April 2007 Bibliographies

Monumental Vibrations
Ryan Knighton
pp. 16-18

The website for the John Cage Project offers detailed information about the composer, the composition, the instrument, and the medieval monastery in which this miraculous performance is taking place over 639 years. Visitors can listen to the haunting hum of the current note, take a virtual tour of St. Buchardi church, and trace the history of the project from 1036, when the cornerstone for the church was set in Halberstadt.

Ryan Knighton’s journey to Halberstadt is the subject of the forthcoming documentary As Slow as Possible. A website for the film features a photo of Ryan with his young guide, Justus, and an extended trailer that follows Ryan from Vancouver to the doorstep of the German church.

Probe Knighton’s “Private Bits” and “Propaganda” at his quirky website. By way of introduction, see the article originally published in the Globe and Mail that begins, “I’ve been going blind for fifteen years now. That’s serious procrastination, true to my slacker ethic.”

If Knighton’s sightless journey sparked your imagination, try Jason Roberts’s A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Roberts, a contributor to the Village Voice and McSweeney’s, tells the story of James Holman, a 19th-century naval officer who lost his sight in his twenties but went on to become a professional travel writer. Peppered with offbeat characters and engaging prose, Holman’s adventures through Africa, Siberia, and China make for compelling reading.

Lords of the Lobby
Margo Pfeiff
pp. 18-22

More than simple bellhops or doormen, concierges have a long and storied history that dates back to the Middle Ages. Quebec’s Merici International Concierge Institute has posted a brief account of the evolution of this “grand tradition.” For a more anecdotal treatment of the subject, read Henry Nicolaides’s Concierge Confidential (Victoria, Australia: Pennon Publishing, 2002), in which the author dishes on the secret lives of those passing through the Rydges Melbourne Hotel. In French director Jean Girauld’s 1973 farce, La Concierge, leading man Bernard Le Coq plays an intellectual, sexually-driven university graduate who becomes an apartment concierge after he rescues — and beds — one of the building’s tenants.

For those considering entering the profession, a good primer is McDowell Bryson and Adele Ziminski’s The Concierge: Keys to Hospitality (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1992). The training manual includes chapters on concierge culture in the US and Europe as well as on technical aspects of the trade, such as “The Hotel and Its Management: How the Concierge Helps Other Departments” and “The Concierge Desk: Location and Design.” The unsatisfied dilettante might also follow up with a reading of Holly Stiel and Delta Collins’s Ultimate Service: The Complete Handbook to the World of Concierges (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994). Perhaps, though, a four-star hotel would provide the better education. Locate a concierge savant near you on the Clef d’Or website.


Cubic Connection
Siobhan Roberts
pp. 22-26

Professor John Conway is one of the world’s most prominent mathematicians. Among his claims to fame is the invention of a cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Not quite a game, not precisely a simulation of life, the mathematical machine is nonetheless a fascinating diversion, whether or not you delve into the theory behind it. Play it online here.

Siobhan Roberts encountered George Odom while researching her book King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man who Saved Geometry (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2006). Odom corresponded with Coxeter from his home in the Hudson River Psychiatric Center, sharing his discoveries with the late University of Toronto professor and renowned geometer. Roberts’s biography of Coxeter sheds light on both the man and on the importance of his work.

Better Red, Then Dead
Joshua Knelman
pp. 26-27

Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), an organization that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists, offers online profiles of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, unpacking their historical, symbolic, and environmental significance. You can also view their photo album to see the lush and arid extremes of the area. FoEME is concerned with the environmental consequences of the Red-Dead Canal and poses questions that others may not have thought to ask, such as whether toxic odours released by the mixing of the two seas will scare away tourists.

The Red-Dead Canal isn’t the only proposed project on the block. The Ezekiel Project, which is based on water sustainability principles described in the book of Ezekiel, is being promoted as an alternative to the Red-Dead canal. The people behind the project claim that the canal has “major problems,” including the fact that “the delivery system is three times longer than a route from the Mediterranean Sea to the north end of the Dead Sea” and that it “only delivers 1.8 billion cubic meters of seawater annually to the wrong end of the Dead Sea. Extensive potash and mineral mining operations are at the south end of the sea.”

The Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation recently re-launched their website, which now provides a wealth of information on water standards, management plans, and international partnerships. Perhaps the most entertaining offering is a video on the National Water Master Plan. After being welcomed by the king of Jordan, the viewer is treated to gorgeous nature images, whirling graphs, and sound bites from politicians, all set to a memorable soundtrack.

It’s a Dog’s Life
Alison Gillmor
pp. 30-32

If you’ve polished off the books discussed in Alison Gillmor’s essay, and your appetite for canine life-lessons isn’t sated, try Mark Doty’s Dog Years: A Memoir (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007). Doty goes through hard times, adopts a dog, grows as a person, etc. You know the drill.

More, you say? Why not try living one of the books. First, you’ll need to ruin your life to the point that it’s crying out for doggie intervention. Acquiring a drinking problem would be a good first step, and in this venture you’ll find the folks at Modern Drunkard magazine an invaluable resource.

Soon you, too, will need to learn how to love and laugh again. Now it’s time to visit the Humane Society of Canada, where you can adopt a new best mate. May we suggest something in a golden retriever? You can really sell a golden retriever. Because that’s really where we’re going with this. Elizabeth Lyon’s Nonfiction Book Proposals Anyone Can Write: How to get a Contract and Advance Before Writing your Book (New York: Perigee Books, 2002) will equip you with all the tools you need to turn your personal story of salvation at the paws of a loveable canine into a pitch that no publisher with pedigree will be able to turn down. Next stop: the bestsellers list. Doesn’t it feel good to be back on top?


Forgotten, But Not Gone
Janine MacLeod
pp. 34-37

Environmental Defence has published a series of reports on the accumulation of toxic chemicals in Canadians’ bodies, recent installments of which are available here and here. Their most recent and high-profile report revealed the levels of toxic chemicals present in four federal politicians. They also maintain a website devoted to the subject, Toxic Nation.

Dr. Paul David Blanc’s book How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) is an accessible examination of how the products we use and the processes employed to manufacture them affect public health.

After surviving cancer, scientist and poet Sandra Steingraber decided to examine the toxic chemicals that permeate the part of rural Illinois from which she hails. The resulting work, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1997), is both a personal account of Steingraber’s struggle with the disease and an indictment of the disregard with which we treat toxic substances in the environment.


Red Rush
Patrick White
pp. 38-49

The British Invasion this is not. The Mountain Pine Beetle has taken BC’s pine forests by swarm, and northern Alberta’s pine population — still mostly unscathed — remains under close watch. The cross-provincial threat posed by the tiny killer, which could infect Canada’s boreal forest as far east as Nova Scotia, has become such a concern that the federal government recently launched the Federal Mountain Pine Beetle Program. The program has a website, where you can “Meet the Mountain Pine Beetle,” scan a map of the beetle infestation, and subscribe to an electronic newsletter for updates about how the government is combating the infestation.

For those Beetlemaniacs who are interested in learning about other species of Dendroctonus ponderosae, there’s plenty to gnaw on at Bark and Wood Boring Beetles of the World or Bugwood.org.

Driven to Distraction
John Lorinc
pp. 50-59

Adherents of David Allen’s teachings have yet to be seen publicly in white robes and matching sneakers. There is, however, something unsettlingly cult-like about the devotion with which people ascribe to his “Getting Things Done” philosophy. If you’d like to take a sip of the Kool-Aid rather than drinking the whole glass, check out some of Allen’s Tips & Tools for making your life more efficient.

One of Allen’s foremost disciples is Merlin Mann, who maintains the 43 Folders website that John Lorinc discusses in his article. The site is full of distraction-baffling organizational ideas and other assorted lifehacks, and its popularity is such that Mann has launched a video podcast: “The Merlin Show.”

A more conventionally spiritual approach to the overwhelming distraction in our society can be found in Elizabeth Hanson Hoffman and Christopher Hoffman’s Staying Focused in the Age of Distraction: How Mindfulness, Prayer, and Meditation Can Help You Pay Attention to What Really Matters (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2006). The authors — a psychologist and a social worker — advocate a series of step-by-step techniques that are designed to help you tune out the attention-sucking trappings of modern life and achieve inner peace.

