The Confluence Issue 6

Confluence

The

Falling for Frogs:

Brittany Mills takes apart the fairytale romance

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I Hope You Like Text:

The Confluence, now with 25% more writing!

Neo-Puritanism: Paul Strickland talks about radical progressivism

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The Poetry War: Brian Fawcett brings out the big guns -Page 8

April 2012

Puritanism Masquerading as Progressive Paul Strickland, Contributor In his 2009 book, Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges condemns increasingly degrading and filthy pornography in the United States.

Researchers and everyone who believes in a sense of fair play owe him a debt of gratitude. Injurious forms of pornography and sadistically violent movies contribute significantly to the debasement of public taste and a sense of indifference to real-life victims of crime and dictatorship.

Unfortunately there are those who use the problems of graphically violent movies and pornography to reach the erroneous conclusion that all sexual desire is wrong, and that male sexuality is inherently violent.

These Stalinopuritanical killjoys want to eliminate all sexual spontaneity and condemn any appreciation of the beauty of the human form. In the McCarthyite early 1950s, being a friend or ally of a Communist could lead to the authorities assuming you were a Communist yourself. This was denounced by the left-liberals of the day as a policy of “guilt by association”. Now, because a few bad men commit rape, all men, because of their physical make-up, are condemned by the ideologically driven killjoys as potential rapists. This is guilt by anatomy. This is an attempt to criminalize male sexuality.

Fair-minded feminists criticize this point of view. Elisabeth Badinter, a French feminist, says “the theory of the ‘rapist male’ is fiercely challenged by anthropologists and psychologists. The English feminist anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sonday has shown that the propensity to rape varies considerably from one society to another.”

Badinter’s book XY: On Masculine Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) is important 1 The Confluence

to this discussion. One of her conclusions in this work is as follows: The theory according to which rape is inherent to male sexuality has never been demonstrated. What is more, it is injurious to the male sex. Psychologists who have studied rapists tend to think rape is a pathology of virility and not the expression of normal virility, a problem of gender and not of sex. According to the work of David Lisak, rape is first of all the consequence of a failure of male identification and an excessive repression of one’s femininity, which he calls “self-mutilation”. The psychological profile of the rapist cannot be extended to all men – far from it. Rape implies a hatred of the other, and many men confide that they could not have sexual relations in such conditions. What remains true is that the model of the hypervirile man, dematricized, defeminized, is a source of real uneasiness with respect to identity and is responsible for two types of violence – violence toward others and violence toward oneself.

Badinter also says, “The new equation, male = bad, has given rise to a loss of identity for a whole generation of men.”

Some women commit acts of violence against other women. For example, the efforts of sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, a recent guest on Jian Ghomeshi’s Q program on CBC, to launch an erotic magazine edited by women for women in the 1980s led to censorship, threats and violence from some feminist groups.

The magazine, On Our Backs, was embraced, at first, by San Francisco’s Communist and anarchist bookstores. But then Bright ran into serious resistance from other feminists she thought would be her allies. In her 2011 book Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir, she recalls, “In every major city there were large women’s bookstores – the heart of feminist publishing – but each one took a different position on us. Mostly against. Some, like the Toronto

women’s bookstore and A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin, issued press releases in which they accused us of being virulent racists and anti-Semitists, of practising female genocide, of endorsing white slavery, of being pimps and masquerading as women. When I spoke on the topic of female orgasm in western Massachusetts, I got bomb threats at two different campuses.”

Bright and her allies in publishing were threatened with assassination. They got hate mail every day, mostly unsigned. Their adversaries were inspired in part by the radically puritanical feminist thinkers, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. “Their acolytes, armed with knives, baseball bats, legal threats, and buckets of fake blood came at us in bars, on the street and at literary conferences. They talked to one another in code. On Our Backs supporters were considered the equivalent of ‘race traitors’,” Bright says in her book. Some of Bright’s women’s-literature bookstores were firebombed.

Bright gives credit to anticensorship feminists who remained in the liberal tradition of free speech and free thought – Ellen Willis, Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, Nan Hunter, Lisa Duggan, Dorothy Allison, Ann Snitow and Carole Vance.

However, on both the left and the right, the totalitarian mindset never goes away. We have to speak up against it.

Garett Svensen, Production Editor

Andy Johnson, Editor in Chief

Once Upon a Lie: The Reason Why Women Fall for Frogs Brittany Mills Contributor ‘The One,’ our soul-mate, Prince Charming, our knight in shining armor. We women spend our lives believing that one day our prince will come and whisk us away into happily ever after. But after repeated losers, boozers, and drug abusers, when do we start to wonder if our guy is really just a frog disguised as a prince, and not the Disney version? Who is to blame for this misconception of Mr. Right, and the maze of men we seem to keep running through? When we think back upon every prince idol we grew up adoring, is it any wonder why we end up chasing losers? Walt Disney’s famous princes are all shallow or ill-tempered, and the only thing they have going for them is a giant castle and stunning boyish looks. Disney films are rife with examples of young women gawking at pompous jerks, but for some reason this is viewed as a ‘happily-ever-after’ situation.

“Disney films are rife with examples of young women gawking at pompous jerks...”

First and foremost on the list of bad men women swoon over is Beast. Ladies, if you ever encounter a man who has been nicknamed “beast” (or in this case, been transformed into a beast on account of his crude manner), you should probably take this as a hint and assume he behaves exactly as

the name would suggest. The list of Beast’s unfavorable behaviors is a long one, but let’s focus on a few of these key qualities. As a prince he is described as “spoiled, selfish and unkind,” and “repulsed by [the sorceress’] haggard appearance, sneered and turned her away.”

It would seem that the Beast has a severe distaste for older people: he turns a poor old woman away before abusing and locking Belle’s father in a dungeon. Throughout the film, the Beast exhibits many instances of being an angry and domineering man.

When Belle disobeys him, he yells at her, grabs her, and throws furniture around. He constantly blames her for his short temper: “If you hadn’t have run away, this wouldn’t have happened!” This is, mind you, only after he has thrown large pieces of furniture at her. Let us not forget the fact that Belle is also under Beast’s captivity in place of her father, and is not allowed to leave without his permission. It is only because of the gentle-hearted servants that Belle is given a proper room rather than being left to ‘be a guest’ in the dungeons for all eternity. However, by the end of the movie, Belle seems to be suffering from something called Stockholm syndrome, which is characterized by a captive who develops sympathetic feelings for their captor.

