Turns out Leonard Cohen was wrong...

... or maybe not

My Sixth and Final Canadian Book of Lists List: The Top 10 Things I Learned Through Reading and Researching the Canadian Book of Lists

Being the sixth post on

The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists. 

THE TOP TEN THINGS I LEARNED THROUGH READING AND RESEARCHING THE CANADIAN BOOK OF LISTS

1. At time of composition, David Ondaatje was a student at Lakefield College School, an institution that  features in CANADA'S 10 BEST INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS FOR BOYS*. Whether its position,  #6,  is a reflection of Messer Ondaatje's feelings toward his school is unknown.

Like David Ondaatje, I was at the time a teenage schoolboy, albeit in the plebeian public system. I remember much being made about Prince Andrew attending Lakefield. Low and behold, the book includes this uncredited, poorly reproduced photo.

2. David Ondaatje is the son of Sir Christopher Ondaatje.

3. Sir Christopher Ondaatje was the president of Pagurian Press, publisher of the book.

4. In 1979, the year after Pagurian published The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists, Sir Christopher teamed up with son David's writing partner Jeremy Brown to cobble together Pagurian's The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Sex and Adventure.

5. "K-K-K-Katy" was written by Geoffrey O'Hara who, like Arthur Stringer, was a Chatham boy. 

Reading up on the song's history, I learned that in the 'twenties it had been appropriated by the Women of the Ku Klux with "K-K-K-Klanswomen."

My introduction to the song came through the folk group the Brother-in-Law.

My parents had all their albums, including The Brother-in-Law Strike Again! (1966), which features "K-K-K-Klansmen":

The Women of the Ku Klux Klan would not have been pleased.

6. In 1978 Rush was the best Canadian rock group.

Who knew!

The Band having disbanded the previous year, I would've thought it was either Teenage Head or Pointed Sticks, but THE 10 BEST CANADIAN ROCK GROUPS set me right. The list comes from Ron Scribner, President of Music Shoppe Agency. He places Heart, a group consisting entirely of Americans, at #2. Scribner's list of the THE 10 BEST MALE AND FEMALE CANADIAN VOCALISTS has Dan Hill in top spot and misspells Murray McLauchlan's name.

7. Leonard Cohen was a non-entity. He doesn't appear once in the book's 391 pages, nor does Tommy Douglas. Michael Ondaatje, David Ondaatje's uncle, is also absent.

8. Mary Anne Shadd does not feature, nor does Josiah Henson. Black Canadian history is ignored completely, and is similarly ignored in every review.

9. Kateri Tekawitha, Joseph Brant, Pauline Johnson, Francis Pegahmagabow, and Chief Dan George do not feature.

10. Before reading the Canadian Book of Lists, this Montrealer was forever pushing back against the claim that Toronto thinks itself "the centre of the universe." Now, I'm now not so sure.

* "Member schools of the Canadian Headmaster's Association only."

Related posts:

My Canadian Book of Lists Lists: An Introduction

My First Canadian Book of Lists List:
Ten Lists That Have Aged Poorly (Featuring Barbara Amiel!)

My Second Canadian Book of Lists List:
The 10 Most egregious Errors (with Timothy Findley!)

My Third Canadian Book of Lists List:
The 10 Biggest Contributors (Featuring Claire Wallace!)

My Fourth and Fifth Canadian Book of Lists Lists:

It's a Man's World... an English Man's World

A Poet's Pulp Novel

The Winter of Time
Raymond Holmes [Raymond Souster]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949
160 pages

Anyone looking for a good story is sure to be disappointed. The plot is so thin, so unsurprising, so uninspired, that I have no hesitation in sharing it in full.

This shouldn't take long.

It is March 1945. Harry Byers, our hero and narrator, leaves Halifax for a war that everyone knows is all but over. Bournemouth, his destination, is the primary reception depot for RCAF personnel. Harry has barely set foot on English soil before being pressed by a new pal to go on a double date with WAAF gal Helen Noble. They hit it off and are engaged within days. Germany surrenders. Harry and Helen wed, honeymoon in Scotland, are separated due to respective service obligations, but are reunited in London. To borrow from F Scott Fitzgerald, Harry did "get over," but he never sees action.

