Stuff white people write • Hockey’s haunted houses

$6.50 Vol. 24, No. 8 October 2016

Lev Bratishenko Tunnel Vision Why our cities need less Jane Jacobs

PLUS Douglas Coupland and Christian Bök on fetishizing the future Donna Bailey Nurse on forgetfulness Andy Lamey on our abuse addiction Ana Siljak on the new Edwardians

Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Sonnet L’Abbé on Anne Carson Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K Paul Wilson on the real John le Carré Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 New from University of Toronto Press

A Quiet Evolution The Emergence of Indigenous-Local Intergovernmental Partnerships in Canada by Christopher Alcantara and A Mile Of Make-Believe Jen Nelles A History of the Eaton’s Santa Claus A Quiet Evolution is a call to politicians, Parade policymakers and citizens alike to by Steve Penfold encourage Indigenous and local governments to work towards mutually This unique history of the Eaton’s Santa beneficial partnerships. Claus parades in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton reveals how Eaton’s pressed its image onto public life and influenced parade traditions.

Productivity and Prosperity An Historical Sociology of Productivist Thought Redesigning Work by Karen R. Foster A Blueprint for Canada’s Future Well- In Productivity and Prosperity, Karen Being and Prosperity Foster challenges the prevailing notion by Graham Lowe and Frank Graves that productivity is the lynchpin to prosperity and that economic growth is In Redesigning Work the authors essential for quality of life. provide a blueprint for the future of work in Canada by identifying practical ways to make work more motivating, rewarding and productive.

A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 1921-2015 by Lori Chambers Out of Place Lori Chambers’ fascinating study Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants explores a wide range of themes and in Canada issues in the history of adoption in by Luann Good Gingrich Ontario since the passage of the first statute in 1921. This book explores social inclusion and exclusion of the Low German-speaking Mennonites who have migrated from Latin America to rural areas of Canada.

Also available as e-books at utppublishing.com Literary Review of Canada 170 Bloor Street West, Suite 706 Toronto ON M5S 1T9 email: [email protected] reviewcanada.ca T: 416-531-1483 • F: 416-944-8915 Charitable number: 848431490RR0001 Vol. 24, No. 8 • October 2016 To donate, visit reviewcanada.ca/support

EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian 3 Bibliomania, “Bit Rot” and 21 Between Words [email protected] The centre cannot hold, for there is no centre: MANAGING EDITOR Fetishizing Time Michael Stevens Christian Bök in conversation with Anne Carson’s Float CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Sonnet L’Abbé Douglas Coupland Mohamed Huque, Molly Peacock, 6 The New Edwardians 22 For L.K. Robin Roger, Anthony Westell The new Gilded Age and Jennifer Welsh’s A poem ASSOCIATE EDITORS Judy Stoffman, Beth Haddon The Return of History Ian Angus MacLean POETRY EDITOR Ana Siljak 23 The Audacity (and Idiocy) of Hope Moira MacDougall 8 Tunnel Vision A fellow electoral survivor on Noah Richler’s COPY EDITOR What Jane Jacobs got wrong about the lives of campaign memoir, The Candidate Madeline Koch cities Jane Farrow ONLINE EDITORS Lev Bratishenko Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, 24 Hunters and Foragers Donald Rickerd, C.M. 12 Conflict Averse A poem PROOFREADER Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse: Dean Steadman Robert Simone a fearless view of power, victimhood and the 26 Whiteout RESEARCH Rob Tilley disappearance of personal accountability Why do writers who can invent universes and Andy Lamey entire species have so much trouble creating DESIGN James Harbeck Schwartzwald black characters? 14 ADVERTISING/SALES Andray Domise A poem Michael Wile Bruce Whiteman 28 Against the Clock [email protected] 16 Country of Eternal Forgetting James Gleick’s Time Travel, and the undue DIRECTOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS Michael Booth Memory, nostalgia and the writing of influence of an improbable idea DEVELOPMENT OFFICER M.G. Vassanji Robert Charles Wilson Erica May Donna Bailey Nurse 29 After Grief. In the Garden PRODUCER 18 Phantom of the Rink A poem Michael Mooney From hockey’s earliest days, the arena has Kate Braid ADMINISTRATOR Christian Sharpe shaped the game, suggests Howard Shubert in 30 The Other Tradecraft PUBLISHER Architecture on Ice Writing and espionage in John le Carré’s long- Stephen Smith Helen Walsh awaited memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel [email protected] Paul Wilson BOARD OF DIRECTORS George Bass, Q.C., Tom Kierans, O.C., Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Jack Mintz, C.M. ADVISORY COUNCIL Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Cover art and illustrations throughout the issue, unless otherwise indicated, are by Lisa Vanin. Schiff, Reed Scowen, Jaime Watt Lisa Vanin is an award-winning, multidisciplinary artist and illustrator in Toronto who graduated from OCAD POETRY SUBMISSIONS For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. University in 2009. Her client list includes the Canadian Opera Company, The Walrus, Elle Québec, and private LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK commissioners and collectors. See more at www.lisavanin.com. Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization.

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October 2016 reviewcanada.ca PEN Canada presents the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award at the International Festival of Authors

The RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award celebrates unpublished work from writers 18 to 30.

The award is part of a global initiative to develop young talent. The winning Canadian entry is submitted to PEN International to be judged against promising writers from around the world.

Congratulations to Laura Legge, winner of the 2016 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award

The PEN Canada bene t at the International Festival of Authors: By Word and Deed: Resistance in Times of Turmoil Saturday, October 22, 2016, 7:30 pm

Writer and lmmaker David Bezmozgis in conversation with Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, To End All Wars, and, most recently, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, about the lessons we learn from writers and activists battling fascism, racism, and other forms of injustice.

Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto Tickets: $50 available at www.pencanada.ca/wordanddeed or 416 703 8448 ext. 25 All proceeds support PEN Canada’s advocacy for imprisoned and exiled writers.

2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Bibliomania, “Bit Rot” and Fetishizing Time Christian Bök in conversation with Douglas Coupland

n Bit Rot, a collection of essays once involved in. He wanted to give me and short fiction (and his 16th something that I would think of as art, so Ibook), the polymathic Douglas he gave me the tape ball he made while Coupland continues his exploration installing sliding windows in Vancouver of time and the future, collection and condominium towers the summer archiving, and the broad intersec- before his acting gig began. It’s a lovely tions of culture and technology. His art object, and to me it emotionally evokes exhibition of the same name opened the idea of a decaying pixel. at Museum Villa Stuck in Munich on CB: You must know about a pro- September 29 after being on view at the ject called “The Ghost in the MP3” by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Ryan Maguire, who collects bits lost Art in Rotterdam. It is his second major in the computerized compression of a retrospective in recent years, after song and then plays them back again Everything Is Anything Is Anywhere Is in sequence so that you can hear what Everywhere; his art has been exhibited entropy does to the music. His project world-wide. shows us what collections of MP3s might Christian Bök is that rare thing, sound like, after bit rot erodes our music a celebrity poet; his books include over time. the bestselling, Griffin Prize–winning DC: Does it sound good or … haunt- Eunoia. His artwork, including books ing? Or like noise? Or like background fashioned from Lego bricks and Rubik’s music in old movies with the sound of Cubes, has been shown in galleries. crackling? Since 2002, he has been working on The CB: Well, it sounds haunting, kind of Xenotext, a “living poem” that, with the like whispers in a conch shell made help of biologists, he has encoded into of copper, somewhere in a museum, the genome of a bacterium. A sculpture collecting dust. My good friend Kenneth of the resulting molecule, Protein 13, Coupland with a readymade called “Doink,” from his new exhibition. Goldsmith has argued that, while digital (Image courtesy of artist; see more at www.coupland.com) was recently on display at Charles culture might have turned each of us Darwin University in Australia, where he teaches. the only time I’m mentally able to go back to the into a thief, pilfering sounds and videos from the Coupland and Bök spoke via email from their way time used to feel like 20 years ago is to … read Web, our culture has also turned each of us into an respective locations in Munich and Darwin. a book. It’s like temporal ecotourism. We look at unwitting archivist, who hoards information, with books as the font of wisdom (or insert some other the same kind of abandon as Charles Foster Kane CB: Your book Bit Rot seems fraught with con- Enlightenment phrase here) but we also look at trying to fill the palace of Xanadu with artefacts. cerns about the future, eating away at the past, byte them as time machines, a way out of our heads DC: So true. Look at music. Growing up, the by byte, so to speak. Our digital records undergo that was never required before. When I go on holi- assumption was that your musical taste froze for- spontaneous degradation over time, eroding our days I read historical biographies set before 1850 ever at the age of 23, and you had a pile of vinyl in legacy—and your book returns to this issue of because they won’t have machines or technology the basement that you worshiped forever and your our desire to build bulwarks against these future in them. It’s like temporal ecotourism taken to the taste never ever, ever, ever changed. It’s now not losses. You seem to express concern about the max. uncommon for people to have several years’ worth entropic marching of time into a future that arrives And returning to the notion of bit rot, digital of music and TV stored in a single device. too soon. information degradation is the shame of the archiv- CB: And of course, Goldsmith hoards terabytes DC: Is time itself entropic? That’s an interest- ing world. Nobody knows how to save any of it for of files, collecting MP3s and MP4s from the history ing proposition. Maybe it’s the only thing in the very long. Nobody. I like the image of a single pixel of the avant-garde, posting everything on his pro- universe that isn’t entropic. Everything else disin- disintegrating, like a one or a zero disintegrating … ject UbuWeb for free. His website has, by accident, tegrates but it remains the sole constant—although what would that even look like? And it would be a become an invaluable scholarly resource for edu- there is new thinking that time also changes over breach of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory. cators (after nearly 20-plus years of such piracy), time. It came about after scientists researching a CB: Boy, I’d love to see a representation of a and the site may in fact represent the greatest of spontaneous nuclear fission event in Gabon began single pixel evaporating over time in slo-mo. Why his artworks. His archive really attempts to freeze investigating byproducts and the numbers weren’t not try to envision it in one of your works? a century of the avant-garde, putting all of it in one matching. It’s contested but there might be some- DC: Oddly, I’m writing these words in Munich, “eternal present” online. thing to it. on the Villa Stuck’s floor, where I’ve just begun DC: Man, I have so much stuff I could add to But to get back to human timeframes, yes, the installing the Bit Rot exhibition. I just had a friend ubu.com. future is no longer the future. It’s right now and take this picture of me with one of the works in CB: Well, I know that Kenny would also love the concern is that we are stuck in this new time the show, a readymade called “Doink.” A doink is your new book—and in fact, he has just published frame and it’s driving us crazy that we can’t return a sphere of anything made of one material. It was a work called Wasting Time on the Internet (based to a gentler, more narrative time. Unsurprisingly, given to me as a gift by an actor in a show I was upon a course of the same name, taught by him at

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 3 the University of Pennsylvania). Kenny’s even pub- that “collecting” things (including art) does not dif- Titan. We can even gaze across a mesa on Mars, as lished a work called Soliloquy, a transcript of every- fer much now from hoarding… if standing there in person—but poets just ignore thing said by him over the course of a week (but DC: Both reveal the deep percolations of the access to such sublime imagery from fantastic land- only his words, not what others have said to him). subconscious. scapes that actually exist. I don’t know why. Most of his projects involve some kind of encounter CB: …and I must confess that I probably suf- DC: And Protein 13 is shocking. I want it for the with the overload of information online. He effec- fer from the bibliomania that you describe in the house. (I collect molecules, too.) See if it’s for sale. tively argues that, when online, we never waste book, collecting premier editions of poetry, sur- For real. I’ll buy it. Predicting the folds of protein time, because it exists there in abundance, preserv- rounding myself with stacks of bookshelves full of molecules is one of the great quests of mathematics.­ ing a kind of “continuity” that connects everyone. avant-garde experiments with language. I joke that CB: Fantastic! You’ll be the first to know when DC: I love doing nothing in public … no devices, my books have become backups for the digital cop- I’m finished. I’m trying to encipher a poem into not even walking—just sitting on a bench. People ies (in case of deletion by a solar flare or an EMP the DNA of a microbe so that the cell might build look at you like you’re dangerous: Why isn’t he pulse). this protein in response, but so far I’ve only gotten doing anything? Call the cops. It also feels like a DC: You’d make a good bookseller. The really the construct to function properly in E. coli—when luxury experience. good ones are crazy and they don’t want to sell any in fact, I’ve promised to make the thing work in an This new relationship to time reminds me of books to anybody. unkillable bacterium capable of surviving in outer Christian Marclay’s The Clock—that was the movie CB: You remark in your book that, while you space. where Marclay essentially went through every film like to collect artwork, members of your family DC: I think it’s dawning on people that you can ever made and culled all might express some turn any document into an organism of some sort, references to clock time concern behind your though to what end I’m unsure—that’s why you’re and then built it into “It’s like temporal back, worried that such figuring this out. DNA may end up being the carrier a 24-hour film experi- ecotourism. We look hoarding of “art shit” pigeon of the 21st century. ence that can only be constitutes “a cry for CB: Yeah, I’m striving to write a poem that resists seen in museums dur- at books as the font of help.” You note that the depredations of bit rot, I guess—but alas, I’ve ing the actual time of hoarders often stockpile still got some remaining obstacles to overcome. day the film describes. wisdom, but also as time unrequired provisions DC: You and I have so many commonalities that The fact that it can only for the future after the I’m starting to wonder if we’re maybe isotopes of be seen in a museum in machines, a way to get trauma of some loss in each other. It’s spooky. How do we not know each real time is so elitist and the past—but you never other? Maybe Twitter really works. control-freaky that it’s out of our heads.” mention what kind of CB: Well, true, we’ve got a lot of aesthetic inter- kind of funny. Marina art shit you actually ests in common—touchstones like Sol LeWitt, Abramović is opening a museum in New York State have in your own collection. Robert Rauschenberg, etc.—hey, even the music of where you have to commit to a minimum six-hour DC: That’s from George Carlin: My stuff is Kraftwerk. Ha! And you won’t remember (because visit and before you can even go into the museum my stuff, but your stuff is your shit. Much of it I barely do)—but we did meet very briefly at a cock- proper, you have to count all of the dried beans in was on display in the Witte de With Center for tail party in Toronto sometime in the early aughts. a jar. Same control-freakiness as Marclay, except Contemporary Art last year and is being reinstalled We were both pretty tipsy at the time. maybe that is the point—You’re probably not going in Munich as I sit here staring at it all. The collec- DC: I never remember anyone from parties. It’s to experiment with time on your own, so let me help tion cleaves into several categories: Death. Image like guaranteed amnesia. I hate crowds and par- you do it. degradation. War. Data storage. Political theatre. ties. And I can’t eat food if there are more than four CB: Wow, only the most leisured classes with It’s collected work with my own work, which taken people in the room. My reptile brain turns off my OCD can attend her exhibit… together depicts my conscious and subconscious hunger switch. DC: And look at the recent Oscars: Boyhood, in universe. But since then the house has filled up But I work with words out on the periphery which a child grows up for real in front of you, and again—pieces that came out of deep storage as well of most mainstream worlds and then I discover Birdman, all done in a “single take.” As a culture as a blast of new works. I don’t know what I’m going people like you or Kenneth doing very similar we are starting to fetishize continuity—continuity to do with it all. If you’re in Toronto, I also have a things and yet we’re not close friends or even aware was something we used to experience, and now show at the Daniel Faria Gallery until late October. of each other. This strikes me as odd. In the poetry we fondly look back on it in the form of an artistic CB: Alas I’m in Darwin (a city that actually world, are you considered an outlier? I don’t think experience. reminds me of Calgary, except that Darwin is one so—you’re getting awards (*cough cough*) so … CB: I’m quite envious of The Clock too— tenth the size, but with palm trees and oceanfront I don’t know. although I was kidding Kenny during a viewing views. I occasionally post photos of the horizon CB: Kenny and I have enjoyed a modicum of at a museum that if I’d done the project, I would on Twitter, because the beauty of the cerulean sky celebrity—atypical for most poets, especially in the have exhibited only clocks of the same type, either against a turquoise sea always reminds me of col- avant-garde. But probably all poets see themselves analog displays (with hands) or number displays our studies in abstract painting. as outliers in their own culture, at least to some (with units). In The Clock, Marclay jumps between DC: The Pacific: I grew up beside it and have degree. And poets, like Kenny and me, we often the two technologies, perhaps because there’s not lived in and around it for five decades and its scope polarize opinion—we’re either celebrated as heroes enough footage in the history of cinema to cover freaks me out every time I fly over it. I do think that or denigrated as frauds, depending upon the poetic every minute according to my own compulsive Twitter is like turning your life into homework. biases of our audience. I’ve always wanted to constraint. To me, the technology of the clock in the I kind of go there every so often but it feels like a broaden the appeal of avant-garde poets, because, scene said something important about its moment detention. It’s so interesting to see which people hey, I think that we’ve got some of the coolest, fun- in time (and using only one kind of clock would’ve take to which new platforms or technologies. It’s nest ideas about how to engage with the world—but turned the motif into one of the “timeless” fixtures always a surprise. And you have a thing for exo­ alas, some of our peers, they really do suffer from that recurred amid all the jump-cuts). terrestrial photography. It’s possibly the greatest toxic doses of seriousness. DC: Last month I bought a bunch of industrial wonder of our time and everyone yawns. So unfair… DC: I’ll take your word for it about the poetry clocks with analog sweep to cover a wall—includ- CB: Yeah, I can’t believe that people don’t appre- world. In art school, in the early 1980s, I had a ing Speedo swim racing clocks. I like the notion of ciate photos of outer space with more excitement— job doing paste-up and layout in a space that was all that analog sweep, the second hands that are I mean, when you look into the sky, you’re looking beside the now long defunct Vancouver Literary slightly unsynchronized. I like that it makes you back into the deep time of the past. Under such Storefront. My desk was about ten feet away from feel a part of something human and eternal. And I circumstances, my friend the poet Bronwyn Lea the podium, which was around a corner, and for love the fact that even though clocks were initially says: “your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine.” years I got to hear three, four, five readings a night, created to homogenize time and facilitate industry DC: That’s great. which was a remarkable thing to have experienced. and commerce, they can also take you out of the CB: I collect photos of nebulae (like the Veil It taught me a lot about the dos and don’ts of pub- industrial reality they helped generate. Nebula or the Crab Nebula), some of which fig- lic speaking. I respect poetry and understand its CB: Cool! I love the Speedo clocks. I remember ure prominently in my best poem, “The Perfect importance, but I’m not into it … the way I’m not them from my days as a champion sprinter on Malware”—and often I lament that poets continue into country and western music. I just don’t fully my swim team in high school, racing against their to write about their divorces even though a robot is get it. I wonder if poetry is a brain pathology like sweep hands. Let’s talk about collecting. You note currently taking pictures of orange ethane lakes on punning or even Tourette’s or something like that.

