Canadian Health Care

In the last US presidential debate Trump dissed the Canadian health care system. His stupid assumptions make me sick! In Canada, we take health care as our inalienable right. For elective procedures there can be long delays. I've had to wait for months for hip surgery and for dermatological procedures. But when I had a scuba mishap I was taken into hospital for immediate and extensive treatment over a period of three weeks. When it was discovered in a routine examination that I had arterial blockage to my heart, I was under the knife within a week for a quadruple bypass. Tthere were no delays. The costs were never even raised as a consideration. And the care was superb. Both my brothers had extensive hospital treatment which would have cost literally millions of dollars. No one ever brought up the expense. They were given first-rate treatment. If I've had to wait for non-threatneing treatment, no problem! Eventually I received excellent care. And never, not ever, were costs a consideration. For urgent treatment, immediate state-of-the-art response. No personal costs. I pay my fair share of taxes and do so cheerfully. I get great value for my investment. So, grow up, America. Health care is a right, not a privilege. I sincerely hope you are able to heal your excruciatingly embarrassing political system before it infects the rest of us who watch with a mixture of pity, anger, and heart-felt anxiety. You're better than this!

Nothing to do with The Girl in a Coma

It's been eleven years since I reluctantly retired. "The Girl in a Coma" is one of the brighter fruits plucked in a withering vineyard. It's my new YA mystery and I'll comment on it in a few days. For now, I want to share my retirement speech. I was struck by how thoughtful it was, entirely concealing the hysteria that has since dwindled into benign amusement. Here goes: A Few Words I have been a teacher for thirty-nine years, mostly as a professor of Canadian literatures. When I was seven I vowed to my grandmother that I would live a life of adventure. By the time she died, following her hundredth birthday which coincided with the centennial celebrations of Canada, the adventurous life took a bit of a turn. From surviving high school football, enduring a desultory undergraduate career, walking through the desert with David Lean, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia for my job standing in for Peter O’Toole, swimming the Hellespont from Abydus to Sestos, patiently lecturing Robert Bolt, the author of A Man for All Seasons and the Lawrence filmscript, about how to write plays, my understanding of adventure shifted, and after a chance reading of Don Quixote I became immersed in a world of books. Never, however, did books confine my life. As well as writing and teaching, I was busy with family, competing in the Ironman, running Boston, travelling Greenland and Spain and Japan, breeding horses, teaching myself architectural design and carpentry, learning the arts of the plumber, the roofer, the electrician, the dry-waller and tile-setter, the cabinet-maker. Books enhanced everything I did. Bee keeping or scuba diving, watching “Bewitched” with the kids, white-water canoeing, collecting vintage Bordeaux and tribal carpets, walking twenty-eight solitary days in the Barrens, or skiing the glorious annual marathon from Montreal to Gatineau, books swept me toward those silver reaches of the estuary. And now, books written, books read, and with five thousand students behind me, I find myself momentarily in stasis, caught between retiring and expiring, not entirely comfortable in the realm of the undead. I am curious as to where the great adventure will lead next. It has been my good fortune never to think of our profession as work. To be a professor is not something you do but something you are. Being a professional has always seemed open-ended, a vocation exceedingly difficult to enter, and to be quit only at a time advantageous to all. But since both law and the university deem mandatory retirement a present necessity—it has not always been so, and soon will seem a barbaric anachronism—I will retire with the same forbearance as I intend, eventually to expire. On the way, I would like to share a few words I have jotted down about my profession. The irony here is that I have never lectured from notes. It is my conviction that if I do not sufficiently know my materials and the rhetorical design of their presentation, it is unlikely my students will engage with what I have to say. I do not advocate this for all personalities, for sometimes what I do is more like sky-diving without a parachute than walking a tight-rope without looking down; and it would be inappropriate in some disciplines, for I cannot imagine cluttering my mind with the periodic table or the finite particulars of quantum mechanics. I have never hidden who I am when I lecture. If my own life does not broadcast the pleasures of the text, then I am a charlatan or, at best, uninspired. It may be instructive, knowing that I thrill to the lines of Margaret Avison and Gerrard Manley Hopkins in their magnificent affairs with God, and am an atheist. It could be illuminating to know that I often travel in the high Arctic wind where the snow flies parallel to the ground, and that sometimes I dive deep among canyons of coral in the South Pacific, and my perceptions are shaped by Blake and Al Purdy, Shakespeare and Margarets Atwood and Laurence; imperative to recognize that culture is not a contiguous phenomenon but the shape of our consciousness of ourselves in the world. While trained in the liberal arts, I value the study of science to help understand what we are. The arts tell us who. While trained in literary analysis, I appreciate how essential is full awareness of the texts of our history, the maps of our human geography, the conversations among philosophers through time. A text without context is an unbroken code, hiding far more than it reveals. While trained in English literatures, and thrilled by Spenser and Austen, Shakespeare and Beckett, writers of the great tradition about whom I have written, as well as by the visionary Wilson Harris, the revolutionary N’gugi wa thiongo, the metaphysics of Doris Lessing and Tennessee Williams, I have focussed my interests where these writers intersect from a Canadian perspective. No-one can be open to literature as literature who does not know the writing of the community that shapes his or her perceptions. As a Canadianist, I have been able to work close to home, not just to help make us real but to break down the garrison palisades, to make us connect. I have always held that students know more than I can possibly imagine and sometimes significantly less than they think. It is folly for the authority speaking from a lectern to assume there are not, among those attending, minds of greater capacity, fuelled by experiences drawn from the South African veldt or the mean streets of Arnprior, who should not be addressed. It is my function as a teacher to provide them a safe context to critically interrogate their own versions of the world through the lenses of our cultural capital. It is never enough to know a poem as a poem and not another thing. One must know the poem as a meeting place or it is merely an artefact. At the same time, it is folly for the lecturer to presume knowledge: sometimes even graduate students need to be reminded about the strategic differences between a metonym and synecdoche. A word about marking: as a practical humanist, I hold objectivity to be an illusion, whether in response to a text or in pedagogical assessment. I make it clear to my students that neither justice nor mercy will determine a grade, for there is no justice when a gifted student who is lazy does well, nor mercy extended for the student in need of a mark undeserved. But I urge them to trust in my fairness, and try then by example to earn that trust. In the process, it is imperative to teach informed taste and good judgement. While ideas build empires, it is the quality of our singular engagement with the world as perceived that makes what matters matter. I have never been able to contain my astonishment at animating this brief point of consciousness in the universe. As I leave the University of Ottawa, I am sad. Even those of my colleagues I know only in passing have defined this place from which I weigh and measure the world. I thank you all so much. Over the decades, my daughters, their husbands, and their mother, all earned Ph.D.’s or doctorates. My beloved Beverley (and it is still exciting to say that, after nearly a decade together), Bev is literally within weeks of finishing her own Ph.D., in Cultural Theory. I have had the good sense to surround myself with people brighter than I am, whether family or this larger community of writers and colleagues and friends, who have tolerated my eccentricities, humoured my pretensions, and nurtured my heart and my soul. Thank you again and again. —John Moss 2005

