Geist 81 - Summer 2011

GEIST

Volume 20 Number 81 Summer 2011

FEATUREs Postcard Lit

A visit to the winners’ circle: three image-inspired short-short stories that scooped First, Second and Third prizes in the 7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest

Leslie Stark, Jen Currin, Leslie Vryenhoek 42

Instrumentation

A fresh look at discarded technology, from a photographer who disassembles gadgets, lays out the bits “almost like a family portrait,” then drops them from the ceiling

Todd McLellan 45

An account of banging, crashing, yelling and general mayhem in a fifthwheel trailer at a quiet RV park, then a 911 call, then a swarm of guys in uniform

One Night at the Oceanview

J. Jill Robinson 54

Life in Language

A profile of Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen, partners in life and in four ­decades of work with west coast Aboriginal groups, documenting and teaching endangered languages

Constance Brissenden with Larry Loyie 58

The Geist Foundation PUBLISHER Stephen Osborne SENIOR EDITOR Mary Schendlinger assistant publisher Michal Kozlowski associate editor C.E. Coughlan e ­ xecutive Patty Osborne circulation manager Kristin Cheung assistant EDITOR Chelsea Novak editorial assistant Sarah Hillier administrative assistants Jordan Abel, Jenny Kent, Kazuko Kusumoto, Daniel Zomparelli interns Andrea Bennett, Becky McEachern, Lauren Ogston, Jennesia Pedri, Dan Post editorial board Bartosz Barczak, Kevin Barefoot, Trevor ­Battye, Jill Boettger, Brad Cran, Melissa Edwards, Robert Everett-Green, Derek Fairbridge, Daniel Francis, Erinna Gilkison, Helen Godolphin, Leni T. Goggins, Lily Gontard, Michael Hayward, Gillian Jerome, Brian Lam, Sarah Leavitt, Sarah Maitland, Thad McIlroy, Ross Merriam, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peterson, Leah Pires, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Kathy Vito accountant Mindy Abramowitz, cga advertising & marketing Clevers Media cover Eric Uhlich web architects Metro ­Publisher composition Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada printed in canada by The Prolific Group first subscriber Jane Springer managing editor emeritus Barbara Zatyko PUBLISHED BY ­director

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N OT E S & D I S PATC HE S

Stephen Osborne 10 Banker Poet

Norbert Ruebsaat 14 Heart and Soul

Daniel Collins 15 Phallic Blessing

James Pollock 17 Northwest Passage

Rhonda Waterfall 18 Saltspring to Étaples Myrl Coulter 21 Room Ten David Milne 22 Tugboat Nocturne F I N D I N GS

27 S. Bear Bergman, Unholy Disconnect; Doug Savage, Tarting Up Your Cubicle; Jonathan Ball, Clockfire; Craig Silverman, Hash Brownies Were Not Consumed; Salvatore Difalco, Better than TV; Sully, November: Virginia Woolf Dress; Paul McLaughlin, Why She Fights; Holy Old Dynamiting Jesus; David Lester, Tragic Act of Spin Doctoring; R.M. Patterson, First Supper; Rebecca Kraatz, Nurse Agnes; Jeff Lemire, No Excuses Boys!; and more CO M M E N T

Alberto Manguel 71 Metamorphoses Stephen Henighan 73 Divergence Daniel Francis 75 Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity

D E PA RT M E N TS

George Webber 4 In Camera

Letters 6

Misha Glouberman & Sheila Heti 24 Charades Geist staff & correspondents 77 Endnotes, Noted Elsewhere, Off the Shelf

Meandricus 87 Puzzle

Melissa Edwards 88 Caught Mapping

On the cover Photograph of a disassembled rotary telephone by Todd McLellan, from “Instrumentation,” page 45.

Cover design by Eric Uhlich Geist is printed with vegetable-based inks, on 100% recycled paper. ­Subscriber copies are mailed in oxo-biodegradable plastic wrappers made by EPI Environmental Products Inc., in accordance with standards set by ASTM International, which develops international voluntary consensus standards.

IN CAMERA

Unit A, Ninth Floor A photograph is a secret about a secret.

The more it tells you the less you know.

—Diane Arbus

D

iane Arbus was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.

She was a tiny woman, delicate, waif-like, with enormous green eyes and a curiosity that drew her into intimate, unseen and forbidden places, where she created portraits of startling power. Her work has challenged and inspired generations of photographers.

In 1967 her photographs were featured in New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The critic John Gruen described her work as “brutal, daring and revealing.”

Near the end of July 1971, Arbus committed suicide in her New York apartment.

The autopsy concluded that she had swallowed barbiturates and slashed her wrists.

Arbus’s lover, Marvin Israel, art director for Harper’s Bazaar, found her body in the bathtub. She was forty-eight years old. A year after her death, in 1972, she became the first American photographer to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (a book compiled by her daughter Doon, and Marvin Israel), which accompanied the Museum of Modern Art travelling exhibition, has since been hailed by critics as one of the masterworks of post-war American photography.

On a Friday afternoon in September 2009, I visited the Westbeth apartment building in the West Village of Manhattan, where Arbus had moved after the breakup of her marriage to Allan Arbus. The building had once been part of a Bell Laboratories site, and was converted into live-work spaces for New York artists in the late 1960s.

The courtyard of the Westbeth is grey and cavernous. I could hear the faint oblique sounds of footsteps and voices nearby. A spacious gallery on the ground floor was filled with large paintings by the artist Paul Muryani, who was sitting behind the desk. I asked him if he had ever heard of Diane Arbus.

“Yeah,” he said, “I was living here on the night she killed herself. The cops said to me, ‘Hey kid, do you want to come in and see this?’ I was about ten years old. I went and had a look.” Paul Muryani was now forty-seven years old, just a year younger than Arbus had been when she died.

Later I spoke with the building manager, who said that Arbus had lived in Unit A on the ninth floor, but he didn’t know the apartment number. He phoned a maintenance man, who took me up to the ninth floor in the elevator.

It was just about 4:00 p.m. when we walked from the elevator along the hallway over to Unit A. The polished linoleum shimmered like the surface of a bathtub. I stopped, held my camera very still and released the shutter.

When I got back to Calgary I looked in my copy of Diane Arbus Revelations, a compilation of Arbus’s work published in 2003, and found on page 207 a little sketch of a floor plan that Arbus had made of her apartment in the Westbeth. She had lived in #945.

—George Webber Page 4 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Unit A, ninth floor, Westbeth apartment building, New York, September 25, 2009.

George Webber’s most recent book is Last Call, published in 2010 by Rocky Mountain Books. His photo essay “Vanishing Point,” in Geist 77, is a finalist for a 2011 Western Magazine Award. See more of his work at geist.com.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 5

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LETTERS

Clos e-up s loved Annabel Lyon’s intimate profile of Edith Iglauer (“Eye for Detail,” Geist 78-79). I read it on my iPhone this morning and not even the tiny screen could prevent me from finishing it.

—Ivy Young, Roberts Creek BC Read the full profile of Edith Iglauer at geist.com.

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Thank you for George Fetherling’s wonderful profile of Don Stewart, proprietor of MacLeod’s Books in Vancouver (“Man of a Hundred Thousand Books,” No. 80). It is perfect; perfectly true. Yes, Stewart is a scholar trapped in the role of a bookseller. And his colleague Bill Hoffer was a feudist. Terrific job.

—Alan Twigg, BC BookWorld, Vancouver A great in-depth article about a fellow bookseller.

I have talked to Don, but after reading this I get a much better sense of the man in a business that has become very challenging.

Congrats, Don, and thank you for allowing a story of your life to be shared.

—Duncan McLaren, St. Catharines ON Read the full profile of Don Stewart at geist.com.

B eing Norma l love Taylor Brown-Evans’s comic “In the Centre,” about being enrolled in a school for kids with disabilities (No. 78-79). Who knew that being “normal” could be a disadvantage?

Well . . . actually, I write and tour oneperson shows about living with bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis, and I know that humour is the way to engage people.

—Victoria Maxwell, Halfmoon Bay BC Read “In the Centre” at geist.com.

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Page 6 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

T he H enighan E ffect fter reading Stephen Henighan’s (very well-written) article “Phony War,” about climate change and the food shortages to come (Geist 77), I just can’t keep my fingers still. I’m glad he’s got his head out of the sand, but his nihilism makes me want to drown myself in glacial meltwater. It’s the epitome of the “every-man-for-himself,” city-slicker attitude. Growing our own food, as Henighan’s enlightened friends suggest, is most definitely the single best strategy to save ourselves from the coming chaos. But if couples in Toronto think that just means moving north, building a fence and starting a farm, we face a bleak future indeed. It takes more than two people to productively cultivate a sufficient diet, and if you’ve got six or seven on a big plot of land it can be damn well fun. I’m not suggesting a commune, though, either.

Community gardening is the answer you’re looking for. The system in Toronto is not so great, granted— plots are in awkward places around town, and then there’s the question of where to get started if you’re new to the game, and government support is lagging. But a huge number of people in Ontario are passionate about grassroots community gardening.

Dismissed as quaint, homely hobbyists, most realized long ago that growing our own food is a necessity, and they are struggling against the status quo to realize the shift we need. Don’t wait for the city or the province to lead the way on this; their support will come round in ten years when the demand for soil and water toxicity tests skyrocket, and they have to hire more environmental technicians and community landscapers.

I agree with Henighan that the problem is overwhelming, and that the collapse

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LETTERS

of the system we know is inevitable.

But savvy individuals like him are just going to have to lead the way for others. If the community garden in your neighbourhood is small and crappy, make it bigger. If the people who work there are strange, bring your friends and family along to help break the ice.

I don’t know where we’re going to put millions of hungry, displaced Americans three decades from now; but if we have our shit together when they get here, we’ll have a much better shot at working it out. It’s going to be a grassroots revolution, so grab a shovel. Henighan’s writing is wonderful, by the way—it’s just the message I wanted to hash out this time.

—S. Butler, Kingston ON I am so glad to read this article, as depressing as it is. Henighan is such a lucid, honest writer. Even the worst darkness acquires a glitter when he writes about it. We all do our hopeful little bit—but our civilization is doomed, and the world our children will know. I was in Detroit a couple weeks ago and struck by this—the empty houses and roads and endless parking lots are the evidence of a fallen empire, but not just an American empire—it is ours too. It is our consuming, capitalist, refusing-toface-reality empire. Particularly chilling is Henighan’s image of well-armed Americans surging north. The only way that climate change can be halted is by massive governmental and societal shifts—laws as well as consciousness. No government on the planet has the will to do this. Even Norway, so green in many ways, is a major investor in . . . the Alberta tar sands! Yikes. Thanks as ever, SH! —Karen Connelly, Toronto In his essay “The BookNet Conspiracy” (Geist 78-79), Stephen Henighan warns that book sales figures compiled by BookNet Canada

will drive book publishing decisions to the point where the work of new and interesting writers will be ignored.

As a working book editor, I find this alarmist scenario unrecognizable.

Sure, we think hard about potential sales, but we have been doing that since Gutenberg and we had good methods for assessing sales long before BookNet came along. In fact BookNet is not that helpful; many publishers have quit subscribing because they found it is not accurate enough. And while it’s true that the financial squeeze on publishers caused by big retail, declining reading rates, bad economic conditions, etc., has made us ever more sales-conscious, we are not so brutally stupid that we think sales can only be predicted by past performance. It’s not just Carol Shields: every season books that shouldn’t do well take off, and vice versa. There are thousands of examples. We know this truth better than anyone else because our companies live or die by it. That is why we will never just go by the numbers and will look at every good manuscript that comes before us and try to figure out if it is going to be this season’s unexpected hit. The accountants would like the world Henighan imagines to be true, but by the time they have been through one publishing season they learn with absolute finality that it’s not and never will be, as long as writers are writers and readers are readers.

—Anonymous, Cyberspace Read Stephen Henighan’s essays at geist.com.

Wave Theory he 20th Anniversary Geist Collector’s Issue (No. 78-79) is beautiful. Thanks so much. It looks like I won’t be the only one thoroughly enjoying it—my two-year-old was

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Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 7

LETTERS

quite inspired by the photograph accompanying “The Lost Art of Waving.”

—Amy Girard, Burnaby BC Read “The Lost Art of Waving” and Stephen Osborne’s other writings at geist.com.

Attribution love Jane Silcott’s story “Lurching Man,” about a late-night encounter (No. 78-79), and I appreciate her honesty throughout. I’m confused on just one point: what’s an “adjectival person”?

—Merope Hoopus, Ottawa Jane Silcott has favoured Geist with a number of stories whose subjects take adjectives. Visit geist.com to meet “Natty Man” (No. 60) and “Gangly Man” (No. 69) as well as “Lurching Man.”

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Comings and G oings n opposing immigration to Canada by Asians and Blacks, Stephen Leacock was “a man of his time,” as Daniel Francis writes (“Canada’s Funnyman: The Flip Side,” Geist 76). This view might be a little more understandable had Leacock not been an immigrant himself. It reminds me of a day I stood on a Toronto subway platform, when two men started taunting a Pakistani man in a security guard uniform. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” they roared in the broadest possible Scottish accents.

—Nigel Spencer, Montreal Read Daniel Francis’s essays at geist.com.

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B rain Wave emory Test,” Veronica Gaylie’s story about her mother at the

“M

Page 8 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

LETTERS

Brain Centre (No. 78-79), is beautiful, witty and whimsical, but most of all, touching in the way it brings us the light and love of Mrs. Gaylie. Her physician should get a copy of the story—it may be the best notes he will ever have about how to provide good patient care. Thanks for warming my heart.

—Shirley, Vancouver Read “Memory Test” at geist.com.

Ru s h Hour f all that many Rush fans really were Ayn Rand fans, as Derek Fairbridge suggests in his review of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (at geist.com, and in No. 78-79), Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 would have done better at the box office. The key value in the film, though, is the moral warning against wearing open-chested kimonos in public. That danger cannot be overstated.

—James Baker, Vancouver

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P l anet M om egarding Jill Boettger’s review of the anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (at geist.com, and in No. 71) . . . You mean I am not the only crazed, anxious writer out here alone in parenting wilderness? Thank the Lord! Sometimes I’m sure I’m the only sleepless madwoman with deep thoughts, relentless ambition and not a stitch of true solitude to hack away at them.

—P. Portal, Victoria

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send your letter to: The Editor, Geist letters@geist.com Fax 604-677-6319 #210 – 111 W. Hastings Street Vancouver, BC v6b 1h4 Letters to Geist may be edited for clarity, brevity and decorum. Authors of published letters will receive a Geist Map, suitable for framing.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 9

Notes & Dispatches Banker Poet Stephen Os borne

Robert Service, once the wealthiest author in Paris, died in 1958, but there he was outside the window of the Café Kathmandu

W

hen the well-known poet Robert Service appeared on the sidewalk outside the Café Kathmandu­on a Friday evening last summer, he had been dead for more than fifty years; those who recognized him or, as they said later, thought they recognized him, presumed that the man they recognized must have been someone who bore a likeness to the “real” Robert Service, who was not real at all or at least not real any longer since the death of Robert Service in 1958, but the man seen outside the Café Kathmandu that evening surely could not share in the authorship of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or any of the well-loved verses Page 10 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

written or composed by the Robert Service who died in 1958 on the 11th of September.

We were sitting at the window table in the Café Kathmandu, my companion and I, eating Bhende Chili chicken, prawns Jhingey Maachhaa and green salad dressed with miso when we saw or recognized Robert Service for ourselves on the sidewalk, only a few feet away on the other side of the glass, leafing through a copy of the Georgia Straight with his wife or girlfriend at his side, a younger woman with strawcoloured hair, who rested a hand on his forearm and leaned toward him as she studied the newspaper. The Georgia Straight restaurant critic had assigned a

Golden Plate to the Café Kathmandu in the Asian Cuisine category, and it occurred to us that Robert Service and his wife or girlfriend might be reading the reviewer’s opinion of the Café Kathmandu before deciding whether or not to enter.

The two of them remained on the sidewalk for some time; so long in fact that we stopped noticing them, and would have forgotten them entirely had they not eventually stepped right up next to us and peered over our heads into the Café Kathmandu through the window, only inches away from us, to which a menu had been taped offering passersby in the second person your chance to discover authentic Nepali food for the first time: Choilaa, your choice of tender shredded chicken or pork s­ immered with a distinctively Kathmandu-style spice mix with lemon, garlic, onion and fresh coriander; Aaloo achaar, chilled sesame-lemon potato salad flavoured with Himalayan peppercorns and fenugreek; Bhutuwaa, your choice of goat, chicken or tofu marinated in savoury spices and pan fried; Bhatmaas, toasted soybeans, quick-fried with fresh ginger, garlic and chili garnished with fresh coriander; Momo, steamed dumplings with savoury fillings of vegetable or pork, served with tomato and cilantro chutney; Kothay, golden fried dumplings, crunchy on the outside, succulent filling on the inside, with your choice of vegetable or pork, served with tomato and cilantro chutney; and as I mentioned, Bhende Chili, which my companion and I order every time we visit the Café Kathmandu, our choice of savoury marinated chicken or tofu

photo: SAM MCGEE’S CABIN, WHITEHORSE, by mandelbrot

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

cubes (we always choose the chicken), sautéed with onions and green and red peppers, along with Jhingey Maachhaa, fat prawns rolled in spices and sautéed with garlic.

But neither Robert Service nor his wife or girlfriend paid any attention to the menu taped to the window glass; they continued instead to peer in over the top of the menu and over our heads into the depths of the Café Kathmandu. Seeing Robert Service close up and from slightly below the chin, a view not duplicated in the many portraits of Robert Service that can be found on the internet, we were certain that he couldn’t be anyone other than the Robert Service, the most successful, if not the greatest, of the Banker Poets and the only one of the Ambulance Poets known to have liberated a town in the First World War: a short, wiry man in pale trousers and a creamy shirt tucked in at the waist. He carried

a fanny pack or belly bag slung on a wide belt over his shoulder in the insouciant way that men in photographs similarly dressed in the 1920s might sling a cardigan sweater casually over a shoulder. His hair was combed straight back to reveal the narrow forehead and the widow’s peak, and the mischievous look, a “gleam” that never left his eyes even in photographs taken in his old age, in a perfect oval face, the long, straight nose with the slightest swelling at the tip; you could say that he was almost a smug-looking man, a man with the look of someone who maintained himself at a degree of removal; he had always been the quintessential observer of himself, a role that he played throughout his career and his life, which became the same thing for him after the success of Songs of a Sourdough, and Ballads of a Cheechako, two slim volumes, the royalties on which amounted to five times his salary at the Imperial Bank of

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 11

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Commerce in Dawson City, and soon made him reputedly the wealthiest author living in Paris, France, according to an item on Wikipedia that says he liked to dress as a working man and walk the streets, blending in and observing everything around him.

My companion and I did not comment on these or any aspects of the life or career of Robert Service while he and his wife or girlfriend continued to peer into the Café Kathmandu over our heads; we seemed to have made a silent pact to ignore him, and her, if possible, in order to preserve our so-called personal space at the window table at the Café Kathmandu, where we had been regular customers and well known to the proprietor since shortly after he opened the place five years ago on this section of Commercial Drive badly in need of a clean well-lighted place with interesting good food such as that listed in the menu taped to the glass above our heads.

We were thinking these or other thoughts when Robert Service strode directly into the Café Kathmandu through the front door, having turned away from the window, we presumed, without our noticing, leaving his wife or girlfriend waiting on the sidewalk by the still open front door, and at just this moment the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu came out from the kitchen carrying a jug of water; he paused at the counter as Robert Service approached jauntily with one hand thrust out in a jaunty manner; the word jaunty comes to mind as the term that Robert Service often applied to himself in both of his autobiographies: “jauntily I walked,” he might write, as he might as often write, “gladly the sun smiled”; he was undaunted all his life by the pathetic fallacy, often conjoined to the inverted predicate favoured by editors at Time magazine: “resplendent were leaf and blade,” he once wrote, “a jocund wind Page 12 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

trumpeted.” When my companion and I looked over again, Robert Service was entering the men’s washroom; moments later we were deep in conversation. When we looked up there was no sign of either of them, inside the Café Kathmandu or out on the sidewalk, and neither my companion nor I have seen Robert Service or his wife or girlfriend since.

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he proprietor of the Café Kathmandu had never heard of Robert Service, he said, when he came by our table with the water jug and I informed him of the identity of his illustrious visitor.

Furthermore, he said when I pressed him, he had never heard “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” or “The Call of the Yukon.” I recited a few well-known lines to test his cultural memory— there are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, a bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—but nothing rang a bell with the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, who had been a citizen for more than a decade and was a wellread man familiar with the works of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and ­Mordecai Richler; the first Canadian books he read, he had told me once, were biographies of Louis Riel and William Lyon Mac­kenzie, and Stanley Ryerson’s Marx­ist history of Canada.

Later in the week I dropped in at the Café Kathmandu with a recording of Johnny Cash reciting “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” I would have thought that Robert Service was mandatory reading for new citizens, I said to my friend the proprietor, and explained that whereas other, betterknown Banker Poets such as T.S. ­Eliot and Walter de la Mare achieved a certain literary status, Robert Service achieved great wealth and enormous

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

fame; two of his poems became Hollywood movies, and he played himself in The Spoilers, with John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich, as Robert Service, a poet sitting in a saloon in Alaska, at work on a poem, as he explains in the movie to Marlene Dietrich, the madam of the saloon, about a lady who’s known as Lou, and in the movie it is Marlene Dietrich who gives the poem its famous title, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

None of the other Ambulance Poets, I said to the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, of whom there were so many— Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, Harry Crosby, Dashiell Hammett, et al.—ever liberated a town, as Robert Service liberated the town of Lille, France, in 1917. There is no question that Robert Service led a charmed life: he was able to pop off three or four poems at a time during a stroll in the countryside; he wrote his autobiography twice, and in the second one he had the opportunity of describing himself writing the first one.

