Amy Lavender Harris's Blog, page 4

Imagining Toronto at Classical Pursuits

Welcome Classical Pursuits visitors!

Here are the slides from today's Imagining Toronto talk at Victoria College:

Imagining Toronto CLassical Pursuits Toronto Pursuits talk 21 July 2011

I'll update this post later to include links to other literary references of interest.

Engaging Toronto's Diverse Communities Through the City's Literature

"The city is the place of our meeting with the other. … The city is the privileged site where the other is and where we ourselves are other, as the place where we play the other." [Roland Barthes, Semiology and the Urban. 1986.]

Welcome Toronto Public Library staff who have registered for today's workshop!

Here are the slides accompanying the presentation:

Engaging Torontos Diverse Communities Through Reading TPL Workshop 2 June 2011

And here is the handout:

Engaging Torontos Diverse Communities TPL Culturally Resonant Literature Handout 2 June 2011

[In the interests of grammatical correctness, please imagine there are apostrophes in the titles.]

If you are looking for the Imagining Toronto Library:

click here to access the library of literary works.

Click here to access the inventory of scholarly and popular works engaging with local history and culture, literature and place, cultural geography, city planning and urban design.

Click here to access an informal catalogue of Toronto literature representing the city's neighbourhoods, cultural communities and social conditions.

Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale

As promised, for those who attended the "Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale" Jane's Walk event this afternoon but were not able to hear well due to the huge turnout or who just wanted a printed copy of your own, here are the reference notes I used on the tour.

Parkdale Scummy Parkdale Amy Notes Janes Walk 2011

Here, also, is the one-page handout I distributed:

Parkdale Scummy Parkdale Janes Walk 2011 Handout

Both documents include a recommended reading list if you would like to follow up on some of the literary and scholarly sources referenced. This material is drawn from my book, Imagining Toronto, and may not be reproduced or used without written permission secured in advance.

Thank you to everyone who came out! What a fantastic weekend!

 

From Hip to Chic: Imagining Yorkville, 1960 to the Present

This evening, as Part 2 of the Imagined City series of talks I am doing this spring for the Toronto Public Library, I will discuss literary representations of Yorkville. The title suggests I'll be focusing on Yorkville from 1960s to the present, but in fact I'll discuss representations of Yorkville back to its inception as a village annexed by the City of Toronto in 1883.

The thrust of my talk will be that there is not one Yorkville but rather three of them that should interest us. The first, a run-down, working-class district; the second, Yorkville's half-decade in the 1960s as Toronto's Haight-Ashbury, and finally, the high-end shopping district contemporary Torontonians are familiar with.

The talk will be held tonight, Tuesday 19 April 2011, from 6:30-8:00 pm at the Yorkville Branch (22 Yorkville Avenue) of the Toronto Public Library. Here's a link to the TPL's description.

A brief overview:

Contemporary Yorkville, a gentrified district of expensive boutiques and luxury condominiums whose spiritual epicentre is the intersection of Bloor Street and Avenue Road, owes the bulk of its literary reputation to a brief bohemian period that lasted less than a decade but has inspired at least two generations of writers eager to pay homage to the memory of a neighbourhood once known as Toronto's very own Haight- Ashbury.

Incorporated in 1853 and annexed by the City of Toronto in 1883, Yorkville grew from a crossroads into a prosperous suburb before its fortunes declined in the years following World War I. Before Yorkville became a bohemian centre, it was a working-class neighbourhood of narrow streets lined with rundown row houses.

Despite this backdrop of not-so-picturesque poverty, by mid-century Yorkville was a neighbourhood in flux as its southerly streets, zoned increasingly for commercial use, began to house galleries and shops frequented by wealthy doyennes drifting north from Toronto's Mink Mile. In the late 1950s and early '60s the city's beatnik subculture established a beachhead amid Yorkville's growing cluster of coffee houses as nearby Gerrard Village—Toronto's original bohemian district—began to be overrun by hospital expansions and commercial redevelopment. After the mid-1960s a shift in the cultural Zeitgeist made Yorkville a gathering place for aspiring musicians and social activists as well as disaffected young people attracted to its tune-in, drop-out vibe.

By the late 1960s city planners, politicians and the general public expressed considerable concern that the Yorkville 'scene' had gotten out of hand. The "festering sore" city politicians had decried now needed to be lanced. In 1969, having quietly assembled entire blocks of Yorkville real estate, a commercial consortium announced plans to redevelop parts of the district into a hotel, parking garage and high-rise residential complex. Despite local opposition, the plans met quickly with municipal approval, and by 1970 Yorkville was over.

