Valley of Genius

The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley, as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made it Boom

by Adam Fisher

An oral history about Silicon Valley gleaned from over 200 interviews, chopped up and re-organized by topic, making it read like a group chat.

The result is an insider's perspective, racy and insightful, its only drawback the number of times you'll have to refer to the 28-page Cast of Characters at the back of the book. Published in 2018, it logs in at 494 pages and includes 16 pages of colour photos.

Apple and Steve Jobs get the most coverage with seven chapters, Atari is next with three, and Google with two. Adding a gossipy flavour are mentions of George Lucas, Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Joss Wheedon, Wavy Gravy, R.U. Serious, the Duke of URL, and the names of people who attended the Stanford memorial service for Steve Jobs (and those who didn't).

Xerox PARC
"Everybody says Steve Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC. He didn't, Bill Gates did."

Atari
In 1981 the company's gross was more than the entire movie business in Hollywood. At one point they had 10,000 employees but only 200 by 1984.

"It was like the fall of Saigon. People were dropping equipment into the trunks of their cars from the second story."

Apple
The Apple I was "mostly made with parts from Atari."

General Magic
Despite the company's failure, "iPhones, social media, electronic commerce, it all came out of Magic."

Pixar
"But the Disney execs kept pushing us to make these [Toy Story] characters more edgy.... And so we ran into story problems along the way.... The characters, especially Woody, were just repellent. Woody was just awful, awful, awful!"

Wired
"Everyone was sleeping with everyone at Wired."

Netscape
"All of us who worked at Netscape in the early days were terrible to each other. We were all really abrasive people. We did most of our negotiation by screaming and insulting."

Cyberculture
“... about twenty-five pianos stacked against a part of the freeway, and at one point the pianos caught on fire and the Highway Patrol shut down the freeway because the flames got high enough that they were coming over the top of the freeway, fifty feet above us.”

eBay
Items offered for sale included a kidney, a rocket launcher, and someone's virginity.

Google
“You show up in a suit? You're not getting hired.”

Napster
“Napster was the first case where you've got young founders, and the VCs came in with the 'adult supervision,' and it was an utter disaster.”

iPod
It “freed Apple from the PC wars.”

Facebook
“Zuckerberg's first business cards read, I'm CEO...bitch.”

iPhone
“We're not making a phone. We're making a laptop killer.”

Twitter
“It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine -- and fell in.”

Steve Jobs 
His last words: “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!”

Yellowknife: A Novel Trip Through the Absurd

Yesterday a friend kindly sent me a recent review of my novel, Yellowknife. Written by Grace Guy, it appeared in the August 16, 2019, edition of the Yellowknifer, a newspaper published in Yellowknife, the capital of either the Yukon or the Northwest Territories, depending on your point of view. Here are a few excepts:

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this book was to read. Written in the snappy, fast-paced, and detail-oriented way I find familiar from mystery or spy novels, Yellowknife: A Novel brings an international flavour to the local, combining the wild fantasies that some Southerners have of the North –- people cross-country skiing down Franklin Avenue to go to work –- with some more familiar exploration of the Yellowknife homeless community and the inescapable bureaucracy.

Told in four parts and spanning the separation of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife: A Novel twists the absurd perceptions some people have of the North with the truth, making the novel feel like it was set in a fantasy version of Yellowknife as opposed to the real thing. For example, there is a moment from Moyeg G. Vassanji's 2006 novel Nostalgia in which a character remarks that he is from “Yellowknife, Yukon Territory.” These odd “Nostalgia moments” are so common in Yellowknife: A Novel that it makes them feel intentional and adds a surreal quality to the novel.

Most of the novel is hilarious, usually because of the odd situations and dialogue instead of specific jokes being made, while at the same time having moments that are astonishingly beautiful or strange, making this mixed-bag of a book worth reading – both as someone who grew up here, and as someone re-discovering the history of the North.

Welcome to Lagos

Several people in the Niger Delta are thrown together by chance. Two of them are army deserters, Chike and Yemi, unwilling to participate in violence against innocent people.

They encounter a boy with an AK47. He belongs to a militant group fighting for a share of Nigerian oil profits. His name is Fineboy and he is keen to be a radio presenter.

They are joined by two women, Isoken and Oma, one a young hairdresser fleeing the fighting near her village, the other fleeing her abusive husband.

