Field NotesColumnsFeaturesMemoirsArts and Culture
- Style: “Reawakening the Brief, and Other Unmentionables”
- Literature: “The Ends of the Earth”
- Travel: “Where Beauty Has No Ebb”
- Music: “Life After the Death of Jazz”
Field Notes
“Driving Lessons”
by Joseph Boyden
(pp. 21-23)
Joseph Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005), recounts the story of a Cree medicine woman from Ontario whose family is ravaged by World War I. Three Day Road was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2005.
Those readers anticipating the delivery of a child in the back of a car can track down the 1966 instructional film Sudden Birth by Alan Paul Rhone, which offers birthing tips for police officers should they ever come across women in labour in stalled automobiles or traffic jams.
If your own child was born in a car, you can submit your account to birthstories.com, which has an “Alternative“section devoted to babies born in cars, trucks, and bathtubs, among other venues.
To prepare for gun-related crime on your next road trip to the United States, read Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001) by Gary Kleck and Don B. Kates, and The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), by John R. Lott, Jr.
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“High School Confidential”
by Douglas Coupland
(pp. 23-25)
Is it every grown-up child’s dream to lay waste (artistically or otherwise) to that bane of adolescent existence - high school - or just Douglas Coupland’s While it’s now too late to visit Coupland’s installation Vancouver School, you can still live vicariously through Coupland and his mates by reading a review of the project from the Vancouver Sun and catching a glimpse on the blog of Vancouver advertising firm IndustrialBrand and on Coupland’s website.
To catch up with Coupland’s literary work, check out his latest novel, JPod (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2006) and one of his most popular earlier works, Hey Nostradamus! (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004).
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“My Doomed Voyage”
by Helen Humphreys
(pp. 25-26)
If you’re looking for more on Franklin’s doomed voyage, Owen Beattie and John Grigsby Geiger’s Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (Vancouver: Greystone, 2004) goes over the forensic evidence used to uncover the details of Franklin and his men.
To hear Stan Rogers’s “Northwest Passage” (from his 1981 album of the same name), to which Humphreys alludes, visit Fogarty’s Cove Music’s website, where the song provides the background music for the introductory page.
The online resource for all things Victorian, victorianweb.org, has a section on Franklin’s expedition with links and background information. The site also contains Charles Dickens’s outrage at the suggestion that Franklin resorted to cannibalism.
Polar regions inspired much nineteenth-century literature, and one of the best examples (albeit pre-Victorian) is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2003). The novel is infused with the obsession the Brits of that era had with travel and adventure. Plus, nothing is creepier than the monster saying, “I just want to be loved” and leaping from ice floe to ice floe with an animal between his teeth. Not quite as chilly, H. Rider Haggard’s novels are filled with the swashbuckling gentleman in Africa that preoccupied the Victorian imagination. See King Solomon’s Mines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and She: A History of Adventure (New York: Modern Library, 2002) for solid examples.
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Imaginings
“It’s a Smallwood, After All”
by Wayne Johnston
(pp. 30-31)
This is certainly not the first time Wayne Johnston has written about Joey Smallwood. Johnston’s bestselling novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1998) is narrated by the former premier of Newfoundland. Johnston is also the author of The Navigator of New York (Toronto: Doubleday, 2002), the story of a young man’s search for his origins in Newfoundland and New York told against the background of American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook’s early-twentieth-century rivalry over their race to the North Pole.
For a non-fiction account of Smallwood’s life, read Richard Gwyn’s Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, recently reissued (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), or get it straight from the horse’s mouth in I Chose Canada: The Memoirs of the Honourable Joseph R. “Joey” Smallwood (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1973).
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You Are Here
“What Do You See”
by Andrew Braithwaite
(pp. 32-33)
To learn more about how the Rorschach test works, see John E. Exner’s The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System (4th ed.; New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and Rorschach Content Interpretation (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1976) by Edward Aronow and Marvin Reznikoff.
For those who think the whole Rorschach experiment seems a little sketchy, What’s Wrong with the Rorschach Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) by James M. Wood et al. claims to expose the test’s “fatal flaws.”
To nurture your hidden scrying talents, consult The Fortune-Telling Book: Reading Crystal Balls, Tea Leaves, Playing Cards, and Everyday Omens of Love and Luck (London: Little, Brown, 2000) by Gillian Kemp.
