Judy Rebick Book Launch at UNB: March 27!

Journalist, Writer, and Activist Judy Rebick will be at UNB on the afternoon of Friday, March 27th, at 4:00 pm as a guest of Women's Studies and Political Science. She is touring Canada to launch her new book, published this week, called Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political".

Location: Chancellor's Room, Wu Centre, UNB, Fredericton
Time: 4:00 pm
Date: Friday, March 27th
There will be a short reception after her talk. Her book will be for sale.
The event is free and open to the public.



Judy Rebick is a well-known social justice activist, educator , writer, and speaker. She currently holds the Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University.

Judy is founder of rabble.ca, Canada’s most popular independent online news and discussion site and the author of several books and articles, most recently Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution (Penguin 2005). Her other books are Imagine Democracy (Stoddard 2000) and Politically Speaking (Douglas & McIntyre 1996).


In her new book, "Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political", veteran activist Judy Rebick explains how globalization and mass communication technology are revolutionizing our understanding of power and producing profound new ideas about social and political life. Whether it’s the election of President Obama, the rise of democracy in Bolivia, or the success of Wikipedia, it’s the process that’s key: bringing communities of people together to produce something new; building a movement from the bottom up; sharing experience, knowledge and wisdom; emphasizing co-operation and consensus over confrontation and political partisanship.

Meaningful response to the environmental crisis and social injustice requires substantial, sustainable change at every level, which can only come through building power from the grass roots, from the people most impacted. In Transforming Power we discover the ideas, the people and the practices that can provide the paths to the change we need.

Visit her website: Transforming Power for more info on the book and Judy herself.

Oulipian Horoscopes.... keep your brain limber

An acquaintance of mine started a Facebook group called "Echo Spoor," an online workshop for literature in the style of the oulipians (those who've read Christian Bok will be familiar). They imposed strict rules on their writing, "believing that formal constraints were liberatory".

People can create "echo spoors" - poetry derived from horoscopes.

The rules: use only the letters, words and punctuation in your daily, weekly, or monthly horoscopes to write "your" poems. you may not repeat words or punctuation.

My poem is derived from Rob Brezny's Scorpio horoscope for this week. I had thought with all the talk of "workmen", "entering the body", etc this would be a bit more risque.... turns out Weil infuses all with her love of the Godhead ...


When waiting for passage,
Keep in mind the mystic and political activist,
Entering our tired world of
Order and beauty,
Suffering and hurt,
Redemptive pain.
His coming is the expression of love.


(Horoscope):
In her book Waiting for God, French mystic and political activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) wrote a passage I'd love for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks: "When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen have this fine expression: 'It is the trade entering his body.' Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the order and beauty of the world that are entering our body." I encourage you, Scorpio, to adopt this redemptive attitude about the suffering you have been experiencing.

quickie toon

I just found a site where you can make cartoons! toondoo.com
I just picked a background, and it all came together..... oh my.

txt msg nvl: "The Last Messages"

A new novel by Finnish author Hannu Luntiala is written entirely in txt msg lingo. Released this month, the novel The Last Messages tells the story of a man who quits his job as an Executive and subsequently travels through-out Europe and India, keeping in touch w/ friends and fam by IM-ing on his mobile.
The 322-page novel --a quest? a techno-picaresque? shorthand epistolary?-- lists his messages and the replies (about 1000 altogether) in chronological order.

I've seen a few novels that make use of e-mail exchanges to tell the story, but this is quite an endeavour, for both the author and the intended reader. I'm behind the idea from a creative standpoint, but do I really want to read 322 pages of txt msgs, complete with broken grammar and slang? Does it make a difference that the messages are fictitious and therefore I can expect some sort of compelling plot? (Is that what I expect when I read a narratve?).

The novel makes me think of Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, in which he transcribed every word he uttered for a week while living in NYC. It's a real-time monologue, an extended aside.

Which would you rather read? The Last Messages is a creative work that exploits contemporary technology and trends, Soliloquy is an "uncreative" artistic mirror held up to the idea of the monologue, the constructed narrative-reveal. It is pure doumentation. What do the different methods, fecund creativity or "nutritionless" uncreativity, offer? Could you tell the difference between a constructed narrative made to look like documentation, and an actual documented life that resists the tropes of dramatic monologue while still investing in them?

**"nutritionless documentation", and "uncreativity" are terms Goldsmith has used to describe his work.

The shovel is brother to the gun

A Canadian soldier with her national brand.
I wonder what she feels on this day that honours the fallen. Does she think about our collective idea of a veteran as a kindly old white-haired fellow with his war bride on his arm, accolades adorning one breast-pocket, and a poppy on the other? How does she incorporate herself into that image?

