“Canadian people especially like to be proud of their athletes and proud of their accomplishments,” said Gillick. “The opportunity for Robbie and I to go into the Hall of Fame, I think it’s a feel-good story for the fans in Toronto, a feel-good story for the people across Canada.”

When I was a kid in Toronto in the 1950s, I was crazy about sports. It was primarily hockey of course. I played and I was lucky to be taken to Leaf games by my guardian. Baseball was on the periphery—softball at school, some hardball in the nearby diamond.

Maple Leaf Stadium on the Lakeshore, Toronto. It was a fun place to watch a baseball game and to see the lakers sailing through the “Eastern Gap.” Toronto set attendance records for a minor league baseball team.

A friend of the family began taking me to the Toronto Maple Leaf baseball games in the early 1950s, down at Maple Leaf Stadium on Lake Shore Boulevard. The Leafs played in the “Triple A” International League against teams such as the Buffalo Bisons, Rochester Red Wings and Havana Cubans (later Sugar Kings). I loved listening to the Leaf’s away games on the radio, especially “from” Havana (I later found out that the broadcasts were faked from ticker tape and enhanced with fake crowd and bat noises), where the 5’3” Yo-Yo Davalillo played.

The baseball Maple Leafs pretty much typified what Toronto thought about itself in those days—independent (owned in the 50s by Jack Kent Cooke, who gave us free hot dogs) and minor league. The hankering to be big league grew, as did the metro dream of being New York north. The baseball Leafs were abandoned and forgotten and the stadium torn down.

The Blue Jays came along in 1977 and I became a fan, though the Jays never seemed to have the aura of the Expos in those days. I was such a fan that I named one of my daughter’s stuffed toys for Lloyd Moseby. I was lucky to be at game 3 of the World Series against the Atlanta Braves in 1992. I shouted myself hoarse at what turned out to be one of the most famous plays in World Series history. It began with a spectacular catch in centre field by Devon White, and ended with what should have been a rare triple play, missed by the umpire (who later admitted his mistake).

The editors of The Canadian Encyclopedia have always focused on Canadian-born players but the induction of Pat Gillick and Roberto Alomar into the Baseball Hall of Fame has changed our mind. Gillick built that team, which brought the “World” Series to Canada. Alomar, a transported Puerto Rican, was the best player on the team and the best second base man of his generation. Together they made an incalculable contribution to Canadian sporting history.

James Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia

Growing up in Toronto in the 1950s it was certainly encouraging to me to read that a global genius and eccentric such as Glenn Gould lived among us—a sheep who could jump the fence.

Cohen was already one of the most influential and popular Canadian writers when his songs gained him an international reputation (photo by Alexander W. Thomas).

In that colonial atmosphere where the Union Jack and “God Save the Queen” dominated the classrooms and television fed us a fragment of American corporate culture, it helped us to see that the air we breathed and the streets that we roamed could produce true originals, such as Marshall McLuhan, Oscar Peterson, Margaret Laurence, and Marylyn Bell. Even those, such as heldentenor Jon Vickers, who rejected their Canadian provenance were a source of wonder.

So it was that Leonard Cohen entered my life when I first became entangled in the tousled threads of love. Discovering his early book of poems Spice Box of Earth coloured and scented my experience. I tried to breath the lines, copy the images, project that unique sensitivity:

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

About the time I was discovering the more nuanced culture of Montreal, with a girlfriend there and another feeling of inferiority under the sneers of native Montrealers of my Toronto-the-Good origins, Leonard Cohen began to “sing.” English professors were appalled and in those early days the voice was high and thin. But those songs! Played by candles burning in drained Mateus bottles, they helped love find its edge. My girlfriend bristled at the impertinent lyrics and called him a “brat,” which only made me admire and envy him more. I still cannot hear that song “Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” without inhaling the fragrance of those days:

Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye

It would be presumptuous to say that I grew up and then grew old with Leonard, but he seems to have enriched my life all along the way, as his voice darkened and his lyrics sharpened. In that remarkable and lesser-known song “The Window,” Cohen sang:

Then lay your rose on the fire
The fire give up to the sun
The sun give over to splendour
In the arms of the High Holy One
For the Holy One dreams of a letter
Dreams of a letter’s death
Oh bless the continuous stutter
Of the word being made into flesh

As Stephen Scobie wrote in The Canadian Encyclopedia, “only Leonard Cohen could conceive of the process of the Word being made Flesh as a stutter – and only Cohen could bless that insight.”

Some of that old envy of his power over women flares up when I see their seductive grins during songs such as “I’m Your Man.” I know that he is “their man.” It is his acute sense of irony that saves it all from sentimentality. The irony that cuts through depression and even despair: “Waiting for the Miracle to Come,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Everybody Knows.” I am not a Buddhist, or a Jew or a Christian but I can accept his resignation:

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

“Rags of light!” This from a Canadian troubadour.

