National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 6

A6 nationalpost.com CANADA NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2009 fx wpp LIVING AND DYING i ill ml dy'fai 1 V- i v'' TYLER ANDERSON NATIONAL POST Author and musician Paul Quarrington was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer this year: "There is no stage five, at least not in cancer-speak." 1 "Ho. i 1 ll1 1 1J 7 I AIM TO had aboard the Clipper Adventurer. I was technically there as a musician (the literary arts were represented more than ably by publisher Doug Gibson and writer Alistair MacLeod, perhaps our country's finest) and most nights would play in the Forward Lounge, part of a group consisting of myself, singersongwriterrocker Tom Barlow, fiddlerbutton accordionist Daniel Payne, and David, a man who emerged from the crowd of passengers, sat down behind the piano and began playing with practised dexterity (and singing in a piercing falsetto.) I think this sort of thing is good for me, indeed, music and performing has been the basis, thus far, of my idiosyncratic therapy. On a purely physical level, JOURNEY Continued from Page Al There is no stage five, at least not in cancer-speak, although I guess stage five is really the launching into the great unknown. I didn't really have to make plans, a la Mr.

McGraw. I already had plans, plans that involved touring with my musical group, Pork-belly Futures, plans that involved a lot of travel, including a cruise down the coast of Labrador with a company called Adventure Canada. This was billed as "The Walrus Arts Float," where people with an artistic bent were encouraged to write, paint and make music. (The TYLER ANDERSON NATIONAL POST Dining with his Porkbelly Futures band mates during a break in a recent recording session at Humber College. "It i v7 7 V' fir' Paul sings a lot.

Should he be doing that? I think it's good for me to bellow for three or four hours in a row. It seems pretty logical; if one's left lung is all mucked up, covered by a squamous sessile tumor, why not get some air down there, shake things up a little bit? I recall one visit to the doctor's, where some member of my support team (Martin, Jill and Dorothy, or a combination thereof, always accompany me) asked, "Paul sings a lot. Should he be doing that?" "Well," the doctor answered seriously, "there's been very little research on the relationship between singing and lung cancer." That seems odd to me. I had a vocal coach the redoubtable Micah Barnes who taught me to draw in prodigious amounts of air, all in the aid of vocalization. I was even shown a method of inflating an invisible subcutaneous life-saver ring, and yes, I mean one that goes right the way around.

I blew and hummed and made my lips slap together with the insistence of a 40-horsepower Johnson. Continued on next page ship was flying the colours, at least figuratively, of The Walrus magazine and its publisher Shelley Ambrose.) This particular plan of mine was a wee bit problematic, which is to say, I spent a few weeks trying to convince people that the voyage was a good idea. The doctors, for example. "Where are you going?" "Well, we board the ship in Kuuj-juaq. But then we're heading for some places that are pretty remote." Various objections were raised.

For example, my condition makes me susceptible to hypercoagula-tion, which means that, for example, on the plane to Nunavut I could develop a blood clot and then subsequently throw an embolism and then subsequently die. Way way way sooner than I thought. But I was pretty adamant about my desire to go on the trip, although if you'd pressed me at the time, I don't think I'd have been able to say why. So let me vault ahead in time and report that I have just returned from the ten-day cruise. Certainly, fun was TYLER ANDERSON NATIONAL POST Quarrington is scheduled to play a solo show at Hugh's Room in Toronto this month..