Franco-American News & Events, 3

Boreal Tordu

2007-06-24T06:18:00.000-04:00

Boréal Tordu links to this page...and this is a repost of an earlier post...in recognition of their work...

info on the group:

http://www.borealtordu.com

Tonight, Wednesday, February 15 at 6pm Charlie Gaylord of Cornmeal Records
interviews Robert Sylvain of Boréal Tordu on 98.9fm WCLZ, now streaming on the web at: http://www.989wclz.com/

If you miss it tonight, the program will be re-broadcast and webcast on Sunday, 2/19/06 at 11am.

Also, Chris Busby chimes in with a review of the CD, in The Bollard, online at: http://www.thebollard.com/story_music/boreal_tordu.html

Hope to see you all at the CD release party at the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston Maine on March 4. More information and tickets can be found at: http://www.francoamericanheritage.org

Au revoir,
Robert, Steve, Ron et Pip

--
Boréal Tordu
La musique originale d'Acadiens du Maine
Original music of Maine-Acadians
30 Mechanic Street
Portland, ME 04101
(207) 761-3931
tordu@gigafone.com
http://www.borealtordu.com

New News Blog Created, This site index

2006-05-24T09:52:00.000-04:00

New News Blog Created, This site indexed

This site has been "retired" and indexed...go to FAWI News and Events page for the index...
http://www.fawi.net/FANews/newsandevents.html

or, conduct a search on this blog.

A new NEWS and Events blog has been created to continue this work of looking at the French, Franco-American phenomenon on the Glocal Scale...

See listing of all News and Events blogs to the right, OR,

Go to http://www.fawi.net/FANews/newsandevents.html
to access the newest blog of news...

merci for your reading attention!

Franco-American Women's Institute, FAWI

Franco-American News Homepage at FAWI, Index

FA News/Events,7

FA News/Events, 6, site retired, indexed

FA News/Events, 5, site retired, indexed

FA News/Events, 4, site retired, indexed

FA News/Events, 3, site retired, indexed

FA News/Events, 2, site retired, indexed

FA News/Events 1, site retired, indexed

Franco-American News & Events, site retired, indexed

Franco-American News Backfile, site retired, indexed

Today's posts

2006-02-27T17:09:00.000-05:00

If article does not appear in listing at the right, click on the date and conduct a search. Bon lecture!
archives/2006_02_27

2006/02/oui-je-parle-francais.html
2006/02/way-of-life.html
2006/02/new-life-in-maine.html
2006/02/mardi-gras-beyond-colored-beads-and.html
2006/02/safe-in-her-shadow.html
2006/02/family-unties.html
2006/02/americans-of-today-and-of-tomorrow.html
2006/02/opinions-clash-over-lauded-brokeback.html
2006/02/in-france-baby-boom-and-bust.html
2006/02/brokeback-owes-nod-to-gay-film.html
2006/02/frances-baby-boom-isnt-enough-to.html
2006/02/female-resistance-to-male-authority.html
2006/02/berlin-film-festival-revealing-dream.html
2006/02/do-you-parlez-vous.html
2006/02/conversations-in-french-made-simple.html
2006/02/doyenne-of-mag-trade.html
2006/02/first-nation-art-from-native-american.html
2006/02/honolulu-celebrates-mardigras.html
2006/02/vagina-monologues.html
2006/02/bishopaccountabilityorg.html
2006/02/winning-new-converts.html
2006/02/puppets-figure-in-african-culture.html
2006/02/doucet-and-beausoleil-bringing-30.html
2006/02/making-strides-toward-bilingual.html
2006/02/history-too-often-left-untold.html
2006/02/american-folk-festival-plans-coming.html
2006/02/love-potion.html
2006/02/shoulda-coulda-woulda.html
2006/02/artists-plan-acadian-festival.html
2006/02/mardi-gras-in-new-orleans-american.html
2006/02/in-nutshell-portrait-of-elizabeth.html
2006/02/longfellow-days-in-brunswick.html

A way of life

2006-02-27T17:08:00.001-05:00

A way of life

By Bonnie Washuk,Staff Writer
Lewiston Sun Journal
Published : Sunday-February 05, 2006

As consolidation looms, parishioners say Catholic schools are essential.

LEWISTON - Every day before she drives from her Sabattus home to work in Auburn, Yvette Pouzol drops off her daughter at Holy Cross School in Lewiston.

Julia DeLong, 13, is the third child Pouzol has enrolled in parochial schools.

It's not convenient, and the costs aren't covered by property taxes.

Tuition at Holy Cross is about $2,000 a year, the same as at the other two Catholic elementary schools in Lewiston-Auburn.

Soon, there will be only one.

The Catholic diocese of Maine has announced it will consolidate the elementary schools by this fall or next because of declining enrollment and increasing costs.

Pouzol was not surprised to hear that St. Peter and Sacred Heart, St. Joseph's and Holy Cross schools will soon be one.

But she was saddened.

"Catholic schools have been such a tradition," she said. "It makes me wonder whether kids who leave the schools, do they lose out on a way of life?"

That way of life has been essential to her family and many others for generations.

Pouzol, 48, grew up in Lewiston and attended Holy Family School. At her stepfather's insistence, she went to St. Dominic Regional High School.

She wanted that experience for her children, too.

"Catholic schools support the religious values and morals I believe in," she said. "Praying, unfortunately, doesn't happen in public schools."

Pouzol's mother, Lilly Gagnon, went to the now-closed St. Mary's school. Her stepfather, Richard Gagnon, went to Saints Peter and Paul's, then to St. Dom's.

Catholic schools strengthened religious convictions - and there was little tolerance for bad behavior, said Gagnon, 71.

"We had total discipline," he said. "I remember one guy who wouldn't buckle down." That student had to leave the school.

Today, rising tuition keeps many parents who share those values from enrolling their children in Catholic schools.

When Gagnon attended St. Peter's parochial school, families who could not afford tuition didn't pay. Parishes didn't have to hire lay teachers. "It was all nuns and brothers," he said.

When he graduated from St. Dom's in 1954, tuition was $50, up by $10 from the year before. When his children attended high school there, tuition was $200 to $300 a year. Tuition at the high school today is $5,430.

That means some parents have to choose between paying for either elementary or high school tuition.

However, parish scholarships are available for people who can't afford to pay the full amount, said the Rev. Mike Seavey, the parish priest of St. Joseph's.
Franco tradition

In the 1950s and '60s, there were eight parochial elementary schools in Lewiston-Auburn: Holy Family, Holy Cross, St. Mary's, Saints Peter and Paul, St. Joseph's and St. Patrick's. in Lewiston and St. Louis and Sacred Heart in Auburn.

"Every church had its own school, and they were populated," said Rita Dube of the Franco-American Heritage Center.

When Gagnon attended grade school in the 1940s, 2,000 youngsters were enrolled at St. Peter's, including his seven brothers and two sisters, he said. This year, a total of 656 students attended all three of L-A's Catholic elementary schools. Ten years ago, enrollment was 935.

Sixty years ago, Franco-American children, who were often treated as outsiders at public schools, found a haven in Catholic schools.

"They were being ridiculed and laughed at," Dube said. "They were not allowed to speak French. Many times, they didn't know any other language."

At Catholic school, they spoke French in the morning and English in the afternoon. Virtually all students were from French-speaking families.

"Catholic schools were the force behind the education of 90 percent of the Franco-American children," Dube said. The largest enrollments were from the 1940s through the 1960s, she said.

She credited one priest as being the most responsible for the schools: the Rev. Herve Drouin.

"He was a genius in many ways," Dube said. "His personality was outstanding. He was able to get money for the schools like you wouldn't believe. He had followers, was totally charismatic. He deeply cared about the French children."

Committed to improving the education of French children, Drouin founded St. Dominic high school.

"He was a friend of the family," Dube said. "My father died when I was 5. We grew up poor. But Father Drouin always told my mother, â€˜Don't worry Jeannette. Your children will be able to go to St. Dom's. I'll take care of it.'"

She teared up as she spoke. "He was like that with so many families. He would not refuse anybody."
Empty pews, less money

Drouin had something that is gone today: pews filled each Sunday by parishioners.

In the past 20 years, attendance at Catholic churches has dwindled.

Dube remembered what Sunday services used to be like at St. Peter's. Five Masses every weekend, three upstairs, two downstairs. "They were always packed, and it's a massive church," he said. Attendance is now about one-fourth of what it once was, she said. "And it's mostly gray-haired people."

Life used to revolve around church and prayer. "You don't see that today," Dube said. It's not as important to send children to Catholic schools. "That has a lot to do with declining enrollment."

In announcing the consolidation last week, the Most Rev. Richard Malone, bishop of Portland, said paying for the three schools puts too heavy a burden on the four parishes. For example, St. Joseph's School costs the parish $160,742 a year, which accounts for 40 percent of its expenses.

The schools need more money to cover the bills, but increasing tuition would burden parents. Parishes are already contributing significantly and cannot afford more, said the Rev. Daniel Greenleaf of Holy Cross School.

If creating one new school means the survival and betterment of Catholic education, Dube is all for it, she said. But to see the numbers diminish, "when you think at one time there were nine Catholic schools (including St. Dom's), and now there'll be two, it's heartbreaking."

Seavey believes the consolidation will evoke both sadness and hope. People will grieve, but the new school will be stronger and healthier, he predicts.

Like other local pastors, he officiates at more funerals than baptisms. It's not that way everywhere, he pointed out.

His uncle was ordained last year in Georgia. In that parish, the church is packed every weekend. The school is so full that they are building a new one, Seavey said.

When his uncle was introduced to the parish, the congregation was asked how many were from the North. "Two-thirds raised their hands," Seavey said. "Our young people are having a hard time staying in Maine," he said.

http://www.sunjournal.com/search/story.php?ID=143471#

Oui, je parle Francais!

2006-02-27T17:08:00.000-05:00

Oui, je parle Francais!

By Eileen M. Adams,Staff Writer
Lewiston Sun Journal
Published : Monday-February 20, 2006

RUMFORD - A 78 rpm record played the foot-tapping sounds of a Madame Bolduc singing "La Bauce," the Canadian, Quebec and Montreal flags hung colorfully along one wall, and young and old feasted on crepes.

It was the end of a three-week unit in Catherine Charles' classroom at Mountain Valley High School on learning how to speak better French by talking and interviewing local people of French ancestry. Dozens of students and adults chatted, ate and got to know one another.

"It's a great experience for them and for us," said Marcelle Miller, who'd been interviewed by Larissa Cayer and Joshua Burke. "We don't have an opportunity to do this anymore."

Her last name, Miller explained, was actually Anglicized from Meunier, meaning a miller of flour.

She and Larissa learned at lot. Larissa discovered that her great-aunt once operated Georgette's Hat Shop in downtown Rumford, and that her grandmother and mother had worked there.

"Marcelle knew my grandparents, and my grandparents used to speak French, but now they've lost it. I'm picking up on my heritage and can understand the language better," she said.

Arthur Boivin, whose original language was French, discovered much of it coming back and getting better the more he spoke with Brendan Kreckel and D.J. Gerrish.

"Using it makes it a lot better," he said.

And hearing it, said Gerrish, is a real learning experience.

"We've just heard our teacher speak it. This is firsthand," he said.

Roland Belanger saw the invitation in the newspaper asking French-speaking community members to attend and have a chance to speak their language.

"I thought it might help the teacher, especially with the dialect," he said as he placed a 78 rpm French record on the record player for everyone to listen to.

Charles, who is in her second year at the high school, said she'd tried a similar project when she taught at Foxcroft Academy.

"This gives the students a real-life situation to practice speaking French," she said.

Students interviewed community members, then shared their results through PowerPoint demonstrations.

http://www.sunjournal.com/search/story.php?ID=145570

A new life in Maine

2006-02-27T17:07:00.000-05:00

A new life in Maine

By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer
Lewiston Sun Journal
Published : Monday-February 13, 2006

LEWISTON - When Abdirizak Maalin's 1-year-old daughter said her first words, they were in English.

It will be her mother tongue.

"We are very careful to talk only English around her," Maalin said. "She can learn the others, but first she must learn in English. I want her to be able to think in English."

Maalin, 22, a Somali Bantu refugee, is one of an estimated 300 Bantu - about 50 families - who have moved to Lewiston.

Like the ethnic Somalis before them, they see promise of a new life in Maine: a better economic future, a good education for their children and a chance to live safe and free.

But they are not the same as the ethnic Somalis, who began arriving in Lewiston five years ago and now number more than 2,300. The Bantu come from a different culture, speak a different language and have a different history.

"If you are from Somalia, people assume you are Somali and that you speak the same language," said Rilwan Osman, 21, another Bantu living in Lewiston. "We don't."

Lewiston's ethnic Somalis speak a dialect of common Somali. The Bantu speak a language called Maay Maay. They might know some words in Somali or English but are more comfortable in their native tongue.

The language difference leads to problems, Osman said. He's one of the five Bantu who serve as unofficial translators for the community. Friends and neighbors call him at all hours to help with job applications and meetings with doctors and government aid workers.

His unofficial status makes it hard, though. He has accompanied friends to important meetings several times, only to be asked to leave.

"They have their own translators but they speak Somali, not Maay Maay," Osman said. "They think that we must speak the same language, since we are from the same country. And I have to leave."

His friends come out of the meetings confused about what happened.

"Sometimes, we think the translator gives an answer just to get it finished," Osman said.

He and the other unofficial Maay Maay translators are working with Coastal Enterprises Inc. to gain official status. They're taking tests and getting permits. As official translators, they'll be paid for their efforts.

The Bantu's lack of English and Somali language skills has also been a challenge for local schools.

The city hopes to hire six new language teachers to help an expected 150 Bantu students. The increase in the English Language Learners program is part of a proposed $2.2 million spending increase, which won't affect local taxes because the city is getting a big increase in state aid.

The city's newest immigrants are melding with a diverse community. Lewiston has as many Spanish-speaking people as Bantu, and almost as many Sudanese and Ethiopian refugees.

The city's response to such influxes has improved since the first wave of Somalis arrived in 2001, said Phil Nadeau, Lewiston's deputy city administrator.

"We have systems to respond to non-English speakers of all types. We've been down this road before, but this time we know what to do," he said.

For example, having people on hand to help with translations has made a big difference. The city doesn't spend more money but it is more sensitive to non-English speakers, Nadeau said.

"We're more careful how we convey information," he said. The forms, informative posters and reminders all around City Hall are now written in English and three other languages - French, Spanish and Somali. Several city employees are fluent Somali speakers, and they're readily available to help.

