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GEIST

Volume 27

· Number 97 · Summer 2015

F EAT U R ES

THE SYRUP TR AP Canada's favourite humour magazine 33

OPER ATION PRIDE

Ethan Eisenberg Toronto pride photography 50

MY FATHER’S PICASSO Cary Fagan Norma always called it the scribble 52

P OSTCARD LIT Winners of the 11th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest 59

DON'T LOOK DOWN Evelyn Lau You are sinking into that spiral 62

Page 22. Deep prairie

GEIST

Adverb-free zone, since 1990

NOTE S & DI S PATC H E S

F IN D IN GS

CO LU MN S

Michał Kozłowski Publishing Life 9

20

AFTERLIFE OF CULTURE

The Banff Method

Immigrants from Nowhere Stephen Henighan 66

Literary Festival Field Guide Roni Simunovic 11

Itinerant Poet CITY OF WORDS

Life Below the Circle

The Armenian Question Alberto Manguel 68

Letters to Manitora

NATIONAL DREAMS

Cruel Summer

Vincent Pagé Milton Acorn Googles His Own Work 12

Acts of Resistance Daniel Francis 70

Eve Corbel Old Women Cry at Weddings 13 Susan Mockler Hey, Sexy 14

D EPA RT MEN TS

Neon Moon Chinese Export Paintings

IN CAMERA

Bad Behaviour

LETTERS

Four-Legged Poetry

ENDNOTES

and more…

OFF THE SHELF, NOTED ELSEWHERE

Rob Kovitz Certain Embarrassing Questions 17

4 5 73 78 PUZZLE

79 CAUGHT MAPPING

The Q is set in ITC Legacy Serif in 622.5 point type. ITC Legacy was designed by Ronald Arnholm in1992. It is based on a version of Jenson, used to set Eusebius's De praeparatione evangelica in 1470. cover:

cover design:

Eric Uhlich

80

I N

M

C A M E R A

uch of what we know to be the Modern in art of the last 125 years or so has to do with slowing down our rate of perception. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, by Marcel Duchamp, is a well-known example of such a slowing down and the making strange of what we think we see in the world; i.e., reality itself. We are required to stop and pay attention. Ross C. Kelly has been working to a similar end in a series of cityscapes made in Vancouver, Toronto, Melbourne, Shanghai, New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo and other major cities around the world. His procedure is to photograph the same scene repeatedly over a period of days, months or even years, and then to cut out

4 Geist 97 Summer 2015

small segments of the resulting images and overlay them in a collage to create a single complex image of the urban scene. The image displayed here depicts an intersection along Granville Street in Vancouver, taken over a period of several days and assembled from segments of about one hundred and fifty photographs. The result is an arresting image that, by using the snapshot as its kernel, contradicts the instantaneity of the snapshot that pervades our visual culture: we are called to look again.

Ross C. Kelly’s work was shown in spring 2015 at Art Beatus Gallery in Vancouver, and can be seen at rossckelly.com. —Mandelbrot

letters

GEIST

READERS WRITE

published by

The Geist Foundation publisher, editor-in-chief

Michał Kozłowski associate publisher

AnnMarie MacKinnon administration

UNMASKED

Respect to Geist for publishing the review of Red Skin, White Masks (“Time for a Rewrite,” Daniel Francis, Geist 96), but I think Glen Coulthard’s book deserves more than the treatment it got in the spring issue. The important difference between Coulthard’s work and The Comeback by John Saul is well articulated by Hayden King and Shiri Pasternak in their review “Don’t Call it a Comeback,” published this year in the Literary Review of Canada. King and Pasternak’s take is that Saul writes from a sense of “innate Canadian exceptionalism” and a belief in the power of Canadian institutions— existing court and electoral systems most significantly—to usher in necessary transformations. In King and Pasternak’s view, Coulthard’s work fundamentally rejects this politics. By contrast, the combined review of Red Skin, White Masks and The Comeback in Geist ultimately conflates them, highlighting their somewhat shallow common ground—the premise that things are fucked up in Canada right now—and jettisoning the more complicated political question of what to do about it.

—Owen Toews, Winnipeg Read more work by Daniel Francis at geist.com.

BEATITUDE ADJUSTMENT

After reading “Piss-up” (No. 96) I thought, “Sometimes you read something and it connects with you so deeply that it leaves you speechless,” and then I realized I had never actually had that moment before. I’ve

felt the exact connection to life after hours spent awake and watching the sunrise Jeff Shucard describes, but it is too sacred for me to ever try to put into words. Shucard did it perfectly.

I used to have a plan: Ireland 2013.

It never happened. Now I think it is time to resurrect that dream.

—Justine Pittman, Calgary Read “Piss-up” and other work by Jeff Shucard at geist.com.

Digital Publishing: Roni Simunovic Reader Services: Dylan Gyles Office Admin: Christine Novosel Volunteers: Rebekah Chotem, Patrick Easton, Jennesia Pedri brain trust

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WEST COAST LITE

I read many kinds of magazines, each for its different types of information and entertainment, including Geist because I like its whimsical humour and particular focus. But I can’t say I was amused by Stephen Osborne’s smug note in the spring issue (“Insurgency,” No. 96) comparing Geist to other publications like the Walrus, Saturday Night and Quill & Quire. Decrying the “respectful and respectable,” repeating phrases such as “orthodox and humourless,” “the encroachment of the boring,” he sounds too much like my grandsons talking about almost any printed nonfiction of more than a few hundred words.

Incidentally, since Osborne goes on to mention Pauline Johnson, the Week, and the 1885 Riel uprising, I wonder if he knows that Saturday Night actually grew out of that context. Edmund E. Sheppard’s Toronto Evening News, in the grand old tradition of local Orange journalism, published an article in 1885 suggesting that Frenchspeaking and Catholic soldiers sent to the North-West from Lower Canada may have been less than enthusiastic in Letters 5

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Jordan Abel, Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Philip Basaric, Trevor Battye, andrea bennett, Jill Boettger, Jesmine Cham, C.E. Coughlan, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert EverettGreen, Daniel Francis, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Jill Mandrake, Becky McEachern, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Lauren Ogston, Patty Osborne, Eric Peterson, Dan Post, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito support the geist writers and artists fund: geist.com/wafund www.geist.com

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their pursuit of Riel and his followers.

The News was sued for libel by the 65th Regiment of Montreal; the litigation dragged on into 1887. Sheppard was served with a fine and an injunction against ever again publishing a daily newspaper anywhere in Canada. As a result, on December 3, 1887, he began publishing the weekly Saturday Night.

No doubt the magazine had some moments of what Osborne would call “ennui,” but it retained a readership for over a hundred years. May Geist “provide a bulwark or at least a redoubt against the encroachment of the boring” (without sinking into “West Coast lite”) for at least as long.

—Ray Ellenwood, Toronto Stephen Osborne replies: I must decry the notion that I was decrying the respectful and the respectable, when I was merely stating the existence of those qualities: Canada has always needed Saturday Night and still does. The charge of repeating myself is also groundless: none of the phrases cited by Mr. Ellenwood is used more than once (my granddaughter counted them). I am grateful for his note on the genesis of Saturday Night, arising, as it did, so to speak, from the insurrection.

Read more of Stephen Osborne’s work at geist.com.

OOPS!

In Geist 96, we named Gary Baldwin as one of the authors of Franzlations. His name is Gary Barwin. The title of Stephen Henighan’s piece should have been “Cross-Country” and not “White Out” and the phrase “Whoah! A Canadian!” should have read “Whoah! A Canadiana!” Our apologies. write to geist G

Thoughts, opinions, comments and queries are welcome and encouraged, and should be sent to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Snailmail: #210 – 111 West Hastings St. Vancouver BC v6b 1h4 Letters may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist map suitable for framing.

Our thoughts are with our friends at Café Kathmandu in Vancouver and their families in Nepal. Over the years Café Kathmandu has become an informal secondary Geist office, where many Geist gatherings, dinners and high-level publishing talks are held.

RANDY REPORTS

I

find it amazing how non-Native people are unaware of the fact that here on Vancouver Island there are three distinct nations. When I explain the differences and similarities to nonNatives they are usually surprised but appreciate the information.

The three Nations on Vancouver Island are: Nuu-chah-nulth, on the west coast; Kwagiutl, on the north of the island; and Coast Salish on the central and southern island. Each Nation is made up of a number of Bands or tribes. And each nation has more than one language, and numerous dialects. Each of the three nations is as different from each other as the 6 Geist 97 Summer 2015

Germans are from the French and English.

There are similarities, of course, but the similarities aren’t universal. For example, First Nations people across North America believe in creation.

There is a common belief in the need to be stewards of the land. The family structure is critical to the survival of the tribe; children are our future.

Differences are evident in spiritual beliefs, food gathering techniques, rituals, ceremonies. The languages are very different. Within Nuu-chahnulth territory there are two distinct languages and each tribe has its own dialect. The Ditidaht (at Nitinat Lake),

the Pacheedaht (at Port Renfrew) and the Makah (Neah Bay in Washington State) speak a similar language. They can understand each other but have their own dialects.

Members of each of the three nations relied on the ocean for food.

They were superior in building dugout cedar canoes. They were proficient at fishing, harvesting sea mammals, gathering shellfish and the Nuu-chahnulth even hunted whales. The Coast Salish had an ingenious technique for catching groundfish. They would sink a device similar to a badminton shuttlecock and then pull it back up. As it rose to the surface it would spin and any groundfish seeing it would follow it to the surface where the fisher would spear it.

The Nuu-chah-nulth were famous for their halibut hook, which was so effective the design is still used today for the commercial halibut fishery.

They had special designs for canoes for different purposes. For instance, they had a seal hunting canoe that was a much different design than a cargo canoe used for moving people and the planks they used to build their homes in villages on the coast. The early commercial fishing boats in the late 1800s up to modern times in British Columbia were based on the design of the Nuu-chah-nulth canoe.

The canoe styles for each of the three nations were slightly different but each was very efficient. There has been somewhat of a revival of canoe building but the art is fast disappearing and is in much danger, like many aspects of traditional aboriginal ways of life.

In British Columbia there are close to two hundred distinct Bands. There used to be more than the current number of individual Bands but the Department of Indian Affairs forced many tribes to amalgamate. The year 1949 was critical in history for amalgamations and for forcing Bands to elect Chiefs and Councils, but that is a topic for another time.

—Randy Fred Letters 7

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NOTES & DISPATCHES

Publishing Life M I C H A Ł KOZ Ł OWS K I

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding, music

What Wave Dave and Rena, Jeremy Bruneel

L

ondon, Ontario, in the 1970s— population 250,000—was, by many accounts, a conservative and boring town, so average that it served as a market-test city for retailers and fast food chains; its great musical contribution to the world was Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians,

a brass ensemble that claimed to play the sweetest music this side of heaven (and sold more than 100 million records). But by the late 1970s, punk culture, which had already established itself in London, England, and New York City and other major centres, began to take root

in London, Ontario. Young musicians and art school students began to gather around galleries and studios that were popping up downtown.

They formed their own bands and started to play shows at jam spaces and dive bars—the Cedar Lounge, York Hotel—and the scene grew; over the years London sustained several hundred bands. By the early 1980s, the punk scene began to splinter and to be replaced by smaller, more specialized art and music scenes, which continued to provide a space for London musicians, artists, writers and publishers to engage with counterculture, DIY aesthetics and anarchist politics.

Out of this milieu emerged the music zine What Wave, published from 1984 to 1996 by Dave O’Halloran and Rena MacDonald, a young couple from London, Ontario. They had no publishing experience when they began to produce What Wave but they were already immersed in the world of alternative music magazines and punk zines as readers of the legendary US publications Kicks, Bomp and New York Rocker, which at the time were the only publications where you could get the straight goods on emerging bands, especially in a small, conservative town in southern Ontario.

Dave and Rena took over What Wave from Al Cole, guitarist for the Legend Killers, who had been publishing What Wave for a couple of years: in the fall of 1984, Al gave them a box of back issues of What Notes & Dispatches 9

Wave and a clip-art collection of old monster magazines. Dave and Rena had just returned from a trip to New York, where for the first time they saw bands associated with American garagepunk—a punk take on psychedelic ’60s garage rock—that had not yet been discovered in London, Ontario, and about which, Dave recently recalled, they wanted to get the word out to their friends and fellow punk fans.

Dave, a computer tech, and Rena, a high school special needs teacher, published their first issue of What Wave in December 1984. It was thirty pages long, on standard 8 1/2 x 11" paper and side-stitch bound. It featured Deja Voodoo—a Montreal duo that played twangy punk known as sludgeabilly—on the cover, interviews with Katrina and the Waves from London, England, and UIC from London, Ontario, and reviews of the garagepunk shows they had seen in

New York: the Tryfles, the Pandoras, the Fuzztones, the Fleshtones, the Slickee Boys. The first fifty copies were sold with bonus candy left over from Halloween.

What Wave had had a small print run and featured writing about rock and punk. But now Dave, who became known as What Wave Dave, and Rena began to print longer issues and to publish more frequently. They 10 Geist 97 Summer 2015

broadened editorial coverage, writing not only about music but also about comics, wrestling and skateboarding.

And they expanded their music con-

tent to include a range of sub-genres and offshoots of punk and rock, including surf, roots, garagepunk, grunge, hardcore, rockabilly, sludgeabilly, psychedelic and other associated streams of underground music.

A typical issue of What Wave contained photographs, articles, interviews and comics by Dave and Rena and a few local artists and writers.

Covers were designed in the collaged, crude mode of punk show posters.

Production took place in Dave and Rena’s apartment: articles were typed out on the typewriter, cut out with scissors, arranged on pages, decorated with clip art, glued down and then turned over to a friend at the local print shop, who printed the pages at a discount. (The friend, Mike Niederman, is often cited as one of the foundational figures of punk culture in London, for printing art, zines and show posters for many bands, artists and publishers, and for providing jam space in his loft to the first London punk bands.) When the printed sheets arrived, Dave and Rena would invite friends over to help collate pages, a process of shuffling from one stack of letter-size pages to the next throughout the entire apartment, then stapling

each copy along the spine, sometimes for many hours through the night, until they had a few hundred or a thousand copies of What Wave bound and ready for distribution.

What Wave could be purchased for $1.00 (more for later issues) at record stores and comic shops, at first in London and Toronto, and then, as What Wave became better known (through word of mouth and reviews in other zines), in cities in North America and Europe, including Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and England. Within a few years, demand rose for the music written about in What Wave, and Dave and Rena began to produce mix tapes to distribute with copies of the zine. They also produced several 7" records of local bands, promoted many concerts, and hosted many touring bands at their house.

Printing and postage, the major publishing expenses, were covered by revenue from single-copy sales, subscriptions (roughly twenty at any given time) and door money from benefit concerts put on by local bands to support What Wave; the rest of the subsidy came from contributed writing and art and other volunteer

labour, the typical creative subsidy model required of publishers of zines and cultural magazines.

What Wave continued to publish for twelve years and became a success

covers by andrew lewis, mike lodge, kit carson

Literary Festival Field Guide RO N I S I M U N OV I C

by Canadian publishing standards: at its peak it had a circulation of a thousand copies, a tiny but dedicated subscriber base, distribution in North America and Europe. Dave and Rena dedicated their leisure time to travelling throughout Canada and the US to see concerts and to visit record stores and comic shops, where they would trade copies of What Wave for records and zines and magazines, a kind of barter system that allowed them to hear and read about the music they liked, to write about it for What Wave and to promote the community that sustained them.

In the early 1990s, Dave and Rena began to raise two daughters and they devoted much of their time to family life. The last issue of What Wave came out in 1995 (reissued in 2000) and contained a “family tree” that connected the bands—more than 270— of the London, Ontario, punk scene

of the 1970s and 1980s. These days, Dave hosts Radio What Wave, a weekly ninety-minute program on CHRW, the University of Western Ontario community radio station, during which he continues the What Wave tradition by talking about and playing underground music. He and Rena still host touring bands in the guest room of their home.

The story of What Wave—volunteerism, the DIY ethos, creative subsidy—is an example of cultural publishing at its best. Zines and cultural magazines are not so much facilitators of a lifestyle as they are a lifestyle, a way of being in the world for publishers, writers and readers.

Michał Kozłowski is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Geist. Read more of his work at geist.com.

Savour the latest episode of

JILL & LORNA’S

Kitchen live on location from Italy

www.youtube.com/user/ JillandLornasKitchen

Photo: Leanne Boschman.

Notes & Dispatches 11

Milton Acorn Googles His Own Work VINCENT PAGÉ

A quarterback is running across the field parallel claims he can throw completes 44 of his passes The moon’s a harsh mistress balloon

Could I forget the look that tells me you want me You loved me back Jann Arden my heart to death me and I froze in time To the void with how to fill the void without food how to fill the void with god how to fill the void within

Who else would chill in this room I be talking to Shoot yourself in the foot emoticon gif

12 Geist 97 Summer 2015

There’s a joker in the pack

I couldn’t become a hero agree more care less

The old guy gets married knocked out eaten

The stronger the acid then which of the following is true wind the stronger the trees wind the larger the particles it erodes

Should I wish an ex happy birthday?

What time is it in Sochi

Lord, who let Have you let the dogs out?

Don’t look at the flowers

Here is the church here is the steeple thing

Doctor listened to my heart to stomach

Joseph, you’re not the father

He was cool a quiet man a friend of mine the quarterback

Struggle is the key to success quotes

Shall I compare you to Sir Robin Day

Where’s the beef nearest McDonald’s closest McDonald’s pizza

I lived a long way from Tipperary distance relationship

I wouldn’t go in there

On that note Dig up my heart heart Milton Acorn I speak this to your shame by permission Like a rolling stone virgin boss g6

Vincent Pagé’s work has appeared in Event, the Malahat Review, Plenitude, the Mackinac, the Feathertale Review and other publications. He lives in Toronto.

T R U E

F U N N I E S

Notes & Dispatches 13

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Hey, Sexy S U SA N M O C K L E R

Some recovery possible, no guarantees

“H

ey, sexy,” Jack said as he rolled up in his wheelchair.

I slowed my power wheelchair to a halt. The porter escorting me pushed the up button on the elevator.

“Hi, Jack.”

Jack was balding and had a goatee. He was a little older than me. In his mid-thirties, burly, and probably fairly short, though I’d never seen him standing. A paraplegic. Complete.

Paralyzed from the waist down. No chance of recovery. I was a quadriplegic. Incomplete. Paralyzed from the neck down. Some recovery was possible over the next few months at the rehab centre, but there were no guarantees. I had regained some movement in my left hand. That was something.

Paras. Quads. Complete. Incomplete. Critical distinctions I hadn’t known until three weeks ago, after my car accident.

“I’m just coming from physio,” Jack said. “Learning to pop wheelies in my chair. So I can get over curbs, shit like that when I get out. Just a few more weeks they tell me.”

“How’d it go?”

“Kinda cool. I was the best in the class.”

“That’s great.” The elevator doors opened. “Let me go in, then you can get out first upstairs. I’m pretty bad at backing up, so it takes me a while.”

“That’s why you got Pierre here to help. Right, man?”

“Sure thing, Jack.”

When we reached the second floor, I tugged the handgrip toward me in an attempt to back out of the elevator, but the chair veered to the left and I got stuck in the corner.

“I told you,” I said. The elevator beeped; the doors had remained open too long. I thrust the grip away from me to move forward, but I pushed too 14 Geist 97 Summer 2015

hard and rammed into the opposite corner. “Jesus.”

“Let me give you a hand,” Pierre said. He grasped the control and manoeuvred me out of the elevator.

“I’m awful at this.”

“Don’t worry,” Pierre said.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Jack said.

“I don’t know. My arm needs to work better so I can control it.” I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else.

“What’re you up to now?” Jack asked.

“Resting a bit before my next appointment. You?” “Grab a smoke, then chat with the ladies.” He nodded to where the nurses were gathered at the reception area.

In my room, I pulled up to the window. Only about fifteen minutes before the porter would return to take me to physio. Not enough time to be transferred into bed to lie down. I felt a flash of envy toward Jack. Paras could transfer themselves with their arms. Quads could do nothing. Jack.

A petty criminal I’d never have met in my ordinary life. Now, my peer.

United by our loss, cripples together.

We’d met during my first week at the rehab centre when Jack dropped by my room.

“Hi, I’m Jack.” He wheeled toward me. “You’re Susan, right?”

“Yeah.” I’d seen him in the halls, on my way to physio and occupational therapy. But why was he here? I relished my privacy, my single room, was so grateful it was covered through my ex-husband’s health insurance.

“Thought I’d pop in for a visit.”

“I’m pretty tired.”

“I won’t stay long. Keeps up the spirits to talk to someone. You were in a car accident, right?”

“I was.”

“I totalled my bike driving back from a party in the country. Out of

nowhere a bird flew into my face. I swerved and rammed right into a brick wall. Never saw the wall. It wasn’t there and then it was. What about you?”

I told him the story I’d been telling the last few weeks. The story that had become my only story. “Then the car hit a moose. I was the passenger.”

“A moose?” he said. “That’s fucked up.”

“I know.” I smiled. It was fucked up.

“What happened to the driver?”

“Nothing. A few scratches.” The driver. Gary, a man I’d been dating for less than a year.

“And he was sober? No booze? No weed?”

“Just a freak accident.”

“I got to admit, I’d had a few shots.

Vodka. Have a taste for it. Like the old man. This the first time you been in the hospital?”

“First time.” Then I remembered an overnight stay with Jell-O and ice cream when I was four.

“I was in two summers ago. Not this place, the Royal Ottawa. They didn’t treat me so good there. I guess I deserved it. I got to tell you, I was a bad man. A really bad man. I think that’s why this happened. You know?

God telling me it’s enough. Time to change my life.” His face went blank.

“I was in the Royal ’cause I got shot.

Right here.” He pointed to his lower right abdomen, then yanked up his T-shirt.

The puckered skin was pink and shiny where the bullet had entered.

“That must have been scary,” I said.

“It was kinda in the line of duty, you know? Part of the job.” He looked down, then up again, his face brightening.

“You like dogs?”

“Sure.”

“My brother, he has this big place.

An old farm in Stittsville. About twenty miles west of here. That’s where I was, you know, that night? He raises dogs.

A whole bunch of them is gonna have

babies in a few weeks. I could get you one if you want.”

“Oh?” “They’re real good watchdogs. Pit bulls. Cutest puppies I ever seen. Just let me know and I’ll arrange it like that.” Jack snapped his fingers. “He’s got some shepherds too. But you got to learn German to have one of them.

Sitz. Halt. Shit like that. It’s all they understand.”

After that, whenever we met I was friendly and polite.

I tried to avoid thinking about my accident. The four-lane highway between Ottawa and Montreal. Ten o’clock Sunday night. On our way for a week-long hiking trip in the mountains. What if we’d stayed home and left the next morning? What if I’d insisted we stop for coffee just minutes before?

M

idnight and I was struggling with sleep, still disrupted by my exhusband’s visit earlier that evening.

I couldn’t ask him why, if he really

Notes & Dispatches 15

wanted to be with me again—maybe we’ll still have kids together someday— he’d just put a down payment on a condo with a bedroom loft. When he was with me, he wanted to escape, but when we were apart, he wanted me back. Two years since we’d separated and still this back and forth.

I had to stop thinking about him, to steel myself, focus on recovery.

Maybe a couple of Gravol would help me sleep. I pressed the call bell for the nurse.

A few minutes later a tall beefy nurse entered the room. I didn’t recognize her.

“Two Gravol for you, right?” She leaned over me and tugged the cord to turn on the light above the bed. Her foul breath, the wiry dark hairs on her upper lip, the blackheads across the bridge of her nose repulsed me.

