I thought that this blog entry by Colby Cosh on Accordion City was
worthy of note in case you hadn’t seen it. He wrote it after a recent
visit here:
I suppose the couple that put me up for
the weekend didn’t realize they were making such a wonderful black joke
by having a paperback copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation lying
on the coffee table when I arrived. I was thumbing through the book and
was reminded that, at the outset of Asimov’s space epic, the galactic
capital–a vast, crowded, barren planet frantically maintaining a
tenuous grip on empire–is called “Trantor”. Coincidence or prophecy?
I kid. We provincials are fond of
complaining that Toronto regards itself as the “centre of the
universe“. But, honestly, what else can we reasonably expect? I’m not
certain any other city so closely resembles what the actual metropolitan centre of the universe
were to look like if such a thing existed. And I mean this in both bad
ways and good. Listen to the polyglot hum emerging from the television
and the street; consider the historical layering and the Herculean
churn of the city’s architectural scene, which runs the gamut from
ruins-in-progress to outrageous new confections;
ponder the way Toronto tries (oh so very hard) to assert a proprietary
interest in universal mass culture by obsessing over its movie shoots
and semi-notable part-time residents.
Gertrude Stein said of Oakland that “there’s no there there”; in
Toronto’s case the genius and the calamity may, equally, be that
there’s an everywhere there, trying to fit into a somewhat narrow
geographical space.
(The bold links are his; the non-bold links are my own additional “link-a-torial”.)
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Hey Joey,
Here is the link I was mentioning last night: http://maddox.xmission.com/ ...funny that you mention Asimov in this entry...Maddox's last "rant" was about 'I, Robot'. Some of his stuff is marginally funny, while most of it is hysterical...you'll have to do some digging for the gold. Carrie