Geist 78-79 Preview by Geist Magazine

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e keyed everything into the database in the afternoons, and unwound in the evenings with a glass of Savage Caves, a can of Kokanee, a

bottle of Moosehead beer. Twenty years passed and we had 3,383 things in the database, a tidy collection of top-notch work. But where was the pain, the struggle, the agony? Where was the hijacking of No. 8, the whole edition snatched from the loading dock by faceless

villains? Who would steal 5,325 copies of a literary magazine, said the officer attending. No one had any ideas, but one fact remains: Geist No. 8 is the most completely collected issue in the twenty-year history of the illustrious magazine that you hold in your hands at this moment, with 1,388 writers and artists of the first calibre in the database, along with 302 poems, 404 fiction pieces,740 narrative pieces, 175 comix, 295 essays, 108 “other” things, and hundreds of photographs, maps, puzzles and illustrations, reviews of 1,558 books, films, zines and comix. Some-

one said the numbers don’t add up. Well, some of the records are multiples. And don’t forget the readers, the illustrious 22,580, every one of them keyed into the database with loving attention throughout the same period, readers who followed these same writers and artists of the first calibre through 5,248 published pages, a lot of page turning, a lot of keyboarding, but no smoking, not any more, not in this century anyway. We outgrew our tiny office, and booked meeting rooms in the public library until the librarians threw us out for laughing too loudly too often: it was time to move on . . . continued on page 82 Fact & Fiction Made in Canada by Annabel Lyon t D.M. Fraser t Edith Iglauer t Paul Tough t Miriam Toews Charles Bernstein t Meandricus t Mary Meigs t Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas t TOM WALMSLEY

Soren Bondrup-Nielsen t MandELbrot t bill bissett t Yoshihiro Tatsumi t Jane Awde Goodwin t Clem and Olivier Martini t Bakir Junaideen t Edward Hoagland t Jennica Harper t Patricia Young

www.geist.com published by The Geist Foundation publisher Stephen Osborne senior editor Mary Schendlinger publishing assistant Michal Kozlowski associate editor C.E. Coughlan executive director Patty Osborne circulation manager Kristin Cheung web editor Ross Merriam editorial assistants Sarah Hillier, Chelsea Novak administrative assistant Daniel Zomparelli interns Becky McEachern, Lauren Ogston, Dan Post editorial board Kevin Barefoot, Bartosz Barczak, Trevor Battye, Jill Boettger, Marisa Chandler, Todd Coyne, Brad Cran, Laurie Edwards, 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, Billeh Nickerson, Eric Peterson, Leah Pires, Leah Rae, Debby Reis, Craig Riggs, Kris Rothstein, Norbert Ruebsaat, Jane Silcott, Paul Tough, Michelle van der Merwe, Carrie Villeneuve, Josh Wallaert, Kathy Vito, Kaleigh Wisman, Barbara Zatyko accountant Mindy Abramowitz, cga advertising & marketing Clevers Media cover Steffen Quong web architects cascadiamedia.ca composition Vancouver Desktop distribution Magazines Canada printed in canada by Hemlock Printers first subscriber Jane Springer managing editor emeritus Barbara Zatyko Support the Geist Writers and Artists Fund: geist.com/donate

Volume 19

Number 78/79

Fall/Winter 2010

NOTES & DISPATCHES

Stephen Osborne

Shots Fired

Veronica Gaylie 12

Memory Test

Jane Silcott 14

Lurching Man

Jane Awde Goodwin 16

Dear Doctor

Megan Mueller 17

Vladimir

Taylor Brown-Evans 18

In the Centre

FINDINGS

Joseph O’Connor, Catherine 21 Owen, Olivier Martini, Bakir Junaideen, Edward Hoagland, Jennica Harper, Tim Inkster, Don McLeod, George A. Walker and Frank Newfeld, Patricia Young, Shane Rhodes, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, François Mandeville, Sarah Leavitt, Roger Epp, Harry Karlinsky, Renee Rodin, Susan Telfer, Jeffery Donaldson, Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, Gillian Jerome