So far, the city has relied on Somali speakers to translate for the Bantu, Nadeau said.

Osman hopes that will change when he and others become official Maay Maay translators. But the best solution is for the Bantu to learn English, and that is their priority.

Most have found jobs working as janitors and laborers at area businesses, but they also have enrolled in English classes through Lewiston Adult Education. Osman is working toward his GED, and both he and Maalin hope to go to college.

"Economically, we have a better chance here," Maalin said.

http://www.sunjournal.com/search/story.php?ID=144558

Safe in Her Shadow

2006-02-27T17:05:00.001-05:00

'All Will Be Well: A Memoir,' by John McGahern

Safe in Her Shadow
Review by VERLYN KLINKENBORG
February 26, 2006

IMAGINE a flock of birds somewhere in the west of Ireland, suddenly rising from a hayfield and settling in a line on a telephone wire. That's something like the effect of reading John McGahern's powerful memoir, in which the fragments of the life that lies scattered across his remarkable novels and stories seem to disentangle themselves from their embodying fictions and come home to roost.

If you've read McGahern before, you'll already know his territory — the fields and rivers, the villages and bogs. And you'll know both the subtlety and the plainness of the people who live here, on the border of County Leitrim and County Roscommon. If you haven't read McGahern before, this is a good place to start, at the heart of a lyric grief and an embittering passion.

The grief is for his mother, a teacher who died of cancer when McGahern, the oldest child in his oddly sorted family, was still a boy. They lived in a small bungalow outside the village of Ballinamore in County Leitrim. McGahern's father — a police sergeant and an occasional visitor in a blue Ford — lived 20 miles away in the barracks at Cootehall. Theirs was an unequal contest for the child's affections, made all the more unequal by his father's violent and unstable character. McGahern's young life was shaped by this imbalance: knowing one parent too briefly and the other (as far as he could be known at all) far too well.

"People did not live in Ireland then," McGahern writes. "They lived in small, intense communities which often varied greatly in spirit and character over the course of even a few miles." In his fiction, McGahern is one of Ireland's supreme topographers, mapping the nuances of minute shifts in neighborhood and class. The singular accomplishment of "All Will Be Well" is to show us, with almost blinding emotional clarity, the small, intense community of a particular young boy growing up in a certain set of fields and lanes by the side of his dying mother, a boy tortured, at irregular intervals, by the attentions, desirable and undesirable, of his parsimonious yet emotionally wasteful father. McGahern has hinted at all of this before — in his stories, in novels like "The Barracks" and "The Dark." But here he takes up his own life in his own hands.

I don't know another writer who grounds his fiction as inevitably in the natural world. Neither foreground nor background, it has no emotional fallacies to perpetrate on McGahern's behalf. It is simply the stuff of perception itself. In "All Will Be Well," McGahern reminds us of the way our appreciation of nature is grounded in repetition. The lanes near Ballinamore are overgrown with hedges, "and in the full leaf of summer," he tells us, "it is like walking through a green tunnel pierced by vivid pinpoints of light." What makes those lanes even more vivid is McGahern's memory of walking along them with his mother.

Woman and boy beat a long path through their short life together, and it is the familiarity of that path — its persistent emotional echo — that McGahern wants us to understand. "With her each morning," he writes of her walks with her young family, "we went up the cinder footpath to the little iron gate, past Brady's house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the deep, dark quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill by Mahon's shop to the school, and returned the same way in the evening."

That simple route recurs like a litany in "All Will Be Well." Walking by his mother's side — after she returns from an inexplicable absence and in the dim foreknowledge of her death — he is "safe in her shadow." The doubleness of that phrase — the fact that as a grown man he is still safe, even in the shadow of her death — haunts the book and also McGahern's understanding of life's purpose: "I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything."

From the reassuring mystery of his mother's love, the boy was suddenly plunged at her death into the impenetrable mystery of his father's overbearing presence. "Which of us knows who we are?" the neighbors said evasively when McGahern, later in life, asked them about his father. "He had a physical attractiveness that practically glowed," McGahern explains, "but seldom was he able to sustain it: he demanded that the whole outside world should reflect it perfectly back. Once this mirror dimmed or failed, his mood would turn."

The cardinal elements of this man's being were vanity and self-pity, which is all the more striking since McGahern's dying mother seems never to have grieved for herself. That the core of such a brutal man, so ready to beat his children, should turn out to be cowardice and weakness hardly seems surprising. Until the boy comes of age and stands up to his father, the children's only defense is their wicked mockery of a grown man — and a police sergeant at that — bemoaning his fate.

The course of "All Will Be Well" takes us through the writer's life, almost down to the present. And yet what makes this memoir so moving is its insistence — shared with many of McGahern's stories and novels — on the power of the single day that passes before us. For McGahern, daily routine is the root of our being, the arena of our noticing. It has an ontological glow, as if life were best understood in the episodic rhythms of daylight and darkness.

It is also a rhythm of expectation and disappointment. That is the world McGahern describes in his short story "Sierra Leone": "The rich uses we dreamed last night when it was threatened that we would put it to if spared were now forgotten, when again it lay all about us in such tedious abundance." But the day can also be one of epiphany, as in "The Wine Breath": "This, then, was the actual day, the only day that mattered, the day from which our salvation had to be won or lost: it stood solidly and impenetrably there, denying the weak life of the person, with nothing of the eternal other than it would dully endure."

There must, of course, come a day when the dying are removed into a separateness all their own. As a boy, McGahern clung to his mother, to the paths they walked. But as a man he comes to understand the true nature of her vanishing. "Those who are dying," he writes, "are marked not only by themselves but by the world they are losing. They have become the other people who die and threaten the illusion of endless continuity. Life goes on, but not for the dying, and this must be hidden or obscured or denied. . . . All the pious platitudes are like a covering of dust or chaff."

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes editorials for The New York Times. His new book, "Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile," has just been published.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/books/review/26klinkenborg.html

Mardi Gras: Beyond colored beads and cat masks

2006-02-27T17:05:00.000-05:00

Mardi Gras: Beyond colored beads and cat masks

Jenna Lefever
Etownian Staff Writer
Elizabethtown College

    Beads, beer, endless parties and un forgiving indulgences … the way to celebrate a holiday rooted in religion? It sounds like many college students' dreams, but Mardi Gras - as we know it - has actually evolved over hundreds of years in the Catholic faith.
   Mardi Gras, literally meaning "Fat Tuesday" in French, arrived in the United States at the end of the 17th century when French explorers first came to the U.S. and established New Orleans. However, this holiday is also celebrated internationally. Known as Carnival, Fasnacht Day and Shrove Tuesday in different parts of the world, Mardi Gras signifies the same thing the world over.
   In a religious sense, Mardi Gras is the last chance to indulge or celebrate before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. It is the last day of the season known as Carnival, which is a time of feasting before fasting during Lent. Carnival - literally meaning "farewell to meat" in Latin - generally lasts from Epiphany, which is the 12th day after Christmas, to Ash Wednesday, culminating the very last day as Mardi Gras.
   The reason people partake in all of the feasting and indulging during Mardi Gras is because during Lent which follows immediately, Catholics are to fast. "It is custom for Catholics to fast by consuming less food during the duration of Lent - 40 days - and abstain from eating meat on Fridays and now Tuesdays, too," Rev. David Danneker said. "Complete fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is still obligatory."
   Danneker, campus Catholic minister and faculty member in the department of philosophy, said that Lent is about more than just fasting.
   "One point of Lent is penance - to do something for yourself and for others. Too often, though, it is done in a selfish way that will only benefit the individual doing it," Danneker said. "The Church would prefer you do something positive by helping others - maybe helping the poor or the elderly."
   The world celebrates Mardi Gras in many unique ways. The most recognizable Mardi Gras celebration to Etown students would be the parties in New Orleans. Although Hurricane Katrina devastated the city last year, it wasn't enough to stop the Mardi Gras festivities. The traditions will take place once again this year.
   Included in the New Orleans festivities are parades, which own the streets of New Orleans from Saturday, Feb. 18, through the day of Mardi Gras, Feb. 28, an abundance of masks and costumes and the traditional devouring of King's cakes.
   What is a King's cake? According to www.mardigrasday.com, the official site of Mardi Gras New Orleans, the King's cake was traditionally made on Epiphany, which is the day in the Christian religion that the three kings brought gifts to the Christ child.
   "A very popular custom that is still celebrated is the making of the King's cake, which represents the three kings who brought gifts," the site explains. "A plastic baby is baked inside the King's cake, and the tradition is whoever receives the baby in their piece of cake must buy the next King's cake or throw the next party."
   And what is with all of the purple, green and gold? These are the colors of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Purple symbolizes justice, green symbolizes faith and gold symbolizes power.
   Rio de Janeiro is considered the Carnival capital of the world. During the four-day celebration ending the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, Carnival includes the crowning of a Fat King and performances from numerous singing and dancing groups and ultimately ends in the samba parade.
   In Nice, France, people celebrate with floats, masquerades, fireworks and parades. But what are Etownians doing for Mardi Gras?
   Danneker expects the Newman Club to have their Mardi Gras party Tuesday night, Feb. 28. Then there will be an Ash Wednesday service at 5 p.m. March 1. This service is growing in attendance each year, and Danneker said that the ashes used in the service make it unique.
   "The ashes are made from the palms from the year before," Danneker said. "They get burned on Monday so they are ready to be used before Ash Wednesday."
   If you're a senior just in the mood to celebrate, head to Bube's Brewery in Mount Joy from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 23. The night is planned to celebrate the 2006 hours left until graduation, but the theme of the night is Mardi Gras. Students who go to Bube's can celebrate two occasions in one exciting night.

http://www.etownian.com/060223/features-mardi_gras_beyond.asp

Family (un)ties

2006-02-27T17:04:00.000-05:00

SHELF LIFE
Family (un)ties

MARTIN LEVIN
Globe and Mail
POSTED ON 25/02/06

One of the most difficult aspects of this job is deciding which fiction titles should be reviewed in these pages. Obviously, with the Atwoods and Urquharts and Philip Roths and Ian McEwans of the world, that's not an issue. Ditto such Roman candles as Zadie Smith, Lisa Moore and David Mitchell. Rather, it's sorting out those thousands of novels published by unknowns, little-knowns and somewhat-knowns that vexes us. Since our priority is Canadian fiction, we simply try to cover as much of that, from presses large and small, as we can. Which leaves precious little turf for the rest.

All of which means that a combination of judicious attention, research and luck is required to sort out the likeliest candidates. Given the sheer volume, your editors rarely have opportunity to examine more than a page or two of a new novel, or to check out who's supplied the dust-jacket blurbs (that's another issue entirely).

One way of deciding which of these many young wines might lay down well is through the intermittently reliable grapevine -- industry and individual buzz. Publishers are supposed to wax ecstatic about their literary children, but often, one can pick up an extra vibe, a measure of true enthusiasm beyond the hype. A better way is to consult colleagues in the business.

A while ago, I asked the editor of a U.S. books magazine what enthused her this season. Unhesitatingly, she fired back: A Family Daughter, by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 325 pages, $32).

In recent weeks, I've devoted columns to two marvellous British women writers of a certain age (Rose Tremain and Jane Gardam). So now, it's a pleasure to discover a younger American fictionist-- a kind of old world, new world thing.

I hadn't read Malloy's first novel (following a short-story collection), Liars and Saints, but when a debut novel is extravagantly praised by the disparate likes of Philip Roth, Ann Patchett and Helen Fielding, one pays attention. Our own reviewer, Cynthia Holz, called this chronicle of an American Catholic family "resonant and moving."

That now beloved California family was the Santerres, who are back for another round in A Family Daughter. "Dazzling" is a word perhaps too promiscuously employed by book reviewers, but in this case, I think it entirely applicable. I still haven't read Liars and Saints, but shall remedy that deficiency in short order. . . .

. . . Two hours later.

I still can't say that I've read Liars and Saints, but I have looked into it, as Dr. Johnson once replied to an interlocutor who questioned whether he'd actually read a book he'd reviewed.

I'm glad I did because, although either book can be read by itself with considerable gain, neither is quite comprehensible without the other. Think of A Family Daughter as a companion piece to Liars and Saints, a gloss, an extension, a re-imagination, a literary unsettling.

The earlier novel is a half-century history of the Santerre clan of California, headed by French-Canadian matriarch Yvette (nationalists will be glad to learn that she is almost certainly the "saint" in question), and involves family secrets and lies, family hopes and family dysfunctions: Think Buddenbrooks, but with incest and lesbianism.

The central character of the new novel, which opens in 1979, is Abby, who played a very different part in its predecessor. (Note to readers of that book: Prepare to be surprised and initially perplexed by the opening of this one.) She is sick with the chicken pox, and it is with the efforts to rouse her out of bored illness that Meloy's elegantly tangled web begins its weaving. Abby, it turns out, is a novelist. And that's all I'll say about that, not wanting to interfere with the many pleasures that await you in the tale itself.

But you may think that this complex interplay is but tricksy postmodernism, and that Ian McEwan has already pulled off the novel as constructed by one of its characters in his masterpiece Atonement. But you'd be wrong. Though the linking of the two novels is an impressive technical feat, it's much more than a game in which the author denies reader expectation by contradicting events we thought settled in the earlier book. Meloy also investigates the nature of faith, love and betrayals of various sorts.

To be sure, these are all consistent elements of family sagas, one of literature's enduring forms. But rarely are they executed with such range and depth of intelligence and feeling, such nuanced development of character, such richness of perception. And all written in a prose that is captivating without being showy. Not least impressive is Meloy's ability to marshall the elements of melodrama without ever descending into it.

Maile Meloy has a most impressive understanding of the vagaries and contradictions of our humanity. In the Santerre family, she has fashioned a clan that we half love, half despair of. More than a writer to watch, Maile Meloy is a writer to read. Maybe she'll even become a writer to treasure, one whose works go directly to the Must Review pile.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060225.BKLEVI25/TPStory/SpecialEvents/columnists

The Americans of today and of tomorrow - Visions of a Newropean (I)

2006-02-27T17:03:00.000-05:00

The Americans of today and of tomorrow - Visions of a Newropean (I)

Written by Franck Biancheri
Thursday, 23 February 2006
This particular article was finished only a few days before the September 11th attacks. The author chose to keep it as it had been written knowing sthat it can provide elements of clarification on the current reactions and their consequences. It constitutes a truly European view, open and friendly, but far from any fascination, on the people and country that have been at the centre of History since the beginning of the 20th century. This view is not that of a passive spectator, but of someone curious to identify what tomorrow is made of, as much for the sake of the Americans themselves, as for the sake of this Europe with a future so uncertain.