self-evident

I was going to title this, "Hey, I'm back!" (I haven't blogged for a couple of years). Bev tells me this is self-evident, so just get on with it. I've been busy. I have a new YA mystery just out from The Poisoned Pencil, an imprint of Poisoned Pen Press in Arizona. It's called "The Girl in a Coma." See my website for more info (www.johnmoss.ca). It's got some American content but is mostly Canadian. Allison Briscoe, the main character, is disabled in the extreme but still manages to solve murder mysteries. In flashbacks to the ancestral past, her forebears also solve mysteries. There's lot's going in. Check it out; pass the word (or the book) on to young readers you know. Next blog, I'll fill you in on other projects in the works. It's good to be back. Cheers

The Dead Scholar

The Dead Scholar is the fourth in the Quin and Morgan mystery series. The first three, Still Waters, Grave Doubts, and Reluctant Dead, have been published by Dundurn Press, who will be publishing number five,"Blood Wine," in 2014.To fill in the long gap and because Dundurn won't publish a novel the length of "The Dead Scholar" (50% longer than the others), I decided to make it available as an ebook. It is an intricate "ship of fools/country house" novel that could not be cut without seriously diminishing its achievement (such as it is). The following is a description of "The Dead Scholar." Give it a try, tell all your friends, enjoy! When the corpse of an elderly professor turns up on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Francis Bacon Society are not surprised he was murdered. Each of the twelve eccentrics in this unlikely group devoted to the Renaissance rogue and scholar is profoundly in the dead man’s debt, and each has reasons for wanting him dead. Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are drawn into their midst as the investigation moves from the university environs to a grand summer house in Muskoka, and reaches from the turn of the new millennium back into the bleakest events of the twentieth century, and even beyond, to Elizabethan England and the sordid beginnings of a new world order. "The Dead Scholar" is a drawing room thriller and a black comedy, an exquisitely paced intellectual puzzle and a complex study of quixotic characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.

