act confined to books and magazines, and, in somewhat more scattered form, newspapers; what we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it— is not reading.

When we read on screen, the translucent surface holds the text at a remove from our fingers, displaying it under glass like an archaic specimen.

This distance blunts our immersion in the words, causing us to regard them with irony even when we are enthusiastic about what they say. By making all events equally available (and equally distant), the screen engenders a simultaneity that nullifies the words’ ability to forge an alternative chronology or a summation of what the world is like. The screen’s imposition

of historical simultaneity, in which events that occurred centuries apart appear side by side in undifferentiated sameness, is accentuated by the more agitated simultaneity of the multi-window experience. Whatever I may be looking at, I feel hectored by other screens that want my attention: email, Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, work-related sites. In proceeding through a book, a reader accepts a pact. She is aware of breaking that pact if her attention wanders, if she flips ahead or puts the book down; the on-screen experience, by contrast, depends on the compulsive, fidgety sampling of the individual who keeps all his options open. The term ebook, more than a misnomer, is an oxymoron: we may read a text on a screen, in between anxious jumps to other windows, but we do not read a book because we do not achieve the level of concentration necessary to experience the spiritual or artistic affects that books provide. Some software

even invites the user to read the book and watch the movie at the same time.

A tweet is a perfect match with the medium of the screen; approaching a book in this way is like trying to view the rings of Saturn with cheap binoculars.

The genres of the screen are diverging from those of the page.

Forgettable formula fiction accounts for the largest swathe of ebook sales; most readers of literary fiction and serious non-fiction prefer print. A short story in an online journal does not aspire to the Modernist unities sought by print quarterlies. No one remembers forever characters encountered in an ebook, nor are the students on the buses deeply marked by their first encounters with Plato, Marx or Freud when these readings are downloaded onto their phones.

On the screen, the magazine or newspaper’s magisterial feature article is replaced by a truncated, fragmented text studded with hyperlinks; even the opinion column is blunted and diminished when it transmutes into the blog post. The distinctive forms of the screen, along with their imaginative trivialization and social paralysis, leak back into print as newspapers shorten their features and jazz up their front pages to meet the visual expectations of online browsers. Social media may organize the committed to sign a petition or even attend a rally, but unlike books, screens cannot make converts by transforming the individual’s conception of a sacred chronology. Commitment yields to irony, concentration to distraction. Whatever we may be doing on our screens, we are not reading.

Stephen Henighan is the author of A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (Biblioasis, 2008). His most recent book is A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change (Linda Leith Publishing, 2013).

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

20 Geist 89 Summer 2013

FINDINGS

Family Piano and Bison, from Home and Heterotopia: The Wild Alberta Series. Lindsey Bond is a photo-media artist.

She lives in Winnipeg and at lindseybond.ca.

Grandpa’s Fries sarah selecky “Grandpa’s Fries” first appeared in Prism 51:2. Sarah Selecky wrote This Cake Is for the Party and created Story Is a State of Mind, a digital creative writing program.

She lives in Toronto.

M

y grandma was Italian, extremely petite, and superb in the kitchen.

She taught me how to make fluffy, airfilled tapioca by whipping egg whites into meringue before stirring them into hot milk. She liked to eat oranges with thin slices of Vidalia onions, garbanzos, and a slim drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on top. Grandma always served herself on side plates, or in small glass ramekins, to make sure she ate tiny portions.

My grandpa, however, was Polish, morbidly obese, and liked to show off by eating strips of raw bacon. He’d

dangle the bacon over his mouth, wiggle it, and then lap it up with a grin while my cousins and I squealed in horror. He ate three meals a day in his brown La-Z-Boy while he watched television, and he kept a generous stash of hard candies in the side table drawer beside him. Our game: to pester Grandpa slowly and deliberately until he yelled at us or gave us candy.

He usually gave us candy at first, which meant we would come back to push our luck a second time. Then he’d yell.

This terrified us in the best way.

My cousins and I were at our

grandparents’ house in Evansville, Indiana on the day of the tornado warning. This was the first time I’d experienced one, but my cousins lived through tornadoes every year; they weren’t afraid this time, and I followed their lead. My three cousins lived in Evansville, so they often stayed with our grandparents during the day. I was visiting from Sudbury, and this was the first time my parents left me there on my own. In their absence, my grandparents’ house felt different, more tangible. It was as though a pane of glass had been removed from a diorama, and now, on my own, I was free to see and touch and live in the real house.

As soon as the rain started, Grandma called us down to the basement, the safest place to be during a thunderstorm in tornado season.

Grandpa ignored her, so we did too.

Findings 21

He heated a pot of oil and stood at the kitchen counter and sliced a whole bag of russet potatoes. He chopped each potato in half lengthwise first, then chopped it again three or four times to make long wedges.

The sky grew darker and darker as he worked. Grandpa kept the peels on; that’s where the vitamins were, he said. Then he plunged them into the oil. The rain was coming down sideways and thunder shook the kitchen walls.

Grandpa’s colossal body filled the room like the weather; his billowing grey sweatpants and T-shirt loomed above us. Grandma stayed downstairs for all of this, in part because of the storm, in part because she didn’t like to watch Grandpa use the deepfryer in her kitchen. The storm only enhanced his performance.

When each batch was ready, he scooped them out of the oil with a slotted spoon and dumped them out on a cookie sheet lined with paper towels. They were steaming hot, crispy and golden. The light coming out from under the stove hood was the only light in the dark kitchen, and it cast a glow that made the fries look dramatically bright. Grandpa let me and my cousins salt the potatoes after each batch was done. We took turns with the shaker. Then he’d put another few handfuls of wedges into the hot oil, and we’d wait for the next batch. We were way too afraid of Grandpa to sneak any into our mouths.

The storm closed in as Grandpa cooked. He didn’t rush it, though. It must have taken him about half an hour. The last batch was done just before the power went out. There was still enough light to see—it was only mid-afternoon—but the clouds had turned the yellow-green of a bad bruise.

Grandma still waited for us downstairs.

GEIST ALERT Google Alert results for “ Geist.”

22 Geist 89 Summer 2013



We brought the fries to the basement on a big white plate. Grandma had put out paper napkins for us, even though she wouldn’t be eating any of it. She’d turned on the little red radio and was listening to the news.

The storm took some trees down in the neighbourhood. One came down across the street. Men with chainsaws would have to come chop it up and clear the road the next morning. My aunt and uncle would have to replace their garage because of the damage; fallen branches from the tree next door had crushed the roof. No one was hurt. We were lucky.

In the years before and since, Evansville has seen more than one powerful tornado rip through the city: entire subdivisions have been destroyed. On this day, the storm

must have been more dangerous than Grandma and Grandpa let on. But learning about the danger came years later; I don’t even remember hearing the news that day, even though I know Grandma was listening to it. What I do remember: the wind and rain whipping at the small basement windows, the vibration from heavy thunder, like something was being thrown at us from above, and the potent feeling of polished independence that came from spending the day with my grandparents. I would call it sophistication, if I were to describe that feeling today.

But I was a child—only seven years old—and besides, it feels more honest to name it with the food itself, the flavour of which is so vivid I can taste it now: Grandpa’s fries, still hot from the oil, almost sweet, crunchy with too much salt. 

Sandcastles jesus hardwell From Easy Living, published in 2011 by Exile Editions. Jesus Hardwell is at work on a second volume of stories and a number of plays. He lives in Guelph, ON.

T

hey were boys running, three young boys with no place they had to be because they were there already, running on the beach with the summer inside them. The thin ones were brothers and the heavy one their friend, and as they ran he lagged, but they were all together, slapping their feet on the sand and kicking through the surf flashed by the sun. It was cider light, stronger than usual. Yet the sky was low, and held a drape of smolder, for there was always haze. Most days it didn’t burn, staying heavy like grey wool and everything was vague. Today it was sparse, the wool pulled to gauze, and the sun came warm on their backs,

their faces, on the new brown of their bodies, theirs to use.

The part of the beach where they were was crescent-shaped with a bluff behind, so it harboured the wind and enlarged it. But there wasn’t much now, only weak lifts from the sea.

They spread their arms and held them, and when the breeze caught they became gulls anyway, fierce ebullient gulls with the throats of boys snatching the air fresh alive in their mouths. They climbed, stunted, soared. They scanned and drifted, and they swooped the pipers to see them skip. One of the boys roared and banked. He returned a plane, a fighter pilot in a spindle plane with

squirrel statue missing from corvallis park: Jude Geist of the parks department is hoping the theft is what he called “a drunken college prank,” but he fears the statue was sold as scrap metal. teena geist

Worldwide Nemesis, 2008, ink and coloured pencil on paper, by Tim Pitsiulak, appeared in the exhibition Animal Power: Images in Contemporary Inuit Art, at the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver, April 20–June 8, 2013. Tim Pitsiulak lives in Cape Dorset, Nunavut.

blazing wings, so the others were, too, and they fought their shadows until each where they crossed crashed laughing down, and lay dead on the dunes.

Waiting for their breath they counted the waves—spools rolling, unrolling, long white furls like shavings, cresting and falling apart, gathering again—then forgot the waves and leapt up, roamed. Away from the shore, up where the banks curved and cliffed out, there was slashgrass that hid nests sometimes, so there might be eggs. They went there looking, poking around. One plucked a tine of the grass and blew a squall between his thumbs. Don’t cut your lips,

called another, pursing his like their mother. The brother blew louder, laughed.

They jumbled back to the shore, sailed stones and hunted shells. Dogwhelks and mussels, nothing good.

Then suddenly a rare one, a fist-size spiral with a pink mouth. Glassy and cool, they held it to their ears, each other’s ears to share the sea there, hear it surge in them and deepen.

That was fine. After, they put it down carefully, and paced back steps like duelists, turned, and smashed it with rocks. Then, because there was no one to scold them no, they stared at the sun, seeing who could the longest. When they shut their eyes other

suns appeared, and pinwheels with comet tails glittering back and forth in the black.

The heavy one got a stick, leaned on it and tottered about tapping, his eyes closed and feeling the air with his hand. He said he was blind, he was old and blind now, and please would they show him to the hospital? The brothers snorted and hooted, he looked so funny with his big legs in shorts and his shaky cane. They snapped to his side and led him about, up and down the beach. When they tired of that they said they’d arrived, the nurses could have him and stick him full of needles. They poked him and tried to trip him, at first, but he wouldn’t, so

ascends the stairway symphony at plato’s porno cave: Self-described as “a wild young thing with a history of violence and a key to her mom’s medicine cabinet,” Geist performs in a creepy mask and, despite being a little intimidating, is wildly talented, incorporating storytelling, burlesque, cabaret and dance into her

Findings 23

they spun him instead. The brothers cried faster and he whirled, whirled round and faster round till the beach did with him, and they let him go. He staggered, a drunk old man, and toppled to his knees. He was happy on his knees, very happy but a little ill, and he dove his hands in the sand to still it.

It was then he saw something odd.

When the sun stopped banging and he could balance, he crawled over and fished it out. It was a record, an old 45. It wasn’t broken, hardly scratched.

He showed it to the brothers. One side was “Cattle Drive Blues,” and the other had the title inked out.

They didn’t know who the singer was, but they admired the picture of a guitar, laid against the full face of a moon, with some tiny notes floating up. Each note had a cowboy hat.

One of the brothers said that meant it was country music, which was mostly yodeling. They all tried a few howls until it hurt. Then the brothers wanted to skim the record on the waves, but the heavy one said no, it was his because he’d found it, and he

was going to keep it. He put it on his head for a hat and walked. It wouldn’t stay, so that was nothing. He turned it in his hands instead and made it a wheel, and they were off, with him in the lead now, driving where he would, his cargo of friends chuffing engines behind him.

When they rounded the narrow of the shore, down by the big rocks where the spray hit and the beach opened again, they saw ahead a bright tent pitched low on the sand. They held the horn loud and long. The tent moved. It unbent and stood, and the tent was a man. He saw them and waved. The beach was ruined a bit then. They let go of the train and plodded up aimless to where he was. When they got there, though, it wasn’t a man anymore. It was a woman now, a short round woman in a huge sundress spatted with red dots like measles. She wore rubber boots, and was very pale and had a long fat neck.