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada ILLUMINATING

Too Young to Die $34.95 hardcover

Extensively researched and illustrated with photos, maps, and letters, this volume provides a revealing perspective on Canada’s underage soldiers in the Second World War.

THOUGHTFUL

The Great Class A sculptural model of Christian Bök’s Protein 13 molecule, poetry brought to life. War (Image courtesy of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto) $34.95 paperback

CB: Well, you wouldn’t be the first to imagine course, hop around through time (through flash- Canadian historian that poets are suffering from a medical ailment. back or foresight), and the book itself represents a Jacques Pauwels offers DC: But we’re supposed to be discussing time. “block universe” into which a reader can intervene a revisionist account I’m going to add a bunch of slogans from my ongo- at any moment in time. of the great-power dynamics that produced ing slogan project to serve as sourdough starters. DC: I had a show of paintings in Shanghai and sustained the First CB: Well, I definitely like your slogan “science five years ago, and their theme was “messages World War. fiction is now just fiction”—because for me, the to someone 100 years in the past or to someone term “science fiction” really does seem like a redun- 100 years in the future.” Then I got an email from dancy. We’re now living my dealer saying China in the futurist visions “While digital culture had just instituted a ban from our childhood (liv- on creative forms that ENGAGING ing vicariously on other might have turned each involved time travel. worlds, using machines I thought he was jok- that are only getting of us into a thief, it has ing and then he sent The Right to Die smarter). I’ve often said me a link. We put the $29.95 clothbound that the job of the avant- also made us unwitting show up anyway as the garde is to make sure idea that painting could The parallel evolution of the law and public that we all show up for archivists who hoard embrace time travel opinion around the future on time—but was too lateral for the physician-assisted what happens when the information.” government to notice. death in Canada. future just shows up far I think the big problem too early, taking you by surprise, like a driverless was the importation of ideology from, say, 1965, car, accelerating by you in the passing lane? and blending it with 2010—the government just DC: Beautiful image! didn’t want to monitor writing and it was easier to CB: I think that most poets of the avant-garde ban it all. But I don’t know—it’s like banning work now see themselves as survivors from the ship- written in iambic pentameter. It’s silly. wreck of a time machine, burnt out in the wrong CB: Most stories (especially in cinema) screw epoch without much hope of either rescue or up the paradoxes of the trope, however, mostly by INFORMATIVE failing to follow all the implications of the imagined return. Final Report of premises about time travel. My favourite movies DC: Another beautiful image. I’ve always felt like the Truth and from the genre (in order of increasing preference) my spaceship crashed and I’m stuck in this place, Reconciliation include: Predestination (by Peter Spierig, et al.); too. Wait! Get me out! McLuhan said that the only Commission of Time Lapse (by Bradley King); Primer (by Shane way to stay sane in all of this is pattern recognition: Canada look for patterns anywhere, everywhere. You may Carruth); and Timecrimes (by Nacho Vigalondo). Volume One: Summary They’re all great nightmares. not find any but the act of looking will keep you $22.95 paperback safe from the Maelstrom. Did you read Christopher DC: Primer was my favourite, but they slightly Dewdney’s Soul of the World? It’s remarkable. Many messed up the ending. And I got jealous they were The full text of the fresh takes on time and our relation to it. And Jim able to film it for $10,000. They had the cheapest sets Commission’s summary Gleick has a time-travel book coming out soon, too. on earth: a garage and a cardboard box. Curse them. volume, including its fi ndings and its 94 Calls Time is in the air. Okay, back to work here in Germany. You’re to Action. CB: Yes, I’ve read Soul of the World—and in fact seven and a half hours ahead of me. What’s it like Dewdney is one of my earliest literary mentors, in the Future? inspiring a lot of my interest in the relationship CB: Well, in the Future, every poet will be between science and poetics. famous for 15 megabytes. (To know the future DC: Uncanny. does not mean that you can prevent it, only that www.lorimer.ca CB: Time travel has always been my favourite you must live it more than once.) Let me finish Independent. Canadian. Since 1970. narrative premise. Time travel constitutes one of with my favourite quote from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: “‘Patience,’ said I to myself. ‘If you want the greatest artifices in storytelling, because the Made possible with the support of the paradoxes of the motif thematize the “achronic” your machine again, you must leave that sphinx Ontario Media Development Corporation quality of temporality in fiction. A story can, of alone.”

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 5 The New Edwardians Jennifer Welsh’s The Return of History, and the limits of progress Ana Siljak

wish and comfort increased, so did prosperity and dictator Louis Napoleon, who was elected in 1848 The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and equality. Liberal democracies offered a kind of con- and declared himself Napoleon III in 1852, was but Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century sumerist homogenization based on the satisfaction a poor, farcical imitation of his uncle, Napoleon Jennifer Welsh of economic desires. For Fukuyama, this not only Bonaparte. What historical moment are we Anansi Press ended ideological divisions, but also created, in repeating today? Welsh never elaborates. 360 pages, hardcover western democracies, a kind of classless society— To my mind, Welsh does point us in the right ISBN 9781487001308 one in which everyone aspired to be middle class. direction—to look at how our own era in history is Inequalities would persist, Fukuyama predicted, a return to the past. In my own view, the present- but they would be relatively minor and short-lived, day commemorations of the centennial of World he title of Jennifer Welsh’s book, The especially as discrimination against racial minor- War One offer the western world the opportunity to Return of History: Conflict, Migration and ities, women and the handicapped was gradually compare the turn of the 21st century with the turn TGeopolitics in the Twenty-First Century, reduced. of the 20th century. In many ways, we have indeed would make little sense without the lingering influ- Fukuyama’s optimism was echoed by political “returned” to the past, to a world much like that ence of Francis Fukuyama’s bold 1989 declaration scientists and other analysts, such as Joseph Nye before World War One. Then, as now, a multipolar that history had ended. In that year, Fukuyama, a and Timothy Garton Ash, who argued that the international system often resulted in brutal local political theorist, penned an essay boldly declaring combination of the decline of military conflict and wars with attendant humanitarian tragedies; then, that the major ideological contests of the 19th and the rise of economic prosperity in the West would as now, radical wealth inequality rendered many 20th centuries were over, and liberal democracy result in the triumph of soft power as the future coin governments near plutocracies; and then, as now, had won: of international influence. In the new post–Cold a kind of optimism about the power of technology War era, countries wielded influence through their and progress led people to believe that a world of What we may be witnessing is not just the economic prosperity, serving as examples worthy peace and prosperity for all was on its way. end of the Cold War, or the passing of a of emulation to those still struggling to create their In fact, even in proclaiming the end of his- particular period of postwar history, but the own liberal democratic states. From this perspec- tory, we repeat history. In the years preceding the end of history as such: that is, the end point tive, scholars predicted the rise of the European bloodletting of 1914, the international peace move- of mankind’s ideological evolution and the Union as a global power, whose enviable social and ment was born. From the second half of the 19th universalization of Western liberal democracy economic life would compensate for the lack of century and on, European observers of politics and as the final form of human government. military might. society were confidently declaring that the growth By now, it is rather commonplace to critique of civilization corresponded to the shrinking of His subsequent 1991 book, The End of History Fukuyama’s End of History—the book has become violence. Henry Thomas Buckle was one of the first and the Last Man, followed up on this controversial something of a cautionary tale for social scien- 19th-century scholars to proclaim that Europe’s thesis with a call for western optimism, a return to tists. Indeed, a cursory search through books and superior civilization was making it less warlike. a pre-1914 belief in progress, as defined by Robert articles on the 25th anniversary of the publication Later, Norman Angell, in his 1910 book, The Great McKenzie in 1880, as “continual advancement from of Fukuyama’s essay finds numerous titles such as Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power a lower to a higher platform of intelligence and “It’s Still Not the End of History,” or “History Is So in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage, well-being.” Not Over.” argued that education and superior civilization For Fukuyama, the reasons for optimism were Of the authors who have contended with were making war less palatable, leading to the many. In the international arena, the collapse of Fukuyama’s intellectual legacy, Jennifer Welsh “unity and interdependence of the modern world.” communism and the triumph of liberal democ- is in the company of the most reasonable and The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 promoted racy would mean the gradual decline of warfare. reflective. The Return of History tells a detailed and laws of warfare and the peaceful resolution of con- Pointing out that liberal democracies, such as fact-laden story of the way in which the post-1989 flict. The Carnegie Endowment for International the United States and Canada, never went to war world has and (more commonly) has not lived up Peace was established in 1910. All of this testified with one another, Fukuyama naturally concluded to Fukuyama’s expectations. Each chapter of her to a belief that civilization was to triumph over that more liberal democracies meant fewer wars. book is devoted to a particular modern problem barbarism. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, faced by liberal democracies: the recent refugee It took very little time for that belief to be chal- Fukuyama predicted that Russia itself would not crises, Russia’s increasing authoritarianism, the rise lenged. Just three years after the foundation of the “pick up where the czars left off,” but would evolve of global wealth inequalities. Although it is never Carnegie Endowment, war broke out in the Balkans into a more peaceful and cooperative state in the stated, the implied conclusion from all of these and raged from 1912 to 1913, accompanied by ter- international arena. chapters is that history is still continuing, in the rible atrocities, challenging the optimism of the International optimism was paired with eco- sense that Fukuyama’s promised triumph of liberal peace movement. Norman Angell and the Carnegie nomic optimism. As the capacity of the modern democracy has not happened—events continue Endowment wrote lengthy analyses of the situation industrialized world to fulfil every consumerist to threaten liberal hegemony. In other words, as in the Balkans and concluded, unsurprisingly, that Welsh’s title argues, history has returned. war fever, propaganda, nationalism, the massacre Ana Siljak is a professor of Russian and East But is history simply continuing on, or is it of civilians, the ethnic cleansing of rival groups— European history at Queen’s University. Her book repeating itself? Welsh is not entirely clear. As these were all the products of insufficient civiliza- Angel of Vengeance: The Girl Assassin, the an epigraph to the book, she uses Karl Marx’s tion, of Balkan backwardness. In its report on the Governor of St. Petersburg and Russia’s famous quote: “History repeats itself, first as tra- Balkan Wars in 1913, the Carnegie Endowment Revolutionary World (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) was gedy, second as farce.” Marx was quite specific in wrote with staggering arrogance: “the Great Powers shortlisted for the 2009 Charles Taylor Prize. his reference: he believed that the arrogant petty are manifestly unwilling to make war. Each one of

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada them, Germany, England, France, and the United world. It was an era of burgeoning consumerism: unthinking greed is then at the root of inequal- States, to name a few, has discovered the obvious new shopping districts and department stores pro- ity—some may have less, and some more, and the truth that the richest country has the most to lose vided the middle and upper classes with a wealth aim is to work hard enough to have more, rather by war.” of newly cheap and mass produced goods: linen than less. Few hate the one percent. Most would The events of 1914 proved shocking for the civil- bedsheets, tablecloths, fresh cheap reproductions simply like to be more like them. The question at izational optimists, but their shock was a product of known artistic masterpieces, ready-made cotton the heart of economic equality is a question of val- of their wilful blindness, not just to the Balkan clothing. Trains, steamships and the motor car all ues—one that liberal democracies are hard pressed cautionary tale, but to the lessons of imperialism. meant that more places were accessible to more to answer, because liberal democracies are focused Well before 1914, Europe itself had utilized the most people, including places of leisure, such as the sea- more on fulfilling individual desires, politically and brutal tactics in its own imperial ventures. By 1867, side or the country. economically, and far less on developing an ethical Europeans controlled 67 percent of the globe, and But the Gilded Age is best remembered not as world view based on self-sacrifice and self-denial. by the close of the 19th century Europeans (includ- the age of the middle classes, but, like our own By now, it is clear to all that the problems of the ing Russia and the United States) ruled approxi- age, as the age of the wealthiest. Toward the end of post–Cold War era will not be solved by history mately 80 percent of the planet’s territory. In the the 19th century, a new breed of upper class men alone. Welsh is quite correct: persistent inequal- fierce competition for new territory, known as the appeared: self-made entrepreneurs who rose from ity, humanitarian crises and international conflict “Scramble for Africa,” and in the rival expansion- obscure origins to the pinnacles of wealth. Werner require an active assessment of the ideals of liberal isms of Russian and Britain in Central Asia, known Siemens, born the son of an ordinary farmer in democracy. To get modern liberal democracy to as the “Great Game,” Europeans were engaged in 1816, joined the Prussian army to learn engineer- take in more refugees from the Middle East, or to the kind of bloody warfare that they professed to ing. He used his training to found a small company, rein in the wealth of the one percent, Welsh would have left behind. Technology, in like us to forego “the private the form of steam-powered “gun pleasures of consumerism” and boats,” allowed naval power to Russia has, unfortunately for embrace “cultivating the public penetrate deep inland, and was good,” at home and abroad. But decisive in conflicts such as the Fukuyama, indeed “picked up where the problem remains—what are First Opium War in China, 1839– our ideals? What are the values 1842. Better bullets and “repeating the czars left off,” using raw hard that come together to define a rifles” were manufactured by the power to achieve its ends. public good? If liberal democ- millions for the major European racy must be defended, we must armies—Hiram Maxim’s version of develop some collective moral the machine gun could fire eleven bullets a second. Siemens, which soon became one of the largest in system that strengthens and undergirds our liberal The new guns were put to brutally effective use in the world. Similarly, William Hesketh Lever began democratic world view. Africa and Asia, especially in suppressing revolts as the son of an ordinary grocer, but soon devel- The Return of History makes this plain, even such as the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Under Belgium’s oped and marketed a popular form of soap that where Welsh herself avoids the deeper complex- control of the Congo, it is estimated that imperial propelled his small company to world-wide great- ities of many issues. In her analysis of the rise of conquest reduced the Congo’s population from ness—Unilever is a descendant of his Lever empire. ISIS, for instance, Welsh correctly points out that 20 million to 10 million between 1880 and 1920. The Michelin brothers, Louis Renault, Henry Ford, the West cannot understand terrorism because it The Russians harassed and killed the native popu- Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz are just a few more cannot believe that “religion could matter.” Her lations of Central Asia in their expansion eastward, names of the Gilded Age inventors and industrial- later description of ISIS recruits as uninterested in and used scorched-earth tactics in Chechnya, raz- ists who went on to create products and found Islam, and even as “petty criminals,” commits the ing forests to the ground and building enormous industrial empires that are still with us. very error she criticizes earlier in the book. ISIS has military fortresses in the clearings. A poem by As a class, these wealthy families lived in open a system of values, one that attracts recruits. We Hillaire Belloc, written in 1898, captured the power and ostentatious luxury: luxury hotels, seaside may find it abhorrent, but we need to understand wrought by superior technology in imperial set- resorts, spas and casinos. They—and their social it, and counter it with an articulated system of our tings: “Whatever happens we have got the Maxim peers—often travelled with armies of servants own. In similar fashion, Welsh correctly perceives Gun, and they have not.” in private railway cars. The ill-fated Titanic had that our approach to economic and humanitarian In other words, the parallels with our own era expensive “millionaire suites.” Homes contained problems, such as refugee resettlement or wealth are striking. Those who had faith in Fukuyama dining rooms built to seat up to 100 guests, and inequality, requires moral solutions. Liberal dem- and Nye were shocked by the Russian invasion of thousands of acres of land were carefully tended. ocracies, she argues, cannot simply emphasize Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia Beyond entertainment and extravagance, wealth growth or productivity, but must also empha- has, unfortunately for Fukuyama, indeed picked was also leveraged into economic and political size fairness. As any parent knows, however, the up where the czars left off, using raw hard power power through bribery, through legal representa- word “fair” is subject to constant redefinition. From to achieve its ends. And, as in 1914, surprise at the tion and through simply befriending those with the extreme left to the extreme right of the liberal return of warfare in Europe was the product of wilful political influence. ideological spectrum, the articulation of what is fair blindness. After all, hard power had been deployed Our own Gilded Age has its luxury suites on will vary widely. Invoking fairness will only get us in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan in almost the airplanes and its estates on 1,800-acre ranches in so far. We need a sustained values system that gets very first days after the end of the Cold War. California. These days, we can find endless news us to see beyond our own immediate desires and If we consider the modern rise of wealth stories decrying the extravagance, tastelessness comfort and leads us to give up something for the inequality, a similar comparison can be made to and hideous excesses of the super rich. Welsh cites sake of others. And that requires much collective the years before 1914. Those who decry the rise scholarship that money is now buying influence, examination of conscience. of a “new Gilded Age” are referring to the original just as it did more than 100 years ago. The rising Up until August of 1914, the western world Gilded Age, the era of wealth and luxury that dom- power of the one percent is seen as the enemy of the had tremendous faith in technological innova- inated the western world up until World War One. middle class—the middle class and the upper class tion and scientific knowledge to bring progress, The point is proven statistically by the recently engaged in a kind of war for pre-eminence. comfort and peace to the world. That faith proved published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by As in the first Gilded Age, however, we moderns illusory, and the 20th century revealed the need Thomas Piketty: before 1914, the one percent had fail to consider the link between the consumerism for a sustained, coherent articulation of the value 20 percent of all income in the United States and and spending of the middle classes and the wealth of every individual as against the tyranny of Britain; in 1950, the one percent had ten percent of of the richest. The very gadgets and consumer states, the brutality of armies and the ravages of the income, and now the United States is back to its items that Fukuyama celebrated in 1989, and that poverty. Larger questions have now returned: we pre-war income distribution, with Europe following the middle classes enjoy today, build the fortunes must now consider the question of evil, the sin closely behind. of CEOs and others, especially in the technology of greed, the ­tragedy of selfishness.The Return of There are many aspects of the old Gilded Age industry. In our uncritical celebration of the prog- History clearly reveals that we too can no longer rest that will seem familiar to us today. The years ress and comfort capitalism can bring, and in our on the faith that progress will save us. History will before 1914 were like our own: dominated by rapid unreflective adoration of new and better products only judge the moral choices we have made, and technological and scientific progress that radically and technologies, we are implicitly accepting greed progress will only result from the values we have altered the daily lives of those living in the western as the normal goal of human striving. That often enacted.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 7 ESSAY Tunnel Vision Why our cities need less Jane Jacobs Lev Bratishenko

