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Thursday, July 9, 2009
I had thoughts this time. Not that I didn't have thoughts the previous three times, they just didn't feel worth expressing here. These ones aren't really worth expressing here either, but express them I shall.
( Spoilers, obviously )
I've had this review stored for seven years. Now as good a time as any to post it.
Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914. Stanford, California: Stanford University, 1976. 615 pp.
People tend to forget how heterogeneous--ethnically, culturally, and otherwise--modern states used to be. Canadians are probably less likely to forget than citizens of other Western states, simply because their country is prone to innumerable fissures--Québec versus English Canada, West versus East, South versus North, even downtown versus suburbs, heartland versus periphery--but other countries evidence much the same fissures. Sweden, for instance, is traditionally thought of as the epitome of homogeneity; yet, throughout its history Sweden has received so many immigrants (Walloons, Germans, Finns, Balts, Dutch) as to become a melting pot even as successive Swedish sovereigns have fought to establish uncontested boundaries. (Sweden's modern boundaries were only defined in 1815, with the cession of Finland to the Russian Empire.) This convenient memory lapse might have been produced by the Western traditions of sovereignty established with the Peace of Westphalia: Thongchai Winichakul's excellent article “Siam Mapped: Making of Thai Nationhood,” (The Ecologist, September-October 1996), explores how Thailand and the Thai national identity have been molded by successive Thai governments the better to establish Thailand's maximum sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity.
At least people seem to forget this less often than before. We can probably thank Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into Frenchmen for this. France was Europe's first modern republic, and well into the 19th century France arguably ranked as the single most powerful state in the West. Most people believe the stereotype that France is a homogeneous society, yet well into 19th century as many French citizens regularly spoke languages other than French--Breton, Occitan dialects, Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Alsatian, Corsican--instead of French, and even in French-speaking areas provincial loyalties often transcended the putative bond of the nation. The introduction of immigrant languages only complicated this picture. Renan, in his famous attempt to define the French nation, said that any nation was defined by the consent of its component communities; Weber argues that if consent was involved, it was manufactured, engineered.
We know, thanks to the research that Weber inspired, the French case is prototypical for most other nation-states. The post-Revolutionary French state was concerned with eliminating troublesome political identities, but by and large for the first half of the 19th century this was limited to the centralization of national affairs in Paris and the pursuit of national glory. Under the Second Empire and--still more--the Third Republic, active steps were made to encourage the elimination of provincial loyalties. Urbanization and industrialization helped immensely, of course, dislocating traditionally agricultural rural communities and allowing a specifically Francophone modernity to penetrate. The growth of mass media--book and magazine publishing, popular music, and the like--also played an important role in making French trendy for the non-Francophone young and diminishing the intergenerational transmission of language. Weber brought a new perspective on the school as vehicle for francophonization; though it was less than successful in homogenous non-Francophone peasant societies (Brittany is the most spectacular example), in areas even minimally open to the French language it removed the children from the traditional norms of peasant society. In one interesting passage, Weber recounts how it took generations to convince the French masses to use the metric system, with measurement in the public sphere (distances, say, and commerce) succumbing more quickly than measurements relating to one's person. I myself, living in a country that converted to metric just before me birth, use kilometres but not kilograms. And now, almost all of France's minority languages are nearing extinction, and the Fifth Republic is far more universally Francophone than any of the previous republics or monarchies of France. Where France has gone, any number of other countries have followed or are trying to follow in their different ways--Thailand, for instance. The French nationalizing project mostly worked.
If this book has a fault, it is that it does not consider the substantial foreign immigration to France. Over the lifetime of the Third Republic, perhaps five million Europeans (at first Belgians, then Spaniards and Italians, then Poles, White Russians, and Armenians, among many others) immigrated to France, making their homes in town or country, assimilating with remarkable speed. This immigration has continued to the present, of course: The Frenchman of the early 21st century is now likely to have at least one grandparent of foreign birth, just like his/her American contemporary. It seems certain that the same methods used to acculturate Limousins to French norms were used to acculturate Ligurians; yet, there was little mention of foreign immigration apart from a mention of Flemish immigrants in Nord and other passing statements. One passage, in which he describes how the folkloric traditions of certain Parisian neighbourhoods disappeared as old generations died off and new residents came in, strikes me as useful. It would have been nice if there had been a sufficiently updated version to cover this, or an updated version to cover all of the scholarly innovations, for a fuller perspective on the integration and assimilation of all the unofficial non-Francophone cultures of France in English. We can, however, look forward for followup works--Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, for instance--to carry the torch.
