Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2013

featurinGDon GillmorLynn Coady

Marcello Di CintioElizabeth Philips

Daniel BairdBarry Dempster

Paul MatwychukJane Silcott

SPRING 2013

Stories That Connect

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DOWNHILL RACERS

THREE

RING CIRCuS

MAN DOWN!CHRONICLING THE END Of THE PATRIARCHy

Skiing into Middle Age

A Palestinian Juggling Act

PlusNew

fictionfromAlex

Pugsley

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Eleven 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, ranked in the global top forty universities, offers world-class creative writing programs at the BFA and MFA level, on-campus and by Distance Education. We’ve been doing it for 50 years now. Join us.

FacultyDeborah CampbellSteven GallowaySara GraefeWayne GradyAnnabel LyonKeith Maillard

Maureen MedvedSusan MusgraveAndreas SchroederLinda SvendsenPeggy ThompsonRhea TregebovBryan Wade

www.creativewriting.ubc.ca

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

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

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

UBC Creative Writing

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 and the waves were red at high tide. Ayahuasca had something to do with it.had something to do with it.- Samuel Veissiere

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i S S u e 6 • S P r i n G 2 0 1 3

HuManKinD

The Descent of ManMiddle age, climate change, and the end of skiing.

On tHe reCOrD

Twilight of the PatriarchsDon’t expect them to go quietly.

tHe MeMOir BanK

In The ChairClippings from around the world.

Don Gillmor

Curtis Gillespie 40

featureS

Action TransfersAlex Pugsley 48fiCtiOn

30Lynn Coady

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

22

Cover photo BLuefiSH StuDiOS

Marcello Di Cintio

Alexis Kienlen

07

11

SPan

Jane Silcott 14

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Juggling ActIt’s a circus in the Middle East. Literally.

Shut Eye Now I lay me down to sleep…I hope.

Everything RustlesTaking back the night.

it’S tHe LaW

Buyer, Be Warned What warning labels are really telling you.

Can•Icons: SasquatchClive Holden 27

Jam PearlsMaking it new.

Espresso 2.0Coffee culture and its dregs.

What Art Is forA dispatch from the galleries of Kyrgyzstan.

The Nightmarish World Of OzWhy is everything about The Wizard of Oz so terrifying?

Daniel Baird 59

SOunDinGS

57

Scott Messenger 55

A Bridge To The PastThe lost isthmus of Pender Island.

Sarah Shewchuk 66BriDGeS

Jennifer Cockrall-King

BottlesCopingProofWhite Pansy, 1927 – Georgia O’Keeffe

Jennifer Still

POetrY

Elizabeth PhilipsBarry Dempster

Sue Goyette12

3552

16

63Paul Matwychuk

MiSCeLLanY

Can•Icons: Politeness43Solo Show: Room 62Sean Caulfield 62

Sean

Cau

lfiel

d

Richard Haigh 20

i S S u e 6 • S P r i n G 2 0 1 3

EDITORCurtis Gillespie

SENIOR EDITORLynn Coady

CONSuLTING EDITORPaul Wilson

MANAGING EDITORSarah Shewchuk

ASSISTANT EDITORConnie Howard

GuEST POETRy EDITORElizabeth Philips

DEPT. Of fACTuALITyHead: Craille Maguire Gillies

Body: Michelle KayM. Jay SmithWajiha Suboor

CONTRIBuTING EDITORSDeborah Campbell Marcello Di Cintio

Craille Maguire Gillies Lisa Gregoire

Bruce Grierson Alex Hutchinson Marni Jackson

Lisa MooreTimothy Taylor Chris Turner

CONSuLTING PuBLISHERSJoyce ByrneRuth Kelly

ART DIRECTORKim Larson

WEBSITEGunnar Blodgett

uNIvERSITy Of ALBERTA LIAISONMarie Carrière/Daniel Laforest

BuSINESS MANAGERTiiu 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 [email protected] or visit eighteenbridges.ca

All contents copyright 2013 and may not be reproduced without the permission

of Eighteen Bridges.PM 40020055

* put FSC LOGO HERE

FeaturingMultidisciplinary Visual Art & Design Exhibits and

Presentations Exploring Human Energy

Stage & Screen presentation opportunitiesContact [email protected]

www.theworks.ab.ca

the works art & design festivaljune 20th –july 2, 2013

churchill square & around downtown


CONTRIBuTORS

DANIEL BAIRD is a Toronto-based writer on art, culture, and ideas. His last piece for Eighteen Bridges was “Photography, Then and Now” in the Winter 2012 issue.

LyNN COADy is a writer and editor whose latest novel, The Antagonist, has been published this spring in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. Her collection of short fiction called Hellgoing will be published by House of Anansi in Canada in fall 2013.

JENNIfER COCKRALL-KING is a writer from Edmonton who travelled Cuba, Europe, Canada, and the US for her new book Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution.

BARRy DEMPSTER, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen poetry collections. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A new book of poetry and a novel will be published this coming October.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO has written for numerous magazines, journals, and newspapers, including the Walrus, EnRoute, and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of three books, most recently Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, which was the 2012 winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

CuRTIS GILLESPIE is editor of this magazine.

SuE GOyETTE lives in Halifax. Her fourth book of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press this spring.

RICHARD HAIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school. He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law.

A few of our contributors…

pg 22

DON GILLMOR is a Toronto-based journalist and writer. His most recent novel is Mount Pleasant.

pg 48ALEX PuGSLEy is a writer and film-maker originally from Nova Scotia. Recently he won the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for fiction.

And the rest of them…

CLIvE HOLDEN is best known for two multi-disciplinary art projects: Trains of Winnipeg (2001 to 2006), and the ongoing U Suite (2006 to 2020). Born and raised on Vancouver Island, he splits his time between there and Toronto.

ALEXIS KIENLEN is the author of two poetry collections, She Dreams in Red and 13. She currently works as an agricultural journalist and lives in Edmonton.

PAuL MATWyCHuK is the general manager of NeWest Press in Edmonton, as well as the film and theatre reviewer for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. His blog The Moviegoer can be found at mgoer.blogspot.com.

SCOTT MESSENGER lives in Edmonton, where he’s a full-time writer and communications specialist, and part-time musician.

ELIzABETH PHILIPS is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent collection, Torch River, was released by Brick Books in 2007. She is working on a novel, and plans to write a book about dogs called They Don’t Call Them Bitches for Nothing.

SARAH SHEWCHuK recently completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. She is the Managing Editor at Eighteen Bridges and the Research Coordinator at the University of Alberta’s Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne.

JENNIfER STILL is the winner of the 2012 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award and the 2012 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her second collection of poems, Girlwood (Brick Books, 2011), was nominated for the 2012 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

pg 14

JANE SILCOTT’s first book, a collection of personal essays titled Everything Rustles (after the essay appearing here), will be published this spring with Anvil Press. Jane lives in Vancouver with her family and teaches for UBC’s Writing Centre and SFU’s Southbank Writing Program.

SPAN Reporting back


met Nayef Othman in front of a Mon-treal Metro station last September.

Othman had been training with the National Circus School for just over a month and I asked him how he was enjoy-ing Canada. “It is cold,” he said. I told him to wait until winter came. We wandered until we found a small bar where we could talk, and I noticed that even as he shiv-ered his way through a neighborhood still mostly unfamiliar to him, Othman walked with the sort of muscular con-fidence certain athletes and dancers

possess. I noticed, too, that he’d kept the stubbled buzz-cut he and his fellow circus performers favoured when I’d met them a few months earlier in Palestine. Othman’s shaved head made him look even stronger and more streamlined, but as we walked I suggested he let his hair grow. What works in a hot Palestinian summer might not suit one’s first winter in Montreal.

Othman is the head trainer at the Palestine Circus School (PCS), and he’s currently spending a year honing

his skills as a teacher of the circus arts at Montreal’s National Circus School. He is also learning to guide students through the process of creating perfor-mance, promoting their physical and psychological development, and using the circus for social education. Othman’s training in Montreal is intense. By the time he completes the course, he will have endured more than 700 hours of instruction, much of it physically demand-ing. He plans to return to Palestine in the fall to teach new circus artists what he’s learned. The circus, he believes, can arm young Palestinians with new weapons in their struggle for identity and dignity. “The circus is a kind of fighting,” th

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JuGGLING ACTIt’s a circus in the Middle East. Literally.

I


he told me. “We are creating an army, a culture army, non-violent, of open- minded people.”

More than this, though, he hopes the circus will provide Palestinians with an alternative language, a language with-out words, that they can use to tell their story. For decades, Palestinians have been ill-served by the scripts written for them. Negotiations and international agreements have done little to nudge the idea of a Palestinian state towards reality. United Nations resolutions in their favour have been ignored. Speeches and slogans come up empty. Palestinians have grown weary of the illusion that words matter. It’s little wonder, then, that they yearn for a more trustworthy form of expression. Which is why some have turned from the failure of words to the muscle-and-bone honesty of the circus.

SHADI zMORROD, THE CO-fOuNDER Of THE PCS,studied theatre as a young man. In response to the cheapening of written text, Zmorrod started to examine perfor-mance based on physical improvisation rather than on written scripts. “I realized how important it was to forget about the text and focus on the body,” he told me in a recent interview in Birzeit, a village not far f rom Ramallah. Beginning in 2000, Shadi conducted physical theatre workshops in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as abroad in Europe and North Africa. In each workshop, Zmorrod touted the primacy of the body and the spontaneous emotion of the performer. “What I feel at this mo-ment, I present.”

Zmorrod’s work attracted the atten-tion of the Jerusalem Circus Association, an Israeli circus troupe, who asked him to join them. Zmorrod hesitated at first. It was 2002, during the most violent days of the Second Intifada, and Zmorrod had vowed to boycott any work with Israelis. Still, the offer intrigued him from a theat-rical perspective. While traditional circus thrills audiences with animal acts, clown antics, and feats of daring, contemporary circus artists tell stories. But instead of words, they speak the language of jug-gling and acrobatics, of Chinese poles, teeter-boards, and aerial silks. And they

express a kind of physical truth. Rather than a representation, circus artists exemplify their own individual realities. They embody their own bodies. The cir-cus appealed to Zmorrod’s philosophy of scriptless physical performance.

Zmorrod thought, too, that working with the Israeli circus could bring Jewish and Palestinian performers to-gether and might advance the cause of peace, at least in a small and symbolic way. Zmorrod had seen this sort of thing work elsewhere. He’d held workshops abroad that used theatre to unite other traditional enemies. Turks and Greeks. Iraqis and Iranians. Even warring ethnic groups in Sudan.“I thought , ‘ W hy wouldn’t it work here?’”

IT DIDN’T WORK AT ALL. “THE ISRAELIS DIDN’Tconcern themselves with peace,” Zmorrod said. In the eighteen months he spent with the circus, the directors refused to perform shows in Palestinian neighborhoods or teach Arab children in East Jerusalem. Then, without telling Zmorrod, the circus brought a ten-year-old Palestinian boy to perform at a commemoration of the Holocaust in Berlin. That a boy who lived under Israeli oc-cupation should be used as a prop to memorialize a tragedy suffered by his occupiers, and to suggest a peaceful coexistence that was inherently false, proved too much for Zmorrod. “The kid used to sell chewing gum with his broth-ers at Israeli checkpoints to make money for the family,” he says. Zmorrod left the company.

I was able to reach Elisheva Yortner, the former director of the Jerusalem Cir-cus, and she called Zmorrod’s accusa-tions “lies” and “pure invention.” She also added that it was Zmorrod’s international funders who encouraged and invited him

to “tell a story of struggling in the face of darkness,” meaning, one could presume, that she felt Zmorrod was engaged in constructing a narrative for himself and the circus rooted in Israeli suppression and betrayal. She labelled it the narra-

tive of “his ‘Palestinian Heroism’ and the ugly Zionist face of the Jerusalem Circus.” We were communicating by e-mail, but I could almost see the shoul-der shrug as Yortner added that she also understands this sort of storytelling, calling it the “rules of the game in order to get budget.”

Zmorrod’s brief cooperation with the Israelis did not, therefore, result in the sort of small-scale reconciliation he’d hoped for, but the experience neverthe-less endeared him to the circus arts. He believed that teaching circus could be-stow dignity and hope to the children of Palestine, and so he moved to Ramallah to gather support and international fund-ing for a wholly Palestinian circus. In August 2006, Zmorrod and his partner, Jessika Devlieghere, opened the Palestin-ian Circus School. It was a hot summer. Is-raeli warplanes were bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and the war tight-ened security measures throughout the West Bank. Most of the European trainers Zmorrod had invited to the circus’ open-ing were too afraid to come. The timing seemed terrible. Looking back, though, Zmorrod believes the circus’ birthing pains forced the company to be self-reli-ant from the start. “We learned to do ev-erything by ourselves,” he said.

Zmorrod’s fellow Palestinians were wary of the project at first. All they knew of the circus was what they’d seen on television. They pictured elephants and lion tamers and, worst of all, girls clad in sequined bikinis dangling from a tra-peze—the sort of thing no Palestinian

Instead of words, they speak the language of juggling and acrobatics.


family would want for their daughters. “The original challenge was proving that we could have a circus while respecting the culture, traditions, and religion in Palestine,” Zmorrod said. Their first production, Circus Behind the Wall, reassured the Palestinian audiences. The show used trapeze, acrobatics, juggling, aerial silk performance, and other circus skills—but no words—to tell narratives of two sisters and two lovers separated by Israel’s wall around the West Bank. The show endeared the circus to the wider Palestinian community. “People saw that circus could tell the Palestinian story,” Zmorrod says.

Soon word of the Palestine Circus School drifted into the circus tents of Europe. Clowns and circus artists from Holland, Denmark, Italy, Australia and elsewhere visited Palestine to run work-shops or collaborate with the PCS on performances. So have the multinational members of Clowns Without Borders. The PCS has, in turn, sent members beyond Palestine’s disputed borders

to per form and tra in in Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and France. And Canada. With the support of the inter-national circus community, and with an ambition Zmorrod admits is near cra-zy, the PCS plans on earning recogni-tion within the next few years as the world’s twelfth accredited professional circus school.

For the first few years, the circus lacked a permanent home. The company moved between a couple of theatres in Ramallah, a garage in an industrial zone of al-Bireh, and a space at a technology centre run by Christian Evangelicals. In 2011, the PCS finally moved into more permanent digs, a restored historical building in Birzeit. The PCS, though, reaches far beyond their white-stone

headquarters. Trainers run workshops for children in Jenin, Hebron, Bethlehem and in refugee camps. Their “Mobile Circus” brings performances to audiences throughout the West Bank. Most other Palestinian cultural events—concerts, poetry readings, and art exhibits—occur only in Ramallah and cater to the city’s upper-middle-class. By bringing circus to the oft-forgotten hinterlands, and by offering performances that are almost always free, Zmorrod has created one of Palestine’s truly democratic art forms.

Nayef Othman joined the PCS in 2007. The circus discovered him tending bar in the lounge above Ramallah’s Al-Kasaba Theatre, which they were using at the time as a rehearsal space. Othman used to watch the performers practise before his bartending shifts. He was born and raised in the al-Fara’s refugee camp, and like many from the camps who grow up with little access to culture or contact with wider Palestinian society, Oth-man was timid and introverted. “Before circus, I wasn’t in an open mind,” he told

me when I first met him in Birzeit before he travelled to Montreal. “I was a very shy person. I was shy with strangers. I didn’t talk with girls.”

The circus fascinated him, however, and Zmorrod invited Othman to join them. He proved to be a natural and Zmor-rod offered Othman a position as the circus’ first full-time paid trainer. Othman excelled at the physical elements of the circus and quickly evolved into one of the company’s most skilled performers. But what most impressed Zmorrod was Othman’s gift for inspiring young people. Othman’s influence on Palestinian chil-dren, and the influence of the school as a whole, has been extraordinary. What-ever initial misgivings parents might have harboured about the circus faded in

the face of the gains their children made in the care of Zmorrod and Devliegh-ere (Papa and Mama Circus, as they are known), and trainers like Othman.

“When I started in Hebron, the kids were throwing the juggling balls,” Zmor-rod said. “But after two or three months of circus training, these same children started to say ‘sorry’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.” As they learned to juggle diablos and do handstands, the children also learned about teamwork, confidence, and self-esteem. Their grades improved. They even stopped littering.

“And they don’t buy Israeli products,” Zmorrod added. Third on a list of eleven rules taped to a bulletin board—right after “respect and communicate and listen when somebody speaks” and “keep a clean environment”—is a mandate to shun anything produced in Israel. The conflict infiltrates every aspect of Pales-tine life and is impossible to avoid, even among the bright innocence of the uni-cycles and coloured juggling clubs. The PCS’s formerly warm relationship with Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil soured last summer when the Cirque disregarded their calls to boycott Israel and performed in Tel Aviv. Cirque du Soleil, in a gesture of consolation, offered Zmorrod’s stu-dents and trainers free tickets to their show in Jordan and accommodation in Amman. Zmorrod turned them down. “Our dignity comes first,” he says. “I do not want pity for the Palestinians.”

In Montreal, Othman told me he couldn’t wait to go home to Palestine. It had nothing to do with the cold, but with his yearning to continue his work with Palestinian children, especially those who, like him, come from refugee camps. The circus offers these children something productive, and “protects” them from despair and humiliation. “The Israelis want you to throw stones,” Othman told me. “And why do you have to give them what they want? Instead of going to the checkpoint and selling chewing gum, come to the circus and we’ll teach you how to play with diablos. Instead of going on the street and throw-ing stones, we’ll teach you to play with juggling balls.”

– Marcello Di Cintio

As they learned to juggle diablos and do handstands, the children also learned about teamwork, confidence, and self-esteem.

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SHuT EyESleep, Don’t Fail Me Now

’ve always been envious of people who say they fall asleep easily. The lucky

ones who have never had insomnia, who sleep on planes, who’ve never needed to take a sleeping pill. If you tell such people about your nights spent staring at the ceiling, hours spent checking the clock or pacing the hallways, headaches from lack of sleep, they will blink, stare at you, and shake their heads. It all start-ed early. When I was a child, I would occa-sionally throw temper tantrums so I could exhaust myself enough to fall asleep. At a young age, I remember telling my mother I wished she would just hit me over the head to knock me unconscious.

During Girl Guides camp, I sat awake in the tent, reading by a flashlight, listening to the sounds of snoring all around me.

Now, I’ll go through periods of sleep-ing well and then my insomnia will resur-face. I could have a problem sleeping if someone looks at me the wrong way. I’m affected by disturbing movies or books, too much caffeine, inadequate exercise, working after dinner, noise, light in the room, stress, personal problems, and temperatures that are too hot or too cold. Over the years, I’ve had to call in sick to jobs not because I was actually sick, but because I was exhausted. Guided medita-tions, warm baths, hot milk, aromathera-py, and enough sleep-inducing herbal tea to fill a tea shop—I’ve tried them all.

Not that it helps much, but I’m not alone. Statistics Canada reports that

approximately 3.3 million Canadians over the age of fifteen have a sleep disor-der that affects their physical or mental health. Insomnia is the most common, but other disorders include sleep apnea, sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, and rest-less leg syndrome. Dr. Ruth Benca, the director of the Wisconsin Sleep Labora-tory and Clinic, has called insomnia a serious medical condition linked to depression, diabetes, hypertension, drug abuse, and death. My own insomnia worsened in 2008 when I took a job work-ing from home—there was no longer any separation between work life and home life. As a classic A-type personality, my head is always filled with ideas for sto-ries, questions I need to research, to-do lists. Working from home meant my ‘off’ switch was permanently set to ‘on.’ The

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solution seemed to be sleeping pills and, perhaps predicatably, it wasn’t long be-fore I was dependent.

I clearly remember the first time I used Zoplicone. I felt a deep, calm relief. I could knock myself out and avoid the torment of lying in bed for hours. I didn’t have to worry, or concentrate, or try to do all the other things I needed to do to get to sleep. I just took a pill. The writer Nic Sheff, a meth addict, wrote in his mem-oir, Tweaked, that “the first time he tried crystal meth, he felt like he had found the answer to all his problems.” I felt the same way about sleeping pills. But then I couldn’t stop. If I didn’t use the pills, I couldn’t sleep. When I accidentally ran out one day, the idea of trying to go to sleep without sleeping pills sent me into a panic. An addiction to any drug can take over every moment of a person’s life, and I devoted a lot of time to worrying about my pills. But after several long months of addiction, I eventually managed to wean myself off the pills; now I’m an occasional user on guard against habit.

But I do wonder if sleep dysfunction isn’t a direction too many of us are headed. Our fast-paced, screen-friendly culture is affecting many of us in our pursuit of sleep. The current emphasis on speed, getting more done, and being constantly plugged in has disconnected us from one of our most fundamental biological func-tions. Sometimes it seems I can’t go a day without talking to someone who is hav-ing trouble sleeping. It’s as if we’ve for-gotten how to be in touch with our own bodies. Have we lost the simple ability to recognize what’s supposed to happen at the end of our day?

In the summer of 2012, I attended a journalism conference in Sweden as part of a group of eleven other young journalists from around the world. I was prepared for room sharing but not bed sharing. My bed-mate (on a queen-sized bed) turned out to be an Argentin-ian journalist, who was, luckily, consid-erate and a daily bather, though it still remained quite uncomfortable. I took sleeping pills every night just to knock myself out. The only person in our group at ease with the arrangement was a Slovenian journalist who said this kind

of thing was common in her country. But for those of us from Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Argentina—and Can-ada—sleeping in such close quarters was awkward.

But it did make me wonder if the discomfort that comes from sleeping in close quarters was particular to the west-ern world and, further, if our problem with sleeplessness is a North American or western condition. My experiences in the developed world have rarely in-cluded sleeping in close quarters, but I’ve slept in public on ferry benches or in the homes of people I barely knew when

travelling in developing countries. It could be we’ve made sleep too neurotically private a ritual in North America—so pri-vate we’re unable to discuss it, and need to see trained specialists to help us figure out how to do it properly.

Or perhaps we’ve made it too much of a ritual altogether. Many of us now have an extensive pre-sleep routine. My bedtime custom is like another person’s yoga practice given the number of props involved: a mouthguard that prevents me from grinding my teeth, an eye mask, an ergonomic pillow.

One thing that’s clear, our relation-ship to sleep has become increasingly

BOTTLESFor so long sleepingunder glass. Ceiling tiles

sagged in stale breath. Every now and then

a gasp. The fan slicing out a stutter.

You can hide a bottleanywhere, you brag to me.

I feed you a mirage, a shatteredswig. Ice chips, one by one, trickling

your lip. You hold onto your shards in a Styrofoam cup. Melt them

into a shot. You can’t take back the bottles, when they fall,

they fall from so high, for so longrain stands in the sky

like blades. We hold out our tonguesto the lens of each drop

leavening the silence while you drymouth

the words.

