The diaper issue is a messy one, especially since your baby will demand 5,000 to 7,000 changes before his second birthday. Currently, 85 percent of Canadian parents use disposable diapers, making them the third-largest landfill item (after newspapers and food containers), accounting for 250,000 tonnes (1.7 billion diapers) per year of solid waste that will take centuries to decompose. One study showed that one year’s worth of disposables requires about 88 kilograms of chlorine-bleached paper fibre. By comparison, six kilograms of cotton will yield enough cloth diapers to cover your baby until she is potty-trained.

However, cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop on Earth and requires 175 litres of water to produce one kilogram, meaning that while cloth diapers have the greener edge, they aren’t sporting the shiniest halo. Home laundering requires an additional one or two loads of hot-water-only laundry a week, so expect your energy use to increase, along with your detergent bill. If you go with cloth diapers, choose a green detergent that is phosphate-free, unscented, and biodegradable.

Then there are the new additions to the diaper market, like gDiapers, a disposable-cloth hybrid made of flushable inserts for cloth pants. They tote the “biodegradable” label, but like anything else will only break down if exposed to air, something that doesn’t always happen in landfills. According to Samantha Leeson, co-founder of BabyReady.ca, the green disposables are often less absorbent than cloth nappies, which means more changes and more products weaseling into our sanitation system.

So the best choice really depends on your neighbourhood. Landfills overflowing? Use cloth diapers. If water quality is an issue, choose disposables. Personally, the Progressive Detective suggests cloth diapers, to minimize chemical exposure. However, you may want to pick up a few planet-friendly disposables for long car trips, or you might run into a messy situation.

Japanese vending machines, at your service any time. Creative Commons photo by David Ooms.

In North America, we barely notice vending machines. They dispense soft drinks, water, sometimes coffee (or laundry soap in laundromats). In Japan, however, vending machines have been elevated to a fine art. To an outsider, these machines, called jidoohanbaiki, are ubiquitous — incredibly, there is one vending machine for every 23 Japanese citizens. In Tokyo, you typically see them every couple of blocks, often lined up half a dozen or more in a row. Having experienced them, I think Canadians are missing out on the opportunity to purchase everything from french fries to condoms to fresh flowers without having to talk to a salesperson.

In addition to the expected pop, juice, and water, in Tokyo you will find dozens of exotic green tea flavours (I developed a taste for one called “melon milk”), iced and hot coffee (as many as six or seven varieties in a single machine), cigarettes, alcohol (beer, whiskey, sake), food (rice balls, ramen soup, octopus dumplings, french fries, eggs, 10-kilo bags of rice, and more elaborate meals that you heat by pulling a string that activates a blast of hot steam in the container), fresh flowers, umbrellas, comic books and magazines, DVDs and CDs, clothing (hats, shirts, ties, socks, lingerie), razors, and even toilet paper. Jidoohanbaiki are so sophisticated that some of them can make change from a ¥10,000 note (the highest currency). An age-verification card is used for cigarettes and alcohol, but a new generation of machines now have “face-recognition scanners” to check an individual’s age.

Why does Japan have the most advanced vending machine culture in the world and we don’t? The big surge in them started with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, when millions of people needed to be served food and other goods, but since then the range of products and number of machines has dramatically expanded. One theory is that the Japanese corporate work ethic means that many white-collar workers — known as “salarymen” — go home very late at night, often after sake-drinking marathons with colleagues (hence the cut flowers and beautifully gift-wrapped sweets in many jidoohanbaiki; peace-offerings to bring home to an irritated spouse). And to serve a population as large as Japan’s — 127 million — it’s essential to have easy, 24-hour availability. And the famously modest Japanese prefer buying certain products (tampons, condoms, pornography) from a machine rather than facing a sales clerk. Of course, there is an environmental issue with so many vending machines humming away day and night. To adopt them here, we’d probably need Energy Star models, ones that are fluorocarbon-free, even solar-powered. In fact, these are already being installed. Where? In Japan, of course.

[Creative Commons-licensed photo by David Ooms]

Creative Commons photo by Jason Scragz

No one ever tells you not to fuck the monkey. Fuck with the monkey. Get fucked by the monkey. The monkey is filled with a selfish wrath, a vengeful will, a self-loathing so encompassing it eats at the fabric of others. And the preaching and questionable advice. The late nights and empty rooms. Bent over some bar, your face in a warm puddle of bile and ochre elixirs, the monkey with one paw on your head, the other angrily massaging your ego, your history. There was a moment there, not too long ago, long enough for affection, but close enough for regret, when the monkey was absent. But then came February. Bitter, twisted, poor-self-esteem-ridden February, with its aborted 28-day life and that Hallmark holiday tossed into the middle for good measure. Like memory and monkeys, I’ve never trusted February, never will.