I had chosen the Johnny Cash recital of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” for its celebrity lustre, despite the cowardly revision that Johnny Cash makes in the second line, when he says toil for gold rather than moil for gold, a point of difference outside the scope of my discussion with my friend the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, who, I admit, was not impressed by “The Cremation of Sam McGee” although he was suitably impressed to hear the voice of Johnny Cash reciting it accompanied so to speak by the large photographs of the mountains of Nepal that decorate the walls of the Café Kathmandu.

I don’t understand this poem, he said: it invokes the midnight sun in the first line and then tells a story that could only happen in the darkness of winter. I admitted that this was a weakness in the poem that I had detected in childhood but learned quickly to overlook. Aha,

said my friend the proprietor of the Café Kathmandu, there you have it! I told him that Robert Service had taken the name Sam McGee from a man who lived in Whitehorse in 1905. When the poem became famous around the world, so did the real Sam McGee, who was haunted for the rest of his life by the story of his demise and cremation on the shore of Lac Labarge.

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n 1903, Robert Service fell in love with Constance MacLean, the daughter of the first mayor of Vancouver, the man who established the city treasury by fining the operators of bawdy houses twenty dollars each. Constance ­MacLean spurned the advances of Robert Service and is unnamed in both of his autobiographies, but the first poem sold by Robert Service, to Munsey’s Magazine in New York, which earned him five dollars, names her five times in six stanzas describing her entrance at a country dance. The poem opens with a rancher who chewed his supper in a cheerful sort of way, and murmured, There’s a dance on for tonight, and closes, as do many of the works of Robert Service, with an envoi: And their hearts will ever beat a sad refrain For the one thing they can’t forget, the One they’ll e’er regret, The dancing, fair, entrancing Miss Maclean.

A photograph of Robert Service liberating the town of Lille, France, and another of Robert Service posing with Marlene Dietrich can be seen in Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon, by Enid Mallory (Heritage House).

Stephen Osborne is publisher and editor-inchief of Geist. He is also the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.

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Heart and Soul Norbert Rueb saat

What words do you use, asked the student from Saudi Arabia, to describe these sensations that might have to do with your soul?

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idway through the history of language unit in the media and communication studies class in an international college in Vancouver, a student from Saudi Arabia asked the instructor whether the existence of the word God, which has been in use for a long time, did not serve as reliable evidence that God existed. The instructor, who had been at pains to convey to students the idea that reality was often produced by communication, especially in the age of electronic mass media, said that the word alone, no matter how long it had been in use, was not evidence that God existed.

Why do you say that? asked the student from Saudi Arabia. I say it, said the media and communications instructor, because I don’t trust the word God. Page 14 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Well, what about the word soul, said the student from Saudi Arabia, after a pause. Do you trust the word soul? Yes, said the instructor, sometimes I trust and therefore believe in this word, but there are times when I don’t.

So is life a matter of trusting and believing, or not trusting and disbelieving words? asked the student from Saudi Arabia. It is a matter of describing emotions, said the instructor: I can sometimes feel, in my body, a sensation that suggests the word soul. Often, I think of this sensation in more literal ways. I think of it as an event taking place in my heart, for example, which is how people in the past, when they spoke about God, often described His possible whereabouts and doings.

Yes, said the student from Saudi

Arabia, I can understand what you are saying. I feel this sensation in my heart as well, but I see no reason not to call it God. Why will you not call it by this name? Because, said the media and communications instructor, too many people in my past used this word, God, in a way that didn’t make sense to me because it didn’t describe the sensations my heart—which may or may not have something to do with my soul—experienced when I was talking with them.

And so I started to distrust that word.

Yes, said the student from Saudi Arabia, I understand this. What words do you use now to describe these sensations that come from the heart and might have something to do with your soul, and which serve as evidence— I’m just thinking about this now as we speak—that such a thing as the soul, although maybe not God, exists? I use the word love, or even desire, said the instructor, or I use the word strength, or sorrow, or pity, or even anger—all these words exist and accurately describe sensations I experience, and so I believe in them. They are useful.

Yes, said the student from Saudi Arabia. And I experience the usefulness of the word God. So we might be brothers in this way of experiencing certain words as useful ways of producing reality. Yes, said the media and communications instructor, although I might not use the word brothers to describe our relationship. Which word would you use? said the student from Saudi Arabia. I might use the word student, said the instructor. We are both students of communication.

Norbert Ruebsaat teaches media and communication studies at Columbia College and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

To read “Ursula,” his most recent contribution to Geist (No. 76), and other writings in his Media Studies series, go to geist.com or dooneyscafe.com. illustration: SOMEBODY’S SON by tmnk

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Phallic Blessing Danie l Co l lin s

For my birthday, I was to be blessed by a wooden phallus once owned by the Divine Madman, also known as the Saint of Five Thousand Women

I

n Bhutan, when an Indian colleague wanted to take me for a phallic blessing on my birthday, I thought it was another of his jokes on the newcomer. But he claimed that there was a wooden phallus in a monastery about five kilometres away, below Metshina, which many local people visited to be blessed by it. The phallus was said to belong to Drukpa Kunley, a legendary maverick fifteenth-century saint of Bhutan. He was born in western Tibet, trained as a monk, then renounced his robes and headed down the dharma trail with his dog, Sachi. They travelled through western Bhutan, Tibet and Sikkim. Kunley recited bawdy poetry and songs, and spontaneously taught lessons of spiritual life in e­ xchange for

photos by daniel collins

chhaang (homemade beer) and sexual favours from women. For this he became known as “the Saint of Five Thousand Women.” My Indian friend said that Kunley’s monastery, Chimi Lhakhang, was built in 1499 on a hill overlooking two valleys—on the spot where Kunley, also known as the Divine Madman, supposedly subdued the demoness of Dochu La with his “flaming thunderbolt of wisdom.”

T

he next day as Tshering, a young driver, was taking me to the hotel outside town where I taught meditation, he asked what I’d been doing lately.

I told him I would soon be going to the lhakhang to be blessed by Drukpa Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 15

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Kunley’s phallus on my birthday. “Oh, good for luck, sir,” he said. As we drove past a large, colourful phallus painted on the whitewashed wall of a traditional house, he exclaimed, “Drukpa Kunley!” I had noticed the ubiquitous paintings of spurting penises ever since I had arrived in Bhutan, but I had been told only that they were “for luck” or “to ward off the evil eye” or “for protection” or “so there will be no quarrels inside.”

“Drukpa Kunley, of course,” said Tshering. “And the wooden ones, same. My friend sent to me a wooden penis. When I opened the box, I was surprised and embarrassed. It was so real looking that my face went red.” He laughed. “Then I knew it was a good one. I got the blessing.”

The blush was part of the blessing.

That is why atsaras (clowns) at certain dances waved wooden phalluses at the girls and women, and they pretended to be embarrassed. “The clowns are naughty monks,” he said.

M

y Indian friend and I drove as far as we could, then walked from the road to the Chimi temple along a trail that crossed terraced rice paddies and meandered through a small farming settlement, most of whose houses were decorated with spurting phalluses. On top of a hill, with a stunning view of two broad river valleys, the little goldenPage 16 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

roofed monastery sat enclosed by a wall with prayer wheels. We passed through the ornate gate, found the main shrine room and asked if we might enter. The door was unlocked for us and we removed our shoes. Then we were taken inside the dark, sooty room by a slightly bored tulku, a young monk, who appeared to be about eight years old. He didn’t speak English. He directed us to the altar, where we placed our offerings of oil and incense. A statue of Drukpa Kunley in full bloom also served as a large butter lamp holder.

The boy signalled us and took up a clumsy, loosely wrapped bundle.

We stepped forward and he bonked us both on the head with the bundle, which turned out to contain fivehundred-year-old relics: a painted wooden phallus with ivory inlay, an iron bow with several old arrows and a brownish thigh bone carved into (what else?) a phallus shape. All is said to have belonged to Drukpa Kunley. We accepted the blessings and

left a donation. We also left a bar of chocolate for the young monk, which made him smile for the first time since we had come.

Daniel Collins is a writer/photographer currently living in Bhutan, where he teaches English and meditation. Read his Geist work at geist.com.

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Northwest Passage Jame s P o l lock

Henry Hudson, his final voyage, 1610–11

I

f you should fail to find your passage north across the Arctic Ocean to Cathay,

Desire Provoketh and, some leagues beyond,

and fail again to find your northeast passage above the frozen coast of Muscovy

Cape Hopes Advance, the island Holde with Hope; yea, if a huge wind plows the booming ice against you, till you set anchor for safety far to the south in a vast but dead-end bay

beyond Nova Zembla and the Gulf of Ob, then fail heartbreakingly in seeking westward

and freeze there all that winter in the dark; in your desperation, before you make a plan

two hundred miles upriver at Norumbega until your good ship almost runs aground; and if you should rig again your old Discovery, trimming your sails for your northwest way at last, and cross the sea to Resolution Island, that most fog-laden threshold in the world, and drive into the Furious Overfall foaming in the mouth of that forbidding strait drawn on the map by those who sailed before you that far only, threading your delicate way through a labyrinth of ice floes in the wind, a nightmare of rain and cloud, fog and snow, and mutiny kindling and covered in the cabins; and if, steering by heaven and your compass, you should name the towering landmarks as you go—

in secret to explore another way and set out in the shallop in the spring, leading your own personal mutiny against yourself by leaving your command; before you come back having failed again; before the last mutiny of your starving crew drives you back to the shallop with your son, your mate, and five mariners, sick and lame, and sails guilty and terrified back to England; haul anchor, sailor, trim your sails for home, and, before you raise Cape Hopes Advance, name the breaking icefield Patience Bay. James Pollock’s poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry Daily, Maisonneuve, Canadian Literature and the Fiddlehead, among other journals. His critical reviews of Canadian poetry have been published in Arc, CNQ, Contemporary Poetry Review and elsewhere. He teaches poetry in the creative writing program at Loras College, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 17

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Saltspring to Étaples R honda Waterfa l l

We have come to Pas-de-Calais to find the grave of my great-great uncle, a World War I soldier who served with the “coloured only” battalion

W

e stop the car and with what French my husband remembers from his childhood in Montreal he asks a man with mud-splattered gumboots if he knows where Étaples Military Cemetery is. The man points west and jerks his arm back and forth as if to indicate a place that is very far away. We show him our map of northern France and ask where Pas-de-Calais is. He outlines a large mass of land and I am struck with the revelation that Pas-de-Calais is a region of France, not a town, and that we have spent hours much more lost than we realized. He points to our current location on the map and then to Étaples and says we are many miles away. We decide that the distance to Étaples is too great for the time left in the day and instead go to Arras, a town close to the Vimy Ridge memorial, and Page 18 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

get a room at the Holiday Inn Express.

In the morning we will visit Vimy Ridge and then continue our journey to Étaples, to the military cemetery where my great-great uncle, James Douglas Whims, was laid to rest.

In 1916, James enlisted with the 2nd Construction Battalion, the “coloured only” military battalion in Canada’s segregated military. Prior to the formation of this battalion, most blacks had been turned away when they tried to enlist for service in the First World War. But when enlistment started to wane and manpower was still needed for the fight, the idea of a “coloured” battalion was born, even though black soldiers were still not wanted on the front lines. On March 28, 1917, James and approximately six hundred other men left Halifax on the SS Southland.

They arrived ten days later in Liverpool, England. It’s presumed he went to the Jura Mountains of France to aid the Canadian Forestry Corps. By April 19, 1918, he was dead.

On our drive to Vimy Ridge, fog blankets the countryside and we can only speculate as to what the view might be like. Much of the land that was once battlefield at Vimy is now a forest of pine and maple. Between the tree trunks, depressions of ammunition craters are still apparent. At the visitors’ centre we are greeted by two university students from Ontario who have signed on to work at Vimy as guides. I ask if they think the fog will burn off and they say it’s doubtful. Off to one side there is a table with stickers and pins advertising the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. We are surprised to see these items in France. We have just come from Vancouver and have yet to see any such swag even though the Olympics are only a month away. We ask if the items are free, and one of the students says we’ve already paid for them with our taxes so we can help ourselves.

We leave the visitors’ centre and walk to a flagpole, the meeting place for the first tour of the day, of the tunneland-trench system. The guide arrives, a female university student from Canada, and we wait around awhile before we are told that the only visitors on this tour will be my husband and I. We follow the guide up a slope to where a view opens up of trenches and some of the larger craters. The guide explains that the largest of the craters are from ammunitions set under the tunnels, when Canadian and German solders would dig under each other’s tunnels and blow them up. The ground is covered in neatly shorn grass, planted to impede erosion, and the guide says that sheep are used to keep the grass trim. She also says that several French farmers are still killed each year by undetonated bombs in the fields, left over from both world

photo of james whims courtesy of rhonda waterfall

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

wars. We ask if the sheep are ever blown up and she assures us this doesn’t happen. We follow the guide down a concrete staircase and she unlocks an iron door that opens into a tunnel. The air in the tunnel is thick and moist. The guide shows us places where soldiers carved their names into the chalk walls, and rooms where the relics of wooden beds and tables have been left to decay.

Collections of helmets, guns and other paraphernalia of war have been piled in corners, where they are turning to rust.

A

fter the tour we take a path that leads toward the memorial. We stop to read a plaque saying that Canadians seized the ridge from the Germans on April 12, 1917, and that on the monument are carved the names of 11,285 missing Canadians who died in France during the Great War. The memorial and surrounding land are veiled by fog.

As we walk, the towering limestone pylons are revealed, then more and more of the memorial becomes visible until we are at the base of the back staircase and the enormity of the structure becomes apparent to us. The limestone seems to be illuminated by the fog. We go up the stairs, flanked by statues of a mourning mother and father, to the main platform and walk around to the front. There we can see the back side of the statue Canada Bereft (Mother Canada mourning her dead), cloaked in fog before us. Her head is bowed and her cheek rests on one fist. On a clear day we would be looking out over the Douai Plains, but today it’s a grey wall. We ask our guide how the memorial and surrounding land survived the Second World War, and she says Hitler had such admiration for the monument that he had declared it off limits.

On the way to Étaples we pass pristine farms whose fields are fallow for the winter. Roads with tight turns Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 19

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and dips lead us through small villages with their walled-in yards. In 1917, a ­hundred thousand troops were camped in Étaples, and they had enough medical backup for twenty thousand wounded from the western front. We pass through Étaples and find the entrance to the cemetery just outside of town. The military cemetery in Étaples is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in France and contains 10,771 Commonwealth burials from the First World War. We pass between two towers and go up some stairs that lead to a grass pathway. There we find a plaque on which a verse from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” is printed: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.

We go to the cemetery register box and take out the binder that contains the name, rank, service number and plot location of each person buried in the cemetery. The entries are arranged alphabetically. We flip through the pages and find Whims between Whatmore and Whitbread. I take a picture of the page. We are armed with a map of the cemetery and we know that the grave we are searching for is on the north side. We head out across the cemetery, and dew on the grass wets our shoes.

James was born on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, in 1900. When he enlisted he lied about his age by two years in order to be accepted. As we pass headstone after headstone, I wonder what he thought of his time in France. Did he miss home, or was he spurred on by the adventure of it all? Grief takes me by surprise, that Page 20 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

he came all this way to die at the age of eighteen of what was understood to be influenza. What would he think of my visit? He would never have envisioned me, a great-grandniece who would no longer fall in the category of “coloured,” as he did on his attestation papers. We find his headstone in the last row of graves on the northern perimeter. We have brought nothing—no flowers, notes, pictures, nothing—and I feel as if I have come to someone’s home empty-handed. A few plots away there is the grave of a Jewish soldier with a pile of pebbles left atop the headstone. I consider placing a stone on James’ headstone, but we are not Jewish, and today we are left without any comparable ritual.

From where we stand, the whole cemetery is visible and rolls out like a sea of graves. All these graves, and here James is in this lonely back row. My husband wanders out amongst the other graves and leaves me by myself. What is the appropriate time to spend at the grave of a relative who died fifty-five years before I was born? After this we are going to visit Dieppe to stand on the beaches where the Canadians landed and were slaughtered on August 19, 1942. We want to get there in time to find a hotel before dark. I study James’s headstone one last time and again regret having nothing to leave as a parting gift.

I am five months pregnant, and in the spring I will give birth to a boy.

We will name him James, not after James Whims but after his nephew, my grandfather, James Robert Wood. We go back to the car and start the journey south toward Dieppe.

Rhonda Waterfall is the author of one collection of fiction, The Only Thing I Have (Arsenal), and short stories published in Geist, Descant and other literary journals.

She lives in New Westminster, BC. Read more of her work at geist.com.

N OT E S & D I S PATC H E S

Room Ten M y r l Cou lter

Was that a ghost? Is it friendly?

Best bed ever. I love you, Ryan. I’ll never forget you.

—Anonymous This weekend is my birthday present.

Just after we checked in we got bad news. Our youngest daughter was in a car accident. We shed tears of fear.

Now we hear that she will survive. We willed it so in this room.

—Naomi, Minneapolis If I was getting married, I would do it in a place like this. But I’m not.

—Nina and Andrew, Abbotsford No, she’s not.

—Andrew, probably moving away from Abbotsford

D

uring a summer road trip to the Okanagan ­ Valley in British Columbia a couple of years ago, a lone traveller stopped for a night at a small inn. There, on an old oak desk in room ten, she found a guest book.

Thank you thank you thank you. I feel relaxed and revitalized. This is my last holiday for a while. I’m expecting twins in two months.

—Rachel and Jordan and ? and ?, Red Deer We grew up around here. This place was overgrown and falling down.

An eyesore. The old mansion was haunted. We’re so glad you restored it. What did you do with the ghosts?

—Norm and Stella, Enderby The rooms are undersized for the oversized price. The floors creak.

Where’s the hot tub?

—John Doe photo: RETRO? KITSCH? JETSON? by james hull

We have come through a year of radiation and chemo. We came here to celebrate a life spared.

—Luke and Mary, Edmonton Why don’t you have room service?

You have a restaurant so I know you have food.

—Shelley, Trail Please move the taps to the long side of the bathtub so that there’s more room for two.

—Kate, North Bay A charming and elegant place to spend our 10th wedding anniversary. But we had a big fight last night so I don’t know if we’ll have an 11th.

—Sandra, Regina Girl weekend! Peals of laughter from rooms eight, nine, and ten.

—Shawna and her buds, Okotoks Utter peace and quiet. Well, except for all those girls from Alberta.

—Jerome and Jenny, Toronto

tranquilité, tranquilité, et encore tranquilité.

—Pierre, de Paris merci pour un séjour formidable.

—Aimée (avec Pierre) We came for my best friend’s wedding.

The groom didn’t show up. We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.

—Marylou, Grand Forks (the Canadian one) I heard thumping on the roof last night. Was that the ghost? Is it friendly?

—Wendy, Lacombe Terrorized the town. Danced up a storm until 2 am. Thumped up the stairs shortly afterwards. Please extend our apologies to rooms eight and nine.

—Terry and Terri, Medicine Hat

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 21

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Tugboat Nocturne

I love love and I love to connect and be open and to feel the open free exuberance in my heart and I love to share tender loving care and I love nourishment and I feel like I’m flying through the sky.

—Harmony, Nelson

David M ilne

Consult tide tables, consult Craigslist, envy the unfreighted

To this list she added her own entry: I brought my own ghosts. We thank you for your hospitality.

—Yvonne, Medicine Hat Myrl Coulter is a writer and photographer.

She was a winner in the 2010 First Book Competition (creative non-fiction category) hosted by the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her book The House with the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers is published by Anvil Press in spring 2011. She lives in Alberta. Visit her at myrlcoulter.ca.

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hat your engine can pull— slow barge in the channel, pistons thumping—determines when you set out. Moon dictates tides and narrow-­ passage current. If load too heavy then run under obscuring night. If channel not cleared when slack tide fails, dangerous rocks and capsize.

If slack tide, no moon, then run channel, loads heavy; pass before dawn.

Cardiac piston-song sings hold-toofull. By day, lie at anchor. Seek buyer re: surplus cargo. Consult Craigslist.

Idle engines and smile when people pass.

Late night, flood tanks to purge cargo. Freight too heavy to void, pistons cardiac; inebriation and careless talk. Come about, safe bay put to anchor, hold sagging with ore. Wake up awkward on a couch, head throbbing, and check cargo doors. Glance over shoulder.

Narrow channel slack tide passage then lay to in harbour. Smile, do not

wipe brow. Consult tide tables. Consult Craigslist. Envy the unfreighted, but only to a point. When friends nearby, anchors to the mud, telltale pistons to silence.

Sunny afternoons on calm bay, secure cargo doors, invite friends aboard.

Troll lazily in afternoon heat, loud music disguising engine knock. When crossing required, excuses and clandestine piston jockey, bow lights extinguished, hold full of uranium-235.

Midnight, dream of open cargo doors and streaming sun, then wake and check oil levels. Consult half-life of ore, mark days on calendar. Glance over shoulder, consult tide tables.

Glances and small talk. Wait for slack tide and still sky, pistons thumping breathless.

Page 22• GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

photo: TUGBOAT ABSTRACT by alan d. coogan

David Milne grew up in northern British Columbia and now lives in Calgary with his wife. “Tugboat Nocturne” is his first published work.

CHARADES

How to Be Good at Playing Charades Mi s ha G louberman and Sheil a H eti

T

here are basically two sets of skills for playing charades. There are actingrelated skills and guessing-related skills— sort of like fielding and hitting in baseball, or offense and defense in hockey.

When you’re acting out a clue for another person, it’s really important to remember that the other person does not know what you’re acting out. This seems obvious, but a lot of the time, people will act out a charade in a way which would make perfect sense if you knew what the title was, but from which the title would be completely impossible to guess if you didn’t know it.

This seems like a trivial point, but it’s important. It means that, if at all possible, you shouldn’t get angry at the other person for not knowing what it is you’re trying to act out. It’s one of the most common failures that people have: they’ll act something out, and the other person won’t be able to guess it, and their response will be to do the same gesture again, but more exasperated this time. So the first step really is just an acceptance of the fact that the other person does not know.