–Jennifer Still

disordered and the lack of sleep impacts our health, our sanity, our safety, our pro-ductivity, and our personal relationships. My sleep doctor has given sleep, anxiety, and disorder training to the Canadian Olympic team and the Edmonton Oilers, which if nothing else at least makes

me feel I’m part of an elite roster of the sleepless. Working with him has certainly improved my relationship with sleep, but it ’s also persuaded me that there’s something fundamentally wrong with how our society approaches bedtime.

During my initial visits I learned more about “sleep hygiene,” which

means (if it’s good) that you only use your bedroom for sleep and intimate activities. You turn off your computer and television a few hours before bed, keep your phone and computer out of the bedroom, and cut down on or eliminate caffeine and alcohol. Of course, the average North

American does precisely the opposite in most of these cases. It turns out that in attempting to sleep well we’re not ac-tually supposed to surround ourselves with devices that beep and emit light, work odd shifts, keep buzzing phones in our bedrooms, or try to fall asleep after watching zombies rip people open on The Walking Dead. But sleep hygiene also

means getting enough exercise, keeping the bedroom dark, avoiding naps, and maintaining regular bedtimes and wake times—more things we have trouble achieving as a frenetic, results-based society.

We are in possession of lives that are complex and information-rich, but we seem to be increasingly failing to understand something utterly simple: we need sleep. Instead of listening to our bodies, we pay heed to the tasks we must accomplish, to daily demands, to the vast amounts of information we’re forced to absorb. We are supposedly becoming ever-more efficient in our waking life, yet we don’t seem to have the time to stop and acknowledge an emerging pattern, a trend sure to damage us as individuals and as a society: that more and more of us seem to be losing our simple ability to sleep. A rallying cry of attention seems called for, but Wake Up! is perhaps not quite right.

– Alexis Kienlen

I was prepared for room-sharing but not bed-sharing.My bed-mate was, luckily, considerate and a daily bather.

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t’s 5:30 in the morning, a few hours away from sunrise. I’m outside stok-

ing the wood-fired boiler at my brother’s place on Gabriola Island when a sud-den beam of light pins me to the boiler. Or so it seems. As if I were a butterfly

on display, stabbed between the shoul-der blades. Hard white light, slam-ming me against metal. I turn and see headlights at about a hundred feet. Aiming straight at me. I stare at them, expecting them to swing, back away.

I’m thinking the car must be heading for the ferry, and it’s people who’ve just realized they’ve forgotten something and are turning around to go home and get it. I move out of the path of the lights to a shrub near the boiler and watch the lights. They don’t move, and then they go off.

I hear nothing—the crackle of wood in the boiler, my breathing, the fan

EvERyTHING RuSTLES

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whirring—nothing. For a moment I’m still rational, still in my managing mode, the mode that got me out of bed that morn-ing—my last morning here—feeling happy, thinking of the useful, practical things I would do before leaving. I consider walking up the driveway to see what’s going on, but it ’s a long driveway. My brother’s place is on five acres, and the small spill of light from the house doesn’t

even reach me at the boiler, thirty feet away. I’ve left the flashlight inside. I imag-ine myself halfway up the driveway and fully surrounded by dark and emptiness in the tunnel of trees, with all those black shapes and the rustle of small animals in the brush. A thread of fear unfurls inside of me and makes my breath go shallow, my heart race.

As I head towards the house I regret

every mystery novel I’ve ever read, every TV thriller, every scary movie. In all of them, it’s a woman. She’s alone and she’s doomed. It doesn’t matter that by instinct and luck I have weathered some situa-tions. I have read In Cold Blood. I know what happens to people in isolated places in the dark. I go in the house and close the door behind me. It ’s a glass door. The murderers/rapists will see me at the same time as I’ll see them. We’ll lock eyes through the glass, and they’ll see that it’s all over but for the killing. I turn the dead-bolt and go to my nephew’s room where there are blinds I can peer through, but his desk is up against the window, and I need to be close. I go to the laundry room instead where my brother has installed machines that look like they’ve been de-signed by NASA, as if laundry is a serious venture. Maybe it is. Maybe I missed the memo. The window is long and deep and looks out on the driveway. I lean against the wall, the lights off. I can see where my sister-in-law parks her van, and past that to the rock at the centre of their turn-around, the shrubs growing around it, and beyond them, the empty driveway, the dark forest.

It’s early December, that time of year when everyone is in a low-level panic, and the dark seems to go on forever. All week I have been sitting in front of a different window on the other side of the house watching light and trying not to. Why go to a beautiful place when you want to concentrate? What was I thinking? In the late afternoon, the sun would pull its light back in, and there would be patterns across the sea and shadows in the seams between the mountains. In the morning, light seemed to spread like a melon open-ing, a slow mystery, an unfolding.

As I stare at the rocks on the drive-way, hoping to see light growing on them, I imagine what it will feel like to hear footsteps approaching. I imagine my heart scuttling up into my throat for protection. I imagine myself simply float-ing up into the air, the cells inside of me like dead fish floating on the surface of the big bag of water that I am.

“The more you feel fear, the more your brain has the capacity to feel it,” I


read somewhere. It’s like anything you exercise: your abdominals, your math skills. Our minds aren’t that different from the rest of us. They get better at things with use, and they get flabby and lazy with disuse. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land.” “To him who is in fear ev-erything rustles,” said Sophocles. I find these quotes later, when I’m safe and rational at home. In the laundry room, I’m not thinking of beautiful writing, I’m thinking of the westerns I watched as a kid where the good guys holed up in the house while the bad guys gathered out-side with guns. How could anyone bear that level of anticipation? I wonder, and I’m serious. If someone gave me a gun, I think I might just shoot myself to get over the suspense.

I stare out the window for at least an-other ten minutes, a part of me aware that imagining Hoss Cartwright as my sav-iour is a sign I’ve been alone too long. The driveway remains grey and silent. Fear needs information to sustain it, I’ll read later on. It’s anxiety that can run away with you. I go into the kitchen and make oatmeal. It’s still dark. The windows are still black expanses all around me. Ma-levolence could still be outside, but I push the thought away and look up sunrise on the computer to find out what time it will be. The sun will rise at 7:56 a.m., I read on my computer screen. Actual sunrise is the time when the leading limb of the sun first rises over the horizon. Limb, I discover, is an official term. I think of sci-entists who get to name things, who give the sun a limb and are still taken serious-ly. I imagine a sun with an elbow poking up over the edge of the horizon, a stretch-ing sun, a running sun, a dancing sun.

My oatmeal is ready. I place a chair facing east and sit with the bowl in my lap. Beyond the verandah, the light is coming; the sea, from a distance, looks like a f lat plate. There are dark amor-phous shadows on it and a boat making a line in a single pale streak of sea. Be-yond it the mountains and above them a tangerine seam opening; then shades of grey and light. A crow calls. The trees, slender boles with feathery tops, stand like sentinels. Between them the dark

clings while the sky and sea fade to the day’s ordinariness, and the land around my brother’s house reveals itself in its broad and innocent emptiness.

On my way out, I pass the neighbour’s driveway, see how close its entrance is to my brother’s, and see a car parked half-way along it. I go home. I tell friends. I’m shocked by how frightened I was. It was a minor incident, a non-event, and I am con-scious each time I relay the story of reveal-ing my own anxiety more than of telling people something that will titillate their fear centers. Still, many of the women I tell nod their heads in recognition. “You went outside in the dark alone?” my sister-in-law says, and I feel a rush of gratitude because she acknowledged my fear. “It never goes away, does it?” my friend Jean says. “It’s that awful feeling you get at night when you hear footsteps behind you.”

But some of the people I tell look at me askance, and I feel a flicker of shame as if I’m revealing something too personal, or I’m showing myself to be nervous, skittish, flighty—qualities I’ve always

disdained. I think of all that time I spent when I was younger dealing with this very fear—I studied Aikido for years. What happened to all that? Where did my confidence go?

When I tell my friend Luanne about the experience, she looks at me with her intelligence, and I have that feeling again, not pinned exactly, but exposed. As if I’m being seen without my coverings, the chimera I’ve built over the years. Luanne is my friend. I know she’s not trying to threaten me. But that doesn’t matter. I feel it anyway. I tell her I think it’s related to an experience in a campground years ago. She shakes her head no. “I think this is something about your brother,” she says.

“No, no. It’s not about my brother,” I say, though as I do, I think, maybe. Was I so afraid of wrecking his beautiful house that I created a fantasy of a bogeyman to distract me? Or was I afraid of the writing I was trying to do? “When we fear things I think that we wish for them . . . every fear hides a wish,” said David Mamet.

COPINGShe can’t tell her bus pass from a birdso knows the pills have found their way to the microphonein her brain and she’ll have to walk. The mating ritual of the clouds is pornographic and she blushes wondering why it’s even allowed. A part of her had sat down many years ago and refused to get up. This is who she feeds these pills to in the hopes that she’ll be trusted and then perhaps liked. Her therapist has not weathered well and is now leaking, water getting into his voice so when he says mother even the word is bloated. Appointments had to be cancelled and a new fear of drowning introduced to her mirror. She is coping. She is coping like an explorer cutting into the leather of resolve and stewing it, convincing herself that this is all worth it. She is walking because when she puther hand into her purse she came across a bird that apparentlyhad died in her care though she doesn’t recall how she got it.This may be the work of the pills. She takes them before she visits.Her past is a vulture, hunched like a hospital and her mother is in there, somewhere, waiting for her. Expectant. One cloud has birthed a whole brood of clouds; this is what they do.They mate for the day and soon their young are strong enoughto feed themselves and then the whole process begins again.

–Sue Goyette

WWW.eiGHteenBriDGeS.COM eiGHteen BriDGeS SPRING 2013 1�

I tell a therapist about the incident, my over-the-top, outside of all rational thinking fear. She says: “You were afraid because you went into the house. You acted scared, so you were scared.” I con-sider the moment when I decided not to confront the headlights and remember how that had felt like a minor defeat at the time, but I still want to argue, what if there had been a car full of yobs, intent on some kind of mischief?

A fRIEND SENDS ME A LIST Of HER fEARS.It’s long. Some make me smile: “When I was little I was afraid of the bogey man under my bed, some unknown devil who would grab me by the ankles and haul me down to hell. I was afraid of the bears that I feared lived in the front little porch area off my parents’ bedroom.” But it’s awful too: “Now I’m afraid of being attacked by a man—raped and/or murdered. Since I know it can happen. I didn’t really believe it until it happened to me.”

“DO ONE THING EvERy DAy THAT SCARES yOu,”Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous quote ex-horts me from a poster on the wall at Lu-lulemon where I’m waiting for my daugh-ter to try on some overpriced shorts.

“I’m embarrassed,” I say to my daugh-ter, and I’m not talking about the shorts. “I think everybody is,” she says. “You feel childish when you’re scared.” After I get over the shock of her mature response, I say, “I guess we think we’re always sup-posed to be in control, at least I do.”

“And then we find out we’re not.”I think of the wisdom of the young

and then of intersections, those moments when my view of the world goes skewiff somehow and I realize I have to readjust my thinking. Carl Jung said that midlife is the time when we need to become who we truly are, rather than who we were socialized to be. If we do this right, he says—in much better language—we won’t be so pissed off when we die. I like this sort of thinking. It’s hard, though, to look back and not get stuck, and it’s even harder to look at where I am, and not think, how did I end up like this?

A couple of years earlier when I’d been arguing with my son over his cur-few, foolishly trying to answer his repeat-

ed, “But, why?” I said something about the streets being dangerous at night. I was thinking of a friend whose son had been beaten up, just because, as he was standing waiting for the bus one night. I didn’t want to tell him, but I wanted him to be aware, to be careful, to be safe. “I don’t want to be afraid all the time,” he said. “I don’t want to live my life in fear.”

I uSED TO BE BRAvER WHEN I WAS yOuNG—or seemed to be. I hitchhiked, climbed mountains, skied steep hills, and for a brief time in the seventies, lived by my-self in a truck with no lock on the door. Now I’m older, it seems that fear has moved in. It leers and pulls at me from around every corner, behind every thought, reminding me that decisions have conse-quences. Accidents and bad luck happen. Evil exists. I think of little old women cowering alone behind their curtains, peering out at the world. Is that where I’m headed?

“Your amygdala has been damaged,” the therapist tells me. “It’s overactive.” I wonder how she knows this as I sit across from her, slumping in my chair, shoulders hunched as though expecting blows. I imagine my amygdala all pumped up, too full of itself, as if it has been going to the gym all these years while the rest of my brain has been lying around smoking pot and watching bad TV.

At home, I read and read. I find out that people who love risk are more sensi-tive to dopamine, or is it less? And that’s why they like bigger scares? I find out that the rush of adrenaline dissipates fairly quickly after a fright, but the corti-sol lingers, making us fuzzy headed and stupid. And I find out that the message from the amygdala to the prefrontal cor-tex travels a path as clear as a freeway; while the return pathway that reason travels is narrow and twisty, like a coun-try road with sheep lying on it.

You can have a predisposition to anxi-ety, apparently. A study done with light and minor shocks and images shows that the people who recovered more quickly from the rude treatment are more likely to have a larger structure in the brain near the amygdala. This structure, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, inhibits

the activity of the amygdala, but for peo-ple who suffer from post-traumatic stress and those of us with more garden-variety anxiety (i.e. those who fuss over what they said to their neighbour three days earlier over the dahlias), the structure is too thin or too small, and so every time the amygdala gets even a little excited, the barrage of messages saying Danger! Danger! Run! Hide! Do something! Quick! doesn’t stop.

I’m looking for excuses, I know. It’s not my fault. It’s my brain structure, my hormones, my over-indulged imagina-tion. I study a photo of my mother that I stuck on our fridge a while after she died. She’s wearing a toque, knit from multiple neon-bright colours, which sits up high on her head, her grey hair sticking out un-derneath. We all made fun of that toque, but she didn’t care. She’s on a ski hill with a walkie-talkie in her hand. A laugh has taken her over, and she’s inside of it.

Is this a non sequitur—or an image of how I want to be?

MONTHS LATER, A fRIEND OffERS ME HER PLACEfor a week when she and her husband are going away. I hesitate, thinking of my fear of being alone and isolated and men-tion it to another friend who says, “You know a woman was murdered near there in the woods.”

“I know,” I say, wondering if she’s tell-ing me because she wants to warn—or scare—me, or if she’s giving me more material for my essay.

My friend’s place has a large patio with a big glass door. Light spills through it. The house is stucco and clematis grows across the front of it in long sweeping strands that remind me of a grape vine. I buy flowers and put them out on the patio, so it feels like I’m somewhere in the Medi-terranean, and this makes me happy, but there are a lot of doors in the house, and every time I lock one a tiny finger of fear shows me how old it is, reminds me how alone I am, how vulnerable.

I call up a friend who survived a bru-tal rape when she was younger, and then she survived the trial, which in the seven-ties was another sort of assault. We talk about martial arts. Elaine studied karate for five years. “But I’m still scared,” she

said. “Nothing has changed. It’s scary out there. The threat of violence is there, even when the actual violence isn’t.” The certainty in her voice surprises me. I was expecting her to sound nervous, like I am. This is bracing, like a slap or cold water. I feel something in me waking up. And wonder if I’m two people, one who is afraid and one who is angry.

Elaine continues: “I hate it in movies where some guy is getting beaten and the woman stands there screaming help-lessly with her hands over her mouth. I think, why don’t you help your guy, kick the attacker or gouge out his eyeballs. Though,” she says, pausing a moment, “I wonder if I could do that, gouge eyeballs that is.”

“But if it was your life or his?”The martial arts, though long in the

past, still help us be more aware, we agree. We look around us; we keep one part of our minds attuned to the periphery, to be ready for surprises from anywhere. If she feels vulnerable now, Elaine says, “I try

not to look like a victim. I bring my arms out from my body as I’m walking as if I have big muscles. I try to look like, don’t mess with me. It’s all part of karate. I think about the reaction, to block, punch, kick . . . Yes, I have lots of rage. But you know. You keep your mouth shut.”

I hang up, thinking of rage and si-lence, the veneers we place over our dan-gerous selves. I look for Aikido videos on YouTube, where I find my old Sensei from Japan. I smile watching him move in cyberspace, remember his chuckling laugh and the grip of his fingers on my wrist, sharp as a snakebite.

I practice Tai-no-tenkan in the hall-way, a deceptively simple step and a turn that we did at the beginning of every practice to warm up, to centre ourselves. “It ’s in your hips,” Sensei would say. “Your hara. Your power is there,” and he’d point to the place where the ties of his hakama would join in front of his belly button. I think of my hara and pivot on the smooth floor, thinking the way I used to,

of holding myself low and powerful and balanced and ready for anything.

Before I go for a walk, I close the blinds, even though it’s still daylight, be-cause my friend had asked me to, and I see how my mind wants to inject some-thing fearful into the moment—a strange car swinging into the driveway, a figure on the other side of the glass—and I dismiss them, recognizing how much I seem to like scaring myself.

I walk a path through the woods out to the Fraser River. The land on the far shore is open, the view filled with light and space. I’m happy out there. Maybe beauty is another kind of awakening. In time, my body and mind swing into rhythm, my torso lengthens, and I feel the health and strength of my body, everything in concert, everything flow-ing in a rhythm bigger than I am, as if I’ve clicked into some sort of current that’s always out there, and that as long as I’m walking inside of it, I am invincible.

– Jane Silcott

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000EB6-NWP-FP.indd 1 2/27/13 2:06:53 PM


IT’S THE LAW

n January of this year, Australia introduced the world’s first man-

datory plain packaging laws for ciga-rettes. All cigarettes sold there must come in drab green packaging, with only a small, identically-sized, brand name identifier. Each carton must also include warnings and graphic pictures related to the evils of smoking (for ex-ample, a close-up of an eye being read-ied for surgery under the bold heading SMOKING CAUSES BLINDNESS).

While Australia has taken this to the extreme, the need to provide warnings on some of the products we use is obvious to most of us. It makes sense that cigarette packages require an acknowledgment of the harms that smoking causes. Ditto for guns. More prosaically, we get used to things like canisters of Drano telling us to use it only for cleaning, not drinking. But what about many of the other products that we buy regularly, which are also of-ten littered with similar proscriptions?

THIS WINTER I PuRCHASED A NEW OuTDOORextension cord. You know the kind: rugged black covered plug ends, bright orange heavy duty ribbed casing, “CSA approved” markings on an attached tag. The model I bought came with an additional short, sharp directive: “Cau-tion: fully extend before using.”

Lawyers love to pick apart the mul-tiple meanings of words and phrases. In this case I was paralyzed before I began. What was I supposed to do? Was I required to fully extend the cord just the first time, after which I was free to coil it up and use it to my heart’s content unextended? Or did it mean I needed to extend it before each use? Could I coil it up while using it, as long as I had done the extending part first? These thoughts ran rapidly through my mind. I even playfully considered whether the label was referring to me: before I used it was I supposed to walk erect with my arms fully raised above my head? The meaning was not entirely clear. And that

got me pondering the broader meanings behind warning labels.

There are two main types of product warnings: those required by government and those offered voluntarily by a manu-facturer. Tobacco, gun, and hazardous product labels, for example, are generally mandated. These labels are aimed at protecting the consumer. Clothing, fur-niture, and extension cord labels, by contrast, are mainly voluntary. Voluntary warning labels serve other purposes.

Take cigarettes, drain cleaners, and ex-tension cords: each falls on a different point on a continuum that begins with mandato-ry, extremely restrictive labelling and ends with mere voluntary warnings. Cigarettes lie at the harshest end of the spectrum; Australia leads the way but most western democracies subject tobacco to stringent labelling requirements. That’s because cig-arettes are addictive and harmful. It thus makes sense that warnings about their det-rimental health effects and their addictive properties should be obligatory.

A little further along the spectrum lies a common product l ike Drano. Labelling requirements for Drano, albeit mandated, are less onerous than for ciga-rettes: the labels need only contain a few suitable symbols and danger warnings.

On one level, this relaxation of stan-dards for Drano compared to cigarettes is incongruous. In some ways, Drano is riskier than tobacco. Its active ingredient, sodium hydroxide, is terribly harmful— ingesting it could have lethal consequences. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if it was banned. Yet, rather than do that, we’ve col-lectively decided that we are better off hav-ing chemical drain cleaners available to us, so long as we are apprised of their hazards.

In other words, a warning label is thought to help ensure that a product like Drano will be used carefully, in the approved manner, without requiring the more draco-nian standards warranted by tobacco. Our relationship to drain cleaner has, in effect, been determined to be positive; it has a net benefit to our lives. Rather than stringently regulating its use—as we do for cigarettes, by imposing tough labelling requirements and limiting their availability—we implic-itly assume individuals will be responsible enough to prevent harm to themselves from Drano without much governmental oversight. Warning labels, hazardous prod-uct symbols, and childproof caps provide sufficient protection to allow Drano to be on supermarket shelves, available to the home plumber in us all.

At the opposite end of the warning label spectrum from tobacco are everyday prod-ucts like extension cords. These warnings, of the “fully extend before using” variety, are not mandated. Instead of acting as an ad-monishment to act safely, their true purpose is often to provide a legal waiver of liability. In the event of an accident, they are intended to protect the manufacturer from liability. That’s why they are often so oddly specific, and maddeningly obtuse. They usually re-flect the fact that someone, somewhere, had an accident in a circumstance akin to what the warning label warns against, sued the manufacturer, and probably won. They rep-resent a manufacturer’s hope that they won’t be sued, at least not for a repeat performance of the same bad thing that happened before.

What’s the point, then, of warnings? If you think about it, many labels, especially non-mandatory ones, are little more than a pretense. If we really wanted to protect people against accidents, should we not insist that more be done? We could have laws that ban the sale of any product that kills, like cigarettes. We could make manufacturers leave no stone unturned in ensuring safe products. We could demand more than perfunctory warnings on little tags: for example, mandatory licensing or training classes before using danger-ous products (imagine going to a govern-ment-mandated Saturday morning class, “How to Use an Extension Cord: Part I”).

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But of course we don’t do any of this. A certain number of deaths or accidents is the price society is willing to pay so the rest of us can enjoy our conveniences and habits.

Yet does that explain why cigarette warnings are more dire than Drano and both more rigidly controlled than ex-tension cords? Given that the number of fatalities directly attributable to one smoked cigarette must be fewer than those due to one misused extension cord—and here I mean a clear, direct fa-tality attributable to a single incident, not one based on long term aggregation—this is a question worth considering. By their very nature, cigarettes cause harm slowly and cumulatively. Extension cord failure, on the other hand, can be imme-diate and catastrophic: accident statistics show that dozens of people each year are electrocuted by faulty extension cords. Of course, the comparison is not quite fair; just because one object can kill in-stantly while the other harms over time doesn’t tell the whole story. That is where regulation steps in. Differences between labelling requirements are pithy remind-ers of contrasting policy choices govern-ments make about products and how to address the associated health and safety risks of each.

