Christopher Simpson: Clippings & Resume Site

Welcome

2008-08-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

This site is available in two formats. One is a PDF which comes complete with graphics and several little side-jokes. To view this format, click on the graphic below.

The other is a boring web-site. To view this format, click on the image below.

Introductions

2004-09-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Hello. I'm Christopher Simpson.

During the mid '70s I wrote a bylined series for The Welland Tribune while picking up credits in Psychology, Sociology and English from Niagara College. After moving to Toronto in 1977, I earned a graphic arts certificate from George Brown and worked for many years as an illustrator and advertiser.

In the eighties I joined J. Walter Thompson as head of their new PC Department where I combined my knowledge of advertising with my skill as a programmer to provide applications development and support to nearly two hundred users across Canada. When the department was out-sourced in 1992 I took technical-writing contracts from such companies as DeBeers and Command Data.

From its second issue, I was assignment editor for The Outrider, Ontario's first newspaper for the homeless. There I worked with Rod Goodman (former editor and ombudsman with the Toronto Star) and Janice Hayes (news copy editor with The Globe and Mail). During this time I also wrote a column entitled "Ad Nauseam" which, under the pretense of advertising review, satirized media and politics (see V8 Juice and Canadian Unity).

The Outrider folded in a relatively public fashion, and Lee Oliver tells the story with much relish, and some accuracy, in The Ryerson Review of Journalism Spring, 1995. (It should be noted, however, that while Oliver mentions a David Paddon as being assignment editor, the fact is no one on staff had ever heard of him before publication of the article, and I'm sure I'd noticed if he'd been sitting at my desk.)

Following the demise of The Outrider, I returned to the University of Toronto as a part-time student where I spent the next six years earning my BA in English.

During most of this time I worked as Senior Staff Writer and sub-editor at the popular community magazine, What's On Queen, where I provided monthly coverage of Queen Street's eclectic culture: its history, arts, theatre, literature and music. I met and interviewed many of Queen Street's (and Toronto's) more notable personalities including Linda Griffiths, Michael Hollingsworth, Robert Berlin, Menno Krant, Milton Jewell, and Dorothy Cameron.

I also co-founded the prestigious Celtic Curmudgeon: Arts & Entertainment Review, through which I began my association with the Canadian Bookseller's Association's (CBA) trade show. There I regularly met with publishing representatives, and interviewed visiting authors like Ian Rankin, Maeve Binchy and Colin Wilson. Curmudgeon's inaugural issue was covered by CBC news.

This picture is from the 2001 Canadian Booksellers' Association Trade Show. In the centre is Tatiana helping to promote Eric Walters' newest "Tiger" book, Tiger by the Tail. That's Eric on the right dressed in black, and Vernon (Tatiana's trainer) in white on the left. In the centre is my lovely wife and co-editor Barbara. The guy with the deer-in-the-headlights expression, is me.

In 2000 I was offered the position of Managing Editor for the Circa2000 Time Capsule, an interesting experiment aimed at archiving various unusual and interesting Web sites and offering them for download as a virtual time capsule. Our public interface was an online magazine, Circa2000, featuring topics of Web-related interest.

During that time I also created Editor's Sidebar, an information resource aimed at journalists in Ontario's smaller urban markets. It was received with appreciation and many warm welcomes from various editors across the province. The Canadian Press Club linked to it, the award-winning newspaper designer Tony Sutton submitted articles, and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association wrote about it in The Publisher.

Presently I am a professor at George Brown College teaching various English courses (College English, Professional Communications).

I am also a columnist for the Metaverse Messenger, a newspaper covering the growing virtual world of Second Life. For a year, under the pseudonym Holman Tibbett, I wrote a weekly column called "The Walkin' Dude" about my continuous hike across the world's continents and the people I met along the way. I now cover news dealing with virtual worlds and have revived my Ad Nauseam column to examine the many challenges facing marketing on Web 3.0.

If you're looking for a mature, educated, writer or editor with an eye for detail and a wry sense of humour I'd be happy to hear from you. I can be reached at: christopher.robinsimpson@gmail.com

The First of the Last Times

2004-04-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from the Globe and Mail, April 5, 2007

The three of us formed a tight little group back in high school: Ian, George and me. "The Mod Squad," they called us, although our little trinity contained neither blacks nor females. Still, as witticisms went, it was certainly better than some of the others we faced. "Are you gay?" one young tough sneered at me. "I'm reasonably happy," I answered, puzzled to hear such an archaic word from someone who appeared to be an inarticulate thug.

