Fall 2018
News
The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
Writers’ Edition
Fall 2018 — Special Writers’ Edition
News
The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
CONTENTS
Editor: Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84)
Nous praktikos: Elisabeth Stones (FYP 2005–06)
Student Editor: Kate Barkhouse (FYP 2018–19)
Design: Co. & Co.
Front Cover: Gospel of Ebbo, Saint Matthew, Evangelist. c. 816–835. Back Cover: Photo by Anya Deady.
Editor’s Note: We Are All Writers by Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84)
22.
Dr. Evan King’s FYP Morning Playlist
13. Masterclass By Kip Johnson (FYP 2018–19)
25.
1. Finding Ourselves Tied in Knots (and learning to love it) by Ben Caplan (FYP 2005–06)
13. Hi! My name is Ozzy. by Angela Negus (FYP 2018–19)
Arrival at King’s and First Encounters with FYP by Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls
26.
3. How to Write Better Essays: Tips from The FYP Writing Coach, Dr. Mark Burke (FYP 1999– 2000) interview by Kate Barkhouse (FYP 2018–19)
14. Science and Nature by Dr. Ian Stewart
Prince Scholarship Re-established by Dr. Susan Dodd
15. Collegium
27.
16. Fathers and sons poem by Christopher Snook (FYP 1994–95)
On Fear and the King’s Open House by Kate Barkhouse
28.
Why Gawain? by Elizabeth Edwards
17. The Mythical Method and Creative Writing in the Foundation Year Program by Christopher Snook
29.
Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in 24 Hours by Emma Oliver (FYP 2017–18)
30.
Announcements
18. Boethius Study Day by Dr. Susan Dodd
31. All Humans Are Pregnant by Michelle Wilband (FYP Senior Fellow since 2017)
4. Plotinus Exegesis Writing by Anya Deady (FYP 2018–19) 6. Is this the Dream of our Reunion? poem by Ata Zargarof (FYP 2017–18) 6.
Excerpt from The Agave Project by Sue Goyette
7. Deal with the Devil: On the Road with FYP Recruiting by Tim Currie 8. FYP for fogies by George Cooper
since 2017)
19. Towards the good that we each know… FYP and YouthNet by Sarah Griffin (FYP 2016–17)
32.
2019: Picture Yourself in Florence
19. …FYP Nights by Anja Pearre
32.
Yet... how is this? poem by Dr. Susan Dodd
20.
33.
My Love, As Ever. poem by Sabina Willmott (FYP 2018–19)
The Trojan Women: Engaging, but in a horrifying way by Emma Steinke (FYP 2016–17)
9. HYP Kids by Owen Pauli (FYP 2018–19) 9. From Migration to Fear: HYP 2018–19 by Laura Penny (FYP 1992–93) 10. FYP as a Come From Away, By Ewout van Waasbergen (FYP 2018–19)
From left: Dr. Susan Dodd, editor; Kate Barkhouse, student editor; Elisabeth Stones, nous praktikos.
10. Jude’s Philosophical Dogs 11. Machiavelli Redux by Dr. Simon Kow 12.
Honeymoon with my Doctor-self by Dr. Asha Jeffers (FYP Faculty Fellow
EDITOR’S NOTE We are all writers here in FYP. In this, each of us is joining generations in “grappling with intractable questions,” as Ben Caplan might say. As we grow into ourselves as writers—in whichever of the ways we will live out that title, and however we determine that we’re actually “grown”—we pass through seasons. The F YP season can be frustrating but at the same time, as Evan King likes to say, it is “mind-melting.” And this intense agon—this wrestling match between the discipline of convention and the glory of fleeting contact with bright spirits from the past—can be immeasurably fruitful. Writing is one of the few things that we can make better just by doing more of it. When we enter the FYP essay genre, we demystify…but only for these short disciplinary exercises, these essays—or, as Michel de Montaigne insists assays, from the French “to try.” FYP essays are attempts, sketches, and studies. As the FYP Writing Coach, Dr. Mark Burke exhorts, we can make great gains if we “think of it more like learning a skill and less like writing a beautiful song or something like that.” Don’t stop writing songs…never, ever stop
writing songs! Write creatively along side of your essays. Good writing can get us out of scrapes and into scraps. There is no way of telling how good writing skills will fit into the work economies of the future. We can be certain, though, that as long as there are human beings, there will be people trying to come to terms with all the influences in our lives, and to engage with integrity this maddening world that we have inherited and yet make and remake daily. We want to honour our parents while finding our own voices. We want to write so that we can make sense of climate change and be part of reconciling settler culture with indigenous culture in active, palpable ways. We want to invigorate public debate, to open and sustain real critical exchange. And we want to be wary of words, and of their power to trap us in desensitized versions of our experiences. The glory of your essays right now, as “beginners” at writing, may be that you haven’t yet internalized the great and terrible secret: you will always be learning how to write. In this season of your writing life, this Foundation Year, you’re still moving with the fresh
hope that you’ll get this skillset, this toolbox of literary hammers and chisels and duct tape and Gorilla glue, and then stride off and write great stuff forever. Rest assured that we, your tutors, have been “learning to write” for as long as we can remember…and it’s still heart-breaking and mind-melting... and utterly life-affirming. Despite my usual fear that FYP News would be dull and goofy, this edition has turned into a beautiful reflection on our work together, especially as we strive to be better writers ourselves, and better supporters of one another in our writing. I hope this helps you to see more clearly that what we offer you with the dreaded “QUOTATION: Discuss” FYP essay is a chance to become a better writer by passing through a “season” of scholarly discipline that engages you in studied contact with the most vibrant writers imaginable. In the long run, we share the goal that, in whatever form it may take, each of us will as Ben Caplan says, “make my own contribution to a long and ongoing conversation.” ❧ —Dr. Susan Dodd
Finding Ourselves Tied in Knots (and learning to love it) BY BEN CAPL AN (FYP 2005– 06) Ben Caplan. The New York Times says: “he is a noisy treasure.”
I am not sure that I could have picked a better school than The University of King’s College to prepare myself for my career as a singer-songwriter. Not that I studied any music while I was at King’s. I never received a formal education in harmony or counterpoint. Instead I learned to trade in ideas and questions. I was trained in the craft of extracting thoughts from my mind and organizing them on paper. I was given the privilege of a community in which to learn, discuss, explore, and dissect ideas. Over my years at King’s I did the Foundation Year Program and dabbled in the History of Science and Technology, Early Modern Studies, and Contemporary Studies. I discussed ideas with students and professors. I wrote essays. So many essays. I found an array of fellow artists and musicians to form bands with. I performed in KTS plays. I drank my weight in sherry. I played my guitar in Cochran Bay, the Wardroom, the chapel, and Prince Hall. I had easy times and crushingly difficult times. I struggled to meet deadlines. All of this prepared me for a career in the arts better than I could have expected. I learned the skills I would need to research and write grant proposals and arts funding applications. I learned the discipline to stay
up late writing essays and I continued my practice of procrastinating by writing lyrics. I learned to love finding myself tied in knots of conflicting metaphors, and I learned the patience to keep writing and re-writing something until my ideas felt internally coherent. Most importantly, I gained an awareness of a broad array of ways to think about the
I was trained in the craft of extracting thoughts from my mind and organizing them on paper. […] I wrote essays. So many essays. world and the human condition. I’ve written my fair share of love songs and autobiographical ditties, but I’ve gotten the most joy and the most mileage out of songs that reflect on what it means to be a human being. I have King’s to thank for my sense of the rich multiplicity of ways to consider the human creature’s place in the cosmos and in relation to one another.
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I have drawn heavily from the texts that I read at King’s over the years since I’ve left. On my first album, In the Time of the Great Remembering (2011), I drew from The Sorrows of Young Werther (and stole a line from Dylan Thomas) to write my song “Down to the River.” Another song, “Stranger,” was inspired in part by my reading of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The song “Beautiful,” not as literary, is about a girl I met while working at The Wardroom. On my second album, Birds with Broken Wings (2015), I played with themes of love and consequence. It’s an album of songs that express my fascination with both romanticism and existentialism. Beauty and inescapable human responsibility. The album art is a painting which I commissioned from NSCAD alumnus Ambera Welman. It is a play on Casper David Freidrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” with some incongruous smoke stacks added to the panoramic view on the back side of the CD and vinyl. I wanted the art to reflect the questions about sublimity and decay woven through the songs. On my third and most recent album, Old Stock (2018), I worked to engage in a conversation about migration and identity. I have always been bored with songs that come
FYP – In itself and for itself
across as didactic. If my education at King’s has taught me anything, it’s that few answers are simple. To that end, I tried to write songs that are more about questions rather than answers. When I do propose answers, I nod my cap to Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal with irony and inhumanity. In my song “Plough the Shit,” I tried to articulate solutions to intractable problems through a world view that I despise. The song draws on the imagery of medieval cosmology and
even includes a large direct quotation from Pico della Mirandola to add a bit of gravitas. Through most of my work as an artist, I have tried to see myself as participating in a long and ongoing conversation. Before I arrived for my first day of FYP, I was aware that women and men smarter than me have been grappling with intractable questions about how to live for longer than my small mind can fathom. For all of my years of study, I haven’t found many answers. I have,
however, found pleasure in thinking about questions. I have broadened my awareness of how others have grappled with questions similar to mine, and I’ve been given the tools to read authors on their own terms, finding joy and inspiration in the imagery and idiosyncrasies of original works. I have been taught the chutzpah to suppose that I might produce original work of my own, and make my own contribution to a long and ongoing conversation. ❧
Reviewing Ben’s second album, “Birds with Broken Wings,” The Guardian wrote: Caplan plays the role of oversized ringmaster to the hilt. “This next one is about death!” he bellows, introducing Belly of the Worm, a swaying country heartbreaker that builds to a deafening white-noise blowout. He can also dial his mega-rasp down to a lubricated croon: the ragged soul of 40 Days and 40 Nights, a snapshot of sexually frustrated separation anxiety, is a hair away from the Afghan Whigs. Caplan closes with the emphatically theatrical Stranger, where he recounts a series of gloomy lifehacks from a gallery of mordant characters, most of whom sound like the Count from Sesame Street. It’s a rollicking end to his energised burlesque. —— https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/06/ben-caplan-review-king-tuts-glasgow-casual-smokers
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story was a “Critics Pick” from the New York Times, March 19, 2018. Alexis Soloski wrote: He looks like a rabbinical Deadhead and growls like a Yiddishkeit Tom Waits. The play is a reminder — salutary, obvious — that there’s a face behind each immigration form, a history attached to each petition for asylum. That’s a lot of babies. A lot of tangos. So many lives made possible because a young man and a young woman, hounded from their first homes, found a country humane enough to take them in and let them build another. Mr. Caplan also plays God, a bandleader’s privilege. —— https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/theater/review-old-stock-hannah-moscovitch.html
CAPL AN’S OLD STOCK WINS MASTERWORKS ARTS AWARD Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, a music and theatre production created by director Christian Barry, musician Ben Caplan, and playwright Hannah Moscovtich, has won the 2018 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award. The Award, which carries a cash value of $25,000, was presented at the Creative Nova Scotia Gala in Halifax on November 10th, 2018. Old Stock was deemed “mesmerizing in all aspects” and the “best production yet by 2b
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
theatre” by the members of the 2018 Masterworks Peer Assessment Committee. Barry and Moscovitch were also the Creators of What a Young Wife Ought to Know, a Masterworks Finalist in 2016. Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story had its world premiere by 2b theatre company at The Waiting Room in Halifax in May 2017. It then went on to Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it won a Herald Angel Award and a Sctosman Fringe First award. In 2018, the
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production won seven Theatre Nova Scotia Robert Merritt Awards, and its off-Broadway run garnered six Drama Desk Award nominations. It was nominated by 2b theatre company Producer, Karen Gross—a self-nomination which was a new option introduced by the Masterworks Foundation this year. ❧ Adapted from the Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award website.
