CNQ's Website Gets a Makeover

Canadian Notes and Queries' online presence has just gotten a whole lot prettier.

A new redesigned website has been launched for the feisty literary print tri-annual, featuring select articles from back issues, exclusive online content, and pithy blog posts regularly updated by editor Alex Good. We've also renewed our commitments to the Twittersphere. To keep up with some of the most lively and combative discussions on contemporary Canadian lit and culture, follow us here. 

And as an aside to all you subscribers: be on the lookout for CNQ 92, which will shipped and hitting the newsstands in the 2nd or 3rd week of February. It's a doozy of an issue, with pieces by Stephen Henighan on Mavis Gallant's cross-dressing Romanian mother, Jennifer Franssen on a Latin renaissance in East Scarborough, Patricia Robertson on writing the necessary, Alex Good on the long, long shadow of CanLit's golden generation, JC Sutcliffe on translations of Inuit and Innu fiction, Kasper Hartman on the golden age of indie video games, and much more. If you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Save on the trip and the price of the newsstand and receive an exclusive collectible with each issue! 

“[CNQ]…may be the best literary journal in the land.” — John Fraser, National Post

Today in History (Just North of the Border)

"Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator."


So begins the posthumously published Juneteenth, written by Ralph Ellison over a forty-year period and spanning at one point some 2000 manuscript pages. There's a hubbub over the border today about Juneteenth--not the book, alas, though the good folks at WDET did quote a few lines for us--but about the holiday, celebrated in 41 states, commemorating the moment that Union General Gordon Granger (along with 2000 federal troops) arrived in Galveston, Texas, to force the emancipation of its slaves. Standing on the balcony of Ashton Villa at a date 2.5 years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Granger read aloud from General Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

A stirring piece of oratory if ever there was.


The book published as Juneteenth was to be the second volume of a trilogy. Ellison never saw it. It was compiled by John Callahan, his editor, and published five years after Ellison's death in 1994. Here's what the Boston Review had to say about it at the time:

The book is more than Ellison fans could expect, yet less than Ellison probably hoped--an ambivalent masterpiece. It celebrates the promise of interracial love even as it cannot square its black and white points-of-view. It flares with stylistic pyrotechnics--passages that matchInvisible Man for energy--even as its plot feels unfinished and its monologues too windy. Perhaps most strikingly, Juneteenth aims to speak to our current racial dilemmas even as it harkens to an age before "the inner city," "black power," and the "underclass." It is easy to see why Ellison could not wrap up his epic: the novel revolves in an intelligence too complex and too quick, ironically, to come to completion. As his Invisible Man might say, Ellison was trapped in a groove of history.

An ambivalent man for an ambivalent holiday, which of course is called Independence Day for African Americans, but also serves as a pointed reminder that emancipation is a process that spans generations. 


Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas will soon be introducing a bill to declare Juneteenth a federally recognized day of observance in the United States.


On another note, it seems that the City of Detroit can't afford sufficient security to manage crowd control at upcoming fireworks displays, and has called upon nearby municipal districts to help staff the upcoming celebrations.


Oh, America! And here's another review of Juneteenth, dug waaayy out of the archives, from CNQ's own Alex Good. Happy nineteenth, everybody. 

Jailbreaks: 99 Canandian Sonnets

Pulled my own version of There and Back Again last night as I headed up the 401 for the Toronto launch of the Zach Wells edited Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. As boring as the 401 between Windsor and Toronto may be, one is quite thankful for it at 4 AM. Too tired to do so tonight, but I should be able to post a fair number of photographs tomorrow. It was an excellent event, with some very fine readings.

In the meantime, Nathan Whitlock has posted an interview with Zach about the anthology on Open Book Toronto that can be found here:

www.openbooktoronto.com/nwhitlock/blog/interview_with_zachariah_wells_jailbreaks_99_canadian_sonnets

And Alex Good has reviewed the anthology in his usual thoughtful fashion on his website, which can be found here:

www.goodreports.net/reviews/jailbreaks.htm

A brief excerpt:

"It's refreshing to see an editor so engaged with his material. And while there are omissions and inclusions individual readers may disagree with, the result is a collection that successfully showcases remarkable variety within its narrow room."

Speaking of Alex Good, he's getting a lot of attention and praise for his fine, sharp and straight-talking piece Looking Backward, in the current edition of CNQ, seemingly on newstands everywhere. Quillblog, Bookninja, and That Shakespherian Rag, among others, are all atwitter. Though I think Susan Glickman put it best: "Alex Good is great!"

If you are unwilling to part with $7.95, you can read Good's essay for FREE -- a CNQ public service -- here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=48