I’ve lost before. I’m good at it. Kids dream of gold medals and first place. I fantasized about fourth place, and certificates of participation. And at the time, the time without the monkey, I was happy in fourth, even had kind afternoons when third felt possible. But then Dad died. Dad had once told me that love lasts about 10 minutes, and if you’re lucky you’re not wearing pants for the second five. There’s something humbling in my memories of my father. Memories riddled in prophecy. And January got shorter, and shorter. And my right upper back started to miss its inhabitant. And before I could find community-centre basements, cold coffee and familiar strangers, I found what I knew, my past. I turned to the monkey.

I got my 30-pound monkey when I was about 16. I’d like to say that I ordered him from an ad in the back of a comic book, because I’m old enough to remember when you could order exotic items like 30-pound monkeys from ads in the backs of comic books. Part of a simpler life. At least then I could blame Marvel or DC instead of myself. I wonder if you can still order stuff from the backs of comic books. I don’t read them anymore, of course, so I wouldn’t know. I still wonder though. But him? I got the 30-pound monkey from a scratch-and-win ticket in a case of 50. Stubbies. Because I’m old enough to remember stubbies. First prize was a hot tub. Second prize was a 30pound monkey. Third prize was a Hyundai Sonata. I wonder if the other winners have had as many problems with their prizes. I wonder if they still have them. The hot tub I can see, the Hyundai not so much.

When I was younger, I would just play with my 30-pound monkey on weekends. My friends seemed to like me more with the 30-pound monkey around. Even the hot girls, the untouchables, suddenly began to pay some attention. I give the 30pound monkey all the credit for my first blow job. Jill Henley. After that I began to take my 30-pound monkey everywhere. Made me wonder about how he had filled his time without me. Maybe swimming lessons, because all of a sudden one day he could backstroke like nobody’s business. But I think he just waited for me, patience being a virtue of the monkey. Friends said I looked better with the monkey around, better groomed. I explained that I had to be clean-shaven around my 30-pound monkey; a full beard reminded him of a difficult past, of his father. He didn’t like to talk about it. Man, did he get me laid during university, that 30-pound monkey did. For four years I was the charming, suave, confident, mysterious guy with the 30-pound monkey on his back. I was all the things I’m not, all the shit I’ll never be. The girls loved it. He never seemed to want anything in return. He was selfless, seemed to live for my wants and needs alone.

And then we were supposed to part ways and journey into adulthood and careers and promise. The weeks were filled with cubicle nightmares and simian dreams. Everybody disappeared into their lives, faded into the background, tucked in their shirts, cut their hair and said goodbye. I guess we grew up. Or they grew up. Me and my 30-pound monkey had no such intentions. We resisted the temptations of cellphone leashes and bleeding ulcers, talk of divorce and golf. This was a new world, where a man and his 30-pound monkey were no longer kings, but rather unwanted fools. How does it happen? How does it change? You try to be a fucking adult with a 30pound monkey whispering, We don’t need these people; we don’t need anyone, in your goddamn ear all night. You end up alone, that’s what fucking happens, at some bar at the end of the night arguing the merits of Darwinism in an empty room. There’s nothing sadder than an old man and his 30-pound monkey slurring their way through evolution at the end of the bar. It’s how we end up here.

I started relishing that time alone, the solitude, the distance. Fuck people, we’d say and stay in and drink two-fours of 50 (just for nostalgia’s sake) and watch Every Which Way but Loose on DVD. I bought him the B.J. and the Bear box set but he found it offensive. Not as a simian, but apparently there’s something about Greg Evigan that really pisses him off. I could always cheer him up by reading him H.A. Rey’s biography, or watching Terry Gilliam movies. For a while this life was good. For a while I thought I was happy, rid of those who failed to see the beauty of a clean-shaven man and his 30-pound monkey.

You don’t really notice when it turns. I’d like to think I could look back and pinpoint an exact moment, but I can’t. We stopped watching movies, stopped trying to find work. We’d just sit around and drink, masturbate and argue. There was no happiness in this life, just anger, resentment. I couldn’t get my 30-pound monkey to wear pants anymore. “Put on a goddamn pair of slacks,” I’d scream at him through a hazy, thick, depressing room. But he’d just carry on pantsless, make fun of me for using the word slacks. Nothing wrong with saying slacks. I’m old enough to remember when people actually said slacks. Maybe they say trousers now. I would still say slacks, though, but damn if I could get my 30-pound monkey in a pair.

