Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)

Good things come to those who wait, but so do the bad and the ugly.

Nine years and 138 days after it was first reported, one year and 321 days after he announced its completion, the prime minister's hockey book was released yesterday. Given authorship, website and book trailer, the launch for A Great Game seems to have been rather muted. No copies were in evidence at the Conservatives' frightening Hallowe'en convention. Costco catalogue copy aside, the only advance notice I spotted came this past Saturday in the form of an ineptly worded, poorly punctuated "Suggested Post" on Facebook:

Pub date publicity – the best being this video of stumbling Leafs –  was by mid-morning overshadowed by a confession from Rob Ford, the prime minister's fishing buddy. The afternoon brought the "political executions" – John Ivison's words, not mine – of Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin. The prime minister's will be done.

Power & Politics passed without a single mention of our prime minister's hockey book. Nevertheless, A Great Game had risen to #16 at Amazon.ca by that point, 782,390 places higher than on Amazon.com. Its placing south of the border must have come as a disappointment to agent Michael Levine, for whom American distribution played an "extremely important" role in selecting a publisher.

I wish Simon & Schuster well, and very much look forward to reading the prime minister's book. While recognizing that Chris Selley, who has written the most thoughtful review thus far, dismisses A Great Game as "dry, dispassionate and detailed as to induce test anxiety," I spot some fun. For example, the first chapter begins with the prime minister cocking a snoot at the world of academe by quoting "The Life I Lead", an American song written for a 1964 Disney musical set in pre-Great War England, as a means of anchoring Edwardian Canada.

Such wonderful childhood memories.

I recognize that some correspondents may question my good wishes for the prime minister and his book. One follower of the Harper Hockey Book Watch has accused me of "picking on the Stephen Harper" (before warning that I best not set foot in Alberta). In fact, my criticism has naught to do with the prime minister, but the fourth estate (and I've visited Alberta without incident).

For nearly a decade, the press picked up and dropped the story of the prime minister's hockey book with the enthusiasm and attention span of a playful, inbred puppy. Back in April 2006, when BC boy Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" topped the charts, Mr Harper announced that he expected to finish the book within months. In the midst of the 2008 election – "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry – he again told reporters that it was on the cusp of completion. In December 2011 – Rhianna's "We Found Love" – the prime minister revealed to Jane Taber and Tonda MacCharles that he'd actually finished his book, adding that a publisher was in place and that it would appear in 2012. Each pronouncement launched a flurry of news stories, but never a follow-up. Not a single news source commented when the promised hockey book failed to materialize last year.

Not one member of the press has pursued Heritage Canada's sudden, unexpected and unexplained decision – which I support! – to allow Simon & Schuster Canada to publish Canadian books.

Hockey is not the only great game.

And so, I close the Harper Hockey Book Watch with two related queries and a gentle suggestion.

Queries: Has the beneficiary of proceeds, the Military Family Fund, received an advance on royalties? If not, why not?

Suggestion: Those who are choosing to boycott A Great Game may wish to consider donating directly to the Military Families Fund.

Note to the Conservative Party of Canada: A website update is long overdue. Rumours are fuelled by things like this:

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77

Q is for Queer People (but not kweer kapers)

The plaque on Palmer Cox's gravesite went missing last year. Its disappearance, believed to be the work scrap metal scavengers, is perhaps the greatest in a long list of insults to his memory. No other name in Canadian literature has suffered such a decline in death, few have been quite so snubbed as this son of Granby, Quebec. Palmer Cox is nowhere to be found in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, yet a century ago his presence was inescapable. Here the man's image graces a cigar box:

Cox's verse and illustrations featured in newspapers, magazines and books published around the globe. Much of his popularity had to do with Brownies, mischievous little sprites inspired by stories told by his Scottish grandmother. Touring companies performed theatrical adaptations of Cox's Brownie verse, while the characters themselves were sold in places like Birks as porcelain figurines.

Tacky? Perhaps you'd prefer some Brownie cutlery or dinnerware? Salt and paper shakers? A creamer? How about a tea towel for the kitchen and some wallpaper for the nursery?

No? Okay, but you'll want a Brownie Ice Cream Sandwich for the road.

You'll say they're great!

It's Disney before Disney.

Cox wrote and illustrated something in the area of thirty books – I've yet to find a reliable bibliography. I think my favourite, Queer People and Their Kweer Kapers (Toronto: Rose, 1888), provides some indication as to why the author is so ignored by the keepers of the canon. We begin with the tale of Grim Griffin, a "giant bold" who lives off the labour of hardworking farmers in stealing their produce and livestock. Cox took the time to draw "heaps of hoof and horn" lying at Grim Griffin's feet. Not a pleasant sight, but then neither is this:

Grim Griffin meets his end when he hooks a whale that pulls him out to sea.

The people rejoice:

The high point of the collection to this discerning reader is Cox's "Cock Robin", in which a dark nursery rhyme is made more morbid.

