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

Return to Miss Moneypenny's Fishing Lodge; or, Billy's Bad Trip

Return to Rainbow Country

William Davidson

Don Mills, ON: PaperJacks, 1975

186 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

About Those Awful PaperJacks Covers
Ontario, Opium and Cocaine

Y is for Young Cover Cavalcade

Toronto: Salvation Army, 1949

Boston: Little Brown, 1952

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1956

Toronto: Ryerson, 1965

Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1982

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984

Christmas with Neil Young's Dad

Home for Christmas and Other Stories
Scott Young
Toronto: Macmillan, 1989

Seventeen stories by sportswriter and sometime hired pen Scott Young, this is pleasant enough stuff. "Bread-and-butter articles" to borrow the words of one character, most were written for the Globe & Mail, many dating from the days in which the newspaper published a Christmas edition. The best of the lot, those spared the jam and jelly, touch on the autobiographical. In "Once Upon a Time in Toronto" he shares memories of his first Christmas as a married man. "The Night After Christmas" is about the unforeseen, rather surprising consequence of a festive wartime party. My favourite, "A Prairie Boy's Christmas, 1933" is as much about the holiday as it is about the author's rough childhood. It's the author's favourite, "Early One Christmas", that disappoints. Rewritten as "Glad Tidings from the Paper Boy", it begins:

Once there was a boy of 13 who had The Globe and Mail paper route on Brookdale Avenue in North Toronto, between Yonge Street and Avenue Road. He was a tall and thin boy who did not like getting up at six every morning…  

Young has placed some distance between himself and the 13-year-old, whom he never names, removing much of the warmth. Here's the beginning to the original, published in the 25 December 1964 Globe & Mail. Enjoy!

Almost everyone has his own favorite Christmas story. I believe that I am particularly lucky in that my favorite concerns one of my sons. He is 19 now, a little taller than I am and a lot thinner. But this story happened six years ago when he was 13 and delivered a Globe and Mail route on Brookdale Avenue in North Toronto.
     I used to hear him almost every morning at six when he wakened. Usually the two hours after he left were my soundest sleep of the night.
     On the rare occasions when he overslept, this built-in alarm mechanism in my mind brought me awake about the time he should have been moving. When I could not hear him I would tiptoe to his room and say, "Neil".
     "Yes," he'd say instantly, sitting upright in bed, wide awake.
     "I guess you overslept."
     "Guess I did."
     But on this Christmas morning of 1958 he was up on time and, like all other Globe and Mail boys up that morning, rose when the world was black and cold.
     He made the blind trip to the bathroom and sleepily began to pull on his clothes.
     Downstairs, he stood for a moment and looked at the stacked and laden Christmas tree, did the slow march past it, stopped to shake a parcel or two and stood like a robin to listen, and then went on.
     A glass of milk and a brief forage in the refrigerator, and then on with his ear-covering cap and his scarf and parka and overshoes and mitts, on that ice-cold bicycle seat and down the driveway to pedal into the morning alone.

Object: A compact 117-page hardcover in red boards with twenty-four illustrations by Huntley Brown. I bought my copy eleven years ago from a Vancouver bookseller. Price: $1.99. It's a signed, first edition. There has never been another.

Access: Twenty-four years after publication, it's not too hard to find in public libraries. Dozens of copies are being offered online with prices ranging from US$0.01 to US$7064.57. Condition does not factor.

Long out-of-print, as Home for Christmas it can be read as an ebook. This is the "cover":

Chindigo and Amazon.ca for $9.99. Amazon.com charges US$10.78 because… oh, just because.

Related posts:

Mordecai's Mom's Memoirs

True Crime Stories with David Cronenberg's Dad

Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White

Following Tuesday's post about John Wesley White's Thinking the Unthinkable.

Pastor White is a rock 'n' roll revisionist, a fearless man who strays far from conventional thought and expression. Billboard be damned. In Arming for Armageddon (1983), White put it that Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" not only topped the U.S. singles chart, but was part of a satanic effort to lure listeners into accepting the Antichrist.


Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) has Laurie Anderson allied with Kiss in playing the devil's music:

"The Elder", the bands's all-time top album, was "concerned with a group of god-like figures who've watched over the planet since its beginnings in primordial ooze." The Elder is "an orphan boy who, through a succession of events, comes to save the world"*

See... just like Kal-el.

During the nine years separating the two books, White has come to believe that the Antichrist is an orphan (hence the dropping of King Juan Carlos from contention); otherwise the pastor's thinking is unchanged: "Britain's successors to the Beatles were the punk rock groups. Most notorious was Sid Vicious..."

