On March 21, members and allies of the group l’Association pour la Défense des Droits et l’Inclusion des personnes qui Consomment des drogues du Québec (ADDICQ) marched through eastern downtown and Old Montreal, demanding that the city government and police respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts in the streets.

The protest took place on the heels of a pending decision from Quebec Health Minister Yves Bolduc about whether he will allow downtown needle exchange site Cactus to open a safe injection program this summer.

The march concluded at a city council meeting, where members asked about safe injection sites and were refused concrete answers.

“It’s not a moral question, it’s a health question,” said ADDICQ spokesperson Kevin Dion. “63 to 72 per cent of users have Hep C and between 15 and 20 per cent have HIV. … Why don’t we arm them better for health?”

Bolduc has said that he will postpone his decision about safe injection sites in Quebec until May, when a federal ruling concerning the existence of Insite – a safe injection site in Vancouver – will likely be made. This could both put a delay on Cactus’s plans to go forward with the site this June, and determine the legality of their operation in the future.

“It has been proven…that it will at least stabilize the [rate of infection],” said Dion. “In several countries – Switzerland, Germany, even Vancouver – they’ve had a lot of positive outcomes. Were talking about 200 overdoses, 2,000 overdoses that should have been fatal if they hadn’t been supervised.”

Jean-Francois Mary, director of Community Organization and Outreach at Cactus, said he was uneasy about Bolduc basing his future decision on the federal verdict.

“It’s a question of morality for Mr. Bolduc. It’s not a question of expertise,” said Mary. “The Ministry of Health should be concerned about the health of its population, and the experts say that this is a critical improvement for the health of the most marginalized.”

So far the Institut national de santé publique du Québec and the AIDS advocacy group COQC-Sida have both come out in favour of safe injection sites, emphasizing their effectiveness in decreasing health threats to IV-drug users.

He emphasized, however, that a rejection from Bolduc would not stop Cactus from opening the site without his permission.

“Cactus has been around for 22 years. The Ministry of Health’s budget has been in place for two years,” said Mary. “Bolduc’s term is going to be short anyway. We’re going to last longer than he does.”

The post Montreal campaigns for safe injection sites appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The widespread response to this article is indicative of a recent upsurge in the number mental health problems among university students. According to a U.S. national survey, the number of students who visit university counseling services with serious mental illness has doubled in the last decade, along with an increase in the number of students requiring prescriptions or emergency care.

At McGill, the number of students using McGill Mental Health Services (MMHS) has risen at an equally alarming rate. According to the Director of MMHS, Robert Franck, the service has gone from caring for 1,000 students over the 2000-01 academic year, to having scheduled an estimated 20,000 visits from the beginning of June 2010 to the end of May 2011. Of these, 1,100 were emergency drop-ins and 1,500 were new patients.

The question of whether MMHS is prepared to meet these increased student mental health needs is one that must be seriously addressed.

In the past few years, MMHS has seen improvements in a number of areas. According to Franck, wait times have gone down since last year, and more effort has been made to introduce non-medicinal anxiety treatments to students. The introduction of mindfulness groups (or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy groups) and a university-based eating disorder program are some of MMHS’s recent achievements to have gained recognition from other universities.

But as the school population grows larger, MMHS’s current model is likely to fail certain students.

Financial and structural problems continue to prevent MMHS from obtaining its ideal goals to provide sufficient care for all students. Currently, MMHS has a staff of only twenty part-time workers – composed of ten psychiatrists, five PhD students, and five psychologists – the equivalent of ten full-time staff.

“I would like more full-time [professionals], but part of the problem with psychiatrists is that I’m in competition with the hospital system. So getting a psychiatrist to come and work here means that they really can’t work at the hospital and obviously hospitals can afford to be more generous financially than McGill can,” said Franck.

At the moment, MMHS receives its funding from both the provincial government and Student Services. In 2008, they tried to raise the mental health fee for graduate students, but the increase was voted down. “The only way we can increase funding is to get money from students…the implication of that [vote] was that the money we were relying on from PGSS to fund extra hours amongst clinicians wasn’t available.” This March, PGSS will  vote again on the increase.

When asked whether the administration would consider donating funds to MMHS in light of enrolment increases, Deputy Provost  (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson insisted that there was no room in the administration’s budget for any new ventures: “It’s taken student money, that’s just the financial realities,” he said. “Some problems you can’t solve by throwing money at [them].”

And while Mendelson’s response echoes the adminstration’s neglectful attitudes toward students needs, there is indeed reason to criticize how MMHS currently functions. Although McGill is one of the few Canadian universities not to cap the number of sessions available to any student, and offers psychiatric consultation without referral, its open-door approach has both encouraged expedient means to health care and placed more stress on its current services.

Arden Keller, the pseudonym of a U3 Arts student used MMHS both when treating her anxiety disorders and working on suicide prevention. In an interview with The Daily, she discussed the failures of the system to deal with students whose mental conditions require more than just short-term care. “They can do assessment but they can’t do treatment,” she said. “‘MMHS’s system in my opinion is just a glorified triage center….”

