September 19, 2009
Joseph Boyden to read at UVM on Sept 25
The author of a short story collection Born With a Tooth , novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce , and his recent biography of Métis leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, Joseph Boyden has quickly ascended the ranks to be one of Canada's most widely read writers working today. His novel Three Day Road (2005) won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in the US was also featured as a pick on the Today Show book club. In 2008, his second novel, Through Black Spruce, won the Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious fiction prize.
Born and raised in Toronto, Boyden completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and then returned to the northernmost regions of Ontario where he worked for two years in the James Bay region as a Professor of Aboriginal Programs. His time there working with the Mushkegowuk Cree, not to mention his own Métis ancestry, have made the land and people of this region his "muse and obsession" and the setting for much of his work. Today he divides his time between Northern Ontario and New Orleans where he and his wife, novelist Amanda Boyden, are currently Writers in Residence.
Joseph and Amanda will both be reading at the Burlington Book Festival on September 26th, but I've managed to arrange for Joseph to do a reading at UVM at 4 pm at the Memorial Lounge. I've taught his novel Three Day Road to hundreds of students over the last three years in courses ranging from English 180 and 182 to my TAP class. It's an extraordinary book and I think this will be a great opportunity for students to hear him read and to ask him questions about his work.
For more information on Joseph Boyden and his work, see his website at http://josephboyden.com.
Reviews of Through Black Spruce:
"Powerful and powerfully told. . .Much of this novel reflects its crisp, poetic title…Will speaks with the straight-faced good humor of Louise Erdrich's Nanapush…in the novel's most moving section, Will flees to live along in wilderness few people ever even see. It's an experience beautifully rendered in the raw poetry of Boyden's prose."
—The Washington Post
“Anguished, angry Uncle Will’s revenge drama is almost perfect in pitch and execution. Tragedy and comedy unspool together in a startlingly casual manner when Will speaks, they way they do in life. When Boyden is at his best, as he often is here, he is matchless.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Reviews of Three Day Road: "Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road is a brilliant novel. You will suffer a bit, but it's overwhelmingly worth the voyage."
—Jim Harrison
"Three Day Road is a devastatingly truthful work of fiction, and a masterful account of hell and healing. This is a grave, grand, and passionate book."
—Louise Erdrich
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September 18, 2009
Spotted Cow Press makes history with innovative double espresso book launch
Later this afternoon, Edmonton publisher Spotted Cow Press will make history by launching its latest book simultaneously in two Canadian cities.
What makes this event unique is that Spotted Cow Press will be printing off copies of S. Minsos' novel Squire Davis and the Crazy River in each of these locations on Espresso Book Machines, making this the first "Double Espresso book launch" in history. After a reading by the author, both the University of Alberta Bookstore in Edmonton, owner of one of the very first Espresso Book Machines ever produced, and the Titles bookstore at McMaster University in Hamilton, who acquired their machine more recently, will start printing copies of the book simultaneously for customers to purchase on the spot. Customers at the Titles bookstore will be able to watch the book launch in Edmonton, 3000 km away, via live video.
Spotted Cow Press and the University of Alberta bookstore already made history on this front when it launched (PDF) Twice in a Blue Moon, a new collection of poetry by Joyce Harries, using the Espresso Book Machine on November 15, 2007, which might well be the first launch of a new literary title using the machine. The cutting edge approaches of both Spotted Cow Press and the U of Alberta bookstore are only just now becoming more mainstream with more Espresso machines starting to appear in bookstores such as the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, VT, and with Google announcing just yesterday that it will being to sell copies of over 2 million currently out-of-print book titles via the Espresso Book Machine.
(Here's a PDF link to the Spotted Cow Press press release about this afternoon's event)
If you're interested in following along online, I expect that there will be a few people twittering from each event. Just look for the hashtag #doubleespresso or follow @pjmartin or @MACBookstore on twitter.