Finally there is that anthem, that remarkable song “Hallelujah”. Along with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”, it is the most played item on my Ipod, a song greater than anyone can sing it, even that other Canadian original k.d. lang. By the sheer force of its astonishing lyrics, the song has power to survive its mediocre covers, its appearance in Shrek, its reported use by the Israeli armed forces and even its popularity as a ringtone:

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

[Note: In honour of Leonard Cohen's 77th birthday, Legacy Records released The Complete Albums Collection, the Leonard Cohen oeuvre - 17 of Cohen's albums, both live and studio-recorded.]

James Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia

“Significant: expressive, suggestive, with unstated or secret sense, inviting attention; noteworthy, of considerable amount or effect or importance”
- Oxford English Dictionary

One of the words that recurs in the making of reference works is “significance.” While the word “encyclopedia” either means or implies “all the knowledge in the world,” and one might call a Canadian encyclopedia “everything you wanted to know about Canada,” of course this was never literally possible. So when you make a reference work you have to make choices and hope that in the final product at least you represent “all the knowledge,” or represent the totality of the given subject, be it baseball or Canada.

When we originally compiled The Canadian Encyclopedia in the 1980s the editors were forced to make hard choices, in particular because the volumes had to be a certain length to make the publication profitable. As editor in chief it was probably my most important task to balance the needs for coverage and length. The senior editors responsible for the major subject areas—biography, social sciences, humanities, arts, and science—each could have (and two did) bring me outlines prepared by their consultants that could have easily taken up the entire encyclopedia. Furthermore, there were subjects such as sports, geographic places or pop culture that I had to advocate personally because they were of no interest to our consultants (of whom we had 250 from all across Canada). How do you judge that one subject is significant and should be included at a certain length, while others are either less significant and should be shorter, or insignificant and should be left out?

In cutting unhappy editors’ lists to size and balancing them with the other lists I had to make difficult decisions. I was not unprepared for this as I had edited some 200 books in Canadian Studies and written a few myself. I studied other encyclopedias back to Diderot. Once an article had been assigned a certain length it was left to the authors to decide what in their topic, be it Margaret Atwood or pingoes, was significant and what had to be left out.

We did a pretty good job according to the some 200 reviews we received. Every reviewer felt good about himself or herself because inevitable they could point out things that should have been included before going on to say that coverage was pretty good. Some readers actually got out their rulers and measured the picas devoted to certain articles on places or certain biographies and compared them to less worthy treatments. Many of these perceived errors in judgment found their way into angry letters, others into newspaper articles, and still others into classroom projects to criticize the editor.

A relative of the Saskatchewan politician Hazen Argue wrote me to complain that we had included a biography of that lout of the family and gave me potted biographies of a dozen other members of the family far more “significant.” I had been told by many consultants that I should not include any biography of someone who is alive, as only historical perspective could tell if they are significant. This would have left the encyclopedia devoid of articles on the very people defining the culture in our time, from Wayne Gretzky to Pierre Trudeau.

Missing of course in this editorial process is the reader and his or her interests, whatever they might be. After the first edition I got thousands of letters with suggestions and took them very seriously and included many new topics as a result in the second edition. The greatest interest was always in people and places. In the book versions, I still felt it necessary to balance as well as cover. I always saw The Canadian Encyclopedia as a portrait of Canada—the most complete ever compiled—and it seemed obvious to me that a biography of Sir John A. Macdonald must be longer than that for Sir John Abbott.

Has all this changed in the digital, postmodern age? As pop culture overtakes our sense of meaning entirely, does the concept of significance have any relevance? Is Justin Bieber’s haircut as significant as Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations? One thing that is redefining importance is Google. Our encyclopedia is most useful if people can find what they are looking for. We are in the process of evaluating the meaning of this as we move forward. Thankfully, we are helping many Canadians as some 500,000 unique visitors access The Canadian Encyclopedia in our best months.

On July 1, 1867, Canadians gathered in public squares to hear the reading of the Queen's Proclamation announcing the birth of their country. This photo was taken in Kingston, Ontario (Courtesy of Queen's University Archives)

John A. Macdonald himself was a late convert to the idea of federalism. He was no visionary, orator or wordsmith like some founders elsewhere, but once the process had begun, he was what the times demanded: a persuasive, charming pragmatist. Eventually, he came to believe in the national enterprise. He spoke of founding “a great kingdom, in connection with the British monarchy and under the British flag.” His preferred designation, “Kingdom of Canada,” was indeed written into the first revision of the confederation bill. But the word “kingdom” offended some Americans, who could not abide the idea of the colonies on their northern border uniting “under the imperial rule of an English prince.” Not for the first or last time, the British caved in to American pressure and the delegates were instructed to find an alternative.

It is said that Leonard Tilley, the New Brunswick delegate to the London meetings, found the inspiration in his daily Bible reading, from Psalm 72:8 (King James version): “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea.” (No mention was made of the rest of the line: “and from the river unto the ends of the earth.”) The other delegates found the word “dominion” appropriate and it was suggested to Queen Victoria, who had been invited by the Quebec Resolutions to determine the “rank and name” of the new nation. She accepted and with this the British North American bill was complete.

