Carleton University Magazine

President’s Message

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:14 +0000

A message from the president

Dr. Roseann O’Reilly Runte

Dear Alumni,

With fall in full flight, we focus rather single-mindedly on scholarly pursuits. I would like to pause and note the many activities of the past few months, including the time when some mistakenly believe faculty and students are on holiday!

I would like to applaud the fine research and teaching conducted over the summer, the countless hours of community service, the employment of students to gain valuable experience as well as funds before their return to campus in September.

In addition, I applaud our athletes who participated in the summer Universiade Olympics. At least 15 Carleton students and graduates took part in these international competitions. Students were active around the world and in Ottawa including joining competitions at NASA, volunteering in programs in Africa, mentoring local students, participating in Pride Week, interning as journalists, engineers, language majors, historians and scientists.

I would like to praise graduate student, Nicole Williamson, for her heroism and courage. She survived a terrible plane crash in the north and freed a seven-year-old child from the wreckage. We all wish Nicole a speedy recovery from her injuries.

Summer and early fall was also a time of celebrations. I received a note from three students who got together for their thirty-year reunion at Carleton. They wrote: “We lived together in Ottawa during our Carleton years. We made a perfect union of three religions [Hindu, Muslim and Sikh] despite wide differences in belief structures and dietary dos and don’ts, worship patterns prescribed by all three religions. We never had a single harsh argument with each other and enjoyed our stay together, the memories that we still cherish. What made it a success? Only one thing: We shared just, basic, decent human values and never looked at each [other] through the filter of any religion. If…[you need] a good story [of] what works for Carleton U, this is it.”

And now, with our notebooks and iPads open to new pages, we begin to compose the stories which will one day, perhaps thirty years hence, be told by alumni gathering for reunions. They will be filled with the same fond memories and will be shared by friends who are, even now, meeting each other for coffee on the quad.

Best wishes,

Roseann O’Reilly Runte
President and Vice-Chancellor
Carleton University

Big Bang Theorist

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Percussionist Jesse Stewart, a professor in the school for studies in art and culture, explores the sonic world in projects that range from the profound to the seemingly bizarre. Combining the perspective of a writer, visual artist, academic and musician, Stewart creates works that expand on notions of space and sound. Charting a career path in four portrait-profiles

He concentrates ferociously, almost glowering, lips scrunched tightly together. Sometimes his whole body moves. Playing his drum kit, Jesse Stewart is on some other planet, focused on keeping time. And time is passing, although no one in the audience has checked a watch. All seem engrossed in Stewart’s mysterious sonic world.

Everyone’s involved as he thrums the membrane of a floor tom with one hand—all digits engaged—and, with the other, taps and snaps for punctuation. Layers of sound build up, louder, then softer. Then Stewart beats with both hands as if working the bongos. The large cymbal crashes, for all the world like waves, until he draws his drumstick against it, eliciting an eeriness turned silvery as his voice comes in on an extended note. Stewart calls the performance “an invitation to lose one’s self in the moment, the expandable moment, almost beyond time.” Eternity in an hour.

At the Gallery

Throughout August and September, Stewart exhibited his artwork at the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa. Walking in, a visitor heard the intermittent sound of a drip—a hanging intravenous bag dripping onto the membrane of a transparent snare drum. Little by little, the accumulation of water changed the timbre of the drum, lowering its pitch. When the drumhead filled completely, the drops fell without a sound. “Our first drum—the ultimate timekeeper,” says Stewart, likening the sculpture to our own pulsing hearts.

Upstairs were other works measuring time. One contained pieces of glass collected over 20-odd years, pale bits worn away by waves lapping onto beaches. Each day Stewart adds one more fragment to the more than 13,000 in this arrangement of concentric rings. Each glassy bit represents the passing of one more day in Stewart’s life.

Instead of giving the usual artist’s talk at Karsh-Masson, Stewart appeared for a performance, a first for the gallery. He played his trap kit, turning aside to spin vinyl on a turntable. The needle scratched and skipped across the square pattern he had sandblasted into the record, reminiscent of hip-hop turntablism. Only fragments of the spoken-word record could be made out, tantalizing snippets such as: “Time … the inexplicable material of our existence …”

Found Objects

Over coffee, Stewart picks up the white ceramic salt and pepper shakers on the table. Tapping the two bulbous bases against each other, he produces a dull clacking. “This does resemble the sound of two little rounded stones being struck together,” Stewart says, almost surprised, as if he had wanted to mimic that very sound. Tapping the shakers together again, he moves them to his lips, formed into an O shape. With his mouth as resonator, like the hollow body of a guitar, the clacks amplify, wowing in vibration.

“When performing,” Stewart explains, “I want to generate interest through a nice balance between the repetition of the beat and the variations between timbre and pitch.” And so, while drumming on plate glass, if he finds that its dull resonance makes for dull listening, he’ll drag or rub his homemade mallets, capped with toy bouncy balls, across the surface. A sustained otherworldly note ensues.

Stewart wants to “explore non-musical sounds and make them musical, elicit some kind of secret, coax new sounds from them.” Every day he listens; every day he wonders. Stewart is nothing if not inquisitive, sharing his curiosity with others who show any interest. Ordinary objects. What else can they be? What else could they be?

He has used steel bowls, electrical conduits, canoe paddles and a sheet of paper. He has played a reconfigured, almost unrecognizable drum set. And he plays with water. One evening this past summer, he played next to John Ceprano’s Balanced Rock sculpture on the Ottawa River. Listening to the sounds of the water, he made a soft answer with his hand drum. As the river replied, Stewart playfully thrummed back. When no sound came back, that silence was heard as never before. As a bird uttered a cry, he grabbed the waterfowl call he had picked up at a hunting store. Bird and man made unfamiliar music together.

