FEATURING
Richard Ford Marcello Di Cintio Lisa Moore Timothy Caulfield Marina Endicott Bruce Grierson Marni Jackson Timothy Taylor
Stories That Connect
FALL 2010
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Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
Photo by David Gluns
– E. M. FORSTER, HOWARD’S END
Timothy Caulfield
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FEATURES
THE SCIENCE FILE
Twisted
If genetics is the key to a better future, where’s the evidence to prove it? Marcello Di Cintio
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HUNTING AND GATHERING
Fellow Traveller
Ron Murdock might just represent something in all of us. The question is, what?
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Perceptions of Promise: Biotechnology, Society and Art
In April 2010, a group of visual artists, biomedical scientists and scholars met for a three-day conference in Banff. No one was quite sure what was meant to happen, but people from around the world showed up anyway.
ON THE
COVER MARILÉNE OLIVER “THE KISS 3”
Mariléne Oliver’s multimedia work explores bio-medical imaging technology. This image is a composite of scans of the artist and her husband kissing inside an MRI machine. Please visit www.marileneoliver.com for more information.
INTERSECTIONS
FICTION
Marina Endicott
50 The Belle Auroras
An exclusive excerpt from an upcoming novel by the Giller-nominated author of Good To a Fault. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Clock = artwork by Cameraman and Emma, photo by Byron Dauncey
SPAN
Timothy Taylor
07 Rabbit and the Faith of Street Art
There needs to be mystery in life. We need myths and magic.
Marni Jackson
10 Hitchhiker
Richard Ford
12 Rereading
Sophie Lees
Girls from Canada were contradictory creatures in 1969. A different hunger.
14 Welcome the Fall The skinny on fat.
Bruce Grierson
16 Dam It All
Robert Kroetsch
18 Is This a Real Story or Did You Make It Up?
Castor sisyphus canadensis. Sitting at my computer, I realized that I was Charlie Aspen. NOTEBOOKS
John England
20 Radical Emptiness
Silence is the real endangered species. POETRY
Nathan Baker Miki Fukuda Don Domanski Julia McCarthy
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Catalogues for Bruegel Wolfsong Soliloquy of a Field Mouse Biodiversity is the Mother of All Beauty SOUNDINGS
Jocelyn Brown
55 Big, Round and Smooth:
Cooking as a Sensual Science Stalking the science of deliciousness.
Lee Henderson
57 Unrequited Dub
Paul Matwychuk
59 Vavavoomology
Are electronica’s hottest beatmakers the torch singers of 2010? What makes a girl who looks like that get mixed up in science? BRIDGES
Lisa Moore
62 Between the North Bridge and
the King George IV Bridge
Snapshots from the bridges of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 4
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EDITOR’S NOTE
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EDITOR Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Lynn Coady CONSULTING EDITOR Paul Wilson VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Sean Caulfield GUEST POETRY EDITOR Don Domanski CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Deborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio Lisa Gregoire Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson Lisa Moore Timothy Taylor Chris Turner CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Joyce Byrne Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson WEBSITE Gunnar Blodgett Duncan Kinney UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carriere BUSINESS MANAGER Erin Berney NEW MEDIA INTERNS Ali Grotkowski Mihaela Ilovan Eighteen Bridges is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, was provided by Venture Publishing Inc. For subscription information please visit www.eighteenbridges.com
Welcome to Eighteen Bridges Magazine Here’s what we learned: starting a magazine is not as easy as you might think. We knew what we were getting into (approximately), that in the current climate starting a magazine—one with a masthead and art and photos and everything else that involves showcasing vivid, absorbing, long-form narrative journalism— was tantamount to setting off from base camp at the start of avalanche season. We understood that. At least, we thought we did. We set out anyway, because we were angry that Saturday Night died. Because so many of the best writers in the country – National Magazine Award winners, international award winners, bestsellers – were having trouble finding places to tell their stories. We did it because so many magazines were narrowing their mandates to pinpoints so small you couldn’t even call them niches. And we did it because space restrictions were impinging on the writer’s world; sure, brevity is the soul of wit, but scope is often the soul of a good story. As we developed our incontrovertible strategy for success, boom became bust in Alberta. Reality set in, the reality of red tape, of resources (human and fiscal) disappearing, of our own energy and desire waxing and waning. But, astoundingly, the occasional setback became
irrelevant to a process that had gained its own momentum through the many faithful allies we had garnered along the way. A bridge had begun to construct itself. Without our realizing when exactly it had happened, Eighteen Bridges, the magazine, was no longer merely an idea. And it was no longer just our idea, either. And so we present our first issue. Many of the stories in this issue take on one aspect or another of the role science plays in our culture. Our goal is to have a loose theme with every future issue, but to leave room for other stories by writers dying to share what they know and feel. Another goal is to have future issues. We hope to publish as a quarterly, but we will adjust our schedule according to your response. (Do we need to spell it out? Please subscribe.) For our first issue, we mostly wanted to say that we created this magazine for a very simple reason: because we love stories that connect. We believe that a society cannot thrive without them, and that we will be all the poorer if we lack spirited outlets to share stories that inform, entertain and sustain. We believe this, and we hope you feel the same way.
The Editors
A THANK YOU: The first issue of Eighteen Bridges magazine could not have happened without the contributions of many people and organizations, and we owe them a great debt of thanks – Carl Amrhein, Rob Appleford, Erin Berney, Joyce Byrne, Marie Carriere, Timothy Caulfield, Sean Caulfield, Cathy Condon, Garrett Epp, Madeleine Floyd, Pamela Freeman, Craille Maguire Gillies, Scott Graham, Andrew Greenshaw, Don Groot, Robyn Hyde-Lay, Laird Hunter, Patricia Johnston, Gary Kachanoski, Ruth Kelly, Eva Kilinska, Kim Larson, Stephanie Laskoski, Jared Majeski, Barbara Poole, Peter Poole, Luis Schang, Doug Stollery, Catherine Swindlehurst, the University of Alberta (the Faculty of Arts, the Health Law Institute, the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Office of the Vice President of Research, CIRCA, and TAPoR), Paul Wilson, Daniel Woolf, Oliver Yonge and Heather Zwicker. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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CONTRIBUTORS
NATHAN BAKER lives in Toronto. His work has recently appeared in PRISM international 48:4. DEREK BESANT is a Calgary artist who has represented Canada in numerous exhibitions including Art as Culture International Video Biennale, Galleria Via Bartolomeo, Rome, 2009. JOCELYN BROWN lives in Edmonton. Her book The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1-19 was recently published. PAUL CASSAR is a doctoral student in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. His research is focused on Stem Cell Biology and Functional Genomics. TIMOTHY CAULFIELD is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and
Record Technique. He is a contributing editor to Border Crossings magazine, and is based in Vancouver.
BERND HILDEBRANDT is a freelance designer/artist who has exhibited multi-media, text and image works in a wide range of solo and group exhibitions and design projects. LIZ INGRAM has exhibited prints and print installations in over twenty solo and duo exhibitions, and over 200 group exhibitions around the world. MARNI JACKSON is a Toronto writer whose most recent book, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, has just been published.
Policy at the University of Alberta. His first book, an investigation into the world of health science, will be published by Penguin Canada in the fall of 2011.
ROBERT KROETSCH, author of more than twenty-five books, is a poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent volume of poetry is Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. He lives in retirement in Leduc, Alberta.
SEAN CAULFIELD and ROYDEN MILLS have extensive independent
SOPHIE LEES is a graduate of UBC’s Creative Writing program and an
careers exhibiting prints, drawings and sculptures nationally and internationally. Recently they worked collaboratively creating Through Destinations for the Imagining Science exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta, 2009.
instructor at Macewan University.
SHONA MACDONALD, originally from Scotland, now lives and works in
MARCELLO DI CINTIO is the author of Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey
the United States. She has exhibited her paintings and drawings across North America and Europe with solo exhibitions including Here, There, Everywhere at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Into the Heart of Iran. His next book is about communities around the world living in the shadows of walls, fences and other ‘hard’ barriers.
PAUL MATWYCHUK is the general manager of NeWest Press in Edmon-
DON DOMANSKI was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and
ton, as well as the film and theatre reviewer for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog The Moviegoer can be found at mgoer.blogspot.com.
now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He won the 2007 Governor General’s Award for poetry for his book All Our Wonder Unavenged.
JULIA MCCARTHY is originally from Toronto, but has lived in Alaska,
MARINA ENDICOTT is an Edmonton writer whose novel Good to a Fault
Georgia, Norway and South Africa. Her two poetry collections are Stormthrower and Return from Erebus.
was a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize, a Canada Reads selection, and a Commonwealth Prize winner. The Belle Auroras will be published by Doubleday in 2011.
ERIC MESLIN is director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics,
JOHN ENGLAND is a professor at the University of Alberta and the Northern Chair for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
LISA MOORE is the author of February, recently long-listed for the Man
RICHARD FORD was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lives on the coast of Maine and in New Orleans. His most recent novel is The Lay of the Land. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages.
MIKI FUKUDA lived in Tokyo and Long Island, New York, before settling in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She has work forthcoming in CV2.
DAVID GRANT is a medical student and Satter Scholar at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. His graduate research focused on drug delivery for bone tissue engineering.
BRUCE GRIERSON is a Vancouver writer who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, Explore, Saturday Night, Vancouver Magazine, Western Living, Popular Science and many others. 6
LEE HENDERSON is the author of The Man Game and The Broken
EIGHTEEN BRIDGES FALL 2010 WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
and is Associate Dean for Bioethics, Professor of Medicine, Medical and Molecular Genetics, Public Health and Philosophy. Booker Prize, as well as Open and Alligator, both nominated for the Giller Prize. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
MARILÉNE OLIVER lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has exhibited at such venues as The Royal College of Art and Design, London, and The Crypt, Kings Cross, also in London. DANIELA SCHLÜTER has exhibited her work worldwide, but most frequently in Canada, the United States and Germany. TIMOTHY TAYLOR is a novelist and journalist. His novel The Blue Light Project comes out March 2011.
CLINT WILSON is an Edmonton-based artist and Head Preparator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. He has exhibited at venues such as the Nanaimo Art Gallery, the Carnegie Art Center in Buffalo and The Winnipeg Art Gallery.
SPAN Reporting back
RABBIT AND THE FAITH OF STREET ART
Faith Wall 2 = artwork by Rabbit, photo by Byron Dauncey
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Their names are code names. Cameraman, Rich S, Jerm9, Rabbit, Take5, AO1, Emma. Here are the vital introductory details. They work together and separately. They want both recognition and anonymity. They’re street artists but they’re not Banksy or Shepard Fairey, who they admire yet also despise on occasion, too. They work at night, but I met each of them first during the day: another telling detail. I became curious about them the way you do looking out a window and seeing somebody walking on the roof of the building next door, which is where I saw Rabbit for the first time, hunched down among the galvanized roof ducts and fans, the litter and the weeds. A few weeks later, I saw him on the street and my curiosity deepened. So I followed him from my daytime work into his work at night. A few evenings out there in the alleys, sharing smokes and a pint bottle of whiskey, watching the art go up on brick walls and dumpsters, on plywood hoardings over long-dead buildings down on Main and Terminal streets. I watched this action in Vancouver, but it was and is happening all over the urban west. Art going up in the darkness. Posters, banners, photographs, stencils. Once, a huge mural involving grass Cameraman picked out of a ditch in East Van and glued to the side of a popular Gastown bar, shaping this organic material into a border around a photograph of himself with many arms, like a street art Kali. But as I watched, I was always the person who worked during the daytime. And they were always the ones who worked at night. That’s the way it would always be between us.
2.
Hastings Street, January 2008. 1 a.m. The wind is freezing. The sidewalks are shifting with people in heavy coats and wool caps. We can all see our breath, ghosting in the air. Hastings and Main Street, to be precise, putting us—that is me, Cameraman
A crowd will probably gather. People will stop and hem in. They’ll look over your shoulder. They’ll ask questions. Is it art? Is it political? and Rich S—at the epicentre of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Here, at one in the morning, everything is the opposite of the rest of the city. The streets are alive. The bars are full. Nobody is sleeping and the street market is in full swing. People sell old luggage, or a set of brass dope scales. Someone is combing the gutter for cigarette butts to harvest for roll-yourowns. That bearded guy on a chair next to the plywood hoarding is actually a doorman. Nobody slips past him and into the abandoned building beyond without paying the entrance fee. No matter that past
the hoarding you step directly from planet earth into the ninth circle of hell, a betrayal unto death on mattresses wreathed in crack smoke, surrounded by heaving shapes in the darkness. You have to pay to get in on that action. We only want to use the hoarding, which is new and graffiti-free, and which Rich S scoped out riding by on his bicycle that afternoon. We want to “put up” here. That is, mount the huge poster Cameraman and Rich S are carrying in their knapsacks, broken into sixty separate panels, each one printed off at Kinko’s on legalWWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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what happens when the poster is finished, as the last panel is pasted into place and the artists step away to reveal it whole for the first time, six feet wide by eight feet high. The upper part is a blown-up photograph of two gymnast figurines, plastic souvenirs from the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. They stand rigidly, one arm flourished overhead, awaiting the judges’ score cards. The bottom part of the posters—in tall, bold letters—reads: Freedom is Slavery. And a cheer goes up. Not from one throat or from a few. But from everyone at once. Cheering like a winning goal has just been scored. “Oh yeee-ah!” “Right on!” The doorman on his feet now, one arm outstretched, pointing. “That is…” he sputters, almost dumbstruck but not quite. “That is black and white, brothers! Black. And. White.”
3.
Take5 is a graffiti writer by reputation but he also puts up beautiful posters. I especially admire his stencil of an Indian chief’s head, which was inspired by the logo on a pneumatic chair used by train engineers. But I like all his work. In fact, I’ll acknowledge a middle-class collector’s impulse. When I see Take’s work, I want to buy some. He obliged once, which is how we got to talking. We spoke about the history of graffiti, about hobo sign-post code and grease pen signatures, about hopping freights, something he still does with the help of friends even though he was injured
doing it as a younger man and lost the use of his legs. But as we talked, I sensed his increasing awareness that he was doing something he didn’t typically do: giving an interview. And at a crucial moment in the conversation, Take5 suddenly told me how strongly he opposed geo-caching the locations of street art installations, a practice popularized by such websites as Flickr and GoogleMaps. Why did finding something beautiful mean you had to catalogue it all? The idea pissed him off. “There needs to be mystery in life,” he told me. “There needs to be something we don’t know, something we don’t understand. We need myths and magic.” He was staring at me intently. We were sitting in the space along Hastings Street known as the Red Gate, or sometimes the Rainbow Art Institute. A gallery, sort of. It’s also the home and office, the sphere and domain, of one Jim Carrico, who is as close to a street art curator as they come. A facilitator, an encourager. There are a half dozen artists living in the empty floors above us at any given time. Carrico introduced me to Take5. And all around us was the stacked evidence of the kind of artistic community that Carrico anchors. One wall, just to my left, was covered in dozens of ballpoint pen drawings of imaginary animals, each brilliantly individual on pages torn from an unused ledger book salvaged from a long-gone accounting firm, the pages tremoring silently in the dusty air. Evidence, I thought, of a frantic industry of creation, only the opposite of an industry in every sense. The opposite
Faith Wall 2 = artwork by Rabbit, photo by Byron Dauncey; Cascading Confession = artwork and photo by JermIX; Light Switch = artwork by Cameraman, photo by Byron Dauncey
sized paper. But the man who runs the door also runs the hoarding, so negotiation ensues and only ends when Cameraman thinks to hand the man what’s left of the bottle of rum we’d been sharing to stay warm. His face breaks open into a smile. He takes the bottle, then leans back and yells into the air: “Rummity, rummity, rum!” I’m taking notes in the chill, trying to write with gloves on, recording the whole process so I can tell you how a poster goes up on a plywood hoarding at Hastings and Main at one in the morning. You pour wallpaper paste into a paint tray, then apply it to the wall with a roller. Press the paper onto the wall, then roller more paste over top. Repeat, aligning each panel carefully with the one next to it as you build the larger image. A crowd will probably gather. People will stop and hem in. They’ll look over your shoulder. They’ll ask questions. Is it art? Is it political? They may critique or they may praise. One woman may even separate from the group and dance out into the street, her arms spread, twirling, twirling, crying out in a sing-song voice: “Keep up the good work, you beautiful, beautiful young artists.” And the hair will rise on the back of your neck as you hear these words echoing off the brick and the dumpsters. Beautiful, beautiful. In the mercury haze of an overhead street light, as a cop car glides past and into the night. As the aromas of the neighbourhood suddenly fill your nasal passages: sweat and urine, the floral ambiguity of garbage. But none of that will prepare you for
of the idea carried forward by so many artists from Warhol to Damien Hirst: the art factory. The Rainbow is the opposite of that idea because the work here seems to accumulate in response to no particular plan or demand. No market of which I’m aware. But the production continues, driven by darker, hidden energies. Carrico himself has recently completed a stencil of riveting drama, intense beauty. The Titanic in fiery four-tone, sinking into the black below. It was hanging on the side of the Cambie Hotel for awhile. But I never saw a price tag on it. I have no idea if it’s even for sale. We need myster y. We have it right here, I believe: why is this art being made at all?
Clock = artwork by Cameraman and Emma, photo by Byron Dauncey
4.
Street art has two bibles. Maybe they answer the question. They shape a Manichean theology where meaning and emptiness swirl in balancing opposition. The first book is The Faith of Graffiti, published in 1974, which combines photography by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky with an essay written by Norman Mailer. The second is Shepard Fairey’s book Supply and Demand, published by the Los Angeles based street artist in 2006. The Faith of Graffiti has photos that will stop you cold if you’ve never seen what the South Bronx looked like in the mid-seventies. The graffiti writers Mailer followed had just two objects in their artistic possession: a magic marker and their chosen street names. So they used the one to inscribe the other wherever and whenever possible. The photos show whole buses and train cars, entire bridges and blocks of apartment flats buried under these tags—Snake 1, Cay, Bama, Stitch— the objects grown-over as if with foliage, as if the city was being snatched back by an angry wilderness that had been held in check too long. Why the name? Mailer asks CAY 161, a seventeen-year-old graffiti writer who, like Take5, has paid with his legs for an accident in the line of work. And CAY 161 answers: “The name is the faith of graffiti. The name is the faith.” Mailer digs this, as would a writer who had already invoked the need for a savage
response—possibly with violence—by the suppressed self onto a suppressing world. Graffiti wasn’t a knife or a gun, but an aesthetic strike using the written name as its holy sword. But we suspect that Shepard Fairey would not, or could not understand it this way. For Fairey, there is a gesture but there is no sword in the hand that makes it. There is no basis for faith. The short version of Fairey’s near-legendary story is that in 1989, he began manufacturing a sticker bearing the likeness of Andre the Giant. Adopted by the skater community, the stickers spread across North America, morphing over time into the “Obey Giant” sticker campaign, which has since morphed into the “Obey Giant” brand of clothing, skateboards, CDs and memorabilia. Fairey hasn’t sold out. There was nothing to sell in the first place. He is ubiquitous and that is his point, which he defends with Marshall McLuhan, saying the medium is his message, but which is underscored more forcefully by his repeated references to Heidegger.
adorned by motifs derived from American currency. But the representation is all. Fairey is past meaning anything. The act “in and of itself sends a message of defiance,” writes the man who now designs shopping bags for Macy’s. “Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989,” echoes the tagline at his website. Although we understand him to mean not dissent, but Dissent©. I have a Shepard Fairey poster in my office. It has all the hallmarks: the currency-inspired border and the political iconography, an image library silhouette of a Viet Cong soldier. When I look at it, however, I don’t find myself thinking about the work of Shepard Fairey. I find myself thinking about the work of JermIX whose hundreds of poetry and text banners have annotated Vancouver over the past several years. You can’t always get what you need, bannered onto the side of a dumpster. Or this one, near the sky train station where a teenaged kid was tragically stabbed: This is where it happened. Jerm’s work never
“One of the things I really liked about phenomenology,” Fairey writes in Supply and Demand, explaining his interest in the German philosopher and Nazi sympathizer, “was that it doesn’t have to attack anything specific.” Fairey is unrivalled in his skill at representing opposition to consumer culture using its own language. His posters have the sheen of Madison Avenue and are
fails to jolt me out of my routines and into the here and now, senses and self-awareness alive and piqued. But why think of this work when looking at a poster by Shepard Fairey? Because like hundreds of others, Jerm now puts up “Obey Giant” posters for the Fairey corporation at a dollar a throw. I’m not saying he’s sold out either. I’m saying JermIX is surviving. He’s paying for his own art, something all artists WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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5.