At the heart of the various regulatory approaches lies a legal choice about pub-lic policy. Extension cords seem to serve a useful purpose: sometimes you need to move electricity further away from its outlet. The benefits of Drano are also apparent (although perhaps less so from the perspective of our sewage systems and the environment). For cigarettes, the benefits are less obvious (at least to non-smokers). So the warning requirements reflect, to some extent, a correlation to the social utility of the product.

The system probably doesn’t work as well as it could, but this is part of a larger ideological question. In the meantime, it’s still worth considering what those labels stand for. Only by do-ing so can we say we’ve fully extended ourselves before using.

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THE DESCENT Of MANMiddle age, climate change, and the end of skiing.

By DON GILLMOR

HUMANKIND


Middle age, climate change, and the end of skiing.

I STOOD uNDER A CLOuDLESS SKynear the peak of Mont Fort, at Verbier, Switzerland, staring at the glaciers of Grand Combin, which shone like starched sheets. Mont Fort is one of the steepest ski runs in Europe. Most of the people who came up on the tram went back down on it. My friend Ken and I had come to Europe to ski and escape ourselves. We were in our fifties, a shadowy decade. Looking down at the can-ton of Valais, I felt a combination of exhilara-tion and fear and simple awe. The world laid out, endless in its possibilities. Though the price was a treacherous descent.


It was late in the season and the moguls were large, rutted from spring thaws, and shiny with ice. A few people picked their way down carefully, making long hesitant traverses across the hill.

We stood in that familiar lacuna, waiting for the right moment to go down, a moment when the path was clear, when courage was high. After several minutes, Ken launched himself without warning. On the second turn, he crossed his skis and fell. He slid quickly on the ice. Both skis blew off, then he lost both poles. He hurtled down the steep pitch headfirst, picking up speed, his helmeted head bouncing off the moguls. It occurred to me that he might not stop until the bottom, more than 300 metres away. There was a crevasse near the bottom, off to the side. It was marked with colourful racing poles to warn skiers away. He was moving at high speed in that direction.

Speed was part of the attraction of skiing for us. Beside me, near the tram-line, there was the residue of a speed course that had been set up a month earlier. Speed skiing is simple: you get into a tuck and go as fast as possible. The skis are 240 centimetres long, and specific aerodynamic helmets and cloth-ing have been developed for this rarified sport. There are only about thirty courses in the world. Speed skiing requires a very steep start and a long run out. The fastest anyone has ever gone on a pair of skis is 251.4 kilometres an hour, achieved by an Italian, Simone Origone. What is remarkable is that he reached that velocity in fifteen seconds, roughly as fast as the 690 horsepower Lamborghini Aventador (which gets to 250 km/h in 14.4 seconds). It was Origone who set the course record at Verbier with a speed of 219 km/h.

In my youth, speed had been a vis-ceral affirmation, an extension of my natural optimism (I won’t crash, I will live forever) and, more, part of my incho-ate search for limits and meaning. But it had become something else in middle age, something I hadn’t fully articulated, though I still sought speed, perhaps simply as a way to prolong youth. Skiing has remained a balance between hope and fear, the hope that it will preserve

me, that it will amplify my existence, and the fear that it might do the opposite.

Ken had managed to get himself turned around so that his feet were point-ing downhill. His boots sent up sprays of snow and ice as he rocketed down. The late morning sun was brilliant. Had we waited another hour or so the hill would have softened up. People stopped to watch Ken, a Gore-tex missile now clearly heading toward the crevasse. I had a sudden vision of gleaming Swiss hospitals, the sense that I was witnessing a cautionary tale.

He skied, he had told me, to take himself out of his own head, a head that was filled with screenplays, resentment, political rants, women, and, more than anything, himself. A head that struggled to contain an expansive ego that now flowed over the moguls 100 metres below.

The act of skiing is visceral, and at a certain age it provides welcome relief from our thoughts, our mortgages, and disappointments. We were both aware that there wouldn’t be many more years of skiing like this. We could ski into old age, but it would be a different sport, a different experience.

Switzerland was having a nervous year. More than half of Verbier was closed, a brown ring around the bottom of the resort. While it was late April, this was unusual. Swiss glaciers, like glaciers everywhere, were in retreat, and had lost eighteen percent of their surface area be-tween 1985 and 2000. Seventy percent of the Swiss glaciers could be gone in the next three decades. The glaciers feed the Swiss river system, and half of the country’s power is hydro-electric. Low river levels will affect energy, transport-ation, and the many ingenious farms scat-tered through the valleys and crawling up the mountainside.

Swiss ski resorts have already felt the effects of glacial retreat. In 2005, Andermatt wrapped the disappearing Gurschen glacier in a protective foil made of polyester and polypropylene designed to keep the sun off and the cold in. Mont Fort followed suit.

Standing at the top of Mont Fort in the perfect spring sun, the snow receding below me, Ken slowing down, I won-

dered if the sport would die before I did. Perhaps we would al l go together. Though Ken seemed poised to go first.

Two hundred and fifty metres below me, Ken finally came to a stop. He lay motionless for more than a minute, then one arm rose and weakly waved, indicat-ing he was alive, at least. His head wasn’t occupied with the messy details of his life now. He was mentally gauging the pain, tracking its source and intensity. Was anything broken? Had the helmet saved him from concussion? He had a bad back that was now much worse. He had knee issues, a sore wrist, and a lifelong case of existential angst, and he travelled with a cache of celebrity-grade painkillers that would come in handy.

I started down, stopping to pick up his skis and poles, moving carefully on the ice, muscles straining, my head empty of conscious thought, reduced to a purely physical being, focused on survival. Speed was no longer a friend; I was no longer young.

I LEARNED TO SKI ON A SMALL HILL PERCHEDinconveniently on the endless prairie. Mount Agassiz had a modest vertical of about 150 metres. It featured one T-bar and a rope tow that ran off the flywheel of a tractor, and was operated by a grumpy farmer who cursed us when we fell off or slid backward on the ice. The hill was a three hour drive from Winnipeg and rare-ly seemed to be warmer than -20 F, and we had to stop every half hour to warm up in the modest chalet. From the sum-mit you could see conifers and low scrub and hard-scrabble farmland that had been cultivated a century earlier by hopeful im-migrants. My Scottish great-grandfather had tried to farm to the east, but finally gave up on that impossible land and moved to the city to become a minister in a particularly pessimistic branch of Calvinism called, paradoxically, the Free Presbyterians.

Mount Agassiz is one of three in North America named for Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1808-1873), a Swiss geologist who was the first to suggest that the Earth had experienced an ice age. He argued that the ice age replaced the biblical deluge, that all (sinful) life was wiped out then began anew.


It was a suspension of not just gravity, but time.


Agassiz kept his faith and resisted Darwin’s evolutionary theory for his en-tire life. During the Pleistocene epoch, glaciers ploughed through Manitoba, leaving a few upturned hills that were gradual on the side where the ice was com-ing from and broken off where the ice had pulled down huge slabs of rock as it went by. Geologically, this glacial till plain was an unlikely spot for a ski resort.

When we were seventeen, a group of us drove 1500 kilometres across the frozen plains to ski at Lake Louise in the Rocky Mountains. Going up the Olympic chair lift, staring back at the immense scale of the valley and the Slate Range that stretches beyond it, the possibilities of not just the sport were suddenly laid out, but the possibilities of life. Chief among them was the concept of freedom. In part, it was the post-adolescent freedom of being on the road, of being in another place, unsu-pervised. But the summit of Lake Louise invited a larger sense of freedom, a phenomenological escape that changed my sense of the physical world. Above it all was the ecstasy of speed, the harmless physics of the prairie given way to a thrill-ing acceleration that was both existential and visceral.

The search for speed may be a natural defense against aging. Time does in fact slow the closer you get to the speed of light, though you have to get closer than fifty km/h. It is certainly a useful symbol for trying to escape the inescapable.

Our Banff trip was a collage of hard skiing and wasted nights. Our lack of suc-cess with the few girls we met was epic. We turned to adolescent stunts: locking one of our number out of the hotel room, naked. We drank beer in crowded taverns and wished we were dancing with girls and stayed until closing time hoping for a miracle and woke up at 7 a.m. and ate pancakes and caught the first lift up.

No one returned to Mount Agassiz. It was irretrievably diminished now, a fondly remembered childhood relic. The following year I moved to Calgary and started skiing seriously, getting out fifty days or more each year. But after six years even the yawning scale of the Banff area became too familiar. It seemed as finite as Mount Agassiz had. Or perhaps

it was my life that was becoming finite, and I needed to get away from ingrained habits and familiar hills.

After graduating from university, I went to France to ski. In the Grenoble train station I saw a man my age wearing a ski jacket who told me that Val d’Isére was the place to go; that’s where he was heading. He looked like Robert Redford and introduced himself as Bob. He had seen the Redford film Downhill Racer several times and had adopted the star’s mannerisms, and occasionally seemed to be acting scenes from the movie, without crediting them.

At the time, Downhill Racer was a touchstone for a certain kind of skier. Redford’s character, David Chappelet, was a perfect late-sixties anti-hero, hand-some and aloof and a bit of a shit. The movie trailer had a voiceover that asked the quasi-existential question “How far must a man go to get from where he’s at?” That question didn’t really parse, but it sounded deep, and Downhill Racer was a gritty, European-looking film, and I want-ed to be like Redford, though not as badly as my new friend Bob. I spent the whole season in Val d’Isere, living in the basement of a massive eighteenth-century stone house with Bob and a handful of expatri-ates. The scale of the resort was immense; we could ski to other villages, to Italy.

Going up a large tram one day, a man who turned out to be from Brooklyn rec-ognized me as North American, and said, “Want to take a walk on the wild side?” In an urban setting, this could mean a number of different, largely uncomfort-able things. But here it meant he knew of a secluded powder-filled bowl. I followed. We climbed and traversed for three hours from where the lift let us off, sweat-ing heavily and panting in the thin air.

We finally arrived at a massive, very steep, untouched bowl. We hurtled down, floating in the bottomless powder. The run took less than two minutes, but that speed and the ethereal sensation of the light powder made it feel longer, a suspension of not just gravity, but time. It was like a dream of skiing, perfect and rhythmic, two minutes of uncomplicated harmony. I was too young to grasp how few of these moments there would be.

The sense of freedom, the possi-bilities of life that I’d first sensed at Lake Louise, were all magnified in Val d’Isére. Just over the mountain was the world conjured by my literary imagination: Paris and Spain and doomed love affairs with tragic Europeans.

In the spring, my peripatetic Calgary girlfriend flew over and the tenor of my expatriate life changed. We skied and argued, then left for Italy. We ended up in Greece, admitting finally that our relation-ship, which had been largely defined by break-ups, wasn’t working. She decided to fly home and I stayed. After she got in the taxi to the airport, I walked to the harbour and sat on the hard sand of a vast empty industrial beach at Piraeus. On the horizon, a figure approached in the heat shimmer, a woman carrying something. It turned out to be a wooden box filled with cigarettes that she carried with the aid of a neck strap, the kind that cigarette girls in nineteen-thirties nightclubs used to have. She stood over me. “Cigarette?” she said in a heavy accent. She was perhaps forty, and her legs, which were at my eye level, had small bruises on them. I bought a package of Marlboros and sat on the deserted beach smoking, pondering the end of my relationship with my girlfriend.

It proved to be the effective end of my relationship with skiing for the next decade as well. I moved east and ski-ing withered amid the dwarfish hills of Ontario. I was trying to be a writer, and my world became almost exclusively urban. On those few occasions that I did get out skiing, I was reminded of Mount Agassiz and its limitations and the whole experience depressed me. Years went by without skiing.

In my thirties, I inched back, going to Quebec a few times. By my forties, the winters seemed increasingly unreliable. One March I drove to Jay Peak Resort, in Vermont, where a large thermometer at the top of the hill informed me it was 61 F. The snow was heavy and wet, and it was like skiing through peanut butter. A storm of tropical force that had been lurking on the other side of the mountain suddenly released a hard rain. Those of us who wanted to persevere were issued green garbage bags with armholes.


By fifty, both winter and myself were getting unreliable. I couldn’t count on snow, and I couldn’t count on my ability to negotiate some of the runs that had once thrilled me. Skiing claims to be our oldest sport (a five thousand-year-old ski was found in Sweden) and now it is show-ing its age. The sport and I appear to be grappling with similar issues: doubt, deterioration, financial worries, envi-ronmental dread. As I lose strength and stamina, the glaciers retreat in solidarity, the snow dries up, the resorts dwindle. The number of US ski resorts dropped from 727 in 1985 to 481 in 2008. Mount Agassiz closed in 2000, though I didn’t hear about it for another decade.

The esteemed glaciologist Lonnie Thompson warned in his 2010 paper “Cli-mate Change: The Evidence and Our Options” that glaciers are disappearing at an accelerating rate. The glacier atop Kilimanjaro, that Hemingwayesque symbol of mortality and loss, could van-ish entirely within two decades; future readers may be perplexed as to what “snows” Hemingway was referring to. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in the Alps are in retreat. “As a result of our inaction,” Thompson wrote, “we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.” Not coincidentally, these are the three options that late middle age offers.

Louis Agassiz was the first glaciolo-gist, before the word was coined, his rep-utation made with the publication of his two-volume Études sur les glaciers (1840). He described the landscape transformed by glacial activity as if it was a woman’s body, a breathless and detailed pensée on the striations and valleys, the round-ing and hollows, the cruel results of time and friction.

At the time that Agassiz published his seminal study of glaciers, the Columbia Icefield on the northern border of Banff National Park was roughly twice the size it is now. In geologic terms, 187 years is a blink, but the Athabasca Glacier (one of the thirty that make up the Icefield) has retreated 1.5 kilometres since then.

Glaciers don’t melt at arithmetic rates. As they become smaller and their bulk provides less defense, as the climate warms, and as more detritus is exposed and its darker hue attracts more sun, they melt at something that is closer to a geo-metric rate. Like certain people, one day they are suddenly old. You saw them only a year ago. And now, in the glare of the supermarket, there they are, the face subtly collapsing, a blurriness, a weight in their eyes that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps it had always been there but you just hadn’t noticed it.

THE yEAR I TuRNED fIfTy, A GROuP Ofold friends from Winnipeg reconnected via e-mail and decided to return to Banff to ski. We came from Winnipeg, from Vancouver, San Francisco, Hong Kong. I flew out from Toronto. I hadn’t seen some of them in thirty years. We caught up, reminisced. There were missing friends. Phil, who on our first trip disappeared with a woman ten years older than him-self one evening and came back at 5 a.m. and perched naked on the sink pouring water over himself in Catholic penance, was now stricken with a degenerative disease. There was a suicide, and the usual complement of tragedy, medical issues, alcoholism, divorce, and debt.

I was long married, the father of two, in reasonable shape. I had a touch of plantar fasciitis, a small arthritic spur on my hip, and an ongoing bout of existen-tial angst. “Something has happened to

CAN.ICONS

SASQuATCH

The Canadian Sasquatch is a fabulous creature rumoured to inhabit the nation’s for-ests. It is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid. The term Sasquatch is an anglicized derivative of the Coast Salish “Sesquac,” meaning “wild man.”

The Sasquatch is reported to be two to three metres tall. The creature’s alternate name of “Bigfoot” came about in response to the enormous footprints that have been found in Canada’s wild country, individual tracks measuring up to sixty centimetres long and twenty centimetres wide. Witnesses have described a pronounced brow ridge, and a prominent sagittal crest (the ridge of bone running along the top of the skull that indicates strong jaw muscles). Cryptozoologists assert that the Sasquatch is omnivo-rous and primarily nocturnal. It is commonly said to have a strong, unpleasant smell.

Wildman mythologies are common throughout the world, especially among indigenous peoples; these include tales of the Sasquatch’s cousin, the Himala-yan Yeti. In Canada, such legends existed long before the Sasquatch became known by a single name, and regional details still differ.

Many scientists are skeptical about the existence of the Sasquatch. They consider it to be a product of folklore and hoax, citing a lack of physical evidence. Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, lepidopterist and author of Where Bigfoot Walks: Cross-ing the Dark Divide, argues for a psychosocial origin, claiming that most cultures have human-like giants in their folk history.

However, during a recent radio interview, world-renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall made a striking comment about “undiscovered primates”: “I tell you that I’m sure that they exist.”

– Clive Holden


me,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Nausea, “It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything ob-vious. It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awk-ward…I was able to persuade myself that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was a false alarm. And now it has started blossoming.”

This confronting of existence alights at some point, a quiet argument that we carry within us. Where is this all headed? The answer too obvious to state out loud.

Skiing was a perfect, if temporary distraction. Skiing takes you out of your head—the act of negotiating a steep hill requires concentration. And unlike many other sports, it doesn’t force you into the unpalatable head of your opponent. It is pure experience.

Both Sunshine and Lake Louise had expanded dramatically since I’d last visited, twenty years earlier. The forty-five minute wait at the Olympic chairlift was no more; the high-speed lifts elimi-nating line-ups. The frequent break-downs that left us swaying in bitter cross-winds for nervous lengths of time were also mercifully gone. We were still good skiers, among the better skiers on the hill, but that was because everyone under the age of forty was on a snowboard. We were part of an evolutionary slow fade.

At lunch the next day, my friend Mar-tin checked his phone constantly for news of pending interest rate hikes. His nick-name was Captain Leverage, I was told, due to his heroic relationship with debt. He had stayed in Winnipeg and when his father died he’d taken over the family manufacturing business. I remembered his taciturn father washing his Cadillac in the driveway, and his beautiful mother pouring vodka over Tang crystals in the kitchen.

Neale was the only one on a snow-board, though it wasn’t a nod to hipness or progress. He had a leg injury that made skiing painful, but somehow allowed for boarding. He had aged very little, and was living with (and has since married) his high school sweetheart, the woman he’d been dating when I’d left Winnipeg thirty-three years earlier. His life seemed

miraculously intact, though this was an illusion. There had been two marriages, two kids, and two divorces.

I spent time with Paul, my closest adolescent friend who was now a suc-cessful developer in Vancouver. In the mornings, as he drove the rented SUV up to the mountain, he would phone his father, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, talking to him in cheerful repetitive tones.

Paul and I recalled a summer night out at the lake when he was behind the wheel of his mother’s Thunderbird, an otherwise responsible boy heading for law school, racing wildly on Highway 1 in the dead of night, trying to pass a white Grand Prix on a blind hill, that reckless teenage faith. The memory of that hunger for speed still brought an unsettling frisson of mortality.

All of our worlds contained secrets now. Certainly it had been true of an absent friend who had killed himself by driving a jet boat into a bridge support on the Red River. He had managed to keep his world contained until that last desperate act. This anarchy lies in many of us; not necessarily suicidal ideation, but an anarchy of the mind over-burdened by disappointment and doubt, or simply time. The hill had been a test-ing ground for us when we were young, a release of pent-up energies. It was more relief now, the visceral experience of skiing displacing, at least for a few moments, other thoughts and worries. It was another kind of freedom. But our speed was only a temporary relief; at the bottom of the hill, our worries regrouped.

THERE ARE OTHER ACCELERATIONS TO BEconcerned about, of course. In 2004, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica drilled to a depth of 3,270 metres, providing a geologic record that goes back eight hundred thou-sand years. The methane and CO2 trapped in bubbles in the ice provides a record of carbon emissions that stretches back to the mid-Pleistocene epoch. During glacial periods, CO2 concentrations varied between 180-190 parts per million per volume (ppmv).

During warmer phases, that figure rose to roughly 280 ppmv. After the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, CO2 concentrations spiked. From 1975 to 2005, emissions increased seventy percent. The current concentration of CO2 is 391 ppmv, the highest in eight hundred millennia.

If this trend continues, the sport of skiing may erode at a rate faster than the glaciers; skiing may be entering the winter of its life. Switzerland noted a six percent decline in skier visits in 2012. American resorts have winnowed by a third in thirty-five years. At Whistler, the number of skiers dropped from 2.3 million in 2001 to 1.7 in 2009. The 2011-2012 skiing season in the United States star ted with the weakest snowfall in twenty years, which prompted a fif-teen percent decline in skiers from the previous year.

Snow conditions are increasingly unre-liable, though partly mitigated by sophis-ticated snow-making machines. But the unreliability of snow means that there are fewer advance bookings, as skiers wait to see where the snow is. This creates prob-lems for resort owners. The economic downturn took a toll as well; uncertainty, in all its forms, especially plagues the ski industry, which is an expensive and time-consuming sport for individuals, let alone families. The sport needs snow and pros-perity to survive.

There is a point in middle age when you feel that there is still time to right the ship, that whatever you have neglected—health, teeth (a particularly sore and expensive point), partners, finances, children—can be dealt with through a concerted push. If we just cut carbs, buy flowers, start putting mon-ey aside today, sit down and have that conversation about drugs with our teenagers, then all can and will be well. Climatically, this feels like the moment we are at; if we install solar panels, buy a Pri-us, rein back our consumption. But there are scientists, many scientists, who think we have passed the point of being able to right that ship, that it has, in fact, sailed; regardless of our best efforts, we’ve already done too much damage, and it will all end badly.

IN 2007, THE LEGENDARy NORTHWESTPassage—impetus for three centuries of exploration—was free of ice for the first time in recorded history. It was an apocalyptic year for ice, and satellite photographs showed that twenty-four percent of arctic ice had disappeared in the previous twelve months. In the nineteen-eighties, sea ice covered an area roughly the size of the U.S.; now it is half that.

Climate can change on a dime, more or less. The catastrophic lurks. Exhibit A for this theory is Ötzi, the Tyrolean ice man, whose frozen body was discovered in the eastern Alps north of Bolzano, Italy, in 1991 after it was exposed by a melting glacier. His body had been in the ice for 5,200 years. He’d been shot in the back with an arrow, and had managed to escape his enemies, only to bleed to death. Within days of his death, there was a ‘climate event’ that was large enough to cover and preserve him for fifty-two centuries. Otherwise, he would have be-

gun decaying or would have been eaten by scavengers. Evidence suggests that the climate event wasn’t local. The isotopes in the water molecules that compose the remaining ice on Mount Kilimanjaro also show a decrease at this point, in-dicating colder temperatures. In the Middle East, 5,200 years ago seems to be the start of a very sudden and prolonged cold snap.