But we weren't gay in the "not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that" sense. We were just good friends. Ian and George were the most important people in my life at the time. "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve," says Gordie Lachance in Stand by Me. My special friendships came in my late teens, but I understand the sentiment.

As the years became decades, Ian and I stayed in touch: sometimes weekly, sometimes missing a year or two. George, on the other hand, disappeared like a ghost in the night; a ship over the horizon; an old TV show before VCRs.

But since then I've often thought: there must have been one last time the three of us were together. What did we do? Did we go somewhere, or did we hang around in a living room? What were the last words we spoke to each other? It seems unfair that so many last times come and go without leaving anything behind.

Death sometimes gives enough warning that we can mark the occasion properly, noting carefully some last message gasped through the rattle of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Of course, there’s always the risk of not quite understanding what was gasped. In such cases it may actually be preferable to forget the details of a grandfather's death than to spend the rest of your life wondering whether he said, "I miss Stephen Lewis," or "Always stay Jewish." Especially if he'd been a conservative Episcopalian.

Seeing people off as they depart forever to distant lands, such as the Orient, the Indies or the Suburbs, is another last time that generally stays in memory -- unless of course the farewell celebrations are rather too successful, leaving details rather hazy.

In general, however, Last times tend to be indistinguishable from every other time. They sneak up and scoot by without the slightest warning, leaving us with nothing to remember. Proust, who created an entire literary career for himself by remembering the taste of a "little crumb of madeleine," probably forgot when the last time was he ate any.

Sometimes too, changes come in such small increments that it's difficult to determine the exact point at which one thing becomes another. One day your favourite restaurant replaces their simple cup of coffee with a dozen vaguely-Italianate choices. A few weeks later the menu, which until now had always described the meals in terms of what they contained ("Hot open-faced chicken sandwich with gravy, peas and fries"), is replaced by a new one which seems more interested in what the meals now lack ("Low-fat additive-free chicken-substitute platter"). Bizarre and unidentified vegetables appear. The chocolate sauce on your dessert is dribbled in a random scrawl like the signature of an exhausted movie star. At what point during this metamorphosis can you say that you've been to your favourite restaurant for the last time?

This gradual change occurs in people too. Shortly before my grandmother died we went to a Chinese restaurant. During the dinner she asked several questions concerning my identity and then proceeded to drop sweet and sour chicken balls into her purse. I never saw her alive again, but could it really be said that this meal represented the last time I saw her? Alzheimer's may be an extreme example, but incremental change affects everyone around us: friends who used to enjoy talking about music now talk about RRSPs; spouses exchange their shared passion for movies with a shared passion for real estate points. We may speak to our brothers or sisters every week without ever realizing that we no longer really know who they are. We talked to them for the last time long ago and never noticed.

"Look at the people around you," read a piece of graffiti in Kennsington Market, "and remember the children we used to be."

But now comes the most frightening thought of all: if so many around me are turning into unrecognizable, strangely robotic beings, is it really feasible that I alone have somehow remained immune? My violin hangs on the wall, its strings loosened so that the neck doesn't warp. My old records, cassettes and CDs sit untouched, and no new ones have replaced them. I live in the core of a vibrant and exciting city, but when I'm outside, my main concern is to avoid the bicyclists on the sidewalk.

Still, could it be that although I may live for another thirty or forty years, I already, without realizing it, have seen everything for the last time?

Maybe I should tighten up the old violin strings and start annoying the neighbours again. I never was a very good musician, but somehow I don't think that really matters. For inspiration I could even put on my CD of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. There are also a number of Brahms symphonies I haven't heard in far too long, not to mention some great Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, and Annie Lennox.

Come to think of it, there's something a little odd here. It would almost seem as thought the best way to avoid missing important last times is simply to keep alert, to see everything as if for the first time.

It's also a great defense against bicyclists on the sidewalk.

Teaching the Web to Think

2001-05-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Circa2000, May 16, 2001

Millions of years ago, out of a primordial sludge consisting of water, saline, and amino acids, the first life forms began their long struggle to evolve. Through random chance and natural selection, some of these primitive life forms became rational, thinking beings. Others became Howard Stern.

Today a similar process is taking place right here on the Web. Out of a primordial sludge consisting of chat rooms, tiny wireless cameras, and fan pages for the Spice Girls, a new life form is arising which may well evolve into a new kind of rational, thinking consciousness. Or get its own nation-wide radio show on which it says "tits" a lot.

