naked east

2010-10-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

26th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, prior to embarkation for Europe. St.John, New Brunswick, 1915.

traditional face classic

2010-01-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

Carleton County Colloquialisms

2009-09-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

http://dooryard.ca/index0.html

2009-08-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

Ship at the Foot of King's Street, St. John, NB, 1915(?)
McCord Museum

Maliseet and Passamaquoddy Territories

2009-08-04T10:57:00.001-07:00

Map of Maliseet (maroon) and Passamaquoddy (grey) distribution. No date given.

Source: Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, p.124.

A History of New Brunswick License Plates

2009-08-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

Vehicles were first officially recorded in Fredericton (the capital) in 1905, but no plates were issued. Interestingly, this makes NB the third province, after Ontario and Quebec, to officially record motor vehicles. The province began registering vehicles in 1908 and, up until 1910, the plates were provided by the owner. These markers were often white on black, and made of leather, with the initials NB usually printed vertically after the serial number. A dated 1910 porcelain plate is known to exist but it too is provided by the owner as the province did not start officially supplying plates until 1911 when annual registration took effect. NB had a longer run of porcelain plates than any other province.

They lasted until 1917 and were in a beautiful array of colours. They are rare, and highly prized today.

Complete History and Image Resource here.

2009-03-28T20:36:00.000-07:00

6:22 PM A: you know these cbc budget cuts?

I don't care.

B: no?
A: no...

and it's not difficult to explain

6:23 PM I'm really sorry that a lot of people are out going to be out of work, particularly in jurisdictions like the maritimes that have small newsrooms as it is

but when I looked at the cuts

they're still keeping stuff like "wild roses" and "the border"

and

6:24 PM basically

B: yeah,

the cbc is going commercial

of course

that's what i hate

A: maintaining the directive of competing with private networks

B: but i just don't want them to cut

A: which is not the cbc

B: radio 3

and shit like that

which is being considered

A: I bet it is

because the cbc is not what it was

it's not cbc anymore

6:25 PM B: well,

on the radio it is...

largely

it's the radio side of things

that i'm more concerned about

A: I really think people who say it's the jewel of canada are just being nostalgic

well, I don't know if you remember

but back in september

they took radio two

6:26 PM from an exclusively classical and jazz station

to something to compete with private networks

and when they do so

they're no providing the content we believe, out of habit, that they providing

B: yeah

well

nothing is the same

A: unique, intelligent, and nationally-reflective

B: as it used to be

canada is not

nothing is

6:27 PM but i will

involve myself in the occasional

symbolic gesture

which allows my voice to be heard in some small way

to symbolize

my discontent

A: such as?

B: such as complaining about cbc budget cuts

6:28 PM i know very well that the cbc is not what it used to be

they have fucking wheel of fortune

on tv now

but my bottom line is that

A: (like, clearly, the cuts are happening in the wrong places. but they're being used to supplement the same shit. the cbc has to change. it has nothing to do with the current government; this has been unfolding for years)

yeah, exactly

6:29 PM B: what is that?

(_______ ) ?

A: hmm? like a turn down commericial road?

B: no, i meant

6:30 PM why did you write that in brackets?

A: because it felt like an afterthought

B: but man, it DOES have something to do with the current governement

just as it did the liberals

and mulroney before

it has to do with certain fundamental

or what once were

canadian values

6:31 PM which cannot be sustained under economically neo-conservative governments

decades of cuts in every sector

lead to depletion in cultural

arenas

in canada

and man....

cbc radio three has been

6:32 PM AN AMAZING

way for independent canadian artists to be exposed

anyways...

i'm not gonna scream about it

i know that the cbc is fucked

but it is still upsetting to me

6:33 PM A: yeah, well it is upsetting

I would listen to radio two day-in

and now I turn it off every day at 3pm

before buck 65 pollutes my living space

6:34 PM but I'm not sure I'm with you on the connection between eroding values and conversative trends

6:35 PM the cbc has a tendency to hire outside leadership

they want to make a profit

6:36 PM I don't think you could say that new the bbc has thrived when they're governments have necessary taken write turns in the past decade (think "new labour")

they survive because of different funding

and a commitment to original content

6:37 PM the cbc seems to want to take ANYTHING and put a made in canada stamp on it

6:38 PM the fact is, the incursion of US network programming shouldn't affect the orgnaization, because poeple should be able to take refuge there

instead they've tried to compete

and they lost.

and maybe, at rock bottom, they'll sort this out

6:39 PM B: yeah well, this is exactly what i wish wasn't happening

A: the fucking heritage minister said as much

B: obviously

you are suggesting

A: well, not that, but that a better system could be implemented on another model

B: no shit

6:40 PM anyways, i think that there are things worth salvaging even in the recent years of the cbc

which haven't been

like the show 'play'

like the different documentary programs on newsworld

6:41 PM most of which just show commercial garbage now

i mean,

obviously i know that the network is going to go in the direction its going to go in, anyways

because the execs

don't care

about preserving those things

have been unique about the cbc

but the reason, one might say,

6:42 PM that the cuts could be protested

has to do with the fact that the harper gov't

is bailing out canwest

etc

and the fact that we have a government which is willing to do that and not help the cbc

6:43 PM suggests the reality of a political environment which supports networks which draw their audience

from the mainstream and commercial

6:44 PM a political environment in which it makes sense for the cbc to become more commercial and lame and stupid because that seems to be the direction in which the mainstream audience wishes to go

and which therefore the body politic

will defend

in the name of being populistic

A: that's interesting

6:45 PM I would have said that it follows

B: populism kills democracy

period

A: that in the desire t promote competition

B: tyranny of the majority

A: they woudl do so

would do so

you know

6:46 PM I sometimes think that "canadian values" are defined by intellegentsia

and sometimes that they belong only to independent communities

6:47 PM B: yes, well,

A: and it leads me to think that

in some cases

B: i honestly think that this is a just reality...

for canadian values to stem from an elite class...

because this class of 'elites'

A: the people who incubate these values with their lives are not considered canadians in their values and consumption habits

B: provide the only opportunity for the defending of

minority opinion

6:48 PM which is the most interesting and vibrant source of cultural strength

in this country at least

almost every truly democratic political act, in my opinion, involved forsightedness...

in the sense that, for example,

6:49 PM years ago the majority of canadians would not have been in favour of a woman's right to choose

it was an ELITE opinion

held by those who had it

A: right

B: but in order to protect the rights of a minority

and to allow canada to maintain its reality

6:50 PM as a (at least in terms of legalities and human rights)

progressive nation

there needs to be an elite class

of individuals

who are able to fight for the rights of marginalized canadians

6:51 PM and take political action that is not in the least populistic

avoiding a tyranny of the majority

and, for example,

the idea that senators should be elected is trite...

6:52 PM senators should be there to represent the rights of canadians whos rights may otherwise fall to the wayside in light of the strength of the majority

and if canadians elected senators

they would be representing the majority of canadians

6:53 PM and therefore not fulfilling their obligation to defend the charter and use it to help disadvantaged canadians

so, for example,

6:54 PM pierre trudeau was certainly an intellectual elitist.... he was not an average canadian. he came from a position of privilege and used that position to open the country to a kind of (potential, not actualized) diversity....

and...

point being....

YES, canadian culture at its best

comes from an elite group of people

6:55 PM and this is how an independence in canadian thought can be preserved

and also how the rights of less privileged canadians can be defended

and the vital existence of our cultural institutions

A: it at least is constituted by an elite

6:56 PM B: of which the cbc has traditionally been one of those institutions..

i mean, really..

A: or, in some instances, a creative class

B: there most certainly is a connection between

A: this is nuance

B: the harper gov't

and the state of the cbc

A: and cultural erosion, yes

B: the cbc does not function in a vacume

A: but I think the cbc's problems are insidious

6:57 PM you can't liken it to

as I heard today

the closure of the museum of contemporary photography in ottawa

or even the fabled national portrait gallery which harper wanted to build in calgary or, apparently, not build at all

6:58 PM B: obviously the cbc are doing most of this to themselves,

yes,

but what i mean is

6:59 PM that if the elite class of culture-bearing canadians had not been forced to the sidelines by decades of cultural erosion... the cbc would not be justified in ruining what it used to be, in defaming its own spirit

7:00 PM and no, i don't think that it's the beacon of canadian culture or anything

or that it ever has been

but i mean

look at cbc archives

on the website

and the extent to which there used to be such a vastly more discernable canadian culture

7:01 PM which the cbc was on the pulse of

i lament the cuts not because i think that the cbc is doing a good job and shouldn't have to do this

i lament the cuts because the are indicative of an outward reality

7:02 PM A: indeed

above all

B: yes

A: the cbc

was

7:03 PM that unifying culture element

that maintain an edge of intelligence

you could argue

that because canadian culture is necessarily a feeble idea

7:04 PM a weakened cbc is a weakened canada

7:05 PM B: yes, we have lost our sense of order....