Oddly enough, he’d wear panties. Loved panties. Anything with lace or frills. Only problem is he would tend to nibble at their edges, so while he would wear panties, he’d usually eat his way out of them within an hour. So I’d find myself at LaSenza Girl every other weekend, restocking his supply. I think the staff started to be suspicious of my buying patterns. One day I noticed them snickering behind the counter, and I wasn’t in a particularly good mood — the 30-pound monkey and I had been up railing codeine and drinking gin ’til our eyes bled, so the sight of these whored-up mall workers laughing at me sent me into a rage and I started throwing all the panties and bras I could get my hands on at them and screaming, “You don’t get it, girls, I’ve got a half-naked 30-pound monkey at home.” Fuck them, fuck mall security, and fuck community service.

That was the bottom, I’d have to assume, from what I can remember. At that point I was drowning in the dregs. The 30-pound monkey, of course, was fine, gracefully backstroking along the surface. This was when I met Sara. Sara is my wife. Was my wife. I had seen her from across the bar one night. I was filled with the monkey’s confidence. I told her, “I have no money and very little promise. But one day I’d like to buy you a house.” We shared the rest of my cigarette and were married four months later. The church was Unitarian and her mother never showed. Sara painted sometimes. I wrote country songs about her in the garage after she’d gone to sleep. She was an insomniac, but she hadn’t told me. She liked the secret. I guess I found out at some point. We would have liked to have one day owned a dog, and named it Oldham after her late father. I never met her father. Neither had she, but sometimes she said she imagined him. Slowly, she convinced me I could do without the 30-pound monkey. Oh, he fought a good fight, even threw on jogging pants on occasion and a Baby Gap T-shirt, stopped putting out cigarettes in my hair and whispering devious things I could do to Sara while she slept. But Sara won out, and the 30-pound monkey crawled begrudgingly off my back, packed his bits of panties and an autographed Mickey Dolenz eight-by-ten and left.

Or maybe he never left. Maybe he was just hiding in the closet, chewing on Sara’s underwear and waiting for an opportunity to return. Some nights I would wake up screaming about panties and monkeys and Clint Eastwood. Sara would ease me back into sleep with her soft, caressing hands and whispers of better days. Sometimes I’d find myself at the liquor store, looking for him in the sweet caramel diamond reflections of competing Scotch bottles. Sometimes I’d walk by a bar that struck me with some odd degree of familiarity, and I’d hear a laughter I’d think was mine coming from inside. Sara would pull me past, take me to safer places, without laughter and without my 30-pound monkey. Maybe she got tired of playing that role, mothering a grown man, of feeling second place to an absent 30pound monkey whose friendship she could never live up to. Maybe I forced her away, making it easier for me to find the monkey again. Maybe it’s the monkey I love, because his pants are always off, and that’s true love, isn’t it?

So she left. She said, “I deserve to make mistakes too. But one day I’d like to make up for them.” We divided the cutlery, and she moved into a loft two neighbourhoods over. I stayed in the apartment and thought about moving and changing and dogs and things of that nature, but mostly I feared the monkey. I took to sedatives and a youngish waitress from the local. The monkey was somewhere close, always somewhere close. I had taken to long walks, and often asked for rain. I rarely went to work, and the apartment likely needed to be painted. The monkey called and offered to help. He came over, but instead of colour palettes brought beer. We fell down to some bar we had never been to, settled into bourbon and old habits, tried to kill Sara’s memory. But even bourbon can’t kill, it can only bring you closer to him, or closer to here.

