Jewish Women Occupy Israeli Consulate in Toronto

This is Israeli propaganda, and it is a pack of lies. The important thing to remember is that there was a ceasefire brokered by Egypt in July of last year, and that ceasefire succeeded. So, if Israel wanted to protect its citizens—and it had every right to protect its citizens—the way to go about it was not by launching this vicious military offensive, but by observing the ceasefire.

Now, let me give you some figures, which I think are the most crucial figures in understanding this conflict. Before the ceasefire came into effect in July of 2008, the monthly number of rockets fired—Kassam rockets, homemade Kassam rockets, fired from the Gaza Strip on Israeli settlements and towns in southern Israel was 179. In the first four months of the ceasefire, the number dropped dramatically to three rockets a month, almost zero. I would like to repeat these figures for the benefit of your listeners. Pre-ceasefire, 179 rockets were fired on Israel; post-ceasefire, three rockets a month. This is point number one, and it’s crucial.

And my figures are beyond dispute, because they come from the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. But after initiating this war, this particular table, neat table, which showed the success of the ceasefire, was withdrawn and replaced with another table of statistics, which is much more obscure and confusing. Israel—the Foreign Ministry withdrew these figures, because it didn’t suit the new story.

The new story said that Hamas broke the ceasefire. This is a lie. Hamas observed the ceasefire as best as it could and enforced it very effectively. The ceasefire was a stunning success for the first four months. It was broken not by Hamas, but by the IDF. It was broken by the IDF on the 4th of November, when it launched a raid into Gaza and killed six Hamas men.

And there is one other point that I would like to make about the ceasefire. Ever since the election of Hamas in January—I’m sorry, ever since Hamas captured power in Gaza in the summer of 2007, Israel had imposed a blockade of the Strip. Israel stopped food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching the Gaza Strip. One of the terms of the ceasefire was that Israel would lift the blockade of Gaza, yet Israel failed to lift the blockade, and that is one issue that is also overlooked or ignored by official Israeli spokesmen. So Israel was doubly guilty of sabotaging the ceasefire, A, by launching a military attack, and B, by maintaining its very cruel siege of the people of Gaza.

Life's Gifts and A Dream of Wild Bees by Olive Schreiner

Life's Gifts

I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreamt Life stood before her, and held in each hand a gift—in the one Love, in the other Freedom. And she said to the woman, "Choose!"

And the woman waited long: and she said, "Freedom!"

And Life said, "Thou hast well chosen. If thou hadst said, 'Love,' I would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that day I shall bear both gifts in one hand."

I heard the woman laugh in her sleep.

London

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A Dream of Wild Bees

A mother sat alone at an open window. Through it came the voices of the children as they played under the acacia-trees, and the breath of the hot afternoon air. In and out of the room flew the bees, the wild bees, with their legs yellow with pollen, going to and from the acacia-trees, droning all the while. She sat on a low chair before the table and darned. She took her work from the great basket that stood before her on the table: some lay on her knee and half covered the book that rested there. She watched the needle go in and out; and the dreary hum of the bees and the noise of the children's voices became a confused murmur in her ears, as she worked slowly and more slowly. Then the bees, the long-legged wasp-like fellows who make no honey, flew closer and closer to her head, droning. Then she grew more and more drowsy, and she laid her hand, with the stocking over it, on the edge of the table, and leaned her head upon it. And the voices of the children outside grew more and more dreamy, came now far, now near; then she did not hear them, but she felt under her heart where the ninth child lay. Bent forward and sleeping there, with the bees flying about her head, she had a weird brain-picture; she thought the bees lengthened and lengthened themselves out and became human creatures and moved round and round her. Then one came to her softly, saying, "Let me lay my hand upon thy side where the child sleeps. If I shall touch him he shall be as I."

She asked, "Who are you?"

And he said, "I am Health. Whom I touch will have always the red blood dancing in his veins; he will not know weariness nor pain; life will be a long laugh to him."

"No," said another, "let me touch; for I am Wealth. If I touch him material care shall not feed on him. He shall live on the blood and sinews of his fellow-men, if he will; and what his eye lusts for, his hand will have. He shall not know 'I want.'" And the child lay still like lead.

And another said, "Let me touch him: I am Fame. The man I touch, I lead to a high hill where all men may see him. When he dies he is not forgotten, his name rings down the centuries, each echoes it on to his fellows. Think—not to be forgotten through the ages!"

And the mother lay breathing steadily, but in the brain-picture they pressed closer to her.

"Let me touch the child," said one, "for I am Love. If I touch him he shall not walk through life alone. In the greatest dark, when he puts out his hand he shall find another hand by it. When the world is against him, another shall say, 'You and I.'" And the child trembled.

But another pressed close and said, "Let me touch; for I am Talent. I can do all things—that have been done before. I touch the soldier, the statesman, the thinker, and the politician who succeed; and the writer who is never before his time, and never behind it. If I touch the child he shall not weep for failure."

About the mother's head the bees were flying, touching her with their long tapering limbs; and, in her brain-picture, out of the shadow of the room came one with sallow face, deep-lined, the cheeks drawn into hollows, and a mouth smiling quiveringly. He stretched out his hand. And the mother drew back, and cried, "Who are you?" He answered nothing; and she looked up between his eyelids. And she said, "What can you give the child—health?" And he said, "The man I touch, there wakes up in his blood a burning fever, that shall lick his blood as fire. The fever that I will give him shall be cured when his life is cured."

"You give wealth?"

He shook his head. "The man whom I touch, when he bends to pick up gold, he sees suddenly a light over his head in the sky; while he looks up to see it, the gold slips from between his fingers, or sometimes another passing takes it from them."

"Fame?"

He answered, "likely not. For the man I touch there is a path traced out in the sand by a finger which no man sees. That he must follow. Sometimes it leads almost to the top, and then turns down suddenly into the valley. He must follow it, though none else sees the tracing."

"Love?"

He said, "He shall hunger for it—but he shall not find it. When he stretches out his arms to it, and would lay his heart against a thing he loves, then, far off along the horizon he shall see a light play. He must go towards it. The thing he loves will not journey with him; he must travel alone. When he presses somewhat to his burning heart, crying, 'Mine, mine, my own!' he shall hear a voice—'Renounce! renounce! this is not thine!'"

"He shall succeed?"

He said, "He shall fail. When he runs with others they shall reach the goal before him. For strange voices shall call to him and strange lights shall beckon him, and he must wait and listen. And this shall be the strangest: far off across the burning sands where, to other men, there is only the desert's waste, he shall see a blue sea! On that sea the sun shines always, and the water is blue as burning amethyst, and the foam is white on the shore. A great land rises from it, and he shall see upon the mountain-tops burning gold."

The mother said, "He shall reach it?"

And he smiled curiously.

She said, "It is real?"

And he said, "What IS real?"

And she looked up between his half-closed eyelids, and said, "Touch."