Critics of gentrified Yorkville have claimed that the district's rapid transformation in the early 1970s was the result of a calculated, coordinated effort between municipal politicians, public health officials, city planners and a police force determined to reclaim Yorkville's streets for the use of Toronto's more respectable citizenry. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that the neighbourhood's rows of quaint town houses, proximity to downtown and village-like character—the very qualities that brought beatniks, bootleggers, hippies and hangers-on to Yorkville—also attracted real estate speculators eager to cash in on Yorkville's cultural cachet and commercial promise. In one sense this sounds like a standard narrative of gentrification: artists and other representatives of the urban avant-garde "discover" and transform a promising but rundown neighbourhood before being displaced in turn by more affluent purchasers in a rapidly appreciating real estate market.

But even in its Bohemian heyday, "the Village" harboured the seeds of its own transformation, one in which artists, poets and privileged urbanites were active participants. In the early 1960s ,Yorkville already housed a number of high-end boutiques and art galleries, and by the latter part of the decade these were sufficiently well established that a 1968 City planning report described the neighbourhood as "an enclave of interior decorators' and couturiers' shops […] sidewalk cafes, coffee houses, art dealers' galleries, fine housewares shops, boutiques and gourmet restaurants." If the City's spin might be interpreted as political wish fulfilment, literary representations of Yorkville reflect a district where high culture held its own alongside the long-haired, lowbrow hippie scene, in part because it preceded it by several years.

By the late 1970s, Yorkville's transformation into the now-familiar high-end shopping district was complete.

Literary works I'll discuss this evening include David Helwig's story "Something For Olivia's Scrapbook, I Guess" published in The Streets of Summer (Oberon, 1969), Juan Butler's Cabbagetown Diary (Peter Martin & Associates, 1970), Dorris Heffron's A Nice Fire and some Moonpennies (Macmillan of Canada, 1971), John Reid's The faithless Mirror (Darkwood Press, 1974), Don Lyon's Yorkville Diaries (Elephant Press, 1984), Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (McClelland & Stewart, 1988), F.G. Paci's Sex and Character (Oberon, 1993), Paul Duval's memoir Berryman Street Boy: Growing Up in Yorkville (Von Lotz, 2000< Anne Denoon's Back Flip (Porcupine's Quill, 2002) and Sarah Dearing's Courage My Love (Stoddart, 2002).

Slides for tonight's talk are available here:

From Hip to Chic Yorkville Talk Slides Toronto Public Library Yorkville Branch 19 April 2011

And a link to which I'll also make reference:

The Toronto Star's Neighbourhoods Map

The material from tonight's talk is drawn largely from the "Yorkville" section of the Imagining Toronto book. All material, quotations from literary works aside, is copyright Amy Lavender Harris, 2010 and 2011 and may not be used without securing written permission in advance.

Research Day talk at York University

Today at the Geography Department's Research Day event I'll be doing a condensed version of a longer talk I'll be delivering at the Glocal City in Canadian Literature conference in Spain called 'The Myth of the Multicultural City'.

The talk is drawn in part from the Myth of the Multicultural City chapter in the Imagining Toronto book, as well as from a co-authored paper with Peter Fruchter called 'The Myth of the Multicultural City — or — Learning to Live Together Without Coming to Blows,' forthcoming in Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities.

It begins by exploring literary representations of multiculturalism in Toronto and goes on to critically examine concepts (and criticisms) of cultural difference and tolerance in the west. Ultimately I argue that tolerance, a principle establishing the minimum standard for civility, makes room for genuine engagement with tensions over cultural difference and helps us learn how to live together — or determine whether we can do so at all.

Here are the sides for today's talk:

Myth of the Multicultural CIty Geography Research Day 7 April 2011

Week 12: The Magical City

This week in the Imagining Toronto course we will explore Toronto's mythological qualities, beginning with essaying Jonathan Raban's observation that "[l]iving in a city, one finds oneself unconsciously slipping into magical habits of mind." In Soft City (Hamish Hamilton, 1974) Raban devotes an entire chapter to the "magical city," exploring its supernatural qualities and appeal to cultural superstition and arguing, ultimately, that a fundamental tension exists between regulation and the unreal.

