Fall 2020 and Spring 2021
News
The Foundation Year Program: in itself and for itself.
UNPRECEDENTED! DOUBLE EDITION
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
News
The Foundation Year Program: in itself and for itself.
CONTENTS
Editors: Dr. Susan Dodd (FYP 1983–84) Christopher Snook (FYP 1994–95)
Nous praktikos: Elisabeth Stones (FYP 2005–06)
Student Editors: Sarah Kasprzak (FYP 2020–21) Sadie Quinn (FYP 2020–21)
Design: Co. & Co.
Front Cover: Susan Dodd, photo Back Cover: Mini King’s (to fold & to hold) by Sarah Kasprzak
Inside Front Cover Editor’s Note: FYP News Unprecedented by Susan Dodd 1 Unprecedented: A Doctor’s View (the other kind of doctor) by Mark Mackenzie, M.D. 2 FYPers in a Dangerous Time by Bill Lahey 2 Introductions: Tim Clarke 3 Five Years (Sort of) Directing FYP by Neil Robertson 3 Student Meditations: Sappho’s If Not, Winter by Dylan Taylor 4 Unfolding of Blankets by shalan joudry 4 FYP Memes 5 FYP’s Visit with Tamino by Michael Schade
Elisabeth Stones, in the virtual FYP office
6 Music Recommendations by Michael Bennett and David Huebert
Phoebe Stones in the real FYP Office
21 On Levity by Elizabeth Edwards
34 Beyond the Virtual Veil by Roberta Barker
7 An Interview with Dr. Michael Bennett: COOL ADA 2020-21 by Sadie Quinn
22 In Honour of Elizabeth Edwards by Neil Robertson
35 A Tasty Lamb’s Appreciation of Eagles by Ranall Ingalls
23 Third Time Spanking by David Huebert
36 Books on Bikes by Paul McKay
8 “Can You Hear Me?” Foundations of Journalism 2020-21 by Katie Ingram
24 Your Unrepeatable First FYP Reading—Repeated! by Tom Curran
37 Join us in King’s Joint Honours Next Year?
8 Snuggles the Pig by Katie Ingram
25 Bard in the Yard by Sadie Quinn
10 The Show Must Go On! Collegiate Sport and Academics During COVID-19 by Neil Hooper
38 NIGHT FYP: Zuppa’s Pop-up Love On-line
25 Ghost Writing by Grace Layla Ross
38 Student Evensong Meditation: Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Cameron Lowe
11 The Making of an Unprecedented FYP Year: an Interview with the FYP Lecture Production Team Mark Pineo and Paul Robinson by Sadie Quinn
26 The Advice of Children by Sahar Ullah 26 YouthNet by Neyve Egger 27 Where I Might Have Been Now by Catherine Fullarton
37 First Time Tutor (and Chair of Classics!) by Eli Diamond
39 Robert Darwin Crouse Memorial Lecture—Andrew Louth, Review by Matthew Vanderkwaak
12 Student Meditations: Aristophanes’ The Birds by Sadie Quinn
27 Student Meditation: Machiavelli’s The Prince by Thomas MacEachern
40 Pythian Games by Eli Diamond
13 Navigating the Unknown Seas of FYP Online by Maria Euchner
28 Decolonising the Classroom by Gordon McOuat 29 Life in the North by Jane Neish
42 Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper: An Auratic Experience by Hilary Ilkay
13 Student Meditations: Montaigne’s Essays by Jessica Casey
31 Piratical Philosophy in a Pandemic by Simon Kow
44 Check out Pets and Books
14 Best on Desk
32 Apocalypse 2020 by Susan Dodd
45 The Creek by Christopher Snook
14 Student Meditations: Rousseau’s Discourse by Mauricio Rico Quiroz
33 Death 2021 by Daniel Brandes
41 On Icons by Benjamin Von Bredow
15 April, Come She Will by Hamza Karam Ally 16 Halifax Humanities 101 Online by Colin Bowers 17 Victor Frankenstein: GUILTY as Charged! by Dawn Tracey Brandes 17 Dawn Tracey Brandes: SUPERSTAR by FYP News 17 A Virtue of Vice Presidents by Neil Robertson 19 In Honour of Kim Kierans by Denis Kierans 19 Take that Job and … Get it Done: Kim Kierans as V-P by Stephen Kimber 20 Quotes from FYP Tutorial 2020-21 inspired by Clair From left, Editors Susan Dodd and Christopher Snook. Student editors Sarah Kasprzak and Sadie Quinn
FYP NEWS: UNPRECEDENTED! SUSAN DODD Last spring, the FYP Fall 2020 committee felt like a collective Victor Frankenstein, only we were making an unknowable creature out of the bits and pieces of a learning experience that we knew and loved in person, in the flesh. It felt impossible And then, in September, F Y P opened its zoomie eyes and there you were! Bright. Hopeful/Anxious. Beautiful. What would this plague year have been without you all?
Meeting together, opening to these voices from the past, we were like Machiavelli, donning our ceremonial garb, alone and yet in the best possible company, to debate with a history that is our curse and our blessing, our worst Other and our best selves, our limit and our infinite possibility. Everybody was overwhelmed this year; heartbroken, but above all, grateful in unprecedented ways.
We are grateful to you for being the awesome, unprecedented FYP class of 2020–21, and for King’s, our unique, quirky, and dedicated learning community. We are academics and journalists. Words are our thing. Here is your FYP News, and that is, some closing words, to keep you company until we meet again in the Fall. ❧
Unprecedented:
A Doctor’s View (the other kind of doctor) M ARK M ACKENZIE, M.D. (FYP 1982–83)
…the world hadn’t just changed, it had been turned upside down.
Mark MacKenzie
Dude, where’s my car? One year ago, I left my family medicine clinic on a Friday and came back to work on Monday to find that the world hadn’t just changed, it had been turned upside down. And furthermore, that it continued to change. Hour to hour, day to day. The speed of change was overwhelming. PPE, Covid swabs, public health advisories, hospital meetings, clinic meetings, staff upheaval, virtual care, video licenses, extra phone lines. It all arrived with a crash. And at first it was scary. I didn’t know how quickly our hospital would be contending with sick Covid patients. I didn’t know how many of my colleagues would get sick as a result of caring for patients in hospital. I didn’t know if I would bring the virus home to my family. My medical community came together quickly and self-organized in myriad ways. We regulated our presence in the hospi-
tal, long term care facilities, and community clinics so as to minimize the chance of being vectors for the infection within our community. We organized centralized in-person assessment clinics so that patients could be triaged from virtual clinics to a clinic where they could be examined in person. And when we realized within weeks that social distancing was working and that we weren’t going to be another Italy or New York, carefully and intentionally, we gradually brought patients back for essential in-person visits. I became accustomed to wearing a mask all day and to always looking through fogged up eyeglasses. I learned the hard way to pull my mask aside before trying to have a sip of coffee. I realized I really missed seeing my patients in person. I discovered that for my patients at least, the 21st century hadn’t really arrived yet and that all the virtual video apps in the world could not compete with the popularity and acceptance of the telephone. In my practice, I saw a big spike in mental health issues, alcohol related illness, marital break downs, and eating disorders. In my older patients I saw the grinding, hollowing, and unrelenting effects of isolation from family and friends. And in the hospital I spent a lot of time changing in and out of scrubs. When the pandemic started, it felt like a sprint but by autumn it was feeling like a
marathon, except a marathon where no one knew where the finish line is. “I miss the early pandemic”, one of my colleagues said with a sigh. But despite everybody feeling fatigued, when my community became one of the epicentres of infection in B.C. for the second wave in January, it felt like it wasn’t scary anymore, like we were ready for it. Ready to get it over with. And now with vaccines starting to roil out, and the days getting longer again, it finally seems that things are going to become better for everybody. Many people have lost a lot in the last year. I feel very lucky that for me the losses have been few and there have been some real benefits that would not have happened without the pandemic.
Driving less, working with a group of committed and collaborative colleagues, and unexpectedly having a chance to spend more time with family are all things I am grateful for. Driving less, working with a group of committed and collaborative colleagues, and unexpectedly having a chance to spend more time with family are all things I am grateful for. But I could live with never having to sit through another zoom meeting again. Best of luck with your exams and here’s to an improving 2021. ❧
Phoebe says:
“Let me show you around King’s!”
Phoebe photos by Matthew Stones
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FYP – In itself and for itself
FYPers in a Dangerous Time BILL L AHEY In an unprecedented year, it is good and proper to have it end with the Unprecedented edition of FYP News. About a year ago, though it seems longer somehow, we were telling you that spending a year in the company of consequential books and fellow searchers after wisdom in a community of mutual support would be a good—or at least better—way to spend a pandemic. Now, with vaccines and deliverance from this pandemic in sight, I hope your year has lived up to its billing. I am told by many of you it has and I know that is because you and
your professors have embraced the opportunity the pandemic gave you, to make the 49th edition of FYP truly unprecedented. Not just in the obstacles and difficulties it overcame—though there is that—but more importantly, in the opportunity it created to push deeper into the books and the questions they raise in our moment precisely because you were all, as a favourite old rocker from the same decade as FYP might say, “FYPers in a dangerous time”. I am very sure you will similarly prevail in your oral exams. After all, together and with and for each other, you have conquered a pandemic. Remember your examiners are there to see you through, just as they and all your professors have been there to see you safely through this whole year. And as you look back on this year, and even though I am sure you were never quite “waiting for the sky to fall”, I hope just the same “you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all”.
Bill and Casey having hot chocolate with students in the Quad
I congratulate each of you on all you have accomplished and will yet accomplish and I offer you my very best wishes for the rest of FYP and beyond. From the Lodge, President Bill ❧
Welcome Dr. Tim Clarke who joins us next year as an Assistant Professor INTRODUCTIONS TIM CL ARKE As I think about the matter of introductions, I’m struck that there is always a difficulty in these acts of bringing something outside into the circle of what one knows. How and where does one begin? Where should introducing stop to leave room for the longer work of acquaintance? The breadth and scale of FYP invites these questions naturally enough; since learning that I would be joining the King’s faculty and teaching in FYP this fall, I’ve been wondering about them myself. In the spirit of introduction, then, I’d like to offer a few words about myself and what draws me to FYP. How and where does one begin? I was born and raised in western Newfoundland and belong to the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, and I feel enormously privileged for the occasion to return to Mi’kma’ki after many years away. I began my academic career studying English and Historical Studies at Memorial University’s Grenfell
I feel enormously privileged for the occasion to return to Mi’kma’ki Campus before moving on to graduate studies in English at Queen’s and the University of Ottawa, where I obtained a doctorate in 2018. Although I’m a literary scholar by background (I specialize in American liter-
…it’s in refusing to take this “West” as selfevident, while at the same time insisting that we understand its effects and constitution, that FYP does something especially powerful. ature and modernist studies), the work I find most enlivening involves the same conversation across disciplinary boundaries that FYP facilitates so well. My own work, whether on the strange recurrences of Spinozism in American literature or on literary collisions between the Decadent tradition and vitalist thought, takes place at the juncture of literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas. What I find most impressive and valuable about FYP is that it offers more than just an introduction to the vast range of conversations and texts that inform the present moment. It doesn’t just aim to familiarize students with the unfamiliar; it also defamiliarizes what might otherwise be taken for granted. Consider an idea like “the West.” It is all too easy to make assumptions about this idea, to load it in advance with determinate meanings. But it’s in refusing to take this “West” as self-evident, while at the same time insisting that we understand its effects and constitution, that FYP does something especially powerful. “Western culture” emerges here as an object of inter-
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Tim Clarke, PhD English
rogation rather than of reverence, and we may begin to see “the West” as something more complicated than a stable, unitary tradition: a mutable product of innumerable relations and exchanges with a wider world, some peaceful, but many of them difficult, violent, and of persistent consequence. In striving to be responsible to this complexity, FYP, I believe, offers both perspective and purchase on the crises, struggles, and opportunities that shape our lives in the present. Undoubtedly, this is difficult work, but the uncommonly intensive, sustained, and searching inquiry that FYP offers is invaluable; in the words of Spinoza, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” I can’t wait to join you in this work at King’s in the fall, and I look forward to thinking— and learning—with you in the conversations to come. ❧
FIVE YEARS (SORT OF) DIRECTING FYP NEIL ROBERTSON (FYP 1982–83) I am so grateful for my time as Director of the Foundation Year Program. Working these last five years with Susan Dodd and Elisabeth Stones (we all started together) together with many others, has been the source of deep satisfaction and simple enjoyment—amidst all the work and worry and endless administrative detail. I need to thank the wonderful Senior Fellows—really all the fellows who have been part of FYP over this time—and my longer-term colleagues, as well as all the other staff and faculty who do so much to sustain FYP. And to explain my odd title, I must mention that not only has my directing always been only “sort of directing”, but it has also been only “sort of five years” as Dr. Dodd took on that role, while continuing her own, for six months
dren under the oversight of their parents, but nor are they simply fully established adults inhabiting definite roles and subject to definite obligations. There is uncertainty and confusion and vulnerability in this moment, but also, of course, irreplaceable potential and freedom. It is celebrated at its conclusion in every graduation ceremony. But while there is complication everywhere in what I am describing, I want to suggest that the Foundation Year Program has the special opportunity and duty to respect this exceptional moment. In F YP, our role and duty is to that potentiality, that delicate freedom within each of our students, to be guardians and enablers of this moment of the potential—the potential and the actual together. My great mentor in all things FYP, Neil Robertson
In FYP, our role and duty is to that potentiality, that delicate freedom within each of our students, to be guardians and enablers of this moment of the potential—the potential and the actual together. of 2020, when I went on leave and was called to deal with the crisis of Covid in its early days. I will always be indebted to her for this profound act of collegiality and friendship. But my deepest gratitude is for you, our students. I have been part of the FYP cycle as a faculty member for more than thirty years, but the special privilege of FYP is that it is always springtime—even while Eliot tells us this is the cruelest time—where we get to catch young minds in their first blossom. Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale University, described the undergraduate time, as a time of “no longer” and “not yet.” By and large undergraduate students are no longer chil-
Student Evensong Meditations
Angus Johnston, was a deep lover of Aristotle. Aristotle thought deeply about the potential and the actual and the inherent relation between the two. All of our students are becoming something actual—you are actually making something of yourselves—sometimes to our surprise and always to our deep satisfaction when and if you come back and tell us. FYP occurs at this strange moment when the potential that has been supported and sustained by your parents is becoming aware of both its possibilities and its capacities. The Foundation Year Program has always billed itself as an odyssey of self-knowledge; it is a way of knowing ourselves and our world—and of coming to know
that these are in fact the same. In this sense these last five years in FYP have been but a continuing of what has always been at work in FYP. However, this time has seen pressures and questions and concerns that challenge, if not undermine, the vocation of FYP. When Susan and I took up the reins of the program five years ago, the most obvious issue was the decline in student numbers that had occurred during the previous three or four years and we thought that various ways of strengthening the experience of FYP and renewing its sense of pedagogical activity might go someway in reversing this decline. So we introduced FYP’s first writing coach, Mark Burke, and we started new initiatives like FYP News and Write Now and more recently Read Now. We were supported by a wonderful patron who enabled us to launch Night FYP as a series of performative based events to supplement and enrich and give direct experience of what we are learning about in FYP. In short we have done all we can to make
This year, students were invited to present a reflection on their favourite text from the Foundation Year Program at the Friday Evensong service in the King’s Chapel.
Dylan Taylor Sappho’s If Not, Winter The F Y P text that spoke to me the most this year was easily If Not, Winter, a collection of Sappho poems translated by Ann Carson. Prior to reading this compilation, I was having a hard time fully engaging with the material that FYP had to offer. Many worldviews and experiences detailed by ancient authors felt so completely foreign to my own that I had a hard time relating to the content on an emotional level. This book changed that. The immediately evocative poetry helped me to understand that Sappho and her contemporaries were experiencing the very same feel-
ings of love, heartache and existential dread that we feel over here in the 21st century. While the ways that our ancient ancestors processed these feelings were very different from the way we process them today, the underlying emotions remain mostly consistent throughout history. Reading this book during a time when much of the world seems ideologically divided was certainly an eye-opening experience—if I can relate to a woman who lived thousands of years before me, I can certainly find common ground with the people around today that I disagree with.
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“Dance past the chapel.”