Some of the tips that apply to charades are the same tips you would apply to any improvisation: Be precise in your gestures. Be wholehearted.

Don’t forget to bring emotional content to what you do. These things help a lot.

When you’re guessing, assume that every detail is important. If someone is drinking a beverage, you might say drink or water. But if they’re drinking a beverage in a dainty manner with their pinkie extended, assume that’s part of the clue—that there is a reason for that. The word that they’re trying to connote cannot be drink, because no one would try to connote the word drink by drinking in this very specific Page 24 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

manner. The word might be tea or English.

The most important thing to remember for everyone involved is that it’s a dialogue. That is, it’s your job to respond to each other. So, as the guesser, throw lots of guesses at the person acting out the clue, because this allows them to change what they are doing, or lets you know if you’re on the right or wrong track. If you just sit and watch, waiting until you know for sure, you’ll never get it right. Similarly, as the person acting out the clue, if you just take the approach that you want to take, while ignoring what is or isn’t getting through to the people you’re acting for, it’s going to take a very long time.

Playing charades is specifically about the difficulty of communication.

Without the difficulty, there is no game.

With practice you could get better at communicating through the obstacles that charades presents you, but that’s not really the point. It’s a game, so the point is not the elimination of obstacles— it’s enjoying yourself. To learn to play charades, you have to learn to enjoy yourself while trying to communicate with people who don’t understand you and don’t know what you know.

When I taught the charades class, I didn’t let people play a real game of charades until our second or third meeting, on the assumption that it was important to learn the component skills first, and that it would be irresponsible to cast people into the game without training or warm-ups. Instead we did drills and exercises. Here is a selection: Quick single words in pairs Before this exercise, give out a million slips of paper to everyone in the class and have them write down individual words.

This is a really good thing to have people do before class, while you wait for the stragglers to show up. Then put all of those clues in a bag. Now put the people in pairs and have them take turns acting out these one-word clues for each other.

You can tell them that if they find a word too hard, they can skip it and do another one. Have the group do this for three or four minutes. Then have them switch partners and play some more, then switch partners and play some more.

If you do this drill at the beginning of a series, it has a lot of good functions.

Everybody gets to play with a lot of other people, so you create a lot of one-to-one camaraderie pretty quickly.

And playing in pairs, there’s a lot less pressure. Shy people who might otherwise hang back are forced to play.

I’m not sure if I should say this, but the premise that doing one-word clues is easier is false. It’s actually harder, because if you have a whole title, you can pick the easy words and do those first, and people will eventually guess the other words if the title is familiar.

Still, I think that’s fair. A drill can, in some ways, be harder than a game, in the same way that you might lift weights to prepare to play a sport.

Acting practice Charades is divided into acting skills and guessing skills. Among the acting skills, there’s the ability to come up with ideas, and then there’s the ability to communicate those ideas with your body, which is partly about comfort.

One thing you can do to train people in comfort is to have the whole group, at once, act out a bunch of words. Take that bag of single words—and it’s probably best in this exercise for the class to be the thing, rather than indicate the

CHARADES

thing—and say, Everybody be a telephone.

This could help people.

Charades instruction circle This drill is played with regular charades clues, not one-word clues. All the participants stand in a circle. One takes a clue from the bag and acts it out for the person to the right, who guesses. They get thirty seconds to complete it. If they fail, the clue gets passed on. Everyone watches.

What’s nice about the charades circle is that after each charade is completed, we take a bit of time to talk in the group about what worked and what didn’t and how each person’s strategy went.

Speed drills Speed is obviously a really important part of charades, so we do speed drills

in class. I think that practicing doing charades fast can help get you out of your head, so rather than sort of sitting around trying to think about the best way to go about something, the speed game forces you to go ahead and do it.

I think people are more likely to find themselves doing something surprising with their body in a speed game, rather than in a regular game.

You put people in pairs and give them full clues and give them two minutes, during which one person is exclusively the actor and the other person is exclusively the guesser. Tell them their goal is to get as many successful clues as they can during those two minutes, and allow them up to, say, three passes.

After each round, have them report back how many clues they were able

photo: A-MAZE-ING LAUGHTER, vancouver, by mandelbrot

to guess. This introduces a feeling of competition. Maybe in the first round there are a couple of people who can do five clues in two minutes. Challenge the group to see if anybody can do seven clues in two minutes.

From The Chairs Are Where People Go: How to Live, Work and Play in the City, published in spring 2011 by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti. All rights reserved.

Misha Glouberman is a performer, facilitator and artist who lives in Toronto. Sheila Heti is the author of The Middle Stories, Ticknor, How Should a Person Be? and shorter pieces in the New York Times, McSweeney’s, n + 1, the Guardian and the Believer. She lives in ­Toronto. Read her Geist work at geist.com.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 25

FINDINGS

Unholy Disconnect S. Bear Bergman From “Wrap/t” in The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009. S. Bear Bergman is an author, a theatre artist and a lecturer on the points of intersection between gender, sexuality and culture. Bear lives in Toronto with hir husband and son.

W

hen I was first shown how to put on a tallis, it was by my old teacher Joe Yordan, a great teacher if perhaps a somewhat odd man.

I have no idea how much his sense of mysticism influenced what he taught, but I remember him showing me how to pronounce the blessing, Baruch Ata Adonai Elohaynu Melech haolam asher kiddishanu b’mitzvota v’tzivanu l’hitatayf b’tzitzit, and then pull the piece of cloth over my head and let it rest there for a long moment— a breath, he demonstrated, two full theatrical beats—before settling it on my shoulders. I remember that we practiced and practiced, and that my movements were somehow not quite correct. My Hebrew was flawless—my Hebrew was always flawless—but it was a lot of weeks before he deemed my mechanics appropriate. He would show me again and again, and I would imitate him with all the skill a short but devoted life in theater had honed, but still it wasn’t right. He would shake his head and sigh, and we would try again.

Again only in retrospect, it becomes clear to me that the incorrectness of my movements was gendered. Mr. Yordan needed for me to perform

a young woman’s gestures, and now when I replay the moment in my mind’s eye and think about the other bat mitzvah girls my age, they all did it the same way. Like grooming birds; a tender kiss each for the words baruch and tzitzit, a small motion of the arms, head ducking under the cloth and then up just in time for it to skim the tops of their heads. Elbows held close, chin slightly down, motions very restrained, they would wrap themselves in their tallisim in barely more space than they stood in (which, by the way, wasn’t much. They all had Laura Ashley dresses).

And me? I was doing what my father did.

He had, at the time, a long and slim tallis, a prayer shawl of somewhat retiring character, which he wore with great pride and a big man’s motion. He pecked at the beginning and end of the blessing, quick and masculine, and then swirled it over his head in a movement that was in part commanding and also part kindergartener-learns-to-put-onhis-own-winter-jacket. He donned his tallis at full wingspan and with a kind of defiant pride, a post-World-War-II pride, a sense of himself as a Jew in a room of Jews. He would settle the tallis on his shoulders with a short tug, and when I was a kid I was amazed at the effect. My dad, my cranky overworked dad with his big head (a family trait) and mouthful of criticism suddenly looked . . . different. Calmer. When I was older, I would say that in his good suits (because, by then, he was wearing very good suits, tailored just right) and his tallis he looked like the king of a small but culturally rich nation. It remains true.

Nevertheless, my imitation of his tallisdonning behaviors was all wrong. I only know Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 27

FINDINGS

Tarting Up Your Cubicle Doug Savage From Savage Chickens: A Survival Kit for Life in the Coop, a collection of cartoons (including a wee flipbook) written and drawn by Doug Savage and published by Penguin in 2011. Doug Savage is the creator of savagechickens. com, a daily online post-it note cartoon blog. He lives in Vancouver. See more of his work at geist.com.

it now because I can see it in hindsight and through the lens of what I now understand about Mr. Yordan (and teachers in general, and also Jews, and also gender). I can see the disconnect, unbridgeable and unholy. At the time I was red-faced and frustrated, unable to understand what the problem could possibly be. In retrospect it’s clear that this failure of behavior, of movement, was the same failure of my entire adolescence, wearing a different hat.

Truthfully, however, it must be said: if he had just told me to look more like a girl, I would have been able to save us both a lot of trouble.

This was an instruction with which I was already familiar, and I had, by then, practiced with and gained a moderate amount of success at it (though, it also must be said, not so much success as all that). But either Mr. Yordan didn’t realize that’s what he was asking or he somehow found the instruction odious; either way, he never asked that of me, just shook his head and showed me again, either unwilling to make the instruction explicit or unable to recognize the crux of the problem.

Page 28 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Regardless, I was always very attached to my tallis and, in the absence of specific instruction, probably went back to my tomboyish tallis-wrapping ways rather quickly, about which, after the bat mitzvah, I never heard another criticism. I don’t think my parents wanted to fight that battle in addition to all the others—clothes, hair, school, and the rest of it, in the midst of which they may not have even noticed the tallis. I was not in company of great numbers among my contemporaries in continuing to attend Shabbos services and study after my bat mitzvah was over; I suspect that my parents were so pleased to see me close in the fold of Judaism that the angle of my elbow as I wrapped myself in my prayer shawl was beyond, or possibly beneath, notice.

If anyone else at shul noticed, they didn’t say a word. Part of my experience as a gender-transgressive Jew was, and remains, in my family name and reputation. When we moved to Connecticut and joined our current temple, it was dying. I mean that literally; the

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elders of the shul were dying off or moving away, no young families were coming to take their place, and the building was crumbling around us. My family, along with a halfdozen others, worked tirelessly to turn the place around, holding fundraisers, firing the old rabbi (a mean man with no real rachmones and not much sechel either) and hiring a much better new one, scraping and painting and laying carpet and tile, teaching in the school.

I worked alongside them starting when I was about eight years old and very earnest about it, setting up chairs and selling popcorn and scraping paint, and working in the kitchen with my father making platters every year to break our fast after Yom Kippur. So if anyone had anything to say about my problematically masculine tallis-wearing behaviors, they kept it to themselves.

Today, I accompany my family to shul for the High Holidays in a suit and tie, goatee trimmed and tidy, new tallis on my shoulders.

My mother (Rabbi Search Committee, Building

Committee, Board of Trustees) and my father (Ritual Committee, Building Capital Campaign, past Treasurer for seventeen years) introduce me (with an annually increasing note of insistence) as their daughter, Sharon, and it’s not my first name that matters in that moment but my last name, my family name. It’s the Bergman that trumps, that gives me the space to show up and be whatever gender of Jew I am. It’s the family name that sees me through, again, and anyone who might still call into question the gendered behaviors of a fellow Jew in a Reform synagogue probably doesn’t have the chutzpah to say it to me, a Bergman.

So I sit with my family, in a whole row, with my folks and brother and grandmothers and cousins and, these days, my husband Ishai and sometimes even my ex-wife. I wear my tallis and hold hands with my relatives and kid around with my brother and cousins and help a grandmother up and down from her seat and, again, or maybe still, I am accepted for what I do, for having shown up at all.

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Clockfire Jonathan Ball From Clockfire, published by Coach House Books in 2010. Jonathan Ball is a writer, teacher, director and screenwriter, author of Ex Machina (BookThug), “Haiku Horoscopes” (haikuhoroscopes.com) and poetry that has appeared in publications across Canada and the United States. He lives in Winnipeg and at jonathanball.com.

Autography Minimalist set: small table, single chair, stack of books. An author enters to great applause. He holds a feathered quill, the picture of refinement.

Smiling, a sly smile (so humble)—he winks at the absurdity of his elevated stature, of the stage.

(Are there Clockfire festivals yet? The play is well-suited to open or close such festivals.)

The author sits. The audience forms lines.

He attempts grace. Signs books, shakes hands, smile widening. He remembers names, spells them all correctly and makes small talk while crafting witty inscriptions. He signs another copy for your mother. He answers all your questions with aplomb.

He wets his quill, the signature in quick (but measured) strokes. The play continues until its author runs out of blood.

Any Animal Prior to performance, audience members collect, with the program, a slip of paper and a pen. The

Mild Anti-Americanism From the Wikipedia entry “Canadian literature,” accessed January 22, 2011. Traits common to works of Canadian literature include: Failure as a theme Humour Mild anti-Americanism Multiculturalism Nature (and a “human vs. nature” tension) Satire and irony Page 30 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Self-deprecation Self-evaluation by the reader Search for self-identity Southern Ontario Gothic The underdog hero Urban vs. rural

paper bears the age-old question: “If you could be any animal you wanted, what would it be?”

The audience write down their names and choices. The ushers gather the responses and relay these to the actors in the green room.

The actors take the stage, which is adorned with the most advanced medical equipment available. Then the actors (in reality, a team of surgeons at the top of their respective fields) begin the laborious process of transforming the members of the audience into their animals of choice.

All props are sterilized, and patients are allowed to recuperate in nearby facilities. As there can be no predicting the choices the audience will make, a wide range of specialists stand by.

Should any protest and wish to leave, ushers remind them that the world has changed. That the performance has already begun.

Hostages The actors enter the theatre, armed, and block the exits. They will execute anyone who tries to leave.

At first, they have demands. Unreasonable, nonsensical. Panic grips the audience. Heroes emerge and are killed.

What do the actors want? It soon becomes clear that their demands have been improvised, a mere stalling tactic. All they want is that the situation continue. All negotiations fail.

Perhaps the police rush the building. In this instance, the actors repel the attack with such ease that the audience loses all hope of rescue.

After a long time, the actors present the audience with a choice. They must select a saviour. Someone is to be executed before them, and this life will pay the ransom for their lives.

And the audience must choose who it will be.

Remember, their heroes are all gone. No one will offer to be sacrificed.

This play has a number of possible endings.

The audience selects a saviour, against the saviour’s will, who is murdered, while the audience is freed. Or the saviour is freed, while the audience is murdered. Or the audience cannot agree upon a saviour, and in their quarrels tear each other apart.

In the instance that the audience selects a saviour, the director must decide the play’s course. But this solution must be decided in

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advance, instructions left in a sealed envelope to be opened by the lead actor only as the play nears its climax, so that the director is never present. The director sits at home, relaxed, watching the news reports, while the audience makes its decision. And thus the audience can never learn why, can never know the mind of this absent god.

Eight Minutes If the sun exploded, it would take eight minutes for its last light to reach Earth, meaning that for eight minutes one might look into the sky and see a sun that has already exploded.

Armed with this fact, the director destroys the sun. The play transpires during the next eight minutes, performed by countless actors, the entire host of the planet’s life.

Who continue on, unaffected, unaware that the world they know is already gone. That a new world, with new terrors, rushes towards them at the speed of light.

Hash Brownies Were Not Consumed Craig Silverman Corrections, retractions, clarifications, apologies and other notices of factual errors published in major Canadian daily newspapers, from Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, published by Viking Canada in 2007. Craig Silverman is managing editor of PBS MediaShift and Idea Lab, co-author of Mafiaboy and a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, the Toronto Star and BusinessJournalism.org. He is also the founder and editor of RegretTheError.com. See Endnotes, this issue, for a review of Regret the Error.

A

ny number divided by zero is undefined, not zero as reported last Sunday in a Starship article about the number zero. Zero divided by zero is also undefined. The Star regrets the ­error. —Toronto Star

A Report on Business item on Wednesday misstated two facts relating to Scott Paterson, the former head of Yorkton Securities. Mr. Paterson remains married to his second wife. Additionally, he was described by Peter C. Newman in his most recent book as precocious, not ­precious. —Globe and Mail The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published Oct. 22. In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn published Oct. 15, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction.

We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any distress caused by our previous apology. —Ottawa Citizen A Canadian Press story published Tuesday made a reference to “rig pigs” as if the term were an acceptable one in the oil industry for drilling rig workers. In fact, the term is considered derogatory and outdated. —Canadian Press Contrary to a story in today’s What’s On, Singer Lena Horne is not dead. The Star regrets the error. —Toronto Star The television actor John Aniston is still alive.

Incorrect information appeared in Shelley Fralic’s column on this page Saturday. —Ottawa Citizen Heather Crowe, the former Ottawa waitress who became an activist against second-hand smoke after being diagnosed with lung cancer, is alive. Incorrect information appeared in yesterday’s National Post. —National Post Wednesday’s story about Canada’s Walk of Fame inductees incorrectly referred to “the late Morley Safer.” Safer is alive and continues to file stories as a 60 Minutes correspondent. The Star regrets the error. —Toronto Star Hash brownies were not consumed on The Dawn and Drew Show. Incorrect information appeared yesterday. —Globe and Mail

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 31

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Better Than TV Salvatore Difalco From The Mountie at Niagara Falls and Other Brief Stories, published by Anvil Press in 2010.

Salvatore Difalco is the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories, as well as short stories, essays, book reviews and poker columns published in periodicals across North America. He lives in Toronto. See his Geist work at geist.com.

One July My neighbour asks me why I’m not flying the flag. I tell him I don’t have one.

“You mean to tell me you don’t have a flag?”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Unpatriotic, don’t you think?”

“What’s it to you?”

I know I can save face if I run down to the store and buy a flag, but why do I need to save face in the first place? Who the fuck is this guy?

I march over to his house.

“You again,” he says.

The Poet’s Beard Allan Peterkin and Nick Burns From The Bearded Gentleman: The Style Guide to Shaving Face, published

by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2010. Allan Peterkin is the author of One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair. He is a writer, poet and doctor who lives in Toronto. Nick Burns writes about men’s grooming. His work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Elle and other publications.

How to achieve this style: Shave your cheeks, upper lip, throat, and the area immediately below the lower lip. Leave intact the hair at the point of your chin and extending a short length along the jawline. Using a razor, form a defined edge that blends along the jawline into the thicker chin hair. Trim the beard to a short, blunt point. Look thoughtful and forlorn.

Page 32 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

“Where’s your f1ag?”

“Flying high out back, man.”

“Pretty proud of yourself, eh?”

“That I am. I am proud.”

I follow him in. His house smells nicer than mine, cleaner. A blue-green aquarium with yellow fish fizzes in the corner.

“You like?”

“Very much.”

“It’s a pain in the arse but better than TV,” he says. “Now what are you here for again?”

But by then I’ve forgotten why I came here and sit down on my neighbour’s sofa and join him for a cold beer.

Iroquois Park I’m here to see a friend’s son compete in a ­lacrosse tournament. Last year a leg injury kept him on the bench, but today he’s raring and ready to go. I have to imagine it, as I got caught up in traffic and never made the game.

The arena is packed to the rafters. Different factions cheering on their teams. The air is electric. But it’s warm. I’m sweating already.

Despite the warmth, an old man seated beside me is wearing a bulky red plaid work shirt. His ball cap bears a Six Nations Rebels emblem.

Two long grey braids hang across his shoulder blades.

“Did you know that lacrosse is Canada’s national sport?”

I smile. It was, I almost say. Until 1994. We all know what it is now.

He smiles. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do?”

He nods. “Just remember: no ice, no hockey.

You don’t need ice to play lacrosse.”

The crowd cheers a hard hit.

One of the youths hobbles off the field, favouring his right leg. It’s a rough game.

The old man nods to the field and looks at me with his small black eyes. “Bad wheel, eh.”

He taps his right knee. “I know all about bad wheels. Blew this one out back in ’67 down in Brantford. Or maybe it was Hamilton. Blew it right out. I used to be a helluva middy.”

I don’t really know what a “middy” is.

Someone else goes down. Two trainers run onto the field and help him off.

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The old man stands up. “Sissy stuff,” he scoffs, “this indoor game. Back in the day they played lacrosse outside, with a thousand men, on fields that stretched for miles. None of this pussyfooting around. Fights would last for hours. Games would go on for two or three days straight. Sometimes more. Did you know that?”

I don’t know what to say. He’s staring at me.

After a moment he bursts out laughing.

I laugh, too, but I don’t really know why.

The crowd cheers. Someone scored.

I get up to see if it was my friend’s son, but the players all look the same to me.

“He’s playing good today,” the old man says.

“What’s that?”

“Your friend’s son. He’s playing good. His leg is good.”

November: Virginia Woolf Dress Sully From The Hipless Boy, published by conundrum press in 2009. Sully (Sherwin Tjia) is a poet, painter and illustrator, author of the poetry collections Gentle Fictions and The World Is a Heartbreaker, and the comic-strip collections Pedigree Girls and Pedigree Girls Forever. He lives in Montreal.

A Near Perfect Day The wife was telling me something. Fireworks started popping off outside. I heard the terrified dog whimpering in the kitchen. The wife went to calm him down. Leave that pussy alone, I said. You’re only feeding into it. She told me to shush. I love my wife. I hate her sometimes. I stretched out on the chesterfield in my red-andwhite maple-leaf boxers. We were in the middle of a heat wave. It was Canada Day. I was watching CFL football on the CBC. A little flaky but it was football and better than any of the other shite on the tube. I could hear the wife cooing softly to the dog. Fireworks continued exploding outside. Folks in these parts love their fireworks.

During the football game two Argonauts started shoving each other on the sideline. At first it looked like they were joking around, but then one of them hit the other in the mouth with a quick left jab that pitched him sideways.

What a beauty that punch, so short and crisp.

I had eaten too much steak and corn at dinner. I was on my sixth beer. The fireworks roared to a crescendo, then abruptly broke off.

After a while the dog came out from under the kitchen table and the wife returned to finish what she was telling me.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 33

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Be Reasonably Considerate From “Eleven Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees,” written for male supervisors during World War II and published in Transportation Magazine in 1943.

P

ick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their un­married sisters, they’re less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn’t be doing it, they still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently.

When you have to use older women, try to get the ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy. It’s always well to impress upon older women the importance of friendliness and cour­tesy.

General experience indicates that “husky” girls—those who are just a little on the heavy side—are more even-tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

Whenever possible, let the inside employee change from one job to another at some time during the day. Women are inclined to be less nervous and happier with change.

Be tactful when issuing instructions or in making criti­cisms. Women are often sensitive;

Bight Blaze Boilermaker From a list of logging terms used between 1910 and 1940 (and, for some, well beyond), in Island Timber: A Social History of the Comox Logging Company, Vancouver Island, by Richard Somerset Mackie, published by Sono Nis Press in 2000.

