“I am I because my little dog knows me.” The words are Gertrude Stein’s; the dog in this picture knew my parents and lived with them before I was born, and they celebrated its existence in a pair of studio portraits. The other shows the dog looking straight at the lens with its paws on the back of a bentwood chair. I prefer the more formal one, with the lady’s wrist watch raffishly slung around the dog’s neck.
Only when I settle down in the back seat of the cab do I notice that on the dashboard there are several stickers with the letter U, the sign of Ustashe. During the Second World War, Ustashe was the ruling party in the Independent State of Croatia. They also had their own army and ran a number of concentration camps where many Serbs, gypsies and Jews were slaughtered.
Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a factory making torpedoes. “Most of the torpedoes used by the Axis during the war were made there,” he informed me.
Brian Howell’s first glimpse into the impersonating world came at a lively Sunday gospel meeting in southern British Columbia, led by an Elvis impersonator who said that his Elvis costume had given new meaning to his life. The impersonating world is a hall of mirrors through which Brian Howell has sought out myriad reflections of celebrity at every level, from the neighbourhood gospel show, to community centres catered by Lions Clubs, and finally to big conventions in Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida.
tim.Thanks for publishing my letter about the fractured French in your reprint of Catherine Owen’s “Trouvé mort” or “Un Patient est Trouvé Mort: Haikus from the French” (Geist 64). I appreciate seeing the author’s response alongside your own in Geist 65. I give Owen full points for chutzpah. Of special interest is her assertion that the errors in the poem’s French-language citations are entirely attributable to Le Journal de Montréal, which she says is quoted verbatim. »»
In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenirs from the hundred destinations listed on decorative signs in the museum, such as one near the door reading: “New Guinea, Borneo, Africa, Thailand, South America, archeological sites, Machu Picchu Peru, pagan Burma, the Nile Egypt, Abu Simbel.”
Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer; the walls in the comedy club were bare brick and the stools were too high for my feet to touch the floor. The funeral director saw the challenge of his work in bringing back the essence of the dead person in the face by massaging the skin. He said the important moment comes when the dead person’s family looks into the casket and recognizes the person lying there, or not.
I saw my mother under sedation in the Psych Ward, after she collapsed at the funeral. She foresaw the bridge disaster, but no one believed her, not even father. Her “visions” made him uneasy.
Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different religion. Readers and members of the media around the world joined a campaign against the practice of honour killings in Jordan and other countries. The only problem was that Khouri’s book was a fake—a fact that came to light after a few Jordanian journalists pointed out numerous factual errors in the story.
Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.
