[LINK] Some Friday links

• 3 Quarks Daily reports that a writer for L'Osservatore Romano praised Oscar Wilde for his take on the problems of the modern world. Also, it observes that Hemingway's grandson is trying to edit A Moveable Feast into a book that's kinder to his mother and representative of what Hemingway meant to write.


• Centauri Dreams notes that existing technology can detect "exomoons," moons orbiting planets in other planetary systems, including potentially habitable ones.


• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wonders if a WTO ruling against the European Union's ban on seal products might jump-start anti-globalization sentiment.


• Daniel Drezner notes anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiment among the pro-democracy protesters in Iran and wonders if that country is going to become a focus for international rivalries. He also notes how Obama's election has improved the United States' image abroad.


• Torontoist profiles an early 20th century artist, Charles William Jeffreys, whose sketchings provided an invaluable native perspective on the scenes of Canada's history and landscape.


• Noel Maurer challenges his readers to pick out the abandoned house. Also, he wonders why Canada no longer calls itself a dominion.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness introduces his readers to sangaku, the indigenous Japanese tradition of scientific research and innovation that existed throughout the self-imposed isolation of the Tokugawa period.


• Spacing Toronto has a poll asking its readers whether they think that some streetcar stops should be eliminated to boost the overall efficiency of the service.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales introduces his reader to a scientist, Peter Ward, who argues that far from creating a self-sustaining biosphere life is actually quite unstable.


• The Volokh Conspiracy, sadly, confirms that the North Korean Twitter feed is not legitimate.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russian federalism, as it is currently constituted, isn't so much about decentralizing power as it is about assimilating neighbouring territories.

[PHOTO] Looking down Lansdowne

Looking down Lansdowne
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This April photo is looking down Lansdowne Avenue south towards Bloor, just north of Lansdowne's intersection with Davenport Road.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Franco-Ontarians of Windsor

Although the embattled southern Ontario city of Windsor managed to keep its local CTV affiliate station, the Francophones of that city haven't been so lucky with their electronic mass media.

Supporters of CBEF 540 AM were seeking an injunction to stop Societe Radio-Canada from cutting local programming at the station. Justice J. Templeton rejected the application on the basis that she did not have the jurisdiction to grant the injunction.

In a recent round of job cuts at CBC and Radio-Canada, CBEF saw its staff slashed from nine employees to two.

Nicole Larocque, president of SOS CBEF, a citizen's committee working to save the station, said the group is disappointed with the decision.

CBEF serves a francophone community of about 35,000 people, and has an audience of between 1,000 and 2,000 people per week. Local content has already been severely reduced. Before the cuts, the station produced a three-hour morning show. Now, Windsorites get only 20 minutes of local content on the show, which is piped in from Toronto.

What are these Franco-Ontarians doing, living in such numbers so far away from the regions of northern and eastern Ontario where the province's Francophones are concentrated? Simply put, they're native to the area; more, their settlement predates Anglophone immigration, stretching as far back as New France.

Le Détroit was originally a French colony that included the area on both sides of the Detroit River. To this day, three hundred years after its foundation, French language and culture still survive in the area, primarily on the Canadian side of the river. There are francophone communities in Windsor and in several little villages throughout Essex and Kent Counties — places like Rivière-aux-Canards (River Canard), LaSalle, McGregor, Tecumseh, Belle-Rivière, Pointe-aux-Roches (Stoney Point), St-Joachim, Pain Court, Grande Pointe, among others. But who are these Francophones? Where did they come from? How have they kept their language and their culture alive in the very centre of English-speaking North America?

The French founded a colony at le Détroit du lac Érié in 1701. Détroit means “strait”, and that’s exactly what the Detroit River is: the strait between Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair. The colony was the brainchild of Antoine Cadillac, first commander of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. He brought soldiers, farmers and merchants, as well as members of several First Nations, to settle in the area, in order to help defend the Great Lakes and French possessions in the interior against advances by the British and their Iroquois allies. Initially, the colonists settled on the north shore of the river (on what is now the American side). But from1749 on, they began occupying the south shore as well. Some of the settlers came directly from France, others from the Saint Lawrence River Valley. They practised a bit of agriculture, but most of them relied on hunting and fishing and the fur trade to earn a living. The colony became a British possession in 1760, but Francophones continued to settle in the area. Even after the north shore became part of the United States in 1796, the Detroit River remained for all intents and purposes a French river.