Scenes of the Crime

Scenes of the Crime It’s been a week now since the annual Wolfe Island Mystery Lover’s Festival, Scene of the Crime. This was my second go at it, the first as a speaker, panelist, and honoured guest. And the guests were honoured, no question of that. In a setting that is somehow outside the normal sweep of time, where tourists and mystery buffs wander the main streets of the idyllic island village in search of ice cream cones and tales of murder, we were befriended, celebrated, and applauded by people who love books. For the writers and readers alike, it was sheer delight. The four writers featured in the readings Saturday morning were D.J. McIntosh, whose debut novel, “The Witch of Babylon,” has captured accolades and stellar sales in the historical thriller market. Dorothy read and spoke about her background research. Thomas Rendell Curran gripped the audience of close to one hundred with a background discussion and brief reading from his Eric Stride series, while Y.S. Lee offered a lovely entry into her Agency novels, set in Victorian London. Ostensibly written for the Young Adult reader, her Mary Quinn novels charm all ages (as the best YA fiction does). For my own allotted twelve minutes I read a story of grim retribution taken from a work in progress. Chair of our reading session was the charming and exacting fantasy writer, Violette Malan, who is also President of the Festival Board. Her cohort on the board, the celebrated mystery writer, Vicki Delany, chaired the afternoon panel which featured the same four writers. Five writers on a stage, each as different from one another as possibly imaginable, gave a performance that seemed to enthrall the audience. It certainly was satisfying, from my perspective in the midst of the spirited wordfest. Throughout the day, book sales were brisk, with the business end of things arranged by the hard-working folks from Novel Idea in Kingston. Like any writer, I love signing books. It makes that extra connection that offsets the hours of isolated labour exploring the possibilities of an empty page. Much as I like the affirmation of selling, I like even more that my books are going to be read. The annual Grant Allen Award, named after the British writer and Wolfe Island native, was given this year to a fiendish cluster of women from the Ottawa area, The Ladies Killing Circle. Authors of a series of anthologies with names like ‘Menopause Is Murder’ and ‘When Boomers Go Bad,’ as well as a huge range of mystery novels on their own, ranging from cosies to police procedurals, the Ladies were an absolute delight as they simultaneously thanked the Board for the honour, entertained with accounts of their history, and excoriated their perceived enemies with gleefully venomous wit. I have not read all of them but I will. Vicki Cameron, Joan Boswell, Linda Wicken, Barbara Fradkin, Sue Pike, and Mary Jane Maffini are individually lovely and gracious, and collectively they’re lethal. The organizers of the Wolfe Island Mystery Lover’s Festival include writers, the effervescent Violette Malan, the poised and stalwart Barbara Fradkin, and one of my favourite people, the estimable Vicki Delany. They also include many local people, including the Carr family, Ken Keyes, and my ‘handler’ Judy Reid, all of whom deserve the most sincere thanks from writers and readers alike, all of us bound by our love of a good mystery or two. Bev and I will be back, for sure.

The Scholar, Still Dead

After forty rewrites, this doesn't seem much different from the first one. A little punchier, I hope.

When an elderly professor turns up dead on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Bacon Society are not surprised he was murdered. Enthralled by the Renaissance rogue and scholar, Sir Francis Bacon, this unlikely band of misfits also shares a profound loathing for the dead Mephistophiles who had been their leader. They draw Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan into their midst as the investigation moves from the university environs to a grand summer house in Muskoka, and reaches from the new millenium back into the bleakest events of the twentieth century. The Dead Scholar is a drawing room thriller and a black comedy, an intellectual puzzle and a complex study of quixotic characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.

Hockey?

If Don Cherry developed dementia, would anyone notice?

The Dead Scholar

This is the blurb I've created for the back cover and promo material for the next Quin and Morgan mystery. I'm putting it out here in case anyone thinks it can be tweaked, should be altered, must be entirely revised! Thanks for your help.


THE DEAD SCHOLAR

When an elderly professor is found dead on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Bacon Society are not surprised to learn he was murdered. Enthralled by the Renaissance rogue and scholar, Sir Francis Bacon, and bound by their shared loathing for the dead man, this incongruous band of eccentrics draws investigating detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan into their midst. Set in the university environs and Muskoka at the dawn of the new millennium, The Dead Scholar reaches back into the darkest events of the twentieth century. This is a drawing room thriller, an intellectual puzzle, and a complex study of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.

Opening Books

I've just posted answers to 10 questions asked by Open Book Ontario. It was a pleasure doing them, so I thought I'd post their address and you can see for yourself—


http://www.openbookontario.com/news/ten_questions_john_moss

Canada Impossible

In the spring of 2006, I was Visiting Professor of Canadian Literature at the Universität Wien and invited to give the opening address at the International Graduate Conference for Canadian Studies in German speaking Countries in the presence, among other dignitaries, of Mme Gervais-Vidricaire, Canadian Ambassador to Austria.

