Notebook on Cities and Culture
(Formerly The Marketplace of Ideas.) Colin Marshall sits down for in-depth conversations with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene all around Los Angeles and beyond.

In Toronto's Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of Imagining Toronto, a study of the city as depicted in its literature. They discuss the psychedelically-illustrated, Toronto-centric poetry of Dennis Lee with which so many Torontonians grew up; how it took her thirty years from her Lee-reading days to come to understand the full scope of Toronto literature; In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje's much-named, little-read novel of city-building; how she first went about creating a university course on Toronto literature; her "personal fetish," the narrative of place; multiculturalism as Toronto's foundational myth; why Torontonians falsely believe the United Nations declared their city the world's most diverse; the "eternal haggle" of life here; how she's come to agree, at least halfway, with the description of the city as "a place where people live, but not where things happen"; why, in Canada, everyone has a hyphen; her non-Canadian-born husband's appreciation of the country as one where "people have nothing to declare"; Torontonian manifestations of Stanley Fish's "boutique multiculturalism" and Charles Taylor's "inspired ad-hocing"; why hating Toronto became such a literary and social tradition; no longer talking about achieving "world class" status as a sign of having achieved it; what about Toronto architecture makes people call it ugly, and why buildings that make people talk have already succeeded; the significance of the ravines in the Torontonian consciousness; 1960's suburban satire The Torontonians and the Canadian "flourishing of cultural production" that would come later that decade; Canada's thoroughgoing urbanness against its imaginary self-conception as a rural country; and the important elements of Toronto — remaining, vanishing, and gone — identified in one particular Dennis Lee poem.

 

Direct download: NCC_S4E62_Amy_Lavender_Harris.output.mp3
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