Over the past week I’ve been attending a number of sessions at the London International Animation Festival. The LIAF has been around since 2003, but this is its first year in the Barbican Centre, where it comes at the tail end of a summer celebrating the art of animation.

July at the Barbican saw a retrospective of Studio Ghibli’s films, which I was shocked to discover never made it to British shores until 2001. Being a kid who remembers precisely two films from his toddlerhood, one being the Cantonese dub of My Neighbour Totoro (the other was The Land Before Time), it continues to astonish me that the childhoods of my peers were Miyazaki-free until Spirited Away. Also running at the Barbican Art Gallery until 11 September is Watch Me Move: The Animation Show, a gallery exhibition spanning 150 years of global animation history that I’ll have to write about another time. My readers in Canada will be happy to note that the exhibition’s next destination is the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where Watch Me Move will run from 8 October through Christmas Eve.

All digressions aside, I really must commend the LIAF’s outstanding curation. In the out-of-competition programmes alone I’ve found some classics I had hitherto missed like the Russian masterwork Hedgehog in the Fog, which grounded a session dedicated to cut-out animation past and present, and discovered some new and instant favourites. Two that stood out for me, both selections from last year’s SIGGRAPH conference: Mobile by Verena Fels, a crowd-pleasing shuffle of animals on wires reminiscent of Pixar’s For the Birds; and The Wonder Hospital by Shimbe (Beomsik Shim), a surreal descent into what I’d best describe as a funhouse of cosmetic surgery.

The piece that I want to draw attention to here, however, is Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries). It was presented as the fulcrum of a session dedicated to the oeuvres of its director, Theodore Ushev, and its subject, the 1960s Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Ushev himself was in attendance as one of the LIAF’s featured guests this year and told the audience of the many coincidences behind his latest project. Here’s one: when Ushev moved from Bulgaria to Montreal, where he has been based since 1999, he stayed in the same building that housed Lipsett for most of his life—until the latter committed suicide in 1986, aged 49.

Now that the National Film Board has digitized most of its treasures, you can see Lipsett’s films for yourself. His breakout work, Very Nice Very Nice, attracted the notice of Stanley Kubrick, who asked him to cut the trailer for Dr Strangelove. (Lipsett declined.) As an aficionado of the history of science and technology and the future as imagined by the past, my personal favourite is A Trip Down Memory Lane. Subtitled as “additional material for a time-capsule”, it features newsreel footage of everything from airships to chemistry experiments to wartime munitions, which were already nostalgic miscellanea in 1964, when the film was made. It’s an early work of retro-futurism, if you will.

As you can tell, Lipsett’s signature style involved the rapid-fire juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, often extracted from other documentary material, and his speciality was sound collage. The effect is one of funnelling our perception of the visuals through contrasting audio, although in truth, Lipsett typically began with the soundtrack first and set the images second. The technique is comparable to what William S Burroughs was doing textually with cut-up books like Nova Express, only Lipsett got there first. (I’m certain Marshall McLuhan must have written about Lipsett—how couldn’t he?—but not having my McLuhan volumes handy I’m not in a position to check.)

Lipsett Diaries is not a biography of its subject, but is closer to a work of historical fiction, diving into the recesses of a mind we only know by the trail of creations it left behind. It incorporates many of Lipsett’s own techniques and splices imagery from his films, although everything is rendered in Ushev’s painstakingly hand-painted frames. In terms of process, Ushev and Lipsett were very well matched. “For me to animate something, I have to hear it first,” Ushev explained at the session’s close. An illustrator and graphic designer by training who came to animation relatively recently, he confessed that he did not have a natural facility for timing, and preferred to assemble his work to the rhythm of existing sounds. “If the text is not recorded,” he said, “I cannot do the film.”

The voice-over narration comes not from Lipsett’s actual diaries, which have never been found, but is a reconstruction of what he might have been thinking as he hurtled through successive phases of his troubled life. It was written by Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and well-known chronicler of Canadian animation history, about whom I’ll have more to say in a moment. First, here’s a brief video where Ushev and Robinson talk about the film in the very corridors of the NFB that Lipsett used to scrape for clippings.

At its heart, Lipsett Diaries stands as an intensely moving effort by one Canadian animator to revive the profile of a once-prominent predecessor who has since fallen into obscurity. If this sentence doesn’t ring a bell, it should. It also describes one of the first films that gripped my attention when I started to take a serious interest in contemporary independent animation: Chris Landreth’s Ryan.

Ryan, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2005, was Landreth’s depiction of his encounter with Ryan Larkin, a former animator who was once of some renown thanks to his film Walking, and who was rediscovered at the turn of the millennium as a panhandler on the streets of Montreal. After Landreth’s film sparked a renewal of interest in Larkin’s work, it looked as though he would recover from his long spell of homelessness and substance abuse and return to animation once more. Sadly, this was not to be: Larkin died in 2007.

At the end of the LIAF screening I asked Theodore Ushev about whether Ryan had any influence on the conception of Lipsett Diaries. There was a very direct connection, he answered. For one thing, Arthur Lipsett and Ryan Larkin were contemporaries and rivals at the NFB of the 1960s—both of them Oscar nominees at the vanguards of experimental forms, both of them turfed in the 1970s. Their acolytes set them in opposition to one other: they would say, for instance, that Larkin was a monster and Lipsett was the true genius. “You were for Lipsett or for Larkin,” said Ushev, referring to their competing legacies.

Even more relevant is the involvement of Chris Robinson. Robinson, after all, was the one who rediscovered Larkin on the tip that a homeless man who claimed to be an animator was panhandling on the Main. It was Robinson who brought Larkin back to the attention of the animation community in a profile he wrote for Animation World Magazine in November 2000, and who ultimately introduced him to Chris Landreth.

