Spring 2019
News
The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
Poetry & Politics THE
ISSUE
Spring 2019 — Poetry & Politics
News
The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
CONTENTS
1. 3. 3. 4.
5. 6.
7. 7.
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10. 12.
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: George Elliott Clarke, listens at HYP, Humanities for Young People, 2016 Back Cover: the typewritten word. poem by Ata Zargarof (FYP 2017–18)
Editor’s Note: Beauty as Justice or Justice as Beauty by Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) Alexandria Alight by Dr. George Elliott Clarke Hope & Despair About Democracy by Dr. Eli Diamond (FYP 1995–96) Unfinished Work poem by Meredith Bullock (FYP 2018–19) A View From the Left An Interview with Herb Gamberg by Luke Franklin (FYP 1999– 2000) and Josh Neufeldt (FYP 2018–19) Colour Promise poem by Robyn Gould (FYP 2018–19) From ‘Basic Christianity’ to ‘The Americanization of Canada’: The First FYP Curriculum, 1972–73 by Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) FYP: Competing Visions? by Luke Franklin (FYP 1999–2000 FYP: A Constant Battle – An Interview with Sandra Haycock (FYP 1972–73) by Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) Acedia and T.S. Eliot: Caring and Not Caring in the Modern Age by Dr. Neil Robertson (FYP 1981–82) The Healing Steps: Poetry and Performance with Shalan Joudry by Lucy Boyd (FYP 2018–19) Why We Should Read Baldwin by Eddie Cuevas (FYP 2017–18) O Radix Jesse poem by Christopher Snook (FYP 1994–95)
12.
13. 13. 14. 15. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19. 20.
This Can’t Be Happening at Alumni Hall! Interview with Sam Barringer (FYP 2018–19) by Evelyn Swanson-Snook The Clerk or the Sailor? by Anya Deady (FYP 2018–19) Mutants’ Songnet poem by David Huebert (FYP 2004–05) Laramie Project by Katie Lawrence (FYP 2017–18) October poem by Nika Gantar (FYP 2018– 19) King’s Chorus by Malcolm Sepulchre (FYP 2018–19) FYP Mornings: Music in Tune with your Studies selected by Dr. Evan King (FYP 2006–07) and Dr. Michael Bennett (FYP 2003–04) Parsifal Pyjama Party (Night FYP 2019) Summer Reading compiled by Kate Barkhouse (FYP 2018–19) on the banks of the outaouais poem by Dr. Judyta Frodyma A Night with Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the
President’s Lodge (Night FYP 2019) 21. Hiroshige Exhibit (Night FYP 2019) 21. Don Juan Comes Back From the War (Night FYP 2019) 21. A Love Poem poem by Stella Wilband 22. Dean Katie Merwin: “Time to Focus On Students” interview by Kate Barkhouse (FYP 2018–19) 23. Record Number of FYP-student-Athletes in 2018–19 by Neil Hooper 24. E’se’kati poem by Shalan Joudry 24. CSP at 25 by Alan Hall (FYP 1993–94) 25. Athletics Awards Dinner 2018–19 26. Thoughts? Write! Winter Chapel Retreat at Mersey River by Apolonnia Perri (FYP 2016–17) 26. Photos of Chapel Retreat by Tim Lapp (FYP 2018–19) 27. “The World Excites Awe” by Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) 28. Announcements
From left: Dr. Susan Dodd, editor; Kate Barkhouse, student editor; Elisabeth Stones, nous praktikos.
EDITOR’S NOTE “Beauty as Justice or Justice as Beauty” “Alexandria Alight,” a poem by George Elliott Clarke, our final lecturer for this year, is the heart of this FYP News. The poet recalls Caesar’s destruction of the great ancient repository of knowledge: the library at Alexandria. This erasure was a strike of force against learning. It was also, as Elliott Clarke emphasizes, a strike of Rome (aka Europe) against Egypt (aka Africa). We who journeyed through this year’s FYP lived through shifts in what constituted the most pressing questions in each epoch. At the same time, at every step, we did our best to ask, with the thinkers of that time: how can we live in a wounded and wounding world? We recall that the African Saint Augustine, writing as the fragmenting ancient world prepared the ground for the medieval era, does not mention his skin colour once in all of the three million words that he wrote about quite literally everything in the universe, and beyond. By the 20th century, in contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois says that the problem in America was the “colour line.” As FYP continues its own historical journey, it
is helpful to recall the tensions in earlier iterations of the curriculum, as Luke Franklin and Josh Neufeldt show us with their interview with one of FYP’s first professors, Dr. Herb Gamberg, an avowed Marxist. From the early days to today, we continually reflect on curricular tensions between presenting a pedagogically coherent narrative history of “Europe” and giving voice to what we might call the Alexandrians... those ever-present, but elusive voices against which the “dominant” canon defines itself. For my part, as Associate Director of Student Support, though, I want to call attention to the small gradients of diversity. Diversities within and between both Rome and Alexandria, so to speak. First year university is an intense time of self-discovery and confusion for many. At this level, “diversity” is a practical call to greet each person in the face-to-face, practically, as we work together to navigate the barriers and brilliant idiosyncrasies of each FYP student. This is how I know my own self (insofar as I do) — through talking with others about how to get along in this big, beautiful, bad world. I try not to bullshit, but
at the same time to share my profound faith that students already know how live together lovingly, but that my role as a professor is to help bring this knowledge into self-consciousness, and so into words. The kind of debate that Dr. Diamond writes of in his reflection on democracy is possible only within a community that is comprised of people who are willing to take risks, and especially the risk of hearing opinions that we do not like. I am very grateful to everyone who contributed to this edition of FYP News. At first glance, I thought this was a theme-less edition. Now I see that it is really a kind of collective question, a contemporary re-iteration of a question posed by Plato in his “Republic”: What are poetry and politics to one another? What danger does the free play of words pose to our gathering together, as seekers of self-knowledge, wisdom, or even of “Truth”? Maybe the “safest” space is the least comfortable of all? ❧ —Dr. Susan Dodd
Alexandria * Alight GEORGE ELLIOTT CL ARKE
I.
char waterlogged wood to charcoal chips—
cinders took flight too;
“Sunshine charred to smoke,” sayeth Plutarch, of the czar: Julius Caesar exhibited syphilitic blindness— refused to recognize— Beauty as Justice, or Justice as Beauty,
so that each burning boat resembled conniving dandelions.
these miniature torches rained on the port.
as at Alexandria, Egypt, 48 B.C.E. (that untimed time), in his Putsch to dethrone Ptolemy, to rout the obstreperous Egyptians, and so he waxed incendiary: The “Gypsies” were so havocking his sails, so disrupting his sea-borne Siege, Caesar fretted that his patchwork armada would fritter into tatters, become cracked-open carcasses— mass floating coffins— his sailors, bloated like rats, dead in the drift, or look bedraggled rats, clinging to splinters. Caesar scrupled not to skipper— but to scupper— his vessels. That impenetrable, unreachable egotist wagered on letting his seamen burn alive— his tars set flames jetting along ropes, set flames streaking meteoric through rigging, so that his stagnant heart would stay the turbulent dismay that’s Defeat. He had to stave off the Death threat that’s Defeat. Drastic scowls shattered his face: Better to arson his navy— make smoking, fiery, unholy funerals of his fleet—
II. Caesar’s ships were soon floating fires, intended to render Egyptians ash, swamp their soldiery in blaze, smash their machines to sparks and cinders. Once awash in salt-spray and foam, Roman sailors now pinpointed helpful breezes, placed their torches, and were soon awash in ash. But Caesar’s commands— rolling off his tongue like water off his back— showed him a debauched, prima facie arsonist, so eager to bitch at and pitch down Ptolemy, so eager to have the Egyptian perish with the taste of Disgust in his mouth, to know miserable, dreadful Humiliation, to be humbled, then tumbled into a grave beneath a pyramid of cadavers. Caesar needed, not just ruins, but gore. He ordered that any sailor jumping ship— without first setting it alight— would land, spitted by swords.
The harbour witnessed berthing fires— galleons aflame, looking massively imposing as pyramids— but pyramids imploding, dismantling once-calm water, singeing even the sea. And the irregular and flesh-eating Arson made lime-white bones of soot-blackened bodies. Thus, the flooding fire swallowed up the dockyards, then chugged and charged, churning through all of Ptolemy’s palaces, shaming the abashed architecture into ruins. IV. Shortly, the kindled lightning of Caesar’s smoking hulks— his marine-borne 37th Legion— that melange of roaring bees— incinerated the Great Library, liquidating 40,000 scrolls— account books, ledgers, histories, theologies, Poetry— all gone to smog and smut, all teased to smithereens and tatters.
III. Now the Roman Navy was blazing, drifting, and so, soon had the city waterfront— all its docks, wharves, piers, equally burning— with stomach-churning effect. Each blazed galley was a luminous contaminant. Sparks rode waves of superheated air;
V. What was lost? Books good to prop up unbalanced kingdoms or teeter-totter marriages or lopsided tables.
* Cf. Pierre DesRuisseaux.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Eventually, rainbows soothed the sea, but Alexandria’s Great Library was empurpled charring, songs gone to cinders, poems gone to pulp, Philosophy gone to unpardonable swill: Even Theology—gods—got dragged through garbage— worm-chewed garbage.
VII.
that their great strumming is fire that never dies down,
Such constant History is our dispiriting Inheritance. But words still throng into song, thrive, and thus meet Eternity alive—
Imagine Osiris half-burnt, his gilt-face singed.
Dante’s glittering ink, par exemple, or Layton’s crowing lungs, or DesRuisseaux’s plumes of letters,
VI.
all arrive as impudent as sparks—
Caesar’s chronicled Triumph— his capture of Alexandria— was Regression—
or as the lighthouse beams that silver
to exterminate the library, to set parchment smoking robustly, pages blackening unrelentingly, while cheering with wine the aching stories of Egyptian groans—
that encumbers otherwise unencumbered Darkness. ❧ [Enfield (Nova Scotia) 6 février mmxvi Burlington (Ontario) 9 février mmxvi & Ottawa (Ontario) 17 février mmxvi] Reprinted from Canticles I (MMXVI), published in 2016 by Guernica Editions of Toronto.
the wrecks of vainglorious tyrants and the seaweed graves of sunken assassins and arsonists— to tell us Liberty is priceless, not gold, that the Poet enters a Pantheon of Equals— the perennial pinnacles— emissaries of wine;
enacted a masterpiece of Immorality.
