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Goaltending will be the focus in the latest Battle of Alberta when the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames square off in a New Year’s Eve clash Sunday night at the Pengrowth Saddledome (6 p.m., MT).

The game features Calgary’s Miikka Kiprusoff, the reigning Vezina Trophy winner, and Dwayne Roloson, who led the Oilersin an improbable run to the Stanley Cup final against Carolina. Calgary’s Jarome Iginla prepares for another match against the Edmonton Oilers Sunday night at the Pengrowth Saddledome.
(Niklas Larsson/Associated Press)

Both goaltenders, however,have struggled in recent games. Roloson has allowed nine goals in his last two defeats and Kiprusoff has given up at least three goals in each of Calgary’s last four games.

The provincial rivals have played three close games, with the home team emerging victorious every time. The Oilers (18-17-2) won twice, allowing only one goal to Calgary in each game.

The Flames (18-14-4) responded with a 2-1 victory at home on Oct. 7, but have been outscored 6-4 by the Oilers in three games.

Special teams have played a big role in Edmonton’s two wins this season against Calgary. The Oilers scored four goals on 17 power-play opportunities while killing off all 21 short-handed penalties.

The Flames have just two victories in their last seven games and find themselves in a second-place tie with the Minnesota Wild in the Northwest Division, one point behind Vancouver.

Despite their recent struggles, the Flames are coming off a 6-4 win over the Los Angeles Kings Friday night. Jarome Iginla scored a season-high four points as Calgary rebounded from a home-and-home sweepby the Canucks.

“That’s a huge win for us to get the momentum here at home and get the confidence back and just keep rolling now,” said Flames forward Kristian Huselius, who has four goals and an assist in his last two games.

The Oilers, meanwhile, gave Roloson a rest during their 6-2 loss to Vancouver on Saturday night as backup Jussi Markkanen stopped just 19 of 25 shots.

Edmonton has just two wins in its last nine games.

“Obviously, we are fragile right now,” Oilers coach Craig MacTavish said. “We have to build back and realize that our systems are our salvation.” With files from the Associated Press

The book world faced one major scandal in 2006. It involved Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, and in public attention it almost rivalled such momentous controversies as Tom Cruise’s wedding and Britney Spears’ missing underwear.

Though it shook the book industry, it was not the only significant event in writing and publishing circles. There were deep currents of loss and anxiety running through many of the events and milestones of the year.

First, the scandal.

It began early in January when an investigative website called Smoking Gun took a good look at the supposedly true events recounted in the bestseller A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of drug and alcohol addiction by James Frey. The 35-year-old told quite a redemptive story about fights with the police, serious jail time and other hijinks. Oprah loved it. Readers ate it up.

After sifting through court and arrest records, and interviewing police officers, Smoking Gun came up with a much different picture that of a docile and polite young man who just happened to drink too much on occasion. Frey spent a few hours in a holding tank, and that was about it.

Interviewed on Larry King Live, Frey had no rebuttal. During a return visit, Oprah refused him absolution.

The Frey scandal touched on two major issues. The first is truth in memoirs specifically and non-fiction generally. Such notable literary figures as Truman Capote, in his 1966 non-fiction book In Cold Blood, and Farley Mowat, in many of his books on the far north, have been caught cheating on the facts. Carlos Castaneda fooled many a hippie in the ’60s and ’70s by selling fiction his encounters with a Yaqui medicine man as fact.

This tendency not to let the truth interfere with a good story is anathema to serious journalists.

“I’ve never made anything up,” insisted Gay Talese, author of Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, among other landmark works of non-fiction, when he appeared at this year’s International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront.

“Too many of these people who were calling themselves journalists were sloppy journalists,” he told the Star. “I don’t want to say anything negative about Hunter Thompson after his death, but I never wanted to be identified with Hunter Thompson. Why? Hunter Thompson was making it up.”

The second issue is not so obvious. Novelist Norman Mailer once said that the one role he found insupportable, growing up, was the role of being “a nice boy.” Likewise, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the scamp Sawyer is infinitely more engaging than his well-behaved Cousin Sid. Frey’s fabrications including his tale of undergoing root canal without anaesthetics, and his story about beating up a priest who tried to grope him are all designed to make him look good, in this American vein.

He may be a horrible drunk and a self-destructive drug addict, these adventures inform the reader, but by God he’s no sissy.

 Let’s talk about a real tough guy. Two books published by novelists were on the subject of the Biblical strong man Samson: Israeli David Grossman’s Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson and American David Maine’s The Book of Samson.