We'll approach Toronto's 'unreal' qualities through a reading of science fiction author Robert Charles Wilson's story "The Inner Inner City," which describes as 'paracartographic' map of Toronto in which the visible city is only a mirror of the imagined city, an unchartable labyrinth of hidden avenues laid deep within its core.

We will also take a look at Nalo Hopkinson's 1998 novel Brown Girl In The Ring (Warner / Aspect) which describes a divided Toronto whose downtown core has been walled off by wealthy suburbanites and is controlled by violent gangs.  One of the novel's protagonists describes inner-city Toronto as a "donut hole:" we'll consider how Toronto's contemporary 'inner suburbs' have inverted Hopkinson's vision of this particular city-suburb dynamic.

Ultimately, we'll consider what kinds of mythologies Toronto has managed to construct for itself. During the course we've considered a number of what might be called Toronto's 'creation myths:' the myth of the multicultural city and myths about suburbia and the city's relationship with the lakeshore among them.

A generations ago Gwendolyn MacEwen, in her poetry and story collections Noman (1972) and Noman's Land (1985) sought explicitly to craft a mythology not only for Toronto but Canada as a whole. How have the current generation of writers (Darren O'Donnell, in Your Secrets Sleep With Me, Claudia Dey with Stunt, or Sean Dixon with his forthcoming The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn) furthered this aim? has Toronto, at long last, become a city that lives in the imagination?

Slides for today's class are available here:

2010-2011 Week 12 slides GEOG 4280 The Magical City

 

Week 11: Suburban Gothic

In The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, Howard Kunstler denounces the contemporary North American suburban landscape, describing it as

depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particleboard garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth."

Kunstler's views echo those of influential urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, who in The Production of Space wrote succinctly of contemporary cities that "everything here resembles everything else," adding that "repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, [and] the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field."

Although banality, boredom, violence and murder figure prominently in a surprisingly large number of novels set in greater Toronto area suburbs, other literary representations — particularly recent ones — also engage with the complexity of social change and cultural identity, indicating that a new version of suburbia is rapidly being written into the city's literature.

Today in the Imagining Toronto course we will explore literary representations of suburbia in the greater Toronto area. Literary works we'll discuss include Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians, Hugh Garner's Death in Don Mills, Linwood Barclay's suburban thriller Bad Move, Michelle Berry's Blind Crescent, M.G. Vassanji's No New Land (a novel about a family of South Asian Africans living in a Thorncliffe Park highrise), Rabindranath Maharaj's Homer in Flight and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For.

In contrast with Kunstler's view that suburbs are banal, degraded places, we'll consider how immigration and cultural shifts have changed the face of suburbs and how Toronto's "inner suburbs" (Don Mills, Malvern, Rexdale) require a new understanding of what it means to live in and imagine suburbia.

Despite Kunstler's perspective — and in contrast with views held by literary scholars Catherine Jurca (see White Diaspora) and Paul Milton (who wrote that "[n]othing […] of any consequence ever really happens on a crescent") — the continuous exodus of city-dwellers to the urban periphery, alongside the influx of recent immigrants and second generation suburbanites who bypass downtown dwelling entirely, indicates that something more meaningful pulls people to the suburbs than the prospect of a multi-vehicle garage and a verdant lawn. Indeed, an emerging body of Toronto literature indicates that the city's suburbs are continually being inhabited and imagined in new ways, suggesting that if there is redemption to be found in suburbia, it will rise out of a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

Slides for today's class are available here:

2010-2011 Week 11 slides Geog 4280 City Limits

For members of the public following along, today's discussion will engage with Chapter 7, City Limits, in the Imagining Toronto book.

As a bonus, here are links to a variety of films, interviews and music videos set in suburbs:

"Welcome to the Suburbs" (1950s film; Youtube)

"Sin in the Suburbs" (film, 1964; via Youtube)

"Subdivisions" by Rush (via Youtube)

"Suburbia" by the Pet Shop Boys (via Youtube)

"Jesus of Suburbia" by Green Day (via Youtube)

"Rockin' the Suburbs" by Ben Folds (via Youtube)

"The Suburbs" by Arcade Fire (via Youtube)

"Shaikhing Up the Hood: Suburban Placemaking in Scarborough" (Aslam Shaikh, via Youtube)

"The Microcosm of Markham" (The Agenda with Steve Paikin, via Youtube)

