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Our friends at First Book Canada just wrapped up the largest book distribution in their three-year history, distributing 30,000 books to children from low-income homes in the city of Calgary and across the province of Alberta.

Like First Book in the U.S., First Book Canada relies on the generosity of partners and neighbors to get books to kids in need. NeighbourLink Calgary hosted the distribution in their warehouse, and volunteers from Pi Beta Phi, Calgary Youth Corps and the local community came out to help ship and load boxes of books bound for classrooms, libraries and homes across the province of Alberta.

You can learn more about First Book Canada at their website, or keep up with their latest news on Twitter.

“Please accept my personal thanks to you and First Book Canada for its generous donation of books, in support of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary. It is people like you that enable us to continue building upon our shared ideals for growth in our communities through advocacy, leadership and engagement of over 42,000 children, youth and families.”
– Cheryl Doherty, Executive Director, Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary

“On behalf of Further Education Society’s learners, board members and staff, we would like to thank you and First Book Canada for your support. With your support we can strengthen communities, families and individuals through literacy and learning. Thank you for your community spirit.”
– Sue Phillips, Co-Executive Director, Further Education Society

“I would like to express my sincere appreciation for the amazing donation of books from First Book Canada to Catholic Family Service of Calgary. The developmentally appropriate books for boys and girls ages 9–12 will support children and families in a number of our programs. Thank you once again for caring and wanting to make a difference in childhood literacy.”
– Greg Campbell, Chief Executive Officer, Catholic Family Service of Calgary

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I first heard of Henry Miller, perhaps fittingly, when I lived with two guys in East Vancouver. One of the guys had a friend who was a postman, the other guy was having an affair with the postman’s wife. There were a few awkward moments when he snuck her in for a night or an afternoon quickie, but, all in all, things went well and I saw a book which the postman had lent to his buddy, my housemate. It was a compilation of the letters between Henry and Lawrence Durrell.
I became interested and then obsessed with Miller’s writing, read everything of his I could get my hands on.
I still have a worn copy of Tropic of Cancer by my bedside along with Flann O’Brien’s, The Poor Mouth. For some reason which I don’t want to analyze, both books are places of refuge for me when I just want to relax and enjoy the language. At times like that I don’t think as much about the content of what I’m reading as much as how the words are strung together.
Finding Henry’s writing was like the moment when Shakespeare made sense to me in high school: a light bulb shone.
In all my travels after that I kept a sharp eye open when books by Henry were displayed. Krishnamurti, Durrell, Arthur Rimbaud, Anais Nin and others were introduced to me by Henry’s writing and their books were ones I watched for too. Of course, I was watching for cheap versions of their works.
When my friend, Robin, arrived to visit me in Crete he brought a copy of The Colossus of Maroussi, written when Henry visited Lawrence Durrell and his wife in Corfu.
Surviving in a tiny room in Paris on croque monsieurs, cheese, baguettes and red wine, I planned a novel using the Paris metro map as structure. Needless to say, the novel became as confusing and mixed up as my understanding of the Paris subway system and was abandoned.
I made a pilgrimage to the street where Anais Nin lived when she and Henry were having their affair. Their conviction that analysis was necessary and their visits to Otto Rank, a student of Freud, revealed the notion that psychoses are the products of frustrated or blocked creativity. Frustrated writers can take comfort in the idea that writing is at least healthy if not profitable.
By the time I was there, the bars mentioned in his books were too expensive for me to patronise but I lingered outside the Coupole and the Dome.
I walked endlessly around Paris, imagined what it was like then, wondered why Henry was never mentioned in the list of writers who lived in the city in the 30's. There was irony in the thought of him existing from meal to meal as he worked on Tropic in the arts capital of the Western world, poor, reviled and rejected.
I didn’t know then that he and Anais Nin wrote pornography for the money of their rich patrons but I knew there had been an overwhelming rejection of him in the States and that he was involved in the debate about pornography and obscenity.
It looks like the descendants of those moral Americans who banned his books for so long have, seventy or eighty years later, taken over the government of the USA.
He described his trip across the states in The Air Conditioned Nightmare. The title pretty well demonstrated Henry’s attitude toward the system.
It gave me hope.
Here was a man with great curiosity about the world and other people and sex who ignored all the warnings and temptations which were placed before him and followed a singular path of his own. It led him to another continent, through years of poverty and piles of rejection slips. But he kept going and kept laughing.
“Always cheery and bright” was his motto and the most depressing situations could be changed for the better just by reading his books.
I know that a generation who thinks the 60's is ancient history has a hard time understanding his relevance now, but then he was like a beacon. He personified the rebelliousness and questioning which was rumbling underground.
I often wonder what he would have made of this internet, instant world. I like to think he’d re

