Articles

The Annex area of Toronto has long been a popular locus for writers — both as a place of residence and as a source of inspiration. Although the boundaries are often disputed by realtors, the Annex neighbourhood is generally acknowledged to be enclosed by Bathurst Street, Dupont Street, Avenue Road and Bloor Street and for the past century has attracted numerous writers and artists owing to a number of geographic and sociological factors.

As wealthier Torontonians began moving north and east of the Annex in the early part of the last century, their former single family homes, large Victorian dwellings, became ideal rental property as they were divided into multiple-occupancy rooming houses by the new owners. These rental units attracted young families, recent immigrants, labourers and, perhaps most importantly for the literary culture of the area, students and young faculty from the nearby University of Toronto. The presence of university students living in the area created a need for cafés, diners and bookstores, which soon sprung up, and during the late 1960s dissatisfaction with the U of T led students and faculty to form the alternative educational facility, Rochdale, which was also fed by counter-cultural youth living in Yorkville and American draft-resisters who resided primarily on nearby Baldwin. Activities at Rochdale led to the development of two Toronto small presses — House of Anansi and Coach House Press — which attracted many writers to the area, and various waves of immigrants, including Jewish, and later Chinese, communities along Spadina Avenue, as well as Hungarians who arrived and opened businesses along Bloor during the late 1950s, contributed to a vital, energetic and constantly changing enclave of novelists, socialists, students, poets and other artists within a few densely-populated blocks.

In the summer of 2005, Sharon Harris and I designed a literary walking tour of the Annex as part of the Scream in High Park festival that year and in conjunction with the [murmur] archival project. A considerable amount of the groundwork for a walking tour of this area had been constructed by Greg Gatenby in his invaluable 1999 collection Toronto: A Literary Guide, but what interested Harris and I most were the experimental and avant-garde writers who were often less-noteworthy to Gatenby, as well as younger writers and literary stories that had emerged after the publication of his guide. Although the weather this winter in Toronto hasn’t encouraged pedestrian travel, spring will bring opportunities for more perambulation which might include some of the following Annex literary stops outlined below.

Stop #1: Bloor and Walmer
If you leave Spadina subway station from the Walmer exit, and cross the street to the northwest corner, you’ll find yourself at 362 Bloor, which I like to think of as one of the “power points” of Annex literary culture. This spot has been the site of many restaurants over the years (currently it’s Cluck, Grunt & Low) but has almost always been a café of some sort. A few years ago it was Shakespeare’s Café, where cultural commentator and educator Katherine Parrish ran a unique literary series featuring established writers and unpublished high school students reading together. Most significantly to me, however, the remarkable poet Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987), during her frequent bouts of restlessness, would come to this spot to drink coffee and write until the early hours. Fittingly, just north of here at Lowther Avenue is Gwendolyn MacEwen Park (named in 1996) featuring a bronze bust of the poet by sculptor John McCombe which was unveiled in 2006. But beyond MacEwen, Walmer Avenue has been a very popular street for writers to reside on. According to Gatenby, over 40 authors have lived along Walmer including: Paul Quarrington, M. NourbeSe Philip, Carolyn Smart, Dorothy Livesay, Matt Cohen, Morley and Barry Callaghan, Paul Dutton, bpNichol, Dennis Lee and Barbara Gowdy.

Stop #2: Bloor and Howland
If you now walk west along Bloor and stop at Howland you'll have passed a few more important literary streets. Some notable writers who have lived on Brunswick North include the underground and underrated novelist Juan Butler and, according to Toronto: A Literary Guide, bpNichol, Dennis Lee, Morley Callaghan, Marian Engel, David Young and Sarah Sheard. Walking to Howland, you'll also pass Country Style restaurant at (450 Bloor) which is one of the last of the Hungarian restaurants on this strip. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 brought many immigrants to Canada fleeing the Soviet invasion which reinstated Communism — including writers like George Jonas — and many of these exiles opened up dozens of restaurants along Bloor during the 1960s and '70s. In the early days, the food they served was renowned for being very cheap and very filling, perfect for the counter-culture youth to dine on, and many writers during this period have written about surviving almost exclusively on goulash and schnitzel. The Blue Cellar Room, which was once on the south side, was also a Hungarian restaurant and a very similarly-named and described restaurant appears in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion as a place where Caravaggio and the company of gentlemen thieves hang out (although the novel takes place many years before the main Hungarian immigration). Finally, in walking to Howland you'll also pass the James Joyce Pub (386 Bloor) which, although not named after a Canadian literary figure, does feature in Lynn Crosbie's wonderful poem about significant locations in Toronto entitled “Alphabet City.”

Stop #3: Bloor and Bathurst
Continuing west until you reach Bathurst you are now at one of the borders of the Annex. From here you can contemplate some of the literary spots that lie just outside the Annex proper. Turning your mind's eye to the north, to the corner of Dupont and Bathurst, one might recollect the sadly-missed home of Janet Inksetter's Annex Books, well known for its fantastic collection of Canadian poetry and small press items. Considering poetry and book collections, directly across the road from Annex Books lived poets Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack for nearly ten years — along with their books, surely the most extensive private collection of antiquarian and avant-garde books to be assembled in this country. Two younger writers, the poet John Barlow (ASHINEoVSUN II) and literary impresario Bill Kennedy (Lexiconjury, Scream in High Park) lived for many years on the east side. Just west is the Victory Café, home to many literary events over years including, until just recently, the Art Bar reading series. Two blocks to the south, at Bathurst and Dundas, where the Sanderson branch of the Toronto Public Library is right now, is the first home of Coach House Press, and the pool at Alexandra Park, beside the library, also features prominently in Darren O'Donnell’s novel Your Secrets Sleep with Me. Closer to Bathurst and Bloor is Ulster Avenue which appears in Emily Schultz’s short story collection, Black Coffee Night, as well the Ulster Laundromat, a photo of which adorns the book’s cover.

Stop #4: Borden and Bloor
Cross Bloor and now walk east to Borden Street. On the way there you'll have passed Pauper's Pub where many scenes in David Eddie’s satiric novel Chump Change take place, but now you’ll be standing outside Dooney’s Café. To many in the Toronto literary community, Dooney's is synonymous with the writer Brian Fawcett. Initially a poet, Fawcett has, for the last several decades, shifted to writing novels and social commentary. He runs, and is the major contributor to Dooney’s Café, a web site of news and opinion (particularly on the arts and Canadian culture) and one of his recent books about anti-globalization is entitled Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney’s Café and other non-Globalized Places, People and Ideas. The title essay describes how the Annex community resisted this café being taken over by Starbucks in the late 1990s. Starbucks is now just a little further west and across the street.

Stop #5: Brunswick and Bloor
Walk east until you reach Brunswick and you'll be at Future Bakery, which can serve as an example of a generational shift regarding writers' haunts. Whereas Dooney's is comfortable territory for Boomer authors, in the mid-1990s the Future was the place for young poets to hang out. Michael Holmes was a regular patron at that time, and wrote an extended poem about the café (Satellite Dishes from the Future Bakery). Getting here you'll have also passed 497 Bloor, which is now a Pita Pit, but was once the famous Longhouse Bookstore, which was the first bookstore in Canada to have a completely Canadian stock. It was opened in 1972 by Beth Appeldoorn and Susan Sandler, and there were launches and many literary celebrations at this store until around 1997. Brunswick Avenue is also the former home of many Canadian writers including Katherine Govier, who was so impressed by the place and its people that she wrote a collection of linked short stories called Fables of Brunswick Avenue in 1985. Behind the Future is the popular bar The Greenroom, which is also the title of a collection of short stories by musician and author Moe Berg.

Stop #6: Trinity-St. Paul's
Further east you might stop outside Trinity-St. Paul's United Church at 427 Bloor. The Toronto Small Press Fair — founded in 1987 by Stuart Ross and Nick Power as Meet the Presses — has been held in several locales including Hart House at U of T and the 360 Bar on Queen, but the most popular place has been here at this church. On the way to this stop, you’ll also pass the flagship of the Book City chain. This branch is a particularly great bookstore that has also employed many writers over the years including: Alana Wilcox, André Alexis, Derek McCormack and Catherine Bush.

Stop #7: Spadina and Bloor
If you walk to Spadina and cross the street you'll be standing in Matt Cohen Park. There are several [murmur] recordings at this place, including one of Cohen’s widow Patsy Aldana explaining this space. The much-missed Cohen was a brilliant novelist, children’s author, poet and short story writer who died in 1999. At this park there are several plaques celebrating Cohen’s life and featuring quotations from his writing including the great surrealist story entitled "Spadina Time." Cohen also played a lot of pick up basketball at the Jewish Community Centre across the street, which now occasionally supports a Jewish writers reading series, Bagels and Books. As noted in Toronto: A Literary Guide, the JCC (in its earlier incarnation as a YMCA) was also the space for the Contact Reading Series, run by the Contact Press editor Raymond Souster during the early 1960s. Contact Press was the first artist-run, literary fine press in Canada and a clear predecessor of such small presses as Coach House and Anansi. The reading series brought a lot of important writers to Canada, including Amiri Baraka when he was still known as LeRoi Jones, as well as Cid Corman and Louis Zukofsky. Getting to Matt Cohen Park you'll also have passed another late and lamented business, El Basha’s falafel house. The opening acknowledgements page of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion thanks El Basha's for their food, which he apparently lived on during the composition of that novel (and legend has it, modeled one the characters in the novel on the restaurant's owner). For years a signed hardcover copy of that book sat in a glass case at the back of that restaurant, which really did have the best falafels in town. The restaurant was forced to close in 2001 when a new owner bought the building and terminated the restaurant’s lease. Looking north you'll see Spadina Station, the site of poet Peter McPhee's dramatic monologue "The Automated Walkway's Not Moving (and neither am I)." Just visible to the south at 671 Spadina is the first location of House of Anansi Press, the source of some of the most important writing to emerge from post-Centennial Canada, including that of Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, George Bowering, Ray Smith, Roch Carrier, Hubert Aquin, Graeme Gibson, Dennis Lee, David Godfrey, Michael Ondaatje and Erin Mouré.