Back end Back rigger Back spar Barber chair Bicycle Bight Blaze Page 34 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Block Blowdown Blue butt Boilermaker Boom chain Booming grounds Boomstick

Brow logs Bucking saw Bull bucker Bullcook Bull of the woods Bunkmaker

they can’t shrug off harsh words the way men do. Never ridicule a woman—it breaks her spirit and cuts off her efficiency.

Be reasonably considerate about using strong language around women. Even though a girl’s husband or father may swear vociferously, she’ll grow to dislike a place of business where she hears too much of this.

Get enough size variety in operators’ uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit.

This point can’t be stressed too much in keeping women happy.

Why She Fights Paul McLaughlin From an interview with Liz Bader by Paul McLaughlin, published in This magazine (November/December 2010). Liz Bader is one of Canada’s top-ranked extreme fighters and a single mother of two from Maple Ridge, BC. Paul McLaughlin was born in Scotland and grew up in Ottawa. He works as a freelance journalist, researcher and teacher.

This: I assume you no longer have a problem hitting girls.

Bader: It’s funny, actually. I had one fight in Florida where the other girl came running up to me and she actually hugged me and said “I am so glad you’re here to fight me.”

I was just uncomfortable and thought, this is so weird. She was so happy to be fighting that I felt bad. And then, when I was hitting her, in the fight, she actually started to cry.

I was ground-pounding her and they didn’t stop the fight. They had given us strict warning in the dressing room that you don’t stop your own fight. You respect that the referee is going to stop it when it’s over. I almost didn’t know what to do.

This: What happened?

Bader: They eventually stopped it. Both her eye sockets were badly swollen. But afterwards she was smiling and said she was so happy she got her first fight out of the way. So it was all good, I guess.

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Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 35

FINDINGS

Holy Old Dynamiting Jesus From The South Shore Phrasebook, compiled by Lewis J. Poteet and published by Lancelot Press in 1984.

dory plugs thick molasses cookies (Cape Sable Island) ferdutzt confused (Lunenburg) German verdutz, “vexed, chagrined” fetched a heave onto him “pulled him” e.g. aboard the boat (Port Latour) fire in the wind trouble, controversy, anger fog breeze one which blows fog in from the sea (Clark’s Harbour) highliner fisherman who lands the most fish (Woods Harbour) hoedunker sweet fruit tart made with leftover pie dough (Ingomar) holy chain lightning an exclamation (Chester) by the holy old dynamiting Jesus logger’s curse (Liverpool) lambkiller a severe sudden storm in March, just after lambs are born (Ingomar) if you love me “if you please” (Ohio Road, Shelburne County) Lunenburg champagne rum (Liverpool) making wet raining (Lunenburg) is it making anything down? is it raining?

(Lunenburg) meringue storm a storm in which the wind whips sea-foam up off the tops of the waves over the rocks and onto the lawn at the lighthouse, at the end of the peninsula (Baccaro) mollyhawking destroying (Chester) monkey-meat children’s name for the small white edible pods or nuts which may be found at the base of the fiddlehead fern, among the roots (Upper Port Latour) mother soul alone an intensive way of saying “alone” (Lunenburg) muxey untidy (Lunenburg) own horse, own corn “own fault” (Villagedale) If you let your own horse into your own corn, you have no one to blame but yourself pothead the twine mesh funnel in the lobsterpot (trap) through which the lobster enters the trap and out of which he cannot go (Ingomar) Page 36 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

prairie sailor someone who, when rowing, raises the oars too high on the return stroke, wasting energy and often popping the oars out of the oarlocks (Baccaro) schoolmarm piece of firewood where two trunks have grown together and crossed, socalled because “you’ll never get them apart” (Blanche) scurryfungering fooling around (Port Mouton) snowbanker a big American car, hard to control on icy and snowy roads (Port Joli) stinkplant common name for a fish reduction plant I’ll tow that one alongside for a bit before I bring it aboard an expression from Barrington Head to express doubt concerning the truth or believability of something someone just said town bicycle the town prostitute upalong “he’s from upalong” means he lives inland or up the shore (Tancook Island) wee waw unsteady walk (Cape Sable Island)

A is for Argle-Bargle A few of the many English-language slang terms, starting with A, that originated in Canada, from The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor (Routledge). afternoon farmer (n) a lazy and unsuccessful farmer, 1960 aglish (adj) nauseated; sick to one’s stomach, 1999 airy a (adj) none, short form of “never a,” 1999 Alberta Clipper (n) a cold weather system that blows from the Canadian Rocky Mountains eastward, with wind and usually snow, 1999 alley-oop (n) in snowboarding, a 360-degree turn in the direction of the back of the board, 1996 aluminium crow (n) a CF-100 Canuck jet fighter aircraft, also known as leadsled and The Clunk, 1950 anchor ice (n) ice formed along the bottom of bodies of water, also known as ground ice, 1945 Anderson cart (n) a cart made from a cut-down car and pulled by horses (1930s); later, any car that ran out of petrol or broke down, 1987 argle-bargle (n) the sound made by seabirds, 1988 ari-stock-rat (n) a Canadian person of mixed Aboriginal and French ancestry, 1962 artist for the government (n) a person who draws unemployment insurance payments, 1993 Aunt Flo from Red River (n) the bleed period of the menstrual cycle, 2001

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Tragic Act of Spin Doctoring David Lester From The Listener, a graphic novel by David Lester, published by Arbeiter Ring in 2011. David Lester is a cartoonist, painter, graphic designer and guitarist in Mecca Normal, a rock duo. He is the author of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism and comics in the San Diego Reader, Warburger and Bananafish, and he is editor at BC BookWorld. He lives in Vancouver.

Page 38 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

FINDINGS

FIRST SUPPER R.M. Patterson From Nahanni Journals: R.M. Patterson’s 1927–1929 Journals, edited by Richard C. Davis and published by the University of Alberta Press in 2008. R.M. Patterson was an English soldier who moved to Canada and homesteaded on the Peace River in 1924. His canoe adventures on the Nahanni River were recorded in his 1954 book The Dangerous River (Stoddart). Richard C. Davis is professor of English at the University of Calgary.

monday september 24

F

rost in the night & a still, cloudless, golden day with the smoke haze thicker & the mountains blue, dreamlike & unreal behind it. I hewed five heavy planks out of spruce & made a table, like the Rock of Ages for solidity, in one

Nurse Agnes

corner of the shack & made myself a chair out of a big log, with three rungs for a back to it, & with the help of these two I have just had my first supper indoors—alone, as Gordon has not come back. A great & momentous occasion— Menu Two large steaks from a hind quarter of wild sheep.

Beans & barley cooked in mutton broth with much red pepper.

Cold whole wheat porridge with milk, raisins & sugar.

Bannock & tea.

And now I shall smoke & read an 18 months old Post. Almost all the afternoon I worked on my rifle & pistol—the pistol perfect but the rifle still partly jamming. Maybe Gordon may have some ideas on the subject.

The winter wood pile grows apace—now & then I bring in a dry tree & cut it up into stove lengths.

Rebecca Kraatz From Snaps by Rebecca Kraatz, a graphic novel inspired by an abandoned 1940s photograph album, published in 2011 by conondrum press. Rebecca Kraatz is also the author of the graphic novel House of Sugar, for which she won the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent. She lives in Nova Scotia and at rebeccakraatz.com.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 39

FINDINGS

NO Excuses Boys!

by Jeff Lemire

From Essex County, a trilogy of graphic novels written and drawn by Jeff Lemire and published by Top Shelf Productions in 2009. Jeff Lemire is the author of Lost Dogs, The Nobody and several series, including Sweet Tooth. He grew up on a farm in Essex County, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. Visit him at jefflemire.blogspot.com.

Page 40 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Postcard Lit Winners of the 7th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest

first prize

The Glamour Leslie Stark

M

y sister, Kathy, died of lung cancer the day before her forty-fourth birthday.

Yes, of course she smoked.

She smoked and drank in a Mexican bar and restaurant in Winnipeg called Carlos and Murphy’s and ate hot chicken wings and hung with the locals after work every day.

She wasn’t Mexican or anything. I swear I’m not making this up.

She worked for the gas company.

Then later she worked somewhere else. I don’t know where. She put her severance pay into investments and in 2001 when the buildings came down she lost them, like so many.

She was always thin, and her hair was always thick with the smell of chemical spray. She curled it every day, like my mother. She always looked perfectly polished. Nails, face, clothes. Nothing out of place. She looked more like my mother than either would admit.

One time she invited me over for tacos but she fell asleep and when I rang the doorbell she didn’t answer. I didn’t bother trying after that.

She was the only one of us that didn’t have kids. I think that was for the best.

She loved a man named Rocky. No Page 42 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

joke, that was his name. His mother’s name was Dink. None of this is made up. It’s all true.

The carpet in their condo was white.

We weren’t allowed on it without a fresh pair of socks. We weren’t allowed to eat or drink in her living room.

She and Rocky divorced when he

got drunk one night and smacked her.

She never really got over him.

She was my half-sister, same mother different father.

Her father was one of those skeletons in the family closet. He drank, and one night he drank and drove and killed himself, but not just himself he turned some young girl into a vegetable. That’s the legend, anyway. I was only a baby so I don’t know much.

My mother said he was a jerk. No one else even talked about him. But I

know that Kathy loved him and resented my mother for leaving him.

My mom kicked Kathy out of the house at sixteen. One of those TV moments. ­Kathy coming home at six in the morning, Mom: “If you can’t live by the rules of this house . . .” and out she went.

Mom didn’t hear from her for three years.

They never really got along after that. Even when Kathy was dying, my mother didn’t get to say goodbye. Mom had come down with shingles and the doctors wouldn’t let her in the room.

Scared the cancer patient would get sick, with her last breath.

The last time I saw her was two weeks before she died. Her hair was still perfect. She’d spend hours in the bathroom even though every movement was pain. Her nails, her makeup, everything in its place. But she looked wrong somehow. It’s hard to explain.

Something in the line of her jaw, the hollowness of her eyes.

I asked her how she was. She was ­angry. She was scared. No one knew what to say.

The kids and dogs played while we waited for her to emerge from the bathroom, trying to look perfect, glamorous, pretending nothing was wrong at all.

Leslie Stark is a Vancouver writer of plays, poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been published in Wreck, Fugue, Chameleon and Kiss Machine. She also teaches high school drama and English.

POSTCARD LIT

second prize

third prize

East Van End Times Army

Under the Surface

Jen Currin for C.L.

I

’ve got the broccoli and you’ve got the kale. Joey’s got a knife and Mary’s got a gun without bullets. The goats are making milk and we’re making

cheese. Tonight we’ll party with nicotine patches, pilfered brandy from the judge’s house. Miguel’s in the basement brewing dandelion wine. Brenda found fake blood packs in a Victorian closet and I never did give away my eyepatch.

The fire’s roaring; barricaded door.

The stew’s bubbling and the windows are covered. Let’s pretend it’s not the end of the world.

Jen Currin is the author of three books: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil), ­Hagiography (Coach House) and The Inquisition Yours (Coach House), winner of the Audre Lorde Poetry Award. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches creative writing.

Leslie Vryenhoek

W

ay before the complete annihilation of everything, my mother would dress us up and take us downtown to meet Dad for dinner at the Point View, where the ground fell away.

It was always the same. Hello Shelley, Dad would say to the lady whose hair was piled up like a golden basket woven on her head. We’ll have a table by the window.

Eyes crinkled. The restaurant was a wall of windows, stuck into a cliff and leaning out over the Monongahela River.

Beyond, downtown Pittsburgh looked like it had sprung from a pop-up book.

Dad would shake hands with the scowling man. How’s business, Nick?

Nick would always say Can’t complain Mr. J, and Dad would ask for the usual, a pink lady for my mother and a Shirley Temple for me. Under the table, my feet would jiggle for that sweet fizz high and my mother would smooth my unsmooth­ able curls while my older brother waffled between Coke and Sprite.

Sometimes Dad spotted someone and had to go hook his fingers on their chair back and talk until laughter bounced around the room, but that last time there was no one, so we made him tell us again about the plane.

It crashed right down there, he said.

Right into the Monongahela, nose first, and the silt swallowed it so fast they never found it.

I thought all the mystery in the world lived in that one story. I peered hard, trying to see under the water’s surface. We’d studied Egypt in school so I knew about being preserved for all time and I knew, given a chance, I could find that plane. It wasn’t invisible; you just had to look in the right spot.

I turned to tell Dad that, but he was watching the man coming toward us waving a crumpled envelope, shouting.

You goddamned Judas— Dad leapt up, blocking my view. Jesus Ted, I’m having dinner with my family. His hands held up like Settle down.

There wasn’t much more before the man shoved my father into an empty table. The sound of smashing—plates and cutlery and water goblets—was titanic. Dad got up fast but the man was already leaving, Nick at his heels. Off to the side, Shelley held out her arm like Halt, like a background singer delaying our dinner. On the floor, water was vanishing into the carpet.

Dad winked at me, placed his hand over Mom’s. Later she’d move away from a gesture like that but this time she leaned in. My brother started to ask What— so I kicked him, wanting even then, I think, for some things to stay submerged.

Years on, after Dad lost his business and moved to Florida with his new wife and Mom switched to gin, I heard the Point View burnt down but I never went to see. People get these things wrong.

It’s probably still there, still keeping its clear-eyed watch over the Monongahela and everything underneath.

Leslie Vryenhoek’s work has been published in periodicals across Canada and internationally. She is the author of Scrabble Lessons (fiction, 2009) and Gulf (poetry, 2011), and she is an editor on Riddle Fence (riddlefence. com). She lives in St. John’s.

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Instrumentation

Todd McLellan

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T

hese photographs are from the series Disassembly, a work-in-progress by Todd McLellan, who is a freelance photographer in Toronto.

McLellan began the project by acquiring examples of discarded technology of the type often found on street curbs and at garage sales. He selected devices that were in good working order, appeared to be well built and were at least partially assembled by hand. He then took each device apart and laid out the pieces in the studio, as he says, “almost like a

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family portrait.” He wanted each portrait “to look like if you magically swiped your hands across the image they would all fit into place.” For a second series of images (one of which is on the cover of this magazine), he “set the parts free” for each device by dropping them from the ceiling and photographing the fall with strobe lighting. Picking up the pieces was no easy task, he says, but “I made sure that every piece was accounted for.” Todd McLellan’s work can be seen at toddmclellan.com.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 53

One Night at the Oceanview J. Jill Robinson There are two drunk guys fighting in the trailer across from me, I said to the answering machine. Please do something

I

used to like staying at the Oceanview, a small motel and RV park on the edge of White Rock, not far from the beach. It is a long, white bank of motel units backed by about a dozen paved RV/camper slots facing each other across the asphalt. I liked to be up front near where the driveway meets the road—#104 is my favourite space. Behind us once we’ve backed in is a concrete retaining wall with an old plank fence that blocks out a big empty lot full of old apple trees.

Some of the branches hang over the fence and you can reach the apples.

The last time we stayed there, on a Friday night in August, the lot was almost empty.

I backed the Mango, our 1976 VW van, into the site. Directly across from us was a big fifthwheel trailer with Alberta plates, and parked beside it was a big white pickup with dual tires and chrome. Two fifty-something men sat drinking at the green picnic table they’d dragged over near the trailer hitch.

Emmett—my fifteen-year-old son—hooked the dog’s chain around a leg of our picnic table and then let her out for a pee, tethered her and filled her water dish. Then we climbed inside the van and together we popped the top, pulled down the back seat and arranged our pillows and sleeping bags and the dog’s blanket. We snapped the short mustard-yellow curtains across the back and side windows and the long one that sags across the windshield. We brushed our teeth and brought the dog in, and arranged ourselves for the night—I climbed up into the pop-top, and the boy and the dog lay side by

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side below. We read for a while and then turned out the lights. I was glad to be there.

Around midnight I woke up to the two men across from us yelling at each other inside the fifth-wheel. Hm. I am a bit of a scrapper, especially when it comes to my sleep, but something made me wary of marching right over and banging on the door. They sounded angry, and drunk. And there was pain in their anger. I climbed down, stepping onto the counter and then down to the floor, and opened the driver’s door. I went around the back of the van and had a pee on the grass and a couple of tokes while I was at it. When I came back around to the front, one of the men was sitting at their picnic table having a smoke. I got back in the van and closed the door and climbed up to my sleeping bag.

Around 1:15 the fighting started up again, and this time it was louder, angrier, drunker than before. The pain was bigger. Then they started fighting physically, and loud banging and crashing sounds came from inside as well as the yelling. I began to be more afraid than pissed off. They were pretty close. Just over there. I called the motel office on my cell phone but got an answering machine. I left a message: I’m in the Volkswagen van. There are two drunk guys fighting in the trailer across from me. Please do something.

Nothing happened. The yelling and swearing and threatening and banging and crashing escalated. Get out of here. Fucking leave! Bang.

Crash. Thump. Get the fuck out of here. I don’t give a shit. Go, you bastard! Go! Get out!

The dog was sitting up. Emmett was awake.

I climbed down and crouched on the floor and peered over the top of the sagging windshield curtain. I didn’t want them to see us. I’m calling 911, I said. Why? said Emmett. Because I’m afraid, I said. I called 911 and asked for the police and the woman started asking me questions and my voice trembled and my body shook and my brain felt shaky too because I was having trouble comprehending and answering.

I don’t know the address of the motel, I said. I can’t remember what street. White Rock, I said.

Sh, said Emmett, who was trying to hear what the men were saying in the yelling and fighting.

The operator told me the police were on their way and just then Emmett said, Look! One of

photo: THE GREEN DOOR by darrin hagen

the men had come out of the trailer with a big red suitcase on wheels, and drunkenly he pulled it behind him on its leash. Two cop cars arrived.

That’s a bit much, I thought, for a drunk guy.

One car pulled into the driveway. The other car stopped on the road in front of the guy and two officers put him inside. Two more cop cars arrived. This is crazy, I thought. All this for a couple of annoying noisy drunk guys.

Three police officers walked into the lot and banged on the trailer door. Come out! Come out! No answer. Bang bang bang on the door.

Nothing. They went on tiptoes to try to see in the windows, but they couldn’t. The shortest of the three climbed up on the picnic table and jumped up and down on it, trying to see in

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 55

the window. He jumped and told the others he saw a man in the bed. He jumped again. This time he saw a rifle beside the bed. The three exchanged glances and said he’d better report that, and away he went. In a very few minutes a swarm of police vehicles arrived. There were maybe ten cars in the road now, ghost cars and regular cars, city cops and RCMP, all with all their lights flashing blue and red. In the middle of them all sat a big new Suburban with no flashing lights.

Whenever anyone came into the trailer’s line of sight, they crouched and ran, guns drawn. Emmett and I could hear some cops behind our van, using it as cover. One said, There are people in there. They knocked on the window and told us that we had to come out. There was a situation involving a weapon across from us. Can we bring our dog? I asked.

Leave the dog, they said. They “covered” us with their guns as they escorted us to the Suburban. I stood behind Emmett, hugging his chest with my head against his back. We were cold. I am sorry, an older officer said, but we have to put you in here for your safety, and he held open the Suburban’s door. He locked us in the crew cab, which had bars on the windows.

He radioed the licence plate number of the big white pickup truck and asked where the vehicle was registered. Fort McMurray, he said. The boy and I huddled against each other in the crew cab. Good thing we don’t have to pee, I said. I don’t know how we’d go. Mum, the boy said. Be quiet. We watched as the police units readied themselves for action. Amid the flashing lights in a sea of police cars, they secured the perimeter. Taped it off with yellow tape. Evacuated all the motel’s occupants.

Moving rapidly, quietly, with discipline in everything they did. Why don’t they just bash the door in? I asked the sergeant. Because there is only one door in and out in the trailer, he said. If the suspect feels trapped inside it could lead to dangerous behaviour.

A

while later I asked the sergeant for a drink of water, but no one there had a drink of water.

No water bottles and no coffee cups. E ­ veryone’s

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hands were free. In the murmured or clear conversations I didn’t detect ego or hubris, challenge or hierarchy, sexism, crude language, animosity, challenges, laughter, or banter. Only professional camaraderie and necessary conversation. This is definitely dramatic, I said to the boy, but it’s nothing like TV, is it? That’s because it’s real, Mum, said Emmett. I listened hard, trying to read the atmosphere outside.

There was tension, a buzz, but it was quieter, with cleaner lines and an appeal to the senses.

No need for background music or added hype.

There was the breath you could almost see. The red and blue lights everywhere, and the serious voices. Alert. Fully awake. And there was the fifth-wheel trailer, dark and silent. A suspect inside. Planning who knows what. What do you think he’s going to do? I asked the boy. He’s probably sleeping, he said.

A female cop knelt and leaned over the hood of her car with her gun aimed at the fifthwheel. Other officers crouched by the hedges with their weapons drawn. They waited. We waited. Nothing happened. Our sergeant came around to our barred window and asked us to tell him again what had happened. Emmett told him that when I was on the phone to 911 he had heard one man say to the other, It’s loaded. And, I’ll shoot your head off. The sergeant looked hard at the boy and said, Did you say that he said, “I’ll shoot your head off”?

Yes. Did it sound like a threat to you? Yes. I have to relay this information, the sergeant said. Excuse me. This development brought another escalation of police response. More movement of officers. Growing tension. Low voices. No action. Time passing. What are we waiting for? I asked the sergeant. For the ERT, he said. The Emergency Response Team. Like a SWAT team, only Canadian.

The team gathered right outside our window and prepared for their mission. The strong fit men took off their regular coats and put on flak jackets. They loaded their assault rifles and slammed the bolts home. They put on their helmets and looked to their leader for further direction. The communications truck arrived, and the negotiating expert disappeared into the dark of the apple orchard

carrying a megaphone. The police dog and handler arrived, and they too went into the orchard. Could you please ask someone to check on our dog? I asked the sergeant. What’s the dog’s name? he said. Jersey, I said, and he sent someone over. The fifth-wheel remained dark and silent.