The future Americans : Growing diversity and growing ignorance of the outside world - Why the Americans … and not America ?
Because it is a choice : to talk about the Americans , and to forget America for a while ! Because it is easier : indeed, the word, the concept " America " conveys such a mass of clichés, prejudices, images… that it results in more opacity than clarity Because it is lucid : America is diverse, a lot more diverse than we, Europeans, want to admit. Therefore talking about the people renders the task easier while stressing the fact that the subject is multiple.
Because there is this profound conviction gradually gained by the author : America is the creation of the Americans (and not of God Himself, as many Americans prefer to believe !); and just like any human creation, it is in constant evolution. And this evolution is all the more unpredictable that the history of America is so short. Moreover it is strongly shaped by immigration knowing that the demographic evolution of the US can record important changes in 2 or 3 decades.

Therefore these Americans of tomorrow, who will they be ?

Americans less white, and a lot less " European "
Of course, they will in the first place be yesterday's and today's Americans. If we look towards 2020, we shall find the same ethnic components than in 2001 … but in very different proportions. The human cocktail that America is will have a colour, a flavor and therefore a relation to the world, fundamentally different from that of today. Whites, Afro-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, Arabs…. ; catholics, protestants, jews, muslims, buddhists, members of all sorts of sects. All of them will be there … but nothing will be like the mythical America as it has been fixed by the images dating back to the 1950's-1960's, and that we, as much as most Americans, still bear in mind.
The last census (Census 2000, http://www.census.gov ) clearly states these trends : the Latinos precede the Afro-Americans in percentage of population, the Asians continue to grow and belong increasingly to the richer category, California has lost its white majority. Here are three examples of a trend that has already begun and that will most certainly carry on and intensify.

When you look at the immense space of the United-States on the map of a world that is more and more " full ", you can not but suppose that the migration pressures coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America will increase. The Europeans occupied the American space namely because their populations were in full expansion and poor ; but for the last few decades already, it is no longer Europe which has a problem of population " surplus " … and it is rich now, mostly. The American West Coast already records a growing Latin and Asian (mainly Chinese) presence ; the South-West is practically " reconquested " by the Hispanics. Florida has become the " gate of Latin America " (Miami is de facto becoming the capital of South America) and no longer belongs to the " WASP " cultural model. By addressing the Hispanic community in Spanish, candidate George W. Bush proved that he was more adapted to these Americans of tomorrow's American than candidate Al Gore, incarnation of the East-Cost, WASP, culturally European model that now belongs to the past of this country (not as an individual of course, but as the incarnation of a future America).

These trends are dominant and growingly present. These populations whose political, cultural, economic influence grows rapidly, carry a vision of the world where the importance of the transatlantic axis is more relative. The United-States were conquered/constructed by Americans from Europe. In 20 years-time, they will predominantly be in the hands of Americans from America or Asia. From a Newropean's point of view, this means that the EU/US relation will be more complex, more fragile and will require to be founded on new bases in order to reinforce the historical foundations of a community of values and culture : something which in the coming years will be incumbent upon the Europeans and their descendants in the United States. This key-population, dominant but declining, must absolutely start thinking about how to handle these evolutions … rather than cling to this sense of immutability of the United States (see next article on the political system).

Americans ethno-geographically more divided
… in a European way, so to speak
It has always been possible to identify certain geographical areas in relation with certain ethnic groups : Scandinavians in the Middle-West, Afro-Americans in the South… But in the last few decades, this identification has become more acute due to the decreasing will of certain groups to assimilate to the dominant WASP model, sometimes even rejected (Hispanics and Asians, namely). This tendency is reinforced by the "politically correct" movement, which in the end aims at dividing the " minority with a majority tendency " (non-WASP and white catholic) into myriads of sub-minorities competing with one another, and results in legitimating a multitude of identity claims from which the territorial aspect can not be excluded a priori. It is striking to hear a "chicanos" leader explain how the Hispanics of Arizona and New Mexico managed to build the instruments of their cultural autonomy through the development of small community funds, schools, companies, media and universities … exactly like Quebec did it 50 years earlier.

The South-East region of the United-States is also characteristic of another "very European" phenomenon that does not correspond to what the Europeans tend to believe : the true conquest of New-Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California … through a war over Hispanic local populations. A war of territorial conquest … here is another very European feature. And here again, as History changes, the demographic and economic data can bring surprising processes of questioning of what was taken for granted yesterday … the Europeans know this very well - we shall come back on this aspect.

But it is certain that one of the important factors of territorial unification (scarcely populated spaces, associated to a unique and powerful dominant cultural model) is fading away with no obvious replacement in sight.

This may seem paradoxical but it can it be seriously considered today that, under certain cultural or ethnic aspects, the Americans are more diverse than the Europeans. When driving from a "dry-county" in Arkansas (where reigns a complete prohibition on alcohol, and where churches are more numerous than shops, a region that wavers between 17th century-Puritanism and 1920's-prohibition) to a metropolis like Denver, Las Vegas or New-York; or when living in a 2000-inhabitant village amidst Wyoming surrounded by cow-boys and guns, and 300 miles away from the first 50.000 inhabitant city, a whole range of cultural, religious and ethic values is experienced. Behind the radical uniformity, rather oppressing for a European, of the " material " standard and cheap way of life (food, cars, equipments of all sorts, TV programmes), there is an " immaterial " galaxy surprizing by the scope of its diversity.
In Europe, it is no longer possible (since WWII) to find such radical expressions of difference (or even divergence) between the founding values of a modern society. In the middle of Kansas, it requires an immense effort to remember that there is "another" world, somewhere far (Westward or Eastward, the first foreign frontier is over 10.000 miles away; Southward it is 1.500 miles away, and Northward … well, it does not even really exist / In Europe, a frontier is always less than 300 miles away). The Americans of tomorrow bear an extraordinary diversity that can become explosive if the transition between Golden-Age-America (which ended in the 60's) and tomorrow's America is not anticipated today by the ruling elites
The mix between " geographical insertion " and " growing ethno-cultural diversity " will result in a radical questioning of the common unifying fact, if it continues to be solely handled by the dominant group/model. This will be increased by the double religious trend which polarizes society around increasingly diverging groups : those who continue to consider that God is the only master America can find for itself (including in the school programmes); and those who think that God's place is not at the heart of the political and social system.

Americans less and less able to understand the world that surrounds them
A world which begins in their own country. In the last decade, I was struck by a gradually increasing double-process concerning the new generations

On the one hand, there is the general and overwhelming statement regarding the drift all along the last 2-3 decades of the primary and secondary educational system.

On the other hand, there is the flagrant lack of intellectual curiosity of the young Americans.
These two aspects must be related to a major fact : for the elder generations, the statement is the reverse, i.e. presenting good quality of education and a real intellectual curiosity, particularly when it comes to the “foreigner".

Something has therefore happened, or is happening, which modifies radically (in the wrong sense) the level and quality of education of the new generations of Americans.
We shall come back more in detail on the difficulties of the educational system in some next article. At this stage, let's concentrate on the result : an important part (the poorest one) of the growing generations of Americans have a very weak level of education (confirmed by American and international studies), reaching close to 25% of illiterates. Moreover the international approach is so much ignored that President Clinton had to place international education as a priority of "national security" in an "Executive Order" in 2000. At the centre of the global exchequer, the Americans educate their children to ignore the rest of the world.
Worrying for them … worrying for us ! It could be useful that the Europeans bring some active support to those in Washington or in the various networks of teachers and economic leaders, who try to counter this dangerous tendency.
Educated by "Multiple Choice Items" rather unlikely to develop intellectual curiosity and autonomous thinking, without any external reference enabling the comparison, fed to the ideal image of Golden-Age-America, intellectually anaesthetized by a system that favours systematic encouragement and political correctness, the American growing generations are in fact the great unknown in the landscape described before. One thing is already certain : the America of multinationals will increasingly draw their executives from non-American human resources. It has already began.
Moreover one of the main factors of opening to the outside world that had affected generations of Americans since 1942 gradually disappeared in the 90's, and that is the presence of numerous American troops all over the globe (and Europe, particularly). This phenomenon enabled millions of young Americans from various social backgrounds to discover something else than their own country … today, this "window" on the outside world is closed, already affecting those generations which were 20 in the 90's. While the " family window ", that of the family links of the white majority from Europe, is closing now that the time of massive migrations is that of the grand-parents and even great-grand-parents.
And it is not the recurrent problem that Afro-Americans are confronted with in their effort to appropriate American history (which they were forced to join … contrary to the other ethnic groups that reached the US following their own will) and identity, which will lead to a better opening to the world. Between the fascination for a completely made-up history (in which Egypt is a black mother-civilization of all following civilizations, or where the "blackitude" of Jesus is a basic fact - I witnessed edifying diatribes in this respect during the meetings celebrating the Black History Month in Cleveland), and the feeling to have been trapped by the integration offered by the Whites in the 60's-70's (brilliant Afro-American lawyers, children of the civil rights, recommending to the black students of the Stillman College not to integrate with the whites, and taking as an example of the problems African-Americans face the persistence of racism within schools even in the richest and most liberal areas). The myth of a dreamed-Africa, in the end ignored, and the rejection of the European axis, provide no perspective in the short- nor in the middle-term.

The Internet appears de facto as the only means to attract the massive attention of the younger generations of Americans to the rest of the world … under the condition that in the US as well as in Europe, the awareness is raised on the risk that there is that whole generations from the most powerful country in the world become totally alien to everything that is not themselves. For the moment, it seems that some American officials (State Department, Ministry of Education/FIPSE, academics) try to act (like in the organisation of the International Education Week in November) ; but the internal inertia is heavy while outside there is no awareness of the importance of these challenges whatsoever.

To make it short, we must imagine the Americans of tomorrow profoundly different from those that the world knew in the 20th century.
They will also be submitted to new constraints that yesterday's Americans could afford to ignore, but that will weigh over that of tomorrow*. Their common heritage is only partly common and their collective appropriation is not yet given. It is a population in transition towards a new model yet to be defined, which shall be marked by the end of the classically dominant WASP model. Let's hope that the transition will be handled smoothly. But there again, nothing is certain.
Finally and that's the most worrying point, the younger generations of Americans are today among the most ill-prepared to confront and understand globalization, its constraints, and consequences. Contrary to a general idea among the younger Americans, globalisation is not the "americanization" of the rest of the world, but rather it requires to understand better diversity and different cultures; and paradoxically, this implicates an increased influence of the rest of world over the United-States themselves. Internal ethnic diversity could contribute to widen their horizon but only if the sollicitations exist.
As a Newropean, it is clearly this aspect which appears to me as the most likely to convey negative consequences for Europe and for the rest of the world, and which requires an original action from the Europeans in particular. Indeed the problems of transition (not only demographic) that this country is about to encounter could bring very prejudicial over reactions.
The responsibility of the ruling generations as well as of the coming one (the 40 years old) is crucial. Making education a priority as President Bush is doing, is essential ; but the historical challenge is to do it, not only to try to do it.

Franck Biancheri
President of Newropeans
President of Tiesweb

This series, online namely on the TIESWEB derives from the very concrete experience gathered by Franck Biancheri in over a decade on the United-States and the EU/US relations. Not pretending to be either a scientific study or a report, this series of texts reflects the visions of a 40-year-old European in an attempt to cast a European eye on the Americans, the United-States and their future. It is the expression of the learnings drawn from an unusual succession of discoveries/cooperations with the Americans :

-- - invitation in January/February 1991 (during the Gulf War) by the American State Department to a 1-month-stay in the US in the frame of the "Young European Political Leaders" programme
- launch of the Prometheus-Europe network towards North America in 1996
- launch in 1997 in Wahington at the Blair House on the occasion of the EU/US Summit, of the Transatlantic webportal TIESWEB addressed to the civil societies of both sides
- development of TIESWEB since that time (F. Biancheri is the President) along meetings/symposia/conferences held everywhere in the US
- contribution to the launch of the first North American student network (North American Student Forum in Vera-Cruz in 1999)
- launch of the Transatlantic 2020 project in cooperation with the EU Center of theUniversity of Atlanta in April 2000, in presence of Jacques Delors
- survey on the United-States from the " interior " during the Summer 2001
- co-animation of the " September 11th - Transatlantic Response " Internet discussion list, in partnership with various American NGOs.
In a decade, Franck Biancheri visited 34 American States and met with the highest levels of the " Wahingtonian " circles, with academic and NGO leaders from all over the country, and with simple citizens on their living, working or leisuring places.

http://www.newropeans-magazine.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3495&Itemid=85

Opinions clash over lauded 'Brokeback'

2006-02-27T17:02:00.000-05:00

Opinions clash over lauded 'Brokeback'

By Bob Withers
The Herald-Dispatch
Huntington Herald Dispatch, WV
Huntington, WV
LOCAL NEWS | Monday, February, 13, 2006
Herald-Dispatch.com

HUNTINGTON -- It's a cowboy film the Holly-wood crowd praises as "one of the greatest cinematic love stories of all time."

So do the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and other homosexual groups.

But churches and parachurch goups such as Focus on the Family are howling about it. And, last month, a subtle President Bush told a bunch of Kansas ranchers -- three times in the same speech -- that he hadn't seen it.

"Brokeback Mountain," now showing at Marquee Cinemas in Pullman Square, has received eight Oscar nominations, and the Venice Film Festival gave it a Golden Lion last year.

The movie is a tale about two young cowboys portrayed by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal who become lovers while tending sheep in Wyoming in 1963. They both eventually marry and have children, but keep arranging fishing trips as an excuse to get away together from unhappy family lives.

Whatever your position on the issue, it's likely intractable.

"It's not something you want to explore with your children," says Karen Sellers of Barboursville, a member of Christ Temple Church. "I believe the Word of God when it says homosexuality is an abomination. Even though God loves sinners, he hate their sins and wants everybody to turn from their wicked ways."

The Rev. Chuck Lawrence, Sellers' pastor, says he hasn't seen the film but has researched its content.

"Even though the movie comes highly acclaimed in the area of filmmaking, I am concerned about the message it is sending out, especially to our young people -- that it's OK to disregard covenant marriage vows and leave children behind for the sake of an affair," he says. "That message is detrimental to our society."

Jason Arthur, co-owner of Java Joint, has read the short story by Annie E. Proulx upon which the film is based and wants to see the movie, too. He's glad gays are finally being portrayed in a positive way.

"If the gay community is forced to watch love affairs between straight couples on TV -- even in sitcoms -- and have no problem with it, it's about time they have a movie that shows that any two people can fall in love with each other. If it was between a man and a women or two women, it would be considered a 'chick flick,' and no one would have a problem with it. But because its about two men who happen to fall in love with each other, it's a huge problem."

