21 July 2011 Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender...

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21 July 2011 Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 Imagining Toronto Imagining Toronto Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits Victoria College, Alumni Hall 21 July 2011

Transcript of 21 July 2011 Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits Imagining Toronto Copyright © Amy Lavender...

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Imagining Toronto

Imagining TorontoClassical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits

Victoria College, Alumni Hall21 July 2011

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“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion.

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“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on mapsmaps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

Jonathan Raban, Soft City.

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“The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.”

Roland Barthes, 1986. “Semiology and the Urban.” In The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, ed. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, 87-

98. New York: Columbia University Press.

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“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. […] At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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“The city scrolled away from us like a vast and intricate diagram, as indecipherable as the language of the Hittites. Lights dim as stars cut into the vast blackness of Lake Ontario, all quivering in the rising remains of the heat of the day. Here was a religion, I thought. My religion. My secret book, my Talmud.”

Robert Charles Wilson, “The Inner Inner City”

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“Sometimes he couldn’t even remember how long he’d had the amnesia. But one of the nice things about not remembering anything was that the world was almost unbearably beautiful; everything was fresh and new. The city was full of surprises.”

Gwendolyn MacEwen, Noman’s Land.

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Ravine City

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“There is no city that does not dreamFrom its foundations. The lost lakeCrumbling in the hands of brickmakers,The floor of the ravine where light lies brokenWith the memory of rivers.”

Anne Michaels, “There Is No City That Does Not Dream”

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“Like diving birds, Athos and I plunged one hundred and fifty million years into the dark deciduous silence of the ravines. Behind the billboard next to Tamblyn’s Drugstore we dipped into the humid amphitheatre of a Mesozoic swamp, where massive fronds and ferns tall as houses waved in a spore-dense haze. Beneath a parking lot, behind a school; from racket, fumes, and traffic, we dove into the city’s sunken rooms of green sunlight. Then, like andartes, resurfaced half a city away.”

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces21 July 2011Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits

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“With a few words (an incantation in Greek or English) and the sweep of his hand, Athos sliced a hill in half, drilled under the sidewalk, cleared a forest. He showed me Toronto cross-sectioned; he ripped open cliffs like fresh bread, revealing the ragged geological past. Athos stopped in the middle of busy city streets and pointed out fossils in the limestone ledges of the Park Plaza Hotel or in the walls of a hydro substation. “Ah, limestone, accumulating one precious foot every twenty five thousand years!” Instantly the streets were flooded by a subtropical salt sea. I imagined front lawns crammed with treasure: crinoids, lamp shells, trilobites.”

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

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“Again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These kit the bridge together. The moment of cubism.”

Michael Ondaatje, In The Skin of a Lion.

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“In the tee-pee, among sticks of sunlight, I sort through my stone collection and feed Jell-O powder to black ants. Sometimes, overhead, I hear a faint whine I think must be the clouds gliding by. Then there are moments of silence so absolute I am convinced I hear the ants’ footsteps; it is a tinkling sound, as if they wore bells on their ankles. When I lie with my ear to the dirt floor, the tunnelling of the worms is distant thunder. All around me pine trees cross out the view. I am at the heart of an impenetrable fortification. Safe.”

Barbara Gowdy, The Romantics.

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“And in the soft mythology of memory,gully triumphant.

Intractably tied to the tail end of girlhood.

Damp gash wheretrilliums peeked like summer solstice

fairiesand were snatched.”

Elana Wolff, “The Ravine”

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“I loved the river even here. I loved how dark it was, how it held its secrets with the dignity of the damned. I loved how grass and even small trees managed to sprout out of the concrete that held it captive. [….] I loved the sounds, even if they were the sounds of man rather than the sounds of nature. I loved the rattle of the old bridges as the streetcars went over them. I loved the lap of the water as it licked at concrete. I loved the wind in the slim weeds that grew between the railroad ties. I even loved the sound of the rush-hour trains, the buzzing traffic, the sound of my own feet on the asphalt path. I think what I really loved in those moments when I was cupped in the hand of the city was life.”

Rosemary Aubert, Free Reign.

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The City of Neighbourhoods

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“If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text. Their rhetorical transplantation carries away and displaces the analytical, coherent proper meanings of urbanism; it constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order.”