HOW TO WRITE BETTER ESSAYS TIPS FROM THE FYP WRITING COACH, DR. MARK BURKE AN INTERVIEW WITH K ATE BARKHOUSE (FYP 2018–19), EDITOR, FYP NEWS
Kate: What do you find is the most interesting part of being the FYP Writing Coach? Mark: Well, I used to be a FYP tutor and one thing I like about this job is that I get to talk to students about their ideas. I think students used to be intimidated when I was grading them, but now they’re not, so I feel like we’re in a position of equality in a certain way, which is nice. Kate: So, what kind of advice do you like to give students when they bring you their ideas? Mark: …I often think of myself as the first point of contact where I have to translate the academic world to people who haven’t encountered it before. The advice I give is to think of this essay as a particular task that they have to accomplish, rather than a representation of their soul or their ideas or whatever…to think of it more like learning a skill and less like writing a beautiful song or something like that. Kate: What do you think are the biggest challenges for this transition into writing papers for university instead of high school? Mark: One thing that they don’t teach you so much in high school is that you have to develop your own questions. I think FYP is particularly problematic in that regard because they just give you a quotation and it says “Discuss.” A lot of my job is helping students figure out the demands and what
sort of questions they need to develop. Kate: Are there a lot of really common pitfalls that students fall into when they’re trying to do that? Mark: Yep. There are tons of them. I think the biggest one is not respecting how much evidence is required in university-level writing. Another is they want to write about themselves or something other than the text. In FYP your essays are a hundred per cent just about these texts. … Kate: I’ve found, talking to other people, that especially when students are trying to talk about how, exactly, what they’re saying is important, it’s easier to bring it out into a larger context than back into the text. Mark: Yeah. That’s the hardest part. A lot of it, too, is trying to figure out what professional academics, like their tutors, think is interesting. You know what I mean? Like that they can be interested in small things in texts rather than big grandiose ideas. That’s a hard shift to make. Kate: What would you say is the most frustrating or most difficult part? Mark: I gotta say, this is one of the least frustrating jobs I’ve ever had and it’s pretty nice in that regard. …
Think of it more like learning a skill and less like writing a beautiful song or something like that.
Dr. Mark Burke (FYP 1999–2000)
I gotta say, this is one of the least frustrating jobs I’ve ever had… Kate: Do you remember what your first university paper was like? Mark: I did FYP as a student—I remember that I had basically all the problems that anyone else had. I wrote a paper on Dante that I found a copy of like 10 years later and I reread it and it was just… atrocious dribble. So, I remember not being good at writing for sure. Kate: I’m hanging on to mine, hoping they get better with age. Not in a quality better, in an entertaining better. Mark: Yeah, it’s like looking at a picture of yourself dressed up in a hilarious costume. They just don’t age well, trust me. Especially when you think they’re really good and you read them again and go … “Oh God.” Kate: I wanted to ask you about peer review—if you’ve got any advice for us when we’re reading each other’s papers and trying to help each other write better, what we could look for. Mark: Yup. I can give tips that I try to apply with students. One thing that I’ve seen happen—this sounds mean-spirited—but the person reviewing the paper almost wants to impress the person by their wisdom. I think not only is it morally bad to do that, but it can be counter-productive; they give a lot of really complex advice about ideas and so on that the student can’t take in and can’t understand. Another thing is an excessive emphasis on grammatical rules. In my experience, students really don’t respond well or don’t take up grammatical rules so
Above: Clay Tablet with Cuneiform, Ur III, c2200–2000 BCE. Creator: Sumerian. Right: Stylus Estruscan no date.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
their attention to their argument as much as you possibly can. A lot of students think that better writing means learning how to write sentences better, which it can, but if they know how to write a sentence the problem is structuring and presenting an argument
Mark: I teach classes too—I’ve tried to do it myself. I don’t know how successful I’ve been at it, but… Kate: Any general words of wisdom for us FYP students moving into our second semester?
If you’re worried just keep trying to improve and you will improve. And your mark will reflect that.
Photo: Sam Landry
clearly. Ask them to tell you their argument without looking at their paper. If they can’t do that, or if they stumble a lot, it can mean that they don’t actually have an argument.
Kate Barkhouse monkeying around, editing FYP News in a study carrel (a wooden box of calm and concentration) in the basement of the King’s library.
much. …A general thing you can do is help them rewrite a paragraph in the way that you think it should go. Another thing is to draw
Kate: Are there any comments that you’ve heard tutors give that have been particularly interesting? Mark: One thing I’ve noticed is how good the tutors are at giving feedback! This year tons of the tutors are typing out their feedback, which I think is super helpful. Some of them still don’t and they have bad handwriting... But one thing they’re good at is giving positive feedback that doesn’t sound phony. A number of tutors, especially the younger tutors, are very generous in their feedback. They point out what students do properly and then tell them how to do it in the future in a nice way. Kate: As a student, I find that really reassuring, to hear that you are doing something right, I think it makes you a lot more receptive to the critical comments.
Mark: … First thing, for people who are worried about their performance in the first semester, in the final analysis if you do better in the second term, which almost everyone does, that improvement is weighted more heavily in your final grade. If you’re worried just keep trying to improve and you will improve. And your mark will reflect that. So, if you’ve gotten five C+s in a row or five Fs in a row—that’s very unlikely—it’s very unlikely that that will be your final grade. Another thing I think that FYP students could stand to hear is that each individual paper is, in the grand scheme of FYP, and certainly in the grand scheme of life, not very important. So, think of each paper as an opportunity to improve, and if you fail in that improvement on one paper you’ve probably got like eleven more left to do so it’s not that big of a deal if you do poorly on one paper, so don’t stress about it. Also come see me and I’ll help you, ideally. ❧ Mark Burke (FYP 19??-9?) is the Foundation Year Writing Coach. Kate Barkhouse is the Student Editor of the FYP News, 2018–19.
Plotinus Exegesis Writing BY ANYA DEADY (FYP 2018–19) There is a clear disconnect between ancient philosophy and 21st century scholarship, one that confounds almost all contemporary analysis. In a way, that disconnect is simultaneously the most fascinating and agonizing part of what we do in the Foundation Year—we’re constantly trying to get into the heads of people who lived and died in a world that doesn’t remotely resemble ours. However, this torment is short-lived. It’s a trade-off for that one moment of insight into the primeval human condition. The agony may very well be the only means of catching the peculiar glimpse at what shaped humanity, and I think these inquiries are a priceless exchange of momentary sanity for perpetual comprehension. There are many—if not unlimited— ways to write a FYP paper, which makes it a challenging starting point. With so many texts and so many thoughts to write about, how can you possibly choose just one? How can you trust yourself to use the time you
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
have to make the most interesting, most profound, or most challenging points? If you can write about quite literally anything, at the same time it feels like you’re only able to write about nothing.
Anya Deady
My third paper was an exegesis on Plotinus’ Enneads, specifically the First Tractate of the Fifth Ennead. I knew I had to write on Plotinus from the very first sentence of the reading: “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to
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ignore at once themselves and it?” I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do it, I just knew that I had to figure out what he was trying to say. The process of writing an exegesis—or at the very least, my process of writing one— entails analyzing metaphysical context and drawing out what the author is trying to say but isn’t always explicitly saying. In a sense, metaphysics demands that you decode each sentence before you move on to the next. If you don’t understand the first premise, it’s unlikely you’ll understand the second. I like to think of it as a game of hypothetical connect-the-dots. Accordingly, because there is such a vast disconnect between Plotinus and myself, it’s easy to get a one-sided interpretation of the text rather than a critical analysis after the first reading. It follows, then, that talking about my thesis was a crucial step in understanding Plotinus’ argument. Let me be clear: understanding the text is absolutely a necessary condition to writing an essay
Photos of the King’s Campus by Anya Deady
on it. If I didn’t understand the premise of Plotinus’ first hypostasis, I would never have been able to write on the third. (Technically, Plotinus would say that I cannot comprehend the first hypostasis, and that I can only truly understand the third, but that’s beside the point.) As many of the lecturers and tutors say, to fully understand what the philosopher is arguing, you have to “dive into the text.” Only once you feel like you know the author of the text personally will you be able to write on their argument with clarity. This took me a couple of essays to discover, but I digress. The point is, it’s impossible to pretend to know something, you actually have to know it, and know it well. Once the research is done, the writing comes easy. To preface this, I’d like to clarify that in this form of critical writing, you have to emphasize clarity over style—it’s impossible to get the point across by dancing around a difficult topic. The first draft of my
Plotinus exegesis was about 2000 words, but calling it a “draft” is perhaps too generous; it was really just a stream of consciousness. However, once I had that down, I knew that there was an essay in there somewhere, I just had to find it. My Plotinus paper didn’t reflect on the context or character of the Enneads, it instead focused on what the text itself meant, which wasn’t necessarily the most interesting, most profound, most challenging, or most original idea, but I think it was an important paper for me to write. It’s strange to think that I’ve cracked an argument from the third century, and the truth is, perhaps I haven’t. I sometimes wonder if we really are so far away from that original standpoint that no ancient argument is able to be understood at any capacity in the modern world—but that doesn’t mean we should give up our efforts entirely. Still, though, I sometimes wonder if these philosophical endeavors are in vain. I’m willing to concede that perhaps they are
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I knew that there was an essay in there somewhere, I just had to find it. and that we’ll never actually achieve salvation or understand the human soul. But on the other hand, perhaps we’ll never understand our world today or the world of our ancestors if we don’t catch these ephemeral glimpses of antiquity. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
Is this the Dream of our Reunion? That which glows in the forest is the dream of our reunion. The Brothers Karamazov, whiskey, and a cold cup of coffee. Words tumble over one another, lilting like a perfect stream of crooked waters. That which glows in the forest, throbbing like a lamp. I think I am in love with the Universe and that is why I grieve. —Ata Zargarof, 29 October, 2018 Fall Chapel Retreat. Ata is the Peggy Heller Scholar of 2018–19 (for the highest grade in FYP 2017–18)
SUE GOYETTE, FROM THE AGAVE PROJECT: A MANIFESTATION OF UNKNOWING AND ONWARDS NONETHELESS
M AY 15
JUNE 8
JULY 11
I have no idea what I am doing —Sue Goyette
I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson
My last defense / is the present tense. —Gwendolyn Brooks
—— ed note: Sue Goyette, award-winning poet and creative writing professor, read from her poetry collection Penelope (Gaspereau Press, 2017) at our first FYP Night of the year. She generously let us include these images and corresponding words for FYP News.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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A Deal with the Devil —“doing a lousy job of recruiting” BY PROFESSOR TIM CURRIE, DIRECTOR OF KING’S JOURNALISM At each stop on the national lecture tour, FYP Director Neil Robertson and I have been playfully joking with prospective students that we’re doing a lousy job of recruiting. The text we’re lecturing on this year is the rather bleak tragedy Doctor Faustus. On this chilly mid-November evening at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, Neil has paused for dramatic effect on the phrase “homo fuge” to convey the gravity of the natural world rebelling against the prospect of Faustus’s unholy deal with the devil. A few minutes later, he wraps up by questioning society’s subsequent progression toward the Enlightenment with the invention of the guillotine and the killing of animals in attempts to understand vacuums of oxygen.
