[URBAN NOTE] "The heroes of Howland Avenue"

The Toronto Star's Paul Hunter describes how one street in the Annex was devastated by the loss of its young men in the First World War.

They grew up on the same West Annex street, a few doors from each other; boyhood pals, then teenaged running mates. Four of them attended Harbord Collegiate together.

They had names like Billy, Kenny and Cecil, a champion runner who may have been the best athlete of the gang. Though young Eustace, part of a provincial rugby championship, would have argued that.

Life was good on Howland Ave.

There were about 35 red-brick houses, many with impressive gables, on each side of the first block north from Bloor St. to Barton Ave. It was a place where neighbours looked out for neighbours. And a time when the future seemed boundless.

Soon, as what happens with childhood friends, the boys became young men and left their tree-lined street to find their own way.

Soon, most would be dead.

Swept up in patriotic fervour, they signed on to serve King and country in the First World War.

There is much more at the Star.

[PHOTO] Graffiti eggplants, Loblaws

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes that York University is slated to have an architecturally interesting student centre.


• Centauri Dreams reports on new imaging of various protoplanetary disks.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on observations finetuning what is known about HD 209458b.


• Joe. My. God. notes the happiness of at least one white supremacist leader with the Trump victory.


• Language Hat reports on medieval prejudices about collectors of books.


• Language Log explains its silence over the Trump election.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrates Doctor Strange.


• Marginal Revolution suggests anxiety over technological change gave Trump an advantage over Clinton.


• The NYRB Daily considers when it is proper to put a work through a new translation.


• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the week's activities in the solar system.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer is alarmed by the description of the nascent California separatist movement in an article, as the mechanisms are described.


• Peter Rukavina shares of a map about Internet accessibility on Prince Edward Island.


• The Volokh Conspiracy praises Obama's recent statements.


• Window on Eurasia argues Trump's policies might hurt Russia and notes Ukrainians who hope his government will not be hostile to Ukraine.

[LINK] "The Nightmare Begins": Adam Shatz at the LRB

The LRB's Adam Shatz proclaims that the ascension of Trump marks the brutal end to American exceptionalism.

Donald Trump’s quasi-apocalyptic victory marks the end of American exceptionalism: a certain idea of America, as a model of democracy and freedom, is dead. Trump didn’t kill it; he declared it dead with a campaign that was as surreal as it was reactionary. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ a French friend wrote to me in an email. ‘It’s worse than a nightmare,’ I replied. ‘It’s reality.’

But how to explain this reality? How did Trump – the least qualified candidate in American history, a narcissistic, desensitised bully who could not put together a complete sentence, much less an argument – seduce the American electorate? Some see his victory as a misdirected working-class rebellion, staged by resentful middle-class whites who were effectively proletarianised by neoliberal policies promoted by both of America’s major political parties. Others see it as a racist, xenophobic uprising, led by a vanguard of white nationalists who have rallied around Trump as their figurehead.

Both explanations have a kernel of truth. Trump is inconceivable without the 2008 financial crisis, and Obama’s reliance on Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and the other ‘Harvard boys’ reinforced the impression that American liberalism was an elite ideology, and globalisation a luxury that working people could no longer afford. Popular resentment against elites has increasingly been deflected towards vulnerable minorities, especially immigrants and undocumented workers supposedly coddled by liberals.

But neither explanation captures the profoundly nostalgic dimensions of Trump’s appeal, or his animal magnetism among his supporters. Looking at Trump, American liberals see a barroom lout, a pig who boasts about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ and threatens to jail his opponent. But Trump taps into an ideological fantasy among voters who would like to return to a world in which borders counted for something, white men were the ‘natural leaders’, and women and minorities knew their place. A black man in the White House, for them, was an intolerable insult. That he was the son of a Kenyan with a Muslim name, raised in Indonesia, only rubbed salt in the wound.

[LINK] "Autocracy: Rules for Survival": Masha Gessen at the NYR Daily

Masha Gessen, veteran of Putin's Russia, offers good advice in the NYR Daily to people in Trump's America.

Clinton’s and Obama’s very civil passages, which ended in applause lines, seemed to close off alternative responses to his minority victory. (It was hard not to be reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s statement, that “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.”) Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

The second falsehood is the pretense that America is starting from scratch and its president-elect is a tabula rasa. Or we are: “we owe him an open mind.” It was as though Donald Trump had not, in the course of his campaign, promised to deport US citizens, promised to create a system of surveillance targeted specifically at Muslim Americans, promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, advocated war crimes, endorsed torture, and repeatedly threatened to jail Hillary Clinton herself. It was as though those statements and many more could be written off as so much campaign hyperbole and now that the campaign was over, Trump would be eager to become a regular, rule-abiding politician of the pre-Trump era.