Beauty and the Beast is the classic tale of a woman coming to the rescue and changing a heartless man into a prince. Ladies, this is a fairy tale, and should not be tried in your own relationship: Disney strikes by giving women the false hope that they can change a man.

Now, “under the sea” is a

Environment Canada 5-Day Weather Forecast: For Prince George, BC. 19-23 April 2012 Thursday, April 19: 13°C, -1°C, partly cloudy, chance of showers Friday, April 20: 9°C, 4°C, partly cloudy Saturday, April 21: 4°C, -5°C, sunny Sunday, April 22: 12°C, -1°C, cloudy, chance of showers Monday, April 23: 11°C, 1°C, partly cloudy, chance of showers

Contact and Submission Info: The Confluence is looking for submissions of any type from students, alumni and staff.

The next deadline is: May 14th 2012.

Send angry invective, self-indulgent contributions and jokes to: confluence.editor@gmail.com Send classified ads to: confluence.classifieds@gmail.com

beautiful and natural miracle of this world, but apparently the watery depths make man and fish alike very vain. Above waters, it is generally frowned upon for a grown man to be flopping like a fish out of water with a 16 year old girl, but I guess when you are a prince you can do whatever, or whoever, you want. Prince Eric is a completely self-involved man, who often day dreams so much that he cannot even remember the face of his “true love” after blatantly staring into it for a good two minutes. After centuries of women trying to get men to pay attention to something more than just their youthful appearances and “womanly curves,” The Little Mermaid goes and tarnishes all of that. The only reason Ariel winds up with the Prince at the end is because he falls for her looks. She has no voice; therefore he knows nothing about her, and certainly does not realize what a huffy sixteen year old girl she is. Another great Disney lesson for women: men should judge a woman completely by her looks, so she had better hope she still has the body of a sixteen year old.

“A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep.”

Too bad for Cinderella: her dream of being freed from one prison only happens when she confines herself to another. After singing this famous song, Cinderella is interrupted by the chiming of the castle clock: “Oh that clock. Old kill joy. I hear you!

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Once Upon a Lie cont. from page 2...

Come on get up you say, time to start another day. Even he orders me around.” This could certainly be seen as foreshadowing into Cinderella’s future life, a life which will be consumed by bearing heirs to the throne and happily participating in royal duties. Cinderella’s prince is the original Prince Charming, yet there is nothing that seems to fit this name other than his superb dancing skills. The king, Charming’s father, says he is “irresponsible and avoids responsibilities” and he makes this abundantly clear in the movie. Prince Charming is obviously very careless, and demonstrates this immediately after he meets Cinderella. They spend the night dancing away, and yet he never once asks for her name.

Again ladies, a man who does not ask for your name within the first couple of minutes meeting you is probably not that interested in you.

At the stroke of midnight, when she tries to flee, he commands her to stay, a sign he is controlling and does not like to be disobeyed. To add to his lack of concern for her, the prince cannot even muster up enough enthusiasm to go find his future bride after she has left: he leaves the hard work for his duke and servants.

What woman would not be wooed by a man too lazy to search for her?

Thanks again to Disney, the message that a true Prince Charming is a man void of responsibility and lacks any self-motivation is what all women need.

Without a doubt, there are Prince Charmings out there, but do not rely on Disney’s standards.

A prince is dashing, charming and chivalrous: not lazy, self-centered and easily angered. Women need to stop idealizing the lounging princes of the Disney movies, and look for the real prince: a man who is hard working and devoted to his princess. Happily ever after is out there; women just need to dig through the swamp of frogs to find the real Prince Charming in waiting.

3 The Confluence

Mentor Me Andy Johnson, Editor in Chief.

The Northern British Columbia United Way is proud to continue their ‘Mentor Me’ program. This program is designed to bridge the gap between community leaders and students in Prince George.

‘Mentor Me’ focuses on networking. The outcomes of this focus are to enhance networking abilities, help set reachable career goals within the industry chosen by the individual, and to encourage accountability.

Through 6 one-hour sessions over a three month period the aim of this program is to enable an increased connection with community members, transition easier into the

job market, open opportunities for personal career goals, and to build confidence in individual decision making. These aims are designed to allow individuals to explore outside their comfort zones, while being supported by someone who has the technical experience.

If you are 30 or under and are currently studying or graduating from high school, or post-secondary and are thinking about starting your own business, or in a transitional career period, ‘Mentor Me’ be just the opportunity you are looking for.

For more information on the ‘Mentor Me’ program, please contact United Way at 250-561-1040.

Horoscopes

Fun & Games that you’ll decide to take a class to increase your technical knowledge.

One thing is clear - you’re likely to achieve extraordinary success through the use of technology.

Aries: You could be invited on a last-minute adventure soon. By all means, seize the chance! You’re certainly ready for a change, and this opportunity could turn out to be just what you’ve been hoping for. You’ll find it enlarges your world in just the way you’d hoped.

Cancer: You might find yourself unexpectedly busy soon. A change of plans could mean you spend most of the day at the office handling one crisis after another. You could find it difficult to switch gears, but by the end of the day you’ll be happy that you could help.

Taurus: If you’ve been thinking about making a career change, today is a good day to do some research on professions that interest you. It may be that you’re ready to take the leap and start a business of your own. Get out your address book and college directory.

Leo: It’s hard to imagine a world without computers. Expect your income to increase dramatically this year as a result of a technological innovation. You could play a part in developing it, or more likely, find a Gemini: Technology is going to Confluence CNC creative use for it. play a big role in your life in the immediate future. It’s possible Virgo: Some unexpected visitors by. With Sudoku 9x9 - Puzzlecould 4 of 5drop - Very Hardno warning, you

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could be serving lunch or dinner to a group of ten! Take-out was created for just such an occasion. Pull out the linens from the back of the closet, make a few calls to your favorite bakery or restaurant, and voilà!