FYP – In itself and for itself
FYP “work” for our students and for it to be the best way to live this time of “no longer, but not yet.” But perhaps all of this has been in vain. Perhaps the whole project of the Foundation Year program is misbegotten or at least no longer relevant. Perhaps the most important and interesting challenge for FYP in these last five years has been the question of diversity. This has, of course, been a live issue for western—and seemingly primarily English-speaking—democracies generally and for the universities in these democracies. FYP has a more complicated relation to this than most university departments or programs because FYP’s built-in focus on the western tradition seems to place it as a pedagogical project inherently unacceptable to the contemporary moment and its insight into the demands of justice. Certainly F YP has made significant adjustments to its curriculum to meet criticisms of inadequate diversity, including more marginal voices within the western tradition and considering moments of “contact” between western and non-western cultures. In all of this, we become more conscious of the problematic sense involved in designating something called the “western tradition” that begins in Ancient Greece and Israel and ends in modern Europe and some of its colonial offshoots, such as the United States or Canada. But this might simply appear to be trying to wallpaper over an impossible situation. What can justify a program focused on the western tradition today, especially a program that calls itself the “Foundation Year“? My experience of these last five years is that this impossibility is also the necessity of the Foundation Year Program. I would argue that at the heart of the larger historical moment is this impossibility, something that the Foundation Year Program, perhaps uniquely, is in a position to address in a way that global culture or more thematically based programs evade and fail to face. One way of putting this is that the “western” or European tradition is now being understood as but one of many cultures, and itself by no means a unified entity with an identity of its own. But this very culture is at the same time seen to be uniquely the source of the harms that policies of equity, diversity and inclusion seek to address. Sciences, economic structures, arts, practices, political forms and ideals with origins or crucial formation in the “west” have a place now in almost every culture. When we pursue equity, it important to ask relative to what harms or of diversity, relative to what uniformity or of inclusion, it is always important to ask inclusion into what? Largely these questions are taken up in relation to forms of western culture defined especially through its scientific, technological, globalizing capitalism that would now be liberated from its imperial and colonial past. Angus Johnston, whom I mentioned earlier and was perhaps the figure most central to defining the meaning of the Foun-
UNFOLDING OF BLANKETS we’ve inherited the products of history this burden of knowing how we all ended up here through memories of loss we’ve inherited this impossible task of rehabilitation and the unfolding of blankets i will take into my heart those of you whom the story pains how it stirred you into confusion because then at least then we will crawl out together
shalan joudry
dation Year Program, loved to cite Marshall McLuhan who said, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.” This captures the most basic pedagogical task of FYP: by coming to know and question the “west”—that strange, problematic history out of which the modern world arose—we (faculty and students together) might come to see the water in which we all swam. One of the virtues of changes undertaken in the last five years, as we have become more sensitive to the impact of the “west” upon other cultures and peoples, has been a deepening sense of the evil and destructiveness of that development, evil present within that tradition, as well as in its effects on those who have “encountered” it. However, the real challenge of FYP—something I hope has been sharpened over these five years—is to see here not a simple opposition of good and evil in this development, but their necessary mutual implication. Equity, diversity, and inclusion are by no means foreign to that development: while certainly not uniquely western, these clearly are absolutely central to the west, and the deeply moral, political and secular form they take in our current climate cannot be divorced from sources in the western tradition. So the very means by which we would limit and correct the western tradition are not foreign to that tradition: the good we would do is implicated in the evil we would seek to remove. What the Foundation Year Program (over the last five years) has taught me is that even as we develop its curriculum to fulfill more completely its pedagogical vocation and allow FYP to speak to today’s students in all their variety, far from merely “remaining relevant” the basic structure of FYP is more vitally necessary than it has ever been. “Global studies” programs or courses that focus on universal human themes, such as justice or love, presuppose their object. FYP, because it is developmental in its structure and teaching, seeks to see its object— our contemporary world—coming to be. Only in this way, can we see “the water”. Only in seeing “the water,” can we be in a position to help refresh and renew it. ❧
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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hands over arms sweat and tears tending landscapes full of new seeds —shalan joudry, from Waking Ground (Gaspereau Press 2020)
FYP MEMES 2020 –21 Although we all love to express our thoughts on FYP texts in essay form, there are times when only memes will do. This year, when so many aspects of our lives are online, it feels appropriate to share some of the memes that students have created over the course of the Foundation Year Program.
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
FYP’s visit with Tamino NIGHT FYP
MICHAEL SCHADE It was my great joy to be invited to FYP night a Kings College of Dalhousie University. I don’t say that in the way one would normally thank a host for an invitation—in that „say something nice way“—much like way that Kaiser Franz Joseph II in Vienna, was known to respond to things —“es war sehr schön, es hat mich sehr gefreut” ( it was lovely , it made me very happy)! The problem with his statement was, that he said it to everything he had to attend , which meant the words in the end meant nothing- hence, to this day, here in Vienna, you may use “es war sehr schön, es hat mich sehr gefreut” , in order to express a very lukewarm response to the famed question of—“so how was it”?! Well, I am here to say, that my experience with the FYP night, thanks to Neil Robertson’s invite, was fabulous and my feelings about the program are far from the likes of likes “es war sehr schön, es hat mich sehr gefreut”—for it was indeed fabulous! There I was, all zoomed in at a late hour here in Vienna, to match what must have been for Halifax a very odd time of the FYP class in Halifax, due to the time difference, and I was charmingly met “in the room”
Michael Schade as Tamino, with Andrea Rost as Pamina.
Then, suddenly, one by one, like little animals out of a protective shelter, they came out of hiding, when they heard me talk about this vital rule in performing.
by Professor Robertson (as with all my performances I cut the time a little close to „show time“—I hate the word „show“ in the performing arts and in news, but I digress) and then “met” the students. That is where the first magic happened — I saw a bunch of darkened screens with muted mikes and thought, „oh boy this may be harder than I thought, I can’t see their faces and see what they think“. This is rule one in performing recitals or oratorios (unlike opera)— it is to see your audience— for then you can read their souls! Then, suddenly, one by one, like little animals out of a protective shelter, they came out of hiding, when they heard me talk about this vital rule in performing. From here started what I thought was a wonderful class with truly interested students. When I mean interested, I don’t mean „good and polite students“, I mean the kind of student that came to a place like Halifax and King‘s College to explore the word of possibilities .. to find what is the Universe in University....a search for greatness and be ready to dare an openness of the mind. So, the arias, the music, Mozart, the Magic Flute became a real thing, and not a „sight seeing“ class and a „wish I were in Vienna“ trip. I thank you all for inviting me...fact is, at the end I thought, „I wish I were in Halifax“ and could spend more time with the Michael Schade, operatic tenor, has performed at the young and inquiring minds...their pointed great opera houses all over the world. He’s a Grammy excellent questions were awesome too....I
That is where the first magic happened — I saw a bunch of darkened screens with muted mikes and thought, „oh boy this may be harder than I thought…”
just think the world of the program, for it seems to indicate to the students a possibility to find, and a path to a world of expanded horizons and of thinking out of the box, and of seeing completely new shores. A world where we should be able to find each other more easily, due to this discovery of self, and to be able to understand each other’s world , or better said UNIVERSE, better. This is my hope especially when one considers courses like the FYP. I was honored indeed to be part of it. Thank you, say I, and NOT the Kaiser. Yours Michael Schade ❧
“Remember to wash your hands”
and Juno winner.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Music Recommendations MICHAEL BENNETT
I’ve got some musical recommendations, basically corresponding to the three lectures I gave this year in FYP: 1. (For Lucretius) Synaulia, “Synphoniaci” from the album La Musica dell’Antica Roma, Vol. II: Strumenti a Corda “Synaulia” are a group of paleomusicologists from Italy and the Netherlands who reconstruct ancient music on the basis of literary and artistic descriptions of instruments and performances. (They can’t simply play the music, because typically it wasn’t written down using a notation such as they used in the European Middle Ages. Rather, the techniques were passed down orally and esoterically.) This track is from their second album of ancient Roman reconstructions. It’s so evocative!
2. (For Darwin) Philip Glass, Symphony No. 5 “Requiem, Bardo and Nirmanakaya” Blurb: The 5th symphony by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass (which premiered in the year 2000) has, it must be said, a kind of New-Age-y, syncretic goal: to show the commonalities between various global wisdom traditions when it comes to the themes of creation, life, and rebirth. Conceived of an “East-meets-West” fusion of sources, the symphony boasts two big highlights—the 3rd and 4th movements, subtitled the “Creation of Sentient Beings” and the “Creation of Human Beings.” These movements juxtapose texts taken from Japanese, Hawaiian, Bulu and Bushongo creation stories, as well as the Popul Vuh and the Qur’an.
3. (For Foucault) Donna Summer, “I Feel Love,” remix by Patrick Cowley (1978) Blurb: Donna Summer’s seminal discodance track is a classic of early electronic dance music. Written by Paul Bellotte and Giorgio Moroder, the original studiorelease record is iconic enough, but the bootleg remix by composer and New York gay club scene DJ, Patrick Cowley, is even better. Please use this hypnotic 15-minute synth odyssey as a gateway to the three wonderful alliterative albums Cowley brought out before he sadly died of undiagnosed AIDS in 1981: Menergy, Megatron Man, and Mind Warp.
• I listen to “Purple Rain” at the end of any serious writing project
• Bjork’s album Biophilia for William Cronon
DAVID HUEBERT (FYP 2004– 05) • I was listening to Paul Robeson a lot when reading/thinking Du Bois
Special thanks to the student assistants who worked with Dr. Bennett on captioning: Dara Carr, Samantha Sumner, Emily McRae, Alex Bourdignon, and Michaela Pennie.
Liz McElroy, FYP Tech Whiz, 2020–21
Sarah Johnson (FYP 2020–21)
Stephanie Boudreau, A+A receptionist
Mark Burke (1999–2000), FYP’s first ever Writing Coach
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Morgan Dauphinee (FYP 2020–21)
AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. MICHAEL BENNETT: COOL ADA 2020 –21 SADIE QUINN (FYP 2020 –21) SQ: What is your role as Associate Director Academic of the Foundation Year Program? MB: The position of Associate Director Academic, in a non-pandemic year, is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the program. That includes some work on Brightspace, the learning management software that we use in our program, but typically it involves making sure that the lecturers have what they need and the tutorials can run smoothly. How has that role changed as a result of the transition to online learning? MB: This year, it’s been a lot more, as you can imagine, dealing with the online business. Because of that, my title is actually not only Associate Director Academic, but also Coordinator of Online Learning, which is abbreviated COOL, which I think is pretty
videographers actually do… A really unexpected challenge this year has been the closed captioning on the FYP lectures. At a certain point, it became clear that the automatically generated captions that Panopto created were not really useful; they were full of errors. For example, it’s not very good with names, [especially] a lot of Ancient Greek names. So at a certain point in the year, there was a lot of merriment about the malapropisms that the captions had produced. But it turns out that it takes a really long time to edit those captions into a good condition. It takes, at a minimum, twice as long as the actual video. So in Sections One and Two, I asked all the FYP tutors and some of the coordinators to volunteer to take on the caption-fixing for one lectures in the section… I created YouTube tutorial videos for my fellow tutors on how to access the captions, how to change them, and how to save those changes. Now all that work is done
I was supposed to come in to record my Darwin lecture earlier this year, in December, but that was exactly at the time when there was a public health advisory not to travel in and out of Halifax. I recorded it at home on my phone, which was a lot of work, and that made me appreciate how much work the videographers actually do cool. In those joint capacities, I do a whole bunch of stuff. I’m responsible for the content management of the lectures, using the Panopto platform, and I’m also responsible for the distribution of those lectures through Brightspace. There’s a whole production process for those lectures, it’s run by Mark Pineo and Paul Robinson, who are our radio and video technicians respectively, employed by the journalism school. As I’ve mentioned, I was in Halifax yesterday recording a lecture with them, and Paul said that it’s been nice in the sense that there’s been a lot of collaboration between the journalism and humanities sides of the college, which wouldn’t happen in a non-plague year. So that gives you some sense of what my role is this year, and what the role of the ADA is typically. What unexpected challenges have you faced while delivering FYP online this year? MB: This isn’t a very good answer, but I was supposed to come in to record my Darwin lecture earlier this year, in December, but that was exactly at the time when there was a public health advisory not to travel in and out of Halifax. I recorded it at home on my phone, which was a lot of work, and that made me appreciate how much work the
by student interns, who are hired and paid under the Student Assistant program by King’s, or by the Venture for Canada Internship program. For me that has involved a lot of supervision [and determining the order in which the lectures should be captioned]. So I have to knit all these tasks together in a way that I did not expect. I might be looking for a silver lining that doesn’t exist, but is there any aspect of the program that has improved because of the online format?
Michael Bennett (2003–04), COOL ADA
MB: There have been a few instances where I’ve had email exchanges with some of my colleagues and we’ve had to go back and forth a few times, for example, especially about the captions. I’ve mentioned I had to create these YouTube videos; I created one about the captions, one for my fellow tutors on how to email your tutorials through Brightspace, one on how to return papers. Typically, papers are handed in in hard copy to the administrative assistant’s office. Tutors take them home, write their comments on them, and return them to the admin assistance office, and then students come pick them up. So it’s a sort of passive process. This year, we had to actively return them. Originally the idea was to have the administrative assistant email students their papers, but that’s 170 papers to return, which is a lot. Anyway, by the second paper in Section One we decided to return them through Brightspace, so I sent my colleagues videos explaining how to do that. But I think by and large, the experience of a FYP tutor this year is technologically pretty much the same as the students’ experience. You watch the lectures on Brightspace, and you click the link to go to tutorial. ❧
MB: I have two answers, a jokey one and a serious one. The jokey one is that I live quite far from Halifax, so I don’t have to commute in. So for me, that opens up a lot of hours in my week. The more serious answer—and this is a controversial opinion among teaching staff—is that general tutorials, when they’ve been in the webinar format in particular, have been better than they’ve been in the last few years. And even now that we have them as ordinary Zoom meetings, there are more students [at this point in the year than would normally attend]. Tell me about your experiences working with those who—how do I put this nicely— are less comfortable in the online space.
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“Hello Stephanie at the A+A front desk.”
FYP – In itself and for itself
“Can you hear me?” FOUNDATIONS OF JOURNALISM 2020 –21 K ATIE INGR A M “Can you hear me?” has perhaps become the most used phrase this year with many classes, including journalism, going online due the COVID-19 pandemic. For J1002/J1003 (Foundations of Journalism I and II), it also presented another problem: journalism is considered a hands-on field. How will students learn how to be journalists if they can’t interact with people or even step outside their front door? As a tutor and teaching assistant for Foundations of Journalism, I’ve asked myself this question and so has the classes’ main instructor Lezlie Lowe. As she said, and I agree, it boils down one thing: adaptation. “I think we’ve adapted well,” she said. “Because we haven’t merely gone online, we’ve adapted everything we do in order to make it better for online.”
In some cases, this was a struggle. Several assignments for J1002 involve students getting away from campus, interviewing strangers and covering an event. With students from around the world, ranging from China and England to Halifax, there were different regulations to consider, many of which had strict social distancing or stay-at-home orders in place. While the situation isn’t ideal, it’s how things are. It’s also something, doing inter-
can grab on to something in the piece,” said Lowe. For one assignment students had to interview a classmate and write about their own successes and pitfalls. Being online allowed them to reflect not only on different aspects of the interview itself, but technology glitches and similar issues. For Remembrance Day, which is event they cover year, they still had to but the coverage was different. Usually, students
Journalism is an industry and field of study that often changes. Whether it be new technology, a new type of outlet or a pandemic journalism is still there, rising to meet the obstacles set before it. views over a video chat, that’s become part of journalism in recent years, but isn’t preferred or encouraged. “I think something we’ve done better is address the reality that sometimes you are doing interviews, by way of Skype or FaceTime or Zoom, and you still are expected to provide enough detail that your reader
would attend a ceremony event in-person and talk to people there. This year, they had to watch the national ceremony from Ottawa and interview someone separate from the event. For some students, this involved more research and making sure the person they interviewed connected the story’s focus of
Snuggles the Pig K ATIE INGR A M The Foundations of Journalism I and II courses has a new assistant. She four and a half months old and loves to cuddle but will occasionally grunt, push her nose into Katie Ingram’s arm or try to escape her kitchen enclosure. Don’t worry though, that’s normal. This is Snuggles, Katie’s new potbelly pig. Katie bought her over the Christmas holiday from a hobby farm on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. Unlike farm pigs that mostly live outside, Snuggles was trained from an early age to be a house pig, but is being taught to go outside, in a harness, for walks and bathroom breaks. Journalism students are very familiar with Snuggles popping in and out of frame during class and can almost always hear her in the background, happily grunting. ❧
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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socially distant or limited ceremony. In other cases, being online-only made the class itself more engaging. Foundations of Journalism students will often come to a morning lecture on Tuesday mornings, which often features discussion and questions. This is followed by a tutorial lecture Tuesday afternoon or Thursday morning. While the tutorial aspect is mostly the same, abet with an online and pre-recorded lecture component, the Tuesday morning part changed. There are three, 30-minute sessions for students to choose from, instead of
just one, two-hour lecture. This was done to accommodate time zones. Lowe, who leads the morning session, will discuss a few key details about the pre-recorded content before presenting students with a question and sending them into Breakout Rooms. “(The sessions) are small enough for people to come in and have a discussion about it, which approximates I think what we would do in the classroom setting … that’s example of not merely where something is working well, but where actually going online has allowed us to change the way we
teach and change it in the way in that we’re going to try to bring (the question part) into the classroom,” she said. As someone who does journalism along with teaching it, I think this year has shown our students that journalism is, as was mentioned at the beginning, about adaption. Journalism is an industry and field of study that often changes. Whether it be new technology, a new type of outlet or a pandemic journalism is still there, rising to meet the obstacles set before it. ❧
Foundations of Journalism tutorial.