After the War of 1812, new French settlement in the area pretty much came to a halt. Essex and Kent Counties began to fill up with Loyalists and new settlers from the British Isles. On the American side of the river, thousands of settlers from New England headed for the newly opened Michigan territory. The French-speaking population quickly became a minority. At more than a thousand kilometers from Montréal, they were cut off from the rest of the French-speaking world. On the American side, the French language all but died out.

But on the south shore, a new wave of immigration from the Saint Lawrence River valley would reinforce the French population. Beginning in the 1850s, because of a severe economy depression in Lower Canada, hundreds of families headed for the rich agricultural farmland of Southern Ontario. Many came to work on the construction of the Great Wester Railroad that now linked Windsor with Montréal. These new settlers cleared land all along the Canadian shore of Lake Saint Clair, east of where the first group of Francophones had settled. Most of them came to farm the land. They brought with them many of the ideas and institutions of Lower Canada and established an important French-Canadian presence from Tecumseh to Grande Pointe.

There's a remarkable conference paper, by Jay Gitlin with S. Heath Ackley, "Freemasons and Speculators: Another Look at the Francophone Merchants of Detroit, 1996 to 1863", which calls for a reevaluation of local and American history that either ignores Francophones descended from the settlers of this part of New France or relegates them to folkloric characters. French, as is noted above, is dead in Detroit. On the Canadian side of the river, however, Franco-Ontarians survive, or at least have survived: In the long or even medium term, it's difficult to imagine how the community's near-complete assimilation is not likely.

[LINK] "Fishing is key issue as Iceland applies to join EU"

It's unsurprising that, as the Associated Press' Karl Ritter notes, the question of Iceland's fisheries is a major issue in the first negotiations between Iceland and the European Union on membership.

Iceland formally applied Thursday to join the European Union but said it would not accept a "rotten deal" for its fishing industry, a key sector of the island nation's troubled economy.

Iceland's parliament voted last week to seek EU membership as a way to stabilize the country's economy, which was one of the first causalities of the global recession after years of strong growth.

The small North Atlantic country of 320,000 residents already meets most of the EU membership criteria, but tough negotiations await over fishing rights.

The independent-minded Icelanders are concerned that the 27-nation bloc's common fisheries policy would give other European fleets access to Iceland's rich waters.

"To be frank with you, if we would get a rotten deal on the fisheries, the Icelandic people would get quite angry," Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson said after presenting the EU application to his Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt. Sweden currently holds the EU presidency.

"This is not only an issue of economics. It is also an emotional issue. It is also an issue that is related to sovereignty," said Skarphedinsson, a former fisherman.

[. . .]

In 2007, fishing employed 4 percent of Iceland's work force, just over 7,000 people. But seafood accounted for almost half of Iceland's exports and 10 percent of its gross domestic product.

[BRIEF NOTE] HIV-1 kills chimpanzees

The fact reported in the title of Michael L. Wilson's recent New York Times article, "Study Finds Chimps Die From Simian AIDS, Dispelling Widely Held Belief", isn't all that surprising.

The finding upsets a widely held scientific belief that chimpanzees, the closest relatives to humans, can get the virus that causes simian AIDS but without harm.

It also suggests that an outbreak of AIDS is contributing to the declining chimpanzee population in Africa, said the leader of the research team, Dr. Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

She said that comparisons of the viruses that cause AIDS in chimpanzees and humans could lead to new insights into the responses of the immune systems in both species.

“Our findings allow us to look at H.I.V. from a new angle, comparing and contrasting chimpanzee and human infections,” Dr. Hahn said in an interview. Her team’s study is being reported in the journal Nature on Thursday.

As researchers conducted autopsies on the bodies of the dead chimps they could find, they detected evidence of organ and tissue damage similar to that in late-stage human AIDS. Infected chimpanzees were also found to have a 10 to 16 times greater risk of dying than uninfected ones. Infected females were less likely to give birth. If they did, they could pass the virus to their infants, and they had a higher infant death rate than that of uninfected females.

[. . .]

The simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, is considered the precursor of H.I.V.-1, which crossed the species barrier sometime in the past 100 years.

“We cannot date exactly when chimpanzees first got infected, but we certainly suspect that it was much, much longer than 100 years ago,” Dr. Hahn said. “Our gut feeling is that the chimp virus infection is not quite as” damaging as H.I.V.-1 is in humans. The difference in the way the virus damages tissue, she said, “leads us to speculate that chimps may be one step ahead in adapting to the virus, and identifying that step would be important.”