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

[LINK] jsburbidge on what happened with Brexit and Donald Trump

The opinions of jsburbidge, rarely expressed, always deserve sharing. His thoughts on what led to Brexit and Trump's election makes sense, identifying racism and economic dislocation as not necessarily enough to explain what happened.

A third analysis points at anger at fundamentally cultural change: Brexit voters who are Little Englanders, Americans who are nostalgic for the 1950's, people who really don't want to face anthropogenic climate change and thereby have to change their habits, rural dwellers whose communities are being hollowed out by internal shifts towards the cities as farming becomes more agribusiness and countries as a whole become more urban, Evangelicals who resent increasing secularism and immigrants with other religions (whether different faiths such as Islam or just different variants such as Hispanic Catholicism).

Resentment of immigration may slot into this model better than into point (2). Importing Mexicans to pick crops (à la George Murphy) does not obviously displace US workers; likewise, the NHS nurse from Poland at a local English hospital has probably been hired in the absence of sufficient English applicants for nursing positions. Both, however, are markers of change.

This fits many aspects of the general situation relatively well.

First, there's basically nothing that can be done about it. It's all very well to declaim "Turn back the universe and give me yesterday", but it won't work. Even a "succesful" imposition of political reaction does not restore the social fabric of the past (the German states of 1825 were not very much like the German states of 1785, regardless of what Prince Metternich was able to do).

I'm willing to bet that one of Trump's promises which will not be fulfilled is the full mass deportation of "unlawful immigrants": too many economic interests would be impacted (fruit is already withering on the vine in some areas because of an insufficient workforce). There may be a few dramatic staged raids of some form or another, but there will be nothing systematic and long-term. (Ditto with the wall: Congress is not about to authorize that expense.)

There's more, including suggestions on a long-term strategy, at his Livejournal.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why diverse literary festivals are essential for emerging voices"

CBC's Gwen Benaway writes about why literary festivals like Naked Heart are so important. I look forward to going to the launch party at the new Glad Day tonight!

This weekend marks the second edition of the Naked Heart, the "LGBTQ Festival of Words." With over 90 participating authors, it may surprise you to know that Naked Heart is the largest LGBTQ literary festival in the world. Along with the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), it is also the most diverse literary festival in Canada with numerous Indigenous, transgender and racialized authors represented. It cannot be understated how important this is.

While literary festivals introduce readers to new authors and often profile emerging writers at a critical stage in their career, they also build community between writers and other members of the literary community. The broader Canadian literary arts scene can feel exclusionary to many new writers, especially writers from diverse backgrounds. Many of my author friends talk about being the only writer of colour or Indigenous author at literary festivals, pigeonholed into the role of being an advocate for diverse literature. I joke with other transgender writers about always being on the "tranel" — the singular transgender or LGBTQ-specific panel at a literary festival. With festivals like Naked Heart, we are connected to each other and allowed to build networks outside of the mainstream Canadian literary scene.

One thing I've learned as an Indigenous writer is that community is does not occur organically. Many writers are too busy to facilitate broad connections across cities and provinces. We lack the financial resources to engage with each other outside of our day jobs. One of the central goals of the Indigenous Writers' Gathering, an annual Indigenous-specific literary festival in Toronto, is to link Indigenous writers so we can nurture each other. Connection with other writers is essential for great literature, and festivals like Naked Heart, FOLD and the Indigenous Writer's Gathering make those connections happen.

Torontoist has more.

[URBAN NOTE] "Leonard Cohen’s Montreal: refuge and escape"

Robert Everett-Green's essay on the role of Montréal in the life of Leonard Cohen, published after the release of his latest album earlier this fall but before his death, is a beautiful piece of work.

Donald Brittain’s 1965 National Film Board of Canada film Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen shows its subject, who had yet to make his first recording, wandering down the Murray Hill path while reading in voice-over from his 1963 novel, The Favourite Game. “The park nourished all the sleepers in the surrounding houses. It gave the children dangerous bushes and heroic landscapes so they could imagine bravery. It gave the muses and maids winding walks so they could imagine beauty. It gave the young merchant princes leaf-hid necking benches, views of factories so they could imagine power.”

Cohen discovered the romance of Westmount, and its sadness, too, as his friend Irving Layton pointed out. He mythologized the chic women who “float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz.” He was of that world; but as a Jew and a poet, was also separate enough to remark that “Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.”