And he leaned forward and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whispered to it, smiling; and this only she heard—"This shall be thy reward—that the ideal shall be real to thee."

And the child trembled; but the mother slept on heavily and her brain-picture vanished. But deep within her the antenatal thing that lay here had a dream. In those eyes that had never seen the day, in that half-shaped brain was a sensation of light! Light—that it never had seen. Light—that perhaps it never should see. Light—that existed somewhere!

And already it had its reward: the Ideal was real to it.

London

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[from Dreams by Olive Schreiner and reproduced from Project Gutenburg - in accordance with their licence]

I learned of Olive Schreiner's work over 25 years ago, a time when i was exploring international literature and feminism as well as being an anti-apartheid activist. I read her Story of an African Farm as part of my education about South Africa. But it was discovering her parables in Dreams that made my heart sing. I realized many years later that Schreiner's stories were an important part of my eventual choice to be a storyteller. When i moved to Toronto in 89 i special-ordered (from the long-gone Britnell's Books on Yonge St.) a facsimile edition of Dreams. Alas, it was loaned and lost. So, it is with a child's delight of discovery that, having decided to check Project Gutenburg, i found Olive Schreiner's works. How i love the internet sometimes!

These two tales have always struck me very deeply. They are troubling in the best possible way. The first, Life's Gift's, i was reminded of when Niki sent me her story, Stone, which i blogged last week. The second was remembered on the heels of this memory as i looked at our newborn son Taliesen and wondered about what parents can teach their children, what we can hope for for them. And i'm sure it is normal, or at least common, to want the world for them. But can there be any greater gift than the gift of how to make meaning? I wonder. And is that something we can teach? Or is it something that must be sought and found uniquely by each person? I am unsure. It's certainly true that the metaphor of "the search" for meaning (or "truth") is common. And, while i believe that neither meaning nor truth are things that lie in wait to be discovered, perhaps the metaphor is making a more subtle point than that of highlighting the object of the search and is rather pointing to the nature of the search itself - i.e. a task that each individual decides to embrace or not.

Raven Steals the Light

The season of revels is coming to an end. Tomorrow is Twelfth Night and i had hoped to finish preparing a bankelsang of a raven story based on a story from J'net's culture found in E. Richard Atleo's Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview. Well i'm still working on the story, but i offer you this clip from the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure. The winter solstice has, for many cultures, been a time to mark and celebrate the relationship of day and night, the coming and going of the sun. And human imagination has created a beautiful diversity of ways of making meaning of this time. I like the notion of twelve days of christmas (christian doctrine aside). In principle i think there should always be a season of the year to celebrate abundance. I'm also partial to theft stories which carry tricky lessons about life and creativity and more.

I have a real soft spot for Northern Exposure and, as with other literary worlds (such as Armisted Maupin's San Francisco), the characters feel like old friends. I recall this performance of "raven stealing the light" and seeing it again, i am as moved as i was the first time i watched it.

Stone by Niki Pidd

There was this woman who was stressed out. She’d got dragged out in front of the Media and the Vatican and her Dad. Everyone was looking angry and mean and they had big yonnies in their hands and they were gonna chuck ‘em at her. They reckoned she’d had an abortion and was on the pill and was gay. They really wanted to kill her.

She was pretty scared. Her heart kept banging against her ribs and she wanted to run but there was no way they were gonna let her get away. Then this cool guy stepped out of the crowd and grabbed her arm. He smiled at her and she knew he wasn’t gonna hurt her. For a moment she even smiled. He turned around and said to them, “Anyone of you that hasn’t had unprotected sex can chuck the first rock.” Then he pulled out his mobile phone and started writing an sms. The woman could see it and it said, ”Don’t panic.” It took about ten minutes until they were all gone. He gave her a hug and said, “Look after yourself.” Then he hopped on a push bike a rode down the street.

(Niki is a good friend who has just returned home to Melbourne after a ten week European trip - a "magical mystery tour", as she says. She was inspired to write this wee piece by, amongst other things, a visit to St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican and the Catholic Church's recent (and ongoing) attacks on humanity. Thanks, Niki!)

Treasure trove of ancient classics

I confess that if there is a spectrum of relationships to books that runs from bibliomania (the only officially recognized mania pertaining to collecting things) to bibliophile to just-don't-give-a-damn-i-watch-TV-anyway, that i am somewhere between the "phile" and the "mania". I do love books. And if i have a passion for collecting them, i am still safely distant from the pathological extreme. Nonetheless, i think i did salivate when i learned of the Clay Sanskrit Library (thanks, Corvin - it's all your fault), which is publishing remarkably affordable and excellent translations (so Corvin assures me and he's a far better judge than i since he reads Sanskrit, the lucky dog) of classical Sanskrit literature. Of course, this also appeals deeply to the storyteller in me. They've already published a complete translation of the Ramayana (in seven volumes). And they're working on the Mahabharata with at least 11 volumes already published. As the longest epic in human history it should take up quite the shelf space when complete. I have read bits and pieces of these epics for over 20 years, including a fair number of translations of the Bhagavad Gita (which is found in the Mahabharata). The Gita is considered one of the greatest literary works of all time and i'm inclined to agree. You can download an excerpt here.

In their introduction to the Mahabharata they write:

In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator buys from an enigmatic bookdealer an ancient tome written in an indecipherable Indian script: the Book of Sand, so named because like the sand it has no beginning and no end. Whenever he opens the book, he finds different paragraphs and different illustrations on pages whose shifting numbers make no sense. Soon he becomes obsessed by the book’s fathomless depths, and his evenings are spent consumed in its protean secrets. I suspect that when Borges wrote his story, he had the Maha·bhárata in mind.

I agree with this speculation and this passage reminds me of having read Borges' accounts of books and libraries. His story The Library of Babel lodged firmly in my imagination the minute i read it. It's a delicious description of the universe as a library. And one that i have perhaps become lost within. Who knows. Some years ago this image, blended with that of other libraries about which i'd learned: Neil Gaiman's library in the land of the Dreaming (especially as depicted in the comic The Hunt) - a library that contains every book that anyone has ever dreamed; the description of the Book of Thoth in an ancient Egyptian story (a Book said to be hidden in golden box inside a silver box in a box of ivory and ebony in a sycamore box in a bronze box in an iron box and there's serpents carved into one of the boxes that protect it all rather lethally); the library depicted in Umberto Eco's In The Name of the Rose; and the Library of Alexandria whose history is described in The Vanished Library by Luciano Canfora (about which the reputed destruction by Muslims is challenged here). All this talk of books and libraries lead me to imagine my own version of a "vanished library" which contained books of wonder. I fashioned twenty-four descriptions of books found in this "vanished library" and, as i wrote these descripions i also came across Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway's amazing interpretation of The Tempest. He, too, described fantastic books. And i imagine these might also be found in the vanished library. Here is one of the descriptions i wrote:

