La substantifique moëlle de Pantagruelle

Year 2 of the New Job

2010-09-11T11:24:00.005-04:00

Well, I haven't really blogged at all since getting my job here at Southern Football School in Big College Town. The first semester last year was crazy busy, mostly due to all the prep involved in teaching a new grad course, but also due to the pleasures of taking most Saturdays off to participate in all the football hoopla. Last year, I went to 4 games and watched every other game on tv except for one when I was at a conference back home north of the 49th. The 2-2 teaching load and the football hoopla combined into a magical weekly moment that actually allowed me to take time off from work guilt-free. It's just what people do around here, and it's more crazy to try to fight it than to participate in the crazy hoopla. You just gotta go with it and have fun, which I did!

The second semester was pretty busy too, even though I was teaching two sections of a course I'd already taught before. That was on purpose so that I could spend the semester writing a hugely important conference paper (think biggest platform in my discipline) which in the longer-than-presented version has become the new conclusion to my book, so that was productive.

This summer my initial goal had been to write the first two new chapters of my book, but between the fun of being home with all my friends for the summer and the realisation of the simple reality that writing two new chapters was an overly ambitious goal, I quickly revised that down to just writing one, which I almost did. I got a good 30-some pages written and just have about 3-4 more left to go to wrap it up, but I haven't even opened the document to look at my writing since I came back to Big College Town in August.

And now football season is upon us again. Today I'm watching commentary about football on tv, then hoping to take advantage of 4 different invitations to meet up with people (3 drinking wine on the patio parties and 1 bar meet-up) all before the game at 6pm, and then off to the stadium to take in all the action, which promises to be intense. One of the big reasons I moved here was the upgrade from a 3-3 to a 2-2 load, and the reduced load really does make one helluva difference in the quality of one's life. Who knew that one could actually take a day off each weekend?!

That said, tomorrow will be back to prepping, prepping, and more prepping. I've got a new grad course this semester, which thoroughly kicks my butt each week--partly because I assigned too many readings, and partly because I'm lucky enough to have two really smart PhDs and a bunch of really eager and talkative MAs this time around, so it's a challenge keeping one step ahead of them, but always really fun and engaging. And next semester I've got yet another entirely new grad course to prep--and so far I've got nothing more than a 1-line description and a list of plays, nothing else even remotely conceived at all. Ah well, without all the football, second semester promises to yield more work time... although, I'm also co-chairing a hiring committee this year. Yikes! It will be my second time on a hiring committee, and it's always a bit weird to be on the other side of the table. Still, MLA is in L.A., so that should be fun!

Preservation Exercise Complete

2009-10-20T13:15:00.002-04:00

That's it! I don't think there was anything of my own writing that was worth preserving, but at least some of those texts--which took a long time to type back in the day!--are preserved for posterity. For all I know other people could have reposted them all over the web too, in which case this copying and pasting was unnecessary, but it was quick and easy enough to do and I kinda like having some of these representations of my naïve undergrad self on here now, and a lot more of my francophone character represented here now too.

Ode to Spot - Data

2009-10-20T13:13:00.001-04:00

Felis catis, is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature?
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal osculations,
a singular development of cat communications
that obviates your basic hedonistic prevalation
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
you would not be so agile if you lacked its counter balance;
and when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array;
and though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Shakespeare in Star Trek

2009-10-20T13:02:00.001-04:00

Here you will find a text taken from a very old ftp on the Net that doesn't load well anymore and which is hard to find. Full credit goes to it's author Marg Peterson. I am only reprinting it because I wanted to make sure that it didn't get lost someday.

From: petersm@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (Marguerite Petersen)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.misc
Subject: Shakespeare in Star Trek
Date: 1 Oct 92 09:44:55 GMT

This is a list of all the references to Shakespeare within the episodes, movies, and books of the Star Trek genre. The goal of this post is to enhance the occasional threads which appear discussing the allusions to Shakespeare in Star Trek. This posting appears monthly. Note: Only deliberate references to Shakespeare are listed below. For example, "wink of an eye" is found in The Winter's Tale, 5.2. 112, but seems to have no bearing on the episode "Wink of an Eye."

Shakespeare in Classic Star Trek

Dagger of the Mind

Macbeth 2.1.39
Surrounding Text:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing.
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
Macbeth 2.1.34-50

The Conscience of the King

Hamlet 2.2.606
Surrounding Text:

Hum, I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick.
If 'a do blench, I know my course.
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this. The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
Hamlet 2.2.589-605

"The Conscience of the King," as its title would indicate, is based largely on _Hamlet_. The basic plot is similar, and there are many plot devices which are duplicated in the episode from the play, such as the troupe of actors. Additionally, many of Shakespeare's characters find analogs in Star Trek. Here is a list of crossovers (as I see them):

Hamlet --> Kirk
Claudius --> Karidian (Kodos)
Ophelia --> Lenore
Ghost of Hamlet's Father --> Tom Leighton
This is not a comprehensive list, obviously.

The episode also contains several themes lifted from Macbeth, as one would expect since the episode opens with a scene from an "Arcturian Macbeth." The analogs (again, as I see them) are this:

Macbeth --> Karidian
Lady Macbeth --> Lenore
Macduff --> Kirk

At the beginning of the episode, Kirk and Doctor Leighton watch the Karidian Company of Actors perform a scene supposedly from Macbeth. The on-stage dialogue goes something like this:

Lady Macbeth: Is he dead? Speak. Is King Duncan dead? Macbeth: O great Neptune's ocean, wash this blood clean from my hands!
How is it . . . Blot out mine eyes!
To my knowledge, this is not from any part of Macbeth.

Toward the end of the episode, the Karidian Company of Actors performs Hamlet. Karidian, playing Hamlet's father, has the following lines (brackets indicate lines Shakespeare includes but Karidian does not):

I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
[Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be spokin'
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love --
Hamlet 1.5.10-24

Lenore later quotes the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar:
Caesar, beware the Ides of March.
Julius Caesar 1.2.18 & 23

And then paraphrases Fortinbras, after killing Karidian:

O proud Death,
What feast is stored in thine eternal cell,
That thou such a noble prince at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
Fortinbras' dialogue goes like this:
O proud death,
What feast is stored in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
Hamlet 5.2.36-63

All Our Yesterdays

Macbeth 5.5.22
Surrounding Text:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth 5.5.17-28

By Any Other Name

Not a Shakespeare reference

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
Romeo and Juliet 2.2.43-44

Kirk makes additional reference while talking with a woman as he holds out a rose-like flower and says, "As the Earth poet Shakespeare wrote, `That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.'"

Whom Gods Destroy

Marta quotes Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 18

The ensuing dialogue goes thusly:
Garth: You wrote that!?
Marta: Yesterday, as a matter of fact.
Garth: It was written by an Earthman named Shakespeare a long time ago.
Marta: Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday!
Perhaps this is an allusion to the Elizabethan practice of rewriting pre-existing poems and stories, using huge amounts of the same text? (It was considered bad writing not to.)

Elaan of Troyius

The plot for this episode was taken from _The Taming of the Shrew_. As with "The Conscience of the King," some of Shakespeare's characters find analogs within the episode:
Petruchio --> Kirk
Katherine --> Elaan

Shakespeare in Star Trek: The Animated Series

How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth

King Lear 1.4.285
Surrounding Text:

Hear, Nature; hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility;
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
King Lear 1.4.272-286

Shakespeare in the Star Trek movies

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

McCoy quotes from Hamlet 1.4.39:

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!

The text goes on to add:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher
Wherein we saw thee quietly interr'd
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?

Hamlet 1.4.40-57

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Hamlet 3.1.80
Surrounding Text:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolutions
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet 3.1.77-83
Note: a "fardle" is a burden.

In addition to the title of the movie, the following make further reference to Hamlet's soliloquy:

Chancellor Gorkon
- When he toasts to "The undiscovered country."

General Chang
- Just before the photon torpedo hits his ship

Many have criticized the movie's use of "the undiscovered country" in applying it to the future rather than death. Yet change is death--the death of that which is familiar to us. Like Hamlet, Kirk asks himself, "To be or not to be." If the Federation allies itself with the Klingon Empire, it will be the death of the universe as he knows it. It could, in fact, be disastrous: "ills that we know not of" might await the Federation should peace be made. The undiscovered country could be too agonizing, so it is safer to cling on to the "ills we have, [rather] than fly to others that we know not of."
Of course, the undiscovered country may also be wonderful beyond description. That is the dilemma Hamlet faced, and it is also the dilemma which Kirk faces, though (like Hamlet) Kirk does not face this possibility for some time, preferring to cling on to the familiar ills of war and hatred.
As viewers, we are quite aware of just what lies in the undiscovered country Kirk was so afraid of. We have seen the next generation of explorers (even if they never explore anything). I find it amusing that the "ills we know not of" happen to be seen weekly as Star Trek: The Next Generation. A part of me just can't help but wonder if that dig was intentional.

Further references to Shakespeare:

As the Klingons leave the Enterprise, Chang says:

- "Parting is such sweet sorrow."
Romeo and Juliet 2.2.184

-"Have we not heard the chimes at midnight?"
2 Henry IV 3.2.212 [paraphrase]

During the trial scene, Chang says:

- "Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
Richard II 3.2.155-56

And during the final show-down, Chang says:
- "Once more into the breach, dear friends."
Henry V 3.1.1

- "There's a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will--"
Hamlet 5.2.10-11

- "This above all: to thine own self be true."
Hamlet 1.3.78

- "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now."
Julius Caesar 3.2.168

- "How long will a man lie in space ere he rot?"
Hamlet 5.1.163 [paraphrase]

- "Our revels now are ended."
The Tempest 3.1.148

- "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles . . ."
Hamlet 3.1.58-60

- "Hath not a Klingon hands, organs . . . affections, passions? Tickle us, do we not laugh? Prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
Merchant of Venice 3.1.56-63 [paraphrase]

- "I am constant as the northern star."
Julius Caesar 3.1.60

- "The game's afoot."
Henry V 3.1.32

- "Cry 'havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war."
Julius Caesar 3.1.274

- "To be or not to be."
Hamlet 3.1.57

[Whew! Sure was a blabber-mouth, wasn't he?]
Chang also claims that Shakespeare is best understood when read in the original Klingon. Anyone have a .gif of what the Bard would look like with a bony forehead?

Shakespeare in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Encounter at Farpoint

Picard says, "Kill all the lawyers!"

The reference is 2 Henry VI 4.2.74:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
2 Henry VI 4.2.74

The Naked Now

Data says, "When you prick me do I not ... leak?"

The reference is to Merchant of Venice 3.1.60-61:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Merchant of Venice 3.1.55-61

Hide and Q

Q says, "All the galaxy's a stage," to which Picard replies:

"World, not galaxy, all the world's a stage."
The reference is As You Like It 2.7.

The passage adds:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven stages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything.
As You Like It 2.7.139-65

Later on in the episode, Picard says, "Oh, I know Hamlet, and what he might say with irony, I say with conviction:

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!
Hamlet 2.2.304-308

The Defector

While on the holodeck, Data performs a scene from Henry V, when the King mingles with his troops shortly before the Battle of Agincourt.

Originally written for the King and three soldiers (Court, Williams, and Bates), the author of the episode combined Court and Williams into one role, represented here as Williams. Williams, incidentally, was played by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart. Here is the text used in "The Defector," courtesy of Pat Berry (line markation is noted when text is cut):

WILLIAMS
(84) Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?
BATES
I think it be. But we have no great cause to desire
(87) the approach of day.
WILLIAMS
(89)Who's there?
KING
A friend.
WILLIAMS
Under what captain serve you?
KING
Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.
WILLIAMS
I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?
KING
Even as men wrack'd upon a sand, that look to be wash'd off the next tide.
BATES
He hath not told his thought to the King?
KING
No, nor it is not meet he should. For, though I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man, as I
(100) am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me;
(103) in his nakedness he appears but a man.
(106) Therefore, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are. Yet, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.
BATES
He may show what outward courage he will; but I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself
(113) in Thames up to the neck.
KING
(124) Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King's company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.
WILLIAMS
That's more than we know.
BATES
(128) Or more than we should seek after;
(130) If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.
WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, "We died at
(136) such a place."
KING
(154) The King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant.
Henry V 4.1.84-157

Later in the episode, Picard quotes from Williams' speech:
Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.
Henry V 4.1.142-144

Sins of the Father

Merchant of Venice 3.5.1-2
Surrounding Text:

Yes, truly, for, look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children; therefore I promise you, I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter. Therefore be o' good cheer, for truly I think you are damn'd. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good, and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither.
Merchant of Venice 3.5.1-7

Menage a Troi

Picard sets about wooing Lwaxana Troi back from Daimon Tog. In the process, he delivers a Shakespeare mish-mash that would make the Duke of _Huckleberry Finn_ proud:

My love is a fever, longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease.
{Sonnet 147}

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors see.
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view are pleased to dote.
{Sonnet 141}

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
{Sonnet 18}

Let me not... [Tog and Lwaxana drown Picard out.]
{Sonnet 116}

When I have plucked the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It needs must wither.
{Othello 5.2.13-15}

'Tis better to have loved and lost,
than never to have loved at all!
{Not a Shakespeare reference}

Remember Me

Hamlet 2.5.89-92 & 111-113

GHOST:
Fare thee well at once.
The glow worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.

HAMLET:
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this
distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
O, most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
It is "Adieu, adieu! Remember me."
I have sworn 't.
Hamlet 1.5.89-113

Shakespeare in the Star Trek novels

Q-in-Law

There are references a'plenty to Romeo and Juliet in this one, with at least one quote I caught. After the aborted battle, Picard says, "A plague on both your houses!" Don't expect this to shed any light on the book since the guy who says this is Mercutio, and he dies a few minutes later.

A plague o' both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone, and hath nothing?
Romeo and Juliet 3.1.90-91

Perchance to Dream

Hamlet 3.1.66

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.
To die, to sleep-
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
Hamlet 3.1.57-69

Miscellaneous Shakespeareana related to Star Trek

Both William Shatner and Patrick Stewart were trained as Shakespearean actors. The problem with Shatner's acting is that he apparently has never made the transition in style from stage acting to television acting. His overacting and wild motions work fine on stage, just not as well on a TV set where the camera picks up every move much better.

Patrick Stewart did a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has also done productions of Shakespeare and led acting workshops with a Univ. of California-based acting troupe known as ACTER, of which he remains an executive member. Stewart also appeared in a number of the BBC productions, including The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Chances are, a good library would have videotapes of these. A few of the crummier ones may also have copies.

Patrick Stewart has also appeared for several summers on the UC Santa Cruz campus with the Shakespeare Santa Cruz group. (Thanks to Susan Stockwell for this info.)

Patrick Stewart played Shylock in a 1978 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merchant of Venice at The Other Place. He wrote an essay on the production which can be found in Players of Shakespeare, edited by Philip Brockbank.

Gene Roddenberry was a Shakespeare fan.

William Shakespeare was a Roddenberry fan.

The character Captain Picard is a Shakespeare fan, probably due to Stewart's own enthusiasm for the Bard.

General Chang, the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon from Star Trek VI, was played by Christopher Plummer. Plummer is an accomplished Shakespearean actor. He played Macbeth in a 1988 Broadway production of the play.

William Shatner holds Sir Laurence Olivier as his favorite performer because of the late actor's technical skill and ability to project emotion. Olivier continues to be revered as the greatest modern Shakespearean actor. I suggest Kenneth Braggnah.

All Shakespeare quotes are taken from _The Complete Works of Shakespeare_, edited by David Bevington, third edition.

Posted by Marg Petersen. petersm@jacobs.cs.orst.edu

Quelques citations littéraires

2009-10-20T12:58:00.002-04:00

Quelques citations littéraires que j'aimais bien en 1998... on peut changer en tant qu'individu, mais la quête de la liberté continue...

Tout homme plus juste que ses prochains forme déjà cette majorité d'une personne.
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.
La désobéisance civile / Civil disobedience - Henry David Thoreau

Et ne m'en veux pas si
je te tutoie
Je dis tu à tous ceux
que j'aime
Barbara - Jacques Prévert

Nul n'est plus esclave que celui qui se croit libre sans l'être.
Goethe

D'ici là, sans repos ni halte, en communauté de sentiment avec les assoiffés d'un mieux être, sans crainte des longues échéances, dans l'encouragement ou la persécution, nous poursuivrons dans la joie notre sauvage besoin de libération.
Refus Global - Paul-Émile Borduas

Chacun porte son âge - Gilles Vigneault

2009-10-20T12:56:00.001-04:00

Cette chanson pour ceux
Que je n'ai pas nommés,
Moi qui croyais nommer
Ton village et ta ville
Ceux qui s'en vont d'un pas
Que l'on dirait docile
En chemin fermé
Les derniers arrivés
Que je ne connais pas
Et que voici chez nous
Pour avoir fui des guerres
Et qui ne disent rien...
Mais qui ne s'en vont guère
Retenant leurs pas
Chacun porte son âge
Sa pierre et ses outils,
Pour bâtir son village
Sa ville et son pays.

Qui chantera les nuits
De la serveuse au bar?
Qui chantera l'ennui
Du client qui s'attarde?
Chacun est le miroir
De l'autre et le regarde
Le temps d'un départ
Qui chantera le jour
Pareil aux autres jours
De ce vieux retraité
Du métro de cinq heures
Qui ressasse au milieu
Des foules qui l'écoeurent
Ses chansons d'amour?

Chacun porte son âge
Sa pierre et ses outils,
Pour bâtir son village
Sa ville et son pays.

Et ceux qui sont ici
Depuis la nuit des temps,
Toujours surpris de voir
Qu'on vende et qu'on achète
Comme peau d'animal
Des morceaux de planète
Avec de l'argent...
Pour obtenir un peu
Ils nous demandent tout
En fuyant sans arrêt
Nos ciments sédentaires
Et mettre un peu leur jeu
Dans l'ennui millénaire
Que hurlaient les loups...
Chacun porte son âge
Sa pierre et ses outils,
Pour bâtir son village
Sa ville et son pays.

Chanter aussi ceux-là
Qui ne m'entendent pas
Et qui n'ont ni mon pas
Ni mes mots, ni mes rêves!
Ceux-là pour qui la vie
Est une courte trêve
Entre deux combats
Chanter enfin pour toi,
Chanter enfin pour vous
Qui choisirez sans fin
La mort ou la survie
De mes mots, de mes pas,
De ce qui nous convie
À rester debout

Chacun porte son âge
Sa pierre et ses outils,
Pour bâtir son village
Sa ville et son pays.

L'espérance du monde - Gatien Lapointe

2009-10-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

Le jour commençait à grandir
Chacun reconnaissait son visage son paysage
En secret chacun parlait de vivre et d'aimer
Nous avons recouvert nos mains de terre tendre
Avons pesé le poids d'une journée
Avons appris la marche des saisons
Avons fait un chemin de l'instant à l'année
Avons semé des fleurs dans le bois de nos portes
Avons allumé un grand feu sur la montagne
Avons donné nos figures au fleuve
Avons établi les tables de la cité
Avons écrit des noms d'ici sur nom frontons
Avons rêvé avec le sapin et l'érable
Avons rempli d'eau les yeux brûlants du soleil
Avons caché un printemps sous chaque nuage
Avons pris en mains les bêtes perdues
Avons fleuri le lit du premier couple
Avons étendu le rosée sur nos fenêtres
Avons balisé la nuit de blessures vives
Avons imaginé le grand oeuvre du jour
Avons fait de nos corps un langage d'ici
Avons baptisé notre enfance de noms d'arbres
Avons jeté des graines sur chaque marée
Avons soufflé dans chaque nid d'oiseaux
Avons mis de la neige sur nos armes
Avons planté des lampes près du pain levant
Avons écrit notre âge sur la pierre nue
Avons juré éternel le premier amour

Nous continuons l'espérance du monde.

Nus et vulnérables - Gatien Lapointe

2009-10-20T12:54:00.000-04:00

Nous nous sommes rencontrés en plein vent
Pèlerins d'une même solitude
Et nous avons souri à l'arbre aux bêtes
Ignorant toutes les tristesses
Prenant la nuit sur nos épaules
Nous avons pansé la douleur des hommes
Et balisé de flammes leur enfance
L'air du monde nous entra dans le coeur
Le chant de la terre nous enchaîna
Nus et vulnérables un soir
La beauté nous tendit les bras

Nous avons rêvé d'immortalité
Et pleuré dans l'heure éphémère
Nous avons tiré le soleil de l'ombre
Nous avons touché du doigt une étoile
Toute caresse au ras du sol
Toute parole au plus profond du sang
Nous allions nous connaître dieux
Et quitter l'angoisse du monde
Nous allions savoir à jamais peut-être

La douceur du matin très haut
Nous brûla d'une seule larme.

Rabelais - "la substantifique moëlle"

2009-10-20T12:51:00.002-04:00

Rabelais, "qui c'est ça?" tu te demandes! Eh ben, François Rabelais etait un vieux mec du XVIe siècle qui a été le tout premier auteur à écrire des romans en FRANÇAIS! (Auparavant, tout le monde écrivait en latin.) Ou, au moins, je le crois, sinon, il était le premier qui était vraiment important. Il a écrit 5 gros romans qui s'appelait Gargantua, Pantagruel, le Tiers livre, le Quart livre, et le Cinquième livre (vers la fin les titres sont moins originaux hein?) Le premier (qu'il a écrit après le deuxième en fait) parle de Gargantua (évidément), le fils de Grandgosier. Le deuxième parle de Pantagruel, le fils de Gargantua. Le trois derniers parle des aventures de Pantagruel et de son ami Panurge qui cherchent "la dive bouteille". En gros, c'est super bon, il critique toutes les institutions de l'époque, tous les personnages boivent comme des trous, et ça parle sans cesse du cul :)

Voilà, maintenant à la suite de ce court résumé, les textes suivants s'expliqueront mieux j'espère. En tout cas, le but de cette page est d'expliquer le métaphore rabelaisien que j'emploie pour ma page web. J'ai pris le nom de Pantagruel, celui qui a tout alteré le monde (féminisé par moi bien sur) et ma page d'entrée est "l'os" qui enveloppe "ma substantifique moelle". Je cite plus bas des extraits qui mettent en contexte ces mots et ces noms. Malheureusement, les textes sont en vieux français puisque j'ai pas encore eu le temps pour scanner les versions modernisées. Ça s'en vient peut-être à un moment donné mais demande-moi pas quand.