Main Street, August 2010. Midnight. The air is warm. There are trains in the distance and I can smell the sea. I’m not alone but I can’t name names. The artist in question doesn’t want to be known. Let’s just say that he’s an individual and a group of individuals. Let’s call him Rabbit. Rabbit is putting up a poster on the front of an abandoned building on Main Street, not far from Terminal. I’m watching and smiling, because I know this poster. I’ve written about it. That is, it’s written in the pages of my new novel. But I’ve never seen it in real life. Rabbit, who has so inspired me, who has shared with me his stories and the work of his hidden night, is doing me yet another favour by bringing it to life. The poster bears a highly-pixelated image of a man in the middle of a scream. And underneath the anguished face, these words: FAITH WALL. 10
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Do I know what it means? The answer, truthfully, is no. But as the traffic swirls behind us and the crowd spills out of the Cobalt Hotel, as a vehicle marked HazMat Emergency Response screams past us on the way to the waterfront, siren wailing, I believe it to have meaning. In the brush strokes, in the application of paste. In the slow rising of its many panels, I believe it to be full, spilling over, with drive, creativity, hope and human intent. Rabbit, thank you. – Timothy Taylor
HITCHHIKER
W
e rode in many trucks in Spain. I liked this because the noise of the engine and the business of shifting through multiple gears precluded chitchat with the driver, and I felt safer sitting up in the cab of a big truck. It was the end of 1969; the truck drivers had caught wind of the sexual revolution and were hopeful that a young, blonde, braless woman travelling with a thin bearded fellow might
Hand = artwork and photo by Rich S
must do. And in doing so, he acts in the purest of faith that the effort is worth it, refilling with meaning what others have sought to empty.
want to spread the gospel of free love to them. When Paul climbed up beside me, with his long curly hair and black leather vest, some drivers would point at him, say “Bohb Dee-lan” and laugh. There were fewer cultural equivalents for me; I was too big to be Twiggy, Joni Mitchell wasn’t famous yet, and most of these guys, I guessed, didn’t read Sylvia Plath. In Granada I got sick. We were staying in a tiny family-run pensión, a spare room in someone’s home that we had found listed in our “Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day”. (We often managed nicely, if boringly, on less.) When the señora heard I was sick in bed, she brought me her sopa del pollo and inspected my pallor. “Embarazada?” she asked, smiling. No, I wasn’t pregnant. I was taking birth control pills, the first generation of them; I had enough anti-baby hormones coursing through me to power a poultry farm. The señora felt my brow for fever. A mother’s knowing hand; it made me homesick. It made me realize how formal and stoical I had been, for months on the road, speaking inanities in broken French and Spanish, scrambling up into trucks, and always smiling, smiling at strange men to thank them for giving us a ride. There was very little that was “free” about this. It was more like working an endless reception line at a wedding; one’s face grew tired. But our job as middle-class, twentyone-year-old graduates was to leave home and travel, to “do Europe” or to buy a ticket on a painted schoolbus to India. Careers were for dullards; bumming around the world, from Carnaby Street to Ibiza to the beaches of Goa, was part of how you “found yourself.” I went about this in the same dutiful way I had attacked my third-year essay on “The Concept of Bawdiness in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” As I convalesced in Granada, we walked through town, but slowly, aimlessly, like a local couple on a Sunday stroll. The sight of oranges growing in the shiny, dark-green trees of the central plaza seemed like a sly trick, or a special effect. Fruit on trees; what a good idea! We toured the Alhambra, where the Arab mosaics looked like a highly magnified close-up of some molecular code. In my weakened
state, everything dazzled me. Normally, we moved too fast for art to work on us as it should. The next day, too hastily as usual, we pushed on. I regretted leaving the kind señora and her excellent soups. My pack felt heavier on my shoulders, and I wasn’t used to the midday intensity of the Spanish sun. We trudged through town, hump-backed troglodytes of little interest to the locals who sat on café patios, their faces lifted to the sun, reading folded-back newspapers, eating pastry for breakfast. That looked like the free life to me. On the outskirts of Granada we stood at the base of a steep mountain and held out our thumbs. Right away, a pick-up truck passed us, then braked and swerved over onto the shoulder. We ran towards it, our packs flopping. The driver said he was on his way to pick up some goats, or maybe pigs—my Spanish animal names were skimpy. The back of the truck had a bed of hay. He patted the seat beside him. I could sit up in the cab with him, and Paul could ride in the back with our stuff. I was wearing a white Indian shirt, semitransparent and easy to rinse out and dry overnight. No bra, but I was smallbreasted, and I usually wore a vest too, a homemade patchwork thing I had made out of old scraps of my high school clothes. Wherever I went, I had a turquoise triangle of peau de soie from my first prom dress on my back. My hair was long, blonde, and parted in the middle, a Quakerish, almost military look that for some reason was deemed more “natural” at the time. I wore glasses, aviator-style with a smoky tint. Very Dennis Hopper (or early Gloria Steinem). Silver bangles, plus a glow-in-the-dark, pink plastic rosary around my neck. I wore the cross ironically, not that this made any difference to the people who picked us up. I had clumsily embroidered a butterfly on my denim bag. But that was the extent of my hippie craft; no beads, no macramé. It was more about listening to Van Morrison sing “Madame George” fourteen times in a row for me. I did have the folk singer hair, and I played acoustic guitar, too. I had the fingerpicking down for “Pretty Boy Floyd”, and “The Good Ship Vanity.” But I didn’t take my guitar with us on the road. My boyfriend was the designated poet.
Paul clambered into the back and I got up beside the driver. The grade was steep and he concentrated on shifting gears as we got underway. I turned around to check on Paul; his hair was whipping around in the wind as he stood with his arms braced on the wooden rails of the pen. He smiled at me through the window of the cab. Our first ride of the day, and we might make it to Seville by lunch. I sat in the clutter and grease of the front seat, the driver’s leather valise at my feet, with a line of oranges on the dashboard. A few fat drops of rain hit the windshield, then stopped. The driver was small and joli-laid, with a lacquered ledge of swept-back dark hair. He had an incisor tooth that went a bit sideways, inflecting his smile. Nice deep-set
I said, demurely, displaying the dimestore ring I always wore on the road. He looked at me sadly with a glance over his shoulder, and gave an eloquent shrug: What sort of husband is this, to let you sit up here with me? Then he split open an orange, offering me half, and we drove on in citruspungent silence. Here was a girl, the driver must have thought, who should be home helping her family instead of riding in a truck. With her roundish Canadian face, prim braless breasts, and a blue plastic wallet of traveller’s cheques in her hippie bag, while her long-haired “husband” rode in the back, knee-deep in hay like a burro. In Italy, on the high-speed autostrada, the drivers were sometimes elegant men in expensive cars who bought us espres-
There was very little that was “free” about this. It was like working an endless reception line at a wedding; one’s face grew tired. eyes. A cross of tiny seashells hung from the rearview mirror, and Virgin Mary decals covered the dash on his side. We laboured to the top of the mountain and then barrelled down the other side, navigating an alarmingly narrow stone bridge as we drove into a more rural landscape. It was hot. I took off my vest, then wished I hadn’t: nipple alert. The driver looked over and gleamed his incisor. He offered me a cigarette, which I dearly wanted but declined. He said a few sentences in Spanish that I didn’t understand, something soothing. Then he jerked his head back towards Paul, and put one hand up behind his head, pinkie and index finger raised in the universal sign for cuckold. He gestured gracefully towards his groin, as if to a third person in the cab, and spoke in soft, flowing Spanish, like a doctor outlining some necessary course of treatment. The gist of it seemed to me that I would be missing an unforgettable experience if I overlooked this opportunity to cuckold my boyfriend. I appeared to be an adventurous person, accepting rides from estranjeros, and so it would really be in my interest to take him up on this offer. La revolucion, si? Paul had crouched down in the hay, to keep the wind from lashing his hair into his eyes. I raised my left hand and turned the back of it towards my driver. Mi esposo,
sos and played opera cassettes. They drove too fast, with skill and control. But fast was good. After a few months of hitchhiking, the momentum of the road was hard to forsake; our stays in cities grew shorter, the time on the roads between longer. If a famous church in Florence was closed—as they regularly were—we would shrug and move on to Sienna. The staggered columns of daily expenses that we kept in our separate journals were lengthening. Frugality became more seductive than expansiveness. What I liked most were the empty, accidental times, on the fringes of cities, when we stepped off the last stop of the city bus into a place where the buildings thinned out and the raw fields began. Where we could hear birdsong and crickets instead of motorscooters. I liked these hitchhiking moments, when you had no choice but to stand for hours along one stretch of road, open to the line between the car-world with its fuel smells, and the ditches with their tossed coffee cups and delicate wildflowers. Highways broadcast oblivion, beginning with the appalling amount of roadkill—a story of not having seen the animal, and then not even knowing you had hit one. Cars were like a thicker skull, making humans stupider. I loved the early mornings best, when the tarmac WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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was cooler than the dirt of the shoulder, and then hourly grew hot, soft and tarry, until by mid-afternoon the pavement radiated heat. If you lay down on the tarmac then, it was warm as a body. But girls from Canada were contradictory creatures in 1969. We expected strangers who earned a fraction of what our fathers made to give us free rides, maybe buy us lunch, yet if they took our transparent shirts as a sexual invitation and made an advance, we became indignant. Did they think they owned us and could do as they wished? Didn’t they see we were independent women who only wanted to be treated with respect? Even though we needed them to get us to the next town? It was late in the afternoon when we came to a Y in the road and the driver— Luis—pulled over. There had been a lunch of grilled sardines at a café, with two carafes of red wine, followed by a nap on the shoulder of the road, in the shade of an old wooden watertower. At least, Luis slept; Paul passed the time writing in his notebook, and I read my book (“Love’s Body” by Norman O. Brown). It was only when we got back into the truck that I
let myself fall asleep, leaning against the window. Then I felt the truck hit gravel and come to a stop. Luis reached across, brushing against me just a touch, and opened my door. There was a side-trip he had to take, he said, and it was time for us to get out. He was smiling, but there was a hint of reproval in his tone. I was confused. Paul gave me a what-gives look as he handed down our packs. You’ll get there well before dark, Luis explained, no problem. Muchos carros, he said, gesturing with his hand, even though we hadn’t seen one for some time. Then he pointed at my vest, and wagged his finger, meaning, leave it off. He drove away, and Paul and I were alone by the road. Our shadows lay long and narrow on the pavement. We ate our oranges. The crickets and cicadas had fallen silent when the truck had pulled over, shedding its fumes. Now they started up in the fields again, a workmanlike chorus. We held our arms out and began walking backwards in the direction of Seville.
REREADING
Y
ears ago, when I was an under-aspiring and entirely unlikely college English professor in America, there used to be an insider joke I shared with myself around the department Xerox machine, and that always sent me away entertained. Whenever any one of us esteemed faculty members would ask another if he’d read such-and-such a book—let’s say it was Daniel Deronda (unopened by me to this day)—one’s rumpled, tweedy, pipeclenching colleague would go all evil-eyed and twitchy and found-out-looking, and with an airy, half-dismissive, half-stricken smile, answer: “Oh, yes. Of course. You know I really must reread that.” And off to class Professor Dottle would go, coat-tails a-waggle, crepe soles barking, old exam papers and curriculae vitae fluttering from his book satchel.
– Marni Jackson
CATALOGUES FOR BRUEGEL We go like a fog in an overgrown estate, the rich relative gone, the upper rooms darkened. We go like a world of lens grinder’s dust falling, a world stumbling into the darkness of a ditch. The slim catalogues we took over time of our green world, the ripe fruit and the animals darkened under a moral screen, sobered under the prattle of coins upon a table (while on a mountain it continued to storm). We go like a hired hand’s songs out the vast seam of property and waiting, crusoed by our vantage point in the dark while the wind makes like a saviour through other altitudes. I speak friendly to all bloodstreams but I grow tired; this isn’t the age of speaking you say grief to a chickadee and the only tears are rain. [Italicized words are from ‘Breaking’ by Patrick Lane in Go Leaving Strange] ~ Nathan Baker 12
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Everyone, by this measure, had already read everything at least once, and life’s jolly onward journey was understood to be nothing more than revisiting these worn old faves, savouring prior underlinings, and— because we only read great books—having our important judgments burnished and re-certified by the deeper delve. Oh, I know there are people who’ve read everything. Really everything. When I unaccountably taught at Harvard, sixteen years ago, I regularly lunched with a man named Walter Jackson Bate, who by then was elderly, retired, and made extremely weary by his young literary-theorist colleagues—weary enough that having soup ‘n sandwich with an unknown novelist from New Orleans seemed not that bad an idea. Jack Bate had been the teacher of a teacher of mine, which was how and why I’d worked up the nerve to introduce myself. He was also the great biographer of
Keats and Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, and the brains behind plenty of other recondite books. If knowing a lot makes you smart, he was probably the smartest man I ever met. Jack Bate had read everything. And occasionally, when we were joined for lunch by one of his emeritus colleagues, they would talk about it. About ever ything—at least everything where books were concerned. Norse mythology. Sanskrit poetics. The life of every small and large post-Raphaelite poet who ever drew breath. About hermeneutics. About Icelandic sagas. About Steinbeck. About Gainsborough. About theories of the sublime. About Kant, Li Po, Chaucer. They’d quote—always apposite, always spot-on (I thought so, anyway)—Dante, Shakespeare, the Venerable Bede, Congreve, Raymond Chandler, Joel Chandler Harris, Langston Hughes, Richard Hughes, Spenser, Milton, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Woolf, La Rouchefoucauld, Merleau-Ponty, Ortega y Gasset, Burke, Locke, Ibsen, Cotton Mather, Jerry Mathers, Goethe, Roethke, Racine, Rimbaud and whoever wrote Beowulf. Everything was their specialty. And I promise you it was never boring for one second to hear what they said. It was great, and great just to be there—like having my birthday every day. It pleased me no end that here were these old boys who’d done the job right (unlike how I and my previous poky colleagues had done it), and were happy to toodle along the way I just said—coursing around their own fertile brains as they spooned up their chicken-noodle soup, and feeling the fond caress of literature, which had held them fast all those years. If Jack Bate said he’d reread something—Daniel Deronda—he’d goddamn well reread it. If we’ve ever read any books at all, we’d probably like to read at least a few of them again. We were certainly too young to get most of the jokes in Ulysses the first time—if we made it through. And not until you’ve read The Waste Land twenty or thirty times (it’s better read out loud), does it become just like a man talking to you—and making sense. Plus, since we’ve been around more now, we’re less gullible, more seasoned, less likely to be overpowered by showy virtuosity. Therefore, the
brilliant-but-murky parts won’t seem as murky, and there’ll be fewer of them, so more of the best parts can finally make it into our brains.
The standard claim to gravitas by a certain kind of chin-pulling, Middle-western American university graduate is that he or she reads The Great Gatsby every year. The reason being that as these readers move steadily on from one mystifying life-phase to another, Fitzgerald’s sleek, seemingly straightforward little tragedy of Nick and Daisy and the enigmatic Gatz, all lethally frolicking around in big Long Island houses and swimming pools and speeding cars, just keeps on turning up wonders which prior readings gave few hints of. The entire idea of rereading implies just such a likeable and progressive assumption about life, one that’s meant to keep us interested in living it: namely, that as you get further along, you find out more valuable stuff; familiarity doesn’t always give way to dreary staleness, but often in fact to celestial understandings; that life and literature both are layered affairs you can work down through; and that as Henry Moore once optimistically observed, we should never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume. In other words, more is better. Mostly we don’t have the time to reread books, of course. I know I don’t. Usually only teachers do, and then only because they have to teach them to make a living. But most of us aren’t teachers. And many of us, like me, are slow readers who spend our days scratching our heads and furrowing our brows at the mirage of some desired horizon line we wonder how we’ll ever reach. Beyond that, rereading’s actually an expensive and baulky luxury, since our roads are already lined with all those books we haven’t even read the first
time and that have a first claim on us if we could ever get to them. A Man Without Qualities. The Good Soldier Svejk. Under the Volcano. And then there’s all of Henry James—books you need to be older, more patient, perhaps smarter to read. We’re all eagerly waiting for that day. Also, rereading requires a kind of confiding, suspension-of-familiarity (assuming we don’t find we hate the book we’re rereading and never want to open it again). To read a good book twice—even if our hearts still stir and swell at the prospect—we still have to re-subject ourselves to the novelist’s now-transparent inaugural shenanigans, designed not for us rereaders but for all those fickle first-time readers who’re forever threatening to put the book down if it doesn’t “grab them.” “Okay. We get it, we get it. It’s India!” we rereaders shout out (silently) at poor Forster. “Just get us to the Marabar Caves part.” And of course there are all the things we never liked in Moby Dick to begin with—even though we loved the book “as a whole.” All that whaling stuff; and the extracts. The cetology. It can all seem tedious ritual on subsequent exposure—like the begats in the Lord’s own novel. Couldn’t we, we wonder, just skip these and get along to Revelations?
I guess the answer’s no, if we’re really rereading and not just dipping in, having a sniff. Our recalled affection for a book is, after all, always woven into how we entertain and balance the best parts with the less artful passages or the wooden infrastructural bits the novelist couldn’t bear to take out. Novels are forgiving forms: good writing over here often forgives less good writing over there, so that the whole may prosper. Rereading all of a novel sometimes invites us to be more forgiving ourselves. The point here (unsurprisingly) is that rereading a treasured and well-used book WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look. Every time I open a book for the first time I feel I’m taking a risk. It’s part of the great excitement of reading. It’s like standing in the street and watching
a glistening, sequined tightrope walker traverse the empty space between tall buildings. If he falls, I’m implicated because I’m watching. Though maybe he won’t, and I’ll be implicated in a triumph. But with rereading, less is thrillingly at risk—though it can still be thrilling. Everything just seems to happen on solider ground—not high up. In that sense, rereading is more like what we originally meant by reading—an achieved intimacy, a dappled discernment, the pleasures of volition, of surrendering, of time spent lavishly, the chance of glimpsing (but not quite possessing) the heart of something grand and beautiful we might’ve believed we already knew well enough. – Richard Ford
WELCOME THE FALL
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ere’s the skinny: I am a fat woman. And I’m not talking fat in the way an average-sized woman might, as in, “Does my butt look big in these jeans?” I’m talking fat as in, “Jesus Christ, look at that woman over there; I can’t believe she’s eating in public.” Fat as in morbidly obese, as in unforgivably and gluttonously swaddled in it. I’m talking about a BMI that is, literally, off the chart. I may be a fat woman, but I wasn’t a fat kid. I experienced all the wondrous freedom of skinniness, living in a body made to run, run fast, run forever. I had a skinny family: I have an image of the four of us 14
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from 1978, The Summer of Fuzzy Blue Letters (the naming of summers being a childhood habit I refuse to grow out of). We’re wearing those t-shirts popular in the late seventies, the ones with a dark coloured band around the neck and sleeves, which my mum had taken to some store and had messages printed on them in raised, velvety letters. I don’t remember what mine or my brother’s said, but my mother’s said “Loraine with one R” and my father’s said “Dad Pal,” that being my moniker for him. I remember, as recent immigrants from the United Kingdom, that we were attempting something quint-
essentially Canadian: spending a day at the lake. Three of us were a matching set: blond-haired and whippet-thin. Then there was my father, black-haired and built like, well, a healthy human being. My mother, at five foot nine (although age has eaten away an inch or more), has weighed between 113 and 118 pounds my entire life. I have no idea what my father weighs, but I do know, strangely, that my brother weighs 163 pounds. I am five foot eight, and weigh 254 pounds, a number that had been a secret, even to me, since 2001, the year my parents returned to the UK. But I recently dragged the scale from its dust bunny nest, stripped off my clothes, stood starkers on that sucker, and saw the number. 254. If you are still reading, I thank you, because, whether I like it or not, sizeism exists. More, it’s de rigueur, a socially acceptable bigotr y because the benefits outweigh the harms, which are merely psychological (there have been no reported fat-bashings yet). We also have a multi-billion-dollar dieting industry to support, and, hey, fatties—I admit it—do it to themselves. Besides, sizeism isn’t exclusionary: everybody hates fatties and none more so than we fatties. I wouldn’t have bothered to bring up sizeism at all, except that the nine years I have just spent going from normal to super sized began with my assimilation of sizeist attitudes. Prior to 2001, I struggled with sizeism and my weight, losing and gaining the same seventy pounds over and over, a cycle as sure as the seasons. I couldn’t bear the labels that being fat stuck to me: Greedy, Gluttonous, Weakwilled, Lazy, Ill-educated, Dull-witted, and worst of all, Unattractive. My mother, being generationally-challenged, believed that a woman’s power, her means of survival, was her attractiveness, something to which I unwittingly subscribed, having no belief in or awareness of other traits I might possess. The syllogistic reasoning I lived by was thus: fat equals unattractive, and unattractive equals an utter failure. Then, in 2001, following The Summer of Endings and Beginnings, I went back to school and began writing. At the time, I had just completed the losing-weight cycle, so I looked good and felt great. But
writing released an entirely unknown me, creating a self-worth unconnected to my physical being. Writing is an act that negates the body; my size, for the first time in my adult life, was immaterial. And my mother could not argue this for she was now an ocean away. I no longer measured my worth in terms of my sexual attractiveness, and because cyclic raging against sizeism had ended only in my failure time and again, I let it go. I dropped it as if I had unzipped a heavy, woolen dress, let it slip over my shoulders and fall to the floor. My freefall into freak-show fat brought a certain kind of freedom and even, incredibly, love: I met the man I am to marry. He, unlike any man I’ve known, sees my body as the manifestation of the woman he loves. Must letting go inevitably lead to a weight gain of 140 pounds over nine years? Not unless you are me and have a deep-seated belief that you cannot function without the rich, the creamy, the savory, the gooey. And now I could live deprivation-free since I had surrendered to sizeism, which to me meant embracing sizeist attitudes—I would accept that I was unattractive, weak-willed, lazy, greedy, gluttonous, and any other label stuck on a fat person, but I would also accept that I was intelligent, generous, a reader, and a writer with something to say. But the underpinning of my capitulation was another deep-seated belief based on something my father, a medical doctor, told me when I was in my early twenties. “Your size is a matter of genetics,” he said. Being the only fat person in my entire family tree, I scoffed. Yet he persisted; he believed that researchers would one day discover a genetic propensity for obesity and a genetically predisposed weight. “Accept who you are,” he told me. I paid heed because I adored my father; I would have been a model daddy’s girl had he been so inclined, which, sadly, he wasn’t. It was a most uncharacteristic conversation to have with a man so mistrustful of certainty. And, though I believe he spoke out to counter my mother’s unceasing disgust, the words were discomfiting: who wants to be a fat person, natural or not? But by the time I was thirty-one, I ascribed to them wholly, as if a mantra. I believed,
no, assumed, that my body would find its ideal, pre-ordained weight and I would accept that weight, be it overweight or obese, hallelujah and amen. After all, I was well-educated in nutrition and I ate balanced, albeit Sophie-sized, meals. Yes, I indulged in junk food, but I exercised, walking my dogs in an off-leash park an hour a day.
A person experiencing debilitating pain should go to a doctor. I won’t argue with this. But I knew the cure was to lose weight; I didn’t need a doctor’s visit to be told something I wasn’t going to entertain, given the sure knowledge that I could not survive the deprivation of a diet. So, I went with Plan B: avoid all actions that caused debilitating pain and tell no one.
The food I was willing to die for was no longer part of my diet. So, really, I told myself, how fat could I get? In the waning months of The Summer of Coming Loss (2005), I euthanized one of my dogs. Seventeen years old, Dylan would no longer sleep inside; he haunted the backyard like a low, yellow moon. The day following the first frost, I bade him go gentle into that good night. And we adopted Chico, a dog with issues, principally his habit of attacking other dogs without provocation. Walking the dogs at an off-leash park meant muzzling Chico and keeping him on the leash. He fought it every step of the way and every day meant returning to the car when my arms or my pride tired, neither of which ever lasted more than twenty minutes. It wasn’t worth the struggle and I stopped, deciding to walk the dogs leashed in our neighbourhood. But the stop and start, sniff and piss pace didn’t suit me, and neither did the rectangular grid. Soon, dog-walking was a chore, not a pleasure. The number of blocks dwindled from four to three to two, at which point I started to experience a pain in my lower back, but—hey—who doesn’t have back pain? But by The Summer of Dead Ends (2007) the latter half of the dog walk often seemed to push that same back pain closer and closer to the front of my consciousness until—Wham!—it would flare, white hot, and I would find myself literally unable to take another step. Finding relief was easy—I had to shift my weight off my hips; sitting was best, but in cases like dog walks where seating was unavailable, I soon learned that crouching down and bending forward would relieve the pain. Except it only took ten steps for it to return.
