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, [...]
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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. |
Greetings, Crestwood students! Slides from the presentation to Chris Jull’s “Reading Toronto” class at Crestwood Preparatory College, 5 February 2010 are available here. 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] Whenever I visit Kensington Market — approximately weekly for both business and pleasure — I always make a point of stopping by This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. This Ain’t is a legendary independent Toronto bookstore that relocated to Kensington Market in 2008 after having been a fixture for three decades in the Queen East and [...] 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 [...] |
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