From a Growl to a Scream, Father’s Day, Bitter Medicine, The Butler’s Room, Hotcakes on a String, Strange Time, Flowers for Hitler Was a Peculiar Book, Extinction, Circle the Wagons: In Ink, Drifting Life, The Cheating Gambler, The Agony and the Impasse, Waiting For Sleep, Moniyaw Treaty, Evolution of Objects, Home Team, Funeral Fire, Hereafters, Like a Belly Dancer, Tenement Song

COMMENT

Stephen Henighan 121 The BookNet Dictatorship Daniel Francis 125 Revising Mr. Bennett Alberto Manguel 127 Going to Hell RETROSPECTIVE

Authors old and new

81 Selections from 20 years of Geist

DEPARTMENTS

4 Letters Mandelbrot

7 In Camera

The Usual Gang 131 Endnotes Meandricus 143 Puzzle Melissa Edwards 144 Caught Mapping

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FEATURES

Flowchart 41 Christopher runs. leannej He runs everywhere. Sometimes he wears no shoes.

Eye for Detail 42 A profile of Edith Iglauer Annabel Lyon She has been writing for more than seventy years, and her dense, detailed style of description has a quality of almost photographic accuracy and deep care. Guanacaste Journal 54 We are intent on leisure Evelyn Lau The pool, the food, the drinks, the artificial waterfall . . . Letters from Josef 56 Joseph Meyer, or Josef Mengele? Ann Diamond At age eleven, a young man from Pennsylvania realized that he was a reincarnated Nazi war criminal

Motion Sensitive 62 Stories like lines of wash M.A.C. Farrant The time we buried Daddy is another story. The grave was too shallow and then it rained

Postcard Lit 64 500 words or less Honourable Mentions 6th Annual Postcard Story Contest Tilly Starblanket 70 “Are you an Indian squaw?” Kelly Shepherd Tilly says that when people try to guess her ethnicity they are always wrong, because they see what they want to see and Natives aren’t exotic

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Red Scare 77 Our winter of protest Daniel Francis Canada on the brink of a Bolshevik revolution? Sholem Paints 119 The Ugly Painting Competition Sheila Heti So ugly, Sholem couldn’t look at it Cover design by Steffen Quong. Geist is printed on eco-friendly papers with vegetable-based inks.

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LETTERS

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Readers Write

Geist is published four times a year by The Geist Foundation. Contents copyright © 2010 The Geist Foundation. All rights reserved. Subscriptions: in Canada: Individuals $24 (4 issues); Institutions $31; in the United States: $32; elsewhere: $32. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Correspondence and inquiries: subscriptions@geist.com, advertising@geist.com, letters@geist.com, editor@geist.com. Include sase with Canadian postage or irc with all submissions and queries. #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1h4. Submission guidelines are available at geist.com. issn 1181-6554. Geist swaps its subscriber list with other cultural magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you prefer not to receive these mailings. Publications Mail Agreement 40069678 Registration No. 07582 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, #210 – 111 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Canada v6b 1h4. Email: geist@geist.com Tel: (604) 681-9161, 1-888-geist-eh; Fax: (604) 677-6319; Web: geist.com Geist is a member of Magazines Canada and the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and available on microfilm from University Microfilms Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The Geist Foundation receives assistance from private donors, the Tula Foundation, the Canada Council, the B.C. Arts Council and the B.C. Gaming Branch. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) for our publishing activities.

special thanks to the tula foundation

“S

E L E M E NT A L S enjoyed Lynn Coady’s short story “The Natural Elements” (Geist 76 ) so much, I actually resubscribed to Geist. But I take exception to Cal, the main character, being called “a well-meaning schlub” by Steve Fahnestalk (Letters, No. 77). To me, Cal is a man a bit adrift in a world where the rules and certainties he grew up believing to be written in stone turned out to have been etched on ice and melted away with the years. (And when I look at the young men of today, I think we may have lost something valuable.) What particularly struck me was the compassion Coady telegraphed for this man, who might be thought of as old-fashioned, even sexist. I couldn’t help but feel he was human and good, even if I don’t agree with his world view. So not a schlub. —Beverly Akerman, Montreal At geist.com: “The Natural Elements.”