Une dernière chose à noter. Parfois sur mon site j'écris "moelle" avec des accents, c'est-à-dire "moëlle". Je sais bien qu'il ne faut pas l'écrire de cette façon, mais je le trouve plus beau, ça se pronounce comme ça de toute façon, puis c'est pas souvent que j'ai le plaisir de démontrer au monde que je sais où se trouve cet accent-là sur le clavier. Je l'utilse puis je l'aime; peut-être que je réussirai un jour à le faire changer dans Le Petit Robert :)

"Substantifique moëlle" Texte original: Gargantua - Prologue de l'auteur

Crochetastes vo' oncques bouteilles? Caisgne. Redvisez à memoire la contenence qu'aviez. Mais veistez vo' oncques chien rencontrant quelque os medullare? C'est comme dict Platon li. 2 de rep. la beste du monde plus philosophe. Si veu l'avez: vo' avez peu noter de quelle devotion il le guette: de quel soing il le guarde: de quel ferveur il le tient: de quelle prudence il l'entomne: de quelle affection il le brise: et de quelle diligence il le sugce. Qui l'induict à ce faire? Quel est l'espoir de son estude? quel bien y pretend il? Rien plus qu'un peu de mouelle. Vray est que ce peu, plus est delicieux que le beaucoup de toutes aultres pour ce que la mouelle est aliment elabouré à perfection de nature, comme dict Galen 3. facu. natural. & 11. de usu particu. A l'exemple d'icelluy vo' convient estre saiges pour fleurer sentir & estimer ces beaux livres de haulte gresse, legiers au prochaz: & hardiz à la rencontre. Puis pour curieuse leczon, & meditation frequente rompre l'os, & sugcer la substantificque mouelle. C'est à dire: ce que ientends par ces symboles Pythagoricques, avecques espoir certain d'estre faictz escors & preux à ladicte lecture. Car en icelle bien aultre goust trouverez, & doctrine plus absconce que vous revelera de tresaultz sacremens & mystères horrificques, tant en ce que concerne nostre religion, que aussi l'estat politicq & vie oeconomicque. Croiez en vostre foy qu'oncques Homere escrivent l'Iliade & Odyssée, pensast es allegories, lesquelles de luy ont beluté Plutarche, Heraclides Ponticq, Eustatie, & Phornute: & ce que d'iceulx Politian a desrobé? Si le croiez: vo' n'aprochez ne de pieds ne de mains à mon opinion: qui decrete icelles aussi peu avoir esté songeez d'Homere, que d'Ovide en ses metamorphoses, les sacremens d'evangile: lesquelz un frère Lubin vray croquelardon s'est efforcé desmontrer, si d'adventure il rencontroit gens aussi folz que luy: & (comme dict le proverbe) couvercle digne du chaudron. Si ne le croiez: quelle cause est, pourquoy autant n'en ferez de ces ioyeuses et nouvelles chronicques? Combien que les dictant n'y pensasse en plus que vo' qui paradventure beviez comme moy. Car à la composition de ce livre seigneurial, ie ne perdys ny emploiay oncques plus ny aultre temps, que celluy qui estoit estably à prendre ma refection corporelle: sçavoir est, beuvant et mangeant. Aussi est ce la iuste heure, d'escrire ces haultes matières et sciences profundes. Comme bien faire sçavoit Homere paragon de tous philologes, et Ennie père des poëtes latins, ainsi que tesmoigne Horate, quoy qu'un malautru ait dict, que ses carmes sentoyent plus le vin que l'huile, Autant en dist un Tirelupin de mes livres, mais bren pour luy. L'odeur du vin ô combien plus est friant/ riant/ priant/ plus celeste, & delicieux que d'huile.

"Pantagruel" Texte original: Pantagruel - Chapitre ii

Et par ce qu'en ce propre iour nasquit Pantagruel, son pere luy imposa tel nom: car Panta en Grec vault autant à dire comme tout: & Gruel en langue hagarene vault autant comme alteré, voulant inferer qu'à l'heure de sa nativité le monde estoit tout alteré. Et voyant en esperit de prophetie qu'il seroit quelque iour dominateur des alterez. Ce que luy fut monstré à celle heure mesmes par aultre signe plus evident. Car alors que sa mere Badebec enfantoit, & que les sages femmes attendoient pour le recepvoir, issirent premier de son ventre soixante & huyt tregeniers chascun tirant par le licol ung mulet tout chargé de sel: apres lesquels sortirent neuf dromadaires chargez de iambons & langues de boeuf fumées: sept chameaulx chargez d'anguillettes: puis vingt et cinq charrettes de porreaulx, d'aulx, d'oignons, & de cibots: ce qui espoventa bien lesdictes saiges femmes, mais les aucunes d'entre elles disoient: Voicy bonne punition: cecy n'est que bon signe: ce sont agueillons de vin. Et comme elles caquettoient de ses menuz propos entre elles, voicy sortir Pantagruel tout velu comme ung Ours, dont dit une d'elles en esperit propheticque, Il est né à tout le poil, il fera choses merveilleuses: et s'il vit, il aura de l'eage.

"Gargantua" Texte original: Gargantua - Chapitre vi

Le bonhomme Grantgousier beuvant, et se rigollant avecques les aultres entendit le cris horrible que son filz avoit faict entrant en lumière de ce monde, quand il brasmoit demandant à boyre/ à boyre/ à boyre/ dont il dist, que grant tu as, supple le gousier. Ce que oyans les assistans, dirent que vrayment il debvoit avoir par ce le nom Gargantua, puis que telle avoyt esté la première parole de son père à sa nativité, à l'imitation et exemple des anciens Hebreux. A quoy fut condescendu par icelluy, & pleut tresbien à sa mère. Et pour l'appaiser, luy donnèrent à boyre à tirelarigot, et feut porté sus les fonts, et là baptisé, comme est la coustume des bons christians.

Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond - Sade

2009-10-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

LE PRÊTRE- Arrivé à cet instant fatal où le voile de l'illusion ne se déchire que pour laisser à l'homme séduit le tableau cruel de ses erreurs et de ses vices, ne vous repentez-vous point, mon enfant, des désordres multipliés où vous ont emporté la faiblesse et la fragilité humaine?

LE MORIBOND - Oui, mon ami, je me repens.

LE PRÊTRE- Eh bien, profitez de ces remords heureux pour obtenir du ciel, dans le court intervalle qui vous reste, l'absolution générale de vos fautes, et songez que ce n'est que par la méditation du très saint sacrement de la pénitence qu'il vous sera possible de l'obtenir de l'Éternel.

LE MORIBOND- Je ne t'entends pas- plus que tu ne m'as compris.

LE PRÊTRE- Eh quoi!

LE MORIBOND- Je t'ai dit que je me repentais.

LE PRÊTRE - Je l'ai entendu.

LE MORIBOND - Oui, mais sans le comprendre.

LE PRÊTRE - Quelle interprétation... !

LE MORIBOND- La voici... Créé par la nature avec des goûts très vifs, avec des passions très fortes uniquement placé dans ce monde pour m'y livrer et pour les satisfaire, et ces effets de ma création n'étant que des nécessités relatives aux premières vues de la nature ou, si tu l'aimes mieux, que des dérivaisons essentielles à ses projets sur moi, tous en raison de ses lois, je ne me repens que de n'avoir pas assez reconnu sa toute-puissance, et mes uniques remords ne portent que sur le médiocre usage que j'ai fait des facultés (criminelles selon toi, toutes simples selon moi) qu'elle m'avait données pour la servir. Je lui ai quelquefois résisté, je m'en repens; aveuglé par l'absurdité de tes systèmes, j'ai combattu par eux toute la violence des désirs que j'avais reçus par une inspiration bien. plus divine, et je m'en repens; je n'ai moissonné que des fleurs, quand je pouvais faire une ample récolte de fruits... Voilà les justes motifs de mes regrets; estime-moi assez pour ne m'en pas supposer d'autres.

LE PRÊTRE- Où vous entraînent vos erreurs, où vous conduisent vos sophismes 1 Vous prêtez à la chose, créée toute la puissance du créateur, et ces malheureux penchants qui vous ont égaré, vous ne voyez pas qu'ils ne sont que des effets de cette nature corrompue, à laquelle vous attribuez la toute-puissance.

LE MORIBOND- Ami, il me paraît que ta dialectique est aussi fausse que ton esprit. Je voudrais que tu raisonnasses plus juste, ou que tu me laissasses mourir en paix. Qu'entends-tu par créateur, et qu'entends-tu par la nature corrompue ?

LE PRÊTRE- Le créateur est le maître de l'univers, c'est lui qui a tout fait, tout créé, et qui conserve tout par un simple effet de sa toute-puissance.

LE MORIBOND - Voilà un grand homme assurément! Eh bien, dis-moi pourquoi cet homme-là, qui est si puissant, a pourtant fait selon toi une nature corrompue.

LE PITÊTRE- Quel mérite eussent eu les hommes, si Dieu ne leur eût pas laissé leur libre arbitre? et quel mérite eussent-ils eu à en jouir s'il n'y eût eu sur la terre la possibilité de faire le bien et celle d'éviter le mal?

LE MORIBOND- Ainsi ton Dieu a voulu faire tout de travers, uniquement pour tenter ou pour éprouver sa créature : il ne la connaissait donc pas, il ne se doutait donc pas du résultat?

LE PRÊTRE- Il la connaissait sans doute, mais, encore un coup , il voulait lui laisser le mérite du choix.

LE MORIBOND- A quoi bon, dès qu'il savait le parti qu'elle prendrait et qu'il ne tenait qu'à lui, puisque tu le dis tout-puissant, qu'il ne tenait qu'à lui, dis-je, de lui faire prendre le bon! -

LE PRÊTRE - Qui peut comprendre les vues immenses et infinies de Dieu sur l'homme, et qui peut comprendre tout ce que nous voyons ?

LE MORIBOND - Celui qui simplifie les choses, mon ami, celui surtout qui ne multiplie pas les causes, pour mieux embrouiller les effets. Qu'as-tu besoin d'une seconde difficulté, quand tu ne peux pas expliquer la première ? et dès qu'il est possible que la nature toute seule ait fait ce que tu attribues à ton dieu, pourquoi veux-tu lui aller chercher un maître! La cause de ce que tu, ne comprends pas est peut-être la chose du monde la plus simple. Perfectionne ta physique, et tu comprendras mieux la nature; épure ta raison, bannis tes préjugés, et tu n'auras plus besoin de ton dieu.

LE PRÊTRE- Malheureux! je ne te croyais que socinien, j'avais des armes pour te combattre, mais je vois bien que tu es athée, et dès que ton coeur se refuse à l'immensité des preuves authentiques que nous recevons chaque jour de l'existence du créateur, je n'ai plus rien à te dire. On ne rend point la lumière à un aveugle.

LE MORIBOND- Mon ami, conviens d'un fait : c'est que celui des deux qui l'est le plus doit assurément être plutôt celui qui se met un bandeau que celui qui se l'arrache. Tu édifies, tu inv entes, tu multiphes moi je détruis, je simplifie. Tu ajoutes erreurs sur erreurs: moi je les combats toutes. Lequel de nous deux est l'aveugle ?

LE PRÊTRE - Vous ne croyez donc point en Dieu?

LE MORIBOND - Non. Et cela par une raison bien simple : c'est qu'il est parfaitement impossible de croire ce qu'on ne comprend pas. Entre la compréhension et la foi, il doit exister des rapports immédiats; la compréhension est le premier aliment de la foi; où la compréhension n'agit point, la foi est morte, et ceux qui, dans tel cas, prétendraient en avoir, en imposent. Je te défie toi-même de croire au dieu que tu me prêches, parce que tu ne saurais me le démontrer, parce qu'il n'est pas en toi de me le définir, que par conséquent tu ne le comprends pas, que, dès que tu ne le comprends pas, tu ne peux plus m'en fournir aucun argument raisonnable, et qu'en un mot tout ce qui est au-dessus des bornes de l'esprit humain, est ou chimère ou inutilité; que ton dieu ne pouvant être que l'une ou l'autre de ces choses, dans le premier cas je serais un fou d'y croire, un imbécile dans le second.

Mon ami, prouve-moi l'inertie de la matière, et je t'accorderai le créateur; prouve-moi que la nature ne se suffit pas à elle-même, et je te permettrai de lui supposer un maître. Jusque-là n'attends rien de moi, je ne me rends qu'à l'évidence, et je ne la reçois que de mes sens; où ils s'arrêtent ma foi reste sans force. Je crois le soleil, parce que je le vois; je le conçois comme

le centre de réunion de toute la matière inflammable de la nature, sa marche périodique me plaît sans m'étonner. C'est une opération de physique peut-être aussi simple que celle de l'électricité, mais qu'il ne nous est pas permis de comprendre. Qu'ai-je besoin d'aller plus loin? Lorsque tu- m'auras échafaudé ton dieu au-dessus de cela, en serai-je plus avancé, et ne me faudra-t-il pas encore autant d'effort pour comprendre l'ouvrier que pour définir l'ouvrage ?

Par conséquent, tu ne m'as rendu aucun service par l'édification de ta chimère, tu as troublé mon esprit, mais tu ne l'as pas éclairé, et je ne te dois que de la haine au lieu de reconnaissance. Ton dieu est une machine que tu as fabriquée, pour servir tes passions, et tu l'as fait mouvoir à leur gré, mais dès queue gêne les miennes, trouve bon que je l'aie culbutée; et dans l'instant où mon âme faible a besoin de calme et de philosophie, ne viens pas l'épouvanter de tes sophismes, qui l'effraieraient sans la convaincre, qui l'irriteraient sans la rendre meilleure; elle est, mon ami, cette âme, ce qu'il a plu à la nature qu'elle soit, c'est-à-dire le résultat des organes qu'elle s'est plu de me former en raison. de ses vues et de ses besoins; et, comme elle a un égal besoin de vices et de vertus, quand il lui a plu de me porter aux premiers, elle l'a fait, quand elle a voulu les secondes, elle m'en a inspiré les désirs, et je m'y suis livré tout de même. Ne cherche que ses lois pour unique cause à notre inconséquence humaine, et ne cherche à ses lois d'autres principes que ses volontés et ses besoins.

LE PRÊTRE- Ainsi donc tout est nécessaire dans le monde?

LE MORIBOND- Assurément.

LE PRÊTRE- Mais si tout est nécessaire, tout est donc réglé ?

LE MORIBOND - Qui te dit le contraire ?

LE PRÊTRE- Et qui peut régler tout comme il l'est, si ce n'est une main toute-puissante et toute sage ?

LE MORIBOND- N'est-il pas nécessaire que la poudre s'enflamme quand on y met le feu?

LE PRÊTRE Oui.

LE MORIBOND- Et quelle sagesse trouves-tu à cela ?

LE PRÊTRE- Aucune.

LE MORIBOND- Il est, donc possible qu'il y ait des choses nécessaires sans sagesse, et possible, par conséquent, que tout dérive d'une cause première, sans qu'il y ait ni raison ni sagesse dans cette première cause,

LE PRÊTRE - Où en voulez-vous venir?

LE MORIBOND- À te prouver que tout peut être ce qu'il est et ce que tu le vois, sans qu'aucune cause sage et raisonnable le conduise, et que des effets naturels doivent avoir des causes naturelles, sans qu'il soit besoin de leur en supposer d'antinaturelles, telle que le serait ton dieu qui lui-même, ainsi que je te l'ai déjà dit, aurait besoin d'explication, sans en fournir aucune; et que par conséquent dès que ton dieu n'est bon à rien, il est parfaitement inutile; qu'il y a grande apparence que ce qui est inutile est nul et que tout ce qui est nul est néant. Ainsi, pour me convaincre que ton dieu est une chimère, je n'ai besoin d'aucun autre raisonnement que celui que me fournit la certitude de son inutilité.

LE PRÊTRE - Sur ce pied-là, il me paraît peu nécessaire de vous parler de religion.

LE MORIBOND- Pourquoi pas ? Rien ne m'amuse comme la preuve de l'excès où les hommes ont pu porter sur ce point-là le fanatisme et l'imbécillité. Ce sont de ces espèces d'écarts si prodigieux, que le tableau, selon moi, quoique horrible, en est toujours intéressant. Réponds avec franchise, et surtout bannis l'égoïsme. Si j'étais assez faible que de me laisser surprendre à tes ridicules systèmes sur l'existence fabuleuse de l'être qui rend la religion nécessaire, sous quelle forme me conseillerais-tu de lui offrir un culte ? Voudrais-tu que j'adoptasse les rêveries de Confucius plutôt que les absurdités de Brahma? adorerais-je le grand serpent des nègres, l'astre des Péruviens, ou le dieu des armées de Moïse ? à laquelle des sectes de Mahomet voudrais-tu que je me rendisse ? ou quelle hérésie de chrétiens serait selon toi préférable? Prends garde à ta réponse.

LE PRÊTRE- Peut-elle être douteuse?

LE MORIBOND- La voilà donc égoïste.

LE PRÊTRE- Non, c'est t'aimer autant que moi que de te conseiller ce que je crois.

LE MORIBOND- Et c'est nous aimer bien peu tous deux que d'écouter de pareilles erreurs.

LE PRÊTE - Eh! qui peut s'aveugler sur les miracles de notre divin rédempteur?

LE MORIBOND- Celui qui ne voit en lui que le plus ordinaire de tous les fourbes et le plus plat de tous les imposteurs

LE PRÊTRE -Ô dieux, vous l'entendez et vous ne tonnez pas!

LE MORIBOND- Non, mon ami, tout est en paix, parce que ton dieu, soit impuissance, soit raison, soit tout ce que tu voudras enfin dans un être que je n'admets un moment que par condescendance pour toi, ou si tu l'aimes mieux pour me prêter à tes petites vues, parce que ce dieu, dis-je, s'il existe comme tu as la folie de le croire, ne peut pas pour nous convaincre avoir pris des moyens aussi ridicules que ceux que ton Jésus suppose.

LE PRÊTRE- Eh quoi! les prophéties, les miracles, les martyrs, tout cela ne sont pas des preuves?

LE MORIBOND - Comment veux-tu, en bonne logique, que je puisse recevoir comme preuve tout ce qui en a besoin soi-même? Pour que la prophétie devînt il preuve, il faudrait d'abord que j'eusse la certitude complète qu'elle a été faite. Or, cela étant consigné dans l'histoire, ne peut plus avoir pour moi d'autre force que tous les autres faits Historiques, dont les trois quarts sont fort douteux. Si à cela j'ajoute encore l'apparence plus que vraisemblable qu'ils ne me sont transmis que par des historiens intéressés, je serai comme tu vois plus qu'en droit de douter. Qui m'assurera d'ailleurs que cette prophétie n'a pas été faite après coup, qu'elle n'a pas été l'effet de la combinaison de la plus simple politique, comme celle qui voit un règne heureux sous un roi juste, ou de la gelée dans l'hiver? Et si tout cela est, comment veux-tu que la prophétie, ayant un tel besoin d'être prouvée, puisse elle-même devenir une preuve?

À l'égard de tes miracles, ils ne m'en imposent pas davantage. Tous les fourbes en ont fait, et tous les sots en ont cru. Pour me persuader de la vérité d'un miracle, il faudrait que je fusse bien sûr que l'événement que vous appelez tel fût absolument contraire aux lois de la nature, car il n'y a que ce qui est hors d'elle qui puisse passer pour miracle : et qui la connaît assez pour oser affirmer que tel est précisément le point où elle s'arrête et précisément celui où elle est enfreinte? Il ne faut que deux choses pour accréditer un prétendu miracle : un bateleur et des femmelettes. Va, ne cherche jamais d'autre origine aux tiens, tous les nouveaux sectateurs en ont fait, et, ce qui est plus singulier, tous ont trouvé des imbéciles qui les ont crus. Ton Jésus n'a rien fait de plus singulier qu' Apollonius de Thyane, et personne pourtant ne s'avise de prendre celui-ci pour un dieu. Quant à tes martyrs, ce sont bien assurément les plus débiles de tous tes arguments. Il ne faut que de l'enthousiasme et de la résistance pour en faire, et tant que la cause opposée m'en offrira autant que la tienne, je ne serai jamais suffisamment autorisé à en croire une meilleure que l'autre, mais très porté en revanche à les supposer toutes les deux pitoyables.

Ah ! mon ami, s'il était vrai que le dieu que tu prêches existât, aurait-il besoin de miracles, de martyrs et de prophéties pour établir son empire ? Et si, comme tu le dis le coeur de l'homme était son ouvrage, ne serait-ce pas là le sanctuaire qu'il aurait choisi pour sa loi? Cette loi égale, puisqu'elle émanerait d'un dieu juste, s'y trouverait d'une manière irrésistible également gravée dans tous et d'un bout de l'univers à l'autre; tous les hommes, se ressemblant par cet organe délicat et sensible, se ressembleraient également par l'hommage qu'ils rendraient au dieu de qui ils le tiendraient; tous n'auraient qu'une façon de l'aimer, tous n'auraient qu'une façon de l'adorer ou de le servir, et il leur deviendrait aussi impossible de méconnaître ce dieu que de résister au penchant secret de son culte. Que vois-je au lieu de cela dans l'univers ? Autant de dieux que de pays, autant de manières de servir ces dieux que de différentes têtes ou de différentes imaginations. Et cette multiplicité d'opinions dans laquelle il m'est physiquement impossible de choisir serait, selon toi, l'ouvrage d'un dieu juste?

Va, prédicant, tu l'outrages, ton dieu, en me le présentant de la sorte; laisse-moi le nier tout à fait, car s'il existe, alors je l'outrage bien moins par mon incrédulité que toi par tes blasphèmes. Reviens à la raison, prédicant: ton Jésus ne vaut pas mieux que Mahomet, Mahomet pas mieux que Moïse, et tous les trois pas mieux que Confucius, qui pourtant dicta quelques bons principes pendant que les trois autres déraisonnaient. Mais en général tous ces gens-là ne sont que des imposteurs, dont le philosophe s'est moqué, que la canaille a crus et que la justice aurait dû faire

pendre.

LE PRÊTRE- Hélas! elle ne l'a que trop fait pour l'un des quatre.

LE MORIBOND - C'est celui qui le méritait le mieux. Il était séditieux, turbulent, calomniateur, fourbe, libertin, grossier farceur et méchant dangereux, possédait l'art d'en imposer au peuple, et devenait par conséquent punissable dans un royaume en l'état où se trouvait alors celui de Jérusalem. Il a donc été très sage de s'en défaire, et c'est peut-être le seul cas où mes maximes, extrêmement douces et tolérantes d'ailleurs puissent admettre la sévérité de Thémis. J'excuse toutes les erreurs, excepté celles qui peuvent devenir dangereuses dans le gouvernement où l'on vit; les rois et leurs majestés sont les seules choses qui m'en imposent, les seules que je respecte, et qui n'aime pas son pays et son roi n'est pas cligne de vivre.

LE PRÊTRE- Mais enfin vous admettez bien quelque chose après cette vie ? Il est impossible que votre esprit ne se soit pas quelquefois plu à percer l'épaisseur des ténèbres du sort qui nous attend: et quel système peut l'avoir mieux satisfait que celui d'une multitude de peines pour celui qui vit mal et d'une éternité de récompenses pour celui qui vit bien?

LE MORIBOND - Quel, mon ami? celui du néant. Jamais il ne m'a effrayé, et je n'y vois rien que de consolant et de simple; tous les autres sont l'ouvrage de l'orgueil, celui-là seul l'est de la raison. D'ailleurs il n'est ni affreux ni absolu, ce néant. N'ai-je pas sous mes yeux l'exemple des générations et régénérations perpétuelles de la nature. Rien ne périt, mon ami, rien ne se détruit dans le monde; aujourd'hui homme, demain ver, après-demain mouche, n'est-ce pas toujours exister? Eh ! pourquoi veux-tu que je sois récompensé de vertus auxquelles je n'ai nul mérite, ou puni de crimes dont je n'ai pas été le maître ? Peux-tu accorder la bonté de ton prétendu dieu avec ce système et peut-il avoir voulu me créer pour se donner le plaisir de me punir, et cela seulement en conséquence d'un choix dont il ne me laisse pas le maître ?

LE PRÊTRE - Vous l'êtes.

