The Imagining Toronto Project This website offers news and commentary about the Imagining Toronto project and the Imagining Toronto book (Mansfield Press, Fall 2010).
Visit the Imagining Toronto Library for an extensive and regularly updated list of literary works engaging with Toronto.
The Imagining Toronto course syllabus, lecture notes and related materials are accessible by clicking here.
|
July 13, 2010, at 7:26 am
A short update to note that I’ve had a couple of new pieces of writing released into the wild.
The first is a short commentary called “My Literary Leviathan,” about the challenges and rewards of reading Josef Skvorecky’s award-winning, deeply resonant novel, The Engineer of Human Souls (1977; trans. 1984), in the July issue of the Mansfield Revue. Here’s an excerpt:
I keep reading, in large part because Skvorecky examines one aspect of Canadian culture that remains mainly unacknowledged. In the opening pages of the novel he describes Canada as “this country of cities with no past” and adds, “I feel wonderful. I feel utterly and dangerously wonderful in this wilderness land.” Skvorecky’s protagonist is a survivor of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, and in his view one of the most compelling, if exasperating, virtues of Toronto is its amnesia, its failure to remember or take seriously the wounds of history. A professor at the “Edenvale” campus of the University of Toronto, Skvorecky’s protagonist attempts, with limited success, to cut through his students’ superficiality by pointing out analyses of totalitarianism and truth in prominent, primarily American, works of literature.
Skvorecky’s depictions of Toronto have a farcical quality. Czech émigrés like himself are dogged by secret agents hoping to gather incriminating evidence to take back to the Soviets, while Toronto whirls around them, a glittering, snowy wonderland of restaurants, booze, gossip and sexual dalliance. Haunted by history, Skvorecky’s protagonist is unable to let go of his past and, like many Torontonians, drifts through two cities simultaneously: present-day Toronto, where he lives in comfort and security, and the remembered, repressive Prague of his vanished youth.
The Imagining Toronto column in the current issue of Spacing Magazine is called “Desire Lines,” and traces some of the genealogy of queer tropes in Toronto literature. Here’s a short excerpt:
Urban literature is tightly wedded to the tropes of heterosexual desire, but stories about queer experience have always been embedded just as deeply–if historically more covertly–in the city’s corporeal landscape. Parallel, intersecting, yet ultimately distinguishable from heteronormative narratives of the same era, these works provide critical background to contemporary readings of queer literature. They offer historical context in addition to foregrounding corporeal sensuality, sexual politics and the sense of social otherness–all themes that have characterized literature produced by subsequent generation of gay, lesbian, bisexual and genderqueer writers.
Works discussed in this essay include John Barlow’s edited anthology, Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, Edward Lacey’s poem, “Quintillas” (which Barlow considers the first Canadian poem to openly acknowledge gay sexuality), Gordon Stewart Anderson’s The Toronto You Are Leaving and Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For as Long as Possible. John Grube, Scott Symons, Sky Gilbert, R.M. Vaughan, Leah Lakshmi-Piepznasamarasinha and Sandra Alland are mentioned in passing, and three writers who should have been mentioned are Jim Bartley (whose play, Stephen & Mr. Wilde, adds imaginative depth to Oscar Wilde’s 1882 sojourn in Toronto), Greg Kramer, whose ribald, surreal fiction (The Pursemonger of Fugu, Couchwarmer and Hogtown Bonbons), turn both queer and hetero Toronto on its head, and Farzana Doctor, whose 2007 novel, Stealing Nasreen, describes a tender, awkward attraction between a Toronto psychotherapist and her married Gujarati teacher.
The current issue of Spacing also includes my reviews of two books, Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy (Random House, 2010) and John Warkentin’s Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto (Becker / City Institute, 2010).
The Mansfield Revue is available here; Spacing Magazine is available at newsstands and booksellers pretty much everywhere (or you can subscribe here).
Read on, y’all.
July 9, 2010, at 2:00 pm
 After a very humid week in Toronto, a gentle rain has softened the soil and revived the city. The trees sigh visibly, flowers raise their faces, and the streets and buildings are full-dimensioned and freshly washed. Despite the heat wave, the city is lush and overgrown. This week the hollyhocks opened, all frilly and old-fashioned, and two days ago I heard a cicada for the first time. Again we descend into deep summer.
The Imagining Toronto book is in the editing process, moving increasingly quickly toward its fall launch. Please stay tuned for updates, as launch dates, scheduled readings and other events will be announced soon. Everyone who has seen the book so far seems pretty excited about it and I’m looking forward very greatly to letting it go out into the world.