Making the Implicit, Explicit

The force behind this new brain is the Mindpixel Corpus. With the vaguely perplexing motto, "Making the implicit, explicit," their aim is to gather billions of simple observations, true regardless of race, gender, or individual differences, which will form a working model of the human mind.

Here's how it works.

Visitors are encouraged to submit a "mindpixel." A mindpixel, they explain, is "a binary statement of consensus fact such as 'Water is wet' or 'It is difficult to swim with ski pants on'."
Upon submitting an entry, the visitor is then asked to rate ten previously submitted mindpixels according to their "truth" and "value." The plan is to gradually provide the "brain" with countless units of human experience, graded according to consensus and reliability.

You Don't Know GAC!

The brain being created in this grand experiment is called "Generic Artificial Consciousness," or GAC (pronounced "Jack").

The project head is Dr. Robert Epstein, whom the Mindpixel site calls "one of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior." Dr. Epstein has a psychology doctorate from Harvard (1981), is the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts, and is Adjunct Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University.
In its first year on-line, the Mindpixel Corpus has received nearly 8 million individual measurements of more than 355,000 individual items of "human consensus experience." Upon completion of its collection phase in 2010, work will then begin to create a statistical model of an average human mind with the aim of using it as a foundation for true artificial consciousness.
All of which is possible only because of the World Wide Web. Without the aid of the Internet, the data entry alone would have cost $250 million.

But Does He Get Coffee Breaks?

Will it be successful? To his credit, Dr. Epstein isn't sure. "We don't know if it is possible to build a normal personality out of millions of little pieces. This experiment will tell us how reasonable the idea is."

Of course, whether or not it succeeds depends largely upon how we define "success." If by "success" we mean the creation of a truly artificial consciousness, many experts believed it is probably doomed to failure. They claim that electronically storing millions of simple statements about experience, and processing them according to an established set of rules is no more likely to produce consciousness than doing the same thing with statements written on pieces of paper.
One long-standing argument against this approach to Aritificial Intelligence is John Searle's "Chinese Room Argument."

In this thought-experiment, a man is locked into a room with nothing more than a book of complex rules. Through a slot in the door come slips of paper upon which are written Chinese words. The man compares these symbols with his rule book, writes down the result (which is an English translation), and shoves it back through the slot.
Searle's point is that even when you add a living human being to it, no rule-based system is conscious.

Survey Says ...

But even if the GAC fails to reach a state of true consciousness, it still holds out hope of offering invaluable insights into the way minds work.

If nothing else, GAC could completely revamp the way we conduct polls and surveys. No need for dozens of employees to phone thousands of average citizens to discover which product name they like better: we could just ask GAC.

Of course, we'd have to know exactly what GAC's "demographic" is. In other words, we'd have to find out just what kind of "person" is residing in GAC's virtual mind.

And this is precisely the purpose behind the present months-long psychological test GAC is undergoing right at this moment. When it is finished, not only will we have a window on its underlying personality, but GAC will be the first machine-based artificial personality to be tested by the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), used in both corporate hiring practices, and criminal court proceedings.

It will be interesting to see whether GAC turns out to be an ideal CEO, or found "not guilty by reasons of insanity."

Counting In the Foxhole With Maeve

2000-05-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

This interview for Celtic Curmudgeon followed the publication of her book, Tara Road. ("CS" stands for "Christopher Simpson," and "MB" stands for "Maeve Binchy.")

Reprinted from Celtic Curmudgeon: Arts & Entertainment Review, Volume 2, Issue 1.

CS: The first thing I'd like to ask is, "What are you doing with the numbers?" The heroine's dream home is house number 16. Her duplicitous friend lives at number 32, or 2 X 16. Her mother, who is the eldest of three generations, lives at number 48, or 3 X 16. And when Ria finds her enlightenment she is living at a street number 1024, or 64 X 16.

So the question again is, "What are you doing with the numbers?"

MB: I do not believe you!

I never wrote any of this! I never thought of it at all. I drew a picture of the road in my mind. I thought I wanted Ria living about a third of the way down, and I just threw Colm at one end with his restaurant, and Gertie with her launderette at the other. And I put the old people's home in there. I just did it all at random, so if you see anything significant, then we had all better hold on to something fast.

CS: That's really not the answer I was expecting. I just assumed you meant it.