GEORGE ELLIOTT CL ARKE The tiny rural community of Weymouth Falls sits on the banks of the Sissiboo River in a far-flung southwestern corner of Nova Scotia. Best known as the birthplace of world-renowned boxing great Sam Langford, the predominantly African Nova Scotian village also served as muse for Black Canadian writer George Elliott Clarke (1960-present), who channelled the spirit and vernacular of the community into the 1990 book-length poem, Whylah Falls. Those who’d been paying attention four years earlier when Dr. Clarke was a master’s student in English at Dalhousie would have been given a glimpse into the genesis of the epic poem, now regarded as a Canadian literary classic, in the pages of the student newspaper. “Weymouth Falls, founded in 1815 by Black Refugees, is a village in Digby County,” reads an introduction to a poem by Clarke in a December 1986 issue of the Dalhousie Gazette. “It is a snowy northern
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
Mississippi, with blood, not on magnolias, but on pines, lilacs and wild roses. This homespun spiritual is one of its first songs.” Dr. Clarke, raised in Halifax, had worked in Weymouth Falls and other rural communities like it as a social worker prior to returning to school at Dal in his mid-20s. (He had previously earned his BA at the University of Waterloo). He says the experience was an “incredible introduction to the beauty of African Nova Scotian . . . speech, and the stories, and the folklore, and the songs” and instilled within him a desire to acknowledge the richness of the language in poetry. At Dal, Dr. Clarke began to develop the distinctive lyrical style that has come to characterize his body of work. Flip to the acknowledgements in any of his books and you’ll find the name John Fraser, the Dal poetry professor Dr. Clarke credits for changing his academic career and making him a much better poet. Dr. Clarke soon left Nova Scotia to do a PhD at Queen’s University and has worked as a professor at universities outside the province for much of his career, including the University of Toronto and Duke Univer-
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sit y. W hile geog r aphically removed from his home province, his literary output has remained largely focussed on exploring the history and cultural geography of “Africadia” — a term he coined to refer to the often-marginalized communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick built by the descendants of Black Loyalists and African-American slaves. Dr. Clarke has won praise for tackling issues such as racism, oppression and change in his poetry, and as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016-17) and a member of the Orders of Canada and Nova Scotia — as well as a Dal honorary degree recipient — he gained a broader audience than ever. But even in the pages of the Gazette all those years ago, you’ll find evidence that his would be a unique voice in the Canadian literary landscape, chronicling untold stories of love and grief in verse. ❧ From Dal.ca
Unfinished Work My favourite is always the middle Books Cinnamon rolls Theatre Holidays It’s always the most delicious The part you want to savour You see, you’re confused at the beginning It’s tough You’re jetlagged It’s a part that requires chewing through and sorting out
Dr. Eli Diamond
HOPE & DESPAIR ABOUT DEMOCRACY
DR. ELI DIA MOND (FYP 1995–96) We seem to be in the midst of a growing crisis of confidence in democratic government. As long as democracy was “the only game in town,” it was easy to take everything democracy requires for granted, and for its virtues and benefits to become invisible. The recently waning faith points to an interconnected set of suspicions, frustrations, and anxieties about democracy: the growing influence of money in politics (that we are actually living under a plutocratic oligarchy and not real democracy); that a political elite is increasingly disconnected, closed and even disparaging of large sections of the electorate they represent; that the need for constant attention to re-election drives politicians to focus on immediately recognizable short-term benefits at the expense of any long-term planning, especially any which demands sacrifice from citizens. On top of this, people are newly aware that democracy as a political system is particularly vulnerable to take-over from within by demagogic populists who can introduce authoritarian anti-democratic measures by democratic means. The idea of this talk is that precisely at this moment of uncertainty, it is worthwhile to go back to the very first theorists of democracy, who were responding to the emergence of the first-large scale democratic city, Athens, who were constantly thinking about its relation especially to oligarchy and tyranny, and who diagnosed the very problems which worry us today. After moving through certain Ancient Greek democratic enthusiasts, who note the capacity of democracy to hold together an emphasis on freedom and equality with a maintenance of order under the rule of law, I focus on Ancient Greek critics of democracy (who constitute the overwhelming majority of ancient theorists), especially Plato’s vari-
ous treatments of democracy and Aristotle’s qualified praise for the right kind of democracy. Perhaps the most pertinent and timely ancient Greek analysis of democracy is Plato’s treatment in Book VIII of Plato’s “Republic” (which so many of you read in FYP), where democracy is characterized simultaneously as the most beautiful regime and as the second-worst regime, better only than tyranny. Plato’s articulation of the inner character of democracy and its connection to other kinds of constitutional
precisely at this moment of uncertainty, it is worthwhile to go back to the very first theorists of democracy
The end is always sad You’re left with questions A blast of chilly air as you de-board A round of unquestioning applause An empty plate A bent spine It’s the middle where you sink in Cozy comfort Sticky satisfaction Heightening hilarity Sleeps on silky sands So never work for the end Just work for the middle —Meredith Bullock (FYP 2018–19)
regimes can help us see more clearly how our mixed form of government combines all these elements, and allows us to reflect on how we should encourage or discourage these political forces both in choosing leaders, developing our citizens, and reforming our institutions. Only if we cease worshipping democracy uncritically as an unconditional good can we attend to the forces which compromise it and imagine how it could be improved and adapted to contemporary pressures. Ancient Greek political philosophy offers a great critical lens through which we can examine the challenges and opportunities in our own democratic politics. ❧ Dr. Eli Diamond is a professor of Classics at Dalhousie, and the Co-ordinator of FYP’s Ancient World. This is a summary of a talk given at the Halifax Central Library, on March 12, as part of Dalhousie faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Lecture Series.
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Meredith Bullock (FYP 2018–19)
FYP – In itself and for itself
FYP’S FIRST YEARS:
A View From the Left An Interview with Herb Gamberg, one of FYP’s first Professors
Luke Franklin: How would you say your time teaching in FYP influenced the thinking that a reader would find in this book, [i.e., Marxism after Marx]? Herb Gamberg: I don’t know. LF: Yeah, OK. HG: I don’t know. My time teaching in Foundation Year — university was very, very marginal, to what I was doing at the time. In the sixties — I got here in 65 to Halifax, and from 67 to 69 I read my first Marxism. LF: 67 to 69. HG: I was, how old was I then? I was in my early forties. I’d met foreigners — third world revolutionaries — elsewhere. When I got a sociology degree, I got a Princeton PhD, I’m absolutely marketable at the time, the jobs were falling out of the sky — seriously. I came here because we were, my wife and I were tired of the United States because there’d been nothing happening about Vietnam so we left, and Canada sounded romantic to us. I didn’t know where Halifax was, I didn’t know where Dalhousie was, I was just straight American. But I knew that Marxism was something I never studied. We never read Marx in sociology departments. Standard Sociology had not — Marx was called a classical thinker [who was] out of date. So, when I got here, I knew Marx was important, so we set up in my house — a study group, and that study group started
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
at the Communist Manifesto, and read as much of Marx as possible, on a drop-in basis. I don’t know I would run it like that again. But at that time we were innocent, we learned our Marxism there. And then after that I was finished. There was no way I could give it up. I’m a latecomer, but I’m not unusual — everybody’s individual life is extremely full of luck, or good or bad luck. Individual biography’s very, very, arbitrary and unpredictable, and who you meet at a certain time makes a difference.
Dr. Herb Gamberg
LF: What were you doing in the early seventies, and how did you get involved with FYP? HG: I taught 1972 to 1977. The first five years, that’s fifty years ago. That’s a long time ago. [John Graham] Morgan was a colleague of mine in the sociology department, and he was by accident made dean of men at King’s — and he became president of King’s for one accidental reason. He was a, what’s the right word, what’s the major religion here? LF: Anglican. HG: He was an Anglican! By accident. He had no more interest in Anglicanism than he had in any other religion, so he became
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the youngest university president in Canadian history, Graham Morgan. He was an Englishman, and I guess they had similar kinds of program in England, and he initiated it, a program like this which is, you know, unprecedented. I don’t know, is there another one in Canada? No. A program where basically, you have informal involvement with learning, with a mentor. You don’t have any stringent curriculum in order to pass tests, and you have a tutor who’ll help you along with your papers, so you don’t have a deadline to get the paper in or you fail. In that sense, there’s no great sense of importance of success or failure. There’s a sense of those who are going faster than others, but definitely non-traditional, very innovative and wonderful way of being initiated into a
Photo: Miles Howe. Halifax Media Coop 2012.
BY LUKE FR ANKLIN (FYP 1999–2000) AND JOSH NEUFELDT (FYP 2018–19)
university. In a way, students are on their own in the Foundation Year Program. You work on your own and you think on your own, you’re in good shape — if you want to have a definite standard way of being evaluated, like you have in all the big classes, you’ll be uncomfortable — or if you’re not a reader! I have a grandson, I love him but he’s not a reader, and if you’re not a reader you can’t do the Foundation Year Program. Josh Neufeldt: No, you definitely have to read.
HG: So, it’s very unusual, and I knew Morgan because we were colleagues in the sociology department, so he asked me if I would get involved, and I was coordinator of the 20th century for five years, and he was coordinator of the 19th century, and within those five years was a major conflict. And the conflict was between those who considered — I’m talking at the teaching level — those who considered that the modern period was not worth studying, and that the time of history (for them) to know was ancient Athens, or for some the medieval — they were medievalists. And they were mainly in the classics department. What happened was, that over the first five years, the modern periods were given reduced time, Morgan’s 19th and my 20th century got reduced time, and therefore there came about a huge conflict between the classicists and Morgan, who was president, and me, and there was a fight to get rid of the director of the program, who was a classicist, and a long fight involving the board of governors at King’s, and in that fight, Morgan won, to have the director replaced, and he said to me, I won this battle, but I still have to live with them. So he quit the program, and me, we both said, we got to live, we can’t get rid of living with these people, we might as well give up on the whole thing. LF: Aside from the conflicts, what were the challenges of teaching the 20th Century? HG: I’ll tell you how I taught. You always
have to know historical context for everything. The historical context was the seventies, and the seventies was the time of the student rebellion, and part of the student rebellion was that in the social sciences, Marxism became very, very — not popular fashionable — the bright kids all wanted to be Marxists, especially in my field of sociology, sociologists [were] always the centre of the new left dominant in the seventies. Looking back, I was a bit innocent about the world in a way, because there was a big split in the so-called communist world between Russia — the Soviet Union — and China. I don’t know if you know, this happened in the sixties, and in that split, the Soviet Union was defined as revisionist, meaning, so, the sellouts, and although they had a front of public ownership they effectively were not democratic and they were elitist and privileged, etc. I’m telling you guys too much, in a way, but it reflects on the way I taught. I taught about the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution — and movies and so on — Burn, you know Burn, with Marlon Brando — you got to see Burn, with Marlon Brando, Burn — his best. Eisenstein’s Potemkin, I showed movies because I’ve always believed that students learn more through visual [materials], than they do through reading [on its own].
“ You think differently at different ages relative to what you face.”
Colour Promise she said to me this winter, with eyes so very blue, “ when the leaves come back all will be well” I am across from the old cemetery where the snow lays in droves and the trees await to bloom in docile sympathy, while this anxious winter waits holding us in its blanketed spell the promise of spring rings out with the call of the chickadees for under the barren trees, there is a pregnant hope of blossoms, a pending promise of budding joy for when the leaves come back and the world is green and gay again, we will find the world transported from this gray, blank slate
LF: You end this book with a closing discussion on climate. HG: We didn’t face climate change then. Now we’ve got a different issue which is, we’re not going to live long enough to talk about socialism or capitalism. If we don’t solve the climate problem now, we might as well — forget it. So, politically now, I’m not a Marxist; I am a Marxist, but tactically, I’m an environmentalist. You think differently at different ages relative to what you face. At that time what we faced was the possibility, or, we thought, the probability, that revolutionary China at least was the vanguard, and Cuba, the vanguard of humanity’s probabilities. That’s all changed — fifty years ago — but I remember that part better than other parts of my life because I was more active and more to do, right? I’m more just a thinker now but then I was a thinker, and a practical person. ❧ Herb Gamberg was coordinator of section 6, the Contemporary World, from 1972 to 77, the first five years of FYP. He is the author of Marxism after Marx, cowritten with Tony Thomson and Zhanbin Ma.
