Category Archives: Lynne Van Luven

Collage artist moves beyond words

Vancouver artist Sarah Gee studied creative writing at the University of Victoria but is now known primarily as a visual artist. Lynne Van Luven talked with Gee recently about her creative process. Gee’s current exhibition of collage works, “Stuck,” is showing at the Slide Room Gallery, Vancouver Island School of Art, 2549 Quadra Street. The show, curated by Tyler Hodgins, runs until Feb. 18, 2013.

Sarah, you strike me as someone whose creative life is always evolving, sometimes between really different forms of expression. Can you talk a bit about your shift from studying writing to becoming a practising visual artist?

For a long time, growing up, I assumed I would be a writer. I came from a highly literate family and I seemed to have the knack for it. I received a degree in Creative Writing and loved that protective, isolated environment, but I never wrote seriously after university. Part of that was due to the immediate pressures of life, which meant a series of low-paying jobs. When I first tried making art, it was more text than image, which betrayed a lack of confidence on my part. But it felt wrong – contrived, somehow, a shortcut, maybe even a falsehood, relying on language when what I wanted was beyond language. Maybe it has something to do with being wary of unequivocal expression, I’m not sure. Now my work is about as mute and ambiguous as it’s possible to be. And I don’t have the knack for visual arts the way I had for writing. It’s really hard, and I fail a lot! But it feels right.

In the publicity for your show at the Deluge Contemporary Gallery in Victoria in the summer of 2012, you were quoted as saying: “I use collaged paper to compose what could be called geometric abstraction, but I sometimes think of it as heretical geometry: formalism combined with the psychedelic.” Could you “unpack” that statement a little bit more and discuss the spatial aspects of your vision as an artist?

If I’m using geometry as a kind of utopian language, that seems heretical to me, in a funny sort of way. I’m more of an idealist rather than biographical or political artist, and I’m hoping for a kind of transcendental experience when you look at my work. Most compositions are made of repeated geometric shapes, and because there is something hypnotic about repetition with slight variation, the image can invoke a sort of theta wave response. That’s where the psychedelia comes in. Psychedelia tries to unlock the mind through intense, vibrating colour and radical, often sexualized imagery. It all looks a little silly today, but I appreciate what they were trying to do, and in my own way I’m attempting the same thing. I don’t know if I unpacked that statement or just crammed a lot more junk into it.

How does the “vocabulary” of art differ from that of creative writing? Or does it?

Creation of all kinds demands the same things from the maker. Be honest and accurate. Avoid cliché by knowing the history of your craft. The only thing that may separate the majority of writing with what goes on in the art world is the act of deliberate provocation. The art world is far more addicted to what I call The Grand Startle than the literary world. Visual artists make work that will most certainly be perceived as ugly, unlikable, or just plain confusing. Yes, there are great experimental writers, from James Joyce to Mark Danielewski, but it’s not part of the larger writing culture. Writers, in my opinion, try to orient you to the world, while visual artists try to disorient you. Through disorientation – shock, bafflement, or in my case, the mysteries of abstraction – hopefully you can come to a new kind of thinking.

With your current show in Victoria, are you marking the end of one period of your work and getting ready to segue into another?

I’m not sure my themes or my methods will change in the near future, but any exhibit is a natural end period – you get to see your work for the first time outside the studio, and it feels elegiac somehow. But when I get a bone I don’t let go. Right now I’m obsessed with these horizontal stacked forms, these “totems,” and I can’t seem to make anything else!

What are you reading right now, and does it somehow inform your art?

Being self-taught, I do a lot of reading about the history of art, and right now I’m reading a coffee table book about, of all things, how big tobacco companies in the 40s and 50s collected amazing contemporary art. It’s filled with drool-inducing photos of industrial spaces crammed with Lichtensteins and Picassos, all with a kind of democratic approach to art that seems not only radical, but sadly obsolete now. But by far the bulk of my reading right now is crime fiction. I’ve come to realize there’s a strong correlation between a mystery novel and my own aims as an artist. Both are concerned with bringing disparate elements into harmony, and both expose secret or hidden aspects of life in an attempt to make sense of it all. I find life mostly bewildering and painful, and the idea of a neat resolution is very alluring.

 

Novelist undismayed by publishing changes

Ann Ireland’s new book, The Blue Guitar, has just been released by Dundurn, an Ontario literary press. The author spoke to Lynne Van Luven via e-mail from her winter pied-a-terre in Mexico.