Indeed, I recall how the most indelible piece I read about Larkin upon his death was the extremely ambivalent remembrance Robinson penned for The Ottawa Citizen and Cartoon Brew, where he lamented the undue sanctification Larkin received in the wake of Ryan‘s success. An excerpt:

After [OIAF 2000], an animation co-op in Calgary was all set to invite him to get back into animation. But Ryan refused. He said he was worried about losing his welfare cheque. In truth, Ryan was scared that he didn’t have anything to say anymore and frankly, the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he didn’t want to be saved. He’d lived this flaneur existence for so long, he couldn’t turn back. Initially I respected this, but I quickly soured towards him because I could see that he had a routine. He convinced many people before and after me into thinking they could save him when all he really wanted was some smokes, beer and chicken wings.

Ryan returned to Ottawa in 2004 to accompany the screening of Ryan. It would be a homecoming of sorts. I even arranged to have Ryan’s film Walking shown in the cinema (Ryan hadn’t seen the film in 35mm in thirty years). My excitement faded fast though. Ryan had changed. His drinking had reached the point of no return. Ryan needed constant supervision. We kept feeding him with beers and smokes to keep him happy, anything to stop him from flipping out. Of course, by late afternoon, he’d be a mess anyway. As much as I enjoyed watching Ryan piss on the streets in broad daylight, I wanted to grab him and slap some sense into him, tell him to stop being a child and take some responsibility for his life.

It was too late though. The winds of success blew Ryan into mythological status. Young animators made pilgrimages to Montreal to pay tribute to their hero, the flawed genius.

What I didn’t know until I dug up that article again today was that Theodore Ushev drew the accompanying illustration. In fact, prior to Lipsett Diaries, Ushev collaborated with Robinson as an illustrator for his Larkin biography, Ballad of a Thin Man; you can view Ushev’s artwork for the book on his website. To see Ryan as a direct precursor of the Lipsett film was more accurate than I knew.

Two years ago, when the NFB celebrated its 70th birthday, The Walrus published an article questioning the film board’s future vitality. It’s a flawed piece, and another Walrus contributor correctly noted that the NFB remains a pervasive fixture of Canadian culture even if people don’t know it by name, but never mind all that. I wish to attend to one particular passage:

The Memories of Angels, like another recent NFB film, the Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, looks back at NFB history. Memories is a reconfigured collection of shots from films by such masters as Denys Arcand, Arthur Lipsett, Michel Brault, and Claude Jutra. Ryan is an exploration into the work and life of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Larkin, a former wunderkind who was found, a quarter century after his work had essentially stopped, homeless and broken. These films’ success begs an obvious question: is the NFB an institution that has nowhere to go but to look back to the glory days of its golden age?

Not surprisingly, the NFB’s new commissioner, Tom Perlmutter, takes umbrage at the suggestion. Ushering me into his office at the NFB’s Montreal headquarters, he makes the distinction between empty nostalgia and creative renewal. “It’s interesting, to me; that’s precisely the way not to be a slave to the past. Those films are an homage, and they’re both entirely original in their own ways. The editing in The Memories of Angels is amazing—it’s a tribute both to the city and to the history of filmmaking. It’s not simply a recycling, but rather a reimagining of those images.”

Like Perlmutter, I view artistic reflection on the past as a sign not of stagnation, but of maturity. Some of the most pivotal works in any medium are the ones that recapitulate their genre’s history and trace a lineage back to their forebears. Look at Billy Wilder’s resurrection of Gloria Swanson from DeMille’s silent Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard; Maurice Ravel’s post-WWI reconstruction of the Straussian Viennese waltz in La valse; Charles Mingus’s tributes to the big-band orchestration of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in Mingus Ah Um; Cervantes twice over with his grand parody of the Spanish chivalric romance in Don Quixote, which goes on to swallow itself when Part II of the novel makes history out of Part I.

The interwoven network of Canadian animation is well past coincidence, particularly in Montreal’s history-steeped community. Films like Ryan and Lipsett Diaries are not so much acts of reverence as they are cases of artists exploring the uncharted crannies of their own studios. This, I think, is how culture motivates the definition of an identity, a distinctive local stamp. What we may see in retrospect as gestalt movements are, in reality, a scatter of new visions finding their place in the halls of their ancestral inspirations.

I read something dumbfounding today. You could say it was founded on dumb.

On first inspection, John Ibbitson’s article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (“Core support keeps the PM in thrall”) is an ordinary, forgettable opinion piece that uses the recent silliness over the lyrics to the national anthem as a springboard for restating the obvious: the Conservatives can’t win a majority because every time they’re close, the mythical Republican-style rabble-rousers lying in ambush in the tall grass of the Alberta prairie celebrate with a premature volley from their unregistered firearms, and the rest of the country begins to have second thoughts about whether letting them win is a good idea.

Never mind the questionable statistical basis for linking one issue to the other. This isn’t news to anyone who follows Canadian politics in a sound state of mind, nor is Ibbitson’s sensible identification of the Tory core as moderate centrists (however incongruent that may be with partisan caricatures from both the left and right). There’s nothing here to see.

But the way he puts it is bizarre:

The great political irony for the Conservative Party is that, while it must avoid estranging core conservatives at all costs, extreme core conservatives keep the party from winning a majority. They are the social Darwins.

[...]

Most of the time, these right-wing nuts are ignored. But whenever Mr. Harper appears to have enough support to form a majority government, the base starts to get excited and aggressive, and social Darwins “bare their teeth and embrace things that the majority of Canadians don’t want to see,” says Mr. Turcotte. This frightens enough centrists to keep the Liberals in the game and the Conservatives confined to minority governments.