Not that kind anyway.

Come Christmas, Harry is back living with his parents in Toronto. War bride Helen is with her parents in London, awaiting passage on a ship to Canada. They write each other daily, though Harry struggles to fill the pages. In one of her early letters, Helen announces that she's pregnant. The news encourages Harry to return to his boring old job at a Bay Street brokerage. When not writing letters and sending provisions overseas, he goes out drinking with old friend Paul Hannah. One memorable evening, he ends up in the back of Paul's 1938 Ford with new friend Vera (Harry never learns her last name). Pretty Betty Anderson is another new friend, but she's far too good a girl for him to make a move.

The baby, a boy, arrives in August. All seems fine until Harry receives a cablegram that Helen is very ill. He flies to New York, then across the Atlantic, arriving in London too late. After the funeral he's back in the air, leaving his son in the care of his in-laws. Harry stays in New York for a couple of weeks, visiting pal Pete Adams and taking up with Clair Thompson, a tall brunette who looks good in a sweater and slacks. He never tells either of his dead wife. After that, it's off to see Montreal writer friend Walter Green in Montreal, then he catches a train to Toronto. Once home, Harry makes a play for Betty, but she tells him she's taken. He goes on a bender with Paul, which ends in a car accident that should've killed them both. They decide to rent a cottage up north, and maybe work on a book, but the plan is cut short by Clair's sudden appearance in Toronto. She tells Harry that she's pregnant, so he proposes: "I guess I thought about the two of us getting married since the first time we met, so the it doesn't sound strange or something unexpected, now."

And that's pretty much it.

The New Stand Library cover copy paints The Winter of Time as a sprawling epic:

What veteran, accustomed to regimentation and suddenly thrown on his own resources to take his place in the way of life for which he had fought, didn't experience a strange mixture of hope and despair, relief and nostalgia, determination and frustration, joy and bitterness, as did Harry in these two symbolic years?

But can we really expect so much from so slim a volume?

It's best to approach The Winter of Time as a first novel that attempts much while adhering to strict confine enforced by the publisher's standard 160-page format. As evidence, look no further than the final three pages, in which Clair turns up unexpectedly in Toronto, announces that she's expecting, and becomes engaged to Harry. This rush of events, typical of News Stand Library endings suggests a writer who realizes the sudden need to wrap everything up. Souster proves himself superior to other NSL authors by applying the brakes with a closing descriptive paragraph that has Harry raising the blinds of his apartment "for no reason" and looking down on sunlight playing on once cloud-covered Sherbourne Street.

Three things make The Winter of Time worth reading, the first being the collision of life during wartime with the impetuous folly of youth. Harry and Helen decide to marry on their third date. The stuff of Las Vegas misadventure today, it was not so unusual at the time, particularly given the circumstances. My grandparents, who lived to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary together, were one such couple. It has been claimed that service leads to maturity, but this is not the case with Harry. A married man in his mid-twenties, he cheats on his pregnant wife of one year with a woman he doesn't even like. Keep in mind, Harry is the narrator of this story.

The novel's greatest riches in come in the details, like the experience of taking a train to London on VE-Day or what it was like going to see Bert Niosi at Toronto's Palais Royale:

There were a lot of girls checking their coats and purses. They had come stag, mostly in two's. They were the usual girls you saw at the Palais, girl who were now in the city and did not have a steady boy-friend. And most of them were nice kids, jus out for an evening of dancing.They were the prey of all the fast boys who thought they were God's gift to women. The fast boys were interested in only one thing, and every one had his own system of leading up to it, the only difference being that some were more subtle than others.

Palais Royale, Toronto, 1946

There are many more references to many more drinking establishments. I was most taken aback by mention of Montreal's Blue Bird Café, which a quarter-century later would be the site of one of the city's greatest tragedies.

As a child, I first read about it in the pages of the Montreal Gazette. It has haunted me ever since 

Students of Canadian literature, not true crime, will be more interested in the odd turn the novel takes in the last third, immediately after Helen's death. It begins with Harry's visit with Pete, a Montrealer who is studying at Columbia:

Pete is a good guy and he has written some damn fine poetry. Poetry with guts that was still only grudgingly accepted in Canada. He had been very frankly critical about my work but mine was so close to the thing that he was tying to do himself that I knew he was honestly interested in it, and that was something very rarely found in another writer.