Two songs really caught me after MuchMusic came to my home: Annie Lennox's "No More 'I Love You's" and Everything But the Girl's "Missing"
Below is a fine live performance of the song.
Below is a YouTube video carrying the song, the Terry Todd remix, as it was heard on the radio and seen on the music video channels. I've no problem with Wikipedia's summary of the song's background and success. Prior to "Missing", Everything but the Girl was most known as a folk and jazz group. They had released eight albums prior to Amplified Heart and had a number-three UK singles chart hit in 1988 ("I Don't Want to Talk About It"), but were relatively unknown in the United States. "Missing" was recorded as a laid-back guitar-based pop song that had earned modest airplay on U.S. Adult Contemporary radio. The duo gave the track to house music producer Todd Terry to remix for clubs. The resulting dance version of "Missing" became a worldwide smash, matching Everything But the Girl's UK best chart position of number three in November 1995 and hitting number one on the German singles chart. The song became the duo's first U.S. Billboard Hot 100 entry, and after a long climb up the chart, it peaked at number two in 1996 (in its twenty-eighth chart week), eventually spending fifty-five weeks on the chart (a record at the time which has since been broken — the single is today the ninth-longest charting song on the U.S. Hot 100.).
Tracey Thorn later explained to Rolling Stone that "Missing" was originally intended as a dance-oriented track: [1] "It was written with that idea in mind, totally... we put on sort of a laid back house groove instead. Then when we gave it to Todd, he took it in a really, really strong New York house direction, which had a real simplicity to it, but it was very infectious." </blockquote> Here come the lyrics. I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeared somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain The song's fundamentally about a story of loss: Someone goes to an address, looking for someone, knowing that they're not there and are never going to be there, but going out of a sense of grief. That narrative, told in Tracey Thorn's heartbreaking voice against Todd's brilliant subtle electronica, got me hooked, made me as huge of a fan as I could, waiting for the video or listening to the album. It resonated. Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout down to me
Where I always used to be
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain Back when "Missing" came out, I remember an article in Spin that suggested that one way the song became as big a it as it did was through gay clubbers, who by the mid-1990s peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were certainly aware of any number of their friends, vital energetic people who mattered, leaving their friends and the world in a horrible way hopefully for a better, unreachable, place. The stunned survivors could do nothing but watch as the suffering continued and the death toll rose, perhaps sometimes even making it impossible to track the fate of one individual, or many. Back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess I've been hanging around your old address?
The years have proved to offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone
But I can't move on
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain Freud's thinking on loss comes to mind. Freud’s essay proposes an analogy between the pathological phenomenon of acute depression, or “melancholia”, and the universal phenomenon of mourning which inevitably follows loss. Freud acknowledges that this similarity was adumbrated by Abraham in his 1911 paper. In fact, however, the connection had interested Freud since at least 1895. In an early text known as “Draft G” – which was not published until more than a decade after Freud’s death – he had remarked that “The affect [i.e., in this context, the emotional state] corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning” (1985, 200). During a discussion on suicide at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910 Freud had also insisted that the starting point for any understanding of suicide must be a comparison between these two phenomena. The intuition which propelled such as yet embryonic remarks was the key conviction that at the core of melancholic illness is always a “longing for something lost” (1895, 200). The song's subject is similarly trapped, melancholic and depressed because of something that was lost, something causing the subject to mourn. The subject might well be able in theory to move on, find new people and a better life, but how can that be done, really? The past may be past, but it still shapes the subject, just as it does other people, and that lost person, those possibilities so cruelly shut off--these are losses that are irreversible. How can you recover from these scars?, I ask for the song's subject
This is regarded as the great work of Belgian fantasy (at least in the novel form: there are loads of Belgian comics and films with sfnal content). It's quite difficult to get hold of and I eventually picked up a copy of the 1998 Atlas Press translation on eBay. It appears at first to be about the peculiar inhabitants of the house of Malpertuis, in a city which is presumably Ghent in the dying days of Francophone supremacy; but in fact it turns into a peculiar confrontation between the organised Catholic church and the gods of ancient Greece. My edition makes the inevitable link with H.P. Lovecraft; I would add James Stephens' The Crock of Gold as a potential source, and I wonder if Neil Gaiman drew on it, consciously or not, for American Gods (and likewise, for the nested narrative structure, David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas). Ray is not quite as terrifying as Lovecraft (though fairly gruesome in places), and he is certainly not as cheerful as Stephens, but he does add a certain level of surrealist incomprehensibility to the mix that is appropriate for a slightly older contemporary of Magritte, who like Magritte stayed in Belgium and wrote this book during the German occupation. Certainly an essential read for sf fans interested in Belgium, or Belgians interested in literary sf.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cassave is one of several people who have recently shifted completely from Livejournal to Facebook, but now I know where he got his name from while he was here.