I’ve been following your career as a fiction writer since A Certain Mr. Takahashi (1985), and I notice that you seem intrigued by the dynamics and power differentials in learning situations where we have a student/instructor relationship. Could you comment on that?

When I was young, [I had] various teachers who exerted a strong influence on my greedy mind. In a way, I wanted to become the person I admired. This must have been creepy for those concerned. I saw getting close to the teacher as being a short cut to a certain degree of sophistication and knowingness. Now, as a long -time writing instructor (Ryerson University’s continuing education division) I have a strong radar for students who want to get too close, and I find myself backing off. I know too well . . .
In my new novel, The Blue Guitar, I wanted to investigate how caring for someone who has had a severe breakdown creates an uneasy power imbalance in a relationship. It can be tantalizing to save someone, to feel his dependence.
When the younger, cared-for Toby decides he wants to make big steps on his own, it is an affront to his lover, Jasper, who is afraid that Toby will be hurt again. And yes, perhaps [even] more afraid that Toby will manage on his own. So easy to confuse Control with Loving.

Ann, The Blue Guitar — in this era of endless television reality shows as well as oppressive celebrity culture — addresses the tensions and fears behind competition, in this case among a group of classical guitarists. Can you talk a little about your view of the pressure to excel in culture today?

I wouldn’t confuse celebrity with achievement, but perhaps these two concepts are getting mucked about these days. It’s dead easy to achieve celebrity via the Internet. Heck, I have been flailing about on Facebook and various social media sites, getting out the word on The Blue Guitar, and I feel the narcissism in this sort of activity. More me! Here I am again! Another ‘like’ on my author’s page!
I recall, when I was a little girl and drawing my name on the dusty surfaces of mirrors, my mother would recite: ‘Fools’ names and fools’ faces/always appear in public places.’
I hear that voice whispering into my ear, constantly. However, real achievement– playing the recital of your life after putting in ten thousand hours of practicing – that is another matter entirely. That is climbing the mountain; that is sticking your flag at the summit. It’s the result of immense personal effort and even, dare I say, ‘talent.’ Talent exists. Maybe even a talent for celebrity.

Toby, your main protagonist in The Blue Guitar, has had a breakdown due to competition stress a decade ago, but is driven to try again. Do you see him as more “heroic” than Lucy, who’s a talented amateur who just wants to push herself beyond playing at weddings.

I’m not sure that I see Toby as more ‘heroic’ at jumping back into the fray, after such a god-awful mishap ten years ago when he played in Paris. He is a huge talent and knows it. Lucy is not a huge talent and knows it. Each of them imagines a life that would change drastically if s/he were to win this competition. Yet they are at such different points in their lives, Lucy being middle-aged mother of two teenaged sons, Toby not quite 30, feeling the last ten years have passed him by. I’m not sure for whom I’m cheering. Lucy was the ‘me’ character, except she’s way more accomplished as a musician. She operates at the competition in my stead –if only I had more courage, more musical talent . . .

You understand “competition nerves” very well. Do you play an instrument yourself?

I have played most instruments known to man in my life – and none of them well. Classical guitar, piano, oboe, cello, banjo, recorders. I don’t play in front of people, or hardly ever. Nerves tend to play havoc with my performance. In high school, I liked playing in orchestras, band, trios, quartets. It’s one of those ‘if I had another life to live’ deals.

Ann, you’ve been publishing fiction for over 20 years now. What’s your opinion of the current bouleversement in Canadian publishing?

Thanks; I had to look up that word. Maybe that’s because I’m writing this from Oaxaca City, Mexico, and Spanish is in my ears. You are speaking, no doubt, of the upheaval due to e-books and the end of the old ways: warehousing books, packing them into cartons and sending them across the country to book stores, then the unsold ones getting packed up again and sent back to the warehouses . . . It wasn’t viable to continue that way, books being a commodity that were sold on consignment.
Technology has slammed all of this and I think it may be a good thing. Writers MUST make sure they get a fair shake on e-books. E-books don’t have to be printed, shipped or warehoused. They are much much cheaper to produce. Yes, the publishers still have to acquire/edit/market books and print ‘tree books,’ and those costs remain. But there is no getting around the fact that the e-books circumvent many of the traditional costs. In the future we may see more writers’ co-operatives, selling e-books and print on demand books with no middleman.
I also note that the smaller, independent publishers are quicker on their feet and more flexible – and they don’t have to answer to the mother ship in Germany or New York or wherever.

