Strange City Research Articles

Street youth are our kids, too

Most of us have a pretty stereotypical view of street youth. The phrase conjures up images of squeegees, panhandlers, rings and studs in strange places, shooting galleries, and big city blight. Not your typical tourist attraction, they sit, blank faced, dishevelled, anonymous. Sometimes they are just another statistic in the sad tale of life and death on our streets. One asks, where is the glamour in that? We, the Adolescent Health Section of the Canadian Paediatric Society, have come to realize that the phrase ‘street youth’ covers a complex mix of young people. There are the homeless, the curbsiders, the wannabes, the sex trade workers, the addicts and the weekenders. Each comes from a different set of circumstances, but all are marginalized, alienated, exploited and vulnerable. However, they are also inventive, resilient, caring and spiritual, and have dreams of a future similar to most young people in Canada. They have two families – the one that they left behind and the one that they found. The connections may be tenuous but they are attached to both. When we, physicians and the general public, think of street youth, we usually associate them with big cities. They are not commonly thought of in the context of the smaller cities and towns across our country. During the analysis of data for a recently released report on young sex trade workers in four smaller British Columbia cities, fellow researchers and I stumbled upon findings that challenge some of our notions about street youth (1). I say ‘stumbled’ because we were expecting to find that big and small city street youth did not differ that much. In the smaller cities what we discovered was a much younger group of youth with greater involvement in the sex trade. Of the 77 youth studied, most were under 18 years of age, lived at home and attended school. Most of the youth came directly from the local community, and 80% had been in government care at some point in time. Our study focused on sex trade workers, so it was no surprise that 36% of the youth considered themselves to be prostitutes. It was a surprise that the average age of entry into sex trade work was 13 years. The experiences of the youth included pregnancy (50%), physical and sexual abuse (90%), and smoking (100%). The majority reported exposure to drugs and alcohol, multiple sexual partners and frequent suicide attempts. Earlier studies of street youth in Vancouver and Victoria showed important differences between big city and small city street youth (2,3). The average age of big city street youth was older compared with small city youth (19 years versus 16 years, respectively), there were more males (49% versus 7%) in the big city group and more big city youth were from ‘away’ places (93% versus 51%). The big city street youth are less likely to be living at home, to be in school or to be in government care. Both big and small city street youth differ from in-school or ‘mainstream’ youth in the greater extent to which they experience difficulties with school, poor health, bulimia, and physical and sexual abuse; attempt suicide; are involved in physical fights; carry weapons; smoke; and abuse drugs. In addition, they report experiencing these behaviours at a much younger age than in-school youth. In reviewing our findings, we concluded that we had found the early beginnings of a street youth cycle. We believe that as their involvement in street life progresses, young people leave their home communities to go to big cities, sever connections with family and peers, and escalate their involvement in drug abuse, commercial and survival sex, and other risky behaviours. We need to know more about that process. Our research in smaller cities highlights the need for more studies of the early phases of the street youth phenomenon. How did they get started? What early intervention strategies are needed? What are the risk and protective factors in these early adolescents? Why do they continue in such a destructive cycle? What happens to their dreams? When we see squeegee kids in Toronto or Vancouver, we need to try to understand their realities better. We need to realize that they did not get there by accident or considered choice. The youth have told us that they need safe spaces, affordable shelter, educational and vocational opportunities, access to youth friendly health clinics, and alcohol and drug treatment. This means that more services are needed in small communities before the street youth reach the big city.

The Court's "Two Model" Approach to the Fourth Amendment: Carpe Diem!

A traveller, lost in a strange city, can occasionally make three wrong turns and find himself on, if not necessarily the right road, at least one that is going in the right direction. Similarly, the United States Supreme Court, lost in the strange city of Fourth Amendment law,' has taken three wrong turns, but may yet find itself on a road that, if not right, in terms of the Court's precedents, is logically defensible and will lead to a much more straightforward rule for police. However, like the traveller, if the Court fails to recognize what it has done, it will be doomed to continue its wayward course. The three wrong turns that the Court has taken are United States v. Robinson2 (a warrantless search incident to any custodial arrest may be a full body search, including a search of any containers in the suspect's possession), New York v. Belton3 (a warrantless search incident to arrest of an occupant of an automobile extends to all containers in the passenger compartment), and California v. Acevedo4

