Geoff Powter is a veteran climber who was also a practising psychologist in Canmore for many years. “When I was counselling, I heard time and time again that people coming in were thankful they had a climber-therapist who they could talk to because they hadn’t had so much luck with ‘civilian’ counsellors,” he says. “Why? Because in their minds, the people they were talking to were criticizing mountain sports and trying to get them to explore things like leaving the sport, or questioning the community’s cultural norms around death as part of the game.”
That disconnect is part of the reason therapy hasn’t traditionally been part of the culture of mountain sports, even though the risk of loss and trauma is baked in. Barry Blanchard, a climber and long-time professional mountain guide in the Canadian Rockies who’s one of the co-founders of Mountain Muskox, never heard about mental health care from the older mountain guides who mentored him. Blanchard, now 63, first found his way to therapy in 1986, after an accident killed two of his clients on a guided trip. The anchor holding him and his group on a steep snow slope sheared through the snow, sending them sliding. Their long fall brought an avalanche down with them. “I was probably one of the first mountain guides to be involved in therapy,” he says. He only wound up in counselling because a close friend connected him to a psychiatrist who had been a climber himself.
“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.
“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”
But in February 2017, the media reported on a recent paper by Lin Cheng-Horng, director of the Taiwan Volcano Observatory, that argued there was a magma chamber beneath Datun – the hallmark of an active volcano. Downtown Taipei, with its skyscrapers, bars and restaurants, is just 15km (9 miles) away. Five million people in Taipei and New Taipei cities are well within reach of the impacts of an eruption. In a worst-case eruption scenario, hot lava could engulf residential settlements at the foot of the park, while the cities could be covered in swirling clouds of volcanic ash.
Behind the scenes, Taiwan's government swung into action. First, it ordered scientists to find out as much as they could about the volcanoes and the risks. Then, in May 2018, it tasked the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), its meteorological and forecasting agency, to work with scientists, government agencies and officials to hammer out procedures for an early warning system. It was unveiled to the public little more than two years later, in September 2020.
The food itself hardly seems worth the attention. The offerings are standards of Cantonese cuisine, with options like stir-fried tomato and eggs, sweet and sour pork, or braised beef and turnip. They are ordered cafeteria-style, by pointing or shouting one’s order to an expectant worker with a ladle. Even the name given to these establishments is as no-frills as their menus: “two dishes and rice.”
But that plainness is the point.
For many years now, I’ve left home early in the morning. I’ve walked down the street leading to the train station, crossed, gone in, come out the other side, continued another couple of blocks, and then shut myself in a room to write all day. Seven minutes of walking. In the evening, every evening, I do the same thing in reverse. I lock the door to my office, walk back through the station, arrive home, leave my small backpack with my laptop in the entranceway, greet my wife and daughter, and then we sit down to dinner, and each of us reviews our day. I’ve always spoken quite a bit without ever saying what goes on in my office.
Some nights, after dinner, we watch a movie together, chat together on the couch, invite someone over for a drink or for tea, read our books in the same room or in separate rooms. Then we go to bed, and in bed we’ve told each other the most important of things and the most insignificant, recapped the following day. Sometimes we make love, other times not, some evenings with passion, other times not, and we fall asleep holding each other or each of us on our own side.
By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake, and stories versus lies — with their often blurred boundaries — Companion Piece challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate. Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel — including Sandy's dreams and childhood memories and the terrible ordeals of a talented, steely 16th century waif — that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.
In a pandemic-ravaged and post-Brexit Britain, our narrator, Sandy Gray, who is anything but gray, character-wise, though in her present state of personal and political despondency she might well feel she is, receives an unexpected call from one Martina Pelf, formerly Martina Inglis, a university acquaintance who has recently been held for seven and a half hours at border control, an officer annoyed by her dual citizenship (“Is one country not enough for you?”), and Martina is calling to share this with Sandy, and to ask Sandy a question — and so begins Ali Smith’s 18th book, the superb novel “Companion Piece.”
King’s book is a well-calibrated celebration of “bad” taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, “The Jersey Shore,” the Cheesecake Factory, the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie and (in this book’s silkiest essay) Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist.
That King writes about these things while alluding to Sontag and Updike and Penelope and Odysseus without once seeming like she is otherwise slumming is part of her achievement.
This is John Higgs’s second book about the poet, following 2019’s manifesto, “William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever,” from which this project was spawned. That the English author, journalist and cultural historian has previously written about Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the electronic rock band the KLF and a whole host of both old- and newfangled strangeness supplied some advance notion of who his Blake might be. I was prepared for the far-out, whoa-dude version of Blake. Fortunately, Higgs dismisses the idea that Blake “took psychedelic drugs, and this was an explanation for his work,” but my expectations were not entirely misdirected.