The name “Canada” never seemed to have been in question, though it was questioned by some. The famous British journalist Walter Bagehot preferred “Northland” or “Anglia.” Fortunately he had no say. There were alternate names to honour the Queen herself (Victorialand) or her late husband (Albertsland) and other suggestions included Borealia, Cabotia, Mesoplagia, Transatlantia and the acronym “Efisga,” derived from England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Germany and Aborigines. One shudders at the prospect of referring to “Efisganians.” (See Let’s Call it…Efisga.)

Canada was by most accounts a local name derived from the Huron-Iroquoian kanata, meaning something like village, and it dated from the voyages of Jacques Cartier in 1535. It first appeared on a world map c 1547, referring to an area north of the gulf and river St Lawrence. The name Canada was used loosely as a synonym for New France as the territory pushed ever westward and southward. The name became official with the Constitutional Act of 1791, which divided the Old Province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. It eventually fulfilled Tilley’s phrase and was applied from sea to sea (and to sea) as the country expanded. The notable American historian Samuel Eliot Morison once remarked that “never, since the Roman Empire,” has such a local name received such a vast extension as “Canada.”

The birth date of July 1 was not Macdonald’s first choice. The confederation bill only passed March 8 and there was so much to do: pick a cabinet, distribute offices, etc. He preferred July 14, but deferred and decided to make July 1 a holiday. He sent out instructions that the garrisons around the country fire royal salutes and hoist royal standards.

Almost every account of that day includes comment on the propitiously fine weather. It was a warm, clear day with a brilliant cobalt sky. “On aimera à se rappeler quand la Confédération aura subi l’epreuve du temps, combien a été beau le jour de son inauguration,” wrote the editor of the Journal des Trois Rivières. Aside from weather reports, numerous Canadian newspapers carried verse that was more doggerel than poetry: “As moments now that do this instant flow/That these vast lands should yet in one unite/For some great purpose of his mind of might/To well combine the good of Europe’s powers/Reject the bad from these fair shores of ours” – Ottawa Daily Citizen, July 1867.

The military were the designated noise-makers for the celebrations, firing off a salute of 101 guns in Ottawa just after midnight, while the church bells pealed and the bonfires crackled. Early the next morning many communities were awakened by royal salutes. Twenty-one guns roared at Saint John at 4 PM, and at Fort Henry at 6. At 8 PM a salvo was ignited at the grand parade ground in Halifax. In Toronto, the highlight was the presence of the 13th Hussars, the “Noble Six Hundred” of Balaclava, newly arrived. They drilled and fought imaginary battles. The Globe also reported that at 6 PM an immense ox would be roasted at the foot of Church Street and the meat distributed to the poor.

People gathered in the city squares, markets, parks, and parade grounds. From hastily erected platforms and scaffolds the local mayors, reeves, or wardens read the Queen’s Proclamation. Then at once the bands erupted in “God Save the Queen,” followed by three cheers of hip hurray. In Quebec City the mayor, in his official robes, read the Proclamation on the Esplanade. That was followed by a feu de joie and three hearty cheers for the Dominion. Later in the day excursionists boarded the S.P. Bidder for a trip around Îsle d’Orléans and a grand ball was given on board H.M.S. Aurora.

In Ottawa, John A. Macdonald made sure that he reached Parliament Hill in good time, before 11 AM. He was now officially prime minister, not elected but chosen back in March by Lord Monck. No one seemed to object to the choice. Charles Stanley Monck was an obscure figure, from an aristocratic family in Ireland that had fallen on hard times. He admitted frankly that he took the job of governor general “for the money.” Confederation had been his aim as much as any of the Canadians. An outsider, Monck seemed dull and he lacked style. Throughout his seven-year tenure, Jacques Monet wrote of him, “he seems never to have sought popularity, nor ever to have found it.” He finally arrived on Parliament Hill, dressed in plain black clothes—if Canada could not be a kingdom, presumably it could not have someone decked out like a viceroy.

The ceremony was perfunctory and unremarkable. Then to everyone’s surprise Monck announced that honours would be bestowed on George-Étienne Cartier, Alexander Tilloch Galt, Charles Tupper, Samuel Leonard Tilley, William McDougall and W. P. Howland (Companions of the Bath). Somewhat controversially, Macdonald was made the more prestigious Knight Commander of the Bath.

The more romantic observers that day saw hope in the brilliant light of the day. Not everyone was impressed, especially those dissenters in the Maritimes and Quebec. The young and fair Nova Scotia had been forced into marriage with the “old, crabbed and bankrupt” suitor Canada, reported the Pictou County Advocate on July 3. By all accounts the day had been a failure, they claimed, rather a day of humiliation. In Halifax, there were empty flagstaffs and small crowds. In Truro two black flags were displayed in prominent positions. It was all a big “fizzle” wrote the Morning Chronicle (Halifax), reporting that only 600 people of more than 30,000 in the city attended the event, about the same as “a decent funeral.” An effigy of Charles Tupper, one of the architects of confederation, was burned on the waterfront, alongside a live rat.

For the rest, the populace enjoyed the day off and once the proclamations were read, went off to play cricket, to sail, scull, race or picnic. With darkness finally, the fireworks began, the Roman candles and rockets stirring strangely as they do today. There is no unalloyed joy in life, but it does sometimes occur among the young. In Hamilton that day a young girl recorded in her diary the thrill of the shooting stars and the rush of fresh cool air that marked the night. “This is the First of July,” she wrote, “in the year eighteen hundred and sixty seven. My father said ‘always remember this day. You are a very lucky little girl to be a child in Canada today.’”