Eszter Hargittai reports on a study that she carried out on the demographics of users of Facebook and MySpace. The results are certainly interesting.
There are two main findings here. First, there is a general increase in use of Facebook and a general decline in use of MySpace across the board. In 2007, 79% of the study participants were using Facebook while in 2009, 87% of the sample reports doing so. In contrast, while in 2007, 55% of the group reported using MySpace, in 2009, only 36% do so.
Second, we continue to see ethnic and racial differences as well as different usage by parental education (a proxy for socioeconomic status). Students of Hispanic origin are more likely to use MySpace than others and less likely to use Facebook than others. Asian American students are the least likely to be on MySpace. Regarding parental education, the relatively small number (7%) of students in the sample whose parents have less than a high school education are much more likely to be on MySpace and much less likely to be on Facebook than others. Students from families where at least one parent has a college degree are much less likely to be MySpace users than others.
In my 2007 paper, I talked a bit about what may be going on here, but getting deep into that is difficult through data of this sort. danah boyd does much more in-depth work in this realm – granted, on high school students not college students – and has shared reflections both two years ago and just last week on what may be going on. As Hargittai cautions in the comments, this draws from an unrepresentative sample of very active people. Still, it's interesting, don't you think? I did a [LINK] post on this subject back in 2007, for whatever it's worth. Go, read the Crooked Timber post and my 2007 post. Please? ;-)
Dhruba Adhikari at Asia Times has come up with an interesting article, "Nepal plunges into politics of language," which describes how the Maoists who now govern Nepal are trying to deal with the country's multilingualism by privileging minority languages as much as possible.
The issue of official language(s) has never been as sensitive in Nepal as it is now. While the interim statute maintains the continuity of Nepali, in Devnagari script, as the language of official communication, some members of the 601-strong Constituent Assembly want to add 11 more languages to the list, giving them the same status, while others are advocating for the addition of Hindi.
Otherwise, the members will resort to writing "notes of dissent", unwittingly using an English expression to press their point. One contention is that since Nepal is now a republic, it should adopt a language policy to de-link the country's monarchical past.
If all 11 languages gain equal status with Nepali as demanded, that will still leave Nepal's 60 other languages and dialects, whichare spoken by just 1% of the population in a country of over 25 million people, off the list.
But does Nepal have the required resource-base to have a dozen official languages? Yes, it is possible, said commentator Shyam Shrestha. Since democracy requires equality, the state should be prepared to pay a concomitant price for it, he said in a recent newspaper article.
[. . .]
Nepali, an offspring of Sanskrit, is the mother tongue of 49% of the population and has been in use for official communication for centuries. In Nepal's neighborhood and beyond it is also called Gorkhali, a name derived to identify it with the world famous Gurkha soldiers. It is a language with an enriched vocabulary, grammar and literature. Besides being the official language, Nepali has provided a link between and among communities speaking local languages and dialects. To some extent, this attempt to enfranchise minority languages reflects policies in many Communist state. Early Soviet nationality policies, which, as George Liber describes, at least nominally saw the devolution of power and cultural/linguistic equality for non-Russian minorities even extending to the realm of government affairs, all fitting within a Soviet people. Chinese nationality policy was similar, with the exception that the theoretical right to secede was not included. Adhruba, who seems quite skeptical of the efforts, argues that questions of language standardization and the roles played by extra-Nepali languages will complica Some scholars of the Rai community in the eastern hills, for instance, have discovered 28 variations of the Rai language, with speakers of each group wanting their dialect to receive identical treatment from the state. The Sherpa community, which provides high-altitude guides to mountaineers attempting to scale Everest and other Himalayan peaks, is uncomfortable over purported moves to marginalize their language to bestow a higher status to a language used by recent immigrants from Tibet. But people living in the foothills of snow-capped mountains in the northern belt have not lost their cool, and are not making much noise.