7. The Book of Delight
This book is housed in a puzzle-box made of seven different kinds of wood: zebra wood, rose wood, ebony, spalted maple, apple, teak and oak. Small panels must be moved into the correct position for the box to be opened. Once accomplished the curious (and determined) will find a thick book whose cover seems to run with many dark colours. The colours swirl slowly and resemble clouds moving across an obsidian sky. Patient readers will be rewarded by the marvelous sight of fireworks bursting amidst the swirls of dark colour. The pages of this book alternate between image and text. Each image (photograph, drawing, watercolour, doodle) has been produced by a person during a moment of joy. The text recounts moments of private delight – almost unnoticed by those who experienced them: a three-year old girl is bid goodnight by a storytelling uncle who says, “you’re so lucky,” and the almost sleeping child responds quietly into the darkness, “I feel lucky”; a lonely man walks along a sidewalk on a late-winter day and notices, upon looking up, that the magnolia tree is covered in velvety buds; in a beach cottage room full of family, a grandfather suddenly stands up and dances unselfconsciously with a doll, remembering younger days when his three-step dance “signature” was both well-recognized and desired. The latter half of the book is blank and the last piece of written text invites the reader to place their hand upon a blank page and recall forgotten moments of delight. Once done the reader is free to add to the book’s wealth. It is often reported that the sound of many voices cheering and laughing can be heard in the library as this book is read.

Remembering Heartbreak

In 1984 and 85 i spent a good deal of time in Nicaragua where i learned spanish, volunteered on farms (planting potatoes and talking about Salvadoran guerilla's need for very good watches), taking thousands of photos and cutting coffee, amongst other things. This photo of Umberto, one of the worker-owners of the coffee farm where i worked for a few weeks, is one of many i hope to scan and share in the coming year. Having injured my leg one day, i hung back from the coffee fields and spent the day helping Umberto roast coffee for us cortadoros. Sadly, the coffee was wretched. But it was flaboured uniquely with the very fresh fruit of our labours. I can taste it still. My visits to Nicaragua are now over 20 years in my past and yet they remain vivid in my heart and inspire me still. When the revolution succumbed in 1990 to US aggression, i was deeply saddened and have carried that complicated sadness within me since. The complicated emotions, perhaps not surprisingly, included anger. I had risked my life to make some small contribution to the revolution. And i'll never forget being shot at by contras packing US-supplied M16s. Though terrified while under fire, the emotion that has lasted is profound anger (tinged with indignation - I recall standing, the morning after the first attack, over the site from where the contras had been shooting. The spent M16 shell casings lay all about and i gathered a few up - strange mementos.)

This anger was refreshed as i listened to Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech which Democracy Now featured this week on the occasion of Pinter's death this past christmas eve. Pinter spoke of Nicaragua:

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance, and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. 2,000 schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one-seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

I share Pinter's analysis. He describes perfectly my own sense of things in that time. (And his mentioning of the eradication of polio reminds me of the day i went deep into the Nicaraguan countryside, everyone heavily armed, to deliver the polio vaccine to villagers living far from the highways. It was a moving day.) This speech sparkles with the kind of truth to which the phrase "speak truth to power" refers. This is the kind of truth that is so disastrously absent from mainstream media. It is the kind of truth i witnessed in the coffee fields and homes of revolutionary Nicaragua. It is the kind of truth that has sustained me over the past quarter century of activism to be a better person and help make a better world.

Pinter also includes in his speech an excerpt from a Pablo Neruda poem that has held profound meaning for me for almost thirty years. In this stanza we see Neruda's genius in knowing that there can be no poetic embellishment that is more meaningful than the heartbreakingly simple decription of the last line:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

I know i will listen to and reread this speech several times in the coming weeks. I need the reminder of the truths of which Pinter speaks. It cracks my heart open once again. It has always struck me as an irony of the human heart that broken-hearted is the only way one can live - for it is through the cracks that we let in truth and love and through which our compassion can flow.

Below is the one of the two excerpts that Democracy Now featured. The second excerpt is here. And you can watch all of Pinter's speech on YouTube here (though the sound quality is distracting). The two Democracy Now episodes that include Pinter's speech are here: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 and Wednesday, December 31, 2008. The Democracy Now website also includes complete transcripts of their shows and the relevant parts are here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). You can read all of Pinter's speech at the Nobel site here (and it includes downloadable PDFs in Ebglish, French, Swedish and German).

Some poems by Antonio Machado

Still more about the bittersweet: the popularity of the phrase "we make the road by walking" finally compelled me to do my own translation of the Antonio Machado poem from which it comes. While i appreciate the way the phrase is used as a pithy statement making-it-up-as-we-go-along of self-organizing, the phrase, taken out of context, is seen as an optimistic and hopeful sentiment. However, the poem in which this phrase is found, is a melancholic lament about impermanence. Here's Machado's poem followed by my translation:

PROVERBIOS Y CANTARES - XXIX

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

Wanderer, your footsteps
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, we have no road,
we make the road by walking.
As you walk you make the road,
and to look back
is to see that never
can we pass this way again.
Wanderer, there is no road,
only traces in the sea.

A friend sent me a Robert Bly translation of "Anoche cuando dormía", another of my favourite Machado poems, and i was so upset by his translation that i had to do my own. I like a lot of what Bly does, but i think he really blew it on this one. I'll let you read the poem before i point out Bly's flawed interpretation.

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé, ¡bendita ilusiòn!,
que una fontana fluía
dentro de mi corazòn.
Di: ¿por qué acequia escondida,
agua, vienes hasta mí,
manantial de nueva vida
en donde nunca bebí?

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé, ¡bendita ilusiòn!,
que una colmena tenía
dentro de mi corazòn;
y las doradas abejas
iban fabricando en él,
con las amarguras viejas,
blanca cera y dulce miel.

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé, ¡bendita ilusiòn!,
que un sol ardiente lucía
dentro de mi corazòn.

Era ardiente porque daba
calores de rojo hogar,
y era sol porque alumbraba
y porque hacía llorar.

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé, ¡bendita ilusiòn!,
que era Dios lo que tenía
dentro de mi corazòn.

My translation:

Last night while sleeping
I dreamt - blessed illusion! -
a fountain flowed
within my heart.
I said: why this hidden channel,
water, coming to me,
spring of new life
from which I’ve never drunk?

Last night while sleeping
I dreamt, - blessed illusion! -
that a beehive
within my heart;
and the golden bees
were making,
from my bitter disappointments,
white wax and sweet honey.

Last night while sleeping
I dreamt, - blessed illusion! –
a burning sun blazed
within my heart.

It burned because it gave
the heat of a warm home,
and sun because it illuminated
and because I cried..

Last night while sleeping
I dreamt - blessed illusion! -
that it was God that I had
within my heart.

