SPRING 2015
FEATURING
Stories That Connect
“This is how my people feel” After decades of bad blood, aboriginal people are taking a new approach with police: trust
Katherine Ashenburg Steve Burgess Amy Rosen Richard Haigh Carissa Halton Steven Heighton Christine Wiesenthal
FOR BUTTER OR WORSE
The real comfort behind Paula Deen’s food
LISTING BADLY
Categorical truths about our fascination with ranking
PLUS
NEW FICTION FROM
ROMESH GUNESEKERA
Wherever you’re writing from... Then I did some of my best writing. A house on stilts on Marajó island, where the Amazon meets the sea. There was a rubber tree inside the house, and the waves were red at high tide. Ayahuasca had something to do with it. - Samuel Veissiere
When the weather’s polite, I write from a garden shed in our back yard affectionately known as the Paperback Shack. It’s less than 8’ by 10’, wired for light, with the inside painted the blue of a blind pony’s eye. - Katherin Edwards
I write a lot on the subway using my iPhone, on the A-train between West 4th and Lincoln Center, listening to a man in a tinfoil hat expound on the joys of no longer having to hear the aliens. - Chris Tarry
UBC Creative Writing Multiple Genres Of Study | On-Campus or Online | Flexible, Comprehensive, Challenging Write and learn on our breathtaking campus in Vancouver, Canada, one of the world’s most livable cities. Or participate in a vibrant online community from wherever you live. UBC offers world-class creative writing programs at the BFA and MFA level, on-campus and by Distance Education. Join us.
www.creativewriting.ubc.ca
Faculty Alison Acheson Deborah Campbell Kevin Chong Maggie de Vries Charles Demers Steven Galloway Sara Graefe
Wayne Grady Nancy Lee Annabel Lyon Keith Maillard Maureen Medved Susan Musgrave Andreas Schroeder
Linda Svendsen Timothy Taylor Peggy Thompson Rhea Tregebov John Vigna Bryan Wade
ISSUE 8
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SPRING 2015
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. – E. M. FORSTER, HOWARDS END
FEATURES HUMANKIND
Amy Rosen
15 For Butter or Worse
What’s so comforting about Paula Deen? STORIES FROM THE CITY
Carissa Halton
22 A Different Kind of Simikanis
Hitting the restart button between the police and aboriginal peoples FICTION
Romesh Gunesekera
46 The Last Pleasure
Cover photo JESSICA FERN FACETTE WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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SPAN
Craig Taylor Katherine Ashenburg
Steve Burgess Richard Haigh
07 The Queens People Digging a boro
09 Lost and Found in Translation
Spanish is an ocean—and I am happy to wade at its shores as long as I can
11 Listing Badly
The top 10 reasons we should dump lists
13 A Religion of One’s Own Acting in good faith MISCELLANY
Clive Holden
20 Can•Icons: Aurora Borealis 51 Can•Icons: Islam
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POETRY
Steven Heighton
08 Thalassacide
Arlene Paré
10 After Sudden Rain
Rita Wong
19 North Shore Sewage Story
Christine Wiesenthal
56 Two Short Tales From a History
of Telecommunications SOUNDINGS
Paul Matwychuk Jay Smith Scott Messenger
57 Tweets from Underground The crazed film world of LexG
59 Reader, Heal Thyself
Is there such a thing as self-help literature?
63 Hit or Myth
Can songwriting help make a nation? BRIDGES
Dan Rubinstein
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66 Heron Road Bridge The histories we cross
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ISSUE 8
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SPRING 2015
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Scott Messenger FEATURES EDITOR Craille Maguire Gillies CONSULTING EDITORS Lynn Coady (co-founder) Paul Wilson SUBMISSIONS EDITOR Matthew Stepanic GUEST POETRY EDITOR Christine Wiesenthal DEPT. OF FACTUALITY Head: Craille Maguire Gillies Body: Angela Walcott CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jennifer Cockrall-King, Marcello Di Cintio, Lisa Gregoire, Bruce Grierson, Marni Jackson, Don Gillmor, Lisa Moore, Timothy Taylor, Chris Turner CONSULTING PUBLISHERS Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson WEBSITE Linn Øyen Farley Craille Maguire Gillies UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carrière CIRCULATION & NEW MEDIA COORDINATOR Jason Purcell BUSINESS MANAGER Tiiu Vuorensola Eighteen Bridges ISSN 1927-9868 is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, 3-5 Humanities, University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 Canada. The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, is provided by Venture Publishing Inc. Occasionally, Eighteen Bridges makes its subscriber list available to like-minded magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you would not like to receive these mailings. Subscriptions are four issues for $25.95 plus GST. To inquire about advertising, subscriptions and back issues, contact ebmag@ualberta.ca or visit eighteenbridges.com All contents copyright 2015 and may not be reproduced without the permission of Eighteen Bridges. PM #42968512
ISSUE BY ISSUE
T
he unthinkable has transpired in Alberta. What seemed impossible and unlikely in the extreme has actually come pass. The odds were always against it and personally, having been witness to the process for longer than I care to admit, I was convinced it wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime. But lo and behold an entirely unforeseen set of circumstances converged and we now find ourselves living in a new dawn awash with possibility and excitement. I speak, of course, about the fact that Eighteen Bridges is publishing a new issue. I’m only partly joking. Yes, there has been tectonic political activity in Alberta, with the NDP being the primary recipient of the electorate’s utter repudiation of the PC party. This event remains hard to compute but it can only be positive for the province. Rachel Notley is a deft politician, which means we are likely to see an only slightly left-of-centre government, but the real value of the NDP victory was the reinforcement that democracy as we know it retains value (though our first-past-the-post-system could use an upgrade). Canadian voters are sensitive and sensible, and routinely make wise choices. Danielle Smith was not given a riding to run in after she threw her own party under the bus. Stephen Harper was not given a majority until he proved he could moderate his more extreme neo-con impulses. Rob Ford was elected because of his flaws. And Alberta went NDP to remind politicians everywhere that when they take citizens for granted—as the PC party so blatantly did—they will get tossed out. How can that not be cause for celebration? But recent political events in Alberta are, to my mind, related to the publication of a new issue of Eighteen Bridges. Both show that not everything
is about formulas and predictions and business cases. Sometimes things don’t go according to plan… which becomes the plan. Who would have thought that a general interest narrative magazine publishing internationally could come out of Edmonton? Well, probably the same people who thought the NDP could govern Alberta (and we hope they all subscribe). Furthermore, Canadians are not nearly as regionally dissimilar as we often fall into thinking. There is no reason why a story about Edmonton can’t appeal to a Montrealer or why a story told by a Torontonian won’t fascinate a Winnipegger or why a smart left-wing politician can’t be successful in Alberta. Canadians regularly make political choices that say certain things about us, that we are progressive, fair, curious, open-minded and forward-thinking people. Those are values we share, whether they are expressed in Alberta or Newfoundland, and they are good things we should be proud of. And these values are often translated into and through the stories we tell one another. Canadians have the rare national ability to look outward and inward, we have an honesty about ourselves and we have a true national gift for being smart and funny. Here at Eighteen Bridges HQ we’re just as happy as can be to put out an issue every now and then to act as a pipeline (ha ha) for those values and stories. Is Issue 8 a revolution? No. But neither is an NDP victory in Alberta. It’s just proof of who we’ve always been.
Curtis Gillespie
* put FSC LOGO HERE
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CONTRIBUTORS
A FEW OF OUR CONTRIBUTORS…
22
15 AMY ROSEN is a writer and
46 CARISSA HALTON lives with
cookbook author living in Toronto. She claims it look her 72 hours to digest the meal she ate at Paula Deen’s restaurant.
her three kids and husband in Edmonton’s inner city. She’s writing a book of essays – or, rather, a complicated love story – about living in a revitalizing neighbourhood.
ROMESH GUNESEKERA was last seen aboard Noontide Toll and is believed to be in the vicinity of www.romeshg.com.
AND THE REST OF THEM… KATHERINE ASHENBURG is turning her award-winning book, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, into a children’s book called Gross!
STEVEN BURGESS is a freelance writer
and broadcaster and author of Who Killed Mom? from Greystone Books.
ROMESH GUNESEKERA was last seen
aboard Noontide Toll and is believed to be in the vicinity of www.romeshg.com.
RICHARD HAIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law. STEVEN HEIGHTON is the author of
the story collection The Dead Are More Visible, the essay collection Workbook, the novel Afterlands, and more. His short fiction and poetry have received four gold National Magazine Awards and have appeared in publications including London Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and Best Canadian Stories. Anansi will publish a new collection of his poems next spring.
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CLIVE HOLDEN works on the Eighteen Bridges loading dock. He’s lived in five Canadian provinces and has driven through the rest, except for Newfoundland. He loves them all equally, but some more equally than others. PAUL MATWYCHUK is an Edmonton writer, editor, and co-host of the podcast Trash, Art, and the Movies. He can’t quite believe that LexG has more than twice as many Twitter followers as he does. SCOTT MESSENGER is a full-time writer and editor in Edmonton. Sometimes he thinks he is a musician. ARLEEN PARÉ is a Victoria poet and novelist. She has earned several awards, including the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books). In October, 2015, This Inflammable Mercy, another collection of poetry, will be released by Caitlin Press. DAN RUBINSTEIN is an Ottawa-based writer and editor, and the author of Born to Walk (ECW Press, 2015). He has trouble sitting still.
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JAY SMITH self-betters herself in Edmonton. She is working on a series of short stories about failure. CRAIG TAYLOR is the author of
Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now. He is the editor of Five Dials magazine.
CHRISTINE WIESENTHAL lives and works in Edmonton as a teacher, administrator, editor, poet, and biographer. Her books include Instruments of Surrender (Buschekbooks, 2001), The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther (UTP, 2005), and The Collected Works of Pat Lowther (Newest, 2010). She has new poems forthcoming in The Malahat Review and Prairie Fire. RITA WONG lives on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver. Her forthcoming book, undercurrent, shares what she is learning from the beautiful watershed that she lives in. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
SPAN REPORTING BACK
THE QUEENS PEOPLE By CRAIG TAYLOR
THE QUEST STARTED. WE WERE ON ROOSEVELT Avenue, in Queens, in traffic, under the elevated train. Just this morning Frank had taken the Quest in to get the engine certified. I know a guy, he told me, I know a guy, I know a guy. But each time he brought the vehicle to a stop on the avenue in Jackson Heights on this cold Sunday in January, the Quest stalled. A red light flared on the dashboard. Frank wrenched the transmission back into park. Someone behind us honked. OK, fuck you, Frank said quietly. He started up the minivan and we inched further along Roosevelt. On the pavement I could see a man in a foam Statue of Liberty crown handing
out flyers under a banner that read Immigration Advice. A woman handed out her own flyers for tax prep. The headlines were in Korean. We rolled towards the La Abundancia bakery but the Quest came to a stop in front of Spicy Tibet. It stalled. Someone honked behind us, a different car. Fuck you, Frank said quietly to that different car. It was a bright day in Jackson Heights. I was there doing what I’ve been doing for the past year in New York: asking the people who populate the city right now to talk, usually at length, usually with volume, about their version of the place, with no fixed line of questioning. I often
heard about neighbourhoods. Frank told me to imagine a triangle. No, he said, a rectangle shape that separates Woodside from East Elmhurst and North Corona. That’s the shape of Jackson Heights. That’s how this neighbourhood in Queens looked. Keep going on the 7 train and you’re in Flushing. What do you think of Flushing, Queens? he asked me. Sounds like a good idea, he went on before I could answer. Frank grew up in Woodside—Catholic schools and a pub next to the church, the old Irish holdout. You see that place over there, he asked me. He pointed through the windshield across Roosevelt Avenue. That used to be a cathouse. A lot of boys from Woodside lost a certain something there. I’d been spending time in Jackson
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Heights. I had a line on a few other residents—Bill, a member of the aging gay community; Javier, who ran the Latino paper; Kathy, the ex-coatcheck woman who now sold real estate in the area. I’d been to loud town meetings to hear discussions of redevelopment. I’d seen Miss Universe, a tall, fragile-looking Colombian woman, address a crowd of Colombians in a requisitioned nightclub. Each time she mentioned Colombia, a confetti cannon boomed with paper spray the colours of the flag. I ate with Javier at Taqueria Coatzingo one afternoon and he told me Roosevelt Avenue was like no other street in the city. He held out his hand. On separate fingers: Pakistani, Indian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, Colombian. The next hand: Mexican, Nepalese, gay, straight. A nd things are not what they seem. You’ll see a Mexican store selling Jarritos, he said, but is it Mexican? It’s owned by Ecuadorians. I met Kathy at a coffee shop on 37th Avenue. She said: 37th Avenue is the Manhattan of Jackson Heights. You got that reference? She’d grown up a few blocks away on the other side of Northern Blvd. Northern Blvd was the Queens of Jackson Heights. Which was in Queens. Do you follow what I’m saying? Kathy asked me. She got up from the table to smoke. Are you getting these references? she asked. I recognized the Quest because of the dent on its side. The Quest had never stalled when we drove to the other parts of Queens. We’d driven the long boulevards of Long Island City, even the cobbled streets, past the old warehouses. The new apartments of Long Island City peered across at the lit flank of Manhattan. One night we drove past the one skyscraper in Queens, the one that was giving the finger to Manhattan, or so Frank said. I got into the Quest one day and Frank had a couple newspapers on the dash, local Queens papers celebrating a re8
THALASSACIDE After the 2095 tsunami
On the shrink-wrapped shoreline a madman sits shiva for the seas, lapis and lapping the last living coast with strontium as a castaway hamlet floats eastward over the dateline (the village retains its form, its dirt lanes now salt canals, small Shinto temple a flagship). In the deeps a deeper quiet accrues, a Permian anemia; the insurgent seas, on the face of it victorious, still have to hoist the foam white flags of breaking waves, as ages beneath the sun’s farthest scope carbon sea-caves (those eerie protozoan parks, where all this began) turn tomb. On a shoreline ledged like the lip of a grave a one-man clean-up crew broods—your son, a centenarian in eras after you—mourner late to the wake or reluctant sage who has just seen through the last possible proof of God. – Steven Heighton cent high school basketball victory over Brooklyn. Brooklyn, he said darkly. They think they have everything over there. No one messes with their bridge. No one messes with the Brooklyn Bridge. Oh no, not like the Queensboro Bridge, he said. People in Manhattan, even those bastards Simon and Garfunkel, referred to it as the 59th St. Bridge. 59th St. Bridge, Frank said darkly. It was the Queensboro Bridge. It was the one thing that had our name on it. Now it’s the Ed Koch Bridge. One evening we pulled over at 74th St. subway station after a drive through Queens. Frank was dropping me off. I got out of the Quest. There was a young guy sitting on the pavement with a cardboard sign propped up nearby and a dog lolling at his feet. That looks like a very reliable vehicle, he called out to Frank. Fuck you,
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Frank said quietly. We kept moving through Jackson Heights. The Quest stalled out in front of the pre-war apartment building. The traffic had stopped. An Indian woman carried a roll of bright fabric across the street. The World Cup in Jackson Heights was a time of colour and noise and street closures. Advertisers sometimes covered select billboards with photos of cricket stars. These pre-war apartments, said Frank, could have been given away a few years ago. Someone behind us honked. OK, OK, Frank said. He wrenched the transmission into Drive. A while ago we’d gone from street to street in the Quest looking for a plaque celebrating the life of the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who died in Queens in 1931. His plaque was somewhere near the old German
bakery. We drove through the quiet neighbourhood and finally found the place on 46th. This guy, Frank said, was one of the early jazz greats in the city. He lived a tragic life, alcoholism, some said he only left his apartment to buy gin. But he was part of New York’s art form. This is tragedy, this is Queens. He slowed the Quest down in front of the plaque. I peered out the window to read the text of the tiny plaque. Someone behind us honked. Fuck you, Frank muttered. He put the Quest into drive. You read it? he asked. Sure, I replied. You get the idea, he said. I liked the mess in his minivan. Work was going well. Family court was busy, but tragic. When we drove around Jackson Heights he told me he was taking on a big New York department store on behalf of a family. The daughter had lost a finger in the escalator of this New York institution. And do you know where the headquarters are? he asked me. That great New York store is in Cincinnati. I got a call from them. They said I didn’t have a case. Tell it to the escalator. Some nights Frank drove me all the way back to where I was staying on the West Side of Manhattan. I’ll drive you home, he said one evening. It’s not a problem. I told him thanks. He shrugged it off. It’s a chance, he said, to go past the hotel on Central Park South where I spent my wedding night. The bridge to Manhattan got closer. It changes, he said. Queens changes. You’ve got to give the next people their time. The Colombians, the Nepalese, whoever. The Mexicans, I said. The Mexicans, he repeated. There shouldn’t be much traffic on the 59th St. Bridge, he said. We rode in silence for a few minutes. The Quest was moving now. The engine hummed. I meant the Queensboro Bridge, obviously, he muttered. EB
LOST AND FOUND IN TRANSLATION By KATHERINE ASHENBURG
I WAS NEVER ANY GOOD AT FOREIGN languages. I got through French and Latin in high school because vocabulary comes easily to me, and expectations were not high. I disliked words that moved, as I thought of verbs and their annoying conjugations, and concentrated on nouns and adjectives. Later, when I lived in Holland for a year, in my thirties, I hoped that once I had learned, say, 5,000 Dutch words I would wake up one day and speak Dutch. I knew that wasn’t the way language worked, but laziness trumped sense. I wanted to speak languages, I really did, but my distaste for grammar was stronger than my fantasies of sitting around in cafés and chatting in French, Italian or Spanish.
