{"id":88,"date":"2009-07-17T00:08:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T04:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=88"},"modified":"2009-07-17T07:40:19","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T11:40:19","slug":"qotd-canlit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/07\/17\/qotd-canlit\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: CanLit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

To mark Dominion Day (as you\u2019d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times<\/em> asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on \u201cwhat they most miss about home.\u201d The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen<\/em>, raising the suspicion he\u2019d simply recycled his beloved Dominion Day column of 1954 — which is not just environmentally responsible but very shrewd given New York Times<\/em> rates for freelance contributors.<\/p>\n

But thereafter the expats got with the program. The musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after years in the \u201cAmerican melting pot,\u201d pined for \u201cthe Canadian mosaic.\u201d But the great thing about the Canadian mosaic is that it engages in \u201ca national conversation about literature like a big book club,\u201d so the bookseller Sarah McNally said she missed \u201cthe pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn\u2019t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they\u2019ll sound like nerds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Multiculturalism, government books, using phrases like \u201cCanadian mosaic\u201d with a straight face, hailing the ability to say \u201cCanLit\u201d with a straight face as a virtue in and of itself . . .<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Canada has done everything David Rakoff, Sarah McNally and Melissa Auf der Maur want\u2014not least in their own fields. It taxes convenience-store clerks to subsidize books and writing and publishing and that wonderful \u201cnational conversation about literature like a big book club\u201d in which everyone\u2019s membership dues are automatically deducted from your bank account whether you go to the meetings or not. And still Mr. Rakoff and Ms. McNally and Ms. Auf der Maur leave. They applaud the creation of a \u201cjust\u201d and \u201cequitable\u201d society, and then, like almost all the members of the Order of Canada you\u2019ve actually heard of, they move out. Despite commending the virtues of a social \u201csafety net\u201d for you and everyone else, they personally can only fulfill their potential somewhere else, without one. Usually in a country beginning with \u201cGreat\u201d and ending in \u201cSatan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mark Steyn, “Why do you leave the one you love? Our \u2018funny creative people\u2019 adore our social safety net, not that they stick around to use it”, Macleans<\/em><\/a>, 2009-07-16<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To mark Dominion Day (as you\u2019d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on \u201cwhat they most miss about home.\u201d The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen, raising the suspicion he\u2019d simply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-cancon","category-quotations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}