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September 7, 2009
Breaking my silence
I've got my head down these days and am working on nothing but my book. I need to take a few moments to say the following:
Even as a non-American, I'm getting a bit freaked out by the rhetoric of the anti-Obama crowd. To me, it's gotten beyond bizarre and is getting plain scary. I would feel even more disheartened if I saw something like this happening in my own country.
This great editorial cartoon makes light of all this, but, really, can people actually think that it's okay to pull their kids out of school so they don't have to hear a message from the leader of their country? That scares me. Of course, those are probably the same people who would be up in arms if they tried to pull the Pledge of Allegiance out of the schools.
I've told my kids that, as non-Americans, they don't need to say the pledge, but that they should be respectful of it. Obama is not their president and this is not their country. I'm happy, though, that they get to watch his speech in school tomorrow. Obama is such a fine example of what is possible when you value education and develop an insatiable curiosity about the entire world. He's the best role model of any world leader that I can recall. I feel very sorry for the children whose parents are removing them from school tomorrow. That narrow-minded action by their parents is teaching them the exact opposite of what education should be about.
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July 26, 2009
The Tragically Hip at Shelburne Museum
All four Martins had a great time at Shelburne Museum this evening. The Tragically Hip were excellent, as usual, and the setting was a wonderful place to see a concert. It's always kind of a surreal experience seeing The Hip here in Vermont because, although tonight's gig was sold out, the venues and crowds are vastly smaller than what one would find in Canada. So, it always feels like a special treat getting to see them in such an intimate venue.
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July 15, 2009
A bit more about Canadian healthcare, or The Truth About Canada
I've been trying to write about things other than healthcare, but it's hard these days to keep my mouth shut when I hear some critics in the US pointing to Canada's system as the doom and gloom scenario awaiting the US if Obama manages to accomplish his planned changes to the American system. This morning, I watched this video by Steven Crowder entitled "ObamaCare Yay or Nay? The Truth About Canada!". What he finds is important and it points to some of the many problems currently being experienced in Quebec, especially by those people without a family doctor. What it does not prove in any way, really, is the failure of the Canadian system as a whole.
Here's an expanded version of the comment I just posted on one of the many conservative blogs that is now using this video as their top evidence of how the last thing they want is for the US to look to Canada for inspiration.
As a Canadian currently living in the US, I watched this video with interest. I saw nothing that resembles my own many experiences with healthcare in Canada. As with the United States, the level of service one gets can depend greatly on where you live. For me, I've consistently had longer ER wait times in the US than I ever had in Canada (my son has asthma and I've visited emergency rooms on a number of occasions back in Canada). Just a few weeks ago, my wife and nine-year-old daughter waited 7 hours in our local ER in Burlington where she went because of chest pains and trouble breathing. All in all, though, I have to say that we've had fine service in both countries. In terms of service, access to care, and high quality of care, I've seen no difference. The big difference, though, is that my employer and I pay thousands of dollars per year for our coverage in the US. That works out to far more than the difference between the income taxes I paid in Canada compared to what I pay in the US. I pay slightly less in income tax here, but four times what I paid in property taxes in Canada, and my employer in Alberta paid under $200 a month for my family's healthcare.
In the video, Steven Crowder, who if I recall correctly is a dual citizen, visits Montreal, Canada's second biggest city and the place in the country that seems to be having the worst time of things by far. When I lived in Edmonton, if it were an urgent matter I could usually see my GP on the same day that I called. After-hours, there were a number of 24-hour clinics where the wait would be longer but I'd always be able to see someone. For urgent cases, we'd go to the ER and the wait was always understandable; the more severe cases always go first, as they should. Crowder goes on and on in this video about how in Canada they have to ration care because of the system. I'm sure my University of Vermont colleague down the hall, who is fighting with her insurance company here to get approval for some desperately needed spinal surgery, would be happy to talk about her experiences of care being rationed in the US. It's rationed in the US all the time, not because of a lack of capacity in the medical system, but rather to increase shareholder earnings in the for-profit insurance system.