I stopped walking the dogs, and by that fall, not only was I unable to walk half a block, I couldn’t stand on my own two feet for more than a minute. I was teaching at a local college by this time. Imagine conducting a three-hour class when you can’t stand up unsupported for five minutes. Thank goodness for well-built lecterns and tabletops to lean on. Writing on the white board? Fuck that. That’s why they invented PowerPoint. House-cleaning was a total non-starter: vacuuming, mopping, dusting, doing dishes. Instead of doing chores once a week, they became a biannual ordeal. Cooking I could manage, as long as recipes were simple and I had a stool nearby. But the food I was willing to die for was no longer a part of my diet because I couldn’t grocery shop. My fiancée Ted and I speak different food languages, so ingredients were limited. November 23, 2007, was my father’s seventieth birthday, and to celebrate, my mother threw a party at a posh restaurant in London. As I landed in Heathrow, I realized I hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of my disability. At home, I drove everywhere. In London, I had always walked, taken buses, and generally reveled in a functioning, efficient public transportation system. But how was I going to manage that now? Luckily, my sister picked me up at the airport. It didn’t take long for that luck to run out. That first night, the night of the party, we set out for the restaurant on foot. I made the first block, but the second proved too much. I clung to a lamppost, and acting the tourist, pretended to look at something riveting. The third block, I heaved myself from lamppost to lamppost, no longer needing to act the WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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tourist because by then my tribe of relatives, more than a block ahead of me, had turned a corner and vanished. I began to panic. I didn’t know where the restaurant was and suspected I’d soon be arrested for lamppost molestation. But when I lurched to the end of the block and made the corner, there stood my entire family: aunts, uncles, cousins. And my mother. Upon returning home, I found an email from my mother informing me I was no longer welcome until I lost weight and regained my mobility. I believe my mother means not to punish but to save me, but in either case, banishment is cruel. Because you see, in The Summer of Silence and Loss (2006) my father suffered a severe stroke, and though he has recovered much of what he lost, he cannot communicate in speech or in writing. And so, since 2007, I’ve been cut off from the person most precious to me. I am able to accept that my weight will likely cause premature death, and am even willing to accept the interpretation that it is a kind of slow suicide, but I can’t accept the loss of my mobility. And I cannot live without seeing my father again. Still, even knowing I could no longer carry the weight of these consequences, it took me until the first heat of The Summer of My Revelation (2009) to act. Eighteen months of avoidance, of feeling powerless to make a change, of suffocating in my belief that, somehow, I was a victim of circumstance: genetics, depression, addiction, the food industry, the media. For nearly a decade, I allowed wishful thinking to rule. I can’t blame ignorance. I’ve done much reading on the subject of obesity. But I never questioned my idea of a “natural weight.” In The Summer of My Revelation, I did question it. Hard. When you strip away factors such as metabolism, genetics, and hormonal diseases, the body is simply an engine, and calories the fuel that powers it. There’s no such thing as generically preordained (or even predisposed) weight. And there’s no such thing as a natural weight. A weight—any weight I choose—can be maintained once a point of stasis is reached, when the number of calories consumed equals the number of calories burned. There’s no magic to it, no wishful thinking involved; it’s an equation 16
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utilizing facts and computation. Gaining a pound of fat requires an excess of 3,500 calories; losing a pound of fat requires a deficit of 3,500. Take a can of cola, 140 calories devoid of nutrition, and add it to what I already consume and burn. Drink one every day and I’ll gain almost fifteen pounds in a year. After a decade, I’ll have packed on 146 pounds. Which sums up my decade: an extra 140 calories a day. How such an inconsequential number effectively managed to cripple me is not my concern now. Reversing the damage is. Looking beyond my personality, with its self-entitled wants and desires, its susceptibility to fantasy and distraction, I can see that the solution is mine to choose. It’s like shrugging off that heavy woolen dress again, only this time I’m going to let go of my wishful thinking. The Summer of the Well-Oiled Duck (2010) is now behind us. I’m fifty pounds lighter than when I visited London for my father’s seventieth birthday, and I have regained much of my mobility. I’m exercising again, but I am still morbidly obese, still banished, still despairing. My feeling toward sizeist attitudes is in flux. I question whether bigotry can ever be moral. That question aside, sizeism exists and to escape its burden is my responsibility and mine alone. But with accepting great responsibility comes great power, which is also mine. Still, I confess I do occasionally indulge in wishful thinking: I wish I could tell the difference between feeling full and feeling filled. I wish I could rub out the FAT label stuck to me and write something else instead, something like Work in Progress. And I wish I could see my father. – Sophie Lees
DAM IT ALL
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t wasn’t quite what Jean Thie was looking for—he had been scanning satellite images of melting wetlands permafrost for signs of global warming— but the Canadian ecologist quickly recognized what he saw on Google Earth that October day in 2007.
The crescent-shaped blob hiding in the southeast corner of Wood Buffalo National Park was a beaver dam. A big one. Thie went in tighter, CSI-style. He could see canals, which beavers sometimes build to float logs from the surrounding area in to the worksite. In the centre of the pond, the lodge, Thie used a scale tool to get a sense of the size. That couldn’t be right, could it? The dam was almost a kilometre long. He’d never in his life seen a beaver dam of such dimensions. Turns out, nobody else has either. The Wood Buffalo Beaver dam was— and until something definitively trumps it, remains—the biggest beaver dam on Earth. In terms of its footprint, it is twice the size of the Hoover Dam. Thie’s best guess, using aerial images from previous decades, is that a beaver first wedged a forked stick into the bog sometime between 1975 and 1980. Its brethren have been working on it for the last three decades. And they’re still building. Thie posted the discovery on his blog (geostrategic.com), where it eventually got picked up by news outlets. The questions were easy: What are those animals up to? How many of them are there? What might a dam this size mean? Normally, when presented with news of a natural-history discovery, a team of scientists would muster and go check it out for themselves. But in this case it wasn’t so easy. “It’s hard to overemphasize the remoteness of this place,” park spokesman Tim Gauthier told me. “There’s no trail in and nowhere to land a plane. It’s paradise for beavers and almost no other animals.” An editor from National Geographic called the park office. How, he wondered, could they put a photographer in there? Geographer Mike Keizer, a longtime media liaison for the park, worked out the most straightforward logistics. Landing on the pond itself was out of the question—it’s a national park, and so the welfare of the beavers will always come first. The best option, Keizer said, was to land a float helicopter on the edge of Lake Claire and bushwhack from there.
It is a site only a beaver—or Sisyphus—could love. Keizer isn’t even sure how many days it would take to reach the dam. Two, at least. “They never called back,” Keizer said. And so the dam remains an enigma wrapped in a mosquito-infested fen surrounded by a national park roughly the size of Denmark. The temptation here is to report that I alone have been in. And what did I find? A huge colony of beavers—good ol’ Castor canadensis—toiling away collectively on their mega-project, many dozens of them working as units, hot-bunking in the lodge? Or a lost colony of castoroides—giant prehistoric ancestor to the modern North American beaver—that escaped ex t inct ion? Or perhaps a mall, started by three particularly enterprising beaver brothers with a grand vision of bringing a little culture to the sticks, so that even the most cosmopolitan beaver need never leave Alberta? All these, incidentally, are theories journalists have inquired seriously about…
well, except for one. Mike Keizer was as curious as everybody else. Looking to put a little flesh on the mystery, he and some park scientists decided this spring to fly over the dam for a close look. They set out from Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories at 5 a.m., hoping to catch the predominantly nocturnal beavers at the tail end, so to speak, of their work shift before they retired to the lodge. (Beavers haven’t always been nocturnal. Early aboriginal stories described them as basking in the sun, and some speculate that their switching day for night is a reaction to being hunted to near-extinction by man.) The plane angled in through the delta. The plate-flat Peace Athabasca wetlands reared up to form the Birch Mountains. And right at the junction, on a gentle gradient below a constant supply of fresh running water, sat the dam. It is a site only a beaver—or Sisyphus— could love. The gradient is so shallow, and the spongy soil so saturated, that running water spills routinely and more or less continuously around the ends –
prompting the beavers to work nonstop, shoring up one side and then the other. “You can almost see,” Keizer said, “how this thing had to grow.” All around, for hundreds of kilometres, rich, swampy boreal forest teems with water lilies and such dense stands of willow that three decades of beaver activity seems hardly to have made a dent in the food supply. “Knowing how fast willows and poplar and aspen grow here they could easily get into a regenerative flow cycle here,” Keizer noted. Meaning, the trees grow faster than the beavers can eat them. In fact, the beavers themselves have created some of the area’s vegetation. A new beaver pond changes its surrounding ecosystem. A whole swampy “transition zone” of reeds and sedges starts growing between water and land, and over time timber mass actually increases despite the fact that beavers continue to cut down trees. In a sense, the Wood Buffalo beavers are creating their own little Biosphere 2—a rodent experiment in self-sufficiency. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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As Keizer and the others continued circling overhead, they saw that the dam, near the middle of the pond, featured a large bean-shaped extrusion. Everyone on the plane, at almost exactly the same time, said: “That is a big lodge.” From the satellite photos Thie estimated the lodge to be about 14 metres by 7 metres—the size of two Greyhound buses side by side. Design-wise, it’s a fascinating hybrid. Some of it, like the cut logs mud-mortared in, is original beaver handiwork. But there is also natural deadfall the beavers have cunningly incorporated. It is Albertan boreal forest design by way of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. There are add-ons to both the left and right sides. It brings to mind a house renovated and expanded by successive generations.
“ To me it’s a sign of their intelligence,” Keizer told me. “They have done no more than they needed to do to create that environment. Unlike us: we’d want to build it another fifty feet higher just see what we could hold back.” What the lodge looks like on the inside is, of course, impossible to say for sure. Beavers have been known to build an upper floor, in case the lower floor is flooded out, so split-level Wood Buffalo living is certainly a possibility. From the satellite images Thie thought he could make out a second, smaller lodge off to the west—a starter-home built by departed yearlings, perhaps, although Keizer saw no firm evidence of this. “There’s no pond there,” he said. “And you can’t build a lodge without a pond.” During their flyover, the team didn’t spot any beavers, and if there was beaver breath issuing from the chimney-like fresh-air port in the centre of the lodge, the plane passengers were too high to see 18
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it. But all the signs of beaver activity were there. There were fresh “runs” beneath the pond surface—channels cut in the mud from beavers moving around. Most of them led straight to the lodge, which led to the question: How many beaver families are there? The probable answer, somewhat disappointingly, is one. “It may be a family as large as eight to ten animals,” Boston University biologist and beaver expert Peter Busher said, “but I’d be surprised.” Most likely, rattling around in the cavernous lodge, there are six beavers: a mated adult pair, a couple of babies and a couple of yearlings weighing their options: move out or stay on for another year—free rent in exchange for help with the babysitting. And as to the question of why beavers are still living on the site after all this time—given that the three decade-long occupation is the most astonishing thing about the dam—the answer is: Because they can. The usual things that force beavers to break camp and move—forest fires that consume their food source, predators that consume their young— aren’t factors here. Thie estimates that the area hasn’t burned since the late1920s. There could be wolves nearby, since Keizer did spot a moose on the flyover (where there are moose, there are wolves), but even so, the beavers in their gargantuan aquatic fortress would be extraordinarily hard to catch. As for that other predator, the two-legged one, well, they too are a non-issue, to date. The swampy, decaying biomass works like a compost heap: it warms the land, making the ice too thin to support snowmobiles. Aboriginal trappers long ago deemed it too dangerous, and they stopped coming into the area in the mid-1970s. And so the Wood Buffalo beavers enjoy a unique distinction. At least three generations of them, almost unprecedentedly, have been untouched by human activity, a fact that has given hope to people like Audrey Tourney. The founder of a famed beaver sanctuary in the woods of Muskoka, Tourney has been closely following the tale of the Wood Buffalo dam. To her, all beavers are a little bit heroic, and this lot might be closer to blessed, given that they have successfully cre-
ated a sanctuary back where they used to be. From what Jean Thie can discern, this might be part of a larger pattern. The beavers of northern Canada are returning to their old stomping grounds, repopulating the sites of their mass extermination cauded by the fur trade. Whether because those once denuded landscapes have grown back, or more romantically because they are simply “repatriating” their land, “they’re invading their old territories in a remarkable way in Canada,” as Thie put it. “I more or less see this as beaver re-colonizing their habitat as if it was before the fur trade.” Audrey Tourney agrees, sort of. “If humans can’t get near them,” she said “they’ve got to be the most fortunate beavers in the country.” – Bruce Grierson
WOLFSONG In a falling Snowflake is the kingdom Of evergreen, where the night is Upon me. Yet it is I who chase the night Fleeting away in the golden skin Of a leaping doe, would seize By the throat the heedless flesh, bolt As it bleeds Into another, seamlessly, like a ribbon Of red silk of my own immortality— ~ Miki Fukuda
IS THIS A REAL STORY OR DID YOU MAKE IT UP?
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arents ask the question. School principals ask the question. Police ask the question. Journalists ask the question. What’s the story? The questioner has two expectations. He or she expects to find out what happened. He or she, at the same time, expects to receive a not-quite reliable version of what happened. You might, in answering, be mistaken. You might have neglected a few facts. You might even be
lying. That is, every story begets the need for more stories. And so, what’s the story going to be? I should begin by confessing I’m a recovering novelist. My doctors have me on a heavy dose of poetry. It seems to be working. I’m persuaded that I’ve kicked the habit. I can now look back, in quiet and relaxation, at the foibles and flaws of story. Even now, in my use of alliteration, I see I’m turning from story towards a poem. We live in a time when the possibilities of story are exploding. The idea of exploding, of course, is a version of story, as your TV screen will tell you at any time of day. Like you, I am a symbol-making animal. I take all the TV explosions to be metaphoric, even if possibly real as well. It’s that metaphoric possibility that delights us. And confuses us. We need more stories to explain the stories we are told. Story is one of our principal ways of thinking. What a shaky way to go about thinking. We base our individual lives, our cultural groups, even our very existence, on stories. Once upon a time... In the beginning was... On a dark and stormy night... Have you heard the one about? Premier Stelmach announced today... We base society on stories, yet we can’t for a moment agree on what the stories are saying. Fortunately, our emerging story-makers will remedy all that. One of my sisters, when I published a new novel, would ask, “Is this a real story or did you make it up?” Back then, I gave the answer, “I made it up.” She, brusquely, returned the book I was tr ying to give her. She never read one of my novels. My sister read cookbooks. She could read a cookbook and imagine whole feasts. She gave me a cookbook: Easy Meals for Lazy Bachelors. I tried to make a beef stew. The dog left the kitchen. So much for creative non-fiction. Back then I said that my novels were made up. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps the task of the writer is to make up what isn’t made up. I’ll try another example: One of the places where I see hope is in social networking. In these developing strategies of the Internet we can tell lies, we can be promiscuous, we can be poetic, we can tell the bald truth. Purity is fatal to story. Ev-
ery existing version of story, from gossip to the yarn to the novel to the sacred text, is full of desire and exuberance, violence and terror, facts and possible facts and contradictions. This new version of story, social networking, is written by many authors, authors who invent others and themselves. Surprise erupts through the clichés of story. At one time the censors worried about the novel. Now they don’t even read the cover flaps of novels. Now they worry about the Internet. That’s an encouraging sign. Censors give us a good indication of what’s in the future. Stor y is at once glue and solvent. Let’s look at something as pinned-down and trackable as the novel. Currently, as I see it, the novel is becoming prisoner to its own aesthetic. It has become, too often, a bad imitation of the greatness, the supreme greatness, of Jane Austen. It has become an ingrown batch of stories about privileged people living trivial lives, the women, without needing jobs, imitating liberation, the men, with no help from the women, trying busily to rectify erectile dysfunction.
Story is at once glue and solvent. The novel has to become young again, down and dirty, promiscuous, in bed with poetry and science fiction and plain lies and wild imagination and evolution and revolution and disgust and shameless desire. The success of historical fiction at the moment is a small signal. The borrowings from fantasy and the detective story are a sign. What a dangerous, exciting, prodigious time in which to be a young story-teller. Story is always waiting to be rescued from itself. How’s that for wisdom? Part of the diminishment of what the novel might be comes from a naïve sense of what entertainment might be. Story is often about difficult or impossible choices. It challenges our very being. Pure entertainment makes the other guy the goat; it makes us, as mere voyeurs, feel comfort-
able and privileged. And safe. Perhaps poetry is, once again, a place of serious entertainment. For me, story begins with Homer’s two great poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey. If you want a dangerous woman, read about Helen of Troy; if you want a tricky, attractive man, read about Odysseus. Perhaps what we need is a social network in which the participants can only address each other in verse. We would have to think about language; we would have to think. Unless, of course, the thumb replaces the mouth as our means of communication. But—back, one more and final time, to the novel. I’ll change my confession: I didn’t voluntarily take a cure for novel-writing; rather, I made the necessary mistake of tackling the impossible. I tried to write a novel that I was going to call The Fence. It was going to be about an aging Alberta man who was trying to build a fence in the foothills and the first range of the Rockies west of Edmonton. A wild country full of ghost towns. My hero, Charlie Aspen, was going to try to start a cattle ranch in the forest. He had been a coal miner; he came out of the ground. Charlie Aspen acquired the land around an abandoned coalmine and began to build a fence. Then he noticed the wild forest and moose pastures and beaver ponds and valleys around his land and instead of closing his fence he began to extend it. Perhaps we are all squatters. Then he fell in love with a beautiful Spanish woman whose husband believed the area now called Alberta still belonged to Spain. Charlie was disappointed in love. He needed more land. He still had not so much as a single cow. One dark and stormy night, sitting at my computer, I realized that I was Charlie Aspen. I, the novelist, was endlessly extending my fence. I couldn’t close it, because I longed to embrace the whole West. Maybe even the whole world. I realized I wasn’t going to make it. One last thing: remember, story-tellers. Just to attempt the impossible is victory enough. So. What’s the future of story? – Robert Kroetsch WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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NOTEBOOKS
Radical Emptiness
“What an endangered species is our silence. It is the one great heritage of the original earth.”
“…sanctuaries for people. Places where planes can’t fly…areas of radical emptiness.”
John England has been visiting and studying the Arctic for close to four decades. He is a professor at the University of Alberta and the Northern Chair for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This notebook was filled by Dr. England on Ellesmere Island in July of 1975.
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“The silence of the arctic is the psychic oil of the centuries to come.”
JOHN ENGLAND ON ELLESMERE ISLAND, 1975
“What then would it say of our society if we destroy these remaining areas…”
“What a position Canada is in to demonstrate leadership and enlightenment. There is no way that we can be too bold in preparing for the needs of the future.”
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THE SCIENCE FILE
TW STED
If genetics is the key to a better future, where’s the evidence to prove it? BY TIMOTHY CAULFIELD // ILLUSTRATION BY CAMERON CHESNEY
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n a recent flight home from Europe the movie selection was so limited I decided, reluctantly, to watch The Time Traveler’s Wife. My reluctance was not due to movie snobbery (I have lowbrow taste), but because when I am tired and 30,000 feet above the ocean, manipulative, sentimental romances make me cry; not just sniffles, but full tears occasionally accompanied by sobbing. Watching action and adventure films is no antidote, since tears and heaving shoulders are inevitable if the hero happens to find redemption, revenge or long-overdue respect. Left with no options, I began watching The Time Traveler’s Wife, expecting the worst, but I soon found myself too preoccupied by the premise to let loose with the sobs.
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The protagonist, played by Eric Bana, has a genetic anomaly—Chronodisplacement Disorder, to be exact— that causes him to involuntarily travel through time (which is, it turns out, tough on a relationship). While I am a fan of fully suspended disbelief in the service of cheap entertainment, I found it bizarre that the creative minds behind the movie—and, I assume, the author of the book—felt that genetic science was the best way to explain time travel. It struck me as the equivalent of using cellular biology to describe gravity. The more I thought about it, however, the more Bana’s chromosomal dilemma made perfect sense. It echoes the current place of genetics in our social consciousness. Genetics is all-powerful, it’s everywhere, and we can’t escape its reach. And so it’s only natural that Hollywood would embrace genetics as a mystical force powerful enough to tear Bana from the embrace of the lovely Rachel McAdams. For decades we have been bombarded with headlines and magazine covers that extol the advances occurring in the area of genetics. We have been told that we are living through a “genetic revolution.” In 1994, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Genetics: the Future is Now.” A decade later, Time ran another genetics cover, telling us this time that “gene science has changed our lives.” And, if you believe the headlines, scientists have already located a gene for virtually every human condition you can think of. Even a short sampling of recent headlines bears this out: “Is ‘Laziness Gene’ to Blame for Couch Potatoes?”; “The God Gene: Does Our DNA Compel Us To Seek a Higher Power?”; “Always Lost?: It May be in Your Genes”; “Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes”; “Marriage Problems? Husband’s Genes May be to Blame”; and, my personal favourite, “Genes May Effect Popularity, Researchers Say.” But what is the truth? While I am fairly certain genes can’t transport us to another time or dimension, this extraordinary level of pop culture attention gives the impression that a revolution is afoot. If our genes can tell us whether we are destined to be lost, religious, lazy, unfaithful or un24
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popular, and if, as the magazine covers declare, the future of genetics is now, then shouldn’t we be able to put genetics to work for us?
MY FIRST TRIP TO MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA was in 1997. I was at Stanford University as part of a research team looking at the social implications of the “Genetic Revolution.” Should kids get tested to find out genetic predispositions? Will insurance companies want to know your genetic background? These all seemed like timely and important issues. We were still only a few years into the revolution. The massive Human Genome Project was not yet finished and, in 1997, it was easy to believe that society was only a few years away from enjoying myriad medical breakthroughs and concomitant social dilemmas. Few of us within the biomedical community doubted the potential of the field. I toiled away producing articles on how society should respond to the revolutionizing breakthroughs that were on the horizon.
Thirteen years later I was back in Mountain View to take advantage of one of the few tangible products of that revolution. The plan was to get a profile of my genes—or, at least, almost 600,000 genetic markers—by a company called 23andMe (so named because each one of us possesses twenty-three pairs of chromosomes). My journey to Mountain View to get tested by 23andMe actually began two years earlier, in an auditorium at the University of Toronto, in the fall of 2008. That event was a public lecture on direct-to-con-
sumer genetic testing, and the auditorium was surprisingly full with what seemed like well over 500 people from all walks of life. I was sitting on the stage with Joanna Mountain, a Stanford assistant professor and the senior director of research for 23andMe. The focus of the event was whether the new era of commercial genetic testing offered any health benefits. Could genetic testing really provide the average person with information to improve their health? Mountain told me, later, that that Toronto panel, which included a number of scientists and genetic clinicians from around the world, “was one of the most hostile panels I have ever been part of. I felt like it was me against six other people.” I was one of the six. When it was my turn to speak on that Toronto stage I told the audience that most of the information provided by genetic testing companies was useless, a complete waste of money. In response, in front of the audience, Mountain offered me the 23andMe service for free. It sounded like a dare. I met Mountain’s strategic generosity with a firm and public “no thanks,” declining for three reasons. First, I believed the information would not tell me anything valuable about my current and future health status. Second, despite this skeptical view, I was worried that I was, in fact, just neurotic enough to over-interpret whatever results were provided, that I would become one of the “worried well.” Lastly, I didn’t want to come off as hypocritical and opportunistic (“Well, if you are offering it for free, sign me up!”). Although I had three reasons to say no to Mountain, I shared only the first with the audience. But my curiosity grew. Perhaps I was interested in knowing what this test might say. I am, after all, as self-interested as the next person. How could more information about me not be worth knowing? And so, more than a year after the public lecture, I emailed Joanna Mountain to take her up on her offer. She responded immediately and sent me the information necessary to order a 23andMe test kit from the company website. When I told my wife and four children of my plan, most were not thrilled. My wife was worried I’d discover health information that would cause her stress. My
eldest daughter, who is eleven, wondered, not irrationally, why “anyone would want to know what will kill them.” My six-year-old son viewed the required spit collection process—23andMe sends you a tube to gather what seems like an entire mug of saliva—as a significant and insurmountable problem. “That is super gross, Dad,” he said. “Do it in the bathroom.” With these lukewarm family endorsements secured, I put a large tube of my lukewarm saliva in an envelope and sent it across the US/Canada border.
