Wild About Writing

Okay, I’m reading Arianna Huffington’s book, Complete Guide to Blogging, but I haven’t seen anything in it about getted “memed” which has just happened to me.

I saw this term for the first time this morning when my Writers’ Union friend Lilian Nattel sent me a comment saying she’d been “memed” and now it was my turn. Tell six things about myself.

So first, (Luddite, me) I had to go and find out what it means:

“A meme is a set of questions that are passed from person to person.  You fill out the questions. Post them on your blog. Then you tag another blogger who is supposed to do the same thing.”

So here goes:

1. Deborah and I have decided to give a name to our new Prius when this zippy, hi-milage car arrives next month. We’re calling it Zelda. We were going to give that name (a la Zelda Fitzgerald) to our new puppy but she already had a name when we got her.
2. Love of my life at this moment is Morag, the new puppy. Well, a “senior” puppy – she’s 1 year old, a beautiful, loving Wheaten. Morag is Gaelic for sunshine and she’s brought lots into our life, after losing our beloved Rory.
3. I’ve just seen the first promotional ad for my new book, Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime. It’ll be out in the Spring, from McFarland Publishing. They’re in Jefferson, NC, but their reach is worldwide.
4. The book I’m reading most carefully at the moment is David Rocco’s Dolce Vita, a great Italian cookbook. Love that Farmer’s Breakfast and Spaghetti con Pomodorini (S. with cherry tomatoes).
5. Favorite new TV show is CBC’s Being Erica. Enjoyed the premiere so much, watched a rerun last night, and looking forward to the second instalment of this sexy, adult sit com tonight.
6. As a book lover, I think The Globe and Mail is on the right track with its revamp of its weekly Books section. Better to move more stuff over to the web – no space constraints — and I find the prospect of daily reviews, blogs and news quite enticing.

And now, I’m tagging Mary Soderstrom.

Mark Steyn “columnist to the world” thinks it “odd” that Canada has so far escaped the brunt of the global recession.

In an interview Mark gave to blogger Hugh Hewitt, he says:

“ I think this is clearly not about cranking up the global economy and getting it functioning again. America is taking a hit on this. There’s a lot of other countries, beginning with Iceland, that are being hit far harder and far faster. And there’s some countries for whom the pain is relatively small like Canada, oddly enough.”

Let me tell you why this is so, Mark.

First, Canada has not engaged in wild military adventures that have drained our resources  — although we’ve come close to it in Afghanistan.

Second, after a  bit of a slow start, we’ve regulated our mortgage companies so that they can’t set up “no down payment” suckers for later foreclosures when high interest rates click in.

Third, we worked carefully to bring Canada out of deficit under Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien.

Nothing “odd” about all of this. Just good Canadian common sense.

Amid all the bad news about death and destruction in Gaza and the deepening global recession, my friend Barry Francis phoned to suggest that  I try to find some good news to blog about.

I surprised myself by digging up quite a few good news items. Here’s a sampler:

President George W. Bush took his last official Air Force One flight on Saturday to Virginia for a ceremony to place a warship named after his father into active duty. Now, that’s really good news!

The Royal Bank of Canada says monetary and fiscal stimulus are two reasons it is predicting the recession in Canada will be shorter than the two previous ones. The bank expects Canada’s economy to start growing again in the second quarter of this year.

The Illinois House of Representatives, in a historic display of anger and frustration, voted 114-1 Friday to impeach disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich and send him to trial in the state Senate. Blagojevich is claimed to have ridden  roughshod over the legislature, wasted millions of dollars in state money and tried to sell everything from state contracts to the former U.S. Senate senate of Barack Obama.

Famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma received more honors for his Silk Road Project, which has the vision of conencting the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe. Ma, who inspired the creation of the Toronto Music Gardens, a unique waterfront park, was named musician of the year by Musical America magazine.

Magna International Inc., the big Canadian auto parts maker, has won a nice contract with Ford Motor Company (the only really solvent Big 3 carmaker) to supply key engine components for a new battery-powered compact car. Magna landed the deal by building a demo vehicle on spec. Innovation pays!

Two horses, Sundance and Belle, are now in good hands after their rescue from snow-covered Mount Renshaw in British Columbia. Their owner had abandoned them. Volunteers from McBride, B.C., dug a trench through CTV Photo             2-metre snowbanks to bring out the animals. Now that they’re safe their former owner, Edmonton lawyer Frank Mac Kay, wants them back. Fat chance!

The Globe and Mail, recognizing the future of communication is the Internet and not the newspaper printing press, has revamped its weekly book pages to accommodate a predominance of online daily reviews, blogs, a book club and other literary chatter. Good to see one paper recognizing reality while others, like the Heast-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer, go down the tube.

