New News Blog Created, This site indexed

New News Blog Created, This site indexed

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or, conduct a search on this blog.

A new NEWS and Events blog has been created to continue this work of looking at the French, Franco-American phenomenon on the Glocal Scale...

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merci for your reading attention!

You don't know Jack about Kerouac

You don't know Jack about Kerouac
10 facts about Kerouac that just may surprise you
By RACHEL BRIERE, Sun staff

It's the 19th season of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! This weekend a poetry contest, pub tour, open mikes and films of Jack Kerouac's Lowell will attract Kerouacians of all stripes. Festivities in honor of the King of the Beats kicked off yesterday and unofficially end Sunday. (See a complete list of events below.) We all know he hailed from Lowell, but here are 10 things you may not know about the man.

1. His battle with the bottle is legendary, but most don't know his favorite local watering hole was Nicky's on Gorham Street, which is now Ricardo's Trattoria.

2. The wordsmith learned English as a second language, speaking "joual," a French-Canadian dialect, as his first.

3. He was born Jean-Louis Kerouac and changed his name to Jack before On The Road came out in 1957. He published his first novel, The Town and the City, under the name John Kerouac in 1950.



4. His father owned a small printing press, where he first got the writer's bug. He would pen stories when he was 5 in the Bridge Street shop.

5. He spent some time in the U.S. Navy and as a merchant marine and was admitted to the sick list after eight days for headaches. Doctors diagnosed him with dementia, which he shrugged off as nervousness. He received an indifferent discharge for "unsuitability."

6. Most have seen this photo of Kerouac with his cat (this newspaper has run it many times), but he had more than a soft spot for felines. He took care of as many as four at a time and believed the four-legged creatures were God-like.

7. If things did not work out for him as a writer, painting was his next choice. He dabbled in watercolors, such as Old Angel Midnight, above, and sketched like a madman.

8. He did a short stint as a sportswriter at The Sun, but was dismissed for overly flowery prose.

9. Although he is most famous for his novel On the Road, Kerouac did not drive. Friends like Neal Cassady did most of the wheel work on his cross-country treks. He didn't learn to drive until he was 34, and he never had a driver's license.

10. He lived in 14 different apartments in Lowell before he graduated high school. His mother's yen for change fueled his wanderlust.

***

From poetry to music to tours, the 19th season of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! has something for everyone:

Today

* 9:30 a.m. -- Youth Poetry Contest, Lowell High School, 50 French St.

* 4 p.m. -- Lowell Blues, Kerouac film, Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center, Market Street

* 6 p.m. -- Scroll to Lowell fundraiser with David Amram, Kerouac writers-in-residence Dave Daniel and Major Jackson, musician Frank Morey, Pollard Memorial Library

* 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. -- Mystic Out Bop Review and On The Road video festival screening. 119 Gallery, 119 Chelmsford St. $5

* 9:30 p.m. -- Ghosts of the Pawtucketville Night, led by Roger Brunelle. Meet at McDonald's on Mammoth Road

Tomorrow

* 10:30 a.m. -- Commemorative at the Commemorate, Kerouac Park, intersection of French and Bridge streets

* 12:30 p.m. -- Cairo to Kerouac, David Amram and friends, Pollard Memorial Library

* 2 p.m. -- Kerouac walking tour, Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center

* 2 p.m. -- Van tour of Nashua by Steve Edington, park visitor center

* 4 p.m. -- Open mike at Rainbow Cafe, Cabot Street

* 4 p.m. -- Lowell Blues, park visitors center

* 5 p.m. -- Kerouac Pub Tour, Ricardo's Trattoria, 110 Gorham St.

* 8 p.m. -- Poet Janet Hamill and Moving Star, Rainbow Cafe

Sunday

* 12:30 p.m. -- Amram Jam open mike, Caffe Paradiso, 45 Palmer St.

* 4 p.m. -- Lowell Blues, park visitors center

http://www.lowellsun.com/front/ci_4451278

"Deep Woods and River Roads"

Kennebec-Chaudiere Heritage Corridor Launches Audio Tour, "Deep Woods and River Roads"
MaineToday.com, ME Released 10/10/06

Waterville, ME (October 10, 2006) – The Kennebec Chaudière Heritage Corridor will celebrate the completion of a new audio tour “Deep Woods and River Roads” in Waterville on Wednesday, October 11, 2006. On hand for the audio launch will be Public Radio International’s American Routes host, Nick Spitzer, as well as several of the people whose stories and experiences were captured in the unique “listening journey” from Quebec City to Popham Beach.

In recognition of the corridor’s many vibrant downtowns, including Bath, Skowhegan, Gardiner and Waterville, the official launch of the audio tour will take place at a 4:00 p.m. reception at the Redington Museum in Waterville immediately following the 6th Annual Maine Downtown Conference.

"Before this project, the Kennebec Chaudière Corridor was merely a yellow line on the state road map,” said Erik Jorgensen, Assistant Director, Maine Humanities Council. “This project gives that line dimension and depth to a really extraordinary degree. It's a very exciting pilot, one that could serve as a model for future cultural tourism projects in Maine."

Utilizing such documentary approaches as personal and community narrative, soundscapes and audio art, the Kennebec Chaudière Audio tour celebrates the region’s cultural heritage by featuring stories, sounds, and experiences of the region. Ranging from the traditions surrounding the maple sugaring industry, guiding and boatbuilding, to the contemporary work of artists, writers and craftspeople working in the region. The 80-minute CD is a rich audio snapshot of local landscapes, architecture, people, artifacts, traditions and stories. A companion guide to the audio tour was also developed.

Early in the 17th century, the Kennebec and Chaudière Rivers served as the border between the French and English settlements. By 1819, Maine farmers established a trail along the two rivers in the hopes of developing new markets for their products. Decades later, more than one million French-Canadian and Irish immigrants made the journey, known as the “Old Canada Road,” to work on farms, logging camps and in shoe and textile factories throughout New England. Today, the Corridor is a diverse geographic and cultural region. From the northern woods of Jackman to the tidewaters of the Kennebec in Bath, this thoroughfare is rich in culture and history.

"The audio tour provides the listener with a more complete experience as they travel along the Kennebec Chaudière Heritage Corridor”, stated KCHC board member André Pied. “We hope it will encourage visitors and residents of Maine to explore the rich history and heritage of the corridor from Québec City to Popham Beach.”

Copies of the audio CD are available from Old Fort Western in Augusta, by calling 207-626-2385 or email oldfort@oldfortwestern.org. Copies will also be available at organizations and sites throughout the corridor, as well as regional businesses and libraries throughout the state. In addition, the audio tour can be ordered online by visiting www.kennebec-chaudiere.com.

Abbe Levin of Cultural Resources, Inc., served as project director. As part of the planning process for the development of the audio tour, community forums along the corridor were held in eight locations to collect information and input. Cultural Resources, Inc is a non-profit agency that works with communities on developing strategies to sustain local culture and heritage through documentation and inventory work.

The audio tour was produced by Rob Rosenthal of Shunpike Audio. A talented radio producer and teacher at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Rosenthal has produced several cultural documentary projects including the most recent “Aucocisco Radio: Ten Stories about Portland Harbor” which received first place in the Maine Association of Broadcasters.

Funding for the project was provided by the Maine Department of Transportation, Maine Community Foundation, Maine Office of Tourism, Maine Arts Commission, Maine Humanities Council, and Old Canada Road Scenic Byway.

The Kennebec Chaudière International Heritage Corridor works to identify, interpret, conserve, and promote its natural, human, and cultural resources by collaborating with communities and organizations throughout Maine and Québec.

http://business.mainetoday.com/newsdirect/release.html?id=3514

Priests' rise is called sign of change, hope

Priests' rise is called sign of change, hope


Rev. Daniel Hennessey (left) and Rev. Michael Harrington carried the heart of St. John Vianney during a procession at St. John's Seminary in Brighton. Also in the procession was Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley (left). (Globe Staff Photo / David L. Ryan)

By Michael Paulson, Boston Globe Staff  |  October 13, 2006
Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, declaring yesterday that ``the priestly vocation is in jeopardy," hailed as hopeful signs the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to elevate two local pastors to bishop and the arrival in Boston of the preserved heart of a sainted French priest.

O'Malley said he hopes the examples of the two priests being promoted, the Rev. John A. Dooher and the Rev. Robert F. Hennessey, and of the one who died 137 years ago, St. John Vianney, will inspire others to consider the priesthood.
O'Malley gave Dooher and Hennessey each a purple skullcap , called a zucchetto, and a pectoral cross that are signs of the office of bishop.
Then he prayed before the saint's heart, which was encased in glass inside a shiny brass reliquary and carried on red velvet at the head of a procession of white-robed seminarians and a cloud of incense on a sunny Brighton hillside.
``One of the challenges that we have in trying to reach out to inactive Catholics and getting them more involved in the church is to communicate, as these two pastors have successfully done, a sense of personal vocation to our people and, at the same time, a sense of communal mission, because it's not only the priestly vocation that is in jeopardy in today's world, but all Christian vocations," O'Malley said.
He will ask the new auxiliary bishops to help him administer the sprawling archdiocese, which reports a population of 2 million Catholics, the vast majority of whom do not regularly attend worship services.
Hennessey, a 54-year-old South Boston native, was once a missionary in Bolivia who for the last 12 years has headed one of the largest and most successful parishes in the archdiocese, Most Holy Redeemer Church in East Boston, attended largely by immigrants from Central and South America. At times the parish is so crowded that Masses have to be broadcast to the streets around the church, and it has played a major role in helping to resettle immigrants, often announcing job and housing openings from the pulpit.
Dooher, a 63-year-old Dorchester native, has been pastor for 10 years of St. Mary Church in Dedham, which the archdiocese said is home to a particularly successful program for Catholic youth . Dooher spoke yesterday of the importance of youth ministry.
But it was Dooher's history assisting at the chancery that drew criticism from leaders of Bishopaccountability.org, an organization that is compiling an Internet-based archive of the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Dooher is mentioned in a 2003 report by Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly as one of two priests who in the mid-1990s met with pastors in parishes affected by abuse cases. Dooher was named in a deposition by Bishop John B. McCormack as having participated in conversations in the Boston archdiocese in 1994 about where to house abusive priests.
``John Dooher abetted a harmful and immoral coverup for the Boston archdiocese," said Anne Barrett Doyle, codirector of BishopAccountability.org. ``Now he should lead it into an era of unprecedented honesty."
Archdiocesan spokesman Terrence C. Donilon said that from 1993 to 2000, Dooher had assisted the archdiocese in counseling and supporting accused priests and ``some survivors," but that ``at no time was Father Dooher in a position of decision-making authority with regard to accused priests."
Donilon said Dooher ``has come to understand the pain experienced by survivors of sexual abuse by clergy and the need to work at all levels of the church to bring about the healing and unity necessary for us to live out our call to be one family in Christ."
Hennessey will replace Bishop John P. Boles, who is retiring, as administrator of the central region of the archdiocese, while Dooher will replace Bishop Richard J. Malone, who since 2004 has overseen the Diocese of Portland, Maine, as administrator of the archdiocese's south region. There are currently three other active auxiliary bishops in the archdiocese.
Public veneration of the heart of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, will be today from 4 to 10 p.m. in St. Mary Church in Waltham and tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/10/13/priests_rise_is_called_sign_of_change_hope/

This province really not like the others

This province really not like the others
Consider the demands faced
by Les Canadiens

Oct. 14, 2006. 01:00 AM
Toronto Star,  Canada

If you want proof that Michael Ignatieff is on the right track with his controversial policy toward Quebec, just look at the Montreal Canadiens. In particular, look at a burly young forward named Guillaume Latendresse.

Here's what you need to know about Latendresse: He's 19; he weighs a good 220 pounds, perhaps more; he played his junior hockey for the Voltigeurs of Drummondville, one of the grittiest, least fashionable towns in Quebec; he can score pretty goals; he can also deliver bruising checks.

The Canadiens drafted Latendresse in 2005, and last fall he nearly forced his way onto the team. But he was returned to the Voltigeurs. He could have played for Drummondville again this season — not many 19-year-olds thrive in the NHL. But another impressive stint at training camp put severe pressure on general manager Bob Gainey.

In the end, the choice for the final position on the Canadiens' roster came down to Latendresse or Andrei Kostitsyn, a gifted 21-year-old forward from Belarus. If the choice had been made strictly on its merits, Kostitsyn may have had the edge. But when you're talking about Les Glorieux — an old, sadly inaccurate nickname for the Montreal franchise — merit is not the only factor.

For decades, the Canadiens incarnated Quebec pride. Roch Carrier's story The Hockey Sweater captures that spirit, as does Roy Dupuis's magnificent portrayal of Maurice Richard in the recent movie The Rocket. From Jacques Plante to Patrick Roy, Aurel Joliat to Guy Lafleur, the Canadiens always had a stream of Quebec talent at their disposal. Local heroes were never hard to find.

Not any longer. In the 1980s and '90s, the stream began to run dry. This year's roster boasts 11 Europeans but only four Quebecers: a fourth-line forward, two run-of-the-mill defencemen (one of whom is injured till December) and Latendresse.

Now, if we were discussing any other middle-of-the-pack team — the Maple Leafs, for instance — it would be absurd to worry about a player's birthplace. So what if Bates Battaglia, from Chicago, made the squad while Kris Newbury, from Brampton, did not?

But Gainey has to face a barrage of daily comment from journalists and broadcasters like Réjean Tremblay, Jean Pagé and Michel Bergeron (the longtime coach of the extinct Quebec Nordiques). And much of their talk has a fiercely nationalist edge.

To some commentators, it's not enough for the Canadiens to win — they have to win using lots of Quebecers. To lose with homegrown players is sad but permissible; to lose with foreign players (Europeans, Americans and English Canadians alike) is shameful.

The other day, I decided to Google Latendresse, looking only for webpages in French. And although I knew about Latendresse-mania, the results still surprised me. Craig Rivet (a stalwart anglo defenceman) attracted 15,300 hits; Saku Koivu (the veteran Finnish captain) garnered 58,500; but for Latendresse, who had just played his first two games in the NHL, there were already 90,700 hits.

Latendresse may have broad shoulders, but this is an awful lot of pressure to place on them. He is, after all, a mere teenager who has already suffered two concussions. Now, he has to embody the hopes of the Quebec ... nation.

You see, as Michael Ignatieff understands, this is not a province like the others. This is a place with a history, a culture, a language and a sense of identity all its own. That doesn't mean it craves more administrative power. What it needs is recognition.

Today, in much of English Canada, Quebec is regarded as just another province, one that whines a lot in a foreign tongue. When Ignatieff expressed his acceptance of Quebec as a civic nation, along the lines of Scotland and Wales, the reaction in some quarters was almost hysterical.

His position is not something dreamed up after his return from Harvard last year — one of many errors about Ignatieff that lazy or malicious commentators have spread. His 1993 book Blood and Belonging includes a long chapter about Quebec, based on visits to Montreal, James Bay, the Cree territories, the Eastern Townships and Trois Rivières — where Ignatieff spent time with a Quebec nationalist named Dennis Rousseau and watched him play hockey at the local rink.

"The core of my separation from Dennis comes down to this," Ignatieff wrote: "Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state."

This is not a conclusion he enjoyed drawing. The chapter ends wistfully: "One can sit in a hockey arena in Trois Rivières on a Tuesday night, watching a young man skating his heart out, with a wild grin on his face, and wish, suddenly, that we did actually love the same nation and not merely cohabit the same state."

If Guillaume Latendresse scores in tonight's home opener, he'll surely have a wild grin on his face. And the cheering may echo across the Ontario border.

Mark Abley is a Montreal journalist who has written or edited 11 books. He is also a former reporter with the Montreal Gazette.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1160689837116&call_pageid=970599119419

Monette's coming out

Monette's coming out
Hosanna was 'huge event'
 
Robert Cushman
National Post

Friday, October 13, 2006


CREDIT: NIR BAREKET
Salvatore Antonio as Hosanna at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, the role that was first played by Richard Monette in 1972. “It brought me from being a good actor to being a star actor,” he says.

For many years now the lobby of Toronto's Tarragon Theatre has been dominated by a large photograph of a man dressed, handsomely, as Elizabeth Taylor dressed as Cleopatra. It's a picture of Richard Monette in the title role of Michel Tremblay's Hosanna, as produced at the Tarragon in 1972. Hosanna, the Montreal drag-queen locked into a love-hate relationship with a rough-trade partner, is a role that Monette looks back on as "a huge event in my professional life."

And this is doubly a time for looking back, since Hosanna is being revived at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in a production by John Van Burek, the play's English co-translator with the late Bill Glassco, who directed that original production. Meanwhile Monette is about to complete a record-breaking 14 years as artistic director of the Stratford Festival; the 2007 Stratford season, of which the details were announced last week, will be his farewell.

"In my professional life," Monette says, "Hosanna brought me from being a good actor -- in some people's minds -- to being a star actor. Bill Hutt said that it was one of the few star performances he'd seen by a Canadian." Monette still wonders whether those last three words make the compliment somewhat backhanded, though I don't think he needs to worry.

"I was playing Orestes opposite Monique Mercure's Electra at Centre Stage," Monette remembers, "and she suggested that I get the script. I read it, and I wrote to Bill Glassco saying, 'Please, please, please, could I have an audition?' And because I was a squeaky wheel, he agreed to see me. I said I'd like to read it in a French Canadian accent, and he said no." Doing it without the accent, though, Monette sounded like "a New York hairdresser from Greenwich Village," so finally Glassco allowed him to try it his way. "And when I did that, it exploded. Bill told me afterwards that in his mind he'd already cast somebody else. Then he changed his mind."

Ironically Mercure, the actress who had egged him on to try for the role, was critical when she saw, or rather heard, him do it. "Monique didn't like my accent; she thought I was making fun of the accent. But I am French-Canadian, and I based it on one of my aunts; I spoke just the way she spoke but in English. Michel writes in joual, which is what my family spoke." Richard Donat ("brilliantly cast"), who acted opposite Monette, spoke in an English accent, and the contrast seemed to work.

