Prolific author Charlotte Gray is hard at work on a new biography of E. Pauline Johnson, a turn-of-the-century Canadian poet better known for her colourful life than the words themselves. This should be a fascinating followup to Gray's last biographical outing, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.

That book was published last year to rave reviews, and I was lucky enough, thanks to the cruelties of the Canadian book marketplace, to pick it up a few weeks ago in a remainder bin for $7. I'd often heard about Moodie and Parr Traill, and was familiar with excerpts of their work, often-quoted in my Canlit text books from university days. But it took a writer of Gray's calibre to breathe new life into their fascinating stories. They were two English "gentlewomen" who immigrated to Canada with husbands ill equipped to deal with life in the backwoods of what was then Upper Canada. The research in the book was bountiful, but Gray's writing was exquisite and yet respectful of the source material.

Pauline Johnson should make for marvellous material. While I've always found her poems to be a bit tacky, they worked in her times. More amazing was her life, sort of a distaff version of The Grey Owl myth, without the fraud. The daughter of a prominent Mohawk warrior, she popularized her poems by travelling as an entertainer doing live readings. And she always felt caught between two worlds, far more comfortable at home on the Brantford Reserve than out in the world doing readings for the people she called "palefaces."

A friend of mine has a leather-bound copy of Flint and Feather, given to her by her grandmother who as a little girl was frightened out of her wits by one of the Indian Princess' live performances in full Mohawk head-dress. Sisters in The Wilderness might have been a hard sell (remaindered so early), but I could foresee Hollywood snapping up Gray's next book.

Much More Mozart
Tonight the TSO's programme possesses a prescient thematic. The orchestra will be performing Mozart's Symphony No.32, a piece which demonstrates the composer's ability to foreshadow the musical future. He called for a "kind of orchestra that would not be seen until Beethoven's time." Mozart's music is complemented by Schubert's final symphony entitled "The Great" "in deference to its wide range of expression and "heavenly length."

Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Wed. June 14 at 8pm
Thurs. June 15 at 8pm
Hans Graf, conductor

Party On!
For those of you who haven't heard of Burning Man, be sure to tune to The View From Here tonight. This is a crazy documentary about an even crazier arts festival. Every year a group of wacked out artists, pyromaniacs and neo hippy gypsies get together to create an alternative community in the middle of the Nevada desert. Call it silly. Call it essential. But if you've missed seeing the man, don't miss the doc! TVOntario at 10 pm ET

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