7:06 PM the sense that we were a more civilized and intellectual and ordered society than those worshipers of 'freedom,' the americans

our conservatism

and our socialism,

in days of old

gave canada its unifying strength, i do think

7:07 PM but now conservatism is modern and american

and a social democrat in canada

is the equilvalent of a liberal democrat

from the states

man, i'm such a weiner

Univeristy of Fredericton

2009-03-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

There is indeed such a place. Based out suite 101, 371 Queen Street, the University of Fredericton's programme's are nonetheless administered entirely online. They seem particularly enthusiastic about their Executive Masters In Business Administration. An MBA is a popular degree, particularly for its networking opportunities, so this is understandable. But, you ask, this is a correspondence program. And, the minimum GPA is 2.5 our of 4. And, tuition for this programme is $24,000.

Their slogan, as you'll see, is "Accessible. Affordable. Accredited."
Yes, we were curious.

Land of the Bad People (2005)

2009-03-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

Miramichi, NB.

this month's edition, hot off the press

2009-03-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would post this post-produced news feed from the forerunners of grassroots media, volunteer radio-style.

This month's edition of Groundwire.

Molly's IV.

2009-03-18T05:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Woodlot trumps Woodside: Costco poll favours new location

2009-03-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

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.

UNB Woodlot: Costco Poll

2009-03-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

A poll that appears to have been informally organized by the city of Fredericton is circulating on Facebook.

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.

Molly's III.

2009-03-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Train bridge

2009-03-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

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.

VI. Fredericton -- The Celestial City

2009-03-09T20:07:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Canadian Cities of Romance (McClelland & Stewart LTD, 1922) by Katherine Hale

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."

Arresting Exodus

2009-03-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

New Brunswick faces many long term economic problems, the greatest being changing demographics and the decline of the population. The average age of New Brunswickers has increased by five years in the last ten: from 35 to 40 between 1997 and 2007. The birth rate in New Brunswick is less than half of what it was 1960 and more than half of the babies born in New Brunswick leave the province permanently (a rate much higher among university graduates), while more than half of those immigrating to New Brunswick from other provinces and other parts of the world are retirees (GNB Department of Finance, 2008). Consensus among economists is that this trend will bankrupt the province by 2020 if nothing is done.

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

Molly's II.

2009-03-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

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...

To-day there is not a great deal in the outward aspect of the place to remind one of a romantic past. St. John is sufficiently picturesque in herself, and beautiful enough in natural surroundings to make one fully content with the present. Still at the foot of Middle Street, in West St. John, may be seen the remains of earth works, marking the site of Fort La Tour erected in 1631. But, alas, the Electric Light Station now stands on the site of the old French Burial Ground where lay Governor Villebon and the heroic Lady La Tour. Indeed the city does not even possess a statue in honour of the latter. Everyone goes to see the old Burial Ground lying near King Square, once on the outskirts of the town and still tree guarded, where many of the founders of St. John are buried. The Court House is an elderly and dignified building that fortunately escaped the fire of 1877 which destroyed two-thirds of the city...

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.

Molly's

2009-03-02T19:23:00.001-08:00

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

This is going to be about God.

2009-02-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

I sat in the church, fascinated by the back of the neck belonging to the man in front of me. It turned red every now and then throughout the funeral. We seemed to be sitting in the godless pews: my mother and father and I in one short row, my sister and her husband in the one ahead of us, joined by the man I mentioned and his impossibly thin mother. Everyone else from what I could see knew exactly what they were doing, how to do it, and when. The kneeling, the praying, the call-and-response, when to flip open the bible and read along with the priest, when to shut up and let him go on. We’re not Catholic. I’ve only ever attended one regular Sunday church service in my life, and it was at a United Church last year. I’m not United either.

“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

Our Game

2009-02-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

My grandmother would have preferred my Saturdays spent indoors, book in lap, head in the clouds. In actuality this was often the case, but I was never content being pigeonholed as the brain of the family. I loved hockey -- the game, that is, not the surrounding culture. I loved the game, loved the sound of my blades on the grey ice of my grandmother's pond nestled in the evergreens just beyond the edge of her garden, loved the smell of the snow, the trees and the crisp winter air. We played every Saturday, most Sundays and some weeknights after school, daylight permitting, the same trio each time: my brother, our cousin Francis who lived across the field, and myself. The pond was just the right size for one-on-one plus a neutral goalie; nearly always my brother, who was the youngest. We played hard. Me versus Francis, trying everything to outsmart him and get a decent shot away at my brother, crouched between a pair of boots in his homemade cardboard pads with 'Heaton' scribbled down the sides in permanent marker. We played as though our lives depended on it, as though our loved ones were being held by the hockey gods as the fulcrum in some twisted balance of blood sacrifice and our own sweat.

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

2009-02-25T10:14:00.001-08:00

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!

Poet Laureate

2009-02-24T14:57:00.001-08:00

A community that understands itself improves.

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.

The Next Day

2009-02-22T21:27:00.000-08:00

The next day the news had died down. What then was 'now' was now 'then' and had somehow become irrelevant in the eyes of the general populous. For a brief time the comet's long and graceful ponytail enraptured, guided, and mystified the hopeful stargazers as they set their dreams on this brilliant beam of dust, and waited.
The pinkish evening boded well for the light show. Those who wanted to witness the new traveller were ready with lawn chairs, blankets, cameras, binoculars and telescopes, as well as plenty of food, drinks, and card games to tally the hours more quickly. A few added ripples to the atmosphere by bringing along stereos and glowworm-like toys that cast an alien green on the grass and encircled darkened wrists and necks. As if trying to communicate with the stars, the audience sported their own borrowed light: a beautiful sight from afar; we are like you, they seemed to wish to say. Various insects hummed, providing a background music below the subtly violent harmonies that issued from the human and electronic babel. The skies, however, were the focus, and the scenery became the source of action in a complex theatrical spectacle.
The pink faded into a whitish blue that, when one followed it closely, disappeared into the midnight blue that precedes midnight. A small light came into view and drew the millions of eyes towards itself: a mass staring at a distant mass through an arras of colour and optical distortion. The comet was a visual monologue-- a soliloquy for those romantic sorts who dreamt of interpreting its message in a more personal manner. Self-conscious or completely unaware, it bore a certain sprezzatura in its travels through the colours of the sky---a single apparition comet that had flown into view of the earth, pulled and driven, but beautiful as though the violence of gravity were rather a comfortable motion meant to be carried out with finesse, dignity, delicacy, composure (despite its resplendent display of disintegration). The illuminated tail reflected in the eyes of the watchers, but the mystery held a deeper sway than even the pull of gravity: the dark centre remained hidden behind the light of the dust.

But the effect fades at the end.

The party departed at the break of day. The comet granted few, if any wishes. Shadows, grey and imperceptible at first, grew sharper along the earth as the sun rose and the gazers hid their heads under pillows--those who had the leisure to do so.
A few, still awake, pointed to the small stratus clouds developing in the north.

And you stood before me and I saw the comet still in your eyes.

Marlo Burks

Naked East Radio

2009-02-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Tonight.
11:00pm Atlantic.
CHSR FM.
At best.

Could be a rerun.

If not, then possibly dead air.

Join!

2009-02-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

As our ranks, readership and friends grow, so too should our faceland group. Join, read back issues, and spread the good news.

Woodlot: Court Appearance and Opposition Deadline

2009-02-18T09:04:00.001-08:00

On Monday morning, activist Mark D'arcy appeared in the Fredericton provincial courthouse filing private charges against RAR Properties for allegedly filling a regent street wetland, located on the UNB woodlot.

The case was delayed until March 23 because, according to reports, the lawyer for RAR properties argued that documents filed stated that the alleged events took place in Fredericton, but not Fredericton, New Brunswick. Patrick Hurley, RAR's representative, effectively objected on grounds that the charges stemmed from allegations that may have taken place in another Fredericton. Or, by extension, the other Fredericton: a rural Prince Edward Island community.

--The deadline for public objection to the encroachment of a gas bar on the Corbett Brook marsh looms at February 26. Contact Jaques Whitford at mary.murdoch@jaqueswhitford.com.

--The deadline for public objection to the development of a Costco on the UNB woodlot approaches at March 9. Send objections to cityclerk@fredericton.ca

Two conversations about Miller Brittain

2009-02-17T16:14:00.000-08:00

(1912 – 1968)

Art, when relevant, takes cues. It is adaptable, and forward-looking, yet its relevance is judged by the extent of agreement with contemporary values. Relevance is not an artistic value, but remains an ingredient of success. Context and demand press upon oeuvre in greater ways than the independent drive to create and the vision it spawns. It's been said that there can be no creation, no vision a priori: just innovation.
There was a time when Canadian painting was dominated by landscape, in a post-impressionist manner, which recognized the vitality of the land we live on and its inexorable marks on our character and consciousness. Our artists recognized the distinctiveness of our surroundings and how the western tradition could interpret them. And what a thing it must have been, alone on Algonquin lake, early in the twentieth century, holding on the tip of a paintbrush the image of an infant nation. Painting the land was what they did, and they did it well, soon there was demand, and that demand remains. And Miller Brittain's relative obscurity in the annals of Canadian art still pivots on his decision to paint the people that walked the streets of his hometown; streets that even then were old. Because his vision was social he bucked a significant trend, and his success during his life was moderate, I gather. Eventually, when the second world war broke out, he joined the RCAF hoping to become a pilot but was made a bomb dropper. A decade after the war his wife died of breast cancer. His work became troubled, biblically-charged, frantically rendered. His draftsmanship faltered as what was left of him succumbed to alcohol. The two galleries that housed his work during Millar Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears, which I worked in throughout the summer, were divergent such that they could have been the works of different artists. In many ways they were. The show was a testament to the work of one man inasmuch as to the weight a person bears when he has been iconoclast, when he has lost in love, and when he has seen and made death.
Miller Brittain was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. He trained in Saint John and New York City before enlisting in the Canadian Forces. He died in his hometown of a stroke at age 56. When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears was the biggest retrospective of his work ever assembled, and tonight will be packed up and divided and dispersed, all a little better known than before. His work impacted me and I will miss it.