This is the police! Come out! Come out! the negotiator called through his megaphone. Poor Jersey, I said. She is going to be so scared. That megaphone right beside her. All those cops around the van. The sergeant came back over to us and said, There’s going to be a loud bang in a minute. We’re throwing in a stun grenade. But then the police dog started barking and the guy in the fifth-wheel came right out.

And that was it. As dawn approached, the police put him in a car and took him away. All the cars and equipment had dispersed by 5:30 a.m. We went back to the Mango and cuddled the dog and slept until ten. I went out and walked to the end of the driveway where it met the road, where all the action had taken place.

Nothing there. Not a scrap of tape, not a bit of paper. Not a trace of what had happened. It was just an ordinary empty road under a sunny summer sky.

I

n my bare feet I walked up the sidewalk and looked into the orchard. Someone had set out a TV table of items—a couple of florist vases, a pink ashtray, some chopsticks, a pair of knitted bedroom slippers. A hand-made sign read: Take It! It’s Yours! I looked into the orchard, where the grass had been trampled into a path to the fence. I could see the gap in the fence, see the Mango, from the apple tree side.

Back at the Mango, I made some coffee and sat at the picnic table reading an article about Eliot Spitzer in an old New Yorker. An apple fell from a branch that hung over the fence and thumped onto the ground. A police car pulled in and let out a guy, who went into the fifth-wheel. He came out shortly after with wet hair and a different shirt on, and he nodded at me as he went out to the street and started walking up the hill. A few minutes later I heard sounds in the apple orchard. Apples

were falling. I got up and went over to the gap in the fence and looked in. There was the guy from the ­­fifth-wheel, up in one of the gnarly old trees. He was picking apples and pitching them at the ground.

After a shower I went into the motel office and the cheerful woman who managed the place during the day asked me what had happened. I told her the story, and finished by suggesting she might want to kick those guys right out. And to arrange call forward so someone would answer the phone at night if there was an emergency. She nodded as if to say, I know, I know, and then she shook her head and with an indulgent-mother smile said, Oh that Arnie. I knew he was going to go too far one of these nights. You know these guys?

I said. Oh yes, she said. Arnie. And that was his brother, who came for a visit. Arnie’s been depressed lately, poor fella.

Emmett and I washed the cereal bowls and spoons and put them in the cupboards and drawer. We packed up the coffee machine. We put the rear seat back up, pulled down the poptop, stuffed in the canvas all the way round and secured it. We unsnapped and pushed back all the curtains. We stuffed the sleeping bags into their sacks and loaded the duffel bags and cooler and suitcases into the back. Jersey got up on the back seat and shoved her nose out the broken fly window. The boy was already in the passenger seat with his iPod. I poured sand on the puddle of oil underneath the Mango’s engine and poured in another litre.

And we drove away, heading east. Did all that really happen? I asked Emmett. Yup, he said.

All that! I said again. All that huge response, all that razzle dazzle of police action, and for what? What was it about, really? Some drunk guy, Emmett said. Some drunk guy and his drunk brother.

J. Jill Robinson is the author of Residual Desire, Eggplant Wife, Lovely In Her Bones, Saltwater Trees and shorter pieces in Canadian literary journals.

She writes from Banff, Alberta, or Galiano Island, ­depending on the season.

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PROFILE

Life in Language Constance Brissenden with Larry Loyie For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen collaborated with Aboriginal groups in British Columbia and Washington State to preserve their original languages, by observing, recording, writing, publishing—and listening

T

he summer day in 1969 when Jay Powell knocked on the door of an older female tribal member on the Quinault Indian Reservation at Taholah, Washington, marked a turning point for him.

Powell was a thirty-year-old PhD student in anthropological linguistics, the recording and analysis of tribal languages, and he had embarked on an intensive hands-on phase of his ­research. The Aboriginal languages of the Northwest Coast were largely unrecorded, and one of his mentors at the University of Hawaii had encouraged him to study the dying Quinault language. He had the name of a woman who was one of the last three or four fluent speakers in a community of about 450 people. On that summer day he knocked on her door, announced his name and credentials and asked if she would be willing to teach him the language so he could write it down.

The elder simply said, “I’m doing fish now.

I’m busy,” and shut the door in his face.

The Quinault Reservation lies on the Olympic Peninsula in northwest Washington, on the far western edge of the continent where the land meets the open Pacific. Taholah is only 152 kilometres west of Seattle, but its windswept ocean beaches, ragged cliffs and dense conifer forests contain a vastly different cultural landscape. The Quinault, who call themselves the Canoe People, are one of several Northwest Coast tribes who claim the salmon and red cedar as their emblems in their home territory

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of thousands of years. This much Jay Powell knew. What he didn’t know was that this community had recently had a traumatic experience with another anthropologist. For his research on ­human evolution, the man had talked tribal members into donating blood samples for a study of a small, isolated community. Then he left, literally carrying off their lifeblood in the trunk of his car. In a story achingly familiar to many Aboriginal communities, the Quinault never heard from him again.

Like other Aboriginal people across North America, the elder whom Jay went to visit in 1969 had had enough of outsiders. For decades, these tribes had been labelled as dying cultures and had patiently withstood being studied by anthropologists. Now Aboriginal people, young and old, were taking a stand to establish their rights. Jay was an outsider; the door was closed.

For him, the shock of rejection was the start of a consciousness that would open the doors to his future linguistic work. “I realized that I didn’t ever want to be an outsider again,” he says. “I wanted to be invited into the community to do the research and the writing that they wanted.”

Jay reviewed his options: “I had to find another related language group to work with or jump in the Pacific Ocean and start swimming back to Hawaii.” So he headed north and drove 120 kilometres to the Quileute (pronounced Quill-ee-yoot) village of La Push, population 450, and asked residents if anybody still spoke the traditional Quileute language. It was his

portrait by brian howell

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PROFILE

good fortune to be referred to the long-time tribal chief, Fred (Woody) Woodruff. “Woody was like a good-natured grizzly bear. Early on in our day-long work sessions he told me, ‘Put a sign on the door that says kikitalhil paqit ­(geniuses at work) so we don’t get interrupted.’”

Jay got to work. He bought a battered trailer with a 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean, the beach and the rocky outcrop of James I­ sland, AKa-Lat (Top of the Rock) in Quileute, burial place of chiefs and source of spiritual power.

The tribe’s creation story tells that a mythical transformer at the Time of Beginnings created the Quileutes from wolves.

Today La Push boasts an oceanfront resort, a seafood plant, a marina, a post office and even a festival, Quileute Days, in mid-July. In the late 1960s, life was radically different. Historically the Quileute were renowned as the best seal hunters on the Olympic coast, second only to the more northerly Makah in traditional whaling. Jay describes a village hemmed in by rain forest, with rustic amenities, including minimal running water during the summer influx of nonNative commercial and sport fishermen. Back then, when the visitors came to town, residents could only flush, wash dishes or take a bath in the middle of the night.

Woody Woodruff introduced Jay to various old-timers, and Jay met a shrinking group of fluent Quileute speakers—about sixty people.

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Eventually he became fluent too, and today, in his early seventies, he is the last fluent speaker alive. But the process of learning such a complex Northwest Coast language was long and arduous. Quileute contains explosive clicked sounds and glottal stops, with twelve different k sounds and words that can stretch to a dozen syllables.

Jay spent months talking with and recording Woody Woodruff, his primary language source.

“Get it written down right so it will be right forever,” Woody insisted. Jay struggled to master the tongue-twisting language, repeating each sound and phrase until his teacher was finally satisfied. “You got it now,” Woody would say.

“Pour us some more of that coffee.”

From the old-timers, Jay learned community history, including their first contact with the hokwat’, the Quileute word for non-Indians.

The word means “people who live in a drifting village,” as the locals perceived the sailors on the St. Nikolai, a Russian sailing ship that wrecked on the rocks near the village in 1809. At the time, Quileute territory comprised 324,000 hectares of old-growth forest, prairies, shorelands and rivers that provided a dependable subsistence to traditional Quileute hunters, fishers and gatherers. Official contact was made in 1855 when the Quileutes met with representatives of Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens. A year later, in the Quinault River Treaty, the Quileute ceded their lands to the United States government in return for the promise—ultimately unfulfilled—of ­edu­cation and health care. By 1889, by executive order of US President Grover Cleveland, their 260-hectare (one square mile) reservation at La Push was established. Tragedy struck later that year when a disgruntled white settler, coveting their small parcel of land, burned down all of its twenty-six longhouses while the tribe was away.

The 252 villagers returned from seasonal work picking hops in the Puyallup Valley to find the last of their pre-contact carved dance masks, baskets, hunting equipment and ceremonial regalia destroyed. The fire was devastating.

Jay wrote about the Quileute language as well as learning to speak it. To complete his doctorate, he produced a complex academic analysis of Quileute, a language that is unrelated to any other, and one of only five ­languages in the world with no nasal (m or n) sounds.

PROFILE

Although it was an important contribution to linguistic knowledge, Jay doubts that any Quileute ever read it. From now on, he could concentrate on things that the people would read—writing up the stories of Big Bill Penn, the last living Quileute whaler; describing Lillian Pullen gathering iba (bear grass) for her baskets; recording Hal George’s explanation of a person’s t’axilit (guardian spirit); completing the nine-thousand-word Quileute dictionary with Woody Woodruff. (Quileute had some ninety thousand words; the dictionary consisted mainly of root words.) The old people saw their culture slipping away. What they wanted was for Jay to get it written down before it was all gone. They trusted him and believed in his commitment and training. As it happened, the person who would work with him on this challenge for the next forty years turned out to be the girl next door.

V

ickie Jensen grew up in New Hampton, Iowa, the same town as “Young Jim Powell.”

(The “Jay” came later, after his stint in the army, where everyone went by their initials.) Their parents were merchants and best friends in the small farming town of three thousand residents.

After the Second World War, Nels and Lorraine Jensen bought a jewellery store on Main Street.

Nels soon tired of indoor work and went back to building houses and later tiling, the process of draining marshy fields to make them more productive, and Lorraine ran Jensen’s Jewelry.

Jay’s parents, Jim and Helen Powell, owned Powell’s Hawkeye Variety, a dime store located a block east of Jensen’s. Jay, born in 1938, was eight years older than Vickie, born in 1946.

Both were only children. As youngsters, they were too far apart in age to become friends, but both were intelligent, athletic and adventurous.

Jay was sixteen years old when he began his pursuit of becoming an archaeologist, attending summer school at the National University in Mexico to survey and reconstruct Mayan, Mixtecan and Aztec sites. The next year, he was in the Near East excavating at Dothan, a biblical site. After graduating from Wheaton College in Illinois (BA, Archeology, 1959), he served in the US Army as a Russian translator and cryp-

Jay Powell and Fred (Woody) Woodruff, his mentor in the Quileute language, La Push, Washington, c. 1974.

tographer. He used the GI bill (free education benefits for veterans) to take up studies at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. With his natural facility for languages, he picked up Spanish, German, Hebrew and French. Vickie, a teenager, listened avidly as Helen Powell read his letters home to Lorraine Jensen over coffee at the Main Diner Café.

One Christmas, home from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa (BA, magna cum laude, English, 1968), and working in the jewellery store, twenty-year-old Vickie was dazzled when a tall, distinctive man walked in. Young Jim Powell carefully unfolded a pouch and asked Mrs. Jensen to check out the engagement gift he had brought back from Israel for his bride-to-be.

He placed a series of silver, alexandrite-encrusted crosses on the counter. Vickie, the daughter of a jeweller, had never heard of an engagement gift other than a diamond ring. The idea of giving antique crosses was the stuff of novels.

Four years later, when Jay’s mother told her that Jay was getting a divorce, Vickie advised her not to fret: the important thing, she said, was that Jay be happy. Looking back, she realized it was advice she was also giving herself.

Her own first marriage was not going well. As she left Helen Powell’s home that day, Vickie asked for Jay’s address.

Writing her first letter to Jay in La Push was one of the biggest chances Vickie ever took. She wrote countless drafts before she finally finished

photo: vickie jensen, courtesy of the audrey and harry hawthorn library and archives, ubc museum of anthropology, a003022c

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PROFILE

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PROFILE

one and took it to the post office. One letter at a time, they found common ground. Vickie had trained as an educator in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the University of Iowa, influenced by mentors who stressed the importance of creating curriculum materials with content that students were interested in, from dating in pickup trucks to resisting the Vietnam war. During the summers, she taught photography on the University of Iowa campus as part of Upward Bound, a federal project for smart but troubled inner-city youth, exposing them to six weeks of university life and, for many students, their first positive academic experience. Teaching in her own high school classrooms, first in Iowa and later in South Dakota, she translated her students’ interests into assignments and eventually curricula: they wrote about their lives and published a book of poetry, read and discussed popular books, designed and presented multimedia shows on current events. She taught high school English, then added university-­level photography and creative writing classes. In South Dakota, she was active in a collective of parents and educators to revise curriculum and start an alternative school. Not incidentally, one of the motivating factors for Vickie was that in her American literature classroom, not one of the textbooks mentioned anything of relevance to her students of Sioux ancestry.

In July 1972, after a year of exchanging increasingly personal letters with Jay, Vickie sent him a telegram and proposed that they spend a week together. He had landed a job at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, starting in September, but for the summer he was ­finishing up his doctoral research at La Push.

She flew to Seattle, where Jay picked her up for the four-hour drive to the village at the end of the continent. She stayed nine days, meeting people and taking photographs—of Woody Woodruff as he worked with Jay, of other residents who dropped by, of daily life in the village.

When each day’s work was done, Jay and Vickie talked about a shared future, about how they felt about having children, about collaborating on a book about the Quileutes. She went home, divorced her husband, quit her job, gave away her dog and got ready to leave her country. In

The first book written, compiled, edited and published for the Quileute community by a group of elders with Jay and Vickie.

December 1972 she joined Jay, who was now teaching anthropological linguistics at UBC. She found work teaching photography classes and working at a gallery in North Vancouver.

Whenever they could, they made the eighthour drive to La Push, where they worked with a committee of elders to design a series of language and culture books for the community.

By 1973, Quileute Language: Book 1, their first book, was ready for printing, along with an illustrated alphabet poster. Jay and Vickie had typed up and laid out a series of lessons for high school students and adults based on everyday words and phrases. Jay arranged for a commercial printing company to do a first run of three hundred copies. A series of three Quileute for Kids books for elementary students soon followed, along with a second high school book and the Quileute dictionary, all carrying the tribe’s copyright. In 1976, the University of Washington Press published Quileute: An Introduction to the Indians at La Push, the illustrated community history Jay and Vickie had compiled. Within four years the Quileutes had their own language and culture curriculum.

The books won awards, and word spread.

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PROFILE

Aboriginal groups: “Could you come do for us what you did for the Quileutes?”

Over the next forty years, Jay and Vickie went on to produce language and curriculum materials for the Musqueam of Vancouver and Kwak’wala-speaking communities including Alert Bay on northeast Vancouver Island. They spent five summers along the Skeena River in northern BC in the eastern and western Gitksan communities of Kispiox, Hazelton, Kitwankool, Kitwanga and Kitseguekla. In central BC they worked with the Secwepemc (Shuswap) of Alkali Lake, Dog Creek, Soda Creek, Canim Lake and Sugarcane. Later on, Jay was invited by five villages on central Vancouver Island to record various dialects of Nuu-chah-nulth, one of the main Aboriginal languages there.

S

even of the eleven Aboriginal language families in Canada can be found in British Columbia. In 1990, the Assembly of First Nations, in a survey of 151 bands in Canada, reported that 66 percent of Aboriginal languages were declining, endangered or critical. Only 15 percent flourished in the communities. The study was a renewed alert to Aboriginal groups. As the last fluent speakers passed on, almost every language in the province was threatened with extinction. When Jay Powell was starting his career in the late 1960s, there were only a handful of Native language courses, particularly among the Sto:lo and Musqueam, being taught in local Indian reserve schools or band council offices, but he knew of no programs going on in the provincial school system.

But all of that was about to change. Jay and Vickie began to write down and tape-record the last of the speakers of various languages.

A number of other linguists (including Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, Brent Galloway, Dell Hymes, Dale Kinkade, Aert Kuipers, Margaret Sequin Anderson, and Larry and Terry Thompson) were seeing the need as well, and had begun research projects with other Northwest Coast groups. Federal and provincial government funding became available for language documentation, revitalization and curriculum development programs. Bands Page 64 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

and school districts co-operated in the effort to set up language and culture programs within school classrooms.

Even so, the challenge was daunting. “If I’d had a clear view of the enormity of what I was attempting, I might have given up,” says Jay, reflecting on the past four decades. “I’ve always loved teaching but my work with Aboriginal communities has been my life’s great adventure.

Originally, the focus was on tape recording the language, and doing so provided a deeper insight into their traditions and culture. It gave me the rare opportunity to spend time with elders who remembered the days before their world began to change forever.”

One significant advantage of teaching at UBC was that it provided Jay with summers and sabbaticals, affording research time to do fieldwork. As interest grew in teaching Aboriginal languages in school classrooms, Jay and Vickie were invited to work with groups across the province. Doors that did not open easily for outsiders opened for them. They are quick to point out that they were in the right place at the right time, that the need was there and they were qualified to fill it. But more than that, it was who they were as people that brought them the trust of the groups they worked with. They listened well to what communities wanted and responded with respect and hard work.

Vickie was convinced that educational materials should feature students’ own environments, through photographs and illustrations. At the time there were few templates for such materials, so they had to learn by trial and error what worked in the classroom. “A dictionary, though useful, was not the same as a lesson plan so we needed to develop those,” says Vickie. “The lessons needed to be sequenced. Curriculum materials were most effective if they were tied in to the community’s annual cycle, whether hunting and gathering activities in the natural world or ceremonies and other events. Equally important, effective language teachers had to be more than just fluent speakers. They needed to present lessons using engaging tactics, content and endless repetition to students, some of whom had serious attention or ­discipline issues.” She began collaborating with Joy Wild, an ESL

PROFILE

(EAL) teacher, to develop teacher manuals and teacher training workshops for the communities they were working in.

The focus of the curricula kept widening, and gradually Jay moved away from pure linguistics to applied anthropology. “We started to include more cultural content in the materials,” he says, “based on what the old people said was important to them. We realized that it wasn’t enough to just teach how to say, for instance, ‘That’s my auntie’ in their language, because in many Northwest Coast cultures, words for relatives can extend beyond a biological reference. Students also needed to know about their group’s lifeways and beliefs so they could think traditionally. We had to craft lessons that would allow teachers to present language in its cultural setting.” They toiled late at night, on weekends, during teaching breaks and summers, and the school books piled up, all self-published with copyright by the bands that had hired them. ­Altogether they produced a massive catalogue of more than fifty books.

To work well, language programs needed a collaborative effort among the band/tribal council, teachers and a committee of ­ fluent elders. Jay worked with tribal, school and government administrators to secure grants and other funding. The work of planning the project, researching language, developing textbooks, training teachers and delivering courses in the classroom was a commitment that often stretched to several years for the community as well as for Jay and Vickie. Occasionally the process was interrupted by political disagreements or family rivalries that had to be resolved tactfully before a project could continue. Humour was an important factor in community relations.

Aside from their long-term (and ongoing) association with the Quileutes, Jay and Vickie’s most intensive fieldwork took place during 1980–81, when they moved to Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, reachable by ferry from the northeast tip of Vancouver Island, to work with the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl). The Kwak’wala-speaking groups, like all Northwest Coast peoples, had survived dark times in their history, notably the devastating loss of ­population beginning in the mid-1800s, primar-

The Quileute books won awards, and word spread.

Other Aboriginal groups approached Jay and Vickie to ask: “Could you come do for us what you did for the Quileutes?”

ily because of smallpox. At that time, when little factual information about the culture of many Aboriginal groups had reached non-Native people, the Kwak’wala-speaking villages became renowned among anthropologists worldwide because of the work of Franz Boas at Fort Rupert on northern Vancouver Island. Boas, considered the father of North American anthropology, spent decades collecting texts from knowledgeable speakers. He also published widely about the potlatch, their culture’s most integral ceremony, which marked, through dramatic masked dances and inherited songs, important social changes such as the passing on of a chiefly name. These events were illegal, having been outlawed by the Canadian government in 1884, two years before Boas ­arrived at Fort Rupert.

On December 25, 1921, after years of planning, Chief Dan Cranmer of Alert Bay gave an extravagant potlatch to honour his marriage. After the festivities, Canadian officials arrested some forty-five people; twenty-two men and women ended up being sent to prison for terms of up to three months.

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wealth, regalia (dance wear), dance rattles, whistles and other cultural properties were confiscated from their owners and distributed to private collections and museums worldwide. The traditional ­culture with its rich language, art and ceremony seemed doomed.

In 1951, the Indian Act was revised and the potlatch law was simply dropped from the books rather than being repealed. Chief Jimmy Sewid at Alert Bay and others began a movement to recover the several hundred objects confiscated at the 1921 potlatch. The yearslong campaign of lobbying and fundraising culminated in the construction of two Aboriginal cultural centres—one in Alert Bay and one on nearby Quadra Island—to house the repatriated artifacts. On October 31, 1980, the U’mista Cultural Centre opened in Alert Bay, proudly displaying its potlatch collection returned from the National Museum of Man (now the Museum of Civilization) in Ottawa, more than half of the confiscated potlatch masks and assorted dance regalia. About seventy-five other objects have been repatriated in subsequent years, from the Royal Ontario Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Smithsonian) and a private collection of thirtythree pieces that the Alert Bay Indian agent had sold to George Heye of New York in 1922. The whereabouts of an unknown number of other objects are still being tracked down.

Jay and Vickie had first visited Alert Bay in the early 1970s, invited to attend family potlatches by Gloria Cranmer Webster, Dan Cranmer’s eldest daughter and a staff member at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Gloria subsequently left UBC to return home to Alert Bay, where she was hired as the first curator of the new museum. In the late 1970s, she asked Jay to create a preliminary set of language lessons for an adult Kwak’wala class. As the building of the U’mista Cultural Centre progressed, the president of UBC approached Gloria, asking what the university could do to help, and she had a ready answer: release Jay Powell from teaching responsibilities for a year so he could go to Alert Bay and develop language and culture lessons.

