Imagining Toronto

Time to Update your Bookmarks

2009-03-25T10:45:00.004-04:00

I'm writing a final post here to let readers know I have migrated the Imagining Toronto blog and all posts to the Imagining Toronto domain. Please feel welcome to join me there, as I'll continue posting updates and commentary on Toronto literature and the forthcoming Imagining Toronto book.

I will not be making any further posts here, but you can visit the new blog at its new location.

[ http://www.imaginingtoronto.com]

Narrating the Crash: Reading Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown

2008-09-23T03:32:00.000-04:00

As major corporations stumble and jittery investors dump failing holdings amid a widening economic crisis, we find our warning in literature. In particular, Hugh Garner's Depression-set Toronto novel, Cabbagetown (Collins/White Circle, 1950; restored edition published by Ryerson in 1968) probes deeply into the effects economic downturns have on ordinary working people.

Cabbagetown is a multi-faceted exploration of the effects of the 1930s Depression of working-class Torontonians, and his analysis seems timely now that another historic economic shakedown seems inevitable. Early in the novel Garner invokes the slowly dawning recognition of the extent of the downturn. At first, Cabbagetown's residents seem dismissive, even smug:

One evening in October the newspapers printed extra editions reporting a stockmarket crash. Of all the city's neighbourhoods Cabbagetown probably took the news most quietly. In the wealthier districts, and even in the middle-class neighbourhoods, the citizens were shocked or sloughed off the news as merely a temporary halt to the inevitable spiralling of the economy. .... Cabbagetown went on its serene way, not caring whether the stockmarket crashed or didn't, such things being as far away and as alien to Cabbagetown as an aeroplane crash in Peru. With millions of dollars worth of investors' paper profits blowing away on the autumn breeze Cabbagetown knew that its hard-earned wealth was safe. Come Friday night or Saturday noon the same familiar pay envelopes would be carried out to the shipping platform by the foreman or handed through the timekeeper's wicket as usual. Whether some stock-market plungers lost their fortunes or whether a particular stock was worth this or that was of no particular interest. As a matter of fact most Cabbagetowners felt rather smug about the whole thing.

Soon, however, Garner's protagonists -- none of whom have stocks or substantial savings, most living paycheck to paycheck -- begin to experience the spiralling effects of the crisis:

The panic wasn't over as soon as the optimists predicted, and over the next few months its results began filtering down through business and industry, and even into Cabbagetown itself. Business said it had to retrench, and it began to cut its staffs relentlessly, and cut the pay checks of those who were retained in their jobs.

Before long they too are struggling profoundly, confronting not only joblessness but ultimately homelessness and privation. Garner's protagonists resort to a variety of strategies of survival: manual labour, domestic servitude, prostitution, public welfare, crime. These efforts are accompanied, inevitably, by a dawning awareness of the political implications and class dynamics of the Depression.

And this is perhaps Garner's most remarkable achievement with Cabbagetown. A staunch defender of the working class and a harsh critic of the excesses of industrial capitalism, Garner nonetheless rejected dogmatic Marxism. His socialism was fierce, principled, and entrepreneurial. His advocacy for the vulnerable invited state involvement only to correct the economic disparities it engendered; other than that, Garner's ethic demanded that the state stay the hell out of everyone else's business.

At a time when an economic crisis -- perhaps of Depression proportions -- seems inevitable, and moreover seems to have been brought about by the most culpable excesses -- it seems especially instructive to re-read Cabbagetown. The novel might not help anyone avoid struggling during the coming hard times, but at least it reminds us of what we might expect.

The Word Made Flesh

2008-09-12T08:03:00.016-04:00

Appearing to the left is the reason for my long silence and the absence of recent Imagining Toronto updates. Our little daughter, Katherine Aurora, was born five weeks early at the beginning of August. It seems she had not received the memo coordinating her due date with the book deadline (apparently not everything crosses the placenta). Despite spending several days in an ~~oubliette~~ Isolette^tm tethered unnecessarily to electrodes, IVs and a gavage feeding tube in a hospital neo-natal intensive care unit, Katherine emerged vividly alive, and now provides astute critical commentary on my efforts to finish writing the book. She's curious and clear about what she wants, and evidently (see image) enjoys giving the finger to the paparazzi. World be warned.

Katherine's unexpectedly early arrival has necessarily postponed the publication schedule for Imagining Toronto, and as a result the book will now be released (Mansfield Press) in the spring of 2009. Exciting details of the launch schedule will be released as they are finalized.

Speaking of the book, writing proceeds apace. Fortunately by longstanding habit I rise at or before dawn to write in the stillness of early morning,which coincides these days with my care-giving shift. I still try to find time to read in the afternoons, sprawled on the chesterfield with Katherine like a pair of laconic beasts, but for some reason these days there seems to be less time for leisure (or even research) reading. My backlog of unread Toronto novels grows inestimably large.

By pleasant coincidence our little daughter shares a name with several well-known Toronto authors, including Catherine Bush (author of several novels engaging with Toronto, including Minus Time (1993), The Rules of Engagement (2000) and Claire's Head (2004); Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer (novelist and literary editor at Bookninja) and Katherine Govier (whose Fables of Brunswick Avenue, 1985, who has also engaged extensively with Toronto in Going Through the Motions (1982) and Hearts of Flame (1991).

Imagining Toronto Book News

2007-11-18T16:27:00.000-05:00

I am extremely pleased to announce that Imagining Toronto will be published by Mansfield Press. Assuming the universe unfolds as it should, the book is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2008.

Mansfield Press is a Toronto-based publisher of poetry, literary fiction, and books about city culture. Some of Mansfield's most notable titles include Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City (2007), College Street -- Little Italy: Toronto's Renaissance Strip (2006), and Red Silk: An Anthology of Women South Asian Poets (2004; edited by Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal).

I am very grateful to publisher Denis De Klerck for taking on this project, which I hope will be a credit to Mansfield's City Building Books imprint.

And now, to clear my schedule and lay in a supply of Bailey's to steady me through a winter of writing. I'll still be teaching at York one day a week, but the bulk of my time and energy will be dedicated to completing the book. Afternoon invitations to escape for hot chocolate, however, will be welcomed warmly.

Last Leaves: One more book sale report

2007-10-27T02:58:00.000-04:00

On Thursday I evaded the week's responsibilities and biked downtown to pick up warm-from-the-press copies of GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto (Coach House, 2007; I'm a contributor) and stopped by the St. Michael's College book sale. A smaller sale than the others, but still offering its own treats and treasures.

My special finds:

Gwendolyn MacEwen's The T.E. Lawrence Poems (Mosaic, 1982). The brilliance and beauty of MacEwen's poetry takes my breath away.

Former city councillor Jane Pitfield's Leaside (Natural Heritage Books, 2000: second edition). The writing is a little wooden, but this book seems thoroughly researched and is richly illustrated with archival images and addresses a part of Toronto often overlooked by other historians.

Jeffrey Miller's Toronto novel, Murder at Osgoode Hall (ECW, 2004). Chatty but amusing.

Charles Foran's The Story of my Life (So far) (Harper Collins, 1998), a Toronto-based memoir narrated as if by a young boy, and featuring the Don River and its ravine.

Also some books for pleasure reading and/or gifts, including David Larkin (with Julek Heller, Carolyn Scrace, Juan Wijngaard and Sarah Teale)'s Giants (Abrams, 1979), a classic illustrated anthropology and archaeology of the giants the authors suggest once strode the earth; Catherine Sheldrick Ross' Alice Munro: A Double Life (ECW, 1992); Beatrice Culleton's April Raintree (Pemmican, 1984); John Metcalf's edited anthology, The Bumper Book (ECW, 1986), a collection of essays about Canadian writing and publishing and a follow-up to Kicking Against the Pricks (1982), which reportedly raised a fuss when first published for its expose of Canadian literary politics.

And then I sped over to Ben McNally Books (366 Bay, a block or two south of Queen) and bought a copy of Mark Strand's New Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007). Strand is my favourite poet, period. Pity he's never written a word about Toronto.

And now, with the book sales ended and the season cooling as the sun turns away from the hemisphere, I turn inward. I've made considerable progress on the intellectual underpinnings of Imagining Toronto despite taking on too many other projects at the same time, and would like now to return to it on a more full-time basis with the aim of finishing it off as a coherent manuscript rather than simply whoring bits and pieces of it out to magazines and journals.

[Old books image by David Pritchard and used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

Beware of Falling Leaves

2007-10-21T13:47:00.000-04:00

Yesterday errands and a strong wind blew us downtown, where Peter and I spent a couple of hours at the Trinity College book sale (it's on until Tuesday in case you're interested in some good deals). Peter bought an armload of science fiction, and I picked up a few treasures, including:

Margaret Avison's Momentary Dark (McClelland & Stewart, 2006), the last collection of Avison's poems published before she died this past summer.

A collection of Diane Schoemperlen's stories, Red Plaid Shirt (Harper Perennian, 2002), which I'll look forward to reading in the bathtub as soon as I can afford an afternoon break from Toronto literature. Schoemperlen's stories are not only good; more importantly, they come across as true. Homey without being domestic, they interweave the mundane (recipes, photographs, trips to the A&P) with the meaningful (meditations on love, morality, finitude). I also like Schoemperlen's invocations of Kingston, a city I loved living in.

Austin Clarke's The Bigger Light (originally published in 1975; my copy a 1998 Vintage Canada trade paperback), the third volume of Clarke's 'Toronto Trilogy' interrogating the experiences of West Indian immigrants in Toronto and their impact on the city's culture. See also: The Meeting Point (1967) and Storm of Fortune (1971).

Charles Sauriol's Remembering the Don (Amethyst, 1981), a kind of episodic memoir of the river and the ravine.

Oh, and other books of course: Irving Layton's memoir, Waiting for the Messiah (McClelland & Stewart, 1985). Alden Nowlan's Bread, Wine and Salt (Clark Irwin, 1973; originally published 1967), an amusing (and sometimes perplexing) collection of his essays, Double Exposure (Brunswick Press, 1978), and An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New & Selected (Irwin, 1985). Jay Macpherson's Poems Twice Told (Oxford, 1981; a reprinting of The Boatman and Welcoming Disaster). Derek McCormack's The Haunted Hillbilly (ECW, 2003); a novel/writer whose alleged cult status I might believe in if not for the stylistic/grammatical errors marring the text. Rob Budde's The Dying Poem (Coach House, 2002), which looks really interesting: bombed out libraries, dismembered poets -- how can you go wrong? Also New Canadian Poetry (ed. A.F. Moritz; Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2000), a decent if brief overview/anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry. And, for good measure, Coles paperback editions of Catharine Parr Traill's The Backwoods of Canada (reprint of a volume originally published in 1836) and the diary of Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, circa 1792-1976 -- which I've long since tired of consulting in their electronic versions.

I have to admit that Trinity isn't my favourite book sale. It's usually appallingly crowded and busy with book scouts too busy chatting via cell with their dealers to get out of anyone else's way. Also far too many master's students loudly and self-consciously reviewing theorists they appear never to have read. As at University College, the gems are mixed in with a lot of trash (dated anthologies and multiple copies of the same title should not be taking up valuable real estate on the tables). The prices are higher than the other sales, as well as uneven: some decidedly third-rate poetry anthologies were marked at $6 while I picked up my copy of Avison's Momentary Dark for only $2. In its favour, Trinity has a great selection of Canadiana, lots of science fiction, and masses of history, military, philosophy and political science titles. For the most part they manage to weed out the marked-up textbooks. And the volunteers are helpful and efficient.

Biking toward home I was nearly run down by a well-dressed middle-aged woman plowing her late model black Mercedes through the intersection of Harbord and Spadina. Her approach to making the left turn was to play chicken with the pedestrians and other vehicles who actually had the right of way. Sadly, Peter and I failed to pull our usual box-phalanx formation in time and she got away with it despite coming close to crushing me under her left front tire.

But we had fun fighting the wind all the way home, stopping in at a great (tawdry, flashy, fun) Hallowe'en store at the Dufferin Mall to pick up a mask for Peter and a few costume bits for me for a party next weekend. Then back to work (still working on a long story about dwelling, homelessness and the im/permanence of objects ... set in Toronto, of course).

[Photo by Dan LaMee and used here under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

Pillage Report: Fall Book Sales

2007-10-14T06:44:00.000-04:00

Ah, fall book sales, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Just as garage sale season ends, the University of Toronto holds its annual book sales. Here's my summation of the line-up.

Peter and I swung by the annual September Woodsworth College book sale on the last day this year and didn't pick up too much, but the Woodsworth sale is usually pretty good for Toronto poetry, popular paperback fiction (including genre novels set in Toronto) and signed first editions. While books are sorted into sections (philosophy, literature, etc.), they are not alphabetized and many good books never make it out of the boxes crammed in under the tables. A related problem is that not much effort is made to separate really good books from the chaff, meaning that browsing can be fatiguing and a little frustrating. A third problem is that the auditorium is not quite large enough to hold the bounty of books included in the sale. More diligent book sorting would solve all of these problems and would probably ultimately mean less work during the sale itself for Woodsworth's wonderful volunteers. I would also like to see more effort to separate Canadian literature and poetry, which deserves its own section(s).

I biked to the Victoria College Book Sale the day before Word on the Street and bought so many books the box barely fit onto my rack. The Vic sale is very well organized; while not really alphabetized, Canadian literature has its own section, and Canadian poetry is further categorized, making it easier to find Toronto titles. Prices are good (although not as good as at Woodsworth) and the halls are large enough to alleviate claustrophobia even among the crowds. Saturday morning seems to be the best time to hit this sale, as the opening night crowds have dispersed and the afternoon browsers are still having brunch somewhere else. A few of many special finds at the Vic sale:

Stuart Ross' Wooden Rooster (Proper Tales Press, 1986).
I am Watching (Anansi, 1973), a collection of poems by Shirley Gibson, apparently about the end of her marriage to Graeme Gibson. One might be forgiven for reading this collection alongside some of the stories in Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder (2006).
The Story So Far 3 (ed. David Young; Coach House, 1974), including a detective story of sorts by bpNichol, a picture of George Bowering looking suspiciously like Boy George and (among numerous other contributions) work by Matt Cohen and ... William S. Burroughs. A letter from Buckingham Palace rejecting a requested submission is included. Overall, a snapshot of Coach House (and local writing) circa 1974 which joins a bookshelf-length row of similar volumes I've picked up over the years. Neat stuff.
Plush, selected poems by Sky Gilbert, Courtnay McFarlane, Jeffrey Conway, R.M. Vaughan and David Trinidad (Coach House, 1995; ed. Lynn Crosbie and Michael Holmes). An anthology I've wanted for quite a while but have never managed to pick up.
Grammar of Dissent: Poetry and prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip and Dionne Brand (Goose Lane Editions, 1994; ed. Carol Morrell). Interesting as a retrospective of these women's work on identity and exile.
Kim Moritsugu's Old Flames (Porcupine's Quill, 1999), a Toronto novel and, if it's like Mortsugu's other work, a great fun read.
Sylvia Fraser's The Candy Factory (McClelland & Stewart, 1975; my copy a mass market paperback reprinted by New American Library), a salacious novel set in what appears to be a fictional Hamilton.
Sketches of Old Toronto (Frank N. Walker; Longmans, 1965).
And at last, a hardcover copy of Hugh Garner's autobiography, One Damn Thing After Another (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973)

Yesterday I visited the University College book sale (which runs until Tuesday). Again a meticulously curated book sale with sections clearly distinguished and, in some cases, alphabetized. Prices are good here, too. The selection of poetry is quite limited (or was by the time I got there), but there was plenty of good Canadian literature, including new and old hardcover first editions, almost all priced under five dollars. Again I biked home in a high wind with a huge box acting as a sail. Some of yesterday's good finds:

Raymond Souster's Selected Poems (Oberon, 1972). Okay, so I paid $8 for this in the 'special books' section. It's a great anthology concentrating (for a change) some of Souster's best work, and is highly evocative of Toronto represented across the decades referenced in the book. There's also a thoughtful essay by editor Michael Macklem, making this a good introduction to Souster's work up to the 1970s.
Graeme Gibson's Communion (Anansi, 1971). I don't care for Gibson's work especially (Five Legs perplexed me so deeply in high school -- when I sought it out specifically because it was referenced in Atwood's Survival -- that I never went back to it), but this appears both interesting and strongly written. It's set in Toronto, and so goes onto the subway reading pile.
A nice first edition copy of Morley Callaghan's Our Lady of the Snows (Macmillan, 1985)
Barry Callaghan's Black Queen Stories (Lester & Orpen Dennys), likewise a nice hardcover (apparent) first edition.
Poetry Toronto (Number 46, February 1988), a neat little photocopied magazine (an early zine, really, or a precursor to Word) including work by Rosemary Aubert (well-known author of Toronto-based thrillers) and a bunch of other people I've never heard of.
Variable Cloudiness: New Poems by John Robert Colombo (Houndslow Press, 1977)
Alana Wilcox's A Grammar of Endings (Mercury, 2000). A beautiful and haunting novel, but perhaps with a surfeit of metaphors. A good book to read alongside Stephen Marche's Raymond and Hannah.

And some neat other finds.

I went through a large pile of the journal Canadian Literature and was pleased to find no. 22, with Louis Dudek's essay on Raymond Souster (one I've put off photocopying at the university library) and no. 35, a special edition on Wyndham Lewis.
I also picked up an astonishing volume called The Urban Experience, part of a 'Themes in Canadian Literature' series (including other volumes such as The Maritime Experience and The Frontier Experience) published by Macmillan in 1975. The Urban Experience is an anthology of Canadian city writing, including Earle Birney's 'I Think You Are a Whole City' and Miriam Waddington's 'Toronto the Golden-Vaulted City' , as well as Toronto-focused work by Margaret Atwood, Hugh Garner and others. Other Canadian cities are represented here, too, but the unusual thing about this book is that it appeared at a time when Canadian writers were not widely acknowledged to write about cities. Indeed, neither Hal Niedviecki's Concrete Forest (1998) nor Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (2005) (both excellent books) references this much earlier anthology.

I also picked up Double Exposures (Coach House, 1984) a book of images and texts by one of my favourite non-Toronto-centric writers, Diane Schoemperlen; Patrick J. Kearney's A History of Erotic Literature (Macmillan London, 1982); artist Ronald Woodall's Magnificent Derelicts (J.J. Douglas, 1975), paintings of abandoned rural buildings; and Heather Robinson's A Terrible Beauty: The Art of Canada at War (James Lorimer, 1977). All in beautiful editions.

This coming weekend I'll be checking out the Trinity College book sale (October 19 to 23) which, if last year was any indication, will have a very good selection of Canadian poetry and literature. Last year I went on a very busy and crowded Sunday, but this year I think I'll go earlier. Right after that I'll visit the St. Michaels' College book sale (October 23 to 27), which I've never been to before.

After that it's a long wait until the Vanier College book sale at York University.

September 11, The Tower

2007-09-11T09:08:00.001-04:00

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

(Mark Strand, “The Next Time”, from Blizzard of One. New York: Knopf, 2000.)

The city wakes up, almost surprised to find itself still there. All night it has felt the deep rumblings of buildings collapsing, has choked on the smoke of their descent.

Or it imagines it has.