MB: I never thought about it at all. I write so quickly. I write like I talk. Once somebody said to me, "You don't write better when you write slowly," and that was like a green light to me. If I write quickly I'll be finished. It'll be done and I can go on to the next bit. I don't go back over it, and my agent she's a bossy woman, she's even bossier than I am always sees these things.

But she's never seen anything about the numbers. So I'll tell her that now. She'll be amazed that she hasn't spotted it. I shall tell everybody about it and pretend I thought of it all by myself.

CS: I'll back you up on it.

MB:You can blackmail me later.

CS: I'll be sure to keep the tape.Well,with that topic now deflated let's move on to the next question,which concerns the figure of Mrs. Connor, a strange and ambiguous fortune teller. Where does this character come from?

MB: Well, I'll tell you where I got the idea of Mrs. Connor. I have a friend in Ireland, a very successful hairdresser, and she told me that many of her clients, who can afford chin-tucks and such, also go to this fortuneteller. And she says, "You have no idea Maeve how much they pay her. They pay her fifty to a hundred pounds, and they go out to her house, and she's got no signs of wealth." And I asked her, "Have you ever gone?" "No, I've never gone," she says, "I'd be afraid to go." All of these women run their lives by her. It's like the church was when we were young.

CS: But none of this reflects your own beliefs, does it?

MB: Oh, heaven's no. I believe entirely that we are responsible for our own lives. I don't believe in God anymore. I don't believe in Heaven or an afterlife. I believe we are here for a short time and that while we're here we have control over our lives.

I was on a French television program once called Apostrophe. The guy was terribly, terribly, uh, what I would think of as pretentious, but it was a huge honour to be on his program, and I speak very bad French─I speak French exactly the way I speak English: with an Irish accent and very quickly. So, on this program he asked me what was my philosophy of life. And I had never been asked my philosophy of life─ever. Here I was with maybe eight million viewers and I've got no philosophy of life.

I knew I had to answer and the thing going through my head was, "I don't know anybody in France so it doesn't matter if I make a fool of myself." But what was I going to say? And then I thought, "Well, say what's true, don't you think?" So I said that my philosophy of life is that we are dealt a hand and we have to play it.I cannot think of anything more banal to say, but whatever you're dealt you play.

In my case, I was dealt the good family, the happy family, a secure background, enough brains to scrape past my exams, enough money to pay for an education at a time when you had to pay for education, and a cheery personality because I was brought up in a happy home. That's the good side I was dealt. On the bad side I was fat, and that's bad to be a girl and be fat because that is unacceptable. We were always on the edge of having enough money to get ahead, which sometimes is worse that being poor. And then as I got older I got arthritis, very bad arthritis. So I was lame and fat, and I was a school teacher which is not considered in Ireland a hugely good job, and I didn't have a fella, and all these things were bad. That was the bad hand, those were the poor cards that were dealt.

What I got out of it all─and I'm not patting myself on the back, I've made lots of mistakes along the way─is that I've played that hand for the best that I can do with it. And that's my philosophy in life. And I wouldn't take any help from God. Even when I had a very serious operation and was told that I could die, and a nice Chaplain came in to me. "I'm just coming in as a matter of course now," he says, "and maybe you don't want anything to do with me." "No, I don't," I said, "it wouldn't be fair, just because I'm going in for an operation. I can't ask for something from some person I haven't dealt with in over thirty years."

CS: You are that rare breed, the atheist in the fox hole.

MB: That's it. And I'm also the un-guilty one. When I decided to be the "atheist in the fox hole," I decided, "That's it; I'm not going to call on Him─or Her or It─in times of trouble." And that's for fortunetellers, or for psychics, or any of the others. I have such good friends who believe in a lot of things I don't believe in at all...who believe in the healing powers of crystals...who believe in lots of things, and they do believe in them. When I was very, very lame my friends were concerned about me. I was hardly able to walk and was bent double, and they would tell me about Seventh Sons and various healers and things with faith because these people had actually cured people. But I said, "There's no point in going to them because I would be going with a hypocritical heart, because I believe that you always have to try to do it for yourself.

In my books there are no "makeovers." In novels of the same type and going to this same audience, there are "makeovers": the fat person becomes thin, the single person becomes married and the poor person becomes rich. Well, I've seen enough thin, rich and married people who are dead unhappy, and that's not the way to get your redemption in life.