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

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“[Walking is] a spatial actingout, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding. Paths link familiar places and bring the possibility for repeated actions. Different paths enact different stories of action. Walking is like a story, a series of events, for which the land acts as a mnemonic. aimless walking represented a radical insubordination to capitalism.”

Mike Pearson & Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology.

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Toronto is …

“a score of cities joined together by geographical propinquity.” (Hugh Garner, 1970)

a place where “an antique administration drags on / Like a bunch of small villages rolled into one.” (The Brothers-In-Law,” 1966)

a city where “the streets proceed tiresomely through the neighbourhoods in which each house tries to be more ordinary than the next.” (Stephen Marche, 2005)

A place where “underneath the flourish and ostentation” of the new Toronto is “the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their porch pillars like the off-white stems of toad-stools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable.” (Margaret Atwood, 1988)

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“Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. […] Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns held loosely together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. […] There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summoning of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative.”

Mark Kingwell, “All Show.” In Toronto: A City Becoming, 2008.

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“Toronto has no social classes— Only the Masseys and the Masses,”

B.K. Sandwell, 1952.

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“The village stands at the top of Spadina Road which has been one of the great caravan routes of upwardly mobile immigrants since the nineteenth century. […] As Spadina Avenue crosses Bloor Street, it becomes Spadina Road and passes through an area inhabited mainly by respectable transients—students, “singles” setting up house for the first time—then it climbs north through a middle-class district until it crosses St. Clair Avenue and becomes for a mile or two the main street of Forest Hill Village. The village is synonymous in Toronto minds with the Jewish Establishment, although it was originally created by successful Anglos and still honours Protestant thrift in the shape of Timothy Eaton United Church, a cathedral blessed by the money of the successful shopkeeper to whom the church is dedicated.”

Eric Wrights, Smoke Detector.21 July 2011Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits

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“[H]er life had been divided into two separate sections as definitely as the city was divided by the Hill which was far more than a simple geographical line of demarcation. To live below the Hill was, metaphorically, to live on the wrong side of the tracks, and excusable only if your father was a professional man. Even when this was the case, it was not considered in good taste to like living below the Hill.”

Phyllis Brett Young, The Torontonians.

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“Our lives in the Forties and Fifties were insular and “unreal”—unconnected to the WASP reality of Toronto, unconnected to the rural reality of Canada. We knew almost nothing beyond the Village, the downtown department stores where we’d sometimes wander on Saturday afternoons and charge clothes to our fathers’ accounts, and the bits of northern Ontario where we summered and wondered at the people who stayed there after Labor Day.”

Erna Paris, “Ghetto of the Mind” in The Toronto Book.

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“[I]s there dancing still at Casa Loma? […] I suppose there must be; that grand old fake castle, the white elephant that rears its architectural absurdities on the Toronto skyline, would have to be kept standing somehow—and it’s not much use for anything else, is it? I mean, when you have this place with a room big enough to let a whole regiment sit down to dinner, what else could you do but hold dances in it?”

Phil Murphy, Summer Island.

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“In the mid-nineteenth century, when the city was a small grid of neatly laid out streets clustered around the harbour and named after kings, queens and English market towns, Rose Park was a wooded area ten miles away where rich people built country houses. By the turn of the twentieth century, once isolated estates had acquired closer neighbours in newly constructed manors. Soon, roads were laid that linked Rose Park to its environs, and bridges were constructed across the ravines. With access came development, the building of more houses, many grand enough to confirm the neighbourhood’s reputation as an exclusive, moneyed enclave. Emphasis on old establishment money, of my father’s kind.”

Kim Moritsugu, The Glenwood Treasure.

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“Olivia’s childhood had been lived at the very heart of Rosedale. South Drive was Rosedale’s aorta. (Its vena cava was Crescent Road.) But the ebb and flow of its life was sluggish now—constrained and ill at ease. Newcomers—bearing gifts of money but none of taste—had come to buy the old houses, divide them up and rent them piecemeal back to the descendents of those who had been the original owners. The rents were exorbitant and sometimes smacked of a slap in the face—but that’s what you got for being born out of time. Your name was often all you had—and the memory of place—and the absent shade of trees cut down in your exile.”

Timothy Findley, Headhunter.