Things changed, abruptly as I remember, one day while I was writing a book about the history of washing our bodies. Because much of it was a European story, I needed to hire people to translate relevant articles and parts of books from various languages. After arranging for yet another translation, I was visited by a spasm of self-loathing. It was pathetic to speak only English and atrocious French, and I decided that once I finished this damn book I would learn languages. My sixties would be devoted to perfecting my French and learning Spanish, and my seventies to Italian and German. I would decide about my eighties later. I now see that something deeper lay behind this mad impulse. My ideal
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self knew a few languages, not just for the pleasures of cosmopolitan café hopping, but as a natural extension of my interest in history, in Europe and in travel. I didn’t allow the sobering phrase “now or never” to cross my conscious mind, but clearly the thought was there in every misconjugated verb, in every sneaky preposition. I began with Spanish because it has the reputation of being easy. For the record, no language that has two non-interchangeable verbs for “to be” is easy—even less, one where the glamorous but baffling subjunctive insinuates itself into the most unlikely sentences. But I didn’t know that then. The beginning, filled with words I recognized from their French or Latin cousins, was promising. I moved from a night-school class in Toronto to a summer session at UBC that was like Sesame Street for grownups—the teachers were so entertaining and the games we played so diverting. Then, rather daringly, I went to Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, to study for a month. My school in Antigua had no classrooms as such, just a long garden with a string of huts, each furnished with two hard chairs and a small table. No blackboard, no audio-visual equipment, just an old U.S. high-school textbook and Carmen Castellaños, who spoke Spanish to me for about six hours a day for less than $200 a week. Sometimes in the sunny afternoons, stupefied by hours of gnarly idioms, Carmen and I would play Scrabbly (Scrabble) in Spanish. Occasionally, she let me win. By then, something had shifted. After decades of denial, I had accepted that learning a language wasn’t about the vocabulary—it was about the grammar and primarily the verbs. Other than late-blooming maturity, I can’t explain how this happened. I only knew that stem-changing verbs, as Spanish as paella, which would have repulsed me in the past, now fascinated me. 10
AFTER SUDDEN RAIN droplets light the mid-panel of my bedroom window only the mid-panel the rain that fast precise beyond the window hydro-wires bisect the maple tree whose tips thin out to red beyond the maple a quarter rainbow clichés the sky the clichéd sky rummages between violet and green sun blinds the eye dries the sidewalk saturates the buds on the viburnum cars flash chrome doors yellow a man leaves his house in orange trousers the street washes itself in detail almost too much to bear the clarity the optimism white trim partitions one house from another to say the street below approximates perfection is to celebrate the imperfect tell me is the desire for originality an original sin wanting all things new again? and yet who can help it who refuses paradise when sunlight halleluiahs after sudden rain? – Arlene Paré
WHICH DIDN’T MEAN I WAS GOOD AT IT. I had the same tin ear and the same talent for convincing my teachers that I understood them when I didn’t. I also had acquired the inability to grasp the difference between the two main past tenses and to remember which maddeningly arbitrary preposition was correct. But studying Spanish, however slowly, made me strangely happy. I loved the way verbs, usually implacably consistent, would suddenly detour into a wilderness of irregularity.
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I loved the way my brain, needing a word, would sift through smatterings of Latin, French and a formal English, and concoct something that often passed as Spanish. Because of this mental archiving trick, my vocabulary strikes Spanish speakers as slightly archaic, like something spoken by white-suited señores in a Havana bar in the 1920s. When a teacher told me, “Tu español es muy especial” (Your Spanish is very special) it was not entirely a compliment. When I began studying Spanish,
I had two goals: to be able to read the explanatory panels in Mexico City’s wonderful Museo Nacional de Arte, and to call for help if I fell off a trail and broke my leg on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (“Ayúdame! Mi pierna está rota!” ). Once I had accomplished those goals, I set another: to be able to spend an evening talking naturally in Spanish. To that end, I studied in Madrid, Barcelona, Oaxaca and most thoroughly in Mexico City, where I lived for five months. In Mexico City, my immersion in Hispanic culture ran the gamut from high to low. Take housekeeping, and my painstakingly crafted notes to my cleaning woman, notes which were always ignored. Months later, I realized that she, like close to seven percent of Mexicans, couldn’t read. Or take sex, when my teacher begged me never to use the word chaqueta for jacket as it had a rude meaning. I thought about it, and asked if it meant condón, a condom. He put his head in his hands and said he couldn’t talk about it. Later, I discovered that chaqueta is Mexican slang for masturbation, although the connection escapes me. When it came to culture, I rented movies from the golden age of Mexican cinema, the 1940s and 50s, and I could even understand them— once I put on the Spanish subtitles. I became an aficionada of Pedro Infante, Maria Felix, Dolores del Río, and dozens of terrific movies. At home in Toronto, I read the gossip magazine Hola!, which has made me an expert in the most obscure twigs of the Spanish royal family tree. (My obsession with the madcap octogenarian Duchess of Alba only ended with her death last year.) I watch the Spanish TV news on Univision, especially when presented by Jorge Ramos, a Hispanic Anderson Cooper, only cuter (mas guapo). I ’m st ill not good at foreig n
languages. There was only one dinner party in Mexico City where I felt I expressed myself more or less naturally in Spanish. But I had to drink so much tequila in the process that, for the sake of my liver, I have given up that ambition. I can see that my classmates at Toronto’s Spanish Centre are sometimes surprised that, after seven years of intermittent study, my Spanish is so inadequate. But I’m more or less at peace with my tortoise-speed progress. Another of my ideal selves believes in
old chestnuts like “the journey, not the arrival, matters.” Plus, I take comfort from the French painter Ingres. He loved playing the violin but did so very badly. When a person works hard at a pastime for which he has little or no talent, the French call it his violon d’Ingres. Spanish is my violon d’Ingres, and years ago I scrapped my plan of going on to other languages. To put it another way, Spanish is an ocean and I am more than content to wade at its edges for as long as I can. EB
LISTING BADLY
The top 10 reasons we need to stop using lists By STEVE BURGESS
YOU WISH TO STRENGTHEN YOUR MARRIAGE. You seek awesome facts about Romania. You want to know where you rank as one of Canada’s 10 biggest drug lords. You crave lists, pop culture’s drug of choice. But in falling for the easy seduction of lists are you surrendering free will? Below are 10 reasons why lists have become pernicious and pervasive, and what you might do to counter their influence on you.
10. LISTS ARE THE INTERNET’S ZOMBIE PLAGUE It’s the editorial phobia of the age: TL, DR (Too long, didn’t read). The boom in lists is driven by fear of reader
boredom. Modern media consumption is a tale of ever-shortening attention spans and editors do not want to lose those restless, caffeinated eyeballs. Read a long article or scan a pithy list? Slaughter and pluck a live chicken or munch a box of tasty McNuggets? No contest.
9. LISTS ARE ILLOGICAL More accurately, we’re illogical. It doesn’t take lists to prove that point, but they do nonetheless. Lists that are merely catalogues of suggestions (e.g. 10 Things to Do in Lloydminster. OK, Five) do not mess with our rational minds. It’s the ranking lists that do it.
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A study from the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University showed that our estimations of ranked quality are affected by boundaries. The researchers studied school applications. When a school moved up a list from, say, 13 to 12, applications increased only slightly. But when the school’s ranking crossed a significant boundary—such as from 11 to 10 —applications increased dramatically.
8. THEY HARNESS THE POWER OF GRADE NINE Our illogical urge to rank wouldn’t matter much were it not so compelling. It starts early in the poster-plastered bedrooms of the nation. My best-ever TV shows; My favorite Miley Cyrus videos; My best friends; My leastbest friends. Kids love lists. List-making behaviour seems to emerge naturally (although perhaps it’s just ingrained early by a succession of yearend countdown shows). Compulsive list-making is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a common expression of obsessivecompulsive disorder. Lists dispel chaos and provide order. They transform ambiguity into certainty. There’s something very comforting about a list…to your inner Grade Niner.
7. LISTS ARE THE ABSOLUTE WORST No one ever clicked on a list of 12 Acceptable Poker Strategies. The fundamental appeal of the list is that its contents are sold as the Ultimate, Best, Worst, Sexiest, Funniest, Loudest—a Top 10 list always turns it up to 11. The hyper-competitive online environment demands oversell and the lack of a payoff is irrelevant to the list-maker—you’ll never get that click back. Of course, overselling also has its shortcomings. 10 Most Stupendous Mid-East Peace Solutions will probably not be used in the next round of 12
peace talks but 10 Most Nuanced Arguments might be an interesting read.
6. THEY ARE THE GREATEST HITS COLLECTIONS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE I once had an opera-loving friend who used to shower contempt on the many CD collections of famous arias. These were for punters, he insisted—a true opera lover will listen to the entire opera score, the better to appreciate the arias in context and follow the tale of which the aria is just a part. I was, and remain, an opera punter. Just give me Nessun Dorma and Largo al Factotum back-to-back and skip the singing exposition, thanks very much. But I know what he means. I always felt the same way about people who bought those Beatles’ Greatest Hits collections. Buy the albums, man. Lists are for dilettantes. 10 Greatest Philosophers in History from Listverse (Aristotle is #1! In your face, Plato!) is no classical education. On the other hand, samplers have their place. Intrigued by the arias, I eventually started going to live operas. And it’s possible that the contents of 10 Greatest Philosophers in History is a fair summation of what a philosophy student retains 10 years after graduation.
5. ARE THEY ALL JUST A BIG MISTAKE? What tops the list of lists? In Western culture there can be no doubt—it is the Ten Commandments, that chiselled, metric menu of moral prescriptions Moses lugged down Mount Sinai. If they truly came from God it suggests that our human love for lists is a divine principle, and Heaven is just a place where every list stops at #1. But even if the Biblical Ten Commandments sprang from the same very human impulse that now gives us 10 Best New York Hotel Bathrooms, its cultural influence is unrivalled. It’s the ur-list. The problem is the Old Testament story of God’s Top 10 is not as carved
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in stone as later tradition has it. There aren’t necessarily Ten of them—that number may represent one of the earliest historical examples of editorial packaging. Different traditions number them differently, combining One and Two or dividing number Ten into numbers Nine and Ten. Some versions manage to come up with Ten even after eliminating the traditional opener, “I am the Lord thy God.” That’s because when you break down the full list there are at least 13 divine edicts, a less than ideal quantity. Have our cultural imperatives been shaped by a Top 10 list that wasn’t?
4. IS THAT A HAMMER I SEE BEFORE ME? Editors demand effective internet click bait. Thus the writer with an idea will be encouraged to listify it. The list is the editorial hammer that turns every story idea into a nail. Are you a homeowner with a leaky roof? Your desperate need for a list of options is perfectly understandable. Are you trapped in an unhappy marriage? Same. But not every issue lends itself to ranked solutions. While the list format is arguably best suited to a plumbing problem or sluggish acceleration in your Toyota, the craving for quick tricks and fast fixes also gives the list format an irresistible pull in more complex situations. Recently Salon.com featured “The 9 Smartest Marriage Tips Ever” by Tracy ClarkFlor y. She quotes Terri Orbuch, who recommends setting aside 10 minutes every day. “Ask her what her favourite movie is and why,” she suggests. “Ask him to recall a happy memory from childhood.” It’s wellmeaning advice. Happy couples talk. Unhappy couples don’t. When couples aren’t talking it’s rarely because the idea hasn’t occurred to them. Which points to a fundamental limitation about lists: They can speak to our real problems—which is why we
are drawn to them—but rarely offer insightful solutions.
3. THESE DAYS WHO HAS TIME TO THINK? Lists are cousin to awards. Lists and awards offer the imprimatur of considered opinion. The list, like the award, tells consumers that their own critical faculties will not be required. Someone has already done the work. The verdict is in. Lists and awards tell the overwhelmed consumer that this cultural product has been sanctioned by experts. Once the decision is made—Top 10 or Award-winning—it becomes the equivalent of a government safety stamp on a package of hamburger. This one is a safe buy. As to the others—who knows? In some ways, it connects to one of the great rhetorical scourges of our age—the inability to separate fact from opinion. Lists, in their quest for legitimacy, exacerbate this problem. Most lists are quantified opinions. But opinion does not offer sufficient authority for an effective piece of clickbait. Therefore the online list must be definitive. It must pack the power of expertise. Thus it is not just any arbitrary compendium of European beach getaways/Brooklyn cheese shops/most difficult dog breeds; it is offered as the definitive verdict. Again, no need to think. The list does it for you.
2. TOP 10 ARGUMENTS FOR FREE WILL Does anyone really love determinism? The theory that most human behaviour consists of programmed and predictable responses to genetics and/or environmental stimuli is depressing, to say the least. Songwriters do not trill about rolling down the highway with the wind in their hair as a programmed response to biological imperatives. And our love of lists, it seems, offers evidence for the theory. “Lists tap into our preferred way of receiving and organizing information at a subconscious
level,” wrote Maria Konnikova in The New Yorker. “From an information-processing standpoint, they often hit our attentional sweet spot.” She cites the work of psychologists Claude Messner and Michaela Wänke who investigated the “paradox of choice,” the phenomenon that more options make us less happy. Quicker decisions with more rapid information processing make us happier. As well, we gain a sense of satisfaction merely through completion.
The list satisfies because of its form, not its content. Lists are our puppet masters. Free will—glorious, sexy, difficult free will—demands analysis. Cut the list string and you proclaim: “My thoughts, my decisions, my choices are beyond number. My soul is not quantifiable.” No one makes romantic comedies about determinism. Be free.
1. THE END Sometimes they just pad the numbers. EB
IT’S THE LAW
A RELIGION OF ONE’S OWN By RICHARD HAIGH
IMAGINE YOU’RE ENROLLED IN AN ONLINE university course. The classroom is virtual but interactive, requiring you to read articles, post reports, and engage with the other students and the professor. And while your classmates are scattered across a large geographic area, you feel part of a community—one where you can learn while you’re in your slippers. Once during the term, you are required to gather with your study group, in person, at a weekend retreat. You look forward to this. But then something strange happens. The professor explains that a male study group member claims that his religion forbids him to sit with the women in the group. The student has asked to be exempt from the retreat. How would you react? Would you be glad not to have to face someone with those beliefs? Disappointed that a university student could have such unenlightened views? Or furious because the student is able to shirk
responsibility based on a bizarre and outdated view of gender relations? When this happened at Toronto’s York University in 2012, the professor and most of the students in the course were outraged. Not only did they think the student’s behaviour discriminatory, but no one could point to any religion forbidding male and female university students to work together. Feeling confident that he would be supported in refusing the student’s request, the professor sought advice from university administrators. W hat they said shocked him. The university’s position was that the student ’s request should be honoured. It relied on a Canadian legal doctrine that says religious freedoms need to be accommodated. The professor and students remained indignant. The university’s official position never wavered, however, because it was in no position to judge the validity of a student’s religious views. It may seem otherwise, but
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we’re lucky to have laws that supported the university in this case. They’re the reason such disputes are resolved peacefully. Religious clashes like these are becoming all too common in the West — sometimes playing out as small incidents in classrooms and workplaces, sometimes as singular and tragic events. In the past few years we’ve seen violence erupt over the publication in Denmark of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad; growth of a “new atheism” literature, claiming the irrationality of religious belief; a proposed Charter of Values in Quebec prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols; and the massacre of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris by Muslim fanatics. For the most part, Canada’s broad and open immigration policies, multiculturalism, increased diversity and pluralism have given rise to an amazing social and cultural mosaic, but they have no doubt also contributed to flashpoints like the one at York. Accommodating religious beliefs can be very complex, partly because of the nearly infinite ways in which religious beliefs are manifested. The Supreme Court of Canada’s test for assessing whether something is religious is wide open. To meet the test, all one need do is show that a practice, such as not working face-to-face with female students, is connected with a higher purpose. The subjectivity of the belief is what’s interesting here: no one has to cite scripture or refer to religious experts to support their position. A religion is pretty much one’s own. All one need do is assert, in good faith and sincerely, that a particular practice or belief has a nexus with religion. That, the Supreme Court says, is sufficient. It’s not a difficult burden to meet. Gurbaj Singh, a Sikh student in a grade school in Quebec, was allowed 14
to attend school wearing a kirpan—a religious and ceremonial dagger— because he claimed it was part of his religious practice. Non-Sikhs, in contrast, aren’t allowed to carry knives. The Supreme Court found that all Singh had to do was establish that his personal and subjective belief in the religious significance of the kirpan was sincere. He didn’t have to establish that a kirpan isn’t a weapon or that Sikhism requires wearing one. The reasons for treating freedom of religion subjectively are practical and principled. Courts are secular institutions—there is no place for them in the pews of the nation. But this subjective approach brings potential challenges. No one can say my belief—however unusual or even socially disruptive it might seem to others—isn’t valid. There needs to be sincerity in that belief, and some connection to a basic idea of religion (related to the divine, or spiritual faith), but nothing more t ha n t hat . S o t he York st udent fervently believed his religion didn’t allow contact with females (at least in a student setting). He was sincere in that belief (at least initially; he later recanted in some way, since he ended up attending the weekend session). The university accepted that belief and determined that the only reasonable accommodation was to grant him dispensation from the weekend retreat. When accommodation doesn’t occur, the results can give rise to a different set of problems. In February, Quebec Judge Eliana Marengo refused to hear Rania El-Alloul’s testimony because El-Alloul was wearing a hijab. Like the York incident, the outcry was swift, and the positions of each side quickly became entrenched. For El-A lloul, religious freedom meant that a hijab should be accept-
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able attire pretty much anywhere. For Marengo, establishing a measure of respect in the courtroom is part of a judge’s authority over controlling the court, and entitles her to set rules related to decorum and dress. For me, the Quebec courtroom case is far from morally equivalent to the York case. Unlike the professor and other students who felt discriminated against by the exemptionseeking student, it is hard to imagine that the judge would feel discriminated against. Rather, it seems to be no more than an exercise of power. Why couldn’t the judge accommodate? It isn’t going to lessen her authority to have one witness wear a headscarf. Marengo comes across not as a wise sage, but as tone deaf to the Supreme Court of Canada’s pronouncements on the subjective nature of religious belief. And in the end, justice was not served by her decision. No doubt accommodation, which allows difference to flourish, may sometimes seem unfair to those who must do the accommodating (and even discriminatory to those who are not offered the same treatment). Those feelings can be hard to shake, as attested by the York professor and st udents. But ac commodating religion is one legal method we use in Canada to ensure societ y remains uninterested in religious beliefs. The Quebec judge missed the point. It’s a necessary paradox—by vigorously maintaining reasonable accommodat ion of religious beliefs, we act ually protect the secular nature of our state. Maybe our relative peace fulness—our lack of killings over cartoons, for instance—isn’t just luck after all. We’ve stacked the deck a little by aligning the law with an ideal but practical kind of justice. And I thank god for that. EB
HUMANKIND
SOUTHERN COMFORT What makes Paula Deen such an appealing purveyor of comfort food? By AMY ROSEN BUTTER DEEN BY LAURA LYNN JOHNSTON
YOU HEAR THE SLOW, FLUID DRAWL OF THE SOUTH
everywhere you go in Savannah. It’s the kind of town where the undulating lineup for scoops at Leopold’s Ice Cream—with f lavours like lemon custard and Tutti Frutti, unchanged since 1919—is actually pleasant to be in, worth the wait just for the friendly banter and easy warm sunshine. Savannah is also a place that lets you stroll around with red Solo cups full of alcohol, unfettered by such things as societal norms or actual laws, through parks lined with springtime trees hanging heavy with Spanish moss and graveyards boasting centuries-old crypts. This is a city based on good time, any time tourism. Especially the good times. And at its heart is celebrity chef Paula Deen and her restaurant, The Lady and Sons, the spiritual home of comfort food. I travelled to Savannah recently, less on a pilgrimage than in the hope that I might lift the covers off a dish or two in an attempt to understand both Deen’s appeal and the appeal of the food she serves.
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there what I believe and how I run my life. I believe that every one of God’s creatures on this earth was created equal. I am here today because I want people to know who I am…” Lauer interrupted to press her on the business side of things and why he believed she was there, seeing as several of her partnerships had already severed ties. “Would you have fired you?” he asked. “Knowing me? No.” He then asked point blank: “Are you a racist?” “No. No, I’m not.” “Okay, but you swore under oath that you used the most offensive word to describe an African American. How can you not be considered a racist?” “The day I used that word, it was a world ago,” she calmly answered. “Thirty years ago. I had a gun at my head.”
