“Toronto is just like New York but without all the stuff.”
– 30 Rock
http://tiny.cc/stuff384

Hey Steven — thanks for highlighting this article. I haven’t had a chance to respond formally to it myself.

I had a pleasant exchange with Geoff Pevere this morning, agreeing with him in part — that it’s questionable whether Toronto has a well-established mythology. In his article he doesn’t deny there’s a literature — he suggests, rather, that it might be nascent.

I would — and do — argue that Toronto has a lot more literature than it receives credit for. After 200 years it can hardly be considered nascent. I also think it’s invalid to ask whether the city’s literature can compare to Joyce’s Dublin, Dickens’ London, or even Mistry’s Mumbai (which Pevere doesn’t seem to do, to his credit). But I think it’s entirely valid to ask what sort of mythology Toronto has created for itself. If I may be a bit self-promotional here, this latter question is at the core of the Imagining Toronto book (which Mansfield Press will launch later this spring). Perhaps not surprisingly, I argue that one of Toronto’s most prominent myths is (among others) the myth of the multicultural city.

By the way, Pevere is the author/editor of Toronto on Film (TIFF, 2009) — a must-read for anyone interested in how the city has been imagined and represented in/on the silver screen.

And for the Toronto-haters out there, here are a few lines from Francis Pollock’s 1936 novel — set in Toronto, you should know — Jupiter Eight:

“He had been accustomed to abuse his city, as all his friends did. All the sporting set, all the arty crowd vilified it as one of their staples of conversation. The sportsmen despised it because it did not sufficiently resemble Chicago and Havana; the artists because it did not sufficiently resemble Paris and Munich. They called it a slow place, a dull place, where English snobbery met American vulgarity and each thrived on the other; where the police would not let you drink standing up, and where there was no subsidized theatre. They called it a half-grown city, a nest of Methodists and Orangemen, of Puritans and Pharisees, who had not yet learned that Queen Victoria was dead. They called it a rube town, a hick town, an overgrown tank-town, with half a million people who confused Dada with Santa Claus. Derrock had called it all these things himself.”

And this, from Darren O’Donnell’s novel — also, incidentally, set in Toronto — Your Secrets Sleep With Me (Coach House, 2002):

“It wishes it were other cities: Chicago, New Delhi, Istanbul, Mexico City, Montreal, San Jose, Algiers, Moscow, London, Karachi, Caracas, Tokyo, Kathmandu, Barcelona, Bogota, Cairo, Perth, Berlin, Kinshasa, Manila, Singapore, Shanghai, San Francisco, Brussels, Paris, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Rome, Marrakech, Sarajevo, Cape Town, Lahore, Taipei, Athens, Prague, New York City, Casablanca, Kiev, Madrid, Nairobi, Dublin, Tijuana, Lisbon, Hanoi, Calcutta, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Santiago, Bombay, Copenhagen, Addis Ababa, Los Angeles, Helsinki, Kuala Lampur, Las Vegas, Tel Aviv, Colombo, Havana, New Orleans, Mecca, Beijing, Managua, Jakarta, Oslo.”

There’s plenty more Toronto-bashing in the Imagining Toronto book. Something for everyone, really.

Who exactly are these mythical Torontonians who say Toronto is great? I’ve lived here all my life and never really met one. No one bashes Toronto more than its own citizens.

I’m with you, Bill. In In the 2007 documentary film, Let’s All Hate Toronto (there’s also a 1956 book by Jack McLaren with the same title), filmmakers Albert Nerenberg and Rob Spence traveled across Canada hoping to discover why hating Toronto is such a rewarding national pastime.

In the end, they concluded that nobody hates Toronto more than Torontonians themselves.

There’s plenty of literary Toronto in print. City of Words by Cormorant Books has a good sampling of what’s out there. In fact, it was a big $50 book that Indigo got behind last Fall and book buyers responded snapped up.