More than 40 simian immunodeficiency viruses are known to infect African primates. African monkeys infected with the virus that causes simian AIDS have rarely developed AIDS. Only seven chimpanzees naturally infected with S.I.V.cpz have been studied in captivity, and five of them died of unknown causes as infants. The only chimpanzee that was naturally infected with the simian virus and underwent standard virological and immunological tests showed none of the typical damage of AIDS, like low CD-4 cell counts and damaged lymph nodes. Two other chimpanzees injected with S.I.V.cpz in captivity did not show such changes.

The simian immunodeficiency virus is ultimately the source of the various human immunodeficiency viruses, with more than forty different variants. The two major types of HIV producing the HIV/AIDS epidemic are HIV-1 and HIV-2, originating in viruses hosted by chimpanzee and sooty mangabeys. HIV-2 is a virus indigenous to West Africa's primate population, apparently introduced throughout Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s by Portuguese medical campaigns. HIV-2 tends to be less virulent than HIV-1, more difficult to transmit than HIV-1, the viral strain largely responsible for the AIDS epidemic; in fact, HIV-2 is limited primarily to West Africa and former Portuguese colonies, HIV-1 dominating elsewhere.

If a virus is more virulent in humans, it's not very surprising that its more virulent in the chimpanzees from which the virus originated. To me, a non-biologist somewhat familiar with HIV and AIDS, that is.

[DM] "Liberal economics and replacement-level fertility: Are they contradictory?"

I've a post up at Demography Matters briefly exploring the possibility that, in an age of liberal globalized economics and its accompanying consumer culture, wide-spread replacement-level fertility may be impossible. Go, read.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Nan Goldin and photographic preservation

I first saw the photographic works of Nan Goldin on the 28th of August, 2003. I had bought, at the Dorchester Street tourist information centre, a passbook allowing unrestricted access to two dozen different museums and other cultural attractions over two days, and I had decided that the Musée de l’art contemporain de Montréal would be one of the museums that I would see in the course of my two days. Entering the museum, I saw the announcement of a Nan Goldin career retrospective that had already run most of the summer and would continue for only a week or two longer. I congratulated myself on my good luck, showed my passbook, and entered.

That exhibition of Nan Goldin photographs was the first time I'd encountered her art, the first time I'd encountered photography as an art form, really, the only thing that I remember from that trip. The pictures were so direct and frank, so honest, so emotional, that I couldn't help it. Their power was remarkable, as was the history of her career.

(I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I don't have any of her pictures up for this post, but I've exceeded my monthly Flickr quota and I dislike stealing others' bandwidth. This Google Images search will show you all of the Nan Goldin photos that you might want.)

Goldin started her career in the 1960s taking photographs of her friends. Heavily influenced by the shimmer of disappearing elegance in Hollywood movies and European fashion photography, these early black and white snapshots record the transformation from adolescence to adulthood.

Goldin celebrates the life-stories of individuals by returning to them as subjects over several decades. One series charts the life of her friend, underground actress Cookie Mueller, famous for her collaborations with film director John Waters. The series starts with a portrait of Cookie and her son and ends with an image of Cookie in her coffin, her son grieving. In these photographic records no aspect of the human condition is ignored - from couples making love to friends dying of Aids. She captures her subjects' shifting realities and creates testaments to their lives.

Celebrating the exuberance of self-created worlds, the first drag-queen series reveals a period in her life when she flat-shared with two transvestites. Turning her camera on their public on-stage personas as well as more intimate, domestic moments, these images shot in intensely saturated colour, revel in heavy make-up, glittery costumes and glamorous poses. Later works document Gay Pride in New York, as well as visits to Bangkok and Tokyo.

Goldin made her name in the arts world with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first shown at the legendary Mudd Club in New York in 1979. Now a cult classic, this 700-image slide-show captures women and men in day-to-day activities - lying in unmade beds, talking on the telephone, staring into mirrors, drinking in clubs, coming home in taxis. Accompanied by music ranging from Brecht to Dean Martin, The Ballad also uncovers a darker reality with disturbing images of battered women, prostitutes and junkies.

The Balllad of Sexual Dependency was the next major work of hers that I encountered, and its cataloguing of the moments in the lives of her friends and lovers and herself again got me.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. My written diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyze it. My visual diary is public; it expands from its subjective basis with the input of other people. These pictures may be an invitation to my world, but they were taken so that I could see the people in them. I sometimes don’t know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture. [. . .]