Is it possible for the image of the veteran to be supplanted by today's soldiers who fight under a different and ill-planned banner of justice? Soldiers who lack the ideological support of a large percent of the population? Afghanistan is not a sure thing. Citizens are confused, the government is bumbling, and our Foreign Minister will not apologize for his sexist "mistake" and therefore cannot be expected to be accountable for moral and mortal mistakes in warfare.


~Marge Piercy ~ Right to Life
[A Woman is] not a purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.


~ Katha Pollit ~
Trying to Write a Poem Against the War

My daughter, who's as beautiful as the day,
hates politics: Face it, Ma,
they don't care what you think! All
passion, like Achilles,
she stalks off to her room,
to confide in her purple guitar and await
life's embassies. She's right,
of course: bombs will be hurled
at ordinary streets
and leaders look grave for the cameras,
and what good are more poems against war
the real subject of which
so often seems to be the poet's superior
moral sensitivities? I could
be mailing myself to the moon
or marrying a palm tree,
and yet what can we do
but offer what we have?
and so I spend
this cold gray glittering morning
trying to write a poem against war
that perhaps may please my daughter
who hates politics
and does not care much for poetry, either.


~ Wilfred Owen ~
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: "Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."


~ Randall Jarrell~
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.


~ Carl Sandburg ~
Iron

Guns,
Long, steel guns,
Pointed from the war ships
In the name of the war god.
Straight, shining, polished guns,
Clambered over with jackies in white blouses,
Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,
Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses,
Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.

Shovels,
Broad, iron shovels,
Scooping out oblong vaults,
Loosening turf and leveling sod.

      I ask you
      To witness-
      The shovel is brother to the gun.


~ ani difranco ~
to the teeth

the sun is setting on the century
and we are armed to the teeth
we're all working together now
to make our lives mercifully brief
and schoolkids keep trying to teach us
what guns are all about
confuse liberty with weaponry
and watch your kids act it out
and every year now like christmas
some boy gets the milkfed suburban blues
reaches for the available arsenal
and saunters off to make the news
and the women in the middle
are learning what poor women have always known
that the edge is closer than you think
when the men bring the guns home

look at where the profits are
that's how you'll find the source
of the big lie that you and i
both know so well
in the time it takes this cultural
death wish to run it's course
they're gonna make a pretty penny
and then they're all going to hell
he said the chickens all come home to roost
yeah, malcolm forecasted this flood
are we really gonna to sleep through another century
while the rich profit off our blood?
true, it may take some doing
to see this undoing through
but in my humble opinion
here's what i suggest we do:

open fire on hollywood
open fire on MTV
open fire on NBC
and CBS and ABC
open fire on the NRA
and all the lies they told us
along the way
open fire on each weapons manufacturer
while he's giving head
to some republican senator

and if i hear one more time
about a fool's right
to his tools of rage
i'm gonna take all my friends
and i'm gonna move to canada
and we're gonna die of old age


~ Moxy Fruvous ~
Gulf War Song

we got a call to write a song about the war in the gulf
but we shouldn't hurt anyone's feelings
so we tried but gave up 'cause there was no such song
but the trying was very revealing
what makes a person so poisonous righteous
that they think less of anyone who just disagrees
she's just a pacifist
he's just a patriot
if i said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?

fighters for liberty
fighters for power
fighters for longer turns in the shower
and history seems to agree that I would fight you for me

so we read and we watched all the specially selected news
and we learned so much more about the good guys

won't you stand by the flag was the question unasked
won't you stand by and fight for the allies?

what can we say, we're only twenty five years old
with 25 sweet summers, and hot fires in the cold
this kind of life makes that violence unthinkable
we'd like to play hockey, have kids and grow old

fighters for texaco
fighters for power
fighters for longer turns in the shower

don't tell me i can't fight cause i'll punch out your lights
and history seems to agree
that i would fight you for me
that us would fight them for we

is that how it always will be?

Jessica Grant is my new favourite

The final reader at this weekend's Calgary Blow-Out, St. John's native Jessica Grant blew me away with her witty, quick and quirky style.

