Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill: Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys

As his 90th anniversary of publishing juvenile or children’s literature fast approaches June 1, author Franklin W. Dixon remains indefatigable. Mind you that could be because Franklin W. Dixon is a pseudonym for the many Franklin W. Dixons there have been over the last nine decades writing Hardy Boys books.

The Hardy Boys series, published by Grosset & Dunlap, began on June 1, 1927, with three titles by ghostwriter Leslie McFarlane, writing under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill. McFarlane, a Canadian-born journalist, wrote the first 15 or so volumes of the series, establishing the writing style that made the books so successful. Early volumes were published in a cloth hardcover format with colour dust jackets. In 1962, the series switched to a newer cover format with the cover art printed directly on the cover and no dust jacket. In 1979, Simon & Schuster acquired the rights for all new Hardy Boys books.

The son of a school principal, McFarlane was raised in Haileybury, Ontario, located on the northwest shore of Lake Timiskaming, 150 kilometres north of North Bay, and established and named after his English alma mater, Haileybury College, by Charles C. Farr, who had come to the area six years earlier as an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

McFarlane became a freelance writer shortly after high school. He and his family moved to Whitby, Ontario, right next door to where I grew up in Oshawa, in 1936. In fact, McFarlane died in Oshawa in September 1977, at the age of 74.  Before his Hardy Boys non-fame, McFarlane worked as a newspaper reporter in Sudbury, Ontario, Toronto, and briefly in the mid-1920s, in Springfield, Massachusetts as a staff reporter at the Springfield Republican.

Leslie McFarlane is the father of Brian McFarlane, who has written many books himself, and is best remembered as a commentator on CBC Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts between 1964 and 1991, and as an author of almost 100 hockey books, selling more than 1.3 million copies. Leslie McFarlane started writing the Hardy Boys books when his son Brian was around four-years-old.

It was while living in the United States that he replied to an advertisement placed by the Stratemeyer Syndicate for a children’s book ghostwriter. That children’s book would be the Hardy Boys series, which continues to be published. While it’s not altogether clear whether Bayport, said to be located on Barmet Bay, a horseshoe-shaped inlet three miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and the fictional home of youthful sleuths Frank and Joe Hardy, and their parents, Fenton Hardy, a private investigator and retired New York City Police Department (NYPD) detective-lieutenant, who worked in the 71st precinct, and their stay-at-home, Laura, is supposed to be further located in the State of New York (the most likely choice) or New Jersey, or perhaps the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is clear the series has an enduring resilience and lasting popularity, not tied to its statehood or who Franklin W. Dixon is this book. The books have been translated into 50 languages.

In 1905, Edward Stratemeyer, a prolific writer in his own right, had founded a network of freelance writers and editors, after realizing he had far more ideas for stories and series than he could write on his own. Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. Stratemeyer Syndicate’s central aim was to produce a very large number of books at the lowest possible cost.

“The industry that churns out children’s books has changed surprisingly little in the last century,” Daniel A. Gross, a  Boston-based writer and public radio producer, argued in a piece for The Atlantic, “The Mystery of the Hardy Boys and the Invisible Authors” (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/hardy-boys-nancy-drew-ghostwriters/394022/), published two years ago in May 2015.

“The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple,” Gross wrote. “They are still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers, a business model that is central to the Internet age.”

Having signed away any royalties without regret, McFarlane was paid a flat fee of $100 per book for most of his Hardy Boys books, which he was churning out in prodigious numbers during the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression, although still wondering when his agent would be able to send another cheque so he might buy more coal for the furnace.  A well-preserved Hardy Boys first edition is now worth about $1,500.

McFarlane eventually moved back to Canada from the United States, working as a writer, producer and director for the National Film Board (NFB) in Montreal, the CBC and, for a time, after moving to Toronto, where he was a friend of actor Lorne Greene, working as a scriptwriter on the 1960s TV hit, Bonanza. As part of the National Film Board in Montreal, he wrote and directed documentaries and short dramas, including the 1951 documentary Royal Journey, Here’s Hockey, a 1953 documentary featuring Montreal Canadiens’ star Jean Beliveau. He also wrote the documentary titled Herring Hunt, nominated for an Academy Award in 1953 for Live Action Short Film.