Black bangs made her face small, and when she spoke she notched her head aside like a bird asleep. 

Dwindling Crew don kerr From Wind Thrashing Your Heart, published by Hagios Press in 2011. Don Kerr is a retired English professor and Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan. He lives in Saskatoon. ghost stories at the campfire the key for the family cabin is under the back step not a soul inside but us a dwindling crew those who painted the rocks brushed down endlessly the cobwebs tore down the illegal biffy boiled the potatoes mixed the drinks

planted the flowers read the books pointed the pier into the circling lake planted the tiny evergreens now two cabins tall ghosts thin as cobwebs silent as a lake without waves a tree without a breath of breeze we a dwindling crew

Beware the Bluffblast laura trethewey From The Book of Unknowably Obscure and Overly Specific English Words, a work-in-progress by Laura Trethewey. She lives in Toronto.

air pusher Noun A person who, while moving through a revolving door, only pretends to push and thereby shirks the weight of the door onto those in front of or behind her: At high-traffic business towers, air pushers are routinely rounded up and bitch-slapped.

bibliosporia Noun The massive and irretrievable dispersion of overdue library books around the world: Librarian lobbyists descended on Ottawa, determined to push for action on bibliosporia.

boreporize Verb Retell a story multiple times to the same person, with fatal results: Candidate speeches are vetted for any possible threat of boreporizing the crowd. bluffblast Noun A threatening storm that never arrives: The captain hopped out of the boat, cursing the bluffblast that scared him off the water. cralph Noun The persistent but untraceable smell of dog feces: The shipment of books was ruined by cralph. dowinnow Noun A disparaging term for a woman who is believed never to have married due to impossibly high standards: For the rest of his life, he woke from his sleep screaming about dowinnows.

arm-hair-raising performances. 10 essentials: Willie Geist, our favorite early morning TV host, shares his top ten essentials, ranging from super chunky peanut butter to dress shirts. geist man told to stay away from school children after numerous complaints: Police have warned a Geist man for the last

24 Geist 89 Summer 2013

A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times

flatumiate Verb Revel in the smell of one’s own flatulence: Not only did he flatumiate nightly, he chose tight, enclosed spaces, such as elevators and the insides of drainage pipes, to enhance the experience.

hermicholia Noun Profound feelings of guilt caused by staying inside on a pleasant day: August shows the highest rates of hermicholia in women between the ages of 24 and 36. meflect Verb Startle at the appearance of one’s own reflection: I meflected in the glass and spilled tea down my doublet.

rhiject Verb Blow liquid through the nose, often caused by a sudden urge to laugh or cry while drinking a beverage: We shared a common love of rhijecting milkshakes at the opera. publidormiate Verb Sleep in public transitory spaces, such as moving buses and flying planes: The publidormiating woman had her bag of cucumbers stolen on the subway.

sapophobia Noun Irrational fear of residual soapy feeling remaining on hands indefinitely, common after hand-washing delicates in the sink. Also known as “having the Lady Macbeth.” schnittkaputt Noun A completely unnoticeable haircut: The hair salon catered to older ladies who paid high prices for schnittkaputts. writer’s ruse Phrase The condition of believing one’s most recent writing is one’s best writing, while simultaneously fearing that novelty is its only charm: Halfway through the reading of his short story, he looked out over the crowd, overcome with writer’s ruse. 

sheila heti From backtotheworld.net. Sheila Heti is the author of The Middle Stories, Ticknor and her latest book How Should a Person Be? She is the creator of the Trampoline Hall lecture series and she frequently conducts interviews for The Believer. She lives in Toronto. Visit her online at sheilaheti.net.

T

he Globe and Mail—the newspaper I saw my father reading every day when I was growing up—published a profile of me this past weekend. In it, a familiar Canadian story was told: Canadian artist, neglected in Canada, finds acclaim in the States, and only then at home. While there is certainly some truth to this, and a lot of what I said in the piece seemed to corroborate it, I made a point of telling the journalist that my story feels different to me, as does the story of my latest book’s publication, and that I think it’s time for a new story.

Of course, what one says in an interview is always used to support the myth the journalist has—or in this case, that Canada generally has of Canadian artistic success. But it’s not precisely the case that n+1, or the article in the Observer, or the piece in the Guardian, caused the success of the book. Especially in a place like Canada, the ones who facilitate success are primarily the other artists.

While it seems from the article like I have been neglected, the truth is I have had tons of support over the years, more support than any artist could hope for—from writers, painters, musicians and poets.

It isn’t (and I suspect it never has been) the presumed engines of Canadian culture—the Globe and Mail, the Giller Awards, the Governor General’s Awards, etc.—that make Canadian artistic culture. My book was tepidly

reviewed in the Globe three years ago.

I have never received a Canadian award.

Meanwhile, during the seven years I was working on this novel, Margaux Williamson, my artistic collaborator, spent hundreds of hours reading drafts and giving me notes.

I received feedback on drafts from the theatre director Chris Abraham, the novelist Christine Pountney, the artists Shary Boyle and Leanne Shapton, Coach House editor Alana Wilcox, Vancouver novelists Lee Henderson and David Chariandy, former CBC producer and writer Kathryn Borel, the artist Sholem Krishtalka, Geist editor Stephen Osborne, I could go on and on (the poet Ryan Kamstra, the essayist Mark Greif…). Rawi Hage lent me his Montreal apartment so I could finish an edit there. I have never received so much support in my life. These were people with their own work to do. But they helped me.

As we all help each other.

The real story about my book and its “success,” it seems to me, is how it was supported by people who relied on their own judgments, without external validation, who influenced its shape.

The years I spent on my book weren’t years spent alone in my apartment, but a time when I spent weeks touring through Europe with the Toronto- and Berlin-based band, The Hidden Cameras (even though I’m a crummy musician, they still

time. marines powerlift for charity: Sgt. Thomas Geist and Cpl. Michael Politowicz, collectively known as the Stone Bay Bar Benders, have been powerlifting together for just under a year. hamilton woman convicted on drug charge from marijuana-laced candy: A student told authorities that her mother,

Findings 25

put me on stage with an instrument). I worked long hours in Margaux’s painting studio, travelled to the States to meet fellow writers and artists, and participated in the activist projects of Dave Meslin and the Toronto Public Space Committee, all of whom I learned from, whose work and thoughts developed my art and changed its direction.

We live in a place where the official rewards aren’t so grand, but that means something else happens: Artists slide between mediums, they

work on each others’ projects, and new forms emerge. I often think of how the ethos here makes it easy to even find someone to rip tickets at the door of your show.

We put hours into each others’ art, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the only rewards we can count on are the rewards of creating, the pleasures of doing it together, and the satisfaction of being in each other’s audience.

It’s a rich, complex, and intelligently critical world we inhabit: a

world that produces great art, and that does not burn brightest when the CBC or the Globe take notice, or when the Americans or Brits do.

It’s a world populated by writers and artists who give help and recognition without scoping the horizon for whether the arbiters are near. We are the arbiters. Whether the myth of Canadian achievement includes this world or not, this world exists. It’s true. 

Reporting the Wars jamie sharpe From Animal Husbandry Today, published by ECW Press in 2012. Jamie Sharpe lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.

(Halfpenny Gate, 1920) A country priest lies in the middle of the road. He has lost something. The day passes unaware. It rained this morning: gemstones rest on cut wheat; the road’s a thousand lakes.

Mud slowly claims the man’s frock and—half-dried— turns statuary. His resolve’s stiffened also; only eyes move, scanning inches ahead of him or beyond the horizon.

(Avignon, 2007) White streamed off the canvas, hitting the woman in the stomach, seductive like rough foreplay. How many strokes of the painter’s hand had it taken? After placing a pink photocopy of her lips on the work she is tackled, in a less alluring fashion, by the museum’s aging security guard.

Restoration of the painting is priced at $2000.

(New Jersey, 1984) It was half-past ten and already I’d made 46 Reubens, 32 Po’ Boys, 19 Cheesesteaks, 12 Heros, 4 Tuna Melts, and a Dagwood. I was locked in this kitchen yesterday and would be again tomorrow. Who creates a world where fingers smell of mayonnaise and a living’s eked shilling animals on leavened bread?

(Montreal, 1975) A funny joke, given the predicament: “Take everything.

There’s no safe behind the mantel’s painting.” The last line delivered in faux-stutter. Despite being hogtied, the man exerts a measure of control by making the intruder look. The man’s wife shakes her gagged head. The burglar does her one better, by kicking the comic in the stomach.

Everyone’s a critic.

(New Jersey, 1984) “I want to create something evocative and pointless.”

The journalist’s cassette recorder spins noisily, struggling to commit this to memory. “These images accumulate in my mind and I sweep them into the collective’s consciousness.”

The journalist nods vigorously while contemplating what to get at the sandwich shop next door.

(Paris, 1940) The city leaked its contents into the countryside; with most thoroughfares reduced to one lane, the pandemonium commenced at ten kilometres per hour. As a last line of defence, we stood awaiting what had toppled hundreds of thousands and bypassed our precious Maginot Line.

We protected the people, surely, but also the symbol of Paris (which would shortly signify something else).

Andrea McCoy, had produced the candies and that Robert, her stepfather, was a medical marijuana provider. The student then distributed some of those candies on the school bus. In his closing argument, Deputy County Attorney Thorin Geist said McCoy is ultimately responsible for what happens within her home. track and

26 Geist 89 Summer 2013

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle roberto dosil & the government of canada There’s a seven-year waiting list to receive a reminder of the responsibilities that come with Canadian citizenship.

Nov. 7, 2005

August 20, 2012

Mr. Roberto Dosil 1331 Georgia Street West, Suite 2505 Vancouver, British Columbia V6E 4P1

Mr. Roberto Dosil 1002-588 Broughton Street Vancouver, British Columbia V6G 3E3

Dear Mr. Dosil:

Dear Mr. Dosil:

On behalf of the Honourable Scott Brison, Minister of Public Works and Government Services, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence of November 4, 2005, requesting a flag that has flown from the East Block or West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

It gives me great pleasure to provide you with the enclosed Canadian flag, which was flown from the East Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on June 22, 2012.

Thank you for your interest; however, since we do receive a large number of requests for these flags, I would like to point out that given the long waiting list we currently have for East/West Block flags, it may take approximately 6 years before we are able to honour your request. Nevertheless, I have taken the liberty of adding your name to our department’s waiting list.

Please be assured that we will do our best to accommodate your request as quickly as possible.

A nation’s flag is the embodiment of what a country represents. During the past 47 years, our flag has come to be regarded with respect and admiration, both at home and abroad. For many people around the world, the red maple leaf has come to stand for hope and compassion.

The flag is also a symbol of what people of diverse faiths, cultures and linguistic backgrounds can accomplish, and a reminder of the responsibilities that come with citizenship in our great country.

I hope that you will appreciate your flag and that it will always remain for you a source of pride and respect.

Please accept my best wishes.

Yours sincerely, Yours sincerely,

Dan Seekings Chief of Staff

Rona Ambrose Enclosure

field: both pirate teams post solid results at little amik meet: Leading the girls was a runner-up finish by Marietta Geist in the 3200-meter run and a third place finish by Sydney Boike in the triple jump. the frankfurt school, part 2: negative dialectics: Terms such as Wissenschaft and Geist traditionally get

Findings 27

Song of the Old Dog

(Las Canciones del Perro Antiguo) ed frymire This poem arrived, by mistake, in a pile of entries to a Geist poetry contest. Ed Frymire lives in Vancouver and sojourns in Angangueo, Michoacán (where this poem was written); Xilitla, San Luis Potosi; and Bangor, North Wales.

The bells ring again and the cars arrive, day after day—same hour, different hour What do I care!

The bells ring again and I am on the street and promenade, not lost and not found The butterflies are alive and moving.

I move from one scent to another.

I am not lost and not found

But… I know I am too heavy and I complain too much: “These straps are too tight” “Too loose” “The sun is too close, the moon too far away” “Fly closer to the ground! There are no smells up here” “I need mud in my feet and a crotch in my nose” “Land here!

