with the gore and the glass and the reek it is towed to town,
the wrecker breaking down before a schoolyard
and the children all come running forth to see the dead
within: Bonnie’s lip near severed from her mouth,
Clyde with his head blown open,
the hum of heat and the insects never yielding

the car comes to rest in the town of Arcadia, home to 1,000 souls
and a herd of 16,000 try to get an up-close view:
one man tries to harvest Clyde’s fine ear, another wants his trigger finger,
bits of Bonnie’s hair and dress are snipped away,
Clyde’s body is a smear of red, wet rags,
Bonnie has hearts tattooed upon her thigh,
beer sells for two bits and you can’t get a thin ham sandwich at any price

there are 17 entry wounds in Clyde, 26 in Bonnie,
they are photographed frail and naked on the gurneys,
they are sent to separate funeral homes
where someone offers Henry 10 grand for his son’s body
and Emma Parker can no longer hide her hatred for the boy

meanwhile the Ford V8 flathead sits in the Arcadia impound lot
pocked by 167 bullets, filthy, with an engine smooth as silk,
the posse think that it belongs to them, sweet ambush booty
along with all the guns and cash and trinkets from the ride

Ruth Warren disagrees: that damn car was stolen from her place
April 29 in Topeka Kansas and she comes to drive it home,
then rents it out to Charles W. Stanley who loads the car
upon a flatbed truck and tours it round the land for free,
though a dime per person would help towards expenses

Cumie Barrow and Emma Parker join the car on tour
in March of ’35, a paycheck is a paycheck after all,
Henry had a job and Marie would handle ticket sales
for the show entitled Crime Does Not Pay,
not long before they head back home to Dallas

Stanley ran the Death Car Tour well into the 40s
people fell upon their knees and wept to see it
arguments broke out and lawyers made their fees
the car moved hand to hand from state to state
and rests today upon the floor in
Whiskey Pete’s Casino, Primm, Nevada

the car they lived and died in, a little like a shrine:
damn you Henry Ford and your knack for slick design.

Kay Kritzwiser, a feature writer assigned to the Globe and Mail’s weekend supplement, The Globe Magazine, had never heard of Marshall McLuhan when, on a mid-November morning in 1963, her edior, Colin McCullough, asked her to write a profile of him. She visited the Globe’s library and took away a Who’s Who entry and a few articles about the University of Toronto English professor. One, a profile by Kildare Dobbs published the previous year, compared a conversation with McLuhan to a trip to outer space. “In orbit with him one looks down to see the comfortable world of familiar facts diminished to the scale of molecules; long vistas of history yawn frighteningly…”

Kritzwiser, who regarded herself as a woman with her feet on the ground, thought it sounded like a carnival ride. She read on: McLuhan’s first book, an eccentric intellectual critique of advertising and society called The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, had been published in 1951 to good reviews and weak sales. His second major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, had been published in the fall of 1962 and widely reviewed both in Canada and in prestigious international publications, and had won that year’s Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Nevertheless, McLuhan was, for the most part, a high-brow academic whose challenging ideas on communications and media were confined mainly to university campuses and a few industry and government organizations. In the fall of 1964, he was two years away from the mega-celebrityhood that his theories in part addressed.

At that time, almost all female reporters were forced into one of two stereotypes: those who specialized in women’s page fare (weddings, fashion, cooking tips) and the so-called “sob sisters”—reporters whose great journalistic achievement was the use of sympathy to coax family photos from grieving widows. Kritzweiser fit into a third category that might be classified as post-emancipation and pre-feminism: independent, determined career women actively competing with their male counterparts (at half their salaries) who nonetheless saw no irony in backing up serious reporting and research skills with a feminine flair. They were the precursors of the liberated, college-educated go-getters who began pouring into newsrooms in the mid-1960s.

A Regina native, Kritzwiser was recruited by the Globe in 1956. A year later, she had established herself as one of the paper’s senior feature writers. In his 1999 memoir, Hurly Burly: A Time at the Globe, Richard J. Doyle fondly described Kritzwiser in a passage that also revealed an attitude toward women shared by many of his generation:

The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow. A rustle of silk announces her arrival, a breathless voice begins the interview, a laugh like [Lauren] Bacall’s punctuates the questions. Tiny gasps greet the most mundane of responses to her guileless prodding into the dark recesses of the hapless fellow on the other side of her notepad.

Until the interview appears in print. “Did I say that? I didn’t admit… but if I did… why did I tell her about… Who does she think she is?”

Kritzwiser’s writing reflected Doyle’s modernizing of the Globe in the 1960s. Although most of us take it for granted today, at this time people were just beginning to realize that objectivity, a goal of news reporting for decades, was seen as too confining to cope with the complexities of modern life. Features were longer than a conventional news story and had a beginning, middle, and an end; readers who devoted time and attention to them expected some interpretation, not just a recitation of facts. Pierre Berton and a handful of others had turned out these kinds of features from time to time since the 1940s, but now they were becoming accepted practice. And it was the only approach that had a hope of making sense out of a figure like Marshall McLuhan.

“How do you do, Professor McLuhan?” Kritzwiser said, stepping into McLuhan’s cramped, shabby office on the U of T campus. Considering McLuhan’s published statements about how the electronic media were killing print, it was hard not to notice the books: shelves groaned with them, they were piled high on tables and the floor, and they spilled out into his secretary’s tiny alcove.

