The court jester tennis4/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Soon, he said with breathless anticipation, everywhere would be the same! and Canadian shopping malls were indistinguishable. "There’s nothing there-nothing!" Today U.S. In a fever, he began to speak of his upbringing in a faceless U.S. Like the multinational marketing executive flattening regional cultures in order to sell the same burger to everyone, Jester had fixed his sights on diversity as the enemy. But the thrust of the diatribe was unmistakable. A few years from now you’ll go to Sri Lanka and say, ‘I drank coffee at the Sri Lanka Starbucks, I ate at the Sri Lanka McDonald’s.’ It won’t matter where you are because everywhere will be the same."Īs the gods of editing were merciful to Jester, consigning this section of the show to the cutting-room floor, I can’t verify that these were his precise words. But when I invoked the homogenizing forces of globalization and commercialization as being at the root of the problem, I made a surprising discovery: Jester loved homogenization. Jester made no objection to this point indeed he claimed to have pioneered it himself. We underlined the paradox that in spite of being one of the world’s most urbanized countries (more than 80 percent of our population lives in cities of over 100,000 people), Canada produces few urban novels. We turned a jaundiced eye on Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Unnerved by this contradiction, I began to wonder whose side the pop-culture commentator is on.Īt the host’s prodding, the conversation had turned to the disappearance of place from the Canadian novel: the outpouring of novels set in undefined locales, the peculiar state of Canadian commercial publishing, which allows explicitly Canadian cities and details to grace our historical novels but rarely those set in the present. When issues of corporate control came up, he leapt into line with the CEOs. Yet contrary to what you might expect from a critic with these credentials, Jester was no anti-globalization campaigner. He wrote for a magazine that had once been a bastion of the political left he and I shared the distinction of having attacked the Giller Prize. Jester had been described to me as a pop-culture "scenester," a figure who brought a whiff of the underground to mainstream broadcasts and publications. On a Toronto television show I faced Jester, a commentator of particularly rampant contradictions. The pain-though it was enlightening pain-came from the fact that participating in the discussion were anointed cultural critics. This changed when a book I published landed me on panels with outspoken cultural observers.Īccustomed to book promotion as an exercise in slipping into university radio studios to attempt the impossible by talking about short stories or a novel in a way that might persuade a listener to hunt down a small-press book and buy it, I discovered that the pleasure of promoting a non-fiction book was the directness with which one could speak to an audience about the book’s subject matter. Like most readers, I have scanned the irony-drenched ruminations of these pundits in newspapers and magazines, but until recently, I gave little thought to the contradictions inherent in their position. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution. One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. OL27060350W Page_number_confidence 81.48 Pages 218 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.17 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20220119101017 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 318 Scandate 20220115172717 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9781438987941 Tts_version 4.Recent Canadian novels, for all their no-name pandering to the international market, retain their dominance in Canadian bookstores Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 06:07:09 Associated-names Issartel, Jean Forrest, Nigel Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA40330902 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier
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