During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!
A note to Stephen Osborne about his Letter to Subscribers, on summer fiction, enclosed in Geist 65: Fiction is your business. For many of us who don’t have the luxury of daily contact we are stuck with the editorial page and many other kinds of uninspired writing.
Paper Trail by Arleen Paré is a blend of memoir, poetry and magic realism in which the unnamed narrator, having decided to retire early, struggles through her last 206 work days as a middle manager in an insidious corporate environment.
Mairowitz and Crumb’s Kafka, meanwhile, opens with a horrifying drawing of one of Franz K’s many grisly fantasies of his own death—a pork butcher’s cleaver hacking off neat slices from his head.
Pushkin is one of those admirable small presses with an eclectic list that suggests the proprietors are interested in more than the bottom line; Paul Morand’s Venices, translated by Euan Cameron, would be a perfect choice for reading on the Lido.
Venice and the Islamic World, 828—1797, edited by Stefano Carboni (Yale University) provides a comprehensive overview of Venice’s artistic heritage, shown within the context of nine centuries of commerce between La Serenissima and the Islamic empires of the East.
What better song for summer’s soundtrack than Kate and Anna’s “Swimming Song”? I added it to my iPod rotation while reading Kate and Anna McGarrigle: Songs and Stories (Penumbra), too much of which consists of transcribed newspaper reviews of albums and performances by the irreplaceable, inimitable McGarrigles of Montreal (a separate booklet of thirty-three song transcriptions is also included).
For summer I favour books that can withstand the indignities of the season: beat-up paperbacks that can get stained by sunscreen, or library hardcovers in Brodart jackets that can be wiped clean with a damp cloth. But I make exceptions for new books from a few specific authors, which is how Annie Dillard’s second novel, The Maytrees (HarperCollins) came to be on my summer reading list.
One summer I began taking pictures of people on the street surreptitiously, by holding the camera at my waist and aiming it at passersby when they were about six feet away.
Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.
