Go to Mount Royal to Find Pure Air in Montreal, Study Shows: Or Pollution Knows No Boundaries

The health of Montrealers depends on Mount Royal: if there were any doubt about it, new research to be published shortly in Social Science and Medicine shows that the mountain and neighborhoods next to it are much less polluted.

Dan Crouse, a doctoral candidate at McGill University in geography and epidemiology, has been keeping track of nitrogen dioxide--a good indicator of overall pollution-- at 129 points around the island of Montreal for the last couple of years, checking each device in spring, summer and winter. He’s plotted NO2 levels against socio-emographic data, and his results have been a bit of surprise, he admitted to Le Devoir.

Some of the highest levels occur in rather well-off neighborhoods—St. Laurent, Westmount and the Plateau—while the best levels were found in Montreal North, where income levels are much lower and where charges of racial profiling have been big news since a young Latino was killed by police last summer. It seems that the neighborhood is protected by being bounded by a river on one side and not having highways run through it.

And it’s proximity to heavily travelled highways that causes the largest problems, Crouse said. St. Laurent has three major highways crossing it, while Westmount despite its green and toney sections, is bounded on two sides by even busier highways. The Plateau, currently enjoying a gentrification boom which accounts for its relative high income levels, is extremely dense with much car traffic.

Nevertheless, the overall average of 12 ppb in winter , and 8 in summer, is better than that of Toronto, Los Angeles or New York: 22 ppb is the level when respiratory problems develops, according to World Health Organization studies.

But take a look at the map of his data and one thing jumps out at you: the mountain is an island in the middle of pollution. “What they say about it being the lungs of the city is indeed true,” Crouse emphasizes. Getting cars out of the city is a solution to the larger problem, he adds. “Vive the bicycle!”

As someone who walks regularly on the mountain, I'd add: "Long live getting around on your own two feet, too!"

Memo to Print Media: Monocle's Success Suggests that Maybe Quality and Creative Ideas Are What Is Needed

Just as Reader’s Digest announces that its US operations will be filing for bankruptcy, the British newspaper The Independent has a fascinating story about one magazine owner who seems to be getting it right in this cyber-crazy world.

The venerable magazine—which I loved to read when I was about 10 or 11—insists that employees and its various media products won’t be badly affected by the plan aimed at restructuring its debt. But it is just the latest in a series of print media to run into very stormy seas lately, so the success of Monocle and Wallpaper* is that much more surprising—and encouraging.

Winnipeg-born Tyler Brûlé is the man behind the two magazines. A journalist for the BBC and print publications, he lost the use of his left hand after being shot by a sniper in Afghanistan in 1994. During his convalescence he dreamed up Wallpaper*, a high end life style magazine that became a big success and was snapped up a few years later by Time-Warner. After staying on for a while, Brûlé left it and three years ago launched Monocle.

The magazine, based in London, sells 150,000 copies worldwide at £5 a pop. It has spun off a line of exclusive shops (one is due to open in Toronto soon) and is experimenting with a wide variety of both audio and artistic features.

Brûlé explained the magazine’s success to The Independent: “Media owners around the world are scratching their heads, asking why magazines and newspapers aren’t selling anymore. Why? Because you’ve downgraded the experience. When you are competing against digital, which can zoom in and animate? then your print experience needs to be tactile and exciting and, for magazines, a bit collectable.”

Hey, what a revolutionary thought: concentrate on quality and give your readers good material. Sure, Monocle is at the de luxe end of the publishing world, but there must be ways to translate that message down the ladder.

If print media don’t do that, they’re headed toward the fate of Reader’s Digest. (I did mention that I liked the magazine when I was just old enough to read well? It doesn't hurt to mention that again since seems to me there’s a message there, too.)

Halifax's Lovely Public Gardens: Times Change, But the Pleasure Goes on

In the cool of the evening Sunday after the NDP convention wrapped up in Halifax, I spent a pleasant hour in the Public Gardens. We’d walked through them in the spring of 2003, back when I was beginning work on Green City, and I had pleasant memories of formal beds full of tulips and daffodils just about to burst into bloom. Since then the Gardens, founded in 1867, have been gone through devastation—Hurricane Juan hit the summer following our visit—and been reborn.

The picture here was taken sometime in the Victorian Age, but obviously people today enjoy it just as much as people did then. Sunday evening strollers admired the fountains and little streams, the band stand, the green lawns, the many tall trees that had survived the hurricane. Others sat on the benches, reading or chatting or simply enjoying the twilight.

There is a difference between then and now, which says a lot about our times, however. Mixed in with the couples of all ages wearing shorts and sandals, the teenagers with bleached and spiked hair, the pretty girls in strappy little sundresses and high heels, and the elderly proceeding from bench to bench with the aid of cane or walker--in short a cross section of mainstream Haligonians--I spied several families visibly rather recently arrived in Canada, with women wearing hidjab or salwar kameez. Even in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so strongly identified with Celtic tradition, the public has changed as Canada has opened its doors.

Beside this fact should be placed another: the young woman (police officer or park guard, I wasn’t sure) who was charged with making sure the gardens closed at night fall. She made a pass through in an electrified cart shortly after sunset, checking under bushes and in a shady glade. Then just before it was well and truly dark, she drove through again, calling out “We’re closing in five minutes.” At the gates when I left, male park employees were wishing people a pleasant evening as they departed, but, significantly, she was the person in authority.

What NDP Convention Did Reporters Go To? Not the One That I Did

It's always strange to be away from your usual media sources for a few days, and then to come home and catch up. It's even stranger to find that what has been reported corresponds very little to what you've been experiencing. That's what I feel this morning, having just arrived back home from the New Democratic Party convention in Halifax.

The headlines in The Globe and Mail and Le Devoir today both suggest that some how delegates were robbed of the chance to discuss a name change for the party, specifically dropping the "New." An oxymoron, supposedly. Not in keeping with the idea that party ought togo right in order to win votes.

"Names change debate fizzles," says the Globe. Le Devoir's headline says about the same, and the lead paragraph talks about the name change as "one of the most controversial issues" on the convention docket. There also is much hand wringing about the way the party reaffirmed many of its lefty policies.

But that's what the people there wanted--and it is also, I'm sure, what the people of Canada want.

I was there from 9:30 a.m on Friday until the closing, and I heard practically no one talk about the name change. The two motions didn't even get forwarded from the preliminary sessions where they were considered with a recommendation that they be debated on the floor of the convention. There were far more important things to talk about like child care, and defending health care, and sustainable development, and the crisis in the salmon fishery and... Well, the list goes on and on. I haven't counted but a good 350 resolutions had been submitted from across Canada, perhaps 75 were forwarded from the preliminary sessions with recommendations for further consideration, and maybe 30 were approved on the floor. The rest of the resolutions that made the first cut may be further considered by the National Council.