Libra: Friends or colleagues could introduce you to a field of study that captures your interest. You’re ready for something new in your life; your creative juices are flowing and you’ll want to make good use of them.

Writing, painting, and photography are all good choices.

Scorpio: Travel is in store for you.

You could visit friends or take advantage of sales and do some shopping. Your active mind will pick up on all sorts of ideas for improving your home. Once the errands are done, go home and look at your space with a fresh eye.

Sagittarius: You’re likely to receive news that brightens your future outlook. Whatever the news, know that your financial picture will begin to look dramatically better than it has been. Start making plans for how you’ll improve your lifestyle. A vacation may just be in order.

Capricorn: You can expect your life to change in a fairly dramatic way.

The change could be subtle at first, but with time and distance you’re likely to look back on this day as pivotal. Keep your mind open to the possibilities.

Aquarius: You are itching for a change. The difficulty is figuring out what you really want to do with your life. Find out what people do and don’t like about their careers. Use the library and the Internet. This should provide you with a clearer vision of where you want to go.

Pisces: You’re going to be busy but happy. It’s likely that a project you’ve been working on for a long time suddenly yields positive results.

It’s clear that you’re right for this particular job. Social activities are also highlighted, so treat your team to lunch to celebrate.

The Confluence 4

Arts & Entertainment

Break Megan Wall,

Contributor “I want you to leave.”

It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, hearing those words. The anger drained out of my body and was replaced with a mixture of tiredness and cool inevitability. Her words were only an echo across our connection.

The words are still echoing, though their sound on her lips and the look on her face are obscured by time and its ill effects on memory.

But I remember falling back onto the floor from my crouching position at their sound.

What was most striking about her statement was the contrast between it and the rest of her personality. She was soft spoken and agreeable, an adorable girl often mistaken for a fourteen-year-old despite being in her early 20’s. The words that would sound harsh from another mouth were expected, craved even, like some unrealized eventuality. It was refreshing to see her pushed to the point of honesty, as she was content to slip away from me quietly.

Instead I grasped at all the beautiful pieces of her as they slipped through my fingers. She was like sand, falling to the ground only to be caught up in the wind, simultaneously trapped and free; a place I could not access let alone understand.

She sat on the stairs while I sat across from her on the floor and we didn’t look at each other for a long time. I would go, but not yet.

It wasn’t fair that I had to be the one to leave; she was the one who had decided to change things. But 5 The Confluence

do we really have any control over these changes? She seemed to have little choice in destroying my trust in her with broken promises against self-mutilation. I wonder if she had a choice in letting somebody else kiss her. There seemed little consequence to leaving.

“It was refreshing to see her pushed to the point of honesty, as she was content to slip away from me quietly.”

I was tired of pretending to care. I was tired of pretending she cared about me, and tired of pretending that she needed me. In reality she was just another desperate case, another victim who’d fallen through the cracks. She had created a world in which she would not allow herself to be happy until she found her savior, and that savior was no longer me. Funny how I never remembered signing up for the job in the first place. My attempts to fulfill the role were ill received and I became another aggressor, another person that victimized her, another part of the past that she wanted to run away from. Or maybe being left was all she knew how to do.

I made a last ditch effort to make a connection with her, but I was faltering. The touches and good bye kisses seemed false after the truth of her statement. She was too hot; she was always too hot, prone to fevers that blurred tears into sweat.

Tears between us were nothing new.

I ached to believe that we weren’t done talking, that I would see her again and fairy-tale love would be strong enough to fix it. I

can see her face clearly as I close the door behind me. I wished for this to be a dream, in hopes that I could forget that look. I wonder if she always made that face when somebody left.

To the Victor...

Garett Svensen, Production Editor The seventh annual Barry Mckinnon Chapbook Awards and reading was held Friday, April 13th at CNC. Reading at the event were, Ryan White, Meghan Sterling, Garett Svensen, Darcie Smith, Courtney Bates, K. Darcy Ingram, Rob Ziegler Kael Walske, Matt Partyka and Alex Buck.

Alex Buck won the chapbook award of $250 for Ceci n’est pas la Poesie. Darcie Smith took home the runner up prize of $50 for Butter Thief. Ryan White won the Dark Horse award of $50 for Seperation of North and State. Garett Svensen won the Poem of the Year award of $25 for The Prodigals.

Chrono Trigger: 18 Years On

Andy Johnson, Editor in Chief.

-Square Enix, 2008 -Nintendo DS 1995 saw the release of one of the most definitive games of the 1990s: Chrono Trigger. The gameplay, story and replay value of this game were exceptional for a roleplaying adventure game released in the mid-1990s. Chrono Trigger since its initial North American release in 1995 has seen two re-releases; Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy duel pack released for the Playstation in 2001, and the 2008 port to the Nintendo DS. The gameplay on the Nintendo DS is very similar to the gameplay on the SNES, with only slight differences in names of items and tech abilities. The DS version also has another gameplay feature which utilizes both screens of the DS, this option is a must if one does not own a DS XLi as it saves upper screen real estate when in battle. Although, there are two draw backs to the DS port gameplay; first it seems a lot slower in terms of turn base, compared to Chrono Trigger’s PS or SNES counter-parts. While this does not detract from the game’s enjoyability, it does drag the game out slightly. The second is that the game seems to be a lot easier than its previous ports. Over all, the games controls are intuitive and function properly, there are no glitches, and the sixteen-bit graphics still look lush and detailed.

The story follows Crono, Lucca and Marle (Princess Nadia) as they travel through time in order to stop the parasitic Lavos. Along the way they meet; Frog (Glenn), a master swordsman from 600 A.D., Ayla, a prehistoric chief of Ioka Village from 65,000,000 B.C., Robo (R66-Y/ Prometheus), an android from 2300 A.D., and Magus (Janus), a dark magician from 600 A.D. (previously from 12,000 A.D.). In addition to meeting these characters, they are also all playable and they all have the same goal: Saving the world

from Lavos. All of the characters are memorable for different reasons, yet Magus seems to be the character that really sticks out in people’s minds.

From his snide dialogue to his brooding theme, Magus is definitely a character people enjoy most in their party.

