Maclear’s Vietnam
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…
Morris Wolfe
Essays, New & Selected
Morris Wolfe
Essays, New & Selected
That Long Distance Feeling
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 Methodism in Their Madness
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…
MTM TV
Some of my television columns examined particular themes — the treatment of old people on TV, for instance. The following column looked at the treatment of women. … “As Mary Tyler Moore goes, so goes the nation.”— Maude BACK IN…
Jolts Per Minute
In trying to describe the difference between American and Canadian television, I came up with the crude but I think useful notion of ‘jolts per minute’ (JPMs). American programmes had far more. … CLEARLY, IT WAS A COUP for 90 Minutes…
Growing Up With a Three-Minute Attention Span
In 1973 I became Saturday Night’s television critic, a position I held through 1980. I found myself focusing on the nature of the medium and the the differences between Canadian and American culture as revealed by looking at my television…