This is the first indication that our hero holds literary aspirations. The second comes on the very same page when Harry describes his address book as being filled with names of publishers and old girlfriends. From this point on, references to thing literary are frequent; Joyce, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Morley Callaghan abound. Harry tells Pete he is impressed by his recent New York-themed verse, though just when and where he read it is a mystery. He is convinced his friend could be a great poet, the kind of poet Canada has needed for a long time, but never produced. As Harry tells Clair, "I'd hate to see his fine talent turned into something unnatural and a mockery after those university professor bastards and C.A.A. parasites got their claws into him."

The digs against the the world of academe and the Canadian Authors Association continue in Montreal:

"I think the whole writing game is a little overrated," I said. "Here in Canada, though, the odds are so much against any decent writer that he's practically buggered before he even starts. I guess we should all be college professors and join the C.A.A."

   "I'm seriously thinking of joining," Walter said, "All I've got to do is get rid of my artistic conscience and any pretensions of doing any more honest writing."

Walter is Walter Green: "He was a few years older than I was, and for some years had been writing almost the only honest proletarian writing in Canada, if there really is such a thing as 'proletarian writing.'"

Is Pete Adams modelled on Ralph Gustafson? An even more interesting question is whether Jewish Montrealer Walter Green was inspired Ted Allan. Could be. Souster had to come to News Stand Library somehow. Allan's pseudonymous NSL pulp Love is a Long Shot was published two months before The Winter of Time. Garner, we know, came to NSL through Allan's recommendation. His Waste No Tears appeared eight months later under the name Jarvis Warwick. 

 

The Winter of Time is not to be read for its plot, but it is to be read. It's a shame that it had to end so soon.

I wonder when Harry would've told Clair about his dead wife and newborn son. 

On drinking in Toronto:

The bottled beer came and we ordered two more pints. The beer was very good. I was just beginning to appreciate it. You could tell it was Montreal beer. The best beer.

On drinking in New York: 

The beer was very amber and clear, lighter than Canadian beer. It was milder and pleasanter to drink, I thought, than our beer if you were only interested in a cool drink and did not want to feel happy after two or three glasses.

A query: Are we really meant to believe that the Sunday Times received an advance review copy of a Canadian pulp novel?

Object and Access: A typical News Stand Library book, except that it has fewer mistakes than most. I caught one sentence that cuts off after the first word. Clair appears variously as "Claire" and "Clare."Buses is misspelled "busses," but that's a common error.

Well done!

D Rickard's cover is strange, even by News Stand Library standards. At no point in the novel does our hero walk down Bloor Street. Neither of the two girls he knows in Toronto has black hair. And doesn't that gal look an awful lot like Rickard's rendition of Gisele Lepine from Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street (1949). And aren't their dresses very similar?

As of this writing, just one copy is listed for sale online. Price: US$195.00.

I received my copy as a gift last Christmas.

The Winter of Time was reissued at some point – when, I'm not sure – by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. Whether that edition is still available is up for question as my query has gone unanswered.

Related posts:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

On Robbie Robertson (w/ update)

I don't mean to be an ass about this, particularly in light of such sad news, but do note that the New York Times' report on Robbie Robertson's passing includes three references to America, three references to Americana, and one to the Confederacy.

At no point is it mentioned that he was a First Nations man who was born and raised in Canada.

I'll add that not one of his Band bandmates is named, nor is Bob Dylan.

Damage control:

Fair Canada: 'Here many nations dwell...'

'Fair Canada' is the first of six patriotic pieces featured in poet/publisher John Imrie's Sacred Songs, Sonnets, and Miscellaneous Poems (Toronto: Imrie & Graham, 1886).

It's sure to raise the ire of Ezra Levant, but I quite like it.

Best wishes to all on this Canada Day!

Related posts:

'We first saw light in Canada...'

'God Guide Thee Canada'

Laura Salverson's 'For Canada' for Canada Day

'Canada to England, July 1st 1917' by Horace Bray

'O Canada! beloved native land...'
'O Canada! our native land thou art!'
Patriotic Verse from the Garden of a Girl's Dreams
A 123-Year-Old Poem for Canada Day

Two Hurrahs for the New Dominion

Charles G.D. Roberts' Dominion Day Collect
Marjorie Pickthall's Canadian Hymn

Verse From the First of Dominion Poetesses

Canada's First Telefome Pome?