The convention ended with Leader Jack Layton talking rousingly about "taking Canada back" from the Conservatives. That would make a great campaign slogan. And what about this for a campaign song?

"Don't throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When ev'ry thing old is new again"

Note: Hugh Jackman lyrics, of course.

Saturday Photo: The Beauty of Invasive Plants

It's a little early for the Saturday photo, but I'm away this weekend and I hope you won't mind.

The blue flowers of chicory are everywhere these days along with overgrown red clover, a grass which my mother called wild oats but which surely isn't, and tall, yellow-flowered plants whose name I haven't discovered.

The flowers have transformed vacant lots and the unused land along the railroad tracks into wild gardens. They aren't wild flowers, as such, though. In almost all cases they are escapes from gardens, plants native to somewhere else which have successfully found a niche for themselves here. In some cases they are so successful they crowd out the local flora.

I have conflicting feelings about these escapes. Certainly the way purple loosestrife doesn't let anything else grow is dangerous for a varied ecosystem. But I give chicory and clover high points for gumption--and charm.

P.S. Just discovered that the grass is wild barley--wild oats is something quite different.

Has That Other Steven Got Some Good Reading for You! 31 Days of Short Stories

I don’t know how he does it but Steven W. Beattie, book review editor at Quill and Quire, has begun an amazing series on his blog That Shakespearean Rag: Notes from a Literary Lad. You’d think his day job would keep him busy enough, but he seems to be set on posting excerpts from and essays on 31 short stories over the 31 days of August.

The selections so far are a treat, and have introduced me to several writers I haven’t read before . So far, in fact, only a few names are really familiar: John Barth, Angela Carter, Barbara Gowdy and Lisa Moore. You could make a summer reading list from the books he’s suggesting, which may be just what he’s intending to do.

The others so far are: “Reference #388475848-5″ by Amy Hempel, “Headhunter” by Ann Cummins, “Pardon Our Monsters” by Andrew Hood, “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” by Will Self, “Out on Bail” by Denis Johnson and “CommComm” by George Saunders.

Check out the blog before heading for your favourite bookstore or library to get something good to read. This Steven is made of different stuff from the Prime Minister.

The Naming of Parts II: When Classification Becomes Poetry

This poem seems to me to be the perfect follow-up to Carol Kaesuk Yoon's essay on classification. In it naming things becomes a comment on life and war and nature. Henry Reed (1914-1986) wrote it while he was training in the British Army in World War II. Born in Birmingham, England, he earned a B.A. from the University of Birmingham (1937), and worked as a teacher and free-lance writer (1937-1941.) His wartime experience led to a series of poems, The Lessons of War. After the war, he worked as a playwright and broadcaster.


The Naming of Parts


Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens likecoral in all the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have the naming of parts.

Note: the work seems to no longer be in copyright.

The Naming of Parts I: To Classify Nature Is Human, If Not Divine

Carol Kaesuk Yoon in Tuesday’s New York Times Science section gives us a little meditation on taxonomy, or the naming and classifying of plants and animals. It sounds dry and as stuffy as a store room of museum specimens, but she makes it fascinating.

People all over the world name and classify, and in many respects are remarkably consistent in how they do it, she writes. “Cecil Brown, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University who has studied folk taxonomies in 188 languages, has found that people recognize the same basic categories repeatedly, including fish, birds, snakes, mammals, “wugs” (meaning worms and insects, or what we might call creepy-crawlies), trees, vines, herbs and bushes.”

The ability to do this seems hard-wired into our brains, Yoon says, citing a case where a young man with a brain injury could not identify inanimate objects, but could still remember the names of living ones.

To study and classify is a way to make contact with nature, she says. “We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction... entirely unaware that anything is happening.” But to meditate on an organism’s “ beetle-ness, its daffodility” and then name it is to change everything, including yourself because then “you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.”

Yes indeed. Makes you think of the second chapter of Genesis (verses 19 and 20):

“ And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

“ And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field...”

Old unbelievers like me will argue against divine inspiration, but sometimes we have to recognize a psychological truth.

A Year out It Looks Like Big Government Saved the Day, Or Why Stephen Hawking Lives in the UK

What a difference a year makes! At this point in 2008, the writing was there for those who knew to read it, but few did. We were tooling along toward an economic meltdown in the middle of a US presidential campaign, with the dog days of summer filled with John McCain’s rants, and Sarah Palin was still in Alaska.

A year later Palin is back in Alaska, and McCain is still ranting, but such a cautious observer as Nobel laureat Paul Krugman is saying that we have averted “the worst,” that is Great Depression II. The reason is Big Government which acted as the federal government did not in 1929. This time it stimulated the economy and provided a counterweight to private sector job slashing through Social Security and other transfer payments, continued federal programs which employ many people, and bail outs for a staggering financial system.

“Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible,” Krugman writes. “But in the 1930s the trend lines just kept heading down. This time, the plunge appears to be ending after just one terrible year....And aren’t you glad that right now the government is being run by people who don’t hate government?

I wish that were the same in Canada. It seems we actually are doing a bit better than the US, but we still have Stephen Harper in power, and a bunch of Conservatives who only acted last winter when pushed to the brink by the ill-fated coalition threat raised by the Liberals, NDP and Bloc. Something is going to have to be done about that.

BTW, Krugman's blog today quotes part of the campaign of disinformation going on against the Obama health reform package: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Er, sorry but I think Hawking spent most of his life in the UK, and it wasn't the US he was talking about moving to a while back, but Canada. Can you imagine what he health care costs would be South of the Border.

A Little Quiet, if You Please! Noise in the Urban Setting

When you find out that you’re not the only ones who find something troubling, it’s often very comforting. What’s more, it may also be the beginning of doing something about it.

This time it’s noise, which I’m beginning to think is the next big urban problem. While the sound of heating and ventilating machines are a continuous problems and shoddy construction makes sound transmission within buildings worse, the latest complaints around here are related to outdoor concerts. The Stevie Wonder concert during the Montreal Jazz Festival was a great success, but we could hear it chez nous four kilometers away. And we’re not the only ones: residents of a suburb on Montreal’s south shore say they are being disturbed three nights a week by concerts at a park on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence, at least four or five kilometers from them.

There’s no excuse for this. Sound systems can be fine-tuned (pun intended,) better aimed, or even simply turned down. In fact, this seems to have happened at the Jazz Fest: although there were several other massive concerts, we didn't hear them.

Complaining about noise is not just crankiness. The dangers of high levels of sound are many, particularly for those close by. Just ask those rock musicians who have discovered at 30 that they’re deaf, or the construction workers for whom a whole range of sounds have disappeared because they've worked too long next to noisy machines. For those who are further away, well, there are a number of studies under way which aim answer the question of just effect noise has on our health, mental and physical. A Quebec one, commissioned three years ago, is due next fall.

To be continued...

Saturday Photo: The Fruits of the Summertime

Raspberries, strawberries, blueberries...