“How do you do,” said McLuhan, standing up behind his desk and indicating a chair. Kritzwiser sat down, crossed her legs, and placed a notebook on her knee.

Like most things she did when working, Kritzwiser dressed for effect; this morning she was wearing her beautifully tailored grey wool suit with the pearl-white buttons and a stylish grey felt hat. She was a short, trim woman with a sunny personality and plain, boyish features. On most occasions she seemed entirely at ease, a function, in part, of several years spent in amateur theatre in Regina, which she regarded as excellent preparation for interviewing. She drew a cigarette from its package and politely asked McLuhan whether he had a light.

He was a tall, lanky man, his thinning grey hair swept straight back, handsome in a distinguished way, she observed. He wore a russet-coloured Harris tweed suit and, as he leaned forward in a courtly gesture to light her cigarette, she noticed his relaxed stance, the angular lines of his free hand on his hip, index finger pointing downward. Then he sat down and lit a thin cigarillo.

Kritzwiser was a social smoker. Cigarettes, to her, were mainly aesthetic, a prop, part of a formality that relaxed both interviewer and interviewee in the days before antismoking sentiments came to dominate Canadian society. Her brand was Sweet Caporals, not for the taste but for the red filter that approximately matched her lipstick.

McLuhan, she knew, had been born in Edmonton and brought up in Winnipeg, so they chatted about the West. McLuhan had no idea how to make small talk—he described it as “a world without a foreground, but with the whole world as a background.” Then he began a discourse about how the industrial revolution was symbolized by the extension of feet into the wheel, the knight-in-armour into a tank. Next the earth’s curvature was discovered, which led to the invention of modern media.

“Today, the central nervous system has been extended outside the body through the age of electricity,” he explained, smoke forming a nimbus around his head. “Literally, our brain is now outside our skull. We’re lashed around by the fury of these extensions. It’s like a spinning buzz-saw. It’s not known where the teeth are but we know they’re there.”

It didn’t take much to get McLuhan started, and he was warmed up now, his voice purring on eight well-tuned cylinders while his thoughts wound circuitously through a maze of theories, many related to a work-in-progress that would be published, a few months later, as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Kritzwiser’s pen darted back and forth across the page in an effort to keep up. McLuhan was incredible; he spoke in what sounded like feature-story paragraphs, although following his train of thought was like trying to scoop up a puddle of mercury. It was, she thought, as though he simply hadn’t stitched together all the loose ends yet, as though he was feeling his way toward a new philosophy, like a blind man acquainting himself with a new neighbourhood.

An exhilarated Kritzwiser arrived back at the office. In today’s world, where computers are not just in most homes but now ubiquitous in the palms of millions, it’s hard to remember that 50 years ago McLuhan’s ideas—about a “global village” and a computer-driven medium of communication that sounded a lot like the internet—might as well have been science fiction. “I don’t know what I’ve got,” she told her editor, “but I do know a man has pulled aside a curtain for me. I don’t know what I saw but I know I glimpsed the future.”

Later she read over her notes. The story hadn’t gelled yet, she thought. She was still looking for what she called the “moment of truth,” that dramatic scene or anecdote or object that symbolically captures the essential theme of a story. But what was the theme? So far, Kritzwiser had a professor in a book-filled office and seven pages of notes that included references to Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, as well as cryptic phrases (even though they were in her own handwriting) such as “in a non-specialist society, relevance will be our business.”

The following Saturday, she arrived at McLuhan’s rambling two-storey home in the Annex district of Toronto, a few blocks north of the U of T campus. There were bicycles on the front porch and inside the homey smell of a baking pie filled the air. McLuhan, in a rumpled flannel shirt and casual slacks, looked like a homebody sitting in his chair beside a crackling fire with his legs stretched out. He was talking to a friend who worked at the Royal Ontario Museum about a lecture he was scheduled to give the following week.

“TV is tactile,” McLuhan was saying, rubbing his fingers together as though he were feeling silk. “The eye has immunity to radio…”

But Kritzwiser’s attention was captured by a carved wooden slab of a mask hanging on the wall. Was it Greek? She was interested in Greek and Roman mythology and her instincts told her she had found the symbol for her story. On January 4, 1964, her article, bearing the title “The McLuhan Galaxy,” was published.

On the fireplace wall of the Herbert Marshall McLuhan home, a giant wooden mask broods over the living room. Visiting children swarm up the chair beneath it to stroke its satiny furrows. It is a mask of Tiresias, the Theban of Greek legend who saw Athena bathing and was struck with blindness when she splashed water in his face. Through she repented, Athena was unable to restore his sight. Instead, she gave Tiresias the power of soothsaying. She opened his ears so that he could understand the language of the birds. She gave him a staff with which he walked as safely as a sighted person.

Six foot tall and lean, Marshall McLuhan, an internationally known expert in the new science of communications, casts a shadow like a television tower on the University of Toronto campus… But in his home, sprawled beside the fire, the mask of Tiresias above him makes a provocative comparison. For McLuhan’s new global reputation as a communications authority credits him with the power to see as few do, to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.