"The first piece I'm going to read will take about five minutes, and then I'm going to read a second piece which will take about eight minutes.. just so you'll know exactly what is going to happen"

She began her first story, which she thinks, no, she is sure is the first chapter of a novel. We meet a woman who's pet tortoise Winnifred has died. She thinks it has died because Winnifred's head doesn't poke out. After deliberating, she wraps Winnifred in five paper bags and throws her in the garbage bin over the railing. She calls her friend to say that she doesn't have to look after Winnifred anymore, Winnifred is dead.
She arrives at the airport, and while waiting to board remembers hearing that sometimes tortoise's hearts can beat very slowly, about once and hour. Maybe Winniffred wasn't dead! But is dying now in the dumpster... should she go home?
But she can't miss her plane, she has to go see her father who is in a comma, no a coma. She made that mistake yesterday when writing an e-mail. Perhaps Winnifred is in a comma, not a coma. She is in a pause between heart-beats.....

I LOVE it. that's the basic action of the story but the details and tone were hilarious and bittersweet.

Jessica Grant's most recent publication is Making Light of Tragedy Porcupine’s Quill, 2004.

on the importance of reading: tag, I'm it!

I got this list of question off a. raw's blog:

1. one book that changed your life:
Daughters of Copperwoman “by” Anne Cameron

(I’m going to squeeze in Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Brave New World, and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke). All read when I was 13-14, and pivotal in shaping my ideas on time, womanliness, and multiple realities. I must include them all; they’re a cocktail of my burgeoning.
Hmmm. I think I should scrap all of my theory-reading and get back to my beginnings in Sci Fi and Fantasy.

2. one book you’ve read more than once:
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
"Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion."

3. one book that has made you cry: (newly remembered question)
"The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
I FINALLY read the Bell Jar this year. It's a phenomenal read, but I'm glad I didn't read it until now; I wasn't ready until now. You need to already know that you're of sound intelligence, that you're work/creativity/passions are valued (by you mostly, but also the community), and that you can do WHATEVER you want. These are things a woman must know. Plath only half-knew these things, in a time when all society told her the opposite.

The book affirms all we know about the relations of talented & brilliant woman and men, and who gets short-changed in that equation (for those who don't know, it's the one who drives herself nuts taking care of children in the remote English country-side [while hubby-poet snogs first-years] and solves the problem by sticking her head in an oven).
Multiply by Elizabeth Smart, and, well, its horrifying how mothering/creating/success was so stymied for so many women. At least Smart survived. Is it different now?

So, in answer to this question of crying: In "The Bell Jar" Plath survives her first case of suicide and institutionalization; I the reader know that after this novel was lived she entered two more time-tested institutions: Academia and Marriage.
They destroyed her. and I cried and cried.

4. one book that made you giddy:
Eunoia by Christian Bok, especially in performance, espacially Chapter U.
“Ubu cups Lulu’s dugs; Ubu rubs Lulu’s buns; thus Lulu must pull Ubu’s pud...Ubu stuffs Ruth’s bum (such fun).”

5. one book that you wish had been written:
“How to have Children and Tenure within the Next 10 Years of My Life: an Explanatory Guide and Timeline”.

6. one book you wish had never been written:
Science of Survival by L. Ron Hubbard (1951)

7. one book you’re currently reading:
Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics by Carolyn Guertin (Ph.D Dissertation 2003). This is what I keep trying to start as research for my thesis.
I actually just finished Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia, and I Love Dick

8. one book you’ve been meaning to read:
Silence by John Cage - it’s been sitting neglected on my shelf since fall 2004.

Please listen to Cage's story about translating a Basho poem about Mushrooms. pine mushroom. ignorance. leaf of tree. adhesiveness.

9. now tag people.
Christina and Sean, Leslie, Martha, and Morgan

**All welcome to post their answers!**

Nicole Brossard, toujours deja

Tonight I'm going to attend Nicole Brossard's launch of her new essay collection Fluid Arguments at "This Ain't the Rosedale Library" in the Village. I've hopscotched the country in hopes of hearing her read, and though I missed her breakfast at York because the TTC doesn't run until 9am sundays (what about those worm-earning early-rising church goers?)(not to mention how I didn't attend Congress yesterday cuz of the strike), I did catch the thoroughly multi-lingual seminar Sunday evening. What an asset it is to speak french and move effortlessly between mental spaces of language, following tonalities.
I've bought her new paperback edition of Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, and look forward to digging into it next week while sitting on a bench in Vieux Port.

cyberfeminism & community-building

As a follow-up to Panel #3:

VNS Matrix - Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century
Donna Haraway - Cyborg Manifesto
Shelley Jackson - my body & wunderkammer
Caitlin Fisher - These Waves of Girls
Feministe Blog
Skawenatti Tricia Fragnito - Why I Love WWWriting
Documentary on sexual assault - Searching for Angela Shelton
Frances Power Cobbe (1822 - 1904) - Wife-Torture in England, Other Writings

Please feel free to leave other useful feminist resources! And add anything I've forgotten!