WHY GET YOUR GENES TESTED? TRYING TO answer this complex question first requires a look at the scientific advances that have brought us to the point where a comparatively small company such as 23andMe can offer to test over half a million genetic markers for less than the cost of a cheap suit. Genes, as anyone with even a basic exposure to biology knows, are the units of heredity—a reality that was first illuminated in the 1860s by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk who diligently and meticulously studied the variation of pea plants in the courtyard of an abbey in what is now the Czech Republic. Mendel showed that traits, such as wrinkly pea skin, could be passed from generation to generation. In the early 1900s, scientists built on and refined Mendel’s rules of inheritance, including their role in the development of disease. In 1908, for example, British physician Sir Archibald Garrod suggested that some diseases were due to “inborn errors of the metabolism.” It wasn’t until 1953 that the actual unit of inheritance, the gene, was famously described by James Watson and Francis Crick in a ridiculously short article in the journal Nature. The one page paper, one of the most famous in all of science, starts with the understated pronouncement that “we wish to suggest a structure” for DNA that has “novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” It then goes on to describe the double helix shape that has become the ubiquitous emblem of modern science. In the 1970s and 1980s a variety of new technologies allowed scientists to
read the chemical codes that make up our DNA. The complexity is staggering. Try to imagine your genetic material, your genome, as a string of letters…three billion letters. It would take ten years to read it out loud. New technology (sequencing) made it possible to start unraveling this big string to tr y and identify the place
it was a scientific effort on the scale of the trip to the moon and the Manhattan Project that, if measured against quantifiable technical goals, was a genuine success. In April of 2003, 99 per cent of the gene–containing part of the human sequence was finished to 99.99 per cent accuracy. The project was, in effect, complete.
Try to imagine your genome as a string of letters… three billion letters.
and function of genes. While still slow and expensive compared to today’s computer assisted and automated sequencing, the 1980s technology had progressed to the point where many in the scientific community thought it was time for a big step: the sequencing—or mapping—of the entire human genome. In April 1987 a group of leading scientists issued a report calling for the US government to “fund a major new initiative whose goal is to provide the methods and tools which will lead to an understanding of the human genome.” This report was what initiated the Human Genome Project (HGP), the project that led to the genetic revolution, the era of genetic medicine, the biotech century, or whatever other hyperbole-laden label you wish to use. The report itself was enthusiastic about the potential for the project, understandably, since they were asking the US government for hundreds of millions of dollars, but they did add a caveat, tipping their hands to the unknowable meanderings of scientific inquiry: “We do not know what sequence information is the most valuable. It is likely that the most significant applications to medicine cannot be foreseen at the present time.” The HGP was biology’s first foray into the realm of big science. Costing over $3 billion,
Francis Collins was the head of the US arm of the HGP, and in the summer of 2009 Barack Obama appointed Collins as the director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins has consistently said that improving human health and reducing the burden of disease for all people was, and remains, the real goal of the HGP. Measured against this standard, the success of the HGP is less certain. Since the completion of the HGP the technological advances have been breathtaking. Gene sequencing has improved to a velocity unimaginable even a few years ago. It is also vastly cheaper. A 2009 article in the journal Science outlined how a genome was sequenced for just $4,400. Many in the scientific community think that cheap genomes (as little as $500) are just around the corner. In only seven years (a true blink of the eye in the usual tempo of science), the cost of sequencing a genome has dropped from the billions to the thousands and soon to be hundreds. It’s like the Apollo moon project now costing the same as a flight from Edmonton to Toronto. These are the technological advances — driven by computer automation—that have allowed companies like 23andMe to emerge. The cost, speed and efficiency of genetic research and analyzing the genetic markers (since 23andMe does not WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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sequence entire genomes; rather, it looks at genetic markers along the genome that, through genetic research, are known to be associated with a disease or trait) has decreased to the point where it can be offered to the public at a reasonable rate. But, more to the point, what does all this mean to me, for my health? Yes, it’s exciting, but can this technological genetic wizardry allow me to live a healthier life today? I had sent my saliva south. I was now waiting for answers, wondering if my 23andMe genetic profile would provide me with information I could use to make health decisions that mattered. Two days before heading to Mountain View to meet with Joanna Mountain, I received an email from 23andMe telling me that my results were ready. The email said I could even look at the results now, on my computer. I was sitting in my home office when I got the email, enjoying a moment of guiltily surfing the net at precisely the hour I knew two kids were headed to bed and two others needed help with their homework. Perhaps not the best time to peek into one’s genetic destiny, but I was too nervous and excited to resist. I opened the webpage. I found my profile. There it was. I could hear the normal family chaos rumbling outside my office, but I opened the results anyway. They were intriguing. Provocative. But then I read something… “What the fuck?” I said, obviously louder than I’d meant to. I don’t often use profanity. Even from within my office, the outburst caused a brief and instantaneous moment of family silence.
I ARRIVED AT THE 23ANDME HEADQUARTERS early in the morning. From the outside the company ner ve centre looked like a typical business-park style office; the bland brick façade and modest corporate sign said more “insurance adjusters” than “paradigm-shifting hub of innovation.” I reminded myself that this company had garnered considerable international attention and created about the same level of controversy (in 2008, Time magazine declared its DNA testing kit, the one I used to collect my spit, to be the best invention of the year, but a number of jurisdictions, 26
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including California and New York, have locked horns with 23andMe, claiming, in brief, that it is providing an unregulated medical service). I was early, though not that early, knowing Californians don’t work before 9 a.m. The building looked dead. The door was locked. I pressed a button, and soon a hip–looking, youngish employee opened the door without even asking who I was. Joanna Mountain arrived a few moments later. “Sorry I’m late,” she said apologetically. “Dropping the kids off.” Mountain, whose look and speech is more professorial than corporate, walked me through an open-plan office. We sat in a brightly-coloured lunch room adjacent to an even more brightly-coloured workout room. “We have a Google mentality about fitness and lifestyle,” Mountain explained, referencing one of 23andMe’s biggest investors and Mountain View neighbour. We logged onto my personal 23andMe webpage and start chatting about the results, which are attractively arranged. Each “disease risk” is presented with a “confidence” rating (based on available research) and a listing of your risk (as a percentage) compared to the general population. The website offers results for dozens of disease risks. They are grouped together according to elevated risk, low risk and typical risk. Here is what I found out: I do not have an increased risk for throat cancer (the disease that killed my mother); I do not have an increased risk for high blood pressure (despite the fact that regular blood pressure checks tell me my systolic pressure is consistently elevated); and I have an increased risk for celiac disease, prostate cancer and atrial fibrillation. At first glance, it all appears somewhat ominous. Reading the phrase “increased risk for prostate cancer” is not a great way to start the day. But are these “risk” increases meaningful? Not really. Almost without exception, the increases are mild or moderate. And more impor tantly, they must be read within the context of daily life. The 23andMe report provided me with five key elevated risks, those meant to be viewed as the most significant. The
celiac risk was part of this group. My genetic markers indicated I have a 0.4 per cent chance of getting the disease. This is an increase over the population average of 0.1 per cent. I also have an increased risk of multiple sclerosis. My risk: 0.5 per cent. The population average: 0.3 per cent. When compared to the impact of obesity, not exercising, driving while talking on a cell phone, and, the big one, smoking, a 0.2 per cent increase in risk is essentially lost in the wash of the risks associated with life. There was still the one piece of genetic information that had so unner ved me when sitting in my home office. I asked Mountain about that one piece of data. “Can that genetic result be right?” “Probably,” she said.
My expression must have betrayed my disappointment about this particular result, because she added, quickly and with a patient smile, “Perhaps you have another genetic mutation that moderates its impact.”
IN A 1999 NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE article Francis Collins suggested that the main benefits of the HGP would be new drug therapies, gene therapy, pharmacogenomics (that is, drugs tailor-made for individual genetics) and preventive medicine (using genetic risk information to motivate behavior change). In the article, Collins used a hypothetical scenario to describe how, in 2010, the genetic revolution would impact our lives and the practice of medicine. The
scenario represented a hopeful prediction made while the excitement surrounding the HGP, and the future of health care, was at its most intense. Collins’ predictive scenario involved a visit by a typical male patient to a doctor, in which the doctor used an interactive computer program to take the patient’s family history and in which the patient took a battery of genetic tests for common diseases (again, using an interactive computer program to pick the tests). The hypothetical patient found he was at high risk for lung and coronary disease. And, as Collins put it in the article, “[c]onfronted with the reality of his own genetic data, he arrives at that crucial ‘teachable moment’ when a lifelong change in health-related behavior, focused on reducing specific risks, is possible.” The genetic risk information provided the patient with the “key motivation for him to join a support group of persons at genetically high risk for serious complications of smoking, and he successfully kicks the habit.” Now, in the real 2010, the genetic revolution has not arrived quite as Collins had envisaged, (though to be fair to Collins, most predictions about the practical applications of genetics—such as gene therapy—have been wrong, or, at least, overly optimistic). Family physicians do not offer routine testing for genetic predispositions to common disease, and they do not have cool interactive computer programs to determine which genetic tests to order. And there seems to be no getting around the unalterable tendency of humans to persist in their bad habits, no matter how unhealthy.
A FEW DAYS AFTER RETURNING FROM MOUNTAIN View I called Jonathan Kimmelman, who possesses a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and is now part of the McGill Biomedical Ethics Unit. Kimmelman has a strong understanding of both the science and social consequences of genetics, and it would be fair to say that the hype surrounding the potential clinical application of genetic technologies irritates him. Normally a man of mild manners and easy temperament, he becomes agitated when discussing the topic, although he
does believe that some genetic technologies will have an important role in future healthcare systems. Kimmelman feels researchers are too confident about how basic research—conducted in labs using test tubes, computers and, when necessary, animals—will eventually play out on a human subject. “If we went back and looked at all the pre-clinical research that looked good and exciting,” Kimmelman told me, “we’d see that ninety-nine out of a hundred times we were wrong. I marvel at how people interpret these pre-clinical studies. You’d think the reality of the situation would change our perspective. The way people interpret pre-clinical evidence is often shockingly unsophisticated.” Kimmelman also thinks that despite the glowing reports in the popular press and from people like Frances Collins there has, in fact, been a rapid deterioration in scientific support for the idea that genetic testing will provide vast amounts of useful clinical information. “In the mid nineties,” Kimmelman told me, “everyone was lined up behind the belief in the existence of highly predictive genes. Around 2002 or 2003 that belief started to break up. People began to doubt its value. You still hear it discussed and presented as an exciting possibility, but no one really seems to believe it.”
heap. Few people in Canada have had as direct an impact on genetic research, both scientifically and politically, as Tom Hudson, who is currently the president and scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He has been the lead author on many renowned studies and was, for years, the director of McGill University’s Génome Québec Innovation Centre. He’s been both a participant in this research revolution (when the HGP money started to flow in 1991 he was at MIT, one of the major gene sequencing centres) and an energetic advocate of Canadian genetic research. In the late 1990s, Hudson was knocking on doors in Ottawa asking politicians for funding to establish Genome Canada, an entity that has since become the focal point for much of Canada’s leading genetic research. When I met with Hudson, his time was, characteristically, short. “How much time do I have?” I asked him. He glanced at his watch. “I can give you twenty-five minutes, maybe thirty.” I have known Tom Hudson for over a decade, both professionally and personally; we have worked together on policy committees, shared bad coffee at too many conferences to count, exchanged ideas for our respective research projects, and swapped stories about our children.
The way people interpret pre-clinical evidence is often shockingly unsophisticated.
Kimmelman may be something of an emerging star on social issues associated with biomedical innovation, but he is not doing direct genetic research. I wondered if a leading geneticist would agree with Kimmelman’s pessimistic vision? To find an answer to that question, I went to the top of the Canadian genetic research
Yet despite my “in” Hudson has become so busy that I needed to make an appointment months in advance. For thirty minutes. With time at a premium, I dove in. What, I asked him, is the value of genetic testing, right now, for my personal health? “The genetic revolution will be more about the details of clinical care than the WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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man on the street,” Hudson said, while leaning toward me across a table covered in science journals. “It will not help individuals make day-to-day decisions.” He answered so quickly and with such confidence and intensity I was left with the impression it was a truism he rolled out frequently. I was a bit taken aback by his frankness, and so I asked him to expand on his answer. He paused now, exhaled. “The science is moving so fast.” He settled back in his chair. “But you need to find things that allow for prevention, detection, diagnosis, something with clinical value. Those things take time. You just can’t find markers to predict disease. You need to acknowledge all the complicating factors, the environment, human behavior… everything. And if we find a genetic marker that predisposes someone to disease, we need to be able to modify the risks in a meaningful way.” He leaned towards me again. “For example, maybe your genetics put you at a higher risk for a certain cancer. We can get those people to get more screening. But we still need to do the clinical research to find out if this screening really makes a difference. Is it worth it?” He was referring here to the fact that there are many examples of screening procedures that have not panned out as originally envisioned. I continued by asking Hudson what he thought was driving the broad public misperception of the immediate or near future clinical utility of genetic testing? Here, Hudson was in complete agreement with Jonathan Kimmelman. Too many basic researchers (and, as a result, many in the media) simply do not understand that good exciting science does not necessarily lead to good exciting clinical applications. “Just because it is valuable science,” Hudson said, “doesn’t mean it’s clinically valuable.” There are many factors that add complexity to the transition between basic science and clinical application: the lab logistics of doing the research; gender and socio-economic factors (men typically don’t like to get screened); the lack of pharma-style funding for clinical trials. Robust clinical research, its significance and dif28
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ficulty, is undervalued, under funded and misunderstood, Hudson noted. “There are many great basic scientists doing amazing things, but they are clueless about how to bring something to the clinic.” As I was leaving Hudson’s office, it was becoming ever clearer that the relationship between genetic research and our physical health is considerably more complicated than we are often led to believe in the media. The so-called “genetic revolution” is more of an uncertain and iterative evolution. We have vast amounts of genetic information at our disposal, and incomprehensibly sophisticated technologies that allow for the speedy production of more and more of it, but we still appear to be nibbling indecisively around the edges of what to do with all the data.
As Hudson walked me to the elevator he continued to supply me with data about genetics, cancer, the speed of his sequencers and, most tellingly, his agency’s tobacco control work. “This tobacco project is having an impact, right now,” he said, holding a door open for me. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with genetics.” It seemed a telling thing for a worldrenowned geneticist to say.
GIVEN THE UNDERWHELMING PERFORMANCE of gene therapy and predictive testing, much of the current genetics rhetoric is focused on using genetic information to inform a healthy lifestyle. The watchword is prevention. The plan: procure our individual genetic information in order to help us make decisions about what to eat, what kind of exercise to do, and what kind of
surveillance testing to get. If our genes can uncover a chronic disease we are at slightly increased risk of getting, might we be motivated to take evasive action? (“I am at increased risk for heart disease, I better start exercising and eating right!”) This is the prevention strategy Frances Collins alluded to in his 1999 New England Journal of Medicine article, wherein the hypothetical patient mustered the motivation to quit smoking when “confronted with the reality of his own genetic data.” The past few years have seen a wide increase in the popular culture of stories and companies putting forward the notion of using genetic information to personalize lifestyles and become a proactive player in one’s own health. A company that goes by the name of My DNA Fragrance will, for instance, produce perfume from your DNA, because, as the website says, “Every person’s DNA blueprint is different. So no two fragrances will smell the same.” The health side of the equation is even broader. You can order (allegedly) genetically personalized sports drinks, nutritional supplements, and exercise programs. Genetics is being sold as a pathway to an individualized, healthy lifestyle, the message of almost all direct-to-consumer genetics testing companies and, for that matter, many researchers working in the field. The message of Navigenics, the biggest competitor to 23andMe, exemplifies this pervasive prevention ethos, in that it claims to “use the latest science and technology to give you a view into your DNA, revealing your genetic predispositions for important health conditions and empowering you with knowledge to help you take control of your health future.” There are, as I see it, two problems with the idea of using genetic information for the purposes of prevention and/or personalizing your lifestyle. The first we have already touched on—the research simply hasn’t uncovered genes that provide highly predictive information. (I’ll come to the second problem momentarily.) The idea of personalizing your lifestyle with the help of genetic information looks to be almost as big a bust as gene therapy. In a 2008 article in the New York
BIODIVERSITY IS THE MOTHER OF ALL BEAUTY FOR JUDY DAVIS
when I think of blood drops and little hurts entering a field filling the field when I think of dandelions off their leashes and the Noh play of dragonflies airborne red and metallic blue light as silk when I think that one sigh was the pro-genitor of all life that the binding of oxygen and hydrogen is the most erotic calligraphy that every thought human and otherwise is an astronomical unit that each is star-laced to its very core when I think that inside every genome there is a line of sight that surrounds the earth that perception holds the evanescence of all things within itself that atoms are in a perpetual state of bliss when I think that deer move elegantly between trees like the great tea master Rikyú did among his bowls that a deep sea coral off the Hawaiian Islands is 4000 years old when I think of parallel universes colonizing the edges of birdsong when I think that synaesthesia is the language of God that flesh covers a wider and deeper pilgrimage when I sit here knowing this is a dying world nothing could be more effortless more sacred than this sleepy forest at dawn. ~ Don Domanski
Times, David Goldstein, a geneticist from Duke University, was quoted as saying, “There is absolutely no question that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be.” He went on to add that, “[a]fter doing comprehensive studies for common diseases, we can explain only a few percent of the genetic component of most of these traits…It’s an astounding thing that
we have cracked open the human genome and can look at the entire complement of common genetic variants, and what do we find? Almost nothing. That is absolutely beyond belief.” Yes, it is beyond belief, especially when considering the ongoing push and profile of the idea of prevention. I set up an interview with David Goldstein, and in person he sounded only slightly more
optimistic than he’d sounded in the 2008 Times article. In response to my question about where the field of genetics is heading he started with a cautionary note: “Predicting where science will take us in the near future is almost always a bad idea.” New genome research techniques, such as those being used by Goldstein’s research team at Duke, will, he told me, lead to the identification of a “small number of individuals with high risk genes.” But Goldstein, much like Tom Hudson, is unsure what we will be able to do with that information. Goldstein told me that the public face of genetics—the idea that we can all access useful health information—has it backwards, in that it’s flipped the reality of what’s actually taking place. “The idea of personalized genomics has run in the opposite direction of what the research actually says,” he said. In fact, gene chip technologies like those used by 23andMe, “can only provide information on low risk mutations with little meaning. Researchers will find a small number of high risk mutations, but we can’t do anything to help these people. Even if we can make those predictions, can we do anything to help those identified at high risk? We don’t have any particularly encouraging evidence.” This leads directly to the second big problem with the notion of using genetic information for prevention or lifestyle personalization. Goldstein’s rhetorical question—“Can we do anything to help those identified at high risk?”—is just a different way of asking how successful we would ever be at getting people to adopt healthy habits. Will providing individuals with genetic risk information help change bad habits? Will knowing I’m at a slightly increased risk to get a particular disease be enough to get me on a treadmill or cram some broccoli down my throat? Colleen McBride, chief and senior investigator for the Social and Behavior Research Branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, is one of a handful of scholars worldwide looking at how genetic information impacts health behaviours. Her team hopes to come up with data that will move WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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the prevention debate beyond speculation, a point she made, in the simplest of terms, at the start of our conversation. “We need to bring evidence to these debates.” Which begged the question of what we could learn from whatever evidence is currently available. What this evidence tells us is that genetic risk information isn’t very likely to change behaviour. “Any risk communication exper t would laugh at the suggestion,” McBride told me. “We have long known from other areas of research that the communication of risk is necessary but rarely sufficient. And even if people do change, they all relapse.”
0.5 per cent really cause a person to stop eating potato chips? McBride’s bottom line: “Don’t go to these testing companies looking for risk information that will motivate you.” There is a final nail to hammer into the coffin of the prevention idea (perhaps not the best metaphor when discussing risk information). If genetic risk information could supposedly change behavior in a positive direction, might it not also push people in the opposite direction? For every individual that is at an increased risk for a disease, there will be someone at a decreased risk (in fact, my 23andMe test seemed to show more “decreased risk” genes than genes that increased risk). A person might think, incorrectly, “It says here I have 0.5 per cent less chance of getting heart disease. Bring on the fries and gravy!” Even if we were to accept that genetic information could change behavior for the better, we would be no further ahead. Some people would change in a positive direction, some would order an extra poutine.
DESPITE THE UNSUCCESSFUL REALITY OF THE
In other words, you take the pounds off, you put them back on. Study after study has shown that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get people to change their ways even when faced with powerful risk information. Humans are hard to motivate, and we are, by and large, slugs. Even armed with the knowledge that a behavior is unhealthy, dangerous or just plain stupid, we persist. Learning genetic risk information will do little, at least on its own, to change this reality. This has been understood for years, and a review paper published by McBride and her team in 2010 concluded that, “Genetic information based on single-gene variants with lowrisk probabilities has little impact—either positive or negative—on emotions, cognitions, or behaviour.” And it’s worth reiterating that most of the available genetic risk information, such as the information I received from 23andMe, is weak. Would a risk increase of 30
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“genetic revolution”—few gene therapy successes; few highly predictive genetic tests for common diseases; a pressing need for decades of expensive clinical research to reveal what, if any, benefit will be derived from genetic testing; little evidence that genetic information motivates preventative health strategies—we are still constantly told that a genetic revolution is underway. Even as I was writing this article, Francis Collins published an editorial in Nature claiming that the genetic revolution has arrived, citing as evidence the existence of predictive tests, preventative strategies, and primary care physicians who practice genetic medicine. Where is this revolution happening? Not in the world I live in. How, I wondered, can Collins’ view so dramatically conflict with the existing evidence? And how come we still see headlines that claim to have found the location of a gene for laziness, popularity and getting lost? James Evans is a geneticist and clinical researcher at University of North Carolina who has keenly followed the socio-cultural portrayal of the genetic revolution.