Some people old enough to remember him shared their stories with me while I processed their admissions or purchases. Here are two I liked. They are both fairly irreverent, but far better than nothing.

-----

I knew him actually.

Really. What was he like?

Well, he was quite a character.

You must have been very young.

Well, let me see. At the time I was a medical student so it would have been in my early twenties, I suppose. Once he brought me and another man, a doctor, around to his house. And he was wearing a large gold pin and an ascot and a pair of white shorts. And he was very flightly, almost bouncing, showing us around. His studio was in the attic, and the artworks on the walls leading up to it on the stairs were the very schizophrenic ones, all pastels. It was all in disarray, and he had a few dogs that would pee all over his drawings. Many of them were salvaged though by Thom Cerack and his wife Celia for a show in Montreal, the paintings and drawings. Yes, he was an interesting man. I remember there were beers bottles lined up along the walls of his house, sort of in the wall

In the wall itself?

Not exactly, lined up with it. He drank quite a bit, you see. We have a Miller Brittain as it happens. My husband and I, we bought it for our paper anniversary, after our first year of marriage. It's an image of a pot of flowers, and behind it a figure of a very emaciated woman. He told me that he believed that when his wife died she would become the flowers, or that her soul would enter them. He believed things to be connected that way.

----------

We used to go down to the Legion with Miller, he was quite a drunk. Often people would drive out to his house and get him drunk and then steal his paintings. Anyway at the time I had an old convertible, and the interior was all white except for the seats, which were all red leather. One night we agreed to give Millar a drive home, and when we got to the car he stopped and looked in. And he looked up at me and said, Virgin's Curse?

September 19,2007

UNB Woodlot: Developments

2009-02-15T15:08:00.001-08:00

'On Monday, February 16th at 9:30 AM, a concerned Fredericton citizen will be continuing his private prosecution in Fredericton Provincial Court against RAR Properties Inc. for the infilling of Regent Street Bog last summer. A total of four (4) charges are expected to be read by Judge Graydon Nicholas to RAR Properties Inc.

Mark D'Arcy of Fredericton, New Brunswick, says that he had no option but to go to Provincial Court.

"After considerable media attention last summer, and after personal pleas to Attorney General T.J. Burke of New Brunswick, and Environment Minister Roland Haché to intervene and enforce the Order in Council and our environmental legislation that protect this wetland, the infilling of Regent Street Bog went unchallenged by the Province of New Brunswick."

"Too many groups and government departments have worked to protect and preserve this beautiful ecosystem", says Mark D'Arcy. "The special legal protection afforded this Provincially Significant Wetland was the result of numerous studies by botany and wildlife scientists and organizations, Environment Canada, NB Department of Environment, and NB Department of Natural Resources."

Wetlands comprise only 4% of the land coverage in New Brunswick. They are very critical pieces of our environment, our wildlife habitat, and our flood control. The Regent Street Bog is the headwater to the large Corbett Brook Marsh, part of Fredericton's watershed that covers the huge forested wetlands of the UNB Woodlot Forest.

"All homeowners in downtown valley of southside Fredericton should be very concerned what happens to these wetlands at the top of the hill," says D'Arcy. "These wetlands are our insurance policy against the severe rain events and increased winter runoff due to climate change. Without forested wetlands working as natural sponges, rainwater capture and run-off control will be seriously compromised. Taxpayers should not have to pay for any attempt to replace the natural function of these wetlands with manmade pipe and retention pond infrastructure. And since an acre of forested wetland can absorb a million to a million-and-a-half gallons of rainwater, no amount of tax dollars can replace what nature is now doing for free."

"If we lose Regent Street Bog, officially designated a Provincially Significant Wetland, the other wetlands in the UNB Woodlot Forest don't stand a chance.", concludes D'Arcy.'

Courtesy of Woodlot Watch

Occupation

2009-02-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

Old monuments line

the roadway

to our meeting place

where often I have

traveled, spurred on

by designs

of our own making,

to where the tremors

of first steps were laid

together, and fingers

pronounce their findings

on the once foreign

territory of neck

and shoulders, which

move beside me as

bodies breathe

in asymmetry

and we remain our own

but caught within this

occupation of the night.

Matt Abbot for UNB Student Union President

2009-02-14T16:56:00.000-08:00

Because if you haven't heard, a group calling itself 'United for Change' is running a slate of candidates in UNB Student Union elections, to be held between February 22 and 27. Read more about the candidates on their website and vote if you're able to. Matt Abbot!

tune in

2009-02-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

to those (slightly decrepit) radio waves
CHSR 97.9 / chsrfm.ca
tonight,
well
just slightly more than an hour from now

for a dose of Beirut (New Mexico, not Lebanon)
Bonnie 'Prince'
CocoRosie
Man Man
and a variety of spectacular "hits"

plus the meaning of acorns,
and words on the weathered why.

Tantramar Revisted: week in review.

2009-02-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

Our week begins and ends with the last post from naked east radio at 1:00AM Atlantic, CHSR FM.
Our week in review, therefore, begins Friday.

And Friday began with a bit of news and commentary. A wonderful reflexive piece by Maggie went up Sunday about the lives lived by her cat, terse and semi-fictionalized. Monday night Chuck came over and we walked through Westmount. I thought of trying to explain my feelings about living away from home but decided we'd already seen that conversation through. Instead we walked silently to the St-Marc lookout and stared across the south island.
Tuesday Mike allowed us use of his fantastic photo essay on a day in the life of Fredericton minor celebrity and blogger Charles Leblanc. Charles appreciated it and so did we. We registered 87 hits and 132 page views Tuesday alone.
Then, on Wednesday, a great piece from Marg, a Fredericton writer from St. Andrews, which proved to be, if I may say so, without inundating you completely with commas, a chilling reflection of the development of small-town homicidals and the plenitude of unacknowledged warnings. I once heard that Gregory Allen Despres spent hours locked in the bathroom talking to himself in the mirror in the years before he decapitated an elderly Minto couple.
I spent this afternoon laid out by the window on the second floor of the Atwater library. I read for the first time Charles G.D. Roberts' Tantramar Revisted and was stunned. Because so much of what naked east hopes to do is foster a literary voice for New Brunswick, it is incredible to find antecedent works of striking beauty and depth. It was sobering to realize I was encountering this poem for the first time.

Keep watch for a radio preview. Or just tune in tonight at 11:00PM on CHSR. Bye for now.

Mrs. Henderson’s Magnificent Dinosaur Collection

2009-02-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

A week or two ago I received an e-mail from my mother. Subject: Is anyone surprised? I don’t know that I wasn’t, when in the message she told my siblings and I that a man from home and his teenage girlfriend had been arrested under suspicion of infanticide. Regardless of who is involved, such things tend to be surprising.

Charlotte County, New Brunswick is hardly a densely populated area. Crime happens though, as it does everywhere. Usually it is quite run-of-the-mill: drugs, impaired driving, bar fights, domestic abuse -- there’s even an idiomatic flair for vigilantism, and the occasional rich St. Andrews townie getting caught up in embezzlement schemes -- nothing remarkable. But then there are the remains of two unrelated newborns found near St. Stephen in as many years.

I’m in no position to speak on the specifics of these events. What I know of the subject can be read by anyone with Google or a copy of The St. Croix Courier or Telegraph Journal at hand. It is all very easy to find because, well, things like this just don’t happen in small communities (except that they do) and we like to talk about them.

A woman I am friends with on Facebook but whom I’ve never met in real life to my knowledge (she’s years older than me but grew up in the same town, population two-thousand), invited both my sister and I to a Group called “A Child is a Child (petition is located in the discussion board)” which we at first thought to-our-discomfort was a Pro-Life group, but turned out to be about the most recent infanticide. Neither of us joined because as far as we have been able to tell, the petition mentioned in the name of the group is to be sent to Southeast NB’s MP Greg Thompson with the object of… well, stopping the murder of newborn babies. The implication presented by the group is that a) if you don’t sign, you support baby killing and b) this is a productive use of your time because certainly were someone thinking of ending their child’s life, seeing that 199 people had signed a petition online saying it's a bad idea would demonstrate the error of their ways.

That isn’t how the world works.

It just isn’t.

The man who has been arrested and charged with First Degree Murder in the death of a baby went to school with my brother. I know who he is, and have a few hazy memories of being a very small child and actively wanting to avoid his ilk on the playground before school (they were much older bullies, and this was the only time “big kids” and “little kids” were mixed in a social setting). I recall years later hearing that he was dating a girl a grade below mine, and knowing this was not a bright idea. He is, however, predominately just a Name to me, as there are so many just Names even in a small town. Names you hear in passing or anecdotally (So-in-so broke into a house and stole underwear), but frankly nice-girls wouldn’t actually know the person.