y introduction to Jane Jacobs was completely ordinary. Like many, Mmany architecture students since its publication in 1962, I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities for an introductory course in urbanism. Jacobs was a joy to read, whip-crack smart and caustically funny, and she wrote in impeccable, old-school sentences that convinced you with their unimpeded flow. She explained her ideas in utterly clear and simple language. Planners are “pavement pounding” or “Olympian.” There are “foot people and car people.” Why were we reading her? I expect it was to encourage us to look harder at the city, and to imbibe some of her spirited advocacy for experi- ence over expertise. It was a captivating message and delivered at the right time. Today it seems as though everybody interested in cities has read at least part of Death and Life and found personal affirmation in it. Michael Kimmelman wrote, “It said what I knew instinctively to be true.” For David Crombie, “she made it clear that the ideas that mattered were the ones which we understood intimately.” This quality was important, and one of the rea- sons that Jacobs endures in our culture is the facility with which we can identify with her. She is one of “us,” whoever that is—not an expert, more like an aunt than a professor. Her speciality was the induc- tion of rules from patterns discovered by individual observation, like a 19th-century gentleman scien- tist. Her work gave seriousness to reactions that might otherwise be dismissed as taste, ignorance or prejudice. Yet for all that, the Village, the neighbourhood she loved so fiercely and immortalized in Death and Life, has died. It was not levelled by the plan- ners; it was slowly strangled by the invisible hand. Of course, it does not look dead. If anything, it looks recently repainted. But the vitality is gone. Its rich new residents have closed in on themselves, and ever is workable, whatever has charm in city life,” ible relationships of power. Tweak to those and step more businesses serve tourists than locals. Writing Jacobs wrote in 1956. She appealed to pragmatism outside Jacobs’s crackling narrative, and suddenly in Salon recently, Peter Moskowitz bemoaned its and common sense based on a conviction that her all you can see is what she leaves out. It is unpleas- state: “The same neighborhood Jacobs lauded for discoveries on the street could be generalized. Part ant but it is necessary, for whoever today invokes its diversity in the 1960s and ’70s is today a nearly of her near-mythic status comes from the fact that, her blindly invokes also her blindness. all-white, aesthetically suburban playground for at a historical peak of institutional power guarded Her inattention to racism, whether in the form the rich.” But if Jacobs won, how did her neighbour- by men, she was a woman who dared to make of American housing markets or in official policies hood lose? people trust their own eyes. As Marshall Berman like redlining, is well known—at least within the “The starting point must be the study of what- wrote, Jacobs gave us “a language to appropriate academy, and it was noticed before Death and Life our own experience.” was published. In 1961 her editor, Jacob Epstein, Lev Bratishenko has written for Abitare, Canadian Unfortunately, there are a lot of things you do wrote her that he was worried about the absence Architect, Cabinet, the CBC, Disegno, Gizmodo, not see, especially if you are a middle-aged, middle- of any discussion of the race issue: “I don’t think The Guardian, Icon, Maclean’s, the Montreal class white lady in 1950s New York. What you see that you can proceed as though the question didn’t Gazette, Opera News and Uncube. He curated The depends on who you are, and many of Jacobs’s exist.” Jacobs replied that she had her reasons Object Is Not Online at the Canadian Centre for appealing dictums seem much less universal once but no time to explain them. Sociologist Nathan Architecture. He lives in Montreal. you consider race, class, ethnicity or other less vis- Glazer wrote her that he agreed with Epstein, then

8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada shrugged off the concerns they both had as unreal- anyone else, or facing down injustice. At 85 she plans on paper, she went to Philadelphia and saw istic: “on the other hand, you can’t do everything.” would admit, “Really, I’ve had a very easy life.” that the “slum” streets waiting for bulldozers were Race is not a sideshow in the story of American Jacobs came to the writing life through jour- spilling over with life, while in the modern hous- cities in the 20th century. Following the collapse of nalism: an unpaid internship at the Scranton ing projects she saw only a solitary boy kicking a Reconstruction and the tyranny of Jim Crow, racism Republican followed by her first paid article tire. Bacon did not recognize the problem, but she pushed millions of blacks northwards in the Great in Vogue in 1936, after she joined her older sister in did. “Not only did he and the people he directed Migration. Racism was the organizing principle New York City; then a job at Iron Age, a metallurgy not know how to make an interesting or humane for entire neighbourhoods—the suburbs became trade magazine where she got national attention street, but they didn’t even notice such things and places where whites could escape from minorities. for an article decrying Scranton’s lack of war work. didn’t care,” she would write. From then on her But since it was not something Jacobs had experi- (The former mining town had 30,000 unemployed.) work would be tinged with righteousness—she had enced, it was a footnote in her study. When it was By 1943 she was working for the U.S. Office of War trusted architects and planners, and they were not published, she had a black woman, Glennie Lenear, Information as a propagandist, writing articles on telling the truth. coming to clean once a week. The fact is no more “the magnitude of America’s war production, and Her public break with the establishment was the unusual at the time than her blindness to colour, vignettes illustrating the achievements, efforts and legendary speech she gave at Harvard University but it is enough reason to question her relevance way of life of the American people.” McCarthyist in 1956. Asked to replace her boss, Forum editor- today. investigations of her loyalty embittered her toward in-chief Doug Haskell, at the last minute, Jacobs It would not be necessary to hold attacked public projects for creating Jacobs to a higher standard than any “social poverty beyond anything the other white doctor’s daughter born Step outside Jacobs’s crackling slums ever knew.” The speech was a in small-town Pennsylvania in 1916, sensation and the entire East Coast except that we are regularly reminded narrative, and suddenly all you can architecture establishment was in of her timelessness. Her TED talk– see is what she leaves out. the room to hear it. It led to her quotable style has kept her in the famous 1958 Fortune magazine article public consciousness, and in her cen- “Downtown Is for People,” and the tenary, there are Jane’s Walks on the first weekend government, but she still shot up the civil service Rockefeller Foundation grant (actually two, worth of May in more than 75 cities around the world; a ranks. around $200,000 today) that produced Death and new biopic just screened at TIFF; and the opera “A Living in New York, she took courses at Life. Marvelous Order,” which imagines New York mas- Columbia on subjects such as economics and It was around this time that Jacobs was ter planner Robert Moses and his nemesis, Jacobs, zoology, and after seeing a cat skeleton at the immortalized as one of the “bunch of mothers” as lovers, premiered last year. She is an actual saint Museum of Natural History with her sister, Jane who stopped Moses’s plans to run a road through in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood—a joke decided to make one herself. So they caught a Washington Square Park. The campaign was led that reflects her status. stray, drowned it in the river, and she skinned it at by a Village actress, Shirley Hayes, for three years Saint Jane has become shorthand for whatever home. Eventually she took so many courses that the before Jacobs joined, and the fight, as well as is nice about living in cities. On the left, she is cele- university decided she should matriculate, but her the one over the Lower Manhattan Expressway brated for saving neighbourhoods, and on the right high school grades were too low. The experience (Lomex) in the 1960s, is central to Jacobs legacy. for her hands-off approach. Academics have long soured her on credentials and she never accepted a She was also chair of the Committee to Save the criticized her overgeneralizations as irresponsible, single honorary degree. West Village, one of the few times when a neigh- but if they engage with her work deeply they can At the end of the war, Jacobs was writing for bourhood managed to reverse its slum designation usually find something valuable to pick out, a new Amerika, a magazine published by the State (hint: not a black neighbourhood). There is not insight or fresh attitude. The public Jacobs has Department and distributed to Soviet citizens. It is a lot about her activism in Kanigel’s book, so her never had such a sober reassessment. the Soviets who can claim credit for pushing Jacobs methods and exact roles remain mysterious, but Robert Kanigel’s new biography Eyes on the onto the urban beat, since one of their most effect- her organizational energy and professionalism are Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs should nudge her ive criticisms of the United States at the time was alluded to, as well as her image as a “clomping, popular image closer to reality. His book context- its large slum population. Jacobs was part of the sandaled stride and that straight gray hair flying ualizes each of her major works with contempor- government’s response; she wrote articles showing every which way around a sharp, quizzical face.” aneous praise and criticism, and later assessments how America’s modern planners were solving the Her baggy-sweater inelegance was a kind of acci- of the influence or abandonment of her ideas, all problem, until 1952 when she resigned rather than dental disguise, and it made her look as if she could the while feeding a lithe narrative. As a biographic move to new offices in Washington. not possibly be on the side of power. Later in life, subject, Jacobs is aloof. There are no diaries, so the By then, Jane Butzner had been married to when her image got fixed in Canadians’ minds, she personal is largely conjectural and small details architect Robert Jacobs for seven years, had three looked like an old hippie. seem revelatory: unbelieving Jacobs dutifully children, and was living in a three-story house that In his telling, Jacobs was a reluctant activist. packed the family off to church, to feel part of some they owned in Manhattan. Adjusted for inflation, She always wanted to be writing, and she had to be larger tradition, little more. She did not realize she was making around $100,000 a year. Jacobs asked to join the fight. And if she did, it was motiv- her youngest was illiterate until age nine and then had lived with her sister in Brooklyn until she ated by a NIMBY-ish concern for her square, her immediately corrected the problem. On car trips discovered Greenwich Village by chance on one sidewalk and her neighbourhood. When Father she would invent stories for her three children and of her subway expeditions—she liked the name of Ferard La Mountain came to ask for help against their guests about Peanut, who became Peanutina Christopher Street station, got out and fell in love Moses’s Lomex—in planning since the 1940s, it in her 1989 children’s book, The Girl on the Hat: with the neighbourhood. Her curiosity was legend- would have rammed right through the Village— “Thinking about a useful life for herself, Tina’s first ary, but she had to be invited before she visited East Jacobs declined. “I wanted to work on my work.” idea was to make little Easter baskets, starting a Harlem—by an episcopal priest named William And she did not get involved until years later. This long time ahead to have plenty to sell.” Kirk, who offered to show her a slum-designated revelation of her reticence is a welcome corrective Buying and selling are the fundamental activ- area up close. to the Jacobs and Moses cartoon. ities of civilization as far as Jacobs was concerned. With huge federal grants available for slum clear- Jacobs arrived in Canada with maximum repu- In Kanigel’s account, despite coming of age during ance and redevelopment, many major American tation and the sense that the mistakes made in the the Great Depression, she never knew want. Her cities were designating entire neighbourhoods as United States could still be averted here. The family mother was a nurse and her father was a doctor, slums and connected developers were buying up fled to Toronto in 1968 with their draft-eligible and her childhood and adolescence took place in prime land at discount rates. Although well inten- sons preferring jail to induction, and Jacobs was Scranton, mostly in a suburban house on a pretty tioned, it was a tragic combination of what Jacobs quickly pulled into the fight against the Spadina street. The family had a freethinking streak. There would call “catastrophic money” and people with Expressway. It had already been going on for two was Uncle Billy the one-eyed criminal defence no love for the city. In 1955, a tour of new projects years, and although we are not told exactly what she lawyer and prohibitionist Aunt Hannah, who at age in Philadelphia with master planner Ed Bacon went did, she was a forceful and experienced addition, 45 set out for Alaska to “bring civilization” to the memorably wrong for Jacobs. After three years of and she was welcomed by the community. Marshal natives. As a child, Jacobs was unafraid to call out writing appreciative articles for Architectural Forum McLuhan’s first friendly gesture was to loan her his ignorance and known for standing up to teachers, about redevelopment schemes, some of which she Calabrian cleaning lady. but there are not any stories of her standing up for may not have visited and many of which were only Jacobs praised Toronto as a relatively unscrewed-

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 9 up city, and Toronto responded with an immodest enthusiasm that has yet to be explained. It is probably best that Kanigel, an American, did not try. One way that Jacobs returned the favour was by setting her fictionalized books in New York, saying that “talking to Canadians was like talking to a pillow.” Her engage- ment with our culture does not appear to have been very sophisticated, typified by the confused silence that greeted her 1980 argument for an amicable divorce with Quebec (although she did correctly predict trouble for another monet- ary union). She brushed aside a few hundred years of complex history as a “shotgun union” and, tellingly, her book The Question of Separatism was never published in French. Jacobs influenced her adoptive city through ideas, and Kanigel quotes Alan Broadbent in pointing out that there were no “straight lines from her to any particular planning process.” Toronto’s St. Lawrence development was “inspired” and “influenced” by Jacobs who apparently neither assembled the council who began it, planned it nor even attended the meetings leading to its approval. But among the reminis- cences of its architect Alan Littlewood Architect Paul Rudolph’s Lomex plan (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-26438]) is the story that when he was not sure how to begin, Jacobs told him to “get off my ass or revolution” was a provocation to recognize the Jacobs was profoundly self-critical about the and get on with making a plan.” The next day, fact that the longer suffering is ignored, the more form and logical development of her writing, end- “Like a recalcitrant sinner, I knew exactly what to violent is its inevitable expression. The conception lessly revising and agonizing over her “confused” do. I didn’t even have to open the book.” The book of modern architecture was overscaled in response texts, but she seems not to have doubted the objec- had been internalized; its descriptions turned into to the overwhelming size of the problem. Western tivity of her observations. In 1994 she laid out her prescriptions that could be reproduced without too cities suffered from overcrowding, basic services method to Steward Brand, creator of the Whole much attention to process. were not being provided (introducing them into Earth Catalogue. She wrote that there were three Jacobs had made the same mistake in assuming 18th- and 19th-century city fabric seemed impos- kinds of evidence: “solid statistical evidence,” “ran- that her economistic reading of the streets accur- sible), and decades of laissez-faire governance had dom, highly suspect anecdotal evidence,” and “spe- ately reflected how they had come to look that way. left people living next to smokestacks and cess- cifically illuminating cases.” If you agree with the You can’t tell by looking at it if a bustling porch was pools. New York still had hellish 19th-century–style conclusions then the anecdote is illuminating, and built by a slumlord. And she later criticized the tenements into the 1940s, because private develop- if you do not, it is just random. When confronted New Urbanists for exactly the same thing, although ers found the returns too low to invest in building with the obvious problems of this kind of cherry- still on formal grounds: “They don’t seem to have a low-cost housing. (They still do.) And the new picking, her famous retort was, “Darwin didn’t have sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. Soviet Union was scrambling to house millions. It data either.” They’ve placed them as if they were shopping cen- would have been rather surprising if such condi- The data have worked out better for Darwin. ters. They don’t connect.” tions produced a theory of architecture and plan- Although her formal theories have largely held The ideas in Death and Life are based on two ning that was anything other than mass-produced, up on their own terms—they make nice-looking assumptions: that human behaviour is shaped by standardized and industrialized. streets—their implementation has not kept neigh- the physical environment, and that capitalism is You do not have to like the form of public bourhoods alive. Form is only a container for the natural order of things. The first was immedi- housing projects to empathize with the effort they various and even opposite ideas. As architect Rem ately attacked and the implications of the second represented, or want to live in suburbia to appreci- Koolhaas wrote, Jacobs identified “the ingredients still seldom come under scrutiny. Kanigel points ate the seductiveness of early suburbs with their by which shopping could stand in for urbanity.” to Herb Gans’s review in Commentary that named healthy green lawns and clear skies. Jacobs’s criti- That is what happened to the Village. Jacobs’s mistake “the physical fallacy.” It lets her cisms ignored the disease and suffering caused Jacobs was right to attack the dreadful conform- “ignore the social, cultural, and economic factors by a century of industrialized cities because she ity of some post-war modernism, and the brilliance that contribute to vitality or dullness.” Ignoring hated the solutions being imposed on the city of her writing undoubtedly helped to spare many them allows Jacobs to identify the characteristics of she loved. She found Ebenezer Howard’s Garden people from forced relocations and the destruc- healthy neighbourhoods in formal terms: 1) mixed City schemes ridiculous, and we might agree, but tion of their livelihoods. But only for a while. The residential, commercial and industrial buildings; would a Beijinger? At least superblocks came with same people, largely working-class minorities, have 2) short, pedestrian blocks; 3) mixed old and new indoor plumbing, and the suburbs had real appeal been displaced by rising rents, which are much buildings at various rents; and 4) enough density to to people being slowly killed by poisoned air and harder to mobilize against than a master planner create self-sustaining local businesses. unsanitary crowding. But Jacobs showed little in a dark suit. Jacobs has little to offer here; her Jacobs’s reading of the opposition was simi- compassion for those people, probably because public-­private partnerships were too wimpy a solu- larly formalist, and Kanigel follows her in treating she never experienced such conditions herself. She tion. She never dared to question whether we must modernism as an aesthetic movement, a bunch of considered the suburbs a character flaw: “really necessarily make money by providing housing. deluded artists hell-bent on abstract tenets of light, nice small towns if you were docile and had no They have been displaced farther away from space and air. Although modernism developed into plans of your own and did not mind spending your downtown, where they spend more of their time a formal style, it emerged out of principally social life among others with no plans of their own.” She commuting, replicating the behaviours of the white concerns, and its physical obsessions were quite seems to have never really accepted that the sub- folks who made the trip when it was desirable. reasonable reactions to the urban problems created urban myth was part of American culture, and they There was no public housing built for them, a con- by 19th-century industrialization and 20th-century kept being built for her whole life, with real social, sequences of the damage Jacobs—and others, and war. Le Corbusier’s famous choice of “architecture economic and ecological implications. the miserable underfunding of its maintenance­—

