Category Archives: Reviewers

Container object for the CS Reviewer categories

Author walked the trail, tells the tale

 

Wild
By Cheryl Strayed
Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages, $29.00

Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

Two years ago, shortly before my fifty-first birthday, I went backpacking alone for the first time. Although the trip was short in both time and distance – three days, 26 kilometres – I felt immensely proud of my accomplishment. After years of backpacking with companions, I had braved the wilderness on my own and carried with me everything I needed to survive. By the time I picked up Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, my blisters and bug bites had long healed and the blackened nail on my left big toe had finally returned to its normal hue, but I felt an instant affinity for this young woman who had dared to embark on her first solo backpacking trip at half my age and with no previous long-distance hiking experience of any kind. After reading her account of her three-month, 1,770-kilometre journey, I am in awe of her fortitude and spunk.

Strayed was 26 when she first heard about the Pacific Coast Trail, a high-elevation wilderness route that follows the western spine of North America from the California-Mexico border to southern British Columbia. Still deeply mourning her mother’s death four years earlier, estranged from her siblings and stepfather, and in the throws of divorcing a man she loved but could no longer live with, she decided a long, solitary walk in the mountains was what she needed to clear her head. She set off carrying a pack that weighed more than half her body weight (she soon nicknamed it Monster) and a compass she didn’t know how to use. Amazingly, despite searing heat in the Mojave Desert, trail-obliterating snow in the Sierra Nevada, ill-fitting boots to which she lost six toenails, exhaustion, loneliness and scary encounters with menacing men, rattlesnakes and a Texas longhorn bull, Strayed kept going, mile after mile, day after day. And like any good pilgrimage, the journey transformed and healed her.

In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might have become mired in pathos or wandered off into tedium. Strayed keeps it on track with her honest self-analysis, wry humour and strong storytelling instincts. With her deceptively simple, conversational prose, she held my full attention through all the highs and lows of her soul-searching, and the endless, gruelling ascents and descents.

Near the end of her epic trek, Strayed writes of how deeply her feet hurt: “Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at the day’s end I was still pretty much shattered.” Her words might not make you want to tackle the Pacific Coast Trail yourself, but they’re bound to inspire. Whether you’re looking for an outdoor adventure story or a rumination on coming to terms with personal adversity, Wild is sure to satisfy.

Frances Backhouse is a Victoria-based author and magazine journalist. Her travel memoir, Hiking With Ghosts, relates her adventures backpacking the 53-kilometre-long Chilkoot Trail.

Beautiful Book, Beautiful Pages

Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page
By Sandra Djwa, McGill-Queens University Press
322 pages (398 including notes).

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

I admire biographers. Biography is a daring, sometimes dangerous genre, requiring time-consuming, research and a finely-tuned sense of diplomacy vis a vis informants, including the subject — in this case Victoria’s illustrious poet and artist, P.K. Page. These qualities of stamina and tact are clearly evident in Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Biography of PK Page. The research is impeccable, the life details, sharp and clear, and the text is always respectful.

This is a beautiful book about a beautiful woman who lived a (largely) beautiful life. The glossy dust-jacket displays a detail of Britten Miller’s gorgeous portrait of the young P.K. Page: she’s wearing her signature red lipstick, her half-face serious against a turquoise sky background. I could hardly get beyond the cover.

Journey is the public version of an artist’s life lived very much in the public eye, both in terms of her role as an icon of the twentieth-century Canadian literary establishment, and her role as the wife of prominent Canadian diplomat, Arthur Irwin. Page broke literary ground. She became a respected woman poet early in the century, when poetry was a hard (male) club to break in to. She appears to be in control of her public image and, despite her death in 2009, PK seems still to have been in control in this admirable accounting of her life. No skeletons, no dirty laundry. Djwa’s writing is scholarly, but refreshingly accessible, and her research is meticulous. There are over fifty pages of endnotes, over ten pages of bibliography and a useful index of thirty pages. The many personal details Djwa has chosen to include are charmingly enhanced by numerous quotes from Page’s own journals, letters and poetry. PK Page kept almost everything, it would appear, and so her life, told chronologically, unfolds in a convincing manner. Very little detail is missing. But the essential, if I may use that term, Pat Page remains elusive. For some reason, I was not able to develop a clear picture of her emotional life. I read about her family background, her interest in Jung, in Sufi philosophy, her passion for words and for paint, her good looks, charm, friendliness, even about her periodic black depressions, but I was not able to develop an emotional sense of her.