 

Grossman’s Samson is a confused, basically soft-hearted, alienated fellow, set apart and isolated almost from the moment of his birth by his divine mission. Maine’s Samson is not a bit alienated. His talent killing is perfectly in sync with his job in life. If he’s isolated, that’s the way he likes it. Maine’s Samson has the feel of a murderous American frontiersman, as opposed to Grossman’s conflicted, good Jewish son.

Samson’s dual appearance may not be entirely coincidental. Historical fiction, like science fiction, is always about the present, and Samson’s endless war against the Philistines obviously mirrors Israel’s endless war against the Palestinians. Like Samson, the Israeli army is virtually invincible in open battle but is not always able to strike effectively against a wily foe as was demonstrated by the summer conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

 Two well-known Americans, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, published particularly sobering novels.

 

“Bleak” hardly does justice to the horrors of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic America in The Road, where the weather is always cold and bitter, and cannibalistic thugs roam the deserted interstate highways in search of edible slaves.

Roth’s novel, Everyman, features an unnamed protagonist who is faced with a prospect almost as discomforting: his imminent death.

Both novels clearly favour the past over the present and future. There is no future to speak of in McCarthy’s novel. As for Roth’s hero, his warm memories of childhood unusually warm for a Roth hero are set against a present and immediate future of hospital corridors, hostile sons, pain, fear and unresolved guilt.

Both Roth and McCarthy are well on in years, and it is understandable why they would privilege the past over the future. The old tend to do that. But the shrinking from the future in these two novels seems to echo a wider cultural mood of anxiety and apocalypse, particularly in the United States.

 The past also looms large in two books of literary reminiscence published this year: American Cynthia Ozick’s The Din in the Head: Essays and Canadian David Helwig’s literary memoir, Names of Things.

 

A feature of both books is a sense of the dwindling reputation of former literary grandees.

“His fame is long dimmed,” Ozick writes of Delmore Schwartz, an American poet who flourished in the mid-20th century.

“Few remember Irving Howe, say, or Randall Jarrell,” she comments at another point, regarding two intellectual leading lights in her student days.

Even the late Lionel Trilling, a giant of academia while Ozick was at Columbia University, and a literary intellectual of unsurpassed moral seriousness, has faded in reputation.

Helwig’s memoir is animated by a similar spirit. Whither, the memoir implicitly asks, such once-influential figures as Dave Godfrey, leading the troops of Canadian literary nationalism in the late ’60s and early ’70s?

Perhaps the faded figure Helwig is most concerned with, however, is Helwig himself. He was once in the forefront of Canadian writers, as judged by reviewers, academics, publishers. Now he must remind the reader of the good reviews his work received in The New York Times and The London Sunday Times, and the occasion when Governor General Adrienne Clarkson quoted one of his poems in a speech.

“I was once told a story about Margaret Atwood being asked why, after all her success, she did publicity tours,” Helwig writes. “`If I don’t, they’ll forget me,’ she supposedly said.”

 Irving Layton, for generations of Canadians the embodiment of Canadian verse, died. So did American novelist William Styron, author of such works as Lie Down In Darkness and Sophie’s Choice. The two writers were poles apart in temperament, background, style and genre, but the feisty Montreal Jew and the aristocratic Virginian had one thing in common: both came under political attack in the 1960s.

 

Layton’s mistake was supporting the Americans in the Vietnam War. He once sent a book of his poetry, The Shattered Plinths, to Lyndon Johnson in admiration.

Styron’s fall from grace occurred in the aftermath of the 1967 publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner, his fictionalized reminiscences of the leader of a slave uprising in pre-Civil War Virginia. Black critics recoiled from his portrayal of Turner as emotionally tortured and sexually conflicted, and accused the author in an early anticipation of the appropriation-of-voice controversy of producing a “whitened appropriation of our history.”

A more interesting issue for Styron readers: his propensity to write about female sacrificial victims who are doomed to perish before novel’s end.

 The best-known writer to die this year was undoubtedly Mickey Spillane, creator of the immortal private detective Mike Hammer. Spillane was less important as a literary stylist than a cultural bellwether. An air force instructor during World War II, Spillane knew that the American sensibility had been permanently altered by the experience of total war.