LE MORIBOND - Oui, selon tes préjugés; mais la raison les détruit, et le système de la liberté de l'homme ne fut jamais inventé que pour fabriquer celui de la grâce, qui devenait si favorable à vos rêveries. Quel est l'homme au monde qui, voyant l'échafaud à côté du crime, le commettrait, s'il était libre de ne pas le commettre? Nous sommes entraînés par une force irrésistible, et jamais un instant les maîtres de pouvoir nous déterminer pour autre chose que pour le Côté vers lequel nous sommes inclinés. Il n'y a pas une seule vertu qui ne soit nécessaire à la nature, et rêversiblement, pas un seul crime dont elle n'ait besoin, et c'est dans le parfait équilibre qu'elle maintient des uns et des autres, que consiste toute sa science. Mais pouvons-nous être coupables du côté dans lequel elle nous jette? Pas plus que ne l'est la guêpe qui vient darder son aiguillon dans ta peau.

LE PRÊTRE - Ainsi donc le plus grand de tous les crimes ne doit nous inspirer aucune frayeur?

LE MORIBOND - Ce n'est pas là ce que je dis: il suffit que la loi le condamne, et que le glaive de la. justice le punisse, pour qu'il doive nous inspirer de l'éloignement ou de la terreur, mais, dès qu'il est malheureusement commis; il faut savoir prendre son parti, et ne pas se livrer au stérile remords. Son effet est vain, puisqu'il n'a pu nous en préserver, nul, puisqu'il ne le répare pas : il est donc absurde de s'y livrer, et plus absurde encore de craindre d'en être puni dans l'autre monde, si nous sommes assez heureux que d'avoir échappé de l'être en celui-ci. À Dieu ne plaise que je veuille par là encourager au crime! Il faut assurément l'éviter tant qu'on le peut, mais c'est par raison qu'il faut savoir le fuir, et non par de fausses craintes qui n'aboutissent à rien et dont l'effet est sitôt détruit dans une âme un peu ferme. La raison, mon ami, oui, la raison toute seule doit nous avertir que de nuire à nos semblables ne peut jamais nous rendre heureux, et notre coeur que de contribuer à leur félicité est la plus grande pour nous que la nature nous ait accordée sur la terre. Toute la morale humaine est renfermée dans ce seul mot: rendre les autres aussi heureux que l'on désire de l'être soi-même et ne leur jamais' faire plus de mal que nous n'en voudrions recevoir. Voilà, mon ami, voilà les seuls principes que nous devions suivre, et il n'y a besoin ni de religion, ni de dieu pour goûter et admettre ceux-là : il n'est besoin que d'un bon coeur.

Mais je sens que je m'affaiblis, prédicant; quitte tes préjugés, sois homme, sois humain, sans crainte et sans espérance; laisse là tes dieux et tes religions; tout cela n'est bon qu'à mettre le fer à la main des hommes, et le seul nom de toutes ces horreurs a plus fait verser de sang sur la terre que toutes les autres guerres et les autres fléaux à la fois. Renonce à l'idée d'un autre monde, il niy en a point; mais ne renonce pas au plaisir d'être heureux et d'en faire en celui-ci. Voilà la seule façon que la nature t'offre de doubler ton existence ou de l'étendre... Mon ami, la volupté fut toujours le plus cher de mes biens; je l'ai encensée toute ma vie, et j'ai voulu la terminer dans ses bras : ma fin approche, six femmes plus belles que le jour sont dans ce cabinet voisin, je les réservais pour ce moment-ci; prends-en ta part, tâche d'oublier sur leurs seins, à mon exemple, tous les vains sophismes de la superstition, et toutes les imbéciles erreurs de l'hypocrisie.

NOTE

Le moribond sonna, les femmes entrèrent, et le prédicant devint dans leurs bras un homme corrompu par la nature, pour n'avoir pas su expliquer ce que c'était que la nature corrompue.

Déclaration de l'indépendance du Bas Canada de 1838

2009-10-20T12:38:00.002-04:00

DECLARONS SOLENNELLEMENT:

1. Qu'a compter de ce jour, le Peuple du Bas-Canada est ABSOUS de toute allegeance a la Grande-Bretagne, et que toute connexion politique entre cette puissance et le Bas-Canada CESSE des ce jour.

2. Que le Bas-Canada doit prendre la forme d'un gouvernement REPUBLICAIN et se declare maintenant, de fait, REPUBLIQUE.

3. Que sous le gouvernement libre du Bas-Canada, tous les citoyens auront les memes droits; les sauvages cesseront d'etre sujets a aucune disqualification civile quelleconque, et jouiront des memes droits que les autres citoyens de l'Etat du Bas-Canada.

4. Que toute union entre l'Eglise et l'Etat est declaree abolie, et toute personne a le droit d'exercer librement la religion et la croyance que lui dicte sa conscience.

5. Que la Tenure Feodale ou Seigneuriale est, de fait, abolie, comme si elle n'eut jamais existe dans ce pays.

6. Que tout personne qui porte ou portera les armes, ou fournira des moyens d'assistance au Peuple Canadien dans sa lutte d'emancipation est dechargee de toutes dettes ou obligations reelles ou supposees, envers les seigneurs, pour arrerages en vertu de Droits Seigneuriaux ci-devant existants.

7. Que le "Douaire Coutumier" est, a l'avenir, entierement aboli et prohibe.

8. Que l'emprisonnement pour dettes n'existera plus, sauf les cas de fraude evidente que l'on specifiera dans un Acte de la Legislature du Bas-Canada a cet effet.

9. Que la peine de mort ne sera prononcee que dans le cas du meurtre seulement et pas autrement.

10. Que toute Hypotheque sur Bien-fonds devra etre speciale et pour etre valide, devra etre enregistree dans des Bureaux crees a cet effet par un Acte de Legislature du Bas-Canada.

11. Qu'il y aura la liberte pleine et entiere de la Presse dans toutes les matieres et affaires publiques.

12. Que le proces par JURY est garanti au peuple de l'Etat, dans son etendue la plus liberale dans les proces criminels, et dans les affaires civiles au montant d'une somme a etre determinee par la Legislature de l'Etat du Bas-Canada.

13. Que comme une necessite et un devoir du Gouvernement envers le Peuple, l'education publique et generale sera mise en operation et encouragee d'une maniere speciale, aussitot que les circonstances pourront le permettre.

14. Que pour assurer la franchise et la liberte elective, toute election se fera par le moyen du BALLOT.

15. Qu'aussitot que les circonstances pourront le permettre, le Peuple choisira des Delegues suivant la division actuelle du pays dans les Villes, Bourgs et Comtes qui constitueront une Convention, ou un Corps Legislatif, afin de baser et d'etablir une Constitution, selon les besoins du pays, et conformement aux dispositions de cette Declaration, sujette a etre modifiee suivant la volonte du Peuple.

16. Que toute personne male au-dessus de l'age de vingt-un ans aura le droit de voter ainsi que pourvu ci-dessus, pour l'election des Delegues sus-nommes.

17. Que toutes les Terres dites de la Couronne, ainsi que celles appelees reserves du clerge, et celles qui sont nominalement en possession d'une certaine compagnie de speculateurs en Angleterre, appelee «Compagnie des Terres de l'Amerique Britannique du Nord», deviennent de plein droit, la propriete d'Etat du Canada, sauf telles portions des dites terres, qui peuvent etre en possession de cultivateurs, qui les tiennent de bonne foi pour lesquelles nous garantissons des titres en vertu d'une loi qui sera passee afin de legaliser la possession de tels lots de terres, situes dans les «Townships» qui sont maintenant en culture.

18. Qu'on se servira des langues Française et Anglaise dans toutes matieres publiques.

Et pour le support DE CETTE DECLARATION, et le succes de la cause Patriotique, que nous soutenons, NOUS, confiants en la protection du TOUT Puissant et la justice de notre ligne de conduite, engageons, par ces presentes, mutuellement et solennellement les uns envers les autres, notre vie, nos fortunes et notre honneur le plus sacre. Par Ordre du Gouvernement Provisoir,

ROBERT NELSON
President.

Speak White - Michèle Lalonde

2009-10-20T12:34:00.002-04:00

Speak white
il est si beau de vous entendre
parler de Paradise Lost
ou du profil gracieux et anonyme qui tremble dans les sonnets de Shakespeare
nous sommes un peuple inculte et bègue
mais ne sommes pas sourds au génie d'une langue
parlez avec l'accent de Milton et Byron et Shelley et Keats
speak white
et pardonnez-nous de n'avoir pour réponse
que les chants rauques de nos ancêtres
et le chagrin de Nelligan

speak white
parlez de choses et d'autres
parlez-nous de la Grande Charte
ou du monument à Lincoln
du charme gris de la Tamise
de l'eau rose du Potomac
parlez-nous de vos traditions
nous sommes un peuple peu brillant
mais fort capable d'apprécier
toute l'importance des crumpets
ou du Boston Tea Party

mais quand vous really speak white
quand vous get down to brass tacks

pour parler du gracious living
et parler du standard de vie
et de la Grande Société
un peu plus fort alors speak white
haussez vos voix de contremaîtres
nous sommes un peu durs d'oreille
nous vivons trop près des machines
et n'entendons que notre souffle au-dessus des outils

speak white and loud
qu'on vous entende
de Saint-Henri à Saint-Domingue
oui quelle admirable langue
pour embaucher
donner des ordres
fixer l'heure de la mort à l'ouvrage
et de la pause qui rafraîchit
et ravigote le dollar

speak white
tell us that God is a great big shot
and that we're paid to trust him
speak white
parlez-nous production profits et pourcentages
speak white
c'est une langue riche
pour acheter
mais pour se vendre
mais pour se vendre à perte d'âme
mais pour se vendre
ah !
speak white
big deal
mais pour vous dire
l'éternité d'un jour de grève
pour raconter
une vie de peuple-concierge
mais pour rentrer chez nous le soir
à l'heure où le soleil s'en vient crever au-dessus des ruelles
mais pour vous dire oui que le soleil se couche oui
chaque jour de nos vies à l'est de vos empires
rien ne vaut une langue à jurons
notre parlure pas très propre
tachée de cambouis et d'huile

speak white
soyez à l'aise dans vos mots
nous sommes un peuple rancunier
mais ne reprochons à personne
d'avoir le monopole
de la correction de langage

dans la langue douce de Shakespeare
avec l'accent de Longfellow
parlez un français pur et atrocement blanc
comme au Viêt-Nam au Congo
parlez un allemand impeccable
une étoile jaune entre les dents
parlez russe parlez rappel à l'ordre parlez répression
speak white
c'est une langue universelle
nous sommes nés pour la comprendre
avec ses mots lacrymogènes
avec ses mots matraques

speak white
tell us again about Freedom and Democracy
nous savons que liberté est un mot noir
comme la misère est nègre
et comme le sang se mêle à la poussière des rues d'Alger ou de Little Rock

speak white
de Westminster à Washington relayez-vous
speak white comme à Wall Street
white comme à Watts
be civilized
et comprenez notre parler de circonstance
quand vous nous demandez poliment
how do you do
et nous entendez vous répondre
we're doing all right
we're doing fine
we
are not alone

nous savons
que nous ne sommes pas seuls.

Refus Global - Paul-Émile Borduas

2009-10-20T12:29:00.002-04:00

Rejetons de modestes familles canadiennes françaises, ouvrières ou petit bourgeoises, de l'arrivée du pays à nos jours restées françaises et catholiques par résistance au vainquer, par attachement,arbitraire au passé, par plaisir et orgueil sentimental et autres nécessités.
Colonie précipitée dès 1760 dans les murs lisses de la peur, refuge habituel des vaincus; là, une première fois abandonnée. L'élite reprend la mer ou se vend au plus fort. Elle ne manquera plus de le faire chaque fois qu'une occasion sera belle.

Un petit peuple serré de près aux soutanes restées les seules dépositaires de la foi, du savoir, de la vérité et de la richesse nationale. Tenu à l'écart de l'évolution universelle de la pensée pleine de risques et de dangers, éduqué sans mauvaise volonté, mais sans contrôle, dans le faux jugement des grands faits de l'histoire quand l'ignorance complète est impraticable.

Petit peuple issu d'une colonie janseniste, isolé, vaincu, sans défense contre l'invasion, de toutes les congrégations de France et de Navarre, en mal de perpétuer en ces lieux bénis de la peur (c'est-le-commencement-de-la-sagesse!) le prestige et les benefices du catholicisme malmené en Europe. Héritières de l'autorité papale, mécanique, sans réplique, grands maitres des méthodes obscurantistes nos maisons d'enseignement ont dès lors les moyens d'organiser en monopole le règne de la mémoire exploiteuse, de la raison immobile, de l'intention néfaste.

Petit peuple qui malgré tout se multiplie dans la générosité de la chair sinon dans celle de l'esprit, au nord de l'immense Amérique au corps sémillant de la jeunesse au coeur d'or, mais à la morale simiesque, envoûtée par le prestige annihilant du souvenir des chefs-d'oeuvre d'Europe, dédaigneuse des authentiques créations de ses classes opprimées.

Notre destin sembla durement fixé.

Des révolutions, des guerres exterieures brisent cependant l'étanchéité du charme, l'efficacité du blocus spirituel.

Des perles incontrôlables suintent hors des murs.

Les luttes politiques deviennent âprement partisanes. Le clergé contre tout espoir commet des imprudences.

Des révoltes suivent, quelques exécutions capitales succèdent. Passionnément les premières ruptures s'opèrent entre le clergé et quelques fidèles.

Lentement la brèche s'élargit, se rétrécit, s'élargit encore.

Les voyages à l'étranger se multiplient. Paris exerce toute l'attraction. Trop étendu dans le temps et dans l'espace, trop mobile pour nos âmes timorées, il n'est souvent que l'occasion d'une vacance employée à parfaire une éducation sexuelle retardataire et à acquérir, du fait d'un séjour en France, l'autorité facile en vue de l'exploitation améliorée de la foule au retour. À bien peu d'exceptions près, nos médecins, par exemple, (qu'ils aient ou non voyagé) adoptent une conduite scandaleuse (il-faut-bien-n'est-ce-pas-payer-ces-longues- années-d'études!)

Des oeuvres révolutionnaires, quand par hasard elles tombent sous la main, paraissent les fruits amers d'un groupe d'exentriques. L'activité académique a un autre prestige à notre manque de jugement.

Ces voyages sont aussi dans le nombre l'exceptionnelle occasion d'un réveil. L'inviable s'infiltre partout. Les lectures défendues se répandent. Elles apportent un peu de baume et d'espoir.

Des consciences s'éclairent au contact vivifiant des poètes maudits: ces hommes qui, sang être des monstres, osent exprimer haut et net ce que les plus malheureux d'entre nous étouffent tout bas dans la honte de soi et la terreur d'être engloutis vivants. Un peu de lumière se fait à l'exemple de ces hommes qui acceptent les premiers les inquiétudes présentes, si douleureuses, si filles perdues. Les réponses qu'ils apportent ont une autre valeur de trouble, de précision, de fraîcheur que les sempiternelles rengaines proposées au pays du Québec et dans tous les séminaires du globe.

Les frontières de nos rêves ne sont plus les mêmes.

Des vertiges nous prennent à la tombée des oripeaux d'horizons naguère surchargés. La honte du servage sans espoir fait place à la fierté d'une liberté possible à conquérir de haute lutte.

Au diable le goupillon et la tuque! Mille fois ils extorquèrent ce qu'ils donnèrent jadis.

Par delà le christiaitisnie nous touchons la brûlante fraternité humaine dont il est devenu la porte fermée.

Le règne de la peur multiforme est terminé.

Dans le fol espoir d'en effacer le souvenir je les énumère:

peur des préjugés - peur de l'opinion publique - des persécutions - de la réprobation générale

peur d'être seul sans Dieu et la société qui isole très infailliblement

peur de soi - de son frère - de la pauvreté

peur de l'ordre établi - de la ridicule justice

peur des relations neuves

peur du surrationnel

peur des nécessités

peur des écluses grandes ouvertes sur la foi en l'homme - en la sociétié future

peur de toutes les formes susceptibles de déclencher un amour transformant

peur bleue - peur rouge - peur blanche : maillon de notre chaine.

Du règne de la peur soustrayante nous passons à celui de l'angoisse.

Il aurait fallu être d'airain pour rester indifférents à la douleur des partis - pris de gaieté feinte, des réflexes psychologiques des plus cruelles extravagances : maillot de cellophane du poignant désespoir présent (comment ne pas crier à la lecture de la nouvelle de cette horrible collection d'abat-jour faits de tatouages prélevés sur de malheureux captifs à la demande d'une femme élégante; ne pas gémir à l'énoncé interminable des supplices des camps de concentration; ne pas avoir froid aux os à la description des cachots espagnols, des représailles injustifiables, des vengeances à froid). Comment ne pas frémir devant la cruelle lucidité de la science.

À ce règne de l'angoisse toute puissance succède celui de la nausée.

Nous avons été écoeurés devant l'apparente inaptitude de l'homme à corriger les maux. Devant l'inutilité de nos efforts, devant la vanité de nos espoirs passés.

Depuis des siècles les généreux objets de l'activité poétique sont vouée à l'échec fatal sur le plan social, rejetés violemment des cadres de la société avec tentative ensuite d'utilisation dans le gauchissement irrévocable de l'intégration, de la fausse assimilation.

Depuis des siècles les splendides révolutions aux seins regorgeant de sève sont écrasées à mort après un court moment d'espoir délirant, dans le glissement à peine interrompu de l'irrémédiable descente:

les révolutions françaises

la révolution russe

la révolution espagnole

avortée dans une mêlée internationale malgré les voeux impuissants de tant d'âmes simples du monde.

Là encore, la fatalité fut plus forte que la générosité.

Ne pas avoir la nausée devant les récompenses accordées aux grossières cruautés, aux menteurs, aux faussaires, aux fabricants d'objets mort-nés, aux affineurs, aux intéressés à plat, aux calculateurs, aux faux guides de l'humanité, aux empoisonneurs des sources vives.

Ne pas avoir la nausée devant notre propre lâcheté, notre impuissance, notre fragilité, notre incompréhension.
Devant les désastres de notre amour...
En face de la constante préférence accordée aux chères illusions contre les mystères objectifs.

Où est le secret de cette efficacité de malheur imposée à l'homme et par l'homme seul, sinon dans notre acharnement à défendre la civilisation qui préside aux destinées des nations dominantes.

Les États-Unis, la Russie, l'Angleterre, la France, l'Allemagne, l'Italie et l'Espagne: héritières à la dent pointue d'un seul décalogue, d'un même évangile.

La religion du Christ a dominé l'univers. Vous voyez ce qu'on en a fait: des fois soeurs sont passées à des exploitations soeurettes.

Supprimez les forces précises de la concurrence des matières premières, du prestige, de l'autorité et elles seront parfaitement d'accord. Donnez la suprématie à qui il vous plaira, et vous aurez les mêmes résultats fonciers, sinon avec les mêmes arrangements des détails.

Toutes sont au terme de la civilisation chrétienne.

La prochaine guerre mondiale en verra l'effondrement dans la suppression des possibilités de concurrence internationale.

Son état cadavérique frappera les yeux encore fermés.

La décomposition commencée au XlVe siècle donnera la nausée aux moins sensibles.

Son exécrable exploitation, maintenue tant de siècles dans l'efficacité au prix des qualités les plus précieuses de la vie, se révélera enfin à la multitude de ses victimes: dociles esclaves d'autant plus acharnés à la défendre qu'ils étaient plus misérables.

L'écartèlement aura une fin.

La décadence chrétienne aura entrainé dans sa chute tous les peuples, toutes les classes qu'elle aura touchées, dans l'ordre de la première à la dernière, de haut en bas.

Elle atteindra dans la honte l'équivalence renversée des sommets du XIIIe.

Au XIIIe siècle, les limites permises à l'évolution de la formation morale. des relations englobantes du début atteintes, l'intuition cède la première place à la raison. Graduellement l'acte de foi fait place à l'acte calculé. L'éxploition commence an sein de la religion par l'utilisation intéressée des sentiments existants immobilisés; par l'étude rationnelle des textes glorieux au profit du maintien de la suprématie obtenue spontanément.

L'exploitation rationnelle s'étend lentement à toutes les activités sociales: un rendement maximum est exigé.

La foi se réfugie au coeur de la foule, devient l'ultime espoir d'une revanche, l'ultime compensation. Mais là aussi, les espoirs s'émoussent.

En haut lieu, les mathématiques succèdent aux speculations métaphysiques devenues vaines.

L'esprit d'observation succède à celui de transfiguration.

La méthode introduit les progrès imminents dans le limité. La décadence se fait aimable et nécessaire: elle favorise la naissance de nos souples machines au déplacement vertigineux, elle permet de passer la camisole de force à nos rivières tumultueuses en attendant la désintégration à volonté de la planète. Nos instruments scientifiques nous donnent d'extraordinaires moyens d'investigation, de contrôle des trop petits, trop rapides, trop vibrants, trop lents ou trop grands pour nous. Notre raison permet l'envahissement du monde, mais où nous avons perdu notre unité.

L'écartèlement entre les puissances psychiques et les puissances raisonnantes est près du paroxysme.

Les progrès matériels, réservés aux classes possédantes, méthodiquement freinés, ont permis l'évolution politique avec l'aide des pouvoirs religieux (sans eux ensuite) mais sans renouveler les fondements de notre sensibilité, de notre subconscient, sans permettre la pleine évolution émotive de la foule qui seule aurait pu nous sortir de la profonde ornière chrétienne.

La société née dans la foi périra par l'arme de la raison: L'INTENTION.

La régression fatale de la puissance morale collective en puissance strictement individuelle et sentimentale, a tissé la doublure de l'écran déjà prestidigieux du savoir abstrait sous laquelle la sociétié se dissimule pour dévorer à l'aise les fruits de ses forfaits.

Les deux dernières guerres furent nécessaires à la réalisation de cet état absurde. L'épouvante de la troisième sera décisive. L'heure H du sacrifice total nous frôle.

Déjà les rats européens tentent un pont de fuite éperdue sur l'Atlantique. Les évènements déferleront sur les voraces, les repus, les luxueux, les calmes, les aveugles, les sourds.

Ils seront culbutés sans merci.

Un nouvel espoir collectif naitra.

Déjà il exige l'ardeur des lucidités exceptionnelles, l'union anonyme dans la foi retrouvée en l'avenir, en la colletivitié future.

Le magique butin magiquement conquis à l'inconnu attend à pied d'oeuvre. Il fut rassemblé par tous les vrais poètes. Son pouvoir transformant se mesure à la violence exercée contre lui, à sa résistance ensuite aux tentatives d'utilisation (après plus de deux siècles, Sade reste introuvable en librairie; Isidore Ducasse, depuis plus d'un siècle qu'il est mort, de révolutions, de carnages, malgré l'habitude du cloaque actuel reste trop viril pour les molles consciences contemporaines).

Tous les objets du trésor se révèlent inviolables par notre société. Ils demeurent l'incorruptible réserve sensible de demain. Ils furent ordonnés spontanément hors et contre la civilisation. Ils attendent pour devenir actifs (sur le plan social) le dégagement des nécessités actuelles.

D'ici là notre devoir est simple.

Rompre définitivement avec toutes les habitudes de la société, se désolidariser de son esprit utilitaire. Refus d'être sciemment au-dessous de nos posibilités psychiques. Refus de fermer les yeux sur les vices, les duperies perpétrées sous le couvert du savoir, du service rende, de la reconnaissance due. Refus d'un cantonnement la seule bourgade plastique, place fortifiée mais facile d'évitement. Refus de se taire --- faites de nous ce qu'il vous plaira mais vous devez nous entendre --- refus de la gloire, des honneurs (le premier constenti): stigmates de la nuisance, de l'inconscience, de la servilité. Refus de servir, d'être utilisables pour de telles fins. Refus de toute INTENTION, arme néfaste de la RAISON. À bas toutes deux, au second rang!

