Essays, New & Selected
Essays, New & Selected
The two articles that follow deal with academic politics. The first tells of Valery Fabrikant, a mechanical engineering professor at Concordia University, who, having been denied tenure, murdered four of his colleagues. I covered the story for Saturday Night for…
“IT HAS DICK to do with art,” muttered an angry male faculty colleague as we left a tense meeting of Toronto’s Ontario College of Art Faculty Association on October 31, 1989. The subject of the meeting had been the employment-equity…
AMERICAN MASS CULTURE tends to be about the world as we’d like it to be, one in which goodness and reason prevail, where things almost always work out for the best. Canadian mass culture, on the other hand, is much…
The next two essays were written to mark anniversaries — the tenth anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970, and the sixtieth anniversary of Canada’s imprisoning eight communists in 1931. In both cases, men and…
THE WORD NOSTALGIA was originally a medical term used to describe melancholia caused by long absences from home or country. The illness was ‘discovered’ in the eighteenth century and appears to have been directly connected with dislocations in people’s lives brought…
THE GLOOMY AND ALOOF Masseys have long been objects of amusement. Remember B.K. Sandwell’s lines: “Toronto has no social classes/Only the Masseys and the masses”? Many of us know little about Vincent Massey except that his name is attached to a…