Spring 2018
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The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
FYP & Friendship
Spring 2018
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Editor: Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) Nous praktikos: Elisabeth Stones (FYP 2005–06)
The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.
Design: Co. & Co.
CONTENTS Cover, front and back: Friendship collage 1. Note from the Editor: FYP and Friendship by Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84)
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Imagination, Friendship, and FYP by The Rev’d Dr. Gary Thorne
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Revolutionary Theatre by Catherine Campbell (FYP 1983-84)
2. A Reflection on Father Thorne’s Smashin’ New Look by Cédric Blais (FYP 2015–16); Illustrated by Evangeline Freedman (FYP 2014–15)
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Prison Book Club by Aaron Shenkman (FYP 2008–09)
4. Dream Society by Nathan Ferguson (FYP 2017–18)
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Crossing the Ocean to Learn by Christian LaRoche (FYP 2017–18)
5 On Crying One’s Way Through FYP by Amy Bird (attended FYP 2017–18)
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My Foundation Year by Leith Johnson (FYP 2017–18)
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On Dean Hatt: “Care for one another.” by Luke Franklin (FYP 1999–2000)
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To Father Thorne: A Tribute by Ian Stewart
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A Reflection on Section Four: Encountering the Modern World as if for the First Time by Neil Robertson (FYP 1981–82)
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Night FYP by Neil Robertson
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Night FYP Schubert by Ata Zagarof (FYP 2017–18)
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A Different Kind of Social Worker by Tamar Kenigsberg-Bentov (FYP 2017–18)
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Staging Everyman in the 21st Century by Ethan Speigel (FYP 2015–16)
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Life After FYP by Sarah Sharp (FYP 2017–18)
6 FYP, Frankenstein, and Drums and Organs by Gillian Clark 8 From FYP to Law School by Sarah-Jane Hasenauer-Kinsley (FYP 2011–12) 9 From Trial Law to FYP by Douglas Tupper (audit FYP 2017–18) 10
“‘We’re all in it together’” Shannon Parker on Dean Nick Hatt (FYP 1997–98)
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King’s Athletics by Neil Hooper
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To Err is Human, To Err As Often as I Did is…Almost Impressive by Evany Rosen (FYP 2005–06)
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Tribute to Father Gary Thorne by Neil Hooper (Athletics Director)
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The Musical Offering By Mike Bennett (FYP 2003–04)
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FYP Essay Laurels 2016–17
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What is a writing workshop? by Jane Breakell (Fulbright Scholar in FYP, 2017–18)
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The King’s Treasures by Patricia Chalmers
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FaceBot by Andrew Milne (FYP 2016–17)
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Why I love chalk so much by Judyta Frodyma (FYP Faculity Fellow 2007–18)
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King of the Long Goodbye by Thomas McCallum (FYP 2009–10)
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Books, Degrees, Performances
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Theophany in Nature by Veronica Curran (FYP 2008–09)
Dr. Susan Dodd, editor
Elisabeth Stones, nous praktikos
N OT E FRO M T H E E D I TO R
FYP and Friendship SUSAN DODD
For friendship is a partnership, and as a man is to himself, so is he to his friend; now in his own case the consciousness of his being is desirable, and so therefore is the consciousness of his friend’s being, and the activity of this consciousness is produced when they live together, so that it is natural that they aim at this. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics This edition of the FYP News is about friendship…and this happened without any plan or even intention. It is just where the articles fell… all at the feet of Divine Philia. As I write this, Father Thorne is composing his final lecture for us, The Foundation Year Programme. Over the years, we have sparred, Father Thorne and I, over the differences between “academics” and priests. I cannot say that I have won even one single, small point against this Muhammad Ali of the Spirit, but there are no dynamic exchanges that I have ever loved better, and there is no one who has challenged me more radically, by example, to give to others, without hesitation and without reserve. And from Dean Nicholas Hatt, in over a decade of working together on what the professional class call “student affairs,” I have learned in a gentle, practical way, that the best way to open possibilities especially for the troubled is to proceed as Nick has done with us, in a gentle, practical way. As every constituency in the college testifies, Dean—now Father—Hatt administered by dining in company: breakfast, lunch, supper and snack were Nick Hatt’s daily problem-solving, or rather, problem-averting convocations. Maybe it is this mood of farewell, piling as it does, on the departure from this life of our beloved friend and teacher Angus Johnston exactly one year ago, that has turned my heart so completely to the marvel of our lives together in FYP. How is it possible that we have this community of thought, and talk, and fruitful confusion here in the midst of the age of utility and control? It has to have something to do with the numinous quality of the texts that we read, their power to draw us out in our differences, and to bring us together in our confusion.
I, personally, have had a most challenging and full year; a most Kingsy Winter Term. Each week I drove to the Burnside Correctional Centre with one of the dons, first for a course on “Blood Money” with Andrew Griffin, then for a course on “Reconciliation” with Maria Joy Bartholomew, and finally, with Aaron Shenkman, when the inmates wanted to keep going, for a “book club” on whatever we could agree upon. School devolved into a get together among people who were friends, for a contingent time, and in a fragile way over beloved books. I will shed more than one tear in saying goodbye to this year’s FYP class. We shared this year in a most remarkable living together, over our drinks, our gambles, our exertions and searches, and over our studies. Aristotle continues: And whatever existence means for each class of men, whatever it is for whose sake they value life, in that they wish to occupy themselves with their friends; and so some drink together, others dice together, others join in athletic exercises and hunting, or in the study of philosophy, each class spending their days together in whatever they love most in life; for since they wish to live with their friends, they do and share in those things which give them the sense of living together.
“I will put on the skin of a lion and roam the wilderness…”
…we have sparred, Father Thorne and I, over the differences between “academics” and priests.
This edition of the FYP News is a very long “Thank you” to you, this most remarkable FYP class of 2017-18, from all the faculty, staff, and friends of the college who have had the tremendous good fortune to meet you as new and future friends in this intergenerational living together of King’s College. ❧ Susan Dodd is the FYP Associate Director, responsible for Student Support.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
A Reflection on Father Thorne’s Smashin’ New Look BY CÉDRIC BLAIS ILLUSTRATED BY EVANGELINE FREEDMAN
the problem was that his beard was to us so powerfully symbolic of his wisdom that it had come (in the idolatrous mind of this author, at least) to be seen as its receptacle and material embodiment. Never had there been such dramatic implications for one’s change of hairstyle since at least Samson. Yet when the dust settled and King’s still hadn’t collapsed, it finally dawned on us that we all would have to learn to live in a world where Father Thorne could be both wise and beardless.
A
s Dr. Fraser is ever fond of reminding us, we humans—modern and otherwise— have always read the world around us as a system of signs to be decoded. The obvious question that came up when Father Thorne shaved his beard was thus: what could such a loss possibly mean?
The key question that remains is, of course, what happened to the majestic silvery mane when it was released from its bondage.
For those of us who had never known Father Thorne otherwise, it was a source of confusion –if not distress. Not that we have any aversion to seeing his priestly chin; no, Father Thorne looks as good as ever. Rather,
FYP News – Spring 2018
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Photo by Hayley Frail
Was it stored and set aside, to be admired by King’s students to come? Was it buried and returned to the earth –ashes to ashes, dust to dust? Either way I wish it the best of luck now that it is leaving us. And so too to Father Thorne himself, I suppose; King’s will not be the same without him. With or without the beard. ❧
I myself like to think it will be exploring in great strides some beautiful Nova Scotian countryside, visiting old churches and delivering sermons in a deep, booming voice, bringing comfort to those who need it.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
DREAM SOCIETY NATHAN FERGUSON Dream society is not for dreams or for dreaming—quite the opposite actually; it is almost exclusively for society (the community), for the weird mirrored semicircles and now-meaningless codes and shameful neoplatonism, and for being. awake. For being, out of the pacific (that is, peaceful. but also churning stormy and vast—unknowably vast) kingdom of dreamhood; for being in the mediate, the in-between—for falling into the world with eyes to affirm it; for moving back into our unasked-for and unwarranted seat of control, aware of and awake to our obligation to love and notice and hope for it all. That is what dream society is for (for me). Halifax Night Flight
And so we commit to each other—strangely, patiently, unknowingly—to see and smell and smile at the silent corners and unshone-upon staircases of each other’s deep-belowness—to bow, under the roof of the stars or of our hearts, in reverence and admiration and gratitude for what lingers beneath the hello’s and oh-yes’s and laughing’s of the occupied (too occupied) day. And we laugh too and love too and feel too much—and we meet at some unannounced or misannounced moment.
Jenny Lapp and Nathan Ferguson
Winter Dream Sky
FYP News – Spring 2018
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And satisfied, scared, silent—we return to our beds; crawl back into the wombs and tombs and gloomy dispatches of our true selves—the unmitigated nocturnal dialogues of with and by ourselves—with the knowledge that now, here, there, then, we may emerge from the divine grottoes, the steampunk disrealities— the twisting glimmers and mistful flickers and flowers of love-terror-joy and, yes, pain—into light and sight again, and that soon, at the end of some day anon, find a congregation of friendship or something more, and there
And so we commit to each other— strangely, patiently, unknowingly… share without shame, tightly wrapped in wool, some yet-unforgotten cracked or dusty fragments of half-remembered soul with those who feel an urge, a desire, a weird and irrenounceable calling to hold them, carefully—to look inside, through the awful shadows and pale glowing truths—and hand them back, saying: “how strange. this looks something like myself.” ❧
Casey the Dog, President Lahey, Amy Bird, Johannah Bird. (Amy Bird attended FYP in 2017–18)
Johannah Bird reads poetry by Indigenous writers to FYP students and graduates.
Bishop Mark MacDonald is the Indigenous Bishop for the Anglican Church of Canada. He was the missioner for the King’s Chapel for Holy Week, and met with students and faculty both informally and during a FYP-sponsored lunch.
Fra Angelico, “The conversion of Saint Augustine”, c1430-1435
On Crying One’s Way Through FYP AMY BIRD This Holy Week I received a visit from my older sister. Well, actually Father Thorne and the King’s College Chapel received a visit from her and I was allowed to come along for the ride. Johannah is a PhD candidate studying Indigenous literature, and her visit included a talk on Indigenous poetry. In addition, she followed the chapel missioner around, Bishop Mark MacDonald, Anglican bishop for the Indigenous peoples of Canada, and participated in the discussions surrounding his talks. The conversation over the week ranged from residential schools, racism, faith, and everything else. Serious, heavy stuff. As an Indigenous person (or maybe as just a person) I felt the weight of it all. Johannah and I did a lot of crying that week. As if this wasn’t enough, we found ourselves
caught up in the incense-filled circus of Holy Week at the Chapel. Johannah’s first immersive Chapel experience and Fr. Thorne’s last. Cue the tears. Of course, tears have been nothing strange in this year’s FYP curriculum. Priam and Achilles, Augustine, Dante and others cry too. I imagine Simon Weil cried an awful lot. But why do they all cry? Why does anyone cry? (Why do I cry?) If these diverse experiences have tears in common, is there a possibility that there is something else binding them together as well? I think that there is a something in the suffering of Indigenous people, a something in the mystical and mysterious services at the Chapel, a something in the texts we’ve read together that both reaches to the heart of all things, but is also so beyond as to be impossible to reach. It seems as though this something is so immediate that it fills the space within me, until there is no room left and it must escape through my tears. And yet at the same time my inability to reach to the something beyond makes me frustrated at human limitations that I can’t even begin to understand.
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As an Indigenous person (or maybe as just a person) I felt the weight of it all. What are you supposed to do with all that? What can one do when the unlimited smashes into limit? Or when justice gives way to suffering? What can one do when the inescapable reality of your never-being-enough is the last thing you want, but the one thing you’re stuck with? There is something beyond you yet inside of you that calls, but you’re incapable of answering. Maybe crying is about this strange place between fullness and lack. The point I’m trying to make here is that being a weepy mess is a universal experience that actually indicates a participation in the cosmic whatever. The good news is that whenever I cry I’m almost always laughing shortly after. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
FYP, Frankenstein, and Drums and Organs BY GILLIAN CLARK
Roberta Barker: From March 27-31, the Fountain School of Performing Arts produced the world premiere of Drums and Organs, a ‘new theatrical creature’ created by playwright Gillian Clark (BAH, Dalhousie University, 2013) and inspired by Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein (a perennial FYP text). Fifty students and faculty members from King’s attended the March 28 show, thanks to the generosity of a very kind donor. Drums and Organs was commissioned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Dalhousie University, which was founded in the year of Frankenstein’s publication, 1818. At the heart of the play is the dreamlike relationship between Mary, a medical student in contemporary Halifax, and her alter ego, Dr. Victor Frankenstein: a meeting of two questing, troubled minds that brings together the scientific, social, and theatrical worlds of 1818 and 2018. Oh…and the plot of Frankenstein also appears as filtered through the imaginations of a class of eighth graders. So it’s not all serious. Here, Gillian Clark reflects on how King’s and the Foundation Year Programme helped to shape the play:
FYP News – Spring 2018
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I never did FYP, but I went to all the parties.
