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Hard Knox
Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada
by Jack Knox, Foreword by Ian Ferguson
Victoria: Heritage House, 2016. $19.95 / 9781772031508
Reviewed by Bill Engleson
*
For almost three decades, Jack Knox of the Victoria Times Colonist has been reporting on, and lampooning, life on the west coast and has now assembled his columns into his first book, Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada.
Nanaimo-raised Bill Engleson wades in with an appreciative review from Denman Island, his own vantage point on the western edge.
*
I cracked open Jack Knox's Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada on the coldest day of 2016 on Denman Island, alarmed at the baby blanket of snow on the ground near my front gate. You see, though I was born in British Columbia, I am snow-sensitive. This is Denman Island, not Baffin Island. It doesn't take much to snow me.
The next morning, as I made ready to read on, I forgot to put the coffee pot on the element and some of the fair trade organic coffee grounds overflowed onto my almond-chocolate croissant. My west coast tragedies were mounting.
Despite these missteps I knew that I was in good hands with Jack Knox. This charmed Vancouver Island satirist seems to know me even better than I know myself.
And I seem to know Knox. I believe he might adhere to the credo, famously espoused by the late Art Buchwald, the American humourist and Pulitzer Prize winner, that "You can't make anything up anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you are doing is recording it.";
And does Knox record it. He explores the full arena of Island and west coast oddities, fetishes, and rituals. He charts, with a deskbound meteorologist's precision, the vagaries of coastal weather. He is a weatherman intruding into the happy unpredictability of west coasters. No local peccadillo, imagined or real, escapes the anthropological notebook of this latter-day Franz Boas.
Or maybe I should observe that the entrepreneurial spirit of Robert Dunsmuir has inhabited him. He takes random chunks of cultural coal and, applying gentle pressure, turns them into gems and retrieves them from geological time. "No pressure, no diamonds,"; as Robert Carlyle put it.
Even as Knox fires his jokes at you, and about you, as if he is salting a coal mine, he is a delightfully funny fellow -- as well as a self-described grump -- from whom readers should be prepared to take their lumps.
No subject is verboten in Hard Knox, even Victoria's antiquated sewage system. He mentions it a couple of times, but it only earns a single spot in his index. Indeed he tips his hat to the iconic "Mr. Floatie"; (James Skwarok), Victoria's turd-gid, occasionally bubbly, anti-raw-sewage-directly-into-the-sea activist. Nuff said about that.
But my point, dear reader, is that Hard Knox has an index. This means that the author is a serious fellow, despite his voracious appetite for wisecrackery. In 2003, Art Salm, the book reviews editor of the San Diego Union Tribune, categorically re-butted any qualm regarding the pungency of book indexes with the following helpful aphorism: "A nonfiction book without an index has no heft. I pay it no attention. When I am deciding on whether to review or have a book reviewed, I check the index to get a good idea of what's covered in the book to help me decide.";
I can only assume that R. Mackie, the book reviews editor of this learned gazette, The Ormsby Review, was guided by a similar deference to indexes when deciding to review Hard Knox.
Thus sustained and buoyed, indeed floated, with confidence, I flushed forward to a fuller glance at the index to Hard Knox. The first item listed, curiously, is the "4/20 Marijuana Rally."; I stared at this for some time. I got myself another café au lait and a fresh pain au chocolate.
Thus sustained, it dawned on me that the book is not alphabetically coordinated. I was incredibly slow to grok that the number 4 refers to the fourth month and that, for the uninitiated, April 20th is international marijuana-smoke-your-brains-out-in-public day. It has nothing to do with wanting to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday. I was making progress.
The 4/20 reference appears in one of the more rabble-rousing of Knox's chapters, "Our Contrarian Culture: THE NAKED TRUTH,"; in which he wangles a catalogue of issues and protests that have emerged in our peevish past. Of course, he au naturel-ly begins with naked protests, summarizing our protest penchant succinctly by stating that, "After all, this is British Columbia, where people have exposed their wobbly bits to draw attention to everything from logging, war, religion, and subsidies for small bookstores, to, of course, antinudity laws.";
I was unsure if his comment about "wobbly bits"; refers to human appendages or Knox-speak meant to conjure up an image of the IWW movement in B.C. His index failed me on this point. I wanted to reference the infamous 2001 anti-logging ride of Briony Penn, aka Lady Godiva, but I am told that she is now also a book reviewer for this august publication.
