New, Old and Notable: Volume 1, Issue 3

Reviews and Comments by Gordon Phinn

New, Old & Notable is a recurring column by Gordon Phinn in which he concisely reviews several books from the past and present. Links will take you to the publisher’s page for more information.

You can access Gordon’s previous columns here: https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/t/new-old-and-notable

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The Death Of Tony: On Belonging In Two Worlds by Antanas Sileika (Stonehewer Books 2024)

I was acquainting myself with Antanas Sileika’s new novel The Seaside Café Metropolis, when his earlier memoir The Death Of Tony: On Belonging in Two Worlds fell into my lap. Recalling the pleasure of reading his much earlier stories and memoirs Buying On Time Again and The Barefoot Bingo Caller, I slipped into it without so much as a hint of resistance. He has developed an easy-going narrative style that, regardless of the subject matter, the feeling is one of friendly converse, like some long-distant but now beloved uncle filling you in on the whispered secrets and mysteries of the extended family and almost forgotten culture.

Sileika’s culture is Lithuanian, and as with many immigrant narratives, it oscillates between embracing their new homeland while hurriedly disposing of the old country in youth, and then slowly but surely rediscovering roots as children and grandchildren gather about them. One might say, if one were so inclined, in progeny we repatriate our past.

A childhood in the then-new Toronto suburb of Weston, making friends with several Brit expat neighbours and loving the English language that his boy pals used without affectation. A youth of Saturday morning language schools, Lithuanian Scout camps and an expanding choice of beachfront cottages. College era literary studies with essays on the likes of Faulkner and Hemingway. An escape to artsy Paris, where he helped found the journal Paris Voices. Relatives unvisited, imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain until the ebbing away and final collapse of Soviet Russia. The novice writer knocking at the door of CanLit until admittance was gained and the long journey to fame and success begun. Summer break residences at the Humber School of Writers, which apparently saved the bacon of many an impoverished Canadian fictioneer. An established name with many an appearance on television and invites to conferences abroad.

In combining his own journey with that of post-war Lithuanian society he elaborates on his subtitle On Belonging In Two Worlds, trying to come to terms with his own love/hate relationship to his ethnic origins and its deeply troubled history, sandwiched between those ruthless aggressors Russia and Germany, forcibly deporting and murdering without compunction as the complicity of his countrymen in the Holocaust ran alongside.

In this effort, he is not entirely successful and admirably does not shy away from so admitting. While one applauds his efforts to so confront one also gives thanks for a story well told, a chatty reminiscence that charms as it instructs.

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Three Way Renegade: Samuel Steward Without Apology by Keith Garebian (Frontenac House 2023)

What do we mean when we speak of community, those shared interests and activities, sparked by desire and then insulated by the smooth mechanisms of defensiveness? Do we share similar playgrounds with other orientations and inclinations? Can we see the commonalities striving for some eloquent but so far ill-defined harmony?

It is my experience, however unctuously adumbrated, that such is and can be so. Seemingly condemned to the paddock of white bourgeois heterosexual society, where others and I were similarly educated, parade in slow circles to the proclivities of our trainers, their cultural preferences polished to a proud shine, we yearn to reach out and embrace our brothers and sisters who insist that leopards need not always have stripes. And in doing so, we can assert our common humanity, thereby smoothing at least some of the ruptures reading their riot acts over the weave of our temporary satisfactions.

Poems in praise of the beloved share in a tradition millennia long, echoing each other’s devotions and pleadings, however culture-bound, repressed by religion or shunted aside by social norms. It is no secret that the dark lady of the sonnets may well have been a handsome youth of the male persuasion. Or that the love that dares not speak its name now has no lack of vocal supporters singing its praises. The ancient hypocrisy of double standards seems outdated and verging on useless, and those who yet live by it are anachronisms. Of course, telling them to get with the program merely results in a digging in of the heels. In 2025’s Stay, the author shares the dance of daring to desire and its uncanny ability to devour both lover and beloved in the sweat of surrender, poems that unveil the secret of being consumed.

