Children's book too hot for U.S. publishers warmly received in Canada

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and author, has a deadline reminder in his home office. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 14, 2011

VICTORIA

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and writer, created a children’s book so outrageous, so outlandish, so controversial no American publisher dared touch it.

It does not depict nudity. It does not contain curse words. It does not include blasphemy. The love scenes, such as they are, involve males with females.

It does include a straightforward explanation for the complexity of the natural world through a simple scientific theory.

“So many of the publishing professionals I was talking to were leery,” he said.

“When push came to shove they declined to publish the book. Several did indicate to me it was too hot a topic.”

The book wound up being published by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press, which also expected objections from creationists.

So far, the book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, an illustrated primer written for readers in Grades 3 to 7, has generated more prize nominations than controversy.

Evolution is one of three young-reader finalists in the Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science books. The other finalists for the $10,000 prize, to be awarded Wednesday, are Ultimate Trains by Peter McMahon of Ontario and The Sea Wolves by the British Columbia team of Ian McAllister, a photographer, and Nicholas Read, a writer.

Mr. Loxton’s book is also a finalist in the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children’s non-fiction. Earlier this year, Evolution was a finalist for the prestigious Silver Birch award.

His latest book, just published, is Ankylosaur Attack about a young, plant-eating, heavy-plated dinosaur.

Mr. Loxton, 36, is editor of Junior Skeptic, a youth supplement included in each issue of Skeptic, a California-based magazine that “examines extraordinary claims.”

He lived an itinerant life in an Airstream trailer as a boy. His parents were contractors who hired planters at clear cuts throughout British Columbia. As for his upbringing, he describes it as being a mix of Utopian and feral.

His parents believed in much paranormal phenomenon. As a boy, he was convinced he had stumbled across a Sasquatch footprint deep in the woods.

He discovered skeptical inquiry as a university student, finding science had explanations for such folkloric beliefs as UFOs and ESP, alien abductions and succubus attacks, human combustion and the predictions of Nostradamus.

Now he has a career solving paranormal mysteries. As Harry Houdini once did. Or Scooby-doo.

Even when displaying a sense of humour, hokum-busting skeptics convey a certain killjoy quality. After all, who does not want to believe in a hairy, harmless, beer-guzzling Bigfoot?

“I want to teach people stuff,” he said. “I don’t want to cram anything down anybody’s throat.”

So, how does a “professional skeptic” handle the topic of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus with his five-year-old son?

(Spoiler alert: The truth behind fictitious childhood characters revealed below.)

So far, the lad has not asked about a chocolate-sharing rabbit, or a wand-waving dentine thief. As for the gift-toting jolly man whose belly shakes like a bowlful of jelly, the parents are taking a soft position.

“We’re not debunking it,” he said. “I’m a sentimental kind of a guy.”

Which is to say the Loxton household is experiencing the three stages of Santa theorem: You believe in Santa. You don’t believe in Santa. You are Santa.

An illustration from Ankylosaur Attack by Daniel Loxton and Jim W.W. Smith.

Anarchist archive

The University of Victoria library has received seven boxes of papers from Ann Hansen, who was sentenced to a life term for conspiring to rob an armoured car and for a series of bombings in Ontario and British Columbia in the early 1980s. The material, which includes pamphlets and prison correspondence, will be included in the Anarchist Archive founded by art historian Allan Antliff, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Art.

Mr. Antliff approached Ms. Hansen for the donation, for which she will receive no payment. Much of the material will be posted online alongside other anti-authoritarian materials in what is the only archive of its kind in Canada.

The most interesting contribution is a transcript of conversations recorded from a police bug police placed in her bedroom before her arrest. Alas, a 70-year privacy restriction has been placed on the transcript, which will not be accessible to the public until 2081.

Ms. Hansen, 58, spent seven years in jail. She got permission from her parole officer to travel to the campus last week from her home on a farm west of Kingston, Ont., where she remains active in the prison abolition movement.


Official loudmouth

George Bowering, who was Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, is a baseball aficionado. He has been issued business cards by the Vancouver Canadians baseball club on which he is identified as the Official Loudmouth Fan. (Anyone who has heard his Foghorn Leghorn declamations from his perch behind home plate would not need a card to confirm his role.) Mr. Bowering’s team won the league championship on the weekend, sending dozens of rooters into paroxysms of non-riotous celebration.

The prolific author took a break from his own merrymaking to write a letter decrying the award of an Order of B.C. to former premier Gordon Campbell. Mr. Bowering was himself invested in the order seven years ago.