ABSENT FRI ENDS hanks to Julie Vandervoort for sharing her heart (“Sewing Cabinet,” No. 74). All of us who have lost a mother or a loved one will immediately understand what she is talking about. How our lives, like it or not, are woven with others’ lives, and in

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OH, T HE BOWERI NG FEELI NG till a Writer” by George Bowering, at geist.com (from The Box, published by New Star Books), about being a writer and a spy, picked me up with the first sentence and carried me through the paragraphs with as much suspense and anticipation as the Grand Chute on the Des Moines River once whisked my canoe from top to bottom. Nice pic, too. Hope you still have those shoes, George. —Bruce McDougall, Toronto At geist.com: “Still a Writer” and other work by George Bowering.

www.geist.com

their absence we need to fill in for them, with our memories that spring as they never did before. Objects and spaces acquire a new meaning. The question arises: Why live distanced from the ones we love? The ones who are still here, in this transient journey like us? I like the way the story flows in psychological time more than linear time. It gives the narrator a tri-dimensional, human quality and the reader can follow her in every heartbeat. —Maja L., Tulum, Mexico At geist.com: “Sewing Cabinet” and other work by Julie Vandervoort.

LINGUISTIC PEST CONTROL arah Leavitt’s cartoon “The Authoritative Field Guide to Language Vermin” (No. 76) is the most super, if visual, bit of language lessoning I have seen/heard in a lo-o-o-o-o-ng time. —Janet E. Smith, Edmonton At geist.com: The field guide, and other works by Sarah Leavitt. Read an excerpt from her new graphic memoir, Tangles, in this issue.

WAY OUT OF THE PARK hanks for “Kosmic Baseball,” Brad Robinson’s memoir of counterculture baseball in Vancouver during the 1970s. Like Robinson, I was writing for the Georgia Straight in 1970, and played in the Kosmic League, at Connaught and McBride Parks. A couple of memories. First, an all-female team called the Eager Beavers had a centre fielder who, in desperation during a lopsided mismatch, threw her glove up at a fly ball that was hopelessly out of her range. The glove actually caught the ball some twenty feet in the air and fell to earth, and she attempted to throw the runner out at third base (in vain). Second, if I remember right, Flex Morgan and the Mock Heroics had a

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catcher who wore pants that were split in the crotch, and he played sans cup or underwear. Anything to distract the pitcher . . . —Ted Laturnus, Delta, BC At geist.com: “Kosmic Baseball.”

C L I M A T E WA R S started “Phony War,” Stephen Henighan’s opinion piece (No. 77)— about the cataclysmic damage being done by climate change—with reluctance, only because I have been listening for some time to the low hum of rising panic that rests on the horizon, waiting to arrive full-blown and terrifying. I did not want to read more doom and gloom. I really didn’t. But Henighan is a compelling writer, and an intelligent, reasoned argument is difficult to resist; and so, I read the whole thing. And I agree with him, absolutely. Nonetheless, I will soon board an airplane and head to Texas (one of the future desert states), where our only grandson lives with his parents. I am going to celebrate a wedding—his parents’, in fact. And I will look around at all the drive-through businesses (even the liquor and beer stores) and lack of sidewalks and limited public transit and keep my thoughts (mostly) to myself. We will be there to celebrate life. But what of our young grandson’s future? Thirty years (according to Henighan)? Please be wrong. Thank you for the article. And how I wish I hadn’t read it. But like all things truly important and difficult, it will stick with me in ways that others on the same topic have not. Instead, they have simply drifted away. —Ruth E. Walker, Whitby ON At geist.com: “Phony War” and more work by Stephen Henighan. And, for that matter, more work by Ruth E. Walker.