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to colour once more my blue-eyed girl’s words ring true when the leaves come back, We’ll be well and full of hope and when the cherry blossoms strike us with their pink-white hue, and the golden-green woods alight with fairy lore and the slumbering dragon of winter lulls itself to a quiet still, the dark moors of all we knew will rest in sleep, when the leaves come back once more —robyn gould (FYP 2018–19)
FYP – In itself and for itself
From ‘Basic Christianity’ to ‘The Americanization of Canada’: The First FYP Curriculum, 1972–73 BY DR. SUSAN DODD (FYP 1983–84) As a sometime section coordinator in the 21st centur y, the first thing that jumps out at me is how many lectures there are in each section: there were five lectures per week, and ever y section had at least four and a half weeks! The second astonishment is the marked shif t bet ween Sections IV and V from a primar y text and theologically informed approach to a primar y and secondar y text mix in a Marxist/social scientific approach. This must have been quite a whiplash for students. Unless I am missing something there are no women either lecturing or being read and the only “person of colour” is Augustine (unless one counts the Greeks, and the Mediterranean world generally speaking). Class was the categor y by which inclusion was to be expanded, and a re-thinking of the inter-change bet ween the Greeks and Asian civilizations. There is no mention of Islam.
The Ancient World, Section I was five weeks long, introduced jointly by Dr. Gamberg and the founding FYP Director and Classics professor Dr. Wayne Hankey, and coordinated by the Classics professor Dr. Patrick Atherton. The Iliad had five lectures, “Genesis” and “Exodus” combined had three, there were two Greek tragedies. Both the Iliad and Aeneid were taught expressly as “theology.” Dr. Hankey gave two lectures on “Basic Christianity” (the assigned reading being one letter from Saint Paul), and Professor Atherton gave a third lecture on “Christianity in the ancient world.” Lore has it that the reading assigned in the early years to introduce “Genesis” and “Exodus” was Hegel’s Introduction to The Encylopedia Logic. The Medieval World, Section II was five weeks long, coordinated by Dr. Hankey and included four lectures called “Christian Theology,” plus a lecture each on The Rule of Saint Benedict, Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, eleven lectures on The Divine Comedy (Selections), and a lecture on the crusader romance, The Song of Roland.
“The era ends in a blaze of Money.”
The Modern World: Its Origins in Faith and Reason, Sections III and IV were a combined nine weeks long, coordinated by Dr. Hankey and Dr. Steffen. There were lectures entitled “The Popular Consciousness,” “Mysticism,” four lectures on Descartes’ Meditations, two on secular Calvinism, two lectures each for Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract. The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie, Section V, was coordinated by Dr. Morgan. Seven lectures were dedicated to expressly historical topics: the French Revolution, Napoleon, “Reactions and Revivals: Politics and Religion,” four lectures on Marx plus one on “Industrialism and Imperialism,” two novels—Balzac and Dickens (a lecture each), two social science lectures, J.S. Mill, two lectures on “the theory of evolution and its significance” (but no actual Darwin reading), and two concluding lectures entitled, “The era ends in a blaze of Money.” The Contemporary World, Section VI, was coordinated by Dr. Gamberg. Lecture titles include: “The Heyday of European Hegemony,” “Political Economy of the 20th Century,” “The Rise of Monopoly Capitalism,” “Corporate Capitalism and a Social System,” “Class Inequality and Political Order,” “Alienation and the Quest for Community,” “The Rise and Fall of Fascism”—the reading for which was the recently much-maligned 1984 by George Orwell, “The Russian Revolution,” “The Chinese Revolution,” “The Moral Crisis of the West,” “Science and its Application,” “The Americanization of Canada,” and finally Dr. Hankey on “Concluding Apocalyptic” with an assigned reading by the Canadian philosopher George Grant. ❧
Josh Neufeldt photographed the typewritten proposed FYP curriculum for 1972–73—the inaugural FYP year—from the King’s archives.
Photo: Josh Neufeldt
Dr. Wayne Hankey, Professor of Classics, founding Director of FYP
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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FYP: Competing Visions?
Photo: Josh Neufeldt
BY LUKE FR ANKLIN (FYP 1999–2000) “We have come to a certain end of Western Civilization” — so begins the introductory essay to the 1976–77 FYP handbook, written by Wayne Hankey. In ancillary materials accompanying The University of King’s College Calendar, 1973–74, he has more to say on this point: “We are endeavouring to understand the roots of our culture, to see how it produced what it did and to judge — given that what it has produced is dying — whether we wish to return to those roots to build again or if we must renounce all and give ourselves over to the whirlwind.” The ‘whirlwind’ he has in
mind seems to be that of directly practical political activity, exposed as it is to all the expediencies of the moment, their ruthless suddenness and unpredictability. The purpose of the program, as adumbrated here, is to sift through what is sedimented in around the ‘roots’ of the moment of crisis, the political turmoil of the early to mid-1970s. One animating purpose of FYP, then, in its beginnings, was to see whether or not the wrenching conflicts of the present really call for a liquidation or abandonment of tradition, or, as Hankey’s remarks suggest, some sort of newly critical and politically-conscious return to it. ❧
very loosy goosy. But we had more hours: 3 hours, 3 days a week and 2 hours, 2 days a week… or vice versa. I remember walking across the quad with a friend, and she was telling me she hadn’t read a book all year. She got the same mark as I did. Even then I thought, “Well, who suffers here?” There were less than 35 of us who finished the year, and tutorials were much smaller. It was an experimental time…all kinds of eccentric things were going on, pedagogically speaking.
Sandra: It taught us how to read… if you wanted to. There weren’t all the checks and balances… profs could give a gut reaction to the students. There weren’t a whole lot of women getting ahead… there was one Marxist tutor named Linda White (either my year of the one after, I can’t remember). Even the “conservatives” had NDP roots… Marxists… but a different kind. The line from A to Z seemed very disparate, but there was a logic there. We learned to read, we learned
Luke Franklin is the don of Chapel Bay and host of FYP’s “Write. Now!” Saturday evenings.
The First FYP Curriculum, 1972–73 (excerpt)
FYP: A CONSTANT BATTLE AN INTERVIEW WITH SANDR A HAYCOCK, FYP 1972–73 (Sandra is a life-long friend of FYP: she took the program in its first year, and later married Angus Johnston who was a tutor, professor and director of FYP, and also served at the Vice-President of King’s for eleven years).
Susan: Did you make friends? Susan: I was just looking at the curriculum for your FYP year. Moving between Sections IV and V, between a theologically-informed, primary text approach and a sociological secondary text approach…that must have been something… Sandra: There was a constant battle because the tutors were also disparate… we had a tutor who was a Marxist, African… there were only maybe five tutors and we didn’t switch tutors then… and so the people who had a Marxist would get a Marxist take on the whole year. We watched black and white Russian movies… we read Red Star Over China in April. It was a massive tome! There wasn’t the same rigour about papers. I think I wrote one paper in Second Term. Susan: Surely you must be exaggerating? Sandra: Maybe…but not much. We didn’t have mid terms or orals: it was all
Sandra: My best friends. To this day. The late Christopher Crouse and three other people, and we are still best buds. We were day students, and the percentage was very small, so we would hang out together. By thanksgiving we were a team, and we went to Robert’s [ie, Rev Dr Robert Crouse]. The whole thing was surreal… Robert’s Divine Comedy was astonishing. Even to us ignorant people. We knew it was important. Everybody smoked: by the end of the lecture the Haliburton room was f illed with smoke. Robert timed his smoking the way they time the incense in church… The people who were in my year were diverse, some of us were hippielike. The next year they all arrived looking like they were going to Oxford. We were hippies, and then all these scholars showed up.
“ We were hippies, and then all these scholars showed up.” to write, and to ask questions. The variety of having crazed religious persons and crazed Marxists was good. There was always a lot of debate going on around us that we didn’t understand. Lots of people came to lectures, especially if they heard that Robert was lecturing. Susan: What did you do after FYP? Sandra: They offered reading classes with FYP tutors because there weren’t any higher level King’s courses. I read Aristotle with Wayne [Wayne Hankey]. One of my friends read Augstine with Colin Starnes. We did all kinds of things. But they had to stop that… it was so hard on everyone. Susan: Students and profs, both, I’d imagine!
Susan: Do you feel you got a good education?
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Sandra: Yes. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
REFLECTIONS FOR EVENSPEAK KING’S CHAPEL, MARCH 27, 2019
Acedia and T.S. Eliot: Caring and Not Caring in the Modern Age BY FYP DIRECTOR DR. NEIL ROBERTSON (FYP 1981–82)
Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow
Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper.
As a condition, not simply of the individual soul, but of a civilization, of an age, the condition of acedia — literally, the lack of care — surely has no more compelling spokesman than T.S. Eliot, the great poet of early twentieth-century modernism. In his masterpiece The Waste Land of 1922 or in the strange liminal poem of 1925 “The Hollow Men” from which I have just quoted, Eliot paints a world, an age, that has come to experience itself as “care-less” — rendered impotent by a shadow. This shadow is perhaps most directly the apparent auto-destruction
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
of European civilization at the moment of its unparalleled height in power and worldly accomplishment in the terrible, pointless, fruitless — unless the prickly pear of bitterness and hopelessness can be called a fruit — of World War I, the Great War. But for Eliot and his Tiresian vision of inchoate, prophetic suffering much more is lost here. The War only makes manifest what other earlier spirits had seen: the Western Tradition had come to Nothing. Eliot could see this already in his great poetic teacher Charles Baudelaire:
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There is one uglier, wickeder, more shameless! Although he makes no large gestures nor loud cries He willingly would make rubbish of the earth And with a yawn swallow the world; He is Ennui! — His eye filled with an unwished-for tear, He dreams of scaffolds while puffing at his hookah. You know him, reader, this exquisite monster,
— Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother! This acedia, this care-less-ness gets called many things: it is ennui or boredom for Baudelaire. You who are taking FYP this year will remember that Daniel Brandes contrasted in Heidegger the mood of the ancient world — wonder — with that of the modern world, boredom. But it can also be called alienation, anomie, existential despair, melancholia, tristesse. In Nietzsche we find perhaps its most profound and powerful exploration as nihilism — the devaluation of the highest values: The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. I want you to observe here what is at work in Nietzsche’s account of nihilism: a wiping away of our horizon — the very context, the very possibility — by which we can have a world of meaning, a world to care about at all. In fact this sense of acedia I think can take us quite a way into understanding what is at work in Eliot’s sense of our time — this wiping away of the context of care. I can here mention another of the figures we have read in FYP this year, Martin Heidegger, the undoubtedly greatest philosophical thinker of our time. For Heidegger, care, sorge, constitutes our most fundamental way of being-in-the-world. It constitutes the way our world can have meaning, can be a world at all. So acedia, as care-less-ness, is the very withdrawal of meaning altogether. If this is so then what is the source of this state of civilizational acedia? What is Eliot’s “shadow” that forecloses upon “ the reality”, “the act”, ”the creation” or “the response”? Is it the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” of the “sea of faith” Matthew Arnold writes of
in his poem “Dover Beach”? Is it more than this? Not simply a withdrawing, a lack, but a new presence: the modern subject, modern self-consciousness, or a secular human-alltoo-human world, or a moment of reflection that separates us from all that connects? But if our problem is acedia, a state of carelessness, then surely our solution is altogether at hand. We must connect. Or better yet see the connections always already there that a miasma of existential despair is only hiding from us: the face of the other, the world that is there before us, the difference we can make. Indeed many see the claims of Eliot or Heidegger or Nietzsche as altogether overblown — in fact I might number myself as sharing something of that view. But I want to suggest that for Eliot such a turn to our Heideggerian involvements, our various concrete and particular ways of caring are not enough. Indeed the demand that we should or must care, that we need to be more connected, give more of ourselves, be less self-enclosed, is not and cannot be the way forward.
