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Giller Prize nominee David Bergen joins a lengthy list of the old master’s disciples
© University of ChicagoSaul Bellow“A writer,” Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader moved to emulation.” One way to define Bellow’s stature is to note that aside from all the critical adulation and prizes the novelist won, he’s also been among the most emulated of modern writers. This was certainly true during his lifetime and continues to be the case even though Bellow died in 2005 and has been out of literary favour for several decades.
More than one reviewer has noticed the similarities between David Bergen’s new Giller-nominated novel, The Matter With Morris, and Bellow’s Herzog, the 1964 novel that aroused the greatest emotional response from his readers. Bergen is upfront about his homage to Bellow. Morris Schutt, Bergen’s hero, is a Bellow reader; we’re told that Herzog is “one of Morris’s much-loved novels.” (Bergen’s novel was excerpted in the September 2010 issue of The Walrus.)
One reviewer described The Matter With Morris as “Herzog using a Winnipeg setting.” The parallels are many: both novels track the nervous breakdown of a middle-aged soulful intellectual who waxes philosophic about life’s unexpected tragedies. Moses Herzog and Morris Schutt share the same peculiar hobby of writing frenzied and perplexed letters addressed both to famous politicians (Dwight Eisenhower, Stephen Harper) and dead philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche). The two heroes have a common tendency to become ensnared in farcical situations and fall under the suspicion of the police. Moses and Morris, Bellow and Bergen: even the names sound alike. (more…)
In which the author recounts her personal experience of tubal ligation
I wasn’t wheeled into surgery, I walked. I suppose if you’re healthy, if you choose to have surgery, you walk in. It felt like the final test of my resolve, to walk myself into a room where I would be forever changed. I held my IV bag above my head, which had been encased in two caps to hold all my hair. I was escorted by an OR nurse who surprised me when she said, “I know it’s none of my business, but why are you getting a tubal ligation?” In my blue gown and paper booties, moments away from having my request for total control over my reproductive organs fulfilled, I was asked to justify myself.
I answered with all the nicety I could muster. After all, this woman was about to play an integral part in making sure I came through the procedure without complication. Inside, I was screaming. I had a lot of “Why”s that needed answering too. Why can’t I escape this, even now? Why do I have to spend so much time justifying this? Why do people feel they have the right to question me?
In my original draft of this piece, written the day before my surgery, I wrote almost 1,500 words about what had led me to this point in my life. I wrote about my family, but that’s none of your business. I wrote about my past pregnancy, terminated thirteen years ago, which is also none of your business. (Though talking about my abortion doesn’t seem to confuse anyone, unlike tubal ligation, and I get almost universal support when I mention it, also unlike tubal ligation.) I wrote about my feelings surrounding the physical changes during pregnancy and lactation, feelings which — when voiced — garner comments that I am psychologically unwell. I wrote about all the things I’d lose if I had kids, a line of thought that sometimes gets me pitying looks, as if I’m too stupid or immature to know that I don’t really want to sleep in any weekend or have the time and money to book plane tickets on a whim. When that nurse asked, “Why are you getting a tubal ligation?” I had already spent far too much time justifying myself. (more…)
In Vancouver, the host of past heartache, the author says goodbye to all that
I have been in Vancouver International Airport’s baggage claim area about a dozen times. Every time I stood waiting for my luggage to appear from a flight arriving from Toronto or Montreal, I had the same feeling — a toxic mixture of hopeless love and aching lust, peppered with a knowledge that I was both stupid and doomed.
