Ray and Robert #nlpoli

With the release of Ray Guy:  the final columns, 2003 - 2013,  almost every column Ray Guy ever published is now available in book form.

This compilation is edited by Brian Jones,  published by Creative,  and contains a decade's worth of writing Guy did for The northeast Avalon Times.  The topics are all familiar fodder:  provincial politicians.

Let's be clear about one thing up front.  You will buy this book to fill out your collection of Ray Guy's work.  You will not be buying it as a penetrating insight into a decade's worth of politics in Newfoundland and Labrador. Sure the cover blurbs are effusive in their praise - "brilliant writing"  and "unequalled style" - but by the time Ray was clacking out his opinions on Danny,  Jerome or Roger,  he was clearly tired.

What's more evident is that his touchstones,  his go-to references had become cliche,  stale and lifeless through overuse.  And what's worse, his writing lacked any sign of crispness, clarity, deftness of phrase, or any of Guy's other hallmarks.

The Mythical Golden Age of Newfoundland News #nlpoli

Ray Guy, on the endless search for truth in local newsrooms (circa 1974):

Sometimes you get the feeling that the newsrooms of the city are as divorced from reality as the earth is distant from the sun. Their almost exclusive stock-in-trade has become the reports of speeches, seminars, election campaigns, council meetings, legislative shenanigans, endless press releases…  All that is planned news, programmed news, bloodless mimeographed news, which touches not at all on the endless swirl of the sometimes-grubby, sometimes-heartening day-to-day life in the streets outside.

-srbp- 

Honouring Newfoundland Writers #nlpoli

Most of you have probably never heard of a fellow named Alonzo John  Gallishaw. 

John Gallishaw is best remembered in his native land for his brief service in the Newfoundland regiment during the Great War.  Wounded at Gallipoli,  Gallishaw was invalided out of service and eventually went back to the United States.  Born in St. John’s in 1890, Gallishaw had been in the United States at the time war broke out.  He was studying English at Harvard University, of all places.

He took up a teaching appointment and after the Americans entered the war,  Gallishaw enlisted in the American Army in January 1918.  He  took a commission and went to France as part of the American expeditionary force   That was Gallishaw’s hat-trick since he had enlisted briefly in the Canadian army on the war to Newfoundland in 1915.

The Revolutionary Years

For those who loved the first volume of Boulder Publication’s compilation of Ray Guy columns, make sure you get Ray Guy:  the Revolutionary Years.

The first volume ended in 1971 just at the tail end of Joe Smallwood’s reign.  This one picks up in 1971, carries through the tumult of Sally’s Cove and then rocks through the 1970s, Come by Chance, the Marystown Shipyard, offshore oil, Baie d’Espoir, the Lower Churchill, John Crosbie, fuddle duddle, Fintan Aylward, Ed Roberts and all.

Get it now at your local bookstore or order online from Boulder. It’s a better use for 20 bucks than another compilation of columns by a far less talented writer at least one of which was cribbed from the Globe and Mail.

- srbp -

The Placentia Bay Nostradamus

If the Telegram editors ever get jammed up for copy, they could easily recycle Ray Guy columns from 40 years ago. 

Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between goings on then and now.

Back then, partridgeberries were the economic salvation of this cove or that harbour.  These days, cranberries will replace the income from a pulp and paper mill in Grand Falls.

Back then people were complaining about the great partisan conspiracy against the beloved saviour of His People.

These days, Bill Westcott is lacing into Peter Pickersgill on much the same basis. Poor Pickersgill has the extra misfortune of not only being the progeny of mainlanders but of being not pur laine hisself:

Despite spending a lot of his adult life in Salvage, we must remember PIC is not even an (Island-born) Newfoundlander, one of da boys! His genes, I think are rooted in Winnipeg and Ottawa.

That explains everything, of course.

There is no way the truth could be known by someone who wasn’t born here or who doesn’t live here.

Sure John Hickey said so dealing with another one of the confounded traitors:

Of course Mr. Waugh is entitled to his opinions on any and all Labrador matters, even as he writes from the comfort of his Nova Scotia home.

And Bill Westcott? 

He writes his truth from Florida.

That must be Florida, Bonavista Bay.

-srbp-