It fits too with the play's underlying theme. Hosanna, says Monette, was "slightly scandalous to people" when it opened; it dealt, through Hosanna's infatuation with Liz Taylor, with the theme of celebrity ("which was very big then"), and also of course with gender-bending. "It was regarded as being outspoken, with gayness, salty language and nudity. But it's also a political play, with Hosanna representing Quebec -- a transvestite in other people's clothes." It's a plea for Quebec to be itself and stop emulating America, represented in this case by Hollywood.

Tremblay himself, though, told the actor: "I think what makes it work is its heart." Monette agrees. "It was shocking, but it was human. The difficulty with playing the role -- or the trap -- is it's easy to see Hosanna as getting her come-uppance because she's got a big mouth. She's a bitch, but funny. The problem is in making the character charming in the second act. But it's a fabulous role. It's got everything."

According to Monette, "Hosanna put Tremblay on the map in English-speaking Canada." It also put Monette on the map.

You can trace a straight line from his performance in Hosanna to his current eminence at Stratford. In the audience at that 1972 production was Robin Phillips, who was about to begin his own regime at the festival and, duly impressed, invited Monette to be part of it.

He had acted at Stratford before, in minor roles; one of them was Eros in Antony and Cleopatra, with Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell; and it was Caldwell's Cleopatra headdress that, in a nice gesture to tradition, he wore as Hosanna. (It's one thing that makes that Tarragon lobby photo so striking.) Under Phillips, Monette played leads, starting with Hamlet, and began directing. He continued doing this, with increasing success, under three succeeding regimes, before assuming the top job in 1994

Will he miss it? "While I'm doing it, I don't think I'll miss it, but I know that when it's over, I will. At the time, every day seems an age, but it's all gone by in the blink of an eye."

- Hosanna runs until Oct. 28 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Call 416-866-8666 or visit youngcentre.ca for tickets.

http://www.canada.com/cityguides/toronto/story.html?id=3c08fb0f-3e83-417c-aba3-4a8da84a19b2&k=78853

The sunny side of the street

Reporter's Notebook: The sunny side of the street

By Steve Desroches/ sdesroch@cnc.com
Friday, October 13, 2006
Cape Codder, MA

"I'm giving you my car," my good friend Bert said over the phone from his home in San Francisco.
    "Um, what?" I asked, gulping down three-day-old macaroni and cheese I found in the back of the refrigerator. "I can't take your car."
    "Look, when I went to visit in February your car didn't even have heat," he said. Your car is a piece of junk. And anyway, it's too late; I already shipped it. It's probably somewhere in Nebraska right now."
    I was stunned. Bert was right; my 1993 Geo Prism was a wreck. It used to be black, now was mostly rust. It had no heat or air conditioning. The radio was broken. It burned oil. It failed its last two inspections and required repairs that would certainly cost more than the car was worth. My little car that I bought the day after I graduated from college 10 years ago was on its last leg.
    Bert's offer came to the rescue. He had bought himself a Prius and wanted me to have his 2000 Grand Jeep Cherokee, a vehicle I never in a million years would have been able to buy for myself.
    After all, I'm a journalist; he's a corporate attorney. You do the math.
    Waiting for this gift from the gods turned into an interesting mental exercise. See, I'm half Quebecois and half Polish. I was born in America, but I certainly inherited some of the cultural attributes of the two ethnic groups. And those attributes are often opposing forces. My mother was the first person in her neighborhood to marry someone who was not Polish. When she took my father around to meet all the neighbors, Mrs. Repski, the oldest person on the block, asked my father if his last name was French. When he said, "Yes. French-Canadian, actually," she shook her head and said to my grandmother, in Polish, "Oh well, maybe the marriage will work out anyway."
    The birth of my sister and then me was proof enough that the marriage worked out splendidly. Nevertheless, the mixing of the French and Polish set off a culture war of sorts for my sister and me. The Quebecois side of my family seemed to always see the sunny side of life. The littlest accomplishment was reason to have a party. Family clambakes on the beach near my grandparents' home in Mattapoisett turned into a community fair as the more the merrier. There is a reason why French-Canadians make a big deal about New Year's Day. They love a party.
    The Polish side is a different story. I love them all dearly, but they have a healthy dose of the "Slovak Sorrow." It's understandable. Life for my French-Canadian ancestors was pretty good. Roaming around the woods of Quebec in a canoe hunting beaver pelts sounds great. My Polish predecessors were wondering which one of their neighbors was going to invade next. If it's not the Germans, it's the Russians. If it's not one thing, it's the other.
    Bad car karma
    Those two forces were at work in my mind. I wanted to be happy about my new car. Bert told me it was in great condition - it had leather, heated seats, a CD player and a rack for my kayak. But then I started to think, "Eh, my excise tax is going to go up. And it only gets 14 miles to the gallon. Filling up is going make me go broke. And blah, blah, blah." Every negative thought I could have filled my brain, when I should have been focusing on what good fortune had come my way.
    But when the car arrived I think I actually did a jig of glee. It's beautiful. And it has heat! I actually started looking forward to winter as I remembered that the rear defroster on my old car broke last January. I drove it around Provincetown to show all my friends and felt I'd left those negative thoughts far behind.
    But then, the other shoe that we Poles always wait for, dropped. The next morning the car wouldn't start. It turned over, but would stall. Over the next few days there were times it would start and I drove it around town, only to have to leave it in a parking lot when I couldn't get it started again. I managed to drive it down to Frank's Texaco in Orleans. Frank knew my old Geo well. Too well. So when I showed up with a shiny new Jeep, only to say it was having problems, it looked like I had bad car karma. I left the key and walked to work, completely deflated and sliding down a black hole of negative thoughts:
    "This is going to be expensive."
    "They don't make cars like they used to. This is all because of corporate greed."
    "Some friend. Bert gave me a lemon. Thanks a lot Bert!"
    The awakening
    But no sooner did I settle in at my desk, still snorting smoke, as by this point I was in a particularly foul mood, than the phone rang.
    "Can you bring down theother key," the voice from Frank's said.
    " This key starts the car," said the mechanic holding the key I brought in. " This key is what's called a valet key."
    I got a quick tutorial that the key I had been using to try and start the car was designed to prevent theft when using valet parking. It would only start the car a few times in a given time period. I felt my face grow red.
    "You didn't read the book, did you?" the mechanic asked, quite astutely, I might add.
    "Uh-uh," I sheepishly admitted. "And the last time I went anywhere that had valet parking, I was parking the cars."
    I left Frank's only having to pay $29 for an inspection sticker.
    That night I went out to celebrate. I rallied my friends to go out and toast to the fact that good things do happen, and even when bad things strike, there can be a positive side. I called the next day to donate my old car to WOMR, the Outer Cape's community radio station. I figured I should toss out some good energy into the universe since some had come my way.
    And then I decided that I would write to my relatives in Poland. Seems that now that communism is dead and buried, things should be looking up in Warsaw, no? After all, it used to take about month to get a letter to them, now I can fire off an e-mail. Yes indeed. Au revoir to the Slovak Sorrow.
    Who's got the champagne?
    
http://www2.townonline.com/brewster/opinion/view.bg?articleid=595200&format=text

In Ottawa, Hanging With 2 Canadian Favorites

Edwin Holgate's "Ludivine" depicts a young Quebec girl whose mother has recently died.
Photo Credit: Painting By Edwin Holgate / National Gallery Of Canada Photo



In Ottawa, Hanging With 2 Canadian Favorites

Sunday, October 15, 2006; P10

WHAT: "Clarence Gagnon, 1881-1942: Dreaming the Landscape" and "Edwin Holgate" at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

WHEN: Through Jan. 7.

HOW MUCH: About $10.50 (U.S.) for both exhibitions.

WHY GO: Major retrospectives on two of Canada's most admired artists are happening in two exhibitions at the same time in the same building. What a happy coincidence.

The artists were separated in age by more than a decade -- Gagnon was born in 1881 and Holgate in 1892 -- but both brought a modern aesthetic to the country's art scene through their portraits and rural landscapes. Gagnon and Holgate studied in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they incorporated the principles of impressionism into their works.

They had their differences. Gagnon was more illustrative and conjured the romance of the Quebec villages he depicted, whereas Holgate -- as is evident in his portraits -- was less spontaneous and more focused on form.

DON'T MISS . . . Holgate's "Ludivine" (1930), a mesmerizing portrait of a young girl from a large Quebec family who had just lost her mother. The artist shows her in a state of shock as she looks out blankly. "It's really one his best paintings," says Holgate exhibit organizer Rosalind Pepall, curator of decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Other standouts include Holgate's "The Lumberjack" (1924), which shows a hulking, imposing figure standing in the foreground of a landscape and illustrates the artist's attention to detail. Gagnon's "Oxen Ploughing" (1903) depicts a farmer walking behind a plow that is being pulled by a pair of oxen. It is a quintessential representation of the artist's depiction of rural Quebec.

EXTRAS: In conjunction with the two exhibitions, the museum will host a day-long symposium beginning at 9:30 a.m. Nov. 18 featuring talks (in English and French with simultaneous interpretation) by curators, critics and writers. Admission is about $26, and registration is required (613-998-8888). Young adults can check out "ArtSparks: Spins & Needles" at 6 p.m. Nov. 30; the event features a tour of the exhibitions, hands-on projects, and music and dancing in the Tour Group Lobby. Cost is about $8.75, and registration is required (613-998-8888).

Give yourself a museum break and time your visit so you can attend the 21st annual Ottawa Wine and Food Show (Nov. 3-5). The event at the Ottawa Congress Centre (55 Colonel By Dr.) will feature about 200 booths offering wine, beer and food from around the world; celebrity chefs will hold cooking seminars on the hour. Tickets (about $13.25; no one under 19 admitted) can be purchased in advance by calling 613-755-1111 or by visiting http://www.playerexpo.com/WineShow .

EATS: Get into a French Canadian state of mind at Luxe Bistro (47 York St., 613-241-8805), offering top-of-the-line steaks in the $32 to $38 range. Fish dishes, including Crispy Lobster Risotto, cost slightly less. For an Asian-inspired meal, book a table at Shanghai (651 Somerset St. W., 613-233-4001). DJs spin tunes every Thursday, and Saturday is karaoke night. The restaurant is known for its dumplings, about $6.65 per order, and pad thai , about $10.55 to $14.95.

Eating on the run? The ByWard Market (55 ByWard Market Sq., 613-562-3325), one of Canada's oldest and largest public markets, offers fast food and baked goods from all over the world. There's also some great shopping: A slew of boutiques and outdoor vendors sell fresh fruits and vegetables, flowers and arts and crafts.

SLEEPS: For convenience, it's hard to beat the Sheraton Ottawa Hotel (150 Albert St., 613-238-1500, http://www.starwoodhotels.com/ ), in the middle of the Canadian capital about two blocks from the museum. Its weekend packages start at about $106 a night for a double.

For a more intimate setting, try the Carmichael Inn & Spa (46 Cartier St., 877-416-2417, http://www.carmichaelinn.com/ ). Each of its 11 units has a queen-size bed and a private bath, as well as fine antiques. Rooms at the inn, a 15-minute walk from the museum, start at about $131.25 a night.

INFO: The National Gallery of Canada is at 380 Sussex Dr. Details: 800-319-2787, http://www.gallery.ca/ .

-- John Maynard
The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/13/AR2006101300475.html

Céline Dion to trade the Strip for nappies?

With 1 year to go in Vegas, plans afoot for another child
Céline Dion to trade the Strip for nappies?

Credits
Written by
John Egan
Published
14/Oct at 04:00
Source(s)
ExtraTV.com
Four years into her record-breaking Las Vegas show A new day... Céline Dion has disclosed plans for her post-Vegas life. Two new albums, a new home, and a second child are all on the books.

French Canadian songstress Céline Dion raised a lot of eyebrows when she took herself off the road to mount a nightly extravaganza in Las Vegas. Many doubted whether she could draw in consistent enough crowds to make it profitable. However high demand and massive profits have proved the critics wrong--and other acts are now lining up to "work the Strip."

But Céline's contract at Caesar's Palace runs out next year--what's next? In an exclusive interview she gave to the American entertainment programme Extra, Céline didn't equivocate. Her immediate future includes "French album, English album, one more year of this show. After, I hope to have another child".  She and her husband are also building a new, larger home in Florida, in which to live after their Vegas commitments are over.

Fans of both her French and English music will be thrilled: Céline's last new French album was 2003's Une fille et 4 types, though she released a double-disc best-of French language disc (One ne change pas) in 2005. Céline's last new English album was 2004's Miracle. Click here to view the interview.

Céline Dion won the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland with Ne partez pas sans moi (Don't leave without me)

http://www.esctoday.com/news/read/6524

Voices.com Raises Accents and Dialects Awareness

Voices.com Raises Accents and Dialects Awareness

Voices.com, the voice marketplace, is revealing one of the hottest secrets in the industry today: how to increase the international presence of a company globally through localization.


New York, NY, October 14, 2006 --(PR.COM)-- In the international marketplace, it is very important for organizations to be able to both globalize and localize their product information and service offerings.  That being said, the information presented to their target audiences is only as effective as the means by which it is communicated.

For audio purposes, the vessel or means of communication is via a voice talent performance; in essence, a voice-over recording performed in an accent or dialect native to the people the message is being directed at, in other words, localizing (familiarizing) a message that will yield more targeted and fruitful consumer responses.

Localization is one of the easiest ways for a company to its broaden international reach and better serve current customers.

To illustrate, if someone were writing a French Canadian script for an audience located in Montreal, QC, they would make sure that the terminology used is familiar to French Canadians living in Montreal. Not only that, the writer may employ unique speech and formation characteristics indigenous to the French Canadian language and relevant cultural references to help their audience best identify with what is being presented to them.

Going one step further, a script written for a Montreal, Quebec audience would be recorded by a native French Canadian voice talent from Montreal whose voice embodies the characteristics of the people and can convey the copy in a meaningful and direct manner accessible to all French Canadian speakers in Montreal.

Voices.com is home to over 8,665 voice talents, representing over 100 languages worldwide, meeting the needs of millions of people who search for voice-overs online, particularly in language translation and localization services.  

Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli says, "Localization is conveying a message to people in a specific geographical location implementing language and concepts that they can understand.  Our voice talents are capable of bringing the world to an organizations’ doorstep with the power of localized voice-over recordings.”

One of the largest markets for dialects (or accents) today is in performing voice-overs for videogames. This industry continues to grow, encouraging international flair, which in turn requires the performances of roles speaking in specific dialects and accents.

Voices.com is able to fulfill the requirements of any voice-over project, and now finding the perfect voice to expand the global reach of an organization is as easy as posting a voice-over job or searching through the Voices.com Voice Talent search engine.

To learn more about Voices.com:
http://www.voices.com

About Voices.com

Based in London, Canada, Voices.com provides an online marketplace, facilitating transactions between business clients and voice-over professionals, employing a comprehensive suite of web-based services. Clients that have worked at Voices.com include NBC, ESPN, PBS, The History Channel, Reader's Digest, Comcast, Nortel Networks, Bell Canada, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, ING, Western Union, Ford, GM, Jaguar, US Army, the US Government and more.

###
Contact Information
Voices.com
David Ciccarelli
519-488-5575 111
media@voices.com
http://www.voices.com
#1 Voice Over Marketplace

http://www.pr.com/press-release/20103

ACQS

ACQS, Description of Conference
Preliminary Conference Program
Preliminary Teacher Conference Program
Dates/Places for future conferences
Call for Papers
Information for next conference

Preliminary Conference Program 2006

Cambridge, Masschusetts
October 12 - 15, 2006

Thursday October 12

11AM - 6PM Registration - Somerset Room

2:00-3:30 Session Plénière/Plenary Session 1
Room: Riverfront

Le Colonial et le Postcolonial au Québec

Chair: Ray Pelletier, University of Maine - Orono

Du colonial au postcolonial
Leslie Choquette, Assumption College

Pour une vision postcoloniale et postnationale
Jocelyn Létourneau, Université Laval


3:30-4:00 Pause café/Coffee Break
Room: Riverfront

4:00-5:00 Plénière/Plenary Session 2
Room:Riverfront

Humeurs d'écriture

Chair: Jane Moss, Colby College

Marie Laberge, écrivaine et dramaturge


5:30 - Shuttle bus from hotel lobby to Harvard Square. Free time for dinner

8:00 - Concurrent Event: Tournée des Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois Film Festival - "C.R.A.Z.Y." (2005, 120 min.) at Brattle Theater. Followed by discussion with the screenwriter François Boulay.
Note: Tickets for this film will be available for purchase at the Registration Desk.



