Saturday, September 5, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Maliseet and Passamaquoddy Territories
Map of Maliseet (maroon) and Passamaquoddy (grey) distribution. No date given.A History of New Brunswick License Plates
Saturday, March 28, 2009
A: no...
Friday, March 27, 2009
Univeristy of Fredericton
Their slogan, as you'll see, is "Accessible. Affordable. Accredited."
Yes, we were curious.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
this month's edition, hot off the press
This month's edition of Groundwire.
Molly's IV.
A friend I worked with in 2003 told me that she'd gone into Molly's one summer when the popcorn machine in the doorway was working. My friend had bought some popcorn, but had accidentally spilled a fair amount on the floor. Molly, irate, had made her sweep it up herself.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Woodlot trumps Woodside: Costco poll favours new location
An online poll initiated last week by Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside and circulated on Facebook produced some unexpected results. Pushed primarily through a Facebook group set up to gauge public sentiment toward a Costco on the UNB woodlot, the poll initially favoured the proposed location. The group was overwhelmingly visited by consumers, most largely indifferent to economic or environmental impact. The poll then swung from an enormous lead to favour a Costco at another location. This seemed to test the patience of organizers, who wrote
It was taken down when it was brought to my attention that the same response was repeatly (sic) being selected. The poll registered more than 300 votes for "Not in the woodlot" in less than 15 minutes.
A response repeatedly selected is something that generally happens when people vote, Mayor Woodside.
But regardless, a mobilized opposition should do nothing to effect the validity of the result; the fact (we're speculating here) that the folks at Woodlot Watch may have turned the tables by soliciting votes on their mailing list should not nullify it. If the poll was technically flawed, it was probably being exploited by both sides. The City, it seems, thinks undesired results are not a results.
Friday, March 13, 2009
UNB Woodlot: Costco Poll
A Facebook group called Costco for Fredericton is inviting feedback on its wall and forum and asks that people take time to vote here. It would appear that they're encouraging readers to vote yes to Costco.
We encourage you to vote no.
And, to do so as many times as you like.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Molly's III.
Sunday, supper time. I hadn’t slept, eaten or bathed since Friday morning. I’d spent all my money trying to be the same place as him last term. All he'd done in the week I'd been back at school was wave once. The past weekend had been spent in suspension. No hope, no lesson.When I knew he wanted to see me I was ready in 20 minutes. I grabbed a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, which I had finished for the second time last week, because I knew it would fit in my coat pocket. I paid for a cab and was breathless on his doorstep because he said he and his friend were going to study and I could come hang out if I wanted. I sat self-conscious, the basement room smelling like raisins. Those boys always smelled like raisins.
Us three tripped into the hall. I’d forgotten a hat. I pulled my fox tail hood over my eyes and the snow fell warm like down. I tried to tell him about Billy Pilgrim, shouting against the falling insulation in the empty street. I started to just plod along behind the boys, wet gripping at my long pants.
We climbed the stairs to the upper level. Dusty rafters, dusty kites. Peter Gabriel was on the hi-fi. A small card was on one of the thrift-store bed-stands that served as dining tables: “There is a seating fee of $2. Please spare us the embarrassment of asking.”
I stared at the same page for an hour. He got up and put his jacket on without a word. He left me with his friend. I wouldn’t allow myself to ask what was going on. I saw that it was nothing.
On the way back to my dorm, I broke into his bedroom. I left a photo of us together, as a last gesture, and slept thickly that night. When he wrote the next day to confess his infatuation, my heart sank as it does when another part of life ceases to make sense. I refused to control what happened between us in the years after. For that reason, it is all my fault.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Train bridge
There, on the wood that spans the always surprisingly great river, it was tempting to look forward, and to look back, but most tempting to stay in suspension. Nostalgia and hope were poised above the water and ready to dive in and disappear, or maybe they were the supports, or the substructure. It is tempting to extend the analogy, but then to call it an analogy isn't even quite right, because, as I remember, the physical character of the bridge bore marks, scars, and memorials of other's hopes and memories and jokes. Its body retained so much wisdom and confusion and nonsense. It was that, not just an analogy of that.
And meanwhile this wood deserved to be danced upon: the sound was perfect, and it did not matter who passed, who was ahead or behind watching, because over the water everyone with a passionate spirit became just a little tipsy, even if the deep lead-coloured sobriety lurked beneath. Maybe it was sobriety that functioned as the substructure, keeping people from falling in.