In her own experience, Keller’s biggest criticism of MMHS was its lack of policy concerning how to care for suicidal patients: “I remember going in once – and it was a couple days after a suicide attempt and being like, ‘I think I’m going to do it again’. And I had this one doctor and she actually said, “I don’t know what to do here.’ That’s when I realized that they don’t have a system in place to deal with students who are really suicidal.”

The possibility that such established systems have been worn down because of MMHS’s overrun services is not unlikely. As Keller noted, “I don’t think that the people work[ing] there lack empathy or don’t care. I think they’re probably doing the best they can with a really, really broken system.”

In the upcoming year, Franck hopes to establish ways of getting more feedback from students and improving upstream health care. His plans include creating a student survey with the help of Students Services, and increasing Mental Health’s overall campus presence. “I’d like to see MMHS get more involved in outreach,” he said. “Mental health is more than just the absence of mental health it’s….looking at…how to encourage adaptive coping strategies amongst students early on.”

Yet more funding and a stronger presence from the administration is needed for MMHS to meet the demands of students. As Keller explained, the consequences of this continued neglect are dire: “The bottom line is, it’s not just about frustrating waitlists and being bounced around, it’s the system failing people.”

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Her mother, a wino and a depressive, embodied the pressures that perpetually weighed upon the mid-century housewife. Married at 19, she was an abominable cook and housekeeper, and eventually dulled the shame of her domestic failure by taking generously to the bottle. In marrying my father, my mother took these sore lessons of her childhood with her. She committed to being uncommitted to the domestic kitchen, and for a number of years, served Oreos for dessert with pride.

During the 15 years that my mother and father were married, the kitchen never played more than a minor role in our family lives. Both of my parents worked, and so when the question of what to have for dinner arose, the answer was always what was quick and easy. Day in, day out, we alternated between potatoes, meat cutlets, some variation of vegetable, and large plates of spaghetti. Occasionally, my mother would bake a cake – borrowing the recipe from Betty Crocker – and no one would notice when she glued its broken pieces back together with icing. In those times, the kitchen was a simple, no frills place, where my mother could find peace when she sought it.

When my parents divorced in 1999, something about my mother’s relationship to food and the kitchen changed. As a single working mom she had even less time to prepare meals for her children, and was forced to turn to frozen dishes and take-out more frequently to fill our bellies. On weekends, she responded to the guilt of not being able to prepare a week’s worth of home-cooked meals for her children (though meat dishes and spaghetti still remained), by feverishly cooking and collecting recipes. Books like The Joy of Cooking and Canadian Living were suddenly piled on our countertop flagged with colourful post-its; baked goods (always dry or undercooked) made their way into my lunch boxes; and runny eggs Benedict and roast dinners found their way into our Sunday routine.

Conflating the failure of her marriage with her failure to reproduce an archaic ideal of womanhood, cooking became both an obsession and a source of repulsion for my mother. While at dinnertime she fussed over what to make, agonizing over whether the final product was “too salty” or “too dry,” she simultaneously scorned culinary goddesses like Ina Garten for taking too much of an interest in food.  “Food is for energy,” she’d say, crossing her bony arms as we watched Garten waddle a tray of butter-cream cupcakes to her husband. “I eat to survive.”

Married, wealthy, and a stellar hostess, Garten represented an ideal of femininity that for my mother had turned the banal activity of cooking into a desperate personal drama. By breezily cooking five-course meals for her husband on television, Garten made the ability to cook and stay married seem contingent. She embodied that repressive old wives’ tale that said the way to man’s a heart was through his stomach. My mother protested this idea by hating her.

When my father re-married in 2004, his wife kept a kitchen that was permanently stocked with homemade casseroles and pies. I was convinced my mother would run over to their house and kick in the oven. Pretty, round, and a great cook, my stepmom was everything my mother had learned to despise. But perhaps from the realization that her marriage was effectively over, a sort of maturity dawned on my mother. Taking a bite of her own bitter and under-cooked pad thai one day, my mother burst out into laughter. “This is fucking terrible,” she said, and threw her hands up in the air.

Today, watching my mother in the kitchen is still entertaining, although not in the way that adjective would be applied to Garten. She still obsesses over which combination of ingredients to use, and warns us that her meals are going to be too spicy or too dry.  The difference in her behaviour is subtle: she shrugs her shoulders when she misses a step in a recipe or when something gets burnt. But she’s more at ease with herself and with her kitchen. What’s more, she’s even come to like Ina Garten.

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Most often, it has portrayed the journalist as a citizen hero who bravely risks everything in the pursuit of truth, and is rewarded for their courage with the prestige of exposing the next Watergate. In reality, however, coming across such revelations in one’s journalism career is a rare event. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward may have struck it lucky by uncovering Watergate in the 1970s, but neither of them ever found another story of such importance in their careers.

Given its tendencies to distort or exaggerate, then, cinema might seem like a controversial place to start understanding journalists. However, with the guidance of Le Devoir film critic Andre Lavoie, gleaning a deeper understanding of journalists from the film reel might just be possible.

