Some Reading/Listening

Sorry to do two mainly-linky posts in a row, but I haven't had time for much blog-oriented original writing...too busy trying to make sure I get one more chapter of this done before the big move.

• A discussion by the Ontario Women's Justice Network of the annual report released by the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee.
  
  
• A brief history of the "roads not taken" by the U.S. labour movement -- it's failure to embrace community unionism, and to challenge racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and empire. (Via Monthly Review.)
  
  
• An MP3 interview with MP Libby Davies on the private member's bill she has introduced to try and start combatting racial profiling in areas under federal jurisdiction. (Via Radio4All.)
  
  
• Judy Rebick writes about struggles around reproductive choice in Canada, then and now. (Via Rabble.CA.)
  
  
• The book page for Pink Blood: Homophobic Violence in Canada, a look at instances of queer bashing in Canada between 1990 and 2004. I haven't read it, but I heard about it from a friend -- one who is quite excited to have been mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. It is the first book of this kind focusing on Canada, and it looks quite interesting.
  
  
• The shortlist for this year's Sunburst Award, described as being "for Canadian literature of the fantastic." I haven't read any of the nominees this year -- I've hardly read any books about anything but Canadian history this year, to be honest, and not nearly as much fiction in the last several years as I used to, and sadly little "literature of the fantastic" for even longer than that -- but I've read other novels by two of the five nominees, some of which I enjoyed and one of which I did not. Depressingly male list, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was depressingly white as well. (Found this via scribblingwoman.)
  
  
• Joe Bageant on sanity, complicity, and Adolf Eichmann. "All this sanity is killing some of us. To my mind, it is killing the best of us. It drives the artist and the philosopher, dancer, the psychiatrist, the homosexual torch singer and the spiritualist dishwasher toward the cliff with its macabre locust drone. Most of the genuinely beautiful minds and souls I know are in the deepest sort of despair. Rather like the cabaret society of 1930s Berlin, you can hear the high whine of hysteria behind their drunken revelry, their bitter laughter in the face of such black folly."
  
  
• And an article on progressive activism in Texas. I have my usual complaints about the liberal framing of problems and solutions that you tend to find in AlterNet articles, but I think looking at areas that are often written off by liberals and the left is a good idea, and that a sentence in the concluding paragraph has at least the beginnings of some very important political insight: "Texas activists say support from national politicians and progressive activists living in liberal cities would give them more power and influence."