Douglas Evans, co-director of Marshall University's Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Outreach Office, thought it was great.

"It does provide a different perspective of how a gay or lesbian relationship would play out in a society where they're dealing with repression of themselves and having to fit in." he says. "That causes a lot of issues."

The Rev. Paul Willis, pastor of First Baptist Church, says the film destroys his heroes.

"Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, John Wayne, those guys created my image of cowboys. They were macho -- masculinity at its finest," he says.

But, Willis adds, he plans to see the film.

"I'll get some sermon material," he says.

Bill Smith, one of Willis' deacons and superintendent of Cabell County Schools, is planning to see the film if he has time and doesn't want to comment on its controversial nature.

"People have told me it's excellent," he says. "It's a movie that's well done and stars actors who are well-known."

Nolan Grubb, an insurance and investment representative who sometimes teaches Sunday School at Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, isn't going.

"I've read enough to know it's a movie that presents an agenda rather than an honest look at homosexuality in rural America," he says

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060213/NEWS01/602130306/1001/NEWS

In France, baby boom and bust

2006-02-27T17:01:00.000-05:00

In France, baby boom and bust

By Celestine Bohlen Bloomberg News

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
PARIS Even though the French government has promoted large families for 200 years, the country still is not producing enough babies to pay for its aging population.

Cash payments, tax breaks and subsidized child care have helped make France's fertility rate the second highest in Europe. It still is not high enough to rescue the country from an aging population that threatens state spending on pensions and health.

"Even France, with its great juggernaut of family policies, can't say they are a success," said Jonathan Grant, director of Rand Europe, a research institute based in Cambridge, England, and the author of a 2004 report on fertility in Europe.

Aging populations are straining government budgets throughout the region, as the number of workers supporting each pensioner declines. The working-age population of Europe will drop to 57 percent in 2050, from 67 percent today, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency based in Luxembourg.

France's fertility rate, or the number of children per woman of child-bearing age, rose to 1.94 last year, second only to Ireland among EU countries. Germany, which has the largest population in the Union, had a fertility rate of 1.37, below the EU average of 1.5. Italy, Spain, Greece and seven countries in Eastern Europe reported even lower rates.

The fruitfulness of French women is a matter of national pride for the country's politicians. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin forecast last month that the baby boom and immigration might make France the most populous country in Europe by 2030. "Rejoice," he told the Paris press corps.

The reality is likely to be different.

France's population in 2030 will be 68 million, said Guy Desplanques, head of demography at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, in a recent interview. That would leave it behind Germany, where the population is expected to remain steady at about 82.7 million.

"There is a side of people which puts an emphasis on the 'grandeur' of France," Desplanques said.

France's pride in population growth dates from the end of the 18th century, when it had fewer people than Britain. "Natalist" policies, designed to encourage women to have more babies, have been part of the French political tradition ever since, Desplanques said.

"It is a consensus shared by all politicians," he said. "You will not find a single political party in France that supports a drop in the birthrate.'

'

By 1940, France's population, hit hard by World War I, was 40 million, roughly where it had been in 1840. By 2000, it had jumped to 60 million, the largest increase in Europe.

In addition to financial incentives, government policies encourage working women to take time off to have babies. State-supported day-care centers and nursery schools are available for infants starting at the age of 3 months, with parents paying a sliding scale according to income.

Last September, Villepin proposed changing benefits to encourage women to have a third child, without having to take too much time off work. Instead of receiving a government payment of €512, or about $612, a month for three years, the mother could opt for €750 a month over one year.

Even with such policies, France's population, now 60.7 million, will continue to age. A third of the country's population will be more than 60 years old by 2050, up from 21 percent now, Desplanques forecasts. That ratio is in line with a European average that will strain budgets across the Continent. Immigration, now increasing by about 100,000 a year for a total of 4.2 million foreign-born residents in France last year, will not change that, experts say.

"One of the biggest challenges the EU faces is how to respond to demographic changes," Odile Quintin, the European Commission's director general for employment and social affairs, said last spring.

Barring changes to national pension programs, Europe's aging population will mean an increase in spending on pensions by 5.25 percent of gross domestic product by 2050, a commission study in 2001 found.

France's welfare system, including health care, retirement and support for families, is already in deficit, with a budget shortfall of €12.9 billion.

"I am convinced that we go even further" in raising the birth rate, Finance Minister Thierry Breton said. "It is part of the solution to high growth, above all in face of the aging of our population."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/21/business/boom.php

Female Resistance to Male Authority, Part Two

2006-02-27T16:58:00.001-05:00

Female Resistance to Male Authority, Part Two

February 21, 2006

by Mary Arnold

Female Code of Conduct in the Court Life of France

The Heptameron is a collection of seventy stories told by five men and five women, including discussion of the stories. Taken together, these tales depict the lives of women in sixteenth-century France. Like their Eastern counterparts, women were expected to be governed by the men in their lives, either husband or father. The dominant attitude is that "women are made solely for [men's] benefit" (Navarre 119). The men assert that "it becomes [women] so well to be soft and gentle" in their relationships with men (Navarre 187). A lady who withholds her love and favors from a man is deemed 'cruel.' One of the storytellers compares this withholding of love to starvation from lack of food:

Saffredent: Nevertheless, if a lady refuses to give bread to some poor wretch dying of hunger, then she is regarded as a murderess.

Oisille: If your requests were as reasonable as those of the poor begging bread in their hour of need, then a lady would indeed be extremely cruel to refuse them. But the malady you are talking of only kills those, thank God, who would die anyway within the year!

Saffredent: Madame, I cannot think that a man can have any greater need than that which makes him forget all other needs. Indeed, when love is truly great, a lover knows no other bread, knows no other meat, than a glance, a word from his beloved. (Navarre 426)

Like Genji, the men in The Heptameron employ the rhetoric of lovesickness in attempts to gain favors from women. If a woman doesn’t love a man who purports to love her, she is accused of inflicting "diabolical torture" that is more painful than "all the torments in Hell" (Navarre 283). Also like Genji, sixteenth-century French men believed their "honour ruined" if they failed in their conquests (Navarre 97). Therefore when a man is faced with a woman who is "too sensible and good to be tricked" and "too well-behaved to be won around by presents and talk," he is "justified" in taking her "by force" (Navarre 219).

The double standard prevalent in sixteenth-century France was promoted by women as being the proper conduct for women. Parlamente (the character who is thought to be Marguerite de Navarre) asserts that:

Women who are dominated by pleasure have no right to call themselves women. They might as well call themselves men, since it is men who regard violence and lust as something honourable. When a man kills an enemy in revenge because he has been crossed by him, his friends think he's all the more gallant. It's the same thing when a man, not content with his wife, loves a dozen other women as well. But the honour of women has a different foundation: for them the basis of honour is gentleness, patience and chastity. (Navarre 397)

It's interesting to note some of the male storytellers refuse to believe "the hearts of men and women [are] any different" (Navarre 254). Since women desire the same things as men, i.e. love and passion, a man is able to destroy "the fortress of the heart where Honour dwells" if he only perseveres long enough to persuade the lady to give "herself up to that which she had never wished to resist" in the first place (Navarre 214).

The male storytellers and the male characters have difficulty believing a woman whom they desire might not desire them also. They ascribe female reluctance to their sense of modesty, not faithfulness to their husbands if she is married or chastity if she is not married. While social standards of female conduct in sixteenth-century France are very similar to those of tenth-century Japan, the female storytellers and women depicted in the stories possess an important difference from their Eastern counterparts: They are more assertive in resisting male dominance, particularly in controlling their own sexuality.

Female Resistance to French Code of Conduct

Although some of the male storytellers advocate rape if the woman refuses all sexual advances, in the majority of the stories told in The Heptameron rape and attempted rape rarely go unpunished, unlike The Tale of Genji. In Story Five after the ferrywoman escapes the two friars' attempted rape, she rounds up a mob from her village to return to the islands and seize the two friars (Navarre 99). All the villagers were "anxious to join in the hunt and have his share of the fun" (Navarre 99). The two friars were tied up and paraded through the village streets "to the shouts and jeers of every man and woman in the place" (Navarre 99).

Some women in the stories are threatened into submission, like the nun in Story Seventy-two who "dare[s] not resist" the monk whom she considers "the most pious man in the place" (Navarre 540). However, the majority of the women actively resist unwanted advances. Unlike the women in The Tale of Genji, most of the female characters will physically fight with their male oppressors. In Story Four, the Princess fends off her attacker by biting and scratching his face horribly (Navarre 92). Also in Story Forty-Six, a wife of a judge kicks a friar down the attic stairs when he refuses to heed her warning not to follow her into the attic (Navarre 406). These are only two of the many instances when women will physically engage in fights with men; in this regard, they are very different from the women in tenth-century Japan.

The women agree it is "reasonable" that husbands should govern their wives but stipulate that husbands should not "abandon them nor treat [them] badly" (Navarre 361). The majority of the wives who are treated badly resist their husbands' ill behavior in some manner. Some women try to change their husbands' behavior, and others seek out means to avenge themselves.

In Story Thirty-seven, a wife embarks upon a campaign to win back her husband's love after he begins cheating on her. When he returns to his wife in the morning, she gives him a bowl of water to wash his hands, saying it is "only decent to wash one's hands when one had been somewhere foul and dirty" (Navarre 359). She hopes to induce her husband to "acknowledge and abhor his wicked ways" (Navarre 359). This ritual continues for a year, but the husband’s behavior does not change. The wife then decides more drastic measures are needed; she hunts all over the house until she discovers her husband in a bed with "the ugliest, dirtiest, and foulest chambermaid in the house" (Navarre 359). She sets fire to straw in the room and when the husband fails to wake, the wife shakes him awake. She tells him if he does not change his ways, she doesn’t know if she "shall have it in [her] power a second time to save [him] from danger" (Navarre 359). Her husband promises "never again to give her cause to suffer on his account" (Navarre 359).

Other wives in the stories attempt to shame their husbands for their philandering by conspiring with the women their husbands have been pursuing. In Story Eight and Story Fifty-Nine, wives instruct the chambermaids to set up a rendezvous with the husbands. In the first, the wife takes the place of the chambermaid (Navarre 109), and in the second the wife arrives at the rendezvous and catches the husband in the act of seducing the servant (Navarre 467). These two examples reflect a growing resistance to the double standard of sexual conduct. No such resistance to this double standard is seen in The Tale of Genji. In the court of Japan, it is a given that men will have more than one wife and/or concubines.

In the circumstance of cheating husbands, some women decide to avenge themselves by taking lovers also. The wife in Story Fifteen tried "everything in her power to win [her husband] around," but he refused to give up his illicit affairs (Navarre 190). The lady became depressed, and earned the pity of a noble lord who attempts to console her. The King puts this friendship to an end, but she soon discovers another man willing to be her lover. Her husband, finally realizing his wife's beauty and desirability, begins to pay more attention to her; but it is too little, too late. By this time, the wife has "a desire to pay him back for the sorrows that his lack of love had brought her in the past" (Navarre 192).

French women also attempted to seclude themselves from men who had dishonorable designs upon them. In Story Forty-two, a townswoman is pursued by a young prince who believes she would be an easy conquest. The prince sends a messenger to declare his intentions, but the young woman feigns disbelief and insists the messenger must have made it all up without his master's knowledge (Navarre 382). The prince begins to court her by letters, but she refuses to answer. She also avoids attending events in which she might see him. When he arranges a ploy to gain access to her house, he pleads with her to "give [him her] love in return," admonishing her for her "spite" in continuing to refuse him (Navarre 384). However she says she "would rather die" than do anything that would damage her virtue (Navarre 384). She continues to remain chaste, earning the enduring respect of the prince who arranges an honorable marriage for her.

In The Heptameron, one can discern rising levels of consciousness that women should be allowed to choose their own husbands. One example of this resistance to others determining a woman's marital state occurs in Story Forty. In this story, the Comte de Jossebelin refuses to let any man marry his sister. She and a young man who lives in the household fall in love and are secretly married (Navarre 368). Even though the sister is old enough to marry whom she wants and is legally allowed to do so, her brother has the man killed when he becomes knowledgeable of the marriage. The Comte, wary that his sister might "seek revenge or would appeal to the law" has a castle built in the middle of the forest in which he locks her away "forbidding anyone to speak with her" (Navarre 370). After a time, he attempts to "regain her confidence" and even insinuates he will allow her to marry (Navarre 370). But his sister resists all appeasement and, in effect, places a curse upon her brother for his evil actions with the result that he and his six sons "all die[ ] miserably" (Navarre 370). Although the common social custom is still that women should seek guidance and permission in their choice of husbands, there is a growing attitude that women should marry for love and not as a matter of convenience or financial gain.

In The Heptameron, there are many women who resist the customary sexual norms imposed upon them. The majority of these women though usually experience punishment for their transgressions; one of the few exceptions to this occurs in Story Forty-Nine, which also depicts the extremity of female promiscuity. A foreign Count and Countess are visiting the court of King Charles, when the King becomes enamoured of the Countess (Navarre 417). King Charles sends her husband away on business so he can have the Countess "to himself" (Navarre 417). But the wayward Countess is not content with the King only; she 'imprisons' a succession of men in her dressing room for a week at a time, installing another one whenever she releases the one currently hiding there (Navarre 418).

Each of the men knew that the others desired the Countess, but they each believed that he was the only one to "have his wishes granted" and each man "secretly laughed at the others for having failed to win such a prize" (Navarre 418). Eventually however the six men who were the Countess' captives could no longer keep from bragging about their sexual conquests, and so they all learned what the Countess had been doing (Navarre 419). They decide to punish her by accosting the Countess on her way to Mass, all dressed in black and wearing an iron chain around their necks to signify their 'slave' status (Navarre 420).

The Countess realizes she has been found out, but she refuses to let the men succeed to humiliate her; she does not "become angry or change her behaviour in any way" (Navarre 421). The six prisoners of the Countess "were so abashed at this that the shame they had desired to bring down on her fell upon them and remained in their hearts" (Navarre 421). The Countess' evenness of temper conveys to the men the idea her behavior is no more shameful than their own had been. While the female storytellers condemn the Countess' actions harshly while not commenting on the men's behavior, this story and many others exhibits an increasing hostility towards the double standard of male and female sexuality.