Ötzi was forty-five, relatively old in the Copper Age. It is thought that he might have been a shepherd. Because his corpse was the best-preserved example of primitive man, it has become one of the most minutely studied in history. His lungs were blackened by campfires. He showed degeneration of knee and ankle joints, and had tattoos that may have been related to pain relief treatments. He was lactose intolerant, and may have been suffering from Lyme disease. The arrow-head that killed him was still lodged in his back. Perhaps he was a skier. Whatever else he was, Ötzi was a middle-aged man

with health issues, trying to survive in a hostile environment.

As Ötzi sat on the mountain, bleed-ing out, what was he thinking? Perhaps he was thinking about his beautiful mate and their golden children, or maybe he was thinking about the cruelty of this world, the difficulties of finding food, of avoiding enemies and predators. Or he was looking at the stars trying to divine man’s purpose. Maybe all he thought about was the pain of that arrow in his back, the coldness in his limbs. Whatever he was thinking, while he was thinking it, everything changed. The earth sud-denly got much colder. It snowed for days, temperatures plummeted, and he was buried along with his dreams of love and survival.

We dream of those things still. As we age, perhaps more so. We descend, becoming increasingly conscious of the speed, the acceleration, of the blur in our periphery, of those events and possibili-ties now just out of reach. EB

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Is the age-old figure actually on his last legs?

TWILIGHT

PATRIARCHS

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Is the age-old figure actually on his last legs?

TWILIGHT

ON THE RECORD

PATRIARCHSBy LYNN COADY | PHOTOGRAPHY BLUEFISH STUDIO

was eighteen when I heard Margaret Atwood tell an interviewer that none of the details of daily life in her patriarchal dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale—the milita-rized religious state, the religiously-prescribed and ritualized rape, the policed pregnancy, the enforced prostitution, the absence of basic human autonomy—were made up. These, Atwood asserted in her deadpan, deal-with-it delivery, were

all things that had taken place sometime, somewhere in human history, that in some cases were taking place as she spoke. I can only report what happened next, cliché or not, because the hair actually did stand up on the back of my neck.

When we talk about ‘feminist awakening’—or any political awakening, really—the emotion that’s often being awakened is panic. It’s the feeling of being abruptly and extremely destabilized, as if a rug is pulled out from underneath you and you realize there hasn’t been a floor this whole time.

I

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In early 2012, in the run-up to the American presidential election, I began to experience again that same panicked where’s-the-f loor-gone sensation. The U.S. culture wars had allowed for many a self-satisfied Canadian chuckle over the last decade or so, but now, watching former moderate turned Stepford Tea-Partier Mitt Romney closing in on the presidency—avowing his abrupt desire to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood, and declining to tell a reporter whether or not he supported equal pay for women—my once secure-feeling seat on the sidelines of Tea Party America was starting to feel a bit too close to the battlefield for comfort. It felt as if almost overnight a real patriarchal madness was hitting top gear in the nation next door. Every day seemed to deliver a fresh outrage: rape apologism, slut-shaming, more rape apologism, and not just from the neo-con bullhorns on television, but from sena-tors and congressmen. New laws based on medically-illiterate suppositions about women’s bodies were being proposed and, in some cases, passed. Protestors took to the streets brandishing signs that trumpeted not high-blown rhetoric, but basic, exasperated facts: “Women vote!” and “This is 2012!”

Witnessing the coordinated attacks on Planned Parenthood, I realized how mad it was that I was considering sending money to women fighting for their rights in the wealthiest, most powerful democ-racy in the world. In the early 2000s, I was supporting women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, fueled by precisely the same female unease: There but for the grace of God…

This realization was followed by the news that a pro-life, pro-gun rights judge in Texas had all but declared pre-emptive civil war if Obama was elected to a sec-ond term. “I’m not talking just riots here and there. I’m talking take up arms, get rid of the dictator.” Next came the news that a militia group arrested in Seattle had stockpiled hundreds of thousands of dollars of military-grade weapons to overthrow the Obama government.

It would be easy to dismiss these as isolated incidences of lunacy. Except one was a judge. Except every news day

demonstrated that lunatics can buy guns as easily as gumballs in the United States. Except that just over the border there were men and women with the power to pass laws saying inflammatory, violent, shockingly anti-democratic things from sea to shining sea.

Except that it began to feel as if the better part of the lunacy was directed at women.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, the narrator, didn’t head for the hills when she should have. One day, whispered a dead-pan, deal-with-it voice in my head, her credit cards were all cancelled and her bank accounts were closed, and the next thing she knows the tanks are in the streets and she’s a brood mare for God and country.

No rug. No floor. Now, I felt, might be the time to panic.

BuT WAIT—IT TuRNED OuT THE fLOOR was still there. Obama was re-elected, the Tea Party came out of the election at an all-time low in the polls and even the GOP appears to be starting to recog-nize that extreme social conservatism is lowering the party into a grave. But what was that, exactly? Those seismic tremors down south? Those bellowing, gnashing noises that reverberated world-wide, that nearly shook the continent apart? Something culturally significant happened through, if not because of, the American election of 2012.

What we witnessed, it seems to me, were death throes—the kind of violent spasms to be expected when the (once) most powerful creatures of the land come

to a tail-thrashing demise. What we saw was nothing less than the beginning of the end of the patriarchy in the United States, an evolution that surely had to be inevitable for any nation calling itself a democracy. Of course, the world’s most powerful democracy also happens to be the land of fervent evangelical Christianity, the Koch brothers, and Superpacs—a land-scape where the patriarchy’s power and influence has traditionally been greatest. Hence the violence of the beast’s death.

Sure, roll your eyes: The very idea of the patriarchy provokes eye-rolls. A ‘pa-triarch’ is today an innately cartoonish figure, after all, like the Monopoly man in his top hat and monocle. Caricaturize as ruthlessly as you like and what do you come up with? A fat, rich, powerful, loud buffoon. Oblivious to his privilege, a mor-al hypocrite. An ex-wife collector, who yet deplores how the venerable institution of marriage has been besmirched in these dark times. A glass of scotch in one hand, the obligatory phallic symbol cigar in the other, bloviating from his comfy perch.

But of course it’s not a caricature; in fact, it’s a real person. Rush Limbaugh, the man who fired the shot heard round the world in the conflict that’s come to be called The War on Women. And what a poorly-aimed and anachronistic shot it was, having wound up in the proverbial patriarchal foot.

IT WAS IN 2007 THAT THE PANIC—THEpatriarchal panic, that is—kicked into high gear, when a woman and an Afri-can-American emerged as the top two

Rush Limbaugh is a grotesque caricature of the patriarchy come to life

AP

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Democratic presidential contenders. This historical first electrified the race with the collective thrill that comes from witnessing a decisive turn of history’s wheel. Barack Obama was chosen as the Democratic candidate, and then voted into office on a wave of exhilaration ex-perienced across the globe. The two words that came to be associated with his campaign were “Hope” and “Change” and everyone seemed to understand instinc-tively the kind of change Americans—and invested onlookers—were hoping for. Namely, a country no longer run by and for the white male elite.

That was 2008. Once a population has experienced progress on such a vis-ible, influential scale, a layer of cynicism and defeatism gets scrubbed away, or so we like to hope. Universal suffrage, the emancipation of the slaves, the fall of the Berlin Wall—doors open in our minds, light floods in. The political fight at such points always shifts from the effort it took to pry those doors open in the first place, to the struggle to keep them open and opening wider. Which brings us back to 2012, to a struggle that turned out to be by no means over, and to three social issues that relate to the patriarchy and which are in different stages of cultural evolution: abortion, rape, and the female presence on the internet.

THE PATRIARCHAL SKIRMISHES Of THE 2012U.S. election can be traced back to the abrupt onslaught of legislative attacks on women’s health and reproductive rights that took place, according to the presi-dent of Planned Parenthood Cecile Rich-ards, “the day after” the Tea Party swept the mid-term elections. Planned Parent-hood itself, an organization once lauded by Barry Goldwater, was suddenly public enemy number one according to the GOP. Things steamrolled from there, cumulat-ing in a much-mocked congressional hear-ing on the subject of insurance coverage for birth control—a hearing to which no representatives of the birth-control taking population were invited. A hearing from which one such representative, Sandra Fluke, was rudely turned away.

And this is where we return to Rush Limbaugh and his ineptly-aimed shot

heard round the world. There was some-thing about the Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke and her poised, articulate testimony that tipped Limbaugh, and his entire patriarchal club, into a frenzy. Six days after Fluke spoke at an alternative hearing, Limbaugh took to the airwaves in high dudgeon. Fluke, he insisted, had testified that she wanted to “be paid to have sex.” He then uttered his now-famous summation: “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.”

Fluke had simply testified about a friend who lost an ovary as the result of being denied insurance coverage for con-traceptive pills.

Despite widespread condemnation and a looming mass advertising boycott, Limbaugh’s ire was not to be restrained. He ranted for three full days about San-dra Fluke on his show, exclaiming, “She’s having so much sex it’s amazing she can still walk!”

In her book, Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America, Nancy L. Cohen exam-ines how sexual hysteria has hijacked American conservative politics in recent decades. She begins her story with the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1965, demonstrating how the new era of sexual freedom led directly to the women’s and gay liberation movements. “Although it is easy to grasp why ‘women’s lib’ and gays coming out of the closet might have ticked off a lot of people,” writes Cohen in her opening chapter, “it is hard to imagine how it could have sparked the delirium that has consumed American politics for four decades.”

The ‘sexual counter-revolution’ started not in response to Roe vs. Wade, says Cohen, but as a conservative back-lash against the Pill. The new sexual f reedoms the Pil l represented ran counter to cherished patriarchal ideals

about the family, exposing it as “a petty tyranny,” and setting “itself against fun-damental assumptions about American culture.” Assumptions such as the idea that women (well-bred women, at least) were indifferent to sexual pleasure, or that their natural and preferred domain was at home with children. More than a generation later, in his nonsensical leap from insurance-covered contraception to sluts and prostitutes, Rush Limbaugh was merely reframing the original patri-archal panic attack over women’s sexual freedom.

Late in 2012, after the U.S. election, I called Cohen at her home. I was feel-ing suffused with relief and elation at the decisive Republican defeat, but still shaken by the woman-hating leading up to it. In 2012 alone, by way of example, con-gressional Republicans introduced an astounding sixty-seven bills that focused squarely on restricting legal access to abortion. Matters were even worse at the

state level, with forty-three new restric-tions enacted in nineteen states, the one most resonant of The Handmaid’s Tale being a Virginia “informed consent” bill that conveniently left out the consent.

This bill in particular warrants detailed examination. In the online magazine Slate, Dahlia Lithwick wrote about the bill, which mandated trans-vaginal (meaning, internal) ultrasounds prior to a woman receiving an abortion. An amendment had been proposed be-fore the bill was passed, Lithwick noted, specifying that women would have to give their written consent to an internal ultrasound if that was what their doctor determined was necessary to obtain images of the fetus—essentially allow-ing them to opt-out of being penetrated unnecessarily—but this amendment was voted down. Therefore, wrote Lithwick, “the law provides that women seeking an

A ‘patriarch’ is today an innately cartoonish figure like the Monopoly man

in his top hat and monocle.

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abortion in Virginia will be forcibly pene-trated for no medical reason. I am not the first person to note that under any other set of facts, that would constitute rape un-der the federal definition.”

Eventually the Virginia law was amended due to media attention and public outcry (including counter-amend-ments tabled by female legislators that would have done Jonathan Swift proud, such as one requiring men have rectal exams before they could get prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medication). Women would still have to sit through unnecessary ultrasounds, but at least now would not be penetrated. The dysto-pian irony here is that it meant the man-dated procedure was not just medically unnecessary, but pointless; external ul-trasounds produce no images in the early stages of pregnancy. These legislated ultrasounds, then, were pure theatre—a legally-enforced ritual straight out of an Atwood-inspired nightmare.

This was all icing on the large and un-appetizing cake being served by the Tea Party in the lead-up to the 2012 election. But the Democratic victory in Novem-ber did stand as a decisive repudiation of their policy menu. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that defeated

Republican candidate Mitt Romney had “resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.. .white male America,” noting, as did others, that the 2012 election featured the largest gender gap in history. The feminist website Jeze-bel credited “team rape,” Todd Akin, and a cadre of other gaffe-prone Republicans for making such a mess of the abortion issue that they actually helped to increase support for abortion rights across the United States.

When I called Cohen, she told me she was still in the process of getting her thoughts together, post-election. As an

expert on sexual delirium in American politics she had been much in demand leading up to perhaps its most delirious political race to date. Recalling the images of women protestors holding signs that read, “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit!” I asked Cohen how America could have come so ridiculously close to turning back the clock to the days when sex was, in her own words, “risky, dangerous and, in many situations, com-pletely illegal.”

“The Tea Party has always operated under the radar,” Cohen told me. For all its avowed obsession with taxes and the economy, it ’s telling that the highest-profile Tea Party candidates tend to be anti-abortion and anti-gay rights evan-gelical Christians—what Cohen calls the newest generation of “sexual counter-revolutionaries.”

“That’s their pattern,” says Cohen. “When they’re losing, they tend to rebrand themselves as something other than the religious right.”

Many pundits have expressed baffle-ment that, despite clear evidence that the Republican “war on women” was in large part responsible for the defeat of the GOP, Tea Party Republicans have by no means powered down their war machine. In a

late November editorial, the New York Times took Republicans to task for stone-walling the Violence Against Women Act, patiently explaining how heartless such indifference to women’s suffering was making the party look, especially in the wake of Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks, and asking, “Is that really what Republicans want to stand for?” Why, we might well wonder, isn’t the GOP lead-ership doing an about face on women’s issues now that it has proven to be their Achilles Heel?

Because, says Cohen, their goal is not to win the hearts and minds of the Ameri-

can public. Nor has it ever been. “These people are ideologues bordering on theo-crats. The war on women was never a dis-traction—it was a main issue for them.”

IN OTHER WORDS, IT’S NOT SO MuCH ABOuT winning over public opinion as it is about achieving an overarching theocratic agenda. Texas Governor Rick Perry’s vendetta against Planned Parenthood illustrates Cohen’s point. He has scrap-ped the federally-funded Women’s Health Program and created a new program of the same name, state-funded, for no reason other than to keep Planned Parenthood out, leaving over fifty thou-sand uninsured women in need of a new primary care doctor. Perry turned down federal money and absorbed the costs of creating this new program. This is not a politician hoping to win hearts and minds across a spectrum. This is someone play-ing to his (largely evangelical) base.

Accordingly, hearts and minds across that broad spectrum have indeed not been won. Americans have shown themselves to be in full revolt against the old-school patriarchal values the Tea Party represents. A Washington Post/ABC News poll noted that socialism is currently pulling more favourable num-bers than the Tea Party. On the fortieth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade last January, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that for the first time in its history, a ma-jority of Americans supported legalized abortion.

ONE Of THE COMMON TROPES Of DISCuSSINGCanadian identity is contrast with the United States: we’re like them, but not like them. Certainly, the abortion is-sue—which is so central to analyzing and understanding the path of the patri-archy—was as wrenching for Canadians as it currently is in the U.S. before abor-tion was decriminalized here in 1988. Since then, the procedure has been regu-lated only by the Canada Health Act and, following a brief but horrific spate of anti-abortion violence between 1994 and 2000 (where, among other incidents, three doctors in three different provinces came under sniper fire), Canadians seem to have decisively lost their taste for the debate.

The legislated ultrasounds were pure theatre.

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Occasionally, however—and in-creasingly during Stephen Harper’s leadership—a weather balloon gets sent up in Parliament. In 2012, a balloon was launched by the Conservative back-bencher Stephen Woodworth, who tabled a motion that called for a special commit-tee to determine when life begins—in essence, opening the door to Canadian personhood legislation.

During the run up to the American election, Planned Parenthood employed a new slogan meant as a warning to right-wing politicians: “Women are Watching.” Women were watching in Canada, too—

clearly the machinations taking place in the U.S. sent people such as myself into hypervigilance. Woodworth’s motion 312 was pounced upon as a none-too-subtle effort to put the criminalization of abor-tion back on the table, making headlines and sparking protests and petitions from the moment it was put forth.

Prime Minister Harper told the me-dia he did not support the motion—one of his explicit election vows being that he would not re-open the abortion debate. Nonetheless, he allowed a free vote on the motion, an action NDP opposition leader Thomas Mulcair called Harper’s

“backdoor way of signaling to (his) base.” The motion was voted down 203-91, as predicted, but eight Conservative cabi-net ministers, and nearly half the party’s caucus, voted in its favour, including Rona Ambrose, the Minister for the Status of Women.

The weather balloon deflated and fell back to earth, but perhaps the true impact of having launched it in the first place was realized a few months later when the National Post conducted a poll asking 1,735 randomly selected Canadians over the age of eighteen when abortion should be legal. Researchers were startled when a full sixty percent of those polled replied, “Always.” Only a year previously, that number had been fifty-one percent. Stephen Woodworth was credited with having entrenched public opinion in favour of legalized abortion. Not to mention that his motion was “happening alongside a U.S. election campaign in which abortion played a very prominent, contentious part,” as the National Post’s Matt Gurney observed. “Canadians seem to have responded by becoming even more pro-choice.”

Alberta, my home province, is typically viewed as the Canadian hotbed of U.S.-style social conservative values, but the 2012 provincial election threw that stereotype into question. When the ‘bozo eruptions’ of extreme-right Wild Rose Party candidates began leaking into the media—one candidate talked about the “advantage” of being Caucasian, another (an evangelical pastor) blogged about gays “burning in a lake of fire”—the Wild Rose landslide predicted in the polls was reversed, and the Conservative Party, with its first female leader in history, continued its forty-one year power monopoly, taking sixty-one seats to the Wild Rose’s seventeen.

“The lesson here,” the National Post quoted strategist Goldy Hyder as saying, “is that the Alberta voter, and certainly the Canadian voter, has decided that issues that have already been settled are best left alone.” Canada’s conservative newspaper of record went on to sound the death knell for social conservatism in this country, pronouncing it “an electorally toxic Pandora’s Box.”

PROOfThe black fox is a stream she divines by chanceor geometry, a flash of dark fluidity, the crestof a night wave, its sharp muzzle and sharpereyes. Her path and the fox’s path, not quite parallel lines, arrest at confluence—they hover, eye to eye, the shortest distance between two points.

The fox has encountered a humanbefore, she can see the calm in its hesitation, its poised, exactappraisal. The two of them afloat on the greenery of their discretetrails, the fox’s less discernible, and low-slung, hers wide, groomed, almost a road. One all-encompassing gaze

and the fox dismisses her, she feels herself drop as the black head swims into the greycross-hatching of alder—it swallows the elliptical sweep of tail, white-tipped, as if the water the fox is frothed just there. A form drawnfrom nothing, as hers is, the water she is, upright, cylindrical, a standing

well or a stranded waterfall, too far from the earth and lonely for it. She’s covetous of every still pool or rill, of the innumerable lives at home in the planes of lightand dark, moving among the conifers which do not walk, their slow green turbulence the fox flows into an intimacy—ground-swell—between the forest and all otherforms of water.

–Elizabeth Philips


“RAPE IS HAvING A MOMENT.”When I Googled that exact phrase to look up a story on Salon.com this past January, I was surprised, albeit not particularly shocked, to notice how many other in-stances of it came up. At the time, it was undeniable that sexual violence had become high profile. The first wave came as a result of international shock in response to a gang rape in India. And then, closer to home in Ohio, a story about high school football players allegedly toting an unconscious teenage girl from party to party and sexually assaulting her.

Prior to this, I had been corre -sponding with writer Kate Harding a pioneering feminist blogger whose book about rape, Asking for It, will be published in 2013. She also maintains a Tumblr called “Don’t Get Raped,” a wry commentary on the pervasive idea that it’s a woman’s job to prevent her own rape, as opposed to being the responsibility of a civil society.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be Kate Harding in present-day western culture, arduously documenting every instance of not just rape but the attitudes towards it we encounter every day—a premiere example of this being the incident that sparked the internation-al phenomenon of Slutwalk, in which a

Toronto police officer told a group of female university students, as a part of a rape prevention talk, that they should avoid “dressing like sluts.” It seemed to me that Harding had given herself per-haps the most miserable job in the world.

“Yes, it’s really hard to be optimistic right now,” admitted Harding in an e-mail dialogue. The story of the football players and the unconscious girl from Steuben-ville, Ohio had particularly appalled her. The narrative of sports-playing golden boys sexually assaulting women with impunity is one that Harding sees played

out over and over again in her research. “It keeps happening and we keep pre-tending there’s no pattern.”

This may be true, but Steubenville is itself an example of how the pattern has recently shifted, thanks in large part to the internet and social media. The internet has profoundly altered the conversation about rape, and maybe even its prosecution and punishment. It’s unlikely the Steubenville case would have made international news if not for social media. It began with tweets from party-going bystanders and the football players themselves that featured such insights as, “Song of the night is clearly Rape Me by Nirvana.” A photo of two boys carrying an unconscious girl by her arms and feet was posted on Instagram.

The tweets and the photo were quick-ly deleted, but enough were captured in screenshots and posted by a crusading blogger that the case exploded online. Soon it was picked up by the New York Times, and hit the blogs in earnest, be-coming impossible to sweep under the rug, as some prominent members of the local community had been accused of attempting to do.

The most notable of these accusers was the online hacker group Anonymous, which swept in like avenging superheroes,

launching an online campaign to expose the putative cover-up and initiating Occupy Steubenville, a watchdog-cum-protest movement. Someday someone will write a story about how Anonymous appears to have appointed itself Anti-Sexism Sheriff of Internet Town, stepping in when suicidal girls are being goaded by Twitter-trolls and launching an online attack on “revenge porn” merchants like Hunter Moore (the creator of the website “Is Anyone Up?” which posted photos and videos of women who had not consented to having their im-ages online). Anonymous’s crusade marks

the current high point of an increasing on-line resistance to, and backlash against, sexism both virtual and IRL (in real life).

Slutwalk is yet another example of this increasing resistance. While the mindset exemplified by the Toronto police officer’s words was telling and depressing, the movement it sparked in response has been awe-inspiring, and it is clearly a movement that would not have, could not have, spread so quickly and immediately without the connective power of social media. In the space of a year, a protest that started in Queen’s Park has been multiplied exponentially from India to Hong Kong to Australia.

In fact, it now seems clear that social media has taken over from the conscious-ness-raising groups of the Sixties as the new space for women to share thoughts, validate experiences, and mobilize for change. Back in 2005, the website Holla Back was one of the first sites to f lex the power of collective female outrage, allowing women to post stories and pho-tos depicting incidents of everyday street harassment. One of the most dispiriting things about sexism in daily life is the feeling of isolation it imparts—the idea that the entire culture is mobilized against you. Holla Back blew apart that isolation, giving women a graphic document prov-ing how ubiquitous street harassment is while providing a sense of solidarity with other sufferers.