Place a la magie! Place aux mystères objectifs!
Place a l'amour!
Place aux nécessités!

Au refus global nous opposons la responsabilité entière.

L'action intéressée reste attachée à son auteur, elle est mort-née.

Les actes passionnels nous fuient en raison de leur propre dynamisme.

Nous prenons allégrement l'entière responsabilité de demain. L'effort rationnel, une fois retourné en arrière, il lui revient de dégager le présent des limbes du passé.

Nos passions façonnent spontanément, imprévisiblement, nécessairement le futur.

Le passé dut être accepté avec la naissances il ne saurait être sacré. Nous sommes toujours quittes envers lui.

Il est naïf et malsain de considérer les hommes et les choses de l'histoire dans l'angle amplificateur de la renommée qui leur prête des qualités inaccessibles à l'homme présent. Certes, ces qualités sont hors d'atteinte aux habiles singeries académiques, mais elles le sont automatiquement chaque fois qu'un homme obéit aux nécessités profondes de son être; chaque fois qu'un homme cosent à être un homme neuf dans un temps nouveau. Définition de tout homme, de tout temps.

Fini l'assassinat massif du présent et du futur à coup redoublé du passé.

Il suffit de dégager, d'hier les nécessités d'aujourd'hui. Au meilleur demain ne sera que la conséquence imprévisible du présent.

Nous n'avons pas à nous en soucier avant qu'il ne soit.

REGLEMENT FINAL DES COMPTES
Les forces organisées de la société nous reprochent notre ardeur à l'ouvrage, le débordement de nos inquiétudes, nos excès comme une insulte à leur mollesse, à leur quiétude, à leur bon goût pour ce qui est de la vie (généreuse, pleine d'espoir et d'amour par habitude perdue).

Les amis du régime nous soupçonnent de favoriser la "Révolution". les aqis de la "Révolution" de n'être que des révoltés: "...nous protestons contire ce qui est, mais dans l'unique désir de le transformer, non de le changer."

Si délicatement dit que ce soit, nous croyons comprendre.

Il s'agit de classe.

On nous prête l'intention naïve de vouloir "transformer" la société en remplaçant les hommes au pouvoir par d'autres semblables. Alors, pourquoi pas eux, évidemment!

Mais c'est qu'eux ne sont pas de la même classe! Comme si changement de classe impliquait changement de civilisation, changement de désirs, changement d'espoir!

Ils se dévouent à salaire fixe, plus un boni de vie chère, à l'organisation du prolétariat; ils ont mille fois raison. L'ennui est qu'une fois la victoire bien assise, en plus des petits salaires actuels, ils exigeront sur le dos du même prolétariat, toujours, et toujours de la même manière, un règlement de frais supplémentaires et un renouvellement à long terme, sans discussion possible.

Nous reconnaissons quand meme qu'ils sont dans la lignée historique. Le salut ne pourra venir qu'après le plus grand excès de l'exploitation.

Ils seront cet excès.

Ils le seront en toute fatalité sans qu'il y ait besoin de quiconque en particulier. La ripaille sera plantureuse. D'avance nous en avons refusé le partage.

Voilà notre "abstention coupable".

À vous la curée rationnellement ordonnée (comme tout ce qui est au sein affectueux de la décadence); à nous l'imprévisible passion; à nous le risque total dans le refus global.

(Il est hors de volonté que les classes sociales se soient succédées au gouvernement des peuples sans pouvoir autre chose que poursuivre l'irrévocable décadence. Hors de volonté que notre connaissance historique nous assure que seul un complet épanouissement de nos facultés d'abord, et, ensuite, un parfait renouvellement des sources émotives puissent nous sortir de l'impasse et nous mettre dans la voie d'une civilisation impatiente de naitre).

Tous, gens en place, aspirants en place, veulent bien nous gâter, si seulement nous consentions à ménager leurs possibilités de gauchissement par un dosage savant de nos activités.

La fortune est à nous si nous rabattons noe visières, bouchons nos oreilles, remontons nos bottes et hardiment frayons dans le tas, à gauche à droite.

Nous préférons être cyniques spontanément, sans malice.

Des gens aimables sourient au peu de succèer monétaire de nos expositions collectives, ils ont ainsi la charmanante impression d'être les premiers à découvrir leur petite valeur marchande.

Si nous tenons exposition sur exposition, ce n'est pas dans l'espoir naïf de faire fortune. Nous savons ceux qui possèdent aux antipodes d'où nous sommes. Ils ne sauraient impunément risquer ces contacts incendiaires.

Dans le passé, des malentendus involontaires ont permis seuls de telles ventes.

Nous croyons ce texte de nature à dissiper tous ceux de l'avenir.

Si nos activités se font pressantes, c'est que nous resentons violemment l'urgent besoin de l'union.

Là, le succès éclate!

Hier, nous étions seuls et indécis.

Aujourd'hui un groupe existe aux ramifications profondes et courageuses; déjà elles débordent les frontières.

Un magnifique devoir nous incombe aussi: conserver le précieux trésor qui nous échoit. Lui aussi est dans la lignée de l'histoire.

Objets tangibles, ils requièrent une relation constamment renouvelée, confrontée, remise en question. Relation impalpable, exigeante qui demande les forces vives de l'action.

Ce trésor est la réserve poétique, le renouvellement émotif où puiseront les siècles à venir. Il ne peut être transmis que TRANSFORME, sans quoi c'est la gauchissement.

Que ceux tentés par l'aventure se joignent à nous.

Au terme imaginable, nous entrevoyons l'homme libéré de ses chaines inutiles, réaliser dans l'ordre imprévu, nécessaire de la spontanéité, dans l'anarchie resplandissante, la plénitude de ses dons individuels.

D'ici là, sans repos ni halte, en communauté de sentiment avec les assoiffés d'un mieux être, sans crainte des longues échéances, dans l'encouragement ou la persécution, nous poursuivrons dans la joie notre sauvage besoin de libération.

Paul-Emile Borduas

Magdeleine ARBOUR, Marcel BARBEAU, Bruno CORMIER, Claude GAUVREAU, Pierre GAUVREAU, Muriel GUILBAULT, Marcelle FERRON-HAMELIN, Fernand LEDUC, Thérèse LEDUC, Jean-Paul MOUSSEAU, Maurice PERRON, Louis RENAUD, Françoise RIOPELLE, Jean-Paul RIOPELLE, Françoise SULLIVAN.

An Experiment in Preservation

2009-10-20T12:19:00.004-04:00

So Geocities, the first major free web hosting that dates back to the mid-1990s, is shutting down its service and taking all of its free web pages offline on October 26th. I created my first website way, way back in the summer of 1997 when personal webpages were a lot more rare and one had to know HTML in order to make one. I was entirely self-taught, and I'm rather proud of what I managed to design back in the day. But that site is now well over a decade old, and I'm definitely not an undergrad anymore, and a significant portion the content was derived from papers I wrote in my undergrad classes, although quite a bit was original (such as mon journal de bord souverainiste, which was basically a blog from back in the day before blogging software existed or online journals were called blogs). So I'm a bit sad that all of this content is going to disappear off the web, except for what some archiving services might copy, but it's all on my hard drive, and I realized that most of it is so old and out of date that it's not really worth my time or the effort to move it over to another free hosting site. But, it occurred to me that the texts worth preserving, the ones that I know that people have linked to and used frequently over the years, such the "Refus Global" and "Speak White" and other important cultural texts that weren't on the web at all back in the mid-90s until I took the time to type them up and post them there, well, those ones are worth keeping online for other people to continue to google up and link to. So, I thought that I could post each one as a blog entry, and it would still be google-able and each entry would come up as individual webpage, so that's what I'm going to do. Consider the experiment started....

I should probably update my blog too, but this first semester at a new school and prepping my weekly grad class is keeping me too busy these days to do anything more than this copying and pasting exercise!

Summer Update

2009-08-01T14:19:00.005-04:00

So I'm sitting at a Café Dépôt on the corner of Papineau and Mont-Royal. I'm back in the most wonderful city of the world for the summer, for 7 whole weeks to be precise, and I've still got 2 weeks left before classes start at Southern Football School--and I can't help but bitch just a bit that our classes start ridiculously early, 3 weeks early by Canadian standards, but still go just as long.

The summer seems to be flying by. Classes at Awesome College ended ridiculously late--3 weeks late by Canadian standards (why do American schools have longer semesters but Canadian schools still have smarter students?)--and then I spent several weeks preparing for the move from Middle-o-Nowhereville down to Big College Town, which went exceptionally well. Moving within the same country was so much easier than last summer's cross-border move! I had completely unpacked and was settled into my beautiful new (rental) condo within 48 hours of the moving van leaving, and then had another two weeks to get settled on campus and managed to mostly unpack my office.

Originally my plan for the 7 weeks of summer research time in the city was to write the hardest of the two new theory chapters for my book, but after only a couple days that goal got completely reevaluated. Just doing the readings, taking notes, and figuring out what I was going to say was more than enough to fill my plate. The research is going well, but I'm not even sure I can finish it all in the two weeks that I have left, especially since I now have to start shifting my attention towards finishing prepping my grad class for next semester. I've got 8 students--6 MA's and 2 PhD's--and although I've taught this class to 4th year undergrads, there is still quite a bit of beefing up to do along with articles to track down, photocopy, scan to pdf, and upload.

But it's sunny and beautiful outside today, this café is pretty happening, there are tons of people walking around the coolest neighbourhood of the city, and I've still got two weeks of festivals and fun with friends in front of me. La vie est belle, quoi!

New Job

2009-05-02T12:33:00.003-04:00

So, I've been at Awesome College in Middle-o'-Nowhereville since mid-July and haven't blogged once since leaving my beloved home and native land. And my first blog post since arriving here is to announce that I got an awesome new job and am moving onwards and upwards!

My lack of blogging from AC is in large part simply due to an absolute lack of time. That's the first year on the tenure-track for you. And as is now obvious, I added to all of the first year craziness by going on the market, unbeknown to my colleagues for the first six months I was here until I finally got the job and wrapped up negotiations.

There's also the simple fact that Awesome College has turned out to be not so awesome after all, and Middle-o'-Nowhereville has been depressing as hell, and therefore neither has been worthy of blogging about. To be more precise, Awesome College is actually awesome--if one is a student. But it leaves a lot to be desired if one is a prof. We are definitely a teaching school with a strong focus on the student experience, but faculty needs go out the window. The worst thing about this place is the complete and utter backwardness of AC's approach to technology. It has been incredibly frustrating for this geek to deal with stone age infrastructure. I've been banging my head up against the wall time and time again at each attempt to get the administration to improve the technological infrastructure. But the IT dept. has purposely kept the faculty in the dark about technology for the past decade as a means of control, so the rest of the faculty, and consequently the faculty-governed admin people, don't even realize that they are working with tech tools that are barely superior to a chisel and stone tablet. The IT dept has manipulated "ignorance is bliss" to their advantage, and it has been far from bliss having to confront AC's technological shortcomings on a near daily basis.

MV, quite simply, is really not worthy of more than a sentence to say that living here has been a soul-sucking hell on earth. I have never been so glad to contemplate saying goodbye to a town as I am to this one. I like my cozy little apartment, but I can't wait to get out of this town that depresses and frustrates me daily on the five minute drive from my apt to the office. I honestly do not know how people can make a life here and be happy. This is definitely a scary town with zero potential.

That said, my colleagues have been fantastic and I will miss them very, very, very much. It felt like I bonded with them instantly and they have been wonderfully supportive in getting me through the first year and helping me adapt to life in this place. They are the warmest, most kind, and most caring bunch of people I have met in a very long time, and I very much doubt that I will find friends and colleagues this amazing where I'm going next. There has been a core group of women here, all junior faculty, who are incredibly tight and supportive of each other, and I feel so lucky to have instantly become one of their group. I've never spent so much time socializing before, and that has been really key to surviving life here. I think that we socialize so much precisely because that's the group's survival strategy, and it works. Among the many parties and events, our core group of women has had a monthly dinner and movie night, and we've come to call our group "the coloreds and queers" since everyone is either black, Latina, South Asian, or lesbian--or some combination of such. We all want out of here, and they have been just as supportive of me leaving as they were when I arrived, happy that I'm getting out since they all want out too, but they really are a truly fantastic group of women whom I'll miss a lot.

But, onwards and upwards, so here's the scoop on my new job. It's at a big Southern football school (henceforth SFS) in a big college town (henceforth BCT) which is technically a city, but I wouldn't go quite so far as it call it a city--it has the population of one, but in my world what makes a city a city is a gay bar, and this place no longer has one, although it used to. The nearest gay bar, and the nearest airport, is an hour's drive away, but both of these factors are still vast improvements on MV which was an hour and a half away from either of those things. SFS is 15 times bigger than AC, and BCT has 10 times more population than MV, so getting away from the claustrophobic small-town feel will be really great.

SFS offers a 2/2 teaching load (compared to 3/3 at AC), a PhD program with graduate students I will eventually have to supervise (yikes!), and technically it's a R1 research school, not one at the top of the R1 scale but certainly not one to turn up one's nose at either. It has a strong program in my field, and the funds to support that program and the profs' research, and several smart colleagues to work with. There a tradition of frequently bringing in outside scholars, so lots of colloquia loom in my future, which will be really great. It's rare to continue to have access to that kind of scholarly community after grad school, so I really lucked out to end up at a place that is similar to my PhD school in that regard.

Being Southern, one of the really great things about SFS and BCT is that it never snows! Même si je suis fière d'être québécoise, and a proud Canuck too, gawd do I ever hate the snow! MV has snow up the wazoo, worse than Canada, and I'm so glad to be leaving that behind and to know that next winter I'll be basking in 20C temps and bright sunshine.

And, BCT has a much larger community of Canucks. Here at AC, I've been the only one, and it has become a huge part of my identity to the point where it feels like every third word out of my mouth has been "Canada". Even though BCT is much further south of the border, as a bigger community it has more Canadians, so I won't be alone on the cultural/national identity front anymore. I'm already FB friends with one of my new Canadian colleagues, who also happens to be a dyke--what more could a girl wish for in a new friend. SFS also puts me in a much better position to find a job back home someday (although after 5 years on the market, I have no plans of going on the market yet again next year!), and that's a really important part of what it has to offer as well. But at least it's a place where I can foresee living my life if a job in Canada doesn't materialize, which is something I definitely could not say about AC. Until I finally got the offer from SFSI was seriously considering quitting academia and taking up the offer of admissions to law school, just to get the hell out of MV and back to Canada. I'm really grateful to be going to SFS, which really does feel like winning the lottery.

So, the move from MV to BCT is hopefully going to happen sometime in mid-June, which is only 6 weeks away! All told, I'll have only been in MV for 11 months, and there's something satisfying about knowing that it will have been less than a year of my life. I'm still waiting for SFS to finish negotiating a tender with a new moving company, so I haven't actually been able to book my move for sure yet, but their purchasing dept says my dates shouldn't be a problem, and I've already found a great place to live when I get down there. It's a cute, brand-new, condo that is less than a 10 minute walk to campus, only 600 sq. ft. but with hardwood floors, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances, and altogether absolutely gorgeous. I can't wait to be in the new place--and I just hope I can fit all my stuff in there, but I've measured out how much stuff I have, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Last Day / Dernière Journée

2008-07-19T13:53:00.002-04:00

It's my last day in my home and native land, c'est ma dernière journée dans mon beau pays. I'm going to miss it here--a lot!

The movers came at 8:30am. I didn't finish packing until 3:45am and only slept intermittently from 4 til 7am. Ugh. But the move at my office (which they did first) went extremely well, in and out in 30 minutes, and the move at my downtown storage locker went just as well, another in and out in just 30 minutes, and although it was a bit slower, 2 hours, the move out of my apartment went very smoothly too. I'm at my office now taking advantage of the internet connection before locking my keys inside, going to eat a 3pm breakfast, seeing a film, and then going to a BBQ a friend is kindly throwing for me at 7pm.

I fly out tomorrow at noon, connect in a major hub, will be hoping that my bags connect too, since I don't normally check baggage but will be checking two suitcases this time, and then arrive in nearest major city to Middle-o'-nowhere-ville at about 6pm. Thanks to priceline.com and American consumerism, I got a 4-star hotel for dirt cheap and can spend the night there so that I can meet a new friend for coffee in the morning before doing a stock-up shopping trip to Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and, of course, Ikea. Being an hour and a half away from this city sucks, but at least the shopping is good when one can get there! I've rented a car from the airport for the next two weeks since I'll be in my new home for two weeks before flying off to the fancy-pants, by-invitation-only conference in England, and then hopefully the new car I'm buying will be there ready for me when I get back. And hopefully all my belongings will arrive a full week before I have to go to England. The movers say they will arrive either Thursday or Friday of this week, so fingers crossed they do!

I am going to miss Canada a lot though.

Le Québec va me manquer beaucoup, beaucoup.

I've been so busy with non-stop planning for all this basically since I got the job offer. The past few weeks have been even more hectic, and I've been too busy so far to mourn or cry much. I hope that I can hold myself together for the next few weeks of unpacking too. They say the first year as an assistant prof is hell year, and this summer has definitely been the summer from hell so far. In a way I'm grateful that I've been too busy to have time to be upset, but at this point I just want this whole stressful moving experience to be done and over with, even if I'm not at all keen about where I'll end up once it is over. The new apartment is ok though, and hopefully it will look even better once my stuff arrives and I can begin nesting. It will feel good to feel settled and grounded again.

Opération Point-QC

2008-05-19T12:43:00.006-04:00

J'ajoute un lien au site web de l'Opération Point-QC, fondée par Daniel Turp afin de pétitioner la création d'un nom de domaine .QC sans le .CA à la fin. C'est une bonne idée qui circulent depuis très longtemps (j'ai entendu des gens se plaindent à ce sujet il y a une décennie), et je félicite Daniel d'avoir le courage et la conviction de mener le project à terme, ce que je suis convaincu qu'il va réussir à faire.

Et en même temps, allez faire un tour au site web de Daniel à sa nouvelle adresse: http://www.danielturpqc.org/

Et pourquoi pas devenir un "fan" de Daniel sur sa nouvelle page Facebook?

Cultural Stockpiling

2008-05-17T22:30:00.002-04:00

I set out from home this sunny morning with a plan to hit the used record and cd shops in the cool part of town in order to try to sell off 4 records (not originally mine; I don't even own a record player) and 4 cds. It was also a chance to take in the sun since it's supposed to rain for the next couple of days, and more importantly to take in this city which I love so much and which I will be forced to leave in just two short months. I managed to sell / simply give away the records and cds. I didn't get much for them, but I was mainly happy to get rid of them since they were emotional baggage I did not want to take with me when I move (I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff from my late spouse lately in anticipation of this move and starting over somewhat afresh and unburdened by material objects from that relationship).

Anyway, I finally arrived back home a shocking 8 hours later extremely happy and weighed down with an immense pile of second-hand treasures! And when I say immense, I mean immense. I ended up hitting just 5 second-hand cd and books stores, but I browsed away almost the entire day and ended up buying 8 books, 7 dvd's, and a whopping 18 cd's!!!

I have never shopped like that in my life. I have never splurged that much at a single time before. To be fair, it wasn't entirely splurging since everything was so cheap, no where near what one would pay for all that new. But given how fiscally responsible and conservative I am when it comes to money, blowing $300 in a single day on books, dvd's, and cd's is a big deal for me.

I am absolutely thrilled though and don't regret a single penny. I am cultural stockpiling. Yes, this splurge was all about stocking up for when I cross the border in two months into the big, bad U.S. of A. where I know that everything that is normal, abundant popular culture around here will suddenly become a rare "import", if lucky enough to be available for importation at all.

Presque tout ce que j'ai acheté est en français. Des livres sur le nationalisme (technically some of these could count as "research"), des films que je pense peut-être pouvoir jouer pour mes futurs étudiants dans une espèce de ciné-club qui existe (je pense) sur le campus, ou bien que moi je devrais fondé en arrivant, avec l'aide des profs de français, et tout simplement de la musique québécoise pour me consoler une fois que je serai pognée là-bas, triste et en peine d'amour pour mon pays. For both of my countries, actually. A third of the cd's were pure English Canadian, the kind of English Canadian rock that couldn't be any more canuck if you doused it in maple syrup.

Cultural stockpiling. It doesn't make forced exile any less emotional, but it does provide some solace. It's money well spent. I can't wait for the next sunny day to hit the second-hand shops and stock up some more... No matter how long I end up stuck south of the 49th, mon âme et mon coeur seront toujours ici dans mes pays.

Book Proposal, Take Two

2008-05-07T20:15:00.004-04:00

I have just sent off my book proposal to the big publisher whom I talked to at MLA and whom I really hope takes it. The more I think about it, the more I think this publisher would be the best fit, probably much better than the first one I sent it too, mainly for prestige reasons and with a "there's no harm in trying" attitude. But this publisher is prestigious too, and the only harm was waiting and waiting for a response only to find out that the first one was definitely cancelling the series I'd submitted to. And not having my proposal in the pipeline at this other publisher during that time. But hopefully having talked to the editor at MLA before sending it off will prove to have been a good thing, and hopefully there will be a positive response this time around!

Now there's just that darn anthology proposal to write, the one I've been procrastinating about for over two years now, probablement parce que je dois l'écrire en français. Ayoye, il va falloir dépoussiérer ma cervelle.

Monkey Off My Back

2008-04-27T19:42:00.002-04:00

I finally got a big monkey off my back--an article that it feels like I've been working on since forever. I haven't been working on it much or very long at all, in fact, in terms of actual hours, but it has dragged out for a year since it was solicited for the volume that it's going in, so it has been hanging over my head for a long time, even though I haven't had much time to work on it.

This article was also my job talk at my campus visit. What's weird about it is that it's my only piece of research that is well and truly in my field. It's my most Renaissance-y piece, and it also falls into an interdisciplinary sub-field that was part of my new job description, so it fit my job perfectly for the job talk, but now that it's done, I'm not working on anything that truly fits my new job. In fact, just the fact that I'm publishing this piece makes me feel like a bit of a fraud since I don't feel like I know enough about the period, simply because I'm not one of those new historicist Shakespeareans, and it feels weird to think that this is what my job is and what my new identity as a prof is supposed to be.

Weird and fraudulent or not, I'm still really glad the article is done! Now it's back to editing my book proposal to send out again, and hoping for better luck than I got last time when the publisher stopped publishing. This time I'm sending it to the publisher I talked to at MLA who expressed definite interest, so fingers are crossed for a positive reply.

New Job Update

2008-04-27T17:53:00.004-04:00

Well, things have been insanely busy since I got my job offer and I haven't had much time to blog. I was out of town on and off for three weeks, and ever since I've gotten back it has been non-stop organization and prep work for the big move.

To summarize, and establish my acronyms for the next year at least, my job is at Awesome College (AC) in Middle-o'-nowhere-ville (MNV), USA. Awesome College is, well, awesome, and it reminds me a lot of the university where I did my MA, which is my favorite of all four of my alma maters. Middle-o'-nowhere-ville, on the other hand, not so much. USA, even less. I'm dreading leaving behind mon pays, both of them, to move south of the 49th. I've spent a lot of time the past couple months being depressed and crying about my impending move and all that I'm leaving behind--just little minor things like, say, free universal health care, gun control, my civil rights as a gay person, CBC television and my national culture, ya know, nothing too major according to those who try to console me about moving to the land o' Dubya, because it's not like I'm a political person with any kind of personal investment in those issues on a daily basis or anything like that.