The replay value of this game is still exceptional. There are over ten different endings to Chrono Trigger. While a majority of them are slight variations of the main ending gained from the first play through, the remaining nine unique endings are dependent on when the player beats the game. The hardest of all these endings is the “Programmer’s Room”, this ending is achieved by beating Lavos with either Crono and

Marle, or just Crono once a “New Game +” file is started. The DS port also features a “Monster Battle Area”, two additonal quests and a new boss! Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS is a great example of successfully altering an existing title without losing any of the original mythos, or enjoyability. Yes Lucas, I am referring to you.

It seems the seventeen years since the initial release of Chrono Trigger have been kind. Not only does it have decent gameplay, an excellent cast of characters and high re-play value, it also has one of the most memorable soundtracks which draws the player into the story and the most original final bosses of the 1990s.

An accident occurs in Chrono Trigger.

Work OverArt

Paul Strickland, Contributor Dedicated to the union meatpackers in Brooks, Alberta; Oelwein, Iowa; and Garden City, Kansas: Make earning a living an everlasting scramble.

Fill the labour pool to overflowing.

In the flood you tread water for dear life

trying to keep your nostrils above the surface.

See all the deadwood get swept away.

Discourage, divide, displace and replace.

No labour unions on the Tower of Babel.

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College of New Caledonia

Students’ Union Canadian Federation of Students Local 13

Your Students’ Union The College of New Caledonia Students’ Union (CNCSU) is the collective voice of all students attending the College of New Caledonia. The CNCSU provides services and events, and advocates for student rights locally, provincially and nationally.

If you have any questions or would like to volunteer, stop by the office or e-mail us at info@cncsu.ca Room 1-303 3330 22nd Avenue Prince George, BC, V2N 1P8 Tel: (250) 562-7415 Fax: (250) 562-4709 Email: info@cncsu.ca Web: www.cncsu.ca

Advocacy Advocacy is the primary function of your Students’ Union.

The CNCSU can support and assist you through grade appeals and student complaints, and provide advice and assistance with any issues you might face as a student.

The CNCSU also lobbies for a fair, affordable and fully accessible post-secondary education on the municipal, provincial and national government levels. Drop by your Students’ Union office to find out how you can help.

International Student Identity Card (ISIC): - FREE to all full time CNC Students! ($16 Value) - Great discounts on travel with - Greyhound, Via Rail and Travel CUTS - Come to the Students’ Union office for your photo

Faxing and photocopying: - FREE local & long distance faxing (within Canada) - Fax receiving service available - Cheapest photocopying on campus!

- Only $0.05 per page single or double sided

Clubs: -

Start a club today!

Funding available up to $500 per club Great opportunity to make new friends Dedicated campus calander board

Studentsaver: - Great local discounts around town.

- Located in the back of your Student Union Handbook - Includes discounts across Canada.

Student food bank: - To help combat student poverty - Information about community services available as well - The Students’ Union is always looking for donations and you are welcome to use the service whenever needed.

U•Pass -The Universal Transit Pass gives you unlimited use of Prince George Transit as well as full use of both Aquatic Centers in Prince George. Pick-up your student card at Admissions than pop by the Students’ Union Office to get your U-Pass sticker.

Lockers - Rent your locker at the Students’ Union office, Room 1-303 (Near the Atrium).

Find us in room 1-303

-

Half size lockers are $5 per term Full size lockers are $10 per term $5 lock deposit fee Payment method: Cash Only

your students’ union • local 13, canadian federation of students 7 The Confluence

A Poetry War in Prince George Brian Fawcett, Reprinted with permission from dooneyscafe.com There’s a poetry war going on in Prince George, B.C., the first serious one I can think of that’s occurred for quite a long time, anywhere. Poetry isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when Prince George hits the news. Pine beetles might, and overcutting the forests should.

For the prurient-minded, there’s locally born porn queen Marilyn Star, or for those who enjoy being appalled, the fact that the city has been designated the most dangerous city in Canada by Maclean’s Magazine two years in a row for its high crime rate.

But poets duking it out in gangs? Aren’t poets supposed to be flighty poufters who spend their social energies looking poetical, networking like a herd of downscale MBAs, dreaming up schemes to make themselves famous in an uncaring-for-poetry culture, or devising ways to make themselves appear more sensitive than the poets around them?

There’s quite a lot more going on in Prince George these days.

The poets are fighting over what people are allowed to imagine and speak about, and why. And because that is the central cultural battle going on all across Western civilization right now, it matters, and not in a small way.

Prince George happens to be my home town, so this conflict and who gets hurt by it matters to me personally, even if it won’t to the local city council, or to the unemployed loggers trying to make their traditional living in a landscape

that is getting very short of trees. A poetry war in a small town might not seem worth taking seriously to most outsiders, but like I said, these are global stakes in microcosm, and so I’m going to try to explain who the players are, what they’re fighting about, and what the stakes actually are, global and local.

The first thing you should know is that Prince George has had an active poetry scene for about 40 years now. It was touched off in about 1970 by the arrival of Barry McKinnon, who is now regarded as a major Canadian poet with a precision-tuned sensibility that is as tough-minded as it is generous, but he was then not much more than a pencil-necked recent university grad getting his first teaching gig. From the beginning, McKinnon was full of all the right kinds of energy: he loved teaching poetry, wasn’t interested in power, prestige or an academic career, and more or less instantly felt at home in Northern B.C.. The scene was boosted when John Harris, now regarded as among the most original prose writers British Columbia has ever produced, moved to the city in 1972 to teach at the College of New Caledonia with McKinnon.

McKinnon was educated at UBC and Sir George Williams (now Concordia University) in Montreal, where he took classes from, among others, Irving Layton. McKinnon used a deceptively simple method of making it work: he created books.

Folk hero and developer Ben Ginter had donated an old letterpress to the college, which Barry discovered in one of the college out-buildings. He got it working and turned it into a teaching device, and then, when the college began to move itself toward industrial development stupidities of one sort or another and found McKinnon’s activities morally worrisome

and administratively irritating, he found another letterpress in Barkerville, which he moved into the basement of his house. Whenever a poet came to town, McKinnon—usually with the physical collaboration of the poet and his students, would print up small letter-press monographs or broadsides for the occasion. Many were beautifully produced, and all of them were interesting. The students learned that poems were made, that both composition and production were linked, and most of them went away enlightened, whether they turned into poets themselves, or went out in the world to do other things.