For the past five weeks I have been living in Austria and teaching at the Department for English and North American Studies at the University of Vienna. Through the spring of 1980 I taught Canadian literature in West Berlin. During the early 1960s I spent a lot of time with German sun-worshippers and anarchists on Ibiza, long before it became expensive, and back then I travelled in Germany and Austria through several impoverished seasons by what used to be called ‘auto-stop.’ In Waterloo County, southwestern Ontario, my great grandparents on my mother’s side spoke German, not only at home but in the community. When my Scottish grandmother turned up in the 1880s, moving from nearby Granton, Ontario, she had to learn German to work as the first telegraphist in the local post office. When I was a child and she was very old, she would gleefully evoke her mother-in-law by speaking English with a theatrical German accent.
It has been a while now, living in Vienna, since I first began dreaming in German. Appropriately, in the city of Freud, when I wake up I have no idea what I was dreaming about. The German language has become as familiar to me as my own and yet it remains largely a closed dimension in the parallel worlds of my mind. No matter how carefully I listen, whether to people speaking around me or to my echoing genes, German refuses to make sense. I have no facility with languages at all. Even English often leads me into obscurity and confusion. Therefore it is humbling to stand before a gathering of people who speak not only English but German, and probably French, and perhaps other languages, as well.
I am here as a Canadian. That seems to be my primary credential. Many of you at this conference know more about aspects of Canadian culture and Canada as a geophysical presence, about Canadian politics, history, economics, natural resources, native peoples, bicultural symbiotics, immigrant statistics, multicultural anomalies, postcolonial angst. I know about being as a Canadian, but that only has meaning in the Heideggarian sense. Dasein. My awareness of my own existential condition is from a particular and unique Canadian perspective. This might qualify me to speak as a representative human in the world but not as an exemplary Canadian, a collectivity wherein I exist as a singularity of no great genius or eminence, although with a penchant for the public display of modesty which is a particularly Canadian characteristic.
A good part of my academic career has been devoted to making generalizations about Canada, usually in the disguise of informed opinions; sometimes, especially in more recent years, these opinions are embedded in poetry and fiction. Imagination has been necessary because there is no such thing as Canada. This makes Canada an existential singularity – its non-existance, then, proof that such a thing as Canada exists. Canada in the Heideggarian sense exists in being what it is not.
Samuel Beckett would have understood: Canada is an impossibility. My authority for saying this is that I am Canadian.
“You can write whatever you want about Vienna, it will always be true.” This was written by the Viennese writer Hans Weigel in a marvel of dialectical redundancy, proving by making his statement that his statement, in fact, is the truth. He wrote this, of course, in German and perhaps meant something quite different. What we understand, here, together, in English, might not be what he meant. And if you are quietly translating my English translation of Hans Weigel back into German, you might not even see the Canadian connection.
Perhaps we should take a different approach. Canada is not a blank slate. Just because quite possibly there is no such thing as Canada and just because whatever you say about Canada is true, no matter how contradictory, no matter how contrary, Canada is not tabula rasa. Nor is it a whole that is either more or less than the sum of its parts. Nor is it what is left of North America when you take away the United State and Mexico. In fact, if the U.S. ceased to exist, Canada would collapse as a ribbon of desiccated snow along the north bank of the Rio Grande. If you were to arrange what each of you knows about, believes in, desires from Canada, the result would not be a mosaic signifying Canada from a Germanic perspective. It would be more like the proverbial elephant, described by a cohort of the blind from a variety of perspectives. Each of you might be correct; the chances of assembling your separate visions into an elephant, however, or a mosaic representing an elephant is infinitesimal.
In Austria, history and geography converge. The same might be said of all the nations in what we peremptorily call ‘the old world.’ ‘The old world’ is a term that seems to mean those parts of the planet wherein historical texts were devised to record the progress of what is determined by textual analysis to be ‘civilized.’ Given that the indigenous people of Australia settled there some fifty-thousand years ago, long before the endangered cave drawings were inscribed at Les Escaux, long before Europeans exterminated their Neanderthal cousins, given that the native peoples of America were there for at least twenty thousand years before the Vikings landed at L’Anse aux Meadows in New-found-land, it seems odd to call their worlds ‘new.’ Yet, we name those people aboriginals as if they were a geographical feature of the landscape, with a past but no story. And if history is text, not heritage, then perhaps that is true. In real nations, such as Austria and Scotland, history and geography are virtually inseparable, the shifting boundaries and diverse causes of generations indelibly inscribed on the bruised and battered surface of the earth.
In the United States, history has subdued geography, drawn it into submission through grand schemes like the Hoover Dam and a manifest destiny in which conquest was not of other nations but of the land itself. With armies and engineers, farmers and entrepreneurs, Americans staked out the heart of a continent and imposed a revolutionary history upon everything within its grasp. In parts of Central and South America, history has yet to bring the natural world into submission, but not for want of trying. There are vast areas of rainforest that will not surrender, yet they, too, will finally dwindle to dust in the face of global atrocities. History, like cancer, will eventually kill off what it cannot control.
Canada, subject to the same threats, is different. History is one thing; geography another. If, in the U.S., geography was subdued by history, and in the Old World, from Ireland to Israel, Japan to Viet Nam, geography has been subsumed by history, in Canada it was the imposition of geography as a system of measurement, of incising distance and direction upon the land, that made history possible. If elsewhere, history and geography ultimately converge, in Canada they refuse to do so. We have history, yes. Much of it was written by surveyors as they superimposed new names over old, making every map of Canada a palimpsest – native names that endured five hundred generations suddenly over-written by strangers with an alien tongue. Some of it was written in the ledgers that trading post storekeepers sent ‘home,’ with notes on market conditions; some was scripted by permanent tourists like the Strickland sisters, or by subversives like Anna Jameson and Mina Hubbard. And much of our history happened somewhere else, on the battlefields of Europe, in South Africa, in Singapore, among foreign diplomats at Paris and Ghent.