“Edit. Edit. Edit.”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
The Show Must Go On! COLLEGIATE SPORT AND ACADEMICS DURING COVID 19 NEIL HOOPER, ATHLETICS DIRECTOR Who would have thought that we would be here in April still going through the many adjustments and restrictions of Covid 19! With all formal competitions cancelled for Atlantic Collegiate Athletic Association (ACAA) and Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) most would ask, “why would they want to come?” For the students
cases but because Nova Scotia was a shining example of how to manage a pandemic, we followed public health protocols and relied on sound decisions made by the university OHS Committee and bounced back to give the student-athletes as much we could give them in terms of access. For many students, adjusting to first year is always tough but try this in a pandemic. This has not dampened the spirits of student-athletes taking the FYP program. First year F Y P Arts student and Men’s Soccer player Ethan Odenkirk summed up his academic experience as “challenging at times but for the most part it is going well. It is a big change from High School but I expected that.” When asked if he enjoyed the soccer experience, he replied, “absolutely, I
…the true King’s and Blue Devils pride has kicked in and while getting an excellent education, the goal was to keep their skills sharp and focus on getting ready for 2021–22. that are part of King’s teams the answer was because they love King’s and their sports! So, lo and behold, 92 percent of student-athletes decided to do the same thing! We were very fortunate that King’s residence was open so some of our first-year students were able to live on campus and get the sport experience as well. For upper year students their preference was to also to come to Halifax, studying, living off-campus and taking full advantage of participating in-person but continuing to play the sport that they love. There were ups and downs in the form of gym closures when there was a spike in
have really enjoyed it!” he was very complimentary of his teammates and coaches as well. Most students who have returned knew that we were all fighting an uphill battle, but the true King’s and Blue Devils pride has kicked in and while getting an excellent education, the goal was to keep their skills sharp and focus on getting ready for 2021-22. Coaches have been keeping the experience as real as possible and have provided exhibition game opportunities that have partially filled the gap in their lives of competing in real games. There are many collegiate programs across the country that have not
Women’s volleyball, photos courtesy of Naomi Puddicombe (FYP 2020–21)
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Neil Hooper, Award-winning Athletics Director
even been able to practice or even enter their gymnasiums, so our students are fortunate. Students in general have been able to use fitness facilities at king’s and Dalhousie, making it an even better experience overall. As the title says, “The Show Must Go On!” The pandemic had our backs up against the wall so many times and as a university through a great blend of academics and athletics, we have been able to safely educate students and enhance the experience in so many ways. Students have lived on campus, persevered and worked through their online education, and played the sports they loved to get as close as possible to “the real thing.” From the very beginning of the pandemic arrival our King’s Blue Devils went back to their biggest core value, which is that teams are like families, if we stick together and support each other, we can get through anything! We are all looking forward to the end of this pandemic and better days ahead! ❧
The Making of an Unprecedented FYP year AN INTERVIEW WITH THE FYP LECTURE PRODUCTION TEAM MARK PINEO AND PAUL ROBINSON SADIE QUINN SQ: Paul, I’ll start with you. What is your background, and how does that apply to the production of FYP lectures?
I said, “well, we don’t have a video department, but we’ve got Paul.” So that was the genesis of it all.
PR: I went to King’s, I did the four-year journalism degree… I graduated from journalism and went into freelance video for a few years, doing promotional short docs, a lot of livestreaming and stuff. I eventually started working at King’s as the video technician for the journalism school. Mark talked to me about this project at the start of the summer, and put together we had a pretty good skill set for this.
Can you walk me through the production of a FYP lecture?
“…we don’t really have an AV department, but we’ve got Mark,”
MP: At the very beginning of everything, the first thing I asked for was a full-year schedule. I wanted the whole lineup of every Foundation Year lecture. That came from Mike Bennett, who I’m going to thank a number of times throughout this. As busy as he is, he replies to our emails immediately, which helps us make time. I got the schedule from Mike, and then I just started harassing people. One of the challenges was scheduling because everyone’s so busy… But once we get a schedule, people show up, and the oversimplified version is that we aim a camera at them and press record. Once we have a video
What unexpected challenges have you faced in the lecture recording process? PR: Scheduling everyone [was a challenge]. With online learning, people have so many Zoom meetings throughout the day, so it was hard to fit everyone in. The Foundation Year Program is an interesting one because it includes people from so many different departments, and even different schools. We not only recorded these lectures, but gave a lot of advice and tutored other professors on how to improve their audio or camera setup at home.
“…we don’t have a video department, but we’ve got Paul.” MP: There were so many moving parts, and we had to be aware of what cog in the machine Paul and I occupied. Can you tell me about a lecture that was particularly memorable this year?
Mark Pineo and Paul Robinson (FYP 2011–12)
Mark, what background do you bring to this process? MP: I’m the audio instructor in the school of journalism. We do a lot of live broadcasting and recording, and production of that nature. I’ve also been the AV coordinator for a number of years, doing live productions and recording them. And I was the closest ‘warm body’ when they needed someone to step up and see if we could solve these issues for King’s. That’s in reference to conversations that we had back in April and May of 2020, when everybody was dismissed and it looked like we would be online for the fall— we were already finishing up the semester around that time anyway, and I got the call from Peter O’Brien. I think the inspiration came from Dal, when they said, “we’re going to go to our AV department and see if they can help us”, and Peter O’Brien said, “we don’t really have an AV department, but we’ve got Mark,” which made me laugh. And
file, we make sure [everything has worked]. If there’s any editing to be done, that’s Paul. We put everything in a OneDrive folder and send it to Mike Bennett, usually the day of. We record live to tape, and our goal from the outset was to press stop and have a finished lecture.
MP: There was one really early on where we showed up and the laptop just didn’t work at all. We ended up having to record into the camera, which was sort of our Plan F. You know, you have Plan B, Plan C, and we got up to plan F. So we recorded into the camera and there was a lot of editing to do afterwards. That was one of the more memorable ones, but there were a lot of good lectures this year. Some of the best ones were the ones that had next to no production value, like Daniel Brandes is such a compelling speaker. He just used the chalkboard, and I thought that was really impressive. And Krista Kesselring, who lectured on Queen Elizabeth, she structured her lecture in more of a broadcast Continued next page
PR: When [FYP students] see the instructors, they’re pretty much doing everything live, each 15 to 30-minute part. They just stand up and do that whole thing live, and we edit the slides in as they go. So they don’t take a lot of breaks, we don’t do a lot of restarts, we don’t snip a whole bunch of pieces together at the end. So it’s basically as if they were giving the lecture in class… If we had to piece everything together after it was recorded, it would take a very long time. MP: It was important to us to preserve the theatre of the Foundation Year, which is why the live recording of it was important.
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“Let’s visit Coach Hooper in the Gym!”
FYP – In itself and for itself
Continued from previous style, which is what Paul and I teach in the J-school. Her delivery was so organic, and she would have these very naturally inserted asides, and it just made the content really stick. PR: [A memorable time for me was] very early on, working with Eli Diamond in the library. He was our first lecturer, and we did five in a row with him, so he was very nice to be the guinea pig for our setup. It helped a lot having one person to work with several times in a row, because then he knew what to do, we didn’t have to coach him every time… Something that was really memorable about it was that it was coming right out of all of us being locked away in our homes
tion. The J-school is on the third floor, and it’s people running around with cameras and microphones, we’re the weirdos of King’s College, an arts school. But at the end of the day, we are part of King’s. [Tim Currie] was very open and excited that he could offer Paul and me to do this. It was good for us too, because we got to work with a bunch of faculty that we wouldn’t normally get to work with. PR: The video room is in the basement, next to the offices of Mike Bennett, Laura Penney, Christopher Snook [and others]… I would pass these people almost every day in the hallway, and we’d give each other a nod and a hello, but I didn’t know any of them and we never encountered each other in a profes-
The J-school is on the third floor, and it’s people running around with cameras and microphones, we’re the weirdos of King’s College, an arts school. But at the end of the day, we are part of King’s. for a couple of months, and we hadn’t been seeing people. It felt like a wild social occasion, just getting together with three people and recording in the library… It felt fun, even though we were there to do a job… It was a great experience to see people again, and to talk about our favourite music [and movies] together in between takes.
sional way at King’s. And now I’ve spend hours on end with many of these people throughout the past year. So it’s been a really nice experience getting to know people, and feeling like this school is actually connected.
What has this year meant in terms of collaboration between the journalism school and other areas at King’s?
PR: I certainly hope [the collaboration] doesn’t stop here. Just through the production skills that we bring, there was a reason for us to connect with the rest of the school.
Do you see that collaboration continuing in the future?
MP: It broke down some of the silo-ing at King’s. Credit to our boss, Tim Currie, he has a very collaborative mindset and he believes the school of journalism is part of King’s College, and that we should work together and be part of the community. I mean, it is part of the community, it’s not a hard divide, but there is a degree of segrega-
It was important to us to preserve the theatre of the Foundation Year… I’m hoping there are still more opportunities to do that, and to be involved in FYP events [whether they occur online or in person]. Is there anything else you’d like to add? MP: As a concluding point, I’m really honoured that there was something that we could offer, some way that we could contribute to this year. It was a really tough year for some people in different ways. King’s is a community, we all came together and helped in our own ways. Some people have come in with hyperbolic statements, like, “you guys saved the school,” but we feel like we’re just part of the team and we contributed one little thing… We owe Mike [Bennett] the credit, we think Mike saved the school. PR: It was a good feeling that in the midst of all this, people were able to come together to work on [this project]. On a personal note, it was fun for me, having gone through FYP ten years ago, to experience it again and see how it’s changed. We both sort of got the benefit of getting FYP for free this year, and experiencing all this content from all the lecturers, and learning quite a bit from it while we were setting up cameras and mics and lights. ❧ Ed. note: Paul and Mark will be scheduled for oral exams
FYP MEMES
STUDENT EVENSONG MEDITATION
Sadie Quinn Aristophanes’ The Birds “My favourite FYP text is Aristophanes’ The Birds. I love it because it presents a great opportunity to take something that may seem silly or superficial and find the deeper meaning that undoubtedly exists. The Birds is a funny, ridiculous, and slightly problematic story about trying and failing to create a better world. It’s a story about daring to dream and trying to overcome our individual desires in order to improve society. I’m also partial to this play because I love theatre, and I greatly enjoyed the unrehearsed staged reading a few of us held in September, which we called Bard in the Yard. While it was a wonderful experience, I hope to be involved in the more official Classics in the Quad in the future!”
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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READ NOW!
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and for Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther Roberta and I joined forces again. The exhilarating experience of reading aloud culminated in a fullcast reading of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with some professional actors and various members of the King’s community that Roberta organized—definitely a highlight of the year for me! It was wonderful to see students join in the readings over the course of the year, which allowed for the creation of a space shared and enjoyed by faculty and students that probably would not have emerged outside the new realities of life shaped by a global pandemic. As I am trying to steer the ship of online tutorials safely into the harbour, I cannot express enough appreciation and gratitude for the efforts of everyone at King’s who provided us with a compass for navigating through this extraordinary year—a year of learning, humility, new opportunities, and
Navigating the Unknown Seas of FYP Online M ARIA EUCHNER When I embarked on the FYP journey as a new Faculty Fellow in the fall of 2020, I had practically no idea what to expect with respect to online teaching. Despite my misgivings about it, I tried to keep an open mind, but there is no doubt: conducting FYP tutorials online was a challenge! It was a challenge I thought I was reasonably well prepared for, having spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to navigate through those uncharted waters. Without much expe-
Maria Euchner (FYP 1995–96)
Faculty Fellow Luke Franklin had the brilliant idea of initiating “Read Now!,” inspired by the popular in-person “Write Now!” of previous years, which provides a space for faculty and students to write together in a supportive group atmosphere. The online “Read Now!” had faculty read aloud (excerpts from) the assigned texts the night before a FYP lecture. rience to fall back on, however, the Zoomefied FYP odyssey ended up being a lesson in relinquishing navigation as I had known it, replete with both anticipated losses and surprising gains. One of the obvious losses is physi-
STUDENT EVENSONG MEDITATION
Jessica Casey Montaigne’s Essays “Montaigne’s writing stood out for me this year. He’s got a distinct voice—he’s evocative, relatable, and intensely personal. He famously says “I am myself the matter of my book,” and seemed more interested in reconciling his own mind with the world around him than convincing any reader of his beliefs. He’s notoriously honest, and unafraid to acknowledge his limits and defects. Some of his best advice amidst his oversharing was, in my opinion, to be curious about yourself, practice pleasure, and never accept certainty. His dedication to teaching and pondering joy shines through in ‘On Experience,’ a sort of how-to on living a good life, where he writes: “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
cal human interaction, and if the experiences of this past year of the pandemic have confirmed anything, it is the fact that humans are social animals. No matter how appreciative one is of one’s time alone, humans do not do well in prolonged periods of isolation, and having been forced into isolation of some kind or other has left its marks on all of us. Teachers thrive on the energy in a room full of students, but regardless of the number of faces on my computer screen, I am still the only one in the room, which means the palpable energy of the give and take dynamics that are at the heart of a satisfying class are simply not there. That was probably the loss I felt most keenly. On the flip side, our online peregrinations also brought me to the shores of islands of great—and quite unexpected— joy! Faculty Fellow Luke Franklin had the brilliant idea of initiating “Read Now!,” inspired by the popular in-person “Write Now!” of previous years, which provides a space for faculty and students to write together in a supportive group atmosphere. The online “Read Now!” had faculty read aloud (excerpts from) the assigned texts the night before a FYP lecture. Dr. Roberta Barker, Acting Dean of FASS and Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Dalhousie University, and I shared dramatic readings of some favourite passages of Sophocles’ Antigone, Vergil’s Aeneid—with the support of King’s VP Peter O’Brien—and Dante’s Purgatorio. Catherine Fullarton, another first-year Faculty Fellow, revealed her voice acting talents in our dramatic reading of
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Luke Franklin (FYP 1999–2000)
shared experiences! Most thanks must go to the students who braved the tempest of uncertainty, and helped to keep the vessel afloat—I hope we can continue the journey in person on campus before too long! ❧
“Did you check the Handbook?”
FYP – In itself and for itself
Best on Desk
This year, when our workspaces are far apart, we wanted to bring them together. Student Assistant Sarah Kasprzak had the idea of asking students and tutors to submit photographs of the most unique item on their desk. Here are the items we received.
Eli Cooper: a well-dressed duck, a unique bookmark holder, and a gold dragon companion
Christopher Pace: an hourglass with magnetic sand
FYP tutor Catherine Fullarton: a moose lamp
Erin Sinclair: A family of dinos
Emma Martel: a model guillotine (demonstrated in action with Lego Queen Elizabeth)
Some cool/weird stuff that is currently sitting on Mike Bennett’s desk: a book of post-it tabs from Western Sydney University, a glass paperweight that looks a bit like my cat, an action figure of Captain Picard in a blue Sciences Division uniform, and three pins: Betty from Archie Comics, Wittgenstein’s Duck-Rabbit and a Leninist youth organization from Soviet times.
FYP MEMES STUDENT EVENSONG MEDITATION
Mauricio Rico Quiroz Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality On March 5, I had the wonderful opportunity of delivering a reflection on Rousseau in the chapel. I think the Discourse is one of the most interesting texts we’ve read so far. It answers a fundamental question that I think we’ve all pondered over at some point in our lives. What makes us humans? Rousseau says that the faculty of mercy is an innate feature that defines us. I find his argument very comforting because it means that we can naturally empathize with others and strive to build a better society for all. However, Rousseau also warns us about the possibility of losing our pity. He argues that rationality can make us lose our mercy and become insensitive beings.
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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April, come she will HA MZ A K AR A M ALLY There is a chance I was too well prepared for what happened. Not in any meaningful sense, mind you. Not in the sense of real, material resources or capabilities—non-perishables and DIY skills and such. No, not in that sense at all, indeed. I mean rather that I was at that time already—in truth, have probably always
things are finite, precarious. Untenable in the long run. There cannot be endless acceleration—it’s a Law of physics...probably (in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!) But more importantly of Abraham, ironclad; behold, the oldest admonition of superego is realized. Augustine even said so, didn’t he? There is no settling down in Carthage, you go in bright-eyed and hungry but you better start making ready to come out right away when the wind turns. Well alright, but what about if Carthage is a state of mind?
In the manner of a grazing animal, I guess I had always, on some preconscious level, been listening for a sound, not Gabriel’s horn necessarily, but at least the sound of a door slamming. been—in a vigilant crouch, ready to fly. It is, as far as I can reckon, my default posture, not shavasana but a runner’s lunge, the kind of fidgety readiness one has, to retract one’s hand during a game of red hands (slapsies) or five-finger fillet. In the manner of a grazing animal, I guess I had always, on some preconscious level, been listening for a sound, not Gabriel’s horn necessarily, but at least the sound of a door slamming. Surely
There is a chance I am too well adapted to what happened.
So I was not “surprised” when the tree shook us free. A whispering of the bad conscience, maybe? At any rate, I found I already had my shoes on. I made the necessary ablutions. I ate everything in the fridge, save for a half dozen hot dogs for the road. I left town at 5 am in the rain heading west, with a thermos of acrid coffee and wearing, absurdly, an old bathrobe (it was a 1,200 mile drive, in my defense). The road was snowy and blowing, an air of make believe. Fledgling checkpoints leaving Nova Scotia. Cold evergreens swayed lonely in old soul New Brunswick. Somewhere in Quebec around sunset I pulled over and leaned-to against a tree below the road, a strange kind of modern pilgrim in a black cowl, polo sigil,
trying to get the blood back. What manner of pilgrimage is this though? The ascetic treats life as a maze, in which one must walk backwards till one comes to the place where it starts. I will be in Ontario before dark, where all the ladders start. Is this the end of something? Am I bearing witness to something? What am I in relation to this thing? Why does it feel like a thing already lived once, a thousand times, a familiar thing somehow? A trucker nods and grins, tires shriek on the highway. O Lord, thou pluckest me out. I look around now at the instruments of the past year. A vast Apparatus, everything in its right place, which is to say nothing that moves of its own accord. It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. Une année sans lumière. The breath of anxiety quivers always through dasein. These fragments I have shored... There is a chance I am too well adapted to what happened. ❧
FYP MEMES
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
“I think I wanna dance!”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Halifax Humanities 101 online COLIN BOWERS, HH101 2020 –21 During the past year—this year (+?) of pandemic, of plague—I, along with approximately a dozen other participants and many wonderful instructors currently from or once affiliated with Dalhousie University and University of Kings College, have embarked on a remarkable journey. It is not one that has required us to travel very far in physical space (thankfully, chained as we are presently to our desks with their digital
Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first.
It has been an escapade, as you’ve guessed by now, that features those very best things on earth: books. wonders that have enabled this opportunity), but one that has taken us far both in time and depth. It has been an escapade, as you’ve guessed by now, that features those very best things on earth: books. We began our adventure in Perspectives 101 in Fall 2020 and many of us have continued on with the fuller experience of Humanities 101 in Winter 2021. We picked up a few sojourners at the holiday intermission and said goodbye to a few friends at the same time. I recall the very first poem that we read last fall by Emily Dickinson; a paean to reading, something Emily fundamentally approved of, you won’t be surprised to learn. She, like many of us over the past year didn’t
I have felt much like that mouse, ‘nibbling here and there’ on the many delights that I’ve found so far along our trail.
