edwards block

For years, Saturday mornings for me have centred around my reading chair, a nice cup of tea, and the Globe and Mail. Even while I was on my bike trip across Canada last summer, I persisted in this ritual. Of course, I sometimes had to adjust it to compensate for the fact that I often woke up in a rural backwater (ie: Calgary), miles from a Globe vending box. On those days, I was forced to pick the Globe up during the day’s ride and stow it in my luggage, to be read on Sunday morning while seated at a damp picnic table, my shivering hands wrapped around a plastic Neoprene bottle filled with tea that had been coloured with skim milk powder and sweetened with stolen packets of Tim Horton’s sugar.

Nevertheless, at home in Vancouver it really was a ritual. I would get up in the morning and put the kettle on. I would dress, flatten my hair, gather my coins, pour boiling water over a few black Sri Lankan leaves, and walk to the box up the street. You might wonder why I didn’t just have the paper delivered. I live in an apartment and the carrier doesn’t have a key to the building, so I had to walk down to the lobby anyway, and somehow a short walk in the morning just hightened the whole experience. In winter the brisk air would wake me up, and in summer the chirping birds gave me something cheery to think about before I started reading of the miseries of the world. Also, I had calculated that the Globe was actually cheaper if bought from the box compared to home delivery. Over the course of a year, I saved $4.80. How much incentive does a man need?

Once back in my apartment, I would pour a cup of now-steeped tea and sit in my reading chair. The first task was to organise the sections of the paper in the order that I would read them. One of the little details that made me a dedicated Globe reader was the fact that the Sports section was entirely independent of the rest of the paper, meaning I could pull it out of the middle of the stack and drop it disdainfully onto the floor next to my chair, where by midday a small pile of ravaged newsprint would be ready for the blue bin. Sometimes the order that I would read the sections would vary, depending on what feature articles appeared on their covers, but usually the order was: Business, Section A, Focus, Style, Travel, Books.

Anyone who knows me well (or anyone who has seen me with my clothes on) might wonder what possible interest I could have in a section called “Style”. Indeed, both Business and Style were the two sections that I was least interested in, but I still felt compelled to at least glance over the pages. However, the Style section presented a particularly important element of the Saturday experience, however uninteresting I found it in principle – the columnists. There were three columnsists of note: Heather Mallick, Russell Smith and Leah McLaren.

Mallick’s column was titled “Bought”, and was a very short piece about some item she had bought somewhere. I read it mainly because I like Mallick’s style so much that her other, more political, column was just never enough, even if I sometimes didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell it was she was talking about, not being much of a shopper myself.

I’ve never actually read any of Smith’s columns – I’d just glance at them long enough to glean the subject and thank the gods that I wasn’t born him. He appears to be one of those nauseatingly phony ‘metrosexual’ types who pluck their eyebrows so that they can impress and bed ditzy young women with low self-esteem who are easily seduced by shiny objects and tired pickup lines that somehow seem fresh and convincing when they’re excreted from the Botox-lined lips of guys like Smith. Which brings us to Leah McLaren.

Reading McLaren’s column was a bit of a game for me. I would glance at a clock (preferably one with a second hand) and start reading. Usually within the first three paragraphs – frequently the first sentence – I would throw the Style section to the floor with disgust, unable to endure another word of drivel. Perhaps it’s just a generational thing. In my middle-aged mind, that whole post-’Gen-X’ crowd is surely the most uninspiring generation of youth since poodle skirts were the fashion. Or maybe I’m just jealous because they’re getting laid and I’m not. I recently heard that Leah has published a novel. Perhaps I’ll try reading the dust jacket some day.

Now, at this point you’re probabaly thinking to yourself “What’s with Ed? It’s unlike him to be so negative!”. Well, let me assure you, there were plenty of things about the Globe that I liked. I actually enjoyed Edward Greenspon’s column about the process of putting the paper together. I’d read almost every word of the Focus section. The editorials were often thoughtful and challenging, even if I disagreed with them. And I loved the Books section, which is why I always saved it for last. But perhaps my favourite feature of the paper was Heather Mallick’s “As If” column, which appeared in the Focus section.