Which brings us back to February, hollow chocolate hearts, three suspiciously missing days and bowls of Scotch for breakfast. And Dad’s gone. And Sara’s gone. And I’m sitting in my emptied, unpainted living room with a bottle or two or three or 10 and the 30-pound monkey is in my bedroom unpacking his things and I’m thinking can it really be this easy, to give in, to give up, to go back? But I keep drinking and the 30-pound monkey is mounting his Curious George poster over the spot where Sara’s stereo used to be, and I keep emptying bottle after bottle as he wanders around whistling “Daydream Believer” and some song whose title eludes me but goes, “Come on come on, come on come on, come on is such a joy, come on is such a joy, come on let’s take it easy, come on let’s take it easy, take it easy take it easy,” and occasionally dropping off a pill or two and maybe a shot on the coffee table with a wry and twisted smile, and I’m only too unhappy to oblige and all of a sudden it feels as if I’ve gone back in time, and that Sara never existed and Dad never died and everyone was without pants and Jill Henley thinks I’m cool and her mouth is warm and new and there’s a contest to life and I’m winning and there’s laughter in every room and it’s there because of me, but in a flash that is brilliant and humbling and horrible and maddening and wonderful and spiteful and humiliating and festively blinding, I’m brought back to a room I hate, where I have no control, where I’m led around by a 30-pound monkey who has deceived me into believing he loves or cares or helps and does not hurt, or hate, or kill slowly, painfully and decidedly like he killed my dad, like he killed my 20s, like he killed this room, this life, and suddenly I feel a power I’ve never had and a hate I never noticed and I grab a bottle off the table and I smash it, which gets the 30pound monkey’s attention all right, and I start chasing him around the room, and he’s screaming and I’m screaming, and he’s swinging from chandeliers that likely only exist in my mind and I finally get a hold of him and he looks up at me with evil piercing eyes and I take one deep, horrible last breath and I start swinging the broken bottle and blood is spurting everywhere, and bits of lace are flying about and I’m covered in his blood and my blood, and somewhere there is yelling and bellowing infinite sirens and bright lights and humorous lies and hungry mistakes and a simple redemption and an unsatisfying yet predictable end. And then I’m here. And I see the monkey in all of your eyes, and in the reflection of your knowing.

Mike Spry is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008). He lives in Montreal.

Creative Commons-licensed photo by Jason Scragz [source]

Before my son Louis could walk, he could surf. He took to the internet like an aquatic creature, swimming easily and confidently. It was cute to see him perched at the computer, his big baby head topped off by a pair of giant headphones. But his avidity made me uneasy, a disquiet that lingers still, when I hover over his shoulder trying to see what he’s watching, making, understanding.

Generations see screens differently. Illustration by Dave Donald

I come from a generation of watchers — of movies, of TV — but Lou belongs to a generation of makers. Even though he’s only seven years old, already he’s leaving me behind, moving from consumer to creator, making and posting videos of his Lego men, swimming in a vast sea of video clips, remixes, parodies. To him, culture isn’t a static thing to be passively imbibed, but something to act upon; not an inviolate product, but simply material. As much as I admire the next generation’s digital fluidity, I miss the bigger picture — something that isn’t cut up, sliced into bits and pieces. More importantly, I worry that Lou will miss it also.

The break between the emerging culture of the empowered creator and the old-fashioned passive consumer is the subject of Brett Gaylor’s award-winning documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. RiP picked up the 2008 Dioraphte Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and is being released this spring online and in theatres. The subject of the film is how current intellectual property laws affect the culture being made by a new generation. The copyright debate is something of a Wild West show at the moment, and no one embodies that spirit more fully than a musician named Gregg Gillis, who records and releases under the name Girl Talk. Gillis combines hundreds of samples from other artists’ songs into mashups, and in so doing, risks lawsuits, prison time, and massive fines. The film uses Girl Talk as a test case for current copyright laws, but also poses fundamental questions about how new forms of culture always need to build, borrow, or outright steal from the past.

In one of the film’s more thought-provoking segments, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, argues that overreaching copyright laws have strangled creativity and eaten away at the public domain in the name of money and control. Despite lawsuits and penalties, people continue to rip, remix, and sample with gusto. After all, Lessig argues, the desire to play along is a natural form of creativity. And to punish or outlaw such a manifestation is tantamount to creating a generation with no respect for the law. (Lessig’s talk, included in the film, is available online at ted.com.)

I think Lessig is right about the importance of sharing ideas, but my misgivings linger — not just about how material is used, but how it’s perceived. It’s not because I’m afraid Louis will get sued one day. It’s because when films are simply something to be cut up, reworked, made into goofy commentary, and viewed ironically, I think something is lost. The ability to follow a sustained narrative has been fundamental to human nature, but it’s been so fractured, so chopped into small pieces, that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing.

Louis informed me the other day that YouTube was better than TV and movies because you could watch whatever you wanted, and no one made you watch something (like ads) that you didn’t want to see. Here I am in danger of dating myself terribly, but this makes me think about how the medium carries the meaning. I am reminded of what it once was to listen to records. The A- and B-sides, the sequential tracks, formed a journey — and to interrupt this process was to miss the larger impact. You were meant to move in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.