No provision was made at the time to celebrate confederation annually. On June 20, 1868 Lord Monck issued a proclamation calling upon “all Her Majesty’s loving subjects throughout Canada” to celebrate the first anniversary, on the 1st of July, 1868. Then on May 15, 1879, Royal Assent was given to “An Act to make the first day of July a Public Holiday by the name of Dominion Day.” Special celebrations were held in 1917 for the 50th anniversary, in 1927, to mark the “Diamond Jubilee,” and of course in the Centennial year, 1967, marking probably the most celebratory and confident mood Canadians have ever felt. The Centennial Flame, which was lit by Lester Pearson (“Happy birthday Canada!”) to launch those celebrations, has been left alight ever since.

The name “Dominion Day” was extinguished by law in October 1982 amidst all the constitution making and repatriation. To many, “Dominion” smacked too much of Canada’s colonial past and was too closely associated with the monarchy. But it must be said that the new legal name “Canada Day” (French: “Fête du Canada”) seems a meaningless denial of history. One cannot imagine the Americans calling their “Independence Day” “America Day,” or the French changing “Bastille Day” to “France Day.” It is the historical event of “Confederation” that we celebrate and that is what we should call its day.

James Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia

The editor's granddaughter Charlotte Bird on Canada Day, 2011

“It is clear that the electronic world will force changes not only in the delivery of the information, but in the very nature of the information itself.”

The Canadian Encyclopedia recently celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the publication of the printed volumes in 1985. It is in fact 30 years since I began work assembling The Canadian Encyclopedia in Edmonton, Alberta (see my history of The Canadian Encyclopedia).

The multi-volume printed encyclopedia, dutifully alphabetized from “A Mari usque ad mare” to “Zooplankton,” appeared similar to any encyclopedia of the past 200, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie to Britannica, except that “all the knowledge” was Canadian.

Editor in chief since 1980 James Marsh speaking at the Convention Centre, Ottawa on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

It was the great good fortune of my career that at the very time it became financially unfeasible to continue to print The Canadian Encyclopedia (some 250,000 sets and almost a million volumes had been sold), a digital revolution shook our world. With its attempt to represent “all knowledge” and its large number of internal cross references linking articles (think hypertext), the encyclopedia was a natural fit for digital delivery. We were in fact the first encyclopedia in the world to use a computer (University of Alberta’s Amdahl mainframe) and a database program (Spires) in the early 1980s to track article lists, contributor information, numbers of words, schedules, etc.

Editor in chief since 1980 James Marsh speaking at the Convention Centre, Ottawa on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

The addition of a search engine greatly enhanced the power and accessibility of the work and the CD-ROM versions of the late 1990s sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1999 we tentatively put the encyclopedia online and became part of that greatest of all encyclopedias, the World Wide Web.

By its very nature The Canadian Encyclopedia was from the beginning more than just a collection of books uploaded to the internet. It was an internal network of linked, comprehensive and coherent information. Also, unlike most of the information on the growing World Wide Web, the encyclopedia was also a thoroughly edited, researched and verified source of information, written by thousands of experts.

While the primary occupation of the editors has been to update and expand the text of The Canadian Encyclopedia online, we have also been aware of the need to adapt technically and the past ten years have seen many changes in design, programming, linkages, social media, and multimedia, and we recently launched a mobile version (end of March) and are planning a number of apps. How different this world is from the world of print!

Now that the 25^th anniversary has passed, we are encouraged to look ahead (is it even possible to imagine the world 25 years from now?). We remain convinced that, perhaps now more than ever, our portrait of Canada is extremely valuable, that the information that we provide is essential for Canadians (in both languages), in particular for our young people, who do not have access to another purely Canadian general reference work online.

Now the future has been challenging us. We are encouraged to ask fundamental questions about the nature of our enterprise. Will future developments change the very nature of what an encyclopedia should or can be? The sure world of bound and printed books imposed certain limitations on encyclopedias, notably the length and numbers of articles, that are no longer relevant. The stunning success of Wikipedia has challenged the principles of authority, but the threats and challenges are greater than that. It is clear that the electronic world will force changes not only in the delivery of the information, but in the very nature of the information itself. For the editors, sorting out the questions, listening nervously to those who claim to predict the future, and finding a plan to remake the encyclopedia is daunting.

We will be raising some of the questions in this space in the hopes that by thinking out loud some answers are in sight.

James Marsh is editor in chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia

It is a great pleasure to attend a live lecture and I went with such anticipation, which was somewhat dampened by the length of the introductions and formalities.

Adam Gopnik's published Massey Lectures on Winter.

