When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list. They took this seriously and called me up a few days later to say that they had taken care of the problem by arranging for me to give most of my talk before dinner, which was not quite what I was getting at, but there’s not much I wouldn’t do for Geist.
The Great Canadian Search for a New National Motto has come to a close. Many thanks to those of you who took up the challenge. From the hundreds of entries received in the Geist office and at Basic Black (Arthur Black’s Saturday morning show on CBC AM), our judges have settled on a shortlist of new mottos that will be translated into Latin and then forwarded to the appropriate Parliamentary Committee.
On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.
You’ll need more than one cross-town bus ride to polish off The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (as abridged for Dell). But this book remains pre-eminently a great read, and it’s rife with graceful periods and rolling paragraphs.
Readers of Dennis Lee’s Riffs (Brick) might find themselves disappointed with this book, which declares itself to be fiction when they would perhaps prefer it to be fact. As fiction, these poems don’t read well: they are clever, well-crafted, technically exciting, yes, riffs, which leave you wondering about the story they describe.
The Shipping News is a novel about Newfoundland written by E. Annie Proulx (Scribners), an off-Islander who states frankly in her disclaimer that “the Newfoundland in this book, although salted with grains of truth, is an island of invention.” Nevertheless readers who insist on a Newfoundland to believe in if not the Newfoundland they know will be disappointed to find in these pages very little of either such place.
The Way of a Boy is Ernest Hillen’s story about his life in a Japanese prison camp in Java during World War Two. Hillen was only a boy at the time—he spent ages seven to eleven in the camp—and instead of looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, he chooses to tell his story from the point of view of his boyhood self, without benefit of hindsight or grown-up judgements.
The Girl Wants To, edited by Lynn Crosbie (Coach House) overwhelms its readers with sheer volume. It contains everything from cartoons to photos, to articles and stories and poems, to exhibit documentation.
The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser (Coach House) is not a book about ecology, although it does remind us of the concept of the sacred grove, which is central to aboriginal belief systems in which language and knowledge are said to come from certain lands or natural sites. Robin Blaser has been a resolute explorer of this terrain between language and knowledge and the ways in which we construct belief systems from our imagination of it.
Michael Posner’s Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films (D&M) is a passionate and at times hair-raising account of what’s right and what’s wrong with Canadian moviemaking. Posner follows the making and marketing of ten very different Canadian features (including I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, The Decline of the American Empire, and A Rustling of Leaves).