For those of you who are unaware, I am presently writing from what must surely be the Darwin capital of the world. It’s wall-to-wall Darwin here. All year long I have bathed in the most glorious talk of the literary Darwin, the proto-feminist Darwin, the abolitionist Darwin, the invalid Darwin, the patriarchal Darwin, the imperialist Darwin, the epistemological Darwin, the analogical Darwin, the cultural Darwin, the impressionist Darwin, and Quentin Blake’s cartoon Darwin. I am a stone’s throw away from Darwin’s letters, Darwin’s Plots and the Darwin College bar. I’ve seen the poor fellow’s name used and abused in every imaginable way.

I don’t have the foggiest idea what John Ibbitson means by “social Darwins.”

This is an original coinage of his. A Google search for “social Darwins” (excluding suggestions of Darwinism or Darwinist) returns a few scattered results from web forums and other wretched hives of scum and villainy, but the phrase’s appearance in Ibbitson’s article is a media first.

So far as I can tell, it’s a semantically vacuous slur, and obloquy of the laziest kind. It raises the spectre of social Darwinism, that strange appropriation of the legendary naturalist’s name to describe (with frustrating looseness of fit) the fascistic belief that the disadvantaged or inferior should be left behind to die. Now, I’m not convinced the hard-right hooligans who think Stephen Harper is a pandering sellout who doesn’t reverse enough gay abortions in the name of God are necessarily social Darwinists at all, but let’s give Ibbitson the benefit of the doubt. How, exactly, does one get around to calling them Darwins? What magnitude of scientific illiteracy does it take? And what, if I may ask, is being Darwinized here? In what universe, what nonstandard logic, what Wittgensteinian language-game, do these hypothetical bearded chimeras of right-leaning frenzy do anything to guide the selection process that favours the survival of centrist species of government?

I don’t have a horse in this race and I’m not about to foam at the mouth about how The Globe and Mail is a dirty Liberal rag, or whatever they call it these days in the faraway places where The Calgary Herald is regarded as a reputable newspaper. But anyone who accuses Ibbitson of meaningless mudslinging is, in this case, absolutely on point. It is a sophomoric writer who presumes to toss a name like Darwin into the fray and expects the readership to take it as an inherently bad word. This is exactly what many on the right do with the word “liberal” and what some on the left do when they refer to the Tories as “the Cons”—and it’s a pollution of political discourse.

Only here, it’s worse: it promotes a misconception of evolutionary thought, which is already so ill understood to the detriment of science in the public eye. One wonders if Darwin had journalists in mind when he wrote of the descent of man.

Time will tell what I remember of the Vancouver Winter Olympics decades from now: not much in the way of specifics, I expect, but a lingering oddness of having missed the biggest national celebration in my country’s recent history on account of being overseas. On face it was an Olympics like any other: foreign, inconveniently scheduled, and mediated by coverage that was indifferent at best and infamously vicious at worst.

I watched that hockey game, of course, and could only have been happier with the Crosby goal if my hometown messiah Jarome Iginla got in on the play—oh wait, he did—but the BBC cut away before the medals were awarded, and I missed almost the entirety of the rest of the games. (CTV had online video feeds but insisted that I install Silverlight—a bizarre choice of technological affiliation on their part, almost as baffling as if they had decided to license exclusive content to a dead-in-the-water device like the Zune. I mean, Silverlight? Who in their web content team thought that was a good idea, and when will they vacate their jobs? I am available for an interview and will supply references upon request.)

Several of my compatriots took to the keyboards, composing paeans to the full bloom of maples metaphorical, declaring the fortnight as a whole (but the men’s gold medal hockey game in particular) a milestone of national pride for a country where the very idea of identity is a bit of a running joke. The statistics back this up: in an age where popular media has splintered and television has declined as a central force, to be the most-watched broadcast in Canadian history is no small feat. To say this will remain a defining moment in the country’s perpetual quest to come to terms with itself is to make a self-fulfilling prophecy: over two-thirds of active Canadian history textbook authors are likely to have watched the game (and probably more, if we suppose this demographic to be of a more patriotic bent than the mean). Comparisons to the Paul Henderson goal of 1972 can hardly avoid cementing themselves as fair, only this time we have victories in thirteen other competitions and a global audience in the mix.

The sheer neatness of the narrative should have us scratching our heads and running background checks on the referees to uncover scandalous past careers as European ice-dancing judges. Come to think of it, I should have known we were in for a Canadafest of unprecedented proportions when I caught the last half-hour of the opening ceremonies, at approximately the mark where the ever-undercapitalized k.d. lang broke the standing moratorium on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.

And yet it is striking to think how little of Canada as we know it now, how few of our quaint clichés of public exhibition, were around for the Calgary Olympics in 1988. The ink hadn’t dried on the Constitution Act, national unity was far from a given, and we hadn’t even reached the point where Céline Dion was considered a good idea, let alone a bad one.

This I do know about the Calgary Olympics: it created the entire sporting infrastructure of the city as I knew it growing up and as we continue to know it today. For citizens of my generation to imagine a Calgary before the Olympics is borderline impossible, and the spirit it injected into the civic culture, all too easy to take for granted in the ahistorical mist of youth, was in retrospect a full-fledged metamorphosis. For all the objections to the Vancouver games and uncertainties over whether it was money well spent, the legacy of its spillover benefits will course through the city for decades to come.

There is value in being world-class. It doesn’t matter if you contrive to suspend Parliament for months to secure yourself a once-in-a-lifetime seat next to Wayne Gretzky or celebrate in your ivory tower over a bottle of ink and a sheaf of parchment addressed to a newspaper that likes you; you can appreciate it all the same—yes, even if you’re in the UK.