Moving right along, the index ends with Zulu. Again, Knox and I are in astonishing alignment. In "Griswolding Part 1,"; he compares his outdoor Christmas lighting geist to the 1964 colony-enhancing and Imperialist epic film, Zulu, starring Michael Caine in his first significant cinematic role.
Our effervescent journalist takes issue with Christmas foofaraw and compares his burnt-out Christmas lights to the fallen British Army fusiliers at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I have no doubt the comparison brought tears of joy and nostalgia to the Oak Bay Branch of the Monarchist League.
This discussion also served as a niggling reminder to me of an overdue domestic duty and so, on December 27th, I hauled out my box of strings of ancient outdoor Christmas lighting and strung them up in five minutes' flat. Many had fallen in earlier exposures, their light forever dissipated. A few more are now broken, shattered by my never-ending carelessness and the Great Freeze of January 2017. But I digress.
I then warmed up with a re-watch of Zulu, available for nada on YouTube. A ripping yarn.
Some time later, I pondered on how easily one can be ensnared by indiscriminate indexing. You will find -- well, I found, and you may -- that Jack has a favourite saying he oft repeats. It is almost a theme to live by, a reflection of his classically organized Kamloopsian mind.
It is, ta-da, "But I digress."; This utterance appears several times throughout the book (pp. 59, 76, 195, to name but three). It suggests a candour about the man that is appealing. When Knox digresses, he tells you he is digressing.
He could easily have placed "But, I digress,"; in his index. It would have slipped in comfortably between "Butchart Gardens, The,"; and "Butter Tarts.";
Speaking of desserts, Knox gains considerable favour with me with his rhapsodic ode to Nanaimo Bars in his wide-ranging chapter with its Franco-friendly title, "CHERS Touristes,"; which attempts to inform francophone (and American) visitors about Vancouver Island politics, currency, crime, culinary confections, and related local traits and foibles.
Let me digress. I was raised in Nanaimo. I cut my teeth on Nanaimo Bars, the chewy kind, and later slaked my insatiable young chops in the other Nanaimo bars -- the more prevalent beer parlours, of which the Hub City was rumoured to possess the most per capita in the known world.
As for butter tarts, my mother made the best ones, often freezing them for months on end. I periodically snuck downstairs to the basement freezer to liberate a frozen butter tart or three. I loved those hard, sticky-sweet beauties, poker-faced harbingers of future dental disease.
As I journeyed through Knox's musings, I found myself flummoxed as to what was my favourite. I was especially drawn to the chapter, "My Illicit Love, BC Ferries,"; which has a peculiar charm. Besides its ironic (I think) allure, I was bemused that Knox and I were, seemingly, drinking from the same trough.
To wit: where he, economically and in one tightly composed paragraph, references the 2005 story of heroic Jay Leggit, the Mayne Island baseball player who jumped from the Spirit of British Columbia into Active Pass to get to his game on time, I devoted a whole convoluted chapter to that audacious episode in my recently released book of essays. Great minds.
Perhaps, throughout this entire review, I have been digressing as much or more than Knox does. It may well be a West Coast pastime. So many things to say, so much time to say them.
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own,"; wrote Jonathan Swift. By this measure, Hard Knox may not even be satire at all.
Indeed, I found my own image looking back at me repeatedly as I floated through Hard Knox. Many readers will, I suspect, see their image captured in whole or in part as Knox traces delightfully common denominators to life on the western edge of Canada.
*
[Ormsby Review 2017]
Opportunity Knox: Twenty Years of Award Losing Humour Writing
by Jack Knox
Victoria: Heritage House, 2017.
$19.95 / 9781772032086
Reviewed by Bill Engleson
*
Jack Knox, columnist of the Victoria Times-Colonist, is known for his incisive humour.
His proposed names for new B.C. Ferries: the Spirit of Jobs Sent to Germany, the Service Reduction Princess, the Coastal Community Collapse.