Next up, I launch into my presentation, showing a news photo of a devastating forest fire wrought by climate change. King’s is a super fun place. Really. Trust us. :) My role in this event is to place into current context Neil’s lecture on Faustus and the era of Christopher Marlowe. I’m arguing that a quest for absolute power can be made only in the absence of a free press. And that Marlowe was, in fact, arguing for
journalism, even though he lived in a world without it. A stretch? Perhaps. But I receive some encouraging chuckles from an audience willing to grant me some rhetorical rope. In the text, of course, Faustus makes grandiose promises of great deeds but he also pledges to vanquish his enemies. He reveals disparaging attitudes toward women. He decides hell doesn’t exist. But even if hell
mately a literal one? The consequences of our own unchecked environment abuses are still unclear. As you can imagine, our presentation really brings in the laughs. At its end, the audience seems a bit numb. But intrigued. The lecture has been billed as an authentic taste of first year at King’s. Someone points that out. More chuckles. I joke that Neil and I are going to have
…a quest for absolute power can be made only in the absence of a free press. were a figurative state of torment, as Mephistophilis suggests, he’s convinced it would still be a pretty good place for those in the one per cent. Drawing parallels to the modern day isn’t difficult. There’s ample opportunity to talk about journalism’s role in questioning those with power. I start by noting the surprising number of countries taking steps toward authoritarianism. Then I draw the audience’s attention to screenshots of recent news stories — about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Donald Trump’s language toward Stormy Daniels and Jared Kushner’s apparent avoidance of U.S. federal income tax. The argument I’m awkwardly making is that journalists have a unique role in uncovering and conveying important information the public needs in order to be effective citizens. And if the public is to avoid dire consequences of, say, debt, inequality and democratic decay, we need journalists, who serve the public interest in their reporting. There’s no one in the Marlowe play offering Faustus fact-based evidence that the deal he’s cooking up is a horrible idea. No interviews with possibly regretful outcasts from Heaven. No accounts of human suffering wrought by wanton abuses of power. Those would have served Faustus well, I argue. The final part of my presentation includes a screenshot of a story published in the Guardian about the report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the body of climate scientists that, in October, gave the world a 12-year ultimatum to take action on climate change — or face possibly dire environmental consequences. Is this prospect a potentially figurative hell of missed opportunity? Or perhaps ulti-
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to choose a happier text next year if we want to increase enrolment. A FYP alumnus in the audience says hell is a focal point of the program. Some laughter now. Then some questions, and a series of thoughtful, fresh perspectives on the presentation from prospective students. It’s clear the ideas have struck a chord and we’ve got many smart young people headed our way next September. Yes, this lecture has been on the dark side. But I’m starting to wonder if King’s students rather like it that way. ❧
FYP Director Dr. Neil Robertson, Journalism Director Prof. Tim Currie, and Registrar Julie Green on the annual national lecture tour. Photo: a friendly stranger. (Ed note: Speaking of diabolical, not only are these people hopping across the continent on reading week, but they’re doing it 3-across in seats that do not recline because they’re at the very back of the airplane.)
FYP – In itself and for itself
Photo: Susan Dodd
FYP Director Dr. Neil Robertson, Niccolo Machiavelli, and former King’s President and Board Chair Dr. George Cooper
FYP FOR FOGIES; OR “WHAT CAN FYP DO FOR US OLD FOLKS?” BY GEORGE COOPER (FYP 2018–19) Dr. Tom Curran recently reminded me about Cephalus, the host in Plato’s Republic. Socrates and his gang had just crashed Cephalus’s digs in Piraeus, then, as now, the seaport of Athens, to spend the day talking about Justice. “Come on in, boys” says good ole Ceph. “I’m an old man, free at last from the raging hormones and pheromones of youth. Bring on the philosophy!” (Note to Tom: what the h*** are pheromones?) That’s the great gift of old age. The distractions of youth are behind you. The trivial round, the common task soon overtake the busy world of commerce (in my own
case, toiling in the vineyards of the law). You are free to latch on to any passing fancy, like a daddy long-legs flitting across a mill pond and gobbling any tasty insect that floats by. Aye, there’s the rub! A month ago, at the 110% mark of life’s journey (I am 77), I found myself—if not in a Dark Wood of Error, at least in a Dark Funk. I was bored. What to do? What project could I tackle? Nothing earthly-minded, but something to stretch the old noggin after a year in full retirement mode. Just then the self-same Tom—my Guide, indeed—in his Sunday sermon at the King’s
Chapel summoned in aid not only Dante (who makes regular guest appearances in Tom’s homilies), but St. Augustine, to bolster his message. I confess I straightway left off the sermon when my Guide remarked that Auggie’s Confessions was Neil Robertson’s FYP lecture topic the very next morning. Instantly I was hooked. I had my project. I would enrol in FYP. Now I would have a fixed course of great classics. It would replace the shallow reading habits I had fallen into in my year of idleness. (The relative novelty in My Guide’s sermon of a reference to Augustine rather than a routine one to the Sommo Poeta was the trigger to my own conversion. I simply add that if you really want to ace FYP, hearing Father Tom’s weekly homilies wouldn’t hurt a bit.) My Guide also quoted Mark Twain: “‘A classic is a book that everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to actually read.’ But these are the books,” my Guide continued, “that are essential. They seep into your soul and they become a habit. The questions raised in FYP allow you to lead a better life.” Samuel Johnson enjoins us to “read hard” when we are young. How I wish I had done so! But FYP works at any age. Of late I’ve spent my evenings sitting by my metaphorical fireplace, smoking my metaphysical pipe, lost in a world of wonder as I grapple with the greatest minds of our civilization, the haze lifting only the next morning as I sit mesmerized by the erudition and eloquence of our FYP lecturers. FYP is indeed a gift beyond price, even for an old fogey. Thank you, King’s! ❧
Photo: Bennett selfie
Even as we go to press, Dr. Michael Bennett is in Australia listening to a panel of his peers present conference papers about his book. This must be a thrilling and terrifying experience. It is a tremendous honour and, we hope, an immense joy for him.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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The HYP Kids BY OWEN PAULI (FYP 2018–19) In the summer of 2017, I boarded a flight to Halifax to go to a university I was not familiar with to attend a program I did far too little preparing for. The program was HYP, or, Humanities for Young People, a sort of proto-F YP for high school students that takes place around a week over the summer and tackles a singular topic like Migration, or Fear. The topic for our group was Reconciliation, which meant tough issues, emotional bonding, and challenging self-reflection. I spent time with people from reser ves, victims of intergenerational trauma, people who were so capti-
vatingly passionate about this emotional topic that I find myself still burning with a political rage, ready at any time to explode on a rant about Stephen Harper’s 2008 “Statement of apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools” or Justin Trudeau’s continued inaction concerning the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. HYP gave me knowledge of something I knew embarrassingly little about: my country’s past and ongoing flaws, the racism that I benefit from yet, and the historical context of our socio-political reality. This shift in my understanding excited my interest in politics and philosophy: if not for HYP and the people involved in it, I would likely not be at King’s, in FYP, or possibly not even be study-
ing this field of humanities which I so love. My time at HYP showed me what the problems were, and I aspire that FYP will give me tools to someday try and help solve them. There is still a group chat on Snapchat that most of the members of HYP 2017 organized to keep in touch when our time on campus was done. We still talk at least once a week. Some of us are attending King’s this year, some will be here next year, and maybe some others the year after that. Yesterday, we celebrated as a member of HYP was accepted into the FYP program for the fall of 2019, and those few of us who experienced HYP as an enlightening precursor to this unique study at King’s, hope to welcome the newcomers back with open arms. ❧
HYP gave me knowledge of something I knew embarrassingly little about: my country’s past and ongoing flaws, the racism that I benefit from yet, and the historical context of our socio-political reality.
HYP Kids 2018, photo: Ellen de Beer from the HYP Program 2018
HUMANITIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
FROM MIGRATION TO FEAR: HYP 2018–19 BY DR. L AUR A PENNY (FYP 1992–93) King’s hosted the third session of Humanities for Young People (HYP) . HYP 2018 focused on the theme of Migration. Students wrestled with this timely topic by reading some F Y P classics—book one of Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Othello—as well as more contemporary works by Dionne Brand, and our keynote speakers, novelist Lawrence Hill and journalist Doug Saunders. HYPsters learned about the nuts and
bolts of refugee and immigration law and media coverage of migrant stories. They pondered Canadian multiculturalism, what it means to belong, and the roots of xenophobia. They also had fun! HYPsters trekked to the North End for donuts, took in a performance of Othello by HYP friends Shakespeare by the Sea, and cooked up a feast with our food workshop leaders, Chef Flavia, and Chef Abod. King’s will be hosting its fourth session
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of HYP this summer. The theme for HYP 2019 is Thinking Through Fear, and it will take place July 6 to 14. HYPsters will be encouraged to think about the political uses and abuses of fear, the psychological dimensions of fear, and our deep and weird fondness for scaring ourselves, be that in the form of tragedies, horror movies, or rollercoasters. Please check out our website, at http://hyp.ukings.ca/, for more information about HYP 2019. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
FYP AS A COME FROM AWAY BY EWOUT VAN WA ASBERGEN (FYP 2018–19) A little bit less than a year ago I made the decision to leave the Netherlands to study F YP and play soccer for the King’s Blue Devils. This choice has turned out to be challenging, interesting and above all a really good call. The first thing that I experienced as
different when I arrived in Halifax was the openness and kindness of almost all the Canadians at the King’s campus and in Halifax. I have the feeling that everyone I talk with is not only friendly—a stereotype Dutch people have about Canadians—but also truly interested in my own culture, and whether I like it here or not. This makes it really easy for an international student to settle and feel comfortable in a new and different culture. I knew that I was facing a serious challenge in FYP, reading Plato, Dante and many other great works in a language that is not my own. I always thought that my under-
The intensity of the season […] made my start in FYP a difficult one, but my teammates became great friends of mine: joining the soccer team made the start of my life at King’s really smooth and easy.