Poems in measured acclaim of unsung heroes, artists and iconoclasts claim a lesser pedigree, but for me are a welcome addition to the annals of admiration. Poet and critic Keith Garebian has made a worthy contribution to this cultural niche with his Three Way Renegade, his appreciation of Samuel Steward (1909-93), apparently a “forgotten icon in the contemporary gay world”, a status he aims to revitalize with this collection of prose poems reflecting on his hero’s “sexual cosmopolitanism”. From the high-born and famous to the common man, unremarked but for his comely exterior, Steward evinced little or no preference. Something of an equal opportunity partner, he was also a “secret documentarian who kept a meticulous card file of over 4,500 sexual encounters”, some of which, in keeping with the current trend, were taped.

In following through the accumulation of assignations and conquests, I was reminded of the various frank disclosures of Gore Vidal, but then I do lead a sheltered life; remembering folk well in some Chelsea hotel is a bit beyond my bailiwick. The saving grace of all this is Garebian’s prose poems, precise and articulate renderings of Steward’s life, thought and encounters. Let #20 of the 135 be the finger pointing to the moon, illuminating the landscape.

English college instructor in Helena, room and board included,

trying to teach cowboys and their sons about semi-colons;

sherry a soft solace before whisky sours

with a monsignor, his college Prez, a nice bed tumble,

what would be a cardinal sin in Ohio, a mere peccadillo in Montana.

Fall term, two more priests in bed with him, a third popping

out of the confessional to see who has confessed such lurid sins.

Catholicism by the wayside, he tucks himself back into life.

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Best Canadian Essays 2026, ed. Brian Bethune (Biblioasis 2025)

As a long-time devotee of the essay form, I am gratified to see that it continues to flourish, despite the depredations and encroachments of a digital era which favours short and sassy expositions of opinion, however ill-informed, slogans embroidered with seductive shock and outrage. Biblioasis’s yearly Best Of series (essays, stories and poetry) does an admirable job of keeping pace with our homegrown output and this year’s volume proudly continues the tradition.

My own love stretches back to Montaigne, Hume, Cicero, Voltaire and others of that vintage, up to contemporaries like Aldous Huxley, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philip Lopate, Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm. The intellectual pleasure afforded the reader of the twenty-minute compact distillation of ideas, conflicting or complementary, is to me, virtually unparalleled. Admittedly, short stories, when executed with vision and discipline, can come close. Unfortunately, matters of craft often take precedence.

As editor Brian Bethune comments, essays continue to be “among the most protean of literary forms,” and despite the best of intentions, editors of collections such as this can rarely settle on “what is and what is not an essay”. He also refutes the contention that there can be too much “I” in the perspective, citing the famous remark of the form’s progenitor Michael de Montaigne, “I myself am the matter of my book”. Certainly, this current selection makes no bones about that. The “I” is paramount and spouts from a pulpit Bethune obviously approves. Whether it’s death, driving lessons, suicide, childlessness, or autism, the emphasis on ‘It’s me here talking’ is relentless, the literary rendition of ‘Oh poor me’.

The occasional transcendence of personality, its grievances and discontents, would be welcomed. The self-awareness, as celebrated, dances around the edges of self-pity. That’s not to critique the actual narrative drives on display. I enjoyed each and every one, spreading out my reading over days to savour the pleasure of the text, particularly the nature mysticism of Basma Kavanagh and the eulogistic praise of Robert Fulford by his son-in-law, Stephen Marche. Words are plucked, sentences sculpted, paragraphs carefully patted into place. Unfortunately, the actual content retains its own pitfalls, contributing its fair share of melancholy, grief, anger and a general all-around palette of suffering. Are we CanLit types prone to the gloomies? Dour Presbyterians and guilt-ridden Catholics? Have all those prairie winter survivors morphed into wildfire refugees? Hey, I’ve got some cheese for your whine.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any happy campers in this assemblage. One almost yearns for the raw chuckle of a Miriam Toews, almost but not quite. Everyone’s got an angle or a grievance, if not several. Eco-crisis crazies abound, fretting about every trendy issue of the day. How about the lifelong vegetarian now convinced hunting his own deer is the only ethical choice as he fetishizes his deceased father’s bolt-action rifles. Fondle that smooth action, dude. How about the eloquent and respected writer obsessively seeking to find his spot on the autism spectrum? Having worked in the field, I recognize the furtive identity quest. Has Atwood’s endless line of dystopian fictions poisoned an entire generation? Life sucks, and then you die. Audrey Thomas once wrote that “writing well is the best revenge”. With this crowd of complainants, I would counter, revenge against what exactly? The adversarial vicissitudes of life? Good luck.