He proposed, as a name for a new library in Victoria, Booky McBookPlace, Library McLibraryface, and Dewey McDecimalface.
Reviewer Bill Engleson likens some of Knox's columns to bird droppings on a car windshield. "You can almost hear the wipers flapping as you flutter from chapter to chapter.";
Knox's first book, Hard Knox: Musings From the Edge of Canada, was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Now the humourist, like the postman, has knocked twice. It's a pretty safe bet he'll be returning. - Ed.
*
Opportunity Knox, Jack Knox's sophomore book, is a compilation of seventy-six (or thereabouts) columns written by Knox for the Victoria Times-Colonist, starting in September 1998 with the delightfully anti-cat, pooch-frippery essay, "Cat-astrophe,"; containing, in passing, this biting double-barrelled blast of Lower Mainland municipal mockery, "I have long thought of Coquitlam as being like Surrey, only without the charm.";
He ends in the spring of 2017 with an undated yet apparently fresh treatise. "Nasty-grams"; contains a raft of "encouraging"; notes from disgruntled and occasionally witty readers who offer artless articulations such as "Good luck with your shitty column.";
Critics aside, Jack's missives range widely in topic from the frequent joys of his brand of dog-friendly journalism (yes, he prefers dogs over cats) to occasionally melancholic moments like his 2015 column, "Tweet.Retreat.Delete,"; in which he laments the Canadian penchant to be "sanctimoniously offended"; by pretty much everything.
In his introduction to Opportunity Knox, he offers an unadorned assessment of his writing credo: "Most of what I write isn't funny. Or to be precise, most isn't meant to be funny."; Immediately after he avows -- possibly as an offering to Articles, the Greek God of Journalism (pronounced art-i-kleez, thank you, Joe Heafner)[1] -- that "I'm a serious journalist, damn it; have been for forty years."; He caters to "Politics. Crime. Angry people with purple faces.";
It is difficult for this reviewer to imagine that many folks will read Opportunity Knox and become "angry people with purple faces."; Knox's writings are a lunch buffet, a sundry smorgasbord. All he aspires is to be a writer for the Average Joe and to prove that humour can be "written by someone who is as common as bird crap on a windshield.";
You can almost hear the wipers flapping as you flutter from chapter to chapter.
For instance, in a chapter from 2016, "F-Bombs Away,"; Jack ponders our collective decline into free-for-all profanity, and in the very next chapter, "George Dubya's Hurricane Di'ry,"; we are cavalierly flung back to 2005 and Katrina without so much as a f***ing parachute.
In another saga, "Shaken and Stirred,"; though the title suggests a rumination on James Bond, Jack offers a testy rebuke to the incessant earthquake warning announcements we receive on the west coast and provides his own enchantingly extreme response to the end of the world scenario suggested by The Big One.
Though many of Jack's tales are fanciful and almost hallucinatory imaginings, some are quite real. Jack is a player with real skin in the game. For example, while Opportunity Knox makes no reference to naked bike rides -- a stellar moment in Hard Knox -- Jack does peddle a bike tale this time around with "A Pebble on the Tour de Rock."; As with much that is Knoxian humour, Jack tears a self-deprecating strip off himself at every turn -- including a blood-curdling head-over-heels tumble near Nanaimo, of all places, that takes him out of the tour -- whilst still providing a seriously supportive commentary on this annual fundraiser for pediatric-cancer research.
Another essay that touched an emotional chord for me was "The Drawer where Dad kept his War."; This early (1998) column is a lovely set piece of family memoir. There is barely a salty-teared chuckle to be had here. Rather, it is a powerful ode to his father, exemplified by this heartfelt lament that, "My God, he was only a kid.";
Leaving no stone unturned, Jack even opines on the dreadful turnip. Buried within an almost reflective essay from 2008 on being thankful and kind, entitled "They had me at Amen,"; is a clear statement of Jack's views on the sorry root. Whilst waiting for his mother to finish saying grace, and sincerely concerned that his potatoes might get cold if she didn't move it along, he confesses that, "It was, however, a good opportunity to slip turnips to the dog while no one was looking.";
Knox's latest collection is a rambling, animal-festooned (both real and imagined) dog-bone crunching chewy frivolity. For most of Jack's aficionados, this will serve them well. However, for a few -- and I regret that I am one -- his herding cats' quality could have benefitted from a more organized presentation.