This month, Cinémathèque québécoise will host “Images du Journaliste” – a film series organized by Lavoie that aims to give a more nuanced portrait of the elusive figure of the journalist. The series comprises 12 films, mostly from American directors. Highlighting the diverse aspects of the journalist’s professional and personal life – from the difficulty of reporting on something that is politically controversial (All the President’s Men) to the personal temptation journalists sometimes face to forge seductive details in their articles (Shattered Glass) – it will also include presentations from various film critics of the Canadian media.

“I tried to present an accurate vision of how it is to be a journalist,” Lavoie told The Daily of the series. “I want people not only to see heroes but human beings that are involved in moral dilemmas and ethical problems.” In achieving this end, Lavoie’s line up is certainly successful.  While films like All the President’s Men and State of Play reiterate familiar stereotypes of the journalist as the lone truth seeker, many others challenge and diversify this image. George Cukor’s Philadelphia Story (1940), for example, which screened this past Saturday, offers a kitschy and heart-warming glimpse of the journalist fumbling on the job as he falls in love with his subject. In the film, tabloid reporter Mike Connor (James Stewart) goes undercover to report on the wedding of wealthy main-line Philadelphia socialite, Tracy Samantha Lord Haven (Katherine Hepburn), and subsequently becomes enmeshed in a comic love quadrangle between Tracy, her fiancé, and her ex-husband.  The film ends with Tracy rejecting a marriage proposal from Mike after she has broken off her engagement to her fiancé – leaving Mike with a story that’s full of juicy tabloid twists but marred by personal heartache.

Other films in the series showcase similar intersections between one’s profession and one’s heart: a reporter becomes emotionally invested in a community he once barely knew in Robert Morrin’s Windigo, and an amateur music journalist struggles to balance glamourous friendships with pressing deadlines in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Viewed in its entirety, the series offers an assessment of journalists which seems bluntly balanced: sometimes journalists are good at their job and sometimes they fuck up.

Lavoie’s enterprise is undoubtably a laudable and much needed attempt to dispel misleading stereotypes, and anyone thinking about embarking on a career in journalism would do well pay attention. Lavoie warns, “If you see the reality of journalists with only All the President’s Men as a guide and become a journalist, you will be disappointed by the reality”; these films will help you move beyond the common cliches.

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Images du Journaliste runs until January 29 at Cinémathèque québècoise, 335 Maisonneuve E. See cinematheque.qc.ca for listings and more information.

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The McGill Daily: In representing Canada’s military past, the museum has two primary aims: to correctly represent history, and to respect those who have participated in the conflict. How do you work to balance these sometimes conflicting goals?
Dean Oliver: The museum has a very clear mandate and mission as the national museum of Canadian military history, and each of the components of that mission and mandate are terribly important. That it is a Canadian museum, for example, we aren’t mandated to tell military history or commonwealth military history. That it is a military museum as opposed to a civilizational museum or a political history museum, in other words, we focus on the raw material of the country’s military past and we make nods and allusions where necessary, and important to other things. … And finally…we’re a museum of history, which happens to have as its principal mandate the study of Canadian involvement in organized conflict…so the primary litmus test for what goes in the galleries…is whether or not it helps…proceeding from the basis of scholarship, to inform Canadians and assist them in understanding the nature of their own military past, and its relevance to their own lives.

That said, there are many other things we need to pay attention to. Clearly as a public cultural institution, as a opposed say to a private cultural institution….we must be at a very basic level responsive to the needs, demands, critiques, complaints, requests, of those members of the public that we serve. … So in any dispute…the basic approach always proceeds from what in our estimation as scholars of the military past and interpreters of it in the present day, will withstand reasonable scholarly inquiry or invigilation. In other words, what’s history and what’s not, and in particular, what’s important in history and what’s not. … All of these things are as much subjective as they are objective…they are all subject to negotiation.

MD: What then are the requirements for a piece of art that gets shown in the museum. Is there another process for selecting those more creative pieces?
DO: We are essentially a storyline driven museum. So all of the objects that we have, from an Alex Colville painting to the smallest military medal, are all deployed as essentially story-tellers or story-telling aids in a whole series of broader narratives. So what we have…will get across relatively simple messages that will allow the public to understand. … Then all kinds of other tertiary but important things come into play, principal of which is, “Is it good art?” Is it a trenchant, lovely, fantastic picture, or is it just representational? Does it say something about a particular artist or branch of art? Does it speak to both genders? Will it say something to French Canada? Does it have something in it around which we can tell a hugely interesting story?
MD: How is what gets represented in military history shaped by what tools are available to document history?
DO: At one level, [it’s] easier to do any kind of cultural display or interpretation in the 21st century probably than it was even 20 or 30 years ago. The toolkit that one has available now is vastly larger and more complicated and more potentially rewarding and flexible than would have been available to my colleagues…in the old army building downtown in 1885. However, it is also extraordinarily easy to be seduced by technology, into thinking that newer is better, or wiser, or faster or stronger. … People continue to come to museums or similar institutions like art galleries, for two principal reasons. … [Firstly] to see what they would describe loosely as, “The Real Thing”, and secondly they come because somehow or another, in particular in museums, they believe that museums are telling the truth.

MD: When the museum told the story of Afghanistan in the display “Glimpse of War,” I noticed a fairly obvious one-sidedness. … Tell me about the struggle of representing a war that is ongoing, and that is still heavily debated within Canada.

