Canada's First Matinee Idol

Robert Goulet, who marshalled his dark good looks and thundering baritone voice to play a dashing Lancelot in the original “Camelot” in 1960, then went on to a wide-ranging career as a singer and actor, winning a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy, died today. He was 73.

After the “Camelot” triumph, Mr. Goulet was called the next great matinee idol. Judy Garland described him as a living 8-by-10 glossy. He was swamped with offers to do movies, television shows and nightclub engagements. Few articles failed to mention his bedroom blue eyes, and many female fans tossed him room keys during performances. His hit song from the show, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” remains a romantic standard.

“Something in his voice evokes old times and romance,” Alex Witchel wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1993. “He makes you remember corsages.”

His more than 60 albums, travels with touring theatrical revivals and many Las Vegas gigs were enough to ensure nearly a half-century of popularity.

Mr. Goulet’s rise after “Camelot” was swift. In 1962, he won a Grammy award as best new artist for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us,” and his hit single “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Two years later, his album “My Love Forgive Me” went gold; 17 of his albums between 1962 and 1970 made the charts.

He reached the peak of his popularity in the ’60s. In 1966, he starred in a television adaptation of “Brigadoon,” which won an Emmy as outstanding musical production. He won a Tony for his performance in the 1968 Broadway musical “The Happy Time.” And he appeared frequently on popular television programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

A theatrical agent recommended him to Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist, and Frederick Loewe, the composer, for their new musical, “Camelot” which would also star Julie Andrews and Richard Burton.
His audition, in September 1960, went so well that everyone applauded, a rarity, Mr. Goulet recalled in an interview with Music Educators Journal in 1998.

Mr. Loewe asked him, “Parlez-vous francais?”

Mr. Goulet answered, “Oui, certainement.” (Lancelot was French.)

Variety called Mr. Goulet the “perfect Lancelot.” The public loved it. It ran for 873 performances, closing in January 1963. The cast album, featuring “If Ever I Would Leave You,” topped the charts.

"Robert Goulet was a monumental presence on the stage and had one of the great voices of all time, which often overshadowed his many other talents," pianist Roger Williams said in a statement Tuesday. "He really could do it all -- act, dance and was as funny as hell, especially when he was making fun of himself. Robert always took his craft seriously, but never took himself seriously."

"Oh, how we will miss this great guy."

Robert Goulet, 1933 - 2007

Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy

Ball, cube, cylinder, cone. By using these four shapes, I can draw any picture I want. And so can you! Hello friends, this is Jon Gnagy, to prove to you that you can learn to draw by following my step by step television lesson. So get your papers and pencils ready, and we'll start right away!

In May of 1946 NBC placed a sixty one foot antenna atop the Empire State Building and kept one promise made in the 30's and postponed during the war years — television. At the same time, Jon Gnagy began teaching America how to draw. He was a television star before Lucille Ball, Milton Berle or Arthur Godfrey. In fact, Jon was the first act on the first commercial television show ever, broadcast May 14,1946.

On the first episode, Jon Gnagy, sporting a goatee, wore an artist's smock and beret. He led the viewing audience through his step-by-step method to make a drawing of an old oak tree. His crayon melted under the studio lights, his chalk squeaked, but in seven minutes the lesson and the picture were completed.

That first live program was seen by about 200 viewers living within 80 miles of NBC's 61-ft tower atop the Empire State Building. In 1946, there were 15,000 televisions in the entire United States, by 1949, 3 million. By 1961, there were more televisions than bathtubs in American homes.

By the autumn of 1946, Jon Gnagy had become so popular that NBC gave him a show of his own. This was a plain speaking Midwesterner dressed in a plaid shirt and dark trousers. The format of his show was so simple—one character in a single, shallow set, and a minimum of camera angles—that it became a training ground for all the new directors, camera men, and sound technicians starting out in a burgeoning industry Here was a show that was accessible to everyone and it was called You Are An Artist.

Jon Gnagy was born in 1907 in Varner's Forge, Kansas, where he grew up as a member of a Mennonite Community. In this straight forward, hardworking environment, Jon Gnagy began making pictures. Portraits were tantamount to idolatry according to the Bible, so he made drawings of the farm and the Kansas landscape that were good enough to win prizes at the State Fair art shows.

"I had a great many artistic inspirations... I tried to express these inspirations on canvas but I found I lacked the mechanical know-how. For years after that, I spent my evenings and weekends studying philosophy, psychology, physics, and physiology in an effort to obtain the know-how and to find, if I could, a key to esthetics."

"When I was satisfied that I had achieved both, I decided that what I wanted most was to give this knowledge to others. The desire to express is in everyone, and if people are shown logically how to materialize an idea, then their inspiration grows and gains momentum and they work intuitively and have a swell time of it. There is nothing like the supreme satisfaction that you get from being able to express objectively something that is subjective and nebulous. That's what art is, the expression of unconscious feelings in an objective form."

In 1939 Gnagy decided television was the "ideal teaching medium". Seven years later, Gnagy was on the air, teaching "the world's largest art class".

Jon Gnagy introduced to American families the idea of being an artist, an idea that was not couched in terms of privilege or preciousness. He was sharing some first hand knowledge at a time when television viewing still had a sense of intimacy and concentration.

In 1951, members of the Museum of Modern Art's committee on art education sent an angry letter to the New York Times. "The use of superficial tricks and formulas found in the Jon Gnagy type of program," they wrote, "is destructive to the creative and mental growth of children." Gnagy responded, "My purpose," he always said, "is to get as many people as possible to sketch on their own."

To go along with his television show, Jon Gnagy produced a kit of art supplies and a book of drawing lessons. The writing style is direct, outlining his plan. The chapter titles are terrible puns, the sort of jokes one forgives a favorite uncle for making (While There is Still Life There is Hope, How To Get A Head By Going in Circles). At the end of the book, he wrote "The plan I have outlined in this book will be invaluable to you. It will release the creative drive in you and set you free. . ."

Who taught Jon Gnagy? Jon called it the Art Spirit.

Lesson outlines and broadcasts

Real Life Magazine article, Summer 1985

The Unclean Children of God

 

There is not an animal that lives on the Earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but forms part of communities like you. Nothing have We omitted from the book, and they all shall be gathered to their Lord in the end. ~~ Al-Qur'an 6:38

A conservative Iranian cleric has denounced the "moral depravity" of owning a dog, and called for the arrest of all dogs and their owners.