The Amsterdam Archive

Six o'clock, a warm September evening; I sit in a closet of a hotel room in Amsterdam. What am I doing here? Away from my family, strange place, strange city. I'm visiting the Amsterdam Archive, the International Institute for Social History. It must be the most extraordinary institution of its kind in the world. Its holdings are awe-inspiring. Its staff are legendary. It sits in a new home in the Amsterdam docklands, a refurbished warehouse. In a single day I've worked on original papers by Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Sidney Webb, Leon Trotsky; even a letter from Max Weber to Bernstein (terrible script) and letters from Robert Michels, also to Bernstein. I've had the pleasure of meeting enthusiasts both on staff, and in the reading room; I saw someone reading the Melbourne Southern Advocate for Workers Council, edited by Jim Dawson,1 turned out to be Michael Buckmiller, the German expert on Karl Korsch. The staff introduced us; they must speak at least six languages each, tapping directly into the needs of Dutch, Germans, Italians, Anglophones, Hungarians, French and others. So what is this mecca? Its physical existence confirmed by its new, permanent location, the Amsterdam Institute now also has a freshly published history, confirming its past as well as its future. I say history, but probably handbook would be more accurate. Many people over the years have written about the Institute, including the German ultraleft Karl Heinz Roth.2 The Institute has published its own pamphlet, History and Activities, in 1985, and a book length study by Jan Lucassen, Tracing the Past,3 in 1989. Now there is the new handbook edited by Atie van der Horst and Elly Koen: Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam.4 This is a book which all enthusiasts and especially libraries should have, for it is an indispensable guide to the collection. With history, it starts. As the book explains, the IISH was founded in 1935 by the aptly-named Professor N. W. Posthumus, with the financial support of 'De Centrale', the Central Workers' Insurance and Deposit Bank. De Centrale was a workers' insurance company, the statutes of which reserved a small percentage of its profits for cultural purposes on behalf of the labour movement. If this part of the initiative was clever, the next major interlude was exciting, not to say intriguing?or breathtaking, life-endangering. Prior to the Second World War the Institute took on a rescue function. Financially fluid, located in a politically neutral country with a remaining left-sympathetic culture, the IISH was able to act as a safehouse for radical and working class literature, not least of all from Germany. As the new volume observes, this was the period when the Bakunin papers were smuggled through a Vienna which was draped already