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Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ‘tail of the devil’ and ‘Smoke of Satan’ and the disintegration of the ‘Catholic world’

“The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world,” said Blessed Pope Paul VI on Oct. 13, 1977 in a formal address marking the 60th anniversary of the sixth and final Fatima apparition – the “Miracle of the Sun” – at Fatima, Portugal on Oct. 13, 1917. “The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Blessed Pope Paul VI’s remarks on Satan indwelling even the highest levels of the Catholic Church were reported on the following day – Oct. 14, 1977 – in the Milan-based daily Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

It was not the first time Blessed Pope Paul VI had sounded such a warning. More than five years earlier, in what is now known as his “Smoke of Satan” homily delivered on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, the Pope gave the sermon that remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30  “porporati” (cardinals) present, including  Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,  dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was  delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B.,  a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the  El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of  the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring  on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial  well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full  panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

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Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living  50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places.  “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association.  “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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This one’s for you, Christopher Heard

I have never accepted a Facebook invitation for an app. In fact, just recently, I have blocked Zynga Bingo, BINGO Blitz, Criminal Case and Slotomania Slot Machines, although I admit, Criminal Case is kind of tempting to check out . Philosophically, it’s not that I have a problem with them. They’re no better or worse, I suppose, than a myriad other things you can do on Facebook. They’re just not my thing.

Bingo? Well, my only connection to bingo in recent years has been working some monthly ones as fundraisers at St. Lawrence Parish Hall here in Thompson with my brothers from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961. Hey, you can’t be Catholic, right, and have no connection to bingo? Before I joined the Knights of Columbus, the last bingo games I had been to were circa 1972 and 1973 when I was 15 and 16 years old, working for Len Ovenden and Doris Metcalfe, selling refreshments on the wooden flooring over the hockey ice surface at the old Civic Auditorium in Oshawa, Ontario. In those days, bingo players used plastic chips, not daubers, a fact I didn’t discover until 2013. It wasn’t as good a gig entertainment-wise as working OHA Major Junior A hockey games – where we worked the first two periods only – so I could watch with undivided attention the Oshawa Generals play the often crucial third period – for free.

But bingo players were big spenders (as were women at wrestling when wrestling made occasional appearances in Oshawa in the early 1970s … Jody Hamilton, the American masked wrestler, who wrestled solo at the time under the ring name The Assassin, once either deliberately or accidentally [probably deliberately] kicked over a whole tray of pop in waxed cups with lids, I had sitting on the floor, as I served another patron, en route to the ring.  His manager promptly but discretely bought them all with a generous tip. Just a bit of unscripted show biz for the fans.)

As well, while I “like” posts and photographs that I spot on Facebook with some frequency, and even comment on some of them occasionally, I rarely accept out of the blue invitations to “like” a particular page, but there are exceptions. Like this morning when I got an invitation to “like” Christopher Heard’s,  The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, which you can find a link to here at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Suite-Life-The-Magic-and-Mystery-of-Hotel-Living/231463750263919?notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite

Mind you, in the interest of transparency, I have to tell you Christopher Heard, an accomplished author and film historian, is my second cousin. While I haven’t seen Christopher, who is about six years younger than me, in about 40 years now, we both grew up in Oshawa, and crossed paths at family events, often at my Aunt Norma and Uncle Ray Seager’s place, which had an above-ground pool. What I remember was Chris was a tall and quiet kid. Not how you would describe (quiet) my five Seager first cousins, who were a fun-loving rambunctious lot! Me? I was probably somewhere between those two poles. A bit on the quiet side, but not above getting up to a bit of mischief, especially in my teens and 20s, as Joanne, David, Sharon, and Maurice Leveille, Joanne’s husband, could attest to and no doubt happily would if the occasion was right. The recurring common elements of various escapades seemed to revolve around motorcycles and girls.

Christopher Heard’s dad, Bill Heard, was my sacrament of confirmation sponsor on May 8, 1968 at St. Mary of the People Roman Catholic Church, built 11 years earlier in 1957, when Bishop Francis Marrocco, still an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto, confirmed me. Bishop Marrocco was named bishop of the Diocese of Peterborough just over a month later on June 10, 1968. My confirmation name is James. Bill Heard was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.

What I only learned a couple of years ago, at least that I recall, from Marie Heard, the family genealogist, was that my father, William Barker, himself a convert from the United Church of Canada to Catholicism, had been Bill Heard’s confirmation sponsor years earlier.