Dogs are considered unclean in Islamic law and the spread of dog ownership in Westernised secular circles in Iran is frowned upon by the religious establishment.

"I demand the judiciary arrest all dogs with long, medium or short legs - together with their long-legged owners," Hojatolislam Hassani is quoted as saying in the reformist Etemad newspaper.

"In our country there is freedom of speech, but not freedom for corruption," he said.

Religious traditions hold that if a dog - or woman - passes in front of you as you prepare to pray, it pollutes your purity and negates your prayer. Dogs are permissible as watchdogs or for other utilitarian purposes but not simply for companionship.

Tehran journalist Mafiseh Kouhnavand told the BBC that the subject of dog ownership had been brought up many times before.

Hardline judiciary agents and police occasionally clamp down on the practice, fining owners and confiscating their pets from streets and parks. In June, police banned the sale of dogs and penalised anyone walking a dog in public. The practice is seen by conservatives as a corrupting influence of decadent Western culture. But despite the clampdowns, dog ownership has been on the rise, especially among rich Iranians in the north of Tehran.

Hojatolislam Hassani appears to be widening the scope of his anti-canine campaign.

Last year, he publicly thanked police for their policy of exclusively confiscating short-legged dogs in Urumiyeh.

Source: BBC

Image: The fifth century BC seal shows a Persian noblewoman playing a harp for her Maltese dog. The Phoenicians brought this dog from the island of Malta to Asia Minor where it became very popular with wealthy Persians.

Dogs in Islam

Art for the Masses

Ken Danby, recognized as one of the world's foremost realist artists and best-known in Canada for his iconic hockey painting, At The Crease, has died at the age of 67 while canoeing in Algonquin Park.

Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Danby's vast portfolio includes everything from portraits of famous Canadians to athletes in mid-play and landscape paintings so crystalline that at first glance they resemble photographs.

As an artist, Ken Danby's work was loved more by the people than it was revered by the critics. Although his works were bought by museums, he found his best, most rewarding and lasting appeal among private collectors and purveyors of popular culture. A superb draftsman and a prodigious and prolific artist of his own time, he was a realistic painter who reflected quotidian events, natural landscapes and athletic prowess to mass audiences, rather than an abstract expressionist who created troubling, edgy canvasses for an intellectual elite.

The prolific artist was known as the school artist from the time he was very young. At 18, he enrolled in the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where one of his teachers was Group of Seven member J. E. H. Macdonald. Other students called him Vincent because of his goatee and the fact that he was a loner who seemed to be obsessive about drawing and painting.

"I was intense and almost fanatical about drawing and did hundreds of studies, mostly in pen, during my first year."

OCAD's preference in abstract expressionism was at odds with his interest in precise figurative drawing, and he left to pursue a number of design jobs before finally launching a free-lance career with Gallery Moos.

Danby's first one-man show in 1964 sold out, an occurrence that would become commonplace as his work proved popular with private, corporate and museum collectors.

His 1972 painting of a masked ice-hockey goalie hunched in the crease is considered by many to be a Canadian national symbol. The anonymous player represents every goalie who has ever waited for a shot to test his or her mettle, but it also captures the tension of that moment when the arena goes silent and fans stop breathing as all become one with the solitary figure down on the ice. As an indication of the painting's significance in popular culture, Mr. Danby put the image on a hockey mask as a fundraiser for spinal cord research and it raised $15,100 (U.S.) at a charity auction on NHL.com in November, 2006.

While many Canadians connect Danby with hockey images, he points out they make up only a dozen images in a long painting career. "I still love the game," he said in a 2002 interview. "I respond to it, so there's that appeal. That there has been such a focus on them in Canada shows that I've tapped into something that has to do with Canada's soul and spirit."

He also has done portraits of Canadian icons such as singer Gordon Lightfoot and former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And he is renowned for his landscapes, including the 1997 painting Niagara. A retrospective at the Joseph Carrier Gallery in 2004 featured 60 paintings, many capturing Canadian scenes such as Lake Louise. He received many honours, including the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.

It is tempting to imagine ironies both cruel and poetic in the death of Mr. Danby, the realist, while canoeing in the same wilderness (although at a different lake) where expressionist landscape painter Tom Thomson drowned 90 years ago. The coincidences and the metaphors may not bear serious scrutiny - they interpreted and represented nature in different ways - but both men loved the wilderness and were exploring its richness when they died suddenly and before their time, causing great shock and grief to their families, friends and admirers.

Ken Danby obituary

Ken Danby official site

The Poetry of Silence

Marcel Marceau, whose lithe gestures and pliant facial expressions revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, died in Paris last Saturday. He was 84.

Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, Marceau, notably through his famed personnage Bip, played the entire range of human emotions onstage for more than 50 years, never uttering a word. Offstage, however, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking. He won't stop," he once said.

A French Jew, Marceau escaped deportation during World War II – unlike his father, who died at Auschwitz – and worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children.

He performed tirelessly around the world until late in life, never losing his agility, never going out of style. In one of his most poignant and philosophical acts, "Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death," he wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.

"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" he once said.

Marceau was born Marcel Mangel on March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, France. His father introduced his son to the world of music and theatre at an early age. The boy adored the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers.

When the Germans marched into eastern France, he and his family were given just hours to pack their bags. He fled to southwest France and changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins. With his brother Alain, Marceau became active in the French Resistance.

In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father's death: "Yes, I cried for him." But he also thought of all the others killed: "Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.''

When Paris was liberated, Marcel's life as a performer began. He enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art, studying with the renowned mime Etienne Decroux.

On a tiny stage at the Theatre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank cabaret, he sought to perfect the style of mime that would become his trademark. Bip – Marceau's on-stage persona – was born.

Marceau once said that Bip was his creator's alter ego, a sad-faced double whose eyes lit up with child-like wonder as he discovered the world. Bip was a direct descendant of the 19th century harlequin, but his clownish gestures, Marceau said, were inspired by Chaplin and Keaton.

Marceau likened his character to a modern-day Don Quixote, "alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty."

Dressed in a white sailor suit, a top hat – a red rose perched on top – Bip chased butterflies and flirted at cocktail parties. He went to war and ran a matrimonial service. Single-handedly, Marceau revived the art of mime.