The thing that bothers me about Bly's translation is that he translates amarguras as "failures" when the word Machado uses actually means "bitternesses". Of course we don't have such a word in English and so i choose "bitter disappointments" as the imperfect choice. Bly's choice of "failures" is a far cry from what Machado is speaking of here. Which is, to my ears, the bittersweet. The juxtaposition of the bees making honey from his amarguras seems to make this obvious. This poem beautifully evokes the notion of the bittersweet which is something much more generative for me than "failure". Machado is not talking about failures but rather about losses. Which echoes the great loss of his life (Leonor) of which most of his poetry speaks. What of life is not bittersweet? That our lives are so short, that there is death and dying (even though we know there is renewal and rebirth) makes of the bittersweet, one of the most profound truths of our humble existence. I think this is one of the aspects of Machado's poetry that makes him still one of Spain's favourite poets.

Finally, one of my colleagues at the Faculty of Environmental Studies sent me this video of Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat singing about Soria (from where Machado hailed) and which includes some recitation of Machado's verses (thanks, Tania).

Ahh, the bittersweet

that this isn't funny at all

A Writing Life? Writing a Life?

My life has been turned topsy turvy in the past couple of years. If you'd told me two and a half years ago that i would be rounding out 2008 with a new born child, two step-children and a brilliant and beloved partner, calling you crazy would have been the merest hint of my skepticism. This year has been one of learning to live with many more people in my life. While yet keeping up with the exigencies of earning a living, continuing to contribute to making a better world and writing. I live through reading and writing. My mind and heart soars through the worlds of text and image and our shared imagination. The coming year now includes adventures in parenting, which i expect i'll be writing a good deal about. And yet, i still see the world largely through the lenses of popular education and storytelling. How these two praxes fit together is something that i am forever sorting out. And this blog is a place that i can test ideas and, hopefully, "be of use" as Marge Piercy writes.When it comes right down to it, the only thing about which i am certain is that i am uncertain about what is popular education and storytelling. This blog is my exploration of that uncertainty. And i have an enduring curiosity that drives me to explore anything and everything. to connect and collage, to seek and create pattern. At times i accumulate such an abundance of information and knowledge and experience and emotion that it gets traffic-jammed. And this year has been one very traffic-y year - a year of remarkable and surprising abundance. Now, on to the sorting of that abundance into useful (and often playful) meaning. Happy New Year and a wonderful season of revels to all!

Well, i'm still on strike

Yup, things aren't looking great for the strike at York University. With the newborn to care for, i'm feeling the pinch like i've never imagined i might. Alas...

i"m reposting this Australian video about unions that i simply adore. It's as funny the 50th time as it was the first. Humour is such a wonderful weapon. and we need to speak truth to power as the Quakers say. As well as being mindful of Oscar Wilde's advice: "If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh, or they will kill you."

Well, the following article is not so funny, but it has much truth in it.
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The Neoliberal University: Looking at the York Strike
(from T h e B u l l e t - A Socialist Project e-bulletin, #165, Dec 5, 2008)

Eric Newstadt

Placed neatly in the middle of a global economic maelstrom, it is near impossible to understand or predict what, if any, consequences the strike by 3500 odd teaching and research assistants and contract faculty at York University in Toronto (represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903) will have for higher education in Ontario and throughout Canada. While there are some early indications that the strike – which began in early November and continues to shut down the university – at York is aiding (at least mildly) in negotiations at the University of Toronto (whose teaching assistants, research assistants and contract faculty are all presently in negotiations), the strike seems also to have engendered the anger and vitriol of the public such that the viability of similar strikes in the sector are in question. And while the tenor of the action was and remains pitched firmly at rolling back the "neoliberal university," it is questionable whether even outright victory at York would or could have such far-reaching consequences across the university sector.

Of course, there is only so much that can be accomplished in a single round of bargaining. Even if it may not yet be possible to outline how history will record the current work action, there are nonetheless some very definitive things that we can say about the particular conditions which have produced the strike of 2008. And we can also weigh and measure the degree to which the strike holds the promise of ameliorating those conditions (at York if not throughout the province), either temporarily or on a more lasting basis.

The Political Economy of the Neoliberal University

It is simply not possible to understand the present labour conflict outside of some consideration of neoliberalism in general: the educative capacity of the state has been deployed in service of a program of accumulation that relies on a highly "flexploitable" and disciplined workforce. Out of the ashes of the Bretton Woods system, through a process of inter-class negotiation and conflict that neither put entirely to rest the practices of the Keynesian state, nor left any aspect of the postwar order entirely intact, a "new world order" built upon the flexibility of labour markets emerged in the 1980s. There is not sufficient space here to go over the details of this historical transition.

What needs to be understood, however, is that the crisis of Keynesianism, which was as much a political as an economic crisis, saw capital, and particularly a re-emergent finance capital, work with the capitalist state to respond to the crisis through a series of efforts that culminated in: (1) the complete transformation of the state apparatus and the state's capacity to do things (i.e. in severe cutbacks to government spending on virtually everything including colleges and universities); (2) the acquiescence to such restructuring by the bulk of the population, and progressively; and (3) the emergence of broad based public support for the logic of "fiscal restraint" as well as for a program of economic growth premised on labour market flexibility, within which the neoliberal university factors very largely.

The neoliberal university began to take shape in the early 1970s, when hiring was frozen while tuition-fee and support generating enrollments were grown, as short-term stop-gaps to what were perceived as temporary fiscal cutbacks. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the neoliberal university began to take on more definitive dimensions, not because fiscal restrain had "hardened," but because what amounted to a form of structural adjustment, drew increasing support from university administrators, an ever larger portion of the professoriate, and a good number of students as well. Thus, the neoliberal university has come to rapidly and rabidly pursue a closer articulation with industry and an educational methodology that focuses more on training than on educating.

Neoliberalism has involved "belt-tightening" and "fiscal restraint." But its unfolding has also been underwritten by a more expansive logic than mere fiscal restraint could possibly entail. The university is now seen as a useful tool in the reproduction of a pliant working class and as a huge, publicly subsidized, research complex that can be deployed to further socialize the research costs of private capital accumulation and thus economic growth in its neoliberal form. In other words, through various forms of public-private partnerships, particularly at "research intensive" universities, private corporations can have taxpayers pick-up 90% of the costs associated with R&D, while they can maintain ownership over the bulk of whatever profits such research generates.

This kind of extensive logic is precisely why the neoliberal university is a massive and expansive morass of highly specialized departments, programs, research centres, laboratories and administrative offices, a huge and immensely diversified corporation with arms in almost every field of study. It is also why the fields of study themselves have become more cut-off from one another, even as we've seen the emergence of so many cross and sub-disciplines, like physical biology, or cultural studies, or urban and environmental planning (such growth makes meaningful forms of "interdisciplinarity" difficult to undertake).

