This Magazine articles from September 1996

This Magazine archives from September 1996

It could be verse (merging politics and literature).
September 1, 1996... A letter from the editor by Clive Thompson Last winter, Frank magazine reprinted a handful of poems by Dave Tsubouchi, the former minister of Social Services in Ontario's current, arch-conservative government. The poems originally had appeared...

Shields up: legal and physical attacks put gay-bookstore employees in defence mode.
September 1, 1996... When the Glad Day Bookshop - Toronto's main gay/lesbian bookstore - decided to stock its shelves with a few German "art books", it touched off a storm of protest amongst its workers. The problem: the books contained pictures of naked boys....

Collected works of Jean Chretien (found poetry based on the Prime Minister's explanation for his attack on a protester).
September 1, 1996... When Prime Minister Jean Chretien physically attacked a protester this spring, his attempt to explain his actions afterwards was typically opaque. "If you are in my way," he told the Globe and Mail, "I am walking." It was classic Chretien:...

Prize.
September 1, 1996... A week ago, he'd been on the stage of the Lottie & Lennie Bergdorff Palace Theatre. The building owed its unwieldy name to two of Toronto's wealthiest arts patrons, and to the 1920s vaudeville house they'd helped restore. Most of the...

Flak jacket: nice book. Shame about the cover.
September 1, 1996... Back in the days before compact discs (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I remember one of my favourite used-record stores in Toronto was a subterranean dungeon on Yonge Street. The walls were plastered with album covers from ABBA to Zeppelin....

Cooking the books: as Revenue Canada cracks down on the underground economy, artists are caught in the dragnet.
September 1, 1996... Alvin Comiter has been a respected, working Canadian artist for more than 20 years. He specializes in architectural and landscape photography: Globe and Mail art critic Kate Taylor describes his pictures of Maritime buildings as "simply...

Advice for girls: Kate Fillion's splashy book (Lip service) shows us a lot about the political uses of narrative.
September 1, 1996... When Kate Fillion's book on women, and the wicked things they do, came out this past winter, there was an audible gasp. The noise was helped by the hype surrounding the book's release: three segments previously serialized in Saturday Night...

Last words: a memoir: Daniel Jones asked that his suicide note be published -- as his "last piece of writing," the coda to a literary life.
September 1, 1996... Daniel Jones, editor, publisher, fiction writer and poet, was found dead in his apartment in Toronto's Little Italy district yesterday. He was 34, and had a history of battling depression. -- The Globe and Mail, Feb. 16, 1994 I was on...

Ten years after his death I examine a few lessons my father taught me.
September 1, 1996... A cheese slice is not a slice of cheese. Red sky at night means nothing. Close all gates behind you. Hemp has more honour than nylon, but any rope is your friend. Buy British. Spit on the whetstone before...

Sisters.
September 1, 1996... I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way. I. As my mother was leaving for the hospital to deliver me, she asked my sister,...

If we may not save the living let us save the dead.
September 1, 1996... XXXIV I am a bachelor. XXXV My sisters talk to each other all the time. XXXVI Recently I was sitting and talking with my sisters and my mother, all of us together again. It was something I hadn't done for a long time. I...

Beatrice Chancy.
September 1, 1996... Peacock's Imagination of Beatrice Sly as Dante's seraphically dark houri sloe-violent, Gioconda eyes, sable hair ivying carnal gold, How she'll slender at touching things... I have a dream of her mauve lips moaning, ...

Anchoress.
September 1, 1996... Because what she believed was big enough for this world - or it was too small, something anyone could pack in an overnight bag, strap on a back, carry at the end of a stick (not even drooping under the weight). ...

Working title (first-time novelist Yan Li talks about immigrating, cleaning houses, and writing her first novel).
September 1, 1996... Last December, YAN LI's novel Daughters of the Red Land (Sister Vision Press) was published to critical acclaim. Based on the experiences of Li's family in China during the turbulent period of Mao's regime, Daughters was nominated for the...