But let’s begin with some links. I read up on much of what I missed via this article by Paul Wells, who saw the opening from inside GM Place. Jonathon Narvey and Adrian MacNair made photographic excursions to capture the early protests, which they described as scattered in a plurality of marginally coherent agendas; that was before things turned violent. For an alternative look at the political counter-programming, my friend and former schoolmate Meera Bai visited the Poverty Olympics in the Downtown Eastside. The political dimension of the Olympics doesn’t interest me all that much, to be honest, but the stories and pictures are flavourful.

I have a lumbering giant of a feature article in the works that will hopefully see the light of day soon. Until then, content yourself with some further reading:

• Kevin Brown of Geographicus wrote a comprehensive introduction to authenticating rare and antique maps—a must-read for the cartographically inclined.

• And while on the subject of maps, Google incorporated aerial images from World War II into Google Earth.

• Roger Ebert took a mental walk around London. Like most of the personal recollections Mr Ebert has put in writing of late, it’s a beautiful piece—and near the end he comes by my present stomping grounds in Cambridge and Grantchester.

• Terrence Deacon raises some problems with the theory that language is a product of natural selection.

• When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of Israel, he considered Albert Einstein for President. Einstein declined.

Were this a political blog, I would have little to add to the obvious analysis that every national publication promptly shoved out the door. Nobody knows what to do with this, yet everybody knows what to do with this because there isn’t that much to debate. Say, wasn’t that rather good? Aren’t the lyrics ironic in light of Conservative policy? Didn’t the Prime Minister previously criticize this sort of arts gala as too removed from public concern? Is this a gift-horse for the artsy-fartsy elites or a populist slap in the face? And isn’t Michael Ignatieff ever in trouble when all he has to his name is a tour of duty as a BBC culture personality in the 1980s (which carries a lot of weight with me, as you can probably guess)? Colour me bored. The one refreshing piece of journalism in all this is this human-interest story in The Globe and Mail about how Laureen Harper arranged the gig—and I call it refreshing not least because it’s, you know, The Globe and Mail.

We can ask ourselves if this was an “honest” move or a shrewd grab for political advantage (as if the two were mutually exclusive!) until we are blue in the face. But this is not a political blog, and what Mr Harper’s performance says about politics is a good deal less interesting to me than what it says about music.

I have little reason to doubt that Harper selected “With a Little Help from My Friends” for relatively pedestrian reasons: because he liked it, it was within his ability, and people would recognize it. Nevertheless, it behooves us to recognize that his performance is emblematic of a particular vision of the arts. It is not a Conservative vision, although it may well be a conservative one. It is a vision of the arts as directed towards the final purpose of entertaining us, making us happy, and leaving it at that; as a need that we meet when all other needs are met. It is the doctrine, peculiar to the stable middle class, that the arts are something we teach our kids and do at home when we need to cool off from our day jobs. It is the modern distillation of the young lady in the Victorian parlour who dabbles in the pianoforte because that is what ladies do.

Let me be very clear that I do not find this vision all that objectionable—merely a tad myopic. It is a good thing that musical and artistic literacy is abundant in our schools, homes, and communities. It is a very good thing that we have a Prime Minister who is competent in a musical instrument. I came out of the RCM examination system myself, and toward it I bear no ill will. But I wish to make the point that Harper’s surprise performance at the National Arts Centre gala says very little about the place of the arts in this country to those who are concerned about it. It invokes a wholly different conception of what the arts are about.

A suitable comparison is to the state of football, or soccer, in Canada and the United States—the two developed countries where professional football is so conspicuously absent that foreign visitors are right to wonder if they are still on the planet Earth. In North America, football is a widespread institution of child development, but there is no professional culture for the talent to develop and grow. I grew up in the same city as Owen Hargreaves; I would know.

In both cases, music and football, there is widespread public engagement with the activity as recreation, but little public support for mastery and deep exploration. And that is the danger of the vision of the arts as an epiphenomenon that we only keep around for fun—as something that it is nice to have, but not in the first instance essential to our way of life. It risks stagnation. It drives us to cover and copy while delivering little new to imitate and offering few incentives to study the classics in depth.

I, for one, do not believe the end-state of the arts is merely to please and entertain. Neither, I suspect, would anyone else who takes the craft of ideas seriously. My appraisal, boldly stated, is this: the arts are a decentralized research programme into the workings of the human mind—of human beings as both creator and audience. Our creative activity, the order we assemble from chaos, gives us invaluable insight into how we think and who we are.

(Here I have to pay lip service to a third competing vision of the arts: that they have a duty to be socially, politically, or culturally subversive and are therefore by nature left-wing. I believe this to be a very limited vision, destructive to the diversity of our creative output, that came into being in the twentieth century as right-wing policies hostile to the more-than-recreational arts shoved them into an ideological pigeonhole. Looking at the past few decades, it is remarkable how little democratic regimes have produced in the way of monumental, statist art.)

In all fairness, we should acknowledge that Harper’s performance, no matter his policies or his sense of pitch, was hardly antithetical to the conception of the arts as something more than that which makes us smile. And the reason for this was less the act of sharing a stage with Yo-Yo Ma than it was his selection of music. He could hardly have made a more perfect choice, given the longstanding credibility of the Beatles as serious (if not classically refined) musicians who earned their global popularity with memorable contributions to melody, harmony, rhythm, production, and the structure of popular song.

And to further confuse the matter, let us not forget that “With a Little Help from My Friends” hails from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—an album organized around the concept of four accomplished professionals putting on the costume of an amateur band. What, exactly, is Mr Harper putting on? Us, perhaps? Beats me, but at least he’s having fun.

In brief: The text of Ignatieff’s appearance in CBC Radio’s Massey Lectures series makes for an effective plainspoken introduction to the complex balance of rights in modern liberal democracies. What remains to be seen is whether the positive vision of Canadian-style governance, founded on civic notions of identity rather than ethnic ones, has a realistic chance of spreading to the societies that need it most.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Rights Revolution, keep reading below.)