In the past decades, he has taken Bip to from Mexico to China to Australia. He's also made film appearances. The most famous was Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. He had the only speaking line, "Non!''

As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level, never losing the agility that made him famous. On top of his Legion of Honor and his countless honorary degrees, he was invited to be a United Nations goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on aging.

"If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on," he told The AP in an interview in 2003. "You have to keep working.''

October is Fundraise for Farley Month

It's every pet owner's worst nightmare. A beloved pet needs veterinary care, but the owner can't afford treatment. For many seniors and people with disabilities, this scenario is a sad reality.

That's where the Farley Foundation steps in.

The Farley Foundation helps sick and injured pets that belong to low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

The Foundation offers financial assistance to veterinary clinics in Ontario to help cover the cost of providing necessary veterinary care for pets belonging to seniors receiving the Federal Guaranteed Income Supplement or people with disabilities who receive the Ontario Disability Support Payment, and who cannot otherwise afford treatment for their pets.

The Farley Foundation pays tribute to one of Canada's most famous pets. Farley is the Old English sheepdog who appeared in the For Better or For Worse® comic strip. For Better or For Worse® is the charming and poignant chronicle of a Canadian family. Cartoonist Lynn Johnston first introduced the fictional Patterson clan to audiences 21 years ago.

Farley was the first dog I ever owned. As a puppy he was a boundless ball of black and white energy. As an adult, he was a personality, unique unto himself and truly, part of the family.

Owning a dog introduced us to the world of veterinarians, groomers and obedience school - all of which helped us to learn how to care for and understand what owning a pet entails (pun intended). Farley was a wonderful, unforgettable companion, who died but lived on for years in FBorFW.

In 1995, Johnston decided to develop a storyline about the death of Farley, the Patterson's 14-year-old sheepdog. The powerful and moving story received international media coverage. Johnston received more than 2,500 letters from fans. Many were devastated that the beloved dog was written out of the comic strip. Others shared their heartbreaking stories of losing a family pet. After seven years, Farley's loss is still a sentimental subject!

Long after Farley left us, I had the opportunity to work with my husband's sister, a veterinarian in Manitoba. It was Beth who made me so aware of her role in the community. As an "animal doctor", she tended to family pets as well as large farm animals. Every patient was handled with professionalism and sincere consideration for both the animals and their owners. After all, when a member of the family is sick, it affects everyone!

Seeing a worried family greet their healthy pet after a night in the "hospital" was a rewarding sight. Calming someone who had lost a pet was as heartwrenching as any final passage.

Beth did her work for the love of it. When people couldn't pay, they brought us chickens or fresh pies. Never did a patient go untreated - even in the middle of the night, sick animals were treated and cared for. Calves were born, piglets too and abandoned kittens were nursed by hand until they were big enough for adoption.

It was a hard job, and I was part of it for a season, carrying supplies, cutting sutures, holding flashlight and holding hands.

To be asked to help veterinarians to care for pets who, for lack of finances, might be left to suffer is an honour. By lending Farley's name and image to the Farley Foundation, I feel part of this venerable group, and once again, my very first dog, is remembered in a very special way.

More about the Farley Foundation and how to help out here

For Better or For Worse® official website here

More about For Better or For Worse® here

The Kindness of a Stranger

A puppy that seemed destined for the pound and possible death was reunited with his owner late Tuesday.

On August 26, Josh Gomez, a 22-year old music teacher, brought his puppy, Pilot, to the PetFIRST Veterinary Clinic in Duluth, Georgia. Pilot was suffering from parvo, a deadly virus that can kill young animals very quickly. Treatment, which involves providing fluids to prevent dehydration, and managing related symptoms, can be costly.

Three days later, Gomez went to pick up his dog. He paid the vet $1,152, the amount he said the clinic had quoted him. However, Dr. Garry Innocent, the veterinarian, Innocent, however, said he never quoted that figure to Gomez and that the real amount Gomez owed was $1,640. That amount eventually increased to over $2,200, because of boarding costs.

Gomez felt that his dog had been held "hostage", as the clinic refused to release Pilot until all additional costs were paid.

Georgia law allows veterinarians to "dispose of" a pet 10 days after demanding, in writing, that its owner pay the animal's medical bill in full.

In a letter dated Sept. 8, Innocent informed Gomez that if he didn't pay the bill, he would "report this matter to all authorities including Gwinnett County Animal Control for pet abandonment and disposal" and suggested that the puppy might be euthanized. He called Mr. Gomez a "jerk", commenting that "all the twit has to do is pay his bill". PetFIRST does not offer options like payment plan negotiations or Care Credit, a third-party loan for veterinary expenses.

In response to angry e-mails and phone calls that "were disrupting his business", the vet relented and advised that instead of handing the dog over to Animal Control, he would offer Pilot for adoption to one of his "star" clients.

Tuesday, September 18 was the deadline Innocent set for Gomez to make good on his debt.

That afternoon, Carol Diamantis of Brookhaven paid $972 in cash to free Pilot.

Diamantis, Gomez and his attorney, Ed McCrimmon, paid a surprise visit to PetFIRST Animal Hospital late Tuesday. The cash Diamantis ponied up Tuesday afternoon settles the bill once and for all, according to the vet.
Diamantis said she stepped forward after reading news accounts of the pet's possible demise. "If I was in the position, I would hope somebody would help me out," said Diamantis, who brought her two sons with her.

The surprise visit prompted further theatrics, and the vet demanded that Pilot's bill be paid in cash before the dog would be handed over. McCrimmon, Gomez's lawyer, even called the Duluth police — to make sure the exchange took place, he said. Finally, a vet tech handed Pilot to his owner.

The dog jumped into Gomez's arms, his tail wagging. Gomez beamed. So did everybody else.

"I feel better than ever," said Josh Gomez, as he petted and hugged his puppy, Pilot, in the parking lot outside PetFIRST Animal Hospital in Duluth, Georgia. "I'm just glad it's done."

Credits: Ben Smith at Atlanta Journal - Constitution; Jason Getz, photography

L'enfer c'est les Autres

When French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporary existential masterpiece for stage, Huis Clos (No Exit) was first produced, theatre audiences and critics alike were disturbed by its unsympathetic characters and unrelentingly bleak thesis—succinctly stated by Garcin, the journalist-coward trapped in a room with two other craven individuals, all fated to act as each other's torturers for eternity—"Hell is other people."