The five of them form an uneasy alliance and travel by bus to Lagos where they end up sleeping under a bridge. By chance they discover a secret underground apartment, uninhabited but fully furnished. One night the owner shows up, a high-ranking government official named Sandayo. He too is in flight. Learning that he was about to be sacked and disgusted with government corruption, he absconded with ten million dollars.

The story takes a delightful turn when the group, after taking Sandayo prisoner, decide to spend the money on much-needed supplies for schools. Information is leaked to a local journalist, the story shifts to London where the BBC get involved, and a pompous newscaster is sent with a crew to Lagos.

I enjoyed the novel most when the focus was on the original five characters and the tumultuous day-to-day life in Lagos: the sights and sounds, the snippets from a newspaper that head the Lagos chapters, and especially the pidgin spoken by many. When Yemi, who has found work as a traffic warden, is asked where he learned the moves he makes while directing traffic, he replies:

“Nah me teach myself. I dey learn some new moves I go soon display.” 
“Chike doesn't see to dance,” Sandayo said.
“No o. You dey look him face think he's a small boy but inside nah old man.”

The result is a rich tapestry of life in contemporary Nigeria, as hinted at by the cover. If you take a close look at the hoarding, you'll see next to the author's name, Chibundu Onuzo, a thumbnail of the author herself.


BBC has a website in Nigerian pidgin.

Pushkin's Button

Russia's greatest poet received a fatal wound in a duel with a man who had been flirting with his wife. Yet such a bald statement fails to convey the byzantine events surrounding Pushkin's death.

D'Anthes

A handsome but semi-literate Frenchman with "a merry disposition, loose tongue, and ready wit." He was also "a tenacious and zealous flirt" who "preferred targeting married women." Above all he was an "impeccable inexhaustible dancer."

He was also lax in his duties as a cavalry officer, being “cited 44 times for lateness, unexcused absences, and other breaches of discipline.”

Baron Heeckeren

The Dutch ambassador took a liking to d'Anthes, supporting him financially and taking the unusual step of adopting him, even though d'Anthes's father was still living and they were not estranged. Subsequently Heeckeren made him his heir.

Described as "polished and shrewd” with "an elastic idea of truth," the Dutch ambassador's name after Pushkin's death became "synonymous with iniquity and deicide.”

Natalya

Pushkin was 36 when he died, his wife Natalya 24. Though she had given birth to four children, she was still the most beautiful woman in Petersburg and loved to dance. She was considered by many to be shallow and flighty.

Though it's true she and d'Anthes had been flirting, such behaviour at the time it was not considered improper. Pushkin on his deathbed told her, “None of this is your fault.”

Pushkin

Where d'Anthes was tall and blond, Pushkin was short and dark, the great-grandson of an African who came to Russia as a boy.

Vain, proud, aloof, volatile, and quick to take offence, Pushkin had already been involved in numerous duels and challenges. On one occasion he famously ate cherries out of a hat while waiting for his opponent to fire.

"A man under permanent special surveillance," he persisted in defying strict sartorial rules by wearing a coat with a missing button, an act that the author of Pushkin's Button says is hard not to see as "a mocking symbolic statement."

The Letter

The attention that d'Anthes paid to Natalya did not go unnoticed and became the subject of gossip, which Pushkin chose to ignore until he and several of his friends received a letter awarding him a cuckold certificate. The sender's identity is not known with certainty, but it is generally agreed that without the letters the duel would never have taken place.

Pushkin issued a challenge to d'Anthes, then withdrew it when d'Anthes agreed to marry Natalya's sister. A marriage ensued but the flirtatious behaviour between d'Anthes and Natalya continued.

Pushkin brought the matter to a head by writing an offensive letter to Heeckeren, accusing him of pimping for d'Anthes. If Heeckeren took the bait and challenged Pushkin, it would imply that d'Anthes was craven. This forced d'Anthes to issue his own challenge, which was exactly what Pushkin desired.

The Duel

A lane 20 paces in length was cleared in the snow. The first shot was fired by d'Anthes. Pushkin fell but managed to return fire, striking d'Anthes and knocking him down. The wound however was not serious. It was said that a button on his clothing deflected Pushkin's bullet. Pushkin's was a belly wound, and it took several days for him to die in extreme agony.

Pushkin's death is foreshadowed in Eugene Onegin and the short story "The Shot."