Mallick is a feminist and a leftist. Now, I’m not much of a leftist, in the contemporary Canadian sense. If I had to be labelled I’d say that I’m kind of a “Libertarian Communist”, in the oxymoronic tradition of the Progressive Conservatives, so I am not necessarily in agreement with Mallick’s politics. I would call myself a feminist, perhaps even more of one that many women I know. I once had a friend who I knew was very right wing and very much a devoted Christian, but he was one of the rare ones who expressed seemingly sincere concern for others and actually kept his religious beliefs to himself. Despite being affiliated with evangelists, he never tried to push religion on me, and I respected him for it. Until one day when he was at my apartment, glancing over the books on my shelves. He pulled a copy of Gloria Steinem’s “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” off my shelf and said “Steinem! That feminist bitch!”. The words shot off his tongue like spit. I was shocked and dismayed, having never seen any evidence that he was anything other than a gentle soul and at least tolerant. We drifted apart after that.

But back to Mallick. It’s not just that I often like what she has to say, and the fact that she is saying it – one of the few, it seems, in the mainstream media. But I also like the way she writes what she does. She puts the words and ideas together in a way that seem to flow so easily and vividly. Her columns are not full of the pseudo-intellectual puffery of self-promotion. She’s a sceptic and she expresses her scepticism boldly and in a way that captivates the mind. If my writing were a bit like hers, I would not be disappointed. I once wrote her a ‘fan’ letter – the only one I’ve ever written in my life, as I have no interest in celebrity for it’s own sake. Her reply was very gracious.

As a reader of the Globe and Mail, I’d thought of myself as the member of a special club, one of those who wanted their news presented in a style that did not assume that I was barely literate, as the local Canwest papers often seem. The big Globe news articles did not follow the style of the Vancouver Sun, where one could read the same paragraph over and over, worded slightly differently each time. No, the Globe was a paper for those who wanted to draw their own conclusions. The Globe was different, about ideas and facts, not just an advertising delivery mechanism. Or so I dreamed.

The first sign that registered in my head that the Globe was losing it’s sheen for me was when they started combining the Sports section with other parts of the paper, namely the BC News and the Obituaries. I liked reading the obit stories of interesting lives, but I resented having to legitimise the sports content by even having to open it. When I read the paper in public, as I did sometimes on summer mornings in a small cafe overlooking English Bay, I was forced to stick the sports section inside another section so that it would not look as though I were reading the boxing news.

Sometime near the end of 2005, Mallick disappeared from the Globe and Mail, and I was naturally disappointed. I missed it, but apparently a small line appeared that said Heather Mallick is no longer employed with The Globe and Mail. It’s unclear if she left of her own volition, but my guess is that she did not. Regardless of which it was, it altered my view of the Globe. An important piece of my ritual had been removed. I e-mailed the paper to find out whether Mallick was just on vacation, or gone for good. They didn’t even manage the courtesy of a reply. Another nail in the Globe coffin.

The thing that has really destroyed any of my illusions that the Globe is any more ‘highbrow’ that the other media, however, is their introduction of the “Join the Conversation” feature on their wesbite. This allows readers to comment on individual articles without having to get through the filter of the Letters to the Editor. There are, of course, some thoughtful comments, but there are also a lot of the stupidest comments imaginable, of the type that one might see in the letters section of the Province, that local Canwest rag targeted to those who suffer from botched lobotomies.

Those factors, combined with a general need to avoid the miseries of the world that change not one bit despite being documented in the news, means that my Saturday mornings are not what they used to be. I miss the the ritual. I miss Heather. I miss the Saturday crossword (though Eric has been photocopying it for me). But I don’t miss Leah.