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Spring in northern climes such as ours is heralded by the return of birds.  For us, the honking of geese in the skies are a sure sign of the season.  When we lived in Alberta, we sometimes went out into the countryside to see the return of the snow geese.  Their flocks would fill the sky in swathes of white and blanket the fields on the ground.  In Manitoba, it is mostly Canada geese that make their presence known in spring.  Just the other day, I saw a pair gracefully wafting along the edges of a nearby creek.

Two books I have read to my children about migrating birds and spring are Swan Sky by Tejima and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlof (illus. Lars Klinting.)  Swan Sky is a picture book that tells the story of a young swan who is unable and unwilling to make the migratory flight northwards in spring.  It is a poignant and simple story, beautifully illustrated with the woodcut prints of the author. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a longer book and is a children’s classic in Sweden. Commissioned by the National Teacher’s Association in 1902 as a reader for geography, the story of Nils took Lagerlof three years to research and write.  Nils is a mischievous farm boy who is punished for his cruel acts to the farm animals by being turned into a wee tomte.  In order to escape the anger of his parents, he hitches a ride on a domestic goose who yearns to be like the wild geese flying northwards in their annual migration.  On this journey, Nils tours the provinces of Sweden, experiencing adventures that make him grow up and become a responsible young man.

What is spring like where you live?  What birds do you see and hear in your part of the world?

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To start off this "big update", here is a collection of Christmas cards I did last year for the Royal Alberta Museum (their mascot is a mammoth and the museum is stationed on a long hill, pictured in the painting). They are up for sale in the museum gift shop as a set if any there are any local readers interested in purchasing the set.

It's been quite the summer! My big project with Alberta Learning is being wrapped up this week, giant files transferred and details checked over to make sure everything is just so. I've never been such a large part of the creative on a project of this scale - people helped turn my drawings into vector characters that are to be animated and turned into an interactive game for grade eight social studies students across Alberta.

I'm so happy to announce that I'll be back posting regularly on my blog - it's been over a month since my last post - something I have not skipped out on since creating my blog two years ago. I will not be able to post any images from it until the Alberta Learning team has published it to the web, which will not be for many months. I'll keep you posted! Until then here's a few reject drawings:







Things that happened over the summer -
1) I was commissioned to do a children's book for a publisher in the UK. A wonderfully complex pop-up about a garage and it's mechanic, cars and trucks. Unfortunately the project was put on hold 3/4 of the way to the end of the project which was a blessing as well as a disappointment (I had taken on too many projects and was quite exhausted). I have attached one of the character designs I created for the main character (Bumper), which later changed to a different model of car. After I get word from my agent about posting more images I'll let you know!

2) I did a marvelously complex vector illustration for a forestry company called Millar Western (a local Alberta company) and adored doing all of the little animals in the picture - here's a sample - I highly suggest you click on it to see the details:


3) Here's some images from a grade 3 math text book I worked on as well -






Thanks to those who are by blog "followers" now too!

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Gordon W. Russell is a Profess Emeritus at the University of Lethbring in Alberta where he taught social psychology and conducted research on sports aggression for over 32 years.  His book Aggression in the Sports World: A Social Psychological Perspective is an international and interdisciplinary presentation of the best and most recent findings in the study of sports aggression, and provides a series of proposals intended to prevent or minimize the severity of riots and panics. In the excerpt below Russel looks at the role of competition and aggression.