I felt I became a better novelist, and a better person, when I stopped believing that there was somebody up there who was going to look after it all. Because now I have to do something. If I see somebody lying on the street because they're homeless─I'm not going to take him home, I'm not Mother Theresa─I have to do something to help. Whereas, in the old days, we were more inclined to think of the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor for they shall see God." In Tara Road nobody gets a Makeover, nobody gets life easy. And it's the only thing I hate, when people say my books are "cozy," because they're not. And also in my book there is a lot of my own philosophy about secrets. I don't feel you have to tell everybody else your secrets. I allow people I know to live in ignorance, and I'm sure I'm living in ignorance about things myself. I don't believe Gertie has to be told that her husband was a shit. I think she should be allowed to think, "Okay, he's dead and he was a wonderful person," if she wants. If she wants to remember it as a beautiful marriage, give her that.

CS: What about your next book?

MB: I already know what it's going to be about. It will be about a couple, a young man and woman. These two are brought together by an impassioned urge for cookery. There will be twelve chapters and it will be a different story each month.

CS: How hard is it now for you to make a book deal?

MB: Well, I told them all of that─about the book─on one page and handed it to them, and now twenty publishers in different countries have answered back, "Go ahead and do it." So that's all I need to do now. I'll start that book in September of next year and maybe be done by March. It takes me about six months to write a book.

CS: So you write yearly?

MB: I write one book every two years.

CS: As a brand new Maeve Binchy fan, I am looking forward to it.

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Maeve Binchy was born in Co. Dublin and went to school at Holy Child Convent in Killiney.

She took a history degree at UCD and taught at various girls' schools, writing, travel articles in the long summer holidays.

In 1969, she joined the Irish Times and has written humorous columns from London and all over the world.

The Peacock Theatre in Dublin was the scene of her two stage plays, End of Term and Half Promised Land.

Her television play, Deeply Regretted By won two Jacobs Awards and the Best Script Award at the Prague Film Festival.

Her last five novels, including Evening Class, The Copper Beech and The Glass Lake were number one bestsellers and her books have been adapted for television and the cinema, most notably Circle of Friends, which was one of the most successful films of 1995.

She is married to writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell.

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Book List

Tara Road

Small Circle of Friends

Evening Class

The Lilac Bus

Firefly Summer

Silver Wedding

The Glass Lake

The Return

Journey

Circle of Friends

Echoes

London Transports

(Wheeler Large Print Book Series)

Maeve Binchy's Dublin Four

Silver Wedding

The Glass Lake

This Year It Will Be Different

Chicken Art & Canadian Politics

1999-12-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

Reprinted from What's On Queen, Dec. 1997

In 1997, Ottawa performance artist Rob Thompson caged a man and a woman to protest the conditions of commercially bred chickens.

Considering the spate of controversy surrounding Rob Thompson's recent performance-art in Ottawa, a naive observer could be forgiven the impression that caging two people in for a week is somehow "strange" or "peculiar. "

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite those critics who doubt the validity of Thompson's art, he is in fact following a long tradition of avant-garde aesthetes, not the least of whom was the late, great Rudolph Schwarzkogler who amputated various portions of his body until he ran out of material and died.

Leaving aside philosophical concerns regarding performance-art — such as whether it should be considered "late-modern" or "postmodern" (particularly in view of Ihab Hassan's carefully reasoned 1980 article, "The Question of Postmodernism," in which he concludes that he really isn't sure) — there is still the matter of its remarkable allure and powerful effect.

Indeed, if Thompson's recent piece is to be condemned for anything, it should be condemned, not for being too radical, but for being too mainstream. Performance-art has become such a common method of propagating an idea that, regardless of its proper dialectic position within modernity, it should at least lose its status as a "subordinate" or "alternative" art form.

And Canada has contributed more than its share of talent to the field.

Few would argue that the most successful Canadian performance-artists in recent years are Parizeau and Bouchard who combine the comedic talents of Laurel and Hardy with the political sophistication of Abbot and Costello. But many others, albeit less spectacularly, have displayed their own form of artistic genius.

Consider, for instance, the recent meditation on public vs. private housing. No debate could have raised awareness in quite the same fashion as Preston Manning's performance piece entitled "Stornoway." And art critics will long remember Jean Cretien's innovative 1996 piece, "I Talk to the Homeless," which so poignantly highlighted the distressing, and mostly ignored, tragedy of mental illness brought on by serving too long in an elected office.

It is precisely this ability to drive home important messages without benefit of rational thought that makes performance-art so valuable. Rob Thompson could hardly have chosen a more suitable method to highlight the living conditions of commercially bred chickens than by paying two people $2000 to sit in a cage for a week.