This logic is also why the ideological scope within the neoliberal university is more limited than in previous eras. The space for critical scholarship has shrunk enormously in the social sciences. In part, this is a result of concerted efforts to purge so-called radicals (mainly from the right but also from the post-structural left), but in the main it is a result of state policies that either openly or tacitly endorse such an ideological closing, through conditional forms of finance. The neoliberal logic is also why much the same kind of ideological closing has happened in the natural sciences – there is increasingly less room devoted to basic and curiosity driven research because the drive to "research and innovate" favours the production of commercializable research and of intellectual and property rights.

The extensive logic of neoliberalism is even writ large spatially across the university, as university administrators, ever in search of new revenue-streams, offer-up any useful space to the signs and symbols of corporate accumulation. Buildings and classrooms are named after capitalists (and corporations) who have nothing whatever to do with scholarship, and even the bathroom stalls of the neoliberal university have become advertising opportunities.

Neoliberalism has also seen universities vie for precious market-share in large and growing national and international markets for higher-education. Each university is a competitor firm in the race to seize valuable customers from emerging economies ahead of competitor institutions. All of this has meant that the neoliberal university works hard to cultivate a brand, a particular kind of reputation, an orientation that potential customers understand will help them generate returns on their investments. The neoliberal university is also internally classed: a small cadre of elite academic "stars," who are nonetheless terrifically over-worked, are offered high levels of academic and financial support, they enjoy relatively smaller teaching loads, social-status, and an ability to access some level of control within the institution. A much larger cadre of part-time and/or contract faculty are denied even basic – or any – perks, even as they undertake a terrific – and increasing – proportion of undergraduate teaching.

Not surprisingly, these changes have in turn required that the university become an expansive administrative bulwark with a large and growing cadre of career bureaucrats and administrators, many of whom move from university to university. There are also new kinds of offices opening up all the time, or old ones being re-branded as it were – from technology transfer offices to offices of research and innovation, to registrar cum customer-service departments, to in-house legal departments. The growth of this section of the university has been spectacular (squeezing down academic budgets while expanding general administration budgets). Students are en masse taking from the neoliberal university a general familiarity with the rigours of life under contemporary capitalism: an ability to understand and negotiate a large and expansive corporate environment, a sense of how to work the "system," in the most instrumental way possible, as precisely that is what employers are looking for.

read the rest of the article here: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet165.html#continue

Jack Black Rules - Prop 8 Should Die

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

I was deeply disturbed to hear of the success of Prop 8 in California this past election cycle. It amazes me to hear that homophobic society is as strong in California as it seems to be. With the film about Harvey Milk coming out soon i am reminded of how deeply moved and influenced i was by the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. I am anxious for the new film to be great. We'll see. Meanwhile, this video of Jack Black, John C. Reilly and others is a wonderful humorous fight back against hate and fear.

Why we fight

Michael Franti is a god!

On strike - Keeping the union strong

Collective Murals

I've extracted some descriptions of collective mural activities from a 'zine i'm working on about art and popular education. You can download the murals descriptions here. You can use this document to guide your production of any one of a variety of mural methods. They are good both for popular education work as well as political action.

Murals have a long and respected history in social justice struggle. Producing them collectively can be an important means of engaging in dialogue as well as a means of documenting our struggles. The photo in this post is from a bankelsang production i did with some friends many years ago. We simply took a passage from Eduardo Galeano's Walking Words (Norton, 1997) and created a series of panels that illustrated the words. A bankelsang is a form of street theatre practiced in medieval Germany. Literally meaning "singing banner" it's a means of sharing a short narrative with a sequence of images to focus people's attention. It's a great thing for guerilla art, being very portable.

Popular Education Toolkit - Jobology

Some years ago we developed a popular economics course. It's about 40 hours of activities over about ten sessions (of three hours each). And it barely scratches the surface of the topic. We developed a number of tools for that course including this one here which we call JOBOLOGY. I used it a couple of weeks ago in the popular education class i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies and i was once again amazed at how well it works to share information about the history of work across the generations. It's also a tool that can be used to begin a discussion of class - what people think it is, what a marxist notion of class is, where people feel they might fit in a class structure. I'm hoping to develop this tool further so that it can be used in the context of the theory of diverse economies that J.K. Gibson-Graham are working on and which includes conceptualizing class as something akin to a verb rather than the noun (or thing) it is characteristically seen to be (i.e. class is more dynamic than it is normally thought to be). Meanwhile, if you have a context for using this exercise, i highly recommend trying it out. You can use it as a simple discussion provoking tool or you could use it to guide a discussion about class and the history of the changing world of work. You can download activity descriptions here: MSWord or PDF.

Art that makes you want to do art!

Here's a couple of videos from Old Crow Medicine Show (whom i have Matt to thank for introducing me). While i have an expansive love of all music, i have a special place for the those types of music that catch the bittersweet of life: acadian fiddle, cajun zydeco, bluegrass and bagpipes. A cajun or bluegrass waltz can transport me. And a lament played on bagpipes will often bring tears to my eyes. The stuff of music legend, OCMS have gone from busking to the Grand Ole Opry. Their music makes me happy. And there's also that about it that inspires my own urge to create. It's one of the mysteries of art, whether painting, writing, music, theatre, that some works reach into your soul and light a fire (or perhaps fan flames already alight). And that fire is only satisfied when it pours out as your own art. I recall seeing an exhibit of Van Gogh's work at the Met in New York - It was the Van Gogh at Arles exhibit that my friend Carey brought me to as a birthday present. I'd seen pictures of Van Gogh's haystacks before but i had never imagined i could be so moved by the massive canvasses that confronted me. I was surprised by their size as well as by the subtleties of light that seemed miraculously caught in the the two dimensions of canvas and pigment. I recall returning home and filling two sketchbooks with stuff. OMCS's punky old-timey bluegrass does the same thing to me. I want to learn (and sometimes relearn) all these songs and i want to be in a bluegrass band. But, that being unlikely, i'll just sing to myself. And now i have the opportunity to learn these songs to sing to this new wee critter that is in our lives and who is teaching me that lullabies are a wonderfully effectgive technology. Who knew?

I'm feeling Churchillian about democracy these days

Check out www.voteforenvironment.com (see below for explanation).

Okay, Stephen Harper scares me. But it is less anything that he says that scares me than what appears absent, i.e. some humanity, a bit of doubt, perhaps. While U.S. vice-presidential Sarah Palin performs a blithe, arrogant and contemptuous certainty about her conservative values with a winking (vapid) vim and vigour, Harper performs a similar certainty about similar values but with a lack of emotional affect that makes me think Body Snatchers. And as i caught one of his campaign ads this afternoon in which he says we "need certainty" and not "risk" i remembered these words from Eduardo Galeano (from an interview he did in NACLA-Report on the Americas many years ago):

...I do not have a bad opinion of doubt. I think doubt has been a factor in the movement of history. I have grown to appreciate doubt more and more and, at the same time, to distrust those compañeros who only offer certainty. They seem too much like the wooden men which the Popul Vuh in Mayan mythology describes as one of the mistakes the gods made when they attempted to create man and didn't know how to construct him and finally they made him out of corn and he came out alright. But one of those attempts consisted of creating him out of wood.