THE CASHIER AT THE GIFT SHOP ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF THE LADY and Sons was friendly though she was suffering from a bout of seasonal allergies, wiping her nose as she smiled and said, “Wisteria blossoms.” She then packed a paper bag with my new “Butter, Y’all” yellow ceramic butter dish and peach cobbler lip balm, before deftly upselling me on Paula Deen Special Seasonings House Seasoning. “It’s what she uses on everything,” she said. Paula Deen cookbooks were stacked high on wooden tables beside healthier versions penned by her sons Bobby and Jamie, while bottles of signature chipotle raspberry sauce and pickled beets gleamed from country store style open shelving. Silicon spatulas, fake flowers, “Onions, Y’all” tea towels, endless aprons, and a crush of patrons displaying varying degrees of plumpness were picking over souvenirs like the first sweet corn of July. Just beyond the gift shop door, at the busy hostess stand, my friend Ilona and I were handed a plastic ticket at our pre-booked reservation time and told to take the elevator up to the third of three floors, each of which had its own banks of seating and southern buffets. The vibe was oddly calm and frantic, as if people knew they were in for something they were going to enjoy but worried it might all be gone before their turn came. They didn’t need to worry. After Ilona and I had tucked ourselves into a booth in the darker bar area in the back, Nick, our young, bespectacled waiter, approached to explain our good fortune. “You’re seated at the closest table to the buffet, right through that archway,” he said, pointing to the rear of the room. “Now let me set you ladies up with drinks, then I’ll come back to explain the menu.” Nick returned with two icy 20-ounce glasses of unlimited tea topped with mint
BUTTER DEEN BY LAURA LYNN JOHNSTON
For the uninitiated, Deen’s story in a (Georgia pecan) nutshell is that she became known over the course of many years, books and TV shows for recipes like old-fashioned meatloaf and key lime pie with a mile high meringue topper, serious comfort food. Deen came to represent an idealized version of the mother or grandmother we wish we had, laying down home-cooked meals every night including a show-stopping dessert, as if the 1950s had never ended. Her TV shows taught viewers that they too could make the delicious doable, like cola-basted ham and creamy potato salad. Deen also became notorious for simple, highly processed recipes such as her Twinkie Pie, which calls for one and a half boxes of Twinkies, packaged vanilla pudding and a tub of whipped topping. It was essentially the polar opposite of the Julia Child approach, using commercial products in a new fangled sort of scratch cookin’ allowing people to feed their families something resembling homemade food. These recipes made Paula Deen a household name. But before fame, fortune and Twinkie Pie, Deen was a single mother raising two sons in Albany, Georgia. In her twenties she was hit by agoraphobia and supported the family through her catering business, The Bag Lady, where orders were hand-delivered by little Jamie and Bobby. By 1996 her catering business outgrew their home, and Paula outgrew her 20 year bout with agoraphobia. She opened up The Lady and Sons in downtown Savannah, a restaurant that sold Southern hospitality, and comfort food, to the culinary masses. In 2002 Deen’s first cooking show premiered on the Food Network, then came an eponymous magazine, more TV shows and cookbooks, restaurants in Las Vegas and product deals. Her empire was growing in step with the waistlines of her patrons until June 20th, 2013, when fans were shocked to see an apparently darker side of their comfort-food heroine. Leaked court depositions (from a now-dismissed case) showed that Deen admitted to having used the N-word deep in her past. She was under oath and didn’t, couldn’t, deny it. The Food Network dropped her. Her empire began to crumble. Caesars Palace closed her four buffet restaurants. Walmart ended their relationship, as did Target, Home Depot, Smithfield ham products and, perhaps most tellingly, Novo Nordisk, makers of the diabetes drug Deen had been taking for type 2 diabetes. One week after the leaked court deposition came to light, Deen had an emotional 15-minute interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show. “I’m in shock,” said a weeping Deen. “The main reason I’m here today, Matt, is that it’s important for me to tell you and everyone out
“I believe that every one of God’s creatures on this earth was created equal. I am here today because I want people to know who I am…”
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and lemon wedges. Behind him, a gaggle of women with bedazzled iPhones were taking selfies with the bartender. At the first sip of my tea, a wave of extreme sweetness hit my brain and I felt an immediate concern that my pupils might explode from the sugar rush. Nick ran down the menu. “Today we have baked chicken, fried chicken, fried white fish, ten sides, plus salad bar, hoecakes and cheese biscuits, and dessert. The buffet is the most popular item on the menu. It’s all you care to eat.” He briefly paused, possibly to gauge our interest, possibly to catch his breath. As polite Canadians we remained silent and stoic. He charged on. “But we also have à la carte options like our famous shrimp and grits and fried green tomatoes.” Journalistic duty demanded that we order the buffet and we girded ourselves as we headed toward the archway. And through the looking glass.
DURING THEIR NOW-FAMOUS INTERVIEW, DEEN WENT ON TO TELL Lauer that she had used the N-word decades ago when a robber held a gun to her head during a robbery at the bank where she was a teller. Of course, she remains a product of a time in the Deep South that many would rather forget, but does she remain unreconstructed? Deen was well into her twenties when calls for equality and an end to segregation had begun. Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and movies such as The Help weren’t created out of thin air. She didn’t lie under oath, but she was naïve in failing to understand the hurt she would cause recalling a time she had used that word. Lauer (who was irritated that she’d cancelled the week before) pressed her on it, not unjustly. “So there’s not another side of this personality we see on TV?” Lauer asked. “This warm, sweet, sugary, sassy girl of the South? There isn’t a side of you that’s intolerant?” “No. No, no, no. What you see is what you get. I’m not an actress. I’m heartbroken. I’ve held friends in my arms while they’ve sobbed,” she said, sobbing herself. “And I tell them, if God got us to it he’ll get us through it.” Once Paula realized the harm she had done, how ignorant she had been about the weight of the N-word, she went on a cross-country apology tour, appearing on mass market TV shows, often with her grown sons by her side, holding their hands on her lap for support as she repented. She cried often. It was yet another in a seemingly endless line of modern American redemption stories. Fans took to Twitter. Colleagues rallied around her. Lineups at The Lady and Sons grew stronger. In February 2014 the Wall Street Journal reported a recently formed new company, Paula Deen Ventures, had 18
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“So there’s not another side of this personality we see on TV?” Today show’s Matt Lauer asked Paula Deen, probing for alleged racial intolerance
received an investment of between $75 million and $100 million from Najafi Cos., a private-equity company led by Jahm Najafi, owner of the Book-of-the-Month Club and BMG Music Service. The subscription-based Paula Deen Network launched for $9.99 a month in September. And by March of this year, her comeback was almost complete with deep hugs and two segments on the network hybrid talk/cooking show The Chew, where Deen flogged her new Candy Crush-style app, Paula Deen’s Recipe Quest. Deen excitedly talked about her soon-to-open new restaurant in Tennessee and prepared deep-fried chicken wings doused in a sauce of butter, peanut butter and jelly. The audience, her audience, ate it up. But is the story complete? The First Lady of Comfort Food bottomed out and is on top again, but what does that say about her food? And about us? “I love Paula, she’s a great person and from the heart,” Hugh Acheson, the James Beard award-winning chef and restaurateur and persnickety judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, told me after I had visited his restaurant in Savannah. “Here’s a single woman who fought against adversity and made a real impact on food in the area. But there’s a changing idea of Southern food and the misnomer of Southern food being this lard-enhanced stuff that’s going to kill you. To me that’s not Southern food, that’s just crappy food.” It’s true that Paula Deen regularly brands less-thanhigh-quality recipes as Southern comfort, such as her
NORTH SHORE SEWAGE STORY crows party at the wastewater treatment plant hop, skip, skim the scum for meaty delectables released from urban drains crows swoop the bubbling froth with the grace of gravity one lone monkey puzzle tree sits at the lion’s gate witnesses sludge stream gas flares the huge digesters process what we have left behind our discards sifted chlorinated, pumped out into the burrard inlet primary treatment was built to handle good shit, not phthalates & flame retardants birth control pills & anti-depressants morphing fish anatomy decreasing sperm counts infiltrating fishy homes while i long for tertiary rescue the crows salvage what they can from cities industriously pumping out chemical consequences transgendering water & children testing ocean temper – Rita Wong
chocolate cheese fudge recipe that calls for a cup of butter and two boxes of confectioner’s sugar…and a halfpound of Velveeta. But is the quality of the food even the point? She’s a big hugger, an even bigger laugher, and if you were to cast her as Mrs. Claus in a Hollywood movie, she wouldn’t need hair and makeup. Through her rags-to-riches story, her personality, and her ability to connect with people, she was able to rebound quickly.
Her fandom was and is, literally, entirely comfortable with her. How much of that, I wondered, was due to the symbolism of the food she has created for those fans?
THE PULSE AND FLOW AROUND THE BUFFET PUT ME IN MIND OF rush hour in Jakarta, but visually I had been expecting more from the buffet than what looked like an Indian lunch spread with a side serving of sad salad bar. Across from the steamy buffet, I spied a woman behind glass shaping biscuits and frying up cornmeal hoecakes. Back at the table and surveying my choices, the food looked even more prosaic. Some of the veggies were a greenish grey instead of emerald, and there were pieces of unappealingly pink ham hock tucked to and fro. There was no tantalizing aroma, no visual pops. Maybe it wasn’t hot enough? I shrugged, picked up my fork and took a few bites. I was transported. If tastes were colours, this was a double rainbow, almost inconceivably packed with flavour. It made my ears hot. A few bites in I could feel my pulse race in a good way. The chicken was crunchy and moist, oniony and garlicky. The cornbread casserole, a mix of cornmeal, creamed corn and cream cheese, was buttery, sweet and salty. The yams were rustic baked chunks lolling in a cinnamon sauce that was sweeter than a Georgia peach. Salty black-eyed peas were cooked near perfect, and the even saltier collared greens were even more satisfying. Grits were smooth and buttery; fish was crispy and flaky. I was halfway through, lips glistening and fingers slick, when I realized that I didn’t even really need a knife and fork. In fact, apart from the chicken, everything could be eaten with a spoon. Every piece of food I was lustily downing was soft, extremely tasty, but somehow almost didn’t even require chewing. I stopped to take a breath and noticed Ilona smiling madly as she attempted to Instagram mac and cheese, the cheese strands stretching the full length of her arm from plate to fork. I laughed out loud, which made me notice that the restaurant was eerily quiet. There were perhaps 200 people on this floor alone, all of it covered in hardwood and high ceilings, yet nary a peep could be heard. It was the silence of intense concentration, as if we were all sitting in a gymnasium taking a final exam. Ilona noticed it, too, and found it genuinely disorienting. “Are there people behind me?” she said. “It feels like there’s a huge void behind me.” “Just turn your head,” I said. She did and saw what I saw, which was a room full of people engaged in two relationships, though neither relationship appeared to WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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be with the people at their tables. Nobody was coming up for air because they were engaged with the food and, therefore, with Paula. They were in the middle of a world where food meant the comfort they were experiencing in the moment and Paula was the person responsible for making them feel this way. But just how comforting is this food? When I’m sick or heartbroken I don’t want to tuck into a pint of Häagen-Dazs or a plate of fried chicken. I can barely eat at all, often relying on applesauce and frozen peas to get me through the tough times (making me wonder what Paula was eating during her scandal). But I could understand how if I were a different person from a different town, I’d want Paula’s buttery cornbread casserole in my corner. Not that it’s all about trauma; comfort food is also about the familiar, especially in our swirlingly complex modern world. What is knowable? What can you truly rely on? Well, if you’re a person with a low tolerance for the splintered reality of modern times, perhaps the last thing you want is to see modern times on your plate. Perhaps all you want at the end of a day is something in front of you at dinner that you can put your faith in and that tells you the world makes sense. As I was looking back out to the giant quiet room full of people with their heads bent it occurred to me that The Lady and Sons was not an exam hall but a house of worship. Nick burst into view, stopping by with our hot hoecakes and garlic buttered cheese biscuits. I tucked into them with something like greed. They were—I’m sorry—heavenly. But then something changed. A spurt of panic shot into my throat. My ears began to ring. Beads of cold sweat formed on my upper lip. The food was doing something bad to me. I looked at Ilona. She didn’t look too hot, either, even though she’d eaten her entire giant biscuit and was now picking at mine. She stopped when she noticed me examining her. “Are you feeling okay?” I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. I was suddenly consumed by the thought that I might actually vomit on a table in a busy restaurant. Not just any restaurant, the busiest restaurant, the Church of Deen. Good Lord, I thought, is this how it ends?
OUR TAXI DROPPED US OFF AT A FORMER ICE FACTORY IN THE emerging midtown area of Savannah, about 10 minutes removed from the touristy River Street district where people walk around drinking alcohol-laden frozen daiquiris from Wet Willie’s in SLUTS logoed cups (Southern Ladies Up To Something). There are varying forms of comfort, I realized, whether it be at the bottom of a deep-dish pie or the bottom of a fuchsia Call A Cab adult slushee. 20
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CAN.ICONS AURORA BOREALIS The Aurora Borealis is a magnificent natural light display in Canada’s northern skies. Particles born to Earth by gusting solar winds collide with gas molecules in the upper atmosphere; the resulting disturbance—an acceleration of charged celestial particles—causes the spectacle that’s also known as the northern lights. The Aurora typically takes the shape of giant, curtain-like folds, streamers, or swirling arches across the heavens. During extraordinary geomagnetic storms it’s visible on the horizon as far south as the U.S. border. But in the North, it often appears directly overhead, filling the sky with hissing, whistling light. Colour reveals altitude: red for the highest particles, green for mid-range, blue for closest-toearth. Yellow and pink indicate a live re-mixing of altitudes and hues. Little wonder the Aurora inspires magical thinking. A widespread but controversial belief, popularized by the American TV series Northern Exposure, holds that Japanese tourists travel to the North to make love under the Aurora Borealis in the hope of conceiving a fortunate child. Recently, when a Japanese blogger informed a Northerner that he’d never heard of this custom, he received the reply, “Are you really Japanese?” Some Inuit and First Nations link the lights to fertility and childbirth, or even to the celestial dancing spirits of children who died at birth. Others conceive of the lights as torches held by the dead while they play a form of soccer with a skull. One of the most appealing is the belief that the Creator lives in the far North, where he builds spectacular bonfires to remind us of his lasting love. – Clive Holden
Inside the old ice factory we found a stunningly reimagined space, a scrubbed industrial setting full of exposed brick and whitewashed ductwork, grey and teal banquettes and white marble bistro tables. The Florence, Hugh Acheson’s high-end eatery, is cool without
being cold. Soon after we took our seats, a white-haired Southern lady reached up to grab one of the chef’s cookbooks stacked high on the window casement behind my banquette. “Pardon my derriére,” she said, smiling through her delicately powdered face. The room was burbling lightly with two and four tops. The room felt chatty and happy and light. I felt at home with a house-bottled wine cooler and the breezy décor. There was a tinkling of background music so quiet we couldn’t tell if it was American jazz or ’80s pop. I realized I was breathing deeply and regularly. “Southern food is still defining itself, and it’s a really exciting time to see that change,” Acheson told me when I spoke to him later. For a country like Canada that has long been snickered about because it had no identifiable food culture (save for a few better-known dishes out of Quebec), the main thing Acheson said he learned while cheffing the late Henri Burger in Hull (which had defined itself as a high-end classical pioneer of the field-to-table movement) and Buonanotte in Montreal, was that “these restaurants were getting the lamb delivered to the back door from a farmer friend.” The cheese was from a guy in Gatineau. Someone would bring in foraged mushrooms and garlic scapes. All of it coming through the back. These were restaurants with an authenticity and zeal. “So I took that authenticity and brought it down here to a place that had a lot of history, but the recipes came on the backs of slaves. It wasn’t pretty. And they were getting all their ingredients from giant distributors.” Acheson changed that. He opened up his back doors to local providers, to the guy who makes stoneground grits, the woman who grows 14 types of carrots. “We started buying from them when nobody else was. There’s a culinary heritage and history here based on low country food,” he explained. “We’re still figuring out what the real influence is. Figuring out the actual identity of the place.” Or at least he is. The identity of The Florence is seasonal Italian, from the spring bruschetta with its roly-poly fresh peas on ricotta, to the root vegetable salad composed on a piece of slate; all freshness, texture, raw, cooked, whipped, pickled, powdered. And colour, with natural sweetness and a feather touch with seasoning. My cavatelli pasta walked the high wire between challenging and familiar, the heat of Calabrese chili with the earthy chew of chicken hearts, a creamy cloak on the fresh pasta and a pleasing zing from lemon. Everybody finds comfort in different places, and this food was deeply comforting, in the way that something beautiful—food, in this case—can engage the mind and lift the spirit.