Savage confronts prairie’s sad forgetting

 

A Geography of Blood:
Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape
By Candace Savage
Greystone/David Suzuki Foundation, 214 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

It’s both gratifying and unnerving to read a book that simultaneously challenges and affirms one’s own struggle with Western Canadian history. Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood is such a book. And I’m not the only one to think so: two days after I finished reading it, and was ruminating on this review, Savage won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize. Ironically, the winner is yet another of those titles created by Greystone Books, an imprint of the backruptcy-ridden Douglas and McIntyre. (Sad proof that publishing good, relevant books is not enough in today’s beset publishing world?)

Savage obviously put her entire heart, soul and intellect into A Geography of Blood: it’s a personal, thoughtful and sternly researched piece of writing in which the author confronts the literally buried history surrounding the small (population 600) Saskatchewan town of Eastend, where she and her partner have bought a get-away property. In this confrontation, she calls into question the entire triumphalist “settler history” of Canada. An august member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Rachel Carson Institute honour roll, Savage is the author of over two dozen books on the natural world and its denizens. This book should give her the national and international reputation she so richly deserves.

Older Canlit readers will recall that Eastend is the site of Wallace Stegner’s iconic book Wolf Willow, which I’ve always thought was a proven precursor to today’s creative nonfiction just by its very subtitle: A History, A Story and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.

Once she gets over the delights of the quaint seclusion, the prairie light and the terrain where “the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan,” Savage, like any honest researcher, becomes obsessed with what and who preceded European settlement. And that, of course, was once-immense herds of buffalo and First People’s long inhabitation of the land around the Cypress Hills.

Savage does not have to dig very deeply before she discovers the full import of the past: Big Bear, Little Pine, Lucky Man and the ensuing 1883 confrontation with the heartless deceit of “the Great Mother” Queen Victoria and her minions. While personally searching out the “lost” history buried within the Cypress Hills terrain, Savage interviews a contemporary woman, Jean Francis Oakes, also known as Piyeso ka-petowitak (Thunder Coming Sounds Good). While trying to internalize Oakes’s hunger-camp stories, Savage writes one of the most compelling sentences in the book: “There are limits to my capacity for shame and sadness.”

And this is the essential message of A Geography of Blood: that the shameful stories of how the prairies were wrested from the “savages” and “settled,” must be told. And retold — until Canada’s collective capacity for both shame and sadness is replaced by a new, inclusive narrative in which First Nations people at last enjoy equal rights and opportunities as citizens.

Lynne Van Luven grew up on a farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, which is surrounded by five reservations, further legacies of the hunger camps

 

Movie inspires without saccharine

Searching for Sugar Man
Directed by Malik Bendjelloul
Empire Theatre, 3980 Shelbourne Street

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

“Thank you for keeping me alive,” Sixto Diaz Rodriguez says to the ecstatic South African crowd.

The words capture a triumphal moment in the documentary Searching for Sugar Man. If you don’t manage to see it at the Empire Theatres this week, don’t mourn; it will be popping up again at Cinecenta on the University of Victoria campus.

Although the haunting snatches of Rodriguez’s song “Sugar Man” lured me to the theatre, the sharply told documentary soon captured my attention. Directed by Malik Bendjelloul, the Swedish/British film started making waves at Sundance earlier this year. It encapsulates the search by two of Rodriguez’ South African fans, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, as they looked for the mysterious singer whose bootlegged album, they claimed, had provided “the soundtrack to our lives” and been such an important part of the anti-Apartheid struggle.

Everyone knows the facts now: Detroit-born Rodriguez, now 70, is a Mexican-American singer whose early promise – two albums, Cold Fact in 1970 and Coming from Reality in 1971 – never quite materialized. Apparently unbroken, he went on to live his life out of he spotlight: a BA in philosophy from Wayne State, lots of hard labour, fathering three daughters. Meanwhile, the rumours in South Africa were that he was dead by suicide or drug overdose.

