July/August 2007 Bibliographies

Cowboy Camp
Guy Vanderhaeghe
pp. 20-22

Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley was named after a Cree myth later embellished by Mohawk-Canadian poet Emily Pauline Johnson. In Johnson’s poem, a homeward-bound Native Canadian is canoeing through a lake in the Qu’Appelle Valley when he hears someone calling his name. After shouting, “Who’s there?” and receiving no response, he switches to French: “Qu’appelle?” The response — from the other side of the lake — is his echo. Returning home the next day, the man discovers that his fiancé, who died while he was out on the lake, called out his name with her dying breath.

Though a work of fiction, Johnson’s poem was based on a reality documented by Métis trader Daniel Harmon: Natives in the region often said they heard a voice calling to them from the hills surrounding the valley river. In response, the Natives would respond with “Qui appelle?” or the Cree variant, “Kâ-têpwêt?” This response has since become the namesake of the Qu’Appelle valley and river as well as the town of Qu’Appelle and Fort Qu’Apelle.

The Englishman’s Boy, first published in 1997, won Saskatchewan-born novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe his second Governor General’s Award. The film adaptation, produced by Minds Eye Entertainment, is scheduled to air Spring 2008 on the CBC. The trailer can be viewed at the Minds Eye International website.


“I Am Strong in My Basically”
Jon Turk
pp. 22-26

At 1,660,000 square kilometers, which constitutes roughly 1/6th of China’s landmass (the country’s largest political division), Xinjiang autonomous region is home to some of the most remote terrain on earth: the Turfan Depression, 155 metres below sea level; Qogir or “K2,” a towering peak of 8,611 metres in the Karakoram mountain range; the Eurasian pole, some 320 kilometres north of Urumqi in the Dzoosotoyn Elisen Desert, the furthest point on land from any coastline. Xinjiang is composed mostly of broad, grass-covered steppe, but the traditional nomadic yurts now contrast with the modern cities of Urumqi and Kashgar, signs of China’s economic renaissance.

Through four Chinese dynasties, Mongol rule, two periods of independence, and, finally, communist control, Xinjiang has for centuries been the haunt of various tribal groups, including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui, Kirgiz, Mongols, Uzbeks, to name a few. For more information on the Uyghurs, Xinjiang’s largest ethnic group, visit Uyghur Culture and History, which compiles relevant links.

Uyghur separatist movements continue to attract international attention. In April 2007, Canadian Huseyin Celil was sentenced to life in prison for alleged separatist plotting. Earlier, in February, Uyghur activist Ismail Semed was executed by Chinese authorities for attempting to “split the motherland.” Huseyin’s case in particular has strained Canada-China relations and has inspired a website of support. The Opposite End of China and Xinjiang Watch, both English-language blogs updated from Xinjiang, cover many of these travails.


Dreaming a New Myth
Andrew Westoll
pp. 26-28

The tiny, low-profile country of Suriname may be the next big thing in tourism, thanks to the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, located at the northern end of the Amazon jungle—one of the world’s most remote and diverse stretches of wilderness. Declared a unesco world heritage site in 2000, this 1.6 million-hectare area of jungle has been saved from the development that has ravaged other parts of the Amazon. Consequently, it won’t be the roar of chainsaws but the flash cameras and chatter of eco-tourists in Tilly hats that send caracaras into flight. Conservation International (CI) and their Suriname branch are trying to reap eco-friendly economic benefits from the area by building tourist facilities in the heart of the reserve. But just how eco-friendly can a three-story visitor center in the middle of the jungle be? Read a CI article on the project and decide for yourself.

According to Kamania’s now legendary story, it was a voice he dreamed and the face he saw in a granite boulder that led him to the hidden caves of Wherepai. Communicating with nature is vital to many Amazonian cultures, including the Peruvian Ashaninca tribes — the subject of Michael Posner’s July/August 2006 Walrus article, “Plants with Soul.” Posner’s article explores the Ashanincas’ use of a mind-altering tea to communicate with plant gods that can diagnose and treat illness. If Posner’s piece piques your interest in Amazonian plant-based medicine, check out this slightly outdated but fascinating bbc article on the collaboration of Trio shamans and foreign pharmaceutical companies in the village of Kwamalasamutu.


Extraction
Edward Burtynsky
pp. 32-34

Edward Burtynsky, who wrote about extraction in this issue as well as photographing the cover, is the subject of Jennifer Baichwal’s critically acclaimed documentary Manufactured Landscapes (2006), which was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. You can find a gallery of Burtynsky’s photographs at the artist’s homepage; an audio interview with Burtynsky is also available at the online photography magazine Lens Culture.