Anyway, I keep trying to hold onto my sense of gratitude and relief at getting a job in the first place, and a pretty good job at that, despite hating where it's at (my new state, by the way, is debating a constitutional gay marriage ban, just so you know I'm not being overly dramatic; it really is that backwards). Where was I? Oh, yeah, gratitude. It really is a good job as academic jobs go. It's at a top 100 private liberal arts college. I have a 3-3 load, 2-3 for the first year. The tenure requirements are pretty slack, "quality not quantity" when it comes to research requirements, with the main tenure requirements being focused on teaching. After three glorious years in a cushy job as a postdoc, teaching is going to be a big shock to my system, but I managed to negotiate my course load for the first year down to two classes I've taught before, so I only have three new preps, one first term and two the second.

So I've spent the last six weeks (hard to believe it's been that long) trying to get ready to move. First there was the visa application (a visa for "speciality workers" which made me feel special) which took a month to do, even with Awesome College's lawyer in nearby major metropolis. At the same time, I was doing a lot of investigation about getting a Social Security number (which one can't do without the visa) and getting a driver's licence (which you can't do in my new state without a Social Security number), so that I could buy a car when I got there (which you can't do in my new state with an out-of-state licence, believe it or not). Then I found out that I wouldn't be allowed to enter the country on my visa until 10 days before my contract starts, which had been set as August 24th, so I wouldn't have been able to move until August 14th, which would have left no time to unpack and get settled before classes started. So AC had to consult with the lawyer some more and we changed my start date to July 28th (the best the could do without having to pay me before September 1st and start my health insurance), so I can move as of July 18th, which is the day I'll try to get my visa stamped and I've scheduled my move for the next day.

I've also been busy tracking down an apartment in MNV, which I did with the help of a real estate agent who agreed to go and take photos of three apartment complexes for me. I wanted to live in a complex, not a creaking old house with drafts and idiosyncracies and my own heating bill to pay in winter. Give me convenience and all-included utilities over character any day. My new place is going to be right "downtown", as much as MNV can be said to have a downtown, since I figured it was better to be in walking distance to the one or two bars, since the police are so tough on the college kids and I didn't want to get a DUI right after finally getting a car, and I didn't want to be "in the country" a mile outside of town after moving from a city of 3 million to a town of a mere 13,000. I wanted whatever semblance of city life I could still get. My new place is 800 sq. feet, which is going to be huge compared to my old place, which is a one-room, 300 sq. foot studio. I'm going to have walls! And a "dining room", which is going to be a huge luxury considering I haven't even had a dinner table for the last six years. I'm going to have to do a lot of furniture shopping when I get there, which should be really fun. I'm already excited about the idea of a new bed, bedside tables, a dinner table, and a new desk, all of which I'll need when I get there, plus a car too, of course, which I haven't had for the past six years either.

I've also spent the last few weeks organizing renting out my old apartment and getting rid of all my old electronic junk, which I had a lot of, and all by way of careful recycling so as not to pollute the environment with electro-junk. I also spent a couple days getting rid of a lot that has been in my storage unit downtown for the last five years, and figuring to move a lot of my stuff from my home province up here before I move so I can load it on the moving truck to MNV.

So it has been a very busy couple of months in preparation for moving to MNV. I've already gotten set up with an AC email account, had numerous emails with my chair about my class schedule (trying to keep it to MWF even though most profs at AC teach on a five day schedule!), and put in my book orders for next fall's classes. In a month and a few days, I'm going down to MNV to see my new apartment in person and begin to set up a bunch of other things like getting a US cell phone and a bank account and the keys to my new office (I get to pick between two options within the department). The transition is in full swing!

Most of all, I've spent the last two months trying to savour what's left of my time in my amazing doctoral city. Not that I've had time to go out and do anything yet, but I have been soaking it all in, and now that spring is finally here I hope to get out and enjoy the city a bit more while I still can. Plus, most important of all, I've resolved that instead of buying my first home in MNV that I'm going to try to buy a condo here in doctoral city and come back every summer and rent it to students during the school year. That's the plan for next summer, and that's what's making this upcoming move much more bearable. That, and I'm definitely going back on the market again next year to try to get back to our home and native land!

Job Offer!

2008-02-29T17:51:00.001-05:00

I just got a tenure-track job offer a couple hours ago! I am so relieved! It's not so much joy or happiness but just plain relief. Relief on so many levels. To be blogged about further once the negotiations are over and it's all signed, sealed, and delivered. Now it's off to drink champagne with my gf!

Campus Visit Update

2008-02-10T17:32:00.000-05:00

I'm back from my campus visit. I think that it went really well, although I don't want to say too much about it for fear of jinxing it, and because I'm still not sure if the search committee might come across this blog (although all signs indicated that hasn't happened yet). The school was great. Everyone I met was very warm and friendly and I'm convinced that they would all be wonderful colleagues to work with. The town is, well, what I was expecting, small but liveable, and the quality of the school and colleagues well make up for the size of the town and make it a place where I could conceive of living for a long time. There are still two more candidates to go after me, so I will have to wait at least three more weeks before I am likely to hear any news from them at all, since that will be the soonest they will be able to meet to come to a decision. The waiting is surely going to drive me crazy since I feel like I've been in waiting-and-hoping mode non-stop since the MLA list came out way back in September, but since there's nothing to be done about it, wait I must. At least I will be less stressed over the next few weeks knowing that it's now out of my hands and I did the very best I could, which, in my opinion (and based on feedback that I got back from others while I was there), was pretty darn good! I hope the job offer goddesses will smile favourably on me!

Temporarily in Draft Mode

2008-01-26T09:59:00.000-05:00

As I said in my last post, I got a campus visit a couple days ago. Yippie! I'm really excited about this, and, as I said in the last post, I think they are the school for me and I'm the candidate for them. I honestly believe that we are a perfect fit for each other.

However, when I booked my plane ticket, and forwarded it to the search committee, I didn't realize that Expedia would include my login name / email address in the message. It's the same nickname I use on this blog (because I'd rather confine junk mail to my hotmail account than have it pile up in my university inbox). So, just to be on the safe side of things, in case the search committee should decide to google my nickname and arrive here (I would if I were on a search committee), I've taken down all academia-related postings and just left up the ones about Québec politics and the innocuous personal posts. Those deleted posts are in draft mode and will reappear after the job search is over.

If, dear search committee, you do arrive here and read this, I just want to say that I don't actually have anything to hide. There's nothing in those postings that I wouldn't say face to face. Heck, I probably will convey much of what's in those posts when I see you in person, and the rest is already on my cv. I'm taking them down mainly because I feel stupid about not forwarding my flight itinerary to myself first and double-checking what it said, editing out my email nickname, and then forwarding it to you from my university account. What can I say but that I'm very excited to have been invited to your campus and it had been a long day by the time I made the booking. I'd also like to think that I'm mature, responsible, and tech-savy enough to fix my own mistakes. I'm not taking down my old website though, which also has the same nickname, because I trust that no search committee would hold me accountable for what I wrote way back in my undergrad days. As Virginia Slims would say, I've come a long way, baby! (In any case, there's so much out there these days that it's impossible to control one's google results anymore anyway, and academia is going to have to learn to accept that and adapt to the new tech reality. I've got lots of thoughts on that subject, but will save them for another day....)

My typically irregularly scheduled posting will resume in a couple weeks, at which point I hope to have some very good job news to blog about!

Campus Visit

2008-01-24T23:01:00.001-05:00

I had a campus visit scheduled today. It's at the school where I think I have the best chance of actually getting a job offer and where the job description best fits my profile. I am sooooo relieved and happy about this! I don't want to say too much and jinx anything though. I'll be doing a job talk with a paper that I've given twice before and am currently expanding/revising anyway for a book volume. No teaching! More updates may follow once it's over a couple weeks from now, but for the moment I just want to bask in the good vibes that I'm feeling and the wonderful sensation of not feeling anymore that tight constriction that has been around my chest since the MLA list was posted back in September. Thrilled would be an understatement right now!

A Class Meme

2008-01-22T08:56:00.000-05:00

I don't normally do memes, but I think that we don't talk about class nearly enough, neither in academia or in the general media. Why, for instance, does everyone say the Democratic primary is about choosing between race (Obama) and gender (Clinton), when really it's about race, gender, and class (Edwards)? Why is it that the advocate for the middle-class, and the only one who is really focussed on class at all, is simply dismissed as "an angry white guy"?

Anyway, on to the meme, as seen chez Dr. Crazy. Bold the statements that are true.

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.
3. Mother went to college. -- She went to "community college", aka vocational school, to take an "office skills", aka secretarial, course when I was already in my undergrad, after doing her GED when I was in high school. My dad dropped out of the GED course. I wouldn't call my mom's course "college" in the four-year college sense though. It was only a one-year program.
4. Mother finished college.
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home. -- Thanks to the Scholastic book program through my elementary school. My mom always kept me well stocked in books and I read way more novels for pleasure when I was a kid than I do now.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children's books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18. -- My mom put me in skating lessons when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I was dressed up as a daisy for the final show we performed.
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18. -- Lol. My mom wouldn't even let me have a bank card to access my savings account until I was 18, even though I was working 40 hours per week.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.
16. Went to a private high school.
17. Went to summer camp. -- One week long basketball camp for three summers in high school.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. -- What vacations?!
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18. -- Almost never. All from the second-hand store where my mom worked from when I was in grade 4 until after I was in undergrad.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house. -- Yes, in the boonies.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home. -- They paid the mortgage on it.
25. You had your own room as a child. -- Thank goodness. My brother's room was the former "dining room" though.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course.
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school. -- A tiny, 10'', black-and-white set with a long antenna, and obviously no cable. Even the family tv didn't have cable because we lived too far from town. We only had 2 channels until I was 14, then 3 channels after that.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16. -- One way to Toronto when I was 15 to visit my cousin, who drove me back home on a 24 hour road trip.
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. -- Of course, I knew. My mom never stopped telling me how little money she had every week for groceries, how much everything cost, how hard it was to stretch our money, how expensive university was, and how I absolutely had to win a ton of scholarships or I wouldn't be able to go.
Score: 9 out of 34.

MLA update

2007-12-29T19:42:00.001-05:00

I'm at MLA and it's going well. Of my 10 writing sample/dossier requests, only 2 materialized into interviews, but they were both for job descriptions that perfectly fit my profile, and both interviews, which I had yesterday, went exceptionally well. I'm excited and thinking positively about campus visits and am relatively confident, based on how well the interviews went, that they will materialize.

I'm not live blogging the conference, but am enjoying reading the updates of Blogging the Renaissance and Flavia who are. Except for the Book Exhibit, I'm avoiding the conference as much as possible. I had enough anxiety of my own up until yesterday that I don't need to consume that which is palpably present in the air. I pitched my book proposal to a couple presses at the exhibit (got really enthusiastic feedback from one which is near the top of my list) and got a rather stagnant and immobile update from the editor on whose desk my proposal is currently sitting unread, unlikely to be read for a few more months at least. I'm undauted though and trying to focus on the other presses to whom I can submit it, and the articles and chapters I desperately need to write this semester.

Instead of hanging around the hotels or going to any panels, I've been rewarding myself after my week and a half of pre-interview bootcamp spent prepping, prepping, and prepping some more for questions that were never even asked of me. I went to see the Jasper John's exhibit Grey at the Art Institute and braved the cold today to go shopping along the so-called Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue--which was not magnificient enough to convince me to buy anything and really didn't have anything that caught my fancy.

And dinners. The dinners out have been fabulous. Mexican the first night, then Italian, then Mexican again last night, Asian fusion tonight, and Mexican again tomorrow night. Bring on the margaritas!

Témoignage à la Commission Bouchard-Taylor

2007-12-03T15:10:00.001-05:00

Je me suis inscrite pour donner un témoignage oral à la Commission Bouchard-Taylor sur les accommodements raisonables, mais à cause du nombre élévé des inscriptions, mon nom n'a pas été retenu sur la liste. On m'a offert l'option d'envoyer mon témoignage par écrit, ce que j'ai fait. Le voici (sans quelques petits détails identifiants):

J’ai « immigré » au Québec à partir de la Nouvelle-Écosse en 2001 afin de faire un doctorat à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. J’ai choisi le Québec comme mon pays parce que j’étais, et suis toujours, souverainiste, et, somme tout, je trouve le Québec plus progressif sur le plan social que le reste du Canada, y compris dans son choix d’interculturalisme plutôt que de multiculturalisme, ce qui permet à une anglophone comme moi de participer pleinement à la vie sociale collective à condition de vouloir bien s’intégrer, notamment en parlant le français. J’ai déménagé à Montréal en 2002 afin de terminer mon doctorat à McGill, où depuis 2005 je suis chercheuse postdoctorale.

My research falls within the fields of literature and gender studies. I am certain that Professors Bouchard and Taylor are familiar with the concept of “heteronormativity,” which legitimizes and privileges certain gender and sexual norms and practices as natural when, in fact, they are socially constructed. Heteronormativity has been responsible until quite recently for various forms of discrimination against LGBT people because these supposed “norms” infiltrate legal discourse (marriage law, adoption laws, etc.). By analogy, I would like to discuss a concept which is rarely, if ever, named: “Christian-normativity”. I’d like to present three examples, two of which come from my own experience and which I consider an undue imposition of Christianity into my life, and which go socially unrecognized as impositions at all because Christian-normativity blinds people to the religious beliefs and assumptions underlying so-called “normal” practices.

Sur le plan juridique, la Constitution canadienne elle-même constitue un cas flagrant de la contradiction entre la loi écrit et l’envahissement de la chrétien-normativité. L’introduction de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés dit, « Attendu que le Canada est fondé sur des principes qui reconnaissent la suprématie de Dieu et la primauté du droit », tandis que le point 2.a dit, « Chacun a les libertés fondamentales suivantes : liberté de conscience et de religion ». Il est tout à fait incohérent de garantir la liberté de religion—qui inclut la liberté de ne pas avoir de religion du tout—et de reconnaître en même temps la suprématie d’un Dieu (présumé chrétien, bien sûr) qui veille sur ceux qui n’y croient même pas, ainsi que sur ceux qui sont chargés d’assurer le respect de la liberté de religion comme les juges et les politiciens. Il est illogique de mettre « Dieu » et « la primauté de droit » dans la même phrase sans considérer que le droit pourrait être compromis par les interprétations que certains attribuent à leur Dieu. Il est heureux que le Québec n’ait pas signé cette Constitution canadienne et n’ait pas inscrit de telle incohérence dans sa propre Charte des droits et libertés de la personne, mais il faudrait rester vigilant pour que de telles influences chrétien-normatives ne s’ingèrent dans nos lois, car on voit déjà cette ingérence dans plusieurs espaces publiques.

En 1999, je me suis mariée au Palais de Justice de Trois-Rivières. Nous avons choisi le Palais de Justice par exprès parce que nous étions athées et ne voulions pas nous marier à l’église. Vous pouvez imaginer mon surprise de constater, à l’entrée dans la salle de cour le moment venu, un grand crucifix, d’à peu près six à huit pieds d’hauteur, suspendu au mur au dessus du banc du juré. Non seulement était mon mariage civil envahi par la présence de ce symbole religieux non souhaité, mais j’étais d’autant plus outragée parce que le message envoyé par un tel symbole religieux est tout à fait contradictoire au discours légal. Un crucifix laisse entendre aux jurés que, même s’ils sont tenus à prendre des décisions en suivant la loi au pied de la lettre, ils sont sous le regard d’un autre discours moral qui, selon leur croyances personnelles, pourrait ne pas s’accorder avec la loi, menant ainsi à une application inégalitaire de la loi dans des procès. Il en va de même pour le travail des politiciens à l’Assemblée nationale qui débattent souvent des projets de loi ayant un caractère moral. Je recommande donc à la Commission de mandater le gouvernement de bannir l’affichage des signes et symboles religieux comme des crucifix dans les lieux gouvernementaux, tels les cours de justice et l’Assemblée nationale. Ces symboles ne sont pas des représentations de l’héritage culturel du Québec, mais bien de son héritage religieux. Or, la culture ne se réduit pas à une seule religion pratiquée par certains citoyens. Le Québec peut très bien—et doit—affirmer son héritage cultural (par le drapeau, la Fête nationale, la création d’une citoyenneté et une Constitution québécoise qui rassemble tous les citoyens) sans avoir recours à la religion, car la religion est essentiellement privée et non pas publique.

The form of Christian-normativity which I find the most personally offensive and invasive, and which unfortunately is often regarded as banal, is the infiltration of Christmas symbols and songs into the public sphere, especially in spaces which ought to remain religiously neutral, and hence entirely secular. Lest we not forget the underlying religious nature of this increasingly commercialized holiday, Christmas is fundamentally at its origin a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ as the supposed son of a supposed God—a myth which non-Christians do not believe and should not be forced to endure in the public sphere. I am deeply perturbed and offended that for at least one and a half to two months of the year (and it continues to creep sooner and sooner each year, increasing beginning on November 1st), it is nearly impossible to escape this infiltration of Christian propaganda within the public sphere in spaces which ought to remain neutral and secular. In particular, it is discriminatory for non-Christians to be forced to listen to Christmas songs, which are tantamount to Christian propaganda, since it is impossible for one to choose not to hear them when they are played in pubic spaces, such as government buildings and especially in buildings which are essential services, such as grocery stores and pharmacies. Grocery stores are officially recognized as essential services since they are permitted to hold extended opening hours. Short of going on a hunger strike for more than a month every year, it is impossible to boycott grocery stores. (Even if one were wealthy enough to eat only in restaurants during the one to two month Christmas period, these too participate in this practice of Christian propaganda, but are luxuries, not essential services, and therefore beyond the scope of my complaint). The same is true of pharmacies which dispense essential medication. While it is possible to avoid shopping centers and commercial stores during the Christmas period (which indeed I do every year), it is not possible to avoid grocery stores and pharmacies. I thus recommend that the Commission mandate the government to ban Christmas songs and Christmas paraphernalia in government buildings and spaces that constitute an essential service, such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and post offices.

Some people will undoubtedly argue that Christmas songs are not actually religious and offensive to non-Christians, or that they are not really Christmas songs but rather “winter songs” or “holiday songs” or « des chansons du temps des fêtes », but these are clearly euphemisms intended to excuse a current practice, and the very recourse to a euphemism implicitly recognizes these songs as Christian-normative and hence offensive to non-Christians. It is certainly not customary to play “spring songs”, “summer songs”, or “fall songs” in public spaces, and this inconsistency highlights the euphemistic nature of these so-called “holiday songs”. Admittedly, sometimes Christmas songs are now played in public spaces in instrumental versions without words, but the insidiousness of Christian-normativity, which has forced this propaganda on almost all citizens in the Western context since childhood, makes it impossible to hear instrumental versions without automatically recalling the words. Just as I was indoctrinated against my will (and against article 2.a of the Charter of Rights of Freedoms) as early as elementary school (when our teachers forced us to recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning before classes began), so too has every school child been indoctrinated to know the words to such songs as “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger,” songs which celebrate the myth of Christ’s birth, despite the lack of any historical or scientific evidence documenting such events, and certainly without any scientific proof as to the supposed godliness of this person. At their very core, Christmas songs are Christian propaganda, and even those that are not explicitly religious, such as “Frosty the Snowman” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” are still implicitly Christian since they support the overall celebration of Christmas as a holiday, and hence of Christ’s birth. Again, we certainly don’t play songs about the sun shining in summer or leaves falling in autumn, so the cultural origin underlying these “winter songs” is clearly Christmas and not the winter season.

While the term “propaganda” may seem exaggerated, the OED definition (2: “a movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine, practice”; and 3: “the systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view”) describes perfectly the phenomenon of the Christmas song, which by its supposed innocuousness and cheerful disguise, is the perfect medium for retelling in a repetitive and indoctrinating fashion the myth of the birth and life of Jesus Christ without provoking a critical regard or analysis of its content. “Myth,” furthermore, is an equally apt term, since the difference between “myth” and “religion” is merely a matter of whether or not one believes the narrative. If one were to believe in Zeus and Hercules, they would be the foundation for a religion, and not considered ancient Greek myth. The only difference between Zeus/Hercules and God/Jesus is the number of people who still believe in the latter and who have made that myth normative.

Furthermore, as a former employee of a retail store during my undergraduate days, I can testify to how demeaning and discriminatory it is for stores to subject their employees to Christmas songs and decorations for 8-hour work days, several days a week, for well over a month and sometimes as much as two months (one-sixth of the entire year). For non-Christian employees (who cannot complain without being labelled a grinch and opening themselves to unfair treatment from bosses or colleagues), this incessant propaganda amounts to ongoing aural rape (far from exaggerating here, rhetoric has been figured as a form of penetration analogous to rape since ancient times, particularly during the early modern period). Moreover, employees in retail situations, such as those who work at check-out counters in grocery stores and pharmacies, are usually only paid minimum wage, and such working-class employees (often students and single parents) simply cannot afford to quit their jobs, however uncomfortable these working conditions may make them, and therefore have no choice but to endure this incessant Christian propaganda, unless the government steps in and legislates a secular work environment for them.

While it may not be possible to intervene in shopping centers and other commercial stores where capitalism and the free market economy implicitly constitute the law, at the very least the government could set an example by protecting the employees who work in essential services, and by accommodating the non-Christian customers who have no choice but to consume such essential products as food and medicine. It does not hurt, injure or otherwise inconvenience Christians not to listen to and see Christian songs and symbols in the public sphere (since they are free to do so in private), but it does violate the right to freedom of religion of non-Christians if these songs and symbols infiltrate the public sphere, especially in government spaces and essential services.

En tant que citoyenne non-chrétienne, qui même en restant vigilante et en essayant de m’accommoder moi-même en évitant des représentations de la chrétienté, il m’est impossible de ce faire dans une société chrétien-normative. Face à l’influence insidieuse de la chrétien-normativité, il faut que le gouvernement intervienne afin de protéger le droit à la liberté de religion—et de la religion—de citoyens non-chrétiens en légiférant que l’espace publique doit devenir laïque.

2, 47, 4

2007-11-14T00:33:00.001-05:00

2 months of full time work doing nothing, absolutely nothing, but job applications (and sending off the book proposal). 47 job applicatations sent prior to MLA, the last one submitted just a few hours ago. 4 requests for writing samples already. Tired! Somewhat happy and encouraged so far! Did I mention tired? Nuff said for now...

Shakespeare Quote Generator

2007-11-12T14:39:00.000-05:00

As seen chez Profgrrrrl and Dr. Crazy.

O excellent! I love Pantagruelle better than figs.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

I particularly like this one, given the bawdy pun on early modern figs. I'm really missing my girlfriend's figs right now, but, soon, oh so soon...

Update on Book Proposal

2007-10-17T11:36:00.001-04:00

So I heard back this morning from Specific Series Editor of #1 Publisher. It turns out that he's no longer editng the specific series for which I prepared my book proposal. That's all the news he could give me. He gave me the name and email of a contact person at Publisher, but it turns out that she's travelling with limited email for the next two weeks. The person mentioned in her auto-reply didn't know the answer to any of my questions but said she would try to find out. So, as it stands now, my email submission was pointless, and my hard copy submission is now in the mail, addressed to a series editor who no longer edits the series, and I don't even know if that specific series is going to continue to exist! Hopefully I won't have to wait the full two weeks for the contact person to return in order to get an answer. Hopefully someone else will be taking over editing the series, but at the moment I don't even know that. This came as a shock to both supervisors #1 and 3, neither of whom had any idea that series editor wasn't editing the series anymore. Supervisor #1 has close ties with series editor and there's a long track record of people for whom he puts in a word getting a book contract, but now that the series is no longer being edited by that person, I can't count on that connection to help me out, which is the most troubling part of all this. So now I sit and wait for an answer from the publisher about the status of the series. And I go back significantly deflated to those 37 more job applications. And I'll have to tackle modifying my proposal for those three other publishers a lot sooner than I thought. Ugh.