[caption id="attachment_33165" align="alignleft" width="800"]
Jack Knox at a book signing in Kamloops for his first book.[/caption]
Unlike Hard Knox, Opportunity Knox contains mild deficiencies in two key areas, characteristics which made Hard Knox a delightfully easy, rib-tickling trail to follow: to wit, a table of contents (TOC) and an index.
Hard Knox spoiled me. I like lists. I generally don't make them, but I do appreciate them. The TOC in Hard Knox offered the reader a classic sense of order. The essays were arranged by months. There was a flow, an almanac's ease. One felt safe and secure, much like the sense of comfort obtained from a weather report delivered by a competent television meteorologist.
The reader will often find him or herself trapped in Jack's fertile twenty-year stretch of imagination, somewhat like a miniaturized Raquel Welch and her crew found themselves in 1966's Fantastic Voyage.
Jack also admits that he has "tweaked old columns here and there to make them a little more relevant."; We can thank the 45th President of the United States for that. As Jack trumpets early on, "If you think it odd that a piece written in 2005 takes a poke at Donald Trump, well, get over it. I'm not going to pass up a chance to take a cheap shot at Trump, even if it involves time travelling.";
More than just content to tweak time, Jack channels Trump in a 2016 column. In "It's Me, Donald Trump,"; he risks life and limber when he has Trump opine, "Nobody has as much respect for Canadians as me, Donald Trump. Even Victoria. Nice city named after a terrible queen. Nasty woman.";
Quibbles (or kibbles) aside, Opportunity Knox takes us on an honest, sometimes dizzy, and entertainingly unostentatious circuit of Knox's off-the-wall west coast world.
Enjoy the trip. Opportunity Knox is an exuberant, courageous read.
[Ormsby Review 2017]
by Jack Knox, Foreword by Ian Ferguson
Victoria: Heritage House, 2016. $19.95 / 9781772031508
Reviewed by Bill Engleson
*
For almost three decades, Jack Knox of the Victoria Times Colonist has been reporting on, and lampooning, life on the west coast and has now assembled his columns into his first book, Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada.
Nanaimo-raised Bill Engleson wades in with an appreciative review from Denman Island, his own vantage point on the western edge.
*
I cracked open Jack Knox's Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada on the coldest day of 2016 on Denman Island, alarmed at the baby blanket of snow on the ground near my front gate. You see, though I was born in British Columbia, I am snow-sensitive. This is Denman Island, not Baffin Island. It doesn't take much to snow me.
The next morning, as I made ready to read on, I forgot to put the coffee pot on the element and some of the fair trade organic coffee grounds overflowed onto my almond-chocolate croissant. My west coast tragedies were mounting.
Despite these missteps I knew that I was in good hands with Jack Knox. This charmed Vancouver Island satirist seems to know me even better than I know myself.
And I seem to know Knox. I believe he might adhere to the credo, famously espoused by the late Art Buchwald, the American humourist and Pulitzer Prize winner, that "You can't make anything up anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you are doing is recording it.";
And does Knox record it. He explores the full arena of Island and west coast oddities, fetishes, and rituals. He charts, with a deskbound meteorologist's precision, the vagaries of coastal weather. He is a weatherman intruding into the happy unpredictability of west coasters. No local peccadillo, imagined or real, escapes the anthropological notebook of this latter-day Franz Boas.
Or maybe I should observe that the entrepreneurial spirit of Robert Dunsmuir has inhabited him. He takes random chunks of cultural coal and, applying gentle pressure, turns them into gems and retrieves them from geological time. "No pressure, no diamonds,"; as Robert Carlyle put it.
Even as Knox fires his jokes at you, and about you, as if he is salting a coal mine, he is a delightfully funny fellow -- as well as a self-described grump -- from whom readers should be prepared to take their lumps.