It was not Kritzwiser’s best story. McLuhan was both charming and hard to pin down, and her profile was overly flattering. Some of McLuhan’s ideas were summarized but they weren’t critically analyzed, nor was Kritzwiser particularly well qualified to do so. Few reporters were at the time, but she might have included one or two of the critics of McLuhan who thought he was a self-absorbed crackpot whose theories lacked intellectual rigor, or more often simply lacked a point. The closest Kritzwiser came to representing that view was through an unnamed faculty member who said he admired McLuhan’s ability to challenge tradition but admitted he left his seminars “with a thundering headache.”

Her story was otherwise typical of how daily journalism usually dealt with McLuhan in the mid-1960s. The opening was revealing. The key phrase was the reference to McLuhan’s ability “to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.” Aside from tying neatly into the Tiresias myth, it reflected the accepted wisdom among mainstream journalists that the electronic age was to be feared and mistrusted. Since the public had as much trouble understanding abstract subjects involving science, physics, and technology as the press had writing about them, most stories focused on a person. The mid-1960s was a time of accelerated change, and McLuhan seemed to offer an accessible link with the future. A Canadian, he was emerging as an internationally acknowledged “expert”— which lent him credibility—but he was also easily portrayed as a literary invention: an ivory-tower egghead who might be a genius, an adventurous non-conformist who, against all odds, wasn’t a young, bearded, wild-eyed revolutionary. Instead, he was a respectable family man with six children, and it was as easy as it was natural for Kritzwiser to “humanize” him near the top of her story by presenting him in a Norman Rockwell–like setting where Corrine McLuhan, “wife and mother, calm, handsome and dark-haired,” appeared as “the pivotal force in the McLuhan galaxy.”

Sometimes the mainstream media seemed like a three-ring circus, with a few big attractions on the front page (or leading the TV newscast) and plenty of sideshows to ensure there was something of interest for everyone. Even papers like the Globe or the New York Times, with their well-educated readers and lofty reputations, still had to entertain as well as inform. A few months later, when McLuhan’s Understanding Media was published, The Globe Magazine ran a critical review by Lister Sinclair in which he declared, “He has become a writer and he can’t write. He has become an authority on communications and he can’t communicate.” Many academics agreed, and if the debate had been confined to the insular world of university scholarship, today McLuhan might be an obscure curio of the ’60s. But instead, he became even more popular and controversial; a “McLuhan story” had increased in value because it was viewed as entertaining, which resulted in more coverage.

By publishing Kritzwiser’s respectful profile, the Globe introduced McLuhan to an elite audience and acted as a stamp of approval, signalling to timid editors of other papers that McLuhan was important. Over the next few years, the momentum grew. Articles were written about him in virtually every major North American publication, including the New York Times, Playboy, Time, Life, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Night, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune. (Which, in November 1965 in its weekend magazine, New York, published Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of McLuhan that posed the Wolfian question: “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times—what if he is right…?”)

As McLuhan had written, the medium is the message. That meant new technologies, from television to computers, were revolutionizing human consciousness and altering the context of communications, but it could also be summarized as content follows form. The properties of the medium were more important than the information it conveyed. Still, even many scholars had trouble following his train of thought, so, in 1964, the job of communicating McLuhan and his ideas fell to journalists like Kay Kritzwiser who focused on the most accessible information—and left the theories to the future in which we live.

Kinuseo falls in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the problems of company towns, which had a habit of becoming ghost towns, by empowering local governments to create real communities.

Not everything went as planned. Four decades and a dozen such towns later, many once-vibrant communities were near death as mills and mines shut down or shipped out. The government was, however, right about one thing: towns aren’t so quick to grab the tombstone. Here’s how four post–Instant Towns are embracing their abundant resources, natural and artificial, in hopes of a greener second life.

Hudson’s Hope

Industry: Hydroelectricity
Incorporated: 1965
Population: 1,012
Hudson’s Hope was incorporated in 1965 when it became the second-largest municipality in B.C. Dubbed the “Land of Dinosaurs and Dams,” the town is rich with fossils. There are more than 1,700 dinosaur tracks in the area dating back to the Early Cretaceous Period. They even have their own dinosaur—the Hudsonelpidia—that was named for the town.

Mackenzie

Industry: Pulp and paper
Incorporated: 1966
Population: 5,452 (2006)
Mackenzie is home to the world’s largest tree-crusher. Indeed, in 1968 the 175-tonne behemoth flattened a 1,773-square- kilometre patch of woodland that would become Williston Lake, the province’s largest reservoir. The town has since incorporated the tree-crusher, which sat idle for years, as a central attraction in the town’s push for tourism.

Tumbler Ridge

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1981
Population: 2,454
Tumbler Ridge bills itself as the “Waterfall Capital of the North.” Kinuseo Falls is taller than Niagara at nearly 200 feet. The Cascades are 10 waterfalls that are all located within a few kilometres of each other. The community also holds an annual music festival—Grizfest—which this year hosted April Wine, Platinum Blonde, and children’s entertainers Sharon & Bram.

Elkford

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1971
Population: 2,463
Elkford may be a coal town, but nature still dominates. Indeed, the town’s website calls it a place where “humanity borrows a bit of space.” Currently, Elkford is repositioning itself as a good getaway for photographers. If would-be tourists are brave, they can try to snap some of the area’s grizzlies, elk, lynx, or wolves. If not, there’s always the Elkford webcam.