Writing as Craig Bartholemew, here is how Strydom describes his search: “In 1996 I determined to find the man, dead or alive. After nine months, 72 telephone calls, 45 faxes, 142 e-mails, long nights reading through encyclopaedias, music books, dead ends, loose ends and fag ends I reached him. ‘Yes . . . it is I, Sixto [Seez- to] Rodriguez,’ said the voice on the other end of the telephone.”

As director, Bendjelloul focuses on the initial mystery and the fans’ search. In doing so, he elides much of Rodriquez’ personal story, including the singer’s career in regional politics, his local music career, his two visits to Australia, one of them touring with Midnight Oil, in order to tell the story from the South African perspective. But even though you are not getting the entire picture in Searching for Sugar Man, the movie keeps you entranced from beginning to end. And despite its title, it manages a feel-good ending without saccharine coating.

I confess: 000 Interest in 007

By Lynne Van Luven

I don’t get it. I never have got it. I never WILL get it.

Why all this brouhaha about Skyfall, the new James Bond movie? What’s the big deal?

Daniel Craig’s woodenly rugged face. Screeching motorcycle chases. Big Booms as things explode. Car tricks. More big Booms. Lots of gadgets, many of which cause booms. Also Kapows and Kabooms, just for variety. Sexy women. Big Bosoms too. That encapsulates the Screech-Boom plot of the new James Bond movie. Which echoes the plots of the previous 22 James Bond movies. And yet: everywhere, endless attention over so much empty action.

The fuss boggles my mind: I have perfectly sane colleagues who collect Bondabilia. And feminist friends who make special dates to see each new Bond film; they brag about having seen every one — and wait with bated breath for the next one. And I have a really smart co-worker who argues that Sean Connery was the BEST bond, even better than Roger Moore, who himself now 85, says Craig makes a “convincing killer” as the newest Bond.

Why, I ask? Why, why why? And don’t tell me that Kate and Will have made a date to see Skyfall. Means nothing: that pair will go anywhere.

Yes, okay, I guess: Escape. Entertainment. The frisson of being part of something described as “iconic,” a 50-year old “franchise.” Cinematic groupiedom.

But really: the current Bond cost $150 million to make – not including marketing and distribution. The cast went through 200,000 rounds of ammunition during weapons training for the movie. The storyline required 750 extras, 100 background vehicles and a 300-person film crew –just for the chase sequence through Whitehall in London.

Nope, not even a blond Javier Bardem and the redoubtable Dame Judy Dench will get me into the theatres for Skyfall.

I remain: neither shaken nor stirred.

 

Scant Magic Lights Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children
Directed by Deepha Mehta
Screenplay by Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta
Preview: Odeon Theatre, Nov. 1, 2012

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

I’ve always said that Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s 1981 book about India’s independence, is the best novel the author has ever written. So you’d expect me to come away from the movie unimpressed, wouldn’t you? Because the book is always superior to the movie?

I was eager to see the movie and wanted to love it. Midnight’s Children is lovely to look at, studded with accomplished Bollywood actors and moments of humour and pathos. But, after what felt like a very long time, I left the theatre feeling somehow manipulated, as if I’d seen a sanitized and too-carefully-handled version of Rushdie’s magic realism. The movie captured the events of the novel but recreated none of its spirit and power.

Perhaps Mehta and Rushdie tried too hard or were too enamoured of each other’s reputation? Perhaps the book’s sprawling timeline is too difficult to manage as a movie? But where the novel manages to capture the teeming vitality of India, of its independence from Britain and the partition that followed, the movie feels as shackled to linear narrative (despite Rushdie’s voiceover) as the book’s characters are “harnessed to history.”

The children born on August 15, 1947, at the stroke of India’s independence, have special powers, and they are the promise of the “new India’s future.” As current events in Pakistan and Bangladesh daily reinforce, that legacy has gone awry. At the heart of the movie lies the “switched at birth” trope: Nurse Mary (played by Seema Biswas) impulsively follows her activist lover’s dictum (“Let the rich become poor and the poor become rich”). She switches wrist tags on the heir of a bourgeois couple with those of the son of an itinerant street musician. So the poor child Saleem “steals the life” of the rich-born Shiva. Saleem (Satya Bhaba) grows up in comfort while Shiva (Siddharth Narayan) rages against his poverty and becomes an acclaimed soldier. Neither boy learns of the swap for many years, but it is Saleem’s magic gift – his ability to summon his midnight-born peers with a snort of his gigantic proboscis – that lifts the show from its torpor.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t see the movie – Zaib Shaikh from Little Mosque on the Prairie has a cameo role – but I won’t leap up and down and urge you to go. It’s not bad, and some might find it educational, a cross between a Knowledge Network feature and a Merchant-Ivory film.