No subject is verboten in Hard Knox, even Victoria's antiquated sewage system. He mentions it a couple of times, but it only earns a single spot in his index. Indeed he tips his hat to the iconic "Mr. Floatie"; (James Skwarok), Victoria's turd-gid, occasionally bubbly, anti-raw-sewage-directly-into-the-sea activist. Nuff said about that.
But my point, dear reader, is that Hard Knox has an index. This means that the author is a serious fellow, despite his voracious appetite for wisecrackery. In 2003, Art Salm, the book reviews editor of the San Diego Union Tribune, categorically re-butted any qualm regarding the pungency of book indexes with the following helpful aphorism: "A nonfiction book without an index has no heft. I pay it no attention. When I am deciding on whether to review or have a book reviewed, I check the index to get a good idea of what's covered in the book to help me decide.";
I can only assume that R. Mackie, the book reviews editor of this learned gazette, The Ormsby Review, was guided by a similar deference to indexes when deciding to review Hard Knox.
Thus sustained and buoyed, indeed floated, with confidence, I flushed forward to a fuller glance at the index to Hard Knox. The first item listed, curiously, is the "4/20 Marijuana Rally."; I stared at this for some time. I got myself another café au lait and a fresh pain au chocolate.
Thus sustained, it dawned on me that the book is not alphabetically coordinated. I was incredibly slow to grok that the number 4 refers to the fourth month and that, for the uninitiated, April 20th is international marijuana-smoke-your-brains-out-in-public day. It has nothing to do with wanting to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday. I was making progress.
The 4/20 reference appears in one of the more rabble-rousing of Knox's chapters, "Our Contrarian Culture: THE NAKED TRUTH,"; in which he wangles a catalogue of issues and protests that have emerged in our peevish past. Of course, he au naturel-ly begins with naked protests, summarizing our protest penchant succinctly by stating that, "After all, this is British Columbia, where people have exposed their wobbly bits to draw attention to everything from logging, war, religion, and subsidies for small bookstores, to, of course, antinudity laws.";
I was unsure if his comment about "wobbly bits"; refers to human appendages or Knox-speak meant to conjure up an image of the IWW movement in B.C. His index failed me on this point. I wanted to reference the infamous 2001 anti-logging ride of Briony Penn, aka Lady Godiva, but I am told that she is now also a book reviewer for this august publication.
Moving right along, the index ends with Zulu. Again, Knox and I are in astonishing alignment. In "Griswolding Part 1,"; he compares his outdoor Christmas lighting geist to the 1964 colony-enhancing and Imperialist epic film, Zulu, starring Michael Caine in his first significant cinematic role.
Our effervescent journalist takes issue with Christmas foofaraw and compares his burnt-out Christmas lights to the fallen British Army fusiliers at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I have no doubt the comparison brought tears of joy and nostalgia to the Oak Bay Branch of the Monarchist League.
This discussion also served as a niggling reminder to me of an overdue domestic duty and so, on December 27th, I hauled out my box of strings of ancient outdoor Christmas lighting and strung them up in five minutes' flat. Many had fallen in earlier exposures, their light forever dissipated. A few more are now broken, shattered by my never-ending carelessness and the Great Freeze of January 2017. But I digress.
I then warmed up with a re-watch of Zulu, available for nada on YouTube. A ripping yarn.
Some time later, I pondered on how easily one can be ensnared by indiscriminate indexing. You will find -- well, I found, and you may -- that Jack has a favourite saying he oft repeats. It is almost a theme to live by, a reflection of his classically organized Kamloopsian mind.
It is, ta-da, "But I digress."; This utterance appears several times throughout the book (pp. 59, 76, 195, to name but three). It suggests a candour about the man that is appealing. When Knox digresses, he tells you he is digressing.
He could easily have placed "But, I digress,"; in his index. It would have slipped in comfortably between "Butchart Gardens, The,"; and "Butter Tarts.";
Speaking of desserts, Knox gains considerable favour with me with his rhapsodic ode to Nanaimo Bars in his wide-ranging chapter with its Franco-friendly title, "CHERS Touristes,"; which attempts to inform francophone (and American) visitors about Vancouver Island politics, currency, crime, culinary confections, and related local traits and foibles.