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“Old money whispers, new money shouts: one of the lessons Roz thought she had to learn, once. Keep your voice down, Roz, went her inner censor. Low tones, low profile, beige clothing: anything to keep from being spotted, located among the pushing hordes of new money, narrow-eyed, nervous money, bad-taste money, chip-on-the-shoulder money. Anything to avoid incurring the amused, innocent, milky and maddening gaze of those who had never had to scrimp, to cut a few legal corners, to twist a few arms, to gouge a few eyes, to prove a thing. Most of the new money women were desperate, all dressed up and nowhere safe to go and nervous as heck about it […] Though by now she’s been new money for so long she’s practically old money. In this country it doesn’t take long.”

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride.

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“Five years of hard work have brought him here, tonight, in front of this huge mansion. I going have to paint them windows green; and throw a coat o’ paint on the doors … the screens in the windows will be green like in the West Indies … I going pull up them flowers and put in roses, red ones; and build a paling, and build up my property value … and he goes up on the lawn and tries to count the rooms in the four-storey house. Imagine me in this house with four stories! and not one blasted tenant or boarder! But he cannot count all the rooms from the front, so he goes through the alleyway to look at the back, and the rooms in the back and […] four men pounce upon him and drag him along his lawn, with hands on his mouth and some in his guts, and drop him in the back seat of the car.”

Austin Clarke, “Four Stations in His Circle.”

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“Rosedale,” my father said. “Why in God’s name would we want to live in Rosedale?”

“What’s wrong with Rosedale?” my mother said.“What’s wrong with it? It’s Rosedale, that’s what’s wrong with

it,” my father said.“Could you be more specific?” my mother said.“I’d feel out of place there.” […]My mother replied that not everybody in Rosedale came from

long-established families. There were people here like us, she said, self-made people who had been poor starting out.

“We were never poor,” my father said.“We were poor,” my mother said. “But so were a lot of people

who live here. Or at least their parents and grandparents were.”

My father said that was doubtless one of the standard lines that real estate agents fed the nouveaux riches to make them think they could be happy in a neighbourhood like Rosedale.

Wayne Johnston, Human Amusements.

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“When I told people later on that I’d grown up in Rosedale, they were always impressed and ready to concede me a class distinction that I’d never thought of asserting. If I identified the location as “north Rosedale” the mistaken identification didn’t occur, because north Rosedale was in some degree the dormitory of the servants of the south.”

Hugh Hood, The Swing in the Garden.

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“We moved into a flat in Rosedale, on Standish Avenue, backed up against the CPR main line. It’s not a Rosedale Street, Inspector, if you know what I mean. The rich people in their mansions lived farther south, away from the main line railway track and the constant noise of passing freight trains. But it was Rosedale, don’t you see? That’s what made it important to her.”

Hugh Garner, Death in Don Mills.

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The Myth of the

Multicultural CIty

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“She likes the mix on the streets here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the nineteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they're trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's the other way around."

Margaret Atwood, 1993. The Robber Bride. McClelland & Stewart: 39.

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“But as at any crossroads there are permutations of existence. People turn into other people imperceptibly, unconsciously. …. Lives in this city are doubled, tripled, conjugated – women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, it’s impossible to tell one thread from another.”

Brand, Dionne, 2006. What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf: 5

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“They come from everywhere, from Argentina, Nigeria, Russia, Pakistan, but rarely because they have an explicit vision of the place; they aren’t drawn by mythic images of riches and glamour like the immigrants arriving at the airports and harbours of New York. They are exiles, for the most part, who have thrown darts at a map of the world. Arriving, astonished by the cold, bewildered by hockey and our Nordic reserve, they nonetheless build their cities within our city: Chinatown, Little India, Portugal Town. Our city becomes a new city surprised by itself, doubletaking at the profusion of culture: Brazilian dance clubs, Indian cricket matches, Polish delis, Chinese newspapers, Ecuadorian snack stands, somber Italian Easter parades.”

Patricia Pearson, 2003. Playing House. 21 July 2011Classical Pursuits | Toronto Pursuits

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“[i]n this city there are Bulgarian mechanics, there are Eritrean accountants, Colombian cafe owners, Latvian book publishers, Welsh roofers, Afghani dancers, Iranian mathematicians, Tamil cooks in Thai restaurants, Calabrese boys with Jamaican accents, Fushen deejays, Filipina-Saudi beauticians; Russian doctors changing tires, there are Romanian bill collectors, Cape Croker fishmongers, Japanese grocery clerks, French gas meter readers, German bakers, Haitian and Bengali taxi drivers with Irish dispatchers. “

Dionne Brand, 2005. What We All Long For Toronto, Knopf: 5.