There are a couple of large churches on the route Cohen would have walked to the Shaar. He went to school with kids from those churches, at Roslyn Elementary and Westmount High, both imposing buildings where anglophone Christians and Jews mingled as they no longer do in the borough’s more diversified school structure. Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons says that between one-quarter and one-third of Westmount High students in Cohen’s day were Jewish. He was exposed to Christian pageants at school, and had even gone to church with his Irish Catholic nanny, laying the basis for a lifelong fascination with Christian imagery and rhetoric.

Cohen’s spiritual side never completely detached from the carnal, of course – Murray Hill had its “necking benches,” where adolescent desire ran up against the stern sexual mores of the 1950s. From his earliest teen years, Cohen’s Montreal also included the neon-lit zone of clubs and cabarets that flourished along St. Catherine Street, where he would dream on the sidewalk about the sacred debaucheries going on inside.

His first public performance with music was in one of those places, in the Birdland jazz club above Dunn’s Delicatessen, where in 1958 he read a poem over an improvised piano accompaniment, a form of delivery made fashionable by Beat poets. His Montreal also included McGill University, where he imagined he was participating in a colonial rewrite of Brideshead Revisited, while serving as president of a Jewish fraternity.

[URBAN NOTE] On the new, and very high, taxes in Vancouver on empty homes

Natalie Obiko Pearson's Bloomberg News article, published in the Financial Post, reports on a noteworthy tax indeed.

Want to keep your million-dollar luxury pad in Vancouver empty? Get ready to pay $10,000 (US$7,450) annually in extra taxes. Lie about it? That’ll be $10,000 a day in fines.

Canada’s most-expensive property market, suffering from a near-zero supply of rental homes, announced the details of a new tax aimed at prodding absentee landlords into making their properties available for lease. The empty-home tax will take effect by Jan. 1 and will be calculated at one per cent of the property’s assessed value, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson told reporters at City Hall.

“Vancouver is in a rental-housing crisis,” Robertson said. “The city won’t sit on the sidelines while over 20,000 empty and under-occupied properties hold back homes from renters.”

The measure is among efforts to make housing more accessible and affordable in Vancouver, ranked the world’s third-most-livable city, and has drawn attention for its sky-high prices fomented by global money flows. Public scrutiny has focused on absentee landlords, particularly from overseas, who are accused of sitting on investment properties where windows remain dark throughout the year.

In August, the provincial government imposed a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers, and last month the federal government tightened mortgage insurance eligibility requirements. The city of Vancouver has focused its efforts on the rental market, where vacancies can get scooped up within hours while bidding wars drive up leasing costs.

[URBAN NOTE] "Trump win makes Canadian real estate look even more attractive"

Of course this would happen. From the Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski:

Canadians should not expect a flood of president-elect Donald Trump exiles to further fuel the Toronto region’s hot housing market.

But the shocking U.S. election could, at least in the foreseeable future, make our real estate an increasingly attractive investment, according to some experts.

Many housing analysts wouldn’t predict the impact of Trump’s ascendancy.

“It’s too early to know what it means for Canadian housing markets. Nobody knows what it means for the Canadian economy writ large, let alone housing markets across the country,” said a statement from Canadian Real Estate Association chief economist Gregory Klump.

But for those who already see Canada as an attractive, stable place, the U.S. election could heighten that perception, said Royal LePage CEO Phil Soper.

[URBAN NOTE] "Next Big Tech Corridor? Between Seattle and Vancouver, Planners Hope"

Nick Wingfield's October article in The New York Times looks positively prescient.

Seattle and Vancouver are like fraternal twins separated at birth. Both are bustling Pacific Northwest coastal cities with eco-conscious populations that have accepted the bargain of dispiriting weather for much of the year in exchange for nearby ski slopes and kayaking and glorious summers.

Yet 140 miles of traffic-choked roads and an international border divide the two cities, keeping them farther apart than their geographic and cultural identities would suggest.

Now the political, academic and tech elite of both cities are looking for ways to bring them closer together, with the aim of continuing the growth of two of the most vibrant economies in North America.

“Vancouver has a lot more in common with Seattle than we do with Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, anywhere else in our country,” Christy Clark, the premier of British Columbia, said in an interview. “We should make the most of those cultural commonalities.”

Whether their grand vision of a “Cascadia innovation corridor” — which borrows its name from the region’s Cascade mountain range — ever materializes, leaders on both sides of the border have motives for getting cozier immediately. American tech icons like Microsoft, with voracious needs for global engineering talent, are expanding their Vancouver offices, partly because of Canada’s smoother immigration process.