Stop #8: Huron and Bloor
Continue walking east until you reach the Croll Apartments at 341 Bloor, which is better known as the former home of Rochdale College, the alternative education community founded by several disgruntled academics and students from U of T, including Dennis Lee. As at Matt Cohen Park, there are a number of [murmur] recordings about this dynamic and controversial institution, which lasted between 1968 and 1975. Many writers were associated with Rochdale beyond Lee, including Matt Cohen, science fiction author Judith Merril and poet Victor Coleman. The meeting between Coleman and printer Stan Bevington at Rochdale led to the formation of Coach House Press, which soon moved from Dundas to its current location behind Rochdale on bpNichol Lane.

Stop #9: bpNichol Lane
Walk south on Huron and turn east at the first opportunity; this will lead you to a north-south laneway formally known as Huron (Rear) but which, since 1994, has become bpNichol Lane. Nichol (1944-1988) was one of the most-beloved Toronto poets of the last century, and one of his poems is carved into the concrete outside the press's doors. Nichol was, among his many literary activities, deeply involved with Coach House as one of the main editors of the 1973-1988 collective. He also published many of his most important books with the press and Coach House continues to keep several of his books in print.

At this point you might wander in several directions, back home via St. George subway station, or down south to Robarts Library, or south and west to Ten Editions bookstore — all significant literary points as well, and a few more of the several hundred others that I might have also pointed out in this short stroll of what continues to be a vital and active area for creative writing in Toronto.

Stephen Cain is the author of four collections of poetry including Torontology (ECW, 2001) and American Standard/ Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005). He has lived in several neighbourhoods since he moved to Toronto in 1994, but never in the Annex.

References (and Further Reading):

The Art Bar Poetry Series: www.artbar.org

Barlow, John. ASHINEoVSUN II. Toronto: Exile, 2002.

Berg, Moe. The Greenroom. Toronto: Gutter, 2000.

Cohen, Matt. Columbus and the Fat Lady. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972.

Crosbie, Lynn. “Alphabet City.” Queen Rat. Toronto: Anansi, 1998.

Dooney’s Café News Service: www.dooneyscafe.com

Eddie, David. Chump Change. Toronto: Random House, 1996.

Fawcett, Brian. Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney’s Café and other non-Globalized Places, People and Ideas. Vancouver: New Star, 2003.

Gatenby, Greg. Toronto: A Literary Guide. Toronto: McArthur and Company, 1999.

Govier, Katherine. Fables of Brunswick Avenue. Toronto: Penguin, 1985.

Holmes, Michael. Satellite Dishes From the Future Bakery. Toronto: Coach House, 1998.

Lexiconjury: http://www.commutiny.net/lexiconjury

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

McPhee, Peter. “The Automated Walkway’s Not Moving (And Neither am I).” The Sound of Filling Hollow. Compact Disc. STEGCD01. 1996.

[murmur] sound project: www.murmurtoronto.ca

Nichol, bp. The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader. Toronto: Coach House, 2007.

O’Donnell, Darren. Your Secrets Sleep With Me. Toronto: Coach House, 2004.

Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

Schultz, Emily. Black Coffee Night. Toronto: Insomniac, 2002.

Scream in High Park: www.thescream.ca

Toronto Small Press Book Fair: www.torontosmallpressbookfair.org

It's a truth universally held by veterans of the Grade 9 English exam that a work of fiction requires a "strong sense of place" to come alive in the reader's mind. Those of us who answered the bonus question may also remember that the attitudes, goals and manners of characters in a work of fiction are very much determined by their place of origin and residence, and that characters in a Canadian novel have a special relationship to a vague, brooding entity known as The North. Beyond that, most readers, if they consider place in fiction at all, do so with an affection for the fictional settings of their favourite novels and stories.

Place, then, is a subject for authors to fret over. Believe me, they do.

Deciding on the setting for a story or novel is a largely intuitive matter determined by the author's personal history and literary bent. Some authors range across the globe (and across the centuries) in search of suitable locations for their fictions, while others enact a broad range of stories in the same place over and over again. Regardless of sensibility, authors eventually come up against the same intimidating challenge: how to construct a believable setting for their work – be it small-town Ontario in the 1960s, Vancouver at the beginning of the new millennium, or the planet Xarxon in the year 3099 – with a cohesive set of cultural, social, political and historical norms and a clear sense of the penalties inflicted on those citizens reckless enough to challenge convention.

As outlined in Amy Lavender Harris's excellent essay, "Six Cures for Literary Amnesia" in the Fall 2007 issue of Open Book Magazine, Toronto presents a number of unique challenges for authors trying to capture its particular "placeness" in their work. Beginning life as an isolated garrison town surveyed and laid out by British army engineers in the late 18th century, Toronto rapidly expanded from the pressure of wave after wave of immigrant groups, each with its own distinct cultural identity. Yet Toronto's civic culture remained distinctly British and Presbyterian well into the 1960s, rarely referencing either the city's unique geography and history or the displaced indigenous populations and the various ethnic groups crowding its streets. What little architectural and geographical unity and character the city could lay claim to was often bulldozed and built over by ambitious but short-sighted politicians and business men with a hunger for a quick buck.

These and many other forces have conspired to create a prolonged case of what Lavender Harris calls "literary amnesia," a lack of a cohesive literary (and historical) tradition for Toronto authors to draw and expand upon in their work. For poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwan, Lavender Harris writes, "Toronto's amnesia was not merely a local problem but a national one rooted in the absence of a shared or at least communicable cultural mythology," a cultural-historical lack that MacEwan confronted by bringing the same degree of intensity and vision to the city's often drab landmarks and tamed geography as other artists have brought to the Parthenon in Greece and the medieval streets of Paris. Other authors have adopted a broad range of narrative and aesthetic strategies to put the city on the world's literary map, but the suspicion remains that Toronto still lacks a distinct literature and culture.

This phenomenon of literary amnesia was brought home to me in a big way while writing my first book, The Long Slide, a collection of short stories that either take place in North York or feature characters who came of age in that seemingly nebulous land mass just north of downtown Toronto. As I soon discovered, North York is a place that presents an author with all the literary pitfalls and roadblocks of its cooler parent city to the south as well as a number of challenges all its own, the most formidable being a history that is even shorter and more invisible than Toronto's.

For those of you who missed the parade and fireworks, North York, formerly a Toronto borough cobbled together from a scattering of 19th-century farming communities and railway villages in 1922, became an independent city in 1979. With a population just over a half million, it was one of Canada's ten largest cities for almost twenty years before being dissolved back into Metropolitan Toronto during the forced amalgamation of 1998. Its two decades of cityhood witnessed the construction of a gaudy city centre, arts complex and central library just north of Yonge and Sheppard, serviced by a subway station that few people ever used. Otherwise life went on as before, until mayor-for-life Mel Lastman left his perch in North York to briefly reign as mayor of Metro Toronto, leaving many downtowners scratching their heads and asking themselves, Where did that strange little man come from?

Where indeed? Where is North York, and what is it doing there and why? How is North York different from Toronto and from the rest of Canada – or the world for that matter? And how do North York's citizens experience the place in their daily lives and memories? These questions kept coming up as I fleshed out the stories for the collection, but answers were initially few and far between.

I began to reflect on my childhood and adolescence in two distinct North York neighbourhoods, the area around Keele and Sheppard, where I lived from age six until eleven, and the more densely populated intersection of Bathurst and Wilson which acted as kind of town square for my Junior and Senior High School years. I also began to search for stories and novels set in North York and Toronto that might offer literary models for my own work.

I quickly discovered that there isn't a lot of fiction set in North York, and what little I could find often focused on immigrants establishing a life in the midst of a largely alien culture and landscape. Immigrant literature is, on one level, the fiction of estrangement and discovery, dramatizing the collision and cross-pollination of two relatively fixed communities, that of the immigrants and their children and the more established "Canadian" populations they encounter. Other literary models presented themselves, such as historical novels set in Toronto or its surrounding communities and literary works set in contemporary Toronto that encompass a range of narrative techniques from the satirical to the naturalistic, the gothic to the deliberately mundane. Several non-Toronto authors, including Flannery O'Connor, V.S. Pritchett, Henry Green and Alice Munro, provided more examples of fictional characters whose inner and outer lives are enriched and limited by their attachment to a particular time and place.

As much as these works of fiction inspired and guided me, I was still lacking place-specific literary reference points for the gallery of characters I was creating, most of whom were first- or second-generation Canadians who came of age in North York in the 1980s.

The question remained: how do I write North York?

My first breakthrough came in the form of a realization that, if I couldn't adequately define North York for myself then I was certainly up to the task of defining what North York isn't. By asking myself that simple question – What isn't North York? – I opened up my work to a series of interconnected narrative possibilities that helped the stories' settings come alive in my imagination and later on the page.

I began to compile my list of isn'ts, the first of which was, North York, in spite of the protests of its civic boosters, isn't and never was a city. There is no neighbourhood or intersection that North Yorkers would define as an organic city centre, and the area's history and development has been so entwined with Toronto's that most of its citizenry define themselves as Torontonians. North York may occupy an impressive chunk of the map of Toronto, but it had failed to colonize a comparable space in the consciousness of the city. I couldn't remember a single conversation in my life or in the media about what it meant to be a North Yorker. And North York, since its inception, had always been too large to be considered a town.

North York isn't exactly a suburb either. The population density is generally higher than that of traditional suburbs, and the majority of the area's residential houses, though not as architecturally diverse or finely crafted as comparable homes in the downtown core, lack the numbing repetition of design that defines so many suburban subdivisions. North York is older than most suburbs and expanded in a more haphazard fashion, with century-old farming plots gradually giving way to clusters of house-lined side streets, massive apartment buildings and strip malls, as well as schools, rec centres and other government buildings. Because of North York’s age and varied neighbourhoods, and because downtown Toronto was just a short bus or subway ride away, my friends and I missed out on the chance to wallow in classic suburban ennui. Most of us dreamed of leaving North York for a more exotic, suitably urban location for our staggering future successes, but the burning need to escape a stifling community that defines so much suburban and small-town fiction was mostly absent.