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POSTCARD L I T ttention, Geist readers who didn’t get the connection between the story and the postcard image for “Blue Eye” by Donna Kane (No. 77): check out the magazine cover on the far right. There’s a single blue eye that looks permanently open. Subtle connection, but what a start for a story. Imagine if that eye were in your stroke-damaged body. —Heidi Greco, Surrey BC

ood riddance to Louis, I say (“Blue Eye”). Never trust a guy who keeps his eyes shut. Do you remember Jean McKay’s story about the teacher she had in elementary school who made the kids carry a clean teaspoon in their pockets in case one of their eyeballs ever popped out, so they could scoop it up and plunk it back in? Can’t pull off that little trick unless you’re looking. Same with life. —George Sipos, Salt Spring Island BC The postcard story “Men Gone Mad” by Richard Harris—so damn funny. Is that a teapot in your pocket or . . . —Jason Tannenbaum, Bronx NY At geist.com: Winners of the 6th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest, and entry information on the 7th annual contest, underway now. SPELL CHEQUER was going to let you have the last word on the spelling of “plough” (“plow,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, your house lexicon) when, just yesterday, reading Jack Hodgins’s A Passion for Narrative, I noticed that on page 213 he uses the word ploughing. I believe that the Canadian Oxford would be well advised to take its spelling preferences from living Canadian authors—who, I’ve

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noticed, generally agree with the way I was taught to spell in Canadian schools. —Anne Miles, Gibsons BC

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VOGON’S A DVOCATE n her blog, your editor Becky McEachern objects to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the One Book, One Vancouver title chosen by the Vancouver Public Library. To play Vogon’s advocate for a moment: I agree that it’s hard to drag anything Vancouver-specific out of this thirtyyear-old British book, but I have to agree with the selection on principle. It’s an incisive, funny, whimsical book whose satirical relevance has, if anything, grown over time—the titular handheld, networked computer that sprang from Adams’s fertile imagination in 1979 is very much a reality today, and in fact it’s hard for us to appreciate how fantastical it would have seemed when originally published. Now, you can argue that public reading events should focus on up-and-coming, or local, or capital-L literary authors (or preferably all three) and ignore lighter, popular fare such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide, but that attitude is so prevalent that it actually makes a popular book a daring choice. I’m reminded of recent criticism of the work of Anne Michaels (as one of Canada’s ten most overrated authors) in the National Post: “They’re the All-Bran of CanLit: books that people read because they think they’re good for them, not out of any expectation of pleasure or enjoyment.” Surely we can allow ourselves a break from the All-Bran and enjoy a nice meal of fish and chips every now and again instead? One more thing: McEachern’s blog entry on the subject was posted October 10, 2010, binary-42 day (10/10/10 = 101010 = 42 in binary notation). That only rolls around once a century. —Brook Jones, Vancouver

SENSE OF PLACE aving grown up in eastern Ontario, I was pleased to see Apple Hill included on the “Beatles Map of Canada” (Jill Mandrake and Melissa Edwards, No. 77). My buddy and I used to bicycle there from Alexandria to visit his grandparents. However, you appear to have located it north of the Ottawa River, in “La Belle Province.” Did I miss something? Has Harper ceded that part of Ontario to Quebec in his crazed quest for the Quebec vote? —Peter Dawes, Edmonton Melissa Edwards replies: Hm, looks like there are two, and I chose the less culturally significant one. Go to http://ow.ly/2qrxL to see the one in Quebec. For more on the Geist maps of Canada, see geist.com/atlas.