The three damned souls - Garcin the army deserter and philanderer, Inez the lesbian who turned a wife against her husband, and Estelle the gold-digger and cheat - are ushered into a Second Empire style drawing room. They realize that they are in hell, and they fully expect to meet with the wrath of Satan and his minions.

Instead, they are politely shepherded into the single room together, one by one, after which the door is locked behind them. Quickly, they realize the hideous truth of their collective situation - each individual is to act as the torturer of the other two.
Resisting this fate, they decide they must fully understand and forgive each others' sins in order to find salvation. As each character's personal web of deceit unravels, they are all forced to face their own true nature.

---

ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is so vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window-- but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do without a looking-glass for ever and ever. I simply can't.

INEZ:Suppose I try to be your glass? Come and pay me a visit, dear. Here's a place for you on my sofa.

---

The barriers come down, the denials fade, all attempts to self-justify are shot down, and the ugly truth of each sinner is revealed.

---

GARCIN: Will night never come?

INEZ: Never.

GARCIN: You will always see me?

INEZ: Always.

GARCIN: This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thought out beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales!There's no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE!

ESTELLE: My darling! Please-

GARCIN: No, let me be. She is between us. I cannot love you when she's watching.

ESTELLE: Right! In that case, I'll stop her watching. (She picks up the PAPER knife and stabs Inez several times.)

INEZ: But, you crazy creature, what do you think you're doing? You know quite well I'm dead.

ESTELLE: Dead?

INEZ: Dead! Dead! Dead! Knives, poison, ropes--useless. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. SO here we are, forever.

ESTELLE: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.

GARCIN: For ever, and ever, and ever.

(A long silence.)

GARCIN: Well, well, let's get on with it...

---

First produced in Paris, 1944, Jean Paul Sartre's famous one-act play Huis Clos is his clearest dramatic metaphor for his philosophy: We all hold the power of choice, and with that power comes the responsibility of consequence. It is in the judgement of our peers that the truth lies about who we really are.

Updating animal legislation from 1892

In recent months, a number of high-profile animal abuse cases across the country has made many Canadians aware of how woefully inadequate and outdated Canada’s laws against animal cruelty are.

These well-publicized incidents have prompted thousands of Canadians to sign petitions and write letters to Members of Parliament demanding reform of our animal cruelty laws, which have changed very little since 1892.

There are currently two private members’ bills before Parliament to reform the Criminal Code sections on animal cruelty.

Bill C-373, introduced by Mark Holland, M.P. for Ajax-Pickering, is a comprehensive bill that not only increases penalties, but also closes off the many loopholes that allow animal abusers to walk away scot-free. Currently only one quarter of 1 % of animal cruelty complaints actually result in conviction.

Bill C-373 has the support of such major animal welfare organizations as the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies (CFHS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA).

However, hunting and animal industry groups are supporting rival Bill S-213, which substantially keeps in place laws from 1892. This bill, introduced by Senator John Bryden, is opposed by the major animal welfare organizations.

What can you do?

To learn about the differences between Bill C-373 and Bill S-213, read Mark Holland's article which was published in the September 2007 issue of Canadian Pets & Animals Magazine.

Inform yourself about animal cruelty issues and why Canadian law needs to change.

Share your views with your MP, and tell him or her that you want to see an effective bill passed.

Write to newspapers and discuss the issue with friends and on online forums.

Write to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and tell him that you are not satisfied with Bill S-213.

Write to the Senators and urge them not to pass S-213 in its present form when it is reintroduced under a new number in the new session of Parliament.

Visit Mark Holland's website for their contact information.

Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented."

The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the "dark night" of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa's may be the most extensive such case on record. (The "dark night" of the 18th century mystic St. Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Her faith-filled perseverance might have been her most spiritually heroic act.

Come Be My Light is that rare thing, a posthumous autobiography that could cause a wholesale reconsideration of a major public figure — one way or another. It raises questions about God and faith, the engine behind great achievement, and the persistence of love, divine and human. That it does so not in any organized, intentional form but as a hodgepodge of desperate notes not intended for daylight should leave readers only more convinced that it is authentic — and that they are, somewhat shockingly, touching the true inner life of a modern saint.

More at Time

Scarborough Unfair

A Scarborough homeowner who spent 10 years cultivating a native plant garden of more than 150 species says Toronto bylaw officers went well beyond their authority by chopping it down without warning last week. Deborah Dale returned home from work last Tuesday evening to find the plants removed from in front of her home.

"I called the police because my garden had been vandalized. It's not the first time I've had plants stolen, but to have the entire garden been taken away ... After 10 years it's not funny in the least," said Ms. Dale, a former president of the North American Native Plant Society.

City officials confirmed yesterday they were responsible for removing the garden, which was on both Ms. Dale's property and on the city-owned boulevard, saying they had received complaints that the garden had become unruly and offensive. The cost, about $200, will be added to her property taxes.

The Toronto Municipal Code requires all lawns to be kept trimmed to 20 centimetres or less. Natural gardens, those of free grown plants native to the area, are exempt. But Bill Blakes, the area’s manager of municipal licensing and standards, said the city rarely issues such exemptions. In Scarborough, he issues about 12 a year.

Ms. Dale said the city had no right to deem her property an eyesore simply because they didn’t recognize the plants she was growing.

"The city not only destroyed flowering plants and plants that were setting seed for use by the North American Native Plant Society in their fundraising efforts, but they also removed shrubs, a red oak tree, and even the sign indicating that it was a natural, pesticide-free garden," she wrote in an e-mail. She listed Cardinal Flowers that attracted hummingbirds and Butterfly Milkweed — finally in full bloom after years of growth — as some of the casualties.

A 2003 complaint about her garden was dismissed, Ms. Dale said. On June 26, the city received a new complaint. She received an infraction notice the next week, she said.

"I know the neighbours complain. I've complained about them, they’ve been hacking at my hedge. The city can't do anything about that. Apparently they can do something like enter private property and destroy my garden," Ms. Dale said.

Mr. Blakes said the city responds to complaints about unruly gardens and lawns with an "advisory letter", and then a second warning before sending in the mowers. Ms. Dale said she's filing a grievance against the city to recoup the cost of her garden, approximately $10,000.