Protesters at Barriere Lake turned away election officers from the Indian Affairs Department in July. Photo courtesy Defenders of the Land.

The path forward, if the futures of First Nations and the rest of Canada are to reconcile, begins with two steps. Repeal the Indian Act, and abolish the department that delivers it. Bluntly put, the legislation that governs how status Indians are treated—and defines who holds that status—was racist and wrong in its conception 135 years ago, and has been in its implementation ever since.

Adopted explicitly for the purpose of assimilating Indians and eliminating “the Indian problem,” the devastation wrought against First Nations is today undeniable. Moreover, the social disharmony and economic cost to Canada as a whole remain ongoing challenges of this legacy. Change is desperately needed, but as that change will mold the future relationship between First Nations and Canada, it is essential that we get it right this time. And getting it right won’t be easy.

In a speech at July’s Assembly of First Nations, National Chief Shawn A-in-chut Atleo rekindled a debate that has been going on for quite some time over how to replace the Indian Act and the department that delivers it. When the Government of Canada floated the notion of repealing the Act in its infamous 1969 White Paper, it was surprised by a strong and effective negative response from the very people who suffered most from the legislation. Trudeau and his Indian Affairs Minister, Jean Chrétien, thought that simply wiping out any differentiation between Indians and other Canadians would bring equality and be welcomed by everyone. But for First Nations, that approach to the repeal of the Act and abolition of the department is incomplete.

As First Nations leader Harold Cardinal said at the time:

We do not want the Indian Act retained because it is a good piece of legislation. It isn’t. It is discriminatory from start to finish … but we would rather continue to live in bondage under the inequitable Indian Act than surrender our sacred rights. Any time the government wants to honour its obligations to us we are more than ready to devise new Indian legislation.

Therein lies the debate. Formal equality—undifferentiated treatment under the law— has the appeal of simplicity and superficial fairness. That’s why some people support repeal today: They like the idea of ending “special rights.” But equality under the law starting today means that the inequity enforced since before Canada was a country remains unaddressed. In particular, the laws under which everyone would theoretically be equal were created by and for those who have perpetrated that inequity, without regard to the rights and interests of First Nations. This approach simply continues the policy of assimilation.

What National Chief Atleo and others are proposing is something more complex and nuanced than wiping out all historic and legal distinctions in one fell swoop. They are suggesting that the rights First Nations hold in law—treaty and aboriginal rights recognized both under international law and under section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982—be respected. From this perspective, upholding legal difference is, in fact, essential to equality. The failure to respect historic legal rights and interests would only continue the injustice.

Atleo is also suggesting that a responsible and methodical approach be taken toward the ultimate objective of repeal and abolition. This includes rapidly increasing the number of completed self-government agreements and accelerating the conclusion of the claims processes, vesting responsibility and accountability with First Nations governments and facilitating economic, social and political progress. On the bureaucratic side, it means creating two entities in the federal government to replace the 34 that currently administer aboriginal programs and services. One would occupy itself with the intergovernmental relationship between Canada and First Nations, establishing the foundation for reconciliation of the rights and interests of all. The other entity would continue in a diminishing role as service provider for those First Nation communities that continue to move toward selfgovernance, carefully winding down the traditionally paternalistic role played by the federal bureaucracy in Indian country.

This proposal is neither radical nor new. It is consistent with recommendations in a 1983 submission from a House of Commons committee known as the Penner Report and the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples released in 1996. Unfortunately, whether for practical or ideological reasons, no government has been willing to act on the idea until now. Interestingly, this proposal was part of the aboriginal issues platform of the New Democratic Party in the most recent federal election, but it is not popular within the Harper government. In response to the National Chief’s speech, a spokesperson for Minister John Duncan of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada dismissively responded, “Our government is strongly committed to addressing challenges within the Indian Act” (emphasis added).

Ironically, in June of 2009, Prime Minister Harper apologized for Canada’s residential schools policy by saying, “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.” But more than two years later, his government insists on retaining the central vehicle for assimilation—the Indian Act itself—albeit with some tinkering around the edges. It wants to keep the department as it is, as though having renamed it from “Indian and Northern Affairs Canada” to “Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada” resolved the dysfunction there. In short, the Prime Minister either misunderstood the lessons he claimed to have learned in his apology, or he never really meant what he said.

Throughout the history of this country, government after government has pursued only one policy toward First Nations — assimilation — and it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t accomplished assimilation as its proponents wanted, and it certainly hasn’t worked for First Nations. At a time when First Nations are ready to identify both an alternative vision and a way to get there, it is up to all Canadians to reject failure, show respect for First Nations and finally set the country down the path of reconciliation.

Getting it right won’t be easy, but it is worth the trouble.

Daniel Wilson is a freelance writer and consultant on human rights and aboriginal policy. He is a former diplomat and advisor to the Assembly of First Nations.

Creative Commons photo by flickr user ecstaticist.

