The New Poles of Canada

From The Globe and Mail:

Rise of the metropolis suggests two new solitudes: cities - and everywhere else

By ROY MacGREGOR
Thursday, February 27, 2003 - Page A2

Think of it as the New Two Solitudes.

"Absolutely," says Paul Reed. "That's exactly the message we've been trying to get out."

What Reed, a social scientist with Ottawa's Carleton University, and several other academics and statisticians across the country are seeking to do is no less than turn conventional thinking on its ear.

They believe the time has passed for seeing Canada as a French/English split, as Hugh MacLennan originally put it in his landmark Canadian novel Two Solitudes -- or, for that matter, regarding the country as a federal system with a central government in Ottawa and a second layer composed of clearly defined provinces and territories.

( Read more... )

"The Wily American"

From Slate:

The Wily American
A look at the new Graham Greene movie shows how anti-Americanism has changed over the years.
By Katie Roiphe
Posted Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 9:23 AM PT

The film version of The Quiet American opens with the body of an American in a white linen suit bobbing face down in a river. The American is quiet because he is dead. He is dead because he tried to meddle in the politics of a country he barely understood. When the movie was screened soon after Sept. 11, apparently several test audiences responded negatively to this sequence of events, causing Miramax to delay the release of the film by a year, on the grounds that it was anti-American. To many involved in the movie's production, the release may have seemed like bad timing. But it was not the first time that The Quiet American faced this particular accusation.

When the book came out in 1955, American critics rallied against it as if some sort of metaphorical violence were being done to their country. In The New Yorker, A.J. Liebling called the book "a nasty little plastic bomb," claiming that the author "apparently resented passing on the world leadership to the Americans." Newsweek ran an equally vitriolic review, "This Man's Caricature of the American Abroad," denouncing its "dreary stereotyping" and arguing that Greene was still bitter about difficulties he'd had in getting a visa to come to America. Later that year, in the charged political atmosphere of the McCarthy era, the magazine published dark innuendos about the book's appeal to the Kremlin. And when the original movie version came out, in 1958, the producers altered the plot to make it more flattering to Americans—altered it so completely, in fact, that Greene said, "One could almost believe that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and the author."

( Read more... )

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Want money?

From Slate's "Today's Papers":

"As the WP's style section reminds, some greedy music retailers got caught in a price-fixing scheme, and by order of the court are offering a wee bit of cash to anybody who bought a CD between 1995 and 2000. No proof of purchase necessary. Just go to musiccdsettlement.com. The deadline is March 1, and as it stands, claimants—such as TP—will get about 17 bucks each. But the more people that sign up, the lower that'll go. So, shush."

http://musiccdsettlement.com/english/default.ht

[HONOURS] MacLennan's Barometer Rising

Here's the next-to-final draft for the MacLennan segment of my Honours English esaay.

Comments, criticism?

( Remember that I claim full intellectual rights to this essay and any attack against these rights will be treated, eh, badly. )

I liked Linus

Which Peanuts Character Are You Quiz

LJ code

I need a livejournal start-up code for a friend. Does anyone have one I could give?