I responded to my mother’s email with “Yikes. Psycho.” because my instinctual reactions to things are always politically correct and considered. This is what she replied: “We met him when the boys were six. He’s the little boy who terrorized the elementary school with an almost theatrical intensity. No one was safe, and little girls were frequently and viciously targeted. Driven mad, teachers were unable to cope or discipline. In third grade, he brought a knife to school and murdered Mrs. Henderson’s magnificent dinosaur collection, slicing them to ribbons and shards. Everyone knew how disturbed he was and is. No one successfully intervened and I wish that I believed that someone tried to help him in some small way .”

Charlie & me

2009-02-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

Picture-taker Michael Woodside documents a day with Fredericton BLOGGER and ADHD activist Charles LeBlanc.

2009-02-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

I have a very good memory. I can remember things that happened to me I should have been too young to remember now. I remember my first step (I made it to the stairs, and I fell down them). I remember the moment I knew I did not want to drink from a bottle any more (I found the sensation of the rubber in my mouth stomach-turning. My Mom says I could not have been older than 2).

I remember my father's huge veiny hand holding a tabby kitten under a hot water tap to de-louse his fur – we were too poor to take animals to the vet, or to buy treatments. I would have been about two and a half. I don't remember the story of how he came to our house, but my father has told me.

We were driving up the Nor'west Road, almost in Sevogle. Dad looked into Buzzy's yard, and knew he had to stop.

Buzzy was about 5'2, wiry, with a big red beard and purple skin from whiskey. People called him Yosemite Sam, and this was just as much for his temper as it was for his look. Buzzy was holding a shot gun at his side. His son, Dale, 9, was holding a wooden box. Dale tossed the box into the air, somewhat miraculously without having it fall back down on his small body. Buzzy aimed and shot at the box. This looked to be the last of several attempts.

Buzzy's old cat had given birth again, and this was his inspired, drunken scheme to get rid of them. My Dad opened the box, to find one bug-eyed kitten amongst mangled and bloodied fur. He came home with us. I named him Buzzy. I remember that part, but I didn't remember why and I can't explain why. My sense of irony was simply not that well honed at age 2.

Buzzy the cat died last Spring. He'd been blind for some time, for years when you picked him up, his body had lacked that fluid, flexed sensation that most cats have, and he had stopped grooming himself or even standing when he had to void his bladder. His legs made cracking noises. He spent all his time against a heater. Brown sludge began to accumulate in the corners of his mouth, like seeping death.

I pleaded with my parents through a Southeast Asian calling card to put him out of his misery. My father was despondent, angry. We'd had that cat for almost as long as we had been a family, and to him we were desperate to kill him off.

Buzzy the cat had cheated death until he was 23. It is only appropriate that he was finally shot. Dad did it

2009-02-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

Good News For a Change

2009-02-06T11:50:00.001-08:00

The good news is, this probably didn't cost one million dollars.

The bad news is it probably cost more than $15000.
That, and it's a poor substitute for effective health policy.

In spite of its warnings, aimed at children, of a critical state of "wellness", the site is nevertheless predicated on the notion of elective health. This initiative is equally frivolous and insulting.

So once again, the New Brunswick ladies who brought you Vivacious Curves. In the words of Cendrars, here's to our true ambassadors.
Photo www.vivaciouscurves.com

Radio Naked East Preview 02-05-09.

2009-02-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

Remember to tune in, as always, and spend some time with Zach on CHSR 97.9 FM. The show starts at 11pm EST. We're holding out for a preview playist, but you never know.

--

If you're listening, you're hearing Johann Johannsson's Fordlandia in entirety, as well as your friend Zach, and your friend Micah too. And Moldy Max, the Agony of Leaves.

The Aquinian: was's and wasn'ts

2009-02-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

In the Fall of 2005 the Fredericton student media received an unexpected jolt.

The St. Thomas Aquinian, coming off a banner year (2004-05) under Editor Miriam Christensen, had undergone pivotal changes in format and direction, faced threats and made national headlines.

It had taken off under past sub-editor Justin Sadler in what was very likely its best year of production, ever. The Aquinian was sound but provocative, stern yet comic. It seemed to believe in journalistic standards and the agenda particular to student newspapers. It came under fire and made questionable decisions, but people read it.

It was in under these circumstances that a weblog, written anonymously,began to cause a stir. The Aquinian: is's and isn'ts, hosted byblogger and penned by STUdissiDENT, attacked the Aquinian, its staff and writers in a pejorative, vulgar, weekly salvo throughout the eight-month school year. The blog was discussed between students, in classes and in the Aquinian, but mostly in the blog's comments section, a forum visited upon by a diverse sample of the student body. The Aquinian rounded out the year having received more attention from the student body on a consistent basis than it ever had. The blog had something to do with it; "It's dialogue, and that's awesome," Sadler once said. But he knew that the interest in the blog, and the reasons why the blog existed, had more to do with the quality of the newspaper and the attention it was getting. It was doing what a student newspaper was supposed to do.

The irony of the blog and its timing wasn't lost on those who remembered it the following year. Under editor Kate Wright, the paper aspired to take what one editor called "a more serious approach," an attempt to be "more like a real newspaper."
Rather than staking out the fox hole from which the agenda of a progressive and daring publication had been pushed, the Aquinian of 2006-07 retreated into reliable and safe formulas. In the following two years the paper was reverted from a highly stylized tabloid to a poorly considered broadsheet with a quiet logo and photo covers that gave scant indication of contents. The editorial board swelled from 5 editors in 2005 to 9 in 2009 (including, inexplicably, an "International Editor"), but the paper remains stuck between the conflicting agendas of its predecessors. And, as one St. Thomas student recently observed, "No one reads it."

Newspaper is a verb, a mutable construction whose face changes with the faces that occupy it. The direction of ownership and editors inflect the direction of a newspaper and what it thinks and speaks. But a rotation of values is not a change of
purpose; the pivotal, definitive character of a newspaper that draws the like-minded to it. And for this reason, the failure of the Aquinian in recent years to uphold a previously achieved standard has little to do with its recent editors. A student paper is, after all, a playground for budding journalists, a place for
them to explore within the fenceposts of niche media. But if, in the process, they abandon what made the paper great, albeit controversial, the question becomes 'why'? Why change what works for the sake of change alone?

For whatever reason successful editors have been unable to hand-down a legacy. In every category, the only consistent thing about the paper is that it will be revamped every September. And the best explanation for this is that editors are inevitably hiring editors that resent the direction their forebearers steered their inheritance. If Kate Wright is to Justin Sadler as Rex Murphy is to Naomi Klein, why did he offer her his post and subsequently betray his vision? Rather than seeking successors who were drawn to the Aquinian because they liked it, the editors offered it up to qualified candidates who objected to the way it had been managed before. The proceeding generations, swept up in the tension of competing visions, knew that the paper would be ripe for plucking in the approaching term. Now new editors don't aspire to match a standard of quality; they desire to implement their vision.

I'm told the Aquinian sits untouched and swept around on the tables of James Dunn Hall and the George Martin Cafeteria at St. Thomas, as visually as it is spiritually amorphous. Students glance it over and dismiss it. They complain about advertising, but they don't think far past them. Dark ages precede renaissances, and romantic nostalgia follows salad days. Without doubt, one roll of the dice some September will cast the protean St. Thomas paper into form. And perhaps, if editors keep the student body in heart and mind, they'll know enough to ensure it stays the way they fought to make it.

Sight to behold

2009-02-04T10:45:00.000-08:00

Officer's Square, Queen st. Monday, February 02, 2009, 12:37:50 PM

The City of Fredericton webcams. Mere moments in time, but familiar and comforting.

2009-02-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

"Caribou Hunting in New Brunswick -- 'In at the Death,'" Anonymous, 1863. Published in the Illustrated London News, January 18, 1863.

Last Thursday night the Fredericton city council held and irregular meeting to correct elements of a bylaw debuted one week ago. It would allow parts of the UNB woodlot to be rezoned for development.

The reason for the emergency meeting was clear: there were errors on the woodlot map that required correction. The revised version, however, made some notable omissions.

According to an observer, the revised map does not include the Corbett brook area of the woodlot marsh that may be staked for development. Additionally a second wetland along Regent street is now coloured in. The map makes no allusion to buffer zones that would prevent the sedimentation and poisoning of these ecosystems.

Conservation efforts remain what they are, attempts to reverse the corrosion of natural spaces and their destruction for the sake of profit. A greater struggle, however, is against those that before signing the papers and turning the keys in bulldozer ignitions, cease to believe that these places exist.

More about the Leatherback

2009-02-01T22:16:00.000-08:00

(Source)

The Leatherback Turtle

2009-01-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

Dermochelys coriacea

It is found thoroughout tropical and subtropical climates around the world, its migratory path plied widely about the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The Atlantic subpopulation has been known to appear on the New Brunswick coast between October and June. It is the largest of all living sea turtles, and the world's fourth largest reptilian.

The Leatherback produces four to ten clutches of eggs during seasonal breeding, each clutch containing between fifty and seventy eggs. Eggs and hatchlings come quickly under assault, and very few mature. Adults are vulnerable to chemical pollution, and though human cultivation is irregular 1,500 mature females were accidentally caught each year from 1990 to 2000. Many die from the consumption of plastic bags, which they commonly mistake for jellyfish.

The New Brunswick government lists the Leatherback as endangered as of 1996.

