A Bit More Detail

• blogTO shares photos of Yonge and Dundas in the grimy 1970s.


• The Big Picture shares photos from a Tibetan Buddhist assembly.


• Crooked Timber shares a photo of Bristol's floating bridge.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on an estimate of the number of extraterrestrial technological civilizations.


• The Dragon's Tales notes an atlas of drought in Europe.


• Geocurrents examines the fallacy of environmental determinism.


• Joe. My. God. notes how open travel between the European Union and Ukraine has been endangered by the failure to protect gay employment.


• Language Hat links to an essay by a feminist talking about what it is like to live in a language environment, that of Hebrew, where everything is gendered.


• Language Log engages with fax usage in Japan and notes rare characters in Taiwan.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the plight of the dying steel town, all the worse because it was evitable.


• Marginal Revolution has a bizarre defense of Ben Carson.


• The Russian Demographics Blog and Window on Eurasia report on a rectification of the Russian-Chinese frontier.


• Window on Eurasia is critical of village values in Russia, and notes the return of ISIS fighters to Azerbaijan.

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that stars commonly ingest hot Jupiters.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the spread of robots.


• Far Outliers shares terms for making shoyu.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Ashley Madison nearly bought Grindr.


• Language Log notes the changing usage of "hemp" as a political term.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the plan to save New Orleans by abandoning the Mississippi delta.


• The Russian Demographics blog notes the genetic distinctiveness of the Denisovans.


• Towleroad notes the pulling-down of a Warsaw rainbow monument.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the American debate over birthright citizenship.

Languages have materiality, Mizumura insists, and her personal essay-cum-allegory lets the landscape of English letters hover like a mirage above physical America. In Iowa “the view was not particularly beautiful. There was none of the poetry one sees in scenes of the countryside in American films.” Yet “turning to Chris [the program director], I roused myself and said exactly what an American might say at such a moment: ‘Beautiful day!’ ” Such are the dangers of a universal language: Being in America, speaking “American,” Mizumura can utter only “what an American might say,” even if that means lying about the blighted prospect around her. In contrast, here is the author’s memory of touching down in France: “Once I set foot in Paris, I was greeted with boulevards shimmering with new leaves and skies gloriously liberated from the dark of winter.”

I mention France because the French language—all liberté and illumination—is one of Mizumura’s sanctuaries, a spiritual alternative to English. (It is also a scholarly alternative: Though she doesn’t mention him outright, Mizumura, who studied French literature at Yale during its Structuralist heyday, is clearly indebted to Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the first to propose that meaning arises from closed linguistic systems. Saussure wrote in French.) Her family moved from Japan to New York when she was 12, and she “stubbornly resisted getting along either with the United States or the English language,” instead soaking in French audiobooks on repeat in her room. What draws Mizumura to the lingua franca of the Enlightenment is its beauty, but also its predicament: Once the embodiment of the “soul of Europe,” a standard-bearer for the humanities, the expressive Play-Doh for writers like Voltaire and Diderot is now in the same lamentable position as Japanese. Which is to say, French and Japanese speakers are confined to the particular, while English speakers live in the universal.

A writer writing in English can count on her words reaching people all over the world, whether in translation or the original, but there’s no guarantee English-speaking readers will ever encounter experiences first framed in Japanese. Nor can bilingual writers just switch to English: Even if the West does not seem “too far, psychologically as well as geographically,” a sense of romance surrounds novels written in the novelist’s mother tongue, making fiction formulated from a second language less palatable. So, Mizumura concludes, non-English speakers “can only participate passively in the universal temporality … they cannot make their own voices heard.” Discouraged by the deafness of the world—even as Internet fans sing about our increasing connectedness—they might decide to stop writing altogether.

When writers stop writing in a language, that language decays. People lose faith in its ability to bear the burden of their fine feeling and entrust their most important thoughts elsewhere. Raging against the decline of “lesser” lexicons, Mizumura is stressing more than the loss of cultural artifacts, or the value of diversity for its own sake. Non-dominant tongues must live on, she warns, because “those of us … living in asymmetry are the only ones condemned to perpetually reflect upon language, the only ones forced to know that the English language cannot dictate ‘truths’ and that there are other ‘truths’ in this world.” Buried in that argument is an oddly touching one about the nature of literature: “The writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.”

• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper examining the search for exomoons and links to another looking for very widely-separated exoplanets.


• Far Outliers' Joel shows some unusual Japanese words.


• The Financial Times' The World blog notes, in the context of recent riots, that Vietnam is an important player in global supply chains.


• Joe. My. God. notes the opening of a museum in New York City dedicated to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly can't bear to visit.


• Language Hat notes the new Russian laws banning profanity.


• At his blog, Peter Watts discusses his experience speaking at a conference about the origins of revenge.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, target of the ESA's Rosetta probe, is now growing a coma.


• Towleroad notes that the Centers for Disease Control in the United States have released guidelines for the use of truvada to prevent HIV infections.


• The Transit Toronto blog notes that there's a TTC subway car ravaged by Godzilla down on Yonge Street.


• The Volokh Conspiracy deals with the complex copyright case of a man who killed himself after a nasty divorce and whose ex-wife is trying to remove his writings critical of her from the Internet.

• Crooked Timber's Maria Farrell writes about Ireland's Magdalen Laundries, institutions she sees as product of Irish misogyny and Roman Catholicism.


• Daniel Drezner took note of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and argues that the main people arguing about a currency war are (among others) developing countries and a Bundesbank that doesn't want to lose power to the European Central Bank.


• Eastern Approaches points out that cohabitation in Georgia between President Saakashvili and the governing opposition is not going well.


• Far Outliers' Joel points out that the dialect of African-Americans in the Japanese translation of Gone With The Wind is that of the marginalized Tohoku region in northern Honshu, visited two years by disaster.


• Geocurrents maps the results of a referendum on conscription in Austria, noting that the largely rural state of Burgenland--once part of Hungary, and still a frontier region--voted strongly in favour.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dave Brockington notes that the American states with the longest voting lines tend to have Republican governments and relatively large African-American and Latino populations.


• Progressived Download's John Farrell points out that private labs offering adult stem cell treatments very often inflict terrible, novel illnesses on their clients.
  
• Registan's Mitchell Polman points out that Central Asia is hardly likely to prosper if foreign influence is seen as a zero-sum game. All kinds of powers need to take part.


• Window on Eurasia quotes from a Russian Eurasianist thinker, Rustem Vakhitov, who argues that separatist tendencies in Russia overall are strongest in Russian regions. Why single out the ethnic republics and risk triggering something?


• Zero Geography's Mark Graham maps Twitter usage in different African cities.

• At blogTO, Matthew Harris blogs about the ongoing condo boom in the tony Toronto neighbourhood of Yorkville. No, Toronto doesn't have a real estate bubble, really it doesn't ...


• Charlie Stross blogs about his recent second visit to Japan, a country that he sees has being alien but with this alienness rooted as much in its own distinctive history as in its futurisms.


• Daniel Drezner makes the point that certain conservatives in the United States don't want to accept, that the US shouldn't have to boost its military spending up to Cold War levels since the United States isn't facing a power as remotely as globally powerful as the Soviet Union.
  
• Eastern Approaches wonders what the European Union's policy to post-crackdown Belarus is going to be. The author doesn't seem to expect that much will change, owing (I suspect) to European lack of effort rooted in lack of interest.


• At Far Outliers, Joel writes about how an American missionary in 1860s Japan created the modern system of Romanization and kickstarted English-language education in Japan.


• Maximos blogs about Sydney, Australia's, disappeared tram (streetcar?) network.


• Mark Dandridge photoblogs his encounter with Britain's Gilbert and George.
  
• Science not Fiction's Kyle Munkittrick uses Google's Ngram viewer to note that people really aren't talking about the future--or at least, using the word "future"--as much as they were before 2000.


• Window on Eurasia has an interesting brief piece on Russia's Assyrian minority.