Amis’s anti-hero Lionel Asbo: violent seduction

Lionel Asbo: State of England
By Martin Amis, Knopf, $29.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

Witty. Profane. Excoriating. But possibly just a tad too long?

That’s my postcard review of Martin Amis’s new work of fiction, his 15th, written from his perch in Brooklyn, from which he does indeed have the long view on Britain. As ever, I derive readerly delight from Amis’s coruscating and corrosive view of society – in this case, London’s working class of Diston Town, a populace determined to either rise above or brandish a life of crime – and his relentless wordplay. But as I got to about page 175, I found myself wondering if, like so many satires (Amis says he’s being ironic) firmly embedded in the awfulness of now, Lionel Asbo would have much of a shelf-life, even with its dedication to Christopher Hitchens.

The novel proves Milton’s thesis in Paradise Lost: that evil is always far more entertaining than good. Lionel Asbo, self-named after the Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a restraining directive occasioned by his tossing paving stones through car windshields at the advanced age of THREE, is the dark, roiling heart of Amis’s novel. Lionel’s life of constant crime is derailed by his lottery win: he becomes Lotto Lout Lionel and bespoils many a bespoke suit, posh hotel and rich woman. His nephew Desmond Pepperdine, only child of Lionel’s deceased sister Cilla, is intelligent and earnest; Des acquires a wife and baby daughter after he gets over boinking his Gran, but he cannot hold a torch to the ceaseless revenge-drama of his Uncle Li’s life.

Of course, Lionel (a yob-oik hybrid) lurches from the page as a larger-than-life caricature, but he’s one in which Amis has invested his love. The reader can never escape the threat of Lionel’s fisted face, his slab-like body, his ceaseless appetite for crime and sex, his truisms (Skirts not worth the trouble. You know where you are in prison.), his horrific abuse of his dogs . . . Lionel’s sweat and semen ooze from almost every page.

So: not a novel for the tender-hearted then. But a tour-de-force, even though Amis signals his ending from the very first epigram: Who let the dogs in? . . . This, we fear, is going to be the question.

Lynne Van Luven is the editor of Coastal Spectator

Memoir explores author’s transplanted life

Kamal Al-Solayee    Photo by Gary Gould/Ryerson

Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes
By Kamal Al-Solaylee
Harper Collins, 204 pages, $27.99

Kamal Al-Solaylee teaches journalism at Ryerson University and is a former theatre critic for the Globe and Mail. He answered Lynne Van Luven’s questions via-email at the end of September. He noted that his memoir has netted responses from “other Arab/Muslim gay men and women and they’ve all been supportive, inspiring.” In Yemeni media, he said, the book has been covered as a gay story, which he considers reductive. Mostly, Prof. Al-Solaylee is “disappointed in the lack of responses from the Arab community in Canada. They chose to ignore it. I was hoping that the book would kick-start a conversation about a number of issues: the pervasive nature of extremism here in Canada and back in our home countries, women’s and gay rights, and our civic participation in Canadian society. Maybe that’s a lot to hope for and maybe that’s to come.” Let’s hope so.
Clearly, you silenced and edited yourself for many years 
prior to writing this book. Can you look back now and see a “catalyst 
moment” that precipitated the idea of finally telling your and your 
family’s stories?

The idea for the book came to me after a particularly distressing visit to the family in Sana’a, Yemen, in 2006. It was my first trip in about five years and I couldn’t get over the rapid decline in both the material and emotional lives of my family. I also started to notice what I would term a disturbing level of religiosity. That visit put into focus the huge gap between my life in Toronto – a safe, privileged and even spoiled life – and that of my family. To illustrate the point, I returned to Toronto after that trip and within a few days I went to New York to review the Broadway opening of The Drowsy Chaperone, the Canadian-penned hit spoof musical about the roaring twenties. It took a few days and before I knew it a complete depression started to set in. A friend suggested I write about that experience which is how the book originated – in sadness and depression.

Towards the end of the book, as you worry on the page about
 your family members, and wonder about the viability of moving everyone to
 Cairo, I found myself thinking that you were suffering from something akin 
to “survivor’s guilt.” What can you say about that?