There’s a pile of garbage”

These young whippersnappers (los loquillos) They have no memory!

They sniff and go crazy.

These young ones sometimes take my spot, They are rude and have no stories They have no nose!

I am here forever What do I care! and the bells ring again not lost and not found…

Once I was El Toro… (she sees me but there would be a fight and no one wants that now) I am not lost, yet not found

I know the infinite aroma of you all.

I do remember the perfect aroma of you.

The young butterflies practise flight and grow strong.

They are moving…

I will ask them to strap me on their backs and I will ride the wind

From Loteria Jarocha, by Alec Dempster, published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2013.

translated into “science” and “spirit,” apparently irreconcilable opposites, whereas in philosophical terms the difference between the two is much less marked. elmer’s calls it quits after nearly 60 years of haircuts: Four years shy of his goal, Geist is finally closing up his cozy, venerable barber shop on Tuolumne Street.

28 Geist 89 Summer 2013

According to W.J. Maclean, sworn From Massacre Street, published by the University of Alberta Press in 2013. Paul Zits is a poet whose work has been widely published in literary journals, including Canadian Literature and Arc Poetry Magazine. He lives in Calgary.

well, some say that the dead indians are the good ones but in his life i considered him a good indian this is a live indian and i consider him a good one, yes a good, though a live one

big bear, he was a sort of chief, i believe he was perfectly mute advised them strongly to leave that they had better of, by letters

i seen him, yes, once or twice i am sure of he was doing nothing, no, i believe he had goods not taken by himself however, i think he had some tea i am sure he had some tea given to him

i am a pretty good critic as to handwriting, generally i can identify handwriting very well some of them i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what became of them but some of them i know, that wore into atoms in my pocket two or three little notes

that is the extent of it, he grumbled, i donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know i am sure nothing more than anybody else a characteristic of indians is grumbling it was a good long walk before sunrise, and such when the sun would be at a certain point in the sky had a parley with the chiefs, with the prisoner in the dock that one was listening, although, i did not speak to him nor did he speak to me

i very likely kept them, all that were addressed to myself but they were of very little importance it is possible i may have had others the impression is that i carried away all addressed to me

GEIST tablet edition

the 3rd annual

Geist Erasure Poetry Contest

Winning entries will be published in Geist.

Winners and honourable mentions will be posted at geist.com.

Big cash prizes and the coveted Geist Erasure Poetry Trophy!

your Name

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

GEIST Fact + Fiction ď ? North of America

l i t e r a l

l i t e r a r y

Postcard Lit Winners of the 9th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest FIRST PRIZE

Gone Flat mireille smith

D

inner for one and a couple of wedding rings on the Goodwill pile. And all because he found the body in my trunk.

He couldn’t stop gagging but to sputter on about betrayal and crime and morality, packing his bags with the speed and force of Cupid’s crossbow. He said he’d noticed my tire was flat, figured it would be a nice surprise to change it for me.

(I’d have been surprised, all right. He hadn’t changed anything more complicated than a light bulb since I’d known him. It’s not an insult; his hands were just made for things other than labour.) No, he’d been digging around with a stolen shovel, prowling my territory. He had crept across the border from ours into mine.

We had shared our lives and, consequently, our surroundings and possessions.

Together, we’d also shared separateness: respective sides of the bed, TV chairs, sections of the newspaper, underwear drawers, and cars (with each its trunk).

I remember we used to go dancing, the smoke encircling us as we circled

the dance floor. Afterwards he would breathe into my ear that he loved how the smoke in my hair made me smell like a bad girl. I told him I would never lie to him. He said he would love me forever.

Instead he slammed the trunk shut without even asking me why it was in there.

Mireille Smith lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she works in an academic library.

Postcard Lit 31

SECOND PRIZE

Rattlesnake Rodeo alissa rossi

U

ncle got crushed beneath the Pattullo Bridge. The office is just upstream, next to the houseboat that got busted for the grow-op though no one admitted who owned it. As a surly teenager sitting at the reception desk, I learned the traffic patterns along Front Street. Rush hour and train traffic. “You watching the show,” the voice on the phone, me watching the unusual gridlock. “Jumper on the Pattullo, and you got front row seats.”

Bodies are nothing new. Caught up in the dock, between the tugs and the pilings. Bloated. Murdered, fell. Great-grandfather drowned in the Fraser, but with the family history you never know if it was push or slip. New West is still a frontier town, though it’s as much pawnshops and wedding dresses as drugs and accidents.

Uncle didn’t jump. It was mid-June and freshet had swollen the river up to a kick. He’d taken the Sea Cap III out to assist a barge. Tug caught the current and flipped, he went down with life jacket hooked on something, had to rip it open to get out. Two minutes underwater, and that after being pinned up against the barge.

“Good thing you had one of those old piece-of-shit life jackets on,” I say later.

Cousin is the first to show up at the hospital. When the nurse asks if there are any other conditions, Cousin says, “He’s got a fake leg.” The nurse balks. “Take it off him and hide it. Make it harder to escape.”

When I arrive, everyone is standing around the cot like they’re at a funeral.

Mother introduces me. Uncle looks at her, surprise processing through the

32 Geist 89 Summer 2013

drugs. “I know.” Then to me. “You in Montreal still.” “Yep.” “You moving back.” “Nope.” There is a plastic bottle half full of dark liquid draining from his punctured lung. He is unnatural under the thin sheet, skinny like a mannequin. Older. I see Grandfather in him. In both of them. Same face Uncle, Mother—blank eyes, straight mouth. They run on the energy of cornered rodents. You’d think they weren’t paying attention but they are.

Uncle shifts but can’t, ribs busted all down his spine, collarbone broken.

The deckhand from the barge comes in, all fear sweat and trauma.

Smell hollows my guts. “Jesus,” he says. “I didn’t think you were coming back.” Uncle relaxes, straight line broken into smile, eyes twinkling. They go through the details. The deckhand is fucked, breathing shallow, guilt and dead panic still hunched in his throat.

For Uncle it’s already a story, another for the Uncle-of-a-thousand-lives.

He’ll get one of those new plastic hundred-dollar bills, put it in with the rattlesnake he keeps in his office. Talk about being trapped underwater while the guys eye the money, all dared up by his story. The nurses have the shots, they’ll think. Could be worth it.

Alissa Rossi is a librarian who grew up in the Vancouver area and now lives in Montreal. Her work-in-progress is a series of very short stories.

THIRD PRIZE

To the Man Wearing Christmas Lights in the Apartment off of 7th Ave. NY on December 18th, 2012 micheline maylor

I

saw you. But you knew. You could see me on the rooftop with a lit cigarette.

I knew you were dancing for me. The way you turned to the window and shook it. Your hips swayed to the long, slow drags of my cigarette. My specific pucker. I want you to know, I think of you. Inappropriate times. Once in a downward dog I felt a muscle so deep in its own sinew, I remembered the mean one. The one who took me up against the kitchen wall so hard that my back broke the dimmer switch clean off its bracket. And do you know what he said after? After the sex, and the blow jobs, and the DIY repair? He said, “You’re not ready yet.” I know you’ve been let down too, by the one you thought was the one. Something tells me you’ve been loved like that.

I thought of you when Sting on the radio squealed, “Roxanne.” Oh, those red lights.

I felt the nip in the air that night, the bright bloom out from Times Square, and you flipped on the light in your place just to be sure I had the best possible view.

But I reflect my interpretation onto you, do I not? Your free, free will.

I thought about injustice, about Pussy Riot, in Si-fucking-beria. All the things they can’t say, or do, or show, or light up. Kids missing their moms. And what feminism means in a world that wants to know less about Maria and Nadezdha than Kim Ye’s fetus. A world where the greatest free speech activists are

pornographers, hackers, white-haired accused rapists. And you.

I want to know, do you wait like that in your electric garland for a silhouette before you begin your window tango? For someone to turn eyes to you in the New York sky above the Chelsea Hotel? Its unmade beds?

And we bend over and take it, don’t we. Still. We take it from The Man. We take it from the mean girls, the mean boys. We take it from the schools. I took it from myself. And I gave it too. I might have given it to you, beautiful bioluminescent boy.

I’d say you, if anyone asked me now about the brightest torch by the Hudson. You, my welcoming harbour.

My Ellis Island.

Last December I loved you for those ten minutes like you were the only man in New York. I loved you like no other. And that’s a cliché, and yes, I still think of you, the way you gave it right back to the world. You gave me hope in unicorns and midnight kisses. You showed me freedom when you waved your wang at the world. Stilled my ennui.

Micheline Maylor teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Her third book of poetry, Whirr & Click (Frontenac House), was published in spring 2013.

The Annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest begins not with words, but with an image. Entrants create or find pictures from online sources, greeting cards or actual postcards and write a short story of 500 words or fewer to accompany that image. The 10th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest will be launched in Fall 2013. Read past winners and this year’s Honourable Mentions at geist.com.

Postcard Lit 33

SIGN UP NOW FOR FREE CLASS SETS OF GEIST If you are a teacher of writing, composition, literature, publishing or any kindred subject, you can get free copies of Geist for you and your students, just by asking for them, and free access to the Geist Digital Edition is included!

Geist is always looking for new writers and readers. Teachers are always looking for good readings. Geist in the Classroom puts us together.

PS. If you are a student, hand this to your instructor.

For details: geist.com/gic or call 1.888.434.7834

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

SPOTS BEFORE YOUR EYES

Leopard Realty Postcards, 1971–72

text by michal kozlowski

I

n the early 1970s in Vancouver, the artists Kate Craig and Eric Metcalfe,

having adopted the personas of Lady Brute and Dr. Brute, embarked on a project of colonizing a world with leopard spots. They collected examples of leopard print imagery from the worlds of art, advertising, fashion, magazines and everyday life, and distributed them through a mail-art network of artists across North America. They went to parties and art openings in leopard print costumes, hung around street corners in leopard print, played leopard print instruments, photographed each other in leopard print. They painted, glued, stitched, embroidered and projected leopard spots onto canvas, clothing, photographs, found objects, sculptures, buildings. They called this leopard spot world Brutopia, which has been described by Metcalfe and by critics as “always encroaching,” “kinky,” “ruthless,” “violent,” “the underbelly of North American society.”

Spots Before Your Eyes 35

Kate Craig and Eric Metcalfe were founding members of the Western Front artist-run centre. They participated in the Fluxus network of artists, composers and designersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a movement born of Dada art and art happenings, and the work of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and othersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and adopted Fluxus values of anti-art, anti-commercialism, anti-gallery, artistic collaboration and art as lifestyle. eric metcalfe

Eric Metcalfe began drawing comic strips as a child, with a friend who would write the story and dialogue. He was born in 1940 and raised in Victoria. In his teenage years he started drawing comics of a world of repression, violence and sexual fantasy, set in ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the American West, 36 Geist 89 Summer 2013

Banal Brutality Inc., c. 1971–73

the crime-ridden streets of the 1920s and the battlefields of World War II. At age fifteen he created a character he named Dr. Brute, who occupied these worlds and was based partly on an uncle of Metcalfe’s, an army doctor, gourmet cook and opera aficionado. At the same time he discovered his mother’s collection of jazz records and the music of Dave Brubeck and Charlie Parker.

That was his cultural awakening, he says, the moment he knew he wanted to make jazz in visual art—unprocessed, improvised, intuitive art.

He studied fine arts in high school and took drawing classes at the Art Gallery of Victoria and at a private art school. His teachers included the Czechoslovakian artist Jan Zach, displaced by World War II, and Herbert Siebner of Germany and Richard Ciccimarra of Austria, who had been prisoners of the Russian army during the war.

Spots Before Your Eyes 37

From Banal Brutality Inc., 1969

38 Geist 89 Summer 2013

From Banal Brutality Inc., 1970

Spots Before Your Eyes 39

Carole Lombard Embroidery, Kate Craig. 1971

In 1963, while taking evening classes at the Victoria Art Gallery, Metcalfe met Michael Morris, who later became a central figure of Canadian conceptual and multimedia art, a collaborator of Metcalfeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and one of the founding members of the Western Front. Through Morris, Metcalfe met Maxwell Bates, then in his late fifties, who was a well-established artist in Canada, recognized for his simple, intense paintings in the style of the Fauvists, with bright, opaque colours and figurative compositions. Bates became a major influence and long-time mentor to Metcalfe.

