Author Archives: gus

A Child’s View From Gaza

Public Reception, Exhibition
Maclaurin Building, A Wing, A. Wilfrid Johns Gallery, University of Victoria
Thursday, Nov. 15 at 7 p.m.
Includes presentation by Dr. Robert Dalton, a live performance of Arabic music and a Gazan/Palestinian cultural display

The display is on at the A. Wilfrid Johns Gallery from Nov. 6 through Dec. 4, 2012, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Admission is free, donations accepted. About the exhibition: A Child’s View from Gaza, will feature images of 20 drawings by children in Gaza from 5 to 14 years of age, created during the course of art therapy. The exhibition reflects the children’s perceptions of the Israeli offensive
against Gaza, which took place from December 27, 2008 to January 17, 2009. Each drawing is unique in its perspective and details. The drawings reveal that Gaza’s children, despite their tender ages, are acutely aware of the politics of their situation.

Tamara Bernstein ‘This Constant Singing of the World’: the Music of Ann Southam

Gives a lecture
Monday November 5 at 10:00am-10:50am
MacLaurin B120

Tamara Bernstein is one of Canada’s foremost music critics. She has published over 1300 articles, mostly in The Globe and Mail and the National Post, and has written numerous long-form documentaries and features for CBC Radio, including Ideas series on Dmitri Shostakovich, Hildegard von Bingen and Ethel Smyth. She has taught numerous courses for Ryerson University’s LIFE Institute. She is currently writing a book of essays on the music of Ann Southam.

All are welcome

Wise Food for Urbanite Thought

Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto
By Rhona McAdam.
Rocky Mountain Books, 168 pp., $16.95.

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Rapidly increasing urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly challenges human society. In Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, Rhona McAdam takes a critical step toward a new “urban agriculture manifesto” by placing the urban human/environmental interaction at the center of new attempts to deal with the current urban food dilemma. McAdam argues that the current “culture” of imported food has resulted in the decimation of the once thriving, sustainable, and local farming industry. This has resulted in the “majority of us having no idea what the ecological consequences of our food choices are.” To remedy this, McAdam calls for a “new food ethic,” the proliferation of small, sustainable, local, urban food producing gardens, and a return to the “virtuous cycle” of producing the food we eat.

Between tending her small Victoria garden and exchanging garden tips with her neighbourhood gardening collective, McAdam travels, researches, and writes on growing urban habitation and the current global food crisis. McAdam recounts her personal journey of discovery of the “good food” and “slow food” movement and her subsequent training in ‘Sustainable Local Food’ from St. Lawrence College. She reports on current food-safety issues, describing the historical sources and the issues around food production. As well, McAdam spotlights such new directions in the field as urban allotment gardens, edible landscaping, kitchen gardens, urban fish farms, meatless Mondays, and vertical farming, while providing an insightful analysis of the negative environmental consequences of the mega-agro industry.

Throughout, she is both thoughtful and informative, as evidenced in her final chapter, The Future of Urban Agriculture, in which she urges us to look beyond the immediate and envision “the future of food secure cities – and food production in general.”

You don’t need to be a “Guerrilla Gardener” to enjoy reading Digging the City. The book is appealing for its personal narrative, informative analysis, and for its contribution to the growing literature on the sustainable food movement that seeks to change the way we eat.

Susan Hawkins is completing her History in Art PhD and is a trained gardener

50/100 concert – October 26, 2012

 

Ajtony Csaba conducts the University of Victoria Orchestra in 50/100, a
performance of Stravinsky, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Uvic. In the spirit of John Cage, who is
celebrating his 100th year, this program plays around with the numbers 5, 50 and
100. At intermission, 50 audience members will have the chance to create a
Mozart-inspired dice-game Menuet, to be performed by the Orchestra following
intermission.

8:00pm October 26 in the University Centre Farquhar Auditorium. Tickets $13.50-$17.50.