We dream of claustrophobia, of hurrying down endless stairways, of secret pockets of escape. We fall endlessly in our dreams, but are caught up in the end in an updraft of our own awakening. We think that the human spirit cannot so easily be crushed, cannot be reduced to a pocketful of dust and ash. We cache the memories of those events in secret crevices of our soul, like the shards of bone and flesh sifted and collected for identification.

We cringe at jet planes.

We imagine ourselves to be pigeons, feet stained red, wings heavy with dust but still lifting us in startled flight. We chortle and mutter and weep in the low shelter of underpasses, and leave curious sigils at the edges of fountains, entrails of grief.

It was not just their city: it was our city, too.

We are frightened of this knowledge. We do not want to think the worst, or if we do, we flee from it like rats.

But there is a hard truth in it, something we cannot afford to turn away from. And like all important truths it is a difficult one, riddled with unbearable alternatives. We hold it in our hands like a dove or a grenade, knowing that carelessness with either will make us killers.

In this city we are enthusiastic about shawarma. We remember to say Shalom to one neighbour and Al salaam a'alaykum to the other. We attend cultural festivals and acknowledge each other's holidays.

But in reducing culture to cooking, sometimes we forget to ask the harder questions about whether and how we can dwell together. We shy away from difference, and deny the hard truths of the things we do not like about each other, failing also to see the things we might appreciate most if only we were prepared to talk about them.

Even an unpleasant truth is better than no truth at all.

The people in this city come from Romania and Israel, from Vietnam, from Kenya, from Argentina and Portugal, from Trinidad and Jamaica, from Persia and Iraq and India and China and England. They come from places that no longer exist, or from places that exist only in the imaginations of their dreamers. Some of them even come from Toronto.

In this city we talk, separately and sometimes together, about the weather, about traffic and the price of oil, about the housing market, about elections here and elsewhere, about our work and families and pets, about whether objects in motion really tend to stay that way.

Much less frequently we also talk about who we are, and explore the parameters of our differences. Sometimes those differences seem too great to bridge; sometimes they are, especially if a hockey team is involved. But if we might learn unpleasant things about each other, at least we would have been open to learning.

Because in the end, sometimes all that remains is a single opening, and at this aperture we might have time to pause for only a moment, to truly recognise each other before we hold hands and leap.

[This commentary originally appeared at Reading Toronto. CN Tower image by rsambrook and used here under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

Redhill's Consolation Wins Toronto Book Award

2007-09-06T06:42:00.000-04:00

Consolation, Michael Redhill's haunting historical novel connecting Toronto's cultural amnesia to its shifting topography and lost archival history, has won the 2007 Toronto Book Award. Redhill received the news and an $11,000 cheque just one day before the Man Booker Prize (for which Consolation is already one of thirteen longlisted works) announces its shortlist.

If there is a single theme linking the finalists for this year's Toronto Book Award, it is history and the persistence of memory despite the erosions of time. Consolation, for example, pairs neatly with the wonderfully chosen archival images and fascinating historical texts of Sally Gibson's excellent Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s (Cormorant). Similarly, Geoffrey James' photographic book, Toronto (Douglas & Mcintyre), captures a Toronto that seems almost to flicker and vanish even as it appears on the page. Uptown Downtown (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box) reads like a swan song for Toronto's eighty-something unofficial poet laureate Raymond Souster, its poems celebrating the present even amid its philosopher's shrewd perspective on the past (how greatly and yet how little we have changed, the poems seem to say). Vincent Lam's Giller Prize-winning story collection, Bloodletting & Other Miraculous Cures (Anchor) is perhaps the odd book out, although its comingling of ambition and mortality suit it to the list ("Gravity shapes everything," observes one of the characters, a comment suited equally to architecture as people).

Since 1974 the Toronto Book Awards have accumulated a valuable archive of Toronto's literary heritage while (at the same time) underscoring our city's cultural amnesia. Indeed, it is possible to trace the development of this city as vividly through its literature as by transformations in its architecture. In many cases the words have lasted longer than the buildings.

[This commentary first appeared at Reading Toronto.]

Tanya Huff's Blood Ties Slashes at the Small Screen

2007-08-21T06:25:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I enjoyed the guilty pleasure of reading Tanya Huff's (mostly)-set-in-Toronto vampire novel series (Blood Price (1991), Blood Trail (1992), Blood Lines (1993), Blood Pact (1993), and Blood Debt (1997)). Last night I had the equally guilty pleasure of watching Huff's novels translated into the television series Blood Ties (Insight) when its two-hour pilot aired on CityTV. CityTV's description:

Blood Ties follows the misadventures of Vicki Nelson (Christina Cox), a feisty, attractive, 29-year old ex-cop turned private investigator, who seems destined to sit on the sidelines until fate intervenes, turning her life upside down. After witnessing a terrifying murder, she finds herself on a collision course with a stranger who is also investigating the case. He is Henry Fitzroy (Kyle Schmid), a 450-year old vampire who just happens to be the bastard son of King Henry VIII. After solving the murder, Vicki finds her forays into supernatural crime are anything but over. Week after week, Vicki's relationship with Henry draws her into baffling cases involving a terrifying pantheon of occult adversaries. Forget fraud investigations and cheating spouses - she's squaring off against ghosts, goblins and ghouls. Vicki and Henry's unlikely alliance soon progresses beyond a purely professional arrangement, complicating her relationship with her long-suffering ex-partner in policing and love, Detective Mike Celluci (Dylan Neal) and pretty well everything else in her life.

The complete first season will reportedly air on the network this fall.

The trailer (click above to view) zeros in on the characters -- Vicki, her sometime lover (and former police partner) Celluci, and the vampire Henry Fitzroy -- but many of the scenes are stolen by the show's greatest recurring character: the city of Toronto itself, which gleams and flashes and sometimes wails in the background, always a crucial part of the action. The lens lurches between scenes set in clubs, condos, alleyways, greenspaces, and underground parking garages that are always almost recognisable, set against the streaming lights of traffic and the CN Tower set apart in the distance as if watching over the city.

The Toronto Star's Vinay Menon gives Blood Ties a decidedly mediocre review, citing its clumsy plotting, occasionally facile logic (Menon writes, bitingly, "At one point, Vicki leaves a voicemail for Mike: 'This is going to sound crazy, but I've plotted the locations of the three murders. And they make up the first three points of a pentagram.' Lesson No. 8: What appears to be the first three points of a pentagram could, in fact, simply be a triangle."), and unoriginal love triangle. And it is true that some of the acting seems wooden, the narrative a little disjointed. I was disappointed, too, that the pilot, while true to the novels in many respects (perhaps too true at times), abandons scenes Huff set at York University's post-industrial campus and environs and filmed them instead at the University of Toronto and Annex neighbourhood. Nonetheless, as Menon acknowledges, Blood Ties is an adequate addition to the vampire canon. Apart from the setting and the camera's evident love for Toronto, my own favourite part of the pilot is Vicky Nelson, a powerful, brash, independent ex-cop who takes on her own battles and who, when attacked, fights back with fists and blade rather than shriek and flail helplessly. This is a welcome departure not only from cinematic convention but also from the vampire genre, which generally narrates women as helpless or insatiable.

Blood Ties is not the first vampire television series set in Toronto. Between 1992 and 1995 Forever Knight aired for three seasons on CBS television, and was arguably a more sophisticated exploration of the shades of darkness manifested in all vampire narratives. But as this hot summer slips into fall and bright days begin to fade into twilight, it seems wholly appropriate that we might look forward to another chilling season, on television at least.

[In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes regularly about the imaginative qualities of cities. Lately she has been collecting and watching television series set in Toronto, including the courtroom drama This is Wonderland (strikingly similar to Harry Wodson's 1909 book, The Whirlpool: Scenes From Toronto Police Court) and Twitch City. She's still hoping for a DVD release of King of Kensington. This commentary first appeared at Reading Toronto]

Rare Reads: Tracing Toronto's Literary Genealogy

2007-08-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

For a long time it seemed as if Toronto literature began around 1968, the year Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown was published in full, the year Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies first appeared in a very limited edition issued by the nascent House of Anansi Press. After that things began to move quickly. In 1969 Margaret Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, was published by McClelland & Stewart. In 1970 Mel Hurtig reissued Morley Callaghan's influential 1928 Toronto novel, Strange Fugitive (described erroneously by at least one literary scholar as "Canada's first urban novel.") In 1972 Oberon Press released Gwendolyn MacEwen's Toronto mythology, Noman. In 1974 the City of Toronto established the annual Toronto Book Award, and after that Toronto novels came thick and fast. By 1987, when Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion appeared, or 1996, when McClelland & Stewart published Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, it might have seemed difficult to keep up with the outpouring of Toronto literature.

It might have seemed difficult to keep up with if anybody had been keeping track.

But, as literary scholar Germaine Warkentin argues in "Mapping Wonderland", a fascinating and illuminating essay on Toronto literature published in the Literary Review of Canada in 2005, Torontonians have trouble remembering our own narratives. She writes,

A key difficulty in constructing the city's metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory.

Warkentin suggests this amnesia is connected to Torontonians' propensity for tearing down the city's buildings in dreams of newer and more impressive monuments: "the urban scene changes with unimaginable speed ... the amnesia of the merchant class has destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt ..." In Warkentin's assessment, we might learn to navigate our cultural territory by observing how Toronto writers navigate the city's labyrinth of ravines, bridges, and intersections.

But it is not just the city's monuments we have neglected and rebuilt. We have done the same thing with the city's literature. If nearly every Toronto building is erected upon the ruins of its predecessors, so too does every Toronto novel has its shadow. And, in the same way that old churches refract and shatter against the new glass towers, early Toronto novels may be seen to reverberate and echo across their successors. And we might learn to navigate this ruptured genealogy by tracing it from one known point to another, as if we were traversing the city from one neighbourhood or ravine or mayoral regime to the next.

Germaine Warkentin traces the origins of Toronto literature to circa 1790s descriptive accounts written by Elizabeth Simcoe and the surveyor Joseph Bouchette. Warkentin's rendering of these early accounts, "from diary, through "statistical sketch," animal tale, short story, thriller, to the novel in its various forms", overlaps closely with William Keith's inventory in his detailed Literary Images of Ontario (University of Toronto Press, 1992). Neither account can do more than acknowledge First Nations depictions of the villages of Teiaigon (on the Humber River) and Ganatsekwyagon (a Rouge River settlement).

But even prior to the arrival of the Simcoes and their surveyors, the French had engaged in the Toronto area with the Senecas, the Mississaugas, the Huron, and the Iroquois for 150 years. Scholars are familiar with Percy Robinson's Toronto during the French Regime, 1615-1793 (1933; second edition 1965), but readers interested in this era of Toronto's past would do well to read George F. Millner's undeservedly forgotten Toronto novel, The Sergeant of Fort Toronto (published by the Gorham Press in 1914), which, thanks to a collaboration between the University of Toronto's Robarts Library and the Internet Archive's Texts Archive, can now be read online here. It is generally worthwhile to read historical fiction with an eye to the fantasy inherent in recreated events, but The Sergeant of Fort Toronto is vivid and engagingly written for its era, and provides insight not only into Toronto (once Fort Rouille) during the days of the French but also into literary preoccupations of the early twentieth century.

The Sergeant of Fort Toronto is, of course, far from the only forgotten Toronto novel about a nearly vanished aspect of Toronto's past. Recently I picked up a copy of Annie Gregg Savigny's long lost (some might say deservedly so) Romance of Toronto, first published in 1888 but reissued by the University of Toronto Press in 1973. Savigny describes Toronto in florid, overblown prose:

Toronto is a fair matron with many children, whom she has planted out on either side and north of her as far as her great arms can stretch. She lies north and south, while her lips speak loving words to her offspring, and to her spouse, the County of York; when she rests she pillows her head on the pine-clad hills of sweet Rosedale, while her feet lave at pleasure in the blue waters of beautiful Lake Ontario.

Savigny's novel may be painful to read, but its preoccupation with representing Toronto as more than a colonial backwater is telling. Further, its efforts to historicize Toronto anticipate subsequent decades of Toronto novels, including the bestselling-in-its-day but now long forgotten 'Toronto gothic' Telforth family saga (Serpent's Tooth, Time in Ambush, Lorena Telforth, and The Wise Brother) written by Isabelle Hughes and published between 1947 and 1954, which traces a fictional Kingsway family and the City's own progress from the 1830s onward.

Isabelle Hughes wasn't the only bestselling Toronto novelist of the era who has been forgotten since, either. Phyllis Brett Young, whose excellent 1960 novel The Torontonians, is being reissued by McGill-Queen's Unviersity Press this fall, also wrote Psyche, another set-in-Toronto bestseller, first published in 1959). Young's Toronto-based fictions might be considered as dated and deservedly forgotten as Savigny's Romance of Toronto, except that The Torontonians seems directly to anticipate many of the same proto-feminist themes Margaret Atwood takes up a decade later in The Edible Woman. Indeed, it seems an error to read Atwood's work without looking back to her predecessors and their renditions of Toronto, especially Phyllis Brett Young but perhaps also Hughes and maybe even Savigny.

As I pore over vintage Toronto novels uncovered through painstaking research or fortuitous luck, I am struck repeatedly by their connection to current works. Vincent Lam's Giller Prize-winning Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, for example which reminds me not only of Don Coles' Doctor Bloom's Story (2004) but of Sol Allen's salacious and perplexing medical novels including Toronto Doctor (1949) and The Gynecologist(1965). Gwendolyn MacEwen's voice echoing in Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004) and Bruce Macdonald's Coureurs De Bois (2007). Connections between Henry Kreisel's forgotten 1948 novel of Jewish immigrant life in Toronto, The Rich Man, and David Bezmozgis' Natasha and Other Stories (2004) or John Millers' A Sharp Intake of Breath (2006).

Even the title of Germaine Warkentin's literary essay -- "Mapping Wonderland" -- has its echoes in Toronto's literary past. Warkentin connects her inventory to George Walker's now-cancelled Toronto-based television drama, This is Wonderland, which represents Toronto as a labyrinth of justice mapped against streets, ravines, buildings, faces. And yet, even Wonderland has a literary precedent, traceable at least as far back as Harry Wodson's The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court, first published in 1917 and describing an almost identical drama of corridors and labyrinths.

Toronto's literary genealogy can be traced back as far back, and perhaps even farther, than the history of the city itself.

[In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes regularly about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities. This commentary first appeared at Reading Toronto.]

Michael Redhill's Toronto Novel, Consolation, on List for Prestigious Man Booker Prize

2007-08-14T07:12:00.000-04:00

Michael Redhill’s Toronto novel Consolation (Doubleday Canada, 2006) is one of thirteen longlisted nominees for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for fiction.

Established in 1968 to honour literary excellence in the Commonwealth, the Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English-speaking world. While the winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000 and literary stardom, as the Booker prize website observes, “both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.”

The 2007 shortlist will be announced on September 6th, and the winner will be revealed on October 16th. This timing coincides closely with the Toronto Book Award, for which Redhill's Consolation is also a finalist. The winner of the Toronto Book Award will be announced on September 5th.

Consolation is a historical novel in the tradition of some of Toronto's best literary fiction, including Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces. It's a story about memory, transience and longing, told largely in the guise of an archaeological quest for valuable photographic plates believed sunk near the long since landfilled original location of Toronto's harbour.

Redhill's use of the lost photographic plates as a fictional device is an especially fitting one in a city that has struggled with its erosions of memory even as it buries its own past as if compelled to do so. As literary scholar Germaine Warkentin observes in a 2005 essay published in the Literary Review of Canada,

A key difficulty in constructing the city's metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory.

But after reviewing Toronto writers' efforts to chart the city's past, Warkentin cautions, "nostalgia will not help us to explore that map of the city today." And despite its title, Consolation offers something more than mere nostalgia. It is a measured assessment, a meditation, on Toronto's propensity for banishing and then calling back its past, the killer who cannot help but return to the scene of the crime. It is a thoughtful book, exquisitely written, and well deserving of both nominations.

It is an important book for Toronto, too. If appearing on the Man Booker longlist will help propel Michael Redhill's career even further (Redhill's previous novel, Martin Sloane, was nominated for a variety of awards, including the Giller Prize and the Toronto Book Award; and his ouevre of stories, novels, poetry, and magazine writing/editing is both substantial and excellent), then the nomination will also undoubtedly increase Toronto's visibility as a literary city.

*

Readers interested in Toronto's photographic history will also wish to explore Sally Gibson's lovely book, Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors, 1880s to 1920s (Cormorant, 2006; also a finalist for this year's Toronto Book Award) and Maureen Jennings' detective novel set in Victorian Toronto, Night's Child (McClelland & Stewart, 2005). Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987) perhaps most famously references civic photography in the construction of urban identity.

[This commentary originally appeared at Reading Toronto.]

Bye Bye Books

2007-08-01T08:48:00.001-04:00

The Toronto Star reported last week that the Toronto Public Library Board has voted to close sixteen library branches on Sundays and cancel thousands of book orders as part of a budget slashing exercise ordered of all city agencies, boards and committees in the wake of a $575 million budget shortfall announced just last week.

What leaves are being torn from the Toronto Public Library? To start with, the Toronto Reference Library, the Lillian H. Smith Library (affecting both the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books and the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculative and Fantasy literature), and fourteen other branches (including North York Central, Albert Campbell, Bloor/Gladstone, Brentwood, Don Mills, Downsview, Eatonville, Fairview, Goldhawk Park, New Toronto, Northern District, Pape/Danforth, Parkdale, and Parliament) will be closed on Sundays beginning in September. Furthermore, a seventeenth branch (Jane/Dundas, currently undergoing renovations) will be mothballed until further notice. On top of this, the TPL has reportedly cancelled the purchase of 14,000 items, mostly books and periodicals. These are cuts that library users will see.

But these are only the visible cuts. Most of the projected $1.2 million budget reduction will be paid for by library workers, particularly part-time library employees who will have their hours cut and full-time staff who will bear heavier burdens because the TPL will institute a hiring freeze. Staff training and travel costs and technology expenses have also been slashed on short notice, meaning that library workers will have to do much more with considerably less.

How will these cuts affect the Toronto Public Library system? Currently, the TPL is the largest public library system in Canada with 99 branches and over eleven million items in its collection. It is reportedly the second busiest library system in the world (after Hong Kong). Perhaps it can afford to absorb a few cuts. But a closer look shows that Toronto's library system has already been labouring under increasing strain. A great many of its branches have already had their hours reduced, including my local branch on Annette Street, which (like about half of Toronto's local library branches) is already closed on Sundays and opens as late as 12:30 on some weekday afternoons. Other branches make do with deteriorating fixtures, aging carpets, broken photocopiers, and dated computing equipment. As further cuts are applied to part-time employees, even more programs (including the Storyteller in Residence program, already targeted by the current cuts) will vanish. So TPL patrons may expect to say goodbye to computer training classes, research skills workshops, childrens' programs, and language skills assistance, and other programs relied upon by many Torontonians, particularly its vulnerable populations: the young and elderly, students, immigrants, parents, the unemployed, as well as people who patronize libraries simply because they have nowhere else to go. Bye bye books.