Organs to feel like one of those nights.
And you feel so blissed out, vibrant and raw.
FYP parties were my favourite.
I wanted it to feel like the time I ran down Spring Garden Road in a rooster suit after raiding a party host’s tickle trunk at the Dante party.
I wanted Drums and Organs to feel like that.
They were also oddly educational? Everyone would be talking about The Epic of Gilgamesh, or Agamemnon or what Jesus Christ must have actually looked like. Even though I was drinking Fireball whiskey and wearing a demon costume—I felt like I was getting wiser. I miss those parties. I wanted Drums and
I wanted it to feel like dancing so hard at the Wardy that you see beads of sweat dripping onto the carpeted floor. (I guess it’s not carpeted anymore!) I wanted it to feel like… walking home after the YAS ball. Smeared make up, carrying your shoes, your best friend on your arm.
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Okay but here’s the thing about those parties– It was never really about the partying– it never is. It was about being in a room full of people and feeling like a part of something. Just like the theatre. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
FROM FYP TO LAW SCHOOL SARAH-JANE HASENAUER-KINSLEY (FYP 2011–12)
Odaiba Beach, Tokyo
My first oral exam in the Foundation Year Programme was with Neil Robertson. I was so nervous, especially about answering questions from the first section. I had something memorized about Plato that I planned to use as my answer for anything in t hat sect ion. Epic of Gilgamesh? The Odyssey? Let me tell you about Plato though. To my complete shock, Neil asked me, “Who wou ld you l i ke to st a r t with?”. Did I take this golden opportunity to spew my perfectly memorized blurb on Plato? No friends, I did not. Instead, for some reason still unknown, I launched into a shaky (thoroughly inaccurate) interpretation of Aristotelian ethics. Directly following that exam I am
pretty sure my parents received the 4th or 5th announcement of the term that I was going to fail first year. I have thought about FYP a lot since starting law school. When I started at King’s I had little experience with philosophy or grades that weren’t A’s. My first essay grade was a C and on the essay my tutor had written, “A great start!”. The gut-wrenching self-doubt that followed that grade was eventually replaced with a determination to do better. Now in my second year of law school, affectionately referred to as 2-hell, I look back on the challenges of FYP and I am so grateful. FYP taught me many wonderful things of which I have largely forgotten the finer details of (I’m looking at you Aristotle) but most importantly it taught me how to think and how to process constant shifts in my worldview. In FYP I often felt like I was drowning in new ideas and struggling to keep up with how fast my knowledge base was expanding.
My first essay grade was a C and on the essay my tutor had written, “A great start!” Law school has presented the same avalanche of new information to process but this time around I have the confidence to be comfortable with how little I know. Opportunities like FYP are rare and if I could go back to my first-year self I would tell her to relax, think about grades less, ask more questions, and start the essays more than 12 hours before they’re due. And while I can’t go back in time, I have certainly tried my best to keep those FYP lessons close in new challenges, academic or otherwise. ❧ Sarah-Jane Hasenauer-Kinsley, FYP 2011-2012 and Second Year Law
Jane Breakell, Judyta Frodyma, Asha Jeffers, Stephen Boos, Daniel Brandes, Michael Bennett (Evan King is behind a pillar and Susan Dodd is behind the camera)
FYP News – Spring 2018
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FROM TRIAL LAW TO FYP DOUGLAS TUPPER (FYP 2017–18) It’s 9:25 a.m. and I just sat down. It’s time for FYP Announcements. Strangely enough, I actually look forward to the daily ritual of the various announcements. It gives you some insight into what is going on at King’s. What do students think is important today? What motivates them to want to participate, and do other things, beyond reading and more reading, papers, preparing for tutorials and exams, and old fashioned solitary thinking? Pizza and beer at the President’s Lodge. A lecture on Robots on Tuesday. Debating Club at 6:30. Improv at some time, yet to be determined, at a location yet to be discovered. Poetry reading on Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. Hockey at midnight. Please come and cheer … The list goes on. Refreshments promised for each event as an enticement. Every day there are more announcements—more events—more things to get involved with. The students mostly make the announcement themselves, and the class, supportingly, claps for each presenter. I have to say, I am impressed. I started my freshman year at Dal in 1969, 49 years ago. There was no FYP at King’s. FYP did not start until 1972. The Dal SUB and the Dal Library had just opened. There was a Dal football team to cheer for on Saturdays. No one went downtown for beers. It all happened on campus. Dances with live bands on Friday and Saturday nights. Tuition was $400 (and you could actually save that by working in the summer). Beer and steak for two at the Midtown cost $4.00. Women were only allowed in the Midtown and the Ladies Beverage Room. Like most students (then and today), I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was in a hurry to start a ‘career’ in something. Fast forward 49 years. I have recently retired after 40 years as a trial lawyer. All the books on retirement urge people to stay busy, to remain curious, to set new goals. A friend told me about the FYP program at King’s. He described it as a journey through the evolution of time, from the ancients forward, using great literature as the guide. I was intrigued. I looked through the calendar. I had read some of the books, but that was almost 50 years ago. I decided to enrol as an audit student—no papers, no exams. My friends thought I was crazy. Why do this when you retire?. Why read all those books when you don’t have to? Why read philosophers and poets? Why sit through
two hours of lectures, four days a week, when you could be relaxing at home? Why indeed? There are so many interesting questions to be considered. Why did some civilizations flourish, and some fail? Why did religion play such a great role in the evolution of society?. Why did some religions prevail? Where did our prejudices and our predilections come from?. How and why do things change? Why are we constantly struggling to find our way?. Why do we repeat the same mistakes?. Is everything just an ‘aimless process’, or is there a plan going forward?. How did we get from there to here?. Where to next?. How do we get there, or how do we avoid going there? To me the answer is obvious because I now have the luxury of time, and the opportunity to think about things that have interested me for years. I now have the chance to examine the things that are self evident, but I did not have the time to consider, or think about before.
...there are still golden threads that bind us together. So, here I am in 2018, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I slowly realize that everyone else in FYP is doing the same thing, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives, albeit from the difference in perspective of 49 years. I have already chosen my career and worked 40 years at my trade. I no longer have to worry about various things that presumably concern the other FYP students. But that aside, despite the time difference, in some ways, we are all seeking the same thing. The FYP student could have easily followed the typical undergrad route, and taken the ‘usual’ first year courses—English 100, History 100, Chem 100, Physics 100, etc. But they didn’t. Instead they chose a very different path—a journey through time, from the ancients to modern day, with literature, and its context, and discussion, as guides. Although it may not yet be apparent to everyone in the class, I think they made a great choice. There will be lots of time for specific courses. It is far better off to start with a curious mind, open to new ideas.
that is so apparent. A typical undergrad goes to class and goes home. He/she may or may not meet their fellow students in their various classes. In the FYP program, the students remain with their classmates the whole year. They take the same classes, read the same books, attend the same lectures, suffer through the same assignments and exams. The shared experiences, and the friendships formed from this will last a lifetime. So what did I ‘learn’ from the FYP year? I read a number of books I probably would not have discovered, and a number I probably would have otherwise ignored. I listened to a number of lecturers who clearly enjoyed their subjects, who offered their views on a variety of subjects that I would not have considered or thought much about. I fed my curiosity about ‘why we are the way we are’, and ‘where to from here’. Or course, the year highlighted the frailties that have plagued our existence—the ambiguities, the inconsistencies, the cynicism, and the hypocrisy throughout the ages, but the year also reminded me there are still golden threads that bind us together, and there are lots of reasons for optimism going forward. As James Doull, a former lecturer in the FYP program wrote: There is much to be learned from the past. The question is, whether we in our present culture can be receptive of it. …. So far as there is, there is not only much to be learned from the past, but we are capable of learning from it. Even though I am 49 years late, the F YP journey was worth the wait. ❧
The other interesting thing about FYP is the bonding, and the formation of friendships,
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FYP – In itself and for itself
“‘WE’RE ALL IN IT TOGETHER’” SHANNON PARKER ON DEAN NICK HATT
Andrew Thorne, Shannon Parker and Colin Nicolle
Another gangley undergrad from Chester
Don Helen Reddy emulates Nick Hatt’s timeless style.
President Barker appreciates Dean Hatt
FYP News – Spring 2018
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The rector of St. George’s and former college Dean visits King’s.
Bishop-to-be Ron Cutler and Priests-to-be Nick Hatt and Stephen Harnish play with knives.
In Fall 1997, another gangly undergrad with round Harry Potteresque glasses turned up to King’s to try out the Foundation Year Program. He didn’t live on campus (he was a local, from Chester) and he dropped out of studies altogether after his second year, unsure of whether university was the place for him. As he puts it, FYP had opened up all these questions…about what was real, about the place of ideas and the imagination, and about community. He wasn’t sure how to continue to search out those questions. He took some time off and after a year and half returned, having changed his focus to Classics and Contemporary Studies. There he found a continuation of thought that addressed the questions provoked by FYP, and he has never really stopped thinking about them since. Our friend and former Dean, Fr. Nicholas Hatt never imagined in those early days that he’d spend thirteen years of his life in the Quad. First in 2005, he returned to King’s as the Don of Middle Bay and after three years became Dean of Students from 2009-2018.
From his time in FYP (and perhaps even earlier), his friends had teased him that he looked like a forty-year-old man (which means that, for at least the last twenty years, he’s truly been coming into his own). Not that the sight of him was ever unpleasing… when he was Don of Middle Bay, the students called him “Foxy P-I-T” (priest-in-training). His friends on the Don team also sought to mimic his high ideals and good looks (See photo with former Don, Helen Reddy). At one point during his Deanship, the College purchased a house across the road and shipped him over there to live (so that he could host epic dance parties off campus) but soon he realized the secret of common life in FYP…that you share it by being present to the texts and to each other. And he knew that living in the Quad was the truest way that he, as a Dean, could be present and share that life with the whole student body. So they fixed up the Dean Suite in Alex Hall (moved the bedroom AWAY from the elevator shaft) and that is why one could see him, anytime night or day, crisscrossing the Quad, either
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scurrying (because being a Dean is busy), shouting “Hello” or laughing (with considerable volume), or stopping for a word with staff, faculty, or students . He wanted to be present with staff and faculty, often making rounds, stopping into the Bursar’s Office or FYP office to check in because, as he was fond of saying, “we’re all in it together”. He wanted to be there with the students so that he could rip the knee out of his khaki’s while wiping out of in front of Alex Hall, because water ballooning the Dean gave you bonus points during the frosh week scavenger hunt. And most importantly, which often went unseen, he wanted to be there for students, especially those in FYP, who were in need of encouragement or support, especially if things were getting rough. Like the old HMCS, King’s was a ship to him, and he gave himself to everyone there in the hope that no one would be lost on his watch. And we weren’t. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
To Err is Human, To Err As Often as I Did is…Almost Impressive A Message From a Former FYP-er to her Fellow FYP-ites BY EVANY ROSEN
TARYN HANRAHAN FYP STUDENT — WOMEN’S RUGBY TEAM
FYP student Taryn Hanrahan made a big impact as Fly Half for our King’s Women’s Rugby Team. She comes from Halifax and will likely be a player to count on in the future. She started every game in that position and could be counted on by her teammates. She comes from Halifax and played High School Rugby. As Taryn’s coach, Lysa McGrath says: “She came to us off a knee injury and we put her into a leadership role with no questions asked and she killed it. If all my players came with her work ethic, sprit and drive I would be in heaven.”