The wooden man was just like a man except that no blood ran through his veins; he had no spirit or courage and didn't speak a word. I believe he had nothing to say because he had no courage and therefore was never discouraged. The proof that one has courage lies in the fact that one can be discouraged. And the proof that one can arrive at certainties that are truly capable of transforming reality lies in the ability to entertain fertile doubts before arriving at certainty; doubts that buzz around in one's head, one's conscience, one's heart, in the imagination, like tenacious flies. We need neither fear doubt nor discouragement: they are proof that our endeavors are human. And we are fortunate that these endeavors are human. Otherwise, these would be the endeavors of false men, men of wood, that is to say bureaucrats, dogmatic men, people who choose models over reality. Discouragement and doubt indicate that one sees reality as it really is.

Well, Harper is as much a poster-boy for the Popul Vuh's "wooden man" as i've ever seen. And this "certainty" he speaks of is as treacherous a disposition as i've seen in Canadian politics. And i think we could use some of this ancient Mayan wisdom about doubt and uncertainty. How else do we learn anything? H.G. Wells once said, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." When i watched Harper in the debates this week (and Palin as well, for that matter) i felt that he was not a person open to learning anything new. And to hear him speak of his "certainty" makes me feel like "catastrophe" is not far off.

As for feeling Churchillian about all this: after the leaders debates this week i couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by the whole thing. While I'll vote NDP, i do not feel like they will avert the catastrophes that lie before us, nor the Greens who are just too neoliberal for me. And the Liberals are less-bad Tories. So as Churchill said in 1947:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

So, i received a forwarded e-mail from friends (thanks, Lorne) from Bob Bossin of Stringband fame in which he appeals for some strategic voting. And as i was listening to the news this evening i was thinking how bloody annoying our voting system is - that a party can form a government with as little as 30% of the populace voting for them. And if the Liberals, Greens and NDP split the vote and let the Tories ride up the middle to a majority, i will be very sad (and mad). So here's Bob's e-mail in which he recommends a website that is tracking ridings and predicting which are the ones most vulnerable to vote-splitting. You know, they could be right.

Dear Fellow Canadian:

This letter is blatantly political, but it is also personal. And urgent. I've been watching the federal election campaign with something bordering on despair. In all my 63 years, I have never known a government less in tune with my values than this one - and that is going some. By the polls, most of us feel kinda the same way. But we are divided among four parties, and that may allow Harper and his cronies to waltz back into power.

Skip to the next paragraph if you like, but I gotta get this 100-word rant off my chest: "In two years under Harper, Canada has become one of the worst heel-draggers on global warming. Our military has shifted from peace keeping to war making. Where we once welcomed war resistors, we now turn them away. In April, the Conservatives de-regulated and privatized food inspection, and we know what happened in August. They plan to do the same for the airline industry. Prisons, they say 'are for punishment.' And
for 14 year olds. They don't much like the arts and they don't get the internet. I could go on. If Harper wins his majority, I shudder to think how, well, American, Canada will become." End of rant.

What - as William Bendix used to say - a revolting development this is!

And yet, something is afoot. I don't know about you, but I have been receiving dozens of messages from friends and strangers talking about what amounts to do-it-yourself proportional representation. I can't say I've become optimistic, but I do believe there are two effective things we can do.

The first is to make our votes count. We may not have rep by prop (we are one of the world's most backwards democracies in this regard) but we can fake it. If I lived in Central Nova, I would vote for Elizabeth May in a heartbeat. But here in Nanaimo-Cowichan, to vote Green (or for that matter to vote Liberal), is, de facto, to vote Conservative. Lucky for me, our local MP, Jean Crowder, is good people, and anti-Harper through and through. I don't have to hold my nose when I vote. (I just have to roll my eyes at Jack's car-salesman style.) But if the best way to stop the Conservatives was to vote Liberal, this time I would. With glowing heart. (Registered trademark, 2010 Olympics, all rights reserved.)

Fortunately, voting strategically has just gotten a whole lot easier. There is now an amazing website, www.voteforenvironment.com, that is tracking every riding in the
country and making up-to-the-minute suggestions on how best to fight Harper. It is the coolest example of Canadian grassroots democracy since the Free Trade comic book.

So that is the first thing to do: check out www.voteforenvironment.com

And there is another thing just as important. This happens to be a time when our ability to communicate with one another has never been greater. To contact you with this message, I just had to overcome my reticence about doing it. (I'm Canadian, after all.) The rest, nowadays, is easy. If you do it too, if you contact your friends and colleagues, acquaintances and list-mates, and let them know what you are thinking, we could actually affect the results in some key ridings and, who knows, we might even affect more than that. It's worth a try.

bb

Bob Bossin - Old folksinger - Old folksinger's homepage: www.bossin.com

Whiner alert: who knew Harper was right?

I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see ... a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up -- I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people. Ordinary people understand we have to live within a budget.

Well, Alon Nashman, a Toronto-based actor, has added his two cents. And what a two cents they are.

It's the Questions that Bring us Together

Well, i'm well into a new season of teaching and work and, of course, baby-raising (Oy!). And this year, in addition to the Popular Education for Social Change graduate class that i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University i am also teaching an undergraduate class called Perspectives in Environmental Studies. It's a very popular class that my colleague Peter Timmerman has been teaching for several years and is currently on what i'm sure is a well-earned sabbatical (thus the contract work for me).

I design and write and/or c0-write a syllabus every year that i produce as a 'zine. This year i collaborated on the syllabuzine with Tina Lopes, an educator with whom i worked in the Doris Marshall Institue for Education and Action. Unfortunately, the enrollment numbers were unusually low this year and FES had to cancel the section that Tina would have taught. Alas. Tina and i decided that this year's theme would be "The Arts of the Self in Culture, Classroom and Community" and i had looked forward to exploring the many meanings that this could have with Tina. Now i'm on my own with it - albeit accompanied by 22 graduate students. You can download of PDF (2.6 megs) of the syllabus here: http://www.web.net/~story/RC/syllabuzine6150-2008.pdf (send it to your printer for double-sided copying and you should end up with a foldable booklet.veb

As for the undergrad class, one huge challenge for me is how to practice some of the ideals of popular education in an environment that is designed both in form (line-of-sight lecture hall, 500 students, one weekly two-hour lecture plus a one-hour tutorial) and expectation (of the 500 learners) to practice authoritarian pedagogy. Ouch! Not that i haven't got a lot to say that is worth listening to. But i wonder skeptically about the quality of learning in such circumstances. Thus i have discussed with the TAs how we can design an asignment that pushes students to learn to think critically, creatively and transformatively. We've come up with an assignment based on questioning. Not unlike this wee tale that i posted her a while back.