I don't doubt that the City is in fiscal crisis. I haven't doubted it for some time. But the City's $575 million budget shortfall didn't begin with last week's announced cuts, nor with the news a day earlier that the Mayor's plan to pry $356 million from home buyers and drivers had been defeated by deferral. It's dishonest to conflate these events. The problem, in my view, lies in a short-sighted city council whose only solution to money woes is to demand a bailout or, when that fails, to plunder anyone it can get to ante up, whether via property taxes or through user fees at the local pool. And when that fails? To slash and burn city services by reducing access and cutting hours and employees. This is crisis economics at its worst, and the implications are far reaching: gutted services at the local level, deteriorating labour relations between the City and its employee unions, lack of confidence in council and mayor, and loud derision not only from the provincial and federal governments but from other GTA municipalities as well.

It's almost too easy to discuss sources and solutions to the current crisis. Downloading of decades past. The MFP debacle. Recalcitrance from the provincial and federal purses. Council's "inner circle" brand of cronyism leading to infighting and cynicism among citizens. The city's persistent inability to take public consultation seriously. A missed but controversial opportunity to raise property taxes and/or take advantage of other new taxing powers. A mayor and councillors who'll cut hours and jobs but who won't take a pay cut to save the city. It's so easy to discuss the current crisis that it's astonishing that the City -- whose 'clean sweep' mayor is nearly a year into his second term -- apparently didn't see it coming. That the City was taken by surprise is indicated by the edict that city agencies and staff implement emergency "cost containment" measures by July 31st -- two weeks after the defeat of the land transfer and vehicle registration tax proposal, itself motivated by crisis management. The current council is starting to sound a little too much like councils of the past -- except that this time we've got a fiscal crisis so deep we might not be able to dig out of it.

So what can we do now? I won't speak to the big picture. That's something I'd like Council to start doing. But what about Toronto's public library system? Who will speak for it? I've got a couple of ideas.

* The Toronto Reference Library -- turning 30 this year -- has invited patrons to submit stories about the Reference Library for a collection and exhibit celebrating its tenure as one of the country's most interesting public research centres. Users are invited to submit stories to yourstories@torontopubliclibrary.ca . But why should only the Reference Library hear these great stories? It seems to me that City councilors should also be interested in these stories. Got a great story about the Toronto Reference Library? What about your local branch? How will the cuts affect your use of the system? What would Toronto be like without a public library system? Tell your stories!

* The City has forced the TPL's Board to cancel orders for 14,000 items, mostly books and periodicals. But perhaps the City doesn't think this is a large number. Perhaps councilors don't have any sense of how much space 14,000 volumes take up -- or what kind of vacancy will be left in their absence. 14,000 books, magazines, videos, and other resources. They take up a lot of room. Can you imagine how much room 14,000 volumes would take up in the rotunda of City Hall? In the Mayor's office? In council chambers? Perhaps citizens should help council understand. 14,000 volumes.

Got any better ideas? Surely it can't be too hard to find better ideas than closing branches and cancelling book orders.

[In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes regularly about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities. This commentary first appeared at Reading Toronto.]

[Library stacks image by Neil Lee and used here under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.]

Bookstore Reviews: Steven Temple Books

2007-07-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

Steven Temple Books (489 Queen Street West, second floor) specializes in scarce and rare titles and Canadian literature, but the rarest item on offer may be the bookstore itself. Operating for more than thirty-two years in Toronto, bookseller Steven Temple has seen the independent used book trade around him burgeon and then almost disappear. Once one of a dozen used bookshops along Queen Street West, Temple says, "I'm the only one left" and adds, "I suggest people come see a bookstore while they still can."

Steven Temple Books is the archetypal antiquarian bookstore. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of rare volumes frame a gorgeous bay window filtering muted sunlight onto a window seat also piled with books. You can traverse the creaky floorboards for hours, following a librarian's labyrinth of editions, all the while breathing in a rich vapour of leather, oil, dust, and old paper. It's a book addict's space, and it's nearly impossible to visit without buying at least one book you've never heard of before but suddenly cannot live without. Like The Natural History of the Toronto Region ($40), a rare 1913 first edition (complete with maps) describing Toronto's geology and its flora and fauna. Or a profusely illustrated 1930s first edition copy of Toronto: An Illustrated Tour through its Highways and Byways (ed. Rodnewy Bowden-Smart and Frank J. Beech; about $75). Or James Edmund Jones' intriguing Pioneer Crimes and Punishments in Toronto and the Home District (1924; about $20). Or O Toronto (1973), a collection of artist William Kurelek's beautiful contemporary paintings of Toronto (about $15). Or, if your book budget is much larger than mine, for about $950 you can bring home a scarce and sought-after 1877 copy of James Timperlake's Illustrated Toronto: Past and Present, a richly illustrated volume including numerous plates and lithographs showing Toronto's factories, schools, residences, businesses, and other noted buildings of the era.

With regret I left these books behind, because I had just spent the week's grocery budget on two rare Toronto novels: Annie Savigny's A Romance of Toronto (1888; reprinted 1973), and Anna Durie's John Dangerfield's Strange Reappearance (1933), and a beautiful first edition copy of Gwendolyn MacEwen's Noman (the Toronto poet's first book of stories set in Toronto and published by Oberon in 1972). But don't worry: there are still plenty of important Toronto titles left, including a rare first edition of Morley Callaghan's Strange Fugitive (1928), described as "Canada's first urban novel." and two copies of Callaghan's The Varsity Story (1948; a novel set at the University of Toronto), plus rare copies of Toronto works by Hugh Garner, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Russell Smith, Raymond Souster, and many other novelists, poets, and storytellers who've made Toronto a fixture in their work.

Steven Temple Books specializes in anitiquarian, rare and scarce titles, Canadian literature and Canadiana, and also stocks rare and beautiful works on the world's regions, military, aviation and nautical history and interest, travel and exploration, science and medicine, children's books, modern literature, and a variety of other categories. Readers and collectors of genre fiction will be happy to discover that Steven Temple Books also specializes in rare first, limited edition and signed copies of science fiction / fantasy as well as fine volumes of crime and suspense literature.

You can visit Steven Temple Books in person Monday to Friday from noon until six o'clock, and it's very much worth the visit. The store is located on the second floor at 489 Queen Street, on the south side about a block west of Spadina. You can also browse and order online through the store's website.

[This post originally appeared at Reading Toronto. Bookstore Reviews is an occasional series.]

Reading Gary Michael Dault's Southwester: 35 Poems

2007-07-10T10:58:00.001-04:00

Perhaps it's the July humidity, the kind of superheated air that reminds you wistfully of long country drives through faded brick-and-batten towns, roughly painted 'antiques' signs looming like mile-markers, produce stands tilting at the verge of the highway, clover, manure, skunk and dust mingling and oddly sweet as you pass a tractor turning onto a gravel sideroad. Or perhaps it's Gary Michael Dault's exquisite pen tracing snapshots of southwestern Ontario into poems perfectly evoking passage through rural Ontario, the roads long and the conversations short, the shadows of a hundred small towns stretching across the highway as if to broach an escape.

Throughout Southwester: 35 Poems (limited handmade edition, Lyricalmyrical Press) are tensions arising in small towns whose appearance is the sign of their vanishing. A boarded-up hotel "where the road turns / as if to avoid it"; vacant lawnchairs sitting "like yearning parentheses"; a rural gas station whose ancient, teenaged attendant "stares at me / and leaves through his eyes." Each poem is numbered before it is named, like a series of concession roads, and as such the poems navigate memory the way the creases of a roadmap contain the crumbs of the journey. Dault writes,

Somewhere between
Cambridge and Dundas
there's a place
that has sausage rolls
and we search it out
getting hungrier
as we first mistake gas station
and general stores for it
until there it is
finally
at the bottom of the next hill
the sausage rolls
flaky beyond belief
so that in one tentative bite
there is an exultation
of buttery crumbs
all over your pant legs
and down into the car seat
and you think
well there's nothing to lose now
so you carry on eating
and the car fills up
with this warm new landscape.

But if both traveler and landscape are transformed by the journey, Dault's poems remind us that we cannot truly know a country if we only pass through it:

there's no alignment
when you're driving
all rivers are perpendicular
to you

And it is this lyrical geometry that makes Southwester resonant, like a kind of poetic physics in which both distance and duration are transformed by perspective: "some lowcut girl / nobody to see her sunrise breasts", main street storefronts looming in recollection "but maybe that's just / because you were small," fields like "long quadrilaterals / pitted against you / for you know you will never / attain an order like that," Highway construction where

No detour is temporary
the way it claims
every dislocation
leaves long damage
when you are given
the highway back
you cannot resume
the original speed
of your dignity

'Southwester' is country terminology for a gale blowing from the southwest. At this time of year southwesters appear when humid days grow overcast with the slow gyre of storm clouds forming overhead. The wind rises and stills suddenly, droning cicadas disappear into silence, and "you can see it coming / grey over the mustard fields / trees empty their pockets." You ask directions to the highway while gassing up, wondering whether the town you are leaving will vanish in the downpour. But later, on the highway you notice

So many trucks on the 401
It's like driving down
the main street
of a town that's moving with you.

[In conjunction with the Imagining Toronto project, Amy Lavender Harris writes regularly about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities. This commentary first appeared at Reading Toronto. ]

A Review of Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City

2007-07-03T11:44:00.001-04:00

On the morning after the carnival the city is lethargic, hung over. The sidewalks are awash in food wrappings and wrinkled streamers; a folded festival program drifts desultorily in a wind of rush hour traffic. The city feels congested, and as it girds itself for the day to come it inhales a thick cloud of commuters. They are choleric, too, and as the city and its citizens breathe out they contort themselves into the inevitable chores of tallying the carnival’s takings and its tourist count, pacifying the corporate sponsors, fording the flow of critical press, and beginning the indelicate effort of justifying next year’s budget request. And in this shift is an unseen, almost unacknowledged tension, the tension between movement and volition, between the opiate and its effect, between public means and private ends.

This unspoken tension is at the heart of Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco’s Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City (Mansfield Press, 2007). To Di Cicco, the city’s vitality is measured not in the plans and accountings which impose structure and quantify value but in the spontaneous, authentic eruptions of creativity that give expression to joy. In the creative city, art happens not because it has been programmed but because it cannot help itself. And, averring that “this book is not about what can be done better, but what we cannot do without”, it is into this breach that Di Cicco launches his manifestos, prescriptions for the rehabilitation of a “civic aesthetic” that recognizes “the desire of the citizen for elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity .... [and] all the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

Municipal Mind comprises a preface, thirty-four unnumbered manifestos, and a coda. The manifestos themselves may be combined and read in any number of ways, but thematically they form three parts: twenty-two discourses describing the creative city, followed by a diagnosis of the current civic malaise, and shifting thereafter to specific rehabilitative statements about how we might restore the civic soul by harnessing diversity, creativity, and civility. Through the heart of Di Cicco’s manifestos flow closely interwoven definitions of the creative city, which Di Cicco avers is found in “rejoicings that spark the impulse to create again and again” in an “essential atmosphere of passion”. Above all, creativity is found in “the faithful investigation of ultimate metaphors”. Di Cicco’s metaphors are carried on currents of joy, passion, embodiment; these are “where the romance of a city begins.” A creative city is authentic, unselfconscious, conversational, and unpretentious. The creative city is an antidote to the diseases Di Cicco diagnoses: spitefulness in the civic politic, loneliness, the fetish of “lifestyle”, foolish bylaws, and the dictates of the market. The creative city culminates in self-reflection, charity, mutuality, reverence, and openness to risk-taking. It gives rise, ultimately, to an ethic founded in an aesthetic of grace.

Di Cicco is not the first to discuss “civic aesthetics”, but his innovative use of the term inverts the meaning of aesthetics usually encountered in the urban planning and design literature in conjunction with the “city beautiful” movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Where proponents of the city beautiful movement harnessed urban design to attain desired social goals in efforts to build great capitals of culture and commerce (following the model of Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris), in contrast, Di Cicco insists that “the beautiful is not landscape, or cityscape or architectonic; the beautiful is what people have built in the spaces between each other – a reciprocity, an exchange of ideals and a shared vision.” Di Cicco’s creative city may also be aesthetically beautiful, but more immediate and vital is the “architecture of faith,” and a “city soul” that is “located in the architecture of the space between people and is predicated by congruent aspirations and social commonality.” In the meantime, Di Cicco suggests that we find beauty and inspiration where we may, in the abandoned or overlooked quarters of the city; he observes that “the citizen rummages through the city looking for those sights and spaces that reflect a human scale.”

For its diagnosis of the urban malaise and its lyrical prescriptions for treatment, Municipal Mind is a vastly overdue contribution. It should appear on the desks of every city bureaucrat and politician, not so much as a manual but rather as a palate cleaner between the larded courses of by-laws and budgets. While reading Municipal Mind, I could not help but think Di Cicco was reflecting on some of Toronto's more audacious cultural failures, such as the Imagine a Toronto ... Strategies for a Creative City report that appeared and vanished a year ago like so much other flotsam tossed upon the municipal waves. His appeal to the "legacy of an idea that resonates before and after the clang of turnstiles" might be applied pointedly to creative festivals, like Luminato, whose success is calculated in terms of tourist dollars spent and for which local engagement is a hasty afterthought. If in cities we spend most of our time staring into flickering screens and the headlights of the cars in front of us, Di Cicco goads us to look out the window at the real city arrayed before us, the city we must do more than see but should actually feel.

At the same time, it is in this unceasing adjuration to feel that Di Cicco’s manifestos hesitate and lose some of their power. Di Cicco deplores the dominant civic discourse as “dipodic, western, Aristotelian,” and argues that “poets, artists, designers” can add the necessary holism to our language. But if our cities suffer from a “failure of heart”, then the body politic of Di Cicco’s creative city has a heart but lacks a spine. Di Cicco argues that passion is what we need. But I cannot agree that our cities lack passion. When one young man shoots another in a high rise hallway, or when we riot and loot, or merely isolate and exclude, surely that is passion unleashed. Di Cicco’s claim that “violence is the reaction to loneliness, the absence of collective ideals” is true, as far as it goes, but requires a concerted call to one aspect of a “civic aesthetics” Di Cicco refers to only indirectly and in passing: the discourse of shared principles.

“Only universals cohere,” Di Cicco writes toward the end of Municipal Mind, and surely this is the clearest definition of principle. But Di Cicco’s “narrative of the charitable and the empathic, from which the pledge of civic sacrifice is born” cannot be rooted only or even primarily in the body or the visceral passions, although certainly it can extend to them. It must connect our embodied experiences to something outside ourselves, something more lasting and more meaningfully communicated, something that simultaneously celebrates and transcends diversity. Di Cicco argues that creativity – for him the greatest universal – is the route to civic grace, and I do not disagree, if by creativity he refers not only to the flourishing of the arts, authenticity, and openness to joy but also the harder virtues of standing for shared principles we can agree or disagree on. Di Cicco moves toward this position in the latter portions of Municipal Mind, particularly in his discussions of civility, mercy, and care, but the connecting mechanism between creativity and care – that of principle – seems to me to be incompletely developed. He avers that we must be “poets of a common metaphor,” but perhaps at the same time we would do well to be philosophers as well.

Years ago when I trained and practiced as an urban planner, I railed against the bureaucratization and 'professionalization' of the planning field, particularly its preponderance for reinventing the wheel (in which every new design movement was termed a 'revolution' and gave rise to a new orthodoxy of urban design) and its fetish for quantitative measures of the qualities of cities. Shortly before leaving the profession, in response to a call for greater strictness by the planning profession's gatekeepers I wrote in the Ontario Planning Journal that professional accreditation should be opened to "sculptors of public art; committed social activists; writers ..." and that we could restore relevance to the profession by "stretching the boundaries of our vision of planning to include all that which enhances our relationships with each other and with our cultural, physical, ecological, economic, political, intellectual, and spiritual environments." It is restorative to read Pier Giorgio Di Cicco's manifestos for the creative city, and it is with relief that I will set it beside my equally dog-eared copy of Land Use Planning Made Plain. In September, when I return to teaching city literature, culture and design to university students, we will have the pleasure of using Municipal Mind as a guidebook for our urban pilgrimages.

[This review originally appeared at Reading Toronto.]

Summer Reading

2007-06-20T20:41:00.001-04:00

It's vacation time for the Imagining Toronto project!

I'll still be researching and writing (including finishing a solid draft of the Imagining Toronto manuscript (although some other interesting writing opportunities have come up and might get priority) and writing for Spacing magazine and Reading Toronto and finishing a commissioned piece for Library and Archives Canada and writing a talk for Walk21 and preparing for fall term teaching and reformatting the Imagining Toronto website and ...) but these activities will now be interspersed with time spent lolling languidly in the sun, gardening (and garden-partying) and reroofing our garage.

I am looking forward to catching up on some excellent Toronto reading, including a thoughtful re-read of Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians, which is being reissued by McGill-Queen's University Press later in 2007. Also on tap: more Raymond Souster, Morley Callaghan, Catherine Bush (The Rules of Engagement and Claire's Head), Katherine Govier's Hearts Aflame, and dozens of other books piled around my study. I'll try to update the list of some recently acquired promising-sounding works. My usual reading preferences are for intelligent, philosophically challenging works, but lately I've had a craving for lighter, plot-driven fiction suitable for reading in the sun. Catherine Bush is hardly fluff, but it's much more rewarding to take the time to read her novels slowly, and I'm looking forward to spending whole days with her novels. I'm also reading some of Maureen Jennings' excellent set-in-Victorian-Toronto detective novels.

I tend to use this blog to update on recent and forthcoming activities. Here are a few recent ones.

In May Peter and I co-wrote an essay called "Acts of Salvage" (a summation of our urban scavenging adventures) which Coach House Books will publish later this year in GreenTOpia, an anthology of Toronto-focused environmental writing.
I chatted about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities with Matt Galloway on CBC Radio One's "Here and Now" program on May 30th, a day before my "Imagined City" talk as part of the 2007 Toronto Festival of Architecture & Design.
On June 2 the Toronto Star published "The Book on Toronto", an 'Ideas' feature article I wrote by accident after a reporter called asking for information on Toronto literature that would have taken hours to compile. I called his editor and told him I was not a research assistant. Many thanks to Ideas editor Gabe Gonda for the resulting invitation to write the piece.
Library and Archives Canada has commissioned me to write an essay on Toronto literature for a national project on regional literature they'll be releasing in 2008. More details forthcoming. I'm excited to be participating as a new look at the shifting landscape of Canadian literature is vastly overdue.
And I'm quite grateful to Spacing magazine for making me a contributing editor and letting me write a regular column on Toronto literature.
Oh, and the Imagining Toronto course (code GEOG 4280 3.0) will run again in the Department of Geography at York University. I think enrollment has filled up already, but there might still be room for one or two more students.

That's all for now. I'll still be answering emails (albeit perhaps a little more slowly than usual) and will, as always, be happy to chat about Toronto literature. I'll also try to update here occasionally with short notes about interesting Toronto works.

Happy summer!

The Imagined City

2007-04-13T17:12:00.000-04:00

Haunted subway tunnels? A riot at Christie Pits? The CN Tower toppled into Lake Ontario? Amy Lavender Harris (Imagining Toronto) and Gary Michael Dault (Cells of Ourselves, The Milk of Birds) explore Toronto's place in the literary imagination and discuss how Toronto writers capture the city's diversity and growth, as well as its nightmares, desires, and secrets.

This free public talk is a featured event of the 2007 Toronto Festival of Architecture and Design. May 31, 2007 (7:00 pm) at the Lillian Smith Library, 239 College Street, Toronto.