JUDE’S PHILOSOPHICAL DOGS Dr. Judyta Frodyma is a scholar of Romantic literature…and a professional dog walker. She walks only the most literary dogs. Here Dr. Frodyma is pictured with Hopper the border collie, who we must assume is named after the American painter Edward Hopper.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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Ewout van Waasbergen (FYP 2018–19)
standing of the English language was pretty well-developed, since it has been taught to me since I was 4 years old, but after reading some of the texts in FYP, I realised that I still have a lot to learn. More than once I have sat in a lecture and thought that I studied the wrong text for that day because I completely misinterpreted what I have read. This year, I will not only learn new philosophical ideas, but I will also master a different language and learn how to adjust to a culture different from my own. My first two months at King’s were mainly shaped by the UKC Blue Devil’s soccer season. The intensity of the season, with either a practice or a game every day, made my start in FYP a difficult one, but my teammates became great friends of mine: joining the soccer team made the start of my life at King’s really smooth and easy. Being a foreigner in FYP gives a little extra challenge, but with extra effort and the support I get from my classmates and professors whenever I ask for it, I can say that it is for sure possible. It’s valuable, as well, because of all the things I learn apart from the lectures and tutorials about this culture and the English language. I am really happy that I decided to hop on a plane to Canada and to become a Blue Devil. ❧
Machiavelli Redux BY DR. SIMON KOW Consider this scenario: during the second decade of a new century, a vainglorious man with largely inherited wealth is elected to govern one of the most powerful countries in the world. He calls for a massive building in a desperate attempt to secure a lasting legacy, but it stays on paper only. In the meantime, while he is beset with internal dissension and external conflict from erstwhile allies, an acute political observer publishes a book about the politics of fear which criticizes his lack of communication even with his closest advisors and his habit of changing his views based on the last person to whom he talked. I am, of course, referring to Maximilian I, Habsburg ruler and Holy Roman Emperor (a formally elected title) from 1508 to 1519. Voltaire famously quipped that this loose confederacy of German states was not holy, not Roman, and not really an empire. In a futile bid to make the Holy Roman Empire great again, Maximilian sent the Habsburg army to fight the French while defending Austrian territories from the Hungarians and the Turks. While he ensured Habsburg rule over Spain and the Americas, as well as over Bohemia and Hungary, through carefully orchestrated dynastic marriages, the German princes and cities successfully resisted his attempts at centralizing his rule over the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. He was also forced to recognise Swiss independence in 1499, which only underscored the ‘holeyness’ of the Germanic empire (and commemorated by holey Swiss cheese; the independence ceremony must have been a Swiss ‘fun do’). As consolation for his at-best mediocre reign, Maximilian—as described in a recent piece in The Public Domain Review— commissioned an ‘extraordinary, grandiose triumphal arch in around 1515 to glorify himself and his ancestors’ (pictured right). The odd thing about the arch is that it was never intended to be built in stone, but instead would take the form of giant posters plastered at ‘town halls and ducal palaces
Luther, the boxer, thinking about his unworthiness.
G UN WARNIN EX TREME P
throughout the Empire’. The Roman-style arch has gates devoted to Praise, Honour, and Nobility and illustrations of Maximilian’s family tree, ancestors, significant events during his reign, other rulers, and even episodes from his private life. Seven hundred copies were made from woodcuts designed largely by Albrecht Dürer and his pupils. One could say that those aspects of the arch glorifying the riches of his empire were intended to show off his ‘Maxi-millions’, while the posters as a whole were meant to create an en-Dürer-ing legacy. Researchers at FYP News’ Department of Holy Roman Imperial Propaganda Posters have uncovered evidence that the slogan shouted at campaigns drumming up support for this triumphal arch around the Empire was (in subdued caps-lock) ‘BUILD THE WALLPAPER!’ Students in the Foundation Year Program may be interested to know that Maximilian I is mentioned unfavourably in works by the Italian political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli. In the Discourses on Livy, Book 2, Chapter 12, Machiavelli adduces the example of rulers placing their trust in the Emperor Maximilian to demonstrate the folly of forming a relationship with a prince
FRODO!
who has more prestige than power. In other words, Machiavelli regarded Maximilian’s power as ‘paper thin’. Even more damningly, Maximilian is criticized in chapter 23 of The Prince for his ineptitude in dealing with flatterers and untrustworthy advisors. Machiavelli writes: ‘Because the Emperor is a secretive man, he communicates his plans to no one, nor does he take their advice. However, when he is carrying out his plans and they begin to be
Consider this scenario: during the second decade of a new century, a vainglorious man with largely inherited wealth is elected to govern one of the most powerful countries in the world. recognized and uncovered, they begin to be criticized by those around him; and he, just as if it were a simple matter, lets himself be diverted. From this results the fact that those things he does one day, he undoes the next; and that no one ever understands what he wants or what plans he is making, and that no one can rely on his decisions’ (p. 81; trans. Peter Bondanella, Oxford University Press, 2005). Fortunately, in 2018, we should be thankful that this sort of chaotic and incompetent leadership in conjunction with deluded grandiosity is a thing of the past. ❧ Simon Kow is Coordinator of Section 3, and author of the blog Early Modern Times.
Finnegan
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Pandora and Pythagoras, Dr. Elizabeth Edwards’ dogs are forces alternately of feminine chaos and mathematical selfcontrol. Here, they adore Dr. Frodyma.
FYP – In itself and for itself
HONEYMOON WITH MY DOCTOR-SELF BY DR. ASHA JEFFERS (FYP FACULTY FELLOW SINCE 2017) This summer, I went on a honeymoon with my doctor-self. After surviving a PhD, which is a wild and wearying process, it’s important to, as Parks and Recreation would suggest, treat yo’ self. It’s always a good idea to remember that you aren’t just a head in a jar, to reconnect with your body and your instincts, and I like to do that through travelling. So, I went to Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Kenya, and Ethiopia to see friends, experience some things, and mind other people’s business. It was great. The world is big and humans are interesting wherever you go. And since thinking about humans, particularly how and why they move and how that moving affects them and their children, is basically my whole bag, this trip was also a good reminder that the stuff I spent the last several years writing about is very real and very relevant to people’s lives all over the world. I also have a big soft spot for statues and these pictures are a few of my favourites from this trip. Enjoy! ❧
Photos By Dr. Asha Jeffers
TO BLUE MOUNTAIN WITH THE PRESIDENT President Bill Lahey led students on a wilderness hike to Blue Mountain, the highest point on Halifax’s Chebucto Peninsula. The Blue Mountain Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area is close to Bill’s heart: its creation as a protected area was one of the highlights of his time as Deputy Minister of Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment.
Manaf Mansour, Bill Lahey, Bayleigh Marelj, Brooklyn Connolly.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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Kip Johnson
MASTERCLASS BY KIP JOHNSON (FYP 2018–19) Last Friday, I was lucky enough to attend a masterclass by Barbara Hannigan on singing and the life of a professional solo performer. The audience, who were mainly Fountain School students and members of the community, got a very personal look into the workings of world class orchestras, operas, and soloists. It was a very unique learning experience, as before this point I had never had the chance to learn from someone who had objectively “made it” as an internationally renowned performer. From my perspective as an almost complete beginner, taking whatever opportunities present themselves, it was astounding to hear the level of selection that Hannigan could make in the shows
and repertoire that she wanted to perform. This shift from taking what is offered to you to negotiating setlists with entire orchestras seems to me the greatest demonstration of the dizzying heights to which musicians can aspire. For me and the rest of the students, perhaps the most valuable part of the masterclass was Hannigan’s critique of upper-year students’ performances. Her advice focused less upon technique and other aspects that could be achieved through individual practice, emphasizing the aspects of singing that make the music into a performance art. The lessons from the class lend themselves to actors, singers, and any other artists who use spoken word in their work. A nugget of wisdom that really stuck with me was Hannigan’s approach to how emotion is expressed. For any performance, the artist will have read, reread, analyzed and
over-analyzed every word, ensuring that every syllable is in its correct place with its correct inflection. Here is where the trap lies. When people are expressing intense emotion, they do not have each word in their outburst planned before they begin. For artists with scripts, the risk of sounding robotic is very high, especially for singers, who can actually telegraph the emotion they will convey in their next lines through how they sing and breath leading up to that segment of their performance. For a firstyear fool who assumed that as long as he sang the correct words, the emotion would be communicated fully, this was a welcome thunderbolt. I just hadn’t thought about how much difference there was between the way that I spoke normally and how I would sing those same words. The masterclass with Hannigan was truly that: a class in which a master of the art improved the abilities of every person in attendance. To listen to and, more importantly, learn from such a fantastic teacher was indescribably valuable, and improved my own ability to communicate with an audience more than any other two-hour segment of my life. Barbara Hannigan is the ideal teacher: a master of their craft who does not look down on those who are striving towards
Barbara Hannigan is a Nova Scotia opera singer of great talent, generosity and renown.
their level but helps everyone they meet to better themselves in the pursuit of excellence. It was an incredible learning experience, and a great motivator to continue working towards perfection. ❧ Kip Johnson is an aspiring musician.
HI! MY NAME IS OZZY. TR ANSL ATED BY ANGEL A NEGUS (FYP 2018–19) I’m a six-month old albino African Pygmy Hedgehog. I live in Alexandra Hall with a FYP student. I’m an emotional support animal, and always manage to find a way to cheer up my human and everyone who meets me! Some of my favourite things are mealworms, running in circles all night long and hiding in people’s hair. I’m nocturnal and love to cause mischief at night when my
owner can’t stop me. Pouring my water out into my bedding is lots of fun! I love it when my owner reads her FYP texts with me. My favourites so far have been Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’ Birds. My favourite thing about living here at King’s is spending time outside in the Quad. Hope to meet everyone one day! ❧
“My favourites so far have been Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’ Birds.”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
SCIENCE AND NATURE BY DR. IAN STEWART Everyone has heard of climate change, and some have heard of the ‘Anthropocene’. What is becoming clear to us is that the traditional distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’, which has served a fundamental assumption affecting every aspect of modern intellectual culture (including
an eye on the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline proposed expansion, connecting the interior of Alberta to the coast of British Columbia. In all, the dialogue is being enriched by engagement with our Indigenous peoples around what it means to ‘impact’ our world with what we do. Part of the ‘nation-to-nation’ relationship that Canada is entering into in renewed ways will involve a frank reconsideration of the relationship between Indigenous conceptualizations of the ‘socio-ecological’ and those rooted in the European traditions of the natural and social sciences.
Part of the ‘nation-to-nation’ relationship that Canada is entering into in renewed ways will involve a frank reconsideration of the relationship between Indigenous conceptualizations of the ‘socio-ecological’ and those rooted in the European traditions of the natural and social sciences. Sperm Bomb. Nancy Spero 1966. Exhibition: The End of the World: Contemporary Visions of the Apocalypse, 1984. New Museum of Contemporary Art. New York.
Angel Announces the Fall of Babylon, no date. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
assumptions of our power over nature) no longer serves us well (if it ever did). Humans are shaping the planet, and in turn the planet is shaping who we are and what we do. The term ‘socio-ecological system’ is one way of expressing this basic reciprocity. For a long time, I have worked in pretty obscure topics concerning 16 th and 17th century philosophers, and their attempts to contribute to “natural philosophy” (what the natural sciences were called back then) and the institutions (such as universities) where this was pursued. What interests me more than ever is the situatedness of natural philosophy within broader questions about the human condition. Recently, I’ve also turned my thinking to these dynamics in their contemporary forms. I am applying ‘systems’ thinking to a very specific area of environmental science: assessing what the human ‘impact’ is of our efforts to extract materials and energies from the earth. The last 100+ years has been the era of oil (or hydrocarbons more generally), and how we proceed to survive on this planet will depend a lot on how we continue—and don’t continue—to depend on hydrocarbons to fuel our transportation, our agriculture, our materials production (eg. plastics) and our energy needs. An important part of that ‘how’ concerns the ways we conceptualize, measure, talk about, react to and make laws concerning just what we think our ‘impact’ is…on the planet and on ourselves. In my work I get into the weeds of how our contemporary environmental and social sciences shape that conversation around ‘impact’. For a number of reasons, I have focussed recently on offshore oil and gas development in Canada, but also with
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Dr. Ian Stewart
King’s is a great place to think, discuss and write about these topics, not least because at King’s we recognize the value of studying the past for its significance and influence on the present. In my experience, being familiar with the complex history of our attempts to know nature (science) helps me think about these very present-centred challenges all the more imaginatively and creatively. I’m grateful for every colleague and every student at King’s with whom I have the privilege of forming intellectual community in which to think, argue, dialogue and learn. ❧ Dr. Ian Stewart teaches in the FYP and the History of Science and Technology (HOST) program, including courses on ancient and medieval and early modern science and medicine, the history of brewing, and maybe in future… courses with racy titles like “Science and the political: what’s democracy got to do with it?”