MC HAMMER Jesse Stewart down the way from campus at the corner of Bronson and Gladstone avenues. Found objects produce found sound. If Stewart doesn’t get the sound he likes from an object, he’ll experiment and adapt. In this case, he added bouncy balls to homemade mallets

Up the Tree House

BRANCHING OUT Jesse Stewart created this tree house for his children. Having spent considerable time and money on the project, he felt a tinge of sadness. What of all the children who have no home? He assuaged his concerns by hosting concerts inside the tree house. Admission is a donation to a children’s charity of their choosing

In Stewart’s backyard is a tree house he built for his two children. It’s solid, nothing rickety. The stairs are steep, ladder-like—and once up, you see the splayed trunk of the silver maple emerging through sawn holes.

Two windows have shutters with gingerbread cut-outs. Two skylights let in daylight, and battery-operated lights serve in the evening. Inside are a desk, benches and a bed, hideaway furniture made of simple boards. There’s a shallow cupboard for storing the weatherproof cushions.

Stewart intends to give concerts up here. It wouldn’t take many for a full house. There’s no room for a whole drum set, but Stewart’s simple frame drum fits just fine. So would other small instruments: pebbles, shells, a salad bowl. Voice might get into the picture. Here, “the space itself becomes the improv partner.”

Back in the ’90s, Stewart played jazz and rock in bar bands. A few years later, as his visual work went on display, he left the dark dinginess of a club for the clean light of an art gallery. Attentive audiences were a nice change too.

Since then, Stewart has been drawn to different acoustic environments. He’s played at a second-hand store in St. John’s, surrounded by playable blocks of ice at Toronto’s WinterCity in Nathan Phillips Square, at Vancouver’s International Jazz Festival and at the National Gallery of Canada in front of Barnett Newman’s immense, minimal Voice of Fire.

So far, the tree house accommodates only three people, with perhaps a fourth perched on the tiny balcony. Up here, Stewart is reminded that many children don’t have a tree house in which to play, quietly or madly. Some don’t even have a real home. He proposes audience members pay by donation to their favourite children’s charity.

Down in the Cave

Stewart spent the whole of the last night in September recording his 21st (or so) CD in the Bonnechere Caves in Eganville. He took his two heaviest instruments to strike, scrape and roll, to mark time. Both are made of stone. One is a collection of rock core samples, the other a marimba he made from 97 pieces of cut, polished marble, weighing almost 145 kilograms. Playing in the main cave, the connected network of side caves and tunnels made for unusual acoustics amid what he calls “the poetic sensibility of stone with stone.”

Ever restless, Stewart is exploring the periodic table as a template for a new series. He’s working from the premise of every chemical element being defined by the number of protons in its atomic nucleus. The simplest element, hydrogen, has only one, which we take to represent its atomic number. Stewart proposes matching atomic numbers to pitches. Thus hydrogen would equal one pitch; oxygen, with its eight protons, eight pitches, and so on. A dense composition that’s tricky to pull off.

He knows that the Bonnechere Caves are 500,000 years old, that his marimba marble is younger, and that the earth’s molten metal, some in his cymbal, was thrown 4.54 billion years ago. And the universe? Cosmologists reckon that nine billion years before the birth of the earth, the Big Bang happened and somehow all 118 chemical elements were produced. From somewhere. Where have we come from? Where are we going? Jesse Stewart keeps up his never-ending inquiries.

ROCK OUT Jesse Stewart recorded his latest album in a cave to take advantage of the unusual acoustics and the poetic sensibility of stone

Dark Art

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Art and science meet in the work of artist-academic Cindy Stelmackowich. Contrasts abound as she churns up beauty from the abject. The resulting works show that attraction and repulsion can coexist. A look inside the atelier with journalist Paul Gessell and photographer Rémi Thériault.

BEAUTY IN THE DETAILS Cindy Stelmackowich inside her studio at the Enriched Bread Artists’ co-operative in Ottawa. The artist traffics in the macabre, finding beauty in bodily details and dated medical practices

Cindy’s little shop of horrors is down a hall through a rabbit warren of artists’ studios in an old Ottawa bakery. The building—now called Enriched Bread Artists—is something of a laboratory for creative minds. Among them is an anatomically obsessed artist, properly titled Dr. Cindy Stelmackowich, during her day job as a contract instructor at Carleton University.

Just past the entrance to Stelmackowich’s studio there is, to the right, an assortment of human hair pieces called domes. Nearby is an old physician’s examining table that has surely been party to more indelicate secrets than a church confessional. Another wall displays rows of antique black mourning lace that fashion-conscious Victorian ladies used to adorn their widow’s weeds. Further into the room are photographic blows-ups of squirming little creatures known as cholera bacteria. The back wall reveals an image of a handsome young man, his eyes closed, his chest open, his organs tumbling into a ruby-red glass bowl below. Despite the gore, the man looks angelic, serene, even seductive. That’s a Stelmackowich trademark: conjuring beauty from unexpected places. Turns out, the little shop of horrors is actually a beauty shop.

Among the studio’s many surprises, none is greater than the dissection table covered with gleaming white ceramic tile in the middle of the room. It’s a replica that Stelmackowich, MA/95, had built to match some she saw in photographs from Germany’s Nazi era. She wants to allude both directly and indirectly to that period and to “practices related to that history” in an art show someday. Why? Because that was a poignant period in medical science. “No matter how I use the table in my art, it will refer to science as having had negative resonance,” she says.

Stelmackowich loves to bring new life to controversial or creepy old things, so we are simultaneously curiously attracted and repulsed. It forces questions.

Until the dissection table goes on public display, Stelmackowich is using it as a work surface. “I like the clinical look,” she says. On this particular day, an elaborate Victorian-era hair wreath rests on the table. Human hair is twirled to form roses, lilies and other flowers. Stelmackowich added dozens of small lengths of wiggly wires, each topped with a button that looks like an eye. “I thought it would be interesting to have the wreaths look back at you,” Stelmackowich says. Of course. Why have a hair wreath just sit there?

“She really enjoys that push-pull,” says Judith Parker, acting curator of Ottawa’s Bytown Museum, where Stelmackowich did a residency earlier this year and where she has a solo show on now and continuing until January 8, 2012. The exhibit, called Dearly Departed, looks at the visual and written language of 19th-century mourning.