Book Proposal Progress & Job News

2007-10-16T19:28:00.001-04:00

Whew! What a day! I finally sent off my book proposal today to number-one-make-your-career-for-life publisher! I'd been working on it for months, then after that first draft had to set it aside while I worked on an initial batch of job applications, so over a month went by between the first draft and when I actually began the revisions suggested by supervisor #3. That was a good thing, I think, because it gave me some distance and let me see more clearly what needed to be edited and how to do it. In the end, my supervisor's suggestions were perfect and I'm feeling really confident about the final product. It's a lot better than the first draft, that's for sure. I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders now that it's been sent. Sure, I'm sending it over a month later than I had planned, so I'm no longer sure if I will hear back in time for MLA interviews, but at least it's done. There are still three other publishers to whom I want to send the proposal, but this was the most important one to send it to first, and the other three all want the proposal in another format (of course!), so that will take some time and may not get done at all given how time consuming job applications are.

Speaking of which, good news! I just got an email a few minutes ago informing me that I'd made the short list of the first school to which I'd applied. It looks like a pretty decent university with a manageable teaching load; the only downside is that it's on another continent in another hemisphere! Still, making the short list is a positive sign, right, and it surely must bode well for all the other applications I'm sending off too, right? Actually, the thing that makes me the most hopeful is having completely revised my job letter, slashing and editing and restructuring, so it looks nothing like last year's and it breaks the mould in some ways.

So far, as of a few hours ago, I have submitted 12 applications. There are still 40 more on my list of positions to apply to!!! There are about 3 which I'm still debating about or which have really late deadlines after MLA, but that still leaves 37 more applications to finish and send in the next few weeks. It's exhausting! Not to mention there's still that article due by xmas that I haven't touched in the past six months, and the second book proposal too.

All in all though, after today's successes, my spirits are much higher than they were at the beginning at job season! Gawd, people talk about the dissertation as if it's a marathon, but the diss is nothing compared to being on the job market, especially when it's not the first year, or the second, or even the third...

Beginning of Year Blues

2007-09-20T15:11:00.001-04:00

I'm slightly drunk. I just came back from a wine & cheese lunch held in conjunction with the other department who was moved into our building this summer against our department's will and who appropriated the classroom and office space of many of my colleagues. I'm actually not very bitter because the move didn't affect me, and I work in both disciplines, but rarely talk to people in the other department, so it was nice for me to be able to meet many of them for the first time in my what is now my sixth year at this university.

I'm not half bombed because the wine & cheese was free and my grad student tendancies reemerged (although that is partly true too). No, it's because a very good friend of mine, who was like a father to me, died two days ago. I found out from my aunt back home yesterday evening. She was kind enought to wait until the evening to tell me so that she didn't spoil my day. Up until that point, it was a rather productive day, actually.

I've also got the blues because the MLA job list was posted on Friday and the jobs in my field this year suck. For the most part, they are in the middle-of-nowhere, podunk-ville, redneck state, USA. There are a few really good jobs in decent locations, but we all know that those will go to the Ivy League grads (INRU grads as Flavia calls them) , because there are no high-end schools on the list in my field this year. There are, however, a couple of schools in towns that have been struck by natural and not-so-natural disasters, so perhaps fewer people will apply there, or maybe everyone will reason like me and everyone will apply to those places. In any case, the outlook is grim. There is only one job in my country in my entire field this year. Can anyone say forced exile?

On the upside, I finished a 3-page "article" today and sent that off to the person who commissioned it. It's actually really hard to write a 3-page paper about anything. It's not long enough to say anything substantial, but it's too long to say nothing at all. It was based on a 39-page dissertation chapter I wrote many moons ago. I cheated and sent off 3 single-spaced pages instead of the (implicit) 3 double-spaced pages. Oh well. I can't even list it on my c.v., so why not?

Now, it's back to the relatively fun job of examining my first-ever set of page proofs! Yay! This isn't my first article, but it is the first one for which I've actually been sent back proofs and allowed to scrutinize them myself. It's exciting. I also need to begin to work soon on revising my book proposal, which Supervisor #3 deemed ok but in need of some revision. Rather than asking for more argument, which is what I expected, he thought it needed *less*! Yippie! Cutting is a lot easier than writing. What I need to add is more of the basic social history of the period I'm studying, which to me is "common knowledge" and easy to write, although it's far from being common knowledge to those who will read my prospectus and what will hopefully become my book.

I revised my right margin to-do list. It's pointless for me to make a semester-long to-do list. Mine needs to be for the whole academic school year. As I blogged about before, for a postdoc, it's all about long-term goals.

Pre-Paris Plural Post

2007-08-12T21:59:00.001-04:00

This is an unabashed filler post on a plurality of subjects because it's been over a month and a half since I posted anything here, and I'm not likely to post anything for another month. I have had all kinds of ideas for news-worthy posts over the past few months but have been enjoying summer too much to write them out.

I was going to write a chronicle of my two week trip to home province (880.8km on the rental car, which fortunately had unlimited km's because I basically circled the entire province in one week) followed by spa-like, relax-and-recharge time in the suburbs of major urban center. Much family drama was discussed and many litres of alcohol were consumed and it was all very wonderful, my best trip home ever (oddly emotionally fulfilling), and, well, major center is always a sure-fire hit.

I was going to write a theoretical post about presentism and my epiphany that I don't need to apologize anymore for not being a new historicist (even though every single blogger in early modern studies or Shakespeare on the entire web seems to be one!).

I was going to write a joyful post about my summer academic accomplishments, namely, finally finishing the first draft of my book proposal. I am so relieved to have a first draft written, and I have gotten positive feedback from the first of my three supervisors. Former supervisor #1 said that it's good enough to be sent off to the publisher now, and I spent the next 24 hours after that conversation on cloud nine. I am desperately eager to get feedback from the third supervisor, and eventually send the proposal to the editor, scratch it off my to-do list, and put it on my c.v. as "in submission" in time for job season. Unfortunately, even if I manage to do that, I still have to modify the form of this version substantially in order to send it out to my 2nd through 4th choices of presses, since each one wants the information presented in a different format. Plus, that initial joy at former supervisor #1's extremely positive and encouraging feedback has been deflated substantially by former supervisor #2's feedback which could be summed up as "your entire thesis is crap; start again from scratch". Supervisor #3's feedback, expected three weeks from now, will thus be determinate in whether or not the proposal gets submitted relatively "as is". I have zero desire to start again from scratch on the thesis of my diss/book and hold off on submitting my proposal before job season starts again.

So this is a mish-mash filler post before I jet off to Paris for a nice, long vacation while I'm on my way to England for a ridiculously short conference. I believe that conferences are like real estate: it's all about location, location, location! Not to mention stretching travel time as long as possible. I'm intending to post some (anonymous) photos of Paris when I get back...

Job News

2007-06-29T15:57:00.001-04:00

I never thought I'd ever say it: I turned down a job offer yesterday.

It was my first job offer ever for an Assistant Professorship. It was from a local university to which I'd applied for a tenure-track job--a late posting. It would have been a really nice first job, and it would have been a really nice place to live permanently if it turned out that my first job also ended up being my only job for the rest of my life. After the job was approved and advertised as tenure-track, however, the university president decided that one way to deal with the university's current financial crisis (which I knew nothing about) was to decide unilaterally to refuse to rubber-stamp already approved tenure-track lines--and without that last, essential John Hancock it's not a tenure-track job after all. And so, I was offered (rather last minute and out of the blue, sans interview even) a one-year assistant professorship instead, what we Canucks would call a CLT and south of the border would be a VAP.

A one-year CLT--with a "strong chance" of conversion to tenure-track, but we all know what such promises mean in academia--versus one last year as a postdoc? Teaching six courses, four of which are out of my field, while commuting a somewhat substantial distance, versus 100% free time to work on my two book proposals and to finish two partially written articles, one of which has already been taken by a volume? The obligation to go on the market yet again next year no matter what. Hmmm... It really shouldn't have been a tough choice, should it? And yet it was agonizingly difficult. Pressure from the university in question (which really is a delighful place, and is in a really rough situation trying to cover its slate of courses this year), pressure from my current postdoc supervisor (which was surprising and illogical in many respects, but whose advice is definitely not to be taken lightly given said supervisor's status), and the lure and desire to be a grown-up, a real academic, to assume that all coveted identity of "assistant professor" (with the accompanying shockingly high salary, more than double what I'm making now).

I said no. It was difficult. As the panic and anxiety and stress of this week have begun to subside in the last 24 hours, as the feeling of relief has begun to bring my heart rate down a bit closer to normal, I'm beginning to feel proud of myself. Proud of myself for saying no, but also just a hint of pride, a vestige, from that initial moment of elation when the offer arrived in my inbox and I realized that someone out there thinks that I don't suck, someone out there thinks I'm actually worthy. That's a damn good feeling.

Pride, I know, shall soon be replaced with the stress of making the most of this last year of glorious postdoctoral freedom, of maximizing every potential publication and getting as many new lines on my c.v. before next year's job season (only 2.5 months until the new MLA listings!), but for now pride and relief are to be savoured as much as my erratic heart rate will allow.

Une Gouvernance Souverainiste

2007-06-11T18:35:00.000-04:00

Les 3 travaux du PQ se poursuivent. Un nouveau texte du groupe, "Une gouvernance souverainiste qui fait gagner le Québec", a été publié dans Le Devoir d'aujourd'hui. En gros, les signataires du texte disent que la gouvernance souverainiste serait la suite logique de la Révolution tranquille et qu'il faut qu'un gouvernement péquiste mette en oeuvre des politiques nationalistes pour faire progresser le Québec, non seulement en attendant la souverainiste mais comme façon de se rendre jusqu'à là. C'est mieux d'améliorer la société québécoise et de faire des gains pour le Québec que d'être pris dans un jeu de "tout ou rien" et de s'en tirer avec rien. On pourrait, par exemple, adopter une constitution du Québec, créer une citoyenneté québécoise, et réformer les institutions démocratiques. Il faut aussi que le PQ cesse de dire sa stratégie aux fédéralistes et de s'enfermer dans une promesse irréaliste de référendum à tel ou tel moment. Après tout, on n'est pas des référendistes, on est des souverainistes, et c'est la réalisation de la souverainété, au moment où c'est propice de la réaliser, qui nous importe, non pas la date du prochain référendum. Le texte complet dit bien plus, bien sûr, alors allez le lire!

Pour une Constitution du Québec

2007-05-15T21:52:00.000-04:00

La Columbie-Britannique en a une depuis 1996. Même les états les plus arriérés, comme le Mississippi et l'Alabama, en ont une depuis 1890 et 1901 respectivement. Rien dans la Constitution Canadienne n'interdit aux provinces le droit d'avoir leur propre constitution. En fait, en 1858, neuf ans avant l'entrée en vigueur du British North American Act, Jean-Charles Taché a proposé que chaque province se dote d'une constituition écrite. En 1968, le Parti Libéral du Québec a adopté une résolution en faveur d'une constituition, et le Parti Québécois a fait la même résolution en 1968 lors de son premier congrès national. En 1990, un ministre du PLQ a encore une fois proposé une constitution, Jacques Parizeau a exprimé la même intention en 1994, et le PQ l'a mise dans son Programme de pays lors du Congrès national de juin 2005. Même l'ADQ a mis l'idée d'une constitution dans sa plate-forme électorale en 2007. Pourtant, le Québec n'a toujours pas de Constitution!

Il est grand temps que le Québec se dote d'une Constitution qui affirme haut et fort ses valeurs nationaux et qui définit ses principes de loi fondamentaux. Une constitution sera "une geste de souverainété" en préparation de l'indépendence. Pas besoin d'en faire une après le Oui si on en a une déjà! Rien de mieux pour assurer le peuple de la stabilité après le Oui que de leur fournir la garantie auparavant que le Québec est fondé sur la démocratie et la primauté du droit! Ni le PLQ ni l'ADQ ne peuvent s'opposer à une constitution lorsqu'ils ont déjà dit qu'ils sont en faveur.

Un projet de loi sur la Constitution du Québec sera déposé à l'Assemblé nationale par Daniel Turp, le député de Mercier. Appuyons ce projet!!!

Update: Le projet de Constitution a été déposé à l'Assemblé nationale le mardi 22 mai. Vous pouvez lire le texte du projet en format html ou pdf. C'est le projet de loi # 191 (il faut descendre dans l'encadré pour le trouver).

Les 3 Travaux du PQ

2007-05-15T20:24:00.000-04:00

SVP visitez le site des 3 travaux du PQ. Ce sont de bonnes idées pour un parti en plein renouveau, le seul parti qui peut nous donner un pays!
Voici un résumé des grands points du texte:

1) Cesser la fuite en avant référendaire

La stratégie « élection-référendum-souveraineté » n’est pas la seule stratégie souverainiste possible;
Il faut éviter de gouverner en provinciaux en attendant le grand soir référendaire;
Il faut gouverner en souverainiste : il faut faire gagner le Québec jusqu’à l’indépendance;
La gouvernance souverainiste = si c’est bon pour le Québec, on le fait, point.

2) Une social-démocratie de résultats

L’efficacité et la réussite sont au coeur des succès de la social-démocratie;
C’est faux que : gauche = générosité + inefficacité / droite = égoïsme + efficacité;
Le Parti Québécois doit redevenir le parti de la classe moyenne.

3) Rejeter la démission identitaire

En voulant se dissocier d’un prétendu nationalisme ethnique, les leaders souverainistes ont abandonnés le thème de l’identité québécoise;
La promotion d’un projet souverainiste non nationaliste a mené directement à la défaite du 26 mars;
Le Parti Québécois doit gouverner en souverainiste : il doit adopter des politiques nationalistes inclusives (constitution, citoyenneté, clause dérogatoire, etc.)

Spring, Take Two?

2007-04-18T18:00:00.001-04:00

I'm almost afraid to say it and jinx it, but I think (knock on wood with crossed fingers) that Spring may finally be returning. After all the weird April snow last weekend, today we are up to +12C and I actually felt the sun beating down upon and warming my skin when I emerged from the metro this afternoon. The forecast predicts 19, 20, and 24C this Sat, Sun, Mon, and I can't wait. It's especially weird for there to be snow on the ground now because, for me, SAA usually marks the beginning of spring. Every year, I dig my suitcase out of the closet in order to pack for SAA, and in doing so I pack away my hat, scarf, and gloves, secure in the knowledge that when I return from SAA, spring will have arrived. This year, that didn't happen. It was profoundly disturbing and depressing. SAA = Spring. That's the way it works. If that's not the case, something is wrong with the world.

I'm glad that the sun is finally out though because I've been itching for a few weeks now to update my sidebar To-Do list, but I didn't dare change it from Winter to Summer (term) until the sun actually began to shine. Far be it from me to delay the arrival of Spring any more than it already has been by my wishful thinking. I think--hope--that we are finally, finally in the clear though.

Facebook

2007-04-18T17:35:00.001-04:00

First, I started this blog. Then, I got Google Reader (which is wonderful) so that I could read everyone else's blogs as soon they were updated. And, now, I've really taken my procrastination and frittering away of valuable work time to a whole new level. Yes, I signed up for Facebook. I don't even know what possessed me. I did it last Sunday night, after midnight!, when I had just gotten off the plane and home from SAA. It must have been the combination of the fact that it was late enough to go to bed but I was still on California time and therefore didn't feel tired. That first night when I signed up, I ended up surfing the site until 4:30am! I don't even want to think about adding up all the hours I spent on the site last week. Since this weekend, I've been doing much better. The novelty has worn off. I only check it once or twice or day, or when an email alert arrives. I can now go a whole 24 hours straight without checking it in fact. But this site is very, very addictive. Who would have thought that it would be so interesting to catch up with people that I've lost touch with since my undergrad or my MA degrees, or even with people for whom it's only been a few years, like all the MAs who were in my PhD classes a few years back. It is though. And it's amazing to see how spread out all over the world these people are. They are all across Canada, the US, and the UK.

Facebook might be the latest hot craze for undergrads--and University Affairs wrote just over a month ago that apparently undergrads these days consider email to have gone the way of the dinosaur and they now prefer Facebook and text messages as their primary mode of communication--but I think this might also soon become the latest craze for faculty too, at least junior faculty. Judging by the impressive amount of grad students who are on it, it's only a matter of time before they get jobs and expand the ranks of faculty on the site, and I have seen some more technologically minded profs on the site already. Personally, I envision it as a great tool for chatting amongst ourselves between conferences. I've already searched to see if any of my SAA conference buddies were on the site (none are, but I encourage them to sign up!). What better way to stay abreast of what others are up to without composing a slew of individual emails when we're already busy grading papers and writing articles? And like blogs, it seems to me to be a great way to break down the isolation that is inherent with our jobs and to socialize and build communities in between expensive, annual conferences. Don't you think? Try it out...

SAA: Post-Mortem Post

2007-04-10T21:43:00.001-04:00

Well, I'm back from SAA in San Diego, and it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, especially given the great blog discussions already going on over at Blogging the Renaissance. SAA is my favourite conference of the year, but it's also the most stressful for various reasons too personal to get into here. Generally though, I look forward to it as a chance to catch up with old friends, network, and meet new people. It's always a good experience overall from which I've always come away enriched either academically or personally.

This worst part of this year's confernce was my seminar discussion. It was non-existant. We had a 15 minute monologue from our seminar leader, then everyone summarized his or her own paper, and after 17 summaries of papers I'd already read on the plane, the 2 hours were up. No discussion. No comments. No critique. Zip, zero, zilch. The seminar itself was a complete and total waste of time. I pity the auditors, of which we had quite a few.

The highlight of this year's conference was also my seminar. The written papers were great, by far the best group of papers that I've gotten in the 5 years that I've been attending SAA. This was the first time that I wasn't in a seminar that was overloaded with tons of performance papers about productions that I haven't seen and don't really care about. I signed up for a more historicist-oriented one in an effort to build up my early modern cred, since I'm one of those not-very-early-modernist Shakspeareans who doesn't normally do that stuff, or at least I haven't done it much since my grad classes many moons ago.

Which leads to an even bigger highlight. Out of my seminar of really great papers, apparently a book volume is going to be published, and I was asked to be in it! I wasn't planning to revise and submit this piece to a journal for quite some time, as I've got another article and a couple book proposals to be working on instead, but the editors want this piece by the end of the year, so I guess I'm going to have to start revising it a lot sooner, but on the other hand I won't have to wait as long for it to appear in print, nor go through the long process of submitting it to bunch of historicist journals which would no doubt rule that it's not historicist enough. This will be quicker and easier, and quite frankly I'm not complaining!

The other big event at SAA (since I didn't bother going to the dance) was the screening of Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It, which was set in Japan. It was awful!!! Worse than the unexplained discrepancy between the opening Samurai culture and the complete absence of any traces of Japan in the forest, the actress playing Rosalind/Ganymede did a terrible, just terrible, job of passing as male. Long hair, girly hips, swooning, fainting, and what in the world was up with that scene when she's bathing naked in the river?! Or for that matter the epilogue?! An epilogue to AYLI that keeps the line "if I were a woman" makes no sense if it's not played by a boy, so why keep the line, or why do the epilogue at all, especially with a meta-cinematic approach, given that the film completely failed to suspend anyone's disbelief about Ganymede's gender?

In other random SAA comments, I'm glad that I looked at a map before I booked the conference hotel out by the airport. I booked downtown instead. While I'm sure that the SAA hotel was a welcome relief to those who had just endured RSA, I found it very dark and depressing. There was never adequate lighting anywhere in the hotel. The marine-themed bar was always way too noisy to talk and too crowded, although the Tapatini martini bar was great. Nothing beats a margarita in SoCal!

Anglophones for André

2007-03-14T01:27:00.000-04:00

I don't know if this is joke or what, but except for the somewhat muffled voice it seems to be legitimate. On Cyberpresse, I came across these links to two YouTube videos put together by "Anglophones for André". I've never heard of them, but I'm sure glad to see that there are lots more anglophones out there who support the PQ in addition to me. I've met a few now and again since I'm pretty well-known in party circles for being one of the rare anglos, but I've never heard of any specific organisation that advocates for anglos to vote PQ. You can't argue with their logic though. The past four years of Liberal government led by Jean Charest have been horrendous! Here are the YouTube links:

"A New Beginning for Quebec: Vote PQ"
and
"Vote André Boisclair PQ: the Anglophone Choice"

To the Anglos for André group, whoever you are, if you read this, please write me! My nickname, là où il fait chaud, if you catch my drift.

Débat des chefs--Victoire à Boisclair

2007-03-14T00:25:00.000-04:00

Boisclair est de loin le gagnant du débat des chefs. Il était clair, posé, et il a fait preuve d'humeur à plusieurs reprises. Half a dozen times, he totally burned Charest and Dumont who couldn't--and systematically wouldn't!--answer any of his questions. Charest et Dumont n'ont fait que du patinage artistique, mais les deux se sont tombés sur le cul! Boisclair était le seul à l'hauteur d'un chef d'état, il a marqué bien de points, il a clairement présenté son programme, et il était relaxe et a communiqué plus de personalité que par la passé. Gagnant clair!

First Day of Shoes

2007-03-12T21:37:00.000-04:00

The first day of spring be damned. Today was a much better day--the first day of shoes! Yes, much of the snow was washed away from the sidewalks this weekend by a light rain, and temperatures have consistently been just above freezing for three days straight now, and so today was that miraculous day when it was finally safe--and sane--to wear real shoes instead of boots for the first time in a couple of months. Actually, I don't wear boots per se, I wear Clark's "Muckers", made in England, short-cut like shoes, but water-proof, and surprising warm, although perhaps not that surprising given how cold it can get in England on rainy days. Today I got to dust off--and I do mean dust off quite literally!--my good ol' Doc Martens (gee, I seem to have a thing for English shoes!) and break them in again, complete with that little spot that rubs against the back of my heel but which is nonetheless a welcome pain to bear in exchange for clear, ice-free, snow-free, and relatively slush-free sidewalks. Here in CanuckLand, it's got nothing to do with groundhogs, spring solstice, or the switch to daylight savings time (as much as that too was very much a welcome relief this weekend). Nope, what truly signals the beginning of spring and instills hope and pride at surviving yet another long, cold winter is wearing shoes again. I can't wait til tomorrow morning to dust off my sneakers too!

Long Term Goals

2007-02-14T13:49:00.001-05:00

I haven't blogged for a month and a half. It's not like there's been nothing to blog about, but none of it seemed really pertinent or news-worthy at the time. Things have happened in the real world. The mayor finally recanted on his awful plan that I had blogged about to change Parc Avenue to Boulevard Robert-Bourassa, and all it took for him to change his mind was a petition with 50,000+ signatures and mass protests in the streets in the middle of winter. Gilles Duceppe, le chef du Bloc Québécois, came to Canadian Instant Name Recognition U (to borrow Flavia's neat term), and the event, which was organized entirely by myself and two other guys, was, apparently, a huge success, although I was not even in town the day of to witness it. Reports in the undergrad newspapers were fair and balanced though, which is impressive given that one would expect them to have a hostile biasis towards "les méchants séparatistes" (or "séparatissses" as people are wont to say).

