Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.
In his hotel room the director took a mouthful of Scotch, swallowed a Viagra and then headed off to the gala. He pushed past women with diamonds around their necks and stiletto heels under their manicured feet. At the bar he ordered another Scotch and fiddled with the gold links on his French cuffs. Men gathered in corners discussing fishing trips to Chile and starlets they had bedded.
In 1982, a few months after I moved out of my parents’ house, my dad asked me if I wanted to go for a drive down to Key West at Christmas. I said sure.
In 1971 I went to work as a reporter at the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper depended for much of its copy on a roster of freelancers who would get their assignments by phone and drop by the office to deliver their articles. One of these contributors was D’Arcy Marsh.
No one can ignore that the publication of several caricatures of Mohammed in a number of periodicals around the world (first in Denmark, as a joke, then in other countries, as an act of defiance) ignited the furious protest of various Islamic groups. History repeats itself: faith, which is supposed to be the unmovable pillar of a true believer, seems to shiver and shake when confronted by a mere artistic creation, with a brushstroke or a few scribbled words, while in the name of the Supreme Being, his followers announce that a fit of divine temper is imminent.
On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the custody of Thomas York, who owned the farm, and a neighbour who was staying overnight.
In March 2006, on CBC Radio, As It Happens interviewed a man in Sweden who composes music to be performed on instruments made of ice. Then they played some of the music, which was indeed icy and tinkly, and the strings (was that a harp?) were vibratory and the “brass” (ice horns resting on ice plinths, I think) was glassy.
What makes [Palmer] Cox so interesting, at least to Nick Mount in his new study When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (University of Toronto Press), is that he was part of a literary expatriation of Canadian writers to the United States. At the time of the 1901 census, only fifty-six writers were making a living in Canada.