I arrived at K ing’s for my F Y P year in September of 2005 with the bright-eyed, overly confident attitude that I’m sure many do. I was an honour roll student and my teachers encouraged me towards the most challenging university program I could find. I was 17, braces-free, and had spent my summer reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for FUN (I have yet to finish it). I was my bloody highschool valedictorian for Pete’s sake! How could I not be destined to spend my life soaring at the apex of the Ivory Towers? Eat your heart out Icarus, for I must fly DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN. And then, of course, I arrived to discover that everyone else was also smart, and that many of them were smarter, not to mention a lot more disciplined. And it probably didn’t help that I spent half of my F YP lectures scribbling an original play for the KTS called “The Blacks, The Gays, and the Jews”; the title of which, to be fair, was technically more clever than it sounds. But it was also exactly only as clever as it sounds. And it certainly didn’t help that I immediately stumbled my way into a then improv, and later sketch troupe called Picnicface, which would wind up being a much more engrossing and successful endeavor than my scholastic one would ever be.
My most Faustian failure came, somewhat ironically, when I delivered my EMSP honours thesis in my fourth year, simply titled: “The Play’s the Thing: An Analysis of Goethe’s Faust as Theatre.” At my defense I was gently informed that what I had turned in was, “certainly…a very niche interpretation of the text,” not to mention, “30 pages too short,” and “literally riddled with typos.” Game, set, whoops. Fortunately for me, King’s is blessed with a faculty who are not only brilliantly minded, but unfailingly kind as well. And their commitment to the rich philosophical tradition they have devoted their careers to imparting is matched by their commitment to making sure that every student gets the most they can out of their own, er– unique academic path. If ever Descartes needed a back pocket proof for a non-malevolent God, let it be that. Trusting not only that I could surely do… at least a bit better if I applied myself, but also seeing, and supporting, the fact that I was in the throes of establishing my comedy career while still semi-valiantly attempting to stagger to the finish line of my degree, I was allowed to return for a fifth year to re-complete my thesis. To this day, the sheer act of rising to that second chance is one of my most proud achievements. And let me
TRIBUTE TO FATHER GARY THORNE BY NEIL HOOPER, DIRECTOR, KING’S ATHLETICS
JORDAN DYCK FYP SCIENCE STUDENT— VARSITY BASKETBALL PLAYER
Jordan came to King’s from Amherst High School and enrolled in the Foundation Year Program. He was a tremendous asset and brought a great set of skills to the team and made a big impact as a first year player. He is well liked by players, coaches and opponents across the ACAA. In a team that was full of rookies, he was rewarded by his coaching staff and presented with the Defensive Player of the Year Award. As the program moves forward, Jordan will be a key piece of the puzzle for the Blue Devils Men’s Basketball Program. King’s is very fortunate to have a player like Jordan on board to build a stronger team!
Father Gary Thorne, who means so much to this university, is retiring from King’s at the end of this year. Since arriving on campus his contributions to the life of this campus are infinite. In our Athletic world you can look into the stands and see Father Gary, usually accompanied by his son Andrew, cheering as loudly as possible for whatever Blue Devils team was playing. Numerous student athletes had the chance to meet him over the years. He made them all feel so much more special, in meetings and just running into him on the Quad. He has met our coaches and has been with us in person and in the spiritual sense too. The most memorable moment of mine with Father Gary was a number of years ago
—— Neil Hooper, Director, King’s Athletics
FYP News – Spring 2018
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just after the Bathurst High School tragedy where numerous members of the that team lost their lives in a terrible accident. King’s was playing Mount Allison and there were members of the men’s and women’s teams from Mount A that were friends with these deceased students and prior to a “moment of silence”, Father Gary gave one of the most heartfelt tributes and speeches which was so relevant and needed at this time. Father Gary gives of his time so unselfishly and will be truly missed on campus and without a doubt in our gymnasium… All students, coaches and athletic staff send their best to Gary in his retirement. ❧
tell you, the second time? Boy howdy. My now 80 page, mostly typo-free dissertation was described as, “technically improved,” if not, “still an odd choice of subject matter,” and for which I received an undoubtedly generous…gentleman’s B-minus (but please, hold your applause).
Now, this may not sound like the triumphant climax to an underwhelming collegial performance—and did I coast more on charm than brains? Absolutely. Ask anyone who ever taught me. But, as I have transitioned in my life from being a mouthy, underprepared,
overly confident absentee academic in a bad outfit (fashion was rough in the mid-aughts for everyone, but I had really committed to a corduroy blazer over a sweatshirt, inexplicably accented with a loud, thin scarf look that is probably my truest regret from my time at King’s/life to date); into a slightly better dressed, appropriately self-assured, ultimately more successful and still very mouthy comedian, I look back with utter fondness and deepest gratitude for my half decade in the NAB. Because, as it turned out—and I particularly discovered this when muscling through my own insane decision to write my book of humour essays about the history of the Western World (ya know, just as a casual subject)—I learned so much more during FYP and my subsequent EMSP degree than I ever could have realized at the time. And I don’t mean in an, “I discovered myself, and learned what I was really made of ” way. I mean, literally. Dr. Robertson explains the Categorical Imperative to you enough times and some of it’s gonna stick. Even to my wet, wild, child’s brain. So for those of you who find yourselves embarking on your journey at King’s—loving what you’re learning, but unsure if learning it forever is really the career path you can imagine for yourself—know that you are not alone, and that you are in the right place, right now. The scope of human thought you are discovering and the nurturing and impossibly special environment in which you are learning it will serve you always, wherever you end up. And I’ve ended up in some weird, weird places…like writing
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The scope of human thought you are discovering and the nurturing and impossibly special environment in which you are learning it will serve you always... on the late Alan Thicke’s “reality” show during one strange, broke summer after my show got cancelled; or teaching improv to a small group of professional magicians who needed to get better at crowd work (same summer). If knowledge is power, and to think is to be, or to at the very least to be oneself, then anyone who is drawn to the fantastic philosophical crash-course that is FYP and the programs that lie beyond it has everything to gain from it, and nothing to lose. Or, in my case, nothing to lose but an extra year, a bit of dignity and my copy of Being and Time. I left it in Alex Hall 12 years ago, my name and parents’ landline number is written in the front in purple pen. Please contact me if found.❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
THE MUSICAL OFFERING BY MIKE BENNETT Among the choices that are thematically related in a more obscure way, there’s Sufjan Steven’s very sad album Carrie & Lowell for the day on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” You have to listen to the album and pay attention to the lyrics to grasp the appropriateness. Likewise, Piano Phase by Steve Reich on the day we do Kant seems to make sense to me and perhaps no one else. It’s about the relationship between two musical lines phasing in and out of one another because of minute differences in tempo; Kant is all about the relationship between the rational and the empirical resonating with one another without ever exactly coinciding.
I’ve been selecting and playing music in the mornings before FYP lectures for two years now, and along the way I’ve developed some thoughts and opinions about what it makes sense to play. Here are some of them. Basically, the music should be either historically or thematically related to the content of the FYP readings. I tend to think of the FYP music choices as falling along a spectrum from “unimaginative” to “inspired.” Historically related choices—like the Gregorian chant on the first day of Dante’s Purgatorio or Tallis’s Spem in alium motet on the day of Queen Elizabeth I—cluster at the “unimaginative” end. Even so, often these pieces of music have the considerable aesthetic virtues of being pretty and contemplative, which I think is appropriate for 9:00 am on a weekday before a challenging lecture.
Occasionally the stars align and a piece of music can be both thematically and historically related to the reading. Thematically related choices can be either obvious or obscure. More obvious ones include Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” symphony for one of the days on the Iliad (it’s about a city under siege) and Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments on Kafka day. Occasionally I like it when the music’s title is just a pun or meagre joke about the readings. Representative semifunny puns include the Radiohead album In Rainbows on the day we study Newton’s optics and Twoism, the EP by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada, on the third day on Descartes’s Meditations, which Neil Robertson correctly interpreted in his lecture as a mild musical dig at Cartesian dualism.
FYP News – Spring 2018
Occasionally the stars align and a piece of music can be both thematically and historically related to the reading. On the first day of Descartes this year we heard the ballet suite Psyche by Descartes’s French contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lully. But this sort of thing is rare. Speaking of the first day on Descartes, one thing that I really think doesn’t work for morning music is a short playlist of thematically related pop songs. I’ve tried it three times, with only marginal success. Last year on the first day back in January, I curated a bunch of songs on vaguely Cartesian topics: “Dreams” by the Cranberries, the song in which Michael Jackson proclaims he’s “starting with the man in the mirror,” something by No Doubt—you get the idea. But this is so awkward and cheesy. Among the musical choices that I flatter myself by considering “inspired,” here are my top five favourites: 5. Reveil des oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen— Birds by Aristophanes Messiaen, who was an ornithologist as well as a composer, often makes his serialist music ape birdsong. I adore it. Messiaen makes an appearance twice, flitting in again in Section 6 on the environmentalism day. 4. You Want it Darker by Leonard Cohen— Dante’s Inferno Dante’s Inferno is, like the Iliad, one of the more difficult texts to choose music for. That’s more or less because the pit of hell is music-free (which is why I play Polymorphia by Penderecki on the second day on Inferno, a piece that sounds more like groaning than melody). But Cohen’s last album sounds to me like the final lament of a sinner who doesn’t believe in the possibility of redemption.
