Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
A BBC article reports on the controversial and potentially ground-breaking Friday prayer service which took place yesterday at facilities of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City, after local mosques refused to host it. Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, led the Friday prayers, which were attended by 80-100 Islamic men and women.
Another article, from the Chicago Sun-Times, is here, and includes this quote:
Some Islamic scholars have said they were aware of a few other mixed-gender prayer meetings led by women, mostly in the West, but they are rare.
''The issue of gender equality is a very important one in Islam, and Muslims have unfortunately used highly restrictive interpretations of history to move backward,'' Wadud said before the service. ''With this prayer service we are moving forward. This single act is symbolic of the possibilities within Islam.''
There was immediate criticism from Muslims who felt this was unacceptable; before westerners jump to conclusions, it's important to understand some of the reasons on both sides, which are covered somewhat in the articles.
12:49 PM
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Friday, March 18, 2005 Getting warmer...
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
Just three of many recent stories that show Toto this definitely isn’t Kansas. All of these news bits are gleaned from accounts in the Montreal Gazette, which unfortunately is not available free online in its entirety, or I'd give you the direct links.
Huge Student Strikes Protest Provincial Cuts in Education Aid
230,000 students went on strike, and nearly 100,000 of them marched this Wednesday in the biggest student protest in Quebec since the 1960s. The protests were in response to the Quebec government’s recent announcement of $103-million cut in student scholarships. I wish I could link to the electronic edition of yesterday’s Gazette and show you the photograph of the huge demonstration stretching as far up a Montreal street as you can see.
But get this: following in the footsteps of their elders, high school students have also been striking. 150 students from four high schools showed up as early as 6 a.m. on Wednesday to form a human chain surrounding their school building in Villeray. Unlike university and CEGEP (basically like a U.S. two-year college or technical school) students, Quebec law says that high school students are required to attend class. But their teachers refused to cross the picket line. Here’s the quote that really got me:
“On the other hand, teachers and administrators don’t want to discourage the students from being politically active,” said Claudette Lechasseur, a spokesperson for the Commission scolaire de Montréal. “The students are required to attend their courses,” Lechasseur said. “Except we realize these are important issues that will one day affect them directly. They’re learning an important lesson in citizenship.”
Big Business Loses in Court
The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously refused to overturn the Quebec government’s ban on butter-colored margarine. The suit had been brought by the international giant Unilever, saying that it costs the company $100,000 a month to have separate manufacturing and distribution processes for margarine designated for Quebec, which is the only place in the world still to have such a restriction.
“Quebec margarine, made in Toronto from Western-grown canola and Ontario soybean oil, is usually a lardish, pale cream colour because of a regulation that aims to protect Quebec’s huge dairy industry by eliminating potential confusion with butter.”
The Supreme Court ruled that the province did indeed have the right to protect its dairy industry.
Gay Activists Also Stage Protest
About 40 members of the Montreal queer activist group “the Pink Panthers” demonstrated in front of a conference center where Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper – an opponent of gay marriage and abortion - was appearing. They arrived in a vehicle topped with a papier-mache likeness of Stephen Harper in a, umm, homosexually compromising position with a pink panther. Some of the other protesters came dressed as bishops and pink pigs – the latter a comment on police brutality.
“His discourse is very homophobic, very anti-abortion, very pro-criminalization of sex work and pro-militarization. We’re sure he’s put on his best makeup for Quebec, and we want to strip him naked,” said Pantoufle, 28 (one of the organizers). The aim of the protest was to show delegates that the Québécois do not support Harper or his party’s policies, protesters said.
The demonstration seems to have been taken with good humor and it later disbanded peacefully, without incident or interference by police.
5:24 PM
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Thursday, March 17, 2005
We're back in Montreal, as of yesterday evening. Life feels so much more tranquil here. I know - it's a city, what am I talking about? But it's true. And that's one of the impressions whose longevity I wonder about: will we always feel this way? Part of it is that this apartment feels like such a cozy nest, compared to our drafty, much larger wooden-frame Vermont house. Right now, there is jazz on the radio; J. is lighting a fire in the fireplace; the rice is cooking on the stove and the broiler is heating in preparation for a chicken breast glazed with apricot, dijon mustard and tamari. Cars go by, but I barely hear them; the streetlights reflect a pink glow off the snow.
This has been a demanding stretch of time, both workwise and personally. Basically things are fine, but there have been important meetings and potentially stressful discussions, all now in the past. As the one who had had the most sleep in the past few days, I drove yesterday, and arrived here with knots across my shoulders and a headache, both of which have eased away during the day today. Watching the fire reflect in the side of an old, carved wooden chest, I feel grateful for many simple things.
Readers interested in Thomas Merton might enjoy the post and subsequent discussion going on at The Vernacular Body (where yours truly has been hogging a good deal of airtime). For me, the discussion feels like it's resonating in the light of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, recently re-read, which is ostensibly about an Italian monastery during the Inquisition, but is actually about lust of all kinds - including lust for power between competing institutions, and lust for knowledge contained in books. The comments, however, are about Merton's choice to remain in the monastery, bound by his bows of obedience - and how we might conceptualize that in terms of our own lives.