“It has been some time now that I have wanted to speak to you about the youth gang. Since July there has been much conjecture about how the youth gang started, and when, and where, and what exactly the youth gang is, and who belongs to it, and whether its members wear ‘colours,’ and which weaponry they carry, and how to best protect ourselves—Kevlar vs. chainmail, house alarms vs. hounds, landmines vs. prayer— and whether the youth gang represents a simple gap in generational understanding, or a malevolent shudder in the collective morality of humankind, or the death of love, or a mirror, or a warning, or the end.

“But here we are, October, with no real progress or understanding to speak of. Three months of terror have passed and still the youth gang holds us in its clutches. And while we continue to ask how, when, where, even what, no one in our close-knit multicultural community, in which not a soul wants for anything and everybody knows your name, has ever asked why we have a youth gang. And before you go throwing your hands up in despair, Mrs. Heinz-Mercer, and muttering to one another, Sheikh al-Shabazz and Mother, about who the heck does this woman up there think she is, I pose a further question, one that requires serious introspection, analysis, and honesty. Consider: Who created the youth gang if not all of us?

“Grumble, fine! Sometimes the truth is difficult to hear. Although to those, Father Power and Rabbi Berkowitz, preparing to storm out in a huff, hold on. I am willing to acknowledge—okay, confess—something you’ve no doubt been waiting for. (Though have you never considered that I’ve wanted to say it, too, but merely lacked the courage, or the impetus? And sure, maybe yesterday’s tar-and-feathering of the entire security force at the factory outlet mall has provided exactly that.) A solution begins, I think, with each of us accepting responsibility. In that spirit, let me be the first to do so.

“Listen to me now: the youth gang is largely, if not entirely, my fault. Had I not founded the youth group, no youth gang would have ever mutated out of it. It is that simple. And I’m sorry.

“Thanks, Sardarji, nice to see you sitting back down— you, too, Nakamura-san. So there it is, what I’ve wanted to get off my chest since the BuskerFest swarming back in July. Mea culpa. But fault me not for good intentions! Honestly, I believed it was the right thing—following consensus, reached at a town-hall gathering very much like this one, to get the youth off our streets.

“But now I wonder: were the youth ever on our streets? Prior to the first youth-group meeting at the recreation centre, weren’t they mostly in our basements with computers? And also, technically, this subdivision doesn’t even have streets. There’s an abundance of crescents, courts, and cul-de-sacs, two wide and beautiful tree-lined boulevards, a trail, a path, and I for one live on a place, and there are other places and drives and avenues and ways and passes and even roads—but streets? No. Not one.

“So we had a logistical or at least semantic problem from the get-go. But, people, streets or no streets, it’s insignificant now, when every night our chimneys are being stuffed with fertilizer and the word PWNED burned into our lawns with bleach. What matters is how to stop the menace—the menace of the youth gang. And to do this we need to come together. Now, I know that several of you (Mestre Appleton-Bannerjee, the Honourable G. A. Sabatini, Comptroller Choi, others) have booked the Hall tonight at 8:00 for capoeira practice, so I’ll do my best to be brief. And I’m sure the members of our local roda would appreciate it if everyone helps stack the chairs on their way out. Thanks!

“I’ll add, too, that what follows is not meant as an affront to the Nguyen-Orloffs, whose Reading Instead program happens weekdays from 3:30 to 6 p.m. in the Bookmobile. I see a lot of confused faces. Really? No one knows about this? You’ve never wondered about the repurposed RV up on blocks in the cemetery parking lot? Well, it’s a fine, fine initiative, with as many as six kids diverted, or at least temporarily distracted, from joining the youth gang. As you may have noticed, an empty salsa jar is making the rounds for donations. Please give generously, and now you know what they’ve been up to, let’s give Minh and Jack a round of applause for their efforts.

“Great. Now—Mother, stop muttering—everyone, please listen: in times of communal confusion, truth gets lost amid the clatter of voices—each straining to be heard, each deaf to one another. (You and your research fellows heard me, Dr. O’Connor; no need for the eyebrow raising.) This is how gossip becomes mythology. Much of what you think you know about the youth gang—that they sleep in caves underground and eat small dogs—is spurious and absurd. Remember the

hysteria about the youth gang recruiting babies from the natal ward at Jewish General? In truth only one baby was approached before the youth gang realized they could make their own babies, babies born into the youth gang and as such members for life—though this is perhaps equally worrying, for different reasons.

“Rumours cloud judgment and preclude reason. Please allow me to detail an accurate history of how the youth gang formed and evolved, and explain where they are now in their organization. I’ll conclude with a potential course of what I’m calling ‘proaction,’ contrasted with a picture of what the future may hold for our community if things continue on their current trajectory (i.e., more incidents like the urine-balloon bombing at last Sunday’s Fall Harvest Festival.)

“Here’s how it all began, last June, at the rec centre. About 15 minutes into the first youth-group meeting, through diversionary tactics and trickery, the youth locked me in the supply closet and, commandeering a staple gun, affixed the head lifeguard, Florian Henderson—hi, Florian—to a spinal board by his trunks. That led to a handful of youths unleashing a skunk into the retirement home next door, while another faction spray-painted a lurid mural of male genitalia, mid-climax, in the library parkade; still others stormed CROG FM and, holding the hosts at bay with gardening tools, broadcast a burping contest for the entirety of Rick and Tina’s Commuter Hour.