One Night Only – Hudson’s Bay Journals

David Barton

David Barton is a professor of comparative literature working in Taiwan. His previous books include two novels, Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan and Saskatchewan, as well as a book of essays, Pornography of the Emotions. Barton’s second collection of poems, Saskatchewan Gothic, with drypoint illustrations by Jennifer Wise, will be published by Poppy Press next year.

Jennifer Wise

Jennifer Wise is an associate professor of theatre history at the University of Victoria. Her books include Dionysus Writes (1998), The Broadview Anthology of Drama (2003), and a new translation of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Methuen, 2013). Wise’s prints and drawings have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Toronto and Victoria, and are held in private collections in Canada and the U.S.

Alexander Lavdovsky

Alexander Lavdovsky studied painting and printmaking at the Folk Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and has won several prestigious awards for his design and illustration of limited-edition books by P.K. Page, Linda Rogers, and Alice Major. He also attended The Institute of Graphic Arts in Prague for 5 years where he mastered the crafts of letterpress printing and engraving. His artwork has been
shown in solo and group exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, USSR, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland and Canada. He is a member of the Limners and his works are in private collections around the world.

New novels launched with suitable enthusiasm

Bill Gaston and Marjorie Celona

A Reading Hosted by Penguin Canada and Munro’s Books

Wednesday, October 17/12, Bard and Banker

Attended by Garth Martens

Novelists Marjorie Celona and Bill Gaston were in high cheer at the launch for their respective books, Celona’s debut novel Y and Gaston’s latest achievement The World. Relegated to the heat-lamped Hobbit hole upstairs, one hundred bodies crammed intimately together on benches, wicker chairs and between shelves of books, with pints in steady supply and higher demand. If a packed house is a recipe for an anxious sweat, the claustrophobic constraint of the venue added an uncommon ebullience to the usual wafty social cocktail that precedes such events, with every effervescent embrace an affirmation of tribal reliance.

The readings were brilliant as expected, beginning first with Celona, an emerging astonishment who flew in from Banff that morning, followed by local treasure Bill “The White Bear” Gaston, typically self-effacing in unshaven assemblé. Whether from the unrelenting heat lamp or the friction of flawlessly tempered prose, even the bodies lollygagging on the patio were unbuttoning their varied cardigans, dismantling their paisley silks, each set of thick-rimmed glasses sliding from the bridge of the nose, the product-rifled coifs losing their curated weave. Verily, the autocracies of style disunited in sweat.

Following the readings, of course the rabble queued, blank pages folded open, eager for a bit of chat or the commodified stamp of an author autograph, no one saying what everyone was thinking: if you back the right horse you can supplement your retirement fund on Ebay, or at least pay the rent this winter. The hooch was bankrolled by Penguin Canada, so I ordered another pint, its sedimental froth
churning like butter on the tongue. A good piss up, as my uncle might say. And two books that deserve it.

As the night staggered to an end, Gaston offered me a plate of fries, half-eaten. “Don’t take it if it’s gross,” he said, pointing to his mouth. “You can have half of the burger too, if you want it.” I took the fries. As Bill shambled to the bathroom, I picked at the plate with a gamesome friend, wondering when Bill’s partner Dede Crane might turn, mid-conversation, to find an alien person eating from her
husband’s plate. When we exceeded the budget for the liquor, the assemblage began to rotate and disperse. The moon looked like getting out of there. I kicked it to the street with a pair of books, a full belly, and a great night put to rest.

Garth Martens has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Victoria. He is a former member of the poetry editorial board at The Malahat Review. His first book of poems, Motive of Machines, will appear in spring of 2014 with House of Anansi Press.

The Hungry Heart Motel: Where Guests Die of Laughter

The Mystery of the Hungry Heart Motel
Written and performed by Chris Wilson and Peter Carlone
Phoenix Theatre, 8 p.m. Until Oct. 20

The comedy pair Peter N’ Chris, UVic alumni Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson, take audiences for an energetic ride in The Mystery of the Hungry Heart Motel. The play is a creepy Nancy and Drew murder romp, where two actors take turns being possessed by hilarious characters.