The way forward, the way to deal with our cultural or civilizational acedia is not to care more … but to care less: to die to care altogether. Here, I firmly and fully agree with our poet. The way forward, the way to deal with our cultural or civilizational acedia is not to care more, to try to “shore the fragments” of our existential care against our ruins, but to care less: to die to care altogether. We must not even care about care, about our very care-less-ness. We are not the problem and we are not the solution.
most strikingly manifest in a new understanding of time. The past is now no longer only preserved as memories of what has vanished, but as objective, eternal fact present to the mind of God, and redeemable through action and suffering.” The crucial thing to see here — and crucial is the operative word — is that I believe for Eliot, as for Thomas Aquinas, the opposite of acedia is not work or involvement or care simply: but charity, spiritual joy. This charity is not available to us in and by our own efforts, our works, our care — we can only receive it in and by dying — only in despair, in the death of care, even the death of that care of carelessness, can we find joy. As Eliot writes in “East Coker” one of the Four Quartets: The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart. Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere. The chill ascends from feet to knees, The fever sings in mental wires. If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. ❧
Robert Crouse
So Eliot, after The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” came to — was given — a different vision. Robert Crouse wrote of this in his wonderful reflections on Murder in the Cathedral: “Eliot’s new standpoint is perhaps
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FYP – In itself and for itself
The Healing Steps: Poetry and Performance with Shalan Joudry BY LUCY BOYD (FYP 2018–19) The prologue of Shalan Joudry’s poetry collection Generations Re-merging (Gaspereau Press, 2014) begins with the line: “each generation must make its own / journey through a thick terrain.” So begins a work that unites both the trauma and wisdom of the past with the hope of bettering our future. On March 8th, Night FYP (in partnership with the Haliburton Literary Society) was honoured to host Shalan Joudry for an evening of poetry and performance to commemorate International Women’s Day. Joudry is the Haliburton Society’s Honorary Member for 2019. In the words of Haliburton Society president Keenan Livingstone (FYP 2015–2016), “the Honorary Member is one of Haliburton’s time-honoured traditions. Each year, the Society invites a local author, poet, or creator to come and share some of their work. We are so grateful to Shalan Joudry for accepting our invitation this year, and to Night FYP for co-hosting this event with us.” Both Joudry’s collection and performance were timely. Delivered on International Women’s Day, the talk followed Dr. Sasha Kovac’s lecture on the work of the
Canadian indigenous poet E. Pauline Johnston (Tekahionwake) and coincided with the close of FYP’s fifth section—the Era of Revolutions. Joudry’s poetry is the deeply personal expression of a Mi’kmaq woman who looks both backward and forward simultaneously. It explores the legacy of colonialism in Canada, as well as the current ecological fragility of her community in the wider world. In doing so, her work nicely echoes several of the central challenges that the Foundation Year Program foregrounds. In her poem “The Known World,” Joudry asks: “how can something known / become unknown / in so little time”? And indeed, what better way to conclude a program that aims to look to the future than to critically examine our conceptions of the past?
While I had been fortunate to encounter Joudry’s thinking through her poetry, the chance to see her not only recite her work but also sing, drum, and story-tell can only be described as transformative. A rapt hush fell over the President’s Lodge as Joudry showed the audience her drum— painted with an eight-pointed teal star that, according to her, “represents the land and people that make up Mi’kma’ki.” She uses the drum, she explained, because upon it she can play the first song every person hears, regardless of their background: the steady thrum of their mother’s heartbeat. The drum is also an important aspect of her oracy—the Mi’kmaq tradition of sharing stories and wisdom orally, through a combination of story-telling and song. Attendees were not only able to experience this tradition for themselves, but also participated by learning a Mi’kmaq friendship song and singing it together. Music, she explained, is a medicine, and it is vital to her artistic work—and the work of reconciliation at large—that non-Mi’kmaq members of the audience learn the song and sing it with her. Joudry’s work as both an ecological conservationist and as an activist profoundly inform her poetry. One of the current challenges to contemporary society, she explained, was the increas-
Lucy Boyd
WHY WE SHOULD READ BALDWIN BY EDDIE CUEVAS (FYP 2017–18) In this programme, we are tasked with understanding the western canon, and we go through a beautiful journey of human thought, from Plato to Dante to Shakespeare to Nietzsche, and when it all inevitably ends, we can’t help but wonder what else there is to see, what parts we missed, what other beauty lies in the stories that were not told. What we read, what we engage with has the power to grip us, to meet us where we need them. They follow us home and hover above us, carefully entrenching themselves into who we are, until we find ourselves arguing quite aggressively about whether or not the Aeneid ripped off the Iliad (it did). These are, ultimately, the stories that we do it all for. We seek that recognition in the writing, we seek to engage with authors who not only knew, but understood the world they lived in, who provided fresh, interesting opinions that
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
demand active responses to them in our own lives. The best of these writers, I believe, is James Baldwin. He tells explicitly these kinds of stories, the kind that hold you by the hand and deliver you, personally, to a new understanding of both yourself and your world. This was his talent. He understood, often at his own expense, those parts of humanity that we hide, the ones we don’t talk about, where we keep ourselves. In his work we see that sentimentality does not have to take a backseat to intelligence, and he shows us how the synthesis of the two leads to a beautiful balance between emotionally relevant and intellectually engaging. Baldwin, who was both gay and black, understood intersectionality on an intrinsic level; through his lenses we see a world in which the beauty
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…through his lenses we see a world in which the beauty lies in the parts between our identities…
support the Mi’kmaq community? Indeed, the land upon which our university is built is unceded. As President Bill Lahey remarked in his opening address, “this is the first time, to my knowledge, that we have invited a
“ … I have hope for the future and for the future of my daughters.”
Shalan Joudry
ing isolation of humans from their natural environment. “Being connected to the land, that’s not only a Mi’kmaq thing, that’s a human thing. We need to re-ignite that ancestral memory, that desire to be a part of the land.” To this quandary, she explained that there is but one solution—to spend time outdoors and recognize that you are a part of a larger whole. It is also vital that city-dwellers ensure that existing green spaces are protected. Joudry also addressed the complications surrounding the word “reconciliation” and a question that weighed heavily upon many minds that evening: what can non-Indigenous university students do to
lies in the parts between our identities, in the grey areas where our inner conflicts interact. Not only is Baldwin’s writing deeply moving on a personal level, his insights on the political situations of his time is unmatched. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, and until his death in 1987 he witnessed a variety of important movements in black history, including the Harlem renaissance and the civil rights movement, and he shows us an astute understanding of the situations he found himself in, both from an objective
Mi’kmaq speaker into this particular parcel of unceded territory that now constitutes the President’s Lodge.” The importance, Joudry explained, lies in self-education and a desire to engage with and learn about Mi’kmaq culture. “The onus is always on the Mi’kmaq people to be educators, to be bi-cultural. But non-Mi’kmaq people need to make that effort on a personal scale, to learn about the Indian Act and its effects, to immerse themselves in local Indigenous culture.” She suggested that one of the best ways to bring down the wall between cultures is to attend local Mi’kmaq events and visit the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre on Gottingen Street. “‘Reconciliation’ is a complicated word for me,” Joudry noted. “And it’s painful to confront the traumas
point of view as well as a subjective point of view. He shows us both the reality and the sentiments of being black in America in the 20th century. However, Baldwin’s insight is not limited to his home country. Due to his emigration at the age of 24, Baldwin spent a significant part of his career abroad, spending a lot of it in France, as well as Switzerland and Turkey. This gives him a more complete understanding of the issues concerning black identity in the pan-African diaspora, since racism is by no means confined to America. I could sit here and write about the specific reasons why a writer so prolific should be read and analyzed, but frankly, the fact is that we should read Baldwin and other writers like him because they represent a voice that has been systemically erased in the past, and the answers to the issues that trouble us the most often lie in the parts we ignore the most. Engaging with James Baldwin will always teach you something you didn’t know. ❧
of history. But I was born believing in peace and hope. Maybe that’s just who I am. But I have hope for the future and for the future of my daughters.” As a final gift, the audience was privileged to hear a poem that Joudry only reserves for very special, intimate gatherings: a poem void of name, just as “the most scared treasures of creation are.” It is perhaps this poem which best encapsulates the layers and themes that permeate her work: close your eyes brothers sing it out and let that be medicine to walk away with close your eyes sisters listen to each other’s stories and let that be medicine to walk away with. And indeed, what better way to close off the evening and begin our venture into the final section of FYP, where we will confront the challenges of our present world? I think I speak for everyone in attendance that evening when I say wela’lin to Joudry for the gift of her stories, and for teaching us how to walk with her. ❧ See Generations Re-merging, Shalan Joudry (Gaspereau Press, 2014)
FYP SCREENS THE 2017 DOCUMENTARY ABOUT AUTHOR JAMES BALDWIN, “I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO.” NIGHT FYP 2019
Eddie Cuevas
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FYP – In itself and for itself
O Radix Jesse i. Dandelion seed is fructifying in the damp earth while goat weed warms in the sous-vide soil of Spring and the tall trees farther-on trumpet the season’s reveille, the round roots of old maples gulping great rhizomatic mouthfuls of Spring melt to feed the Autumn’s brilliantine blossom of burning bush and whispering (I swear it) Take, eat, Take eat All the world is woke or waking though winter kept us warm. ii. Over the hill, the sea wind rising from the harbour and my hands chill in the dirt
This Can’t Be Happening at Alumni Hall! AN INTERVIEW BET WEEN A YOUNG MOVIE FAN AND FYP’S VERY OWN MOVIE MAN SAM BARRINGER BY EVELYN SWANSON-SNOOK FYPer Sam Barringer has an alternative identity. In the world of films inspired by Gordon Korman’s hilarious young adult novels he is known as George Wexford Smyth III — a brilliant business minded student at MacDonald Hall. It was in this role that he first came to the attention of Evelyn Swanson-Snook, an eleven-year old fan of Korman books and movies.
I think of fingers (other’s, not my own) thin and tough as chicken legs scrabbling dandelion radix from the hard ground,
Evelyn (daughter of FYP tutor Christopher Snook) and Sam recently conducted an interview that covered a wide range of topics including Halifax, acting, and … dragons!
then the bitter tang of root coffee, the shrivelled tubers like memory and desire
Sam: I’ve wanted to go to school on the coast since I was a little kid. My cousin Mary, who went through FYP about 12 years ago (she actually had your dad as one of her oral examiners) told me about King’s upon hearing of my coastal longings. I looked into the program and decided it was perfect for me, and I’m very glad to be here.
after winter’s sleep: what are the roots that clutch? iii. O root of Jesse! O hidden, medicinal root! We dream that root a river and would drink it down with a salad of ditch weeds, lupin and wildflower. We’d make a tincture of you each morning, the way the old women drank you, the way they hid you at home for love, a charm for the sick, buried you in gardens against the killing frost. O hidden root, O Jesse, Come quickly.
Evelyn: Why did you come to Kings’ College?
Evelyn: Where did you grow up? What do you like or dislike about Halifax? Sam: I grew up in Hamilton Ontario. It’s right on Lake Ontario, and it’s a really nice place. As for Halifax, the restaurants are excellent, which I’m quite happy about. I’m also a fan of coastal cities in general, and I’ve always wanted to go to school on one. Plus, the fact that everything is walking distance away is nice. Evelyn: How long have you been acting? How many movies have you been in?
—Christopher Snook (FYP 1994–95)
Sam Barringer (FYP 2018–19)
Sam: I’ve been acting professionally since I was nine years old. I’ve been in three movies, five TV shows, a handful of short films, and three animated series. Evelyn: What would your advice be to anyone who wanted to be an actor or an actress? Sam: Learn to enjoy the audition process. In a best-case scenario, you might get one booking for every 100 auditions you go to. So the best thing to do is just think of auditions as being opportunities for you to perform, and enjoy that chance for performance. Evelyn: If the Queen invited you to her place what would you do? Would you faint? Sam: I like to think I’d be cool and dignified, but in reality I would almost certainly scream, faint, wake up, and continue to flip out. Also, I would probably ask her for a sword. Evelyn: If you could invite one person to dinner (dead or alive) who would it be? Why? Sam: If I could invite one person to dinner, it would probably be J.R.R. Tolkien. He’s my all-time favourite author and I have an endless amount of questions. The second might be Socrates, but I don’t speak Greek. Also, I feel like he would probably have some pretty negative feelings about being handed something to drink, considering how his last drink went. Which would probably make cocktails a little awkward. Evelyn: What it your greatest fear? Sam: My worst fear is being forgotten. Also, I don’t really like heights. Evelyn: Do you have a pet dragon (I know dragons are not real)?