“I think a lot of what we’re seeing (on the internet) now,” says Harding, “is women who have been keeping their mouth shut for years finally going I’VE HAD ALL I CAN STANDS AND I CAN’T STANDS NO MORE! But I do think the courage to do that comes from seeing how bad it is for other women.”

Late in 2012, a Twitter meme initiated by women in the gaming industry called #1ReasonWhy became a phenomenon—tech and gaming being two bastions of male ‘brogrammer’ culture. But tech is also a young person’s industry, mean-ing an entire generation of female twen-ty-somethings entering the field are experiencing good-old fashioned sex-ism first hand and are, unsurprisingly, not standing for it. The #1ReasonWhy hashtag is just one of thousands of such

Social media has taken over from the consciousness-raising groups of the Sixties as the new space for women to share thoughts, validate experiences,

and mobilize for change.

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memes being used to fight discrimination worldwide (in Germany recently an anti- sexism hashtag called #aufschrei (outcry) sent the popular media into a soul-search-ing tailspin). #1ReasonWhy arose in response to a male Kickstarter employee innocuously asking on Twitter: “Why are there so few lady game creators?”

“Because I’m told designing games to my POV is ‘niche’…while male ori-ented design is ‘normal’,” tweeted one obviously female responder. “Because

every disclosure of harassment feels like risking never being hired again,” posted another. Within twenty-four hours of the question being posed, thousands of women had responded in this vein and the hashtag made national news.

Another instance of online mobi-lization came in the early days of 2012 when the largest and best-known breast- cancer research organization in the United States, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, blindsided its supporters by

announcing it would be cutting its fund-ing to Planned Parenthood. The online backlash Komen suffered following this announcement was so immediate and scathing that in the space of two days, Komen reversed its decision. Its once spotless corporate image has yet to recover.

For a long time, and for many of its users, the idea of the web as a safe, affirm-ing place for women would have elicited cynical laugher. Women with blogs, high profile women on Twitter, and women in business, politics and tech with an active online presence have long been targeted and in many cases hounded off the internet by misogynist online campaigns.

This tendency started to be noticed around 2007, culminating with the case of Kathy Sierra, a technology blogger who eventually felt compelled to shut down her blog and cancel public appear-ances in response to an onslaught of anonymous death and rape threats she received courtesy of online trolls—who also took care to publish her address and social security number. It wasn’t as if Sierra had avowed her belief in white supremacy or pronounced herself a child pornographer. Her only transgression was what Kate Harding identified as “the crime of writing while female.” That is, she was a female writing authoritatively about the tech industry.

Harding was one of the first to tackle this phenomenon on her blog, Shapely Prose, in a post that she says ended up being one of the most highly trafficked things she has ever published. Hard-ing noted how the conversation about Sierra’s harassment seemed dominated by those who condemned the attacks, but ultimately thought she should suck it up. Harding paraphrased the attitude as: “Hey, Welcome to the Internet, Sport!” She was startled by how many of her male correspondents seemed to have no idea of the depth and virulence of the abuse women with online presences have had to endure.

“I didn’t realize,” she told me, “how much (they) were invested in believing, A) men and women get exactly the same volume and nature of f lack online, B) online harassment and abuse is basically C

P IM

AG

ES

Participants in the Slutwalk gather at Queen’s Park in Toronto May 25, 2012


meaningless, so the right thing to do is ignore it, and, C) if you don’t ignore it, if you dare to call it out as a real problem, you just don’t understand how the internet works.”

Harding was one of the first to insist that online harassment was a women’s issue, and needed to be repudiated con-tinuously and vociferously. That thinking has since taken hold online, and it’s illu-minating to consider how far we’ve come since Kathy Sierra. The 2012 version is Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who might as well have had troll bait written all over her from the moment she appeared on the web. Sarkeesian, who produced a video blog about sexism in pop culture called Feminist Frequency, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to raise funds to make a documentary explor-ing gender tropes in video games (here picture that bait being lowered into the shark tank).

The backlash was immediate and nasty, reminiscent of that which Kathy Sierra received. Not only did Sarkees-ian attract the obligatory death and rape threats, she also had her YouTube page, Wikipedia page, and webpage hacked and defaced in various threatening and pornographic ways.

But what distinguishes the attack on Sarkeesian from the one on Sierra is the pushback in response to the pushback. Online supporters flocked to Sarkeesi-an’s virtual side. The campaign to threat-en her into silence was outed everywhere from Slate to Gamespot.com to the New York Times, and donations poured into her Kickstarter account. At the height of the hostilities, a Canadian named Ben Spurr created an online game al-lowing users to virtually “punch Anita Sarkeesian in the face.” Spurr’s identity was tracked down by Stephanie Guthrie,

another Canadian, who promptly “sic(ed) the internet on him” via Twitter; now it was Spurr who had to defend himself against a mob of online adversaries. Guthrie, naturally, received her share of death and rape threats, which she promptly reported to the police. “The internet has become a place where these views have been able to fester and flower,” Guthrie told me when I spoke to her recently. Like countless others watching the Sarkeesian attack, Guthrie had had enough and acted on it.

In 2007, we were arguing about whether or not Kathy Sierra should have sucked it up. In 2012, the prevailing wisdom changed from “don’t feed the trolls” to “chase down and expose the trolls.” Like Planned Parenthood reaping public support in the back-lash against Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Anita Sarkeesian not only raised awareness of sexism online and in the

gaming industry, but raised her Kick-starter fundraising goal of $6,000 within twenty-four hours—and then went on to raise $15,297 more.

THERE’S A fEELING Of A PATRIARCHAL endgame in the air. Ireland—so long the Catholic-dominated holdout of west-ern democracies—is for the first time since 1992 debating its abortion laws. The horrific, lingering death suffered by Sav-ita Halappanavar last October for want of an abortion in an Irish hospital led to pub-lic outrage, mass protests and calls for action that could no longer be ignored by those in power. Pope Benedict XVI, that last old-school patriarch, roused himself just before announcing his retirement to utter a condemnation of the potential new legislation, which pro-choice groups and Halappanavar’s parents are pro-posing should be called “Savita’s Law.”

The patriarchal grip has been so difficult to shake off because it’s had so many centuries to establish its hold on us. But real change is evident. Accord-ing to Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men (and the Rise of Women), women are making great inroads into the legal, medical and business professions and it is only a matter of time before the workplace starts to reflect this.

Historian Stephanie Coontz, however, disagrees with Rosin’s central prem-ise that all these signs point to “the end of men.” What we are seeing, Coontz recently wrote, “is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascen-dance.” What is actually in decline, she says, is “institutionalized patriarchy” and “the tolerance for the forcible assertion of male privilege.”

Canada, as we know, has an unprec-edented six female premiers, one of whom is openly gay. In his second term inauguration speech, Barack Obama evoked the phrase “gay rights”—another historical first, another door flung open to let in the light. These are real changes.

Not that the endgame is quite fin-ished. Take our real-life caricature, Rush Limbaugh. He has his devotees, as steadfast as ever. But the hit Limbaugh took following his remarks about Sandra Fluke had real repercussions, not just for his own show but for the entire genre of right-wing talk radio and, therefore, right-wing culture. According to Media-Matters.org, Limbaugh’s words not only did “incalculable damage to his brand,” but led radio advertisers to reassess altogether the wisdom of associating themselves with a f igure capable of provoking such a powerful consumer backlash. An internal memo revealed that 141 advertisers had requested their ads no longer be played during Limbaugh’s program. Programs similar to Limbaugh’s in tone, content, and philosophy—with hosts such as Mike Savage, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity—were alluded to as well.

Could all this mean curtains for the patriarchy? Perhaps not yet. But one thing seems certain: society is no longer buying what these men are selling. EB

In 2012, the prevailing wisdom changed from “don’t feed the trolls” to “chase

down and expose the trolls.”

Orders • 1-877-864-8477 | infO • ccrooks@ualber ta.ca | uap.ualberta.ca

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GRew uP IN a loweR-mIddle-claSS weSteRN caNadIaN home with a limited haircut budget for male children—zero, to be precise—which meant a tension-filled hour for me and my four younger brothers whenever our father brought his Sears Craftsman thirteen-piece barber kit out of the closet, the one that

claimed on the box to contain “all the equipment needed for home hair-cutting.” My father ran his own glass and trim business, and was famously handy—he could repair a television, do home wiring, build a garage, re-cover a sofa—but he was a dreadful barber. I suspect it was intentional, given his expertise with other tools and with how low the

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basic competence bar had to be for home-barbering five boys in the early seventies in Calgary. Maybe he thought passable haircuts would sow unrealistically high expectations for the life ahead, I don’t know; I never got the chance to ask him. Whatever was behind his ineptitude, the results were always the same: bad haircuts and worse reactions. There were always tears of rage and embarrassment, quite often followed by a terse exchange between my parents.

“For heaven’s sakes, Gerry,” my mother would say.

“Can’t you be just a bit more careful? They care how they look, even if you don’t.”

“It’s hair,” he’d say. “It’ll grow back.”That kind of logic usually didn’t go over very well.

Conor, the fourth of five brothers, used to burrow into the towels and toilet paper under the bathroom sink when Dad was finished with him. He’d hunker in there for hours, a reaction that struck me even then as illogical, given that he was only hiding from equally disfigured siblings.

the author receiving a hair cut from his father, circa 1968


It wasn’t until well after high school that I convinced a girl to go out on a date with me, and although it would be unfair to blame a parent who’s no longer around to defend himself, having a sad haircut couldn’t have helped. Girls might have as-sumed I was homeless, or that my weird haircut was the lid on a jar containing some legitimately disturbing personal hygiene complications. Still, given that my father has been dead for over two de-cades and that the only thing about him I don’t miss is his haircuts, I think I’d sit under my bathroom sink for a month if it meant having him back for even the few minutes it would take him to deal me his signature snaggle-toothed semi- bowl cut.

The still-visceral longing to see my father again—to witness his grin, to play cards with him, to watch him fix a radio at the kitchen table—must explain why even now a dodgy haircut makes me think of him. Comforting isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe the buzz of a barber’s clippers but the sound is cer-tainly transporting—I am instantly a boy on a kitchen chair under a ratty polyester cape, trapped as my father perpetrates yet another dismal styling. One of my favourite pictures from my childhood is that of me, seven years old, sitting in the makeshift barber’s chair in the kitchen at home. My father is standing over me with the clippers in his right hand. His left hand is gripping the top of my head, as if he’s preventing me making a run for it. My shoulders are hunched up. I look more worried than unhappy. Even though it appears he’s only halfway through the job, you can already tell it’s not much of a haircut. The photo seems to perfectly capture the apprehension I remember filling the house on haircut day.

Which is why some may find it odd that these are memories I prize. Some will find it even more peculiar that not only have I made no effort to minimize the risk of a bad haircut in my life, I seem to be in-creasingly seeking out that risk. None of it is odd to me, though. Yes, a bad haircut is always going to be, publicly and inescap-ably, exactly what it is—a bad haircut. But it’s also much more than that to me. It’s a way to remember.

I’ve come to aPPRecIate oveR the yeaRSthat I left my childhood home with a freakishly high tolerance for styling risk. Although my father’s barbering incom-petence was harrowing for one or two of my brothers, it never unsettled me at the requiring-years-of-therapy level. I suspect this was because my hair was as unremarkable then as it is now. I also grew up believing that my hair was sim-ple to cut. My father never spent more than ten minutes on it; how tricky could it be? Quite, apparently; barbers both domestic and foreign have since pointed out that I have two cowlicks on the crown of my head and that at the neckline my hair is an untamable swirl. Who knew?

In any case, my blithe resistance to haircut hazard didn’t fully manifest itself until I started travelling. Now, it’s second nature. I don’t even think about it. Most travellers, I’m given to understand, arrive in a foreign city and immediately set out for museums, sights, shows, restaurants, and art galleries. I have nothing against such practices, and have even followed them myself when I don’t need a haircut. But as I grew up, forged my own life, and moved further into a career as a writer who travels, I began to notice that I’d pull into Sofia or Guatemala City, Munich or Key West, and be reflexively drawn to lo-cal barbers and stylists. The buzz, so to speak, was always greater if they didn’t speak English.

The Paros debacle was my first for-eign cut. The Greek who barbered me on that rocky, sunny island some two de-cades ago had hair like my father’s, multi-hued and combed back off his forehead. The hair similarity wasn’t why I visited the Greek, but I noticed it right away. Though my father had a whitish beard for most of his last years, which earned him

the nickname “Ghost,” his hair was five or six different colours—primarily white and grey, but with some black, brown, and red streaked in, as well as a few yel-lowing strands that undoubtedly had less to do with pigmentation than a lifetime of smoking. From ten paces away, you’d have said my father had grey hair, but the clos-er you got the wider the color spectrum became. He kept it tidy but long enough that he could work in a bead of Brylcreem and comb it Don Draperishly up across his forehead from left to right. Hair colour was not the only similarity between my fa-ther and the Greek barber: neither talked much and both liked to keep a cigarette going while they worked.

In Paros, sitting on a second-floor hotel room balcony playing backgam-mon with my friend Murray, using the scalding midday sunshine as an excuse to drink beer, I was surprised to hear the unmistakable high chatter of a barber’s clippers filling the narrow streetscape beneath us.

Guzzling the last of my beer, I told Murray I was stepping out.

“Where are you going?”“For a haircut,” I said.Murray, then and now a man of good

taste and elegant appearance, grimaced. “A haircut? In Greece?”

“Greeks have hair. They get it cut. What’s the big deal?”

I left my room and crossed the rough-hewn rock of the street below. Inside, the barber with the hair like my father’s ap-peared to be delivering a lecture to three hobos sitting on a bench against the wall. The barber’s chair was, mysteriously, empty. I’d heard the clippers whining away not a minute earlier, yet it was plain to see that none of these hobos had been barbered that day…or ever.

I left my childhood home with a freakishly high tolerance for styling risk.


The barber put his cigarette in an ash-tray, and slapped the chair half a dozen times with a white hankie, motioning for me to sit. As he put me under the cape, I saw the clippers on the counter in front of me; grainy rust scabs covered the silver handle, the cord was badly frayed, the blade was missing a few teeth. Against the mirror was a comb jar full of bluish liquid topped by a hairy scum. No matter, I thought, if the locals trust this guy, I can, too. It would occur to me a few days later, as the nicks and cuts were starting to scab over, that the locals didn’t trust him at all, given that we didn’t see another patron en-ter his shop for the remainder of our stay.

The barber turned to me and said something I didn’t understand.

“Sure,” I said, nodding. He switched on his rusty clippers and

immediately ran them straight down the middle of my head from front to back at skull level, stopping afterwards to examine his work like a carpenter checking a plumb line. Looking at myself in the mirror I saw a highway paved through the Amazon. What he stopped to ponder I have no idea, since five seconds into the job the only possible way forward was to clear-cut my entire head. On the third pass, closer to the back of my left ear, one of the broken metal teeth caught on a hair, which caused the clippers to stutter and growl. A prickly surge of elec-tricity shot into the base of my neck and I jumped in my chair. The barber ignored my reaction, apparently indifferent to my electrocution. I stayed quiet except for the involuntary yips.

On my way out, I turned to look at the hobos, since I now understood why they were all so scruffy. They regarded me ex-pressionlessly, and although I was sure I would hear roars of laughter when I left the shop, a scooter zipping by made it too noisy to tell if they’d erupted.

“Boy…you got your money’s worth,” said Murray, deadpan, when I got back up to the room. “But why does the back of your neck have all those welts on it?”

I smiled, not in the least upset. It felt like being a kid at home.

my fatheR PaSSed away oN JuNe 9, 1992,three days after suffering a stroke on the day of my wedding. It was devastat-

ing and, in the words of a friend of mine about his own father’s early death, my fa-ther’s untimely passing is luggage I have never unpacked, just learned to carry. It’s not the kind of thing you ever really get over, or, in fact, want to get over. I’m not even sure what that means. To me, it’s like losing a leg, or an eye; you don’t heal, you adapt.

In the years following June of 1992, my travel writing increased in step with my need to find ways to remember who my father was, to never forget. I wrote about him. I sent letters to friends about him. My siblings and I organized a golf tourna-ment in his memory. And I kept walking the haircut high-wire in London, Toronto, Edinburgh, Paris, Riga, and Rome. The cuts were often dreadful and the circum-

stances regularly fascinating, but each episode never failed to act as a memory chest I was glad to open.

Six years ago I visited Sofia, Bul-garia’s vibrant and raw capital, still in a communist hangover, with its gleaming commercial avenues opening out onto civic squares with giant rusting cast-iron busts of former dictators (all sporting Stalinist hairstyles, I noted). Strolling down Boulevard Czar Assen, I found my-self peering through the window of Salon Irina. A couple of stylists looked up from their fashion magazines when I entered. Both were holding cigarettes. Tendrils of smoke hung like crepe dangling from the ceiling.

“Hi,” I said. “Can I get a haircut?”They stared at me. One stylist retreated

CAN.ICONS

PolIteNeSSEveryday examples of Canadian politeness, or “niceness,” can be broken down into categories: helpful gestures such as holding doors for people of all genders and ages; liberal use of “please,” “thank you,” and “no problem”; disarming greetings like “hello” or “how’s it going,” especially before business transactions; and the crucial category of leave-taking language, including “take it easy,” and “have a good one!”

A widespread yet subtle form of non-verbal politeness is the “Canadian nod,” commonly observed when two strangers approach each other. This may stem from traditional working environments where busy hands prohibited the doffing of hats.

The art of the apology may be said to define Canadian politesse, sometimes to the point of cliché. For example, Canadians will invariably say “sorry” when two people come close to colliding and no one’s to blame. This can be humorous to outsiders, but that signifies a misunderstanding of intent—the word in this usage is closer to an expression of respect than one of culpability.

British Columbia’s Ministry of Tourism has run a form of “politeness boot-camp” for many years, and they export this expertise worldwide. It teaches hospitality industry employees the central practices of polite Canadian customer service, including warm greetings, constructive listening, and learning never to roll one’s eyes.

Reader’s Digest recently sent undercover reporters to assess levels of polite-ness in thirty-five of the world’s largest cities. Toronto did very well, placing third. Zurich placed second, and New York City won; it would be impolite not to say so.

– Clive Holden

behind a curtain. The other took a su-try pull on her cigarette and continued to observe me with impressive disdain. The curtain opened. Four stylists came at me, all in stilettos, all heavily made up, all smoking. I felt like an extra in a movie scene calling for a gathering of assassins masquerading as high-class escorts (or vice versa). It was not unpleasant.

“Haircut!?” said their leader, a kohl-eyed woman about my age. She sounded like a Russian spy.

I made what I hoped was an observ-able visual inventory of the shop’s chairs, shampoos, gels, clippers, scissors, and combs, but as I did it occurred to me that it may have been a female-only salon, or that they were closed for lunch, or that the salon was nothing but a front for a high-end brothel and I’d raised suspicion by using an incorrect password. Or, even more worryingly, the correct password. The leader took a sharp drag on her smoke before turning away from me to clarify the situation for her squad, a clari-fication that took much longer than the sentence He wants a haircut should take in any language.

“Yes,” she said finally, turning back to me. “Please.” One of her young troika put a hand on my upper arm and took me to a shampooing chair. The bored stylist from the front counter managed to tear herself away from her magazine in order to move to the shampooing station, which allowed me to notice that she was wearing a tight black miniskirt and a low-cut blouse. She stubbed out her cigarette, blew the smoke over my head, and gave me a vigorous shampoo and head rub, all of which in-volved considerably more bending over on her part than seemed strictly neces-sary. Once the shampoo job was complete and I was in a chair under a cape, the older stylist, who I had decided was Irina, began pulling my hair this way and that while studying me in the mirror, as if she were trying to gauge my character.

“Thick.” She raised an eyebrow. “Long.”

“Yes,” I said, hearing an oddly high pitch in my voice.

Her eyes bulged slightly. She held up her right thumb and forefinger, about three inches apart.

“No, no,” I said, trying to indicate a shorter cut. I moved my hands around under the cape, trying to free them with-out accidentally groping a stylist.

“Ooooh,” she said, cutting me off. One of the other stylists—who’s own hair was a jet-black Medusa’s head of curls—used both her hands to suggest a length closer to eight or nine inches. I was about to shake my head again when I caught on. I pouted my bottom lip out a bit and shrugged, as if to say, You take what you’re given, which made them hoot. Irina set to work, wield-ing her scissors expertly, stopping occa-sionally to say, “Shorter?”

“No,” I’d say, pulling my hands out and putting them an unseemly distance apart. One of the younger stylists slapped me on the shoulder.

When Irina finished she took a tub of red goop and put a few ounces of it in my hair, making it stand up in various places. The four of them led me out of the chair and up to the till. I paid the absurdly low five lev fee (about three dollars) and then gave each of them, even the moody hair-washer, a five lev tip.

I exited unsure if Irina was training her staff or whether it was the sort of es-tablishment that required no training. All I knew was that I had engaged in flirty Bul-garian banter about my equipment, had been pawed by numerous sexy women, and reeked of cigarette smoke and fruity gel, all of which was agreeable in its own way, but was, I suppose, more than one ought to expect from a haircut. I knew something about the challenges Bulgaria was facing in its early adjustments to capi-talism, challenges not entirely beneficial to the lives of young women. As I walked down Boulevard Czar Assen and through Yuzhen Park, I lit a small candle of hope in my heart that styling hair was the reason those ladies were gathered at Salon Irina.

It was the heavy curtain of smoke inside the Salon that put me back in the kitchen chair at home with my dad hov-ering over me. The smell and sight of cigarette smoke has always been linked to the haircut for me (a barber shop combination now non-existent in North America). I don’t smoke and never have, but the smell of cigarettes is not only not


offensive to me, it’s achingly nostalgic. I cannot help but think of my childhood. It makes me comfortable. It induces sen-sory recall at every level. When we were shackled in the barber’s chair as kids, my father usually kept a cigarette go-ing and often let it dangle from his lips while he clipped and snipped, the ash sometimes breaking off and falling into our laps. The smell and sight of smoke was everywhere, and was as crucial to the mise en scène as any other element. My mother was always present, as well, anxiously working a cigarette of her own as she spectated from the kitchen table, clearly torn, unable to decide who to root for.

theRe waS ceRtaINly No Smoke befoRe,during, or after my visit to the Seoul bar-ber. I’ve had just the one haircut in Seoul and although I wouldn’t hesitate to visit a barber there again, it’s unlikely I’ll sub-mit to a supplementary treatment with-out first getting a reliable translation of what’s involved. My plan had been to visit one of the famous jimjilbang sauna/spa combos, most of which feature barber-shops. I was looking for a haircut, but

was certainly curious about the entire operation. I found a six-floor jimjilbang near the bustling Seoul Station, paid a small fee, and was given a wristband with a bar code to track how much to pay upon leaving.