Legal Satire in The Tale of Beryn

Legal Satire in The Tale ofBeryn Richard Firth Green University of Western Ontario rTALE Of BERYN, though h,rdly a negligible item in the Chaucerian apocrypha, has receivedvery little comment. Perhaps potential readers have been warned offby an untypical lack of enthusiasm in its first editor: its Prologue at least, says Frederick Furnivall, may repay study­ "whoever skips or skims the Tale."1 In what follows I shall be arguing that its very specificlegal satire makes the tale itselfin some ways quite as interest­ ing as its prologue and that it deserves rather better than skipping or skimming. At the end of a prologue which has described the arrival of Chaucer's pilgrims at Canterbury, their visit to the cathedral, their stay at the "Checker of the hope" Inn (where the Pardoner's sexual opportunism gets him into hot water), and their departure next morning, the Merchant volunteers to tell the first tale of the return journey. T hough judged by Furnivall to be an "awfully long-winded one," this tale reworks only the first sixth of its French original, the Roman de Berinus-a section which is largely concerned with its hero's dealings at law.2 In the English version 1 The Tale ofBeryn. ed. F J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s., vol. 105 (London, 1909), p. viii. Subsequent quotations from the tale are taken from this edition (see note 10 below). For studies ofthe prologue, however, see E.J. Bashe, "The Prologue to The Tale ofBeryn," PQ 12 (1933):1-16; S. Kohl, "Chaucer's Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature," Fifteenth-Cen­ tury Studies 7 (1982):221-36; B. Darjes and T. Rendall, "A Fabliau in the Prologue to the Tale o/Beryn," MS 48 (1985):416-31;]. M. Bowers, "The Tale o/Beryn and The Siege ofThebes: Alternative Ideas of The Canterbury Tales," SAC 7 (1985):23-50; K. A. Winstead, "The Beryn-Writer as a Reader of Chaucer," ChauR 22 (1988):225-33. 2 Ben.nus: Roman en prose du Xlf;e siec/e, ed. Robert Bossuat, SATF, 2 vols. (Paris, 1931-33). Subsequent page citations are to this edition. This prose version is evidently a redaction ofan earlier Berinus in verse, only surviving in cwo fragments; unfortunately both fragments come from near the end ofthe work and thus cannot be directly compared with the English version. Since the French prose Berinus is "en etroit rapport" with these fragments (1.vii), whereas the English poem is a rather free rendition, there seems no way of deciding which of the two French versions the English poet was working from; as Bossuat remarks, Beryn "peut tout aussi bien deriver du Berinus en vers que de son remaniement en prose" (1.viii, n. 2). 43 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Beryn, a spoiled young Roman nobleman who has fled an unsympathetic stepmother to seek his fortune in foreign trade, is driven off course by a storm and lands in a strange city where he immediately finds himself embroiled in a series of preposterous lawsuits. Two local merchants try to enforce fraudulentcontractsto swindle Beryn outof his cargo, he isaccused by a blind man of having cheated him out of his eyesight, a woman claims to be his abandoned wife, and he is even framed for a murder by the victim's son. With the aid of a man called Geoffrey (once a Roman mer­ chant himself, though long since ruined by the chicanery of the citizens), hesuccessfully extricates himself from these lawsuits-thereby winning the approval of Isope, the local king, who rewards him with the hand of his daughter. In the numerous additions and alterations the author makes to his source, he revealsan obvious concern for the law, and we may reasonably assume that the story had recommended itself to him in the first place as a vehicle forcommenting on contemporary legal practice. As Mary Tamanini has rightly observed, "The law and its processes are central to the develop­ ment of the Tale ofBeryn."3 To claim that The Tale ofBeryn is about "the law" is far easier than to define precisely the kind of law it is about or the kinds of legal issues it raises, yet...

The Tiebout Model: Bring Back the Entrepreneurs

Several recent papers in the literature have reformulltlated the nature of equilibrium in IFiebout mo(lels by alSSlIuim`ing an exogenous number of communities, inflexible commullity l)OU(alaries, anti in pirticular inactive lantlowners and developers. Ihis paper argues that these assumptions are unwarranted and reSul1t iIn in(eterminate solutions and incorrect analyses. Determinate lOn1g-rUn1 solutions require equilibrium in intercommui land markets, which in turn require giving lantlowners and/or entrepreneurial (leveloelers an active role in the models. The role of politics in these models and its juxtaposition with entrepreneurial activities are also analyzed.

Toward resolution of the spatial puzzle

Driving through a strange city, even with map in hand, can result in frustration and disagreement. Some navigators rotate maps constantly to advise on right or left turns; others become completely disoriented and are soon hopelessly lost. Nor does it help morale to know that a few individuals always seem to know where they are and how to proceed to the next station along the route. After more than ten years of exploring these and other manifestations of spatial disability, we have become convinced that the origins of competency extend through the first decade of life and, perhaps, back to the moment of conception. But, the ultimate level of functioning and ease with which mature individuals acquire a spatial reasoning system varies remarkably. Moreover, left to nature, women experience greater difficulty and less success than do their male contemporaries. Even in an advanced technological society, with many tasks performed by specialized people or machines, proficiency in judging the speed of an approaching vehicle by the rate of its apparent increase in size, in visualizing and mentally rotating three-dimensional objects, and in understanding complex relationships presented in only two dimensions is highly important in daily life, the sciences, and the visual arts. At a higher level, men and women must be able to communicate their thoughts about object and space relationships through construction of sketches, drawings, and maps. Adults often seem oblivious to the many conceptual problems which children must solve. Every boy and girl is forced to puzzle through a succession of verbal, spatial, and emotional mysteries to achieve some acceptable level of mature equilibrium. That level of functioning is defined partially by the culture and the period of history in which the individual lives. Contemporary American culture, for example, places enormous emphasis on verbal competence. Parents initiate the process in their offspring by supplying linguistic labels for objects, actions, ideas, and feelings; thus, performance in the verbal realm is recognized and rewarded from the earliest age. While motor and spatial development also is valued, especially during that period when the child learns to crawl, walk, and explore-interest and encouragement are less constant and unreservedly shown. Educational institutions follow similar priorities when they encounter the child at four to six years of age. They express token concern for spatial learning, but symbolic language domi-

