The Imagining Toronto Project This website offers news and commentary about the Imagining Toronto project and the Imagining Toronto book (Mansfield Press, spring 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.
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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.
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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.]
January 27, 2010, at 12:00 pm
 In The Robber Bride, novelist Margaret Atwood refers to Toronto’s polyphonic gathering of voices as “music from elsewhere.” Walking up Spadina Avenue, a wide street vibrant with fruit venders, fish mongers, electronics importers and Sichuan restaurants, Atwood’s protagonist studies the diversity gathered around her and observes,
“She likes the mix on the street 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.”
Author Dionne Brand seems to respond to this description in her Toronto novel, What We All Long For, suggesting that “as at any crossroads there are permutations of existence. People turn into other people imperceptibly, unconsciously.” She adds,
Lives in this city are doubled, tripled, conjugated – women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, it’s impossible to tell one thread from another.
These two characterizations of identity — one historical, the other invented – exemplify tensions among competing narratives of Toronto as a cultural crossroads. In Atwood’s Toronto, culture is nostalgic, wistful, unsettled but largely resigned to what it has gained or given up in a city described as little more than a palimpsest of other cities. Tellingly, her protagonist is a historian, an archaeologist of memory who sees herself as an observer of culture rather than a participant in it. In Brand’s Toronto, conversely, culture is hybrid and contested, engaged actively in the construction of its own memories and meanings. Brand’s protagonists take culture wherever they find it – in sweaty nightclubs, impromptu street parties, Kensington Market coffee shops, each other – and weave tradition, in-jokes and borrowed memories into a pastiche that simultaneously rejects and reclaims the concept of cultural identity. They make the story up as they go along, and as a result the city they create through narrative is continually shifting and often at odds with itself.
Despite their differences, Atwood and Brand have one vital thing in common: both writers describe culture as emerging from narrative, as erupting from acts of storytelling that alternately reconstruct and reimagine the city’s past and present. In doing so, they challenge the anthropological claim that culture consists primarily of fixed, measurable or neutral qualities. Indeed, if culture is rooted in the stories we tell, it must necessarily involve the possibility of contradiction, forgetting and outright fabrication. This creates urgent challenges in a city like Toronto where almost everybody has a story to tell, and where so many narratives compete for our attention. How do we navigate among them? Is a coherent narrative of the multicultural city even possible?
Slides for today’s class are available here.
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January 20, 2010, at 12:00 pm
 This week in the Imagining Toronto course we will explore Toronto’s literary cartographies. We will begin with the idea that the ravines are the repository of the city’s memory. Then we’ll move upward into Toronto’s streets and neighbourhoods as part of a discussion about the poetics of walking. Finally, we will step into to towers that ring the downtown core, in order to explore what perspectives they offer — and take away.
Lecture slides are available here. All course materials may be accessed by clicking on the Course tab.
Bloor Viaduct photograph taken by Amy Lavender Harris in 2006.
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January 13, 2010, at 12:00 pm
 Slides for Week 2 of the Imagining Toronto course are now available here. Two handouts — guidelines for the research essay and guidelines for the first reading response assignment — are also available to be downloaded.
Today’s discussion will revolve around the idea of the city as text.
We’ll begin discussing Dionne Brand’s novel Toronto Book Award winning novel, What We All Long For (Knopf, 2005), and will refer primarily to two articles about imagined cities: Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson’s “City Imaginaries,” from A Companion to the City (Blackwell, 2000> and Stephen Cain’s essay, “Annexing a space for poetry in the new Toronto,” published in The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto (Coach House, 2006).
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January 6, 2010, at 12:00 pm
In the winter 2009-2010 term, the Imagining Toronto course (listed as GEOG 4280 3.0) will be held on Wednesdays, 4:00 to 7:00 pm in Vari Hall room 1018.
The syllabus and reading list are available here; a copy of the syllabus may be downloaded by clicking here.
