httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5qalNX5G94
Elaine in the episode of Seinfeld where she hates The English Patient but must see it multiple times.
In case you missed it, here’s the National Post’s ten most overrated Canadian authors (yes, Michael Ondaatje is in there).
For entertainment purposes only.
To be fair, Michael Ondaatje’s lovely poem, “The Cinnamon Peeler” (with video), after the jump.
Glen Pearson at his blog The Parallel Parliament cites Frye on Canadian liberalism in a post here.
Money quote:
When Canadian Northrop Frye penned his seminal Divisions on a Ground, he used that very term to describe this very country he appreciated. While acknowledging the various diverse components struggling to make their way in Canada, he also affirmed that they were in one place – “On A Ground” – and that accommodations were being made. For that reason, his work was hopeful.
The liberal temperament looks at it the same way. To live together, temperament matters just as much as policy. To be decent, tolerant, smart, accommodating, principled and generous has mattered just as much in this country as wealth. It is who we are and it’s best we get back to it.
The now nearly forgotten Jacques Parizeau, leader of the Parti Quebecois and Premier of Quebec at the time of the 1995 Referendum. The near miss may have been partly the result of an attempted electoral fraud by PQ party workers at the polls who suppressed “no” votes. Parizeau, of course, saw the result differently and notoriously blamed the loss (some say drunkenly did so) on “money and ethnic votes.” We also discovered that had the PQ won by the narrowest of margins (the question posed in the referendum included negotiating a new constitutional arrangement with Canada first), Parizeau intended to make a unilateral declaration of independence on behalf of a newly sovereign Quebec. As Parizeau put it, the bamboozled population would accept it once they realized that they were now “lobsters thrown into a boiling pot.”
On this date is 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the consent of the federal government.
Frye in “Canadian Identity and Cultural Regionalism”:
When the cultural and imaginative regionalism in Canada takes on a political cast as well, it becomes merely provincial. In extreme cases, as with certain extreme separatist groups in Quebec, British Columbia and the Prairies, it can become a kind of squalid neo-fascism. On the other hand, when the national political consciousness attempts to become generally imaginative and cultural, it is apt to become confused by insoluble problems of identity. I think we can eventually work our way towards a national culture and imagination, but it needs a solid regional basis. (CW 10, 268)
So reports the The Gazette here.
Full story here.
This story is perhaps not getting as much attention as it should: at least one individual and perhaps more in the Defence Department at CFB Cold Lake, Alberta, has been trying to alter the Wikipedia entry on the Harper government’s decision to spend billions on a new stealth jet fighter. (Again, we can’t afford increases to education and health care, but…) The effort involves at least three computers registered to the Defence Research and Development Canada’s Ottawa offices. The IP address, however, has been determined to be from CFB Cold Lake. Wikipedia has labelled the alterations vandalism.
Bad enough. But Defence Department computers in Alberta have also been used to insert insulting comments about Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff onto the same Wikipedia page.
Meanwhile, efforts to remove from Wikipedia criticism of the Harper government’s decision to invest in stealth jet fighters continue to be traced to computers located in downtown Calgary.
Alberta, Alberta, and again Alberta.
This is why Harper will never win a majority. Canadians do not like this sort of thing and will not put up with it.
On this date in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first English colony in North America in what is now St John’s, Newfoundland.
Frye citing a folk song, which he describes as “a delightful bit that could only have come from one place in the world, southeastern Newfoundland”:
“Oh mother dear, I wants a sack
With beads and buttons down the back. . .
Me boot is broke, me frock is tore,
But Georgie Snooks I do adore. . .
Oh, fish is low and flour is high,
So Georgie Snooks he can’t have I” (CW 12, 241-2)
We are very pleased to announce that Branko Gorjup’s paper, “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,” presented at the 2001 Frye Festival in Moncton, has been posted in our journal’s Festival Archive here.
That’s how calendars and daytimers blandly render this day in Canada — “Civic Holiday” — because each part of the country has its own designation for it (Frye’s Canadian “anarchism” at work, er, play). In New Brunswick, Ed Lemond of Moncton’s Frye Festival advises me, it’s New Brunswick Day because New Brunswick evidently lives in a New Brunswick-centric universe. (Good for you, New Brunswick.) In Ontario, it’s Simcoe Day — as in John Graves Simcoe, who only abolished slavery in Upper and Lower Canada in 1793, so I guess there’s no reason he should have a national holiday dedicated to him.
How else do we know it’s a holiday in Canada? Well, for one thing, for the first time ever that I’m aware of, we had way more visitors from the U.S. than from Canada. In fact, our traffic today was business as usual from all around the world. But today Canadians were chillin’ it.
Plaque commemorating the first telephone exchange in the British Empire in the old Exchange Building at 8 Main Street East in Hamilton, Ontario
On this date in 1922 Alexander Graham Bell died.
Frye in his “Convocation Address, University of Bologna” (April 24, 1989):
In Canada, with its sparse population, immense area, and physical obstacles separating each part of the country, communication has always been a major preoccupation. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison both lived a good deal in Canada; the building of railways and bridges and canals have formed much of Canadian history, and a fair number of Canadian intellectuals have been philosophers of communication theory. (CW 10, 343)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QZioxCg20I
Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”
This sample is statistically miniscule and irresponsibly narrow, but, given how overwhelming the talent here, it’s easy enough to want to believe that it is representative of the women of Canada generally.