Friday October 13, 2006


Exhibits and Registration (all day) -Room: Somerset

7:30-8:45 Breakfast & Special Plenary Session 3
Cosponsored by Institute for Quebec Studies
Room: Parkview

The Future of Québec Studies in the United States: Enriching a Vibrant Community - Findings and Recommendations

Chair: Christopher Kirkey, Director, Institute on Québec Studies (IQS)
Christopher Kirkey, Director, IQS
Raymond Pelletier, President, ACQS
Diddy Hitchens, President, Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS)
Kevin Christiano, Past President of ACQS
Sam Fisher, Treasurer, ACQS


9:00-10:30 Sessions
Evolutions postcoloniales
Room: Riverfront

Chair: Jack Yeager, Louisiana State University

Three tendencies in contemporary Montreal novels: the limits of the sayable
Michèle Lacombe, Trent University

Perdre la carte. Braconnages et postcolonialisme dans la littérature québécoise
Simon Harel, Université du Québec à Montréal

Québécois Postcolonial Expression: the third wave?
Eloise Brière, The University of Albany-SUNY

La pédagogie du film québécois dans les cours de français universitaires
Room: Charles A

Session organized by the Tournée des Rendez-vous du cinéma québéois
Presenter: Dany Laferrière


Haïti/Québec I
Room: Charles B


Chair: Jean-Jacques Thomas, Duke University

Du colonial au post-colonial : la révolution
Corinne Beauquis, University of Toronto-Scarsborough

Female Legacy and Narrative Chains in Marie-Célie Agnant's Le livre d'Emma
Patrice Proulx, University of Nebraska-Omaha

Le Trauma et le témoignage dans Le Livre d'Emma de Marie-Célie Agnant
Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz, University of Akron


Gabrielle Roy
Room: University A


Chair: Myrna Delson-Karan, Fordham University,

Looking for Canada: the Journalism of Gabrielle Roy
Rosemary Chapman, University of Nottingham, UK

Quand je est autre : identité et altérité dans la Détresse et l'Enchantement de Gabrielle Roy
Yvon LeBras, Brigham Young University

Discussant: Myrna Delson-Karan, Fordham University


La Langue française et québécoise
Room: University B


Chair: Julie Robert, University of Michigan

Does one have to speak French to be a Québecker?: How young francophone pupils in Québec define their language(s) and identity
Elatiana Razafimandimbimananana, Université de Haute Bretagne de Rennes 2

La part des archaïsmes et des anglicismes dans la variété du français québécois
Paul André Lagueux, Royal Military College of Canada


Session d'auteurs/Writer's session
Room: University C


Chair: Jane Moss, Colby College

Lori Saint-Martin, nouvelliste

Catherine Mavrikakis, romancière

Louis Patrick Leroux, dramaturge


10:30-11:00 Pause café/Coffee Break
Room: Parkview

11-12:30 Sessions

Americanité et postcolonialisme
Room: Riverfront


Chair: Eloise Brière, The University of Albany-SUNY

Révisionnisme, Américanité et Postcolonialisme
Claude Couture, University of Alberta

Québec: The Moderns' Difficult Dealing with French Inheritage
Anne Legaré, Université du Québec à Montréal

De l'américanité à l'américanisation : voix multiples, perspectives diverses
Maureen Waters-O'Neill, Université de Paris X



Haïti/Québec II
Room:Charles B

Chair: Patrice Proulx, University of Nebraska-Omaha

Self-fragmentation in Dany Laferrière's self-representational text, Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and Richard Rodriguez's autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Muna Shafiq, Université de Montréal

Metropolitan Opera: Joël Des Rosiers' and Dany Lafferrière's Urban Migration
Jean-Jacques Thomas, Duke University

Mise à l'épreuvre et de réciprocité, celle d'une rencontre entre deux étrangers - Québécois and immigrant writers
Alessandra Benedicty, Québec Government, New York


La subjectivité féminine
Room:University A


Chair: Roseanna Dufault, Ohio Northern University

Maria Chapdelaine, un roman "féministe"?
Sarah Domareki, University of Maine - Orono

Un nouvel espace femme dans l'œuvre de Louise Dupré
Anne-Marie Jézéquel, University of Cincinnati

Parody and the Woman Writer in Contemporary Quebec Fiction
Juliette M. Rogers, University of New Hampshire


Le monstrueux discursif
Room: University B


Chair: Karen Gould, University of Cincinnati

Le Libraire : un exemple du "monstrueux" dans l'œuvre de Gérard Bessette
Steven Urquhart, Université de Lethbridge, Alberta

L'univers existentiel blaisien de l'enfance: Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel
Pascale Vergereau-Dewey, Kutztown University

The Trembling Present: Trauma and Epistemology in Les fous de Bassan by Anne Hébert
Scott Lyngaas, Beloit College


Représentations de l'écrivain et de l'artiste
Room: University C


Chair: Patrick Coleman, University of California-Los Angeles

La figure du peintre dans L'Ange de la solitude de Marie-Claire Blais
Kirsty Bell, Mount Allison University

Éthique et narration dans Tu attends la neige, Léonard? de Pierre Yergeau
Pascal Riendeau, University of Toronto

Jacques Allard: l'explorateur du roman
Roseline Tremblay, Saint Lawrence University


Les entreprises culturelles québécoises et leur place à l'international
Room: Charles A
Session sponsored by the Société de développment d'entreprises culturelles (SODEC)
Presenter: Pierre Major, économiste, Directeur général Planification, politiques et communications, SODEC


12:30-1:30 Lunch Break

12:30 - 1:30 Québec Studies Editorial Board Meeting
Room

2:00-3:00 Sessions

US/Canada Relations
Room: Riverfront


Chair: Robert Gill, Radford University

Comparing Values in U.S.-Canadian Relations: How to Interest Americans in Canada and Quebec
Douglas Nord, Wright State University

Exploring Cross-border Relations in the New Historical Atlas of Maine
Stephen Hornsby, University of Maine

Dicussant: Robert Gill, Radford University


Théories du post-colonial, du post-moderne et du post-national
Room: Charles A


Chair: Jocelyn Létourneau, Université Laval

La littérature québécoise contemporaine: prérévolutionnaire, postcolonial et postmoderne?
Peter Klaus, Freie Universität Berlin

Québec in/and Theory
Jean Marie Walls, Union University


Représentations des Autochtones dans la littérature québécoise
Room: Charles B


Chair: Susan Rosenstreich, Dowling College

Yves Thériault: Le Bien et le Mal dans la trilogie d'Agaguk
Evelyne Méron, l'Université Bar-Ilan, Israel

The 'Native Informant' in Paul Bussières' Mais qui va donc consoler Mingo? or why the Québécois writer still needs a Native guide
Sandra Hobbs, Wayne State University


Le femme et le féminisme au Québec
Room: University A


Chair: Juliette M. Rogers, University of New Hampshire

Mental Disorder in Women in Quebec, 1912-1940: An Analysis of Women's Ambivalent Relationship to Culturally Prescribed Sexual Roles as Demonstrated through Expressions of "Madness"
Mary G. Okin, University of Maine-Orono

Réception de la théorie postcoloniale dans le féminisme québécois
Chantal Maillé, Concordia University



Musique et identité culturelle
Room: University B


Chair: Amy Reid, New College of Florida

"Alors que l'on est québécois": Lynda Lemay chante-t-elle le Québec?
Catherine Daniélou, University of Alabama - Birmingham

Québec Rap : The Practice of Cultural Synthesis
Christopher M. Jones, Carnegie Mellon University


Québec: The State and Diversity
Room: Charles B


Chair: Robert Whelan, University of Texas-Arlington

Transforming the Relationship Between the State and Indigenous Peoples in Québec: Analytical Perspectives on the Paix des Braves and the Agreement in Principle on Approche commune
Carole Lévesque, Centre International de Recherche Scientifique et Daniel Salée, Concordia University

A Postcolonial Remnant? The Anglophone population of the Eastern Townships
Aimée Vieira, Université de Montréal

Discussant: Andrew Holman, Bridgewater State University


3:00 - 3:30 - Pause café/Coffee Break
Room: Parkview

3:30 - 5:30 Sessions

Aliénation et cinéma québécois
Room: Charles A


Chair: Maxime Blanchard, The City University of New York

Pour la suite du monde : aliénation et libération dans Françoise Durocher, waitress d'André Brassard et C.R.A.Z.Y. de Jean-Marc Vallée
Maxime Blanchard, The City University of New York

Réflexions sur l'aliénation involontaire : Les Ordres de Michel Brault et Les Smattes de Jean-Claude Labrecque
Terry Cochran, Université de Montréal

Terroristes ou patriotes: guerre et résistance cinématographique au Québec
Brian Martin, Williams College

L'enfant dévoré: suicides, infanticides et autres mises à mort de la lignée dans l'oeuvre de Micheline Lanctôt
Catherine Mavrikakis, Université de Montréal


L'édition québécoise pour la jeunesse de 1970 à 2005
Room: Charles B


Chair: Suzanne Pouloit, Université de Sherbrooke

L'édition québécoise pour la jeunesse du colonial au postcolonial
Suzanne Pouliot, Université de Sherbrooke

Le discours éditorial sur la lecture chez Soulières éditeur: état actuel des recherches
Rachel Deroy-Ringuette, Université de Sherbrooke

Les représentations des personnes âgées dans la production albumique québécoise récente
Janine Dupont, Université de Sherbrooke

L'édition québécoise pour la jeunesse : le cas des réécritures des contes de Charles Perrault dans les albums
Sophie Michaud, Université de Québec à Trois Rivières


La séparation dans la littérature actuelle des femmes au Québec
Room: University A


Chair: Sandrina Joseph, Université de Montréal

La parole du deuil et du désir dans Ce désir toujours de Denise Desautels
Barbara Havercroft, University of Toronto

Extravagance et audace : stratégies de fuite dans la poésie récente de Denise Desautels
Alisa Bélanger, University of California - Los Angeles

Flight, Abandonment and Return in Two Recent Novels by Diane-Monique Daviau and Christiane Frenette
Miléna Santoro, Georgetown University

Rompre, puis le raconter : conversation et logorrhée dans Folle de Nelly Arcan
Sandrina Joseph, Université de Montréal


R&ecute;conciliations historiques
Room: University C


Chair: Anne Griffin, Cooper Union

Les collèges des sulpiciens français et l'affirmation des identités en Amérique de Nord
Ollivier Hubert, Université de Montréal

Les Patriotes contre la Reine à la fête de Dollar: la refondation comme argument pour la réconciliation identitaire des Québécois
Anne Trépanier, Université d'Ottowa

Ireland in the pre-rebellion imaginaire : foil or role-model
Mary Haslam, New York University

La réconciliation des ennemis après la Conquête de 1760: Amitié et providence dans les Anciens Canadiens de Philippe Aubert de Gaspé
Jacques Cardinal, Université de Montréal



Autour de 1948
Room: University B


Chair: Rosemary Chapman, University of Nottingham

Les influences françaises de Claude Gauvreau
Thierry Bissonnette, Université de Montréal

Réinterprétation du surréalisme chez l'avant-garde nord-américaine (1940-1950). Pollock et Riopelle : le mythe du pionnier
Louise Vigneault, Université de Montréal

Paul-Marie Lapointe's and Allen Ginsberg's 1948 Visions: Young Men, Trees, and Sunflowers
David Palmieri, Université de Montréal

Du Refus global au réalisme magique: « Place à la magie! » dans les Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal de Michel Tremblay
Olivia Choplin Jones, Emory University


5:30 - 6:15 Session plénière/Plenary Session 4
Room: Parkview Sponsored by the Québec Government

La nouvelle politique internationale du gouvernement du Québec
Mme Monique Gagnon-Tremblay, Ministre des Relations internationales


6:15- 7:30 Réception du gouvernement du Québec
Room: Parkview

Hommage à/Homage to Professor Alfred O. Hero, Jr.

Presentation of the Prix du Québec


Free Evening

9:00 "Délivrez-moi" (Forgive Me, 2006, 103 min.) Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québéois Film Festival at Harvard Film Archive. Followed by discussion with director Denis Chouinard

Note: Tickets for this film will be available for purchase at the Registration Desk.

Saturday October 14

All Day Exhibits and Registration
Room: Somerset

All Day Teacher's Workshop
Room: Parkview

7:30-8:30 Breakfast and Round Table Plenary 5
Room: Riverfront Sponsored by the Gouvernement du Québec
Analyse de la nouvelle politique internationale du Gouvernement du Québec/An Analysis of the Québec Government's New Initiative in Foreign Policy
Chair: Kevin Christiano, University of Notre Dame

Louis Balthazar, President of the Center for the United States Studies of the Raou-Dandurand Chair, Université du Québec à Montréal

David Biette, Director, Canada Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Marc T Boucher, Guest Professor, École nationale d'administration publique

Earl Fry, Professor of Canadian Studies, Brigham Young University


9:00-10:30 Sessions

Globalisation et pluriculturalisme
Room: Charles B
Chair: Maureen Waters-O'Neill, Université de Paris X

Le pluriculturalisme en Amérique
Hilmi Alacakli et Huseyin Gumus, Université de Mamara, Turquie

Cultural Goods, Francophonie and the Global Economy
Jody Neathery-Castro and Mark Rousseau, University of Nebraska-Omaha

Jacques Godbout et les espaces commerciaux: mise en littérature comme mise en garde
Laura I. Pondea, The Ohio State University



Feminist Postcolonial
Room: University A


Chair: Debra Popkin, Baruch College - CUNY

Epistolary Fictions of Postcolonialism: Lise Gauvin's Lettres d'une autre and Nancy Huston/Leïla Sebbar's Lettres parisiennes
Beatrice Guenther, Bowling Green State University

Une amie révolutionnaire: Marie-Claire Blais's tribute to American Activist Barbara Deming
Roseanna Dufault, Ohio Northern University


Stéréotype et idéologie
Room: University C
Chair: Vincent Desroches, Western Michigan University

Declining the Stereotype in Stanley Lloyd Norris's La Pucelle and Max Dorsinville's James Wait ou les lunettes noires
Susan Ireland, Grinnell College

Arrive without travelling: Wrestling cultural identity, coming out, and group affiliation in Steve Galluccio's Mambo Italiano
Lonnie Renteria, University of Washington

Idéologie et représentation dans quelques films québécois. La figure du nègre comme une étrangéité a priori
Boulou E. de B'béri, Université d'Ottawa

Les Porteurs d'eau: les artistes québéois se mouillent
Vincent Desroches, Western Michigan University


(Re)lire Guèvremont
Room: University B


Chair: Lucie Joubert, Université d'Ottawa

Genres et Cycle chez Germaine Guèvremont
David Décarie, Université de Moncton

Une Phonsine nouvelle : quand la bru tient tête à l'entourage... dans le radioroman
Lucie Joubert, Université d'Ottawa

Pouvoir et parole dans le radioroman du Survenant de Germaine Guèvremont
Lori Saint-Martin, Université du Québec à Montréal


Le roman familial dans la littérature et le cinéma québécois contemporains
Room: Charles A


Chair: Maïté Snauwaert, McGill University

Achever l'inachevable roman familial : figures de la "Stabat mater" dans les films d'Anne-Claire Poirier
Catherine Mavrikakis, Université de Montréal

D'une famille à l'autre : l'échappée du mort dans le cinéma québécois
Étienne Beaulieu, Université du Manitoba

La transmission générationnelle dans l'œuvre écrite de Pierre Perrault : une controverse territoriale
Daniel Laforest, University of California - Santa Cruz

La filiation du roman à l'essai : la littérature anthropologique de Suzanne Jacob
Maïté Snauwaert, McGill University


10:30 - 11:00 Pause café/Coffee Break
Room: Charles Foyer

11:00-12:30 Sessions

Federal Relations
Room: University C


Chair: Brian Tanquay, Wilfrid Laurier University

Strategic Perspectives: An Examination of the Strategic Decisions of the Federal and Quebec Governments between the Referendum and Patriation
Neal Carter, St. Bonaventure University

Framing the issue of Québec's sovereignty in the rest of Canada
Scott Piroth, Bowling Green State University

It's a Long Road from Fort Greely to Chicoutimi: Québec Sovereignty and the Issue of Missile Defence
David Haglund, Queen's University


Contemporary Québec Theater I
Room: University C


Chair: Louis Patrick Leroux, Concordia University

Squatter la scène dans le théâtre québécois contemporain
Shawn Huffman, Université du Québec à Montréal

Robert Lepage: The postcolonial in global space
Karen Fricker, Trinity Collge, Dublin

Jouer dans les décombres: quand le théâtre aborde la catastrophe
Stéphanie Nutting, University of Guelph

Figuring performance-nation connections in modern Québec
Erin Hurley, McGill University


Translation/Imaginations, Traduction/Imaginaires
Room: University A


Chair: Jane Koustas, Brock University

Divers rougarous ou La récupération de voix franco-métisses, une pratique postcoloniale
Pamela V. Sing, University of Alberta

Traverser les langues et les cultures : Santiago de la romancière franco-manitobaine Simone Chaput
Estelle Dansereau, University of Calgary

Transatlantic Translation of the English Canadian Imagination
Jane Koustas, Brock University


Convent Voices from New France
Room: University B


Chair: Thomas J. Carr, Jr., University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Teaching the Tridentine Catechism in New France
Mary M. Rowan, CUNY-Brooklyn College

Québec Women Religious and Colonial Warfare
Maureen F. O'Meara, University of Dayton

Convent Writing in New France A Colonial Literature?
Thomas M. Carr, Jr., University of Nebraska-Lincoln


Figures du père dans la littérature et le cinéma québécois contemporains
Room: Charles A


Chair: Lori Saint-Martin, Université du Québec à Montréal

Modèles paternals dans Ce qu'il en reste de Julie Hivon
Isabelle Boisclair, Université de Sherbrooke

Hunting the Father in Francis Leclerc's Mémoires affectives (2003) and Francis Mankiewicz's Le temps d'une chasse (1972)
Katherine Roberts, Wilfrid Laurier University

Le «nouveau père» existe-t-il? Trois modes de conservation des viandes de Maxime-Olivier Moutier
Lori Saint-Martin, Université du Québec à Montréal


12:30-1:30 Lunch Break 12:30-1:15 ACQS Business Meeting - Open Forum

1:30-3:00 Sessions

Historiographie du Québec: religion et cléricalisme
Room: Charles B


Chair: Mary J. Okin, University of Maine - Orono

Roman Catholicism and the 'Normal' Society: Towards a Re-imagining of Québec History
Michael Gauvreau, McMaster University

Quelques aspects du clérico-nationalisme dans des manuels d'histoire canadienne en usage à l'école secondaire francophone au Québec des années 1960 : nouvelles perspectives
Paul Buck, University of Maine - Orono

La composante religieuse dans la discours nationaliste québéois
Xavier Gravend-Tirole, Université de Montréal