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3. “A Hu ge Ever Grow i ng P u l s at i ng Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld” by The Orb—Plotinus, “The Three Initial Hypostases” By far the best of the title-jokes (in my humble opinion) is this deeply Neo-Platonic masterpiece of ambient house. 2. Talking Union and Other Songs by The Almanac Singers—Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie’s old band, singing standards like “Solidarity Forever” (to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) strikes me as an unexpected, humanist, and unpretentious choice for the day on Marx. My favourite song on the album is “Casey Jones” which recasts the “great engineer” as an incorrigible union scab. 1. Ágaetis byrjun by Sigur Rós—the day of the last (regular) FYP lecture This doesn’t really have anything to do with Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, either thematically or historically (although I think there’s an elf in one of the songs, which is animal-adjacent). But the emotional tone of this seminal work of Icelandic post-rock is just right for the end of a year: dreamlike and nostalgic, but hopeful. Plus, the understated title means “An alright beginning.” ❧
WHAT IS A WRITING WORKSHOP? BY JANE BREAKELL I think about my father’s workshops for silversmithing and woodworking: neatly arrayed files, hammers, shears and callipers, hung on racks or pegboards; a kind of heavy-duty loupe called an optivisor, the better to see detailed work; and of course, power tools. I think of the longstanding association between workshops and elves: Santa Claus and his elves with their brightly lit, family-style assembly line, Grimm’s shoemaker and his secretive, fly-by-night elves, and of course, those elvish swords and dirks and things that Tolkien goes on about, which presumably were forged in a workshop, presumably using a bunch of extra-cool elvish tools. Stories set in workshops tend to follow a formula: craftsman stresses about deadline, craftsman pulls all-nighter with the elves to meet deadline, succeeds, lives happily ever after (this is the shoemaker). In a modern subgenre, person stresses about office job, begins making something—let’s say, cakes—quits office job and finds serenity in the hands-on creation of tangible, useful objects (this is Ina Garten, who left a finance job for a Food Network/Nancy Meyers-level kitchen setup, a.k.a. the ultimate workshop). In all of these narratives, the hero is able to succeed based on his or her development of certain craft techniques—lasting shoes, magicking steel, tempering custard—and/or the help of elves. Cool tools, elves, slight but manageable drama with happy ending—what’s not to like, then, about a workshop? The thing is, none of these pleasant associations are evident in the writers’ workshop. The FYP Creative Writing Workshop, just for example, takes place in the Senior Common Room, which is devoid of callipers. All we have for accoutrement is some printouts and, for sustenance, some Twizzlers, chips, whiskey and
soda. We arrive tired and are in no way prepared for an all-nighter. We don’t really have deadlines to meet, so motivation must be self-generated. There are no elves. And the finished pieces are just barely tangible: most often, at the end of a workshop you still have a Word file which you can’t seem to call finished. Why is it even called a workshop? False advertising! Lies. It’s more like wishful thinking. We call it a workshop to convince ourselves that (1) writing is craft as well as art, (2) that there are people for whom it is useful, or at least engaging—readers—and (3) we can, in fact, get better at it. Each week a writer submits a poem or a short story, others read it and say what it made them think about, the writer sees the gaps between what happened in her head and what happened on the page and revises accordingly (or not—writing is also art, after all). Not to equate the readers with elves of the kind the shoemaker had—serving the writer selflessly. In examining what the writer has done, and how, and wondering why, readers begin learning to think more analytically about their own writing. This is the hope, anyway. And here we come to the craft technique we’re after: becoming a passable editor—that is, a detached yet sympathetic editor—of one’s own work. Ata Zargarof, who workshopped several poems this term, puts it so: “I’ve found that the workshops challenge me to take the creative process more seriously. In particular, I’ve had to learn the skill of editing with my brain what I originally wrote with my heart.” Each week we work together toward this feat of solitude: splitting oneself into two roles, fevered artist and thoughtful editor, each of whom will spend hours alone with the Word file. The sum of these two characters, when fully developed, is the master craftsman. ❧
Hammering hand courtesy of Rodney Parsons from King’s Facilities.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
FACEBOT BY ANDREW MILNE FaceBot001 was created as a final project for the History of Automata seminar (HSTC 3011) that was organised between the University of King’s College and St Mary’s University. During the lecture series we received an excellent and fascinating lecture from Dr. Dawn Brandes on the idea and practice of Puppet Life. Dr. Brandes related a recurrent experience described by both puppeteers and puppet makers alike; one of engaging with the desire of the material. That puppeteering and puppet making involved listening in some way to how a puppet wants to move or how it wants to look and by extension how it wants to function and be organized. My primary desire in constructing a robot within the scope of the class was to engage with these types of experiences as a practitioner while reflecting on the writing and thinking of the various theorists and other practitioners that were presented within the course. The completed robot operates through three states: Search Mode, Facial Acquisition Mode and Chatbot Mode. In Search Mode the robot randomly looks around the space reciting selected lines form the Divine Comedy that relate to mechanisms until it detects a face. (Its favourite being from “Paradiso,” Canto XXIV). Once it detects a face it switches to
FYP News – Spring 2018
Facial Acquisition Mode, randomly selects a gender (voice) and asks if it can become you and have your face. It then switches to Chatbot mode where you can chat with the robot using a small keyboard. The experience of making this robot will inform my understanding of robots and automata in ways that I cannot yet anticipate, but it is worth I think, exploring what I experienced as a gravitational draw, within the work, toward creating a ‘convincing’ interaction; toward evoking an experience of aliveness. I had intended to make a basic robot: something with loosely anthropomorphic mechanical construction, that performed a set function. However, as I worked through the various problems that arose there was a sense of it wanting to be a certain way, or rather, that I could only complete the project it if I aligned my efforts with a ‘certain organisation’ that seemed emergent from within the set of functions that I had begun to assemble. I don’t know how well I can describe this phenomenon as much as it was like feeling drawn toward creating coherence. Not so much a predetermined position but rather an unfolding determination that I was following. In working with the chatbot there is a sense that you are engaging with a mysterious other, but it is different from the sensation of creation, as there is a being on the other side of the chatbot, there is a programmer or a team of programmers who have set it in motion.
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Dr. Brandes related a recurrent experience described by both puppeteers and puppet makers alike; one of engaging with the desire of the material. Within the creation process there is apparently no one else, only me, the material and a feeling of ‘where the work wants to go or become’. It still seems plausible that this ‘will to be this’ and ‘not be that’ is purely constructed or imagined, but this process of creation did require me to change; to shift my actions and intentions away from my original intentions and orientation to a new place, a new target that seems emergent in some way. Not seemingly a teleology or a destiny, but also not, somehow, without a will. ❧ Andrew Milne worked internationally as a contemporary media artist before arriving at uKings. You can find some of his previous work at andrewjohnmilne.com
King of the Long Goodbye THOMAS MCCALLUM
The sun was falling through the dust, For the king of the long goodbye, He’s been this way for many a long hour You can hear his mournful sigh “Farewell, so long”, make a great swan song For the King of the Long Goodbye, Goodbye my friend, I don’t know when I’ll come to you again My treasure buried by the old white church, You’ll know what I mean, Sidney, David, Baby Birch, I missed the golden seam Oh why did I forsake our happy little home, A life with neither spot nor shame, To be loved, but never owned Our love was like the river, A gash across the land, The drive back to the city, The night you held my hand The sun was falling through the dust, For the King of the Long Goodbye, Goodbye my friend, I’ll be sure to tell you when, I’ll come to you again. ❧
(printed by permission, in honour of Father Thorne)
Coconut Sometimes hanging out and performing
Theophany in Nature BY VERONICA CURRAN The Rev’d Dr. Gary Thorne has held a relationship with King’s since he himself was a student. But in the 11 years since he took the position of College Chaplain, Father Thorne’s presence on campus has profoundly shaped many students’ experiences of FYP. There’s no question that he is a contributor to the academic side of the programme; he has given lectures on the early Christian church and the theologians Pseudo-Dionysius, Martin Luther, and Jean Calvin. Although these lectures demonstrate in a tangible way the relationship that the College Chaplain can have with FYP, it does not get to the root and depth of that
relationship as it has grown during Father Thorne’s term. In the last decade, students have come to associate the Chapel with outdoor activities including hikes and retreat weekends which are strongly attended by FYP students. These experiences provide students with a break from the mental stress of a rigorous first year. They also challenge students intellectually to think about the possible connections between spiritual life and academic life. During these outings, Father Thorne has spoken of theophany in nature, the concept of God showing forth in nature. Through this concept, Father Thorne challenges students to look for the Good that they are reading about beyond the lecture hall, in the text of nature. Through the nourishment of this openness Father Thorne also encourages students to open themselves up to each FYP text
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with a questioning and curious mind. Father Thorne also models the balance of the intellectual and experiential life by advocating for social justice in Halifax and Nova Scotia and encouraging students to do the same. He educates students on the gaps in our society and the ways that they can work to fix them. The balance is not only admirable, it is the essence of the humanities. In a time when the humanities are waning, the reminder that the discussion of ideologies, which the humanities nurtures, requires a practical application in order to truly become itself. The title of Father Thorne’s final lecture, “Imagination, Friendship, and FYP” truly sums up his time as the Chaplain. ❧ Veronica Curran is the former Chapel Administrator and Don, and a PhD Student at the University of Toronto.
FYP – In itself and for itself
The philosophers have o the world in various way however, is to love it. Excerpts drawn from the Reverend Doctor Thorne’s notes towards his final FYP lecture: Imagination, Friendship and FYP * Over these past 13 years here I often wondered about the disconnect between me and you. In preparing for this talk, it all became clear to me. I am a child of the sixties, and I have never grown up. I am not an academic and certainly not a philosopher. For forty two years I have sat in FYP lectures, as you have this year, and as I am introduced to the thinking of others, I am ever discovering more about myself, and thus I discover my freedom. […] I am a Maritimer, born in Saint John NB in the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers—there were some thirty or so of these homes across Canada in the 1950s. Most ‘girls’, to use the language of that day, were there because of social stigma in the fifties—abortion was illegal and families did not want extended family, friends and neighbours to know about the unwed pregnant daughter—but that wasn’t my mom’s particular situation who was married at the time, but simply too poor to deliver a child in a hospital. I wonder if you have any idea of post WWII urban poverty—that particular form of hell doesn’t exit any more but you can read about it. Life certainly had an urgency about it and it was not boring. Violence was commonplace: beatings in the home and on the street was the daily experience. You would never know when a friend would come up to you and smash you in the face as a group watched—because a gang had bullied him into either doing that or having the living ‘you know what’ kicked out of him. As David Adams Richards writes “‘There is no worse flaw in man’s character than that of wanting to belong.” […]
I remember the evening of 4 May 1970. The five or six of us ‘pinkos’ (we were thrilled every time someone would call us ‘pinko commie bastards’ because it meant someone was paying attention—but it really didn’t happen that often) were huddled around a radio for hours on end, hanging on every word as the news came bit by bit of the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University during a mass protest against the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces. Twenty-eight guardsmen fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. (Some of you will know Neil Young’s song ‘Ohio’, composed to memorialize that event.)
I have no idea why bishops found my convictions perplexing. For some reason it wasn’t until I entered high school that I realized that there were books that people read for pleasure. I had never read a book. It never occurred to me. I read textbooks, manifestos, carried around Mao’s little red book, and memorized facts for tests in school, and copied information out of reference books for ‘projects’. But I remember the time and place in Saint John High School when I first became aware of the notion of actually reading a book from cover to cover. I was off to the races! […] You were very briefly introduced to Feuerbach in your lecture on Marx. One of the great surprises when I arrived in 1976 was the
absence of Feuerbach: in the 42 years I have been a FYP student, there has never been a full lecture on Feuerbach. I consider Feuerbach to be an essential turn into the contemporary philosophical spirit. Now I understand that your tutors will tell you that Feuerbach is a second-rate thinker and not really so influential for Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, and even Lowith … As I ride off into the sunset let me just say that I disagree … A student of Hegel, Feuerbach provided the first substantial response to Hegel’s claim to represent the culmination of the Western teleological philosophical tradition. Derrida would say of Hegel that “He undoubtedly summed up the entire philosophy of the logos.” Feuerbach ‘inverted’ and secularized the ideas of Hegel, reducing Hegel’s absolute spirit to human terms, describing religion and speculative philosophy as forms of alienation of man’s essence. Feuerbach, he turned idealism on its head: all theology and metaphysics became anthropology: the gods are projections of the human spirit. Feuerbach anticipates the increasing secularization of the West precisely upon the principle of the Incarnation, suggesting in the early 1840s that the hidden “truth of Christianity” (Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy 263) is finally about to be realized in the form of an atheistic humanism that renounces the fantastical consolations of religion in order to embrace the historical tasks of human self-realization and the creation of the political and cultural institutions that are conducive to it.
— *Whether these notes will bear any relation to the final lecture as Father Thorne delivers it on April 10, 2018, in Alumni Hall remains to be seen! —ed.
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only interpreted ys; the point, […] I have no idea why bishops found my convictions perplexing.
of philosophy becomes the means of philosophizing: the history of philosophy is philosophy. What has been achieved historically can become our own possession.
[…]
[…]
In order to make as clear as possible what I mean, I am going to rely largely on the teaching of Robert Crouse, one of the founders of the Foundation Year Programme in 1972 who taught in the programme until his retirement in 2006.
Surely this is the project to which we have given ourselves this year. Your lecturers and tutors have struggled to make past present to your recollection, so that you may share its intellectual achievement. The hope is that this year of study has begun to uncover what was both hidden to us, yet active and effectual in us.
In his convocation address given in 2007 on the occasion of his being made an Honorary Doctor, Dr Crouse said: Recollection is the fundamental task of education. It must make what is sensibly past, or hidden, clear and contemporary for intellect; it must evoke the past, recent and remote, so far as possible in all its fullness and coherence, so as to make of it the nutriment of present memory; to establish thus the perspective, the substantial dimension of the present, fleeting moment. … The past is always and inevitably here, and our choice is only whether to possess it consciously in recollection, or to possess it in the form of unreflective prejudice, devoid of understanding. What more precise description of FYP could there be? And more better apologia could there be for FYP? There is no doubt that when I arrived in King’s I held my prejudices unreflectively, “devoid of understanding”. An individual knowing no limits (Nietzsche) and thus tortured by the open-endedness of being. Here I discovered my own thinking. Attending to the dialectics of the history
[…]
...we must open ourselves, with sympathy, imagination, judgment and care. Before I arrived at King’s I knew of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Greek tragedies, but not the tragedies themselves. I knew of Nietzsche’s accusation that Socrates was the executioner of poetry in his insistence that to be beautiful a thing had to be intelligible (Birth of Tragedy). The Socratic embrace of rationality is described by Nietzsche as a form of sickness that dismisses that powerful Dionysian side of the human that is instinct. Socrates’ turn to reason and dialectic creates an unreal world of unity, essence and substance that falsifies the actual world. But turning to the ancient texts themselves in FYP I learned that Greeks had a profound appreciation of the conflict between the rational and affective sides of the human soul.