Errors about New Brunswick Reported in National Media, Mark 1.

2009-01-29T13:45:00.000-08:00

From theglobeandmail.com
"The Rothesay area, near Moncton, is reporting close to 400 outages"
Let's quickly consult a map.
140km apart. Oh my.

Government Beer, Souvenirs de Berlin-Est

2009-01-29T09:58:00.000-08:00

Alcool NB Liquor is set to launch its own discounted brand of beer this spring to stay the flow of New Brunswickers into to Quebec in search of lower prices.

An NB Liquor spokesperson said that New Brunswick will be the only jurisdiction distributing its own brand of beer.

The New Brunswick government lost approximately $12 Million in liquor sales to Quebec in 2008, in addition to losses to the United States due to a strong Canadian dollar. The 12-can packs will be sold for $18.67, apparently the lowest possible price. A discounted 12-pack in Quebec can run as low as $10.82.

UNB Woodlot: Developments

2009-01-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

Fredericton has 30 days to voice opposition to construction of a Costco on the University of New Brunswick Woodlot.

In order to build on the site, the city must issue a bylaw rezoning UNB endowment conservation land to make it endowment development land. It must then be rezoned a second time to allow box store development.

The Daily Gleaner wrote that "the purpose of debuting the bylaw at a formal council meeting is to advise the public that it's now available at the city clerk's office at city hall for examination and written objections may be submitted within the next 30 days."

To voice your opposition to UNB Woodlot development write to the
Office of the City Clerk
City Hall
397 Queen Street
Fredericton, NB E3B 4Y7
Phone: (506) 460-2127
Or email by following this link.

--

Corbett Brook. [here] magazine. December 7, 2006

On the paths around Corbett brook one can see the marsh hills through dry poplar branches and discern in the water the long reflection of the trees. Short hills lay low in the water, turning yellowed grasses to the wind, a pair of ducks bathing and calling in between. Leaves in puddle bottoms have assumed the tones of the wet clay path, broken cattails waver under a sudden drizzle. A mist loosens all definition. The grey shapes of the tree line are interrupted by an orange growth on a long dead birch, alike in colour to the department store signs that peer garishly upon the wetland.

Corbett brook, at the point nearest to the department store, reaches about the length of a soccer pitch. Both the store and brook stand on the University of New Brunswick woodlot, spreading east from the place upper Regent Street rounds out to highway 101. 50 percent of the woodlot’s 1,500-hectare surface has been marked for development since to the university decided to capitalize on the asset, and by 2050 the lot will abound with shops and restaurants. But the plan corresponds with the environmental assessment made in preparation for development, and the other 50 percent, comprised of waterways and old growth forests, will remain untouched.

The separation is a delicate one. A stone’s throw from Corbett brook is a catch pool, ringed with a wire fence, that divides the wetland from the parking lot. A paved lot is not environmentally innocuous; the parked cars it hosts leave patches of motor oil that are washed out with the rain.

“And it’s right up against the buffer,” said Geoff Harding, Development Manager of the local Ducks Unlimited branch. He was surprised by the proximity when he saw Corbett brook on a recent errand.

“There isn’t much space left between the parking lot and the brook. I know that the store and the university went through the processes to get the zoning permits. But in a situation like this there is going to be run-off from the parking lot, and it might not be easy to control the consequences.”

Corbett brook, once a fairly isolated waterway, is an essential part of an ecosystem, feeding forest growth and wildlife. 15 years ago, before the development began, Ducks Unlimited built a water control structure leading into the marsh, stabilizing and enabling changes to the amount of water it contained. The goal was to create a permanent wetland.

Harding said that with run-off the risk of pollution is paired with the potential impact of sedimentation, the distribution of earth and organic matter throughout waterways. If one tosses a stone into the catch-pool, the water that courses up in reply is a pale brown.

“With a paved lot you get a lot of quick runoff, with oil and stuff like that. It hits the buffer before it reaches the brook, but can eventually spill over,” he said.

“Sedimentation happens everywhere, because of forestry and agriculture and the disappearance of trees. When enough of this takes place you have the disappearance of wetlands, and the loss of natural habitats.”

Harding said that Wetlands are critical to wildlife survival and to the overall health of the watershed. Marshes like Corbett brook filter contaminants from our water systems that can detrimentally impact water quality over time. Sedimentation and pollution from run-off could eventually reduce the brook’s cleansing properties. Although New Brunswick has some of the strictest environmental protection laws in Atlantic Canada, the buffer required may not be enough to preserve the integrity of the brook. The proximity of the parking lot could be the first step toward its demise. As the rain continues over the parking lot and ripples the trees mirrored in the brook’s surface, one wonders what image the water will project 15 or 20 years from now.

“This is somewhat typical of how wetland loss happens,” said Harding.

“Not in big huge losses, by being drained, but in small pieces, one at a time. They get chipped away.”

2009-01-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

A whir and rumbling in the tunnel, lights climbing round the walls. The airborne filth mists and pushes out, the train approaches. Few choices now, says the old Roger to the young nurse. A child in her lap. The peace of kinship, he thinks to himself, the simple and iconic beauty. Please don't leave me now. There's so much chaos here. The dirt of an age, gathering and gathering, and Old Roger the sentry with his broom, clearing it out again. Underground station 122, Hinton Square Park. One hundred and twenty-second home.
Something in his beard catches his eye and he looks down.
Yes, says the nurse. Nearly Ten o'clock. Another couple of runs. We're running late but really it's better that she sleeps now. I won't chance not getting her down at home. Too much on tomorrow.
The Nurse straightens her cap, smiling. The little girl stirs in her lap. Ah, yes, says Roger, pretending to grasp the logic, and then continues, No place for a young one, of course.
He forces a sandy chuckle and clears his throat.
The nurse runs her fingers through the girl's hair, fixes her collar. Roger gives his push broom an
artful swivel, showering soot. What day is today? Would it make much difference, if I were to know. I know all else that matters, thinks old Roger. He knows the times of the trains and every delay. He knows where the dogs will rupture greasy sacks of refuse. He knows where the water penetrates the ceiling. I needn't idle here. Am I alone here? No, no, I do not think I am alone at all. Transit stations are the locus of human freedom, no attachment but to one's self. The question is moot. This is the sort of power she dreams of, the nursemaid, wrapped up in a child's life. A vibration in his soles, creeping up into the laces of his boots. The last train's advance. Would you like to know why I have stayed here, he says to the nurse.
She looks up, taking a hankerchief from her handbag and bringing it to the sleeping girl's lips. The name on her grey official's badge is Ginger. Certainly, but only another time. She look at him pityingly; he is nauseated; she whispers quickly to the child. Emily, is it? How I would like to speak to young Emily, little girl, sweet and
pretty, Emily, Emily. Old Roger tasted the name, he let the name roil on his his tongue, bristling, whinnying. Such a darling name. Happy Christmas, said the nurse, standing. She brushed soot from her dress.
Yes, and to you. And also you, little one, said roger. Emily, did not look up. They approached the paused train as he turned his back, his grey hands folding calused fingers into familiar grooves. He pushes the broom toward the wall. And waits. He listens. But they are gone when he turns back again.

Saturday, Decemeber 31, 2005.

Remembering Patel's

2009-01-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Patel's has sounded a death knell with the announcement that their family recipe is up for sale.

The business was a Boyce Farmers' Market mainstay. The popularity of Patel's recipe led to competition in various incarnations, eventually fostering the successful Samosa Delight. The two competing businesses were jockeyed around the market by the complaints of other vendors during 2007's "samosa war", who imagined that the samosa draw decreased traffic in front of their stalls. When the Boyce Market requested that the samosa stands move to a hut outside, Patel's folded.

Saint John may boast the province's best samosas and Samosa Delight is easily less greasy, but Patel's remains firm in the memory of those who grew up with them, maintained through the promethean power of defining, first experiences.

Mink

2009-01-22T07:44:00.000-08:00

Posted on Giraffecycle Forum:
Last week I noticed my cat was limping and had air bubbles under his skin on his shoulder. The vet found bite marks and thought it was caused by a cat fight, which made sense to me.
Today my next door neighbors beagle was attacked. She was found in a puddle of blood, not moving. They took her to the vet and they discovered hundreds of punctures (bites) all over her body, and the same air bubbles under her skin.
My dad saw a massive mink a few days ago and we think this is what is attacking pets. If it is a mink, they are vicious and will attack animals larger than them even if they are not provoked, and this mink is big. If you live in the area of the French Village Road, please keep your pets in or watch them when they go out.

The 2006 Census of Agriculture by Statistics Canada listed the Mink population in New Brunswick at 46,825, a 74.8 per cent increase from 2001, likely the result of reduced trapping due to the prevalence of fur farms. The American Mink, Neovison Vison, are considered "truly domesticated animals" by the United States Fur Commission solely on the basis of their long-standing place in fur farms. Minks are nevertheless agressive and high-energy animals, and have been bred for size and not placidity.

The Sea Mink, Neovison macradon, was hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century. It lived among the coastal rocks of the North Atlantic, from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, and possibly lower Newfoundland. The last known specimen was killed on Campobello Island, New Brunswick in 1894. It was preferred by trappers for its pelts, Auburn and naturally larger than its sister species. Eliminated before scientific analysis, subsequent speculation suggests it was nocturnal and solitary. Evidence of the Sea Mink found on the Maine Gulf Coast dates back 5100 years.