I never thought of it in such terms (survivor’s guilt) but I guess that’s how I felt and continue to feel. I believed that I betrayed the family, especially my sisters, and abandoned them when they needed me most. The events of the Arab Spring and the civil war in Yemen last year only exacerbated that. I can’t keep thinking that way, however, or I’ll go stir crazy. I have to accept that I made the decisions that were best for my personal, emotional and intellectual survival. Writing this book both helped me think through that and added to the sorrow associated with my decision to separate from the family and my helplessness about it all.

Do you think North Americans can ever begin to truly 
understand the complexity and convoluted cultural history of Arab culture, 
not just in Yemen, but elsewhere in the world? (I always remember
 Margaret Atwood’s veterinarian character Dr. Minnow in Bodily Harm, musing
 about the “sweet Canadians” who do helpful things like sending supplies of 
pork to countries whose inhabitants do not eat it.)

I don’t know if Arab people understand their own culture(s), let alone the North Americans. One of the most distressing aspects of the move to religious extremism in the Middle East has been the shutting down of debate and the marginalization of alternative and dissenting voices. Here in North America, I think we’re suffering from a kind of intellectual laziness. The idea of the general public educating itself on a part of the world by reading extensively about it has been replaced with the histrionics of 24-hour news channels and the banalities of the sound bites and the political messaging. Funny how having too much information – social media, cable networks, bloggers – has led to less not more real understanding of issues.

You comment several times in your memoir about how difficult 
your mother’s and sisters’ lives have been, yet at the same time you are
 frustrated by their tendency to self-sacrifice. Can you elaborate a 
little on how you feel about that now, in the wake of the memoir’s 
publication?

Writing this book has helped me understand the “choices” that all my family, male or female, have made. I put the word choices in quotation marks because I don’t believe that they had any. I should say “reactions” or “responses” because that’s more accurate. I must say that I don’t blame or accuse my family of anything. I’m just trying to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to where they (and I) are now. Strangely enough, the clarity that came with writing the book didn’t help mitigate my heartbreak or made the gap between us any less dramatic.

Had you not been gay, I wonder if you would have ever left 
your family and moved to England and then Canada. Do you ever imagine 
scenarios about what your life would be like if you still lived in the 
Middle East somewhere?

Being gay is so essential to my identity, to my life, that I can’t even think of one where I’m not. I came out of the womb gay! But, speaking hypothetically, it’s quite possible that had I been straight I would have settled with my family in Sana’a and led the proverbial life of quiet desperation. I’m glad that’s not what happened to me. I often say that being gay was the best gift that life gave me. I won the genetic lottery in the family. It allowed me to experience difference. I’m beyond grateful for that. Sometimes I think I would have been a very horrible straight man, given my instincts for self-preservation and my reluctance to sacrifice. My gay self made me more aware of the challenges and beauty of being a human being. I like to think I’m more empathetic because of my sexuality.

Lynne Van Luven is the Editor of Coastal Spectator.

 

Art gallery affirms artistry of kitty videos

By Lynne Van Luven
Dissing cat videos has suddenly become a vibrant pastime among the literati. Writers and film critics alike frequently bemoan the puerile focus and the cute factor. I don’t get it.

I’d understand if such critics were exercised by schlocky music videos or vile snuff films. Or if they took umbrage at screaming-chef videos or the blather of smarmy blonde actors who extol their new-found “lifestyle” wisdom.

But to bemoan kitty videos? Come on, folks, graft a bit of humour on to your humanity. Life is filled with awful realities: daily events in Syria; reporters being stifled and killed around the world; children starving, people using guns to express their political views . . . .

But kitty videos? How can you scoff at these witty, whimsical and loving expressions of man’s bond with felinity? When life is kicking you in the ribs, a quick viewing of the antics of Maru, the box-infatuated Japanese cat, will immediately alleviate your pain. And if you are on the outs with family or friends, there is nothing like a quick link to the furious cat video to remind you how
silly hissy fits really look.

That’s why I was thrilled to learn that The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just sponsored an Internet Cat Video Film Festival, with 70 entries, as a social experiment — as well as a modern-art event.

And I was even happier to see some of my favourite feline performers entered: Keyboard Cat was represented (26.3 views since first posted in 2007) as was the obsessive Maru. Best of all, the winner of the People’s Choice award turned out to be my all-time favourite cat video: the inimitable Henri 2, Paw de Deux, by Will Braden.