Yesterday I drafted the acknowledgements page for the book, and although I am happy to thank the individuals and organizations who have encouraged and supported the various endeavours of the Imagining Toronto project, in truth I am grateful for many things that have little, on the surface, to do with it at all.
I am grateful for the opportunity to write. More than a decade ago, while finishing off a graduate program at Queen’s, I joined colleagues in imagining what we would do with the money if any of us won the lottery. I am not in the habit of buying lottery tickets, but I find speculation of this sort a useful way of identifying unspoken dreams and desires and said, upon reflection, that I would like a little house and room (and time) to write. Ten years later, after enduring a creative drought that lasted the entire duration of my subsequent graduate work and engagement in two professional fields, I began to write publicly again for the first time since my very early twenties. Doing so has filled me with such pleasure and relief that I cannot imagine doing anything else.
I wanted to write long before I learned to read. As a young child I regularly created secret societies (of which I was the only member) dedicated to writing, inspired in part by children’s stories like Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and Jean Little’s Look Through My Window. At the age of nine I received a small diary as a Christmas present, and ever since then have maintained a prodigious private journal that, as I have grown older, has amounted to several hundred thousand words each year.
For most of my life I have thought of writing as a personal, private endeavour. Although throughout my teens I wrote a regular, weekly newspaper column, and for a time had intentions of becoming a journalist and did freelance work to support that ambition, I never really thought of professional writing as a meaningful form of communication. The articles I wrote for public consumption had little, if anything, to do with the things I believed or felt internally. I felt utterly disconnected from the articles and essays I wrote for university or the various local newspapers whose editors liked my work. I saved my truest words for private places where they would not be subject to criticism, ridicule or coercion.
And in those places I wrote about things that interested me: the shape of the seasons, the spaces between people, moments when the cosmos seemed ready to open and make room even for me. And in doing so I gained an increasingly clear sense of what American poet Mark Strand calls the weather of words.
At some point, late in my twenties, I realized that I did not care about what anyone thought of me and began to live accordingly. I began to say and do exactly what I thought. And if this was alarming to other people, it was utterly liberating for me. I had listened for such a long time, and now I was learning to speak. I began to write publicly and have not stopped doing so since.
Now I write at all hours of the day and night, sometimes privately but, for now, mainly professionally. If travel or technical failure prevents me from writing my hands begin to itch as the words accumulate, ready to spill out one way or another. I am terribly grateful for the opportunity to do so.
I am grateful for many other things, high among them the shape of the life my husband and I have built together.We have taken considerable care to create a life in which we have the liberty to engage in creative, intellectual or political projects without jeopardizing our livelihoods. The fact that we work very hard does not at all undermine the fact that we do so entirely for ourselves. And for this I am immensely grateful.
I am grateful, perhaps above all, for our little daughter. An article from New York magazine currently making the rounds argues that parenthood does not make people happier and may actually reduce their perceived quality of life for years or decades. I understand the contemporary reaction against idyllic myths of motherhood lodged in paternalistic and essentialist views about the appropriate roles of women. Still, as I wrote in a discussion the other day, I feel a rush of low-grade euphoria every time I think about or interact with our little daughter. I have felt this way ever since she was born, when I was struck with the sense of having gotten away with something magnificent. Of course, some of that euphoria is because she’s no longer a helpless infant and finally — at the age of nearly two — sleeps through the night. But as someone who had to overcome infertility to become a parent, a good deal of my pleasure stems from being acutely aware of how close I came to never being one at all. I have always wanted to have a child. And while my reasons for doing so include banal biological imperatives and a conviction that my genes are worth seeding, the primary reason I wanted to have a child was because I feel lucky to have lived, and wanted to pass that good fortune on to someone else. And the greatest pleasure I feel in being a parent isn’t for myself at all: it is in the sheer joy of her being.
As I wrote in my informal response to the New York piece, I suspect part of the problem with parental happiness studies is that ultimate their measures of happiness fixate on the material self-interests of parents. The article offers a similar impression: as one researcher observes, “what children really do … is offer moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.”
Transcendence matters precisely because it is not about the material. Transcendence is a moment of clear sight, a sense of immanence, the cosmos opening and bestowing some gift of experience or understanding: the awareness, for a few moments, of belonging to something larger than the self.