I got off the elevator at the fourth f loor, the men’s f loor. Everyone was naked, except for the service staff. My trained eye found the small barbershop off in the corner. There was a lone barber and four people in line, so I decided to explore the hot pools before getting my hair cut.

After stripping and locking up my things, I wandered out towards a long, low hall of showers, saunas, baths, and

pools, and sampled them all more or less in succession until I was near the deepest recesses of the chamber. Only then did I see the low arched passageway at the back. Beyond, inside a tiled, misty, dimly lit grotto, two fat naked men were groan-ing loudly as they received some kind of vigorous rubdown from wiry fellows wearing what appeared to be diapers; the steam and poor light made it hard to figure out precisely what was taking place, but it looked like the kind of scene David Lynch might find himself directing. One of the masseurs saw me peeking in and barked something. He pointed at my wristband—the bar code—and then at a hook on the wall holding other wristbands. I placed mine in the queue and went to the nearest hot pool to wait.

It’s just a massage, I reminded myself. This is what Koreans do. What’s the worst that can happen?

When my turn came, an attendant took a giant bucket of hot water and splashed it across my bed. After laying me out like a corpse on an autopsy table, he produced a laminated page covered with Korean characters. He pointed at it and said, if I was translating correctly,

“You are a stupid foreigner. Why are you here?”

I gaped at him.He worked his lips in preparation.

“Rrreggalahh?” he said. “Ohr V. I. P.?”I smiled, gave him a thumbs up.

“V.I.P.!”He put down the page and squirted

lotion over every part of my body. After a business-like but still rather more in-timate rubdown than I’d wanted or ex-pected, he doused me with warm water from the cistern near the wall. Okay, I reasoned, maybe the massage was too invasive for my tastes, what with the exposed privates and all, but it was still within reason. However, my attendant

then donned what looked like a pair of oven mitts. He motioned for me to lie on my stomach. A spurt of panic shot up my windpipe, and while turning over I real-ized I was entirely unclear about where all this was going.

As I was trying to imagine the possibili-ties, my man leaned into me as if shaving the side of a door with a hand plane. His oven mitts weren’t mitts at all, but gloves covered with thousands of tiny grainy shingles. This masseuse with cheese grat-ers for hands put his entire body weight into each stroke up and down my back, my legs, my ass, exfoliating me to within a millimeter of skinlessness. The scrap-ing, hair-pulling, nerve-shredding pain of it was so intense it actually passed through to a kind of sensory purity, in that way our lives locate boundaries of extreme physical sensation to live between.

The dermabrasion stopped. I let out a breath, and nearly wept with the relief of it being over. But I felt a touch on my shoulder. Words were being spoken. I raised my head. My attendant was mak-ing a rolling motion.

I blanched. “What?”He made the motion again, this time

quite impatiently. There was no resis-tance. I rolled onto my back. He ran his handrasps across my chest. The pain returned in full. He set to work on my arms, down across my hips and my upper thighs, my knee caps, then moved to my inner thighs, moving upwards, closer, re-lentlessly sandpapering in the direction of the only part of me he’d yet to touch. No, I thought, he’s not going to. There’s just no way. He can’t. He won’t.

He did. He got to my equipment, grabbed it, f licked it around a bit, and then gave my whole package the kind of brisk scouring you’d give a handful of baby potatoes before tossing them in the pot. I was gritting my teeth, clenching my fists. When he began to energetically scrub my perineum I knew it was time to halt this cultural experiment.

But then the scraping ceased. I was too scared to open my eyes in case he was going to ask me to assume some other unimaginable and even more vul-nerable position. A glorious cascade of warm water fell over me, then another,

I realized I was entirely unclear about where all this was going.


and another. I felt reborn. I was ordered to roll over, which I did. More water, more warmth, more relief. And then he was bidding me to stand up. I was free. My thigh muscles were wobbly, my knee joints spasming, my testicles jerking like yo-yos. I staggered like a crash survivor to the common area.

There was no lineup at the barber-shop, and my body went that way without me sending it conscious instructions. In-side, a stoic-looking barber was working on an older gent dozing peacefully under the cape. The barber was clothed, thank-fully, although after what I’d just been through, a nude Korean barber wouldn’t have thrown me. He gave me a half nod to express that I could be next. When he finished with the man in the chair, I stepped in.

The only thing I was wearing was my barcode wristband, and in the mirror I saw that my entire body was the color of a red Twizzler. The barber surely knew what I’d just been through, but his face betrayed nothing. He merely swiped a reader across my bar code, placed a clean towel on the chair, and handed me another towel to cover my public privates. I sat. He took his scissors and began cut-ting. For the next fifteen minutes, he did not once look at me other than to assess the progress of the cut. He did not utter a single word or make a sound of any sort. He did not seek my opinion in any way as to what I wanted or whether the cut was proceeding to my satisfaction. There was no communication of any sort. Once he’d finished I couldn’t help but notice that my hairstyle looked a lot like his own. He’d simply taken a road of his choosing and stopped when he arrived, a process iden-tical to the one my father employed his

entire barbering career. I don’t recall my father ever asking our opinion as to what our hair should look like. He’d just turn the clippers on and when there were no more scowling kids in the chair he’d turn the clippers off.

My Korean barber put his scissors in his pocket, but he wasn’t done. He moved to his front table, picked up a straight razor the length of a carving knife, stropped it laconically, and then went for the stubble at the back of my neck. Such a moment would normally have held a certain frisson, but after the scrotal assault in the misty grotto, being trapped naked under the control of a mute Korean pressing a straight razor to my neck was, comparatively speaking, a Rockwellian scene of innocence and bedrock values.

At the end, he snapped off the cape

like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under a setting of heirloom china, then splashed a citrusy tonic in his hands and rubbed my neck. He made a slight bow and, now standing, naked again, I returned it. It was a top-notch haircut, and if it wasn’t the most relaxing cut of my life it was certainly the quietest. I left with not a single word or sound uttered between us.

Dazed, I went into the showers and must have sat under a warm stream of water for fifteen minutes before working up the energy to clean my hair and exam-ine what was left of my skin. The entire surface of my body was crackling like a downed power line. An hour or so later, riding a high of pure cleanliness now that my skin was beginning to regenerate, I passed the barber on the way out. He was cutting someone else’s hair, but paused to look my way. I smiled broadly for him. He waited a second to react, but then he

abandoned his poker face and gave me a full-bore, shiny-eyed grin. I laughed, but he simply nodded, put his straight face back on, and returned his attention to the man in his chair, or at least to the hair of the man in the chair.

Outside the jimjilbang the smog was heavy and the traffic frenzied, but I felt renewed, exhilarated, at peace. Getting on the subway I thought again of my Seoul barber, his silence, his smile, and how it had all made me think of another undemonstrative person who used to cut my hair and never really said much him-self, a person from a past that gets farther away every day. Not that the ever-widen-ing gap between now and then lessens my determination to focus my gaze in that direction. Life—my life, anyway—is a lake I’m crossing in a rowboat, which means the only way to go forward is to face backwards. The departing shore and the distance covered are receding all the time, growing ever more indistinct, but I want to know them and cherish them by remembering them. I do turn around every now and then, to make sure I’m still generally headed the right direc-tion, but mostly I’m gazing back at where I’ve been. It seems to me the only proper way to cross the lake.

Decades after he first spoke them, I can still hear my father speaking the words that time and ref lection have smoothed into metaphor. I know he’s nev-er coming back, and there’s nothing I can do about that; I don’t brood on it. Instead, I wait for those moments when memory and life conspire to make me grateful for what’s been and for what is. Recently, em-bracing a whole new sub-genre of styling risk, I let my thirteen-year-old daughter, Grace, and her friend, Emily, cut my hair out on the front porch. They giggled as they took the scissors to my locks, snip-ping away in what from the chair seemed a very unstructured approach.

“I can’t believe you’re letting us do this,” Grace said enthusiastically. “But we’ll try to do a good job, Dad. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” I said, meaning it. My next words came unbidden, and it made me happy to hear them. “It’s only hair,” I told them. “It’ll grow back.” eb

I left with not a single word or sound uttered between us.

Henry Kreisel Memorial LectureHenry Kreisel Memorial LectureHenry Kreisel Memorial LectureNow in its seventh year, this annual lecture has featured some of Canada’s most talented authors,

including Lawrence Hill, Annabel Lyon, Eden Robinson, Dany Laferrière, Wayne Johnston and Joseph Boyden.

This year’s lecture:

Don’t Turn Back: Observations on Home

Introduction by Marina Endicott. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture. All are welcome to attend this free event. No RSVP required.

The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne presents...

by

Esi EdugyanEsi EdugyanEsi EdugyanTuesday, April 16, 2013 at 7:30 pm

Timms Centre for the Arts 87th Ave. & 112th St.

Edmonton, AB

Esi Edugyan's most recent novel, Half Blood Blues, won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize,the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers TrustFiction Prize, and was longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Edugyan has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany,Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, BritishColumbia with her husband and daughter.

For more information, please visit our website, at: www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/

000EB6-CLC-FP.indd 1 3/11/13 4:46:02 PM


By ALEX PUGSLEY

Actio

n TR

ANSf

ERS

ThE SUmmER mY PARENTS dIvoRcEd ThE fIRST TImE, ThE SUmmER I TURNEd SEvEN, I wAS No LoNGER ABLE To wALk.

F I C T I O N


Something happened to my super-speed. The flash of quickness I once relied on to propel me past any other living kid left me and I began to limp from an ache localized at the top of my left leg. This progressed into a sharp and steep pain, preventing me from walking, from hobbling, until finally I simply hopped everywhere on my right foot. My older sister said it was because I had an undigested carrot lodged in my hip-bone and explained I should have listened to her about properly chewing my food, but another diagnosis pointed to a form of avascular femoral osteonecrosis and a bone disorder called Legg-Perthes. So I was hospitalized for the months of that summer and spent my days and nights in orthopedic traction—that is, with pulley weights dragging my legs away from my pelvis.

Even though I had brought with me a pencil case of precious effects, and even though my parents had spoiled me with a number of new Letraset Super Action Transfers—acetate heroes that could be rubbed on to card-board panoramas—my stay in hospital was a strange time for me. I was so surprised by my new situation that I mostly pretended it wasn’t happening, that I wasn’t in a hospital, that things were the same, and that I would soon be returned to my family’s life, delivered from whatever mythical creatures this place contained. But morning after morning, I awoke in the Izaak Walton Killam Hospital for Children, unable to walk away from my mechanized bed, unable to use my legs, unsure what would happen.

ThE SUmmER mY PARENTS dIvoRcEd ThE fIRST TImE, ThE SUmmER I TURNEd SEvEN, I wAS No LoNGER ABLE To wALk.


I remember the smells of the place, the green reek of the industrial cleanser used on the tile floor, the blended odours of a lunch cart’s undelivered meals—cubes of processed ham congealing into cheese macaroni, tapioca pudding melt-ing with humidity, snack-size cartons of souring skim milk. By the end of the fifth day, I developed bedsores and chafed el-bows, my skin a mess of raw cross-hatch-ings, and I was forced finally to pass a bowel movement into a metal bed pan. I buzzed for a nurse to come empty this pan but nurses were often busy and no one came right away. So the smell of my feces, my just-lying-there-on-the-stain-less-steel poop, spread through the air, slightly sickening me and very much em-barrassing me, for I was not alone in the room. I was in a double room and over the eight weeks of my stay behind the cur-tained partition was a succession of other kids—tonsillitis kids, appendix kids, car accident kids. A new patient might come in the middle of the night, host a crowd of visitors that morning, have surgery that afternoon, and be gone the next day.

Small talk with other families de-pleted me—fake smiles, hopeful waves, promises to stay in touch. I was happiest when I was alone and the other bed was empty, a stack of laundered sheets clean on the bare mattress. All day I would occupy myself with my pencil case of precious effects: a much-loved Batman figurine sprung from a toy Batboat, a green terrycloth wrist band, a newly-received Yellow Submarine. For hours I played with this Yellow Submarine, tremendously impressed with the cast-metal permanence of such an artifact, its revolving periscope, and the hatches that opened to reveal a pair of psychedelic Beatles. At the end of the day I watched the black-and-white television mounted on the ceiling, each evening wondering at Truth or Consequences and the lives of people who lived outside hospitals. I awoke sometimes to screams at night—kids wailing, adults sobbing—and sad-der adults you will never see than those pacing a children’s hospital at three in the morning. The hallway outside my room was mostly quiet with moments of sudden, shrieking calamity.

moRE TERRIfYING foR mE wAS ThE ATTEmPTat recreation and diversion on week-day mornings. Day after day I would be wheeled in my hospital bed toward the elevators, the hallway’s perspective telescoping wildly like the dolly-zoom in a spooky movie, where I would share the rising car with a perpetually smiling hospital porter. Arriving at the top of the building, I would be steered down the hallway toward the fifth floor play area.

From inside my bed, I watched the walls go by, queasy at the sight of the cheerful posters that featured, say, a photograph of two kittens dangling from tree branches beside the jokey caption “Hang In There!” or a school of cartoon minnows happy to be reading from the same story-book. For this room was full of extremely ill and not-healthy-at-all children: cancer kids, burn victim kids, paralyzed kids in wheelchairs. But my at-tention that first morning was drawn to a purple-faced boy in a hospital bed.

I say purple-faced boy because that’s all he seemed to be—I had no idea the world held such problematics. He was a Thalido-mide child who, God knows how, had sur-vived into puberty and adolescence, and the purpleness of his complexion, which under the fluorescent ceiling lights looked positively saurian, was the combined result of teenage acne and steroid medication. The purple-faced boy was one of fifty cases born in the city and he was, like the jokes I would later hear in the school playground, a Guy with No Arms and No Legs.

He was mostly just a head and I felt so humiliated and sorry for this purple-faced boy, who was living an existence he hadn’t chosen but which he must have known was about as wretched as a human life could be—and I am ashamed even now as I write this that on that first morning I couldn’t look him in the eye and was too afraid to talk to him. Because he could speak, of a fashion, making glottal noises in his throat to indicate a direction or that he wished returned to his bed a fallen book. I was embarrassed by this purple-faced boy—wondering how on earth he had happened and could what happened to him happen to me?—and I was sickened to feel such embarrassment and this first mo-ment has stayed with me and stayed with

me and stayed with me, because of all the kids in the fifth floor play area, the cancer kid, the burn victim kid, the paralyzed kid in the wheelchair, or me, a kid in traction, we all knew we were better off than this purple-faced boy, who was a horrendous fuck-up of a human. With his misshapen head and squiggle fins he seemed a sort of monster and not a sure bet to be anything but dead. I had never met a kid so marked for death. I could sense he knew this, his eyes were grey and grim and guarded—he probably knew he was not going to get out of that children’s hospital and that his possibilities for life were diminished and diminishing.

We happened to be the only kids in hospital beds that morning and the Per-petually Smiling Porter put our beds to-gether, so that we were side by side, our bed rails bumping. A nurse assigned to the fifth floor play area, this was a formi-dable woman from Herring Cove named Patty Oickle, suggested I share my Super Action Transfers with the purple-faced boy. But in my panic I feigned discom-fort, as if I were in pain from my traction weights, and stared instead at the bald chemo kid who was loose on the floor, playing with a golden Hot Wheels car I recognized as Splittin’ Image.

From the nearby nurse’s station, an eight-track played a record from that year, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Though I had loved the first side a few months be-fore, especially the jubilant “Cecilia,” the tape’s second song became for me a small eternity of suffering. This was “El Condor Pasa,” an odd, despairing folk tune, full of faraway sorrow. The singer’s existential musings—he’d rather be a sparrow…than a nail…or a hammer…if he could? Who would want to be either? I didn’t under-stand the guy—preyed on my child’s sense of insecurity and looming dread so that when recreation time was over and I was finally free of the fifth floor play area, I was fantastically grateful to be delivered back to my room, regardless of its screams and smells or possible room-mates, content in my diversion of Letrasets and comic books and my pencil case of curiosities. I’d rather stay in my room for the entire two months by myself if I could—if I only could, I surely would.


BUT EAch wEEkdAY moRNING oN ThE PoLIShEdfloor I would hear the shoe-steps of the Perpetually Smiling Porter and I would be wheeled again to the fifth floor play area. The first day of my second week, my middle sisters brought a care pack-age to me (Twizzlers, Pixy Stix, Green Lantern–Green Arrow comic), and, not finding me in my room, went searching. They found me in the fifth floor play area, next to the bed-ridden purple-faced boy.

They came exploring down the hall, my sister Faith softly humming “See See My Playmate,” and then—and I remem-ber this next moment so exactly—they were completely bewildered at the sight of the purple-faced boy. Both reacted by staring at him, hardly blinking, gaz-ing in a sort of simple fascination—not because of any prejudice toward him, but because of a lack of all reference for what they were seeing—which in turn provoked wild curiosity and disbelief. They were having trouble identifying the purple-faced boy as a person, as some-thing more than monstrous, as a crea-ture recognizably human. I felt in that moment that completely ignoring him, was not the sort of example I should set for my sister Faith, who was four years old and quite an impression-able young girl, and so I turned to the purple-faced boy and said hello and told him my name. He did not have a lot of motor control over his neck and his pupils tended to quickly shift and re-adjust, often straining to the limits of the eye-socket. He made a sort of smile, his eyes sympathetic to me, and through the bars of his hospital bed I touched at his nearest appendage.

After Bonnie and Faith left—they were not allowed to stay as the fifth floor play area was off-limits to civilians— I showed the purple-faced boy the Letra-set I was working on, a space adventure called The Red Planet. Letraset was about finding the right place in the landscape for the action figure as well as cleanly transferring it to the panorama. Some-times in my haste the figure, especially if it were in a pose I considered hum-drum, would only partially come off the acetate, forcing me to line it up again and to try to match, say, a sentry’s hand

with a disembodied ray-gun. The pur-ple-faced boy examined my handiwork, noting the split-level choreography I had achieved around a cliff face, and glanced at the sheets of acetates.

I passed him the last sheet and the teaspoon I’d been using as a transferring implement. He accepted the acetate but made me aware that he didn’t need the spoon, producing from the bed-sheets a pencil, sharpened at both ends. He held his double-pencil in pincer fashion, one of his appendages having opposable dig-its of a kind, like a swollen crab claw. He penciled the acetate figure into the land-scape with surprising authority and con-centration. His handiwork was superb and glitch-free, his effort very genuine, and, as I nodded to him, the mutual enter-prise involving us, bonding us, I under-stood I had a colleague in the fifth floor play area.

ThE PURPLE-fAcEd BoY wAS STEAdY ANd studious and resolute—he took nothing for granted, ever watchful, noting every-thing for himself—and he had a super-power. He had an ability to read fast, very fast, there’s-no-way-he-read-it-that-fast fast. His gurney-bed was home to an im-provised library and book after book van-ished into his eyes. I saw him put away Tintin au Congo, André Norton’s Witch World, and The Fellowship of the Ring in the space of a day. He would use his dou-ble-pencil to guide his eyes along a line of text and, when reading a newspaper, arranged his bed-sheets on either side of a column so his gaze wouldn’t bounce around. Because he didn’t really speak himself, I guessed his reading was swift and free of any subvocalization, fields of text moving clean into his nervous sys-tem. One quiet Wednesday in the fifth floor play area, Nurse Patty Oickle rolled over to our vicinity one of the hospital’s book trolleys. This was an assortment of sorry-looking children’s books within which had been stowed some adult hard-covers like King Rat, The Valley of the Dolls, and Papillon.

The purple-faced boy was fascinated by Papillon. I saw him read it three times, and, though I could be baffled by the te-dious sameness of the pages of an adult

book, I scanned through it myself, un-derstanding it was a true-life adventure about criminals escaping Devil’s Island. But I was busy finishing General Custer, my next-to-last Super Action Transfer. The remaining Letraset was some jun-gle-themed piece I didn’t care for called Animals of the World, all elephants and peacocks, and I offered it to him. His eyes spun to their furthest extreme, bloodshot with strain, indicating I should return to him the Papillon hard-cover. In the top right corner of the book’s first end-paper, he placed the image of a bull elephant and rubbed it perfectly into the book. He turned the page and positioned a second elephant on the next recto page, again in the top corner, so the images would align. He turned the page and began another, in this manner filling up the book’s first quire, his double-pencil whittled down to a nubbin. I said nothing, watching the acetate animals emerge glistening in each page corner. Then, in a moment that revealed to me an intricate genius, he fluffled these first pages, making the animals shape-shift in a shimmer of ani-mation. He had made a flip-book.

“We can do this,” I said to him, excited and raising myself off my hospital bed. “You can do this. We can do the whole book. I’ll help you. You wanna do it?” The purple-faced boy looked at me, his own eyes shimmering for a moment, their grimness replaced by insight and curios-ity. I asked him again and slowly, because the movement was onerous, he nodded his heavy head, yes, yes he would do it.

I’m NoT SURE whY, EXAcTLY, IT SEEmEd cRUcIALLYimportant for two bedridden boys to transfer an acetate figure to every other page of a book called Papillon. The ven-ture was ours, it was attainable, it was perfectible, and I liked that we were re-making a contraption already in the world, giving it new meaning and vivid-ness. I suppose the project was our plan, our jubilation, our method of escape, and there was for me something so inexpli-cably right about it. My days in the hos-pital, which once seemed never-ending, an infinity of bedsores and decomposing lunches, became fraught and finite. To inscribe every other page of the book’s


pages would require 228 figures— elephants, eagles, lions, gladiators, wild west cowboys, I didn’t care as long as they were transferred in the mint-perfect style he had established.

In mid-August, there was a visita-tion from my mother, distracted in a floppy hat and peasant skirt. I put in my request for more Letraset then asked her about the purple-faced boy. How long had he been in the hospital? How long would he stay in the hospi-tal? “He can stay till he’s eighteen,” said my mother. “And then he’ll have to go to another hospital.” Then where—where would he go then? But my mother, who was suffering from the lingering effects of a year-long post partum depression, who had spent a few weeks that summer in another hospital herself, who would shortly leave my father for some months, was not able or interested in pursuing an unknown child’s possi-bilities. She shrugged to show there were contingencies in the world she neither controlled nor understood. I didn’t push the subject, opting to simply re-emphasize my requisition order for Letraset. And to my deepest pleasure, my oldest sister brought and left me more Letrasets—copies of Zulu, Carnival, and Prehistoric Monsters Battle—at the nurses station the next morning.