Reflecting on North York’s lack of particulars eventually brought home the realization that the entire notion of cities, towns, regions and countries possessing a unique "sense of place" is being increasingly challenged by the global nature of culture. Most of us draw from the same well of TV shows and movies and albums, meaning that local slang, references, and dialect are absorbed into or replaced by a constantly changing global patois that transcends municipal and national borders. With each new generation, personal, familial and community loyalties once defined by place, ethnicity, gender roles, political allegiance and venerated traditions are weakened and eclipsed by individual media and lifestyle choices largely defined by an overarching global culture.

So how, then, was I going to write about North York? I had found the blank spaces for my canvas, my isn'ts, but my stories needed something more than a bunch of characters sitting in anonymous rooms watching TV and speaking in global slang. I wanted to evoke the culture and unique associations and perceptions generated by this no-place, with its lack of local traditions and ancient social loyalties and conflicts. Where to begin?

The answer, when it came, was as obvious as it was simple: I would begin with the bizarre, self-referential culture of the friends I had grown up with in North York. Though I wasn't interested in writing overtly autobiographical fiction, I realized that my friends and acquaintances (and enemies for that matter), severed from many traditional extended-family and community loyalties, were a kind of human microcosm for the sort-of-city/sort-of-suburb of contemporary North York. I decided to let the culture of North York that I'd experienced stand in for the actual physical place wherever possible, and to immerse the reader directly in the drug-and-TV-addled, attention-challenged sensibilities of my characters and their bizarre group mythologies and loyalties. I would make the reader experience this narcissistic, smart-alec, pop-culture-saturated world, with its rounds of parties, donut-shop gossip sessions and romances, from the inside, and by doing so dramatize the limitations of those group bonds as they are challenged by the demands of adulthood and the lure of a more cosmopolitan world beyond North York.

I'd found the breakthrough I'd been looking for, and the stories began mutating and cross-pollinating in exciting and unanticipated ways. I saw that, although my characters were as rooted in their time and place as their fictional counterparts in the works of Faulkner, Doestoyevsky and Alice Munro, their lived experience of North York would be largely defined by a temporal, geographic and social disconnect from a traditional understanding of physical place and community.

This all sounds much more abstract and cerebral than it actually is and is probably better illustrated by including a few samples of the fiction that these reflections generated. The first example is from the third story in The Long Slide, "A Gap in His Teeth," which takes place in an attic apartment in downtown Toronto where a group of old friends have gotten together to help one of their members move his few belongings to another apartment. The young men all met as teenagers in North York, and although they have since moved downtown, their friendship is still very much defined by those formative years:

They were veterans at twenty-two, though they had never worked together at a job that any of them cared about or played on the same amateur sports team or gone into business together. None had been the other’s best man because none of them were married, and none had fathered a child to complain or brag about. They had never pooled skills passed down from fathers to fix up a car or a piece of property, and no one close to them had died or moved to another city, leaving the others to bond over an absence. But they had all met in their final days of sobriety and virginity, and they had taken turns driving each other’s lingering enthusiasms out from the sheltering closets of private bedrooms, where these last ties to childhood were stomped to death with comedy routines that extended over an entire summer. There was Craig’s impersonation of Jerome at his telescope: 'Look, I’ve discovered a new constellation – Meps! – shaped just like my sister’s vaginer!' Jerome went after John’s heavy-metal record collection with a shrieking falsetto: 'Hello, North York! Do you want to rock and roll all night!?' The five friends remembered that summer as one long game of Gophers, where the carny gives you a pillowed stick and you have to clobber the stuffed gophers that pop their heads out of their holes for a split second, only here the stick had spikes on the end and the gophers were like children, slow and trusting, and when you smashed them they stayed dead.

I tried to give the reader a sense of how the absence of cultural and social traditions has simply been filled with a unique subculture of in-jokes, pop-culture references, repeated anecdotes and personal and group mythologies generated and perpetuated by each of the group's individual members. Humans can't but help generate culture and history and experience – when one set of traditions and norms disappear, they simply create new ones from the materials at hand.

In the story "My God, Richard Is Beautiful," a young man in bed with his friend's girlfriend looks out from a haze of lust and guilt at his lover's bedroom in a drab, rent-controlled housing complex near Yorkdale subway station:

Paul catalogues everything in the bedroom. A particle-board dresser with a couple of missing drawer handles topped with a mirror shaped like a cartoon crown. A queen-sized bed the sisters share. A little rickety table beside the bed.... Theresa and Lisa have stuck little photos and ticket stubs in the crack between the mirror and the frame. The mementos remind him of amendments scribbled in the margins of an official document – the lease to a midsize car or an announcement to change the zonage of a four-storey building. Paul has never seen one of these documents, but there must be millions of them in drawers all over Toronto.

Paul knows that there is a larger world outside of the rounds of parties and sex that has defined his post-pubescent life in North York, but he has only begun to experience that world and is still overwhelmed by its sheer size and complexity, expressed here in his strange fixation on official Toronto documents. Home may be predictable and impoverished at times, but it has its familiar rewards and consolations.

In the collection's title story, I included a scene in which a character is confronted by a culture living by strict codes of dress and morality dating back hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. Here, the protagonist, stoned on a Friday afternoon, bored with his life and his girlfriend and his own tired cynicism, looks forward to sundown when the local Hassidic population will make their way to their synagogues:

the [Hassidim] seemed to rise from the mists of Friday dusks and drift up to Lawrence in black overcoats and wide round hats that were all rim, like the mechanism of a top waiting to be spun by the hand of God. Patrick would be waiting for the sun to go down and a party to start somewhere and the Hassidim would suddenly appear and he would shadow their pace from the other side of the street, feeding on the reigned-in excitement of the little beardless boys, feeling that together they were following parallel treks to ecstasy, the Hassidim walking the path of devotion and ritual, he of suffering and worldliness.

Besides showing the reader a small sample of the worlds that co-exist in North York (or in just about any Canadian urban and suburban space), the scene dramatizes Patrick's romanticized longing for a fixed ethnic identity and the guidance of a traditional community to rescue him from the perpetual cultural flux of the late 20th century.

These are three examples of my own particular take on North York’s many isn’ts, but throughout the stories, and in my yet-to-be-published novel In Jokes, I also began to look past North York’s blank spaces to what is uniquely there: the almost pristine ravine systems, estate-sized parks (and the surreal park parties held beneath the sheltering canopies of trees), the homely, squat bungalows, basement rec rooms, crushingly depressing public housing complexes, the high schools, cliques, three-story apartment buildings, video arcades (remember those?), delicatessens and hobby shops. There were many little worlds to bring to life, and even more worlds beyond my personal experience that other authors had explored (such as North York's Russian-Jewish immigrant community, vividly evoked in David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories).

The task of tackling the textures and blank spaces of North York certainly freed me of a dismissive attitude still espoused by many cultural commentators and authors, namely that Toronto (and by extension, North York) is, in the words of Bert Archer, "a city that exists in no one's imagination." To say that Toronto exists in no one's imagination and is therefore incapable of generating works that are place-specific is to buy into a nexus of cultural insecurities that date back to colonial times, when Canadians believed that real art and culture were generated in the Empire's Imperial heart, London, or in other equally cultured European centres. This insecurity still permeates literary debate in Toronto, expressing itself in a self-defeating complaint that goes something like this: If only Toronto were more interesting, more cultural and vibrant, then we could all get down to the business of writing the great Toronto novel. Such assertions are easily disputed by the history of literature, which has demonstrated time and time again that cities and places do not create literature, authors do. What was Joyce's Dublin but a colonial backwater suffocating under the rule of an oppressive colonial hierarchy? Yet its dirty crowded streets provided Joyce with the raw material for some of the finest passages in the English language. Saul Bellow's Chicago was an inferno of crude capitalist lust, Alice Munro's southern Ontario a gothic landscape of small towns ruled by Byzantine codes of hypocritical social observances, yet these most unliterary of places, in the hands of skilled, dedicated authors, were transformed into unique literary worlds.

If those authors could grow their accomplished works from such modest native soil, why shouldn't we? After all, there is no place unworthy of an artist's loving attention.

James Grainger is a books columnist for the Toronto Star and Quill & Quire magazine. His first work of fiction, The Long Slide (ECW Press, 2004), won the 2005 ReLit Award for short fiction and he is concurrently finishing two novels, one of which takes place in a North York basement apartment in 1986.

References
Archer, Bert. “Making a Toronto of the Imagination.” In uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, ed. Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox. Toronto: Coach House, 2005, 220-228.

Grainger, James. The Long Slide. Toronto: ECW Press, 2004.

Lavender Harris, Amy. “Six Cures for Literary Amnesia.” Open Book Magazine, Fall 2007. http://www.openbooktoronto.com/magazine/fall_2007/.

In Tilted: The Trial of Conrad Black, veteran attorney and journalist Steven Skurka brings the trial of media titan Conrad Black to life and argues that it was "tilted" from the outset by an American justice system that stacks the odds against the defendant, and a prosecution that played the "class card" in an attempt to demonize Black for his wealth and excesses. Skurka also shows how Black attempted to tilt the trial in his own favour by using his wealth to mount a powerful defence.

Pointing to [David] Radler's past lies to Hollinger committees, prosecutors and FBI agents, [Edward] Greenspan attempts to paint Radler as a serial liar motivated by his plea bargain to give testimony favourable to the prosecution. Greenspan refers to Radler's arranged transfer to a minimum-security prison near his Vancouver home, and Canada's more lenient parole regulations, as a "sweetheart deal."

. . .

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Well, the real F.D.R. finally revealed himself in court today. Not the subject of Conrad Black's biography, of course. Frank David Radler walked into the courtroom as the David who fought bravely against a Goliath for several days. By the end of the court session, he emerged as an emperor with no clothes. Radler's shining credibility was tarnished by Eddie Greenspan today, and the damage to the prosecution's case may be irreversible.

Greenspan will be the focal point of blame if Black loses this trial. He assumed that risk when he agreed to handle the case in an American courtroom. The trial judge is extremely tolerant of Greenspan's misadventures with the local rules of evidence and procedure two months into the trial. The jury may be less forgiving.