One of the course TAs found this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To a Young Poet:

Try to love the questions themselves, as if they were lock rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don´t search for the answer, which couldn´t be given to you now, because you wouldn´t be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer

Ahhhh....

And i found a translated edition of Letters to a Young Poet here. I highly recommend this work - one of the great (and modest) 20th Century works on creativity and writing.

Manuals on Human Rights and Facilitation

I just learned about more on-line manuals for human rights and facilitation:

• Action for the Rights of Children (ARC) Reach Out Training Kit: Facilitator's Toolkit (also available here as Word docs and in Spanish, French and Arabic)
  

• People's Watch in India - a great collection of curricula
  

Elections, elections everywhere and democracy is still hard to find

"You know, I think when ordinary, working people come home, turn on the TV and see … a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people." Of course, what counts as an "ordinary" Canadian to Harper and his ilk is a rather disturbing, if fictional. Mind you, as this video implies, perhaps Harper and the Tories will be successful in creating the very "ordinariness" they seem to crave.

A new life for the world

A few things have changed in my life. A new life in this house. Meet our wee mister.

The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy

There are some excellent articles in this publication from the McGill University-based Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. A couple of the articles i'll be reading include: "But What Can I Do?": Fifteen Things Education Students Can Do to Transform Themselves In/Through/With Education by Paul R. Carr and Notes from a Fan: Paulo Freire Comes to Idaho by Dale T. Graden

Making the Connections

Brett Dennen's song and video (in preceding post) reminded me of two other similar productions. One is this rather elusive video called Drop the Debt. I believe it was first produced by Comic Relief in Britain but it has since been hosted on an Australian World Vision site. It looks like it's been on YouTube a couple of years now. It's a wickedly clever production with numerous layers of irony. The music is Michael Franti and Spearhead and you can see their video of the song here.

I wonder perpetually how we can better see our interconnection with everything that happens such that we just might choose to do something positive about it? And not something that just helps us cope better with feelings of guilt? That our wealth and privilege (says a white boy sitting here in downtown Toronto) is causally linked to the deprivation of the many is something i have believed for a long time and, having lived abroad and studied and researched, i know that this is so. And thus i have devoted myself to popular education both to support those struggling against oppression as well as to offer to the curious and the willing some avenue of understanding of the history of oppression and resistance as well as how we connect to it and can choose to act against it. I was particularly struck in Dennen's video, with the woman who finds a loose thread in her red sweater only to see that it is linked to three asian-looking women working in a sweatshop. This immediately reminded me of Sweet Honey in the Rock's song Are My Hands Clean? - a poignant tale of the journey that cotton (made into shirts) makes from "blood-soaked fields" to North American bargain basement bins. Here's the lyrics:

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood, pesticide-sprayed workers toil in the broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day

Then we move on up to another rung - Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the U.S. of A. for the first time

In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of
Dupont

Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela
Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills

In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador

In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time
May she be one day soon free

Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day

My sisters make my blouse

It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me

This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount

Are my hands clean?

(Composed for Winterfest, Institute for Policy Studies. The lyrics are based on an article by Institute fellow John Cavanagh [no relation -c], "The Journey of the Blouse: A Global Assembly." Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon, 1985.)

I wish that this art could swing hearts to the side of compassion, solidarity and action. But, of course, social change is never so easy. I was startled (pleaasantly) when i saw Alice Walker on the cover of the May 2007 Shambhala Sun beside the headline "This is the best of all times to be alive." A counterintuitive thought if i ever heard one. In the interveiw which you can read here <We Live in the Best of All Times> Alice Walker explains this sentiment by saying:

There’s so much to do! (Laughs) We are so lucky. There’s no shortage of work to do! (Laughs) There’s no excuse for anyone, in my opinion, to complain that they can’t change anything. For instance, there are millions and millions and millions of hungry children, people who don’t have clothing, people who don’t have housing, trees that are begging us to let them live, rivers that are crying out to be clean, skies that are shouting at us to let the ozone layer live. There is no end to the ways we can have full self-realization. That’s what has to happen, and that’s what this time is pointing out. This is the time to have full self-realization as an earthling. It’s time to be responsible and take charge of that. It’s also a great time because if we fail, we lose the earth.

I plan to convey this message to the 500 undergrads to whom i'll be lecturing weekly starting in a couple of weeks. I'm teaching Perspectives on Environmental Studies this Fall and Winter. I'm still figuring out what to teach - this will be a new adventure for me - not my favourite form of pedagogy; but i'll make the best of it. I plan to tell a lot of stories. Any advice is welcome.

Life, the Bittersweet

New DVDs of and about Paulo Freire

Remembering Freire/Reinventing Freire is a two DVD set that has long been needed by popular educators. The occasion of this production was the "Conference and Dialogue on the 10th Anniversary of the Death of Paulo Freire" held on May 2, 2007 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto (and coordinated by the Ontario Region of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education). One DVD has footage of various presenters and panel discussions. The second DVD has the, until now, rare footage of Staring from Nina: The Politics of Learning made by the Development Education Centre in Toronto in 1977. This includes rare video of Freire speaking in English. As D'Arcy Martin, one of the producers explains, Freire urged that they solve their problem of production funds by offering this film (for a price) to the many people and institutions who were desperate for footage of Freire speaking in English. Needless to say, Friere said he would refer all such requests to the filmmakers. It's a charming film and it still carries relevant messages to todays educators. In addition to this film are three filmed dialogues between Freire and J. Roby Kidd and Alan Thomas: "Becoming a Christian", "Guns and Pencils", and "Letters in the Earth". This DVD set is beautifully produced by Bill McQueen of Fireweed Media Productions and they're only $20 (plus delivery costs). I highly recommend adding these to your collections. You can order copies by e-mailing Fireweed Media: fmp [ at] netrover [dot] com. (You can click on the graphic to see a larger version if you'd like to read the contents description.)

My Favourite Bluegrass Kung Fu Mashup Ever

Legacy to Dialogue

by Vincenza Spiteri Debonis
Every Friday morning we met, the seven of us. We were the circle. Our power was in our vulnerability with each other. We meditated, we read, we were present in dialogue. We were the circle. Illness took one of us away. Then there were six.

Every Friday morning we met, the six of us. We were the circle. The questions were asked by the others, “What do you talk about? How is it that you can get away for a whole hour and just talk about nothing?” Always our response, “We meet every Friday, come join our circle.” They did. They felt uncomfortable, irritated, bewildered, they bristled at the vulnerability that was required to honour each in the circle, to give power to each in the circle. They let us continue offering paternalistic platitudes of what tremendous work we were doing. They sanctioned the dialogue circle as a professional development strategy to humanize the workplace. Hoping against all hope that the small room would contain the small circle. Retirement took one of us away. Then there were five of us.

Every Friday we met, the five of us. We were the circle. The questions were asked again, and again we invited them. This time though they could no longer stomach the incongruence of power within the circle, talk could not produce results. Take away the small room, take away the small circle.