The Court Marshal

D'Anthes, Pushkin, and Pushkin's second were found guilty and sentenced to death. The judgment was a formality. Instead, d'Anthes was stripped of his rank and ejected from Russia. In Pushkin's case, the ruling was "a farcical black comedy," his hanging suspended "on account of death."

Heeckeren was recalled without being offered another posting.

Serena Vitale

The author is an Italian professor of Russian literature. The book was first published in Italian in 1995. The English translation by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild appeared 1999.

Pushkin's Button is packed with excerpts from contemporary correspondence imparting an immediacy to the story, and the author uses a engaging personal style, making such comments as:

• For the first time we feel a twinge of pity for d'Anthes... 
• A mischievous urge inclines us to consider... 
• We dissolve in laughter, unable to read on. 
• And here we were wracking our brains! 
• Instead of giving up let us reread the invaluable text yet again...

Grey Owl

Born an Englishman, he came alone to Canada at the age of 16. From that point on, he constantly tinkered with his identity and seldom went by his real name, Archie Belaney. He was a poseur, a bigamist, and a drunkard, but what he is best known for is his role as a conservationist.

He wrote four books, three of which appear in this volume, Collected Works of Grey Owl:

The Men of the Last Frontier (1931)
Pilgrims of the Wild (1934)
Sajo and the Beaver People (1935)

Sajo is a children's book. The rest -- including his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) -- are memoirs that fall somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, for much of what he wrote about himself was made up. 

The book I enjoyed most in Collected Works is Pilgrims of the Wild, the first half of which is about the beaver kits that he and Anahareo adopted. He touched upon them in a chapter of Men of the Wild Frontier, but in his second book the writing is much more assured and a masterpiece of nature writing. His portrayal of the kits is tender enough to melt anyone's heart.

Biography

From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (1990) by Donald B. Smith is the definitive biography, its name derived from the title of second chapter in Men of the Last Frontier. The footnotes alone take up 70 pages, yet it's not a tedious book.

Earlier contributions came from Thomas Raddall, who wrote a perceptive essay in his book Footsteps on Old Floors (1968), and from Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's publisher, who wrote Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (1973).

It was Dickson who arranged two wildly successful reading tours in England. Grey Owl was a gifted speaker, as was no more evident than when he gave a command performance for British royalty, and which so delighted young Princess Elizabeth that, as the talk drew to a close, she jumped up from her seat, clapped her hands, and urged him to continue. He took his leave of the king by touching his shoulder and saying, “Goodbye, brother.”

Anahareo

Anahareo deserves to be more well-known. She persuaded Grey Owl to save the kittens, McGinty and McGinnis, who so won their hearts that Grey Owl began his crusade to preserve the beaver, which had nearly been trapped out during the Depression. It was not until after his death in 1938 that she learned he was English.

Her memoir My Life with Grey Owl was published in 1940 by Lovat Dickson, who asked her to avoid mentioning the issue of Grey Owl's identity. Later this bothered her enough that she took to visiting libraries and tearing out the first chapter of the book.

In 1972 she published a revised version, Devil in Deerskins. In it she writes: "When finally I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that I had been married to a ghost."

Though wounded by the deception, she defended his legacy as a conservationist. At first glance the book's title seems like a rebuke, but in fact is a tribute, as Grey Owl planned to use that title for a final book in which he planned to reveal the truth about himself.

Later she married a Swedish count and in 1983, two years before her death, she received the Order of Canada.

Images

Collected Works, Land of Shadows, Wilderness Man, and Devil in Deerskins all contain several pages of B&W plates.

Two vintage film clips, both named "Beaver People," can be viewed at the National Film Board's website. One, at approximately 9 minutes in length, shows Anahareo interacting with beavers. The other, at approximately 16 minutes long, shows only Grey Owl and the beavers.

A 1999 movie, Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, was less than memorable, in part due to the miscasting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl.

Casterologia

Many years ago I wrote a whimsical short story about a beaver family that meets up with Grey Owl and McGinnis. Entitled "Casterologia," it was published in the 1997 Spring issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, along with this delightful illustration by James Beveridge.

The story concludes with a list of references, only one of which is made up:

Dallman, J.E. 1968. Giant Beaver from a Post-Woodfordian Lake. J. Mammal. 50: 826-830.

Heter, E.W. 1950. Transplanting Beaver by Airplane and Parachute. J Wildli. Manage. 14: 143-147.