Contemporary Québec Theater II
Room: University C


Chair: Shawn Huffman, Université du Québec à Montréal

Mommy Dearest: Mothers and Daughters in Quebec Women's Theater
Jane Moss, Colby College

L'œuvre théâtrale de Pol Pelletier: la femme, le corps et l'inconscient
Celita Lamar, University of Miami

(Se) Jouer (de) l'authenticité dans les autofictions théâtrales assumées, suggérées ou feintes... L'Inoublié de Marcel Pomerlo, Henry et Margaux d'Évelyne de la Chenelière et Everybody's Wells Pour Tous de Patrice Dubois et Martin Labrecque
Louis Patrick Leroux, Concordia University


Fragmentation and collage
Room: University A


Chair: Miléna Santoro, Georgetown University

Piecing Together our Stories: Collage and the Internet in the Autofiction of Régine Robin
Katharine Harrington, University of Maine-Fort Kent

Les modes de communication dans Retour d'Afrique de Francine D'Amour
Heather A West, Samford University

Searching for Identity, Authenticity and Redemption in Carole David's Impala
Jay Ketner, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Une représentation littéraire de l'événement de la recontre urbaine
Marie Cusson, SUNY-College of Plattsburgh


Trends In Twenty-First Century Literature
Room: University B


Chair: Paula Ruth Gilbert, George Mason University

Writing Nagasaki: History and its Half-Life in the Novels of Aki Shimazaki
Emile J. Talbot, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

Writing (after) the end of the world: Brossard and Blais
Karen McPherson, University of Oregon

Parodic Professionalism: The idea of literature in Nadine Bismuth's Scrapbook
Patrick Coleman, University of California-Los Angeles


Le colonial au XXème siècle
Room: Charles A


Chair: Leslie Choquette, Assumption College

100th anniversary of the birth of Father Emile Legault
Marge Fitzpatrick, Dickinson College

L'Amérique française and the limits of the colonial model
Marvin Richards, John Carroll University

La double inconstance ou le théâtre colonial dans L'homme de paille de Daniel Poliquin
François Paré, University of Waterloo

New France, Culture in the New World and Speech Acts in Volkswagen Blues
Susan Rosenstreich, Dowling College


3:00-3:30 Pause café/Coffee Break
Room: Charles Foyer

3:30-5:00 Sessions

Contemporary politics: Quebec in/and Canada
Room: Charles B
Chair: Richard Vengroff, Kennesaw State University
Twenty-first Century Proposals for Political Reform in Canada and Quebec
Diddy Hitchins, University of Alaska

Le gouvernement Bush et la droite francophone au Québec: l'exemple de la revue Égards
François-Emmanuël Boucher, Royal Military College of Canada

The Neoconservative Agenda: Implications for Québec
Ellie Malone, U.S. Naval Academy

Discussants:Richard Vengroff, Kennesaw State University


Redefining Québec: Language and Intention in the 1960s
Room: Charles A

Chair: Peter Klaus, Freie Universität Berlin

Le code littéraire « canadien-anglais » dans la Nuit de Jacques Ferron
Susan Murphy, Queen's University

Naming the Individual, Naming the Collective: Names, Identity and Community
Julie Robert, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

You Are What You Read: Reading Reviews in Liberté
Meadow Dibble Dieng, Colby College

L'imaginaire et la morale chez Félix Leclerc
Michael Gendre, Middlesex Community College


La filiation dans la littérature contemporaine
Room: University A


Chair: Mary Jean Green, Dartmouth College

L'image du père dans la littérature québécoise actuelle
Lucie Lequin, Concordia University

Flora, Flore, et le piège du passé: Le Premier Jardin d'Anne Hébert et Le Livre d'Emma de Marie-Célie Agnant
Amy Reid, New College of Florida

Flora Fontanges, Comédienne
André Senecal, University of Vermont

Le paradoxe filial sous l'éclairage de Francine Noël et de Suzanne Jacob
Anne Caumartin, Université d'Ottawa



Franco-American History and Literature
Room: University B
Chair: Mark P. Richard, SUNY College at Plattsburgh

The K.K.K. in French-Speaking Centers of Maine in the 1920s
Mark P. Richard, SUNY College at Plattsburgh

Exploring the ideology of la survivance in two failed romans à thèse: La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les Enfances de Fanny
Cynthia Lees, University of Florida

Unacceptable Colonizations
Constance Schick, College of the Holy Cross


5:15 - 6:00 Plenary Session / Session Plinière 6
Room: Skyline Suite
Chair: Juliette M. Rogers, University of New Hampshire Presentation of the ACQS Distinquished Service Award

Colonial/Postcolonial: Two or Three Things Michel Tremblay Has Taught Me
Robert Schwartzwald, Université de Montréal


6:15 - 6:45 Séance plénière / Plenary Session 7
Sponsored by the Canadian Government
Speaker to be announced.

6:45 - 7:30 Réception sponsored by the Canadian Government
Room: Grand Ballroom Foyer

7:30 - 9:00 Closing Banquet
Room: Grand Ballroom

9:30 "Familia" (2006, 102 min.) Tournée des Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois Film Festival at Harvard Film Archive. The film is followed by a discussion with the director Louise Archambault
Note: Tickets for this film will be available for purchase at the Registration Desk.

http://www.acqs.org/biennial_conf/program.html

Africa explorer's remains exhumed

Africa explorer's remains exhumed

By Mark Doyle
World affairs correspondent, BBC News
Saturday, 30 September 2006,


The once-rival cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa are linked by ferry
The remains of Pierre de Brazza, the 19th Century French explorer and founder of modern-day Congo, have been exhumed in Algeria.

They will be reburied in three days' time in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville.

It is one of the few African cities that retains the name of its colonial founder.

Brazza was buried in 1905 in Algiers, when Algeria was part of metropolitan France.

His century-old adventure story pits the Frenchman against the envoy of the Belgian crown, Henry Morton Stanley, to capture central Africa.

Both men had different masters but a common aim - to win the 19th Century "Scramble for Africa", that audacious and often cruel race to subjugate a continent.

Mineral riches

The American Stanley, who today is famous for having re-supplied the struggling British explorer David Livingstone, was working for the ambitious King of Belgium, Leopold. Brazza was working for France.


They both wanted to capture the navigable section of the great Congo river - and with it vast territories and fabulous mineral wealth.

In the end, Brazza won the race through uncharted jungles, planting the French flag on the northern shore of the river.

Brazzaville was born. Stanley was forced to the southern shore of Congo river. He founded another city and named it after his royal Belgian backer, and Leopoldville took root.

Today, Brazzaville and Leopoldville, later renamed Kinshasa, are joined by only a short ferry ride.

Brazzaville is the capital of Congo. Kinshasa is the capital of the confusingly named "Democratic Republic of Congo".

Controversy

Brazza's remains will be flown to Brazzaville in a few days time to be reburied in a mausoleum built jointly by the French and Congolese governments.

Some Congolese are critical about the honouring of this controversial figure.

They say Africans have not benefited from the relationship with France.

French and Congolese historians of Brazza's exploits say, however, that by the standards of the day, their man was a humanist who had respectful relationships with African chiefs.

Where possible, they say, he used negotiations rather than force - unlike Stanley, who by most accounts was a brash and violent conqueror.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5395194.stm

Brazza’s remains transferred to Congo

Brazza’s remains transferred to Congo
EuropaWorld - Sep 30, 2006
A ceremony will take place on 3 October in Brazzaville at which the mortal remains of the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza are to be transferred.

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in Rome in 1852, as Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazza, the seventh son of Count Ascanio Savorgnan di Brazza, a nobleman of Udine with many French connections. He was one of the most extraordinary figures in the French presence in Africa.  Adventurer, visionary and humanist, this peaceful and bold explorer always rejected the use of violence.  He was an administrator who was mindful of the interests of the people under his responsibility.  He died in Dakar in 1905

One hundred years after his death, his family and the Congolese authorities wished Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza to lie with his friends and family in the city which bears his name and which was founded exactly 126 years ago on October 3, 1880

http://www.europaworld.org/week279/brazza29906.html

Lewis and Clark

recycled: Previously published Slate articles made new.
Lewis and Clark
Stop celebrating. They don't matter.
By David Plotz
Posted Monday, Oct. 2, 2006, at 7:36 AM ET

Slate's "Assessment" columns dissect the conventional wisdom about real people (L. Ron Hubbard), fictional characters (Scooby-Doo), companies (Whole Foods), body parts (the prostate), and even weather patterns (El Niño). This week, Slate is resurrecting a handful of classic "Assessments," all collected in a new book, Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate.

The American infatuation with Lewis and Clark grows more fervent with every passing year. The adventurers have become our Extreme Founding Fathers, as essential to American history as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but a lot more fun. Last month, President Bush announced the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, a three-year, 15-state pageant that begins Jan. 18 in Virginia and could draw as many as 25 million tourists to the Lewis and Clark trail by the time it wraps up in 2006. The same week as Bush's speech, Time devoted a special issue to the expedition, 42 salivary pages of Lewis and Clark.
Bookstores have been stuffed with Lewis and Clark volumes since the publication of Stephen Ambrose's in 1996. There are scores of trail guides, multivolume editions of the explorers' journals, a dozen books about Sacagawea, three histories of Fort Clatsop, a Lewis and Clark cookbook, and at least three books about Meriwether Lewis' dog, Seaman.
Our Lewis and Clark have something for everyone—a catalog of 21st-century virtues. They're multicultural: an Indian woman, French-Indians, French-Canadians, and a black slave all contributed to the expedition's success. They're environmental: Lewis and Clark kept prodigious records of plants and animals and were enthralled by the vast, mysterious landscape they traveled through. They're tolerant: They didn't kill Indians (much) but did negotiate with them. They're patriotic: They discovered new land so the United States could grow into a great nation. Lewis and Clark, it's claimed, opened the West and launched the American empire.
Except they didn't. "If Lewis and Clark had died on the trail, it wouldn't have mattered a bit," says Notre Dame University historian Thomas Slaughter, author of the forthcoming Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness.
Like the moon landing, the Lewis and Clark expedition was inspiring, poetic, metaphorical, and ultimately insignificant. First of all, Lewis and Clark were not first of all. The members of the Corps of Discovery were not the first people to see the land they traveled. Indians had been everywhere, of course, but the corps members were not even the first whites. Trappers and traders had covered the land before them, and though Lewis and Clark may have been the first whites to cross the Rockies in the United States, explorer Alexander MacKenzie had traversed the Canadian Rockies a decade before them.
After the celebration of their safe return, Lewis and Clark quickly sank into obscurity, and for good reason. They failed at their primary mission. Jefferson had dispatched them to find a water route across the continent—the fabled Northwest Passage—but they discovered that water transport from coast to coast was impossible. Jefferson, chagrined, never bragged much about the expedition he had fathered.
Not discovering something that didn't exist was hardly Lewis and Clark's fault, but the expedition also failed in a much more important way. It produced nothing useful. Meriwether Lewis was supposed to distill his notes into a gripping narrative, but he had writer's block and killed himself in 1809 without ever writing a word. The captains' journals weren't published until almost 10 years after the duo's return; only 1,400 copies were printed, they appeared when the country was distracted by the War of 1812, and they had no impact. The narrative was well-told, but it ignored the most valuable information collected by Lewis and Clark, their mountains of scientific and anthropological data about the plants, animals, and Indians of the West. That material wasn't published for a century, long after it could have helped pioneers.
Lewis and Clark didn't matter for other reasons. At the time of the journey, the Corps of Discovery "leapfrogged Americans' concerns," says American University historian Andrew Lewis (no relation to Meriwether). "They were exploring the far Missouri at a time when the frontier was the Ohio River. They were irrelevant."
When the country did start catching up, decades later, the Lewis and Clark route didn't help. William Clark told President Jefferson that they had discovered the best route across the continent, but he could hardly have been more wrong. Lewis and Clark took the Missouri through Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Montana before crossing the Rockies in Northern Idaho. Their route was way too far north to be practical. No one could follow it. Other explorers located better, southerly shortcuts across the Continental Divide, and that's where Western settlers went. Lewis and Clark aficionados delight today in the unspoiled scenery along the trail. The reason the trail remains scenic and unspoiled is that it was so useless.
In a few years, Lewis and Clark disappeared from the American imagination and the American project. Lewis was dead, and Clark spent the rest of his life on the frontier, supervising relations with Indians—an important job, but not one that gave him any say over government policy. Meanwhile, other daredevils captured the popular fancy, especially during the great wave of exploration in the mid-19th century. John C. Frémont enthralled the country with his bold Western trips. John Wesley Powell—the one-armed Civil War veteran—made his name by rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The midcentury explorers provided information that was vastly more productive than anything Lewis and Clark offered.
By the late 19th century, Lewis and Clark were negligible figures. They weren't found in textbooks, according to the University of Tulsa's James Ronda, a leading scholar of the expedition. Americans didn't hearken back to the adventure. It was so unimportant that Henry Adams could dismiss it in no time flat in his history of the Jefferson administration as having "added little to the stock of science and wealth."
The first Lewis and Clark revival occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when the journals were published again after an 80-year hiatus. Americans were remembering the trip only after the West had been settled, the Indians had been wiped out, and the frontier closed. During the years that the empire was actually being built, at the time of settlement and conquest, Americans hadn't cared at all about Lewis and Clark.
After World War I, says Ronda, the expedition was ignored again. University of Texas historian William Goetzmann says that when he was writing his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West in the mid-'60s, he wasn't even going to include Lewis and Clark, but "my publisher talked me into it."
But by the late '60s, Americans had rediscovered Lewis and Clark, and their fervor has not flagged since. The creation of the 3,700-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in 1978 made the story accessible in a way that history rarely is. Millions of people have followed Lewis and Clark's footsteps and oar-swings since the trail opened. Ambrose's book attracted tens of thousands of new fans to the tale. The expedition's various appeal—ecological, patriotic, diverse, literary, thrill-seeking—gives it traction. More and more Americans read directly from the captains' journals, whose blunt, direct, and oddly beautiful language makes the story live. And the United States, as Ronda notes, is a country that loves road stories, and there is none more vivid or exciting than Lewis and Clark's.
But our fascination with Lewis and Clark is much more about us than about them. The expedition is a useful American mythology: How a pair of hardy souls and their happy-go-lucky multiculti flotilla discovered Eden, befriended the Indian, and invented the American West. The myth of Lewis and Clark papers over the grittier story of how the United States conquered the land, tribe by slaughtered, betrayed tribe.
Lewis and Clark didn't give Americans any of the tools they required to settle the continent—not new technology, not a popular narrative, not a good route, not arable land. It didn't matter. Nineteenth-century pioneers were bound to take the great West, with or without Lewis and Clark. Their own greed, ambition, bravery, and desperation guaranteed it. They did not need Lewis and Clark to conquer and build the West. But we do need Lewis and Clark to justify having done it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2150568

Chicago History Museum

City planners were right -- and wrong
Museum puts centuries of the famous and the dubious together

October 2, 2006
BY TOM McNAMEE, Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

When I was a kid, we called any vacant lot full of weeds a "prairie," which seemed stupid to me at the time. Even I knew, from watching cowboy shows, that a prairie was an endless field of grass where pioneers lived in log cabins.

The prairie at the end of my block, on 79th Street, didn't have even one pioneer -- just old tires and bottles and a rusted-out radio and a broken lamp and a waterlogged pile of porn magazines.

I'd tell my mother, "I'm going to the prairie," and she'd say, "Watch out for broken glass," not knowing about the porn.

But when I grew older, it occurred to me that calling an undeveloped lot on the edge of the city a prairie made perfect sense -- because it was a prairie. It may have been hemmed in on all sides by buildings and streets, but nothing had ever been built on it, meaning it was a tiny remnant of those great grassy fields that swayed in the wind before Chicago was Chicago.

That's the fascination of Chicago: It's been built and rebuilt in a hurry, one brilliant or asinine layer thrown up over another, and the old days still poke through, like arrowheads in a garden.

"The past, present and future, all right in front of you," agreed Russell Lewis, chief historian for the Chicago History Museum. "If you know how to look."

The museum -- previously called the Chicago Historical Society -- reopened Saturday after a complete renovation and redesign. Exhibit space has been tripled.

I met Lewis on Friday while visiting the museum to see what's new. I told him that I like learning about Chicago's past because it makes the day-to-day experience of living here that much deeper. When I walk across a bridge over the Chicago River, I imagine French voyageurs paddling upstream. When I drive up Ridge Avenue, it sometimes occurs to me that this was once an Indian trail -- the high ground in a swampy land.

"And it was the rim of Lake Chicago," Lewis said, referring to a prehistoric glacial lake that shrank to become Lake Michigan. "I do the same thing."

The museum is a terrific place to begin learning about Chicago's history, Lewis said, which is why its motto is "Chicago begins here." But nothing, he said, beats exploring the city firsthand.

"The really great artifact is the city itself," he said. "It's an accumulation of our ancestors' dreams, some of them wrong and some good."

A tavern on the river
Learn enough of Chicago's history, and after a while a ghost city moves alongside the living one.

When I look out a south window of the newsroom at the Chicago Sun-Times, I see the curved green facade of the 333 W. Wacker Building. Right about where that building stands, I often remember, was the famous Sauganash Tavern, opened in 1826 by a fiddle-playing French Canadian, Mark Beaubien. I try to imagine the drinking parties there, on the bend of a river in the middle of nowhere.

When I walk past Holy Name Cathedral, I look for the bullet holes in the stones from when, in 1926, Hymie Weiss was gunned down outside the cathedral, probably by Al Capone's boys.

When I sit in St. Gabriel's Catholic Church on the South Side, I imagine how the hush and splendor of this landmark building must have soothed my paternal grandmother, who came alone to this country when she was only a teen. She cleaned houses for a living. I wonder if she sat in these pews, with the choir and the Latin mass, and felt like she was back in Ireland.

Touchstones of Chicago history are everywhere, once you get to looking, and it almost becomes a game of six degrees of separation.