If one compares male attitudes towards women in The Tale of Genji and The Heptameron, one will see little difference regarding their views of female inferiority and subjectivity to males. The primary difference exists in how the females themselves comprehend their roles in society. Women in tenth-century Japan are taught to be completely docile and submissive to the male figures in their lives. The only resistance they exert is of the passive kind, i.e. with admonitions, feigning illness, and concealing themselves as much as possible from men. In contrast, the women of sixteenth-century France are much more assertive in defending themselves from physical abuses and ill treatment from men. However the prevailing attitude is still that women should be submissive to their fathers, brothers, and husbands as long as those men do not treat them badly. A woman is only justified in opposing male authority if she is not treated with the kindness and consideration that is due to her.

Bibliography

Navarre, Marguerite de. The Heptameron. Trans. P.A. Chilton. London: Penguin Books, 1984.

Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Random House, 1990.

Mary Arnold holds a B.A. in literature and history. She is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ which is a site for Fiction Writing. Her writing portfolio may be viewed at http://www.Writing.com/authors/ja77521

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/3690.php

France's Baby Boom Isn't Enough to Reverse Aging Population

2006-02-27T16:58:00.000-05:00

France's Baby Boom Isn't Enough to Reverse Aging Population

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- France, where the government has promoted large families for 200 years, doesn't have enough babies.

Cash payments, tax breaks and subsidized child care have helped make France's fertility rate the second highest in Europe. It still isn't high enough to rescue the country from an aging population that threatens state spending on pensions and health.

``Even France, with its great juggernaut of family policies, can't say they are a success,'' said Jonathan Grant, director of Rand Europe, a research institute based in Cambridge, England, and the author of a 2004 report on fertility in Europe.

Aging populations are straining government budgets throughout the region, as the number of workers supporting each pensioner declines. The working-age population of Europe will drop to 57 percent in 2050, from 67 percent today, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency in Luxembourg.

France's fertility rate, or the number of children per woman of child-bearing age, rose to 1.94 last year, second only to Ireland among European Union nations. Germany, with Europe's largest population, had a fertility rate of 1.37, below the EU average of 1.5. Italy, Spain, Greece and seven countries in eastern Europe reported even lower rates.

National Pride

The fruitfulness of French women is a matter of national pride for the country's politicians. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin last month, claimed the baby boom and immigration might make France the most populous country in Europe by 2030. ``Rejoice,'' he told the Paris press corps.

The reality is likely to be different.

France's population in 2030 will be 68 million, Guy Desplanques, head of demography at the Paris-based National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, said in a Jan. 13 interview. That would leave it behind Germany, where the population is expected to remain steady at about 82.7 million.

``There is a side of people which puts an emphasis on the 'grandeur' of France,'' Desplanques said.

France's pride in population growth dates back to the end of the 18th century, when it had fewer people than Britain or Russia. ``Natalist'' policies, designed to encourage women to have more babies, have been part of the French political tradition ever since, Desplanques said.

``It is a consensus shared by all politicians,'' he said. ``You will not find a single political party in France that supports a drop in the birth rate.''

World War I

By 1940, France's population, hit hard by World War I, was 40 million, roughly where it had been in 1840. By 2000, it had jumped to 60 million, the largest increase in Europe.

In addition to financial incentives, government policies encourage working women to take time off to have babies. State- supported day-care centers and nursery schools are available for infants starting at the age of three months, with parents paying a sliding scale according to income.

Last September, de Villepin proposed changing benefits to encourage women to have a third child, without having to take too much time off work. Instead of receiving a government payment of 512 euros a month for three years, the mother could opt for 750 euros a month over one year.

Even with such policies, France's population, now 60.7 million, will continue to age. A third of the country's population will be over 60 by 2050, up from 21 percent now, Desplanques forecasts. That ratio is in line with a European average that will strain budgets across the continent. Immigration, now increasing by about 100,000 a year for a total of 4.2 million foreign-born residents last year, will not change that, experts say.

Demographic Challenge

``One of the biggest challenges the EU faces is how to respond to demographic changes,'' said Odile Quintin, the European Commission's director general for Employment and Social Affairs, speaking in Brussels in April 2005.

Barring changes to national pension programs, Europe's aging population will increase spending on pensions by 5.25 percent of gross domestic product by 2050, a 2001 European Commission study found.

France's welfare system, including health-care, retirement and support for families, is already is the red, with a budget shortfall of 12.9 billion euros ($15.6 billion).

Finance Minister Thierry Breton says he wants French women to have more babies.

``I am convinced that we go even further in this area,'' he said. ``It is part of the solution to high growth, above all in face of the aging of our population.''

To contact the reporter on this story:
Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=aUK_fW2GrWcg&refer=europe#

Berlin Film Festival: Revealing the 'dream girls' of the 1950s

2006-02-27T16:57:00.000-05:00

Berlin Film Festival: Revealing the 'dream girls' of the 1950s

By Geoffrey Macnab
Published: 24 February 2006
from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

Who needs stars when you can have Volkswagens? That seemed to be the philosophy behind the art installation conceived to support the "Dream Girls" retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival. A fleet of 30 tiny red cars was parked in a street leading up to the main festival hub, every one of them celebrating a glamorous starlet of the 1950s. Their windows were frosted, but each had a peephole. Voyeurs and passing pedestrians were thus able to peer at clips from movies by the likes of Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

The one actual actress who came to Berlin to take part in the retrospective - 45 films showcasing 30 "screen heroines" - was Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman's muse and lover in the early 1950s. Back in 1952, when she played the voluptuous greengrocer's daughter in Bergman's Summer With Monika, Andersson helped define a new kind of sex symbol: to put it crudely, one without a bra.

"At that time, the (Hollywood) films had no possibility to show the breasts," the retrospective's curator Hans Helmut Prinzler confides. "The form of presentation of an attractive, erotic person was different from today."

In Sweden, though, different rules applied. Monika is shown splashing naked in the water and frolicking in the woods with her boyfriend Harry (Lars Ekborg), though Andersson tut-tuts at any idea that her back-to-nature scenes with Bergman paved the way for Brigitte Bardot, Russ Meyer and the rest.

"I started in a private theatre school when I was 15 years old and I started working in the theatre in 1949," she says, emphasising her "legitimate" credentials. When I try to talk to her about representations of femininity in European and Hollywood films of the 1950s, she clams up. "I didn't think about that. I was working. That was my life," she says. "Also, in the 1950s, women didn't talk so much. They were supposed to look sweet and nice and keep their mouths shut."

That, Prinzler argues, is precisely what makes the decade so fascinating. Andersson sums up the contradictions in a decade in which prudery and liberation walked hand in hand. In Europe, the 1950s marked the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague, a time when directors and their actors embraced a new, far less inhibited style of film-making, There were cracks, too, beginning to appear in the patriarchal world of Hollywood. The women were beginning to talk back. (Witness Jane Russell and Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as the golddiggers terrifying any male they meet.)

With television threatening to suck away the cinema audience, the studios began to present their biggest stars in ever more strident and exaggerated formats. Monroe stands alongside 3D and Technicolor as one of Hollywood's secret weapons. Fox showcased her in a series of big-budget star vehicles. Meanwhile, they promoted her as the star "whose kisses fired men's souls". There was a sense, though, that they couldn't contain the force that they had unleashed.

Sounding like an anthropologist describing rare tribes, Prinzler lists the different kinds of femininity that Hollywood portrayed in the era. There was Doris Day, "a good comrade, very practical and active"; Audrey Hepburn, "romantic and a little bit sentimental"; Monroe, "expressive but naive". And then there was Lana Turner, the blowzy star whose colourful private life made even her most lurid movies (Peyton Place or An Imitation of Life) seem understated. She changed lovers and husbands with such frequency that gossip columnists struggled to keep up.

In the austere, post-Nazi era, German audiences were fascinated by such exotic figures. "We were not familiar with [Hollywood] movies of the 1940s because in the middle of the 1930s there had been a break," Prinzler explains. "I remember that we were very interested to see American movies [in the 1950s]. People were open to new faces."

In stark contrast to the Hollywood "glamour queens" were the actresses in Europe: self-consciously defiant types like Andersson or Bardot who were open about their sexuality and chafed against the male-dominated society in which they lived. "Many actresses [in the 1950s] play self-confident characters, shaped by existential experiences, who want to assert themselves in a male-dominated world," Prinzler notes.

Stardom can't help but seem slippery and elusive as a subject for scholarly debate. By discussing the careers of the Dream Girls in political and sociological terms, the experts risk ignoring what made them special the first time - namely the pleasure they gave to audiences. Nonetheless, as the British film critic Raymond Durgnat once noted, you can tell the social history of a nation through its film stars.

Prinzler, who acknowledges that many of the retrospective's films were the ones he enjoyed discovering as a young cinephile/ adolescent male, is unapologetic about taking a highbrow approach to populist material. He argues that any retrospective has two main goals: to "open a chapter of film history for young people" and to spark debate. With this retrospective, there was a third purpose: to put the Dream Girls back where they belong, on the biggest screens possible.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/article347304.ece

Conversations in French made simple

2006-02-27T16:56:00.001-05:00

Conversations in French made simple

By Kate Irish Collins
KeepMEcurrent.com, ME Staff Writer

SACO (Feb 24): What could be better than learning to say the words, “I love you” in any language? That most wonderful of phrases is just one of the many everyday sentences people of any age can learn through Patricia Mailman’s “Fun with French” program.

Mailman, a fourth grade teacher for 30 years, created her simple French language program with the intention of using it in her classroom at the Kennedy School in Biddeford. But she retired from teaching before completing work on the program, which teaches beginners to communicate in French.

The program includes a workbook, which is part coloring book, part vocabulary builder, and part conversation builder, and an accompanying CD with the phrases and words pronounced in English first followed by the French.

Mailman, a Saco resident, first began researching a fun and simple way to teach French to her students about eight years ago. She finally decided to create her own program after discovering she didn’t like anything that was being offered in more traditional French language textbooks.

Mailman’s program does not include instruction on how to conjugate verbs, the difference between masculine and feminine objects, the French alphabet, or numbers, except one through 12 so anyone learning the program is able to tell the time.

She said her whole approach to Fun with French was to create a program that would allow people to almost immediately speak basic French. A child learns to speak before being taught to read and write, and the same is true for learning a foreign language, Mailman believes.

She thinks that learning basic words and phrases is more helpful than starting out with a list of vocabulary and learning the alphabet. Those ways of learning have their place, with more advanced study, but to learn to communicate, Mailman believes practicing basic phrases a little everyday is the most effective.

She suggests that people using her program focus on saying one thing at a time, over the course of a week, until it really sticks and begins to become second nature.

Mailman sells the Fun with French workbooks and CDs for $20. She has sold close to 200 workbooks and CDs locally, mostly to home-schoolers, but she is now starting to get repeat orders with customers saying they’re sending the workbooks to friends and relatives out of state.

The conversationalists on the CD are locals, Sandra and Alexa Dumont. The two go through the short phrases and sentences used in each of 12 everyday scenes found at the beginning of the workbook.

It starts with a mother entering her child’s bedroom and saying good morning, “Bonjour,” and telling her child she slept a long time, “Tu as dormi longtemps.” The scenes then go through the child saying J’ai faim,” I’m hungry. Then eating breakfast, doing the dishes, having a friend over for the day, and going to bed.

The back of the book includes basic words, including various feelings such as, “Je suis malade” – I am sick; “Je suis content” – I am happy. There are also basic words for cutlery, salt and pepper, bread, the rooms of the house, animals, body parts, running errands, family members and words and phrases for eating and drinking.

“I think learning to express your basic thoughts and needs is a good way to start learning any language,” Mailman said. “Where will counting or knowing the alphabet get you?” she added.

“I know what kids need to learn. You need to make learning fun and easy,” she said. “I did a lot of research and realized no one else has a program like this. I wanted to design something fun, easy and appropriate.”

Mailman decided to start with a simple French language program because of the many people of French heritage living in the area and because she herself is of French descent.

Under Maine’s Learning Results standards by the time a student graduates from high school they must have learned a second language well enough to communicate fluently, both orally and in writing.

The elementary school standards include being able to describe people and things using short phrases, express feelings, make and respond to simple requests and ask and respond to questions in social situations.

Elementary school students will also be expected to demonstrate a clear understanding of brief messages, commands and directions, select the main ideas and identify the principal characters in illustrated stories and recognize sounds and speech patterns.

They must also be able to describe daily life and personal likes and dislikes in short narratives and concentrate on correct pronunciation.

In addition elementary school students should be able to draw a floor plan of a typical house, using the second language to identify the rooms and the furnishings.

These are all things one can learn using Mailman’s Fun with French program, because she designed it with the Learning Results in mind.

Mailman is willing to make presentations on her Fun with French program to small groups or individuals. For more information, or to set up an appointment, call her at 282-4468.

Based in Saco, Staff Writer Kate Irish Collins can be reached at 207-283-1878 or by e-mail at kcollins@keepmecurrent.com.

http://www.keepmecurrent.com/Community/story.cfm?storyID=15405

Do you Parlez-Vous?

2006-02-27T16:56:00.000-05:00

Do you Parlez-Vous?

By Joshua Bodwell
jbodwell@seacoastonline.com
York County Coast Star
2-24-2006

KENNEBUNK — The world is smaller. The marketplace is without borders. To be truly effective, the new workforce Maine is graduating must be globally proficient.

Maine is ranked eighth in the country when it comes to the percentage of employees working for foreign corporations — that’s 6.4 percent of our private sector workforce employed by some 17 Maine-based international businesses.

Mainers are no longer going to faraway lands in search of work; the world has come to Maine.

Despite this fact, Kennebunk High School students – even those deemed to be on the college track – are not required to be proficient in a foreign language in order to graduate.

When 150 educators from 40 high schools across York and Cumberland counties gathered in Portland in late January for a conference on re-designing Maine’s high schools, Maine’s Commissioner of Education, Susan Gendron, gave the day’s opening address. The topic of foreign language came up.

As a key to the future success of Maine students, Gendron cited at least two years of study in another language as an important element in a “rigorous core curriculum” for all Maine students.

Kennebunk’s is not the only high school in the area lacking language requirements. A sampling of southern Maine schools found that Wells, Biddeford, Sanford, York, Noble, and Portland high schools are among those that do not require the study of a language other than English.

It’s a surprising gap when you consider that KHS met nearly all of the commissioner’s curriculum suggestions and that Kennebunk’s own literature states “a global economy requires knowledge of a second language.”

Spanish teacher Jane Matheson is also the Foreign Language Department Chair. Matheson was one of the three KHS teachers who attended the January conference. Matheson says she’s not aware of any high school in Maine that considers foreign language a graduation requirement.

“Here at KHS, we advise a minimum of two years,” Matheson says. “However, we also tell students that to be ‘college ready,’ they should take three, four or even five years of the same language.”