UNLIKE SOME FOODS THAT CAN LITERALLY WEIGH YOU DOWN. After I’d recovered from my calorific panic attack at The Lady and Sons, I drank a glass of water and ordered dessert. (I am a professional, if nothing else.) A friend from home had told me that I “had” to order Paula’s Gooey Cake, which waiter Nick described as a bottom layer of yellow cake mix topped with baked cream cheese, butter and sugar. It might just be the quintessential Paula Deen dish. “I’ve got to warn you,” Nick said when I asked about it, “It’s reeeeaaaalllly sweet.” I ordered it. It came in a small plastic bowl, the type you’d normally see holding cafeteria Jell-O. The scent of hot butter meeting graham crumbs hovered over the table. The taste reminded me of the yummy bits stuck to the bottom of a warm cheesecake pan. It was also easily the most calorie-dense bite of food I have ever experienced, and I’ve done my fair share of eating. There was no false advertising; it was gooey. I muscled through a mouthful before waving the white flag. Later that night, after we’d left The Florence, I got to thinking about the meaning of authenticity and its relationship to comfort when it comes to food. Paula Deen’s food is not fake. It is true to Southern culture in one sense, in that it’s home-style, hearty and decadent. Even Hugh Acheson told me about his first Georgian Thanksgiving at his future in-laws being crammed with absurdly rich casseroles: “After that, I didn’t go to the bathroom for a week,” he said, possibly over-sharing. But there is an honesty to Deen’s food. For worshippers who flock to The Lady and Sons, expectations will be met (and in the case of the Gooey Cake, exceeded). Deen is giving the people what they want: Something to believe in, which happens to come in the guise of food. “ People ma ke m ist a kes,” Acheson told me, in reference to Deen’s scandal, “and I don’t think you can fake the sincerity that Paula has about her apologies. People truly believe in her. The cult of personality is real. She’s got it.” He’s not giving her a free pass on her transgressions, “but I will give her a free pass on the fact that I like Paula!” Bigotry can’t be condoned, he added, and, in a linkage that can’t be treated as equating one to the other and that perhaps he didn’t even exactly intend, but all of which seemed to me apropos in any case, he also added that perhaps it’s time to own up to what’s been wrongly celebrated about Southern food. Like, butter, y’all! “Anyway,” said Acheson. “As long as Paula continues to make amends, I will be one of her biggest supporters.” I was afraid to ask if he was referring to her past attitudes or her food. EB WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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STORIES FROM THE CITY
A Different Kind of Simakanis What happens when policing forces start to listen ? By Carissa Halton
Photography Jessica Fern Facette
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t was not quite midnight as I drove home north on 95th Street from downtown Edmonton, past the glowing Burger Baron sign, the dark pawnshops, the queasy light from various convenience store windows and the ever-present drug trade hopping off and on bikes, out of backpacks, through car windows, into cupped hands. I craned to watch the action, but when I looked forward again I had to quickly stomp on the brake pedal. Just ahead of me on the road was a woman walking with a slight sidestep, as if she’d been riding a horse too long or had wet her pants. Her acid-wash skinny jeans glowed like moonbeams under the car headlights. I’d come across walkers in the middle of the road here before. They often staggered or shouted, or weaved in the disoriented way of frat boys after midnight. This woman in platform shoes, however, walked straight on the centre line. 22
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EARLY IN HIS CAREER, INSPECTOR JONES WORKED WITH ABORIGINAL PEOPLE, IN EAST EDMONTON, ON THE 118TH AVENUE BEAT
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INSPECTOR DAN JONES PLAYS A LEAD ROLE IN THE EDMONTON POLICE SERVICE’S ABORIGINAL RELATIONS UNIT
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I rolled down my window. “Can I help?” The salt tracks on her brown cheeks shone in the light of a truck behind us that would not pass. She glanced back, and when she met my gaze there was no fear, no relief—just something closer to confusion. A scar followed the curve of her eye until it disappeared into her shoulder-length black hair. “I need to get away from those guys,” she said, gesturing back towards the truck. Before I could respond, she walked around the front of my vehicle to the passenger door. This woman—possibly in danger, possibly high, and possibly about to rob me—was about to get into my car. Too many things were unfolding to process fully: the men behind, the woman in front, the ghosts of so many missing and murdered women all around. And inside my head was the voice of a former gang member I’d met. “I have a place,” she’d tell johns, directing them to a trap. Her words skipped like a record in my head. “I robbed people alone, too. I’d just pull a shank.” When the woman in the acid-wash jeans reached out, I instinctively locked the door but rolled down the
window. “I’m sorry, I don’t feel comfortable letting you in my car.” Of course. Her face fell into resignation. Of course. “Can I call someone?” I turned on my hazard lights, which blinked far slower than my pulse. Her hand dropped to her side and she moved to the dark sidewalk. I followed her, slowly, while my mind raced. Why is that truck still behind me? How could I have left her out there? The truck passed. I pulled up beside her again and asked if she wanted me to call the Crossroads outreach line. She was slight and small, and her resolve had blocked her tears. “Just forget it.” “Please, can I call anyone?” “No one cares a fuck about me,” she said. Her voice was flat. She waved a limp arm at me. “Forget it.” She stopped and said more urgently: “Don’t call the cops.” I had to pull out and ease around a couple of parked cars. I stopped further down the road and looked in my rear-view mirror. Her moonbeam legs raced on to the road towards a stopped truck. Boxy front grill and lights. They’d just gone around the block. The door opened and
EARLY EVENING IN INNER CITY EDMONTON
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the truck’s cab swallowed her up. No one cares a fuck. The flatness of those words struck me only slightly harder than the insistence of the last thing she said to me: Don’t call the cops.
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y n n Jackson, R achel Quinney a nd Bonnie Jack a l l disappea red from the streets of Edmonton and their bodies were eventually found dumped along nearby rural roads. Twenty-six sex-trade workers, many of them aboriginal, went missing or were murdered in Edmonton between 1988 and 2014. Inspector Dan Jones with the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) knew many of them. He worked the 95th Street and 118th Avenue beat between 2000 and 2004, early in his career. Not only did he recognize every unf lattering mugshot, he often knew the women’s partners, kids and parents, too. This was the same beat Jones’s father had walked. He has photos of his dad lighting cigarettes for homeless people at a time when new community law-enforcement models transformed many police “forces” into police “services.” Becoming part of the streetscape—walking, biking, drinking coffee—was one element in a broader strategy. For officers, crisis response was secondary to building relationships. But when it came to race issues, there were limits to what progressive community policing could do. Jones’s dad had told him about the “Indian List.” It was the early 1970s, and aboriginal people weren’t allowed to buy alcohol or go into bars. If someone somewhere worried an individual would break the law, their name was added to the list, and they could be arrested at any time, without cause. There was no Indian List when Dan Jones walked the beat in the early aughts, but there were proportionally more aboriginal people—Cree and Inuit, Ojibwa and Blackfoot, who made their home in the inner city. In 2013, Jones was assigned a lead role in the police department’s newly formed aboriginal relations unit. A n aboriginal strategy was released in 2014, and that same year Edmonton hosted the final event in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which had been created in 2008 to document experiences of those affected by Indian residential schools. Edmonton’s mayor proclaimed 2014 to be the “Year of Reconciliation.” It was also a year in which the EPS faced backlash for promoting officer Mike Wasylyshen, the son of a former police chief, to sergeant. In 2002, Wasylyshen found 16-year-old Randy Fryingpan passed out in the back seat of a truck. 26
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He tasered Fryingpan six times in just over a minute. Fryingpan survived. The judge called it “cruel and unusual treatment.” Wasylyshen’s sentence was a 120-hour suspension and a decade of delayed promotion. Many in the aboriginal community challenged the spirit of the promotion. Taz Bouchier, an aboriginal elder who worked at the Edmonton Remand Centre, protested at a police commission meeting. “For many people, a police uniform is a trigger and promoting Wasylyshen promotes mistrust,” she told reporters at the time. “He has a criminal history that is violent,” Bouchier said. “It makes it difficult for the aboriginal community to access services when they cannot have trust and a relationship.”
“For many people, a police uniform is a trigger and promoting Wasylyshen promotes mistrust.”
The goal of the EPS’s aboriginal strategy was to build the kind of trust Bouchier was talking about. In 2017, Edmonton will have the largest population of urban aboriginals in Canada. Two out of five already live below the poverty line. While aboriginal people represent almost a quarter of the national incarceration rate (this proportion only continues to grow), half of the inmates housed in Edmonton’s national maximum security facilities are aboriginal. In the city’s women’s institution, that number is closing in on two-thirds. Aboriginal people are twice as likely as non-aboriginals to be a victim of a violent assault, and they are seven times more likely to be murdered. “Collaboration is key to success,” reads the strategy. “Crime prevention and public safety are most effective at the grassroots level, working side-by-side with the community.” But according to Jones, history and habit can stand in the way. It was often the role of the local RCMP officers to collect the children for residential schools. Authority figures such as Indian agents, social workers, police officers and parole officers, not to mention prison guards and security personnel, have not always helped the community. “For many aboriginals, simakanis are simakanis are simakanis,” Jones said to me, using the Cree word for law officer. (Simakanis or simakanisak
traditionally translates more broadly to “protectors that surround the living area.”) “It’s our job,” he added, “to help people understand that we’re not all the same.”
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o one cares a fuck. The words were with me the next day when I entered Boyle Street Community Services in the core of downtown Edmonton. Every day, smokers crowd around the sign announcing there is “no smoking closer than five metres.” When I visited, 10 cranes were at work hoisting steel and timber and glass. The frame of the controversial new arena grows there on Treaty 6 land. The cranes were reflected in the glass of the new Epcor building that cast a gentrifying shadow across the north side of the old CN tracks. There, the George Spady centre shelters “wet” clients, Hope Mission shelters “dry” clients, and a medley of drop-ins and food agencies are dotted through Chinatown and Little Italy. Boyle Street serves the most desperate people in the
city: chronically homeless, unmedicated, actively using. Eighty percent of the clientele are aboriginal—a distressingly disproportionate number in a city where aboriginals make up five percent of the population. I had come for a special pipe ceremony to honour International Women’s Day. I peeked into the room where many women sat in a circle on cushions borrowed from couches around the centre. My stomach sank; I had forgotten to ask about protocol. I wore no skirt and brought no tobacco. I quickly tied my neck scarf around my waist and hustled a smoke from an empathetic client. I entered and moved clockwise around the circle. I remembered this practice from a sign at the museum on “tipi etiquette.” I knew I could not be on my moon time, but I felt nervous. What else didn’t I know? At the head of the circle sat Ruth Anne, a traditional Anishnawbe woman and a clinical therapist by training. She volunteers at the drop-in as a “big sister” two times a month, where she speaks to victims of assault. Many are aboriginal women who did not feel comfortable reporting their assaults to the police. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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GARY MOOSTOOS, A CULTURAL SUPPORT WORKER, WHO HEARS MANY STORIES OF RACISM FROM HIS ABORIGINAL CLIENTS, EXPERIENCED AN INCIDENT THAT MADE INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES 28
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“Why wouldn’t the women go to the police?” I asked her later. I imagined shaming or further assault or a ‘drive and drop’ to the outskirts of town. “The women worry about arrest, but usually the warrants are for unpaid jaywalking tickets or skipping the fare on a train,” she said. “Also, often they don’t understand police protocol.” Coffee and deep chats are her forté. Yet in this circle, she was nervous. She hadn’t led a pipe ceremony before. When the flags, made from folded pieces of patterned cotton cloth, and a tobacco pouch arrived, Ruth Anne began the ceremony. She lit the herbs piled in the centre of a shell and straightened small teacups and the bowl of saskatoons. Eventually, lighting the long wood and clay pipe, she prayed as the smoke rose. Between puffs to keep the bowl lit, she reminded us: our words were in the tobacco. As it burned, our words rose up, up, up to the Creator. In time, I passed Ruth Anne the “gifted” cigarette. She took it and asked what I hoped for. I told her I hoped for bravery.
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ary Moostoos, a cultural suppor t worker at Boyle Street, had heard many stories from his aboriginal clients about racism at City Centre Mall. The mall’s east entrance faces Churchill Square, Edmonton’s civic core. To the north of the square sits the pyramid-shaped City Hall and to its east is the art gallery, a twisting feat of architecture flanked by the city’s leading concert hall. Finally, to the south of the square is the main library. This is where the city’s 2,300 homeless often find themselves. There are few public washrooms downtown, so many use the facilities in the library or the mall. While security personnel at the library are generally respectful, Moostoos had been told by many aboriginal clients they’d been targeted by mall guards. He wasn’t sure what to make of it all until one lunch hour last fall when he ordered noodles at the mall’s food court. What happened next made news around the world and fuelled public outrage. Moostoos had sat down with WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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his lunch at a table in the food court when two security guards approached him. They wanted to see ID. “Sorry, what?” he asked. “Can we see your ID?” “No, you may not. I am eating lunch.” “You look like someone who is banned.” He refused to show his ID because he was eating noodles. He was an aboriginal man eating noodles in the food court. He asked them if he could see their manager. A woman in a white shirt arrived with another man; now four people stood over him. Back-up arrived. Six, eight, 10 security personnel circled his table. Moostoos refused to show his ID; he was just eating noodles. When the guards put on black leather gloves, he knew what was coming. As many of his clients watched, he rode the escalator to the main floor accompanied by a half-dozen non-aboriginal security officers who marched him outside. They banned him for six months. Previously, he had gone to the mall just about every day and spent upwards of $600 a month there. But now he was banned—for eating noodles. And as he walked towards his apartment, which overlooks the river valley and Jasper Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, shock and humiliation set in. “Oh my God, this is how my people feel,” he thought. “This is an awful feeling. I can understand why they walk around with their heads down.” Moostoos has always been proud of hailing from the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, but as he made his way home he felt something break inside. He couldn’t stop crying. When he texted his sister the picture of his ban notice, he didn’t expect she’d post it to Facebook. The next day, a friend called him to say that someone at CBC wanted to talk to him. He asked his boss at Boyle Street if it was appropriate for him to do the interview at work. “Yes, you bring it here, because this is about our community,” the executive director said. Reporters were lined up at his office door when Moostoos arrived at work. On Facebook he had received messages of encouragement from as far away as Chile and England. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get through the interview. In his office, he smudged. Pulling the sweet smoke to his heart, over his head, and around his body, he prayed, “Creator, I don’t know if you picked the right person to do this. I don’t think I’m strong enough.” He looked out the glass window of his office and saw his people sitting in the Boyle Street’s drop-in centre. When he opened the door, the first reporter said: “They picked on the wrong guy this time.” “No,” he told the reporter. “I think they picked on the right guy. Come in.” 30
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ecurity guards may be a less powerful kind of simakanis, but along with bylaw officers and police officers, they are part of the front end of a system that spans courtrooms and remand centres, jails and halfway houses, lawyers’ offices and parole-board tables. And this does not take into account the relatively recent history of the Indian agent overseeing all aspects of reserve life. If you are born with the name Moostoos—or Cardinal or Whiskeyjack or Callihoo—no matter your education or career, your chances of meeting a simakanis are exponentially greater, for exponentially more serious things. In Alberta, a kid with the name Moostoos is nine times more likely to go to jail than the same kid named Jones who claims no indigenous ancestry. If Moostoos moved to Saskatchewan, he would be 30 times more likely to go to jail. While youthful demographics, lower employment and education rates all impact the higher proportion of aboriginal people in jail, they aren’t the only reasons for the inequality. Take an Albertan child named Moostoos and raise him alongside his adopted, non-aboriginal brother named Jones. Give both the same education and the same jobs. Then watch. Moostoos would still be five times more likely than his brother to spend time in jail. The Moostoos boy would more likely to get a traffic ticket. He would be more likely to get arrested. When arrested, he would be more likely to get convicted, and when convicted, he would receive a longer sentence than his adopted brother Jones would for the same crime. Moostoos would be less likely to get parole. When he finally got parole, he would face harsher probation terms than his brother. On finally gaining his freedom, Moostoos would be less likely to be offered a job and more likely to again see the inside of a police car, courtroom and jail cell. As victims, aboriginal Canadians are more likely to be sexually assaulted, murdered or robbed. In the face of all this, the real Jones, Dan Jones, forges on. Perhaps because he believes in relationships. The system is made up of people and he believes people can change. He believes it because he has seen it.
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eresa Strong lured the 300-pound man into the apartment and locked the door behind them. She and the other members in her gang robbed people regularly, but this time, just over a decade up, it was about go terribly wrong. The john had picked her up on a corner around 95th
TERESA STRONG HAS LEFT BEHIND A LIFE IN THE SEX TRADE
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Street. Strong was blond and skinny and, despite being noticeably pregnant at the time, she rarely stood on the corner for long. As usual, she’d told the john she had a place. After she locked the door of the rundown apartment, her boyfriend stepped out from the bedroom. “What are you doing with my wife?” he asked. Her man was a big guy, too, and climbing the ladder in Edmonton’s only aboriginal-based street gang. Other friends stepped out from rooms at the back of the apartment. They pushed the john around, took his wallet and saw he had no cash. “What were you going to pay her with?” Strong’s boyfriend asked. They tied the john to a chair and took his bank cards to an ATM. They trekked back to the apartment empty handed. He’d given them the wrong pin. The beating was brutal. With the proper pin number, the group drained the man’s accounts: $3,000 would cover a hotel room and crack. They would eventually be caught and charged. 32
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It wasn’t the most she had ever stolen from the “creeps” who picked her up. Once she made off with $30,000, but she’d take anything. Robbery was better than sex, though this particular robbery nearly killed a man. It was the beginning of the end of a love affair that nearly killed her. She took her first hoot of crack at the age of 15. It was like a multiple orgasm on repeat. Every heightened pulse was a waving call of sirens. For a time, she held it together working the high-track sex trade in Calgary. She was a teen and could make lots of cash— often $2,000 a shift. Her pimp bought her fur coats and a car. Sex work required protection, so Strong turned to the gang after she moved to Edmonton as a 19-yearold. While she wasn’t aboriginal herself, members of aboriginal-based gangs can be inclusive, and Strong felt comfortable among them and had relationships with several of them (leading to children). And sometimes, when she was in the mood for ref lecting,
TERESA STRONG CREDITS DAN JONES FOR HELPING TO CHANGE HER LIFE FOR THE BETTER; SHE OFTEN SHARES HER STORY WITH OFFICERS AT A TRAINING SESSION HELD AT THE BENT ARROW TRADITIONAL HEALING CENTRE. FAR RIGHT: THE NEIGHBOURHOOD HAS CHANGED SINCE STRONG WORKED THESE STREETS, WITH STREET AND FACADE IMPROVEMENT, AND NEW BUSINESSES
she’d fondly remember her early teenage years in Fort Chipewyan. When she ran away from her dad’s home in Fort McMurray, often she’d head to Fort Chip, where a Cree family had adopted her (in the traditional way). She babysat their kids, ate their food and found some solace from her family’s drinking and the step-moms she despised. Dan Jones worked a similar beat to Strong’s at the time. “When you gonna smarten up, Teresa?” he’d ask. “Fuck off,” she’d reply. “What business is it of yours?” “Call me when you’re ready,” he always said, as he sauntered away. A decade later, on the same avenue, I walked towards Strong’s home. It was filled with pictures of her kids, a comfortable sectional and aboriginal art. In the years since Strong worked those corners, the avenue has had millions of dollars of neighbourhood improvements. It has been widened, given new sidewalks and better lighting. A nail salon leases the building where the sex shop used to be. African Beauty Supplies does brisk business a couple
bays away from a community-run arts café. The violin and mechanics shops have had facelifts, and at night, an inviting Nigerian restaurant lights up the street. “Aren’t you triggered here?” I asked her, wondering how she could live so close to places where she once worked and used. Despite the changes to avenue, old friends still work the corners. “I feel safe here,” she said as she made coffee. We moved to the living room. Her body relaxed deep into the folds of a leather rocking chair. She rubbed her eyes, tired from a late night playing charades with sober friends. Strong has been clean for 10 years, in part because Dan Jones believed in her. “I was so mean to him, but I liked him,” Strong said. “On the street like that, you don’t have feelings for anybody. You can’t, because then you are weak.” A fter the robbery gone wrong led to a five-year sentence in a federal jail, things began to change. Her father threatened to cut her from his will. A social worker WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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told her she’d never have custody of her kids. Her boyfriend was beaten so badly in jail that he was left permanently disabled. The robbery also brought back buried memories: as a teenager, a boyfriend had tied her up, beaten her and told her she was going to die. It was a parallel scene to the robbery, only she was the one frozen by cutting ropes and delirious fear. After 18 years of abusing drugs, herself and others, she decided she’d had enough. “I’m done with this life,” she told Jones over the phone. He connected her to a wide variety of agencies who supported her. She regained custody of two of her four kids. She had another child she never lost to the system. Today, Strong goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings every week. And she begins every day by smudging. Last summer, Dan Jones asked her if she would speak at a patrol officer training session he had asked Roy and Judy Louis of the Samson Cree Nation to develop. The first sessions would train the 819 patrol officers in the EPS. Jones wanted Strong to share her experience in the aboriginal-based gangs and to talk about how she had changed her life so radically. Strong agreed, reluctantly. She had never respected cops, except Jones. But she understood how important it was for the people still “out there,” those who traversed the melting streets yet to hit rock bottom. She shared her story with the officers, many of whom had arrested her. During one of 21 sessions, she stopped in the middle of a sentence and pointed to a man in the crowd of 30 or so officers. “I know you,” she said to the man. Jones watched and braced himself for confrontation. “You were the only one who arrested me who was nice to me,” Strong told the officer. She remembered his face, the gentle way he’d put on the handcuffs, the hot chocolate he gave her. “Officers all start the job wanting to help,” Jones said to me later. “They believe everyone is good.” He wrote this at the top of an inverted pyramid he drew for me to illustrate the challenge police officers face in responding with compassion. “The Reverse Asshole Theory of Policing” is from Kevin Gilmartin’s book Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. As officers meet people—both victims and perpetrators—over and over and over in their absolute worst moments, their hope in people falters. Jones’s finger continued down the funnel, following a tragic, emotional trajectory. At some point, many cops begin to feel that only cops are good. Then they believe only their division is good. Then only their squad. Then
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ROY AND JUDY LOUIS DEVELOPED A TRAINING SESSION TO HELP MEMBERS OF THE EDMONTON POLICE SERVICE IMPROVE THEIR RELATIONS WITH ABORIGINAL PEOPLE
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THE LOUISES REMEMBER DAYS OF VIOLENCE IN MASKWACIS. ROY HAD ONCE WANTED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE RCMP—BACK WHEN ABORIGINALS WEREN’T ALLOWED TO JOIN THE ORGANIZATION
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just their partners. His finger came to rest at the bottom of the funnel: Me. An officer, utterly isolated. “Just look at the number of suicides by first responders,” Jones said, referring to the impact of protective isolation. In January of 2015, five first responders killed themselves in Canada. On average, for every one cop that dies on the job, three kill themselves—a gap that Jones believes is widening. “We can have a lack of empathy that comes across, to protect us,” he said, “but that same lack of empathy takes away who we are. In the end, it kills us.”