 

Week 10: Desire Lines

This week in the Imagining Toronto course we'll be talking about how Toronto's writers represent sexuality and desire in the city. We'll focus primarily on four aspects of desire:

Queer and heteronormative perspectives on desire
Sex work
Desire's dark side: assault and possession
Fertility and birth

Slides for today's class (which are subject to modification) are available here:

2010-2011 Week 10 slides GEOG 4280 Desire Lines

For members of the general and academic public following along (welcome aboard!) the discussion will be informed by the Desire Lines chapter in the Imagining Toronto book and a reading of a variety of literary texts, among them Gordon Stewart Anderson's The Toronto You Are Leaving, John Grube's story "Raid," Daniel Jones "Things That I Have Put Into My Asshole," Katherine Govier's Going Through the Motions, Barbara Gowdy's Helpless, Margaret Atwood's story "Giving Birth" and Gwendolyn MacEwen's poem "Breakfast for Barbarians."

Week 9: Class Fictions

Today in the Imagining Toronto class we will be talking about Class Fictions: narratives of poverty and homelessness as well as literary representations of work.

Slides for today's class are available here:

2010-2011 Week 9 slides GEOG 4280 Class Fictions

We'll be discussing a wide range of literary depictions of homelessness, among them Maggie Helwig's Girls Fall Down, Richard Scrimger's Crosstown, Rosemary Aubert's Free Reign, Pat Capponi's Last Stop Sunnyside and Shaunessy Bishop-Stall's memoir, Down To This.

We'll also look at how Toronto writers have represented the experience of work; e.g., Emily Schultz's Heaven, Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, Earle Birney's Down the Long Table, Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown, Barbara Greenwood's Factory Girl and Austin Clarke's story "Canadian Experience."

Critical perspectives will be drawn primarily from phenomenological and Marxist literature on poverty and work: we'll challenge the capacity of these perspectives themselves even while using them to 'read' the imaginative literature.

Update: A late addition: Taxi Driver Syndrome, Geoffrey Reitz's excellent analysis appearing in this month's Literary Review of Canada.

 

Cartographies of Desire

Cartographies of Desire

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 or 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 public expressions of internal desire, a compass charting our most intimate longings.

Despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe our awareness of these cartographies of desire not to poets but to transportation engineers, who once designed highway networks by charting destination preferences they called "desire lines." Subsequently, urban planners and landscape architects used the phrase to refer 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 topographies of desire 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 Stephen Marche's novel Raymond and Hannah, a young man and woman meet at a party: their attraction is mutual and immediate. Raymond is a graduate student, bound to his books, while Hannah is days away from flying to Israel for a nine-month Aliyah program in Jerusalem. They spend six days together, and then she leaves. This could be the uncluttered conclusion to a quick fling, except they have fallen hopelessly in love and left the imprint of their union all over the city.

Throughout the novel, Marche describes their liaison in spatial language: Hannah's empty attic is a symbol of anticipation as well as absence, Raymond's basement a metaphor for the long hibernation he will endure while she is gone, every restaurant meal a plateful of proximity, the lake a ledge at the edge of infinity. Like a breath held until it must be released, the city sings a silent aubade for the lovers, begging the streets to be still:

Transport trucks, go slowly. Pull yourself over on the side of the road. Bring the night with you into your bunks. Let Raymond and Hannah anticipate endlessly on stairs up to attics. Nights in August in Toronto are too short besides. And go slowly, street-washing men. Just let the dirt be dirty for now. Let the streets seize with filth. Let your engines stall, and stop the morning from coming.

But space and time cannot be stretched out indefinitely, and six days later the lovers learn that "[a]irports are built for Raymond waiting at doors that slide open and shut, and Hannah running through check-in, through security, through the tunnel to the airplane to sit and consider what was."

During the long months of their separation, Hannah becomes immersed in her heritage, Raymond in his studies. She grows settled, considers staying. Raymond grows melancholic and, perhaps inevitably, betrays her sexually. The thread between them, thin already, is stretched almost to the breaking point. But something inexplicable pulls them together, and when Hannah returns to Toronto it is as if all the intervening oceans have parted just for them. The city fits their contours perfectly:

Their bodies are as beautiful as a city not cared for much. His belly and hers were two bridges facing each other across a ravine. Their hair waved like the flags over the embassies. Their mouths were two open doors leading into a single building and, lying beside each other, they spread out like one smog cloud over two smokestacks. They ran like water, like the subway, from one end of the city to the other. […] Every part requires every part in a city, in a body. His hand on her thigh means her hand on his neck just so. […] Again in Toronto, their bodies make the sound of rivers. They taste salt, emerging out of their own rivers. They have become the lake at the end of the city, perfect and serene and calm, and they start up like two pigeons among a flock of sleeping doves in the public grounds of the city. Their bodies are perfect.

