[META] On hiatus

I’ll keep track of what’s going on elsewhere in the blogosphere, and I may even make comments. Until I’ve something worthwhile to say here, though, I’ll be putting this blog on hiatus.

Later,
Randy

[BRIEF NOTE] What’s the point?

Looking back to this post by Angua, I wonder if she’s right. Is blogospheric discourse functionally impossible?

Your thoughts, please.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the East Timorese violence

As angel80 notes, the ongoing civil violence in East Timor was precipitated by the sadly typical of newly-decolonized states, with tensions between factions of the ruling party and a profoundly dysfunctional economy encouraging violence and rancour.

You know, we on the outside had a chance to help East Timor avoid this fate, both in 1976 and in 1999. What a pity for the East Timorese that we opted to do nothing, or–at best–not enough.

[BRIEF NOTE] What use is Wikipedia?

This discussion at alt.history.future on the future uses of Wikipedia seemed a bit off-base to me. When I’m looking for a quick and easy link, yes, I do normally turn to Wikipedia. I don’t do so because I think that the Wikipedia article is necessarily good: Wikipedia articles are frequently quite good indeed, and can often cover obscure areas, but, as The Miami Herald‘s documentation of the controversy over Cuba’s wikipedia article demonstrates, hot-topic issues can frequently distort articles.

Why, then, do I use Wikipedia if its articles can be prone to error? Although there can be distortions and lacunae, only a few of the articles tend to be as contentious as the Cuba article described above. Besides, almost as important as the actual content of the article are the articles links, to other Wikipedia articles and to external websites. For all of its stiff competition with the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia for me isn’t an encyclopedia so much as it is a portal. Expecting it to be something different, given its open-source model, is unrealistic.

[REVIEW] Crash

Crash was a bit of a frustrating film for me. Certainly there’s plenty of sociological insights, though since I’ve never been to Los Angeles I can’t tell if it’s true or not that whites don’t like Hispanics who don’t like Asians who don’t like blacks who don’t like Iranians (who aren’t Arabs). The script of Crash just seemed so contrived, from the opening line about car crashes as a substitute for human relations to the convenient choice of the blanks. There’s still more than enough watchable material in the film for me to have enjoyed the viewing experience, even for me to think fondly of it in retrospect. But would I have given it Best Picture? Hardly. Brokeback Mountain gave the attention to the fine detail of lived reality that Crash didn’t.

[REVIEW] Resident Evil: Apocalypse

One of the most enjoyable things about Resident Evil: Apocalypse is that the part of Raccoon City is played by a quite recognizable Toronto: Raccoon City Hall is the same Toronto City Hall that I pass by on a regular basis, the skyline in outline and in detail is the same one that I know, the Bloor viaduct and Don valley make a good perimeter for the doomed city, and Pizza Pizza has apparently managed to make it to the region of the Arklay Mountains. There’s something amusing about seeing zombies ravaging my city in daylight, just before the mushroom cloud of the five-kiloton tactical nuclear weapon obliterates everything.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a by-the-numbers movie, entirely predictable in the manner of all horror movies. As I said last night to G., I knew that Dr. Ashford’s expression of concern for his daughter’s well-being would shortly thereafter be followed by a scene showing his daughter’s endangerment in the course of the Umbrella Corporation evacuation. Even though its depiction of a corrupt and managerial technoculture that is capable of unleashing, by accident, the worst possible catastrophes is something that was done already and better in the first Resident Evil, I still had an enjoyable hour and a half in front of the Samsung widescreen. I just really like the zombies overrunning Toronto–that’s classic.

[URBAN NOTE] The prophets among us

Passing Nathan Phillips Square last evening, I saw two people standing at the City Hall’s Speakers’ Corner, a podium set aside on the southwestern corner of the City Hall grounds, in an area where the grass sods are being broken up by pedestrian traffic.

Speakers’ Corner exists, I suppose, as a hommage to Hyde Park’s own Speakers’ Corner, perhaps also as a vague recognition of Anglo-Canadian links. Last night was the first time I’d seen a single person there. Instead, there were two people: one, a man, standing on the podium and singing nonsense (“Hey na na, na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-nuh”), the other a woman who danced with a bored expression on her face.

“It’s falling, it’s falling, falling, falling,” he sang as I walked out of earshot. I didn’t think of stopping to ask him what was falling.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Montenegro’s new national identity

Via the news site of the Serbian Unity Congress, a diaspora organization, I’ve found this blog posting by Nebojsa Malic wherein he proved that I was right yesterday when I wrote that I expected “certain people to note that the strong support lent by ethnic Albanians in the south and Bosniaks in the Sandzak on the border and judge the referendum as invalid on these grounds.”

I’ve got nothing against Croats, or Albanians, or Muslims (I won’t call them “Bosniaks,” that’s just silly). But there is something wrong with their votes deciding the fate of Serbs in Montenegro. You see, “Montenegrin,” like “Bosnian,” is a territorial identity; until it was invented by the Communists, there was no “Montenegrin nation.