The passersby, if they stopped midstream, might be tempted to forget their direction of movement and be drawn to a standstill by the colours instead. Even on a grey day the iron stood out brilliant in its revelation of fiery reds and oranges, the wood of softer browns, greens, and greys, and the water reflecting or even foreshadowing the mood of the sky, sometimes an uncanny blue, sometimes industrial grey. In one of the slowest places I've lived, change was always just beneath the bridge.
And I wonder, being now a fair distance from that place above the water, if it's still frozen in winter's grip, or if islands of ice are flowing towards the ocean. And what is it carrying with it?
Bridges are clichés, and like many clichés, they are still important: they are still powerful symbols of passage, of change, of forgetting; and yet they tend to stand (unless we burn or otherwise destroy them) longer than the life of an individual, longer than the life of a childhood, an adolescence, a university "career", an adult's mid-life crisis, or a an old woman's Sunday walks to the cathedral, one of the few times in the week she might breathe the fresh air and say hello to the younger ones, the ones who wouldn't initiate a greeting like that nowadays, but are willing to return one most of the time. It is an image of forgetting, but of our forgetting; and yet so often it bears the harsh wounds or gentle touches of its builders, its present and sometime users. Its body is shaped and aged, by water and by hands, and it holds what we may have forgotten, for a little while longer, at least, as long as someone is there to walk on it.
And yes, this is the sort of bridge that captures the eye because of its picturesque placement over a wide river between a still thickly wooded north and a colourful south side. It was the subject of one of my first photographs in Fredericton, and one of my last long walks. And for however many times it's been the subject of yet another tourist's (or resident's) photographic mediocrity, it is still a brilliant, present thing.
Monday, March 9, 2009
VI. Fredericton -- The Celestial City
AND some miles up the river one comes upon the capital of New Brunswick, Fredericton, lying all blue and gold in the sun, encircled by her hills and rivers. The traveller sees a peaceful yet thriving place, a cathedral city as well as a capital, the military centre of the Province, the seat of the Supreme Judiciary and of the Provincial University. He knows that it is also a centre of lumber trade, and a summer paradise on account of good roads, good fishing, and the joys of motor boating.
The historian harks us back to the days of Villebon, when the site of the present city was an Acadian settlement called St. Anne's Point. It was an Indian camping place as well, and down the St. John came the canoes of the Malicetes, piled with beaver skins. They came to trade with the gentlemen adventurers of France. Villebon, Governor of all Acadia, made the fort just opposite St. Anne's at the Nashwaak's mouth his citadel, in place of the abandoned Fort Royal. No one pretended to look for peace in those days. If it was not the Indians it was the New Englanders. Villebon had a certain 'old Ben Church' and his fleet of New England vessels to fight. But the Nashwaak guns were too many for them.
Generations later the Loyalists built St. John, and when New Brunswick was made a Province, the first Governor, Thomas Carleton, must have remembered the ancient prowess of St. Anne and her invincible fort, for he made Fredericton its capital. In a little building still standing near the present Queen's Hotel, known as the King's Provision Store, the General Assembly met for its third session in July 1788. Two years before the first sermon ever preached in the settlement was delivered here. It was later remarked by the Rev. Samuel Cooke, the Rector, that the inhabitants of Fredericton number four hundred, "of whom one hundred attend church, but many of ye common sort prefer to go fishing."
I do not know who first named Fredericton the Celestial City, but I think it must have been a poet, for the vision of the poet includes all that the historian knows and all that the traveller sees. That vivid background, Indian haunted and pierced by the conquering note of the French, sharpens his imagination, but he also feels the romance of his city of to-day.
The shimmering waters that surround it, rimmed by green hills, suggest to him certain celestial qualities. They imply a life of leisured intellectual pursuit, an unhurried happy state that seems to mark this community as a thing apart from the usual scramble of modern life.
In a charming account of his early home, written by Charles G.D. Roberts years ago and never before published, the well-known poet and short story writer describes the beautiful setting of Fredericton. "Drawn about her, the broad and gleaming crescent of the St. John, and opposite to her wharves the lovely tributary streams, the Nashwaak and the Nashwaaksis."
