I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation that culminated in his shouting that the friend I was visiting in Boston could not be American if she had a Hispanic name.
Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me. He tried to kiss me on our step but I said I could see the roof rack on Dad’s car coming down Mountbatten Drive. Barry calls me Roof Rack now.
Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages, a harmless enough question that might be asked in either official language, but only in Ottawa would anyone try to answer it, without irony and in both languages at once; for the conversation, which was taking place in the Museum of Civilization, was relentlessly, touchingly bilingual, with no translation provided.
When Geist requested a copy of How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by the new English kitchen queen Nigella Lawson (Knopf Canada) “for review purposes,” the distributor wrote back to say “fat chance.” They could not have chosen a more appropriate expression. Eventually I broke down and bought the book, and I have been enthralled with it ever since: the proof of a pudding is not in its tastiness, but in its power to woo.
When I saw Jan Zwicky’s latest book, Wisdom and Metaphor (Gaspereau Press) on the shelf at a local bookstore, I bought a copy for myself and another as a birthday gift for a friend. When I got home, there was a package waiting for me on my doorstep and inside was yet another copy of the book, sent to me by another friend.
The people who published these two books have recently released an anthology that not only illustrates this last point marvellously but also provides insight into the enviable cultural contexts that have allowed traditions of substantial cartooning to flourish overseas. Many of the stories presented in Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5, in particular, Dupuy & Berbérian’s “Monsieur Jean” and Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s “Kept,” have an unselfconsciously literary feel that is foreign to the North American scene.
There’s something comfortingly predictable about a young adult fantasy. In The Princess Pawn (Sumach) by Maggie L. Wood, Willow is a geeky teenager trying to infiltrate the cool clique without estranging her fat, sloppy best friend. A few chapters in, she discovers that she is a magical princess and heir to the thrones of Gallandra and Keldoran.