The Man on the Island
Wayne Grady
pp. 60-68

Calvin Braithwaite may not be the most educated or ethical job seeker, but his long, listless days sadly parallel the situation of many skilled immigrants in Canada. The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council provides information to immigrants looking for employment as well as to employers who want to help. One of the resources they recommend is World Education Services, which has tips for immigrants who are concerned about transferring qualifications across borders.

The journalist in “The Man on the Island” wonders if Calvin is related to Guyanese writer Edward Ricardo Braithwaite, whose 1959 novel, To Sir, with Love (New York: Jove), is a partially autobiographical account of an immigrant trying to find his place as a professional in London. Braithwaite had a doctorate in physics but, upon immigration to England, could only find employment as a social worker.

Wayne Grady usually earns his bread as an esteemed non-fiction writer, and his list of accomplishments (including a Governor General’s award for translation) can be reviewed here. One of Grady’s most notable non-fiction works is Tree: A Life Story (Toronto: Greystone, 2004), which he co-authored with David Suzuki. In a 2004 Quirks and Quarks segment, the book is described as “the tale of the life and death of a single Douglas fir on Canada’s west coast. The story begins when a seed lands on the forest floor after a fire and ends more than 900 years later when the giant tree trunk returns to the ground and becomes a nurse log for new trees.” Listen to Bob McDonald interview Grady for the segment here.


God’s Slow Death
Daniel Baird
pp. 70-75

Atheism is a hot topic these days, and Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Michel Onfray are primed for the attention with their savvy websites. Dawkins’s website is the flashiest and includes video clips of the author reading from The God Delusion and fielding a provocative Q&A session. Sam Harris’s website is comparatively slight, featuring a page of laurels he received for Letter to a Christian Nation and another with links to his publicist. Michel Onfray has his own website (in French), complete with the usual links to biographical information, news, and the various projects he has on the go. More interestingly, Onfray has recently started a blog, and the regularity of the updates would suggest he’s enamoured with the medium.

Can the atheist movement cohere? The nascent Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is hoping to make it happen. The organization’s website is under construction, and, while its mission is still outstanding, we do know that it is aiming for charitable status and that it will function as a hub for atheists who need support (perhaps like those recently profiled by Paula Zahn). The foundation’s Atheist Help & Resources page has links to a diverse array of atheistic groups, from ex-Muslims to the Brights, based in California.

In “The Crusade Against Religion,” Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf suggests that “fence-sitters” like himself are the primary targets of the evangelizing non-believers who want to convert people to the New Atheism. Wolf talks to the big names (Dawkins, Harris, and Daniel Dennett) and even checks out a church service, where his experience is somewhat less transcendental than Daniel Baird’s.

But what do the people in the pews think of the New Atheism? Matthew Simpson’s review of Harris’s The End of Faith in the Christian journal Books and Culture is one sample. While Wolf finds Harris to be naive, Simpson goes further and disputes Harris on logical grounds: “Harris’ argument for the abolition of religion goes like this: people act based on what they believe, and religious beliefs are especially apt to make people act violently; thus…religion should be done away with. The problem is that none of his premises are very plausible.” While Simpson concedes that Harris “writes with pith and energy,” he argues that, “his style is put in the service of terrible arguments.”

An editorial in Christianity Today titled “The New Intolerance” claims that as atheism loses ground globally, it is becoming less tolerant and more aggressive. The article also points to the fact that atheism’s “most eloquent spokesmen are receiving icily critical reviews in the very mainstream press that Christians often dismiss for liberal bias” and offers links to secular reviews of Dawkins’s work in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s magazine.

The Perfect Seat
Julia Dault
pp. 76-79

Chairs: A History (New York: Abrams, 2006), written by interior designer and former antiques dealer Florence de Dampierre, is a comprehensive cultural history of the chair and its evolution from ancient Egypt through the present day. One of the most thorough (and certainly one of the most lavish) studies of the chair, it represents eight years of research and features a wealth of original photography shot in the Vatican and more than thirty art museums worldwide.

Of course, the most aesthetically perfect chair in history is of little use if it makes your back ache after ten minutes of sitting. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety has tips on what makes an ergonomic chair. Style and comfort don’t have to be mutually exclusive, though. “Ergonomically bang on,” is how designer Kirsten White describes the Eames brothers’ lounge chair. Have a look at this and other Eames designs in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.