That straight-line mentality has been disrupted, and not simply because there is often no top or bottom, no beginning or end, on the internet. When the larger arc is missing, the fundamental nature of story can change, becoming smaller and less affecting.

But the loss of the experience of sitting quietly in a darkened theatre to watch a movie — something I still love, but can’t truly share with my son — makes me sad. My experience has been shared by countless parents, who watch their children launch into some new world we can only fleetingly grasp. All we can do is wave goodbye from the shore, as they swim away.

As in so many immigrant families, weekend mornings in my house always meant one thing: “our shows” on TV. We are of Indian descent, and the sounds of the latest Bollywood hits were a staple of our Saturdays and Sundays, as much a part of our weekends as omelettes and the newspaper. But for all the nostalgia, we had little choice. For years, if you were an immigrant looking for your own media, your only other option was one of the “ethnic” grocery-cum-video stores that still pepper neighbourhoods today. And while these shops function as impromptu community centres, there was always something a little unsettling about having to drive to an out-ofthe-way plaza only to pick up a poor-quality knock-off DVD.

The web allows immigrants to straddle two worlds like never before. Illustration by Matthew Daley

It was a disquieting state of affairs that only added to the isolation so common to the immigrant experience. But thanks to the web, things are changing. Minorities are no longer confined to gathering around a TV on weekends or driving to the nearest bazaar. With the mainstreaming of the internet, immigrant minorities have exponentially more access to film, music, and literature from their root cultures.

The difference in diversity between traditional and online outlets is striking. Zip.ca, Canada’s most popular online DVD service, currently has 728 Bollywood films available, which, last time I checked, is approximately 727 more than at my parents’ local Rogers Video. Walk into a Best Buy or HMV and you will be lucky to find a handful of “world music” CDs. In contrast, eMusic.com, Canada’s second-largest online music seller behind iTunes, currently has more than 33,000 artists under their international category. The disparity is staggering.

At the core of this pluralist promise is the “long tail.” Coined by Wired editor Chris Anderson, the term describes how the web’s massive capacity as a distribution network, coupled with its greatly reduced cost of delivery, allows online retailers to offer a much greater variety of content than bricks-and mortar stores. Rather than relying on selling huge quantities of a few blockbusters (the head), the theory suggests that online stores can thrive by selling just a few units each of a huge catalogue of titles (the tail). But though most of the technorati have focused on the long tail’s economic benefits — which might not be as lucrative as once predicted — few have yet to think through its impact on minority cultures.

After all, beyond merely having more choice, what does it now mean to be an immigrant in the face of this greatly expanded access to culture? My parents’ generation spent much of their life in a sort of cultural limbo. Unwittingly alienated by a majority culture, they sought out the familiar and the known. Yet, the trips to dingy stores around the margins of cities were more symbolic than anyone cared to admit and, despite a growing immigrant population, quality, selection, and currency were all lacking. Put off by mainstream culture and unable to connect with the contemporary culture of their homelands, they were stuck.

Flash-forward to today, and my mother can watch the most current movies from Bollywood at full quality, a few even in high definition. My father has a large MP3 collection composed of ghazals and classical Indian tracks he never thought he would find again. This is just the start: it says nothing of the radio streamed from Taiwan, the news sites from Somalia, the poetry from Pakistan, or the podcasts from Jamaica. The internet allows immigrants to engage in the currents of the cultures they know with an immediacy and range that simply could not have happened before.

The obvious danger is increased ghettoization. But in an unexpected way, the web allows for an equality of participation. The ebb and flow of media, the contemporary pulse, was once privy to those with Globe and Mail or Saturday Night subscriptions. But, though it is perhaps anecdotal, it seems no coincidence that, after finding Bollywood clips there, my mother also turned to the web for reports on the U.S. election or video from Oprah.com. Suddenly a part of the swirl of popular culture, my family’s cultural isolation lessened.

If minority alienation is a question of access and inclusion, then perhaps more than anything, the long tail means that the choice between assimilation and traditionalism has ceased to be an either/or proposition for immigrants. When one is no longer forced to cling to an imaginary past but can instead engage the cutting edge of both cultures, the movement to the contemporary Canadian becomes degrees easier and less threatening.

The web in itself might not be a magical panacea, but when immigrants are neither asked to constantly look back, nor entirely conform to an alien present, perhaps the ideal of multiculturalism has found a practical friend in the long tail of the internet.