Gopnik has woven together a wonderful, evocative series of ideas about something that is so deeply seated to most Canadians that we are hardly aware of it. He begins this last lecture, “Remembering Winter,” with a reference to the paradox of ice wine that “the hardest weather makes the nicest wine.” We won’t all agree—that wine is not “nice” to me, far too sweet—but in the case of Joni Mitchell’s song “River,” it is a revelation when he says that it evokes “a kind of Magical place of memory.” “Oh I wish I had a river/I could skate away on.” I felt most comfortable with this evocation of personal memories, buried in our own winters past, and in particular in how artists, poets and artists have responded to and expressed winter. He quotes 15th century French poet and vagabond François Villon’s love poem, “Ballad of Yesterday’s Beauty’s,” with its haunting refrain “Mais où sont les neiges d’autan?” (“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”)

I loved Gopnik’s statement “What else is poetry for, save to memorialize an everyday emotion?” He includes the text of two amazing poems: “The imaginary Iceberg,” by Elizabeth Bishop, and “90 North” by Randall Jarrell. Of course these poems relate winter to death. It is a metaphorical union one would expect. As Jarrell writes:

“I see at last that all the knowledge
I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me
Is worthless as ignorance:
Nothing comes from nothing.”

But the author is not satisfied with that one side of winter in memory. His real theme is more as he says “Winter started as this thing we had to get through; it has ended as this time to hold on to.” To illustrate this he refers to that best of all Christmas carols, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” about the remaking of the world in the desolate solstice. And he tells the story of an 1869 Arctic German expedition, whose ship had sunk and whose men, clinging to survival in tiny shelters on an ice floe, opened a leaden box one late December eve and joyfully saw that it contained bright crackers and toys so that they could celebrate Christmas.

In this vein the great French-Canadian poet Émile Nelligan’s “Soir d’Hiver” would have fit nicely:

“Ah! Comme la neige a neigé!
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre
“Ah! Comme la neige a neigé!
Qu’est-ce que le spasme de vivre
À la douleur que j’ai, que j’ai”

(“Oh how the snow has snowed!
My window is a garden of frost
Oh! How the snow has snowed!
What is this spasm of life
To the pain I have, I have!”)

Adam Gopnik delivering the 2011 Massey Lecture on “Remembering Winter,” Koerner Hall, at the Royal Conservatory, University of Toronto. (phot by James Marsh)

I was less interested in Gopnik’s quite long sidetracks into urban planning (in particular the underground labyrinth beneath downtown Montreal) as I hate malls, particularly the monstrosity in Edmonton that sucks the life out of the heart of the city in both winter and summer, and another on the role of the automobile in destroying the city’s soul.

The lectures are available however you want them, filmed, recorded, printed and I am sure that in any form will give pleasure to and extract surprise from any Canadian. Each essay is filled with provocative insights and allusions.

I thanked the author afterward for evoking the Proustian idea of memory reconstituting our lives in the Canadian context and later spent time writing down my own childhood memories of winter with a new insight. Of course, this is a big country. Winter in Edmonton is a far cry from winter in Montreal (much less Vancouver where plus temperatures are considered “chilly”). Think of walking a shaggy dog in -40 degrees, in a world so frozen that it acts like a sensory depravation tank, under a blazing blue sky, almost blind and hearing only the squeak of rubber on the ice crusted snow—the very essence of solitude.

Winter: Five Windows on the Season will air on Ideas from November 7 to November 11 on CBC Radio One. The published series is available from House of Anansi Press. Visit the Massey Lectures for more information.

Three versions of The Canadian Encyclopedia on CD-ROM.

This success of CD-ROM was partly owing to two primary causes, I think. First was storage, as entire works of thousands of pages of print could be stuffed onto a single CD-ROM. This was at a time when the cost of paper was making the reprinting of multi-volume works prohibitive. Secondly, there was the search engine. There is so much more information in a reference work than can ever be covered in an index, and with a good search engine, everything in the text could be found. But CD-ROM did not last. In fact there was too little storage space when it came to adding multimedia. Before DVD could replace CDs, the World Wide Web came along.

Encyclopedias have proven even more successful on the Web than on CD-ROM. Arguments about whether or not Wikipedia qualifies as a traditional encyclopedia aside, the Web is home to innumerable encyclopedias, helping to make sense of the millions of answers to a single question in Google. It is easier to go straight to Wikipedia than to page down through hundreds of results. Our own encyclopedia is well used for Canadian information with up to 900,000 visitors per month.

CD-ROM seemed a godsend at the time but as demands for multimedia grew it proved very limited and was soon superseded by the Internet.

Enough time has passed with our online presence, with what is essentially still a book version transported online, that we have been asking questions about how we can expand the idea of what an encyclopedia can be in the new environment. More on this elsewhere on this site, but for now The Canadian Encyclopedia is excited to have launched its first iPhone app. Last March we launched a mobile version of The Canadian Encyclopedia, which is quite widely used, but it is not an app.

Our staff and our developers have kicked around numerous ideas – too many, really – about what an encyclopedia app might be. For now, we have settled on expanding and transforming the information we provide on Canadian cities—one of the most important and widely used topics in The Canadian Encyclopedia. We decided to focus on history in situ and on telling interesting stories that give users a sense of time, a possibility completely impossible in a book encyclopedia. Because of its mobile aspect—telling the stories as you stand in the places where they happened—impossible online as well.