Reviewing her statistics, Matheson said, “We usually have almost 70 percent of our students enrolled yearly in a foreign language.”

During a recent foreign language presentation to the school board, the numbers showed that 71 students are currently studying Latin, 104 German, 255 Spanish, and 118 French.

Of the high schools polled regarding foreign language requirements, all the guidance counselors and/or administrators said they “recommended” or “encouraged” it to kids “going on to college.”

This train of thought raises two questions.

First, when and how are kids deemed to be college bound? If students don’t decide until their junior year that they’d like to attend college, they may end up with serious ground to make up when it comes to a foreign language. Will the lack of a solid foreign language requirement hurt these kids?

Second, how is a student determined to be “college material”? Does this mean foreign language is only taught to students that teachers and advisors consider “college material”?

Looking again at Kennebunk’s literature, it states, “Learning a foreign language provides a competitive edge in career choices.” Does this mean that students who are not tracked as college-bound don’t deserve a “competitive edge”?

MSAD 71 is making attempts to introduce language at an earlier age; some classes are available at the middle school and, via a Service Learning course, high school students teach a foreign language class to fifth graders in the district.

Patrick Manuel, Curriculum Director for MSAD 71, says he isn’t sure how the district will move around the language gap.

“We are trying to prioritize what the kids need,” he said.

Manuel also chairs the Curriculum Committee that would propose a foreign language requirement to the school board. Manuel says he’d love to see more language studies in the elementary schools but that the district is lacking the money to implement such programs.

Another item worth considering in the foreign language debate is what languages are being taught. Kennebunk’s Modern and Classical Languages options (French, German, Latin and Spanish) are Eurocentric. While certainly beneficial, do these options mirror the changes sweeping the globe, and will they help prepare these students to compete in the new marketplace?

Ted Sanders, former President for Education Commission of the States: “Language instruction does not reflect today’s realities. For example, while one million students in U.S. schools study French, a language spoken by 80 million people worldwide, fewer than 40,000 students study Chinese, a language spoken by almost 1.3 billion people.”

This page has been printed from the following URL:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/yorkstar/02232006/news/89293.htm

The doyenne of the mag trade

2006-02-27T16:55:00.000-05:00

The doyenne of the mag trade

Globe and Mail Update
2/24/2006

Lise Ravary, editorial director of Rogers Media's large and lucrative empire of women's magazines, curls a critical lip at the muted grey tones of the abstract painting on the wall of her temporary Toronto office. “It draws in energy,” frowns Ravary. “It's not exploding with energy.”

Ravary, 49, does explode with energy. A small dynamo with a large, gusty laugh, she is currently involved in (take a deep breath): hiring a new editor for Chatelaine's English edition; hiring a new editor for the about-to-be-launched Canadian edition of the celebrity magazine Hello!; overseeing the launch of two new Rogers Media magazines on home decor; and relaunching Rogers's French-language health and beauty magazine Éclat (probably with a new title). She also “keeps an eye on” content delivered on Rogers websites.

Arguably, Ravary is the most pivotal force in Canadian consumer publishing today. And in both official languages — probably no one else more closely experiences this country's two cultures of magazine journalism.

One obvious difference, she notes: Quebec has a much stronger celebrity culture than English Canada. Quebec readers spend $3-million a month on locally produced celebrity magazines. Some editions sell as many as 150,000 copies on newsstands. By contrast, few English-Canadian magazines break into the five digits on newsstands; most survive by subscription or controlled circulation. No wonder Rogers Media has turned to a Quebecker in its relentless drive to increase English-language newsstand sales (catnip for advertising dollars).

Another difference: French-language women's magazines have tended in recent years to be edgier than their English counterparts. Ravary produced her first mainstream magazine article, on plastic surgery and breast reduction, in 1981, submitting it to both Châtelaine and Chatelaine. The Montreal edition bought it; the Toronto editors' rejection note said the subject was “inappropriate.”

Yet back in the 1960s and 70s when Ravary, the daughter of a businessman and a stay-at-home wife, was growing up in East End Montreal, English Chatelaine fearlessly tackled everything from divorce to disarmament. In the early 1970s, as Ravary was moving through “difficult” teen years, failing math and writing for Pop Rock, a Montreal music magazine, English-language Chatelaine was “a ground-breaking publication that informed and enlightened millions of women about emerging new issues,” as author Erna Paris has written.

By the early 1970s, Ravary was no longer writing for Pop Rock, she was editing it. She recalls it as a wild time: “ Almost Famous, that's me, but without the sex. I was a good Catholic girl.” In 1975, she left Quebec for England, ostensibly to see the world. Instead, she married an Englishman. Back in Montreal in the early 1980s, a single mother with two young daughters, she took a job as director of public relations for Canadian Pacific Airlines and in 1988 moved with her family to Calgary.

The next year, she was once more in Montreal. By this time, across anglophone North America, women's magazines were moving from public issues into private realms of mental and physical health.

Meanwhile, Ravary, who by 1994 had joined Quebecor, was gaining a reputation for a keen commercial sense. Drawing on her airline-industry background, she persuaded Quebecor to take over enRoute, the bilingual Air Canada in-flight magazine, which at the time was known as a serious market for ambitious feature writers. The takeover prompted consternation: Morris Wolfe, then magazine columnist for this newspaper, warned that under Quebecor, “writers who actually have something to say” would be replaced by those concerned with “lifestyle.”

Ravary, still piqued with Wolfe, points out that enRoute was a finalist in 1996 for two National Magazine Awards, one by Ravary herself. She had converted to Judaism (“I fell in love with a cerebral approach to religion”) and wrote about trekking around the Holy Land. Keeping the sabbath as a time apart from the world must be what a fireball like Ravary needs. And she has brought the controversial subject of religion into magazines she has edited: One 2002 Châtelaine story dealt with Quebec women converting to Islam.

Observers says Ravary will likely help steer English Chatelaine in a more edgy, newsy direction. Indeed, she says she and Chatelaine publisher Kerry Mitchell want the magazine's next editor to be someone capable of playing a role in public life —“someone who might appear before a Parliamentary committee.”

Yet she's clearly fascinated by consumerism and can wax rhapsodic about a new vacuum cleaner. After serving as editor of Elle Quebec, founding editor of Elle Canada, and editor and publisher of Châtelaine (she recently relinquished the latter role), she unleashed the shamelessly shopaholic LouLou, which currently sells about 66,000 copies in Quebec and 130,000 copies in English. And she acknowledges that Rogers's new decor magazine could be called “a LouLou for the home.”

“Her big strengths are her energy and her ability to get inside readers' heads,” says former Chatelaine editor Rona Maynard. “Vivacious — the French Bonnie Fuller,” says Dianne Rinehart, former editor of Homemaker's. Some Ravary watchers add that she's a candidate for burnout. She lives with her two daughters in West Montreal but commutes to Toronto often to deal with her long to-do list. Soon, she says, Rogers will announce the new editor for Hello! (“Someone with a good Rolodex”). Chatelaine is taking longer.

Meanwhile she is dreaming up new projects for herself: “I'm thinking of starting a cookbook. I have a passion for English food. How about Kosher English Cooking?”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060223.wxravary0223/BNStory/Entertainment/home

First Nation art from a Native American point of view

2006-02-27T16:54:00.000-05:00

First Nation art from a Native American point of view

February 24, 2006
By Anne Galloway Times Argus Staff
Barre Montpelier Times Argus, VT

Above: A recreated ceremonial headress made with turkey feathers and bead work, by Johnson State College students Left: "The Columbian Triad," by N. Scott Momaday Above left: A recreated chip-carved bentwood box by Aaron York, a western Abenaki.
Photo: Photos by Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus
Helen Day Arts Center Public programs
"Meeting the Dawn: First Nation Art from the Northeastern Woodlands" is on view in the Main and West galleries at the Helen Day Art Center through April 5. "Then and Now II: Janet Fredericks/Language of Water, Intimate Conversations on Paper" is in the East Gallery. The center, located on School Street in Stowe, is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $3 for adults. For more information, go online to www.helenday.org or call 253-8358.

Saturday, March 11: Family day, noon to 4 p.m.; basketmaking workshop, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., free.
Friday, March 24: Viewing of film, "Against the darkness: Abenaki Material Culture, Forensics and Sovereignty," and discussion led by Fred Wiseman, free, 7 p.m.
Friday March 31: Viewing of Terry Jones' film, "What the Hell is Corn Soup?" traditional Iroquoian corn soup and fried bread dinner, discussion with Chief Paul Thompson and Chief Francis Booth, "Who Discovered America?" $5, 7 p.m.

None of the stereotypes hold in the Helen Day Art Center's exhibition of Native American art from the First Nation peoples of the Northeast. And that's because our pop culture understanding of the native arts is based on a pan-Indian lineup of totem poles, patterned rugs, eagle-feather headdresses, buffalo skin loin cloths and fringed pants, and heavily beaded clothing from tribes that lived throughout North America.

The Helen Day's exhibition may seem foreign to viewers because it is specific to the First Nation peoples of the Northeast, a region that encompasses southern Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, upstate New York, Massachusetts and Vermont. The western Abenaki tribes of Vermont and eastern Abenaki of Maine, the Mohawk of Massachusetts and the Iroquois of New York are represented in "Meeting the Dawn: First Nation Art from the Northeastern Woodlands."

The show, an assortment of contemporary re-creations and historic pieces, is not organized chronologically like a natural history museum display. There are far too many omissions to allow for a linear arrangement. And the gaps stand out as painful reminders of the extreme forms of racism tribes in the region endured. Vermont's Abenaki, for example, were subjected to "voluntary" sterilization in the 1930s.

Many of the ancient arts were lost as tribes went underground. Curator Jacquie Leven Mauer says, "Parents wouldn't tell their children that they were Abenaki."

So it's no wonder that First Nation peoples were reluctant, for much of the 20th century, to engage in activities, including ceremonial arts and traditional handicrafts, that might reveal their identities.

This show isn't an accumulation of artifacts from the usual suspects: anthropologists, natural history museums or white collectors. All of the artwork in "Meeting the Dawn" is on loan from collections held by First Nation museums or individuals of Native American descent.

It's this adherence to authenticity that sets this exhibition apart.

The artwork reflects the aesthetic values of the First Nation peoples and the materials they had at hand, and the way in which their work changed as they have adapted to white society. There are a substantial number of early, functional objects – a 17th century barking axe, a 19th century wooden box, a carved wooden maple granulating spoon – and 19th century ash and sweet grass baskets and wood trinkets made for the tourist trade.

Today, descendants have re-created traditional headdresses, baskets, chip-carved wooden boxes, canoes and ceremonial clubs. The artists have also interpreted these forms with modern materials.

The examples of traditional works are displayed side by side with their contemporary versions. Certain themes and materials are ubiquitous, though. The predominant motifs are derived from floral patterns, leafy curlicues or blossoms, and beading, carving and basketmaking are the common forms. There are a few paintings in the show – most notably a triptych by N. Scott Momaday, a renowned author, activist and artist – but by and large, two-dimensional art isn't a medium favored by these First Nation artists.

Basketmaker Judy Dow has collected traditional ash baskets decorated with delicate cowiss loops made by Abenaki artisans. And she has made her own line of interpretive vessels, from Ritz cracker boxes and telephone wire. Fred Wiseman, a professor at Johnson State College, worked with students to fashion two traditional headdresses, one composed of a deer pelt, the other of eagle down, both with beaded velvet headbands.

Momaday's acrylic painting "Columbian Triad" is a meditation on the psyche of the explorer. In the first image, the large sunken-eyed face of a sailor is dwarfed by a mountain. In the second, a ghoulish blue-tailed, pink-chested mermaid swims above another sailor. In the third, a nude, dark-skinned native is dwarfed by an amorphous white man, apparently Columbus himself. The triptych is a psychological progression that doesn't cast aspersions per se; it merely states what is. And therein lies its power.

Momaday is the only exception to the rule, to the self-imposed limitations Maurer placed on the exhibition. He is the only Native American artist in the show who isn't from the Northeastern woodlands, but given his stature in the pan-Indian world as a poet and academic, his presence in the show is something of a coup.

Otherwise, Maurer has emphasized the works of artists who are closest to home. And studying the many exquisite examples of works by Vermont Abenaki is perhaps one of the best ways to understand their culture – present and past.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060224/NEWS/602240304/1011

Honolulu celebrates Mardi Gras

2006-02-27T16:53:00.001-05:00

Honolulu celebrates Mardi Gras

Star-Bulletin staff
features@starbulletin.com

Downtown Honolulu transforms itself into a local version of New Orleans' French Quarter next week, with Mardi Gras celebrations planned at Aloha Tower Marketplace and along Nuuanu Avenue.

Generally recognized as Fat Tuesday, the last day before the start of Lent provides one last opportunity for believers (and everyone else, for that matter) to party. While the actual date varies from year to year, Fat Tuesday is always followed by Ash Wednesday and, later, Easter.

Aloha Tower Marketplace kicks things off at pau hana, with live entertainment on multiple stages from 5 to 9 p.m. Slim Junior and Slim Mango will perform at the Center Atrium, while Robert Cazimero plays at Chai's Island Bistro and Bluzilla takes over the space formerly known as Kapono's.

New Orleans Zydeco Jazz and Zanuck Lindsey will be on stage at Gordon Biersch, and Hooters will entertain with a chicken-wing eating contest. A Brazilian-themed Mardi Gras Parade will make its way throughout the marketplace at 7 p.m.

AT ABOUT the same time, the sixth annual Nuuanu Mardi Gras Celebration gets started on Nuuanu Avenue between Pauahi and King streets.

Both events feature free admission, although the Nuuanu block party also aims to raise funds for the Honolulu Culture and Arts District. The organization plays a large part in the revitalization of Chinatown and will receive a portion of the proceeds from food booths set up in the street. More than a half-dozen local restaurants have signed on to help.

Entertainment will definitely have a Cajun flavor, with New Bayou and Bayou Cadillacs scheduled to perform along with Downtown Charlie and the Humbones and African drumming group Jammarek. A costume contest will take place at 9 p.m. Tuesday, and there will be jugglers, clowns and other street performers on hand to entertain.

ON THE club front, it appears that the Wave Waikiki is the only spot actively promoting a Mardi Gras theme on Tuesday.

With help from promoter Silvana, the Wave presents "Carnaval," complete with Brazilian dancers and a "Miss Mardi Gras" contest. DJs KSM and Byron the Fur will be in the mix at this 18-and-over party. Call 306-1940.
Honolulu Star-Bulletin -- http://starbulletin.com

http://starbulletin.com/2006/02/24/features/story04.html

The Vagina Monologues

2006-02-27T16:53:00.000-05:00

Diversions
Behind the scenes of The Vagina Monologues

Monologues cast revels in taboos
By Jeff Amoros
February 24, 2006

“Vagina!”