Attempts have been made to trace our national narrative, most famously through the fur trade, and in popular accounts through the building of the railroads, or the distribution and ultimate uses of Eaton’s Catalogue. But a cursory survey of Canada today reveals how inadequate these historiographic paradigms actually are. For a story to become history, it must make the collective enterprise seem its inevitable outcome. One can believe the United States would be otherwise, but for the Wild West. Yet millions of amphibious rodents slaughtered to make hats for European gentry are nothing in romance or myth upon which to found a nation, and their sacrifice bears little on the minds of contemporary Canadians. It is the difference between metaphor and metonym. Beavers no more embody the story of our past than the seal hunt does of our present, or the slaughter houses of Chicago do of the American dream.
History and geography in Canada form an uneasy alliance. One of the reasons is time. In Canada we are never far from reminders of how ancient is the universe and our human place within it. We are aware, even from the city’s edge, of the vast excoriated surface of the Earth gleaming under the sun through five and a half times zones (Newfoundland declaring its difference on the half hour); we talk endlessly in Tim Hortons over coffee, in offices and schools, over neighbourhood fences and to complete strangers, of weather systems rolling for days, even weeks, across our sovereign landscape; we are aware of how fragile is our tenure on the planet, by virtue of our vast wilderness, which the native peoples call home. We are a very old country, geographically. Yet our history has no roots. It is like lichen on Arctic boulders, a mixture of algae and fungus, but with no reality of its own, clinging to the surface of the rock.
Ask Canadians about history. They will tell you about the Greeks and the Persians. Hebrews and Egyptians are pushed a little to the side as religion and myth. They might tell you about Rome, or the interminable quarrels of Europe, or the European imperial project abroad; or inform you that the Gettysburg address was Abraham Lincoln’ postal code during the Revolution. We sometimes get confused. You might hear of Chinese dynasties or Mogul empires. Or of conquistadores and buccaneers. Ask Canadians about history: you will hear almost nothing of Canada. For a few minutes on November 11th every year, we celebrate our valiant warriors, but this is nostalgia, not history. We make other gestures, we celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday, we celebrate our hockey victory over the Soviets in 1972, we celebrate the brief life of a one-legged runner, Terry Fox. It is not that things did not happen in Canada, but rather that, for the most part, we choose to forget.
This is in part our colonial legacy; by definition, history happened elsewhere. In part, it is due to our evolutionary progress toward democratic sovereignty, such as it is; there were no signal events, only significant dates. Partly, it is because we live so close to ‘concept America’; it is difficult to see our reflection mirrored in the rocket’s red glare. And finally, perhaps for these other reasons, we now erase ourselves in a bland mixture of humility and arrogance under the aegis of multiculturalism: do not fear assimilation for we are so empty as to be infinitely accommodating.
Is there such a thing as culture if no-one knows about it? As a postmodernist, I’m used to telling jokes no-one gets. It is almost a measure of my humour’s success that it goes unappreciated, and I tend to feel a vague sense of disappointment when someone smiles. But if an entire culture goes unrecognized, perhaps it is more than a quirkiness to be overlooked or admired. This is not my judgement, that Canadian culture does not exist, that the term itself, ‘Canadian culture,’ is apparently an oxymoron. It is probably not the judgement of people working for the National Film Board or activists funded by the Canada Council in one or another of its various guises; it is probably not the judgement of Canadian Studies specialists, such as yourselves, each of whom has a different notion of what Canadian culture is and why it is difficult to grasp; nor the judgement of professional Canadians working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Otherwise, you will be hard pressed to find someone who admits to Canadian culture as an empirical fact.
Culture has enlivened the Canadian sensibility from the beginning, of course, when, following the arrival of Europeans to our illimitable shores, we first conceived ourselves a separable place in the world. Culture washed across us in waves – from France, the British Isles, Germany, from Eastern Europe, from Japan, China, Southeast Asia, from what we awkwardly know as the Indian subcontinent, and always from the south, where Americans commodified populist culture as a major export, and increasingly, rising like springwater from below, from the people, the First Nations, who were here when the others arrived; culture washing over us seems only to have worn us away. Perhaps, the only thing distinguishing our culture is that, like Atlantis beneath the sea, it haunts by its absence and is under constant erasure.
Only a few years ago, a minister for cultural affairs in the federal government declared there is no such thing as Canadian culture. I cannot remember who she was – to do so is like remembering an assassin’s name while forgetting the victims – but I documented her precise words in a book called The Paradox of Meaning. In any case, so many other politicians have urged upon us the same facile and cowardly denial of Canada as a cultural entity that there is nothing extraordinary in the minister’s unseemly effacement. It seems a characteristic of the political profession, in Canada, to cast no shadow. This happens, of course, either when there is wondrous illumination or there is absolute darkness.
Do not think it is only federal politicians who stand shadowless and gaze into mirrors in an inversion of vampires, seeing only their own reflection, the background being utterly void. Last year the Government of Ontario considered granting, ex cathedra, legal jurisdiction to Sharia Law within a self-defining community throughout the province.
Quebec, of course, for all its sad legal battles over language, has a culture. Only a few years ago we almost tore the country apart, and left indelible scars, by refusing to allow Quebec the constitutional designation, ‘distinct.’ We would be damned if Quebec is a distinct society, we would be damned if it is not! And the rest of Canada, each region, each federal riding, is for electoral purposes distinct, emphatically so, so long as that appellation is not donned as a mantle of disaffection. You can see what I mean about the paradox of meaning: cultural distinctiveness is not to be confused with political difference. Politicians might allow Quebec its undeniable personality, based on the confluence of time, space, and being, or, to put it less grandly, on the coming together of history, geography, and culture over an extended period, sufficient to make it distinct. But Canada as a whole, which paradoxically includes Quebec, is simply – not family, not community, not alliance – Canada is simply a consensus.
Now let me clarify. We are a very cultured people. Well no, we are not a people. Let me say that again: we are very cultured, notwithstanding our lack of peopleness. ‘Notwithstanding’ is a very Canadian word. Those familiar with our constitutional documents will vouch for that. Perhaps, if we are to uncover evidence for Canadian culture we should start with the word, ‘notwithstanding.’ There must be some idea of Canada that can stand for the whole. We are highly educated, we are well informed, we are relatively open-minded. But if we cannot imagine ourselves in the world, how can we expect the world to imagine us?