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o reach Roy and Judy Louis’s home on the Samson Cree Nation, I trusted my GPS to get there. It failed me and I couldn’t help but take note of the symbolism of it all. “Find Maskwacis,” I said to the system, dutifully using my hands-free navigation system as I drove. While the technology made the effort to listen, its translation of even the most basic instructions made it clear it did not understand. “Where would you like me to find it?” “Open Navigation,” I began again. “Where would you like to go?” “To Maskwacis.” “Where would you like me to find it?” I punched my index finger at the screen. I pulled over and talked to Siri on my phone instead. “Find Maskwacis.” “Destination found,” Siri confidently said. Three days drive to Massachusetts. I tried again, and she found me another destination, this time a much shorter journey: a one-day drive to Iowa. I resorted to expletives, and called home. My husband calmly gave me directions. America filled the car and my body relaxed. There was nothing to do but drive and sing with Simon and Garfunkel. “Let us be lovers we’ll marry our fortunes together / I’ve got some real estate here in my bag / So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies / And we walked off to look for America.” I played the song again. I wondered if it was some kind of ironic treaty statement? I thought of Maskwacis, the town formerly known as Hobbema and shared by four Plains Cree nations: Samson, Ermineskin, Louis Bull and Montana. I drove past Highway 611; head north along it and you’d reach the townsite of Louis Bull Nation. When the gang wars terrorized these
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MASKWACIS, FORMERLY KNOWN AS HOBBEMA, IS HOME TO THE SAMSON, ERMINESKIN, LOUIS BULL AND MONTANA PLAINS CREE NATIONS
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communities, shots were exchanged by rival gangs across that road. It happens less often now that the number of gangs has dropped from a high of 13 in 2008 to three in 2015. Roy and Judy Louis remembered those days as a time of fear. In 2008, there were 365 shootings in six months. The community’s 16,000 people were terrified, and most had nothing to do with the violence. Like five-year-old Ethan Yellowbird, who was hit by a stray bullet as he slept in his bed. Or an 18-month girl who was shot while eating lunch at her grandfather’s table. She survived. Ethan Yellowbird did not. I passed Samson’s more recent housing developments, a series of cul-de-sacs. The lower third of many homes are canvasses for colourful murals. The murals—traditional designs created with paint that had been donated by former gang members—drastically reduced incidents of graffiti. The town’s street turned into a country road with yarrow and prairie grasses growing up to the asphalt. Eventually, I bumped along the Louis’s long driveway, and passed Roy’s daughter’s home at the bend. Then the Louis’s sprawling bungalow came into sight. Set on high ground, it has sweeping views of the Battle River. A sacred area, demarcated by flags, was laid out 15 metres from my parked car. The Song of the Red Horse came from here. Roy’s grandfather, the famous war chief Maskepetoon, once camped here. Roy Louis waved from the doorway of the home he built in 1980. He had once wanted to be a police officer. He led me through a lower sitting room full of the Louis’s collections and keepsakes that included a Hudson’s Bay spirit blanket, the headdress of his father, a painting by Eddy Cobiness, a buffalo jaw, one of Father Lacombe’s original bibles, and sacred ceremonial objects. As we climbed three stairs to the dining room, Judy Louis greeted me with a hug (we had never met) and said, “Do you like coffee? We have Starbucks on the rez!” As we walked through their upper living room I pointed to a pair of rattles. “What were these used for?” “Oh yeah, they’re from a trip to Cuba,” Roy laughed. Paintings by George Littlechild and Norval Morriseau overlooked Roy’s mother’s medicine bag. He comes from a long line of leaders. His paternal grandfather was Louis Natuasis, headman to Chief Joe Samson for 27 years. His maternal grandfather, James Seenum, signed Treaty 6 as he was Chief Pakan. His father, Jacob Louis, was chief of Samson for a quarter century and a farmer who used horses to break his land. We sat at their antique dining table, warmed by the 40
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sun that flooded the main floor of the house. The two married 12 years ago. Judy was a teacher from a nearby town and white family, however she’d known Roy’s family most of her life. His older brother had traditionally adopted her, after her mother had sought out cultural mentors for Judy’s three adopted Dene siblings. Her first memory of him is at a parade in Hobbema three decades before. “There came this guy down the street with a white buckskin outfit on a horse. He had jetblack hair and it was Roy.”
“We can have a lack of empathy that comes across, to protect us, but that same lack of empathy takes away who we are. In the end, it kills us.” Roy Louis had grown up on Samson Cree Nation, the second youngest of 12 children and one of only two children to not attend residential school. As a teenager he went through a traditional coming-of-age rite (which is now seeing a resurgence in the community). “I spent four days with my Uncle John and slept alone in a sweat lodge for two nights,” Roy told me, laughing. “Now that was scary.” “After high school, I told my dad that I wanted to join the RCMP,” Roy said. “He laughed at me, then said, ‘That isn’t for us.’” This was a fact, not a preference. Aboriginals were disallowed from applying to the RCMP until 1971. “You could be a scout,” Roy said, “but it wasn’t a real thing.” Instead, he went into education, and then co-founded Peace Hills Trust, sat on Samson’s band council, and was head of the Samson Group. He wrangled cattle, collected art, and travelled abroad in service to the Queen. Forty years after he thought about a career in policing, he became an aboriginal adviser to the deputy commissioner of the RCMP’s K division in Alberta, and later advised the national commissioner of police, as well as the commissioner of corrections in Ottawa. When it comes to simakanis, Roy Louis has been a helper and mentor to many. I asked him about the events of 2008 when there were 365 shootings in six months in Maskwacis, when people needed the police more than ever.
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Street gangs sell belonging to kids, then they ply them with drugs and control them with violence.
“It developed into a full-blown war, basically,” he said. “Kids weren’t playing outside because they were afraid of gunshots.” “People weren’t smoking on their deck because they were afraid of gun fire,” Judy added. “There were three hundred gang members in the four nations,” Roy said. “But there was another incident, almost as significant as gang members,” Judy completed his thought. “During a sundance ceremony one of the RCMP drove right through the sacred grounds. The community chastised the RCMP and, I can tell you, we didn’t need any more animosity towards the police.” The RCMP asked the Louises if they’d facilitate a two-hour cultural awareness training for officers at the Maskwacis detachment. The two hours grew to become a two-day workshop, the first held in a classroom and the second day in a more traditional manner, starting with a pipe ceremony, then a sweat, and finishing with a feast. The impact of the training showed in many ways, one of them being the very nature of calls the detachment received. Slowly, the RCMP saw a change from always being asked the question What are you doing? to asking themselves the question What can we do? Roy looked out the dining room window at ground covered with medicines and low brush, noting for me that this land has hosted many sweats specifically for simakanisak. Top-ranking provincial RCMP officers have sat with the Louises under the willow branches and canvas of a sweat lodge. “The warm water and the heat allows the officers to dump everything, to get rid of some of that stuff they’re carrying around,” said Judy Louis. “And sometimes even to talk about it.” 42
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an Jones always wanted to be a police of f icer. E ve n a s h i s f r i e n d s got involved in using and then running drugs, he stayed out of it. He had a daughter when he was 19, which meant he had to get a job, which led him eventually to work at the prisons, where he ended up guarding three of his friends. “I don’t believe in bad guys,” he said during a talk as part of Citizens’ Police Academy, a program that educates the public about policing methods. “I believe in weak choices.” Holding an Anchorman mug, he spoke to the group about street gangs. “What’s the difference between a street gang and organized crime syndicate?” he said. “Organized crime is about business. Street gangs are about respect.” For the next hour and a half, participants focused on the Inspector. Jones talked about life as a youth worker, about walking the beat and then going undercover into a neo-Nazi group. He used the word “wiretap” numerous times and as casually as I might mention the weather. “We isolate our aboriginal population for a whole set of reasons, right?” he told me later at his office. “The racism that goes on this country is absolutely…” His email pinged, the message updating him on news that a teenager had left her family in Alberta to join ISIS in Syria. Radicalization is part of his file now. With startling ease he linked Islamic extremism to aboriginal-based street gangs: the gangs manipulate the warrior culture, in much the same way ISIS warps and co-opts Islam. Street gangs sell belonging to kids, then they ply them with drugs and control them with violence, all but twisting it until it is no longer recognizable as one of the core Cree values Roy Louis was raised to respect: wahkotowin. It means kinship, blood memory. And it is what most ties nations together. Jones pulled out a warrior drawing a gang member had given him. It was a stylized image of an aboriginal man. On his left half, the man wore traditional leather and beadwork, an eagle feather headdress and held a bow. The right half of the man was dressed in modern street garb. His bulging muscles were exposed. As were gang badges tattooed on the arm that held a pistol.
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n 2012, senior EPS officers came to the rather belated realization that they had no aboriginal strategy or aboriginal relations unit. The EPS hierarchy, many with former RCMP ties to the Maskwacis area, connected Dan Jones with Roy
and Judy Louis. Later that year, various EPS members shared bannock at the Louis’s dining table and developed a day-long curriculum based on much of what the Louises had done for the RCMP. “We hit on four themes: colonization, residential schools, treaties and the Indian Act because they all impact First Nations people across the country,” said Roy. “And the most important thing we identified,” said Judy, “was that we need to help officers identify and understand how stereotypes and biases impact aboriginal communities and their relationships with the police.” The training was called “Learning Together: Wahkotowin”. Each of the training days, held at Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Centre, was opened by one of the three most senior EPS members. The chief and his deputies created the tone for the sharing circle that followed. “Then, we’d start every day with a talking circle and a smudge,” said Roy. Holding the eagle feather, each member shared his or her hope for the day. Then, Louis released the officers to view pictures posted on the wall. “Write the first thing that comes to your brain when you look at the pictures,” he instructed. “No political correctness allowed.” “I tell you, it could be brutal,” Judy said. “The different myths and misconceptions came up,” said Roy, “Like: You’re a drain on society. You’re a menace because you are filling the jails and overcrowding the child welfare system. They were expressing their beliefs and that was OK. We needed to deal with that right off the bat.” In one photo, a dark haired man with a sparse moustache hugged his four smiling kids. The officers wrote: A man on a supervised visit with his kids. “ W ho’s taking the picture?” L ouis asked. His case officer. In fact, this was a prominent aboriginal activist out with his family. His wife had taken the picture. In another, a light-skinned family of four knelt in traditional aboriginal dress. The father wore a knee-length headdress, while the mother and kids smiled in elaborately beaded shawls. People dressing up for Halloween. It was in reality a Mi’kmaq family preparing for ceremony. A third picture showed a set of handcuffs. Justice, wrote the officers. These were, in fact, the tiny handcuffs used to punish kids in residential schools. What followed was a frenzied march through an often wretched history, from pre- and post-contact, to the impact of colonialism and residential schools. Louis presented dizzying facts that were new to most of the participants. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. South Africa’s apartheid system was heavily
influenced by Canada’s Indian policies. The workshop participants were reminded that Duncan Campbell Scott, who held the fate of many aboriginal communities in his hands as federal deputy minister of Indian Affairs from 1913 until 1932, had said: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” Jones jumped in every time he thought the officers at the training sessions were becoming defensive. Louis covered the facts and Jones, as a high-ranking officer, offered the commentary. After lunch, Teresa Strong shared her experiences from the inside of an aboriginal-based street gang, and talked about how her life changed since then. In one session, as Strong described the robbery that would lead to her final sentence, an officer audibly gasped. She remembered the crime scene, because she had been a first responder—one of the first to see Strong’s victim beaten, bloodied and terrified. “It’s just hard to believe,” the officer said. Her response was visceral and raw. “It’s hard to believe that you’ve changed.” Strong shrugged. “I don’t have to prove it to you.” Jones interjected. “We are not here to judge.” The officers, inspired by Strong’s story, then gave some reflections of their own. On every call, they do their job and leave. They rarely discovered what happened to the people involved in offences, or gained insight about them. Now they had heard a survival story. The officers gave Strong her first standing ovation. Because they started with a circle, the training closed with a sharing circle. In almost every session, as the eagle feather travelled clockwise, a police officer disclosed aboriginal heritage that he or she hadn’t mentioned when the day began. Close to five percent of EPS officers have aboriginal heritage. “It’s probably significantly higher because there are many on this job who have never disclosed that they are aboriginal on their file,” said Jones. “As a nation, we have really marginalized a group of people and made it not OK for them to be proud to be who they are.” As the simakanisak rolled out from Bent Arrow on to the streets in their patrol cars and bikes, they began to use the Louis’s advice on building rapport with aboriginal people. One officer started showing up at Bent Arrow on his days off to play floor hockey with kids. Another listened to a Cree language app. He learned enough of the language that when he was called to a violent WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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domestic dispute, he de-escalated the situation almost entirely in Cree. Not long ago, another simakanis responded to a call at a Light Rail Transit station. A heavily intoxicated and belligerent man was threatening riders while slumped against a brick wall near the tracks. The officer approached and removed her black leather glove. She offered him her hand. “Tanisi,” she said. It is a simple greeting. “I think I need to sober up so I can teach you more Cree,” the man said. “I’d like that,” said the officer. “But how about you sober up outside the station.” The man complied. After almost every session, Roy and Judy Louis received emails from officers seeking resources and advice. Many officers now carry a small supply of cigarettes in their ticket boxes (though not all Nations use tobacco as protocol). In 2015, Learning Together: Wahkotowin will be repeated for all new recruits and the remainder of the EPS officers who haven’t yet participated (high-ranking members and specialized units). A more in-depth optional four-day training program is being developed. “It’s a small drop in the bucket,” said Jones. “But we have a lot of great cops who are very relationshiporiented. Those are the ones we need to champion change for.” They are the ones who Moonbeams might, one day, come to trust.
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appreciate the apology,” Gary Moostoos said to the City Centre Mall spokesperson. It was nine days after his expulsion and a rally was being held honouring Moostoos and shaming the mall. “I cannot accept the apology today, however. I would like to see what you do within the next six months. Then, I will be in a place where I can hear those two words [we’re sorry]. Those two words are powerful. You cannot just say them and expect someone to say it is all right. It is not all right.” As they knelt together for an honour song, the female spokesperson began to shake as the drummers played. Moostoos held her hand. Moostoos isn’t one to hold a grudge. He’s reached out to law officers in other ways. Last fall, he invited the EPS to come out of town with him to pick herbal medicines. One beat officer joined them, then began to stop by the community centre more often. He participated in a pipe ceremony. He came for brush downs (smudging ceremony). After making his own drum, he asked Moostoos if he would teach him a song. The officer brought his drum 44
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and the spiritual elder and Moostoos taught him a water song: a song about how the spirit comes to life. In time, the simakanis asked Moostoos if he could make and serve a meal for the Boyle Street community. He came with his partner… and nearly 50 other officers. Because some of the officers were on duty, he asked: “Can we come in uniform?” He hastened to add: “We aren’t there to arrest anyone, just to build trust.” Moostoos wasn’t sure how his people would respond. Some joked about it. “Are they going to serve us lunch or warrants?” “They are here today to honour us,” said Moostoos before the meal. “It is the start of a good relationship with those meant to protect us.” Four hundred people were served chilli, buns and fruit that day. Only one person refused to accept food from the cops, and another ate but refused to talk. After the food had been served, the officers moved through the room clearing plates. One cop approached a woman whose plate was scraped clean. “Can I take that?” “You can fuck off,” she offered. The simakanis gently removed the plate from the table and placed it in the garbage bag he held. “I can do that too.” EB
FICTION
THE LAST PLEASU BY ROMESH GUNESEKERA ILLUSTRATION ROBERT CARTER
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VERY OTHER SATURDAY NIGHT, RIGHT THROUGH THE FIRST SEMESTER, THERE
was a dance at our island school. Judy, the star from the drama club, would wear a flirtatious dress and the Pacheco twins from 10th grade would come out in identical outfits. The twins played games with the sophomore boys—switching partners—and the boys could never be sure which one was which when they huddled in the shadows. Fr. Carson, the headmaster, trained spotlights on every corner of the hall but inevitably a fuse would blow and plunge the place into darkness. Ricky was usually the culprit who shorted the circuit but he would be the first to protest. “No, Father, I was sorting sodas with Miss Gomez.” Always an impeccable alibi. Gloria Gomez was the belle of the faculty who taught math radiantly.