He chaired various United States federal policy committees on genetic issues and has conducted research at UNC on issues such as direct-to-consumer testing. To Evans, there are a number of factors that contribute to the hype. To begin with, he says, “we always gloss over the stuttering, uneven pace of science which includes dead ends and wrong turns. This doesn’t negate the value of the research endeavor. On the contrary, we will be better off for doing this research. But science is an unpredictable, long, circuitous slog, and we always seem to forget this.” Evans has also noticed shifts in promised benefits. “There has been an erosion of claims in the face of reality. The claims have become less and less grandiose. It used to be gene therapy. Then it was highly predictive genetic tests. Now we have a focus on behavior change. But, trust me, behaviour modification is going to be a bust, too.” The other principal factor that has overhyped the revolution, according to Evans, has been technological advance. Things like the ability to sequence entire genomes have created an unattainable level of expectation. “The basic science,” he told me, “is moving much faster than we could have imagined. This sets up an expectation that we will reap benefits in patient care, but I’m skeptical that we’ll find robust genetic predictors of the kind that will make any difference for the individual.” David Goldstein agrees with Evans. Scientists often blame the media for the hype around genetics, but, says Goldstein, “scientists have a lot of responsibility for the hyped portrayal of genetics. Scientists are under pressure to get research resources to come to them instead of the next guy. The genetics community wants to make it look like we are on course to help with common diseases, even if we aren’t. If we don’t create that impression, the money might go to another area, like stem cells.” Geneticists, says Goldstein, should stop over-promising and star t underpromising in order to avoid “an inevitable backlash.” The unpopularity of this position in the research community was made clear to Goldstein recently when a very prominent genetic researcher, whom he
declined to identify, told him to “shut up or the money will go somewhere else.”
BEARING IN MIND THAT MY PERSONAL JOURNEY through the world of the genetic revolution was less than convincing, I was conflicted about my own genetic testing experience. I knew that much—well, practically all—of the information provided by 23andMe was useless from the perspective of health care
young. Sure, we never did live in Jamaica, but I still held various school and county records, and at the age of twelve I joined a track club and trained with Olympians, nakedly aspiring to be one. My passion continued throughout high school and university, but although I won or did well in some big races, it eventually became clear, crystal clear, that I wasn’t Olympic material.
Humans are hard to motivate. Even armed with the knowledge that a behaviour is unhealthy, dangerous or just plain stupid, we persist. decisions. Still, I found it intriguing. I loved the fact that I had the longevity, good memory and slightly-above-average height genes (even though the research supporting the relevance of these genes is still thin). The ancestry aspect of the testing, which 23andMe also offers, was compelling. It turns out that I am, as Joanna Mountain put it, “Irish to the core.” I don’t have a single marker from any location on planet Earth save the Emerald Isle, though I am unclear how this informs anything other than my love for a good Guinness. Beyond this, visiting 23and Me provided me with no information that was I able to envision using to improve my health in any meaningful way. But there was still that one genetic shocker, the one piece of genetic information that caused me so much anxiety and personal reflection, that made me swear out loud at home and stop my children in their tracks. Ironically, this bit of information had nothing to do with my health. Here I must caution that I am about to become somewhat immodest. I was about five years old when I realized I was fast, the fastest kid in every grade, which said a lot because we moved often when I was
It didn’t matter, because the sport gave me much: my first formal date; my first overnight trip away from my home; wild post-race parties that helped to establish close friendships; my wife. I met Joanne, a world class runner with all the right genes, at our track club. After university I shifted to sprinting with a bike on a velodrome, a sport I still pursue competitively and fairly successfully. I could continue, but you get the idea. Sprinting has been central to my personal history. I am a sprinter, through and through. Or am I? On that busy night when I first scanned the results from 23andMe, one thing jumped out. One 23andMe analysis is of the genes that code for “muscle type.” The test result said the following, in plain language: “unlikely sprinter.” My genes did not possess the code for quick twitch muscles. Zero, in fact. The narrative following the “unlikely sprinter” result also suggested I partake in endurance events. Ouch. Damn Irish genes. For days after reading that I sulked about, and frequently found myself looking at my legs, cursing their unsprinterly
muscles. In its long history, Ireland has produced few world-class sprinters. It seemed I was now part of that unstoried tradition. But I wondered, Would the right quick-twitch genes have propelled me to Olympic glory? Probably, or almost certainly, not. Some other physical failing would likely have limited my success. Short shins. Fat feet. Hairy, drag inducing legs. Of course, if I was born in this the era of the genetic revolution, my parents could get me tested for sporting propensities. Many companies now exist that will test your child—for as little as $150—to find out if he or she has the genes for speed or endurance. Atlas Sports Genetics, for example, will test children as young as one–year–old, allowing parents to make an informed decision about which sport to obsessively push, I mean “to encouragingly place,” their children in. Had I taken such a test perhaps I’d have become a famous endurance cyclist. Or perhaps I’d have been just good enough to be distracted from university and would have flunked out. Maybe I would have detested the endurance sports I am apparently genetically suited to pursue, and would have done nothing but sit on my posterior. Most likely, due to the constellation of complications that make us human, I would not have been any better at climbing a mountain on a bike than dashing 100 metres down a track. A few weeks after my visit to 23andMe, I ran into James Evans at a conference in Cambridge, England. With great sorrow, I told him of my non-sprinting-gene affliction and he offered me his sympathies. “The fact that you don’t have a quicktwitch genetic predisposition but still enjoyed and excelled in sprinting just shows how complex things like sports are,” he said. “But it’s more profound than that. The greatest thing about having evolved is that we’re not slaves to our biological destiny. We can pursue activities regardless of various simplistic deterministic predispositions. We can violate the imperatives of biology.” Evans paused a moment before continuing, then smiled. “That’s how we find joy.” I’ll raise a Guinness to that. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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RON MURDOCK ON THE 3A HIGHWAY OUTSIDE OF NELSON
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H U N T I N G & G AT H E R I N G
Fellow
Traveller Ron Murdock might just represent something in all of us. The question is, what?
BY MARCELLO DI CINTIO
// PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID GLUNS
A few days before the Easter weekend in the spring of 1992, Ron Murdock woke up in a ditch on the side of the highway. Heavy snowflakes landing on his nose jarred him awake at five in the morning. Snow was drifting around his sleeping bag. He was in the middle of a spring blizzard, and he was freezing to death. The rides along the Yellowhead Highway had been steady the day before. Hitching the Yellowhead was always smooth, especially along the busy stretch from Hinton to Saskatoon. Murdock’s last ride had dropped him thirty kilometres east of Edmonton, a few kilometres past an Esso Station on the north side of the highway. These are the sort of details Murdock remembers. He’d thanked the driver and glanced at the dashboard before he stepped out onto the asphalt. The gleaming clock read one a.m. He had already spent fifteen hours on the highway that day. “I figured it was time to pull off the road for the night and get some shut eye,” Murdock told me, eighteen years later, when I met him in Nelson, British Columbia.
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Murdock sat up, got out of his sleeping bag and gathered up his gear. Then he made his way to the roadside hoping to catch some sunrise traf fic. Except there would be no sunrise that morning; the storm had reduced visibility to almost zero and was charging down the highway before the first morning truckers. Wet snow softened his cardboard sign and the black ink of ‘SASKATOON’ started to run. The wind sharpened the snow into ice. Murdock shivered. The muscles in his shoulders began to spasm. He knew then he would be dead in a half an hour. Murdock thought of the people he would never see again. He thought of his father, a retired long-haul trucker from whom Murdock inherited his urge to travel. He thought of his mother who never stopped worrying about his life on the road—Ron was their only child—and of his grandmother who lived near the railway junction in Burnaby. He thought of his friends and the dogs he knew. The cold muddled Murdock’s mind. He surrendered to the storm, and decided he wanted to die. “Make it fast,” he said out loud to whatever God ruled the highway. “I don’t want to linger.” Murdock saw lights shining through the blizzard’s grey haze and thought he must already be dead; someone was coming to take him to the next life. But the lights belonged to a van. “It wound up being I hadn’t died yet,” Murdock said to me later. The driver somehow spotted
the streets of Saskatoon, warmed and rescued. Murdock’s near–freezing, though, did not pull him off the road. Far from it; by the end of that year, he’d racked up nearly 14,000 miles on Canada’s highways.
I HAD READ ABOUT MURDOCK’S NEAR-FREEZING in an article he wrote for Street Talk, a street newspaper he used to sell on a corner in downtown Calgary. The article recounted Murdock’s twenty-five years of hitchhiking through Western Canada. He wrote about his favourite highways to hitch on—the Crowsnest, the Alaska Highway—and advised potential hitchhikers to travel light, keep clean, and carr y a sign. He described his longest and shortest waits, his longest and shortest rides. The stor y also revealed that Murdock’s near freezing did not stop him from hitchhiking. “When the ‘call of the wild’ beckons, some of us yield to it,” he wrote. “It becomes intoxicating.” I found Murdock himself intoxicating, and I wanted to learn more about the life he had yielded to. I found dozens of stories he wrote for Street Talk and other street papers. Most were about things like urban pover ty, homelessness, subsidized housing and dumpster diving. Murdock wrote little about himself, but occasionally included a bit of his own histor y in whatever stor y he was telling. I started to collect fragments of Murdock. He grew up in Burnaby. He’d sold street papers in five different Canadian
obligations of career and family for a romantic life of constant wandering. I didn’t know men like Murdock—a “real hobo” as he describes himself—still existed. I didn’t know anyone this free. I didn’t desire Murdock’s life; I am a husband and new father. But I am also a traveler who, in part, coveted Murdock’s hobo sovereignty and “King of the Road” reality. Surely there was wisdom born of hitched rides and highway miles. Murdock had to know things the rest of us didn’t. I wanted to learn what they were. Murdock embodied a kind of traveler’s dream: What would it mean to live a wholly untethered life?
RON MURDOCK AND I STOOD ON THE SIDE of the road among the weeds and summer wildflowers. We were in Balfour, a town just north of the ferry terminal and the junction where Highway 3A becomes Highway 31. It was a good spot, Murdock said, because there was a shoulder wide enough for a car to pull over. Murdock told me to stand a little behind him so as not to block his sign, a cardboard box-flap with the word KASLO hand-lettered in black capitals. A woman approached in a sedan. She smiled as she past us and held her thumb and index finger an inch apart. “Did you see that? That means she’s going only a short distance,” Murdock explained. I had contacted Murdock about a month earlier. He said I was welcome to visit him in Nelson where he worked as a night clerk and custodian at the New
What would it mean to live a wholly untethered life? Murdock, stopped, stepped out of the van, and heaved him into the back. Murdock needed the help; his legs had frozen and wouldn’t bend. “Thanks for picking me up,” he said. “I gotta get warm.” He shook and shook and shook. The driver kept ahead of the storm and a couple of hours later dropped Murdock beside the highway just before Lloydminster. Murdock then caught a ride to North Battleford, followed by one more to Saskatoon from a couple who stuffed two twenty-dollar bills into his pocket as he left their car. He got out and stood on 34
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cities. He had once worked as a part-time custodian at Calgar y’s Central United Church, and had manned reception desks at hotels in Watson Lake, Dawson Creek and Kamloops. He didn’t smoke. And he now lived in Nelson, a town in the West Kootenays. Murdock’s biography is cartography, a map of a Canada few of us have seen or perhaps even want to see. His story links prairie highways to dive hotels, soup kitchens to soft roadside ditches. His landmarks are rail yards and bus depots and cafés where coffee is cheap. He rejected the
Grand Hotel. “After years of moving here and there I am glad to find an area I call home,” he wrote. He told me he still travelled every couple of weeks on his days off, usually to towns in the Kootenays or, once or twice a year, to visit his parents in the Okanagan. These days, Murdock travels most often by bus. “I still hitchhike,” he said, “but not like I used to.” I asked if I could join him on a trip, and he recommended we visit Kaslo together. A week before I landed in Nelson he wrote to warn me that the one bus heading north to Kaslo on the day I would arrive went only
more than 4,600 miles on the highways of Western Canada. “Once it gets in your blood,” he told me while we stood waiting for the Balfour ferry to unload, “it never goes away.”
A LINE OF CARS SNAKED OFF THE FERRY AND
as far as Balfour. “It leaves the only option to hitchhike the last thirty-six kilometres. What are your thoughts on this?” I’d said I thought it sounded perfect. Murdock met me in Nelson on the corner of Vernon and Ward. He wore a plaid shirt under a fleece vest, navy trousers and a Bud Light baseball cap. He carried a small backpack on his shoulders and his cardboard sign under his arm. His beard was mostly gray, his smile a little snaggletoothed. After I shook his hand, he asked “Did you get your sign?” He’d mentioned in an email that “it is wise to carry a cardboard sign with Kaslo written on it” but I hadn’t realized he meant I should bring my own. I’d told him that I, too, was a traveller, but suddenly I felt like a poseur. The bus dropped us at Balfour and I followed Murdock to the junction. He said we could try hitchhiking together for a little while, but figured we’d have more luck separately. “Lots of people are willing to pick up one hitchhiker, but not two.” The last time he tried hitching with someone else—out of Clearwater in 1992—he waited forty-two hours for someone to stop. While we waited, I asked Murdock if he remembered his first hitched ride. He couldn’t recall, but it must’ve been sometime in 1979. “That was the year I got wakened up,” he said. He was in his early twenties, had a high school diploma and a certificate in industrial first aid, and worked as a lab assistant cleaning test tubes at Vancouver General Hospital. “I was just a flunky, that
was all.” He spoke about his time at Vancouver General with a bitterness that I would learn was out of character for him. “It was a really tedious job,” he told me. “Ever yone was always bitching and complaining. There was a lot of politics involved. The hospital was more concerned with saving money than they were with patient care. I thought, ‘This isn’t what a hospital is about.’ I just absolutely, thoroughly hated it. I think that’s probably why I got out of mainstream society and worked on the fringe. It was better for my mental health.” After working at Vancouver General, Murdock decided he wanted nothing to do with the conventional expectations of an ordinary life. “I didn’t want to fit into that world,” he told me. He left Vancouver, and hitched east to find work in Swift Current. The shock of moving from a coastal metropolis to a small prairie town roused something in Murdock. He liked Swift Current well enough, but it was the journey itself that most inspired him. There was something exciting about traversing all those miles. He started hitching rides around Saskatchewan. He traveled to Maple Creek, Moose Jaw, Regina, and Saskatoon. He slept in dive hotels with shared bathrooms, and ate in rough cafés and soup kitchens. He worked odd jobs to fund his trips, and sold street newspapers where he could. Murdock recorded the mileage of every journey. 1979 was Year One of Murdock’s new life, and he logged
onto the highway. Most vehicles turned south to Nelson and few drove past us at all. Murdock wasn’t worried. “This is good territory to hitchhike out of,” he said of the Kootenays in general. “It’s easy. Lots of people are living alternative lifestyles, and they’re used to hitchhikers.” That said, Murdock knows hitching anywhere has its risks. He occasionally refuses rides from drivers who give him “bad vibes.” He told me about drunks who’d stopped for him in the past, and the two occasions when drivers expected him “to engage in homosexual behavior” in return for a ride. “One guy picked me up in Moose Jaw. He told me to go into his glove compartment and there was a porn magazine in there. He wanted me to get horny looking at all the pictures. I got disgusted and got out of the car.” Such incidents are rare, and Murdock told me that hitching is a “great way of building a bigger community.” He believes the interaction between driver and rider, though brief and often anonymous, forges another bond in what he calls the “human family.” “It’s something I learned from a guy who picked me up once,” he told me. “He said ‘When you connect with a hitchhiker the way I’ve connected with you, it extends the community by one.’” Murdock abruptly stopped talking to lift his sign for a passing car. The driver ignored us. “When you connect with a ride,” he continued, “you make up for not having long term friendships.” Camaraderie between hobos is common—except when they vie with each other for rides—but enduring friendships are rare. Sometimes they are tragic. Murdock first met Brad Azerbach in Dawson Creek when Murdock checked him into the men’s hostel. Years later, they saw each other at a lunch counter in Saskatoon, then again in Edmonton where both sold a street newspaper called Our Voice. Though their encounters were WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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infrequent, Azerbach and Murdock somehow grew close. One afternoon, Azerbach confided in Murdock that after years of panhandling and homelessness, he wanted to settle down and get off the street. Later, Azerbach helped Murdock through a painful break-up with a woman he was involved with. “He seemed to understand me,” Murdock said. “He was one of these street people that maybe had mental health issues. But I liked him a lot. He meant no harm.” Harm found Azerbach anyway. In 2006, a homeless woman named Rose Mary Ice killed Azerbach with a hatchet. She struck him five times in the head as he brawled with her common-law husband at a drunken party along Calgary’s Bow River. The blade split Azerbach’s skull and bruised his brain. The next day, two people spotted his dead body on the grass near the Shouldice Bridge. Police caught Ice. They already knew her. Fifteen years earlier, she and another assailant stabbed a man to death with steak knives and a pair of scissors, and she had just gotten out of jail. Murdock saw a notice of Azerbach’s death pinned to a corkboard at Calgar y’s Centre of Hope. A face he recognized, Brad’s, hung over a stor y he could hardly believe. “Awful, awful,” Murdock said. “I was shocked.” Such a crime had never happened to someone he knew. The murder warranted a story in the Calgary Herald and a few brief mentions on the local CBC. Only the gruesome details made the crime newsworthy at all; the deaths of drifters rarely draw media attention. But Murdock wrote about the murder in Street Talk. He wrote about Brad helping him through a “rough patch” in his life and how his chats with Brad always left him “in a better frame of mind.” It was one of the few stories I could find that described Azerbach as something other than a “homeless man” or a “street person.” “Brad looked rough,” Murdock wrote, “but had a good heart.”
AF TER MURDOCK AND I HAD STOOD IN Balfour for forty-five minutes without anyone stopping, he decided to disband our partnership. He pointed to a spot about 36
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100 metres up the road where he wanted me to stand. “It would be better if you had a sign,” he said, “but your thumb should work.” We agreed that the first one to Kaslo would wait at the Kaslo Motel for the other, then we’d go to his favourite café, The Silver Spoon. “I usually order a large hot chocolate,” he said. “We can sit outside and listen to the water lap on the lake.” I smiled at the thought of having to compete with Murdock for a ride. “Which of us has the better chance of getting a ride first?” I asked.
was from and what I was doing in the Kootenays, Murdock said, “You might as well tell her.” After I told them, Carla said that she was from Yellowknife and that she and her Australian boyfriend, Aaron, who was driving, had just been to the Shambhala Music Festival near Nelson. They were road tripping to Revelstoke, and had no real plans beyond that. I sat quietly in the back and read the misspelled messages handwritten on the van walls: HAPPIENESS IS ONLY REAL
He looked me up and down. “It’s about even,” he said. “We’re both respectable.” Ten minutes later a Volkswagen van stopped to pick up Murdock. I groaned, defeated, but when the driver saw my thumb, he pulled over for me, too. A beautiful young woman with big sunglasses, tanned arms and a pierced lip leaned out the passenger window. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Kaslo,” I said. She laughed. “Seems like everyone is going to Kaslo. Get in.” I joined Murdock in the back. His eyes widened when I looked at him and he held up his hand as if to warn against telling our hosts we were together. Perhaps there was something in the hitchhiker’s code that prohibited a pair of travelers splitting up and then sharing the same ride. But when the woman, whose name was Carla, asked me where I
IF IT IS SHARED; PEOPLE EVERYWARE ARE CONNECTED ETERNALEY. Murdock leaned towards the front and told Carla and Aaron to drive up the 31A to New Denver and travel north to Revelstoke from there. He warned them they might have a four or five hour wait for the ferry at Galena Bay. Carla turned around and told us more about her own travels. She’d journeyed overseas to Southeast Asia, to India, and to Qatar, of all places. Now she wanted to roam through Canada in a van with Aaron. “Go for it,” said Murdock. “Do it while you’re young.” Before we jumped out in Kaslo, he warned Carla again about the delays at the Galena ferry terminal. Then he said goodbye. I enjoyed watching Murdock counsel the next generation of wanderers
and asked him if he considered people like Aaron and Carla to be kindred souls. “Yeah, but there was also a little sexual attraction there. I was sitting there looking at her legs and thinking, ‘Thanks.’” I laughed. “She was something.” “She is a free spirit. I like that in young people. I like that in anybody.” We walked down to the Kaslo Motel. The Australian couple that checked us in knew Murdock by name; he rents a cabin there for a couple of nights every six weeks or so. He visits Kaslo for the good price at the motel, for the view of Kootenay Lake, and for the mountains. “The Rockies don’t look like mountains here,” he told me. “They look like mounds of ice cream that have melted and refrozen.” Mostly, though, Murdock comes to Kaslo just to walk along the street. He comes to relax in his cabin, visit the library below the old firehall, and to drink hot chocolate at The Silver Spoon. He always travels this way. Museums and tourist sites don’t interest him. He’d rather experience the ordinary life of a place. “I do normal things,” he said. “I go for coffee. I mingle with the residents. I become part of the town.”
MURDOCK HAS LOVED TRAINS SINCE HE WAS A five year old watching them thunder through Willingdon Junction in Burnaby, a sight that thrilled him then and thrills him now. Yet Murdock never hops freights like a proper hobo. It’s not the danger he fears most. Nor the law. He simply can’t bear
south along the Island Highway to Nanaimo, usually arriving with just enough time to board the final ferry back across the Strait to Horseshoe Bay, and make the last bus to Vancouver. Then he would go home to sleep. The wait for the Powell River ferry was the only time all day that Ron was not technically in motion. He didn’t go anywhere. He just wanted to move. Murdock surprised me when he first said he has been “big into meditation” for the last decade or so. The man did not fit the stereotype of a recreational Buddhist. Then again, what could be more Zen than Murdock’s time on the highway? To meditate, after all, is to unclutter. It is to rid the mind of distractions and desires. It is, simply, to be. And for Murdock, to be is to move. Buddhism also teaches that the journey holds more importance than the destination. Murdock takes it one step further: sometimes he doesn’t have a destination at all. Travel is a meditation; continuous stillness through constant motion.
RON MURDOCK KNOWS MANY THINGS MOST people don’t know. He knows that when Highway 97 passes through the Okanagan, it brings carloads of migrant workers from all over the country who come to pick fruit, but 97 North between Cache Creek and Prince George is full of ranchers and rednecks. Past Dawson Creek, the 97 becomes the Alaska Highway where you might go 200 kilometres between buildings. “That does something to a person’s sense of belonging,” Murdock said. On
rye toast at the Treehouse Café. “Each road has its own character.” Murdock knows a little about breakfast, too. He told me that meals served at soup kitchens and free food lines are usually pretty palatable. Breakfasts, though, are always better at the beginning of the month when shelters receive their monthly grocery donations. Shelters serving bacon and eggs the first week are ladling porridge by the fourth. Between refills of weak coffee, Murdock told me that he sees things “from the back alleys and the abandoned rail yards of life.” He likes this phrase, and repeated it often during our time together. “I have the time to experience life more fully,” he continued. “I removed a lot of clutter from my life. I don’t have a mortgage to pay off. No family to raise. I never have. I am not really interested in that. From the fringes, I tend to look at life through a different perspective.” “What do you see that I don’t see?” I asked. “I experience life as it is,” he said. “I see things how they really are.” “And how are they?” “People are living in a state of illusion,” he said. “They are caught up in the small picture and miss out what is happening in the big picture. They don’t have time to sit down and think about things.” Murdock’s answers were frustrating; his observations were astute but hardly profound. I wondered if my expectations for road-borne wisdom were too high.