It’s my view that rather than thinking of parenthood as something that should make us “happy,” we should compare it to other endeavours valued not because they are pleasurable but because they create meaning. Writing, for example — a form of creation with striking similarities to the labour involved in birthing and parenting a child — is hard, exhausting, frustrating work, but is something we do because as writers we feel we have something of ourselves to offer, something that is, at its best, transcendent.
And in this sense I am grateful for my daughter, as I am for the opportunity to write, because they are both ways of experiencing transcendence.
June 2, 2010, at 11:32 am
Hello to members of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) attending the MagNet conference, ongoing at the Chestnut Hotel in downtown Toronto from June 1-4, 2010.
As part of the conference I will be leading a literary walking tour of the City Hall area, including Nathan Philips Square and the area once known as ‘the Ward.’ The walking tour will run between 2:00 and 4:00 pm today; please meet at the ‘Experience Toronto’ table before 2:00 pm.
As part of the tour I’ll spend a few minutes talking about Toronto literature and the imagined city; slides for the presentation (which include many of the literary references we’ll discuss on the walking tour) are available here: PWAC MagNet Imagined City Slides 2 June 2010.
March 24, 2010, at 11:48 am
 In Soft City, Jonathan Raban contrasts the reasoned, ordered, regulated city projected by planners and politicians with the mysterious, often magical city experienced by urbanites.
Cities, Raban suggests are far less rational and comprehensible than we think, meaning that if we are to understand them or make them more functional, we must recognize and work with their feral, disordered side.
Literary works discussed in this week’s class include Robert Charles Wilson’s story, “The Inner Inner City,” Nalo Hopkinson’s novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, as well as literary representations of Toronto by Cory Doctorow (Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town) and Leah Bobet (“Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct”).
This week’s lecture slides are available here.
March 19, 2010, at 10:45 am
 The shortly forthcoming Imagining Toronto book (Mansfield Press, spring 2010) is profiled briefly in the March/April issue of This Magazine. Here’s an excerpt of the review, written by Ava Baccari:
“In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a literary scene that is reflecting the city’s shifting geography, moving into inner suburbs like Scarborough and North York, and well into deep suburbia: Pickering, Vaughan, Ajax.
Harris began writing her book two years ago after scouring the city for books for a Toronto literature course. She soon found herself delving into the city’s literary history, as framed by the narratives of iconic neighborhoods like the Annex, Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Now she has oriented the city’s public spaces in its literature, tracing Toronto’s identity to the streetcar lines and architectural icons that recur in its literature.”
I’m also quoted as suggesting the CN Tower — Toronto’s most iconic and loved/loathed architectural symbol — may shortly be replaced by the Michael Lee-Chin crystal at the ROM. For the record I’ll state that I love the crystal, although understand it hasn’t added much to the Museum’s actual functionality. But aesthetically, it’s a fantastic addition to Toronto’s streetscape.
I’m looking forward, most of all, to seeing the crystal immortalized — positively or maliciously — in the city’s literature.
P.S. The image here is your first peek at the book’s cover.
March 17, 2010, at 2:51 pm
 In The Urban Experience, geographer David Harvey reminds us that a city—and its suburbs—should be understood as a process rather than a thing. In this light, it is important to remember that Toronto’s suburbs did not appear out of nowhere at mid-century, emerging all at once from the landscape like earthbound Leviathans. In his 1898 book, Toronto the Good, C.S. Clark wrote of the city’s diurnal migration of suburbanites who “come down every morning to [do] business in crowds between the hours of seven and nine, and literally pour out of it between the hours of four and seven in the evening.” The suburban commuters Clark refers to are mainly the wealthy inhabitants of Rosedale, Moore Park and the Annex, at the time still distinguished from the rest of the city by a combination of social class and legal jurisdiction.
At the same time, however, working class suburbs had also begun to make their muddy appearance in undeveloped areas west of the city. In Unplanned Suburbs, geographer Richard Harris traces the development of these communities, established through the subdivision of large landholdings into building lots purchased primarily by immigrants attracted to industrial jobs located along the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific rail lines. Some residents bought developer-built homes in rapidly growing industrial suburbs like the Town of West Toronto Junction but many others settled in an area known as “the Shackland,” a district of self-built homes and squatters’ shanties centred on St. Clair in the Earlscourt area around Dufferin Street and extending west into the Junction.