Imagining Toronto Gets Social

2007-04-05T06:56:00.000-04:00

Wasting time when I should be marking end-of-term research papers, I have created several satellite groups for the Imagining Toronto project. One, Imagining Toronto at Facebook, is a bit of a collaborative sandbox. Another, Imagining Toronto at Ning, is really just a loud version of the RSS feed for this blog. If you are partial to either of these networks, please feel free to join in.

I am pleased to report considerable interest in Toronto: The Novel, an idea to help the city catch up to its new stories by engaging in multiple collaborative writing projects with a variety of communities. I have decided to pilot Toronto: The Novel in the Imagining Toronto course at York in September, and will then be open to expanding the idea. If you would like to join in, I would love to hear from you. I'll be announcing further details soon.

I am also pleased to report several other developments of the Imagining Toronto project.

First, I would like to gratefully acknowledge new funding from the Ontario Arts Coun c il under the Writers' Reserve Program, which is a helpful addition to the Toronto A rts Council grant the Imagining Toronto project received last September.

Second, I will be delivering a public talk on Toronto literature as part of the 2007 Toronto Fe stival of Architecture and Design. Full details are forthcoming, but the talk is scheduled for Thursday 31 May 2007 at the Lillian H. Smith Library on College Street.

Third, I have a bunch of essays and book reviews in the works or forthcoming, including an article on literary watersheds (in particular, the influence of Hurricane Hazel) in/on Toronto literature in Spacing Magazine (coming out in June). Peter and I are scheduled to have a co-written essay on urban scavenging published in GreenTOpia (the third volume in the uTOpia series) forthcoming from Coach House Books later this year. There are other things in the works, too, which will be announced as they develop.

And best of all, the Imagining Toronto course is slated to run for the second time as a fourth-year undergraduate course in the Department of Geography at York University in 2007-08. This course is where the Imagining Toronto project had its formal origin (the project emerged out of a new course proposal the Department invited in 2005), and is where many of its themes are worked out and explored. For this I am very grateful to both the Department of Geography and its wonderful students.

Toronto: The Novel

2007-04-03T12:08:00.000-04:00

As many of you know already, the Imagining Toronto project explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region. Currently I am writing a book (called, unsurprisingly, Imagining Toronto) exploring these connections. From the introduction:

Whole words come alive at the intersection of literature and place. They exist in locations so familiar to us that we don’t even notice them, regions simultaneously so strange that we can hardly conceive them. In the iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987), Michael Ondaatje writes that "Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting." In Soft City (Hamish Hamilton, 1974) Jonathan Raban observes, “[t]he city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps.” These commentaries suggest that the cities we live in are the products not primarily of brick and mortar (or bureaucracy and money) but instead are the invention of our memories and imaginations. In other words, our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.

But in navigating the formal (and formulaic) aspects of writing literary non-fiction (and labouring to be both academic and accessible) I am reminded repeatedly of Toronto author Dionne Brand's observation (quoted in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Toronto literature)that "the literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories."

In the time I've engaged with the city's literature, I've learned that (contrary to repeated claims that Toronto doesn't exist in anyone's imagination) Toronto writers cover a vast literary, cultural, and physical terrain. Yet, as Brand suggests, many stories remain untold. When I teach Imagining Toronto as an undergraduate course at York, I invite my students to tell their own stories about the city. Last fall a number of these writings were anthologized in Urban TEXTures, a chapbook produced to considerable interest within and beyond York.

My plan this year is to do something more directly collaborative, called Toronto: The Novel. My idea, at this point, is to invite participants to help the city catch up with its new stories by writing a collective text about Toronto. In the course we will probably agree upon characters, cultures, settings, themes, and perhaps plot lines near the beginning of the course. During the term we'll write, and while doing so we'll compare what we write to the body of published Toronto literature we'll be reading. One intention will be to observe how these parallel texts converge and differ. Another intention will be to remind students that we all write the city we live in.

I am curious if this is an idea that would work beyond the Imagining Toronto course. Would you like to participate in a similar project? My idea, somewhat in genesis, is that Toronto: The Novel could be repeated in various settings with various groups of participants. The plan is not to 'publish' the work as such, but rather to write, post and edit it electronically and publicly, using open community software and a website.

I'll be doing a public talk about Toronto literature as part of the 2007 Toronto Festival of Architecture and Design in May, and will discuss this and an idea about Toronto literature-focused book clubs (thanks to Sean Lerner for letting this out of the book-bag on the Imagining Toronto Facebook group). If you are interested in participating (or have any ideas about open-source web-based software that would support such a collaborative project and that anybody, including older children, could use; e.g., a wiki), I would love to hear your thoughts here or via email at alharris@yorku.ca .

[This post appeared originally at Reading Toronto.]

Further Adventures in Social Bookmarking: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and the Internet Book List

2007-03-28T10:50:00.000-04:00

Further adventures in social bookmarking have produced the Internet Book List and the Internet Speculative Fiction Data base. The Internet Book list appears, not unlike the Internet Book Database mentioned in the previous post, to facilitate recommendations more than social networking per se. The IBL appears to be a private project (its creator describes the site as a hobby). Like a wiki, titles and author lists can be updated and edited by users, although the site functions essentially as a searchable database. I typed in several prominent Toronto authors and found incomplete listings of their work, underscoring the reality that the database does not pretend completeness and features the titles its users enjoy and/or have read. The IBL was probably innovative when first created in 2003; now, however, it seems superseded by other 'social bookmarking' sites like LibraryThing. I was impressed by the database itself however, mainly because I would love to have one for the Imagining Toronto library.

The second site I have come across is the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, a true wiki project still in beta testing but now open to the general public for editing. This site, hosted by the Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University, seems especially promising for scifi, fantasy, and speculative fiction readers. I have to admit finding it quite delightful, mainly for its democratic character. As soon as I brush up on my wiki editing skills, I'm going to create an entry for Toronto-focused speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. It's not a genre I read generally, but one of the chapters in the Imagining Toronto manuscript focuses on Toronto-based genre fiction and I'm currently exploring connections between the possible worlds of speculative (and noir, detective, and mystery) fiction and the real city. Really fascinating stuff.

NB: Toronto-area scifi and fantasy buffs might want to check out the Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculative, and Fantasy literature located at the Lillian H. Smith Library on College Street. You're likely to see me there this summer, doing research.

Social Bookmarking | LibraryThing, Booktribes, Shelfari, Storycode

2007-03-17T19:11:00.000-04:00

Today I discovered a new 'social bookmarking' website called Booktribes. So new that I was (apparently) its 802nd member, Booktribes "helps you discover great books and the people who love them." Booktribes is the partner site of ABCTales.com, a UK-based online writing site.

As an experiment, I entered some Toronto novels whose international currency is well established. Where they were listed at all, they seemed to show up only in mass market or trade paperback editions, leading me to infer that the website's database is limited to major publishers' 'in print' catalogues. And indeed, someone from the site does indicate that "Neilsen's" is their source. I assume (but do not know for certain) that this has something to do with Neilsen BookScan, a clearing house for publishing industry data. At present it is not possible to add books to the database.

It appears quite clear that Booktribes is in an early beta state, meaning that these (and other) limitations will presumably be worked out. In the meantime, it is worth checking out, but I am not going to abandon my LibraryThing account anytime soon.

Guessing that Booktribes and LibraryThing must not be the only 'social bookmarking' websites out there, I ventured further afield and came across Shelfari and StoryCode (thanks to Vecosys, whose blog provided the links). Shelfari (click here to view my profile and truncated 'bookshelf') allows users to import their libraries from LibraryThing; such portability is a good thing given that the size of most serious bibliophiles' libraries is likely to lead to inertia (the prospect of uploading the same library titles again and again is quite unappealing). I have to admit liking Shelfari quite a lot, as it seems exceedingly user-friendly. A limitation is that (like Booktribes) it is not yet possible to add books to the database. This cut short my attempts to import my LibraryThing library (because so many Toronto titles I have listed there are rare and out-of-print). However, Shelfari is also in beta, and the word is that before long users will be able to add books -- a must if Shelfari is to match LibraryThing's appeal.

I also signed up at Storycode, but have not stayed long, as (1) it allows users to 'code' only fiction; and (2) the protocols for 'coding' (reviewing) 'stories' are exceedingly banal. After that, I browsed through the Internet Book Database, but was so horrified by the "top authors this week" list that I veered away almost immediately. Perhaps I have become a snob. In the end, LibraryThing remains my favourite for its sheer size, sincerity, and extensive customizability.

I am perennially amused by social networking websites, not only because I find them enormous (but cheaply scintillating) time-wasters [disclosure: I met my husband online], but because each week they attract more would-be entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the 'Web 2.0' Zeitgeist. Social bookmarking encouraging close encounters among bibliophiles, however, seems to get closer to the roots of the web, and reminds me very much of the days when I prowled the web researching nothing other than ... books! Plus ca change ...

"She Ridicules Suburbanites" | More on Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians

2007-03-11T16:33:00.000-04:00

A rather scathing review of Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians (Longmans, Green & Company, 1960) lambastes the author for her unflattering portrayal of Toronto's circa-1960 suburbia:

Don Quixote tilted at windmills, Phyllis Brett Young tilts at the sacred cows of suburbia, poking fun at the ranch-type bungalow, the bigger and better electrical appliances, the strange tribal customs of the natives such as the barbecue and the "inverted snobbery (which) dictated that servants did not belong to the Good Life. ..." All these things are satirized with a lively, sophisticated touch, and in this category the book is excellent, even if the suburban pack will be in full cry after Mrs. Young, anxious to nail her hide to their knotty pine walls. (Joan Walker, writing for the Globe & Mail, Saturday October 22, 1960; page 16)

The reviewer goes on to aver that Young's suburban satire "fails dismally," commenting on its "stock characters" and "slick dialogue" and its apparent "nostalgia ... for the Toronto of Rosedale." This may well be true, but I have the feeling Young's reviewer may protest too much and perhaps projects her own longing upon Young.

But the prospect of a novel of this vintage tackling suburbia -- then a relatively new phenomenon in Toronto (Don Mills, "Canada's first corporate suburb", was only about five years old when The Torontonians was published in 1960) -- is encouragement enough to read. This is particularly the case given that I have come across so little Toronto literature focusing on suburbs. Hugh Garner's Death in Don Mills (1975) comes to mind, as do Antanas Sileika's Buying on Time (1997), Linwood Barclay's Bad Move (2004), Michelle Berry's What We All Want (2001) and Blind Crescent (2005; not exactly Toronto, but close enough), and Ray Robertson's Gently Down the Stream (2006; which includes several long passages on the narrator's return to his parents' Etobicoke home). If the boundaries of fictionalized Toronto may be stretched far enough into southwestern Ontario, it becomes possible to include Emily Schultz's Joyland (2006) and Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field (1998), as well as Barbara Gowdy's suburban fiction including Fallen Angels (1989). One thought worth considering is that many of the areas once considered 'suburban' (including Don Mills and even the neighbourhoods Margaret Atwood writes about in Cat's Eye (1988)) have subsequently been swallowed up by the city.

As I have wondered earlier here, I am not sure why there are so few clearly identifiable suburban Toronto novels. It isn't because suburbia is uninteresting (as the American writer Don DeLillo has shown so convincingly, banality is rarely boring), nor is it because there is any lack of willing readership. I'm not the first person to tackle this question. In 'Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch's Troutstream and Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark', an essay published in the edited anthologyDowntown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (University of Toronto Press, 2005), Paul Milton (who, if my memory is accurate, was one of my tutorial leaders when I was an undergraduate student at Queen's) comments,

I came to question the relative absence of suburban sites in major Canadian fiction, an absence made all the more significant given that a large proportion of Canadians live in suburban areas. Why might Canadians choose to live in the suburbs yet choose not to write about them? (167)

Milton goes on to suggest that where suburban literature does exist, its "dynamism ... may result from the interaction between the competing discourses of the dream and the myth," (173), adding that suburban novels "revisit and revise the suburban dream, acknowledging the illusory quality of its claim to transcendence." (182)

Perhaps Milton is accurate. But it seems to me that there must be more to the story, and I would guess further answers will be found by looking at suburban literature not as a small collection of contemporary novels related only by their suburban setting but as a sub-genre with a diverse and contradictory history of its own. I am hopeful that Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians may, as the earliest suburban Toronto novel I have yet come across, give some further sense of this.

['She Ridicules Suburbanites' review is from the Globe & Mail, Saturday October 22, 1960; page 16. The cover image is of Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians; Longmans, Green & Company, 1960.]

Rare Reads | Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians

2007-03-10T15:21:00.000-05:00

Published to considerable acclaim in 1960, Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians (Longmans Green & Company) was a Canadian bestseller in its time but now appears long forgotten.

The book's dust-jacket (reportedly one of the first to show the new City Hall on its cover; see cover image) describes the novel as "a brilliant presentation of the immediate predicament in which we all find ourselves, with Toronto the kaleidoscope through which we view it. To some this novel will be no more than a cynical glimpse behind the city's staid facade, to others simply a modern drawing-room comedy or a delightful picture of successful marriage; to many it will be a nostalgic memoir of the past thirty years, to many more a penetrating analysis of the contemporary social scene." The commentary adds, "these people are called Torontonians -- and their city is unmistakably Toronto during its period of fantastic growth in size and sophistication". The Torontonians appears to have been issued under a variety of titles to suit international markets, including as Gift of Time (1962) and as The Commuters (Pan Books, 1965).

I have just received the book and have added it to my reading pile. Once the teaching term ends in April, I plan to sit outside in the spring sun (please, oh please, let there be lots of it!) and catch up on a huge backlog of Toronto reading.

Initial research fails to turn up much on Phyllis Brett Young. Indeed, in Toronto: A Literary Guide (MacArthur, 1999), Greg Gatenby observes that Young disappeared from both literary notice and the public record long before her last recorded whereabouts in 1981. Despite this, Young received considerable acclaim for her work, which includes a number of novels: Psyche (1959), The Torontonians (1960), Anything Could Happen (1961), Undine (1964), and A Question of Judgement (1969). Young's papers are apparently held by the Boston University library.

Further research turns up an increasingly interesting story. A search at the University of Toronto library reveals that Brett wrote at least one novel under a pseudonym: The Ravine (as Kendal Young, published in 1962). According to an IMDB entry, in 1971 The Ravine was made into a violent, salacious, and perhaps pedophilia-tinged film film called Assault.

From further research still, this time into the Toronto Star's "Pages of the Past" archive, I note the following references to Phyllis Brett Young (shown in the image to the right, which appeared in the Toronto Star on October 3, 1961):

(Friday October 21, 1960): Dennis Braithwaite writes, "Phyllis Brett-Young's "The Torontonians," comes out today and already Hollywood is interested in a movie version. ... At any rate Chatelaine, which has published excerpts, got a phone call from 20th Century-Fox yesterday to that effect ... They'll probably make it a western and call it "Last of the Torontonians ..."

(Saturday October 22, 1960): In an article titled "Coiffures and Books" (in which the hairstyle of The Torontonians' cover artist receives as much attention as the book itself), Lotta Dempser writes, "The Torontonians" is probably the first book to have the new City Hall on its cover. Jean [Miller, the cover artist], obeying what at first seemed like an impossible request from the author (to put a profile of the heroine and a sketch of the City Hall together), worked it out after a sudden brainwave. The profile dominates, and the building is dreamily sketched in with a cocktail glass motif." [Miller also designed the cover for Young's first book, Psyche.]

A Saturday December 10, 1960 advertisement by The Torontonians' publisher (Longman Green & Company), inserted likely to boost pre-Christmas sales, cites favourable reviews of the novel appearing in an array of Canadian newspapers, including one from the Winnipeg Free Press describing The Torontonians as "one of the most professional and satisfying novels, Canadian or otherwise, to have come along for many months." (emphasis added; these days such a comment would be made as sarcasm.)

(Tuesday October 3, 1961; page 41): A long profile of Young, written by Lotta Dempsey, appears in the Toronto Star. In it, Young comments, "What I wanted most was to send some of Canada abroad -- the vibrant, vital country I know; not the dull, gray-tone backdrop it so often seems to come out." This comment seems to foretell the rise of urban Canadian literature, although its rise has never, to my knowledge, been associated with Young's work. The article reports that Young's first novel, Psyche, set in northern Ontario and Toronto (another addition to the Imagining Toronto library) was being made into a Hollywood film. Dempsey describes Young as the "Toronto-born housewife" of a Canadian diplomatic corps officer (unnamed) and the daughter of University of Toronto philosophy professor G.S. Brett.

My searching so far has not produced any further information, but I will add more should I come across it. I think I will write an article about vanishing mid-century women/Toronto writers, featuring Young, Joyce Marshall, and others whose work has been long forgotten. I have a strong suspicion that the subsequent generation of successful women writers (reading about Young reminds me immediately of Margaret Atwood) owes much of its existence to forerunners such as Phyllis Brett Young. Indeed, Margaret Atwood's 2003 Toronto novel, The Blind Assassin (McClelland & Stewart) seems to have been written very much in the spirit of Young's work. Intentional or otherwise, I think there is a connection worth exploring here.

***

Because commentators generally claim that Toronto-focused literature does not precede the 1970s (indeed, sometimes they are unable to reach further back than the 1987 publication of Michael Ondaatje's iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion), I am always eager to push the horizon back further. The findings, though, have been slim so far. Writer Anne Denoon (author of Back Flip (Porcupine's Quill, 2002; a novel set in late 1960s Yorkville's art community) told me about Joyce Marshall's Lovers and Strangers (1957), a long-out-of-print novel I finally managed to track down this week (pending international shipping rates, it will arrive sometime in the next couple of weeks). There is also, of course, Morley Callaghan's fiction, including Strange Fugitive (1929), a novel literary scholar Justin Edwards describes as "Canada's first urban novel."

I do not think it is so difficult to find earlier Toronto novels because few were published. On the contrary, I suspect a great many novels with Toronto settings were published, but because they were popular novels directed at general audiences in the years before Canada's literati rewrote Canadian literary history as having begun with their own works (and the establishment of the Canada Council for the Arts), they appeared to brief acclaim and vanished almost as quickly. Canada's literary history since about 1965 has focused very much on works of high culture (novels exploring the great literary themes) rather than acknowledging the equally important role played by popular and pulp fiction in mirroring our own culture(s) back to us.

And so, in the coming months I suppose I will begin digging through the archives of Canadian Literature and the popular Canadian press (some of Phyllis Brett Young's work was serialized in Chatelaine magazine, for instance), seeing what I can dig up about other long-forgotten Toronto best-sellers. At the same time, I think I will take more care in digging through the boxes of dusty mid-century novels while I cruise the city's garage sales this summer.

If you know of any pre-1960s Toronto novels I haven't mentioned here or listed in the Imagining Toronto library, I would love to hear from you.

Bookstore Watch | Balfour Books Takes it (half) Off

2007-03-09T02:39:00.000-05:00

Got a note from Liz Walker, a staffer at Balfour Books (601 College at Clinton), suggesting it would be a terrible pity to miss the store's annual half-price sale:

Balfour Books Annual Half-Price Sale March 10. Toronto's best used bookstore is holding its annual sale and this year. It will last a whole week. It's a great opportunity to stock up on fiction, photography, theory, design, art, architecture, film, culture studies, cooking, religion and more. All books in the store are on

sale for one week. Open daily at Noon. Open to 11pm.