Gloria, a fluent Kwak’wala speaker, envisioned a full language program as part of U’mista’s mandate.

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In 1980, Vickie and Jay packed their bags and moved with their shy two-year-old son, Nels, to Alert Bay. The move from Vancouver to the small, remote island community was a hard one for Vickie. Jay had insisted that she be part of the hiring package, and she was uncomfortable about having the job imposed on her and on the residents of Alert Bay, rather than being considered an integral partner in the project. As the ferry approached the island, her stomach was in knots of apprehension. She was determined to gain her own acceptance.

On arrival, they moved into a rental house on the reserve, a stone’s throw from one of the most noted ceremonial Big Houses on the coast. Their home office consisted of a dining room table, tape recorder and coffee pot in constant use, side-by-side typewriters in a converted bedroom, and a darkroom set up in the basement. Over the months that followed, Vickie’s fears were replaced with a sense of true accomplishment. “For the first time, I became an equal partner in the process of Jay’s work,” she remembers. “When we left after a year, we had made more friends in Alert Bay than we had in Jay’s ten years at UBC.” That year in Alert Bay began with the opening of the U’mista Cultural Centre. Members of the various Kwak’wala-speaking communities gathered for a weekend of traditional ceremonies, drumming and dances, and welcomed distinguished guests from around the world.

The visitors soon filled the two hotels in town, so Jay and Vickie invited thirty-five guests into their house, all sharing a single bathroom. One morning, the couple spent four hours cooking blueberry pancakes for everyone. “In a community that regularly hosted potlatches that involved feeding a thousand guests,” Vickie says, grinning, “it was no big deal.”

Once everyone had gone home, Jay got back to work. He spent most mornings recording two primary language informants, Agnes “Gwanti’lakw” Cranmer and Margaret “Ada” Cook. Afternoons and evenings he analyzed the language data that filled his field notebooks and organized it into lessons. Jay also recorded legends and narratives that would be referenced in a language book about the potlatch. Nola Johnston, a graphic artist who lived in ­Vancouver,

PROFILE

joined the team as illustrator, travelling to Alert Bay to get to know the community and to develop an alphabet poster that featured an illustrated word representing each of the forty-three Kwak’wala sounds—A is for abals (apples), B is for busi (cat), and so on. Nola continued to work with Vickie and Jay, providing illustrations for all their language and culture books, for the next three decades.

Vickie took photographs throughout the Kwakwaka’wakw villages and in the classrooms she visited in both band and public schools.

She talked with teachers, getting a feel for school activities, games and vocabulary that would be effective in language lessons. Together Jay and Vickie worked with a committee of local teachers to determine the focus and scope of the books and to develop an appropriate Aboriginal curriculum. They were often invited to participate in cultural activities such as salmon canning, berry picking and fishing, experiences that were incorporated into language lessons. They attended potlatches and Vickie was asked to photograph these ceremonies. Today it is common to see people taking digital photographs in the semi-darkness of potlatches, but in the 1970s and early ’80s, cameras were seldom permitted. “Flash photography was distracting,” Vickie says, “so I had to learn to shoot black-and-white film at very slow shutter speeds and to anticipate what the dancers would be doing.”

A year later Vickie and Jay and their Kwak’wala-speaking consultants and collaborators had completed the Learning Kwak’wala series of twelve language and culture books and a teacher’s manual. Vickie had also taught a photography class and given birth to a second son, Luke. The schoolbooks were produced for two distinct age levels. Me and My Family, My Body—My Clothes, My Village—Myself and Dogs, Cats and Crows were for elementary students and included games and paper cut-outs of a boy and girl in both traditional and modern dress.

More advanced language texts were created for older children and adults. All the schoolbooks included illustrations by Nola Johnston, as well as historic and contemporary photographs of the various communities. The U’mista Cultural Centre held the copyright on all of them.

Beau Dick (left) and K’odi Nelson, Alert Bay, BC, 1981. This and other photographs of dancers were taken as source material for illustrations of the potlatch, to be used in the book Yaxwatlan’s (We Will Dance).

In September 1981, having met their deadlines and finished the projects, Jay and Vickie left for a sabbatical in Quito, Ecuador, with their two young sons. Eight months later they returned to Alert Bay to visit friends, and Jay gave a course in writing Kwak’wala to local language teachers and other interested adults. The Aboriginal classroom teachers were eager to create more lesson materials. After conferring with U’mista and North Island College, Vickie and Jay devised the innovative and highly successful three-year Kwak’wala Teacher Training Project (KTTP), in which language and culture teachers took a series of courses for academic credit at the college. Just before heading back to university life at UBC, Jay and Vickie made a snap decision to buy a house in the village, and Alert Bay became their second home.

Over the next three years, Vickie and Joy Wild flew to Alert Bay from September to April for a series of weekend-long teacher-training classes that included both fluent elders (as language resources) and those teaching Kwak’wala in classrooms as far south as Campbell River and Quadra Island. The participants produced lesson plans, and developed and shared puppet shows, games and activities to go along with them. When Jay finished his university term in May, he and Vickie and their sons moved to Alert Bay for a month so he could conduct

photo: vickie jensen, courtesy of the audrey and harry hawthorn library and archives, ubc museum of anthropology, a0030932

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classes in reading and writing Kwak’wala. In 1985, when KTTP finished up, some students were able to move into the education program at Simon Fraser University and become fully certified teachers. Jay and Vickie sold their Alert Bay house in 1986. In 2001, U’mista contacted them to produce another groundbreaking work: a computer-based language resource, an animated CD-ROM to teach Kwak’wala to kindergarten students, using no spoken or written English.

F

rom the time they got together in the early 1970s, Jay and Vickie’s lives were scheduled and shaped by fieldwork. From early May until September each year, they lived in one or more Aboriginal villages. During Jay’s first fifteen years teaching at UBC, they never spent a summer at home. Come fall, they returned home with language and culture data, along with illustrations and photographs. They then edited and designed everything into book form and arranged for printing and shipping. When they could get away, they carried the boxes of bound books back to the village, where they could be handed out at a feast or community event.

Once every five years they packed up for a yearlong sabbatical from UBC and explored other cultural groups around the world. Their sons, Nels and Luke, went on the road with them. As youngsters, the boys were home-schooled, and then studied through the BC distance education program. They grew up in an interesting cultural mix, with a succession of Aboriginal grandmothers and playmates. “Our sons opened doors,” Jay says. “Village life in most cultures is based on the extended family, and people saw us as a family rather than visiting academics.”

In the pre-computer era of their early books, “desktop publishing” was a laborious cut-andpaste process. Revisions that take ten minutes today on the computer would take hours to complete with their IBM Selectric typewriters, state-of-the-art machines with whirling golfball-like font elements that had to be manually changed for italic type and Northwest Coast phonetic symbols (a font prepared by members of a linguistics relationship project at the University of Hawaii). Other tools of the trade Page 68 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

included transfer type, scissors, exacto knives, hand-held hot-wax applicators and light tables.

UBC did not, at that time, accept any of these Aboriginal language books as scholarly contributions. In the publish-or-perish world of academia, only books published by a press with a peer-review editorial process would count toward promotion or tenure. But Jay and Vickie chose to continue to write, edit and lay out the books themselves, in collaboration with their Aboriginal hosts. They felt it was important that the bands have copyright and that the books be available right away, rather than having to wait two or three years for peer review and conventional publishing. Ultimately, Jay was granted tenure and promoted on the basis of his dissertation, published dictionaries and articles, conference papers and positive teaching reviews.

Once their sons were older and involved with school friends and activities, the pattern of work shifted. In 1987 a mentor appeared in Vickie’s life, pointing her career in a new direction.

Alan Haig-Brown, editor-in-chief of Westcoast Publications, a company with a growing number of trade magazines, asked her to edit a new maritime trade journal, Westcoast Mariner. “I don’t know a tugboat from a football,” she told Haig-Brown. His reply—“Don’t worry, you’ll learn”—proved true. Vickie spent the next four years of monthly magazine deadlines venturing out on a variety of workboats to interview the crews. She researched, wrote and edited most articles, took most of the photographs, proofed layouts—did everything but sell ads and subscriptions: “It was a terrific immersion education in publishing.” When she finally left the magazine, it was to write non-fiction trade books. The first was Where the People Gather: Carving a Totem Pole (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), retitled Totem Pole Carving: Bringing a Log to Life in subsequent paperback editions.

She also wrote a string of maritime books, including Saltwater Women at Work (Douglas & McIntyre, 1995). The subject—women who made their living on vessels on the unpredictable and often dangerous waters of the Pacific— suited her sense of adventure perfectly. Many of the women profiled in the book, she wrote in the introduction, “had a zest for life, perhaps sharpened by a sense of living on the edge.”

PROFILE

Eventually she set up her own publishing company, Westcoast Words (westcoastwords. com), benefiting from years of writing, laying out and arranging for the printing of Aboriginal books. The company’s first publication was Build Your Own Underwater Robot and Other Wet Projects (1997), a unique primer for students, coauthored with Harry Bohm, then project manager of the Underwater Research Lab at Simon Fraser University. They had met years earlier when Vickie interviewed him for a story on underwater robotics; now Harry got back in touch and said, “I want you to write the book I wish I’d had as a kid.” The book has sold more than seventeen thousand copies, and it led to a longterm contract with Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center of Monterey, California, to co-author and edit Underwater Robotics: Science, Design & Fabrication (2010), a textbook on underwater vehicle design. Cowritten with Bohm and Dr. Steven W. Moore, and illustrated by Nola Johnston, the book was a ten-year-project that filled 770 pages and weighed in at just over three kilos. In June 2010 the Powell-Jensen family, grown sons included, travelled together to Hawaii to launch the new book at MATE’s annual underwater robotics competition.

J

ay Powell retired from UBC in 2000. As professor emeritus, Department of Anthropology, he threw himself energetically into new activities. He and Vickie lectured on Aboriginal life and arts aboard cruise ships on the Alaskan run, the South Seas, Siberia and even one around-the-world cruise. One summer, Jay talked Vickie into a sixty-four-day bicycle tour across Canada. Later, on his own, he spent six months walking the Pacific Crest Trail from the US-Mexico border to Manning Park, in the Cascade Mountains about 220 kilometres east of Vancouver. After his blisters healed, he declared that he was “a self-described failure at retirement” and returned to work as a consultant. Now in his early seventies, he has shifted the focus of his work to ethnographic research and community histories; hearing loss has made it difficult to distinguish the precise sound differences of various Northwest Coast languages.

Jay continues to work on contract for several communities, most recently the Hoh people of the Olympic rain forest in Washington State, and the Haisla people of Kitamaat village on the North Coast of BC. In this capacity he has produced publications and reports that provide background information for government issues and/or treaty negotiations.

It takes years of observing and recording, taking notes, conducting interviews and asking questions to document a culture and its ­ language. “Preparing a revealing cultural ­description or Native language grammar is like catching a species of bird as it flies off to extinction,” says Jay. But that’s only half the challenge that he and Vickie have to meet. The other half is returning the information to the people in a format they can use and build on, particularly as traditional societies continue to lose their elders and embrace mainstream North American life at the speed of cable television, wireless internet and Facebook. As Jay observes, “Forty years ago we were fortunate to have the training, expertise and opportunity to work with a generation of elders, many of whom still remembered the old ways and wanted to record that information for generations to come. We also benefited from the recorded observations of a handful of very early linguists and ethnographers. Today, many Aboriginal groups are graduating their own anthropologists. That’s a tremendous development. Hopefully some of them will find the work we did to be helpful.”

Over the decades, Jay and Vickie’s goals have changed. Initially they hoped that languages could be revitalized, that by joining forces with teachers and fluent elders, they could develop enough educational momentum to return Aboriginal languages to everyday use. But eventually they had to face the fact that too many elders had died, and too few of the younger generation had learned their language from those elders. However, Jay also realized that to know even fifty words could generate a strong sense of culture and pride. He put that new goal into practice during 2008-2009 in a series of six-week community language lessons in La Push.

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meetings in the school gym that drew people of all ages. They sang Quileute songs, exchanged greetings, learned telephone conversations and practised sweet talk and compliments, laughing as they did so. “It’s a community’s determination to revitalize their language and traditional cultural knowledge that counts,” Jay says. “School programs and language materials can make a difference if they teach simple everyday expressions such as greetings, commands and questions, and if people get in the habit of using them.”

Jay and Vickie have seen other cultural knowledge being nurtured in several communities. Jay says, “It can be as simple as parents and grandparents who share their experience of cedar bark weaving, fishing, beading and storytelling, or band council leaders who mandate answering the phone in their language and who support bilingual signs in a community.” Vickie remembers that when they arrived in Alert Bay for the first time in the early 1970s, “the kids were dancing with cardboard masks and papier-mâché rattles.

Now their dance program features elaborately carved cedar masks that are real works of art. In the ’70s it was only old men who sat at the drumming log and sang the Kwak’wala songs at potlatches. Today a whole new group of young guys in their twenties and thirties have learned those traditional songs and even burned several CDs.” “Looking back more than forty years, so much has changed and so many have died,” Jay says—among them his first mentor, Woody Woodruff. “What was ordinary village life back then now seems extraordinary.” Today very few grave houses or burial figures remain in Aboriginal villages, not many children have pulled cedar bark for making baskets, fewer oolichans and smelts can be harvested, and hardly anyone remembers the purification rituals for puberty, pregnancy or hunting. For some groups, Vickie’s photos, Jay’s language recordings and their notes on cultural institutions are a rich documentation of the lifeways and traditional knowledge of the last speakers. La Push has changed dramatically in another way since 2005, when the Twilight series of novels by Stephenie Meyer became popular. In Meyer’s hands, the Quileute legend in which their ancestors were made from wolves became a contemporary story in which Page 70 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

one fictional character—Jacob Black, a Quileute from La Push—is a werewolf, and much of the action unfolds in Forks, a nearby Quileute community. Meyer’s bestselling books and the movies based on them have caused La Push, still a small village of 371 residents, to be thronged by “Twihards,” as fans are known, snapping photos and buying Twilight-inspired memorabilia.

In 2009, Jay and Vickie donated their life work—Jay’s field notes and recordings, and 33,000 of Vickie’s photographs—to the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Their hope is that the massive Jensen/Powell Fonds, as the collection is called, will serve as a time capsule of life and cultures during a period of change; that Aboriginal scholars and community members will use the data and images not only as windows on the past but also as guides for the future.

The foundation of their work together has always been family, whether the extended families of a village, or their own. Their home in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver is filled with Aboriginal art and artifacts, many of which were presented to them as gifts. They now gladly trade the cold, wet Northwest Coast winters for the predictable sun of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, enjoying yet another language and culture. Iowa is still in their lives, in annual summer visits to elderly aunts and uncles.

“We are prairie folk,” says Jay, “ordinary people who had an amazing opportunity and took it. We always loved the work, but the single most important fact was that we did it together.

That’s how people thought of us, as a team.”

Constance Brissenden is a writer, editor and teacher, author of many books of history and travel. She and her partner, the award-winning Cree author Larry Loyie, have worked together for twenty years. In 1993 they founded Living Traditions Writers Group (firstnationswriter.com) to encourage writing in Aboriginal and other communities. Their recent projects include Loyie’s Goodbye Buffalo Bay (Theytus Books) and Brissenden’s Vancouver: A Pictorial Celebration (Sterling). “Life in Language” is one of a series of profiles commissioned with the assistance of Arts Partners for Creative Development.

COMMENT

Metamorphoses In the country, nothing is as old as the hills—not even the hills

Alberto Manguel

W

hen my partner and I settled in the French countryside, over a decade ago, my urban mother’s first question was: “But what in the world are you going to be doing with yourself all day?”

Little could she have known (or I for that matter) that these past years have been the most hectic years of my life.

Partly, the hecticness comes from the fact that I’m not at home all year round: work forces me to travel, as if I were living under the curse of Cain whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, not a nomadic herdsman like his brother Abel, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

Consequently, when I’m at home, work accumulates. Other than my reading and writing, there’s looking after the house and the garden (I cook, my partillustration: GARLIC by taylor brown-evans

ner is the gardener), and making sure that the ancient stones remain in place.

We have always had the sense that rather than own this place, we have been made its custodians, and we are supposed to see to its well-being: mend the roof, nurse the trees, play with the dog, protect the birds, feed the stray cats, rescue hedgehogs that fall into the pool and see that the big snake that lives deep inside the crypt can come and go undisturbed.

Partly, it comes from the state of constant change to which we are privileged witnesses. In a city, paradoxically, in spite of the frantic rhythm, change is slow, almost imperceptible: as in a torrent of white water, the rush is too great for whatever is swept away to be distinctly apparent. In the country, Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 71

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i­nstead, changes seem fast and furious, perhaps because the rhythm of their flow is so much slower. In the hesitant transformations of light, for instance, that brighten or darken the lawn, the appearance of a new bird or the fall of an old branch is obvious, unmistakable. The days on which the bread is delivered, the arrival of the post in the mornings, the tolling of the church bells, the hours during which the town hall is open (twice a week), the passing of the market bus (every Wednesday)— these lumber by with elephantine stubbornness, so that any stumbling, any tardiness, any alteration hits you powerfully in the senses. The ear notices the wrong number of peals on the tremendous evening when the mechanism of the bells breaks down, the eye catches a foreign patch of colour the afternoon on which an unfamiliar species of bird lands on the rim of the bathing trough, the foot trips on a parcel left by a supply mail carrier at an unusual spot by the door.

The countryside lulls you into a false sense of constancy, but nothing is as old as the hills, not even the hills.

A new house is built on the slope of the hill just ahead, where a tower can be seen that is mentioned in Rabelais’s sixteenth-century Gargantua and Pantagruel. Fields of fluorescent yellow stain the land that Balzac described as “the colour of broth.” In a farm that for centuries bred Jersey cows or Poitou donkeys, South American llamas now dream nostalgically of the heights of Machu Picchu.

And even in the changed landscape there is change, and change of change.

In the town where we do some of our shopping, the nice greengrocer and his wife divorce at the unreasonable age of sixty and close shop, without once considering our needs. The young man who holds the tobacco concession in a nearby village, who kept a wine cellar on the side and used to teach us about wine, leaves for Tours, without asking for our consent. The onion lady who had a stand with many kinds of onions at the Poitiers market, and who used to give us recipes for cooking onions in dozens of different ways, becomes ill and stops coming. The big hardware store at the entrance of the highway, where we bought the bits and pieces we needed to fix up the house when we moved in, shuts down without a word of apology. A retired metro operator in Paris, whose house was on the other side of our driveway, who gave us wise counsel on how to manage the vegetable garden and brought us gifts of fresh eggs, falls sick and dies. Likewise a friendly neighbour who greeted us on our arrival in the village with chocolate cake and coffee. The wiry woman who came to the door to sell goat’s cheese and milk stops coming. The restaurant where we used to go to welcome the New Year moves to somewhere far away.

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In the countryside, change is always a memento mori.

As a child, I used to love a large picture book that showed, on a twopage spread, “The Four Seasons in the Country.” A tree, a hillside, a farmhouse were transformed from season to season with sharp, obvious and circular changes. Now those stately transformations pace my everyday life, like shifting backgrounds for all others, in and out. Outside, the countless, minute, niggling changes like the ones I mentioned, undermining my efforts to seek constancy, nibbling at my determination to sit still. Inside, of course, as if I were inspecting one of those medieval statues of Vanity that show, from the front, a graceful woman and, from behind, a carcass crawling with worms and toads, I know that things are slowly falling apart, inklings of that last change that I won’t witness.

In the seventeenth century, Luis de Góngora reproached his friend Licius for not paying heed to the evidence of change, large and small. The last verses of the sonnet run like this: Carthage confesses it. And in your case?

You’re in danger, Licius, if you insist, pursuing shadows and deceitful ways.

Nor will the hours show mercy for your tears, the hours that are grinding down the days, the days that go on gnawing at the years.

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently A Reader on Reading, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, City of Words and The Library at Night. He lives in France. Read more of his Geist work at geist.com.

COMMENT

Divergence People used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate

Stephen Henighan

society threatened to shrivel the potential for democratic debate, induce feelings of helplessness and discourage voter turnout in elections. All of these fears have come true to some extent, yet one of the surprises has been that convergence has not gone as smoothly as planned.

Diversity of news content has suffered, yet the huge financial windfalls that the conglomerates projected for their shareholders have not been realized. The newspapers of the former Southam chain have been passed from Hollinger to Canwest to their current owner, Postmedia Network; yet the chain’s flagship publication, the National Post, has never attracted enough readers to free itself from corporate subsidy. If it were ever subjected to the ruthless market principles for which it advocates, the National Post would fold tomorrow.

I I

n the mid-1990s, media people began to talk of “convergence”: the consolidation of media resources in fewer hands and the distribution of journalistic content through a wide variety of formats. Conglomerates amalgamated newspaper chains, television stations, magazines, book publishers, internet providers and music companies. ­Facilitated by legislation that f­avoured deregulation and privatization, these ­ conglomerates aimed to boost the number of stories they produced, digitize them, then distribute them through as many different properties as possible in order to maximize profits.

As companies merged, journalists’ jobs were cut. Those who remained wrote stories that had to be sufficiently

generic to appear in different publications, and even in different formats.

Stylistic originality and commitment to a local audience became liabilities. Articles evolved toward no-name sameness; conglomerates such as the Péladeau family’s Sun Media Corporation or Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. laid down strict ideological programs, usually neo-conservative in orientation, that journalists had to follow.

Cherished journalistic principles, such as the separation of editorial content (which expresses an opinion) from news content (which reports what happened) were trampled as editorial biases pervaded the presentation of events.