“I take them crushed with jam.

There’s some packets on top of the cabinet.”

“Who’s that? She’s so pretty.” The

16 Geist 97 Summer 2015

nurse pointed to the framed picture that my ex had given me that evening, a photo he’d taken of me seated on a seawall in Portugal, in a bright green sundress, smiling, tanned, my hair streaked blond by the sun, looking vital, vibrant, radiating health.

“That’s me.”

“Really?” The nurse mixed the Gravol and jam.

“Can you give me the water jug?” I sipped the water and tried to swallow the jam and Gravol mixture without gagging.

She kept glancing between the photograph and me. “I can see it a bit, especially around the eyes.”

“I’m done. Can you turn out the light?”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No.” Just go. Get out.

“Sleep well.”

W

henever we met, Jack greeted me with lines like: Hey, sexy.

How’s it going, sexy? At first I’d cringed.

Propped in a chair, a lifeless body, the steel halo brace bolted to my head, caging a face swollen with purple and yellow bruises. With time, though, I tried to be less embarrassed, to accept his kindness. Jack’s comments belied an understanding that was beyond the nurses and staff, and until now even beyond me.

I moved my eyes to the photo and ran my tongue over my chipped bottom teeth, the only damage from the accident I could actually feel. I visualized myself, again in the green dress, strolling down a sunlit street, entering an office building, the elevator to the dentist’s office. Waiting in the chair for the procedure to begin, eager to receive the final repair.

Susan Mockler is a psychologist. Her writing has appeared in Taddle Creek, Ars Medica, and Descant. She is currently writing a memoir, Fractured, from which this story is taken. She lives in Toronto.

F A Q

Certain Embarrassing Questions RO B KOV I TZ

Putting, raising, pondering, evading, begging, answering the question

“Why have you got such a Bare Neck, Mummie?”

“I’m going to a Dance, Darling. One has to dress like this for a Dance!”

“Do the Ladies dance in one Room, and the Gentlemen in another, Mummie?”

An Embarrassing Question, Punch, May 25, 1895

FAQ (noun) pronounced fak Acronym for frequently asked question What is a FAQ? A FAQ is a list of questions and answers, posted on a website or newsgroup with boilerplate answers, to preemptively address newbie ignorance and confusion. How is FAQ pronounced? The correct pronunciation is fak, though some insist on spelling it out. Why are FAQs worth reading? A FAQ can save a newbie considerable time by providing information that could otherwise be learned only by lurking for days or weeks, and considerable embarrassment by heading off breaches of netiquette as obscure yet essential as Robert’s Rules of Order.

Jonathon Keats, Control + Alt + Delete: A Dictionary of Cyberslang

How are we to begin? We should certainly not wait till the eve of marriage, but begin in childhood. In theory, it is wrong to lie to children, if they are to maintain unshaken confidence in their parents, and remain truthful themselves. No doubt we cannot explain everything to a child at the age when it begins to ask its mother certain embarrassing questions, but we should endeavor as far as possible to tell it the truth in a manner suitable to its age. When this is impossible, every child who knows that no reasonable explanation is ever refused it will be satisfied with the answer: “You are too young now to understand that; I will tell you when you are older.” Every child who speaks openly to its mother asks sooner or later how children come into the world. It is easier to reply to this when the child has had the opportunity of observing FAQ 17

the same thing in animals. Why should the mother conceal the fact that it is nearly the same in man as in animals? The child never thinks of blushing or laughing at natural phenomena.

Auguste Forel and C. F. Marshall, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study

She doesn’t answer but instead asks her own question, trying her best to conceal the question mark: Dad, what if all the churches and cathedrals were really centers for transmitting and receiving messages to and from space?

A. G. Porta, No World Concerto

YOU are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history for ever more.

Charles Sumner, On the Crime Against Kansas

So What Is Capitalism, Anyway?

We are used to seeing modern capitalism (along with modern traditions of democratic government) as emerging only later: with the Age of Revolutions—the industrial revolution, the American and French revolutions—a series of profound breaks at the end of the eighteenth century that only became fully institutionalized after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Here we come face to face with a peculiar paradox. It would seem that almost all elements of financial apparatus that we’ve come to associate with capitalism—central banks, bond markets, shortselling, brokerage houses, speculative bubbles, securitization, annuities—came into being not only before the science of economics (which is perhaps not too surprising), but also before the rise of factories, and wage labor itself. This is a genuine challenge to familiar ways of thinking. We like to think of the factories and workshops as the “real economy,” and the rest as 18 Geist 97 Summer 2015

superstructure, constructed on top of it. But if this were really so, then how can it be that the superstructure came first? Can the dreams of the system create its body?

All this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, a question on which there is no consensus at all.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

23. Objection to the Consideration of a Question.

An objection may be made to the consideration of any original main motion, and to no others, provided it is made before there is any debate or before any subsidiary motion is stated.

Thus, it may be applied to petitions and to communications that are not from a superior body, as well as to resolutions. It cannot be applied to incidental main motions, such as amendments to by-laws, or to reports of committees on subjects referred to them, etc. It is similar to a question of order in that it can be made when another has the floor, and does not require a second; and as the chairman can call a member to order, so he can put this question, if he deems it advisable, upon his own responsibility. It cannot be debated, or amended, or have any other subsidiary motion applied to it. It yields to privileged motions and to the motion to lay on the table. A negative, but not an affirmative vote on the consideration may be reconsidered.

When an original main motion is made and any member wishes to prevent its consideration, he rises, although another has the floor, and says, “Mr. Chairman, I object to its consideration.”

The chairman immediately puts the question, “The consideration of the question has been objected to: Will the assembly consider it? [or, Shall the question be considered?]” If decided in the negative by a two-thirds vote, the whole matter is dismissed for that session; otherwise, the discussion continues as if this objection had never been made. The same question may be introduced at any succeeding session.

The Object of this motion is not to cut off debate (for which other motions are provided) but to enable the assembly to avoid altogether any question which it may deem irrelevant, unprofitable, or contentious. If the chair considers the question entirely outside the objects of the society, he should rule it out of order, from which decision an appeal may be taken.

Objection to the consideration of a question must not be confounded with objecting where

unanimous consent, or a majority vote, is required.

Thus, in case of the minority of a committee desiring to submit their views, a single member saying, “I object,” prevents it, unless the assembly by a majority vote grants them permission.

Henry M. Robert, Robert’s Rules of Order Revised for Deliberative Assemblies

Let it suffice to have said so much about these matters; and as to the question how and by what exploits being Egyptians they received the sceptres of royalty over the Dorians, we will omit these things, since others have told about them; but the things with which other narrators have not dealt, of these I will make mention.

Herodotus, The History

“Sir?” Hogan prompted. “Robert Niles…?”

“I’ve never received any kind of threat from that direction, Detective Inspector Hogan. Nor had I heard the name Herdman until after the shootings.” He turned his head from the mirror.

“Does that answer your questions?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If Herdman had set out to target Anthony, why turn the gun on the other boys? Why wait so long after sentencing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Motive isn’t always the issue…”

Should one pay special attention to the training of the thumb?

It may be said that the thumb and the middle finger are the two arch-conspirators against a precise finger technique. They crave your greatest attention. Above all, you must see to it that, in touching the keys with these fingers, you do not move the whole hand, still less the arm.

Josef Hofmann, Piano Playing: With Piano Questions Answered

Ian Rankin, A Question of Blood

epiplexis e-pi-plex'-is from Gk. epi, “upon” and plessein, “to strike” Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question.

Examples Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? —Job 3:11 Gideon Burton, Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric)

For ever and anon comes Indigestion (Not the most “dainty Ariel”) and perplexes Our soarings with another sort of question: And that which after all my spirit vexes, Is, that I find no spot where Man can rest eye on, Without confusion of the sorts and sexes, Of beings, stars, and this unriddled wonder, The World, which at the worst’s a glorious blunder— Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XI

The sister was not a mister. Was this a surprise.

It was. The conclusion came when there was no arrangement. All the time that there was a question there was a decision. Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Sources: Burton, Gideon, Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric), Brigham Young University, http:// rhetoric,byu,edu/. Byron, Lord (George Gordon), Don Juan, Vol, II, London: Thomas Davison, 1828. Forel, Auguste, and C, F, Marshall, The Sexual Question; A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study, Brooklyn: Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, 1931.

Graeber, David, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville House, 2011. Herodotus, The History, Translated by G, C, Macaulay, Volume 2, London: MacMillan and Co., 1914. Hofmann, Josef, Piano Playing: With Piano Questions Answered, New York: Dover, 1909.

Keats, Jonathon, Control + Alt + Delete: A Dictionary of Cyberslang, Globe Pequot, 2007. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Translated by Philemon Holland, London: G, Barclay, 1847. Porta, A, G, No World Concerto, Translated by Darren Koolman and Rhett McNeil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. Rankin, Ian, A Question of Blood, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003. Robert, Henry M, Robert’s Rules of Order Revised for Deliberative Assemblies, Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1915. Stein, Gertrude, “Tender Buttons,” 1914, Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, New York: Vintage, 1990. Sumner, Charles, “On the Crime Against Kansas,” 1856, The World’s Famous Orations, Edited by William Jennings Bryan, New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1906.

Rob Kovitz is the founder of Treyf Books. His previous works include Pig City Model Farm, Games Oligopolists Play and Ice Fishing in Gimli. He lives in Winnipeg.

FAQ 19

FINDINGS

From Western Canada (2005–2010), a series that explores the geographic, social and economic relationships of

The Banff Way DAV I D A L BA H A R I

From Globetrotter. Published by Yale University Press in 2014. David Albahari is the author of many novels and short story collections. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.

I

turned again on the stairs when I heard Mark Robinson’s voice, but this time faster, as if speed could help.

What is so absurd here, I had said to Daniel Atijas when we had our first long, serious conversation, is that artists come to the Centre seeking solitude, dedication to their inspiration and their work, but most often they cannot for the life of them elude the curiosity and envy of those who do not 20 Geist 97 Summer 2015

succeed in finding either. It’s easiest here, I said to him, to do nothing, and that is exactly what most of them do, pretending all the while, of course, that they are working on something great or at least that they never stop thinking about their work. This notion, I said, that artists should isolate themselves from others, from society, which should be the source of their work—this idea is misguided and so

absurd in a system that has long since ceased endorsing isolation for any one of its segments. The notion smells of segregation, isolation, classification by any other determinant except general membership in the human race, which is forbidden and politically out of sync today, but artists continue to be set apart in reservations; this one here happens to be situated in the middle of a national park traversed every year, I said, by three to four million tourists, and we are expected to create works amid all the frenzy, works that express our serenity and focus on questions of form and content, the resolution of the dilemmas of poetics. I don’t know why I spoke so furiously at the time, just as

hinterland regions to major metropolitan areas. Thomas Gardiner lives in Vancouver.

I don’t know how all of this relates to the tangle of hairs on Daniel Atijas’s neck, but when I next had a chance to see the nape of his neck, it was freshly barbered. I don’t know who had taken him to the hair stylist; maybe he went on his own—after all, he struck me as the type who figures out how to find his way around an unknown city with ease, and Banff, hand on heart, is not an overly challenging urban labyrinth—but it is quite certain that Daniel Atijas did not then look like the kind who was ready at any moment to soar into the air. That’s how it is with some people: the more you free them of the ballast that is holding them down, the heavier they get. Instead of

rising, they sink; instead of growing, they shrink. I may be overstating this: perhaps the snipping of a little hair from the neck and behind the ears cannot be fairly compared to other feelings of liberation and levitation, especially not to those which spring from a long-lasting reliance on certain psychophysical skills, but I feel this way every time I step out of a hair stylist’s. A person who has just had a haircut and doesn’t smile when he looks at himself in the mirror while the stylist brushes the hair off his shoulders, that person has something terribly wrong with him that may eat him alive. When I saw the freshly trimmed hairs on Daniel Atijas’s neck, I wondered

whether he smiled after getting the haircut, and I have to admit that I was at a loss for the answer. I didn’t have it then, nor did I have it later, nor while I did what I could to untangle them while drawing the detail of his tangled hairs, or as I did—while standing at the entrance to the dining hall—what I could, though feebly, to untangle the morning, a morning that was slowly but surely, whether I liked it or not, turning into day. All in all, I didn’t have much time—perhaps, who knows, I never did—but if I wanted to get something done, there was no time for waffling. I am forever surprised by the fact that time passes more speedily between mountains than it does out on Findings 21

AUTHOR TOUR, 1923 From Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, 1923–24 published by Coach House Books in 1975.

Dear Lorne Pierce, I went to Saskatchewan on Oct 31st and was given a great reception.

Dr Wilson, head of the English department of the University, met me at the station with his car and took me to the hotel. Mrs Dr Sommerwill met me there and welcomed me in the name of the University Women’s Club under whose auspices I was to speak. Next morning I called at the bookstores with Mrs Sommerwill and sold McMillan 25 and the two other stores 12 each. At noon I addressed the Kiwanis Club and at 3 PM went to an afternoon tea at the University. At 4:30 I addressed the University students and at 8 PM read before the University Women’s Club.

At my readings I have been dividing profits on my books with the ArtsTabernacle Society. Now please keep this a secret as I don’t want every other writer in the country to do likewise. I have made several discoveries as to the methods of selling books and the secrets are between you and me.

It would be grossly unfair if you put another writer out here next season and let him adopt the methods I have discovered at great cost.

Bliss Carman’s visit to Regina resulted in the sale of about 20 books.

My visit sold hundreds.

If I do not sell books at my reading the booksellers will not buy them.

If I do go to a bookseller and say: “I sold 50 books at my reading” he will take 25 or so.

Every book sold means a book that is shown to scores of people— hence if I sell books at my reading the bookseller will sell 10 times as many as if I did not do so.

Now, as I am the first writer who ever sold books in this country at his own readings, this secret is not for publicity.

I am going to try and get my pass extended in Vancouver. They will wire Montreal. My opera is to be presented in Regina on my return trip and I will not reach Toronto before Feb 15th. This will leave two months for my Ontario or Nova Scotia tour.

The money I made in Saskatoon and Prince Albert (where I received a wonderful reception) amounted to nearly $100 over expenses. This money I sent back to Dempster the baker in Toronto to pay back his loan in September. He loaned me $100 to get my teeth fixed and to get underclothes and shirts for the trip.

My next $200 will pay off my remaining debts in Regina and Toronto.

I don’t mind poverty but debt makes me wild.

Two enclosures: to Dr Pierce $11.40

to Ryerson Press 8.00 Hoping you are feeling better, Wilson MacDonald P.S. send all future mail c/o Tom McInnis, Vancouver, Glenson Lodge

OVERUSED WORD ALERT  Google Alert results for “litany”

22 Geist 97 Summer 2015

the prairie, though never, when speaking of time, should one talk of facts, for time does not exist, so it cannot be measured the same way phenomena and things can be that are, or at least seem to be, real. Whatever the case, there were still two or three days before the moment of Daniel Atijas’s departure, and they seemed, regardless of length, inadequate for all I had in mind, especially for finishing the picture of the face, and this was not only because of my working slowly but also because of the feelings that kept rising up and becoming impassable obstacles.

The faster time passed, the slower I worked. I made no effort to explain this to Daniel Atijas, especially after his assertion, repeated several times in various circumstances, that time in his country had stood still. When he first said this, I had thought he was still speaking of the plain, of that sense of its endless expanse and the drop beyond the horizon when a person really has the impression that time, mid-plain, stands still, but he had something different in mind and was thinking, he said, of time as a reflection of life, and in his country, time, he said, became a quagmire, a temporal rotten egg, and as with all rotten eggs, nothing could come of it, nothing but foul smell. Time that reeks, said Daniel Atijas, has never been recorded as such. I tried to imagine life in a place like that but couldn’t. The only thing I did say was that this must be what one of the circles of hell was like, at which Daniel Atijas laughed and said that in comparison to the stench in his country the stench of hell was, to his nostrils, a breath of fresh air. And he had lovely, slim nostrils, which quivered a little whenever he was excited or raised his voice. I attempted in one of the drawings to record that quiver, sketching the outlines using a similarly shaky hand, but that didn’t do it. Many more

castros have a litany of sins to confess: Who am I to tell the Pope how to be, well... the Pope? dublin teen sentenced for litany of crimes during “six months of madness”: The 17-year-old boy’s dis-

From Graphic Underground: London 1977–1990. Published by McIntosh Gallery, Western University, 2013.

static attempts also didn’t work— when, for instance, I sought the shadow cast across his cheek under his jutting cheekbone. I don’t know how I could ever have believed in the possibility of capturing, in an artistic rendering, one quivering nostril, or even both, either way. Our capacity for selfdeception is incredible, I thought, and I trust that Daniel Atijas would have agreed if only he had shown up and given me the chance to ask. Instead of him, on the steps appeared Mark Robinson; he had finally caught up with his voice, the voice I had heard as I was leaving the dining room. He grinned as if nothing had happened the evening before. Then he thumped me on the back and invited me that evening, if my obligations allowed, to get together with him and finally spend some time with our memories. Memories, said Mark Robinson, are the single constant in this changing world. I know, I said, and I really did know, because that was a line from one of his popular poems, so popular that

children read it in the Saskatchewan elementary schools. I promised I would give it a thought, but I didn’t dare promise anything more than that, though I feared that the morning might never end, that the previous evening was something only archaeologists still cared to seek, and that sooner or later I would sniff the reek of stagnant time, the same stink Daniel Atijas had been talking about. When that happens, I thought, even the mountain peaks won’t help, and it won’t matter whether a person is in the middle of the plain or at the highest point above a vertical cliff and besides, one falls into, not out of, oneself, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be speaking of falling just now, but some things do surface with no intention on our part, no matter what the psychiatrists claim. To say that everything is linked, that a pear dropping from a tree somewhere in the heart of Europe has anything to do with a horseshoe that flies off the hoof of a horse in southern Alberta and kills a boy perched on a

fence, to claim that between these events and hundreds, thousands, millions of others there is some kind of cause-effect link, not obvious yet incontrovertible, is the pointless effort of a superior human mind that does not grasp its humble scope. I didn’t say this to Mark Robinson, because I didn’t want to talk with him, and while he was walking away I quaked at the possibility of his suddenly turning around and coming back, but as soon as he’d crossed the path and headed toward the building with the swimming pool and sports hall, I thought of the pear snapping off the branch and that hurtling horseshoe. They were, they should be, my bulwark against the onslaught of those who work to persuade us that our behavior is nothing more than a repeat of pre-set patterns and that, no matter what we think, we are merely entering data into a fixed equation of vital and spiritual structures of whatever, according to these interpretations, makes us all the same.

Identical, I should say. 

traught mother wept in court as the six-month term was imposed at the Dublin Children’s Court which was told the youth had been “heavily involved in the taking of tablets” at the time of his crime spree. public sector downsize a litany of misinformation, incompetence, deceit, redundant bureaucrat says: “The

Findings 23

Cruel Summer P ETER C U LLE Y

(after Wallace Stevens) From Parkway. Published by New Star Books in 2013. Peter Culley was the author of Hammertown, The Age of Briggs & Stratton, and To The Dogs. He lived in Nanaimo. He died in April 2015.

1

2

3

He was in Nanaimo writing letters to Marshall, every now & then walking down to the playhouse for a smoke. The heavy leafage of a wet June absorbed the roar of the highway so he sat on the damp carpet he’d slung over the old garden chair & picked up and put down the book that had begun to curl on the dusty table raising more dust.

He trades places with the cat so that when the gravel trucks gear down or loudly up the cat can watch it pass & he can pretend to read.

He wakes in the pollarded half-shade of a dying walnut. The half-audible early birds tweet ear bones press against each other a passing satellite pings its archive.

He hangs hangers in a cupboard left to right

It was almost time for Rockford when the news intervened. Outside the last bees on Planet Earth rubbed sagey pollen on their undercarriages.

Noting this he raised his eyes from the newscrawl to a copper Ford drifting thru the twilit Bel-Air of the Ford administration. This is the part of the sublime from which we shrink: Sepulveda, Ventura & Culver City are to him an approximate haze as hard as calcium, unspooling painkillers at every point of the compass. Something shifts & then he shifts. He apologises to the dead space where he had been sleeping.

Night had been a tree to him moving through space, sparing him memorable dreams, something medication never quite achieved but if you sit there thinking it goes dim the golfball grain comes rushing in like water through a window. All he knows of the moon—its interlocking t-shapes of broom yellow fanning oilslick tailfeather—is that it’s both outside & above, a bell held in a cup.

The pain is such a little thing to be wandering abroad like that. He becomes aware of the heavy air & that he’s awake, a hiss of decompression through the leaves hanging heavy in a hoary-hanging sky sickly after the rain hit, turning west he hallucinates as it falls each ring of the tree.

the wind chime’s soft memory gonging across his neck, Chico Hamilton style— a handswidth or two more or less, unstrapping the braces, snapping brasses a hinged ruler with oil, rarely looking up, even at those shivers of bleached green leaf piercings where other people move through the light more or less as he does but rarely with that quadrant over-the-shoulderyou-see-what-he-sees angle—no narrating parrot or hummingbird or offshore bee would follow so close knowing neither right nor left nor above nor below bouncing around at the end of a pineal stalk like the third eye of realism squinting through the low cloud. 

last 12 months bear testimony to a litany of misinformation, inconsistencies, incompetence, mismanagement, secrecy and deceit, and some of the most appalling regard for human resources I have ever witnessed,” he said. cadiz man arrested on litany of charges: A Cadiz man was arrested Monday on charges of shoplifting,

24 Geist 97 Summer 2015

Southern Life M I N I AO D L A F REE M A N

From Life Among the Qallunaat. Published by University of Manitoba Press in 2015.

Edited by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak with Norma Dunning. Mini Aodla Freeman is an author, playwright and translator. She was born on Cape Hope Island in Nunavut.

She lives in Edmonton. Qallunaat refers to non-Inuit, white people. alikatu

I began to meet a lot of people. My first visit to a qallunaat family and first long ride by car were exhausting.

While in the car, I did not know what to look at. There were other cars— big ones, little ones, and all colours— buildings, stores and, how odd, people in the front of windows were smiling. I had a good look at these people later—they were model dummies.

In my mind, I concluded that it was one way to get people to buy, which my grandmother would have called alikatu—showing off or competing with others. And there were people standing about, others walking as if they had big loads on their backs, but there was nothing on their backs, just a little handbag in their hands.

The man who was driving was telling me that he had just learned to drive. I looked at him, surprised. I thought he had known how to drive since childhood, just as I knew how to hitch a dog team at the age of five. It is only now that I know why he did not drive since the age of five. That is one of the many laws of the qallunaat world that I, too, eventually had to conform to: hitching up a car.

The home of the first qallunaat family I visited was even more surprising. I was offered a chair. I had only been sitting an hour in the car, but that was not what surprised me—it was the children. They were not allowed to be normal the way children in my culture are allowed: free to move, free to ask questions, free to think aloud, and most of all, free to make comments so

that they will get wiser. As they grow older, questioning becomes a boring habit—they have gained wisdom and eventually become more intelligent.

The more intelligent they become, the quieter they are. That is the reason why children are allowed to be children. I very often have been asked by qallunaat who have gone north and lived in the settlements why Inuit children are so spoiled. They do not have an idea of what Inuit home life is like, and they do not believe in systems of Inuit child-rearing. (Most of the questioners have expected me to give them an answer and a full explanation in two minutes flat. It would

take me another whole book to really explain about Inuit child-rearing.)

