“Do you feel, you know, some vibrations, under your bed?” This crewman on this ocean liner was clearly trying to seduce me.

“Of course, from the engine,” I sad.

I have been sleeping for the past thirteen days within a great machine. I can feel the mechanical throbbing all night long, and the intermittent hum through my pillow. Several hundred workers, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines, dwell in the bowels of the ship—on the numberless decks below level one. Long, white corridors; no windows.

“Well, the problem is the boiler,” the crewman told me. Yes. It cannot be much fun to live for eleven months at a time next to a boiler. What does one say to that? This is what modern ocean travel has come to: driving across the ocean in what is essentially a giant luxury car.

When you think of the word “ship”, what images come to mind? It is an inspiring word, a positive word; it speaks of adventure, of passage, of potential. Of harnessing the elements for motion. Voyage, freedom. Or sometimes, slavery.  What are the realities of twenty-first century ships?

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Shary Boyle isn’t a comics artist, though comics readers are happy to claim her as one of their own. I first started paying attention to her work when it appeared in the 2006 volume of Kramers Ergot, a comics anthology that scrambles divisions between comics and other visual arts. Boyle’s airy, neon-coloured drawings of uncanny creatures strewn amid grasses and drizzled with bodily fluids numbered among the strongest inclusions in those pages—which, when it comes to the generally high quality of work in Kramers, is saying something.

Some more of those drawings turn up in the new Boyle retrospective, Otherworld Uprising, where we learn that they’re part of her “Porcelain Fantasy” series, mock-ups for impossible-to-realise porcelain figurines, and we begin to understand why they’re so easily acceptable as part of a continuum of cartooning. Fantastic and figurative, depicted in line art conducted in pencil or ink, Boyle’s drawings suggest narrative possibilities and freeze motion in ways particular to comics. But unlike similar near-cartooning by BC resident Julie Morstad or Québec native Geneviève Castrée, both of whom share Boyle’s concern with the fantastic and feminine and grotesque, Boyle’s works remain defiant and unruly, however suggestive. They defy fantasy, for one, and refuse to coalesce into any discernible “world,” instead remaining disarmingly ungoverned. For another, they defy figuration, preferring rather to cut the figure apart, obscure it, distort it, or at most make it more of a figurine than a figure. Most of all, though, they defy narrative, confronting us simply with the unsettling facts of existence—this woman has no head, or the universe has exploded, or yes this creature is looking at you—without explaining them away, without providing them with a comforting sense of before and after.

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PARIS—Sports and music make strange bedfellows. When they agree to jump in the sack at all, that is.

How strange can it get? Last week, hot-stuff rapper Lil Wayne started blogging about sports for ESPN.com. I should have noticed this, seeing as I spend upwards of 8 hours (equivalent to a 21-overtime hockey playoff game) surfing the Worldwide Leader’s archives.

But embarrassingly, it was actually pointed out to me by a friend of mine, Dave, the music editor at Eye Weekly in Toronto, who emailed me to get my take on the depth of Wayne’s sporting chops for his weekly web-music column, Totally Wired.

(The joke that got away, i.e. the one that came to me after Dave’s deadline: “Seriously, Lil Wayne? Dumping Ben Roethlisberger for Kurt Warner, just because Ben looks like he’s not going to turn it around, is like ditching Rihanna for Queen Latifah because Rihanna threw up on your shoes at the Grammys afterparty.”) (more…)

This week, Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, and deservedly so. It is a sprawling, brilliant, playful, heartbreaking, and eminently wise book that considers its world with unusual bravery and purpose. It’s easily one of the very best books I’ve read this year. I caught up with Lee Henderson last month, while he was in Toronto for the launch.

* * * * *

This is your first novel, but unlike many first books it’s not obviously autobiographical. How did your ideas come together?

I think it still is autobiographical, but more symbolic autobiography. I’ve always been doing drawings, and I always thought it was somehow irreverent to draw naked men, and I’d be in writing classes and you’re supposed to write critiques on people’s stories or poems, and I’d just be drawing little naked men for them. It seemed counterintuitive at the time, so I’m always looking for how to draw stories out of very small obsessions like that. I knew that if it was going to take nine years, at least I’d be entertained while I worked on it. (more…)

“There’s a man here with one leg, five women, and thirty-two children,” Sarah Shambe tells me, on the day of Rosh Hashanah, as we walk away from Eid prayers to her two-room home in a suburb of Kampala, Uganda.  Sarah spent the morning praying in an open field with thousands of other Ugandan Muslims. Now that the praying is done, she fills me in on the neighbours.

I didn’t know Sarah before about an hour ago, but now she’s invited me to her home. This is after prayers where small kids ate ice cream in shades of bright pink and pastel orange, and music played in the background while friends and relatives greeted each other, and everyone wore their best clothes for Eid, and people prayed in a clearing under the clouds in front of the Kampala skyline.

This is how I spend my Rosh Hashanah in Africa: observing Eid. (more…)

WESTWOOD, CALIFORNIA—I found this Beer Dong poster attached to every other post on the street I’m staying on in Westwood. The street does have a map name but is more commonly called “Frat Row.” You’ll forgive me but this has put me in a gender war kind of mood. But screw you if you are a man!

