When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor. The people and the media in Saskatchewan regard farming as a deeply interesting subject. I myself, with my jaded big city upbringing, always found my attention shifting to the more offbeat aspects of the agricultural life. Like the farmer whose tractor flipped and pinned him flat one day in the 1940s. As he lay dying under the tractor, he managed to scrape on the fender with his knife: “Leave it all to my wife.” Later the fender was removed and presented in court, where it was accepted as the farmer’s last will and testament.
Let us recall a Saturday afternoon in New York City early in the twentieth century: a young woman named Moina Michaels, having been moved by a poem she had read that morning in the Ladies’ Home Journal, finds a supply of red silk poppies on sale in Wanamaker’s Department Store at the corner of 8th Street and Broadway; she has been searching for them all day through the shops and department stores along the stretch of Broadway known as the Ladies Mile. This event will determine the course of her life.
This postcard was produced as part of The Lesbian National Park Rangers, a performance by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, which took place in July 1997. Dempsey and Millan dressed as rangers and patrolled the streets, trails and canoe routes in and around Banff for three weeks, answering tourist inquiries and handing out information on the Lesbian Flora and Fauna in Banff National Park.
A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.
The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and Montana, has now given us The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, a well-written account of that land.
My favourite thing about Evelyn Lau’s new book, Inside Out: Reflections on A Life So Far (Doubleday), is the smart slipcover (design by Kevin Hoch/Pylon), which is made out of a thick, translucent onion-skin paper. It wouldn’t fit in my bag after I left the store, so I carried it out into the rain in my hand, confident that the clever covering was waterproof.
I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old pianist. Maya is tiny and almost transparent from birth, but she has an extraordinary gift for music; this takes a terrible toll on her mother Lara, a frustrated musician, who begins to break down as Maya grows less dependent on her.
I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old pianist.... The prodigy of Helen DeWitt’s novel, The Last Samurai (Knopf), lives in a more tumultuous and confusing world. Ludo and his mother Sybilla live in London and spend most of their time riding the tube because they can’t afford to heat their flat.
Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “Enjoy him” and “don’t be afraid of him,” and remember, “feeding is learning.” (Grrrrr.) Now there are thousands of self-help and baby-care schmaltz books (many of them poorly disguised as mother-rearing tracts), and since I found out I was pregnant, I’ve been reading my way through genetics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism and new age kitsch to answer the question: What does it mean to be a mother in the twenty-first century and how the hell do I do it?