The situation is quite different in the southern belt, which shares porous borders with India's Bihar state - known for lawlessness - and Uttar Pradesh state, with a large population, among others. Small political parties, with loaded regional overtones, suddenly felt strong enough to demand that Hindi, spoken mainly in northern India and popularized by India's Mumbai-based film industry, be given the status enjoyed by Nepali. This happened on the eve of the national polls of April 2008 that were held to elect the constituent assembly.
Existing regional parties were emboldened with the sudden emergence of new parties, mainly consisting of disgruntled leaders from the mainstream national parties such as Nepali Congress and the Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), which is considered a moderate communist group when compared with the Maoists.
Media reports claimed the new political parties were floated - ahead of the crucial election - with moral and material support from the south; but official India promptly denied such reports and allegations.
Those who have appeared vocal in the constituent assembly debate belong to these newly formed parties, and have inserted the dissenting opinion with the demand that Hindi too be made an official language like Nepali. Their main argument is that since most Nepalis watch Hindi films and enjoy listening to Hindi music there should not be any hesitation to accept it as an official Nepal language. Adhikari quotes a professor who argues for the preservation of Nepali as a common national language, with minority languages and languages of cultural/religious importance coming afterward. Given the situation that Adhikari describes above, it doesn't seem very plausible to expect the different non-Nepali language groups to agree. Thoughts?
1. Hackery
1a. I was going to post about why the way mainstream Western media have been framing the racist/Islamophobic murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, pharmacist, ex-national handball athlete, mother, wife, and daughter, in a German courtroom is problematic but muslimah media watch has done so. P.S. Sherbini is emphatically NOT the first victim of racist and/or Islamophobic murder in Germany no matter how hard the media, including the Grauniad (who should know better), try to spin it. (My previous news post on this murder.)
1b. Aquatic deer and ancient whales: "If you startled a deer, you might not expect it to jump into the nearest pond and submerge itself for minutes. But that is exactly what two species of mouse-deer in Asia do when confronted by predators, scientists have found. One other African mouse-deer species is known to do the same thing, but the new discovery suggests all ruminants may once have had an affinity with water. It also lends support to the idea that whales evolved from water-loving creatures that looked like small deer." Source at BBC Earth News.
1c. Mummified dinosaur including an AWESOME photo of the skin/scales at BBC dino de jour News.
1d. Most of you will be aware of the recent job ad for a "witch" at Wookey Hole, via BBC witching News. I think there should be a series of televised auditions decided by a public phone vote. It could be called Britain's Got Witches! P.S. Remember the Wookey Hole cave cheese which gave everyone food poisoning?
2. Lexicophilia: "Her hot rage was douched with cold shame." Does "douched" mean something different in USian English or d'you think the writer meant "doused"? o_O
3. The ever reliable Wikipedia reveals one of the places I've lived "is home to people". INTERWEBZ FACT!!1!!
4. The BBC local news for the area of England I'm considering moving to is... quiet... apart from traffic accidents and, slightly oddly as the area has no coastline, drownings. However, today there was news of two stabbings during an attempted robbery!!1!! The italics and bolding in the following quote are mine:
"The robber went behind the counter with a knife after paying for a newspaper. The woman suffered cuts to her hand and abdomen and the man sustained a chest injury. Their injuries were not life threatening, police said. A police spokesman said the woman was injured during a struggle with the robber. Her partner was injured when he came to her aid. [...] During the struggle, the offender was hit in the face with a mug of hot tea and may have an injury."
On a trip heading vaguely northwards sometime in May, I came across some interesting graffiti as I headed north through the cool/shabby areas bracketed around Kensington Market. Below are a few that really caught my attention.
An advertisement for the store Dancing Days, offering new and vintage clothing, the store located at 17 Kensington Avenue and the picture at the corner of Kensington and St. Andrew. The above intricate drawing is located on the east wall of Head to Toe, a holistic and naturopathic clinic located at 71 Oxford Street. "Mister Sulu, set phasers for FUN!" Found on the door leading to the abandoned space on 316 College Street. Found painted on the north wall of the Toronto Sanjiao Holy Temple, located at 508 Spadina Avenue.