Having conceded the validity of his project, however, we are not then compelled to overlook its few, but glaring, weaknesses.

In the first place, his indexical symbology would have been more accurate had he placed two women in the cage rather than a man and a woman, since hens, by and large, tend to be female. By mixing his gender-related imagery, he not only compromises the overall integrity of his work, but also destroys the otherwise natural connotations that could have been developed vis a vis the broader canvas of women's issues.

Nor should he have allowed Eric Wolf and Pam Meldrum (the "chickens") to speak. A more demanding artistic standard would have restricted their articulation to clucks -- although an argument could have been made for Eric Wolf, as the rooster, to occasionally crow.

Still, despite these, and other lapses in the execution of his work, Thompson's piece succeeded in its overall effect. Not only did it create a visually disturbing image concerning the main issue of fowl-slavery, but when we remember that over 80 people applied for the position of "chicken" it also vividly carried a strong subtextual message concerning the effects of mass unemployment.

Other good news is that Thompson may have inspired an artistic response. According to recent reports, an unidentified commercial chicken farmer living in the Niagara Peninsula is thinking of producing his own performance piece dramatizing the conditions of free-range chickens. In this work, up to twenty people will spend their nights perched on wooden rods. During the day, of course, they will strut around a dirt yard eating food from the ground with their mouths.

Works like these will assure Canada of its proper place in the artistic pecking order.

Mummers & Pagans & Wrens -- Oh My!

1999-09-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from Toronto Irish News, 1997

In the tiny village of Wainfleet, where I spent an important (and decidedly strange) portion of my childhood, all the children played Fox and Geese the day after Christmas.

Having come to the country as a city kid from the immense metropolis of Windsor, Ontario, I never fully understood all the rules of the game, but as far as I could determine, it consisted of gathering together on the frozen canal, stamping out a wheel-shaped pattern in the snow, and then falling through the ice.

All things considered, I think I would have preferred Mummering.

Mummering, as most readers know, is a British Isles tradition in which grown men (and more recently, women) wear disguises, act extremely silly, then ask for money. As traditions go, this may not be a particularly dignified one, but it certainly beats plunging into ice-cold water for free.

There are almost as many names for mummers as there are theories of their origins. They have been called "Guisers," "Guizards," "The Seven Champions," "Johnny Jacks," "Tipteerers," and "Hogmanay-men" -- which merely confirms that people in the British Isles talk funny.

As if this weren't confusing enough, however, some also call them the "Wren Boys" and "Morris Dancers." In general, however, most people know them simply as "mummers." This, when you stop to think about it, is probably the least appropriate name of the lot since the word means "silent" (i.e. "Mum's the word") which the mummers are decidedly not.

The standard Mummer's Play consists of George (who is most often a king, although sometimes a prince or saint) expressing the need to kill someone, preferably a Saracen knight. As it turns out, such a knight just happens to be available, often with the name of Slasher, and the two go at it until Slasher is mortally wounded.

At this point, either Slasher's mother appears, wailing for a doctor, or the George character (for reasons never made fully -- or even partially --clear) has a change of heart and requests the aid of a doctor himself. The call then goes out for a ten pound doctor whereupon a voice from offside replies: "There is no ten pound doctor." The request, quite reasonably in my view, is then changed to a five pound doctor.

Although this describes the basic plot, it doesn't begin to indicate the number of personnel involved. One by one, additional players appear: Big Head, Divilly Doubt (or Devil Doubt), Johnny Funny, Betty or Betsy, Jack Straw, Tom Fool, and Beelzebub who always carries a club and frying pan. As each appears, he or she recites a piece of nonsense verse having absolutely nothing to do with the preceding action, but encourages the crowd to give money.

Like the story-line, the origins of the plays are wonderfully obscure. Scholastic interest began in the early 1800s by folklore collectors such as John Brand and George Ormerod, who saw the plays simply as colourful droller and a means whereby working men could earn a bit of extra cash for Christmas.

Towards the end of the 19th century, however, a new respect was being shown to mummers. This was largely due to Thomas Ordish, a civil servant who classified the various Mummer's Plays and suggested a connection to the sword-dance and ancient Germanic rituals.

Shortly after this, Sir James Frazer wrote his now infamous book, The Golden Bough, in which he posited that modern folk rituals were really the remnants of a prehistoric pagan religion. Despite the fact that Frazer's theory had little evidence backing it up, and many scholars tearing it down, it was soon accepted wisdom that the knockabout comedy known as the Mummer's Play was actually a Neolithic rite, led by a Mother Goddess, to waken the earth from its winter sleep.