We are not exactly sure what the origins of this app were. I think it started in my own mind as more of an historical guide, but our developers at 7th Floor Media persuaded us to move more towards storytelling and then to link to more conventional information from those stories.* My own staff were highly skeptical of this direction, preferring that we concentrate more on a comprehensive Canadian Encyclopedia app. Perhaps, like most young people, they were being skeptical of any interest in history. However, as the app unfolded in a unique design, with a cool “then and now” visual transformation through time, and as almost everyone we showed it to repeated the “cool” encomium, we grew enthusiastic. Seeing the links to the mobile version of The Canadian Encyclopedia for “more information” satisfied my urge to add a serious “encyclopedic” aspect to the app.

The Vancouver In Time App and its link to the TCE Mobile version.

Links from the Vancouver In Time app to the mobile version of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Of course we see this Vancouver app as only the beginning, with plans well underway to create a Toronto app, with Ottawa, Montreal and others to follow. It is my hope that users will explore the stories from cities other than their own—we are really ignorant in Canada of the richness not only of our own history, but even more of the history elsewhere. I had people tell me in Vancouver that Toronto would be infertile ground for such an app, as it has very little history! It is an understandable point of view as really, our city developers have gone out of their way to destroy our physical heritage. We hope to recover some of that, at least virtually.

We are also planning to add an Android version and possibly RIM and iPad as well. We are just getting our feet wet, but already realize that we must build in an interactive aspect, in which people can comment, share photos and ultimately their own stories. If we can help build awareness of our stories, based on location, and get people involved in sharing their history, we think it a worthy expansion and an exciting new direction for what a modern encyclopedia can provide.

James Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia

*We are very grateful for the guidance, persuasion and great work of our developer 7th Floor Media: Noni Mate for management, Daniel Sheinin for programming, Dennis Smith for the stories and photographs, and Moragh Goshinmon for the design. Daniel Francis was the source for many of the stories.

Link to Vancouver in Time: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vancouver-in-time/id480547811?ls=1&mt=8

On May 20, 1960 a team of Israelis drugged Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel for war crimes. The abduction caused a sensation around the world. No-one blamed the Argentines for being furious at the violation of their sovereignty. What is most interesting to me in retrospect is the reaction in the United States. A vituperative editorial in the Washington Post was typical, calling the operation “jungle law,” and an “act that is divorced from justice.” Time noted the “high disregard of international law.” The Christian Science Monitor declared that the Israelis show themselves no different from the Nazis. Noted Conservative critic William Buckley call the trial a “pernicious effort designed to speak for a mythical legal entity, the Jewish People.” Buckley deplored the fact that whereas Christians focus on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ “for only one month of the year,” “this trial was to last three months.” The New York Times called the act “immoral” and “illegal.”

What a contrast on May 1 of 2011, when Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had shot Bin Laden in the head and later buried him at sea. The news touched off an outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the ground zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.

By killing Bin Laden, the Americans spared themselves many of the issues that the Israelis had to resolve with Eichmann. Who would judge, prosecute and defend Eichmann? What would be the scope and legal status of the crimes for which he would stand trial? What would be the larger historical framework? In the event, the Israelis were scrupulous in trying Eichmann and giving him his chance to speak—despite some questionable aspects noted by Lipstadt.

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, 1961. (from the documentary film "The Specialist")

So how to account for the incredible difference in the reactions of Americans over these two related events? Are there in fact “crimes against humanity” separate from the “crimes against Americans, or French, or Jews” and should the principles of due process and rule of law apply when perpetrators are found?

While I am devoted to the idea that a knowledge of history is important to a good education, good citizenship and even to our humanity, I have never subscribed to the easy assumption that we “learn” from history. I do, however, believe that if history does not supply us with easy answers, it does provoke interesting questions. So this is not a comment on the probity of the reaction to either event, nor on the evil of either protagonist (though it must be noted somewhere that Bin Laden’s crimes pale next to those of Eichmann), or not even on the appropriateness of revenge. The comparison does however leave a sense of unease at what might best be called inconsistency, or worse hypocrisy.

James H. Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Grant wrote his book so that “posterity may know that we have not loosely through silence permitted [our independence] to pass away as in a dream.”

is essential reading for any Canadian interested in the question that he posed in his introduction to the Carleton Library edition in 1970: “in what ways and for what reasons do we have the power and desire to maintain some independence of the American empire?” As a matter of record, I was the editor of that edition—the first book that I edited for McClelland and Stewart. Reading it changed my ideas and my life. I had to track down Mr Grant for delivery of that introduction and he was very crabby with me, for good reason I found out, as he had just endured a very serious automobile accident.

William Christian has called the book a “masterpiece.” It is not that, I don’t think, for its many weaknesses. Yet it stirred discussion of Canadian nationalism and its central concern is just as relevant today as it was then.

The book was written out of particular events, namely the election of 1963, in which Grant argued the Liberal Party under Lester Pearson, and the NDP under Tommy Douglas joined ranks to defeat the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker. Grant believed that if Pearson was successful it would open Canada to John F. Kennedy’s American imperialism and spell the end of Canadian nationalism (Kennedy hated Diefenbaker). Though not uncritical of Diefenbaker, Grant contrasted his brand of indigenous nationalism to “American liberalism” (an odd phrase today). In the end most Canadians preferred Kennedy, and his guise of “Camelot,” to Diefenbaker’s “True North.” Grant wrote his book so that “posterity may know that we have not loosely through silence permitted [our independence] to pass away as in a dream.”