Greenspan took a different approach today after a restless weekend and it reaped immediate dividends. The most critical point that Greenspan established was the absence of a single fax, e-mail, or memo that supported Radler's contention that Black initiated the bogus non-compete scheme. This distinguishes the Black case from the other high-profile American corporate fraud cases in which documentary corroboration abounded. The judge will be required at the trial's conclusion to offer a cautionary charge to the jury about accepting Radler's evidence absent any supporting evidence. While more diluted than the equivalent Vetrovec warning in Canada¹ (named after the Supreme Court of Canada decision that created the legal principle), it nonetheless will likely have a critical bearing on the jury's decision in the case.

Greenspan crystallized for the jury, for the first time in the trial, the theory of the defence. This was a major failing in the defence's opening addresses. After accusing Radler of making the best deal of his life with the prosecution, Greenspan continued: "For that deal — that incredible sweetheart deal — you had to give the U.S. government what they wanted, when no crime was committed by anyone but you."

According to the defence theory, the rogue and scoundrel in the dishonest non-competition scheme for the U.S. community newspaper deals is David Radler. He arguably conned his co-defendants, the Hollinger International shareholders, and the prosecutors who made his artificially sweet deal, and, most significantly, is now attempting to dupe the jury in the case.

Radler made a serious misstep today. Rather than admit that his relaxed sentence was potentially abbreviated, he attempted instead to portray the lustrous shine on his deal with the prosecutors as a bit rusty. He seriously maintained in answer to a question put by Greenspan that he was uninformed that his twenty-nine-month prison sentence, to be served in Canada, could be shortened with parole considerations by almost two years.

He feigned ignorance that the sentence could be reduced to six months served in a Canadian prison. Greenspan immediately shot back, "Until this moment you didn’t know that? I think I’m going to send you a bill."

The notion that Radler wasn't tuned in to the precise sentence he is facing is complete balderdash. It is implausible that he wouldn't be overly curious about his own parole eligibility, and it would be highly unprofessional for his acknowledged stellar Vancouver lawyers not to have spelled it out in detail. It is a mystery why it is not explicitly set out in Rader's written plea agreement with the prosecutors. It is also an immutable assumption that every prison inmate knows two facts as he is about to commence a prison sentence: his visiting privileges and his earliest release date.

The comfortable and defiant Radler vanished from the courtroom today, replaced by an irritated, nervous man who realized that he was beginning to look foolish with some of his answers. When Greenspan snapped at him that it was easy for him to lie, Radler responded, "I don’t believe I have to answer that." Judge Amy St. Eve dropped the ball by not insisting that Radler answer the question. A few of her rulings were also questionable. When Gus Newman received a damaging and non-responsive answer from Radler, he swung around and pointed at the prosecution's table: "Do you feel that this gratuitous remark," he asked Radler, "strengthens your position with the people at this table?"

Eric Sussman made an objection with no name that was sustained. The question posed was perfectly appropriate and the ruling forestalled a full inquiry of Radler's fishy deal. However, today marked the best day for Judge St. Eve in the trial. Her decisions were otherwise evenhanded and she firmly chastised Sussman outside the jury's presence for leaving an improper impression with the jury that Greenspan was not operating in good faith. She was visibly angry at the lead prosecutor for allowing matters in the courtroom to descend into the personal arena. She wasn't prepared to deal with it in a secretive sidebar, either. It was about time that she interceded in this fashion. Every mocking objection by Sussman to a Greenspan question has been made with his voice raised and his head nodding in apparent disbelief.

Greenspan is not without fault, as he occasionally baits his adversary in a boisterous tone. It has become an unfortunate and nasty sideshow to the trial. It was, however, a red-faced Sussman who stormed out of the courtroom moments after the judge's admonition.

Radler has one final day on the stand and the prosecution will then move to its final phase. The case is marching to its conclusion. In a few weeks it will be clear if Conrad Black will be ushered out of court in handcuffs or leave with his freedom intact. There will undoubtedly be a few more twists and turns before the final chapter is written. It will be a dramatic conclusion to a fascinating case.

Slip-Sliding Away

I find myself continuing to struggle with a number of differences in procedure between the Canadian and American justice systems. For example, it is fairly common for an attorney at this trial to begin a question and then suddenly change his mind in mid-sentence and declare it to be "withdrawn." The air is sprinkled with some magical potion and the question is asked again as if nothing else had ever been spoken.

A more jarring difference is the use of objections made by opposing counsel during statements to the jury. In Canada that would occur about as frequently as a winter without a raging snowstorn. However, in the Black trial, both defence and prosecution objected with impunity. In one instance, Ed Genson successfully objected to the prosecutor's opening as "personalizing the jury." I wondered how an objection would be framed for misleading the jury. The following passage was included in the opening statement of Jeffrey Cramer:

You're going to hear from David Radler. I told you Radler pled guilty. He's accepted responsibility for his fraud and he's going to jail. And David Radler will give you an inside look at how they went about stealing $60 million; how he and Black and Atkinson and Boultbee and Kipnis, how they all stole $60 million. Radler will tell you how it worked. And he'll give you a view into it. He'll tell you what they did — what memos they produced. And David Radler, you’ll have a chance to judge him; he will be supported by the other witnesses who testify; and, he will be supported by documents.

David Radler will be supported by documents? Am I at the same trial as these prosecutors? If there is one matter that is abundantly clear from Radler's lengthy testimony, it is that there is not one single document, whether it be a fax, memo, e-mail, or letter, that supported the word of the star prosecution witness. Did such documents simply disappear after Mr. Cramer gave his opening? It seems that the prosecutor perhaps misspoke. There will be no objection by the defence for poor form. I strongly suspect, however, that the jury will be reminded in final argument by the defence that the only document supporting David Radler is his plea agreement with the prosecutors. He has already used his lifeline.


"The Prosecution: May 9" is an excerpt from Tilted: The Trial of Conrad Black by Steven Skurka. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Steven Skurka is the legal analyst for CTV News, and covered the trial for the network. He is also a law partner with Skurka Spina Cugliari LLP in Toronto, and a certified specialist in criminal litigation. His blog, < http://www.thecrimesheet.com/>The Crime Sheet, enjoys tremendous popularity and is quoted by Maclean’s on a regular basis.

Notes

1. Vetrovec v. The Queen, [1982] 1 S.R.C. 811.

Over a 48-hour period, artist and writer Evan Munday, who is a publicist for Coach House Books, and writer Julie Wilson, who works in publicity and marketing at House of Anansi Press and Groundwood Books, interviewed each other about the art of publicity, community building, bizarre book launches and their personal artistic endeavors. The interview was conducted via e-mail.

A key difficulty in constructing the city’s metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory. (Warkentin 2005)

The past was the secret and mysterious city, the city within the city, the city of the alleyways and swimming pools and the city of the lakeshore. And the lake, which cared nothing for time, would often cast up strange relics of the future, as well as the past, upon its shores. (MacEwen 1985: 81)

1.

You’ve read these words before. You’re sure of it although you’ll remember where only later, when a copy of this very book – the one you thought you were reading for the first time – slides from the shelves of your own library, its leaves smudged with your thumb prints, margins marked by your own familiar hand. You stare at the pages as if for the first time and begin to worry about the extent of your literary amnesia.

Literary amnesia is a phenomenon familiar to anyone struck by déjà vu while reading. It is so common that it has its own its own treatise (Patrick Sűskind’s Amnesie in Litteris) and its own anthology (Jonathan Lethem’s Vintage Book of Amnesia). Indeed, Lethem points out in his introduction that despite its medical rarity, amnesia is so widely used as a literary device that it might be considered an intrinsic feature of fiction. Lethem suggests further that if every novel is “conjured out of the void,” amnesia may be this era’s ultimate fictional metaphor, reflecting or responding to contemporary preoccupations with alienation, finitude, anomie, violence and even political forgetting.

If literary amnesia has its etiology not only in the writer’s craft but in the reader’s relationship to it, then who is to say it might not seep out like a dream fog even further, to envelop publishers, reviewers, even an entire city? I say this only because a collective amnesia appears to afflict Toronto, a city where nearly everybody is a writer or aspires to be one, where books have their own television shows and street festivals, where celebrity authors are jostled and fawned over in the street – but where books, no matter how enthusiastically they may be read, reviewed and rewarded when they are first released, slide irretrievably into oblivion like flotsam beneath a somnolent sea.

2.

There is a persistent if unwarranted belief that Toronto lacks a literary character, or that what literary tradition does exist here dates back no further than two or three decades. In the first volume of Coach House’s groundbreaking uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto series, Toronto journalist Bert Archer claims that Toronto is "a city that exists in no one's imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world." He adds, "Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination." A 2005 Vanity Fair article allows that “A vision of modern Toronto gradually took shape before our very eyes,” but dates this genesis back only as far as the 1987 publication of Michael Ondaatje's iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion. In a 2006 literary roundtable organized by Toronto Life editor Mark Pupo, novelist Andrew Pyper observes, “I think there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place,” a sentiment echoed a few months later by the Toronto Star’s Philip Marchand, who wrote flatly of the “bland and featureless reputation” of Toronto’s literary landscape and insisted that “our city awaits its great novelist.”

At best the existence or eminence of Toronto’s literary culture meets with ambivalence. Stephen Marche (whose 2005 Toronto novel, Raymond and Hannah, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award) asserted in a late 2005 Globe & Mail article that "Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time" but derides Toronto’s physical spaces as “unimaginative to the extreme” and describes both the city and its fiction as “insular” and focused on “interior rather than public spaces.” Some reason for optimism, at least, is offered by author Dionne Brand (a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the winner of the 2006 Toronto Book Award for her beautiful, evocative local novel, What We All Long For) who is quoted as having suggested that “the literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories.” (Tepper 2005)

3.

Two years ago when I began amassing Toronto novels, stories, poetry and drama for a course I was developing in the Geography Department at York University, I was prepared to believe that Toronto didn’t have much of a literature. Like most Torontonians I was familiar with Margaret Atwood’s Toronto novels, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown. Unlike many Torontonians I had even read them. For years I had picked up local small press novels and poetry chapbooks at garage sales, and thought I might just manage to pull together enough material to justify a course on Toronto’s literary landscapes.