“Sure, there had been signs of dissent. The youth group was no happy commune, all smiles and sunshine—actually, if anything disorients the youth, it’s sunshine. When I first herded them out of their basements into the Youth Group paddy wagon, generously donated by Captain N’diaye’s 32nd Precinct, they staggered like so many pubescent moles into the light of midday summer, blinded and lost. For a moment my heart leapt at the sight of them, so vulnerable and confused— that is, until I discovered a note (I’m a try-hard fatty) affixed to my back with chewing gum. Oh, that’s just great—laugh it up, Mother. Everything’s so hilarious to you, isn’t it?

“Since June I have dropped 17 pounds, most of it over those traumatic four days locked in the rec-centre supply closet, subsisting entirely on powdered sports-drink concentrate and unpopped popcorn kernels. Through a ventilation shaft I listened to the youth, over a succession of daily ping-pong tournaments, morph from group to gang. By the time I was rescued by the centre’s long-time caretaker, Donato DiFruscia (who promptly fled for the ‘old country’), the youth, in a horde of all-over print hoodies, were descending upon BuskerFest— an episode the talented singer-songwriters whose CDRs were stolen, recorded over with flatulence, and promptly returned, will never forget.

“I don’t think I need to detail the humiliating months that have followed: the toilet paperings, the drive-by Slurpeeings, the teabaggings, the hijackings of decency and Segways. We have learned things. If, for example, a flaming paper bag appears at your front door, get the hose. A sign announcing ‘Free Beer’ accompanied by a series of chalked arrows leading to an alleyway is best ignored. For those duped out of their RSP savings by the space tourism/all-you-can-eat surf ’n’ turf scam, my heart goes out to you.

“But enough, I say: enough! Enough shame and terror. Enough peeking out at the world through our mail slots and doggie doors. Enough flights of journalistic fancy such as—with due respect, Karen—Miss Behaviour’s op-ed of September 12, ‘Anyone Know a Good Exorcist?’ Enough tribunals and sanctions, which only waste community picnic funds. Enough vigilante posses prowling the neighbourhood in backcatcher masks with rolls of quarters in their fists—yes, Mme. et M. Letourneau, I’m looking at you. Enough booby-trapping the woods. People, the youth gang don’t even go into the woods; they abhor nature and distrust trees.

“Let’s admit our complicity. We put the youth in tennis lessons, and what was once a forehand buggwhip is now a tire iron smashed through the windows of Fetisov’s Ceramics Boutique. We paid for the karate classes that equipped the youth with the very roundhouse kicks used to destroy, to use a convenient example, the entire back stock of Fetisov’s Ceramics Boutique. How worrisome, then—for all of us, not just you, Mr. Fetisov!—that the video games we bought the youth teach strategies for storming buildings with assault rifles and gunning down rooftop snipers. Thank God for our community’s strident firearms laws—at least for now.

“Friends, neighbours: how can our creation also be our enemy? The youth gang comprises our sons and daughters, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our paperboys and girls; these kids used to bag our groceries and flip our burgers, rip our tickets at the movie theatre, and, sometimes, even fill the classrooms of our schools. (Where are they now, you ask? God knows. They may even be in this room— it’s impossible to tell, since the hide-and-seek we encouraged has made them so adept at subterfuge.) My point is this: as its architects, aren’t we also part of the youth gang? In this war against the youth gang, whom are we fighting, essentially, if not ourselves?

“Quiet, please. I’m not finished. So what then, some of you ask, if not a punitive response? I suggest talks, dialogue, tolerance, patience, understanding. I have faxed one of the youth gang’s representatives, and she seems willing to negotiate— though who knows for what, and under which terms. But a lull in hostilities is the first step to reconciliation and, perhaps, even a truce. What does the youth gang want, besides crafting scenes of prurient orgy with our garden gnomes and sailing looted futons down the river? Does anyone know? This was a rhetorical question, Mother; please put down your hand. You are a thousand years old. There is no way you have any idea.

“People, we have one week until Halloween—that means Devil’s Night will be upon us in only six days. Does this worry anyone except me? Oh, wow, everyone? I’ve got a whole page here of ‘worst-case scenarios,’ but maybe—right, I’ll skip it. Okay. I hope we can turn anxiety into action—or proaction, as I mentioned earlier. And quickly. If I can broker talks, everyone here needs to participate, albeit, of course, calmly, without shrieking or finger-pointing or the petulant feet-stomping that certain also-rans in last spring’s 5k Jog for the Cure seem to think passes for sportsmanship. And, please, people, no spitting. This has never, ever been okay. Do you hear me? Ever.

“I thank you for your time. Let us do the right thing, let us extend the olive branch—and be prepared that we might be handed roadkill in return. We must persevere. The youth gang is our doing. It is all of our faults. And it is up to us, as those responsible, to work with the youth, to show them the way out of their misdeeds, toward a new path. And as for what this path might be…”

The speaker trailed off. Looking out over the crowd, she flipped through her notes. The room was silent. Everyone waited for her to conclude, to provide definitive and clear instructions. The air had gone brittle with expectation. But instead of saying anything, with shaking hands the speaker plucked from behind the lectern a bottle of Vitamin Water, which she tipped back and drank—the entire thing, rapidly, in a single, open-throated gulp.