The continentalist vision brokered by the Liberal Party establishment prevailed. “Canadian nationalism! How old fashion can you get” declared billionaire E.P. Taylor. Or, as Liberal Cabinet minister Mitchell Sharpe said to me in a seminar, “I look up at skyscrapers on Bay Street and on Wall street and see no difference.”

Problematic in the book of course is Grant’s declaration that it is the values of liberalism that erode any chance of Canadian nationalism (individuality, capitalism, the pursuit of personal self-assertion), and that only a faith-based conservatism could preserve it. Yet his argument seems even more relevant now as globalization and American style consumerism and popular culture destroy traditional values, a sense of local community, languages and culture.

It was this strain of an independent destiny that so affected me in wondering about the preservation of a distinct society on the northern half of the continent—or at least the possibility of developing one. In Grant’s mind it would be impossible when technology, consumption and individual liberty are the virtues we value the most. After all, Canada was put together, Grant noted, by two peoples “who did not want to be Americans.” (My italics.) Grant denied that he was a pessimist. I am.

“I am lost to the world.”

I spent much of my reading time this past November 2011 with a new biography Gustav Mahler (English translation 2011), written by Jens Malte Fischer. It was an unsettling, otherworldly experience.

First published in Germany in 2003, Fischer was able to draw on resources unavailable to previous biographers, including the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler. I have been listening to Mahler’s music for a long time and have read other biographies of his life, but of course I remember little. I take solace that a poor memory brings the advantage of discovery. I was interested in the genesis of Mahler’s composing, his conducting, his philosophy, his relationships with his friends, family and particularly his marriage to Alma. I was less interested and perhaps skimmed much of the coverage of the politics of his various appointments and his relationships with musicians (except the singers with whom he had affairs), which were repetitiously bad.

I don’t know the massive biography by Henry-Louis De La Grange so talked about either as a work of genius or tedium (nor is it likely that I will as each of the four volumes sells for $150!), but neither will this one be definitive. Is such a thing possible for a life and character as complex as Gustav Mahler? I came upon several careless reviews of the book on the Internet. I cannot agree with Rupert Christiansen that “Fischer loses the essence of Mahler’s grandeur.” Fischer adores Mahler and leaves a strong impression of his magnitude. Where did this reviewer get the idea that Fischer implies that Mahler “was touched with the Asperger’s syndrome so common to those cursed with creative genius”? One hears the same sort of claims about Glenn Gould, but it is useless speculation and I did not find it anywhere in the book. (Freud thought he had a serious “mother fixation.”)

Then there is Norman Lebrecht, who claims that Fischer “displays no grasp of the constraints of Jewish life in central Europe.” (I thought that he does—it is a contentious, complex and critical issue not sidestepped, especially in the extensive chapter “Jewishness and Identity.”) Norman seems on shaky ground making any claim, as his book on “how Mahler changed the world” is savagely panned in reviews.

High-strung he may have been, but Mahler was also just plain resolute, able to conduct four or five performances a week, many of them three- or five-hour operas like “Tristan” and “Don Giovanni”; to rise early the next morning to orchestrate his own music; and then to walk to the opera house to deal with the myriad complications and headaches that came with his position as music director of a major opera house. He conducted with raging fevers, sore throats or, his particular curse, painful hemorrhoids—even before his heart distress.

Laid up in bed with a virus, reading the book on my iPad and wired to my iPod, I had an intense experience opening my imagination to this amazing “other,” this man of genius and intensity. Mahler conducted over a hundred operas in some years—imagine some conductor today—all from memory. Was he a genius as a composer? I guess that is more of an opinion. He was a strange one, that’s for sure. I listened to all the songs I have in my collection and all the symphonies (except #10) at least once—number 3 perhaps never again—perhaps not 8 either. The rest never disappoint and one must pay attention. The music feels profoundly autobiographical almost confessional—tender or violent, sarcastic or sentimental, trivial or idealistic. “I have written into them, in my own blood, everything that I have experienced and endured,” he confided to a friend after finishing the Second Symphony. (This before the hammer blows of the Sixth!)

This relationship between Mahler’s music and his personal life is nicely expressed at the end of his love affair with soprano Johanna Richter: “a sense of inexpressible anguish had arisen between us like an everlasting partition wall, and there was nothing I could do but press her hand and leave. As I came outside, the bells were ringing and the solemn chorale could be heard from the tower”

Portrait by Finnish artist Akseli Galen-Kalela. "Mahler looked like someone who had despaired in God and who in consequence had been cast down from the light into the darkness.”

No artist likes to give simplistic answers to the sources of his/her inspiration and Mahler spoke less and less of this as he got older. While attending a fair in 1900, Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports that “Mahler was so taken by the combined sounds of the shooing galleries and Punch and Judy show, the military band music and the singing of a male-voice choir, that he exclaimed ‘You hear? That’s polyphony, and that is where I get it from!’”