Mark it on your calendar. Don't come in the shop on March 24 asking for the sale. It will be over and won't happen again until next year.

Sounds good enough for me! In case you're not familiar with Balfour, Toronto Life writes of the store, "[w]ith its whirring ceiling fans and wooden shelves, this shop boasts an appealing old-world atmosphere. One of the last general-interest used bookstores, it stocks almost 20,000 titles; specialties include opera, cooking, art, photography and children’s literature. Balfour carries fiction ranging from contemporary to classic mysteries."

[Old books image by me.]

Literary Widgets | LibraryThing

2007-03-07T10:07:00.000-05:00

Regular visitors may notice the new 'Random books from my library' widget in the sidebar, powered by LibraryThing (an amusing and useful collection of user-generated library catalogues that gives new meaning to 'social bookmarking'). I've uploaded a bunch of titles from the Imagining Toronto library (some of the ones I own, anyway -- I can't keep up with the city's stories!) and have also included books on space and place, phenomenology, and urban culture. I'll upload more titles as time permits. You can also visit my entire LibraryThing library here.

Bookstore Tourism in Toronto

2007-03-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

This morning I came across the (American) National Council on Bookstore Tourism (and the Bookstore Tourism blog), both run by Larry Portzline, a bookish Pennsylvanian. In 2005 Larry visited some of Toronto's independent bookstores, and wrote about his visit here. Interesting commentary, especially given how much has changed in the past two years with some bookstores going electronic only (Abelard and Annex Books come to mind) and others opening (Type Books on Queen, BMV's new location on Bloor).

If you are interested in Toronto-focused literary tourism, you might want to check out Bibliotravel's list of books about Toronto. The list is quite incomplete, but includes some good recommendations. The most exhaustive catalogue of Toronto-focused literature (fiction and non-fiction) that I know about is my own, the Imagining Toronto library. I've also uploaded an incomplete catalogue of titles by genre here.

While you're pursuing literary tourism in Toronto, don't forget to visit Toronto's numerous independent new and used bookstores (there's a list in the sidebar to the right, or visit here for details and commentary).

[Books image taken by me.]

Bookstore Watch | Coming Soon: McNally books on Bay

2007-03-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

I see in the Saturday Globe & Mail ("Bookseller sets up shop on Bay Street") that Ben McNally, the former longtime manager at Nicholas Hoare Books on Front Street, will in June open an eponymous bookstore of his own -- called Ben McNally Books -- at 366 Bay Street (between Richmond and Adelaide). Reportedly the independent bookstore will sell new titles and will focus on quality fiction and non-fiction.

For many years Ben McNally has been an energetic presence in the book trade, writing the "Notes from a Book Addict" column for Booklounge.ca (a trade website), contributing to the Harbourfront Centre's literary programs, and interviewing authors and speaking about bookselling and publishing at large. McNally's departure last fall from Nicholas Hoare Books aroused considerable public curiosity, and so the news that he will be opening his own store does not come as much of a surprise.

I don't follow local literary politics, am always happy to see a new bookstore open, and will look forward to visiting Ben McNally books during my regular Toronto bookstore visits.

[Ben McNally Books image from BenMcNally.com]

Latest Additions to the Imagining Toronto Library

2007-02-27T12:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to suggestions from several colleagues, I have recently begun exploring some of the ways Toronto is imagined through art (especially painting) and photography. My knowledge of art is quite limited, and so discovering the ways Toronto has served as an artistic subject and muse has been a real revelation.

Yesterday two books came in the mail: Edith Firth's wonderful Toronto in Art: 150 Years Through Artists' Eyes (Fitzhenry & Whitside in cooperation with the City of Toronto at its sesquicentennial in 1983), and A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada (ed. Paul Simpson-Housley and Glen Norcliffe, Dundurn, 1992). Firth's book offers reproductions of nearly 200 artistic works interpreting the city, along with short interpretive commentaries of each. A Few Acres of Snow is a collection of geographical essays on representations of place and landscape, and while many of the essays focus on the rural or wild aspects of Canada, Jon Caulfield's essay, "Augurs of "Gentrification": City Houses of Four Canadian Painters", explores how painters have represented Montreal and Toronto: I was most taken with Caulfield's discussion of painter Albert Franck (who is also discussed in Firth's work). [If you are interested in further commentary on the ways artists have defined Toronto, you might want to read the text of Robert Fulford's 1996 William Kilbourn Lecture, "The Invention of Toronto: A City Defined by its Artists".]

I also picked up several Toronto novels and some poetry yesterday at the annual V anier College Book Sale at York University (a good book sale that gets a little larger each year and offers titles across subjects and genres, including plenty of scholarly work and a surprising quantity of detective fiction, almost all available for much less than $5):

A hardcover first edition of Morley Callaghan's A Fine and Private Place (Macmillan of Canada, 1975), whose jacket describes it as filled with "tantalizing hints of autobiography" and literary obsession. A number of Callaghan's novels are set in Toronto; indeed, his 1928 novel Strange Fugitive has been described as "Canada's first urban novel." For reading soon.

Ted Plantos' The Shanghai Noodle Killing (stories; Seraphim, 2000). This collection seems to pick up where one of his earlier works, The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen (Steel Rail, 1977), leaves off. Dereliction for the next generation, in other words. I've been reading Plantos' work on and off (including on the subway on the way home from teaching late last night), and while I find his vignettes moving and compelling, they seem to lack development and tend to stop abruptly in the middle of the page. However, Plantos' portrayals of Toronto's Cabbagetown ring true and are essential accompaniments to literary explorations of this neighbourhood (alongside, of course, Hugh Garner's novel Cabbagetown, as well as Juan Butler's Cabbagetown Diary (Peter Martin, 1970).

I also picked up Eric Wright's A Sensitive Case (Doubleday, 1990; one of Wright's Inspector Charlie Salter novels), Maureen Jenning's Vices of My Blood (McClelland & Stewart, 2006; one of her Detective Murdoch mysteries), and a sizable pile of books unrelated to Toronto.

These and many hundreds of other Toronto titles are listed in the Imagining Toronto library. And if you're wondering where to get Toronto literature for your own library, check out the Guide to finding Toronto literature I've compiled.

Literary Intersections in Spacing Magazine

2007-02-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

My essay, "Toronto's Literary Intersections" appears in the new issue of Spacing Magazine (Winter/Spring 2007; available at your local newsstand or by subscription).

The article explores how literary intersections "mark the city's encounter with itself as a hybrid, multiple, layered collection of beings, places, motion, and meaning" and argues that "paying attention to literary intersections ... helps us recognise and render legible the city as an organic and contested space where cultural and literary genealogies jostle for position, not unlike traffic at an intersection.".

In it I refer to a number of Toronto literary works, including bpNichols' The Martyrology Book 5 (1982), Stephen Marche's Raymond and Hannah (2005), Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004), Richard Scrimger's Crosstown (1996), Ted Plantos' The Universe Ends at Sherbourne and Queen (1977), Dionne Brand's What We All Long For (2005) and Thirsty (2004), and Gwendolyn MacEwen's "The Music" from Afterworlds (1987).

This issue of Spacing also includes fascinating discussions on the myriad facets of Toronto's character that are revealed at its crossroads, including commentaries on Parliament & Carlton, Gerrard & Coxwell, Bloor & Lansdowne, Dundas & Roncesvalles, Albion & Finch, Dupont & Dufferin, Allen & Eglinton, and Yonge & Eglinton. Other intersections are featured, too, alongside considerations of the ways the city's intersections are planned and what they develop into and mean. A more fully annotated discussion of the contents is provided here, or you can pick one up (or subscribe) and find out for yourself!

[Beautiful cover art for the new issue of Spacing is by Matt Borrett. It shows the intersection of Yonge & Eglinton.]

Imagining Toronto the Damned in the (not damned) National Post

2007-02-19T07:54:00.000-05:00

An article I wrote for Reading Toronto (called "Imagining Toronto the Damned") is excerpted in today's National Post. Since the Post (with permission; I should have asked for the by-line since most of the text is reproduced from my original post) excerpted my text verbatim, I don't suppose there's any problem -- other than recursion -- with me quoting myself again here. A note: the list of noir/mystery novels is far from complete (I left off Morley Callaghan's Strange Fugitive (1928) for example -- a book described as Canada's first urban novel).

Pity I posted only the first half of the article last week, without getting into why Toronto is a setting for so many noir novels. But then, that's a chapter I'm working on in the manuscript, and it remains far from complete. In general, though, cities are easily associated with chaos, anonymity, danger, and the service of our visceral compulsions. Their anti-pastoral character makes them a natural setting for moralistic tales. Is the trope outdated? Despite a surge in 'American Gothic' novels, the city remains the focus of many of our darkest fantasies. More to come.

The City

National Post

Published: Monday, February 19, 2007

BLOGTOWN

A SHOCKING NUMBER OF MURDER MYSTERIES SET IN CITY

Amy Lavender Harris has a fascinating post on Readingtoronto.com on the surprising library of Toronto murder mysteries.

''Who'd have thought Toronto the Good could produce such a hearse-load of dark fiction? Since turning to Toronto literature full-time a little over a year ago, I've come across more Toronto-based murders, mysteries and thrillers every week,'' she writes. ''A demon that tears the throats out of hapless transit riders at Eglinton West subway station. A severed hand in the Don Valley, once attached to a member of the Law Society. Royal Ontario Museum mummies with the urge for a snack (not to mention your soul). Mobsters who put the con in your King West condominium. Psychic schizophrenics. A shambling, flesh-shedding thing emerging from the wading pool in the neighbourhood park.''

''Try Graham McNamee's Acceleration (2003) or Tanya Huff 's Blood Price (1991); Huff also writes about a romance writing vampire who lives in a downtown condo and the ROM's escapee mummy. Suburban horror? Try Linwood Barclay's Bad Move (2004) or Hugh Garner's classic Death in Don Mills (1975). Victorian murder mysteries? Maureen Jennings' award-winning Detective William Murdoch series. Punk noir? Daniel Jones' 1978 (1999). Class commentary and crime on the same page? Vivian Meyer's Bottom Bracket (2006) and Pat Capponi's Last Stop Sunnyside (2006).

Ms. Harris --find out more at www.imaginingtoronto.com --is kind enough to post her list of mystery/detective/noir novels set in Toronto:

- Ackler, Howard, 2005. The City Man (a pickpocket gang in 1930s Toronto).

- Rosemary Aubert's Ellis Portal mystery series, largely about a disgraced former judge who finds himself living in a shack in the Don Valley before finding redemption in selfless acts. Free Reign (1997), The Feast of Stephen (1999), The Ferryman Will Be There (2001), Leave Me By Dying (2003), and Red Mass (2006).

- Baker, Nancy, 1993. The Night Inside. Toronto: Viking. Later re-released as Kiss of the Vampire.

- Toronto Star writer Linwood Barclay's Bad Move (2004) and Bad Guys (2005). New York: Bantam.

- Batten, Jack, 1991. Blood Count. Toronto: Macmillan.

- Brady, Liz, 2001. Bad Date. (A Jane Yeats Mystery) Toronto: Second Story Press.

- Anti-poverty activist Pat Capponi's Last Stop Sunnyside (2006), featuring a group of rooming house residents to work together to solve the murder of their friend.

- Carpenter, J.D., 2001. The Devil in Me. (A Campbell Young Mystery). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

- Deverell, William, 1995. Street Legal: The Betrayal. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. (Deverell is the creator of the CBC Street Legal series.)

- Gibson, Brian, 2004. Bleeding Daylight. Thornhill: Oubliette Press. Set largely at York University.

- Gordon, Alison, 1995. Striking Out. Toronto: McClelland &Stewart. See also: Safe at Home (1991).

- Green, Terrence M., 1996. Blue Limbo. 1988. Barking Dogs. New York: St. Martin's Press.

- Holmes, Michael, 2000. Watermelon Row. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. An excellent, if exceptionally violent, novel about how easy it can be to slip into skid row.

- Tanya Huff 's witty and suspense- filled Vicki Nelson series featuring a female ex-cop and a romance-writing vampire: Blood Price (1991), Blood Trail (1992), Blood Lines (1992), Blood Pact (1993), and Blood Debt (1997). Huff 's Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (1989) is also set in Toronto.

- Maureen Jennings' award-winning Detective William Murdoch mystery series set in Victorian Toronto, including Vices of My Blood (2006), Night's Child (no. 5, 2005), Let Loose the Dogs (no. 4, 2002), Poor Tom is Cold (no. 3, 2001), Under the Dragon's Tail (no. 2, 1998), and Except the Dying (no. 1, 2001, a novel which won a commendation from Heritage Toronto).

- MacKay, Scott, 2003. Old Scores. (Detective Barry Gilbert series) St. Martins Minotaur. See also: Fall Guy (2001) and Cold Comfort (1998).

- McFetridge, John, 2006. Dirty Sweet. Toronto: ECW Press. Sex and violence in Toronto's real estate market.

- Meyer, Vivian, Bottom Bracket (2006). A fun, fast-paced crime novel set in Kensington Market. The protagonist is a thirty-something female bicycle courier.

- Moritsugu, Kim, 2003. The Glenwood Treasure. Toronto: Dundurn. Light-hearted mystery set in Rosedale.

- Rehner, Jan, 2003. Just Murder. Toronto: Sumach. Rehner teaches at York University.

- Swan, John, 2004. Sap. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Classic noir.

- Eric Wright's Charlie Salter mystery series, including The Last Hand (2002), The Night the Gods Smiled (1984; winner of the City of Toronto book award), Smoke Detector (1984), Death in the Old Country (1985), A Single Death (1986), A Body Surrounded by Water (1987), A Question of Murder (1988), A Sensitive Case (1990), Final Cut (1991), A Fine Italian Hand (1992), and Death By Degrees (1993).

Helplessly Waiting for the new Gowdy

2007-02-07T07:29:00.000-05:00

Last night I read in Toronto Life that Barbara Gowdy's got a new Toronto novel coming out anon. It's called Helpless (Harper Collins, 2007: release date February 16 according to Amazon.ca). The publisher's description:

Helpless is Barbara Gowdy’s brilliant new novel, a provocative, gripping story of an unthinkable act and a mother’s heroic love for her child.

Rachel is an uncommonly beautiful young girl. With her tawny skin, pale blue eyes and chromium-blond hair, she is a cherished gift to her mother, Celia. Celia is a single parent holding down two jobs. All too aware of her own precarious equilibrium, she worries about Rachel’s innocent longing for her unknown father.

When a blackout plunges the city into darkness and confusion, Rachel is snatched away. Celia, numb with terror and guilt about the choices she has made, confronts the reality of every mother’s worst nightmare. The media coverage is tremendous. Closely monitoring it is Ron, a small-appliance repairman with a rare collection of vintage vacuums in his basement. Though Rachel is a stranger to him, he feels oddly connected to her, as though she is his responsibility. His feelings for her are, at once, tender, misguided and chillingly possessive.

Tapping into the fear and tension just below the surface of contemporary city life, Gowdy’s clear-eyed prose artfully urges us to consider what we dare not look at too closely. With her uncanny ability to lay bare our common soul and to fearlessly explore the intricate complexities of love, Gowdy has created a masterful novel.

I've pre-ordered a copy from Amazon.ca. (Surprised? If you're curious about my book-buying practices, check out "BMV Books: Toronto's Latest Literary Anti-Christ?", an article I wrote recently for Reading Toronto. I tend to buy new major press books online so I can afford to buy smaller-press books locally in person.) Once it's released I'll review the book for Reading Toronto.

Gowdy's novels are almost always somewhat uncomfortable to read, partly because they seem to hone in on the perverse (or sometimes merely perplexing) facets of human behaviour. Her short story, "We So Seldom Look on Love" (1992, anthologised in her story collection of the same title) describes a necrophiliac woman's desire to connect with something transcendent even in death; this story was turned into the well-known film Kissed (1996). Her excellent Mister Sandman (1995) explores how dark secrets can sometimes keep a family together. Falling Angels (1989) is a suburban gothic about relationships between compulsive, abusive parents and their co-dependent daughters. Gowdy's much award-shortlisted novel about elephants, love, death, and memory, The White Bone (1998) made her a literary mogul. I am reluctant to confess that I haven't read it (yet), nor The Romantic (2003), nor what appears to be her first novel, Through the Green Valley (1988). Summer reading, perhaps.

Gowdy's literary gifts are prodigious. She is a superb stylist who constructs novels rather than the incompletely scripted prose renderings many well-known Canadian writers produce (I love those texts, too, but it's often an error to call them novels: Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion -- which I admire for its lyrical qualities and rich symbolism but not for its plot -- is probably one of the worst offenders). Her imagination for the disturbing is unique, perhaps most of all because she can humanize even monstrosity. She reminds us that our own struggles against selfishness, envy, rage, and love may be different only circumstantially from those of the characters she constructs her novels around.

I expect that Gowdy's new novel will ruffle a few feathers, tackling as it appears to the squirm-inducing subjects of pedophilia and obsession. Likely a few shocked reviewers will write "Well I never ...!" commentaries on the book, and will seek to pigeon-hole Gowdy further into the "Southern Ontario Gothic" slot they seem to have chosen for her. But I anticipate it will be harder to undo the power of her narrative and text. I look forward to reading Helpless, and will report my thoughts on it soon

By the way, if your tastes run toward the 'gothic', some other Toronto novels I'd recommend highly are Michelle Berry's Blind Crescent (2005, an amusing suburban horror reminiscent of Don Delillo's work), Bill Cameron's Cat's Crossing (2003) or Timothy Findley's Headhunter (1993).

Winter Reading and Writing

2007-01-19T07:55:00.000-05:00

What a busy fall! Between teaching the Imagining Toronto course and the Kensington Market field research course, and doing a bunch of talks (1, 2, and 3) and publishing articles and a book chapter and writing for Reading Toronto every Tuesday, I haven't had much time to update here.

And this winter I'm even busier, pushing forward with the Imagining Toronto manuscript and farming out chapters for publication, and a more personal work tentatively called Acts of Salvage (excerpts from which appear occasionally at Reading Toronto ... here and here and here) and continuing to write short pieces for Spacing magazine as long as they'll have them and teaching a writing course at York called The Naked City and another course on theories of space and place and so on and so forth.

I'm also kept busy re-filling the bird feeder outside my office window every two or three days, now that whole charms of finches and sparrows have discovered it.

But at my desk, and on the subway, and in the bathtub on cold winter evenings with a glass of Bailey's, I am continuing to read (almost) every piece of Toronto literature I can get my hands on.

Recent, planned, and ongoing reads:

Sally Gibson's excellent Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s (Cormorant, 2006), which I have reviewed here.

Gordon Stewart Anderson's The Toronto You are Leaving (Untroubled Heart, 2006), a novel about young gay men's experiences in Toronto during the 1970s, which I'll be reading shortly and will review for Reading Toronto soon.

Tanya Huff's funny and faintly frightening Blood Price (Daw, 1991), a detective/vampire novel set in Toronto, featuring a nearsighted ex-cop who teams up with a vampire who writes bodice rippers to hunt a demon. I almost never read genre fiction except under duress or for research purposes, but this one's really good (it's the first novel of Huff's Vicky Nelson series). Apparently there's a television series in production. Believe it or not, there is a huge list of detective / mystery / urban fantasy novels featuring Toronto (if you're interested in reading some of it, send me an email and I'll send you a list).