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A World of My Own: A Dream Diary by Graham Greene (Viking 1994)

The joys of book browsing will not be unknown to any of you. Plucking one’s discovery from a dusty pile and carting it home to relish its longed-for pleasures is a treat to be shared only with French brandy and Belgian chocolates. I had not known that Graham Greene was a lifelong compiler of dreams, a large journal of which was slimmed down by his publisher after his passing into this compact delight now before me. That dreams, either fantastical or fleetingly lucid, are a portal to the other world of imagination and adventure, one that seduces our prized rationality into weighing anchor and setting sail every night, is no secret to me. Yes, I’m a convert. If you are teetering on the edge, Robert Moss’s (Dreamer’s Dictionary) might be just the ticket. A wide-ranging historical survey taking in many cultures and epochs, it serves to map those other worlds with anthropological and psychological detail unsuspected by cynics and the sniffily superior. From the sleeptime activities of the Huron and Algonquin, as reported in the 17th-century Jesuit Relations, to the precognitive visions of Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, a surprising number of Russian novelists and Winston Churchill, revealed post mortem by his personal physician, this tidy encyclopedia fits snugly on one’s otherworldly shelf, reference handy.

Meanwhile, Greene visits and interacts with some celebrities and politicians of his day (Francois Mitterand, Ho Chi Mingh, Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro, etc.) sometimes in almost parallel to his daytime life and others in some sliding scale where past and future find themselves deliriously fluid. “In June 1984, I was visiting Castro in Cuba. We walked around in a friendly fashion and came to a halt beside a poor man who was weeping. He had just buried a small child in a tiny grave he had just dug himself. Castro tried to comfort him by telling him that now his child would suffer nothing, know nothing. But the man was not comforted. I crossed myself, and he at once stopped crying and shook my hand. He said, “ I feel you are one of those who think there may possibly be something after death”.

Dreams of Nazi invasion occur in the mid-sixties, twenty years after the cessation of hostilities, and include an arrest of the infamous Adolf. There is much to amuse and titillate in the diary, much to make one’s own peregrinations in those endlessly shifting sands of anxiety and desire more than curiosities. In passing, I should not neglect to mention, as Moss does, Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams (1961), something of a passed-over treasure trove for Beat Generation bunnies, a slowly dwindling tribe, but as yet impossible to dismiss.

In the section titled Animals Who Talk, let me enchant you with this: “It is one of the charms in this World Of My Own that animals talk as intelligibly as human beings. For example, on the evening of October 18, 1964, I was caressing a tabby kitten who boasted to me in a small, clear voice that she had killed four birds that day. I rebuked her with pretended anger since I am not very fond of birds. She replied with a certain pathos, "But you know I got forty-two francs for them”.

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Gordon Phinn, a longtime resident of Oakville, Ontario, has been active in literary production since 1975, with several titles in a variety of genres to his credit: Non-fiction, fiction, poetry, criticism and memoir. His early critical work for Books In Canada and Paragraph is collected in It’s All About Me, and his four-year reviewing stint at WordCity will soon be available as Joy In All Genres. Other recent essay collections: Bowering and McFadden, Laughing At The Universe Of Lies and Consciousness: A Primer. A novel, An American In Heaven, a memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions and a poetry collection, Winter, Spring and Eternity’s Seduction. He is currently editing a collection of essays in celebration of the work of Laurence Hutchman, to be published by Guernica in 2026.