The preference among Canadian literary awards for historical fiction has created a national literature devoted to burlap sacking instead of life in the sack. The repeat shortlisting of historical fiction, in which a rural or foreign yesterday is somehow more important than today, contributes to our excessively chaste literature. England has just seen the release of In Bed With, an anthology of smut by respected female writers. Meanwhile, in their new book The Porning of America, literature professors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott examine how the internet has made porn and sexuality mainstream (hello, YouPorn.com). Yet here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality.

Here in Canada we still have a fiction devoted to mill town sagas and multi-generational farm stories, few of them emboldened by sexuality. Illustration by Graham Roumieu

Mary Lawson’s 2003 Crow Lake manages to have a plot that turns on the consequences of sex, but prefers to devote its prose to marsh fauna and the joinery of farmhouses, not farmhands. Andrea MacPherson’s 2007 Beyond the Blue is literally set in a wartime burlap factory. In life, we flirt by email. In our literature, we go to barn raisings.

Several Canadian literary magazines have recently released so-called “sex issues.” Pick up these earnest journals and you’ll find plenty of writing devoted to pop culture and shades of afternoon light. Etymology will abound. But no one will actually have sex.

Counter to this trend of dour and sexless fiction is Russell Smith’s self-confessedly pornographic — and recently re-released — novel, Diana. Part dirty love letter, part cri de genitalia, and part satire, Diana has many layers. This urban coming-of-age story follows a twentysomething Toronto woman in and out of a few jobs and several more beds. The vicissitudes of the publishing industry meant the first edition had become hard to find, so when Biblioasis, a new Ontario press, began re-releasing important but out-ofprint Canadian books, Smith emerged from behind his female mask to re-release Diana with a frank new introduction. Smith rightly calls it “silly” that Canadians don’t write or read about sex, “that area of conflict and pleasure which is so central to our daily lives, our relationships, our self-confidence, our whole sense of self.”

Globe columnist and Governor General’s Award nominee Smith originally released the novel under the pseudonym “Diane Savage.” Although he now regrets having tried to pass off the first edition as the writing of a woman, that gender-bending was obviously more than just a desire to court the largely female market for erotic literature. Writing as a woman allowed Smith to investigate important issues of submission and dominance both freely and authoritatively. Diana is submissive in one relationship, then dominant in the next; this trajectory provides an honest and complex portrait of female sexuality.

More generally, however, our sexless national literature perpetuates North America’s gender double standard and is even more discouraging of lustful, pro-sex women. Popular fiction by Canadian women has recently forgotten about birth control, with Ami McKay’s The Birth House featuring a cover image of a woman who is headless, barefoot, and pregnant, and Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl, devoted to a “sperm bandit” in search of a big belly, not the big O. Not Diana. Not Smith. His sweaty chapters are a sexual decathlon, taking us through exhibitionism, BDSM, three-ways, phone sex, fetish-wear, and swinging.

Smith’s affectedly female voice is interesting and socially valuable, even if it isn’t always successful. He goes straight to the genitals on the first page, which is exactly counter to any advice I’ve ever received (couldn’t we start with the backs of the knees?). The original use of a pseudonym may also have made Smith too cautious. The penis is freely described with a varied schoolyard vocabulary, yet Diana‘s happy spot is often referred to as “her sex.”

The fact that sex is everywhere save our (subsidized) literature is more than simply misrepresentative. It’s also a lost opportunity to capitalize on one of fiction’s specialties — privacy. We often watch movies with someone else, whereas fiction is almost always read alone. Diana is actually quite funny, and humour is another thing often lost in our overly chaste literature. Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version was one of the last novels to win the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and it’s full of sex.

If realism, social relevance, intimacy, and humour aren’t reason enough to up the porn quotient in CanLit, look at your thermometer. This is Canada. Is there a better way to keep warm in the winter?

Woodpigeon may very well be the biggest Canadian band you’ve never heard of — literally and figuratively. The eight-member Calgary collective’s wistful, lyrical alt-folk has been drawing capacity crowds and garnering deafening buzz in the U.K. and Europe over the past year, though homegrown listeners have been slower to discover the group’s charms.

Listen to Knock Knock by Woodpigeon

Woodpigeon's sophomore album, Treasury Library Canada. Available from Boompa Records

Mark Hamilton, a linchpin of the burgeoning Calgary indie scene, began the band while living in Edinburgh several years ago. Once back at home, he called upon a rotating roster of musical pals to flesh out his delicate melodies with strings and cherubic harmonies.