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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Sam: Just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean I can’t keep one as a pet. So yes, I do have a pet dragon. His name is Tim. ❧
THE CLERK OR THE SAILOR? BY ANYA DEADY (FYP 2018–19) A grocery store clerk and a sailor have nothing in common. At least, nothing of any importance. But much like Heidegger, I find that nothingness hard to explain, so let’s leave it behind us for the moment. Instead, I’ll concede the little commonalities between the clerk and sailor, say, a striped t-shirt or a pair of loafers, and other things of no particular importance. This is a story about nothing, a story that I was told sometime in March in Prince Hall. But I digress—back to the grocery store clerk. He is a stationary creature, moving only his limbs and extremities within a tiny cubicle. Perhaps he takes a drink of water, as mammals often do, or even steps out of his cubicle to seize a nickel hopping anxiously along the concrete. He uses the restroom, eats lunch, and finds himself subject to other mundane bodily needs. Let us then humour ourselves and consider the most arbitrary of circumstances that our clerk may find himself in. Perhaps he gets distracted by some debacle in the cereal aisle in the middle of ringing up an elderly woman’s groceries. This woman, thinking the exchange is over, snaps her coin purse shut, packs up the ingredients she’s bought for apple pie, forgets her change, and waddles out the door. Our clerk then, recovering from whatever it was that distracted him, looks down at his hand and sees the forgotten change. He must then, (says Kant, but much more convolutedly) leave his little cubicle, and quickly! So, our clerk runs after the woman and finds her next to some early model of a red, sun-faded Subaru, (I don’t know the first thing about Subarus) leisurely packing away her things. After a brief inter-
action, he hands over the change and the ordeal is over. So, he returns to his cubicle, where he’ll linger for the remainder of his shift. I’ve outlined the exceptions to his stationary existence, but now I’ll say something about the motionlessness itself. Like a sea sponge on dry land, he’s a being—if you can call him that—by which everything else passes. A carton of eggs here, a bundle of spinach there, and a smidge of life there. He watches the sun pass by the window, customers too, one by one—a linear, infinite assembly line of ordinary little humans; a mirage of the human existence. But maybe that’s a little too theatrical. Anyways, the point is, everything passes him by. He actively does nothing, save for the exceptions above. But that’s enough concerning our clerk, he’s drowsy and about to clock out for the day. So, onto the sailor we go. I don’t know the first thing about sailing, so I’ll make this part quick. A sailboat, I think, is roughly the size of a couple living rooms. I don’t know, I’ve never been on one. Regardless, our sailor moves about the cabin. Like our clerk, he uses the restroom. He makes breakfast soon after waking, guides the boat through nothingness and even wanders aimlessly. For equity reasons, we can consider our sailor in a funny, arbitrary circumstance too, because why not? Say our sailor brought some Homer aboard, and reading it one day, he folds the page corner on Aiaia. Our little sailor, much like us, has traced a line connecting Homer to Kafka, and wishes so desperately to hear the sirens. So he flings himself off the side of the boat, cannonballing into the sea. When he finds himself in the water, he doesn’t move much, only kicking and splashing, enjoying the sun. He is suspended in complete stillness, perhaps even nothingness. This seems to be our sailor’s only exception. The point is though, that after all this time, he has passed by everything. He has endeavored an everlasting crusade, and much like Werther, he has been yearn-
Anya Deady
ing towards something he does not yet have, whatever that is. He is unquenched desire itself. There’s a good chance that none of what I have said makes any sense. I suppose that’s up to you. All that’s really left to say then is, where does all of it leave you and me? I think, in many ways, that it brings us here and now, to read these books on the shores of the Atlantic, to try to be both clerk and sailor, and to find a commonality that might actually mean something. So that when we find ourselves in the sense-consuming buzz of a grocery store or in the nothingness of the seas, we are capable at the very least of mentioning something we read once in passing, in a fat green book bound by a plastic coil. At any rate, that’s what I was thinking about in Prince Hall some balmy afternoon in March. ❧
Mutants’ Songnet We fell in love in the tailing pond where you’d built your shopping cart hutch. The sky was a rerun— canned laughter, technocolor gore. You fed me nitrogen rich popcorn, I spied your WD-40 tongue. Licking your fingers, you asked if I, too, loved to loathe the smuck of ethanol. First base was a gas pump—weep, seep, dry. We mated in microwaves, watched our brood slime around the block. I’m sorry it had to end, and I’m sorry you cried. I just needed to see rainbows dance in your crocodile tears, petroleum eyes.
Hokusai, Dragon Ascending Mount Fuji
—David Huebert (FYP 2004–05)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Laramie Project BY K ATIE L AWRENCE (FYP 2017–18) The Laramie Project is a verbatim play that documents the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard a gay college student in Laramie Wyoming in 1998. Matthew was picked up in the Fireside, a college bar, and driven to the outskirts of town where he was tied to a fence and beaten into a coma. As Matthew later died in hospital people from around the world gathered at vigils and protests to stand in solidarity with him. In 2009 former U.S. President Barack Obama passed the Matthew Shepard Act to target hate crimes against sexual orientation. This March, Bad Ideas Theatre Collective staged The Laramie Project in the HMCS Wardroom. This was an opportunity to consider and confront the challenging themes of Laramie in a casual space with an open bar. Further, the Wardy, like the Fireside, is a college bar enjoyed by professors and students. The hatred inflicted on Matthew infiltrated the lives of Laramie residents and invaded their space. We hoped that by staging Matthew’s experience in a
Left to right: Connor Adsett (FYP 2017–18) (director of 1st act), Skyler Curtis (director of 3rd act), Adrianna Vanos (FYP 2017–18) (director of 2nd act)
of the tragedy. In our production, the actor playing Matthew’s murderer also played Matthew’s father, thereby preventing the audience from completely villainizing him. This dynamic forces audience members to reconsider their first reactions to hateful characters and to rationalize these characters’ actions in relation to their circum-
By staging The Laramie Project in the Wardroom, we were obliged to contend with poor sightlines and a vast space that does not carry sound well. To best use the space, actors moved throughout the Wardy performing scenes in various different corners. We positioned audience seating around the perimeter ensuring that every-
Watching this play in the reclining seats of a proscenium theatre seems like a luxury we shouldn’t have.
Left to right: Top row: Dylan Jackson (FYP 2017–18) (actor), Molly Somers (FYP 2017–18) (actor), Eddie Cuevas (actor), Katie Lawrence (actor), Sam Barringer (actor), Adrianna Vanos (director of 2nd act), Bottom row: Skyler Curtis (director of 3rd act), Connor Adsett (director of 1st act), Alex Retzer (FYP 2017–18) (stage manager/producer), David Woroner (FYP 2015–16) (actor), Sofia Zaman (actor)
familiar place audience members could better identify themselves in the tragedy and not reduce Matthew’s beating to Western American small town close-mindedness. The play was created from interviews with residents of the town, reporters, friends and family of Matthew, homophobes and queer individuals alike. The play features a tiny cast, with the intention that every actor must play multiple different people and often must represent opposing perspectives
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
stances. The multiple roles were also a huge task for our cast, where certain individuals were required to portray seven or more different characters, with different physicalities, emotional states, and accents. Often actors would have no lines between different characters and would simply signify the transition with a costume piece, having a couple seconds to change their entire body and situation. This made Laramie both uniquely humanizing and theatrically exhausting.
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one saw some perspective of the play. Unfortunately, there were instances where distance and the Wardroom’s pillars made watching a scene impossible, but I think this was not to the play’s detriment. One audience member explained to me that she was forced to pay extreme attention to everything going on and was constantly turning around in her seat to catch the next bit of action. In short, her viewing experience was uncomfortable, but how should it be? The themes and ideas in Laramie are uncomfortable. Watching this play in the reclining seats of a proscenium theatre seems like a luxury we shouldn’t have. This is a play that demands attention and action, and how can we answer either of those appeals when we are only spectators in a darkened theatre? With this production of The Laramie Project we hoped to explore the limits of theatre and confront hatred in a safe space, together. ❧
October Lately everything has been blurryI lie in grass and stare at moon-fed stars Streets seem strangely vast People seem strangely alien And memories nestle in my stomach like the flu I guess I feel pretty nauseous And I’m not sure how He still does that I guess I am scared I will run out of things to say But it still feels like it’s going to rain and
Photo: Anya Deady
Did you know they banned me from the city of Boston? For being too witch-like I tell them, “I used to be pretty!” Please do not burn me — They burn me just the same —Nika Gantar (FYP 2018–19)
KING’S CHORUS BY M ALCOL M SEPULCHRE
The King’s Chorus, beyond a doubt, is a one-of-a-kind community. Ikos, our Spring concert, is set for March 24th. This time, our focus is much less around a single piece; we’ll be performing a wide range of mystic works, mostly from the 20th century, by Tchaikovsky, R achma ninof f, Pä r t, Tavener, and other great composers. Lyrics will be in English, Latin, Russian, and Church Slavonic (the liturgical language of the Slavic Orthodox churches). As I write just two weeks beforehand, I’m looking forward to it immensely: many of us who joined in September are now really getting our footing, so I have every reason to hope we’ll nail another performance and turn All Saints Cathedral into a Photo: Samuel Landry
Bless my roommate. Either he doesn’t notice me chanting in Church Slavonic at midnight and at 8 in the morning, or he’s just accepted it as a fact of life. Before joining the King’s Chorus, I’d never sung outside of campfire circles and friends’ living rooms. My answer to the familiar question — “do you sing?” — would likely have been an apologetic “well, no, not really”. But I liked to sing. And that’s what everyone who joined the Chorus in September and in January, and everyone who’s sung with the Chorus in previous years, had in common. Whether we’ve been in choirs and bands our whole lives, or we’d never touched a page of sheet music before, we like to sing. Our concert for the Fall term, Music for Saint Cecilia, centred on one phenomenal piece: Joseph Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass. As a prelude, we sang Sir Hubert Parry’s “I Was Glad”, Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus”, and
“Jesu Corona Virginum”, a chant attributed to Saint Ambrose and set to music by Hildegard von Bingen, my favourite medieval European. The night of the concert, we packed Saint Mary’s Basilica. We sang the “Jesu Corona Virginum” as we filed towards the front of the church; after the first two stanzas, I thought, “phewf, we sound good!” Sure enough, the rest of the concert went swimmingly. As Kip, my FYP Music friend and fellow Chorus member, told me afterwards: for a first choral experience, it doesn’t get much better than singing Haydn in a packed cathedral!