In his mid-twenties, Metcalfe exhibited his jazz drawings at Pandoraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Box Gallery in Victoria and was invited to enrol in the University of Victoria fine arts program. There he fell under the mentorship of Peter Daglish, the renowned British painter and linocut and lithograph artist. Daglish, who is Lady Brute, portrait by Rodney Werden, 1973

40 Geist 89 Summer 2013

now ninety-three years old, remains a mentor and close friend.

Dr. Brute’s Kiss, 1969

k at e c r a i g

Kate Craig began her training as a costume designer at age fourteen, in 1961, when she took a summer job as a seamstress at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. She worked at the theatre with Robert Doyle, the leading Canadian costume designer.

Craig was born in Victoria in 1947. Her parents separated and her mother married Doug Shadbolt, a well-known architect and brother of the artist Jack Shadbolt. The family moved to Halifax in the early 1960s; she studied at Dalhousie University, quit after three years, moved to Montreal and took a job in the costume department at le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.

At a Mothers of Invention concert, she saw Frank Zappa—a Dr. Brute-like figure of 1960s counterculture music—for the first time, an event that “blew her mind,” according to her biography, Skin, and “changed her life path.”

In 1967 she moved to Victoria and studied general arts at the university

Leopard Alphabet, 1971

Spots Before Your Eyes 41

there. She met Eric Metcalfe in an art history course, and within a few months they were living together. She quit her studies after a year and took a job as a legal secretary to support herself and Metcalfe while he finished his studies. They were married in 1969, with Peter Daglish as best man.

Boys in the Band, 1974

“ the

brutes ”

In 1969, Eric Metcalfe began drawing Banal Brutality Inc. comics, set in Brutopia—whose whereabouts, according to the text of one of the comics, “could be said to be somewhere in the North American continent”—and featuring Dr. Brute, guns, fighter jets, crime, men being masturbated into buckets, buckets of semen on conveyor belts and a woman whose breasts were ice cream scoops nestled in a brassiere made of ice cream cones. All in an atmosphere of totalitarianism, machinery, oppression and a sense of struggle for release.

Metcalfe took a course with Dana Atchley, a young professor at the University of Victoria and a successful artist and participant in the Fluxus art movement and mail-art movement. Kate Craig showed Atchley the Dr. Brute comics that Metcalfe had been drawing since he was a teenager. Atchley was impressed and suggested to Metcalfe that the comics were his real art, as Metcalfe tells the story today, “because they were personal, crude, not at all ‘real art’.” Eric Metcalfe adopted the leopard spot as his totem.

He procured a tuxedo and top hat, a jab at his conservative father, who was known to wear tails and tailored suits. Kate Craig stitched leopard spots onto the costume. And that’s when Eric Metcalfe adopted the persona of Dr. Brute. Shortly after, Kate Craig took on the persona of Lady Brute.

Dr. Brute with Mr. Peanut, 1974 spots before your eyes

In nature, leopard spots act as camouflage; the eye passes over the leopard surface. In culture, they are fetish and kitsch, sexuality; they draw the eye.

According to Metcalfe, they are a “universal image symbolizing both power and banality.” The leopard spots were a means for “The Brutes” to examine high art and low art, nature and culture, themes of anthropology that many artists were then exploring. “The leopardskin in each image is a reference point from which to read all the visual information that is not leopardskin,” writes Hank Bull, a collaborator of Craig and Metcalfe’s, in Art & Correspondence from the Western Front (1979). postcards

Lady Brute (Kate Craig), photo

by Eric Metcalfe. The image was picture of the week in File Magazine, vol. 1 nos. 2&3, May/June 1972.

42 Geist 89 Summer 2013

In the early 1970s, Dr. and Lady Brute put out a call for leopard print imagery through Image Bank, the system of postal correspondence among artists administered by Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov, who maintained image request lists and directories of participants. Artists from all over North

America sent in their leopard spot images; the archive of Brutopian images grew. The mail-art network effectively took art out of the gallery and into homes, hallways and letterboxes. performance

Kate Craig’s performances tended to be informal “guerrilla” events—they happened in the world more often than onstage, and often with an unknowing audience. She would dress in a leopard print skirt, shirt and jacket and attend an art opening, or a dinner, or just go about her everyday business— and that would be the performance. Lady Brute mocked the projection of beauty and promiscuity in the figure of the woman in leopard print often seen in advertising and Hollywood films.

In Toronto, Dr. Brute performed Pillar of Wisdom at A Space Gallery, for

On the Road Sax, 1972­–78

which he was chained naked to a pillar covered with leopard spots and then whipped, lightly, in front of an audience. At times he employed a cedar saxophone painted in leopard spots, with a kazoo for a mouthpiece. Sometimes he would sing scat. Dr. Brute performances were planned and often required a venue, props and an audience. g a l l e ry o f g r a s s

For Leopard Realty Triangles, Dr. and Lady Brute painted dozens of triangles in yellow, orange, red, green, blue and purple, covered them in leopard spots and set them out in public parks, where they drew crowds of bemused passersby. These outdoor pop-up installations became a means of taking art out of the gallery and into more public spaces. c o l l a b o r at i o n

In March 1973, Kate Craig, Eric Metcalfe and seven other artists purchased

Leopard Realty ’s, 1972–73

a building in East Vancouver and established the Western Front artist-run centre, where some of the artists took up residence. They opened studio and exhibition space and called it a laboratory for art. The Western Front became a hub of artistic activity on the West Coast: artists from all over the world visited, exhibited work, drank, made art, talked about art, did drugs, hung around and frequently collaborated with each other and the Western Front artists. Years later, Eric Metcalfe said that collaboration led the Western Front artists away from tropes of highbrow art, medium-high seriousness and the ideology of the artist as genius. a f t e r t h e b r u t es

Kate Craig and Eric Metcalfe separated in the fall of 1973. They organized Spots Before Your Eyes, a retrospective of their leopard material, exhibited in Vancouver and Toronto in 1975. Metcalfe made a Thompson gun of cedar,

Thompson Gun, 1975

Spots Before Your Eyes 43

with a carrying case made of pine, the stuff of coffins. The gun and the pine box were left unleopardized, to signify the assassination of Dr. Brute. Metcalfe continued to work with Brutopian themes and settings in the 1970s and 1980s, in videos. His new Brutopian characters included Howard Huge and Ruby the Fop. Metcalfe began collaborating with Hank Bull, an artist who had joined Spots Before Your Eyes, 1977

the Western Front society early on. Kate Craig also collaborated with Bull, and after she and Metcalfe separated she and Bull moved in together at the Western Front.

In 1975, Craig made The Pink Poem, a costume comprising many articles of pink clothing, which she wore for performances and video recordings.

She became one of the first practitioners of video art in Canada. In 1976 she founded a video-artist-in-residence program at the Western Front, and she was instrumental in developing the media arts program. She became a major

Flying Leopard, 1974

figure in video art in Canada, and exhibited work in cities in North America, Asia and Europe. She spent the late 1990s preparing for a major retrospective of her work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, entitled Skin. Kate Craig died in 2003 of pancreatic cancer.

Eric Metcalfe lives at the Western Front, in the apartment that he moved into forty years ago. He socializes a lot, wears an ascot sometimes, barbecues, vacations in Mexico, dances to jazz in his kitchen. He is seventy-three years old and he still listens to Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck. In 2012 he painted more than one hundred paintings. For a recent project he reproduced a set of ancient Athenian pots, decorated in bright patterns resembling zebra print, or the Dazzle Art patterns painted onto warships and warplanes by camofleurs during World War II, much as he had done with model planes and ships as a child. A few years ago he produced Laura, a murder mystery

Eric Metcalfe and Kate Craig, aboard CPR ship to Seattle to see Miles Davis perform, fall 1967

art installation based on the 1944 film of the same name. He dedicated the piece to his mother and an aunt (wife of the uncle who inspired Dr. Brute), both of whom opened up to him the world of culture, jazz and art.

Michal Kozlowski is the Assistant Publisher of Geist. He is the author of the children’s book Louis the Tiger Who Came from the Sea (Annick Press) and several fiction and non-fiction stories in Geist. Read his work at geist.com.

“Spots Before Your Eyes” is the second instalment in a series on West Coast postmodern art in the 1970s. The first in the series, “The Artist As a Fraud,” on the work of Glenn Lewis (a.k.a. Flakey Rrose Hip), appeared in Geist 88. Geist 90 will feature “My ABC Colouring Book”—Peter Daglish’s series of ten lithograph prints coloured by the founding members of the Western Front. The Daglish prints will also be exhibited at the Vancouver Memory Festival in November 2013. The series is produced with assistance from the City of Vancouver.

44 Geist 89 Summer 2013

t h e

c o n a n

d o y l e

f i l e

The Ghost of James Cawdor bill macdonald A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself

S

ir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed Scottish novelist, spiritualist and creator of Sherlock Holmes, enjoyed visiting Canada. It’s a known fact that he preferred Canada to the USA. I’m sure he’d be gratified to know that the Arthur Conan Doyle Society of North America has its headquarters in Ashcroft, BC, a stone’s throw west of Kamloops.

Between 1894 and 1923, Sir Arthur toured Canada at least four times and on two occasions traversed the country by train from Vancouver to Halifax. What he liked to do was flog his books along the way, give talks on spiritualism and indulge his fascination with deep-shaft silver mining. He was already familiar with the silver mines of Cornwall and had great respect for Cornish miners. In British Columbia he was particularly intrigued by the Silver King mine near Nelson, on the west arm of Kootenay Lake, which, like most deep-shaft silver mines, had run out of ore and had been abandoned in 1911.

In the summer of 1914, just before the start of World War I, Sir Arthur visited my great-aunt Leone’s neck of the woods, northwestern Ontario. Specifically, the town of Port Arthur, on the storm-swept shore of Lake Superior. Back then, before it amalgamated with nearby Fort William into the present dysfunctional metropolis of Thunder Bay, there wasn’t much happening in Port Arthur. Still, our famous visitor stopped there, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there was the old

46 Geist 89 Summer 2013

Colonial Theatre, in which he gave evening lectures on spiritualism and sold a few books.

For another, there were several abandoned silver mines in the area: Silver Harbour, Silver Mountain, Silver Bay, Silver Islet. Of these, during its boom years between 1872 and 1884, Silver Islet, thirty nautical miles east of Port Arthur, was by far the most productive, yielding several million dollars in profit and sinking its shaft to a spooky depth of 1,200 feet. Sadly, in 1885, thoroughly depleted, the mine was abandoned and the shaft allowed to flood, and Silver Islet became a ghost town.

The sixty-five miners and their families were forced to go elsewhere looking for work, leaving their vacant houses to the mercy of the elements.

It was at the Colonial Theatre in Port Arthur, after his initial talk, that Sir Arthur first met my great-aunt Leone. He was accompanied on that occasion by his publicist, Mr. Booth, and by Mr. Booth’s secretary, a compliant young woman named Agnes. In later years Aunt Leone couldn’t remember whether Sir Arthur’s wife was with him on that visit. Somehow she didn’t think so. After the lecture she introduced herself to him, bought a couple of his books, assured him she was a devout occultist. What she hoped to be able to do, she said, was persuade him to pay a visit to Silver Islet, since her late stepfather, James Cawdor, was buried in the cemetery there and she wished to contact him.

I must tell you, Aunt Leone was a very persuasive person. Few things in life intimidated her. My parents used to say that her feistiness was the result of her severe upbringing. When her unmarried mother became pregnant, her biological father had fled to Africa, where, in 1874, he was murdered by Burundi tribesmen.

To prevent her baby being born fatherless, the mother married a gruff widower named James Cawdor. Unfortunately, the poor young thing did not survive her daughter’s birth. And so from infancy onward, Aunt Leone faced an uphill battle. Her stepfather didn’t really want her. Her step-siblings, two older sisters (one of whom became my grandmother), resented her. And so she had no choice but to grow a

thick skin. Throughout her life, she never forgot those who were kind to her, nor those who were cruel. During her teenage years, after her step-siblings moved away from Port Arthur and took up residence in southern Ontario, she served more or less as James Cawdor’s unpaid housekeeper.