Vancouver-born Harris came from an impressively Canadian but more conventional academic background, doing undergraduate work at UBC with Bill Schermbrucker and a PhD at McGill under Louis Dudek and Hugh McLennan. He was more influenced by Northrop Frye and the conventional canon of Canadian Literature than Mckinnon was, at least before that was shredded by the universities as they turned literature departments into remedial writing facilities to serve the literacy needs of the college and universities’ ascendant science, MBA and industrial job-training programs. Harris, who is arguably more self-deprecating and academically unambitious than McKinnon, was also a different sort of intelligence, less interested in poetry, more interested in personal and public truth, and in narrative.

People used to joke that Harris was incapable of not telling the truth as he saw it, a personality trait that

http://cncsu.cfs-services.ca/en/student-saver

The Confluence 8

had him permanently on the wrong side of the college administrators.

It created fascinating tensions in his fiction as well, because it forced him to write fiction by recounting, as laconically as he could, exactly what had happened in the real world. Let me explain it this way: when, as part of one of his books, he had to invent a pseudonym for Barry McKinnon, he gave his character the name “Larry McKinnon.” Harris arrived with a press of his own—not using letter-press technologies—called Repository Press. The list of Repository publications over the years, which has included a succession of poetry anthologies and some very useful hiking guides for the North, is startling and deeply relevant to life as it is lived in Northern B.C. What both McKinnon and Harris have written themselves, from the mid-1970s to the present, constitutes an accurate if slightly accidental record of what happens when you try to live a thoughtful life in Northern B.C.. Someday, if there’s any justice, this record will be treasured as an alternate history to that of the blind boosterism that characterizes the public record of northern aspirations. Both McKinnon and Harris have retired from teaching—Harris in 2006, McKinnon a year later. But the interest in poetry and the unfiltered way it perceives the world has become permanent amongst the people they taught, and a legacy—or, as the administrators see it, an attitude problem—that several of those who were their contemporaries and those who have succeeded them have been infected with.

Not long after his arrival in the city, McKinnon started inviting poets from all over B.C. and the rest of Canada to Prince George. An astonishing number accepted his invitations, and the result was a series 9 The Confluence

of highly memorable cultural events few cities the size of Prince George have enjoyed. It culminated in a poetry conference in 1980 that had Robert Creeley, George Bowering and Robin Blaser headlining, practically every poet working in B.C. at the time playing second fiddle, and a surprisingly large cross-section of local citizens, only some of them students, enthusiastically participating.

The conference created a ferment that reverberates to this day.

The list of poets who came to Prince George at McKinnon’s invitation included Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Earle Birney, George Stanley, P.K. Page, George Bowering, Sid Marty, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner, Robert Creeley, Lissa Wolsak, Robert Harlow, Pierre Coupey, Patrick Lane, Robert Harlow, bp nichol, and Robin Blaser, along with dozens of other major and minor figures in Canadian poetry. The list of local people drawn into poetry by the McKinnon-Harris “machine” is less famous, but no less impressive for its range within the local community. They included, in the early days, the wonderful ecologist/poet Alice Wolcuk, local realtor /poet Barb Munk, who came from a local pioneer family, Bill Bailey, Harvey Chometsky, Shirley Weese, Meryl Duprey, John Oscroft, Randy Kennedy, Sharon Stevenson, Larry Calvert, and Maureen Morton.

From the mid-1980s through to McKinnon’s retirement from the college, the local presences were (in no particular order) Paul Shuttleworth (via Mackenzie and San Francisco), Lee MacKenzie, Virginia Marsolais, Richard Kaulback, Ken Belford, Bob Atkinson, Paul Strickland, Stan Shaffer, Bev King, Donna Kane and Vivien Lougheed, whose recent head-crackingly clear expose of the dinosaur bones industry,

Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils might actually help to resolve the unproductive conflict between amateurs and professional fossil hunters in the North.

The current front-line generation of poets and prosewriters, (with many of the longtime players still around and active, including Harris and McKinnon), seem to be Matt Partyka, Alex Buck, Graham Pearce, Arianwen Goronwy-Roberts, Greg Lainsbury and Andy Johnson, all of whom seem to possess both the sense of humour and the attitude problem that have become a local tradition.

McKinnon’s poetic and intellectual base was lodged in what’s come to be known as “The New American Poetry”, named after Donald Allen’s 1960 counter-culture anthology that brought focus to a generation of dissident American poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Most of the poets of New American Poetry were male, many of them were gay, and nearly all were culturally and socially—and intellectually—disaffected from the finely-crafted “feelings” that had come to characterize English language poetry, and, not incidentally, middle class values as they were practiced in the 1950s and 1960s. The New American Poetry, as a cosmopolitan social and artistic movement, was centred originally in major American centres like Boston, New York City, and San Francisco.

But within a few year of the anthology’s publication, Vancouver, B.C. had become a major nexus, largely due to the presence of Warren Tallman at U.B.C., and after Robin Blaser’s immigration to Canada in 1966, Simon Fraser University. McKinnon, and nearly ever other writer on the Canadian west coast caught it there, and through George Bowering, who returned to B.C. in 1969 after several

years teaching at Sir George Williams in Montreal.

Everyone involved with the New American Poetry has shared two things, whether they were the original poets in Allen’s anthology or the several generations of poets and writers since, including a fairly sizable group living in, or passing through, Prince George, B.C.. One of those things is a sense, often more pervasive than directly articulated, that there is something wrong with the mainstream—wherever they encounter it. It has been an apprehension of civic and artistic misrule powerful enough that the poets are permanently in search of the smoke pipe that those in authority are either waving around to obscure the human and environmental damage being inflicted—or have shoved, as the saying goes, in their sensory orifices to keep them dazed at the thought that they’re in the control room. At the root of this “apprehension” is the cosmopolitan sense that the local and the global are intimately connected, and that there is no excuse for the global predations upon the local.