These past few weeks have been remarkably busy, which explains how it is that I've read and reviewed just one old, forgotten book this month. Sadly, that volume is John Wesley White's The Man From Krypton.

Heaven help me.

And yet somehow, despite it all, I found time yesterday to thumb through Sacred Songs, Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems, an 1886 collection by John Imrie (1836-1903).

I wonder what the poet, a staunch Presbyterian, might've made of White's interpretation and misrepresentation of the Holy Bible and Superman: The Movie. I expect he would have been mystified. Imrie died in Toronto three years before the first motion picture was screened in that city, thirty-eight years before Action Comics #1, and long before televangelists took to the air.

John Imrie was obviously of a very different time, as reflected in his Sacred Songs, etc. Amongst the 210 pages – referencing orphan boys, newspaper boys, Sunday school teachers, and the Knights of Labour – is this unusual and unexpected verse. It's not brilliant, but it is delightful. To think that when 'A Kiss Through the Telephone' was published, Bell's invention had been available commercially just six years.

Enjoy!

A Bonus (for the musically inclined):

Related post:

Man of Faith, Man of Steel

Steinmetz on the Launch Pad

One week from today, I'll have the honour of interviewing Andrew Steinmetz at the Ottawa launch of Because, his sixth book.

I've known Andrew since we were young pups. We met at Montreal's Station 10. This would've been in the latter half of 1985. Andrew spent much of the evening onstage as a member of Weather Permitting. I'm pretty sure he sang this song: 

Described by publisher Véhicule Press as a "punk-rock novel about teenage daydreams and sibling dynamics," Because draws inspiration from those younger days.

Or am I wrong?  

Let's find out together!

Sometimes a Fantasy

The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie
Kent Thompson
Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1973
200 pages

Describing The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie as a good debut novel seems faint praise, but I'd have said the same had it been a second or third novel. The narrator is William A Boyd, a disgruntled American schoolteacher who, lured by the charms of New Brunswick, purchases a rundown Fredericton duplex. His idea is to retire, occupy one half, and live off the rent of the other.

It all seems a bit crazy. Boyd is well south of forty and has little in the way of savings (though he'd claim otherwise). Taking ownership means taking on a substantial mortgage. And then there's the furnace, which heats both sides of the duplex. Boyd, who takes pride in his new role as a landlord, was ignorant of this fact. And he's never experienced a Fredericton winter.

The first order of business is to raise the rent on the tenants he's inherited. After they move out, as he knew they would, Boyd places a classified ad in the Daily Gleaner. He considers just one response, from Harrison Tennyson ("Tennie") Cord, who has just taken a position as Associate Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick:

The letter was headed by the letterhead, which of course served as a return address: "River Idyll Motel: Cabins and Cottages – Reasonable Prices." Tennie had neatly inked in the date under the slogan. But it was a mistake to use that stationary provided by the hotel. I should never have done that myself, even if it meant buying more paper. The very address had a touch of panic to it. 

Boyd has his failings as a landlord – which become increasingly evident – but is astute when it comes to tenants, whether current or prospective. Corrie and Tennie move in, bringing with them their three young children. As a newly transplanted American, Boyd shares something with the Cord family. Early in the relationship, Corrie and Tennie invite him to their November Thanksgiving dinner. The experience of the American expat weighs heavily on our narrator:

An immigrant from the United States to Canada comes always under the shadow of history – or to be specific, the shadow of Benedict Arnold. Arnold, who was considered to be a traitor to both king and Congress (an American easily forgets the first treachery)...

These words come from The Alien's Guide to Survival. Boyd's philosophical work-in-progress, it deals also with democracy, human behaviour, economics, religion, consumerism, and aesthetics. This passage gave me pause:

By ugly, I mean that which is offensively temporary. it is perfectly illustrated by the K-Mart Shopping Plaza  (at the top of Smyth Street Hill in Fredericton, New Brunswick). It is self-evident that ugliness debases men. Unless he is made of very stern stuff indeed, a man will act under the influence of his surroundings. Put a man in prison - and he will act like a prisoner. Surround a man with the shoddy goods of contemporaneity, and he will act in proportion to their measure.