Gender, because of Palin and Hilary Clinton, has become popular as a meme in 2008. Only gender is not actually ever discussed. (more…)

So it does not go on forever, what one passenger called “Matthew Swan’s floating circus.” There are grand finale events planned, of course—the final recap, the captain’s dinner, Aaju’s fur fashion show, the variety show. But the last day also had serendipitous moments…

Walrus public square, part one

Earlier in the trip, Franklyn Griffiths had given a talk on “Camels in the Arctic?” (The Walrus, November, 2007). He talked about his findings during a journey from east to west in the Arctic when he canvassed Inuit leaders and hunters about climate change. He concluded that there were significant regional differences (more awareness in the west) and three levels of understanding and concern: those concerned about climate change and committed to alerting the world about the loss of animals and a way of life; those more concerned about culture; and a majority who considered themselves “marvelous adapters” to the changes they identified, such as changes in the intensity of light and the taste of caribou, but who focused on the here and now in a very practical way, confident of their ability to adapt. (more…)

I moved to Toronto from Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I miss most about home is the daily commute that took me over the Cambie Street Bridge and into the downtown core each morning. I’d hop on my trusty ten-speed (minus one brake cable, but who’s counting?) and rocket down the hill, past the all-too-familiar yellow and red safety vests of the Canada Line construction workers, and onto the wide bike-friendly path speckled with self-propelled individuals on their way to work. On rainy days my view from the bridge was limited to the slippery pavement in front of me, but on the rare and much celebrated occasion of a clear, sunny Vancouver morning, the city would rise up before me in all its tall, glassy glory.

To my left, the expansive curve of English Bay’s shores would wind beneath the Burrard Street Bridge, where tiny rainbow-coloured ferries shuttled market workers to Granville Island. To my right, the waters of False Creek would reach into the city, before ending abruptly at the foot of the Expo ‘86 architectural orb known as Science World. And in front of me, clusters of residential towers would form a shining wall across the horizon, some so distant that only the sharp glare of their reflections would register, others so close that I could see through their windows smartly dressed couples making breakfast and preparing for the day. It was easy to see how Vancouver earned the Coupland-coined moniker “City of Glass.”

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LYUBOV ORLOVA—The fish bought in Greenland by the ship and served subsequently several times for dinner was called simply “halibut” on the menu; and then someone would say, well, really, it is turbot. It did not taste like my idea of “halibut”—the glorious weighty fish caught in late spring off the shores of northern BC and Alaska; this was softer in texture and smaller. Nor did it taste like what I remembered as “turbot,” so what was it?

Hippoglossus hippoglossus is the scientific name for the Atlantic halibut;

Hippoglossus stenolepis is the scientific name for the Pacific halibut;

Psetta maxima is the scientific name for the European turbot.

Even the website of the Canadian Department of Agriculture flounders (heh, heh) on the subject of why this particular flatfish—which sometimes acts like a roundfish, meaning it can swim vertically—is given the name of two completely different species: “The physical aspects of this fish more closely resemble its relative, the Atlantic halibut, than the European turbot (Psetta maxima), but for reasons too numerous to explain, the species must be marketed in the United States as “Greenland turbot” (so as not to confuse it with Pacific halibut) and in Europe as “Greenland halibut” (so as not to confuse it with true turbot).” (more…)

PARIS—Hola, Sportstrotter amigos. How’s it hanging? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but the lines on the field don’t paint themselves here at Sportstrotter-MGD Stadium.

I’ll tell you where I’ve been the last couple weeks: holed up in my tiny apartment, with the heat on (winter starts early here in Paris), half-dressed and huddled under a desk with my laptop, obsessively reading the news and trying not to piss myself. With a virulent mixture of abject, tremble-inducing terror and maniacal, Joker-esque amusement, I’ve been following along at home as the world self-destructs. Economics, politics, society, science, culinary, environment — you name the topic, and one undeniable truth pervades: we’re fucked.

Worse still: a Cubs pitcher recently threw a no-hitter; the Buffalo Bills are 3-0; even the Yankees, ever-fueled by Steinbrenner’s billions, missed the playoffs this month. If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, I don’t know what is. (more…)

The Arctic, to the new eye, looks like a barren place, an empty place. But in fact this apparently desolate landscape, and seascape, have rich stories to tell; you just have to know how and where to look. This means seeing a little clump of twigs with red leaves the size of oat flakes as a forest; this adjusts the scale of everything. Major archeological finds have been discovered because a pile of rocks suddenly looks more than random.

Yesterday in Hoare Bay on the Cumberland Peninsula on Baffin Island, there were three small icebergs, clearly settling in for the winter. Someone asked Chris (assistant expedition leader, an exuberant Brit in an Aussie hat with a passion for ice) where those icebergs might have come from. (Icebergs follow the currents once they are unleashed from the glaciers, which means they travel north up the coast of Greenland and then south along Baffin Island, and can take as long as two years to reach the coast of Newfoundland. Like the ships of the British explorers, icebergs too overwinter in bays like this.) So where did these icebergs come from? The only way to tell, says Chris, is to find a bit of rock or gravel, imbedded deep in the glacier, and analyse that. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious. In Korean, the word for pork is dwaeji gogi — “pig meat.” Most other meats work the same way: insert name of animal, followed by the word for “meat” — not much in the way of linguistic frippery to disguise the fact that meat is basically dead flesh and ripped-apart muscle.

In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of their dishes, displayed right underneath jovial cartoon versions of whichever animal gave their life for the food. This is especially true of restaurants serving galbi, pork or beef rib meat barbecued over flaming charcoals stuck into the centre of your table.

The following is series of portraits of these brave ambassadors of personal flavour. As you can see, most of them look downright delighted at the prospect of ending up in your bowels. (more…)