COLLEGIUM
Tutors C Snook, A Jeffers, J Frodyma
Casey, the dog in the Quad with the president
Students wait to make morning announcements to the FYP Class
Vice-President Peter O’Brien (FYP 1984-85) at library
Zach Pottie, Port Hawkesbury, is the Pat Dixon Technical Assistant for FYP 2018–19
Photo: Tim Lapp (FYP 2018-19)
Dons at Dante Live: Mariam Henna, Maria Bartholomew, Madeline Wheeler, Ginny Wilmhoff, Katie Merwin, Aiden Ingalls, Aaron Shenkman, Andrew Griffin
Emily Gorman FYP 2018–19
FYP Open Mic at Chapel. Patrick Reynolds (FYP 2018–19)
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Tutors Judyta Frodyma, Christopher Snook, Neil Robertson
FYP – In itself and for itself
Fathers and sons (for John) Telemachus, too, waited years for his father to come home. The wars took him, John — men crippled by hunger, devoured by giants, men whose homesickness was a dull fame, extinguished. They first saw one another in the island hills, the pungent smell of goat and wild thyme, bread baked over charcoal. His father was dressed in beggar’s clothes. It’s a wonder we don’t all come back like Odysseus — from reverie or the office, from wherever it is we go more often now. The rosy fingertips of dawn reach west into the shadows. We all come begging, still points of arrival one for another but ourselves in pilgrimage. I come begging too, my friend, wanting to wait with you and watch by an open fire, the smell of sage and thick coffee, to see if this homesickness is illusion or remembrance. —Christopher Snook
370–60 BCE Eumaeus and Telemachus, and Odysseus
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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THE MYTHICAL METHOD AND CREATIVE WRITING IN THE FOUNDATION YEAR PROGRAM BY CHRISTOPHER SNOOK (FYP 1994–95)
In 1923, T.S. Eliot described a method of literary creativity that will be familiar in practice, if not in name, to every student of the Foundation Year Program. The ‘mythical method’ (exemplified in Eliot’s own epochal poem The Waste Land and in James Joyce’s paradigmatic modernist novel, Ulysses) juxtaposes images, characters, and themes from vastly different historical contexts in a given work as though they are contemporaneous with one another. These fragments of diverse literary traditions— combined, assimilated, and synthesized— generate meaning through the persistent habit of allusion. Remarkably, Eliot’s method describes the very thing students have been discovering this year—that the habit of allusion is one of the most pervasive features of the literary and philosophical quilt (tattered, imperfect, and partial!) that we study each year. Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, is more meaningful for us because of its careful reflection on the Homeric tradition; Dante becomes richer as we unearth the strands in his remarkable synthesis of literary, philosophical and theological traditions; Petrarch’s outing to Mont Ventoux is something more than travel literature because of his conscious employment of tropes from Augustine’s Confessions.
Photo Elisabeth Stones
“Creative writers, unite!
Christopher Snook collects his FYP readings for 2018–19
Part of writing essays in the Foundation Year Program is discovering the ways that each periods’ works are haunted by those of previous ages (in much the same way the styles of the 1980s haunt contemporary fashion!). Just as importantly, each period challenges and transforms its antecedents. Though essay writing and academic publishing are the primary work of Foundation Year students and faculty alike, a signif-
icant number of people in the Program are also engaged in creative writing of wonderfully diverse kinds—from fan fiction to poetry, from short stories to original songs, from stand-up comedy to plays. No doubt the great Canadian novel is being written by a student as I type! Creative writing is one of the primary venues (as Eliot would say) for engaging organically with the great works of the past. Half-remembered images, fragments of texts, the cosmological musings of earlier ages, even the major moments of historical triumph and crisis, offer a means by which to think creatively the experience of the present moment. Sue Goyette’s Penelope illustrated this at the year’s very first FYP evening event. Below is an example of poems that try to think across time, using old images to muse on even perennial realities.
…And give the mythical method a try.” A new semester is around the corner. Creative writers, unite! …And give the mythical method a try. Yours might be the work that, like Eliot’s The Waste Land, articulates the mood of an entire generation. ❧
Charity, Hope, and Faith: Dante’s allegory is of dancing women lit with the symbolical colour of the virtue they embody—passionate red, growing green, pure white clarity. Three circling women, then advancing, danced: at the right wheel; the first of them, so red that even in a flame she’d not be noted; the second seemed as if her flesh and bone were fashioned out of emerald; the third seemed to be newly fallen snow. And now the white one seemed to lead them, now the red; and from the way in which the leader chanted, the others took their pace, now slow, now rapid. (Dante, Purg.29.121–129)
Charity, Hope, and Faith. Engraving by Gustave Dore, 1885.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
BOETHIUS STUDY DAY BY DR. SUSAN DODD Saturday, October 27, 2018 FYP tutors spend an unreasonable amount of time together. Four days a week we sit and listen to each other lecture, we share students, some of us share offices, we gather to discuss the best ways to teach things from outside our text-based, literary and philosophical specializations, we gather to talk about the week’s readings on Friday at General Tutorial, and after that we gather for drinks in the Senior Common Room. This intense collegial life is unusual compared to other university departments: it is downright unnatural. Stranger still is that many of us gathered one Saturday in the middle of term to listen to papers about Boethius—a giant of medieval philosophy and poetry, but who is not on the FYP curriculum this year. Boethius (477–524) wrote Consolatio Philosophiae or The Consolation of Philosophy while he was in prison awaiting
Lady Philosophy and the Wheel of Fortuna.
Luther bringing Dr. Evan King back to earth after Paradiso. (Speaking of the unusually close collegial life of FYP: Dr. King shares an office with Dr. Frodyma… and thus all her philosophical friends).
HOMER BY THE SEA: Dr. Neil Robertson FYP Director reads to students from The Odyssey at Point Pleasant Park during Orientation Week.
Photo Cédric Blais (FYP 2015–16). Day Student Societey.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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his execution. Perhaps the most influential of all medieval secular writings, The Consolation guides us through the question of why we suffer while evil people seem so totally happy…and as the exhausted and purified philosopher-prisoner says to Lady Philosophy: “You are the greatest comfort for exhausted spirits. By the weight of your tenets and the delightfulness of your singing you have so refreshed me that I now think myself capable of facing the blows of Fortune. You were talking of cures that were rather sharp. The thought of them no longer makes me shudder; in fact I’m so eager to hear more, I fervently beg you for them.” Organized by Dr. Elizabeth Edwards, we heard papers from colleagues at Dalhousie Classics and from Dr. Tom Curran, Dr. Elizabeth Edwards, Dr. Neil Robertson, and Dr. Ian Stewart. This study day was a rare and delightful chance to discuss a crucial text at a high level but without the usual rigmarole of a scholarly conference. ❧
TOWARDS THE GOOD THAT WE EACH KNOW… FYP AND YOUTHNET
Perhaps life ought to be about pointing one another towards the good that we each know: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to love it.” (A s former K ing’s Chaplain, and founder of St. George’s YouthNet, Father Gary Thorne said in his final FYP lecture last year, playing on a famous quote from Karl Marx). For a second semester now, over twenty young students that attend St. George’s YouthNet have been bringing life to campus with their loudness and laughter once a week for one-on-one tutoring by King’s students. St. George’s YouthNet is a non-profit program, originally established by King’s students approximately twenty years ago, to serve children from low-income households in the North End of Halifax. The vision of the program has never been to advance academics. Rather, in the name of friendship, each child knows that someone is waiting to spend time with them each week, and that because of this it is important for them to show up. It is only
King’s Advancement
BY SAR AH GRIFFIN (FYP 2016–17)
FYP and YouthNet.
through friendship, knowing one another, and being responsible for one another, that boundaries are recognized and overcome. Any success of the program thus far is thanks to the dedication of King’s students, many of whom are in FYP, who dedicate themselves weekly to the project of friendship. Not only are there twenty FYP students
who show up on a regular basis, but there are at least twenty more who only wish there were another YouthNet child so that they too could tutor someone. Perhaps, because of this loving dedication shown by so many, some of these YouthNet kids, ten years from now, will be returning to campus once again to begin FYP. ❧
friends several times a week; baroque music makes such impromptu gatherings for pleasure possible and rewarding. For years Robert Crouse was our keyboard person at Gerta Josenhans’ on Monday nights. Though we liked to play a summer concert or two at Crousetown church, the performance there was only one of many ingredients of those experiences: Robert served dinner with his garden vegetables and flowers, we sang grace together in canon, we swam in Robert’s grandfather’s millpond, we admired his garden of ancient rose varieties, we walked back from church on the dark country road under the stars, we got lost in Robert’s helical library which ended at the center with one chair. Robert knew that the world was coherent and could be harmonious. It was years before I attended a Dante lecture and heard Robert speak with that resonant, assured voice. Monday nights he hardly spoke. 6. In Crousetown we found intimations of Dante’s well-ordered world, but baroque has its own expression of coherent wholeness. In trompe l’oeil painting for instance: boundaries are fluid where painted angels may cavort before God in heaven, at the same time spilling bodily from the remote cupola by stretching a careless marble foot into the three-dimensional space of the church beneath. Suffused by spirit, membranes are
permeable. There is simply nothing extraneous which needs to be extirpated and arbiters of good taste throw up their arms in despair. 7. FYP kids get to read and hear and peruse and act and smell and taste examples of western cultural accumulation with permeable membranes between the starring items and with navigational guidance. I trust that their supple metaphorical muscles become adept at balancing opposites in a rich Frankensteinian comparison, effort applied to the world’s urgent need of revivifying all those dead thoughts with a rhythmic heartbeat. Good night Neil, have a lovely summer. —Anja Pearre ❧
… FYP NIGHTS Dear Neil, I should have known; after spoiling me with exciting events in the FYP nights, Professor Robertson is going to ask me to write an essay to pay for my overindulgence. I’ll make it short. 1. A warm thank you with all my heart to you and the lovely King’s people who variously included me, steered me, shook my hand, emailed me, wrote (!) me snail mail, made me think and took me under wing. 2. My return to the King’s orbit, as it were, occurred after a difficult time in my life and was vastly therapeutic. Your FYP events for me enabled major renovations of my own foundation. 3. When I entered King’s (/Dal) my parents urged me to take as many different courses as possible. Back then I had to devise my own program to encompass as much of the universe as possible, but few students or especially professors were interested in interdisciplinary comparisons in that age of specialization. 4. A recent New Scientist article proposed a refined understanding of intelligence: it connects multifaceted networks in the brain and makes disparate nerve centres fire in synch. A good education aims to do that. 5. I play amateur music with assorted
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Anja Pearre (King’s B.A. 1962) is a great friend to the FYP, and she faithfully attends our FYP Night events. This year’s FYP Nights have included Zuppa Theatre’s Pop-up Love, DTS’ Dr. Faustus, Medieval Chant, and Renaissance Music.