The shout rang out across the stage at Wednesday night’s rehearsal, causing 22 actors dressed in eclectic blends of black, pink and red to quiet down and turn to the blonde girl in the front row.

On the set of the feminist production The Vagina Monologues, this is code for “listen up.”

It’s also a greeting, a salutation, a nickname and an essential theme to nearly every discussion the cast has.

“I have to tell you, if I was in awe of vaginas before this moment, I’m in deep worship now,” the show’s final character says, segueing into a graphic description of the birth of her granddaughter.

Backstage, the act set off a debate among the cast about the significance of the act of giving birth. Does having a vagina define a woman as a receiver? Does birth transform a vagina into the ultimate giver?

“It’s the epitome of womanhood,” said Brittany Graham, a sophomore English and theatre major, before she was cut off by another call for attention from the director.

“Vagina!”

The on-set culture reflects the spirit of the play, a collection of monologues based on real interviews with women about their take on their vaginas, returning this weekend for its annual campus production. As the cast appeared on stage for a curtain call, co-director Carrie Rohrbach, a sophomore French and education major, ticked off a list of the play’s strong women:

“She’s the one who talks about hair, they’re the transgendered women, she’s just angry.”

Rohrbach was referring to the play’s characters, but the actors who portray them are just as bold, and many have their own stories to tell about womanhood.

For instance, Shaun Salmon, a sophomore American studies major, said her mother inspired her to audition for the show.

“My mom had me when she was very young,” Salmon said. “The whole woman power thing is very big in my family.”

For others, being part of the production helped them to grow and let go of their inhibitions.

Julia Suszynski, a freshman journalism major, was actually auditioning for a different show the day of auditions for this one.

“I heard about the auditions the day of and decided to try out,” Suszynski said. “Going into rehearsals, I wasn’t really comfortable with it, but the show has really opened me up.”

Sophia Franklin, an academic adviser for the College of Chemical and Life sciences, said she decided to join the cast after, as an undergraduate at Morgan State, she went to see a production of the show and was misquoted in a student newspaper as saying the lesbian themes made her uncomfortable. On the contrary, she said, she thought the show was great and decided she wanted to be involved in it.

Regardless of their attitudes coming into the production, cast members now share an openness about their womanhood, from hair to menstruation, sex to abuse — and, of course, the word “vagina” itself.

“It’s changed for all of us,” Graham said, in reference to the word.

The cast has also become tight-knit over the course of the rehearsals. Kate D’Allevar, a junior math and theatre major, performed in the show while she was a student at Frostburg University.

“This is the most non-cliquish group of females I have ever worked with,” D’Allevar said.

Rohrbach, who was in the show last year, said although the show itself creates camaraderie among the cast, the closeness of this particular group is unique.

“It’s just amazing the chemistry these girls have,” Rohrbach said. “The show has potential, but I saw it this year much more than last year.”

As the rehearsal drew to a close and the women prepared to go home for the night, they discussed what made the show important.

Audrey Edmonds, a junior English major, brought up the letter to the editor “Student finds women sports boring” from Wednesday’s Diamondback. In it, a reader claimed “no one cares about women’s basketball,” calling it slow and lacking in exciting plays.

“This is the reason — people have such uneducated opinions,” Edmonds said.

For Franklin, the show gains meaning from its relevance to people from a variety of backgrounds.

“For a lot of women, there is something in this show, and for a lot of guys too,”# Franklin said. “This is real life for so many people.”

Contact reporter Jeff Amoros at amorosdbk@gmail.com.

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/02/24/43fedf5fc5056

Winning new converts

2006-02-27T16:52:00.001-05:00

Winning new converts
Admit it. Don't you from time to time think about sharing with your neighbor, your friend, your family member, your colleague the joy that it is in your heart in enjoying the fullness of our Faith in the Catholic Church?

Friday, February 24, 2006
Father John McCloskey

As the Catechism reminds us, winning converts to our Faith should be a constant concern for all Catholics: "The true apostle is on the lookout for occasions of announcing Christ by word, either to unbelievers...or to the faithful" (#905). How should we go about it? People are brought to the Church one by one. God pours out his saving grace in many ways, but He normally requires, and we could even say desires, the willing collaboration of his sons and daughters in this joyful task. Winning converts is your task and there is no more endlessly satisfying and challenging work than that of saving souls. The famous Catholic philosopher (and convert) Dietrich von Hildebrand said that we should look upon all people we encounter as Catholics in re (in fact) or in spe (potentially). I agree.

Admit it. Don't you from time to time think about sharing with your neighbor, your friend, your family member, your colleague the joy that it is in your heart in enjoying the fullness of our Faith in the Catholic Church? No apologies here (except in the "Pro Vita Sua " sense), thank you. Perhaps already some of you have had the wonderful experience of being the godparent or sponsor of a friend whom, by God's grace, you have guided into the Church. You know then the joy that fills the heart in being God's instrument. The only comparable joys are marriage, becoming a parent, and performing in "persona Christi" the sacraments of the Church as a priest!

This delight in a friend's baptism or reception into full communion with the Church is always a cause for holy celebration, but it is a particular joy in the present circumstances of our culture and in the present ecclesial moment as we await the third millennium of the Christian era. We see ourselves surrounded in our "culture of death" by so many persons bereft of any real meaning in their lives. Has there ever been in the Christian era a more joyless, aimless, lonely society than our own, a society that is truly "Clueless," a society that has appeared to have gained the whole world but forgotten the existence of its own soul? On the other hand, has there ever been a Roman Pontiff at the head of our Church who has so incessantly and hopefully proclaimed the Gospel in all its fullness throughout the world, addressing the fallen yet redeemed world's hopes and anxieties so completely?

The constant growth through the first three centuries of the infant Church up to the Edict of Milan in the early fourth century took place through the witness and personal influence of thousands of Christians and their families. With the passage of more centuries, Christian ideals lived out in the world by persons and families gradually transformed the West into a form of a Christian culture which we know as the Middle Ages. In our own time, following the gradual dissolution of that particular culture through, in part, such historical events as the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the titanic struggles of ideas and ideologies of the last two centuries (Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, and so on), we are called to do the same. The partial success of these various heresies and ideologies on the world stage has been due in part to the fact that a large portion of the Catholic laity have been "missing in action" in the apostolic sense through the last several centuries, ignorantly content to let the clergy and religious do the "heavy lifting."

This article aims to give some insights, largely based upon my own experience, into how we can more effectively spread the gift of faith through example and friendship, or what Cardinal Newman referred to as the "apostolate of personal influence." As we rapidly draw to our crossing the "threshold of hope" into the third millennium, it is the historical moment to throw off our timidity, our fear, and let our light shine out not only from under the basket but upon the shining hill. Why do you think it is that at the end of this century our Faith, so abused, attacked and vituperated, has drawn to it well known Jewish atheists, Protestant ministers by the dozens, prominent politicians, etc.? Why did the Holy Father in his last pastoral visit to the U.S. in October 1995 virtually conquer the heart of New York, the capital of secularism? Why is it that in the media today when the word "Church" is used, it is always understood to mean the Catholic Church and not pan-Protestantism? Certainly not because membership in the Church is the road to riches, affluence, fame, good health, and a care-free future! It attracts those seeking eternal verities that promise eternal life, "life everlasting."

If now is "the age of the laity," as is incessantly proclaimed, its success will be measured not by the ever-increasing participation of the laity in ecclesiastical "ministries" but rather by the growth and spiritual health of the Church as manifested in an increase both in numbers and in the intensity of laymen's prayer, sacramental participation and apostolic fervor. This, in turn, will lead inevitably to a gradual transformation of culture into one that reflects faithfully Christ's teaching as mediated through the Church. As the Pope said in his address to the American Bishops in Los Angeles in l987, "Primarily through her laity, the Church is in a position to exercise great influence upon American culture. But how is American culture evolving today? Is the evolution being influenced by the Gospel? Does it clearly reflect Christian inspiration? Your music, your poetry and art, your drama, your painting and sculpture, the literature that you are producing -- are all those things which reflect the soul of a nation being influenced by the spirit of Christ for the perfection of humanity?" To be able to answer in the affirmative may take decades but the effort will start with our own personal conversion which will result in the conversion of others.

The prophetic message of the Council and the present pontificate have led to this thinking about the laity... The Holy Father believes that, as we enter the third millennium, we are crossing the "threshold of hope" into "a new springtime for the Church." If this is to happen, it will depend ultimately on the apostolate of millions of persons and families. He said in his letter on missionary activity: "The witness of a Christian life is the first and irreplaceable form of mission. Christ, whose mission we continue, is the 'witness' par excellence and the model of all Christian witness. The first form of witness is the very life of the missionary, of the Christian family, and of the ecclesial community."

We may refer to this sharing of our faith as evangelization, giving witness, etc. I prefer the word used most often by the Conciliar fathers in this regard, apostolate: The second Vatican Council tells us: "The individual apostolate, flowing generously from its source in a truly Christian life, is the origin and condition of the whole lay apostolate, even of the organized type, it admits of no substitutes (my emphasis). Regardless of status, all lay persons (including those who have no opportunity or possibility for collaboration in associations) are called to this type of apostolate and obliged to engage in it."

In a later encyclical on the laity by John Paul II, the point could not be made clearer: "The entire mission of the Church, then, is concentrated and manifested in evangelization... In fact, the 'good news' is directed to stirring a person to a conversion of heart and life and a clinging to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior; to disposing a person to receive Baptism and the Eucharist and to strengthen a person in the prospect and realization of new life according to the Spirit." In short, the buck stops with each one of us to evangelize those who surround us. No excuses. "Every disciple is personally called by name; no disciple can withhold making a response: 'Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel' (I Cor 9:16)."

Perhaps we should firmly establish our right, as well as our duty to bring our friends to Christ's Church. First, it is His Church, with the successor of St. Peter as the Vicar of Christ. As the Holy Father points out in the encyclical On Commitment to Ecumenism, "the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. The Decree of Ecumenism emphasizes the presence in her of the fullness (plenitudo) of the means of salvation. Full unity will come about when all share in the fullness of the means of salvation entrusted by Christ to his Church... The Catholic Church is conscious that she has preserved the ministry of the Successor of the Apostle Peter, the Bishop of Rome, whom God established as her 'perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity.'"

If we can put it more succinctly, all who are saved are saved through the Church even if they are not aware of it on earth. Everyone in heaven is a member of the Church. Belloc had it right, I think: "One thing in the world is different from all other. It has a personality and a force. It is recognized and (when recognized) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, it is the night."

Second, there is a mistaken notion that is fairly widespread in our society that the second Vatican Council was about the role of the lay Catholic in the Church. It was not. It was about the role of the lay Catholic in the world. This role can be summed up in the search for holiness that is our baptismal right and duty and consequently in assuming the right and privilege of extending the kingdom of God here on earth through witnessing to our faith through the Christian example of our family and friendships.

A few words of caution. We are not speaking of proselytism (in the pejorative sense). That is to say our sharing, witnessing, speaking, giving, forming, educating and so on has absolutely nothing to do with coercion, or, perish the thought, lack of respect for the "freedom of the children of God," particularly in that which refers to our "separated brethren" Christians. Quite the contrary. I am in total agreement with the landmark ecumenical statement from Evangelicals and Catholics Together in l994, written by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus and co-signed by many other prominent churchmen of both Catholicism and the Evangelical faiths, which says: "It is understandable that Christians who bear witness to the Gospel try to persuade others that their communities and traditions are more fully in accord with the Gospel." We realize that only God's grace can effect a conversion and that pressure, other than our prayer, sacrifice, good example, and friendship, would not only in the long-term certainly be counter productive but would also not respect "the dignity of the human person" so central to the teachings of the 2nd Vatican Council and of John Paul II.

"Christian witness must always be made in a spirit of love and humility. It must not deny but must readily accord to everyone the full freedom to discern and decide what is God's will for his life. Witness that is in service to the truth is in service to such freedom. Any form of coercion, physical, psychological, legal, or economic corrupts Christian witness and is to be unqualifiedly rejected...." No, we are interested only in our personal total "gift of self" which is never more complete than when we act as God's collaborators in communicating the gift of divine life, God's grace. Cardinal Newman, the proto-convert of the last two centuries, made it clear that "to believe is to love" and that grace of the fullness of faith is only given to those who are freely seeking it.

But now on to more practical matters. How do we "make" converts? First of all, we don't, God does. Having made that abundantly clear, what is our first step in approaching someone to consider becoming a Catholic? Naturally the desire will flow out of our prayer life. To paraphrase the epitaph written on the tomb of the famous London architect Christopher Wren, If you seek converts, circumspice (look around you). We come into contact with dozens if not hundreds of people in the course of our daily lives each month. They range from dearest family members and intimate friends to the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. We look at them and ask ourselves "could this person be open to our Faith?" If the answer is yes, on to the next step. It is said that the most effective way to raise money for a good cause is to simply ask for it. The same may be applied to our situation. The question "Have you ever thought of becoming a Catholic?" addressed to many people over the course of our life will certainly produce not only converts but also interesting and thought provoking conversations and new personal relationships. You may have to practice this line in front of a mirror a few times just as you did before asking out your first date. You generally will be surprised at how flattered, if somewhat surprised, people are at the question. Naturally it has to be emphasized that we are not approaching perfect strangers. Indeed, if we are not in the process of developing a deep and lasting friendship with the potential new member of the Church, then our question lacks authenticity and will be rightfully judged as impertinent and insincere. The great majority will say that you are the first person who has ever asked them that question, and more than a few will say they have been waiting for someone to ask them that question all their lives! A few will react negatively, but after all, not all "have eyes to see or ears to hear." We "shake the dust off our feet" and go on. We are not looking for success. It is the "love of Christ that compels us." We may also be surprised to see after the passage of time, even many years, people coming back to us looking for answers because we had the courage to offer them at an earlier time our Faith.

We are challenging people to consider making the most significant decision they will ever make in their lives, infinitely more important than the choice of school, profession, or spouse; one that will affect every fiber of their being for the rest of their lives, and have serious consequences in the hereafter. It is essential that you get to know them well, particularly their religious background, if any, so, as is said in the vernacular, you "know where they are coming from." Of use in this regard would be a thorough reading of Separated Brethren (Our Sunday Visitor), a survey of Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and other denominations in the U.S. by William J. Whalen. By engaging in conversation on this point you will be inviting your friend, and committing yourself, to go deep below the surface of everyday trivialities into the heart of the matter. Why are we here? What is truth? Is there a right and wrong? Is there a God? An afterlife? Is Jesus Christ God? Did he found a Church during his lifetime? If so, which one? Do we need to belong to it to be saved? Of course, you need to be not only willing to discuss and answer these queries but prepared.