Before I get started: yes, I’m aware this post comes a few days behind schedule and that if I keep this up, I’m going to have to drop the “Wednesday” from the Book Club. Rest assured that the weekly reading project will continue in 2009 for as long as I can sustain it, though it is not immune to interruption.

The Rights Revolution is a series of five radio lectures edited into book form, delivered in 2000 when Michael Ignatieff was a Harvard professor (with all the pre-9/11 optimism that entails). As is characteristic of the Massey Lectures, it is unambiguously directed at the general Canadian public; much of what Ignatieff discusses should not be news to anybody with a college-level understanding of political theory, though here it is condensed into a refreshingly lucid and jargon-free package. Here’s a sample of the questions he tackles:

• In a democratic society, where does the protection of minorities from the tyranny of the majority end, and the tyranny of the minority begin?
• If rights are universal to all human beings, how do we square that with the recognition of human uniqueness?
• How do we balance the individual right to dissent from a group with the necessity of collective rights to protect groups of individuals?
• Is the increasing legal deference to individual rights leading to the poisoning and dissolution of stable social structures like the family?
• Does the recognition of rights claims present a threat to national unity, or a boon?

While I remain committed to the political neutrality of this journal—this is a literary review, you see, and it has always been my opinion that books and ideas invariably outlast governments—it would be disingenuous to brush aside the reality that Michael Ignatieff is currently in a position to potentially become our next Prime Minister, a fact that presently colours any reading of anything he has ever written. Indeed, if you really want to get a measure of a politician, it is always advisable to look at what he produced prior to the opening of his political aspirations and the accompanying campaign doublespeak.

All the same, The Rights Revolution has been on my reading list since before Ignatieff entered politics, and my intention in reading it was never to gauge him as a statesman. So all I will say on the matter is this: regardless of what you think of Ignatieff or the party he leads, don’t swallow the line that his opponents on all wings will inevitably trot out about his inexperience as a Canadian resident. He knows this country and he knows it well.

Indeed, the first real surprise to come out of the book is Ignatieff’s elucidation of how Canada looks from the outside: as a unique hotbed of what he calls “rights talk” and a leading exporter of rights-based discourse to the rest of the modern world. Our insecurity as a country often compels us to receive any talk of Canadian global leadership with a healthy scepticism—deep inside, we can’t help but feel that this is just a young whippersnapper of a patchwork state, and that we all live in the sticks—but Ignatieff has a point: the legal, institutional recognition of competing rights claims in this country is exceptional in its degree.

When Ignatieff speaks of Canada as a progressive country (as he does repeatedly), one gets the sense that he does so not to exclude conservatives as un-Canadian, but to recognize that whatever our opinions are on the legitimacy of certain rights versus others, or the role of the state in protecting them, what is common to all Canadians is our habit of speaking in terms of rights at all. Political culture isn’t an ideological monolith, but a discursive one.

This encouraging appraisal of national identity—based on the nature of Canadian citizenship rather than any shared essential traits—recurs throughout The Rights Revolution, making the strongest impression in the final chapter, which evaluates how “rights talk” fits into the context of national unity. Here, one sees the seeds of Ignatieff’s involvement in the Harper government’s recognition of the Québécois as a nation. Ignatieff envisions the rights-based state, which Canada has already become, as a successor to the very concept of the nation-state: civic culture, not ethnicity, is his ideal basis of government.

Under this schema, the recognition of the Québécois nation is part and parcel with the legitimacy of all minority groups that rely on collective protections of entities like language, be it immigrants or First Nations. Separatism, to the contrary, is founded on the antithetical model of regarding ethnocultural homogeneity as the basis of statehood. While it is facile to reduce the reception of any political text to a statement of “I agree” or “I disagree”… I agree.

Ethnic nation-states have historically had their own legitimate reasons for coming into being, often as a result of an ethnic community casting off a government in which it was disenfranchised, but a monolithic vision of society based on naïve myths of common origin is destructive, exclusivist, and ultimately outmoded. Ideally, the Canadian vision of what Ignatieff calls “civic nationalism” should permeate the globalizing world, and individuals should be free to pursue whatever personal culture they like—which, as Ignatieff explains, may involve participating in a collective lobby for cultural protections.

In practice, it is difficult to see how Ignatieff’s ideal of multicultural coexistence as a natural outgrowth of “rights talk” will find any traction whatsoever in states that are, in reality, overwhelmingly homogeneous. As Ignatieff argues himself, Canada’s predilection to rights-based discourse was the product of a very specific chain of historical circumstances. The foundation of a country should have little say in its present governance insofar as its former ethnocultural composition is concerned, but it also has an indelible legacy in either permitting or curtailing the legal respect for pluralism in all three classes of relations—individual-to-individual, individual-to-group, and group-to-group. Without that history, and without its accompanying domestic legacy, it is hard to see how states with little to no tradition of cultural pluralism or individual liberty will ever arrive at the same ideal of governance.

Be that as it may, The Rights Revolution is an effective and balanced guide to conflicts of rights as they occur in the domestic theatre. Ignatieff concedes that the enfranchisement of individual claimants has created a fair share of ruptures in structures of power at all levels, while emphasizing that rights are not themselves the cause of the trouble: rather, rights exist to give a voice to unrecognized troubles that are going to explode sooner or later anyway, and provide us with a framework for arbitrating the whole sorry mess. There is nothing uniquely liberal about this idea except in the small-L, classical sense that also gave us democracy; and although rights and democracy may not always go hand in hand, there is a certain elegance in how one provides for the other.

I am typically very strict about preserving this journal as a non-political space, but the events on Parliament Hill are too exciting to pass up. Furthermore, it is my position that everyone involved needs a swift non-partisan kick in the head, and I am more than happy to deliver it.