The major problem in Canada has, to my mind, very little to do with universal healthcare itself; there can always be greater efficiency in any system, but the system in Canada at the moment is underfunded, particularly in Quebec. Crowder's video documents this underfunding very well with the clear problems in the Quebec system's shortage of capacity at the moment. Despite this underfunding, the results in Canada are still superior to those of the US. Canada puts 30-40% less into healthcare than the US does and yet Canadians' life expectancy is longer, patient satisfaction levels are similar if not higher in Canada, and no one ever goes bankrupt over medical bills. The question of higher tax rates in Canada, as I suggest above, is all relative. In Quebec, Crowder is right that with sales tax people do wind up paying the 8% provincial sales tax on the 5% federal sales tax, but there are other provinces that have solved this by "harmonizing" their sales taxes so that they are charged only one tax rather than two separate ones. In Alberta, there is no provincial sales tax at all and there never will be. Paying tax on tax is absurd, but one can't say that happens in all of Canada.
While we Canadians, like people everywhere, wish our taxes would be lower, 85% of Canadians recently surveyed said that they wouldn't dream of trading their healthcare system for that of the United States. Universal healhcare works. It's more effective than what we find in the US in terms of its ability to treat everyone equally. It's also, contrary to popular belief here in the US, far less bureaucratic than the US system. Just stop by a Canadian hospital or doctor's office and look for the billing office. You won't find one.
To see the problems Crowder found in Montreal as representative of all of Canada is as foolish as walking into one of the poorest areas in a major US city and describing the whole country as being rife with poverty and crime. The Canadian system needs to be improved and better funded, without a doubt, but overall it's still very good and works well for most Canadians.
Finally, as Canadians, it doesn't do us any good to be smug about how well our system works, because it doesn't work anywhere close to as well as it should for many Canadians, and particularly First Nations people on reserves and the Inuit . Just because we're ranked slightly higher internationally than the US doesn't mean that we still don't have a lot to learn and lots to improve. Because of our sometimes foolish and shortsighted preoccupation with what Americans think of us, it's easy for us to get distracted by comments in the US about the good and the bad aspects of our system. What we really need is to start looking seriously (as they are doing right now in the US) about how we could do a much better job at providing better access and quality of care to all Canadians. Instead of focusing how much better our system might be than that of other countries we should start looking at how much worse our system is than that of the nations higher up the list.
Followup: This report from CNN offers a pretty balanced assessment of the state of things in Canada.
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May 28, 2009
Tim Hortons Nation
This blog's in hibernation mode until I get my book done, but couldn't resist stopping in to talk about coffee and donuts...
This story on a recent survey on Canadians' taste for Tim Hortons is interesting and is probably something that's bound to come up in this fall's freshman seminar "From Pucks to Parliament: Exploring Canadian Culture."
Now, if only I could convince someone in Vermont to open a Tim Hortons, something I promise to do if I ever win the lottery.
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May 18, 2009
If you read anything today, this might be the article you want to read
I'm so busy here keeping my head down and trying to get this book finished that I've avoided blogging for weeks. There are lots of things I've been dying to write about, including healthcare, the border, the end of the semester, and the graduation of some of my favourite students here at UVM. After reading the following article, though, I knew I had to break my silence.
I'm all for trying to put more hybrid and electric vehicles on the road and, more importantly, trying to cut down on our use of vehicles altogether. These days, I bike to work most days and try to take the bus during the winter. We've deliberately avoided buying a second car for our family to try to be more environmentally conscious. Despite all that, I've been laughing all morning at this piece from this weekend's Sunday Times.
This review of the new Honda Insight may be one of the best car reviews ever written. That's not to say that Jeremy Clarkson liked the Insight. Indeed, he seems to loathe everything about it.
Here's an excerpt, but make sure to read the whole thing here:
Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.
So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.
