Span

Abbie Hoffman, social activist and professional shit-disturber of the nineteen-sixties once said, “The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” Since my godmother, Karen, is manifestly a child of the Sixties, I’ve decided to blame Hoffman for her recent stealth exercise in social agitation—though Karen says it all began with her Catholic school nuns and their emphasis on civil rights and justice. I support those goals. The problem is that my godmother is unruly and prone to obsession.

It began with a phone call. Peter Baker, a Canadian veterinarian with a small animals practice in Johannesburg, South Africa, wanted me to come to Bookbedonnerd III, a literary festival in the Great Karoo Desert village of Richmond. Peter’s partner in the festival, Darryl David, had located my novel The Great Karoo (about western Canadians fighting in the Boer War) online. I assumed this meant he liked the book, but in fact it was so thoroughly unavailable in South Africa, neither Peter nor Darryl had physically seen it.

As I write this, CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi is on Twitter tweeting (crowing?) about the success of Canada Reads 2012. For the first time in the eleven-year history of the Survivor-esque best-book competition, every one of the five books under discussion ended up on The Globe and Mail top ten list of Canadian best-sellers.

The Canadian beaver is famous for its mighty dams, its once-coveted fur, and its flat, paddle-shaped tail (used to signal danger by slapping the surface of the water).