At this precise moment in history, I am reminded of the scene at the end of Lawrence of Arabia where the Arabs run the Turks out of Damascus and promptly descend into inter-tribal squabbling over basic matters of infrastructure. I am also told that Lawrence of Arabia is Stéphane Dion’s favourite film. If that is so, I’m not sure he was paying attention.

There is no question that the coalition-in-waiting—or, as some have come to call it, the New Libs on the Bloc—has the constitutional and democratic footing to oust the Tory government on a confidence vote. Coalitions are a feature, not a bug, in the parliamentary tradition; in fact, I prefer stable coalitions to outright party mergers.

The legitimacy of the agreement does not mean the move to topple the government is anything but an ill-timed, moronic, and utterly shameless manoeuvre. At least wait for the budget, you dummies. When the electorate has chosen, within the last month and a half, to place their trust in the perceived party of patient fiscal prudence by granting them a stronger plurality (if not a majority) of seats in the Commons, forming an emergency coalition on the basis of unknown hair-trigger stimuli that will no doubt involve concessions to the socialists is not my idea of stable governance.

Irrespective of Gilles Duceppe’s signature on the agreement, the Governor General is within her rights, not to mention her faculties of reasoned thought, to take this to the electorate rather than green-light the coalition. We are looking at a prospective Liberal-NDP government that does not have a plurality in the House, the stability of which rests on the approval of the Bloc Québécois. We are looking at yet another minority serving as a de facto majority on the strength of a non-governing separatist party’s endorsement, only this time it comes signed and sealed. We are looking at a 114-seat government with a 143-seat Official Opposition. The optics are horrendous.

The right move at this juncture is to call an election with the coalition agreement on the table for everyone to see, and make it a referendum on both the proposed coalition and the Tories’ post-election tactics—the political party subsidy, the NDP conference call tape, the works. Sadly, not happening.

Assuming that neither an election nor a prorogue occurs and the coalition takes power, which is shaping up to be the likely scenario, the right move for one or all of Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Dominic LeBlanc is to promise an election call as part of their respective leadership bids. Their fates, and that of the Liberal Party, will ride on whether they manage to facilitate a dramatic economic recovery. The sooner they can be rid of the NDP and the Bloc, the better. Sadly, not happening.

The wrong move, for the Tories, is to dump Stephen Harper without prior pause for thought. Given how much they spent in the last campaign on massaging his middle-class image, he’s in the best position to ride the popular backlash should the economy implode on the coalition’s watch. Sadly, not happening.

On second thought, let’s wait until Peter MacKay goes head-to-head with Michael Ignatieff, the NDP and the Bloc fade into the background like they should, and we can put the inmates back in the asylum and forget this ever happened. Can I dream—or is it written?

In brief: The second novel in the Deptford Trilogy never quite attains the the ambitious moral order and dramatic unity of its sublime predecessor, but it doesn’t need to, as it is a very different book tailor-made for a very different narrator. The story on the surface (a rationalist lawyer exorcises his personal demons with the aid of Jungian psychiatry) is not by itself earth-shattering. Where Davies’ genius shows its hand is in his depth of vision and talent for expository voice, best displayed when the book interlaces its characters and events with those of the previous volume. The Manticore stands independently, but with diminished elegance; I recommend it as essential reading for anyone who loved Fifth Business, which should or will be all of you.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Manticore, keep reading below.)

Dominion Day brought to mind the problem of the Great Canadian Novel; that is, if such a beast exists. For decades now, various circles of literary criticism have talked about the Great Canadian Novel as if it were a sasquatch—non-existent, frequently confused with actual wonders that fall just short of national mythopoesis, and hypothetically enjoyed over a pilfered can of Kokanee lager.

Some have gone so far as to call its existence an ontological impossibility. As I see it, this is symptom of the postmodern refusal to label anything the Great X-ian Y, but the arguments have some merit. The dominant complaint used to be the Argument from Our Inescapable Provincialism; nowadays, it is the Argument from Our Paradoxically Essential Multiculturalism. I attribute both lines of reasoning to an underlying anxiety that Canada has no shared history. To be more precise: we have a history, but people don’t like to share it.

According to my learned opinion, the matter of the Great Canadian Novel was settled in 1970. It’s by Robertson Davies and it’s called Fifth Business. If you haven’t read it, you must.

The Manticore is the sequel. Its narrator, David Staunton, is a minor character in Fifth Business who only appears to us peripherally as a child, and later, “a lawyer and a drunk,” in the first novel’s action. In The Manticore, we find out just how lawyer-like he is, and how drunk.

As I re-read Fifth Business beforehand, the ironies that reveal themselves in connection with the first book were especially visible to me. The biggest problem with sequels and derivative works of any sort is their tendency to fill in gaps that are best left open to interpretation, but Davies’ command of voice and perspective claims this pitfall as an asset, and that is when the novel is at its best.

There are moments in The Manticore that develop familiar characters entirely by implication. The information we glean from David’s tale is never just an exercise of filling in the blanks; some of the things we discover feel like they were hitherto unconsciously glossed over by the first book’s narrator, Dunstan Ramsay. We get a child’s-eye-view of some of the pivotal events in Fifth Business (insofar as the middle-aged David recalls his own childhood under psychiatric examination), and the added elements feel like they weren’t merely details the author hadn’t figured out at the time. They were organic events and behaviours that never struck Ramsay as relevant to his purpose as a storyteller, even if he knew about them. For one thing, he paid little to no mind to the Staunton children and the family’s servant, Netty Quelch (never named and barely mentioned in Ramsay’s memoir); the more we hear from David, the stronger our awareness of the first book’s implicit upstairs-downstairs myopia becomes.