Here White continues to be confused about Sid, whom he describes variously as a man and a band. Eventually, he settled on a the former with a sentence lifted from Arming for Armageddon: "His theme song was "Anarchy in the U.K.", in which he boasted of being an 'anarchist' and 'antichrist'."

I take issue. Sid was no role model, but I can find no evidence that he appropriated "Anarchy in the U.K.", a song he didn't write, performed here by a band of which he wasn't yet a member.



White is never so interesting, nor surprising as when he writes about popular music. I was taken aback in reading that in 1993 teenagers were being drawn increasingly to old chestnuts about ending it all:

Elton John sings about contemplating suicide; Elyse Wineberg says he is mortuary-bound; and British rock group Tin Lizzy belts out 'Suicide'.

Emboldened by the pastor's wavering over Sid Vicious, I challenge his assertion about "British rock group Tin Lizzy" through verse:

Lizzy was thin,
Not made of tin,
And came from Dublin.

Phil Lynott, the man who sang "Suicide", was long dead when Thinking the Unthinkable was published, but not by his own hand.

I admit, Elyse Weinberg was a mystery to me. A bit of digging reveals that Elyse is not a fella, as the pastor believes, but a woman. "Mortuary Bound" features on her 1968 debut album Elyse, which was released on the obscure Tetragrammaton label:


The same album peaked at #31 in the United States, and failed to chart in Canada, which pretty much explains why I'd never heard of Ms Weinberg.

The same album features a song with Neil Young on guitar:



Nineteen-sixty-eight was, of course, the year Young left Buffalo Springfield. He struck out on his own, playing intimate venues like Canterbury House, a small Anglican – sorry – Episcopal chapel in Ann Arbour Michigan.

Pastor White doesn't think much of the Episcopal Church.

Wonder how many people showed up for the free eats.

* The album – correct title: Music from "The Elder" – was a commercial failure. Released in 1981, it holds the distinction of being the worst-selling album in the band's 39-year history.

Related posts:
Same Old Same Old about Armageddon

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb

Same Old Same Old About Armageddon

Thinking the Unthinkable
John Wesley White
Lake Mary, FL: Creation House, 1992

The Salvation Army provideth. Three years ago, whilst whiling away an afternoon in one of their finer thrift stores, I happened upon Arming for Armageddon by berugged Canadian evangelist John Wesley White. Wild, wondrous and weird, the book is perhaps the most imaginative and fanciful work I've ever reviewed. In its pages, Pastor White posits that Spain's King Juan Carlos is the Antichrist, praises murderous Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, has Sid Vicious belting out "Anarchy in the UK", and warns against the evil influence of films like I Married a Monster from Outer Space.

Arming for Armageddon was published in 1983, during what were some of the frostiest days of the Cold War. A great deal had changed when Thinking the Unthinkable hit bookstore shelves: the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Berlin Wall had crumbled and actress Kristy McNichol had given her penultimate performance on Empty Nest.

Purchasing Thinking the Unthinkable, I was prepared to pity the poor preacher. So much of his interpretation of scripture had had the USSR playing a key role in the End Times. According to White, Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" would prove itself very evil indeed. The pastor wrote about this not only in Arming for Armageddon, but Re-entry: Striking Parallels Between Today's News Events and Christ's Second Coming (1971), WW III: Signs of the Impending Battle of Armageddon (1981), The Coming World Dictator (1981) and, predictably, Re-entry II (1985).

How would Pastor White handle the simple fact that there was no more Soviet Union? Its death must have brought about much rethinking and – forgive me – soul searching. One fairly feels the pangs of nostalgia when he writes in Thinking the Unthinkable, "what for seventy-four years had been the USSR is no more." This is the only acknowledgement of the Evil Empire's dissolution; in the 211 pages that follow the Soviet Union is very much alive with "shifty" Mikhail Gorbachev in charge.

All this print and paper discredits People's Church (Toronto) pastor Paul B. Smith's blurbed back cover belief that "John Wesley White has a grasp on world affairs that is uncanny."

There's a fair amount of recycling going on here. King Juan Carlos, José Efraín Ríos Montt and Sid Vicious all reappear in these pages. Pastor White continues to be troubled by a Hollywood blockbuster entitled The Little Beast, of which IMDb has no record. I Married a Monster from Outer Space has been joined by such "supernatural and satanic" films as The Idolmaker and Devil in a Blue Dress.

Snicker if you will, but those doubting the pastor as a prophet should note that the latter film was not released until three years after the book's publication.

I regret to report that, like Arming for Armageddon, Thinking the Unthinkable has me rethinking the value of an Oxford education. Pastor White, who holds a Ph.D. from the university, plays pretty loose when it comes to references.