I have felt much like that mouse, ‘nibbling here and there’ on the many delights that I’ve found so far along our trail. We’ve encountered characters clever and resourceful, intrepid and fearful, morose and unscrupulous, miserly and generous, all-knowing and naive. We’ve met up with seafarers, virgin maidens, cupids and cherubim, itinerant philosophers, oracles and Cassandra-like seers, political dictators, peasants and slaves. We’ve walked landscapes that are marked by mountains formed by buried giants; sailed on seas, angry or calm, that are the moods of jealous or interfering Gods; been thrown up on far-flung shores where we’ve encountered all manner of monsters (our own friends and selves usually included, as nature and those ‘others’ act as mirrors to ourselves). And
The hour grows late, alas, and there is much yet to be read. oh, so many caves, from Plato’s to Fingal’s! We haven’t encountered too many drunks or junkies, harlots or Bluebeard husbands, orphans or capitalists yet, but patience, dear reader. These too we will meet along the way, the foreshadowing has been clear. The hour grows late, alas, and there is much yet to be read. We join with P.B. Shelley in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” to remind us that as much fun as we’ve had, this is also serious business: The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Special thanks to Dawn Tracey Brandes the Director of HHH/Perspectives 101 and the very best of Virgils (guiding us through these great texts), for inviting me along. And thanks, ironically, to Covid 19 for enabling those outside metro Halifax to participate this year. ❧
FYP MEMES
get to venture very far from home, although for different reasons than ours: likely a combination of her poor health, strict Puritan family and her gender. But imaginatively speaking she traveled further than most mortals dare go, or indeed are capable of going. One of her idols was another woman poet named Elizabeth Barrett Browning who in her early 20’s wrote: I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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Victor Frankenstein: GUILTY as Charged!
“He’s not even in the book!”
THE WELDON LITER ARY MOOT 2020 –21 BY DAWN TR ACEY BR ANDES (FYP 2001– 02) On Friday, March 5th, a group of law students, community members, and lawyers gathered around their computer screens to present a Zoom version of the Weldon Literary Moot. This is the tenth Literary Moot, held as a fundraiser for The Halifax Humanities Society, but thanks to COVID-
19 the typically live affair has moved online. Although the audience of over 100 people watched from their homes rather than in the Schulich Law building this year, many things remained the same. As always, one literary character was suing another—this time, Frankenstein’s Creature was suing his Creator for negligence. The Creature, played by Benjamin Friedrich, was in the market for some plastic surgery, although the cobbled-together image of his ideal body that he held up for the camera was perhaps a little optimistic. His troubles were compounded by his fledgling marriage to The Bride (Eastern Front Theatre Artistic Director Kat McCormack). Meanwhile, Dr. Frankenstein, played by Schulich Law professor and beloved Liter-
DAWN TR ACEY BR ANDES: SUPERSTAR The Halifax Humanities Society is blessed with an exceptional Director: Dr. Dawn Brandes, educator, scholar, and puppet master. The Halifax Humanities Society is a non-profit group that offers barrier-free university level classes that are modelled on FYP. Dr. Dawn, as students call her, is a COVID superstar. First, she pivoted the in person Halifax Humanities 101 to on line last spring. Then, she seized the opportunity of the online forum to open the course to participants across the province. And now, she continues to guide and support a Board that tends more to the visionary than the practical, Chaired as it is by Neil Robertson, with Susan Dodd as Vice-Chair and Eli Diamond as Secretary. Many of your tutors and lecturers volunteer teaching for the Halifax Humanities, which was founded in 2006 at King’s and now involves most NS universities. Dawn is also a professor of Theatre in the Fountain School of Performing Arts.
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ary Moot alumna Diana Ginn, seemed oblivious to her Creature’s duress. On the other hand, when her “moral character” was tested by her own counsel with the question, “Have you made a donation to The Halifax Humanities Society?,” she did answer in the affirmative. Finally, her assistant Igor (Dal and Weldon Moot alumni Nicholas Foran) was a wild card, claiming at one point that he was responsible for the Creature, and not Dr. Frankenstein. Defense counsel Matthew Frick objected, on the grounds that “He’s not
The real winner of the evening, though, was The Halifax Humanities Society—thanks to the Literary Moot even in the book!” In the end, the Judge (Augustus Richardson) advised the audience to vote via Zoom poll, and the defense had it: Dr. Frankenstein was ordered to pay damages to the Creature. The real winner of the evening, though, was The Halifax Humanities Society—thanks to the Literary Moot team’s hard work and our generous sponsors, we exceeded our fundraising goal for the event. Congratulations and thank you to everyone involved! ❧
The Creature leaped out of the screen and ran off into cyberspace, leaving no trace behind.
FYP – In itself and for itself
A Virtue of Vice-Presidents FYP AND THE VICE-PRESIDENTS NEIL ROBERTSON The collective term for crows is famously a “murder”. I don’t know what the collective term for vice-presidents is. I am proposing a “virtue of vice-presidents”. We have a virtue of vice-presidents to recognize and honour as they each are, in somewhat different ways “leaving”. Elizabeth Edwards and Kim Kierans are retiring and Peter O’Brien is stepping down as Vice-President of King’s. Elizabeth has, of course been a professor in the Foundation Year Program for thirty years. I actually knew her before her arrival at King’s as we were both graduate students at the same college in Cambridge. I like to mention that I taught her how to eat a Kiwi in polite society; I think this explains everything. Kim and Peter are both alumni of FYP. Kim took the program just before I did and Peter just as I was leaving to go to Cambridge. I had no opportunity to share my kiwi-eating expertise with them: but somehow they were still able to meet the demands of
the Vice-presidency. This virtue of vice-presidents collectively have held this College together for much of the last two decades. The virtue of vice-presidents is precisely that: holding things together, being the being that
suffer fools gladly and to be exposed as one by her probing intellect was for many of us a spur to think and do better. She brought this sense of challenge into the life of the College. Kim has been for me the embodiment of sacrificial leadership: she was a
If the President is the “head” of King’s, the vicepresident is the “heart” of King’s, keeping the life blood of a kind of collegial friendship, a philia, circulating through the arteries and veins of this small, living community. connects students to faculty to administration to staff to alumni to the broader community. If the President is the “head” of King’s, the vice-president is the “heart” of King’s, keeping the life blood of a kind of collegial friendship, a philia, circulating through the arteries and veins of this small, living community. Elizabeth and Kim and Peter have each been that heart and have given their hearts and minds to our institution. It is with a deep gratitude and melancholy that we say goodbye in differing ways to them. I think, in spite of their shared virtue, their dedication and wisdom, they each performed this role in differing ways. Elizabeth brought to the role her wonderful and bracing sense of challenge. She does not
Peter O’Brien, exiting VP. Photos contributed by Rachel O’Brien (FYP 1984–85)
FYP News asked Rachel O’Brien for some words about the exiting (and outgoing) V-P Peter O’Brien. Rachel cryptically replied with these photos. Why the orange? Penitent? Hunter? Partisan? Fashionista? Nah...it’s got to be Medieval symbolism: green/hope + red/charity.
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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kind of strength and integrity in the centre of things when King’s faced some pretty challenging moments. Peter has been a figure of deep patience, holding in conversation different aspects of King’s that could in misunderstanding come to misunderstand and clash with one another. In all fo these aspects these vice-presidents have brought to life and kept alive the friendship in thought and shared activity that is the very essence of King’s. All we can say to each of them as they “depart”, we will “endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate.” And we welcome another FYP professor, Sarah Clift in this heart of things, this heart of King’s, to continue the virtue of the vice-president. ❧
IN HONOUR OF KIM KIERANS DENIS KIER ANS (FYP 2003– 04) My mother, Kim Kierans, is soon to retire from King’s College after more years than we care to count. During this time, she has taken on many roles—from teaching students, to directing the School of Journalism, to serving as the University’s Vice President. She brought the energy, aptitude and generosity for which she is so well known to all of these positions. Teaching, however, is her real passion. Or perhaps better to say she feels most at home and fulfilled when she is with her students. She told me many times over the years that she learns more from the students than they do from her. That’s not down to modesty alone. For her, the boundary between teacher and student is porous. This view is driven, I think, by her deep curiosity in people and the world more broadly. A good journalist is curious, a keen listener,
For her, the boundary between teacher and student is porous. This view is driven, I think, by her deep curiosity in people and the world more broadly. always learning—well, that’s her to a tee. I say this as a way to reflect on her many successes within and outside of the academy. There will no doubt be many more to come. So with that I join you all in wishing
Professor Kim Kierans (FYP 1980–81): an embodiment of strength and integrity
my mother—your colleague, friend and professor—all the very best as she takes this well-deserved next step in her life. ❧ Denis Kierans is a researcher in Migration and Diversity at Oxford.
Take that job and… get it done: Kim Kierans as V-P STEPHEN KIMBER My most enduring memory of Kim’s early years as Director of the School of Journalism and then as Vice President of King’s is of Kim returning to her office after whatever most recent tedious, tendentious meeting of academic minds she’d survived and declaring — to no one and everyone — that she would be more than happy, thank you very much, to just take this job and shove it… or words to the that effect! The best part of those memories — for me and for the future of the university — was my certainty that she didn’t mean it. Or at least wouldn’t really do it. What would we — and King’s — have done without her? Despite her very real (and understandable) frustrations with academic bureaucracy, Kim — an impressive combination of charm, intelligence, determination and directness — was always among its very best practitioners. And I mean “best” in the absolute best sense. Kim never lost sight of a university administrator’s ultimate purpose, which is to make the institution a better place for its students, as well as its faculty, staff, alumni and the larger community. King’s is a better place today because of Kim Kierans. We all have favourite memories. Here’s mine. It was the spring of 2013 and I was part of a small group that had spent close to two years putting together a proposal for a new
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at King’s. We’d navigated — with Kim’s guidance every step of the way — all the bureaucratic loops and hoops, winning hard-won approvals from both King’s and Dal. We’d reached out to potential mentors,
Sometimes, as with the MFA, Kim’s work on behalf of students has been invisible. In other cases, she’s been front and centre—as champion, as counsellor, as confidante — helping yet another generation of students feel at home in their university.
Despite her very real (and understandable) frustrations with academic bureaucracy, Kim — an impressive combination of charm, intelligence, determination and directness — was always among its very best practitioners. prepared our marketing materials and were ready to consider our first applicants when the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission — the final step in the approvals process —unexpectedly turned down our application. We were crushed. Kim didn’t blink, didn’t flinch. Instead, she encouraged us to regroup and reapply. Now! Just a few months later, we welcomed our first students to the new program. Most of them, of course, would have had no idea how close we’d come to losing the year. Or the behind-the scenes role Kim had played in making their program reality, and the MFA an ongoing success for King’s and its students.
Whatever happens, you and I will experience it together / Peril or safety, whatever it will be. [ 19 ]
Today, as Kim finally really does tell us to take our job and shove it, all we can say is thank you for everything. And please don’t go! ❧
“As Aeneas says in the sculpture on Middle Bay.”
FYP – In itself and for itself
Quotes from Tutorial FYP 2020–21 FYP tutorials were held via Zoom this year, but that didn’t stop students and tutors from making statements—text-related and otherwise— that sound ridiculous out of context. Here are some of the most memorable ones. Thanks to Claire van Donkelaar (FYP 2021–21) for the suggestion. “I like cockroaches.”
“This is civilization, folks—my chair.”
“The Catholic Church is HELLA corrupt.”
“It’s settled guys, I’m gonna be a cyborg for Jesus.”
“Don’t hate the Germans. You can’t hate them until 1871.”
“It’s very difficult to be rational if your head is not attached to your body.”
“Maybe we are doomed.”
“There’s a metallurgy pun for you.”
“Make tempest of brain!”
“We deserve a war—we’ve earned that.”
“She settled for a nerd. But in more academic terms…”
“Speaking of oppression, let’s turn to the text.”
“The wizard of Oz strikes again.”
“He pulls out his axe which he has conveniently for road rage incidents…”
“There’s more to life than philosophy.” “Is heaven a stale doughnut?” “You know the three-paragraph essay? It’s dead and buried. It’s in my garden there.”
“There are some who read books about discovering food lying on the ground. That’s not for me.”
“Are we in Soviet Russia?”
Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. (Job 41:33).
Or, as Hobbes translated it on the famous frontispiece for his Leviathan, ‘There is nothing on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every high thing below him; and is King of all the children of pride.’
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On Levity ELIZ ABETH EDWARDS, FYP FINAL LECTURER 2020 –21, SOON-TO-BE INGLIS PROFESSOR (i.e., RETIRED) Levity: an attitude characterized by lack of seriousness or gravity. Not heavy, not burdensome nor oppressive. Ebullience, elation, mirth, merriment, cheerfulness, lighthearted: lightness is my farewell topic. Levity, in its etymological root, concerns what is light, as in levitation and alleviation. Levity, I propose, is enlightenment in a new sense of the word, not the clearing of the gloom of superstition in the light of reason, but simply lightening things up, making them less heavy. “Oh, if there were a little more lightheartedness in my veins” cries Young Werther, and I think we probably all agree with him. Of all the titles I considered,
There is certainly a lightness in Being… the one I most coveted was already taken: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This is the title of a novel by Milan Kundera, the famous Czech writer, set in the difficult political situation of the Prague Spring in 1968,—an unlikely setting for conceiving of Being as a lightness (lack of seriousness or gravity). Now we use the word unbearable paradoxically in English to mean exactly that which must be borne, for instance, excruciating pain or devastating trouble. Kundera’s novel rather suggests that there is a lightness to being that cannot be carried or borne because it is, exactly, too light. If that sounds cryptic, his sense is that every time his character tries to take moral responsibility, or take on the seriousness of the politi-
cal situation, his burden evaporates, turns into pleasure or suits him better than his previous life. There is certainly a lightness in Being, including many if not all of the things that make life liveable, such as conviviality, jokes, laughter, frivolity, water skiing, and karaoke. This lightness is ungraspable, ephemeral, difficult to talk about, difficult to think about because it cannot bear thinking (it’s not worth thinking about)—the frail structure of the light cannot bear the weight of thought. The struts give out. But this may be because thought has quite a weight problem; it ponders things; it is serious; it plumbs the profound—to use words with etymologies related to weight and depth. Take the scholarly literature on jokes and laughter, starting with Bergson and Freud: there is a lot of interesting material—none of it funny. The joke, an essentially light affair, is notoriously ruined by explanation; a failed witticism trails off into “you had to be there.” And you DID have to be there, or rather you had to have been present in some here and now, and not in the ‘later’ of digestion and recapitulation: for levity is ‘in presence.’ I cannot tell you why I cracked up for days about a bumper sticker that read “honk if you need to poop”—though even as I write it, several psychoanalytic ideas occur to me that nonetheless ruin the joke. It would seem that in the attempt to think lightness (a property that infuses different phenomena rather than belonging to them), lightness itself has eluded thought, become heavy, ponderous, grave. Floated off? Just exactly the sine qua non of the occurrence remains the uncaptured, the uncapturable.
FYP MEMES
And yet thought too needs lightness. Another alternate title was: The Leaven of Thought. Leaven is the agent of lightness, for bread and for human activity. Again, Werther tells us “There is no sourdough in my life to set it working and rising; I have lost the delights that kept my spirits up in the depths of night…” Thinking itself requires the enlivening energy of something rising, working, fomenting. Yet, this lecture is most certainly not an injunction to be of good cheer in this depressing plague year; few things are more insulting than being told to “lighten up.” Levity is not a panacea, or even a good
And yet thought too needs lightness. in itself (if there is such a thing); years as a feminist killjoy have honed my sensitivity to unfunny jokes and to the dangers of the risible, of not taking seriously what ought to have been, about being uncaring, that is, not assuming the burden of care in both its senses of worry and nurture. In an extreme case, Primo Levi includes in his account of the Holocaust a letter from a German lamenting her non-intervention: “That is my crime. I can come to terms with this terrible levity of mine, cowardice, and selfishness only by relying on Christian forgiveness” (181). There are many forms of bad laughter and many objectionable jokes: St. Paul speaks of the “leaven of malice,” our enjoyment of the misfortunes of others, the elevation of spirits attending spite and even cruelty. Laughter is “sudden glory” (Hobbes), but you can die laughing. So how to lighten up without recourse to dismal moral prescriptions? I am proposing a paradoxical care, an attention to the fragility of ebullience, the elevation of euphoria, the transitoriness of the cheerful, gay and jocund. But don’t take me too seriously. ❧
“Hegel” Sadie Quinn (2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
In honour of Elizabeth Edwards NEIL ROBERTSON Elizabeth Edwards has been a faculty member at the University of King’s College for thirty years. She came to King’s and the Foundation Year Program as a star doctoral student in the The Faculty of English at Cambridge University. Her developing work on Thomas Malory, which eventually appeared as The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur, was already being seen as promising a brilliant contribution to the scholarly world. Elizabeth was a mother with young children, one of whom—David Huebert—would come to King’s as an undergraduate and returned in this her last year in his first year as a tutor. But what she was first and last was a teacher of students, who had wonderful gifts for asking striking and disturbing questions. If thoughts were being neatly piled one on top of another, her inclination was to upset the happy order, pointing to what was unthought and unreflected upon. While always kind and thoughtful for those struggling, Elizabeth was impatient with the lazy and complacent, whether in academic work or administration. None of this was done to belittle, but just the opposite, to raise up, to point to the deeper aspirations of the task. And it became clear that along with her academic gifts, Elizabeth has gifts of administration. Even as she was being appointed a tenure track professor, she became the first Director of the Contemporary Studies program, helping to establish that program as it was first finding its legs—building on the prior work of Ken Kierans. She then went on to become the Vice-President of King’s in July 2001, following the long tenure of Angus Johnston and in many ways carrying on that work of developing the inner life of the College. She was crucial in overseeing and supporting the development of both the Early Modern Studies and History of Science and Technology Programs. There is so much more that could be said of Elizabeth and what she has meant to King’s. At the centre of it is her fierce and wonderful personality, both heart and mind, that she has given to King’s with unalloyed generosity for three decades: she has made herself one of her own objects of study: a gift. ❧
Elizabeth Edwards’ granddaughters Rose and Sybille (photos: David Huebert)
If thoughts were being neatly piled one on top of another, her inclination was to upset the happy order, pointing to what was unthought and unreflected upon.