I began to have an inkling not only of the great range and depth of Toronto literature but of the extent of this city’s literary amnesia when I browsed the 30-year list of Toronto Book Award winners and found that surprisingly few of the approximately 200 winners and runners-up had remained in print. I began contacting local publishers to ask about their backlists, and found that while their staff spoke enthusiastically about new titles, they had a hard time recollecting anything more than a few years old. I noted that while the Toronto Public Library maintains a modest list of recommended “Toronto Arts and Stories” on its website, it appears never to have formally catalogued its vast inventory of local works into any sort of “Toronto collection.” With feverish anticipation I ordered a copy of Greg Gatenby’s Toronto: A Literary Guide (1999) and was disappointed to discover that while it included exhaustive descriptions of where (and sometimes with whom) literary figures had slept while living and writing in Toronto, it focused only incidentally on works actually set in this city. And yet, whenever I asked colleagues and acquaintances if they knew of any Toronto novels I could add to my list, they would begin by saying they didn’t think there were that many, but almost never failed to mention a novel, story collection or poetry anthology I had never heard of before. It became clear to me that in this city we’d lost our ability to navigate what writer Hal Niedzviecki calls the “concrete forest” of urban literature (Niedzviecki 1998) because we’d gotten hopelessly lost among thickets of books so dense we’d forgotten they were there.

And so I began to build my own library of Toronto literature. I haunted local used bookstores and dowsed their alphabetized shelves for Toronto titles. I typed “Toronto” into the searchable databases of libraries and online book purveyors and was warned curtly that I had exceeded the number of results their servers could generate. My study – a converted sunroom at the back of our house – began to sag visibly under the weight of the dozens and then hundreds of Toronto books I stuffed into its jury-rigged shelves. I spent my Arts Council grants on books long before the cheques arrived in the mail. I created an online inventory of Toronto literature and have received so many suggested additions it is difficult to keep up to date. And every time I pick up an unfamiliar Toronto novel at a book sale or receive another email notice about a poetry launch, I am struck with the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying sense that I am still just scratching the surface.

4.

Toronto’s undeservedly neglected ‘mythopoeic poet’ Gwendolyn MacEwen engages directly with the problem of cultural forgetting in Noman (1972) and especially in Noman’s Land (1985). Noman, who emerges naked and amnesic from the Ontario wilderness and hitch-hikes to Toronto to search for his identity, observes,

Sometimes he couldn’t even remember how long he’d had the amnesia. But one of the nice things about not remembering anything was that the world was almost unbearably beautiful; everything was fresh and new. The city was full of surprises. (MacEwen 1985: 52)

For MacEwen, Toronto’s amnesia was not merely a local problem but a national one rooted in the absence of a shared or at least communicable cultural mythology, and so she undertook to create one. By reconstructing a personal connection to significant events in Toronto’s history, including spending time inside Henry Moore’s Archer (the famous sculpture anchoring Nathan Phillips Square) and recreating Marilyn Bell’s marathon swim across Lake Ontario, Noman realizes that identity is something we must recognize or invent within ourselves. As he tells a reporter upon the victorious conclusion of his swim across the lake, “There is another country, you know, and it’s right inside this one.”

Seeking “the city within the city” (MacEwen 1985), archaeologists of Toronto’s literary memory have tended to trace its origins to the late 1960s. Literary scholar Sophie Levy suggests that a “consciousness of the city” begins to “manifest […] in the work of its writers” in 1968, the year Dennis Lee’s Toronto sequence Civil Elegies (a series of lyrical meditations on and in Nathan Phillips Square) first appeared (Levy 2001). Similarly, in his monograph on Toronto publishing houses Anansi and Coach House, poet and academic Stephen Cain attributes the rise of a genuinely local literary and publishing culture to a “new generation of writers” buoyed by the “nationalistic spirit of post-Centennial Canada.” (Cain 2002)

It is true that this period produced numerous groundbreaking Toronto works. The Meeting Point, the first novel in Austin Clarke’s ‘Toronto Trilogy’ exploring the lives of West Indian Torontonians, was published in 1967. Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown first appeared in its complete form in 1968, a year before Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, was published by McClelland & Stewart. In that same year McClelland & Stewart also issued Scott Symons’ outrageous Toronto satire, Civic Square, as 800 or so typed manuscript pages signed and sealed with ribbon in a large blue box (I have number 206 of the limited edition but have never managed to read beyond the first 50 pages for fear an unexpected draft will blow them irretrievably out of order). In 1972 Oberon Press released Gwendolyn MacEwen's Toronto mythology, Noman. In 1974 the City of Toronto established the annual Toronto Book Awards, and after that Toronto literature came thick and fast.

But Centennial convenience and even critical literary mass aside, 1967 is ultimately an arbitrary date, one which risks consigning decades worth of Toronto literature to pre-history, and indeed Cain acknowledges that the kind of Toronto literature appearing after the late 1960s was “different” from what preceded it rather than suggesting it had appeared out of nowhere. He comments that a transformation had been “fermenting for many decades previously.” (ibid.) If this is the case, one wonders, then what was bubbling away in the pot, and why is it that we have so little memory even of its taste?

In Literary Images of Ontario, William Keith traces Toronto literature to the 1770s, observing, “by a happy chance we are favoured with continuing literary impressions of Toronto from its very beginnings as an English settlement – even, indeed, a little before those beginnings,” citing accounts such as Elizabeth Simcoe’s diaries which mingled fact and fantasy drawn from English, French and Mississauga narratives of the region. (Keith 1992: 191) He suggests that a distinctly Torontonian sort of poetry emerged during the rebellion of 1837 (ibid; see also Moir 1965), and inventories a rising fictional tradition dating back to the 1831 publication of John Galt’s Bogle Corbet. (ibid.: 194) My own library of early Toronto literature doesn’t go back quite that far, but includes Annie G. Savigny’s A Romance of Toronto (1888), Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), Frederick Nelson’s speculative Toronto in 1928 A.D. (1908) and George F. Milner’s The Sergeant of Fort Toronto (1914), suggesting that an active local literary culture existed decades before Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive – supposedly “Canada’s first urban novel” (Edwards 1998) – was published in 1928.

5.

But addressing Toronto’s literary amnesia requires more than a simple historical inventory of literary works. A list of this sort can gain provenance only when these works are seen as antecedents for contemporary Toronto literature – that is, when one starts tracing Toronto’s literary genealogies, looking for preoccupations, motifs, even characters and neighbourhoods that recur across genres and time periods. At this point things cannot help but get really interesting.

Commentators on Toronto literature tend to fixate on its more rarefied expressions, and are perpetually on the lookout for new works bursting with the kind of mimetic resonance we hope will put Toronto on the international literary map. Such a grudging estimation of what counts as ‘great’ literature risks excluding popular narratives that may not only have more to say about lived experiences in Toronto but in many cases have enjoyed far greater international prominence.

Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown is familiar to most readers as the Ryerson Press version published in 1968. But this was not Cabbagetown’s first appearance: the novel was first published in abridged form in 1950 by White Circle, a pulp imprint of Collins that produced disposable fiction sold at newsstands and bus stations. That same year under the pseudonym Jarvis Warwick, Garner published Waste No Tears (subtitled The Novel about the Abortion Racket) with News Stand, a similar pulp imprint of Export Publishing. Most notable for their depictions of Toronto’s ‘skidrow’, Garner’s early works seem directly to anticipate subsequent literary explorations of poverty and violence on Toronto’s streets, most notably Ted Plantos’ The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen (1977) and Michael Holmes’ Watermelon Row (2000). This is not to say that either Plantos or Holmes drew (consciously or otherwise) on Garner’s work, but it seems to me that their subsequent texts cannot truly be appreciated without an awareness of the socio-economic, historical and literary milieus that preceded them.

Michael Redhill’s acclaimed recent Toronto novel, Consolation is, like Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion before it, credited with awakening interest in Toronto’s historical origins. But literary efforts to historicize the city date at least as far back as Annie G. Savigny’s tedious, plodding A Toronto Romance (1888) and fictionalized accounts of Toronto’s history had become sufficiently interesting to readers that novelist Isabelle Hughes was able to publish four volumes of her ‘Toronto gothic’ Telforth saga – Serpent’s Tooth (1947), Time in Ambush (1949), Lorena Telforth (1952) and The Wise Brother (1954) – tracing a fictional Kingsway family and the City’s own progress from the 1830s forward.

Another undeservedly forgotten mid-century Toronto novel whose shadow looms across this city’s contemporary fiction is Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (1960; reissued 2007). Reportedly the first novel to feature Toronto's nascent City Hall on its cover, The Torontonians was an international bestseller in its time, reprinted in international editions for nearly a decade and its rights sold to Hollywood film producers. Until literary scholars Suzanne Morton and Nathalie Cooke pressed for its re-publication this year, The Torontonians had been almost entirely forgotten. And yet, the rapidly changing city Young depicts – beset by sprawl, rapid redevelopment, and a veritable revolving door of cultural and architectural changes – seems an apt representation of Toronto today. More provocatively, this enormously subversive novel may be seen as a direct precursor to Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and The Blind Assassin (2003), which invoke startlingly similar landscapes and social conditions and whose female protagonists find unusual solutions to their social confinement. Whether these homages are inadvertent or planned, it is my view that such connections are not accidental, but instead provide evidence that Toronto's literary genealogy stretches back further and more firmly than we have come to think.

As I pore over vintage Toronto novels uncovered through painstaking research or fortuitous luck, I am struck repeatedly by their connection to current works. It seems to me that Gwendolyn MacEwen's ‘mythopoeic’ voice echoes strongly in both Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004) and Bruce Macdonald's Coureurs De Bois (2007). The Jewish immigrants of John Miller’s A Sharp Intake of Breath and David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (2004) have a great deal in common with Jacob Grossman in Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man (1948). Even literary scholar Germaine Warkentin, who offers a succinct diagnosis of Toronto’s literary amnesia in an essay titled “Mapping Wonderland” (Warkentin 2005) borrows its title from George Walker's now-cancelled Toronto-based television drama, This is Wonderland, which represents Toronto as a labyrinth of justice mapped against city streets and weathered faces. And even This is Wonderland has a literary precedent, traceable to Harry Wodson's The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court, first published in 1917 and describing an almost identical drama of corridors and labyrinths.