Since the release of Songbook, the band’s quietly stunning 2006 debut, Woodpigeon has amassed a devoted following, particularly in Europe. Their second full-length, Treasury Library Canada, sold out its entire initial run last fall in mere weeks before being reissued this February at home and in the U.K, where the band has received raves from the august likes of the Guardian.

“We’ve always felt deep down that people would begin to take notice, and we’ve always treated that as something that would grow naturally,” Hamilton says. “We’ve got some beautiful friends in Canada, indeed, but I’ve no problem admitting it’s definitely been a strange experience heading overseas and seeing the reaction we’re receiving over there versus here.”

Woodpigeon hopes to woo North American audiences with an upcoming volley of releases; they’ve finished their next album, Die Stadt Muzikanten, due out this fall, and have already begun work on a subsequent record, Thumbtacks + Glue, scheduled for 2010. The prolific output is in anticipation of a possible hiatus — Hamilton, who’s currently finishing up his Film Studies degree at the University of Calgary, is keen to start work on a master’s degree.

“If Joel Gibb can keep The Hidden Cameras going in Toronto while living in Berlin, and Rivers Cuomo can finish degrees off between Weezer albums, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a struggle,” Hamilton quips. “Even while I’m drowning in my thesis, there’ll be new Woodpigeon music coming out.”

Jillian Tamaki

Last year, on October 21, Jillian Tamaki got a phone call from her cousin, the Toronto-based writer-performer Mariko Tamaki. Their muchloved co-creation Skim had made history by becoming the first graphic novel nominated for a Governor General’s Award, in the Children’s Literature (Text) category. Skim, loosely about sexuality, teenage alienation, and Wicca, had already received a torrent of praise and would later make the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books list. Now it was in the running for Canada’s pre-eminent literary prize.

But there was a snag. The Canada Council for the Arts had only nominated Mariko, who wrote the text. Tamaki, whose signature sketchy, half-finished illustrations filled the book’s pages, was not included in the honour. The writer was the author; the illustrator was not. “Obviously, I was extremely disappointed,” Tamaki writes in an email — the Brooklyn-based Calgary expat gently insisted on an online interview because she is “a bit phone shy.” “I suppose it can be argued that one could read the text and look at the illustrations of a children’s book separately, but that’s impossible with a graphic novel.”

A few weeks later, on November 12, genre heavyweights Chester Brown and Seth published an open letter to the Governor General’s Literary Awards, condemning the council’s exclusion of Tamaki and its implicit misunderstanding of how graphic novels work. “The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together are the text,” they wrote. “Try to imagine evaluating Skim if you couldn’t see the drawings.” The council responded that it was too late to change the nomination, and the award eventually went to another work. But the letter — co-signed by a cadre of comics luminaries — quietly marked a touchstone in the uneven cultural ascent of the graphic novel.

Page from Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Click to enlarge

“In a tiny way, I believe the letter nudged the comics community and the book community together, at least in Canada and albeit briefly,” Tamaki says. “It’s not often they have a dialogue. For about a week, we were talking about the nature of storytelling in this medium, which is unfamiliar to new readers.” Graphic novels have proven lucrative as blockbuster film adaptations, though literary approval remains more elusive. “But the book world is obviously making some big statements by nominating graphic novels in its more traditional categories,” Tamaki adds. “It says a lot, since I believe that some still probably believe that comics will never be ‘legitimate’ literature.”

It isn’t surprising that a medium marked by egalitarianism between art and text might turn off the word-focused lit world. “We forget that as ‘comics people’ sometimes: there is a large segment of readers who are picking up their first graphic novel and learning how to read them and judge them,” Tamaki says. Brown and Seth are right that it is impossible to imagine Skim without Tamaki’s drawings. One crucial moment is entirely wordless; the eponymous narrator kisses her adult teacher in a tangle of woods, the school faintly visible in the background. This illustration takes up a full two-page spread.

Despite Skim‘s success, Tamaki still considers herself a “comics newcomer.” She is an editorial illustrator by trade, whose list of clients includes the New York Times and the Guardian, as well as Canadian outlets like the CBC and The Walrus. “Illustrators are interpreters of others’ ideas, and I enjoy that challenge,” Tamaki says. “But oftentimes there is not a lot of yourself in illustration work.” Tamaki, though, is everywhere in Skim, in every pained adolescent expression and looming empty space. Her contribution escaped the Canada Council for the Arts, unaccustomed as it was to a foreign format. But her presence stays with the reader.