The show is one of many commitments crowding Stelmackowich’s calendar. She is teaching a Carleton course on feminism and gender issues in art while also doing research for the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa for a forthcoming exhibit on medicine and the five senses. Next spring, Stelmackowich will do a post-doctoral fellowship at the New York Academy of Medicine, an honour normally bestowed upon doctors and scientists, rather than artists. The fellowship will be followed by the 2012 publication of Bodies of Knowledge: Nineteenth Century Anatomical Atlases, 1800-1860, which incorporates much of her doctoral thesis from Binghamton State University of New York.

Stelmackowich’s academic career and art practice have been a juxtaposition of science, medicine and art. She loves nothing more than to find an arresting anatomical drawing from an old atlas, photograph it, enlarge it and then Photoshop other objects into the picture. The final work is a startlingly life-sized digital print collage that challenges the viewer to look at the human body in new ways. The inside, with its trellises of veins and nerves, can be just as beautiful as a painting of a voluptuous woman in her bath.

Stelmackowich grew up in Melville, a small city in eastern Saskatchewan, the daughter of a teacher and a baker. It’s one of life’s fine coincidences that the daughter who spent years helping her dad bake bread is now following her creative impulses in an old bakery.

In school, Stelmackowich was equally enthralled by art and science, so she studied both for the first few years of her undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. By third year, she had decided against spending her life in a laboratory and pursued a double major in fine arts and art history. Her electives included courses in cell anatomy and biochemistry, to keep up that side of her interests. In 1991, Stelmackowich came to Carleton to complete her MA. The doctorate from Binghamton came in 2010.

It was in the late 1990s that Stelmackowich started creating medically themed art in earnest. Laboratory beakers, test tubes and other scientific equipment were turned into installations and sculptures. Most successful were the images harvested from old medical texts and then reworked the way a sculptor moulds clay.

The Los Angeles Times was definitely impressed with Stelmackowich’s exhibition at the Kristi Engle Gallery in that city in 2008. The review described the work as “bizarre, haunting and beautiful.” And, the reviewer added, sexually charged.

MOURNING GLORY Stelmackowich in her studio with a Nazi-era replica dissection table and a collection of hair domes, objects of mourning that were often made with the hair from an entire family. In exploring early mourning rituals, the artist found that hair has an ethereal presence in some ways. However, when it’s off the head, it generates anxiety. “Hair can strike you in so many ways,” Stelmackowich says.

“One stunning example is The Wreck of the Underley off the Isle of Wight, England—1866 in which the bow of the careening ship slices into the body of a whale,” wrote reviewer Sharon Mizota. “This tableau is embedded in the abdomen of a female torso whose flayed skin frames the scene like petals or skeins of spun candy. It’s an image of penetration on at least three levels: the ship’s collision with the whale, the dissection itself and the suggestive placement of the phallic ship inside a woman’s body.”

Stelmackowich was delighted with the Los Angeles rave. She was also delighted last spring when the National Arts Centre staged the multidisciplinary arts festival in Ottawa called Prairie Scene, which saw her work exhibited alongside that of one of her idols, Winnipeg’s Diana Thorneycroft, whose art also aestheticizes the body in startling ways.

Evolving cultural attitudes toward the body, especially the bodies of women, infuse Stelmackowich’s work in the studio and the classroom. In the first few lessons, of her fall course, Stelmackowich revisits feminist debates of the 1960s, an often-unknown era for 20-year-old students. She explains why women rebelled and how the rebellion was linked to liberation movements for gays and racial minorities. Then the class moves into the study of feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, the American creator of The Dinner Party, a much-debated installation honouring 39 women from history.

Another course she has taught is called Envisioning the Body: Between Arts and Science, on how art about the body intersects with science. Many science majors are attracted to the art history class. They suddenly become enthralled with the visual culture of biology or medicine.

Stelmackowich has lectured at Carleton since 2003. “She is incredibly friendly and accessible and approachable,” says Brian Foss, an art historian and director for the School for Studies in Art and Culture. “She is able to visualize images with the kind of immediacy and sensuality that isn’t distant, that students rightly find extremely engaging.”

Foss sees Stelmackowich’s work as evolving from the Renaissance, when artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo physically explored the inner workings of the body in order to give more life to their images of its exterior.

Stelmackowich enjoys leading student debate on the trend of exhibiting real corpses that have been plasticized and placed in poses borrowed from art history or the world of sports. An example is the physician and anatomist Gunther von Hagens’ globe-trotting Body Worlds, public anatomical exhibitions of donated human bodies to educate the public about health and anatomy. Stelmackowich compares such shows to 16th-century public dissections by the likes of Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius. It was not until the late 18th century that cadaver dissection disappeared behind the closed door of the hospital, Stelmackowich explains, noting that in some parts of Europe, the exhibition of body parts remained an attraction at travelling fairs as late as the early 20th century

Exhibitions such as Body Worlds are considered exploitative and ghoulish in some quarters. So what about Stelmackowich’s reworking of old anatomical drawings? Are they ghoulish? Andrew Morrow says no. Morrow, a former colleague at Enriched Bread Artists, paints sexually explicit, apocalyptic scenes that also conjure up beauty from unexpected places. The two artists have the same dealer. “I find the work quite academic and strongly motivated by a collector’s impulse,” says Morrow. “I actually find it quite pristine and cold.”

Stelmackowich is more concerned with creating objects of beauty than of fright—she is more beautician than vampire. If viewers appreciate the aesthetics of her work, she is content, but she is delighted if people examine the issues raised by the layers of her work.

Pointing to the hair wreath on the dissection table, Stelmackowich declares: “I want to challenge myself and take this wreath somewhere else. It’s already strange. How can I make it surreal? How can I be fair to these aesthetics but, at the same time, place them somewhere where they can go up in all these conversations? To me, that’s the role of the artist. That’s also the role of the academic.”