The Kingston Trio didn't have the last item in their song from the 1950s, but I kept thinking of it and them the last couple of weeks as I've been buying fruit at the Jean Talon Market. This public market is a fixture in Montreal, and unlike other urban markets (Pike Place Market in Seattle comes to mind) it is a market for locals, not a tourist institution.

You'll find people from all around the world there, sure, but that's where they're from. not where they live now. This means that you were able to find mangos there long before they came widely available, as well as halal meat and Italian sausages. But the backbone of the market is local producers who this time of year have stalls bursting with good produce from nearby.

The spring strawberries are over, the raspberries are at their height, and the blueberries are just coming in. Great eating.

And for a little nostalgic listening, check out my favourite group from my high school days when I had no idea that I'd be speaking French every day, or get to know Paris pretty well.



I always sang along:
"Raspberries, strawberries, the good wines we brew.
Here's to the boys of the countryside, the ones we drink 'em to."

A Quiet Spot in the Middle of the City: The Pleasures of Mount Royal Cemetery

If it weren’t for the Mount Royal Cemetery I don’t know if I’d be alive in Montreal today. Or not really alive, anyway. For decades I’ve walked there several times a week, with kids, with a dog, with Lee, but most frequently alone in the early morning. It is a wonderful spot in all seasons. I arrive with my thoughts—a problem in whatever I’m writing, some strategy to think out, an action to plan—and I leave more often than not with a solution, or the beginning of one, or at least with the idea that the world will continue and I with it.

The green space on the north side of Mount Royal was set aside more than 150 years ago as “rural” cemetery like those designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to combine a place of rest for the dead and a bucolic setting for the living. Olmsted made the first plan for Mount Royal Park, and the cemetery which adjoins it is a perfect companion for Montreal’s signature open space.

Yesterday morning, however, Le Devoir vaunted the cemetery’s slopes as great places for cyclists to train, and I’m afraid that some of the peace I’ve grown accustomed to will be spoiled. True, the winding, well-kept asphalt roads must be great to cycle down, after climbing the steep slope that leads up the mountain from the east side, but I hope the place won’t be over-run by pumped-up bikers.

The story has already elicited comments from people who walk or bird-watch there, while cemetery officials are quoted in it as saying that cyclists who “exaggerate” are asked to go elsewhere. Let us hope that cyclists get the message so that the many people (and there must be hundreds) who quietly enjoy the grass, trees, birds and lovely views can continue to do so.

Photo: a summer morning when the cloud cover is so low it's fog.

Fighting Fire with Fire: Green Apple Books on the Web

Time for some silliness. I first saw this on Bookninja, I think, but I’ve discovered where they live on YouTube. The store is a new and used book store in San Francisco, and it sounds like a terrific place. (Just checked the new book listings there, and they’ve got The Walkable City, too. Yay!)

Mowing a Lawn with a Power Mower Equals Riding a Bike to Work? Stats Can's Spin Is Wrong--and Dangerous

So suburbanites and urban dwellers spend about the same time being physically active? That’s what a new Statistics Canada study would have us believe, that’s what their press release on the study says. But if you look more closely at the whole report some really important differences show up. It’s almost as if Stats Can were trying to provide an apology for automobile-based living.

The study was a large one of people living in several kinds of neighborhoods in Canada’s biggest cities, among them Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. The participants were asked to keep a time-use diary of what they did. The data were collected from 19,597 respondents, who are said to represent nearly 26.1 million people.

The results indicated that people in suburbs are much less likely to walk or bike in their daily lives, but get exercise working outside on their property. On this basis, the Stats Can press release says that “people living in low-density residential areas are as likely to be physically active over the course of a day as those in high-density areas.”

Very few news stories reporting on the study pointed out that the kind of lawn-mowing and snow shoveling this entailed probably was assisted by machines. None of the stories that I saw featured the next finding: “However, people living in the central neighbourhoods of Canada’s largest metropolitan areas are the most likely of all to be physically active.”

The study report adds that for persons who spent at least nine hours of their day at work or at school and "do not necessarily have time to engage in physical recreation activities, area of residence—urban or suburban—made a huge difference in physical activity. Of those who lived in urban neighbourhoods, 26% made at least one physically active trip. The same was true for only 9%, or about three times fewer proportionally, of the ones living in typically suburban neighbourhoods....The difference is so large (in the group aged 25 to 34) that it affects the overall level of physical activity in the age group: 59% of urban dwellers in the group had at least 20 minutes of physical activity during the day, compared with 49% for those living in the suburbs.

"In short, living in a typically suburban neighbourhood discourages physically active travel in general, with even stronger effects on some groups. That information may be important in campaigns to promote physical activity, particularly those aimed at getting sedentary people to do more.”

The problem is larger than advertising campaigns though. Dense, public transit-friendly, walkable neighborhoods are not only vital to reduce our dependence on petroleum, but for our health as well. Now to get the message across to those who make the decisions about what is built where. Unfortunately the spin given on this study isn't going to help much.

Gates, Hill and Rich: Musings on Race Relations, Beer and Doughnuts

Frank Rich mused most interestingly in Sunday’s New York Times about the problems Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found himself in recently. Viewed by a neighbor trying to get into his home, Gates was arrested by Cambridge MA police. The details of the incident are a little vague, and any ill feelings have been patched over by the public beer Gates hared with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Mass. police drank together last week. But the reaction to the incident in some quarters shows just how far the US has not come.

“The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest 'national conversation about race' is the same one we’ve taken away from every other 'national conversation' in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not post racial," Rich wrote.



The US may have elected a man of mixed-race as president, but the desire to categorize people because of their skin colour has not gone away. Gates himself very discovered while doing research for PBS series that he is almost without doubt descended from an Irish warlord of the Fifth century. Yet under the categories we operate today, he is not considered to be White. He is African American, or Black or whatever term you want to use. We have not changed that much from the old Civil War category in which a Negro was anyone who had any known African blood.

Compare this with the following excerpt by the novel by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill, the child of two Americans, one White and one who, Hill says, called himself proudly a Negro. The couple came to Canada to raise their children because racial tensions are less here, but nevertheless they still exist. Hill's novel is called Any Known Blood, in fact.

"I have the rare distinction — a distinction that weighs like a wet life jacket, but that I sometimes float to great advantage — of not appearing to belong to any particular race, but of seeming like a contender for many.

In Spain, people have wondered if I was French. In France, hotel managers asked if I was Moroccan. In Canada, I've been asked — always tentatively — if I was perhaps Peruvian, American, or Jamaican. But I have rarely given a truthful rendering of my origins.

Once, someone asked, "Are you from Madagascar? I know a man from Madagascar who looks like you..."

