[BRIEF NOTE] CFTAG Report

(Apologies for the lateness of my posting. Life intervened.)

• The James Bond series of films qualifies as marginal science-fiction. schizmatic lamented that, of late, the films have tended to lose all subtelty, presenting blatantly obvious villains. I had to agree. On the other hand, I think that Judi Dench is fun as M.


• Foreknowledge of the future, particularly if the future is locked relative to our position in the present, wouldn't be fun.


• We agreed that Battlestar Galactica is rather impressive.


• It's annoying when characters are brought onto television shows with the express intent of increasing sex appeal, for instance, buxom blonde women who announce that on their planet everyone goes topless.

Things were thrown askew by the surprise and welcome interjection of James Bodi into the mix, still more by the appearance of a friend from Queen's. Later, in a sort of annex to the main meeting, after enjoyable visits to Glad Day and This Ain't the Rosedale Library, we returned to the Yonge-Wellesley Starbucks and discussed, among other things, the possibilities of Calcutta remaining capital of the Raj.

[BRIEF NOTE] More on Alexandra

From the Toronto Star:

Romanian-born Alexandra Austin, who was adopted by an Ontario couple but sent back five months later to poverty and deprivation, has launched a $7 million lawsuit against her adoptive parents, the Canadian and Ontario governments and Swiss International Air Lines.

The suit, filed by Toronto lawyer Jeffrey Wilson, is also a landmark human rights case that aims to eradicate inequalities in the federal Citizenship Act that allow foreign-born adopted children to fall through the international cracks, becoming stateless if their new parents fail to apply for Canadian citizenship.

"Internationally this will be a landmark case," says Wilson. "It forces us to look at the issue of `What do we, the international community, owe to an adopted child?'"

I hope that she takes everyone involved to the cleaners. And again, what was Children's Aid doing while all this was going on?

In the meantime, I'm left wondering why it has taken so long for adopted children to gain rights equivalent to those of children raised by their biological parents, and ashamed that this task isn't complete.

Religious conservatives may oppose the process of adoption because it creates non-traditional families not necessarily linked by biological ties; well-meaning liberal may oppose the process of adoption because it can, well, create non-traditional families not necessarily linked by biological ties. Since when, though, has biology been recognized as the exclusive principle underlying constructed communities like the family?

[BRIEF NOTE] Egypt and Ethiopia and their Nile

On the 10th of this month, Ethiopundit posted a fascinating article, "Not just a river in Egypt", a fascinating overview of Egyptian-Ethiopian relations in history, particularly as they relate to the Nile.

Ethiopian and Egyptian civilizations have had contact for thousands of years but it was after the advent of the Ottoman Empire that Egyptian government looked upriver and down the Red Sea with a strategic vision of their own ’Ethiopian Question’. The rather distant Nile threat has been used over countless centuries when invading Ethiopia for the sake of Imperial conquest (sometimes using the convenient banner of Islam) or simply to keep Ethiopia as fragmented and weak as possible.

Indeed fighting Egypt or the Ottoman rulers of Egypt has been one of the constants of Ethiopian history and the principal reason after about the 7th century that Ethiopia lost contact with the Middle East and Europe. Ethiopian Emperors have occasionally used the empty threat of the Nile to bargain on behalf of Egypt’s Coptic community (which for almost one thousand five hundred years until the 1950s sent Ethiopia her archbishops).

The country of Egypt is much more cohesive than the country of Ethiopia, since the near-complete concentration of its wealth and its population on the shores of the Nile and environs ensures greater unity than the dispersal of Ethiopia across the Ethiopian plateau and surrounding lowlands. By the same measure, Egypt's dependence on the Nile for its existence--in particular, on the Blue Nile, which provides most of the Nile's waters and originates in Ethiopia--also ensures Egypt's interest in dominating Ethiopia so as to ensure the continued uninterrupted flow of the Blue Nile.

Ethiopundit argues that Egypt, generally wealthier and more technologically advanced and united than Ethiopia, has long had an interest in dominating and fragmenting a poorer Ethiopia. More's the pity, frequently Ethiopian governments--most recently and disruptively the radical Communist Derg--have collaborated in this goal. Concluding on a despairing note, Ethiopundit concludes that things will never change.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Sexualization of Anti-Semitism

Recently, Andrew Reeves made a disturbing observation about medieval Christian anti-Jewish sentiment.

Luther's treatment of the Jews [. . .] strikes me as being most similar to an abusive relationship. Like the husband/boyfriend who beats his partner, Luther cloyingly pleads that the Jews come into the Christian faith, that this time it is different, that this time, Things Have Changed. But then when the gentle pleading is rejected, the result is an explosion of violence and abuse that the abused party has nevertheless earned in the mind of the abuser for not having accepted his gentle entreaties.

In a way, such an analogy might in some ways encapsulate the relationship between Christendom and the Jews for a large part of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period--respectful treatment, entreaties to convert, and spasms of violence and abuse. What makes the gendered nature of the cycle more apparent is that outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence frequently saw the Jewish men killed, but the women and children converted and taken into the Christian fold.

Last January, when I did a presentation on Miri Rubin's Corpus Christi for my medieval devotional literature course, I noticed this trend myself. Jewish man profanes eucharist, in the face of his wife's protests and his children's terror; Jewish man gets killed by righteous Christians, and his grateful nuclear family gets assimilated into the ranks of the true believers.

It's disturbing, to say the least.

[BRIEF NOTE] Anne in the Oddest Places

While perusing Language Log, I found the most interesting blog reference to Anne of Green Gables.

A couple of days ago, Geoff Pullum asked amazon.com for a book by J. A. Green on the theory of sets and groups, and got answers that included one of the Anne of Green Gables novels. That very same evening, I happened to be reading a passage in William Gibson's 2004 novel Pattern Recognition where something similar takes place in a conversation between two human beings. Although both of Anne's intrusions were unexpected and unwelcome, they were the result of conversational strategies that make a lot of sense in general.

Read the rest of the post.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Jeff Gannon Affair

I'm rather surprised by the fact that I have to admit complete and utter surprise that the Jeff Gannon affair became such a huge controversy.

Please note that I'm not saying that the circumstances aren't bizarre. The discovery that the man representing a sham news organization created by Texan Republicans was, before his ersatz career in journalism, a gay prostitute who traded upon the fetishism of the US Marine Corps on his several websites was unexpected. Then again, before the scandal erupted I had no idea that Talon News even existed.

Left and right in the United States unite in their insistence that the second Bush fils administration occupies a crucial period in American and world history. Why, oh why, can't they find anything of import to report on?

[NON BLOG] Choir Practice

I went, after an interval of three weeks, to Rainbow Voices of Toronto choir practice. It was nice to sing again, and my fellow choir members are nice and interesting people, and I've got an acceptable schedule of payment for my fee.

I'm still curious as to how well I sing, though.

[BRIEF NOTE] Book Sale

Last Saturday, I noticed that This Ain't The Rosedale Library (article in eye here) had a very nice sale on some books, mainly but not only fiction, mainly but not only used, $C5 per item or $C10 for three items. Talking to Buizen, I found out that the sale would go on for at least another week; which means that people who want to get books cheap from an independent bookstore have several more days to go and plunder.

And yes, I bought items: several British music-mag CD compilations, Katherine Govier's short-story collection The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery, Nathalie Sarraute's The Golden Fruits, and Jan Rogozinski's Honor Among Thieves (H-net review here) (PDF format). How could I do otherwise?