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada did to the idea of public housing both as a concept, A credo of sorts can be heard in the voice of being but as a police officer of market-appropriate as something cities ought to provide, and as a Hiram from The Nature of Economies in 2001 (he behaviour. She gathers material ahistorically and process, as something that cities can provide well. replaces the gloomy ecologist Ben from Systems of delights in upsetting the cart for the sake of it You can open Death and Life on a random page to Survival; Jacobs’s style at this point had become (infamously claiming that cities predate agricul- find an example of her witty and dismissive bile for Socratic) “Economic life is ruled by processes and ture—she was a poor armchair archaeologist.) city planning: “although city planning lacks tactics principles we didn’t invent and can’t transcend A wide-ranging interview with David Warren in for building cities that can work like cities, it does whether we like that or not.” Naturalization, of 1993 published in Vital Little Plans has Jacobs talk- possess plenty of tactics. They are aimed at carrying course, is a favourite tactic for powerful people ing about her two moral “syndromes”—according out strategic lunacies.” Instead of good planners trying to stay that way. “Science” has also been to her, all people in the world are either “guardians” and bad planners, no planners; instead of good employed to show that one race or another was and “traders.” The latter were originally going to developers and bad ones, silence. “objectively” inferior, putting relations with them be called raiders, but presumably that sounded Although the move is not generally widely beyond the realm of the political and into another too moralistic. Later on she admitted that perhaps noted by her progressive fans, Jacobs energetically category, something like the empirical manage- artists were a third category, and mused: “How participated in the cultural turn extraordinary that people would from government interventionism exchange goods instead of grab- toward laissez-faire policy. She Jacbos failed to see that the suburbs bing things from each other.” Not participated in celebrated victories had real appeal for people being slowly really, unless gift economies, or against irresponsible government, cultures where goods and lands are personified by Moses (Robert Caro’s killed by poisoned air and crowding. stewarded collectively have never 1974 biography of the unelected occurred to you. After 30 years of and arrogant Moses did wonders living in Canada, she had missed the for Jacobs’s reputation since, if he was so bad, his ment of a natural problem. Jacobs was against indigenous third of our culture. nemesis must be as good) but Jacobs never, to my similar logic when it condemned “unsalvageable” At one point, in a 1994 speech to a group of knowledge, fought private developers. If she did, it slums to demolition, and it is echoed today by women entrepreneurs, Jacobs made the startling is not a part of her popular legacy. Why did Jacobs businesspeople that claim that if their business claim that, “when the ceiling does dissolve it does respond to the danger from urban planners but not model is illegal, then it is the “outdated” law that not do so because legislation says it must.” Certainly from developers and banks? must change. she had had to fight for herself, but such acknow- Jacobs claimed to be beyond ideology, which In a way, Jacobs is part of this tradition too, and ledgements of complexity also disguise a knee- should have been a clue. “I am no ideologist. I am Zipp and Storring have made it easier to trace how, jerk animosity to government, a fundamentalist an old fashioned pragmatist,” she said, and we keep and to find precedents in case we think she came to Americanism that is the last thing we need more taking her at her word. For a thinker whose defin- “radical centrism” late in her life. Kanigel helps by of today. These two books help us to understand ing quality was a posture of rejecting all received reminding us of her agitation to privatize Ontario why, and they depict a thinker not of our time but cant, this is a curious state of grace. A new volume Hydro, and her co-founding the Consumer Policy completely of hers, as modernistic and rigid as the of 40 less-publicized writings may help to dispel Institute to privatize the postal service and trans- planner theoreticians she so skillfully demolished. the aura. Combining early articles, hard-to-find portation networks as well. They believed in statistics as facts, and they were speeches, and a previously unpublished draft into a In a 1967 speech in London, Jacobs asked the wrong. She believed in observations as facts, and sampling of her life’s work from 1936 to 2004, Samuel question that guided her work on The Economy of she was wrong too. Zipp and Nathan Storring’s upcoming compilation, Cities: “Why are some cities creative only for a time, Today the market has sorted everything out, and Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, and then halt? … Perhaps the best way to get a little the age of the master planner is long past, and the allows for a quick immersion into her thinking that light on the problem was to read the histories of danger for some time has not been the imaginary reveals trends. The editorial introductions are more successful business.” This is how easily profit comes opposition to Jane Jacobs, but the image of Jane contextual than critical (unless “there’s no doubt to embody creativity, and commerce to stand as the Jacobs smiling from construction hoardings for that this is just the right time for more Jane Jacobs,” measure of a culture. She continued: “most of what new condos. She assumed the markets’ innocence means an easy book deal), yet reading her over many we call the spread of civilization amounts to slip- and could not use the word “exploitation.” It is the decades lets the material speak its own strengths pages from internal economies of cities into their perfectly pitched message for our age of capital- and weaknesses. It also rebalances her life’s work, export economies.” This is an impoverished view, ist triumphalism. Jane Jacobs, crypto-libertarian, which has been dominated by Death and Life. Jacobs but it is one that plays well to the egos of executives. offers nothing that would upset the capitalists, and wrote six other serious books in a four-decade-long Jacobs tracks thinking that sees the ideal state we should not be surprised that she continues to be attempt to write a natural history of ­economics. not as a redistributive mechanism for social well- relevant.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 11 Conflict Averse Power, the new victimhood and the disappearance of personal accountability Andy Lamey

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair Sarah Schulman Arsenal Pulp Press 356 pages, softcover 9781551526430

ISBN roponents of trigger warnings—labels inserted in university syllabi to indicate Pwhen class readings contain descriptions of war, rape and other traumatic subjects—argue that such warnings help survivors of such events avoid reliving their trauma in flashbacks. Last year, for example, four undergraduates at Columbia University in New York wrote an article not- ing that Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains graphic descriptions of rape: “Like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive They know what will help them better than anyone ticular student but a problem with the material. material that marginalizes student identities in else, no matter how well intentioned. Students Every student in the class receives a message that the classroom.” Beyond Columbia, calls for trig- therefore decide for themselves whether they need codes class content as potentially problematic. The ger warnings have been made by students at the some sort of accommodation and, in consultation idea that reading Metamorphoses can be harmful University of California, Santa Barbara, Oberlin with the OSD, what form it should take. is normalized in advance. In the Columbia case, College, the University of Michigan, George Trigger warning campaigns follow a different the students wanted a warning because they con- Washington University and Rutgers University. logic. Warning advocates often speak on behalf of sidered the poem “triggering and offensive.” Ovid is Works recommended for warnings range from students other than themselves. Hence the New thus potentially harmful not only to students with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (misogynistic York Times interview with a student at UC Santa specific medical conditions, but to everyone. Even violence) to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe Barbara who sought a warning before her class saw in instances where avoiding offence is not offered (racism, colonialism, religious persecution). a film with a graphic depiction of rape: “she said as a rationale for warnings, class readings are pre- It is noteworthy how trigger warnings differ from that she herself had been a victim of sexual abuse, sented alongside an invitation into victimhood. existing efforts to assist students, for instance, those and that although she had not felt threatened by the In this way trigger warnings symbolize a perni- with mental health issues. As a professor I feel a film, she had approached the professor to suggest cious view of the life of the mind. Texts in English, strong obligation to make my classroom inclusive that students should have been warned.” Students history and philosophy are far more likely to be sad- and welcoming to such students. For example, on with conditions such as post-traumatic stress dis- dled with warnings than chemistry or physics text- the first day of large lecture classes a few students order, who sometimes do re-experience trauma in books. In assigning humanistic texts to my students will approach me with a letter from the Office for flashbacks, have been less vocal in calling for trigger I am not victimizing them. I am expecting them Students with Disabilities. The letters note that warnings. The same is true of medical profession- to show resilience and mental discipline, to not the student has a physical or mental condition als who treat them. Harvard University psychology crumble in the face of difficult ideas or images, as that requires some kind of accommodation: the professor Richard McNally, an authority on PTSD they learn to think for themselves. Accommodation most common request I receive is for extra time on and obsessive-compulsive disorder, has said trig- letters allow me to meet my genuine obligations to exams. Something I appreciate about the accom- ger warnings are “countertherapeutic because they students with mental health issues without com- modation letter approach is its personal touch. encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and promising my expectations for the class as a whole. Because students have to bring their letter to me avoidance maintains P.T.S.D.” So to any OSD students who happen to read this, I get to know them a bit better than I otherwise If the accommodation letter approach sees stu- please know, I have your back. To the rest of the would. The tailored letter method also sees students dents manage their personal needs where trigger class, essays on the ethics of torture, war and abor- play a central role in managing their own condition. warning campaigns have not done so, this is not tion are due Tuesday at five, no exceptions. the only difference between the two approaches. These thoughts are inspired by Sarah Schulman’s Andy Lamey teaches philosophy at the University of Trigger warnings are generic syllabus text pre- new book, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, California, San Diego, and is the author of Frontier sented to the entire class. They often take the form Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair. Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What To Do of “trigger warning: rape” or “trigger warning: war.” Schulman is concerned with an ideology that About It (Doubleday Canada). What they identify is thus not a problem for a par- perpetuates a false view of oneself or another as a

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada victim, or what she terms “the new victimology.” the connection she feels, her inquiry could have a he had been selling loose cigarettes. Michael Trigger warning campaigns are illustrative of vic- happy ending—or she could be labelled a harasser. Brown was simply walking down the street. Their timology’s overly broad view of who is a victim. But “One false move and I could be the sad object of an encounters with the police involved conflict, but just as opposing trigger warnings does not entail outraged story on the dreaded grapevine: ‘Sarah neither Gardner nor Brown was a threat to the offi- a denial of the legitimate needs of OSD students, Schulman came on to me. It was so inappropriate.’ cers involved. Yet those officers, Schulman argues, rejecting an ideology of victimhood does not entail The story would never be ‘I liked her, I flirted with somehow perceived their interactions with both denying that real victims do exist. Schulman’s point her, she understood me, and then I was scared men as threatening enough to justify lethal force. rather is that the ideology of victimhood denies the I would be hurt like I had been before.” Racist police killings thus exemplify the pattern of normalcy of conflict. If grappling with a difficult or The story that would never be told is one that escalation she describes. “Nothing happened, but disturbing text is a routine aspect of academic life, happens all the time. Human beings do feel drawn these people with power saw abuse.” so too is it a normal part of life in general that we to other people, only to draw back out of fear or Schulman’s scepticism toward the law however experience conflicts with others. These conflicts uncertainty or because they are suddenly reminded cuts deeper. She views the legal system as uphold- frequently involve power struggles, large and small. of something from their past. Admitting this, ing a framework of justice that disadvantages But the new victimology, because it does not accept though, means we may share some responsibil- women, racial minorities and LGBT groups. Getting conflict as a normal aspect of every family, relation- ity for a conflict. In the case of women, Schulman the state involved in a conflict therefore, rather than ship and society, has come to redefine conflict as writes, even now, there is the additional considera- addressing the real source, is likely only to harm abuse. tion of a cultural script according to which they these groups, whether they did anything wrong Schulman argues that conflict is mistaken should be attractive yet sexually pure. or not. Schulman catalogues many ways that ask- for abuse across many domains, from the most Schulman illustrates the dynamic further ing the police to intervene in domestic conflicts intimate and personal, including romantic rela- with the example of a woman who signals that can backfire for disadvantaged groups. She cites a tionships, to the public and political, particularly she reciprocates a man’s sexual interest, only to report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence where they involve the police. When people think soon break things off and deny that she was ever Programs, which notes that in 2013 “‘the police they have been a victim of abuse mis-arrested the survivor as the it is only a small step to believing The new victimology, because it does perpetrator of domestic violence’ they have also been the victim in over half of all queer domes- of a crime. Thus Schulman sees not accept conflict as a normal aspect of tic abuse arrests.” These cases victimology as often resulting in involved actual violence, and so counterproductive attempts to every family, relationship and society, has are not examples of abuse claims “gain access to the state’s punish- being manufactured out of con- ment apparatus.” On an interna- come to redefine conflict as abuse. flict. But what they do illustrate—a tional level, she sees false claims perpetrator gaining control of an of abuse justifying declarations of war, as when ­interested: “What he wants is the ‘I was attracted abuse narrative—may be even worse. foreign populations are depicted as guilty of crimes to him but I wouldn’t acknowledge it, so I got con- What makes such mis-arrests possible, Schul­ deserving revenge. fused’ version [of events]. We don’t have language man suggests, is that the police are often poor Whether the context is familial, legal or geopolit- or methodology for that option, because it immedi- arbiters of domestic relationships. Thus disastrous ical, Schulman argues that the underlying problem ately becomes her ‘fault.’ In a world based on blame, consequences can result when they are asked to is the same: power struggle is too often misidenti- women have to be clear to be clean, unfortunately, intervene in domestic conflicts that someone has fied as power over. Conflict occurs at so many levels so avoiding blame means avoiding complexity, mistaken for abuse, as when parents call the police of interaction because it is rooted in difference, contradiction and ambivalences.” The simplified to “scare” their disobedient children, only for the which can be uncomfortable to deal with. Hence narrative renders one party a victim in Schulman’s children to be shot. If the law is a “punishment exaggerated claims of abuse arise out of “the oppor- scheme and the other an abuser—which denies the apparatus” in Schulman’s account, it is one that is tunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake latter person the right to be described accurately. coiled to go off at any time. An especially destruc- internal anxiety for exterior danger.” But classifying Schulman argues that oversimplified narratives tive feature of false abuse narratives therefore is conflict as abuse does not merely misdescribe real- of victimhood can set in motion patterns of behav- their propensity to unleash that apparatus on indi- ity. It engenders a false certainty and righteousness iour that escalate into disrespect and harm. One viduals who may have done nothing wrong. in victims that license retaliation against their form this takes is shunning. Someone looking back Schulman’s notion of conflict is distinct from perceived abusers. “Difference is misrepresented on a relationship or friendship with interpersonal trauma. Conflict as she defines it is mundane and as an assault that then justifies our cruelty and conflict, rather than accept it as something to be manageable whereas trauma is extreme and shat- relinquishes our responsibility to change,” writes managed and negotiated, cuts the other person tering. She suggests however that individuals who Schulman. out of his or her life forever. The person doing the have unrecovered trauma are particularly likely to Scepticism toward claims of victimhood has shunning thinks they have been abused, but really mistake conflict for abuse. “Traumatized people,” become a trope of conservative and centrist auth- their refusing to speak to the other person is itself she writes, can “refuse to see or hear or engage ors. Schulman’s goal, however, is the opposite of a small-scale abuse. “Refusing to speak to some- information that would alter their self-concepts, discrediting the claims of women or racial and one without terms for repair is a strange, childish even in ways that could bring them more happiness sexual minorities. Rather, she seeks to bring out act of destruction in which nothing can be won,” and integrity.” In this way they share something how false claims of victimhood often perpetuate says Schulman. It can easily become collective. On with individuals in the grip of supremacist ideolo- injustices against these very groups. Schulman, either plane, shunning is the ultimate form of non- gies, who see themselves as belonging to a privil- a prolific novelist and professor at the College of accountability, a way of avoiding our responsibility eged gender, nationality or race. The motivations Staten Island in New York, has long experience as to set terms for how differences might be worked for avoiding self-questioning are different. People an author and activist on feminist and lesbian, gay, out. with unrecovered trauma feel too fragile to do so, bisexual and trans issues. What lends her skepti- Progressive political views are often premised on whereas supremacists see themselves as having a cism toward false victimhood unique authority is the idea that justice obliges the government to take right not to critically examine themselves. But the that it arises out of intimate familiarity with the real some affirmative steps. This is true of everything stance of both groups is at odds with the ethos of kind. As Schulman puts it, “I use queer examples, from calls to raise the minimum wage to campaigns accountability that Schulman seeks to foster. I cite queer authors, I am rooted in queer points of to bestow legal recognition on same-sex marriage When we see other people mistake conflict for view … I come directly from a specifically lesbian (as opposed to having the government remove abuse, and thereby create an alibi that permits historical analysis of power.” itself from the marriage-recognition business alto- hurting their “abuser,” we should intervene. When Schulman’s notion of conflict is subtle and gether). A distinctive feature of Schulman’s analysis we find ourselves involved in everyday conflicts of includes many different forms of opposition. In the is how cool it is toward the idea that the state has our own, rather than view ourselves as victims who personal realm it often takes the form of unrecip- any positive role to play in addressing the problems are justified in lashing out, we should ask how we rocated sexual desire. Schulman describes being she describes. One reason is because representa- can replace escalation with “repentance, repair and at a professional gathering where she cannot tell tives of the state can themselves mistake conflict reconciliation.” if another woman is flirting with her. The woman for abuse, with deadly consequences. We are all too The alternative to repair is illustrated in keeps using the word “G-spot” and Schulman familiar with police killings of African Americans Schulman’s final chapter, which documents social begins to fantasize about her. If Schulman pursues in the United States. In the case of Eric Gardner, media coverage of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 13 In Schulman’s telling, the Israeli clearly states of Mary that “it was government falsely portrayed itself not her fault that Beth threw the as a victim of abuse at the hands of object. It was Beth’s action to own.” Hamas, the fundamentalist political Schwartzwald But Schulman less clearly states that organization that governs the Gaza Mary “helped produce the moment, Strip, by wrongly identifying Hamas My mind is running even if she did not cause it.” Saying as organizing the kidnapping and on pure grief and pure love, I want you someone helped produce an out- murder of three Israeli teenagers. to know this. come seems another way of saying When the teens’ bodies were Don Coles, Forests of the Medieval World that they helped cause it. Here discovered, Israeli president Ben­ for Jane and elsewhere, Schulman’s project jamin Netan­yahu paraphrased of holding all parties to a dispute accountable seems to go one step Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik: Late November roses, and vetch “Vengeance for the death of a small too far. Surely we can avoid false growing under autumn leaves among child, Satan has not yet created.”­ claims of victimhood and false attri- the grass, still green and resilient The military assault on the people butions of blame. of Gaza that followed killed more as beauty always is. Grey and empty These shortcomings must be than 2,100 Palestinians, 70 percent balanced against the book’s virtues. of whom the United Nations identi- milkweed pods hang like stiffleg Schulman’s work is studded with fied as civilians. Of the 73 Israelis derricks in the shade, while lady beetles lucid insights on a host of tangen- killed in the conflict, all but seven scour for aphids and die of longing. tial issues, such as the difference were soldiers. This was a geo- The husks of their bodies blow in the between guilt and shame: the for- political instance of victimology: mer is “pro-social,” motivating us to Israel invoked a false victim nar- wind, as all the insectivorous birds have make amends through apology or rative to license great suffering. In fled due south. Beauty’s not the point for confession, while actions motivated by shame often injure relationships. Schulman’s dynamic, “resistance them, whatever role of common to Abuse was reconstituted as its There is an especially thought- sacrifice each and every creature plays. justification.” provoking analysis of how modern communication technology such t is perhaps no surprise that Nothing makes its way with any grace as email and text messaging makes IConflict Is Not Abuse is written among these final tags of summer. it too easy to avoid face-to-face by a novelist. A work of fiction in It’s dark by five, the sun marooned conversation, which is the most which one character is simply a elsewhere in bleak dispassion. Desperate effective means of making ourselves victim, while another is just an accountable to others. abuser, will fail as art. Schulman men seek love or booze to palliate Schulman’s central insight is that translates this idea to non-fiction, the night, and dreams of fake identity, conflict, misunderstood as abuse, asking us to avoid a similarly reduc- skirting death. There’s little else, in can have harmful consequences. tive view of real people. Perhaps fine, besides the grimly obvious. This framework has considerable this novelistic background is what explanatory force. Reading her book makes Schulman’s analysis so ori- I more than once felt it clarified ginal. There is a tradition of invoking Bruce Whiteman dynamics that had occurred among personal responsibility to obscure people I know, including individual the role that societal factors such and collective shunnings. It also as racism and inequality play in Bruce Whiteman is a Toronto poet and book reviewer. His most explains a curious feature of con- structuring people’s lives. This is recent collection of poetry is Tablature (McGill-Queen’s University temporary campus life, beyond the evident for example in calls for Press, 2015). His reviews have appeared recently in Pleiades, The rise of trigger warning campaigns. black Americans to “pull themselves Hudson Review and Canadian Notes & Queries, among other jour- Protesting students will often up by their bootstraps” to escape nals. Right now he is reading The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry identify as victims in some way, poverty. Schulman’s breakthrough and a new biography of Franz Liszt by Oliver Hilmes. as when they characterize a cam- is to outline an ethic of personal pus policy or visiting speaker as responsibility that is deeply sensi- “unsafe.” The same students, how- tive to systemic injustice. ever, will frequently demonstrate Inevitably, not every point is equally convincing. tion to turn away from the state, rather than reform great tenacity and resilience in protesting the Consider Schulman’s scepticism about the ability it, leaves its discriminatory elements in place. offending policy or person, whether by taking over of the police to respond appropriately to domestic Schulman several times anticipates that she a dean’s office, organizing a boycott campaign or and other conflict. This view may arise in part out of will be accused of “blaming the victim.” This is even launching a hunger strike. Schulman’s analy- Schulman’s experience coming of age in 1980s New often the result of “supremacist” thinking, which sis can explain this paradox, insofar as it character- York. The police were then so prejudiced against Schulman never engages in. But there are times izes victimhood as a power status, one that grants gays and lesbians that Schulman and its occupants moral energy and every gay person she knew took it for Schulman’s activism on feminist and authority. granted that calling the police after a Perhaps the most memorable crime had occurred was pointless. LGBT issues lends unique authority aspect of Schulman’s fearless and Given this background, it is not brilliant book is the way it drains crazy for Schulman to be wary of to her skepticism toward false victimology of this authority. One the legal system. But not expecting puts down Conflict Is Not Abusewith justice from the police hardly seems victimhood. a sense of being liberated from the an adequate response to the sys- lure of false victimhood. One reason temic injustice she describes. The report she cites when she does seem to misallocate blame for a Schulman is able to achieve this exhilarating effect regarding the arrest of LGBT survivors of domes- dispute. It is one thing to say that two parties can is because she rejects the idea that we must be tic abuse recommends training police to assess both contribute to a dysfunctional relationship. It is victims in order to warrant help and concern. “The LGBT partner violence better. This seems more another thing to say one of them should be blamed current paradigm is encouraging all of us to think reasonable than giving up in advance on the pos- for the other’s actions. Schulman sometimes seems we are in abusive relationships,” Schulman quotes sibility of a legal system that addresses the needs of to blur the two, as when she describes a woman a social worker as saying. “And if you are not in an LGBT people and other minorities. Paradoxically, named Mary who for years was cruel to her lesbian abusive relationship, you don’t deserve help. Being although Schulman’s analysis is animated by con- partner. Eventually the partner threw an object ‘abused’ is what makes you ‘eligible.’ But everyone cern for disadvantaged groups, her recommenda- at Mary hard enough to break a bone. Schulman deserves help when they reach out for it.”