I think it would be safe, even in such a cultural treasury as Vienna, to say that the term ‘culture’ in relation to national being does not refer to the arts, to enlightenment and the refined sensibility. Rather, it describes the depth of shared values and social behavior by which a particular people experience their collective existence. In the past, such values and behavior have been determined by racial or ethnic homogeneity, religion, language, common laws, continuity of customs – all usually, but not always, circumscribed by geographic limits and historical continuity. Quebec, by these cultural measures, is certainly a nation. Each tribal unit of native peoples in Canada, as determined by negotiated or imposed boundaries, is known as a First Nation. Some of these consist of thousands, others of only a handful of people. The Inuit of Canada, who participate in a circumpolar genealogy, are not a nation, since their borders for convenience are the same as those of the country to which they are host. Most Inuit would probably refuse the contained and limiting implications of the term. They are free people upon the land, ownership of which is a logical absurdity. They are proof, perhaps, that while a nation must certainly have or be a culture, a coherent culture is not necessarily a nation.
What, then, is Canada, if not impossible. Austria is an idea that can be held in the mind, without knowing exactly what that means. If someone were to challenge the notion, our several definitions would inevitably overlap. One can have an idea of Austria, and Mozart and Freud, the Habsburg dynasty, World Wars, alpine scenery, the governor of California, these will all be there. An idea of the United States, diverse as it may be, and often idealized as ’the American dream,’ will include Washington and the Constitution, Lincoln and the Civil War, the Kennedys, cowboys, gangsters, Marilyn, the Mississippi, James Dean, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and probably the governor of California, as well.
What about the idea of Canada? What are the iconic names, images, conditions or events that converge in our collective awareness of ourselves, in your conception of us as a singular entity? Superman and Austin Powers originated in Canada, but we don’t think of them. Mounties and mountains? Many Canadians have seen neither. Maple leaves, Maple Leafs – foliage of trees unknown in most of the country except on a flag designed by a political party; a hockey team as much reviled as revered. The North? North is a direction determined by the Earth’s axis – despite the opinion of many, especially in Canada, it is not a place. Moral vision? We are fiercely polite. Political vision? No. Our federal political system is of accidental design and incidental efficiency. Is there an idea of Canada based on nostalgia – not really, when the past seems vaguely an embarrassment? On a dream? We dream only, in occasional panic, of having no dreams.
Where, then, does an immigrant to Canada arrive? If we seem a nation only by political expediency, and a country by virtue of adjectives describing our size, our diversity, our weather, and we seem culturally transparent, pathologically reticent about our past or future, diffident about the foundations of our laws and values (as if we had none, before our very recent Charter of Rights and Freedoms), then what are newcomers, who are strongly encouraged to maintain the customs and culture they fled, what are they to become? The answer, of course, is Canadian. In a contemporary world, Canada is emerging as a postcolonial multicultural anomaly. We are the first postmodern nation.
In a world where the pride of nations leads to devastating moral righteousness, after twentieth century nationalisms led to imponderable waste, Canada can serve as the model for difference. The terrible clash of historical inevitabilities will be mute if history, itself, ceases to be of importance. Whoever it was who said, those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, was wrong, dead wrong. It is those who do know history who are its minions, its slaves, who are driven to rewrite it again and again. History is not the repository of virtue but the breeding ground of folly and vice.
Canada breaks all the rules of what it is to be a nation. Of course we have a past, but we choose the present. And of course we have a culture, but we live it, day to day. It is not something we think much about, but just try suggesting we join the United States and see where it gets you. Who cares if we mumble about health care and hockey, the right to ban handguns, bilingual cornflakes. We know who we are. We also know we are not an inviolable chorus or choir, but a lovely cacophony of multiple voices. We are not my mother’s Canada, which was neo-European, nor her mother’s Canada, which was British, nor her mother’s, which was pioneer, nor hers, shaped by land-clearing settler-invaders, nor any other, back nine generations to my earliest forbears who fled the American Revolution, my Mohawk grandmother from the Finger Lakes District of New York State, my Mennonite grandmother from Pennsylvania. Nor is my own fiercely sovereign Canada that of my children, which is multicultural, multiracial, nor of their children, my six grandchildren, which is yet to be determined. We are a community in motion. It is only in stasis we become dangerous to ourselves or to others.
And, of course, we are geography, we’re the empty place on CNN weather maps. In Mercator projections we’re impossibly large; in geography texts, impossibly variegated, absurdly complex. We have the longest ocean coastline in the world. It would be as hard to miss us on maps as to draw our margins from memory. Perhaps because of size and diversity, perhaps because we have learned from the original peoples whose descendents are still among us, we do not possess the land with borders and boundaries, with laws and deeds and government treaties, and certainly not with walls, which are the greatest geographic folly of all. But we are here: understand this, we are an ancient land, a land unlimited by human consciousness. Geography may have conspired with history to give us our present shape and generate the illusion of ownership, but we are merely custodians. And even without maps, we know where we are.
Many of you who are experts in Canadian Studies have been to Canada. Once there, you were in no doubt where you were. From Vancouver to Halifax, Comox to Heart’s Content, there is something about Canada that says you are there. Is it because we drink double-doubles, admire cops, smoke pot, smile a lot, hate winter, love snow, reject -isms and -ologies, and always say thank you? We break the rules of what it means to be a nation. Somehow the word ‘country’ might seem more appropriate, but we break the rules of what it is to be a country, as well. Yet, when you cross from the U.S. into Canada you know you are there; when you get off the plane or the ship from elsewhere, you know you are there.
Imagine dreaming in English, and waking up to realize you only speak German. Imagine me, in Vienna, surrounded by a language I do not understand, immersed in the baroque splendour of a culture steeped in the past, within national boundaries established by armies and alliances, in a world where maps do not make countries but countries make maps. I know from its splendid coffees and pastry, Vienna is empirically real, yet so much is encoded in ineffable diction, I cannot make it quite real in my mind. Like music. Like Haydn and Mozart and Schubert – we know these men as a visceral experience but not who they were. Not who they are. As we listen, sensibility and sense, feelings and reason, reach out and touch each other, even caress, but they do not converge. Music, of course, is impossible. If there were no-one to hear, it would not exist. That is what postmodern Canada is like; that is what it is like to be a Canadian.