Another time, when a man sitting next to me in a donut shop complained about Sikh refugees arriving by boat in Gander, Newfoundland, I said: "I was born in Canada and I don't wear a turban, but I'm a Sikh. My mother is white, but my father is a Sikh and that makes me one, too." The man's mouth fell open. I paid the waitress to bring him twelve chocolate donuts. "I've gotta go," I told him. "But the next time you want to run down Sikhs, just remember that one of them bought you a box of donuts!"

One of the things Rich adds in his Sunday column is that "by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate" the population of the US will be majority non-White and/or Hispanic. This is "causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments," he adds.

Guess we'll need some more doughnuts, some more beer if we're ever going to work this one out.

Pictures: Henry Louis Gates, Jr, on the left from PBS. Lawrence Hill on the right from CBC.

When Thinking "Nothing's the Matter" Is Necessary to Live

“Milk in the Batter! Milk in the Batter! We Bake Cake! And Nothing’s the Matter!" That’s the refrain of In the Night Kitchen, one of two children’s books that Yann Martel is sending today to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The other one is Where the Wild Things Are, also by Maurice Sendak.

The occasion is the 61st in Martel’s continuing campaign to provide Harper with some good bedtime reading, and, not incidentally, the birth of the first child of Martel and his partner Alice Kuipers.

Both books are children’s classics, and I’d be surprised if the Harper household didn’t have them at one time, if they don’t still. Nevertheless, the books are an opportunity for Martel to muse about the importance of books to children. An adult whose imagination has not been stimulated in childhood is “less useful to society because incapable of coming up with the new ideas and new solutions that society needs. A skill is a narrow focus of knowledge, a single card in a deck. Creativity is the hand that plays the cards. Hence, once again, the importance of children’s literature.”

Very true. There’s also an important message in the silliness of the “Milk in the Batter” refrain. Small children also need to think that no matter how scary the moment is, everything will turn out all right.

That is clearly not true, of course. Horrible things happen, cement blocks fall from tall buildings, wars break out, crops fail. Children will learn that soon enough, but like all of us, they need to believe on one level that “nothing’s the matter” in order to go to sleep, to try new things, to love, to live.

Welcome to the world, little Theo, by the way. You’ll find it an interesting place. Your parents, I'm sure, will do their best to make see that you grow up confident that it will all turn out all right.

Saturday Photo: Urban Lions

It takes all kinds, they say. That goes for lions too. The one on the left is carved from granite or some interesting stone and is part of a pair guarding the stairs leading to an imposing house on Côte Sainte Catherine Road.


The picture on the top right is of a lion in concrete in front of a much more modest dwelling in Montreal's Plateau district. It probably has a more devoted group of fans than the other one, I imagine. As I passed it one morning recently, a man and his little boy in a stroller--probably on the way to day care--were talking about it. Obviously it is a landmark on their daily round.



The other one is much less approachable. Not only is it in a considerably more chic neighborhood, but it is on a street which doesn't get nearly as much pedestrian traffic. I'd gone past it hundreds of times on the bus or in a car before I walked in front of it and discovered the lovely workmanship. Art for the masses, or art for the elite?

André Picard on Universal Health Insurance: "Americans Can Only Dream of Having Such a System to Bemoan"

Today I’d like to thank André Picard, the health system writer for The Globe and Mail, for his excellent story yesterday about that woman who says she had to go to the State to get treated. check it out yourself if you have time, but if not just read the last few paragraphs.

“ The question is: Can insurers (and providers) delay and deny care, and can they limit and deny coverage?

Of course they can, and they do so all the time. In the United States, health insurance is expensive and it is often tied to employment. Even those with good insurance see their claims denied because of “pre-existing medical conditions,” insurers' attempts to hold down “medical losses” (the industry term for paying for care), and caps on total payouts.

Ironically, for all her lauding of private insurance, someone like Ms. Holmes would find it virtually impossible to buy insurance, given her medical history.

The infamous ad claims that Canadians have long waits and are denied all manner of care because the “government says patients aren't worth it.”

On the contrary, medicare – universal state-financed health insurance – means everyone is worthy of care and entitled to care.

If nothing else, Ms. Holmes' foray into the U.S. health-care debate should remind us of how medicare, despite some shortcomings, is worth it.

Americans can only dream of having such a system to bemoan.”

Tomato Blight, Our Warming Climate and Who Cares?

So far no field tomatoes from Quebec have showed up in Montreal stores or at the Jean Talon Market. Usually it’s August before the crop comes in, and this year it may be even later because of the cool weather and rain. But, if the farm panel on CBC’s Radio Noon show is right, we may escape the blight that is ravaging tomato crops in the US North East.

The New York Times had a big story on Wednesday, about the damage done by the blight, a fungus related to the one that caused the Potato Famine in Ireland 180 years ago. Organic farmers, whose arsenal of defence is limited, are particularly hard hit, it seems. Aside from tearing up and burning or deeply burying affected plants so the blight though, so it must re-applied after every rain at a cost of about $1,000 a shot, according to one farmer.

That explains something a neighbor told me Tuesday. A friend of hers on Long Island reported that no local tomatoes were in the markets there, but that tomatoes from Quebec were. They must be hothouse ones—I’ve written before about the excellent Savoura ones we get now all winter long—which is more than a little strange for this time of year.

All this comes out at a time whe climate scientists from around the world are meeting in Montreal for a conference called Our Warming Climate. There has been very little press coverage even though meteorologists, arctic specialists, oceanographers and many other academics have been discussing a number of important issues. Don't know if this is a result of the extremely erudite quality of the papers presented, or because nobody is very interested. If it's the latter, we're in trouble.

Learning Portuguese: Muito Dificil

The report from the language wars isn’t encouraging. Despite quite a bit of effort I still cannot understand the news on Radio Televisão Portugal, even though I’ve been able to read newspaper articles and even an academic text or two for some time.

This summer I thought I’d try to find someone to give me private lessons, but it is, after all, summer, and everyone I approached said no one was available. In that fall, they said. There are courses at many places, wait until then.

So I found another teach yourself kit at the library. This one is Harrap’s: what I know I owe to one from Nathan which I’ve listened to so often that I actually make out individual words. A sentence from a dialogue stood me in good stead when I wanted to buy a map: Uma planta de Lisboa tem uma lista das ruas. Without too much difficulty I was able to turn it around and ask if the map I was looking at had a list of streets.

But to go any further I’m going to need some help. Maybe in the meantime I should make up little dialogues and try reading aloud. There are three weekly Portuguese newspapers in Montreal, for starters. For the moment, though, I’ll just wish you “Bom dia,” and get back to working on Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure.

Photo: From the window of a shop in Lisbon that specializes in dueling and fencing. Some of the words are easy to figure out, if you know some French or Spanish. But it's the continental accent that gives me pause. All too often the last of a word is swallowed. A few months ago I watched RTP reports about forest fires for three days before I realized the word that sounded like "owe fogue" was "o fogo," or "fire."

Disinformaton Campaign in the US about Health Insurance: What Is Going on South of the Border?