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 15 Country of Eternal Forgetting A masterful literary archivist explores a future unburdened by the past Donna Bailey Nurse

one of the greatest tragedies Nostalgia in recorded history. The M.G. Vassanji uprooting of ten million Doubleday Canada people from their homes, the 257 pages, hardcover loss of one million lives, rape ISBN 9780385667166 and abduction of thousands of women have all been swept under the carpet of s there any Canadian oblivion. writer who contemplates Ithe meaning of time with Vassanji’s novels drama- greater distinction and intellec- tize the multiplicity of voices tual grace than M.G. Vassanji? required to chronicle even Guided by nostalgia, instinct a partially true history. His and an accumulation of resid- memoirs, on the other hand, ual proofs—documents, diaries, find him literally doing the photos, furniture, shards of leg work, excavating objects memory—he reconstructs a cul- and anecdotes. Even a harsh tural history that is not merely memento of horrific Partition, past, but virtually extinct. From says Vassanji, is affirmation his earliest novels, he has exhib- of the Indian past; a pre- ited a preoccupation with the cious piece of the puzzle that notion of historical preserva- is himself. And Home Was tion. His book The Gunny Sack, Kariakoo: A Memoir of East which received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers stories of my forebears, and I stood at the Africa searches for such forgotten narratives in his Prize, features a hero who uses family heirlooms to threshold of becoming a man without history, native Tanzania. Through wide-ranging peregrina- resurrect the little known history of Indians in East rootless. And so origins and history became tions he uncovers clues of the African and Asian Africa. In The Book of Secrets, which earned Vassanji an obsession, both a curse and a thrilling call. past, although it is mostly European monuments, the first of his two Giller prizes, a retired history graveyards and buildings that survive. Vassanji is teacher in Dar es Salaam pieces together the colo- The book earned him a Governor General’s discouraged by the sight of Tanzania’s dwindling nial past of an Asian village in Kenya. Throughout award. Part travelogue, part memoir, it intimately Indian communities, on the wane since the African the novel, the teacher, Fernandes, repeatedly asks: maps Vassanji’s passionate encounter with the land country’s independence and the abandoned kha- “Does anybody care about history?” of his ancestors, beginning in January 1993, in the nos where they socialized and worshipped. Vassanji himself did not give the subject much wake of horrific communal violence. He finds an Vassanji’s anxieties are those of the perennial thought until he was far away from the community Indian people racing toward a wealthy, American- minority. In Tanzania he is an inconvenient Indian, where he grew up. Born in Kenya and raised in style future. Wandering from city to city, back resented by his African compatriots. In India he is Tanzania, Vassanji knew his Khoja Muslim fore- through time, he reimagines an ancient history a Khoja Muslim in a Hindu land wracked by com- bears had travelled from Gujarat, in India, to settle of repeated conquests and spiritual conversions. munal violence. In Canada he is the accomplished, in East Africa a hundred years earlier. But apart Yet he is unnerved by signs of forgetfulness in this favoured South Asian, but an outsider nonetheless. from the occasional reference to Bombay, that land with a Hindu majority. In Trivandrum, for Indian past received little mention in his home or in instance, where religious tolerance among Hindus, n his latest novel Vassanji continues his obses- the larger community. The family’s focus was on the Christians and Muslims has been the tradition, Ision with the missing past, but takes us in a new present and the future. It was only after attending no one seems to know anything about indigenous direction. The ironically titled Nostalgia projects us MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, where he Muslim lore. In Gujarat, his ancestors’ native prov- into the future, speculating about what happens earned a PhD in nuclear physics, that he began to ince and Gandhi’s as well, conversation about the when people are determined to forget their pasts. consider his history. As he writes in A Place Within: “Father of the Nation” feels weirdly suppressed. What are the consequences, Vassanji asks, of a Rediscovering India: Most troubling, he sees little acknowledgement— collective absence of nostalgia? In this exceptional official or otherwise—of lives lost during Partition, sci-fi satire, characters march steadily forward with After a few years in North America, I came the violent rending of the country into Hindu India nary a backward glance. In the process they come upon the realization that that “ever-present,” and Muslim Pakistan at Independence. Vassanji to understand less and less about themselves and which had been mine, my story, had begun to quotes the novelist and editor Khushwant Singh: their responsibilities to one another. drift away towards the neglected and spurned The main action takes place in a Toronto of the We Indians and Pakistanis have chosen to not-too-distant future. Medical science has devel- Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An forget what we did to each other to gain our oped technology that allows human beings to live Anthology of Black Canadian Writing (McClelland freedom. We have no museums, no memori- forever. Doctors provide aging individuals with new and Stewart, 2006). als to commemorate what was undoubtedly faces and refurbished bodies, while a psychological

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada procedure rids them of personal histories that have Our protagonist’s days generally unfold peace- immortality on Earth, and young people—includ- become too long or complicated or unpleasant. fully in a sunlit community by the Humber River. ing Joanie—demonstrate against high unemploy- Their new biographies are posted online and their When he is not working he likes to play exhausting ment. What’s more, scores of young adults have old histories destroyed, leaving immortals with zero games of virtual cricket. And he is addicted to a been orphaned by parents whose new histories recollection of their previous lives. The operation is news network called XBN. His own immortal status eradicate all memory of having children. common in the prosperous North Atlantic region, and youthful appearance have won him (inevi- And yet these same immortals are obsessed where Toronto is located, but practically unheard tably) a beautiful partner, Joanie, young enough with childhood. Ethnicity notwithstanding, many of in the area south of the Long Border, a part of to possess her original body and mind. Even so, request biographies with childhoods set in the the world rife with poverty and violence and ruled Frank’s constant awareness of his actual age makes Midwest or the English countryside. It is an amus- by warlords. him amusingly insecure in the bedroom. And now ing idea—every Canadian with the same generic Our protagonist is Dr. Frank past—but also a disturbing analogy Sina, a specialist in the treatment for exchanging one’s heritage for that of Leaked Memory Syndrome, also Many request childhoods set of the dominant culture. known as nostalgia, in which scraps Delicate territory to be sure, and of memory from patients’ discarded in the Midwest or the English perhaps why Vassanji opts for sci-fi past seeps into their present lives. His and satire rather than strict realism. work also involves composing new countryside. It is an amusing, and In mixed company, however civilized, biographies, often for the rare refugee discussions about the place of race who makes it across the Long Border. disturbing, idea—every Canadian or heritage can sometimes go side- Frank enjoys his work although, like ways. Vassanji’s intentions are pure. Fernandes in The Book of Secrets, he with the same generic past. Altogether his oeuvre—ten works of sometimes asks himself: does his- fiction and three non-fiction books— tory really matter? His answer sounds reveals a writer firmly committed a little like rationalization: “In the cosmopolitan a new patient has Frank disturbed. Frank feels a to the ideal of brotherly love. That said, Nostalgia world that’s now evolving without deep memory, strange connection to Presley Smith, and a sense conveys his belief that kinship, community and a conflict is reduced. People—and nations—without of déjà vu. After Presley goes into hiding to escape knowledge of one’s roots are essential to life on this long, painful memories are free of guilt.” government officials, Frank becomes obsessed. The lonely planet. This entertaining novel opens in the vein of two meet up again on the website of a journalist With Nostalgia Vassanji has moved from his Conrad, alludes to Mary Shelley, and works in kidnapped by terrorists south of the border. community’s neglect of its history to the geopolitical aspects of The Bourne Identity and the drama of In Nostalgia’s Canada, people forget where they consequences of forgetting the past. The novel is a Patty Hearst. Who knew Vassanji could be this much come from. Collectively as well, they forget their brilliant success, although I am curious to see how fun? Creepy but delightful is his delineation of med- unsavoury political connections to the impover- it will be received by the reading public. Despite his ical advances that lie in the realm of the possible, if ished south, although occasionally they air-drop playful demeanour, Vassanji crushes Canadians’ per- not the probable, such as the technology predicted care packages behind the Long Border or send ception of themselves as a generous, tolerant nation. for decades that could make life last forever, per- in volunteers. Erasing the inconvenient past may This is probably not the best moment in time to call sonal computers that can read your mind and the sound like a definition of Utopia, but not everyone a brown man a radical; let’s just say this may be the erasure of memory as a treatment for depression. is pleased. A number of religious orders protest most radical Canadian novel I have ever read.

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October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 17 Phantom of the Rink Arena architecture shaped hockey, but will the new generation of entertainment multiplexes diminish the game? Stephen Smith

hat took us so long to get Architecture on Ice: Waround to hockey? If we hesi- A History of the Hockey Arena tated, as a people, to pick up sticks Howard Shubert and put them to use chasing pucks, McGill-Queen’s University Press we did have a crowded winter of pas- 320 pages, hardcover times to beguile us. We are back in ISBN 9780773548138 the middle of the 19th century here, wherein Canadians found much of their wintry delight in snowshoeing ard to say just when and tobogganing. If it was the ice they the ghosts got into the were headed for, then curling was HMontreal Forum. We know the thing, or pleasure skating. People that they were definitely ensconced in were doing a lot of that in the 19th the rafters of that bygone rink by 1989, century, and much of the time they if only because the upstart Calgary were in masquerade costume, with a Flames, in town that spring to chal- band playing nearby. lenge the Canadiens for the Stanley Yet when you look back, it is dif- Cup, are on the record talking about ficult to conceive of a time when having to conquer them. The Flames’ 20-year-old story that Howard Shubert is telling in his learned hockey was not pre-eminent in Canadian life. dynamo Theo Fleury, for instance: “I’ll bet if you and entertaining new book, Architecture on Ice: A The game (we have come to feel) is both a natural sat there with all the lights off, when it was quiet, History of the Hockey Arena. resource and a proprietary technology of ours. The you’d see the ghosts skating,” he said. “Morenz, The You would think that somebody would have freedom and purity of the outdoor, natural rink is Rocket. I don’t really believe in ghosts. But in your bored into the vernacular of rinks and arenas something that we persistently idealize, and it has mind, I bet they’d be there.” before. For structures that are as distinctive in the a history all of its own that continues to feed the Easy to dismiss the musings of a young rookie historical Canadian landscape as sod huts or CP emotional relationship that Canadians have with before a big game—especially when (awkwardly hotels, they dwell in a curiously neglected field. hockey even as the professional game tests our enough) Maurice Richard still, at that point, had Harold Kalman’s two-volume History of Canadian patience. eleven years of corporeal life left to live. Architecture, for example, all but passes them by. Back in those early 19th-century days, though, But since Fleury is not the first to have evoked Meanwhile, on the hockey shelf, many of the hist- hockey was an outsiders’ game, and even a blight. the spirits aloft in old hockey arenas (even as he ories of the game have touched on the develop- Hockeyists, when they showed up on your pond, denies them), let’s stick with the ectoplasm for a ment of hockey’s arenas—Michael McKinley’s came in hordes, they were loud and heedless, moment. To speak of a hockey arena’s ghosts—or, Putting a Roof on Winter: Hockey’s Rise from Sport knocked you down. As Shubert notes, polite skating for that matter, to talk about the game as religion, to Spectacle comes to mind, and Bill Fitsell’s How society tended to line up at this time more or less played out in “cathedrals”—may be fanciful, but Hockey Happened: Pictorial History of the Origins with the opinion expressed by an English writer in that does not mean that it is without meaning. of Canada’s National Winter Game. In 2005, hockey London Society magazine circa 1862. Hockey, he If the spirit of Howie Morenz did ascend after he historian Martin Harris published a helpful regional declared, died of a broken hockey heart in 1937, it was mixed catalogue, Homes of British Ice Hockey. Shubert’s is with the clouds of collective memory and nostalgia a cultural study, rich in scope, rewarding in its ought to be sternly forbidden, as it is not only that had already been accumulating under the details, which goes well beyond any of those. annoying (to leisurely skaters on a pond) but Forum roof over the years. That is what we are talk- Given the grip that the game has had on dangerous … It is more than annoying to have ing about here, I think: the connections we make Canadian culture for nearly 200 years, it is surpris- the graceful evolutions of a charming quadrille with venues where we gather as communities, ing that there is such a blank in the literature to be broken up by the interruptions of a disorderly where strong feelings take hold and activate our filled. Shubert, who is an architectural historian mob, armed with sticks and charging through own memories of playing the game, or watching and former curator at the Canadian Centre for the circle of skaters and spectators to the our kids play, of the rituals of taping our sticks and Architecture in Montreal, does it in style. Teeming imminent danger of all. I should be truly glad tying our skates, of the smell of Zamboni exhaust, of with illustrations, this is a thorough and broadly to see the police interfere whenever hockey is what it is to skate out on pristine ice after the flood. thoughtful chronicle not simply of design and commenced. That emotional relationship is a big piece of the development, but also of the social and cultural spaces that ice-houses occupy in our hearts and on Hockey has gone on, of course, offending its Stephen Smith is the author of Puckstruck: our streets. It is a bit of a ghost story, come to think critics and detractors, and mostly it has done so Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada’s of it. A trigger warning may be in order: if you are without the interference of the police. That is not Hockey Obsession (Greystone Books, 2014). anything like a hockey purist, or suffer from acute to say that the game did not face an array of other He also steers a blog, at www.puckstruck.com, sentimentality, Shubert’s account does get a little existential threats in its early days. There were the that keeps an eye on hockey history, literature and scary toward the end. struggles over amateurism, and over whose rules culture. should prevail. Warm winters threatened early pro-