Nick Halley, Director of the King’s Chorus
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Malcolm Sepulchre (FYP 2018–19)
sublime monastery on the edge of the taiga. The King’s Chorus, beyond a doubt, is a one-of-a-kind community. That a group with such a wide variety of musical backgrounds and experience levels can actually work so well is made possible by two things. First, there’s the amazing direction of Nick Halley, Paul Halley’s unbelievable pianoand organ-playing, and the ridiculously talented soloists and professional musicians we bring in to accompany us. The second is, well, the Chorus members themselves: if someone sticks around and sings in the concert, it’s because they’re willing to put in the time and energy it takes to make themselves and everyone else sound as good as possible. Whatever year or faculty you’re in, if you’re looking for a way to pursue music as part of the King’s community — and, I might add, in a very King’s way — the Chorus is worth checking out! ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
FYP MORNINGS: MUSIC IN TUNE WITH YOUR STUDIES Selected by Dr. Evan King and Dr. Michael Bennett** Section Four — The Age of Reason DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Mon, 7 Jan N. Robertson
Descartes: Self
**Jean-Baptiste Lully, Psyche (1678)
Wed, 9 Jan N. Robertson
Descartes: God
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Organ Works (early 17th century)
Thurs, 10 Jan R. Huebert
French Neo-Classicism
René Clemencic, Molière Soundtrack (1978)
Fri, 11 Jan N. Robertson
Descartes: World
Sieur de Sainte-Colombe, Concerts à deux violes esgales
Mon, 14 Jan S. Boos
Hobbes: The Modern State
**Matthew Locke, Music for Broken Consort (1660s)
Wed, 16 Jan I. Stewart
The Newtonian Natural Philosophy
**Radiohead, In Rainbows (2007)
Thurs, 17 Jan K. Morris
A New World
Henry Purcell, Fantasias (1680)
Fri, 18 Jan J. Vusich
Baroque Art
**Claudio Monteverdi, Vespri della Beata Vergine (1610)
Mon, 21 Jan W. Lahey
Property and Empire
G.W.F. Handel, Coronation Anthems (18th century)
Wed, 23 Jan S. Dodd
Rousseau: Society and Inequality
**Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Village Soothsayer (1753)
Thurs, 24 Jan T. Curran
Storm and Stress
**Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 49 “La Passione” (1768)
Fri, 25 Jan S. Dodd
Rousseau: Freedom and the State
**Max Richter, Vivaldi Recomposed (2012)
Mon, 28 Jan C. Jeffers
The Debate over Slavery
**Ignatius Sancho, Minuets (late 18th C)
Wed, 30 Jan D. Brandes
The Kantian Morality
**Steve Reich, Piano Phase (1967)
Thurs, 31 Jan N. Robertson
Austen
**Ignaz Pleyel, Piano Sonatas (late 18th C)
Section Five — The Era of Revolutions DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Mon, 4 Feb R. Barker
A Dream of Progress: Frankenstein I
**Einojuhani Rautaana, Cantus Arcticus, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra (1972)
Wed, 6 Feb S. Dodd
Rights and Revolution
**Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, “Eroica” (1805)
Thurs, 7 Feb J. Frodyma
Romanticism: History, Imagination, and the Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, “Fate” (1808); Symphony No. 7 Sublime (1813)
Fri, 8 Feb S. Clift
Workers of the World, Unite
**The Almanac Singers, Talking Union and Other Songs (1943)
Mon, 11 Feb R. Barker
The Challenges to Selfhood: Frankenstein II
Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden”, “Der Zwerg”, “Der Doppelgänger”, “Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren”, “Des Baches Wiegenlied”
Wed, 13 Feb C. Jeffers
Liberalism
Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961)
Thurs, 14 Feb L. Penny
Flowers of Evil
Claude Debussy, “5 Poèmes de Baudelaire” (1889)
Mon, 25 Feb C. Cohoon
Nietzsche I: Genealogy of Good and Evil
**Richard Strauss, Salome (1905)
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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PARSIFAL PYJAMA PARTY NIGHT FYP 2019 Four and a half hours of Wagner’s Parsifal, with snacks and good company in Alumni Hall.
Wed, 27 Feb M. Bennett
Darwin: Theories of Evolution
Birdsong of N. America
Thurs, 28 Feb R. Barker
Modern Transcendence: Richard Wagner and the Total Work of Art
Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882)
Fri, 1 Mar C. Cohoon
Nietzsche II: Conscience and the Ascetic Ideal
Georges Bizet, Carmen (1875)
Mon, 4 Mar J. Vusich
Japan and Europe: An Artistic Encounter
Claude Debussy, La Mer (1905)
Wed, 6 Mar C. Jeffers
Race and Social Change
**Paul Robeson, Spirituals (1946)
Thurs, 7 Mar S. Kovacs
Literature, Performance, and the Critique of A Tribe Called Red, Nation II Nation (2013) Colonialism
Fri, 8 Mar R. Barker
Realism and the Fin de Siècle: Cutting Down the Orchard
Sergei Rachmaninov, Songs (1890–1916)
Section Six — The Contemporary World DATE
TOPIC
MUSIC
Mon, 11 Mar L. Penny & D. Brandes
Kafka: The Problem of Our Laws
Leoš Janá ek, On an Overgrown Path (1901–1911)
Wed, 13 Mar D. Brandes
The Question Concerning Being
La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano (1964)
Thurs, 14 Mar C. Snook
Modernist Poetry
Scott Joplin, Piano Rags (c.1900–1910)
Fri, 15 Mar S. Clift
The Rise of Psychoanalysis
**Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Mon, 18 Mar D. Glowacka
The Holocaust
Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time (1941)
Wed, 20 Mar L. Penny
Feminist Existentialism: The Second Wave
Sidney Bechet, The Fabulous Sidney Bechet (1958)
Thurs, 21 Mar J. White
Early Cinema: Years of Revolution
Video: Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Fri, 22 Mar S. Clift
Totalitarianism and WWII
**Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988)
Mon, 25 Mar D. Brandes
Arendt and the Political
Miles Davis, Sorcerer (1967)
Wed, 27 Mar S. Kow
Contemporary Art
**Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Akira soundtrack (1988)
Thurs 28 Mar S. Boos
Discipline and Biopower
Brian Eno, Ambient I: Music for Airports (1978)
Fri, 29 Mar M. Bennett
The Turn to Language
Steve Reich, Proverb (1995)
Mon, 1 April A. Jeffers
Post-Colonial Experiences
Calypso Rose, The Queen of Trinidad (2012)
Wed, 3 April C. Taunton
Indigenous Art
Jeremy Dutcher, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018)
Thurs, 4 April L. Penny
The Internet and the Digital Revolution
Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze (Sub Rosa, 1995)
Friday, 5 April G. McOuat
Science in the Twentieth Century and Into the Future
Fennesz, Endless Summer (2001)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Summer Reading COMPILED BY K ATE BARKHOUSE
Ready to read again? After following Dr. Brandes’ advice and recovering from FYP with some pulp fiction, pick up these recommendations from your tutors!
Dr. Stephen Boos Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Dr. Daniel Brandes John Banville, The Sea Watch: The HBO comedy “Veep” Dr. Chris Cohoon: Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths Dr. Susan Dodd Any Dostoevsky, beginning with Crime and Punishment, George Elliot, Middlemarch, Christopher Snook, Tantramar Vespers Watch: Miyazaki “Princess Mononoke” Dr. Judyta Frodyma Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire Must read. Hilarious and moving and contemplative. Reverend Dr. Ranall Ingalls Simone Weil on The Need for Roots. Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Dr. Asha Jeffers Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Dr. Chike Jeffers Alex Beam , A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books Dr. Evan King Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts Dr. Simon Kow Suggestions which immediately come to mind for this year’s FYP graduates. Sorry, I know I was only supposed to choose one.... Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, trans. James Woods: the entire western tradition contained within a sanatorium in the Swiss alps—an inverted Underworld, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, neo-Platonism, nihilism, modernism, music, and so much more in one book. Bonus for Doctor Who fans: it’s a novel about Time, and a veritable Tardis—bigger on the inside. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: the FYP graduate will fully appreciate the references to Homer’s Odyssey, neo-paganism, the themes of friendship and home in this beguiling narrative...and if you can get your hands on a copy, Jan Needle’s The Wild Wood: a clever socialist retelling of Grahame’s novel from the perspective of a working-class ferret! Wu Cheng-En’s Journey to the West (recommended abridged translation: The Monkey
photo by Elizabeth King
Dr. Roberta Barker Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady — easily the book I’ve read and re-read most in the last 30 years. :)
Silas King recommends Hop on Pop, Dr. Seuss
and the Monk, ed. Anthony C. Yu): the most beloved novel in Chinese literature resonates with all of the great epics taught in F Y P—including Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid—from a Chinese Buddhist perspective, with a good dose of satire and silliness plus a Monkey King who kicks ass! Robert Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics: hilarious comic-strip and comic-book versions of the Bible, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, and more. ‘Nuff said! Fr. Christopher Snook JM Coetzee, Disgrace (“spare, relentless, and sparkling”) and Age of Iron, also by Coetzee. For poetry, American Primitive by Mary Oliver and The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Watch: “Love it or List it” on HGTV! Dr. Jerry White All of the following are short (except the Popol Vuh), all are classics, and all are on Amazon.ca in good and cheap editions (except Cléo and Prisoners, which require a little bit of looking around): Short Stories: Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges Novel: The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy Poems: Selected Poems 1965–75, Margaret Atwood Play: Prisoners, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Politics: Lament for a Nation, George Grant Religion: Waiting for God, Simone Weil Foundational: the Popol Vuh Film: Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda
Peter, Michael Bennett’s cat co-author
❧
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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Judyta Frodyma on the banks of the outaouais There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; 1. you were the prophet-poet of great forearms and Mufferaw fame, with your workboots and your ax, rollings logs of words downstream the outaouais river. your hair, yukon flawless golden stream, a life so lived, and yet un-gleaned. all of the trees were wearing crowns of gold for you that day, some wispy, some brass. they had the glow of a bygone era, that of river pigs and catty men, decreed to send their timber to decorate the gilded halls of the great city; of wives with babes in arms and snow up to their knees.
Dr. Judyta Frodyma, FYP Tutor
the sirens wept long before the city was built they watched, wailing, as king edward later descended down the timber slide, before crowds of lumberjacks. 2. in 1918, you were reborn as a prophet to the great white north, your A-frame built of those same logs that once drifted on the banks of the outaouais, quietly murmuring in the moonlight. and you told the world you were a sensitive man, a holy man, a tabernacle within men. blessed by our lady of sorrows, (ice pond, you were seven) you later built her a shrine, outside the city walls. it was made of white pine, & moss. and there you prayed, for the light to come. for blooms in furnished rooms, for tomorrow’s appointments to keep to schedule, or perhaps to run over a tad. you prayed for twelve days, because when you were nine, your french teacher told you you could pray your way out of purgatory.
Sandra Haycock (FYP 1972–73) (with George the collie) and Angus. (See interview, p. 7)
except you didn’t care for purgatory, or for me, or for the Algonquins. you cared only for the fate of the montreal canucks and the fearless end of sam mcgee, his beard glowing purple and orange in his furnace. and the railway tracks of the great canadian pacific and the pint that awaited you on the other side. how could anyone build a city of god with your old hands, and wrinkled frame and weakness for alcohol? 3. will i, too, repent when i die? will i raise my speckled hand to my forehead, in the name of the father, and the son, and the holy ghost ...ego te absolvo in nomine patris... returning to the light ? i have seen the new jerusalem. there were no gilded domes & ivory. no, Dr. Dodd at the great Irish Vale ice wall of 2019 (just down the coast from her writing shed).
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FYP – In itself and for itself
A NIGHT WITH MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI IN THE PRESIDENT’S LODGE NIGHT FYP 2019
Photos this page: Judyta Frodyma
Dr. Roberta Barker organized a glorious evening of song with singers from across Halifax, including FYP’s own Director, Dr. Neil Robertson who sang the terrifying Commendatore role and FYP Administrative Assistant Elisabeth Stones who sang the playful Zerlina.