And finally, I leave you with this item — without comment:

Five Somali pirates drowned when a wave washed off their getaway boat as they squabbled over how to split their $3 million ransom. The ransom money had been dropped by air to end the world’s biggest ship hijacking.

President-elect Obama made a powerful and compelling speech Thursday in announcing his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.

But it seems to me the mainstream media have missed the real story here.

I’ve never heard such a blunt, even frightening description of the condition in which the United States now finds itself. The problems go way beyond the current economic crisis. You’d think, according to the media, that this is all there is to it.

The headlines and the ledes were much the same all over. The Washington Post web site headlined, Obama warns of dire consequences without stimulus. TheToronto Globe and Mail used the same words to head up its web report.

The New York Times had a small variation: Obama presses for action on the economy. CNN echoed the same thrust:  Bold action essential on economy, Obama warns.

Sure, the President-elect focused on the steps he plans to propose to kickstart the economy – a trillion dollars in new spending and tax cuts, and the prospect of a trillion dollar a year deficit extending many years into the future. He’ll need to, and he’ll need the support of both Democrats and Republicans. He’s not likely to get it.

Llisten carefully to what Barack Obama had to say at George Mason University and you’ll see a recognition that America’s problems are far more fundamental — and will be much more difficult to resolve — than merely getting the stock market back up or creating a few million new jobs.

The line in his speech that caught me was the one about ”an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington.”

And this:

“To give our children the chance to live out their dreams in a world that’s never been more competitive … we’ll provide new computers, new technology, and new training for teachers so that students in Chicago and Boston can compete with kids in Beijing for the high-tech, high wage jobs of the future.”

Did you ever hear such an admission that the United States has come through an era of unbridled corruption, and that it now faces a second-class future?

The President-elect, perhaps unwittingly, was delivering a requiem for a decaying America. Consider these facts:

• The United States is now the world’s No. 1 debtor nation and cannot pay its bills
• American industry is no longer competitive withAsian or even European rivals
• The U.S. has fallen so far behind in graduating engineers and scientists that it will likely never catch up with China or Europe
• The global reputation of the U.S. has been shattered by its ill-conceived reaction to a single, admittedly traumatic, terrorist attack
• George W. Bush leaves office as the most reviled — and morally most corrupt — president in American history.

The problems facing the new President far surpass the dire challenges that confronted Franklin Roosevelt when he took office at the depths of the Depression. Then, it was only jobs. Now, it’s survival.

Let’s all wish Barack Obama much wisdom, the support of his people, and good fortune when he swears in as the new President next week.

He’ll need all of that, and more, to check the decay that has brought America to its lowest ebb since the fateful, frightening days of its Civil War.

In British Columbia, charges of polygamy have been laid against two leaders of a fundamentalist Mormon community where “celestial marriage” has long been a religious practice.

The issue has bedevilled authorities in B.C. for more than forty years. Canada’s law on polygamy is clear, but  the adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints have never — until now — been charged with breaking that law.

The men charged are Winston Blackmore, 55, a former bishop of the church in Bountiful, and James Oler, 44, the current bishop. Bountiful is a religious community of about 1,200 people, near the town of Creston, B.C .

(Creston happens to be my hometown, so I’ve always watched this issue with special interest.)

Blackmore was ousted from his post by the FLDS leader in the States, Warren Jeffs, but he has continued as head of the Mormon Hills School, which receives public funding from the B.C. Department of Education. (Jeffs is currently in prison for rape.)

It’s about time that Canada’s polygamy law is being enforced. For years, cautious politicians and skeptical lawyers have feared that  a court might throw out the law, on the grounds that it infringes on religious freedom. If that were to happen, polygamy would suddenly become legal in Canada.

This seems to be a risk that the B.C. Attorney General, Wally Oppal, is prepared to take.

I talked to Oppal two years ago when I was preparing a report for The National Post. I wrote from the perspective of someone who had grown up in the Creston area, and had watched families and their children live under the the hard rules of their male-dominated church.

Elsie, one of Blackmore’s more than 100 children. Photo: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun

In my article for The Post, I wrote:

“Few Canadians care today about the sexual proclivities of their neighbors. They do care, however, about brain washing of young girls in fundamentalist Mormon communities who are coerced into entering multiple marriages as a religious obligation.”

It’s worth noting that today’s charges do not involve child abuse. This might be because of the difficulty of securing witnesses to  such charges. Instead, they simply allege Blackmore and Oler to be  guilty of practising polygamy – cohabitating with more than one person at a time, whether or not they’ve gone through a form of marriage.