18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada fessional hockey, and so did fires, which burned And so here we are: in the early years of the new down its arenas with alarming frequency. century, hockey is just another tenant in the arenas Hockey leagues were expensive to sustain, it used to own. Which, of course, are not arenas and often tottered under financial strains in those any more. Hockey’s professionals ply their trade in earliest days as the 19th century turned over. War Centers now, and Places, with corporations lining did not help—with it always came the questions of up to pay millions of dollars for the privilege of whether young men should be doing their patriotic naming them, which is how we end up in buildings duty at the front rather than idling away on ice try- called Pepsi and Bell and Canadian Tire. Some ing to chase a puck into a net. NHL venues still may call themselves Arenas, but Canada’s first skating rinks were mostly com- be careful—they are lying to you. mandeered spaces, frozen floors of buildings originally designed and built for other, practical s this a time to bemoan what has been lost, then purposes: barns and warehouses, armouries and Ito keen for the past? If you are a fervent fan of drill halls. Early hockey remained mostly out- the New York Islanders, the answer might be yes. doors—the first organized game was played in Last season was the team’s first in the Brooklyn’s Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink in March 1875. Barclays Center following a move from its long- The venue shaped the game from the start. The time Long Island home at the Nassau Veterans dimensions of the ice they played on that day— Memorial Coliseum. Before the last game had been 80 feet by 204 feet—set the standard for the surface played at the new facility in the spring, rumours used by the NHL to this day. To save the spectators were rife that the team was trying to escape its lease and the windows, a puck was used that day for the and leave the fan-unfriendly sightlines and wander first time, in place of a rubber ball. Does it surprise elsewhere in search of a new new home, maybe in anyone that the proceedings ended with a fight? Queens or even back on Long Island. The first purpose-built hockey rink in the country It is enough to break your heart, as a hockey fan. was Montreal’s Westmount Arena, which opened in We are a hardened bunch now, though, aren’t we, 1898. Hockey was growing in popularity, and the after all that we have seen? We are past worrying old buildings were not big enough to accommo- that our national winter pastime has been reduced date the crowds that wanted in. Take a note of the by the corporatization of the game, or that our "[Reddy] writes about nomenclature, if you will: the Westmount was an affection for it, and our memories, might be at risk. arena rather than a rink. Hockey was not just a Aren’t we? the immigrant game you played with your friends any longer; it If Howard Shubert has strong feelings on any was spectacle now, and increasingly builders and of this, he does not share them—or maybe he feels experience with an owners and impresarios were thinking about ways that is beyond his brief. He does offer a word of to attract spectators and—all importantly—to con- … solace? Religion, he points out, is in decline, unpretentious vince them to spend their money. too, replaced by a deeper interest in wealth and In tracing this evolution, Architecture on Ice consumption. You see churches being deconse- intelligence that ranges across the map, to early English rinks with crated and repurposed all the time, so … not … to their artificial ice, and (at length) across the United … worry. captures both the States. Shubert lingers on the building boom south I had some of these questions in mind one of the border in the early years of the 20th century, midweek afternoon during September’s World anguish and wild turning a fine, fascinating focus to what he calls the Cup of Hockey as I went down to watch some of humour of it." dialogue between sport and architecture without the hockey at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. The which professional hockey never would have been weather was not really in the mood, and the city able to take root in New York and Chicago, let alone still had most of its downtown attention fixed on -Elisabeth Harvor (later on) Anaheim and Columbus. Along the way, baseball’s Blue Jays and their run for the playoffs. he talks about urban revitalization and the role of Still, Finland was playing Russia with a place in public financing of private arenas; celebrates the the tournament’s semi-finals at stake, so I bought expressive, even poetic form of several West Coast a ticket. I was on my own, which I did not mind, U.S. arenas that went up in the 1960s; visits with since I had work to do, involving careful watching the beloved American tradition of tailgate par- of just how we were inhabiting that air-conditioned ties; pauses to consider the effect The Beatles had space. on audiences; and thinks about Canadianness and My report: Top 40 tunes blasting at seat-shaking Weather Permitting & Jumbotrons and cheerleaders on skates. volume still are not an upgrade on the old organ. He sounds a few notes of complaint along the And with the lights so bright—for TV—what Other Stories way. There is an air of mild disappointment that phantoms could hope to haunt in such a glare? It persists throughout the book: if only hockey’s was exhausting, with so much corporate concern arenas had been designed with a little flair. Sports focused on every one of us in the building. Are you by Pratap Reddy architecture in North America, he laments, tends sufficiently entertained, need another beer? It was toward the safe, the banal. Take Montreal’s Forum: difficult, too, to remember not to watch the colos- a shrine it may have been, site of many extraordin- sal screen above the ice as the real, live hockey ISBN:9781771830560 ary events during its 72-year history, but none of swirled five rows in front of me. Commodified rel- them was inspired by the building’s architecture, ics were available in the concourse: “Own a piece which was “never more than ordinary.” of history,” the announcer commanded—vials of Paperback Hold on, though: Shubert has worse tidings. melted World Cup ice were on sale, he wanted us Hockey got bigger in the late 1960s, which is to to know, a huckster of holy water. $20.00 say that the NHL expanded, and for all the virtues It was a good game. I will not say that I was of that—new markets and new fans—it was the actively searching the upper reaches of that non- beginning of the end for hockey’s arenas. We are in arena for anything other than the score. On that 200pp the age now of what Shubert dubs the corporate-­ day, as the Russians pressed their advantage and entertainment complex. The hockey arena has went on beating the Finns, whatever ghosts usu- not vanished so much as it has been swallowed, ally reside in the rafters at the ACC seemed to Spring 2016 “reduced to a space” whose identity no single have left the building. I do not know whether it is a attraction can be allowed to define. What owners permanent situation, but be advised that if you are want now are “generic, shape-shifting, ‘no places,’” headed there anytime soon, it might be a good idea www.guernicaeditions.com Shubert writes, hubs for development. to bring your own, just in case.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 19 2016 speakers and events include:

Hon. Lena Daniel MacIvor El Jones Alexander MacLeod Metlege Diab

Can the Liberal Arts Books That Spur Post-Truth Politics Save Society? Nta’tugwaqanminen Saturday, October 29, 4pm Our Story: Evolution of the O’Regan Hall, Halifax Central Library Friday, October 28, 7pm Gespege’wa’gi Mi’gmaq King’s College Prince Hall, 6350 Coburg Rd. Fact-based politicking is dead. Donald Sunday, October 30, 9:30am Trump’s presidential bid has all but ce- As the cost of living soars and our arts Pavia, Halifax Central Library and culture sector continues to stagnate, mented this fact. Relying on dubious facts more and more young people choose their The Mi’gmaq of the Gaspé Peninsula have and emotional button pushing, his cam- further education based on its perceived occupied this land since time immemo- paign has evolved from an unsettling joke usefulness, driving them from the “imprac- rial. Prior to Canada’s settlement, they to a strong candidacy. Similarly distressing tical” liberal arts even though studies con- were its sole inhabitants. This book by patterns are emerging here. Spur asks: Why tinue to show minimal fi nancial gain from Gespe’gewa’gi Mi’gmawei Mawiomi, with are we so angry? When did experts become eschewing them. Spur asks: What is the val- a foreword by Satsan (Herb George), pro- untrustworthy? And what is the future for ue of a liberal arts education? Do the liberal vides evidence for their ancient inhabitancy political and civic participation in Canada? arts and the sciences interact meaningfully, through both historical research and the and does their separation negatively a ect narrative history passed on for generations either fi eld? by Mi’gmaq elders.

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20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Between Words Anne Carson’s new book-without-a-spine, and the spiritual experience of centrelessness Sonnet L’Abbé

Float Anne Carson McClelland and Stewart 272 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771018435

ometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page,” writes Anne “SCarson, in her new poetry collection, Float. “It is a page with ‘Essay on Translation’ at the top and … by the end there is not much left but a few flakes of language roaming near the margins.” Like the quick-witted but vulnerable kid who will joke at her own expense before you point out her flaws, Carson seems to want to tell us, before we point it out, that she knows that even she has habits. Carson, credited with having radically advanced the practice of contemporary poetry in English, Reading is freefall, Float tells us (Image courtesy of Quinn Dombrowski, from Flickr; converted to greyscale) earned a worldwide readership with genre-defying work described as “unclassifiable.” You would physical form was a powerful material rendering of and naming that is untranslatability, a space some think her almost incapable of producing anything Carson’s “piecing together” of her grief. It was such might call godly. Carson, compelled to evoke what one could call formulaic. But it has been 25 years a successful translation of poetic theme into aes- untranslatability is, reaches for it by translating a since Glass, Irony and God, and more than 15 since thetic object that when I see Carson playing with lyric poem by Ibykos, “over and over again, using Daphne Merkin called The Beauty of the Husband book form again, it is the first thing I am interested the wrong words.” “thrillingly new.” Float is as erudite, and beautiful, in. Float is a “collection of twenty-two chapbooks In “Cassandra Float Can,” Carson considers the as the books that propelled Carson into the liter- whose order is unfixed and whose topics are vari- endless folds of temporality embodied in proph- ary stratosphere, but the bold choices that set her ous” stacked inside a stiff, clear, plastic sleeve. ecy. She explains that it was when approaching apart—essays bringing Greek epic poetry and myth- We are told: “Reading can be freefall.” I notice the untranslatability of Cassandra’s scream in ology into conversation the carefully curated Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, uttered in syllables of with 20th-century art, Translation, for Carson, colours of the book- Greek gibberish, that she first noticed the sensation poems that use mod- lets: mainly navy, but of “veils flying up … offside my vision.” To query ernist avant-garde for- moves through, and also ice-blue, a pale the place where the as-yet-untranslated dwells, she mal play to exploit the blue-green and sea- uses the word “float”: How can it float and how can resonances of Sapphic gives us a degree foam green. A Pantone it? asks Carson, channelling Gertrude Stein. She and other Greek poetic poem, ranging from sea compares etymology to an incision into a word, fragments, or flaunt- of access to, that to sky. Is it hydrosphere similar to the “anarchitecture” of artist Gordon ingly anachronistic or atmosphere? What Matta-Clark, who cut elliptical holes into build- personifications of space between chaos composed randomness ings (or to John Cage’s composition of silences), Classical gods driving and naming that is are we floating in? remarking: “etymologies make cuts that show being Buicks or complain- The weightier essays as it floats inside things and how it floats and how ing to their therapists, untranslatability, a space provide clues to Car­ can it.” for example—show up son’s theme, which is, In “Contempts,” the obsession of male gods, pro- again in this collection some might call godly. basically, the spiritual tagonists and movie producers with women who as reliable, signature experience of appre- will not allow themselves to be known parallels moves. Still way out there compared to most lyric hending the realm, perhaps the Real, somewhere Carson’s own fascination with all that eludes lan- poetry, but out there in a way we are now familiar between chaos and language. “There is something guage. For Carson, it is a kind of triumph of Being with, Float is classic Anne Carson. maddeningly attractive about the untranslat- itself when form and boundlessness, presence and When New Directions published Nox, an epi- able,” Carson writes in “Variations on The Right complete withheldness, present themselves simul- taph to Carson’s dead brother, as one long sheet, to Remain Silent.” Joan of Arc’s interrogators went taneously, as “a block,” for aesthetic appreciation. folded concertina-style, in a box-shaped cover that after it when they pressed Joan to explain the voices Brigitte Bardot’s performance in a Jean-Luc Godard opened up like a little memory chest, that book’s in her head. Frances Bacon honours it when he film is such a triumph, Carson declares. “I cannot goes after “the scream more than the horror” in analyze this,” she writes, and one hears it as the Sonnet L’Abbé is a poet and professor. She is at work the silent medium of paint. Some say Holderlin’s highest note of praise. on a book called Sonnet’s Shakespeare, an erasure- madness was evidenced by his obsessive, overly In the most personal chapbook, “Uncle Falling,” by-crowding, in which she overwrites or “colonizes” literal pursuit of the untranslatable in Sophocles. Carson-as-lecturer-accompanied-by-chorus nar- all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. She lives on Translation, for Carson, moves through, and gives rates one portrait of her great-uncle Harry, who Vancouver Island. us a degree of access to, that space between chaos lived alone, near a lake, in northern Ontario, and

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 21 another of her father, with whom she “never had a conversation … in [her] life.” The drama is a medita- tion on how rarely in others we glimpse “‘that res- ervoir of ease and indeterminacy that is in us and is our soul,’” on “falling” into dementia (as both uncle and father did at the end of their lives), and on the tenuousness of sense:

what a terrifically perilous activity it is, this activity of linking together all the threads of human sin that go into making what we call sense, what we call reasoning, an argument, For L.K. a conversation. How light, how loose, how My mind is running unprepared and unpreparable is the web of on pure grief and pure love, I want you connections between any thought and any thought. to know this. Don Coles, Forests of the Medieval World “Carson has always been a writer in the Romantic The ground was cracked, saline, and gold tradition of the sublime,” James Pollock wrote in a review of Decreation. In that book, says Pollock, The rain had corroded your face like stone Carson’s main object was the “displacement of the Our anxieties were matched, reader’s self,” a moment of disappearance when the teller “get[s] herself out of the way in order but still I told you there was safety in the night to arrive at God.” In Float, Carson’s fascination Still I told you not every man is less the displacement of self from the centre who climbs temple steps of a work and more the displacement of centres of goes begging work entirely. This time, instead of disappearing a stable teller, Carson disappears the stable spine of the book. Carson was trained “to strive for exact- “But Janos!” You cried ness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us.” She “We have both seen the blade was trained to think in terms of what Gilles Deleuze dangle above the feline and Félix Guattari called “the classical book,” with its “pivotal spine and surrounding leaves,” where Have both seen the cruel, the ill, the blind “binary logic is the spiritual reality.” Carson removes the spine from her book not (simply) as Marxist Have both seen our fathers join armies intellectual praxis but to evoke the spiritual reality in order to escape famine of the centrelessness that knowledge-as-language And our wives, dear Janos! cannot enter. Another way Carson gets to this real- ity, we learn in “Merry Xmas from Hegel,” is to go Bedridden with other lovers and stand outside in the snow with a bunch of trees. God! God is not of this land!” Many of Float’s shorter poems left little impres- sion on me. Sometimes the conceit of indetermin- acy felt like a cop-out, a way to frame a booklet We walked on the great plain at dusk stack that simply brings Carson’s odds and ends together. Carson’s translations of Émile Nelligan, The fields were black, the sky white, surprisingly faithful and conventional, yet studded but you could derive no meaning from this with a couple of sparks of unicorn light, however, are a flash of dark Canadiana that redeems the You told me every way in which the world would end, relentlessly random vibe that sometimes over- then you stormed off into the enveloping night, powers the less substantial texts of this collection. while beneath our feet, and night-hidden: Carson’s best works have a raw quality, not because their pages radiate around a spine but The cracked saline soil, because in them her postmodern architectures of and little tufts of green reason are blown through with fleshly emotion: sexual longing and power in Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband, grief in Nox. To talk Ian Angus MacLean about this book, I look for a centre; there is no main body to root for. I grasp at an organizing principle; without a spine to enforce a nice linear reading experience, my sense of order floats. (“Reading can be freefall.”) What’s first? What’s last? The world trains me to want things carved in stone. Float’s Ian Angus MacLean is an emerging Canadian writer. His most recent work is forthcoming in “binding” is clear plastic: in place of a cover by which the Rose Red Review. He is currently reading Bite Down Little Whisper by Don Domanski to judge, Carson offers only transparency. I look to and Landscape with Yellow Birds by José Ángel Valente. the title, and am thrown a “float.” Now I know: I am at sea, between languages, between words. No mat- ter how I clutch at a word, it will move with me. If I try to find stable ground in the word’s meaning, a hole will appear in it, more sea inside. The sea itself is untranslatable; Carson once calls it a thinkable “residue” that “doesn’t exist.” I find it somewhat cold. Carson calls it refreshing. In Float, Anne Carson uses her formidable, familiar powers to immerse us in its waves.