Every Friday we do not meet, the five of us. We are the circle. We are in dialogue everyday where there is conflict. We are in dialogue everyday where there is pain. We are in dialogue everyday where there is joy. “Intention, listening, inquiry, advocacy, silence” these were the lights we lit the small room with; these are the lights we light the institution with. We are now five times five, times five, times five, times five, times five.

Everyday we meet, the multitude of us. We are the circle.

(Vincenza was a participant in the Popular Education for Social Change class this past season and she shared this piece in class. I was very moved by it and saw in it something poignant and important for popular educators to keep in mind. Vincenza was kind enough to let me publish this piece here - thanks - c)

Ethics for Activists - 17

As i re-design the Popular Education for Social Change class that i teach at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, i've been re-reading Pedagogy of Freedom (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) by Paulo Freire. Paulo's work has guided me my whole adult life and i'm always surprised and delighted to learn new things from words i've read and assumed i'd understood. Once again i'm impressed with Paulo's thinking and am reading and re-reading Chapter Four of this book: Teaching is a Human Act. It is providing me with some answers (and, perhaps more importantly, questions) about something i find particularly difficult to theorize as well as put into practice: how to train popular educators - not only in the necessary skills and so-called competencies of the work, but also in the dispositions that i believe are necessary. Not that one can teach such things as humility or compassion. But i do believe there are ways to support the growth of such things in people. For the next several weeks i am diving into these questions as i concentrate on finishing a manuscript about trickster pedagogy. So here are some words from Paulo that inspire me and that i hope might do something similar for you:

Is my curiosity able to express itself? Is it growing? In my opinion, one of the essential qualities that an authoritative, democratic teaching practice ought to reveal in its relationship with the freedom of students is a sense of its own self-confidence. It’s a self-confidence that expresses itself in a firmness of action or of decision in regard to its respect for the freedom and autonomy of students, its ability to discuss its own positions, and its openness to reviewing both itself and its previously held positions.

If the teacher is imbued with self-confident authority, there will be no need for a speech about it at every available instant. If there is self-confidence regarding its legitimacy, there will be no need to ask anyone: ‘Do you know to whom you are speaking?’ (pp. 85)

What is Art?

Much, much more than a guide about Workplace Safety

This manual is on-line and well worth checking out. Even if you think workplace safety and health is incidental to your work (and you shouldn't think that, since the "workplace" is where a helluva lot of us spend a lot of time), this manual includes some great material on group process, self-study and more. For example, it includes "committee basics" such as "ground rules" and "effective chairing"; "Communication skills" including "active listening" and "asking open questions. This manual outlines a five step process to This 372 page document details a five-step process for researching and identifying workplace safety issues, and coming up with and implementing solutions including organizing and mobilizing when necessary. You'll also find a 67-page "Committee Process Toolbox" that includes such things "Ground rules for Healthy Conflict" and the "Triangle Model (to analyze racism and discrimination)". And, of course, there's a 150-page "Health and Safety Toolbox" which, i'm very excited to see, includes workplace and body mapping processes to identify sites of injury. Jump straight to page 299 to see "Mapping Tools to See the Workplace with "New Eyes". I know these as processes developed by Dorothy Wigmore, an educator and trade unionist of long-standing. I've used the body mapping process in popular education workshops and i am always startled, if pleasantly, to see how much we can learn about our bodies and our history of injury that, sadly, we often take for granted, thus missing the opportunity to make connections with others who have suffered similar injury. Without making these connections there is little opportunity to do the necessary organizing to change things for the better. So, do yourself a favour and download this manual for your work.

Kudos to the WCB's Community Initiatives and Research Program (CIRP), the Manitoba Government Employees Union , the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP), and the consultants that wrote this guide: Joyce Rankin, Laurie Todd and Dorothy Wigmore. Terrific work!

Oliver Schroer On a Grander Tour

I just learned that Oliver passed away yesterday. I've been listening to his music daily for several months and am sad that he will no longer be among us. When i moved to Toronto almost 20 years ago one of the things i recall most vividly from the early 90s was going to see a play called The Storyteller At Fault - a storytelling and fiddle show. Dan Yashinsky performed a collection of his tales (re-worked from traditional sources) and Oliver scored the show and performed fiddle accompaniment that was so different from anything i'd heard done before that i can still hear those ethereal strains now. Oliver has a great website that's worth checking out: http://www.oliverschroer.com/index.htm and he also wrote a blog about his experience with leukemia. It is a brave and bittersweet document. And Oliver reminds me of my friend dian marino who died in 1992 after having lived with cancer for many years. dian was very critical and defiant of the common discourse around cancer, i.e. fighting cancer. She used to say that if one insisted on the frame of "fighting cancer" and, especially if the cancer was terminal, then not only was it inevitable that you would lose, you had already lost in a way. dian rejected this frame and embraced life more fully than anyone i've ever known up until her body could take no more. In an essay about living with cancer called White Flowers and a Grizzly Bear, dian wrote:

We do need a language of resistance in our struggles with chronic illness, but it needs to be a language free of militarism. I found it wonderfully healing to spend quiet time in nature - a form of resistance perhaps, but hardly a battle. (in Wild Garden: art, education and the culture of resistance, Toronto: Between the Lines)

Oliver reminded me of dian. They were kindred spirits. I know from interviews i heard on CBC that Oliver met his death with courage and equanimity. He used the word "acceptance" in one interview. And i heard that he never stopped playing or composing - up until the end.

There's a T-shirt i'm fond of (if also careful about) wearing that says, "You get what everyone gets. You get a lifetime." There is a face of a pretty goth girl with thick make-up and an udjat design around her eye and, as some of you who share my passion for comics know, this is the figure of the Sandman's older sister who is Death. It is a benign and compassionate vision of death (she's pretty hot, too) and it is one that i reflect on a great deal. It is not a sentiment i would share with someone who has just lost someone, but it is one that i think we would all do well to ponder from time to time. Our world puts such great store by the length of a life. And we neglect the depths that can be lived in mere days or hours. I know that Oliver understood something of this. And i am moved, saddened and comforted in this moment of loss.

There' s some lovely YouTube footage of Oliver that you can check out. This piece is from his last concert a month ago. He called the concert his "Last Concert on his Tour of this Planet."

And you simply MUST check out this CBC Concert on Demand: Oliver Schroer Tribute Concert.

J'net on the TV about the Government's apology

It was a moving day, though the emotions are complex. The government's apology was long in coming and did not come until it had been pushed and pushed. But the content of the apology was impressive. And if the emotion and sincerity was lacking at times, i would say that that that non-aboriginal Canadians simply have the greater obligation to open our hearts and imaginations to learn more and act with more courage and justice for the creation of a Canada in which can live the dynamic, if heartbreaking, histories of all the people who now call this land home.

This CTV clip includes a brief bit with J'net that you can see 6 minutes ad 8 seconds in.