The figure of the doctor, obviously, had originally been a shaman.

With so many people supporting this belief, it's a downright shame that no records of the Mummer's Play can be found predating the 18th century. Although the records of 16th and 17th century England are filled with references to mummers, this ancient performance of death and resurrection is never mentioned.

Closely connected to the mummers, although in an obscure fashion, are the Wren Boys. According to the traditional story, the birds found themselves without a king and decided to give the position to whoever could fly the highest. Naturally, the eagle beat all other contestants -- or so it appeared until a wren, which had been clinging unnoticed to the eagle, took off like a feathered X-15 and flew a few yards higher.

To celebrate this Celtic display of trickery and one-upmanship, a wren is killed on St. Stephen's Day (more familiarly known in North America as Boxing Day). A group of men called the Wren Boys parade the streets singing the Wren Song, carrying the tiny corpse, and performing various entertainments to collect money for its burial -- which would never have been necessary if they hadn't killed the bird in the firstplace.

Toronto is fortunate to have its very own Wren Boys troop which, for the past fourteen years, has kept the tradition alive, despite none of its members being completely sure what the tradition is all about.

"I think it may have to do with some ancient pagan ritual," says Jonathan Lynn who often plays the role of king during their performances, "but I couldn't say for sure."

Pat O'Gorman, another regular Wren Boy, clarified matters for us by saying, "I don't really know the origins. You should ask Jonathan Lynn."

Origins aside, both the mummers and the Wren Boys perform vital functions. They are a means whereby inhibitions can be loosened, adults can have a bit of childlike fun,and a cultural legacy can be continued.

Best of all, no one has to get dunked in ice cold water.

Book Review: My Cat Saved My Life

1999-08-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from What's On Queen, August 10, 1999

“I had not dealt with death very well,” says Phillip Schreibman in My Cat Saved My Life, and the reader is likely to agree. Mr. Schreibman does not handle death well─but then, the deaths he has been called upon to handle (his parents dying within a few years of each other from lingering, debilitating illnesses) have been tediously traumatic.

A different person suffering such painful loss may well have recouped and carried on. Another may have descended into self-pity. Mr. Schreibman does neither. He looks for answers and finds meaninglessness. Ahead he sees nothing: behind, illusion. “In a flash of absolute clarity, I was made completely conscious of the power, the terror, the blankness of death.

This overpowering loss of purpose separates him from any and all sense of meaning. Worse yet, the strain of constantly having to make difficult medical decisions during his parents' illnesses has separated him from all but a superficial contact with the world. “Like the time delay on a radio talk show, everything was screened out and censored before it reached me.”

C. S. Lewis, in his classic work A Grief Observed (a merciless record of his own bereavement following his wife's death), says: “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.”

Certainly, Schreibman found it so.

For him there is no salvation by means of the latest psycho/spiritual/clinical fad. Positive thinking, Prozac, dynamic visualization, support groups, belief systems: none of these can fill the gap that comes when Reality itself is negated. It is nothing less than the existential loss of reality that Schreibman is suffering from when he meets his feline savior, Alice. In short, My Cat Saved My Life is not potential material for a Robin Williams' Warm-and-Relevant-Humour™ cinematic vehicle. In fact, at its core, this is not even a book about a man and his cat. It is a book about nothing and Nothingness.

On the other hand, of course, it is a book about a man and his cat.

We are introduced to Alice as an abandoned kitten in an alleyway off Queen Street where Schreibman comes to her rescue before the Fat Boy can get his hands on her. The Fat Boy is the miscreant son of a brutal neighbour who kept his dog outside in a wooden box for so many years it became misshapen. Eventually the dog disappeared and when Schreibman asked about it, the Fat Boy told him that, according to his father, it was now working for the Toronto Transit Commission. “I'm still not sure,” Schreibman comments, “if that is a startlingly original euphemism for death or if I've been on that bus once or twice. Or both.”

What follows the cat's rescue is a strange, and sometimes disturbing, relationship. Partly, it is just a story about a man who learns to feel again by means of his pet. Cats are both familiar and mysterious; autonomous yet dependent. They can take all the love a person is willing to expend upon them without showing a desperate need for it. All pets are therapeutic, but for anyone whose emotions have short-circuited, cats can be invaluable.

But Schreibman's story goes far beyond the expected plot-line of man-taught-to-love-again-by-means-of-an-animal. Schreibman, it's safe to say, doesn't so much need to learn how to love again, as he needs to learn what the point of love could be in the first place.