DO: The contemporary stuff is a whole other challenge for museums, in particular for history museums. … You have to be very clear with your public where you are speaking from in historical perspective and where perhaps you might be speculating, and there better be very few times in [which] you’re speculating, because the public – whether it’s a service members’ family or a member of peace church or just John Q. Public – will tell you immediately whether they think your story is soft or weak. So in the case of Afghanistan… the exhibition included a large wall display, for example, that compared the information available to students of the Afghanistan war with the information available to students of World War Two. … [In addition], the subject material at the time we did the exhibit [was] extraordinarily limited…[so] what we tried to do was to present the war through the perspective of two guys who we knew had, in great measure, witnessed [the war] personally – the two [freelance] journalists, [Stephen] Thorne and [Garth] Pritchard – and we organized their material not in response to any metanarrative that we at the museum had constructed on the nature of the war or what was important, or what one might say about particular campaigns, but very largely, more or less episodically, around what we would call vignettes on their own experience of their own time in Afghanistan. … And then there was the process of grouping those images, thinking about what the material we as a museum might have available to modify or enhance them with, and in fact with Afghanistan – given that most soldiers from there are still in service. … What we did, and this may be part of the subtext of the question, was to provide all sorts of opportunities for people in the exhibit to leave us the museum feedback on what they thought about the war. So we had very simple things like tables set up in the exhibit where we asked relatively open-ended questions, and then allowed people to fill this. The table stood about 3 feet high, maybe higher than the average kitchen table, and it had a large plexi erected in the middle of it, and on the plexi was a question and it was facing a poster answer. And it was questions like, “Do you think we should be in Afghanistan,” “Do you think we should get out of Afghanistan,” “What do you think Canada should do for Afghanistan, if anything.” And people left hundreds if not thousands of comments through the course of the exhibit about everything that we had asked and more. … We also included the newspapers themselves about every day or so; we had a little section in the exhibit that updated the principal news stories, the op-eds, the for and against, the criticism, and [for] some of the more telling moments in the history of the war we actually had the front pages from various pages framed [and] mounted in the exhibit as well. And in the last portion of the exhibit we had another series of boards where we asked people: Ought Canada…stay, leave, or some[thing] in between? And again, allowing people to leave their own comments, post them on the wall, and debate with one another as they went through the space. But all of that stuff, those interactive techniques, the use of newspaper media, were designed to acknowledge the full gamut of people’s views of the war and allow them to actually talk about them in the exhibition with one another. So it was very much a social dialogue as the war unfolded, and the exhibit sort of wrapped around that. Not just the [Department of National Defence] story or, the DND tale. … And in terms of public feedback it was widely more successful than we had ever thought the exhibition would be. It brought in nearly 200,000 visitors to the museum. … I don’t think I received a single formal complaint from anyone left, center or right of the political spectrum about our coverage in the exhibition of the Afghanistan war, so I’m very interested in your feedback, because yours would be among the first…that found it imbalanced.

MD: I found an imbalance in one photo called “The Legacy of War,” of a child who was the victim of a landmine, and then the caption beneath explained that soldiers were trying to remove the landmines. And it made me think of what the other causes of these injuries to Afghan children might be, and what Canada’s contributions in that respect might be. I was a little stopped, I think also because of the powerful emotional impact of seeing a child looking into a camera so directly.

DO: I know very well the image. … It’s an interesting point that you make about being aware of the power of the medium, media, that you deal with. We tried also in the exhibit, where possible – and you know, knowing that you’re dealing with war, which is, you know, death and injury, grief, and all these other intense human emotions – we tried not to be as emotionally leading as some of the material might otherwise have lent itself to. So there were places in the exhibit, for example, where we had the option, given the media that we were deploying, of using sound or music. And sound or music as an exhibition technique can be extraordinarily effective and can also be extraordinarily leading. … And there were a number of places where we thought that it would be doing a disservice to the material, which was very contentious and hotly debated, to try to impose over it any kind of musical score. … People immediately smoke you out: “Oh, I’m supposed to feel sad here.” But what if in fact I walk through the exhibit and I believe Afghanistan is a waste of time? And all these poor young men and women’s lives were squandered for no purpose. Why am I hearing sad or patriotic music that’s supposed to make me feel happy…or alternatively I’ve lost my son, why is the music supposed to be making me feel like this was all a great waste of time? So we eschewed it everywhere…and very much we used the photographs…essentially as interpretive portraiture. … It’s a very astute observation to talk about the way in which emotion can be deployed, used, and, frankly, manipulated. There are always times when you want to employ your full arsenal…[but] you have to be respectful of the whole range of [potential] reactions. … particularly in an unfinished story.