IN A chILdREN’S hoSPITAL, ThERE IS A LULL ThEweek after Labour Day, when sport camps have finished, when canoe lessons are done, when families have returned from vacations and there is lighter traffic on highways. So the hallway outside my room was calm, the other bed in my room unfilled. I was not sure where the purple-faced boy went at night, because in a few days time I was to be released from traction, fitted with plaster casts, and dis-charged from hospital—and we still had fourteen pages of Papillon to finalize—so I asked Nurse Oickle, who had taken an interest in my partnership with the pur-ple-faced boy, if he might be moved to my room. But the purple-faced boy never left the fifth floor, she told me, and needed to be kept under observation at night, and a shift to the second floor was out of the

question. So I asked if my stay in hospital might be extended. But this, too, was im-possible because the appointment for my casts with the orthopedic surgeon was booked for Friday morning. In this mo-ment the face of Patty Oickle from Her-ring Cove was faintly plump, solicitous—but she was baffled that I wanted to stay longer in hospital when there were, as she put it, “only three more jeezly days of summer left.” So I asked, if the purple-faced boy couldn’t be moved to my room, could I be moved to his? She wasn’t sure but said she would ask.

The next morning the purple-faced boy was not present in the fifth f loor play area. He was somewhere having tests—he was in line for an operation to repair a congenital heart defect—and there was some concern whether his system could stand such a procedure. On my own, I worked on Papillon but ner-vously and only completed one image, a Triceratops whose horn-prong I almost mangled, very nearly twisting it in the fi-nal transfer. I had one last day in hospital and thirteen more pages to complete so I asked again if I could visit the purple-faced boy, wherever he was, and finally

Nurse Oickle relented. I never knew if she got higher approval or simply snuck me on her own.

The Perpetually Smiling Porter wheeled me after hours to the eleva-tors and we ascended to the summit, moving beyond the fifth floor play area and through a room of odd incu-bators where inside were cocooned pinkish, wrinkled creatures—new-born infants, I saw, but smaller than newborns, and some with open chests, for this was the neonatal ward. I was mystified that hidden on the fifth floor was an entire culture of other patients, preemies kept alive in ICU isolation. In the doorway to his room, on his gurney-bed, was the purple-faced boy.

He sur veyed the scene, re -viewing his fellow-patients with steady interest. His colour was not good—his cheeks seemed desic-cated, the consistency of t issue paper, the result, perhaps, of some augmented medication—and his thoughts, as ever, seemed far away.

How many kids had he seen come and go? What did he know?

From six o’clock we worked till ten, working until my eyes were dry, my fin-gers cramped and trembling. “Wanna leave the rest till tomorrow?” I asked, shaking out my hand. “The last two pages?” At that moment an exhausted-looking anesthetist arrived, confused to see me with the purple-faced boy. She told me I would have to return to the sec-ond floor, that a night nurse would arrive shortly to take me back my room. I reg-istered the details around me, the pills and ointments at his bedside, the varied prescriptions on his rolling lunch table, the books piled in the windowsill. All the books he read—where did they dwell? Where did they go in his imagination—where did these meanings reside?

I stared at the purple-faced boy, this boy whose name I would never know, contemplating his care and diligence, the shift and flicker of his grey-green eyes. He was oblivious to the distractions of the other room—the beep-beep of the electro-cardiograms, the chorus of hap-hazard breathing—and working with a

whITE PANSY, 1927 – GEoRGIA o’kEEffEIt’s like those photos of the dead, disengaged in some essential way, but beautiful, an innerness so intent the wall glows. The spot where soul once came and went, the only real colour, yolk-gold, though mauve-black bruises mar the fringe where caress deepens to a pinch. The rest white, frosted cheeks and chins. Why didn’t she place it in a vase? Memory alone isn’t enough to keep anything alive. All that’s left is the levitating smell of oil, the shush of a hog’s hair brush. A flower long-gone, petals crisp and cold, puckered at the core like lips sewn shut. What is art? A gasp of dazzle. An old woman staring you down with her bone face.

– Barry Dempster

single-pointedness of mind I was only now beginning to appreciate. I was con-scious of my staring at him, as he must’ve been conscious of my staring at him, as he must’ve grown used to all sorts of staring years ago, but the example of his intent was really meaning something to me and as I was wheeled out of the room, I reached in kinship to my colleague, touching at the pincer-fingers that held the double-pencil.

AT ThE ENd of SUmmER I wAS RELEASEd fRomtraction, encased in hip-to-toe Petrie casts, and given a wheelchair. After two months in hospital, I was free to scissor off my hospital identification bracelet and return to my family’s life. My parents were busy divorcing that month so no one in my family was able to meet me. I was told a cab would be coming. I had no trousers that could fit over my plaster casts and so there I was, in T-shirt and green y-front underwear, waiting in a wheelchair at the front doors of the children’s hospital.

I was so bewildered to be outdoors amid seagulls and f lying beetles and smells of cut-lawns and thoughts of go-ing home that I hadn’t really registered the unorthodoxy of my appearance. It was only when the taxi arrived—and the driver, who lifted me from my wheelchair and stowed me in the back seat, kept re-peating that it was nothing to be embar-rassed about, being in your underwear, no, it was exactly like being in a bathing suit, exactly like it, sure, just like being in a bathing suit—that I felt ashamed for I sensed his humiliation for me, a blink-ing kid in underpants, unable to walk, waiting alone at the hospital, clutching a pencil case of knick-knacks. The driver was packing the collapsed wheelchair into the trunk when someone knocked on my window. On this morning, the face of Patty Oickle was drawn, anguished. She opened the car door and gave me the copy of Papillon, saying I should keep it. I was never told of the purple-faced boy’s death, exactly, but I guessed it, I felt it, from her face I knew it.

Years afterward, my older sister would talk of him, recalling in contem-plative moments the person she had seen for a few minutes one Monday morning. “He was probably better off not being alive,” she said. “A boy like that—he’s better off.”

Life seemed random to me that sum-mer, death more so—I was only a kid, seven years old, but my sense of fairness was disturbed. Something seemed off in the universe. But I had been given the gift of a book. Coming home that afternoon, lifted back into my house, I opened the fi-nal pages of Papillon. On the next-to-last page, in the top corner, was the blended image of two Super Action Transfers, a lion with the head-and-wings of an eagle: a gryphon. It was a work of keen talent and I was impressed by the rightness of the proportions, the invisible seam be-tween creatures, the gleam of assurance in the eagle’s eyes. The last page was blank and I would wonder for years why it was left this way, deciding at last that it was simply a sign of things to come. EB

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000EB6-MagsCanada-FP.indd 1 3/8/13 1:25:26 PM

SoUNdINGS Taking the measureSoUNdINGS Taking the measure


n the fall of 2011 I sat in on a jam I’ve since recognized as part of the future of how we create and consume music.

What’s more, for musicians, it points a way forward for an in-dustry that often seems like it would rather die than evolve from a reliance on making and selling records.

It took How Music Works, David Byrne’s new book, for me to finally understand the impact of what I saw and heard in a small studio at the University of Alberta, where perhaps a dozen musicians had gathered for a weekly session. The lights were low and most people sat cross-legged on the floor in a wide, loose circle. Apart from a guy with a saxophone and a girl with a violin, few of the players had traditional instru-ments—or used them in traditional ways if they did.

Instead, one player swished a whisk, broken and splayed like an aging tulip, in a metal mixing bowl. Another tapped bamboo skewers on the lino tile in front of her. Someone rubbed together rough sheets of paper. The saxophonist issued mournful, reedless puffs, while the violin lay free on the floor, bouncing as the bow was dragged tunelessly across its strings. “Play free, no rules,” Scott Smallwood, the collective’s leader and assistant professor of composition, had told them. He joined in, squeaking out discordant notes on a synthesizer.

Despite giving the impression of hippies at kindergarten, this symphony of found objects was hardly without form. Over the course of a fifteen to twenty minute piece, Smallwood’s Experimental Improv Music Ensemble, or Xime, cycles through patterns; it will work itself into a frenzy of sound,

or lull itself into near silence to accommodate, well, a whisk solo. Structures and patterns emerge organically, providing enough tension to keep listeners wondering what might come next and rarely able to guess.

But when it’s over, it’s gone. Smallwood will suggest a new direction to explore, and his band starts over, the sonic slate wiped clean. Xime might record pieces to discuss them amongst themselves, but there’s no attempt to use them as the sketches that, in conventional jams, go on to become songs. There is no intention to make and sell records; ephemerality is the goal, and it’s achieved handily. In the time it takes to make a forty-minute album, for instance, Xime would have created dozens, if not hundreds, of unique compositions, simply to explore the mechanics of unfettered composition.

Independent up-and-comers—the most reliable source of innovation and creativity in modern music—can learn from this, because Xime represents an overdue parting with the past. Making and selling records has been the heart of both the industry’s business model and the musician’s ar-tistic statement for decades. However, file sharing, iTunes, even well-intentioned distribution sites like Bandcamp.com, have rendered the format about as relevant as an 8-track tape. Musicians make albums at their own, often considerable, expense and consumers pick them apart for next to nothing, (or nothing at all, more likely: according to a recent study, Canadians are amongst the world’s worst offenders for illegal downloads of music files).

I

Jam Pearls

M U S I C

// By SCOTT MESSENGER


That means creativity today comes at a cost that may soon prove unsustainable, even for established acts. Byrne’s book—a collection of ten essays covering how spaces, physi-cal formats, collaborations, and more have shaped western music—includes a chapter on business and finance in the in-dustry. For what it means to the average musician, it might as well have been written in red ink. “I’ve talked to some emerg-ing musicians who are still watching the industry tank,” Byrne writes, “and when I asked them why they even want-ed to make a record, their feeling was, ‘I want to do it while they still exist.’ I may have been operating under the same impulse.” How’s that for a business plan?

For Byrne’s 2004 release Grown Backwards, recording swallowed up nearly ninety-seven percent of his advance against sales, leaving him with $7,000 for roughly a year’s worth of work. Though he admits he could have recorded more cheaply, “you have to sell an awful lot of records to ex-pect to live off record sales alone, and maybe you shouldn’t count on that happening.”

Not to say the album is dead. In 2012, Rush celebrated the format by releasing Clockwork Angels, the Toronto trio’s first full-length concept record, selling 103,000 copies in its first week, their highest number in a decade. Other artists that year leaned on the album to accommodate unusual bursts of output. Mark Knopfler went double-long for the first time in his thirty-five year career with the two-disc Privateering. Yel-low & Green, the double album from Georgia-based metal act Baroness, gave indie label Relapse its best first-week seller in more than two decades. And R&B phenomenon The Weeknd’s first major release (following a series of mixtapes) was a triple disc. It has since been certified gold.

But these are outliers. As Byrne’s research points out, and as everyone knows, sales of CDs have plummeted—roughly $15 billion between 2000 and now; at the same time, digital sales have risen to only about $4 billion. In 2009, only two percent of the nearly 100,000 records made sold more than 5,000 copies, he adds. Ugly odds for newbies.

That’s part of the reason why he also makes art, works on films, and writes books—all of which cost too much money, time, and energy for most musicians to consider. But Byrne’s diversification makes sense, and that’s where an idea like Xime becomes so important.

Could the spirit and intention of Xime be applied to mod-ernizing the music industry? Why not create a site devoted to capturing those moments of inspired creativity of traditional bands? I’ve experienced these in my own projects. You take chances when you ‘play free.’ You and your bandmates lead (or push) each other into unfamiliar territories. Quite often, the results are so extraordinary that, even if you recorded to later refine the piece into a song, it’s like bringing a fire from inferno to controlled burn. By capturing and posting home-made video, musicians would be treating listeners to a new kind of intimacy, giving a glimpse of an artistic point of origin. It’d be quick and dirty, but the internet doesn’t care.

The same site could also host one-off projects, for which we’re already seeing an appetite. NPR’s music site is grow-ing its collection of Tiny Desk Concerts, in which artists like Ben Gibbard, Martha Wainwright, and Lyle Lovett drop by the office for short, lo-fi sets. Undercover, from the A.V. Club (The Onion’s arts and culture property), is a video series fea-turing bands that pick from a list of songs to cover; it’s now in its third season. And, independently, two guitarists launched the “$100 Guitar Project” in 2010, shipping their cheap music-store find to sixty-five accomplished guitar buddies to use it to make short, novel recordings of compositions to post on the project’s website. It has since spun off a record, a double album, no less.

That might be one source of revenue for the site’s musi-cians: occasionally compile and sell tracks as cheap digital downloads, perhaps coupling the release with concerts show-casing the music those early jams wrought. A little more cash might come with advertising (no one, after all, is going to pay), and that might help to bridge the gap to that next record. Few will be able to do it by touring non-stop.

More than that, this sort of venture would help satisfy con-sumers in our era of relentless engagement. Social media has produced a generation of fans that demand not just content but connection. The internet may have taken the industry out at the knees, but it’s also offering unexpected opportunities for it to try to walk again: for bands to build brands and even grow as artists.

“For me,” writes Byrne, “diversification is about seeking out ways of stretching creatively. Diversity is not a business decision: it’s a way of staying interested, alert.”

All artists should all be so lucky. Since they’re not, they should put the creativity that goes into their work toward creating sustainable business models, rather than accepting breaking even as their brass ring.

“We’re so inundated by the idea of playing by the rules,” Smallwood told his players during the Xime session at the U of A. A jam had just come to an end and he was both compli-menting them for breaking those rules and pushing them to do even more. After all, the task the collective has set for itself is bigger than it might seem at first listen. Xime, he told me at the end of the evening, is ultimately about discovering new ways to make music. “We’re trying to invent a new language,” he said. EB

creativity today comes at a cost that may soon prove

unsustainable, even for established acts.


riends came to stay with us recently. Among their suitcases and belongings, they had a cute, quilted shoul-

derbag, which they plunked on the kitchen countertop. Out came sleeves of aluminum pods, each one a pre-ground single-portion serving of coffee. Then a milk frother. And finally the Pixie, a sleek, pint-sized machine. It turned out this was a smaller version of what they use at home, the Citiz and Milk. The Pixie, my friend explained, a tad embarrassed, was their travel-sized Nespresso machine. It accompanied them on road trips.

My friend apologized for imposing another appliance on my cluttered kitchen counter. “No messy grounds,” she of-fered by way of explanation. “Besides, even he can use it!” she added, glancing over at her uniquely disastrous-at-any-type-of-cooking husband. Indeed, all you had to do was pop a cap-sule into the top slot, push a button, and out came an espresso with a decent-looking crema floating on top. Even the spent capsule dropped automatically into a holding drawer.

At first, I chalked The Pixie up to the gadgety eccentricity of our coffee-crazed friends. But soon after, I couldn’t ignore other clues that this “single-serve” java culture was breaching the levees long held by workaday automatic drip machines and the nerdish luxe of home barista contraptions.

Last year, Nespresso launched its first big North Ameri-can television ad campaign just in time for Christmas. Penelope Cruz seductively lisped over and over again how “just one touch creates the perfect coffee.” George Clooney’s face has been splashed all over Europe for years as Nespres-so’s pitchman. More recently, John Malkovich has joined

Clooney in the company’s TV ads. You can view their work on YouTube.

At the same time, other companies were amassing their lines of single-serve capsules and delivery devices—at all price levels. Keurig, Tassimo, Bosch, Cuisinart, Krups (Nescafé), Sears, Black & Decker, and other brands overtook shelves at Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Home Outfit-ters, The Bay, Future Shop, and Canadian Tire.

Everywhere — everywhere! — kitchen and housewares stores had pop-up ‘espresso boutiques.’ Perky sales clerks were at the ready to demonstrate just how easy it was to brew a foolproof cup. Not to mention the growing line of ‘must have’ accessories, from carousels that arranged your cap-sules in a twirling, pleasing manner to matching serving cups. In grocery aisles, those little f ive-gram single- use capsules were crowding out regular beans and bags of ground coffee.

As 2012 came to a close, even Tim Hortons and Starbucks threw their hats into the ring, offering single-serve at-home versions of their trademark brews for devotees who could no longer be bothered to wait in the morning lineups.

The skeptic in me assumed that this was a well-orches-trated campaign where the tail was wagging the dog—that clever marketers were creating demand out of thin air. But with a quick look at the research statistics, I soon realized that Big Coffee was merely trying to keep up with the fickle whims of the caffeinated masses.

According to the NPD Group, a market research com-pany that tracks restaurant and consumer food trends, over

F

// By JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING

C O N S U M P T I O N

Espresso 2.0


one quarter of us are drinking more cups of joe at home, and less in restaurants and cafes, partly to save money. And as we do, we’re going berserk for the single-serve machines. Even before 2012 was over, NPD reported that single-serve machines had become the second most popular coffee makers at thirty-one percent of the market share and the Canadian mar-ket for machines alone had reached $113.2 million in sales, a growth of fifty-eight percent over the previous year.

Josh Hockin, the 2011 Canadian National Barista Cham-pion, is director of training and quality control at Transcend Coffee, a craft roastery with two cafés in Edmonton. When I asked his opinion on these machines and this trend, he used words like “burnt,” “thin,” “bitter,” and “uninteresting” to describe the espresso that a plastic machine could produce.

Without fairly expensive equipment, and without a lot of training and experience, “brewing espresso at home is actually pretty hard,” Hockin said. This is why he thinks there’s been a parallel growth in the business of at-home specialty coffee and its mass-market contender of single- serve systems.

Hockin cautions that single-serve contraptions are not a great choice, though he understands the convenience and the lack of mess. For what they are, he admits, they produce con-sistent coffee if nothing else. Of all the brands, he credits Nes-presso as being “the best at what it does.” (It is the only brand that uses actual grinds in the capsule and not an instant.) But it’s definitely a compromise. “When was the coffee roasted? Probably a year ago.”

Poul Mark, Transcend’s founder and owner, added that the “single-serve revolution” has been the dominant topic of North American coffee conferences for the past two years. “Obviously, we’re not fans,” he told me, concerned not only as a business owner in the specialty bean trade, but as a lover of quality, hand-roasted coffees. He pointed to the massive money being made on what are at best mediocre beans, fuelling the “ridiculous growth” in this retail segment, and encouraged me to consider the cost of the product inside those little capsules.

I did the math. Single-serve capsules cost between fifty to seventy-two cents each for five-to-seven-grams of coffee. This means that the cheapest coffee inside a capsule prices

out at about $100 per kilogram or forty-five dollars per pound. Transcend’s most expensive beans sell for forty-three dollars per pound, while the majority of their single-source fair-trade beans sell for twenty-five dollars per pound. With relatively cheap machines, the capsules are the real bonanza for these companies. It’s analogous to the model that printer companies developed to sell us cheap machines that require expensive ink cartridges. No wonder companies like Nespresso could afford George Clooney and Penelope Cruz to pitch their products.

The Bay in Southgate Mall in Edmonton has one of six Canadian Nespresso Boutiques. The other five are tucked in as stores-within-stores at select Bay locations in Toronto, Yor-kville, Montreal, Quebec City, and Vancouver.

The Edmonton boutique manager toured me through the various machines, distinguished by their minor differences in shape, the colour of the exterior molded plastic, whether there was a milk frother attached or not, and price. It appeared that you could pay anywhere from $199 to $1599 for essentially the same appliance. Sleeves of shiny aluminum casings in pal-ettes of colours like makeup displays were the eye-candy at the “capsule bar.” A sleeve of ten servings ranged from $6.80 to $7.20.

Dozens of people were browsing the glossy plastic ma-chines alongside me, merrily buying indigo blue and scarlet red capsules. There was a sophisticated feel to the whole affair. You were part of a club, literally, with membership discounts and loyalty perks. Nespresso even has its own hip product-place-ment magazine. Glossy stories on chefs, exotic destinations, ar-chitecture, and art were layered in between soft-focus close-ups of machines, capsules, and accessories. There was an article about the Nespresso-sponsored Team New Zealand’s twenty-two metre Catamaran in the most-recent America’s Cup. I lost count of the full-page ads for watches.

When the moment came for a taste-test, I chose a decaf, reasoning that if such a machine could extract a superior de-caf, I would be won over. Sadly, I was not. The coffee was thin and lacked the finish that a proper machine can extract from good, freshly roasted beans, even decaffeinated ones.

I left the boutique asking the obvious question: Was good marketing and convenience enough to make 2013 the year of the single-serve revolution? Or would quality carry the day, and make this year’s machines next year’s yard sale items?

Of course, who’s to say the coffee war will even be fought on quality? It’s losing ground already to the personal micro-economic decisions we are making every day in our down-ward-facing economy. We still love our espresso drinks, but at four or five dollars per latte, they’re getting harder and harder to justify. Single-serve lattes, macchiatos, and cappuccinos seem to be the new affordable luxury, with the added bonus of at-home convenience and affiliation with Clooney, Cruz, and Malkovich. The question, in the end, may not be whether it’s as good as a top-notch barista-made espresso, because, of course, it isn’t. The point is that, for many, the actual quality of the coffee might not matter, and the coffee companies have figured this out. EB

Nespresso even has its own hip product-placement

magazine—stories on chefs, exotic destinations, and art

between soft-focus close-ups of machines and capsules.


ishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, is a small Central Asian city set under five thousand metre peaks and sandwiched

between the vast steppes of Kazakhstan and the deserts of Tajikistan and Western China. As of the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, Bishkek was little more than a collection of huts, a way station on what remained of the silk road, dry and dusty, and bitterly cold in the winter, but thanks to the Soviet Union’s predilection for gigantism, the city’s boulevards and plazas are now vast, it’s air a haze of sweet coal smoke pumped from the smokestacks of a generating station.

The State Historical Museum is set in the middle of the endless and almost always empty Ala-Too Square in the city centre, in front of which is a glassed-in booth with two perfectly motionless soldiers in long great coats and jack boots; during the changing of the guards they exit with high, puppet-like goose steps. Nearby is a statue of Manas, the furious nomad warrior of the national epic. The museum itself is a massive poured concrete cube, columns along its sides, in a style that is a hybrid of Islamic mausoleum architecture and brutal Soviet modernism, and inside, above the sparse smattering of relics of Kyrgyz history, are soaring murals that depict the Russian Revo-lution and chaotic, bloody tribal raids. Behind the museum is a statue of Lenin, displaced by Manas from its original place at the front, donning his signature worker’s cap and defiantly pointing toward the future—or rather, toward nowhere in particular.