FAMILY HAIR LOOM This work, called Eye Wreath, uses eyes made of hand-painted glass that are originals from the Victorian period. Taxidermists used them for ducks and birds. Stelmackowich sources period artifacts from flea markets to juxtapose them with objects from her own collection—such as a Victorian hair wreath made from the hair of an entire family—for an effect that is visually lush, yet surreal and ghoulish

One for the Books

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Career shifters quit their day jobs to write what might be the next great Canadian novel. Others put their life’s research into bound format in current affairs, media, poetry, history and sexuality. Not just a listing of recent publications, here is a summary of dreams realized by Carleton University faculty and graduates

Hot Type: The Antagonist by Lynn Coady, Bahons/93

It might seem strange to draw comparisons between Lynn Coady’s fiction and the NHL career of fellow Nova Scotian Sidney Crosby. But The Antagonist has proven to be very timely: its focus on the effects of brain injuries connects the novel to a wide-ranging debate over the impact of concussions on the lives of stars such as Crosby and on the future of professional sports.

The novel is the story of Rank, an unusually large young man, or “gland case,” as his friends call him, whose father pushes him into a world of ritualized violence by employing him as the muscle at the family ice cream stand (seriously) and goading him into playing hockey.

In The Antagonist, Coady returns to themes familiar from her earlier work—the hypocrisies of the Roman Catholic Church, masculine anxieties, a dark reading of the rural Maritime family and teenage alienation on Canada’s East Coast—and adds a few new wrinkles. The novel explores the ethics of appropriating the stories and personalities of others in one’s fiction (possibly as a response to negative reaction Coady received early in her career for writing versions of her friends and family into her work) and presents the story as a series of one-sided e-mails and Facebook posts, forcing the reader to gradually piece together the narrative and evaluate the reliability and motives of Rank, the author of these missives.

While many reviewers have focused on Rank, his father, Gordon Sr., stands next to Isadore Aucoin and Jim Arsenault in the pantheon of Coady’s pseudo-pious, belligerent, and self-obsessed father figures.

After a five-year hiatus (from fiction), it’s great to have Coady back. The Antagonist further cements her status as one of the most important, innovative and subversive voices in contemporary Atlantic Canadian fiction. 352 pages, House of Anansi Press, $32.95.

—Peter Thompson, PhD/09. His doctoral dissertation examined constructions of nature in Lynn Coady’s fiction.

ADVENTURE

The Iranian Conspiracy
By Greg Fisher
A professor in the College of the Humanities, Fisher combines fact and fiction, past and present, East and West in his archaeological adventure novel. Kindle edition, $4.99.

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

A Matter of Principle
By Conrad Black, BA/65
Black asserts his innocence in this widely reviewed memoir. The former chair of Hollinger International refers to himself as prisoner number 18330-424 and documents the minute details of prison life. However, the big house did not diminish his big vocabulary. Black’s paragraphs are so full of dry wit and reference, they are practically sculpted. 581 pages, McClelland & Stewart, $37.

BUSINESS

Change Happens: Your Guide to Navigating Change Using the 5C Model
By Beth Page, BA/86, MDPW/96
Page, who teaches in the MBA program at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., covers organizational development and the tenets of her 5C model, which she developed in her 2006 book Done Deal. 148 pages, Authenticity Press, $25.95.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions
Edited by Terry Cook, MA/70
University of Manitoba scholar Cook examines how archivists select and manage documents deemed worthy of preservation. 442 pages, Society of American Archivists, $56.

Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture
By Jeffrey A. Brown, BA/89
The archetypal action heroine takes many forms in pop culture. Brown interprets the changing gender dynamics of female action heroes as they shift from the sexual objectification of women to progressive models of female strength. 269 pages, University of Mississippi Press, $50 hardcover.

CURRENT AFFAIRS

The Canadian Federal Election of 2011
By Chris Dornan, BJ/78, and Jon Pammett
Pammett, political science professor, and Dornan, director of the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs, edit this post-mortem on the campaign and election outcome. Chapters cover the major parties, aspects of local campaigning and the social media landscape. 368 pages, Dundurn Press, $37.

Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care
By Rianne Mahon and Fiona Robinson, MA/91
Women travel from poor to wealthy countries to work as nannies, nurses, maids and sex workers. The struggle to maintain a balance between work, family and care in Western nations creates a care deficit in the developing world. Mahon teaches in the School of Public Policy at Carleton. Robinson is a political science professor at Carleton. 234 pages, UBC Press, $94 hardcover.

Generation NGO
By Alisha Apale and Valerie Stam
The book is a compilation of first-person stories and critiques of international development. Among the contributors is Laura Sie, BEng/00, who examines a single incident to reveal a number of cultural, racial and economic realities in her piece, A Night Out in Malindi. 212 pages, Between the Lines, $24.95.

FICTION

Critical Care
By Philip Brown, BA/78
The suspenseful family medical drama is set in a Boston hospital and concerns Peter Douglas, the patriarch of a wealthy, proper New England family. 604 pages, CreateSpace, $17.95.

The Demon Left Behind
Marie Jakober, BA/68
An urban fantasy adventure about a group of demon researchers who embody themselves as humans to study the troubled 21st century. 256 pages, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, $14.95.

Drift
By Leo Brent Robillard, BA/96
Paardeberg, South Africa, is far from the Canadian prairies. In 1899, best friends from the town of Portage la Prairie sign up with the Winnipeg Rifles’ “A” Company to fight in the Second Boer War. There they meet a cast of characters who are fleeing their former lives while facing the shattered bodies of war. 192 pages, Turnstone Press, $19.

Grass
By Steve Williams, BCom/84
The mystery thriller about grow-op heists and an interconnecting viral marketing campaign comes from the mind of a “mad” man. In 2010, after a 25-year advertising career culminating in the position of chief creative officer for Venture Communications (the firm owned by Arlene Dickinson of CBC’s Dragon’s Den), Williams left the agency to write for periodicals and finish the novel. 464 pages, CreateSpace, $16.99, $8.99 e-book.

Ooter’s Place and Other Stories of Fear, Faith, and Love
By Karl El-Koura, BA/02
Thirteen stories touch on a variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror and superhero fiction. 146 pages, Amazon.com, $8, $2.49 e-book.