FYP – In itself and for itself
Photo: Emma Steinke
CL ASSICS IN THE QUAD 2018
The Trojan Women: Engaging, but in a horrifying way BY EMM A STEINKE (FYP 2016–17), DIRECTOR
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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I was nervous to direct a play with as much historical, political, and emotional tenor as this one, but am incredibly proud of the end result, and feel like I was able to be a part of something really meaningful. My goal was to create a piece of theatre that was engaging, but in a horrifying way. I never for a second wanted the audience to fall under the impression that they were watching nothing more than an Ancient Greek play—the tragedy happening in front of them is not confined to the quad but has been a part of our world for thousands of years. I wanted to make the audience question how our politics are related to Ancient Greek acts of war. How can humans do this to one another? How can we let ourselves be complicit? ❧
Photo: Emma Steinke
Photo: Hayley Frail (FYP 2017–18)
What drew me to Trojan Women was its ability to transcend its ancient roots. The stories of the women of Troy are, sadly, a universal, repeating across the world over the course of centuries. When I was researching past productions of the play, I found that it had been adapted time and time again in order to reflect the aftermath of wars; there was an adaptation with contraction from holocaust and Hiroshima survivors, a Nigerian adaptation representing the fall of the Owu kingdom, an adaptation which comments on the US invasion of Iraq, a Syrian production, and an adaptation which I used heavily in my own script by Jean Paul Sartre which critiques European imperialism in Asia. This play is so universal due to the unfortunate and unavoidable universality of war.
CAST LIST
Poseidon Athena Hecuba Talthybios Cassandra Andromache Helen Menelaus
Luke Cameron Abby Hunter Leela Shamash Willum Watt Mia Denison Ana Dinino Meg Smith Sam Barringer
Chorus: Lara Van de Venter, Frances Hayward, Elise Boyle, Kaija Jussinoja, Isabella MacKay, Hermione Davis, Emily Smiciklas Produced by Ghislaine Sinclair and Noah Harrison Directed by Emma Steinke
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FYP – In itself and for itself
DR. EVAN KING’S FYP MORNING PLAYLIST To intensify FYP’s immersive character—and to soothe and to delight—Dr. Evan King curates a FYP morning playlist. Students who have not yet made a practice of finishing their readings as the lecture hall fills might want to check out Dr. King’s pairings of FYP topic with music from across genres and eras. Section One—The Ancient World DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Wed, 5 Sept K. Fraser
Intro Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia
Peter Pringle, “The Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian” (2014)
Thurs, 6 Sept C. Jeffers
Ancient Egypt
The Sun Ra Arkestra meets Salah Ragab in Egypt (1984)
Fri, 7 Sept D. Brandes
The Hebrew Bible: Genesis and Exodus
Jordi Savall, Jerusalem (2009)
Mon, 10 Sept N. Robertson
Greek Epic I: Homer’s Odyssey
Bob Dylan, “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962)
Wed, 12 Sept N. Robertson
Greek Epic II: Homer’s Odyssey
Louis Killen (aka Louisa Jo Killen), Sea Chanteys (1968)
Thurs, 13 Sept E. Varto
Ancient Art
Musique de la Grèce antique (Harmonia Mundi) (1979)
Fri, 14 Sept N. Robertson
Greek Epic III: Homer’s Odyssey
Sarah Kirkland Snider, Penelope (2010)
Mon, 17 Sept M. Wilband
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
Steely Dan, Aja (1977)
Wed, 19 Sept E. Diamond
Greek Tragedy: Sophocles’ Antigone
Sinead O’Connor, “I Am Stretched on Your Grave”, (1990); Elvis Presley, “Suspicious Minds” (1969); Aretha Franklin, “Respect” (1967)
Thurs, 20 Sept E. Diamond
Greek Comedy: Aristophanes’ Birds
Olivier Messiaen, Reveil des oiseaux (1953)
Fri, 21 Sept E. Diamond
Plato I: Republic and Symposium
Erik Satie, Socrate (1919)
Mon, 24 Sept E. Diamond
Plato II: Symposium
Stephen Trask, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998); Pascal Szidon (dir.), “Discours d’Aristophane”
Wed, 26 Sept E. Diamond
Plato III: Symposium
Leonard Bernstein, “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium” (1954)
Thurs, 27 Sept S. Kow
Ancient China and Classical Confucianism
Tan Dun, Hero Soundtrack (2002)
Fri, 28 Sept I. Stewart
Aristotle on Nature
John Adams, “Phrygian Gates” (1978); Bruce Cockburn, “Rumours of Glory” (1980)
Mon, 1 Oct P. O’Brien
Ancient Rome I: Virgil’s Aeneid
Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1680)
Wed, 3 Oct P. O’Brien
Ancient Rome II: Virgil’s Aeneid
Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (1680)
Thurs, 4 Oct K. Fraser
Late Pagan Spirituality and the Quest for Salvation
Ezequiel Viñao, Arcanum (2005)
Fri, 5 Oct P. O’Brien
Ancient Rome III: Virgil’s Aeneid
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens (1858)
Bob Dylan, Desire. Album cover. 1976
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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Standing Woman. Inca, 16th c. Silver. Metropolitan Museum New York.
Armada portrait of Elizabeth I, George Gower. 1588
Section Two—The Middle Ages DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Wed, 10 Oct N. Hatt
The Christian Era in Europe
Sister Marie Keyrouz, Byzantine and Maronite Chant (Harmonia Mundi) (2001)
Thurs, 11 Oct J. Vusich
Christian Art of the Middle Ages
The Hilliard Ensemble, Pérotin (1989)
Fri, 12 Oct C. Mitchell
Muhammad and the Early Muslims
Abdul Basit Abdul Samad, “Al Baqara (The Cow)”
Mon, 15 Oct N. Robertson
Augustine I
Bob Dylan, Desire (1976)
Wed, 17 Oct N. Robertson
Augustine II
Ambrose and Augustine, “Te Deum Laudamus” (387)
Thurs, 18 Oct K. Cawsey
Romance I
Millenarium, Chansons de Trouvères (2001, 2002)
Fri, 19 Oct N. Robertson
Augustine III
J. A. Hasse, La conversione di Sant-Agostino (1750)
Mon, 22 Oct T. Curran
The Divine Comedy: Inferno I
Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker (2016)
Wed, 24 Oct T. Curran
The Divine Comedy: Inferno II
Kryzstof Penderecki, Polymorphia (1961)
Thurs, 25 Oct D. Brandes
Medieval Judaism and Philosophy
Ensemble Accentus, Sephardic Romances (1996)
Fri, 26 Oct E. Edwards
The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio I
Gregorian Chant, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto” (13th century)
Mon, 29 Oct E. Edwards
The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio II
Sequentia, Dante and the Troubadours (1994)
Wed, 31 Oct E. King
The Divine Comedy: Paradiso
Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Guillaume de Machaut, Messe de Nostre Dame (14th century)
Thurs, 1 Nov I. Stewart
Late Medieval Humanism
Anonymous 4, The Second Circle: Love Songs of Francesco Landini (2001)
Fri, 2 Nov E. Edwards
Romance II: the Late Medieval
Gothic Voices, The Castle of Fair Welcome (1987) Cont’d next page
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Section Three—The Renaissance and Reformation DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Wed, 7 Nov K. Fraser
Renaissance Philosophy
Hespèrion XXI, Henricus Isaac (2017)
Thurs, 8 Nov J. Vusich
Renaissance Art
Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli (1562)
Fri, 9 Nov S. Kow
Renaissance Politics I: Machiavelli
Giorgio Mainerio, Il Primo Libro de Balli (1570s)
Mon, 19 Nov C. Snook
The Protestant Reformation: Luther
The Hilliard Ensemble, Josquin (2004)
Wed, 21 Nov R. Barker
The Catholic Reformation: Teresa of Ávila
Tomas Luis de Victoria, Officium defunctorum (1603)
Thurs, 22 Nov S. Kow
The Jesuits in China
J.-M. Amiot, Messe des Jésuites de Pékin (1779)
Fri, 23 Nov L. Beck
The Americas I: Encounters and Impact
Luis Péres Ixoneztli, En el Ombligo de la Luna (1981)
Mon, 26 Nov R. Barker
Renaissance Ambition
The Newberry Consort, A Candle in the Dark (1999)
Wed, 28 Nov Y. Wassersug
Renaissance Politics II: Elizabeth I
Thomas Tallis, Spem in alium (c. 1570)
Thurs, 29 Nov D. Nicol
The Americas II: The Settlement of Jamestown and the Discourse(s) of the “New World”
Alfonso Ferrabosco (the Younger) and Robert Johnson, music from Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611)
Fri, 30 Nov L. Penny
The Renaissance Self
François Dufault and Jacques Gallot, Compositions for Lute (17th century)
Mon, 3 Dec D.T. Brandes
A Brave New World: Shakespeare’s Tempest
Michael Praetorius, Dances from Terpsichore (1612)
Tues, 4 Dec K. Morris
A New Method: Bacon
John Dowland, Consort Music (early 17th century) Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum 1433. Detail, Augustus: Prophecy of Sibyl. Illuminated Manuscript
Photo: Matthew Steves
Elisabeth Stones (nous praktikos) at Night FYP: Zuppa Theatre’s Pop-up Love.
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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ARRIVAL AT KING’S AND FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH FYP BY REV’D DR. R ANALL INGALLS Dr. Kyle Fraser began the first FYP lecture this year with a ‘Welcome to Hell’ and the assurance that if our university career is to be transformative, it must be ‘hell’. That is, it must be allowed to challenge even what is most dear to us. I am happy to be able to say that to be at King’s and to be able to sit in on FYP lectures has been hell. My best hope is that it will long continue to be. That said, I would not want to be anywhere else. While coming to King’s has been hell, it has also been a kind of homecoming. I first encountered King’s and FYP almost thirty years ago, when I began working on the Miramichi with a King’s graduate, the Rev’d Dr. Barry Craig. He was ‘Father Craig’ then, but not yet ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor’. That came later. He is now Principal of Huron College in London, Ontario. At that time I had two degrees in Philosophy but had read almost no primary texts in the history of philosophy: not Plato’s Republic, not Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, not Augustine’s Confessions, not Dante’s Divine Comedy. Fr Craig saw a problem and set out to remedy it. We began to read together, and I continued to read when I went to take my own Parish. Years later, Dr. Craig was my boss again as Head of the Philosophy Department at St Thomas University in Fredericton. For six years I taught part-time in the department. They call it ‘part time’ even if you teach six or eight courses in a year! The task was to teach the history of philosophy from primary texts. I now had to play a part in offering the kind of education that King’s and FYP provide that I had heard about years before. There is no way to learn like teaching. It was a taste of what so many of my friends had experienced at King’s. At the same time, it was an enormous joy and privilege to teach. To
be able to place students in the same room with people who have thought deeply and profoundly about what it is to be human, about what a truly human life might be, and about the various kinds of order of which we are a part, is a great responsibility. But the rewards are great. It would be hard to imagine anything better than to be there
ideas and concepts that are at stake. But all around us in Alumni Hall or Prince Hall or in the Residences or the apartments and streets of the city is the Other, too, in the flesh. As someone has said, it is easy to love ‘humanity’ (for example), it can be death itself to love people. But beyond that kind of death may lie a kind of new life. Last year, in the final FYP Lecture, the outgoing Chaplain, Fr Dr. Gary Thorne, pointed to three great thinkers who might lead us through this kind of death that comes of actually engaging with flesh and blood to a renewed life. He suggested that from Simone Weil, the French philoso-
While coming to King’s has been hell, it has also been a kind of homecoming.