Once it gets in your blood it never goes away. sitting still for hours waiting for a train to move. “You don’t know when the train will leave,” he said. “You can end up waiting at the siding for a couple of hours. You can waste a lot of time doing that.” Murdock obsesses about movement. Back in 1990, he’d wake up early on Sunday mornings and head to Vancouver’s bus depot. He would catch the long haul bus to Powell River, then a ferry through Blubber Bay and across the Strait of Georgia to Courtenay. He’d leave the ferry terminal, hold out a cardboard sign, and hitchhike
the Crowsnest Highway through southern British Columbia conspiracy theorists abound, which always makes for interesting rides. The hitching is good on Highway 16 from Terrace to Prince George, but hard between Terrace and Prince Rupert where traffic is sparse. The Yellowhead Highway from Saskatoon to Edmonton is full of truckers and salesmen who will stop for hitchhikers even in the middle of the night. Or the midst of a spring blizzard. “Ever y highway is different,” Murdock said, between bites of sausage and
Murdock knows every shelter from here to Whitehorse. He knows the ferry schedule at Galena Bay. He knows what days the Kamloops shelter is most likely to serve bacon and eggs. He knows how to get from wherever he is to anywhere he wants to go. But I wanted more than that. I wanted insights. I wanted a highway philosopher, a man who might even tell me something about myself I had never considered, or who could have shown me what I might have become had I gone one way in life inWWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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stead of another. It was foolishness on my part, a projection. He lived the traveler’s fantasy, but at the end of every highway he was just Murdock.
UFO HUNTER WAS ON TELE VISION AND Murdock wanted to get back to his room in time to watch it (he has twice seen UFOs: once when he lived in Calgary, and once as a boy in Burnaby when a flying disk rose over Burnaby Mountain while he was watching Laugh-In.) I left him to his television and walked to the Kaslo Hotel for a beer. The man on the next bar stool had a braided soul patch and asked what I was doing in Kaslo. I told him about Murdock. “Just another bleeding heart story,” the man scoffed, as he ordered us a round of tequila. He presumed my stor y about Murdock would end up a pitiful account of an abandoned man. He was bored of sob stories, he told me.
heard Murdock speak this way. He talked about filthy hotel rooms he’d occupied and the occasional long wait for a ride, but had never complained about his life, at least not to me. He was not bitter. He wanted no sympathy. The next morning, over pancakes at the Treehouse, I asked Murdock if he felt he’d had a tragic life. He didn’t think so. “Everyone has rough moments in their lives, so I’m nothing special. We all go through tough times. I could sit here and say ‘poor me, I had a crummy childhood,’ but I’m not a child anymore. There are opportunities around me. There are more blessings than negative stuff. So count your blessings.” Murdock abandoned mainstream society because he wanted to. Nobody pushed him onto the highway. “I don’t want to get involved with people who say ‘I feel sorry for you.’ It’s too much negative chatter.” He is even uncomfortable accept-
“I figure I’ve been given to,” he told me, as he wiped up the last of his pancake syrup, “and so I give back.” When Murdock lived in Cranbrook, he tried to get a new men’s hostel opened. “There was no shelter between Highway 3 and Kelowna,” he said. The hostel, as Murdock envisioned, would provide beds and meals for the homeless and create a handful of new jobs. Murdock campaigned social services and approached local businesses for support. “Some were receptive. Most weren’t.” In 2001, Murdock drew on his experience selling street newspapers in Edmonton and Winnipeg to start a street paper in Saskatoon. He even recruited young journalists from the University of Saskatchewan’s campus newspaper, The Sheaf, to write for the new street paper. But the Cranbrook hostel never opened and the Saskatoon paper quickly folded. The projects involved too much bureaucracy and politics for Murdock to manage. “I’ve given up on those things for the time being,” he said. Murdock still tries to give back in his own way, even if it means simply being kind to waitresses, motel clerks, and the girls who work in cafés. And he always offers to buy coffee for the drivers that give him rides. Sometimes they accept, other times they don’t, but Murdock never forgets to ask. The small gesture is part of his personal code.
ON OUR BUS RIDE BACK TO NELSON, MURDOCK
Then he recounted his own. He told me he was adopted and had a miserable childhood. He talked about his refusal to seek out his biological mother and father, and how he’d broken contact with his adoptive parents. His last relationship crumbled when his girlfriend told him their nine-month old child was probably not his. He described hitting “rock bottom,” then drained another bottle of Miller Genuine Draft and asked me if I wanted to write a story about him. It occurred to me then that I’d never 38
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ing charity. When he lived in Saskatoon, he suffered serious back pains and went on general disability for a year and a half. The government cheques paid him double what he earned hawking street papers, but Murdock would rather make his own money than rely on “handouts.” He has next to nothing, but doesn’t feel society owes him. In fact, Murdock believes something close to the opposite. After decades of hitching rides, sleeping in shelters, and dining on donated food, he thinks he has a debt to pay. At least a karmic one.
told me about some of the “old-time hobos” he’s known. Calgar y Len hopped trains from Calgar y to Vancouver and back again, sometimes stopping in Kamloops. He slept in emergency shelters, ate at free food lines, and bet his welfare cheques on slow horses. Robby S. Thompson, named for his love of Hunter S. Thompson, worked periodically for a cattle auction in Dawson Creek. Ross ‘The Baptist’ Draper experienced divine visions he insisted on sharing, loudly, and worked the fishing boats in Prince Rupert. Al the Taxpayer never worked at all. “If it was work, he ran,” Murdock said. “All he wanted to do was hitch around.” These hobos each had a territory they traveled through. Len kept to his rail route from Calgary to the coast. Al the Taxpayer
SOLILOQUY OF A FIELD MOUSE What moves the reddened wood of my blood the brightened eye of my eye its wick lit by a river trembling with fire what novas in the forest – immaterial pulse of feathers grey as waves against a shore I cannot name what was I once that I should be again what precedes me will remain when I’m dissolved into the ethereal speech of grass gone green again I will leave my body as I have done before a small meal for my predators and my kind on this field’s floor I will spread unseen like water spilling from a glass the current that moves between sibling things what pervades me for a taste of the contained the defined world both elegant and maimed what sustains the forms that haunt the particular life what claw what claw of water hunts me down. ~ Julia McCarthy
rarely left Dawson Creek. Murdock had one of the largest terrains, a vast network of hostels and shelters that formed a triangle between Whitehorse, Saskatoon and the Okanagan. The men ran into each other once in a while in different parts of the country. Even men like Calgary Len and Al
the Taxpayer drifted off their regular routes from time to time. Murdock keeps track of the hobos he meets and where he meets them. When he sees someone in three different cities or three different provinces, he inducts them into his Hat Trick Club.Len, Al and The Baptist are all members.
Murdock hasn’t run into any of these old friends for years now. Pure hobos, he told me, men who choose a life of highways and hostels, are becoming hard to find. When governments cut funding to social services they changed the complexion of Murdock’s milieu. Most of the men sleeping on emergency shelter beds or standing in the free food lines nowadays are rarely travelers like Murdock and his hobo cohorts, but are more often addicts, recently released convicts, and the mentally ill. Of course, there is never a shortage of transients-by-choice in the West Kootenays, and we stepped off our bus in Nelson into their midst. These are not fiftyyear-old career hobos like Murdock, but young drifters who’ve left their parents’ homes to gather in loose bands; women in long gypsy skirts and headscarves, men in unbuttoned shirts and sagging jeans, both with piercings and dreadlocked hair. The Shambhala Music Festival had ended only a few days earlier, and young hippies—Nelsonites call them the “Shambhalost”—crowded the street corners more than usual. I paused to listen to a dreadlocked busker drone a chorus about being “connected to nature.” I didn’t envy or admire these kids the way I did Murdock. Their activism seemed naïve, their rebellion shallow. The young transients rejected the rules of the majority, but embraced conformity within their tribe. They were not free the way Murdock was free, and they did not give back. The same kids who spent two hundred dollars for Shambhala tickets showed up for lunch at Our Daily Bread, a church-run soup kitchen set up to feed Nelson’s poor. Murdock likes the hippy kids, but he doubts they have the stamina to stay on the road as long as he has. “They’re doing it while they’re young and getting it out of their system,” he said. “It’s excellent that they’re doing it, but they don’t last. They get married. She gets pregnant. They’ve got to settle down and raise a family.” He paused, as if for emphasis. “Nothing stops a traveller cold like an unwanted pregnancy.” Murdock knows more than anyone the unromantic demands of his sort of life. “Doing it for years does take a lot out of a WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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THE RUNNING TALLY
person,” he said. “There’s the tension of not knowing how long you’ll be waiting for a ride. Then, here you are, waiting, and you turn around and there’s a thunderstorm coming.” Even a dedicated transient like Murdock has endured moments of fatigue and doubt. “After being stuck in a place for five or six hours, I would think ‘Maybe I should go home and get married and find a real job,’” he admitted to me. “But then you get that ride and immediate-
about his visit to the doctor that morning. “I lost forty-three pounds in the last two years,” he announced. I was shocked. “How?” “Just exercise,” he said. “Is it healthy to lose that much?” I found myself worried for him. “What did the doctor say?” “He said it’s good. I was overweight before. But he said I don’t need to lose any more.”
stack. His recently-used Kaslo sign was at the bottom; Grand Forks, his next destination, on top, followed by Creston, New Denver, Yahk, Nakusp, and Cranbrook. I restored the signs to the closet shelf, careful not to shuffle the order. Murdock showed me a sheet of paper lying on a shelf. Under the heading Yearly Mileage Record was an annual accounting of his travels. A column of typed dates crawled down the left side of the page next to the miles traveled each year. In 1979, the first year of his travels, Murdock covered 4,609 miles. In 1992, his record year, he traveled 13,527 miles. “Almost all hitchhiking,” he said. The following year’s total was the lowest, only 1,472 miles; he’d clearly been exhausted from the year before. Murdock handwrites his more recent sums on the right side of the page. After each journey, he crosses out the previous number and adds the updated total. He uses an old calculator to convert kilometres to miles. I held the mileage-sheet in my hand like a sacred text. I had wondered before meeting Murdock what it would it mean to lead an untethered life such as his, and holding that sheet felt like some kind of
Pure hobos are becoming hard to find. ly those thoughts go away. The adrenaline of someone stopping for you.” He smiled. “Even after all these years, it happens every time.”
KING’S FAMILY RESTAURANT IS THE KIND OF place that serves Chinese and Western cuisine and still uses the word “smorgasbord.” Murdock and I shared our last meal there; I went Chinese and he went Western. After we finished our chow mein and pork sausages, we grabbed six Kokanee Gold and went to his place on Ward Street, a basement apartment with a single window that lets in little air or light, only the occasional view of sandaled feet on the sidewalk. Murdock has a bed, a stove, a fridge, and some green patio chairs, but he shares a bathroom with the other tenants in the basement. I twisted open two beers, handed one to Murdock and asked him 40
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Murdock seemed tired. He sat on his easy chair and let me tour his place on my own. He pointed to a collection of toilet paper rolls stacked on a counter. “It was my idea to recycle the unused toilet paper,” he said. Part of his job at the New Grand is to clean the adjoining bar and restaurant. Each night he replaces the toilet paper in the restrooms. Murdock brings home the roll ends rather than throw them away. “I give it to people who can use it,” he explained. “Occasionally homeless people come over.” Murdock’s cardboard hitchhiking signs sat in a pile at the top of his closet. Each had NELSON written on one side, and his destinations on the other. Murdock visits these towns on a regular rotation. The sign on the top of the pile represents Murdock’s next trip. When he returns, the sign goes to the bottom of the
answer, almost as if I were peering into his DNA. He didn’t tally destinations, only miles, and as I stared at his list, at the roster of the tens of thousands of miles he’d traveled without a single mention of a place, I thought that perhaps there was a final wisdom here after all. Murdock is a body in perpetual motion, but he is also no more or less than any of us. We are not best defined by the road signs of where we arrive, but by the miles, and actions, in between. Murdock, of course, doesn’t care to be a symbol or a sage. All he wants is a ride. And then another. And then a ride home. I looked at the sheet one last time. The final number, written in blue ink, represented our round trip to Kaslo. Eighty-six miles. Already accounted for. I touched my finger to our tally, and returned the paper to its shelf. EB
MEET SCIENCE ART
Perceptions of Promise: Biotechnology, Society and Art
ESSAYS Eric Meslin / David Grant and Paul Cassar ART Besant / Caulfield / Mills / Wilson Ingram/Hildebrandt / Macdonald / Schlüter
In April 2010 a seemingly disparate group of forty or so people met at a hotel in Banff, Alberta. It was billed as a conference, but no one was quite sure what the title of the conference was, or that it qualified as a conference, or even precisely what it was that was supposed to happen at this conference. Visual artists from as far afield as Buenos Aires and Massachusetts had made the trip, as had biomedical scholars and scientists from places like Indianapolis, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. Sponsored in large part by the Canadian Stem Cell Network, the loose premise of the conference was to explore how the worlds of art and science, particularly biotechnology, were beginning to intersect in ways that no one could have predicted. Artists are becoming fascinated with how rapid advances in biomedical research are challenging traditional ways we view our bodies and environment, and scientists and scholars are finding a new way of seeing their work through the eyes of the artists—both camps wanted to meet to talk about it, whatever “it” was. The three day gathering (in itself a kind of sequel to a 2008 conference that produced the award-winning book Imagining Science) led to fascinating and, at times, unsettling discussions and presentations. What follows is a snapshot of that conference, a glimpse into some of the art, some of the thinking, and some of the research, all of it a unique collaboration between scientists, scholars and artists. It will be brought together later this year as an exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, and will be published in book form in 2011 by the University of Washington Press. Both carry the title Perceptions of Promise: Biotechnology, Society and Art. >
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LIZ INGRAM and BERND HILDEBRANDT / Perplexed Realities
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The Books of Life ERIC MESLIN One of the ways genetic science has captured the public’s attention is in the way it allows us to believe that understanding one’s DNA leads to understanding deeper truths about people. The fully mapped and sequenced human genome has been called the book of life, since it contains all the genetic information necessary to construct human beings. But does genetic information tell us all we need to know about a person? Hardly. If we really want to know a person—their character, hopes, ideas, beliefs, sense of humour—genetic science can only get us so far. DNA is not destiny. And while we’re at it, maybe we should also dispense with public opinion surveys, focus groups, standardized tests, voting records, and bar code results from grocery purchases. Instead, why don’t we simply have a look at the books stacked on their bedside nightstand. The thinking goes like this—whereas opinion polls and other strategies for eliciting attitudes have statistical validity, they can never authentically capture more nuanced ideas about why people think the way they do and what matters to them. Books, especially books you choose to read, ought to reflect more of who you are. And the books on your bedroom nightstand may say the most. At this moment I have eight: a new historical account of the Medical Committee for Human Rights written by John Ditmer; Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist; a compendium of Stephen Jay Gould’s essays by Steven Rose; Greg Mortensen’s second book, Stones for Schools; a couple of Clive Cussler novels; a scuba diving guide from the “Dummies” series; and a book about losing belly fat (which actually seems to be working). There is no formal order to the pile: the books are partially stacked, partially piled. Nor are they in any rational order, except perhaps that the most recently read is on top and the widest one (Rose’s compendium of Gould) is good for holding my reading glasses.
Of course, many people have books piled on nightstands, likely organized (or not) in different ways. Aesthetics aside, books on nightstands reflect their owner. In my case you would correctly gather that I have an interest in evolutionary biology, human rights, personal health and scuba diving. But how much can we generalize from this? For example, looking at my nightstand today would give you a current snapshot but not a full picture. Two months ago Ridley and Rose hadn’t been purchased; instead you would’ve found a Lonely Planet
Guide to Perth and Western Australia and Jack Weatherford’s Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (to read along with my daughter reading it for a high school summer assignment). Who knows what the pile will be in two months, let alone two years? So it is with DNA. In some cases you can learn that a tiny misspelling in a person’s genetic alphabet greatly increases their chance of developing a disease or responding to a drug. This is good and useful. But genetic information will not reveal all. Moreover, we are
MACDONALD / Simmer Dim (above), CAULFIELD and MILLS / Plan for a Sanctuary
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MACDONALD / “Branches, Portals, Places”
WILSON / Logos, 2006-2009
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now learning that small changes in the environment may actually trigger differences in how genes work. Perhaps I have just proved the negative: using the content of one’s nightstand as a method for more deeply understanding an individual has some merit, but it has to have inherent limitations. Again, it’s the same with DNA. But it seems the public has a different take on this, which is problematic. You can hardly read a major daily newspaper (or its online equivalent) and not find survey results of public attitudes on stem cell research, organ transplantation, health reform, or genetic testing. And the snapshot approach—telephone, mail or online surveys—is often what’s used to capture public opinion. These snapshots are limited by the questions asked, how they were framed, and what the respondent was thinking at the time, as is the case with any opinion survey. One could also take the long view—by examining, for example, all the books I’ve piled on my night-
stand over the years (and the thousands of books on hundreds of nightstands over many years). Like many, it would be a pretty long list—rivers of reading material have come into my life, eddied for a time (some longer than others since I am always reading more than one book) and then moved on with the current, taking completed (or unfinished) books to the second-hand book exchange my wife uses or to friends and colleagues. The river-of-books-over-time approach is analogous to large longitudinal cohort studies in which scientists track a population over many years. The Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts has been ongoing for more than sixty years; researchers have been following the residents of this small town over their lifetime to see how they lived and died, how many got sick and of what, and at what age people had heart attacks or strokes. They occasionally interview them, ask them to complete surveys, and take small blood samples for genetic analysis. If only there was a way to do this with the books on our bedside tables. Taking the long view gives a much better picture of populations at a depth that no poll can ever touch. Similar efforts are underway with large biobanks—repositories of DNA, blood and other biological materials often linked to health records that are being developed around the world. Like the Framingham study, these biobanks are now being mined for genetic data, which researchers hope one day to turn into health information that can aid in preventing and treating disease. They are valuable tools to learn about what makes people healthy or sick, at high or low risk. But of course they can’t tell you anything approaching a person’s life goals or plans. Genetic analysis isn’t any different; it can’t tell you who people are or what is important to them. So how, then, ought we try to understand the connections between genetic data about a person, and the person herself? How do we make sense of a survey outcome about someone’s beliefs about genetics, and the profound complexity that make up the beliefs themselves? And how do we translate genetic knowledge obtained from a tiny piece of DNA extracted from a blood sample into an eventual treatment plan for people with a common disease? It’s not so much that genetic science is flawed; it’s that it’s incomplete. Maybe the public needs to learn more about science, a lot of which they’ll find in books. And of course it’s not that books are unable to provide some information about what people are like, it’s just that it’s more important to hear what people say about the books they’ve read. DNA may be called the book of life, but it’s never going to be a replacement for the books in my life. EB
SCHLÜTER / Similia Simibus 16
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Breaking Through DAVID GRANT and PAUL CASSAR C.P. Snow stated in his 1959 Cambridge University Rede lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” that society was increasingly divided by the humanities and the sciences, the expertise of scientists and “literary intellectuals” so unlike one another as to be almost wholly incompatible. F.R. Leavis’ spirited 1962 rebuttal, “Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow,” first delivered as the Downing Lecture at Cambridge and then reprinted in The Spectator, attacked Snow’s premise and criticized his methods. Literary London shook with the controversy, and the spectacle is still discussed and pored over by commentators today. Now, more than fifty years after Snow’s lecture, we find that these “two cultures” are still firmly ingrained into our collective unconscious. In fact, this past spring the Cambridge philosopher Onora O’Neill delivered the 2010 installment of the Rede Lecture, a talk entitled “The Two Cultures Fifty Years On.” However, most of the commentary and controversy until now has taken it as a given that science and the humanities were mutually exclusive disciplines, and, importantly, disciplines which required, thrived upon, and cultivated distinct intellectual abilities and thought processes. This distinction more generally has recently been called into question, with many realizing that science and art are, in fact, quite similar. Both are dynamic, iterative, and solitary. Both are often independent. Both can involve a high level of uncertainty and, consequentially, risk. Both use unique man-made tools, with inherent physical limitations, for specific purposes. And both the scientist and artist thrive on keen powers of observation, which lets them observe their world and from it draw a dim signal amidst a sea of noise. But these are just outward indications of a deeper similarity that unites the process of art with the process of science, and that suggests the need for a re-evaluation of the decades-old debate over education in the sciences versus the humanities. Like the artist, the scientist is most interested in telling a story that has not been told before, and must do so usually with only loose guidance from pre-existing knowledge. Every action is deliberate, yet the outcomes are uncertain. At its essence, there exists in the process a shared desire to create something profound. Gustav Flaubert captured this concept when he observed that “human language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the while we are longing to move the stars to pity.” Although they use 46
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different tools, the process of science and the process of art are united by the notion of creating something which changes the way we think about our world. This process can be thought of as externalizing the internal desire to describe what it means to be alive. It is in this context that the above list of similarities in performance arises: as mere consequences of a common underlying process.