A narrower band of information being distributed through larger swaths of

illustration: DIGITAL CONVERGENCE by andrew van wart

n the Canadian popular imagination, convergence is incarnated by the felonious former newspaper magnate Conrad Black. In the late 1990s, a journalist on a Black paper told me that “Tubby,” as he called him, was beginning to question the wisdom of convergence. In theory, he said, globalization should blend content into one-size-fits-all message-products; yet the cultures and identities of the news organizations that had been merged were proving more recalcitrant than anticipated. (BCE’s later forced marriage of CTV with the Globe and Mail, for example, remains an uncomfortable union.) At the same time, new sources of information were springing up on the internet, and even in print, to fill the ideological gap left by the corporatization of the mainstream media and the silencing of many of its centrist and leftist voices. These events epitomize a world in which longstanding local Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 73

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and national institutions collapse, and megacorporations transmit the same information to the borderless billions; yet, in an apparent contradiction, audiences splinter, fragment and become more ­specialized. The unacknowledged shadow of convergence is divergence; we cannot understand what is happening around us unless we recognize this.

O

ne result of divergence is that rather than having different opinions about events, people have narratives that do not overlap sufficiently to permit discussion to occur. This was always true to some extent, particularly in the case of tightly defined ethnic or religious communities. But whereas in the past, young people might define themselves against their origins mastering the knowledge necesby ­ sary to participate in the larger society,

r­ ebellion now means passing from one tightly defined niche (a devout Punjabi family) to another, equally restrictive bubble (players of the video game EVE Online). The information one receives in the 500-channel universe is unavoidably partial; the anarchist blogger and the Tea Party blogger cannot even agree on the terms of debate. The viewer of Fox News knows that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks of September 11, 2001; the viewer of films such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Dylan ­Avery’s internet hit Loose Change knows that the Bush and bin Laden families are long-time allies who collaborated on these attacks. When Canadian viewers used to choose between CBC and CTV for their evening news, the differences in what they knew about their country and the world were differences of emphasis. Now people know different truths: coalition government, which is an anti-democratic plot to a reader of the Calgary Sun, is evidence of a healthy parliamentary democracy to a reader of an independent newspaper such as Montreal’s Le Devoir.

Reporting by mainstream networks is less incisive since these networks are less confident that they are speaking to a public with shared perceptions of reality. “Dumbing down” is one of the consequences of divergence.

Under the sign of divergence, new forms—often driven by the use of different delivery systems—are taking shape. Different literary cultures, for example, are emerging online and on paper. The multiplication of delivery formats and the fracturing of audiences makes this inevitable. Online literary culture is informal and dominated by punchy brevity. The blogger’s rant, the Facebook post and the tweet are in the process of blending into a fast-moving, ated, hyperlinked new form of opinion­ ironic, self-centred self-expression that Page 74• GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

mingles fiction and non-fiction, narrative and information. We don’t yet have a name for this form, which will be tailored to the tastes of the individual who produces it and who may not seek an audience beyond her friends, real or virtual. But one is bound to emerge, just as the word column for an opinion piece emerged in response to changes in newspaper and magazine publishing around the turn of the last century.

In the online environment, the barrier between published and unpublished writers is disappearing.

In the future, “content producers” will be paid in notoriety rather than cash by an audience that expects to get its content for free. Print literary culture, by contrast, may distinguish itself from the electronic world by reinforcing traditional forms such as the novel, the short story, the poem or the formal essay. Connoisseurs of these forms will pay to buy them on paper, just as connoisseurs of wine or painting pay to acquire these refined products. It is equally inevitable that e-books will evolve their own literary culture. Rather than an alternative way to read Charles Dickens, the e-book will become the conveyor of e-literature. This e-literature will fracture internally into different types of e-books: with or without hyperlinks, with or without videos, personalized or not to the reader’s pre-registered tastes and prejudices. Across the spectrum of human endeavour, from politics to painting, a similar dispersal of a common vocabulary is under way.

Divergence is where convergence ends: not only in sameness, but also in evernarrower specialization.

Stephen Henighan’s books include The Streets of Winter, A Grave in the Air and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. See more at stephenhenighan.com, and read his Geist work at geist.com.

COMMENT

Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity Back in the 1960s the familiar Canadian identity was smashed, and as with Humpty Dumpty, no one has been able to put it back together again

Daniel Francis

I

f you weren’t there, you are probably tired of hearing about the ’60s from those who were. Woodstock, Sgt. Pepper, summer of love, hash brownies, yada yada yada. Why don’t you just get over it, you want to ask those aging hippies drooling into their memories (or are they fantasies?). And you’ve got a point. But before you dismiss the ’60s as an overhyped boomer-generation acid flashback take a look at Bryan D. Palmer’s new history of the decade, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (University of Toronto Press). Palmer, a professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario,

better known for being a labour historian, argues convincingly that the 1960s was a turning point in Canadian history, much more important for transforming the country’s image of itself than for its much ballyhooed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

The first thing that strikes the reader of Canada’s 1960s is just how much went on during the decade. Each of Palmer’s chapters could be a book of its own. The Diefenbaker-Pearson interlude, Cold War spy scandals, the rise of political terrorism in Quebec and left nationalism in English Canada, Trudeaumania, Red Power,

photo: PEACE & LOVE by lady dragonfycc at flickr.com

feminism, the Waffle—all had a role in shattering Canadians’ comfortable notions of what the country represented.

Palmer quotes the poet Al Purdy: “the little eddy that is my life/ and all our lives quickens/ and bubbles break as we join/ the mainstream of history.”

Purdy was reflecting on the October Crisis in Quebec in 1970, but his observation that Canada had become “a different country from the one where I grew up” is the larger theme of Palmer’s book.

Looking back, one of the most astonishing changes that took place in the 1960s was the transition from the jowly septuagenarian John Diefenbaker, prime minister until 1963, to the dashing skirtchaser Pierre Trudeau, prime minister just five years later. What were voters smoking that caused them to make such a dramatic shift? Bryan Palmer blames Gerda Munsinger. Hardly anyone remembers Munsinger nowadays.

She was a faded good-time girl with ties to the criminal underworld who slept with a couple of Diefenbaker cabinet ministers and who the RCMP suspected, briefly, of being a Soviet agent, our very own Mata Hari. In the normal course of things she would hardly merit a footnote in the history books.

But in the context of mid-’60s politics, she was dynamite waiting to explode.

Canadians moan about the low level of contemporary political debate; in 1965 the situation was even worse. It was conventional wisdom that, in the words of the Liberal cabinet minister Judy LaMarsh, “Parliament was sick.” Neither Conservatives nor Liberals could win a majority; the country seemed to mistrust both equally. The party leaders despised one another; the House of Commons was a squabbling bear pit; scandalmongering was the default setting of government. When he learned about Gerda Munsinger’s past connection to the Conservative ­ opposition, Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 75

COMMENT

Prime Minister Lester Pearson threatened to dredge it all up if the Tories did not tone down their criticisms of his government.

As a piece of political theatre, l’affaire Munsinger came to very little, but for Bryan Palmer it signifies much.

If nothing else, it put Canada on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

There was nothing like a Cold War sexand-spy scandal to make the country seem grown up, sophisticated, important. Suddenly the staid, even prudish image of official Ottawa was replaced by visions of champagne and call girls in the corridors of power. Munsinger precipitated what Palmer calls “a thaw in the iciness of political life.” Canadians were loosening their ties and kicking off their shoes. As Pierre Trudeau would discover, sex appeal went from being disreputable to something that

could attract adoring crowds on the hustings.

After Munsinger, Palmer turns his attention to another bit player in the national drama, this one in the world of sport. In 1966 the Toronto boxer George Chuvalo, “Canada’s Great White Hope,” took on Muhammad Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens for the heavyweight championship of the world. Ali is an iconic figure now, but in the mid-1960s he was more reviled than revered. He had become a Muslim, taken a new name (he was born Cassius Clay) and come out against the war in Vietnam. The Establishment hated him; as Palmer says, the only reason his bout with Chuvalo came to pass was because no American city would host an Ali title fight. The boxing world expected a slaughter; instead it got a classic. The ­Canadian slugger, who was thought to be no match for the smooth Ali, went the full fifteen rounds, absorbing everything the American threw at him without once going down. Ali won the fight, wrote a reporter, but Chuvalo won the crowd. The son of East European immigrants, raised in The Junction, a working-class Toronto neigh­bour­hood, Chuvalo emerged as an improbable symbol of Canada: an underdog who stood toe to toe with the American bully and fought him to a standstill. Palmer uses the fight as the centrepiece of an insightful discussion of ethnicity, anti-Americanism, Canadian character and national identity.

Canada’s 1960s also contains discussions of the New Left, the rise of the FLQ in Quebec, the flag debate, the emergence of “Red Power” among Canada’s Aboriginal population, and more. Again and again Palmer shows how the ’60s was a watershed decade, marking the demise of a particular definition of Canadian identity, what Page 76• GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

he characterizes as “British Canada.”

Centennial year, and particularly Expo 67, both noisy celebrations of Canadian success, seem to contradict this argument. But in Palmer’s reading, Expo did not so much reveal a triumphant Canadian identity as it disguised the tensions that were threatening to tear it apart. When US President Lyndon Johnson came to the fair, his visit had to be shrouded in secrecy for fear that he would be set upon by anti-war protestors. Later that year President Charles de Gaulle of France shouted his famous “Vive le Québec libre” from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall and René Lévesque formed a new ­political party to fight for Québec independence. As the novelist Hugh McLennan observed, “the bright promise of the Centennial Year and Expo 67 did not last as long as the Centennial Year itself.”

But like Humpty Dumpty, when the old identity shattered, the pieces could not be put back together again.

“The irony of Canadian identity in the 1960s,” Palmer writes, “was that as the old attachment to British Canada was finally and decisively shed, it was replaced only with uncertainty.” The familiar “isms”—socialism, feminism, nationalism, separatism—combined to subvert the old Canada, but no new identity emerged to take its place. Instead, Palmer argues, Canada became, and remains, a fractured society “still very much in need of definition.” More than acid rock and the Yippies, this is the real legacy of the ’60s.

Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, most recently Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). To read more of his Geist work visit geist.com.

ENDNOTES

Reviews, comments, curiosa

Reviewing the Unreviewable Andrea Bennett

H

ow do you review Tiger, Tiger (Douglas & McIntyre), a memoir about child abuse that details a decadeand-a-half-long relationship that starts when the author, Margaux Fragoso, is seven and Peter is fifty-one, and ends when Peter commits suicide? If you are the ­National Post, you begin with a Dickens quotation about the compelling nature of harrowing childhoods. If you’re the Telegraph, you reference James Frey and suggest the author remove all questions about veracity by writing the book as fiction.

If you’re among a host of other magazines and newspapers, you begin a dialogue about just how much sexually explicit content is appropriate to include in this kind of memoir. Inevitably, you mention Lolita, reconfigured. One critic praises Fragoso’s “vividly poetic descriptions”; another laments that her editor didn’t rein in the clunky phrasing and mixed metaphors that pop up here and there. It’s tempting to ask who will want to read the book, “other than voyeurs looking for a sustained closeup of a pedophile in action.” This question, first posed in the New York Times, echoes through several other reviews.

About halfway through Tiger, Tiger, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to review it.

When someone asked me how it was going, all I could muster in response was that

she should read it herself; that it was worth reading. Yes, the book is intense. Yes, it has some flaws—there is no clean wrap-up or narrative arc, and Fragoso’s writing can come across as a bit naïve, maybe in need of editing. But when it comes to making definitive statements about its merit, or its place in any socio-cultural sphere, I can only return to a question posed by a former poetry instructor of mine: How would you rewrite the poem? Going through the rewrite, he said, you’d face the same decisions the poet faced while crafting it, and you’d understand why they arrived where they did. I feel that way about Fragoso’s Tiger, Tiger. None of the reviews I read got it quite right. The question the book poses, and answers, is how exactly does something like this happen?

Just the Facts Mary Schendlinger

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n Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech (Viking), Craig Silverman explores how it is that North Americans have lost faith in the news m ­ edia, and what’s to be done about it. We can assume that most news-mongers set out to be correct, complete and fair. And the fact checkers at Geist, which comes out four times a year, can only imagine the challenge of being on top of all the facts— thousands of them, every day—­especially since everyone disagrees on what the facts are. But too often, the acknowledgement of error is ignored, or buried,

or written in a way that is “more puzzling than helpful.” And too often, standards of accuracy are revised largely to maintain circulation and therefore advertising revenue. Silverman begins with a quick history of errors: from the first Englishlanguage newspaper, published in 1620 in Holland, one issue of which is dated “the 2. of Decemember,” to the New York Sun “moon hoax” of 1835 (goats, unicorns, bat-people, etc., “discovered” to inhabit the moon), to the error-packed profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay in The New Yorker that gave rise to the magazine’s revered factchecking department.

In the early 1970s, the New York Times began running correction notices on page A2 or A3, and the practice was adopted by many major dailies; this brought us “more than three decades of editorial complacency in the area of corrections.” As budgets dwindled, publishers reduced their proofreading, fact-checking and research staff.

Then we got the internet, which allowed errors to proliferate every time a news article went out to databases and websites, and which delivered battalions of external fact checkers, “a motivated, opinionated, public cadre of checkers who exist outside the press.” These scrutineers have always been with us, but in the online age, they can no longer be merely tolerated by the “fortress newsroom.” Silverman notes that some of them have a passion for fixing copy whether or not they are right, and some engage in media watching as a Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 77

ENDNOTES

“blood sport.” But to his credit, he applauds readers’ instinct to hold the press to account. Printed, posted and broadcast material comprises much of the public ­record, so “the correction is, in essence, a form of update.” And why not view all of this conversation as—well, conversation?

For Silverman, the goal is not a perfect news piece, but a lively intellectual life in a democratic society.

Read an excerpt from Silverman’s book on page 31 of this issue, and visit his website, regrettheerror.com.

Butch Stories Daniel Zomparelli

T

here is something unique about Ivan E. Coyote’s writing that Missed Her (Arsenal Pulp Press) brings to the reader’s attention. Yes, she can bring you to tears with her stories, and yes, the beauty in the unexpected is there, but Coyote’s new collection raises the question of identity that is affecting the queer community today. Coyote and her cohorts come to life as they discuss the differences between butch and femme, gay and straight, dyke and lipstick lesbian. By being themselves, these characters challenge the limiting nature of such definitions and terms. When we have become integrated into the mainstream there is less need to define, less need to unify with terms such as butch and femme. But anyone who steps outside of those definitions is ostracized. The narrator deals with this subject over and over again. Because she is allergic to gluten, she can’t order a beer at the bar and instead orders cranberry and vodka, which brings mockery from her friend. The narrator feels the pressure of not being butch enough, and feels the label slipping through her fingers—a label that has come Page 78 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

to define her, her whole life. The stories had me repeating my favourite quote from Christopher Nealon’s book of poetry, Plummet: “I’m not gay, I’m from the future.”

The Other Story Carrie Villeneuve

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n November a friend handed me a freshly minted post-Giller Prize copy of The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (Douglas & McIntyre). The story about this book—how a debut novel from Gaspereau Press, an independent publisher and print shop, won the Giller Prize and survived—has very nearly overshadowed the story in the book. Or rather stories, as this is less a novel with a single plot than the stories of three characters and their layered, intersecting identities.

The narrator is a wounded lover and a daughter trying to understand her father, a derelict dad and a dying man seeking solace from his friend; the friend, Henry, is a surrogate father to the narrator, a touchstone for both, and a gatekeeper of sorts for the man-made lake that submerged his town. I didn’t love this book— there are passages that are more poetry than prose, the characters at times are caricatures rather than people, and the symbol (¶) at the start of every paragraph is beyond annoying, but I enjoyed it, and I recommend it for the book it is rather than the story it’s become.

The Russian Connection Stephen Osborne

T

oo much of the good stuff in Canadian history remains hidden away in dusty corners—perhaps because so much of the story of this country belongs to

ENDNOTES the history of imperialism and is too often considered to be a mere error of the past. The story of the Canadian invasion of Siberia in 1919 is known to almost no one today, yet it was known to everyone in the country when the troops selected for the invading army (eventually totalling 4,200) mutinied on the main street in Victoria and had to be whipped and beaten onto the ships that set out for Vladivostok in December 1918 and January 1919. The cause that our reluctant forces were defending by taking “freedom” to Siberia was the British Empire, that ineluctable force of colonialism. After thrashing around in Siberia for four months, the troops were brought home.

Within two more months the Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Trade Commissioner closed down their carpetbagging operations and fled back across the Pacific.

Canadian forces suffered nineteen casualties during the expedition: two by accident, sixteen by disease and one by suicide. Eighteen Canadian horses belonging to the Mounties (along with “two White Russian soldiers”) were killed by Bolshevik gunfire during an attack on a train. It seems odd today to read of the Mounties in a military invasion, but then we remind ourselves that the Mounties are a paramilitary organization and only secondarily a police force. (I recall seeing a photograph in the Mountie Museum (official name: RCMP Heritage Centre) in Regina, showing a battalion of Mounties sitting on a dock in Vladivostok, where, according to the caption, they “succeeded in achieving an advanced state of preparedness”). The Vladivostok fiasco belongs to the story of the Red Scare described last year by Daniel Francis in his book Seeing Reds (see an excerpt at geist.com). Now the Vladivostok story can be known in detail from

the excellent research of Benjamin Isitt, in his new book From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 (UBC Press), a fascinating and wide-ranging account.

In one of the many adventures in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Elif Batuman spends four days without her luggage at a Tolstoy conference at Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo Tolstoy was born and buried and where he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Throughout the conference Batuman is forced to wear the sleeping clothes that she wore on the flight—flip-flops, flannel shirt and sweatpants—causing the International Tolstoy Scholars to mistake her for a traditional Tolstoyian sworn to poverty and peasant dress. When she calls Aeroflot, the luggage clerk says to her, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase, resignation of the soul?” At breakfast, a historian studying the marginalia in Tolstoy’s copy of Kant announces that Tolstoy “didn’t write anything in the margins at all. But the book fell open to certain pages!” ­ Finally, on the last night, her luggage arrives and she is able to change her clothes for the banquet, and a “White Russian from Paris” shakes her hand and advises her to change her clothes three times during the evening, “to make up for lost time.”

Through her stay at the Tolstoy estate, Batuman develops an elaborate hypothesis: that Tolstoy was murdered with henbane, also known as Stinking Nightshade, administered by his wife Sonya or another member of the household. The argument that Tolstoy was eighty-two years old when he died and had suffered several strokes, she points out, is “exactly what would make it a perfect crime.” In support Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 79

ENDNOTES

of her position, she makes reference to Dostoevsky, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty and Tolstoy’s last play, The Living Corpse. The bus back to Moscow detours to Chekhov’s residence, where the tour guide describes the parlour as “the scene of everlasting, interesting conversations” and announces, in a shout, “here is the beloved inkwell of the great writer!” Batuman’s adventures with Russian books are multifarious, multinational, refractory and delightful.

Being Right Here Jordan Abel Jen Currin writes eloquently; she writes fervently—she writes irony and truth with alarming ease. In her latest book of poems, The Inquisition Yours (Coach House), language doesn’t stick together in the usual ways but collides with itself and springboards into unexpected and striking terrain. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Currin’s work is that the reader is lulled into her unique style through the familiar.

Take the first section of “Twelve For Constancy” for example: “Absorbed by His Black Hat / I walk with the walrus through waves of sugar. He beat me to death in / a past life. Now I can guess his middle names.

Face after face. I write / them down with my left hand.” Or these lines from “The Order Of Permanent Ideas”: “Bread-andbutter jobs, the simple foods / of monks. / He hadn’t quite escaped yet. / His paintings show that. / Selling his library: / he had to eat. / It’s completely chemical, he explained. / (His mother’s suicide.)” Currin’s writing is always surprising and often revelatory, punctuated by epiphanies and linguistic acrobatics. And although her work leans toward the avant-garde, anyone who wants to write will find this book an absolute joy to read.

Page 80 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

ENDNOTES

Outlaws Patty Osborne

W

ithin the first few pages of Pope and Her Lady by Leon Rooke (Exile Editions), we figure out that Mady is dead and Pope, Mady’s lesbian lover, has been arrested and is suspected of murder.

But since we’re dropped into the story when Pope is already at the police station, and since Pope, the narrator, is an unreliable witness who speaks (and writes) in a heavy dialect (which the cover copy tells us is from Glasgow), we need to pay close attention if we want to follow the gradual unfolding of the events that led up to Mady’s death. By the last page we’re still not certain of who did what to whom, but we’ve experienced a slice of life in the seedier parts of Glasgow, including questionable police procedures, an abandoned baby, surrogate fatherhood, bad carpentry and even some poetry. Pope and Her Lady is a touching and exuberant little mystery with a soupçon of black humour and a modicum of suspense, so don’t be a big daft eejit—jes quit yer bletherin’ and read this bloody book.

In The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Anansi), two outlaw brothers make their way from Oregon to California in search of a man they have been hired to kill. The target turns out to be a partner in an easy, surefire way to extract gold from creeks, and on the way they deal with a poisonous spider bite, a debilitating toothache, a witch’s curse, a grizzly bear, several hangovers and the murder of some people who just get in their way. The story is told by Eli, the sensitive brother, who is having second

thoughts about their line of work (he’d really like to be a store clerk) but who has trouble communicating this to his older brother, Charlie, a heavy drinker who is both smart and lucky. The understated humour builds slowly as the brothers wreak havoc on themselves and on the people they come across. Readers may find themselves grinning as the brothers get caught up in gold fever, lose almost everything and, in the end, return to the only reliable thing in their lives—their mother. Zane Grey must be turning over in his grave.