King’s Chaplain, Rev’d Dr. Ranall Ingalls; Photo by Aidan Ingalls, Fall Chapel Retreat, 2018
as students get down to business with Plato or Augustine, Hegel or Nietzsche, in lively conversations through which understanding and desire are reshaped and deepened. And so coming to King’s has been a kind of homecoming. Somehow King’s and the kind of education offered here has been in my ‘memory’ all these years, though I did not study here. But there is another hell to embrace here at King’s, closer to home. In FYP and in many other classes we learn to attend to the Other who is foreign and challenging in so many ways. We are urged to put aside anxious self-preservation in all its manifold forms and to recognize, honour and love truth, beauty and goodness wherever these are found. This is much easier when it is only
pher who died very young, we might learn something of what it is and what it costs to be attentive to one another. From Hannah Arendt, the political thinker, we might learn responsibility for one another—how we are each other’s keeper. And from the very peculiar and eccentric twentieth-century poet Charles Williams we might learn ‘co-inherence’—the ways in which we live not only for one another, but from one another—from not only the flesh-and-blood human beings we approve of or like or agree with, but especially from people we may dislike and distrust and who may dislike us and appear to threaten very much that we hold dear. So here we are together in a kind of school of friendship or charity: a ‘collegium’ in which we recognize that none of us have what is true or good as a private possession, but only in relation to one another and dependence upon one another. In this school I am a fellow-student, not a ‘graduate’ of the school of friendship or charity. The ‘classroom’ for this kind of learning certainly includes Alumni Hall, but it is also Prince Hall or Halifax’s North End or the remote Nova Scotia wilderness. It is also the Chapel. And I hope to be here with you in the years ahead, as one student put it, living ‘on the cusp of Beauty and Hell.’ ❧
Finnegan awake (after James Joyce or the puppet from Mr. Dress-up?), the Chaplain’s corgi, on chapel retreat.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
PRINCE SCHOLARSHIP RE-ESTABLISHED King’s “Prince Hall” is named in honour of a working-class Anglican priest who worked in the relief effort following the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Samuel H. Prince wrote the first-ever study of the aftermath of disaster, Catastrophe and Social Change (Columbia University Press, 1920). The Rev’d Dr. Prince lived, taught and worshipped at King’s from 1924 until a couple of years before his death in 1958. Prince was a pioneer of social welfare in Canada, and a dynamo who
provided support for others in all possible ways, from the most personal kindnesses to the most systematic social reform. The Prince Scholarship was first created in 1959 and is available to an African Nova Scotian student entering the Foundation Year Program. Many thanks especially to President Lahey and Patricia Chalmers for the re-establishment of the King’s Prince Scholarship for African Nova Scotian FYP Students. ❧
Above: Portrait of the Rev’d Dr. Samuel H. Prince in Prince Hall, the dining space named in his honour.
Photo: King’s Advancement
From Left: Gordon Sinclair Earle (Prince Scholarship Recipient, 1959), Mureena Hebert (Prince Scholarship Recipient, 1969), Chair of King’s Board of Governors Doug Ruck, University of King’s College President William Lahey.
Prince Hall, visitors gathered for the open house 2018
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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On Fear and the King’s Open House When I went to the Open House last year, I knew exactly two things about King’s. First, doing FYP meant I would get to spend my entire first year reading and writing essays. Second, it’s where my family’s token weird cousin, who apparently used to wear a cape, had gone to school. Figuring that any place one might wear a cape to couldn’t be that bad, I went off to the Open House. The thing I remember most from that day is being utterly terrified. The future loomed over me like a huge wall that could crumble at any second, and university was a physical manifestation of my fear of making the wrong decision and waking up in twenty years to the realization that I had made a terrible, unretractable mistake. I don’t know what, exactly, changed that, but I think it was that day. Maybe it was listening to Dr. Robertson lecture on the Odyssey and, despite not having done the assigned reading, could use my vague knowledge of Greek mythology (thanks, Rick Riordan) to follow along. Maybe it was after, when I turned to talk to my friend about it, and she confessed that she’d fallen asleep while I had been completely riveted for the whole
Photo: King’s Advancement
BY KATE BARKHOUSE (FYP 2018–19)
Cupcakes from Céline et al in Prince Hall.
hour, and I realized that King’s was the right school for me. Maybe it was touring the campus and spending a solid twenty minutes trying to guide that same friend, who had somehow become desperately lost, back to the quad, or maybe it was walking by a display showing off that year’s FYP books, when I laughed naively at the sheer volume of material FYP students read until it really sunk in that I would also be reading over two thousand
years’ worth of literature and philosophy. Was I less generally scared after the Open House? Perhaps not. But I stopped worrying about making the wrong decision about my university and knowing that I would be going to a school that fit me so well
The thing I remember most from that day is being utterly terrified.
Photo: King’s Advancement
made the uncertain future a lot less scary. And so, I wish every high school student who came to the Open House the best of luck. King’s is exactly as weird and wonderful as the Open House makes it seem. ❧
Prof Tim Currie Director of Journalism
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Why Gawain? BY ELIZ ABETH EDWARDS The curriculum in FYP is constantly morphing and changing, usually not radically, but by adding this new text, or taking that one out. All coordinators are working within a very limited set of parameters—as coordinator of the Middle Ages section, I decided to keep Dante, one of the most stable elements in the FYP reading list since its inception; and to make Saint Augustine’s Confessions the centre of the account of how the west became Christian—another pillar of the course. Presto: eight of the section’s fourteen lectures decided at the outset. Then it is a matter of choosing between many worthy and extraordinary texts for the remaining six. This year, as a parting gift to the program, I decided to add the anonymous Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the final day of the section. At first I thought this choice might be a bit self-indulgent. SGGK is a canonical text in my field of scholarly training and research, very well known to English students, but little
Sir Gawain on the Perilous Bed. Ivory. 14th century.
with a new, decidedly late medieval, view of the human individual as marred, isolated and internalized, as an ethically responsible subject. The poem falls in the very broad category of Arthurian literature, as do some of the much earlier lais by Marie de France that we also read this year. It is composed in alliterative verse, an archaic poetic form that ties the rhythm together with stress patterns on the same sound. In its original English, it is a mighty sonic accomplishment, highly beautiful, and, in the hands of this poet, capable of striking onomatopoeic ef fect s. However, moder n English followed the London high street of this poet’s exact contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, so we read the poem in translation. Even so, the beauty of the effects, not to mention the extremely clever plot (which I will not spoil here), came across very well. The poem begins with a beheading game. A supernatural green visitor interrupts the New Year’s games at Arthur’s court, with an offer to exchange a blow to the neck with any knight hardy enough, the strike to be exchanged a year later. Gawain accepts the challenge, only to find that the green knight can pick up his head and ride off after
Gawain and his companions are invited by huntsman into the castle of Dolorous Gard. 14th century. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
being beheaded; the playing field, then, does not appear to be level. The great thematic structures of the poem concern games and their strategies, courtly behaviour and the perfection of chivalrous manners, contracts and bargains of a surprisingly commercial nature, and a quest for knightly perfection in the intertwined virtues of Gawain, “the pentangle knight.” While the marvels and magic, no less than the traditional material and Arthurian setting, tend to situate this drama in never-land, the consideration of “troth” (truth), the quest for ethical perfection, and the individualism of that quest, as well as the fourteenth-century commercial, context instead make this text a transition to the next section, to a new conception of the human. To put it very colloquially, when introducing new texts into Foundation Year, the question is always ‘is this book great enough for a great books program?’ I believe that this work has spoken for itself. ❧
The poem begins with a beheading game.
Sir Gawain rides pensively through a forest. 14th century. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
known, as it turned out, to people outside the discipline. As out-going coordinator and now semi-retired professor, I indulged myself. Sir Gawain is a strange mixture of archaisms and traditional medieval story forms
FYP News – Fall 2018 – Special Writers’ Edition
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HELL, PURGATORY, AND HEAVEN IN 24 HOURS A DANTEAN PILGRIMAGE FOR THE HALIFA X HUMANITIES BY EMM A OLIVER (FYP 2017–18)
Photo: Susan Dodd
ing, the energy continues. The members who are not playing music or reading or moving in whatever way feels right to them as a representation of Paradise, are joining in on the laughter and the energy. We journey through the first moments of Paradise with music and dance and laughter. It’s probably the closest we can get to doing the first few cantos of Paradise justice— at four in the morning, at least. After they are done (and after Kyle and I get mugs of caffeinated tea—thank you, Brendan!), the time has come once again for the “Dawn and Friends” time slot. There
Dr Eli Diamond (FYP 1995–96) plays Sordello in Purgatory late Saturday night.
Photo: Susan Dodd
The reading ends, and a few moments later, at 11:47 pm, the swelling choral harmonies cease. I am no stranger to Halifax Humanities’ marathon readings, given the fifteen hours that I witnessed of Odyssey Live last year. This year, once I heard that the reading was the great Dantean pilgrimage (though I’m admittedly more partial toward the great Homeric one), I texted Kyle, my marathon-reading- partner and (official!) future King’s student, agreeing that we would try to stay for as long as we did last year (roughly fifteen consecutive hours).
