Geist.com - Ideas and Culture

Trial by Water

volunteer — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:51:55 -0500

Thad McIlroy

Letter from Nepal

volunteer — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:48:23 -0500

Daniel Collins

At first the blackouts in Kathmandu are limited to six hours a week, so in my area we do without lights on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It’s not difficult—candles at dinner, quite charming at first—but then we jump to fifteen hours a week without power, then to thirty-six hours, all within ten days. The government calls it “load shedding.” This in a country with the potential to be number two in the world for hydroelectric production.

Intellectual in the Landscape

volunteer — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:44:23 -0500

Stephen Osborne

When the celebrated English poet Rupert Brooke came to Canada on the train from New York in 1913, he had been warned that he would find “a country without a soul.” The gloomy streets of Montreal, overshadowed by churches and banks and heavy telephone wires, reminded him of the equally gloomy streets of Glasgow and Birmingham.

Godzilla in Kosovo

stephen — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:40:26 -0500

David Albahari

Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

Canadian Destiny

sarah — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:25:56 -0500

In “Dates with Destiny” (Geist 67), Daniel Francis meets Elio, whose father made a torpedo in a factory that sunk a ship carrying Francis’s mother-in-law; thus Daniel says to Elio: “So, your father tried to kill my wife’s mother.” Canadian taxpayers pay for weapons, ammunition and soldiers that are used in the Afghan “mission”; in this way of thinking, each and every one of us is personally responsible for the killing of Afghan fathers and sons.

Cause and Coincidence

sarah — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:23:21 -0500

As if “Dates with Destiny” (Geist 67) didn’t speak to coincidence eagerly enough, I stumbled upon it during my waitressing shift. Wouldn’t you know it—at the moment I flipped through No. 67, the word Fiume jumped out to meet me—the short-lived city Fiume, my own father’s birthplace.

Views and Reviews

sarah — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:08:33 -0500

Maybe Patty Osborne, who reviewed Canada in the Rough (Geist 62), should visit a slaughterhouse and take lots of pictures of how they kill the animals she eats. The farmer’s little calf, raised by a child and now maybe has grown to an adult with the big brown eyes, paraded into a room and shot in the head with a ramset a couple of times before it goes down.

Night Work: A Sawchuk Short Film

sarah — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:55:59 -0500

In the short film Night Work: A Sawchuk Poem (based on the book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs), director Justin Simms explores the question: What kind of man puts himself in the path of a rubber missile travelling straight to his head at the velocity of a Bobby Hull shot?

All Star Wrestling

sarah — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:23:53 -0500

Sister DJ’s Radio Band

Hear the song “All Star Wrestling” by Sister DJ’s Radio Band. Listen for the names of some of your favourite extreme wrestlers: Haystack Calhoun, William Muldoon, the Fabulous Moolah, Kenji Shibuya, Gene Kiniski, Hardboiled Haggerty, Bill Dromo, and Dump Matsumoto.

Time’s Arrow

volunteer — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:44:23 -0500

Andrew Danson Danushevsky

These two portraits (of John Jackson of Toronto) were taken by Andrew Danson Danushevsky and are separated by an interval of eighteen years.

Grey Flannel Life: Quotations on Men

sarah — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:01:06 -0500

Quotations from The Little Grey Flannel Book, compiled and annotated by Oline Luinenberg and Stephen Osborne (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Stay As You Are: Non-Sequitur Theatre #24

sarah — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:43:14 -0500

Brad Yung

I’d enjoy being in love more if it didn’t involve other people.

Buffalo Bill’s Defunct

admin — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:03:53 -0500

Daniel Francis

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

Men + Men

sarah — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:41:52 -0500

Stephen Smith

We have men on the slope and men on the ridge. In the gully, more men. Men on the main road wait for the men on the esker to move up onto the ridge so that they (the men on the road) can take their (the esker-men’s) place. Men hesitate and grumble. The valley is all men. Men, men, men.

Reporting Typo

sarah — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:46:23 -0500

Thanks for the email about the writing workshop and other things. Pierre Berton’s name is spelled wrong in the email. Just felt compelled to point that out since he’s a Canadian institution and everything.

Portrait

sarah — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:59:20 -0500

Robert Everett-Green

“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.

My Father’s Hands

sarah — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:35:07 -0500

David Albahari

In Paris, during a recent visit, I find myself thinking about my father’s hands.

Balkan Farewell

volunteer — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:35:44 -0600

David Albahari

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.

Crematorium

sarah — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:53:47 -0500

Gillian Wigmore

She lives in Prince George.
in plastic bags on tuesday nights
we load frozen corpses
from industrial-sized freezers
into the back of the suzuki.

Seasons in the Abyss

volunteer — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:04:48 -0500

Adam Lewis Schroeder

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.