For more on Roland Castro’s vision, visit the home page of his candidacy, where he lays out his concrete utopias (among his 89 proposals is a foreign policy based on Gandhi’s teachings) or the website for his latest project, the
Caravelle.
It can sometimes seem as if the English-speaking world is determined to distort what’s actually happening in France. Nevertheless, the Guardian maintains an excellent page on France, featuring blogs and all their latest articles. Of course, there’s always France’s newspaper of record, the elegant Le Monde, which has a glut of online features. If you miss that cozy Canadian feel, cbc’s David Common answers your most frequently asked questions about the French presidential elections and more on his Analysis and Viewpoint page.
The Idea of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) is a brilliant analysis of modern French history by iconoclastic French historian Pierre Birnbaum. For quicker consumption (warning: you’ll be hungry again in an hour), you can read up on the latest riots online at Wikipedia. The country’s best-selling novelist is Michel Houellebecq, a writer who dares to say things about France that no one else will (often because they’re complete fabrications). Randy Boyagoda reviewed three of Houellebecq’s novels in the June 2006 issue of The Walrus.
An Upstream Battle
Barbara K. Adamski
pp.30-32
Preeminent lacrosse scholar Tom Vennum wrote the book on the history of lacrosse in North American native culture. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1994) offers some interesting facts on the social functions of the game—warfare between tribes and a curative for sickness—and details the mechanics of the game with illustrations and appendices.
Franciscan monk François Rabelais was one of the first to name the outdoor ball-and-stick game lacrosse, or “la crosse” as it appears in his sixteenth century comedy, Gargantua, reprinted in Gargantua and Pantagruel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990). But Rabelais’s wordsmithery extended beyond sports; Gargantua, which contains several masterfully wrought variations on the word “bunghole,” was banned by the Catholic church for its bawdy word play and general grotesquerie.
In an effort to establish lacrosse as Canada’s national sport, William George Beers published the first Canadian book on the sport and titled it Lacrosse: the National Game of Canada (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1869). The original edition is held in the National Library’s Rare Book Collection, and their website offers a brief history of the book and its dentist-cum-lacrosse-advocate author.
If reading Barbara Adamski’s article has turned you into a diehard Salmonbellies fan, your timing couldn’t be better. The 2007 Western Lacrosse Association season is just getting going, and you can track the Bellies progress online as they vie for their 25th Mann Cup win.
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