When I entered this qallunaat home, I could not help but notice the treatment of the children by the parents. One child asked, “What is that girl sitting in a little red dress?” She was answered with whispers and told to leave. Instead of being proud that the child could actually question about the girl sitting in a red dress, instead of examining the way the child used her wording upon asking questions, she was right away shut down. To my people, such discipline can prevent a child from growing mentally, killing the child’s sense of interest. “Is it very

COMING TO THE END OF THE BLIND KNOT LU DW I G Z E L L E R

From The Rules of the Game. Published by Quattro Books in 2012. Ludwig Zeller is a writer and artist whose work has been translated into many languages.

He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. to Gwendolyn MacEwen Tired of living, your sail shredded by your ruined nails, Your body—frost garrotes it, it huddles in fear, It harries the crows, and on a blank horizon blood Freezes. Can’t you hear anymore, don’t you feel pain?

Maybe you’ve deciphered the monstrous, mysterious hieroglyph That burns between our lips and never forgives, the Word On the anvil? Closed over yourself, you drift downstream With no sorrows, memories or scents to paint your eyes: A fiery needle sewed them shut forever and now you’ve become Only an image, a cipher at the end of the blind knot.

public alcohol intoxication, menacing, resisting arrest, criminal mischief and assault. a look into the wizards’ litany of losses in home elimination games: For as cruel as the ending of Friday’s Game 6 was for the Washington Wizards—their hopes dashed by a Paul Pierce three-pointer that came just a few milliseconds

Findings 25

cold where she comes from? Did she live in an igloo before she came here?”

Shhhh! the mother was cautioning.

“Go outside! Don’t do that! No! Move away!” How I wanted to pick up the child and say, “It is not very cold where I come from because we wear warm clothes.” But words like “DON’T,” “NO,” “MOVE” were to me like talking to a dog who was eating from some other dog’s dish, or who was going in another direction instead of following orders during sled travel, or who was in the doorway. The whole episode stuck in my mind, as it was very different from what my culture demanded in terms of how to handle children: whenever I asked questions that my parents did not want to answer, I was always told to hand them a needle and thread—that my mouth would be sewn up. But it did not kill my sense of questioning because I was not told to shut up instantly. The word “NO” I never heard; instead, I would be distracted and shown something else. My culture tells me that the word “No” leads to disobedient children who become very hard to handle later on. And the only place that I could not MOVE was in a canoe out in the water. My visit that day was an event, though I could not express my thoughts and feelings.

Being very shy, all I said was Yes, No and Thank you.

Letters to Manitora N I N A B U N J E VAC

to please a friend

There were things that I was willing to try, but others I did not care for. Bicycling was one of the things I did not care for. There were things imposed on me that I could refuse, but to please a friend, one day, I agreed to go bicycling. We started off from Rideau Street and planned to cycle up to Sussex Drive. I got on: in that instant, I had to summon all the senses that had not been used since I left home, my eyes, my ears, my sense of direction,

my balance and most of all my nerves.

All these things I had been taught to use in order to survive. A car screeched behind me. I looked, and all I could see was the driver shouting with a very mad look on his face. And there was my friend yelling, “Mini! Stop! Stop!”

I stopped with a swish with my feet on the cement. My nerves went all tense

and the beat of my heart just seemed to be all over my body. My friend was right behind me, reminding me to stay on the right side. She had put more pressure on my nerves than ever when she asked me to go cycling with her, but I went in order to please her. By the time I got back, the fee on my rental was overdue, and when we finally got

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26 Geist 97 Summer 2015

From Fatherland. Published by Jonathan Cape, a Penguin Random House Company, in 2014. Nina Bunjevac is an award-winning artist whose work has appeared in Taddle Creek, Exile, Broken Pencil and others. She lives in Toronto.

something else. I just followed my qallunaaq without question. As usual, she just seemed to know where everything was. I had my own picture in my mind about where to go for a boat ride— that was either straight to the beach or to the river. But as I followed my qallunaaq, my picture just did not form.

First of all, we had to go to a man who was standing on a street, and he gave us a sheet of paper. When I read it, my picture completely changed, and when we got to the place for the boat ride, my picture was turned completely upside-down. I had pictured my qallunaaq and me rowing or running a motor alone in a boat along the shore, with beautiful scenery going by. But there we were in the midst of people, in a line-up waiting for our turn. And I thought people bought tickets only to the theatre and the exhibition grounds.

Embarking on that boat was something else. I could not understand where the loud voice was coming from and I couldn’t see the sites it was describing. All I could see was the mass of heads of other people who were in the boat with us. My qallunaaq was so excited about the whole thing. The river we were in just did not seem normal to me. It did not have the shape or form of the rivers I had boated on. All it reminded me of was one straight long bathtub filled with water. When we disembarked, my qallunaaq was bubbling with excitement. I felt like asking her, “Suukainnaqita? What did we do?”

questions, such as: What reasons do I have for taking a boat ride? Where do we get a boat? In the North, when people take such trips, it’s either for hunting, berry picking or to make a seasonal move from one camp to another. This, of course, is done for joy as well as for work and to get resources.

But taking a boat ride in Ottawa was

It was one of those days when my qallunaaq and I met after work. She suggested that we eat at a restaurant. I had no idea just exactly what you do there. I understood that it was an eating place, but I thought you served yourself. As usual, I followed my qallunaaq without question. I kept my mouth shut, while all the time I was

dog meat in the south ?

home, my friend was able to relax casually on her bed, while I was still shaking. And all I whispered to myself was Mini, peace, peace, peace, peace. artificial river

My qallunaaq decided one day that we should go for a boat ride. That made some sense to me, but I also had

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Findings 27

asking myself, why are we sitting down? A lady came over and handed us a folded sheet of paper. “Menu,” it read. I watched my qallunaaq. Do we sit here and figure out what to cook for ourselves? I felt very lost—it was not at all like the place where we ate at the Terrace. Finally, I became aware of the other people in this restaurant. They

were not doing anything but eating.

The lady was passing food around.

Ah! I have to tell the lady what I want and she will go and cook it.

I had discovered that there was nothing free in the South, so I had to think about the cost of what I was about to ask the lady to cook for me.

For the first time, I had a good look

Neon Moon D U N CA N M ERC RE D I

Originally published in Prairie Fire Vol. 36, No. 1. Duncan Mercredi is a poet and storyteller. He lives in Winnipeg.

1 my blood has blessed these sidewalks longer than the waters of Misipawistik have washed my village and this story began from that first view of city lights it was a buick circa 1958 tripping to the big city south on highway six gravel road barely wider than two car widths my dad traveled at night in a car full of sleeping children scattered on the back seat but not me i was awake full of excitement watching my father driving never over 60 the car sliding side to side on loose stones slowing at passing trucks and cars dust out field of vision obscured my dad gently blowing against the windshield trying to clear his line of sight exhaling softly at reaching the asphalt covered road

just past gyp moosehorn appeared from out of the dark then ashern for a quick coffee and pee break didn’t flush then eriksdale to our left slowing down to glance at strange faces watching our strange faces lundar was just a blur never could pronounce grosse isle but even from there i could see the glow in the sky city lights barely able to contain my excitement eyes wide at the lights and traffic my dad’s hands gripping the steering wheel white knuckled driving block after block of quiet streets my head was a swivel unable to see or grasp it all tumbling out of the car at the Mac then warned not to wander off finally a restless sleep i had landed on the neon moon i was twelve all so new and yet it seemed so right 

at the sheet of paper. There it showed the prices. Anything that sounded good was beyond the amount in my purse. Finally, my qallunaaq said that she would have a hot dog. I burst out laughing and could not stop. What is a hot dog? Do not tell me people in the South eat dog meat! I felt a bit sick. Which one is that? She pointed: wiener on a bun, twenty-five cents. I asked the lady to cook one for me as well; in fact, I asked for everything my qallunaaq asked for—Coke, jello and a hot dog. When the dog was brought to our table, I stared at it. I was very hungry at that moment and began to picture nice fresh seal meat, but the aroma of the dog killed it. I did not like it. I washed the taste down with Coke. That became a habit of mine; I drank so much that my face broke into a million pimples, even down to the soles of my feet. my first square dance in the south

My Inuk mind has had many disappointments since I came to the South.

When my qallunaaq suggested that we go square dancing, it sounded like lots of fun. It sounded like everybody being themselves. But anything that sounded familiar never seemed to turn out the way I had in my mind.

We entered the dance hall and I felt excited. (Even fun was not free— it cost fifty cents to enter.) I had done square dancing at home, but never experienced it in the South. “May I have this dance?” a gentleman asked.

Once more, I learned something new.

I was used to gentlemen in the North who took your hand and led you to the floor. I told myself that I had come to dance, so my answer was yes. I had not thought about partners when we headed to this hall. All over again I felt shy and never wanted to go again.

To this day, I do not know the gentle­ man’s name, though he had asked

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28 Geist 97 Summer 2015

what part of China I was from. Who had ever heard about North? Every time I said where I came from, it just seemed appalling to my questioners. just close your eyes and eat

Having been to one restaurant, I thought they were all the same. But I have learned there are many kinds.

Once my qallunaaq and I decided not to take our lunch at our residence but to have lunch in a restaurant. When I met her, she said, “Let’s have some Chinese food.” I had no idea what Chinese food was. I have met Chinese people; in fact, I have been taken for one so often that I was beginning to think that I knew them.

The place we entered looked very colourful inside. In one corner were two doors with something written on them. It looked like someone had thrown black paint at the doors and the results were these funny shapes.

We were given a menu. As usual, my qallunaaq was completely oblivious to my wonders, so I simply followed her. I ordered what she ordered. That is Chinese food? It looked like the stew my grandmother used to make for pups. “I have not had any for ages,” my qallunaaq said. Do not tell me she ate it before and did not turn piusirluttuk—retarded. If she had had it before, it must be edible. I will eat it. Scooping it up and getting ready to put it into my mouth, something went back and forth in my throat. When I finally got brave enough to eat it, the taste was not so sickening as it looked.

It took me some time to like this alurassak—this prepared dog food, but today I am crazy about it and call it by its respected name—Chinese food. I even look at it while eating.

Snapshot Art From Visualizing a Culture for Strangers: Chinese Export Paintings from the Nineteenth Century by Barry Till. Export paintings were created as souvenirs for Western tourists by Chinese painters who adopted Western painting techniques to capture “snapshots” of everyday life in China. The paintings were popular from 1810 until the 1850s, when they were replaced by photographs as the preferred souvenir. Barry Till is a lecturer and Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

so many and so quiet

My qallunaaq and I decided one day to go to the library. I knew what that

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Findings 29

DRUNK, ARMED WITH GUITAR Tweets gleaned from @ScanBC #Vancouver PD attending to a road rage. Driver swung a bucket at a pedestrian whose dog had just pooped and the owner didn’t pick it up. #Vancouver Police are responding to E 10th Ave & Prince Edward St for reports of a drunk male armed with a guitar threatening an Ambulance. #Vancouver Police are responding to Kingsway & Broadway for a power outage. Traffic lights are out and civilians are directing traffic. #Vancouver Police are responding to 1800 Cornwall Ave for a male on a bicycle who intentionally rode his bike into someone. #Burnaby #RCMP are responding to Revs Bowling for a report of 25 people fighting inside. Main suspects trying to leave in a limo. #Vancouver Police are searching for a male after he told a bus driver he was going to get a slice of pizza and then kill himself.

was—we used to have one at school.

I pictured the one we were heading to as just the same as the one we had in my school, in the corner of the classroom. When we reached the building, the picture I now had was disappointing. The big house was only for books? The lady behind the counter was very quiet; she actually whispered. I could not make up my mind about whether she was playing at something or if that was her natural voice. This was not the kind of voice that I was used to. Then I turned around and there were many people standing and sitting. I could not believe that this many qallunaat could be so quiet. I learned later that I too have to be quiet at the library. It was another qallunaat rule that I have had to accept and use. “ life - or - death ”

#Vancouver Police are responding to 200 blk of Princess Ave for a report of two females doing drugs in a car2go. #Vancouver Police have just located a male passed out in a vehicle with two empty cans of Palm Bay. #Vancouver PD are responding to Tisdall Park for reports that a male doing Tai Chi kicked another male in the face for smoking in the park. #Chilliwack #RCMP are responding to Canadian Tire for a report that a male is threatening staff with an axe he was trying to return. #WhiteRock #RCMP are heading to a residence after a male called 911 and told the dispatcher he didnt know why he called but he has Marijuana. #Vancouver Police responding to Fraser & E 45 Ave after a truck lost its load of fish on the road.

had a reason

Back in the South in 1959, my qallunaaq and I decided one day to go and see a tulip show. I had learned by then what shows were and why qallunaat follow this custom of having them. I had never seen so many tulips in so many colours, nor so many people among the flowers. My weakness for watching people pulled me away from my qallunaaq. There were people taking pictures, bending down to smell the tulips. Then I saw someone who looked familiar—it was not the same man, but the uniform was the same as the one worn by the man who had got all worked up when I had walked on the grass that day.

I decided that his reason must have been this, to make the grass grow for tulip shows. Why did he not tell me that? Really, qallunaat have many laws which they have no time to explain to a little Inuk like me. 

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30 Geist 97 Summer 2015

Your Poem Should Have Four Legs K AT H RY N M O C K L E R

From The Purpose Pitch by Kathryn Mockler. A Stuart Ross book, published by Mansfield Press in 2015. Mockler is the author of three books of poetry and is the Toronto editor of Joyland and the publisher of the online literary and arts journal The Rusty Toque.

Your poem should have four legs.

Your poem should wear a hat in the sun.

Your poem should get plastic surgery or a non-invasive chemical peel.

If your poem is getting too old, lie about its age.

Your poem should be more like his poem.

Your poem needs to lighten up a little.

Your poem needs to take antidepressants.

Your poem should see a dentist.

Your poem should mock all other poems.

Your poem needs a boob job.

Your poem needs to get a sense of humour.

Your poem should stop drinking.

Your poem should stop getting offended.

Your poem should lock itself up and throw away the key.

Your poem needs vaginal rejuvenation surgery—just for itself, not for anyone else.

Your poem should have a good author photo.

Your poem should embarrass itself.

Your poem should hurt everyone else’s feelings.

Your poem should try acid.

Your poem should get its tubes tied.

Your poem should be sent away to camp for the entire summer.

Your poem should learn to knit in a café.

Your poem should be like everyone else’s poem.

Your poem should finger itself.

Your poem should finger everyone else.

Your poem should go get fucked.

Your poem needs to get a day job.

Your poem should be on a floor hockey team.

Your poem needs a feeding tube.

Your poem should take the Rorschach test.

Your poem needs seventeen more followers.

Your poem should find a hobby.

Your poem should blog.

Your poem should sing folk songs on the weekends.

When undressing, your poem should use the private change room.

Your poem shouldn’t let its genitals show.

Your poem should like to be roughed up a bit.

Your poem should spot clean.

Your poem needs to be more like a selfie.

Your poem should get its period.

Your poem should learn pain management.

Your poem should look pretty and shut up.

Your poem should have a boner.

Your poem should smell like a wax museum or jail.

Your poem should not walk alone at night.

Your poem should drink itself to death.

Your poem should be born between 1946 and 1964.

Your poem should be enjoying its sabbatical.

Your poem should first appear fun-loving and then be nasty.

Your poem should start in a waiting room and end in a car.

Your poem should watch its waistline.

Your poem should murder everyone or no one.

Your poem should be in love with itself.

Your poem should get a room.

Your poem should have access to contraceptives.

Your poem should stop sucking its thumb.

Your poem should go to a movie sometime or read a book.

Your poem should look good on a coffee table.

Your poem should annoy all other poems.

Your poem should have an attaché case.

Your poem should squirt.

Your poem should complain about the weather.

Your poem should pretend to say nothing.

Your poem should be literal.

Your poem should be understood by everyone or no one.

Your poem should have low self-esteem.

Your poem should feign humility.

Your poem should take the stairs.

Your poem should hide its obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Your poem should package itself for a grant.

Your poem should live in the future.

Your poem should assume no one is looking.

Your poem should assume no one cares.

Your poem should be a wet dream.

Your poem should be sticky and smell like cheese.

Your poem should not step in the vomit.

Your poem should be reclusive.

Your poem needs to make a lot of friends.

Your poem should never admit it’s a poem.

Your poem should stop an awkward conversation.

Your poem should stop saying things it doesn’t mean. 

shenanigans resembles the litany of neighborhood crimes recorded by cops. a litany of murder victims long before ‘chiraq’: There is a litany of victims, who, since I began covering homicide in this city as a journalist in 1989, were gunned down, mostly in Chicago streets. 

Findings 31

Dear Geist reader, We thought you should know: we’ve met someone.

They’re witty, clever and a bit weird. Oh, and much younger. Like, twenty-five years younger.

They are the Syrup Trap, Canada’s favourite humour magazine, blessed with smarts, beautiful typography and headlines that won’t quit.

It could be just a fling: one hot summer issue of fun and jokes. Or a long-term thing: the perfect union of humour and satire with ideas and culture. Not that we’re talking about producing tiny magazines together, at least not yet.

Either way, we want to introduce you to our new special friend (on the next sixteen pages). Let us know what you think! And keep an eye on future issues of Geist to find out where this summer affair takes us.

Happy reading!

—the Editors P.S. Now is the perfect time to renew your subscription or give the gift of geist to your friends who love to read.

Order at geist.com.

VOLUME 4L ISSUE MMCCXLL

NOT FREE LIMIT 12 PER CUSTOMER

NOT AVAILABLE IN CANADA BEST BEFORE 11/29/12

VOLUME 4L ISSUE MMCCXLL

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L

et me take a moment to explain to you what it is that you’re holding in your hands. What you’ve found lying on the bathroom floor of this dirty Vancouver dive bar is a magazine: a booklet of paper sheets upon which we’ve printed content.

There was a time when magazines were produced en masse, in the short period between the invention of human language and the creation of the Internet.

The titles that weren’t pornographic formed the basis of great moments in history, like the civil rights movement.

Today, most magazines aren’t even read.

Prestigious publications like Cosmo, Wine Spectator and the Walrus are often printed and placed onto the backs of trucks, and then those trucks are driven into the ocean.

Here at the Syrup Trap, we are always looking for ways to break out of our comfort zones. That’s why we’ve decided to honour the lost tradition of print magazines by producing one of our own. And boy, did it ever force us out of our comfort zones.

For example, it forced me to find a draft horse, walk into the forest and tear down a tree for paper. The looks on people’s faces as me and Fritz (the horse) rode into town dragging behind us a 100-foot pine tree weren’t very encouraging. “I don’t think what you guys are doing is legal,” shouted my neighbour as I and Paul, the Syrup Trap’s art director, tried to figure out how to turn the tree into a readable magazine. But we soldiered on.

Making this magazine also forced me into human contact with the other Syrup Trap writers, who until now I had only corresponded with via Internet messaging. We learned a lot about each other this way. I learned, for example, that Jimmy is actually three smaller people stacked on top of 2 | THE SYRUP TRAP

EDITOR’S NOTE each other (each of them bring something different to the table, writing-wise).

As we all sat down to write this magazine, we asked ourselves one simple question: what is it that people want to read about these days? Do they want to read about sports? Do they want to read about fancy literature? Or do they just want to kick back and read about something relaxing, like traveling, or eels? Would a magazine devoted entirely to eels really be that bad?

At one point, Joseph, one of the Syrup Trap writers, spoke up.

Nicholas J.A.H.Q. Zarzycki IIX

“Aren’t you guys tired of talking about everything in an ironic, detached way? Can we actually try to be sincere for once? Why does everything have to be a joke all the time? Instead of constantly trying to anticipate what the reader will like, why don’t we just write honestly and from the heart, while also trying to be funny? Why not try to connect with the audience that way?”

The writers’ room fell silent. Everyone knew that Joseph had struck a chord.

“That’s a fantastic idea,” I said. “Hey Joseph, by the way, how old did you say you are again?”

Joseph looked sheepishly around the writers’ room.

“Forty-one.”

As we tied Joseph up with ropes and carried him to the edge of the nearest cliff, we realized that the Syrup Trap was more than just a Canadian humour magazine. It was at that moment that we realized that it was our responsibility not just to be funny, but also to become a voice for our generation.

But maybe the greatest gift that producing this magazine has bestowed upon us is a renewed appreciation for the printed word.

“Hold on,” the Silicon Valley types among you must be saying right now.

“At the beginning there, it sounded like you were saying that print was dead.”

Not so fast, Silicon Valley guy. See, as much we enjoy writing for Canada’s favourite humour website at www.syruptrap.ca, we believe that print opens up creative possibilities that are unavailable for Internet writing.

What are these possibilities? I don’t know.

Nobody knows.

All we know is that once we print this thing, it’s out there in the world for good. It will exist, in the physical sense, for you to carry with you to a party, to frame on the wall above your eel tank, or to simply throw away.

And the only way for us to make updates or correct any mistakes or install a “patch” will be to visit you in your Silicon Valley home and make changes to the magazine manually.

What I’m trying to say is please don’t be alarmed if you see us at your doorstep, scissors and pens in hand, asking to be let in so that we can make some last-minute edits to the magazine. We’re as new to this print thing as you are.

L EL E W S E EU AK OR SH EF B

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR EELS, NICK? Hey man, I hate to bother you with this, but I’ve been talking to the other guys and we’re a little concerned about the Syrup Trap print edition. None of us have been paid in six months.

Something to keep in mind.

Also, and again, I hate to be a dick about this, but you said there was going to be pizza at the production meeting? Been here for four hours and nothing’s been ordered yet.

You claim we have an office, but all you’ve shown us is a tank full of baby eels. We got a $2,500 arts magazine grant and you spent all of it on: 1. An eel breeding tank ($2,200) 2. A giant poster with the words “A picture’s worth a thousand eels” ($300) Nick, can I be straight with you?

Is this a humour magazine, or an eel breedery? It seems like this is an eel breedery, because we’re breeding thousands of eels.

What are we even going to do with all these eels? Is there a joke here? Is there an eel-related revenue stream you haven’t told us about?

Has the Syrup Trap’s “voice” gone “high concept”? Is this installation art humour?

Don’t you fucking make another “revenue lake” joke.

Do eels even need incubators? Is that how eels work? No one here is an eel scientist, or whatever, and it seems like that’s what you’re looking for.

—The Syrup Trap Editorial Staff

DESTROY THE PIÑATAS I am responding to a recent article published in the Syrup Trap titled “Top 10 Things to Fill Your Piñata With.” I am firmly of the belief that piñatas are the work of the devil. Their concealed interiors are the very embodiment of deceit.

The way they hover between earth and sky is an affront to God’s order.

I don’t want them anywhere near

my children. If my children do go near one, I want them to be ready to fight and destroy the piñata, as an example, in front of lots of people during special occasions. Many other children should be made to watch, or even participate in the destruction of piñatas.

—Mark Trillum, Vancouver, BC

MY SPOOKY PRIZE I recently pledged ten dollars a month on your Patreon donation website (patreon.com/syruptrap), and looked forward to receiving a Syrup Trap T-shirt in the mail.

However, I was disappointed to discover that the package that arrived did not contain a T-shirt, but the deed to an abandoned church at the edge of town.

I was eagerly anticipating a size large “tee” professionally screenprinted with caricatures of Justin Trudeau, Margaret Atwood, etc.

Instead, I have become the owner of this spooky chapel, whose cracked bell rings silently on moonless nights, summoning lost spirits to their rites.

Most likely, there was some kind of mix-up at Syrup Trap HQ. Maybe one of your volunteers went to fill the envelope, but instead of grabbing the T-shirt, they grabbed a yellowed document, written in blood, that bequeaths unto the holder ownership of a half-burneddown church, where the corpsefaced shades of past parishioners gather monthly and sing hymns to the Lords of the Forest.

I really like your publication.