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Features
“A Very Dark Place”
by Tom Fennell
(pp. 34-41)
Kent Roach’s September 11: Consequences for Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003) provides a detailed look at the effect that day’s events had on Canada’s laws, democracy, sovereignty, and security. Roach describes and critiques Bill C-36, the Anti-terrorism Act. Along the same lines, Terrorism, Law & Democracy: How is Canada Changing Following September 11 (ed. David Daubneyet al.; Montreal: Les Éditions Thémis, 2002) is a collection of essays in French and English by people who contributed to a March 2002 conference of the same name held by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice.
Insiders spill the beans on Canada’s national security system in editor Dwight Hamilton’s Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism (Toronto: Dundurn, 2006). Richard Cleroux’s Official Secrets: The Story Behind the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (Montreal: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990) tracks the early years of this civilian service, established in 1984.
Today’s security concerns echo those of Cold War days, when the US considered Canada a hotbed of communist ideas and spies. In Agent of Influence: A True Story (North York, ON: Stoddart, 1998), Ian Adams suggests that the 1964 death of John Watkins, formerly the Canadian ambassador to the USSR, during an RCMP interrogation was tied to the CIA’s efforts to bring down Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.
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“The Long Walk of the Kuchi”
by Adnan Khan
(pp. 42-49)
The literature available on the Kuchi nomads of Afghanistan is sparse. Though dated, the World Food Programme’s 2002 report “Pastoralist Vulnerability Study“(PDF format) charts the history, population, and migration patterns of the Kuchi. The organization Refugees International published two shorter reports on the Kuchi while it operated in Afghanistan (it has since closed its Kabul office). The reports, both from 2004, are entitled “Kuchi Nomads: Displaced and Destitute in Afghanistan“and “Forgotten People: The Kuchis of Afghanistan.”
You can download a PDF version of the 2002 report Khan cites about the history of the Hazara tribe, “The Hazara People of Afghanistan,” by Hussain Razaiat and Father Tony Pearson.
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“Plants with Soul”
by Michael Posner
(pp. 50-57)
If you fancy yourself a little more “Western” in your methodological proclivities, then Benny Shanon’s The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) should satisfy. Shanon’s carefully worded and qualified title is representative of the text, and the author possesses a keen understanding of the cognitive and physiological underpinnings that create common visions in subjects on ayahuasca.
Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2005) charts Graham Hancock’s attempt to understand the development of human culture. Ayahuasca features prominently as a teacher for Hancock. Also, Jeremy Narby’s Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998) is a reasonably quick read and refreshingly free of jargon.
Luis Eduardo Luna is one of the foremost researchers of ayahuasca, and the co-author of Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1999) with Pablo Amaringo, a shaman and painter whose depictions of visions form the basis of the book; one of them appears with Posner’s article.
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Memoirs
“My Life with Tolstoy”
by David Gilmour
(pp. 58-65)
David Gilmour has drawn up a list of recommended Tolstoy translations. For more general works on Russian literature and the “Golden Age” in particular, see D. S. Mirsky’s A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 (ed. Francis J. Whitfield; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999) and Catriona Kelly’s Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). These works provide some historical background and a sense of the Russian canon’s relationship to the European literary tradition.
Leading twentieth-century Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature (San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1981) astutely and perceptively address his country’s heaviest literary hitters, including Tolstoy. And for a less vitriolic version of the age-old Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky throw-down that always comes up in (usually tipsy) conversations about nineteenth-century literature, check out Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (2nd ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), by George Steiner.
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“The Changeling”
by Gail Gallant
(pp. 67-71)
For a taste of the literature of Gail Gallant’s formative years, see The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) by Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricouer, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue (trans. David McDuff; New York: Penguin, 2003), and The Nietzsche Reader (ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), a collection of several of Friedrich Nietzsche’s major works along with some biographical information.
Canadian novelist Nino Ricci focuses on his protagonist’s Catholic upbringing in his trilogy, Lives of the Saints (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), In A Glass House (Toronto: Emblem, 1999), and Where She Has Gone (Toronto: Emblem, 1999). Lives of the Saints won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, and in 2004 the entire trilogy, which spans thirty years in the life of a young Italian immigrant to Canada, was adapted into a miniseries that aired on CTV. It was directed by Jerry Ciccoritti and starred Sophia Loren, and is now available on DVD.
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“Swimming with Mao”
by Xujun Eberlein
(pp. 72-78)
For more about Mao’s life, see Randy Boyagoda’s “Rising China, Razing Mao“in the February 2006 issue of The Walrus. Boyagoda reviews Mao: The Unknown Story (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2005), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s scathing biography of Mao, which casts him as a scheming tyrant. In Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948-1953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Hua-Yu Li analyzes the far-reaching political and economic effects of Mao’s Stalinist policies of the 1950s.