I walk across Michigan Avenue at Wacker Drive and remember that Fort Dearborn stood here.

That gets me to thinking about how all the land east of Michigan Avenue at one time didn't exist. It was created by dumping fill into the lake.

That, in turn, gets me to thinking about the Chicago Fire of 1871, the source of much of that landfill. The city had to do something with all the rubble.

And that, of course, gets me to thinking about Mrs. O'Leary and her famous cow, the one that legend has it kicked over the lantern that started the fire. The legend is false, as it happens, probably made up by a newspaper reporter.

That gets me to thinking about the Chicago Fire Academy, which appropriately stands on the site of the O'Leary barn.

And that, finally, makes me think of Manny's, around the corner from the academy. It's the best Jewish deli in town, and I'm hungry. I should go there for lunch.

Old times no longer old
The more Chicago history I learn, the more time contracts. Old times no longer seem so old, and the people in all those old photos no longer look so different.

At the History Museum, I stare at a photo of a woman in a boat in 1893 and I think, you know, she's got great eyes.

Consider this: If a man who is 88 years old today was held at birth by a man who was 85 years old then, the lives of just those two men have spanned the entire history of Chicago -- from 1833, when the city incorporated as a village, to now.

Chicago is so young.

One of the benefits of studying local history, Lewis said, is that we begin to see that nothing was preordained or destined. Chicago is what it is, for better or worse, because real people made real decisions.

Our civic ancestors decided the lakefront should be free and clear (great idea). They decided the poor should live in high-rise public housing (bad idea). They decided to bulldoze much of the Near West Side to build the University of Illinois at Chicago (good idea -- and bad).

"Nothing had to happen as it did," Lewis said. "Right or wrong, people made decisions. That's what you learn. You have to make decisions."

When I drive down the Kennedy Expy., I often notice all the houses and apartment buildings facing the road. How odd, I used to think, that anybody would build a house facing an expressway.

And then one day it hit me -- the houses came first, and the expressway came second. Before the Kennedy wiped out whole blocks, those houses faced other houses on quiet streets.

But somebody made a decision.

And now, on the Kennedy, I drive through ghost neighborhoods.

Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" runs Mondays in the Sun-Times.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/mcnamee/79735,CST-NWS-mcnamee02.article

Neighborhood spirit remembered at reunion

Neighborhood spirit remembered at reunion
 
By James Lomuscio
Special Correspondent

Published October 2 2006

WESTPORT -- Ed McGuinness remembers Washington Village of the late 1930s as a segregated neighborhood.

"A road ran right through Washington Village with blacks on one side and whites on the other," he said of the Norwalk neighborhood.

There was de facto ethnic segregation in the city as well, he recalled, with Italian, Irish, Hungarian and French-Canadian groups each in their own enclaves.

Still, McGuinness said there was one place where race and ethnicity didn't matter: St. Joseph's Elementary School, a Roman Catholic first- through eighth-grade school on South Norwalk's Main Street.

"We all lived in separate little neighborhoods, but in class none of that was allowed," said McGuinness, who graduated from St. Joseph's in 1945.

He said the Sisters of Mercy nuns demanded "we all had to get along with each other, and we played with each other out in the school yard."

These were some of the memories McGuiness and nearly 100 other alumni from the classes of 1943 to 1953 shared as they gathered for a multiclass reunion at Nistico's Red Barn Restaurant yesterday afternoon.

Though their old, brown brick, three-story school building had been demolished in 1972 --Êand its replacement building was closed by the Diocese of Bridgeport in the late 1980s --Êvivid memories and the spirit of St. Joseph's as an egalitarian force in a diverse yet divided city prevailed.

"Everyone was ethnically equal, and we were not even aware of cultural lines at school," recalled Terry Fontaine, Class of 1946, who grew up in a French-Canadian neighborhood on Woodward Avenue. "We all blended in. We were the new Americans."

Her allegiance toward her alma mater remains strong, even though amenities at St. Joseph's were sparse by today's standards.

"We either walked to school or rode our bikes," she said. "And there was no gymnasium. We played out in the yard, the girls on one side jumping rope or playing marbles, and the boys on the other side playing ball or flipping baseball cards against the side of the building.

"And we had no cafeteria, either," she added. "We went home for lunch."

What the school did offer, however, was a strong education shored up by religious values, she said.

"The emphasis was not only on the three Rs, but on respect and responsibility, the five Rs," said Fontaine, who later went to Sacred Heart Academy in Stamford and Danbury State Teachers College before teaching at Norwalk's Brookside Elementary School for 36 years.

St. Joseph's, like many other neighborhood Catholic schools in Fairfield County, closed with a diocesan reorganization under Bishop Edward Egan. The space St. Joseph's once occupied now houses the Side-By-Side Charter School, which is leased from the diocese. Today, Norwalk has one regional, pre-kindergarten through eighth grade Catholic school, All Saints Catholic School on West Rocks Road.

St. Joseph's Parish, however, remains active and has such a large Haitian Catholic congregation that some Masses are celebrated in Creole.ÊÊ

"Why a reunion after all these years?" asked Roger Ratchford who graduated from St. Joseph's in 1947. "Because we're talking about people who were first- and second-generation American, people who spoke Italian, French and Hungarian at home, but who had a bond here. And they all prospered under the Sisters of Mercy."

ÊRatchford, who went on to Fairfield Preparatory School, College of the Holy Cross and Boston College before returning to teach languages at Fairfield Prep, said the most important thing he took away from St. Joseph's was self-discipline.

"Self-discipline is a real basic premise that works well for any learning enterprise," saidÊRatchford, who received General Excellence upon his graduation from St. Joseph's and was valedictorian at Fairfield Prep.

Matilda Ragosa Valley, Class of 1946, came from Pittsburgh for the reunion.

"I came because it was an important part of our lives, and I wanted to see how they were all doing," she said.

Although many of St. Joseph's graduates have moved away, Vera Santangelo Marchese of Norwalk still attends Mass at St. Joseph's and keeps the spirit of her school alive.

"The people were wonderful, the classes were great, and we kept in touch for many years," she said.

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-nor.oldschool4oct02,0,4937369.story?coll=stam-news-local-headlines

Quebec: Last gasp for tobacco growers

Last gasp for tobacco growers
They're a dwindling bunch, but Quebec tobacco growers are firm 'there's nothing like it,' says one
 
MARK CARDWELL, Freelance
Published: Sunday, October 01, 2006
The Gazette (Montreal)

To hear Robin Janson tell it, tobacco growing is the most beautiful profession in the world.
"There's nothing else like it," the third-generation grower said this month as he watched workers harvest ripe tobacco leaves on his farm in this rural village, a half-hour drive northeast of downtown Montreal.
"It's a clean product, it smells good, and you only have to work six months a year."
Those are just a few of the reasons Janson refuses to give up tobacco. One of 60 growers in operation in Quebec in 2003, when Canada's three cigarette giants - Imperial Tobacco, Rothman's/Benson & Hedges and RJR Macdonald - stopped buying here, he is now one of only four farmers who can legally grow tobacco in la belle province.
The four men, in their 40s and 50s, have so far have spurned government offers to buy their quotas and help wean them off tobacco production, although one of them is wavering, according to Janson. They are the last of a dying breed of farming craftsmen in Quebec, the province's last official suppliers to a despised industry.
Since May, when the province's agricultural and food marketing board announced it was closing the office that had represented Quebec tobacco growers since 1957, the four have been operating as independents in a deregulated, laissez-faire market.
By law in Quebec, at least 10 producers must be active in a sector for it to benefit from a government-funded office that, in the case of tobacco, help set production levels, quotas and prices at the start of each growing season.
"It hasn't been easy," said Janson, 42, who will sell his entire tobacco harvest this year - like last - to Dynasty Compagnie de Tabac of St. Laurent, the biggest of Quebec's few independent cigarette makers. "The industry's been hell in recent years and the risks are high."
Dynasty manufactures Trad cigarettes, named after company owner Alain Trad and sold in depanneurs across the province.
To be sure, tobacco growing has become a difficult row to hoe in Quebec.
According to Gaetan Beaulieu, a former tobacco grower and the last president of the closed office, the industry in Quebec reached an all-time high just 20 years ago when it produced 15.5 million pounds. "That's a lot less than the 90 million pounds or so Ontario tobacco growers were producing every year back then," he said. "But the industry here provided good money for about 150 farmers and good-paying jobs for about 1,500 seasonal workers."
Since then, he added, high tobacco taxes, anti-smoking campaigns, free trade and - above all - the decision by the big tobacco companies to stop buying tobacco in Quebec, have all but killed the market. The result has been the rapid and dramatic decline of one of the most lucrative and most technically challenging fields of agriculture in Quebec history.
"It's sad," said Beaulieu, now a reluctant vegetable farmer and the head of the newly created Association des producteurs du tabac du Quebec, which represents the 56 growers who have abandoned tobacco farming since 2003 and now are fighting for millions of dollars in additional aid money from the federal government. "It's the end of an era."
While that may be cause for jubilation in anti-smoking quarters, the fact remains that tobacco - and tobacco growing - are as deeply rooted in Canadian history as cod fishing and the fur trade.
According to a history of tobacco on the website of Imperial Tobacco, by far Canada's biggest cigarette maker, French settlers grew tobacco from the earliest days of New France, and were trading "tabac canadien" back to the mother country by 1652.
Two centuries later, when smoking - particularly pipe smoking - had become a worldwide pastime, Quebec was producing 1.2 million pounds of burley pipe tobacco. That was almost three times as much as neighbouring Ontario. By 1910, when Canadian tobacco production reached 17.5 million pounds, Quebec was still the country's main producer.
The soaring demand for cigarettes then had a profound impact on the North American tobacco-growing industry. Among other things, it led to a more sophisticated curing method and the development of flue-curing or Virginia tobacco, a variety that was introduced to Canada in the early 1920s.
Thanks to its warmer climate, southwestern Ontario was the focal point of government and tobacco company investments and initiatives aimed at raising production rates. As a result, Ontario was producing more than 90 per cent of all tobacco grown in Canada when the Depression began.
It wasn't until the late 1930s that the Quebec government, through its network of local agronomists, began encouraging farmers in fertile rural counties north and east of Montreal to produce flue-cured tobacco.
Among the first to respond in Lanaudiere was Janson's grandfather, Maximillien. A prosperous dairy farmer with 12 kids in l'Assomption, he bought a second farm - the one Robin Janson now owns - and started growing tobacco in 1939.
"An agronomist told my father that tobacco was going to be the next big thing in agriculture," recalled Maximillien's youngest son and Robin's dad, Roland Janson. "He was right."
According to Roland, the main attraction of tobacco was strong demand - and high prices. "We always sold everything we grew," said Roland, who bought his father's farm in 1952.
Back then, he got 40 cents a pound for tobacco, by far the most money for any cash crop in Quebec. He was getting five times that amount when he sold the family business to Robin in 1994. Despite being - and partly because he is - one of only four growers left in the province, Robin will get $2.50 a pound this year, an all-time high. "There's always been good money in tobacco," Roland said .
The sandy soil of the Janson farm, which is good for growing tobacco, also makes the production process far less gritty than traditional crops.
"Tobacco is a lot cleaner because you don't have to deal with all the mud and dirt like you do with richer soils," said Robin Janson, who on Friday finished curing the 130,000 pounds of tobacco he harvested this year.
"And we don't have to use much pesticide because (tobacco) is a tropical plant and it doesn't have any natural enemies here."
An added pleasure, he said, comes from knowing how to produce such a specialized crop. Begun in greenhouses in April and planted in open fields in mid-May, when the threat of frost has passed, tobacco plants grow quickly and require intense irrigation to allow them to develop large root systems.
Like with tomato plants, the tops of tobacco plants are cut off in July. According to Janson, that allows the sap to run into the plants' huge yellowy-green leaves, making them grow even bigger and producing a sweeter taste.
Depending on the weather ("the hotter the better for tobacco," he said), harvest starts in mid-August, when the spinach-like leaves are ripe. Because the leaves ripen progressively from the bottom of the plant to the top, tobacco is usually picked six times, with three leaves taken per pick and six leaves in the final pick.
Once a back-breaking chore that was the bane of tobacco growers and a generation of mostly young, francophone Quebecers, picking is now done using "taxi-harvesters." On the Janson farm, four to six people ride on the undercarriage of the $100,000 machine, picking leaves by hand as it moves slowly through the fields. Piled in metal bins face up, with the tips facing the same direction, the leaves are then taken to kilns on the property, where they are dried and cured.
Janson says the craft of curing tobacco is as complex and rewarding as making wine, beer or bread. "Nothing is harder to do than dry tobacco," he said. "It takes a lifetime to master. My dad's been telling me how for 20 years and I'm still learning new things. It never ends."
Three years ago, however, it almost did. After years of declining demand for their deadly product, the three Canadian tobacco giants told Quebec producers they no would longer buy their product. Instead, they concentrated their domestic purchases in Ontario, and imported cheaper grades of tobacco from places like Brazil, China and Zimbabwe.
"Production here wasn't large enough to sustain the different variety of grades we needed," said Catherine Doyle, a spokesperson for Imperial Tobacco, the last of the Big Three to buy tobacco in Quebec.
She added that the tobacco giant, which subsequently closed its Montreal cigarette plant, was "praised" for having stayed in the Quebec market until a federally funded exit strategy could be put in place to help tobacco growers leave the industry.
Quebec producers, however, have a different version of events. Many had invested tens of thousands of dollars just a year or two earlier to update the heat-exchange systems in their kilns - a change imposed on them by the tobacco companies.
"We got screwed there," Beaulieu said. "That investment put a lot of producers in a vulnerable financial position."
The tobacco companies, he added, also bought the entire harvest of Quebec producers in 2002 without saying a word about what was coming. "They just pulled the plug on us," said Beaulieu. "It was a hit we didn't see coming and it really hurt. There was a mix of anger, depression and panic among producers. Most just wanted to pay their debts and get out."
The federal government's $67-million aid package was designed to do just that by helping tobacco farmers in Quebec and Ontario convert to alternative crops - everything from ginseng, lavender and hemp to asparagus, sweetcorn, strawberries and cucumbers.
The entire fund was spent buying production quotas at $1.05 a pound, close to the going market rate in 2003. "They cleaned out our piggy bank," said Tom Shenstone, director-general for policy planning and policy integration at Agriculture Canada.
He added that the money, which was distributed with no strings attached - other than a promise to quit growing tobacco - helped 275 of Ontario's 800 tobacco growers leave the industry. In Quebec, 56 producers sold their quotas, leaving only Janson and three others the last legal tobacco growers in the province.
The former producers, however, are far from happy. Together with their Ontario colleagues, they are asking Ottawa for $1.1 billion more in aid. "We need more money," Beaulieu said .
"It's very difficult to switch into new areas where other producers are already operating and we're way behind the eight ball."
He said, too, that few crops are as lucrative or satisfying to grow as tobacco. "I'm growing pickles and squash now," Beaulieu said. "Squashes are really boring."
Despite feelings of failure, he added that that many ex-growers have no regrets about leaving the tobacco industry. "Most are happy to have avoided bankruptcy and kept their farms," Beaulieu said. "Now that the industry is deregulated, the risks are really high. The guys who stayed in are very brave."
For Robin Janson, continuing to grow tobacco is less about courage than it is a desire to keep a family tradition alive and a reflection of his bullish outlook on the future of the tobacco industry in Quebec.
"As far as I can tell, a lot of people still smoke here," said Janson, a lifelong non-smoker. "I figure that as long as they are, they'll prefer to smoke the quality stuff we grow here in Quebec rather than the crap the big tobacco companies are importing from the Third World."
Like most farmers, he also hopes that one day he'll be able pass the family farm on to his 7-year-old son, Jocelyn. "Why not," he said. "A fourth generation would be nice. But you never can tell what the future holds."
Smoking, 16th-century style: 'They claim it keeps them warm and in good health'
On his second voyage to Canada in 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier was amazed to see Indians smoking tobacco at Hochelaga, today the island of Montreal. "Men alone use it," Cartier noted in his journal, the first written observation of tobacco use in Canada. "After drying it in the sun, they carry it around their necks wrapped up in the skin of a small animal, like a sack, with a hollow piece of stone or wood.
"When the spirit moves them, they pulverize this herb and place it at one end, lighting it with a firebrand, and draw on the other end so long that they fill their bodies with smoke until it comes out of their mouth and nostrils as from a chimney. They claim it keeps them warm and in good health. They never travel without this herb."
A continent-wide symbol of peace among native North Americans, who smoked pipes to conclude treaties or as a sign of friendship, tobacco use quickly spread among Europeans.
While history credits - or blames - Sir Walter Raleigh for being the first to export tobacco from North America to Europe, Jean Nicot, a French ambassador who lauded the plant's curative powers in the royal court, lent his name to tobacco's botanical moniker, nicotiana.
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/insight/story.html?id=50a2b97e-467a-4c79-ad20-658e8bc73ebb