Competition is by far the most central and hallowed concept in the sports world. Most children are introduced to the notion of winning during their formative years. Thereafter, it pervades both individual and group interactions at all levels of play. Moreover, competition has taken root as the preferred means of conducting activities in the business world, education, and, possibly to a lesser extent, in scientific circles. One might assume that competition brings out the best in people, more so than say, cooperation.

Parenthetically, the common assumption that competition is superior to cooperation as a means for conducting human interactions is based more on a shared cultural truism (McGuire, 1964), certainly not on the empirical evidence. A cultural truism is a widespread, unquestioned belief that is rarely, if ever challenged. For example, when was the last time you heard someone take issue with the age-old advice to “brush your teeth after every meal?” In North America at least, competition is every bit as much a cultural truism as the importance of brushing after meals.

A review of 121 published studies comparing the effectiveness of competitive versus cooperatively structured tasks on performance and achievement was undertaken (Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson, & Skon, 1981). Cooperation was found to be clearly superior across a variety of tasks, including motor tasks. In one analysis involving 109 findings, 8 favored competition and 65 favored cooperation, whereas 36 favored neither type of setting. We see further that in conjunction with an enjoyment of hard work and a preference for difficult and challenging tasks, low competitiveness is associated with higher salaries among businessmen and higher academic grades among male and female undergraduates (Helmreich & Spence, 1978; see also, Russell 1993, pp. 89–91).

Competition often fails us in other ways. That is, competitive situations are frequently found to breed hostility among participants. Part of the reason lies with the attitudes of competitors. If participants enter the competition with rivalrous attitudes, then hostilities are apt to develop. The association between rivalry and competition is learned in childhood. Rivalrous attitudes “appear in the form of personal intentions that go beyond merely doing well in competition and involve the goal of hurting the other person, perhaps going out of one’s way to do so” (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959, p. 228). Competition itself can be defined as “two or more units, either individuals or groups, engaged in pursuing the same rewards, with these rewards so defined that if they are attained by any one unit, there are fewer rewards for the other units in the situation” (Berkowitz, 1962, p. 178).

The tendency for competition to produce aggression has been well documented (e.g., Berkowitz, 1962, 1973; Deutsch, 1949; Diab, 1970; Sherif & Sherif, 1969). A classic field investigation by Sherif and Sherif (1969) will illustrate the differences between competition and cooperation in fostering hostility. The setting was a summer camp for young boys (11–12 years) in Oklahoma in what is called the Robber’s Cave experiment. The boys were carefully matched on skill level and physical stature. The boys were normal, well-adjusted youngsters who did not previously know one another. Upon their arrival at the camp in separate buses, they were assigned to either of two cabins, later named by the boys as the “Rattlers” and the “Eagles.” Strong bonds of friendship and group loyalty quickly developed within each group. Their cabins were located a considerable distance from each other, and no contact was made until the second stage of the experiment. During the week following their arrival, the youngsters engaged in a number of highly appealing activities, for example, camping out in the woods, improving a swimming hole as well as organized informal games. By week’s end, the two groups had developed stable group structures.

Shortly after, the groups were made aware of each other’s existence, strong “we” versus “they” perceptions of one another emerged. Brought together for a variety of competitions, for example, tug of war, touch football, baseball, and treasure hunt, the early expressions of good sportsmanship and mutual respect began to evaporate. In its stead verbal and physical hostilities began and escalate to the point of a full blown donnybrook in the mess hall. Name calling and throwing of food and then dinnerware brought the experiment to an abrupt halt. Several days of concerted effort by camp personnel were required to restore some semblance of peace between the Rattlers and the Eagles.