Sometimes, reading your articles, I laugh so hard! But I would appreciate it if you would refund my Patreon pledge, and unburden me of this hellish charge. Even now, I can hear the congregation clamouring before their stag-headed High Priest as he defiles the altar with his leprous hands.

Any help you can provide is much appreciated.

—Alexis Shapur, Gatineau, QC

SAVE THE PIÑATAS Word on the street is that Syrup Trap readers want piñatas destroyed.

I, for one, am appalled by the ritual destruction of piñatas. We should be celebrating the piñata, not destroying it. Ritualized piñata culls at birthdays and bar mitzvahs have caused a rapid decline in piñata populations in North America.

Even in their native Mexico, piñatas are prone to being attacked with broom handles and baseball bats.

Conservation efforts—including piñatas lobbying at the provincial and federal levels—are essential to saving these majestic and unfairly maligned creatures from extinction.

—Barbara Keys, Toronto, ON

CALL ME, SYRUP TRAP I texted you eighteen times last night and didn’t hear back. What’s up?

Is this how you treat another human being? We spent two beautiful days together in the Galapagos Islands. Do you remember the rubyred setting sun? Do you remember the finches with their different beaks? Syrup Trap, we made love on the back of an eighty-year-old tortoise. You said, “I want to start a family with you.” You said, “You’re the Darwin of my heart.”

And now you’re like, “sorry my phone was off ” and “in a meeting ttys,” as if none of that happened.

As if what we had together, in those forty-eight hours of beautiful lovemaking, meant nothing.

Do I mean nothing to you, Syrup Trap? Is that what I am to you? Just another tortoise dropping, milky white and flecked with undigested lichen?

You make me sick. I never want to see you again. There is something deeply wrong with you, Syrup Trap.

Something must have happened to you when you were young, something that destroyed any hope of love in your heart. You are broken.

You are a freak of nature.

—You Know Who

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ART DIRECTOR ILLUSTRATION EDITOR COPY EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Nick Zarzycki Paul Bucci Zoe Si Karina Palmitesta Bryce Warnes

CONTRIBUTORS Ryan Abbott Jimmy Thomson Nathan Hare Matt Cardinal Alex Kilpatrick Paul Thompson Winnie Code Matt Meuse David Marino Jacob Samuel JIMMY THOMSON’S EDITOR Alex Kilpatrick

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS David Remnick An empty Google Chrome tab A crushing sense of self-doubt A herd of excited deer A barrel of eels Fear INSIDE JOKES EDITOR We all know this one SLAM POETRY EDITOR Lost during hike CEO Tim Cook HAMLET Anthony Hopkins BACKGROUND The City of New York FIRE MARSHALS Matt Damon Bag of fireworks Bag of sand Bin Efllick

THE CITIZENRY OF VANCOUVER

Viva Eisenstein Joni Reddin Tien Nealy Lai Toothaker Sasha Mook Jeanett Haack Sona Goudy Collette Chavers Caridad Middleton Idella Alphin Dinah Wellington Araceli Bedsole Sharee Deramus Rodolfo Zucco Dagmar Teets Tosha Mormon Aaron Canterbury Meredith Kleeman Kendal Quach Dino Marnell Delphine Archibald Ed Beck Hyacinth Borgia Stasia Martinelli Zoila Thacker Kimi Mcfaddin Myong Wigginton Tyler Galliher Hayley Clukey Madeline Poff Georgeanna Kallas Eleanor Koziel Tracey Downer Tammy Circle Kaitlyn Olea Del Nordstrom Eilene Dziedzic Dominick Yelverton Talitha Vanlandingham Jacqulyn Eberhardt Easter Conard Yung Mccluskey Agnus Sidhu Bessie Carrell Jenni Reider Emilio Rotz Fe Gambill Ramiro Damato Chantal Sours Remedios Hersman Ericka Mercado Krystle Lattimore Ruben Nylander Roman Dupuy Harland Cropper Cleopatra Macarthur Brianna Morain Jessie Sclafani Charleen Furey Isidro Bultman Dann Hunsberger Kimi Maxfield Olive Biondi Christiane Hernandes Suzy Bettis Eleanor Guzzi Grisel Hersey Kimberley Teegarden Jolyn Bogert Fumiko Philyaw Alica Burtenshaw Agripina Culler Thomasena Pressley Miquel Stringham Darius Rominger Karie Tosi Amparo Shiflet Conception Leadbetter Margarett Gehl Hae Caesar Jamee Tunstall Heidy Eustice Tam Freyer Angila Gagliano Maude Buttery Gretta Suddeth Beth Furniss Mariann Deloney Juana Warthen Maryland Macaluso Latosha Tatum Jade Youngblood Murray Valois Rudolf Harrold Isa Trivette Tamiko Kirklin Filiberto Pinter Vennie Ouk Keisha Fukushima Deeann Prestidge Shayla Bixby Kellye Armer Jeneva Belanger Roderick Fodor Torri Michalak Mayra Curnutt Franklin Montes Antonina Macneil Ka Pardini Yvone Toles Qiana Cargile Cedrick Rottman Mazie Lykes Blondell Luc Lakia Elam Federico Ewell Stephnie Moua Filomena Primo Nakisha Farney Tayna Elder Elvin Delreal Armida Solari Glady Eustice Earlean Means Brigida Sancho Dortha Hulet Gudrun Mahaffey Valencia Lagrange Ailene Sutherlin Gonzalo Ostlund Nannette Eriksson Olin Devereux Madonna Waterfield Amber Athens Hanh Ahearn Gemma Harding Coral Vanepps Bertha Keenan Willa Conard Emelda Quinby Marguerite Barks Dionna Lowder Vaughn Carstens Hortensia Erdman Trudy Alred Don Golliday Clelia Burdo Hortencia Depaul Celeste Meunier Jamika Burks Un Eisert Walker Morlan Barbara Martinelli Delana Difranco Hilda Servantes Mana Voorhees My Keitt Muriel Manville Nicole Ruel Piper Arney Chu Schillaci Kary Lewellen Felipe Harville Candelaria Glickman Laila Formby Mardell Pakele Sue Cooke Reggie Hawk Solomon Havener Leonardo Faulkner Jarrett Senko Arlean Lowman Pei Blumenfeld Van Labrador Hyon Dabbs Rosaura Shehane Celena Naughton Nancee Koll Lavonne Hone Mike Pfeffer Sid Stutler Shawnta Hinman Melaine Chandler Nga Celis Karly Knack Anthony Clover Preston Sabat Tia Munos Ardell Stamp Ronny Millman Gregoria Spriggs Adrianna Brunk Burton Snider Fidela Burnette Emely Guerrera Margit Monks Joellen Phillippe Elli Bosio Kathie Crossno Jesse Dacosta Shari Heiman Onie Ervin Brice Rance Jamila Larue Bobette Woltman Bertram Litten Lenora Sobel Brigette Lundahl Gearldine Leja Dorthey Zabriskie Candy Schreck Bob Crowl Veola Gang Stevie Bjork Marg Leite Evette Maxon Elodia Sherrell Diane Chunn Omar Hassett Rufina Schram Arianna Marine Christie Bankston Scot Tremble Leah Ponton Detra Hyslop Alejandrina Keiser France Leet Janine Comean

THE SYRUP TRAP

|3

a HISTORY of the

SYRUP TRAP 1875 The Modern Consumer’s Syrup Trap Weekly is launched by Hal Needham Jr. (no relation) as a monthly consumer products magazine.

1876

Canada (!!)

1898 The Syrup Trap Weekly Theatre Review brings playfully xenophobic yellow journalism to Canada.

1905 The Syrup Trap Dirigible Enthusiast’s Quarterly begins its first Antarctic expedition.

1917 The Syrup Trap Corpse Decoration Monthly becomes the best-selling magazine in Europe.

1935 The Syrup Trap’s Guide to Warsaw & the Polish Countryside sells eighteen million copies.

Five million are delivered to one man: Stephen, who reads every copy.

1946 The Syrup Trap’s Foreign Policy Review assists in the drafting of the United Nations charter, is ejected from the United Nations.

1955 The Syrup Trap Good Housekeeping Companion publishes its Pulitzer-winning review of the Frigidaire Imperial ice box. This would be the third and final Pulitzer for the publication.

1985 The Chicago Bears win Super Bowl XX, as predicted by The Syrup Trap’s Annual Football Preview.

4 | THE SYRUP TRAP

Why you should join our startup We are offering a unique opportunity for social media-savvy professionals aged 16–24. We think you’d be a perfect fit for our startup.

There are so many reasons why you’d love it here. First off, we have flexible work hours. We call it flexitime. We truly don’t care what time you start. No one is here with a stopwatch to see what time you show up. If you’re an early riser, that’s great, come in early. Prefer to sleep in? That’s fine too. As long as you work eleven hours a day, we don’t care when you get here.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yes. Two words: standing chairs.

It’s true. We have them. The prototype design from Herman Miller.

Sitting is the new smoking, everyone knows that. It’s terrible for your body to sit all day at a desk. Slouching and scrunching up your internal organs will kill you. Our standing chairs get rid of that problem, allowing you to support yourself with your feet and legs while remaining immobilized within a hardened plastic frame.

Speaking of sitting and standing, you know bean bag chairs? They’re kind of a startup cliché, right? Well, we have an entire bean bag lounge, with a bean bag couch, bean bag coffee table, and a manual bean bag espresso machine manned by a bean bag barista. The barista takes orders in seven languages and possesses a tortured, mute sentience.

By the way, do you like craft beer?

Well, guess what? We own an entire craft brewery. It’s won multiple

international awards for its hopforward beers and smart packaging. You do have to pay full price for our craft beer, but the brewery is just around the corner and the hours are really good. Be sure to rinse your growlers well before you get them refilled, or the beer will taste like sodium pentothal.

I should talk about our corporate culture. Let me tell you, it is really, really great. It’s true that our Corporate Culture Manifesto forbids employees from partaking in any outside cultural activities, but that’s only because our internal corporate culture makes up for it. We believe in inclusion, equality, active participation, innovation, and mandatory tattoos of our company logo. After receiving lots of feedback and several class-action lawsuits, we no longer require our logo tattoos to be located on your face or neck.

Do you have a beard? Beards identify free-thinking individualists and people who know how to hang loose. That’s why beards are mandatory. We supply a steroid that encourages hair growth.

Have you heard anything about our management style? It’s been written about in several business magazines and BDSM blogs. We’ve researched the subject thoroughly and found that middle managers are vital to employee performance.

Good managers are able to motivate their teams, resulting in more efficient, effective, and satisfied employees. If you were to join our startup, your manager would be an eleven-year-old named Mikey. He loves cereal and wrestling. He’s a lot of fun, and a hell of a storyteller, let me tell you. And he has a mean right hook.

Our four-dimensional performance review process is the envy of the startup world. Once a year, you are placed in a three-dimensional glass cube and stared at by other employees until you shamecry yourself into an egoless shell.

We compare your time with others at your pay grade and whoever lasts longest gets a plaque and a bean bag stress ball.

That’s just a small taste of the many reasons why I think you should join our startup. If you’re interested, send a cover letter, resume, and cheek swab to the following anonymous PO box. •

Cops guys “You don’t know what from where!” said the cop to the other guy. The first guy was a cop, but the other guy wasn’t even a cop. One time he might have been, but instead now he was going to be a bad guy, but it wasn’t just for bad guy reasons. No way. He was going to be a bad guy for good guy reasons, but this cop guy couldn’t understand. No one would.

But that wouldn’t stop the bad-good other guy.

He took out his gun and said to the cop, “Don’t walk any more. You could fall into a trap or maybe you’ll get shot. You never know.” The cop was not going to stop. “Don’t think that I’m joking! I’m really going to shoot you!” It was serious.

“Too many punks like you do this all the time,” said the cop guy. “You think you’re like a cop guy but really you’re just a bad guy, not a good guy at all.” The bad-good guy got pretty upset because he knew the cop guy was right. “OK, no problem,” the bad-good guy said, “No more making the law myself.” Then they had ice cream and weren’t mad anymore. •

EXODUS 9:8-10 Use the blank spaces provided below to make this story your own!

8 Then the Lord said ____________(DIRECTIONAL PREPOSITION) Moses and Aaron, “Take handfuls of soot from __________(DEFINITE ARTICLE) kiln __________(CONJUNCTION) let Moses throw __________(PRONOUN) in the air in the sight __________(POSSESSIVE PREPOSITION) the Pharaoh. 9 __________(PRONOUN) shall become fine dust all over

__________(DEFINITE ARTICLE) land of Egypt, __________(CONJUNCTION) shall cause festering boils __________(LOCATIONAL PREPOSITION) humans and animals throughout __________(DEFINITE ARTICLE) whole land of Egypt.” 10 So __________(PLURAL PRONOUN) took soot from the kiln, __________(CONJUNCTION) stood before Pharaoh,

__________(CONJUNCTION) Moses threw __________(PRONOUN) in the air, and __________(PRONOUN) caused festering boils __________(LOCATIONAL PREPOSITION)

Listen, Karen, you're not getting your plant back Listen—no—listen, I’m not giving you the plant back.

It’s mine now. I spent all summer looking after the damn thing, watering it, feeding it, grooming it, and fuck me if you’re getting it back. He’s my friend now.

I named him. He has a name†.

I don’t care what you were doing this summer.

Doesn’t bother me. Fine—fine, that’s great. You had a good time in Copenhagen. But while you were off staying in backpackers hostels and eating croissants or whatever, I was here, grinding away. Every day.

Just me and Basil. • † Basil

humans __________(CONJUNCTION) animals. jommy pol nek davin balkn

[

Quick note to art director

Please make sure to place the advertisement for Dyson Vaccuums in this space. We have a lot riding on this advertisement and I’m a little bit scared of the people at Dyson, so I just want to make sure that we place their advertisement here. I don’t care about anything else you put in the magazine, as long as you make sure to place that ad here. We can’t afford to mess this one up. Thanks.

] THE SYRUP TRAP

|5

A Settler's Diary of Urban Farming

F

orenoon wet. Planted potatoes this afternoon. Broke the shaft of my spade upon a large root. Loaned another by one Jordan, neighbour. He seemed concerned. Said I must not remove native vegetation. “Stop trying to kill the chestnut tree, dude. It belongs to the rec centre next door.” This tree will hinder growth of my taters. Its shade is a blight.

Saunders fails to understand. His hair is long and tightly bundled atop his head like a school-marm’s.

He is a fool. He is no agrarian.

Fine morning. Thinned rutabagas. Observing the plots of my neighbours, wondered at their lack of industry. Many weeds in evidence: black-eyed susans, fennel, basil, trees. True, these climes are mild compared to the ravaging hoarfrost of the Old Country; however, I fear for these people come Winter, that hunger and the ague may consume their bodies. I pray for them.

Dinner: Hardtack and a grey squirrel.

Fine today. Passing the Common Green at daybreak, espied Jordan instructing several others in a series of strange prostrations. A Papist rite, I suspected. However later during conversation (again I borrowed his spade), Jordan named these activities “yoga.”

I do not hold with Spiritism.

Blowing this morning, turning fine by elevenses.

Foolish claims Jordan has made: “I stopped eating animal products six years ago and I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been.”

“There is no point in wearing shoes during summer.”

“Canada should cut all ties with the monarchy.”

Nonetheless, his rows of kale are most verdant, and 6 | THE SYRUP TRAP

his chard towers over my own. The man is a craven of the chestnut tree. In his excited state, he did not dunce and a Jacobin to boot; I cannot fathom how seem to recognize it. I am not a cunning man, but he produces such fine greens. from the shapes of his mouth and brow, I underLunch: oats and molasses. stand that he recognized an absence, but was unsure Rained today. As it is the Sabbath I awoke at dawn of what. and read Scripture til noon. My week’s rest done, I He resumed his speech, however, seeming to returned to toil. forget the matter. Soon thereafter he left in order Sharpened my axe. to “snack attack some vegan pinche.”

Fine today. Jordan arrived upon his velocipede and High cloud today. Built a springpole lathe. I am began extolling the virtues of a brackish liquor which in want of certain tools, and have inquired in Town he sipped from a canning jar. “Kombucha develops about a Hudson’s Bay Company catalogue, but gut flora and it’s amazing for the immune system. no-one knows where I might find one.

You should try some.”

Jordan arrived in the afternoon, evidently vexed.

My humours need no balancing, neither intro“What did you do to the tree? Did you talk to the duction of strange chymics. I declined. A cup of city? That’s not chill, man. You can’t destroy other buttermilk will slake my thirst. living things.”

Dinner: corn.

This final statement so lacked Very fine morning. Worked sense or meaning that I had no This is the pullquote late last night, but retired before for this article. It won’t words with which to reply. moonrise; I do not know this “I’m reporting this,” said help you understand the Jordan, and in a great fit of pique land well, what spirits walk the night air. I see the womenfolk article, it’s just here to took his leave. who tend their weedy plots here: my traps. Two large fill space. Fill space. Fill greyChecked noses beringed like bulls’, hair squirrels. I will dine well knotted like John the Baptist’s. space. Fiiiilllll spaaacceee. tonight.

I have no doubt that witchery Morning fine, turning to mild is afoot. rain by elevenses. My cabbages Jordan arrived late in the afternoon, having visited have been visited upon by a pestilence. From dawn “The Dispensary.” As I understand, this Dispensary is to noon, I picked greenflies from their leaves. a men’s club of some ilk, perhaps a Lodge. Whenever Covetousness touched my heart as I looked upon he returns from this place, Jordan’s eyes seem in want Jordan’s plot. His leafed vegetables tower nearly as of sleep; yet, he is most spirited and loquacious. high as the fence. Indeed, compared to the sorry “Man, Animal Collective just released a new track, produce of the other settlers, Jordan’s plants are and I was listening to it, and I was like …” &c. &c.

Leviathans. His plot is not vexed with weeds, either.

Today he was given pause when he saw the stump CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

FROM LAST PAGE (LOOK LEFT ) I began inspecting more closely the stalks of his plants. In doing so, I overturned a small wheelbarrow. Beneath were several packages. One was labeled “MiracleGro.” The other was labeled “RoundUp.” I must have these potions.

Fine today. Having found in this town’s Library no Hudson’s Bay Company catalogue, I endeavoured to survey a dry goods store for materials.

List: MiracleGro, RoundUp, oats, black powder, shirt collars, pig iron, heroin.

The Clerk there was a woman. She took my list into the back, perhaps to consult with her husband.

I surveyed the goods on display. Beeswax tapers in canning jars. Garden statues of Oriental deities in repose. “Aromatherapy.”

My senses were confounded.

The woman clerk returned and told me she could not provide the goods I had listed. I was sorely disappointed.

Exiting the store, I saw Jordan pass on his velocipede. He noticed me, but avoided my eyes.

Fog this morning, becoming fine by sunrise.

Turnips doing well. I am pleased.

Jordan came to his plot and shewed me a letter he had produced. Addressed to the Authorities, it listed my transgressions, and demanded my expulsion from the Community Garden, as I had violated City Laws.

I am a simple man, no Barrister nor Doctor of the Law. I read Scripture alone, and am not equipped for Court. Carefully, I explained this to Jordan.

He nodded his head, but continued to frown in disapproval.

In times like these, a man must turn the other cheek. I told Jordan that I would not contest his claims. Also, I said that I was prepared to move from my plot, taking what oats and molasses I had remaining so as to survive Winter. Truly it would wound my heart to abandon my crop, but I had no other choice. With luck, I would survive the winter.

Jordan seemed confused, but continued to nod.

At last, I asked him how I might obtain MiracleGro and RoundUp, so my next plot might be as verdant and rich as his.

Jordan’s face became very red. Evidently, I had hurt his pride.

“Okay, so those aren’t technically organic. I don’t know how you found out about them, but I would prefer if you didn’t tell…” Jordan stopped speaking.

He looked at my spade, which I was leaning on, with its new chestnut shaft. He looked at the squirrel hides I had spread and curing at the edge of my plot.

“How about,” said Jordan, “I don’t do the thing with the City, and you don’t tell anyone about the MiracleGro and stuff.”

It would seem Jordan’s secret packages contain a private manure mixture he does not wish to share.

We had reached agreement. We shook hands.

Jordan’s grip was very weak.

A fine day. •

Figure 9.1 The New Food Pyramid, as seen in Stephen’s Guide to 21st Century Nutrition.

An apology to the followers of my doomsday cult Dear Members of the Giant Eagles Death Cult, Guys, I’m so sorry. I really screwed up this time.

Over the past nine months I have received literally hundreds of signs and voices—mostly squawking—that strongly hinted the earth was going to be swallowed by a giant space eagle yesterday.

I’m mostly just embarrassed. Let’s be honest, I’m the face of the group. I’m the one who rants on the morning shows and gets lambasted by the late-night comics. It’s true that I get to have sex with all of you whenever I want. But I’m not doing that for me. I’m doing it for the Great Eagle.

I’m still not sure what happened. Maybe the Great Eagle swallowed another planet by mistake.

I would not be surprised if astronomers inform us in the next few weeks that a nearby planet—one of the edible ones—has completely disappeared from the solar system without warning.

It’s unfortunate that about two-thirds of the Giant Eagles Death Cult went ahead with the drowning. For that I accept some responsibility. I think initially, a long time ago, I said that everyone should wait for my absolute final go-ahead signal before jumping off the cliff. I did say that, right? But some people got excited and jumped without waiting for my final, final signal.

I gave you a couple signals, sure. I sent that second-to-last signal, the skull emoji, but people must have interpreted that as the absolute final notice and jumped prematurely off the craggy cliffs and into the violent water below.

I’ve always said that if you can’t focus on the good things in life, you might as well commit mass suicide. Well, since we’re not doing that for at least another fourteen to eighteen months, we might as well look at the silver lining: our YouTube videos are smoking hot right now!

Special thanks for Lisa for the outstanding work on social media. You’re taking us to the next level. I’ve checked our stats, and we are currently trending.

If anything, I think this setback could help us spike our Google rankings and online engagement. Just this morning I got several requests to appear on several prominent news shows.

Well, I suppose that’s all for now. Remember to check the sex schedule. It’s a shared Google doc.

As always, remember to let me know if you see or hear any eagles while you’re out and about. It could mean something.

Regards,

THE SYRUP TRAP

|7

“I agree with the guy above me!” —The Globe and Mail “Yes!” — The National Post

And more!

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YES, WE’RE BETTER THAN YOU. 8 | THE SYRUP TRAP

OUTDOOR PACKING EQUIPMENT COMMUNE

ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! ALERT! O!

“Hey, that’s life!” —The New Yorker

Everyone wants to eat healthy, and one of the best choices you can

make is salad. But maybe you get bored of the same old salads, meal after meal. The good news is that creative chefs the world

over are continually coming up with new and innovative ways to enjoy salad. Here are a few of the hottest new salads.

Kale and Cauliflower Last year’s hottest vegetable (kale) meets this year’s star superfood (cauliflower) in a super nutritious must-eat mash-up. Just toss a bunch of kale with a half head of roughly chopped cauliflower, and add half a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper.

P.S. Don’t forget the pepper.

Cold Cucumber Salad Slice a large cucumber into thin strips using a mandoline. Add the juice of one lemon and half a teaspoon of black pepper. Toss to combine ingredients. Throw into the garbage.

Liquid Lemonade Salad Make lemonade.

Fabulous Fermented Freedom

Protein Power Boost Need a protein boost? You’re in luck, because this salad gives you a big boost of protein. Hence the name! Take one leaf of romaine lettuce, which is not high in protein but provides a lovely green canvas on which to paint your protein-boosting masterpiece, add a half can of tuna, one poached egg, 30 grams of lowfat mozzarella, another half can of tuna, one 28-ounce can of black beans, one tablespoon of hummus, and a third of a can of tuna. Then sprinkle with two tablespoons of protein powder and bask in your boosted protein!

