“Arctic Cabaret”
Margo Pfeiff
pp. 21-22
John Bennett and Susan Rowley’s Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004) uses quotes from hundreds of Inuit elders to paint a picture of Inuit culture and history before extensive contact with southerners.
There are plenty of books written about life in the extreme environment of the arctic, but one of the best is probably Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). The book, which won a National Book Award in 1986, was based on fifteen trips to the north over a five-year period.
For more on international cab culture, check out Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 film, Night on Earth. As the title suggests, the film takes place on a single night, sketching the relationships between cabbies and their charges on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Iqaluit, sadly, is not included.
“Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar”
Kay Armatage
pp. 26-28
For a gossipy, firsthand account of Stein’s exploits in Paris with Picasso, Hemingway, and company, read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). The 1933 book, which is neither an autobiography nor by Alice B. Toklas, was written by Stein and tells the story of her life in Paris from the imagined point of view of Toklas, her lifelong partner.
While barreling through France in their Model T, giving lifts to soldiers during World War I, Stein and Toklas befriended a young American infantryman called William Rogers. Years later, Rogers published his account of their thirty year friendship in When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971, c1948).
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