I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.
And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.
Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.
Until I read The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle (Penguin Viking), I thought mummies were just dead people with good PR. But this book traces the role mummies have played in anthropological, historical and medical research, as well as helping to realize great profits for a select few (by being the main entertainment at private parties, for instance).
Sputnik Diner by Rick Maddocks (Knopf) is an in-depth exploration of a group of people who move through a small-town diner in the tobacco belt of southern Ontario. Maddocks shows just enough of his characters’ lives for us to understand, identify and sympathize with them, and the stories are subtly linked so that they read almost like a novel.
The stories in Simple Recipes, by Madeleine Thien (McClelland and Stewart), are closer to home, made with familiar ingredients and spiced with subtle insights. My favourite was the title story, in which a father’s care in cooking for his family is contrasted with his violence toward his son. Thien has a lovely, somewhat rambling yet carefully controlled style.
The latest fashion in Canadian publishing appears to be for books of short stories or slim novels from recent graduates of creative writing programs, as publishers hedge their bets by trying to find writers with credentials. Creative writing workshops, while undoubtedly useful, have their dangers.
Thai prostitutes offer love and affection as well as sexual gratification to their Western clients, and it is this combination, I learned while reading Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (Pluto Press), that causes the farangs (a Thai word for foreigners) to fall in love with and at times attempt to marry the prostitutes. In testimony that is sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes tender and sometimes disturbing, men report that Western sex workers are cold-hearted, hard-bitten women who remind the men of the women they wish to escape from.
Several journeys go on in the three parts of The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert (Knopf). First we meet Helmut, a young man who doesn’t go far from Berlin but spends many hours on the platform of his local train station watching his city empty of people as Germany comes under the influence of Hitler and then goes to war.
In Slow Lightning by Mark Frutkin (Raincoast) we meet Sandro Cénovas, a student who is caught in the middle when civil war erupts in Spain. Threatened with arrest or conscription, Sandro flees Barcelona on a borrowed bicycle and heads for the coastal village of Arcasella, where his parents live.