Nevertheless, her biography is a major contribution to the study of literature and visual arts in Canada. It reveals that Page actually studied how to live the artistic life as a woman by applying the ideas from Virginia Wolfe’s Room of One’s Own. Page made significant inroads into the male poetry establishment and influenced and mentored many younger, now renowned, poets. P.K. is now considered an important twentieth-century figure. As a diplomat’s wife she also made many international art and literary contacts and won enormous acclaim and countless awards for her visual art as well as for her writing. Her art was shown in numerous galleries and in universities. Toward the end of her life, P.K. Page was named Companion to the Order of Canada in recognition of her life’s work. Journey is a must read for anyone interested in poetry, art, or women in Canada – or, of course, in P.K. Page.

Arleen Pare has an MFA in writing and many pages of her own work published

Littlechild’s work vibrantly political

George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within
By George Littlechild
Heritage House, 176 pages, $59.95

Review by Candace Fertile

Just in time for Christmas giving (or maybe even for keeping and sharing), George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within is a stunning art book with commentary by the artist on each of the more than 150 pieces contained within the covers. Littlechild’s brief explanations of his art focus on his personal history as a Plains Cree man who discovered at the age of 17 that his father was white.

Littlechild laments the loss of parents and the chance to grow up in the Cree culture. His mother, Rachel Littlechild, was forced into a residential school; her son George was part of the “Sixties Scoop” when many aboriginal children were fostered or adopted by white families. Littlechild is grateful that he had loving foster parents who encouraged both his exploration of his cultural background and his artistic talent. But the discovery of his true biological parentage sent him on a search for his family. Fortunately he has found an extensive and welcoming community of relations who have helped him gain insight to his parents and himself.

Littlechild selected the work in this book, and it gives an overview of his career and his personal life. They are inextricably intertwined. And while giggling isn’t a huge part of aboriginal history in Canada after the arrival of Europeans, Littlechild prefers to deal with the wonder of life rather than the tragedies of his people. He certainly does not avoid the brutal treatment his people faced, but he tends to celebrate the courage, perseverance, and beauty of his people while educating readers in a gentle direct way about the past.

Littlechild’s artwork is political in that regard. And many of the pieces, whether paintings or mixed-media works incorporating family photographs, are portraits. Perhaps the most emphatic aspect of Littlechild’s work is its vibrancy. Images spring off the page in a fabulous concoction of colour. Reds, pinks, and purples predominate. The images, which often have black in them, are placed on a black background to punch up their effect.

The pictures can appear deceptively simple, but time spent looking at them and then reading the brief commentary opens up the richness that is Littlechild’s synthesis of imagination and reality. Horses are a key feature, as are stars. The more recent artworks incorporate elements of west coast aboriginal art (Littlechild has lived on the west coast since 1990 and currently lives in Comox).

The reproductions cannot possibly capture the vibrancy of the originals, but Littlechild himself points to the importance of access to art when he says in the commentary to Even Mrs. Horsechild Gets the Blues that he was fascinated by his foster brother’s art books and was particularly entranced by Egyptian imagery, a transformative imagery which he uses in his works. Mrs. Horsechild has a human body and a horse’s head.

It’s obvious I’m a fan of Littlechild’s work, and I have been since seeing his work in the 1980s at Asum Mena (the Alberta Native art show) in Edmonton. I feel a personal affinity for Littlechild’s work as Cree blood flows from my maternal ancestors. And his vivid colours affirm life, even when depicting sadness and misunderstanding as in Red Horse in a Sea of White Horses.

The message of Littlechild’s work is optimistic. He believes that through education people can move away from racism and other form of prejudice such as denigrating women or homosexuals. He believes that art is important. As he says in his introduction, “In my work, I am committed to righting the wrongs that First Nations peoples have endured by creating art that focusses on cultural, social, and political injustices. As an artist, an educator, and a cultural worker, my goal is a better world.” This book demonstrates Littlechild’s determination. It’s a visual feast — a treat both for newcomers and those already aware of his concerns.

Candace Fertile still has a Littlechild poster from one of the Asum Mena shows years ago.

