Plenty of Nothing

Overqualified, by Joey Comeau

All Maritime literature is about, at some level, alcohol.  When you read Joseph Howe, you have to bear in mind the punch bowl on the sideboard, or David Adams Richards, the stack of empties in the mud porch. Even Anne of Green Gables gets drunk on raspberry cordial. In Christy Ann Conlin's Heave, Serrie the recovering protagonist wonders exactly what it is Maritimers are supposed to do when they stop drinking.

Joey Comeau's Overqualified fits right in there.  The epistolary novel takes the form of a series of job applications, the applicant Joey Comeau's strategy being to lie in the resumé and tell the truth in the cover letters.  Though for "tell the truth" read "unveil manic fantasies of revenge".  Many of these letters have the belligerence you might meet in a tavern parking lot.  Biographical details sift out about a dead grandfather, a broken relationship, and a brother killed by a drunk driver.  By the end the narrator is no closer to a job, but you are closer to understanding why.

But aggressive truths are still truths.  Here he is applying to Absolut Vodka:

You don't know what I mean, do you, Absolut?  Your commercials are all pretty pictures and clever design. They're very attractive.  I'm applying for a job, because I don't think you understand what it means to be cool or strong or invincible.  You of all people should know.  That is what alcohol does.  It makes you strong.  You can fight anyone.  You can seduce any woman.  You can drive faster than death.

Wow, Nova Scotia

Ice Age Atlantic Canada

During a glacial maximum the increased amount of water locked up in ice shields results in lower sea levels, which in some places like Atlantic Canada makes for some pretty interesting geography.  This map of the area c 11,000 BC shows most of the Maritimes and Newfoundland still under ice, but with large ice-free islands exposed on the Scotian Shelf and Grand Banks and a major iceberg calving channel running through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.  This Geological Survey of Canada site has a series of maps covering the changes from 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, plus a sea-levels animation that pits rising water against rebounding land in a multi-millennial turf war.

Grade Six History

If you attended school in Nova Scotia from 1955 until probably 1980 you'll likely remember Phyllis Blakeley's Nova Scotia, a Brief History, the Grade Six history textbook, and recognize Donald Mackay's illustrations from it.  Nova Scotian history is quite action-packed, especially the 17th- and 18th-century parts, and Blakeley and Mackay do a good job of hitting moments of dramatic tension, like the expulsion of the Acadians above.  The influence of historical novelist Thomas Raddall is pervasive, making this possibly the best example of a history textbook based on a body of historical fiction.  I'm sure the Micmac raid on Dartmouth in chapter 10 is there because Raddall used it in Roger Sudden.  Mackay, whose signature is beside the fourth clog on right, lends an artistic clarity and interest with his drawings that the grainy black and white photographs in the second half of the book lack, and reminds you there was a time when history was an art instead of a social science, and when nothing made it more vivid than a good line.  I'm going to try to find out more about Donald Mackay.  Douglas

Mount Allison to Demolish Sprague and Baxter Houses

If you enjoy press release spin, check out this beauty from Mount Allison University.  The university is gearing up to put the backhoe to two more of Sackville's heritage properties, but before they do so the general public has an eleven day window in which to purchase them, and then two months to haul them off the site.  Will Mt. A sell the properties with the land?  No!  Universities don't sell land!  They only grow and grow, converting their host towns to green space.  Note the use of the soporifics home and family, and the long central quotation from the administrator who commissioned the article.  Especially shiny brass is the way in which the magic word environment has been wrapped around the coming act of vandalism.  As if there's no such thing as a built environment. Of course when no one with a spare vacant lot in Sackville and a few hundred thousands snaps up the houses the university will be forced to flatten them, however reluctantly.  What else can a poor public institution do?  Douglas McLeod

Mount Allison University Axes German Literature

So how long before no one in Sackville recognizes this picture?  There's always a stink whenever a university chops a department, and this particular downsizing probably won't cause student riots (though read one rant here), but you have to wonder what in hell the administrators are thinking.  Germans love Canada, and have been buying up the Atlantic Provinces for the past two or three decades.  So there's money for German Studies there.  With university recruitment stagnant in the Maritimes, there's a premium on international study programs like MASSIE, which brings in planeloads of Japanese sophomores for English language immersion.  Aren't there German sophomores who'd like to spend a term in New Brunswick, among all that forest?   Can Mt A ditch a major European language and maintain its MacLeans score against liberal arts colleges like St FX and Acadia that still teach it?  And does the Mt A classics department image that laying hands on the German budget will benefit its own program?  Because I took classics, and I'll tell you, you can't make heads or tails of the criticism if you don't read German.  Douglas

Snowshoeing in St. John's

Uh huh, yes, I know it's just August, but I want to snowshoe now.  In the interim here's a photo from the archives of Memorial University of Newfoundland showing a party on the grounds of Government House c.1890.  Douglas

The Founding of Halifax

How to Solve Mount Allison's Money Problems

My old campus newspaper The Argosy recently sponsored a debate on the future of Mount Allison University.  (For the build-up to the event, and an MP3 file of the speakers, see the entries around Feb. 4 at Whispering into the Mirror.)  Debates about the future of Mount Allison have almost always taken place in the context a shortage of cash.  The university is currently heading into another lean stretch.  Government funding is down, and tuition now accounts for over half of the school's revenue.  But enrollments are down too.  What are the marsh dwellers to do?

Mt A has historically presented itself as a Maritime university instead of an organ of any particular Maritime province.  As a Methodist foundation it originally saw itself in relation to the church's Maritime conference, which to this day (as the United Church) continues to meet in Sackville.  Relations with the provincial governments are in comparison a lot like relations with foreign governments.  And Halifax, Fredericton and Charlottetown all have hometown universities to think of first.

The University of Ottawa is never out of money.  Since WWII the place has had carte blanche to appropriate any part of its neighbourhood it wanted, and it has, on the government nickel.  The cranes rarely stop twirling.  The secret is the university's close relationship to both the federal government and the Liberal Party.  I once went to a reading there and remember thinking, that guy next to the master of ceremonies sure looks a lot like the Minister of Finance.  (He was.)

Mount Allison needs easy access to government money.  A means to that end would be Maritime Union.  Get a Maritime legislature and say the Department of Education into Sackville and overnight the town will become a prestigious address, have a second major employer, and the university will gain the kind of hometown status that Dalhousie thrives on.  Maritime Union is a legitimate political stance that gets an airing every couple of generations but has always found too many local interests arrayed against it.   But it's in the interest of Mount Allison, and in its image too.

Douglas

Growlers and Bergy Bits

    I encountered these two terms today while exploring the sea ice section the Environment Canada website.  Here's a site that explains the difference, so you don't embarrass yourself by calling one the other the next time you're up the Labrador.  Heather, of course, knows all this stuff already, being an Antarctic maniac.  She could tell you the name of the cat on Shackleton's last voyage.

    I was trying to think of whether I've ever seen an iceberg, or at least a bergy bit, and, yes, I have.  They used to be visible from the upstairs window of the house in Sydney Mines, the winter of 1970/71, menacing the North Sydney ferry.

    This image is by David Blackwood, Newfoundland printmaker, whose pictures of the natural world always seem to be so much more awesome that Christopher Pratt's, because he puts people in them for scale.  Douglas