The indictment against Blackmore says he practised polygamy in 2005 with 19 women — Oler, with two women.

Women who have crusaded against Bountiful’s sorry record of polygamy — many of them former residents of the community — are overjoyed that the authorities are at last taking action.

Still, laying charges is not the same as obtaining a c onviction. But Oppal is obviously confident of guilty findings. It shouldn’t be hard to prove whether these men have cohabitated with more than one woman at a time.

They’ll probably admit they’ve done so. Then they’ll fall back on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, claiming polygamy as a religious right.

There are a lot of things more important than the right to practice abusive lifestyles in the guise of religious freedom.

There’s one thing we shouldn’t lose sight of. Polygamy is Canada is practiced not just in Bountiful. There are thousands of polygamous unions being carried on right now across Canada, mainly among Muslim immigrant families.

If the Bountiful prosecution is successful, will authorities in other places — like Toronto and Montreal — have the courage to take action against these illegal unions?

Or will Parliament someday opt to  change the law to accommodate yet another lifestyle variation — providing a way can be found to ensure the protection of multiple wives and minor children?

Read Winston Blackmore’s statement here.

I spent a contented few hours in front of the television last night, cheering along Team Canada in their World Junior hockey triumph, and enjoying the debut show of Being Erica, the new adult sit-com on CBC-TV.

The connection in these events is that both showcased Canadian talent in unique spheres. We’ve long been proud of Canada’s preeminent role in hockey. We’re not so used to Canadian superiority in light entertainment.

I watched the first two periods of the hockey game which Canada led right from the start, before switching channels at 9 o’clock to watch Being Erica. Happily, I was able to swing back during commercials (so much for all that ad money wasted on me!).

Our 5-1 win over Sweden brought back memories of the great 1972 Russia-Canada series, and Paul Henderson’s spectacular late goal that won the set for our side.

Here’s a shot of me (in the cool 70s suit) cheering that fantastic moment.

 Photo John Craig

Switch to 2009, and what do you have? A cleverly-written fantasy in which thirty-something Erica Strange (deftly played by Erin Karpluk), is cast as a loser without a job or romantic  prospects. Then she gets the chance to relive — and change — crucial moments in her life.

Erica is aided in this adventure by one of my favorite actors, Michael Riley, who used to play that crazy lawyer on Street Legal. In Being Erica, he plays Dr. Tom, a mysterious therapist with the power to let Erica re-visit her past.

Now, who among us wouldn’t like to relive (and change) those horrible moments when we did or said the absolutely worst possible thing? Erica’s return to her high school prom night worked in a nice moral about doing the right thing, even if the results didn’t always make things look that way. Funny. adult and wonderfully watchable.

Tonight, the CBC debuts a prime-time soap opera, Wild Rose, set in oil-rich Calgary. It pits two families, the wealthy McGregors and the debt-ridden Henrys, in a kind of communal clash. Writer Amy Cameron says she chose to depict families in rivalry ”because conflict is inherent in that kind of setup.”

Best in Non-Fiction Writing

The short list for this year’s Charles Taylor Award for Literary Non-Fiction has three books that are bound to appeal to different audiences:

• Sugar: A Bittersweet History — everything you could want to know about the sweet stuff and its effects on society – by Elizabeth Abbott
• Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War — much new material about Canadians in the war to end wars — by Tim Cook
• Angel of Vengeance — an account of Russia’s trial of the century — by Ana Silijak.

Knowing something of the tastes of the jury — headed by Globe and Mail colmnist Jeffrey Simpson, my betting is on Shock Troops to receive the $25,000 prize on February 9th.

There is a lot of teeth gnashing going on about how little Canadians know of their authors and how young Canadians, especially, are ignoring books in preference to iPods, the Internet, and TV.

This latest burst of Canadian unease has come from the release of a survey commissioned by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage. It showed that unprompted, nearly half of all Canadians are unable to name a single Canadian author.

Among those who could name an author, Margaret Atwood was the most often mentioned (by 22%), followed by Pierre Berton (8%), Farley Mowat (8%) and Michel Tremblay (5%).

Strangely, the survey also claimed that Canadians, on average, reported reading about 17 books in the past year, devoting about six hours a week to turning the pages.

Surveys of this type are generally pretty accurate in reporting what people are telling the pollsters.

So why is there so little awareness in Canada of Canadian authors at the very time when Canadians read a lot of books and Canadian authors are winning world-wide acclaim?

This past Christmas, the biggest selling book in the United Kingdom has been the novel No Time for Goodbye, by the Toronto Star columnist Linwood Barclay. Sales topped  630,000 copies.