HISTORY

Canadian Pacific in Color Vol. 2: Western Lines
By Bill Linley, BA/67
More illustrated railroad lore (the first volume looked at CP east of Fort William) by the train buff from Port Lorne, N.S. 128 pages, Morning Sun Books, $59.95.

Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border
By Jacques Poitras, BJ/90, MJ/91
A social history of the border between New Brunswick and Maine. A single francophone settlement shared both sides of the Saint John River until a political trade-off between countries split it down the middle. The first boundary to be drawn between the two nations has served as a microcosm of Canada-U.S. relations. 342 pages, Goose Lane Editions, $19.95.

Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin
By Jennifer Evans
Carleton history professor Evans examines the physical, social and cultural spaces the city straddled from the 1920s to the Cold War era. Berlin had a thriving arts and culture scene. It was also sexually progressive as home to the Institute for Sexual Science and the first organized gay rights movement. All this changed when Hitler rose to power in the1930s and attempted to restore traditional gender rules. 336 pages, Palgrave Macmillan, $85, hardcover.

MEDIA STUDIES

Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada
By Barbara Freeman, BJ/69, MA/88
The adjunct professor spent years researching and writing the collection of essays about activists whose media work advanced women’s rights in the areas of higher education and Aboriginal rights. 352 pages, WLU Press, $75 hardcover.

Kurdish Identity, Discourse, and New Media
Jaffer Sheyholislami, BA/99, MA/01, PhD/08
Sheyholislami, a professor in the School of Linguistics, examines the ways Kurds have used a satellite television channel and the internet to produce and disseminate discursive constructions of their identities. 266 pages, Palgrave Macmillan, $85 hardcover.

POETRY

Inward Poetry: George Johnston and William Blissett in Letters
Edited by Sean Kane, BA/65
The book presents a friendship told in 50 years of letters between poet Johnston, who taught in CU’s English department, and essayist Blissett set in the gossipy world of English studies in Canada when it was ruled by A.S.P. Woodhouse and Northrop Frye. 352 pages, The Porcupine’s Quill, $29.95.

PSYCHOLOGY

Trampled to Death by Geese: More Eros, and a Lot More Nonsense
By Daryl Sharp, BSc/56, BJ/58
The 1955-56 Carleton student council president, now a Jungian analyst in Toronto, serves up a whimsical sequel to last year’s Live Your Nonsense: Halfway to Dawn With Eros. 160 pages, Inner City Books, $25.

REFERENCE

Bilingual Vocabulary for Governance, Public Policy & Administration
By Dick de Jong, BA/72, MSW/75
De Jong, a retired senior federal government bureaucrat, presents a practical guide to bilingualism for public servants and for those with an interest in the workings of government. 591 pages, Pineglen Publishing, $34.95.

Death by Misadventure: 210 Dumb Ways to Die
By Dale Dreher, BAHons/86
Dreher, a story consultant on Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die, documents unusual real-life demises, such as that of a Toronto inmate who died trying to swallow a Bible. Dale Dreher, $2.10 e-book.

Mathematics for the Physical Sciences
By Les Copley, BScHons/64
The idea for this book was suggested as early as 1980. Copley, who taught mathematical physics courses at Carleton from 1970 to 2005, took up the suggestion as a retirement project. The book is published online and can be downloaded in PDF format for free. physics.carleton.ca/book/math-for-the-physical-sciences.

The Procrastinator’s Digest
By Tim Pychyl, MA/86, PhD/95
Psychology professor Pychyl keeps things light and short—he knows you have a pile of things to do. The book offers tips on working life and how to get ahead of the quirks and habits that allow us to fall behind. Some key themes: planning is good and self-forgiveness is key. Amazon Kindle Edition, $2.99 e-book.

Everybody’s Heard About the Bird

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

You may know of Carleton’s mascot, Rodney the Raven—he has been part of campus life for decades. But did you know that Rodney didn’t always fly solo? In 1983, he had a mascot wife named Ruby the Raven. The fluff-and-stuffing couple took over the turf before football games as crowd-revving hype makers. The job of mascot hasn’t changed much over the years—though the costume has. The current uniform resembles a common raven, while older outfits featured yellow beaks and legs and a velvety coat. Today’s polyester blend is more durable to last through the 100-plus games where it’s used. More useless—but entertaining—facts about the beloved bird in a Pop-Up Video-inspired centrefold

Rodney’s head—made of plastic foam, rubber and cloth—measures 48” around. Common ravens have the largest brain of any bird species.
Beak: 16”
The suit is washed and cleaned twice annually.
Rodney’s feet are 15”—which is greater than a man’s size 15 shoe.
The suit was made by Loonie Times in Toronto. They also created Wolfie for Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. A custom suit costs $3 to $4K.
Rodney ruffles feathers. “The number of people that hit on the mascot and the number of guys and girls that give me their numbers in my beak is hilarious,” wearer Merylee Sevilla, BA/11, told The Charlatan.
Shoes: 7.5” high
Patches on his knees show that Rodney has had some wear and tear.
Carleton’s athletics department has two on-call mascots to wear the suit.
Wearers need to be between 5’4” and 6’ to fit into the suit. Lean people use elastic bands to hide the extra material in the suit.
Wingspan: 6’6”
You can’t see it, but Rodney’s head actually includes a tongue—a superfluous detail. It measures 4½”. (By comparison, Gene Simmons, of KISS, reportedly has a seven-inch tongue).
A fan in the back of the mascot headpiece helps keep the wearer cool.

This is the first time Rodney has appeared in a centrefold. Though an exhibitionistically inclined wearer once launched Rodney into a court-side striptease at a basketball game. He was ejected for fowl play.