 

His first book, I, the Jury, published in 1947, reflected the increased tolerance of perhaps even appetite for depictions of nihilistic brutality among a generation of war veterans. His private eye, even darker than the relatively knightly creations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, had no compunctions about beating information out of unco-operative sources, or sleeping with the dames he met on the job.

Spillane lived long enough to see the figure of the quirky, authority-snubbing private eye, often living in the margins of society, fade from the television screen in favour of teams of relentless and unbelievably competent forensic scientists, police investigators and district attorneys.

The war on terror has made people like Mike Hammer dispensable.

 In April I visited poet, novelist and culture critic Bruce Powe’s class at York University on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye to judge the winner of a debate between two student teams over the titans’ respective merits. It was a tough assignment; I more or less chickened out by calling the debate a draw.

 

What’s significant is that these students were interested in McLuhan (”the medium is the message̶ and Frye in the first place. Even when they were alive and flourishing in the ’60s, the pair of University of Toronto English professors were regarded with suspicion by their colleagues.

The influential American literary critic Edmund Wilson once sarcastically referred to Frye and McLuhan as “two rare beauties.” Even before McLuhan died in 1980, academic rivals were doing their best to bury him. They’re still at it. Political trends in literary studies made Frye’s criticism seem hopelessly out of date.

In fact, the two mavericks are an industry unto themselves. The University of Toronto Press is publishing a 31-volume edition of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Twelve volumes, including editions of his diaries and notebooks, have already been released. Gingko Press, a California-based publisher, has published a dozen reprints of works by and about McLuhan, with more to come.

Edmund Wilson, if he were alive, would weep.

 As a culture, we insist that top-drawer literary prose is the property of fiction writers. But no novel I read this year matched the richness of three non-fiction books: Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups; David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays; and Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.

 

Rosenbaum, a New York-based journalist whose best known previous book was Explaining Hitler, demonstrated again that a free-ranging intelligence could do justice to the most formidable of scholarly controversies, being accessible to a general readership and coming up with a pretty shrewd idea of who’s right and who’s blowing smoke.

The essays of Franzen, best known for his novel The Corrections, were narrative in form, rich in detail, emotionally compelling and, it seemed to me, basically truthful. I say “basically” because we all construct a self for public consumption, novelists included; I can say there are no root-canal operations without anaesthetics in this memoir.

Wallace showed what a literary sensibility can do when covering a porn-film convention or a political campaign (two not entirely unrelated cultural phenomena). Every object or remark, even the most mundane, seems to shimmer with significance in Wallace’s reports.

The atmosphere generated by this retrieved human bric-a-brac is not very cheerful, but that’s life in George W. Bush’s America. Mordecai Richler used to do this sort of thing in his reportage, but not with Wallace’s ferocious intensity.

 In the fiction department, one offering that made the Governor General’s Award for fiction shortlist this year should not go unnoticed. Relative newcomer Paul Glennon, an Ottawa-based writer, came up with a series of linked stories entitled The Dodecahedron: or A Frame for Frames.

 

If you like metaphysics you could spend a lot of time pondering this frame for frames think of it as an elaborate construction floating through the void but the narratives themselves were playful and note perfect.

 The bizarrely inappropriate metaphor is threatening to become a Canadian tradition. Remember the “penis sleeping like a sea horse” from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient? Or this metaphor from Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: “The sky was a hazy grey, the sun low in the sky, a wan pinkish colour, like fish blood”?

 

At least two metaphors are in the running for most disgusting trope of the year. The first is from Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation, in which he compares Toronto’s new City Hall to “a broken ice cream cone with a tumour in the middle.”

The second is from the English translation of Gatan Soucy’s novel The Immaculate Conception. A night sky is described as “swollen and glittering, shot with green and blue: the belly of a fly about to lay its eggs.”

Another tough choice.

The following is a partial transcript of the Dec. 31, 2006, edition of “FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace”:

“FOX NEWS SUNDAY” HOST CHRIS WALLACE: Joining us now to discuss the situation in Iraq and what it means for U.S. policy is , the Republicans’ top man on the Foreign Relations Committee.

And, Senator, welcome back to “FOX News Sunday.”

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR, R-IND.: Thank you very much, Chris.

WALLACE: What is the significance of ’s execution? Is there a way to make this a turning point for Iraq?

LUGAR: It appears that much of Iraq was impressed by the fact that the trial occurred, although it was a first trial and later trials were coming and some Kurds, for example, felt that all the problems, the atrocities against them and against others in the country had not been revealed.