MD: What are you working on right now?
DO: Right now, the quick range of things, there’s something finished that’s coming back to us in December, so we opened the Navy show yesterday. There’s a small show…it’s called “A Brush With War,” that’s on military art in Canada after the Second World War, so Korea, peacekeeping, Gulf, Afghanistan. That show comes back to us in December. … Then the big ones for the next couple of years are as follows. In 2011, our big projects are one on War and Medicine…[which] is essentially about the relationship in war, this incredible, torturous, intertwined relationship, between man’s ability to harm and man’s ability to heal. It talks about all the challenges the hideosity of war poses for the healing arts. … Then there’s the second major project we’re working on, which is on the history of peace advocacy in Canada, and that show is also one that deals with a very, very big subject, and one that employs everything from Raging Granny protest signs, right through to the recollections of folks in the world wars who understood implicitly that they were in their own hearts fighting in support of peace. And everybody in between: conscientious objectors, anti-nuclear protestors, people wearing blue berets in godforsaken parts of the world. So how have Canadians chosen, thought, acted, deployed their own talents and resources in support of what they understood to be peace. And after that, two very,very large projects: for 2012, the [bicentennial] of the War of 1812, and for 2013, a project on – working with international partners – Medieval warfare.

The post A glimpse of war appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Like her fiery yet worn appearance, Dee’s music commands your full attention. Made up of a combination of harp, piano, and deep and fluttering vocals, Dee’s music is a layering of majestic sounds that inspires deep reflection. Her lyrics, though deceptively simple and lullaby-like, are honest and contemplative. From sing-song lines questing for love to those that bare all, Dee’s openheartedness in her music is moving. “There’s something very old-fashioned about the way I write music…I guess I just try to say little things that are, or were, true for a while,” Dee remarked in an email to The Daily. This modesty, which one senses not only in Dee’s interviews but in her performances, is the very intrigue of her art.

Dee’s familiarity with (and seeming liberation from) questions of belonging is her art’s second appeal. The Ohio-born transsexual has often been rejected for her differences in her life, though she’s never shied away from them. After deciding to embrace life permanently as a woman, Dee amped up her musical act. “It was like, if people are going to look at me all the time then I was going to give them something to look at, and I was going to look back at them, too,” she told National Public Radio. “There was an attitude there.”

This attitude is what redeems audiences through Dee’s art. “Every body has a right, the right to be the lover, to really be the beloved,” Dee wrote on her website. Welcoming her listeners with open arms and heart, Dee grants every one of us that right. 

The post Baby Dee appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Over the years, Moleskine notebooks have gained an almost religious consumer following. On Moleskine’s website, thousands of devoted fans send in pictures of their artworks and write in comments offering their praise for the product. Illinois-based photographer Armand Frasco represents a more extreme brand of fanaticism. In 2004, he started a fan blog for Moleskines, where he explains: “Not all notebooks are created equal. … Moleskine is not my obsession; it’s an attitude.”

At McGill, a similar kind of dedication can be found among staff and students. In the Faculty of Architecture, at least five professors require that their students use Moleskine sketchbooks, while come September the majority of McGill students who buy their writing supplies at Papeterie Nota Bene (3416 Parc) choose Moleskine’s daily planner.

Given the notebooks’ visual simplicity and exorbitant price, this type of devotion among students and creative types (often among the most financially hard-up members of society) is surprising. No-name hardcover notebooks, perfectly suitable for the average scribbler, are available at any drug store for well under ten dollars. Retailing at as much as $23 for the regular large hardcover, Moleskine notebooks are overpriced and lack the tinsel and flare that typically adorn generic products sold at non-generic prices. The notebook’s smooth black cover and wrap around elastic speak to a very simple function: helping you store personal information, ideas, and sketches in an easy and portable fashion.

Why, then, all the brouhaha?
Originally nameless, Moleskine-style notebooks were invented over a century ago by small French bookbinders who supplied the notebooks to various stationary shops in Paris. One supplier’s version in particular became the favourite notebook of English travel writer, Bruce Chatwin, who gave the generic product its legendary name in 1986. By the mid-1980s Chatwin’s small manufacturer had gone out of business, but the brand was appropriated by a publisher in Milan in 1997. Now known as Moleskine SRL, the company markets its notebook to consumers by obsessively boasting its  connection to an impressive literary and artistic history. On the small pamphlet tucked away inside every notebook, the company states that its product is the “heir and successor” to the notebook that once belonged to such renowned creative figures as Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Ernest Hemingway. This statement – which makes the implicit claim that if you scribble in a Moleskine notebook, you’ll become a part of this creative legacy – is the main thrust of Moleskine’s extremely successful campaign.

A passage about Hemingway’s  use of the Moleskine featured on the company’s website illustrates this point vividly. By recounting Hemingway’s  reflections in A Moveable Feast on writing in his notebook at a Parisian café, Moleskine lays an explicit claim to Hemingway’s creative talent. In addition to referring to Hemingway’s comment that he “belong[ed] to [his] pencil and notebook” elsewhere on the website, Moleskine emphasizes that Hemingway was hard at work on his most famous novel, The Sun Also Rises, at the same time he wrote A Moveable Feast in Paris. Using these details, Moleskine mounts the far-stretching claim that the notebook itself played an active role in making The Sun Also Rises a great piece of literature. This notion, it later claims, should be “unsurprising” to “those that have come to know and love Moleskine.”

At McGill, those students who have come to know and love Moleskine, self-consciously admit to being influenced by the spellbinding effects of its absurd marketing claims. After intelligently explaining the way Moleskine manipulates the aspirations of its users by advertising its connections to great artists and writers of the past, former McGill grad student, Jacob Siefring, sheepishly admitted that at the time he bought his Moleskine address book, he was endeared by the product’s romantic mythology: “I immediately read that history and was taken in with it. … They market it that way. Spend 20 bucks and you’re like Hemingway.”