Vectors in the Eighth Grade

Vectors in the lower grades? Why not? When we arrive in a strange city and ask directions for going from our present spot to a desired place, we are usually told how to get there in terms of direction and distance. That is what a vector is, a direction and a distance. This article suggests how vector ideas can be introduced at the end of a first-year algebra course.

Dream imagery: relationship to rapid eye movements of sleep.

George Trumbull Ladd³⁹suggested in 1892 that the visual elements of dreams were derivations of the "psychical synthesis" of night-time retinal sense data. This hypothesis led him to speculate that the eyeballs move during dreaming. "As we look down the street of a strange city, for example, in a dream we probably focus our eyes somewhat as we should do in making the same observation when awake. . . ." Ladd's ingenious surmise went unverified until 1955 when Aserinsky and Kleitman²reported actual observations of ocular movements during sleep. They described 2 types which appear at separate times during the night in a predictable pattern: (a) slow eye movements (SEM's)—,slow, often asynchronous, gliding excursions of the eyeballs at sleep onset and after every body movement occurring during the night's sleep; (b) rapid eye movements (REM's)—bursts of quick, binocularly synchronous, single and grouped ocular deviations often in clusters

ARCHIBALD LYLE MACLEISH, M.D. 1854-1930

Dr. Archibald Lyle Macleish died on May 20, 1930. He was born in Dunlop, Scotland, seventy-six years ago. Early in life he showed the industry and the passion for exactness that characterized his whole life and made him, for a generation, the outstanding ophthalmologist and a greatly respected citizen of southern California. He attended the University of Edinburgh, supported by his own efforts, winning four scholarships, first class honors in the classics and second class honors in mathematics. There he was awarded the degrees of M.A., M.B., CM. and M.D., and he became president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. In 1881, he became Physician to the Presbyterian Mission in Amoy, China, where he had to care for patients with any disease, including dis¬ eases of the eye. Here he performed his first 100 operations for cataract without anesthesia. In 1894, he came to America and settled in Los Angeles ; he had no money but a large family, and his wife was fatally ill. At this time the strength of character that made him a distinguished man manifested itself to the full. He had determined to be an ophthalmologist ; he was told by medical friends not only that was there no demand for such a person, but that he would starve. This proved to be nearly correct ; his gross income for the first year was $50. The temptation to go back into general practice and surgery must have been tremendous. But charac¬ teristically, he made no compromises with his plan, nor did he allow him¬ self the least infraction of his strict code of professional ethics, at a time when the code was far from oppressive. It was a clear refutation of the not uncommon belief that financial success demands a judicious amount of chicanery. This sternness of character led him to an unyielding condemnation of medical men whom he thought incompetent or indecent in their pro¬ fessional life ; tolerance is not always a virtue. On the other hand, more than one ophthalmologist, newly settled in a strange city, owed his flying start to the patients sent him by Dr. Macleish and to his guidance and sponsorship. Dr. Macleish was a member of numerous professional societies, including the American Ophthalmological Society and the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. Carl Fisher.

GLIMPSES OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY IN BRITISH AND SPANISH HONDURAS.

SPANISH HONDURAS. Puerto Cortez, the principal seaport town on the Atlantic side of Spanish Honduras, is reached from Belize by boat in twelve hours. On the downward trip the steamers of the United Fruit Company make a short stop at Port Barrios. The larger part of the voyage is made in what is practically an inland sea made by the numerous islands, or keys, as they are called, situated some distance from the coast, constituting as they do a broken seawall. Port Barrios is a small dilapidated village notwithstanding it is the Atlantic terminus of the Guatemala Railroad. The cornerstone laid for a public building by the late General Barrios remains as he left it, but is beginning to show the effects of the ravages of the elements and the gradual decay of old age. Puerto Cortez is a strange little city, lining as it does the shore for more