So take that snobs! The rest of us already knew the truth: no matter how many times we listened to Henri’s lugubrious self-indulgent mewlings, we couldn’t help chortling.

Lynne Van Luven would be owned by 15 cats if left to her own devices.

Journalists’ Courage takes Many Forms

A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring

By Nahlah Ayed

Published by Viking, 356 pages, $32

Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness

By Jan Wong

Self-Published, 263 pages, $21.99

Despite many Canadians’ knee-jerk damnation of the print media, two new books prove beyond a doubt that journalists’ courage exists and that honest reporting can have a powerful effect upon readers.

Both Nahlah Ayed, who works for CBC news, and Jan Wong, now a former employee of the Globe and Mail, tell their stories in a direct and personable way. Both books demonstrate that standing up for oneself in the face of trouble is crucial to self-respect and good reportage. It is neither fair nor relevant to ascribe different layers of heroism to either woman. Both face challenging circumstances and are able to write clearly and decisively about their situations.

Ayed, now in her early 40s, was born in Winnipeg and grew up comfortably there, one of four children of Palestinian descent. Thanks to her mother, she became fluent in Arabic, which became a powerful tool in her career when she joined the CBC in 2002. Since then she has reported from Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. Talking to Ayed as I did recently in Toronto (I taught her years ago when I was a journalism professor at Carleton University) is like taking a vitally compressed short course in Middle Eastern history and politics. She’s a beautiful, soft-spoken woman with a spine of steel. Ayed says in her book’s Acknowledgements that her work as a reporter has “always been about trying to understand,” and that comes across clearly in her careful and honest narrative.

Despite her youth, Ayed truly is an “old hand” when it comes to the Middle East. Her family lived – by choice, as a way to reconnect with their culture – in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, when Ayed was a child, and her tenure in war reporting began with the First Gulf War. She’s reported at all the conflicts leading up to and including the Arab Spring. Although her publisher wanted Ayed to write a fully personal memoir, the reporter resisted because she rightly believes the story is about the people she interviews, not herself. There are glimpses of what sort of a woman Ayed has become – feminist, principled, consumed by her job, steely under pressure but still capable of fear – but this is definitely a far cry from a tell-all. And that’s as it should be: Ayed may be off to a posting in London in the short-term, but she will continue to cover the world’s volatile places indefinitely.

“When I look back now,” Ayed writes towards the end of A Thousand Farewells, “the Middle East is often just a blur of guns and violence, of explosions and assassinations, of breaking news bulletins and conspiracy theories playing endlessly in my mind.” Despite that, she has managed to deliver a book of great humanity, one that reminds us that human beings – with the same flaws and flesh as the rest of us – inhabit those troubled places. “I always marveled,” she says, “that anyone would care to talk to us in the midst of so much turmoil, and yet they did, the hundreds of people I met and interviewed over the years . . . “ That they did is, I suspect, tribute to Ayed’s tenacity and compassion.

Even though Ayed’s reports have filtered relentlessly into Canadians’ living rooms for the past decade, Jan Wong is possibly the better-recognized journalist of the two, partly because she is nearly two decades older, with four previous books, and partly because of her famous/infamous “lunch with” column that everyone read in the Globe and Mail when she still worked there.

Wong’s dispute with her former employer — and her almost-publisher Doubleday — is complicated, but she outlines it crisply in Out of the Blue. Her inimitable brand of sardonic humor sparks the narrative as she tells of her own oblivious slide into depression, her battle with the Globe and its insurance company, and her subsequent recovery and new life. This may well be one of the most polished and professional “self-published” books you’ll ever read, but one would expect nothing less from the indomitable Wong. She says she’s invested over $30,000 in the venture, a sum that would give many writers pause. But in the first month of publication, she’s
already garnered more reviews and publicity than many senior authors receive even when touted by a prestigious publisher.

As Wong notes wryly, conflict and controversy always help to sell stories. But I would say Wong deserves whatever success this book brings her: she’s faced down the Dragon Despair, she’s stood up to a pusillanimous set of managers and she’s managed to write coherently about two of life’s most devastating experiences: falling prey to extreme depression and being fired.

Kudos to Ayed and Wong: proof that well-honed words can triumph over violence and corporate self-interest.