[TOR] "The City Rediscovered"

Thank Shawn Micallef at Spacing.ca for linking to Margaret Atwood's "The City Rediscovered", a 1982 travelogue that she wrote for The New York Times on her home city.

When I was growing up in Toronto as a child, in the 1940's, I loathed it. I associated it with standing in the slush with dampness seeping through my boots, itchy bloomers, gray muggy skies, old ladies who hit your knuckles with the metal edge of the ruler if you didn't know the words to ''Rule, Britannia.'' Later, when I was in high school, I liked Toronto a little better, though not much. There did not seem to be a great deal to do, apart from sock hops, smoking in the washrooms and avoiding the appearance of being too interested in frog dissection. As for university, it produces angst in the best of us, and I was probably wrong to attribute mine specially to Toronto. Nevertheless, I did.

As I aged, I was pleased to discover that I was not the only person who found Toronto loathsome. Almost everyone else did too. Montreal was where international flavor, international finance and naughtiness (which meant, to Torontonians, wine with dinner) reigned supreme. New York was where the truly sophisticated hung out, and Buffalo was where you went if you couldn't afford the other two. Toronto was ... well, Toronto was where you lived when you weren't having fun. The notion of anyone actually visiting Toronto, for any purpose other than to attend the sickbed of a moribund relative, was alien to me. I set my first published novel in Toronto (where else was I to set it?) but was so embarassed by the location that I never actually named the city and disguised the street names as best I could. Everyone knew that real novels were not set in Toronto.

Toronto has a long history of being loathed. When it was York, as it was known until 1834, it was ''muddy York,'' with good reason. Anna Jameson, an intrepid Englishwoman who breezed through in 1836, called it ''a fourth- or fifth-rate provincial city,'' and went on at some length about the inhabitants' pretentiousness, meanness of spirit, self-righteousness, smugness and general lack of charm - sentiments you could gather today from any Vancouverite or Calgarian at the drop of a name. Dickens sneered at it; almost a century later, Wyndham Lewis, who got stuck in it during World War II, was still sneering at it. In the 1950's it was known as ''Toronto the Good,'' not flatteringly. On Sundays, in tribute to the sentiments of its still-prominent Methodists, it was closed up tighter than an uppermiddle class matron's mouth after she'd just said, ''If you can't say anything good, don't say anything at all.''

[. . .]

In 1961, I shook the clay of Toronto from my feet, forever I thought, and except for a few interludes that were even more emotionally grotesque than fourth grade, I did not return for 10 years. In the interval, strange things happened, and not only to me. By the time I moved back, a decision that had everything to do with money, Toronto had changed. People were actually admitting that they lived there.

As the poster and commenters at Spacing.ca note, in addition to its noted literary merit and wonderful grim humour Atwood's overview of New Wave-era Toronto is worth reading for its take on a Toronto gone twenty-five years.

[BRIEF NOTE] Watchmen

This morning I saw two people reading Watchmen, one a blonde in her 20s with a white blouse and and a tight black skirt who got on at Bathurst station, the other a slowly balding guy in his 30s wearing an orange nylon jacket with a Reebok sidebag who I noticed at Davisville.

Mass popularity for a graphic novel is good, right, particularly when you're in the process of filming its upcoming movie adaptation? Here's to hoping that Watchmen is as completely awesome as V for Vendetta.

[AH] Tchobanian and Gonzalez, Armenia: From Soviet Republic to Independence

Apologies for the lack of alternate-historical content last week, but catching a Toronto performance of Avenue Q with Jerry easily took priority.

One note: I came up with the idea for this one several weeks before the recent South Caucasus war.

* * *

Nathan L. Tchobanian and Samuel Gonzalez. Armenia: From Soviet Republic to Independence. Harvard University Presses: Boston, 2008.

Tchobanian and Gonzalez's tome is one of the latest book-length academic histories of modern Armenia and to my mind one of the most compelling ones written since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's not easy, given the politicization of historical--never mind contemporary--studies in the South Caucasus and the northern tier of the Middle East, but it does seems to hold together.

The authors begin with a portrait of Armenia as it existed after its 1940 annexation by the Soviet Union. Together with the Balts and of course the Poles, the Armenians were the only secessionist group on the periphery of the Russian Empire to successfully establish their own national states. That success in itself was a major achievement highly contingent on historical circumstances: If Turkey had somehow avoided its collapse in 1919 and eventual reformation as a British proxy shorn of Thrace and its other peripheries, the post-genocide Armenians--themselves benefitting from British support would have been hard-pressed to survive. That said, Armenia's two decades of independence were marked by squabbling of all kinds, from the low-level warfare that accompanied the consolidation of the Armenian nation-state within the contested Sèvres frontiers to the constant fear of Soviet annexation. When it did come, unnoticed in 1940 between the far more momentous events, the authros do court some controversy when they suggest that the Armenians welcomed annexation as the only possible way to avert the German-allied Turkish state's revanchism. The eventual settlement of course saw the reverse happening, with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic serving as the forward base for Turkey's forcible communization. If nothing else, the Armenians did get off lightly compared to the Estonians and Lithuanians in terms of the numbers of Stalinist dead.

Tchobanian, an economic historian, presumably wrote the bulk of the fascinating Chapter 5, which outlines Armenia's economic development under Soviet rule. In the European Soviet Union, economic development was retarded by Communism, but in Armenia like the more troubled Georgia the devleopment of capital-intensive industry was aided, as was the enhancement of Armenia's human capital. The Armenian SSR might have been severed from the large Armenian diaspora, but the chapter describes how Armenians came to constitute a disproportiopnately large component in circular migration towards the great Siberian development projects, providing a new source of remittances.

The book's concluding chapter, tackling Armenia's existential questions in the post-Soviet world, is the one that appeals the most directly to my core interests. Who are the Armenians? Armenians' attempt to radically eredefine themselves after the 2002 Sunflower Revolution is given prominence, with a law of return granting Armenian citizenship to Armenians in the diaspora being taken up by Iran's Armenians at the same time that the Armenians--like the Georgians--try to define themselves as a "European" nation deserving of full integration into the European Union. This last question, the authors rightly point out, is complicated by the fact that Yerevan is separated from Constantinople by a Turkey generally considered to be non-European by the Union's citizenries. (The relationships with Turkey and Azerbaijan, both with historical claims to portions of Armenian territory, are rightly described as strained and in desperate need of the sort of reconciliatory project that no one is really interested in providing.) Armenia's reluctantly supportive relationship to the American adventure in Iraq is also given space, as are the interesting emergent ties with Georgia. The coverage given to the active renewal of ties the diasporic populations in the Union and North America is also appreciated. Can area specialists reading this chime in

Armenia: From Soviet Republic to Independence deserves to be the new standard on the most recent generations of Armenian history. I think this, at least; I've got area specialists reading this who could (hopefully) supplement my approval.