These facts about the mating rituals of garden-dwellers were gathered from Guests in Your Garden: Facts and Folklore About Bugs, Slugs, and Other Garden Creatures, written by Michele Davidson and illustrated by Eve Corbel, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in Spring 2001.
This summer we went to L.A. (Los Angeles) and while we were there, Liam insisted that we go to Venice Beach: specifically to the Venice Beach basketball courts. They’re famous, he told us; movies are shot there, some of the Lakers play there once in a while, we have to go there. We’d be fools not to go there. We can’t not go there. Plus, he said, Jonathan Richman sings about Venice Beach. This summer he started loving the music of Jonathan Richman.
Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene that attracted him so powerfully, pitched over the side of the bridge and plummeted sixty metres into the ocean below. What happened to the camera has not been recorded, but the falling man, during the few moments of his descent (which he would later calculate to have been about 2.5 seconds), was spotted by two lifeguards in an inflatable dinghy who were patrolling Third Beach, a swimming area about a mile along the shore from Lions Gate Bridge.
Descartes believed that monkeys could speak, but that they preferred to remain silent in order not to be forced to work. The intellectual process of granting reality to an invention and then applying to that invention the rigid rules of reality is nowhere more splendidly demonstrated than in our relationship to language.
While I don’t come across many stories about Winnipeg, Between the Stillness and the Grove by Erika de Vasconcelos (Knopf) may be the first one I’ve read about Armenia. In this book the stories of two Armenian women are interwoven to create a deep and moving picture of the lives of displaced people.
The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit the word “quicksilvered,” a neologism used to describe the motion of a snake. Such are the ludicrous effects of Creative Writing: we laugh and stop reading.
The Greg Curnoe show at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff), which ran from March until June 2001, was a wonderful chance to see the work of an artist committed to finding out everything about everything. Curnoe continues to be an inspiration to Canadian artists—literary, visual and otherwise.
The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 is now available in a life-sized edition from Oxford. This was the first pocket-sized popular bible; it could be easily hidden from the thought police of the time, who were eager to burn any copies of the book they could find, along with their owners.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is to be commended for Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery: Martin Frobisher’s Arctic Explorations, 1576-1578, a two-volume compilation of everything there is to know about the series of disasters known as the Frobisher explorations. This is a valuable piece of work and should be in the library of everyone interested in the history of the North.
