“We don't take risks, we don't tell jokes, we don't even have the snarky, incredibly funny items on Mad Men that they have in New York magazine, and I watch Mad Men and long for someone smart to talk to about it.”
Heather Mallick, the one-time Globe and Mail heroine (a smart column on shopping? A sassy column on politics? Yessss), author of Pearls in Vinegar and Cake or Death, writes this to me. She was recently censored for a column that ran on CBC’s website called “A Mighty Wind Blows Through the Republican Convention,” about Sarah Palin, the Republican party and a certain genus of American citizen. The reader response to her article was, apparently, overwhelmingly negative, as was the response by the CBC (essentially: “Our bad”). That Mallick was clearly using some old journalistic power tools — like, you know, hyperbole, satire, an opinion — seemed irrelevant. That Mallick is among the few Canadian writers who are truly incendiary and truly talented, in the postscript of that news cycle, also seemed irrelevant.
While Mallick classily declined to comment on the specifics of the CBC situation, she is generally unhappy about the inability of our nation’s media to accept dissent. “I'm really only concerned that there doesn't seem to be any great website or magazine or newspaper in Toronto that smart young people can flock to," she laments. "They should be welcomed. They should be paid. I call it the Canadian wet blanket and it affects all aspects of life. Have you ever read anything produced in this city that made you rock with laughter? Those writers exist. But were they all exiled? There is nowhere for people to be weird and strange.”
I’d written about this problem for the Toronto Notes blog and the print edition of EYE WEEKLY in an article called “Bonfire of Inanities." The story outlined the gaping disparity between New York’s media scene and Toronto’s, and how the competitive, gossipy culture of New York contributes to a higher level of this kind of youthy, observational journalism.
Modesty can fuck off, basically: I knew the story was tight, and I knew it would be a piss-off to some of my colleagues in the aforementioned local scene. I expected and was right to think the essay would generate more reader response than other stuff I’ve written (including cover stories about vaginal reconstruction and cheating, an essay on anal sex, and more than five years’ worth of music criticism). Gawker picked up on my EYE WEEKLY story and wrote a long riposte, which was kind of fun (American friends who caught it wrote me emails with sentiments ranging from “Why are you still in Toronto?” to “Glad to see you never went to law school” to “Shitty deal about Gawker, bro”).
I personally received an unprecedented number of emails and Facebook messages, and for the week or two following, a few of my media-savvy friends gave me the “You’ve finally gone and fucked yourself” pity eyes. A few local blogs got in on it, too. Aside from one guy positing that it would be bad for his journalism career to sleep with me (I guess?), the comments were pretty squarely about the story itself, although curiously focused on the wrong half of it.
When I argued for a more significant gossip culture in Toronto’s media scene, for more social investment in our publications and jobs, it was because those things act in service to promote and incite more provocative and better journalism: Gawker et al for content’s sake, not for an endlessly brutal, tail-swallowing clusterfuck.
Someone I implicated in my story for squandering a tremendous opportunity was Leah McLaren. However, she is baffled, like myself and Heather Mallick, by the anti-fun paradigm in this country’s media. “I have always found my position as a ‘controversial figure’ in Canadian journalism kind of curious. What's with all the hostility toward youth and irreverence? [Is] it tall-poppy syndrome? Provincialism? Sexism? A protective reverence for the prose of Alan Fotheringham? I dunno. What this grumpy conservatism has resulted in is a buttoned-down literary culture where emerging Toronto writers are taught, like characters in an Alice Munro story, ‘If you don't have anything good to say, then don't say anything at all.' In the world of Canadian letters there is a price to be paid for sticking your neck out and saying something that is funny, surprising, original or in any way critical of the polite-liberal-bourgeois status quo.”
Writing is a weird job. In practice, it’s intensely private and ritualistic, and what is produced is sometimes deeply personal. Then, the work is turned over to the public for consumption and comment. When you make a mistake, everyone sees it, and it exists (on paper, anyhow) forever. What this affords, though, is a paid opportunity to work out those half-baked, maybe compelling ideas, to pursue the most tempting kinds of strangeness. In a city with so many sex clubs, immigrants from around the world, universities, good bands, complicated neighbourhoods, so much city-ness, readers and writers alike have a responsibility to expect coverage that respects Toronto’s enormity.
In a subsequent email, Heather Mallick, as per usual, makes the most sense of things. “I really believe in words. I don't think they are loved in this city, and I think they could be, given the chance.”