"Be ready always with an answer to everyone who asks a reason for the hope that is in you" (I Peter, 3:15). To be an evangelist in today's world means to be an apologist. This is the work of a lifetime, but that does not excuse us from evangelizing while we learn on the job. Remember, no matter how little we know, our friends knows less. And what is more important, we know where to go for the answers. A lot of our catechetical work with our potential convert friends will be, happily, simply to refer them to the best sources. Obviously we should have a good grasp of the New Testament and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, our fundamental texts. However we should also slowly but surely read and study the great English and American apologists: Newman, Lewis, Chesterton, Benson, and Knox and the more modern masters, Sheed and Kreeft. Many of their works are in print. It is also useful to be familiar with the magisterial teachings of the Pope for the most current teachings on matters of faith and morals.

Reviewing our own preparation leads directly to the question of recommending reading for friends who express an interest in our faith. An increasing number of people simply don't understand the basic vocabulary of what it means to believe. An excellent brief volume is Belief and Faith by the famous German philosopher Josef Pieper. He draws heavily on Cardinal Newman's much more complex Grammar of Assent. Many people today need a book to awaken their interest in Christianity or a volume that helps to make Christianity "reasonable" and understandable. Several books come immediately to mind. Both Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man of G. K. Chesterton will stimulate the reader. I am thinking also of a basic primer, A Map of Life (Ignatius) by Frank Sheed, and the famous Mere Christianity of C.S. Lewis. Most fundamental, of course, is the New Testament. An excellent version with ascetical commentary is The Navarre Bible (Scepter Publishers). And we might recommend a good Life of Christ (try Goodier, Sheen, Riccioti, Guardini). Your friends simply must come to know the life of Jesus Christ if they are going to be able to join His Church. Second is a good Catholic catechism so that they may come to know the Church and her teachings. There are many excellent ones in print, by Frs. Trese, Hardon, Lawler, Noll, and the list goes on. Just choose one that you are comfortable with and one that reflects the sound teaching of the Church updated for the Second Vatican Council and the authoritative recent Catechism.

I would recommend that you whet their appetite for conversion by giving them a book or two on stories of conversions: Spiritual Journeys (Pauline Publications) or Surprised by Truth (Basilica Press) come immediately to mind. Our friends will be intrigued to read about the contemporary conversion stories of so many people drawn to the faith from such varied backgrounds and are sure to find at least part of their story in one of these histories. Don't forget, either, the classic spiritual autobiographies of St. Augustine, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Thomas Merton and Malcolm Muggeridge and the more recent one of Dr. Bernard Nathanson. They have changed millions of hearts and minds.

You should also familiarize your friends with the richness of the history of the Church. They clearly will see the continuity of the Faith through the apostolic succession and read the dramatic story of evangelization through the centuries with its ups and downs. I would recommend Msgr. Philip Hughes's Popular History of the Church for a short synopsis of Church History, and the first three volumes of the magisterial History of Christendom by Warren Carroll (Christendom College Press). The latter volumes read like novels, are painstakingly researched, and reveal the Church in all its heights and depths, in its saints and sinners.

An important part of our work of introducing our friends to the Faith will be exposing them to the beauty of the Catholic liturgy and to the art, literature, and music of Catholic inspiration. Accompanying them to the Holy Mass and other liturgical events, such as the celebration of solemn Benediction, a baptism, a wedding, the Easter Vigil, an episcopal consecration, or the ordination of new priests, or a Rosary-filled pilgrimage to a Shrine of the Virgin, will bring them to a deep appreciation of the incarnate aspect of our Faith and its sacramental nature. To listen to Gregorian Chant, today so strangely popular, or the great classical compositions centered on the Mass, the Psalms, or various events in the life of Christ and our Lady will also draw them closer to the heart of the Church. Listen with them to the great works of Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, and to the more contemporary Gorecki and Messiaen for starters. Surely such beauty in music could only be inspired by the Truth.

Introduce them to the great Catholic authors, starting with Dante and continuing on down the centuries to Manzoni and Sienkiewicz in the last century to the Undsets, Waughs, O'Connors, Bernanos', Mauriacs, and Endos of our own day. They will thus understand that the truth really does make us free and no one so free as the artist who has the standard of a faith-filled metaphysic that gives him full rein of expression in capturing the divine in the human.

Let's be realistic. Not all of your friends, by any means, are going to be receptive to this heavy "intellectual" approach. You may have to be much more selective in what you recommend to your friends: pamphlets rather than books, Catholic hymns rather than symphonies, a more contemporary (although sound) version of the New Testament rather than the Douay-Rheims, the stained glass in your parish church rather than Chartres. Listen to their needs, their questions and try to satisfy them. A time of prayer spent with them or a visit to poor or elderly people may be much more influential in the process of their movement towards the Church than any possible reading you might give them.

Oh yes, let's not forget the parish and the priest. After all, our friend wil most probably spend the rest of life normally worshipping in a parish setting. If our friend has not been baptized, the Church normally asks that the budding catechumen be enrolled in the R.C.I.A. program (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) in his local parish which will take him through a month by month program of initiation in the Church that culminates normally in Baptism during the Easter Vigil (hopefully with you there as his godparent!) If he has been baptized, he will make his first confession and then receive the Sacrament of Confirmation and first Holy Communion within a Mass on Easter or at another time. It is useful and proper to establish a team approach in dealing with your friends. Find a prayerful, zealous (they really are synonomous) priest with whom you can work and triangulate, which is to say both of you working together can offer your insights and wisdom, your prayer and sacrifice to your friend, The priest may be able, perhaps, to enter better into some areas that you cannot on account of his sacramental power. He will also be able to advise you as to the best way and moment for your friend to be incorporated in the Church, taking careful notice of personal circumstances.

What happens if over a reasonable amount of time your friend doesn't react, he just doesn't "get it?" He claims he doesn't see it. His difficulties with Christ and the teachings of the Church still result in doubt. His family, parents, spouse present what appear to be insuperable obstacles. Do you throw him overboard in order to sail off for other prizes? You wouldn't think of it! The answer is prayer, persistence, and patience. The violence of your prayer (remember Who is in charge of this operation) will eventually bear him away. Your persistence and constancy in your true friendship will eventually win him over by showing that your love is unconditional. Remember you may be the one person in his life who is interested only in his salvation. No ulterior motives of any sort. By patience we show our realization that conversion takes place at God's pace, not a minute sooner or later. The conversion may not happen until he is is on his death bed, and you may witness it from heaven.

Good, thanks be to God, he finally made it; he is in! What now? Naturally it is on to the next person, or perhaps you are already dealing with several people at the same time. However, don't forget your new-born Catholic friend. He is just a very young child, taking his first tottering steps into a bright new world that will have its storms and shadows. He will be surrounded by some who regard Catholicism and his conversion to it in Chesterton's words as "a nuisance and a new and a dangerous thing." He needs nurturing, your encouragement, your friendship, your support. Blessed Josemaria Escriva says, "Sanctification is the work of a lifetime" and as your friend's godfather, sponsor, or guide, you have to be with him every step of the way. Perhaps you will introduce him to other institutions and spiritualities of the Church that can further his spiritual progress. He will be eternally grateful to you and you in your turn will echo the words of a famous French convert and poet, Paul Claudel, who said, "Tell him his only duty is to be joyful."

First appeared in Catholic World Report in the August/September 1997 issue.
Spero

http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=34&idsub=127&id=2690

BishopAccountability.org

2006-02-27T16:52:00.000-05:00

BishopAccountability.org — documenting the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church.

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/

Puppets figure in African culture

2006-02-27T16:51:00.000-05:00

Puppets figure in African culture

Yaya Coulibaly ran his right index finger along punched-out tin, tracing the zigzag lines on this detail of a wooden antelope head. In Mali, firelight would glint off of the antelope's pattern, signifying water, as puppeteers danced.

"When you're seeing a puppet, you're not seeing an object," Coulibaly said in French. "You're seeing something that's embedded in the philosophy of the whole culture."

Coulibaly, founder of the Sogolon Puppet Company, said puppet shows have held together the social fabric in Mali since the fourth century B.C. This form of communication can simultaneously correct wayward leaders and honor divine spirits.

Pausing her French-to-English translation, Janni Younge of South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company said the aim of her company, founded in 1981, is to do much the same thing.

Standing near the likeness of a witness for the post-Apartheid Truth Commission, the body that let those who had committed crimes go free if they told the truth, Younge said the woeful face carved out of obechi wood can symbolize more than people.

"At the end of the day, a human being is just a human being, whereas that is a representation of a larger picture," she said.

The exhibit of 100 puppets, sculptures and marionettes could have focused on far more. But the emphasis remains on puppet theater, said Enid Schildkrout, chief curator of the Museum for African Art, which is co-presenting "At Arm's Length: The Art of African Puppetry" with the World Financial Center.

Heather Fletcher

"At Arm's Length: The Art of African Puppetry" ends April 15. World Financial Center, Courtyard Gallery, 220 Vesey St. www.africanart.org or (718) 784-7700, ext. 2.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/394210p-334236c.html

Doucet and BeauSoleil bringing 30 years of music to Baton Rouge

2006-02-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

Doucet and BeauSoleil bringing 30 years of music to Baton Rouge

By JOHN WIRT
Advocate entertainment writer
Published: Feb 24, 2006

Photo by RICK OLIVIER
Beausoleil includes, left to right, first row, Jimmy Breaux and Michael Doucet, second row, David Doucet, Tommy Alesi, Al Tharp and Billy Ware.

Last year was even more eventful than usual for Michael Doucet, the high-spirited, fiddling vocalist of BeauSoleil, Louisiana’s best-known Cajun band.

A purveyor of Cajun music and culture, Doucet received the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship award. He joined other honorees — including country and rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson, gospel singer Albertina Walker and country music’s Janette Carter — on Capitol Hill for the Sept. 23 awards ceremony.

When he got the call telling him he was a National Heritage Fellowship recipient, Doucet thought someone had dialed the wrong number.

“It was a wonderful thing, not only to receive but to be amongst those people,” Doucet said last week. “The most unique people who just do their thing. That’s a wonderful thing to instill (in aspiring artists). It doesn’t matter what you do, you just do the best you can, no matter what it is.”

In September, too, Doucet’s nearly 200-year-old Acadian house just beyond Lafayette provided refuge for 12 New Orleans residents who fled from Hurricane Katrina. The guests included his guitar-playing brother and fellow BeauSoleil member, David, and Hackberry Ramblers drummer Ben Sandmel.

The sudden collision of New Orleans culture and Acadian culture made Lafayette a hopping place, Doucet said.

“It was amazing to see everybody around here,” he said. “Everybody really helped out. They had meetings and a big concert the Saturday night after the hurricane hit. There were great things and good feelings.”

While touring in the country in the tragic wake of Katrina, BeauSoleil became a tangible symbol of Louisiana.

“The idea of helping the musicians here out, we promoted that on the road, too,” Doucet said. “People believed in the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity, but they wanted something direct. Or you could be like Marcia Ball (in Austin). She just gave money to musicians. There’s no middleman with Marcia.”

Last year also saw BeauSoleil’s second performance at the Grand Ole Opry and the band’s Grammy nomination for Gitane Cajun, its tenth nomination. BeauSoleil’s previous CD, 1999’s Cajunization, also received a nomination. The group’s L’amour ou la Folie won the Grammy for best traditional folk album in 1998.

Excitement continues swirling around BeauSoleil in 2006 via a series of 30th anniversary concerts. These retrospective shows feature music from every BeauSoleil album released since the band’s 1976 debut. Each performance features a different set list.

Having already played anniversary shows in Lafayette, New Iberia and New Orleans, BeauSoleil’s next retrospective concert is March 3 at the Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge.

BeauSoleil, formed in 1975 and officially named in 1976, dubbed its 25th anniversary tour the 2001 Cajun Space Odyssey. The band toyed with naming the 30th anniversary tour The Agin’ Cajuns. Aging though the group may be, there’s still lots of life and artistic ambition in BeauSoleil.

Looking over its extensive discography is something the band doesn’t normally do. Doucet and BeauSoleil prefer to look forward. The band has a history of keeping traditional Cajun music kicking while simultaneously adding blues, zydeco, Caribbean and Tex-Mex flavors to the gumbo.

“We’re always looking at what we’re gonna do next,” Doucet explained. “But when you’re asked to look back, you take a pause. When you get to a 30th anniversary, it’s pretty cool to see what you’ve done and who you’ve influenced. Seeing the effect of what you’ve done is good for awhile, but then you go beyond. You keep on going because it doesn’t stop.”

BeauSoleil had been performing for more than a decade when, in 1986, it decided to do its Cajun thing full time. The mid-’80s was an era when Cajun cooking, culture and music were on the upswing. BeauSoleil and other Louisiana acts received national exposure through the 1987 film The Big Easy. BeauSoleil also recorded the soundtrack for 1986’s Belizaire the Cajun, which got the group its first Grammy nomination.

Thinking the time was right, BeauSoleil’s band members left their day jobs with the understanding they’d invest six months in being a full-time Cajun band. They also decided that Louisiana, not Nashville or Los Angeles, would be their base of operations.

“We wanted to live here because you have to be a part of this,” Doucet said. “If people wanted us, we’d bring this music to them. The door was open for us to do that and that’s what we did. It was great because there was no road. We couldn’t do anything wrong because it had never been done before.”

The choice to be a Cajun musician was an extension of a choice Doucet made nearly 20 years before. In the late ’60s, choosing to identify oneself as a Cajun was a rebellious act against mainstream America.

“I decided I really liked gumbo and crawfish. I really liked speaking French and having fun times with these people. It’s more earthy, more real, more grounded than all this aspiration thing for what people in California or New York are doing.

“The inspiration happened here. They have oak trees all over the world, but not like we have here. The word Creole means homegrown. From that you develop gratitude for where you came from. And then it’s like, ‘What can I do to maintain and continue this?’ That’s when you go get knowledge from where you live, from elder people, be it music, history or language. It’s something that just fits.”
BeauSoleil
WHERE: Manship Theatre at the Shaw Center for the Arts, 100 Lafayette St.
WHERE: March 3, 8 p.m.
TICKETS: $20-$40

http://www.2theadvocate.com/entertainment/music/2361126.html