The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 65

MIX THE VANCOUVER SUN, SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2000 E5 SPOTLIGHT BRIAN LAM The ArsenalPulp publisher will take the city, thanks. In an era that some have termed post-literate, when real men don't read fiction and real governments don't give grants, how 1 exactly does a small, independent publisher survive? Well, you could specialize in the high-lyric romantic epic that the world has come to expect from Canadian literature or prowl the stacks of THE MIX QUESTIONNAIRE Minnie, Esther and Annie Galway, "wide-bodied" forebears of Matthew Mallon Wrong ANTHROPOLOGY of a divided people What is your favourite Gulf Island? Pender. Being a city boy It's the only one I've been to. of Irish kind iLi LI Uwi What is your quickest time on the Grouse Grind? Never been. I've driven to Whistler, though.

manuscripts looking for easy reads like Bridget Jones's Diary. Then again, you could be Brian Lam, publisher at ArsenalPulp Press and choose genre-defying novels that blur the boundaries between various media audacious works where verse, screenplay and treatise masquerade as novel. And you could supplement those with bill-paying ventures such as alternative cookbooks (How It All Vegan), edgy reference books Secrets Of The City guides to both Vancouver and Calgary) and a veritable blizzard of titles devoted to sex. Already in the catalogue are such titles as Hot Bothered 2: Short Short Fiction On Lesbian Desire; Quickies: Short Short Fiction On Gay Male Desire and The Bald-Headed Hermit The Artichoke: An Erotic Thesaurus. Due out in fall is Carnal Nation; New Sex Fictions, an anthology of Canada's hottest young writers.

(Let's get this straight people like Camilla Gibb and Michael Turner writing about With its three-day novel contest (since taken over by Anvil) and Little Books of Pattison, Van der Zalm et ArsenalPulp had dipped into the waters of creative survival long before Lam's arrival in 1 984. But where the old Pulp personified would have been bra-less or bearded and facing hard left, the Pulp run by Lam and marketing director Blaine Kyllo shaves daily and looks straight ahead into a future that, although sexually and politically indeterminate, is decidedly urban. Liz Hodgson Begorra! Sure and won't the Micks and Paddys be celebrating on March 17 but not the Protestant Micks and Paddys. ATTHEW MALLO SPECIAL TO THE SUN What year did you join Mountain Equipment Co-op? These questions are very outdoor-centric! Who is your local crush? None of your business. Your favourite view of Vancouver? Denman and Davie on a sunny day.

What should go in the gaping retail space vacated by Eaton's? A big fat disco. If not Vancouver, then where? New York. I live for large, oppressive cities. 'it overrun with Danes, Norwegians, the English, the Flemish, the French, all fornicating like mad. And more from Bardon: "There is growing scholarly evidence that 17th-century planters and their descendants did not separate themselves from the native population as much as was formerly believed.

British settlers in Western Ulster sometimes married local women and within a generation their descendants could well be speaking Irish. On the other side of the province the incoming flood of colonists encouraged many native Irish to embrace Protestantism, speak English, and drop the prefix O' or Mac from their surnames The only well-known Mallons I've ever heard of are Catholics. Seamus Mallon is the most prominent moderate Catholic leader in Ulster. There was a Mallon working as a cook on a transatlantic ship in the 19th century who married a passenger called Mary, who went into history as Typhoid Mary. That's Typhoid Mary Mallon, please.

In More Irish Families (or The Big Book of Bogtrotters, as it's known around our place) I discover that it is one of two variants in English "of the Irish surname Meallain, that of a family chiefly noted as joint hereditary keepers of the bell of St. Patrick, otherwise called the Bell of the Tes When I was 16 my uncle took me out drinking in Belfast. At the end of the night, after so much Guinness that I avoid the stuff to this day, I stood barely upright in a crowded basement bar while huge men in camouflage pants and paramilitary mullets screamed themselves raw at the terrified-looking band onstage. There were a few women there as well, each of them smoking half-a-dozen cigarettes simultaneously. They were as scary as the men at least, and were screaming too, the same unintelligible howl.

"What are they screaming?" I slurred in my uncle's ear. "Gloria!" he slurred back. A blues guitarist, he'd found himself onstage in the same situation many times. Here in Van Morrison's home town, he added, "you don't get out of a Protestant bar alive without playing Gloria." And soon I could hear the ragged shape of the old Them song over the mob, and soon everyone was shouting in unison "Gee Ell Oh Are I AY!" and I thought, these are my people? That's my father's side of the family. After recovering from the Guinness, I was taken to visit Auntie Minnie, some sort of favourite great-aunt or cousin once removed on my mother's side.

The Caugh-eys. A burgher's house, solid and dark, mm The writer's uncle Brian Mallon (foreground) in Belfast in 1950, with assorted other Mallons. FROM E5 A growth Industry here on the hill Is great for filling the till. British Properties' grass Is really kick ass. And you thought the view was the thrill.