A self-conscious satire where slow-motion murder makes you guffaw and blood shoots out in shiny confetti, The Hungry Heart Motel spoofs horror classics like Psycho and The Shining. One can’t help cracking up at Chris’s Jack Nicholson impressions and Peter’s regrets about hiding from the murderer in a frozen maze. It’s clever, witty, and plays on larger-than-life archetypes.

Few props haunt the stage, but I never missed them. There’s an interactive, improvisational feel as the actors morph into human showerheads or break out into spontaneous sound effects. Clearly, the play is well choreographed. Peter and Chris are in perfect synch from their Sesame Street-style boy band moves to a Scooby Doo-inspired chase scene that knocked my socks off. Jinkies!

This play knows it’s a play as characters comment casually on backstory and seem aware of how ambient sounds heighten their fear. The foggy void on stage makes space for the limitless imagination. We even get to see the Heebie Jeebies, Chris’ fears personified, in a dynamic use of lighting and acting. The plot almost takes a back seat to the characters who explore the stage together like an overactive imagination. Still, just when we think we know where the road is curving, the plot takes a sharp, three-dimensional jump to the right.

There’s something for everyone in the show: physical comedy for some and wordplay for others. The snappy dialogue had me feeling I was part of a looped laugh track. I giggled like a little girl throughout. But I’m not totally convinced that the old codger/storyteller needed to lead us into the creepy tale. Yes, he sets the tone and invites us to follow, adding layers during a physical rewind of the story later, but the play could have revved up without him. However, the pained painter, who feels more alive than ever while dying, made the play for me.

The title track from Bruce Springsteen bursts in and out, a thematic trigger for murder. It will haunt you for hours later! Murderer and victims all have a hungry heart in one way or another, even if it’s just for clean bedsheets. My main complaint is I didn’t get to clap enough at the end. This show left me hungry for more Peter n’ Chris.

Leah Callen is a fourth-year writing student

 

Bechdel’s mother narrative too static

Are You my Mother?: A Comic Drama

By Alison Bechdel

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

297 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Fans of Alison Bechdel will be interested in her second family-based graphic novel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama.  The graphic skills that made Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic immensely satisfying and readable are on display in Bechdel’s latest offering.  I was thrilled when Bechdel made the leap from comic strip to graphic novel with Fun, which I read voraciously and loved.  So perhaps my expectations of Are You My Mother?  were impossibly high.  While Bechdel’s drawing retains its appeal in her third book, the narrative is less lively than that of Fun.  Nor is the work as a whole as compelling as Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, the 2010 Canadian graphic novel that also tells the tale of a dyke and her mother.

While Fun was the story of Bechdel growing up in a funeral home and focused on her relationship with her closeted father, Mother? addresses the author’s more conflicted relationship with her female parent.  The narrative line of Fun takes Bechdel through childhood and to university while Mother? explores primarily either the infant Bechdel or her adult self in therapeutic or romantic relationships.  The most common settings of Mother? thus lack the graphic energy or interest that her more mobile childhood afforded.  Far too many frames present Bechdel sitting with her therapist, a static situation that is not particularly graphic-novel friendly.  Bechdel also recounts several dreams reminding me that, often, dreams are most fascinating to the dreamer (and possibly her therapist).

Ironically, I find Mother? leans too heavily in the direction of the academic essay.  Although I have studied Jacques Lacan, it demands too much of the graphic memoir for Bechdel to present the theories of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Alice Miller, and Lacan in such detail.  Although I am in shocked awe at her boldness in titling a chapter, “Transitional Objects” and somewhat amused to see Lacan’s Écrits given graphic treatment, I found the many panels of text (complete with highlighting) excessive – and too static to enliven graphic narrative.

Nor does Bechdel quote psychoanalysts only.  Virginia Woolf, one of my favourite authors, serves as her literary touchstone.  Mother? includes textual panels from Moments of Being and To The Lighthouse.  The Woolf references in Mother? parallel Bechdel’s use of James Joyce in Fun.  It’s interesting, and slyly appropriate, that Bechdel uses the iconic father and mother of high modernism to anchor her relations to her own father and mother.  Readers may also note a nod to gender in the colorful rose (or is it pink?), which gives many frames in Mother? the effect of retinted old photographs, and contrast with the verdigris of Fun.