K-Mart Shopping Plaza, Frederiction, 1968

I last visited New Brunswick's capital in pre-adolescence, so can't pretend to know the city. That said, I do recommend The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie to Frederictonians. Boyd address, 696 Rodman Street, may not exist, but I'm betting it's recognizable. The landlord guides the reader through places that no longer exist. My favourite is Hurley's Music Store. It's there that Boyd – remember, he's a Yank – first hears Anne Murray:

I was eating a hot dog with relish and mustard when I heard this song which a youngster was playing – probably listening to the record on the pretence of buying it. Finishing my hot dog, and my coffee I inquired of a clerk about the song. That was a rather pleasant tune, I said. "Why," he said, as if surprised I didn't know, "that's Anne Murray."
   "Anne Murray?" I said.
   He had divined that I was something of a stranger, and explained yo me thatAnne Murray had gone to the University of New Brunswick, "up the hill" and that she had graduated in 1966.

Boyd is so struck by the sweet songbird of Springhill that he not only buys the album (What About Me), but lays out a further $66.95 (nearly $415 today) in the purchase of a stereophonic record player in order to play it.

Who can blame him? The title track is wonderful:

The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie is of a time when Canadian nationalism was at its most fervent. I was alive, but far too young to be a reliable witness. Still, remembering my own university years, when American professors were prevalent, I found this exchange between Tennie and Manners, a fellow UNB academic, interesting:

"You can't seriously mean you're going to deport all the Americans. Look you hired us to do a job. You can't turn us back when the job is finished!"
   "Why not?" repeated Manners. "That's what one does to itinerant labour."

This takes place at a party Tennie hosts when his wife and offspring are away (Corrie's mother has died). It was here that this reader began to suspect that Boyd – an unreliable narrator, at best – was becoming unhinged. He descends into madness, his focus being Corrie. I was probably a bit late in picking up on this. Looking back, I now doubt she really waved her bra at him on wash day, declaring it "whiter than white." 

I really should give it a careful second read.

It's just hard to find the time these days.

About the author: Kent Thompson taught literature and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. Born American, Canada was his home. Kent Thompson died this past summer.

Kent Elgin Thompson
2 February 1936, Waukegan, Illinois -
13 August 2021, Annapolis Royal , Nova Scotia

Object and Access: A slim novel bound in brown boards. The jacket illustration is credited to Jock MacRae. The colour and font do disservice.

Though there was but one printing, used copies are inexpensive (if uncommon). 

Remembering Calvin Dale Williamson

A sixty-page booklet published by William Southam, father of the Southam newspaper empire, Regimental Songs was distributed to members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The first song is "Alexander's Ragtime Band;" the second, "Alouette," is followed by "Annie Laurie." My favourite is the fourth: "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me." Regimental Songs provides only the chorus:

The song in full is quite ribald.

Southam's booklet contains 168 songs – some bowdlerized, some not. "God Save the King" is sandwiched between the chorus of "Every Little Bit Added to What You've Got Makes Just a Little Bit More" and select lines from "Good-Night, Ladies."

Regimental Songs isn't all King, Country, and girls. 

I purchased the booklet ten years ago at a library book sale. It once belonged to Calvin Dale Williamson of St Marys, Ontario, who at nineteen enlisted to serve as a private in the 55th Overseas Battery, Canadian Field Artillery.

Après la guerre, Cal Williamson worked as a plumber. A life-long bachelor, he lived in a modest house on Jones Street East (likely the same house in which he was born). A friend who hired him in his later years remembers Mr Williamson as a hoarder and something of an eccentric. Calvin Dale Williamson died in 1983, at the age of eighty-seven. "When he died, the contents of his house were cleared out and dispersed," writes my friend. "The house was demolished and there is no trace of this interesting man left in St. Marys – except, perhaps, at some drilled wells."

Calvin Dale Williamson lies next to his parents, Thomas and Cordelia, in the St Marys Cemetery.