One of Book Madam & Associates' online comics.

The words “book” and “fan” don’t really fit. Music and fan, sure. Sports and fan, you bet. But when it comes to books, you’re a reader or a lover, rarely a fan. Maybe it’s because fandom has little place in an industry infamous for its cynicism and curmudgeonly attitude, its scything insults and ivory tower. Or maybe it’s because the word suggests an uncritical appreciation that doesn’t quite match up to the way we feel we should appreciate books. Imagine calling yourself a fan of Borges. It just doesn’t fly. When it comes to books, “fan” falls flat.

Enter Book Madam & Associates, professional book fans. Based in Toronto, with outposts in Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax, BM&A are professional appreciators—not critics or influencers, just people who really, really like books and the publishing industry. They spread their appreciation through blogs, tweets, and occasional podcasts, events, DJ playlists, and online comics clumsily drawn in Microsoft Paint.

Julie Wilson, a.k.a. the Book Madam, describes the group as a bunch of enthusiastic lateral thinkers: “We have a wide range of interests, along with a desire to connect people across those interests.” They’re what you could call enablers, fuelled by the underlying belief that people want to connect to books, but often don’t know how, and that there’s an ever-growing list of media tools that can enable this connection.

Wilson started on the road to professional fandom in 2006 with her blog Seen Reading, which she describes as an “esoteric spy journal.” On the blog, Wilson logged what she saw commuters reading while in transit. Each entry includes the location of the spotting, a description of the reader, the book being read, the passage Wilson imagines the person is reading, and her riff on that excerpt.

An example, from October 7, 2008:

Spadina streetcar: Caucasian female, mid 20s, with short blond hair and black-framed glasses, wearing skinny jeans, pink striped T-shirt, and green cargo jacket.

The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla (House of Anansi Press), page 87:

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you’ve got inside you— Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang—depending on what you’ve got. And right then, right when I’m thinking that—I swear—the clouds break up a bit and even though she’s gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

The muted voice offers gentle guidance from behind an inch of hollow door, all that separates this embarrassing and gymnastic feat from the perfumed cheek of the woman who bore her. She sits defeated on the toilet, applicator in hand, and calls her mother in.

Since 2006, Wilson has logged more than 800 entries: a curly-haired woman wearing a white backpack reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote; a Hispanic teenager reading Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi; a black man in his fifties wearing a forest-green sweater reading A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Recently, Seen Reading went global via Twitter, gathering sightings reported by literary voyeurs in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Singapore, and in spring 2012, Calgary-based Freehand Books will publish a book based on the project.

Wilson sees Seen Reading as “an impressive, open-ended display of anecdotal evidence that proves people still read, still read paper books, still read in public as entertainment.” She’s made influencers of readers who, though they may not know it, are producing culture through the act of reading. Considering the publishing industry’s current troubles, BM&A’s unflagging enthusiasm is heartening. A new returns policy instituted by Indigo Books & Music will soon see Canada’s largest retail book chain sending books back to publishers 45 days after they’ve been ordered, slicing in half the long-standing 90-day returns term. That means some books will have only a month and a half to make an impact on readers, an impossibly small window in a very busy season. Some larger publishers, like McClelland & Stewart, who just released Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, have less to worry about. Others, whose fall lists centre on newer voices, may have more of an uphill battle.

“In all your other relationships you’d practice more care, but publishing you truly can’t ever stop trying,” says Wilson of book marketing today. “You’ll turn that book into whatever you think the reader wants: ‘You want a blonde? I can be a blonde!’” As bricksand-mortar bookshelves disappear, some advocate for a re-emphasis on book criticism as a way to keep the conversation going. The reality, though, is that the space available for book reviews in major media outlets doesn’t allow for the considered criticism the New York Times Magazine’s Sam Anderson refers to as the “ground zero of textuality.”

The idea of a professional fan may not jibe with notions of how we receive books. But in building a book community that explores the manifold ways people interact with books, BM&A is doing readers and the publishing industry a great service, reinvigorating the lives books have off the shelf.

Another way Wilson is accomplishing this is through work with the Canadian Bookshelf project, a government-funded database of Canadian books. Its goal is to build community around Canadian titles through customized portals aimed at the general public, film and television producers, teachers and librarians. Wilson blogs about books and authors, and runs a personal-shopper program that matches readers with books based on five self-submitted descriptors, filling the gap left as more curated independent bookstores disappear. The realm of professional book fan keeps growing.

Drawing from her own experiences working in an office, Rosenblum creates characters who, despite their canned lunches and obligatory office parties, are anything but dull. Anyone who has ever worked inside the partial walls of a cubicle, ignoring the constant hum of a computer, while counting the minutes until lunch, will easily relate.

There is Clint, a contract employee, slurring his words as the result of an infected wisdom tooth he can’t afford to have pulled. There’s Andrea, the new hire, who is “straight out of school” and “as jittery as a jailbreak.” And among the most memorable are Mark and Sanjeet, the company’s CEO and COO, who are likely to blame for the company’s demise.

