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I took this photo across the tops of the trees of Christie Pits on one fine autumn afternoon--a Thursday, in fact.
Feb. 18th, 2009
[LINK] "Atwood drops Dubai"
Feb. 18th, 2009 10:45 amGo Atwood.
A festival in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, dedicated to celebrating "the world of books in all its infinite variety" will be doing its celebrating without Margaret Atwood as a result of what Atwood calls a "censorship fracas."
The Canadian author (and vice-president of International PEN) confirmed yesterday in an e-mail that she is turning down her invitation to participate in the first Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature, set to start Feb. 26 in Dubai, after organizers declined to let British journalist and author Geraldine Bedell launch her latest novel there.
Bedell's book, The Gulf Between Us, published by Penguin Group (U.K.), reportedly contains "a minor character" who is both a sheik and gay with an English boyfriend. In a letter to Bedell published on the weekend, festival director Isobel Abulhoul also said the book's setting against the backdrop of the Iraq war "could be a minefield for us."
In a statement of "clarification" yesterday, Abulhoul said her decision to ban The Gulf Between Us was based on having lived in Dubai for 40 years and knowing what kinds of writing "would appeal to the book-reading community in the Middle East." Atwood, one of 66 authors invited to Dubai, was scheduled for an appearance on Feb. 28.
Barbara Ortutay's Associated Press article, "Facebook backtracks on user policy", is, I hope an accurate summation of the state of events.
I've embedded my Livejournal posts in Facebook, and as some of you may ha ve noticed I generate quite a lot of content here. Having rights to this content is nice.
In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user policies while it figures how best to resolve questions like who controls the information shared on the social networking site.
The site, which boasts 175 million users from around the world, had quietly updated its terms of use — its governing document — a couple of weeks ago. The changes sparked an uproar after popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed them out Sunday, in a post titled Facebook's New Terms Of Service: 'We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.'
Facebook has since sought to reassure its users — tens of thousands of whom had joined protest groups on the site — that this is not the case. And on Wednesday morning, users who logged on to Facebook were greeted by a message saying that the site is reverting to its previous terms of use policies while it resolves the issues raised.
Facebook spelled out, in plain English rather than the legalese that prompted the protests, that it "doesn't claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don't claim to own your information."
Tens of thousands of users joined protest groups on Facebook, saying the new terms grant the site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.
This prompted a clarification from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, who told users in a blog post Monday that "on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with."
Mr. Zuckerberg, who started Facebook while still in college, also acknowledged that a "lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you."
But this wasn't enough to quell user protests, and the site also created a group called "Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," designed to let users give input on Facebook's terms of use. It also apologized for what it called "the confusion around these issues."
"We never intended to claim ownership over people's content even though that's what it seems like to many people," read a post from Facebook on the bill of rights page.
I've embedded my Livejournal posts in Facebook, and as some of you may ha ve noticed I generate quite a lot of content here. Having rights to this content is nice.
In the article "", the Times covers the deteriorating situation in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
Le Monde has more on the ground reports from Guadeloupe.
Guadeloupe--along with Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean--is an overseas department of France, as integrated politically into the French mainland as Hawai'i is into the American mainland. These islands' economies have not been able to fully make the transition to a high-productivity high-wage economy--even French Guiana, home of the French and European space programs, has a dual economy--and rates of unemployment in these overseas departments remains high while living standards remain low, financed substantially by income transfers by the French state. Given France's economic troubles something like this was probably inevitable somewhere in overseas France. We'll have to wait to find out when, and how, it gets resolved.
A union activist has died on the French island of Guadeloupe after a month-long strike escalated into riots and shootings.
Jacques Bino, who was in his fifties, was shot dead after being caught in crossfire while driving his car near a roadblock manned by armed youths, who opened fire at police in the capital Pointe-à-Pitre, an official from the local administration said.
He was the first victim of the escalating violence on the island, which has been crippled since January 20 by a general strike over the high cost of living.
The violence, which has caused growing concern in Paris, flared again overnight when gangs of youths looted shops, smashed shop windows and set up burning roadblocks along the main streets of the capital and in at least two other towns. At least 13 people were detained.
Paris appealed for calm and Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, called crisis talks on the deteriorating security situation.
Six members of the security forces were injured in shoot-outs with armed youths, including three police officers who were hurt while helping emergency teams that went to Mr Bino’s aid, police said.