A Place to Roost

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

It has been a lounge, a coffee house, a bar and a cybercafé—no matter the guise, Rooster’s has been meet-up central for students wanting to decompress, study or start a movement. Charting the history of Carleton’s sometimes notorious, sometimes neglected undergraduate oasis

CENTRAL HUB Rooster’s today is still a campus hub where students discuss the economy and their research. Melissa Erion, a political science student, highlights her notes, while her friends, human rights student Natalie Côté, public affairs student Khadija Ga’al and biomedical engineering student Tim Inglis exchange ideas.

1971

Journalism student Arthur McGregor co-founds a club, called the Aardvark, on the mezzanine of the new Unicentre. Its vibe is fuelled by acoustic folk, marijuana and resold cafeteria drinks. No alcohol is served. The name Rooster’s is lifted from the pattern on some tablecloths. It sticks.

1972

The party moves upstairs to its current roost. It replaces a student lounge dubbed The Purple Passion Pit because of a long, snake-like purple couch. The Charlatan of the day describes Rooster’s as “a great place to have coffee during the day and in the evenings there is often entertainment provided by either name artists such as Cedric Smith or local student talent.”

1974

McGregor clashes with the student association. “I was under pressure to bring in draft beer,” he says today. “What I wanted was a listening room. I kicked people out if they talked during a performance.”

1975

McGregor is fired. “Literally the day I left, they brought in the draft taps,” he says. McGregor goes on to found the Ottawa Folklore Centre.

1977

Management invests in 220 hard wooden chairs that patrons curse deep into the 1990s. Meanwhile, a federal health minister, Monique Bégin, causes a political uproar after criticizing her own government during a lecture at Rooster’s.

1980

Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella, BJ/84; Conservative MP Gord Brown, BAHons/83; and Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, BA/83, forge lifelong political friendships over pints at Rooster’s and the pub that will become Oliver’s.

1987

On campus, students rally for East Timor and against apartheid in South Africa. The student association rails against a policy that forces Rooster’s to hire a doorman to curb underage drinking.

2001

The student association faces pressure from the administration to stop serving alcohol in advance of the double cohort. Rooster’s wins back the right to sell food. The deep-fat fryer is retired, and an era of high prices, and limited selection ends.

2002

Rooster’s trades booze for beans and returns to its roots as a coffee house. Students aren’t thrilled. “Rooster’s has a really nice pub atmosphere that’s no longer going to be there,” Laura Foss, BAHons/02, tells The Charlatan at the time. The idea is that drinkers will migrate from Rooster’s, a money-maker, to Oliver’s Pub, a money-loser.

2003

Rooster’s reopens as a cybercafé following delayed renovations. Blue couches and computer terminals replace ratty leather couches and pool tables. The dingy, cigarette-pocked carpet is removed. “It’s a little too chic,” criminology student Lindsay Porter tells The Charlatan at the time. “I think the first- and second-year students will appreciate it because they didn’t grow up with the old, dank Rooster’s.” The campus Wi-Fi network will soon render the cybercafé obsolete.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT Neuroscience major Matt Lafeville and public affairs student Justin Reis man the pita-wich counter in the firmly established coffee house.

2005

Controversy over closing the taps at Rooster’s resurfaces amid plans to reduce the size of Oliver’s during Unicentre renovations. Drinkers never migrated from Rooster’s to Ollie’s, and the pub is still losing money.

2006

Rooster’s gets a plug in The Vancouver Sun when columnist Kate Zimmerman, BA/80, makes reference to a spiced apple juice served at the pub in the late ‘70s.

2007

A frosh guide in The Charlatan taps Rooster’s as “the best place to grab lunch on campus” thanks to its pitas and bagel sandwiches. “Once you have one you’ll be craving them all year,” they warn.

2008

Starbucks sets up shop just steps from Rooster’s, and the student association worries that their money-making coffee house may take a financial hit.

2011

Today the blue couches are a little sun-bleached, and the paint could use a touch-up, but it isn’t the “dank” pub of the 1980s and 1990s. Sandwiches—not coffee or spiced apple juice—are the big money-makers.

Tune In, Take a Trip

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Matthew Edwards, BArch/08, MArch/11, wants you to tap in to sonic spaces. The intern architect was part of a group of electronic artists who created Polylectures, a city soundtrack for self-guided explorers

Words such as “rhythm” and “harmony” act as mediators between the worlds of architecture and music, according to Matthew Edwards. They speak to the feel of a building and to the construction of a song. That was the starting point for him as he was researching 10 buildings in Ottawa’s downtown core that form the route for the 45-minute sound walk. He gave a chunk of inspirational text to musicians including J’envoie, A Tribe Called Red, Kingdom Shore, My Dad Vs. Yours and Adam Saikaley, BMus/08. They, in turn, created original works inspired by buildings such as the Bank of Canada, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the convention centre and the 240 Sparks Street complex.

The project was led by musician Antoine Bedard (aka Montag), who produced a similar walk in his home city of Montreal. As part of his research, he explored the connection between sound and architecture. So, is it direct? Can you assign a backbeat to a brick wall? Not quite, he says, but “you can use a lot of reverberation to invoke spacious places.”

Sound is another dimension of the city, says Edwards. “We can enhance our overall experience by incorporating more than what we see with our eyes. There are many ways to see.”

Polylectures will be available for download through Artengine.ca and on borrowable MP3 players from the Bytown Museum (at the Rideau Canal locks, between Parliament Hill and the Château Laurier) from November 22 to 27.

Matthew Edwards at the corner of Bank and Sparks streets in Ottawa

I Went to University—and All I Got Was This Degree

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Editor’s Letter

Much fuss is being made about universities these days. For those who aren’t following the hoopla or whose eyes have already glazed over, I’ll sum up the argument.

The well-informed and the casual interjectors agree that the value of a degree has lessened in the eyes of many. There are accusations of grade inflation on behalf of the entitled generation and complaints about a decreased quality of education, due to anything from teaching load to distracting technology. So undergrads flood the market either with lax qualifications or without applicable job skills, and the relevance of universities is called into question.

