{"id":2465,"date":"2014-10-23T07:44:08","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T14:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2014-10-23T07:44:08","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T14:44:08","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e62-nothing-to-declare-with-amy-lavender-harris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2465","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E62: Nothing to Declare with Amy Lavender Harris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"amylavenderharris\"In Toronto’s Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of\u00a0Imagining Toronto<\/a><\/em>, 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;\u00a0In the Skin of a Lion<\/em>, 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\u00a0the 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\u00a0The Torontonians<\/em>\u00a0and 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 \u2014 remaining, vanishing, and gone \u2014 identified in one particular Dennis Lee poem.<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0<\/span>here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span>iTunes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Toronto’s Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of\u00a0Imagining 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture","category-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2467,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions\/2467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}