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Re-hanging the National Wallpaper
When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.
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Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women
The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se
Sacred Places in North America: A Journey into the Medicine Wheel
Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of
Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars
Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road
On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac
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City Lectures
The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.
The Main
Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.
A Few Essential Words
I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.