One of the remarkable features of the State Historical Mu-seum, as well as the grimly monumental Kyrgyz Museum of Fine Arts, is that there is almost never anyone there. Like the sprawling boulevards and squares, which by evening in winter are dark and desolate, the museums seem to represent the idea of a country that never really existed and has little to do with the city’s rag-tag, multi-ethnic population of Kyrgyz, Russians,

Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Koreans, Kazahks, and Chinese. In this con-servative, nominally Muslim city, the parks, littered with statues of shamans and Asiatic warlords and Marx and Engels, largely serve as private, secretive places for young couples to make out.

cULTURAL INSTITUTIoNS IN oUT-of-ThE-wAY PoST-SovIET coUNTRIES like Kyrgyzstan with little or no tourism pay no heed to whether their exhibitions and collections are attractive to the population or whether anyone actually shows up. There are no market-ing and publicity departments; there are no education depart-ments; there are no billboards or television advertisements. At institutions across North America like the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the Art Gallery of On-tario almost the exact opposite is the case: saddled with debt from landmark new buildings (or plans for constructing land-mark new buildings), these museums devote disproportion-ate amounts of their budgets to figuring out how to bring great crowds of paying visitors to flashy, five-star exhibitions through their revolving glass doors. This is the world of evidence-based policy, of economic accountability, and of cultural life as consumption, entertainment, and diversion. In a twenty-first century, conservative Canada, with purse strings for perceived indulgences pulled tight, sexy exhibi-tions like Van Gogh: Up Close at the National Gallery of Canada last summer or Frieda & Diego last fall at the Art Gallery of Ontario or even the biennale at the Art Gallery of Alberta, all bringing with them to varying degrees significant shipping and insurance costs, not only need to pull in visitors, they require the f inancia l par t ic ipat ion of companies l ike Sun Li fe Financial, Aeroplan, Scot iabank, and the Bank of Montrea l . T he going euphemism for such funding is “partnership,” but it ’s about money.

B

// By DANIEL BAIRD

A RT

what Art Is for


The press conferences for such exhibitions are always il-luminating and more or less identical. The director of the museum will remark on the groundbreaking importance of the exhibition, and then lavishly praise the various corporate sponsors. A representative of the sponsor will reinforce the im-portance of the new or ongoing partnership, and make a few nervous remarks about the art itself (which often enough was made by modernists committed to the violent destruction of capitalism). After sputtering, largely ignored remarks about methodology by the curator, the director will usually return to the stage, visibly embarrassed, to pump the products available in the gift shops. While private philanthropists can and do pro-vide funding for exhibitions out of generosity, or as a tribute to the society that has richly benefitted them, we all know, despite the love-ins between museum directors and sponsors at press conferences, that companies like Scotiabank and the Bank of Montreal are involved in these exhibitions because they expect a return on their investment: they are disseminating a brand, and such exhibitions are advertisements.

The value of big-money, corporate involvement in the arts, in North America or anywhere else, might seem not only inevi-table but something of a no-brainer. Who doesn’t want to have regular programming of major artists in Canada, whether it’s Caravaggio or Van Gogh or Picasso or the Chinese conceptual artist and activist Ai Weiwei, especially for those of us without the means to hop from show to show in New York, London, Berlin, or Shanghai? Otherwise, many of us would never get to see such art, or only on rare occasions, and young people will get to see it during their formative years. In this context, it would seem to hardly matter that large companies are ultimately interested in proliferating their brands or promoting an image of corporate responsibility; the benefits are simply too big to worry about that.

Few people in the arts are thrilled about the fact that corporate logos have come to dominate the art world in much the same way (and for the same reason) as they have come to dominate professional sports; it is widely regarded as a neces-sary evil. But this cost-benefit analysis—if we want increas-ingly big, international exhibitions, then we have to “partner” with corporations—may be confused. Maybe there is, in fact, something wrong with what we want. Maybe, seduced by the prospect of ever bigger, more elaborate exhibitions, we’ve forgotten what the point of art was in the first place.

Corporate money in the arts has encouraged two insidious trends regarding the visual arts as a form of wholesome,

educational entertainment (so people can feel good about them-selves because they didn’t stay home watching reality TV) and art as part of the global celebrity system in which the draw of an exhibition is less the art than name recognition. Again, such exhibitions, relentlessly promoted, almost certainly allow more Canadians to see more historically important art than they otherwise would, but, ironically, it might lead them to have even less of a relationship to art than they had before. There is such a thing as great art (and the difference between great and mi-nor art is clarified when one becomes familiar with permanent collections like those at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, and the National Gallery of Canada), but the importance of art for the individual in no way depends upon great art. Having an intimate, ongoing relationship to works of art whatever their ultimate quality is more important than seeing major works; it is far better to see a minor painting often than a great painting once or twice. What is important about art is the imaginative project it proposes and the relationship to the world it insists upon. Art isn’t about the moment in which one contemplates it, about the object in and of itself; it’s about everything else.

We should try to imagine an art world without the troubling, and compromising, influx of corporate money. There would be few if any big-ticket exhibitions that (at least occasionally) bring in large crowds, so ticket sales would decline precipitously. The curators and administrators who oversee such exhibitions would probably lose their jobs. Marketing and publicity departments would largely disap-pear. Gift shops would be pointless. Exhibitions would rely on the creative use of permanent collections and national and regional artists: in Canada, this would be a far more provincial and insular world, disconnected from the trends in New York, London, and Berlin. This downsizing would not exactly compare with, say, the collapse of the auto industry, but even in Canada, art is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it should give us pause.

But the question is, would it actually be harmful to art and our relationship to it? Would this be a bad thing? I think not. Sustained by tens of millions of dollars in corporate money in Canada alone, the globalized art world has neither produced better artists than at any other period of history, nor has it cre-ated better, more self-conscious viewers, or for that matter stronger communities: people flocking to exhibitions of what they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be great art leaves them as they were before, in part because, unlike corporate brands, they can partition the art off from the rest of their lives.

Think about what our actual, mundane, everyday experi-ence of art is like. You drift into a museum, gallery, or even a coffee shop with art on its walls during the course of your day. You find yourself more or less at random in front of a work of art by someone whose name you don’t recognize and who may or may not be well known: it might be a painting of a landscape, a photograph of a riot, a looping web of strings and objects. You are held there for a moment, sixty seconds, five minutes, for reasons you may or may not understand. Then you leave, pulled back into the rest of your life, and while

Art ultimately dies when it is a special occasion requiring a trip downtown and a twenty-five dollar

ticket; it needs to be indistinguishable from ordinary life.

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Take the whole family on a journey of discovery at one of Canada’s most popular museums! See all the natural regions of Alberta, enjoy a breathtaking gem and mineral gallery, stroll through a stunning exhibition featuring the story of the First Peoples, and discover exotic insects in the Live Bug Room. Billions of years packed into one amazing day!

you will most likely instantly forget the name of the artist and might not even be able to describe the work as a whole, you might well remember fragments of it— a gesture, a line, a swatch of color—and these fragments begin to intertwine with everything else you look at and think about. Doing this once might not have much of an impact, but by doing it every day, unselfconsciously, as a matter of course, the fragments accumulate and evolve along with you, and suddenly you are seeing the world in new ways. This process in no way depends upon great art; it requires intimacy, allowing art to become part of life, allowing the boundaries between art and life to slowly dissolve. Art ultimately dies when it is a special occasion requiring a dedicated trip downtown and a twenty-five dollar ticket; it needs to be indistinguishable from ordinary life.

oN ThE oThER SIdE of ThE PARk fRom ThE STATE hISToRIcAL mUSEUmin Bishkek is the Dubovyi Park Museum (it literally means “Oak Park Museum”), a small, well-maintained exhibition space devoted to contemporary art in Kyrgyzstan. The building itself has an interesting history. Originally an orthodox church built in 1870 when Tsarist Russia first asserted its presence in the region as part of the diplomatic brinksmanship with west-ern Europe usually called “the great game,” the building was in the process of demolition, its onion-shaped dome already torn down by the Soviet government, when an urgent message was

sent to Moscow that Kyrgyz artists needed a place to exhibit their work. Currently it’s showing an exhibit of photographs tak-en in nearby western China, home of the Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim Turkic people with close ethnic and cultural connec-tions to the Kyrgyz. In the spring of 2013, there will be a show of the well-known local painter Sabidjan Babadjanov—mostly depictions of local people and the villages, high meadows, and mountains one encounters less than an hour from Bishkek.

These artists will never exhibit in the great museums or galleries of the world; even here, few people here will visit the show or even know it exists. But those who manage to drift in and out of the exhibit during the course of the day, when they wander back into the dusty streets of Bishkek—the market with its bins of yak meat, the cab drivers pulled up to alley ki-osks downing water glasses of vodka, the Afghanistan war veterans begging on street corners, the Korean gangsters in power suits and hot pink ties, the old women with headscarves sweeping the gutters with long wicker brooms, the beautiful young women with hats that look like gutted snow leopards set on their shining jet black hair, the mountains presiding over everything—they will do so in a world completely continuous with the art. The economy may be global, but art isn’t because we aren’t. Art exists only in the thoughts and conversations we have at a particular time and place. We don’t need Scotiabank for that. EB


S O l O S h O w: R O O M 6 2

SEAN cAULfIELdSean Caulfield is an Edmonton artist whose work explores the impact of technology on the environment and our bodies. He is interested in creating visual images that blur boundaries between the biological and the technological, the organic and the mechanical, and which challenge viewers to consider the implications of this merging. Caulfield is a Centennial Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. He has exhibited his prints, drawings, and artist’s books extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Diagram for circle of Lights, 2012 contained Body #3 (from the End Point series), 2011

Diagram for the Heaven of the Sun, 2012


he new film Oz the Great and Powerful arrived proclaim-ing it as the work of “the producer of Alice in Wonder-

land.” And so it goes in Hollywood, where L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll can be elbowed aside by the guy who made the Young Guns movies. That guy in question is Joe Roth, a vet-eran producer who’s had some of the biggest hits of his career in the last three years with a series of ‘adult’ takes on classic children’s stories such as Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and the Huntsman.

Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi, has all the Roth earmarks: a top-notch cast (James Franco as the Wizard, and Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, and Michelle Williams as witches), lavish production design, an overgenerous effects budget, and a script that adds layers of backstory to characters and situations whose simplicity and power satisfied audiences perfectly well for over a century.

What this new Oz isn’t, though, is scary. It tries hard to establish dark-and-edgy bonafides with images of the Wicked Witch of the West reaching out from the shadows and clawing up a marble tabletop with her fingernails, and a flock of bat-like creatures flying into the camera. But these rote exercises in computer-generated imagery are pretty weak tea coming from Raimi, who set the gold standard for giddily energetic low-budget comedy-horror back in the nineteen-eighties with the Evil Dead series.

Has Raimi lingered in the Hollywood poppy fields too long and forgotten all his old gorehound instincts? If he has, that’s a problem. A ruinous one, even. The world of Oz exists for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to give young children

nightmares. Any Oz film that fails to do so has to be consid-ered an artistic failure.

L. fRANk BAUm woULd dISAGREE, of coURSE. hE SAYS AS mUchin his introduction to the first of his Oz novels, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900. Baum saw a sea change tak-ing place in children’s literature, and wanted to draw a line between traditional fairytales, with all their “horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale,” and a newer type of children’s story which he termed the “wonder tale.” Wonder tales were meant for the “modern child,” who according to Baum “seeks only entertainment... and gladly dispenses with all disagree-able incidents.” That’s the kind of book Baum wanted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be: “a modernized fairytale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

Baum died of a stroke in 1919, and so was spared the irony of seeing the universe he created become perhaps the twen-tieth century’s most fertile spawning ground for childhood nightmares. As early as 1934, James Thurber noted Baum’s knack for thoughtlessly traumatizing his readers: “Children love a lot of nightmare and at least a little heartbreak in their books,” he wrote in an article for The New Republic. “And they get them in the Oz books. I know that I went through excruciatingly lovely nightmares and heartaches when the Scarecrow lost his straw, then the Tin Woodman was taken apart, when the Saw-Horse broke his wooden leg (it hurt for me, even if it didn’t for Mr. Baum).”

T

// By PAUL MATWYCHUK

F I l M

The Nightmarish world of oz

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A similar disconnect between stated intention and night-marish effects is on display in the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, which begins with an introductory text that, with wonderful hubris, proclaims itself a classic even before the first scene is underway. “For nearly forty years,” we read, “this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion....To the Young in Heart we dedicate this picture.”

Maybe inflict would have been a better word. Twin, com-peting narratives have grown up around The Wizard of Oz. The official version declares The Wizard of Oz a timeless clas-sic, the epitome of Hollywood studio magic-making, one that continues to enchant new generations of film fans through its annual broadcasts on network TV.

In the shadow narrative, however, The Wizard of Oz means something very different to the children who see it. It’s a magi-cal film, sure, but its magic is dark and troubling, and it trans-formed Baum’s cheerful story of Dorothy Gale’s adventures down the Yellow Brick Road into the scariest and most intense experience of most children’s entire moviegoing lives. This is not even a matter of one or two isolated upsetting moments; The Wizard of Oz consists of a steady and unceasing stream of nightmarish images. The tornado sweeping implacably across the featureless Kansas horizon. The legs of the Wicked Witch of the East bonelessly curling up under Dorothy’s house like grotesque party favours. Those terrifying flying monkeys. Film blogger John LaRue once compiled a list of the scariest things in The Wizard of Oz; he singled out the gigantic disembodied head that looms over Dorothy and her companions during their first encounter with the Wizard, and that eerie, vowelly chant the guards repeat as they march outside the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle as being particularly upsetting. For comedian Julie Klausner, it’s the Haunted Forest sequence where the trees come to life and start pelting Dorothy and her friends with their own apples. “It’s grotesque!” she recently observed on her podcast How Was Your Week? “They’re throwing something that’s actually a part of them at someone they hate that much!” And I still haven’t even mentioned the film’s main villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, who is scary when she’s alive and even scarier when she’s dying. Is there a more agonizing demise in all of children’s cinema than the sight of Marga-ret Hamilton melting into the floor, raging against her own mortality with her very last breath?

Rewatching The Wizard of Oz as an adult, what strikes me most is the film’s sense of claustrophobia, which is more subtle but just as intense as anything in Repulsion—strange, since Oz is a film that takes place almost entirely outside. Even in the iconic moment where Dorothy opens a door in her black-and-white world and en-ters the supposedly wide-open Technicolor realm of Oz, in prac-tice, clearly all she’s doing is walking from a small soundstage into a bigger one. The hills in the distance are painted on the scenery; you can see Munchkin shadows playing faintly upon it. The Yellow Brick Road paves over a floor that was obviously already flat.

I think that’s the secret ingredient of The Wizard of Oz’s palpably creepy vibe, even more so than any individual creepy

image—it takes place in a plainly artificial world that refus-es to acknowledge its own artificiality. (It’s the same thing that makes clowns so distasteful—the painted face that fails to disguise the human face beneath.) Even a child can sub-liminally recognize that the creatures the film insists are a magical race of Munchkins are really grown adults forced to wear humiliating wigs and sing in dubbed voices about lol-lipops. (The urban legend darkly persists that a particularly depressed Munchkin actor hanged himself right there on the set. If you look closely, the story goes, you can see his body in the background while the stars march past singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” Tra-la!)

ThE oNLY RIvAL To tHe WizArD of oz whEN IT cAmE To coUchINGhigh-potency nightmare fodder inside anodyne family enter-tainment was the Walt Disney animation studio, from whose goblin mind Bambi, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence from Fantasia all originated. Fittingly, Walt Disney had been interested in adapting L. Frank Baum’s work to the screen since the nineteen-thirties. He acquired the rights to the Oz books in 1954 and came close to making a feature film vehicle for TV’s Mouseketeers called The Rain-bow Road to Oz in 1957 but, for reasons no one seems entirely sure of, ultimately abandoned the project.

Finally, though, in 1985, Disney Studios released Return to Oz, an “unofficial sequel” to the MGM classic. The poster for the film continued the Oz tradition of false advertising: the tagline called it “an all-new live-action fantasy filled with Disney adventure and magic,” a phrase that failed to predict the film’s actual eventual reputation as perhaps the most baf-flingly bleak and terrifying children’s movie ever released by a major studio. “Astonishingly somber and melancholy,” be-gan the Variety review. “Grim and joyless,” said the New York Times. “Kids under six are gonna get nightmares from this picture,” predicted Gene Siskel (correctly!) on At the Mov-ies. The film was directed and co-written by Walter Murch, a revered film editor and sound designer who had previously worked closely with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola; one assumes that Disney had hoped Murch would give them an all-ages crowd-pleaser like Star Wars, but instead they got a children’s movie as emotionally grueling as Apocalypse Now.

If the original Wizard is terrifying, it seems to have gotten that way by accident; the disturbing tone of Return to Oz, howev-er, seems quite deliberate. How else to explain Murch’s decision to begin the story with a sequence in which Auntie Em and Uncle Henry commit Dorothy to a mental hospital? (They’re hoping that electroshock therapy will cure her delusions of having visit-ed a kingdom full of witches and talking scarecrows. This scene, needless to say, does not appear anywhere in Baum’s books.)

Luckily, a freak rainstorm transports Dorothy back to Oz moments before the doctor can switch on the electricity. But once there, Dorothy must contend with a fresh gallery of horrors: an evil witch named Mombi who keeps a collection of disembodied heads in her bedroom that she switches out with her own as the mood strikes her (she has plans to steal

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Dorothy’s head, too, and wear it once it’s “ripe”); the “Wheel-ers,” a race of creatures with wheels instead of hands and feet who serve Mombi the way the Flying Monkeys served the Wicked Witch of the West; and the Deadly Desert, a barren wasteland that turns anyone who comes in contact with it into sand. AV Club contributor Amelie Gillette has especially vivid memories of Return to Oz’s freaky power: “The part that fright-ened me the most as a child,” she writes, “was when Jack, the makeshift scarecrow that pathetically calls Dorothy ‘Mom,’ loses his jack-o’-lantern head as Dorothy and her friends are flying away from the witch. ‘Help me, mom!’ he wails as his head falls through the foggy sky. The thought of his stick body going on and living, possibly forever, without a head was profoundly creepy to me then. In fact, it’s still really creepy to me now.”

IN JANUARY, ThE vANcoUvER movIE ThEATRE ThE cINEmAThEqUElaunched a revival series called “Family Frights”—a full year of children’s films that, as curator Liz Schulze told the Georgia Straight, “have this interesting boundary pushing between the world of the safe children’s film and the world of the dark medieval fairytale, where really anything can happen.” The film that launched the series? Return to Oz.

Sure enough, Return to Oz does enjoy a small but passion-ate cult following, and I hope it only grows larger. Watched as an adult, the strangeness and beauty of Return to Oz become

easier to appreciate, as does Fairuza Balk’s luminous debut performance as Dorothy. Murch’s sensitive depiction of a young girl who passes between the gloomy real world and the often equally gloomy realm of the imagination looks ahead to films like Pan’s Labyrinth or Beasts of the Southern Wild, and behind to the great Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive, about a young girl haunted by the Boris Karloff version of Franken-stein. People talk about Return to Oz as a betrayal of Baum’s vision, but I see it as a film that brings out the darkness that was in Baum’s books all along. (As a child, Baum suffered from recurring dreams of being chased by a scarecrow that would collapse into a pile of straw moments before catch-ing him.) Think of Return to Oz as Baum’s vision with all the Glinda drained out of it.

In the stories, Glinda represents all that is pure and good and safe. It’s Glinda who shields Dorothy from the Wicked Witch, and Glinda who tells Dorothy how she can escape the alien world of Oz and go back to where everything is familiar and normal and she can once again go to sleep, untroubled by thoughts of wicked witches and flying monkeys. What a killjoy—and it doesn’t bode well that Sam Raimi’s new Oz the Great and Powerful has chosen to make Glinda the heroine. Come on, Sam: no child who watches The Wizard of Oz for the first time, not even the ones still quivering with fright, ever says their favourite character is Glinda. EB

s a child, I ventured almost every year to British Colum-bia’s Southern Gulf Islands and I became fascinated

with the history of the places I visited there. It wasn’t so much the tangible traces that intrigued me—the skeleton of a build-ing or a scrap washed up upon the tide line—as the absences and spaces that punctuate the islands. I noticed even then that we referred to the Gulf Islands and their geographies by the Spanish and English names given to them by European ex-plorers and settlers, while pre-existing Coast Salish names for the same places often did not appear on maps. Passing on a ferry, one cannot see many traces of the Japanese-Canadi-ans who lived on the islands before the World War Two intern-ment. And, although I have been told about the abundance of salmon that used to come through Active Pass, there’s not much evidence of them now.

Today, a small slip of a bridge connects North and South Pender Islands. It’s wide enough for one car to cross. Yet, as Noreen Hooper explores in the anthology Islands in Trust, and as other writers have also noted, there was once an isthmus that joined the Penders, effectively making them one island. Although the isthmus had historically been used by Aborigi-nal people, it was destroyed about a century ago so that set-tlers who wanted to move more easily between Port Browning and Bedwell Harbour did not have to choose between the dif-ficulty of portaging across the isthmus and the inconvenience of going around the island by boat. After the rock and soil were torn away, the islands remained unattached for over fifty years until the thin bridge, with its low railings and symmetrical

wooden trestles, brought them together once again.It was from a book that I learned that there had once been

an isthmus between the islands, but I’ve carried the story with me for so long and amassed such a varied collection, that there’s no way for me to know which book it was. In an attempt to learn more about the islands, I visited the bookstores on Mayne Island and North Pender, what was then Sabine’s Fine Used Books and is now Black Sheep Books in Ganges, and the Haunted Bookshop and Tanner’s Books in Sidney, and I scoured online booksellers across Canada. I tracked down old maps and guidebooks, transcriptions of oral history, memoirs and poetry collections, works of non-fiction and local history, and volumes of photographs and drawings in order to account for and uncover what seemed to have been lost.

Noreen Hooper wrote about the importance of the isth-mus for Aboriginal populations on the island and the plethora of artifacts that once could be found there. In BC Studies, Roy Carlson and Philip Hobler also discussed how archaeologi-cal excavations in the nineteen-eighties revealed that the area around the isthmus had been used by Aboriginal people for centuries, even millennia. But the absence of accounts about the area by Aboriginal writers is striking, and I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of what the islands looked like be-fore the isthmus was destroyed. What has happened to the history that has not been recorded? Did it disappear with the bridge? There is now a man-made bridge where there was once an isthmus connecting the Pender Islands. Imagination has become the only real bridge to the past. EB

A

A Bridge to the Past // By SARAH SHEWCHUK

BRIdGES


supporting and promoting edmonton’s arts community The Edmonton Arts Council is a not-for-profit society and

charitable organization that supports and promotes the arts

community in Edmonton. The EAC provides grants to Edmonton

festivals, arts organizations and individual projects, administers

public art projects, and initiates projects and partnerships that

increase the profile and involvement of the arts in all aspects of

community life.

edmonton arts council

Prince of Wales Armoury, 2nd Floor, 10440 108 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta, T5H 3Z9780.424.2787 | [email protected]

edmontonarts.ca

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She is a thing of beauty.

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Eighteen Bridges - Spring 2013