[PHOTO] St. Dunstan's Basilica, Charlottetown

The spires of St. Dunstan's Basilica, located squarely in the centre of downtown Charlottetown on Great George Street, are visible throughout the downtown area. The basilica of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlottetown, St. Dunstan's is the core of Island Catholicism.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• BlogTO links to an interesting app-enabled map showing where people run in Toronto (or, at least, where people run in Toronto using apps to chronicle their routes).


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper examining the role of dust in protoplanetary disks.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis wonders why the Circassians, displaced a century and a half ago from the Caucasian territory where Russia is no holding the Olympics, haven't gotten any media coverage of their cause.


• Language Hat comments upon a video recording of a student's recital of Cantonese poetry that has gone viral.


• Language Log's Victor Mair wonders what official status Cantonese has in Hong Kong, facing challenges from Putonghua as well as from a writing system that doesn't record the city's main spoken language.


• The casual racism faced by players of college sports in the United States is discussed at Lawyers, Guns and Money.


• Marginal Revolution argues that emerging markets facing economic issues should look at their own domestic scenes and not blame global turbulence.


• At Personal Reflections, Jim Belshaw writing about his Australian region of New England makes the point that local histories should also include their global origins.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that the New York accent is mostly dead.


• At Savage Minds, Jane Eva Baxter talks about the ways in which prehistoric artifacts--like the ancient footprints recently discovered in Britain--are used, and misused, in ways that reflect our biases. (Seeing groups of footprints as product of family migrations, for instance.)


• Supernova Condensate marvels at the superb imaging of Luhman 16B.


• Window on Eurasia notes one man's arguments that authentic federalism would suit Ukraine well.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes in passing how Siberia changed from being exciting frontier to grim prison-camp in the popular imagination.

[REVIEW] Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

This evening, with a friend I caught the 6 o'clock showing of producer Nicholas Wrathall's Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West).

I expected much from the film. I'm not as big a fan of Gore Vidal as some, never having read any of his fiction for instance, but I'm quite aware of his history as a public intellectual of note. Besides writing popular and often thematically innovative fiction--his novels may well be the first mainstream novels in the English language to feature explicit gay sex or sympathetic transgender characters--Vidal gained fame as a witty and intelligent controversialist, in the last decade of his life gaining particular renown for his criticisms of American imperialism abroad and corruption at home. Surely, with so many media appearances in archives everywhere, any documentary would have to be good, especially a documentary filmed with his active collaboration. The advance press on The United States of Amnesia was also encouraging. (See, for instance, Norman Wilner's NOW Toronto review, Linda Barnard's Toronto Star review, and Geoff Pevere's review in The Globe and Mail.)

It was unfortunate, then, that the documentary left us both wanting the film to have had more meat to it, to have been better than it was. Technically, The United States of Amnesia was quite competent. Its problems lie entirely in the realm of its narratives.

The documentary seemed almost like an overview of Vidal's career, pointing to the various points of his public career--his filmed verbal exchanges with Mailer and Buckley, shots from Myra Breckinridge, speeches delivered at any number of public meetings on his life and politics, interviews with his intimates--but not engaging in depth with any. We got aphorisms--aphorisms applauded amid chuckles by the audience in the theatre--but little investigation beyond the aphorisms. His arguments about the decline of American democracy were scattered, separated by celebrity interviews and shots of his homes. The United States of Amnesia was a good overview of Vidal, but it wasn't quite satisfying.

On reflection, The United States of Amnesia also seemed to collaborate with Vidal in diminishing the importance of his work. Vidal was, it bears repeating, a public intellectual. He wrote critically about the processes of American empire and American autocracy, his fiction and his non-fiction alike engaging with the problems of public life in ways that are still fresh today. (When Vidal died, a revival of his 1960 play The Best Man was playing on Broadway.) And yet, even though Vidal's arguments are still relevant, we left the theatre with the decided impression that Vidal and his documentary did not think much of his life's work. Pevere's argument that Vidal came to believe that his failure to change things as much as he liked is plausible, while the sense of loss that an old Vidal felt as the people he loved were whittled away by death and disagreement is understandable. It just isn't the sort of argument that I'd expect to be made by a documentary that--I assume--was created with the intent of arguing that a man and his work are of lasting relevance even after his death.

The United States of Amnesia was a good enough documentary on Gore Vidal. We still have to wait for a great one.