To find out more about deforestation of boreal forests in Canada, you can visit these pages. You will also find extensive reporting on the Alberta tar sands in these two Walrus features from 2005 and 2006, and at the cbs News page. The extended passage from British Columbia sci-fi novelist William Gibson, quoted by Burtynsky, can be found in toto at the New York Times website, where it first appeared as an op-ed in 2003, entitled “The Road to Oceania.”


Moneybags
Bruce Livesey
pp. 36-43

If income inequality seems like a big story this year, it’s in part because lefty think tank Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has received funding to study and publicize the issue. Check out their inequality home page, Growinggap.ca, which links to a riveting blog. The ndp are doing their part with this television ad on what they call the “prosperity gap.” They’ve also successfully lobbied the Human Resources and Social Development Committee for a series of hearings slated for the fall.

Economist Dean Baker’s blog, Beat the Press, covers income inequality as well as the American press’s wretched coverage of economic issues in punchy, accessible language. His 1996 book on inequality, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government To Stay Rich and Get Richer, is available in paperback and as a free download. This year Baker published The United States Since 1980, a more academic treatment of similar themes.

If statistics aren’t your cup of chai, you might prefer the voyeuristic pleasures of the 1987 Hollywood classic Sex Lives of the Rich and Beautiful. Or, to see the ravages of inequality in Latin America rendered into aesthetically pleasing violence, try the more recent City of God, best enjoyed with a fistful of Bravaras.

Of course, not everyone’s against the super-rich. Conrad Black’s 2003 biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (his company paid US $8 million to buy FDR’s papers) has been widely admired. Ken Whyte, whom Black hired to run
Saturday Night (RIP) and then the National Post, is currently employing Black’s wife Barbara Amiel as a columnist at Maclean’s.


3D Vision
Taylor Owen and Patrick Travers
pp. 44-49

One of the principal contributors to the International Security Assistance Force (isaf), Canada has suffered the second-highest casualty rate of any allied nation in Afghanistan. Canada has deployed three successive missions to Afghanistan and committed a total of 15,000 troops to combat, making it the largest Canadian military engagement since the Korean War.

Though Canada’s two main political parties are unanimous in their official support for the mission, Canadians themselves are consistently divided over Afghanistan, evidenced by regular polling conducted by Decima Research, Ipsos-Reid, Angus Reid Strategies, SES Research, and the Strategic Counsel.

Further discussion of Canada’s 3D strategy can be found in the December 2006-January 2007 issue of Policy Options, which includes essays by defence experts Sean Maloney and Desmond Morto, and in Peter Pigott’s Canada in Afghanistan: The War So Far (2007). Readers more interested in Afghanistan’s pre-9/11 history should look to military historian Stephen Tanner’s Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban.


Charisma
Jeff Ryan
pp. 50-54

The study of charisma — defining it, deconstructing it, quantifying it — can be traced back to the work of 19th century sociologist Max Weber, who called it the “gift of grace.” In Monitor on Psychology’s “The Science of Savoir Faire,” Mark Greer provides a brief overview of charisma studies since then, citing various schemes that have been developed to measure this seemingly immeasurable quality, including the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and the (90-item!) Social Skills Inventory. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the article for a list of scholarly articles on the subject.

If scoring on ninety variables seems a little too involved, stick with Irvine Schiffer’s eight “ingredient” system, laid out in 1973’s Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society. His analysis is grounded in historical examples as well as then-contemporary politics, but it still provides plenty of grist for conversation about the charisma (or lack thereof) of today’s politicians.

The Rick Mercer Report is a favorite venue for Canada’s leaders to stage their playfulness. For the October 31, 2006 episode, Stephen Harper invited Mercer to 24 Sussex for a sleepover and read the jammy-attired comedian bedtime stories. Elizabeth May poked a little fun at herself on the October 17 episode that year when she fired up a chainsaw and took down a tree, commenting, “it’s a heady sense of power.” More recently, Stéphane Dion attempted self-deprecation somewhat less successfully by discussing global warming with Mercer while soaking up UV rays from sun reflectors (January 9, 2007). Video clips are available at the rmr archives.

It’s widely accepted that Pierre Trudeau set the standard for charismatic Canadian leaders and finding literature on the subject isn’t difficult. Finding arguments that complicate the image of Canada’s rose-toting, pirouetting, banister-sliding, backflipping, and bird-flipping prime minister is appreciably more difficult. However, following Trudeau’s death in 2000, University of Toronto political economy professor Stephen Clarkson posted an essay on news@UofT suggesting that Trudeau’s charisma did not rest entirely in his person, but that the Canadian public projected their own longings and hopes onto him.