On June 25, 1914, a dark, drizzly, overcast day, Aunt Leone, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. Booth and Agnes took passage to Silver Islet aboard the coastal steamer Forest City. After

AFTER THE LECTURE AUNT LEONE INTRODUCED HERSELF TO SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, BOUGHT A COUPLE OF HIS BOOKS AND ASSURED HIM SHE WAS A DEVOUT OCCULTIST. disembarking, they walked along a rough gravel road to the cemetery. On the way they passed James Cawdor’s vacant house, Crannog, which had fallen into disrepair since his death the year before. In the cemetery, under umbrellas, they stood beside his grave and spoke in hushed tones.

“Tell me,” said Doyle, “how did your stepfather earn his living?”

“He was a carpenter,” said Aunt Leone. “A handyman. A jack of all trades. He was also a sailor and a prospector. One day he sailed here to Silver Islet, saw all those vacant dwellings, and decided to take one for himself. He expected me to keep house for him.”

“More to the point, I suppose,” said Sir Arthur, “is: how did he die?”

“He fell down the old mine shaft,” said Aunt Leone, pointing to the ruins of the head frame and engine house.

James Cawdor had become a bit of a recluse, she told him, a bit of a dreamer. He had the idea that if he could lower himself down as far as the first tunnel, he might rediscover the vein, or find a bonanza of silver ore.

The day before he died, he told people he’d heard a voice, supposedly the voice of a long dead miner, who had advised him to get a rope

The Conan Doyle File 47

a hundred feet long, or else build a ladder, and lower himself down. The miner’s ghost, if that’s who it was, would show him a secret hiding place full of silver nuggets. So that’s what he set out to do. Next day, when he didn’t come home, people went looking for him, and a week later someone spotted his lifeless body, all puffed up, floating in the shaft, which in those days was nine-tenths full of slimy water.

There was no rope, no ladder, and so he either fell or was pushed. They finally fished him out with grappling hooks. They sent for the coroner in Port Arthur, who found no evidence of foul play and ruled it an accidental drowning. They buried him in the cemetery, locked Crannog’s door, put up a No Trespassing sign.

“Neither of my stepsisters attended the funeral,” said Aunt Leone. “They said they were never informed.”

After giving this some quiet thought, Sir Arthur said, “Let’s see if we can get through to him.”

Which was exactly what Aunt Leone had been hoping for. But though they tried, standing there in the drizzle on that dark, foreboding afternoon, anxious for the sound of James Cawdor’s voice or some other indication that he was aware of their presence, they observed nothing. They heard wind, leaves rustling, the mournful cries of seagulls, but nothing

48 Geist 89 Summer 2013

supernatural. And finally Sir Arthur said, “My dear, I think we’d stand a better chance at night, in your stepfather’s house, rather than here at his graveside in broad daylight. However, I must return to Port Arthur this evening and catch the train for Toronto. What I’d like to do is come back to Silver Islet next summer, stay overnight, and conduct a proper seance.

I’m sure that under the right circumstances we could summon forth your ancestor.”

Which, had it not been for World War I, is what they might have done. As it turned out, however, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not return to North America until the summer of 1923, when he was sixty-four years old. With his wife Jean along to assist him, he again did a cross-Canada tour, and on July 5 he stopped off in Port Arthur to give a lecture at the Colonial Theatre. Of course Aunt Leone was there, and was mildly surprised that Doyle remembered his promise to return to Silver Islet with her. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, when she reminded him. “I think this time we’ll have better luck.”

The next afternoon, accompanied by Mrs. Doyle, Mr. Booth and compliant Agnes, who was now Mrs. Booth, they sailed to Silver Islet aboard the Forest City. By now, five years after the war, many of the once abandoned buildings were occupied by squatting vacationers.

Silver Islet had become a popular holiday spot and watering hole. The old hotel, GitcheeGumee, had been resurrected, and it was there that Sir Arthur and his entourage took rooms and enjoyed a tasty trout dinner in the rustic dining room.

At dusk they walked along Superior’s rocky shore to James Cawdor’s neglected house, Crannog. Not having been lived in for nine years, it was in a sad state. Inside, as they lit candles, they could hear bats squeaking in the eaves. The smell of mould and mildew, the eerie silence, the shadows, the hollow sound of their footsteps on the floorboards were almost more than Aunt Leone could bear. Not to mention the dust-covered furniture and the west wind sighing at the windows.

Sir Arthur said he thought their best chance of success would be in James Cawdor’s

bedroom, and so that’s where they went. Aunt Leone sat on the edge of the bed while Sir Arthur and the others made themselves comfortable in rattan chairs. Before a single word was uttered, Aunt Leone felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise and her mouth go dry.

She wondered if this was such a good idea after all. To be truthful, she almost regretted having suggested it.

And then, as though from a considerable distance, she heard Sir Arthur say, “Now, my dear, who was it you wished to contact?”

“My late lamented stepfather, James Cawdor,” whispered Aunt Leone. “A reasonable man, for the most part, though somewhat irascible, with human failings, such as a fondness for whiskey and an intolerance for children. He was a wishful thinker who sought his fortune in a defunct mine and fell to his death down the open shaft.”

“And who, if I’m not mistaken,” added Sir Arthur, “until his untimely and mysterious death, inhabited these very premises. Who once sat in this very room, on these very chairs, who slept in this very bed, under this very roof, inside these very walls, and who may be here now, this very night, wondering why it has taken his stepdaughter so long to make contact and express her sorrow.”

It was at that moment, according to what Aunt Leone told my parents, that they heard what sounded like muffled footsteps, followed by strange splashing noises, followed by a long, shuddering sigh.

“James,” whispered Sir Arthur, his voice low and hoarse. “James Cawdor, is that you?”

Aunt Leone would say later that although it was a warm night she felt a cold gust of air, and cold hands gripping hers. She could smell damp stone and seaweed, and she saw a faint, aqueous pool of light come floating down from the ceiling.

“I feel a presence,” whispered Sir Arthur.

“Does anyone else feel it? James Cawdor, is that you?”

And then, according to Aunt Leone, they heard the screech of rusty hinges, a fearful clanking of chains, or shovels on rock, and a pathetic, fading cry, as from someone falling.

“James!” hissed Sir Arthur. “Your dutiful stepdaughter Leone is here.”

At that exact moment, Aunt Leone felt someone touch her right shoulder. It was, she said, a firm, familiar gesture, but an impossible one, because there was no one near her.

Nevertheless, she felt fingers on the back of her neck, and cold breath against her ear, and her nostrils were filled with the scent of damp, decaying flowers.

A REASONABLE MAN, FOR THE MOST PART, THOUGH SOMEWHAT IRASCIBLE, WITH HUMAN FAILINGS, SUCH AS A FONDNESS FOR WHISKEY AND AN INTOLERANCE FOR CHILDREN. And that was pretty much all she remembered. She had only a fuzzy recollection of leaving James Cawdor’s house, of stumbling along the road toward Gitchee-Gumee, supported by Mr. Booth and Agnes, following Sir Arthur and his wife, who carried lanterns.

She faintly remembered being helped to her room by a young chambermaid, who lit her lamp for her and brought her a pitcher of hot water so that she could wash her face. No

The Conan Doyle File 49

sooner had her head touched the pillow than she was fast asleep.

Next morning, when she woke up in her iron bedstead on the second floor of the hotel, sunlight was streaming through her window and she could hear loons and seagulls calling. The young chambermaid brought her another pitcher of hot water and

a most welcome cup of tea, and informed her that breakfast was being served downstairs, where her friends were waiting.

At breakfast, Jean Doyle and Sir Arthur sat beside her, and Mr. Booth and Agnes hovered solicitously. A waiter in white jacket and shiny shoes brought tea, toast and bowls of porridge.

Aunt Leone was intrigued to hear that during her trance the night before, some unseen entity had called her by name and engaged her in conversation, while Sir Arthur and the others had listened to her responses. At one point, as though from a gust of wind, all the candles in the house had gone out simultaneously.

“You referred several times to James Cawdor,” said Mr. Booth.

“Of course,” said Aunt Leone. “My stepfather. I could feel his presence. He held my hands and touched me on the shoulder.”

“Once or twice,” said Sir Arthur, “the spirit seemed to shake you bodily, making us fear for your safety.”

“I have no recollection of that,” said Aunt Leone, “though I don’t doubt it. My step­father used to shake me when I misbehaved. He may have been scolding me. By the way, your moustache reminds me of the one he wore.”

“You gave the impression of being poised on a precipice,” said Jean Doyle. “Of being

50 Geist 89 Summer 2013

prepared for flight. It took our collective strength to hold you back.”

“And we heard a man’s voice calling from a great distance,” said Mrs. Booth. “A voice full of sorrow, or of accusation.”

“There is no doubt in my mind,” Aunt Leone said softly, “that it was the voice of my stepfather, James Cawdor.”

At which point Sir Arthur reached out and held Aunt Leone’s hand. Don’t forget, besides being a spiritualist, he was a writer of detective stories, creator of that most famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.

“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said. “The day your stepfather fell down the mine shaft, was there anyone near him?”

Aunt Leone thought about this, accepted another cup of tea. “I hardly think so,” she said. “I believe he was entirely alone.”

They spent a leisurely morning on the hotel veranda, talking quietly, enjoying the sunshine.

When Sir Arthur suggested they stay a second night and try to reconvene with James Cawdor’s ghost at Crannog, Aunt Leone politely but firmly said no, definitely not. They went for a pleasant walk along the beach, gathered bits of driftwood, stopped at the post office so that Mrs. Doyle and the Booths could mail postcards back to England. At midday, under bright sunshine, they returned to GitcheeGumee for lunch, and later that afternoon they boarded the Forest City for the return trip to Port Arthur. A rather large crowd had gathered on the dock to bid them bon voyage, because, as Aunt Leone said, it was not every day that a personage of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stature paid a visit. 

Bill MacDonald is a writer and photographer who has also worked as a forester, Arctic weatherman, immigration officer and schoolteacher. He is the author of more than twenty published books, most recently Lamplight (2010) and Sirens (2009), and shorter works published in Geist and Prairie Fire.

He lives in Thunder Bay. Read more of his work at geist.com. For more information on his books, visit borealispress.com.

Labour Day

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Identity in a Cup daniel francis Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

I

f I told you that I had never had a cup of Tim Hortons coffee, what would you conclude about me? That I am a left-wing, pacifist peace monkey because I do not drink the brew that fuelled our soldiers in Afghanistan?

That I am a pretentious yuppie whose knowledge of Italian actually extends no further than Vente and cappuccino?

That I condescend to the hard-working folk of our rural communities who are the backbone of the country?

That I am, in a word, un-Canadian?

According to Patricia Cormack and James F. Cosgrave, authors of Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures (University of Toronto Press), a new book about popular culture and national identity, you would be correct to make these assumptions. The absence of Tim Hortons coffee from my daily routine makes me not only unusual—Tim Hortons is the most popular brand in the country—but suspect. After all, “It’s Our Canada, Our Coffee” is one of the chain’s slogans. If I am not drinking “our” coffee, what other subversive habits might I be indulging? And what if I further admit that I am appalled by Don Cherry’s muscular patriotism (not to mention his awful suits), don’t find Rick Mercer funny, and cannot abide the CBC’s relentless attempts to reduce all culture to a list or a contest (viz. the “Greatest Canadian” 52 Geist 89 Summer 2013

and Canada Reads)? Well, I might as well turn in my passport on the way out the door. But before I go, a few words in my own defence, borrowing on some of the ideas in Cormack and Cosgrave’s provocative book.

Desiring Canada is a book about how forms of popular culture are conscripted into the nation-building enterprise. In a consumer society, suggest Cormack and Cosgrave, the state itself is a product like any other.

It must market itself and its services to its own citizens. But this is a tall order, and one for which the state is not always suited, so it forms a partnership with the private sector and hands over to corporations a greater degree of responsibility for mobilizing the public in support of national ideals. In other words, national identity is privatized. No Canadian icon

has taken up the task so energetically as the home of the Timbit®.