If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me (6)

It's only after I began to get to know photographers her in Toronto, and I began myself to take photos in a systematic way that I got what she meant in the introduction to that book. I carry my camera everywhere with me, on the lookout for something that catches my interest: a landscape, a flower or tree, an animal like a pet, even people frozen for a moment in a pose. I never know where I'll find an image that I'll treasure: a fiery sunset, a kitten picture, any one of a number of streetscapes, a gate opening out onto a frozen field. Each of these pictures captures something that will change and disappear over time (night and morning come, the kitten grows, buildings change and occupants move in and out, winter ice melts). With Goldin's pictures--lovers in coitus, a baby caught in a pose worthy of Rembrandt, someone dressing, a couple relaxing in the sun, a man cruising another through a window, a heart-shaped bruise on her leg after her lover beat her--all of those moments are captured with a heart-breaking clarity. What emotion she captures!

When I was eighteen I started to photograph. [. . .] For years, I thought I was obsessed with the record-keeping of my day-to-day life. But recently, I’ve realized my motivation has deeper roots: I don’t really remember my sister. In the process of leaving my family, in creating myself, I lost the real memory of my sister. I remember my version of her, of the things she said, of the things she meant to me. But I don’t remember the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like.

I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history.

I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again (9).

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? My snows aren't so much the people I've lost--although I do have a WAV recording of my grandmother laughing from back in 1999--as it is my experiences on Prince Edward Island as an adolescent and a young adult. I felt so scared all the time, so depressed and so isolated, that the parts of my life that didn't involve academics I've mostly forgotten. I hate to admit it, but I have no memory at all of some of the people who knew me in high school or university; they're all just a blur. I like organizing items and keeping them in order, copying all of my files from one system to another to another, looking for readers, at least, that will permit me to read the oldest stuff. The knowledge that there's all manner of people and cues and events I've missed saddens and scares me. That might explain why the transient photos I've taken of living things involve flowers and trees, very rarely people; it's too awkward for me thanks to the memories.

Goldin feels something like that, if to a much greater and much more accurate degree. The last photograph in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, on page 143, is an image, painted on a door, of two skeletons kissing, the last remnants of a pair of flash-vapourized lovers, preserved forever by an apocalyptic moment. I’d seen this image before, reproduced in Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, taken from a New York City on the verge of an unknowable catastrophe. Her catastrophe was AIDS, something that devastated her circle of gays and artists. Cookie Mueller, an actor and a columnist as mentioned above, was a friend. Her essay collection, Ask Dr. Mueller, is in print and available through the Toronto public library system. It's a nice essay collection.

On page 29 of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, there is a picture of her, seated and looking inwards, at Tin Pan Alley in New York City in 1983, blonde-haired and sharp-featured and attractive. On page 102, there is another picture of her, as she reclines on a multicoloured hammock in a darkened room in Provincetown MA in 1977, her son Max sitting next to her. The most emotionally resonant image featuring Cookie Mueller, though, features her at her wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, in New York City, in 1986, on page 99. Cookie’s wedding photograph is to the right of another wedding image, a photograph of Goldin’s parents’ wedding photo, on page 98. This second image is formally posed, her father standing behind her mother; their faces are only barely visible. The wedding photo is framed on a cabinet in a corner of a yellow-wallpapered room (shades of Charlotte Gilman?). To the left, a suburban backyard can be seen, with a collapsible Coleman tent-trailer. The second couple is photographed in colour, close up to the exclusion of background, unposed. He, dressed in black, is looking down and smiling. She, dressed in white, is crying happily, handkerchief pressed to right cheek. Goldin’s parents are static and old; Cookie and Mueller are vibrant and new.

Cookie died in 1989 of AIDS, just months after Scarpati. Those were only two losses among many. In her massive 2003 tome Devil's Playground, she has a series of pictures featuring her HIV-positive friends who were still alive, but the days before ARV sharply reduced those numbers. Her series following Gilles and Gotscho as the later died also comes to mind. That and other forms of loss are present in Devil's Playground at the same time that other images captu8re moments of joy and happiness, lovers embracing and parents watching their child and gazing pensively out a train window. All these moments have been preserved.

Goldin's photography is dominated by its remarkable ability to preserve transience (things arrive, things fade) and by a remarkable eye for detail (a moment preserved). The loss that comes from her photography is something that anyone can empathize with, just as the happiness that you can witness is at least something that you want to experience. Her eye for all this detail, individual strains combined into one, is the thing that marks her as my favourite art photographer. She should be yours, too.

I wonder. Is it a coincidence that my blog's name is "A Bit More Detail"?

(For whoever's interested, this post was four years in the making. So there.)