"That’s 10 years of work. I don't have the time or the money to put back into recreating that garden from scratch. It took years, and it took a lot of courage. When you have a blank slate like that, just digging the first hole and knowing you're going to be doing something a little different that not everyone is going to understand, it's very difficult.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Dale is still upset at the loss of her personal nature project. "The city hasn't responded to my complaints about this. They haven't even acknowledged they’ve done it. I explained to the bylaw officer again that it's a native plant garden and it's exempt from any bylaws. There are no weeds at all in the garden. I invited them to come out and look at it. And that’s the last I’d ever heard."

Pet lovers call for tougher cruelty laws

When Toronto Humane Society investigator Tre Smith learned this week that his licence had been temporarily suspended, pending review of an ugly confrontation with the owner of a dog whose life Mr. Smith had just saved, the incident underlined a murky no-man's-land familiar to non-police law-enforcement officials.

And with Canada's archaic animal-cruelty laws poised to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st, the altercation provides a snapshot of difficulties looming for the men and women who enforce those laws.

Nowhere more so than in Ontario, whose animal-welfare regulations are by every estimate the weakest in the country. The industrial and financial heart of the country is also behind most states in the US.

That could change. Provincial politicians of all stripes, including the governing Liberals, appear certain to raise animal rights in the election campaign this fall. A further sign of the times: A workshop at the Law Society of Upper Canada, a first, will examine the law and animal rights.

But the big change is likely to be in Ottawa, where two competing pieces of legislation are currently before the House of Commons. Both would amend the federal Criminal Code to make cruelty to domestic animals an indictable offence rather than a summary one.

And while tougher animal-cruelty laws are decades overdue in the view of Hugh Coghill, chief inspector for the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he wonders how the province's more than 170 investigators can be expected to deal with offenders facing years in a penitentiary, rather than a small fine or - rarely - a brief spell behind bars.

"Indictable offences are arrestable offences," Mr. Coghill said.

"That means an SPCA officer would theoretically have to arrest the individual, take him or her to the police station to be fingerprinted, photographed and entered into CPIC [Canadian Police Information Centre, the national database that records criminal charges and convictions].

"Well, we don't provide handcuffs or handguns or nightsticks to our officers, and we don't provide them with the training to arrest people. Nor does any SPCA or humane society across Canada."

Laws in effect since 1892 decree that a Canadian can inflict on a pet the worst kind of suffering imaginable and incur no more than six months in jail, a $2,000 fine and a maximum two-year ban on owning animals.

Two bills are now before the Commons. One is Bill C-373, tabled by Liberal MP Mark Holland, which has passed its first reading and, along with severely toughening sanctions for abusing animals, aims to redefine them as sentient beings rather than objects.

The other initiative - Bill S-213, from Liberal Senator John Bryden - doesn't go that far, and in the view of its critics would still leave gaping loopholes in the law. But because it has the Harper government's backing and has now passed both the Senate and second reading in the Commons, Bill S-213 may be the one that takes effect.

Even with the way things are, he said, laying criminal charges for animal cruelty - 385 were laid province-wide last year - is expensive and cumbersome.

"The OSPCA act only gives us the power to write orders, it's ineffective and it's outdated," said Tre Smith.

"We'd like to see the federal laws toughened but also the provincial ones so we can hit [miscreants] in the pocketbook right away."

Even when orders are issued, one in four are contested via the Animal Care Review Board, a quasi-judicial government-appointed referee.

The society's files bulge with numbers. Each year, more than 1,000 investigations are launched citywide, and each year most perpetrators receive no more than a warning. In the first quarter of this year, the society was able to lay just four criminal charges.

Our laws protect anyone who wants to abuse an animal.

Source: Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail, August 11, 2007

What Can You Do?

Tell the Ontario government and Premier McGuinty that tougher animal cruelty laws are long overdue.

Sign the petition.

Tre Smith - Animal Hero

He did what he could to save man's best friend, but now Tre Smith, a Toronto Humane Society inspector, is in the dog house.

On July 31, Smith was alerted to a Rottweiler named Cyrus trapped in a sealed and roasting car during a blistering heat wave, with internal temperatures approaching 70C. With the creature near death, he broke the window, sending the owner out to answer his car alarm. With a choice between letting the dog die and hanging on to a man accused of animal cruelty, Smith made a difficult decision. He handcuffed the man to his car and left him there to tend to Cyrus.

"He (the suspect) was threatening and abusive and for my own safety and for the safety of the other people around me and for the safety of Cyrus, I needed to tend to Cyrus to save his life," Smith explained.

By the time police arrived, the captive man was bleeding, having been allegedly attacked by angry bystanders who witnessed the incident. "The police hadn't got here just yet but they were almost here, and I had to leave because the dog was non-responsive, had stopped breathing and I had to stimulate the dog just to bring him back," he recalled then. "So I had to leave for the life of the dog."

But that decision has now cost Smith dearly. The Ontario SPCA suspended his agent's license pending an internal review. He can still work at the Humane Society, but cannot investigate animal cruelty cases. The OSPCA fully supports Officer Smith's actions to save Cyrus, but the ensuing assault on the abuser could be problematic for the humane organizations.

By contrast, the accused, Paul Soderholm, who will appear in court in September and who is now listed on a North American animal abuse database, faces a maximum penalty under Ontario's antiquated animal cruelty laws, of $2,000 and 6 months in jail - a mere slap on the wrist.

While cruelty charges have been laid against the owner, there's a terrible irony in the fact that the man accused of the crime could one day get his animal back. It's an old dilemma Smith faces every day in his difficult but rewarding job. Soderholm claims to have rescued Cyrus as an abused puppy five years ago, and "would never do anything to harm him". Whoops! Short memory here! He just wants his beloved pet back. We assume he would be reimbursing the Toronto Humane Society for the $10,000 in veterinary fees to save the dog (in addition to the costs of replacing his beloved car window), but then, we'd rather see Cyrus in a loving home elsewhere. Lucky for him our laws are so gutless; otherwise, he could be liable for, say, $10,000 in fines and a real jail term.

"[The laws are] not tough enough," Officer Smith makes clear. "They don't have any teeth. We're gumming our way through this thing. How can anyone expect us to do our job properly if we don't have the tools, the resources and the laws and the people to back us up?"

"There is an avenue that he can proceed with to try and get his animal back in the meantime before this is seen before the courts." He is referring to the province's Animal Care Review Board which, last fall, returned two dalmatian puppies to their abuser in the Toronto Beaches. The Board's decision was subsequently reversed, and those puppies are happily in new homes. That story is here.