It works both ways: what we already know from Ramsay’s story colours our impression of David’s narrative, revealing its limitations. Previously, I had thought of Fifth Business as a fiercely independent book with a marvelous sense of dramatic closure, but after reading The Manticore, there is a symbiosis between the two volumes that I cannot ignore. No doubt I’ll have even more to say on the matter once I read the third Deptford novel, World of Wonders.

One scene sticks out for me in this regard. I will not divulge all of the details here, to avoid spoiling too much.

It is one of David’s recollections from adolescence, wherein his sister Caroline makes two bold accusations based on a spot of deduction after a conversation with Netty. In the manner of the Harry Potter trio, Caroline imagines that the adults in her life are scandalous in the most romantic ways, and leaps to conclusions that are logical, entirely plausible, and almost certainly wrong.

The first claim is that David’s parentage is in doubt. We know, from the first book, that this isn’t the case… or do we? One of the guiding motifs of Fifth Business, explored further here, is how individuals rewrite their own histories without knowing it; Ramsay’s confessed unreliability as a narrator allows us to entertain a shadow of a suspicion. By the end of The Manticore, we are assured that the truth is what we thought it was all along.

We are given no such assurances vis-à-vis the veracity of Caroline’s second deduction, which involves a domestic murder identical to the one in Double Indemnity, curtains and all. The one in Double Indemnity is also related by an adolescent who suspects there is a lot more to grown-ups than meets the eye, and we are meant to believe that she is right. Caroline’s second theory is easy for the reader to discredit in conjunction with the first, but who knows? Sometimes, the boy really does cry wolf.

My point here is that the novel’s interplay of truth and misunderstanding is at the height of its powers when Davies weaves it in and out of a universe that he has already shown us through another character’s eyes.

As a consequence, I would shy from recommending The Manticore as a book to be read independently, though it is a distinct novel with its own sense of structure. I like to think of it as the second movement of a classical sonata, a meditative companion to the intricate thematic development and recapitulation of the allegro before it. (The more I dwell on the analogy, the better it fits. Note to self: explore this for potential publication.)

The frame story, presented as David’s notes on his Jungian psychiatric treatment and later, his diary, is a straightforward debate of ideologies that befits the self-doubting lawyer as well as the total moral closure of Fifth Business suits the hagiographer Ramsay. It is the usual confrontation between the rational docket of police-court evidence and the romantic conceptualization of life as dream and myth—nothing special, but made better in the telling.

Robertson Davies dips into an exquisite bag of storytelling tricks, and the biggest trick of all is the self-awareness of his characters. There is a fine distinction between Davies’ brand of self-awareness and the worn-out metafictional device of having the characters in a book realize that they have no existence off the printed page, which few authors ever get away with cleanly (the jury is still out on Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World). Metafiction works better as a logic game, like the Preludes in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, than in it does in the form of a novel.

Where the Deptford novels are concerned, the self-awareness I speak of is more like the second book of Don Quixote, where the characters think of life itself as one big drama, and are all too willing to fit snugly in their parts. It’s an easy conceit to swallow, because the implication is that we, the readers, also think of life as one big drama, with the usual Jungian procession of good fathers and bad fathers and all the caves, whale bellies and threshold guardians in between. We’ve heard it all before in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, better known to today’s audiences as Star Wars.

It’s fascinating to think about the universalizing nature of archetypes in the context of the Great Canadian Novel’s questionable existence. Consider Davies’ own statements in The New York Times:

Did he detect any new theme breaking through in the Canadian novel?

“I don’t see one,” he said. “Of course, every author pursues his or her own theme in fiction. Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler – they all go their own way. There’s no central theme in the Canadian novel because there is no unifying Canadian problem.”

I’d say that the unifying Canadian problem is a product of its own non-existence: the much-belaboured problem of identity. Canadians are so divergent that whatever it is they share must reside at the heart of what it means to be human. Small wonder, then, that Davies capitalizes on Carl Jung and presents the world as a theatre of archetypes. Or, in his words (from the same article):

Did his own novels have a central theme?

“I do have one,” Mr. Davies said, “but I hesitate to mention it because it’s so ordinary: the growth of a life, of a spirit, from innocence to experience. But isn’t that the theme of every serious novel?” He paused. “I have a favorite motto that I sometimes inscribe for friends in Celtic. It goes: ‘A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.’”

What isn’t so clear is why the human habit of abstracting lived experience as myth is so at odds with a rational worldview, which is presented as something antithetical to dreams, and an affliction of which David Staunton has to be cured (and even then, I am unconvinced that a psychiatric bloodletting does the trick). Herein lies the major issue I have with The Manticore: Davies’ conception of the legal, reasoning mind, and its discovery of the inner spirit, is founded on a number of naïve prejudices in the humanities that don’t stand up to careful scrutiny.

As the Feynmans, Sagans, and Nicholas Tams of the world have been shouting for ages, the rational imagination has plenty of room for myth and wonder. At risk of going off on a tangent, I would argue that one of the main reasons to be sceptical of institutions like organized religion is humanity’s thoroughly documented reputation as a species of inveterate storytellers. The intelligence that gives us everything from theorems to legal defences—knowledge representation, pattern recognition—resides in the same location as the right-brain spark that moulds the world into our personal visions.

The real difference is between objective and consensual models of reality; it has little to do with how we get there. Crucially, one’s spiritual/psychological reality can never be objective—and if The Manticore is any indication, Davies is aware of this. We all cast the life-drama’s roles differently: even the ones privy to the facts or responsible for the cryptic answer that closes Fifth Business (“the woman he knew, the woman he didn’t know,” and so on) can’t agree on who’s who. So much for authorial intention—and all the better for the reader’s interpretive freedom.