Fermenting is super hot right now, and there’s no better way to enjoy the best fermented foods than in a salad. Mix homemade sauerkraut and kimchee, and sprinkle it with kombucha.

Dog Salad Feed your dog lettuce and then rub his big old dog back as hard as you can until you’re satisfied.

T! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD

Critics agree! Food is Amazing!

Hot New Salads

ERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALER

“I’VE NEVER SEEN SO MUCH FOOD!” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD ALERT! SALAD AL

Welcome to Very Low Foods Dear Team, I want to welcome three new employees to our produce section this week: Nick, Ashley, and Blake!

One thing you’ll find as you start working here is that we at Very Low Foods like to think of ourselves as a family. We are a giant grocery store family, with new state-of-theart checkout counters and a trash compactor. Welcome to the family, guys!

Like a family, Very Low Foods has some core values. And at the very centre of our cluster of values— which include hard work, greeting the customer, smiling, and not stealing—is lowness.

Lowness is at the core of everything we do, guys. Low prices, low shelves, low-cut jeans, low ceilings, Low German, low everything. From now on, I’d like you to imagine me dictating all of our correspondence in a deep, low voice.

The point is, lowness is how we’ve been able to stay in the business for this long, and by embracing it, you’ll keep your job at Very Low Foods.

Ha-ha!

Please be sure to read through your new employee guides (attached), and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks, Bob Reinhardt, Manager Very Low Foods

Dear Team, It’s certainly been an eventful week here at Very Low Foods. The end of the September rush, the giant spill we had on Wednesday, the unsettlingly large rats, and of course our neverending quest for lowness.

I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the performance of one of our new team members, Blake, who did a fantastic job this week. Everyone, please don’t let Blake’s scared, gentle face fool you! He has completely exceeded even my expectations, and he’s done so by throwing himself into and embracing the embryonic warmth of the Super Low value system. Well done, Blake!

—Bob

Dear Team, Before you begin work today, I want all of you to stop what you’re doing and say hello to Blake, because wow, Blake, what a guy. I can’t remember the last time an employee embraced work here at Very Low Foods so effortlessly and quickly.

Blake, you are our employee of the month! Congratulations!

—Bob

Dear Team, I have one word for you: Blake.

We all have something to learn from Blake. We can learn, for example, from those pyramid-shaped fruit displays Blake builds all the time.

Last week I took an orange from the pyramid of oranges and smelled it to see if it was fresh. When I opened my eyes, Blake had already filled the gap left by my orange with another orange. This happens every time I do this. Wow! —Bob

Dear Team, Some of you have approached me about Blake’s behaviour in the past couple days and expressed some concerns, and I wanted to let all of you know that I have heard these concerns loud and clear.

Karen, you told me last week that you were made uncomfortable by the way that Blake walks on all fours and lets his torso hang closely to the ground. I think that on the one hand, we can all understand where Blake is coming from when he does this: it gives him the ability to be as low as possible, and for that I think he deserves to be applauded.

However, yes, Karen, I agree that the overall effect is not dissimilar to that of a large spider-human crawling amongst the aisles, and that this is admittedly very creepy and maybe even disturbing.

Please know that I will be talking to Blake and taking the necessary steps to make our work environment a non-creepy one.

—Bob

Dear Team, I am happy that many of you have managed to escape safely to the Very Low catacombs located beneath the store. My condolences go out to those who fell behind or were eaten.

I suggest that everyone stay here as we formulate plans for a second expedition to the surface and continue to think of creative ways to wrest control of the store back from Blake.

—Bob

Dear Team, I have found you.

There is nothing to fear.

Come with me to the surface.

Work with me as partners in this new world.

The price for resistance will be high.

—Blake THE SYRUP TRAP

|9

I don't think this lion realizes it's my spirit animal L

Listen, I’m going to cut right to the chase. Water is important. I take that back. Water is a big deal. I would go so far as to say it’s the most important thing in the world. And by that I mean your body needs it, badly. So it’s crucial to stay hydrated. How crucial?

The average adult human body is sixty percent water. We need water to survive, because your body uses it in so many different ways. If your cells didn’t have water, they would shrivel up and die. If I didn’t have water, I would lose my mind. I’m eighty-five percent water. That’s why my face looks like that.

If you’re not properly hydrated, I don’t even want to talk to you, because frankly, I’m on another level when it comes to hydration. I have water coming out of every pore, all the time. I don’t shed tears, I secrete them. I’m not allowed to play indoor sports. When I make instant ramen, all I need is a heat source. Before I go swimming, they have to remove water from the pool.

I have trouble wearing any kind of clothing. When I do wear clothing, it’s waterproof, but only to prevent the environment from getting wet. There is a fish living inside me.

I don’t think I’m getting through to you with this.

I can’t emphasize how important it is to drink enough water. Language breaks down when I attempt to do so.

So I just won’t. Have fun dying of thirst. •

Every Canadian is entitled to one free right swipe on Tinder

One free piece of flank steak for you to do anything you want with

GARY M A S O N B A B Y

E E L

B R E E D E R

ONE FREE EEL GROWLER FILLUP

Come on down and fill your growler with wonderful baby eels!

• Warmed to body temperature • Completely free • Do whatever you want with this beautiful piece of meat • It’s your meat, your time, you’re the boss • It’s just you and the meat now!

META ZONE

• An attractive single in your area, who is definitely out of your league, will right swipe you on Tinder, upon presentation of this coupon.

• They will exchange four (4) private messages with you, not exceeding five syllables each, that seem to hold the promise of a future encounter in person.

• At that point, their account will immediately be deleted.

TITLE ZONE

VALID ONLY AT CHURCH’S CHICKEN 3349 MAIN ST, VANCOUVER, BC. PROMO VALID FROM JUNE 26-28, 2015 BETWEEN 2:00AM AND 2:01AM. NOT VALID WITH ANY OTHER OFFER.

As I lock eyes with Simba (sorry, forgot to mention this: I named the lion Simba), it looks like his eyes are speaking to me. He is telling me: get out of my enclosure. I don’t blame him for not acknowledging our spiritual relationship. This lion has been through a lot. The conditions that these animals are subjected to here are insane, and I can understand why he doesn’t trust humans.

As he calls over three other lions, their tongues hanging, I start to feel a bit uncomfortable.

But you know what? I promised myself that I would do one thing a day that scares me.

And boy, am I scared. The good kind of scared, though.

I give a thumbs up to the news cameras and my gathered loved ones.

And then a big middle finger to the zoo staff, who are shouting at me to get out of the enclosure. Nice try, zookeepers. I try to tell them this won’t take long, but they can’t hear me over the now ten or so lions roaring in spiritual approval. Like everyone else, they don’t understand.

Enough of the negativity. Bring on the positive change. •

COUPON ZONE

NO REAL GUARANTEES ON THIS ONE, BUT YOU’RE WELCOME TO TRY IT OUT. I MEAN, THEY MIGHT GIVE YOU A FREE COMBO, BUT WE CAN’T PROMISE ANYTHING. WE CERTAINLY WON’T HELP YOU IF YOU GET INTO ANY TROUBLE FOR THIS ONE. GO FOR IT, BUT I MEAN, BE SMART ABOUT IT.

LOOK

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to stay hydrated

ions are often associated with traits like strength, pride, and courage. They are kings of the jungle, prowlers in the night, impervious to intimidation. These are all traits, I think, that you could also use to describe me.

Still, as I stand face to face with one of the San Diego Zoo’s magnificent lions, his eyes fixed on me and a low growl emanating from his throat, I can’t help but think that something is off. I don’t think this lion realizes it’s my spirit animal.

I’ve been told many times to ignore what others think and to just live my life. That’s why I’m not even paying attention to my two boys as they shout my name from outside the enclosure. From now on, I’m cutting out the toxic influences in my life and surrounding myself with positivity, and also large, carnivorous cats.

There’s Jocelyn, my friend since the fourth grade, screaming at me to get out of the enclosure. Even my best friend won’t join me in this, even after her horoscope told her to take more chances this month. Looks like I’m on my own.

This secret military base needs more industrial fans Joe, I just wanted to shoot you a quick message and talk briefly about the fan situation at the base.

I should preface this by telling you how impressed I am with the progress we’ve made in these last few months.

The futuristic-looking aircraft, the flying sparks, the raised catwalks along which important people like me can pace while discussing top secret information, all of it is shaping up real nice. I think you would be hard pressed to find a top secret military base that represents America’s admittedly dwindling but still impressive, increasingly in-the-shadowsstyle military strength more than this one.

But I have to come clean with you, Joe: the industrial fan situation in this base is, the way I see it now, a complete disaster.

You’ve already told me that this base is adequately ventilated and that we have no need for any more vents or ducts or fans of any kind.

I’m here to tell you that this isn’t about ventilation, Joe. This is about atmosphere. This is about the cool lighting effect that you get when you shine a light through one of those suckers. That slow paced flickering light that lets you know immediately: I am in a top secret, well-ventilated, perhaps even over-ventilated military base. There is absolutely no need to worry about any kind of airborne chemical attack, or a lack of oxygen, or, god forbid, the possibility that this whole base might suddenly be filled with the smell of those cupcakes that Karen used to always make. No, that couldn’t possibly happen in a secret military base this wellventilated. Let’s put all of that behind us and get down to planning some kind of elaborate stealth mission.

You’re a good man, Joe. I know you’ll pull through with those fans for me. •

If people talked about drugs the same way that they talk about coffee Cocaine is the only reason I get out of bed.

I am just not the same without my daily hit of cocaine.

Don’t come near me until I’ve had my cocaine.

Please don’t touch my cocaine.

If you don’t give me my cocaine I will kill you.

I’ve had so much cocaine that I feel like I’m going to die.

Cocaine has ruined my life.

My entire identity revolves around cocaine.

I sold my children into slavery just so that I could buy more cocaine.

I’m sorry I missed your birthday, Mom.

Is he dead? CHECK IF HE’S DEAD.

We had a deal, José. Talk to your people in Colombia.

My nose won’t stop bleeding.

Guys, I’m so scared.

Wake up, George. Wake

up!

I can’t feel my face.

THE SYRUP TRAP

| 11

if

You Wish to Frame this

wonderful article

P U E C I P S O T S Y 7 SEXY WA G YOUR MAN EMASCULATIN

1

3 5 6

e a video gam Beat him at friends... is in front of h

NAKED!

Scoff at his salary...

BUT DO IT NAKED!

4

Make a major financial decision without consulting him

WITH NO CLOTHES ON AT ALL!

IN THE NUDE!

12 | THE SYRUP TRAP

2 WHILE NAKED!

Stare at the ceiling when he’s on top of you, wondering why you’re even there and openly musing that you could have done better but here’s the thing...

Open a pickle jar by yourself...

7

ASK

Winnie

Congratulations on your discerning taste! You’ve just kicked the class in your home/office or home office into ninth gear. People are going to stop and admire this article, maybe pointing to it coyly and saying, “Great article!”

Speaking of which, to cut this article out, follow the dotted line.

If you waver from the dotted line, fear not—just buy a frame with a mat, and we’ll leave enough of a buffer so you can just cover it up.

Once I’ve got my frame assembled, you might be wondering, where should I put it? We recommend eye level next to a door. That’s where people will be most likely to spot it, maybe on their way out of your exceptionally decorated office, and linger those precious few seconds that could lead to your next big promotion, or buy you just enough time to think up a quick one-liner and strike up a conversation with that special someone. We’ll set ’em up; you knock ‘em down. Good luck! [If you’re reading this in an office, leave immediately. He’s a psychopath.]

Make him hold your purse...

This Country Needs MORE Ex-husbands

YOU’RE NAKED!

Castrate him...

WHILE HE’S— YOU GUESSED IT— NAKED!!!

Winnigail Van Code DEAR WINNIE: You mentioned in your last column that being on the lookout for the perfect ex-husband was one of the most important things a girl can do in her early twenties. What are some traits I should look for in my future ex-husband? —Confused Karen

DEAR KAREM: As husbands go, the first one kind of sets the bar. So it’s very important that you pick right.

The ideal future ex-husband will love sports and making money. Neither of these things should fulfill him. He should think he loves you. He should forget your middle name. He should bring you flowers because your friends told him to.

He should have broad shoulders and low self esteem.

Karmem, do not ask your father how he feels about your future ex-husband. Get married in either an orchard or a rose garden: a place that screams, “Where we’re going, we don’t need vases.” Your engagement ring should be upsettingly large and annoy your friends, who will feign happiness. Definitely have kids with your future ex-husband.

Have one or two. You won’t have a pre-nup, because he’s afraid of you.

He will cheat on you with either your young nanny or secretary, and then you’ll know, and you’ll hint at this so that he knows you know, and then you’ll leave him.

You’ll leave him on vacation in Bali. A destination divorce. Blam! You’ve invented the craze of the decade.

When you return, you will pick the children up from your mother’s house, go home, have the locks changed, and phone up your friend’s friend, who gave you the card of a divorce attorney. He is not handsome, and far too comfortable hugging strangers. Start dating him. This man will raise your children.

Kermin, your husband will win 50/50 custody, but he will only see his kids every two weeks because you’re old school. He has an apartment where they might sleep ten times in their lives on fold-out couches.

He will date several women whose names you will try to learn. Your children will forget. They are all named Jessica.

Danielle? You will learn that your children are shitty at guessing ages.

If you fail to succeed at your second marriage, to someone who is genuinely nice and smart, then you will default to a third husband who will undoubtedly sell cash for gold and do his own ads. Koren, you deserve it.

—Winnigail “Winnie” Van Code

Where the Wild Things Are At the hundredth meridian, where the Dairy Queen is On the Pequod, sipping grog with Ish and Ahab The high-occupancy vehicle lane Raking in grand$ and breaking in mic stands Cornering the orange juice market Pastry school Hanging on in quiet desperation In a wretched hive of scum and villainy The Cleveland Indians’ bullpen In the basement, mixing up the medicine On the pavement, thinking about the government The Anarchist Bookstore Making everything groovy Prague, obviously

CAPTION CONTEST Welcome to the Syrup Trap’s To enter, please follow the instructions below.

!

The worst piñata fillings as voted by readers ac ’n’ cheese • Cooked m • Bats iquid) • Cement (l f smaller piñatas o • Thousands mily heirlooms fa e v si n • Expe (redacted) • g shoes Nike runnin • Knockoff oxide on • Carbon m rdened) a (h te • Concre

Karen, I think I left my energy gel at your house Karen, I don’t know whether this is a good time, but I think I might have left my energy gel at your house. If you recall, this is the transparent gel that I consume during longer runs and bike rides to keep my energy levels up. Please do NOT touch

my energy gel. That is, unless it is in direct sunlight, in which case, please move it to a cool, dark place. If for any reason the energy gel sac ruptures, do NOT touch anything it comes in contact with. CALL ME if this happens. •

Write your caption in the space below

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2. Cut along the dotted line.

3. Keep your entry, and mail the rest of this magazine to the following address: c/o Mr. Alain Gaul 541 Acacia Avenue, Rockcliffe Park Ottawa, ON K1M 0M4

THE SYRUP TRAP

| 13

Obituaries

Classifieds Dog for sale. Must have farm, room to run around, other dogs. Otherwise will be shot & buried in dumpster.

Call 604-154-2322 For sale: shitty children. Will trade for comics, beer, freedom to roam.

Call 604-234-3452 #wanted: content. Call 435-2376 Wanted: illegal drugs for consumption by minors who will then commit crimes, ruin lives. Meet Constable Green Mike in Olympia Park. Call 604-329-2992 Wanted: young woman for adult film shoot. Must be natural blonde. Must type at 80 WPM. Call 604-999-2032 Stolen: one (1) vat of eel feed. I know it was you, Karen. Please bring my eel feed and my energy gel to the office and we’ll call it even.

The goose has landed. RED: the goose has la

Wanted: DJ for cat funeral. Great exposure. Call 604-199-2032 Wanted: help. Call 604-199-2032 Have you seen my cat? Then be quiet about it!

Stolen: that’s the name of my dog, ‘Stolen.’ He is lost, not stolen. But now that you mention it, he might have been stolen.

Feeling lonely? That’s how most people feel all the time!

For sale: brand new baby shoes!

Field, Sally (1890s?–yesterday) The Mrs. Doubtfire actress passed away (right?) peacefully in her sleep last night (?), due to pneumonia, or, like, ten types of cancer. Sally Field, who one could be forgiven for thinking she was always or already dead, is survived by (let’s say) twenty-plus great-grandchildren. Services will take place wherever Hollywood was before talkies were a thing.

For sale: quality leashes and pens I M a forty-three-year-old, overweight, unemployed man. U R a 22-year-old college graduate with own job and the body of a Victoria’s Secret model.

Wanted: revenue from classified ads.

Craigslist has ruined us. Ruined! Have you no conscience, Craig? You and your list have stolen the very shirts off our backs. Call 604-199-2032

Have you seen my boat? It’s amazing.

Missed Connections

Invest in the Syrup Trap

You and I shared a moment on the Metro between Place-des-Arts and Saint-Laurent. You kept reading your book but I noticed you never turned the page. I love your glasses. I noticed you were reading Catch-22. I love that book. I know that we are soulmates.

Please contact me. I will do everything for you. I have already bought us a house. It’s not much, but it’s enough to start our family off right. Our first kids will be named Michelle and Eulachon. We will bring them to the Biodome on weekends and leave them there to fend for themselves, living off wildberries and tilapia from the ponds while we make love amongst the high branches of the jungle dome.

You’re perfect. Please contact me. I will remove one of my own fingers for each day you don’t contact me. My name is Jesse.

Do you have some large-denomination bills and blank cheques burning holes in your pockets? Let us put the ST (which stands for Syrup Trap) in “InveST” and take those forms of currency from you for the mediumto-long term!

The Syrup Trap is an innovative, disruptive, dynamic player in Vancouver’s burgeoning startup scene. We’re so innovative we have redone the kitchen six times since last spring, and the bathroom tiles are on order from Spain. The Syrup Trap is so disruptive that all of our neighbours have moved! We’re not sure what dynamic means, but it sounds like dynamite, and we could probably vertically integrate that into some serious disruption if given just a taste of that sweet, sweet capital that’s currently stretching your wallet.

14 | THE SYRUP TRAP

came back and played Abe Lincoln.

Wamted: reding glasses. Call 604-199-2032

Found: my purpose in life.

Hi mom!

Nineties, The Like the butterfly clips they provided us with, the nineties were great and disappeared all too fast into the backseat of my father’s car as he sped away into the night. It had the cool parts of NAFTA, handheld gaming, and my parents before they got divorced and I got a new dad, who won’t let me call him dad, or listen to music with cursing or references to drugs.

So Many O’s, Spaghetti When did they stop making these?

The nineties?

Cobain, Kurt Did you know he was dead? I thought he was just laying low.

I thought maybe he Daniel Day-Lewis-ed this whole thing and it was only a matter of time before he TO VICTORY!

4 hours, 25 minutes (Midnightish–4 am) Passed away swiftly after I checked the clock and realized that’s how long I’ve been watching Kurt Cobain documentaries. I guess time flies when you’re having fun or generally living without heroin addiction.

Tarts, Pop (1 box) You know how they say you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone? I now know that to be true about Kurt Cobain, a lot of carbohydrates, and a biological father.

Respect for Love, Courtney (1990–now) While we can all appreciate her riot grrrl attitude, she now looks like a hobo who rolled down a hill, got in a fight with another hobo and lost.

Did she kill Kurt? I mean, no. But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have tried to keep it tight.

My great-aunt Linda and my whole Saturday (1941–a week ago) She gave me twenty dollars on every birthday for like thirty years, but she also asked me how I was and how tall I was and what I was learning in school or how old I was like once every single year. Time is linear, Linda, get used to it. Funeral services at my Grandma’s house, first come first served on those tiny sandwiches.

Oops, one last classified!

Wanted: an older brother or sister to help mitigate the terrible pain of being a child. 604-992-4392, call before 5pm

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If you are not a subscriber or Patreon donor, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/syruptrap. At the very least, you should ‘like’ our Facebook page at facebook.com/syruptrap. Until then, no more content for you! This might seem harsh, but please for one second put yourselves in our shoes. Producing a print magazine is extremely time-consuming and expensive. Producing this issue alone cost more than $2.7 million. We are now up to our necks in debt and eels. Literally! When we received that first batch of baby eels, I did not expect them to grow this big. (Confession time: I am not an eel breeder. I’m just a regular guy who loves eels.) We now have thousands of fully grown adult eels on our hands, and let me tell you, they are not nearly as fun as the baby kind! Bottom line: I am not comfortable with the size of these eels. Their presence is really, really bumming me out.

I’m not sure I even like eels anymore. Anyway, please send money or help!

sign up today at syruptrap.ca!

I told my doctor he would never walk again. Then I tried Titranol. I calmed right down and began to enjoy art.

Titranol

From the author of Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin and Margaret Atwood: This Time It’s Personal comes...

MARGARET ATWOOD

3-oxoolean-18-en-28-oic acid

“Atwood shines like a burning house.”

—The Telegraph “Everything in this book is a lie, just like all her other books.”

—The New Yorker

My Crazy Life THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1939–Present

Hey, give it a shot.

Some people have had changes in behaviour, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions while using TITRANOL. Some people had these symptoms when they began taking TITRANOL, and others developed them after several weeks. So it looks like we're heading in the right direction. If you experience suicidal thoughts or actions, anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion, TELL US about it. We want to hear your feedback and stories using TITRANOL. Life is one big happy experiment and none of us really know where we’re going.

“Atwood is falling apart.”

—The National Post

“The last book you’ll ever need to read.”

—The Globe and Mail

Available August 21st on Amazon in print and digital editions.

ISBN 817354756574847

Syrup Trap Press LTD

P ortfolio

Operation Pride ET H A N E I SE N B ERG

50 Geist 97 Summer 2015

Ethan Eisenberg has been photo­ graphing the Toronto Pride Parade for thirty years, since it began in the early 1980s as a community protest in response to “Operation Soap,� a series of police raids on gay bathhouses that resulted in one of the largest mass arrests in Canadian history.

Pride Week in Toronto has grown into the best-attended Pride event in Canada and one of the largest in the world. More than 500,000 people attend events during the ten-day festival.

Ethan Eisenberg has snapped some 9,000 images of Toronto Pride Week. He lives in Toronto and at ethan-eisenberg.com.

Portfolio 51

S hort

story

My Father’s Picasso CA RY FAGA N

"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."

H

ere, as I know it, is the story of the Picasso.

Christmas 1966. Burt takes the family to Miami Beach.

They stay at the Ocean View Hotel, where the three boys run about like “wild Indians” (to use Burt’s phrase), and he and Norma sit in lounge chairs by the pool, or drink coffee in one of the hotel restaurants and read the newspapers.

It’s a modern, first-class hotel, with a private stretch of beach. There’s one of those fake indoor streets on the ground floor, lined with highend shops selling jewellery and expensive luggage, offering hairdressing and tailoring services. One afternoon while Norma is getting her hair washed and curled, Burt wanders into the Ocean View Art Gallery and Framing Shoppe, a nondescript place run by a woman from New York. On the walls are a few inferior lithographs by Chagall, some prints by Dali, watercolours by local artists. Burt is about to leave when he notices a drawing in a large gold frame leaning against a wall. He bends down and recognizes the signature of Pablo Picasso.

Burt doesn’t have a higher education, but he likes to read books of history and biography; what interests him are men of vision—Michelangelo, Darwin, the Rothschilds, Albert Einstein. He and Norma have taken a summer tour of Europe, have toured the museums of London, Paris, Florence. He has read about art in Time and Life, with their photo spreads of the courageous lone artist facing the blank canvas, the block of marble.