Radio Naked East Preview Thursday 01.21.09.

2009-01-21T19:57:00.000-08:00

Zach,
at 11:00 p.m. Atlantic time, CHSR F.M. 97.9 in Fredericton, and online, will play some special songs he wants to share with just you.

1. efterklang - swarming
2. broken social scene - anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl
3. the books - an animated description of mr. maps
4. art ensemble of chicago - old time religion
5. christian fennesz - the point of it all
6. efterklang - illuminant OR
7. efterklang - maison de réflexion
8. john antle - 2-1
9. the agony of leaves - heaven to the slaughter
10. the agony of leaves - when dogs outlive us... courtesy of mould cold
11. ghost bees - vampires of the west coast
12. patrick watson - weight of the world
13. ugly cassanova - diamonds on the face of evil
14. pele - leave word "cigarette paper" mix
15. do make say think - horns of a rabbit

+ maybe some hayden, mogwai, or Lonely Lonely,
but surely new playbox stuff.

Radio Naked East is weekly occurence, and is repeated Mondays at 11pm.

Dim the lights, light a Panda, curl up and listen.

Minimum wage increases, count to 2026 continues

2009-01-21T10:00:00.001-08:00

The New Brunswick government has announced that minimum wage will increase twice in 2009, for a cumulative growth of 50 cents. One increase on April fifteenth and another on September first will bring the base wage in New Brunswick to $8.25 per hour.

"We want New Brunswickers to work in this province and be successful," Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour Minister Donald Arseneault said. "At the same time, we are seeking to attract outside investors to help New Brunswick grow and be self-sufficient by 2026."

A View of the Plundering and Burning of Grimross, 1758, by Lt. Thomas Davies. Grimross, a French village of some 300 inhabitants on the site of present-day Gagetown, was sacked and burned to the ground by British forces in October 1758 during the Seven Years War between France and England. The British were led by Colonel Robert Monckton, who later lent his name to Moncton, New Brunswick's second-largest city. Credit National Gallery of Canada/No. 6270.

Where you are.

2009-01-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

Notable hits this month:
5. Whitehorse, Yukon territory
4. London, UK
3. Houston, Texas
2. Mexico City, Mexico
1. Perth, Western Australia

Just us

2009-01-19T11:52:00.001-08:00

Photo: Thom Gillies

Action By Tuition Coalition

2009-01-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

"Fredericton, NB – A group of students from St. Thomas University and the University of New Brunswick are taking action on tuition fee and debt crisis in New Brunswick. Calling themselves the Coalition for Accessible and Affordable Education, they are organizing and promoting an upcoming educational forum on campus entitled the Slash Fees Forum, slated for next week.

'Look at other provinces like Newfoundland and Quebec, they have the lowest university tuition fees in the country, but they have more active student movements; we need that here in New Brunswick' stated Craig Mazerolle, second year St. Thomas Student and On-Campus Rep. 'We need to engage more students in a renewed effort to tackle the tuition fee crisis in this province.'"

http://leftnews.org/archives/2009/01/18/15404/

The Slash Fees Forum will be held on January 26, 6:30pm, in Tilley Hall room 303, UNBF.

雨

2009-01-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A typhoon does not rage outside. It endures. In China, you have to wait. It has always been like this. I will wait for the rain to stop. I will wait to learn my last day of work. I will wait to leave.

The curtains closed, the lamp left on. I tend to regard my days off as over once I reach 4 p.m., because by that time I wouldn’t be working anymore anyway. It has always been like this. I see the clock at 3:45 and feel a loss.

I was watching a pirated spring blockbuster. I heard blue-white movie choir voices climbing the trees of a spectral CGI forest and remembered nights cleaning my old apartment. Bjork slipping over the wooden floor, licking candle flames, rising to the high white ceiling. It’s not up to you, it never really was. The watermelon scent of my environmentally-friendly spray cleaner -- I was never really convinced it was helping anything. The night’s supper, a salmon filet, sweet chili, rice, pushed around on a plate, bitten at once or twice, then fermenting in the overpriced black tin trash can (it has always been like this). A rare time, back then, in which I felt whole while alone. I rarely cleaned.

We grow nostalgic for old problems; in this moment I regret that that time and place will never be mine again. I have always been like this.

New Issue + Radio Preview

2009-01-14T19:35:00.001-08:00

At long last, naked east print edition 4 will be released in the coming two weeks, at least before the very end of the month, I promise.

Tomorrow night, 11pm ATL, CHSR FM 97.7,
naked east radio with Zach will possibly air (there are nonymous and Qwerty readings tomorrow, so brace for a rebroadcast).

Vivacious Curves

2009-01-14T19:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.vivaciouscurves.com/home.html
Say whatever you like, but check out the site.

Exaltation

2009-01-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

Needless to say, the entire ordeal was over very shortly before it began.

Walking through the aisles of the Supermarket, the same solitary fortress of consumption as every other day, the lights seemed a little harsher than usual. It was then that I noticed they were shining especially bright on the produce section. I scanned the area quickly, seeing no other bodies nearby and approached them apprehensively. They glared back at me, the witch of a woman wrapped in a shawl as tightly as the apple in their plastic prison. I panicked at their accusatory gazes, damning my freedom, my ability to leave these horrid confines. I could not stand it any longer and I fell to the floor. I woke up some short time later with a man asking me if I was alright. I told him to leave me alone and bought as much produce that I could fit in my cart. Fresh carrots. Juicy plums. Those terrible turnips that never tasted like anything remotely pleasant. And I left there, quickly, heading back to my own house.

My daughter sat at the table in the darkness, staring at the telephone. "Dad called. Grandma finally died." She started to cry and I walked back to the car, grabbing all of the bags of produce at once and bringing them back into the house. The entire process took about 4 and a half minutes, all while my daughter sat wailing. I forced myself to say "It will be alright, your father knew it was coming, it will be okay." I gave her 20 dollars and told her to go buy herself some new accessories at Ardene's. She left.

That night I snuck out of bed while my daughter played terrible CDs in her bedroom, knowing she was probably stoned or passed out drunk by herself. I opened the fridge and knelt down in front of it, the beautiful, warm glow them lovelier than any embrace I have known. I watched the fruits, the vegetables, as they sat on their own. It took two shelves to hold them all. I plotted their escape, my mind turning circles over and over until I finally decided I would have to relocate them. They could only last in here for so long. My daughter would get suspicious. Yes, a new location. I would drive them out to our cabin an hour away by the lake, and put them in the large, empty fridge there for the time being. I would have to do so tomorrow night, when my daughter will be gone to see her father. Any other time, I would have to provide her an explanation.

It was then that I saw them glaring back at me again, desperate in their entrapment. I reached forward, tearing apart all the bags that contained them, placing the apples next to the bundles of carrots and the plums next to the cartons of strawberries. All of them free to breathe the air of their own company.

The next morning I woke up early for my morning jog and my daughter was sitting on the couch, watching TV. We caught each others eye for a short moment and I continued to the door, dressed in my new jogging suit I purchased for myself when I reached 120 pounds. My jog was fairly enjoyable but I felt myself getting tired too soon, but forced myself on. I ran into the nasty woman Natalie Baer in the park and was forced to feign sympathy for the death of my ex mother-in-law. I ran past those people doing the yearly Cancer run, speeding past them and refusing to acknowledge their presence. I ran around the entire town and it all took about two hours and I felt wonderful.

I returned home and entered the kitchen, and viewed the carnage that had taken place. My new in-table set out in the middle, with casseroles, applesauce, various fruit trays, cooked corn, cabbage rolls, pickled beets. All of my loves, carved and cut. Bled dry and burned. All of them. Taped on the table like an eviction notice, a note: Hey mom! A bunch of the girls and I decided to get a head start on food for the reception after the funeral. We're so lucky you had all this stuff bought already! Cooking is so therapeutic. You know what? I think you're right, Mom. Everything IS gonna be okay! --Sally

I ran forward, frantically screaming and I slammed the table down hard, causing the legs to fold as the top fell to the floor. I sat down quickly, staring at the corpses as I began to devour all of it, knee-deep in smashed and mutilated fruits and vegetables. I writhed in it, eating the fruit plates all at once, crunching carrots, chewing apples. Even those terrible turnips. My tears mixing with the mess on my face as I wailed like a child. And as it all stopped and my stomach was full of them and I looked around, once again, at the horror beneath me, I suddenly didn't feel so alone.

SJ Mayor Orders TJ Interview Ban

2009-01-06T17:03:00.000-08:00

Citing an alleged editorial bias at the Saint John-based newpaper, Mayor Ivan Court is restricting interviews to the Telegraph-Journal until publisher Jamie Iriving agrees to debate issues with him publicly.
He also canceled his subscription.
Full story here: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2009/01/06/nb-court-irving.html

Jamie Irving.