The second thing all of these poets share, particularly those in Northern B.C. where the global screwup is an oppressively plain presence in everyone’s lives, is a sense that what is amiss can’t effectively be countered with righteousness or ideology, and that the most effective instrument of struggle is an open-minded phenomenology fuelled by focusing on local particularities and being willing to laugh. Call the willingness to laugh “gallows humour” if you like, but there is thus an extremely acute sense of irony at work and a willingness to laugh, even when—maybe particularly when—levity is deemed inappropriate by the supervisors of both the economy and the culture.

It’s worth noting that the current generation of McKinnon/ Harris-influenced Zeitgeist-hostile writers and poets seem to be centred around the College of New Caledonia where McKinnon and Harris taught, and around Graham Pearce, an iconoclaustic live-wire who is an instructor at the College. For the past few years Pearce has been running a carefully irreverent reading series in the city called Postnorth, teaching creative writing and English to an enthusiastic (judging from the uniformly glowing student evaluations he gets) new generation of students trying to pierce the fog that passes for public discourse in the North: business boosterism, handwringing about dead pine trees, and cockeyed industrial development schemes (none of which are likely to work any better than the notorious and short-lived chopstick factory that was the main accomplishment of the administrators in McKinnon and Harris’ heyday).

Life in the North has changed since the 1970s, and one of the positive changes has been the opening of a university in Prince George: The University of Northern B.C. It is a genuine, degree-granting institution with a good library, logical local specialties in boreal forestry and aboriginal issues, and a medical school.

But like all contemporary universities, UNBC’s faculty has its share of the generation of humourless academic entrepreneurs who call themselves post-modernists and post-structuralists. These are narrowly-trained people for whom history is a relic of European intellectual chauvinisms of one sort or another, and Western society itself a binary of oppressors and victims they see themselves as personally charged with delivering overdue rewards to. Like the discourse at most

universities today, theirs is crudded with a personal rights-obsessed self esteem-seeking censoriousness, overdetermined by discredited Marxist intellectual methodologies and by an unadmitted moral certainty that imposes cultural relativism on everything but the owner/operators’ often-neurotic fixations, along with self esteem-building and correct consciousness-building programs for those they claim, Bolshevik-style, to represent. These neo-Bolshevist academics are people so certain that they’re right about everything that they are prepared to rearrange the lives and behaviors of the living without their consent and to revise the testimonies of the dead to secure moral and intellectual comfort for themselves and the people they have arrogated the right to supervise.

Please note that this malaise is no more virulent at UNBC than at other universities, and that it has largely supplanted the Liberal Arts vision of the university as a place where students are there, while they receive specialist training of various sorts, to acquire the cognitive tools of competent democratic citizenship.

The infection, in fact, may well be less pervasive and extreme at UNBC given that northern B.C. has always had a way of imposing common sense and punitive practical realities on extremisms of any kind. Nor is the description of these people I’ve offered one that they would acknowledge or even recognize. Moral sincerity is a camouflage that confuses both its wearers and those they seek to confuse—or ambush—with the unstable mix of ideology and radical morality sincerity inevitably seems to result in. These princes and princesses of academia have neither the self-awareness to recognize their intentions, nor do they have any detectable sense of humour with which The Confluence 10

to process such recognitions. In their defense, this is because the moral goals they pursue are worthwhile.

They believe men and women should be treated equally, that systemic social, political and psychological injustices should be corrected, that racial and class distinctions are odious, and that we should stop tearing the planet apart if we want to continue to live on it. Exactly what John Harris, Barry McKinnon, Graham Pearce and a solid majority of Prince George’s population believe, in other words.

But in action, they are practicing a latter-day strain of Bolshevism—which is the presumption that virtue of purpose can confer on the virtuous the right to represent or constrain others without their consent, and that the end justifies the means.

I’m not suggesting that their Bolshevism is identical to the Soviet strain that eventually resulted in about 20 million people being starved to death, worked to death in Siberia, or shot in the neck by the several generations of Soviet secret police. It isn’t. But the moral certainty is similar, and the situational tactics share a similar crudeness, censoriousness and inflexibility.

The leadership of the censorious side of the Prince George poetry war seems to reside in two academically ambitious people. One is an American-born UNBC English professor named Robert Budde, a rotund Vegan who arrived in Prince George shortly after UNBC opened. He’s published four volumes of verse, three volumes of fiction, and has several anthologies to his credit, one a selection of Al Purdy’s verse that I’ll examine in more detail later. The volume of Budde’s verse I’m most familiar with is Finding Fort George, a somewhat odd quest given that the 18th century Fort is long gone and 11 The Confluence

wasn’t much to look at while it was there. Budde seemed to be more intent on discovering Barry McKinnon in various postures (a “gunslinger”, etc.) few would recognize as typical of the notoriously unassuming McKinnon.

Budde’s website, robbudde. weebly.com indicates he has four university degrees, including a English PhD from the University of Calgary for which he submitted, as his thesis, a novel titled Misshapen, which was written under the supervision of Aritha Van Herk, a close associate of the censoriously protestant patriarch of CanLit, Rudy Wiebe, and herself the author of the somewhat dubiously famous novel Judith.

Eva Tihanyi, in Books in Canada, described Misshapen this way: there is a forced quality to the whole book, as if it had been cobbled together with great effort and under some duress. Its short chapters—many only a page long—suggest the selfconsciousness of writing exercises.

Budde also wrote a volume of verse for his MA under Dennis Cooley at the University of Manitoba, although his CV states that his PhD candidacy had course work in “Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, American Women Poets, Feminist and Postcolonial Theory”.

I’ve always found Budde perfectly pleasant to deal with and his writing relatively easy to follow, even though I have as little idea what Postcolonial means as Prince George city council does, and almost certainly will disagree with him over how to define the empire we are the escaped colonists from—not to mention my doubts about any sort of teleological theory as a means of apprehending human reality. I must admit to also having a few doubts about how a guy intent on teaching Canadians in Northern B.C. how to

write would deploy an expertise in American Women Poets or Feminist Theory, but I’m sure I must be missing something on that.

The other major leader of the Bolshevik faction a woman named Si Transken, which I’m told is, in true Bolshevik tradition, a non de plume. Her entry in the UNBC faculty website is difficult to parse.