6.

If I have succeeded to this point in establishing that Toronto exists in the literary imagination and has done so for well over a century, I would like to conclude by suggesting some cures for the literary amnesia that has afflicted so many of this city’s cultural commentators.

1. Become a literary genealogist. Nearly every Toronto novel, poem or story has its genesis in some meaningful experience or observation that may be traced to some literary precedent. For all the myriad ways Toronto has changed over the decades, it remains a city whose occupants struggle with the persistent and intersecting challenges of identity and city-building. You can’t really grasp Dionne Brand’s polyphonic city or the lyrical currents running through T-Dot Griots (2004) without having read Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point. The vivid poetic careers of Margaret Atwood, bpNichol and Michael Ondaatje lose resonance if their origins are not traced to Raymond Souster, whose Contact Press nurtured some of their earliest work and whose own poetry – most of it engaging with Toronto in some respect – has spanned six decades. As Gwendolyn MacEwen writes, “the present is the logical outcome / Of all points in the past, and that building going up across the / street has been going up forever. Everything we do now contains the / seeds of its own unfolding.” (1987)




2. Abandon the Canon. The Toronto Canon consists of a small number of works – for convenience let’s say they include Garner’s Cabbagetown, any of Atwood’s Toronto novels, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – that have achieved sufficient prominence to stay reliably in print. These are all worthy books, deservingly well known for their iconic depictions of Toronto. But the city’s fictions flow well beyond these pages, and it is an error to stop reading so soon. Start anywhere – attend a local reading series, visit the Small Press Fair, ask at your local library, start haunting used bookstores – and read something by someone you’ve never heard of before. Begin with your own neighbourhood: the Annex, Cabbagetown, the Junction, Kensington Market, Parkdale and even Etobicoke have inspired local fictions. Ask a local publisher about their backlist. Attend literary events and ask local celebrity authors what – and more importantly, who – inspired them here in Toronto.




3. Get to know some of Toronto’s great genre fiction. Despite having relatively low crime rates, Toronto is a great city for crime fiction, and detective novels are perhaps this city’s most widely read literary export. For decades writers including Eric Wright, Rosemary Aubert, Scott MacKay and Maureen Jennings have narrated Toronto’s seamy underside to rapt international readerships. Science fiction writers including Cory Doctorow, Robert Charles Wilson and the ubiquitous Robert Sawyer have set internationally best-selling novels and short stories in Toronto. Children’s writers, too, among them Gordon Korman, Beatrice Thurman Hunter, Richard Scrimger and Marlene Nourbese Philip inculcate their young readers with an appreciation for Toronto’s literary and cultural landscapes that may well (as it did with me) extend to their adult reading.




4. Embrace local tropes. Who’s afraid of the CN Tower? Not Gwendolyn MacEwen (1985), M.G. Vassanji (1991), Catherine Bush (1993), Nalo Hopkinson (1998) or Darren O’Donnell (2004), who have managed brilliantly to incorporate Toronto’s most recognizable architectural icon into probing analyses of the city’s social conditions. No symbol becomes trite as long as it is employed in new and original ways, and if Americans have never tired of seeing King Kong scale the Empire State Building, then there is no reason why Toronto’s writers should be derided for mythologizing our city’s landmarks. Similarly, if Toronto’s ravines, buildings and neighbourhoods recur among works, there is no reason why we might not do the same thing with literary characters. I wouldn’t mind, for example, coming across Hugh Garner or Gwendolyn MacEwen in a contemporary Toronto novel. It would be a deserved homage and reminder that even fictional lives have pasts.




5. Support diverse, autonomous local presses. Years after their alleged demise, many of Toronto’s presses survive and some even thrive. Some, like Anansi, ECW and McClelland & Stewart, produce a mix of commercial and literary works. Others, like Cormorant and Porcupine’s Quill, specialize primarily in literary fiction and others, like Sumach, Between the Lines and Tsar Books might be considered niche publishers. Toronto also has a thriving community of micropresses such as Bookthug and Junction Books who mainly produce experimental poetry, often in beautifully made limited editions. The traditional path for writers was to start with small presses and, having established a reputation, move progressively to larger ones. But as poet Sandra Alland points out, small presses can offer advantages even to established authors in the form of intellectual rights and artistic quality (Alland 2006). Alland suggests further that because many established writers have benefited from the small presses who nurtured their careers, they should consider at least occasionally publishing new works with them. I agree, not because I think that small presses have the market cornered on ethical publishing, but because I think Toronto’s literary culture benefits from a healthy mix of small, large, local and international presses who in their turn can foster emerging writers, promote established ones, and provide space for literary experimentation.




6. Stop comparing Toronto to New York. Toronto’s literary naysayers routinely judge Toronto wanting against the literary weight of other cities. As an experiment I have begun asking my literary acquaintances about the poetry, fictional works and literary landscapes they associate with other cities. In most cases my respondents can connect a few authors with cities (Joyce’s Dublin, Baudelaire’s Paris, Coupland’s Vancouver, Richler’s Montreal, Mistry’s Mumbai, Ondaatje’s Colombo) before drawing a blank. I am amused that they seem no more familiar with most cities’ literary cultures than foreigners are with ours (in London or Mumbai I suspect my literary acquaintances would name Atwood, Ondaatje and perhaps Barbara Gowdy before running out of Toronto writers). I find it significant, too, that Toronto-based Mistry and Ondaatje are cited both locally and internationally for their international literary achievements. This suggests to me that many Toronto writers are doubly accomplished, in the sense that they can write as compellingly about Toronto as they do about other regions and cities. And this, I think, is the most significant achievement of Toronto literature to date: that rather than wearing itself a familiar rut, it has reached out to connect with other regions of the world – much like the city itself. Open Book indeed.

Amy Lavender Harris teaches in the Department of Geography at York University. Her current research, the Imagining Toronto project explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region. She is currently writing a book about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities.

References

Alland, Sandra. “Was this book shade-grown? Towards fair-trade Toronto lit.” In The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt, Toronto: Coach House, 2006, 210-219.

Archer, Bert. “Making a Toronto of the Imagination.” In uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, ed. Jason McBride & Alana Wilcox, Toronto: Coach House, 2005, 220-228.

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969.

Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2004.

Bush, Catherine. Minus Time. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1993.

Cain, Stephen. “Imprinting identities: An examination of the emergence and developing identities of Coach House Press and House of Anansi Press (1967--1982).” PhD dissertation, Department of English, York University, 2002.

Callaghan, Morley. Strange Fugitive. M.G. Hurtig Ltd., [1928] 1970.

Edwards, Justin D. "Strange Fugitive, strange city: reading urban space in Morley Callaghan’s Toronto." Studies in Canadian Literature. 23(1), 1998.

Garner, Hugh. Waste No Tears. Toronto: News Stand, 1950.

Garner, Hugh. Cabbagetown. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. See also Garner, Hugh. Cabbagetown. Toronto: White Circle, 1950, which in many respects is a different novel.

Gatenby, Greg. Toronto: A Literary Guide. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 1999.

Clarke, Austin. The Meeting Point. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1967.

Holmes, Michael. Watermelon Row. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Warner/Aspect, 1998.

Hughes, Isabelle. Serpent’s Tooth. Toronto: Collins, 1947.

Hughes, Isabelle. Time in Ambush. Toronto: Collins, 1949.

Hughes, Isabelle. Lorena Telforth. London: Peter Davies, 1952.

Hughes, Isabelle. The Wise Brother. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954.

Keith, William John. Literary Images of Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Kreisel, Henry. The Rich Man. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948.

Lee, Dennis. Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 1974 [reprinted 1994].

Lethem, Jonathan, ed. The Vintage Book of Amnesia. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Levy, Sophie. “Torontology.” Master’s thesis. Department of English, University of Toronto, 2001.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Noman. Oberon, 1972.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Noman’s Land. Toronto: Coach House, 1985.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987.

Marche, Stephen. “Drab and dull, yes, but we write a mean novel.” Globe & Mail, December 31, 2005, page M2.

Moir, John S. Rhymes of Rebellion. Toronto: Ryerson, 1965.

Niedzviecki, Hal. Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998.

Plantos, Ted. The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen. Toronto: Steel Rail, 1977.

Pupo, Mark. “Facts and Fiction. A roundtable discussion on Toronto literature” with Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvadurai. Toronto Life (online edition). 2006. Available electronically at http://www.torontolife.com/features/facts-fiction/

Sűskind, Patrick. Amnesie in Litteris. 2001.

Symons, Scott. Civic Square. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969.

Tepper, Anderson. “Northern Exposure: Can you hear that literary buzz? It’s coming from Toronto.” Vanity Fair (online edition), week of 5 December 2005. http://www.vanityfair.com .

Vassanji, M.G. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991

Warkentin, Germaine. “Mapping Wonderland.” Literary Review of Canada 13(10): 14-17. 2005.

Wodson, H.M. 1917. The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court. Toronto: H.M. Wodson.

Young, Phyllis Brett. The Torontonians. Toronto: Longmans, 1960 [reissued 2007, McGill-Queen’s University Press.]

Copyright is so entrenched in popular thinking about the production and dissemination of culture that we may think of it as natural or inevitable. We may even drape it with mystical ideas about the creative process. To be sure, authors and artists have always had a special connection to their work. The seventeenth-century poet John Milton wrote that books "preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." An anonymous author declared to the British Parliament in 1735, "If there be such a Thing as Property upon Earth, an Author has it in his Work."¹

These claims were made, however, as polemical assertions in the midst of raucous debate, not as statements of established fact. In exalting authors as sources or owners, Milton and the anonymous author spoke against the “common sense” of their time, according to which an artist was most often honoured as a custodian and animator of collective tradition. Artistic and intellectual production understood in this collective way tended to be supported by a patronage system rather than by a system of individual rights or property. Alternative models do exist for encouraging and supporting cultural production (see chapter 18). We need therefore to think twice about copyright’s logic.

