It is morning. The woman on the radio said Hurricane Rita passed through in the middle of the night, but it probably does not feel that way to Boogie Augustine, who is drinking Bud Light in his white pickup truck near a gas station off the Interstate. The rain is sheeting sideways and the wind is gusting so hard that it rocks the truck. If you get out of the truck, you can lean into the wind and not fall over when you should, and the rain hurts when it pricks your skin.
The first time I stayed at the Marlborough Hotel in Winnipeg, I lost several rounds of Scrabble in the bar to an editor from Vancouver, while a trio of incompetent musicians thumped and crashed away on the bandstand, and no matter how much we drank neither of us could come up with a single exhilarating word.
In the fall of 2005, Sheila Heti spent a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst. The EUCAN cans, known to detractors as Monster Bins, carry advertising and have been condemned by citizens’ groups as environmentally unsound.
Several times, during a long life of reading, I’ve been tempted to write an autobiography based solely on the books that have counted for me. Someone once told me that it was customary for a Spanish nobleman to have his coat of arms engraved on the headboard of his bed so that visitors might know who it was who lay in a sleep that might always be his last. Why then not be identified by the books at my bedside that, better than a symbolic shield, define and represent me?
I can’t blame you for claiming this place as your own personal theme park.
For you, there is only summer when every curve in the road brings a new photograph— red cliffs climbing out of the sea, field upon field of white blossoms, a wharf where boats christened The Maggie-Mae and Aurora Dawn depart for the fishing grounds.
On the same bill with The Harp was The Score, a full-length Canadian movie (directed by Kim Collier and produced by Trish Dolman and Leah Mallen) that was adapted from a play by the Electric Company Theatre. The film considers the ramifications of research on the human genome through the life of a woman, Dr. Magnusson, who runs a struggling genetics lab that is about to publish ground-breaking research.
A curious inscription in a copy of a book called Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems from the Chinese inspired Peter Sanger to write White Salt Mountain (Gaspereau Press), a book that weaves together stories and facts about the life of Florence Ayscough, a largely unknown writer, and her contemporaries. Sanger begins in his east coast home, where he identifies the clues that provoked his interest in Ayscough, and from there he proceeds along a trail of discovery of her life and work.
The comics artist and writer Seth dropped in to Sophia Books in Vancouver in early November to promote his new book, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World (Drawn & Quarterly), a sumptuous clothbound volume on whose cover the eponymous Mr. Green appears, embossed in luminous copper ink.
In 2003 Douglas Bruce rode the subway to Coney Island, having forgotten where he was going and who he was. His friend Rupert Murray was one of many directors interested in bringing this story of complete amnesia to the screen, and Murray’s Unknown White Male was one of the most intriguing films at the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival.
