Turning from music and film to the literary world — “McGill failed me — I was mad as hell”…mad enough to kill, apparently. Nega Mezlekia is a prize-winning author of the memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: memories of my Ethiopian Boyhood.Affter a highly visible ugly falling-out with the Vancouver writer who had worked as an editor for him and claimed that she had helped write most of the book, McGill University officials last week approached her for a copy of I Can’t Recognize Myself Anymore, the partially completed subsequent volume of his memoirs on which she had worked as well until they parted company. The University is particularly interested in passages describing a carefully researched plan to hunt down and kill “six people in the department and all higher university officials I could find” in the wake of a bitter academic dispute with a thesis advisor he accused of trying to take credit for his PhD thesis on the behavior of reinforced concrete. Mr Mezlekia apparently went so far as to cross the border to Detroit to purchase the firepower he needed, at which point he describes a spiritual conversion which led him to abandon the plan and return to Montreal to finish his thesis in peace.

The inventory of hardware that I needed for the task consisted of two Colt-45 hand guns
with ten-round magazines; a Heckler and Koch SP89 machine gun with a 30-shot magazine,
four hand grenades, a bulletproof vest, and a half a dozen pair of handcuffs. As
well, I had to purchase high mass bullets with reliable four or five-petal expansion ribs for
maximum stopping power, and a few additional attachments for the Heckler and Koch SP89.
No thought frustrated the imagination more than the thought that someone you had left for
dead recovered, while you served time for your crime, or worse. That had happened to Dr.
Valeri Fabrikant [an academic who killed four people at Concordia University in 1992], and I
would be stupid to repeat his mistake. The National Post