CANUCK-SPEAK More grist (geist?) to the mill for the Cross-Canada Phrasebook-in-Progress, a trove of words, names and turns of phrase that explore regional differences in Canadian English. I’ve noticed that B.C. and Ontario have both common and different terms for putting your old stuff outside for sale. In Vancouver, I’ve seen “yard sale,” “backyard sale” and, on rare occasions, “lawn sale.” Ontario uses “yard sale,” “lawn sale” and “garage sale.” Is there a place in Canada that calls the sorry display of mouldy items what it really is: junk sale? —Ken Klonsky, Vancouver 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.

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IN CAMERA

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COLLECTING

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rom: “100 Shopping Carts,” a workin-progress by Brian Howell, who since June 2010 has been photographing shopping carts in Vancouver used by street vendors engaged in scavenging, recycling and related economic activity. Howell purchases the carts outright, with their contents, so that he can photograph them under controlled conditions in his studio. He pays the prices

asked by the vendors, who say they have no difficulty acquiring replacement carts whenever they need them. The shopping cart on the right-hand end of the middle row was retained by its owner, a man named Cowboy, as it contains his personal belongings rather than commercial goods. The two new bicycles in the cart in the bottom row were returned by the photographer to their young

owners, whom he found on craigslist. Brian Howell’s work has appeared frequently in Geist. It can be seen at geist.com, along with images of the tent on his front lawn in which he stores his growing collection of shopping carts (numbering “just under forty” at press time). His publications include Fame Us: Celebrity Impersonators & the Cult(ure) of Fame. —Mandelbrot

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NOTES & DISPATCHES

Shots Fired STEPHEN OSBORNE

What makes a real city real?

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n the afternoon of September 11, 2004, in a Lebanese café on Hastings Street near Victory Square in Vancouver, a heavy-set older man in a windbreaker and baseball cap who had been chatting quietly with the proprietor began to speak up in a remarkable gravelly voice on the subject of what was wrong with this city; or, to put it another way, he said to the proprietor in

measured tones, I can tell you what this city needs, what this town doesn’t have nearly enough of, he said, is more shots fired. He paused with these words and it was clear now that he was addressing not only the proprietor, an amiable man in an embroidered flat-topped cap who was standing behind the counter, but everyone in the café, young women and men sitting alone or in pairs at tiny

photographs: victory square, steve dynie, dyniephoto.ca 0

tables and along the tiny counter, students from the downtown university campus and the film school at the end of the block, with their books and magazines and hushed conversations, all of whom ceased talking or reading or staring out the window to look over at the proprietor and the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker, who seemed, to me at least, to be an unlikely connoisseur of baba ghanouj, tabbouleh, hummus or the falafel wrapped in pita that lay on the plate before him; he held a folded newspaper in his hand as if it were a pointer or a wand; he was forceful but not unfriendly; in fact he was smiling. The proprietor remained attentive but uncommitted; he seemed to be a man of considerable equanimity. Earlier when I had asked for a bowl of lentil soup, for example, from my stool at the other end of the counter, he met my gaze solemnly with a nod that seemed to seal a pact between us that would never be broken. Perhaps it was his trusting and at the same time conspiratorial manner that encouraged the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker to speak so forthrightly to a room full of strangers, all of whom had fallen silent at the words more shots fired, and remained silent as he went on to describe a recent journey in a pickup truck along the coastal highway through California, Oregon and Washington, accompanied by his faithful dog Alf, whom he referred to as his best living friend. Now in this city here, he said, as he returned to his theme in the same measured tones, you got a fine city here, don’t get me wrong, a good city, a good-looking city, but you can’t call it a real city. You