22 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada The Audacity (and Idiocy) of Hope Political memoir, like history, is written by the victor. Gloriously, not this one. Jane Farrow

Disillusioned Working Young People The Candidate: TCHC Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail UPPER Old People Noah Richler BENNETT East Doubleday CPC COUNTRY 384 pages, hardcover OLIVERLAND ISIL-Anxious ISBN 9780385687270 Forest Hill Jews ISLE OF hat was Noah Richler thinking, MACDOUGALL Locally running for the federal NDP in the Disinterested MID BENNETT COUNTRY/Rich Old People WToronto-St Paul’s riding, an affluent Condo Dwellers Liberal stronghold held by Carolyn Bennett for the past 18 years? Richler is a confident and capable Dog Walkers for Bennett LOWER radio producer, journalist and writer (although Pierre Trudeau’s BENNETT someone should permanently disable his comma Jamaica COUNTRY key, forcing him to write tighter sentences). And as he himself observes, writers are not a natural fit Euro Cookie Roscoe Contractors Joe Mihevc AvenueTerritory West Liberals for politics because they think for themselves and in Big Houses tend to shoot from the hip. Getting elected involves NDP NOAHLAND Worried About a completely different set of skills from floating TCHC Trains policy ideas and offering unsolicited commentary Old People West on the political flap du jour. Even the people who Artists find Richler’s Oxford-educated, John Donne–­ for Deficits LIBERAL quoting ways endearing cautioned him. “Don’t be NDP Poor People FREELAND too clever … You use far too many words when you CASHLAND Worried About speak,” intoned Margaret Atwood at dim sum after Trains he announced his candidacy. So why did he do it? Why does anyone think they can raise a quick $50,000, round up 200 volunteers and run a candidacy up the flag pole? Writerly types A candidate cannot help formulating mental maps like this one, while out canvassing. generally disdain the jejune impulse to “make a dif- (Image from Noah Richler’s The Candidate, courtesy of the author and Penguin Random House Canada) ference,” preferring the liberating effects of the arm- chair and curmudgeon-strength espresso. But as entitlement. He speaks with his mother, who gives than that, Noah and I seemed to face the same the winds of change gathered strength in the spring her blessing to his run, and asks, “Did you tell them challenges: raising money, preparing for debates of 2015, anything seemed possible. And Richler got what ministry you’d like?” Fisheries and Oceans, in and interviews, figuring out how to communicate swept up in it. case you are curious. Noah explains he has spent what is different about your policies and approach, Like millions of Canadians, Richler says, he some time in Nova Scotia, been out on a lobster sparkling while taking out your garbage. Politics is dreamed of a return to form for Canada as a kinder, boat with a local, and, “I figured Heritage was hard work, you discover—humbling and inspiring. less divisive domestic and international presence. taken—and besides, too predictable a fit.” Audacity This coincides with the bleak, cruel and clarifying His father, Mordecai, was a lifelong Liberal, which of hope or a sense of entitlement—you be the judge. realization that you do not have the right timing or, would have made fundraising a breeze, but the son Being Noah Richler, he may also have had an worse, the right stuff. had come to loathe the Grits as interested only in inkling that if he did not have an office in the Centre Richler chose the NDP for its youthful diversity power and “hopelessly and chronically entitled.” Block by November 2015, this whole election caper and progressive bent, combined with the polit- He writes of being disgusted by the party’s cal- would be a book in the making. Judging from the ical experience of leader Thomas Mulcair. He felt culated handling of Bill C-51, its dalliance with level of detail and the conversations he had time Canada needed a third option, and the numbers floor-­crossing Conservative member of Parliament to capture verbatim along the campaign trail, that pitch was tantalizing—as the NDP framed it, the Eve Adams and its acceptance of G20 mass arrest could not have been far from his mind. party only needed to win in 64 more ridings to get overseer and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, But even without a fallback plan, the idea of a majority. Enter a few life-long campaigners and all of which he sees as evidence of this power-mad getting up from the armchair is seductive. It was perennial misfits and the Bad News Bears secret for me, when I ran for Toronto City Council in sauce, and Richler was fully engaged. “You could Jane Farrow is co-author of the Canadian edition 2014 against an entrenched incumbent and got see right away we had only a slim chance in hell of The Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of trounced in the process. I’d helped on a few prov- of winning anything, but this was the team of my Curious Information (Knopf), and Wanted Words incial and federal campaigns over the years, both choosing and I loved them already,” he writes. 1 and 2 (Stoddard). A journalist and former produ- Liberal and NDP, and at a point, you get tired of Off he goes, down the rabbit hole of door knock- cer for CBC Radio, she was the founding director of talking. So I threw my hat in the municipal ring. As ing, burger flipping, donor meet-and-greets, pub Jane’s Walk, a global movement that celebrates Jane an independent I did not have to squirm to fit into nights, debates and video making. He frets about Jacobs’s ideas. someone else’s policies and approaches, but other the ethics of putting a sign on the lawn of a man with

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 23 Down Syndrome (“Am I being patronizing? Is it not his choice?”). He writes about canvassing in high- rise hallways; the door opens and “a wall of dead, used air comes at you in all its fetid, ­de‑­oxygenated Hunters and Foragers saturation … These apartments smell of loneli- ness, but their residents open their front doors and My mind is running treat us with grace.” I, too, can attest to the sur- on pure grief and pure love, I want you real experience of meeting Canadians who speak to know this. seven ­languages, live with their extended family in Don Coles, Forests of the Medieval World cramped quarters, and are raising precocious chil- dren who hang at the doorstep and announce their Spin, spin, spin. How we used to laugh, our Sunday dresses wish to become doctors or MPs. As Richler writes, billowing. Laugh and laugh until the summer sky disappeared, “the happiness is infectious,” and canvassing brings revealing what was before anything was. you back to the reason you got into this in the first place. To both his credit and ultimate downfall, Richler Then as we grew the laughter disappeared, and too the sweet grass, embraces the notion that politics is about ideas, the outsmarting hare, the fertile rains, the feeding lakes and forests, the thrust and parry of democratic deliberation: leaving us weak and the weakest vulnerable “I believed that candidates had their own thought- ful contributions to make, beyond being simple to wander into the city snares and easy fixes, already invisible party pushers at the door.” He struggles to toe the to most eyes but not to those of the men, still boys at heart, party line: snakes and snails and puppy dog tails,

Things I said at the door that I did not alto- the street corner purveyors of little white lies and retold histories. gether believe: Our Sunday best soon torn into shrouds for shallow graves. • That we were in a recession Spin, spin, spin. How they howled the night into laugher, • That we should categorically pull out of the fight against ISIL • That we need to fully restore postal pissing themselves at the ease of the chase before pivoting service on their boot heels to stagger back to the city haunts and sirens, • That we did not need to cancel the exist- dragging one another by the belt loops into morning. ing child benefit Dean Steadman His campaign manager, the legendary Toronto- Danforth organizer Janet Solberg, Stephen Lewis’s sister, is a steadying hand as Richler faces the real- Dean Steadman’s poetry has been published in journals and e-zines, as well as in the anthol- ity of being a party candidate: follow orders, salute ogy Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry, edited by Susan McMaster (Scrivener Press, 2010). He is the leader, and try not to say anything controversial the author of two chapbooks: Portrait w/tulips (Leaf Editions, 2013) and Worm’s Saving Day on Facebook or Twitter. You can see where this is (AngelHousePress, 2015). He was a finalist in the 2011 Ottawa Book Awards for their blue going, going, gone. drowning (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). His second poetry collection, Après Satie — For Two Most books about elections are written by the and Four Hands, was published by Brick Books in spring 2016. He is currently reading Yann strategy folks or journos who worked the cam- Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal and Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves. paigns, the Tom Flanagans, John Duffys, Susan Delacourts and John Laschingers. They tell a com- pelling story, about the pugilism, the smoke-filled back rooms, the sense of destiny. But a book like Richler’s is important for the details it shares about not having the right stuff, for the glimpse of con- temporary party politics—central control, toadyism and all—seen with an insouciant freshness. NDP Coming up in the LRC supporters watched their party let the Liberals take page after page from their progressive playbook in the last election: reintroducing the long-form cen- sus, running deficits, meeting with the premiers, introducing child care and affordable housing. Should Fort Mac What Harper Richler pulls back the curtain on how some of that played out for the candidates. still exist? accomplished A few days after the “devastation,” Richler sits down with Davenport’s ousted NDP MP, Andrew Nancy Macdonald Paul Wells Cash, to hash out the agony of forgetting to win. “There’s a slightly out-of-body sensation to being walloped as we had been, and the two of us were like a couple of rehab vets languishing in the ano- Queer Cities Sexual assault nymity of a city knowing nothing of our pain,” he Amy Lavender Harris writes. “We talked futures, the TPP [Trans-Pacific memoirs Partnership], the arts. ‘They made the better offer,’ Sarah Liss Andrew said.” This book would never have been published without a marquee name on the cover, Remember and it will not be the last of its kind. But it is Noah’s gonzo candour that makes this guided tour of the MuchMusic? Foreign policy 180˚ loathsome political sausage factory a worthy read. No matter what the motivation, or how long the Andrea Warner David Malone odds, democracy depends on us deluded, deter- mined malcontents to get out there every four years and hit the hustings.

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours) by Harold R. Johnson

In Firewater, Harold Johnson—Cree trapper and Crown Prosecutor—rejects the racist “lazy, drunken Indian” stereotype and puts drink itself on trial. With powerful testimonials from Richard Van Camp and Tracey Lindberg.

“Johnson exposes the truth about alcohol, but he also brings solutions. I hope Firewater reaches others the way it reached me.” Mike Scott, foster care survivor and creator of Sober is Sexi

OctoberLRC FIREWATER 2016 ad U of R Press.indd 1 reviewcanada.ca 2016-09-12 3:04 25PM MEMOIR Whiteout Why do writers who can invent universes and entire species have so much trouble creating black characters? Andray Domise

round 30 years ago, as a weird, shy moning new peoples and species from the ether—it a spike in characters written as people of colour). kid living in a Jamaican household in seems especially insulting that people of colour Five years ago, Young Adult author Kate Hart stud- AMalton, Ontario, I discovered fantasy and can hardly be said to exist. Relegated to occasional ied YA book covers, and she was given pause at the science fiction. It started as a mild compulsion, the cameos—if that—we are rarely ever included in the results. Ninety percent of the covers featured white moment I opened the Chronicles of Narnia boxed main cast, and almost never the main protagonists. characters, and less than five percent of characters set on Christmas morning. A couple of years later, Across planets, galaxies, parallel worlds and dysto- across hundreds of book covers were black, Asian I picked up R.A. Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard at pian futures, pale eyes and silky hair are as com- or of Latin descent. a moving sale, and a full-blown addiction was mon as pluck, wit and magical relics. But my broad In other creative industries, notably film and born. My mother curated my habit carefully, and nose, mahogany skin and kinky hair are the rarest television, better representation seems to be on the before long the WHSmith staff knew her by name. of commodities. increase. It is profitable business, after all. The most To this day, even in the age of iPads and Kindles, In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the Young diverse movies and TV shows are consistently the I walk around with a miniature stack of books in Adult genre was growing at an explosive rate, most successful in box office returns and viewer hand. I am 36 years old, and I still read Dungeons its fantasy and sci-fi branches were still a niche ratings. (Consider summer blockbusters such as & Dragons novels late into the night, as though category for geeks, which meant open-carrying The Avengers, or TV shows such as Black-ish and I have nowhere to be in the morning. I read books my D&D books would get me pushed into a mud Brooklyn Nine-Nine.) Casting film and television for adults, books for teenagers and productions is difficult work; there books for children as old as I was is writing a character, and then the first time I wore an unzipped As much as Stephen King’s style and weeks, or more, to get the right sleeping bag as a cape, searching actor for the part. Literature, on for the entrance to Narnia in my pacing have evolved over the decades, his the other hand, is born entirely out bedroom closet. handling of black characters has not. of the imagination of authors. For Three decades since I began the author to imagine a believable reading fantasy and sci-fi, I have non-white character only takes come to another discovery. My bookshelf consists puddle. This was before Facebook groups and time and research—and an inkling of interest. almost entirely of books about white heroes and their YouTube channels. Even internet chat rooms were When I spoke with my friend Septembre white friends, written by white authors, and I cannot a long way off, so being a geek meant enjoying these Anderson, a Toronto-based writer and critic, she ignore this anymore. Shaggy-bearded Elminster, books on your own if you did not have a peer circle voiced a familiar frustration about the reading with his meerschaum pipe and a bottomless arse- with similarly odd preferences. Where I grew up, options available to her son. “He hasn’t actually nal of spells? White. Smart-mouthed Ender Wiggin, there were no book clubs and tabletop games to be read a novel with a non-white protagonist. He’s three steps ahead of every other character except played in the basement—only the wish lists I wrote read books with protagonists who were men, the ones who really mattered? Also white. Rand to my mother, in the hope that I’d wake up to a new women and queer protagonists, but never with al’Thor, Shea Ohmsford, Meg Wallace? White boy, book on the dresser when she worked the overnight anybody who wasn’t white,” she told me. She also white boy, white girl. Kvothe, Vin the Mistborn, shift. At the time, it was not in me to question why noted that the challenge is graver in Canada—that Dante Galand, Harry Dresden, and so on and so on. all of the heroes in the fantastical past, speculative despite what we may think of ourselves, “we aren’t What strikes me, all these years later, is that present and distant future were white. I was well that diverse.” the book industry has not budged in its apparent into adulthood before I discovered black writers in When the diversity question occasionally does inability, or outright refusal, to publish authors the fantasy and sci-fi genres—Octavia Butler, Nalo bubble to the surface in the mainstream literary or characters with whom I—and a slew of others Hopkinson, Minister Faust and others—and under- world, it is swiftly mishandled. Enter Lionel Shriver, like me—can remotely identify. In an increasingly stood it did not have to be this way. known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, diverse North American market, this is inexcusably I will never forget my confusion the first time who recently rankled the audience at the Brisbane bad business. And at this stage of my life, and given I saw the cover of Salvatore’s The Halfling’s Gem, in Writer’s Festival, and sparked a subsequent social my personal commitment to access and equity for 1990, where Drizzt Do’Urden—an ebony-skinned media firestorm. Wearing a sombrero, Shriver people of colour, I can no longer support it. A few drow elf with a shock of white hair—was depicted began her keynote speech, “Fiction and Identity weeks ago, I swore off reading for pleasure (my pro- as a shirtless blond man with tanned white skin. Politics,” by mocking the fecklessness of Bowdoin fessional life as a reviewer is another matter) books Even a black-skinned character from a made-up College administrators (two students at the college that are neither by nor about people of colour. race could not slip into the cover artist’s imagi- were disciplined for throwing a “tequila party,” I may never know how Patrick Rothfuss’s Kvothe nation. Twenty-five years later, the best-selling after a string of racist incidents—including the sail- the Kingkiller became Kote the innkeeper, or how American fantasy author Rick Riordan fumed over ing team’s 2015 “gangster party” and the lacrosse Brandon Sanderson intends to stitch together the European publishers allowing Kane Chronicles team’s 2014 Native-themed “Cracksgiving party”— Shattered Plains, but perhaps it was not for me to protagonist Carter Kane, a black youth, to be had strained campus relations). “The moral of the know anyway. whitewashed on the cover. It took an embarrassing sombrero scandals is clear,” Shriver said. “You’re In genres in which authors have stretched the social media backlash before Dutch and Russian not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s boundaries of human imagination—exploring the publishers produced new reprint artwork, with an what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other peo- frontiers of time, space and human relations, sum- unmistakably black Carter. ple’s shoes, and try on their hats.” These are not anomalies but an embarrassing But cultures are not hats to be worn, and one Andray Domise is a Toronto-based writer. A regular status quo. Since 1985, the Cooperative Children’s would think that a writer, of all people, would be contributor to Maclean’s and has previously writ- Book Center has tracked diversity in literature for more interested in the minds and bodies underneath ten columns for Vice, TVO, Toronto Life and The children and young adults. Between 1994 and 2015, those hats. There has never been a call for white Walrus. He reviews books and film for The Globe only ten percent of the books, on average, had authors to seek consent before writing characters of and Mail. multicultural content (although in 2015, there was colour. What we want—and it is ­surprising this has

26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada to be spelled out—is for writers to write believable characters: characters of various backgrounds, with their own wants, needs and motivations, characters who reflect the diverse and polyphonic world in which the authors themselves live. Writers step out of their personal experience as a matter of necessity. An author with no background in policing who wanted to write a detective story would do some research. That author might consult with current and retired police officers to learn the finer details. Anyone who failed to do this legwork would be criticized for gross inaccuracies, and would look rather silly lashing out at police officers for cur- tailing a novelist’s artistic vision. But Shriver some- how felt justified showing up to a writer’s festival with a sombrero and claims of persecution. Given the sharp criticism she took for her recent novel, The Mandibles (which, now famously, featured a demented, incontinent black woman being led on a leash by a white family), this speech comes across less as controversial truth than special pleading. For readers of colour, the choice should not be between seeing ourselves represented as crude facsimiles, or not at all. That is why I left behind Stephen King after the Dark Tower series con- cluded—because as much as King’s style and pac- ing have evolved over the decades, his handling of black characters has not. I have read most of Brandon Sanderson’s books (as well as listened to his brilliant podcast, Writing Excuses), but after realizing I could only name one black character in his inhumanly expansive and well-written bibliog- raphy, I had to give up his books too. I spoke with the Brooklyn-based urban fantasy author Daniel José Older about Shriver’s speech and her follow-up interview with Time magazine. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” she told Time. “There’s not a law that says there are only a hundred books a year that are going to be published, and we’re going to publish white people first, and—oops!—we ran out of slots, we’re not going to publish you because you’re from the wrong group.” Older was having none of it. “Every writer of colour I know has had that rejection that says ‘We already have the Asian book for this season, or this year,’” he said. Half the time, though not always, it is written by a white person, he notes. “I’ve had the same experience that most nerds of colour have SAVE THE DATE had, which is to realize the deep betrayal that your home genre has perpetrated against you. And to recognize that you’re either a devil, or a clown, or November 10 - 13 nonexistent in the books you love the best.” If the moral argument holds no weight, perhaps Our New Tribalism the market argument will. According to research The 21st century has brought unprecedented change when it comes to per- from the Pew Foundation, in 2013 college-educated sonal freedoms. What were once distinct, assigned roles are inhabited more black women were determined the most likely freely. Many greet this fl uidity—whether it be cultural, sexual or political— to read a book. Across other platforms—theatre with open arms. Others continue to seek fi rm identities, clinging now more attendance, television watching, video game than ever to the tribes they most identify with. What does this mean for our ­consumption—black people are in fact over- communities here in Canada, and for the world? indexed. Yet somehow, in a cultural landscape that produces massive social as well as financial rewards for diversity, writers and publishers can- not seem to expand their imagination enough to www.spurfestival.ca include the rest of us.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 27 Against the Clock Time travel’s improbable legacy in literature and science Robert Charles Wilson