Pink's a little too rosy for this patient

COLUMN
Pink's a little too rosy for this patient

By Bill Nemitz
Sunday, October 1, 2006

Everywhere Sharon Pierotti goes these days, she sees pink. Pink ribbons, pink labels on yogurt containers, even pink-dressed Barbie dolls -- all part of the crusade against breast cancer.
"For me, it's not quite pink," Pierotti said last week. "Pink isn't really the color."
She's 42. She's the single mother of a 10-year-old girl. Five years ago, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer -- and to be honest, it's been downhill ever since.
Pierotti has endured a double mastectomy and removal of her ovaries. She's undergone all kinds of chemotherapy, radiation, bone scans and CT scans. Yet the cancer, first detected in her lymph nodes, now has spread to her liver.
In short, as a Stage 4 breast cancer patient, Pierotti's future looks grim. The same woman who over the years ran three marathons, played golf avidly and taught yoga, now finds herself with no hair beneath her baseball cap, struggling some days just to make it from her shower to her couch.
Which brings us back to the "pink campaign." With today's arrival of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, all things pink will be used to raise money for breast cancer research and to celebrate those lucky enough to have survived the dreaded disease.
Pierotti's problem?
"There are a large number of women who have metastatic breast cancer and aren't going to be cured," she said. "You never see that. That's never talked about."
She has a point. Click on the Ford Motor Co.'s breast cancer Web page and you'll hear the rat-a-tat of drums over the words, "In every woman there is a believer, a survivor, a fighter. A Warrior in Pink." The site goes on to advertise "Warrior Gear" T shirts and bandanas and a sweepstakes in which the winner gets a Warriors in Pink Prize Package -- including a brand new Ford Fusion and a visit to the set of ABC's hit show "Grey's Anatomy."
"There's this sense out there that it's all about attitude," Pierotti said. "Which is really nice to say for the folks who don't make it. Like what, they didn't try hard enough?"
She understands that some might not want to hear this. And she appreciates that the more positive the spin on the array of "pink" events over the coming month, the more successful they will be.
All Pierotti asks is that we remember what she calls "the ugly side to the pretty pink campaign." The side that isn't about celebrations and survival. The side on which she finds herself along with thousands of other women who know deep down that all the pink ribbons in the world can't save them.
"We're still here," Pierotti said. "And we're not part of the fluff."
No, she's not giving up. She considers every day she gets to spend with her daughter, Ellie, a small victory. She thanks God for her family and friends, who come running whenever she needs them.
Nor, on the other hand, will she pin false hopes on something so intangible as a color.
"Believe me," Pierotti said. "I don't want to stomp on what they're doing. But maybe we need another color."
Such as?
Pierotti thought about it for a moment. Then she chuckled.
"Oh, I don't know," she said. "Is there an off-pink?"
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com


Reader comments


Rhea of Brewer, ME
Oct 2, 2006 10:42 AM
I am a 20 yr., 2-time survivor, and I was 33 the first time I was diagnosed BEFORE the Pink Ribbon campaign began to raise awareness about this disease. I designed a pin, to combat the negatives for me...the pin is Red, in keeping with the colors of the American Cancer Society, from which the breast cancer movement took its identity at the time.
The design represents the effect which breast cancer leaves upon the woman who contracts the disease; the pain of loss and the subsequent scars of surgery. The pin is inscribed with the Gregg Shorthand® word for breast, it also gives the outline of a breast, its shadow and the scar cancer leaves, actual or psychological. The design's shape also represents a calligraphic "W" for woman. The white circle symbolizes the feeling of wholeness to which a woman returns in coming to terms with her disease. The color red was chosen because that was the color the breast cancer movement was using at the time. This was just before the change was made to pink and pink ribbons became the symbol of best breast health. This pin is a status symbol for the survivor. This pin was designed in 1993 and shorthand, a written language known mostly by women, is used to represent the silence, secretiveness, and struggle that defines a woman's life who has to learn the lesson of breast cancer which often lasts for many years beyond the actual event(s).
The pin can be seen at:

http://www.fawi.net/BC/bestbreasthealth.html

paula of new sharon, me
Oct 1, 2006 7:25 PM
Bravos to Mz. Pierotti! The women in my family
have not been survivors. I, with spots in my breasts which at this time are neg.cancer cells,
don't view pink as such a 'hot' color either. I've lost my Mom, my sister and maternal aunts to this unhappy disease. Survivors should wear pink
and I choose Bile it really is a beautiful deep
green, more real. You are a great woman Mz. Pierotti, thank you for your courage and love.
Paula

Janet of Windham, ME
Oct 1, 2006 1:13 PM
Three cheers for Sharon's courage to speak the truth that nobody wants to hear. I am a breast cancer survivor, and all the pink sunglasses, keychains, mugs, etc. do not mask the horror that cancer patients have to endure. Find out what Breast Cancer Action has to say about stamps before you hand over the six extra cents for your postage. Why not offer to help pay the utility bills for a patient facing extreme hardship due to the mountain of medical expenses and reduction of income resulting from disability insurance? I invite readers to check out the "Think Before You Pink" campaign, easily found through a Google search. The time has come to stop bowing to the marketing campaign, face the truth and take some meaningful action. A big hug for you, Sharon. My prayers are with you.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/nemitz/061001nemitz.html?com_sent=1

UNE leader takes reins amid growth

UNE leader takes reins amid growth

By KEVIN WACK, Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006

UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND
ENROLLMENT: 3,534

DEGREES: Associate degrees in dental hygiene and nursing; bachelor's degrees in sciences, education, liberal studies and business; graduate programs in health and marine sciences, education and social work; D.O. medical degree and several certificate programs.

UNE HISTORY1831: Westbrook College is founded in Portland for post-high school education. By the 1860s, it becomes a formal co-educational college and in the 1920s is reinvented as a two-year women's college.

1939: Canadian Franciscan fathers open a high school and junior college in Biddeford to educate young men with a Franco-American background.

1953: The Franciscans expand the college -- called St. Francis -- to a four-year liberal arts program.

1967: Women are admitted to St. Francis College.

1970s: The Franciscans withdraw from running the college.

1978: The University of New England of Osteopathic Medicine opens its doors on the campus of the former St. Francis College with an entering class of 36 students.

1992: Westbrook College becomes part of the University of New England.

Source: University of New England
The sky was sunny throughout the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the inauguration of the University of New England's fifth president.
By accepting the school's presidential medallion, Danielle Ripich took responsibility for ensuring that the university's future is as bright as Saturday's early-autumn weather.
Ripich is taking the reins of a small but rapidly growing school. In just the past four years, UNE's enrollment has grown by almost 50 percent.
UNE also has burgeoning research ambitions. The private university is home to the state's only medical school, and it hopes to open Maine's first pharmacy college by 2008.
One of Ripich's biggest challenges will be balancing the push for more research with the need to strengthen UNE's roots as a teaching college. In an interview last week, she stressed that both goals are important as the university begins to map its future with a 10-year strategic plan.
Ripich said her top priority is to find more teaching space for UNE's College of Arts and Sciences, which has added more than 450 students since 2002.
"A good arts and sciences college is at the heart of any great university," she said.
Sam McReynolds, who chairs the faculty assembly of UNE's College of Arts and Sciences, will be watching to see whether the incoming president's words translate into action. He believes the campus needs more liberal arts professors, as well as more teaching space.
"We think she is aware of what our needs are," McReynolds said. "But the proof is always in the pudding, and that will take time."
McReynolds, a sociology professor who has been on UNE's faculty for 15 years, said that his college's needs have sometimes been neglected -- or at least taken a back seat to research and other priorities at UNE.
"The jury's still out on whether we're going to be able to do the things we need to do in our college," he said.
There's no question that Ripich will also hear from vocal advocates for research.
"One of her charges, I think, is going to be to continue to develop research and scholarship," said Ed Bilsky, a pharmacology professor who is also chair of UNE's Faculty Senate. "I think most people understand you can't be 100 percent tuition- driven."
UNE's Biddeford campus is located near the mouth of the Saco River, and Ripich said there's an opportunity for the school to specialize in research on how marine life intersects with human health.
She also hopes to expand the school's research in clinical medicine and pharmacology. To that end, a pharmacy school would be a boon.
Ripich, a speech pathologist who specializes in communicating with Alzheimer's patients, came to UNE from the Medical University of South Carolina, where she was dean of the College of Health Professions.
Although she was inaugurated Saturday, she's actually been on the job for three months.
Dr. Boyd Buser, dean of UNE's College of Osteopathic Medicine, said he's been impressed by her ability to quickly understand complex issues.
"I've found her to be a clear communicator and energetic, very anxious to learn everything she can about the university, and very motivated to make her decisions based on the best evidence available to her," Buser said.
Ripich said that in her initial weeks on the job, she's tried to strike the right balance between observation and action.
"If you don't move, then they think you don't have any vision, and you're not moving ahead," she said. "But if you move too fast, then you really run the risk of getting too far ahead of everybody."
She has ambitious goals for a school with more modest roots than some of Maine's other private colleges. UNE grew out of two small teaching colleges in Portland and Biddeford.
"UNE's reputation has grown significantly over the past two decades," Ripich said during her inaugural speech on the university's Biddeford campus. "But our star can rise higher and shine brighter, and I intend to lead us toward the kind of excellence that commands wider and greater recognition."
She recounted the story of a chance encounter she had with a stranger shortly after she moved to Maine."We began chatting and I introduced myself and told him that I had just moved to UNE," Ripich said. "He said, 'Oh, I know UNE. That's the little school with the big dreams."'

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/061001une.html

BRANCHEZ-VOUS!

BRANCHEZ-VOUS!

Attention Business/Financial Editors:

LeDevoir.com joins the BRANCHEZ-VOUS! Network
MONTREAL, Oct. 2 /CNW Telbec/ - BRANCHEZ-VOUS! announces that the daily
newspaper Le Devoir gave it a mandate to sell national advertising on its web
site, LeDevoir.com (www.ledevoir.com).
With over 200,000 unique visitors in French Canada and over five million
page views per month, LeDevoir.com is one of the main news and information
sites in Québec.
"Thanks to its unique expertise in the Internet advertising market and
with the reach of its network, BRANCHEZ-VOUS! will allow us to get the
advertising revenues we should derive from our high-quality content and our
influential readership", says Catherine Laberge, vice-president, finance and
administration of the newspaper Le Devoir.
"We are particularly proud to represent this jewel of the French-Canadian
Internet, says Patrick Pierra, CEO of BRANCHEZ-VOUS!. This site strengthens
the News, Business and Technology group within our network. We see, among
others, a significant potential in combined sales with our portal
BRANCHEZ-VOUS.com, as an alternative to other portals like Canoe, Cyberpresse
and Radio-Canada."
Also, BRANCHEZ-VOUS! announces that it began, in the past few weeks, to
represent several other web sites, including :

<<
- Le Lien Multimedia (www.lienmultimedia.com), the reference site of the
multimedia industry in Québec;

- Palmares.ca (www.palmares.ca), the new site selling music online from
Astral Media;

- Supernews.ca (www.supernews.ca), an entertainment news site;

- Cine-Horaire.com (www.cine-horaire.com), a practical reference and
listings site for moviegoers;

- MonChar.com (www.monchar.com), a hub for "tuning" fans;

- VersusQuebec.com (www.versusquebec.com), a new sport news site;

- SOScuisine.com (www.soscuisine.com), a bilingual site helping users
smartly plan their meals and grocery shopping; and

- LivingHot.com (www.livinghot.com), an information and community site
for young Anglophones of the Montreal area.
>>

All these sites are now part of the BRANCHEZ-VOUS! Network, which now
include approximately 60 sites and allow advertisers to reach over two thirds
of Quebec Internet users through specialized sites.

About BRANCHEZ-VOUS! inc.

BRANCHEZ-VOUS! inc. is a leading Montreal-based Internet media company.
It owns and operates BRANCHEZ-VOUS.com (www.branchez-vous.com), the largest
independent portal in Quebec, which primarily targets an audience of active
adult users working in and/or interested by technology; and it operates the
BRANCHEZ-VOUS! Network, the largest French-language Internet advertising
network, comprised of approximately 50 web sites - including the French
version of Canada411, LeDevoir.com, LesPAC.com and approximately ten sites
owned and operated by Astral Media. According to data from Comscore
MediaMetrix, the BRANCHEZ-VOUS! Network reaches over 2.5 million French
Canadians every month.
BRANCHEZ-VOUS! is listed on the TSX Venture exchange under the symbol BZV
and has approximately 29.2 million shares outstanding. Additional information
on the Corporation can be obtained on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and at
www.branchez-vous.com/inc/english

The TSX Venture exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the
contents of this press release.


For further information: Patrick Pierra, President and CEO, (514)
842-3838 ext. 249 or Nicholas Powell, Investor Relations Consultant, (514)
904-0084; http://www.branchez-vous.com/contacts/

http://www.cnw.ca/fr/releases/archive/October2006/02/c3901.html

Harvest break

Harvest break
As the need for potato-pickers declines, Aroostook County questions its autumn tradition, when teenagers work the fields.

By Jenna Russell, Boston Globe Staff  |  October 1, 2006

Watch the film:
http://www.fawi.net/blog/potato.mov
Potato Harvest

CARIBOU, Maine -- To the teenagers toiling in the dirt at the Holmes farm last month, picking potatoes was anything but nostalgic. The sun beat down on their heads, and the wind blew dust into their eyes. Their backs ached from bending and crouching. Sometimes they cracked jokes to break the monotony as they made their slow way along the seemingly endless rows of potatoes.

To the adults who paused to watch the pickers fill their handmade wooden baskets -- farmer Dale Holmes ; his wife, Phyllis ; other older Mainers who stopped to snap pictures -- the sight of the old-fashioned harvest was something rare to be savored.

For generations, the potatoes grown in northern Maine were picked by hand, during several weeks each autumn when an army of children, let out of school for the harvest, put down their books and pick up potato baskets. Across vast Aroostook County, where striped farmland rolls away in every direction, almost every family helped harvest potatoes. The experience forged a common bond across the region, even among strangers, and people in the region say it taught them lasting lessons about hard work and perseverance.

The old way of picking potatoes has nearly disappeared in northern Maine. Only three or four potato farms still pick their crops by hand, out of about 280 total farms, according to the Maine Potato Board; the rest harvest with machines. In Caribou, seven hours north of Boston, the Holmeses are easing into retirement and say this fall will probably be their last big harvest. Partly out of nostalgia, they chose to handpick their six acres.

So pervasive is the sense of vanishing tradition, even younger people lament the passing of the old ways.

``That was what Maine was about -- you'd get up before the sun, and everyone you knew would be there," said Adam Bither , 23, of Linneus. ``The older guys would play tricks on you, and you learned how to earn your own money. And sometimes people would stop to help just for fun."

Though just a fraction of students still work in the fields, most schools still close for ``harvest recess." Some school districts are reconsidering the traditional calendar, which requires schools to open early, in mid-August, to make up for the fall break. But some farmers say the break is still essential, because they hire older students to drive the harvest machines. And some families say they are deeply attached to the custom, despite the diminishing need for it, because it connects them to the past.

In Hodgdon, a town of about 1,200 people, school officials recently shortened the harvest break for elementary school pupils to one week. High school students still get three weeks off. In nearby Houlton, a larger town where the break is three weeks for all grades, the school board is considering a similar update. A recent survey of Houlton parents indicated that 70 percent favored a change.

``You're so torn," said Lisa Winship of Hodgdon, a mother of two whose husband is a farmer. ``You want to support the farmers, but you see the benefit of not having three weeks off -- especially for the little ones, who lose all that information they just learned."

Maine potato farming has declined since its peak early last century, when the crop covered some 200,000 acres and dominated the economy. Today, about 57,000 acres are farmed, and hundreds of small family farms have been consolidated into larger, more efficient operations. Partly because of the shift in farming, Aroostook County has lost about 20,000 residents since 1980.

But farming remains a cornerstone of life in the region.

``In our economy, farming is huge," said Franklin McElwain , a farmer and the school superintendent in Caribou, where a recent survey suggested that less than a quarter of students work the harvest. ``The farms only need a handful of people, but where are they going to come from for three weeks?"

On a crisp September morning at the Holmes farm, 10 students, mostly teenage males, gathered in a field behind the white farmhouse at 7 a.m. They pulled on cloth gloves and stowed their lunch bags in the dirt. Most had never picked a potato until the start of the harvest a few days earlier.

``You ready to work hard?" Holmes asked, looking down from the seat of his noisy, red tractor.

Potato picking calls for endurance -- pickers must kneel, bend over, or squat for hours -- but little skill or strength. A machine known as a digger does the hardest work, pulling the potatoes from the earth and dropping them behind it in the dirt. On most farms, a machine called a harvester then suctions up the vegetables. At the Holmes farm, teenagers pick them up instead.

Paid just 60 cents per barrel, most would earn no more than $20 for the day. Pickers drop potatoes in large, round baskets, then dump the baskets into sturdy wooden barrels sprawled along the rows, producing a sound like rumbling thunder. Five or six heavy baskets fill one 165-pound barrel.

``People think we're stupid for working for 60 cents a barrel, but I don't care," said Kody Hornick , 15.

Hornick swigged some caffeinated soda, then used his cellphone's built-in calculator to figure his profits. His first day out, he picked 20 barrels, but the next day, he said, he felt sick and left early, after seven barrels. Altogether, he had earned $16.20.

``I'll probably leave after lunch," he said, sounding deflated.

Some farmers and parents lament the work ethic of today's teenagers. In his day, Holmes said, children often worked until after dark, making 5 or 10 cents per barrel. Cutting out early for track or soccer practice was unheard of.

Many locals recalled picking 80 or 100 barrels a day. Even their children seemed impressed. ``My mom and dad used to pick like a hundred a day," Hornick told his friends as they sat in the dirt to eat lunch.

When Rheal Tardif came to pick up his children for lunch, his daughter Laura, 15, had cleared her section, but his 16-year-old son was still bent over picking. Tardif, 56, a stern French-Canadian native, parked his pickup in the middle of the field and waited.

``I don't believe in leaving potatoes there and going home," he said.

Tardif said he could pick 115 barrels a day as a teenager. ``I think it's about the best lesson you can teach a kid, how hard you can work for your money," he said. But he disapproved of the hourlong lunch break. ``We never had a break like this," he said.

When the harvest is over, and they have sold their 1,000 barrels, the Holmeses will head to Tennessee for the winter. Next spring, they expect to plant no more than an acre or two of potatoes, just enough to sell at their farm stand.

Farming is ``one of the best ways of life there is," Dale Holmes said. But he said he understands why his 17-year-old grandson plans to go to college instead.

Hard as it is, Phyllis Holmes said, change must be accepted.

"There comes a time when you turn the light out and go onto something else," she said.