This is the first time in several years that I’ve not posted here for the entire span of a month, but I assure you that I had an unfinished post from two weeks ago about Pixar’s latest sitting around, which I abandoned in part because it was hopelessly redundant. It went like this:

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, I cancelled all of my plans and zipped off to see Ratatouille as soon as I found out it was playing last night, two weeks ahead of its general release. By now everybody is familiar with the way I gush over every new Pixar film, so I’ll confirm that it’s just about perfect, declare my intention to revisit it several times when it opens, and marvel at how Pixar is a perfect eight for eight and is now indisputably the greatest feature film studio of all time. You know the routine.

… followed by a potpourri of trivial observations that I’ve decided to save until I’ve seen the film a few more times. (For example: was that Chinese take-out box in Linguini’s refrigerator the same model as the magician’s cabinet in A Bug’s Life? And where, if anywhere, is the elusive A113?) More on all this later – and if time permits, a few words about Brad Bird and the American Dream: a post-scriptum to what I wrote about The Incredibles, after a fashion.

Time will probably not permit. I have a lot of Harry Potter to get through. Again.

And now, back to the British Empire (as most things should be).

It’s my country’s special day, of course (musical recommendations: Kenny Barron’s rendition of “Canadian Sunset” on the album Live at Bradley’s, and as always, the entirety of Oscar Peterson’s Canadiana Suite), but that’s not the only special occasion involving the progeny of the Union Jack.

I don’t look favourably upon celebrity culture, so even as a loyalist I’ve never understood the extent of all the fuss over Princess Diana, but I do have to make a special mention of a moment buried in the sea of washed-up pop icons at her Wembley Stadium memorial. It involved Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you can see a segment of it here starring Sarah “I was singing this role before Emmy Rossum was toilet-trained” Brightman and Josh “I’m way too talented for the music I’m given, but Nick’s mother stalks me anyway” Groban.

The other event associated with this particular 1 July was the tenth anniversary of Britain’s loss of the colony of Hong Kong. On the upside, the Hong Kong SAR has managed to retain its autonomy in relative peace for a whole decade. At the same time, that only leaves forty years for the PRC to fall (the sooner, the better) lest the whole operation go to pot. It remains my learned opinion that the PRC basically extorted the place from the British crown by taking advantage of a post-Falklands moment of weakness. And before any of the vehemently anti-colonial types interject, let me point out that there’s a world of difference between a) decolonization in the name of self-determination and b) a transfer of sovereignty to a communist regime that we already knew couldn’t be trusted.

As I was pointing out not long ago to my comrade-in-arms Kyle Kawanami, the British government should have given Deng Xiaoping the finger and fulfilled its contractual obligation to the letter by handing the New Territories over to Taiwan.

Aside from an obligatory tea party, a double waffle cone of peanut butter and chocolate and discovering that first-printing hardcovers of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are still on shelves with the Priori Incantatem continuity goof on page 579 intact, there wasn’t so much to celebrate today up here in the land of absent hockey, misty giants and wacky marriage legislation about which some people out there apparently harbour opinions.

We had our party of patriots three days ago, when I chanced upon a free public performance by a fantastic a cappella quartet on Banff Avenue right across the street from the Grizzly House, capitol of the carnivorous connoisseur. They caught my attention with “Use the Force”, a complete retelling of the original Star Wars featuring mock lightsabre duels onstage and Darth Vader breathing, and held it until after their set when I walked out with two of their albums and autographs to boot.

The ensemble was none other than the Heebee-Jeebees, a Calgarian foursome I first heard of years ago (thanks to their accomplishment of concocting the world’s most boring song, appropriately entitled “The Boring Song”) but never had the pleasure to see in person. It turns out they hit Banff every Canada Day, when admission to the National Park comes at no cost, and I highly recommend seeing them. They also perform at the Stampede in a week’s time, for those of you spending the summer in Alberta’s better city.

This was also when I discovered that their bass singer, who has a remarkable talent for reaching depths lower than das boot in Das Boot, is none other than former Rose Bowl-winning clarinetist Cedric Blary, who was first known to me (although we did not meet per se) over a decade ago as we shared a composition instructor at Mount Royal College back when I hadn’t moved beyond scribbling fat major triads in basic triple time, and I saw him perform his own piece in a student recital. This was years before I started playing the clarinet myself, but it was an important stepping stone in verifying that it was indeed what I intended to pursue as a second instrument. Last I heard, Mr. Blary had taken up the position of being the clarinet clinician at this staple of local musical education.

Somewhere in all this is a segue to a point about the value of celebrating a national holiday, but I am going to forgo a seamless transition in favour of what the calculus-literate refer to as a jump discontinuity.

I’m going to do something unorthodox here and, in an obliquely politico-avoidant manner, reply to what Steve Smith wrote in his entry dated 1 July and the comment box therein.

Mr. Smith has a proven record of thinking national pride is silly, so it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t give a Carlos’ jackass about feeling all whoop-dee-doo when it comes to observing the birthday of the political entity to which he may or may not pay his taxes. He then proceeds to draw the salient distinction between nations and states, the timeworn semantic trademark of those with at least a freshman’s understanding of political theory who respectfully don’t want anything to do with those without the same.

I would contend that Canada’s history of not being and never having been a Westphalian nation-state is precisely why among its class of holidays, Canada Day is something unique and worth applauding.

Over the past few decades, Canada has retooled itself as a most admirable experiment in permitting the divorce of cultural identity from ethnic origin, and encouraging the severance of political allegiance from both. In this sense, separatist movements in both Quebec and to a lesser extent Alberta are a reaction to this project, not a progression.

We’re too good for homogeneous cultural isolation walled behind the borders on a map. While national self-determination is a stabilizing destination in the pre-national world, Canada is a post-national country, and that’s where the state is relevant to its citizens on an individual level. The fact that it has survived this way for yet another year is worth a cheer and a beer.