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go to L.A. to get real, he said. As much as I admire this city, he said, but this city is not real like L.A. is real. That’s where what you need is more shots fired. Say what you want about L.A., but you go to L.A., you get shots fired, lots of shots fired. None of the other diners offered to contradict or to affirm these remarks delivered with such authority by the gravelly-voiced man, who now looked confidently along the counter toward me and toward the other diners, inviting a response from any who wished to speak. But no one spoke; perhaps, being young film students and university students, and a marijuana advocate or two from the paraphernalia shop across the street, they felt that the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker was in some disquieting way right in his call for more shots fired; but to agree with him would be to collude in an unpleasant truth about ideas of urbanity and the city, and to argue with him would be to expose oneself as naïve and foolish. Eventually a young man at the front of the café spoke up, only to ask the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker if the truck parked outside was the one he had been speaking of, and if so, would it be cool for him to go out and say hello to the dog? Better than that, I’ll introduce you personally, said the gravelly-voiced man, and he and the young man stepped out onto the sidewalk and no more was heard, during the remainder of my time in the Lebanese café, of L.A., shots fired and/or the more general question of the real in cities. In another moment all was nearly as it had been when I entered the Lebanese café, low conversations, occasional eye contact, falafels and lentils, baba ghanouj, but one could still feel an after-effect lingering in the air, a continuing reverberation, the consequence

and the promise or the possibility of needing more, more shots perhaps, more shots fired. The lentil soup was, unsurprisingly, superb, thick and savoury, possibly the best lentil soup I had ever tasted. I slipped along the counter and scooped the newspaper left behind by the gravelly-voiced man and read on the arts page an account of the International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest, which had been founded thirty-four years earlier, shortly before closing time in the Piccadilly Bar, three blocks from where I was sitting, followed by a report of the City of Vancouver Book Award, which had been won by Maggie de Vries for Missing Sarah, a biography of her sister, one of the twenty-seven or possibly fifty-six or even sixty-five women taken from the streets a few blocks away from the Lebanese café and possibly murdered on the pig farm in Coquitlam or somewhere nearby over a period of years while the police failed to investigate or even to keep an accurate tally of

the missing or the dead. The question of what made a real city real, as implied by the remarks of the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker, had coloured my attention, which I could feel seeking signs of the real in the news of the day. The front page carried a so-called exposé of the business holdings of the Hell’s Angels, which included nightclubs, coffee shops, a travel company, trucking firm, supermarket and chocolate factory, but clearly the business dealings of the Hell’s Angels were not an element

of the real in the sense that the man in the windbreaker had intended and as I think all of us in the café, fellow diners, the proprietor and myself, had understood it while he was speaking; and in fact the Hell’s Angels story in the newspaper was so long and so boring that no one, not me and certainly not the gravelly-voiced man who had been flourishing the same newspaper like a wand during his address, and who, as I left the café and turned down Hastings Street toward Victory Square, was out on the sidewalk looking into the passenger window of his pickup truck with the young man who wanted to say hello to the dog Alf, would be likely to read it to the end.

ow did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life, I wondered: during our lives in cities, I mean, in this city. What can we mean by more shots fired, words never spoken in cafés or restaurants, or on public transit, but nevertheless words to conjure with, words that conjure a world of dark passages and lurid behaviours; a matter of aesthetics, I wanted to say as I walked down Hastings from the Lebanese café on my birthday, although I had forgotten that it was my birthday, a cloudy Saturday, a day well suited to walking along with nothing much on one’s mind. Who, after all, yearns for shots fired, I wanted to ask or to have asked, in the Lebanese café. Surely, had I thought of it in time, I would have or could have pointed out to the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker that an apparent lack of shots fired, encountered after a journey along the winding, scenic, bucolic highway up from L.A. along the Pacific coast and over the border, was in fact a lack of reports of shots fired; and doesn’t the