For Robert Kroetsch

A friend since 1974, Bob Kroetsch was killed in a car accident a couple of days ago. I may write something in his memory, but right now the best thing I can do is refer you to a posting by my daughter, Laura, on the Canadian Literature website. She says so much, so well, and manages to carry that wonderfully distinctive Kroetsch cadence into her own prose. He's a part of the Canadian language and even death can't take that away from us.
Check out what she says at:

http://canlit.ca/news.php?news=88

The Reviewer Reviewed: Mystery Maven

Reviews are the best connection between writers and readers. As a writer, I can’t always know what readers want, but I do know that when they invest money and time in my novels, it’s important to give them value. Two things, review and sales, are the gauge of how I’m doing. I put more trust in reviewers I’ve learned to trust. Sales can be very misleading. They don’t always provide the best estimation of quality and I fall among those writers who think quality of the writing and of the reader’s appreciation are paramount. I want to be enjoyed by good readers and not just define good readers as those who appreciate me!
A fine review of “Reluctant Dead” came out today on the Mystery Maven blog. Now that’s the sort of thoughtful review any writer loves to receive. Take a look:
http://mysterymavencdn.blogspot.com/2011/06/mystery-review.html

Place, Character, Action!

Crime Writers of Canada asked for a brief note about location and setting. Here's what I sent them:

Location plays an important role in my newest Quin and Morgan mystery, 'Reluctant Dead,' released in mid-June. Location is never simply a background in my novels; it determines action. In 'Still Waters,' both the Rosedale setting in Toronto and the area around Blair in Waterloo County are integral to the developing mystery as well as to the characters’ lives. 'Grave Doubts' again features Toronto, which is fitting since David Morgan and Miranda Quin are both Detective Sergeants who work homicide with the Toronto Police Service, but it is the confusion of the historical and contemporary city due to a corpse revealed in the demolition of a colonial house that leads to suspense and horror. The resolution takes place in the Owen Sound area and, for a truly harrowing episode, underwater in a wreck near Tobermoray. In 'Reluctant Dead,' Quin takes a sabbatical to Easter Island in the South Pacific to write a mystery novel and stumbles into a plot with international implications. Morgan discovers a murder on Toronto Island that leads him to the Canadian Arctic. Ultimately, the two stories connect. Easter Island, with its fabled past, and Baffin Island, with its austere and forbidding conditions, lead Morgan and Miranda through chilling adventures that are only resolved when they get back together in downtown Toronto.

Workable?

Received a lovely review from Margaret Cannon in The Globe and Mail last Saturday (June 4th). My new novel in the Quin and Morgan series, "Reluctant Dead," isn't officially out until next week, so I'm really pleased. The opening paragraph is fascinating, because I know the review is a virtual rave but one particular word weighs it down. Read it and see:

"The team of Miranda Quin and David Morgan, members of the Toronto Police Service homicide squad, is now three books in, and it’s clear that John Moss has a winning combo. Quin and Morgan are professionally and fictionally workable, and Reluctant Dead is the best so far."

"Workable!"
I'd rather they were mesmerizing, enthralling, inspiring, engaging, mind-blowing, you name it. But not to complain. Margaret Canon is the doyenne of reviewers, and I'd rather be workable for her, in such an enthusiastic context, than sheer genius for others.

Waking Up Cranky

Listening to ‘The Current’ this morning on CBC radio, I was struck by the shrill efforts of their correspondent in Japan to stir up a story linking the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the current nuclear crisis following the earthquake and tsunami. He seemed deeply offended that no-one would admit to his simplistic and bombastic argument. And so, rising to the edge of hysteria, he made a story out of the fact that there was no story to make. And all the while, he insisted on using the non-word “nucular,” by which I assume he meant “nuclear.” Shades of Reagan and George W. From the CBC, good grief! Nucular is ignorant and we have a right to expect better. Next they’ll be talking about the “Artic,” instead of the “Arctic.” And dropping the word “who,” when they can use “that” incorrectly in its place.
Sometimes fretting the details is a good way to cope in a troubling and troublesome world! Especially when you wake up cranky. Now back to writing mysteries ...