Work-wise though, there's been nothing to blog about because it feels like I've gotten nothing done since the beginning of term. In fact, I have done lots of work, but finished nothing on my to-do list. This appears to be the semester of long term goals (like being back in that diss-writing period) where everything is a marathon instead of a sprint. As a postdoc, I'm extremely lucky not to have to teach. Except for being a full, tenured prof on sabbatical (with a much higher salary than my own), I think that being a postdoc is the best job in all of academia. No classes, my time is entirely my own, and I'm managing to pump out articles left, right, and center (not ideologically speaking, of course!) and beef up my c.v. which is now up to four forthcoming articles (five if you count that one is being reprinted) and an article translation. If it weren't for the fact that I'm on the job market (and in a constant state of anxiety about my future and where I'll end up spending the rest of my life), and competing with lots of American and UK PhDs (which are inherently "better" on the Canadian market by virtue of not being Canadian--god forbid we hire someone with a PhD from our own country; they can't possibly measure up!), then life would be pretty damn sweet. As a result of this cushy job, work is getting done, albeit in little stages. I've been writing emails tracking down photos for the second of my articles to use illustrations (getting permissions is a total bitch and highly time-consuming--to be avoided at all costs if at all possible!). I've been writing emails getting permissions to use various unpublished manuscripts in my second book proposal, an anthology, which is also time-consuming but advancing slowly but surely. And I've been tracking down copies of successful book proposals from my friends as models to use when putting together my own book proposal coming out of the diss (if ever I get to the point of actually beginning to write said proposal). And now I'm doing the last set of final revisions (commas and such) on the article for which I just submitted revisions at New Year's with the hope that it will make it into this spring's issue of the journal if someone else is slack in getting their own article ready, otherwise it won't be out until next spring. All of this is good; all of this is progress; but for someone like me whose entire academic identity is formed around the idea of being fast, it doesn't feel like it. Given that most aspects of academia tend to advance at only a slightly faster pace than moss growing on a rock though, I guess I should get better acquainted with the concept of long term goals....

Not at MLA

2006-12-31T19:11:00.001-05:00

I did not go to MLA this year. Except for the fact that it means that the four US schools I applied to for jobs all blanked me, I'm pretty darn happy about that. I've been to MLA twice already, when it was in New York in 2002 and last year in DC. I'm almost certainly going to go next year (interviews or not). But I don't like MLA--too crowded, too claustrophobic, and too stressful. And unlike all the American scholars, it's not a chance for me to meet up with friends and colleagues. That's what the SAA and the Learned's are for, my two favorite conferences where all the Shakespeareans and the Canucks hang out. I'm happy that I didn't have to go to MLA because instead I got to spend a very nice week in my home province celebrating xmas (which I don't like to celebrate but which was fine nonetheless) with my birth mother for the very first time--and getting a chance to blog through the airport's free wireless connection on my way back to mon pays.

On the other hand, I have been eagerly reading lots of blogs about people who are at MLA and enjoying them immensely: Blogging the Renaissance, Flavia, and In Favor of Thinking have all be providing MLA reports, and I've enjoyed reading them all immensely. I can't think of a better way to experience MLA than virtually. Get the scoop, not the stress! So I'd just like to say a big thanks to all three of them!

Holy crap! I'm even more happy not to be at MLA now. I just got upgraded to first-class for free for the first time in my life! New Year's drinks are on Air Canada! :-)

End of article / year joy

2006-12-29T18:40:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year to me! I just sent off an article to a journal editor today. Yay! It had been accepted back in July, recommended by both readers but with some revisions, and I was told that if I finished the revisions by December there was a chance it would make it into the issue coming out this spring. I didn't even have time to start working on it until the beginning of this month, and I sure am relieved that I managed to get it done. The 24-hour train ride home for xmas had something to do with that! Lots of spare time with nothing to do but edit. I didn't have a lot of time before that to work on it this month because...

I was in San Francisco celebrating my 30th birthday! That was tons of fun, a total blast! The only downside was that San Francisco was just as cold as Québec! LA, on the other hand, was absolutely gorgeous. I couldn't have wished for a better way to spend my birthday.

Waiting Game Wiki

2006-12-03T16:20:00.001-05:00

I just found out about a new resource for those of us playing the waiting game on the job market. It was mentioned in The Chronicle of Higher Education apparently, although I heard about it from a friend. It's a wiki that anyone can update with information about the status of the application process at each of the universities hiring this year in any particular field: i.e., requests for writing samples, the scheduling of MLA interviews, and campus visits. I got a request for a writing sample a few weeks ago, and have generally written off by now all of the other schools that didn't want a writing sample in the initial application and haven't asked me for one yet, but for those schools that already have my writing sample and at which I might still have a chance at a MLA interview, well, the waiting game really sucks--especially since it makes it impossible to make xmas travel plans without knowing whether or not there is any need to make MLA travel plans. With this wiki, based on updates provided by other candidates who have been contacted, it's possible to know when a particular school has begun to schedule MLA interviews, and when it is time to throw in the towel and give up hope of hearing from that school. Some people over on The Chronicle forums think that it's better to just send off the applications and not think about them anymore, but I think this is a great tool. I've got lots of other things to do besides sit and wait and wonder--and now it's possible to know when hope is still alive and when it's not. Job hunters, spread the word!

Translating Early Modern French

2006-11-28T16:21:00.000-05:00

I have spent over 35 hours in the past couple months translating two articles from French to English. One was in contemporary French about a medieval subject; the other was in early modern French (16thC, I think) and was on the subject of medicine and astrology. I'd read Rabelais in my undergrad many moons ago (pun here = the astrology text was about the moon) in the original early modern spelling, but at least it was a modern type with all of the elipsed characters inserted back in. This was a microfilm or EEBO-like printout of the original. Not an easy thing to read! If I never have to do another translation again in my life, I'll be very happy. These two texts were on top of the traduction d'enfer that I'd done earlier this term. It feels like my entire semester has been spent doing nothing but translating! (Well, that, and admin, job apps, and the web work for which I'm really paid.) Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be translators. It's a long and thankless job. I've been told that professional translators get paid by the word. Some misspelled early modern words can take me an hour to figure out! Fortunately I was getting paid for this by the hour, but I'd hate to do it every day for a living by the word. I'm soooooo happy to be done though! And now that the semester is almost entirely over, I'm looking forward to getting some "real" work done on my "real" research. Real work! Yay!

New office--finally!

2006-11-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

16 months after we were supposed to move into the run-down, old house on campus that was being renovated and redubbed "Espace Renaissance" just for us, the day has finally arrived! Yes, after 16 months of "Oh, you'll be moving in next month", we actually have. I'm blogging from my own, freshly painted, private office. Muse, you would like it. The "coconut cream" accent wall looks pink under the neon lights in the ceiling (you know I don't do pink!), and the locks on the individual office doors are still not-functioning / non-existant, but all in all it is pretty good. The view out the back window, against which my desk is positioned and out of which I'm looking now, is not that bad either. If you can get your eyes to look through the thick screen of the fire escape fence, you can see the green rooftops of some of the old buildings in the center of campus, and even a little bit of the green soccer field next to the library. There are lots of students milling about, walking to and fro between the student center and the library, which is nice and attentuates the isolation of being a postdoc with next to no contact with other people on campus. Plus, the walk over to the real building for our faculty will be a bit shorter now. Best of all, from now on, we only have to climb half-way up that damn, steep hill! And, I've got my own bookshelf and my own file cabinet! What more could a budding scholar want?!

Keith Olbermann's Special Comments

2006-11-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

Keith Olbermann's special comments are amazing! Biting, scathing, and smart. I only discovered him about a month ago, and I immediately changed my cable subscription to make sure that I got MSNBC just so that I could watch him. I first saw him when he did a special comment a month ago about the whole Bill Clinton Fox News interview brouhaha. A ten-minute rant against Bush, and every word of it rang true. Ditto for this one from November 1st about Bush's ridiculous demand that Kerry--a Vietnam vet--apologize to the troops in Iraq for supposedly calling them stupid when Kerry was really calling Bush stupid and Bush was too stupid--or too demagogic!--even to realize it.

Sauvons Avenue du Parc

2006-10-24T15:04:00.000-04:00

Le maire de Montréal, Gérald Tremblay, veut changer le nom de l'Avenue du Parc, one of the funkiest streets in the whole city. Il veut lui donner le nom de Robert Bourassa, one of Québec's most boring politicians (c.f. even Trudeau called him a "mangeur d'hotdogs"), a total loser if ever there was one. Premier ministre de 1970 à 1976 et encore de 1985 à 1994, l'affaire la plus marquante de son temps au pouvoir c'était son incapacité de gérer "la crise d'Octobre". Qu'est-ce qu'il a fait? Il a fait un coup de téléphone à Trudeau pour envoyer l'armée canadienne à envahir les rues de Montréal! Et pour ça une de ces rues-là va porter son nom. Ridicule! Et tellement triste. SVP, signez la pétition contre cette bêtise.

Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback

2006-10-23T10:51:00.000-04:00

This article about the slow return of grammar to English classrooms appeared in the Washington Post this morning. It's about time! There are so many students out there who don't know how to write a proper sentence, let alone understand the parts of speech well enough to know what they are doing wrong in the first place. The move to take grammar out of the classroom was a mistake driven by people who prone "pedagogy" and unproven ideas about letting students "explore and express themselves creatively", as if writing a lot of bad sentences about subjects that may or may not interest them is somehow going to teach them how to write properly.

My favorite paragraph in the article was the last one:

"What you have is a generation of teachers from the early to mid-'70s who don't know grammar, who never learned it," said Benjamin, an author of the national council's publication. "We have armies of teachers, elementary teachers and English teachers, who don't have the language to talk about language. It's kind of their dirty little secret."

This too is true. I was lucky enough to learn a little bit of grammar in grades 6-8, but it was minimal. I learned most of my English grammar by accident because I studied French and Latin. I was one of the lucky ones, but not everyone learns a second-language and gets the side benefit of learning the grammar of one's own. I'm really happy to see that after nearly 40 years the tide is finally starting to turn, but it's going to take a long time before there is any widespread impact, especially since the teachers have to be taught before they can teach the students!

It's funny, but I was just writing my "statement of teaching interests" last week as part of my job applications, and I basically wrote that although I am a big fan of using technology in the classroom, I still think that it is really important to stick to traditional methods. Students may have access to grammar- and spell-checkers, but they need to know how to write on their own. It's nice to know that my opinion on grammar doesn't make me an old foggy but is actually slightly ahead of the curve.

Arden: The World of Shakespeare

2006-10-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

Edward Castronovo, a prof at Indiana University at Bloomington, is creating a serious role-playing game called "Arden: The World of Shakespeare". This is a very cool project, and a long-time coming given how many role-playing games already exist for entertainment but how slow universities have been to jump on the bandwagon and to appropriate this technology as a pedagogical tool. A brief story on this was writen in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the original interview with Prof Castronovo is over at CNET. Here's a brief excerpt:

On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is announcing a $240,000 grant to Edward Castronova for his online game, "Arden: The World of Shakespeare."

The idea behind the project is to produce a virtual world steeped in the rich lore and characters of the playwright's work.

But Castronova--an Indiana University associate professor of telecommunications best-known as the world's leading expert on the economies of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games--sees his initiative as far more than just a historical adaptation of the Bard's work. He looks at it as a way to teach students about Shakespeare's life, times and writing, as well as a way to conduct innovative social-science research.

Traduction d'enfer

2006-10-09T16:29:00.001-04:00

Score another strikethrough. Yesterday I finished the Translation From Hell. That's what I'd started calling it for the past few weeks that I've been working on it. It's an article that will appear in an edited volume, and it is BAD. Bad as in I've read many undergrad term papers that are much better than this. It was written by a senior scholar at another university, and I rather impetuously and foolishly volunteered to translate it from French to English over two years ago when I was an RA for the project that is producing the volume. I thought it would be an easy way to get a couple lines on my c.v. at a time when I didn't yet have any articles of my own to boast. I've been putting it off since then because there was no pressure from the volume editor and I had better things to do (like write my dissertation in just six months). I had no idea what I was getting myself in for. The volume editor obviously recognized how bad the original version was and told me to try to make it better, and I did make some editing suggestions along the way, but short of rewriting the entire article from scratch and changing about 90% of the content, there's no easy way to make it better through sheer translation alone. I'm so relieved that the translation is done, but somehow I fear that my relationship to this particular piece of writing is not yet over. I'm giving it to the editor tomorrow, but I can't give it back to the author--who thinks it's good and has been hounding me for months about how excited he is to see fruits of my labour--because it is full of red edits that I've made which I'm sure he will think are unjustified. I'm supposed to be a translator (despite not being formally trained), yet I'm finding myself in the role of editor of a particularly problematic author too. Any suggestions?

Finished an article

2006-09-17T19:02:00.001-04:00

I just finished expanding and revising an article and sent it off to the volume editors. Yay! This is the first ~~strike through~~ on my new Fall to-do list. Unlike the last article I finished over the summer, which came out of a non-diss related conference paper that started off as something just for fun until the opportunity to publish arose, this article was largely based on my diss. In fact, it basically was my entire diss: pared down intro and conclusion with a one paragraph summary in the middle from the intros of each chapter, and voilà, suddenly my 252 pages are only 19! It's rather weird to think that I can compress most of my diss into only 1/10th of the original length! It makes me wonder if I really had anything substantial to say in the first place! On the other hand, in doing this little editing exercise, I went back and re-read parts of my diss that I hadn't looked at since I defended it a year ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's not all as horrible as I thought it was. There just might be fodder in there for a decent book proposal after all! And after those translations are taken care of, that will be my next task...

Montreal college shooting

2006-09-13T19:40:00.000-04:00

Here's the latest update:

One person has died in hospital as a result of the shooting rampage at a downtown Montreal college Wednesday that also left the gunman dead and 19 others injured.
Paramedics confirmed 20 people were taken to hospital with injuries ranging from gunshot wounds to emotional shock following the shooting at Dawson College.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/

This is why we need gun control. How Stephen Harper could get rid of the gun registry defies all logic. The U.S. needs gun control too. Most of the handguns used in crimes in Canada come into our country across the U.S. border (all while the U.S. is imposing stricter rules against our lumber and food substances). Guns weren't even invented when the "right to bear arms" was written into the Constitution; arms meant swords, not AK-47s.

9/11 conspiracy theories

2006-09-11T15:15:00.002-04:00

"Conspiracy theory" is always a dirty word. It conjures up the image of people who think the CIA are listening to their thoughts through the fillings in their teeth. Just because "conspiracy theory" is a dirty word though doesn't mean that conspiracies--groups of people getting together secretely to cause trouble--don't happen. They do. All the time. Heck, most politics happens behind closed doors or out in the corridors while the legit meeting is going on elsewhere. Not everything gets decided in well-lit rooms around beautiful oak tables. Politics is dirty.

So why don't we give more credibilty to conspiracy theories? Why won't the mainstream media do its job and investigate more fully the leads that are out there? Well, thankfully, CBC Sunday Morning did (and I'm not usually one to praise CBC, but this time I am). Yesterday, they actually discussed Loose Change and the various conspiracy theories about 9/11. Today, I read a Reuters news story that 1 in 5 Canadians do believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful U.S. businessmen and govt officials. That's 20%, but it jumps to 26% for "young Canadians" and a whopping 32% for Québécois (more proof that Québec is a distinct nation with different values and viewpoints than the rest of Canada). I'm part of that 32% who agrees that it's a lot more logical to believe the conspiracy theory (in which many of the facts *do* add up) than to believe the official explanation (in which many of the facts of that day simply *don't* add up).

Everyone should see Loose Change before forming an opinion one way or the other about this affair, and follow the CBC Sunday links to the 9/11 sites out there, including one called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Can the physicists really be wrong? (One has lost his job even for researching the issue.) Certain facts, like the temperature at which steel melts, just don't change no matter how many times we couch the debate in terms of empty rhetorical terms like "liberty" and "freedom". On September 11th, shouldn't we scholars be celebrating (what's left of) our academic freedom and the liberty to investigate thorny issues to the fullest extent?

Why we fight

2006-09-11T14:36:00.000-04:00

When I created this blog and put politics in the description, I thought that it was so obvious that it would be about Québec politics and the sovereignist movement that there was no reason even to state it. Yet, it seems like the political posts on this blog are almost exclusively about the United States these days--surely not because they are the most interesting subject but perhaps because they are the most frustrating.

A few days ago I watched the film Why We Fight and the film Syrianna. Syrianna is a fictional account of the way the oil industry works and the CIA's involvement in it, while Why We Fight is a documentary about what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial-(congressional)-complex", i.e., the arms industry whch is supported partly by Congress. I was shocked to learn that at least 1 piece of every B-52 fighter plane is manufactured in every single one of the 50 states, so when it comes time for congressmen to support military spending, they have to because it means jobs in their home state, which translates into votes which they either keep or lose. The film is filled with facts like this on miltary spending, how Congress is complicit with the miltary industry, and how all the major decisions are being made by think tanks... among many other topics. It's really interesting and scary stuff, but the film is well worth seeing. Seeing both films together is even more of an eye-opener.

Yale Shmale

2006-08-29T22:14:00.000-04:00

Lakehead University has this great new advertising campaign to try to attract young students to its rather small school in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The ad has made the news with some controversy, although personally I think that it's not only a great ad campaign, but it's also true. Ivy League schools do not necessarily produce smarter graduates than smaller universities. Admission to Ivy League schools isn't necessarily determined by one's intellectual potential either--at least not when daddy's trust fund is a source of the donations that allow the big schools to stay big. And when daddy is a governor or president, as Dubya's daddy was, is it really that surprising when someone not quite up to par makes it through with a diploma in hand anyway? Ditto for Dubya's drinking daughters. So why is the ad controversial? What's wrong with a little truth in adversting for once?

Science in the skies

2006-08-23T13:24:00.000-04:00

Last week I flew home to Nova Scotia--sans toothpaste, shampoo, or the eye drops which are medically necessary to prevent scars from forming on my eyes but for which I don't actually have a prescription because the bottles are sold over the counter for $20 a pop. Although I went through security in the Montreal and Halifax airports rather quickly--the standard 15 minutes max that it normally takes me to get from the check-in counter to the gate--it was highly inconvenient not to be able to take these items with me (because it's not like I'm going to check a bag, and then wait 15 minutes on the other end to pick it up, all for a tube of toothpaste). Before I went, which was just one day after the alleged liquid plane bombing in Britain, I already thought that the new security measures were highly exaggerated, over-the-top, fear-mongering by the U.S. government--as is their wont--which would have absolutely no security effect but merely inconvenience travellers.

Well, it turns out that there is science out there--gasp! yes, actual scientific facts, imagine that!--which confirms that the new no liquids security measures are completely ridiculous and that it would be impossible within the known laws of chemistry and physics for the suspected terrorists to blow up a plane in the way that the mainstream media ruckus reported. Not that that's really a big surprise.

This article in The Register entitled "Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?" explains the chemistry alleged to be underlying the plot and how the proposed plot described in the media would not be able to produce an explosion capable of taking down a plane. This article at Working for Change entitled "Was British terror plot a load of crap?" cites from The Register article and gives a bit of a political analysis at the end of the benefits of fear-mongering in a U.S. election year. The Register article claims to be based on a 2005 peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society--ie, it's based on actual research by real scientists and further vetted by other real scientists, not just thrown out there to terrorize (how ironic where the terror really comes from) ordinary citizens by the likes of the pretty faces on CNN or the Republican cronies on Fox News.

After seeing Loose Change, I'm not surprised that there hasn't been a lot of reporting out there on the science of this plot. Loose Change puts forth the argument that it was scientifically impossible, according to the laws of physics, for the Twin Towers to implode at a free-fall rate from planes hitting them--ie, that only demolition-like explosions within the building, which can been seen going off in the original news footage, could have brought down the towers--and it examines how the science of the other two reported plane crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania doesn't add up. Why should we be surprised that the science of this alleged terror plot doesn't add up either?

PhD comics

2006-08-20T23:05:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across this website today for PhD comics. Two hours later I had only scratched the surface of the archives, but it sure was fun reading through them. I guess that I'm not quite as far removed from the PhD experience as I thought I was (and, yes, there were some postdoc quips in there too), or perhaps it's just that one never really forgets all the quirks of the PhD experience. In any case, it was nice to see how universal that experience really is. Of all the characters in the strip, only one was a humanities PhD candidate, and the rest were in science and engineering, but the trials and tribulations, ups and downs, and hurdles to jump over and hoops to jump through were essentially the same. I'm sure glad that there are no more of those flaming hoops to jump through anymore--although perhaps it's more accurate simply to say that now I've got a whole new sets of hurdles and hoops ahead of me to look forward to...

Bon Cop, Bad Cop

2006-08-20T22:16:00.000-04:00

I saw Bon Cop, Bad Cop on Friday night and I think it was really great--as entertainment, of course, not as art, obviously. It was so hilarious I couldn't stop laughing out loud the entire time, and neither could anyone else in the cinema, which was Quartier Latin (ie--I saw the French version with the English bits subtitled in French, as opposed to vice-versa).

It seemed clear to me that it was a Québécois film. I went in expecting some kind of Trudeau-esque version of bilingualism, and expecting not to like it for that reason. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the film was clearly taking the mick at English Canada's expense, and bilingualism in general, since everything Québécois always comes out on top: Patrick Huard's Québécois bad boy cop tactics win out over Colm Feore's polite English style; Huard gets Feore's sister but Feore doesn't win Huard's wife; and in the end Feore not only adopts Huard's rebel style but also learns to curse (à la Caliban peut-être?).

I really liked the "grammaire du sacre" scene. Muse described it on her blog, and I thought it would be nauseatingly bad to watch, too pedagogically serious, but the on-screen performance is quite humourous, and again seems to be taking the mick at English Canada's expense for Feore's ignorance, since it's not like we don't do the same thing when we curse in English too. Just like "calisse", "fuck" can be a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb too--and sometimes all in the same sentence.

The only thing really "Canadian" about the film was Rick Mercer in the Don Cherry role. That was a great casting choice in my opinion and a really nice touch to the film, especially the "frog" reference and the "tie" comment, which just about sums up Don Cherry vs. Québec. Nobody in the audience at Quartier Latin seemed to recognize who Rick Mercer was though, which I thought spoke volumes about the cultural divide. Given the bilingual theme, I also thought that casting Mississippi-born, Québécois star Nanette Workman as the ballet teacher was a nice touch.

The closing credits confirmed my conviction that it was a Québécois film about bilingualism, not a bilingual Canadian film. About 90% of the names scrolling across the screen were Québécois, and it turns out that the comparatively few Toronto scenes that were in the film were actually shot in Ottawa--I guess Toronto wasn't a good working environment and they needed to film the anglo scenes in a bilingual city! Plus, the music that played during the credits was an originally composed Éric Lapointe song--hard to get more Québécois than that!

It was also neat the the production company was called Park Ex pictures. Some of those bar scenes certainly had a Parc Extension feel to them.

I'm certainly not convinced that the movie is the kind of endeavour that will unite the two solitudes, as it's being touted by some, but I certainly like the idea of house full of burning pot as a strategy for breaking down cultural barriers!

Melissa Etheridge in Montréal

2006-08-08T00:16:00.000-04:00

On Saturday night Melissa Etheridge played at Place des Arts in Montréal. The venue really hampered the audience from audience--the sit down chairs and the theatre setting discouraged people from standing up and dancing, and in my particular section of the balcony people in the back yelled at people in the front who stood up to dance so that dampened spirits even more--but Melissa was great. It was the first time that I've seen her play, and I was not disappointed. I'd heard that she had a good following in Montréal and Vermont--northern liberalness, posited one friend--but I was surprised at how many straight couples and how many francophones were in the audience. Apparently she appeals to more than just dykes and she can even break the language barrier.