A few weeks later, a little after nine o’clock at night, and we are both in Alumni Hall. A few dozen people are scattered around, listening to the reading of the fifth through eighth cantos of Purgatory. People come in and out as the hours go on, and the numbers steadily dwindle. Once one o’clock rolls around, we relocate to the Wilson Room, and I am more than thankful to be able to stretch out on a couch. This year surprised me. Two o’clock and Kyle and I are still awake—but we are one of several people, listening to a pair of FYP students read through their cantos, slightly disappointed that they were not permitted to swear (which is, in my opinion, justifiable). At this point last year, it was only the two of us, Dawn Brandes, local theatre prof extraordinaire, Halifax Humanities director extraordinaire, and staying-up-for-really-long extraordinaire, and whatever group was reading. Four o’clock arrives, and a very large, very energetic group of first years arrive. They work wonders to keep the group—who Dawn affectionately refers to as “over-nighters”—awake. As the group takes turns read-
Photo: Dawn Brandes
FYP students (2018–19) weave Paradise with threads of Twilight, early Sunday morning
Tutors and Elisabeth Stones in Hell, Saturday evening.
is something beautiful and poetic about the fact that it has been one year—down to the day, hour, and minute—since Kyle, Dawn, and I were reading about Odysseus in the underworld for Odyssey Live. However, my sleep-deprived brain is not capable of drawing a poetic connection. Around seven o’clock, I nod off for a little bit. It was bound to happen at some point, and so I curl up on my couch backward and let my eyes drift closed for a little while. My apologies to the groups that I missed, but the fact that I’ve been awake and present for ten readings—and a total of around twenty-four hours since I last slept—means that I can fall
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asleep without any regret whatsoever. I wake up to chatting and giggling in between readings, just before nine o’clock in the morning. I’m glad to have woken up in time for the Early Modern Studies Society team—one has to be awake and (somewhat) alert for their King’s-program-society (I would say favourite society period, but alas, my loyalty is pledged to the Day Student Society first and the EMSS second). Their energy is different, but not wholly so, to the group of first years that engaged in song and dance a few hours ago. Their semi-coordinated earth tones, multiple dramatic plateaus, and use of Florence and the Machine—among other music—leaves me feeling a bit more awake after my groggy wake-up from my short sleep. Katy’s various choreographies, whether improvised or not, are quite impressive, and work perfectly as a momentary intermission in between their assigned cantos. This year’s Halifax Humanities 101 class begins their reading at eleven in the morning—the final reading of Dante Live—and we are reminded of why we’re here. We—and when I say we I mean everyone, collectively, who has read throughout the last 24 hours— are here so that this program can go on. We are here for the sake of learning. We are a community that has read Dante, sang Dante, danced and yelled and laughed Dante. We are a community that has read Dante for twenty-four hours, knowing tons or a little or even nothing at all about this Italian man with a story to tell. We are a community that has come together to learn, and to help others learn. And what a beautiful thing that is. ❧ —ed note: Halifax Humanities offers free classes, events, and bookish community to people with low incomes. Modelled on FYP, the Halifax Humanities is taught by professors who volunteer from across Nova Scotia. Check out our collection of writings in Each Book a Drum available in the King’s Co-op book store, including writings by many King’s professors. Donate, and talk others into donating, so that we can buy books and tickets to cultural events for our Halifax Humanities friends. Go to Halifax Humanities 101 at Canada Helps.
FYP – In itself and for itself
ANNOUNCEMENTS ASHER—A THER APEUTIC FAMILY DOG BY CL AIRE FR ASER, 2018 Asher the Border Collie rides with Sandra Haycock, beloved friend to FYP and wife of our friend, colleague and teacher Angus Johnston who passed away two years ago. Asher and Angus are featured in the painting in the FYP office. Their spirit of kind brilliance inspires us still. Claire Fraser made a short film about Asher and his support for Angus and Sandra, and their daughters Harriet and Phoebe that screened recently at the Atlantic Film Festival. ❧
KING’S AND SL AVERY: A SCHOL ARLY INQUIRY In February 2018, William Lahey, the President of the University of King’s College, acting on a recommendation from the Board of Governors’ Equity Committee, initiated a scholarly inquiry to examine the possible connections between the university and slavery in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries (https://ukings.ca/administration/public-documents/slavery-scholarly-in-
quiry/). Considering that King’s is the oldest chartered university in Nova Scotia, with its own distinct history, the President and the Equity Committee decided that this inquiry should be independent from the Lord Dalhousie panel, which is an inquiry into statements and actions concerning slavery and race by Lord Dalhousie, conducted at Dalhousie University (www. dal.ca/faculty/arts/jrj-chair/LordDalhousiePanel.html). [—editor’s note: Details of the ongoing
process can be found on the King’s website: it includes ongoing historical research and public discussion.] In conjunction with the inquiry, Dr. Harvey Amani Whitfield has been invited to deliver a lecture about slavery in Nova Scotia and its aftermath, entitled “Slave Lives Matter,” on January 10, 2019, and, following the publication of the research papers, the Equity Committee is planning other events, including a scholarly panel and a larger public information session. ❧
“THE ANGUS JOHNSTON SEMINAR”
Christopher Snook’s book of poems, Tantramar Vespers, is available at the King’s coop book store.
Recently the book discussion group that meets in Alderney Gate Library changed their name. Formerly the “Wednesday Seminar” for graduates of the Halifax Humanities 101, the group voted unanimously to name their gathering after the late Dr. Angus Johnston, long-time co-ordinator of the Seminar, FYP professor, administrator, Classicist, and as he always said, “father of daughters.” ❧
Are you worried about your library fines? Don’t stress about it, pay them off with groceries, and do something good for others while clearing your own account.
FOOD FOR FINES
Twice a year, the Novanet university libraries run the Food for Fines Campaign, a three-week period during which we accept grocery items instead of cash to pay off fines. Each time, King’s people clear hundreds of dollars in fines, while contributing to Feed Nova Scotia. Watch for the next opportunity, which will be in February 2019.
Food for Fines—Good for the Food Bank, and good for you! — Patricia Chalmers
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“All humans are pregnant both in body and in soul.” BY MICHELLE WILBAND (FYP SENIOR FELLOW SINCE 2017) In Plato’s Symposium we discover that the intellectual project of philosophy—of apprehending reality through thinking—which might appear to be cerebral and abstract, is in fact not a disembodied and computational activity. On the contrary, it is firmly rooted in desire, in the pre-philosophical, pre-intellectual impulses of our embodied being. For Plato, human intellectual activity is inherently erotic, supported and driven by physical and spiritual desire, so that a genuine pursuit of knowledge necessarily takes up and transforms the whole person. Plato captures this erotic and embodied dimension of our thinking in Symposium by evoking the feminine, and by appealing to female embodiment in particular, with its unique and formidable powers of reproduction. Pregnancy and giving birth become Symposium’s central image for doing philosophy, not only in the pursuit of speculative knowledge, but also in the practical pursuits of virtue and legislation in the socio-polit-
ical sphere. The image of pregnancy and childbirth is richly suggestive of all the eros, wonder, and creativity, as well the pain, labour, and radical transformation intrinsic to any meaningful education. For me, over the past semester, the continuity between the feminine experience of bodily pregnancy and the pedagogical work of thinking and
For me, over the past semester, the continuity between the feminine experience of bodily pregnancy and the pedagogical work of thinking and nurturing ideas has stretched beyond the realm of literary metaphor to the realm of concrete experience. nurturing ideas has stretched beyond the realm of literary metaphor to the realm of concrete experience. I certainly can’t concede Diotima’s low valuation of bodily offspring in her mysteries of love, and so in the coming weeks I will happily withdraw from the classroom to care for a child of infinite value. Nevertheless, I will miss the intellectual labour of the lecture hall and tutorial room, where we are collectively challenged and transformed, and where I have carried the very youngest FYPer of 2018–19 with me every day with especial delight. ❧
Photo: Susan Dodd
ON TEACHING FYP WHILE PREGNANT
Michelle Wilband
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Yet... how is this? The chill waking suggests That the slate dawn blurs From the doorstep all on up to heaven I know this day in my sleep Birds fluffed and surly In the sideways highland rain Tea boiled and biting A tannin of generations The night’s lonely hand Slides to the stair As I creak downwards Yet...how is this? The flaking veranda surges Into sparkling blue On the foam-flecked waves In the tufted sky No grey, nor even a hint of it Save the gull Crying the morning from his crooked poll Small birds tumble From wire to air Up under the eaves
Jannette Vusich as “Woman with Cat” Bachiacca (1525-30). (Design: Matthew Frise, King’s Advancement)
This preposterous hope
SUMMER POSSIBILITIES:
Egg-fragile On twigs and fluff
2019: PICTURE YOURSELF IN FLORENCE
Too high for the cat’s claw Too clever for the crow Too secret even for the hunting hawk
Study Renaissance Art in Italy this summer with Dr. Jannette Vusich.
Photo: King’s Advancement
—Susan Dodd, Mothers’ Day, 2018, Big House, Irish Cove
Dr. Sarah Clift and King’s students in Germany (with the bust of an insignificant philosopher).
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Bestiaire d’Amour, Richard of Fournival. 14th c manuscript: “So a tiny bit of happiness will sustain the author like the sun even if he is abandoned. But no nourishment is as good as that of one’s own mother. If his lady will nourish him with her love, he will be as loyal as the peacock, the stork and the hoopoe are to their parents”.
My Love, As Ever. My love, as ever. My mother signs her letters this way. She’s sent three so far. The back of her postcards are a forget-menot blue, but a wilting one, pigment dissolving into soil. They’re different, but on each is printed a woman, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, always looking off over a vast expanse of blue. I put the women on my walls. They recline there, bodies of ink and minds of my mother, a head on two good shoulders, long and lovely limbs extending. Their gaze spills over me as I clumsily gather week-old laundry, stumble to put away the dirty glasses, and pick up each of my awkward parts, tucking them into an unmade bed. I lie and I look at the women, their chests and faces tattooed with my mother’s disheveled cursive: the letters look like wrinkles at the corners of their eyes. I push the blanket into the gap between my cumbersome body and too soft mattress, like my mother used to do. My mother says goodbyes are difficult in our family. When she was young, really young, she would move back and forth between Israel and America every two or three years,
leaving behind the people, the houses and schools, the ocean. I imagine the customs officers knew her by name. I imagine packing her suitcase became as mechanical as brushing her teeth. I imagine the Israeli border was the doorway to the house she grew up in. After a few years, they must’ve stopped putting out the welcome mat. My mother is tougher than I am. She is spattered with sunspots and dipped in middle-eastern sunlight and her hair is permanently frizzy from Haifa heat. Her hands are somehow calloused and rough and simultaneously, softer than duvet down as she tucks the blanket into the crease between my body and mattress. Laila tov chamuda, she says. I wonder if she is homesick too. I wonder for which home. I make my bed in the morning this time. I think about sending her a picture. I’m taking care of myself, the photo says. I’m trying to be as brave as you, the photo says. My love, as ever, the photo says. —Sabina Willmott (FYP 2018–19) Synagogue mosaic: Built 2nd-3rd centuries; abandoned in the 9th century, Susya, Israel. Roman Empire, Byzantine. The Susya synagogue’s remains are dated from the late 3rd to early 4th Century AD, and show that it was in continuous use until the 9th Century AD. It belongs to a unique group of synagogues that form an intermediate transition between the synagogue layout during the Roman (2–3 Century AD) and the Byzantine Period (5–7 Century AD). It was expressed in the tendency to move from a building with entrances facing Jerusalem and no permanent place for the Torah Ark to one having an interior focal point in the form of a Torah Ark and Bimah oriented towards Jerusalem. The broadhouse structure’s walls were built of ashlar, with the
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ceiling attached to a wooden frame cover with tiles. The prayer hall was paved in mosaic and its architectural design, particularly its eastern entrance and axis of prayer, differs from the majority of Galilean synagogues, exhibiting the earliest Jewish law conserved in southern Judea for generations after the destruction of the Temple. In Judea, the older traditions reflecting its closer proximity to Jerusalem, were more closely adhered. The Aron Kodesh (Holy Ark) containing the Torah was built into the northern wall facing Jerusalem with a Bimah (platform) in front of it. Another Bimah on the right hand side was probably where the Torah was read. —from Artstore
FYP – In itself and for itself
“ ...perhaps we’ll never understand our BACK COVER
world today or the world of our ancestors if we don’t catch these ephemeral glimpses of antiquity.”
ANYA DEADY (FYP 2018–19)
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