 

Cage teaches us how to inhabit our world

Cage 100 Festival
Victoria Symphony Orchestra
Tania Miller, conductor
Tzenka Dianova, piano
Rick Sacks, percussion
Alix Goolden Hall
Saturday, November 17, 2012

Reviewed by Jennifer Messelink
Sit. Breathe. Listen.

When was the last time you sat in intentional silence with a hundred people, including an orchestra? The Victoria Symphony, directed by Tania Miller, gave us the opportunity on Saturday night at Alex Goolden Hall, performing works by Charles Ives, John Cage and the world premier performance of Rick Sacks’ Water Music. Victoria is host to The Cage 100 Festival. Curated by UVIC professor of composition Christopher Butterfield, the festival celebrates the centennial birth of American composer John Cage, his influences, and his lasting legacy.

The program began with three works by Charles Ives: Tone Roads No. 1 and No. 3 and The Unanswered Question. Charles Ives was a significant influence on John Cage; both composers used music in new forms, often employing elements of chance and non-traditional techniques. The Unanswered Question is an early example of aleatoric music, or music composed by the principles of chance operations. The work is a collage of three elements, the strings and solo trumpet in the distance off stage, and the woodwinds on stage. The dialogue is notated, but still allows for improvisation through the exchange between the groups. Director Tania Miller commented that, “for music over one hundred years old, Ives’ ideas of polytonality are still fresh, and taking us in new directions. We don’t need to follow tonality, we can go in many directions and at the end come together.”

The Victoria Symphony skillfully presented the tension of Ives’s dissonant chords and extreme dynamics, under layers of familiar tunes of another time. It was a pleasure to hear this music in a live performance.

No John Cage festival would be complete without his most famous, and most notorious work: 4’33”. We live in a world of constant background noise, people talking endlessly on cell phones, the blare of radio and commercials in most public spaces. To sit in silence in a concert hall feels, perhaps more radical now than ever. The ritual of preparation for the performance was usual, but there was noticeable anticipation in the air. The entire orchestra arrived onstage, tuned their instruments and . . . silence. Sitting quietly, one becomes acutely aware of the ambient noises: a car passing outside, whispering in the distance, chairs creaking, shifting, a cough. Applause.

The music of both Ives and Cage is extremely visual, and elements of both could be heard in Rick Sacks’s world premiere of Water Music. Familiar melodies layered on each other, a march and fanfare, and a large percussion section made this work thick with textures and bright sonorities. This work was also visual like Cage and Ives, but in a more direct way. As the work began, a large clown fish and a huge shark floated above the stage and through the audience. It was a fun and effective visual tool, but I found the handlers with their remote controls chasing the watery creatures throughout the hall more than a little distracting.

After Cage’s The Seasons came his Concerto for Prepared Piano, performed by Tzenka Dianova. John Cage experimented with prepared piano to the extent that it became otherworldly, a totally different instrument. The effect is extraordinary when experienced live. When Dianova played a chord, what was expected was not what was heard. The orchestra played with style, very little vibrato and open, bright sonorities. The Concerto for Prepared Piano was written in traditional form, but the effect is distorted yet absolutely beautiful.

Charles Ives and John Cage were revolutionary, both in their compositions and philosophy. The Victoria Symphony handled a challenging, and unusual program, and made it remarkably accessible. John Cage believed life itself can be art, but instead of creating it, we would be altered by it. Let us raise a toast to the centennial birth of John Cage, and to our continued awareness of our place on the canvas.

Jennifer Messelink is a music lover who’s not afraid of silence

 

 

 

Three Gods Walk into An Alley . . .

The Good Person of Setzuan
By Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Conrad Alexandrowicz
Set by Simon Farrow
Costumes by Kat Jeffrey

The Phoenix Theatre

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Imagine three gods touring Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, instructing the locals on the path to Enlightenment. In Bertolt Brecht’s play, three aspects of Buddha find no room at any inn in impoverished Setzuan. When Shen Te, a streetwalker who can’t say no, shelters them for the night, they bless her with a financial windfall. However, this gift from the gods unleashes a wealth of suffering when the commandment to do good splits her like lightning.