8:54AM
http://www.gallifreyone.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?id=EkuZEkAZVpgtsjDmFz&tmpl=newsrss&style=feedstyle Torchwood: Children of Earth continued its strong run on BBC One, with part three watched by 5.9 million viewers, making it the the most 3rd watched programme of the day. The share was 27.1%. An average of 105,000 also watched the programme on BBC HD, with and additional 225,000 watching the late night repeat on BBC Three. If these figures are added to the BBC One showing, then the programme overtakes Emmerdale to become the second most watched of the day. The Appreciation Index for Epis
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Towleroad is one blog among many that is carrying the news that North Korea may have been behind a recent series of cyberattacks on South Korean and American government sites.
North Korea, until now content to threaten to blow up the United States and recklessly test missiles, might be moving into a more aggressive phase. According to South Korean intelligence, "North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces" are behind cyber attacks that knocked out American and South Korean government sites. China is also a suspect.
Affected sites include those at the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commision and Transportation Department, and all the issues occurred over the long holiday weekend. A good time to test one's abilities, when one's opponent is watching fireworks and eating barbecue Gideon Rachmann links to an article with excerpts from a paper in an official Chinese government journal by one Zhang Lianggui, a Chinese expert on North Korea, who fears that another Korean War may be soon. Zhang, who has been at the school since 1989, is a specialist on North Korea, where he studied at Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang from 1964-1968. His analysis, in the June 16 issue of World Affairs magazine, is one of the most critical of the North ever to appear in an official publication. It reflects Beijing's rising anger with its neighbor and frustration that it can do so little to change its nuclear policy – despite the fact that the country relies upon it for supplies of food and oil.
The first generation of Communist leaders had strong sympathy for Kim Il-Sung, who studied at secondary school in northeast China, spoke Mandarin and fought with Chinese forces against the Japanese. The current leaders have no such feeling for his son, whom they regard as a bandit.
In the magazine, Zhang wrote that the world underestimates the magnitude of the risk on the Korean Peninsula.
"If we look at the situation as it is, the likelihood of a military confrontation on the Korean Peninsula is very high," he wrote. "It will start on the sea and then could spread to the 38th parallel. If a war breaks out, it is very difficult to forecast how it would develop. North Korea believes it now has nuclear weapons and has become stronger. It believes that it has overwhelming military superiority over the south and would certainly win a war," he said.
[. . . ]
Zhang also said that the North's nuclear tests pose “a risk that it [China] had never faced for thousands of years.” Nuclear tests by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France were carried out in deserts or remote places far from population centers. But the North's tests are just 85 km from the Chinese border, Changbai county in Jilin province, and 180 km from Yanji, a city of 400,000 people.
"The tests are close to densely populated areas of East Asia. If there were an accident, it would not only make the Korean nation homeless but also turn to nothing plans to revive the northeast of China," he wrote, asking why the tests were far from Pyongyang but not far from China.
"The danger for China is extremely grave. We have not paid sufficient attention to this risk. If we cannot bring about a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, mankind will pay a heavy price, especially the countries bordering Korea," he wrote.
Pyongyang, he said, has never liked the six-party talks that have been trying, with Beijing's help, to get the North to relinquish its nuclear program because it regards the matter as essentially a bilateral issue to be settled with the United States alone. He does not believe North Korea will return to the stalled talks.
[. . .]
"Negotiating with North Korea is like negotiating with the mafia which is blackmailing you," said Wang Wen, a veteran Chinese journalist. "Beijing continues to supply the North with food, oil, consumer goods and other items it needs. The North does not pay. It [China] could cut off the supply, which would lead to a collapse of the regime. That would mean a unified Korea dominated by the United States. Pyongyang knows this and continues to blackmail China, like the mafia."
He said that, to prevent this scenario, Beijing has continued to keep the regime afloat. "For years, it has been pushing the North to follow its example of economic reform and not political reform. The Kaesong industrial park is a small step in this direction, but there is nothing else." All this occurs while Asia Times reports that the North Korean ship recently intercepted may have been actually part of an effort to export nuclear and ballistic missile technology to Myanmar. Four points come to mind. 1. North Korean paranoia isn't disappearing. 2. The US-South Korean defense alliance isn't disappearing. 3. North Korea probably could be defeated militarily, but at a very heavy cost to everyone involved. 4. The Chinese are unhappy with client states which act insanely, without regard for Chinese or even international interests. Thoughts?
Thank you Tim and Nick for helping me remember how Sabotage goes.
Children of Earth, Episode 1
That was surprisingly good... and not in a "for Torchwood" damning with faint praise sort of a way.
( SPOILERS )
Current mood: Still expecting the worst
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