Like almost everything else in Toronto, Raymond and Hannah are drawn together despite their differences. When the lovers return, the city's rough edges soften and reform around them: buildings open, bridges arch and landscapes unfold until, in the end, what remains is what was present in the beginning: the shape of a body in a city yearning only for the warmth of another.

A similar spatial lexicon structures Gordon Stewart Anderson's The Toronto You Are Leaving, a funny, poignant novel describing a young gay man coming out in a city just beginning to chart its sexual terrain. Set mainly in mid-1970s Toronto, in the years before Church and Wellesley became the epicentre of the city's gay ghetto, the work maps the movements of a loose network of gay men among the social spaces—gay bars, the bathhouses, the Y and Hanlan's Beach—that are already coming to define their community. Anderson's protagonist is a graduate student from Victoria who has chosen Toronto not only for its scholarly prospects but also for its sexual promise. New to the city, David meets a navigator, Tim, who becomes his first lover in an on-again-off-again relationship that quickly comes to embody the contradictions of the city itself.

Tim, a "scion of Anglo-Saxon Toronto" whose exuberant sexuality remains at unspoken odds with his upbringing, is an artist who lives in an airy highrise at the fringes of Forest Hill, while David, a diffident academic and anxious lover, burrows into an aging Annex house near the university. Tim remains restless, leaving Toronto—and David—periodically to visit other cities—and other bodies—looking for something he never finds, while David embeds himself in Toronto, finding in it—and in Tim—a multifaceted refraction of their relationship; indeed of gay culture itself:

He had arrived in love, in a new city. From out of Tim's presence and his paths through Toronto, David had begun seeing another city, began writing it in his head. In reality, gay Toronto was a small town: its meeting places were few, faces repeated, it was banal and provincial, with the pallor of oppression. The red-brick buildings obscured the reality that hatred as well as neighbourliness and discrimination as well as friendliness could co-exist in the expanse of Metro that stretched beyond the restricted confines of the gay ghetto. For David, it seemed to hold a whole lost civilization in its ways of moving and feeling. It was an eternal city, greeting him with a kind of tacky Latinity.

David begins writing a novel called Toronto, its chapters laid out in the shape of his lover's body, but finds he cannot complete it because the city, like his relationship with Tim, keeps shifting and slipping away. As David muses, "He kept telling himself to hurry, to get down the words that held it. Tim, its founder and foundation, was real and solid enough, but the city wasn't. It wasn't a feeling of any sort. It was intuitive, from off to the side of the mind. It came around you only at lucky moments, like a city in the wind."

Desire encodes itself in every cell of the city. Like a mitochondrial sequence, it permeates the urban core, connecting the cerebral city—the public city of laws, culture and the mind—with the private, corporeal city of lust, anger, passion and the body. Desire is an organic algorithm, a visceral code tracing the trajectory of our myriad yearnings: for money, material success, remission from terror or the memory of it, power, possession, redemption, revenge, solidarity, solitude, love, a lucky lottery ticket, a winning hockey team or the warm press of a stranger's flesh on a crowded subway. Everything in a city leaves an imprint, with consequences novelist Katrina Onstad considers in How Happy to Be, musing, "What if every hand that laid itself on our bodies left a print? We could read each other better. The loneliest people would be flesh-coloured, and the most abused covered in black."

Still, sometimes in a city desire is the only thing that holds us to the people and places we love. Perhaps this is why in Metropolis, a volume of poems about the embodied city, Rishma Dunlop writes, "there is no consolation except in desire." Sometimes this is all we have left: an evanescent sadness passing across the soul like a row of streetlights across a wet windshield at night. As Maggie Helwig writes in her story "Canadian Movies," "I have also found flowers in the street sometimes, roses just lying across the pavement, all velvet and brittle and the colour of a heart muscle."

[Excerpted from Imagining Toronto, Chapter 5: Desire Lines. Mansfield Press, 2010. All rights reserved.]