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Elizabeth Edwards
Third Time Spanking —David Huebert, for Elizabeth Edwards She never did spank me, though the threat nested in a favoured joke: “First time funny, second time silly, third time spanking.” Our house was full of Freudian slippers, paperback wolf men, interpreters of dream. No, we won’t go there. Once, I repeated the line at a friend’s house, set his chain-smoking grandmother cackling. I was stunned; wasn’t this secret, sacred, severe? Now I see the zeugma, the subversion, the kink in the yoke between silly and spanking. Now I see my mother in her workplace, waxing Gawain, taming tempests, preaching Bowie. Once, I sat in thrall of Alan Hall. Tutorial 13. A shame, he said. I was missing the best of King’s: Elizabeth Edwards’ classroom. But here is what I did not miss: the smell of rain on her navy coat, flush from her walk home. Achilles and Thetis on Chebucto Road, poorly secreted cigarettes, ski trip chocolate bars, Terminator when the other mothers disapproved. Prince and Joplin and Sam Cooke in the living room— our twirling, twisting joy. I was prone to pushing my luck, but who could blame me for risking reprimand? It was all for a laugh, and those who know her know: she laughs and the world spills through.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Your unrepeatable first FYP reading — Repeated! TOM CURR AN The feature of King’s Foundation Year Programme that occasions the greatest quantity of discomfort (for students and tutors) is the fortnightly production of FYP submissions — for the duration of the entire academic year. This disquiet is not restricted to FYP’s hard-working students, but extends also to FYP’s tutors, since they are on the same fortnightly cycle, only “out of sync” with the students, as it were. I have to point out that the tutors have drawn a slightly shorter straw here — since students have two weekends to prepare their masterpieces, while tutors have only a single weekend to assess their success.
English poet John Keats (died 1821) laid out for us in a famous sonnet: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” — Keats’ poem was published in 1816, but honours a translation of Homer first made available in 1616!). This 14-verse sonnet suggests that, for Keats, leafing through this venerable translation was an experience akin to discovering a new planet in the nightly pantheon. I wonder if F Y P students might be encouraged to assume something of the same attitude when analyzing (and then recording their analyzes) of the (often very) familiar works that they are asked to read. After all, no matter how often these works have been mentioned, or discussed, or recommended, you may not have read them before. Therefore, in a sense, whatever anybody says about these works before is actually irrelevant — since you still need to read the work, and puzzle over it, and come to a determination of its central insight and purpose — in isolation, and by and for yourself. And if somebody else, somewhere, has made your point before — So what? This is now your point, one made by you, but only
And, certainly, we don’t wish to burden students with the inconvenience of dealing with “dead languages” Since many of the works that we read in FYP are well known as part of a common heritage, beginning with The Epic of Gilgamesh — it may be difficult for students to realize the FYP vision of first engaging with each work on its own terms. That is, we discourage students from having the idea that they have to read everything that has ever been written on a particular treatise or novel, before they start working on their essays. I suppose a chief duty of FYP lectures is “to provide context”. A work that was literally written in “A Babylonish Dialect”,* as, for instance, Gilgamesh’s cuneiform-recorded adventures, cannot presented to newly initiated readers, as if it had just recently emerged from a time-capsule somewhere — without history and without genealogy. And, certainly, we don’t wish to burden students with the inconvenience of dealing with “dead languages” — such Gilgamesh’s Sumerian or Akkadian or Babylonian. We are inclined to read the poem in English translation, as if English were just another Mesopotamian language. Nonetheless, the best advice I have to offer anyone struggling to make sense of the Gilgamesh poem is to put out of your mind the more than two generations of FYP students who have written on this epic before you. Just try to adopt the approach that the
Tom Curran
after your own analysis, and based, fundamentally, on an insight you have made your own. How exciting is that! However strange this may sound, my inspiration for these remarks comes from a Russian concert pianist, who spoke about preparing for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto (the final version stems from 1888) — which has one of the famous openings in all of 19th-Century Piano Music. Some of what the pianist says will seem all too pertinent to students struggling to approach our F YP texts during “first contact”. Alexander Melnikov (born 1973) discusses his own preparation to play this beloved Concerto in this way: It’s so overplayed that it’s very easy to give a stereotypical performance without even noticing it. On the other hand, to try to be original or different is generally never a good solution and is especially ridiculous in this work... So, the best thing is to try to look at the score as if for the first time — And, as Melnikov suggests, by this means to discover all manner of things in the score/
text that may have been omitted (overlooked or ignored) by other performers or “scholars”. Andrew Davis, who spent more than a decade as the Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, has emphasized the “spiritual” nature of music: “every performance”, Davis says “is irreplaceable, unrepeatable, fully unique … the music only lasts as long as the performance itself…” Something of the same experience, I am suggesting, can be yours as well, each and every time you begin an essay: Has anyone ever read this before? Yes. Has anyone ever read this text the way you are reading it before? No. Has anyone pondered this particular passage before? Yes. Has anyone pondered this particular passage the way you are doing before. No. This is something that has been confirmed by the successful Early Modern Historian Helen Castor (whose 2018 Penguin study of the reign of Elizabeth I puts her well within the FYP orbit.) When asked this question: “What’s the most important lesson history has taught you?” Dr Castor seemed to be addressing FYP students with her answer: “If you want to understand something, start with the most basic questions you can think of. They matter, and they’re overlooked more often than you’d think.” Is it possible that Dr Castor has been studying piano scores as well? So enough of the theory, let’s move on to concrete practice. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein has been read repeatedly in FYP, but this year (2021) the essays I received on this world-famous eponymous hero/ villain/genius/cad were a truly eye-opening experience; each and every student had something unique to say, and even if it only related to a single passage, I was required to consider something that I had never FYP MEMES
Christopher Pace (FYP 2020–21)
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So enough of the theory, let’s move on to concrete practice. thought about before: How exciting, how sensational, how awesome is that? Even in this year of Covid, in FYP, we had been privileged with an absolute and unique highlight: we had a live Zoom concert of Arias
from Mozart’s The Magic Flute performed by tenor Michael Schade from a living room in Vienna: and who could have anticipated that? In the opportunity for give-and-take after the performance, Michael Schade discussed the situation that prevails in international figure skating competitions: you could never get there, our host suggested, if you, as a skater, were not technically perfect — the winners of these ice dancing competitions are those who succeed in “owning” their ballet on skates — in other words, those competitors who imitate the exact procedure followed by
Alexander Melnikov — who go into the performance as if no one had ever done this before. And, as students in FYP for the first time cracking the spine of “Chapman’s Homer”: Go, and do thou likewise! ❧ * This has become a famous expression in English literature to suggest a completely individual approach by a particular author — in a “dialect”, reproduced in written form, uniquely charged to convey the unrepeatable character of the literary insight.
Bard in the Yard SADIE QUINN (FYP 2020 –21) It goes without saying that students in the Foundation Year Program missed out on many King’s traditions this year. When I chose to come to King’s, one of the aspects of university life that excited me the most was
play aloud, but soon people began bringing out costumes, and ultimately 6-8 of us began what could be called an impromptu staged reading, attracting an audience of 10-15 more people.
I had heard about their Classics in the Quad performances, in which students performed Greek comedies and tragedies on the steps of the library the prospect of joining the King’s Theatrical Society. I had heard about their Classics in the Quad performances, in which students performed Greek comedies and tragedies on the steps of the library, and I mourned the loss of this experience, along with the many other traditions that were disrupted due to the pandemic. While the KTS was unable to offer their usual programming, a group of FYP students came together to create an alternative to Classics in the Quad that was just as memorable, if a little—okay, a lot—less polished than the real thing. I had been considering the possibility of assembling a small group to read Sophocles’ Antigone in advance of the lecture. One afternoon, another student in my tutorial unknowingly put my plan into action by asking if anyone wanted to read the play in the quad. I was thrilled that we had the same idea, and a few of us started to gather under the trees. We were originally planning to simply sit in a circle and read the
After the success of Antigone, we repeated the process with Aristophanes’ The Birds, later that week. For the second reading, we spent more time planning the cast and costumes. We had a cast of around 10 and a slightly larger audience. Performing these ancient plays allowed us to experience them on a level that would not have been possible by reading them alone. As FYP student Luke Baumgart said, “it was just our way of having fun with our homework and really immersing ourselves in
We were originally planning to simply sit in a circle and read the play aloud, but soon people began bringing out costumes
Students prepare for their reading of Sophocles’ Antigone.
it. I definitely found that I cared more about the works more. Putting myself in the shoes of one of the more despicable characters (Kreon) gave me a whole new perspective on Antigone.” To this day, several of us still refer to what has come to be called “Bard in the Yard” as the kind of shared experience that makes King’s a special place. ❧
Ghost Writing As I am educated I dream of role models whom I identify with Cause when I callback Nothing answers It’s just my echo’s callback Not cause history is hollow of women It’s cause her-story was ghost written “Books! Books! Books! Little kid books! Big kid books!”
—Grace-Layla Ross FYP 2020–21
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FYP – In itself and for itself
The Advice of Children SAHAR ULL AH Right before Thanksgiving, I fell for no good reason. I scraped my hands and knees skidding down pavement like I was 5 again. I almost forgot what it felt like to fall like that, and since I’m no longer 5, it took longer to get back up. The best part of it all, however, was when a group of amazing children who were playing in masks ran up to me to see if I was okay. They didn’t want me to cry. They said it’s okay, everyone falls. They coaxed me to get up, to wash off the blood, to brush myself off, to drink water, to rest a little, and soon enough, I would be fine. I imagined they had heard that advice from someone many times before. It’s great advice. When I finally got up to leave, one of the kids returned to ask me and my adult if I was feeling better. I could hear the big smile in her voice and her bushy, curly hair. She said when you fall, you gotta brush yourself off and eventually you get back up. I was so impressed with her intelligence and empathy, and I hope the world doesn’t make her lose her kindness. ❧
Sahar Ullah, lecturer, Columbia University and FYP’s Middle Ages
St. George’s YouthNet and King’s Student Volunteers NEYVE EGGER (FYP 2019–20) St. George’s YouthNet is a non for-profit society established in 1998. YouthNet and the University of King’s College have long had ties through the University Chapel and the university’s assistance with YouthNet’s tutoring program. In previous years there has also been a relationship between the lunch program and the school. In a time of great displacement as King’s students are spread out across not only the country but the globe, it is important to remain connected in whatever way is possible. There has been an attempt to link first year and upper year students to their community through volunteer work. St. George’s YouthNet provides
hot lunches to 36 kids as Joseph Howe School in the North End of Halifax every school day. Small groups of King’s students are gathering to provide lunches twice a month while respecting Covid safety protocols. Working with YouthNet’s lunch coordinator Hannah Griffin (FYP 2013–14), King’s is working to continue this lasting partnership with this program. Supplies are purchased and dropped off to volunteers by the King’s College Chapel the night before the meals are to be served. The next morning, they are picked up by YouthNet and taken to the school. So far, macaroni and cheese, with a dessert of homemade cookies and apples, has been the biggest hit with the kids. We are also working on a cookbook to give to current and future volunteers. It will be full of favourite recipes. This initiative aims to make the volunteering process easier for all those who are interested in helping but may not have had much experience with cooking, especially on such a large scale. There will be another meeting about this fun volunteer opportunity soon as we are hoping to recruit more cooks. ❧
Sarah Sharp (FYP 2017–18) YouthNet Tutor coordinator says: Many King’s students volunteered in YouthNet’s afterschool program this year. We look forward to having the YouthNet kids back in the Quad soon. For info about YouthNet and updates about volunteer opportunities check out their instagram @youthnethfx and www.stgeorgesyouthnet.ca
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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YouthNet Volunteers from King’s include Katie Lawrence (FYP 2017–18), Emma McNiven (FYP 2017–18), Adri Vanos (FYP 2017–18), Apolonnia Perri (FYP 2016–17). YouthNet Director is Sarah Griffin (FYP 2016–17).
Where I Might Have Been Now CATHERINE FULL ARTON (FYP 2005– 06) As I exit the library and cross the quad, I look up to see the magnolia tree beside the Academic Administration Building in full bloom. The ground is strewn so thickly with white petals that for a moment, before I remember where I am, I think of snow. I remove the sweater that I, like all northerners who move to the South, carry with me at all times to adjust between overly air-conditioned indoor spaces and the heat and humidity outdoors. It is March, 2021. I am at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. I am nearing the end of a public writing fellowship with an organization called Common Good, so I have spent the day at the library, reading about critical pedagogies and providing feedback on students’ writing. If you had asked me, in early-March 2020, where I would be in early-March 2021, I might have imagined a scene somewhat like that. In 2020, I began work on a public writing fellowship with Emory University and Common Good Atlanta, an organization that provides university-level humanities education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated adults. According to the plan I developed with Common Good’s faculty, I would begin corresponding with students and alumni of the program, over the summer, to develop a better understanding of the organization’s work from their perspective. I would also begin reading students’ work and providing feedback on their writing. Then, during the official
Catherine Fullarton (FYP 2005–06)
term of my fellowship, I would collaborate with students and alumni of the program to produce two documents: an anthology showcasing students’ poetry, creative writing, and academic essays; and a how-to manual and reference guide for future students interested in publishing their work. We also discussed the possibility that, if time allowed, a student and I would co-author a white paper on the value of a humanities education for students’ sense of dignity, well-being, and civic engagement and prepare a presentation of our co-authoring experience. That was the plan. I was visiting my mother in Ontario when the WHO declared the pandemic. As rumors began circulating that the border would be closing to non-essential traffic, I reached out to the faculty at Common Good. They were unsure about how the pandemic would impact their ability to connect with students on the inside, and were trying to determine what kinds of contact would be both feasible and sensible, under the circumstances, especially in light of serious concerns about inadvertently exposing incarcerated students to COVID-19. In terms of my work, the fellowship plan we had developed did not strictly require in-presence work, so I began by
corresponding with a Common Good alum on the outside who was willing to share his writing and reflections. Over the first weeks of summer, I inquired, over email, about how the world looked from his perspective. He responded with stream-of-consciousness poems that gave me glimpses of a shuttering and contracting world both cracked open and dimly lit but flecked with hope. In On Not Being Someone Else, Andrew H. Miller speculates about our curious interest in the question of whom we might have become had a particular choice, decision, or contingency unfolded differently. What does it mean, he asks, that we often wonder about the alternate versions of ourselves who chose other paths through the same woods? After several unexpected shifts and adjustments, 2020 brought me back not to Atlanta but to Halifax. And so I often find myself pondering different versions of Miller’s question. As I exit the library and cross the quadrangle, it is not a magnolia but a maple tree that I pass. There is snow on the ground, and it reminds me that I live somewhere where the bursting-forth of spring will include the peopleing of patios and the lively sounds of social connections that have been percolating over the course of colder months spent largely indoors. It is actually March 2021. I do not think of the unknowable months ahead. Instead, I wonder what it means to be present, here and now, on this singular occasion that I perhaps expected to be completely otherwise. ❧
STUDENT EVENSONG MEDITATION
Thomas MacEachern – Machiavelli’s The Prince “My favourite FYP text this year was Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. An important political treatise from the Renaissance, The Prince describes the ideal ruler and what he must do to maintain power. It is rich with examples and critiques from contemporary Italy, and the author shows complete confidence in his rules for rulers. I loved its dissection of political intrigue — a diverse audience can enjoy this text, from history buffs to anybody who enjoys stories of deception. But the writer should not be straw-manned, and The Prince is a well-written work that should be taken seriously.”
“Library! Fun! Let’s say ‘Hi’ to Pat Chalmers and Janet Hathaway.” Jordan Roberts (King’s Sexualized Violence Prevention and Response Officer) and Rupert at hot (and cold) chocolate in the Quad.