BESANT / Metamorphosis #1
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CAULFIELD / Body Plan #2
While it is commonly accepted that artists create, to see how scientists create is less obvious. It was in 1938 that Hans Reichenach first noted the distinction between a scientist in the context of justification versus a scientist in the context of discovery. It is precisely in the context of discovery where a scientist is seen to create, and where differences between the process of art and the process of science become blurry. It is here that science is most definitely an art. The act of discovery is profound: the focus is 48
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on exploration as the scientist attempts to assimilate new information which may challenge the norms of prevailing paradigms. At these times the creative demand on the scientist is greatest, as they navigate through a murky landscape of conflicting results and limited information to make sense of new observations. It is in the context of discovery where, as Thomas Kuhn argues, existing notions become non-existent and justification is secondary, so that the scientist is able to conceive novel ideas
without constraint. Inevitably, the constraints are restored as the scientist returns to the context of justification, for it is only through rigorous controlled experimentation that their idea can be validated, the hallmark of the scientific method. But if the essence of scientific breakthrough is creative, the way in which art is created can similarly be seen to rely on scientific principles. As mentioned above, most art and science evolve and mature in private, and respective public showings only occur much later when a finished product is ready for presentation. In this prepresentation period both art and science involve cycles of attempt, failure, re-evaluation and re-execution, until the truths each are trying to externalize are sufficiently examined and presented. It is in this iterative sequence of execution and evaluation—sketch after sketch, draft after draft—that artists become scientists. Critical reevaluation of performance or creation occurs against an external metric, perhaps an elusive and difficult to describe goal but one that is driven to and understood once reached nonetheless. Trumpet players famously lock themselves in dark closets and hold a single note for minutes to improve their sound. These “long tones” are certainly not acts of creative expression but a means for the artist to develop the human tools of their trade––the embouchure for a trumpet player, perhaps mixing colours for a painter, or flexibility for a dancer. The point is that successful execution of an artist’s skill and the creation of art requires considerable unseen and diligent development of material skill, something often said in the past to be a first characteristic of scientists. Now, however, we can view the development of material skill primarily in the context of justification (as opposed to discovery), a distinction that is applicable to both scientist and artist. So, if in their essence, scientists are artists and artists are scientists, is a sharp distinction between the two a false one? Many creative endeavours can be seen to require scientific evaluation of performance and combine physical tools with artistically creative thought. Perhaps it’s wiser not to dichotomize in the manner of the last fifty years of debate. More practically, given that the Snow/ Leavis controversy raised fundamental questions about education and what we expect it to achieve, perhaps schools might not automatically streamline pupils with creative talent into the arts, since a creative mind can also find great satisfaction and success in the sciences. The reverse is also true. Simply put, life can be richer if one sees the art and science in what are collectively understood as science and art. EB Perceptions of Promise: Biotechnology, Society and Art, will run January 4, 2011-March 30, 2011 at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta.
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FICTION
The Belle Auroras BY MARINA ENDICOTT
A
t ten, the rasping apartment bell twisted and twisted. After a minute there was a rapping knock, then more twisting. Only Clover was properly up—Bella was still in her night-dress, stirring scrambled eggs. At first they thought they would ignore what must be a peddler or the brushman—unless it could be Aurora, needing milk for morning tea? Clover put her eye to the peep-hole and then stood back on her heels. After an instant she tip-toed backward down the hall to the kitchen. “Sybil and Julius!” she told Bella, who popped her eyes wide open and glanced round the kitchen at the truly dreadful mess they’d let build up since the maid had last been. The rapping and knocking intensified. Clover dodged into the parlour, where Mama lay tangled in blankets on the Murphy bed, mouth fallen slack in sleep. “Mama!’ she whispered. “It is Sybil at the door. And Julius!’ Flora opened one eye, then the other, pulling Clover into focus and staring blankly at her. Then she jumped out of bed, flung the bedclothes toward the centre, shoved the Murphy bed back up into its niche and dashed for the bathroom, snatching her wrapper and a tangled assortment of sewing notions from the chair as she ran. “Wait, just wait!” she whispered, and whisked the door shut, opening it again to release the sash of her wrapper. Her wild eye showed 50
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through the crack, and she nodded. Clover opened the apartment door. “Why, hello!” she said. “Dear ma’am, dear sir—how pleasant to see you after this long while!’ “Yes, you’d think so! Sixteen months nearly to the day, as I count,” Sybil said, biting the words out. Her face was pinched and strange, not at all her eager, unsquashable self. She drew back her upper lip to display tight-clenched teeth. Julius looked at the ceiling. Bella came from the kitchen, where she had been bundling the dirty dishes quietly into the oven. She had tied on a bib apron, hoisting her night-gown so that it almost looked like a dress, and her feet were shoved into Clover’s other shoes, all she could find in the kitchen. “Julius!” she cried, giving him a warm embrace; she turned to Sybil, but stopped in time. “We are here to see Flora, if you please,” Sybil said, frost sharpening her voice and face. The girls fell back and showed their guests into the parlour. There they all stood awkwardly. The Murphy bed’s rise had left the room disordered. Clover flicked the carpet into place and adjusted the arm-chair and the small table by the window. She opened the drapes to let in pale autumn sun. Nobody spoke. Then Mama was at the door, her hair tidied into a presentable knot, girdle snug
and everything dainty about her, as if she’d never had a bad night in her life. “Dear Syb! And Julius,” she said, her hands outstretched as she came forward. “Here you are in cold old Edmonton, what a pleasure!” Sybil tittered. “Yes, here we are, back again like a bad penny. Two bad pennies!” Her eyes darted over Mama, taking in the new lace-point collar, the dove kid slippers peeping out under the silk morning-gown wrapper—the undeniable air of prosperity. “And how delightful to see you,” Mama said. “We thought you would find it so. Delight-ful,” Sybil said. The splotches of colour on her cheeks worried Clover. Julius shambled to the single arm-chair and settled his bulk. One eyebrow waggled. Enjoying himself, Bella thought, the old scallywag. She went for more chairs. “Got your address from Teddy Vickers at the Muse. We ourselves are staying at Mrs. Springer’s, where the food is very decent; very. Performing later this week, Professor Konigsburg’s Ventri-lectricity—at the Princess, south of the river…” He subsided, at a glance from Sybil. “They’ll know where the Princess is, Julius,” she said, with the sweetest of trills. “Even though they theirselves are at the up-tone Muse, above our touch. Took us this long to follow you to Edmonton, to find a theatre that would book us here, but we made it.”
City of Edmonton Archives
In September, 1914, the sister-trio-harmony vaudeville act The Belle Auroras are playing Edmonton as Les Très Belles Aurores de Nouvelle France at the direction of their manager, Fitzjohn Mayhew, a producer of dubious morals who has married Aurora, the eldest sister. Mayhew took Aurora, Clover, Bella and their mother Flora with him the year before when he absconded from a theatre in Montana, leaving their old friends Julius and Sybil in the lurch with the rest of the company. The girls now perform at Mayhew’s new theatre in Edmonton, and have suites in the new Arlington Apartments.
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Bella came back, apronless and dressed, with two wooden chairs from the kitchen, and set them carefully for the ladies, but Sybil would not sit, so neither did Mama. Clover, queasy from the excess of ire in the room, saw that Sybil’s eyes showed white all round the pupils. There was a silence. “When we left Helena so abruptly—” Flora began, but Sybil would not let her finish. “Swanning it pretty well up here, are you? Cats that swallowed the cream?” Flora turned her head in distaste. “Oh, is that too coarse for you? Too materialistic for your fine sensibility?” “You—I don’t know what you mean,” Flora said. “I’m sorry if you—” “Hist!” Sybil said sharply. “None of that! We need no apology from you!” Julius turned from the window, pulling his chair beneath him without troubling to lift its feet. It set up a painful screech in the suddenly-silent room. “Sybil, my dear,” he said, mild as milk. “Can it be you harbour some rancour toward our dear Flora?” Sybil pounced on that: “Oh, can it be? But how should I rancourize—you and I left high and dry without a gig and without a pay-packet—Mayhew, in fact, having come to Jay cap in hand that very afternoon, to ask for the loan of a hundred to tide him over to meet payroll! Fifty dollars he got off him! And if Jay had had more in pocket, we’d have been out all that as well, sure as shooting.” Flora put out her hand and would have touched Sybil, save that she leaped back as if the hand was a hot poker. “Oh no! Don’t you come the friendly with me now. Not one word we had from you, nor from Fitz Mayhew, not that I’d have expected it from him—and Jay ought to have known better—we’ve had enough words over that, thank you very much. But no word of warning that everything was done up! How much would that have cost you?” Flora sat down on the kitchen chair, as if her knees were not obeying her. Bella had crept forward to Clover’s elbow and now tugged very slightly on her sleeve, making bulgy eyes to pull her out of this. Bella herself could stand the music and if there was to be a fight she did not want to miss the fireworks, but 52
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Clover might faint if she was too close to the action. “I’d like to know how you could betray me so,” Sybil continued. “That had been your friend from olden days and forward, and would have gone to the ends of the earth for you—left with egg all over my face!” The girls had reached the hall door, but felt they could not leave Mama alone. They needn’t have troubled. Flora was rising to the attack, cheeks flushed and eyes bright as if she’d been dancing. “I thought it was you who had your finger on all the pulses, always up to snuff, queen of the prying noses—knew anything there was to know, long before we knew it, Sybil Sly.” Julius leaned back in his chair, applauding this rejoinder. “One to the solar plexus!” But Flora was not finished; she turned to Julius. “You! You were the one who introduced my daughters to Fitz Mayhew in the first place, as I recall it, you old Pander.” Sybil milled back in. “So we did, as a favour, and look what good it’s done her! And you!” “If you call it good, for her to be tied to someone more than twice her age. Whom you now—when it suits your story—call unscrupulous.” In the doorway Clover clutched Bella’s hand. Thank God, she thought, thank God, Mayhew is not here to add to this. Towering to all her five-foot height, Sybil jerked her jaw forward in a furious jab. “I don’t say he’s unscrupulous—I say he’s a damned cheat, and I’ll be damned if we’ll ever work with him again!’ Julius hummed, in high good humour at this excitement. “Come, now, my dear Syb, where would we be in vaudeville if we refused to work with cheats and whores!” Flora turned on him. “And who are you calling a whore?” There was a moment of silence in the room. But Julius never backed away from a fence. “I suppose, dear lady, I was referring to your eldest daughter.” Flora stared at him, her eyes dark caves and her mouth fallen off its usual line. Sybil cracked a sudden laugh. “You’d rather he was talking of you?” “Enough!” Flora dashed her hand
across her eyes to clear them and advanced on Sybil, step by step. Her wrapper had come untied; the slip underneath drooped, revealing her slackened chest. “After what you did to me! Such a good friend in those olden days—you made trouble between me and Arthur that nearly dished me, talking about me as if I was no better than a trollop.” Sybil sobbed. “I never meant to,” she said, “I never meant it.” “Well you ought to have meant not to,” Flora told her. “You were jealous as a cat, and you are still, and you near as nothing ruined my life.” Sybil gave a screech of anguish and fell to her knees. “Do you know how hard that was to fight against?” Flora demanded. “He never truly believed me again—his whole life—” Her voice cracked and she flew her fists through her hair, disarranging it. “Girls, out!” She pointed to the apartment door. “Go to Aurora.”
O
utside in the stair hall, Bella and Clover stood shivering, almost laughing, unable to climb the flights to Aurora and Mayhew’s suite. They rang the button, but the elevator was banging and clanging down in the basement region. “Whore!” Bella said, behind her hand, her eyes bright and scared. “How could he say that?” Clover put her arm around Bella. “Oh, fish! Any girl in vaudeville might be called that. Even in the legitimate theatre, to some people’s mind.” “I thought he liked us!” “Think of Lily Bain in Paddockwood,” Clover said. “Everybody had Mr. Tweedie over to supper and felt so sorry for him because he was a widower and a sidesman. But nobody talked to Lily Bain or even let her come to church.” “Well, but Lily Bain went with all the men.” “Why should that make a difference? All the men went with her!” “She looked like a scrag-end of mutton.” “And Mr. Tweedie like an old goat, they were well-suited that way.” Bella laughed. “And she with all those little lamb-kid children.”
“I don’t see why when a woman does that, she’s a whore; but when a man does it, there is no bad name to call him.” The elevator came trundling up at last. The apar tment door behind them opened and Julius slid out, then shut the door again on a confused babble of women’s voices. “I’ve a mind to see Mayhew,” he said, apologizing with a bob of his massy head. “And Miss Aurora—the virtue of whom has never been impugned, to my certain knowledge. Regrets! My devilish tongue cannot resist a quarrel.” So the girls let Julius ride up with them to the fifth floor, where Aurora was already in perfect order that morning, the apartment as well as her own person seeming fresh as iced water after the overheated atmosphere downstairs. Bella and Clover vanished into the kitchen, still in fits of horrified giggles, after attempting to convey the situation by sign language and mental telepathy. Aurora made a polite effort to entertain Julius—with whom she’d never had a cordial friendship, his heart having been given to Clover. She had noticed it often: people picked one or another sister to like, not understanding how closely they were twined. There was no point in his partisanship for Clover, because Clover herself was hopelessly partisan for Aurora and Bella, and they for her. She sought for some subject that might interest him. “We had a delightful dinner with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle last summer, perhaps you have met him on your travels? I know he is fond of vaudeville.” Julius gave a snort of mingled derision and amusement. “Fool! A charlatan, I believe. Authors usually are. I confess, I enjoy the humbuggery of his stories. A fascinating instance of Art surpassing the frail human who creates it—who is the conduit for it, more like.” Since that had been Aurora’s own estimate of Conan Doyle, she could not help laughing. “It was only a month before war was declared, yet all he could talk of was those uppity suffragettes. He is a champion story-teller, though. Papa loved Sherlock Holmes.” The girls came in with a tea-tray, and
Aurora sighed as she saw that Clover was thoughtfully carrying Fitz’s good whiskey by its neck.
S
ome time later, when Julius had succumbed to the whiskey and lay snoring in a corner of the upholstered sofa, Mama knocked on the door and brought Sybil in to see Aurora’s flat and all her nice things, and to say hello properly. They had made up somehow, by the mysterious alchemy of their long knowledge of each other. Clover marvelled at the cozy way the ladies walked arm-in-arm through the suite, conferring over the latest rising salaries in the big-time. Sybil was speaking with earnest emphasis. “Tanguay gets $3,500 a week, I have it on the best authority. My old pal Julian Eltinge, you know. He commands $3,000, as of last asking. Even Miss Barrymore can only ask $3,000 yet—but the sky’s the limit—vaude is only on the up. Look what’s happening, brick theatres everywhere, even here in the sticks! The only chore,” she said, flicking a jaundiced eye over his slumbering form, “is making sure Julius doesn’t give up. Which he will do, if I don’t guard him every minute, because there never was such a man for losing heart. He’s only sixty-three, though you’d never know it; he’s got a good decade to go before he really can’t be hired, if I play his cards right and keep him off the roller-skates.” Papa would have been forty-five this year, Aurora calculated. Ten years younger than Fitz. Sybil bent over Julius, stroking his shoulder to waken him, and for a moment Aurora saw herself standing there. Blonde curls, black eyeliner smudged around staring eyes, elderly husband. She would not let her eyes goggle that way. And as soon as she was off the boards she would stop lightening her hair, would even bob it. But the husband was undeniable. The door opened. As if conjured by her thoughts, Fitz Mayhew strode in with a bundle of clean shirts, a parcel of cheese and spiced meats from the Hungarian butcher, and an armful of chrysanthemums. “Aurora! The car is waiting! You’ll miss your call!” he shouted—and then halted, seeing the array of women’s eyes in front
of him, and the bulk of Julius sleeping in the distance. “My dear, you ought to have warned me. I’d have brought more whiskey,” Mayhew said. “Yes, and you’ll need it,” Sybil said darkly. She prodded Julius. “Jay! Jay! Here’s Fitzjohn back. Tell him what you want.” “I’ve no room at all on the bill,” Mayhew said, but he had a laugh in his eyes. He was entirely on the ball, as always, and Aurora found herself enjoying the scene, which had taken her some time to piece together. She wondered how much Mayhew owed Julius.
E
xcusing themselves on the grounds of an early call, after Sybil was set up in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea, Mama took Clover and Bella down to dress for the theatre. “Can you feature it?” Mama said, as the elevator clanked down grinding its chain. “What was Julius about to let her get into that state?” She polished and polished her wedding ring on a lifted bit of skirt. “He ought never to have lent Mayhew that money, but it’s hardly our funeral—she was unreasonable, distrait even, during our little tète-a-tète.” Bella could not help a gasp of laughter whenever Mama trotted out her French. “And Julius—how dare he? Unforgiveable, that word.” She scrubbed at the ring, staring out into the bright brass cage that fell so slow. “Can you feature?” Must be close to the truth, or she would not be so distrait herself, Clover thought. She must have come pretty near it in Paddockwood, toward the end. Where is the line between being a weak, sweet, af fectionate widow when the grocer comes for his bill, and being Lily Bain? “And now—drunk at mid-day. We cannot be poor, girls. It does not suit us. I was not brought up to it, and neither were you.” Clover considered this, wondering how drunk at mid-day led straight to poverty in Mama’s mind. Did she mean that people who were brought up poor deserved to remain poor? She would not agree to that if it was put to her. A heavy clunk and the cage opened, and they were set free. EB
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Canadian Literature from
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“Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun� Canadian Publishing and the Correspondence 1) !,0&.$,3 144
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Prodigal Daughter
Memoryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Daughter
SELECTED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
A Journey to Byzantium
ALICE MAJOR
MYRNA KOSTASH
This is a daughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetic homage to her parents, both elegy and celebration, that explores the transformations wrought by history, biology, and the alchemy of love.
JORDAN STOUCK
/ ANNOTATIONS BY DAVID STOUCK
Featuring exchanges with Earle Birney, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood, among others, this collection exposes the conditions of cultural work in Canada for much of the twentieth century.
An epic work of travel memoir, Prodigal Daughter sings with immediacy and depth, rewarding readers with a profound sense of an adventure they have lived.
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wild horses
Too Bad
Rudy Wiebe
rob mclennan
Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait
Collected Stories, 1955â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2010
Cast during his year in the U of Aâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writer in residency, wild horses is Ottawan rob mclennanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deep lyrical engagement with Edmonton, Alberta. There is something of the magpie in him: nothing escapes his subtle gaze, his flighty wit, his voracious gleaning of experience.
ROBERT KROETSCH
RUDY WIEBE
â&#x20AC;&#x153;This book is not an autobiography. It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ROBERT KROETSCH ,
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FROM THE INTRODUCTION
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THOMAS WHARTON , INTRODUCTION
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wiebe is one of Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s powerful myth makers and storytellers of the past half-century.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201C;QUILL & QUIRE
SOUNDINGS Taking the measure
BOOKS
Big, Round and Smooth: Cooking as a Sensual Science I
n 1626, Francis Bacon plunged into a snowstorm to test his theory on meat preservation, fatally contracting pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow. In 1837, Rev. Sylvester Graham (inventor of Graham crackers) preached that vegetarianism cured alcoholism and lust, inciting Boston butchers to riot. Such are the spirited moments in the long relationship between cooking and science. In publishing that relationship is highly responsible, and generates dozens of new books every year on anti-aging, cancer-prevention, brain boosting and virtuous eating, many of them beginning with a health questionnaire for readers not yet sufficiently terrified. The Healthy Heart Cookbook, for instance, offers “The Framington Risk Score for calculating risk of death or premature heart disease within ten years.” Over the last decade science jumped onto the other side of the bookshelf—the side where, in Michael Ruhlman’s words, “It’s a cook’s moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.” Here, geekiness is sexy, science serves pleasure, and good cooking is a virtue unto itself. This is the science of deliciousness, a rapidly expanding genre including highly experimental chefs (Heston Blumenthal, Ferron Adrià, Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz), highly culinary scientists (Harold McGhee, Hervé This), food columnists (Harold Wolke, Russ Parsons), and other bold cooks with science leanings (Michael
// BY JOCELYN BROWN
Ruhlman, Alton Brown, Jennifer McLagan, Diane Farley, David Joachim). Fall 2010 will see the hefty six-volume Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking; Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks; Harold McGhee’s Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes; and François Chartier’s Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food with Wine. But why apply science to the culinary magic of a soufflé, a croissant, or brioche? Can too much information on egg white viscosity, for instance, contaminate one’s delight in meringue? Non! Hervé This would say. “Science can be warm, cheerful, sensual!” he writes on his blog; readers need to remember “that at the base … is the experience, the wonderful experience . . . .” To Hervé This, cooking is about love, science must be translated through the heart, and we must feel what makes an egg yolk coagulate in an otherwise hopeful hollandaise, why gluten is so thirsty and eager to bond, and what’s up with the snobbery of lipids. Sharing Hervé This’ delight in culinary indulgence feels like a little holiday. On our side of the Atlantic, such reverence is rare, our cooking and eating habits being far more perfunctory than passionate. In the vicious circle of habitual cooking and joyless eating, the science of deliciousness meets the politics of food, and experts in both camps agree that the missing ingredient is pleasure. According to Michael Pollan, AngloWWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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North Americans have never known how to enjoy their food. We have a longstanding habit of “disdaining the proof of the palate,” as Laura Shapiro puts it in Perfection Salad, and instead eat scientifically, as if food were medicine. The result seems to be high obesity rates and guilt. (Particularly sad is the study where Americans and French were asked to choose word associations for chocolate cake. Americans chose “guilt” and the French chose “celebration.”) So, what will happen if science is applied to deliciousness as zealously as it has been to nutritionism? If we come to understand the furious activity of, say, Maillard reactions, can we surrender more fully to the wonder of freshly baked bread? To bake that bread, use Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, the only cookbook you may ever need. Then, with Harold McGhee in On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen, reflect on those Maillard reactions and their devotion to the flavours not only of bread crust but roasted meats, dark beers, chocolate and coffee beans. According to McGhee, odor, or aroma, comprises most of our experience of flavour, so why not learn about the millions of olfactory receptor cells packed in high up our noses? For this and much more on smell and flavour compounds, see The Science of Good Food by David Joachim et al. Organized as a dictionary, it is nonetheless rich in pathos (bivalves can never be tender and flavourful at the same time) and intriguing recipes (from Absinthe Suissesse to Watercress Cream Reduction).