Her use of quotation, which lacks the full integration of a really good academic essay, suggests Bechdel has not achieved quite enough distance on her therapy to integrate it fully into the literary graphic novel.  The question in her title acknowledges that the story is about Bechdel’s search for a mother rather than about her mother and its present tense implies that that search is on-going, not yet resolved.  Mother? might be read as Bechdel’s own  Drama of the Gifted Child (the Miller book she quotes) – her sincerity and her gifts are indisputable.  Certainly, readers who share similar issues may well forgive the dynamic limitations of Mother? and not only enjoy, but benefit from Bechdel’s psychoanalytic research and insights.  For me, there isn’t enough graphic comic in this Comic Drama.

Chris Fox recently completed her PhD in English – which has not diminished her sense of humour

Real-life events inform Gaston’s fiction

Bill Gaston’s newest novel, The World, was released this fall by Hamish Hamilton. Gaston’s fiction has received many prizes, including nomination for the Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Gaston lives in Victoria, where he’s Department Chair and professor at the University of Victoria. Julia Kochuk discussed Gaston’s new fiction via an email conversation. The novel knits together five tragic and beautiful stories that are full of wisdom and the inescapable complexities of the human condition. The World (355 pages, $32) will be launched in Victoria on October 17th at 6 p.m. at the Bard and the Banker.

What inspired you to write this novel?

Strangely enough, a house fire. Much like Stuart in the novel, I ignited my sun deck, and it spread, and in the morning, the whole side of the house was on fire. I did my research, you might say. So the start of the novel is non-fiction. After that, my writer’s imagination takes over.

The novel is broken down into three parts, told from each of the distinct voices of the three characters, as well as the researched strand of a woman living in the D’Arcy Island leper colony. How did the writing process differ in writing a novel with multiple points of view and voice from a novel with a single protagonist?

I once saw an interview with the actor Kirk Douglas, who had just written a novel. He went on to say that writing the novel was almost identical to being an actor, in that he got to play all the parts and also [be] the director. That rang true, to me. Writing a voice is much like being a method actor, in that you occupy, to the best of your ability, someone else. So that’s the difference. With a multi-voiced novel, you have to stay in the proximity of several voices, not just one.

How did you decide to structure this novel and did you run into any problems in doing so?

It wasn’t ever a “decision,” as it was a process that lasted three or four years. It’s complicated. Basically, the structure isn’t conventional and involves both the seemingly random intersection of lives as well as the nature of fiction. There are fictions within fictions in this fiction of mine. Books within books. There are five independent stories, but they all somehow intersect! And I hope that in saying it this way I’m not making people not want to read this book.

It seems a lot of research went into writing this novel: the way a body falls apart due to esophageal cancer, the way the mind breaks from Alzheimer’s, the way leprosy crumbles limbs and spirits. How did you research these many strands and how did you balance the research with fiction?

Well, as with the house fire, my own life did provide me with lots of research. I’ve had both throat cancer and Alzheimer’s in my immediate family. Nuff said about that. Most leper colony information came from an excellent book, A Measure of Value, by local writer Chris Yorath — though much of the leper colony story is whimsical, that is, imagination, being a fiction written by one of the novel’s characters. In fact, the female leper’s story was written by a character written by a character written by me. (Again, reader, please don’t run away!)

“The World” is an ambitious title. How does the world within the novel reflect the larger world outside of it?

Well, it’s a seemingly ambitious title. A glance at the cover immediately reveals the title’s irony. The book is about small worlds — not just a tiny leper colony, but also our individual, private worlds. It’s also about the world that is our house that can burn down, and the world of our body that can die, and the world of our mind that can lose all awareness of itself, to dementia. The title is really not about the larger world at all.

Julia Kochuk is a fourth-year writing student at the University of Victoria.