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Decolonising the classroom KING’S STUDENTS ENGAGE WITH INDIAN STUDENTS ON THE NATURE OF SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE AND MODERNIT Y
GORDON MCOUAT, DIRECTOR, HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY As we have all know so well, going fully online is not the best way to teach a class, especially at King’s where we value the direct and sometimes spontaneous engagement over a text or a lecture or an issue gnawing at our sensibilities. Proximity is so important. But sometimes going online—even in a pandemic—offers a unique opportunity
ing at feminists, post-colonial thinkers, and especially by those whose global voices that have remained marginalised outside the so-called “tradition”. As part of our international collaborative project between King’s and S.E. Asia, “Cosmopolitanism and the Local”, King’s has been host to a number of visiting international scholars who are at the forefront in thinking about rediscovering the multiple origins and traditions that make up our world: such as historian Arun Bala from Singapore, philosophers Dhruv Raina and Sundar Sarukkai from India, and last year the Indigenous Studies scholar, Kim Tallbear, who gave a inspiring talk to an overcapacity (600+) audience in Alumni Hall about indigenous ways of knowing. This year, taking advantage of going online, and, building on these visiting encounters, we have restructured our core class, “Science and Culture”, in tandem with our past visi-
Gordon McOuat
perspectives and cultures. Topics discussed include “feminism and science”, “pluralism and Indian logic”, “artificial intelligence and the post-human”, “the Anthropocene and modern nature,” “colonisation and decolonisation of knowledge”, “art, representation and truth”, “translation and purification”, and in these final weeks of classes we are
Co-organiser, Dr. Sundar Sarukkai, NIAS Bangalore, and former MacLennan Visiting Scholar, King’s, 2017
Co-organiser: Professor Meera Baindur, University of Manipal, Jaipur
to try something new and radical. This year, in collaboration with a group of scholars and students in India and S.E. Asia, my 3rd year core class (CTMP3002/HSTC3032), “Science and Culture”, has gone international. Normally, this crosslisted core class in Contemporary Studies and the History of Science and Technology Program explores the central place and meaning of nature, science and technology in modernity and modern thought, looking at ways in which this particular kind of knowing and being has rose to prominence in our contemporary world, and how it has come to eclipse all others and the consequences of that ascendancy and exclusion. All questions raised in FYP. Up to rather recently the class has, like other classes and our culture at King’s, remained a story about the “West”– after all, science and technology appears to be a predominantly “Western” affair. But lately we have been encountering challenges to this unilinear “Eurocentric” vision—by look-
Dr. Kim Tallbear, University of Alberta and former MacLennan Visiting Scholar, King’s College, 2020
tors and scholars and students in India. We now engaged in the various ways in which approached the “Barefoot Philosophers” we can “reset modernity” in a world of crisis. group, an organization of students and So far it has been working, quite remarkably, faculty in India, led by Sundar Sarukkai and although it certainly has taken our King’s Meera Baindur, with the idea of running a students well outside their comfort zone, and parallel class between their students in India well outside the received “tradition”. Hopeand King’s. They jumped at the opportu- fully this is the start of something beautiful, nity. And so each week starting back in Janu- meaningful, and long lasting. ❧ ary students in India and at King’s are reading through FYP MEMES the same texts, listening to the same lectures, some by faculty here at King’s, some by faculty in India. The students discuss the issues in our respective silos and discussion groups. And once per month we all meet together live online— I nd ia n a nd C a nad ia n students and faculty—to discuss, to debate and to make sense of the issues of the modern world, bringing into dialogue our diverse
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Morgan Dauphinee (FYP 2020–21)
A R AW EXPERIENCE:
LIFE IN THE NORTH JANE NEISH (FYP 1996–97) I graduated from King’s in 2000 with a BA (Hist/Classics) never imagining that I would end up living in Nunavut which has been my home for ten of the past fifteen years. It was a King’s connection which led me to my first teaching job in Whale Cove, NU in the March of 2005. A small hamlet on western Hudson Bay about 1000km north of Winnipeg with a population of around 400 people, Whale Cove is a community where traditional Inuit culture is still very much a part of everyday life. A friend of mine from King’s was teaching there and when a position became available partway through the year she told me to apply for it. Another King’s graduate who was a mutual friend had taught in Whale Cove until around 2004; I remember looking at her photos of Whale Cove during the time of her teaching practicum and thinking that Nunavut seemed to
be a world away. Living there was not in my plans, but life has a way of taking one down unexpected paths and I will never forget landing in Whale Cove that cold mid-March day: the beauty of the snow-covered land-
in the north. The outdoors life is incredible and from spring to fall I love exploring the trails on my ATV, accompanied for the past 13.5 years by my side-kick, my husky Nanuq (nanuq means polar bear in Inuktitut). While
The weather can kill you if you are not prepared— and even if you are, and humans are not on top of the food chain which is an incredibly unique experience (think polar bears and barren land grizzlies—there is always a threat of bears where I live) scape was overwhelming, my love for the land was instantaneous and I felt at home here immediately. There are many things I love about living
the winters are long, walks on the sea ice on a sunny day are always lovely and I sew my own parkas and snow-pants as many women do here, although mine are nowhere near
“Just revising this essay…again!”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
the works of art that the skilled seamstresses of Nunavut create. I have enjoyed learning and experiencing Inuit culture; I have eaten seal, whale, polar bear, char, caribou and other kinds of “country food” as it is called. Caribou is so delicious and my favourite way to eat it is as qaaq-raw and frozen. Inuktitut is a difficult language to learn, although I have picked up a very small amount over the years, thanks to wonderful friends and my former high school students who taught me words and phrases. I also pay attention to the Inuktitut words that are interspersed throughout the spoken English and in that way have learned more words, but because I have been a lower elementary teacher for the last many years, these are words like “vomit”, “snot,” “head cold,” “bad,” etc.! Living in Nunavut is a raw experience. The weather can kill you if you are not prepared-and even if you are, and humans are not on top of the food chain which is an incredibly unique experience (think polar bears and barren land grizzlies—there is always a threat of bears where I live); I carry a rifle and bear spray on my walks and adventures. But that is one of the reasons I love the north so much. The connection to the natural world is deep here and humans’ inability to conquer it is the reality of this remote part of Canada where we are so weather dependent-the possibility of flights being cancelled due to weather or the plane going mechanical is a year-round reality. This constant reminder of our humanity and our dependence on the natural world is humbling and yet terrifying in the face of our nation’s dependence on non-renewable resources. There are many challenges teaching in Nunavut. The challenges I experience vary from a lack of government support and funding for schools (particularly for educa-
Working this closely with children who have experienced incredible trauma has changed me and my outlook on life tional assistants and teachers), large class sizes, classes with many students having behavioural difficulties and/or developmental delays but grossly inadequate services to support them, a lack of Nunavut-made curriculum, a lack of mental health services for children, and many children living in poverty or experiencing trauma. Working this closely with children who have experienced incredible trauma has changed me and my outlook on life in a number of ways. Their resilience and the love they show me each day is a blessing and it has been a priv-
ilege living here. FYP challenges its students to consider the history of Western thought with an open mind. We look to the past and are asked to engage with each text in a thoughtful and reflective way. We learn to ask questions of the texts we read, seeking to understand the perspective of the author without imposing our own 21st century worldview on the material. The immersion of the self into ideas of what may be “other” can be uncomfortable, but FYP challenges its students to be open to this “otherness” of worldview. My FYP experience taught me how to engage critically with texts, to think and to ask questions, and to consider perspectives other than my own. Being open to consider different ways of knowing, being and seeing the world has enabled me to embrace my life here in Nunavut, although I still have to confront with my own biases and worldview by times, perhaps more often than I would care to admit. ❧
FYP MEMES
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Christopher Pace (FYP 2020–21)
Piratical Philosophy in a Pandemic
United Dutch East India Company. Thus, in 1604, the Company commissioned me, an up-and-coming 21-year-old lawyer, to write a legal defence of Heemskerck’s actions. In my brilliance, it became a massive treatise of natural law in the form of the Commentary.
SIMON KOW, FYP SECTION 3 COORDINATOR & DIRECTOR OF EMSP
Gentili: So you say. Basically, it was a philosophical defence of Heemskerck’s piracy!
It has been an intense and strange experience teaching online due to the pandemic. Lack of in-person teaching has deprived me of an often unwilling audience to my in-class wordplay, so I’m afraid it has not been much of a ‘pundemic’. Among the changes I’ve made to the online version of my EMSP course The Pirate & Piracy has been the deployment of short dialogue assignments to divert my students, as well as to divert my First Mates (Teaching Assistants) and me. Here are excerpts of a sample dialogue I composed for the course, which also happens to deal with the FYP Section 3 reading by the Dutch lawyer and philosopher Hugo Grotius: Scene: Loevestein Castle, 1619. The ghost of English legal thinker Alberico Gentili confronts the imprisoned Hugo Grotius. Gentili: Well, you’ve certainly done it: you’ve been imprisoned by your enemies in the Netherlands, and have saved yourself from execution only by turning on your mentor Oldenbarneveldt. You should be ashamed. Grotius: Lay off! Do you realise that you are insulting the greatest mind in Europe, author of the Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, which promises even greater intellectual heights? Gentili: I’ve managed to read that monster-
Simon Kow
I’m afraid it has not been much of a ‘pundemic’. piece in the Library of the Afterlife (which cont ains only unpublished and— of course—posthumous works). Your thought seeks to overturn the traditional conceptual dichotomy between private piracy and public warfare, and any distinctions between piracy, privateering, and warfare. You would unleash anarchy upon the high seas! Grotius: At least my name will be remembered when yours is forgotten, except for long-suffering university students in Halifax. Gentili: We’ll see about that. What would lead you to write such drivel? Grotius: Setting aside your abusive language, I’ll explain it in simple terms for your small mind. In 1603, my cousin and sea-captain Jakob van Heemskerck captured the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore; the prize yielded millions of Dutch guilders at an auction in Amsterdam for Heemskerck, his crew, and the now
Grotius: That’s not how I see things. Since the infinite sea cannot be possessed, those who infringe natural sociability by monopolising trade in a specific area of the globe and thus besiege the thoroughfares of human intercourse are no better than pirates. I conclude, then, that the Portuguese are not very different from pirates, men who blockade the seas and impede the progress of international commerce. Gentili: Clever sophistry at best. My attempts to distinguish piracy and privateering have ended up entangled and confused in your incapable hands. No wonder you’ll never amount to anything but a prisoner, whereas I have advised Queens and Kings. Grotius: Au contraire, Professor Windbag! I plan to escape from prison in this bookchest, and write an even greater book on The Rights of War and Peace. I’ll be the toast of Europe, and may even win a position at the court of Europe’s most enlightened monarch, Queen Christina of Sweden. Oh how Swede it is to be patronised by her! Gentili: Be careful what you wish for: it may be the death of you. Exeunt. Grotius did indeed achieve fame and fortune as he wished. But when Queen Christina summoned him to Stockholm in 1645, he perished in a shipwreck off Rostock, Germany. ❧
FYP MEMES
“Library. Work. Hard. Good.”
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Apocalypse 2020 SUSAN DODD As I watched, I heard an eagle that was flying in midair call out in a loud voice: “Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the trumpet blasts about to be sounded by the other three angels! (Revelation 8:13) Why do people take comfort in stories— often shockingly violent ones—about The End of the World? The students in the apocalypse class always ponder this question. But this year, Apocalypse 2020 was a little too close to home… it was happening! For one thing, we had those Major Tom moments when my rural wifi set my students adrift in cyberspace, and in the process revealed how precarious that form of “connectivity” is in
arly writing in the disrupted final months of high school? Who can navigate traditional websites? Etc. Apocalyptic writings carry readers into moments like ours when truths that should have already been obvious storm the stage of ordinary life and tear the lid off our old complacencies and blindnesses. It’s a paradox: now we see as we ought to have seen before, but we couldn’t see it back then because we had to pass through the trial and suffer our way to clear-sightedness. This passing through catastrophe into new self-awareness either marks us forever with humility or it makes us double down on some ideology—the vertigo is just too much… This year, the relevance was overwhelming. I hesitated to connect the dots between things like the constant surveillance and conditioning of many post-apocalyptic novels (Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale) and the creepy disembodied hygiene reminders intoned in our grocery
Apocalyptic writings carry readers into moments like ours when truths that should have already been obvious storm the stage of ordinary life and tear the lid off our old complacencies and blindnesses. the panic of wire checks and heart-pounding reboots. “Apocalypse” means revelation or unveiling; it tears the lid off to expose things that we usually try not to think about. Things like our neglected physical fitness staring balefully back at us from the corners of our screens. But other things, too, especially perhaps inequalities. Who has good equipment, study space, and good wifi? Who has mental health support? Who can afford to move out of the childhood home when it’s time, for whatever reasons? Who learned the basics of schol-
stores, or the deserted highways of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the urgent neon sign blaring at me on my way into the city: “Stay Home.” The great revelation this year? The power of these books and our urgent need to read them together. I thought I knew that before, but I don’t think I did. Zoom conversation is difficult; we’re just kind of suspended in space together, more contiguous than connected. Yet every week at the appointed time, students gathered, unfailingly. When the papers came in, it was clear that we were
Lil Buddy on Mersey River where we look forward to exploring with students on the next chapel retreat.
thinking together about The End, and what our own moment was showing us. The heart of that class was a massive, controversial and challenging novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Some students plunged into the existential crisis that Dostoyevsky generates in readers via the struggles between those young men as they come to terms with their family inheritances especially in relation to the women they adore/torment. Other students meditated on Miyazaki’s gorgeous Apocalyptic films “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” and “Princess Mononoke” and the girls who side with nature to save a world nearly obliterated by human technology. For me, the most illuminating work this year was the heart-rending apocalyptic vision of Black Elk, a Lakota holy man who “walked two paths” of the spirituality of his people and of his colonizers. One of the most challenging aspects of this story is that it comes to us via Euro-American ethnographers who “captured” Black Elk’s voice out of what appears to be both a genuine love for the man and his way of life and a social scientific hubris that failed to see how drastically it imposed its worldview on the very vision it wanted to preserve. Why do people find comfort in stories about other people discovering things that they ought to have known, and at some level did know, before the catastrophe? I’m working on that… ❧
FYP MEMES
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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Morgan Dauphinee (FYP 2020–21)
Death 2021 DANIEL BR ANDES (FYP 1989–90) A giant fist is clenched about six inches above the head of a tiny bald Italian senior in a haggard suit. Both are puppets. The puppet fist hovers perilously while the puppet soprano belts out a Mediterranean tune. Suddenly, without warning, the fist drops, murdering (by flattening) the unsuspecting soloist. And scene… Such is the first of many calamities in the very strange and very funny play, “Famous Puppet Death Scenes”—a work that I had the great pleasure of studying this year with a fantastic second-year class in CTMP2330 “Reflections on Death.” Although the play was first produced in 2008, its relevance to the current historical moment—in which the random and accidental character of calamity has been driven home—is all too clear. In fact, this surreal comic play—which I’d initially planned to add to the syllabus as a kind of respite, a breather, from all the philosophical heavyweights—spoke more immediately to our shared experience than anything we read from Hegel, Nietzsche or Heidegger. The play’s only rival for relevance on our syllabus was a daring and original essay from the British novelist and scholar Jacqueline Rose, in which she argued that Freud’s late theory of the death-drive had its origins in the sweeping pandemic of 1918. (Unable to endure the death by virus of his favorite daughter, Freud invented the death-drive, an inflexible
and internal law governing all organic life, and thereby—according to Rose—consoled himself that the death of his favorite child had not been the result of an unaccountable accident, an external chance, a plague.) I’ve wondered over the last few weeks whether these works would have been as resonant for students, or been received with as much sympathy, sensitivity, and engagement, had they been assigned in normal times. And I must say that I doubt it. Although the syllabus was devised before the pandemic struck—and I did worry, once it had struck, that we’d be piling misery upon misery—
Daniel Brandes and Sally (FYP 1989–90)
I’ve wondered over the last few weeks whether these works would have been as resonant for students, or been received with as much sympathy, sensitivity, and engagement, had they been assigned in normal times. there was an undeniable urgency or contemporaneity to these works, and they were met with neither exhaustion nor depression. On the contrary (and I say this with the unbiased eye of a dispassionate observer), the students were enlivened by the material; they were as energized as the ruddy and roaring infant, Anton Kloterjahn, in the closing paragraphs of Thomas Mann’s splendid short story, “Tristan”. (This is an inside joke for students of the class. Or at least a quip. Non-participants are in no position to judge my sense of humour.) I’m grateful for the opportu-
nity here presented by FYP News to salute the hearty band of CTMP2330 warrior-theorists for their mettle, to thank them for their continued vitality and boisterousness (even in the face of puppet massacre), and to urge this year’s FYP cohort, perusing the course calendar for next year, to follow in the formidable footsteps of their predecessors. ❧
FYP MEMES
“Look! It’s the Apocalypse on Susan Dodd’s door!” Morgan Dauphinee (FYP 2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
READ NOW! THE CHERRY ORCHARD ON ZOOM:
Beyond the Virtual Veil ROBERTA BARKER (FYP 1992–93) On many levels, the final week of Section 5 of FYP this year explored the gaps and differences between people. We read Friedrich Nietzsche’s call, in The Genealogy of Morals, for humans to explore the “descent of our moral prejudices” and question their assumptions about what “good” and “evil” might mean. We looked together at W.E.B. Du Bois’s description of the moment in his schooldays as a Black student among white peers when “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.” We also considered E. Pauline Johnson’s (Tekahionwake’s) analysis of the many barriers that divided Indigenous peoples from settlers in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canada. And we closed the week (and the section) by considering Anton Chekhov’s 1903 play The Cherry Orchard: a portrait of a society in rapid transition whose citizens—separated by barriers of class, gender, age, and understanding— often struggle to connect with one another, with the natural world, and with their own emotions. In our exploration of this wonderful play, we were incredibly fortunate to be supported by a group of talented actors who agreed to take part in a virtual Zoom reading of The Cherry Orchard on the evening of March 4. Its illustrious cast included: • Susan Leblanc-Crawford (King’s alumna, founding member of Zuppa Theatre, and MLA for Dartmouth North) as Mrs. Lyuba Ranevsky • Sophie Schade (BA, First Class Honours in Theatre and Physics, Dalhousie University, 2018) as Anya, her daughter