At home he has a coffee-table book on Picasso, a present from his boys, no doubt picked out by their mother. Burt doesn’t approve of Picasso’s

52 Geist 97 Summer 2015

life—all those wives and mistresses—but he does admire his Herculean productivity, his seemingly unbounded creativity. The man started with nothing and grew rich through making art, something nobody actually needs.

Also, Burt and Pablo look a little alike, short and stocky and slightly bowlegged.

The drawing is on a page about three feet high and two feet wide torn from a spiralbound drawing pad. Done in what looks like thick brown crayon. There’s a price tag on the frame that reads $36,000.

Everything in the house back in North York has been chosen by Norma, not just the furniture and rugs but also what’s on the walls—family portraits, framed posters, a small oil bought from a street painter in Montmartre, an aerial photograph of Jerusalem. Burt has never bought a work of art in his life, has never before considered doing so. But he falls for the Picasso.

The New York gallery owner introduces herself and Burt starts to bargain. Why not buy a Picasso the same way he would buy anything else? She acts affronted but turns out to be an equally spirited negotiator. They shake hands on $29,500, including shipping to Toronto. In 1966 that’s about the cost of ten automobiles. He writes a cheque. Then, heart pounding, he goes to meet Norma, who is just getting out of the salon chair. “How do I look?” she asks. “You always look great,” he answers. He says nothing more.

A week or so after they return from Miami Beach, a truck pulls up to the curb and two men carry an enormous crate into the house. When Burt gets home from the office Norma and the illustrations: allen forrest

boys are waiting for him at the door. He searches for a screwdriver, finds it in his sock drawer and begins to dismantle the crate. When the foam packaging is pushed aside, they all stand and look at it.

“Yuck,” says Benjy, the oldest boy. The kids run out to watch television.

Norma looks at it a while longer as Burt stands there sweating. Not long before, Norma’s sister’s husband had asked Burt for a loan to help buy a home seltzer machine franchise.

It was the third such scheme and this time Burt had said no. Now Norma shakes her head. “For my sister’s family nothing,” she says. “But for this scribble you empty the bank?” After that she always called it the scribble. “She got used to it, but I can’t say she ever liked it,” Burt told me later. “The nudity put her off. I remember once she said, not trying to be funny, ‘Who would want to eat a piece of coffee cake under that?”

Burt laughed when he recounted this. Whenever he laughed, I laughed, too. I was twelve years old when he told me the story. He’d been my father for less than a year.

B

urt Epstein was actually my stepfather. As soon as it was official I told everyone I was his daughter, not his stepdaughter. I know that surprised him, and made him happy.

My mother, Loretta, was his second wife.

Burt’s upbringing was much closer to that of his first wife, Norma, whom he had met at McMurrich Junior Public School when they were kids.

He didn’t talk that much about Norma, probably out of consideration for my mother, but he did call her a wonderful woman who knew what her children needed. I was good at reading between the lines and detected that she could be moody and perhaps sometimes depressed. But she was also sharp and he often consulted her on business decisions.

Burt’s childhood companions became the first generation of Toronto Jews to attend university and to go on to become pharmacists, accountants, lawyers. In high school Burt did odd jobs for the Irish and Italian brickworkers, the carpenters and plumbers. He got hold of a broken-down truck and began to take construction materials around to building sites. He opened a depot on Dundas West and when he needed to expand he moved up to Keele Street.

Later he opened yards in Etobicoke and Scarborough. He and Norma married and had three

sons in four years—that must have kept her on her feet. They prospered, took vacations, sent the kids to summer camp, got a new car every four years. In 1956 they bought a decent-sized split level near Bathurst and Sheppard. Friends and acquaintances moved farther into the suburbs, or built near-mansions in Forest Hill, but Burt and Norma stayed put. There was no need, Burt said, to show off.

By the time I met him, his boys were married and had kids of their own, two of them on the west coast and the third in a Boston suburb, so I never got to know them well. Burt had been a widower for six years. People had tried to fix him up, and a couple of widows who needed somebody to take care of had an eye for him, but he wasn’t interested. Much easier to hire a housekeeper. It looked, so various relatives told me later, as if Burt was one of those men who had one great irreplaceable love.

And then, of course, he met my mother.

L

oretta was seventeen years younger, a physiotherapist working in the same clinic as Burt’s doctor. “Maybe,” he said, “you’d like to go out for a bowl of soup?”

Be careful, Burt’s cronies at the Y warned him. Offer a woman a bowl of soup and she’ll want the whole meal. But my mother wasn’t looking. She’d had more than enough bad experiences, not including my biological father who had been a sweet fling during a summer planting trees. No, it was Burt who wanted to buy the whole meal for her. Again he surprised his friends, dismissing their concern that she wasn’t Jewish. Nor did he object to the eleven-year-old daughter.

Loretta and I had lived in a succession of perfectly nice flats, most recently the top floor of a house on Clinton Street. My mother was forty-three but we lived like students, with piles of books on the floor, furniture from Goodwill, funky clothes from the vintage shops. The windowsill in the bathroom was coated with the hardened wax of candles lit whenever one of us took a bath. Loretta was attractive, if a bit unkempt; I was always fixing her collar or untangling her hair or helping to find one of her hoop earrings. She hadn’t always been so careful but now when she dated she kept the men away, which suited me fine. Because she worked and didn’t believe in spoiling, I learned to be independent and knew how to use the subway and Short Story 53

buses. I had dinner started before she got home.

Our relationship could be stormy but that didn’t mean I thought we needed anyone else. At least, that’s what I told myself, but I wonder now if in fact I had some fantasy image of a father, a kindly male figure who would keep us safe.

From the start Burt pressed to meet me.

“How do I know you if I don’t know her?” she reported him saying. It took four months for her to ask me, and when I agreed he came for dinner bearing not one but three gifts: a box of fancy chocolates, a copy of Matilda (which I had read years before) and a Slinky. I’d never seen a Slinky and he showed me how to make it “walk” down the staircase so that it would spring with thrilling violence from step to step.

Most adults told me they liked my red hair and freckles, or asked me what my favourite subject in school was, boring crap like that. Burt told me lurid tales about the construction yards.

How a worker lost his false teeth in a bucket of carpenter’s glue. The time a dozen policemen came swarming in, looking for an escaped bank robber who turned out to be hiding in a pile of sawdust and gave himself away by sneezing. He asked me questions like “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen a teacher do?” and “If you were really, really hungry would you eat a cooked dog?” Afterwards, I told Loretta it was okay for Burt to come around. He usually arrived at dinner time, sometimes bringing takeout—Chinese food or pastrami sandwiches—or lamb chops to throw on the grill. When I was mad at a teacher he always took my side, and in arguments he sometimes agreed with me and not Loretta, which ticked her off. He didn’t bring me expensive presents but small things: a box of Cracker Jack, an Archie comic. When my mother said he shouldn’t, Burt replied that he never had a daughter, only three “gorillas,” and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

No doubt being an only child made me comfortable with adults, but it was Burt I liked having around. Besides, Loretta was in a better mood when he was over. The two of them did leave me with a friend or, more often, on my own to go on Saturday night dates. I told Loretta that when they came back he could stay the night, and eventually she thought it would be all right, but Burt wouldn’t do it. He’d return on Sunday morning to take us for a drive in his Caddy. Usually we went for breakfast to United Bakers, a dairy restaurant in a strip plaza not far 54 Geist 97 Summer 2015

from his house. “Kiddo,” he said, “you never had a blintz? Or eggs and onions? Then you don’t know what heaven is.”

One day I asked, “So when do I get to see your house?”

Burt looked at Loretta, who looked at me.

“You don’t think he’s asked me to bring you over?” she said. “I guess now.”

The suburbs were something that I had seen only in movies. There were always these overhead shots of curving streets, neat, identical houses, manicured lawns. Burt’s street was perfectly straight and the houses didn’t match. His was the only one with two birch trees in front; the grass needed cutting. The house looked sad and I felt sorry for it.

It was obvious even to me that nothing had changed since Norma died. The rooms were generous spaces to someone who’d always lived in flats or apartments, with big windows in the dining room and a sunken living room with worn broadloom and a cozy den. “How old is that TV?” I asked. The eat-in kitchen had a Formica table that I knew didn’t come from a vintage shop. I thought: maybe the house is waiting for me to cheer it up. Then I went back to the living room and saw the Picasso over the sofa. I didn’t know then it was a Picasso.

I noticed because Loretta was staring at it like she couldn’t believe what she was looking at. So I went over to take a look. Three figures were drawn on the paper—father, mother, child.

They looked quickly done. The adults were sort of crouching (the legs weren’t exactly proportioned right), with their hands stretched out as if to catch the child. Maybe the child was just learning to walk. The mother and father were naked but there was nothing disturbing about that; their private parts, a loop and a V, were how I might have drawn them a few years earlier. The child’s forward leg hid whether it was male or female. I decided female. Her curly hair matched the mother’s and also the father’s beard.

It seemed kind of sweet and I wondered if one of the boys had done it when he was young.

By the time of this visit, in spring 1990, the Picasso had been hanging in the same spot for almost twenty-five years and had appreciated in value by two or three hundred percent. Loretta was trying to decide whether we should move in with Burt as he was urging her. She loved him but had misgivings, partly because of the age difference, partly because he wasn’t anything

like the man she had imagined for herself, and mostly because of me. She had been agonizing over whether to even broach the subject with me, but the truth was that I already knew that I wanted to live in this house and become Burt Epstein’s daughter. Maybe, I thought, he would frame one of my pictures and hang it up, too.

B

urt was old-fashioned; he wanted to get married. Loretta didn’t want to convert so he found a reform rabbi—“very reformed,” Burt chuckled—to conduct the ceremony. The three of us lived together in that house for seven years—good years for all of us. And then I left to attend McGill on a scholarship and never looked back. It was Burt who always said he missed me, while Loretta just wanted to know that I was okay.

He sold the business, and Loretta worked another couple of years before his nagging got to her and she gave it up.

They travelled a good deal, and even went on one of those African safari tours. It turned out to be a good thing she retired because they only had six years together after I left. Burt lost his second wife to the same illness as his first.

I

was living out of the country, as I had been since graduation. In Australia and Thailand mostly, but also France, Spain, Denmark, Hong Kong. Mostly I worked for NGOs on contract, occasionally for a private charity. I didn’t fully accept that I was gay until my early twenties. I had relationships with women, some lasting a year or more, but either my rootless life or my emotional wariness prevented anything longer.

I liked to brag that everything I owned could fit into a duffel bag and a hard drive. When Loretta—when my mother got sick, I came home. In the first months I bunked with a friend downtown but as Loretta got worse I moved back into my room in the house. At night when the drugs finally helped her to fall asleep, Burt and I would sit at the kitchen table and argue about whether she should die at home or in the hospital. I think we argued because we didn’t want her to die at all, and as soon as one of us gave in, the other would change their mind. In

the end, she ended our stalemate by going quietly in the night. It was Burt, sleeping in the guest room, who found her. I never saw a man cry like that and I had to hold back my own feelings just so I could help him get through to the morning. My own tears had to wait for the funeral, and even then I controlled myself.

Burt was seventy-six. He had only minor health complaints—bad digestion, arthritis, occasional high blood pressure—but he didn’t look as strong as he used to. His two sons in Vancouver wanted him to move out there, but he had his routine, walking to synagogue on Saturday morning, lunch at United Bakers, an afternoon steam at the Y. He didn’t want more change.

A

n old contact asked me to join an aid project in the Philippines. I kept in touch with Burt, making Skype calls every week or so. The years went by.

The day I turned thirty-five, Burt called to say happy birthday. “While we’re on the phone I have a favour to ask,” he said and then turned away from the screen and coughed wetly into his handkerchief. “A big favour, I know. I’m going to move into Baycrest. It’s too hard to live on my own. And who knows how much help I’ll need before long. But I have to pack up, sell the house—it’s a little much for me. Not that the boys haven’t offered, but Jerry’s getting divorced—” “When are you supposed to move in?”

“There’s a spot coming up. Some other poor schmo is being transferred so he can get more care. I’ll be lucky if they change the sheets.”

“You know it’s a good place. Let me just fix things here.”

“I’ll buy you the plane ticket. But you have to remind me where the hell you are.”

I took a cab from the airport to Burt’s house and stepped out to the following scene: the front lawn crowded with chairs, lamps, boxes of books and record albums. A dozen people milling about. And Burt, eighty-three-year-old Burt, struggling to manoeuvre an end table through the front door while growling, “That’s four dollars and I don’t bargain.”

I rushed over to help. “What are you trying to do, go straight to the funeral home?”

Short Story 55

Burt laughed wheezily. “Fine. You take their money. But don’t let them nickel and dime you.”

So I worked the lawn, stuffing small bills into my pockets, making change. For the bigger furniture, people had to go inside and haul it out themselves. Burt sat on a dining room chair as if waiting for a meal. During a lull I collapsed beside him.

“It’s all going just like that, sweetheart. Pfft.”

“They’re just things,” I said. “You’re the life, Burt. And your memories.”

“Yeah, well my memory’s not so good anymore.”

A man came out of the house. “How much for the Picasso print?” he asked.

Burt squinted up; the man wore a jogging suit and had earbuds dangling around his neck. “That’s no print. It’s the genuine article, mister, by the master’s own hand. I’ll sell it for two hundred thousand and take a certified cheque.”

“Funny guy,” said the man. He put in his earbuds and jogged off.

“Jesus, Burt, is it really worth that much?”

“Who knows? Anyway, it’s not for sale. I’m taking it with me. Now go over to those people holding the Mixmaster. Tell them it has three speeds.”

B

urt also kept his bed, a dresser, a small antique desk, a leather armchair, a Persian rug, some framed photographs and several citations for donating to Jewish charities. He asked me to pull out the nails holding the mezuzah to the door frame. I found out that he had a heart condition and was taking pills. His weight was too low. Also, he showed some early signs of Alzheimer’s, but given his age and its slow development, the doctors weren’t particularly concerned. “In other words, I’ll probably be dead before I forget my name.”

The Baycrest was a building for seniors in need of regular medical attention and some assistance. There was a pool, a fitness room, organized clubs (bridge, music appreciation, Torah study), evening movies, talks. Burt was assigned a one-bedroom apartment with a

56 Geist 97 Summer 2015

kitchenette, although lunch and dinner were served in the dining room. He quipped that he’d be eating strictly kosher for the first time since sitting at his mother’s table.

On moving day, the jokes dried up. He became agitated, shuffling in and out of the house, giving the movers contradictory instructions, losing his temper, becoming teary-eyed. He stopped caring about the furniture, only insisting that we hang the Picasso on the long wall in the living room, above a two-seater sofa that came with the apartment. The drawing would be the first thing people saw when they came in.

Everyone crowded in only made him more anxious so I sent the others out for a bite to eat. Burt sat in his armchair looking exhausted, as if the air had been let out of him. I put on the kettle and made tea, and when I turned around again he was asleep, his head lolling.

I

worried that moving out of his house would be the first step in a slow decline of Burt’s physical and mental health. But it became clear to me what a burden running the house had been, and how isolated he had become these last years. Burt needed people, needed to pronounce on the sorry state of the world, to crack wise. In just a couple of weeks he looked rejuvenated. True, he didn’t like the communal dining much—“Do you want to watch a bunch of old people eat?”—but his weight went up. Despite having his own television, he often watched CNN in the lounge to have an audience for his complaints. He agreed to take a gentle stretch class. When I visited, he greeted me like the monarch of a small country.

“Welcome to my world, kiddo.”

A month or so after his arrival a male housekeeper, a devout Baptist from the Dominican Republic, complained of the inappropriate drawing in Mr. Epstein’s room. Burt’s vocal contempt for his views was not helpful but management handled the problem by switching the man to another floor. In the meantime I got a contract teaching stint at Ryerson University in their non-profit management certificate program.

had sublet an apartment on Major Street, and Baycrest was an easy bus ride up Bathurst. On one visit Burt asked me if I was seeing someone.

I told him about Rita. He took off his glasses to polish them on his shirt.

“Is she Jewish?” he asked.

“Half Jewish.”

“Half is better than none,” he said. “Bring her around and I’ll tell you what I think.”

So I did, and before long they were kibitzing like old friends. She was an easier talker than me and I was a little jealous of how much they enjoyed each other. As we were leaving, Burt leaned forward to whisper loudly in my ear.

“She’s a keeper, sweetheart.” He pushed something into my palm; a hundred-dollar bill. “Go to a nice restaurant. A relationship should never be taken for granted.”

Burt Epstein, love counsellor.

eyesight than me. These people are, what do you call it, philistines. What’s wrong with a mother, a father, a child? Or the human body? We’re made in the image of God, aren’t we? This is a work of art by a titan. They ought to be grateful it’s here.

I should sell tickets.”

“You can’t just dismiss other people’s feelings, Burt. I’m sure there’s a way to fix this. You could put it in the bedroom. Or you could put a curtain over it.”

“Would the Louvre put a curtain over a painting?”

“Ms. Greene is being very reasonable. She just wants this to go away. But according to the contract you signed—” “Don’t wave contracts at me. I was in business for fifty years. I know what a contract is worth: exactly how much you want to pay in lawyers’ fees. To hell with them.”

Rita suggested that the two of us try to persuade Burt to back down. We brought homemade cookies and brewed tea in his kitchenette, then sat in the living room. We twisted round to see the Picasso above us. I marvelled at how something could appear so primitive and sophisticated at the same time.

“It really is great,” Rita sighed.

“That picture,” Burt said without missing a beat, “is the best investment I ever made.”

O

T

This was the first time I had actually lived and worked in Toronto, and the city took on a different feeling. My few friends introduced me to their friend circles. A woman originally from Morocco, a lecturer in public health, asked me out for dinner. Her name was Rita Harrak and she was warm, quick to laugh, generous. In other words, too good for me, but she didn’t seem to notice.

I

ne morning a Ms. Greene from Baycrest telephoned me at work. She explained that another complaint had been made against Mr. Epstein, this time by a resident, who had spied the Picasso through Burt’s open door and called it depraved. To us this might seem a rather excessive response, Ms. Greene said, but we should remember that “our guests” were raised in a different time. Would it be possible—here Ms. Greene coughed uncomfortably—for Mr. Epstein to consider removing the work from his apartment?

I wasn’t thrilled by the call—as if Burt was a child and I his mother. He was perfectly competent to make his own decisions. And while I had sympathy for the woman, and understood management’s desire to keep the peace, I did think it an excessive response, especially since the drawing was inside Burt’s private space. On the other hand, I was glad that she had phoned me, for I knew how stubborn Burt could be and I didn’t think he needed this trouble.

Burt dug in his heels. “She saw it from the hallway? That old biddy must have better

wo weeks went by and I hoped that the matter might have been forgotten. But Ms. Greene phoned again. Now the elderly woman’s family complained. Ms. Greene said that she’d never had to deal with anything like this before.

Wasn’t there something “we” could do?

I phoned Burt.

“Let’s talk about it,” he said. “When can you visit?”

“I’ve got time today. Is four o’clock all right?”

“For you I’ll clear my schedule.”

I arrived a few minutes late and knocked on the apartment door. “Come in,” Burt said. I was surprised to see him on the sofa beside a woman.

She was in her eighties, with a white cloud of hair, and extraordinarily wrinkled skin, like an apple doll, only with red lipstick. An aluminum walker stood next to her.

“This is Goldie,” Burt said.

“Goldie Rosenzweig from Montreal,” she said. “You’re the lesbian stepdaughter. Very nice to meet you.”

Goldie began telling me, in a startlingly Short Story 57

energetic voice, that she’d been an upholsterer in a furniture factory, an active union rep and “troublemaker.” A widow for seventeen years, she had just turned eighty-eight. She and Burt had met at dinner and were now “spending time together.” She had the New York Times delivered every day and subscribed to The Nation. She called Obama a “big dud” and Stephen Harper a “fascist.” Burt didn’t say anything.

Goldie had just two sips of tea. “I know you two have things to talk about,” she said, grabbing hold of the walker. “So much fuss over a drawing.

It doesn’t do anything for me but it doesn’t offend me, either. Not that little pitsl on him. You know what I think it’s worth? Fifteen bucks for the frame. Probably management is on a power trip, things never change. Next time, dear, bring your girlfriend.”

When Goldie left I said “So how long has this been going on?”

“I didn’t want to offend you,” he said. “Your mother’s memory is very dear to me.”

“I’m not upset, Burt. I’m just surprised. I think—well, I think it’s lovely.”

“It’s not that big a deal. A person needs company. A reason to get up in the morning. I’ve had my two big romances, but Goldie is good company. Listen, sweetheart, that picture is becoming a headache. I don’t need the aggravation.

And Goldie told me not to be such a hardass about it, to use her word. I don’t need it here, anyway. It’s in my mind, I can see it whenever I want. So I’m giving it to you.”

“I hope you’re joking.”

“The boys have taken enough already. And when I go you’ll all get a nice nest egg. They wouldn’t even appreciate it.”

“I live in a rented flat.”

“It doesn’t have a wall?”

“I’m not settled. I might leave for another job.”

“When you have Rita here? Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Listen, you’re doing me a favour. You can take it home today.”

“I came on my bike.”

“Fine, it needs to be crated anyway. I’ll have it delivered. Do me a favour. Go see if Goldie is playing bridge. I like to watch. She has quite the mouth on her.”

58 Geist 97 Summer 2015

T

he day the crate arrived, Rita came for dinner and afterwards we pried it open. We fussed with the tape measure and level and took turns hammering. It was hard to hold up the drawing—the frame was solid—and to lower it until both eye-hooks caught.

I was sure that it would look ridiculous in my small place next to the used furniture and piles of books. But somehow it seemed right. When Rita smiled at me I knew she was thinking the same. She had brought a bottle of Prosecco and we popped it open and made a toast. To the picture, to Pablo Picasso, to Burt.

A

year later, Rita and I bought a small row house in Parkdale. I was scared shitless, to be honest.

The moving truck went from her place to mine to the house.

We were in it a week, rearranging furniture, unpacking boxes, before we finally opened the crate. We went through the same song and dance to hang it up. Then we ordered a cab to bring Burt and Goldie over to see the new house.

“Nice, nice,” Burt kept saying, while Goldie sniffed at the drafty windows, the hot-water radiators, the tiny kitchen. “Good luck making Passover Seder in here,” she said.

Then we sat in the living room and had our ritual tea and coffee cake. Burt’s hearing was getting worse but so far he refused aids, and had to lean forward to pick up what anyone was saying.

“It’s nice of you to have us over,” he said, his plate balanced on his knees.

Goldie made a face. “Why shouldn’t they have us over? You gave them a Picasso, didn’t you?”

“What’s that?”

“I said, you gave them a Picasso.”

“Yes, I did.” He raised his eyes and gazed up at it. Gazed up as if he was seeing not the drawing itself, but something far past it.

“Fifteen bucks,” Goldie said. “For the frame.”

Cary Fagan is the author of six novels and three short story collections, among them, A Bird’s Eye and My Life Among the Apes. He lives in Toronto.

L iteral

literary

Postcard Lit Winners of the 11th Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest

1ST PRIZE

No Time to Write BA R BA R A BAY DA L A

H

ectic here. This town is friendly but not rich. There’s a party nearly every night.

I don’t waitress. I work in the drugstore with Deanne. We’re looking for a cheaper place.

Hope it has a shower. It feels real good to be clean. Some days I’m drowning in perspiration. Others I sit with Mr. Miller and drink beer. Guess I’ve done some unique things the ladies haven’t tried out yet. People come right up to me and ask if his head was knocked clean off. You always think of your father as being strong (I did anyway). Now I think a person doesn’t just die. Phil was a bit self-righteous. Not so special after all. Ask my mom what I said to her.