As I wrote here not so long ago on Feb. 20 in a post headlined, “Newsgathering travels: From Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories to Churchill, Manitoba to Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and a few places in between” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/newsgathering-travels-from-tuktoyaktuk-in-the-northwest-territories-to-churchill-manitoba-to-middle-musquodoboit-harbour-nova-scotia-and-a-few-places-in-between/),  “As a journalist, I always enjoyed getting out of the office or newsroom to travel whenever the opportunity presented itself and I could talk my way into a trip somewhere. Newspaper travel meant someone was spending money to send me somewhere, hence the story was usually interesting….” I’ve been able to write about polar bears and beluga whales in Churchill, after a boat trip out on Hudson Bay into the territorial waters of Nunavut, and up the Seal River; travel to The Pas to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the episcopal ordination of Archbishop Murray Chatlain, as the sixth bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas; take Manitoba road trips into Cross Lake, Nelson House and Snow Lake for stories and photographs, while former Churchill riding Liberal MP Tina Keeper, and  Kevin Carlson, then with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO), were kind enough to let me fly into Tadoule Lake and Lac Brochet with them on a day trip; fly into Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N in the Northwest Territories from Inuvik on an 18-seat  Twin Otter for a story; drive for almost three hours through continuous freezing rain out to the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) Strait Area Campus in Port Hawkesbury to hear then Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm talk about a proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project to be located on the Strait of Canso; as well as more pleasant drives on assignment in Nova Scotia, such as one on a balmy Maritime spring evening into Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County.

Pity my poor cousin, Christopher Heard, then. While I was traipsing around in such Canadian glamor destinations as Tuktoyaktuk and Middle Musquodoboit Harbour, chasing stories, Chris was making something of a name for himself as a luxury hotel living Toronto writer ensconced comfortably as writer-in-residence at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel! The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, pun, of course, intended, was published in 2011 by Dundurn Press and is an exploration of hotel culture.  As Mark Medley noted in a Nov. 13, 2010 National Post story on Heard (http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/13/the-royal-york-is-haunted-and-author-christopher-heard-should-know-he-lives-there/), “living in the Royal York, one of the poshest hotels in the city, means you encounter a curious assortment of people. Since moving in, Heard has run into Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Slash, Ricky Gervais, Martin Sheen and the Dalai Lama, among others.”

Heard has also written a number of other books, including celebrity biographies on subjects such as Britney Spears, Kiefer Sutherland, Johnny Depp, John Woo and Mickey Rourke.

He got his big break 20 years ago in the mid-1990s working as a movie reviewer for CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts, when he was sent to New York to interview Kapuskasing, Ontario-born Titanic director James Cameron. In an Oct. 18, 2011 story, Heard reportedly told Matt Bone of the Toronto-based online entertainment magazine, The GATE (http://www.thegate.ca/spotlight/interviews/010958/how-christopher-heard-became-a-biographer-to-some-of-hollywoods-elite/),  “We had this wonderful conversation in New York, Cameron and I. When I got back to Toronto, I checked my stuff and the tapes for the interview weren’t there. “The tapes of the other people were there, Katherine Bigelow and all these other people but Cameron’s wasn’t there. So I panicked, as that was the main person I was there to interview. So I called New York and said, ‘Jeez you forgot to put the tape in,’ and it turned out that Cameron had enjoyed the chat so much, he had kept the tapes aside to make a copy so he could use that tape in his corporate video for his company Lightstorm Entertainment. So when the show aired, Random House Doubleday publishers called me and said ‘nobody has written a book about James Cameron, would you consider that?’ I’d always wanted to be an author but I had grown up such a painfully shy and introverted kid, that’s not something you think would be possible. I signed the contract to do the Cameron book [Dreaming Aloud: The Films of James Cameron], and as it was released [1997] at the same time as the film Titanic, the success of Titanic sort of dragged the book up with it, and Random House said ‘whatever you want to do with your next book, you can have it’.'”

Heard, who met and interviewed actor Leonard Nimoy once (in a hotel room, of course), talked to CTV News last week about why the death of the actor, who played Spock on Star Trek, at the age of 83 on Feb. 27, touched so many people. You can watch a clip of the interview here at: http://video.theloop.ca/watch/nimoy-touched-so-many-people/4084457360001#.VPYM-Y5LOld

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22