Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist, activist and general rabble-rouser, has been awarded the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University. As an outspoken advocate on everything from censorship to poverty to women’s equality to gay rights to arts funding, many human rights activists around the world are hoping Ms. Atwood will join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign and decline the award.
John Greyson, the academic, teacher, superb political filmmaker and committed activist who recently led the campaign to boycott the Toronto Film Festival in reaction to its uncritical spotlight on Tel Aviv, has drafted and distributed the excellent letter to Ms. Atwood below.
Kolkata Dreams is a first collection of poems from Montreal writer K. Gandhar Chakravarty (8th House Publishing) and true to form offers the delight of a new poet’s way of seeing and being in the world — in this instance, the world of Kolkata, India.
What I liked most about this collection — more specifically, about the better poems in the collection — was Chakravarty’s eye for the poetic moment. Wandering the streets of Kolkata, in his finest moments, Chakravarty is able to see into original moments of real pathos and humour through the sometimes difficult tension of being an outsider. The poetic importance, for instance, of children throwing pebbles into a hole in a stone wall — a game that will never be marketed to wealthy Western kids — or the butchering of a small goat, or the way food offerings in a temple become food offerings for the millions of tiny creatures who carry it away, or the crazy and not-so-crazy street words of a leper.
Poetry plays a critical role in Palestinian history, artistic verse emerging from a region where literature has occupied a key space in cultural expression for centuries.
Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian poet and activist based in Toronto, recently released Hadeel, an incredible debut poetry album and important point in contemporary Palestinian cultural history. Ziadah’s current work builds on an incredible history of engaged Palestinian artistic expression that has key played a role in shaping cutting-edge culture in the Middle East throughout the past century.
The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games have come to an end. Canada won more gold medals than any country ever in the history of the Winter Games. And yesterday, Canada took gold in men’s hockey in an electrifying game against the USA. A fitting end it seems to a two-week barn-burner of patriotism and national pride.
But the celebration has its darker side, one that few Olympic enthusiasts know about, or perhaps care to know about. For starters, in 2002 Vancouver residents voted in favour of a $3 billion Olympics that have subsequently mushroomed into a $7-8 billion bacchanalia of subsidies and debt. These “unexpected” costs have put unprecedented pressure on the provincial spending. Over the next two years, provincial funding for the arts will be cut by a staggering 88% – a devastating blow to cultural groups in British Columbia. School closures throughout the Lower Mainland reflect more of the pressure that has been brought to bare on provincial budgets. Add to these the ongoing crisis in homelessness and poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and the ways that Olympic enforcement ran roughshod over Constitutional rights of expression and assembly, and you have substantive fodder for a critical conversation about the Olympic Games.
For those of us who still have holiday gifts to purchase — and let’s face it slackers, that’s most of us — here’s our last minute gift guide for your politically inclined, arts-loving friends and family. Of course, some gifts here are also well-suited for those people us pinko commie types have yet to brainwash with our liberal, freedom-hating propaganda. You never know, you may even catch Glenn Beck questioning his convictions after watching the right documentary.
Where appropriate, separate affiliate links are provided for our Canadian and American readers.
Josh McPhee, one of the fine folks behind the Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists’ Coop, has published a powerful collection of contemporary political printmaking.
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today is a major collection of contemporary politically and socially engaged printmaking. The book’s 156 full-color pages include hundreds of reproductions, as well as three essays and several shorter writings to provide context and food for thought.
From the publisher’s website: “This full color book showcases print art that uses themes of social justice and global equity to engage community members in political conversation. Based on an art exhibition which has traveled to a dozen cities in North America, Paper Politics features artwork by over 200 international artists; an eclectic collection of work by both activist and non-activist printmakers who have felt the need to respond to the monumental trends and events of our times.”
“Paper Politics presents a breathtaking tour of the many modalities of printing by hand: relief, intaglio, lithography, serigraph, collagraph, monotype, and photography. In addition to these techniques, included are more traditional media used to convey political thought, finely crafted stencils and silk-screens intended for wheat pasting in the street.”
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today
Edited by Josh McPhee
PM Press, October 2009, 156 pages Amazon: CDN$17.61 | US$17.96
Montreal author David Bernans made international headlines in 2006 when he was prevented from holding a reading of his novel North of 9/11 on the campus of Concordia University. While university administrators had cited security concerns as cause for the rejection, they were quick to reassign blame to a clerical error once journalists came calling. Documents recently obtained through access to information legislation show that the writer was in fact under observation by security personnel. In this first-person narrative, Bernans chronicles his experience dealing with Concordia’s security apparatus, and questions the motivations of a university that spies on and censors its students.
Dangerous Reading
There is a powerful moment in the film The Lives of Others where ordinary citizens in a recently re-unified Germany are poring over de-classified documents of the former East German regime’s Stasi to see how details of their lives had been recorded and carefully filed away by the spies of a hyper-paranoid police state. What would it be like to sit under the cold glare of the florescent lights of those drab storage rooms among the massive filing cabinets and read about your own life as seen through the eyes of the Stasi?
Well, I have never lived in a communist dictatorship, but you might say I got a glimpse of my own Stasi file thanks to a favourable ruling from Québec’s Access to Information Commission. “It seems,” writes Investigator Jacques Lachance in the report to his superiors, “that Dr. Bernans is interested in bilingualism at Concordia.” Why, I wondered as I read my file, does the investigator feel it relevant to inform his superiors that the subject he is observing — a writer doing graduate work in translation — is “interested in bilingualism”? Is that really news to anybody? Do they have investigators following mathematicians around, informing their superiors that this one is interested in pi, that one in logarithms? Or perhaps, I thought, “bilingualism” was some kind of code word for a particular political tendency, or sexual preference. Was he telling his superiors that he suspected me of being bisexual?
Kolkata Dreams is a first collection of poems from Montreal writer K. Gandhar Chakravarty (8th House Publishing) and true to form offers the delight of a new poet’s way of seeing and being in the world — in this instance, the world of Kolkata, India.
Poetry plays a critical role in Palestinian history, artistic verse emerging from a region where literature has occupied a key space in cultural expression for centuries.
Josh McPhee, one of the fine folks behind the Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists’ Coop, has published a powerful collection of contemporary political printmaking.