In Mahler’s complex, sometimes contradictory philosophy, was an almost Buddhist belief “that our sufferings will be healed and smoothed away and the whole offensive comedy of human conflict will disappear like a pathetic mirage.” But he also believed that only artistic expression makes the world’s suffering endurable. It is very hard for me, at least, to disagree with Mahler’s view that “all that is most profound and most inexpressible in our lives would seem at best like a bad translation but it finds its altogether perfect interpreter in music”

Fischer portrays a fine sense of Mahler’s otherworldliness “ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” “I am lost to the world.” (Oddly, this was the self-proclaimed motto of Carlos Kleiber, who seemed to pattern himself so much on Mahler, but who would have nothing to do with his music.)

For those of us who might be tempted to respond to the fanciful question of where in the past we would like to be reborn with the answer fin de siècle Vienna, we might cite its creativity, genius and beauty, but Fischer portrays it as well as backbiting, pretentious and of course poisoned by an endemic anti-Semitism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal described something else: “ We have nothing but a sentimental memory, a paralysed will and the uncanny gift for self-duplication. We watch our lives pass us by; we empty the cup betimes and yet remain perpetually thirsty…. We have, as it were, no roots in life and wander around among life’s children like clairvoyant shades who are yet blind to the daylight.” This seems to me a perfect description of our own time, but who is there now to express it as Mahler did, while still retaining a “profound respect in the face of life’s mystery”?

Fischer cannot avoid, though he seems reluctant at times, the whole mess of Mahler’s relationship with Alma Shindler. With Alma’s revelation of her affair with Walter Gropius, Fischer writes: “The present writer admits to having difficulty with the events of these months. Rather these events depict our ‘hero’ in such a desperate and hopeless situation, a character who, for all his contradictions, was none the less a great man but who seems to fall apart.” Alma, a mendacious diarist, was likely truthful when she wrote “he said that he felt that I did not love him. He was right. After what had happened everything in me was cold.” “He lived a life of torment and inflicted torments a thousand times worse on me. Our lovely beginning had turned to gloom and misery.” (He lost interest in having sex with her.) Furthermore she could not stand his music: “his art leaves me so cold, so dreadfully cold. I don’t believe in him as a composer.” Fischer is unstinting in his contempt of Alma for lying and destroying evidence and for playing the martyr, but for the marriage, he shows sympathy: “After eight years of a frustrating marriage she believed that she deserved it [the affair].”

Against all this of course, in the background, we have the exquisite (even if overexposed) and perhaps unsurpassed love song to Alma, the Adagietto of Mahler’s 5th Symphony. (Fischer hates the version used, famously, in Visconti’s film Death in Venice.)

Adagietto, 5th Symphony, Sir John Barbirolli, devotion, love, sadness.

The listening and reading brings me inevitably to the 9^th Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde. At my age I am deeply in accord with Alban Berg, who adored Mahler: “I’ve just played through Mahler’s Ninth again. The first movement is the most glorious that he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, the longing to live on it in peace, nature, to enjoy it completely, to the very depths of one’s being, before death comes.”

Even more, and not to be morbid, is the effect of the wistful nostalgia and mystery of Das Lied von der Erde. In Fischer’s words (regarding the last movement)

“Never has the unfathomable loneliness for the human soul been laid so bare and seemed as vulnerable as it does here.” The ending staggers to an end with a sevenfold repeat of the word “Ewig” (forever).

Among many critics and scholars Fischer cites, one of the most sympathetic and influential was Theodor Adorno who wrote: “in his musical vagrancy he picks up the broken glass by the roadside and holds it up to the sun so that all the colours are refracted…. In the debased and vilified materials of music he scratches for illicit joys.”

Fischer describes in great detail Mahler’s death. How does a genius die? “One has the impression that when he died Mahler was not at peace with himself or with the other wider questions of life and death.”

“One day people will separate the wheat from the chaff—and when his [Richard Strauss’] day has passed, my time will come,” Mahler famously remarked. That “one day” for Mahler’s music came in the 1960s. Fischer proposes a number of reasons for this surge in interest in Mahler’s music, including Adorno’s monograph in 1960 and the spread of stereo and high fidelity, which showcased his music. It was just at that time that I discovered both Mahler and Bruckner. I learned to love classical music from a dear friend, Al Hand, whose standards were Haydn and Brahms. He was appalled when I discovered Mahler in the stacks at the Music Library on Avenue Road, located beneath his attic apartment. All I knew came from the LP blurbs and the astonishing sounds I heard.

Margaret Price sings Mahler\’s \”Liebst du um Schönheit\” (Rückert #3). Farewell to the great Welsh soprano who died last year.

“How absurd it is to let oneself be submerged in the brutal whirlpool of life!” Mahler wrote. “To be untrue to oneself and to those higher things above oneself for even a single hour. Strange! When I hear music—even while I am conducting—I hear quite specific answers to all my questions—and am completely clear and certain. Or rather I feel quite distinctly that they are not questions at all.”

James H.Marsh is Editor in Chief of The Canadian Encyclopedia