Particularly sad is the study where Americans and French were asked to choose word associations for “chocolate cake.” Americans chose “guilt” and the French chose “celebration.” Flavours are what the science of deliciousness is all about— creating, intensifying, and experiencing them. “Big, round, and smooth” fat molecules are especially good at adding, holding, and helping us experience flavour as Jennifer McLagan explains in Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient. After championing the nutritional value of fat, she sprinkles literary and historical anecdotes over a rich mix of recipes, from Carbonara to sautéed foie gras with gingered vanilla quince. In Anatomy of a Dish, Diane Forley is also keen on nicely marbled meat but mainly investigates flavour via botanical classification. Beautifully illustrated, the book is part botany guide and mostly recipes for soothing, satisfying dishes such as beer-braised short ribs. Comfort food is comforting because, as Heston Blumenthal explains, our personal associations of a dish affect our experience of its flavours. Known for his techie leanings (mayo with an ultra-sound gun) and for creating unusual dishes like Sardine Sorbet, Blumenthal and his fellow experimental chefs are not known for comfort food. They have a reputation for clinically reducing, over-intellectualizing, deconstructing and 56
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fetishizing food, partly because they’re all steely-eyed men with big stainless-steel kitchens, and partly because they do sometimes serve weird liquids in test tubes and odd itty-bitty cubes dangling from wires. In The Fat Duck Cookbook, and A Day at elBulli, Blumenthal and superstar Ferron Adrià explain and display their versions of extreme dining pleasure. There is no licking of fingers or splashing about of olive oil in these pages. Blumenthal and Adrià’s methods are exacting, precise, and intensely intellectual—all about intensifying flavour on one hand, and analytical sensibility on the other. This “sixth sense,” as Adrià calls it, is “the intellectual stimulation that can be derived from appreciating irony, as a sense of humour, decontextualizations or cultural references in a dish.” Criticized for being pretentious, elitist “techno-cuisine,” is this food really about sensory pleasure? How does one surrender to “the experience—always the experience” of nitropoached green tea and lime mousse? Of porcini foam? Can we learn to enjoy food while simultaneously considering the nature of that enjoyment? Do we want to? I pondered these things, as one should, over a Pain au Chocolat in an excellent local bakeshop, and answers came, as they should, through gentle serendipity. “Ah,” said the baker. “That is the ‘elBulli’ book you’re reading. I went there.” “You’re kidding,” I said. elBulli has been proclaimed the world’s best restaurant for five consecutive years and every year receives two million reservation requests for its 8,000 places. He wasn’t kidding, and treated me to details of his visit: how welcoming and casual the staff were, how his party was free to wander into the kitchen where they met Ferron Adrià and saw a fleet of silent chefs working intensely, how remarkable the service was (fifty-six staff, including the kitchen, for forty-five guests). And the food—the food! “It was—wow—we were there for seven hours. Favourites? So many, we ate 35 tiny dishes. Oh, this gin cloud our waiter pulled out of dry ice; it effervesced in the mouth. And this inverse apple gelee-rabbit jus—oh, and the chest full of fresh chocolates. My head was exploding by the end.” Gin cloud? Is all this fuss really necessary, one might ask? Clearly there is no resolution to an analysis of pleasure; most of us agree that the holy trinity of food, wine, and good company are all we really need to make a meal pleasurable. For inspiration, Taste Buds and Molecules explains all about wine pairing and offers unique but simple recipes. Canadian sommelier François Chartier pays homage to the senses, posing questions that can be answered only with but, of course: “Why not add some roasted fenugreek seeds to a young, heavily iodized manzilla sherry to generate a developed iodized wine such as in the days of ancient Rome . . .?” What, then, can be said about perfectionism and pleasure? Why not, simply, Yes—that open-hearted grateful yes that excellent food in good company so magically produces? My last perfect bite of pastry and the vicarious thrill of an elBulli visit reinforced for me the wisdom of Hervé This. All that really matters is the experience. EB
MUSIC
Unrequited Dub
cpimages
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// BY LEE HENDERSON
o break up is to drown, slowly, like a pelican in crude. Deepwater-sized break-ups comprise many of today’s rap themes, and songs of regret for what’s gone and won’t come back have made a comeback in electronica as well. But isn’t a master beatmaker always looking for the next perfect break? If love can feel unrequited, so can dub. The whirlpool at the centre of Caribou’s latest ocean of an album, Swim, is the lead single, “Odessa,” a song with a mesmerizing beat based on an unbeatable drum break. And break-up. “Odessa” was released in early January in advance of the rest of the record, and is about a woman deciding tonight’s the night she will leave her unprepossessing man. Forlorn and loaded down with sorrow, keeling to undertows of electronica and hip hop influence, “Odessa” has an addictive, funky drum and bassline. The sound is an adaptation of the 1970s infinity drums of Liquid Liquid’s “Optimo” or “Cavern.” More so Neu!, a pioneering krautrock duo central to Caribou’s sound: “Odessa” takes its cue from the deep grooves and cowbells on endless repeat of a song of separation like “Isi” or “La Bomba—Stop Apartheid World Wide!”but is still as sorrowful as one can be riding a trampoline bassline. “She’s tired of crying, and sick of his lies / She’s suffered him for far too many years of her life,” goes the true-to-life chorus.
Many miles away, in the break-driven, bass-heavy genre of hip hop, a regional independent hit called “Cry for You” from crunk rapper-singer King South, the self-proclaimed “Alabama’s Obama,” takes up Odessa’s story from the point-of-view of the man justifiably left behind. King South autotune-croons take me back over a synthesized handclap and sub thump with lyrics straight from the mouth of an inveterate sinner ashamed of his own charm. His lyrics manipulate and plead with Caribou’s: “You’re my better half, plus you’re all that I have… so baby don’t you go … ” Still, King South admits with a laugh on the lethal refrain that his Odessa made a wise choice, “So many different times I lied to you / you make a nigga wanna cry for you.” I first heard King South flex his flow on a single for Gucci Mane’s mixtape 4000 Degrees Below Zero. “It’s Over” is another King South break-up banger. The track makes a divorce analogy to describe a difficult life-change, in one’s career, from once being committed to his white girl—cocaine dealing—to now safely single and peddling music. Gucci Mane raps about his ex before handing it over to King South’s whispered melody, “Product of my ex-life, I call that girl my ex-wife / on to the next chick, I had to hit the exit / It’s Over … / no more fuss and fights now, you can leave my life now / no longer my wife now / some things can’t be worked out / It’s over, yeah, yeah, girl, it’s over.” WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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Gucci Mane put out rap records before, during and after he was released from nine months in jail, and he’s doing for rap in 2010 what Dante did for Beatrice—he has written over a thousand hit lyrics. Considering Gucci’s prolific career has been blindsided multiple times by beef with fellow East Side Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy (the kind that involves both insults and bullets), followed by a prison record for gun and gun-related charges, I sometimes wonder if Gucci ever recorded a better song of love’s labour lost than 2005’s “Bird Flu.” Then I hear 2010’s bakers dozen of semi-official mixtapes—notably perfect is Mr. Zone 6—and feel confident the Gooch has recorded a 2pac’s worth of tracks in the last six months chockablock with bachelor-centric tributes to the dump. His raps are also full of stand-up punchlines—for being best comedian, expect Gucci to receive rapper of year award. The sweatshop pace of production among rappers these days not only makes it impossible to hold down a relationship, but makes most rock musicians and electronica artists seem decadent. There is a new wave of musicians who sleeplessly release new bedroom electronica dubsteps, as well as moonlight production for rap. Two scenes: this year’s boogie funk computer pastiches from California’s love gods Dâm-Funk, Matty G,
fans. Witch house was influencing other artists before its founders had even signed a record deal. But it’s easy to hear in Lorn how witch house begins. Lorn keeps the sound stripped down to the jaded snares and budget dump-you-over-the-phone sub-bass coming from millionaire rap producers in Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans—producers with a string of infidelity hits to their credit. Hear how Salem and Lorn are unfazed to administer the morbid chill of the screwed & chopped riddim, a Robitussin-inspired rap genre whose instrumentals sound like what these white zombies feed on. By way of gangsta rap, Salem and Lorn write wobbly, lethargic, tryptophan-soaked songs about love and loss using slow Mephistophelian growls, angel choirs, and synthesized thunderclaps. It’s an underworldly-feeling music. King South’s “Cry For You” preaches Alabama’s sex secession and King Night howls existential despair at vamp exes— these Blair Witch break-up songs are for a generation weaned on horror and meth, True Blood, Twilight, the Web. Salem is poised to do something huge when King Night is released, while Lorn’s Nothing Else shall remain one of those deadly ironic classics drowning in the digital Lethe between esoteric sub-genres.
The Dirty South is gushing with summer break up songs, for reasons that are dirtier than ever. Baths, Onra, and Alice and John Coltrane’s nephew, Flying Lotus—every one of whom falls for the snare of the broken hearts club, making scorned beats. And the purple wow sound coming heavily out of Bristol this past year—courtesy of Joker, Gemmy, Ginz, and Guido—shares a love for the 88bpm kicked-out-ofthe-bedroom tempo. Flying Lotus and Joker can sound continents apart and still be inspired by a common love for Dr. Dre’s California G-Funk stride. Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma remains the year’s most transcendent boogie of all, an album that breaks body up from soul inasmuch as his aunt Alice Coltrane did on 1978’s Transfiguration. An upcoming album I expect won’t get much press other than this is Nothing Else, by the young British beatmaker named Lorn; it’s being released on Brainfeeder, the coach house label of none other than Flying Lotus. Nothing Else is a short record of dubstep served ultra-boogie, its cold rhythms divorced from love. Lorn makes laptop electronica on the crispy edge of 2010’s new genre, witch house. Witch house, or drag, is the nihilistic suburban musical result of dropping too many downers while listening to depressed gangsta rap singles—purple Hell mixed with DJ Screw. There probably won’t be more than a thousand lonely heartbroken beat junkies who’ll feel this Lorn record, but a lot has already been said about witch house this year, and it will get more intense after the genre’s inventors, Salem, release their debut album King Night. Salem has spent the past year or so slipping a few dozen demo tracks and slowed down Gucci remixes onto blogs and YouTube, where the murky new genre rapidly found 58
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Few pop songs were ever so coated in separation empathy, so slicked over by crude rap-inflected irony, as Caribou’s love song “Odessa,” a shout out from the Solitary North to the Dirty South, the coastal genre that, through its pants-sagging, shop-a-holic infectious id-appeal and its millionaire Garage Band bedroom producers, has touched everything nowadays, from pure pop to witch house. The Dirty South is gushing with summer break up songs, for reasons that are dirtier than ever. Maybe the conditions after Katrina, and now BP, insured the South’s grimy, two-timing sound evermore, one indebted to a pitiless funk minimalism. Take Atlanta’s threesome-loving rap and R&B scene, where 808 handclap & tomtom producers like The-Dream, Zaytoven and Shawty Redd are young bachelor gods. Lorn with Salem, beside Caribou and Flying Lotus, make introverted instrumental music full of rap’s signifying contradictions. However much they refer to it, these beat composers have split from the scenes they love, though they’ve done it to make something that feels individual. Yet the influence of the other genre can be heard in the music of each. It’s Odessa’s year. A gulf lurches between us. An irreconcilable beef between the past and present, a poison tongue between lovers within songs, between ideas of South, and denial of North, between cliques and genres, between the many kings and the Caribou who sings, “She’s tired of crying and sick of his lies / She’s suffered him for far too many years of her life / Feeling low, and scared what he’ll say / Does he know how over time he drove her away? / She can say…Who knows what she’s gonna say?” EB
FILM
Vavavoomology // BY PAUL MATWYCHUK
“What makes a girl who looks like that get mixed up in science?”
Submarine commander Richard Widmark, reacting to atomic physicist Bella Darvi in Samuel Fuller’s Hell and High Water (1954)
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
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n its sexist-caveman way, Widmark’s question isn’t all that unreasonable. Ever since the junk-sci-fi boom of the 1950s, the movies have given us a thin but steady supply of onscreen female scientists, and they’ve needed actresses to play them. But in real life, those actresses really are women who felt no urge to get mixed up in science. They wanted to, you know, act, or at least spend as little time as possible staring into microscopes: Uma Thurman (who played a biologist in Paycheck and a crazed botanist in Batman & Robin) grew up in an academic household but struck out on her own as a teenage fashion model; Elisabeth Shue (a nuclear scientist in The Saint and a molecular biologist in Hollow Man) was a successful child actor in TV commercials; Summer Glau (a genius neuroscientist on TV’s Dollhouse) was originally a ballet dancer before Joss Whedon recruited her into his stock company of performing waifs; and Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Chief Scientist of Venus in the 1958 schlock classic Queen of Outer Space, was… wait, what was Zsa Zsa Gabor famous for again? Queen of Outer Space, in which Gabor wears a laboratory uniform consisting of a Bob Mackie evening gown, heels, pearls, and salon-perfect hair, is one of the earliest examples of my favourite category of onscreen female scientist, a type I like to call the vavavoomologist. Cinema’s classic vavavoomologist is probably Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage (1966), a buxom surgeon’s assistant who is shrunk down to a fraction of a micrometre and injected into the body of a dying scientist—in the film’s most iconic sequence, she dons a skin-tight white wetsuit for an excursion into the man’s lungs, only to be attacked by antibodies, sticky, wriggly little Gummi worms which her
male colleagues must pull off her body by hand. (Donald Pleasance has a particularly hard time disguising the eagerness with which he tackles this assignment.) Welch has had several cinematic descendants, the notable recent example being Jessica Alba’s Sue Storm from the two Fantastic Four films. Storm is a brilliant genetic researcher who gains the power of invisibility when she is exposed to a massive dose of cosmic radiation, a development that the film mostly uses as the springboard for humiliating gags in which Alba suddenly appears naked in public. (The rest of the time, Alba wears a specially designed form-fitting suit which we’re told is made from a space-age material that’s somehow able to turn invisible along with her. The creators of Star Trek: Voyager also used The Ploy of The Magical Suit to explain why ship astrometrician Seven of Nine had to walk around in a shiny, bodyhugging spandex catsuit for seven seasons.) And let’s not forget Tara Reid, donning a thick-rimmed pair of glasses in an endearingly fruitless attempt to pass herself off as an archaeologist and museum curator in Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark; or Denise Richards as tanktopped nuclear physicist Christmas Jones in the James Bond picture The World Is Not Enough; or Deep Blue Sea’s Saffron Burrows, who does Raquel Welch one better by starting out in a wetsuit and then stripping down to her underwear in order to defeat the superintelligent sharks she’s bred in her flimsily constructed ocean laboratory. Closely related to the vavavoomologist are the women who turn up in that odd subgenre of science-themed sex farces. Often set on college campuses (like the pioneering film in the genre, Howard Hawks’ 1952 Monkey Business), these films inhabit a cozy fantasy world of uptight deans, kooky inventions, and DayGlo-coloured potions brewing in test tubes. These are films dedicated to exploring the hypothesis that deep inside every science geek lurks a horny sex addict just begging to be released. Let’s call these women “stealth Welches.” I’m thinking of characters like Sandra Bullock in Love Potion No. 9, playing a biochemist who becomes ferociously attractive to the opposite sex as a result of a gypsy elixir. Or Ann Miller as an apple-cheeked anthropologist in the MGM musical On the Town, using a visit to the Museum of Natural History as an excuse to deliver a risqué ode to “Prehistoric Man.” (“Bearskin, bearskin,” she sings, amorously caressing a statue of a Neanderthal. “He sat around in nothing but bearskin/I really love bare skin!”) There are even a couple of bizarre variations on this theme with campy titles like Sexual Chemistry and Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, in which buttoned-down male science professors ingest potions that turn them into hypersexualized women. But is it patronizing to suggest that any movie containing a female scientist runs the risk of turning into camp? Is there something about a certain kind of luscious female beauty—or WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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at least male reactions to a certain kind of luscious female beauty—that makes any attempt by a sexy actress to play an intellectually serious character seem inherently ludicrous? Why does Jon Hamm come across as a credible NASA scientist in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, but Jennifer Connelly seem so hard to buy as his astrobiologist assistant? Why, in the credits to Jurassic Park, is Sam Neill’s character identified as “Dr. Alan Grant” while Laura Dern’s fellow paleontologist is merely referred to as “Ellie”? Perhaps part of the problem is that we have so few images of illustrious real-life female scientists for our imaginations to draw upon. Biopics of female scientists are few and far between: Greer Garson was nominated for an Oscar for playing the title role in 1943’s Madame Curie, a film so old-fashioned and earnest as to be practically radioactive to modern audiences. HBO’s Temple Grandin, first aired in 2010, was a sensitive, respectful account of the life of the autistic animal scientist— played by the willowy Claire Danes, even though in real life the woman looks more like Paula Poundstone. And then there’s Sigourney Weaver as primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, somehow looking majestic rather than foolish as she squats in the jungle, grunting and grimacing in emulation of her beloved mountain gorillas. In Sigourney Weaver, we at long last find an example of an actress whose physicality seems like a perfect extension and expression of her intellect. Imposingly tall, with that sharp nose and that powerful jaw which manages to be apelike yet feminine, Weaver is not so easily condescended to—even clad in nothing but her underwear in her breakthrough film, Alien, she projected a mental focus and a sort of patrician adeptness that marked her immediately as something more than a sex object. And so she continues to be. One of the greatest visual pleasures in any of the movies released in 2009 was to be found in James Cameron’s Avatar, when Weaver’s chain-smoking exobiologist makes her first appearance in her artificially incubated alien body, a fusion of her own genetic material and some Na’Vi DNA that her consciousness can then control from a remote laboratory chamber. She has been playing a pickup game of basketball with her fellow scientists, themselves also transformed into ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned extraterrestrials, and she is an impossibly sexy sight as she saunters towards us. Maybe the first thing we notice are her giraffe-like legs, or the way her Stanford tank top leaves her delectably long, lean midriff exposed. She is unreal, an impression amplified by our subconscious awareness that at least three-quarters of the image is the product of CGI. But then she breaks out a proud, cocky, challenging grin, and, instantly, you can see Weaver’s soul flooding this character’s face and body language. It’s as if Weaver had been waiting her entire career to be transformed into a ten-foot-tall alien. This union of the physical and the cerebral need not be so dramatic. Sometimes it can simply be a matter of visual metaphor. Think, for instance, of Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway in that early scene from Contact, spending yet another night sitting outdoors, earphones clamped to her head, antennae pointed to60
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ward the sky as she listens for any sign of extraterrestrial life, her posture mirroring that of the satellite dishes arrayed behind her, her small, sharp features so intent that her nose practically resembles an antenna itself. Maybe it’s something in the eyes. Sarah Polley, who still has the wide, wise, curious peepers of a child prodigy, managed to be convincing as a rock-star genetic scientist in this year’s Splice, even as the movie around her grew progressively ludicrous. Emma Thompson seems like she’d make a good onscreen lady scientist—she has the slouchy, distracted quality of a smart person who’s spent way too many hours cooped up alone in a lab—but the only time she’s played one is in the gimmicky Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Junior. (Okay, okay, she also has a brief uncredited cameo in I Am Legend as the creator of a cancer vaccine that winds up turning most of the world’s population into bloodthirsty mutants — it all happens so fast, the Nobel people probably didn’t even have time to demand their medal back.) If one had to name cinema’s supreme female scientist, though, tenure would have to granted to Anna, the larger-thanlife heroine of Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin’s six-minute silent-film pastiche The Heart of the World. The plot, related via Maddin’s usual mix of quick cuts and overheated intertitles and driven along by Georgy Svindov’s propulsive piano score, begins with Anna’s affections torn between two brothers: Nikolai, a mortician, and Osip, an actor currently portraying Jesus in the town Passion play. When Anna, who appears to be some kind of celebrity astronomer geologist, discovers that the earth’s core (depicted literally as a beating heart at the centre of the planet) is about to give out, the news triggers a worldwide panic— riots, violence, orgies in the street. In the confusion, Anna forsakes Nikolai and Osip and instead surrenders herself to the desires of a fat, oily business tycoon. As if responding to Anna’s fall from grace, the earth suffers a heart attack. The end of the world seems imminent, until Anna vindicates herself by sliding down a tunnel and, through some unexplained magical transformation (not unlike, come to think of it, Sigourney Weaver’s mystical union with the tree of life at the end of Avatar), taking her place as the new “heart of the world”—a perpetual source of energy and inspiration now known as “Kino” (the German word for “cinema”). Anna is Maddin’s idea of the Holy Trinity: science, movies, and womanhood, all united in one outlandishly costumed package. As for movies that run longer than six minutes and which are not made by movie-drunk Winnipeggers… well, it’s probably useful to remember that while Hollywood screenwriters may have given us very few realistic portraits of female scientists, they’ve also given us very few realistic portraits of science. In Hollywood movies, an ordinary bullet is powerful enough to lift a man off his feet and send him crashing through a plateglass window, but a fireball expands slowly enough for that same man to outrun it five minutes later. Here, laser beams are visible, dinosaurs can be cloned, and buses can drive fast enough to leap across a fifty-foot gap in a highway. In a world filled with such scientific unlikelihoods, why shouldn’t the women who study them be equally improbable? Like Anna at her post at the heart of the world, long may they throb. EB
The Canadian Literature Centre / Centre de littérature canadienne was established at the University of Alberta in 2006, and is the western hub of the Canadian literary community. It brings together researchers, authors, publishers, collectors and the reading public to promote the strength and diversity of Canada’s written culture, as well as research of Canadian literature, in both English and French, of all genres, languages, and regions.
CLC Highlights:
Brown Bag Lunch Series These noon-hour literary readings with guest authors like Tim Bowling and Erin Mouré have become an Edmonton favourite.
Author Cabaret & Reception This annual event will once again showcase an evening of stories with popular Canadian authors at the Art Gallery of Alberta on Sunday, March 13, 2011.
Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Now in its 5th year, the lecture will feature acclaimed writer Annabel Lyon on Monday, March 14, 2011. Photo of Annabel Lyon: Phillip Chin Visit us at 4-115 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, Website: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/ Phone: (780) 492-9505, email: cdnlit@ualberta.ca
Robin Chapman
BRIDGES
Between the North Bridge and The King George IV Bridge Edinburgh Fringe Festival
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bronze statue on a plinth comes to life. It bops a passerby on the head with its sword. The man executes a double-take, fists clenched. He’s wearing a kilt and black knee socks with red tassels. Even his silver buzz cut looks fierce, gilded by a shaft of setting sun. But the statue is frozen again, blasé, nonplussed, the sword resting casually against its shoulder. I watch a magician blow up a tube balloon so it’s the length of his forearm. He promises to swallow the whole thing. He tilts his head and opens his mouth wide and holds the balloon over it, but pauses to remark: Ladies, I sympathize. There’s a boy who calls himself Super Scott, further down the street. He cajoles and mocks the crowd that grows thick and presses closer. He takes volunteers—a beautiful girl who writhes with self-consciousness and two good-natured, smirking men. Super Scott gets the crowd to clap for them; he makes the men do goofy dances. Then he prepares to juggle batons of fire. The two male volunteers grip each other’s wrists to make a seat. The boy climbs. He makes a show of clasping the volunteers by the cheek or nose, pulling himself up to a wobbly standing position. Once he’s up, he flaps his kilt at half the audience and there’s a burst of applause. And then he tells the girl volunteer to throw him the batons at her feet, one by one. He calls for a lighter.
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// BY LISA MOORE
I’m eighteen years old, he says. He produces a hat and drops it at his feet. Please. Give enough to keep this kid on the streets where he belongs, he shouts. The boy has lit all the batons. He is crouched, leaning forward. Super Scott is very handsome and young looking, wiry and wry—but all of that has emptied out. The boy is staring forward with an intensity that makes him seem absent, a husk. It’s as if he is possessed, caught. Much later in the evening, I will eavesdrop on three women who are part of a cruise. They have finished their meal and the bones are sitting on the plates. One woman leans forward. It would have been better, she says, if he had married Camilla in the beginning. She’s the one he loved. The other women lean in too, Macbeth’s three witches, and discuss it with whispered urgency. Super Scott has lit the torches and drops the lighter to the street below. He tosses the batons and they begin to cartwheel around him. Each baton tips end over end and touches down, slapping the boy’s outstretched hands. The flames are tattered and clinging until they are circling him in a solid chain. They are circling faster and faster, licking and snapping, an orange wheel of ragged light. The air around the boy goes liquid, a wavering film of heat. His blue eyes stare straight ahead, big and wide, into the dusk beyond the glassy melting street. EB
ClubStellaArtois.com Must be legal drinking age. TM/MC InBev NV/SA.
It’s a sports car. Impeccably camouflaged as a luxury sedan.
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