NB Teen Preganancy Rate by County, 2007

2009-01-05T15:09:00.000-08:00

Per 1,000 females aged 15-19 years, N.B. residents only.
Albert: 15.5 pregnant teens/ 1,000 teen girls (in 2006, 12.6; 1997, 18.1)
Carleton: 36.4 (2006, 28.4; 1997, 41.2)
Charlotte: 34.9 (2006: 26.4; 1997, 40.5)
Gloucester: 17.2 (2006: 13.7; 1997, 24.1)
Kent: 22.2 (2006: 13.3; 1997: 29.9)
Kings: 15.7 (2006: 13.8; 1997: 18.1)
Madawaska: 21.9 (2006: 11.3; 1997 15.6)
Northumberld: 21.1 (2006: 29.0; 1997: 29.7)
Queens: 38.7 (2006: 28.3; 1997: 27.2)
Restigouche: 20.2 (2006: 11.0; 1997: 23.7)
Saint John: 43.0 (2006: 39.8; 1997: 47.7)
Sunbury: 19.2 (2006: 20.4; 1997: 45.9)
Victoria: 19.2 (2006: 12.7; 1997: 45.1)
Westmorland: 25.8 (2006: 22.4; 1997: 31.0)
York: 19.4 (2006: 26.9; 1997: 39.8)
N.B.: 24.0 (2006: 21.5; 1997: 31.1)

- The calculation of teenage pregnancies by the N.B. Dept of Health takes into account, for females 19 & under: registered live births, abortions performed in accredited N.B. hospitals, registered still births with at least 20 weeks gestation, including live births and stillbirths for N.B. residents which occurred outside of N.B. (resident out of province births or stillbirths not included for 2007), and covers females aged 15 to 19 years at the time of the pregnancy outcome (rather than conception). Abortions performed in clinics or outside of the province and spontaneous abortions or other fetal losses are not included.
Posted by Panik on http://www.giraffecycle.com/forum/

Goose Lane publishes Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary

2009-01-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

Fredericton publishing house Goose Lane Editions launched a Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary on December 11, 2008. Maliseet is an indigenous New Brunswick language that has, like its sister Passamaquoddy, suffered severe decline since confederation. Conservative estimates put the number of fluent speakers around 300.

The Dictionary

Two Coastal Poems

2008-12-30T07:59:00.000-08:00

1.
Went down deh shop dur a minute ago
Pick up me shop lunch
Bag uh Cheeto’s and me Big 8 Lime
T’ree tins uh sardines in spring water
And d’em Vienna weenies I loves
Chats up brud wit’ he’s gut hangin’
Low as he’s porch
Havin’ he’s first puff uh deh mornin’
Tells me nattuh go wakin’ no one up
An’ I says
“Sure everyone be’s up,
D’ey just ain’t come outta deh house outta it,
Hey b’y,”
And he laughs tuh kill he’self
T’rough he’s Labatt Blue breakfast
Asks where I’m from
Where I’m going to
Tells ‘em “Fredericton…”
Pauses like I got picked outta me grade four class
On who deh last Beothuk wus
After nah doin’ me readin’s,
An’ I looks up at he’s red eyes and says,
“Goin’ tuh Hermitage, Lard willin’”
Mentions d’at d’ere ferry d’at leaves Tuesday at seven
And deh feller goes right quiet sure
Like I made a racist joke er somet’in’
Looks at he’s woman er daughter er whatever missus is
Like I pronounced Topsail Road “Top-sail Road”
Nah “Top-sul” like yuh would
Right ignorant, hey b’y
Lookin’ fur jamborees d’at ain’t on deh go
And comers home d’at still be’s out west, y’knows
And USB cables where deh ports
Don’t be fur USB’s a’tall
And maybe deh scatter mummer d’at visits tents
Nah houses
And uh speed boat right perfect
Fur four hours uh choppy stuff
No problem a’tall, mah son
But I t’inks—
And d’is is ‘tween you and meself now—
I t’inks brud don’t know nudding
But I ain’t bodderin’ wit’ d’at racket
‘Cause arguin’ wit’ a Newfie
Be’s like kickin’ yer mudder’s ol’ vacuum cleaner
Yer getting yer pants dirty
And d’at’s it
Have me nacho cheeters
Now deh once
Uh right cheesy wake up, right on
D’en have me sardine can lunch
Wit’ uh bruised arse pear fur me healt’
If yuh knows what I means
And jus’ toss d’em wieners at deh gulls
Copper deh dog’s gettin’ some old
But he says hello tuh all deh b’ys all deh same
Prob’ly he’s nerves since he’s missus is gone—
I ‘llows he knows d’at pushy cliff cat
Tommy Wiggles
D’at be’s rubbin’ he’s big orange balls
All over deh breakwater
And d’at Copper t’inks d’at ain’t fit, wha
Or maybe he don’t say shit all
Cause he’s dog sitter be’s pushier d’an deh taxman
2.
Today I burnt my face,
My nose most of all,
But Jordan didn’t burn the veggie chili,
Our first and only family meal,
So we ate dysfunctional preservatives
Surviving like the Bronx children
We don’t know,
Like nasty happy mountain sun things
Popping vitamins, all drug-cool or something,
Starting fires as though we were fire starters
With illegitimate logs
And marked up Ketchup Pringles cans
Lily the Buffalo is impressed by our navigation
But not with her frequent bagging—
A meat run with plastic tusks—
Or with her playground abandonment,
Fodder for child molesters
Who overfish their teeth away
And drink brown water heart attacks
I only buy Black Horse in Newfoundland
To spite the Coors Light face
I thought I reflected
Like a lobster adorned mirror,
I only see whales in Newfoundland
Because the Saint John River blows something different,
Griff and Jordan only do their Newfie impressions
In Newfoundland,
Itching from mosquito bite pluralism,
Infected with over boiled salt beef malaria—
So far from civil servants and city hall,
Ultimate Frisbee and the Regent Mall,
I kinda like the aerial skin flock fucks,
And the white lumps that mumble
“Mind now, Stephen b’y”
From one pale toe to another
Putting on cold wet pants
Is so sexual
But the crooked rural responses
I get in them
Feel like call center diversionary tactics
Instead of good ideas about tackle or government initiatives
This is home again
And I didn’t have no clue, mah son,
This is home again
And I’m tired from the softball I played
Twelve years ago,
This is home island
But it isn’t home
Because I’m laughing a little too sincerely,
Thinking completely, concretely,
Soft as crabapple jam,
And not at all,
Morphing like every misty night’s last embers,
Autumnal in my August inhale haunting
There’s a thoughtfully nude moon
Over the diesel lung,
French immersion coughing for its life
Just beyond the incinerator,
And an interracial house of beers toasting
Our twisted diplomat guts
Vagabonds don’t write:
They beach, bleed from their eyes,
Stage torrential bean debates—
“Tomato! Maple syrup! Pork!”—
Taxi in non-taxis,
And talk over peppers and pitcher plants,
Animated by Cabot’s cod headed winds

