[BRIEF NOTE] Work and Related Observations

I was surprised at how easy it was to get up at 6 o'clock, after my cell phone's alarm clock sounded out "The Stars and Spangles" three times, to head to work. It was dark out, and the air was chill, but it was interesting. The absolute black that I saw through the window on the Yonge line north, above the shoulder of the Muslim student dressed in her hijab, worrying her prayer beads with her right hand as she held her paper notes in her left, was fairly rare.

On leaving work an hour ago, I purchased two books at a substantial discount, Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatima Mernissi's 2001 Scheherazade Goes West and The Notebooks, a compendium of new Canadian fiction and interviews with their creators, edited by Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple. Glancing through the latter book, I've noticed some interesting short pieces, most notably Caple's interview with New Brunswick-born R.M. Vaughan:

I find a lot of stuff that's written about Atlantic Canada is dishonest. I don't know if I should be too rude about this or not.

[. . . ]

Well, I read books written by people from Atlantic Canada, and they are about [affects Maritime accent] loggers and miners, and all dem down-home boys, how dey don't have no money to be gettin' their smokes and their drinks. You know what I mean? I despise those books. They're nothing but the worst sort of class tourism. The idea that Atlantic Canadians are the colourful peasantry of the nation enrqages me (439).

One obvious rejoinder to this is that, in many ways, Atlantic Canadians really are the colourful peasantry of Canada. The region was settled long before any part of Canada apart from Québec, unlike Québec the region has had a rather more conflictual relationship with modernity in its various social, economic, and political manifestations (Duplessis' Union nationale regime was a well-thought out implementation of Catholic corporatist thought), and there is that tradition of rural-to-urban out-migration. Then again, that's not nearly everything that is about Atlantic Canada.

[BRIEF NOTE] Thoughts Inspired by Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart"

Within the past week, I've realized that I've a habit of making posts about popular music that I really like: Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice", Linda Lamb's "Hot Room", Moulin Rouge's "Hindi Sad Diamonds", Laibach's "Tanz Mit Laibach", the Eurythmics' Savage album, Peter Gabriel and Deep Forest's "While the Earth Sleeps". Other songs interest me: Mylène Farmer's "C'est une belle journée" benefits from a combination of superb timing and good music, I'll always remember the shivers passing down my back when the first notes of Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan" came from the record player, The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" is a classic perfect angst song, and Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" just because. ("And if I only could,/I'd make a deal with God,/And I'd get him to swap our places.)

Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is another one of those songs. I'd first heard it--more precisely, seen part of the music video, filmed in an abandoned factory--in one installment of a multipart documentary on the evolution of popular music, perhaps this BBC-PBS coproduction. It struck me at the time, powerfully enough that I remembered to buy the 1995 reissued single quite cheaply at Back Alley Discs in Charlottetown five or six years ago.

Saturday, following our visit to the Thomson Collection, I went with talktooloose to Sam the Record Man on Yonge. I felt in the mood to buy a CD, preferably a cheap one. After deciding not to pick up a title by David Bowie or P.J. Harvey, I settled on Joy Division. I decided to pick up Substance 1977-1980 instead of The Complete BBC Recordings, since, at 70 cents, Substance 1977-1980 is one-third cheaper per song than the other album. Last night, I put the CD in my player and advanced to track ten.

Do you cry out in your sleep,
all my failings expose?
Gets a taste in my mouth
as desperation takes hold.
Why is it something so good
just can't function no more?

The song is simple enough, fitting Joy Division's post-punk aesthetic. Listening to the other tracks on Substance 1977-1980, almost all recorded before "Love Will Tear Us Apart," I could hear their sound's evolution, moving from a simpler punk outfit to a very intelligent rough-edged popular music group. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is a short song less than three and a half minutes in length. One jangly guitar starts the track, followed by a second, followed by chimes, followed by the drum, finally breaking into the melody and Ian Curtis' raw vocals, sounding almost electronically processed in their flatness and their distance.

When I first listened to the song in its entirety, it struck me as intensely passionnate in a rather innovative way. That innovativeness has lost its edge for me as the latest waves of pop-punk have emerged, imitating (consciously or otherwise) the Joy Division aural esthetic. I can still recall my first impressions when I concentrate, though: Curtis' despairing passion, despair at declining passion, against that energetic spare music. In 1980, at a time when passion had been cheaply bought by flaccid pop ballads or repeated endlessly in disco mantras, that song must have been a wonderful sharp shock.

Joy Division collapsed after Ian Curtis' suicide. It was reconstituted as New Order, a great group most famous for its hits "Blue Monday" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" and with its best work collected on the 1987 compilation Substance, but that group wasn't the same. It's just a pity that the musical outputs of Joy Division as it could have been and New Order as it was couldn't have shared the 1980s.

On a related note, after I listened to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" for the fifth time, I switched CDs, to a Tamla Motown compilation. Diana Ross and the Supremes' "Love Child" particularly caught my attention. Forty years on, it's a constant temptation to resist classifying "Love Child" as a golden oldie. When you think about it, though, forty years ago it still would have been remarkable that a group of African-American singers would have a #1 U.S. hit with a song describing (in the first person, no less) the sufferings of a child born out of wedlock. Back then, Diana Ross and the Supremes weren't the clichéd prototype of the early 21st century's girl groups, themselves made after repeated copyings--they were credible, their songs were still considered credible. I wonder what it would take to really recover that sense of credibility.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Problem with Multilateral Structures

Over at randynnwm2004, I've posted a brief note on the way that the liberal-minded prosperity enjoyed by the League member-states is guaranteed, if inadequately, by France in Europe and by Brazil in South America.

One of the secondary goals of my alternate history, I suppose, was to illustrate the benefits and the failings of multilateral organizations. I admit forthrightly that I'm a big fan of the multilateral principle, not only because it provides small- and medium-sized states with a voice in international affairs, but because it allows for the consensual construction of durable institutions. Niall Ferguson might argue, bizarrely, that a German conquest of Europe in 1914 would have produced an outcome akin to that of the modern-day European Union (do you think he's a British Eurosceptic? do you need to speculate?); I'd argue that a German military hegemony would have been far less just and far less durable than the current entirely benevolent European Union, which most notably did not expand this year by sending the Royal Navy, the French Armée de l'Air, and the German Bundeswehr to seize Tallinn and conquer the Pannonian plains. Compare the longevities of NATO and the Warsaw Pact following the fall of the Berlin Wall if you don't believe me.

The problem with multilateral political structures, particularly when--like the European Union--they are headed by executive bodies which do not possess sovereign powers in their own right but must arrive at binding decisions through lengthy negotiations. Multilateral bodies tend to work best as regulatory bodies, as agencies which ensure the implementation of common standards. They tend not to be very capable of exerting sovereignty in their own right, not until the process of state formation begins and makes them actual confederal or federal states. This long decision-making process, along with what one might call a benevolent perspective on international relations incompatible with the actual behaviour of states uninterested in binding multilateralism, can leave the multilateral organizations unable to respond in time to aggressive states. The classic example of this, I suppose, is the breakdown of the League of Nations in the face of constant aggressions by the future Axis powers and the Soviet Union, thanks to the underlying inability of the liberal powers at the heart of the League to effectively control the situation.

I'd like to think I'm being pessimistic here. Am I?