[BRIEF NOTE] More on the Language Poll

Right here, if you haven't already voted.

I'd like to thank everyone who has already voted for helping me demonstrate my capacity for making autonomous decisions by voting on my future in an Internet poll. It's a help.

To answer piratehead's question, apart from wanting to communicate with the maximal number of my subjects upon my ascension to godhood (cf. third-season Buffy), I'd like to be able to access popular culture and mass media communicated in languages other than English or French, and perhaps even to contribute to them in my own right without resorting to Babelfish. The applications of this for employment are, of course, obvious.

To answer a point that drtopper raised, yes, write-ins (like Russian, or Latin or Greek) are acceptable. It's my fault, I suppose, that I didn't add more languages to the list--Italian has received a couple of mentions.

And to answer what's no doubt a feeling of ever-burning curiosity, Mandarin Chinese is in the lead with 11 votes, followed by Spanish with nine and German with eight.

[NON BLOG] Observation

When one is walking south down Yonge Street from the Rosedale TTC station in the cool intermittant drizzle and looks up to the skyscrapers, and sees that the points where their lines should converge in a roof are obscured by the increasingly dense grey of the condensed water clouds, and realizes that back in your community of birth you would have seen this sight only rarely because there simply aren't buildings tall enough over there, it's a decidedly nice sort of shock.

[BRIEF NOTE] Welcome to my 10,000th Visitor!

At least as recorded by the counter, which doesn't include people who view my weblog through Livejournal friends pages and possibly other visitors. The visitor, I believe, is a Briton using British Telecom.

[NON BLOG] Desks and Czechs

My infinite thanks to trapezzi for assembling helping me put together my JOHAN computer desk. I'm completely clueless with tools; upon reflection, this threatens the whole IKEA-as-adulthood market metaphor. Supper was subsequently held at the excellent Java House (537 Queen Street West), which reminds me very strongly of the Sleepless Goat in Kingston only run more competently and with better lighting.

On closer examination, the JOHAN's parts were manufactured not in Sweden, but in the Czech Republic. This makes sense, given relative labour costs, though I suspect that within a decade or two the Czechs (along with Hungary, and my favourite central European nation, Slovenia) will be outsourcing the manufacture of their designs to their neighbours. In this context, it's worth mentioning this post at Far Outliers, which describes the depths of the Czech eclipse following the definitive Hapsburg conquest of Bohemia early in the Thirty Years War. I don't believe that the Czechs were doomed to assimilation--after all, the Slovenes managed to survive to form a prosperous nation without Bohemia's medieval and early-modern glories--but for a while it was terribly close.

[BRIEF NOTE] China's Consul-General in Toronto

In the Saturday edition of The Globe and Mail, Jan Wong interviewed (on page M3, "The Communist cadre on the Bridle Path") Chen Xiaoling, Consul-General of the People's Republic of China. The Toronto consulate serves the consular district of Ontario and Manitoba, apparently one of the busiest overseas missions of China: "By [Chen's] account, 550,000 ethnic Chinese live here, nearly half of all Chinese in Canada and one of every seven Torontonians. Last year, her staff issued 64,000 visas, twice the volume five years earlier."

The most interesting aspect of the interview is Chen's own biography: a Maoist who, at the age of 17, was sent to labour in the countryside; a student who, despite suffering from tuberculosis, graduated at the top of her class at the Foreign Languages Institute thanks to reel-to-reel tape recordings; a diplomat who has extensive experience representing the People's Republic throughout the Asia-Pacific region; a person who is the first Chinese consul-general to live on the Bridle Path.

[BRIEF NOTE] Poll Update

Including write-ins, the total is as follows:

Mandarin Chinese: 16
Spanish: 14
German: 12
Japanese: 6
Portuguese: 4
Greek: 2 (?)
Italian: 2
Latin: 2 (?)
Russian: 2

[BRIEF NOTE] McCormack/Sparling Reading

This evening, I attended a reading by Derek McCormack and Ken Sparling at the Toronto Reference Library, starting at 7 pm and lasting until a quarter past eight. I admit that I went mainly because of McCormack. I'd read his Dark Rides on Prince Edward Island, and while our writing styles are rather different--as Bookninja notes, McCormack's is "compressed, precise, extreme [. . .] stripped back and minimal to the point of disruption"--something in his vision, in Dark Rides' sparse short anomie-ridden stories, appeals to me. (See here for more, including McCormack's "Ghost.") I brought my copy of The Notebooks, which contains an extract from an earlier version of McCormack's novel The Haunted Hillbilly, with me to the reading. (Hoping for an autograph isn't a bad thing, is it?)

Although Sparling had good material, and based on the work of McCormack (a writer he edits) he has good taste as a writer and a reader, his reading tended to be a bit scattered and poorly presented, with unannounced switches in reading material and an overall lack of thematic unity in the selections presented. McCormack read from The Haunted Hillbilly, and it's certainly enough of a radical rewriting of the Hank Williams narrative to merit my future interest. (So many interesting books to read, so little time.) The questions and answers session following the two writers' readings was interesting, though I think that Canadian literature is doing a fine job of breaking through the CanLit shackles.

Afterwards, I approached McCormack for his autograph. I'm happy to report that he was quite nice, signing his section of The Notebooks for me and asking about my own interests as a writer. Time well spent.