I've also dipped into Trevor Cole's The Fearsome Particles (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) and Vincent Lam's Giller Prize winning Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (Random House, 2005).

This morning I came across reference to a new Toronto novel, John Miller's A Sharp Intake of Breath (Dundurn, 2007), which is set in 1930s Toronto and features both Kensington Market and Emma Goldman (a winning combination if there ever was one). I've ordered the book today and look forward to reading and reviewing it.

Otherwise, I'm reading much of the scholarly literature on space and place (Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Casey, Heidegger [of course], Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, Ted Relph, etc. etc.)

And a few other books I've picked up and am reading, most notably Arman Marie Leroi's Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (Viking, 2003), appropriate because I have recently re-read Katherine Dunn's Geek Love; and Robert Polhemus' Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority (Stanford University Press, 2005), an interesting study about what younger women seek from older men (a book which has caused me to start guiltily from time to time, given that my close male friends tend to be much older, and I'm married to someone nearly a decade my senior ... not that I have an Electra complex ... I hope).

And today in the mail I hope to receive Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (Knopf, 2006). Usually I want to smack Manguel for self-indulgence, but this time I'll go along with the guilty pleasure. It's supposed to snow today, meaning that it will be perfect weather for bathtub reading.

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach

2006-09-18T11:56:00.000-04:00

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach is a project by conceptual artist Iris Haussler deconstructing the invented legacy of Joseph Wagenbach, a reclusive Toronto artist who is narrated to have filled his downtown Toronto home with sculptures and other works in the art brut and classical styles. The project invites meditation on the city’s identities as concealed and revealed through narrative and art; it invokes themes of immigration, identity, reclusion, exposure, liminality, forgetting and remembrance, loss and accumulation and memory. The Legacy is curated by Rhonda Corvese.

The project has raised controversy because of the ways it mingles reality and imagination in the construction of a narrative. Feature articles have appeared in the Globe & Mail ("Portrait of the artist as a young fake", 16 September 2006), the Toronto Star ("Homage to a man's faux life", 16 September 2006), and the National Post ("Reclusive downtown artist a hoax" and "Does the artist's story affect the art", 12 September 2006).

An exhibition and panel discussion will be held at the Goethe Institute (163 King Street West, Toronto) on this Wednesday September 20, 2006. The exhibition opens at 5:00 pm; the panel discussion will occur at 7:00 pm. Panelists are Iris Haussler (the artist); Markus Schubert (art brut photographer); Mark Kingwell (philosopher); and Amy Lavender Harris (Geographer and environmental phenomenologist). This event is open to the public; admission is free. The panel discussion promises to address questions (as well as pose new ones) about art, narrative, and identity (my own talk will be called "The City's Vanishing Narratives", and will explore 'The Legacy's' real and literary precedents).

The public is also able to tour the Joseph Wagenbach house on weekdays between 3:00 and 7:00 pm (Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5:00 pm). It's located at 105 Robinson Street (two blocks north of Queen, west of Bathurst: Robinson runs parallel to Queen). Bookings must be pre-arranged through the website: http://www.haeussler.ca/legacy/ .

(Images are copyright Iris Haussler)

Images of Suburbia

2006-08-23T07:26:00.000-04:00

(The above aerial photograph of Markham was taken by Ian Duke and used, via Wikipedia, under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.)

As I finalize materials and readings for Imagining Toronto. a literary geography course I'll be teaching at York University in September after having spent a year reading and researching the city's literature for the Imagining Toronto project, I remain struck by the curious absence of suburban narratives from this otherwise rich and diverse body of work. Toronto's downtown is depicted in all its grotty, lurid, or hidden splendour. Readers of Toronto literature encounter punk-rock poets, streetcar philosophers, bums, bureaurcrats, and housewives mingling among the viaducts, valleys, and neighbourhoods that give form to the imagined city. A fictional telephone book of Toronto would list thousands of invented names, its literary atlas hundreds of real or surreal neighbourhoods given life in the city's novels. But there are huge gaps in Toronto's literary terrain: one of the largest is the relative paucity of suburban narratives. As Canadian literary scholar Paul Milton writes in an essay on suburban fiction published in Downtown Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2005), "[m]y suburban life was not a factor in Canadian literature. 'Where is here,' you ask? 'Somewhere else,' I would respond."

Milton's essay explores the "suburban myth" of the homogenous, faceless, white, middle-class suburban landscape, stultifying, banal, and alienating to residents and visitors alike. At the same time, Milton exposes the origins of this myth in late twentieth-century urban critiques of suburbs which, while strongly influencing research and public perception, were primarily aesthetic and vastly oversimplified the realities of the suburban experience. Milton cites Unplanned Suburbs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), historian Richard Harris' groundbreaking study of early Toronto suburbs developed by working-class owner-builders buying the cheapest avilable land at the urban fringe, a phenomenon still evident in the architecturally eclectic residential neighbourhoods that grew between the urban core and the mass suburbs of the century's later decades. In Toronto, excellent examples of such self-built suburbs are visible along side streets near Keele north of St. Clair and along Weston Road into Etobicoke (Anatanas Sileikas' Buying On Time (Porcupine's Quill, 1997) gives fictional voice to these latter suburbs); they are also characteristic of older parts of Scarborough. Demographically and architecturally speaking, suburbs became homogenized only gradually, a trend which seems to have reversed itself considerably if the last decade of Census data is any indication. John Bentley Mays' article in last week's Globe & Mail on Cathedraltown, a New Urbanist suburb near Markham, seems to confirm this shift, as does the presence of the growing Sikh community around Mississauga's Khalasa Darbar Gurdwara, large Chinese communities in Markham and Richmond Hill, and other ethnic and multi-ethnic suburbs in the Greater Toronto Area. The character of Toronto's suburbs has shifted sharply throughout their century-long existence; it would seem that our narratives of them should shift accordingly. The odd thing is not so much that the narratives have shifted so little, but that there are so few of them.

The first suburban Toronto novel I read was Hugh Garner's Death in Don Mills (1975, Ryerson), a novel riddled with drugs, derelicts, detectives, and a dead woman, written about the neighbourhood John Sewell described in The Shape of the City (University of Toronto Press, 1993) as "Canada's first corporate suburb." But Hugh Garner was an anomaly among Canadian writers, well known for his willingness to write about the seamy underside of urban and suburban life. And if his depiction of Don Mills was shocking when it was first published, it seems a prosaic rendering of Don Mills now, a mish-mash of residential, corporate, and industrial structures in the city's north-east quadrant.

Since reading Death in Don Mills, I have come across novels depicting Toronto (or at least southern Ontario) suburbs, but finding them has required some concerted digging and a very flexible notion of the extent of Toronto's suburban reach. Many are set too far away, even if their depictions of suburbia are instructive to Toronto readers. Paul Milton's examples, Joan Barfoot's 1982 novel, Dancing in the Dark, and Gerald Lynch's Troutstream (1995) describe suburbs of London and Ottawa respectively. Kerri Sakamoto's haunting novel, The Electrical Field (Norton, 1998), describes an unnamed suburb that strikes me as further west or north than Toronto. Emily Schultz's Joyland (ECW, 2006) is set in fictional South Wakefield, a rustbelt community seeming to describe the landscape and people nearer to Hamilton or even Windsor than Toronto. Sakamoto and Schultz's invented suburbs are one step away from the explicitly unnamed suburbs of Michelle Berry's scathing Blind Crescent (Penguin, 2005) and Barbara Gowdy's Falling Angels (Random House, 1989). Notwithstanding real or fictional distance, I have sought to integrate these novels into the Imagining Toronto course because there are few more obviously 'GTA' representations of suburban life. The two good examples I do know about are Toronto Star columnist Linwood Barclay's darkly funny Bad Move (Bantam, 2004), about murder and mayhem in north Oakville (which explicitly ties themes of escape and ennui to suburban life); and Lawrence Hill's fluid, lyrical Any Known Blood, a fictionalized history of five generations of the Crane family, descendents of an escaped slave who settled in Oakville. Other novels, including Russell Smith's Noise (Porcupine's Quill, 1998) and Ray Robertson's Gently Down the Stream (Cormorant, 2005) incorporate long descriptions of visits to parents' and friends homes in the suburbs, but the protagonists themselves live in the city. Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor, 2005) describes a garbage-night dumpster search for electronic and computer parts extending into the suburbs north of North York. And then there's Bail Papadimos' surly postindustrial landscape in The Hook of it Is (Emergency Press, 1989):

Walking south on Weston Road or Jane Street or who knows. No cars, no cabs. Wide streets, looking like dormant runways, lined with gray apartment towers. Broken only by futuristic gas bars and silent, screaming mall signs. McDeathburgers and Jonny Mufflerface and Factory Wholesale Discount Bargain Outlet.

And so. what do these depictions of suburban life tell us about Toronto? Most pointedly they show that the suburbs are darker and more diverse than one might think. Far from being bland, faceless, homogenous no-places, the suburbs practically seethe with drama and pathos. Certainly they give credence to the stereotypical tropes, especially of escape, entrapmnent, boredom, and alienation, but they also portray communities as interesting and deserving of a place in the imagination as the city itself.

I am still looking to add to the list of suburban Toronto literature. If you know of additional novels, stories, poems, or other works, please let me know about them.

Note: This post originally appeared at Reading Toronto.

Where and How to Find Toronto Literature: A Guide

2006-08-20T15:37:00.000-04:00

I have posted Where and How to Find Toronto Literature: A Guide to the Imagining Toronto website. The guide offers a comprehensive list of Toronto bookstores (new and used), online sources, libraries and archives, book sales, and other sources for finding Toronto literature.

Imagining Toronto Updates

2006-08-08T16:53:00.000-04:00

A few people have pointed out that I don't update the Imagining Toronto weblog very frequently. There are two principal reasons for this:

In May 2006 I joined Reading Toronto as a contributing writer, and now post there every week (commentaries and ideas every Tuesday, with reviews of new, classic, and evocative Toronto literature every second week). If you are interested in reading my work, please click over to Reading Toronto. I will, however, do my best to post regular links here when I post there, just to faciliate finding the articles and reviews.
Much of my energy this summer has gone into developing Imagining Toronto into a new senior undergraduate course which I'll be teaching in the Geography Department at York University this fall, a book chapter and various articles, and a couple of talks scheduled for the fall. I've been puddling away at the Imagining Toronto manuscript as well, and hope to produce a full draft by the summer of 2007.

This weblog should become more active in September 2006, when it goes interactive as part of the Imagining Toronto course. At that point I'll be encouraging students to contribute to the blog.

In the meantime, here are some details of upcoming Imagining Toronto events. If you'd like more information, please contact me at alharris@yorku.ca . Also, please visit the Imagining Toronto website, which is updated every few days and includes the large and expanding Imagining Toronto library (a catalogue of Toronto fiction and prose as well as critical literature).

1 November 2006
Scheduled release of The State of the Arts: Culture in Toronto (Coach House Books, forthcoming 2006) which will include my essay, "Toronto's Tower of Babel" (a considerably expanded version of a piece originally appearing at Reading Toronto) You can pre-order the book here.

20 September 2006
I will join philosopher Mark Kingwell, photographer Markus Schubert, artist Iris Haussler, and curator Rhonda Corvese at the Goethe-Institut Toronto to discuss the legacy of a reclusive Toronto artist who filled his Toronto home with sculpture. My talk will be titled "The City's Vanishing Narratives." "The Legacy" exhibition and panel discussion will take place at the Goethe-Institut Gallery (opening 5-8pm, panel discussion 7pm). Some details here; more to come. This is a free public event; please feel welcome to come.

15 September 2006
I will speak on opening night at Salon Voltaire's fall lecture series. Title: "Imagining Toronto: Facts, Figments, and the Fictional City". Venue: Jamie Kennedy's restaurant at the Gardiner Museum. For further details, click here. Advance media coverage here.

September 2006
My "Imagining Toronto: Essential Toronto Reads" article will be published in Spacing Magazine. This is a vastly reconceived version of a piece originally appearing at Reading Toronto.

September 2006
I'll be teaching Imagining Toronto as a new fourth year undergraduate course in the Department of Geography at York University. Details here and here (check regularly for updates).

Imagining Toronto: A Review of Pat Capponi's Last Stop Sunnyside

2006-05-24T08:36:00.000-04:00

A drunken, shouting woman is evicted one night from a Toronto rooming house; two weeks later her bruised body washes up at Sunnyside Beach. Meagre evidence suggests suicide; quickly the case is closed. Another transient lost to the street; one more death to be added to the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee's homeless death list.

Who will remember Maryanne? In well-known Toronto writer and mental health care advocate Pat Capponi's new novel, Last Stop Sunnyside (Harper Collins, 2006), Maryanne's friends collaborate to solve the mystery of her death and locate another missing woman. But Maryanne's friends are a motley lot: a recovering rape victim, a psychiatric out-patient, a transient with an anger management problem, an elderly woman impoverished after gambling her savings away, and an agoraphobic medical school drop-out occupying another derelict Parkdale rooming house. Last Stop Sunnyside is not your conventional detective novel, but it reveals facets of Toronto too often overlooked, stepped over swiftly like a strung-out street kid holding out a cup at the corner of College and Spadina.

Pat Capponi is best known for her memoir Upstairs in the Crazy House (Viking, 1992) and four other books chronicling the lives of the marginalized poor and mentally ill. Last Stop Sunnyside integrates their essence into a moving and richly developed narrative of solidarity and courage in the face of deprivation, violence, and marginality. Capponi does not gloss over her characters' struggles with booze, drugs, bureaucrats, or their own inner demons. Instead, she invites her readers to empathize with their grief, their perseverence, their loneliness, and their hope. As the elderly and dignified Miss Semple comments, "I'm not crazy, you know. I spent a few years on the streets, and maybe I was yelling, but I was never crazy. I was just confused, wondering where everyone had gone, my family, my friends."

Last Stop Sunnyside is remarkable not only as a compelling detective story or for its instructive representations of the lives and struggles of the marginalized poor, but also because of its vivid characterizations of Toronto. Capponi describes Parkdale's uneasy mix of gentrified and derelict streets with a familiar eye; her depictions of Harbourfront, the Queen Streetcar, rapacious landlords, well-intentioned cops, the little theatre crowd, drop-in centres, and the haunted men and women who populate the city's streets are glitteringly astute. These eloquent depictions carry the novel far beyond the narrative frame of a straight-forward mystery novel and set Capponi apart even from other luminary Toronto mystery writers such as Maureen Jennings (Vices of My Blood; Let Loose the Dogs), Rosemary Aubert (Red Mass; Leave Me By Dying), and Eric Wright (The Last Hand; The Night the Gods Smiled). As a first-time novelist, Capponi's gift lies in her ability to knowledgeably and movingly depict the lives of Toronto's urban underclass. If some passages in the novel are painful to read because of their graphic descriptions of violence or destitution, this pain is mild compared to the anguish of being abandoned and forgotten. As Ed, Dana's friendly cop comments,

You know what I find even harder? People whose deaths don't disturb anyone. When we can't find a single person to mourn or remember or even identify a deceased. It makes me wonder about life, the kind of life that doesn't touch even one individual. You cared, your friends cared about her. That says a lot about her, and about you.

Last Stop Sunnyside is reportedly the first installment of the Dana Leoni mystery series; Pat Capponi is currently at work on a sequel. In the meantime, Last Stop Sunnyside joins a small and varied collection of other works exploring poverty and homelessness in Toronto, including Shaunessy Bishop-Stall's Down to This (2004), Richard Scrimger's Crosstown (1996), Basil Papadimos' The Hook of It Is (1989), and Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown (1969).

This review was originally published at Reading Toronto.

Imagining Toronto at Reading Toronto

2006-05-23T10:32:00.000-04:00

An announcement:

I have become the contributing book reviewer for Reading Toronto, and will publish reviews of new, evocative, and classic Toronto works every second Tuesday.

Click here to read my review of Pat Capponi's Last Stop Sunnyside (Harper Collins, 2006).

To suggest a book for review, please comment here or contact me at alharris@yorku.ca .

Imagining Toronto: Essential Toronto Reads

2006-05-19T11:09:00.000-04:00

There is a small but exalted Toronto canon, five novels which have achieved sufficient prominence to stay reliably in print. These are: Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown (1968), Katherine Govier's Fables of Brunswick Avenue (1985), Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988), and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (1996). These are all worthy books, deservingly well-known for their iconic depictions of Toronto.

But the city's fictions flow well beyond these pages, and it is an error to stop reading so soon. A complete library of published Toronto literature would fill many groaning shelves. And so, in the interest of expanding Toronto's literary canon, here are thirteen Toronto books -- seven novels, two poetry collections, and four short story anthologies -- that give further voice to the city's lives and longings and traverse more of its liminal and literary terrain.

Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Knopf, 2005). A beautiful, moving novel about the lives and longings of the city. Told primarily through the eyes of five young Torontonians, the novel courses with their desires, the losses and dreams of their families, and the hopes of those they encounter in the city's dwellings, streets, and open spaces.

A companion piece is Thirsty (also by Dionne Brand; McClelland & Stewart, 2002), a paean to the city, at once aching and beautiful, murderous and giving.

Sarah Dearing's Courage My Love (Stoddart, 2001) and Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Tor, 2005). Two novels set primarily in Kensington Market. Dearing takes on the tensions between neighbourhoods and lifestyles; her principal character seeks identity and belonging, renaming both herself and parts of her adopted neighbourhood in order to do so. Doctorow explores the difficulties and possibilities of communication across categories, experiences, and multiple identities. His disparate characters work on building a free, city-wide guerilla, wireless network built out of scavenged electronic parts. His identity-seeking (and thus ambivalently named) protagonist tries to rescue himself by saving others. Courage My Love won the 2002 City of Toronto Book Award; Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town (which should be a candidate for the 2006 Award) may be read online here.

Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner / Aspect, 1998). Ti-Jeanne lives with her new baby and spiritualist-healer grandmother on the old Riverdale Farm in a post-apocalyptic version of Toronto. In a city gutted and abandoned by the rich, gangs control the streets: the city's redemption relies upon Ti-Jeanne's ability to channel traditional African and Caribbean knowledge and her willingness to stand against darkness and graft. Urgent and powerfully told, Brown Girl in the Ring won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest.

bp Nichol, The Martyrology Book 5 (Coach House Press, 1982; reissued 1994). Part of bpNichol's long Martyrology series, Book 5 describes Toronto's downtown and Annex through the lens of a poetic mythology. Simultaneously concrete and etymologically de(con)structive, The Martyrology is sometimes medieval and at other times modern in tone. It is explicitly geographic, taking the reader on a tour of echoes and hidden intersections equally spatial and historical. Almost all Toronto fictions may be read with and against The Martyrology: it's a kind of guidebook, a skeleton key to the city.

Russell Smith, Noise (Porcupine's Quill, 1998). You wouldn't necessarily know it from his sharp and occasionally imperious columns in the Globe & Mail, but Russell Smith writes as sensitively as he does perceptively. Noise is about the search for coherence amid the city's thronging, chaotic currents. Its protagonist detests the chatter surrounding him but is also afraid of the kind of silence that might force him to confront where his avoidances are taking him. Noise is emblematic of the gritty-apartment-and-angst-filled-artist-writer trope in Toronto fiction, but also manages to transcend it (see How Insensitive, also by Smith, Katrina Onstad's How Happy to Be, Anne Denoon's Back Flip, and Jennifer Duncan's Sanctuary & Other Stories -- all excellent Toronto reads -- for more of this trope).

