Letters: April 2008

Then I started to think about all the other indies that are part of my daily life. A small bookstore called Pages, which fills my shelves and my mind with ideas and poetry. There’s Reid’s, the pen and paper people, and Rubaiyat, purveyor of handcrafted art pieces and jewellery. Furniture dealers and clothiers and boot makers . . . the list goes on.

Over the years, I have seen my fair share of boom, bust, and back again. Companies merge and purge, buildings rise and fall. But the independents march along in spite of it all. Very rarely are they considered in the poker game that is the City on the Plain, but they are really what makes my city tick. And I am betting they will continue to do so for a very long time.

EnCana’s plans for the Bow, on the other hand, bring to mind the photograph of Dubai’s gleaming towers published in your September 2007 issue. “Isn’t that something!” I thought. I may someday look up at the Bow poking into the prairie sky and think for a moment, “Isn’t that something!” But beautiful? Meanwhile, I keep hearing that old poker chestnut “Take the money and run.”

Perhaps I am one of the leftovers — a grounder in love with her boots — that Gillmor refers to, but I think there’s been beauty in Calgary for years, in the spirit of all the independents peeking out beyond the shadow of the centre. It’s not big, but it’s small.

Carolynn Hoy
Calgary, AB


Montreality
I’m kind of fond of my adopted city of Montreal. So when I saw that The Walrus was doing a whole issue on cities, including Montreal (“Montréal,” Julie Doucet, January/February), I was pleased as punch. Finally, someone from outside the angst-ridden community of anglophones here in Quebec was going to take a hard look at the city and expose it, warts and all, for the literati of English Canada.

What we got instead were four pages of graphic art more centred on the central character’s navel than on the city, which is represented by the usual touristy spots: the Grande Bibliothèque, Mont-Royal and Saint-Laurent streets, the Jean Talon market. No embedded assignment in Mile End (along the lines of Peter Valing’s in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver); no panoramic examination of the city’s storied history (as is done for Calgary by Don Gillmor); no rumination on the concept of the idea city (as in Mark Kingwell’s take on Toronto), even though Montreal has more students per capita than any other city in North America except Boston.

The Walrus missed an opportunity to bridge the gap between what people outside Quebec think they know about the province and what it’s actually like. Having straddled both environments, I can tell you the gap is large. Maybe next time.

Leonard D. Eichel