M and I made our way to Hanoi both knowing that as I will never be able to write as well as the English traveller A.A. Gill, I could at least quote him. “If the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference,” he has said of Vietnam, “the opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s prosperity.”
In December 2006, the St. Louis Hotel and beer parlour in Calgary—once a favourite haunt of Ralph Klein, former premier of Alberta—closed its doors after ninety-two years of operation. George Webber made many visits to the hotel during its final weeks, with his camera and his notebook.
A tall man sits on the back porch of his Las Vegas home. It is in a gated community, which is also a country club, which was built seven years ago, and it is almost the only thing in the desert. A red mountain of sand can be seen in the distance, and another gated community is being built—it’s still just the bare wood frames of the houses. The tall man has made more money in the past three weeks than in his whole life.
The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.
A note to Stephen Osborne about his Letter to Subscribers, on summer fiction, enclosed in Geist 65: Fiction is your business. For many of us who don’t have the luxury of daily contact we are stuck with the editorial page and many other kinds of uninspired writing.
This is my notice to you that I will not be renewing my subscsription, and I don’t have any intention of coming back, due to Stephen Osborne’s smarmy Letter to Subscribers.
A few years ago, in Geist 56, wepublished a photograph of a nine-year-old girl holding up a freshly caught trout. The photograph had been taken somewhere near Barrington, Nova Scotia, in the late 1950s, and it belonged to Barbara Zatyko, our managing editor at that time, who treasured it because it reminded her of her own mother, who had grown up in Nova Scotia and who used to tell stories of catching fish on the way home from school when she was a child.
In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.
Jim Slater would be judging the competition for Bindertwine Queen that afternoon and wanted to drive over to the festival in his new tractor and park in front of the crowd, but his wife said that it was the Contestants’ day and not his day, and so he took the Buick and drove around and around until he found a parking spot three streets over.