Antanas Sileika, Buying On Time (Porcupine's Quill, 1997) and David Bezmozgis' Natasha and Other Stories (2004) both illuminate the at once funny and frightening experiences of Eastern European newcomers to Toronto. Buying On Time is set in 1950s Weston, while Natasha and Other Stories begins near Finch and Bathurst circa 1980. Both, however, deal with similar difficulties of language and cultural nuance and clearly articulate the shock of plummeting into the city full grown but feeling naked. Further, M.G. Vassanji's No New Land (McClelland & Stewart, 1991) surveys similar terrain from the perspective of South Asian immigrants from Africa.

Finally, four edited anthologies of Toronto short stories provide a panoply of literary interpretations of the city and serve as ideal primers for readers hesitant about where to start. These are: Morris Wolfe and Douglas Daymond's Toronto Short Stories (Doubleday, 1977), Cary Fagan and Robert MacDonald's Streets of Attitude: Toronto Stories (Yonge & Bloor Publishing, 1990), Barry Callaghan's This Ain't No Healing Town (Exile Editions, 1995), and Hal Niedzviecki's Concrete Forest (primarily but not exclusively Toronto-focused; McClelland & Stewart, 1998).

And because one cannot quite keep up with new discoveries, here are four more excellent Toronto novels I'm currently reading: Howard Ackler's The City Man (Coach House Books, 2005), Ray Robertson's Gently Down the Stream (Cormorant, 2005), Bill Cameron's Cat's Crossing (Random House, 2003), and Austin Clarke's The Meeting Point (Macmillan, 1967).

If you are looking for more Toronto literature, visit the Imagining Toronto Library and the City of Toronto Book Awards website. Offline, Greg Gatenby's Toronto: A Literary Guide (McArthur, 1999) provides an encyclopaedic literary tour of Toronto places.

If you think some essential Toronto reads are missing from any of these lists, please suggest them.

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto.

Imagining Toronto: Acts of Salvage

2006-04-27T08:42:00.000-04:00

The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen, however, also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for ... To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing. (Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking")

[L]anguage that carries weight in our culture is very often fuelled by a search for home." (Carol Shields, "About Writing")

When at last you are reduced to this, when there is nothing left to relinquish, what else is there to do but to build anew? To dig a new burrow path low to the ground and gather materials for a new shelter, a place where you might live and call home and dwell. A place where you might, once again, remember what it is like to be possessed of your own wounded self.

Especially here in this city whose inhabitants seem perpetually compelled to discard solid dwelling so that they might be reinvented as something bigger, newer, more transitory. If they haven't lost everything, they act as though they want to. The innards of entire dwellings -- whole kitchens, baseboards, toilets, windows with curtains still attached to their frames -- all slung into dumpsters thrust upon front lawns like glacial erratics, leaving incongruous moraine-scars in their wake. The dwellings of this city vanish and reappear in a strobe of constant revision, jagged slow-motion. The brutal, fresh, brittle facade of the new. The map has again replaced the territory, and the entire city is left homeless. At night it curls itself in architectural renderings: by morning the ink has leaked into the soil and only framed-in skeletons remain, stark shadows against the dawn.

The homeless are believed to slide gradually into irretrievable dereliction. There is something we are presumed to lack, some instinct for stability or talent at grabbing what is available to be claimed. But perhaps what we lack is the destructive urge, this desperate flight from entropy. It is true that we do not resist the downward pull of things over the edge.

But there are so many different ways to be homeless in this city. Sterile condominiums furnished for binocular gaze. Silent, empty homes built to garage unused sectional sofas. No one looks out their picture windows; the doors are locked but there is nothing of value behind them. All the life has gone out of these places, or has never been permitted to enter. And in this way, I am no more homeless than you are. I have merely admitted it. I have enumerated my losses. And it is only out here, amid the discarded ruins of this lost city, that I might recover them.

(excerpted from Acts of Salvage, a work in progress)

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto.

Imagining Toronto: Textures of Kensington Market

2006-04-12T19:47:00.000-04:00

The Market this night is deserted, after three, feral cats
comb for fishheads; diablerie
mists rising from sewer gratings, the moon through scaffolding,
crescented. (Lynn Crosbie, from "Alphabet City")

If every Toronto neighbourhood has a story, then Kensington Market is where the narrative refuses to be confined to the page. Like a cluster of pigeons, the words erupt outward to scatter and coalesce, muttering greetings in a hundred tongues, bargaining, hectoring, laughing, weeping. It is true that there is stillness here, but even the night is alive with breathing.

This is my refuge. It is where I can be invisible or, if not invisible, at least drunk. .... The smell from the market doesn't bother me. I've been here before, me and the old lady. We know the price of things. Which is why I feel safe in telling stories here. (Dionne Brand, "At the Lisbon Plate")

In Emerald City, John Bentley Mays describes how Kensington Market exemplifies architectural historian Spiro Kostof's portrayal of city streets as improvised spectacles where encounters are unscheduled and excitement always unrehearsed, places where memory meets desire, where it is possible to be at once invisible and archetypal. In The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood describes Kensington Market's "music from elsewhere":

It's soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the streets here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they're trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's the other way around.

But there is, too, a tension here, between legacy and aspiration. If Kensington Market has long been a portal for those seeking to arrive, it is also a doorway they are relieved to exit. Mays writes,

To my knowledge, the residents of the Market today are almost all recent immigrants too poor to do otherwise, university students playing poor, and a handful of sophisticated urbanists who, for some reason, want to live among the Market's racket and odours."

And even these "sophisticated urbanists" who come slumming to Kensington Market seek to put their mark on it. Tourists of its counterculture, they leave lattes and lofts in their wake. In Sarah Dearing's Kensington Market novel (and City of Toronto Book Award winning) Courage My Love, one new arrival, despite being in flight from her bland Avenue Road life, seeks to impose order upon the market's chaotic landscape:

Her Kensington Market had been ordered in an efficient separation of products, and she labelled the main roads, for simplified reference, as Fish Street, Clothes and Vegetable Avenues. How much easier life could be if all streets had such utilitarian names; a person would always know precisely what to expect from an address.

But Kensington Market has its own way of resisting such coercions, and sometimes the market transforms its intruders. Later, having renamed herself, having listened, loved, and laboured there, Nova learns to appreciate the market's organic splay:

Underneath, like all markets, it possessed an ancient rhythmic hum created from trade, community, basic needs met, marriages -- or at least couplings -- made. This same music turns to white noise at a modern mall, some special secret element removed by its enclosure or the attempts at convenience.

And for all its noisy chaos, dry rot, and dereliction, it is true that Kensington Market redeems the city. It is a microcosm, a well, a shaft of light and darkness, a patch of unrestrained humanity that leaks out into the rest of the city and makes it live a little more fully. At night when the market gives itself over to alley cats, junkies, and bike thieves, the stall shutters rattle closed, and the clubs cease whirling and gutter into darkness, there is also a breathing stillness here, a listening. At dawn the market will rise and unfurl; the rest of the city along with it.

The Imagining Toronto Project.

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto.

Imagining Toronto: The Liminal City

2006-04-04T18:02:00.000-04:00

The city is liminal.

In the spring, winds and rains sweep the fictional city, gathering and sorting detritus: leaves, lost papers, a winter's accumulation of words.

All winter I wore the city like the skin on a still body of water; it floated above me and I breathed it in as if through gills. It weighed upon me, like water measuring the weight of souls. But in this season I rise through it, muddying the water, breaching the surface. The winter has made me feral, and now I roar through the city with my teeth bared, biting at the wind.

I am voracious.

All at once the city is suffused with light, and alive with its own shouting narratives. The mood in the streetcar line is festive; you feel fierce joy at the way plastic bags billow at the margins of the highway. Even goose shit is amusing, for now.

The city quickens, until its stories spill out in a gush of muddy water and cigarette butts. Newborn, they are unkempt and demanding. They scream for attention. They grow to monstrous adolescence in days, scribbling coarse poems in the laneways, trampling the elderly at literary wakes. Security guards follow them in galleries, protecting the staid, true art. They have no regard for history.

But at night they curl at the base of bridges, warmed by the vibration of the city's traffic. It pulsates in them, and by dawn they have memorized the urban cadences. A lightbulb pops in the marquee at Honest Ed's and someone is there to record it, knowing that small tragedies are metaphors for the larger ones. A construction site reveals a row of bottles, pipe stems and fossils are unearthed beside the Humber, and suddenly the city grows a memory, for now. Two stories pass on adjacent buses, a glimpse of love found, lost, or ignored. That's all right: there's always another one coming along, dawdling in front of the fruit stall, feeding stale crusts to pigeons and sparrows, grabbing a hot dog before the evening commute, biking headlong through traffic, or being wheeled along in a stroller.

The city is liminal. It is also alluvial, vulvar, and valvular. You might add: it is vulgar. And I would reply: it is learning to speak; let it.

Few of us can say we were born in this city, but we give birth to it every day.

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto

Toronto's Literary Cartographies

2006-04-02T07:27:00.000-04:00

It's a city of ravines. Remnants of wilderness have been left behind. Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops. .... Like diving birds, Athos and I plunged one hundred and fifty million years into the dark deciduous silence of the ravines. ... Beneath a parking lot, behind a school; from racket, fumes, and traffic, we dove into the city's sunken rooms of green sunlight. Then, like andartes, resurfaced half a city away ... (Anne Michaels, from Fugitive Pieces)

Jorges Luis Borges tells us of an empire whose cartographers drew a map so complete in every detail that it covered the entirety of the region it described. In danger of engulfing the land it was meant to represent, the map had either to replace the territory or be abandoned to the wind and weather.

A literary cartography of Toronto does not appear likely to confront us with a similar dilemma. Our dilemma is a different one. Unlike the terrain in Borges' invented empire, the topography of Toronto is far from flat. The landscape of Toronto is sedimentary; it shifts in uneasy dreams of the ancient lake before rising. bpNichol wrote,

here
ere I begin
among the streets & houses stand around me
How land over the bridge
(du pont) to Daven's Port
& in between a sea (mer)
Wal
full tragedies are played
(from The Martyrology Book 5)

If the great challenge of cartography is fitting the curved shape of the earth to the flat text of the map, then the great challenge of literature is fitting the curved shape of being to the flat text of the page. There is always a tension between the place and its representation: the territory is always a step ahead of the story. And perhaps this tension is compounded in urban literature, which must reconcile the city's linear structures with its irregular topography. But if we look closely, we see that the curved arches of the bridge are the source of its strength; we see also that the synapses of nature are glittering and sharp-edged. Dionne Brand writes,

Nothing in a city is discrete.
A city is all interpolation
(from XX; Thirsty)

In Topophilia, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observes that we measure objects against the scale of our own bodies and mentally organize the space around us in concentric spheres. He adds, "[t]he contradictions of life are usually resolved in narration. A geometric figure may serve the same purpose of harmonizing the opposites." Accordingly, in this city the familiar stands out in sharp relief, and bridge abutments and roadways become the narrative frame beneath which the distant ravines are suspended. From the elevated perch of our high rises, we ache for a glimpse of the great viaducts joining the edges of the valley below them. We gain a sense of the city's scale and consequence not from one or the other, but from the juxtaposition of the two.

Toronto's ravines and the bridges that cross them are a regular and significant presence in the city's literature. For Michael Ondaatje they symbolize the tasks and costs of city building:

Again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark, somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of cubism. (from In the Skin of a Lion)

For Margaret Atwood they are the site of both terror and escape:

... all around me are blue arches, blue caves, pure and silent. The water of the creek is cold and peaceful, it comes straight from the cemetery, from the graves and their bones. It's water made from the dead people, dissolved and clear .... The bridge is different-looking; it seems higher above me, more solid, as if the railings have disappeared or been filled in. And it's glowing, there are pools of light along it, greenish-yellow, not like any light I've ever seen before. (from Cat's Eye)

And in Anantas Sileika's Buying on Time, a boy might receive his first kiss from a girl perched in a treehouse above the Humber River, a week before she vanishes in the raging swirl of Hurricane Hazel, reminding us, as John Bentley Mays writes in Emerald City: Toronto Visited, that "the river will let us use its ancient flood plain, but on its own terms."

And so, we are reminded that Toronto is a city of mountains inverted. The city's ravines are the basin of its geologic history and the cradle of its industrial birth. Rising above these valleys, simultaneously suspending and being girded by them, the city's great bridges and viaducts embody the tensions between the arches of nature and the geometries of culture. They expose both the textual possibilities and the representational limitations of our urban cartographies.

St. Clair ravine bridge image by Trevor Hunter; used under the aegis of a Creative Commons licence.

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto.

The Imagining Toronto Project: http://www.imaginingtoronto.com

To subscribe the the Imagining Toronto mailing list, send an e-mail to Amy Lavender Harris at alharris@yorku.ca. The list mails occasionally with updates on the Imagining Toronto project.

Imagining Toronto: Toronto's Tower of Babel

2006-03-31T08:22:00.000-05:00

The roofs of the houses form terraces leading like steps to the citycore. The bank towers climb, and over them all the CN Tower soars, a landmark where no one lives or stays. ... This tower is a source of ghostly voices, turbulent speech, stray notes, and static, an infinite variety that may bear no single message, only the enticements and variations of energy, complex and nomadic, a stir and sound more enigmatic than any structure that we could make. (B.W. Powe, Outage. Toronto: Random House, 1995: 180-181)

In the old story of Babylon, a great tower was built so the people could communicate directly with the gods. Angry at this arrogance, the gods caused the people to speak in different tongues, ending their collaboration and scattering the tribes across the land. Unable or unwilling to work through their differences, the people did not realize the tremendous gift they had received. The great tower fell into ruins.

The CN Tower is Toronto’s Tower of Babel. Originally built as a telecommunications tower and symbol of technological, architectural, and economic dominance, it rises above the city and both divides and connects us. Although we turn our backs on it, the CN Tower remains a sly presence in our photographs, memories, and narratives. It is always there, in the corner of our gaze. It is far from mute, and as a symbol it is far from stale. Indeed, Toronto writers continually appropriate the CN Tower in order to reinvent it as the site of resistance, memory, longing, and possibility.

In M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (McClelland & Stewart, 1991), the CN Tower serves as a blinking beacon to Nurdin Lalani, a man who addresses silent questions to it from his living room window high above the Don Valley, and when asked by an even newer immigrant, “Where is your god?” points to the CN Tower, as remote and solid an image as their own homeland.

In Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner/Aspect, 1998), the CN Tower is the beacon connecting two worlds: its energy suffuses the apocalyptic city and brings the possibility of new life. She writes, "like the spirit tree the centre pole symbolized, the CN Tower dug roots deep into the ground where the dead lived and pushed high into the heavens where the oldest ancestors lived. The tower was their ladder into this world."

In Darren O'Donnell's novel Your Secrets Sleep With Me (Coach House Books, 2004), the CN Tower is too derelict an image to redeem or be redeemed, and, as a central motif in the novel, it collapses into the Lake as it must, a lesson against hubris in a city whose occupants must all become refugees in order to start again.

Finally, in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For (Knopf, 2005), the CN Tower is symbolized and re-energized as a lubaio, a Chinese signpost, to which an artist pins the city's longings and wishes like prayers.

As Toronto's Tower of Babel, the CN Tower is a symbol of the great gift the gods have given us -- the gift of different tongues -- of the great challenge and opportunity to learn to communicate across language, culture, and experience in this younger Babylon.

(Image by Darcy Brown; used with permission)

This post was originally published at Reading Toronto.

Imagining Toronto at Reading Toronto

2006-03-11T09:38:00.000-05:00

Between March 11 and March 18, 2006, I will be guest editing at Reading Toronto, the online community focused on urban design, planning, politics, and culture in Toronto. Daily posts will introduce the Imagining Toronto project and address themes and issues arising from intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region.

Please feel free to stop by Reading Toronto and comment.

When Bird Flu Sweeps Toronto?: Reading Timothy Findley's Headhunter

2006-03-05T12:04:00.000-05:00

Timothy Findley's novel Headhunter (Harper Perennial, 1993) is a very good example of what Jeoffrey Bull (writing in the Journal of Canadian Studies) calls "diagnostic fiction". Headhunter (which won the City of Toronto Book Award) describes a near-future dystopian Toronto afflicted by cultural and political depravity and a frightening bird flu known as sturnusemia. Deliberately appropriating symbolism and characters from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and rather powerfully reminiscent of Camus' The Plague and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice) Findley's novel diagnoses not individual patients but a whole city. Prescient, isn't it?

A decade after Headhunter was published, Toronto was rocked by a contained outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). In 2006, the city awaits the first dread trickles of avian influenza virus A -- also known as bird flu -- believed to be the leading candidate for the world's next influenza pandemic. Politicians, the medical establishment, the media, and ordinary citizens in Toronto and elsewhere nervously consider the options for prevention, containment, and treatment -- and contemplate the likelihood of corruption and chaos in the scramble to decide who will be treated, quarantined, or abandoned to the ravages of disease. Acknowledging the truism that more people are likely to die of terror, exposure, and chaos in the aftermath of a disaster than from the source of the disaster itself, perhaps now is a good time to revisit Findley's novel, to read into its vision of things to come.

In Findley's Toronto, the city's psychological and moral malaise is symbolized by Dr. Rupert Kurtz, Director of the Parkin Institute of Psychiatric Research. Setting himself up as the god-head of treatment, Kurtz simultaneously diagnoses and encourages the "death-urge" sweeping the city. It is something he finds aesthetically pleasing, and he draws power from it, unleashing the darkest urges of his patients and joining in them.

Meanwhile, starlings, the alleged carriers of sturnusemia (an AIDS-like virus), are being gassed by squads in city parks, but the birds are not the biggest threat to the city. Rather, Kurtz is the greatest danger, a reality recognized only by one of the city's gently insane, a former librarian who inadvertently unleashes fictional characters from books, including some (like Kurtz) who harm; others (like Susannah Moodie) who advise; and one (Dr. Charles Marlow) who might stand against Kurtz. But Kurtz's army is willingly seduced, low-lidded with power and depravity. And as Kurtz remarks of them near the end,

Every single one of them was persuaded from within. .... My only interest lay in bringing two desiring factions together. I melded them. I made them one. ... I gave them what they wanted. ... I gave them permission.

And the plague takes them all, the members of the Club of Men, their young victims, and Kurtz too. And at the end of the novel, in the city's desolate light, the D-Squads continue to gas and burn the city's birds, while the living mad go on in their gentle way.

This is not to say, of course, that Toronto under plague conditions would be as dark as Findley narrates it. Indeed, the City's response to the 2003 SARS crisis is generally agreed to have been exemplary. And Toronto has responded to conditions of contagion in the past, during outbreaks of tuberculosis, Spanish flu, and cholera.

But we live in a time when public trust is at a low ebb, while the media almost eagerly report projected shortages of flu drugs and squabbles over treatment priority lists. And who can say you have never looked into the eyes of a professional or politician and seen only darkness there?

Sources

Bull, Jeoffrey S., 1998. Giving the Sickness a Name: Reading Timothy Findley's Headhunter and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome as Diagnostic Fictions. Journal of Canadian Studies, 33(4): 153-165.