Melissa was very political throughout the show, which was a really pleasant surprise. She opened up with "Lucky", although surprisingly didn't sing her even bigger hit "Breathe" from that same album. Not long into the show, Melissa started talking about how great Canada was--which made the crowd go wild--because of our approach to gay rights. She talked about how she, like many others, considered moving to Canada after ol' Georgie boy got relected in 2004. She pointed out that she could actually get married if she lived here (this after an earlier reference, in response to an audience compliment, that her "wife" [Tammy Lynn Michaels] spiked her hair for her), and then she went into a series of her most political gay rights songs: "Silent Legacy" about being closeted; "Scarecrow" about Matthew Shepard's murder; "Tuesday Morning" about Mark Bingham, a gay man among the four people believed to have taken down United Flight 93 (although see the Loose Change post below for other theories on 9/11); and (after "The Letting Go") "Yes I Am", the title song on her first album following her coming out at Bill Clinton's inaugural ball. "Tuesday Morning" was really interesting because not only did she talk about how the partners of gays who died on September 11th weren't eligible for survivor's benefits, and therefore how having a gay hero created an ideological problem for the country, but she also modified the lyrics. Normally the chorus goes, "Stand up America / Wake up America", but that didn't really make much sense for a Canadian audience, so she replaced those lines, and changed the pronouns from "Can you live with yourself in the land of the free?" to "Can they live with themselves". It was nice of her to be so gracious about Canada.

She praised us again when she sang another political song, "I Need To Wake Up", which is the closing credit song on Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. She talked about global warming and encouraged everyone to see the film, not just as a commercial plug but because of the urgency to convince people to do something. And of course she couldn't resist joking that with global warming Canada is looking better and better every day. (It wasn't entirely praise though, as she wryly pointed out that despite living in the home of Dubya, she thought that we "still have some business to take care of" ourselves, i.e., Stephen Harper, aka Dubya's mini-me.

She also talked about having gotten breast cancer (which forced her to cancel her last scheduled show in Montréal a couple years ago) and did two songs that she wrote after surviving the chemo: "I Run for Life" and "This Is Not Goodbye".

So gay rights, the environment, and cancer all in one show, and quite prominently at that. I was very impressed!

Other highlights were the highly romantic "Baby, You Can Sleep While I Drive", which always makes me want to take my girl on a cross-country road trip, and "The Letting Go" for which a grand piano was wheeled on stage and which she played poignantly, a nice change from the rocking guitar. For an encore, she did a very long version of "Like The Way I Do", which I'd read was her closer that she draws out much, much longer than on the album, and which turned out to be true, and then she did Joplin's "Piece of My Heart", the same song that sung at the 2005 Grammy's when she was fresh out of chemo and still completely bald. It wasn't as utterly amazing as that performance, which I doubt anything could top, but it was still quite an awesome closer.

On top of the endless Canada praise, she was also very gracious to the audience and interacted a lot with the front row. Had I have been lucky enough to have gotten seats there, I'm sure that I would noticed electricity in the air. She chatted with people in the front row, and several times she apologized because of a techincal screw-up with Place des Arts that meant that the people in the first row were really the people in the third row. Apparently, PdA had raised the orchestra bowl in order to bring some of her equipment on stage, and it got stuck there, so the first two rows of seats disappeared and those people had to squeeze over to the two ends of the stage instead of getting the seats they were supposed to. She apologized to them at least three or four times during the show, and she made a point of singing at the front of the stage / orchestra bowl, even though the stage and all of the set decor was placed about 6 feet further back where it was supposed to be. She really made a point of maintaining contact with the audience even though there was an extra 6 feet of stage where there wasn't supposed to be.

Move over Margaret Mead Made Me Gay. Melissa Etheridge made me a dyke, and I sure am grateful!

Saturday was also the last day of the 1st ever Outgames here in Montréal (as opposed to the Gay Games which moved to Chicago after a bitch fight between our local organizers and their powers that be) and Sunday was the last day of Divers/Cité, our pride festival. It was really amazing to walk down the streets and see people wearing the blue Outgames necklace-keychain-nametag holders, and even their Outgames medals. It was enough to give one whiplash from turning around identifying everyone as "Gay!", "Gay!", Gay!". The city was overrun with queers, and it was fabulous! Well, except for the fact that there were so many queerst that there was a line-up to get into the 7-floor Drugstore bar, which was completely ridiculous! Still, having to find another bar is a small price to pay for having more than a week when it feels like queers make up the majority of the city--how refreshing!

Accepted Article

2006-07-26T17:54:00.000-04:00

I just received an e-mail telling me that an article that I had submitted to a peer-reviewed journal back in December has been accepted! With revisions, of course, but it's an acceptance nonetheless! Yay! Now will come the work of editing to the satisfaction of the editor--including cutting the length by 50%!--but an accepted article is an accepted article, and I'm thrilled to the moon!

Loose Change

2006-07-26T17:48:00.001-04:00

Another film that I have not yet seen in its entirety, but I've seen enough (and read enough previously) to know that it's also worth seeing, is a little independent film that is being shown on the net. It's called Loose Change, and it debunks all the fake science and lies being propagated by the US government about the collapse of the World Trade Centers on September 11th and the government conspiracy to cover up the facts. The film's site is at: http://www.loosechange911.com/ You can see the film online at Google Video: http://www.provostdesigns.com/clients/lc2e/index.php . See it. It too will be an inconvienent truth for many.

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-07-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

Before going to ISA, I saw Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. Everyone should go see it. It's shocking! I knew that climate change was happening, I knew that it was bad, but I had no idea that it was THAT bad! It is. It's worse than most people realize. We have to do something, and fast. 10 years to entirely change our habits and the state of the planet is no time at all. Especially not the way that politics work--at a snail's pace. It's up to the people to raise each other's consciousness, to demand change before it's too late, and to take action any way they can. That's the one weakness in the film though; it doesn't make enough concrete suggestions for change at the end, although it does suggest going to the film's website for more info. It's at: http://www.climatecrisis.net/ Go there. Now.

Back from the ISA

2006-07-26T17:36:00.000-04:00

I'm back from the International Shakespeare Association's World Shakespeare Congress that is held once every 5 years. It was in Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane was very cool, and I love how much Australia is marked by little traces of England which indulge my Brit fetish--meat pies, cheese and onion crisps, bangers and mash, all those unhealthy staples of the British diet that one can't live without. The accent is cute too. And everyone was soooo polite. I swear, they were even nicer than we Canadians are reputed to be! That was cool; what was less cool was how damn obediant they were. Nobody would jaywalk--ever! It was ridiculous; not a car coming for miles around, but everyone would stand there at the light waiting forever for it to change, like mindless drones. A Brit friend, who was taking the mick with me, commented that at least they weren't being a drain on the public health system by crossing and getting themselves killed, as I was likely to do! Not that I did. The weather was great too. It was about 18C the whole time--not bad for the middle of winter. I could get used to winters like that! It's good to be back in Québec though, although the jet lag on the way home nearly killed me. 23 hours door-to-door from the airport hotel in Australia to my own home. Talk about a trip!

What kind of pup I am

2006-06-30T15:49:00.000-04:00

In surfing that last site, I found this quiz too, "What Breed of Puppy Are You?", and just couldn't resist finding out what kind of pup I am:

You Are a German Shepherd Puppy

Intelligent, quick witted, and a bit aggressive.
You've got the jaw power to take a bite out of anyone you choose.

Egad! A "general American"

2006-06-30T15:28:00.000-04:00

So I took this quiz and found out that I speak "general American English".

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

5% Upper Midwestern

Egad! I guess I skimmed the title, "What Kind of American English Do You Speak?", a bit too quickly and missed the word American because I thought it was going to measure if I spoke American, Canadian, or British English. Oh well. It's interesting to confirm that I speak like a Yankee though! :-)

More progress!

2006-06-26T13:11:00.001-04:00

I edited my article from 53 pages down to 43! And it has now been sent to the editor! Yippie! I'm so relieved--and still amazed at how many extra words there were that needed to be cut anyway! That's one more (half) strikethrough on the list, and it feels sooo damn good!

Sauvons Kyoto

2006-06-06T20:45:00.000-04:00

Lisez et signez cette pétition pour que le gouvernement fédéral respecte ces engagements à réduire des gaz à effet de serre et pour qu'il transfère au gouvernement du Québec les fonds nécessaires afin que le Québec puisse mettre en oeuvre les initiatives visant à atteindre ses objectifs.

Progress!

2006-05-29T00:04:00.001-04:00

Progress! At last! After working on the same essay since xmas, I finally finished the first full draft on Saturday night sometime between 12:30 and 1am. Yay! I've been working on this for about five months--which is five times longer than any single dissertation chapter took me last year! Whew!

I can finally use the code for strikethough on the list in the right margin, something I've been aching to do for ages, using the list as a dangling carrot, just for the pleasure of scratching it off. Or partly. The problem now is that the essay is 53 pages long, and the editor who is publishing it has given me a maximum page limit of 45, so now I've got 8 pages to cut. I'd already cut 3 a month ago and have no idea how to cut a text that I know is full of repetition. Some serious editing remains ahead of me...

So progress (yippie!) but there's still quite a way to go yet...

Update - Tuesday, May 30: Translation #2 (the short 5 page one, rather than the longer 20 page one) is now done. One more strikethrough--yay!

The chicken or the egg?

2006-05-27T14:15:00.000-04:00

Also found on Cyberpresse this morning, the enigma of the chicken or the egg has been solved! It's the egg. Or so the scientists say. Talk about taking the fun out of an idiomatic expression! Thank goodness for the humanities. It's probably good though that someone out there is dissecting the paradoxes that we lit crits love, autrement on en serait débordés!

L'énigme «l'oeuf ou la poule» résolue
Le vendredi 26 mai 2006 - Londres
Un philosophe et scientifique britannique a résolu l'énigme qui hante l'humanité depuis toujours en affirmant que l'oeuf a précédé la poule, ont rapporté vendredi plusieurs quotidiens londoniens.
La clé de l'énigme millénaire se trouve dans le fait que le matériau génétique n'évolue pas durant la vie d'un organisme vivant, par conséquent le premier oiseau à devenir une poule a du d'abord exister en tant qu'embryon à l'intérieur d'un oeuf.
Pour le professeur John Brookfield, de l'Université de Nottingham, l'organisme vivant à l'intérieur de l'oeuf devait avoir le même ADN que la poule qu'il allait devenir.
M. Brookfield, spécialiste de la génétique évolutive a affirmé à plusieurs quotidiens «nous pouvons en conclure sans aucun doute que la première matière vivante membre de l'espèce doit être cet oeuf. L'oeuf était nécessairement avant la poule».
Les conclusions du professeur Brookfield ont reçu le soutien du professeur David Papineau du King's College de Londres, ainsi que du président de la Fédération britannique des éleveurs de poulets (Great British Chicken), Charles Bourns.
Selon M. Papineau, philosophe des sciences, le premier poulet a du sortir d'un oeuf pondu par une autre espèce, mais qu'il s'agissait bien d'un oeuf de poule parce qu'il contenait l'embryon d'un poulet. «La conclusion par conséquent est que l'oeuf était avant la poule», a-t-il soutenu également.
Pour M. Bourns, représentant la profession des aviculteurs, dont les propos sont rapportés par The Times, The Daily Mail et The Independent, «les oeufs ont du exister bien avant la naissance du premier poussin».

Coffee and sunshine

2006-05-27T13:47:00.000-04:00

I was thinking the other day, as I continue to wrestle in the throes of procrastination, about what it takes for me to work well, and came to the conclusion that it's coffee and sunshine. I think the idiom is coffee and cigarettes, but, oh well, my lung capacity is shot as it is, and I think coffee and sunshine sounds just as good, if not more poetic. This thought occured, of course, on the first sunny, and my first productive, day after 10 straight days of rain. It was horrible, but when the sun finally returned, so did not only my spirits but also my ability to think coherently.

The coffee might have helped with that too. I have a bad habit. J'ai tendance à oublier à boire du café. Carrément oublier! Hé oui! I told myself at the beginning of grad schoool that I did not want to become one of those people who is completely addicted to coffee and who can't function in the morning without it, or worse who get grouchy without it, so I decided to limit myself to drinking it only when I actually needed it, on busy, work days, so that when in fact I did drink it, it would still have some of its effectiveness and I wouldn't need to keep upping the dose. It was not to become une habitude quotidienne, or worse, a crutch.

That was all well and good, in theory. Le problème, c'est qu'il m'arrive d'oublier à en boire, même quand je devrais ou même quand j'en ai besoin. It's so not part of my habit that weeks can go by in which I'm in such a daze in that regard that I forget to even consider the possiblity that it might wake me up and make me more productive. That's when having one hits me like a ton of bricks. And it's good because it gets me into a new pattern, which I suppose is exactly what I was intending, but is somewhat étrange nonetheless, in and of its unfamiliarity.

That's what happened the other day. I got a double-whammy of coffee and sunshine after having had neither for at least 10 days. Talk about a rush!

And then, speak of the devil, there was this article on Cyberpresse ce matin:

Le café est bon pour la santé, selon une étude norvégienne
Le vendredi 26 mai 2006 - Oslo
Une consommation raisonnable de café contribue à prévenir les maladies cardio-vasculaires ou encore les maladies de Parkinson et d'Alzheimer, suggère une étude de chercheurs norvégiens, parue vendredi sur le site scientifique www.forskning.no.
Les chercheurs ont appuyé leurs travaux sur des données récoltées aux États-Unis auprès de 27 000 femmes âgées: les sujets buvant entre une et trois tasses de café par jour avaient entre 20% et 25% de risques en moins d'être atteints de maladies cardio-vasculaires ou maladies inflammatoires.
Dans cette dernière catégorie, les chercheurs ont inclus le diabète, la maladie de Parkinson, la maladie d'Alzheimer, des maladies pulmonaires, du foie ou rénales.
«Les données suggèrent que les antioxydants peuvent être un facteur de protection contre de nombreuses maladies», a indiqué Lene Frost Andersen, une membre de l'équipe.
Mais les effets positifs du café disparaissent en cas de consommation excessive, à savoir au-delà de cinq tasses par jour.
«Il semblerait qu'il puisse y avoir quelque chose dans le café qui soit nocif, absorbé en grandes quantités», a commenté Rune Blomhoff, un autre chercheur, sans en déterminer l'origine.

So I guess I should be drinking more! It's interesting though that I wasn't totally off about the positive effects not working en cas de consommation excessive. Although I don't think they studied my particular avoidance pattern!

Of course, what's also funny about these things is that there will be a study next week that says the exact opposite. There always is. That's the way medical studies work. They get press for the particular research team that conducts them, thereby making their university happy, and the general public is always left utterly confused from one week to the next, which does though eventually have the positive effect of some people learning simply to live their lives as they see fit and ignoring these "news" releases altogether.

I think it's time to sauter sous la douche, pack up my laptop, and hit the coffee shop to get some work done...

Lament for a prom dress

2006-05-26T19:06:00.000-04:00

A story posted by PlanetOut news. How utterly, and frustratingly, repressive! As if it isn't hard enough being a teenager--let alone learning to walk in heels!--they gotta make it even harder on the poor guy.

Male student in dress barred from prom
Wed May 24, 7:31 PM ET
SUMMARY: Kevin Logan has been going to his Gary, Ind., high school in female dress all year, and is considering legal action over his prom shutout.
GARY, Ind. -- A gay male student who has worn women's clothes to school all year was turned away from his high school prom because he was wearing a dress.
Kevin Logan, 18, went to the West Side High School prom Friday in a slinky fuchsia gown and heels. He believes officials discriminated against him by not allowing him inside.
"I have no formal pictures, no memories, nothing. You only have one prom," he said.
Logan received an $85 refund for his prom ticket Tuesday but was not satisfied. He said he is considering filing a complaint with the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.
Sylvester Rowan, assistant to Gary School Superintendent Mary Steele, said school policy bans males from wearing dresses. Excluding Logan from prom was based on "the dress code, not the student's homosexuality. That's his personal preference."
Tyrone Hanley, the youth program coordinator for the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition in Washington, D.C., said he often sees cases like this and called it gender-based discrimination.
"Prohibiting really short skirts for everyone is a fair dress code; prohibiting them for males is not," he said.
Logan said he had spent years defining and exploring his sexuality. This year, he took a major step by dressing as a female every day, wearing makeup, a hair weave, nails and girls' fitted jeans to school.
His mother, Donnetta Logan, said she was not surprised by what she called the ignorance of school administrators.
"I tell Kevin that in society there will be those who accept him and those who won't," she said.

I'm Will Riker

2006-05-21T01:48:00.000-04:00

I just discovered Will Wheaton's blog, and his back-up blog. I've always liked Wheaton because he's such a geek, and I found out that he's got a book that's called Just a Geek. How appropriate! In surfing his site I discovered a link to the "Which Star Trek Character Are You?" Quiz. Apparently, I'm Will Riker. I think that it's actually quite a good fit! (Especially the part about many women, and finding the right one!) And I'm quite chuffed that Jean-Luc Picard ended up as my second-highest score: he's French, plus both character and actor are Shakespeareans!

Your results:

You are Will Riker -- At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Will Riker -- 90%
Jean-Luc Picard -- 65%
Spock -- 59%
James T. Kirk (Captain) -- 55%
Deanna Troi -- 55%
Mr. Scott -- 50%
Data -- 42%
Chekov -- 40%
Geordi LaForge -- 40%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt) -- 30%
Uhura -- 25%
Leonard McCoy (Bones) -- 25%
Worf -- 20%
Beverly Crusher -- 5%
Mr. Sulu -- 5%

Temptation Blocker

2006-05-19T22:59:00.000-04:00

On my first day of blogging, I stumbled across the Temptation Blocker. After today, I'm going to need it! Where, oh where, have you been all my life, you delightfully sadistic little piece of software, you? Perhaps now that article will finally get finished...

La journée nationale des Patriotes

2006-05-19T21:23:00.000-04:00

Le lundi 22 mai c'est la journée nationale des Patriotes (jadis la fête de Dollard-des-Ormeaux). Voici une activité trippante pour fêter ça!

"Les porteurs de l'indépendance"
21 mai 2006 à 21H00
Au Diable Vert, 4557, rue St-Denis (métro Mont-Royal)
10 $ par personne
Événement organisé par le Parti Québécois de Gouin, Laurier-Dorion et Mercier.
Allez voir la vidéo de présentation! (Attention, c'est un méchant gros ficher!)

NYU Striking Grad Students' Video

2006-05-19T21:10:00.000-04:00

The grad student teaching and research assistants at NYU who have been on strike since the beginning of the year have a 5 minute long video on their website. It's worth checking out!

Dignity. Period!

2006-05-19T20:51:00.000-04:00

I got an email a few days ago about this campaign in Southern Africa called "Dignity. Period!". It's really quite appalling that these women don't have tampons and that the cost is so disproportionate to their so-called salaries. I tried to donate money online, but they only accept donations from the UK. I wonder if they know about The Keeper over there. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than those toxic products the "sanitary" industry expects us to put inside ourselves and would solve their problems (assuming they have clean water, which is probably dubious too).

Goverment of Saskatchwan [double sic]

2006-05-19T18:49:00.000-04:00

In honour of a good friend who has the misfortune of actually having to live there, a political post from Yahoo News that made me laugh. The only problem is that this takes the fun out of Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans when even we Canucks fuck it up too:

Missing "e" causes grief for Saskatchewan party
Thu May 18, 4:42 PM ET
A missing 'e' has put a Canadian provincial party firmly on the defensive after the opposition Saskatchewan Party spelled the name of its own province wrong.
The mistake showed up in a television commercial that listed complaints about the accomplishments of the present provincial government, but spelled Saskatchewan as Saskatchwan.
In a previous document, the party had missed the 'n' from the word government.
"Mr. Speaker, if you can't spell government and you can't spell Saskatchewan, but you want to be the government of Saskatchewan, you'd think you'd at least get one of them right," Premier Lorne Calvert said of the gaffes.
The party wants to oust Calvert's government in the next election, which is likely in the next year or so.
"The opposition is using this to question our credibility," said Ian Hanna, Saskatchewan Party's director of communications.
The word Saskatchewan comes from "Kisiskatchewani Sipi," the Cree name for the Saskatchewan River that means swiftly flowing river. It was altered to Keiskatchewan before the modern spelling was adopted in 1882, according to Natural Resources Canada.

Fun with the Census

2006-05-19T18:32:00.000-04:00

Ok, so technically Census day was Tuesday, so I'm a bit late creating this blog if I want anybody to see this or actually care, but the fact that StatsCan spent Canadian tax dollars to pay US bomb-builder Lockheed Martin to create the online version of our Census and to read the paper forms is absolutely aberrant! This site provides some really fun and creative "minimum cooperation" methods to screw with the paper form so Lockheed Martin's computer system can't read it. I filled it out (twice--cuz I'm bilingual and it didn't say not to!) with some tricks of my own and was laughing my ass off for a good two or three hours after I dropped it in the mail. Nothing beats screwing the government, in my opinion; it's unfortunate it's only once every five years!

The Onion on Academia

2006-05-19T18:06:00.000-04:00

Here are some of my other all-time favorite Onion posts. Why be bitter about academia when it's so damn funny?

TA Spotted at Bar

Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu

Shakespeare Was, Like, The Ultimate Rapper

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs to Shut the Fuck Up

University Implicated in Checks-For-Degrees Scheme

Band Teacher Gay in Retrospect

Fellow Dormmates Warned About Christian in 462

Hilarious Hamlet Essay Circulated In Teachers' Lounge

I'm Pretty Sure I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

You Look Like You Could Use An Elizabethan Adventure On The Holodeck -- Shakespeare and Star Trek together put me in nerd heaven! Ah, but if you'd seen my old site, you'd already know that!

Hé ben, j'ai un blogue!

2006-05-19T15:57:00.001-04:00

Et voilà, c'est fait, j'ai finalement un blogue à moi. Puisque tout le monde et son chien en a un, me semble que c'était le temps de le faire. Quoi que j'en avais un ben avant que "blog" ever even existed as a word! I wasn't going to post a link to it, but since anyone could Google it in two seconds flat anyway, I might as well show you the ancienne substantifique moëlle de Pantagruelle, back in the day, with the cavaet that Pantagruelle then n'est pas du tout Pantagruelle maintenant.

Who is this particular identitary manifestation of Pantagruelle anyway? Well, Chapter 2 of Rabelais' (first-written, but narratively-second) novel says:

car Panta en Grec vault autant à dire comme tout: & Gruel en langue hagarene vault autant comme alteré

So that would make Pantagruelle, celle (pas celui) qui espère alterer le monde by her passage through it... Really, otherwise, what would be the point? Who'd want to leave it in the rather repulsive state that it's in now?

And despite being named after that wonderfully carnivalesque and just plain fun Renaissance bard Rabelais, this Pantagruelle also has a particularly strong penchant for Shakespeare. Whether or not being a Shakespearean qualifies one to alter the world is highly debatable, but that shall be fodder for other (cynical?) posts on the state of the academic profession...

The profession can't be entirely bad though, since it provides us with such humour as this piece from yesterday's version of The Onion. This blog is still here, so let's hope that means my IBM doesn't think that it's entirely senseless rambling, at least not yet!