I suppose subsequent generations came to consider these images and accompanying verse inappropriate for young children. A shame, because they often carry some valuable advice. Consider the last lines in Grim Griffin's tale:

Palmer Cox died at his home, Brownie Castle, which was built by his brothers not far from his childhood home.

It stands to this day, a short stroll to his resting place and the monument that once bore these words:

IN CREATING THE BROWNIES

HE BESTOWED A PRICELESS

HERITAGE ON CHILDHOOD

Not in Canada, he didn't.

The Harlequin Horror That Just Won't Die!

Vengeance of the Black Donnellys
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: Harlequin, 1962

Winnipeg: Greywood, 1969

Toronto: Modern Canadian Library, 1975

Toronto: Firefly, 1995

Canada's most feared family strikes back from the grave!

Related posts:

A Harlequin Halloween

Another Harlequin Halloween

It's Harlequin Halloween Time!
The Horror! The Harlequin Horror!

New Brunswick Boy in Number 10

Here's to Bonar Law, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who took his final breath ninety years ago today. No one was much surprised by his passing; a diagnosis of inoperable throat cancer had forced his resignation just five months earlier. Law holds an unenviable record as the shortest serving British prime minister of the 20th century. Still, his 209 days as a PM (23 October 1922 - 22 May 1923) is far longer than Kim Campbell can claim. In this respect, Law is in Joe Clark's league.

I mention Campbell and Clark because Bonar Law, also a Tory, holds the distinction of being the only British prime minister to have been born on Canadian soil; in fact, he's the only person born outside the British Isles to have held the office. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Law drew his first breath in Rexton, New Brunswick, where he lived until the age of twelve.

Law's forced retirement was much to brief for him to pen his memoirs; he had no ghostwriter or "editorial consultant". The longest piece I have by the man comes in the form of a two-page Preface to Canada in Flanders (Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916) by friend Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a fellow Presbyterian pastor's son and native of New Brunswick.

Two of Law's sons would be killed in the Great War, losses that followed the death of his wife and a stillborn child. For all his political successes, the 20th century wasn't kind to Law, yet he embraced it. Here Law "marks an epoch in Cinematography" in the first cabinet meeting to be filmed "within the historic and sacred walls of No. 10 Downing St."

"A fine study of the quiet and yet steadfast dignity of the New Prime Minister," reads one of the cards. I see a man looking uncomfortable before the camera. A shy smile breaks through in the last seconds.

Look carefully and you'll see members of this very same cabinet in this Pathé newsreel twelve months later. I recommend watching with the sound off.

Andrew Bonar Law
Rextion, New Brunswick, 16 September 1858 -
London, England, 30 October 1923
RIP

P is for Plus ça change...

National Post Editor-at-Large Diane Francis has been making the rounds flogging her latest. I've felt some sympathy. Her book, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, landed in the midst of the government shutdown in the republic to the south. Ever the capitalist, Ms Francis did her level best of capitalize on the sorry mess, beginning her interview with Evan Solomon thusly:

If we were to merge like quickly, like East and West Germany, we'd be 35 million Democrats and the Republicans wouldn't get anywhere in the House or in the White House. So there you go.There'd be no more logjams.

That Ms Francis, a born and bred Chicagoan, thinks Canadians would flock to the Democrats en masse suggests that she has much to learn about her adopted country; that she believes Canadian children would be granted the right to vote suggests that she knows nothing at all about the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Ms Francis began with the very same assertion when speaking with Anna Maria Tremonti, which leads me to think that it also features in the book itself. I don't know for certain because I just can't be bothered to check it out of the library.

Hers is a tired, old idea (see: Smith, Goldwin), one that comes around every couple of decade or so. As with Encke's Comet, no one much notices – but the few who do, like her publisher's jacket designer, find little in the way of inspiration.

Looking through my library I see that I've bought only one volume on the topic: Canamerican Union Now! Published in early 1978 by Griffin House, it's the lone book by D.K. Donnelly, a computer industry consultant from Toronto. Canamerican Union Now! was very much a knee-jerk response to the November 1976 election of the Parti Québécois. The author considered the months – months, I tell you – of handwringing that followed, before throwing up his own right and left in frustration.

Canamerican Union Now!

Diane Francis surrenders because, as she put it on Power & Politics, the Russians and Chinese are "wolves at our door." The author repeated the same words on The Current, in her National Post column, and in numerous – albeit identical – online posts.

Griffin House pitched its book as an open discussion, but it would seem that the computer industry consultant was talking only to himself. Though Merger of the Century, a HarperCollins lead title, ranked 8,358 on Amazon.ca at the time of this writing, I believe Ms Francis has done a bit better. Her newspaper's website has comments on the book from several dozen people, including the author herself. What's more, Amazon has three customer reviews! Someone calling himself "Interested American" informs: "the numbers and data (and new ideas) are presented here for us to take in, especially about the Arctic NW Territories [sic] I had little awareness of, and consider in light of a changing world." Jared Nova chimes in with enthusiasm: "I'm an American who's always had a great interest in Canada. But this book helped me realize how much I didn't know."