Bob Dylan Goes Tubing
Marni Jackson
pp. 64-69

Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has made a habit of turning up in unexpected places — Ontario cottage country seems positively benign by comparison. YouTube keeps a wonderful archive of Dylan’s weirder, under-the-radar moments: like this acoustic showcase with Johnny Cash or rocking out, 1980s-style, on Late Night With David Letterman. And who could forget Dylan’s string of appearances on charity telethons for the Jewish Chabad organisation, including this wild rendition of “Hava Nagila” with Harry Dean Stanton?

In Marni Jackson’s short story, Dylan briefly mentions the Canadian singer-songwriter Valdy. Valdy’s heyday was in the 1970s, when he released several hugely popular albums, including Country Man (1971) and Landscapes (1973). Dylan has always had eccentric musical tastes. “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them,” Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine last year. But Dylan’s no stick-in-the-mud. In the first volume of his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan namedrops Public Enemy and Ice-T. And the playlist on his XM satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour With Bob Dylan, has featured songs from artists as diverse as Mott the Hoople, LL Cool J, and The Streets.


The Principles of Exile
Camilla Gibb
pp. 70-75

It’s true, exile is depressing. For proof, read German social philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno’s incisive aphorisms on the subject collected in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (2005). However, despite the gloomy outlook typical of Adorno’s writing about American culture (in The Stars Down to Earth, he basically accuses the Los Angeles Times horoscope of being fascist), David Jenemann’s recent Adorno in America argues that his relationship with the US was more engaged and complex than previously acknowledged. Indeed, the experience of exile doesn’t always produce a literature of sadness. One or two generations removed from their immigrant parents, the Italian-Canadian women who contributed to 2004’s Mamma Mia! Good Italian Girls Talk Back articulate a wide range of reactions to integrating in the New World.

In her story, Camilla Gibb describes a rather grim incident of a broom being pushed up a clacker. This doesn’t only happen in the Outback, though, as a putative McGill football player discovered last year while being hazed by Dr. Broom; the team ended up being suspended for the rest of the football season, however, whereas the perpetrators in Gibb’s Australia would only ever suffer the sting of shame, if that. Paradoxically, such tough treatment can be avoided in the Outback with the help of The Rough Guide to Australia.

Sufi Gourmet
Marcello Di Cintio
pp. 82-87

Nevin Halici is one of Turkey’s leading food writers. She has published nine books in her home country, but in the West only Sufi Cuisine is available in English and still in print. You can, however, read several of her recipes on the internet, including this one for sour spinach and this lentil soup recipe. For more information on Turkish cooking, you might also want to look at American-Turkish restaurateur Özcan Ozan’s The Sultan’s Kitchen or Turkish Cookery. You could also check out these Middle Eastern cooking websites. Additionally, an excerpt from Sufi Gourmet is available at The Walrus website.

Halici is a member of the Mevlevi Sufis, a branch of the Sufi Islamic tradition who follow the teachings of Mevlana, better known in the West as Rumi. (Click here for an excellent potted history of Rumi and the Mevlevi Sufis from The Guardian’s website.) Mevlana founded the Sufi sect in the Turkish town of Konya, where Halici now lives. Amateur photographer Dick Osseman’s site features a number of photos of Konya, including some pictures of the Konya Mevlana museum. Several of Mevlana’s texts have also been translated online. Wikipedia, not always the most reliable of sources, also runs a comprehensive (and, as far as we can tell, accurate) page about Rumi, with a long and detailed reference section.


In Paris with Mavis Gallant, Writer
Randy Boyagoda
pp. 89-94


In the 2006 documentary Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, Mavis Gallant enigmatically comments, “The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame.” Though Gallant isn’t about to reveal her secret for writing more than one hundred short stories for The New Yorker, she opens up to the camera about her time at the Montreal Standard following wwii, about giving up journalism — a “good job for a girl” — to write fiction in Paris, and about rejecting marriage proposals in favor of independence.

With fifty-seven years’ worth of work to choose from, first-time Gallant readers may be a little overwhelmed. The 1996 compilation, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant is an excellent place to start. Framed with a self-reflective preface by Gallant and organized according to decade, the volume offers readers a chance to trace the development of Gallant as storyteller. For those interested in her life in Canada, the Linnet Muir series (pp. 681-758) is based on her recollections of growing up Montreal. If you’re already familiar with Gallant and ready for some secondary reading, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Canada’s first literary quarterly devoted to short fiction, devoted an entire issue — Volume 28, 1978 — to her work.

Gallant’s personal diaries, which she’s been keeping for most of her life, are currently being collected for publication. If you can’t wait, visit Slate to read a weeklong electronic journal that she wrote in 1997.

When asked which writers have most influenced her, Gallant tells Boyagoda that she learned to write dialogue by reading Earnest Hemingway’s short stories. She confesses, “I read some so often, I almost knew them by heart, like music.” Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” which consists almost entirely of dialogue between a pair of lovers, will give you a good idea of what Gallant’s talking about.