About a dozen times I stood there waiting for the same someone “special” to meet me in arrivals. Every time I knew I was being an idiot, and every time I convinced myself otherwise. Vancouver has the distinct pleasure of being the city that hosted my youth’s most essential, reckless decision. As life choices go, it’s not the worst one a girl in her early twenties can make — I misguidedly followed a boy across the country. (I’m quite sure now he didn’t really want to be followed, but was much too nice to say so.) He had been offered a job on the Left Coast, and after suffering through a long-distance relationship and multiple flights back and forth, I decided enough was enough. After four years in Montreal, clutching my mostly useless bachelor’s degree, I sold my belongings and boarded a plane to Vancouver because of love. I had no apartment, no job, and no plans — just a romantic notion of “going westward as into the future.” What was worse was that, even after all those visits, I wasn’t even all that sure I liked Vancouver, and as the months passed I became quite sure I hated it. At the time, my wise and irritatingly rational scientist father told me that no matter what my experience on the West Coast became, I should stay a full 365 days to give it the proverbial chance. A year to a fresh graduate is an excruciatingly long time, but now that rain-soaked memory seems only like a blip on an otherwise expansive map.
I’d been blaming my failure in Vancouver on a lack of funds for as long as I can remember, but there had always been a small voice in my head that suggested I should look deeper. So after ten years away (and with a boatload of repressed regret), I have reluctantly come back, out of morbid curiosity, stubbornly trying to prove something, or kill something, or maybe just to satisfy my masochism. This time I’ve landed in YVR with a healthy credit limit and no need to shoplift. Again I am baggage claim, this time on business instead of (attempted) pleasure, yet still feeling that inexplicable stupid doom that comes from a relationship that will never work out. And let me just say, Vancouver on love and Vancouver on business are two very different places. (more…)
Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, is a never-done-before, 304-page work of experimental journalism. Based on thirty hours of raw digital footage shot by producer/publisher Alex Jansen and filmmaker Jason Gilmore, written by me — Richard Poplak* — and illustrated by Nick Marinkovich, the book tells the story of a Toronto man whom the international press dubbed “the most prolific bike thief in the world.”
Holly Jean Buck ponders why Igor Kenk needed to store 2,800 bikes in “Surviving the Apocalypse, on Two Wheels,” from The Walrus Blog
In the summer of 2008, Igor Kenk was arrested on suspicion of stealing a bicycle. Kenk was a legend in the Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood, infamous for trading in bicycles of unknown provenance. The story turned weirder and weirder: The scruffy street merchant had a gorgeous Juilliard-trained pianist for a wife; police searches of his shop, home, and rented garages turned up almost 3,000 bicycles and plenty of drugs; Kenk made outrageous claims inside and outside of his court appearances. The city, and indeed the world, became fascinated with this outrageous character. Folks wanted to know more.
And so we have Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which is an attempt to bridge an in-depth investigative profile with a graphic novel. The following pages are extracted from Chapter II, where we learn about Kenk’s childhood and his time back in Slovenia, which he generously terms “the old shithole.” (more…)
It’s two days after the golden goal. What do we know? Canada is the world’s preeminent hockey power. This is not in doubt. It was not in doubt before the torch was lit in Vancouver, it was not in doubt after the initial loss to the Americans, and, shivers of horror aside, it was not even in doubt when the US’s Zach Parise scored with twenty-four seconds left in regulation to send the gold medal game to overtime.
Canada is the global hockey hegemon, this is certain knowledge. We know this, as certainly as we ever know anything about hockey, which is to say we are somewhere between 60 and 80 percent sure. Yes, for the past thirty years, there has been a consistent stream of excellent players from other countries. The Soviet system, through massive investment and militaristic discipline, managed to produce a top end of players who could compete with the quality of players Canada used to find by trawling frozen ponds with fine-mesh nets and picking out likely looking seven-year-olds. There has been a legion of elite Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs — even the occasional lonesome American — who, in an individual contest, if there was such a thing as an individual contest in hockey, could best virtually any single Canadian sent against them. Any country with systematized talent scouting, a well-funded training and development program, and frozen water has it in them to grow a great hockey player, even a team of them.
