[PHOTO] Some graffiti

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.

Dance with Mona Lisa
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

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.

Head to Toe Fantasy
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The above intricate drawing is located on the east wall of Head to Toe, a holistic and naturopathic clinic located at 71 Oxford Street.

Kirk on College
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

"Mister Sulu, set phasers for FUN!"

Found on the door leading to the abandoned space on 316 College Street.

Woman in Purple
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Found painted on the north wall of the Toronto Sanjiao Holy Temple, located at 508 Spadina Avenue.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Nepali language conflict

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?

[LINK] "Popularity of Facebook and MySpace changes, but SES differences in use persist"

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? ;-)

[MUSIC] Everything But the Girl, "Missing"

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."

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

[REVIEW] Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen

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.