To look over the city from the cupola windows of the University buildings, across Queen's Park and the spires of the church steeples, piercing the elm tops half a mile away, is to see far. Beyond the house roofs there is the blue sweep of the river and the white villages of St. Mary's and Gibson, and further still the town of Marysville where the lumber king, Alexander Gibson, rules his domain. The blue river is often dotted with the sails of wood boats. To quote Mr. Roberts again, "Here and there puffs a neighbouring tug, towing an acre or two of dark rafts, or a gang of scows piled high with yellow deals. On all sides is evidence that Fredericton is the centre of the lumber industry . . . The scene is one that fills the eye with gracious colour and harmonious composition. In the Autumn when the trees flame out with amber and scarlet and aerial purple, when the air swims with a faint violet haze, the picture is one that neither the painter's brush nor the poet's pen can do more than dimly suggest..."
A gentle charm lies everywhere. I remember the overhanging elm trees, which it seems to me should be part of every Cathedral town. The Cathedral itself, though small and plain to the point of austerity, is one of the most perfect examples of Gothic architecture on the continent. Queen Street, with shops on one side and lawns and trees and river glimpses on the other, is equally typical of tranquil Fredericton. Speaking of the public buildings on Queen Street, Mr. Roberts refers to "the severe gray pile of the Barracks where the men drill behind high walls, that the glints of their scarlet may not bedazzle the passing demoiselles..."
It may be that only one out of every hundred of the travellers who tarry at the Port of St. John, knows the ancient lovely Capital of the Province, for Fredericton has not yet been discovered by the tourist. Charles G.D. Roberts says that is because "she has sat long aloof, Narcissus-like, admiring her own image in her splendid threshold of water, too loftily indifferent to proclaim her merits to the world."
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Arresting Exodus
The result is a ticking time bomb, where New Brunswick will not have enough productive workers paying income taxes to pay for students and retirees. These demographics benefit most from health care and education, which together cost roughly 3 billion of New Brunswick's 6 billion provincial budget.
Retaining students with Post-Secondary is essential as they constitute 1/6th of the population while making up 40% of the tax base. For the $50,000 cost of educating a university graduate the government gets back about $500,000 in the form of income taxes.
There is no question that the disproportionately high levels of tuition fees and student debt in NB compared with the rest of Canada are driving university grads away to jurisdictions with higher income earning potential. Even premier Shawn Graham admitted this in his 2008 state of the province address.
Ireland, 15 years ago, was in the same demographic and economic tailspin that the Maritimes are currently experiencing. Now they're known as the Celtic Tiger for their astounding economic turnaround. How did they do it, you ask? By eliminating tuition fees, focusing on retaining university graduates and using this demographic as an engine for economic growth.
Eliminating tuition will make the province richer, but only if we bite the bullet and invest in retaining university grads in New Brunswick in order to turn their newly acquired skills and knowledge into productive capacity.
Chuck Fournier
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Molly's II.
When we met she was living with someone else. We sat at the back beneath the dart board at a time when the corner was sentried by wing-back chairs. I asked her about her wig. We laughed and talked about politics and Molly's kitsch. At the end of the first hour, Molly sauntered by and, collecting our beer glasses, voided but for their foam, switched the record player on. There was something, after the accustomed silence, about the way we stared at each other.Four months later we parted ways, the summer wasted on mattresses and impossible expectations.
V. The Port of Saint John
Excerpt from Canadian Cities of Romance (McClelland & Stewart LTD, 1922) by Katherine Hale
STEEP streets and the ringing of church bells; the distant sea; sunset, and the lovely irregular lines of masts and spars and rigging; the view of a hazy hill topped by a martello tower;–these are some of my pictures of St. John.
An old town long ago linked by trade relations with the West Indies, a port filled with foreign sailors, it contains bales of romance never yet unpacked. I remember crossing Queen Square on a fine spring morning with a lover and historian of his city who spoke not of beauty spots, but of old buildings. "I could show you some shacks, hardly taverns, just shacks, where rum was stored and barrels were opened; and the tales of far lands that came in with the cargoes, the songs, the gestures of the South, were all a part of the old days of St. John."
When this city plays the pageant of her past she will have nearly every romantic element of the early days to draw from. As she is the oldest incorporated city in British North America such pictures mean history. Four years before Quebec was founded, Champlain cast anchor at the mouth of the river and christened the region in honour of the Saint whose day it was. That was on the 24th of June, 1604. Before that the site was known to the prehistoric peoples. The Micmacs and the Malicetes loved it; 'Glooscap,' greatest of their demi-gods, had favoured it. Their descendants wondered as they saw a white man plant the golden lilies of France.