The naysayer – tellingly, I think – is the sole Canadian, who observes that "the US nearly gutted itself financially and nearly took down the rest of the western economies", then dares add that "Canada's pragmatic mix of capitalism and socialism protected us from most of the blowback." He also notes that we don't kill each other nearly as much.

"The above critique is infused with anti-American bigotry", responds South Carolina's "C.I. Kendrick", who also believes Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory rates five stars. "A new Classic!"

I was greatly disappointed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory myself... and, truth be told, I've never taken to the idea of a union between Canada and the United States. It's not that I don't love my American cousins, but that I see their country as being, well, foreign.

Those few campaigning for union, like self-described "Canadian-American" Diane Francis, may blame my father, whose record collection introduced me to the idea before I began elementary school. From The Brothers-in-Law Strike Again! (Arc, 1966):

            Oh, we share a common border with a country that you know,
            Just take a look at your atlas, it's the one that's down below.
            There's fifty states in the union and something should be done
            To forget the War of 1812 and make it fifty-one.

            Chorus:         

            There'll be color television,
            Social security,
            Racial segregation,
            And the Birch Society.
            You can cheer for Jimmy Hoffa,
            You can join the Klan today.
            You can even burn your draft card
            When we're Canada, USA.

Everyone!

Now the ladies... 'cause with 35 million more Democrats an Equal Rights Amendment might finally get passed.

Note to American readers: Canada now has color television. We spell it "colour".

Trivia: The first Brothers-in-Law concert took place on 22 November 1963, the day the United States suffered its twenty-fifth political assassination.

There's a cultural difference for you.*

* "I have this great quote in the political chapter. Peter Drucker – who's the business guru of gurus, the late great Peter Drucker – and he said 'Culture eats strategy for breakfast.' So, I get it, but I'm a business person, I deal in facts and reality." 

– Diane Francis on The Current, 30 September 2013

Sugar-Puss Returns!

Sixty-three years after it disappeared from drugstore spinner racks, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street is finally making its way to bookstore shelves. This is not your grandparents' Sugar-Puss, but a brand new edition with Introduction by Will Straw. Reset and printed on FSC certified paper, unlike the News Stand Library original this baby is built to last!

Much has changed since the story of young, innocent, farmette Gisele Lapine last saw print. Dorchester is not a street but a boulevard. No longer a centre of the city's nightlife, it's now a bloodless artery lined by some of the city's blandest buildings. Even the name is gone. The honour conferred upon Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, the man credited with saving Quebec from the Americans during their Revolutionary War, has been stripped and given to a former United States Army liaison officer.

Enough. This is not a time for speeches. In celebration of her return, I present a Sugar-Puss Top Ten – favourite passages from the novel, beginning with the very first sentence:

1 - Dorchester Street spews out almost within shadow of the Harbour Bridge in Montreal’s slummy, crummy East End. Her spawning ground is wedged solidly between vermin-ridden tenements where French and English meet – but do not blend – and the greasy waters of the St. Lawrence River.

2 - Her eyes were large and softly brown as was her skin thereby hinting of a strain of Basque blood. Her breasts were large and firm; a legacy of her Norman ancestry. Long legs tapered off from well-rounded thighs to shapely ankles. Her feet were small and beautifully formed as are those of most French Canadian women.

3 - Bewildered Gisele looked at her newly acquired, giant-sized and self-appointed protector. He smiled back at her through a cloud of smoke. "It's okay, Honey. I'm Jim Schultz. I own this flea trap and you're safe here as you are in yah mudda's arms. Safer unless yah mudda'sgot cauliflower ears."

4 - The girl slouched against the bar beside her. "My name's Trixie. Helluva name that. Pop said he named me after a mongrel that died but Ma said it was a burlesque broad he used to sleep with."

5 - He turned slightly and looked down at her. The lamp cast a bluish glow across her flat stomach. It was like television, he thought.

6 - He didn't trust himself to speak. Instead he drank slowly looking into the light until his eyes blurred.
     She whimpered like a spaniel. "Please, Jimmy."

7 - "Today, Gisele," she told herself, "you are a woman." She paused for some time reliving every one of the precious moments of the night. "You are," she said, "a young woman in love – and what's more you look it."

8 - "Gisele ma petite bebe you are the greatest thing to hit show business here since Fifi D'Orsay. You are superb, magnificent, you are – shall we say – tres, tres? A combination of Pavlowa and Mam'selle St. Cyr. You were great."

9 - Madame Lapointe had given the nearest possible example of a human being sparked with atomic power.

10 - "So she's still in the city," he thought grimly, "and so are a million and a half other souls – plus a few heels."

The Gazette, 2 November 1949

Related post:

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

O is for OW!! OW!! OW!! OUCH!!! OUCH!!!!

A glimpse of Jazz Age Montreal published ninety years ago today in The Axe, John H. Roberts' much-missed muckraking tabloid.

"HE-SWEETIES HAUNT HOTELS" is pretty great, but I much prefer the sub-headline. Click to enlarge.

The Axe, 19 October 1923