But hockey, if you care about objective things, is a longue duree game. You’ve gotta look big — careers, decades, generations — to get at the truth. And the bigger you look, the bigger Canada is. Canada has more players skating on more rinks across more cities than any other country; there are more Canadians making more money filling out the ranks of worldwide professional hockey leagues than any other nationality. Everything in hockey that is most, greatest, or oldest belongs to Canada or Canadians. Count it all from the beginning — all the championships, all the goals, all the stars, all the innovations — and no other country compares. Everyone knows this. It is so known that it’s a cliché, a stereotype, a joke; it’s so well-known that non-hockeyish Canadians are sometimes angered by it. Canada has produced a great many good and worthy things, but hockey is its showpiece. It is the spectacle Canada performs for the world.
Yet still, somehow, despite all that, it sometimes becomes a matter of one game.
It shouldn’t, really. One game is a matter of luck. One game is bounces, deflections, moods, moments. The Canadian Men’s Olympic team would have to be playing the Turkish Women’s Under-18 team to guarantee a victory in advance. A game like Sunday’s gold medal match? There were at least thirty players crossing that ice who have it somewhere in them to break a game open, on the right night, with the right bounces. Even granting, as a matter of course, that the Canadian team was objectively superior in talent to the Americans, they only win that game maybe fifty-seven times in a hundred. If, as postulated by Hugh Everett, the timeline does indeed bifurcate with every possible outcome of every possible choice, then that Big Game shattered time into a metric bajillion little bubbles of possibility: somewhere out there in the sprawling multiverse, the Americans won 8-0 on a Joe Pavelski hat trick and Patrick Kane is dancing around his bedroom wearing nothing but a lumpen gold medallion over his bits. Absolutely anything might have happened. (more…)
Last Tuesday, the National Post published what turned out to be a great justification for the continued existence of Women’s Studies programs, in the form of an “angry, divisive and dubious” (to borrow a phrase) editorial against the discipline.
Now, the opinions expressed by the Post’s editorial board are, very often, not ours; a right-wing editorial would not normally merit a special response from us. This is different. For one thing, the paper’s official position — it bears repeating, official position — on Women’s Studies programs is outright offensive, and woefully uninformed. It states, for instance, that “Women’s Studies courses have taught that all women — or nearlyall [sic] — are victims and nearly all men are victimizers,” which should seem a careless generalization to anyone with a Women’s Studies degree. It cites dated concepts as though they’re generally accepted premises within this (apparently homogeneous) discipline. There ought to be a variation of Godwin’s Law to cover poorly contextualized Andrea Dworkin quotations.
But it would be too generous to say that the National Post’s editorial writers know little about Women’s Studies. That’s not what bothers us: ignorant stereotypes are familiar to all feminists. No, what disturbs us is that the Post considers Women’s Studies’ aims pernicious. The following quote is not, in fact, lifted from the Onion: “The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.” Women’s Studies isn’t a corrective to an unjust society, you see — it’s a conspiracy which is responsible for such horrors as “employment equity,” “mandatory diversity training,” and “universal daycare and mandatory government-run kindergarten.” And thanks to feminism and the unbiased, professionally run, and state-subsidized education system it supports, your children may grow up believing that the differences between males and females are “relatively insignificant.”
This is, in our view, utter rubbish, and it is very much not OK. When a group with a longstanding, deeply entrenched systemic advantage — “privilege,” in the parlance of Women’s Studies and programs like it — speaks heatedly of its “rights” vis-à-vis a less privileged group, it’s usually seen as an expression of bigotry. “White rights” are generally invoked by white supremacists. The words “Jewish conspiracy” or “immigrant takeover” are surefire conversation stoppers. Heterosexuals who object to gay pride parades on the basis that no “straight parades” exist are, if not completely homophobic, not all that bright. In either case, the opinions expressed aren’t just stupid; they’re alarming. We don’t see why things should be any different when it comes to gender, and yet the “pendulum has swung” argument is somehow viable when women’s rights is the issue at stake. (more…)
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Alex Hutchinson ponders the effect of GPS technology on human sense of direction in this video, which accompanies his article, “Global Impositioning Systems,” in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus.
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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