Hope you can visit some time, one time, next time you are through.

Barbara Baydala graduated from the Writer’s Studio at SFU in 2013. Her work has appeared in Emerge 2013, CV2 and the Haro. She lives in Ladner, BC.

photo: david campion

Postcard Lit 59

2ND PRIZE

Dutch Pigeon RYA N H O B E N

R

onnie was on the couch watching The Price Is Right. I was on the balcony cooking chicken wings. I had this recipe where I’d deepfry the wings, then barbecue them while basting them with honey garlic sauce. That sauce you get from the Asian aisle at the Buy-Low, where the white people are. The pigeon sat there looking and not moving, while I applied layer after layer of sauce. The fat dripped down into the flames and sent up waves of thick smoke, coating my glasses. The bird’s eyes followed me. Not in a sinister way, but with the non-chalance of animals. There was sadness to it, like it had seen a lot of things. I brushed Ronnie’s legs off the couch and sat down and watched. Sandra bid $1,365 on a plasma screen and Greg bid $1,366. Kelly and Bret were way off. Greg was closest without going over and got called up to the stage to stand beside Drew Carey. He had a shirt on that said “groom” and the camera kept panning to his new wife, who was terrified. The announcer said that they could win a new car, a Honda Accord with daytime running lights. The game that Greg was going to play was called “That’s Too Much,” where you pick a number that is just above the suggested retail price of the new Honda, then yell “That’s Too Much.” The first number was $19,500. Greg let that one pass. His wife had her hands in her mouth and looked like she had lost a filling. The next number was $20,443. Greg, confident as ever, also let that one go by. Then $21,766 came up on the brightly lit screen and for a moment, Greg wavered. His wife took her hands from her mouth and covered her eyes, unable to watch.

Greg yelled, “That’s Too Much!” and the horns blew. He slunk offstage as Drew suggested that he’d see him at the big wheel. Those horns. When my father told me that Nipper got run over by a local insomniac, Mr. Dansword, they blared. When Jenny Thompson said she already had a date for the formal, they bellowed their contralto tune. The noise didn’t say that nothing would ever be the same, but that sometimes things don’t work out. Happiness wasn’t guaranteed. The wings were crispy so I walked out to the balcony and placed them in a pan. The bird was still there. It was raining and I could hear droplets sizzling. Trails of steam moved upwards then faded. I picked off a piece of meat and held it out, slowly moving closer to the bird. It plucked the meat from my hand and flew off. I watched it until it went out of sight, then ate. Greg spun $1 on the big wheel and lost the “Showcase Showdown” to Catherine, who’d very soon be flying coach, round trip, from LA to Costa Rica.

Ryan Hoben is working on his first novel. He lives in Vancouver.

60 Geist 97 Summer 2015

3RD PRIZE

all the lovely judies J E S U S H A R DW E L L

S

lant rain and the wind stiff, Jon Tropp was tramping the woods, a five-acre birch and straggle pine and popple stand out behind his house, he was hunting partridge, late edge of the season, but his mind wasn’t on it and the ache in his hip started probing its needle, so he said aloud the hell with it, thumbed the catch on the .22 and whistled for the dog, it emerged snorting from a burdock thicket and shook the wet off and they started back slogging through the cold slap rain, muck sucking his boots when they reached the house a squirrel caught his eye, fat blacktail scampering the garage roof, Tropp gauged the lead, fired, let it be for the dog, scraped his boots on the step and went inside to the kitchen, his kitchen now, a week of greasy plates stinking the sink and a mousetrap underneath needing bait, hell with that too, he thought, and poured a tumbler of half milk, half whiskey, drank it in one go and reloaded, it was eleven in the morning, he spread the paper to the race news two hours later he was down in the basement room he never went into, the hatchet with him, fresh-filed, and he was swinging it, swinging and cursing and chopping at the mannequins, all the lovely judies Netta left, beating the hate out and his breath with it, then he sat on the sewing machine box and surveyed the destruction, he sat looking a long time, then he fetched a broom and cleaned it all up the best he could Tropp believed in luck, just not for him, but that afternoon, rain still thrashing, he was barrelling the truck, headed for the track, he had a hunch he couldn’t shake, this unknown pacer name of Lonely Woman going long odds in a claiming race, seventh race, she’d be a mudder he thought, some young ones were, soon as it went bad they wanted to run, and keep on running, he’d learned that much, might as well make some money off it

Jesus Hardwell is the author of Easy Living. He lives in Guelph.

Postcard Lit 61

v aria b le

weather

Don't Look Down E V ELY N L AU

WHITE DOE

after reading Robert Hass’s poem “On Squaw Peak” I want the rain, little Jackson sobbed, I want rain! It was after brunch and we were standing outside Joe’s Grill, taking up the sidewalk in our prelude to goodbye. Storefront windows gleamed with the residue of the morning’s downpour, the sun beating out of the sky heating every washed surface so bright it hurt his eyes. His dad explained these shifts in weather startled the two-year-old to tears. We went in for our hugs goodbye and in the chaos of strollers and jackets and gumboots you stooped and swung Jackson up onto your shoulders— the first time in fifteen years you’d held a child in your arms. A sharp sweetness flickered in my belly, like a menstrual cramp coupled with the ache of desire. It was like glimpsing Hass’s white doe in the woods.

You were wearing a blue cotton shirt, crisp as linen, and you looked, in that splitsecond moment, like a father in a Ralph Lauren commercial— hoisted sails, open ocean, compass pointing the way. Jackson was too startled

62 Geist 97 Summer 2015

by the sudden height, the shift in perspective, to be shy. Grinned like he was yours, little monkey. When you set him safely back down to earth, his parents nudged him toward me for a hug and he hiccupped in horror and hid his face in his dad’s crotch. We laughed, recalling our own small selves pushed toward strangers who prodded our cheeks with stubby stale fingers, whose huge ruined faces leered into ours. Had I become that grotesque thing, that monster with age spots and dilated veins, breath spiked with fried potatoes and sausages swimming in hot sauce, lunging in for a kiss? Later you said no, Jackson was just disoriented from being swung in the air, all this up and down in strangers’ arms, pounding rain one minute and slap of sun the next, no control over any of it. What strangeness, to want anything like this— tiny gripping hand, silk of baby skin.

The wails of his tantrum as we fled to our Sunday afternoon freedom, no one to look after but ourselves.

PLUNGE

JUMPER

Now you are looking up from the bottom of the lake.

You are walking past the townhouses in April under the budding trees, and drowning.

The doctor warned you about this time of year—

Then there is a glaze over everything, as if all the objects in my vision had been dipped in lacquer. Is it the meds? The surge in serotonin? There’s nowhere else to look, no turning away. It’s the same weekend you witness the aftermath of a suicide on the bridge. The man jumped straight into Granville Island, the craft galleries and food markets and souvenir stores, the mill of tourists on a Sunday afternoon.

You leaned over and looked down just as the officers racing past said, Don’t look down.

how you needed to watch the trees, their pale fur coming in. Blink and that dusk would be smooth green leaves.

At the Sylvia Bar the harsh sunlight pressed on your face like a wedge-shaped iron, and for the first time in years everyone was older than you.

His hand in his hair, your hand in yours.

Later, the seaweed trees overhead, swaying.

Your bodies bumping together on the seawall.

Sunset a silver bar weighted on the horizon, blinding. Forget the pink starfish, the flotilla of harlequin ducks, the geese honking across the massed sky.

Already the surface is receding, dimming, and you are sinking into that spiral.

It was like something on CSI, you said—the splayed and crooked legs, the spatter of blood and brains. The ocean just steps away, its sunstruck dazzle stitched by marine traffic— sailboats, kayaks, paddleboarders— the creek lined with magnolias in bloom.

This man had survived the winter dark to die in the month of the cherry blossoms.

You didn’t tell me about it for days.

All the shine and surge of the sea, and still he chose the concrete.

If you’re lucky you’ll brush the sanded bottom, slice a heel on a mussel shell, kick for oxygen— the trail of blood behind you dispersing into the blue.

Variable Weather 63

FAMILY DAY

Once you lived inside her body, heard its thumps and gurgles, that liquid house sloshing in the dark.

Families of ducks squabble on the blue-grey water. You’ve started twitching the way your mother did in her forties— fingers plucking, plucking.

You’re fighting it every day— the black roar of anxiety, skin a pincushion pricked with hives, the fizzes and hiccups of your brain as you lie in bed, insomniac.

No one in your family speaks your name.

Her drawn face, stretched nerves.

But there’s medications for that now.

In vivid antidepressant dreams it’s all pastels and ice cream, except when it’s blood, carcasses, screams.

At least the weather knows what’s what, knows it’s a day for relentless rain.

No families frolicking under sunny skies, in wildflower meadows. No picnics in the park.

Once she ran after you and caught you in her trembling white arms. You could smell her— sour milk, yogurt, the space between her thighs.

She hated the way you pressed your stomach against the sink while washing dishes.

In your teenage bedroom you measured your doughy thighs and pondered where to cut. Hid Mars bars in the dresser, the desk, under the olive shag rug.

Still, you remember plums in the grass.

Snails, slugs in the backyard.

The spider that crawled up your bare leg while you stood stock-still, calling for her.

Your neighbour’s crying in the hall— I don’t know what’s worse, the days my mother doesn ’t recognize me, or the days she does, and remembers how much she hates me.

Evelyn Lau was Poet Laureate of Vancouver from 2011 to 2014. She has published works of fiction and non-fiction, and six volumes of poetry. Her most recent collection, A Grain of Rice (Oolichan, 2012), was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award and the Pat Lowther Award.

64 Geist 97 Summer 2015

Dear Geist... rewriting a creative d an ng ti ri w n ee b I have ar. How do I ye a ut o ab r fo ry o st non-fiction ady to send out? re is ry o st e th n he w know B —Teetering, Gimli M

Which is correct, 4:00, four

—Floria, Windsor ON

o’clock or 1600 h?

Dear Geist, ut said I should write a lot more abo son per one , hop rks wo ting wri In my fiction erfluous and said that the dad character is sup the dad character. Another person writers are very astute. Help!

I should delete him. Both of these —Dave, Red Deer AB

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GEIST IDEAS + CULTURE MADE IN CANADA

afterlife

of

culture

Immigrants from Nowhere STE P H E N H E N I G H A N

What if you don't have a tidy answer to “Where are you from?”

A

misunderstanding stalks my life. It takes different forms on different occasions, yet its roots never alter. At a conference, a reading or a festival, I mention that I am an immigrant.

With a hostile grimace, a writer who may be Canadian-born but who identifies as a member of a minority turns on me and barks: “Where from?” In a gentler form, this comedy plays itself out as a farce of mistaken identity. In one such case I was on a panel with a Canadian-born writer who had a southern European surname. He, who incarnated Canadian moderation, was peppered with questions about his immigrant customs; I, who sometimes offend the polite norms of my adopted land, was asked questions that took for granted that I was a seventh-generation Canadian. Our respective responses and careers ought to have made clear which of us had been born here, yet inevitably the guy with the foreignsounding name was assumed to be the immigrant.

“Where from?” is the question I can never answer. Not long ago, when this challenge was hurled at me by a professor of immigrant literature, I replied: “Why do you think people have to come from somewhere? Lots 66 Geist 97 Summer 2015

of people come from nowhere.” Like many immigrants, I issue not from a place, but from a historical experience. To ask someone where he comes from offends not only in that it excludes the object of the question from his society, but also because it misconstrues the nature of immigration. Some people may pass from one conveniently narrow cultural enclave to another: from the Azores islands to Dundas Street in Toronto, from rural Haiti to the Pie-IX neighbourhood of Montreal, from Shanghai to Richmond, BC. Even these transits may conceal layers of contradiction which easy categorization fails to capture; but many of us were hybrid beings, enfolding multiple identities, before

we arrived in Canada. Most partisans of “Where from?” are people who have invested in the immigrant experience as a narrative of cultural essentialism and dissidence from a Canadian society whose power structures remain dominated by old-stock Anglo-Saxons. The irony of this position is that by accepting this categorization, even from a posture of resistance, the would-be dissidents reinforce the mental divisions imposed by the colonial policies of the past.

A more fluid understanding of immigration would recognize that many of us have histories that arouse what might be referred to as “categorical anxiety.” Immigrants from nowhere provoke this anxiety in citizens who prefer to slot their neighbours into predigested niches.

Throughout Canadian history, it has been the person whose identity cannot be neatly summarized who gets the frosty reception. During the migration of Eastern Europeans to the prairies under the government of Laurier in the early twentieth century, Canada’s predominantly British- and French-descended population was perturbed by the influx of people whom they referred to as “Ruthenians.” This name was reserved for people, most of whom spoke Slavic

languages, who did not come from nation-states, but rather from the illdefined borderlands where the overextended, crumbling Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires blurred together.

The return to the map of vanished nation-states later in the twentieth century allowed these immigrants’ descendants to define themselves as inheritors of the Polish or Ukrainian nations, and to get a better reception.

Jews in the mid-twentieth century, and Muslims in the early twenty-first century, faced exclusion and public opprobrium. Both groups issue from religions that are multi-linguistic and multi-national, complicating any reply they might make to a grunted, “Where from?” Many Jews came to Canada as survivors of a historical experience—a pogrom or the Holocaust—and recent Muslim immigrants are often escaping the vast realm of violent instability, in which national borders are shifting or dissolving, or are hotly contested, that now extends from the eastern Mediterranean to the frontiers of India and China. The murkiness of this region in the public mind, like that of “Ruthenia” in the early twentieth century, accentuates uncertainty and suspicion.

The historical experience of which, in a very mild way, I am a product is decolonization. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s, the closing down of European colonialism, particularly in Africa and South Asia, dispatched white settlers and middlemen of many ethnicities from the places where they had been born, or worked for decades, to a colonial centre that failed to welcome them, then on to third or fourth destinations. British settlers in India went “home” to England, found it cramped and grey, and moved on to Australia or South Africa.

The Pieds-Noirs left North Africa for Nice or Marseille; finding themselves regarded as an underclass, they scattered around the world. East African Asians, after being expelled from Uganda or made unwelcome in Kenya or Tanzania, moved to England, then Afterlife of Culture 67

on to the United States or Canada.

White Rhodesians or Kenyans followed a similar route. Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola, as well as Africans who had collaborated with them, fled to a Portugal that most had never seen; derided in Lisbon, many left for New England, Canada or South Africa. On the fringes of these and other well-worn international pathways one hears thousands of individual stories of decolonization.

Mine is that my English mother and first-generation American father met on a beach in Yemen in 1958, where their work—though they didn’t see it this way at the time—was preparing the ground to close down the British colony of Aden. I never lived in Aden, yet having been shown glowing photographs of white buildings around an extinct volcano since childhood, I winced in the spring of 2015, when warfare pulverized the city. I lived in three countries before I arrived in

Canada. I feel certain connections to each, yet I do not come from any of them. I am not a product of a place, who can be relegated to a comfortable hyphenated identity, but of an amorphous historical experience. If, doubting my immigrant status, you challenge me with a grunted, “Where from?” I will tell you that I come from nowhere. But for me, as for millions of others, “nowhere” is a history and a conception of time.

Stephen Henighan’s Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940–2012 was a finalist for the 2015 Canada Prize in the Humanities. His translation of Ondjaki’s Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com and geist.com.

Follow him on Twitter @StephenHenighan.

C I T Y

O F

W O R D S

The Armenian Question A L B ERTO M A N G U EL

Avoiding the G-word

A

few years ago, I delivered the first Hrant Dink talk at Ankara University. Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was murdered by a Turkish nationalist in 2007. His death provoked a wave of indignation in Turkey. Reading Hrant Dink to research my talk, I was moved by how conciliatory his tone was in his political and journalistic writings, never asking for revenge, never mentioning the word genocide. Some people, while acknowledging that atrocities were committed by the Turkish government against the Armenians, refuse to use the word genocide, alleging an unproven intent. However, in most countries in the world today, say “Armenian” and the word genocide follows almost instantaneously.

Recently, the International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia and Croatia were not guilty of genocide against each other’s people during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The Slovakian judge Peter Tomka declared in his verdict that in spite of the killing of civilians and the widespread destruction committed by forces from both sides, the large-scale 68 Geist 97 Summer 2015

operations to displace people in the two countries did not meet the criteria for genocide. “Genocide requires the intent to destroy a group,” he said, “not to inflict damage on it or to remove the population.”

“Man’s innate casuistry!” complained Karl Marx (as quoted by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).

“To change things by changing their names!”

Last January, I went to Turkey to take up residency at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Strolling through the city, I discovered, in the middle of a red-light district on Sakizagaci Caddesi, the Asvazoni Armenian Church of the “Seated” Virgin. The area was inhabited by Christian Armenians

in Ottoman times, and the Sultan did not think it necessary to dislodge the prostitutes from a neighbourhood of unbelievers, so even today they continue to offer their services next to the church.

As I stood by the door of the church, a black Honda Civic pulled up and the porter rushed out to open the door. A wizened old man climbed out and was helped into a wheelchair. As he was taken into the church, a friend explained that he was the patriarch of the Armenian Church. Speaking in elegant French, the old man granted me permission to enter. In the courtyard, two memorials, decorated with bas-reliefs of a pyramid and palm trees, list in Armenian script the names of the donors. Inside, the church itself is a nondescript empirestyle nineteenth-century construction, decorated with commonplace religious scenes. The place was empty.

I recalled seeing a photo exhibition in the Archaeology Museum in Erzurum that tried to prove that it was the Armenians who massacred the Turks during World War I. Archaeologists dug up skulls in 1986

that (according to the caption to the photos) “told the true story.” In Don Quixote, Cervantes says that history is the mother of truth. That is to say, the story we tell is the story we call true.

Our faith in words is astonishing.

Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling. Perhaps this is the sense of Adorno’s famous “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”: once hell is known to exist as a material place on earth, it may seem useless to prolong its hideous descriptions. And yet, we need to insist on the fact that hell was there, rooted in blood, in Auschwitz or the gulags, in the prisons of the Argentinian military dictatorship, or in the suffering of the Armenian people (whatever name we give it),

because it is all too easy to slip into forgetfulness and rely on monuments to remember for us. We feel that by and large, the story has already been told; that in fact the single account of one of its victims suffices to echo the accounts of millions of others. We must remember, however—we must insist on remembering—that we need all the stories, and that even then they will not render the picture complete.

Every tragedy, as Adorno warned, risks becoming mere literature, even the tragedy of the Armenian people.

But we must continue to tell.

And yet, perhaps there is among Armenians a delicacy of vocabulary toward their past suffering. In Argentina, where many of the Armenian diaspora settled, the year I worked as a writer for a newspaper I shared a desk with an Armenian colleague, a superb criminal reporter. Whenever

he spoke of the Armenian tragedy he referred to it as “the Great Silence.”

He invited me often to his place to drink Turkish coffee, which, at the time, I didn’t like. But I was then in my early twenties and he was nearing seventy, so I drank it. Maybe it was for me an unconscious way of acknowledging the underlying meaning in his words. I hope that is how he understood my gesture. “Witnessing,” Hrant Dink once said, “as all the most significant human activities, also has its rituals.”

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

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N A T I O N A L

D R E A M S

Acts of Resistance DA N I EL F R A N C I S

Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them.

W

hat is often forgotten in the blitzkrieg of commemoration that is taking place in support of the centennial of World War I is that the war was one of the most divisive events in Canadian history. We are asked to remember it as the moment that Canada “came of age.” We are even told that the country was made possible by the sacrifices of our soldiers on the battlefield. But while we may all concur that the war was an important milestone on the road to nationhood, we seem to forget that it also came close to breaking us apart.

Seldom were Canadians as divided against each other as we were during the period 1914–1919. English speakers despised the Quebecois for failing to rally to the war effort with adequate enthusiasm. Working people suspected that manufacturers were enjoying windfall profits while the cost of living soared and soldiers lost their lives. Ethnic tensions ran high as “enemy aliens” were harassed, arrested and interned behind barbed wire. The federal election of 1917 was the most undemocratic in Canadian history as the Conservatives led by Robert Borden brazenly manipulated the vote to force through conscription. Borden got what he wanted but the election did not end the civil unrest. If anything, it made it worse. The following year in Quebec City soldiers fired on a crowd of anti-draft demonstrators, killing four people, while elsewhere 70 Geist 97 Summer 2015

in the country labour disturbances and anti-war protests reached unprecedented levels. In retrospect we think of the war as a time when Canadians were united in struggle against a common enemy; it didn’t seem that way to those who were living through it.

One aspect of an alternative history of the war is the story of anti-war resistance. The centre of the resistance was in Quebec, of course, where the newspaper publisher Henri Bourassa articulated a passionate opposition to Canadian participation in the conflict.

Bourassa was an anti-imperialist. He did not believe that Canada had any obligation to take part in British campaigns. But antipathy to the war was shared by many people in Englishspeaking Canada as well. Farmers preferred to have their sons at home helping with the harvest, and the

labour movement became increasingly militant as wages failed to keep pace with inflation. The story of this resistance is the subject of a new book of essays, Worth Fighting For: Canada’s Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror (Between the Lines), edited by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson and Catherine Gidney. As its subtitle suggests, the book considers two centuries of opposition to war by a wide range of people and organizations. But the essay on World War I by David Tough, a historian at Trent University, is particularly interesting because it speaks most directly to the current centennial commemorations.

(Let me add parenthetically that the Toronto publisher Between the Lines has made itself one of the most interesting book publishers in the country. BTL publishes non-fiction about a wide range of social and cultural issues, including Aboriginal affairs, labour, environmentalism and many aspects of Canadian history.

Their books are timely, provocative and, unlike most of our academic presses, actually readable. Long may they prosper.)

World War I was supposed to be a war for freedom and democracy against the tyrannical Hun. That is the way it was sold to Canadians at the time and that is how it has come down to us in the historical record. “We were waging war on the very Prince of Darkness,” wrote the

suffragist—and one-time pacifist— Nellie McClung. “No man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her.” But in his essay “A Better Truth,” Tough stands this formulation on its head. He suggests that the “war for democracy” trope is a myth.

“More than telling us about the war,” he writes, “it tells us what to feel about the war.” Whatever the soldiers were fighting for, it was not democracy, which, as Tough points out, did not exist in Canada in 1914, not yet.

Women did not have the vote, new Canadians were discriminated against, Aboriginals and visible minorities did not share the same rights as other Canadians, labour was powerless in the workplace. Tough proposes that it was actually those who opposed the war, or at least objected to the unequal demands that the war placed on Canadian society, who were the real freedom fighters.

The crisis of war exacerbated social inequalities that had been taken for granted for years. Canadians were being asked to make all kinds of sacrifices for the war effort.

That was fine, but as the war progressed it seemed evident that some people were asked to sacrifice more than others. Soldiers, of course, were paying the ultimate price. But on the home front, women, who were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, still could not participate in the political system. Working people were asked to labour for low pay while manufacturers seemed to be making a killing producing war matériel. Many people began to think that the war was no excuse for these inequalities to continue, and they began to work for their remediation.

In the end, women got the vote, widespread job action brought attention to employment issues, politics were transformed by the emergence of third parties and a radicalized labour movement. All these forces delivered a jolt to the complacent ruling elite.

National Dreams 71

After the war there could be no going back to business as usual. Ultimately, argues Tough, Canada emerged from the conflict a more democratic society not because of what occurred in Europe but because of what occurred at home.

