Summer,2006

Jogging with Joyce

Steven Heighton

What’s the next best thing to talking boxing with Joyce Carol Oates?

Waiting for Michael (Jackson)

Mary Vallis

Day in Court: A story behind the stories of the Michael Jackson trial

Originally published in Geist 61

Empty City

Rawi Hage

From DeNiro’s Game, published by Anansi in 2006.

David Then, David Now

in
Author: 
Micah Lexier
Teaser: 
In Winnipeg in 1993, Micah Lexier put an ad in the local newspaper looking for males named David. Hundreds of people responded, and he asked the first David of each age, from age one to seventy-five, to be photographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Teaser Image: 
image/gif icon2-12_davidlightteaser.gif
Deck: 
Micah Lexier is a Canadian artist living in New York City. David Then & Now was produced by Plug In ICA in Winnipeg.

In Winnipeg in 1993, Micah Lexier put an ad in the local news­pa­per look­ing for males named David. Hundreds of peo­ple responded, and he asked the first David of each age, from age one to seventy-five, to be pho­tographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The result was an exhi­bi­tion of life–
sized por­traits enti­tled A Portrait of David. Ten years later, Lexier, with the help of the Winnipeg Free Press, located as many of the orig­i­nal Davids as pos­si­ble and asked them to be
pho­tographed again. The result was David Then & Now, a


series of dip­tychs in which each orig­i­nal photo was paired with the one taken a decade later. The project was pre­sented by Plug In ICA as a series of bus-shelter posters in down­town Winnipeg and in exhi­bi­tions at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, TrépanierBaer in Calgary and Birch Libralato in Toronto. 

Click here to see the com­plete series.

photo by Micah Lexier
 photo by Micah Lexier
photo by Micah Lexier
 		photo by Micah Lexier
Click here to see the com­plete series.

  

Date Published: 
October 31, 2007

Who We Were

in
Date Published: 
October 31, 2007
Letter Author: 
Steven Mannell and Laureen van Lierop
City: 
Halifax
Teaser: 
Thank you for freeing up and sending us the handful of early issues we needed to complete our set of Geist. The satisfactions of a full run of Geist (or of anything, come to think of it) are a bit odd and hard to describe.
Thank you for free­ing up and send­ing us the hand­ful of early issues we needed to com­plete our set of Geist. The sat­is­fac­tions of a full run of Geist (or of any­thing, come to think of it) are a bit odd and hard to describe. Our com­plete set comes equipped with plenty of asso­ci­a­tions — issues that we read at the cot­tage on Lake Manitou when our chil­dren, Lucas and Phoebe, were tiny; issues that we read in cer­tain apart­ments and houses in Toronto’s Little Azores, then in the Beaches; and lately Halifax. Reading the back issues that arrived at var­i­ous Christmastimes is a lit­tle exer­cise in time travel. The selec­tions from John Robert Colombo’s Quotations from Chairman Lamport in Geist No. 1 are sou­venir of a more hum­ble and authen­tic Toronto that, sadly, no longer exists; Henri Robideau’s flip-book Elijah Harper Says No/Dit Non from No. 2 stands wit­ness to the man who stood up for an ideal of Canada. The rest of the foot or so of shelf space occu­pied by the full six­teen years’ worth of Geist holds a wealth of sim­i­lar tes­ti­mony to “who we are [and were] so far,” as it says on the cover of your first few issues. We look for­ward to six­teen years from now, when we will have a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence look­ing back through Geist No. 60 and onward. Thanks. 

1974

in
Author: 
Mandelbrot
Teaser: 
In those days, when you saw a Woolworth’s store you thought of the photo booth, and if you had nothing else to do, you went in and invested a quarter in the history of photography.
Teaser Image: 
image/jpeg icon61-incamera-steve-teaser5.jpg
Deck: 
Mandelbrot is the editor of Geist in another life. He is also a photographer and has been writing about photography since 1990. Visit his web site at phototaxis.ca
The place: Victoria, B.C., dur­ing a week’s res­i­dency in February at the King’s Hotel on Yates Street,
around the cor­ner from the Churchill beer par­lour. In those days, when you saw a Woolworth’s store you
thought of the photo booth, and if you had noth­ing else to do, you went in and invested a quar­ter in the
his­tory of pho­tog­ra­phy. A week is a long time when you’re young. The type­writer was a Hermes Baby, a
beau­ti­ful machine with a sen­su­ous key­board, but it was awk­ward get­ting the photo strip in around the
platen so that it wouldn’t slip when you typed on it. They don’t make key­boards like that one any more,
that one on the Hermes Baby in 1974.
—Mandelbrot


Date Published: 
November 1, 2007

Road King

Stephen Osborne

Wide open spaces

Dinosaurs and Mammals

in
Letter Author: 
Lynda Williams
City: 
Prince George, BC
Teaser: 
I applaud Stephen Henighan for "Nations Without Publishers" (Geist No. 59), in which he says that we may be “living through the dismantlement of Canadian publishing.”
I applaud Stephen Henighan for “Nations Without Publishers” (Geist No. 59), in which he says that we may be “liv­ing through the dis­man­tle­ment of Canadian pub­lish­ing.” We need to look the emerg­ing threat to intel­lec­tual diver­sity squarely in the eyes. We need more arti­cles like his to make us think about our choices. But we need to look fur­ther than the chal­lenge of com­pet­ing with Wal-Mart. Assume, for the sake of argu­ment, that any book is doomed if it can­not gen­er­ate the short, loud shriek of attention-grabbing sales appeal that seems to be required to sell a block­buster movie or a brand of cola. Does that mean we reject lit­er­a­ture? Or can we, instead, reject the model of pub­lish­ing that can­not be sus­tained in the cur­rent cli­mate? Small presses, micro­presses, online jour­nals with vol­un­teer staff and other grass­roots pub­lish­ing activ­i­ties may be the mam­mals of the new era, scur­ry­ing around in the grass as they wit­ness the extinc­tion of the mighty who have ruled the earth before. Given a choice, I might pre­fer to go back in time to an age in which it was pos­si­ble to com­mand a huge audi­ence from the shoul­ders of a pub­lish­ing giant. Without that choice, I would rather be a mam­mal in the new age than give up what I love about lit­er­a­ture in order to com­pete for the few (and dwin­dling) oppor­tu­ni­ties to thrive in the realm of the giants. I would cer­tainly rather be a mam­mal in the new age than slaugh­ter every­thing I find mean­ing­ful in lit­er­a­ture — an intel­lec­tual medium of cul­tural expres­sion — in order to make books that have to com­pete with TV com­mer­cials for snap­pi­ness in order to sell.
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