Anne Haldane, a U3 science student, also acknowledged the sway of Moleskine’s historical argument: “I got my Moleskine planner because it’s a really specific format…[But] typically I wouldn’t spend 20 bucks on a notebook. … I think Moleskine is definitely for a certain subculture.”

Marketing itself as a product for ambitious students and members of the creative classes, Moleskine’s empire is built on the willing gullibility of its consumers. In 2009, Forbes writer Helen Coster reported that Moleskine was recession-proof. In her article, Coster writes that Moleskine – which Marco Beghin, president of Moleskine America, describes as “strongly profitable” – increased its global sales by 14 per cent in 2008, to reach a total of $210 million. “There’s no price for unlocking creativity,” Behin explained to Coster in the article, “we always positioned the product as a book you write in yourself.”

But describing Moleskine as “a book that you write in yourself” hardly explains the fanatical appeal of the notebooks to young creative types.

“Brands are these interesting and fascinating high-minded people that you want to assign to who you are,” said Lee Chow, the man behind Apple Computer’s marketing campaign in Doug Pray’s award-winning documentary on advertising, Art & Copy (2009). Using Chow’s logic, college students can choose Moleskines as a way to assign Hemingway and Picasso’s successes to themselves – and hence,  perhaps as a way to block out the terrifying possibility that they may not achieve the goals they set out for themselves at age 20. 
At its most basic psychology, then, choosing Moleskines over generic brands can be considered another way of telling ourselves that it’s all going to work out okay. And given the choice between envisioning myself as Picasso or an uncertain and under-accomplished 22-year-old,  I’d definitely choose Picasso.

In an earlier version of this article, Armand Frasco’s name was misspelled as Armand Franco. His blog was started in 2004, not 2009. The Daily regrets the errors.

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Though Greene is perpetually towed back to the original site of his investigations – his home province, Newfoundland – his poems deliberate the problems of existence in places all across the continent. Writing from his home on Sherbourne Street in Toronto, or the back seat of a cab in Massachusetts, Greene vividly situates his poems in their environments, encountering in each location the extensions of his inner self. Sitting on Newfoundland’s vast “acreage of solitude” in “Utopia,” Greene finds himself worrying about a life “drifting endlessly apart.” He then echoes this concern in “Over the Border,” where he desperately attempts to outrun the “heaviness of shapeless time” in the streets of Austin. Repeating these sentiments across various geographies, Greene’s remark in “Utopia” that “There is nowhere as strange as now,” seems of an elevated wisdom.

Death figures prominently in Greene’s collection. In several elegiac poems, he reticently recounts the glory days of now-deceased family members and friends, as well as the “shipwreck” of their final hours. In a poem dedicated to poet Peter Levi (1931-2000), Greene contrasts the writer’s impressive career with the rather mundane unfolding of his death. He writes, “I saw him staggering in a lane beside the Bodleian, the finest poet/I will ever know, lost in a place/where he had spent half his life” – and abruptly concludes – “I did not see him again.” That death occurs quite blandly and unexpectedly is one message Greene offers in his work.

His collection ends, however, on a much more redemptive final note. In the last poem of the collection, Greene writes admiringly about a family of ducks swimming in a pool by the Washington Monument: “They paddle crazily among the remnants/of winter, the mud and the rotted leaves/casually insisting on what comes next.”

Greene’s appreciation of the sight of these unassuming creatures charging “casually” toward life is the final optimistic affirmation of his book. Greene’s apprehension of mid-life as a metaphor for a journey at sea lucidly perceives the connection between life’s experience of being in medias res and being suspended in a body of water. Both are characterized by a floating feeling – by a sense of being neither here nor there, but on the way to somewhere. Greene’s courage is his hopefulness in the face of this ambiguous motion. As the years chase him down, Boxing the Compass certainly lets us know Greene will still be found insisting on what comes next.

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“This just in,” the article opens, “Martha Washington was hot.”

In a lecture about phallic symbolism in advertising, I was astonished to have stumbled upon information that seems less relevant to my everyday life. This article wasn’t in the “only read in a waiting room before getting teeth pulled” section, nor the “buy on your way out of a grocery store” section. The author goes on to explain that historians concerned about the visual misrepresentation of Martha Washington in text books have asked forensic anthropologists to create a computerized age-regression portrait of Martha in her mid-30s. This explains the two pictures of Miss Washington included in the article. In one, she looks like Paula Dean; in the other, she looks like a young Paula Dean post gastric-bypass surgery and cosmology lessons.

Contrary to popular opinion, asserts the author, Martha Washington was not just a “double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard” when she married George. Like the woman in the second photograph, Martha was a fit, 18th-century bombshell. Men who met her had hoped to “arouse a flame in her breast” and when good ole’ George met Martha, she was busy stealing someone else’s heart.

I scan the article looking for an explanation as to why, 250 years after her death, historians have decided to re-imagine Martha Washington as a more attractive first lady. How this can be considered news is another question altogether.