The trend is for university grads to flock to community colleges as a kind of technical finishing school. “Society demands outcomes,” Centennial College president Ann Buller told the UK weekly Times Higher Education earlier this year, adding, without irony, that “Knowledge that doesn’t translate into action is just trivia.” In the same article, U of T president David Naylor countered that “Successful societies depend on creative people who are well-rounded. That only comes from the grounding of curricula that are available at universities.” The point is hard to argue, unless you’re living in your parents’ basement with a PhD.

A Globe and Mail article in September gave numbers to that picture, reporting that 18.5 percent of Canadian university graduates have incomes that are at or below Canada’s median income of $37,002, according to the OECD. A degree with a big debt load used to be okay because of increased earning power to pay it off later. That’s no longer a valid calculation. Many fields of study lead to work offering a weak return on that investment.

If we’re only calculating ROI, to use MBA-speak, then we’re ignoring wider aspects of a degree and proclaiming everyone with a BA to be SOL. The generation that sees a degree as a key to the C-suite is too transactional. We need thinkers who can deal with complex challenges arising for the first time, alert to the law of unintended consequences. A university degree offers the foundation for that kind of thinking.

Then graduates need to top off what they learned with motivation, a pulse-taking of the market and a passion for their field—those are the engines into the job market. The 21st-century student needs to be an adaptor, navigator and collaborator, since nobody knows for sure what the careers of the future are going to be. Besides, the first-year self is so different from the fourth-year self that going directly for a labour-market outcome disregards the personal growth that happens at university. Taking a line from The Pixies 1991 tune U-Mass, I’ll put it simply, “Oh, baby, university. It’s educational.”

Fateema Sayani, BJ/01, Editor

Fuel for School

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:30:13 +0000

Quick eats for on-the-go intellects range from vending-machine manna to table served treats. An overview of new nosh and standby favourites from your student days

What better? A breakfast of perfect French toast from Baker’s Grille gives pleasure ($5, 4th floor, Unicentre) in a setting with big windows, banquettes and table service. Squirrelled away in Mackenzie Building, Leo’s Lounge offers moist, cake-like double chocolate muffins ($1, 3rd floor) and sandwiches. The bare-bones menu reflects its primary role as a volunteer-run hub for engineering students. Quite the step up from their TV dinners of yore, Mike’s Place offers an eclectic menu, including rotis ($7, 3rd floor, Unicentre). Nights, the joint is jumpin’. Oliver’s is Carleton’s cavernous bar, open late (1st floor, Unicentre). Step up to order, take proffered playing card and retrieve food at kitchen counter when your queen of hearts is called. Sweet potato fries and burgers are popular here (from $3.99)—and they’re named after movie legends. Rooster’s Café (4th floor, Unicentre) offers comfortable couches, not to mention comfort food, at decent prices. Count on pita wraps (from $4). Dessert? Check out Bread & Roses Bakery’s pecan chocolate caramel square ($2).

Low-Flow Bro

troychaplin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:28:24 +0000

Stuart Hickox wants to get inside your toilet to see if it’s leaking. It’s not glamourous work, but it makes a difference. Stop a leak here and there, and you’ll save some dough and some water. Get thousands to do the same, and it’s a movement with a message. Unpacking the mantra of Hickox’s non-profit eco org one change

Stuart Hickox, do you ever feel like a misfit? “All the time,” answers the founder and president of One Change, an Ottawa-based not-for-profit foundation. Since 2005, the organization has parlayed deceptively simple ideas into an engine of change. It started by handing out free compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs to Ottawa homeowners to encourage people to use the energy misers. Now Project Porchlight, as it came to be called, along with One Change’s other programs, has spread to more than 1,200 communities across North America.

As part of his job, Hickox, BA/92, says he has “to do the political thing,” but it doesn’t come naturally. “Being in a room full of politicians, shaking hands and saying, ‘Thank you for your support,’ is artificial for me. So I do something quirky. I reach inside my jacket and say, ‘Want to see my light bulb?’”

His cheekiness is part of his appeal. The 43-year-old also benefits because his zeal is free from that familiar evangelical air that can sabotage any good cause. Hickox’s personal sense of outsiderness defines the operation of One Change.

Most of what we hear about energy efficiency and environmental issues comes from mass marketing and large-scale, upper-tier information sources. Governments prompt us, sometimes with financial incentives, to increase the insulation in our homes. Power utilities encourage us to do our laundry at night, when demand is low. News organizations worry us with disquieting news about ice caps and CO² levels.

One Change, by contrast, knocks on your door and gives you a free CFL bulb, a key chain with a digital tire gauge so that you can keep your tires properly inflated and your car fuel-efficient, and a water conservation kit. The kit uses a dye tablet to detect leaks in your toilet tank, which could cost $250 a year in wasted water.

It does this with an army of local volunteers and the help of sponsors, including banks and city governments. At the same time you’re being handed your freebie, the One Change volunteer will let you know how you can get your old energy-sucking fridge hauled away for free.

The goal is empowering people to take on good social changes they might not get to on their own. The strategy is reciprocity and, on some level, kind of like bribery. The volunteer gives the householder a small gift and asks for something in return that requires a bit of effort and commitment, such as using that dye tablet or booking the electricity utility to have that old beer fridge carted off and recycled.

The approach is rooted in a concept called community-based social marketing (CBSM), a popular mode of advertising in non-profit circles.

Whereas general marketing aims to entice us to buy a product or service, social marketing wants to influence behaviour for social good by using standard techniques such as advertising or cheap giveaways. In addition, the face-to-face contact with a member of your community acts as another layer of influence to instigate change.

But skeptics might argue that having a stranger interrupt your day to talk about a tire-pressure gauge is just another version of faceless (and annoying) telemarketing.

Can handing out a key chain start the sorts of vast changes needed to drop greenhouse gas emissions even a smidge? Yes, it all starts small, according to Hickox, who works out of a second-floor office on Chamberlain Avenue, off Bank Street. “Within three or four weeks into a campaign, when we knock on doors, a quarter of the people say, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about you.’ That recognition predisposes homeowners to listen rather than just turning off.”