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phrase shots fired refer to shots not heard by those who read or hear reports of shots fired, a phrase that itself emerges from textures woven by journalists, photographers, novelists, movie makers, news reporters and the like, whose trade is to wrap a veil of the real around the unreal ordinary city, so to speak, always with one proviso: that the real remain at a distance, just around the corner or over on another side of town, a darker place of mysterious byways and elusive histories, such as the Downtown Eastside, which lay beyond Hamilton Street at the Hastings Street intersection where I paused and looked over into Victory Square at the cenotaph rising up and the grounds around it recently terraced in such a way as to render them unsuitable for the tents of the homeless. I felt confounded by this question of the real, and no matter what I imagined myself saying to the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker, or to the other diners in the Lebanese café, I couldn’t shake the feeling that indeed what cities needed, in order to fill an obscure but real requirement, lay in the requirement more shots fired. The facade of the cenotaph in Victory Square bears a text carved in gleaming capital letters coated with gold paint that I often recited to myself when I was in the neighbourhood: IS IT NOTHING TO YOV ALL YE THAT PASS BY. Now I said it aloud: YOV. What kind of city says YOV when rebuking its citizens? Beside me, on the wall of an empty bank building, hung a bronze plaque memorializing the land commissioner for the CPR, a man named Hamilton, who, in 1885, according to the plaque-writer, IN THE SILENT SOLITUDE OF the Primeval Forest drove a wooden stake in the earth and commenced to measure an empty land into the streets of Vancouver. Here was an urbanity that

denied the gravelly-voiced man, a vision of the city emerging from silence, from an unpeopled vastness, inoculated with a wooden stake against the lurid, the criminal, the world of shots fired, of reality, of any reality at all. I crossed Hamilton Street and Victory Square and went up to the entrance to the six-storey building on the corner that had been head office of the daily newspaper, to read another, smaller plaque memorializing the Reading of the Riot Act by the Mayor, in 1935, on the steps of the cenotaph, before a thousand or more unemployed men who were refusing to work in labour camps for ten cents a day. The photograph on the front page of the newspaper shows the mayor from above, brandishing a sheet of paper, presumably the Act itself, on the cenotaph steps surrounded by police officers armed with tear-gas canisters and truncheons; junior reporters and photographers had merely to hang out of the windows in the six-storey building to get their materials for the big story. The senior reporters were with the chief of police over in the courthouse on Georgia Street, attending the even bigger story of his trial for corruption and conspiracy, a lurid tale of highlevel cops in low-level dives, joyrides in the police boat with notorious procurers and known white-slavers, late-night feasts of chicken, rolls, whisky, beer, champagne, and the bagpipe-playing of a constable named Johnson—sensational events for a city born in empty silence; for some weeks traces of the lurid, alluring world implied by more shots fired can be found in the newspapers of the day, but not on the memorial plaques. Since that Saturday in September, I am often reminded of the gravellyvoiced man in the Lebanese café by newspaper headlines and radio newscasts. A few days ago the local CBC

news described a jewellery store robbery as a brazen heist, a phrase that belongs with shots fired in a certain lexicon, and indeed, the announcer went on to report both a shot fired and then more shots fired. Closer to my home, during the first week of September 2010, several headlines reported a murdered man found stuffed in trunk in a parking lot miles away from the murder scene identified by police as a warehouse on Victoria Diversion, around the corner from where I live on the east side. Stuffed in trunk: were there shots fired as well, I wondered. On Saturday, the 11th of September, I went for a birthday walk along Victoria Diversion, a two-block stretch of cinder-block and wood-frame warehouses, and found the crime scene, a crumbling single-storey structure housing a liquidation centre identified by hand-painted signs offering bicycles, cans of paint, decorations, tables, chairs and other liquidation items for sale wholesale to the public, at enormous discounts. I approached the entrance and peered into a dark interior lined with wooden shelving and cardboard boxes spilling over onto the floor, and felt my neighbourhood enjoined in the texture of urbanity revealed briefly in the Lebanese café: a world of shots fired, bodies stuffed in trunks, decrepit warehouses, empty bank buildings, corrupt police chiefs; as well as the distant scream of sirens, helicopters throbbing overhead late at night, signs of the real that the gravelly-voiced man in the windbreaker, having emerged from the wilderness accompanied by the dog Alf, had prophesied on my birthday in the Lebanese café.

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Stephen Osborne is publisher and editorin-chief 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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