It offers, somewhat curiously in a publish-or-perish environment, no trackable account of her publications, and very little about her educational background, which I had to trace through a second UNBC website. It does have three photographs of her, one of them an attractive colour photo nearly as large the space given to text. Part of the text is a rather strange note about someone that she’s attracted to, a sentence that defines heterosexuality uncategorically as a form of oppression, and the following somewhat opaque description of, I think, her goals as an educator: “Together with her clients she attempts to fully reclaim women’s hope, creativity, vision, and empowerment. When Si facilitates workshops on women’s issues she likes to leave them laughing, coloring, drawing, singing, playing because they already know how to suffer.” Again, I must be missing something. Aren’t wanting to leave people “laughing, coloring, drawing, singing, playing” generally the educational goals at a daycare centre?

Trying to get hold of Transken’s poetry is tricky, although she regularly distributes it at poetry readings and consciousness-raising workshops under titles like “Our Group Poem About Dicks”. She appears to be mainly an editor of anthologies, but the only one I could actually locate on Amazon.com is from a publisher called PressForward, whose website seems to be

offering academic self-publishing facilities from a residential address that Googlemaps locates on a gravel road about 15 kilometres west of Prince George, and Canada 411 has listed to someone named Mark Maillot. The only other solid pieces of information I have on Ms. Transken is that she’s an associate professor in the university’s social work program, has shown her paintings of her vagina at group poetry readings at UNBC, and that she is recently married to Ken Belford, who has been, over the years, the other widely acclaimed poet Northern B.C. has produced aside from McKinnon. A peer review of Belford’s latest book of poems can be found on this website, here.

Let’s go back to one of Rob Budde’s works, which is a selection of Al Purdy’s poems he edited in 2006 for Wilfred Laurier Press University Press in Waterloo, Ontario.

In that selection, Budde went out of his way to select certain poems of Purdy’s—and to exclude others.

Here’s his explanation for the way he selected them: I find some of Purdy’s poems – “offensive” in the sense that they have the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent. They contain, in short, racist and sexist elements.

This is not surprising coming out of the 1960’s in Canada, but it is something that requires comment. I have chosen not to include many poems that are considered Purdy’s best because of these racist and sexist elements. …[Frank]Davey cites “The Cariboo Horses” as an example of Purdy’s tendency toward damaging images. It is the title poem of Purdy’s Governor General Award winning book and is often anthologized.

It is a brilliant poem in many ways, but an entire stanza is devoted to

as an historical figure in a specific context, simply removes whatever poems that contain language that offends the editor’s sensibility, and condemns Purdy for not sharing his values and moral vocabulary as if it was Purdy’s duty, in the 1960s and 1970s when most of his great poems were written, to figure out what Rob Budde finds morally agreeable in 2006.

Fawcett has authored more than a dozen books, including the above: Human Happiness

comparing “Beaver or Carrier women maybe / or Blackfoot squaws” (as if the distinction didn’t matter) to horses. Davey rightly describes the representation of Aboriginal women in the poem as “as extreme and lamentable as any in our literature”.

Purdy’s sexism is clearest perhaps in his “Song of the Impermanent Husband” which addresses a “maddening bitch” without much self-awareness. There are other examples, but that is not what this introduction is for. I think readers and students should look into this systemic racism and sexism in some of Purdy’s work because it is indicative of prevailing thought that still exists in contemporary writing and needs revision.

Budde’s bowdlerized selection from Purdy’s opus, coming as it does from an academic university press, is a teaching text aimed at student readers. The selection, instead of presenting Purdy, a poet who captured the vernacular language and common values of his era more precisely than any writer in Canada,

The anthology therefore fails not just as a representation of Purdy’s intelligence and poetic range, it fails as a teaching vehicle. If Budde, as the selecting editor, wanted to show that Purdy had some ideas that were acceptable in his time but have since fallen out of fashion, he should have provided evidence for it in the form of the texts of the offending poems—and then argued for his moral vocabulary over Purdy’s with his students. But, see, this is not how academic Bolshevism operates. It is so certain of his moral correctness, it can remade Al Purdy in its own image (or that of the book’s editor) and—I don’t think this is incidental—find Purdy comparatively less correct than Budde.

This is a kind of intellectual thuggery worthy of—you guessed it—the Soviet revisions of history during the Stalin era, when politicians and writers were routinely removed from the Bolshevik canon whenever they were found to be out of synch with the capriciouslyaltering correct party line. The only difference is that in Stalin’s Soviet Union, anyone removed from the canon was nearly always shot in the back of the neck or invited to walk to Siberia in the middle of winter after being given 30 minutes to gather food and clothing for the trip.

One wonders what we’d have gotten had Budde been asked to select the poems of Allen Ginsberg, or the The Confluence 12

prose of Raymond Carver, where “the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent” might appear in every second line.

A couple of weeks ago, this website published an explanation by Graham Pearce of his Postnorth reading series and why he’d felt compelled to mount the series. You can find it at http://www.dooneyscafe. com/archives/3003. As part of his defense of the series he offered the following description of an encounter with Budde: … I attended a reading at the Prince George Public Library dedicated to landscape poetry featuring Dr. Rob Budde.” Pearce writes.

“After the reading, we were stuck with the image of Budde wearing a heavy poncho weaved by his father that he explained “represented” the prairies. Sigh. It also said, “I’m so much more sensitive than you are.”

I left the reading feeling like the prairie-poncho was a sign of what was absent at this and most other recent readings: risk. The poncho was also a sign of the political situation poetry had found itself in: the father weaved a poncho for his son/ said poncho represents childhood and father/ said father is a weaver and son is a poet/ no harm done here. …I believe there is room for landscape poetry and its prairie ponchos; equally, I believe there is room for a measured response.”

Now, Pearce was clearly needling Budde here—rather gently, to my mind. I’d have been on about the poncho-weaving traditions of Minnesota, asking where the sombrero and the Clint Eastwood cigarillo was, or wondering aloud about how useful a poncho might be in snowstorm.