Working class suburbs were not only a phenomenon of the early part of the century. An acute housing shortage and a surge in European immigration following the Second World War spurred new growth on the city’s outskirts well before incorporated subdivisions like Don Mills, marketed to the middle class, came to dominate the suburban landscape. In The Suburban Society, a study of urban change in mid-century Toronto, Sociologist Samuel Clark described the bulk of suburban residents as “people in impoverished circumstances prepared to accept whatever the country had to offer them.” In many cases what these residents—many of whom were war veterans or refugees—were prepared to accept were unserviced, undeveloped building lots available for a few hundred dollars. In Pioneering in North York, historian Patricia Hart refers to these suburbanites as “the New Pioneers,” writing that
many bought land and started to build their own houses. They dug basements, covered them over, then paused to regroup their finances, and as the idea became known, others followed suit. They were somewhat derisively called “cave dwellers.” Slowly, these houses have been finished, sometimes after a nudge from the municipal authorities, but for a number of years “cave dwellers” walked daily to a pump near the centre of the community for water.
In Buying on Time, a collection of linked stories, Antanas Sileika describes a family from Lithuania, displaced by the ravages of the Second World War, who buy a building lot in an undeveloped corner of Weston:
Our street had half a dozen other houses on it, but none of them were finished. People dug the foundations and laid the basement blocks. Then they waited and saved. When a little money came in, they bought beams and joists and studs. Then they waited some more. The Taylors stood out because a contractor had built their house from start to finish. We stood out too. We moved in before the above-ground walls went up.
“You want us to live underground?” my mother had asked. “Like moles? Like worms?”
“No,” my father said, “like foxes.”
The lecture slides for this week’s class are available here.
Literary works we will discuss in today’s class include Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (1960), Hugh Garner’s Death in Don Mills (1975), M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1991), Rabindranath Maharaj’s Homer in Flight (1997), Russell Smith’s Noise (1998), Sesanarine Persaud’s Canada Geese and Mango Chatney (1998), Linwood Barclay’s Bad Move (2004), Michelle Berry’s Blind Crescent (2005) and Emily Schultz’s Joyland (2007).
March 3, 2010, at 1:11 pm
 As we navigate the urban labyrinth, whenever we follow the invisible paths laid down by our longings, we trace desire lines across the city. Like the rutted footpaths worn across well-used playgrounds, and the spontaneous shortcuts that materialize at street corners, desire lines mark the movements we make by choice rather than at the command of curbstones and social conventions. Radiating outward from the soul of every city dweller, they are the outward expressions of internal desire, a compass charting our most intimate longings.
Curiously, these cartographies of desire come to us not from poets but from transportation engineers, who once designed highway networks by charting destination preferences they called “desire lines.” Subsequently the expression has come to refer more commonly to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways in pursuit of an efficient shortcut or playful detour. More recently, desire lines have been traced across digital terrain, mapping virtual networks and documenting patterns of electronic wanderlust. A thread connecting these seemingly divergent desire lines is an acknowledgement that between the urban imperatives of production and consumption lies a vast, corporeal landscape made by our movements in the pursuit of leisure, pleasure and play.
In today’s class we will examine representations of gender and sexuality in Toronto literature. Literary works discussed will include Stephen Marche’s Raymond and Hannah (Doubleday Canada, 2005), Daniel Jones’ “Things I Have Put into my Asshole,” Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless (HarperCollins, 2007) and Gordon Stewart Anderson’s The Toronto You are Leaving (Untroubled Heart, 2007).
Slides for today’s class are available here.
February 16, 2010, at 12:59 am
Light mists. The wind churns up the water and after a time it calms down. In the rises and falls I hear sources, the tide’s beat, the waves speaking. The Ursound, the sound of our origins, before books, before technology. And beyond that? The crackle of stellar pulses. And behind that, music that escapes the ear, a message outside the realm of articulate comprehension. [Bruce Powe, 1995. Outage. Toronto: Random House of Canada: 320.]
Welcome back! After ten days in the dark, the Imagining Toronto website is back online, thanks to a salvaged database, backed up files, new security measures and a great new host. Things may look a little rough for the next few days as content comes back online. The Imagining Toronto Library (with its inventory of Literary Works, books and articles about Local History and Culture and thematic guide to Toronto’s Literary Neighbourhoods) is online, however, and in the next day or so I’ll upload materials from the Imagining Toronto course, including the syllabus, lecture schedule, handouts and slides. I’ll also restore the list of literary links to the right sidebar, and bring back various other ancillary bits and pieces. If you notice anything missing or garbled, or any broken links, let me know and I’ll add or fix it up.