Suzukiography

Last weekend's Globe and Mail featured a sample from David Suzuki's forthcoming The Autobiography. A compact retelling of his days spent in Slocan Valley as an interned Japanese non-citizen, his prose is moving and personal. I was reminded of why I became so interested in Suzuk in the first place--after seeing "The Nature of David Suzuki" on CBC's Life & Times series.
I was in the eleventh grade, and had never heard about the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII. "When were they going to tell me!?!" I thought in shock, thinking of all my history and Sciences Humaines teachers, who seemed to have completely forgotten this embarassing chapter of systematic racism in Canada's recent history. Was it not part of our curriculum? Then again, the White Paper wasn't included in our studies either. But them Loyalists sure figured prominently (to the detriment of the Acadians and their expulsion which was also skipped over, another shocking late-teens independent discovery), as well as Tea Parties and Laura Secord. New England's history sounded like a well-catered party to me.

Joy Kogawa, an acclaimed writer whose novel Obasan chronicles a little girl's experiences growing up at one of the internment camps, is currently campaigning to save her childhood home from demolition. Obasan House, located in Vancouver, is set to be demolished this month despite efforts to save it and transform it into a heritage and culture monument. We should find out soon whether the efforts of Kogawa and the Land Conservancy of British Columbia have paid off.

Til then, I await April 22, the release-date for Suzuk's memoir. He will be speaking all over the country in May and June; I intend to see him here in Edmonton on May 9 at the Citadel Theatre, and at Congress at York in June. What will he inscribe on my title page this time? In my The Sacred Balance is written: "Michelle, Let's find the balance. David Suzuki".

Hmmm. "Michelle, Let's make some memories, Suzuk"?

Feminism(s) in the Third Wave

Here's the aforementioned proposal. They have extended the deadline, so I would appreciate any comments, if there are points that need editing or further clarification. I need to cut 100 words out of this proposal, so what is extraneous. Obviously, I haven't written the essay yet so the ideas are not honed...
=======

From SCUM to Cyber-feminism: A Geneology of the Feminist Manifesto

During the late 1960s and 1970s there was a proliferation of writing by women on women’s experiences and feminism. The Radical Women Manifesto (1967), Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto” (1968), Jo Freeman’s “Bitch Manifesto” (1972), and Helene Cixous’s proposal of an écriture feminine in “Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), all garnered excited scholarly and public interest.

The question my paper will pose is: Where are the feminist manifestos of the 21st Century? Consider Ariel Levy’s recently published book “Female Chauvinist Pig” which could be called anti- or post-feminist, and Maureen Dowd’s much e-mailed New York Times article from October 2005 titled “What’s a Modern girl to do?”. While these texts examine issues such as the pseudo-pornographic sexuality of women in pop culture, they lack any clear momentum in terms of a positive direction for feminist activism. Most importantly, these authors write as though feminism is over. It is not--feminism is a plural, changeable entity. There is no unified identity in feminism just as there is no unified identity in “woman”. There is a notion in general society that the work force is now open to all women (though we are still struggling to legislate equal pay for equal labour), and that women can choose whether or not to adopt their husbands’ names (hetero-normative IS the norm), and therefore feminism has served it’s purpose. It is in this gap that young feminists must, and do, insert themselves. Third Wave grrrls draw on the work of feminists preceding them and continue to act for change. ACT is the key word here: today’s (young) feminism is an activist feminism, concerned with a DIY ethics of demonstration and dissent.

So where are the Third Wave manifestos, the calls to action? No longer distributed by the commercial forces of organized publishing, my paper will argue that the Third Wave feminist manifestos are found online. Anticipated by the VNS Matrix in the early nineties with their “Cyber-feminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”, today’s young feminists are the inheritors of Solanas’s self-published rants. Blogs, webpages, and online communities such as Feministe , Blackfeminism.org and Bitch Ph.D are just a few examples of the wide presence of cyber-feminists. In examining several blogs and webpages dedicated to critiquing mass-culture and putting forth feminist activism, I will argue that in utilizing the non-linear, non-hierarchical, and user-friendly interface of the internet Third Wave feminists combine écriture feminine with a DIY ethics. Instead of having one or two major writers disseminating their knowledge via mainstream presses, young feminists are creating a rhizomatic network that is accessible to all. An important caveat of my main question must be: What does a feminist manifesto accomplish? A manifesto is a call to action, a solidifying of a position, and builds community. These are all essential if any action is to succeed, and my paper will demonstrate that feminist bloggers are in fact fostering online communities of action.