Elisabeth Stones as Zerlina, Jacob Hemphill as Masetto
Roberta Barker, JP Decoss, Neil Robertson, Lindsay Hayland, Elisabeth Stones, Tara Scott, Jacolo Hemphill
Dr. Roberta Barker, Co-ordinator FYP Era of Revolutions
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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Casey loves Mozart
Dr. Neil Robertson as the Commendatore
Dr. Jannette Vusich
Cherry Blossom Time, Hiroshige
HIROSHIGE EXHIBIT NIGHT FYP 2019
Photo: Anya Deady
Students ventured to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia with Dr. Jannette Vusich and Dr. Neil Robertson to view the new collection of Japanese woodcut prints. They attended a lecture about the art of printmaking by artist Mark Bovey, and then wandered the exhibit together.
DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR NIGHT FYP 2019 What happens when mythic figures of the past are plunged into a modern world? The legend of Don Juan, the incurable yet charming womanizer, has been told and retold, but rarely in as radical a manner as in Ödön von Horváth’s 1936 play. Positioned in the economic and moral crisis of Europe after the Great War, Don Juan is a broken man, a traumatized soldier in search of true love rather than passing pleasure. Though his world is populated exclusively by women, his goal remains elusive.
Grace Rowan Quansah, Rylan Pembroke, and Audrey Green (FYP 2018–19)
(From dal news online)
A Love Poem Welcome to the world Baby Brother I love you You are very cute. The end. —Stella Wilband
Ata Zargarof, Peggy Heller Scholar from FYP 2017–18
David Hunter Wilband on February 7 “entered the world peacefully at home” as the thrilled Michelle (FYP Tutor), Dan, and Stella put it.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
DEAN K ATIE MERWIN:
“time to focus on students” BY K ATE BARKHOUSE (FYP 2018–19) Kate: I want to start off with how you got here Katie: Oh goodness. It’s a long story, but I guess the short version is I had been a student at King’s way back when, and when I finished grad school I came back to be a Don. I then was working at Dal for a little bit, but, you know, my heart was always here at King’s. So when the previous Dean was leaving a couple folks had encouraged me to think about applying and think about whether this would be something I would want to do, and it was sort of because of the support of a lot of really kind people that I took the leap to apply. Kate: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your day-to-day as the Dean of Students? Katie: My day to day? Oh, no two days are alike … There are usually two types of days: one is back to back meetings with different people, different committees, different students, trying to move all of our priorities and initiatives forward. But then, you never know what’s going to happen because if there’s a knock on my door and a student is in need or a student is in crisis, everything stops and I just focus on what that student needs. So I’ll often book time to say, okay, I’m going to sit in my office and I’m going to
I can’t find this room, so it’s nice to be able to triage, and help people with what they need. Kate: You must find it really satisfying to be able to give answers like that. Katie: It is very satisfying, but what’s even more satisfying is being able to help a student make their own decision and empower them to really be in control of their life. Because it’s one thing for you to be told by someone like me, go do this, it’s another to say, what would it look like if you made a change, and they’re like, oh, the change I want like to make is this, and I’m like, you got it! Gold star! So that’s where I really feel proud of the students, and it’s great to be part of that, as they come to learn how to take care of themselves. Kate: How do you think student life has changed since you were in FYP? Katie: I would say there’s probably more supports and resources available to students now than there were in my time, but that could have also meant that I just wasn’t aware of them as a FYP student, and that’s one thing I know that I’ve learnt this year. I’ve learnt a lot of lessons this year, but one of the lessons I’ve learnt is the importance
“ …a lot of students are coming to King’s … with a lot of self-awareness about what their mental health needs are…” get this report done, and I’ll hear a knock on the door and I’ll go okay, time to focus on this student. You never know when that’s going to happen, so that’s one of the gifts of being the Dean and being able to be accessible in this office and hang out here. Kate: What are the things that you find students come to you with most often? Katie: I would say the large majority are mental health related … I’m noticing that a lot of students are coming to King’s, coming to do FYP, with a lot of self-awareness about what their mental health needs are, and what they need or what they think they need to try to manage that as best they can … Of course, not every student is like that, and someone who’s doing well at one part of the year isn’t necessarily going to be doing the same level of wellness throughout the year. So I often see students who have been going through hard times … I also get students who have questions about sort of admin things — where do I pay this, where do I go to do that,
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
of communicating with students and trying to find more effective ways of communicating with students, and meeting them where they are. Kate: In that vein, what do you think is the most important part of your job? Katie: Supporting students, hands down. And I think the best way I can support students is by being present and by being available and accessible to them. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve done that this year, and thinking about what I can do differently next year. Kate: Is there anything that you hadn’t expected going in that you’ve found now that you’re here? Katie: Lots. Lots! You know the quote, gosh is it Socrates? “The only thing I know is that I know nothing” … This is my first time really being a public figure, and learning how to hear feedback that isn’t personalized. Learning how not to take things personally when
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Dean Katie Merwin, with Casey at opera night in the Lodge 2019
people have maybe difficult things to hear that are important to say but may be difficult to hear … how to not take criticism personally, but how to openly and vulnerably listen to what people are telling me so I can be more responsive to what the needs of the community are, that’s been a really important thing that I’ve learnt that I didn’t expect to have to navigate. Hasn’t been an easy year, but I’ve been really grateful to the people who have been kind and forgiving when I’ve made mistakes. Kate: Any general advice for us now, as we’re moving in to the end of the semester? How do we make our exam season as stress free as it can be? Katie: Isn’t that so important. One thing that I try not to do is give advice, because it makes much more of a difference if you can come to the conclusion on your own instead of being told what to do. If any student would like to have a conversation about how to enter into the end of term with me, I’d be very happy to have a check in and see what we can do. But maybe, ask for help when you need it, and know that it’s all going to be okay. Be nice to yourselves and each other. You know, just be gentle, be kind. ❧ (edited by Kate Barkhouse)
RECORD NUMBER OF FYPSTUDENT-ATHLETES IN 2018–19 NEIL HOOPER The reputation of the King’s Foundation Year program is golden and it is known far and wide as a top scholarly choice for many student across the country and beyond its borders. King’s also has a reputation of having between 30 and 40 on its Athletics Academic Honor Roll. Twenty students are also recognized every year as National Scholars. This ability to combine academics and a busy varsity sport schedule is challenging, but our students do this with great enjoyment and proficiency! Last year was a tremendous recruiting year for F YP Student-Athletes as twenty of our Athletic Recruits chose the F Y P program as the first year of their university educational experience. The opportunity for these students to combine their love of the arts, science and journalism with continued involvement in sport has been a “dream come true” for many of our varsity athletes.
They have gained from the experience and learned to be critical thinkers in a diverse program that challenges students to explore many facets of the arts and this knowledge and hands on reading and writing experience that will vault these students into second year opportunities! The common denominator for many of these students is environment of study is in many ways the same as being on a sports team from a teamwork point of view. King’s, through its support network of excellent and dynamic professors, supportive tutors, dons and classmates provide a learning atmosphere that is second to none. All of these skills learned by living and learning at King’s are transferrable to the courts and fields where student-athletes are required to think, work hard, compete and work toward a common goal of being the best that they can be in and out of the classroom. The future looks very bright for continuing to attract top level student-athletes to our FYP program. As ab added boost the University has launched its first renewable athletic scholarship thanks to the generosity of the
Debra Dean Little and Bob Little Athletic Scholarships. Any student who has an average between 80 and 100 percent and plays a varsity sport offered at King’s is eligible to compete for these Four-year, $5000 per year renewable scholarships. This type of recognition of scholarly and athletic ability will give many student-athletes an opportunity to explore our Foundation year program and get this unique chance to study and learn in this King’s environment. King’s Foundation Year Student and Varsity Basketball Player, Jack Wuotila speaks fondly about his King’s experience: “Being at King’s has allowed me to experience university basketball, university science courses, and access to a seemingly endless wealth of liberal arts knowledge and understanding, all while living on one of the most beautiful campuses in Canada. I have no doubt it is a completely unique experience. “ Jack hails from Calgary and made the decision to come to king’s and by reading this it is easy to tell that he has not regretted his choice! ❧
Molly Lash-Burrows, Women’s Badminton
Katharine Richter, Women’s Basketball
Ethan Merlin, Men’s basketball / Men’s Soccer
Mitchell Rutledge, Men’s Basketball
Joe Thomson, Men’s Basketball
Jack Wuotila, Men’s Basketball
Miriam Burnett, Women’s Soccer
Eliza Burroughs, Women’s Soccer
Lucy Carolan, Women’s Soccer
Niko House, Men’s Soccer
Ewout van Waasbergen, Men’s Soccer
Grace Day, Women’s Volleyball
Laura Hughes McKay, Women’s Volleyball
Emily Outhit, Women’s Volleyball
Rebecca Worden, Women’s Volleyball
Neil Hooper, King’s Atheletics Director, is a treasure for FYP. He recruits for excellence in sports always with a view to the academic mission of King’s.The stupendous donation of scholarships from the Dean-Little family must be in part an homage to our dear friend and colleague, Neil Hooper, whose support for students as whole people never fails.
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Not Pictured Women’s Rugby: Dara Carr Anya Deady Larissa Dean Mady Frellick Sophia Tonks Men’s Rugby: Carl Baxter-Zinck Josh Williams
FYP – In itself and for itself
E’se’kati how incomprehensible eleven thousand years of human change from sa’qewe’k l’nu’k, the ancient ones, chasing giants across territory making homes out of such unrelenting coast as this sa’se’wa’sutiek (we change) here, the southeast corner of Sipekne’kati in the harbour of clams, the mu awsami kejikawe’k l’nu’k , the ones of long ago watched qualipuk and held bowls of clay later weathered back to fragments the way kta’n (the sea) has a way of reclaiming its own identity
the tide always carrying-in the pilei, the new and with it, the bringing and taking of lives what to do with all those hearts bury those hearts in your harbour of clams and calligraphy of stunted trees shifting colonies of pebbles and mud between earth and ocean’s fierce grip on forest’s edge bury those hearts in the roots of spruce and fir snake-anchored to shore determined to thicken and curl into soil and each other’s gnarled land malikwek, such slow continuous pace braced for change
we give thanks to the kejikawe’k l’nu’k, recent ancestors, who stood at this eastern door welcoming naku’set each day gave blessings and thanks through the wape’k the whiting of the sky in wapane’kati
bury those hearts in the geology of families bed-rocked, faulted and fissured, descendants are made from the blood of Mi’kmaq who dug the first clams the blood of French who dug farms the blood of English who dug lines the blood of boat-people who landed to pray and dig and line
such responsibility that had what can we say to celebrate to mourn? to celebrate the change that brought choices and longer lives celebrate how to exist together here now in each other’s embrace but to mourn the names and livelihoods it took away the Mi’kmaq disentangled from landscape, to make way
over all that war people built people loved they built towns and Treaties they beaded and broke and beaded the wampum again still alive
CSP at 25 AL AN HALL (FYP 1993–94) I came down from New Brunswick for the 25th Anniversary celebrations of Contemporary Studies. The main delight was seeing old friends, professors, students and colleagues. Many of whom are at least two of these things. I was at King’s as a student in FYP and CSP in the mid 90’s, the early days of the programme and then back to King’s as a tutor in HOST, CSP and FYP in the mid 2000’s. Coming back always feels like returning to the source. Especially beautiful was the tribute to Peggy Heller, especially hopeful were the panels of graduates who have gone on to find that close reading of difficult texts, and then talking about them with your friends for three or four years might be the best possible preparation for any sort of thing. As always, I left with a deep feeling of gratitude that so many of my formative years were spent in the quad. Also: when did we start calling it “The Wardy”? I don’t think I am super keen about this.