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I was on disco duty only once that semester. In September, more than forty years ago, when the man in the news, shot yesterday in a gun battle in Mindanao, was just a boy. Tony the newcomer. The freshman cohort were all eager, the juniors quickly settled and the seniors busy planning their escape into the great threshing-ground that makes us all safely al dente; only the sophomores, in purgatory, were causing problems. I was introducing punctuation to them as my predecessor was passionate about cummings and nothing else, as far as I could tell. Commas and stops were like confetti on their essays. For my last class that week, my strategy was plain and simple: controlled breath and reading aloud. A dose of terza rima and some smuggled blank verse. Michael was the only one who refused to co-operate. He started coughing when it was his turn to read the page of Eliot I had prepared. “Water,” he spluttered waving his long arms about. “Water.” I waited a minute while he continued beating his chest and thumping the desk. “OK , Michael, go before you choke to death.” He was a big lad and when he stood up his chair fell back. The girls giggled as he staggered theatrically towards the door. Tony was the one who leant over and lifted the chair and shook its heavy writing flap back into place. He did it with one hand, giving Michael a look of some disdain. “Thank you, Tony,” I said. Tony was short but powerfully built with strong muscly arms and a solid square head; his first response to anything was usually a barely controlled quiver. His hair was cropped as close as a helmet and the ripples along his shoulders always seemed to settle his head into a position of 48
defence. Once fully braced he would smile and his big teeth would shine like the shield of Ajax. He didn’t talk much. “Lift it, Tony,” Judy taunted him from behind. “Up in the air, if you can.” “That’s enough,” I said to Judy. “You read now, Judy. Pause at the comma, stop at the period.” “Did you say period, Mr Gibbs?” The girls tittered again like the fluttering babblers and bulbuls I’d watch on my days off down by the prettiest beach on this southern Philippine island.
WHEN I HAD FINISHED FOR THE DAY, I WENT down to the campus canteen. Michael was sitting on the bench at the end of the terrace with a mug of hot chocolate in his hands. “How’s the cough?” “Sorry, Mr Gibbs. It’s like asthma. Semicolons, colons, that stuff brings it on.” He had a big wolfish face. Any attempt at a smile made him look crafty. “You didn’t come back to class. You know what happens?” He turned the mug around in his hand and made a hazy question mark out of the steam. “A prize?” “Saturday night in study hall.” “Best place. Hate those fuckin’ discos.” Michael was a loner. A loser with girls. Shunned by the boys too. But he was intelligent, the cunning kind who liked to hide his light. Always challenging you to a chase across the dark woods of youth. I could see the frayed orange beak of a Penguin peeking out his jacket pocket. “ W hat are you reading?” I asked. “A book.” I was unsettled by the ease with which a boy like Michael, on the cusp of sixteen, was able to crush my shell of adulthood, of slow growth, of compromise, of clean nails and fake ties, but I tried not to show it.
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“That’s good,” I said. “A novel?” He wrapped his large long hands around the mug. “Crime and Punishment. Should be required reading for us all incarcerated here in Alcatraz.” “ St udy hall tomor row night , Michael. You can read all the Dostoevsky you want in there.” I wanted him to suffer some indignity. After all, was that not part of growing up?
THE NEX T MORNING, ON MY WAY TO breakfast stopped at the school office to hand in my weekly report and demerit slips to Vera, the early bird. She raised her thin, fine eyebrows. “That big boy Michael, again?” I shrugged. “Trouble is, I think he likes study hall. He reads.” “Peacenik, na? Give him extra gym instead.” “Gym?” “Michael don’ like gym and Mr. Batista would work him hard in the sports hall.” Vera was a slim Filipina with barely a curve to her chest, but a lovely round voice that seemed to skim over the counter whatever she said. She put the slips of paper in the wooden box nailed to the wall. “Ay nako, Mr Gibbs, you too easy on that boy.” She gave me a bundle of letters. “For Fr. Carson to hand out at breakfast, please.” I took the letters and went on to the dining hall. The path was dimpled with puddles. Down at the tennis courts, a groundsman scrubbed the concrete with a witch’s broom. A small yellow-tail flew ahead of me. Breakfast was served from seven to eight-thirty. Tony was at a table by the door, methodically chopping a stack of pancakes into tiny cubes. He had half an inch of syrup on his plate. “Good appetite, Tony?” He looked up startled. Then he grinned. “Work out, Mr Gibbs. One hour karate, one hour track.” “Already?”
“Dawn patrol, sir. Best time to zap the enemy.” “Enemy, Tony? What enemy? Not Michael again?” He put down the butter knife. “To be a Sakura, you have to root out the enemy of harmony and goodwill. At dawn, sir, the bad things are easy to see.” His small black eyes shrank and his face took on an expression of determination. “Then, wham-whamwham, you destroy them.” Tony was remarkable for the control he exercised over himself. The flesh around his young bones seemed compacted, the dense tissue of hard-worked muscle clung close. It gave him unexpected poise when he stood up, or moved, despite his stocky youthfulness. “You do that, Tony. Righteousness is a narrow path,” I said and sat down opposite him. “How are you getting on with your roommate? Any more rows?” “Just foolin’ around, sir. You wan’ some bacon, sir? It’s real crispy.” Tony pushed the metal tray towards me. The rashers were paper-thin. Everything in this new country I had come to was paper-thin. The sky like blue tissue, the sea like a watercolour painting, the pine trees made up of veneers and everyone in the school seemed to skip out of the pages of a superhero comic. I found it rejuvenating. “You think I should split you guys up?” Tony started to eat the cubes of pancake with a spoon. He pulled out a paper serviette from the chrome spring-box and wiped the syrupy grease off his lips. Then he crumpled it into a small ball and lobbed it into the bin by the hot water urn. “Up to you, boss?” “You shouldn’t throw stuff in the hall, Tony.” “Sorry, Mr Gibbs. Can I get you some juice? Coffee?” “That’s OK, Tony. I’ve had a cup of
tea already.” He looked at me as though he was waiting for me to say something else. “Mr Gibbs, can I ask you something?” “Sure. What is it?” “Would you ever kill someone, Mr Gibbs? Is that something you could do?” “I don’t know, Tony. I don’t think it’s right to kill.” “Even your enemy?” “I don’t have an enemy.” “What if some Commie is coming to get you? Would you do it then?” Tony’s father was a GI in Vietnam. I was not sure what to say. “I am not a fighter, Tony.” “Are you a Commie?” “What’s the problem, Tony? Has something happened?” “Nothing’s happened. I was just thinking.” He took one more pancake and mopped up the last traces of the syrup on his plate. “Michael says he’s a Commie.” I wanted to probe, but Fr. Carson came in through the back door. “Good morning.” He surveyed the hall. “Mr Gibbs, you have the mail for me?” Fr. Carson was a compressed man with no superfluities. No hair, no neck. His bald head had been plunged into its socket; his eyes were an electrified blue. His fingernails looked like they had been pressed into the flesh and he seemed to swell to bursting point with every breath he took. I nodded at the bundle at the end of the table. “All for you.” “You are a funny guy, Mr Gibbs. Very funny.” Fr. Carson picked up the bundle and pulled off the two rubber bands that held them together. He did a quick sort between the junior grades and the senior school pupils. Despite his scary mask, Fr. Carson was scrupulous in his duties. He knew every child in the school by name, date of birth and achievement. He would note their
birthdays during the morning mail distribution and comment on the cards their families sent. “Another baby card for you, Jimmy?” Or, “Sharon Bates, fourteen on Thursday and still can’t match her socks.” This morning there were only half a dozen letters for the young ones. When he had finished with them, Fr. Carson held up a long thin envelope and squinted. “Michael Fenton, from his mother.” There was no answer. “Is Michael not here?” Fr. Carson looked around the hall. “He’s not eating,” Tony said. “I’ll give him his letter.” “You have your own here, Tony. From your own mother, I believe. You don’t need Michael Fenton’s as well, do you?” “He’s my roommate, Fr. Carson. I can put the letter on his bed.” “That is not a good place to put it, Tony. Since he is not here and obviously, from what you say, not in his room. I suppose he is out hiding in the woods? Smoking, is he?” “I don’t know, sir.” “You don’t know?” Fr. Carson surveyed the hall, sharing his incredulity with a scattered bunch of gulping kids. “I think you do, Tony. And I think I am right. I shall go and find him. Is it by the bonfire pit that he goes to smoke?”
I HAD NOT INTENDED TO BE A TEACHER; I was in Manila to pick up some work as a journalist, or something. I had an English degree from an English university and I was in an English-speaking country. I thought I had a chance, but this was late in the 1960s. Journalists were falling out of trees. Finally one of the editors I had managed to reach, through a friend of a friend, said that a private school on a small island south of Luzon needed an English teacher. A lovely situation, he said. A modest place with not much more than one big store and a
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pineapple plantation. The school had been set up after the war with the help of the church to attract both well-todo locals and American expats and provide a decent, moral education away from the debauchery of Manila’s urban sprawl. The beach is beautiful, he added. White sands and coral gardens. It would be my best bet, he said. I would have a real advantage, coming from England. Perhaps it was a joke, but I took it seriously. The interview with Fr. Carson was less daunting than I had expected. On the telephone he had said he would be in town for two days and gave the impression he was interviewing half a dozen candidates. As it turned out there was no one else in the running and our chat was more about him than me. “You see, Mr Gibbs, this is a country of surprises. You come looking for the spirituality of Asia and discover El Dorado. A consumerist paradise. What can you teach, Mr Gibbs? What can you teach a child in such a place?” I thought for a moment. He watched me with his small plump hands together at his chin, fingertips touching. He kept the fingers spread stubbily apart to distinguish the act from prayer. “How to be good,” I said in the end. “To tell right from wrong.” “Do we not know that? Surely that, at least, is given to us at birth?” He glanced upwards. His fingers pressed harder and slipped and locked. “To avoid mistakes then, Fr. Carson? And understand responsibility.” “It is not an easy thing, Mr Gibbs, to live in this world of dust and chaff responsibly.” He glanced down at the mandala patterns in the patch of parquet floor between us as though Dante himself might be struggling to get his bearings there. I followed his gaze and noticed he was wearing brown Jesus sandals. They looked too big for his feet and incongruous. 50
“I am not a discontent,” I said. My tie was neat, ready-knotted on a clear plastic clip. He looked up. “Do you know why I am here, Mr Gibbs?” “To teach?” “On the contrary. I am here to learn. I wanted to be a preacher. But I was advised by my pastor, back in Wisconsin, that I should travel first. See the world we have been given, only then can you truly open the eyes of those who sleep. He was a wise man. And now suddenly, thousands of miles away from home, I find myself the pastor of one hundred and eighty-seven souls.” Despite the religious underpinning of the school, pragmatism was Fr. Carson’s primary philosophy, and in the absence of an alternative, I was appointed. “Teach them poetry, Mr Gibbs. Show them love and compassion. But above all, how to act responsibly and do one’s duty. There is no greater pleasure, you know, as your famous Mr Hazlitt says.”
“YOU ON DUTY TONIGHT?” GLORIA GOMEZ had a voice that could cream po tatoes in their skins. The boys in her math class f lunked every test simply to be in her ext ra st udy hour and gaze at the formula of her intoxicating figure. She also ran the drama club which apparently had more boys than ever before. “Yes, I am. You doing the bar?” “Punch and pop. That’s me.” “Shall I slip in a little vodka?” I joked. She laughed. “ You know Dick Baldwin did that last year. Fr. Carson went berserk.” “Tricky Dick?” He was often talked about in the school. She laughed again, curving her whole lithe body effortlessly. I could happily watch her waft and ripple for hours and made a mental note to bone up on some wisecracks for the evening. “He’s coming back next semester.
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You could be buddies. Anyways, must go. I have marking to do. Don’t you?” “I am going into town to get the props for next week.” I was in charge of equipment for the West Side Story production she was directing. “Mercer’s will have the knives. We need different sizes but they need to be the kind where the blade slides in ...” “Really?” I cocked an eyebrow. “Toy daggers, Mr Gibbs. But we need ones that don’t make that creaky sound.” She smiled disarmingly and added, “I’ll see you at Ridge House tonight.” I watched her totter down to the library laughing gaily at Santos the gardener’s usual gag about the American tourist on the beach who had lost his kit to a Filipino shark. Down at the school gate I found Tony waiting for a ride into town. He was on his own. “No target practice this afternoon?” I asked. He shrugged. “Free time.” When the jeepney came, we clambered in the back. His jeans were neatly ironed, his gym shoes freshly whitened. “You got a date?” I asked. “No way. Just need space. You, Mr Gibbs?” I told him my mission. He perked up. “Can I come?” We got off by St Joseph’s and walked across to the strip of small grey municipal buildings. The store was on the corner. Tony went ahead of me like a little boy into Wonderland. From behind his shoulders looked distorted. His neck and his arms oddly long. Like all fifteen-year-olds he was half-grown and thirsting. I found a salesgirl and asked for plastic knives. “Everything is plastic,” she said sweetly. “You want baby cutlery?” “Daggers,” I explained. Before she understood, Tony had found them. He did an expert twirl with
to want a shield that would protect him from everyone. I didn’t realize that it might work the other way too. I met his mother at the beginning of the semester when she first brought him to school. She came in a hired convertible and wore La Dolce Vita sunglasses and an emerald green scarf around her head. “We are from Manila. But I got to go shooting all over the place this year, so Tony-baby is gonna be here.” She looked at him astonished, it seemed, at how he had grown in the twenty seconds she had been speaking to me. I remember how he had looked at her when she left him and sauntered back to the car. I had told her Tony would be safe and happy in his new school. I was the teacher in charge of Addison Hall. Whatever happened to the boys in Addison was my responsibility. At the time I did not know that Tony’s father had been killed in action.
CAN.ICONS ISLAM Muslims formed part of Canada’s earliest populations. Their presence was recorded in the first Canadian census in 1871, and the country’s first mosque opened its doors in Edmonton in 1938. Many of our earliest Islamic citizens came from Bosnia and Albania, while non-European Muslims began arriving in larger numbers in the 1960s, after immigration laws were reformed. Today there are over a million Canadian Muslims whose roots trace back to India, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and countless other nations. As with most Canadian ethnocultural groups, many of these families arrived here seeking religious and political freedom, or fleeing war, persecution, disaster, or poverty. Although Muslims largely live in Canada’s biggest cities, a popular CBC television show, Little Mosque on the Prairie, centres on an urban imam who moves to a rural town. The show blends contemporary issues with entertainment: in one episode, a female character wonders if a gay man should be allowed to see her without her head scarf, or hijab. Muhammad Ali may well be the world’s most famous Muslim, but Canada’s most celebrated member of the faith is undoubtedly K’naan. While the renowned hip-hop artist uses his music to highlight the severe problems of his Somali birthplace, he remains joyful and optimistic in keeping with his roots—as positive thinking, hope and optimism, even against great odds, are central tenets of Islam.
AT QUARTER TO EIGHT THAT SATURDAY
– Clive Holden
a couple, one in each hand, and stabbed the massive yellow teddy bear hanging from the ceiling like a punch bag. “This what you want, Mr Gibbs?” I asked the salesgirl for an assortment of sizes and bought a dozen. Tony was amazed. “Cool.” I told him there were two gangs in the musical. “With your technique, you should audition, Tony.” “I can’t act,” he said, trying to rub the scuff marks off his shoe. “You were acting now.” “For myself, not for an audience.” “All the best ones do the same, Tony. Really, you should. I’d like you to audition for Miss Gomez next
week. Just do your martial arts.” “You don’t understand, Mr Gibbs. That’s not entertainment. That’s for real.” “Bruce Lee acts, doesn’t he?” Tony stiffened and I saw, in that single moment, what he might one day turn out to be.
I KNOW MOST OF US HOLD SOMETHING BACK. Keeping secrets is how we grow into what we unexpectedly become. Holding back more and more, until suddenly it becomes too much to contain and we burst like a rain cloud. But Tony was different. He seemed to be holding almost everything back all the time. He seemed
evening I was at Ridge house ready to do my duty. The Pacheco twins were on the grass, both in purple tie-dye dresses but with varying starbursts on their budding front. “You could have gone for different colours, girls,” I said. “Not yet, Mr Gibbs.” They did a little dance routine, arm in arm, two steps forward, one back, and bumped their hips with a giggle. “We are the twinkling twins.” Ricky, who was carting a case of Fanta and root beer towards the back, whistled. I went up through the main entrance into the building. The front had three large rooms with interconnecting doors. For Saturday night discos all the doors were folded up and the furniture moved to one side as though the sea had rushed in to make a tumbled strandline of our week’s rickety routine. A glitter ball was put up and, depending on the class that was running the
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show, balloons or paper chains or fairy lights were used to decorate the place. The 100 watt ceiling lamps were exchanged for 40s, the starters for the f luorescent strips re moved and Fr. Carson’s spot lights jinxed. On this occasion the seniors had gone for psychedelic romance: coloured lights, floor cushions, plastic flowers and free-swinging mobiles of stars and moons cut out of dayglow card. I stepped out of the French windows and found Tony on the lawn with a sledgehammer. He swung it over his head and brought it down on a large rectangular block in a gunny sack. He did it again and again in quick succession, smashing the block to rubble. Only when he was done did he notice me watching him. “Mr Gibbs, you dancing here tonight?” “I might very well shake a leg, Tony. What about you?” He shifted his head warily. “I’m no dancer, Mr Gibbs. No way.” He opened the sack and stuck his hand in. He pulled out a large tapering length of ice, like a crude hefty sword, that had sur vived his onslaught. “Except with a blade.” He twirled it expertly and grinned. Then he threw it up in the air and did a karate kick that shattered it. “No flower power for me, sir.” He picked up the little pieces and chucked them into the cool box next to the trestle table from where the soft drinks would be served. He emptied the sack of broken ice into the container. “All done. Can I go back to my room now, sir?” “You know you are not allowed to stay alone in your room on socials.” “I wanna study.” “Go to study hall then,” I suggested. “I got no demerits. I just don’t wanna be here, dancing like a monkey.” “You don’t have your eye on a girl, Tony?” 52
“No, sir.” “I thought that was why you guys were in this school. For the girls.” “That’s you, Mr Gibbs. I am here to learn, sir. To learn how to kill the heathen. Fuckface Commies.” He made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and mouthed gunfire. “POW.” The hand jerked back in recoil. Then he grinned. “Just jokin’, Mr Gibbs. Don’t look so down. I am not really going to kill anyone. Our code is, ‘Show your strength but don’t use it, except in self-defence.’ No fear, we are just always prepared. I quit the rifle club. I read the Bible every night.”