Hickox says most people already know change is needed. “The age of awareness is over in the environmental movement,” he declares, adding that people tend not to change when information is the only motivator. One Change puts the means for change right in people’s hands, and it has a domino effect. People getting a free CFL bulb will, for example, buy at least five more in the following weeks. “There’s a lot of behavioural science that shows catalyst action such as changing a light bulb does affect self-perception,” Hickox says. “People model other behaviours on that change if the idea came from people they respect and if they see other people doing it.”

One Change uses data mapping to identify priority areas, based on the funder’s needs. For example, a campaign in New Jersey, funded by the board of public utilities, aimed to correct a perception problem. A conservation message from the utility didn’t resonate with residents. Who wants to give up precious time to volunteer for the power company? One Change was able to rustle up volunteers to spread the conservation message. The campaign’s success was measured by the number of doors that were opened and by the decline of energy use in subsequent weeks. The foundation measures the results of projects and had its models tested by the Academy of Educational Development in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization that focuses on health promotion and economic development.

Judith Madill, a former faculty member at Carleton who teaches marketing in the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, says a well-designed CBSM program is like most marketing efforts: to work, it has to be based on an understanding of how people behave.

Relationships like those that start when someone answers the door to a One Change volunteer are increasingly important in marketing, she says, “because your peers influence your behaviour.” Academic research shows that CBSM does work, she says, but also stresses that changing behaviour is a complicated and slow process.

CBSM may, in fact, work best when combined with education and the law—the sale of incandescent bulbs will be banned in Canada as of 2012—the other two common methods of altering social behaviour, Madill says.

Hickox stresses that the organization is about far more than just light bulbs, even though he frequently draws on Project Porchlight for illustrations of how One Change works. A visit to the richly documented site www.onechange.org underscores his contention. It has everything from news releases to a video on mercury in CFL bulbs. (Hickox says One Change has always acknowledged the mercury danger of the bulbs and encourages their safe use and disposal.)

Doug McKenzie-Mohr has no doubt about the effectiveness of CBSM, since he describes himself as its founder, but the environmental psychologist does question whether One Change is actually employing the strategy in its full sense. He’s the boss at McKenzie-Mohr & Associates, a consulting and training organization specializing in CBSM, and a former professor of psychology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B.

Some of the standard steps of CBSM include pilot testing and behaviour selection. For example, in the promotion of CFL bulbs, the behaviour you actually want to change is not the purchase of the bulbs, but the installation of them. McKenzie-Mohr gives an example of a project in Queensland, Australia, where homeowners were given CFL bulbs, but only in exchange for an equal number of incandescent bulbs. Thus, they would have to install the energy-saving bulbs in order to have light.

Responding to McKenzie-Mohr’s criticism, Hickox says: “We consider ourselves to be CBSM in practice. We do everything he recommends, just maybe not at the scale he wants everyone to aspire to. There isn’t a perfect model of CBSM.”

Hickox and CBSM seem an inevitable match, considering his lineage. A native of Charlottetown, P.E.I., he’s descended from preachers, who aspire to a better world and prefer good behaviour to bad, and farmers, who know all about small things like seeds growing into big things at harvest time. After a post-university stint with the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, where he became managing editor, he joined the Ottawa marketing company gordongroup. He enjoyed the work, but as a new father in a climate-change-challenged world, he was anxious about the future.

While searching for an Energy Star refrigerator, he spotted the statistic that if every household in the United States replaced one incandescent bulb with a CFL bulb, the reduction in pollution from energy production would be like removing 800,000 cars from the road. “That’s easy. That’s something I could do,” he said to himself, followed by the marketing expert’s question, “How hard can it be to get people to change one bulb?”

Sensing that the advocacy-driven scolding approach of the environmental movement alienates many people, he and some others formed a small local group to do it a different way. Before he knew it, gordongroup, initially supportive of his idea, was suggesting it was time to choose: it or Project Porchlight. “I’m grateful that they forced me to make the choice,” he says.

Since then, One Change has grown into a 16-person operation that can swell to over 300 on the payroll during campaigns. There’s also a full-time campaign manager in New Jersey, where the organization aims to deliver over 1.5 million CFL bulbs. The foundation exists on what it charges its sponsors and occasional grants. It recently received a two-year $78,000 Trillium grant from Ontario to develop a volunteer management strategy, and there was some early money from Natural Resources Canada.

One Change is thinking of a better way to guarantee that there’s money to work with. It has been aided by a report on diversifying and developing its financial resources put together last year by a team of Carleton Public Policy graduate students under the supervision of Edward T. Jackson in the School of Public Policy and Administration. The report notwithstanding, “All my awesome team are living on six months’ notice,” says Hickox, seemingly unfazed by the prospect.

WATER WASTE Stuart Hickox in the green space behind the One Change building on Chamberlain Avenue in Ottawa, off Bank Street. The empty 18-litre water jugs are used to illustrate how much water your leaking toilet wastes. Your throne could be wasting up to 500 litres of treated water in one day. A small blue tab is a quick fix to a huge problem

In 2007, the team accepted $1 million from the Calgary-based natural gas producer EnCana Corporation, an amount matched by the Alberta government, and rounded up 4,000 volunteers to distribute CFL bulbs to 800,000 households in the province. Hickox and his board were aware of the bad optics in taking money from big, bad oil. But, it concluded, while there were risks, there were more risks in putting up walls between industry and their not-for-profit. (Since 2008, Encana has been the target of pipeline bombings in northern British Columbia. Last year, the province’s Ministry of Environment filed charges against Encana over the leak of potentially fatal sour gas in the same area in 2009.)

This past summer, Hickox toured the Yukon to show communities, many of them isolated, how they could conserve energy. He says he was blown away by the enthusiastic response and signed up over 500 people for future energy conservation initiatives.

Now he’s immersed in water conservation and looking ahead to new ideas.

“This little idea from my kitchen has totally hijacked me. It didn’t take long after moving to Ottawa from P.E.I. that I realized I wasn’t going to be prime minister. And that’s okay. But I also didn’t expect to be the founder of a foundation that gives people the tools to change the world one simple action at a time.”