RIP

Related posts:

Remembrance Day 2020

"He Sleeps in Flanders"

Remembrance Day 1019

"In Flanders Now"

Remembrance Day 2018

Edward Maurice Busby and William Horace Humphreys

Remembrance Day 2017

A Poet Remembers Remembers Fallen Great War Poets

Remembrance Day 2016

A Man With No Face

Remembrance Day 2015

William Horace Humphreys

Remembrance Day 2014

Maurice John Busby

Remembrance Day 2013

Reverend Canon Frederick George Scott

Remembrance Day 2012

'A Kiss' - Bernard Freeman Trotter

Remembrance Day 2011

Edward Maurice Busby

Remembrance Day 2010

'A Gun Pit' - Wyndham Lewis

Remembrance Day 2009

Canadian Twilight - Bernard Freeman Trotter

Dustiest Bookcase: Q is for Quarrington

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Service
Paul Quarrington

Toronto: Coach House, 1978

182 pages

On October 15, 1996, I shared a late night dinner with Paul Quarrington and Dave Badini at Suiki Japanese Restaurant on West Broadway in Vancouver. Earlier in the evening, at the 8th annual Vancouver International Writers Festival, both had read from Original Six (Toronto: Reed Books Canada, 1996), a collection of short stories inspired by teams from the NHL's golden age. Quarrington served as anthologist. Badini provided a story about the Chicago Blackhawks. Other contributors included Wayne Johnson (Montreal Canadiens), Judith Fitzgerald (Detroit Red Wings), Trent Frayne (Toronto Maple Leafs), and Jeff Z. Klein (New York Rangers). Quarrington himself wrote the Bruins story.

I didn't say much during our dinner; Paul and Dave were pals and collaborators, and I was happy to listen in.

Over dessert, I asked Paul if he'd do me the honour of signing my copy of The Service, his debut novel. As I remember it, he was surprised when I pushed it across the table. This is his inscription:

At the time, Random House seemed in the process of reissuing every Quarrington novel there was, yet it never returned The Service to print. I wonder why.

Paul and Dave had good fun that night.

Paul had been doing double duty at the festival, promoting Original Six and Fishing with My Old Man (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996), an account of a trip with North American Casting Champion Gordon Deval. This signature never fails to raise a smile:

We ate a lot of sushi that night.

Douglas & McIntyre paid our bill.

Paul died eleven years ago at age 56, a victim of lung cancer.

Today would've been his sixty-eight birthday.

He is very much missed

Just like a paperback novel...

Released fifty years ago this month. Always chokes me up.

If I could read your mind, love

What a tale your thoughts could tell

Just like a paperback novel

The kind the drugstore sells

When you reach the part where the heartaches come

The hero would be me

But heroes often fail

And you won't read that book again

Because the ending's just too hard to take

Erin O'Toole's Proud Disgrace

Yo! Conservative guys and Conservative gals,
You wanna lead this party, you gotta be like our pals,
You gotta talk into the mike,
You gotta tell us what you're like.

– MP Arnold Viersen, "Conservative Rap" (2017)*

Jeff Ballingall's is not a household name, not even in households that follow his Ontario Proud, Canada Proud, and BC Proud Facebook pages.

My only interaction with the man came in June 2018. A few days after the Ontario general election, I asked how it was that Ontario Proud, a page dedicated to the defeat of Kathleen Wynne, a page that had raised funds with the expressed purpose of defeating Kathleen Wynne, had then spent that money on attack ads targeting Andrea Horwath.

There was no answer. My query was deleted. I was blocked from posting.

More recently, in response to a Canada Proud post that criticized the treatment of women and gays in Iran, I asked why Proud Facebook pages allowed misogynistic and homophobic comments.

There was no answer. My query was deleted. I was blocked from posting.

Thus far, questions addressed to BC Proud have gone unanswered.

A former Sun News and Conservative Research Group employee, Jeff Ballingall is a man of many hats. In 2016, he founded Mobilize Media Group, an organization not terribly keen on letting you know what they're all about. Ballingall co-owns and is Chief Marketing Officer of The Post Millennial, home to faux-journalists who rewrite news stories from legitimate sources so as to inflame right-wing snowflakes.