Pearce, instead, is trying to make a couple of serious points about how poems are constructed, and tacitly opining that a full and uncensored range of materials and modes of 13 The Confluence

expression is particularly crucial to meaningful poetic communication. He’s also acutely aware that most poetry readings are among the dullest cultural events in our civilization, particularly those deploying poetry-as-self-declamation-andtherapy, where most of the listeners in the room can reduce the poems performed to a single line: “I’m so sensitive I can’t stand it.” The reality is that most audiences can’t stand it either, which is why so many people fall asleep during poetry readings.

A morally-earnest poetry of woundhealing self-legitimation may have therapeutic value, but it also has the intellectual rigor and entertainment value of an AA meeting.

I suppose it’s also true that a large portion of what is usually called “language poetry” has similar problems. I once witnessed Steve McCaffery read a poem that featured the first syllable of every name in the Invermere, B.C. telephone book. It was fairly amusing until about the letter C, but McCaffery went through the whole alphabet. But the end of it, seven of the eighteen victims in the audience were unconscious, most the rest were close and I was muttering to myself about never going to another poetry reading. A year later I put my money where my mouth was: I stopped publishing poetry. I’ve given a single reading of my poetry in the 28 years since then, even though I haven’t stopped applying the skills I learned from it in other kinds of writing.

I think what Pearce is getting at is that poetry is supposed to have responsibilities. One of them is to present a world other people can see, feel, hear and otherwise relate to— which is to say, not quite the enterprise of securing an hermetic inner reality with one’s own language. The second is be enough public fun that

the people listening are not rendered comatose.

Postnorth’s readings have, I understand, drawn substantial audiences from the beginning, and Pearce got mostly positive responses to his Dooney’s article from readers in Prince George and elsewhere. He also got one very strange response, not from Rob Budde, but from a graduate student Budde is unusually close to. The note said that the sender would be formulating some sort of official complaint against Pearce on the grounds that Pearce is guilty of bullying Budde, which the note defined as “making fun of people for what they wear,” adding that the complainant no longer felt safe or secure around Pearce as a result. I’ve had to piece this together from memory, because Pearce didn’t reveal either the name of the complainant and didn’t think it was ethical to forward me the note. He did mention, with some chagrin, that the note contained four fairly egregious spelling errors, including misspelling “academic” as “acedemic”. I thought bullying was an issue among elementary school and high school students. If it is now being charged in the midst of university level discourse by adults of consenting age, the future of that discourse isn’t very promising: Everyone with a nonconforming opinion will sooner or later be accused of “hurtful bullying” and placed before a tribunal. How Bolshevik!

Absurd as it sounds, this sort of thing, along with an apparently irresistible urge to supervise the language, thought and actions of those around them appears to be normal practice for the Bolshevik side of the poetry war, as is boycotting any poetry reading—or person—they think might have the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent. And if this

degree of intellectual fundamentalism is sweeping the Western world, as it seems to be doing, most of our democratic institutions are in jeopardy, not just our artistic freedom.

Though I confess to having had a lot of fun in this essay making merry with the absurdities of the situation, I don’t think what these people are doing is ultimately very funny. It scares the hell out of me.

So let me be serious for a moment, and tell you what I think poetry is about, and what conditions its composition and dissemination require.

In Thinking the Twentieth Century, which is the remarkable record of a series of conversations historian Timothy Snyder conducted with Tony Judt while Judt was dying of ALS in 2009, I found the following exchange between the two men.

Judt was the author (among a number of remarkable books) of Postwar, which is generally regarded as the best and most complete history of Europe from 1945 to the margins of the present, and Snyder is the author of Bloodlands, which offers readers, for the first time, a competent account of what went on in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Poland between 1937 and 1945—arguably the darkest years and the darkest location of the 20th century.

The exchange begins with Snyder: “History’s fundamental ethical responsibility” he says, “is reminding people that things actually happened, deeds and suffering were real, people lived thusly and their lives ended in such and not other ways. And whether those people were in Alabama in the 1950s or Poland in the 1940s, the underlying moral reality of those experiences is of the same quality as our experiences, or is at least intelligible to us,

and therefore real in some irreducible way.”

“This rather obvious job description” Judt answers, “is actually quite crucial. The cultural and political current flows in the other direction: to efface past events—or exploit them for unrelated purposes.

It’s our job to get it right: again and again and again. The task is Sisyphean: the distortions keep changing and so the emphasis in the corrective is constantly in flux. …we have a second responsibility. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens, with a responsibility to bring our skills to bear upon the common interest.”

If you remove the word “historian” and substitute “poet”, you have the way I see the intellectual and citizenly responsibilities of poetry. The difference is that poets have an additional responsibility, one that rests in the realm of language rather than factual events.

We’re supposed to act as the janitors of language and human perception, charged with enabling both fact and intelligible nuance. And we’re supposed to, I think Graham Pearce would add, enable stories that don’t put people to sleep. None of these goals can be accomplished while we’re neck deep in moral prescriptions and proscriptions, nor can they be accomplished if our main goal is to stroke ourselves and our supervisors’ prejudices, or somehow articulate while we’ve got our heads jammed up our emotional behinds.

We simply can’t move fast enough to apprehend human and natural reality in those restricting postures. In particular, poetry and moral supervision are natural enemies, and should be recognized as such.

the comforts of moral certainty, which are also the enemies of poetry.

That’s why I’m behind Barry McKinnon, John Harris, Graham Pearce and whoever else is on their side of the war. I don’t think they’re winning, and everyone—and I don’t just mean everyone in Prince George who writes poetry—is going to be in trouble if they lose.

Born and raised in Prince George, Brian Fawcett left to study at Simon Fraser University at 22. He graduated from SFU as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He worked as an urban planner for the city of Vancouver, and has taught in maximum security prisons.

He co-founded www. dooneyscafe.com in 2001 and makes his living as a full-time writer and ‘cultural analyst’ in Totonto.

He won the Pearson Prize for Canadian non-fiction for Virtual Clearcut, a book about the globalization of Prince George.

I don’t think this is something that can be compromised, despite The Confluence 14

Date:

May 27, 2012

Time:

[Start 10 am/6 pm]

Location:

Masich Place Stadium Prince George

Registration: FREE! Prizes:

To be announced!

Website:

www.defeatdepression.ca

Prince George Walk/ Run