November 2, 1981

View Full Issue Table of Contents

COVER

Southern Europe marches to the left

The shouts of disbelief came first; then a hallelujah of car horns shattered the soft autumnal dusk. Constitution Square erupted into a delirious arm-locked syrtaki dance of thousands. In the streets, tears flowed and strangers embraced.

PEOPLE

Peter Hodgson was once “hungry, cocky and funny” enough to make $50 an hour playing his music on Ottawa street corners. Then, in 1977, using his stage name Sneezy Waters, he began to impersonate Hank Williams and hasn’t played streets or clubs he calls “toilets” since. By BARBARA MATTHEWS7 min

LETTERS

You hit a lot of bases in your article That Old Sinking Feeling . . . (Canada, Oct. 19). But you are off the mark with your contention that John Diefenbaker devised the title Progressive Conservative “to counter the party’s Bay Street image.”

PROFILE: NADINE GORDIMER

Sensing the earthquakes in society

"People curl their lips and say that we writers imagine that we’re seers; the answer is that we neither arrogantly imagine that we can look into the future, nor do we like this label to be put upon us. But we do have this prescience which comes from being very sensitive to all the undercurrents and waves that are going on below the surface. By Hubert de Santana6 min

ART

Forging a visual language

In 1926, art critic F.B. Housser described Frederick Horsman Varley as “a sort of art gypsy.” He did not intend it as a compliment; Varley’s career, with its protean changes in style and subject matter, was an untidy departure from the landscape-oriented art movement that Housser was determined to champion. By Robert Enright5 min

CANADA

Constitutional chicken game

In Canada’s currently poisonous political atmosphere Richard Hatfield’s outburst at last week’s conference of premiers seemed entirely predictable. “Once they found we would not surrender . . . that was it, end of meeting,” Hatfield grouched, his pudgy hands wrapping and unwrapping around his morning cup of coffee. By Ian Anderson5 min

SCIENCE

Predicting the Eastern Canadian quake

Few of the several thousand people living within several hundred kilometres of the St. Lawrence River realize that theirs is among the more earthquake-prone regions of North America. Yet only two years ago, people in the town of La Pocatière suddenly heard their windows and dishes rattling. By Terence Dickinson4 min