Huey, S.W. and W.H. Wolfrum. 1956. Beaver-Trout Relations. Prog, Fish-cult. 18: 70-74.

Martin, H. 1892. Casterologia: Or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. Wm. Drysdale Co., Montreal.

Owl, G. 1933. Sajo and the Beaver People. Macmillan, Toronto.

Studios, U. 1957-63. Leave it to Beaver. CBS and ABC.

Shakespeare, W. 1603. Hamlet, Prince of Beavers. Ling & Trundell, London.

Yellowknife

Recently I came across some promotional material that accompanied the publication of my novel Yellowknife, and liked it enough to revisit it here.

Oblomov

Usually I disregard the blurbs plastered on the covers and inside pages of books, but two on this one deserve notice.

Tolstoy on the front cover: "I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it."

And Chekhov on the back: "[Goncharov is] ten heads above me in talent."

Oblomov is a Russian couch potato, a flabby landowner who seldom leaves home and spends most of his day dozing in bed. Meek and gullible, he is an easy mark for his friend Tarantiev, who is as grasping and venal as any character in fiction.

His manservant Zakhar, who has dressed him since boyhood, is lazy, clumsy, petty, and loyal. Though he constantly complains about Oblomov, he defends him passionately if anyone else speaks ill of him.

Stolz is Oblomov's one true friend. Active, vigorous, hard-working, and well-travelled, he constantly urges Oblomov to get up off his butt and introduces him to a young woman named Olga. Love blooms and for a time Oblomov is transformed, but his inability to manage his own affairs dooms the relationship.

Though Olga ends up marrying Stolz, both remain devoted to Oblomov for his innocence and purity of heart.

Oblomov's Dream

One of the finest passages in the book is Oblomov's dream of his pampered youth and the simple happy lives of peasants on his family's estate. It describes an idyllic picture of Russian rural life.

Since Stolz and Oblomov grew up together, we also get a picture of Stolz's early home life and how different it was from Oblomov's. Stolz was taught to be self-reliant from an early age.

Analysis

It seemed obvious that the novel was intended as a criticism of the slothfulness of Russian nobility. In an Afterword novelist Mikhail Shishkin indicates this was the usual Soviet interpretation, but argues otherwise.

He states that the marriage of Stolz and Olga is doomed because Stolz is too preoccupied with material advancement. The part-German Stolz lacks the Russian soul that Oblomov and Olga share. Oblomov resists Stolz's advice because it is directed only at personal advancement. There is nothing noble or ideal in it, no higher cause to serve.

Translation

The translation by Marian Schwartz is a recent one and based on the 1862 version, whereas previous ones were based on an earlier edition.

The Jungle and the Damned

Published in 1952, explorer/adventurer Hassoldt Davis describes an expedition in French Guiana backed by France, UNESCO, the Explorers' Club, the New York Botanical Club, and others.

The book is divided into three sections roughly equal in length. "The Damned" comes first, and describes the infamous penal colony of Devil's Island, where Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned, and which was popularized by a book and film called Papillon.

The remaining two sections describe the ascent by canoe of the Maroni River, which forms the border between French Guiana and Suriname. The expedition's goal was to reach the Tumuc-Humacs, a mountain range near the border with Brazil where El Dorado was once thought to be located.

The book includes a map, 16 pages of black-and-white photos, and a useful introduction by Lawrence Millman, who says that Davis had "a passion for the bizarre and the grotesque, a passion that was to become one of his trademarks."

Davis mentions lepers and vampire bats, pirhanas (whom they frequently ate "to their suprise"), a vomiting contest, a test of manhood involving wasps one-and-a-half inches long, the singing of anacondas and an encounter with one that was 27 feet long.

Although the expedition did not quite reach the Tumuc-Humacs, it succeeded in its secondary goal of producing a film that was later released by Warner Brothers as Jungle Terror.

The book sent me scampering to Wikipedia where I learned that French Guiana, once a colony, is now a part of France and the European Union, and the location of a French and European spaceport. The Euro is its official currency.

Hemingway

There are some obvious parallels between Davis and Hemingway. Both were heavy-drinking Americans who thirsted after risky adventure.

There are also some parallels between this book and The Green Hills of Africa. Both are written in the first person and set within a few degrees of the equator, though on different continents. Both men were accompanied by their second wives, and both marriages later came to an end. Davis drank cognac, Hemingway whiskey and German beer. 