Coming back always feels like returning to the source.
so bury my heart in your rhythm the ocean’s steady beat inhaling exhaling lifting debris — shalan joudry 2017
Photo by James Ersil (FYP 2018–19)
(“Ese’kati” is based on a docupoem project with video by Brett Hannam)
CSP at 25. Dr. Eyo Ewara (FYP 2010–11), Lisa Crystal (FYP 2003–04), Dorota Glowacka (Director, CSP), Mordeccai Walfish (FYP 2003–04)
Shalan Joudry in the President’s Lodge, Night FYP 2019.
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
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photo Dorota Glowacka
Many FYP alumni gathered to celebrate the King’s Contemporary Studies Program’s birthday at the 25th Anniversary Summit on March 29. Eleven CSP alumni reminisced and waxed nostalgic about their good old days in the program and showcased a wide spectrum of professional interests and careers post-CSP. Panelists came in from Arkansas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Toronto, as well as from Dartmouth and from just around the corner, representing a medley of careers, including theatre director, journalist, social worker, professor and cyber security expert. On the next day, March 30, a CSP Student Conference showcased the work of current CSP students. Happy birthday CSP, with love from FYP! ❧
CSP at 25. Student panel: Edie Reaney-Chunn (FYP 2014–15), Ghislaine Sinclair (FYP 2016–17), Brennan McCracken (FYP 2016–17)
ATHLETICS AWARDS DINNER 2018–19
Athletics Director, Neil Hooper, on his way to King’s Athletics Awards Night
Molly Lash-Burrows (FYP 2018–19) and Bill Lahey
Ewout van Waasbergen (FYP 2018–19) and Ben West, co-winners, Rookie of the Year
Rory MacLellan (FYP 2005–06), Men’s rugby coach, and Josh Williams (FYP 2018–19)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Photo: Tim Lapp (FYP 2018–19)
Katy Weatherly (FYP 2014–15), Andrew Griffin (FYP 2012–13), and Jordan Draper (FYP 2005–06), at Mersey River chapel retreat.
Thoughts? Write! WINTER CHAPEL RETREAT AT MERSEY RIVER APOLONNIA PERRI, CHAPEL WARDEN (FYP 2016–17) This winter retreat, Dr. Susan Dodd led discussions with excerpts from texts that pertained to the theme of “Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Enchantment Never-Ending.” These texts all contain a vision of beauty that is mixed with the pains of heartbreak and betrayal. As we encounter the beauty of these texts, and as we try to commit the vision of their beauty in our own writing, there is always a deep sense of loss. The question that struck me early on that weekend was this: “How do you write about a vision without betraying the beauty and truth of that experience?” Bishop Mark, Indigenous Bishop of the Anglican Church in Canada, made a helpful distinction between ‘enchantment’ and ‘beguilement’. The word beguilement succeeds in identifying the nature of this betrayal. Beguilement deceives by capturing an alluring image of beauty. It seeks the
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
beauty that conceals an underlying impulse for violence. White man beguiled the Indigenous peoples into treaty relations. Beguilement describes the danger of subtlety—our tendency to hold certain things up without understanding their weight.
As we learn to write we grapple with an experience of beauty and sorrow. The danger we face here remains relevant and personal. The stories we recount can’t merely represent what can be distilled as beautiful. As we learn to write we grapple with an experience of beauty and sorrow. Our experience of that vision threatens to
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become fixed and lose the essential fluidity of beauty. Dante tries to describe the beauty of his vision of the Empyrean: rather, as I grew worthier to see, the more I looked, the more unchanging semblance appeared to change with every change in me —(Paradiso, Canto XXXIII I. 111–113). We cannot write to describe a closed system that will fail to recreate the truth of that experience. We must endeavor to bear the burden of doubt as we labour in our writing. This will leave space for beauty to emerge and affirm itself. Writing can recreate the beauty that is intrinsic to any vision of the world. In a way this craft cooperates with what is held in sight rather than destroying it. ❧
Far left: Arden Rogalsky (FYP 2017–18) Chapel Retreat, Mersey River Left: Bubba (the dog), Ranall Ingalls (Chaplain), Ata Zargarof (FYP 2017–18), and Leah Simonot (FYP 2017–18; Halifax Humanities Assistant 2017–18), and Cedric Blais (FYP 2015–16). Photos: Tim Lapp (FYP 2018–19)
Far left: Sunrise, Chapel Retreat Left: Compline on the Mersey River
BY DR. SUSAN DODD (FYP 1983–84)
Discussions on the chapel retreat get very real. We grapple with what may be the most important question in the universe: How can I live a good life, freely, and not simply in obedience to authority or in nostalgia for some mythical past? This is a question we ask early in FYP, especially with Plato, and it stays with us as we grow more and more self-conscious about ourselves as modern, “Western,” and technological beings. Bishop Mark McDonald invited us to join him in amazement at the natural world, and ourselves, together in it. It seemed that the answer to our most important question was to hold before us one simple fact: “The world excites awe,” as writer Tim Lilburn puts it. If we could just focus on this awe, hold onto it, we would live authentically and respectfully. But of course, sometimes awe abandons us. Sometimes our hearts are dust and our souls turn back into themselves in a whirring repetition of obsessive thoughts and degrading desires. We want peace, and we can’t make it for ourselves. We feel like we’re flying to bits and then someone offers us a bowl of soup…and somehow we are re-knitted, even for a moment. Lilburn counsels eco-asceticism: “Dig a hole in the earth. Lie in it. Wait.” We should cultivate “a stance of being alert without
anticipating anything, a slackening of self which is a higher form of intensity.” The key here is a letting go, that is: ...the renunciation of all secret pleasures that cosset consciousness in its estrangement from the physical world, like the delectable satisfaction of having something to look down on, the attractiveness of which is our estrangement. The question of how to live well becomes an ethical one: how do we risk opening ourselves to one another without dissipating completely? Maybe, if I have understood my teachers here at King’s, we can hazard three general
collegial principles: 1. Drink from the roots: seek nourishment and stability from the ground that formed us, the soil from which we sprang...take the food and acknowledge the toxins. 2. Welcome a fusion of horizons where our presuppositions meet and meld with the moral landscapes of others. 3. By our various ways, through our various gifts, invite one another to greet the awe when it waxes and to seek it afresh when it wanes... ❧
Photo: Tim Lapp (FYP 2018–19)
“THE WORLD EXCITES AWE”
Bishop Mark McDonald, Indigenous Bishop, Anglican Church of Canada, Mersey River chapel retreat.
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Harry Lake, Chapel Retreat
FYP – In itself and for itself
Announcements MORE FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS AT KING’S President Lahey recently announced improvements to King’s funding for students. Students in FYP who receive a B+ will receive $1,000 scholarship, while those who receive an A- or higher will receive $2,500 towards second year studies (it used to be $1,000). As well, there will be more than $400,000 for bursaries. Even more, we have over 60 new renewable named scholarships for new FYP students and King’s students generally, including: two new Prince Scholarships for African Nova Scotian students ($6,000per year); up to 14 Deane-Little Scholarships for FYP students playing varsity sports ($5,000 per year) and the new Carrie and Ralph Wright Memorial Scholarship ($12,000 FYP, $9,000 each year after). There will be more job opportunities on campus for students, too.
FYP Fellows’ Symposium FYP Tutors and students gathered on a winter afternoon for “short talks and smart cookies.” In the 4th and a 1/2th Annual FELLOWS’ SYMPOSIUM, we heard Dr. Asha Jeffers, “Modes of Rebellion: Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction”; Dr. Michael Bennett, “Do Prenatal Genetic Interventions on Embryos Represent the Next Stage of Human Evolution?”; Dr. Christopher Cohoon, “Extravagant Generosity”; and Christopher Snook, “‘Demonic Modernisms’: Eliot on the Problem of Personality in Modern Literature.”
President and Vice-Chancellor William Lahey.
THINKING OF L AW? FROM FYP TO L AW: A NEW PARTNERSHIP In a new partnership formed between the University of King’s College and the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary, students admitted to the King’s Foundation Year Program will be provisionally pre-admitted to Calgary’s Faculty of Law. Provisional admittance to UCalgary Law means students will have an advantage in the applicant pool but will still have to maintain scholarship standing throughout the remainder of their degree at King’s and Dalhousie, plus meet all other admissions criteria including LSAT scores, work experience and community involvement.
FYP News – Spring 2019 – Poetry & Politics
DRACULA ON TRIAL The Schulich Law School Moot Court 2019 In support of the Halifax Humanities Society Each year the Weldon Literary Moot puts literary characters on trial for their crimes. Characters have been tried from Alice in Wonderland, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Charlie and the Chocolate factory, and The Hobbit. This year, Count Dracula sued the vampire hunter Van Helsing for wrongful death. Performed by law students, law professors, Nova Scotia Provincial Court Judge Michael Sherrar, Ben Stone, the artistic director of Zuppa Theatre, and participants from the Halifax Humanities as the jury, the moot raised over $2,000 for Halifax Humanities. As Jon Shapiro a six-time participant told Dal News, “It might be the most fun thing of the year… It’s improv comedy.” What is the Halifax Humanities? Well, to quote myself from my introduction to
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our 2012 collection of essays, Each Book a Drum: celebrating ten years of Halifax Humanities “The original course is Halifax Humanities 101. HH101 is an introduction to selected classics in Western thought, taught as an historical narrative. We offer HH101 “barrier-free” to people who live on assistance, disability, pension, or with other financial constraints… As Jymy and Helen put it in our first valedictory speech: ‘for a while, money or the lack of it was not what was most significant in our lives.’” Halifax Humanities and King’s are deeply interwoven: many of our coordinators, teachers, and board members are King’s faculty; the program was founded by our former chaplain, Gary Thorne along with some FYP faculty; the University supports Halifax Humanities in all kinds of ways, including offering a credit possibility for graduates of the HH101. Dr. Dawn Brandes, the Director of Halifax Humanities is a great friend to the Foundation Year, and now teaches in the Theatre department at Dalhousie. George Elliott Clarke is the Honorary Patron of the Halifax Humanities, and Each Book a Drum takes its title from Dr. Elliott Clarke’s poem that is inscribed on the sculpture out front of the public library on Gottingen Street where HH101 meets for classes. In his preface to our book of essays and poems by volunteers and participants in the Halifax Humanities, Dr. Elliott Clarke writes: “To my mind, Halifax Humanities exemplifies this…principle of pedagogy: To teach is to discover for ourselves the philosophies (and theologies) and principles of the (mal) functions of our governments, economies, and cultures—so that we are enlightened persons—that is to say, empowered citizens.” He concludes that preface with a poem, saying: “Perhaps it demonstrates my understanding about the nature of things, as a poet, well, for better or worse.”
David Huebert’s (FYP 2004– 05) work has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and The Walrus Poetry Prize, among other accolades. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won the Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second book of poetry, Humanimus, will be published by Palimpsest Press in 2020.
Emily Gorman (FYP 2018–19), Canada Games Archer
Tyler Messick (FYP 1998–99) was nominated for an ECMA award for Plain Sight.
CBC Information Morning adopted Rich Aucoin’s (FYP 2001–02) “The Fear” as their theme in September of this year.
Ben Caplan (FYP 2005–06) and Hannah Moscovitz off Broadway hit, “Old Stock: a Refugee Love Story” is now touring Canada. Look for it in Calgary, Toronto, and Halifax in the next few months!
Dr. Eli Diamond “Prince and the Revolution”... with Dance Party. Final Night FYP 2019
Po, the new puppy at Dr. Diamond’s house, with Kieva Diamond (FYP 1996–97)
Harriet Alida Lye’s (FYP 2005–06) new book, Natural Killer will be published by McClelland and Stewart in Spring 2020. It is described as, “an intimate gripping memoir examining the interconnectedness of life and death.”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
the typewritten word. Ata Zargarof (FYP 2017–18)