Lately, as the US House and Senante prepare to vote on a new health insurance package, I’ve been getting e-mail from friends in the States, either asking for ammunition to use against those who are bad-mouthing the Canadian health insurance system as an example of what to avoid, or simply asking for information.

Heaven knows the Canadian system is not perfect, and is under attack here at home (see the op-ed piece Lee and his friend Terry Kaufmann wrote for Le Devoir about creeping privatization of surgical clinics. ) But there is no doubt that the Canadian public as a whole is far better served by it than people in the United States are by their system.

What is amazing is the possibility that old boy Democrats will kill the Obama health care reform package. Paul Krugman ranted a bit about that yesterday, while on Sunday David Leonhardt wrote forcefully about the vilification some US doctors have received when they’ve tried to change the way health care is organized and doctors paid in the US.

The bottom line is that at least 45 million Americans have no health insurance or inadequate insurance (and the numbers are going to jump in California as that state hobbles its program in order to meet its new budget plan,) that per capita expenditure on health is higher in the US than anywhere else in the world, and that by most health indicators Americans are less healthy than people in other developed countries (Canada, UK, France for example.)

A message to my friends across the border: this is an idea whose time came long ago. What are you waiting for?

Earlier Sundown and Music to Get You Started.

Last night it was dark at nine o’clock.

The days change by a minute or two, so slowly that you don’t really notice. But then suddenly the pieces fall in place and you realize that whereas it was clearly light until well after 9 p.m. in late June, it is now dark by then.

The fact that it was cloudy and rain threatened only accentuated the general trend. The days are growing shorter, the construction vacation—that peculiarly Quebec institution—is half over, summer is advancing, and I haven't accomplished half the fun things and only a quarter of the non-fun things I'd hoped to by now.

The fact that when it had gotten well and truly dark last night a thunder storm blew in doesn't help manners. In the space of fifteen minutes at least a half inch of rain fell, or more than our roof drain could handle. Some rain water backed up in to the basement, leading to much newspaper-spreading last night and some literal mopping up this morning.

So I for one feel like a little musical encouragement this morning. The line at the end is the eternal one for all aspiring artists, while singing about cars (and remember the Mustang Wilson Pickett ostensibly had in mind was Ford's attempt to make something sexy in 1963) is almost as provocative.

Saturday Photo: Even Smaller Gardens

It's amazing what people will do to bring a little green and garden into their lives. The photo on the left was taken this week in the center of Montreal. The little patio faces south west, which means that it gets a nice amount of sunshine, but is not too hot in the middle of the day.

The second photo is one I took in Lisbon in May. The neighborhood is much older, and while part of it is being spiffied up, this building needs some paint and stucco work. Yet the people who live there obviously cared about having flowers just outside the window.

The point is that if you want green, you can have it just about anywhere. Here's a link to an interesting blog (from cold Calgary, no less) that specializes in balcony gardens, by the way: The Balcony Gardener.

For more about the relationship between people, nature and urban places, you might want to look at my book Green City, too.

Annals of the Sixth Extinction: The Bats are Back in Côte-des-Neiges

The news from Lukas is good.

Tuesday night he spotted bats flying around the balcony the way they’ve done for the last few years. Presumably they're catching insects in the mature maple whose branches reach up to the third floor where he and Sophie live, but where the animals nest is a mystery. There are no caves or empty structures readily apparent nearby where the bats might roost, although they certainly have been a fixture in Sophie and Lukas’s very urban neighborhood.

Bats are falling prey to a fungus disease, according to Elizabeth Kolbert in an alarming story in The New Yorker, and I had been wondering how the ones in Montreal were doing. Kolbert's article, entitled “The Sixth Extinction,” outlines the way in which humans have devastated the lives of other animals we share the planet with. She mentions the big mammals that we seem to have killed off wherever and whenever our populations expanded into new territory, but she goes on to tell of several diseases which we are spreading inadvertently right now. Amphibians and bees are being decimated by fungus —and now bats in the North East of the US are being attacked by white nose disease, which is also a fungus.

It would appear that the plague hasn’t crossed the border, though. A survey of abandoned mines by Quebec wildlife biologists turned up no cases last year, and now we have the report from the front—or at least the corner of Edouard-Montpetit and Westbury.

The Editing Files: A.S. Byatt As a Case in Point

My friend Ann Charney and I had an interesting exchange about historical novels recently. She’s not that keen on them—“if you want to write about an historical period, why don’t you write non-fiction?” she asks--while I sometimes find them a wonderful window onto both human nature and the past.

But I must admit I was terribly disappointed by A.S. Byatt’s newest novel, The Children’s Book. Byatt is a writer who can catch the moment gloriously—some of her short stories are wonderful in the way they describe sensations so vividly that they stay with you months afterward. Her novel Possession is a masterful combination of such luminous descriptors of incident and of a story that encompasses decades. But I have found it a chore to read her four Frederica novels—The Shadow of the Sun, The Virgin in the Garden, A Whistling Woman (which I threw aside) and Babel Tower (by far the best.) The books tell me far more than I want to know about the world of her characters. All would have profited from editors who were not afraid to perform a savage pruning.

Byatt won the Blue Metropolis International Literary Prize earlier this year, which meant that she was in town this spring, and gave several readings and interviews. I did not hear her, but apparently she was riveting, and more than one acquaintance bought her new book on the strength of that.

Therefore I was more than ready to give her the benefit of the doubt with this new book. It is filled with vivd descriptions (particularly about pots and pantomime costumes), but once again I found myself growing cross with the way she tried to pour the history of the world from 1895 to 1920 into 600 pages. Everything is there, including an ending in the trenches of World War I. Why didn’t Byatt allow herself to be edited, to cut out much of the background information so our eyes are focused on her characters and their singular accomplishments? As Ann might say, if I wanted to know about the the period I would have read history, perhaps Barbara Tuchman's excellent The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War.

I read the novel in a couple of days--there is much that is engaging, some moments are brilliant—but what I would give for reading the same book with 100 pages cut from it! That would be something for the ages.

Eolian Energy: The Answer May Be Blowing in the Wind, But Not Everyone Sees It

Quebec announced one wind power project and cancelled another because of citizen protest the week before last. The timid step forward is part of a plan announced last year to add wind turbine production to Quebec’s electric generating capacity which now is based largely on hydroelectricity. At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that China is going into wind power in a big way—and making sure that outsiders don’t get too much of the action by setting standards that are hard for foreigners to meet.

Then there’s the case of Germany, which is now producing so much wind power that it has begun to shut down thermal plants because their production is no longer needed. The result of more than 15 years of positive incentives and legal requirements, the German wind power industry is an example for the rest of the world, Le Devoir’s environment report Louis-Gilles Francoeur suggests.

But citizen concern in North America about the health effects of wind power are mounting. A group of researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario began surveying residents of nearby Wolf Island last year about their health, and plan on continuing the survey as a wind farm is put into operation and afterwards. While big questions can be asked about the validity of a survey where the participants aren’t chosen at random, but self-report, the very fact that it is getting media attention says something about the contradictions of our current energy situation.