• Frietzen Kenter (BA, First Class Honours in Theatre, Dalhousie University, 2016) as Varya, her adopted daughter • Bob Mann (King’s alumnus and current Manager, Discipline and Appeals, Dalhousie University) as Leonid Gaev, her brother • GaRRy Williams (Artistic Director, Da Po Po Theatre) as Yermolay Lopakhin, a businessman • Matthew Walker (Co-Artistic Director, Litmus Theatre, and Assistant Professor of Theatre, Dalhousie University) as Peter Trofimov, a student • Neil Robert son (K ing’s A lumnus and Director of the Foundation Year Program) as Boris Simeonov-Pishchik, an estate-owner • Maria Euchner (King’s Alumna and Faculty Fellow in the Foundation Year Program) as Charlotte, a governess • David Nicol (Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Studies, Dalhousie University) as Simon Yepikhodov, a clerk • Allison Graham (BA, First Class Honours in Classics and Religious Studies with a Minor in Russian Studies, Dalhousie/ King’s 2017, and Don, Fourth Floor Alex Hall) as Dunyasha, a maid • Sadie Quinn (King’s Student and Student Assistant in FYP) as Firs, a manservant • Logan Robins (BA First Class Honours in Theatre with a Minor in English, Dalhousie University, 2019) as Yasha, a young manservant – • Sarah Kasprzak (King’s Student and Student Assistant in FYP) as Passer-by / Station Master / Post Office Clerk This cast offered a remarkable tour of the King’s, Dalhousie, and Halifax theatrical communities. Like the dramatis personae of The Cherry Orchard, it included folks from multiple generations, professions, and back-
Roberta Barker (FYP 1992–93)
grounds. On Zoom, these folks were divided from one another by the little windows to which we have all become so accustomed over the course of this pandemic year. Each cast member’s isolation in their personal space reflected the emotional and social isolation of Chekhov’s characters; the walls of Zoom ‘rooms’ echoed the walls that the characters erect around themselves. The virtual environment, it turns out, offers a pretty good metaphor for the “veils” that hang between people in Chekhov’s world. But for all that, the thing that our Zoom Cherry Orchard most brought home to me was not separation, but connection. All of the cast members agreed to give three hours of their lives to the reading on a purely volunteer basis—simply out of the goodness of their hearts, their enthusiasm for FYP, and their love of theatre. It was amazing and heartening to hear actors picking up cues, emotions, and nuances from one another across virtual space; to see them reconnecting with friends, students, and professors over the course of the performance; and to feel the empathy and humour with which they responded to Chekhov’s characters. In the face of all the divisions this pandemic year has enforced—and all the divisions that Chekhov’s play explores—the actors’ work brought home to me the arts’ indomitable capacity to bring us together in moments of shared humanity. I’m so grateful not only to all the performers who participated, but also to all the students, faculty, and community members who attended. By coming together to perform and listen, we were able to reach out to one another across—and beyond— the virtual veil. ❧
FYP MEMES
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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THE PRIEST AND NIETZSCHE:
A TASTY LAMB’S APPRECIATION OF EAGLES R ANALL INGALLS, CHAPL AIN
Photo: Sam Landry
A tender tasty Lamb will crawl out from under a rock and say a word about Eagles Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University. After graduation she had more than one career, becoming well known first as a mystery novelist, and then as an essayist, playwright, and translator of the poetry of Dante Alighieri. Once asked to give a lecture on ‘a woman’s view of the writing of detective fiction’ she commented drily that she might as well give a lecture on ‘a woman’s view of an equilateral triangle’. There would not be much to say once one had said what anyone might say. What might a priest find in Nietzsche? What anyone might find: our own social world revealed for what it is and our own selves revealed for what we are! But that’s too easy, isn’t it? There’s Nietzsche’s insistence that there is no disinterested god’s-eye view of things, that we
each bring our interests and perspectives to any subject. Surely a priest must not pretend to be without an interest, without an angle, without an axe to grind, talking about a most perceptive critic of religion. Very well. A tender tasty Lamb will crawl out from under a rock and say a word about Eagles, hoping one does not show up before there is opportunity to crawl back again. Just a few points that seem true to me: Nietzsche does not try to tell us what ought to be, but what is. And what he says about us often rings true. What he says about religion and religious people (like myself) often rings true. We are often afraid of movement, life, change, creativity, and beauty, and set ourselves against these things in the name of safety, security, and familiarity. And religion has often spoken the language of resentment. These things just seem to be true. And they ought not to be true. Not if, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ so that, ‘…nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’ It ought not to be the case that religion is the ally of that ‘trade’ and ‘toil’ which makes human beings grind beauty and life to nothing. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. David Byrne of the Talking Heads put quite a lot of Nietzsche in a nutshell when he sang, The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song They play it once again, they play it all night long Heaven Heaven is a place A place where nothing Nothing ever happens
Ranall Ingalls
that pits unchanging ideas and ideals against the world of change and growth. In doing so, he does Plato a favour, and Jesus too. He does good work on behalf of Platonic philosophy, and on behalf of religion. It seems to me at least that the philosophical eros (= ‘yearning’, ‘desire’) of Plato’s Symposium must always be restless on Plato’s own account of it, and that Plato writes for love of the life of the city and its citizens. And whatever what might think of Jesus no one who has read the Gospels could imagine that what he taught and what he did was all for the sake of bourgeois respectability and what Thomas Hobbes calls ‘commodious living’. But Plato and Jesus have both been misused in this way: as if they were to replace thought, movement, life. As if sleep or death were best. The first thing about eagles from a Lamb’s perspective is that they eat lambs. But if a lamb would like to know about the world they share with eagles, the next thing about eagles is that they fly, and see things from a great height. In the Chapel, the lectern on which the Bible sits is a beautifully carved eagle. According to medieval bestiaries, not only could the eagle look down from a great height on creatures, they could look up with unblinking eye at the sun. Remember Plato’s Sun! If there is greater height from which to look down and a steadier eye with which to look up than Nietzsche, well and good. But no Lamb should be content with the report of an eagle who has seen less. ❧
Abstract, unchanging ideals are a problem • when they replace attentiveness to the world and the people in it, • when they let self-righteous resentment and rejection take away the need for courage to take responsibility for one another and the world we share, and • when they leave us alone and outside communities in which we carry one another and allow ourselves to be carried because we are not ideal—not mere thought—but flesh and blood. Nietzsche rejects the religion or philosophy Finnigan: Eagle? Or Lamb? (With Aidan Ingalls)
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“Dance past the chapel.”
FYP – In itself and for itself
Books on Bikes PAUL MCK AY, BOOKSTORE M ANAGER AND BOOK-CYCLE GUY One of the nice things about being a tiny little store is that it’s awfully easy to pivot and adapt when things change. Being tucked away in the basement of the NAB means we’ll never be as well known as some of the businesses downtown, but a nice downtown storefront became more of a liability than an asset once the pandemic hit. Rather than create a complicated plan with plexiglass barriers and policing customers into long lines I decided to just close up entirely and move to a strictly online bookstore in the hopes of making things easiest and safest for everyone. The bookstore was already “more online” than most stores so it wasn’t too difficult to make the switch and people really responded to how accessible
we made everything. Sharing photos of books, updates on how the store is doing, making dumb jokes on twitter, or just being open about how I was personally relating to the pandemic made people feel connected to something outside of their quarantine prisons and people really appreciated being able to stay safe at home while getting books dropped off at home. Making a fun little cartoon character of me delivering books on my bike also didn’t hurt as people really loved the design and felt like they could see exactly who the person was behind the bookstore! Throughout all of this we’ve made a lot of strong connections with readers and authors in the general Halifax community as well as proving that this little bookstore can reliably support anything King’s and Dal students need, even during a global pandemic shutdown. Now that the need for course books is winding down we’re pivoting again into promoting and focusing on our regular book stock and doing special book orders for people and we’ll
be looking forward to coming up with new and exciting ideas for the summer and prepping for whatever will come next for the Fall 2021/2020 school year! ❧
Join us in King’s Joint Honours Next Year? CONTEMPOR ARY STUDIES PROGR A M
EARLY MODERN STUDIES PROGR A M
HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Interpret today
Understand how we got here
Rethink our relationships with everything
The “contemporary period” might be described as one of constant transformation, with new challenges and opportunities emerging all the time. The Contemporary Studies Program (CSP) engages with the ideas, thinkers, and movements that have contributed to new understandings of the world, community, self and other. In CSP you will:
Many of the fundamental ideas about our world today were shaped centuries ago. Between the 16th and early 19th centuries, thinkers and artists built some of the intellectual and cultural foundations of the modern world. In the Early Modern Studies Program you:
Science and technology infuse every aspect of modern life. The renowned History of Science and Technology Program encourages you to:
• choose from a wide range of interdisciplinary courses that explore ideas about ethics, aesthetics, and politics; contemporary art, modern film, and digital media; new biotechnologies, nature, environment, and the body, and many others. • participate in classes on transformative thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Arendt, Butler, bell hooks, and Foucault. • consider the place of science and technology in the contemporary world and challenge the supposed dichotomy of science and culture. • e ngage with texts by environmental philosophers, thinkers of the Global South, and race and gender theorists. • develop tools for conceptual analyses—from multiple perspectives—of issues such as marginalization, social justice, migration and belonging, freedom and responsibility. • participate in innovative teaching and learning environments; for example, laboratory observation sessions, community-outreach, and gallery visits. • use your critical skills and creative talents.
• Explore the historical impact of European culture • Encounter ground-breaking art and artists like Shakespeare, Mozart and Michelangelo • E xamine issues surrounding gender and race in early modern history, philosophy, literature, political thought, science, and the visual arts • Think critically about colonialism, and the impact of interactions between Europe and the wider world • Assess the significance of witchcraft, vampires, and maritime piracy in the early modern period • Learn about how shifting ideas about religion and science changed the way we understand our place in the universe. Faculty Roberta Barker Mark Burke Maria Euchner Hilary Ilkay Simon Kow
Kathryn Morris Laura Penny Neil Robertson Justina Spencer Lisa Templin
Faculty Stephen Boos Daniel Brandes Susan Dodd R. Luke Franklin Catherine Fullarton Dorota Glowacka
David Huebert Hamza Karam Ally Kenneth Kierans Laura Penny Neil Robertson
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• gain perspectives on the changing ways in which we have conceptualised and interacted with the natural world and have understood the human body • reconsider the relationships between nature, society and technology—explore the social and political implications of scientific discovery and medical practice • take courses on cybernetics, bio-politics, science fiction, alchemy, the ideals of environmentalism, human experiments and the birth of modern medicine Faculty Mark Burke Melanie Frappier Kyle Fraser
Gillian Gass Ian Stewart Michael Bennett
First Time Tutor (and Chair of Classics!) ELI DIA MOND (FYP 1995–96) Since I started teaching in the Dalhousie Classics Department in 2008, I have had the honour and pleasure of lecturing in FYP every year. I always regretted, however, that I had never been able to lead a FYP tutorial. It is so strange to finish a FYP lecture and have no conversation with the students about the text you just introduced to them— to understand what they understood and what they did not, or what captured their imagination and what drove them crazy. So last year through some wheeling and dealing I was able to arrange with FYP and Dalhousie that I would take some tutorials in Section I while serving as coordinator of the Ancient World. Of course, once the pandemic hit, my
classes, I was floating in the world of discussion boards and pre-recorded lectures, with depressingly little contact with my students. I found it very difficult to feel connected to the classes, and I know my students felt the same. My soul was saved in this respect by the four meetings a week I had with my two FYP tutorials. Not that everything in each tutorial was a smashing success—we had our share of awkward zoom silence, and while my breakout rooms into team Creon and Antigone worked splendidly, my breakout rooms in our discussion of Plotinus into team One, team Nous and team Soul was (shockingly!) not quite as successful. But the mere fact of meeting the same group of people at the same time for four hours of week created a real sense of connection and friendship which I was struggling to maintain in my other classes. In the midst of our study of Symposium, I was shopping in Sobeys one day after finishing my daily teaching and I noticed two young people giving me a strange look. After I finished at the cash and took my bags these people asked if I was Eli
while my breakout rooms into team Creon and Antigone worked splendidly, my breakout rooms in our discussion of Plotinus into team One, team Nous and team Soul was (shockingly!) not quite as successful. experience as a FYP tutor was bound to be atypical, but the advantage of leading tutorials in FYP for my first time this year is—like you students—I had nothing with which to compare it! They were the best FYP tutorials I had ever led. Despite being trapped in Zoom-land, leading two tutorials (hello tutorials 6 & 10!) was a profound experience I will not soon forget. At Dalhousie, we had been advised to teach our classes completely asynchronously—and so in my Dalhousie
Diamond, and they excitedly told me they were current FYP students who had just seen my Plato lectures. I think we in that moment the three of us were just so happy to have even a brief masked encounter in the flesh as recognition that these teachers and these students are real, and that we are actually achieving something intellectually together against long odds. My admiration for what the FYP teaching and technical team was able to preserve of the spirit of FYP in this online world is bottomless, especially since
FYP MEMES
Eli Diamond (FYP 1995–96) with his baby bunny Nénuphar
this will likely be the only year I ever have FYP tutorials. I also learned lessons from my Fall FYP experience of what it takes to foster and preserve that collective sense of discovery and dialogue in an online class, and as a result I think my Winter Classics classes at Dalhousie have been exponentially improved. In my advanced Greek class in which we are translating Plato’s Symposium from Greek into English, we work together outside of class on a collective translation document—adding questions and making suggestions about each other’s translations, so we can dedicate our actual class time to exploring questions like what affect the Symposium had on later visual art, or how neoplatonists like Plotinus approached Symposium, or how reading Symposium along with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War opens up new dimensions of meaning in the dialogue. In my seminar on presocratic philosophy I introduced a mandatory weekly meeting where everyone needs to bring one question or observation to the discussion, and the level of discussion and analysis has been as good as anything I have ever experienced in the classroom. So although I have missed my time in FYP this Winter, I feel like I would have no sense of how to be an online professor if it weren’t for those happy meetings in September and October with Tutorials 6 & 10. I am sorry they had to be my guinea pigs, but I sure cannot wait to run into them in post-pandemic times in person and thank them for a classroom experience I will always cherish. ❧
“Thanks for the books, Paul. Yay Co-op!”
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
NIGHT FYP
Zuppa’s Pop-up Love: Online for the First Time! A generous donor who asks not to be named gave Director Robertson a chance to realize his dream of public performances. He wanted to bring the works we encountered in the classroom alive for students, to immerse them in the historical moment via the art of another time. Too many to list but these included an adaptation of Plato’s Symposium by Zuppa Theatre, nights of operatic song hosted by President Bill in the Lodge, and the recitation of an epic poem about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham by Classics prof Jack Mitchell. In this, Covid year, Neil was undaunted. He organized online events including a talk and surprise performance of The Iliad translated into rap, Zuppa online, and performances of medieval chant. Shalon Joudry, a Mi’kmaw poet, invited us to Call Out Spring with her antidote to isolation: poetry about connection with the earth, sky, plants and spirits. Michael Schade, an opera star, talked with us about his immense love for opera, and especially Mozart, and maybe even most especially, for the opera Roberta Barker introduced us to: “The Magic Flute.” Schade even sang two glorious arias for us with a world-class accompanist who just happened to be in his Vienna living room at the time. ❧
“To Love!”
As Dr Brandon Bourgeois says of his rap translation of Homer’s The Iliad: STUDENT EVENSONG MEDITATION
Cameron Lowe Shakespeare’s The Tempest “In the hours leading up to my reflection, I found myself still deliberating over which text was my “favourite”. I knew the answer straightaway, of course— Dante’s Divine Comedy (Paradiso, if I had to choose a canticle)—but what could I possibly say on that text, in this space where the presence of so many nonpareil Dantean scholars (most notably the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse) is still so strongly felt? And besides, it felt disingenuous to speak on a text I’d known & loved for years—so I instead decided to offer my meditation on a text that I’d come to love this year, within the life of FYP: Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Tempest is another text which I had encountered prior to this year, but which I was enabled to see in an entirely different light within the context of FYP. Through seeing it ‘in conversation’ with other favourite FYP texts I was able to see threads that we had been following since Section One, woven together in the narrative of Prospero’s exile and restoration as duke of Milan. In the play, Prospero seizes upon a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to enact his vengeance on the men who orchestrated his usurpation. He
summons a great storm, shipwrecking them on his island, and trapping them in a sort of purgatorial exclave as he enacts his master plan. In the third act, however, there is a sort of anti-climax: Prospero seems to cut short the punishments he had planned against his malefactors and instead forgives them unconditionally. There is reason to believe that this turn toward forgiveness was his fate from the very beginning, but there is no suggestion of rigid determinism; Prospero is possessed of a free will, and could very well have chosen a different path… this hearkens back to the Augustinian notion of aligning one’s will with that which has been chosen for you, or the adage of St. Tomas Aquinas (oft-reiterated by Dr.’s Curran & Dodd in our Dante lectures) that “Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it” … and we still hear echoes of this idea in the age of reason as Sarastro sings in Mozart’s The Magic Flute that “If a man succumbs [to vengeance], love restores him to his duty”. So much is wrapped up in this single moment in the play, much of which we have seen and will continue to see over and over again as we move through FYP. I have only just begun to scratch the surface, but I hope I have managed in some small aspect to convey the ways in which The Tempest manages to encapsulate so many of the concepts and ideas present throughout FYP that I find most compelling.”
“This project is about breaking down class divisions and showing that Homer isn’t only for a certain elitist class of people,” says Dr. Bourgeois, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California (USC), Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “By bringing these similar traditions together, which are both rooted in oral storytelling, I’m hoping to involve two different communities that don’t normally speak to each other.