“What’s happening now is revisionist,” says Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia, “But I think it’s a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was.”

There’s no question that America’s respect for presidential figures has increasingly depended on their appearances. When a debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy aired on television in 1960s, the presidential fight was over. Kennedy had wooed the American voters with his youthful swagger, and Nixon had repelled them with his profusive sweating.

Today, beauty’s hold on its voters is seen best through the rags that feed its myth – take the paparazzi’s fascination with topless, hunk-of-a-President Obama, for instance. I’ve seen Bush’s features grow more and more disproportionate in mainstream political caricatures (The Economist dedicated a whole article in December about Bush’s flaring nostrils), while he’s fallen out of political favour. The morality of the aesthetic shift is rudimentarily obvious. A good man with good politics is good-looking. A bad man with bad politics is not.

But here I am concerned with the president’s woman.

America, the land of dreams, is a country whose legend depends on its maintaining a certain vision of success. In this vision, Jackie O is the ideal first lady and Michelle O is her modern successor. The idea is the same as that mentioned above: behind every great president is a great first lady, and both figures must be beautiful in order to be great.

This is why I find it suspicious that the historians involved in the “revisioning” of Martha Washington claim to be motivated by the desire to “set the record straight.” Their inquiry’s deeper motivation is more likely to erase the negative shadow Martha’s original image might be casting on her husband’s noble status in the American memory. After all, if we know that Jackie Kennedy and Michelle Obama are part of a natural legacy of “hot” Martha’s, can’t we finally really say, “This is the real America,” and this is it as sexy and moral as it always has been.

Into revisioning presidential appearance? Send Ms. Mortimer a lil’ prayer to sarah.mortimer@mail.mcgill.ca. Together, together, you’ll be in her heart and she will love you, forever.

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That said, I’d like to bring McGill’s attention to an issue on campus that affects exclusively women, in particular, those who inhabit the Shatner building on a regular basis. Several months ago, tampon machines were removed from the bathrooms in the Shatner building and were replaced with new phone charging devices.

I know that I am not alone in my belief that a phone charger is a poor substitute for a tampon. An attempt to exchange one object for the other would result in electric shock to the fertile female, and a dead phone to the deadbeat idiot who attempted to charge her blackberry with a Playtex.

In addition to its janitorial staff and food service workers, the William Shatner building houses over 60 student groups, and three campus media outlets. Those administrators responsible for removing tampon machines from the Shatner washrooms fail to show even basic consideration for the needs of those who help to sustain McGill’s reputation, student governance, and cultural life. The late nights of work dedicated by these students have literally been met with an appreciation that can be measured in peanuts.

As with all arguments, mine can be met with some counterpoints. One is the suggestion to BYOT to school. That can be said for condoms too and yet, they seem to still be provided in men’s bathrooms across campus. I would argue that condom dispensers are an excess, for the desire of men and women to copulate on campus can be restrained, while shedding one’s uterine lining every month past the age of 15 cannot.

Neither can predicting when this will occur, or how much said lining will be shed. We as women can estimate this, but there are limits to our accuracy.

Another argument might be that bathrooms just across the way in McLennan Library are equipped with some sort of lady-product dispenser. Any girl knows that every step counts when you’ve had an unexpected visit.

The point of having an amenity of this available at all is to reduce the amount of discomfort a women experiences while searching for a temporary solution to nature’s surprise. Therefore, regardless of how unprofitable these tampon machines may have been for McGill in the past (I assume this is that this is the only reason administration would decide to remove them, for they are of no spacial offence) that tampon machines, like toilets, are an essential service to society’s standards of good hygiene.

Thus, I suggest that we use the building’s payphones in the case of a cell phone emergency, and bring back tampon machines to Shatner. Profits would be made since the tampons in these machines are overpriced anyway – $1 each as opposed to $6 for 16 at the drugstore – and McGill can again call itself one of the first class academic institutions of the so-called first world.

Sarah Mortimer is a U2 Cultural Studies & History student. Send your new and/or used tampons to sarah.mortimer@mail.mcgill.ca.

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It all began when I left home in 2006 to attend university in Halifax. Miles away from the support networks I had depended upon in Ontario, the intense moods swings I had known in high school intensified.

I became obsessed with solving the unpredictability of my future. Though this concern is shared by many high school graduates, I handled it differently than most. For long periods of time, I stopped sleeping; instead, I passed the late hours by compiling lists of goals that I was to accomplish and going for walks at odd hours of the night. Filled with an energy that I could not contain or share with others, I would exhaust my racing thoughts on paper or pavement until they had outrun me, and I was forced to let my body rest.

Friends were alarmed by my inconsistencies. Where one week I would proclaim my happiness to Halifax’s cobblestone harbourfront, the next week I was on my roommate’s floor, in shambles over life’s bitter chaos. As my moods rocked between extremes, my grades remained consistently high, confusing my friends and family. They wondered how I could be terribly sick ,but still rack up A’s while writing for the campus newspaper on the side.

Based on the academic success of my first year of university, my parents weren’t opposed to the idea of me finishing my degree at McGill in 2007. After transferring, my grades remained relatively stable and I continued to engage in extracurricular writing activities. But my inconsistent moods continued, and my anxiety sharpened.