Also in 2008, the Montreal writer Rawi Hage, author of De Niro’s Game, won the world’s richest literary prize, the $156,000 Impac Dublin Literary Award.

Lawrence Hill picked up the prestigious Commonwealth Book Award for his newest novel, the Book of Negroes.

As well, we regularly celebrate Canadian authors through such programs as the Governor General’s Awards and the $50,000 Giller Prize for fiction. Is nobody listening?

A simple solution to understanding the dilemma of Canadian books is to point to the competition that all Canadian cultural products face from the larger English-speaking world. (The situation in Quebec is quite different, where a vibrant indigenous culture is largely unaffected by imports.)

The free market response to all of this is simply that Canadians buy, read, listen to and watch whatever most appeals to them, regardless of its source. The big promotional money is spent on American product, and the result can be seen in box office admissions and best-seller rankings.

Canadians soak up imported culture from kindergarten to the nursing home. My favorite reading as a small boy was the phenomenally popular Big Little Books.

These were little blockbuster volumes, about 4 by 4 1/2 inches, sometimes 400 pages of cheap pulp, put out by Whitman Publishing of Racine, Wisconsin. They cost 15 cents. I was telling Deborah about them one day when we wandered into a sale of ephemeral at the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. There was a Big Little Book being offered at $50!

The thing is, they got me started on books. One of the first serious  titles I read (I was about 11) was the modern classic What Makes Sammy Run?, the marvelous Bud Schulberg novel, another American product. About that time I went through the comic book stage and later got caught up in men’s adventure magazines and yes, the early Playboys, before settling into more serious stuff.

So I’m not uduly perturbed by the the low level of recognition for Canadian authors, even though I am a minor entrant in that league myself. What the latest survey tells me is what a tremendous opportunity there is out there to reach a massive reading public, all over the world, with great Canadian stories.

This won’t be acccomplished, however, without much stronger marketing and promotional efforts. This means more investment in the development of Canadian authors and their books.  And  more public investment in both Canada-wide and international promotion of their works. A boost up, not a bail out, is what Canadian publishing needs.

I am forever fascinated by the simple faith of people who, on being rescued from some death-defying ordeal, pronounce their survival as due to “God watching over me.”

An example of this is in the news currently, involving a man who went snowboarding on Mount Seymour, north of Vancouver, B.C., and was lost for three days before being resuced, frostbitten and exhausted.

In this instance, it is his mother who has credited God with ensuring her son’s survival. “I know he knows that God, obviously, was watching over him,” she told the media.

These accounts always tug at your heart strings, and I share in the relief of the young man’s mother over her son’s survival. As one who grew up in the mountainous interior of British Columbia, I know only too well how hazardous it can be to find yourself disoriented in the wilderness, even in the best of weather.

I have to wonder, however, how special one must be to have God intervene personally on their behalf.

Where was God, I am thinking, just a few days before when eight young men perished after being caught by avalanches during a snowmobiling expedition in the mountains of southeastern B.C.

Three men survived that tragic outing. I have not seen any assertions that their narrow escape was due to God’s intervention. Had any such claim been made, it would clearly have been outrageous. It would have meant God had differentiated among these men as to their worthiness, saving some and allowing others to die.

No, these claims of Godly intervention are almost always the result of situations in which sole survivors are rescued in the brink of time. “A miracle,” the media call it. “God was watching over me.”

As an expression of appreciation for enjoying good fortune, these pronouncements are harmless enough. And at the risk of being thought cruel and heartless, I have to say I also find them dangerously fatalistic, lacking in recognition of the connection between cause and effect, and oblivious to the element of chance in ordinary life.

Carried to the extreme, as Godly sentiments too often are, they become downright dangerous.

I share the sentiments of Christopher Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is one of the most challenging works of recent years.

This is the book that set off fierce debate when it was published in 2007. The nexus of his argument is that there are “four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.”

Worse than that, in my judgment, is the consequence of God worship in justifying territorial and property claims that must be backed up by earthly force in order to prevail.

There is no more dramatic example than the interminable struggle in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Semitic peoples whose lines separated in ancient times, both lay claim to this part of the world on the strength of their age-old presence. Extremists on both sides assert their rival claims to be sanctioned by God.

There are many rational reasons for these peoples to contest possession of Palestine, including the Gaza Strip. Chief among them are economic interest and geopolitical considerations. If these were the only causes setting them apart, there would be hope for rational negotiation leading ultimately to a reasonable settlement of differences.

But when God is injected into the picture, the cause becomes more durable, the conviction more rigidly enforced, and the argument more likely to defy rational explanation.

So when people say “God watched over me,” I say be not so certain you have been chosen. Think of it as luck.