But, same time, ultimately, after the cheering in the streets or the curses, not much change; feeling that this all occurred three years ago and has played its way out.

WALLACE: Given that this is clearly a final statement to Saddam loyalists, the so-called dead-enders, that he really is not coming back, how important is it now for the Shiite government to take concrete steps to reach out to the Sunnis and try to bring them into the political process Д real, national reconciliation?

LUGAR: Tremendously important. And the political side of this really has to be overemphasized all the time Д that is, how the constitution can have amendments so that, as Iraq divides up into various local governments Д Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds Д which they’re allowed to do, that this does not lead to the Sunnis feeling being left out.

Ditto with the oil distribution. To his credit, has started the conversation on the oil; likewise, on the devolution of the country.

But the Sunnis believe that the central government has to be reasonably important or they won’t get their share of the oil and they won’t get their share of the governance. So the reaching out and the success of the reaching out are of the essence.

WALLACE: How much confidence do you have that Prime Minister Maliki and his ruling coalition, all of those other Shiite parties, are capable and willing of taking the steps necessary to have this real national reconciliation?

LUGAR: I have very limited confidence, despite the effects of our ambassador, Dr. Khalilzad, who I think has done a tremendous job trying to push this.

This is one of the facets of the Baker-Hamilton commission that needs to be taken seriously, the so-called contact group of the nations surrounding. A lot has been made about negotiations with Syria and Iran, but equally important are contributions by the Jordanians, by the Saudis, by the Turks, for that matter. In other words…

WALLACE: But as for Maliki himself?

LUGAR: Well, we have to at least bring pressure in addition to whatever our ambassador is saying to him. In other words, some people in our country are saying, “Give Maliki three months, six months. If he doesn’t make it, why, school’s out, we come home.”

But that’s unlikely to really get the job done. Maliki is under great pressure within the Shiite community Д the militias of the young Sadr, for example. And so we can offer all sorts of advice: make sure that militia disappears. Somehow or other, get the oil money divided correctly. And that’s a tough job given the players that he’s got there.

So what I’m suggesting is that the diplomatic aspects Д that is, our diplomacy plus everybody else who has a stake in an Iraq that works, and maybe a greater stake sometimes than some of the Iraqis who keep asking, “Is there really an Iraq, as opposed to a situation of three different groups?”

WALLACE: Would you bring Syria and Iran into that conversation?

LUGAR: Yes, of course. They’re neighbors. But I think that’s why it’s important to have the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Turks, others in the conversation, and including ourselves. It’s not like anybody has veto power on the situation. It’s just that everybody else sizes up what the others are doing, so there are not mistakes.

For example, the suggestion has been made, if we were to abruptly withdraw, the Saudis might be impelled to come in on behalf of the Sunnis. Well, the Syrians, perhaps, although they have a minority Shiite government, conflicted in itself Д in other words, this is a very complex situation.

And what we have to be thinking of is stability in the region, where our forces, both diplomatic and military, can be placed to try to hold the region together.

WALLACE: Senator, let’s talk about what the U.S. does next. It seems pretty clear that President Bush is leaning toward some kind of surge, of sending additional U.S. forces into Iraq.

Do you support sending in more troops?

LUGAR: Well, I don’t know whether I do or not. And I say that because my prayer is that President Bush will take the advice that has come frequently, and that is with people being there on the takeoff, they have to support you on the landing.

Now, in the past, the administration has been inclined not to disregard Congress but to not take Congress very seriously. I think this time Congress has to be taken seriously. There’s been an election; Republicans lost the election. There’s going to be a change in leadership in my committee and likewise on the House side.

What I would advise would be maybe a retreat Д it could be right here in Washington Д but for several hours, in which the Foreign Relations Committee, just to take our group, really studies what is the president’s plan, understands specifically who is to be trained, how would the politics affect what we’ve just been talking about, the devolution of the country, the oil money or anything else, the contact group.

In other words, that there be at least some study of this by all of this before, suddenly, we are all asked to comment, “Are you in favor of surge? Are you in favor of withdrawal? Six months? Three months?” Д all the cliches. These are not going to be relevant.

WALLACE: But you’re saying do this before the president addresses the nation.

LUGAR: Yes, that would be advisable, so that…

WALLACE: And what if he doesn’t do that? What if, basically, you know, he calls a group of you in, has the meeting around the Cabinet Room…

LUGAR: Which is the usual course.

WALLACE: Yes. Then what?