Lecture slides, handouts and other materials will be uploaded weekly; these items are available here.
The Imagining Toronto course is currently full, but a few additional students may be accommodated if classroom space permits. If you are interested in taking the Imagining Toronto course, please contact Amy Lavender Harris at alharris [at] yorku [dot] ca. Students enrolling in the course should hold fourth year standing in the Geography Department at York University.
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September 28, 2009, at 12:00 pm
 Earlier this month I took Spacing Radio producer Mieke Anderson on a literary walking tour of Toronto’s Kensington Market. We strolled through the Market on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning — beginning, of course, outside This Ain’t the Rosedale Library on Nassau and ending up near the bottom of Kensington Avenue — and chatted about literature, community, culture and urban design.
The literary walking tour, which incorporates literary references from Margaret Atwood, John Bentley Mays, Lynn Crosbie and Sarah Dearing, and plenty of extemporaneous commentary, is accompanied by a background soundtrack of Kensington Market ambiance.
Here’s a description of the complete episode, which also features Davy Rothbart of Found Magazine and urban designer Joe Berridge:
Episode 008 of Spacing Radio examines the idea of haphazardness in a city. Spacing magazine contributing editor Amy Lavender Harris takes producer Mieke Anderson and listeners on a literary tour of Toronto’s Kensington Market that explores the neighbourhood’s unique character. Spacing’s Todd Harrison sits down with Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found magazine and books, to discuss the world of lost objects found in the public realm of our cities. And we eavesdrop on urban designer Joe Berridge during a recent panel discussion at the IPAC conference here in Toronto. The music of The D’Urburvilles can be found throughout the episode (songs “Dragnet” and “Hot Tips”).
You can listen to Spacing Radio Episode 008, The Haphazard City, by clicking here.
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September 16, 2009, at 12:00 pm
 Years ago [can it really have been only two?] Library & Archives Canada commissioned me to write a short essay on Toronto literature for a new web exhibition called Canada: A Literary Tour intended to showcase LAC’s prodigious holdings of literary works, images, recordings and other materials representing Canadian cities and regions.
Yesterday, at long last, Canada: A Literary Tour went live. You can read my contribution here. At 350 words it’s very brief, but I managed to squeeze in references to as many Toronto writers as possible, including Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Anne Michaels, Nalo Hopkinson, Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, Phyllis Brett Young, Austin Clarke, Dennis Lee, Margaret Atwood and Dionne Brand. As an overview of Toronto literature it’s manifestly incomplete, but I wanted to inventory some of the writers who have most profoundly shaped Toronto’s literary landscape.
The exhibition separates literary landscapes and literary cities, an unfortunate distinction perhaps, but an understandable one given the enormous range and diversity of Canadian literature. It also includes a number of literary maps, efforts to plot literary references to place.
Overall, the exhibition, which is geared toward a general audience, seems to be an excellent entry point for anyone interested in discovering Canada’s literary heritage and its writers’ preoccupations with place. This is wonderful as far as it goes, given that many of the books inventoried can be found in bookstores and libraries across the country. At the same time, however, the exhibition highlights a critical limitation of Library & Archives Canada: that so few of its holdings (including copies of books long out of print, original manuscripts, maps such as the ones reference d above, writers’ fonds and personal documents donated for posterity) may be accessed electronically. The vast bulk of Canada’s literary heritage is warehoused in Ottawa, far out of reach of most Canadians and many researchers.
A week ago the Federal government announced plans to “modernize” Library & Archives Canada. The announcement garnered media attention, mainly because of its anticipated impacts on the National Portrait Gallery. But really, the issue that should be galvanizing Canadians is when and how we can expect to gain better access — particularly via the web — to the country’s literary archives. Exhibitions like Canada: A Literary Tour are wonderful as far as they go, but at best they can be considered a first, halting step.
[Please note: this post has been recreated from back-up files. Regrettably, any comments posted to the original version have been lost.]
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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.