What to choose? Proportional representation

Canada, in deciding to adopt the British system of responsible parliamentary government, instead imported SMP elections. The supposed strength of SMP was that it encouraged two-party contests, which would lead to clear mandates for the elected MP and strong majorities in the parliament so these MPs could enact legislation with the broadest appeal. PR, on the other hand, inevitably leads to multiple parties being elected to a legislature, which in a parliamentary system means a divided legislature and coalition governments.

If we had adopted PR in 1867 when it was the dominant democratic idea, many of Canada’s current political problems would have been eliminated. At the very least, Canadians would see that parliamentary government and coalition governments are actually synonymous — they are predicated on identical democratic principles.

Furthermore, Canada has been — and continues to be — the exception to the SMP rule. Open any textbook on electoral systems and there will likely be a footnote next to Canada explaining how our large land mass and ethno-linguistically diverse population resulted in “third parties” (and, eventually, four-, five- and six-party contests).

The reason for this is that SMP rewards regional parties. Canadian political parties need only focus their policies and resources on local interests and, as is often the case in Canada, can pit one region against another for electoral gain. This is the reason the Bloc Québécois won 49 seats in the current Parliament, running candidates in only one province. The Bloc Québécois received 12 more seats in the Commons than the NDP, which won eight percent more of the popular vote across Canada.

The skewed electoral system is also the reason most people believe that all Albertans oppose the Liberals and why in the last federal election, 27 of Alberta’s 28 seats went to the Conservatives, even though more than a third of the province voted against them (with 11 percent of Albertans actually voting Liberal).

The exaggerated success of regional parties under SMP in Canada fuels regional discontent. PR would alleviate this because it would ensure that those 11 percent of Albertans who voted Liberal, and the 12 percent of Quebecers who voted NDP, received representation in the House. Regional parties would still have some advantages under PR due to the geographic and demographic quirks unique to Canada, but PR would rebalance the electoral system so it did not disenfranchise pan-Canadian political parties.

Yes, PR ensures more ideological and divergent parties get elected, but SMP is already doing that in Canada. However, since it is rare for any party to hold a majority in a PR system, it forces political parties to form coalition governments. These governments are, based on the mounting evidence from other countries, centrist and not ideological in their policies. The same cannot be said for recent Canadian governments.

Canada’s minority governments for the past five years have increasingly used the threat of confi dence votes and early election calls to ram through ideological legislation in the pursuit of a public policy agenda that was not supported by the public or the majority of elected MPs. Proportional representation would change Canada’s electoral dynamics. Parties would be forced to leave the door open to the possibility of coalitions, and the electorate could consider these possibilities when casting their ballots. It would also force politicians to work together once elected, since the illusion of a majority just being around the corner would disappear.

If PR had been in place, Stephen Harper would not have triggered an early election in 2008. Jack Layton and the NDP would not have wasted the last two years, and the last two election campaigns, running against the Liberals instead of focusing on keeping an ideological right-wing Conservative party out of government. And Michael Ignatieff would not have had an excuse to seize the leadership of the Liberal party without a leadership convention and then spend a month considering whether his own electoral future was most advantaged by keeping the Conservative government in power, forcing a new election, trying to form a Liberal government, or forming a coalition with the NDP.

PR would have ensured that following the last election, all political parties worked together to decide how to form a stable government whose policies were supported by the majority of the Commons and thus the Canadian people. This is how responsible parliamentary government is supposed to work — and that, not the wonky electoral system, is what Canadians thought they had imported from Britain in 1867.

* December 2008 StatsCan figures. These have likely risen since then.

While at first glance it might look like the federal government is playing favourites, with benefits starting earlier and lasting longer in Newfoundland and Labrador, these regional inequalities actually make a lot of sense.

Explains Julie Hahn from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: “When a region’s unemployment rate increases, the entrance requirement is relaxed and the benefit duration is extended to allow more time for a successful job match.”

This is why Newfoundland and Labrador, with unemployment rates nearly five times Edmonton’s, sees their residents eligible for EI at the minimum number of 420 hours, while Edmontonians need to work the maximum 700 hours.

So while the schemes aren’t equal, they are designed to be fair. If only last year’s EI surplus, which topped more than $50 billion, was handled with such care. That money, which could have been used to support laid-off manufacturing workers, was instead funnelled into the government’s general revenues, where it helped pay off the national debt — and cover corporate tax cuts.