LUGAR: Then he can anticipate, not endless hearings, but a lot of hearings, a lot of study, a lot of criticism. In other words, as opposed to having a Foreign Relations Committee that really now is well-informed, understands, may not agree but understands how you get from place to place, we have an assortment of invitations, demands for subpoenas, all sorts of situations in which administration figures perhaps reluctantly come to the committee or don’t come to the committee or various other experts discuss…

WALLACE: You’re saying this could get ugly.

LUGAR: Yes, it could. And it need not.

You know, I wrote just one book, “Letters to the Next President” Д this was before the president’s father came in Д and suggested precisely this: You need to have as many allies as you can co-opted. Co-opt the leadership of the Congress before you act. And if you do, you’re likely to have some reverses, but you may have some friends who will help you really throughout that process.

WALLACE: But let me pursue this, Senator. General John Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, testified just last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said that he had asked every divisional commander in Iraq whether it would help to have more forces sent in. This was just last month. And they all said no. Let’s watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. JOHN ABIZAID: I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: How do you feel about the fact that it appears the president is now prepared to go against his commanders on the ground in Iraq?

LUGAR: Well, this is why I won’t get into hypotheticals Д what the president’s prepared to do, what he’s reported to do. Senators have already advised the president to do this or that or so forth.

What I’m hopeful the president will do is to lay out a plan before congressional leadership to get some understanding of what is involved. Because I’d like to know precisely, if we have more people and they’re going to train other people, who’s going to be trained? Will this be a national police as opposed to militias or local people who turn into militias?

In other words, is the very surge that’s being suggested Д and that involves a lot of training of Iraqis Д likely to lead to Iraqis who are better prepared for civil war against each other?

We really have to begin tracing this carefully. It’s not a question of more people. It’s what specifically these people would do, what kind of training our people have to deal with the Iraqi political situation.

WALLACE: Well, you keep talking primarily about training. There’s a lot of talk that what the administration is talking about is more combat troops…

LUGAR: Yes.

WALLACE: … not for training, but to settle the security situation on the ground.

LUGAR: All right, very good. Now, then the administration needs to identify precisely where the battle lines are, who is it we combat. I haven’t seen any such lines.

The Iraqi casualties each day are bombs in cars or roadside bombs. Now, we are getting much better at getting rid of those. Although the car bombs that killed the Iraqi civilians each day are at random. Conceivably, if you had many more people, you could go house by house, interview everybody, rout out, one by one, persons. But this is a very different kind of situation with this kind of insurgency.

WALLACE: Are there any circumstances under which you could support a surge? If it was primarily for increased combat? Are there some questions that could be answered to your satisfaction?

LUGAR: Well, if the military people or the president are able to describe to me who it is that we’re going to be combating and physically how you find them.

Now, I understand that there are probably some Al Qaida terrorists, there are probably some old friends of Saddam, individual persons or maybe cell groups. But specifically, how are these persons found? How is this combat to be conducted? And what kind of personnel are required?

It would appear to be much more of an intelligence feature. It might require many more people who have the language skills and some idea of the mores of the people that they’re dealing with.

WALLACE: We’ve got less than a minute left. There are a bunch of polls out over the last few weeks that show basically somewhere between 12 and 18 percent of the public supports the idea of sending more troops in. Here you can see: the Los Angeles Times, 12 percent; the Washington Times, 17; CBS News, 18 percent.

From your long experience in Washington, can a country sustain a war policy when there is so little public support for it?

LUGAR: Not very long. This is why I get back to the thought that the president needs some well-informed friends. He really needs to make certain some of us have some idea what the plan is, as opposed to suddenly saying, “Here is the plan, and, by golly, we’re going to win,” or some such verbiage of this sort. Those figures we just saw will go down even further.

If they’re going to go up, they have to be because there are strong advocates that our country is on the right course. And even if there are people who differ, the hearings then in Foreign Relations become well-informed, sophisticated situations, rather than a lynching party.

WALLACE: And you think there’s the possibility of a lynching party?

LUGAR: Well, not exactly. It won’t be that bad. Senator Biden is a good friend…

WALLACE: He’s already against it.

LUGAR: … and we’re going to have, however, four Democratic presidential candidates on the Democratic side there, and this is a season that you’ve already described.

WALLACE: Senator Lugar, we’re going to see whether or not the president takes your advice over the course of the next couple of weeks. Thank you so much for joining us.

LUGAR: Thank you, Chris.

WALLACE: And Happy New Year, sir.

LUGAR: The same to you.