Ladies of the Court Carrie Villeneuve

I

received two copies of Taking the Lead: Strategies and Solutions from Female Coaches (University of Alberta Press) in 2010: one in August, from Basketball Ontario as part of the welcome package for a coaching clinic I attended in Toronto, and the other in December, as a holiday gift from a friend—and I read them both. Edited by Sheila Robertson, longtime editor of the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching, the book consists of eleven articles selected for their cross-section of topics—under the headings Issues, Skills, Advice. Some of these articles were a tough read, even on the second go, not just because of the mass of facts and figures throughout the Issues section, which are alternately depressing and inspiring, but also the clinical tone of the articles in the Advice section, which is more alienating than encouraging. The interesting portions include anecdotes from active high-level coaches, from wrestling to swimming, so I’ve passed on the August copy to a young woman who’s new to coaching and looking for more.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 81

ENDNOTES

Atonement in Ninety-Nine Days Stephen Osborne

Q

uestions posed in the online Reading Guide to Atonement, a magical short novel by Gaétan Soucy and translated by Sheila Fischman (Anansi): • How do you account for the fact that Gaétan Soucy wrote Atonement in just ninety-nine days?

• In your own experience of grief, have you found the world to be unreal, surreal, or ultra-real?

• How does the deformed dog, Coql’Oeil, function in the plot?

• What are gallettes (p. 46), créton (p. 34), bilboquet (p. 16), and soutane (p. 60)?

• Do you feel you need to reread the book to understand it? How does this affect your experience as a reader?

• Does forgetfulness make the world a better place?

The Reading Guide fails to mention that Atonement is the winteriest of books, and has the astonishing effect of tunnelling through the Quebec hinterland directly into the imaginary countries of Eastern Europe and back again. The dog named Coq-l’Oeil, for instance, “belonged to a beggar who died.” Other elements that emerge and re-emerge as if from dreams include: • enormous fields of white snow • a car stuck in a ditch • a dog sled • an organ • a death by freezing, and another by tuberculosis • a German family in a French-speaking village • mistaken identities • a strange dark-haired woman • the assistant Page 82 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

• the lieutenant • moonlight on snow Atonement is a small masterpiece, a triumph, as the Reading Guide might wish to put it, of the ninety-nine-day-novel.

The Beat Goes On Michael Hayward

W

ith the film version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road heading for a fall release, the summer of 2011 might be your last chance to make a personal Beat Generation pilgrimage before hoi polloi start to crowd the sacred sites. The City Lights bookstore in San Francisco is one of the obvious stopping points, as is the firespotter’s cabin perched atop Desolation Peak in the North Cascades National Park, where Kerouac spent some solitary weeks during the summer of 1956. But without a copy of Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide to the Beat Generation in America (City Lights) tucked into your rucksack you’re likely to overlook the Atlantic Whiteflash station in Manchester, Connecticut, where Kerouac pumped gas to earn a bit of money while living in nearby Hartford during the fall of 1941; or the small home at 116th and Greenwood in Seattle, where the poet Michael McClure lived with his maternal grandparents as a young boy; or Buena Vista, Colorado, where the eighteen-year-old Neal Cassady was sentenced to a year in the Colorado State Reformatory in July 1944. It seems a shame (but not entirely surprising) that the publisher’s definition of America is strictly “the United States of”—Kerouac’s Québécois roots are not mentioned, nor are any Mexican sites included although both Kerouac and William S. Burroughs lived in Mexico City at

ENDNOTES

various times during the 1950s. One can only hope that the plan is to issue separate volumes for Canada and Mexico at some later date.

ing “Trans-Species Erotics,” “Zen and Poetry” and “Current Reflections on the Earth”). The DVD includes outtakes, and footage of Snyder reading his poems.

The Etiquette of Freedom (Counterpoint) is a companion book published to accompany a recent documentary film, The Practice of the Wild, which itself presents an extended conversation

To be pedantic, Howl: A Graphic Novel (HarperCollins) is not a novel but a graphica/comics version of Allen Ginsberg’s controversial 1956 poem. The illustrations and book design are credited to Eric Drooker (who occasionally creates covers for The New Yorker). He oversaw a team of animators who produced an animated version of the poem as part of last year’s Howl film project, a movie that focusses on the Howl obscenity trial of 1957 and stars the ubiquitous James Franco as Allen Ginsberg. The graphic “novel” version of the poem takes still frames from the film’s animated sections

between the poet Gary Snyder and the novelist Jim Harrison. The documentary (a DVD of which is included with the book) was filmed in February 2009 at Piedra Blancas, a working cattle ranch on the California coast, part of the legendary Hearst Ranch acreage that surrounds the San Simeon castle of the late media baron William Randolph Hearst. (That castle was the real-life model for Citizen Kane’s Xanadu… but I digress.) It was great to eavesdrop on Snyder—leathery, lean, but still spry (he celebrated his eighty-first birthday in May 2011)—and Harrison— one-eyed and (to use the polite word) stout from a lifetime of indulgence in rich food and fine wine—while they strolled through the grasslands of the Piedra Blancas ranch talking about the origins of their art (Harrison: “that’s nice when a metaphor hits you over the head”); Buddhist practice (Snyder describing how Nepalese herders lead their horses and yaks around the stupas of Kathmandu, because “there are not too many spiritual exercises that animals can do”); and recalling moments from their shared past (Snyder describing his wife’s reaction on first meeting Harrison, surprised that this was the man who had demonstrated such sensitivity to women in his novel Dalva).

The book includes a full transcript of the film, a dozen of Snyder’s poems and the text of several other conversations that did not make the film’s final cut (includ-

and presents them full-bleed on the page, with Ginsberg’s “angel-headed hipsters” shown in vivid colour “dragging themselves through the angry streets at dawn” and “journeying to each other’s hotrodGolgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation” (to choose two of many adjective-laden lines). If you’re a poetry purist you might be offended to learn that Howl’s line breaks are shot all to hell in this edition; but for me this failing is more than offset by the way the poem has been (literally) illuminated and given new life

by Drooker’s graphic treatment.

When Lightning Strikes Lily Gontard

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ife. Death. God. Faith. Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary film Act of God touches on all four topics in an exploration of the varied experiences of people struck or affected by lightning, and their interpretations of the events. (You may know Baichwal for her 2006 documentary Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 83

ENDNOTES Manufactured Landscapes, which followed the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he explored how industry and manufacturing have changed landscapes around the world.) Fred Frith’s improvisational (and mostly) electric guitar soundtrack sets the emotional tone for a film that is patient with the stories of people whose lives have been irrevocably changed by what one interviewee refers to with reverence as “the will of God.” Frith, one of the two interviewees who has no direct experience with lightning, allows his brain to be measured by an EEG machine, as he plays improvisational music.

The EEG reveals that his brain lights up similarly to the earth during a lightning storm. The brain as the earth; the earth as the brain is a slightly forced metaphor in an otherwise subtle film. Baichwal is compassionate in speaking to the ­interviewees who live with the trauma of their experience. They are the survivors. Some were standing beside friends or family members who were killed by a strike: shoes blown open or off their feet, the smell of burning flesh, the relentless memories. There is inspiration to be found in the stories, whether it’s the sheer tenacity of the people who recover from the physical and mental effects, or their acceptance of the event and the changes wrought, or the lack of any change whatsoever. The writer Paul Auster makes a conscious effort not to transform his experience with lightning into a notable or significant event. On the other hand there is Dannion Brinkley, dead for twenty-eight minutes after being struck. A dramatically changed man, he went on to establish hospice care for American war veterans. “Lightning and change go hand in hand,” he says. Those interviewed offer insight into an event that few of us (one in three Page 84 • GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

million) will experience in our lifetime, but that still has the power to fascinate and horrify us.

The Kerouac Years Michael Hayward

V

olumes 1 and 2 of Jack Kerouac’s Selected Letters were published in 1995 and 1999 respectively; in 2008 we had The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, and in 2009 The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. The pace keeps picking up: to the preceding we can now add Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford (Viking), yet another tour through the lucrative literary estates of the two best-known Beat-era writers. We find Ginsberg in New York City in June of 1952, writing to Kerouac in Mexico City: “I don’t see how [On the Road] will ever be published, it’s so personal, it’s so full of sex language, so full of our local mythological references”; we have Ginsberg’s travelogues from Chiapas, Mexico, circa 1954, spinning seductive word-pictures to Kerouac (then living with Neal and Carolyn Cassidy in suburban San Jose, California); we have Kerouac in his “rooftop cell” in Mexico City two years later, writing to Ginsberg (now in San Francisco) about the composition of what would later be published as Desolation Angels. Of interest mainly to Beat fans and scholars, these letters are among the last gasps of a dying genre: I wonder just how much time contemporary writers devote to maintaining epistolary friendships with their peers; and of those who do, how many think to preserve their (now mainly digital) records: their tweets, their emails, their text messages. I suspect that Skype (and technologies still unknown)

will drive a fatal stake through the heart of the lengthy literary correspondence.

The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties by Helen Weaver (City Lights) shines a nostalgic light upon one brief episode in the love life of Jack Kerouac. You might well ask: “Does this slender premise deserve an entire book?”

The succinct answer is: “Yes, it (mostly) does.” The “brief episode” began one Sunday morning in November 1956, when four dishevelled backpackers—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky and his brother Lafcadio—banged on the door of the Greenwich Village apartment that Helen Weaver then shared with her friend Helen Elliott. “A raggletaggle band they were: unshaven, in clothes that looked like they had been slept in for a week—which, in fact, turned out to be the case, for they had been hitchhiking nonstop from Mexico—and each carrying a beat-up canvas rucksack on his back.” Not surprisingly (since there would be no book if things had turned out otherwise), Weaver quickly took a shine to Kerouac (“He was so beautiful!”), and before too many pages pass Kerouac is whispering sweet nothings to Weaver in French (“His Canuck patois became the language of our love”).

Weaver’s fling with Kerouac ended in midJanuary 1957—which left Kerouac sufficient time to inspire yet another memoir (Joyce Johnson’s award-winning Minor Characters) before he hopped on a freighter to Tangier on February 15; such—apparently—was the life of a (then) relatively unknown author in New York City in the fifties.

The Awakener, though, is more than reworked journal entries from someone trying to make much of “very little, long ago.” Weaver gives a nicely detailed

ENDNOTES ­ ohemian’s-eye view of life in Greenb wich Village during the 1950s and ’60s: the cold-water walk-up flats, the jazz clubs, the casual relationships, the poorly paid jobs at second-string publishing houses. In short: the literary life.

Festival Faves Michael Hayward

T

ake characters from Raymond Carver’s world and accelerate them through twenty years of declining prospects. Imagine their children and stepchildren, the product of broken ­marriages and failed common-law relationships: the next generation of outcasts schooled in the semi-derelict neighbourhoods that fringe the modern American sprawl. These are the central figures in Wells Tower’s debut collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Picador). In “Retreat,” the older of two brothers yoked together in dysfunctional fraternity recalls their boyhood rivalry over Dodi, “a mousy girl with a weak chin and a set of extra, canine teeth. She interested me not at all, yet the sight of Dodi and me together drove Stephen into a fever of jealousy. He courted her with a siege of posters, special pens, stickers, and crystal whim-whams to throw rainbows on her windowsill. The onslaught did its job, but when Dodi finally parted her troubled mouth for Stephen’s kiss, he told me years later, he balked. ‘Those teeth! It was like trying to kiss a sand shark. No idea why I was after her to begin with.’” Too many stories in the collection conclude abruptly, as if the last few pages had been lost.

This tactic in literary fiction was once a hallmark of the so-called “dirty realists,” their way of demonstrating that real life never obeys the neat denouements of

“plot”; here, however, it starts to feel as if Tower has simply written his characters into a corner and is anxious to get on with the next story. But Tower’s sentences crackle with mordant humour and spark with the unexpectedly perfect word. One of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” Tower was a surprise hit at the 2010 Vancouver International Writers Festival and is definitely a writer to watch.

I first encountered the work of the Scottish poet Robin Robertson at the 2003 Vancouver Writers Festival; judging from the author photograph in the back of The Wrecking Light (Anansi), the intervening years have worn at Robertson. The bags beneath his eyes are more pronounced, the hairline has receded slightly; more telling, though, is the gaze, which offers a weary “What next?” challenge.

The poems in The Wrecking Light seem to corroborate the impression left by that photograph: there is a bleakness to many

Artists in this Issue Taylor Brown-Evans lives and works in Vancouver. His work has been published in Matrix, the Feathertale Review and the Moosehead Anthology. Read his comic “In the Centre” at geist.com.

Alan D. Coogan is a retired lawyer, serious amateur photographer, world traveller and former boat owner.

Darrin Hagen is a writer, composer, drag performer and photographer, author of The Edmonton Queen and Tornado Magnet (Brindle & Glass). He lives in Edmonton.

For more, visit guysindisguise.com, or “skylinejunklie’s photostream” at flickr.com.

Brian Howell’s photographs have been shown across Canada and internationally, and published in the Guardian, National Post, Reader’s Digest, Western Living and Maclean’s, as well as in Geist. He is the author of five books, most recently Fame Us:

of them, a darkness at the heart. While the poems touch on a wide range of subjects and settings, there are a few recurring motifs: the many manifestations of water (the poems are grouped into three sections: Silvered Water, Broken Water and Unspoken Water); the mystery and almost magical complexity of living organisms (birds in particular); the finality of death, that vertiginous moment when blood cools and the mechanism of life runs down. This sequence from “By Clachlan Bridge” nicely captures the mood of the book: “I remember the girl / with the hare-lip / down by Clachlan Bridge, / cutting up fish / to see how they worked; / by morning’s end her nails / were black red, her hands / all sequined silver. / She unpuzzled rabbits / to a rickle of bones; / dipped into a dormouse / for the pip of its heart. / She’d open anything, / that girl.” Robertson publishes regularly in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. The Wrecking Light was shortlisted for the 2010 TS Eliot prize and is highly recommended.

Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame (Arsenal). He lives in Delta, BC, and at brianhowellphotography.com.

James Hull is an expatriate Montrealer now living in Kelowna, where he teaches history at the University of BC. He is Editor-in-Chief of Scientia Canadensis. For more, see flickr.com/photos/jamica1, or ubc.ca/okanagan/hist/faculty/james.html.

Mandelbrot is a photographer who has been writing about photography since 1990. In another life he is Stephen Osborne, publisher of Geist. See more of his work at geist.com.

TMNK, a.k.a. “Nobody,” is a New York City street artist. See more of his work at menobodyknows.com.

Andrew Van Wart is a web designer and digital photographer living in San Francisco. Visit him at ArtofSF.com and see more of his photos at flickr.com/photos/amoeba.

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 85

ENDNOTES

NOTED ELSEWHERE Recent news of Geist writers and artists, gathered from here and there. Anything else we ought to know about? Tell us: geist@geist.com.

The Sky Is Falling, by Caroline Adderson (Thomas Allen), wrote the reviewer in the Globe & Mail, “has the most memorable final chapter of anything I’ve read in years.” The reviewer at Quill & Quire wrote that it “immerses us thoroughly and believably in the different paranoia of a not-so-bygone decade,” and that Adderson is “nuanced, intelligent, and delightfully acerbic.”

A reviewer at The New Yorker finds Leeches, a novel by David Albahari, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), to be “gnarled and frustrating,” with a love affair “diverting enough to keep the plot moving.”

An NPR review calls it “a hell of a story.

Albahari has written another investigation into the dark currents flowing just beneath the surface of human experience,

and we should feel lucky to follow him down.”

The Canadian Book Review blog declared Memoir of a Good Death, by Anne Sorbie (Thistledown), “a dark and esoteric novel,” not a book “that you can rip through in a couple days,” and the Calgary Herald predicts that it “will undoubtedly cause readers to shed a few tears.”

Of the novel Pulpy and Midge, by Jessica Westhead (Coach House Books), a reviewer in the Globe & Mail wrote: “Pubs under office towers are filled with stories of the Boss from Hell. Some workers chortle over their beer. Others cry into it. In her debut novel, Jessica Westhead brings the monster boss home for dinner.”

The Eye Weekly reviewer warned readers: “Don’t let the cartoonish title fool you . . . With charming design and a storyteller’s skill, Westhead keeps her fiction fresh.”

According to Stephen W. Beattie, writing about Westhead’s And Also Sharks (Cormorant Books) in the National Post, she is a “canny” writer, “adept at providing caustically funny snapshots of lives that are twisted by loss, loneliness or boredom.” In Quill & Quire, Shawn Syms pronounces her “Canada’s Woody Allen.”

OFF THE SHELF Books received recently at the Geist office.

A retired teacher of Shakespeare takes a serum that reverses the aging process (Reliving Charley, Dean Serravalle, Oberon) and a retired hockey player drinks, flirts and takes some steps toward recovery (The Goon, Jerrod Edson, Oberon). A young hockey enforcer disappears to escape from his sins, and returns twenty years later to find that the only person he ever trusted has written a novel that mirrors his life (The Antagonist, Lynn ­Coady, Anansi).

One protagonist listens to stories of epidemics and murders and horse theft (Grandpère, Janet Romain, Caitlin Press); another discovers the sacred bond between man and horse (Soldier of the Horse, Robert W. Mackay, Touchwood).

Suggestive titles: Martha Schabas’s Various Positions (Doubleday), Jennifer Page 86• GEIST 81 • Summer 2011

Still’s Girlwood (Brick Books), Chester Brown’s memoir about being a john, Paying For It (Drawn & Quarterly). Lewis Carroll’s classic acid-adjacent journey returns (­Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Porcupine’s Quill) in the same season as a rigorously footnoted version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Broadview)—both with woodcuts!

Steven Price writes about an earthquake that devastates the west coast (Into That Darkness, Thomas Allen), and Sherrida Woodley imagines a super-virus pandemic and only one hope—a pigeon (Quick Fall of Light, Gray Dog Press).

A man solves his love-life problems with a 110-pound fully operational sex doll (Match, Helen Guri, Coach House). ­Jesus rises again at a Neil Young concert and amazes his neighbour in Thunder Bay by turning water into sangria; a man tries in vain to emulate his father’s suicide, observed by his humourless cat (Distillery Songs, Mike Spry, Insomniac).

Michael Ondaatje wrote that The Truth of Houses (Ann Scowcroft, Brick Books) is “filled with the intricacies of life,” and Guy Trebay of the New York Times referred to Greta Chapin-­McGill’s selfpublished novel, What Passes for Love, as “very polished.”

A five-foot-tall Toronto woman drives a tiny car (Up Up Up, Julie Booker, Anansi), and in 1940 a Jewish businessman, age sixty-three, attempts to transform the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, into a productive industrial complex in order to make himself indispensable to the Nazi regime (The Emperor, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Anansi).

You can learn to cook all kinds of food that almost sounds like food— except for sandwich slaw—with Julie Hasson’s Vegan Diner (Running Press).

Or prepare Great Canadian Hemp Milk and Love Muffins and Superhero Spinach Dip in Jae Steele’s Ripe from Around Here (Arsenal Pulp). For the solitary, Erickson and Erickson’s Cooking for One (Lebhar-Friedman) teaches you to cook alone in winter, spring, summer and fall. According to Daniel, the Geist bookeeper, “that’s the saddest cookbook ever.”

CROSSWORD

The GE I ST Cryptic Crossword Prepared by Meandricus Send copy of completed puzzle with name and

address to: Puzzle #81 GEIST 210-111 West Hastings St. Vancouver, B.C. V6B 1H4 Fax 604-677-6319 The winner will be selected at random from correct solutions received and will be awarded a one-year subscription to Geist or—if already a subscriber—a Geist magnet. Good luck!

ACROSS 1 Frivolous role for Satanic ceremony attendee 5 She was always so pious, with her cap and short hairdo, until she met that mail-order soldier 7 When you put it on, turn back those lace flaps to avoid making a new life for yourself (2) 10 In Vancouver it’s Winnipeg but in Winnipeg it’s Halifax, except when it’s far from England 12 We keep that old one even though he can’t remember anything 15 A lot of them get mixed up down there, like Yoruba, Igbo and Bantu too 16 You can shade the Buddhists with rice straw but some have no point on top 18 I’m thinking of a thing with something else 19 Hungry soldier on horseback loves furry toppings 21 Those bowlers couldn’t make it to the races because they had rollers on their heads 23 Movement of origins not closed (abbrev) 25 The projection from the crown was said to be completely full 27 Sweetness, you’ll find in the dorm, a job to frame the opening 30 Is he just rude or is he confused about the evacuation?

31 He’s such an original guy 33 Martin may have shopped at The Bay when he was tired of plundering French ships 35 If you want to visit Vlad, he’s always in the square 36 Englishman covered the lit hemp with that white stuff from an orange (2) DOWN 1 Are you deaf or is the cover only felt in Germany?

2 I hear the total number of red and whites is being broadcast after signal ten (abbrev)

3 Undercover at the summit, Fred used to do hot taps when he stepped on tails (2) 4 While climbing up his horse, he was harassing the voters 5 I’m trying to deal with the brick at the top of the priest’s mantle 6 When golfing, or touring, put the stiff edge in front of the cat flaps (2) 8 All the quotes cover the Canadian chefs’ toppings 9 It’s difficult with the rounded one already set in concrete 11 That rose has another name but of course it still smells good (abbrev) 13 In fact, the diversion cost this year is relative (abbrev) 14 I draw the line when you destroy my favourite blowup of those wily characters (abbrev) 17 Yes, it sounds like the man is on that big beach in France 19 A Thai had it woven and painted on top on the Queen’s islands (2) 20 No, mister, I don’t like the sound of that beach 21 Christian stylist looked new then 22 To top it all, that PC Canadian mag left the chewer and moved on 23 Of all the men, Todd was puzzled to be left behind

24 Sounds like Sue was penniless when she got to Avignon 25 Over shoulder boulder holder 26 Those gangsters put a top limit on that woman’s cover (2) 28 Rational or irrational, a number of women claim they are 29 Don’t try to barter: a hat is required but a beret is optional 32 There’s a mob of bikers in the desert 34 Now they’re looking for it in the sand The winners for puzzle 80 were Jim Lowe and Brian Goth of Elizaville, New York.

Congrats!

C A R P E T S S H I V E R S

R O U P E T Y R N E U M A S E S I T T E N C O O Y N D R O S N O G U E M I G R A M A N O R T

R V E I O N I N H M O M E E E T E S

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

O N E S

S O U L

E A R A C H I V E

R A D O N

U S A F

B A R F I N I N G

Summer 2011 • GEIST 81 • Page 87