Other companies have tried to link their brand to the country—the Hudson’s Bay Company, Roots, Canadian Tire—but none has done it as effectively as Tim Hortons. For example, Tims has become the place where politicians of all parties come to press the flesh and stage their photo opportunities because they know that Canadians associate Tims with “Main Street values.” Tims also presents its coffee shops in advertising campaigns as locations where immigrant Canadians discover the customs of their new country. And the company associates itself with the national game by supporting youth hockey and attaching itself to various hockey promotions. But most impressively, Tims has made itself the coffee shop of the Canadian military. In 2006 the company opened an outlet in Afghanistan for Canadian soldiers serving there. Cormack and Cosgrave recall that General Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff at the time, remarked on “the superb relationship between two great Canadian institutions,” seemingly equating the Canadian armed forces, i.e. the Canadian State, and a chain of donut restaurants. Tim Hortons is not just reflecting Canadian values; it has become a place where a version of national identity is created.

Inevitably in a book about national

identity, hockey and the CBC play a central role. The Mother Corp. and its contests come in for particular attention in Desiring Canada. Cormack and Cosgrave argue that contests are a crucial part of the CBC’s attempts to establish itself as the place where Canadians find out who they are. According to the slogan “Canada Lives Here,” CBC radio and television are home base for Canadians.

The contests, inane as they sometimes appear to be, reinforce the network’s role as the authority on national identity. What is our best book? Who is the greatest Canadian? What are the Seven Wonders of Canada? The CBC will answer all these questions (which quite possibly no one but a CBC producer would think to ask), and in the process it will define and defend the national identity. “The idea that Canada needs explaining to Canadians is a persistent theme on the Canadian cultural landscape,” write Cormack and Cosgrave, “a theme that serves to perpetuate the ‘crisis’ of identity.”

Even if no firm answers ever emerge, even if the “crisis” never gets resolved, it doesn’t matter. It is the endless conversation itself, not a particular conclusion, that establishes the CBC as the go-to place for thinking about the Canadian question.

A major part of the CBC’s claim to cultural importance is its link to hockey. “The importance of hockey in Canada… points to how sport can generate strong collective emotions and nationalistic fervour in ways that only the most charismatic politicians and intense political movements can match,” write Cormack and Cosgrave.

“Hockey Night in Canada” is the shrine at which Canadians worship every Saturday, and the CBC has been hosting it on television since 1952.

More recently the network has been presenting “Hockey Day in Canada,” a program that reaffirms our identity as a blue-collar nation with smalltown values as opposed to the lattesucking cosmopolitanism of an urban National Dreams 53

dude like myself. Through the CBC, the state is using hockey to define an identity for Canada—tough, masculine, nostalgic, unpretentious. Don Cherry, the game’s resident intellectual, provides for viewers a convenient list of all the people who fit beneath the Canadian umbrella—soldiers and their supporters, dog lovers, sentimental patriots, uncompromising free enterprisers, and all the weak sisters who don’t—Swedes, leftwing pinkos, pacifists. Even hockey fights—much condemned but also much condoned—are presented as a uniquely Canadian form of aggression. The rink is a venue where violence is tolerated, even encouraged; where citizens of the “Peaceable Kingdom” affirm their cultural identity by watching a couple of goons beat each other’s brains out.

“I’m the fucking glue that holds it [Canada] together,” Don Cherry once declared. Can such a ludicrous claim possibly be true? Cormack and

Cosgrave suggest that it may be, at least to the extent that Mr. Cherry’s rock ’em sock ’em, hail-to-the-troops style of nationalism seems to represent a brand that many Canadians embrace. Watching Coach’s Corner, drinking Tim Hortons coffee, listening to the CBC—these are all activities in which Canadians find their pleasures and feel their identity. Of course those of us who share different pleasures do not have to surrender our passports. Canada is a tolerant country; there is always room for us out on the margins. But in the identity sweepstakes, at least for now, it feels like we are holding a losing ticket.  Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, most recently Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918– 1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

c i t y

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Neighbourhood of Letters alberto manguel There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

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iologists tell us that we differ in nothing from all other creatures in the world. Long before Darwin, St. Francis—with no irony—called the worm his sister and the horsefly his brother, humbly taking his place in the vast family of creation. One feature, however, distinguished Francis from all other things in the universe: unlike the worm and the horsefly, Francis knew he was Francis, and was able therefore, from the vantage point of self-consciousness, to recognize his brethren all around him. Not only that: Francis (like all of us humans) was capable of intuiting the world and its myriad inhabitants before going into the world and meeting his brothers and sisters. Francis was able to build in his mind the world and whatever the world contained before knowing it through the flesh.

Our species, in order to survive (and now we are again among the scientists), has developed the extraordinary ability of being able to experience before the fact, to see and understand and draw conclusions from an event before the event takes place. To imagine, in human terms, is to exist.

We ignore whether worms and horseflies (or apes and dogs) have a

54 Geist 89 Summer 2013

sense of time; the universe does not.

In the realm of astrophysics there is no such thing as past or future, and everything takes place in a now too vast for our understanding. We, unlike the universe, are riddled with time. We believe, we feel, that time hurtles us from womb to grave, flowing from what we remember to what we fear, from the place in which we learn to stand to the place in which we are forced to lie. According to astrophysicists, none of this happens as we think it happens, but the laws of our imagination override those of the universe. We imagine the world and ourselves in the world, and we give that imagination the name of reality.

We don’t know exactly when the first stories began to be told, but on a certain afternoon, far away and long ago, our ancestors became aware that, since their imagination allowed them to map the land beyond the horizon, it could also allow them to fashion that land to their liking. No doubt their imagination reconstructed faroff cities from the snippets brought home by travellers and the stories from ancient days, but on that prodigious afternoon these inspired grandparents constructed in words

a city never seen before by anyone, made of bricks also imaginary and inhabited by men and women sprung fully formed from their minds. Their imagination allowed them to lend these people unheard-of adventures and astonishing deeds, and sometimes they mingled with these phantoms the phantoms of real people, dead or alive, to lend verisimilitude to their stories. Because, our ancestors soon realized, it was not enough to imagine; the imagination, if it was to take root in the world of stone and flesh, required an audience, and the audience demanded that, even if the stories were imagined, the characters had to be real. Fiction, our ancestors discovered, cannot be untrue.

From that distant afternoon until this day, the universe has been crammed with imaginary places that have risen from the dust of dreams.

Some have fallen back into that dust, others stand now still, proudly proclaiming their resilience. Nineveh and Carthage no longer stand, but El Dorado and Wonderland and the Emerald City of Oz continue to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. Founding imaginary countries and building imaginary cities has long

been a part of the storyteller’s task, and there is no reason to believe that it will ever stop. The geography of the imagination is generous and always allows room for one more place.

There are imaginary cities for scientists (Swift’s Laputa), for ladies (Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames), for vampires (Paul Féval’s Vampire Town), for bad students (Carlo Collodi’s Play Town), for Christians (Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis), for lechers (the Marquis de Sade’s Silling), for ghosts (Juan Rulfo’s Comala) but, with the exception of Dante’s Commedia, in which the Noble Castle serves as an eternal residence for the great poets of antiquity, and perhaps the secluded forest where the “living books” of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 open their memories to those who want to read them, there seem to be few places, in the vast universal library, in which the imagination has granted writers a home of their own.

The Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares has decided to fill this absence. He has created not a city but a neighbourhood, with houses grouped together for conviviality, and others set apart for peaceful solitude. Then, from his own bookshelf of favourites, he has selected the inhabitants and offered them the neighbourhood’s hospitality. Paul Valéry, Roberto Juarroz, Robert Walser, Henri Michaux, Bertolt Brecht, T.S. Eliot, even Emanuel Swedenborg, who speaks with angels, have all set up home in the houses Tavares has built for them.

Visitors to the neighbourhood might ask: “Where are the women?” The demographics of the neighbourhood are due surely to a question of haphazard choice. Impossible not to suppose that in a near future, we shall see a moving van bringing to one of the houses the trunks and furniture of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf or Clarice Lispector.

Of course, some of the writers are more amenable than others: Monsieur

Valéry and Monsieur Swedenborg are neighbours and occasionally stop to chat; Monsieur Michaux and Monsieur Juarroz have curious conversations about the nature of language and the erotic underpinnings of humour. Each writer has, of course, not only a home but a style. Tavares has understood that to a writer, style is not merely the way in which one writes: it is the way in which one lives, one eats, one walks, one thinks. Style determines that Monsieur Valéry, for instance, uses his left hand only for things on his left and his right hand for things on his right. Style obliges Monsieur Walser not only to address his letters but also to draw on them a map marking the destination with an X so that the mail carrier can make no mistake in the delivery. Style reserves for Monsieur Eliot a house like that of his Prufrock, from where he can observe the universe of promised eternity and listen for the mermaids singing, each to each, though he knows they are not singing for him. Tavares’s neighbourhood is multicultural, multilingual and inhabited by writers of all ages and nationalities. One of the triumphs of the imagination is its ability, through language, to eliminate the barriers of time and space. The “conversation with the dead” that Francisco de Quevedo sought in his library takes place daily in this neighbourhood, and no immigration formalities were required.

As Marguerite Yourcenar (a possible future inhabitant) once declared: “My country is my books.” This might be the motto of Tavares’s enlightened neighbourhood.  The Neighbourhood, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Roopanjali Roy with illustrations by Rachel Caiano, was published in 2012 by Texas Tech University Press. Alberto Manguel is the awardwinning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) A Reader on Reading, All Men Are Liars and The City of Words. He lives in France. Read more of his work at geist.com.

City of Words 55

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ENDNOTES plotto: a plot plotter William Wallace Cook was known as “the man who deforested Canada,” thanks to his prolific production of Western and science fiction “nickel and dime” novels, and short stories published in the “pulp” magazines of the 1920s. Cook died in 1933 and would probably be forgotten today were it not for a fascinating “writing aid” that he wrote and published in 1928. Plotto (back in print from Tin House Books) describes a three-stage method for creating plots: simply follow the rules to come up with a unique plot that is all your own! First: select a Masterplot; next: add a Conflict Situation; finally: blend with your choice of Character Combinations, selecting from “an index of protagonists, each cross-referenced with supporting players who are tied to various conflict situations.” But Plotto also includes more than 400 pages’ worth of ready-made plots; for example, plot number 1443-b: “A, trapped by a falling tree in an isolated place, is unable to extricate himself, and dies.” A handy one-page guide to Plotto’s “character symbols” (A=male protagonist; B=female protagonist; GCHA=grandchild of A; etc.) concludes with this fabulous bit of advice to writers: “X added to any character gives to the character a suggestion of mystery.” According to the foreword, Plotto was used by Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, and

by Alfred Hitchcock. This is a completely absorbing book. All I can say is: “Curses to Tin House for

reprinting Plotto!”—it is just a matter of time before Canada’s boreal forests are no more than a fading memory.

—Michael Hayward

small dose of the infinite The Newfoundland poet Don McKay is self-deprecating, with a sly and subtle wit, and his poetry and essays are evidence of an observer constantly alert to that which animates the landscape and its inhabitants (and even rocks are animate if you choose a sufficiently long time scale). Those familiar with McKay’s two earlier essay collections from Gaspereau Press (Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness, and Deactivated West 100, reviewed in Geist 59) will be delighted with The Shell of the Tortoise (Gaspereau), a new collection of “four essays and an assemblage” (the “assemblage” was published separately in 2009 by Gaspereau as The Muskwa Assemblage).