Unsurprisingly, they knew each other. However -- as Millman points out -- Hemingway "went to great lengths to prove that he was a war hero," while Davis actually was one. During WWII he fought with the Free French army in Africa and Europe, and was awarded the Legion of Honour and twice the Croix de guerre.

The cover shows a detail from "Tropical Forest" by Henri Rousseau.

Figures in a Landscape

Essays 2001-2016

Aspects of Paul Theroux's writing that I've always enjoyed are his astute observations, his acerbic jabs, and the vast range of his reading.

A self-confessed graphomaniac, he opens the book with an obscure quote from the bible (Habakkuk) and towards the end mentions a favourite book, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents.

His command of language is impressive without being pedantic. "Overegged" (used twice) is a delightful new word I learned. Its meaning was easy to guess at, or so I thought until trying it out on my wife. She figured it had something to do with a failed recipe.

Writers

Approximately a third of the 30 pieces are about writers -- Henry David Thoreau, Hunter Thompson, Joseph Conrad, E.B. White, Paul Bowles, Somerset Maugham, Harper Lee -- as well as:
 
Oliver Sacks - a brilliant man whose oddities make him resemble some of his patients. Theroux describes a walk around the streets of New York with him and one of his patients, a gifted artist with Tourette syndrome. Theroux observes Sacks observing how the patient interacts with others, including Theroux.

Graham Greene - one of the longest and most interesting entries consists of three articles grouped under the general heading of "Greeneland." One is about Greene himself, while the others focus on two of his books, Journey without Maps and The Comedians.

Muriel Spark - after reading this piece I rushed out and bought one of her novels.

Georges Simenon - predicted that he would win the "Swedish lottery" and was outraged when Camus did. Theroux remarks that there are interesting similarities in their work.

Travel

The core of the travel articles are set in Africa and include "Stanley: The Ultimate African Explorer," and Theroux's observations about Greene's African experiences.

In "The Rock Star's Burden" Theroux blasts aid projects, believing they do more harm than good, and takes specific aim at Bono's involvement, ridiculing "his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a ten-gallon hat, which he frequently talks through." (Dervla Murphy, in an Irish Times review of Figures in a Landscape, agrees with this assessment.) And when Theroux sees Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Sudan, "the image that sprang to my mind was of Tarzan and Jane." These views are dramatized in his novel, The Lower River.

Another accusatory piece is "The Seizures in Zimbabwe," which first appeared as the epilogue to the paperback edition of Dark Star Safari. It refers to farmers being forced off their farms and the country's resulting economic collapse. "Seizure" in this respect has a double meaning.

Autobiographical Musings

The last piece in the book is entitled "The Trouble with Autobiography," in which he writes:

I have no intention of writing an autobiography, and as for allowing others to practice what Kipling called "the higher cannibalism" on me (Henry James called biographers "post-mortem exploiters"), I plan to frustrate them by putting obstacles in their way.

He then gives a brief but interesting survey of autobiographies by major writers, noting their evasions, omissions, and falsifications, but at the end confesses, "The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel." The book's final sentence: "Therefore, when my Copperfield beckoned, I wrote Mother Land."

In fact, there are many items of an autobiographical nature in the book, and include pieces on living in England and Hawaii, raising geese, collecting art, travelling in dangerous places, a narrow escape from a sexual predator in New York, and "My Life as a Reader."

The article on England (where Theroux lived for 18 years as an official alien) veers between the hilarious and the horrific (riots, bombings). "I learned to smile the ambiguous alien smile when English people said, 'America's so violent.'

One of the longest articles in the book concerns his father who, though born in Massachusetts, spoke French with a Quebecois accent (much like Kerouac, I assume). Theroux incorporated aspects of him in Allie Fox, the protagonist of The Mosquito Coast.

This book is Theroux's third collection of essays. The dust jacket photo from his first collection, Sunrise with Sea Monsters: Travels and Discoveries 1964-1984, is below left. The one from this book is below right.

Wilderness Tips

The title hooked me. I immediately wanted to see Atwood's take on such a Canadian subject, especially given her close association with the outdoors. In Negotiating with the Dead she writes:

At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

I found another of her books, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, to be a useful companion. It consists of four lectures she gave at Oxford in 1991, the same year Wilderness Tips was published. The lectures are on Sir John Franklin's last expedition, Grey Owl, the Wendigo, and women in CanLit.