WHEN I SAW GLORIA GOMEZ A LITTLE LATER I told her that she should keep an eye on Tony. I was troubled by the way he always seemed to slip just out of reach when you talked to him. “He wants to sneak back to his room, but he really needs to socialize.” “Like you?” A small smile twitched in her mouth. “He came with me into town to get the props. I think he might be persuaded to become one of your Jets. He’d be pretty good.” “Right, Mr Director.” “Sorry, I didn’t mean to tell you what to do.” “I have been watching Tony too. He is one of those kids who just won’t loosen up.” It was my turn to smile. “Like you?” Gloria straightened. Her head right then was remarkably perpendicular. She was poised to fly: hair coiled and fastened tight with a wooden pin and a clam-shell clasp. I wondered if she knew what I was thinking. “What are you trying to say here?” “Nothing. I just can’t wait for the music.” “You know you cannot cavort about with our girls, don’t you, Mr Gibbs.” “I had no such intention.” “I am glad of that.” She raised her
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face with a deliberate sniff. “But we can ... can we not?” Her mouth softened and I thought she might blow me a kiss, but then Judy popped her head around the doorway. “Miss G, can I talk to you? Alone, please.” Gloria looked at me. I held her gaze for a moment. She mouthed a soundless, heartless, Screw you. “I’ll go check out the sound system,” I said. Judy could be quite unsettling. My own schooling had been in a boy’s institution that did not acknowledge the existence of the female gender except in biology lessons and Latin. I had no sisters, nor cousins, and had never heard of co-ed before. Therefore pubescent girls with large grey searching eyes were disconcerting at the best of times. On a Saturday night, when they were high with anticipation, more than ever I wanted the refuge of Baudelaire’s fleurs du mal. To lose myself in a more mature world of practised lust. Celebrate with a woman who had dark burgundy lips, speckled eye shadow and the grease of more than one season on the stage. Ricky and David were huddled around the amplifier and turntable. “Can’t we just hook up the tape deck and play that fuckin’ cassette?” Ricky whined. David, a quiet technical wizard, who never quite reached the end of any verbal exercise—a spoken sentence, or written essay—grunted. “Nah, Brian wants to DJ his new sounds.” “Fuck Brian.” David plucked a red lead out. “Problemo.” “Brian can suck my dick.” “Sure he can.” Dave used a pair of pliers to cut the jack and strip the wire. “That cassette is great, man. It really got Judy going last time.” Ricky noticed me. “Hey, Ron. What do you think? Smoochy cassette or a stack of hairy, hippie LPs?” “Mr Gibbs to you, boy,” I said. “I
At the CLC, we pride ourselves in bringing Canada's most exciting authors together with readers, students and researchers. We celebrate the incredible richness of writing in this country. We lead cutting-edge scholarship and organize spectacular literary events throughout the year. Our partners include CBC Radio One "Idea "Ideas," the University of Alberta Press, and Edmonton staples such as LitFest and The Edmonton Poetry Festival.
Brown Bag Lunch Reading Series
These noon-hour literary readings are a favourite among Edmonton’s readers. Past authors include Kim Thúy, Wayne Grady, Michael Crummey, Eden Robinson and Marina Endicott.
CLC Kreisel Lecture
The CLC Kreisel Lecture, named in honour of Henry Kreisel, brings some of the greatest writers in Canada to Edmonton to present an annual talk. Past presenters include Lynn Coady, Tomson Highway, Esi Edugyan, Lawrence Hill, Annabel Lyon, Dany Lafe Laferrière, and Joseph Boyden. Our 2016 Kreisel Lecturer will be Margaret Atwood. The lectures are published by the CLC and University of Alberta Press in the Kreisel Lecture Series. The Series’ most recent addition is Tomson Highway’s 2014 lecture, A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance.
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thought this was a barn dance. Fr. Carson would like you boys to have some good clean fun at the weekend. You guys work so hard in class, he reckons you need a bit of a rodeo.” “If you weren’t a teach, I’d say, up yours, Mr Gibbs.” Ricky grinned.
BY THE TIME OTHER KIDS FROM ADDISON and Rosario turned up, the night air was dark and humid. The woozy Milky Way clotted and thickened above us, but here on our small wooded campus with its needle trees and buffalo grass, its unfurling hibiscus and air-fed orchids, its adolescent musk and hamstrung hassocks, the sea breeze had subsided. Fr. Carson usually liked to set the ball rolling with a little homily which was a precursor to the sermon he would deliver the next day. He told me that he considered his young impressionable pupils as his garden. He liked to plant his seeds on Saturday evening’s unhallowed ground and water them thoroughly, in the chapel, on Sunday as they germinated. I did not fully appreciate his meaning at the time. This evening he read out a news item about a pop star who had OD’d in Manila’s sunset strip. “The perils of alcohol and wantonness are very serious indeed. Stay clear. Be clean. It is but a short step from a nightclub to a hospital bed. You may hold hands, you may dance and shake, but do not step over the mark. Children, be warned. Amen.” The younger boys and girls gave a collective shiver at the consequences of adult misdemeanours. Ricky, who had sidled in next to David, nudged him and smothered a laugh. They shuffled over to their music station. David played the first record. Something innocuous and shrill for the youngest ones to shake and roll to. Fr. Carson hurried through the rooms checking the general distribution by gender and moral armament. 54
The Pacheco twins came up to me and giggled illegally. By about nine, the tempo began to rise and the bigger boys made their moves rocky with spunk and crush. The odour of marijuana, masked by DDT, seeped out of dark corners. Jefferson Airplane took off. I went out to get a drink. Gloria Gomez was sitting on a chair in the shadows, with her neat legs crossed, contemplating the arrangement of the soft drinks and snacks. She had Tony behind the makeshift counter. “Looks good,” I said. Tony twirled a bottle in his hand. “Soda, sir?” “I’ll try the punch,” I said, reckoning that I could sneak a shot of vodka into it nicely, out of his sight. “One minute, Mr Gibbs. One more apple.” A slim, blue-handled, double-edged knife appeared in his hand and within seconds an apple lay in slices on a plate. He slid them into the jug of fruit juice and lemonade. “Cool move.” He grinned. He folded it and put it in the pocket of his dungarees. “Is that a switchblade?” “Just a knife for chopping fruit, sir.” He was lying, but I did not want to challenge him. It wasn’t cowardice, more stupidity. I didn’t want to spoil the evening. It was good that he was out socializing rather than skulking in a corner with his weird thoughts. I took my glass and went over to Gloria. “Cheers,” I said. “You got a real Jet there.” She had dark lipstick and a touch of powder on her cheeks; cosmetics that had an added glamour for being forbidden to all the young girls in her charge. She looked up. “He is a bit edgy today. I think he had a letter this morning from his mother.” “He didn’t say anything to me.” “Man to man?” She stared at me as though there was something to solve.
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“That knife is a switchblade. A real one. I should take it off him.” “Why didn’t you? He’s one of your boys, isn’t he?” “It would become a confrontation. I’d have to send him back to his room. Anyway, there’s more fruit for him to cut.” I took another sip. “Nice punch. A lot better a little adulterated, don’t you think?” “Adult...?” “Aren’t we?” I took out my little silver flask and offered it jokingly. To my astonishment, she nodded. “Go on then, quickly.” She thrust her glass at me. I sloshed a fair bit into both our glasses, shielded from the light. In that warm darkness, her face seemed to glow; her mouth was an open curve of bright promise. I leant forward, close enough to catch a hint of sesame on her skin. Out at the edges of the garden a powerful beam from a flashlight searched the bushes. It moved quickly about illuminating clumps of ferns and beds of perennials. “Inspector Carson is on the prowl outside,” I whispered. I thought she might laugh, but she didn’t. Beads of moisture rose up around her bare neck. “Let’s go inside then?” Her voice was both ardent and challenging. “To dance?” She laughed then, squeezing my hand. “Don’t be an idiot.” She called out to Tony. “You’re in charge, Tony. I’ll be back soon.” I watched her go. I gulped down my drink and told him I had better go on patrol too. “Be good.” The dance floor in the music room was packed full of gawky gyrating youngsters. With Fr. Carson out in the shrubs, the kids had turned off all the lights except for the one on the slowly rotating mirror ball. A wave of writhing rolled along the walls and
heavy breathing slid down the sofas. The reek of ripening hormones, sour milk and sucked smoke ran high. Gloria hooked my arm and led me to the hallway on the other side. From there she hurried us to the back of the building. Collecting a brass key from the janitor’s box, she unlocked a door under the stairs. We slipped into the ironing room. She locked the door and ran her hands over my chest. Her face loomed and her mouth fastened onto mine: lemony and fizzy. She pulled me and we lurched towards the padded ironing table. She hitched up her dress with one hand and mounted it. I stumbled forward and clutched her shoulders. There were things I wanted to say, but the words clouded. Her quick fingers darted. I tried to get Fr. Carson’s glowering eye out of my head. I wanted to be as wanton as she in my pleasure. We were both out of breath by the end of the anthem thumping out of the speakers outside. She flopped back and pulsed like a fish out of water. “Are you all right?” I asked, my head reeling at the speed of our sudden communion. She seemed to be humming. “We should go back,” I said. “There is no one out there supervising.” “What is it about you?” She lifted herself up to a seated position and stared at me as though I had overstepped the mark, or made her do so. She pulled the pin out of her hair and shook her head. I lit a small roach I had in my pocket. In the brief flare of the match, she looked young and girlish and I wondered if I had. “I think you better open the window,” she whispered. “ You can’t smoke in here.” Then she balled up her hair and pinned it again.
THE AIR OUTSIDE HAD A FAINT WHIFF OF seaweed coming up from the beach, mingled with skunk and pine. Next weekend was free for me. I would have
done my duty at Ridge Hall. I thought I could ask Gloria to come snorkelling with me. I knew just the place where the water was turquoise and the fish like cherry blossom. We could spend the afternoon in Sebastian’s Cove with a bottle of cold San Miguel and Harvey’s grilled lobster tails. Maybe a tab or two from Manito’s stash. I had a yellow straw mat that would be perfect on the sand. I could see Gloria stretched out on it. I wanted her in my arms again, her slender legs knotted around me, her silky hair loose in my hands. We could be very good to each other and for each other—this could be the beginning of what I was looking for—but for now, I knew, we had to be more than an embrace apart. Gloria went back into the hall and I set off around the back of the building. As I turned the corner I saw Michael by the trestle table, clutching a bottle by its neck. Study hall over, Mr Batista must have decided to let him join the party. A softie, I thought, unless the boy had done a bunk. A light caught Michael’s eyes, making them glint like a grown-up’s in the dark. I wondered what turned a boy into a man: when does it happen? On some random Saturday night when the stars slip and fall, when the sea froths in your head and you burst the bounds that held you confined? When you enter a sanctuary and learn to balance the pleasures of transgression with those of duty? The twins were singing a song about Virgil and the night they drove old Dixie down. I lingered for a moment by the French windows. “You are a fucking head case,” I heard Michael sneer across the lawn. “Why’d you tell him where I was?” “I didn’t,” Tony protested. “Bullshit. You ratted. You told him I was smoking. He saw me and he’s gonna fuck me up.” “I said nothing.” “You don’t belong here, man. You
are a half-breed napalm head case, putanginamo.” Michael pushed him with his bottle. Tony braced himself, feet shoulder length apart, arms steeled, suddenly taut. His square head tight. I saw his hands clench. “What?” “You are fucking nuts, mother-fucker. You should just go back to your happyhour momma and suck her yellow tits.” Michael raised the bottle again. For two seconds Tony was absolutely still. A beam of light appeared and framed his head in a halo. Then, like the wings of an archangel, his shoulders rose and he sprang into a fighter’s pose. Michael hissed something at him and prodded him with the bottle again. Tony’s fingers opened. His hand moved with extraordinary speed: a mercurial gleam appeared parting the darkness between him and his nemesis. The shout started somewhere in my head, but by the time it found the cords in my throat, Tony’s knife was entering Michael’s chest. It went in and out in rapid succession as the big boy yelped and stepped back. The tiny blade pushed him again and again, puncturing his skin, his epidermis, the membranes of his adolescence, the network of veins, the layer of young muscle and his tender unbitten heart. “A boy’s life is not his own,” Fr. Carson once said to me. “It is ours to nurture and return improved.” Michael crashed to the ground, and with him all the sweet blessings I thought I had found that September night. I saw Gloria running towards Michael’s leaking lifeless body and Tony’s frozen silhouette. My legs were heavy, my blood reckless, my failure unforgivable. I saw how Tony’s mother would hear of this night and wail, and how Michael’s mother would sink down to the ground. The sour inky air swirled around me; my skin was damp. The stain of dereliction, I knew then, would not ever leave me. EB
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TWO SHORT TALES FROM A HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS –FOR GLENN
Speaking of the marvellous borderlands of science, Einstein was of course wrong in his wars with Niels Bohr over the small matter of the quantum world, weightless motes, spores -- a dandelion head, a globe, a universe, light years apart – invisibly threaded together in clandestine correspondence, so whatever excited one sub-sub of an atom, Bohr shouted, also shivered through its distant Siamese space-time other. Pshh, said Einstein, that’s claptrap. Spooky action-at-a-distance only makes sense if you are talking vehicle, tenor, metaphor. Are we talking about metaphors, Bohr? What have you been reading, Wuthering Heights? The single thing Einstein in fact conceded to at this point, being another Danish butter cookie from Mrs. Bohr, Margrethe, who, years later, also proved instrumental in persuading Niels to let bygones be bygones. Early wireless apparatuses. Another bold move. Up there in their heyday with the siren theremin, lusty Madame Blavatsky and medicinal cocaine, these experiments aimed to help mediums contact the other shadow world of the dead. Hookahphone hybrids, the invention of free radicals, no roaming charges. One such instrument drew Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by the Midnight Flyer, express from Chicago to Winnipeg, Winnipeg being believe it or not, the last sub-zero stop on the séance circuit, circa 1919. (Just as I thought, he thought, stepping from station into vapour of ice fog. The atmospheric pressure up here is totally dense.) In his notebook, he wrote: Fifty odd phenomena, including telekinesis table levitation telepathy & tapping (in some old morse code). All recorded under highly controlled conditions -fraud impossible. The medium, Eusapia (pronounced with a glottal stop), wore blush T-strap pumps, also noted. Mind you don’t tangle the U-tube, Arthur, she said, it’s hooked right to the rubber rig entropic, that’s my heart. (Accidents can obviously happen with any contraption composed of confounding figures and parts, Aa, Bb, Cc, etc.) Confounding parts! we heard Bohr shout. He was in another room, hammering at the last intractable problem in physics, the sub-sub mechanics of secret loneliness. – Christine Wiesenthal COURTESY T.G. HAMILTON FONDS, UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
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SOUNDINGS TAKING THE MEASURE
FILM
Tweets From Underground // By PAUL MATWYCHUK
I
t occurred to me the other day that there’s now only one writer whose every single opinion on film I actively seek out. It’s not Anthony Lane, whose pleased-with-himself japes exited my life when I let my New Yorker subscription lapse two years ago; nor is it A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, who are too prolific to keep up with, nor Roger Ebert, who is dead, nor Rex Reed, who might as well be. No, the critic who has my ear is an alcoholic, overweight, alienated, sexually frustrated, deeply lonely and possibly suicidal Twitter-bound mystery man with fewer than 2,000 followers who goes by the name of LexG—or @LexG_III, if you want to be formal about it. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the unnamed narrator begins his tale by letting us know his state. “I am a sick man, I am an angry man, I am an unattractive man, I think my liver is diseased.” He reminds me of LexG. LexG is technically a blogger—he runs a ramshackle site called The Lex Diaries—but he only makes about five posts there a year. Instead, he rose to fame, remora-like, by posting comments on other people’s blogs. I first noticed him as one of the regulars on Hollywood Elsewhere, a movie site run by a cantankerous movie pundit and Oscar prognosticator named Jeffrey Wells. Perhaps because Wells is something of a borderline personality himself, his
comments section became a breeding ground for cranks and misfits, few of whom bothered hide their dislike of Wells. But even within this competitive environment, LexG was impossible to ignore, thanks to his singular blend of hilarious, shoot-from-the-hip movie opinions, self-hating actress-lust, and occasional suicide threats. Wells never knew how to handle this strange virtual houseguest who had become one of his site’s main attractions, or make a decision as to whether LexG was a man crying out for help or just an unusually colourful troll. Wells would ban LexG from the site, then allow him back in on probation, then ban him all over again. At one point, Wells floated the idea of hiring LexG a prostitute for the night in hopes of alleviating his crippling sexual frustration, but the scheme never got beyond the planning stages. (I think Lex truly wanted Wells to give him a column, not a hooker.) In the end, LexG decamped almost exclusively to Twitter, where he’s become a cult figure among online film writers, an object both of pity and awe, an even more unemployable, movie-watching version of Lester Bangs. He’s almost “almost famous.” LexG’s real name remains a mystery to me, but I’ve read most of his nearly 90,000 career tweets, and I feel like I’ve pieced together practically everything else about him. Here’s a précis: • He’s in his 40s, genitally under-endowed, at least 80 pounds overweight and balding—facts which have caused him to have pretty much given up hope of ever having sex, even once in his life, and certainly not with Chloë Moretz, Margot Robbie or any of the other young actresses he obsesses over. • He lives and works in Los Angeles, subtitling movies at some kind of video production company, where he is slowly being driven insane by the inane water-cooler chatter of his co-workers. • He made several attempts over the years to break into showbiz as, variously, a standup comic, an actor, a movie extra, and a comedy writer, all with little success, before concluding that the only people who succeed in Hollywood have family members already in the business. • He’s convinced that if his abusive father were still alive, he’d be utterly ashamed of him. • He’s a bit of a foot fetishist. • He was sadistically bullied all through high school. WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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• The only person with whom he has regular social contact is a Toronto-based Twitter friend named Sanj, whose Aspergeroid Twitter feed is dominated by snapshots of fast food meals and pictures of Hollywood starlets scanned from magazines. • He has never had a paid writing gig in his entire life. He’s also the most compelling film commentator at work today. I admit, LexG’s charms can be somewhat elusive to the newcomer. One does not read LexG strictly for insights into the art of cinema—although he does supply them with surprising regularity. This is a guy, after all, who appears to have seen every movie made since 1972, and has a loving, photographic memory for ninth-billed character actors, random jokes and bits of actorly “business.” He can recall the specific visual “sheen” (one of his favourite words) of every movie he’s seen, and associate it with the relevant directors, cinematographers, and even studios. And Lex’s bullshit meter is second to none. “The Shield is to The Wire what Mann, Stone and Scorsese are to Soderbergh,” went a recent tweet. “The Real without the DETACHED PROPRIETY of a part-timer.” (Those all-caps phrases that punctuate his observations are part of LexG’s distinctive voice, a technique that evokes both the punchy style of old-time gossip columnists like Walter Winchell, and the swagger of a half-drunk street preacher.) “[Angelina Jolie’s] Unbroken is fascinating as a glimpse into how a beautiful person sees the world,” went another. “Even with all her obvious awesomeness, Jolie’s WWII is still a bunch of 2014-PERFECT-BUILD QC ciphers.” Of course, you can get snarky takes on the latest movies from dozens of other Twitter personalities. What I find so fascinating, and upsetting, about LexG is the way his movie opinions have almost stopped being primarily about movies—they’re a sustained howl of outrage at the life he will never lead, the money he will never have, the places he will never go, the women he will never have sex with, all delivered with blistering candor. On a recent Wednesday night, he stopped riffing on the differences between theatre quality in Los Angeles compared to his Pittsburgh hometown to tweet the following: “Drank 8 Bud Lights. Wasn’t drunk enough so I cannonballed a scalding hot bottle of Jim Beam like it was Mr. Pibb.” After vomiting, he immediately returned to tweeting observations about Nick Stahl and Ethan Embry without missing a beat. Every so often, he threatens suicide, or announces he’s quitting Twitter, only to pop up again a week or so later, as feisty and full of self-loathing as ever. Read LexG’s Twitter feed long enough, and it starts to seem like an avant-garde rewrite of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, only with a lot more references to movie starlets’ feet. LexG is falling apart, 58
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and it feels as though movies are the only thing holding him together. Earlier this year, the comedian Patton Oswalt published a book called Silver Screen Fiend, a slim memoir about the time in the mid-90s when he was a struggling comic in the L.A. standup scene and a very frequent customer of the venerable L.A. revival house the New Beverly Cinema. Oswalt describes himself as having had a literal “addiction to film,” a dark compulsion that he says isolated him from his friends and nearly ruined his life. As I read the book, it was all too easy to cast LexG as Oswalt’s shadow self. It’s highly likely they unknowingly crossed paths many, many times at the New Beverly, both focused so bitterly on their dreams of success that they never noticed each other. But their paths soon diverged dramatically. LexG spent so much time in the dark that the darkness finally claimed him; Oswalt became a successful comic, busy character actor, and such a popular socialmedia personality that when he quit Twitter for a few months in 2014, Time wrote a story about it. Oswalt, according to any standard reading, is the positive example: the movie geek who got his act together, joined the world, married a cute girl, had a kid and prospered. And yet, perversely, I insist on declaring LexG a greater source of inspiration to me—perhaps not as a life coach, but at least as a film writer. I found the conceit of Oswalt’s book ludicrous—it’s a so-called addiction memoir that considers spending a weekend at a round-the-clock festival of Hammer horror movies “bottoming out.” The thing is, even at his lowest ebb, Oswalt was experiencing the kind of success LexG could only dream of, writing for MadTV and hobnobbing with the headlining comics at Largo. Oswalt ends his book on a moralizing note, tsk-tsking at those damaged, incautious people who love movies too much. That group includes LexG, whose cinephilia, tragically, might be more chronic and isolating than his alcoholism. “Always fascinated by how much America, deep down, hates movies and Hollywood,” he noted during this year’s Oscars. “Nobody hate-tweets the PLAYER ARRIVALS at the Super Bowl.” I don’t think LexG could hate-tweet a movie if he tried. His demands are simple: give LexG a 7-Eleven coffee and a movie packed with “gags and stunts” (another of his signature phrases) and his pain briefly vanishes. Why begrudge him those 90 minutes of pleasure before he slinks back underground? Yes, LexG is unwell. Yes, he’s an angry man. Yes, he’s an unattractive man. His liver surely can’t hold out much longer. But whatever he may be, he’s also The Real, and he makes the rest of us film writers look like tourists with typewriters. EB
BOOKS
Reader, Heal Thyself // By JAY SMITH
I
n supermarkets, airport magazine shops and Chapters, it’s hard to avoid self-help books. Amazon lists 171,891 titles available in its “self help” section— listed by very similar-sounding subgenres such as “personal transformation,” “happiness,” “motivational,” or “self-esteem.” You can even filter by results published in the past 30, 60, or 90 days. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Just buy the latest book! Considering this glut, and the pervasive idea that we are always lacking in some way, literature’s reaction to the pulp of self-help was inevitable. A trio of new titles does just this, exploring personal-betterment and our response to the genre of self-help. Sheila Heti once confessed that she’s a keen reader of self-help, claiming to have read 80 titles. She’s fascinated by those for whom success is easy, accomplishment uncomplicated. Even the title of her 2010 semi-autobiographical novel, How Should a Person Be?, sounds like a wry take on the genre, cutting straight
through the soft language of self-esteem coaching to what self-help claims to be trying to do, which is provide the opportunity for introspection and growth. At the centre of that book was a play she was then writing, or failing to write, in real life. That play (the real one), All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, did end up being performed and was recently published by McSweeney’s. It reads like a manual of how not to be a family. Thoroughly absurdist—comparisons to Beckett are apt—and the recipient of a few bad reviews, All Our Happy Days is rivetting. The plot follows two families, the Oddis and the Sings, on a vacation to France. The respective children, Jenny (age 12) and Daniel (age 13), go to school together and are surprised to run into each other at a parade in Paris. Abruptly Daniel disappears. While the Sings are devastated, the Oddis are nonchalant. This failure of characters to connect is a recurring theme. Consider when Mrs. Sing attempts to befriend Mrs. Oddi, entreating her: “Perhaps you have a secret ... WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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that you could only share with another woman? ... We are both in families entirely of men.” Mrs. Oddi points out that she has a daughter. “But she is too young to count,” replies Mrs. Sing. Jenny is much disparaged, too, often with sexist overtones. Early on in the play, when Jenny objects to being called “a little girl,” her mother interjects, “Twelve years old is still little. Have you even gotten your period yet? I bet not!” But why wouldn’t she know? And when Daniel returns from trying and failing to lose his virginity to a French prostitute, Jenny tries to tell him something about her period—perhaps she’s just got her first—but, too uncomfortable, he excuses himself and walks away. No character in the play gives her any emotional recognition. In the end, the closest she gets is when Daniel sings to her, but practically the only line in his song is, “Don’t become the thing that you hated.” Hardly uplifting advice—shouldn’t it be something more positive, more happy, like, “Become the person that you love”? But it is the sort of line you’d expect from an absurdist self-help manual, one just as interested in exploring neurosis and its causes as it is in “curing” it.