A premier who had a big deck Said, "You shuffle, I'll cut, what the heck. From the bottom I'll deal While you spin the wheel This industry sure beats high tech." JUNE MACDONALD West Vancouver There once was a premier named U. His party had been in the stew. Can he turn it around, Get up off the ground, And convince us to vote for his crew? ELSIE ANDERSON Squamish Vaughn Palmer in full rant and ramble In each interview and preamble Led the media coup That assures me and you Of four years of hell with Gord Campbell. JIM NELSON Democracy: If just malarkey.

Think Vander Zalm, Harcourt and Clarkie. One vote is too small. It don't help at all. Is it time to revert to mon-archy? MARTY VAN TOL Vancouver tament: Frequent mention is made of them in the Annals of the Four Masters, Loch Ce, etc. In the 17th century there were several distinguished priests of the name, particularly in the Franciscan Order, as the Wadding Papers testify.

The best known was Father Turlough O'Mellan, whose Ulster War Diary (1641-1647) in Irish 'is a document of surpassing interest, historically and As early as 1420 the name was recorded without the when two men named Mallon were appointed tax collectors for Drogheda by the parliament of the time. Commandant Michael Mallin was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising he led the St. Stephen's Green contingent executed in 1916." Right. So my first-born son will be known to all as Turlough. That much is certain.

But how did I end up Protestant? And why do the Protestants hate the Catholics so? And vice-versa? The answer to the first question is lost in time. I would guess that one of my practical and irreligious ancestors saw the way the wind was blowing for Catholics in the north and said to hell with it. What's the Pope done for me lately? And the answer to the second question? Well it's the Brits' fault Basically. In the 1790s, General Lake, the Englishman in charge of suppressing the unrest that would soon break out in the United Irishmen Rising of 1798, received a letter from a subordinate: "I have arranged to increase the animosity between Orangemen and the United Irish. Upon that animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the north." It's the oldest tactic in the book, perhaps.

Divide and conquer. Whenever the Protestant community began to realize that it had common interests against the Empire, dissension was sown. Moderate Protestants were jailed, terrorized by Lake's troops. Many emigrated. That's still the case today.

A couple of years ago, I asked my uncle what he really, really thought of the Troubles, of prospects for peace. He told mc, and thi said "If I talked like that in my local I'd be knee-capped on the way home." animosity between the newcomers and the original inhabitants has always been there. But it has not always been homicidal. At various limes. Protestants and Catholics have worked together against the Iltilish.

Northern Irish Presbyterians were once active in the simple for an independent Ireland. But in order to subdue Ireland, especially Ulster, the English had to build a monster, close to home. And they, and Northern Ireland, have been paying for it ever since. It's not all the fault of the English. The Prods themselves, or at SEE TROUBLES, E6 filled with Victorian knick-knackery.

Middle-class Protestants, wide-bodied, formal people who livened up eventually, especially when one of them arrived with his new record, featuring a picture of him in his red racing car on the cover, and we listened to his sterling rendition of Danny Boy. These too, I thought, drowning in some overstuffed chair these too are my people? I'd been vaguely aware, growing up, that my mother and father were from Ireland. But I knew it was complicated. We avoided St. Patrick's Day.

Had no shamrocks about the house. Religion was a non-issue. The Irish Spring commercial yes, but Oi Loike it would come on TV sometimes and send my father into a gibbering rage. Jesus H. Murphy! he would yell at the bon-nie colleen on the screen.

When I was eight or nine, my mother caught me singing The Patriot Game, an Irish rebel song I'd heard on a folk record. "You can't really sing that," she said with a strange look on her face. "You're not that sort of Irish." Irish Protestants, as my father likes to point out, get the same press as white South Africans. Oppressive, transplanted thugs, mostly. They are disliked by everyone, and generally dislike everyone right back.

They are British, not Irish, or so my Aunt Iris claims. They think of themselves as the Chosen People, a bulwark, the last best hope of Christendom. They defend themselves against, to quote their infamous figurehead Ian Paisley, "priestcraft, superstition and papalism, with all their attendant vices of murder, theft, immorality, lust and incest, blocking the way to the land of gospel liberty." They are the descendants of Scottish and English farmers brought over in the 17th century to settle Ulster, whose bloodthirsty and warlike inhabitants the "hill tribes," as they still are referred to by southerners would not be domesticated. They are dour, practical, God-fearing, honest. Though Paisley's bigoted invective has a certain Irish oratorical roll to it, they are not Irish.

Except they are. From Jonathan Bardon's History of Ulster. the inhabitants of Ulster seemed sharply divided into two ethnic groups with profoundly divergent aspirations Protestants had no difficulty in accepting the theory that they were Anglo-Saxon in race, possessing the inherited virtues of thrift, capacity for hard work, and respect for law and order. Nationalists largely accepted Protestants' assumption of racial separateness, for they at the same time were emphasizing their Gaelic origins and laying claim to inherent characteristics such as hospitality, passion and love of poetry." But most racial assumptions are wrong. There is no pure Irish race anywhere, for one thing.

Historically, the island has been "if.