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/10/01/harvest_break/

Victim made first bus crash call [...what if he could not speak English?]

Victim made first bus crash call

Note: Listen to call
http://www.fawi.net/blog/busaccidentcall.mov
The Call

By: Lohr McKinstry
Staff Writer
September 30, 2006
Plattsburgh Press Republican, NY - Sep 30, 2006

ELIZABETHTOWN — When a Greyhound bus overturned on the Adirondack Northway, killing five people and injuring dozens, the first call for help came from a passenger who was thrown clear of the wreckage.

Five people, including the driver, were killed Aug. 28 when a Greyhound bus bound for Montreal blew a tire and swerved off the Northway in the Town of Elizabethtown, just south of exit 31.

All 49 survivors from the bus were taken to area hospitals, some with critical injuries, but all have since been released.

THE FIRST CALL
The unidentified passenger still had his cell phone when the bus stopped rolling — by some accounts after overturning as many as three times — and he quickly dialed 911.

Sitting at a communications console at Essex County Fire Control, Sheriff's Department Deputy Cheryl Drinkwine picked up the phone at 6:42 p.m.

"Essex County 911. What is your emergency?" she answered.

But what followed was chaotic, with injured passengers screaming in the background, and the caller starting out in French, then switching to English.

Caller: "We just had an accident. Our coach just had an accident on the highway."

Drinkwine: "Where on the highway, sir?"

Caller: "(Interstate) 87 in the direction of Montreal. I really don't know, ma'am, because it's a coach. There's a lot of injuries. People might be dead; I'm not sure."

Drinkwine establishes that the "coach" he's referring to is a Greyhound bus, then keeps trying to get a location.

After the man yells to other passengers, someone tells him they're near mile marker 115, and he relays that to the dispatcher.

"We're going to get someone there right away," Drinkwine tells him.

'IT WAS AWFUL'
The entire call took only a minute and a half, but it was the most harrowing she'd ever received, Drinkwine said.

"It was awful. I couldn't understand him. He spoke in broken English."

The man was apparently a French-Canadian to whom English was a second language.

"I've never had a call like that before. You could tell it was bad," Drinkwine said.

"I tried to calm him down. It seemed like the call was 10 minutes, but it was over within two minutes."

WORKING OVERTIME
Drinkwine had been about to finish her shift, and the call would have been her last before leaving work.

"Instead, I stayed to dispatch. I stayed until 10 (p.m.). There were so many calls."

Sheriff Henry Hommes said his whole day shift stayed over to help. Two deputies, Lloyd Lamont and Shawn LaPier, used their personal vehicles to pick up portable high-intensity lights and take them to the accident site so rescue workers could see as darkness fell.

Other deputies went to the site to join emergency medical personnel, firefighters, County Emergency Services and State Police in helping the survivors.

"I'm very proud of my people," Hommes said. "They did a fine job."

FIRST TO ARRIVE
Essex County Enhanced-911 Coordinator Donald Jaquish said the first dispatch went out at 6:43 p.m., and the first piece of equipment arrived at the crash at 6:54 p.m.

First on the scene was Medic 900, the advanced-life-support-unit from Elizabethtown-Lewis Ambulance Squad.

Medic 900 was staffed by County Emergency Medical Services Deputy Coordinator Patty Bashaw, who made an initial radio transmission based on what she saw.

"We have multiple casualties; some look serious. We have ejections out of the vehicle. The Greyhound is on its top. I'm going to estimate 20 to 30 passengers; we need to call hospitals and find out how many they can take."

By the time it was over, 19 ambulances and a school bus had been used to transport passengers to hospitals, 10 fire departments had been dispatched, and about 150 emergency workers had gone to the crash.

"I think the response was exemplary," Jaquish said. "A lot had to do with learning from previous accidents and having the right people at the scene, the right people to do triage. We had great cooperation with State Police. Everyone worked well together."

http://www.pressrepublican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060930/NEWS/609300311/1001&ts=ts2

Michigan: State library, archives to offer Family History Month programs

State library, archives to offer Family History Month programs
Lansing State Journal, MI
10-1-2006
The Library of Michigan and the Archives of Michigan, 702 W. Kalamazoo St., will offer a series of free workshops throughout October to celebrate Family History Month.

Programs include beginning family history research on Tuesday and Wednesday, military records on Oct. 9 and 10, beginning genealogy for the visually impaired researcher on Oct. 14, organizing family history and genealogy of a house on Oct. 17 and 18, and French-Canadian resources, ship passenger lists and vital records research on Oct. 24 and 25.

To register, go to http://michigan.gov/ familyhistory or speak to a staff member at the genealogy or reference desks.

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061001/NEWS01/610010553/1001/NEWS

Greeneville's Irish history shines

Greeneville's Irish history shines
By BILL STANLEY
For the Norwich Bulletin
October 1, 2006


Bill Stanley photo/Norwich Historical Society
The old Greeneville School, where so many were educated. Its site serves as the location for next week's Greeneville neighborhood block party.

Once upon a time, and really not so long ago, Greeneville was a city unto itself. It was one of Norwich's boroughs, but it had everything: its churches, food stores, industry and a hard-working population.

Old-timers always say, "Greeneville with an 'e,' " because it is named after the man who built the factory, William P. Greene, whose name had an 'e,' and the village developed around his factory.

Back in the 1840s, when Ireland suffered the great famine and also was persecuted by the British, many fled to America. In fact, the Irish came before the famine, for they built the wonderful railroad between Worcester and Norwich, which resulted in Norwich being the port of Worcester.

In the mid 1800s, Norwich served as a gateway to Worcester. The railroad made it quicker and cheaper and would allow heavy cargo to move through Norwich Harbor to Worcester. Norwich was a boom town, and Greeneville was just being born.

So many Irishmen, without a country and no job, were first put to work building the railroad. It was the Irish then who built Ponemah Mill in Taftville. Around that mill was built the village of Taftville and, of course, the mill owned the houses and the store, and the population was totally dependent upon the mill.

The first to work at Ponemah were not happy with the pay. They tried to organize a union, and they were all fired. The Ponemah Mill then imported from Canada the French Canadians to operate the mill. Ponemah was the biggest textile factory in America under one roof. The rooms were 750 feet long and, I believe, 75 feet wide.

With the railroad and Ponemah now built, the Irish were out of work once again. William P. Greene then elected to build his mill along the Shetucket River, and the settlement is now Greeneville. It was the Irish who built the mill and moved from the shanties along the railroad tracks to the mill houses.

The Irish, most of whom were Roman Catholic, established the first Catholic church east of the Connecticut River, St. Mary's. Today, that church still stands, and in beautiful condition, and is the home of A. P. Savage Supply. In time, the U.S. Finishing Co. moved in, as did American Woolen, and Greeneville continued to grow with its factories, churches, schools and stores, also being the city's transportation center. By the turn of the century, the city's car barn, from which all the trolleys traveled, was at the northern intersection of Central Avenue and North Main Street.

Greeneville really is made up of two major arteries. Its industry was mostly along North Main Street and the shores of the Shetucket River, which provided the power for the mills. Central Avenue was the thoroughfare that had the churches, schools, bars and stores. One has to wonder if, 100 years ago, the Leader Store was there. The Navicks are so much a part of Greeneville, one wonders if they were there at the beginning.

In time, the Russian and Polish immigrants moved into Greeneville. Many of the founders were there before the Irish, but Greeneville has always been a religious community, once with seven churches -- St. Mary's, St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox, Divine Providence, Lutheran, Episcopal, Congregational and Baptist. Every denomination had its own church, most of them on Central Avenue.

The history of Greeneville is so rich and wonderful, and for the past few years, Greeneville has been enjoying a renaissance. One of Greeneville's most senior residents, Olive Buddington, is also Greeneville's greatest cheerleader and is leading a celebration scheduled for Saturday. There will be a parade, vendors and all kinds of events.

Norwich Public Utilities is among a great group of organizations that will help in the celebration. The NAG, DARE, TVCCA, Friends of Otis Library, the Woman's City Club, Thames River Family Program and so many others will participate. United Community and Family Services, the University of Connecticut, the Norwich Arts Council, the Norwich Historical Society, Martin House and even American Ambulance will have Andy the Ambulance for the kids to enjoy. Admission is free, and the festivities will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Zone Committee calls its event a neighborhood block party.

This morning's picture is the site of the old Greeneville School, and the heart of the festivities will take place at the playground at Central Avenue and Sixth and Seventh streets. Of course, there will be a big parade with plenty of parking. It should be a wonderful day. The spring event, scheduled for May, was rained out, so everyone is praying for bright, October sunshine.

As a boy I lived on Cliff Place, which was part of St. Mary's Parish. It was where I received my First Communion and was confirmed. St. Mary's, in my time, had the legendary priest Father George Donohue. He was gifted as an orator, and his sermons, which he spoke without a microphone or loud speaker, carried through the church he loved.

Father Donohue was a worldly man who, in earlier years, when pastor of a church in Stamford, had been marked for death by the mob. They accidentally killed the curate, and Father Donohue escaped. First transferred to Pomfret, he later was pastor of St. Mary's for years. The old black and white movie, "Boomerang," was a story about the mob and a Catholic priest. The priest was, in fact, Father Donohue.

He wrote many books and actually led the drive for legislation every child in the state be entitled to a high school education. There was a time when, if you went to public schools, you automatically went to Norwich Free Academy, but if you went to parochial schools, you had to take an exam for NFA that was so severe most parochial school children couldn't pass. Father Donohue changed all that.

Greeneville is a magical town, as are so many of the boroughs of Norwich. We are so fortunate as a city to have Yantic and Occum, Norwichtown and Taftville, the East Side, West Side and East Great Plain.

Norwich is truly a great town, rich in its ethnicity, proud of its industrial past, and none of the boroughs has more to offer than Greeneville.

So, it is my hope this coming weekend all of you who can will take the children to enjoy the wonderful celebration at the park at Sixth Street and Central Avenue to see old friends and meet new friends in the proud village of Greeneville -- spelled with an 'e.'

Bill Stanley's new book, "9-Mile Square," is available at Lawrence & Memorial and The William W. Backus Hospital gift shops, City Perk, Dime Savings Bank, Johnson's Flowers & Gift Shop in Norwich Wonderland Books in Putnam, or by mail by calling 1-800-950-0331. You can e-mail Bill Stanley at gate wayair@aol.com

http://www.norwichbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061001/COLUMNISTS01/610010369/1048/NEWS01

Notre Dame Church in dire straits

Notre Dame Church in dire straits

By: David Casey
09/30/2006
Pawtucket Times, RI 

CENTRAL FALLS - The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence is considering closing Notre Dame, the second-oldest French Canadian church under its jurisdiction.
The Broad Street church is part of the Holy Spirit Catholic Community, a unified parish commissioned by the diocese in the late 1990s. The parishes, which included Notre Dame, St. Matthew, Dexter Street, and the long-since demolished Holy Trinity Church, Fuller Avenue, were consolidated for financial reasons.
In an e-mail to The Times, diocesan spokesman Michael Guilfoyle revealed that the parish is, once again, in dire straits.
"Parishioners of Holy Spirit Catholic Community in Central Falls have recently been involved in a series of sessions led by their pastor and parish finance council, to discuss the most effective, economical and reasonable future of their faith community," Guilfoyle wrote.
"One of the primary concerns is the future disposition of the Notre Dame Church property, which is in need of approximately $700,000 in repairs to address structural and safety issues. Based on these discussions, the parish is in the process of submitting a series of recommendations to
the Bishop of Providence for his consideration. Further consultation will then take place at the diocesan level before any recommendations are approved by the Bishop. Therefore, no final decision has yet been made in regard to Notre Dame Church."
Holy Spirit's pastor, Rev. Timothy J. Lemlin, has already held a number of "listening sessions" with parishioners at Forand and Wilfrid manors, but declined to comment on the church's future, as did a half-dozen parishioners directly contacted by The Times.
Notre Dame was founded in September 1973, a few months after Precious Blood Church in Woonsocket.
Originally located in a wooden structure on Fales Street, "Notre Dame du Sacre Coeur," or "Our Lady of the Sacred Heart" was sanctioned by the Most Rev. Thomas F. Hendricken, in response to a massive influx of French-Canadian Catholics, who emigrated to the Blackstone Valley to stake their claim in the burgeoning textile industry. Until the mid-1960s all church events were held in French; all masses in Latin.
Construction on the imposing Romanesque edifice on Broad Street began in 1928 and concluded around 1933, when the church was officially dedicated. The building's 195-foot steeple, which was damaged in two hurricanes (one in 1938 and 1959), was dismantled in 1971 and replaced with a modern, steeple-less façade. Its name was shortened to "Notre Dame" in 1972.
Its basement has long-been the home of Project Hope's Hospitality House soup kitchen.
In 1997, after the Notre Dame-Holy Trinity parochial school joined with St. Matthew's to form the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Academy, the diocese decided to unite the three churches under one administrative authority.
In 1989 Holy Trinity, which was dedicated in 1889, was de-commissioned and later demolished.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17265546&BRD=1713&PAG=461&dept_id=24491&rfi=6

Tories defend end to law program benefitting seniors, women, gays, minorities

Tories defend end to law program benefitting seniors, women, gays, minorities
 
Alexander Panetta, Canadian Press
Published: Thursday, September 28, 2006


OTTAWA (CP) - The Conservatives are under fire for killing a legal-aid program that has assisted Canadian minority groups in a series of historic court victories over the last three decades.
The cancellation of the Court Challenges Program was slammed Wednesday by the country's largest legal organization, opposition parties, and at least one Tory provincial government.
The Trudeau-era program has helped fund successful court challenges that broadened the rights of Canadian seniors, women, the disabled, homosexuals, religious groups, aboriginals, and minority-language groups.
The federal Tories announced this week that cutting the program would save taxpayers $5.6 million over two years.
Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams - a provincial Tory and a lawyer - called the cuts worrisome and distanced himself from the "right-wing" federal Conservatives.
The opposition Liberals noted the irony of the cuts coming just months after a famous pre-election quip by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"He said, 'Don't worry, if you elect me as a prime minister, the courts will hold me in check'," Liberal MP Omar Alghabra told a news conference.
"(Then) what does he do? He cancels the Court Challenges Program, which is supposed to hold him in check."
The program helped fund court battles that gave seniors employment-insurance benefits, and gave deaf people the right to get sign-language service in hospitals.
It helped women win pay-equity cases, and simplified the necessary argument for a sexual-assault conviction.
It funded cases that opened schools for French-Canadians, guaranteed English-language rights in Quebec, and helped affirm religious freedoms like Sikh children's right to carry a kirpan.
It helped homosexuals win equality protection under the Charter of Rights in landmark 1990s cases that led to a slew of new legal benefits and eventually paved the path to same-sex marriage.
But the program has long drawn the ire of the Tories, who already killed it in 1992 the last time they were in power.
The Liberals revived it in 1994 upon returning to office, and its continued existence has long been a sore spot to conservatives.
Many conservatives have denounced the program as biased, saying it supports liberal causes while consistently denying funding for things like anti-abortion cases.
Harper's right-hand man wrote his doctoral dissertation and several other papers about the program in his previous career as an academic.
Now chief of staff to the prime minister, Ian Brodie published one paper titled "Do the 'Haves' Still Come Out Ahead in Canada?"
"Three interests - official language minority groups, feminists, and homosexual rights groups - have been particularly successful at pursuing their objectives through the courts," Brodie wrote when he was a professor at the University of Western Ontario.
"All three of these interests consider themselves traditionally 'disadvantaged' groups in Canadian society, and so their success is puzzling."
The paper, which he co-authored in 2003 just before joining Harper's staff, suggests "a solution to this puzzle."
The paper concludes that the so-called "haves" really do come out ahead in our legal system - and that's because the Court Challenges Program has simply helped reverse the definition.
"In other words, these self-described 'disadvantaged' groups win because under the new conditions they are now among the 'haves'," Brodie writes in the paper, co-authored with the University of Calgary's Ted Morton.
"Being among the 'haves' has given them the resources required to become repeat players and succeed in judicial politics."
One Conservative government official was far more blunt when asked about the program Wednesday.
If there are any future injustices, he said, offended groups can simply use the news media or the political process to pressure government. Or they can launch lawsuits with their own money.
"From a small-c conservative standpoint, (people wonder) why are we paying people to sue the government?" said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They can raise their own money."
He said the program exposes a key philosophical difference between Liberals and Conservatives.
"(Liberals feel) citizens are clients of the state, and (they feel), 'We better keep those clients, so we'd better stand up for them'."
He added that, because the Charter of Rights is now a quarter-century old, legal rights for feminists, homosexuals, and minorities are well-entrenched in our justice system.
But Newfoundland's Conservative premier weighed in against the federal Conservative government.
Williams distanced his provincial Progressive Conservatives from the federal Tories.
"In my opinion, it shows the difference between Conservatives: true right-wing Conservatives and Progressive Conservatives," Williams said in St. John's.
"You know, when you start taking away funding from minority groups just because they're going to sue government, that means you're saying, 'We're not going to give you any money if we've done something wrong to allow you to sue us.'
"So then (do) you take away legal aid at some point down the road so people who commit criminal offences don't have the right to have legal counsel?"
The Canadian Bar Association - which has 36,000 members - said the government has been dishonest in characterizing the program.
"They're making it sound like these fringe groups were the only ones accessing it," said Guy Joubert, a vice-president at the association.
"That's definitely not the case. . . . What this move has done is silence the voices of marginalized Canadians."