Now two-faced, her male alter ego, Shui Ta, sells opium secretly in the tobacco shop. Veronique Piercy’s masculine strut as Shui Ta made me crack up. It was terrific. Shen Te also falls for a pilot, Yang Sun, who is equal parts charisma and con with no real desire for a woman to co-pilot his life. Alex Frankson was gutsy in this role; Veronique reacted with the pitiable vulnerability of women who love the wrong men. As this falling angel struggles to protect both her pocketbook and her heart in a corrupt city, we wonder can one pray and also prosper?

The costumes add a rich dimension to this production. Each character bears a corporate logo from Starbucks to Playboy to Enbridge. The only exception is kind-hearted Shen Te who wears a charity logo: the World Wildlife Fund panda. The gods wear prayer beads and backpacks patched with oms and peace signs. Watching the Enlightened Ones wander uncomfortably through the garbage strewn streets in the Water Seller’s dreams was fabulously ironic. Their statue-like headwear gave the actors an otherworldly, idolatrous aura.

After slumming it among mortals, they too move from the mystical to material. I’ll never look at Facebook the same way again. This twist was a clever spin on what could have been clichéd: a prostitute with a heart of gold or bashing religion for every evil under the sun.

The cast was an amusing, vivacious ensemble. Characters broke out into song unexpectedly which gave relief like a water bottle on a hot day. There were some striking, surreal moments as characters literally fell for opium and workers were cut down like trees. I loved how Derek Wallis as Shu Fu gestured and spoke with choreographed precision as his mind calculates. I was torn about Brecht’s ending — which was both cheeky and frustrating. It struck me as more of a punchline to a “three gods walk into an alley” joke than a philosophical finale. I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp.

No one in this story wants to see the truth except for our heroine whose heart breaks because of it. Even the gods turn blind third eyes to injustice. Watching this play, I stepped into Shen Te’s shoes before a mirror and asked myself: How good am I?

The show runs until Saturday, November, 24.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

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

 

Hush little babies, listen up: Sweet Lowdown Releases Third Album, “May”

May

The Sweet Lowdown

The Sweet Lowdown 2012

Produced by Adrian Dolan

Reviewed by Andrea Routley

If you’re a Sweet Lowdown fan, you probably fell in love with them for their rich bluegrass harmonies, formidable musicianship, and old-time folk sound. You’ll be thrilled with their third album (with 12 tracks), May.

As always, Sweet Lowdown delivers banjo and fiddle solos that impress the most experienced musicians, and for the rest of us, make us nod dumbly, follow with, “Wow. She’s good.” And just so you don’t forget that, May includes four instrumental tracks incorporating elements of bluegrass, celtic folk and even Indian-style melodies and arrangements as in “Lucknow,” a song inspired by an Indian city which banjo player Shanti Bremer visited. I’m not usually big on instrumental numbers, but I was sucked into this one instantly, with the fiddle mimicking a harmonium’s drone and the crazy Indian gypsy melodies in the banjo.

But May delivers an overall sound that I feel is signature Sweet Lowdown. With simple song forms, unadorned vocals, and three-part harmonies, May offers a kind of folk lullaby. The opening track, “The Heart Is A Hollow Thing,” evokes this lullaby quality not only musically, but lyrically, with lines like, “sticks and stones, Oh, hollow bones, bird take wing, fly high and sing.” This song is written by primary vocalist Amanda Blied (formerly of Balkan Babes), and her love of lullaby is evident in her other compositions, too, like “Hushabye,” which she calls “a lullaby for hard times,” and “What Goes Up,” a song about tobogganing on the winter solstice: “So just like Jack and Jill, we’ll go back up the hill. Just to ride right back down again like friends.” I loved this one for the Sarah Harmer-like melodies. You know the kind–the ones that feel like they’re coming to an end, but there’s still those last two words that carry the line downward in that suprising way.

I was also happy to hear Blied rip it up a little, vocally, in the cover of “Reuben’s Train.” Why “Reuben’s Train” in this album of water imagery, snow and flowers? Because every Canadian folk album must have a train song, of course!

But Blied isn’t the only songwriter with surprises. Banjo player Shanti Bremer showcases her talents in that exciting instrumental, “Lucknow,” and title track, “May.” And Bremer is a singer, too, with two of these songs on the album, “Please Take Me Home,” and “Drink It Down.” Bremer’s voice almost sounds timid on their previous album, but here she sings with steady confidence, while maintaining that angelic quality. Bremer pulls the album into the political with “Drink It Down,” a song about water rights and the impending shortage, and how she considers this in the context of the water-rich Pacific Northwest.