Welcome to the World

Write as many books as you want, publish them if you can, and they remain your offspring forever. They are not your children. Children grow up and that’s a good thing. There is sadness in that, as well as immeasurable satisfaction, especially when they make you so proud to be a continuing part of their lives. I was blessed with a new grandchild this week, my seventh, a boy. Joel entered this world and the world has changed. Marginally, perhaps, but it will never be quite the same. That’s what happens with books; the least of them is like butterfly wings stirring the air. Welcome, Joel. It’s good to have you with us. May your wings stir up a memorable storm.

Honour/able

I do not often sign petitions and I am not a member of the Liberal Party but I just signed the Liberal call for the resignation of Bev Oda, for her dispicable behavior which demeans the position of cabinet minister and demeans us collectively in the process. Politics, it seems, is the last refuge of scoundrels. If a person is to be designated the Honourable or the Right Honourable, it should be because they deserve it. Ms. Oda has behaved disgracefully, and the Prime Minister has behaved disgracefully. They do not deserve any title other than “Politician,” which is a shameful honourific in today’s federal politics.

Blog, A Verb

I wonder how many blogs are about blogging. The winter is rolling along and I haven’t blogged in months. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about it. To blog or not to blog! I’ve been busy but the whole point of blogging is to share what you’re busy doing and thinking, so that’s no excuse. I did have a quadruple bypass, but that’s no excuse, either. The surgery is well behind me and I have more energy now than I’ve had in the last few years. So. I’ve been writing a new mystery, re-writing, polishing, re-polishing, and I’m at last pleased with it, but will go back and re-re-write, re-re-polish, and see what we have. A good novel, I hope. A mystery called “Lindstrom Alone.” It’s the first in a series! And I’m back to tearing our house apart and re-building. This time, it’s our bedroom and master bathroom, or master bedroom and bathroom. So far, I’ve re-wired, re-plumbed, and now I’m re-panelling. I seem to be into “re.” Maybe I’ll start re-blogging!

Before the Bench in Brockville

This past weekend marked the second annual Thousand Islands Writers Festival held in Brockville on the Saint Larence. Bev and I attended and I did a reading in the Saturday afternoon mystery session in the Court House. It’s difficult to imagine a more exciting, and daunting, location to read about murder and mayhem than an actual court room, especially with Judge Cosgrove, in a manner of speaking, presiding. It was memorable. I even got to address members of the jury (that part of the audience seated in the jury box). It was a bit unusual to address the court with my back to the bench, but not being a lawyer, I adjusted.

The organizers of the Festival, especially Doreen Barnes as Chair and Russ Disotell, who acted as MC, did a great job, bringing together a diverse cluster of writers and an enthusiastic gathering of readers. There were many volunteers who should be thanked, but I don’t have the names. Thank you, all. A great deal of thought went into everything from the writers’ goodie bags at the beginning to the wine and cheese celebration at the end. It all helped make this a great event.

Bev and I stayed at the Victoria Inn where the gracious host, Susan Szaraz, offers wonderfully contemporary service in a truly charming and authentic period setting (www.brockvillevictoriainn.ca/index.htm).

I do want specially to thank Jake and Pat at the Leeds County Bookstore (73 King St. West) for their enthusiastic support. From a writer’s perspective, there is nothing more gratifying than finding a bookstore where they genuinely love books and believe in the books they sell (including mine).

I would go back to the Thousand Islands Writers Festival in a minute or, in fact, next year, as a writer or as a reader and listener. Just consider the line-up this year. It was stellar. Reading with me in the mystery segment were R.J. Harlick and Janet Kellough. Also reading, on Friday and on Saturday morning, were Sarah Perry and Tish Cohen, Charlotte Gray and Roy MacSkimming, and children’s writer, Elizabeth Kelly. Due to health problems, I couldn’t be there for the entire weekend. Next time, I’ll do better.

It was a real pleasure and privilege to read with R.J. and with Janet in our session chaired by the irrepressible Russ Disotell.

It’s a pleasure to affirm that the TIWF is well on it’s way to being an institution (especially if they continue to hold readings in the Court House)!

And Brockville! What a beautiful historic city. We’ll be going back for sure, one way or another.

Hey Randy

A good friend of mine just reminded me how long it’s been since I last blogged (sounds like something you’d take a laxative for). I’ve been distracted, but I’ll get back on track. I have to go in for a bit of surgery this Friday and, in a week or two, I plan on catching up on my blogs (sounds vaguely offensive, but at least I’m not going to tweet). In the last few months I’ve been forced to take things easy, but I’ve been writing with a vengeance.

The third in the Quin and Morgan series is coming out early next winter. We’re still wrestling with the title. I’d prefer The Reluctant Assassin. My publisher wants the zombiesque title, Reluctant Dead. We’ll see who holds the power here … As if!

I’m in for a a period of convalescing, so there’ll be no excuse, Randy. I’ll blog.