[…] I have tried to make clear to you that Hannah Arendt’s challenge to open ourselves to the world, and to one another “with sympathy, imagination, judgement and care” has continued to rest deeply with me since reading her Eichmann in Jerusalem when I was in High School. The philosophy I had at hand in those days was that of Karl Marx who concluded his series of theses on Feuerbach with the words: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. My commitment shifted when I came to King’s. What I learned here I suppose could be summed up by saying, The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to love it. Recall how Dr Brandes yesterday introduced to you the words of Hannah Arendt: the problem with the educated philistine is not his or her reading the classics, but reading them with an eye to “self-perfection,” insulating oneself from the fragility, vulnerability and suffering of others, imperfections and realities of the world, that is, from the shared finitude, vulnerability, and fragility of both the world itself and of its inhabitants. It is this world and these realities for which we, all of us, must take responsibility; to which we must open ourselves, with sympathy, imagination, judgment and care. […] …42 years of F YP has only increased my appreciation for Feuerbach and his critique of what manifests today as a particularly popular neo-platonic philosophy that, in my (Continued, next page)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
(Continued from previous) mind, is popular precisely because it demands very little and caters to a self-indulgence that is morally indifferent. It is an intellectual ascent of the individual, leaving the world behind. I admit to you that in the 1990s as students were leaving Halifax with grad-
the hidden “truth of Christianity” (VT 263) is realized in the form of an atheistic humanism that embraces the historical tasks of human self-realization and the creation of the political and cultural institutions that are conducive to it.
This is not a religious doctrine, but a human doctrine. Through giving proper attention to one another we can quite literally take over the cares, anxieties and even the physical pain of another. Now you may think this that this is just another idea, but the point is, we try to practice it. uate degrees, I would warn them sincerely, ‘beware of neo-platonism’. Having studied the Confessions, I think you know what I mean. There, in Book 7 Augustine tells us that in the Books of the Platonists he found everything: it all made sense. Everything but one thing: the word made flesh. The universal logos made particular. The transcendent made immanent. Divinity made human. Our former Dean of Students, Father Nick Hatt lectured on the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that speaks of divinity and humanity coming together in one hypostasis, one person: the relation of divine nature (all the gods) to human nature in that one person, is described as unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, and inseparable. Here is the basis for what will become our contemporary secular world in which the fullness of divinity dwells (apart from any god-language), the secular inseparable from the sacred, but complete in itself—the secular and the sacred are unconfused. In Feuerbach’s language,
In the word made f lesh is the necessary remedy for what would otherwise be a self-absorbed Neoplatonism. Although Hannah Arendt was a continuing companion for me, the two thinkers that I met at King’s in the late seventies who would give me the freedom to love the world in the Word made Flesh were a Jew and a Christian. Simone Weil and Charles Williams. I need not pause to tell you about Simone Weil for Dr Diamond admirably outlined the life of Simone Weil and has provided you with the texts that have been my anchor since the late seventies, and likely have been quoted more than any other texts in the chapel in the past thirteen years. Her early commitment to Marxism never left her and assisted her to be attentive to solidarity with the poor and class struggle. Dr Diamond highlighted Weil’s great corrective to much of earlier 20th century philosophy in her exhortation to give attention to the world
and to the other: The soul empties itself of all its own content in order to receive the human being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only one who is capable of attention can do this… Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this word but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. (Waiting for God 194-5) Just a word about Charles Williams. In the 1970s one could not be here without reading Charles Williams. One of the Oxford Inklings (along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien), one of the finest theologians and interpreters of Dante of the 20th century, who popularized the notion of the Via Affirmativa—the goodness of all creation, his notion of co-inherence—that we belong to one another—and the doctrine of substitutionary love—that we exchange ourselves for one another—provided a vision of life in which we bear one another’s burdens and carry one another. This is not a religious doctrine, but a human doctrine. Through giving proper attention to one another we can quite literally take over the cares, anxieties and even the physical pain of another. Now you may think that this is just another idea, but the point is, we tried to practice it. Nay, I’ve spent my life trying to practice it. In the chapel on this campus it is what we try to practice. ❧
Revolutionary Theatre: FYP Grads in Cape Breton’s Theatre Scene BY C AT H E R I N E C A M P B E L L
In January 2018, while FYP students were reading Robespierre, King’s grad Carol Anne Gillis (B.A. in Theatre, 1990) was tackling the French Revolution from a different perspective at Cape Breton University’s Boardmore Playhouse in a production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade). In the role of the Herald, Carol Anne narrated the play-within-theplay in hilarious and sometimes terrifying rhyming couplets as Marat in his bathtub fomented rebellion among the increasingly restless citizens/inmates. On stage from start
FYP News – Spring 2018
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to finish, Gillis was a standout among a large and talented cast. A year earlier, she played a leading role in The Girl Out Back, which took home five awards at the Boardmore’s One-Act Play Festival including Best Play, as well as Best Script for writer Ken Jessome and Best Stage Manager for Catherine Campbell (B.A., King’s, 1987). In October, she teamed with Jessome and Campbell again for a play adapted from the book Women of Courage, edited by Ron Caplan of Breton Books, which was performed at the book’s launch at the McConnell Library in Sydney.
PRISON BOOK CLUB BY AARON SHENKMAN When entering the prison to attend the weekly “book club,” it can be hard to anticipate how well that week’s text will be received. For example, how will Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment go over in a room full of inmates? Will it be too intense? Will it land too close to home? Is it overstepping the tenuous relationship that has formed between us— those on the outside—and the prisoners?. Never was this more tangible than when Dr. Susan Dodd decided that, in order to follow up the misfortunes and violence of 19th century Russia, we should now turn to the pages of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility
And yet, of course, the men in the “book club” loved it, proclaiming excitedly that it was the only romance they’d had in years, and whole-heartedly engaging in Sue’s questions. Even more curious still was when, in the next week, they eagerly came to watch Emma Thompson’s film adaptation, eating popcorn and drinking sprite provided by the programs officer. Of course, I should not have been surprised.
There is a certain comfort afforded the inmates at the “book club,” where the confines of their reality fade away, at least for a moment, and they have a moment for frank, honest discussions, ostensibly about the book or movie in question, although realistically about life. Dostoevsky and Austen are not loved for their plots or their style, but rather for the conversions they engender, the opportunities they provide, and the “way out,” to borrow a term from K af ka’s “Report to the Academy,” that momentarily appears. However, to say that our weekly gathering is enough to free the inmates of their incarcerated status would be ridiculous. On the way to the classroom, we have to pass the “segregation cells,” which quite literally fill the air with palpable sorrow and despair, and we, the volunteers, are sometimes forced to contend with the unexpected realizations of how what some of our “club members” have done to end up in prison are inextricably linked to our own social circles and private
lives. The prison is very much present before and after our visits. What, then, is the role of the “book club” within this carceral context? Perhaps—and only perhaps, for what I am about to say is certainly presumptuous and ridiculous—we can turn to Zizek here, who writes in The Fragile Absolute: “Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison,” (Zizek 139) and elucidates, examining The Shawshank Redemption, saying, “the man who puts on the record in prison is precisely the one who rejects all false dreams of escaping from prison” (Zizek 150). In other words, reading Dostoevsky and Austen together in our little club does not shatter the walls of the prison and grant ceaseless liberty for those previously inside. Rather, it finds a way to introduce that very meaning into the prison itself, and, in its own little way, offer a little bit of hope to an institution that often seems to seek to be hopeless. ❧
Burnside Correctional Facility
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FYP – In itself and for itself
CROSSING THE OCEAN TO LEARN CHRISTIAN LAROCHE There’s something poetic about having to cross part of the ocean to learn each day. I wake up in darkness, feeling like I haven’t moved since November, much like my copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I’m so tired, I have so much to do, I have so far to go. Then… movement. That daily miracle. I follow the sun’s example, and begin my pilgrimage in darkness, where all pilgrimages begin. But what to bring on my journey? As if it ever changes! Constant like Queen Elizabeth: • FYP Handbook • Macbook • Charger cable • Today’s (and tomorrow’s) reading • History of Science reading • 2 carrots, chopped • 2 stalks of celery, chopped • Half a bell pepper, chopped • An apple • A snack bar • A Clif bar (in case I stay late, which I will) • Snapea Crisps • A sandwich (brought to you by dad!) Christian LaRoche on the ferry headed to Dartmouth. Photo by a stranger.
I’ll see you all on the other side of lecture, fellow pilgrims. Fast forward to lecture break. I lean over to one of my many Virgils and ask him if he got that last point because I couldn’t hear the lecturer over my celery. Fast forward to lunch. Ah! The Wilson room! Where we have met since the beginning. Since we were brought to this Earthly Paradise during O-week by none other than the 4 cardinal virtues themselves: The Executive of the DSS. From driving us home late at night, to buying us snacks, to taking us on adventures in the woods, we’ve never gone long without our comforting guides. Fast forward to the end of the day. The work is done and its another long journey home. But we hold on for a few more hours because tonight, we’ll be treated to an extra serving of wisdom! The performance of an epic poem? A KTS production in the Pit? A sensory slip-and-slide that, and this is very important, ain’t no dinner party?
From the Quad, I descend into the Wardy, and here we gather. We the damned. We who have abandoned hope. We… the Day Students! The first bus gets me to the Bridge Terminal. The second bus takes me across the water. The Empyrean glows behind McNab’s island, but Dante never came to Halifax… or did he? #researchpaper. From the Quad, I descend into the Wardy, and here we gather. We the damned. We who have abandoned hope. We… the Day Students!
FYP News – Spring 2018
Dalcard.” “Residence students, am I right?”
Whatever’s in store, we stick around… together. We study… together. We procrastinate… together. And then we watch in wonder together. My pilgrimage ends in the darkness in which I began. The night is cold. The bus is empty. I am alone with tomorrow’s reading, my eyes f luttering shut. But my day’s pilgrimage has brought me here and at last, I am at rest.
It’s a morning Symposium of coffee and bagels! “Come sit down!” “Who did the reading?”
There’s something poetic about having to cross part of the ocean to dream each night.
“My man Billy Shakes!” “The sofa ate my
❧
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Dr. Curran and Leith Johnson
My Foundation Year LEITH JOHNSON I graduated from high school in 1983, or, as my 12-year-old son would have you believe, back when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. (Dinosaurs, indeed!) However, I never attended college. While my classmates were excitedly applying to universities, I was excitedly falling head-over-heels for Paul Meyers, a recently graduated college senior and an aspiring actor, no less. When fall arrived and my friends moved into their college dorm rooms, I moved to Chicago and in with Paul, instead. Fast forward to thirty-five years later. I have no idea where Paul Meyers lives now, whether or not he still wants to be an actor, or, for that matter, what he’s been up for the past three and a half decades. (Our love affair lasted just over two months.) Instead, I’m married (happily, and to someone else), have two sons, and, in just a few short weeks, I will complete King’s Foundation Year Programme. In addition to accomplishing this latter and considerable distinction, my family will also be celebrating our one-year anniversary of moving to Canada—and what a year it has been! Over the course of F Y P, Achilles raged, Saint Augustus confessed, Luther reformed, Descartes meditated, Dostoyevsky punished, and God . . . well, God died, or so Nietzsche tells us. Meanwhile, on the family front, we
Chris Cohoon and Avon survey the Quad for reluctant new students
purchased a house, our boys settled into their new school, my husband taught at Dalhousie University, our youngest son had an emergency appendectomy (and, thankfully, a speedy and full recovery), and our oldest son went on his first date. In addition, and like most FYP students, I read, I contemplated, I wrote, and then, I read, contemplated, and wrote some more. Even now, there’s my research paper to consider, my second round of oral exams are scheduled for next month, and I still need to figure out and register for next year’s classes. Oy vey! Moving to Canada wasn’t easy. Despite being confident in my family’s decision to relocate to Halifax, leaving the U.S. also meant leaving behind my home, friends, and community, as well as an established career. It meant exchanging the comfortable for the uncomfortable, and the known for the unknown—and giving up the self-identity that I had cobbled together over a course of years for one that felt both unfamiliar and undefined. Beginning undergraduate studies at 52 wasn’t easy, either. I’m old enough to be my classmates’ mother. Hell, I’m old enough to be the mother of some of the tutors. On the first day of lectures, it took me longer than I’d anticipated to gather the courage just to walk through the doors of Alumni Hall and find a seat amongst the ocean of young and intimidating faces. Then, one day after tutorial, when I was feeling too old, too stupid, too “other” to continue in—much less, survive —the program, a perceptive Chris Cohoon helped talk me down from the ledge. (We were actually standing in the parking lot and I was trying to catch a bus, but, hey, Paul Meyers isn’t the only one with a flair for the dramatic.)