They’re all good, but a couple of these “investigation[s] into the relationship between poetry and wilderness” are standouts. In the opening essay, “Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a Reader of Deep Time,” McKay reports on “two recent developments in the taxonomy of time”: the Ediacaran being a new name for a period of time preceding the Cambrian; the Anthropocene a new name proposed for the most recent epoch (which, “if accepted, would acknowledge [our species, anthropos] as the superstars we have been for some time”). In “From Here to Infinity (or So),” McKay asserts that

“a mild, or homeopathic, dose of the infinite is the crucial element in the aesthetic experience known as the sublime, an experience prized by such diverse movements as Romantic poetry and Tourism.” The Shell of the Tortoise is geopoetry made playful, another collection that “promotes astonishment as part of the acceptable perceptual framework.” —Michael Hayward

little betrayals One’s day-to-day jealousies and misunderstandings are usually too petty to be meaningful, and the habit of putting aside uncomfortable truths is not usually life-threatening, but this was not the case when the Germans arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1939. In Far to Go by Alison Pick (House of Anansi), we meet an affluent Jewish couple, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, and their son, Pepik. Marta, their nonJewish nanny, is a simple, naïve woman who loves Pepik, envies Anneliese, is secretly in love with Pavel and is having a clandestine relationship with Pavel’s employer, Ernst—all of which would sound like a soap opera if the reader did not know the awful consequences of being a Jew in a Nazioccupied country. But we do know, and we keep reading even as we dread the train wreck ahead. The small betrayals in Far to Go are understandable, given the human tendency to make assumptions about others’ motivations, but when these betrayals are combined with groupthink and a Nazi agenda, the results are almost always deadly. — Patty Osborne Endnotes 57

doing the occupation In a dance craze called “Doing The Occupation” that got big among my friends when I was in university, you performed silent moves from various jobs: Construction Worker (stomping a shovel and scooping up invisible dirt), Chef (sautéing with a wok), Truck Driver (steering, pulling the horn, pissing into a bottle and chucking it out the window). Théodora Armstrong’s debut collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility (Astoria/House of Anansi), reminds me a lot of that dance. It reminds me of short stories in general—the good ones, anyway, that don’t perform any sensational, bombastic moves, but home in on the everyday aspects of being a social animal. As with the silent dance moves of The Occupation, readers of Armstrong’s stories will easily recognize her characters from their own surroundings: Chef, Server, Day Trader, Wedding Planner, Air Traffic Controller—each one more imperfect than the last. But the appeal of this book doesn’t come from the occupational roles. It comes from the roles we all play in our own lives—sister, father, friend—roles that I dare anyone to try to perform on a dance floor. — Dan Post

seeks bee nerd The Bee Trading Card Series 1 (Resonating Bodies) is a collection of twenty-four cards that feature three anthophila species, in the superfamily Apoidea, found within a twohour radius of Toronto. The cards follow the traditional image-obverse, printreverse format and feature macro photography of bee anatomy and facts on physiology, biodiversity, evolution and 58 Geist 89 Summer 2013

classification. They also read like personal ads—“solitary, vegetarian, powerful jaws, organizes pollinating activities, doesn’t raise own young,” anyone? We have to wonder whether dating would be greatly improved, or at least become more efficient, if a new couple exchanged a set of such cards before sitting down for dinner. At least you would know whether your prospective partner was likely to run off after the kids were born. —Lauren Ogston

truth is stranger Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess (Amy Einhorn/Putnam) is a hilarious look into the life of a woman who can find humour even in her own embarrassments. Lawson recounts the memorable and the “terribly human moments” in her life, from growing up in poverty in rural Texas with a taxidermist father, to her struggle with mental and physical illness, to hilarious misunderstandings with her husband and colleagues. The stories range from the poignant (the realization of loss when her hometown no longer feels like home) to the disturbing (the time Lawson briefly, accidentally, wore a dead deer as a sweater). To prove that her stories are not made up, she has corroborated many episodes with photographs. Read this book for the bizarre situations Lawson has gotten herself into, like fighting off vultures with a machete in order to protect her dead dog. Or read it for the chapter titles: “And That’s Why Neil Patrick Harris Would Be the Most Successful Mass Murderer Ever,” “Thanks for the Zombies, Jesus,” “And Then I Snuck a Dead Cuban Alligator on an Airplane.”

But most of all, read this book and think, thank god that didn’t happen to me! —Kelsea O’Connor

magpie memoir Like his literary heroes Blaise Cendrars and B. Traven, Jim Christy has led a peripatetic life. Raised in South Philadelphia, he has travelled extensively through Mexico and Central America, and lived for many years on BC’s Sunshine Coast. A prolific writer, Christy’s books range from poetry (Marimba Forever, 2010) to memoir/ biography (The Buk Book, Musings on Charles Bukowski, 1997) to noir-like detective fiction (a series of novels set in Vancouver, featuring detective Gene Castle). Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box (Anvil Press) is a collection of 121 short pieces, or “takes,” each one a riff on one of the items that have accumulated over a period of forty years in a “metal Peek Frean’s [biscuit] box into which I’ve tossed items randomly, willy-nilly and with neither rhyme nor reason.” The “takes” vary in length from a single paragraph to several pages, and each is illustrated with a photograph of the item that inspired it: the lid of a tin cigar case “made by the Dannemann company of São Félix, Bahia, in Brazil” (“I bought the cigars […] in the wild town of Benjamin Constant on the Amazon in Brazil [where] I was just knocking around with no plan, going where the river took me”); a Vietnamese lottery ticket (“It cost 200 dong. I might have won the car but I didn’t”); a 50¢ piece from the Kingdom of Swaziland (“I was in Swaziland in 1978, resting and relaxing after covering conflicts in Namibia, Mozambique, and Rhodesia”). It’s an interesting approach to memoir, a collage-like way of illustrating a life lived “as free as possible in an increasingly homogenized world,” the picture emerging through a process of accretion rather than by simple chronology. — Michael Hayward

federal follies

levels of loss

The two protagonists in Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen (Random House Canada)—Becky Leggatt, dedicated and capable wife of the stubborn, doughy, religious-rockopera-writing Prime Minister Greg Leggatt; and Lise Lavoie, the charismatic African-born Governor General—become embroiled in a series of conspiracies, minority governments and ultimately a realization that something is very wrong. Greg Leggatt prorogues Parliament frequently, has a pastor/advisor and lives and breathes the hope of majority, leaving Becky to deal with the ArtsCAN! benefit, lead dignitaries’ wives around the Museum of Civilization, manipulate her media mole at the Mother Corpse (the National Broadcaster) and her “best” friend Lise.

The book opens in 2008, in what we know is a parallel universe because the Queen has given up the throne, although the financial crunch, the listeriosis crisis (“death by a thousand cold cuts”) and the war in Afghanistan are all happening. “Becky couldn’t sleep. It could have been the vise of heat; it could have been the gastrointestinal impact of the kebabs, wrapped in red leaf ‘Liberal’ lettuce ripped from Margaret Trudeau’s vegetable patch, served at the barbecue for Pakistan’s ambassador; it could have been Greg’s freakish snore, akin to a geriatric squirrel’s with apnea…”

In Sussex Drive, Svendsen, who has displayed her sharp analysis of Canadian and international dirty dealings in her television mini-series Human Cargo, transforms her anger and frustration at what we have become (complacent, greedy, hypocritical, gutted) into a thoroughly entertaining, thoroughly Canadian cri de coeur.

— Peggy Thompson

Much of Julian Barnes’s early work is lighthearted and playful (the protagonist in Flaubert’s Parrot attempts to track down the stuffed parrot that sat atop the writing desk; the opening chapter in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is narrated by a woodworm, a stowaway on Noah’s ark); his recent books have addressed more sombre themes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, published in 2008, was “a meditation on mortality and the fear of death”). The heart of Barnes’s latest book, Levels of Life (Random House Canada), is a brief memoir: an examination of grief and loss, written five years after the death from cancer of his wife and partner of thirty years, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Levels of Life is composed of three parts— an essay on the early days of ballooning, a short story and the

Endnotes 59

memoir—which at first appear to have little in common. Barnes links the three pieces together with variations on the idea that “when you put two things together that have not been put together before, the world is changed.” This seems like a tenuous hook on which to hang an entire book; and yet it works. “You put together two people who have not been put together before… and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.” At one point Barnes describes grief as “the negative image of love” and asks: “if there can be an accumulation of love over the years, then why not of grief?” Levels of Life is a controlled and measured expression of a loss that, by any metric, is immeasurable. — Michael Hayward

modernism arrives Robert McTavish’s new film The Line Has Shattered (Non-Inferno Media) illuminates a turning point in Vancouver’s literary scene. In 1963 a small group of newly established American poets (and one Canadian) arrived at the University of British Columbia for the Vancouver Poetry Conference, where they combined classroom discussion, a literary salon and wicked partying into a threeweek intensive seminar on poetry.

Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov and Margaret Avison (the Canadian) taught three seminars to students from both sides of the border.

The female instructors were welcomed but had a smaller role in the conference proceedings. In fact, both Avison and Levertov left after the first week,

60 Geist 89 Summer 2013

making it, in Pauline Butling’s words, “pretty boysey.” Avison, meanwhile and tellingly, does not even make the front or back cover of the new DVD. The decision to have Phyllis Webb narrate the film helps to address the gender imbalance. The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference changed the careers of many Canadian writers, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah, and McTavish interviews many attendees who offer specific insights into how they were altered by the experience. Although the “Poetry News” segments of the film feel contrived, McTavish makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of this event by combining original footage and recordings with firsthand accounts by participants.

The VPC has acquired mythic status in both Canada and the United States, and inspired many echo conferences—from Berkeley in 1965 to Vancouver in 2011. This film celebrates the 50th anniversary of a true

event in Canadian literary history—in Alain Badiou’s sense of the word, where “an event is the creation of new possibilities.” — Gregory Betts

all in the families A generation ago, Canadian poetry was dominated by two alternative fashions, all of them equally dreary in the eyes of a young writer seeking a literary milieu, writes James Pollock in You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (Porcupine’s Quill): “One was a rough, dull, plainspoken lyric poetry in casual free verse, either autobiographical or mythically didactic: Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, George Bowering. The other was a loopy avant-garde composition whose main qualities were tedium and incoherence: bpNichol, Fred Wah, Steve McCaffery.” Pollock recalls that while “sitting in the audience listening to Atwood’s mildly amusing monotone wit, and Nicol’s grunting and snarling and endless puns, it began to dawn on me that something was terribly wrong.” Since then the challenge for young poets, “many of whose predecessors once wandered around lost in the forest of nationalist ideology,” has been to make a poetry rooted in grammar and prosody, a poetry freed from the burden of the foregone conclusion, the faked innovation; to engage in “the struggle to find the ethical emerging from the formal, a challenge that when well met, produces great art in any age.” The poetry celebrated in the pages of You Are Here includes the work of Jeffrey Donaldson, Karen Solie, Anne Carson, Daryl Hine, Eric Ormsby and Marlene Cruikshank, each of whom receive illuminating and often brilliant close readings. Pollock situates these poets within the world of poetry rather than merely the world of Canada; the result inspires readers to

think along similar lines. Attempts to define a Canadian canon, more or less (mostly less) successful in anthologies of several decades, are also considered, and only two recent publications are recommended: The New Canon, edited

by Carmine Starnino (Véhicule Press), which he calls “a revelation,” and Modern Canadian Poets, edited by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet Press), “the best general anthology we have.”

“Poems talk to each other,” Pollock writes, “they move over in bed when a new one climbs in. And it helps everyone if a critic can demonstrate which poems are sleeping with which. It helps readers know how to read them… Like people, poems left alone for too long go crazy and die. They need the company of other poems, especially their families, to survive.”

Pollock’s critical writing echoes Wittgenstein, who writes of his paradigmatic “language games” that they “form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap.” Wittgenstein’s proposition that “ethics and aesthetics are one” is illustrated implicitly by Pollock when he quotes Rilke’s wonderful sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which begins: “We cannot know his legendary head,” and ends: “You must change your life.” The ethical value of poetry, its real moral strength, Pollock writes, is its power to offer us “new languages of personal resonance.”