The next picture has to do with the Lady of St. John. Her husband, Sieur La Tour, who had taken a desirable site for his French fort, was a friend of Louis XIV. Lady La Tour was a Huguenot and her dream was to found a colony. D'Aunay Charnisay, an enemy, opened a campaign against them. La Tour slipped away to Boston for help. Charnisay entered the Fort. And then occurred the heroic defense by Madame La Tour, who pitted all her slender resources against the enemy, only to meet with tragedy. Her garrison was hanged, and the lady herself died a few weeks following her husband's return. Her dream lives on in a poem by Whittier and a story by Harriet Chesney. La Tour married his rival's widow, and for 'diplomatic reasons' became a British subject...
As remembrance the permanent pictures of St. John have to do with her unique setting. She can transport you, in a morning's drive through Rockwood Park, to Scottish hills and gemlike lakes. An hour later you are on the Atlantic seaboard, facing dancing waves, or else black rocks and tawny sands if the tide is out. The fascination of her rivers is inexhaustible. The 'Reversing Falls' is of course one of the wonders of the world, and any guide book will explain the action and reaction of the swirling waters in the winding gorge. But to be interesting it should remain a mystery. I remember two great bridges, shelter houses and rainy weather. I remember that waiting for the tide, staring at red mud where I had imagined glittering waters, seemed more awesome than the spectacle itself, and the rocks, like those of Niagara, more wonderful than the waters.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Molly's
The perfect place to plot the revolution, Molly's Coffee House on Queen street in Fredericton is a cabinet of curiosities and haven for artists, writers, bridge players, outsiders and first-daters. It is an opium den in your grandmother's basement. It is the place you read How to Win an Argument and were censured for putting your feet on the coffee table. It is the place you went three nights in succession and were I.D.'d each time.This photo, and those that will follow, were shot at Molly's by Marlo Burks. We'll continue to post them throughout the month.
If you'd like to contribute a photo or Molly's memory, do: naked.east.the@gmail.com
Thursday, February 26, 2009
This is going to be about God.
“This isn’t going to be about Ellen,” my mother whispered to me as we sat down, referring to her best friend of thirty-years, “This is going to be about God. I just want you to be prepared.”
I was, I guess. Maybe.
I say sometimes that I am culturally Catholic, because that is how both my parents were raised. And for the few in my extended family that are religious, Catholicism is the name of the game. My grandmother was pretty staunch, and had twelve children to prove her point. I have a reasonably strong understanding of the dogma and doctrine of the church, at least as much as can be expected for someone whose parents quit the church wholeheartedly as young adults and never went back. I am characteristically awkward and uncomfortable putting this understanding into any sort of practice, however. My mum, on that note, did know when to kneel and amen and our-father-who-art-in-heaven and so forth, which was somewhat settling. Our two pews did not fully stand out as being confused and unaware of expected pomp and circumstance. Everyone stood when the rest of the attendees stood, and sat accordingly. We cried without cue, but I suspect we were not the only ones.
The acting priest at the St. Andrews Catholic Church is apparently an unpopular one. Ellen didn’t like him much, I know that. He spoke some at the service, and I looked up at the rafters. They were designed to look like the ribs of a ship. The church was built by shipbuilders, which makes sense when you know how St. Andrews itself was built. The priest has an accent, and wore an oft-malfunctioning microphone clipped somewhere on his colourful robes. I understand history better than I understood him.
My aforementioned staunchly Catholic grandmother died in the fall of 2004, my first year of university. Her funeral was hilarious in many ways. The entire family entered the church together from the basement, but the priest started the service before all of us were seated. Our brood is so large, I got stuck in the stairwell with various cousins and aunts, and we had to wait for him to stop talking before making our way to the pews. Later, the priest who knew her very little gave a speech about my grandmother, and the only thing that stands out to me about it was when he said “Molly loved religion, and shared that love of religion with all her children” -- some of whom audibly cracked up. When it came time to perform communion, that same awkward priest announced “Anyone who normally does communion, we invite you to come do so now.” Several of my extended family members stood up, looked confused, and sat back down. Our two pews did not make a move this time, when communion began.
My mother was right in her warning. She had in fact been asked to speak, but declined since she was not being asked to say anything personal, rather to read aloud a verse from a tome she doesn’t believe in. Very little was said about Ellen the person at her funeral, in the whole scope of things. There were lots of readings from the good book, and the songs were all hymns and the like, and an inordinate amount of talk about “god’s banquet” simply because she was a chef. But when the old parish priest spoke, he who actually knew this amazing woman, his words were poignant and suited the affair.