There are none.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy, blurbs that this book contains "breathtaking facts that prick one's mind to action", but none of these burst my balloon:

 • "Jews, of course, invented the engines of war, all the way from nuclear bombs to the sophisticated guidance systems of vehicles that are able to deliver them." 

• "A Swedish bicycle has been produced that uses highly flammable plastic, and General Motors Corporation announced that it could shortly be manufacturing a car of the same substance."

• "A network TV newsman observed that there have been twenty-eight macro-earthquakes since 1958, compared to twenty-four during the whole period before that since the birth of Christ."

Mid-way through Thinking the Unthinkable, Pastor White cites a poll of teenagers that was published in the Chicago Tribune. He doesn't say when or where it was taken, and the sample size is left up in the air, but I don't doubt its findings: "Sixty-five percent of the kids thought a nuclear war would happen in the next ten years and that they would not survive it."

My teenage self wasn't quite so pessimistic; I thought I'd survive. By 1992, the year I turned thirty, I was feeling pretty darn good about the future.

Object: A bland-looking, though well-constructed trade paperback, Thinking the Unthinkable is blessed with a cover that at fleeting glance looks like something flogged by a motivational speaker. My copy has been marked by someone who appears to have been particularly interested in cults.

Access:  Thinking the Unthinkable is much more common in libraries south of the border; Worldcat reports 27 American-held copies to Canada's two. I was surprised to find that the closest to me is located at an institution of which I'd never heard: Redeemer University College, located less than a two-hour drive from my home. Thirty-nine copies are listed through online booksellers, most of which can be had for under a dollar. An optimistic bookseller in rural Nova Scotia is hoping to get seven American dollars. I was charged 75¢ by the good folks of the Stratford Salvation Army Thrift Store.

A personal note: This past Sunday, as I put down Pastor White's book, my old friend Michael Bartsch emailed this photo he'd taken just outside Emigrant, Montana:

Make of this what you will.

Related post:
Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb
Songs for Sunday Suggested by John Wesley White

A Tory Bodice-ripper?

Strange days, indeed. This past Wednesday, Remembrance Day, Linden MacIntyre received a well-deserved Giller Prize for The Bishop's Man. A day later, the novel's position as the country's most discussed book was lost to a 62-page government publication intended for prospective immigrants. The reviews of Discover Canada have been glowing:

"... a reasonable, balanced assessment of the national past."

– Adam Chapnick, The Ottawa Citizen

"...a solid step toward a healthy, self-respecting Canadian nationalism we can all share."

– The Gazette

"...a comparative bodice-ripper when stacked against its bland predecessor..."

– John Ivison, The National Post

I don't think Ivison really means Discover Canada is cheap or disposable or sexually-charged – and read nothing into his use of "stacked" with "bodice-ripper" – but he is very, very excited.

A newly minted Canadian himself, the National Post columnist cheers on Discover Canada as "yet another incremental step in the re-branding of Canada into a conservative country, full of people more inclined to vote Conservative." So, pay no attention to the participation of non-partisan bodies, ignore advisors like Andrew Cohen and John Ralston Saul, Discover Canada is the "Tory guide to a blue Canada". Why? Because it promotes "patriotism, pride in the armed forces and support for the rule of law" (in much the same way Ivison promotes American punctuation). These aren't Canadian values, the columnist tells us, they're Conservative values. Oh, and that maple leaf on the cover? That's not a Canadian symbol, but one that became Tory after a successful "hijacking".

And then, predictably, Ivison's off on another rant about the gun registry.

I can understand why the columnist so wants to claim Discover Canada for his team; it may not be a bodice-ripper, but it's most certainly an improvement. Yes, Bloc MPs hate the thing, but that's just a job requirement; all the other parties are pretty well on board. The greatest criticism thus far comes from New Democrat Olivia Chow, who laments that the new guide doesn't recognize our UNESCO World Heritage sites.

This is not to say that there aren't greater flaws. Christopher Moore notes that there's no mention of First Nations rights and treaties, while Daniel Francis rightly claims that BC receives short shrift (and points out that not one of the 26 advisors comes from the province).

Much more modest, my own complaint deals with the "Arts and Culture in Canada" section. It consumes little more than a page and, curiously, is dominated by sports, science and technology. Oh, there's paragraph on the visual arts, which mentions the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, les Automatistes, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Kenojuak Ashevak. Another paragraph on film and television boils everything down to Denys Arcand, Norman Jewison and Atom Egoyan. But what does Discover Canada have to tell prospective immigrants about our literary heritage?

The answer, in its entirety:

So there you have it: Canadian literature in fifteen or so words. I could make more of this, I suppose, but these guys and their fellow singers and songwriters didn't even get a sentence to call their own.