The investigators next arranged a series of tasks for the boys that required the cooperation of both cabins to succeed. They were superordinate goals or “goals that have a compelling appeal for members of each group, but that neither group an achieve without participation of the other” (Sherif & Sherif, 1969, p. 256). Several “emergencies” having potentially dire consequences for both cabins were created by the researchers. The camp truck that went for food mysteriously developed engine failure. It could only be started with both groups pulling together on their former tug of war rope. At another point the waterline broke down stopping the flow of water to the camp. The Rattlers and Eagles agreed to join forces to search for the break in the line. In both examples, it was clearly in their best interests to cooperate with one another, as in fact they did. The result was that intergroup hostility gradually diminished and a number of friendships even began to blossom between the cabins.

A similar field study was undertaken in Lebanon (Diab, 1970) and illustrates the ease with which competition can lead to ill will, if not outright aggression. Following similar procedures, the youngsters were “matched” and assigned to two groups in the camp. Interestingly, each group contained roughly equal numbers of Moslems and Christians. Friendships and camaraderie within each group developed during the early days of the camp. However, when competition was introduced, hostilities again erupted between the cabins. So intense was the animosity—a knife was brandished—that Diab was required to prematurely end the study. The battle lines were drawn between two temporary and artificially created groups. Surprisingly, the centuries-old divisions between Moslems and Christians played no part in the hostilities.

One might be forgiven for concluding from the Oklahoma boys camp study that the answer to increasing liking between two competing groups lies with having them cooperate in pursuit of a common goal. The answer is not quite that simple. Worchel, Andreoli, and Folger (1977) reasoned that two variables, the outcome of the cooperative endeavor and the nature of the groups’ past interaction, would determine the level of intergroup liking. In a nutshell, previously competing groups who failed in their combined effort experienced less attraction for one another. However, success resulted in increased liking. For previously cooperating groups, success and failure on the superordinate task resulted in increased liking between the groups.

Early writers have long contended that aggression is an inherent element in most competitions. Konrad Lorenz (1966) makes the point in noting that “sport indubitably contains aggressive motivation, demonstrably absent in most animal play” (p. 242). This conclusion is echoed by Caplow (1964) who observed that “In virtually all competitive situations some degree of hostility develops between the competitors” (p. 318). Certainly, the summer camp studies support such a conclusion. In addition, it was noted earlier that the trait of competitiveness is strongly related to the subscales and total scores on the Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). However, laboratory investigations testing the merits of a competition–aggression hypothesis have yielded mixed results. For example, members of a competitive group were less helpful and friendly and more verbally aggressive toward each other than were members of a cooperative group (Deutsch, 1949). A more direct test of the hypothesis was conducted using a two-person reaction time experiment in which electric shock for slow responses served as the measure of interpersonal aggression (Gaebelein & Taylor, 1971). Three levels of motivation were provided subjects: high competition, no shock for fastest response plus 5 cents; moderate competition, no shock; and no competition, shock predetermined. Support for a causal association between competition and aggression was not forthcoming. In the words of the researchers “competition had little influence on the expression of physical aggression” (p. 66).

A video game (Super Mario Brothers) provided the means for a further investigation of competition and its effects on aggression (Anderson & Morrow, 1995; see also, Bartholow, Sestir, & Davis, 2005). Specifically, pairs of male and female, university-aged participants were led through experimental instructions to adopt either a competitive or a cooperative frame of mind. A cooperative mind set was established for a pair by the experimenter stressing that their performances were to be combined and assessed together. For pairs in the competitive condition, they were told their performances would be compared at the end of the session. The goal for both groups then, was to avoid losing the life of the main character, that is, to advance as far as possible in each scenario.

The main characters are Mario and Luigi both of whom are controlled by the participants. Their task is to help the character avoid “cute but deadly creatures” as they navigate scenes. Participants can have their character deal with the creatures they encounter in either of two ways, killing or avoiding them. Jumping on top of a creature kills it as does hitting it with a fireball. Creatures can instead be avoided by the main character taking a different path or jumping over the creature.

The prediction that pairs assigned to the competitive condition would dispatch a greater number of creatures than those playing in the cooperative condition was confirmed. Competitive subjects had a 66% kill ratio in contrast to cooperative subjects who killed only 41%. Sex differences were not in evidence, that is, men and women had virtually the same kill ratios.

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