Taking Risks: Literary Journalism from the Edge ed. by Barbara Moon, Don Obe (review)

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 1, 2000 American Studies in Review Barbara Moon and Don Obe, eds. Taking Risks: Literary Journalism from the Edge. Introduction by Michael Ignatieff. Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press, 1998. Pp. 319. The twelve essays assembled here first took shape under the aegis of the Creative Non-fiction and Cultural Journalism Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. This lumbering label is misleading, since the arrangements are simple enough: once selected, you go to Banff with your project, you have four weeks to pummel prolepses, to ponder, to procrastinate. You are wined, dined, and walked. Three times a week you meet the program heads, two editors, and your fellow interns to have a bit of a chat. By the end of the month you’re out of the mountains with your newborn in tow. All twelve essays have subsequently been published in newspapers and magazines, and they now have a permanent life in this collection . As you might expect, the subject matter is diverse, befitting the amorphous rubric of cultural, here termed literary, journalism. I take it that what is meant by “from the edge” in the title is that the interns, on a month’s parole from the prison-house of industrial journalism or from the mind-glazing langue de bois of the academy, are invited to free-float in the less circumscribed ether of fancy and the imagination ; on the whole, the results are gratifying. The two presiding spirits, Alberto Manguel over five of the essays and Michael Ignatieff over the remaining seven, have nudged the participants towards the age-old writerly practice of making it new. Thus, Joan Skogan’s “Mary of Canada” is a coast-to-coast survey of how frequently images of the Virgin pop up in the most unlikely settings, from a construction site in Regina, Saskatchewan, amid the alien cranes, to the Toronto rock band Our Lady Peace. (Curiously absent is my own favourite, Herself in the upturned bathtub, under a blue naked light bulb, a stellar icon of quétainerie, Québec’s home-grown contribution to global kitsch.) An authentically Canadian chord is sounded in Stan Persky’s primly correct account of a visit to benighted Albania during that country’s free fall: Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 112 All the time, Pavli’s wife was working in the kitchen. The women did all the domestic work; the arrangements were quite traditional.... I thought of a feminist friend of mine back home, and I knew exactly what she would make of it. No truck here with the swoony pastor of Augustan Home Thoughts from Abroad! Truly we are a people on guard. Brian D. Johnson has an amusing account of his job as a film critic, much of it apparently taken up with the tiresome chore of interviewing stars. “For the record,” he points out, “I can’t complain of having been sexually harassed by any of the stars I’ve interviewed.” Good to have that finally cleared up—and yet another example of our enduring national trait, that of monitoring absences. (He might have added that the real bane of interviewing is the elaborate pretence that you’re stupider than the interviewee.) I had not been aware of the new “new thing” that is Japanimation until I read Kyo MacLear’s lively “Race to the Future” about a virtual actorsinger called Kyoto Date, sired by software engineers out of a Japanese modelling agency. Turns out the “eighteen-year-old” Kyoto is “a sassy Scorpio” who thoughtfully lists collecting sneakers among her hobbies. A piquant pixel, Kyoto counts the sci-fi writer William Gibson among her dearest fans; and she has “graced” the covers of several US and Japanese magazines. In the presence of Kyoto Date, MacLear suggests, we can “vicariously approximate” being forever young. Sadly, there is some evidence that the diminutive diva may also, doubtless unwittingly, be a crowd pleaser in the international wankerama that is the Internet. Mark Abley’s threnody “Outrunning the Sun” is a beautifully pitched meditation on the death of native languages, yet another interrogation of absences. And the Mohawk...