Established Philosophies of Copyright

Why should copyright holders have exclusive rights in their works? Copyright laws relate to two major lines of philosophical justification: rights-based theories and utilitarianism. Both of these approaches have advantages and limitations, and both of them are explicitly or implicitly represented in today’s copyright debates.² The economic analysis that holds sway in many quarters today can be seen as a descendant of both lines of thought.

Rights-Based Theories

Rights-based theories are rooted in ideas of natural law. Proponents of natural law believe that the law exists independently, separate and apart from legislation that has been posited by any particular state. While natural law may be associated with a religious world view, it can also appeal to an abstract moral authority, such as justice. The principles of natural law are expressed in documents such as the Magna Carta and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The claim from the American Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" is a good example of natural law philosophy. More generally, the idea of “human rights” is derived from a natural law approach: rights come from “nature or nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, not from a particular ruler or government.

A natural law approach to property would hold that a person has a natural entitlement to his person and to the fruits of his labours. The most well-known expositor of this philosophy is John Locke, who in his Second Treatise of Government (1690) set out a theory that justifies the private appropriation of public resources.³ While Locke was writing about the appropriation of physical resources (that is, land and things), his work has come to be applied to intellectual labour as well. Locke begins with the premise that "the 'labour' of [a person's] body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his." Then he says that whatever a person "removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with it and joined to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property."⁴

In a Lockean view of copyright, the labour supplied by the author provides a justification for a claim to exclude others – even if the author is working with materials previously available to all. A claim that copyright ought to be perpetual could also be justified by reference to Locke, because property rights in physical resources are perpetual.

Interestingly, Locke also specified two limitations on the right to appropriate from the commons. First, he stated that the appropriation must leave as much and as good for others; second, he did not consider ownership legitimate when individuals appropriated more than they could use.⁵ Locke was also explicitly opposed to perpetual copyright.⁶ Thus, whether we are talking about tangible property or intellectual property, Locke may provide justification both for owners' rights and for limitations to them.

On some level many people may think of copyright as a "natural" right because it just seems “fair” that authors should hold rights in work they have created. But the courts, in the Anglo-American tradition, do not see it this way. In the seventeenth century, English courts held that acts of Parliament were subject to the constraints of natural law, often understood to be embodied in “common law,” or the accumulated collection of precedent from specific legal cases. In Dr. Bonham’s Case (1610), the court said that the "common law will control Acts of Parliament, and sometimes judge them to be utterly void: for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it, and adjudge such an Act to be void.⁷ But after 1688 acts of Parliament were thought to be supreme: in other words, the law was understood to lie in what the government had expressly promulgated, enacted, or "posited." In the realm of copyright, this "positive law" viewpoint was confirmed in the 1774 case Donaldson v. Becket.⁸ In this case a divided House of Lords affirmed the limited copyright term of the Statute of Anne over claims of common-law perpetual copyright, rejecting the notion of a "natural" copyright separate and apart from the statute.⁹ Thus, while today’s justifications for copyright law are often rooted in the thinking of natural law, Anglo-American law now operates predominantly according to positive law principles.

Still, rights-based or natural law theories do continue to play a more central role in the civil law systems that originated in Continental Europe, brought to Canada through French law.¹⁰ Civil law systems place more emphasis on the individual rights of the author as a person, and tend to view copyright as an extension of the personality of the author. Canadian law represents a blending of English and French traditions, and Supreme Court cases in particular often reflect a combination of the two.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is another major stream of justification of copyright. As a general school of thought, utilitarianism is generally attributed to the nineteenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. According to Bentham, people can make decisions in a situation of competing interests by measuring the total amount of “happiness” produced. "A measure of government," he wrote, "may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when … the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it."¹¹

The so-called "Copyright Clause" of the U.S. Constitution might be taken as an example of utilitarianism: it does not appeal to a higher power, as in natural law thinking, but rather empowers Congress to enact intellectual property laws as a tool for general benefit – that is, "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." While Canada’s copyright principles are not articulated at the constitutional level, our courts and legislators have often and increasingly used a rhetoric of public or national interest that could be said to be utilitarian.¹²

As a legal philosophy, utilitarianism is associated with legal positivism – the approach that locates the law not in established practice and custom, but in the statute alone. Sometimes positivism can be democratic in spirit, privileging the visible "black letter" law over invisible entrenched interests. However, the classical formulation of legal positivism, as stated by John Austin in his 1832 work The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, shows a harsher side of the doctrine: "The matter of jurisprudence is positive law; law strictly and simply so called: or law set by political superiors to political inferiors."¹³ Most legal education today is based on a modified positivist approach to learning black-letter law. We take a more "realist" approach, locating legal authority not only in the written laws, and not only in general practices and understandings of the good, but in their interaction.¹⁴

Economic Analysis

In today’s debates, copyright is most often justified in economic terms: we are living in a "knowledge-based economy," the claim goes, and we need a particular vision of copyright to drive that economy. Classic economic analysis of copyright law rests on three general assumptions: that the free market system is the appropriate allocation device to guide the creation and dissemination of "information and knowledge-based products;" that information- and knowledge-based goods and services will be underproduced without a guarantee of sufficient market-based financial incentives to creators and owners; and that the expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights is necessary to protect these market-based incentives from being undermined by acts of appropriation.

Within the limitations of these assumptions, economic analysis seeks to promote the efficient allocation of resources in a market setting. In its sacralization of property rights, it is underpinned by natural law philosophies; but it is also essentially utilitarian in nature, in that it recognizes the existence of a trade-off between limiting access to works and providing economic incentives to create works. After all, an economy in which every single transaction with a copyrighted work were "monetized" or metered in some way would carry great financial and bureaucratic costs, which might slow down its growth (economists call these "transaction costs"). The trade-off is often referred to as the "balancing" of interests between the rights of owners and the rights of users.

Such cost-benefit analysis is open to criticism on a number of grounds. One central problem is that the losses that come from limiting access are not as susceptible to precise measurement as are the financial benefits accruing to the owners of exclusive copyright interests. Henry Richardson argues that cost-benefit analysis “makes no room for intelligent deliberation about how to best use our resources,” and that it thus “defeats its own aims."¹⁵ The balancing approach also does not seem to adequately consider how different stakeholders come to the table with different resources, different backgrounds, and different levels of political power. But while it may be argued that the discourse of "balancing of interests" fails to address several problems, it is certainly better than the one-dimensional approach of arguing that protections are good, and more protections are better, without regard to the losses on the other side.

The argument is often made that copyright protections need to be expanded because of changes in technology, or because new cultural practices threaten existing business models. But looking at copyright only from the standpoint of protections overlooks the reality that one person’s additional rights are just further restrictions for someone else. Rather than thinking about rights in a vacuum, we prefer to think also about the corresponding duties and disabilities that the rights impose on others. In other words, it makes just as much sense to speak of copyright restrictions as of copyright protections.

The Problem of Intellectual Property

So far we have introduced two major paths of philosophical justification for copyright, and suggested how they underlie modern economic analysis. While we pointed out some of their pitfalls, we generally followed the tendencies of both approaches to gloss over the distinction between tangible property (land, chattels, goods, widgets) and intangible intellectual property (expression, knowledge, information). However, the differences between tangible and intellectual goods are fundamental, and any fully convincing justification of copyright (or, for that matter, patent, although we will not get into that here) must recognize these differences. The traditional rationales for copyright, then, can be challenged – and if copyright is to maintain its legitimacy this challenge must be acknowledged.

Copyright laws attempt to regulate the flow of intellectual and information goods – or at least the particular ways in which ideas, information, and knowledge are expressed. Talk about the importance of flows of information and knowledge is ubiquitous: Canadians are constantly being told that we live in an “information society.” But little attention has been paid in the policy context to understanding the nature and characteristics of information, ideas, and knowledge. Copyright policy typically proceeds from the assumption that intellectual goods are “things” without further analysis.

In fact, intellectual goods exhibit two major differences from private goods, or commodities: they are generally non-rival in consumption, and they do not inherently possess exclusion mechanisms. We would class intellectual goods, then, as public goods.

If a good is rivalrous in its consumption, it is depleted or used up when one person consumes it. Physical consumer goods that populate store shelves are rivalrous in consumption. When a widget is purchased it is no longer on the shelf for the next shopper. Depletable energy resources are another classic example of rivalry in consumption. When we say that public goods are non-rival in consumption, we mean that the consumption of the good by one person does not reduce the amount of the good available for consumption by others. If you walk down a street illuminated by a street light, the light is not depleted because you enjoyed its benefit. The bulb in the lamp will be depleted through use and is itself a private good with rivalry in consumption. But the service of street lighting is a public good and exhibits non-rivalry in consumption. The act of breathing does not significantly reduce the air available for everyone else, so it too is non-rivalrous in consumption. (Locke said the same about water, so we can see that goods can change, depending on circumstance, from non-rival to rival or vice versa.)

In the context of copyright analysis, we can distinguish a book or a CD (physical goods with rivalry in consumption) from the information contained in the book or CD. Until recently, information was necessarily distributed in physical containers, so the differences between rivalry and non-rivalry in consumption were not as noticeable as they are today. With advances in digital technology, content is now routinely severed from its container. A digital file is non-rival in consumption and can be distributed to ten thousand persons just as well as ten. One could even say that the essence of information as information is that it is non-rival in consumption.

There are certainly exceptions to this general observation. For example, hot market information and other types of proprietary data might become less valuable with wider distribution.¹⁶ But we could also note that much information or expression becomes more valuable as more people use it, by the phenomenon known by economists as “network effects.” The telephone system provides an apt analogy: it would not be very valuable to you if you were the only person with a telephone, but the more people using the system, the more value it has. A similar thing happens in the cultural marketplace with bestsellers, fads, and trends.

The second aspect of a public good that distinguishes it from a private good is that it does not have an exclusion mechanism. A tollgate is an example of an exclusion mechanism. So is a cash register: when you go to the store, you don’t get to enjoy a new shirt or bicycle unless you pay for it. Public goods are different. Anyone can use them, regardless of whether they express a preference for them in the marketplace. People who walk down a street at night get the benefit of the streetlight whether or not they helped pay for it. No shield emerges to block the light from those who have not paid taxes in that jurisdiction (or at least not yet: maybe somebody will think of a way to do it). National defence, policing, roads, and schooling are other common examples of goods that lack an exclusion mechanism. You enjoy the “benefits” of national defence expenditures whatever your opinion on how tax revenues should be spent.