Let me digress. I was raised in Nanaimo. I cut my teeth on Nanaimo Bars, the chewy kind, and later slaked my insatiable young chops in the other Nanaimo bars -- the more prevalent beer parlours, of which the Hub City was rumoured to possess the most per capita in the known world.
As for butter tarts, my mother made the best ones, often freezing them for months on end. I periodically snuck downstairs to the basement freezer to liberate a frozen butter tart or three. I loved those hard, sticky-sweet beauties, poker-faced harbingers of future dental disease.
As I journeyed through Knox's musings, I found myself flummoxed as to what was my favourite. I was especially drawn to the chapter, "My Illicit Love, BC Ferries,"; which has a peculiar charm. Besides its ironic (I think) allure, I was bemused that Knox and I were, seemingly, drinking from the same trough.
To wit: where he, economically and in one tightly composed paragraph, references the 2005 story of heroic Jay Leggit, the Mayne Island baseball player who jumped from the Spirit of British Columbia into Active Pass to get to his game on time, I devoted a whole convoluted chapter to that audacious episode in my recently released book of essays. Great minds.
Perhaps, throughout this entire review, I have been digressing as much or more than Knox does. It may well be a West Coast pastime. So many things to say, so much time to say them.
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own,"; wrote Jonathan Swift. By this measure, Hard Knox may not even be satire at all.
Indeed, I found my own image looking back at me repeatedly as I floated through Hard Knox. Many readers will, I suspect, see their image captured in whole or in part as Knox traces delightfully common denominators to life on the western edge of Canada.
*
[Ormsby Review 2017]
REVIEW 2
Opportunity Knox: Twenty Years of Award Losing Humour Writing
by Jack Knox
Victoria: Heritage House, 2017.
$19.95 / 9781772032086
Reviewed by Bill Engleson
*
Jack Knox, columnist of the Victoria Times-Colonist, is known for his incisive humour.His proposed names for new B.C. Ferries: the Spirit of Jobs Sent to Germany, the Service Reduction Princess, the Coastal Community Collapse.
He proposed, as a name for a new library in Victoria, Booky McBookPlace, Library McLibraryface, and Dewey McDecimalface.
Reviewer Bill Engleson likens some of Knox's columns to bird droppings on a car windshield. "You can almost hear the wipers flapping as you flutter from chapter to chapter.";
Knox's first book, Hard Knox: Musings From the Edge of Canada, was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Now the humourist, like the postman, has knocked twice. It's a pretty safe bet he'll be returning. - Ed.
*
Opportunity Knox, Jack Knox's sophomore book, is a compilation of seventy-six (or thereabouts) columns written by Knox for the Victoria Times-Colonist, starting in September 1998 with the delightfully anti-cat, pooch-frippery essay, "Cat-astrophe,"; containing, in passing, this biting double-barrelled blast of Lower Mainland municipal mockery, "I have long thought of Coquitlam as being like Surrey, only without the charm.";
He ends in the spring of 2017 with an undated yet apparently fresh treatise. "Nasty-grams"; contains a raft of "encouraging"; notes from disgruntled and occasionally witty readers who offer artless articulations such as "Good luck with your shitty column.";
Critics aside, Jack's missives range widely in topic from the frequent joys of his brand of dog-friendly journalism (yes, he prefers dogs over cats) to occasionally melancholic moments like his 2015 column, "Tweet.Retreat.Delete,"; in which he laments the Canadian penchant to be "sanctimoniously offended"; by pretty much everything.
In his introduction to Opportunity Knox, he offers an unadorned assessment of his writing credo: "Most of what I write isn't funny. Or to be precise, most isn't meant to be funny."; Immediately after he avows -- possibly as an offering to Articles, the Greek God of Journalism (pronounced art-i-kleez, thank you, Joe Heafner)[1] -- that "I'm a serious journalist, damn it; have been for forty years."; He caters to "Politics. Crime. Angry people with purple faces.";
It is difficult for this reviewer to imagine that many folks will read Opportunity Knox and become "angry people with purple faces."; Knox's writings are a lunch buffet, a sundry smorgasbord. All he aspires is to be a writer for the Average Joe and to prove that humour can be "written by someone who is as common as bird crap on a windshield.";
You can almost hear the wipers flapping as you flutter from chapter to chapter.