Smith recalls that the province was looking at toughening up the laws, but when the Legislature broke for the election, the new rules still hadn't passed - and won't until after the vote in October.

The good news is that, although Cyrus was near death and facing possible brain damage as a result of his ordeal, he is making a full recovery at the Toronto Humane Society. The friendly and alert rottweiler has already received over many offers of adoption. A Facebook group supporting Officer Smith has over 4,000 members.

In the meantime, the dogfight between the OSPCA and the Toronto Humane Society continues. The OSPCA rightly asked for timely paperwork in this contentious case, especially since the perp was taken into custody by being cuffed to his car. With 20:20 hindsight, we would all have done this differently, wouldn't we? And there is no question that Toronto Humane Society is milking this for all it's worth, and Officer Smith is their poster boy. After all, the 170+ animal cruelty inspectors in Ontario do this work every day.

The silver lining related to Officer Smith's tough decision is a groundswell of anger on the part of the public, and the awareness of the urgent need for more relevant animal cruelty legislation. The current legislation dates from the 1800s, and sadly supports abusers better than it does their victims. Most states in the US are way ahead of the industrial and financial heart of Canada, which is roughly on par with Mississippi. Bringing the anti-cruelty legislation into the 21st century is something that both the OSPCA and Toronto Humane Society can agree on.

City News video

What Can You Do?

Email the Toronto Humane Society and let Tre Smith know what you think.

Contact the Toronto Humane Society

Write to the OSPCA to offer your support for animal cruelty legislation that really has teeth.

Contact the OSPCA

Write to Monte Kwinter, Ontario Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services. He has been working with a task force to put tighter legislation in place. Let's make this a priority in Ontario.

Contact Monte Kwinter

Tre Smith image is copyright Toronto Humane Society.

The Dark View of Charles Simic

Not a peep out of you now
After the bedlam early this morning.
Are you begging pardon of me
Hidden up there among the leaves,
Or are your brains momentarily overtaxed?

You savvy a few things I don't:
The overlooked sunflower seed worth a holler;
The traffic of cats in the yard;
Strangers leaving the widow's house,
Tieless and wearing crooked grins.

Or have you got wind of the world's news?
Some new horror I haven't heard about yet?
Which one of you was so bold as to warn me,
Our sweet setup is in danger?

Kids are playing soldiers down the road,
Pointing their rifles and playing dead.
Little birdies, are you sneaking wary looks
In the thick foliage as you hear me say this?

---

Charles Simic, a Serbian-American writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, was named the U.S.'s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 2007.He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid 1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse, imagistic poems which, like those of William Blake, have their roots in observed objects that serve to extrapolate the universe.

Over the years, Simic's style has come to be considered immediately recognizable. Critics have often referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes." Simic himself has stated: "Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator." The quote intimates Simic's philosophy that true art must be greater than the person who created it.

"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was 15," responded Simic after being named Poet Laureate.

“I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.

His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something, My Noiseless Entourage; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM; Night Picnic; The Book of Gods and Devils; and Jackstraws , which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

His other books of poetry include Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell; Hotel Insomnia; The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Unending Blues.

NY Times Review

Knut, der kleine Eisbär

The world's most famous polar bear is retiring from the limelight.

Fans of cuddly Knut will no longer be able to see him play with his keeper twice a day because he has become too dangerous.

The bear made his first public appearance at Berlin Zoo in March as a 20lb cub.

The boisterous seven-month-old now weighs 110lbs and the zoo is concerned about the safety of his keeper.

Zoo keeper Thomas Dörflein said: "This doesn't mean that I will never play with Knut again; it just means there are no fixed times anymore... I am always there for him.

"Knut is still a child; he needs me."



If you feel like singing along, here are the words:

Knut, der ist ein Kuschelbär
Doch hat keine Mama mehr
Trotzdem ist er frech und froh
Und der Star im Zoo
Kleiner Racker ganz in weiß
Mit vier Pfoten kuschelweich
Alle hab’n den Knut so lieb
Schön, dass es dich gibt
Knut, Knut
Kleiner Eisbär aus’m Zoo
Knut, Knut
Dir geht’s richtig gut
Knut, du bist ein Kuschelbär
Du wirst immer putziger
Laufen kannst du auch schon gut
Weiter so, nur Mut
Nuckelfläschchen in den Mund
Trinke fein, das ist gesund
Danach musst du schlafen gehen
Kleiner Knut, schlaf schön
Knut, Knut
Kleiner Eisbär aus’m Zoo
Knut, Knut
Dir geht’s richtig gut
Knut, du süßer Kuschelbär
Dich zu mögen ist nicht schwer
Streichelt man dich auf dem Bauch
Dann freust du dich auch
Deine Zähnchen sind noch klein
Kräftig beißen, das muss sein
Dann wirst du bald groß und stark
Ja, das ist doch klar

---

Ex-circus performer Tosca the polar bear gave birth to Knut and his brother on 5 December 2006. Tosca rejected Knut and his brother. After four days, the brother died and Knut was separated from his mother by zoo workers. He was the first polar bear to have been born and survive in Berlin Zoo for over 30 years.

Being the size of a guinea pig and facing an almost certain mauling by his mother, he spent the first 44 days of his life in an incubator before zoo keeper Thomas Dörflein began handraising the cub. Knut's need for around-the-clock care required that Dörflein sleep on a mattress next to Knut's sleeping enclosure as well as feed and accompany him on his shows for the public.On 23 March 2007, Knut was presented to the public for the first time. Around 400 journalists visited Berlin Zoo to report on Knut's first public appearance to a worldwide audience.

Not only the zoo has profited from the attention surrounding Knut: several companies offer Knut-related products from ringtones to cuddly toys. Candy company Haribo decided to release a raspberry-flavored Cuddly Knut sweet in April 2007 and has promised the Berlin Zoo a share of the profits. One company even made Knut themed cough-drops. Knut was also the subject of several songs. The most successful were the single "Knut is Cute" and the song by 9-year-old Kitty from Köpenick titled "Knut, der kleine Eisbär". Knut also appeared on the March 29, 2007 cover of the German Vanity Fair magazine.

