Through the Eyes of Mr. Palomar

Often, when I find myself contemplating a scene, whether of people at a dinner table, or an advertisement I’m watching on television, or some ducks in the lake I’m looking at from a park bench in the Tiergarten in Berlin, I begin constructing a logic for the occasion. I make observations, and ask questions: Why does the gray duck have dark green iridescent dorsal feathers? I attempt generalizations: Whether you account for them as caused by a god (dubious) or generated by evolution (likely), those iridescent... 
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Brautigan, Buchenwald, Budapest/Bucharest

Richard Brautigan On the cover of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1962; Dell, 1967) there’s a photo of Brautigan and a woman friend in Washington Square in San Francisco, posed before a statue of Benjamin Franklin in the background. The photo, which I’m looking at right now, shows the tall Brautigan standing in front of the statue, in his early thirties, with a floppy blond mustache turned down at the corners, giving him the appearance of a man with a whimsical sense of humour... 
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Days of Social Democracy: A Memoir

Dave Barrett was the first social democratic premier of the western Canadian province where I’ve lived for 40 years. The province is British Columbia, a huge, coastal, mountainous, forested tract of territory stretching from Washington State to Alaska. Barrett was the premier of the province from 1972-75. His New Democratic Party government had been preceded for more than two decades by that of a regional conservative party known as Social Credit, headed by a small town hardware store owner named W.A.C.... 
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Baruch ata Adonai, Bones, Books, Bowering

Baruch ata Adonai I’m a non-bar mitzvahed, or unconfirmed, Jew. I never went to the after-school Jewish school where boys were instructed in the religion and learned Hebrew, or at least enough bits of it to participate in the confirmation ceremony at age 13. At one point around that age, my father Morrie casually asked me if I wanted to have a bar mitzvah, and I said equally casually, No, I don’t think so. That was good enough for him. The great point of contention between my father and his father, my... 
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Don’t Let the Smoke Get in Your Eyes

The message most quoted by the media from last month’s Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding the country’s marijuana laws is that “there is no free-standing constitutional right to smoke ‘pot’ for recreational purposes.” Stoned folks, fumbling with their Zig Zag rolling papers and baggies of dope, can be forgiven, I suppose, for not reading beyond the headlines. Bummer, eh?, they mumbled, and lit up. Unstoned people who write newspaper editorials, however, are less easily forgiven for not... 
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Letter from Berlin: Kanada Week

For the last couple of years, the Canadian presence in Berlin has been mainly marked by a large hole in the ground. Not just any old hole in the ground, of course. It’s a rather swanky hole located at Leipziger Place, which is just to the east of the lately-erected bevy of glass and brick towers in Potsdamer Place, the new post-Wall commercial and entertainment centre of the city. The Canadian painter, Vincent Trasov, who lives here, showed me some photos he took last year of Prime Minister Jean Chretien... 
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Orwell’s Nightmare

Each of us who reads has a list of landmark books–”landmarks” in the sense of defining moments in our own intellectual and emotional development.(1) One such book on my list is George Orwell’s memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. I can’t remember exactly when I first read it, but Catalonia is somewhere in my reader’s autobiography between Jack London’s The Iron Heel, which I read as a 12-year-old, and encountering Plato’s Symposium in my mid-20s.(2)... 
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A Short Solution to the Non-Reading Crisis

Ok, enough already. Ever since Globe and Mail features writer John Allemang published a very long essay last December about how he was reading less (and less), the columns of Canada’s national newspaper have been clogged with confessions, laments, and nattering about the non-reading crisis. Columnists Russell Smith, John Doyle, and John Gray have all thrown in their two cents. A chorus of Globe and Mail readers dispatched the usual "shocked and appalled" missives to the editor. And Globe and... 
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Two Cheers for Tolerance

The idea of tolerance has lately been getting a bad press. All sorts of people see it as little more than mushy democratic pap. Some on the left condescendingly sneer at tolerance as one of the many veils of liberalism that covers up harder-edged class conflicts. Right wingers see tolerance as a politically over-correct codeword by which liberals shove their values down conservative craws. And almost all of us have lazily come to take the notion so much for granted that it has fallen into relative disrepair.... 
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Kiddie Porn and The Public Good

Even literate Canadians can be excused for not paying much attention to federal Justice Minister Martin Cauchon’s introduction last week of new legislation designed to plug alleged loopholes in the nation’s child pornography laws. It is not just the press of seasonal events–from the incessant thumping of American war drums over Iraq to the permanent crisis in Ottawa, a.k.a. the Chretien government–that accounts for the inattention. Kiddie porn is simply one of those uncomfortable topics... 
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