Perhaps I am not surprised in the least that such types of funerals exist not to really celebrate the life of the person just lost or to address the grief being experienced, so much as assure those in attendance that life shall go on in heaven and not to worry. I have been unable to truly write about Ellen, a woman who helped raise me, who I call my second-mother, even here, because the prospect is too painful, the wounds of loss too fresh. I have had to shift focus to my own issues with organized religion for safety. So in that regard, my understanding of the Marxist cliché has broadened. Religion may be the opiate of the masses, but there is, after all, a reason we’re given morphine when in great pain.
Marg Craig
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Our Game
We played until we could no longer see the puck against the darkness and the choppy ice. Then we would skate over to the boards lying frozen at the edge of the pond, sit, untie our skates and shoot the proverbial shit until the cold was too much to bear then put our boots back on and head across the fallow, snow covered potato mounds to my grandmother's kitchen with its warmth and smell of fried meat. There we would review our day's exploits over hot chocolate while my grandmother smiled at our exaggerated claims.
This was before my brother discovered girls and the internet (but not necessarily in that order), before my cousin convinced himself that the solution to his father could be found at the bottom of a quart of Jameson's and before I discovered radical politics, class-A drugs and the fact that cliche and despair are much harder to outrun than old age, venereal disease and minimum wage. We are all much older now, some wiser than others. I have not strapped on the skates in over ten years and I rarely think much about hockey or what might be happening in the NHL standings.
I loved hockey. But: I did not play hockey at any organized level. I did not pay two hundred dollars for a carbon fibre composite stick. I did not engage in, nor was I the victim of any hazing rituals at the hands of the entitled children of suburbanite lawyers. I did not have to endure the sound of my parents berating teenage referees, my coach or opposing players. I did not idolize Don Cherry, nor think that the only two worthwhile functions for a woman's mouth were giving head and saying 'yes, dear.' For all this, I am thankful.
I am sure my grandmother would be too.
Kirk Williams
John Thompson for Poet Laureate
John Thompson - master of the Persian stanza form known as the 'ghazal,' was a Sackville poet who influenced a whole generation of Canadian writers: notably Michael Ondaatje and his contemporaries. While Thompson's poems are usually not noted as being ones that deal distinctly with the New Brunswick landscape and New Brunswick culture (and therefore often more overlooked within New Brunswick literary circles than the works of authors like Alden Nowlan and David Adams Richards), his poems are among the best and the most internationally anthologized of Canadian poetry. Thompson's works, emerging from the burgeoning postmodern context of the 60's and 70's, should be read always by students of Canadian Lit alongside novels such as Beautiful Losers, and the early poems of Ondaatje, Atwood, and Purdy. Thompson's lyrical voice, with so many divergent cross-cultural influences, along with his interesting and tragic history should make him a Canadian (and of course New Brunswickan) historical literary figure of infinite interest... and I nominate him for naked east's New Brunswick Poet Laureate!Submitted by Cameron MacLean.
Please note: naked east is compiling, alongside current nominations, a list of posthumous PL's.
Nominate accordingly!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Poet Laureate
The reflexive community establishes goals. It looks into itself, the heart of its obstacles, assess and confronts them. This reflexivity clarifies for it the roles held within it; the roles of government and the judiciary; the roles of citizens; the roles of artists. In a sense that is not clinically anthropological, the reflexive community is a community. It is a unified being.
One of the best senses of this comes from the the institutions created to promote self-identification with cultural and community values. The institution of the Poet Laureate, a public figure appointed by government who in investiture agrees to provide literature for public ceremonies and promote cultural dialogue within communities, enables a defense against the erosion of culture as fundamental value in communities, demographics, provinces and states.
It is no surprise, then, that New Brunswick lacks a Poet Laureate.
The necessity of cultural institutions is linked to the necessity of identity; for too long this relationship has been overlooked by stewards of our province.
Beginning next month, naked east will begin to lobby the government of New Brunswick to establish a provincial Poet Laureate to sustain the cultural literacy and identity of our province.
We will advise that the term be no less than ten years. We will submit, among other such things, suggestions.
Send your nominees for the Poet Laureate of New Brunswick to naked.east.the@gmail.com or submit a comment below.
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