So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).
It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.
And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.
So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.
If I were a journalism prof, this might well be required reading....
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April 20, 2009
Great events this week of interest to Canadians and Canadianists in Vermont
Wednesday, April 22
DONALD R. BROWN MEMORIAL LECTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY: "THE ESSENTIALIST CRITIQUE OF MULTICULTURALISM." Will Kymlicka, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen's University, Canada and senior research fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford.
Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building. 3:30 p.m.
A BECKONING COUNTRY OPENING RECEPTION
5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. — Marble Court at the Fleming Museum
Hosted by President Daniel Mark Fogel and Rachel Kahn-Fogel. In celebration of the quadricentennial anniversary of French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlains travels to the lake that bears his name, this exhibit examines the features of the Champlain Valley landscape through the objects and art created from and inspired by them. University Concert Choir performs. Exhibit continues through Sept. 20.
Admission Fee: Regular Admission at the door. Free to UVM.
Thursday, April 23
"Reforming Health Care: A Single Payer or Consumer Driven Solution," a debate featuring Arnold Kling, Cato Institute, and Robert Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect. Moderated by Emerson Lynn, editor of the St. Albans Messenger. A reception follows immediately. ADA accommodations: 656-5665.
4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. — Davis Student Center - The Grand Maple Ballroom
Friday, April 24
k.d. lang, "The Watershed Tour"Flynn TheatreFriday, April 24 at 8 pm
Tickets still available
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April 4, 2009
Fall advising meetings
Fall registration begins for Seniors on Tuesday, April 14 at 7:00 AM, and opens up for everyone else gradually over that week. Make sure to check the UVM Registration schedule to see when you may begin registering for Spring classes.
I'm setting aside enough 15 minute appointments over the next week or so to meet with all 40 of my advisees. I'll be available to answer any advising questions and to help review your choice of courses for the fall semester. If you'll be a senior planning on graduating in spring 2010, you should definitely come to see me before registering so that we can make sure you'll be set to graduate. At the very least, you should carefully review your CATS report to see if you're on track to graduate.
Keep reading after the break for further details and to choose your appointment time.
Continue reading "Fall advising meetings"
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March 24, 2009
Get Fuzzy on Canadians
Thanks to Mark for sending this my way.
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March 10, 2009
Welcome to Canada
Had a wonderful few days in Edmonton where I was giving a paper at the "Transplanting Canada" colloquium put on by the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. Click here for a PDF of the conference program if you're interested to learn more about what went on there.
It was really great to see such exciting things happening at the U of A these days. There are many new young faculty there and a herd of super-smart graduate students (they travel in herds on the prairies). Meeting many old and new friends from across the country and hearing some really interesting talks made this one of the best conference experiences I have had.
The folks at the CLC who planned the conference thought of everything, by the way, including hiring this guy to greet potential conference goers as they drove in to Canada.
(okay, everything I said above was true except for this last part)
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March 2, 2009
Save Radio 3
Although we don't know for sure what kinds of cuts we'll be seeing at CBC over the next few months, it sounds like cuts are imminent. The mere mention of the potential elimination of CBC Radio 3 by one of the heads of the CBC sent shockwaves through Canada's music scene this past week.
As a Canadian living outside of the country these days, CBC Radio 3 is a lifeline to Canada's music scene. More importantly -- and I speak as a music fan, a scholar and teacher of Canadian culture, and a former musician -- Radio 3 has changed the face of the independent music scene in Canada, allowing people around the world to learn about great Canadian bands and artists to whom they would otherwise never be exposed. CBC Radio 3 makes a contribution to Canadian culture nationally and internationally that far exceeds the investment put in by CBC.
Radio 3 has also been at the cutting edge of podcasting and internet broadcasting for years now and really broke new ground for the CBC. The importance of this cannot be underestimated either. If CBC Radio wants to continue to be seen as current and cutting edge, eliminating CBC Radio 3 would almost guarantee that they would never be thought of in this way again for a long time. Radio 3 really is the success story that the CBC should be looking at as a model for other parts of their operations.