As he begins to thaw, Schreibman enters a state in which it would seem his entire waking attention centers upon his cat. He initiates the intriguing experiment of following her on her daily rounds. He enters what he calls “Cat School,” the first lesson of which is both prosaic and restorative ─ the need for sleep. They begin taking cat-naps together followed by stretching exercises. Next Alice heads outside for her daily rounds with Schreibman tailing behind.

“We would wander around the garden, from tree to bush to shrub to grassblade, checking, I suppose, for cat messages. Alice might find a spot, perhaps under the cedar trees, and settle down, not sleeping, just sitting. I crouched beside her and waited.”

As time passes, Schreibman reconnects with life, with “Creation,” as he calls it from his Jewish/Kabbalistic background. This does not mean that he reconnects with the life of activity and purpose going on around him. He is not learning to be sociable again, to “get back into the world,” to “carry on.” He reconnects with the life that is at the core of all this human activity. It is, in fact, his own life, the life underneath his name, occupation and habits, that he establishes contact with ─ not so much as a reconnection as a new discovery. It is this life that he refers to in the title.

“What life had Alice saved? It was here, now, the life taking place in the moment I was in whether I was aware of it or not. It was the life I was wasting, the gift of time I was frittering away, ignoring the wondrous experience of this place, Creation.”

My Cat Saved My Life is a most unexpected work. Alice is not a beloved pet who has “touched the heart” of her owner, but a non-human consciousness who shows a human consciousness what lies at the root of both. “I probably would have died without noticing that I was living if I had not met her,” he says at the end. The reader can decide the truth of his conclusion.

V8 Juice and Canadian Unity

1994-07-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

During the 1994 National Unity debate, Lucien Bouchard made headlines when he predicted Quebec's separation would lead to the swift fall of English Canada to American invasion.

And then these odd, French-only V8 posters mysteriously began to appear in downtown Toronto.

Reprinted from the June 14, 1994 issue of The Outrider

Anglophone Canadians trembled recently when Lucien Bouchard revealed a secret American plan to annex Western Canada in the wake of Quebec separation.
And while the Bloc Quebecois Leader later denied making such statements (by arguing "I would be crazy. Am I crazy? Am I crazy? Do I look crazy?"), his skilled rhetoric came too late to quell Anglo anxieties.

I make this observation after having seen not one, but three French-only V8 advertisements in the Wellesley/Yonge/Church streets area: an obvious bid to placate French-speaking vegetable juice drinkers.

The area chosen for this campaign is a common site for bold and experimental advertising. The wall painting of Cat Woman at Yonge and Wellesley attracted a great deal of attention, and TTC ridership increased greatly at Church and Wellesley when the transit shelter there posted a nicely photographed ad for Toronto's only lesbian strip club.

With such a tradition of liberality it's no wonder that this area has been chosen for the latest "My Canada Includes More Than Your Canada" campaign.
The posters, which hang outside a couple of convenience stores, show two people, each drinking a V8. Underneath is the phrase "V8 est a notre gout," which I believe means "V8 prevents gout" — although I am unable to confirm this as my translator isn't talking to me until she determines whether or not Bouchard is, in fact, crazy.

Nevertheless, such a translation makes sense as a ploy to hold onto Quebec. Rich French cooking has been known to cause gout; V8 prevents gout. Subtextually, what the ads are saying is that no matter what Quebec wishes to dish up, we'll eat it.
At the top of the ad is the word "Sante!" which is probably French for "Sanity." What clearer message could we send to Quebec as a plea for Canadian unity? Protesters will storm Ottawa chanting: "My Canada includes Sanity!" and "V8 prevents gout!"

It's this kind of unambiguous sloganism that has served so well in forcing carefully planned political action in the past.

Nor should we, as do some, take lightly the threat of separation. While many commentators have pointed out various problems that could arise should Quebec choose independence, M. Bouchard has, in fact, openly stated what the rest of us have hardly dared even think: that with Quebec gone there would be nothing to prevent an American invasion. Surely even the most politically naive have known that the only reason Canada has not already been invaded is because of the States' natural reluctance to saddle itself with the problem of Quebec nationalists.

And so it is with many thanks that we salute V8's selfless effort to do its part in keeping Canada together. I'd like to end with one of those rousing French slogans, but I just called my translator and she still hasn't determined Bouchard's mental stability.

Some mysteries may never be solved.