Cude, Wilf, 1996. Truth Slips In: Timothy Findley's Doors of Fiction. The Antigonish Review, 105. Available electronically at http://www.antigonishreview.com/bi-105/105-cude.html

Findley, Timothy, 1993. Headhunter. Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada.

Uncivil Elegies: The Mystery of Civic Square

2006-02-24T17:26:00.000-05:00

I am wondering if anyone can tell me more about Scott Symons' Toronto novel, Civic Square (published as a limited facsimile edition by McClelland & Stewart in 1969).

The novel is mentioned occasionally, usually in passing, and while many people seem to have heard of it, few appear to have read it. Perhaps this is understandable: the book, known as "the book in the box", was published as a facsimile (i.e., photocopied) edition of the original manuscript, and is nearly four inches thick. Symons himself -- an artist and curator as well as a writer -- is described as "one of Toronto's more notorious novelists" (Gatenby, 1999: 47) and as an "alleged talent-free genius" in a 1997 Eye Weekly article.

Through some lucky sleuthing, I was able to locate a copy of Civic Square, which arrived today by parcel post. My copy came in a blue presentation box, wrapped in white ribbon and emblazoned with a wax seal, with the title stamped in silver ink on the cover. My copy is signed by the author in red pen and is identified as "number 206 of a signed limited facsimile edition of the original manuscript." I have begun reading this afternoon, but the manuscript format means it will be some time before I finish.

A summary of the book (at Amazon.com) describes Civic Square as follows:

Written as letters addressed to "Dear Reader," Civic Square is symphonic in its range of tone and style. Largely satiric, it is the story of a man who finds himself in a cultural upheaval as the stifling society of Toronto in 1966 begins to crumble around him - begins to crumble, in part, because he himself is kicking against the walls that constrain. Caught between a huge admiration for the older values of Rosedale and the dynamic new energy of Yorkville, with its musicians, poets and writers of the counter-culture movement, the narrator finds himself trying to reconstruct his world in every aspect. First published as a limited edition in 1969, Civic Square is a lost Canadian classic that has never before been widely available.

I have read (in the aforementioned Eye article) that the original title for Civic Square was "The Smugly Fucklings", until Jack McClelland's intervention prior to publication. Civic Square is apparently one of five books Symons has published. Also from what I read, Symons himself (born in 1933) was a controversial figure in Toronto and Montreal, coming out of the closet before doing so was de rigeur, holding forth dangerously on politics, and taking flight with a variety of lovers. Symons himself describes Civic Square as "obscene, pornographic, scandalous, irreverent, malicious, malignant and magnificent" (frontispiece pages). A documentary about Symons, called God's Fool was produced in 1997 or 1998. I have seen reference to a 2001 reprint of Civic Square (purportedly put out by Simon & Pierre; ISBN no. 0889242984; cover image shown above), but have not found evidence it was ever made available.

At this point I'm curious. I realize that thirty-five year old literary scandals lose some of their intensity in light of the many ways Toronto has loosened up in the meantime, but it seems surprising that Civic Square should have faded to a literary footnote.

If you know more about Civc Square, please write me at alharris@yorku.ca or comment here.

Sources:

Gatenby, Greg, 1999. Toronto: A Literary Guide. Toronto: MacArthur & Company.

Lypchuk, Donna, 1997. "Symons Says: How to be a Smugly" Eye Weekly, December 11, 1997.

Symons, Scott, 1969. Civic Square. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Symons, Scott, 1998. Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press. (I haven't seen this but include it for reference)

New Home for the Imagining Toronto Project

2006-02-20T09:53:00.000-05:00

A new home for the Imagining Toronto project has been established at http://www.imaginingtoronto.com. The site contains a full explanation of Imagining Toronto and a large (and expanding) Library of fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, and critical works. Please feel welcome to explore the site.

Imagining Toronto Manuscript

2006-02-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

In the rush of winter work, I forgot to post the news that Imagining Toronto has become more than a course: it's actually become the skeleton of a manuscript. Chapters are shaping up as follows:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Imagining Toronto: Constructing Identity and Place Through Urban Fiction
Chapter3: Strangely Familiar: Icons of Place, Invented Neighbourhoods and Urban Tribes
Chapter 4: Music From Elsewhere: Immigrants and Natives / Selves and Others
Chapter 5: Sexuality and the City
Chapter 6: The (Im)possibility of Dwelling: Home and Homelessness
Chapter 7: Urbia and Suburbia
Chapter 8: Surreal Toronto: The City as Imagined in Genre Fiction
Chapter 9: Toronto the Wild: Natural and Unnatural Settings
Chapter 10: Conclusion

I will concede, of course, that a book is not really a book until it has attracted a publisher, and that a book is not likely to attract a publisher until it has become a book. The chapters above are currently incomplete; some remain skeletal; they will almost certainly require reformulation. Moreover, current work commitments preclude truly focused writing until early May. In the meantime, I am limited to pawing at chapter sections like a raccoon washing foraged fruit in a brackish puddle. Food that can be consumed only in the dark.

But late at night, and on the subway, I have the liberty to read. In the next couple of days I'll begin posting short reviews of consumed works to this space. I'd be very happy to receive recommendations, too. I'm short on poetry, and would also like to read something torrid about Scarborough.

Reimagining Toronto

2006-02-16T20:47:00.000-05:00

I've been rethinking my response to journalist Bert Archer's claim that Toronto "exists in no one's imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world ... Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination." (Making a Toronto of the Imagination, in uTOpia, 2005: 220)

I still disagree with Archer's assertion that there's been no "first-rate" Toronto fiction since Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. However, I'd like to take up the latter part of his essay, which consists of an adjuration that "we cease ignoring -- and as a result wasting -- the parts of our days we tend to consider white noise: the going-to and coming-from, the getting and the spending parts ... notic[ing] the details, the patterns ... getting a handle on ... what Toronto is, rather than what it is not." (ibid.: 227-228) and use it directly against his own claim about the absence or lack of quality of Toronto literature.

There are not merely dozens but hundreds of novelists (and poets and playwrights) who have turned their attention to the details and patterns of Toronto, and who have managed to create not one Toronto but numerous Torontos of the imagination. It's not Toronto but Toronto literature that seems to exist in no one's imagination. And yet, I have compiled one extensive and expanding list here, and am painfully aware that I am only beginning to outline the scope of available works. The challenge is for readers, writers, and journalists -- like Archer -- to read and acknowledge the presence of these works.

Archer is right in observing that before a place can exist in the imagination, it must develop its own stories. But this is only part of the answer. For a literature to live, it must be read and discussed and fought over. The story itself must be permitted to enter the imagination. The stories must be permitted to matter. The problem with Toronto is not that no-one imagines it, but that a perplexing and pervasive deafness afflicts this city's arbiters of culture, meaning that almost nobody hears it. I think it is a terrible shame, for example, that winning the City of Toronto Book Award seems to be a guarantee that your book will go out of print almost immediately afterward.

But Bert, if you'd like to talk, I've got a long list of books you might enjoy reading.

Imagining Toronto

2006-01-02T17:10:00.000-05:00

I have proposed Imagining Toronto as a new fourth year course in the Department of Geography at York University for 2006-2007. Presently the course has received Departmental approval, but (as of December 2005) has not yet been reviewed by the Faculty of Arts, CCAS, or the Senate.

Why Imagining Toronto? Whole worlds come alive at the intersection of geography and literature. One doesn't need to venture as far afield as Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi's Dictionary of Imaginary Places or even Malcolm Bradbury's Atlas of Literature to find these worlds. They exist in places so familiar to us that we don't even notice them, places simultaneously so strange that we can hardly conceive them. Robert Fulford calls Toronto an "accidental city", in the sense that many of its most meaningful and iconic places -- the CN Tower, Chinatown, and the Toronto Islands among them -- have emerged as happy accidents; the unintended consequences of city planning, commerce, demographics, and natural processes. He writes,

A successful city fulfills itself not by master plans but through an attentiveness to the processes that have created it and an awareness of its possibilities. It achieves a heightened identity by giving form to memory and providing space for new life. (Fulford, 1995: 14)

In Emerald City, John Bentley Mays writes of the city dweller's need to discover 'urban thinking places' and adds that

living fully and mindfully anyplace, I believe, involves giving thought to all the rhythms we move within -- the personal ones, from birth to death, but also the historical ones, preserved and recalled by the artifacts of architecture and urban planning, art and writing and music. (1994: 2; 27)

Fulford and Mays' commentaries suggest that the cities we live in are not so much the products of bricks and mortar (or bureaucracy and money) as they are the invention of our memories and imaginations. In other words, our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.

And yet, there is the question of how and whether a Toronto-based urban literature might supplant a century and more of writing fixated on the rural and wild spaces of Canada, in a country where the very existence of urban spaces is so often conceived as an invasion and a blight on what is romantically remembered as a pristine and natural landscape. There is the additional problem of how and whether such a literature can adequately capture the complex flows, crises, and assertions of a moving metropolis. In Downtown Canada, Douglas Ivison and Justin Edwards comment on the importance of shifting focus to "that most placeless of places, the city" while also "reasserting the local in an increasingly globalized Canadian literature." (2005: 6) Finally, and perhaps most urgently, there is the difficulty of determining whether such a literature exists at all.

Opinion on this last question is mixed. Toronto journalist Bert Archer claims that Toronto is "a city that exists in no one's imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world." He adds, "Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination." (2005: 220) In contrast, in a 2005 Vanity Fair article the American critic Anderson Tepper avers that since the 1987 publication of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, "a vision of modern Toronto gradually took shape before our eyes." The article quotes Toronto novelist and poet Dionne Brand's comment that "the literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories." Writing in the Globe & Mail, Stephen Marche describes Toronto's "flourishing bookishness" almost breathlessly, asserting that "Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time." Yet, Marche describes both the city and its fiction as "insular" and focused on "interior rather than public spaces."

One important purpose of Imagining Toronto is to challenge all of these viewpoints. It has been a very long time since Toronto first clawed its way out of its literal or literary woods. To claim (as both Archer and Tepper do) that Toronto literature begins or ends with Ondaatje's novel is to exhibit a remarkable (although hardly uncommon) lack of familiarity with the city's sizable and expanding literature (please click on the Bibliography of Literary and Critical Works link to view a long and expanding -- and incomplete -- list). Marche's description of Toronto as "unimaginative to the extreme" is as perplexing and narrow as the short list of literary works he grudgingly attributes to Toronto writers. Brand's comment seems to be the only one that offers much hope for a Toronto literature. Indeed, catching up with a city's stories is any urban literature's greatest challenge and its greatest opportunity. Imagining Toronto seeks to take up this challenge.

Imagining Toronto explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region, exposing students to critical and imaginative works on place, culture, and representation. Close readings of a wide selection of Toronto-based literature (fiction, poetry, non-fiction) are paired with critical scholarly works interrogating how places are invented, (re)presented, and (re)produced. The course is arranged thematically. An introduction to concepts and theories in literary/cultural geography (including representations of place, literary regionalism, issues raised by the modernity/post-modernity dialectic, among others) precedes an exploration of topics including (1) constructing identity and place, (2) immigrants and natives / selves and others, (3) transformations of nature into culture, (4) sexualities and the city, (5) the possibilities and impossibilities of dwelling in the city, and (6) urbia and suburbia.

Through engagement with seminars, workshops, guest speakers, and field trips, and through their own (short) imaginative and (longer) critical essays, students will explore Toronto's visible and subterranean layers. Toronto is a city built upon buried streams and half-culverted ravines that periodically roil up and swallow cars and concrete. Toronto's shore is a filled-in lakebed periodically disgorging the remains of sunken trawlers. It is a city built upon its own detritus -- brickyards, landfills, and Huron villages -- revealing that present-day Toronto is only the tip of the tel. Toronto is not only physically but culturally liminal. Neighbourhoods like Kensington Market wear the traces of Jewish, Portuguese, Caribbean, and Asian passage like so many discarded coats thrown down after the voyage, like the overcoats shrugged off in Neil Bissoondath's story, "Christmas Lunch". Toronto novels -- Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion and Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces among them -- turn Toronto's ravines into metaphors of immigrant struggle. Other works, like Dionne Brand's What We All Long For turn streets into rivers along which the grief and hope and longing of generations separated and rejoined coalesce in turbulent flow. Indeed, Brand's novel -- which gathers many of the course themes together -- will serve as the centrepiece of the course and the starting point for our own reflections and inventions, both literary and critical. Groupings of Brand's chapters will be paired with critical pieces selected from the scholarly literature along with shorter pieces and excerpts from literary works exploring similar or contrasting motifs.

For example, in a session exploring home and homelessness, the course integrates a chapter in What We All Long For in which the character Oku meets (and meets again) a homeless musician in Kensington Market. His discomfort with the man stirs up questions about his own place in his family, the city, and the cultures he bridges (Caribbean and Canadian). This discomfort is echoed in Carol Shields' Unless, a novel in which the narrator's daughter (about the same age as Oku) abandons her university studies and family to sit on a Toronto street corner begging and holding a sign reading "Goodness". Similarly, Shaunessy Bishop-Stall's memoir Down to This narrates the author's journey from university studies in Montreal to Toronto's Tent City. The discussion of these texts is filtered through critical commentaries on dwelling and home/homelessness (e.g., Kelly, Derek A., 1975. Home as a Philosophical problem. The Modern Schoolman, LII (January), 151-168; Mark Kingwell’s “Building Dwelling Acting”, Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 2000, 107(2): 177-202); and/or Gerry Daly’s “Homelessness and the Street”, from Images of the Street). Students undoubtedly have their own views and experiences of homelessness; the readings and discussions are intended to both challenge and inform.

The session titled 'Urbia and Suburbia' will explore the oppositional (and yet adjacent) character of urban and suburban experience. In What We All Long For, Toronto's Chinatown and the suburb of Richmond Hill are cast as opposites: for Tuyen's Vietnamese family, the large, insular suburban house is the hard-won prize of two decades of life-rebuilding in a new country. It is their escape from the wearying drudgery of the restaurant they run, but it is also their prison. A culminating scene in the novel is an act of striking violence just outside their home that brings both the city and a lost son to their front door. This grouping of Brand's chapters will be paired with other readings contrasting Toronto-area suburbs with the cities they adjoin, including selections from Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (which contrasts the harsh topography of new tract housing with the harsher subterranean landscape of the Don River Valley and the even more ruthless social terrain of adolescence) and (likely) a selection from Russell Smith's Noise, an urban-suburban satire. Paul Milton's critical reading of suburban literature, "Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch's Troutstream and Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark", in Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities, will help illuminate the varied character and meanings of different and representations of the suburban Toronto experience, as will other analystical pieces like Alison Clarke's "Tupperware: Suburbia, Sociality, and Mass Consumption" in Visions of Suburbia.

The broad aim of Imagining Toronto is to discover and explore Toronto's liminal and literary character, and in doing so, to make a place for both ourselves and our literature in this city.

The course website and an expanding bibliography of literary and critical works is available. Suggestions and additions are very much welcomed. Please send comments to Amy Lavender Harris at alharris@yorku.ca.

About the Course Director

I have lived all over this city. I was born in Toronto in 1972 in what used to be called the Doctor's Hospital, at the edge of Kensington Market, while my parents (newly arrived in Toronto from New Brunswick) lived at Carlton and Parliament. As a child I lived in Cabbagetown and east Riverdale (in the area now known as Little India), before spending several years in a suburb at the east edge of the city. After spending time away to attend university, I returned to Toronto in 1997 for graduate school and lived for five years near Jane & Finch. I now live in the Junction, and travel almost daily by bike to Kensington Market.

When I came back to Toronto to live, I didn't want just to see the city: I wanted to read it. First I read several edited collections of Toronto short stories -- Morris Wolfe and Douglas Daymond's Toronto Short Stories, Cary Fagan and Robert MacDonald's Streets of Attitude, and Barry Callaghan's This Ain't No Healing Town. I read Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces, Michael Ondaatje's obligatory In The Skin of a Lion, Robertson Davies' Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. I re-read Hugh Garner's Toronto essays and some of his novels (like Cabbagetown and Death in Don Mills), as well as Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride. Then I began to look deeper. I found used copies of obscurely written Toronto novels like Basil Papadimos' The Hook of it Is and Richard Scrimger's Crosstown. At some point my interest became nearly obsessive. I found more of Katherine Govier's work, such as Fables of Brunswick Avenue and The Immaculate Conception Photo Gallery, and began reading Austin Clarke and Niel Bissoondath alongside Dionne Brand, Helen Humphries, and Carol Shields. In the past year this list has grown to include speculative literature such as Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring and Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (which is a wonderful companion-piece to Sarah Dearing's Courage My Love, also set largely in Kensington Market), Howard Ackler's The City Man, and Steven Hayward's The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke. This is only a partial list. By rights it should also include non-fiction, like Shaunessy Bishop-Stall's Down to This and Cary Fagan's City Hall and Mrs. God. And as a geographer and urban planner, I have of course read everything from Robert Fulford's Accidental City and John Bentley Mays' Emerald City to Wayne Grady's Toronto the Wild and Jean Cochrane's Kensington. I have even read John Sewell's Up Against City Hall and his later A City in the Making. There is also Toronto poetry, of course. Perhaps the less I say about it the better, given that I am married to the man Christian Bök once (perhaps enviously) described as "everything that is wrong with poetry in this idiotic country." (Word, February 1998, page 7)

I don't just read about Toronto. I have biked across much of it in the mild seasons, and drowsed in its subways in the winter. I have been a passenger in cars travelling to the region's big box stores and its outlet malls. I have sailed the city's lake and waded its rivers looking for fossils. I have sung drunken tunes in the city's seedy bars and sipped afternoon tea at its fine hotels. I have cruised many of Toronto's back lanes and alleys looking for discarded mirror glass and sheet metal to use in salvage and art projects. I garden in this city, and parry regularly with its raccoons. As a child I used to walk along the railway tracks late at night with my father, on midnight trips to the supermarket at Gerrard Square. I have listened to the primordial sound of the streetcars very early in the morning, and the trains shunting into the evening. I have been trampled by bureaucrats rushing to Union Station at the end of the business day, and pushed into traffic by an incoherent, shouting woman on Dupont Street. I have been both a student and a teacher at two of Toronto's universities, and most recently, have begun to write about the city myself. And it is to this end that I have sought to bring all these experiences and narratives and spaces together in Imagining Toronto. Welcome aboard.

References

Archer, Bert, 2005. "Making a Toronto of the Imagination". In Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox, eds., uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto. Toronto: Coach House Books, 220-228.

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed., 1996. The Atlas of Literature. London: De Agonstini Editions.

Edwards, Justin D. and Douglas Ivison, eds., 2005. Downtown Canada: Criting Canadian Cities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Fulford, Robert, 1996. Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto. Boston; New York: Peter Davidson / Houghton Mifflin.

Manguel, Alberto and Gianni Guandlupi, 1987. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Expanded edition. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys.

Marche, Stephen, 2005. "Drab and dull, yes, but we write a mean novel". Globe & Mail, December 31, 2005, Page M2. Available electronically (copy and paste link if it doesn't work) at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/
ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051231/LITERARY31

Mays, John Bentley, 1994. Emerald City: Toronto Visited. Toronto: Penguin.

Tepper, Anderson, 2005. "Northern Exposure: Can you hear that literary buzz? It's coming from Toronto". Vanity Fair, 12 December 2005. Available electronically at http://vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/051212roco02