This past October, following the Conservative's electoral loss, Ballingall joined fellow Sun News evacuee Kory Teneycke in founding Conservative Victory, a group dedicated to ousting Andrew Scheer as leader. In November, Ballingall was afforded a full hour on the CBC – what his Proud followers refer to as the "Communist Broadcasting Corporation " – to speak out against Scheer. In December, Scheer stepped down. In January, it was announced that Ballingall had joined leadership candidate Erin O'Toole's team. According to the National Post, he has been tasked to "oversee digital strategy."

The effect of this new position on the Ontario Proud, Canada Proud, and BC Proud has been immediate. And I do mean immediate.

New posts on Erin O'Toole's Facebook page are shared within minutes on Proud pages, complete with links encouraging donations to the candidate's leadership campaign. Not one Proud page has shared a post from fellow front runner Peter MacKay, never mind any other leadership contender. This is not to say that there haven't been posts featuring MacKay.

Further examples will be provided upon request.

With Ballingall onboard, O'Toole's posts have taken on the look and character – half-truths, disinformation, disingenuous editing – of his Proud pages. That the comments they prompt are similar and in some cases identical to those left on those pages is explained by the aforementioned sharing and the use of Mobilize Media Group's database in micro-targetting Facebook ads.

The result is a cesspool made up of lunacy and conspiracy. The prime minister is referred to as both a communist and a Nazi,

ignorance of the human reproductive system and basic English is on display,

Islamophobia runs rampant,

and, as is habit within the Conservative Party of Canada, Justin Trudeau's murder is encouraged.

And on it goes.

Not four months ago, in a Toronto Life interview, Ballingall sniffed: "They stereotype us – they think we’re all bigoted, racist rednecks. We’re not."

Who is "they," I wonder.

Never mind.

I don't believe Proud followers are all bigoted racists, just as I don't believe Erin O'Toole's followers are all bigoted, racist rednecks, though I do recognize that bigoted, racist rednecks exist within their number.

Does Ballingall?

More importantly, does O'Toole?

Why, after all these years, does Ballingall allow these comments? How is it that Erin O'Toole has hired a man who allows these these comments? More to the point, how is it that Erin O'Toole allows these comments?

Last week, on his Facebook page, I accused Erin O'Toole of scaremongering. I went on to suggest that he was soiling his campaign and his reputation.

Erin O'Toole hasn't blocked me. It may be that he's leaving that decision to Jeff Ballingall.

* MP Arnold Viersen's "Conservative Rap", played at the 2017 Conservative leadership convention. Enjoy!

 

Related posts:

Wanting Trudeau Dead

Wishing the Prime Minister Dead: The Tory Joke That Wasn't Funny the Third Time Around

The Poetry of Arnold Viersen

I've been to Harlequin: Young Under the Influence

Heart of Gold
Marjorie Moore
Toronto: Harlequin, 1967

Related posts:

Songs Suggested by John Wesley White

Arthur Stringer Under the Influence

Bach to the Future: A Voice is Calling

A Voice is Calling
Eric Cecil Morris
Montreal: B.D. Simpson, 1945
487 pages

The strangest novel I've read this year, I struggled to make time for A Voice is Calling between reference materials for my next book. This distraction may explain why it wasn't until late in the book that I remembered its prologue. In my defence, the scene depicted is uneventful: A middle-aged man and young girl enter a Montreal barber shop. A paperboy delivers a copy of the Gazette, and talk turns to the news that Andre Brousseau, wanted in the deaths of six people, has himself been found dead.

Still, I shouldn't have forgotten, because Andre Brousseau is the protagonist of this strange novel. His past is something of a mystery. An architect by training, Andre once worked in Quebec City, but something happened that made him quit both the profession and the city. Prologue aside, the novel opens with the poor sod working away as a lumber company clerk in the fictitious town of Trois Lupins. As a sophisticated city boy, he had attracted and married Suzanne Cote, the prettiest girl in town. It was her now-deceased father who got him the job. Fifteen years have passed – more than enough time to put to rest any idea Suzanne had that her husband will make something of himself. The couple have settled into a routine in which Suzanne nags him to remove his boots when arriving home from work. At the end of a particularly memorable workday, Andre brings news that his boss, M Lalonde, is transferring him to the Gaspé village of Ste Michele, where he will oversee lumber orders in the construction of a new factory. Suzanne, who once dreamed of Quebec City – and even Montreal – can't bear the thought. She confronts Lalonde in his office... and comes away defeated.