It is quite true that, in Montenegro this year as in Québec in 1995, “money and the ethnic vote” played a critical role in determining the outcome of the referendum. Granted that the ethnics of Montenegro acted differently from their counterparts in Québec–as the Journal of the Turkish Weekly reported, “91 percent of ‘yes to independence’ votes came from Rojaye, the capital of Montenegro where the majority of Bosnians reside, and 88 percent came form Ulcin, highly populated by Albanians”–it’s probably accurate to say that the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Montenegro were divided. It’s quite possible that a majority of Montenegro’s Orthodox Christian Slavs voted against independence for, as Vesna Goldsworthy wrote at Open Democracy (“Au revoir, Montenegro?”), the development of the Montenegrins from a subgroup of Serbs to an emergent nation was, and to some extent is, of historically quite late vintage.

I was born and bred in Belgrade, as was my father, but–like so many in the Serbian capital–he has strong ancestral links with Montenegro. While my mother comes from one of those picturesque villages in the lush valley of the Morava river which are the closest Serbia has to the heartland region of southern England known as the “home counties”, my father is half-Montenegrin, half-Herzegovinian. The meaning of such distinctions has been recast again and again by the flow of Balkan history, but both my paternal grandparents would have been as surprised to be told that they are not Serbian as a Yorkshireman or a Devonian woman would be at hearing that they might not be English.

My grandmother, who lived with us throughout my youth, was fiercely proud of her Montenegrin identity. She was named after Zorka, the eldest daughter of the first and the last king of Montenegro, Nicholas Petrovich, during whose reign she was born in a village on the slopes of the kingdom’s Durmitor mountain in 1908. She used to kiss King Nicholas’s picture if she happened to come across it in the newspapers or on the pages of the history books in our library.

[. . .]

“They rose to where their sovereign eagle sails,/ They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,/ Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night/Against the Turk” the sonnet began, to culminate in the invocation of “Great Tsernogora” with its invincible race of mountaineers mightier than any other highlander clan. No wonder granny concluded that Tennyson was a genius. She was in no doubt that Montenegrins were a superior sort of Serbs, probably descended from those remnants of the Serbian feudal nobility that survived the battle of Kosovo in 1389. To question her Serbianness would have been more than my life’s worth. I grew up proud of my own Montenegrin blood and the sorts of highland legends that would put Rob Roy or Braveheart to shame.

Things changed, most notably the actions of Tito’s Yugoslavia in establishing Montenegro as an autonomous republic with its own national structures inside Yugoslavia fully co-equal with Serbia. Montenegrin particularism, in this environment, deepened, and after the collapse of the SFRY created an unfortunate link with an unpopular Serbia, motivated a new nationalism. It’s worthwhile to compare the history of the Montenegrins with that of the Macedonians, who graduated from a subdivision of the Balkan South Slavs–most frequently assigned to Bulgaria, but often to Serbia–to an autonomous nation.

The recency of the shift, mind, doesn’t make Malic’s contention that Montenegrins don’t constitute a nation any the less ridiculous. It is true that Montenegro has a Serb history, but since when have ancestral traditions become binding contracts imposed on future generation? If Montenegrins say they constitute a separate nation, I’m inclined to believe them. Alas, I suspect that continuing conflict between Montenegrins and Serbs within Montenegro over that new country’s identity will continue, distracting people from the more pressing issues of the country’s economic viability, as John Horvath warned at Telepolis (“The Final Blow”) and Renate Flatau wrote at Spiegel Online (“A Forced Marriage Heads for Divorce”). Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the first time that nationalist issues trumped economics, certainly not in that part of the world.

[BRIEF NOTE] The SFRY was globalized

Neil Clark’s claim at The Guardian that an independent Montenegro will enjoy less autonomy and freedom than the old SFRY’s autonomous Montenegrin republic is debatable, though I’m inclined to say that identifying a liberal Communist regime like that of Tito’s Yugoslavia as an ideal is setting the bar awfully low. His claim that Yugoslavia’s regime constituted an authentically viable alternate social and economic system, now, is risible. Is he intentionally forgetting Yugoslavia’s exceptional dependence on the tourism income, workers remittances, and international loans that it needed to keep its economy viable, for a time, before its internal contradictions triumphed and brought the whole thing tumbling down?

Silliness.

[NON BLOG] Drinking the Night Away, or, A Queen’s Reunion

Great fun indeed was had last night via a reunion of fellow graduates from the Queen’s MA English program in the 2003-2004 timeframe, starting at the Ferret and Firkin on 720 Spadina Avenue and heading to Insomnia (563 Bloor Street West) just to the west and then, at night’s end, to one of Toronto’s many private residences for more catching up. This was all quite good indeed, the only problem being that the reunion had been too long delayed.