For instance, in a chapter from 2016, "F-Bombs Away,"; Jack ponders our collective decline into free-for-all profanity, and in the very next chapter, "George Dubya's Hurricane Di'ry,"; we are cavalierly flung back to 2005 and Katrina without so much as a f***ing parachute.In another saga, "Shaken and Stirred,"; though the title suggests a rumination on James Bond, Jack offers a testy rebuke to the incessant earthquake warning announcements we receive on the west coast and provides his own enchantingly extreme response to the end of the world scenario suggested by The Big One.
Though many of Jack's tales are fanciful and almost hallucinatory imaginings, some are quite real. Jack is a player with real skin in the game. For example, while Opportunity Knox makes no reference to naked bike rides -- a stellar moment in Hard Knox -- Jack does peddle a bike tale this time around with "A Pebble on the Tour de Rock."; As with much that is Knoxian humour, Jack tears a self-deprecating strip off himself at every turn -- including a blood-curdling head-over-heels tumble near Nanaimo, of all places, that takes him out of the tour -- whilst still providing a seriously supportive commentary on this annual fundraiser for pediatric-cancer research.
Another essay that touched an emotional chord for me was "The Drawer where Dad kept his War."; This early (1998) column is a lovely set piece of family memoir. There is barely a salty-teared chuckle to be had here. Rather, it is a powerful ode to his father, exemplified by this heartfelt lament that, "My God, he was only a kid.";
Leaving no stone unturned, Jack even opines on the dreadful turnip. Buried within an almost reflective essay from 2008 on being thankful and kind, entitled "They had me at Amen,"; is a clear statement of Jack's views on the sorry root. Whilst waiting for his mother to finish saying grace, and sincerely concerned that his potatoes might get cold if she didn't move it along, he confesses that, "It was, however, a good opportunity to slip turnips to the dog while no one was looking.";
Knox's latest collection is a rambling, animal-festooned (both real and imagined) dog-bone crunching chewy frivolity. For most of Jack's aficionados, this will serve them well. However, for a few -- and I regret that I am one -- his herding cats' quality could have benefitted from a more organized presentation.
[caption id="attachment_33165" align="alignleft" width="800"]
Jack Knox at a book signing in Kamloops for his first book.[/caption]Unlike Hard Knox, Opportunity Knox contains mild deficiencies in two key areas, characteristics which made Hard Knox a delightfully easy, rib-tickling trail to follow: to wit, a table of contents (TOC) and an index.
Hard Knox spoiled me. I like lists. I generally don't make them, but I do appreciate them. The TOC in Hard Knox offered the reader a classic sense of order. The essays were arranged by months. There was a flow, an almanac's ease. One felt safe and secure, much like the sense of comfort obtained from a weather report delivered by a competent television meteorologist.
The reader will often find him or herself trapped in Jack's fertile twenty-year stretch of imagination, somewhat like a miniaturized Raquel Welch and her crew found themselves in 1966's Fantastic Voyage.
Jack also admits that he has "tweaked old columns here and there to make them a little more relevant."; We can thank the 45th President of the United States for that. As Jack trumpets early on, "If you think it odd that a piece written in 2005 takes a poke at Donald Trump, well, get over it. I'm not going to pass up a chance to take a cheap shot at Trump, even if it involves time travelling.";
More than just content to tweak time, Jack channels Trump in a 2016 column. In "It's Me, Donald Trump,"; he risks life and limber when he has Trump opine, "Nobody has as much respect for Canadians as me, Donald Trump. Even Victoria. Nice city named after a terrible queen. Nasty woman.";
Quibbles (or kibbles) aside, Opportunity Knox takes us on an honest, sometimes dizzy, and entertainingly unostentatious circuit of Knox's off-the-wall west coast world.
Enjoy the trip. Opportunity Knox is an exuberant, courageous read.
[Ormsby Review 2017]
Submitted on January 25, 2017 in By David.
