Geist.com - Ideas and Culture

George Elliot Clarke Receives Order of Canada Appointment

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:10:52 -0500

Geistian Moment

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:52:37 -0500

Just a note to thank you for Geist in the Classroom. For many years I’ve taught the Editing and Publishing course in the Creative Writing Department at Concordia University, and this year I signed up for the free class sets and used Geist as a tool—to great effect.

Reading Season

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:48:40 -0500

About “The Fiction Question,” Stephen Osborne’s Letter to Subscribers enclosed in Geist 65 (and the thunderous response to it in Letters, No. 66): I love my subscription to The New Yorker, a gift from a friend, but yes! I do get that sinking feeling when the summer fiction issue slides through the letter slot.

Review, Reviewed

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:45:14 -0500

About Michal Kozlowski’s note on Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993: this is a review? According to my reading of the text on your website, Kozlowski didn’t do more than pick this book up, check out the price sticker, read the last page and flip through the index and the photos.

The Same Clan

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:39:21 -0500

Thanks very much. The information I have found thus far is a chapter in the book The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk, entitled “The Mysterious Vitkevich.”

Unfamiliar Family

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:35:22 -0500

In researching my family history, I came across Stephen Osborne’s “Stories of a Lynching” (Geist 60) about the lynching of Louis Sam, a young Sto:lo man, near Sumas Lake, B.C., in 1884. The story mentions Thomas York (Whatcom County, Washington), my great-great- grandfather, and Thomas Fraser York, my great-grandfather, but nobody in my family has ever told me about the Louis Sam incident.

Exotica

volunteer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:30:57 -0500

Thank you for Stephen Osborne’s loving tribute to the Morgans and their museum on Main Street in Vancouver (“Exotic World,” Geist 67).

Markings

volunteer — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:27:44 -0500

Christopher Grabowski

For most of her adult life, my mother, Danuta Rago, was a professional photographer in Poland. In the early seventies she travelled to the Asiatic republics of the ussr and to Siberia. Her assignment was to take portraits of happy members of the collective farms and pictures of the greatest industrial projects of the Soviet empire to be used as illustrations in heavily censored Polish publications.

Identity Crises

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:43:24 -0500

Daniel Francis

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

Bologna Erases Canada

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:33:02 -0500

Stephen Henighan

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.

Eldorado

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:20:05 -0500

Alberto Manguel

Art museums and geographical exploration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.

World's Toughest Milkman

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:08:59 -0500

David Boswell

Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman, whose catchphrase was “I thought I told you to shut up,” first appeared in 1978 in the Georgia Straight (Vancouver).

Whole Bottoms

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:56:10 -0500

Elisabeth Belliveau

From the great hopeful someday, published by conundrum press in 2007.

Proposition

volunteer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:20:55 -0500

Laurence Hyde

From Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas, re-issued in Canada in 2007 by Drawn & Quarterly and originally published in 1951 in a small edition by Ward Ritchie Press.

The Lights of the City

volunteer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:09:01 -0500

Tom Osborne

The theatre is plush, high-ranking and named after the Queen. I don’t know the name of the play but C does. C brings me to the theatre when I go. I undergo a pleasant transformation when I go to the theatre. I wear a tie, black shoes and a sports coat. At first it was difficult, “not my style.”

Cowboys & Indians

volunteer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:44:42 -0500

Over the loudspeaker, a disembodied voice announces that the Stampede has made some big changes this year. Calf roping is now “tie-down roping” and the wild horse race has become the “Stampede horse race.” The wild horse race comes straight out of the early days of rodeo, and some say it is more dangerous than bull riding. Sixteen unbroken horses are released into the ring and forty-eight cowboys go after them in teams of three men each.

The Honorary Canadian Awards: The Envelopes, Please

volunteer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:22:00 -0500

Christopher Gudgeon

In Geist 9 we announced the Honorary Canadian Awards so that readers could speak their minds, statistically, about Canadians and non-Canadians who have distinguished themselves in one way or the other. We invited readers to vote by mail, phone, fax and courier, and some 300 of you did.

Who the Hell is Michael Wilson?

volunteer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:51:51 -0500

Wreford & Associates

An informal survey of Canadian pedestrians yields surprising results.

How We Imagine Ourselves

volunteer — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:26:45 -0500

Howard White

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list. They took this seriously and called me up a few days later to say that they had taken care of the problem by arranging for me to give most of my talk before dinner, which was not quite what I was getting at, but there’s not much I wouldn’t do for Geist.

Pronunciation Tips

volunteer — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:40:38 -0500

For certified Canadians, the correct pronunciation of Geist is as follows: GE as in Jeeze, I as in incovenient, S as in stop (now banned in favour of Arret), T as in termite or terminal illness.