Rosenblum has crafted a reputation as a Canadian writer to watch for, especially after her 2008 collection of short stories, Once, earned her the Metcalf-Rooke Award. The Big Dream only accelerates this expectation. Each short story is rich with memorable dialogue, capturing the empty banter, complaints, and flirtations that often fill the halls of an office. Rosenblum’s natural dialogue and descriptive prose result in a collection that successfully depicts the complex balancing act between home and work that so often define the lives of office workers who struggle to stay afloat inside and outside of their cubicles.

From “Studies in Sea Ice” (2009) by Roberta Holden. Image courtesy the artist.

Vast, impressionistic, and haunting in its sparseness, Roberta Holden’s landscape photography calls to mind the dark, faraway corners of memory and dreams. Taken from days in the Arctic, over the frozen oceans near Greenland, and during the long nights in Morocco, Holden’s work evokes nostalgia for landscapes untouched by human development—a phenomenon many of us have never experienced. Despite the fact that her work focuses on international subjects, her photographs feel distinctly Canadian in their quiet study of our connectedness with the natural environment and the unspoken effects of the land on us.

Holden, now 33, spent her childhood on a sailboat. her parents sailed frequently up the coast of British Columbia, often stopping in remote locations to hike and work. Taking breaks from life at sea, they would dock the boat in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour and spend seasons harvesting wild rice in rural Manitoba as part of a family business. Until she was 14, Holden worked in the rural landscapes she now documents in her work.

“I think a lot of traditional landscape art tends to romanticize the natural environment. And of course there are a lot of experiences where you can sit back and just appreciate the environment,” she says. “But when you’re actually living and working with the land, it’s just an everyday experience that takes more of the senses than just sitting back and gazing upon it. It’s not just a passive, peaceful thing to look upon, but there’s a struggle in just surviving the day-to-day hardships of the landscape.” Tensions of ancestry, colonialism, barren spaces and the vulnerability of a planet facing the effects of climate change play out in Holden’s most recent touring exhibitions, “Studies in Sea Ice” and “The Stillness of Motion: Changing Polar Landscapes.” Studies in Sea Ice is a series of archival images taken in 2009 by helicopter off the northwest coast of Greenland, a region that has undergone a significant warming trend in the past decade. The Stillness of Motion is a series of black and white images shot in Arctic Canada and Antarctica in 2007 and 2008. The series explores the intersections between humans and the landscapes they inhabit.

Both series have been part of six exhibitions in the Vancouver area during the first three months of 2011. In that time, Holden travelled for the second time to Morocco on a five-month photography trip, where she honed her skills as as photojournalist. As someone who hates having her own picture taken, she can identify with people who don’t like being photographed, an understanding which informs the way she interacts with her subjects.

“It’s taken a little longer to be able to bring a camera out in situations that didn’t create a barrier between people,” she says. “That’s what I see as a problem with a lot of photojournalism that focuses on different cultures.

There’s often a lot of that objectifying of people because you bring a camera to a situation.”

Holden brought her camera to a peaceful protest in Marrakech in late February after which the military ordered that she delete all but two images. Both of them depict a human barricade of soldiers.

Holden’s encounter in Marrakech stands in direct opposition to what she hopes to achieve in her photography—to break away from uni-directional, us-versus-them narratives and, in so doing, illuminate social justice issues, political tensions, and the grey spaces in between. “It’s more of a visceral experience,” she says of her work. “Something felt and not just seen.”

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

Dear Progressive Detective: I heard police arrested a man at the Pearson International Airport in Toronto after receiving a tip from Canada’s Suspicious Incident Reporting System, which alleged the man intended to join a Somali terrorist group. I’m concerned: what is SIRS, and how might the Government’s security efforts affect my civil liberties and right to privacy?

Mohamed Hersi was arrested in March as he was preparing to board a plane for Cairo to study Arabic. The 25-year-old security guard’s employer had submitted a Suspicious Incident Report based on web browsing it deemed “suspicious.” Charged with attempting to participate in a terrorist activity and counseling another person to do the same, Hersi’s case is still before the courts. Though out on bail, he’s hardly free—Hersi can’t apply for a passport or access the internet. He must be accompanied by a surety at all times.

The RCMP describes SIRS as an online service allowing operators of certain companies in sectors such as transit, finance, and energy to file reports on any suspicious activity they witness. The Mounties, CSIS, and other relevant agencies are notified upon a report’s submission. RCMP spokesperson Greg Cox says SIRS allows the RCMP to “develop crucial partnerships, support investigations, and maintain continuous dialogue with internal and external partners on shared national security concerns.”

But according to civil liberty and privacy experts, information sharing may be cause for worry. The government is collecting information about people who have yet to—or may never—commit a crime. Micheal Vonn, of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, calls this connecting the dots before knowing if those dots will be useful. To her, such “info grabs” are counterintuitive. “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says, “these systems provide more hay, not the needle.”

Vonn fears the fate of Maher Arar, deported and tortured because of “suspicions” he associated with alleged terrorists, will be repeated. “Information sharing has ramifications for privacy,” she adds, “and the sense that we aren’t being assessed as people, but by our data shadow.”

To its credit, the RCMP is fairly transparent; SIRS is monitored by the Privacy Commissioner. But any sighs of relief may—for now—be premature. As Sukanya Pillay, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, stresses, civil liberties and privacy must be respected. “Concerns arise when these liberties are chipped away,” she says. “That’s when a country starts to change.”