Whether or not a good has an effective exclusion mechanism can be a question of public policy, a question of technology, or both. The law of theft is an exclusion mechanism that has long been imposed as a matter of public policy. It is against the law to take an item out of a store without paying for it, and it is against the law to sneak into a theatre without buying a ticket. The exclusion mechanism may also be a technological device. The automated tollgate is an older such technology, and consumers are now becoming familiar with a vast array of new digital locks or gateways, known as technological protection measures (TPMs). But exclusion mechanisms are often hybrid: that is, the law often acts to reinforce a technological exclusion mechanism. Think of cable television. It used to be that television airwaves were pure public goods. By turning on your television and viewing a broadcast, you were not depleting the airwaves available for others to enjoy. Cable companies introduced an exclusion mechanism: you had to pay to get the system hooked up. If you “fix” the cable box so that you can view programs without subscribing to the service (or create a device to do so), you are likely to be in violation of a law, and subject to sanctions. The same double exclusion mechanism could be layered onto TPMs, even though there are many legitimate reasons to defeat a TPM: making a backup copy of a computer program, for example, or accessing public domain content (see chapter 9).

Table 1. Comparison of Pure Public Goods and Pure Private Goods

We have seen how intellectual goods are inherently non-rival in consumption as they are not naturally subject to an exclusion mechanism. The container holding the information (the book, the CD) is rivalrous in consumption and is subject to an exclusion mechanism and rivalry in consumption, but the information contained therein is not. Public goods present a problem for market-oriented economists because if an item has public good characteristics, people will be able to use and enjoy it without having to pay for it. Lack of exclusion means you can obtain the benefit of the good whether or not you are willing to pay for it. The price system, which is based on rules of supply and demand, cannot operate for public goods, and we have in this an instance of what economists call total market failure.

While many people see the public goods quality of digital information and expression as an exciting phenomenon, mainstream economists and large-content owners see public goods as a problem that needs to be cured. They desperately need the price system to work. A fix is needed, and the cure is to create some sort of exclusion mechanism. In the case of intellectual goods, the laws of intellectual property can be layered on top of technology to create artificial scarcity and impose constraints on free flows of information.

These artificially created exclusion mechanisms are powerful policy tools. They may well be justifiable on natural law or utilitarian grounds: we may say, for example, that it isn’t fair that an author not be paid for her work, or that it is in the public interest that she be paid. Or we may think that only the individuals who need a certain good ought to pay for it. But the exclusion mechanisms should be used carefully, because they have the potential to unduly restrict the transfer of information and knowledge. We can think of this dilemma in terms of “balancing” different interests. But the public goods analysis also raises a wider question that cannot be properly analyzed within the constraints of conventional cost-benefit analysis. Should we be cautious, as a society, about subjecting information goods to the analytical and policy approaches typically applied to tangible goods? Legislators and courts have most often treated them differently: perhaps we should heed this history.

"Copyright's Rationales" is an excerpt from Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide by Laura Murray and Sam Trosow. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

Laura Murray is an Associate Professor in the English Department of Queen’s University and creator of the website, faircopyright.ca.

Sam Trosow is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario; he is jointly appointed in the Faculties of Law and Information and Media Studies

Notes

1. Milton, “Areopagitica” (1644); the full text is available at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/areopagitica.html. The anonymous author is quoted in Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 55. Rose notes the possibility that the author of this pamphlet was in fact a bookseller – and therefore using the “authors’ rights” rhetoric to bolster the booksellers’ interests.
2. William Fisher divides copyright justifications into four categories: utilitarianism, labour theory, personality theory, and social planning theory. We have combined labour theory and personality theory together as “natural law” theories; what Fisher calls “social planning theory” is reflected in part in the third section of this chapter on information as “public good.” Fisher, “Theories of Intellectual Property,” New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property, ed. Stephen R. Munzer. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/iptheory.html, 168–99.
3. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ch. 5; Project Gutenberg website, http://www.gutenberg.org.
4. Locke, ch. 5, sect. 27.
5. Ibid., sect. 31.
6. See Justin Hughes, “Locke’s 1694 Memorandum (and More Incomplete Copyright Historiographies),” Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper no. 167 (October 2006); Social Sciences Research Network website, www.ssrn.com.
7. Reports of Sir Edward Coke 107, 77, English Reports 638(Common Pleas, 1610); http://plaza.ufl.edu/edale/Dr%20Bonham’s%20Case.htm.
8. 1 English Reports 837 (House of Lords), 17 Cobbett’s Parliamentary History 1078 (1813). For a further analysis of the case see Rose, “Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship.” Representations 23 (summer 1988).
9. A similar result was reached in the United States in the 1834 case of Wheaton v. Peters (33 US 591), where the Supreme Court rejected the argument of common law copyright in favour of a strict reading of the statute. For discussion of this important case, see Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective, ch. 10, (Nashville, Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); and Meredith McGill, “The Matter of the Text: Commerce, Print Culture, and the Authority of the State in American Copyright Law,” American Literary History, 9, 1 (1977).
10. Civil law systems date back to Roman law, and are based on codes that set out the specific provisions of law. These codes are then applied and interpreted by judges when disputes arise. In contrast to code-based legal systems, the English common law is based on custom and practice as reflected in judicial precedent. For an accessible explanation of Canada’s history of combining both “civil law” and “common law” systems, see http://www.canadiana.org/citm/specifique/lois_e.html.
11. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 1, article VII. Jeremy’s Labyrinth website, www.la.utexas.edu/labyrinth.
12. Section 91 of the Canadian Constitution merely lists copyright as an enumerated power of the federal government, with no rationale or guidance provided. See also Laura Murray, “Protecting Ourselves to Death,” First Monday 9, 10 (2004), www.firstmonday.org; and also Théberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain Inc. [2002], S.C.R. 336, para. 32, http://www.canlii.org/ca/cas/scc/20002/2002scc34.html.
13. Austin, Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Introduction by H.L.A. Hart, (New York, Humanities Press, 1965 [1832]), 9.
14. The most famous proponent of the realist philosophy was Oliver Wendell Holmes: see Holmes, “Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review, 10, 457 (1897). For an accessible discussion of related issues, see Roderick Alexander Macdonald, Lessons of Everyday Law, Law Commission of Canada and School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
15. Henry S. Richardson, “Stupidity of the Cost-Benefit Standard,” in “Cost Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Matthew D. Adler and Eric A. Posner, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 136.
16. Examples are advance knowledge of weather conditions that will send the price of a crop’s futures soaring, or inside financial data indicating that a company will have to restate its books to show a large loss. There are whole bodies of law protecting trade secrets and confidential information, and prohibiting certain uses of insider corporate information.

Over a 48-hour period, writer and editor Michael Holmes and design guru and magazine publisher Bill Douglas interviewed each other about creative freedom and restriction in book design, the "ideal weight and heft, texture and shape" of books, and the necessity of good faith between designers and publishers. The interview was conducted via e-mail.

MH: Bill, I’ve admired your design aesthetic for quite a number of years, and I’ve been envious of so many of the books you’ve worked on, often wishing their covers were my own. Years ago I nearly had the opportunity to work with you on a book of my own, but unfortunately that didn’t work out. More recently, as I’ve acquired literary titles for my imprint a misFit book with ECW, I’ve admired what can probably be best described as the feel or sensibility you helped create for the reemergent and reinvented Anansi. You definitely helped make an Anansi book an Anansi book. Which I guess leads to something I’d love to talk to you about: what’s the process of book design mean to you and what does it involve? How do you see your role?

BD: Wow. The process of book design. I think during the making and after the completion of each book project my thoughts on that subject likely change quite dramatically. After 600 or so book projects I still don’t think I’ve figured out the process. Within the industry it seems to change every couple years. As for the parts of the process I can control, it probably hasn’t changed that much since I first began designing books. Probably the first thing I try to do is get a sense of the personality of the book. I think designers need to look beyond the writing and attempt to envision the object. How the object should look and feel. I think every novel, or political book, or collection of poetry has its ideal weight and heft, texture and shape. Once I can envision it, that is where I like to begin the graphic design. As for my role? The best thing I can do is attempt to visually represent the writer’s work in the best and most telling way possible. I love to give writers, especially first-time or lesser-known writers, a fighting chance on the shelves and tables of bookstores. If I can make a book look like it is something that should be paid attention to then I’ve done my job.

MH: I like that you’ve brought up the idea of what a designer can control – and obviously when you’re talking about books, there’s much that you can’t. Generic restraints, industry conventions, and the financial and technical realities of publishing and printing mean some things are decided for you: whether a book is going to be paper or cloth; its general size and shape; what kinds of inks or special effects you can use (metallic foils or embossing, that kind of thing). But what are your feelings about the point where form and function have to meet, where the art part of a design has to also work as a sales or marketing tool – get folks in a store to pick up a book? When I’m working on the look and feel of new titles at ECW, I often find myself taking on the role of mediator. There’re a lot of opinions to listen to: my colleagues; the writer and sometimes their agents, most obviously; but also sales reps and bookstore people. And sometimes those opinions differ wildly from a designer’s. For a book of poetry, or even a novel, the pressure or conflict is often less intense – for works of non-fiction there’s more often a bottom line, the need to come to a consensus that says "the consumer will get this cover." So for an editor, it’s sometimes difficult. I like to think I respect the designers I work with as artists – the same way I respect my writers. Ideally, the look and feel of a book as a product is therefore a collaboration – a felicitous confluence of words and graphic art – that creates a new whole, a completely new work of art. But, sometimes... sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Can you ever avoid the frustration of designing what you feel like is the perfect cover, only to have a press or an author reject it? I know you’ve worked closely with many authors, collaborating with them or at least involving them in the design process. (I’m thinking particularly about the striking binoculars cover you did for Michael Winter’s book a few years back.) Is that how you prefer to work – does that make things easier? Or are there pitfalls for a designer in that, too, getting too much input?