“Don’t become the thing that you hated.” Hardly uplifting advice— shouldn’t it be something more positive, more happy, like, “Become the person that you love”?
If Heti’s play is an absurdist commentary on the discourse of self-help, then Hollie Adam’s novel, Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother, is a comical incarnation of its form. Not only does the protagonist, Carrie, dream of writing a self-help book, the book’s form is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the genre. Written in the second person as a choose-your-own-adventure, Things You’ve Inherited highlights decision-making and individual agency. You are the author of your own destiny, right? But if you follow the random page number prompts (such as “Hit up the nearest tanning salon and stop wearing ‘hand-me-ups’ from your daughter, flip to page 67”), you get a purely nonsensical reading experience. This serves to comically highlight the very bad decisions the main character makes. After her mother 60
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dies, for instance, Carrie protests her workplace’s new no-jeans policy by wearing an old pair of oversized sweat pants, every day, until she is fired. Keen to avoid letting her live-in boyfriend know that she’s newly unemployed, she shifts the conversation and accidentally proposes marriage to him—insisting on a wedding in Snow White’s (nonexistent) castle at Disneyland, no less. There’s a lot of smoking and drinking involved, as well, with the occasional redemptive trip to the gym. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because of Carrie’s enthusiastic refusal to conform to social norms. After finding the funeral-appropriate outfit her sister has laid out for her, for instance, with ‘Wear me’ written on post-it notes stuck to each item, Carrie only momentarily contemplates wearing the outfit. (“Do not forget that you have become an orphan,” the narrator muses. “Remind everyone.”) Instead, she wears a too-small leather skirt and fishnet stockings. Compared to the Heti’s play and Adam’s novel, Damian Rogers’ second book of poems, Dear Leader, features a greater sense of self-awareness. There are a few lines from the first poem, “from the windows the alley,” that reminded me of the intention of self-help books, but Rogers decisively outclasses the genre with phrasing that is transcendent: “I’m working / this summer / on inventing / the life I am already living. / It takes practice / to see myself / without a mirror.” I love these lines for the questions they ask without asking them: What is self-awareness? How does it compare to vanity? Why is there so little coherence between the self and perception of the self? How does one build that coherence? Rogers’ poems investigate how this selfhood is constructed, subsists, persists. She proposes different strategies for accepting this disconnect between selfperception and who we really are. In a poem called “There’s no such thing as blue water” she writes: “A selfhelp author / revealed to me with great confidence that life is swinging / from branch to branch in a fog.” There isn’t a master narrative for our lives, Rogers tells us; it’s just one blind grasping after another so that we don’t fall through space. What these books tell us is that, although there’s a massive self-help market out there, real self-help won’t be found where pop culture tells us it will. Instead, it’s about finding what already exists inside of us—“inventing” what Rogers argues was always there. It ’s about learning how to see the ruptures in our identities and, as readers, learning how to read for complexity, not certainty. EB
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NON-FICTION
I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 by Gary Barwin
Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too: More Ne’er-Do-Wells Through the Ages by Jim Christy
“Between the freaky, funny fi lmmaker Guy Maddin and author Gary Barwin, Canada is producing some of the most innovate creative works of our time.” —Utne Reader (US) 128 pages | $18 can/usa | 978-1-77214-013-2 | stories | may 2015
Seep by W. Mark Giles
Never before have as many outrageous and out-sized characters appeared in one place at the same time. Words like rogues, rascals, rapscallions, reprobates and rodomontades don’t completely describe these individuals; they are more than each or any combination thereof. They are scalawags. 224 pages | $20 can/usa | 978-1-77214-017-0 | may 2015
Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-fi rst century Canada. “Giles’ Seep is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated ... making for a complicated world and illuminating fi ction.” —Tom Wayman
Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer by Stuart Ross
224 pages | $20 can/usa | 978-1-77214-012-5 | novel | may 2015
On Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer:
Breakneck by Nelly Arcan translated by Jacob Homel Breakneck is the fourth and fi nal title in our translation project that brings the work of Quebec author Nelly Arcan to an Anglophone audience. Rose and Julie’s submissive love for the same man, Charles, creates in them an arms race of artificial beauty and debasement. 256 pages | $20 can/usa | 978-1-77214-011-8 | novel | april 2015
Snarky, provocative, funny, outlandish, and self-deprecating, Ross’ “confessions” are urgent dispatches that disrupt the too often polite conversation concerning Canadian literary matters. “For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it’s diffi cult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross’s latest effort, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer.”—Stephen Knight, Quill & Quire 128 pages | $18 can/usa | 978-1-77214-018-7 | june 2015
info@anvilpress.com www.anvilpress.com
MUSIC
Hit or Myth
ILLUSTRATION COLTON PONTO
T
he Race for Space, released in February, is among the gutsiest albums you’ll hear this year. This is because it’s also one of the geekiest. The sophomoric full-length from Public Ser vice Broadcasting, an English duo that has attracted attention and accolades by weaving historical samples with catchy rock riffs, documents the extraterrestrial competition between the United States and the U.S.S.R., beginning in 1957 with the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. There are no lyrics, at least not in the conventional sense. Instead, The Race for Space offers the straight story on this landmark convergence of technology and culture through the voices of those who lived it—such as John F. Kennedy—speaking before the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, the vessel that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Really, the record shouldn’t work outside of a social studies classroom. But watch it end up a critical favourite, just like P.S.B.’s Inform - Educate - Entertain did in 2013, which unapologetically highlighted histories of the British postal system, the design of the
// By SCOTT MESSENGER
Spitfire fighter aircraft and pleated pants. The success of that debut shouldn’t surprise: the band’s approach to composition represents, perhaps ironically, some of the freshest thinking in pop and rock today. I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a place for this kind of creativity in our own music community, using Canadian source material to the same effect as The Race for Space, and surprising listeners by treating obscure Canadiana like it’s actually cool. We have the innovators who could pull it off. And we have the technology, meaning Google: several tracks on The Race for Space draw from NASA audio files freely available online. The main obstacle in Canada, I suspect, would be a lack of enthusiasm for the subject. The Race for Space and many of the tracks on Inform - Educate - Entertain are exercises in mythologizing and, when the source of the samples is British, self-mythologizing. Canadians are terrible at this. We tend not to know what’s even available for mythologizing. “If some countries have too much history, we have too WWW.EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM
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much geography,” said William Lyon Mackenzie King, suggesting that in place of foundational stories, we have vast voiceless spaces. We pass this off as a product of our youth as a nation and, worse, of an unfair reputation for dullness that we seem content to accept, if not adopt. In other cases, when evidence of distinctly Canadian history emerges, we resist or reject it. How many of us, for example, were swept up in the federal government’s efforts to aggrandize the War of 1812? Who wasn’t at least mildly titillated by excoriations of John A. MacDonald in the media on the 200th anniversary of his birth earlier this year? Marshall McLuhan said, “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” It almost seems like a choice, one that comes at the expense of many things, art at times among them. Shameless, purposeful mythologizing is exactly what makes The Race for Space great. The album points to a moment in history that owes itself to science and technology, but it is driven by emotion. With JFK’s address in the album’s opening title track, P.S.B. captures the pervasive hope and ambition of the times; these weren’t the launches of mere scientific expeditions, but the opening lines of the next chapter in an epic story of the human race. The fear underlying the era—specifically of the relentless one-upmanship between the superpowers—comes through with a low-level dread on the electronic drone of Sputnik. Gagarin, however, a sassy funk tribute to the first human being in space, is boldly and innocently celebratory, while Go! conveys the adrenaline rush through cockpit and control room alike. Track by track, The Race for Space draws you into the drama. Listening, it’s hard not to think about what it meant to the world then and what it means now, and to marvel that it happened half a century ago—generations back—yet just a half century after the birth of the age of the automobile. Almost embarrassingly, it leaves me sentimental for the ingenuity underlying the projects, for that drive toward such idealistic (even if nationalistic) progress. The things we did as a species! Though uncommon, there have been instances in which Canadian artists have been capable of eliciting strong feelings with distinctly Canadian subjects. How many of us can resist smiling at the sound of Stompin’ Tom Connors on AM radio, riffing on some aspect of the nation’s past and/or identity? Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—the story of the sinking of a bulk carrier in Lake Superior—placed number 1 in Canada in 1976 (number 2 in the U.S.) and is still recognized as one of his best tunes. And at a Gord Downie, the Sadies, and the Conquering Sun show I saw last 64
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summer, someone hollered a request for Fifty Mission Cap, a fan favourite from Downie’s other band, about the 1951 disappearance of Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Bill Barilko. The demand was an insult but, not shouted down by the audience, telling: we’ll take those stories about our past, relate to and love them in the unique ways all listeners do their music, and yet treat them as shared despite their regionalism. That is, we’ll lean on them to help overcome geography and even perhaps begin to zero in on a national identity.
“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.” But only if they’re done right, of course, which is difficult with conventional songwriting. The generally poor quality of lyrics today is partly the result of the difficulty of writing what should be poetry, compounded by the need for storytelling. The Race for Space suggests a solution, as do the provincial and municipal archivists I ran the idea past, all eager to help locate source material. Who knows? The time may have come for an album about the Avro Arrow. (If that sounds ridiculous, you can have your hackneyed hits about heartbreak and hooking up.) There’s a way to do this wrong, too, of which P.S.B. lead J. Willgoose, Esq. was clearly aware. Even though, like it or not, you will learn something from it, The Race for Space never verges on didactic. “Ultimately, it’s meant to be about putting a smile on people’s faces,” says Willgoose. “People are coming to gigs, not bloody history lessons.” Musicians seek to connect with audiences and to get members of that audience to connect with each other, however ephemerally, through that music. Musicians write not to express themselves, but to try to lessen the loneliness at the heart of the human condition. Call it vying for hits, but they’re reaching for that universal song, offering up something to which they hope all can relate, something with a unifying effect. The Race for Space achieves that by exploring the origins of a whatif that still unites humanity today, but which also rests fully in the individual imagination. As if recognizing this, P.S.B. created reversible cover art for physical copies of The Race for Space, featuring either the American program or the Soviet one. It’s the world’s story, but it belongs first to the listener. Even national myths, after all, start out as an idea in one person’s head. EB
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BRIDGES
Heron Road Bridge // By DAN RUBINSTEIN
W
hen I stop my bike on the paved pathway beneath Ottawa’s Heron Road Bridge, the traffic speeding overhead sounds soothing, almost serene. Cars shush by, unseen, like wind through the trees. Trucks clickety-clack over expansion joints, like trains. I can also hear the river’s spring freshet, rapids cascading over a limestone step a few metres upstream, and ducks cavorting on the slack-water canal. The bridge crosses both waterways, two detached spans—three lanes going east, three lanes going west— supported by six sturdy concrete piers. Some of the footings have been tagged with indecipherable graffiti, although one set of initials appears to read “HST.” Up top, you get a better view of the Rideau valley and the canal and the golden dome of a Ukrainian Catholic church, but the traffic takes on another tone. Engines rev and rumble; mud and slush splatter. Mechanical, messy, slightly menacing. It is not easy to build a bridge. A few kilometres from here, a pedestrian crossing over a parkway took three years to complete. Construction had to be stopped twice, parts were torn down and rebuilt, the city is suing its design firm, and the budget doubled to $10 million. It will cost more than $100 billion to build all of the new infrastructure Canadian cities need; bridges will eat up much of this money. The work will go on for decades. Half a century ago, without computerized engineering, general contractors would be given a year to get a big job done. Usually, they were successful, and our cities raced outward and upward. But things did not always proceed as planned. I cross over and pass beneath the Heron Road Bridge regularly: driving, walking, cycling. But one day not long 66
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ago, after I’d carried my bike from the river’s edge to the roadway, I spotted something I had never seen up-close. Behind a bus shelter, on a grassy knoll, there sits a triangular slab of granite the size of a three-man tent. A bronze plaque bolted into the granite is dedicated to the memory of nine workers who died when the southeast span collapsed and tumbled 20 metres into the river, a shower of splintering wood, twisted rebar, and wet concrete. It was August 10, 1966, 3:30 p.m. Federal government employees were holding their annual picnic in a waterside park. Motorists were cruising beside the canal. A hardened slab of concrete trembled violently and then swung like a seesaw, falling on top of a slab that was still being poured. It sounded like low-flying jet. Most of the dead were crushed by wet concrete. Some suffocated as it hardened. One man was buried up to his neck. A bucket brigade of rescuers kept the concrete moist and cool as welders struggled to free his feet. They discovered, as the Ottawa Citizen reported, “the arms of a dead man clamped around his legs.” The air was shrouded in dust and rang with moans and cries for help. Crew-cut men in shirtsleeves rushed into the river from the picnic. Radio stations put out a call for doctors. The mayor helped dig out people with his bare hands. A fire department chaplain administered last rites. Darkness descended, and floodlights were set up to aid the search for survivors. Afterwards, the contractor pled guilty to a charge of failing to properly brace the structure and paid a fine of $5,000, the maximum amount allowed. Construction safety standards were rewritten. It is not easy to build a bridge. But it is easy to make a metaphor. Today, we are saturated by real-time news of tragedies unfolding on the other side the earth. Airplanes crash and buildings explode and we are there, watching bodies get pulled from the rubble. In our global village, we are in tune with distant rhythms, but we don’t always know what’s happening down the street. A bridge is a fixed link, a conduit between the place where you are and the place you are going. Travelling across on foot helps you appreciate the scale of your surroundings. You see your city as one contiguous community, an ecosystem in which every person plays a role. Fifty years ago, something as simple as a bridge collapse had the power to horrify and unite a city. It brought the worst death and the most compassion. It made people pause and ponder. Now we traverse this connective span on countless quotidian journeys, focused on the day’s destination, breezing atop the layers of our past mistakes. EB
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