The fact is that people want electricity and they want to run motor vehicles. What they don’t want to do is think about where the energy is going to come from, and when they are forced to do so, their gut reaction is to say no, not in my backyard.

But unless we do some drastic cutting in our energy consumption, our best case scenario—not our worst—involves high wind mill towers dotting the land. The Germans are even proud of theirs, Francoeur reports.

New I.F. Stone Biography: An Example of What Might Be Done with Citizen Journalism?

Last week I asked where the new I.F. Stones were, fully realizing that a generation has no idea whom I was talking about. The meticulously researched stories in his newsletter The I.F. Stone Weekly were a balm during the long days of the Vietnam War and brilliant evidence of what a reporter can uncover if he (or she) looks carefully. Somewhere in the basement is a complete set from about 1964 to the end of its existence: I will have to dig them out some day soon.

Then this weekend I came across news of what appears to be an most interesting biography: American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone by D. D. Guttenplan. Not only does the book tell his story—his early days in journalism, his black-listing, his deafness which led him to spend hours poring over transcripts which helped him discover facts hiding in plain sight—it contains some rare wisdom.

A Jew who grew up knowing discrimination, he none the less appreciated the complexities of Israel and Palestine. As early as 1946, a review in The New York Times notes, he wrote “exultantly”: “In Palestine a Jew can be a Jew.” But, the review adds, “he also noticed the Arabs: “Palestine is their home. They love their country. Any equitable and lasting solution of the Palestine problem must take these Arabs and their feelings into account.” “The essence of tragedy,” he wrote in The New York Review of Books after the 1967 war, “is a struggle of right against right. . . . In a tragic struggle, the victors become the guilty and must make amends to the defeated.”

In this new age of easy access to an Internet podium, I’d like to think that there are citizen journalists/bloggers/electronic observers who are examining what is happening in the world as carefully as Stone did, and giving us the benefit of their reflections.

Spell It Right! When Is a Book Review a Good Review?

What to do when a review isn’t a particularly good review, especially when it is published some place where a lot of people are going to see it? The past few days I’ve been faced with this dilemma over a review of The Walkable City: From Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond by Ezra Klein, the Washington Post reporter and master blogger, in The Barnes and Noble Review.

The book has received quite good reviews to date (see links to the right) but Klein, in short, says the book isn’t tough enough. He likes the chapter about Carlsbad, California and shopping centers, but says that there is not enough research presented about questions of urban policy. Nor does he like the conversations I imagine between urban planning icon Jane Jacobs and Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was responsible for rejigging Paris in the mid-19the century (which, by the way, are taken word for word from their writings or interviews, as is noted in the book.)

Well, it's too bad I didn’t write the book Klein would have liked to have read, but I wanted to make my book as amusing as possible. I tried to keep the tone light, particularly because the implications are pretty heavy, and I’m convinced that ordinary folk turn off when things are painted in somber colours. Klein and I had a very civilized e-mail/Twitter exchange about this, from which I think we both gathered that we agree about many things, if not this book.

That said, there are certain advantages to getting even a doubtful review from Barnes and Noble. They haven’t carried my books in numbers in the past, but apparently they are with this one. An old high school friend just wrote that she’d been able to get her local B&N store to order it for her, and I know my publisher did a reprint because of B&N orders.

So maybe the old adage is correct: it doesn’t matter what they say, it’s whether they spell your name right. Check out the review, take a look at the book, and see if you agree. In addition to Barnes and Noble, it’s available at many independent book stores, on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and directly from Véhicule Press.

Saturday Photo: Lisbon, New and Old

Lisbon is a beautiful mixture of architecture over the centuries. I liked this juxtaposition of a late 20th century building with one from the late 19th century building.



The two co-exist pleasantly not far from the major traffic circle where the Marqes de Pombal, who saw to the rebuilding of the city after the disastrous earthquake of 1755, surveys what has become of the city.

More News Needed, Even in Summer: Where Are the New I.F. Stones?

All right, it is summer, but it’s also time to say loudly that covering funerals, no matter how sad, and anniversaries, no matter what the event, is lazy journalism.

We have been treated over the last few weeks with an orgy of necrology: a former governor general, a former pop star, a child snatched away, too many young soldiers. Each is sad, I agree, but to suggest that word pictures and video clips of rock musicians, weeping mothers, and/or pipers (take your pick) are the equivalent of investigative journalism or serious comment is ludicrous.

Ditto for the 40 years since the Walk on the Moon (and has anybody noticed its coincidence with the Moon Walker’s demise?) It was pretty exciting, I admit, but is there nothing more probing to say than that? The Space Race was a child of the Cold War: surely some reflection on what the military-industrial complex has done since would make good copy.

Taking the easy way out has always been tempting, but it seems there’s far more of it. Budgets in newsgathering organizations are slim because of economic bad times and the competition from all those citizen journalists. Who’s going to do the probing necessary to tell the stories we need to hear, even if it’s summer?

If there are any I.F. Stone’s out there, please stand up.

Thyme and Time in Cemeteries and Ian McEwan

Last summer I rhapsodized and puzzled over the carpet of purple flowers in the grass on sunny slopes in Mount Royal Cemetery. I thought they might be a small mountain azalea, and then decided they resembled a clover more. But yesterday discovered that I’d been complicating things: they’re neither and I should have realized earlier.

A pair of young women horticulturalists were weeding a patch of daylilies amid one of the purple slopes, and I had to ask. The flowers are just forming, but it’s clear that the plants have spread, and will soon be absolutely gorgeous.

“Thyme,” the young women told me.

Of course: when I crushed a couple of leaves between my fingers and breathed in the spicy smell, I wondered at how silly I had been not to recognize the herb earlier.

The revelation reminded me of two fleeting bits of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I looked for the passages last night, but couldn’t find them so I must rely on memory to explain. As I remember it, Robbie Turner, the gardener/family friend destroyed by misunderstanding in the book, has planted thyme between the paving blocks on the terrace of the stately house at the center of the first part of the novel. Years later, someone mentally notes the lovely smell arising from the terrace when the thyme is walked on.

The two passages amount to nothing more than a couple of paragraphs, but (as I remember it at least) the thyme becomes a symbol of the way events linger in time, permeating and permutating people’s lives. A singularly appropriate plant for a cemetery too, I know for sure.

Going with the Flow: Permeable Paving and Beauty Underfoot

The value of permeable paving became clear over the weekend when we had a series of intense thunderstorms. Out walking yesterday I saw several good sized ponds on asphalted driveways, as well as deltas of dirt and sand where runoff washed away parts of exposed soil.

Where asphalt had been replaced by brick or interlocking blocks, though, I saw no standing water. Water had been able to percolate into the soil, replenishing both the ground water and cutting down on run-off.