On May 1, 2007 it was announced that New York-based Turtle Pond Publications and the Berlin Zoo signed a deal for the publishing rights to Knut with the hopes of raising awareness of global warming issues.

License to Kill

Tom Rush, wrote "A Cowboy's Paean", which is on his "Trolling for Owls" album. The image is of the Druid Peak Pack in Yellowstone, and the photographer is Dan Hartman. Check out his work at the Hartman Gallery

Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
Makes a man feel good, Lord, it makes a man feel proud!
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
One for Mother, one for Country, one for God.
Well, if you’re having trouble with the truck, or with the woman,
Maybe them kids are screwin’ up in school,
If the cows are actin’ smarter than the cowboy,
You gotta show the world you ain’t nobody’s fool.
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
Makes a man feel good, Lord, it makes a man feel proud!
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
One for Mother, one for Country, one for God.
I got my 30.30 and my eyes are 20/20,
I got my M16 and my trusty .44,
I got my 10-80 and my IQ’s double digits!
Boys, this is gonna be an all-out war.
I got my field rations straight from old Jack Daniel’s,
Hank, Jr.’s on the 8 track in my 4X4,
And I’d shoot a thousand coyotes if I could only just find one,
‘cause, boys, that’s what God made coyotes for.
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
Makes a man feel good, Lord, it makes a man feel proud!
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
One for Mother, one for Country, one for God.
So you never mind them Eastern, liberal, environmental … Democrat sissies,
Vegetarians are just a passing fad,
Just tip your hat and wish ‘em “via con … carne,”
Then go on out and make ‘em hopping mad!
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
Makes a man feel good, Lord, it makes a man feel proud!
Go on out and shoot yourself some coyotes,
One for Mother, one for Country, one for God.

---

In related news, the Bush Administration has issued a disastrous "License to Kill" plan that could trigger the extermination of half the gray wolves in Wyoming and Idaho, starting as early as October. The gray wolf population is still classified as an endangered species, although it has staged a welcome and dramatic comeback from the brink of extinction. Bush is circumventing his own agency's process for delisting a species.
In preparation for these mass killings, the government has already purchased planes and helicopters capable of gunning down entire packs of wolves in minutes. Their goal: To immediately kill up to 700 wolves in Greater Yellowstone and central Idaho.
The administration wants to be able to kill wolves anywhere that elk herd numbers may be affected by wolves. It is focusing on areas where big game numbers are "below management objectives". But those few cases of declines in elk herds have been caused by a combination of factors including habitat destruction, drought and human hunting -- not just by wolves. And in most areas of the northern Rockies, elk numbers are at all-time highs.
Wolves once thrived in much of the lower 48 states. Today, they reside in only five percent of their former range in the U.S. If there is one place in the U.S. where they should be allowed to flourish, it is in and around Yellowstone -- the nation's oldest park -- and the remote Selway Bitterroot ecosystem in central Idaho.

Shadow Mountain

Part memoir, part meditation, part love story, Shadow Mountain is an impassioned commentary on how our connection to the wild can rescue or destroy us.

While completing an undergraduate research thesis, Renée Askins was given a two-day-old wolf pup to raise. Named Natasha, the pup, was destined for a life in captivity. Through her work with Natasha and her siblings, Askins developed a deep, fierce love for the species. On the day Natasha was unexpectedly taken from her and sent to a remote research facility, Askins made a promise to the wolf pup: "Your life, your sacrifice, will make a difference." And it did.

Renée Askins spent the next fifteen years in the grueling effort to restore wolves to Yellowstone, where they had been exterminated by man some seventy years before. The campaign's popularity with the American public aroused the rage of the western ranching community and their powerful political allies in Washington. She endured death threats, years of contentious debate and political manipulations, and heartbreaking setbacks when colonizing wolves were illegally killed. But in March 1995, Askins witnessed the realization of her mission when wolves were released into their native home in Yellowstone–the first wolves to be found there in almost a century.

A born storyteller, Renée Askins offers moving and vibrant examples of the reciprocity that exists between man and animal. And, like a wolf in the shadows, Askins circles the issues surrounding the conundrum of embracing wild nature. Shadow Mountain explores the wildness present within animals and humans, urging us to recognize both its light and its shadow.

Renee currently lives in California with her daughter, her husband, Tom Rush, three dogs, four parakeets and two lovebirds.

Renée Askins website

The Evil in a Blade of Grass

five apparitions are building a moth in the dark
they are nailing wings to fog wings to white powder
they are mixing milk and sulphur in an iron bowl
for its heart they have made the sound of a carousel
coming to a full stop
for its lungs they have made the sound of a train
filling with snowin one stone they've found enough language
in one shadow enough thoughtthey are building a small evil in the dark
a blood drop a flake of dry skin
a demon with a shawl of fine lace
sewn into its backnot the amount of evil a man has
but the evil contained in a blade of grass
a real evil
a moth flying out of a sparrow's throat
and into the evening air

Don Domanski, "Devildom"
from "Hammerstroke", 1986

---

To read Don Domanski's poem, Devildom, about an evil as elusive as fog, an evil made of wings and white powder, stops us short. The poem takes on a topicality we don't generally look for from Domanski, also the author of The Cape Breton Book of the Dead; he is more rooted in the metaphysical realm than in the daily news.

Domanski examines evil here, as part of the fabric of the real, as the yin-yang dance partner of good. In Devildom, evil is built into the world, not in a single moment of creation, but continuously, and on a modest scale.

Why a moth? Perhaps precisely because it's so small and fragile. But there is also the imagery of the Death's Head Moth, the "fine lace shawl" on its back revealing a skull. That a harmless creature should fly through the world tattooed like a bottle of poison may be Nature's version of irony.

---

Don Domanski has been fortunate to be blessed with a few canny critics. He's been called a seer and a necromancer of words, "a cross between Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, and the Brothers Grimm," and the poems have been variously described as "earthy and astral, dark and buoyant," "half fairytale and half flesh." There is something consistent in these descriptions; they indicate the marriage of opposites stirring at the core of his poetry, what one critic has called "the struggle to bring the cosmos and its citizens to us whole."

Domanski's poetry, when read with attention and openness, traverses the ordinary and the extraordinary, illuminating both. He takes our daily objects and experiences, and by carefully relating them to each other, in unexpected contexts, transforms our entire version of reality. But this isn't magic. It's metaphor.