My favourite song on this album, though, is “Let It Go,” by fiddle player Miriam Sonstenes. It is the only song she sings, and I’m not sure why. Sonstenes voice has a clear, straight-forward quality that gives it a youthful naivety which I really loved. “Let It Go” is a song about visiting “old haunts with a dear old friend,” as Sonstenes writes in the insert. Having just recently visited my hometown for an old friend’s memorial service, I found myself connecting deeply with this piece. Sonstenes evokes a connection with place simply and poignantly with lines like “for every grain of sand there’s a tear that I have cried.” But my music-self loved the chorus best. With phrases of three measures, this asymmetrical pattern propelled the song forward in an unhurried yet exciting way. It’s a simple thing, but has a big effect. And you can always count on Sweet Lowdown to offer those simple yet stunning little juicy bits, whether in their stellar musical leads or little unexpected melodic thoughts.

 

You can see The Sweet Lowdown live–and pick up their new CD– at their CD Release show Thursday, Nov. 15 at the Victoria Event Centre:  Doors open at 7 p.m, tickets $13.

 

 

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.

Author explores walls that divide us

 

Walls
Travels Along the Barricades
By Marcello Di Cintio
Published by Goose Lane
287 pages, $29.95

 

Reviewed by Andy Ogle

When one thinks of walls these days, one’s mind travels immediately to Israel’s ongoing attempt to wall out the Palestinians on the West Bank. Or one might recall the Berlin Wall and marvel that it has already been 23 years since it came down.

Marcello Di Cintio does go to the West Bank and he does discuss the Berlin Wall, but he begins his travel with barriers that most North American readers have likely never heard of — in the Western Sahara, at two Spanish enclaves in Morroco, and the barrier still being extended that separates India from Bangladesh. He even finds a homegrown example — l’Acadie fence that separates the well-off anglo enclave of the town of Mount Royal and the largely immigrant, lower-class community of Parc-Extension in Montreal. I confess they were all news to me.

That novelty in itself is one time-honoured feature of good travel writing — taking readers to exotic foreign places or unknown corners of one’s own country. But Di Cintio’s goal is much more ambitions than that. He wants to understand what these walls mean for the people who live against them, those for whom they were built to include or exclude.

“I wondered what it meant to live a barricaded life,” he writes. “I wanted to discover what sort of societies created the walls. More than this, I wanted to know what societies the walls themselves created.”

So, in February 2008, “because it seemed as good a place to start as any,” he flew into the Sahara Desert. Three years later, he finished his quest in Montreal, having more than succeeded in meeting his goals.

Among the lessons he learns is that walls often don’t entirely succeed in their primary purpose of keeping out those who want in — most notably the U.S. Mexican border fence and the barriers at Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves that are essentially the southernmost reaches of the European Union.

What the walls do succeed at — and here Israel’s wall, the Indo-Bangladshi fence, the barriers dividing Catholic from Protestant neighbourhoods in Belfast and the wall that separates Greek and Turkish Cypriots serve as key examples —is to reinforce in concrete and barbed wire the sense of us and them. “With unambiguous authority,” Di Cintio says of his stay on Cyprus, “the Wall declares, You are either Turkish or Greek.” Even on this tiny island, anything Cypriots might share is rendered irrelevant.

The walls also throw up an uncomfortable truth for Di Cintio. As an outsider, it’s easy for him to flit back and forth across the barricades. But they also, as he puts it, scoff at neutrality. To play the role of objective journalist, to talk with those on both sides and refuse to take sides is, he decides, to occupy a sort of no-man’s land, his own private “Dead Zone.”

Yet, at the heart of Di Cintio’s book lies the practice of journalism, of finding people on both sides of the barriers, be they the nomadic Saharawi, African and Punjabi refugees in Ceuti or the gun-toting but surprisingly anti-fence redneck in Arizona, willing and often eager to share their experiences and lives. Walls (long-listed for the $40,000 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction) succeeds largely on that basis. Di Cintio’s willingness to go beyond mere reportage, to ponder his role in the story, lifts it to an even higher level.

Andy Ogle is a former reporter at the Edmonton Journal

 

 

 

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.