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=a0239922-e209-422c-be2e-fbe3ac082c26&k=87890

Ottawa not French-friendly

Ottawa not French-friendly
language czar: New commissioner says capital fails to welcome francophones
[see commentary below]
 
Jack Aubry, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, October 13, 2006
The new federal language czar has slammed Ottawa for not embracing its responsibility as the nation's capital by being more "welcoming" to francophones, instead adopting a "resistant" attitude toward their demands.
Graham Fraser, a former journalist who will officially become the country's new federal language commissioner this month, told the Citizen the city is, essentially, a unilingual English community that has a tradition of resisting a greater French presence.
He said there are four million unilingual francophones in Canada for whom the capital city, while offering them a welcoming atmosphere on Parliament Hill, does not do so a few blocks away.
"You put yourself in the shoes of a French-speaking Quebecer who has come to Ottawa and you think: 'There is not a lot of outreach here, there is not a lot of welcome, not a lot of indication that this is my capital city ... that it's welcoming me'," said Mr. Fraser.
He said the city's private sector is missing out on promoting tourism and attracting more francophones.
"Commercially, it doesn't make sense for Ottawa to pretend there is not a French-speaking society on the other side of the river for which this is the capital city."
Mr. Fraser quickly points out he isn't being critical of the city's municipal government, but rather the private sector, over which he will have no jurisdiction.
Mr. Fraser made the remarks when asked about his recent comments before a House of Commons committee reviewing his appointment.
He told the committee: "I am sometimes astounded to see that, as far as language goes, Ottawa is not very welcoming to francophones. I think that it is a tradition in Ottawa to be resistant to francophones' demands. I think that businesses in the capital should realize that in strictly commercial terms, there is a market of francophones, who are unilingual and much more comfortable in French in this city.
"People should not find themselves in a unilingual city, to all intents and purposes, once they leave Parliament Hill. As a resident of Ottawa, I sometimes find it ridiculous that Ottawa does not offer a more welcoming face to francophones."
The remarks echo a chapter in Mr. Fraser's recently released book, Sorry, I Don't Speak French, in which the former Toronto Star reporter wrote unilingual English Ottawans view francophone demands for French signs and services as "a threat" rather than an obligation of the country's capital city.
Mr. Fraser tempered his recent writings by adding it would not be useful, once he is commissioner, to embark on "a finger-wagging exercise" in Ottawa and he does not think the current situation is due to "overt hostility," but simply people not thinking about it.
Mr. Fraser says he is starting off in his new job, which he landed after one interview obtained by simply applying for the federal posting, offering "more questions than answers."
"Here's a community in which we have invested, as a community, an enormous amount into teaching French, either to public servants or school children ... every time anybody talks about this, there is a natural tendency on the part of anybody who hears that talk, to recoil and to think in terms of regulations, of tests and of obligations," said Mr. Fraser, "and I would prefer people were talking in terms of a language of welcome, a language of communication as opposed to a language of testing."


http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=41a78026-4a97-4dd9-b931-57d152d9fcfc&k=68233

Speaking English is not shameful

Speaking English is not shameful

Brigitte Pellerin, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, October 19, 2006

Remember the Eaton's saleslady who allegedly traumatized an entire generation of Quebecers by telling them to speak English in a Montreal store? She'd be a refreshing choice as the country's commissioner of official languages, instead of yet another anglo who seems to feel it's somehow shameful that the majority of people in Canada speak English.
It gives me no pleasure to give the knuckle-bone shampoo to Graham Fraser, the former Toronto Star writer who just replaced Dyane Adam in that post. I don't know him well (I believe we briefly met twice), but he strikes me as a kind and gentle man. And yes, his mastery of the French language is remarkable -- he speaks much better French than many Quebecers. But his complaining that Ottawa is not welcoming to francophones is wrong, misguided and anti-useful.
"You put yourself in the shoes of a French-speaking Quebecer who has come to Ottawa," he said, "and you think: 'There is not a lot of outreach here, there is not a lot of welcome, not a lot of indication that this is my capital city ... that it's welcoming me.' " He also told a House of Commons committee: "I am sometimes astounded to see that, as far as language goes, Ottawa is not very welcoming to francophones. I think that it is a tradition in Ottawa to be resistant to francophones' demands. I think that businesses in the capital should realize that in strictly commercial terms, there is a market of francophones who are unilingual and much more comfortable in French in this city. People should not find themselves in a unilingual city, to all intents and purposes, once they leave Parliament Hill. As a resident of Ottawa, I sometimes find it ridiculous that Ottawa does not offer a more welcoming face to francophones."
I'm told similar arguments can be found in Mr. Fraser's recent book, Sorry, I Don't Speak French, and I heard him make them in a television interview he gave Radio-Canada just before taking office. If he said anything about how the Quebec government treats its English-speaking minority, it wasn't in that TV bit. But I did hear him, in a different interview, lament that English-Canadian universities don't churn out bilingual students -- as though French-Canadian universities fared any better.
What is he even talking about? I am a French-speaking Quebecer who came to Ottawa from Montreal almost six years ago. True, there was no welcoming committee -- er, I mean, "outreach" -- to mark my arrival. Nobody sent me so much as a box of Belgian truffles, an oversight about which, I admit, I am still miffed. But other than that, to say that Ottawa is not welcoming to newcomers like me is a piece of gratuitous slander on the good people of this city.
Never have I felt unwelcome here. Not once. Nobody ever laughed at my accent or told me to go back where I came from. I was made to feel so much at home from day one that now it's Montreal that feels kinda weird. If you were to go around town asking French-speaking Quebecers who now live in Ottawa whether they were made to feel welcome in their new city, I'm pretty confident you'd get a resounding yes from most of them -- except, of course, the ones who make a point of wearing a chip on their shoulder the size of the Gaspe peninsula.

Mr. Fraser's comments are also misguided because they suggest his main concern is francophones' self-esteem and comfort level, as though they were the only ones worthy of his attention as the country's official languages commissioner.
Sure, francophones are a minority in North America and that's why many people (myself not among them) believe they deserve a bit of governmental coddling. But would it be too much to ask that anglophones' rights, particularly in Quebec, at least be paid lip service to?
Even more annoying and counter-productive than this glaring one-sidedness is his using his office to tell francophones they are right to feel badly done by, despite decades of federal politicians pandering to their needs and millions of English-speaking Canadians struggling to learn French and making their kids learn it, too, simply because they believe that's what good Canadians ought to do. I've seen worse linguistic persecution.
Ideally, the country's commissioner of official languages should be dedicated to fairness, balance and reason between the two linguistic groups. Since I've no hope of ever seeing such a person appointed, I'm starting to think it might be a good idea to bring back the Eaton's saleslady.
At least she wasn't ashamed to live in a country where most people happen to speak English.
Brigitte Pellerin's column appears Tuesday and Thursday.
The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=0d720890-24b0-42fa-a3b8-7489084d1f0f

Pomerleau gets club's honor

LE CLUB CALUMET
Pomerleau gets club's honor

By GARY REMAL
Staff Writer
from the Kennebec Journal
Friday, October 13, 2006


AUGUSTA -- Businessman and community activist Roger Pomerleau will become the first second-generation winner of Le Club Calumet's Medaille d'Honneur, the highest award given to a club member.

Pomerleau's father, Frank X. Pomerleau, received the award from the club in 1990.

"It's the first father-and-son team and we hope to establish a tradition at the club so it happens more often," Pomerleau said Thursday. "I was sort of standing on his shoulders, and my brother, and having an established business allowed me to get out and do volunteer work. I took advantage of my circumstances to get out and provide my volunteer services."

He noted the medal, in past years, had been given to brothers.

The medal award was announced by Richard "Blackie" Bechard, chairman of the club's 2006 Medaille d'Honneur Committee.

"Roger Pomerleau has been a devoted member of Le Club Calumet and an active citizen of the Greater Augusta community," Bechard said. "Roger has devoted his life to working in his family's businesses, and he has always given generously of his time and resources to make Augusta a better place for all of us.

"Roger Pomerleau has brought honor to his family, the Calumet Club and to the Franco-American community at large."

Pomerleau said the award honors both him and his father, who first established the family business.

"It was a surprise. The way we do these things, you never know ahead of time. We're grateful to get it because it's a recognition by our community and our peers," he said. "All the award winners will say, 'We don't do things to get recognition.' But when we do, we hope it encourages volunteerism by others."

Pomerleau is scheduled to be honored at a dinner on Nov. 4. Ceremonies begin at 5:30 p.m.

A native of Augusta, Pomerleau is the son of Frank and the late Lillian (Brunelle) Pomerleau. He was raised on Laurel Street and graduated from St. Mary's School, Cony High School's class of 1969 and the University of Maine at Augusta, where he received an associate's degree. Pomerleau received his bachelor's degree from the University of Maine in 1973.

He married the former Carol Bourgoin of Madawaska. The couple has a daughter, Ann, and a son, Eric, as well as a granddaughter, Bechard said.

Throughout his life, Pomerleau has worked in family enterprises. He was president of Frank Pomerleau Inc. until 2003 and he is vice president of NRF Distributors of Augusta, a company he founded with his brother, Norman, in the late 1960s. He is the past recipient of the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce's Special Service Award.

Pomerleau joined Le Club Calumet in 1980.

http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/news/local/3219753.shtml

Canada sans Quebec, the 51st state

IN DEPTH: CANADA 2020
Canada sans Quebec, the 51st state
Chantal Hébert | October 12, 2006
CBC News, Canada

What will Canada look like in the year 2020? To encourage a debate about the major challenges Canada will face in the coming decades, the Dominion Institute and the Toronto Star have invited 20 leading thinkers to write about an issue or event that they think could transform the country by 2020.

Chantal Hébert

The eyes of the world are on the former Canadian federation on this first Tuesday of November 2020 as its 19 million voters participate for the first time in an American presidential election as full-fledged U.S. citizens.

The outcome of one of the most closely fought election battles in recent American history will be a close one. It is expected that the 50 new Electors from Canada will ultimately tip the balance in favour of one of the two women who are vying for the presidency.

On this voting day, the American public is more deeply divided as to the future course of their nation than it has been in decades.

Voters are torn between the militarist approach favoured by the successive Republican administrations that have occupied the White House without interruption since the early days of the 21st century, and the Democrat promise to restore multilateralism and move to a more open "peace economy."

Since the withdrawal of the United States from the main international forums 12 years ago and the subsequent relocation of the United Nations outside American soil, it is the first time a serious presidential candidate campaigns on the promise to re-engage the country in formal international dialogue.

In the interval, the Republican administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the country free of terrorist attacks. The result has been a full decade free of such deadly incidents, at least on American soil, but also a physical and political isolation on par with that of the Soviet Bloc of the previous century.

Look out Republicans

The central role that the traditionally progressive Canadian voters could play in the outcome of this pivotal election is exactly what the best minds in the international community had hoped for when they originally rallied behind the plan to have the former federation become an American state.

A decade ago, most of the big players on the international scene supported a radical redrawing of the North American political map as part of a last-ditch effort to try to change the balance between isolationists and multilateralists within the last remaining military superpower.

The stakes involved in what really is a battle by proxy between the American Right and much of the progressive forces of the democratic world are unprecedented.

Inspired by the American resolve to stay out of all multilateral forums and framework agreements, China and India have gone down the path of a no-holds-barred capitalism that has allowed them to make giant economic leaps, but only at huge costs to the global environment and to the financial health of poorer nations. Short of a dramatic shift in U.S. policy, the world trend that puts leading-edge technology at the service of feudal values will be irreversible.

Canada, the Trojan Horse

The morphing of Canada into a political Trojan Horse invested with the best last hopes of the planet's progressive forces did not take place easily. Without strong pressure from the international community and the many calls to the social conscience of Canadians, the project to join the American political union would never have rallied the 66% support required to pass the test of the 2010 referendum.

Pushed to the brink by the virtual closure of the Canada-U.S. border in the wake of the 2007 terrorists attacks and the partial destruction of three of that country's major cities, corporate Canada lined up early behind an urgent redefinition of Canada's political status. On Wall Street and among corporate America's political allies in the White House, the notion of making Canada a formal part of the United States had traction from the very start.

After 2001, the acquisition by the U.S. of energy reserves sheltered from the ideological currents that regularly sweep the planet became a strategic priority. Hundreds of thousands of American troops fanned out to distant fronts in the name of keeping America and its economy safe.

But on this ever-changing front, the very notion of what would amount to a decisive victory became elusive. By 2010, a battle-weary American public was more than open to a political change that would allow the U.S. to make giant strides towards the goal of energy security by peaceful means.

Yet without the stunning decision of the alter-globalization movement and, in particular, its influential environmental wing to forcefully support Canada's entry into the United States, the project would likely never have seen the light of day.

On both sides of the Canada-U.S. border and from the main capitals of the rest of the world, some of the most influential progressive voices on the planet joined with those of the corporate right to urge Canada to become part of the U.S.

An isolated Quebec

Quebec also threw its weight behind the project once Washington and Ottawa agreed to offer the former province the status of associate state within the new political entity. By so doing, the two governments fulfilled a key requirement of La Francophonie, the international club of French-speaking countries. Its support for the merger had been conditional on the maintenance of a politically autonomous French-language society in North America.

As opposed to the citizens of its former sister provinces, Quebecers therefore did not fully adhere to the American political union. While Quebec has a first row seat on today's pivotal presidential election, its people are nevertheless only spectators of the suspense next door.

In exchange for its political autonomy, Quebec is also bound to conduct its foreign policy on the basis of strict neutrality. It has agreed to only deploy its armed forces abroad as part of peacekeeping missions.

Over the past five years, Quebec troops have become a presence in many regions of Africa, a continent that continues to be neglected by an international community obsessed with the absence of the United States from its ranks.

Besides a framework trade agreement giving it conditional access to the American markets, Quebec has also been granted most of the powers that the former state of Canada exercised at the time it joined the U.S. By then, they did not amount to much.

Quebec opens its doors

Canada had already given up control over its airspace and its ports after the United States unilaterally took over its northern partner's defence. That followed an investigation which revealed that the 2007 terrorist attacks had been masterminded by a cell operating out of St. John's, Nfld.

Under its last Liberal government, Canada adopted the U.S. dollar in a last-ditch effort to breathe life into a domestic economy strangled by the many physical and virtual controls put in place for security purposes by its powerful neighbour. The two countries had also agreed on a joint immigration policy and a common ID card had been issued to their citizens.

The day-to-day governance of Quebec did not change dramatically under its new political status but its social and linguistic make-up have been substantially altered. In exchange for a two-year open door policy between the soon-to-be defunct rest of Canada and Quebec, the latter's share of the Canadian debt was wiped off the books.

Close to four million Canadians from the other provinces took advantage of the grace period to relocate in Quebec, thus increasing its population by 50% almost overnight.

The massive arrival of so many newcomers — most of them fully bilingual but almost all devoid of francophone roots — altered Quebec's political makeup in ways that the negotiators of the agreement had not foreseen.

Drawn by the prospect of maintaining the former Canadian social model, many former charter members of Canada's progressive establishment elected to live out their days in Quebec rather than as American citizens.

Three former leaders of the defunct federal NDP, the entire parliamentary caucus of the federal Green Party, an octogenarian ex-leader of the former Progressive Conservative party of Canada as well as the last two premiers of Ontario all elected to move to Quebec. The latter two opted to relocate after they lost the battle to turn Ontario into a state distinct from Canada in the wake of the decision to make Calgary the capital of the new American state.

Rejoin Canada?

Besides changing the language mix, the transition from province of a defunct federation to associate state of the U.S. has profoundly modified Quebec's political landscape. Mario Dumont, who served as the first president of the new Quebec, could also have been its last native-born head of state for a long time.

Too far to the right for the new critical mass of progressive voters that resulted from the resettlement of so many other Canadians, Dumont's reign did not survive the changed political demography of Quebec.

Devoid of its historical raison d'être, the Parti Quebecois reinvented itself into a centrist and nationalist party along the lines of the former Liberal party of Canada. Under its reconfigured shape, the former sovereigntist party expanded into many new constituencies. In particular it gathered in the new Quebecers arriving from the rest of Canada who use to admire certain sovereigntist leaders from afar during the old sovereigntist-federalist debates.

As a result, the 2017 Quebec presidential election saw the advent of a Saskatchewan-born Pequiste head of state whose first language was English. That election also featured a challenger from a brand new party committed to having Quebec join its former Canadian partner as an American state.

Promoters of this new party are essentially francophone and progressive. They feel that the coming together of Canada and Quebec under a single American roof would allow the latter to leave its marginal status behind and become a full-fledged player on the most important political checkerboard on the planet.

They argue that Quebec, as an associate state operating apart from the United States, will never truly be able to have its voice heard in the concert of nations. Instead, its citizens will be relegated to second-class status under the emerging world order.

The notion of making alliances with the former Canada in order to increase the progressive influence on the rest of America is also central to the goals of the new party.

Finally, some defenders of the French-language feel that it would be easier to maintain a French-speaking environment in Quebec if its anglophone elements had a chance to fan out across the United States, rather than have their horizons limited to the former province.

In 2 017, the party had a marginal impact on the outcome of the vote. It hit a wall in the regions where the new Quebecers who came to the province because of its distinct political status have settled. By and large, the newer anglophone and allophone communities are determined to preserve and protect the autonomy of their chosen port of call.

But today's American presidential vote could have a huge impact on the Quebec debate. If the U.S., under the impetus of progressive Canadian voters, reconciles itself to multilateralism on the international stage, the result would provide a boost to those in Quebec who promote a reunion with the former Canadian federation. They could also bank on a more sympathetic hearing at the White House and count on a more open attitude to language accommodations.

Today's vote could turn the new Canadian Party of Quebec (CPQ) into a serious player in the elections that are stated to take place in the former province next year. If it comes to power, the CPQ is committed to holding a referendum on Quebec seeking full American statehood, alongside the former Canada, before the end of its first mandate.

As opposed to the 2010 Canadian referendum but in line with Quebec tradition, a simple majority would suffice to trigger the negotiations that would lead to the extinguishment of Quebec's so recently acquired special status.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer with the Toronto Star as well as a guest columnist for Le Devoir. She is a weekly participant on the political panel at Issue on CBC's The National.


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