The walkways and parking places reminded me of the gorgeous paving mosaics I saw in Lisbon in May. While maintenance of such widespread use of small-block paving is easier where labour is cheap, a lot can be said for it even in North America. Repairs do not require breaking up a large swath of paving, since just the blocks affected can be replaced. And since our freeze and thaw cycle means that asphalt or concrete paving is going to break up after a few years anyway, why not start out with something that will move with the frost cycle without major damage?

The pictures are of several sorts of mosaics that I saw, from the most basic on ordinary, residential streets to the gorgeous designs on Avenida da Liberdade.

Religious Sensibilities: Good Will Counts, But Unbelievers Sometimes Don't Understand the Subtleties

When in Rome do as the Romans: interesting that Stephen Harper had an audience with Pope Benedict XVI shortly after a small storm blew up over whether he’d taken communion at a funeral mass recently. How could he, as a Protestant? And if he didn’t swallow the host, did he just stick it in his pocket, which would be even worse?

It can be confusing for a non-Catholic to be presented with the host during a mass: Lukas, aged 12, found himself in that situation at a Christmas party organized by a priest at his nominally Catholic high school. It was a time when he was quite serious about religion (the year before he had decided to be baptized as an Anglican) and came home very upset because he hoped he’d done no wrong in taking the host when he hadn’t been confirmed a Catholic. No disrespect was intended, no harm was done, I assured him, and that is what Catholic officials have said in Harper’s case.

Harper should have been better briefed, though. Sensibilities are different among believers of different faiths—although sometimes in surprising ways. A friend recently sent me this link. She’s a serious Francophone Catholic, but thought this was very funny. As an Protestant-reared, thorough-going unbeliever, I would never have dared!

Saturday Photo: Not April, Not Paris, But Chestnuts Nevertheless

The song says: "April in Paris, Chestnuts in blossom..."

It's a lovely song, although when I've been in Paris in May the chestnuts were in full flower, somewhat later than the old standard would indicate. In Montreal the flowering period is late May and early June, certainly.

Between then and the fall when the chestnuts themselves fall to the ground, I've never paid much attention to what is happening in the trees. But last week I walked across the Van Horne viaduct (from which you get some great views of the mountain) and discovered myself eye to eye, so to speak with a chestnut growing down below. The branches were covered with young chestnuts, their spiny covering looking almost soft in their innocence.

And if you'd like to hear a great rendition of the song:

Obama, Sarkozy and a Girl from Ipanema: A Reassuring Look at (American) Presidential Flaws

This just in: here's the link to an ABC video which clears Obama of any suggestion of ungallantry--but not Sarkozy.

One of my mentors commented once that he was always uneasy around people who seemed without flaw. No one is perfect, he would say. Better to have a vice or two that you admit than to have compulsions seething below the surface that you do not acknowledge.

I suppose that’s why Barack Obama’s struggle to quit smoking is, in an odd way, reassuring. The man is so extraordinary that it’s sometimes hard to believe that he has ordinary faults. But a couple of weeks ago he spoke again about his nicotine addiction as he signed an measure designed to protect young people from tobacco advertising “I know. I was one of those teenagers...I know how difficult it can be to break this habit once you’ve started.”

Then this morning Le Devoir (and I imagine other newspapers) carried a Reuters photo of Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a young Brazilian delegate to the G8 meetings. The two men appear to be looking intently at the young woman as she passes, a real girl from Ipanema.

Now, Michelle Obama seems as much a woman as any man could want and the First Couple seem to have a very strong marriage, but other political marriages have turned out to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. It would be a terrible disappointment if the Obamas were not as deeply committed to each other as they appear.

Does this photo raise that sad prospect? Hardly. I find it rather encouraging even: to me it looks like the US President has all the instincts of an ordinary man. But he’s chosen one of the sharpest women around for his life’s partner, and they’ve stuck together though good times and some bad ones. A passing glance that a photographer caught doesn't count for much weighed against years of partnership.

Can’t say the same about Sarkozy though, with his three wives, an unknown number of flings, and the perpetual roving eye. That’s too much disclosure and not enough self-control.

Krugman, Cats and Health Care: Why US Reform Will Work and an "Antidote du Jour"

It’s been a while since I’ve read Paul Krugman: economics is the dismal science, of course, and I just had to take a break from it. But given the avalanche of tinsel about Michael Jackson, I went looking for some serious commentary in Krugman.

And guess what? He may be a little tired of being serious too. On his blog recently he had an “Antidote du jour” item, before he went on to the more weighty stuff. The "antidote" subject was a visit to the vet for his cat Doris Lessing.

Doris Lessing? He would have won me over with that even if I didn’t find his analysis of the state of the world just about the most pertinent going. Perhaps there’s a connection between her medical appointment (to have her liver checked, he writes) and the subject of his most recent column "HELP is on the Way," which is about why health insurance reform in the US will work. Medical bills for pets aren't covered by universal health insurance in Canada, but thank goodness people's bills are.

ERDC Update: Ready for Another Round in the Electronic Rights Battle

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting the expanded legal team for the Electronic Rights Defence Committee. You’ll remember that this is the 12-year-long class action to win compensation for the unauthorized electronic use of freelancers work by The Gazette and assorted others. After what seemed to be interminable delays despite the sterling work of the ERDC’s lawyer Mireille Goulet, the class action was authorized by the Quebec Superior Court this spring.

Now the hard part really begins, and Mireille advised us that she was going to need some help. That she has got the case this far is a real David and Goliath story, but a one-person law office just doesn’t have the resources to go head-to-head with some of the country’s biggest law firms. So she scouted around and found Sylvestre Fafard Painchaud, a Montreal firm that was one of the first to take on class actions when enabling legislation was passed a couple of decades ago. I must say I was most favourablly impressed by the two lawyers who will now be working with Mireille, Pierre Sylvestre and Catherine Sylvestre (others from the firm may join them occasionally, too.)

So I think we’re ready for the next round...

Urban Gardeners and Gleaners: From Squirrels to Guerillas

The squirrels have already begun to eat the pears, even though the fruit are no bigger than an inch long and hard as rocks. After last year’s bumper crop, I don’t know how many we’ll get, especially since we cut the trees back significantly last fall. But the pear bits littering the ground, as well as the apple munchings in the lane from the apple tree across the way remind me of what a bonanza cities are for urban eaters.

Le Devoir had a trio of stories about guerilla gardening and gutsy gleaning on the weekend. One story featured a young woman who spends all her time searching for food growing in the interstices of the city—“It’s my job,” she’s quoted as saying. Also featured are a woman in Toronto who is raising bees in hives of the top of the Royal York Hotel as well as pioneers trying to persuade municipal authorities to allow chickens in residential neighborhoods. Then there are the young folk who make seed bombs—a mixture of compost, seeds and earth which are propelled into vacant lots and the edges of roadway and railroads to begin gardens in waste land.