The activist, who worked in a government tax office, was returning from a meeting, said Elie Domota, leader of the Collective Against Exploitation (LKP), the coalition of unions and leftist groups that organised the strike.
“The Government’s message is first of all to appeal for calm, that is the most important thing,” said Luc Chatel, a government spokesman, in Paris. “Everyone is better off finding a place at the negotiating table than on the barricades,” he told Europe 1 radio.
[. . .]
The LKP has said it plans to step up protests this week after the government refused to bow to demands for a monthly €200 (£177) pay increase for low-wage earners.
Mr Domota appealed for calm but also accused French authorities of treating the island, one of its four overseas departments, like a colony.
“Guadeloupe is a colony because they would never have allowed the situation to fester for so long in a French department before taking action,” Domota said on RTL radio.
The conflict has exposed race and class divisions on the island, where the local white elite wields power over the black majority.
The economy is largely in the hands of the “Bekes", the local name for whites who are mostly descendants of colonial landlords and sugar plantation slave owners of the 17th and 18th centuries.
A Socialist opposition leader, Malikh Boutih, said it was shocking to watch a police force “almost 100 per cent white, confront a black population” and drew a parallel with the 2005 suburban riots in France.
Le Monde has more on the ground reports from Guadeloupe.
Guadeloupe--along with Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean--is an overseas department of France, as integrated politically into the French mainland as Hawai'i is into the American mainland. These islands' economies have not been able to fully make the transition to a high-productivity high-wage economy--even French Guiana, home of the French and European space programs, has a dual economy--and rates of unemployment in these overseas departments remains high while living standards remain low, financed substantially by income transfers by the French state. Given France's economic troubles something like this was probably inevitable somewhere in overseas France. We'll have to wait to find out when, and how, it gets resolved.
[REVIEW] Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall
Feb. 18th, 2009 06:41 pmI might not be familiar at all with the materials of the fashion industry that Paris-based journalist Alicia Drake uses in her 2005 The Beautiful Fall, but The Beautiful Fall tells the sort of well-crafted traditional moralist's tale that I could easily recognize.
It begins with a gang of awkward but talented outsiders, led by the intensely anxious pied noir Yves Saint-Laurent and the insecure north German social climber Karl Lagerfeld, has them take over the field of fashion and Paris high society, grow rich and famous and powerful over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, only to see their paradise dissolve as heroin and AIDS decimates their co-workers and friends while the Socialists of François Mitterand ironically commodify their art and make fashion just another cultural industry. Drake distinguishes between people, like the model Pat Cleveland, who were able to get out before it was too late (she got out with the help of love), and people like Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld's long-time lover, who was never able to forge an identity for himself separate from the fashion scene and died (of AIDS) in 1989.
There were survivors, like Saint-Laurent and Lagerfeld, but in Drake's narrative they do (in Saint-Laurent's case, did, now) at the expense of being forced to live etiolated lives, their worlds strictly screened for material that might upset their fragile constitutions. The energetic young people who insisted on having everything, it turns out, ended by having everything, yes, but lacking the ability tolerate any of it. but could bear none of it. Like I said, The Beautiful Fall tells an eminently recognizable type of tale.
It begins with a gang of awkward but talented outsiders, led by the intensely anxious pied noir Yves Saint-Laurent and the insecure north German social climber Karl Lagerfeld, has them take over the field of fashion and Paris high society, grow rich and famous and powerful over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, only to see their paradise dissolve as heroin and AIDS decimates their co-workers and friends while the Socialists of François Mitterand ironically commodify their art and make fashion just another cultural industry. Drake distinguishes between people, like the model Pat Cleveland, who were able to get out before it was too late (she got out with the help of love), and people like Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld's long-time lover, who was never able to forge an identity for himself separate from the fashion scene and died (of AIDS) in 1989.
There were survivors, like Saint-Laurent and Lagerfeld, but in Drake's narrative they do (in Saint-Laurent's case, did, now) at the expense of being forced to live etiolated lives, their worlds strictly screened for material that might upset their fragile constitutions. The energetic young people who insisted on having everything, it turns out, ended by having everything, yes, but lacking the ability tolerate any of it. but could bear none of it. Like I said, The Beautiful Fall tells an eminently recognizable type of tale.