Time Travel: A History James Gleick Pantheon Books 352 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780307908797

n June 2016, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Ihosted a conference on the subject of “Time in Cosmology.” One of the questions debated by the attendees was the reality of time. Do past, present and future exist in any meaningful sense? Any expectation that physicists might have a A journey to a Twenty-First-century future, as envisioned by French artist Jean-Marc Côté in 1900. comprehensive answer to that venerable ques- tion would not have survived exposure to even a literalizing the metaphor of time as space. Wells logical implications. If I murder my grandfather, do single seminar. “If I bang my head against the wall,” imagined time as a physical dimension like length I still exist? If I kill a butterfly in the Jurassic era, will physicist Avshalom Elitzur told journalist Dan Falk, or breadth, except that one cannot wilfully travel that act, amplified by the passage of time, render “it’s because I hate the future … The future does in it—unless, somehow, one could. To lend veri- the present day unrecognizable? The genre mur- not exist. It does not! Ontologically, it’s not there.” similitude to this premise, Wells cited not philoso- dered more than a few grandfathers and butterflies Others begged to differ. phy or theology but Victorian science: “Scientific in its exhaustive exploration of those questions. The nature of time, in other words, remains people,” Wells wrote, “know very well that Time In a sense, Gleick suggests, science fiction crowd- as mysterious to modern science as it seemed to is only a kind of Space.” This is a journey by sourced a philosophical problem, making of itself Aristotle and St. Augustine, and as wonderfully machine, not a divine revelation or a mystic vision. a sort of pulp-paper Wiki in which even an idea- perplexing as it prob- The Time Traveller (the starved commercial writer or a geeky 16-year-old ably still seems to an only name Wells gives fan might contribute a trope, a meme, a novel twist. undergraduate phil- Science fiction his protagonist) sallies Gleick knows the genre intimately and does osophy student after into the future with the a fine job of delineating its century-long pas de a couple of bong hits. crowdsourced a implicit blessing of deux with time travel. But if science fiction writ- What, then, are we to the Enlightenment. ers were first to the ball, others arrived soon after. make of time travel? By philosophical problem, Wells was fascin- A few years after Wells invented his metaphysical all rights, the phrase making of itself a sort of ated by his era’s key- machine, Newton’s classic conception of time ought to be meaning- stone discoveries in as a fixed frame of reference was overturned by less—an undefinable pulp-paper Wiki geology and biology. Einstein’s relativity. Time became spacetime—not noun embedded in an Take the long view, and exactly “a kind of Space” but indivisible from it, irrational metaphor. But biological species blur no longer fixed but flexible, contorting to pre- the idea is everywhere. We all know what it means into one another in the kinetoscope of Darwinian serve the apparent absolute velocity of light for … or at least, we know roughly what to expect when evolution; the crust of the Earth is crushed and any observer in any state of motion. The physicist a movie hero or a cartoon character climbs into a folded into mountains and valleys; primordial sea Hermann Minkowski built on this idea in his 1908 time machine. beds surge to Himalayan heights. The Time Machine paper “Raum und Zeit” (“Space and Time”) to James Gleick’s Time Travel asks how that hap- extrapolates those processes into the future. propose a relativistic “block universe,” in which pened: how a wholly fantastic and apparently By the year “Eight Hundred and Two Thousand there is no such thing as the present save from an counterintuitive concept of time became a cultural odd” the human race has become two distinct spe- observer’s point of view, and in which no such trope so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable. cies, the passive Eloi and the Morlocks who prey point of view is more privileged, more authentically It was the writer H.G. Wells, Gleick says, who first upon them. But not even this is a final state. Change now, than any other. Was yesterday’s breakfast less stole time from theologians and philosophers and over time is inexorable and annihilating. Eventually real than today’s lunch? Is today’s lunch more real delivered it to the literate public as a plaything. He the narrator arrives at a future in which humanity than tomorrow’s dinner? According to Minkowski, did that in his seminal short novel The Time Machine is extinct: “All the sounds of man, the bleating of no. “For us devout physicists,” Einstein said, “the (“one of those books you feel you must have read at sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects … all division between past, present, and future is only some point, whether or not you actually did”), by that was over.” an illusion, if a stubborn one.” This was a new way of thinking about time, gran- Moments of time were thus reduced to points Robert Charles Wilson is a Toronto-area writer diose and gorgeously melancholy, and as fantasy on a graph with four axes. This was a wholly deter- whose novels include the Hugo Award winner Spin it was well-nigh irresistible. Science fiction, the ministic view, one that accommodated a certain (Toronto Books, 2005). His forthcoming novel, Last genre Wells unwittingly helped to found, returned philosophical fatalism but had no use for such Year (Tor Books, 2016), is a story of time travel. to the subject for the next century, working out the poetic foolishness as time travel. The concept was

28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada After Grief. In the Garden

My mind is running on pure grief and pure love, I want you to know this. Don Coles, Forests of the Medieval World

A wash of yellow daisy

finger of orange crocosmia, red of rose

through a screen of worry.

Each petal underlined by shadow

clears a space in which my eye can distinguish

the next petal, next layer of bloom.

Kate Braid Fuelling Canadian letters Canadian Fuelling

Kate Braid has written, edited and co-edited twelve books of poetry and non-fiction. A second

edition of In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry, co-edited with 25 for 25 Sandy Shreve, will be published in the fall of 2016 by Caitlin Press. She is currently reading Patrick Friesen and Per Brask’s translation of Ulrikka S. Gernes’s Frayed Opus for Strings and Wind Instruments, The Cathedral Builders of the Middle Ages by Alain Erlande- Brandenburg and Neil Turok’s The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos.

simple, concise and easy to understand—too much Gleick is a gifted explainer, and he conducts the so, perhaps. Gleick describes the mathematician reader through these controversies with an erudi- Kurt Gödel presenting his friend Einstein with the tion that is sometimes astonishing—one wonders, gift of a surprising calculation on the occasion of has he googled every poet who ever invoked the Join a group of visionary Einstein’s 70th birthday: Einstein’s field equations word time?—but never intrusive or intimidating. allow for the possible existence of “closed timelike He leaves us at last on the shoals of the present donors and help us curves.” A closed timelike curve, Gleick explains, day, where the idea of time travel is equally at reach our goal of $250,000 “loops back upon itself and thus defies ordinary home in children’s cartoons and in peer-reviewed by our anniversary, assuring notions of cause and effect: events are their own journals of science, in novels of literary ambition cause.” Which would seem to raise the old science- and in Facebook memes, “in the pop songs, the TV the LRC’s place in Canadian fictional question of paradoxes and grandfathers, commercials, the wallpaper.” Literature and film letters for another quarter but Gödel was untroubled. “Time travel is pos- and the internet have commingled past and future sible,” Gleick quotes him as saying, “but no person so completely that the concept of purely linear century will ever manage to kill his past self … The a priori time has begun to seem passé, which is to say is greatly neglected. Logic is very powerful.” Time archaic, a notion whose time has passed. “In the travellers everywhere must have breathed a sigh wired world,” Gleick writes, “creating the present of relief. becomes a communal process … Images of the For details on how to give, Simple determinism also began to run into past, fantasies of the future, live videocams, all please visit trouble at the subatomic level. Quantum mechan- shuffled and blended. All time and no time.” We are ics described fundamental particles that seem to all time travellers now. reviewcanada.ca/ behave as if time has no preferred direction, turn- Again, or not. We would do well to remember 25-for-25 ing ideas of cause and effect into mere parochial that virtually every technological innovation has conceits. Time might be emergent, some suggested, been said in its day to abolish time (electrical light- a phenomenon that appears only at larger scales ing), or to speed it up (the telegraph), or to take it of reality. Even more provocatively, Hugh Everett’s captive (the motion picture camera). But time con- Or contact: many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics tinues to dictate its own pace and to defy captivity Helen Walsh, President proposed that all possible futures are equally real, as effectively as it defies understanding. For a con- instantiated in alternate worlds somewhere beyond temporary reader, Gleick’s book is an admirable, Literary Review of Canada our accessible fraction of time. Once again, philoso- erudite and deeply entertaining guide to the way we [email protected] phers and science fiction writers sharpened their think about time. Had a copy been transported into 416-944-1101 sxt. 227 pencils. As of 2016 these questions remain hotly the hands of H.G. Wells, he would no doubt have debated but essentially unresolved, stranded on the found it astonishing. Readers a century or two from murky border between science and metaphysics. now may find it merely quaint.

October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 29 The Other Tradecraft Writing, more than espionage, is the subject of le Carré’s memoir—all the better for his fans Paul Wilson

Bay ­prisoners. He compares notes with The Pigeon Tunnel: Soviet spymasters and endures the Stories from My Life castigations of old MI5 and MI6 col- John le Carré leagues who believe he has revealed far Viking too much, or not nearly enough, about 306 pages, Hardcover their secret world (as David Cornwell, ISBN 9780735232549 he worked for both British intelligence services from 1956 to 1964 before turn- ing to writing full time). hese are true stories Of that early life as a spy le Carré told from memory,” John says little, except for the poignant story “Tle Carré writes in his intro- of “Harry,” a mole he ran inside the duction to this wide-ranging collection British Communist Party, who betrayed of personal anecdotes drawn from a his comrades not for money but from lifetime of living and writing. But, he conviction. (“Someone has to clean out cautions, “was there ever such a thing the drains, don’t they?” Harry would as pure memory? I doubt it. Even when say.) To keep Harry’s morale up, the spy we convince ourselves that we’re being and his handler fantasized, almost as a dispassionate, sticking to the bald facts novelist would, about his future role in with no self-serving decorations or the underground resistance. “If those omissions, pure memory remains as Reds ever do come, Harry,” he would elusive as a bar of wet soap.” tell him, “and you happen to wake up There is a certain charm in watching and find yourself the Party’s grand poo- a master storyteller set himself up as bah for your district—that’s when you’ll the unreliable narrator of tales from his become the link man for the resistance own life. But do we, his die-hard fans, movement that’s going to have to drive really care? Most of us would agree with Carrier pigeon with miniature camera designed and patented those bastards back into the sea.” him that “real truth lies, if anywhere, by Dr. Julius Neubronner in 1908. Often, le Carré gets to meet people not in facts, but in nuance.” And after because they believe he knows more all, it is his mastery of nuance that turns his novels able to “reclaim [the stories] as my own, tell them about espionage than he actually does. It is a trib- of espionage, intrigue and corporate skullduggery in my own voice and invest them as best I can with ute to his realism, but it sometimes leads to embar- into more than mere thrillers. my own feelings.” rassment or comedy, or both. On the pretext of As its subtitle suggests, this new book—his Regarding his personal life, le Carré displays the wanting a signed copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 24th—is neither autobiography nor memoir, and reticence of a good double agent under interroga- the president of Italy summoned him to a grand I suspect he has written it partly in response to tion. “I love best the privacy of writing,” he says, dinner, along with “a misty grey army” of men Adam Sisman’s John le Carré: The Biography, pub- “which is why I don’t do literary festivals and, as who listened intently as the president solicited the lished last year with le Carré’s hesitant approval. much as possible, stay away from interviews … First, author’s opinion on the state of Italy’s intelligence (“I know it’s supposed to be warts and all,” he told you invent yourself, then you get to believe your services, about which le Carré says he knew noth- Sisman part way through the process, “but so far as invention. This is not a process that is compatible ing “worth a bean.” Only later did he learn, to his I can gather it’s going to be all warts and no all.”) with self-knowledge.” chagrin, that this grey army had been a gathering Inevitably, Sisman found discrepancies in some of It is no surprise, then, that there are not a lot of Italy’s top spooks, roped by the president into a le Carré’s oft-told anecdotes, and felt duty bound, of personal revelations in this book. What we get pointless exercise to improve their game. as he put it, to “spoil a fund of good stories” with instead are a string of brilliantly crafted glimpses What le Carré does know beans about is writing. more accurate versions. But while there are faint into le Carré’s “tradecraft” as a hard-working, In passing, he reveals the kind of details fans love to suggestions of rivalry here, The Pigeon Tunnel is celebrated writer. Many of his stories are about his discover. “I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks neither a grudge match nor an attempt to set the “serio-comic” encounters with some of the people on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home record straight. Rather, in instances where the two who are drawn to him and his work: famous pol- to pick over my booty.” He writes only by hand: “The books overlap, le Carré says he was pleased to be iticians (Margaret Thatcher), press barons (Rupert lapsed graphic artist in me actually enjoys drawing Murdoch), movie directors (Fritz Lang, Sydney the words.” On field trips, he seldom uses a camera. Paul Wilson is a writer and translator who lives in Pollack, Stanley Kubrick) and actors (Alex Guinness, “When I write a note my memory stores the thought,” the Town of the Blue Mountains. His most recent Richard Burton). Others concern people he has he says. “When I take a photograph, the camera translation is Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the sought out in the course of his research: insur- steals my job.” When he is researching a new novel, Time of the Cult, a collection of short stories by the gency leaders (Yasser Arafat), Russian mobsters, he takes the characters he has in mind along with Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, published last year war correspondents, mercenaries, Jewish Nazi him as “secret sharers,” and takes notes as if they, by New Directions. hunters, German terrorists and ex–Guantanamo not he, were the observer.

30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Le Carré’s remark that “spying and novel writing Moscow, in 1987, he was invited to meet the ailing For me, le Carré’s most revealing anecdote were made for each other” can apply to many writ- Philby, who had defected in 1963 and may have involves his encounter with a young Czech movie ers, but few have the visceral, elemental grasp of been angling for le Carré to help him with his mem- star, Vladimír Pucholt, who portrayed disaffected that truth that le Carré does. In a sense, he was born oirs. Following his own deeply held convictions, le young men in two of Miloš Forman’s early films, to it. “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” he Carré turned the invitation down. Black Peter and A Blonde in Love, movies that were writes. “Evasion and deception were the necessary When the Berlin Wall collapsed, many critics partly responsible for my own decision to live for a weapons of my childhood.” Which brings us to the wondered what a writer whose work was so deeply time in communist Czechoslovakia. Shortly after author’s father, the roguish schemer, womanizer imbued with the ambiance of the Cold War would the Soviet invasion of that country in 1968, Pucholt and con artist Ronnie Cornwell, a man who drove write about now. They need not have worried. came to England on a visitor’s visa that was soon le Carré’s mother to abandon her family when he Le Carré has written half his work—including some to expire. He had no intention of trading in on his was five years old, and who appears in le Carré’s of his best novels, such as The Constant Gardener fame as an actor; he simply wanted to study medi- most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy. Later and A Most Wanted Man—since 1989. His strength cine. The problem was that he refused to claim in life, Ronnie tried to claim that his successful son as a novelist did not come from the accidental refugee status, since that would have endangered owed him everything, and in a way, it family and friends back home. Taken was true, although not as the father There is a certain charm in watching with the young man’s obvious sin- meant it. “Ronnie the conman could cerity, le Carré was not only able to spin you a story out of thin air, sketch a master storyteller set himself up as arrange permission for him to stay, in a character who did not exist, and but also loaned him the money for paint a golden opportunity where the unreliable narrator of tales from medical school. Today, Dr. Pucholt is there wasn’t one,” le Carré writes. “He a well-known pediatrician in Toronto, could withhold a great secret on the his own life. which means that hundreds, if not grounds of confidentiality, then whis- thousands, of Canadian children owe per it in your ear alone because he had decided to ­backdrop of four decades of superpower stand-off, some small measure of their well-being to the per- trust you. And if that isn’t part and parcel of the but from the fearlessly researched realism of his spicacity and generosity of David Cornwell. writer’s art, then tell me what is.” work and his skill in finding a compelling sub- Many years later, le Carré drew on Pucholt to On Kim Philby, the high-ranking British intel- ject—the sins of giant multinationals, arms dealers, create Issa, the tortured Chechen refugee in A ligence official and long-time Soviet mole whose money launderers and warriors on terror—and Most Wanted Man, whose only wish is to become betrayals caused countless deaths and inspired turning it into dramatic fiction. Often dismissed as a doctor. “Sooner than I could have believed pos- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré has a contrarian a mere genre writer whose reach exceeds his grasp, sible,” le Carré writes, “Vladimír repaid every penny take. Many who had worked with Philby, including le Carré belongs in the pantheon of realist storytell- … What he didn’t know—and neither did I until Graham Greene, forgave him, or at least excused ers such as Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Joseph I came to write A Most Wanted Man—was that he him, on the grounds that a man is entitled to act on Conrad or Sinclair Lewis. Like them, le Carré is a had made me the non-returnable gift of a fictional his most deeply held convictions. Le Carré is hav- moralist who has taken a nasty, invisible aspect of character.” ing none of that. On the contrary, he says, “Philby’s the world we live in, and transformed it through John le Carré turned 85 this month. “An old motive for betraying his country smacked … of fiction into something that feels utterly real and writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination,” an addiction to deceit.” On le Carré’s first visit to comprehensible.­ he writes. That may be. But who’s complaining?

LONGING FOR LAND OF THEIR OWN

“With Imperial Plots, Carter continues the ongoing efforts to reconceptualize the prairie west ... By putting the experience of Indigenous peoples and women at the centre of the story, she destabilizes longstanding images of a progressive, peaceful and egalitarian Canadian West.” – adele perry, professor, department of history, university of manitoba

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October 2016 reviewcanada.ca 31 I can’t single out one Canadian book as the most important. How can you choose among novels such as Anne of Green Gables, Fifth Business

or Green Grass, RunningWater, or non-fiction works such as John English’s biographyofTrudeauorCharlesRitchie’s diaries? Whatis sowonderful is how many great books there are, and how Canadian writing has grown as different writers from many different backgrounds add their voices and perspectives. Margaret MacMillan, historian Because the Public Matters. the Public Because Th e Graphite Club e Graphite Th

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To join the Graphite Club, please contact: Helen Walsh, President Literary Review of Canada [email protected] 416-944-1101 ext. 227 Read Well 32 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada CIGI PRESS ADVANCING POLICY IDEAS AND DEBATE cigionline.org

OCTOBER 2016 Look Who’s Watching Surveillance, Treachery and Trust Online

Fen Osler Hampson and Eric Jardine Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US National Security Agency and other government agencies are spying on Internet users and on other governments confirmed that the Internet is increasingly being used to gather intelligence and personal information. The proliferation of cybercrime, the sale of users’ data without their knowledge and the surveillance of citizens through connected devices are all rapidly eroding the confidence users have in the Internet. To meet the Internet’s full potential, its users need to trust that the Internet works reliably while also being secure, private and safe. When trust in the Internet wanes, users begin to alter their online behaviour. A combination of illustrative anecdotal evidence and analysis of new survey data, Look Who’s Watching clearly demonstrates why trust matters, how it is being eroded and how, with care and deliberate policy action, the essential glue of the Internet — trust — can be restored.

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The authors have produced a clear, timely and essential book about the importance of trust as an engine for the Internet. We must foster that trust if the global Internet is to continue to flourish. — Michael Chertoff, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Chertoff Group, and former secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security

Laid Low The Dragon’s Paul Blustein Footprints The latest book by journalist and Alex He author Paul Blustein to go behind the The Dragon’s Footprints: scenes at the highest levels of global China in the Global Economic economic policy making, Laid Low Governance System under the chronicles the International Monetary G20 Framework examines China’s Fund’s role in the euro-zone crisis. participation in the G20; its efforts Based on interviews with a wide to increase its prestige in the range of participants and scrutiny international monetary system of thousands of documents, the through the internationalization of book tells how the IMF joined in its currency, the renminbi; its role bailouts that all too often piled debt in the multilateral development atop debt and imposed excessively banks; and its involvement in harsh conditions on crisis-stricken global trade governance. countries.

October 2016 September 2016 978-1-928096-25-2 | paperback 978-1-928096-23-8 | paperback

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