All of this is impressive stuff, but I think it pales compared to the community garden movement in Montreal. There are more than 90 of them on various plots of land around the city. Gardeners can grow some flowers, but the main thrust is food. It’s a great initiative, with waiting lists and marvelous, well-loved garden plots.

Poetry, Short Stories and Music: Enlightenment for Stephen Harper This Summer?

It’s summer time and the living is—maybe—easy. Yann Martel has sent a nice big package to Stephen Harper for his summer pleasure, number 58 and 59 in his continuing attempt to provide our Prime Minister with some good bedtime reading.

The first is a both a book and an audio book of Alice Munro’s short story collection Runaway. (If you aren't familiar with it, you should read Jonathan Franzen's fascinating review from The New York Times.) Martel prefaces this part of his gift by asking if Harper has called Munro yet to congratulate her on winning the International Man Book Award a week or so ago. He writes that when he won the regular Booker in 2002, he was delighted when the Prime Minister of the day Jean Chrétien called him with congratulations. A small detail in a busy political life but Martel says it meant a lot.

The Door, a book of poetry by that other grande dame of CanLit, Margaret Atwood, is a natural accompaniment, Martel writes, while the audio book of Munro’s short stories is perfect for long road trips that the PM is likely to make this summer as he does his political rounds. Which brings up the last part of the gift package, Camino, a CD of music and sounds by the Canadian violinist Oliver Shroer, inspired by the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostella. Nice listening, for sure.

Martel says he’s off for a trek in the high country of Peru, so he won’t be sending anything a long for a while. But it seems to me that Harper has got more than enough good reading to last for several summer evenings. Would that the invitation to reflection that the books offer translate into enlightenment.

Saturday Photo: Small Front Yards III, Or Pleasure in Front of a Triplex

One of the basic types of housing in the center of Montreal is what's called a triplex here: buildings three stories tall with a flat on each floor. They're big apartments with six to eight rooms. When they were built in the early part of the 20th century their original residents were the families of factory workers, clerks, and small merchants. Many fell into disrepair when the great exodus to the suburbs began, but over the last 15 years they've been discovered by more middle-class young people looking for solidly built housing offering the convenience and pleasures of the city.

Both of these front gardens are on Waverly Street in the Mile End district. The one on the left shows how much fun for little kids you can pack into a 25 by 10 foot space in front of your house, while the one on the right gives a taste of the tranquility than can be created in the same amount of front garden.

And, by the way, this morning when I passed the Garderie Querbes, whose garden I wrote about a week ago, I noticed that it now has a green expanse of lawn where the controversial aménagement paysager had been.

Strawberries, at Home and Abroad: Wild Ones and the Wide World

The very best strawberries are wild ones. My sister who was only two or three was the champion at picking them those couple of summers we spent some time on the Oregon coast near Yachats. We would walk along the top of the cliffs and look for the berries, my mother, Laurie, my aunt Norma and my cousin Susan. The mothers were hoping for a treat for dinner (we were not rich, by any means, and I now realize that a real vacation was something they must have budgeted carefully.) Susan and I ate the few berries we found as soon as we spied them, but Laurie was young enough to be delighted at being praised for her sharp eyes, and carefully brought all she found back to the grownups.

I’ve rarely tasted strawberries as good, even though we await strawberry season here eagerly. The price at the Jean Talon Market has started to drop—a crate of 12 baskets for $18 Wednesday—but because of the rain, they aren’t as sweet as usual. Nevertheless we’re eating a lot because the season is so short and the winter is so long.

When I was in Portugal in May the first of the strawberries—quite good ones, too--were in the markets. I almost missed buying them though because I didn’t recognize the Portuguese word for them. It’s morango, and like many things Lusophone it bears little relation to the words for strawberries use on the other side of the mountains. The Spanish word is fresa and the French, fraise which appear to come from the Latin fragum, but I have no idea what morango’s etymology is.

In case you’re travelling this summer, here’s a list of strawberry translations, adapted from Wiktionairre.

Afrikaans : aarbei
Albanian : luleshtrydhe
German: Erdbeere, féminine
Bulgraian : ягода (ǎgoda)
Catalan : maduixa
Cheokee : ᎠᏅ (anǝ)
Chinese : 草莓 (cǎoméi)
Korean : 딸기 (ddal.gi)
Croate : jagoda, féminine
Danish : jordbær, neutre
Espéranto : frago
Fareon : jarðber
Finnish : mansikka
Frisien : ierdbei
Galician : amorodo, masculin
Hebrew : תות (he)* שדה (he)*
Hungarian: eper (hu)*, földieper (hu)*, szamóca (hu)*
Ido : frago
Indonesian : arbei (id)*
Italian: fragola, féminine
Japanese: イチゴ (ja)*
Kinyarwanda : kere (inkere)
Kurd: tûfiringî, féminine
Latin: fragum
Lenape: tèhim
Lithuanian: žemuogė
Dutch: aardbei, aardbezie (nl)*
Norwegian: jordbær
Polish: truskawka
Russian : земляника, клубника
Senaca: katsistõtaˀshæˀ
Swedish: smultron, jordgubbe
Swahili: stroberi
Czech: jahoda
Turk: çilek
Ukrainian: полуниця (uk)* (polunicǎ)
Zulu : istrobheri

July 2 Isn't Anybody's Holiday, But Let's Celebrate Anyway...

...because the sun is out, and I feel like dancing!

Judy Ingerman forwarded this to me, but I haven't been able to find out much about who are the musicians/dancers/artists. The video was posted on YouTube by a 15 year old Canadian who says his English isn't very good.

Canada Day: On the Move in Montreal--on Bikes

July 1 is Canada Day but it’s also moving day in Montreal. Yesterday Le Devoir had a delightful story about one young man who’s making a career moving people on bicycles, which combined the annual ritual (standard leases run from July 1 to June 30) with a light-hearted approach to life suitable for a holiday.

Julien Myette now has three bicycle-powered carts which he and two employees use for small moves. Hiring them is cheaper than hiring a truck, he says, adding that people are charmed by what he does. That includes wrestling refrigerators down stairs from third floor apartments and then peddling them to their new home.

At the same time, Montrealers appear to be taking a lot more bike rides. The new bike path in our neighborhood which connects the Université de Montréal with a major bicycle thoroughfare is getting a lot of traffic, while bike racks on shopping streets are full of bikes parked as their owners run errands. But the big news is the welcome Bixi, the rental bicycle scheme, has received. Launched officially May 12, in six weeks time 5,300 people signed up for monthly or yearly subscriptions and 150,000 individual rides had been taken, The Gazette reports. Some bikes and racks have been vandalized but so far no more than had been anticipated.

Well, you aren't going to get me on a bike any time soon (got run over by one at an impressionable age, if you have to know) but I like to see people using their muscles to get around. The Walkable City should also be the Bikeable City.