The message on the sign under the elevated railway read, “The John Molson Way,” and seemed to have been designed to resemble a six-pack of Molson Canadian. These were confusing signals and for some moments I couldn’t understand what the sign, with its unequivocal definite article, was meant to say.
You could see nothing through the window until a tapping began at the glass, a grey leafless branch, and you wondered what makes someone sit at a window table when it’s dark outside. You had to ask for another glass of water, yours was filled with hair. While you waited you didn’t know what to do with yourself. The shag carpet was green. You were looking at the dirt under your nails when you heard conversation from the next table over, something about a man’s ears. You took a drink from your new glass and were surprised to find it was orange juice, not water at all. When you called this to the waitress’s attention, she apologized sweetly but said it would be good for you, and you noticed for the first time that her necklace held a gold pendant that said Eat Shit.
Allen Ginsberg is speaking into a tape recorder hanging from the rear-view mirror of my mother’s Volvo, composing a poem with the attitude of one accustomed to the gratitude of posterity.
Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)
When Judy MacDonald spoke about her writing recently in Vancouver, she fascinated her audience with glimpses into how her mind works and the weird angle from which she observes the world. She describes herself as a magpie, someone who collects her material from small, odd moments in everyday life: characters, images and stories found in newspaper clippings or observed on bus rides. Maybe the stories in her collection Grey (Arsenal Pulp) started out as quirky anecdotes told by friends, or odd incidents reported in the news.
Wendy Wasserstein’s superb writing makes her latest play, Old Money, more compelling to read than most contemporary novels. Old Money concerns a Manhattan mansion and the families that inhabit it at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The pictures in Nuvisavik: The Place Where We Weave, edited by Maria Von Finckenstein (McGill-Queens) are of tapestries that tell the story of traditional Inuit life. The tapestries were woven by members of a weaving studio in Pangnirtung, Baffin Island: thirty years ago, southerners introduced tapestry weaving there as a way of providing employment for Inuit women.
The male characters in Mary-Lou Zeitoun’s 13 (Porcupine’s Quill) include a guidance counsellor who takes nude photos of his adolescent pupils and a music teacher who thinks “drums are not for girls.” No wonder Marnie, the thirteen-year-old protagonist, hates men. She also hates school, her parents and her suburban Ottawa home.