The music on the radio, post-dinner, has changed to a live recording from the Fribourg Festival of Sacred Music of medieval chant and chanson, with lute, drums, bells, and women's voices, and it is very wonderful; instrumental interludes interwoven with the sung portions. The fire dies down. And for some reason, I keep thinking of a blue bird I saw hopping happily in a cage in a neighbor's window today, high above the street.
6:41 PM
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Tuesday, March 15, 2005 Montréal, ville plutôt sécuritaire Montreal and the other major Canadian cities have recently been rated the safest North America cities. Montreal ranks further down, at 22nd place, for quality of life in this rating of the world's cities (but what do they know - and we probably got minus points for the weather!)The top cities in both categories were in Switzerland. (Article from Radio Canada, via Montreal City Weblog. In French)
Orchestra on Ice Since I like classical music and am very happy to be in a city with so much excellent live music of all kinds, I've been following the stories about the engagement of Kent Nagano to be the next conductor of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2006. But now there's drama, as always seem to be the case these days with major orchestras, opera, and dance companies - apparently the management of the orchestra and the musicians cannot arrive at a contract, and there is a possibility of a lock-out, right before Nagano is scheduled to conduct several concerts at the end of March and early April. Le Devoir has the story (also in French). (By contrast, I hope many of you read the fairly recent article about the Cleveland Orchestra and their new, young conductor Franz Welser-Möstin in The New Yorker; unfortunately it's not available online, but here's a review from the New York Times of their New York concert engagements last month, which included pianist Radu Lupu playing the five Beethoven piano concertos.)
1:09 PM
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Monday, March 14, 2005
TWO SOLITUDES
Quebec Literature is a large and growing genre, and one that the province is justifiably proud of. But I'm just getting my feet wet, both in Canadian literature, and that of Quebec specifically. I've got several lists that bloggers and newspapers have published, and I noticed in La Presse that someone has just come out with a book about the 100 best Quebecois novels. But I want to ask for suggestions from you who know this literature very well - I'm trying to get a better picture, especially, of Quebec and Canadian history, both past and recent. For now, I'm probably better off with books that are in English translation but I'm gearing up to tackle more and more French. (And of course there are English-language originals on the list too.) Favorites, please?
Hugh MacLennan, born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1907, studied classics (like me); he did his undergraudate work at Dalhousie University, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and got his PhD at Princeton in 1935. He then taught at Lower Canada College in Montreal (does this still exist?), moving to McGill in 1951, where he taught for 30 more years; he died in 1990, probably wondering what on earth was going to happen to his city and to Quebec.
I didn't know about his teaching; just that he is an important Canadian writer. I read his first book, Barometer Rising, about the arms ship explosion in Halifax, a few years ago, and liked it very much. J. is halfway through Two Solitudes, MacLennan's classic book about rural French and Anglo Quebec in the first half of the 20th century, and I'm already stealing snatches of it when he's not reading. Mordecai Richler said that the book's title "entered into our language" as an expression for the Anglo/French cultural divide - he wrote that around 1990, when uncertainty about the province's future was very great and many English-heritage and English-speaking residents had fled to Ontario. The title actually comes from Rilke, and has a much more positive spin than Richler was able to read into it at the time. Although tensions between Anglo- and French culture still exist and can be felt even by newcomers like myself, I hope the Rilke fragment feels more plausible than it did fifteen years ago:
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch, and greet each other.
What I'm most looking forward to, in addition to the insights provided by MacLennan's narrative, is his prose. He's a really excellent descriptive writer; here's one of the opening paragraphs of the book, which begins in 1917:
Nowhere has nature wasted herself as she has here. There is enough water in the Saint Lawrence alone to irrigate half of Europe, but the river pours right out of the continent into the sea. No amount of water can irrigate stones, and most of Quebec is solid rock. It is as though millions of years back in geologic time a sword had been plunged through the rock from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and savagely wrenched out again, and the pure water of the continental reservoir, unmuddied and almost useless to farmers, drains untouchably away. In summer the cloud packs pass over it in soft, cumulus, pacific towers, endlessly forming and dissolving to make a welter of movement about the sun. In winter when there is no storm the sky is generally empty, blue and glittering over the ice and snow, and the sun stares out of it like a cyclop's eye.
All the narrow plain between the St. Lawrence and the hills is worked hard. From the Ontario border down to the beginning of the estuary, the farmland runs in two delicate bands along the shores, with roads like a pair of village main streets a thousand miles long, each parallel to the river. All the good land was broken long ago, occupied and divided among seigneurs and their sons, and then among tenants and their sons. Bleak wooden fences separate each strip of farm form its neighbor, running straight as rulers set at right angles to the river to form long narrow rectangles pointing inland. The ploughed land looks like the course of a gigantic and empty steeplechase where all motion has been frozen. Every inch of it is measured, and brooded over by notaries, and blessed by priests.
Knowing how difficult it is to write that well, I look forward to reading 475 pages more.
3:14 PM
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