Sam MacDonald, as Dante (Sam created many of our FYP memes)
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ROBERT DARWIN CROUSE MEMORIAL LECTURE 2020 –21 GUEST LECTURER ANDREW LOUTH REVIEW
THE NECESSITY OF PLATONISM FOR (INSERT HERE) M AT THEW VANDERKWA AK There was a buzz of anticipation as a small group of us filed into the chapel for this year’s annual Robert Crouse memorial lecture. This year’s speaker, who would be streaming in from over an ocean, was Fr. Andrew Louth, a scholar of patristics and professor at Durham University. Our excitement was due in part to the rare pleasure of seeing one another in person and part due to the talk’s totally audacious title, which had been trumpeted about in the previous week: “The necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology.” For someone who has spent time in our small and strange corner of the world, the response to such a title might be an eye roll or an “obviously”. The “Christian Platonism Project” (as one might call it) of our scola haligoniensis has ever since the days of the Rev’d Robert Crouse himself become for some a worn out (if not problematic) tune, for some a way of life, and for others something commonplace and a bit ho-hum. It was not the topic, however, which promised to make this event a particularly special occasion. The biggest reason for our excitement was that this was the first Robert Crouse memorial lecture to which, thanks to online streaming, the entire world had been invited. By the evening of the lecture, hundreds of friends from around the world had signed up to watch the broadcast at a distance, and when I arrived at the chapel there were already over two hundred cued and waiting. Fr. Louth began his talk by clarifying what he would not be speaking about. He would not be making a historical argument attempting to show that such-and-such Christian theologians were indelibly influenced or dependant upon such-and-such from the platonic tradition (as many of us are used to thinking about St. Augus-
tine’s Confessions). Neither would he be outlining some Christian variety or brand of Platonism (you might think of Origin or Pseudo-Dionysius). And finally, the point was not to line up doctrinal commonalities shared by a tradition of Platonism on the one hand and Christianity on the other (like, say, the immortality of the soul). So if this necessity is neither to be found in the history of ideas nor in doxographies, then what is it? What Platonism primarily teaches us, Fr. Louth argued, is an attitude or posture of openness to a primal meaning which transcends all particulars. What is at stake here is the simple question: is meaning fundamentally something that we construct and create ourselves or is it something which transcends all of our attempts to navigate the world and is “given”, or “revealed” to us. As Fr. Louth went on to put it in the Q & A session, “meaning is not something that we confect or we work out or that we puzzle out, but is something that in some kind of way is ultimately disclosed.” Hearing these words started to realize that Fr. Louth’s topic was even more ambitious than I previously thought. He was not simply arguing that Platonism is necessary to Christian thinking,
Matthew Vanderkwaak and Gus, the Platonic Form of Cat
thing “beyond” and are nevertheless left wanting? Whatever one might make of Fr. Louth’s suggestion, I think that one of the most compelling “take-away” is how this describes the experience of learning. When I think about my own time studying the liberal arts, I am struck that, indeed, the most profound moments of learning in my life have not been meaningful because “I” made them so. No, those brief yet transformational moments of clarity, those times when reading suddenly becomes effortless and my own thought begins to merge with the thought of another, or those times when a class-mate or professor gives voice to the hidden contents of my heart, these are not moments I make but ones I receive as a gift. ❧ Matthew Vanderkwaak is Don of Middle Bay and Ph.D.
“[T]he meaning of things is not something that we read into them, it is not just simply our way of negotiating, but in fact is something that ultimately is found, not even in the things themselves, but beyond […].” —The Rev’d Dr. Andrew Louth, from the Q & A following his Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture, “The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology.” he was arguing that this attitude of openness to what is beyond ourselves is fundamental to all thinking what-so-ever. There are many interesting questions one might ask in response to this suggestion: How is this posture of openness embodied in the Platonic tradition? Is there a method or a way of seeking that which transcends our very attempts to seek? How do we take seriously our own meaning-making (which is so fundamental to political and social life) while at the same time remaining open to this more fundamental meaning from beyond? What if we do grasp earnestly at some-
candidate in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin. The 2020–21 Robert Crouse lecturer, Andrew Louth is a specialist in patristics and Byantine studies and author of The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, The Wilderness of God, and Love among many other books. More than 300 people tuned into this year’s Crouse lecture (from around the world).
FYP MEMES
“Dance to the chapel to catch a Student Evensong Meditation and say ‘Hi’ to Finnigan and Fr Ingalls.” Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Pythian Games ELI DIA MOND On March 5th, the steadfast and devoted Dalhousie Classics student society Res Publica, with the support of the Classics Department, hosted our first ever (and hopefully, last!) online version of the Pythian Games. The Pythian Games, founded in the 6th century BCE, and then gloriously revived after over 1500 years of dormancy in 2011 here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, celebrated its 10th anniversary in this rebooted Dalhousie Classics version. This festival and competition of recitation and performance, which always includes poetry, theatre, song and musical performance in the ancient languages studied in the Department (with surtitles like at the Opera!) as well as various modern languages, has been one of the joyous highlights of departmental life for a decade now. Often held in one of the big auditoriums of the McCain building,the pandemic forced us online. Yet this actually created conditions for one of those rare yet cherished glimmers of light and opportunity delivered to us by our current predicament, since the online format made certain things possible that were not possible in the live setting, not the least of which was the fact that neither audience members nor performers needed to be physically in Halifax with us to participate in this event. As a result we had amazing involvement from alumni of
the Department. And because of this pre-recorded medium, we were able to include visual art, animations and special effects, as well as collaborative performances from individuals in different parts of the country. Competitors recorded their performances in advance and submitted them to the student society, who placed them in order and connected them seamlessly them into one video. Nevertheless we held a live event, including an opening ceremony and an awards ceremony where the King and Queen of the Games judged the performances and awarded lucrative cash prizes in various categories. For the first time we had a “Choice of the Demos (People’s Choice)”
Greek Seikilos epitaph, the oldest surviving complete musical competition, an amazing performance of Cicero’s first Catilinarian oration whose contemporary relevance was striking, and original skits featuring Achilles and Patroclus in therapy, a multilingual Greek and Latin performance which broke out into some old English. and a Latin reflection on the plague from two of the Department’s most beloved medieval monks. The list of performers and winners was full of former FYPers, so Dalhousie Classics hopes you might consider entering next year’s games to have your powers of performance immortalized for the ages. Many remarked that even though we were watching the
This prize was won by a performance for the ages—a cooking show, completely in Latin, in which Saint Augustine taught the audience how to make his delicious pear torte. prize voted in real time by the online audience. This prize was won by a performance for the ages—a cooking show, completely in Latin, in which Saint Augustine taught the audience how to make his delicious pear torte. Other performances included a lovely original painting, captivating performances of Sappho, Catullus and the Gospel of Mark in their original languages, a beautiful contemporary adaptation of the ancient
FYP MEMES
FYP MEMES
Erin Sinclair (FYP 2020–21)
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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performances apart from one another, that the event was one of the few this year where everyone in the Classics Department felt like they were genuinely together. Long live the Pythian Games! If you would like to see the performances, please visit our website classics.dal.ca, where we will be posting the entire video very soon! ❧
On Icons BENJA MIN VON BREDOW (FYP 2013–14) Some of the most striking photographs from the early days of the pandemic one year ago were of crowded public places suddenly void. The introduction of a great Nothing was most present in the places where we most
“…some iconographers prefer to call their activity “writing” instead of “painting” because what is depicted is a “visible word.” busily put our somethings. Among these places was St. Peter’s Square in Rome, the epicentre of the European religious imagination. Instead of the excited buzz of pilgrims waiting to catch a glance of Pope Francis—I’m told that some pilgrims are known to chant “Viva la, viva la, viva la, pap’, pap’, pap’!” as they wait—only the pap’ himself was allowed to pray in the square. He had one of his favourite icons, an ancient image
space behind it. That space has been temporarily filled with a smaller, mass-produced icon borrowed from a local monastery, but it lacked the desired aura of a hand-painted original. I was asked to consider “writing” this icon—some iconographers prefer to call their activity “writing” instead of “painting” because what is depicted is a “visible word”— and accepted the commission. But which image of the Virgin I should produce was not immediately fixed, and Fr. Ingalls asked me to lead the community in a consideration of various options, so I produced, distributed, and at a public gathering introduced a booklet with examples. We were to reconvene on March 23, but we never did. Returning to the project in the Fall, carrying with us everything we had seen and heard of students’ experience of the pandemic lockdowns, Fr. Ingalls and I spent a day in reflection at the Hermitage of the Annunciation in New Germany, and came back agreeing which image of the Mother of God the chapel must have. Salus Populi Romani was the favourite in many respects. Its style and origin bridge the Latin West and the Greek East, and its moderate naturalism invites both affective and reserved engage-
Icon by Benjamin Von Bredow
it is especially an icon for this time, an icon standing for the people’s health of body and soul, an icon confronting us with the reality that health of body and soul comes ultimately from face-toface encounter. of the Virgin May as Salus Populi Romani (Health of the Roman People), transferred from the Church of St. Mary the Great to St. Peter’s. Images of the lonesome pope praying with the Mother of God captured the imagination of Christians around the world as they imagined what worship during a time of pandemic might look like. Here in Halifax at approximately the same time, our chaplain reluctantly cancelled a meeting scheduled for March 23, 2020. The meeting was to collect feedback from the university community on an artistic commission which the chapel had begun to consider in the previous Fall term. During the chaplaincy of Fr. Thorne, an antique Russian icon of the Mother of God stood at the back of the chapel, and became a focal point for student devotion, or perhaps just a site for uncomprehending awe at the presence of a great Something. But that icon left with Fr. Thorne, and left a
ment. It is an icon for any time and place. But it is especially an icon for this time, an icon standing for the people’s health of body and soul, an icon confronting us with the reality that health of body and soul comes ultimately from face-to-face encounter. If I am to be whole, my neighbour must look at me with the steadfastness of goodwill with which the Mother of God does, and I must do the same for my neighbour. The icon is in progress and will arrive in the chapel in April. It is presently only form, only line. But my hope is that it will gain its colour as this sickly world, starved for relationship, begins to regain hers. ❧ Benjamin Von Bredow is the Chapel Administrator.
“Let’s go visit Eli, Roberta, Asha, and Chike at Dal.”
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper: An Auratic Experience HIL ARY ILK AY (FYP 2009–10) Rereading Walter Benjamin’s wonderful essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” I couldn’t help but reflect on how long it has been since I’ve been to an art gallery or a museum. I’ve been lucky enough to visit more than I can
room. Despite the fact that digital exhibitions have a number of advantages—leisure, more control, more freedom—they lack the hallmarks of spending time in a museum: the tired legs and the burning feet after standing still for long periods of time, jockeying with other patrons for prime viewing position, the respectful hush and communal mood of contemplation as each person takes in the art. To use Benjamin’s terms, what’s missing is the “here and now of the work of art— its unique existence in a particular place.” This sense of “here-and-now-ness” underlies the artwork’s authenticity, which, in turn, Benjamin says is founded on “the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down as the same, identical thing to the present day.” Of course, the art institution itself
This act of remote browsing, however enjoyable and mercifully distracting, could not compare with the experience of wandering through a physical, curated space, wondering what assortment of artworks would meet your eye as you entered a new room. count in my travels and to encounter original artworks and artifacts I had only admired in print or digital forms. Benjamin could not have anticipated how digital technology would revolutionize art consumption and production. When museums and galleries around the world were forced to close starting last year, many gave the public access to digital exhibitions, some in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture. I quickly got sucked into these virtual showcases, dropping into one museum after another—in Athens, in Istanbul, in Rome, in California—with ease and speed and without suffering any jetlag or paying any entry fees. This act of remote browsing, however enjoyable and mercifully distracting, could not compare with the experience of wandering through a physical, curated space, wondering what assortment of artworks would meet your eye as you entered a new
is constructed and performative—many artworks displayed within were not created in or for a museum space—and many objects showcased in famous museums with massive collections are far from local; one need only think of the controversy surrounding the Elgin Marbles, chiselled off the Parthenon in the early 19th century by the infamous British Lord Elgin and shipped back to London, where they remain exhibited at the British Museum in spite of the existence of a newly built Acropolis Museum in Athens that critically highlights the missing pieces with veiled plaster casts. Digital exhibitions take this idea of a “world culture” that transcends local heritage and history to the extreme, eliminating altogether the rootedness of the artwork: through digital technology, the world of art truly becomes global and borderless. This increases accessibility, a decisively positive feature, but perhaps at the cost of an “authentic” experience, in Benjamin’s terms. It reveals our desire to “get closer to things,” as Benjamin says in the essay. There is a certain thrill in zooming in on a digitized artwork to reveal the tiniest detail. This doesn’t stop people from trying to replicate this experience in a gallery: the frequent sound of motion sensors shrilly ratting out patrons is a testament to our desire to get as close as possible. However, the fact that there is a limit to how much of an artwork we can take in with our imperfect sense of perception and in a highly regulated space cultivates Benjamin’s enigmatic concept of “the aura,” which he describes as “a strange tissue of space and time: the
Hilary kitties
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
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unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.” Viewing a work of art is, to me, exactly this phenomenologically-tinged “apparition of a distance”: there it is, right there, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, so close I could touch it! But it also towers above me, on a literal pedestal, asserting its distance from me that keeps me in a state of respectful awe as a viewer. One doesn’t have the same feeling when a work of art appears on the screen, which you then have the luxury of manipulating at will. All of this has led me to reflect on a particularly “auratic” art viewing experience I had two summers ago: visiting one of the world’s most famous and most reproduced paintings, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Popularized for better or worse (worse) by Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, the work holds a unique place in our cultural imagination. You can find it reproduced on any genre of merchandise imaginable. Despite its fame, when I asked my tutorials how you can view it, no one knew the details beyond its location in Milan. Unlike most well-known artworks—such as da Vinci’s even more idolized Mona Lisa in the Louvre—it is not housed in a museum, and it has never travelled as part of an exhibition. To view the fresco, you must purchase a timed entry ticket (they sell out notoriously quickly) to the refectory of the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie that grants you a strict 15 minutes in its presence. Even though I had spent four summers in Italy and had been to Milan once before, it never occurred to me to visit the Cenacolo (its Italian title), since, I figured, I had seen so many reproductions and had heard that the original was less impressive due to its deteriorated state. In 2019, however, on my way from Rome to Courmayeur with a stopover in Milan, I deposited my belongings in the coat check—there is absolutely nothing allowed in the space itself, which, interest-
There is a certain thrill in zooming in on a digitized artwork to reveal the tiniest detail. ingly, the Italians have named a museum— and joined my group in the waiting area. There was even a reproduction of the painting on the informational brochure. Right on time, our tour guide arrived to lead us through a series of blissfully air conditioned corridors, briefly narrating the history of the monastery and the painting. In one of the most dramatic museum moments of my life, we then paused before a set of automatic doors outside of the refectory, waiting for the previous group to exit. The anticipation was palpable: what would it be like? Suddenly, the light turned green, we entered, looked
Its original purpose was not to be viewed by the masses, but to inspire private, quiet religious devotion to the right—and there it was. The apparition of a distance. Despite having seen countless reproductions of the painting, nothing could prepare me for beholding it in person on the refectory wall: delicate but commanding attention, more vivid than I had imagined, rich in detail. I had learned that it survives today only by a series of minor miracles. Da Vinci had a hard time getting the paint to adhere to the wall, and its quality diminished not long after its creation. Not only that, but during WWII, Allied bombing caused the roof and one wall of the refectory to collapse, leaving the painting intact but exposing it to the elements for a significant period of time. As a result of this fraught history, the
painting underwent 20 years of major and, to some, controversial, restoration that ended in 1999. The effect is staggering. I stood at every angle and distance possible to get a glimpse of the work (attested in the photo I’ve attached). This experience, to me, was revelatory of Benjamin’s aura: seeing the work of art in the exact religious space in which it was created, on the same wall on which da Vinci painted it, contemplating it as the monks would have done each day. Its original purpose was not to be viewed by the masses, but to inspire private, quiet religious devotion. For this reason, I like the fact that only a small group gets to experience it at a time. A detail that gave me great delight is that there was no museum gift shop: no Last Supper mugs or magnets. My experience with the painting began and ended in the refectory itself, comprising those privileged 15 minutes. When I exited, I was thrust into the peaceful cloister, out of the muted light and into the brilliant sun, with the details of the painting still impressed upon my memory, all the more precious for its inability to be reproduced. ❧
Hilary Ilkay visits daVinci’s masterpiece at its home in the Santa Maria delle Grazie Dominican monastery in Milan.
FYP MEMES
“If I lived in Alex Hall I’d be home by now.”
Sam MacDonald (FYP 2020–21)
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FYP – In itself and for itself
Roberta’s Beatrice-Joanna
Poe, Timothy Hay (bunny in basket) and Eli
FYP students Mary Legorburu, Georgia Jones, Taylor MacLeod, Jessi Berdego with Lil’ Buddy
Finnigan: Eagle? Or Lamb?
Dean Katie Merwin, with Casey at opera night in the Lodge 2019
The Snooks’ Ginny
CHECK OUT
David Huebert’s stories and poems
Check out Chike Jeffers’ podcasts “History of Indian and Africana Philosophy”, at www.historyofphilosophy.net
Asha Jeffers’ first collection of poems
Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 — Unprecedented! Double Edition
Neil Robertson’s Leo Strauss, forthcoming
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Christopher Snook’s Tantramar Vespers
The Creek CHRISTOPHER SNOOK We came out to the creek and the concrete brick wall creeping over the culvert, the water six feet below and the dark dank of the tunnel, breathing, skippers walking on water and the three of us sprawled on the hot stone with the sudden soft ash of a slug’s body between us, and the long line of fences to one side of the gulley that guttered slow-wise through the suburban backyards, the stream dappled-dyed gold leaf in the sunlight, moving to the monotone moan of lawn mowers, hedge clippers, the dull buzz of a thousand bugs, the waterway a child’s roadway between home and school, school and the invisibilia of play, play and the muted rhythms of footfall squelching in the creek then the silent pedagogy of solitude before twilight and the call home. What did we know of waterways, then, of Red Seas and Jordan Rivers? What did we know of the sea’s torment or of anything not soothed by the soft warm glow of our names arcing through the air at day’s end?
Photo Elisabeth Stones
❧
Christopher Snook collects his FYP readings
“See you next year, unprecendented FYPers!”
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FYP – In itself and for itself