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Chris encouraged me to embrace FYP, to trust my ideas, and to dive headfirst into the tutorial discussions, come what may. He was right, and I began to find my way. I forced myself to approach the students in my tutorial individually and introduce myself. I camped out in the Wardroom after lectures and talked to upper-year students about their past experiences. I drove to campus on the weekend, hung out in the library, and composed my essays. I allowed myself to be swept up by the passion of Eli Diamond, to marvel at the spectacle of a Roberta Barker lecture, and to groan out loud at Simon Kow’s terrible, yet endearing puns. Before I knew it, I, too, had become a proud King’s student.
I read, I contemplated, I wrote, and then, I read, contemplated, and wrote some more. What a year, indeed. Moving to Canada and participating in FYP have both been amazing, yet challenging opportunities. Like Dante in The Divine Comedy (which, by the way, was not funny at all), I needed to first descend before I could ascend. In the process, I’ve had to re-evaluate my beliefs, reprogram my thinking, and decide what and, more importantly, who I want to be. In other words, I have far more in common with an 18-year-old FYP student than I ever could have imagined. T h a n k you , K i ng’s (e sp e c i a l l y Nei l Robertson), for taking a chance on this mature…ahem…non-traditional student. My family and I remain eternally grateful. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
LUKE FRANKLIN, ON DEAN HATT:
“CARE FOR ONE ANOTHER.” As dean of students, Nick was pastoral, not managerial. The sense of this word I have in mind is from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. ‘Pastoral’ means (besides bucolic, rural, rustic and so on) something simple but elusive: ‘Relating to the care of souls’. Nick seldom used the language of residence life management. On the first day of don training last September, he told us to keep in mind a simple rule. We were to see all our activities and responsibilities from the same perspective: ‘All through lens of student WELFARE = primary role’. There was also a reminder to ‘care for one another’, the same message I had for my students at our first bay meeting: look out for one another, keep your neighbour’s welfare and well-being in mind.
FYP News – Spring 2018
Among the items on the sample agenda Nick wrote for this meeting is a reminder to ‘think about the nature of your actions and how they affect others’, an elementary but easily lost part of what it means to be a thinker. Some of the founders of FYP were concerned about the splintering of higher education into separate disciplinary compartments. ‘The predominant attributes of our universities’, wrote J. Graham Morgan in 1976, ‘are those of specialization and professionalization, fragmentation and disciplinary isolation’. The words ‘fragmentation’ and ‘isolation’ suggest a fracturing of space, an integral landscape broken up into pieces. A contemporary equivalent to this condition might be
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the acute pressure placed on temporality, on the time we have. In FYP we go ‘hurtling like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries’ (as Rousseau puts it). Keeping up is hard enough on its own, without pressure from all sides to go even faster. On the library steps, on move-in day, Nick observed that ‘Our world is a very competitive place. We are always trying to get ahead, trying to outpace one another’. There was no one more willing to sacrifice his own time for the sake of someone else, or to make time for those who needed it. He will be sorely missed by us all. ❧
TO FATHER THORNE: A TRIBUTE IAN STEWART For many years now as a professor at King’s, that place over in the corner of the Quad, ‘the Chapel’, diagonally across from my office, has been a refuge for me. I go there usually when it is empty. I go for the silence. I go to gather myself. Living (dangerously) as I do largely inside my head, I am easily pulled this way and that by the demands of thoughts—important an unimportant alike—whilst often lacking the wisdom to know the difference. Self-gathering seems a necessary part of my mental well-being. It seems to matter where I do this.
Can we also listen in speaking? Can we speak, listening? Above all I do so before I enter that shared space of the classroom, where I must speak (usually too much) and listen (usually too little) to my students. It is not always an easy thing, what we professors are called to do. Needing to know ourselves precisely, to be at home in our thoughts enough to be confident that they are what students should think, and yet to be attendant to the thoughts of our students. For these thoughts of theirs are theirs, not ours. Yet it is so easy to assimilate, to draw them in once uttered, to shape them
into something more convenient, to remake them into the image of our thoughts…to make our students, in that moment--one shudders to think--more like us. For how else (we ask ourselves) can we know that our thoughts are right, that our teaching is ‘successful’, and that we are being ‘professorial’ (or worse, ‘professional’) … unless we can achieve this remaking? Students reading this may laugh or be horrified at this musing. Are all professors so full of themselves?! My colleagues may well demur at this description. Evidently I can and do speak only for myself; and even more evidently, I am mocking my vanity. But I venture to suggest that in what I’m talking about there is a quite universal dynamic in play in the complex exchanges of teacher and student. It has been written about since forever by wiser heads than mine. Indeed, what it means to ‘learn’ from another touches on some rather profound and lasting questions in philosophy. Many would aver that the exchange of thinking in the moment of learning involves a kind of mystery, for which the whole paradigm of expert and non-expert, of ‘possessor’ and ‘receiver’ of knowledge is entirely inadequate to capture the reciprocity involved in such exchange. This exchange involves a radical commitment to a form of speaking and listening that is simultaneous, deeply implicated in one another. We speak. We listen, but ideally not just for a chance to speak again. Can we also listen in speaking? Can we speak, listening? This reciprocity has been likened to being drawn into something larger than the exchange. And in rare moments, we stop being teachers and learners. We just get ‘it’. Or ‘it’ gets us, in both the speaking and listening. Yes, I agree with countless before me in describing this, in fleeting moments,
as a kind of mystery. So how is this a tribute to Father Thorne? Besides being my priest and colleague for many years, he has taught me, through example, a lot about speaking and listening, about this mystery. I do not mean to equate this to the ‘big’ mysteries of the Christian religion. But this one, too, has its place, and is part of what Fr. Thorne has sought to share with the King’s community, both within and outside the Chapel. He practices what he preaches. And so, I go there, to the Chapel. I go for the silence that remembers much speaking and listening that opens to mystery. I go to gather myself before class, to prepare to get over myself, to get ready for the reciprocity. And sometimes I will also remember his example. One of the Chapel’s many silent echoes. ❧
Hi,
A few dates:
Just a note to say that The Honey Farm, the book I’ve been pushing up a hill for many years, is now rolling down: it will be published on April 15 in Canada, May 29 in the States, and in a couple of weeks if you happen to be in Australia or New Zealand. You can pre-order a copy now from any independent bookshop or online retailer (in Canada, Indigo or Amazon).
April 24 - launch at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, 6-8pm
It’s been getting some nice reviews, which is exciting: Kirkus Reviews said “Lye’s lush, poetic prose soars off the page... Each lyrical line feels like a gift left at the reader’s altar.” It was an Editor’s Pick for Quill & Quire and it’s a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, too. The film rights have sold to a really wonderful production company based in Toronto that I’m looking forward to working with.
June 1–14 - events in New York and surrounding area, dates TBD
May 11 - launch in Halifax at the Art Bar, 6-8pm May 16 - reading, discussion, and signing at the Toronto Public Library, 7-8pm
July 24 - reading at Shakespeare & Company, Paris I’d love to see you if you’ll be in any of these places at the same time, and if you pick up a copy, I hope you enjoy it. — Harriet Alida Lye
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FYP – In itself and for itself
THE AGE OF REASON OR ENCOUNTERING THE MODERN WORLD AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME NEIL ROBERTSON The joy and difficulty of “The Age of Reason” in the Foundation Year Programme is the struggle of making the familiar strange. In this section students can have a sense that they are finally coming home to something that makes sense to them: modern humans who seem to know the world through science and can be released to transform it for human happiness and well-being. God and religion can seem to be at most presuppositions to this work—or perhaps, simply outdated concepts that can and should be set aside in the
name of human progress and well-being. But our students also encounter in this section seemingly all they find most disturbing in our contemporary world: exploitation and pollution of the environment, imperialism, commercialism, the rise of a new state power and hierarchies and so on. The West’s confident appropriation of the world is not merely intellectual, social and political, but furthers and deepens that expropriation of the natural and non-western world begun in the Renaissance. This presents us all with a deeply troubling question: is the secularity that arises in Section Four of FYP in which we finally discover ourselves not also the basis for developments whose destructive and self-destructive tendencies we must resist. But this then raises a further question: where does this secularity come from? This year in Section Four, I proposed as a way to think about this the question: is modern secularity a “negative” or “positive” result? The “negative”, or what Canadian thinker Charles Taylor calls the “subtractive theory” of secularity, argues that secularity is simply the natural result of humans coming through the development of science and technology to abandon religious and metaphysical accounts that, while perhaps comforting or meaningful, stand between us and a purely given natural world. The “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are recent representatives of this view. For us who assume and live in the secular such a view can seem entirely natural and compelling.
But what inhabiting Section Four can raise for us, as we watch the emergence of this secularity, is whether there might not be an alternative “positive” account of secularity where it is seen to arise not in spite of or over and against religious claims, but precisely in and through them. A close reading of how Descartes comes to determine and ground his new thinking self and its knowledge of the world or a sense of how Hobbes or Rousseau come to define the modern state can awaken the suspicion that there is a deeper relation between the modern secularity and the religious accounts it can seem most deeply in conflict with. This sense of a “positive” derivation of the modern might appear to be making a purely historical point: that there are sources or resources in the pre-modern, perhaps especially in its Latin Christian form, that support or perhaps sustain this new secularity. But this would be, to my mind, to miss what such a thought might open up to us: that our modern secular world in all that is both liberating and destroying in it, is not and need not to be simply self-contained so that we should either just accept or reject it as a “package deal”. What section four might do is liberate us both from thoughtless affirmation of the modern world or its equally unthinking rejection. Everywhere in our own world we are surely having to engage in just such a thinking and re-thinking. ❧
—ed. note Hegel. Yes. Hegel. Hegel is crucial. No, we did not even pretend to read him in FYP 2017-18. This is because FYP is a beginning, not a comprehensive account of all things. As well, I see FYP as a participatory performance of Hegelian philosophical history...up to a point. (The point where my colleagues stand on their chairs and shake their Nietzschean hammers...?) Many of our professors and the founders of FYP were avowed Hegelians. Make of that what you will. Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites? is a collection of scholarly essays, years in the making, that poses questions about the relationship between philosophy and politics, or thought and life. Essays include works by King’s professors Neil Robertson, Daniel Brandes, Ken Kierans, and the coordinator of Section V for this year, Susan Dodd (yes, even she who deprived you of a FYP Hegel!). This collection explores Hegel’s continuing influence in Canadian political thinking, and it offers a challenge: what further help might philosophical history offer in our responses to the social, political and personal perplexities of our time? What is the relation between history and freedom? Between tradition and reason? Between community and law? Between conscience and self-making?
FYP News – Spring 2018
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The Mad Farmer Liberation Front BY WENDELL BERRY
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Father Thorne at Cape Split
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
"In part, I view undergraduate teaching as an exercize in tr y ing to give critical thinking tools to students who will become doctors and engineers. And I guess it sounds kind of cheesy but to make them recognize that science is a human activity, done by human beings who are complicated and who inhabit the networks of power, technology, and politics that make their way into the content of their scientific work." (King's website)
Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. ❧ Reprinted from the notes for Father Thorne’s last High Mass as King’s Chaplain
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Dr. Stephanie Dick, PhD Harvard, visited the History of Science and Technology program.