A language of personal resonance is precisely what Brad Cran displays in his new collection, Ink on Paper (Nightwood), which contains several “public” poems written for occasions

and issues that would drive many poets into banality and bathos; one of them, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Grey Whale and Ending with a Line From Rilke,” invokes—brazenly, some might say—not only (by some thematic convergence) the Rilke sonnet quoted by James Pollock in You Are Here, but also “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. The occasion is the appearance of two grey whales in Vancouver harbour, and the poem succeeds wonderfully in leading us to Rilke’s—now Cran’s—famous last line. Cran has found a public voice that emerges from plain speech and stays rigorously clear of the declamatory, the polemical, the sentimental; the result is always compelling and at times harrowing. The title poem is an ethically and morally tangled excursion into the life of the celebrated Chinese poet Gu Cheng, who murdered his wife with an axe. There is nothing coy in these poems, most of which are clearly framed by their titles: “Contemplating Divorce While Watching Porn at the Local Best Western Two Miles from Home”; “Conflating Memories While Listening to ‘Day In, Day Out,’ by Billie Holiday”; “The Death of Ronald Reagan: A Final Love Song”; “At the Canadian Olympics I Am Canadian and On TV”; and, especially appropriate to this notice: “Reading Wittgenstein,” the first stanza of which reads: “I was reading Wittgenstein when / all three were killed on the viaduct.”

Another book worthy of inclusion in one or more of James Pollock’s “families” of worthy poems and poets is Kathryn Mockler’s collection The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books), whose work is entirely free of the gratuitous image-making, the facile metaphors that so many young (and not so young) poets substitute for good writing; here we are in the presence of subjects and predicates wielded bravely in the plain language of telling, as inherited, absorbed, reflected in the “family of work” that includes, among others, Lydia Davis, J. Robert Lennon and Richard Brautigan. Mockler’s first lines set worlds into motion: “I walked into the garage, / and found a teenage boy / in a tank top and shorts, / sweating profusely as he / lifted weights…” and within a few lines the boy tells of mental institutions, the farm, the mall, his mother and his stepfather, people getting their brains taken out… “but what does / it have to do with why you / are in my garage? I’m here, / Alex said, because our garage is being renovated.” Another poem, “Skinheads,” opens: “At first I thought it was a dream or the radio, / and then I realized it was one of the hundred / skinheads that had been surrounding my / house for three days…” There are allegories in these pages as well, such as “The Lamp and the Light Bulb” and “The Cottage,” which begins: “Hurt feeling and Anger had rented / a cottage on Lake Huron for a week / in August.” — Stephen Osborne

Read more online Zen and hazard labels, chaos and pinspotting, flashbacks and remorse, laundry and green ink, Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer… Geist editors and correspondents report on books read, shows seen, events hung out at.

Read Geist at

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Endnotes 61

t h e noted elsew h e r e

Michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca says Ink on Paper (Nightwood) by Brad Cran “kicks the crap out of any second book suspicion” and that the poems “gush, flow, torrent.” Frankstyles.blogspot.ca says that the poems are “without highfalutin obscurity.” Madeleine Thien calls the personal essays in Jane Silcott’s Everything Rustles (Anvil Press) “searching, self-deprecating, celebratory and sorrowful,” and Andreas Schroeder invites readers to “savour their lively intelligence” and “their cheek.” According to the Globe and Mail, George Bowering is “alert, playful and questioning” in his memoir Pinboy (Cormorant Books), and the Winnipeg Review says that he is “a smartass” who writes with “winsome longing for cupping a young girl’s breast in his palm.” PickleMeThis.com writes that Rachel Lebowitz’s poetry collection Cottonopolis (Pedlar Press) “turns language inside out in order to sew the whole world up into a tidy purse,” and a Halifax bookstore tweeted that it “depicts the brutality of the industrial age, check it out!” The Jewish Post & News says that Libby Simon writes with “sharp powers of observation, although always delivered with a velvet touch” in Life Is Like a Pot of Soup (Artbookbindery/SelfPublished), and the Winnipeg Free Press writes that the collection is “formatted to run chronologically.” Quill & Quire writes that the stories in Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow (Exile Editions)

by Leon Rooke are “unified in the outlandishness of their incidents,” and the National Post calls them a “literary tasting menu” to “one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of work in this country,” adding “if the house of CanLit has many mansions, Rooke’s is the one with the gargoyles on the turret.” According to Quill & Quire, Nicole Brossard’s writing in White Piano (Coach House; translated

by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré) “is occasionally tentative or delicate,” and according to the Montreal Gazette 62 Geist 89 Summer 2013

w a l l

she “writes with a poetic intensity that burns.” The Vancouver Courier notes that Catherine Owen’s poetry collection Trobairitz (Anvil Press) “melds the seemingly disparate worlds” of “metalheads and 12th-century troubadours,” and Quill & Quire says it “opens the mind like a scream” as “poetry and metal collide.” c o n gratulations

To Karen Connelly, who won the prize for poetry at the National Magazine Awards for her poem “The Speed of Rust, or, He Marries,” (Geist 84); to Connie Kuhns, shortlisted for a Western Magazine Award for “Last Day in Cheyenne,” Geist 84); and to Joe Fiorito, nominated for a Western Magazine Award for “Wednesday, August 17, 2011” (Geist 86); and to Anakana Schofield, winner of the 2012 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, for Malarky. o f f the shelf

Sarah Sheard buys Bertolt Brecht a ticket for the Toronto Island Ferry in Krank (Seraphim Editions); Jay MillAr composes stanzas inspired by the shape of your purple sweater in Timely Irreverence (Nightwood Editions); Daphne Marlatt eats pie at the White Lunch in Liquidities (Talonbooks). The Motherfuckers end the love-everyone tyranny of hippies through anger, drugs and sex in The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (Scribner); in When This World Comes to an End (Brick Books), Kate Cayley introduces Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson, wings and all, in the afterlife; Jacqueline Turner celebrates the birth of the sevenbillionth baby on October 31, 2011, in The Ends of the Earth (ECW Press).

Lorna Goodison crams 6'4" Tom Yew into a Morris Minor in Supplying Salt and Light (McClelland & Stewart); in Force Field (Mother Tongue), Gillian Jerome likes you like she likes mussels cooked in curry with French fries and malt vinegar; Daniel Karasik would be happier in a smaller, quieter room in Hungry (Cormorant Books). Yvonne Maximchuk dresses salmon in fishnet stockings and

ascots in Drawn to Sea (Caitlin Press); George Szanto derives inspiration from the muck and slime in Bog Tender (Brindle & Glass); Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, edited by Susan Swartwout (Southeast Missouri State University Press) is a small journal concerned with a large valley. It remains unclear what apocalypse we did hope for in Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For (Caitlin Press); Yoko’s Dogs wonder what they did yesterday in Whisk (Pedlar Press); Mari-Lou Rowley sips cocktails in her bathing suit and forgets Gauss’s law in Unus Mundus (Anvil Press). Jacob Scheier pens an ode to the Double Rainbow Guy in Letter from Brooklyn (ECW Press); a disappointed cultist gets a few things off his chest in Klipschutz’s This Drawn and Quartered Moon (Anvil Press); Lillian and Audrey steal a car and bust out of Tranquil Meadows Nursing Home in Flee, Fly, Flown by Janet Hepburn (Second Story Press). In The Hungry Ghosts (Doubleday Canada), Shyam Selvadurai creates ghosts with stomachs so big they can never be filled; in Every Happy Family by Dede Crane (Coteau Books), mothers are like brush fires; Lisa Moore plans a prison break and an escape to Colombia in Caught (House of Anansi). Holley Rubinsky recalls her own wet diapers and first words, among other things, in South of Elfrida (Brindle & Glass); Aysan Sev’er says single women have dragons inside of them in Mothers, Daughters and Untamed Dragons (Demeter Press); Nancy Jo Cullen waxes eloquent on her hirsute character, Valerie, in Canary (Biblioasis). Dale Patterson reveals in Fifteen Minutes of Fame (Red Deer Press) that Tricky Dick never even visited the grave of Checkers, the dog who got him elected; Damian Barr’s Iron Lady nicks milk from small children in Maggie & Me (House of Anansi); Jack Layton was all about the singalongs according to Jack Layton: Art in Action, edited by Penn Kemp (Fourfront Editions).

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #89 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, BC V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist tote bag.

Good luck!

ACROSS 1 Ancient giants can appear quite grainy 4 Does it matter that the cheesy fundamental bit comes in six flavours?

6 Mount that yoga photo with this cardboard 9 A long time back she gave it one of these 10 That tangy green electricity could tenderize cement (2) 12 Jo finds the unleaded almost stimulating 13 Let’s go Dutch on the liqueur while we’re on our snorkeling trip 19 Très triste to be on the Riviera without any money 20 Mary Jane followed her intuition and looked in the hamper for something fatty but nutritious (2) 22 Sounds like you’re going to march about while you fry those veggies 24 In the new will, Pierre comes first (2) 25 The creator said that his apparatus was not secondhand (abbrev) 27 I’m sure she’ll lick that headache on Saturday night 28 If you’re in a pickle, run for it 29 I think it’s divine when the cow smokes 30 The green one is the latest charmer 32 Every day Jon brings me the paper 33 Is it natural for my hips to sound crunchy or is it because I eat oats and wear sandals?

35 At most inns, egg is at the root of Herb’s concoction 39 Are you girls coming to our lobster party?

40 Remember Bonnie? Sounds like she was slightly insane 41 Ferment fungus, add salt, then eat?

42 You men should drop down some time and we’ll see what’s cookin’ 44 He’s kind of a prude and he can’t find his way around Montreal 46 Is there anything to eat besides eels?

47 He was religious, but he was also into dresses 48 That culture is very pro milk 49 Many of those faxes led to the grinding of varnishing cloth

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Down 1 Meet me in the ski chapel and we’ll share some of those curly green fries (2) 2 A lot of additional auditory communication sounds thoughtful (abbrev) 3 Did Henry start wearing a crown when he played in India?

4 Fake cereal can be quite acidic 5 Eat your greens before that Japanese invader takes over the southern US 6 Nutrition is the arch enemy of that famous big raincoat 7 Did you get that heavyweight cooker at Ikea?

8 When he turned forty, yuke playing and funny fowl were both on the menu 11 Bunny always helps Teresa with the eggs 14 Prolific religious chickens often get together (abbrev) 15 It’s rude to rotate one’s orbs while chatting (abbrev) 16 Pat can get confused but she’s always appropriate 17 He’s faithless in the net chaos of her fixed game (2) 18 Every year she shows interest in how many mistakes she’s allowed to make (abbrev) 21 That layabout only has one euro to toss around 22 Last winter, Harry kept pulling it over my eyes 23 Roy said the lonely were exclusively in Lyon 26 At the club, she took one pill and felt more relaxed (abbrev)

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27 Be a pet and water my ice shades while Fatty plants mint in Mexico (2) 28 In Nova Scotia, the last bastion of defence is not over the hill yet 31 Gee, Dad, the flat ones you caught will make the sushi red 33 Sweet! She made gelatin out of that bear 34 Is that the new way to conserve things?

35 In a surprising twist, the boy asked for some more 36 That’s meant to break even (abbrev) 37 Its eagle eye is eery, I think 38 That fruit is inedible—better shellack it 42 He got to know her at the opera 43 On the reserve, there wasn’t enough (abbrev) 45 Maria, dear, please start the song There was no winner for Puzzle 88.

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

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P R I H A C N C D E E S S S P W I A P O R I R N I G O R S

I N O N D E O D R O S I S T E A N T D A N

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

Puzzle 63

c a u g h t

m a p p i n g

Elementary!

The National Map of Sherlock Holmes

by Melissa Edwards

Benedict Glacier Baker Lake

Hudson Bay

Constable Lake

Reason Lake

Adventure Mountain

Crimes Lake

modified Geistonic projection

Baskerville Island

Logical Point

Irene Falls

Duo Lake

Lac Impossible Conan

Loner Mountain

Watch and Chain

Walking Stick Mountain

Clue Cove

Watson Lake Observation Point

Inspector Peak Boscombe

Lac Snoopy

Holmes Crossing

Quai-de-la-Pipe

Boxer Reach Hound Island

Musgrave Peaks Ego Mountain

Lac Novel

The Beehive

Pistol Island

Adler Lake

Inverness

Mount Moriarty

Sherlock Lake Sussex Mazarin Case

Violin Lake

Lac Opium Solitary Lake

Rathbone Lake Wolfe Hawkeye Mystery Lake

Justice

Lac Infer Law

Detector Lake

Brett Lake Bohemia Island

Lake Superior

Scarlet Park

Downey Creek Skill Lake London

Milverton Science Hill

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

64 Geist 89 Summer 2013

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