Wilderness Tips contains 10 stories that portray a society morally adrift. All take place mainly in Toronto or in nearby cottage country.  The three I liked best all have an outdoor connection.

Wilderness Tips

There's a passing reference to the title story in Strange Things. Atwood says it includes a character who, like Grey Owl, wants to be an Indian, but in fact he's only a minor figure. The central character is a refugee named George who comes from a strife-torn European country. He speaks several languages but is still learning the finer points of English, as when he puzzles over a book with the name as the title of the story:

"Wilderness" he knew, but "tips"? He was not immediately sure whether this word was a verb or a noun. There were asparagus tips, as he knew from menus, and when he was getting into the canoe that afternoon in his slippery leather-soled city shoes Prue had said, "Be careful, it tips."

The setting is a summer cottage belonging to the family of George's wife. The cottage has the same name as a popular 19th-century Canadian novel, Wacousta, which Atwood discusses in her Grey Owl lecture. The title character in that book is an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian in order to wreak revenge on his enemies.

George has come to Canada not to dress up as an Indian or to seek revenge. Rather, his masquerade as a charming and successful businessman hides a sinister past. The name he goes by, "George," is only an approximation of his difficult-to-pronounce given name.

George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he's been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities.

The Age Of Lead

The main character has the same given name as Franklin's wife, Jane. She is watching a TV show about his last expedition. Forensic analysis of sailors buried on Beechey Island in the High Arctic revealed they were suffering from lead poisoning, the source apparently the solder used to seal their tinned food supply. It muddled the thinking of everyone on the expedition and contributed to its demise.

Jane's life has some disquieting parallels with the lost expedition. Her travels resemble the confused wanderings of the crew, and her material possessions are not unlike the useless items the sailors dragged along with them in their final overland trek and then discarded. Many of her friends are dying.

It was as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent, a thing like colourless gas, scentless and invisible, so that any germ that happened along could invade their bodies, take them over.

"The Age of Lead" was inspired by the forensic discoveries described in Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger. In 2004 a new edition appeared with an introduction by Atwood and a quote from "The Age of Lead." In 2015 a book co-authored by Beattie, Franklin's Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus, includes quotes from Strange Things.

In Moving Targets, Atwood describes a visit she made to Beechey Island and how she carried away a pebble that she subsequently buried in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park in Toronto. MacEwen was a friend and author of a verse drama, "Terror and Erebus," which was broadcast on CBC Radio.

Of all the stories in this volume, "The Age of Lead" made the most appearances in magazines before being reprinted in Wilderness Tips: twice in the UK and once each in Canada, Germany, Australia and the US.  

Death by Landscape

My favourite story in the book begins by invoking the Group of Seven, whose landscapes are not done "in the old tidy European sense." They rarely include people or animals, and are often so stylized they are almost abstract.

The story centres around two girls attending a summer camp that encourages faux-Indian rituals. It's called Camp Manitou, and before a canoe trip they are urged to bring back "much wampum" and "many scalps."

Looking back on this, Lois, finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why. She knows for instance that they should not even be called Indians, and that they have enough worries without other people taking their names and dressing up as them. It has all been a form of stealing.

While on the canoe trip, Lois's friend disappears without a trace. The last that is heard of her is a shout: "Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon. Short, like a dog's bark."

Possible explanations include suicide, foul play, and a bear attack. Another might be the Wendigo, a mythical monster discussed in Strange Things.

I doubt that I'll be able to look at another Group of Seven landscape without thinking of this story. 

The Other Stories

The ones I like best are:

"Isis in Darkness" - A man falls under the spell of a brilliant but mysterious poet whose work makes him feel “his own careful talent shrivelling to the size of a dried bean.” He ends up toiling fruitlessly in academia while she accumulates fame until her final unsettling appearance. (It's been suggested that MacEwen was the model for the poet.)

"The Bog Man" -  Another exhumed man, this time from a bog in Scotland. A woman has taken as a lover her archeology prof, "the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid."

"Uncles" - The daughter of a war widow works her way up in a newspaper and endures snide sexual innuendo from male colleagues. After she makes the jump to TV and achieves fame, she is attacked in a book by the only former colleague she respected. The story ends with an imagined scene of incomprehensible misogyny.