I was in the mall this week, searching
for a new bathing suit and somehow I wandered into a bookstore. How it
happened, I don’t know. I mean, books
and bathing suits are very separate things. While browsing the magazine rack, I
skimmed over all the fluffy women and fashion magazines—I never read that
garbage—and my eyes fell upon a magazine titled The Walrus.
Maybe it was the word “Canadian” on the
cover, or perhaps the hook headline, “six exciting new Canadian writers.” Maybe
it was the name “Justin Trudeau” in bold print above the magazine title.
Whatever it was, I came out of the shop having paid $6.95 for a magazine I’d
never heard of before. I’m not sorry.
The
Walrus, judging from my first impression, takes a liberal attitude and a
leftist ideology towards most issues. Three highlights of the July/August edition
are, an article on a five-day Shambhala festival, a Woodstock-style music festival
in BC, a piece on Justin Trudeau, describing how emotional appeal and
intelligence combined with reason, rule over reason alone in today’s politics,
and a pieced called “Troubled Waters,” describing the life and demise of a
Government funded lakes research program in North-Western Ontario.
Mixed in with the non-fiction are some
short stories. My favourite is Jill Sexsmith’s “Somewhere, A Long, Happy Life
Probably Awaits You.” A man whose wife
is dying spends a lot of time thinking about what type of new wife he would
like, but when his dying wife latches onto an elm outside their home which is
marked for destruction, he builds her a tree house and learns what she means to
him. It’s beautiful and definitely worth reading. I came close to shedding a
few tears at the end of it.
I found nearly every article in the
magazine enjoyable and informative, so I will definitely pick the next issue of
The Walrus up off the shelf. If I
continue to like it, I may even subscribe. Among all the gossip rags and
sugary-thin words of the women’s magazines, I find it refreshing to discover a
more intellectual and fully Canadian publication. The Walrus is a Canadian magazine, dealing with Canadian issues and
subject matter; this in itself is refreshing.
No comments:
Post a Comment