Unbeknownst to Andre, Suzanne and Lalonde have been having an affair. She's now pregnant with his child and the boss wants her out of the way. The story Lalonde gives his clerk involves Ste Michele's new church, built in anticipation of the influx of factory workers. Andre will be expected to play the organ on Sundays.

There's no exaggeration in writing that Andre lives for the organ. His love for Suzanne is dead. Though he does love Anne, their only child, it's not nearly with the depth one might expect of a father. No, his passion is invested in the organ and, with near-exclusivity, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Something can probably be read into the fact that he keeps the great man's music underneath the marital bed.

The Brousseau family's arrival in Ste Michele is not a happy one. The village is much smaller and less refined than Trois Lupins – as is the house found for them by the parish  priest – and the winter weather is miserable. Suzanne spends the better part of her days in bed crying, while twelve-year-old Anne attends to her needs. Andre, on the other hand, settles in quite nicely. He finds a loyal friend and confident in goodnatured neighbour Lawrence Nixon, a cultured Englishman who has taken refuge in the Gaspé after having suffered some sort of tragedy.

Dust jacket copy describes A Voice is Calling as "a book for everyone – for those who like romances, thrills and adventure, for lovers of music, but most particularly for the countless thousands of readers who like a good, strong, interesting plot that will hold their attention on every page." To the point of Andre's budding friendship with Lawrence, the book held my attention, but this had more to do with it being something of a curiosity. Not many English-language Canadian novels feature French Canadian protagonists, and I can't think of another set in the Gaspé.

Then the novel took a very strange turn.

One evening, while playing the organ alone in the church, Andre senses a ghostly presence. This frightens him, but not so much that he doesn't return. He comes to believe that Bach is guiding his hands in performance. And then, on a later evening, a figure appears in coat, flowered waistcoat: "I am a friend of your's Andre Brousseau – you know me very well, said the  man, in a deep quiet voice, "I am Johann Sebastian Bach."

In order to allay skepticism, the composer invites Andre to visit his afterlife, which is an idealized version of 1735 Leipzig. Once there, the lumber  company clerk is treated to a chamber performance by members of the Bach family and falls in love with his host's dark-eyed daughter Katherina. He returns to twentieth-century Ste Michele intent on seeing her as much as possible, but doesn't want to press his welcome. Drama ensues when Suzanne attempts to abort the baby. Her departure by ambulance to a hospital in Rimouski fairly coincides Andre's discovery by two members of Montreal's Casavant Society, and an invitation to perform at Montreal's ill-fated First Unitarian Church.

First Unitarian Church, Montreal
27 May 1987

Andre's recital is a great success, but tragedy intrudes on his triumph with the news that Suzanne has died. Then comes further tragedy when the roof of the newly-constructed factory collapses. Andre is suspected of criminal negligence. He's taken to Quebec City for questioning, manages to escape, and heads back to Ste Michele in chapters loaded with tension and exclamation marks. Andre is convinced that by playing its church organ one last  time he'll be able to leave this world and live for all eternity with Bach and his beautiful dark-eyed daughter.

I won't reveal more for fear of spoiling things.

Or have I already?

Not as much as the prologue.

Trivia: Catharina Dorothea Bach was the first of the composer's twenty children. Morris errs in spelling her name "Katharina."

Dedication:

A bonus:

Object: An attractive, bulky book in navy blue boards. The dust jacket is by C.W. MacDonald.

Access: Held by Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and sixteen of our university libraries.

Four copies are currently listed for online. The good news is that they're going cheap, ranging in price from US$5 ("lightly rubbed," lacking dust jacket) to US$23 (Very Good in Very Good dust jacket). I purchased my copy in 2017 from a bookseller in Tacoma, Washington. Price: US$13.50.

Translated by Martine Hébert-Duguay as Le dernier voyage: Un roman de la Gaspésie (Montreal: Chanteclerc, 1951), the subject of next week's post.

Related posts:

Bach to the Future, Part II: Le dernier voyage
Bach to the Future, Part III: The Squeaking Wheel
Tan Ming's Disappointing Post-Apocalyptic World