It’s a bit of a sur­prise that the Office of the Chief Elec­toral Offi­cer would pro­duce a charm­ing­ly writ­ten and graph­i­cal­ly pleas­ing book — aren’t those folks sup­posed to be soul­less, humour­less bureau­crats? And it presents the his­to­ry of the fran­chise in Cana­da with sys­tem­at­ic schol­ar­ship. It begins by men­tion­ing the rep­re­sen­ta­tive insti­tu­tions of Native Cana­di­ans, and gives a brief dis­cus­sion of the elect­ed assem­bly that exist­ed in New France, the Con­seil de Québec, between 1657 and 1674, only to be sup­pressed by the infa­mous French Sec­re­tary of State, Jean-Bap­tiste Col­bert, who firm­ly rep­ri­mand­ed Fron­tenac for his “inno­va­tion”. Most inter­est­ing to me were the detailed his­to­ries of the fran­chise in all the British North Amer­i­can colonies before Cana­di­an Con­fed­er­a­tion. Read more »

16616. (Mar­i­on Zim­mer Bradley) The Mists of Avalon
16617. (O. R. Gurny, tr.) Hit­tite doc­u­ment: The Annals of Ḫat­tušili III 
16618. (Steve Muhlberg­er) [in blog Muhlberger’s Ear­ly His­to­ry] The World Turned Inside 
. . . . . Out [arti­cle]
16619. (Karen Joy Fowler) Wit’s End
16620. (Chris Wood) Dry Spring: The Com­ing Water Cri­sis in North America
16621. (David Rothkopf) 9/11 Was Big. This Is Big­ger [arti­cle]
16622. (Andrew J. Bace­vich) He Told Us to Go Shop­ping. Now the Bill Is Due. [arti­cle]
16623. (Richard Dawkins) The God Delusion
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August Der­leth

This is a minor mas­ter­piece by a neglect­ed Amer­i­can nov­el­ist and essay­ist who is bet­ter known as the edi­tor and advo­cate of H. P. Love­craft than for his own work. It is firm­ly in the tra­di­tion of Thoreau’s jour­nals, and simul­ta­ne­ously in that of Sher­wood Anderson’s Wines­burg Ohio, though his beau­ti­fully styled evo­ca­tions of des­per­ate lives don’t have the bit­ter­ness that Anderson’s had. Derleth’s feel­ing for nature, both the human kind and the ani­mals and plant kind, is intense and metic­u­lously obser­vant. His prose is so pre­cise and nat­ural that you don’t hear it as another’s voice, but as your own thought. It’s one of those books that you read with pro­found plea­sure on a qui­et night, with an ani­mal snooz­ing near­by and a sin­gle malt at your elbow.

Eth­nic nation­al­ism is one of the most dis­eased and obnox­ious ideas con­trived by human beings, rivaled only by Marx­ism and reli­gious fanati­cism in its poten­tial for cre­at­ing human suf­fer­ing. The stage was set for the hor­rors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry by the pas­sion­ate eth­nic hatreds of the 19th cen­tu­ry. It was in this era that col­lec­tive loy­al­ties among Euro­peans shift­ed from obses­sions with God to obses­sions with Race and Nation. And it was in this era that most of the “nation­al iden­ti­ties”, which now seem so fixed, were concocted.
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Ténéré daféo nikchan .… yes, I’m back there again. The smells, the sounds, the wind. This col­lec­tion of arti­cles, writ­ten over a decade by a lead­ing author­i­ty on the pol­i­tics of Saha­ran nomads, was an absolute delight for me to read. It deals with the very peo­ple (not just the same eth­nic group, but the par­tic­u­lar seg­ment of them, the kel-Aïr of Niger) who first awak­ened me to the nature of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. I read these arti­cles with a tremen­dous wave of nos­tal­gia. When as a naive toubab, I came to that part of Africa, many years ago, I had been led by the small amount of lit­er­a­ture avail­able on the sub­ject to believe that the Tuareg rep­re­sent­ed a strict­ly strat­i­fied soci­ety, rigid and tra­di­tion­al — the last place to look for any kind of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic ele­ments. But what I saw con­fused me, and ulti­mate­ly enlight­ened me: a maze of con­cil­iar insti­tu­tions, both for­mal and infor­mal, embody­ing all the ele­ments from which demo­c­ra­t­ic the­o­ry evolved in less exot­ic places. Good and bad things, but the same stew-pot of good and bad from which our best insti­tu­tions ulti­mate­ly evolved. I also saw that much that had been writ­ten or assumed was blind to this, shaped by pre­sump­tions that desert nomads where either chaot­ic beings with­out “com­plex” polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions, or a rigid, change­less hier­ar­chy in which dis­cus­sion, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and equal­i­ty played no part. My eyes told me that nei­ther pre­sump­tion was valid. It was this expe­ri­ence that got me inter­est­ed in the issue of the uni­ver­sal roots of demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tice, and trig­gered decades of read­ing. Sad­ly, when Steve Muhlberg­er and I began our first work on the sub­ject, there was no pub­lished work on the Tuareg usable for our pur­pose. This book, had it exist­ed then, would have been a cen­ter­piece of our dis­cus­sion. Read more »

(Peter Bakker, et al.) Basque Pid­gins in Ice­land and Canada:
. . . . [——] (Gidor Bil­bao) Glos­saria Vas­co-Islandi­ca-ren aurkezpen gisakoa [pref­ace]
. . . . 16445. (Jose Igna­cio Hualde) Fore­word to Glos­saria duo Vas­co-Islandi­ca [pref­ace]
. . . . [——] (Nico­laas G. H. Deen) Glos­saria duo Vas­co-Islandi­ca [text in Basque] [arti­cle]
. . . . 16446. (Jose Igna­cio Hualde) Ice­landic Basque Pid­gin [arti­cle]
. . . . 16447. (Peter Bakker) “Las lengua de las tribus costeras es medio vas­ca” ― Un pidgin 
. . . . . . . . . vas­co y amerindio uti­liza­do por europeos y nativos amer­i­canos en Norteamérica,
. . . . . . . . . h. 1540‑h. 1640. [text in Span­ish] [arti­cle] Read more »

I would hap­pily take George Wood­cock as a mod­el for trav­el writ­ing. He him­self out­lines the sources of his style: eigh­teenth cen­tury Eng­lish mod­els of clar­ity and pre­ci­sion, the writ­ings of ear­ly nat­u­ral­ists and sci­en­tists, and the direct influ­ence of his close friend, George Orwell. Wood­cock is best known as a his­to­rian of anar­chist the­ory, and in Cana­da as a cham­pion of Cana­dian lit­er­a­ture (espe­cially that of the west­ern provinces), but for decades he put bread on the table by trav­el­ing to remote cor­ners of the Earth and writ­ing about it in his crisp, evoca­tive prose. A fine descrip­tion of Sal­ish spir­it dance, for which he only had to trav­el a few miles from his doorstep, and a keen­ly obser­vant tour of the Cana­dian arc­tic show that he didn’t have to leave the coun­try to cre­ate the sense of won­der. But the strongest stuff is when he writ­ing about India, espe­cially the Tibetan Exile com­mu­ni­ties that he him­self helped fund and orga­nize, and in the jun­gle tem­ples of Cam­bo­dia. Read more »