One night, while trying to finish an essay, I became so overwhelmed by my inability to concentrate that I began to scream and cry. Scared and alone, I called a helpline that specializes in anxiety to help temporarily subdue my panic. The next day I went to MMHS.

Given the number of students that seek mental health treatment at McGill, I was told that I would need to wait at least two weeks before seeing a professional. Since it can take up to six months to get an appointment with a psychiatric professional outside of McGill’s services, I was advised to visit McGill’s counselling centre while these two weeks passed. Of the 17 psychologists employed at McGill’s counseling centre, seven are Psychology graduate students. One of these students treated me.

She focused mostly on discussing familial conflicts, and I distinctly remember her offering me a Werther’s candy after we had finished the interview. She was very friendly, but I felt that her style of counselling was unsuitable for my needs. While all students in McGill’s graduate Psychology program must have GPAs over 3.3, they are not required to have had practical experience in the field.

For someone who was biologically predisposed to manic depression and chronic anxiety, the success of this novice counselling session could be only temporary. Without regular psychiatric sessions and some pharmaceutical assistance, its effect – giving me the sense that my life had some order – would melt away almost as quickly as a Werther’s candy.

Two to three weeks after my initial contact with MMHS, I received an appointment with one of their full-time psychiatrists. This doctor was welcoming, and provided me with the prescription drugs I would require to help manage my mind’s precarious state. He was adamant that these pills would be ineffective if I did not combine them with therapy. I viewed this as a sign of his professionalism and felt positive about the help I was about to receive.

The patient-therapist relationship differs from the relationship between a patient and his or her general practitioner. Because therapeutic prescriptions are largely opinion-based and can often affect a patient’s personality, they are more often rejected than other forms of medical treatment. Further, there is a natural imbalance in the relationship between therapist and patient. While the therapist listens as an objective audience to the patient’s explanation of his or her problem, the patient enters a position of total vulnerability and forfeits the fate of his or her mental health to the therapist. Thus, it is essential that trust is established between the patient and therapist in order to ensure that the patient will be honest and that he or she will accept the advice that the therapist offers.

It was in my therapist’s repeated failure to secure this bond that MMHS ultimately failed me.

During our sessions, my doctor promoted the problematic view that I seemed perfectly intelligent, and thus capable of gaining control over my emotions. While he might have offered this statement as a way of showing his “unconditional acceptance” and encourangment of my self-disclosure, it implied to me that I was somehow a failure. Much of my distress was caused by the time I spent trying to reconcile my illogical emotions and behaviours with my rational conscious thoughts.

I feel the need to point out that certain neurological disorders (such as schizophrenia, which often begins to surface between in one’s late teens and early twenties), do not always allow for the supremacy of conscious and rational thought, regardless of the intelligence of the patient. While medicine can be used to assist the suppression of some of these behaviors, to a large extent, the schizophrenic simply learns to exist with them. This discredits the idea that intelligence has any strong correlation to one’s overall mental state. Second, many mental illnesses, like manic depression – to which I am biologically predisposed – are experienced periodically. “Most bipolars are thoughtful, deliberative, perceptive and responsible when not ill,” according to Thomas C. Caramagno, author of Flight of the Mind, an analysis of the relationship between Virginia’s Woolf’s creative genius and her manic depression. Manic depression, Caramagno notes, “comes and goes, and when it is gone, individuals are not sick or insane.”

I visited my psychiatrist at MHS two or three weeks after I first made the appointment, and over a year after I had been suffering such “manic” and “depressive” episodes. Hence, if I appeared to be a fully-functioning and intelligent individual when we met, it may have been because I was – at the time when he saw me. Feeling that my illness was undermined by my intelligence, I hardly wished to give my therapist the full opportunity to assess me after he had made such a remark.

This sense of estrangement mounted when, on my third visit to his office, he confused me with another patient by the same surname. The misidentification suggested the unimportance of my case in his eyes, an implication that would hold as the session continued.

Breaching the central code of confidentiality in patient-doctor relationships, my doctor revealed medical information about this patient before realizing his mistake. He laughed meekly at his error, but was unable to reclaim any greater sense of trust from me. From then on, I suspected that the information being shared between us was not truly confidential, or if it was, it was because he had forgotten it by the time I had left.

After this appointment, I saw my therapist much less frequently. I remember visiting him once, several months later, for assistance with a panic attack, and once this year to refill my prescription. Our patient-therapist relationship is mostly impersonal, just like it is with any other McGill administrator.

In order for MHS to offer the “full service” model it advertises to its students, it must ensure the trust of its patients. This will most likely require expanding the number of full-time psychiatrists, so that personal and memorable relationships between doctors and patients can be built.

Despite my strained relationship with McGill’s MHS, there is one companion whom I trust fully. She was a sharp lady of London breed, and her untamed thoughts knew the greatest wisdom of the world. She once wrote of her own mental state: “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud.” Yet, for patients who suffer from illnesses like the one she suffered for a lifetime – in and outside of the lines – I wish that their fate will not resemble hers.

“On the outskirts of every agony,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “sits some observant fellow who points.”

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