The Dusty Bookcase

14 November 2016

Arnold Viersen Has a Rhyme for Manure

Your lights are on, but you're not home.
Your mind is not your own.

The week Arnold Viersen was born, Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" topped the Billboard Hot 100. Who dares call it coincidence?

Like ~~Preston Manning~~ George Pepki before him, the rookie MP for Peace River-Westlock has a rhyming dictionary and knows how to use it. Anyone requiring evidence need look no further than his most recent speech in the House of Commons.

The poet first captured my attention this past May, when he presented this at the Conservative Party Convention:

Straight outta Barrhead, Alberta (pop. 4,432).

Viersen is a seer. Leadership no-shows like Tony Clement were included only because lines like this are to good to let slide:

I've got the chops,
Like to drink hops.
Even on twitter
I'm a heavy hitter.
In Cabinet for ten years,
Leave the Libs in tears.
The man from Muskoka,
I'm our party's Lee Iococa.

I'll allow that Viersen's not much good at reading prose,

but when it comes to verse he really shines. Consider "Farmers: Heart of Rural Canada," which the MP performed in the House on 6 May 2016:

Springtime is here; our farmers are in their fields
Assessing the moisture, gauging their yields.
When rain is sparse and times are tough
And the price of hay is especially rough,
As Conservatives we understand
It takes hard work to till the land.
Alberta NDP passed a law for working on prairie farms:
More expensive food – don’t care who it harms.
They said, “John dear, we want your food
But only feed your cows when we’re in the mood;
No overtime or you pay the price.”
Beef and pork will cost more than twice.
We’re standing up for farmers, feeding cows ’till nine.
We’re standing up for farmers, working overtime.
You eat their beef, you sit on leather,
Your feet are shoed in stormy weather.
Without their food, life would be grim
Unless you plan to be awfully thin
Family farms are getting fewer.
Once they’re gone, we’re in deep manure.
Don’t egg me on, the yolk’s on you.
If farmers leave, what will we do?
Bottom line – You want to eat?
Support our farmers – Buy their wheat.

"Don't egg me on, the yolk's on you." That line alone is worth every cent of the $170,400 the MP will earn this year.

To think it has been immortalized in Hansard.

Related post:

In Search of George Pepki, Poet

13 November 2016

The Most Daring New Novelist on the Scene Today!

12 November 2016

There Are No Rules for Leonard Cohen!

11 November 2016

A Man With No Face

For Remembrance Day, my latest piece for The Walrus.

10 November 2016

04 November 2016

Testing Jimmie Dale's Patience (and mine)

Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1922

This third Gray Seal book begins where the second, The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale, leaves off. Gentleman Jimmie and lady Marie LaSalle are entwined, adrift in a small boat on the East River. Wizard Marre is dead... and with him the last remnant of the Crime Club that had once threatened their lives. Eventually, Marie breaks the embrace and begins to row. Jimmie looks on, "drinking in the lithe, graceful swing of her body, the rhythmic stroke of the heavy oars." All is calm and the pace is slow, despite Marie's exertion, until they reach Manhattan.

Marie acts quickly. Gaining terra firma, she flings the oars in the water, then pushes the boat – and Jimmie – back into the river.

"Jimmie! Oh, Jimmie!" Her voice reached him in a low, broken sob. "There was no other way. It's in your pocket, Jimmie. I put it there when – when you were – were holding me."

Jimmie watches as Marie disappears into the crowded street, and I nearly threw the book against the wall.

The pattern repeats. Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue begins in

much the same way as The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale. Our hero has vanquished the villains of the previous volume only to learn that another threatens Marie. Fearful that the link between she and he will expose the millionaire clubman's secret identity as the Gray Seal, Marie disappears to take on her new foe. The difference this time is that she expects to call on Jimmie's help every once in a while, as detailed in a letter she had left in his pocket.

There follows a new set of Gray Seal adventures; some work toward the defeating Marie's new nemesis, a mysterious figure she calls the Phantom, while others don't. The plots are clever and the writing is on par, but it's all a bit too familiar... and familiarity breeds contempt. I grew tired of reading details of Jimmie's costume changes and elderly

butler Jason's pride at having "dandled" the infant Jimmie on his knee. We're told three times that the underworld's slogan is "Death to the Gray Seal!" (down from four in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale and eight in the The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale). Because the adventures were first published apart in pulp magazines, one might expect a certain amount of repetition and reminding, but the absence of an editor's red pen here just adds to the stagnant nature of the book.

I like to think that Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder, the next Gray Seal volume, opens with the two crimefighters together, perhaps married with children, but I really don't care enough to investigate.

At the end, I cast my mind back to the beginning, and wondered why Jimmie hadn't simply swum to shore.

Object: A 301-page novel in bland blue cloth with damaged dust jacket. The cover illustration is by A.D. Rahn. I purchased my copy in 2012 at London's Attic Books. Price: $15.00.

I have a second copy, one of the ten Gray Seal Edition Packards I bought two years ago. Price: US$25.00 (for the ten).

Access: First published in 1922 by Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). The following year, Hodder & Stoughton put out the first UK edition. As far as I can tell, the novel was last published in 1942 by Novel Selections as Jimmy Dale and the Phantom Clue.

The novel is held by nineteen of our universities, but not one library serving the public. Library and Archives fails, as does the more reliable Toronto Public Library.

Twenty-two copies of one edition or another is listed by online booksellers, ranging in price from US$4.50 (a cheap A.L. Burt reprint) to US$100 (the Copp, Clark Canadian first, "near fine in very good dj"). My advice is to try Attic Books.

Related posts:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

The Further Frustrations of Jimmie Dale

01 November 2016

Stringer's 'The Song-Sparrow in November'

Verse for the month from the 1949 McClelland & Stewart edition of Arthur Stringer's The Woman in the Rain and Other Poems.

Don't know it? You should.

The London Free Press had this to say of the 1907 Little, Brown first edition:

The Woman in the Rain is a volume without which now no collection of poetry in Canada, meant to be representative of the best, written by Canadians, can be complete.

I've got mine... and it's signed!