Duddy Kravitz's brother Lenny

Picture taken after Lenny dropped out of medical school: pertinent phrase--"anatomy's the killer..." O-o-h yeah.

Literary Bile

Today's Arts & Letters Daily features an excellent article from the Toronto Globe & Mail on the biliousness of writers to their own fraternity, entitled "You suck, and so does your writing." It ends with the following comment on Canadian writers:

It pains me, though, that Canadian writers have fallen invectively short. Are we too nice? Too deferential? Sure, there's no shortage of private whingings, resentments and jealousies, but wouldn't it be a treat to have, say, Alice Munro opine of Robertson Davies something along the lines of: “The man was a blowhard. All that cloudy, mystical Jungianism hung on the slenderest of twigs; and never a character you could faintly believe in.”

Ah well, I can dream, can't I?

The article's writer "... [b]ooks editor Martin Levin has been the target of some invective of his own, but of disappointingly low quality."

On History and National Identity

A very useful quotation on the importance of historical knowledge and understanding (à propos the central significance of Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller) comes from Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

For Group Projects

From SFU Can-Lit alumnus M.S., a possible avenue for your Group project:

CBC RADIO ONE and CBC RADIO 3 are once again pleased to invte your radio and journalism students to enter our Student Journalism Awards.

We are awarding prizes for the best radio documentary and inviting pitches for a radio programming idea suitable for broadcast on Radio 3.

The Mowatt Award for best radio documentary is named after Don Mowatt who is an award winning documentary maker and long time producer with the CBC program IDEAS.

The Alexis Mazurin Award is named for our late colleague who was a bright light at CBC and whose sudden and premature death in 2006 was mourned by many. We all hope that his unique and creative talent will live on through this award.

[At this link].... you will find the entry guidelines and forms for these awards. This year we are asking for the entry applications to be made online TO THE ATTENTION OF YVONNE GALL.

Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions. Good luck to all your students!

Yvonne Gall.  yvonne.gall@cbc.ca

On Canadian Parliament Proroguement

Following the tertiary discussion in one of our seminar groups on Canada's parliamentray system (as a part of our unique national identity) and its element of proroguement, there is this data, which I did not previously know and parts of which I found somewhat surprising, from today's online Toronto Globe and Mail:

"The Prorogue Score

Compared to a few Liberal PM's, Stephen Harper is a proroguing amateur.

Chretien 4, Harper 2.

35th Parliament Chretien 1996/2/2
36th Parliament 1999/9/18
37th Parliament 2002/9/16,2003/11/12 ...

And if you really want a lopsided score how about this one:

Trudeau 11, Harper 2

26th Parliament Trudeau 1963/12/21,1965/4/3
27th Parliament Trudeau 1967/5/8
28th Parliament Trudeau 1969/10/22,1970/10/7,1972/2/16
29th Parliament Trudeau 1974/2/26
30th Parliament Trudeau 1976/10/12,1977/10/17,1978/10/10,1983/11/30

....why are these numbers not front and center in the multitude of MSM stories on the topic?...

In our 143 years of existence as Canada, Parliament has been prorogued 105 times...an average of about once every 1.4 years that this, very legal and constitutionally granted power, has been used."

The 105 number surprised me... and Mr. Trudeau's 11 time use.