Perhaps honours for professional politicians should mirror those of professional athletes, who typically must wait five years before induction into a sports hall of fame. The passage of time allows for a more sober-minded accounting long after passions have cooled.

Remembering Ginsberg and the summer of poetry

Poets gather outside the Vancouver home of Ellen and Warren Tallman in 1963. Allan Ginsberg is in the back row, third from left, standing beside a young, far-haired Dan McLeod in glasses. Warren Tallman is seated in the second row, far right. BELOW: The American poet Charles Olson in Vancouver, as photographed by Ginsberg.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 5, 2011

VICTORIA

Allen Ginsberg, fresh from an Asian sojourn, arrived in Vancouver with his hair and beard untrimmed, ringlets cascading from his face. The poet looked like an Old Testament prophet in an age of Brylcreem conformity.

He was a mad (holy) man amidst the Mad Men.

It was the summer of 1963. A three-week university course brought to the grungy port city with its neon-lit streetscapes an all-star lineup of hotshot writers known as the New American Poets.

George Bowering, at the time a student at the University of British Columbia who would go on to become Canada’s first poet laureate, had been reading these works for years. He intended to follow his favourite, Charles Olson. Instead, he found himself shadowing Mr. Ginsberg.

“Maybe it’s embarrassing to say it,” Mr. Bowering said Tuesday, “but he seemed to have some kind of spiritual aura. The air shone around him.”

He remembers the poet in Stanley Park so taken by its natural beauty to deliver an impromptu recitation of “Adonais,” a pastoral elegy to John Keats. “Pages and pages and pages of Shelley!” Mr. Bowering recalled. “I was astonished.”

The movie Howl, which takes as its title the famous poem written by the late Mr. Ginsberg, is being released on DVD this week after a limited theatrical run. The movie intersperses an interview with the poet, a reading of the poem, and a notorious obscenity trial in docudrama fashion.

For some who see the movie, it is unnerving, though not unsatisfying, to see Hollywood portray characters they knew in the flesh.

Stan Persky, a 69-year-old philosophy professor at Capilano University, knew many of the people portrayed in the film — Jack Kerouac (from whom he received a postcard at age 16 encouraging him in his writing), Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky (Ginsberg’s lover), and the poet himself, whom he met in 1959 while stationed with the U.S. Navy in San Francisco.

“Ginsberg was an advocate of gay liberation 10 years before it was invented,” Mr. Persky said. “Ginsberg was totally open about it. I’d be walking around Chinatown and see him on the other side of the street and he would call out, ‘Hey, have you got a boyfriend yet?’ ”

Mr. Persky worked with the poet in organizing an early anti-Vietnam War protest at Berkeley, Calif. When the local Hells Angels chapter made it known they were prepared to beat the peace marchers for not being patriotic, the poet went to visit them in their compound. He returned to announce the Angels had changed their mind, offering to provide security for the protestors, an entente negotiated after the long-haired, gay poet shared with the leather-wearing bikers a supply of LSD.

The 1963 visit to Vancouver coincided with several parties held at the Kerrisdale home of Ellen Tallman, a writer, and Warren Tallman, an English professor, at 2527 W. 37th Ave. The atmosphere was redolent of cigarette smoke and spilled Black Label.

At one point, Mr. Ginsberg posed outside the home with the host and several poets. Among those in the photograph is Dan McLeod, who would go on to co-found the Georgia Straight underground newspaper. Some years later, the Straight faced a substantial fine for criminal libel by having awarded a “Pontius Pilate Certificate” to a judge who convicted Mr. Persky on a loitering charge. The newspaper held a benefit to raise legal funds, attracting the support of folk singer Phil Ochs and Mr. Ginsberg. In a radio interview with Jack Webster, a hard-hitting interrogator from Scotland known as the Oatmeal Savage, the gentle poet used wit and humour to disarm the host. In the end, Mr. Persky remembers Mr. Ginsberg cajoling a $50 cheque from the Scotsman.

Looking back, the 1963 poetry conference is the day what we think of as the 1960s began in Vancouver.

Mr. Bowering likes to tell an anecdote about the conference.

At one point, the visiting poets were playing a friendly game of Monopoly at the Tallman residence. Savvy purchases and some luck with the die soon had Mr. Ginsberg demanding rent payments and calling mortgages on his fellow poets, as he ignored their entreaties for loans or leniency. The writer who decried the excesses of American capitalism was a whiz at tabletop real estate.


Fred Wah recorded a reading by Allen Ginsberg during the Vancouver conference. You can hear it http://slought.org/toc/Vancouver1963/ ">here.