The Poppy Factory

2008-12-22T13:38:00.000-08:00

Lying almost directly outside of my front door is a river which leads all the way to the sea. A leaf-strewn path lined with trees and grassy verges mocks its meandering path for the full three miles. If this sounds idyllic, it is. The Water of Leith Walkway, along which I walk daily if I can help it, steels my soul if it is broken, sets it on fire if it is dull and forms one of the major reasons why I cannot now conceive of moving away. It led me to the café at which I now work, and it led me also to the poppy factory.
Unlike the other drab grey buildings in the area, the poppy factory is built from stone of a distinctive reddy-orange colour, so it would have stood out from its surroundings even were it not for the glossy vermilion flower motif above its green door, or the faded sign outside which bears the emblem 'Lady Haig Poppy Factory' and lists the hours it opens.
My curiosity was well and truly piqued from the first. The words 'poppy' and 'factory' seemed about as unlikely a pair of candidates for linguistic companionship as you could hope to find outside of a children's book, and then there was the presence of opening hours. There seemed little chance that the opening times would ever be found written up outside a pen or a biscuit factory. Opening hours equal invitation, and in this instance, wild horses would not have stopped me from attending.
Yet the sign informed that the factory shut at three thirty on weekdays, and being an evening or at least a late-afternoon walker, I was always too late by the time I reached the factory. Every time I saw it, I promised myself that on my next day off during the week I really would set off for my walk in time to make it inside. In the end, though, I never got around to it, so perhaps the wild horses had got the better of me after all, and there were no further developments on the poppy factory score until my friend came to visit Edinburgh for a long weekend. Since we had a lot of catching up to do, which is always best done mobile, we set off for a Friday afternoon jaunt. Our plan was to walk the two hours to Leith, where the river flowed into the Firth of Forth, have a pint in one of the seaside pubs and then walk back home again. Thoughts of the factory had played no part in my proposal, and it was only when I saw the glossy red poppy gleaming up ahead of us that it occurred to me we might be in time to pay it a visit. I checked the time on my phone, and it was just past three o'clock.
"Do you mind if we just have a look in here? I've been wondering for ages about this place."
My friend looked at the building and turned to me. "A poppy factory? What does that mean?"
"I don't really know. That's why we have to go in."
I felt almost nervous as we pushed open the gate and walked up the path, and definitely glad to have an accomplice. These feelings intensified when a man walked past the glass door, and, seeing our noses pressed to the glass, did a double take, opened the door and gave us an officious, "Hello?"
"I'm not really sure what we're doing here." I felt myself flushing. "We just sort of wanted to take a look."
The man opened the door and sighed, a deep sigh.
"Do you want a tour?"
He was extremely posh, the sort of posh which is rare these days. His vowels all seemed to be on the verge of cracking. My friend Rose and I looked at one another. The man sighed again and said,
"You're a little bit late for a tour. Follow me."
Meekly, or perhaps just not knowing what other course of action was open to us, we did as we were told and followed him inside a modestly shabby building which looked like some kind of club or association, and then through a set of double doors into a high-ceilinged white room. This, apparently, was the factory. It looked, in fact, much like the only other factory I had ever visited - a Japanese sausage factory. The place was riddled with desks and framed pictures but still managed to feel bare; the machinery was sparse and free-standing. The employees were invariably old. There was the air of industry, but only in decent proportions.
The aristocrat introduced us to Tam, who was to be our guide. He asked our names, which I took as a formality, but it turned out not to be. From that moment on, there was not one sentence that went uttered by Tam which was not personally addressed to one, if not both, of us. On repeated occasions he mourned the fact that we hadn't got there earlier, because some of the boys had already gone home, and we would have liked to have met them. Still, we were introduced to all of the workers who remained - all, we discovered, were veterans, with most registered disabled.
"Rose and Polly, this is Walter, Walter, this is Rose and Polly, they're having a tour," Tam would say. "Polly lives in Edinburgh. Rose is visiting for the weekend. Jim's job is to punch holes in the poppies."
We saw machines of all kinds, all delightfully specific in their functions. In that respect it was just like the factories of my pre-school imagination which I had used to spend hours drawing and constructing, and although there was no real 'line' to speak of, there was a progression, the man standing at the machine or the desk here receiving and then uniting or working further on the products of those we had just visited. We were allowed to assemble our own poppies, fitting the green stem through the hole of the red paper cut-out, and then wedging the black centre on top to secure it. Feeling like schoolgirls, we giggled with delight. The employees were just as jovial.
As we walked between the tables, or around the outside of the room which was adorned with historical pictures and portraits, Tam oscillated from fact to grainy fact. The poppy factory had come about in 1923, we were told. Until then, all the poppies for Scotland were made in London, but a suggestion made by Field Commander Haig's wife brought about the factory in Edinburgh which took her name in commemoration, and it is since them that all the poppies for Scotland, and latterly all the wreaths used at remembrance services have been made on the premises. Although admittedly larger than the tiny box of the sausage factory, the place is not large, and thus the idea that every single Scottish poppy is made here seemed hard to credit until we were led into the warehouse, used to store the Wreaths for every church, every scout, cub, brownie and guide group, and all other kinds of groups besides, as well the boxes of poppies, all of which accumulate throughout the year in the months leading up to November. The warehouse supervisor was sitting, leafing lackadaisically through a copy of The Sun. "This is Joe," said Tam. "He's a very busy man."
The tour was nearly over, but first we were conducted into a couple of meeting rooms, where we saw portraits of, amongst others, Lady Haig and Lieutanentant Colonel John McCrae, the Canadian Medical officer who penned the poem responsible for establishing the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, as well as a large framed copy of that same poem whose opening line reads,'In Flanders fields the poppies grow.'
Finally we were shown a three dimensional model of the Garden of Remembrance, set up in Scotland's main drag Princes Street around the month of November, showing the designated places of all the wreaths that were presented by different associations, but all made within the factory.
"It's a very important thing for people, to come and present their wreaths, to remember," Tam tells us. "Poppies are not just about the two World Wars. It's anybody, who has served for their country. You know, the boys in Iraq and so on."
His voice, as it had been throughout, was a seamless mixture of pragmatism and acknowledgment, the very same tone I recognised from my Grandma's speeches about the war. It was the sort of tone which made sense for those for whom war had been a reality - not just an ideological reality splashed across newspapers and pouring from mouths at pubs and parties, but an inescapable part of life. An experience which makes remembrance less of a duty not to be forgotten than an ever-present feature. It seems that to those for whom war has been part of life, it will never again be wholly outside of it.
Against that, there are the people of my generation and those close to it for whom the very phrase 'poppy factory' sounds like something from a dystopic novel, to whom this mild acceptance found in older generations causes discomfort, because we are certain that whatever war is, that it is something which we should not take lying down. Yet in the midst of our clamorous hope to eschew war from our definition of life in the future, we can stray too far into excluding it from our definition of the present, and even the past. Which is precisely why the plight of the Lady Haig factory and their ever-increasing number of tours is commendable in every way. Anything which helps to impress on youngsters the reality of recent history and the loss of past generations must be valued, and the poppy factory tour as an experience is such a surreal one, it seems it cannot fail to do so. Yet we all know, them at the poppy factory as well as us youngsters, that the remembrance we can offer will always be a lame cousin to that of those who have lived it. We can endeavour to understand, to respect the experiences and losses of others, but our mental images will always be that bit grayer, our tears that bit slower to fall. If we do feel genuinely sad, remorseful, some part of us rises up to object that we are not entitled to those feelings, and the rest of the time we have something which closely resembles guilt; guilt for not having to bear it, guilt for belonging to a nation whose international profile is one of almost unremitting perpetration. Included in our cultural heritage is the pressing awareness that remembrance can only be learned the hard way, and the cold knowledge that the alternative is scarcely more savoury.

Christmas, 2006

2008-12-22T07:38:00.000-08:00

I slump over the last steps and draw the liqueur bottle from the top drawer, and unloading the remainder into my throat, take again to the stairs.

My father is storming around, and he stops and says

Don’t worry I’m going to stay and take care of it.

And in an instant I see that this might cut me from the ride I need across town. My aunt and uncle are waiting for him and my mother, and their children are playing Clue in the living room.

If you stay it’s only going to perpetuate the fight. You should go; it’s not worth ruining everyone’s night over.

But he is off again. Brian had found a bottle of Smirnoff in Thomas’ gym bag. Thomas plays on my father’s basketball team, and we all stood around while he issued a summary suspension across the dining room table. Thomas called Brian a faggot. Brian told Thomas he was going to be a janitor. Then Brian and I argued about whose evening plans were more important. The loser would watch the kids.

My mother stops Brian at the hall end and asks him what he was doing with someone else’s PEI drivers’ license. Why did you bring this up now, Dad and I are saying. There are red splashes on the wall through the bedroom windows and open doors, and someone yells from downstairs, there’s a fire truck in front of the house. My aunt and uncle are waiting in the driveway.

Sorry, I’m leaving, I can’t take this shit and I’m going.

If you leave I’m going to hit you in the fucking face on the way out the door.

Poetry Post 1.

2008-12-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

(Excerpt from the Popol Vuh, translated by Z. Crow)

Are uxe' ojer tzij
waral K'iche' ub'i'.
Waral
xchiqatz'ib'aj wi
xchiqatikib'a' wi ojer tzij,
utikarib'al
uxe'nab'al puch rnojel xb'an pa
tinamit K'iche'
ramaq' K'iche' winaq.

or

This is the root of the ancient word
of this place called the Naked East.
Here
we shall write,
we shall plant the ancient word,
the origin
the beginning of all what has been done in the
Naked East
country of Naked Eastings.

--

the pencils easiest to snap
are those uncoated.
the green, metallic text tears,
the wood splinters brilliantly -
the most satisfying crack
and the book propping the paper
wears the wound.

there is no letter "t" left
on that keyboard.
after a grueling day it bust its joint,
flung free from the system
and left the alphabet short.
remaining letters took the hint
then took off, too.

now i have nothing
to write with or on.
almond eyes cranked slowly shut -
allergies acting up.
a big blue pen slaps sloppy drip
on torn bedsheets
a sorry medium.

chunky-cheeked toddlers -
relatives of mine -
ask what joy comes from ruin:
"why did the pencil crack?"
"why did the letters run?"
with a sore and a void
bloody fists are never fun

--

I recited these words
one by one
only moments ago now-
It must have been you speaking through
the moon I was staring at

and when I hit that car
or when it hit me
and sped off like I wasn't even there
I was shocked to be standing
still on my bike
like an immovable force
and I thought
Damn-

and I was glad to know
that what I'd been sensing all evening
was more than a simple inkling,
indeed a real life prediction
that I faced without hesitation
and did not waver
when it really counted.

But he came back after all
with a flat
and no side mirror,
just about speechless

--

sons of new france

found in the appalachians,
white water moored to the bend
of two birch vessels tethered by the stony autumn
the photographs are unmistakable,
the kinsman drifting in the northern air
like waifs and leaves; my heart unyielding

and I stare from the foot of the dry hills
as the tribal motorists band
the green right lanes, too many hinged on token
animal skins and shine bottles ringing on the air,
there a soft belief that greater truths
lie elsewhere in feather beds, the nimbus,
beheld in infant wonder crowning the
idols of the church adorning them

somehow the smoke rings through the piping asters
and I linger with their image in the book,
uncertain where the motors run these young men through
who waltz through the placid evenings aging
with their liberation songs
and cloud at statues in the deafening parks
where hurried placards glow with the elusive strength
that boils as they, frustrated, daily coalesce
and I strain to point my neck
watching them grapple for the unretrieved
as if to wrest, to throne and worship
the tides slipping back to the sea
and I sense that grief;
not certain where the keyhole was
they grappled for the answer in the dark,
the riddle hiding on the daylit streets and pediments
they lament, without their noble, celebrated oneness;
the broad streams sing in the gentle light of the spring,
day closes over the forgotten fields.