I have focussed on David Tough’s contribution to the book, but Worth Fighting For covers a lot more territory than just World War I. It contains essays on conscientious objectors in the second war, antiVietnam War protesters, the peace movement in the Cold War, the activities of the “peace churches” and a variety of other manifestations of war resistance in Canada. The point the editors make is that along with our military tradition, Canada has an anti-military tradition that has not been adequately acknowledged. They are motivated by a dislike of Steven Harper’s recent militarization of our history, but their aims go further than

present politics. “The chapters in this collection tell us, convincingly, that over-emphasizing military history while ignoring resistance to war is a simplification of our past.” There is an alternative to the “nation-forgedby-war narrative,” a counter-narrative to the one that sees war as the most important creator of Canadian identity. These essays identify an anti-war tradition going all the way back to the War of 1812 and extending right up to today’s War on Terror. They show that resistance is not marginal to Canadian history, rather it is central to the development of Canadian democracy.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, including Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns That Shaped the Nation (Stanton Atkins & Dosil). Read more of his work at geist.com and danielfrancis.ca.

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

All zeit, no geist?

Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland (Random House) takes a look at Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today, in a beautifully designed book that asks what our Internet-saturated future might look like. Alcatel-Lucent builds and maintains the fibre-optic cable networks that provide the foundation of the internet; they also operate research facilities and employ patent-generating computer scientists. Coupland gives us a series of snapshots of everyday life at the company, which show how the people who work there strive to connect us all. It’s a humanizing portrait of a corporation, and a laypersonfriendly crash course on the mechanics of the internet. The book’s structure is based on visits Coupland made to Alcatel-Lucent branches in New Jersey, Paris and Shanghai, which frame the company’s development from past to future. Images of dim cubicles, skeins of wires and vacant office space replace our vision of a smooth, silver network-connected future, with an unglamorous mess of cables and cutbacks. Coupland focuses on how the internet has begun to shape us, rather than the other way around. No book on this subject would be complete without cat photos, and Kitten Clone delivers, with a series of anecdotes about the human desire to share images of their cats throughout time, which has led us to the ultimate cat-sharing network. Coupland fears that “the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century is

that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist”; but only the internet can tell what the future has in store.

—Kelsea O’Connor

To Have or have not

In early May, as royalists everywhere awaited news of Kate Middleton’s most recent efforts to ensure the prolongation of the Windsor line, it occurred to me that Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, compiled and edited by Meghan Daum (Picador), would almost certainly not be among the books to be found on the bedside table in the royal birthing suite; Ms. Middleton’s responsibilities as “queen-in-waiting” undoubtedly precluded that particular life choice. For most non-royals, though, the question “To have or have not?” is still in play; in fact it may well be one of the most emotionally fraught decisions imaginable. The three male and thirteen female writers in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed give a variety of reasons for their decisions to choose a “child-free” (vs. “childless”) life: a “maternal ambivalence”; a lack of “baby hunger”; depression, diminished supply of confidence. They mention the social pressures from family members, peers and friends in the child-bearing majority, made to feel that their own choice perhaps indicated “a character flaw.” As Tim Kreider points out in his essay “The End of the Line,” we are probably the only species for

whom this is a choice: “All living things in this planet have a simple two-part mission: to (1) survive long enough to (2) self-replicate. It is a complex animal indeed, arguably one too highly evolved for its own good, that consciously declines to fulfill one of its few basic biological imperatives.” Just how useful are these essays for anyone now teetering on the knife-edge of indecision? Geoff Dyer indirectly points out one major (though perhaps unavoidable) flaw in the anthology: what we have here is a collection of sixteen writers addressing the question; hardly a representative cross-section of the general population. —Michael Hayward

rockin’ through ontario

Road Rocks Ontario by Nick Eyles (Fitzhenry & Whiteside), a poorly proofread guide to our middle province’s geologic wonders, has an average rating of five stars on Goodreads.

Why? Because people who like rocks like them a whole lot.

If they don’t become geologists, they are likely to form rock societies, spend their lives writing letters about fossils to their MPs and develop emotional connections to glacial sediment the way other people attach to sports teams and spouses. Case in point: my father recently Instagrammed a 1993 photo of my brother and me climbing a rock face in Tobermory, Ontario, and I felt as strong a nostalgic tug for the dolomitic limestone as I did for my brother’s chubby little face, or my father’s Endnotes 73

ringletted nineties mullet. (I did not feel any nostalgia for the knee-length purple jean shorts I wore for the climb.) In keeping with this alternative, nostalgic world of wonder, Road Rocks Ontario is the great leveller when it comes to economy of place. Timmins, Marmora and the Warsaw Caves outshine anything Toronto has to offer; Mississauga has nothing on the Cheltenham Badlands. This is what makes it possible to forgive the writers and editors of Road Rocks Ontario for their egregious misspelling of Manatoulin [sic] Island: I want to model a year of my life revisiting the 250 geologic sites catalogued in their book. I want to climb inside their book as if it were Narnia, or a blanket fort, or a tauntaun. —andrea bennett

SHACKLED

In the April 2015 issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, the critic Alex Good says that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future”— a future that paradoxically, he says in the same paragraph, isn’t there. “The gerontocracy of the golden generation [of the sixties],” he writes, “has made a wasteland and called it a legacy,” resulting not in “the twilight of the book but its long dark night. There’s no future, no more belief in posterity.”

This unhappy state of affairs was initiated, he claims, by Roland Barthes, who, in 1967 in “The Death of the Author,” argued that readers and critics do not require knowledge of an author in order to read or criticize a literary work. In Alex Good’s analysis, Barthes cleared the way for the Industrialization of Writing as controlled today by agents, publishers, critics, pundits, teachers and other non-writing hucksters: a difficult argument to follow over the course of some 12,000 words, and one that may or may not stand up to a reread. —Stephen Osborne

74 Geist 97 Summer 2015

VACATION

without reservation

In What Was Canadian Literature?, a whiny post at partisanmagazine.com, the novelist and critic Stephen Marche says, “anyone who whines about being a writer in Canada today needs a history lesson and a long vacation.” What the whiners should do on their long vacation is not specified. “There is no question that we are living in a great time to be a Canadian writer, perhaps the best ever,” Marche says. “But at the same time the sense of writing as a national project is stuttering to its final end.”

Such a “national project,” he claims, was in hand during the late sixties and early seventies, a period that he says “produced questions that are highly suitable to literary investigation. Are we a country? Who are we as a people? What does Canada mean?” But he fails to adduce a literature engaged with these “highly suitable” questions with all of their jejune High Seriousness—because no literature of a national project ever arose. Survivors of that supposedly “golden age” will recall the whiny questions of national identity repeated endlessly during that time by men in suits and red ties, usually at televised gatherings of the Liberal Party or on the quiz show that featured Pierre Berton in one of his nationalist bow ties. In my memory, no serious writer paid any attention to such nonsense, save for Margaret Atwood, whose wretched novel Surfacing is proof of the emptiness of Big Questions, even or especially when written to illustrate an English graduate student’s thesis paper like Survival. The sixties and seventies were made vital not by the Liberal Party and their maple leaf flag, but by opposition to the Vietnam War, the influx of tens of thousands of war resisters, the rise of feminism and the emergence of the Aboriginal struggle.

Those were the days, my friend. They are still here. —Stephen Osborne

In the 1920s it would have been difficult to find many women who were as at home in the Canadian wilderness as Anahareo, a young Mohawk woman who travelled by train, plane, canoe or on foot through the wilds of Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec, sometimes with her husband, sometimes with other trappers and prospectors, and sometimes on her own. In Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo (University of Manitoba Press), we meet a naïve but curious eighteenyear-old girl who follows Grey Owl (a.k.a. Archie Belaney, an Englishman who became famous for his supposed Indian blood and for his extensive writings and lectures on the importance of protecting the environment) into the bush to help him on his traplines. Instead she became an important influence in his conversion to conservationism, and later she was instrumental in getting Grey Owl his first publication and his first speaking gig. The couple’s main focus was to protect the beaver; at one time they shared their cabin with six tame beavers who could come and go through a tunnel that ran under the foundation and out to a lake where the beavers built a dam. After reading Anahareo’s straightforward book, I was excited to find a copy of Grey Owl’s Tales of an Empty Cabin (Macmillan, 1936). This would be a chance to see their relationship from Archie’s point of view, which I guess is what I did: Anahareo is mentioned only briefly. Not only that, Belaney’s prose is florid and verbose. Devil in Deerskins was first published in 1972, and this new version, which includes forewords by Anahareo’s daughters and a lengthy afterword that gives us the historical context for her life, is the first book in a new series called First Voices, First Text. An auspicious beginning.

Naomi Fontaine is an Innu writer who grew up surrounded by the beauty of the north and the poverty, drug addiction and violence of modern Innu life. Her first book, Kuessipan, translated from the French by David Homel (Arsenal Pulp), is written in what feels like free verse or vignettes (although the book is listed as a novel) and reveals a yearning to get away, even if temporarily, from the ugliness of the reserve and back to the clarity of the nomadic life. Yet this sad place—where there are hundreds of houses but only three designs, the park has been vandalized, garbage is heaped up at the street corners, the field is overrun with vermin, twelveyear-olds sniff glue until they black out and every girl wants to get pregnant so she will have “something for herself”—still has the strong pull of home. At times Fontaine’s vignettes state the obvious, but the overall impression left by this haunting book is of fragmented lives and no clear answers. —Patty Osborne

Heavy Reading

Google “most challenging novels of all time” and you will get thousands of results with lists of books that are notoriously difficult to read. Almost always included are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, usually for its daunting length, The Road by Cormac McCarthy for its violent and sexual subject matter, Kosmos by Witold Gombrowicz for its surreal, existential plot, Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce for the disorienting style of prose, and Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus, which appears for all of these reasons. The story is set in Europe near the end of WWII and Endnotes 75

concerns a secret Allied psychological warfare agency and their discovery of an apparent link between the sexual encounters of an unassuming American lieutenant named Slothrop and attacks from Germany with the recently invented V-2 rocket.

Slothrop could be called the protagonist, but with a cast of several dozen characters, many of whom disappear arbitrarily and without explanation, it is hard to say if this novel has a protagonist, or even a central plot for that matter; Slothrop’s journey to discover the roots of his psychosexual connection with the V-2 rocket is frequently interrupted by disjointed, hallucinatory anecdotes about, among others, a pair of Laurel-and-Hardylike kamikaze pilots and an immortal sentient lightbulb planning to overthrow the government. The convoluted story unfolds in sentences that sometimes span several pages, jump forward months at a time, drift in and

76 Geist 97 Summer 2015

out of fantasy, use indiscernible technical engineering jargon and include everything from song lyrics to calculus formulae. Pynchon’s writing is confusing and at times unintelligible, but it is also impressive in its scope, eloquent and funny. Many of his scenes read like Monty Python sketches—the ones that you didn’t quite get, but still laughed at. The key to navigating this novel is to disregard character and plot, and instead rely on the continuity of theme and imagery as a guide. I enjoyed this book once I abandoned all hope of understanding what was going on. —Dylan Gyles

JUNGLE OUT THERE

Lumberjanes, a smart, cute-in-agood-way series of comics by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis and Brooke Allen (Boom! Studios), is all about

kids at summer camp. These aren’t ordinary kids, which is just as well because it’s no ordinary camp. After lights-out, when they see or hear something odd (which happens most nights), Jo, Molly, April, Mal and Ripley head into the bush and bump into some scary supernatural presence—a dinosaur, a monster, a pack of threeeyed were-foxes, a force that can turn a kid to stone—and live through it.

And as if that weren’t enough, they have to go back and face the wrath of Counsellor Jen. But when Jen marches them over to Rosie, the camp director, Rosie seems more interested in the magic—almost conspiratorially so— than in the broken rules. Each issue brings a new adventure and fresh other-worldly danger, which the kids meet by using what they’ve got: one girl is a whiz at anagrams, a little

fellow can turn himself into a fastball, and they hang together and figure things out just like a bunch of kids at camp. All with plenty of Youch! What the junk! Gasp! Look out! Ahhhhhh!, etc., and the occasional neat little nod to a remarkable woman: “Holy bell hooks!”; “Where the Phillis Wheatley were you?” —Eve Corbel

FLIGHT OF FANCY

On May 1, 2015, I took a flight from Halifax to Calgary on Air Canada rouge (always spelled with a lowercase r), a “leisure airline” that operates out of Toronto. During takeoff, we were informed that our flight was the maiden voyage of the new Halifax–Calgary route, so all passengers would receive complimentary biscotti and an alcoholic beverage of their choice. The interior of the plane looked like every other Boeing I have seen except that the curtains separating coach and business class were red, and the flight attendants wore jaunty fedoras secured to their heads with small straps—in case of turbulence, I imagine—which they took off as soon as we reached cruising altitude. I accidentally dropped a piece of almond biscotti on the floor, and I ordered a rye and ginger and got a little drunk.

—Roni Simunovic

artists in this issue David Campion is a photographer whose work regularly appears in art galleries and museums. See more of his work at davidcampion.ca.

Eve Corbel is a writer, illustrator, cartoonist, mom and grandma. Her writing and artwork have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Geist.

Roni Simunovic is an artist and writer. They live in Vancouver and at ronisimunovic.com.

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T H E

W A L L

off the shelf

Mason’s daughter dies with her neck through a rope that does not belong to her or to Mason in Calvin White’s The Bodies and Other Political Poems (Now or Never Publishing). A gentleman’s gentleman scribbles his ideas for a book onto pigskin in This World We Invented by Carolyn Marie Souaid (Brick Books). Strange mammals in layers of fleece, zippers and eiderdown chew fake tobacco and gather bouquets on Yukon’s Ruby Range in Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra by Elena Johnson (Gaspereau Press). A woman’s intelligence and sex drive skyrockets after a blow to the head, a man befriends a Haitian stripper after fleeing a meditation retreat, and a green card applicant hires a ghostwriter to write his wife’s proof-of-marriage essay in Act Normal by Greg Hollingshead (House of Anansi). Men take solace in man-caves with stuffed hawks, nude sculptures and whiskey with an e in Mark Simpson’s The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing). In Monologue Dogs by Méira Cook (Brick Books) the devil’s advocate testifies to his client’s salient points: his sense of humour, his style and his tendency to violent foreshortenings. In Marina Endicott’s Close to Hugh (Doubleday Canada) Hugh plummets from a stepladder into a world of chronic pain in which his parents are dying, his marriage is dissolving and his art gallery is wilting. Strangers invade Catherine’s home to drink her coffee, discuss her new cabinets and laugh at her green refrigerator in Joanne Epp’s Eigenheim (Turnstone Press). An engineer scrutinizes the crude blueprints of God’s so-called “intelligent design” in Sum by Zachariah Wells (Biblioasis). In The Significance of Moths (Turnstone Press) the spirits of the recently deceased surround Shirley Camia in fluttering, fragile bodies. The Campbell clan arrives in Canada in 1827 to take podiums, stitch up men in tents and lose their minds in Laws and Locks by Chad Campbell (Signal Editions). November is the unloved month, the end-of-the-world month, the godless month of lamps, drawn shades and silence that rolls out in waves in Montreal Before Spring by Robert Melançon (Biblioasis). Damian Rogers refuses to join the Hole in the Universe Gang or follow Father Yod in his ridiculous robes in Dear 78 Geist 97 Summer 2015

noted elsewhere

Leader (Coach House Books). In What You Need by Andrew Forbes (Invisible Publishing) it’s the little things that make us happy, like the love of your brother’s wife, the nuclear bomb in your garage or digging up an old dead friend. Not even death will stop Leon Joyce from winning back the love and devotion of his wife in Joyful by Robert Hillman (Text Publishing). In The Night Drummer by Paul Nicholas Mason (Now or Never Publishing) Otis discovers the only thing more dangerous than being gay in small-town Ontario—being Ojibwa.

Jim records the banger opening to “I Don’t Wanna Be A Rock Star” on a condiment tray in McDonald’s in Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What by Andrew Hood (Invisible Publishing). Aaron Chapman pays tribute to a legendary dance floor that has been foxtrotted, jitterbugged, slam-danced and moshed on for 85 years in Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver’s Historic Commodore Ballroom (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Andrew Steeves commences a vigorous exploration of the ecosystem of books in Smoke Proofs (Gaspereau Press). A Washington ad executive quits her job and forms a research institute in the Congo, dedicated to the study of the endangered “Kama Sutra Ape” in The Last Bonobo: A Journey into the Congo by Deni Béchard (Biblioasis). Dan Rubinstein explains how the ancient habit of walking can counteract modern epidemics like obesity and climate change in Born to Walk (ECW Press). Short-order cooks and motorcycle racers attain the state of mind necessary to triangulate their own reality and achieve something like “individuality” in The World Beyond Your Head

by Matthew B. Crawford (MacMillan).

The mole men of Zug dream of penthouse suites high atop the squats of Zombieland in The Gun That Starts the Race by Peter Norman (Gooselane). After one hundred years of mass-produced, mass-mediated overstimulation, North Americans worship the godliness of goods in Shopping Cart Pantheism by Jeanne Randolph (ARP Books). Eric Siblin embarks on a musical odyssey spurred by a seventy-five-dollar gift certificate to Eaton’s department store and a chance encounter with a velvetvoiced real estate agent in Studio Grace (House of Anansi).

Westender writes that The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull (Nightwood Editions) is: “a moving, poetic, disturbing memoir”; the Globe and Mail writes that it is “horrifying, hard to read”; Alicia on goodreads.com recommends it to “anyone who has ever struggled, known someone who has struggled, or who is generally alive at this moment in time.” CBC says that Exquisite Monsters by K.I. Press (Turnstone Press) “will bring out your inner art monster”; Quill and Quire says that Press “turns mothering poems on their ear, while focusing on biomechanical androids and pop culture.” Librairie Drawn & Quarterly describes Asbestos Heights by David McGimpsey (Coach House Books) as “a truly stunning collection of literary burns”; the Winnipeg Free Press says that McGimpsey “distracts with a joke, then breaks the reader’s legs” and the writer Michael Robbins says that McGimpsey is “unfuckwithable, poetrywise.” Partisan describes The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out by Karen Solie (House of Anansi) as a landscape “where language, kineticism and imagery converge deliciously”; Maisonneuve writes: “Too often the speaker says directly what her main point is”; and the National Post says that Solie can get away with “pretty much anything she wants.” The Montreal Gazette calls Louise Carson’s A Clearing (Signature Editions) a disarming paradox and Lynn on amazon.ca calls it a wonderful meal for the mind. congratulations

To Jane Munro for winning the Griffin Prize; to Rolli, who was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; to Jennifer Delisle, who was shortlisted for the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award; to Ted Bishop, who was shortlisted for the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction; to Jill Mandrake, who was longlisted in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest; to Stephen Henighan, who was named a finalist for the 2015 Canada Prize in the Humanities; and to Susan Paddon, Patrick Lane, Stevie Howell, Suzanna Showler, Sina Queyras and Jen Currin, who were shortlisted for poetry awards by the League of Canadian Poets.

The GEIST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus

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The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist keychain. Good luck!

ACROSS 1 I’m glad we’re going to get dressed up and dance to Rich’s piano music 4 We’ll need that plank recut if we’re going to get it into the van (2) 10 One 1,000,000,000,000,000,000th is not much of a tot 12 What did we do in 1972?

13 She always surprises me when she gets to the bottoms of the oceans 14 Olga met hers in 1972 15 An old hairy one told on me 16 My buddy has only one male sibling (2) 17 Of course it depends to what degree you want to balance 18 Look carefully at that guy before you give him your cat 19 Even in the capital, the Scots read reports at night 20 I’m bored with upright young men playing cards 22 I hope the lead dado will hold that weight and still be able to operate (2) 24 Pull the joint through the slot when you put your shoes on (3) 33 In central Canada she keeps company with gamblers and that little gymnast 34 Sounds like you really love to block that opening with little fuss or ado (2) 35 Ivy’s skipping and bowling are done so she’s staying the night 36 This one was not young when he played with Neil on his knee 37 He may be all heated up but he’s still not gay 38 Those rascals we chained up were mostly bad guys 41 Patrick and Gabrielle are not like that American cowboy 43 Keep the schedule hidden until we know what age Dan is 45 Did I hear you say you just bought that?

Most emphatically not!

46 He accounted for her life process 47 Nina quilts to protect us from the cold 48 Tell Nell to put it over the door 49 On the weekend she looked after the kids while they took an exam in the States 50 The supervisors acted like they were the only club down there (abbrev)

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Send copy of completed puzzle with name and address to: Puzzle #97 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319

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DOWN 1 We’ll support you and if you’re going far, rest under the shelters.

2 Neil claims he was born playing all the holes but some think he’s the bogeyman (abbrev) 3 We were floored by her illustrious past 4 Give those debs a tampon so they can mail that letter and get those thick pieces into the frame (3) 5 Can you think of a noun that can’t be a thing in itself, or is it unknowable?

6 I always get bored by 1½ and 3½ (3) 7 In the end, Mayer often shows up to verbalize loudly 8 The Nov. duel alienated both parties 9 That American rapper sure looks cheesy (2) 11 Scotty got cross but he started the teleporter anyway 14 Our gang certainly puts out an earthy questionnaire (abbrev) 21 We love to drive around without any implements 23 I’m never bored by that groovy panel 24 Never hammer obliquely on a tile 25 They’re definitely not part of the ruling class (abbrev) 26 She’s got a nerve hitting her sore head on the oak tree 27 What language did Lovelace use to drive her analytical engine?

28 That Australian nincompoop 29 According to Olga, RNA can be crunchy in the morning

30 Aah, this is great but let’s stop chatting and go outside 31 Hey bro, dive over my hand and you might exceed expectations 32 Lately, the pres is given to choosing the black ball 39 In the end she expels 40 Can you blame that horny bearded one for escaping?

42 Lulu isn’t a Hindu but she still likes the dog 44 Garlic is good for whatever is making you sick The winner for Puzzle 96 was Alice Gradauer. Congrats!

P U E R P E R I U M

O S I C A K O N K E S S S

I D B E L A E U M

D R A M B

T P A R O N T E D P L R A U E D M W I F E E M R A E X I L I

R T R R A S T H A C G A N S E M A U M N I C A

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

P E A R F R O H I O N F E T A R C T A S T C A M O O T T E R S B O M B W A T E R B Y R E I E E C S I G H

Puzzle 79

C A U G H T

M A P P I N G

Badlands The Terrible Map of Canada

by Jennesia Pedri

Bad Weather Cape

modified Geistonic projection

Devil Island

Abandon Bay Low Point

Ruin Point

Terror Island Hostile Lake

Down Fall Island

Rusty Lake

Fear Lake Foul Inlet

Lame Duck Creek Last Chance Creek

Lousy Point

Road to Nowhere Rottenfish Lake

Broken Skull River

Tragedy Point

Destruction Bay

Lac Gory

Mistake Mountain

Lac Good for Nothing

Boring Ranch

Unfortunate Cove

Misery Mountain

Ugly Pond The Bottom

Broken Leg Lake Bad Heart

Horrid Gulch

Hell’s Half Acre

Hell Hole Shoal Rotten Point

Useless Point

Bad Neighbour

Mount Beelzebub

Lac Lucifer Wreck Beach

Mount Satan

Castaway

Bland Island

Dead End Lane Bad Luck Falls

Scum Lake

No Good Lake

Deserted Lake

The Gutter

Poor Man’s Rock

Lac Inferno

Worthless Creek

Lac Forgotten

Lost Lagoon

Misery Point

Petit Lac Miserable Gore Snake River

Drowned Mans Point

Zero Lake Stinking Creek

Last Point

Suck Creek Consolation Valley

Skid Lake

Mean Creek Crude Hill

Forget Error Lake The Bad Hills

Bastard

Garbage Island

Gross Go Home

Broke Lake

Broken Paddle Lake Sad Lake

Wrong Lake Nowhere Island Bad Medicine Lake

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

80 Geist 97 Summer 2015