Eric Nicol & Peter Whalley, Canada Cancelled Because of Lack of Interest

There are loads of writers in Canada doing things for the month of April.

Kim Fahner in Sudbury is posting daily reviews as photo uploads with accompanying text to her friends on Facebook. Last year Stuart Ross in Cobourg did something similar. Chaudiere Books, under the steady hand of rob mclennan in Ottawa region, is sharing a new poem every day. Olivia Chow in Toronto is making a proclamation tomorrow morning at Toronto City Council.

Things are going on, things are happening.

I live in Montreal and the digital marquee ticker tape stays in perpetual motion here as I’m sure it does across the country.

Manahil Bandukwala is at long last launching Heliotropia in Montreal tomorrow night and I am thrilled to finally get the chance to meet her.

People are talking about poetry books, sharing poems, gleefully namedropping poets, shamelessly self-promoting, hosting events, online and in-person, launching books, conducting interviews, using rules of three, really doing everything they can, without much real sense of envy, to one-up one another and the culminating effect this has overall is singular: delight.

To some, it’s no different than any other month of the year, and I would even say purports dubious rights to the claim of ‘national’—some might say it’s a patent misnomer.

But to the rest of us, it is what it is, and that is cause for celebration.

It was 1922 when T. S. Eliot, whose name spelt out contains all the letters for the phrase Así es el amor and then some (with T, H, T, N, S, T, O leftover), published The Waste Land wherein he famously wrote April is the cruellest month.

Because he was a banker and April for the Rabbit was tax season, which poets relate to big time; whereas regular nobodies are otherwise vexed by ordinary nemeses and vices such as caffeine addiction, whether the pope shits in the woods (he’s dead, so no), and mobile sports gambling.

These sorts of things poets never think about, although they feign passing interest in order to mine commoners for dress-down vernaculars to purloin and peddle off as original verse with a dismissive flick of the wrist.

So we celebrate the cruelty of the month with chiefly poetical concerns such as how to steal photographs from jwcurry without his permission (thanks spud) and trying marijuana again after years of abstinence to see if we still get hungry and paranoid when we smoke it (we do and the resulting munchies are deleterious).

You can also celebrate national poetry month in Canada in particular by griping about the Griffin shortlist then marching with us in the streets for a guillotine-forward social movement—that’s right, I know people always say it, but this time we’re gonna do things differently people.

No, wait, this post is meant for something else. What was I talking about again?

I’ve been writing for an hour now without picking a book of poetry so I’ll pick the most diametrically opposite piece of bookery I can scramble up at this hour (literally the eleventh hour of the evening) and that is Eric Nicol’s & Peter Whalley’s Canada Cancelled Because of Lack of Interest (which is so old you can read it online for free now).

It is a hard cover book from 1977 with comics and lengthy, irreverent fictitious prose elaborations on historical events and reasons for things happening in an alternative Canada that would make up for and explain the woes people had in 1977, and by extension, those woes largely relate to the woes you read in social media comments still today.

As an Anglo, even quoting one paragraph from this book about Quebec would get me kicked out of the province sur-le-champ and tout de suite, so on that note I will cite the only sentence containing all French which also happens to be one word long (phew!):

“All that is human must retrograde if
it do not advance.”
Edward Gibbon

“Merde.”
Pierre Elliott Trudeau

The concept of this work is that the Canadian identity has been found, at last!

Now we know why we have inaccessibly priced railroad prices, impossible domestic commercial flights, houses by the railroad tracks all across the country, the metric system, an unwavering loyalty to the former glory of petrol-economics, unquestionable faith in lawyers, inscrutable deference for the French language we can’t speak, the CBC in all its toxicity and fecklessness, the national arts scene and everything they’re doing, squandered potential, why clubbing baby seals disqualified us from the NHL, and I am going out on a limb to guess this last one because I spent more time looking at the funny pictures (such as the evolution of Homo canadiannus), an overbearing predilection towards consuming the ill-advised contents of canned food cans.

The cover shows one of Whalley’s illustrations, the jacket design was done by David Shaw & Associates Ltd., and the work published by Hurtig Publishers, Edmonton.

Whalley was born in Brockville, Ontario in 1921 and Nicol in Kingston in 1919.

I’m running out of time so spare me your sympathy for a moment to do some arcane comparative metrics for those in the know.

This book is better than any anthology of Calvin & Hobbes comics but wordier than any Sid Barron book and funnier than anything illustrated by Matt Groening before becoming synonymous with The Simpsons.

You might still prefer the Sid Barron “mild, isn’t it?” cat to all this rigmarole, but you can’t deny that “no parking any time except...” loses its appeal over five full-on pages of prose describing a fake future year 2000 where Quebec has succeeded in becoming independent from Canada by returning to France as a colony in trade for all of Montreal’s debt, which France quickly sours on.

Shit, I said we weren’t gonna talk about Quebec.

But for all anyone’s gripes and moans nowadays, and the constant rhetoric on places like TikTok, Reddit, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and in real life, of so-and-so apparently “destroying” Canada (usually in the past tense, so it’s already too late, very convincing rhetorical fallacy), or there being too many freedoms and not enough lawyers, guns, and money, this book is refreshingly cogent and up-to-date.

These dudes were born over a century ago and even they know it’s all bull hockey.

If people thought about what would make Canada more livable and less insufferable as much as they complained about it and the people who captain it, they’d see it’s been the same as it ever was: cheap trains, cheap planes, cheap houses, no war, no church and state, and preferably a decent brew, and maybe bring back MTV (and maybe free-to-air TV that’s not the CBC while we’re at it).

But, you know, if you really want something to complain about, you’ve gotta close the funny section and read the actual news.

Not podcasts, not Twitter, not Apple News, not TV, or what the boys told you at the job site on smoke break.

Actual paper news. Local rags, big Canadian magazines, literary journals. History, philosophy, whatever studies. And books.

Need I say anything else?

I’d say go vote but by all accounts apparently the lot of us already have. So with that I’ll just say this: good luck and good night.