Rilke's poem, The Reader, captures the uncanny way words on a page can create a world so rich and involving it's like experiencing an alternate reality.

---

Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published eight books of poetry. Two of his books (Wolf Ladder, 1991, and Stations of the Left Hand, 1994) were short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 1999 he won the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry.

Northern Poetry Review

The Minamata Pietà

Minamata is a small Japanese fishing town living in the shadow of the chemical factory of the Chisso Corporation. When the factory began dumping large amounts of mercury in the bay in 1956 thousands of people began to develop symptoms of mercury poisoning. Almost all the towns cats went insane, throwing themselves into the ocean. Birds fell out of the sky. Panic gripped the city. In time, thousands of people would die from the poisoning.

An aide mops the brow of Chisso's president Shimada, after he performed the Japanese ritual of shame and apology: touching his forehead to the ground, at the close of a grueling day in court.

Eugene Smith's portrait of Minamata is an impassioned tale of environmental destruction, corporate neglect, and social responsibility. Together with his half-Japanese wife Aileen, he chronicled the fight against the industrial state, the direct action protests, the court cases, the stories of the afflicted families. Smith's achievement is remarkable as he was not a detached observer but an active participant in the story, his role both heroic and tragic. Measured by its social impact, his photobook, Minamata, is one of the most important pictorial documents in history.

William Eugene Smith took this photo, and together with the help of his wife and Ishikawa Takeshi, a local photographer, many other photos were taken of the effects of long term environmental industrial mercury poisoning on the local population.

Here, on the Japanese Island of Kyushu, we see an image of an outwardly healthy mother bathing her fetal-poisoned 16 year old daughter, Tomoko Uemura, grotesquely deformed, physically crippled and blind since birth due to environmental industrial mercury poisoning in the local Minamata, Japan, water supply.

This may well be the first environmental pollution photojournalism. Note also the invariable comparison to Michelangelo Buonarroti 's Pietà.

William Eugene Smith, who was severely beaten by goons hired by the offending chemical company, also received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise."

More

In the Footsteps of Gandhi

Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year. ~ Indian peasant prayer

An ant carrying a wild lettuce seed, a source of food for them that Monsanto seeks to destroy through use of its herbicides.

While Mahatma Gandhi is best remembered for his campaign to end British colonialism a half-century ago, the greater part of his life's work was devoted to renewing India's vitality and regenerating its culture from the ground up. He was a tireless champion of what he called swadeshi, or local self-sufficiency.

One of the most prominent of Gandhi's intellectual heirs is Vandana Shiva, a physicist and philosopher of science by training who has developed a considerable reputation as a champion of sustainability, self-determination, women's rights, and environmental justice. She has written more than a dozen books, including Monocultures of the Mind, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, and Biopiracy. She is also well-known in India for her grassroots efforts to preserve forests, organize women's networks, and protect local biodiversity.

Vandana Shiva is the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the 1998 Alfonso Comin award and the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. David Brower, the late environmentalist, once said that Shiva would be his choice for world president, if there were such a thing.

Interview with Vandana Shiva

The Gift of Food

In the words of the sacred texts of India, "The giver of food is the giver of life," and indeed of everything else, says Vandana Shiva.

One of my favourite images in India is the kolam, a design which a woman makes in front of her house. In the days of Pongal, which is the rice harvest festival in South India, I have seen women get up before dawn to make the most beautiful art work outside their houses, and it is always made with rice. The real reason is to feed the ants, but it is also a beautiful art form that has gone on from mother to daughter, and at festival time everyone tries to make the best kolam as their offering. Thus, feeding the ants and works of art are integrated.

The indica rice variety's homeland is a tribal area called Chattisgarh in India. It must be about fifteen years ago that I first went there. The people there weave beautiful designs of paddy, which they then hang outside their houses. I thought that this must be related to a particular festival, and I asked, "What festival is it for?" They said, "No, no, this is for the season when the birds cannot get rice grain in the fields." They were putting rice out for other species, in very beautiful offerings of art work.

Each time I see a supermarket, I see how every community and ecosystem's capacity to meet its food needs is being undermined, so that a few people in the world can experience food 'surpluses'.

But these are pseudo-surpluses leading to 820 million malnourished people, while many others eat too much and get ill or obese.

We are now working on technologies, based on genetic engineering, which accelerate this violence towards other beings. On my recent trip to Punjab, it suddenly hit me that they no longer have pollinators. Those technologically obsessed people are manipulating crops to put genes from the Bt toxin (the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) into plants, so that the plant releases toxins at every moment and in every cell: in its leaves, its roots, its pollen. These toxins are being eaten by ladybirds and butterflies which then die.

We do not see the web of life that we are rupturing. We can only see the interconnections if we are sensitive to them. And when we are aware of them we immediately recognise what we owe to other beings: to the pollinators, to the farmers who have produced the food, and to the people who have nourished us when we could not nourish ourselves.

Grain giant Cargill controls seventy per cent of the food traded in the world; and they fix the prices. They sell the inputs, they tell the farmer what to grow, they buy cheaply from the farmer, then they sell it at high cost to consumers. In the process they poison every bit of the food chain. Instead of giving, they are thinking of how they can take out that last bit, from ecosystems, other species, the poor, the Third World.

"Our seeds are smart; we have found new technologies that prevent the bees from usurping the pollen."

Instead, Cargill says that the bees usurp the pollen - because Cargill have defined every piece of pollen as their property. And in a similar way, Monsanto said: "Through the use of Roundup we are preventing weeds from stealing the sunshine." The entire planet is energised by the life-giving force of the sun, and now Monsanto has basically said that it is Monsanto and the farmers in contract with Monsanto that, alone on the planet, have the right to sunshine - the rest of it is theft.

So what we are getting is a world which is absolutely the opposite to the 'giving of food'. Instead, it is the taking of food from the food chain and the web of life. Instead of gift we have profit and greed as the highest organising principle.

Resurgence

Resistance is Fertile

Most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the North American food supply.



The Future of Food, a chilling documentary created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety.

At first, Garcia thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the "terminator" gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

"It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue." That is, corporate control of the food system and the patenting of life.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the "green revolution" of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide. The chemical companies succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapped patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

Garcia tells the David-versus-Goliath story of Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser. He's one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company's Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action -- for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation. Labeling might just drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

"Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late."

There are seven parts to this film. Watch them all.

The Future of Food