Whether you are a regular listener to Radio 3 or not (if you're not, you should be!!), please take a minute and sign this petition.
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February 23, 2009
Freedom to Read Week
It's Freedom to Read Week in Canada this week. It's interesting to take a look at their list of challenged books to see how many of Canadian literature's most canonical texts are on that list, including Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Timothy Findley's The Wars, and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. Censorship at all levels is an ongoing issue. Just this past year, as discussed on this blog, there was a challenge to the presence of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale on the high school curriculum in Ontario.
It's important for us all to speak out against such challenges when they occur, but also to pay attention to the quieter forms of censorship such as when certain books are simply not ordered for school libraries (perhaps we should start protesting when certain books aren't on the shelves!) or even when teachers avoid putting particular books on the syllabus because they don't feel equipped (or paid enough) to handle the reactions that might ensue.
If you start to look through the documented cases of people trying to have particular books pulled from the shelves, you might find your anger and disbelief occasionally turn to laughter. As I was reading through a list of such cases that I found on the Freedom to Read website, I came across this entry:
Gill, John (ed.). New American and Canadian Poetry.
1994—The school board in Sechelt (BC), responding to a parental complaint, removed
this book from student use in Chatelech Secondary School.
Cause of objection—Anthology was said to present an anti-establishment view and to
present sex and four-letter words in a positive light.
Update—The school board decided, following a review, that the book should remain in
the library. The sole copy has since been stolen and not replaced.
These complaints all sound ridiculous to most people and it's easy to dismiss them. But we also cannot be complacent. Our authors deserve to be defended from such actions by all of us. So, the next time you hear of a complaint like this in your town, make sure to call up the school board or library to voice your support for keeping those works on the shelves. And, maybe plan on stopping by the library at a later date just to make sure that book hasn't mysteriously disappeared.
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February 16, 2009
The Literary Landscapes of Canada
Here's a list of 40 books or so that I mentioned in a talk given today on Canada's Literary Landscape. This is anything but a complete list, but it's not a bad start for anyone looking to learn more about Canadian literature.
Canada’s Literary Landscape:
A list of suggestions to help you read your way across Canada
Paul Martin, February 16, 2009
Paul.Martin@uvm.edu http://pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu
NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
Donna Morrissey, Kit’s Law (2001)
Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998)
Lisa Moore, Alligator (2005)
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
NOVA SCOTIA
Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (1999)
Alistair Macleod, Island: collected stories
George Elliott Clarke, George and Rue (2005)
Lynn Coady, Strange Heaven (2002)
NEW BRUNSWICK
David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children (2000)
Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie
QUEBEC
Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues (1983)
Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version (1997)
Anne Hébert, Kamouraska (1970)
Marie-Claire Blais, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1964)
ONTARIO
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1996), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2001), Cat’s Eye (1988)
Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (2005)
Anything at all by Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1983)
Timothy Findley, The Pianoman’s Daughter (1995)
Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (1995)
MANITOBA
Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (1974)
Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches (1957)
Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998)
Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness (2005)
SASKATCHEWAN
Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Englishman’s Boy (1997); The Last Crossing (2004)
W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947)
Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning (1995)
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (1955)
ALBERTA
Thomas Wharton, Icefields (1995)
Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man (1970)
Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers (1994)
Richard Harrison, Hero of the Play (1997)
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2000)
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)
Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel (1954)
Emily Carr, Klee Wyck (1941)
Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief (2006)
Yukon, NWT, & Nunavut
Richard Van Camp, The Lesser Blessed (1996)
Robert Arthur Alexie, Pale Indian (2005)
Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993)
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Where I am speaking today
Speaking today on "Canada's Literary Landscape" for the Elder Education Enrichment group in South Burlington today. Should be about 100-125 people there to listen. Looking forward to it.
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