FYP – In itself and for itself
NIGHT FYP NEIL ROBERTSON Night FYP began last academic year (201617) as a way to give the students in the Foundation Year Programme an opportunity to experience directly through a combination of performance and lecture the “worlds” of
FYP News – Spring 2018
thought and culture they study during the day in FYP. Artists and teachers from King’s and Dalhousie and from the broader Halifax community have offered their craft to our students and to the general public of Halifax in a series of events connected throughout the academic year to the curriculum of FYP. It is our hope that Night FYP can be a forum through which the intense academic work of the Foundation Year Programme can
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meet with the vibrant work of culture and interpretation alive on our University campus and in the artistic community of Halifax and produce “a sea change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, Tempest). Night FYP is made possible through generous support to FYP made through the Annual Fund. ❧
Night FYP Schubert ATA ZARGARPOUR “Schubertiades,” a common feature of European aristocratic life in the 19th century, were gatherings at which musicians would perform the work of Franz Schubert for the enjoyment of all present. The Schubertiade organized by Neil Robertson sought to recreate the feel of such evenings. To this end, members of the Fountain School of Performing Arts contributed not only their musical powers, but also, in the case of two theatre majors, performances as Schubert and a student of his. Following a light-hearted and playful exchange between these two, the music began. As the aching vigour of Schubert’s magnificent pieces washed over the room, I could glimpse, just for a moment, what these gatherings must have been like in their original form. Drawing on what images I’d already encountered from textual and visual
renderings of 19th-century European society, I tried to picture such an evening in my mind. Rather than aiding my vision, however, the music seemed to resonate with the feel for that period and place. After I put aside my sight and allowed the aural artistry to take me, I could sense with perfect softness that I had been transported. Owing to the robust richness of this experience, I feel now as though, for moments, the evening broke through time. Of course, it goes without saying that all of us were thoroughly indebted both to King’s—by which I mean the institution as a community—and the students who offered their honed talents in the service of this multifaceted adventure. Without the superlative theatrical performances, the fierce grace of the pianists and opera singers, or the palpable emotional openness of the audience, I don’t think my moment of rapture would have been possible. As the evening drew to a close and the lengthy applause gradually dissipated, I could discern in the eyes of those present a thing truly extraordinary: a sense of having been momentarily liberated from time and place. ❧
Of her glorious, radiant performance of Pergolesi, Elisabeth Stones says: “From the ominous suspensions in the opening movement to the door-slamming triumphance of the “Amen,” Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is a wild ride through dread, grief, joy, and ecstasy. I felt honoured to be a part of bringing it to FYP this year.” Elisabeth Stones
Photo by Jennifer Adams, departing Librarian Sophia DeBruin, Silas (“King Baby”), and Hannah Fisher
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FYP – In itself and for itself
A Different Kind of Social Worker BY TAMAR KENIGSBERG-BENTOV “Good evening! I’ve been waiting for you! Welcome to Hell! Let’s take a look at your file….oh my…. Murder….rape….arson…quite the profile you have here! It’s gruesome….but hardly original. What? Who am I? Oh yes, sorry. How rude.
You see, if I just toss you in the aforementioned pool of lava, you would eventually begin to accept the warmth and comfort of the molten rock, once you realized it wouldn’t actually hurt you.
Ah, I can see the despair appearing in your eyes. You are worried you couldn’t possibly enjoy those days of respite knowing they are only a tease.
Hell is not supposed to be a warm blanket, goddammit!
But guess what?
God dammit? Get it? It’s a pun? Since God damned you? See?
That day of relief, of joy? That might not be Hell at all! That might be Heaven!
Really? You humans never have a sense of humor down here….
No, I am not speaking metaphorically.
I’ll be your caseworker. You look confused. Of course there are caseworkers in Hell.
had, of what peace and happiness once was.
Anyway, the point is, we have to change up your trials from day to day.
You see, God designed humans with all their feeling, positive and negative. So my boss made a deal with Him.
You see, we need to make sure everything is taken care of properly.
Maybe today you w ill be f layed alive. Tomorrow eaten alive by savage hell hounds. The next day pummeled by hail. The next day you will get a relaxing day on the beach.
I mean, we can’t just toss you into a pit of lava for all eternity, can we? Can you imagine how boring that would be?
Oh, that last one wasn’t sarcasm.
Once a year, no matter how defiled the soul, God steals one soul from Hell. Regardless of the amount of sin, regardless of the violence, the pain inflicted, God takes one damned soul up to paradise.
No, no, no. We must make sure your punishment is tailored to your specific offenses.
You see, down here we don’t always bestow pain and suffering. We also grant relief and refuge.
But with variety! Originality! Uniqueness!
Again, you look confused.
Why you ask?
Let me explain.
And hope is the most precious of all human emotion….
Besides the pleasure we get out of various tortures?
We go back to what I said about humans being adaptable.
And we want to give you a sliver of hope, that someday you might escape Hell.
It’s simple.
If all you know is pain, you will learn to accept it.
Because how can you crush hope….if it isn’t there?“
But if we give you a “day off”, a contrast, to the eternal torture you are here to face, we can constantly remind you of what you once
❧
God designed humans to be very adaptive. Able to change, evolve, cope. That’s frustrating for us.
FYP News – Spring 2018
Why? Because with eternal damnation comes hopelessness….
Robbie Dryer and Jamie Whitley in “Murder,” by Anthony Shaffer
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Ezra Tennen and Katie Lawrence as Death and Everyman
STAGING EVERYMAN IN THE 21 ST CENTURY BY ETHAN SPIEGEL, DIRECTOR When we first began discussing the prospect of staging a modern adaptation of Everyman, the challenge seemed both daunting and exciting. We started the basis of our interpretation on one simple idea: the story of Everyman forces humanity to reflect on our lives in the face of mortality, yet, in our modern Western world, we must do so within the confines of a hospital room (most of the time, at least). We also wanted our vision to fit within our secularized culture—so we decided that Everyman (Katie Lawrence) wouldn’t encounter a personified pageant of Christian moral values. Rather, our “proverbial Everyman”, while diagnosed with a terminal illness, endures a barrage of psychological chaos at the hands of a series of hallucinations and fragmented memories. Creating a set that could aesthetically reflect the content of our vision proved one of the greatest difficulties for the planning and execution of our production. With inspiration from the Swiss architect and designer, Adolphe Appia, we made plans for a set that could symbolize the path of psychological dismemberment. Three plain-white oscillating panels compose the set, which allowed us to facilitate the physical breakdown of a hospital room into an open receptacle for the entrance of Christian-like hallucinatory experiences.
Despite the sometimes disturbing nature of how we chose to depict some of the characters who represent these medieval Christian ideals, we had no intention whosever to fully excise any sense of meaning from the narrative. Staging Everyman within our contemporary context necessitates a high degree of reinterpretation and adaptation, those who try to preserve the minute details of its precise socio-historical context often render any production, no matter how talented the actors, into a mundane affair. In our production, the depiction of god as a petulant baby experiencing a temper-tantrum subverts any conventional relation of the viewer to the traditional spiritual content of the narrative. Our interpretation attempts to transpose the philosophical meaning away from a fear-mongering Judeo-Christian god into Everyman’s relationship with her own Good Deeds (Jeremy Earley), Knowledge (Emma Doig), and Death himself (Ezra Tennen). All this being said, not a single aspect of our interpretation would be able to come to life without the absolutely incredible devotion from the cast and crew. The producers (Hannah MacDougall and Kat Jones) worked tirelessly to organize everything, help build the set, and find props. They surpassed any possible expectation anyone could dream for in a producer. Our stage managers (Ghislaine
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Sinclair and Andrew Van Wyck) and AV technicians (Zach Greenham and Noah Harrison) were indispensable in the help they provided. The nonstop dedication and brilliance from every member of our cast ceaselessly amazed us as they actualized the content of our vision by developing their own understanding of the character they portrayed. The idea of staging Everyman first struck our interest because it posed an opportunity for us to work out how we could go about bringing forth a new and unique performance out of an old and decaying play. The cultural biases of our modern world often impede us from confronting these dated moral values within the text, but by utilizing modernist dramaturgical theory and technique, we tried to challenge ourselves and our audiences to break through this bias. Staging Everyman gave us the chance to try to rebirth the past through the present and show how the Western theatrical tradition can intimately access the past while also understanding it with a new artistic lens. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
LIFE AFTER FYP BY SARAH SHARP For the past eight months we have not only been studying in FYP, we have been living in it. The texts, lectures, and conversations in every corner of the campus have informed and altered our thinking in ways we previously never could have imagined. Not only has FYP changed our thinking, it has shaped the way we experience. The ghost of Antigone still lingers on the library steps and Prince Hall is now inseparable from the sensory slip and slide that was ‘Pop-Up Love’. I cannot recall November without imagining Luther, nor February without Nietzsche. FYP has found its way into our minds, into our conversations, and even into our dreams. As the academic year comes to a close, if your experience has been anything like mine, you may be left wondering: How do I emerge without getting the bends? What is life after FYP? Well, the Don of Radical Bay has perhaps provided a way out of what
would otherwise take the form of impending decompression sickness. On four Friday evenings throughout the winter semester, I gathered with some of my fellow FYPers in the Radical Bay Don Suite for the Residence Colloquium Series. Some of King’s most beloved professors spoke on subjects which clearly excite them. Each evening offered a taste of one upper year program, and I am unable to think of a better way to end the week—or to start the night. To Daniel Brandes, Gordon McOuat, Laura Penny, and Eli Diamond—thank you for choosing to spend a Friday evening with students in residence. It is not possible to listen to you speak and not feel an infectious excitement for the learning to come. To Andrew and Hannah—thank for your warm hospitality, your cozy living room and tasty snacks alone would have been enough to
draw a crowd of students. Thank you for the providing so much delicious fresh fruit and such a perfect place to foster food for thought. Because of what FYP has been, it is comforting to know that it can also lies ahead of us. Life after FYP can be just as engaging and exciting. ❧
FYP has found its way into our minds, into our conversations, and even into our dreams.
FYP ESSAY LAURELS 2016–17 SECTION 3 THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
SECTION 4 THE AGE OF REASON
SECTION 5 THE ERA OF REVOLUTIONS
SECTION 6 THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
Stuart Harden
Caleb Sher
Violet Pask
Rachel O’Brien
“Discuss the role of nature in Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa” —Written for Caleb Langille
Ghislaine Sinclair
What is the role of political order in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure? —Written for Dr Susan Dodd
“…I beseech you tell me how the soul of a man (since it is but a thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions” (Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, “Selections from Her Correspondence with Descartes”) —Written for Dr Michael Bennett
Andrew Milne
“[…] I can will the lie but can not at all will a universal law to lie” (Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals) —Written for Dr Stephen Boos
“To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle to which even the apes might subscribe…” (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals) —Written for Caleb Langille
“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) —Written for Dr Suzanne Taylor ❧
It’s truely absurd that these are first year papers —Dr Eli Diamond
Dante, with laurel wreath
FYP News – Spring 2018
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FYP and the King’s Treasures BY PATRICIA CHALMERS, ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN The Foundation Year Programme is known for helping students engage intellectually with fundamental texts from the past. Last fall many FYP students had an opportunity to encounter some of those texts in a tangible way as well. Seven tutorial groups visited the King’s College Library, where they were excited to see and handle unique manuscripts and rare printed books, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
Stella and Michelle Wilband prepare for FYP
We take today’s abundance of printed and digital books for granted, but I prompted the students to think about how some of the books they studied have come down to us from the past. I spoke briefly of the transmission of texts through the ages from the manuscript era to the printing press. Three hand-written works on parchment were shown, including a Biblical codex from Ethiopia, a page from an illuminated medieval Book of Hours from France, and a thirteenth-centur y legal scroll from England… Even after the inventions of paper and the printing press, some aspects of the manuscript were carried over to printed books; it took time for the conventions of the printed page as we know them to develop. Two examples of incunabula, that is books printed in the fifteenth century, were shown. Albertus Magnus’ Sermones de tempore et de sanctis, (Ulm: Johann Zainer, 1480) is a handsome edition of a late mediaeval Christian work, printed in a heavy Gothic type, with woodcuts. Cicero’s De Rhetorica (Venice: Baptista de Tortis, 1481) is a wonderful example of Renaissance type
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design used to serve a classical text, and enhanced by illuminations. As printing spread, books were produced in greater numbers, and at less cost. But until the modern era, books were often rare and expensive objects, sometimes richly embellished. In addition to their value as texts, they can be studied as art-historical objects, as examples of the history of bookbinding, typography, and book illustration. With their marks of ownership and marginalia, books can also tell us about those who have owned and read them in the past. I told how our Library was established early in the 1800’s through the efforts of the Governors, Bishop Charles Inglis, and his son John. It is one of the oldest surviving libraries in Canada, and the collection formed in those early years is in many ways still consistent with our teaching interests. Students were encouraged to think that in their researches in upper years, they might draw upon the Library’s rare book collections. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
WHY I LOVE CHALK SO MUCH BY JUDYTA FRODYMA
There has not been a single day this FYP year where my clothing has not been covered in chalk dust. On days when I am not teaching, I’m hanging out, rather literally, at Seven Bays (come say hi!) on Gottingen. Although classroom chalk and climbing chalk are not exactly the same in their chemical makeup, they are, for the most part, the same thing: white, alkaline, powdery substances originally made of limestone deposits. In both cases, the nature of the chalk contributes to the binary nature of its greater purpose: the ephemerality of the medium (chalk is, after all, a very soft rock that is easy to erase) versus the deep-running nature of ambition (to pass on knowledge, or to complete that V3/ V4 route before the next reset). The usage of actual chalk and slate in classrooms goes back to the eighteenth century, but the practice is an ancient one. Temporary writing as a mode of memorisation and comprehension has been a commonly observed practice in education—hence copying out lines and taking notes. It has also in recent years, fallen prey to the most ridiculous of studies, such as the “Assessment of Airborne Fine Particulate Matter and Particle Size Distributed in Settled Chalk Dust During Writing and Dusting Exercises in a Classroom.” (The study concluded, unsurprisingly, that more chalk dust is
inhaled when using chalk than when using a whiteboard.)1 However, I do hang on (ha ha ha) to the belief that the traditional ‘chalk and talk’ method has something to it. For one, it does help to enliven the discussion: as some of my tutorials will know, I am not afraid of a bit of drama in the classroom (pretending to “throw” students’ impromptu in-class quizzes out the window comes to mind—don’t worry Neil, I didn’t really!) Chalk makes this more feasible, and not only because it serves as a handy prop in explaining abstract philosophical concepts, or explodes when I underline points too emphatically, or goes flying across the room out of my hand in a moment of enthusiasm. It makes thinking visible.