Perhaps appropriately, during this period I had occasion to re-read Bruce Powe’s Toronto novel, Outage. Set in Toronto in the late 1980s, shortly after the stock market crash, Outage explores the consequences of excessive technological dependency, not only for individuals but an entire city, even an entire culture. Published in 1995, at a time when everyday users were just beginning to discover the internet, the novel is remarkably prescient in its predictions about what happens to people when the technology they rely on spins out of control. The book offers a fantastic combination of speculative fiction and existential commentary, and it’s definitely worth a read if you are at all interested in the cultural impacts of technology.
As a person who does not use a cell phone and who lives much of her private life in digitally unmediated spaces (or did, until picking up, for the first time ever, a laptop computer a few months ago), it’s a curious, and revealing, read. I’m personally inclined to agree with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued in The Question Concerning Technology that our dependency on contemporary technology reduces us to “standing reserve,” waiting to be “challenged forth.”
The trick, as always, is to manage some kind of balance. Heidegger invokes the classical Greek language of “techne” which meant, “the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful.” In my view, this means that technology must add to, rather than destroy, the beauty of craft and art — and literature.
As the Imagining Toronto project comes back online, I’ll be happy to spend more time dealing with techne rather than technology.
February 5, 2010, at 12:00 pm
Greetings, Crestwood students!
- Students interested in literature engaging with particular Toronto neighbourhoods will find a geographically sorted list of books here.
[Please note: this post has been recreated from back-up files. Regrettably, any comments posted to the original version have been lost.]
February 3, 2010, at 12:00 pm
 Toronto is a city wrapped in the rhythms of work. All night vehicle lights surge and recede along the urban expressways, as fluid as arteries and pulsating as if propelled by the city’s beating heart. At dawn packed buses wallow in the curb lane, moving like migrating manatees. An hour later the subway is stuffed with commuters who sway in silent communion as the train scythes around a bend in the tunnel, while above them, at kitchen counters and crowded street corners, coffee cups are raised and lowered and raised again in sleepy salute to the day.
In this precise, punctual, tightly scripted city–”New York run by the Swiss,” as playwright Peter Ustinov is claimed to have once remarked–we rely on these rhythms. Torontonians shove past sidewalk laggards and chafe at waiting in line. We view the weather report-snow squalls in Barrie, flurries along the 401, light rain near the lakeshore-less as a meteorological phenomenon than as a kind of calculus for plotting our commute into work. In this city, where time is indistinguishable from money, we shout into cell phones whenever there is a lane closure, a lag on the subway line or a stalled streetcar in our path. We are always in a hurry to get to work, as if failing to do so on time would jeopardize not only our gainful employment but the very essence of our being.
In Toronto we have grown accustomed to think of the great battles over work as having been fought elsewhere and a long time ago, in Germany and England or perhaps in Winnipeg. In an era of employment standards acts, employment insurance, human rights  tribunals and public health care, most of us have come to take work-if not always our own jobs-for granted. As unionization levels continue to decline, we consider strikes an intrusion into the orderly progress of urban life, particularly when the striking workers are public servants who pick up our garbage or drive the buses many of us take to work. We have grown even to dislike the word “worker,” with its connotations of lunch buckets and blue collars, preferring to think of ourselves as professionals, even consultants. We watch television programs like The Office with rueful recognition, but fail to see in them any meaningful reflection of our own working lives. If we are unhappy, overworked, undervalued or work in unsafe conditions, we blame our boss or coworkers. If we sense that some structural imbalance underpins the relations of production, we joke about it or keep our mouths shut. Everyone has to make a living, don’t they?
More than a century after trade unions and other labour organizations took up the cause of workers’ rights in Toronto, and in the long decades since legislation was grudgingly and gradually enacted to even out the balance between employers and working people, it is easy to forget the appalling working conditions that led to those demonstrations and labour stoppages and the sharp social schisms that pitted people against one another. Yet, Toronto’s history is in many ways the history of an industrial city. Moreover, many of the same labour issues that prompted demonstrations and strikes in the early part of the century persist today in an era of globalization and lean production.
This week, among other works, we will be discussing Hugh Garner’s classic novel depicting working-class Depression-era Toronto, Cabbagetown (Ryerson, 1969), Earle Birney’s Down the Long Table (McClelland & Stweart, 1955), Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (McClelland & Stewart, 1969) and Emily Schultz’s Heaven is Small (Anansi, 2009).
This week’s slides are available here.
[Please note: this post has been recreated from back-up files. Regrettably, any comments posted to the original version have been lost.]
|
|