To better understand what it was like to live in China during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, read Growing Up in The People’s Republic: Conversations Between Two Daughters of China’s Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) by Ye Weili with Ma Xiaodong, two women’s account of their lives in China from the 1950s to the 1980s.
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Arts and Culture
Style: “Reawakening the Brief, and Other Unmentionables”
by Julia Dault
(pp. 80-83)
To get underneath the fascinating history of underclothes, see Elizabeth Ewing’s Underwear: A History (New York: Theatre Arts, 1972) and the more recent Unmentionables: A Brief History of Underwear (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) by Elaine Benson.
If you’d like to further explore the deep cultural significance of your skivvies, Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), edited by Daniel Miller, is a good collection of essays by contemporary theorists who critically examine various aspects of material culture from ancient times to the present.
For an intriguing profile of Dov Charney, the controversial Montreal-born mastermind behind American Apparel, see Josh Dean’s “Dov Charney, Like It or Not“from the September 2005 issue of Inc. magazine. And Seth Stevenson’s “Tangled Up in Boobs,” published on Slate.com in April 2004, looks into the mysterious appearance of music legend Bob Dylan in a spooky commercial for underwear giant Victoria’s Secret.
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Literature: “The Ends of the Earth”
by Lisa Moore
(pp. 84-87)
To follow up on Lisa Moore’s literary journey to Van Diemen’s Land, open up two novels by Richard Flanagan: Death of a River Guide (London: Picador, 1997) and Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
Nicolas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania (London: Harvill, 2004) is an engaging history of the island, from convict cannibalism to marsupial eradication (which Moore notes). Also cited in the article is Peter Hays’s Vandiemonian Essays (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia: Walleah, 2002), a collection of reflections on the culture and history of Tasmania. (The book is not available in Canada, but can be ordered directly from the publisher). For a thorough biography of the island’s most famous - and cartoonish - inhabitant, writers David Owen and David Pemberton detail everything you need to know in Tasmanian Devil: A Unique and Threatened Animal (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2005).
Finally, if prison theory is what whets your appetite, check out philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995), a reprint of the original eighteenth-century essays, edited by Miran Bozovic. Bentham’s theories on prison reform, in addition to inspiring designs and methods used in Port Arthur, Tasmania, later influenced French philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan; New York: Vintage, 1995).
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Travel: “Where Beauty Has No Ebb”
by Mark Anthony Jarman
(pp. 88-91)
When Michael Collins, the leader of the Irish Free State Army, died at the hands of an unknown gunman in August 1922, Dublin shut down for the day, and one Guinness cask maker took the opportunity to drown himself in the Royal Canal. That cooper was Mark Anthony Jarman’s grandfather, and in Ireland’s Eye (Toronto: Anansi, 2002), the writer uses the deaths - the one famous, the other obscure - as a springboard for exploring the history of a nation and his family.
Mother Ireland: A Memoir (New York: Plume,1999) is a collection of seven essays by Edna O’Brien charting her early life in County Clare, from her days in convent school to her first kiss. William Trevor, darling of the New Yorker and master of understatement, addresses English colonialism in Ireland in the title story of his collection Beyond the Pale and Other Stories (London: Bodley Head, 1981). The book is hard to find in North America; your best bet might be to check a university library.
Flann O’Brien satirizes the Irish in The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life, originally published in Gaelic in 1941 (trans. Patrick C. Power; Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996). “Putting on the poor mouth” is a Gaelic expression which means to overstate the desperateness of one’s situation in order to gain time from creditors, and in O’Brien’s fictional village of Corkadoragha, the suffering and poverty of the Gaelic people is sublime.
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Music: “Life After the Death of Jazz”
Alexander Gelfand
(pp. 92-95)
For jazz aficionados and lay people alike, a good history and analysis of the genre is Stuart Nicholson’s Is Jazz Dead Or Has It Moved to a New Address (New York: Routledge, 2005). Another good read is the anthology of jazz essays and articles Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), edited by Gary Giddins.
To hear what all this new-jazz fuss is about, start by downloading some samples from Robert Glasper’s latest album, Canvas. A sample of Rudresh Mahanthappa’s collaboration with Vijay Iyer on the 2004 recording Mother Tongue - a track called “The Preserver”- can be downloaded in MP3 format. Finally, enjoy a taster of Rez Abbasi’s new album, Thin Elephant, with the melodic track “Kismet,” also in MP3 format.
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