I love this moment because the ferocity with which she smashes her slate—a small chalkboard used in lieu of a notebook, or, I suppose, a laptop—demonstrates a momentary escape of rage in an otherwise rational world and the temporary triumph of the ‘animal’ over the ‘human’. This transient lapse in thinking temporally—if I break my slate now I will not be able to use it later—is at the heart of the chalky binary of ephemerality and permanence. What I mean is that Anne’s need for her slate later, and her disregard for any social protocol, is subsumed by her uncontrollable rage at inequality—‘How dare you!’, she screams at (her future husband) Gilbert, and then proceeds to boldly assert her identity on the chalkboard, as if it needed further emphasis.
These kinds of moments remind me of one of my favourite literary and cinematographic incidents involving chalk. In a moment of reactionary non-decision, Anne (of Green Gables) smashes a schoolroom slate across the head of Gilbert Blythe for tugging her braid and calling her ‘Carrots’. As punishment, Mr. Phillips writes ‘Ann Shirley has a very bad temper’ in cursive on the blackboard, telling Anne that she must copy it out 100 times before the end of the day. In the film adaptation, Anne’s first move is to pick up the chalk and defiantly add the ‘e’ to her name.
Anyone who has been to the climbing gym with me will know about my not-so-secret love for chalk and my strange desire to put my hands in other people’s chalk bags (and no, this has little to do with the Nietzschean tights episode that plagued me for a number of tutorials). In fact, anyone who has sat through a tutorial with me will know I cannot teach unless I have a piece of chalk in my hand. The board must be filled and erased several times over during the course of an hour for me to make sense of the things I am trying to convey.
— 1 I mean, HOW IS THIS EVEN A FUNDED STUDY!!?!?!?!! And this is not the only one: another study, entitled “Effects of Chalk Use on Dust Exposure and Classroom Air Quality” concluded that “Wearing face masks and increasing distance between seats and blackboard can also prevent teachers and students from chalk dust hazard. The results of this study should serve as a reference for improving indoor air quality and protecting teachers and students from harmful dust particles in classrooms.” We might as well just Skype into tutorials every day, because, you know, cooties.
FYP News – Spring 2018
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I have been thinking about this and realised that there are two things going on here: from years of experience of being a perpetual student, I have come to learn that I not only comprehend visually, but also kinaesthetically. So not only does it help for me to see concepts in silly, representational cartoons, (remember Fortuna? Nietzsche’s ‘waves’? the feudal system?) but the actual process of writing or drawing them out helps crystallise what it is I am trying to get at. And yet, there is something precise and peculiar about the medium of a chalkboard—I have taught and lectured using whiteboards, PowerPoint, handouts, and one time, an electronic whiteboard (that was wizardry; I do not recommend!)—and none of these were as effective as a piece of chalk. I like its chalkiness. I enjoy feeling it diminish and break down under pressure. I like to imagine, if this was real chalk rather than manufactured, all the crushed skeletal remains of phytoplankton and green algae from the bottom of the sea now explaining, badly, Heidegger’s the nothing. Chalkboard chalk, however, is not the deep geologic calcium carbonate; rather it is made of gypsum or calcium sulphate. French chalk used in bicycle punctures is a natural magnesium silicate, while climbing
chalk is magnesium carbonate (also used by weightlifters and gymnasts). What is baffling in all cases is that an object arising from such permanence—the deep geologic time of resurfacing ocean floors—is used in such an ephemeral way. The purpose of French chalk (commonly known as talc) in bicycle puncture repair is to stop the newly patched bit of inner tube from sticking to the inside of the tyre. In this case, it is used as a cushioning between two surfaces to decrease friction and avoid sticking (though some argue this is a hang up from days when bicycle tyres and tubes actually contained natural rubber, which had a tendency to get sticky when they got hot or warm. Modern tyres are made of synthetic rubber or butyl, but I digress. When I am not climbing, I’m out on my bike). Why, then, would climbers use the same substance to increase friction and stick better to the rock face? As with many things in life, climber’s chalk has a sweet spot. Too much and you’ll slip off the holds (hence the toothbrushes attached to broom handles you’ll see at Seven Bays— used to clean the excess ‘caked on’ chalk and grit from the holds); too little and you’ll also slip off the holds. Most of the time it is meant to soak up finger and hand sweat
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and increase grip—perhaps not so much a problem in indoor climbing as it would be on the glacier-polished cracks of Yosemite on a sweltering summer’s day. Chalk buildup on outdoor routes, though not permanent, also removes the factor of discovery that is so vital to a climber’s experience. Completing a climb for the first time is an intellectual puzzle before it is a physical one, yet it is nevertheless a puzzle that needs to be solved kinaesthetically. I find I can never truly ‘know’ how to solve a route or even single out a move until my body has attempted the position. Which is why it’s such a perfect medium for teaching. The point of tutorial, for me, anyway, is not to permanently embed any particular idea in a student’s mind for later regurgitation (like, say, during orals), but to participate in the organic process of creating together, which I do with my entire person. I need the chalk because it is my way of learning, out loud, visually, kinesthetically. And it reminds me that what is said is not “set in stone”. Or rather, it quite literally is for a moment, and then it is subsumed into the very air we breathe. ❧
FYP – In itself and for itself
BOOKS, DEGREES, PERFORMANCES
Congratulations Harriet Alida Lye (FYP 2005–06) on the novel and the movie contract! (see page 25)
The Ethical Detective, Rachel Haliburton. Cover art by Mary Campbell (FYP 1983–84) (By my FYP roommate who stayed in Alex Hall last year writing this —Ed)
This spring, Mr. Duncan McCue (FYP 1989–90)will receive an honorary doctorate from King’s. An author, educator, award-winning journalist and current host of CBC Radio One’s Cross Country Checkup, Mr. McCue was featured in our Fall edition of the FYP News.
King’s will also recognize long-time Dean of Students, now rector of St. George’s Round Church, and as Celine of our dining hall says, “my buddy,” The Rev. Nicholas Hatt, as an Honorary Fellow of the university.
Front Cover: Clockwise from top left: Gary Thorne and Aaron Shenkman (Nico Fortier); Amy and Johannah Bird (Hannah Fisher); Alex Retzer, Katie Lawrence, Frodo Puppy, Caroline French (Jennifer Elvidge); Nick Hatt, Nico Fortier, Jenny Lapp, Nathan Ferguson (Susan Dodd); Max Tal, Sam Richmond, Meg Collins, Natasha Forth, Chlore Kaulbach (Susan Dodd); Achilleus with Patroclus binding his wound.
2 Father Gary Thorne (Anglican Diocesan Times)
Bishop Mark MacDonald (website), Conversion of Saint Augustine (Wikicommons)
Winter Dream Sky (Susan Dodd)
10 All photos from Nick Hatt’s collection
Inside cover: Susan Dodd (Mary Campbell); Elisabeth Stones (Bike Ninja)
5 Casey the Dog, President Lahey, Amy and Johannah Bird (Susan Dodd)
11 Father Hatt Visit (Susan Dodd)
1 Gilgamesh
Students and Jesse Blackwood with Johannah Bird (Susan Dodd)
Janice Landry (FYP 1983–84), winner of the 2018 Resiliency Award
(Dr. Asha Jeffers and her Examiners from York University, Toronto)
This term, Asha Jeffers gloriously defended her Doctor a l T hesis: “Reading Speculative Subjectivities: The Second Generation and the Afterlife of Migration”
PHOTOS BY PAGE
FYP News – Spring 2018
3 Father Gary Thorne (Hayley Frail) 4 Halifax Night Flight (Susan Dodd) Jenny Lapp and Nathan Ferguson (Nico Fortier--Chapel Website)
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6 –7 Fountain School of the Arts 8 Jarah-Jane Hasenauer-Kinsley Tutors (Susan Dodd)
12 King’s Athletics 13 Evany Rosen
FYP Grad Mary Beth Carty (FYP 1999–2000) and Ashley MacIsaac in Sydney, Christmas Eve. Mary Beth Carty is an award winning musician. “A solid instrumentalist of outstanding calibre with undoubted star quality whose passionate voice rings in your head long after you have stopped listening.” fRoots Magazine Check out her album at: https:// marybethcarty.bandcamp.com/ album/les-biens-nomm-s
FYP graduate Ben Caplan (FYP 2005–06) continues to dazzle! Here’s an excerpt from his website: Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story is a humourously dark folktale woven together with a high-energy concert. This Klezmer-folk music-theatre hybrid starring genre-bending sensation Ben Caplan is inspired by the true stories of two Jewish Romanian refugees coming to Canada in 1908.
It’s about how to love after being broken by the horrors of war. It’s about refugees who get out before it’s too late, and those who get out after it’s too late. And it’s about looking into the eyes of God.
14 Mike and Peter the Cat (courtesy Mike Bennett)
22 Christian LaRoche (Stranger)
29 Ata Zargarpour (Nico Fortier chapel website)
15 Poetry Workshop: Meg Collins, Brielle LeBlanc, Natasha Danais, Grace Higgins (Jane Breakell)
23 Dr Currran and Leith Johnson (Hayley Frail)
31 Ezra Tennen and Katie Lawrence (Hayley Frail)
Dr Cohoon and Avon (courtesy Dr. Cohoon)
Hammering Hand of Rodney Parsons (Susan Dodd)
24 see cover note
32 Sarah Sharp and Georgia Noble Irwin (Chapel Website); Andrew Griffin (Chapel Website)
16 Nico Fortier and the FaceBot (Andrew Milne) 17 Ezra’s room (Ezra Tennen); Coconut Sometimes (Hayley Frail) 19 Father Thorne (Hayley Frail) 21 C atherine Campbell, Carol Anne Gillis, Ken Jessome (Cape Breton Post) Burnside (CTV)
25 Harriet Alida Lye (website) 26 Dr. Stephanie Dick (Website) 27 Father Thorne at Cape Split (Chapel Website) 28 Helios with Elisabeth Stones; Sophia DeBruin, Silas King (Evan’s “King Baby”), Hannah Fisher (Jennifer Adams); Rachel Taylor, Dalhousie Music (Susan Dodd); Bella Larsen at Chapel Open Mic (Hayley Frail).
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33 Pat Chalmers and Rare Books; Stella and Michelle 34 Judyta and Neil (Hayley Frail) 37 King’s Chorus Back Cover: Stella and Michelle Wilband (Dan Wilband); Nico Fortier, Ata Zargarpour, Jenny Lapp (Chapel website); Katie Lawrence (Alexandra Retzer).
FYP – In itself and for itself