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“Multiculturalism? Is multiculturalism you say? What is so multiculturalistic about Toronto? Toronto is a collection of ghettos. Ethnic ghettos. Cultural ghettos. In other words, racial ghettos, and –“

“Oh Christ, I never looked at it this way! That’s right!”

“You got Rosedale: Anglo-Saxon people. Jane-Finch: black people and visible minorities. High Park: the Poles. Sin-Clair, all up there by Dufferin and Eglinton: the Eye-Talians ...”

“Don’t leave-out the place up north, where the cheapest house cost a million. The rich Eye-talians...”

Austin Clarke, More (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2008): 256.

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Multiculturalism is “[…] a voice that lures us slowly to neutralityand tolerance […]It’s a refrain that reels off many warningsand resembles the Pied Piper whose soundspush us like mice into the invisible Lake Ontarioand we drown dragged down by concrete neologismsMultiaccessmultiaddictmultiadvocatemultiarbitratormultiathletemul

tiballotmultibarriomultibathroommultibombmulticavitymultiCanadianmultichallengedmultichannelmulticitizenmulticleaningmulticinicmulticoffeemulticondominiummulticulturalmulticuntmultidisciplinarymultidrugmultieducationmultiemailmultiemissionmultiethncmultiexclusionmultiexhibitionmultiexitmultiexterminatormultifacemultifairmultifaithmultifinemultifuckmultinsurancenumbermultgallerymultigarbagemultigendermultigentrificationmultiglobalmultiguidelinemultihomelessmultijailmultilandlordmultinclusionmulintegrationmultilingualmultilovermultinativemultimortgagemultineighbourhoodmultipersonalitymultiplanningmultipoetrymultipridemultiproductmultiracemultischlepmultisexmultisheltermultisoldierultitonguemultitolerantmultivictimultivoicemail”

Corrado Paina, “Embrace the Walls” from Souls in Plain Clothes. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2008.

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“Some say that the only thing race is good for is to divide the population into work categories. Those who wash the dishes will be Sri Lankan, those who drive the cabs will be African, those who run the banks will be European, those who watch the kids will be Filipino, those who mind the store will be Korean and those upon whose bodies the good life is modelled will be, more and more, a hybridization of all of the above – on TV, on billboards, in magazines. But it would be a mistake to believe that these beautifully mixed people represent a race-free future – that people will stop their fixation on difference and settle down to enjoying similarities. It’s just a smokescreen. Part of a dazzling performance.”

Darren O’Donnell, 2004. Your Secrets Sleep With Me (Toronto: Coach House): 108.

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“When you live here for three months, then you will really understand what racism is. I call the shots the way I see it. That is not racism. Over here racism is a sort of polite thing, not like in Trinidad. Nobody calling you nigger or coolie or names like that, but it’s always inside them. Deep down. You see it in the bus when they refuse to sit by you. In the park when they suddenly change direction if they see somebody black. In the bank, when the teller’s smile suddenly disappear when she look up and see a brown face before her. Over the telephone, when they recognise the foreign accent and tell you that the position is no longer available or the apartment was just rented. That is how racism operate over here. “

Maharaj Rabindranath, 1997. Homer in Flight (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions): 49-50.

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Race Talk

“Let’s have some race talkSome pakiniggerchink talkLet’s have some race talkSome white talk some joke talkLet’s have some lynchdeportbash talk.

Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, “Let’s Have Some Race Talk”, in Domestic Bliss (Toronto: Is Five Press): 48.

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“Here is a ghetto gotten for goyim

O with care denuded of nigger and kike

No coonsmell rankles reeks only cellarrot

Attar of carexhaust catcorpse and

cookinggrease”

Earle Birney, “Anglosaxon Street” in The Poems of Earle Birney. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969.

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“The pig, they said, was the most beastly of beasts. It ate garbage and faeces, even its babies, it copulated freely, was incestuous. Wallowed in muck. Eat pig and become a beast. Slowly the bestial traits – cruelty and promiscuity, in one word, godlessness – overcame you. And you became, morally, like them. The Canadians.”

M.G. Vassanji, No New Land.

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“The city is the place of our meeting with the other. … The city is the privileged site where the other is and where we ourselves are other, as the place where we play the other. “

Roland Barthes, 1986. Semiology and the Urban

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“So give me time i wanti want to knowall your squares & cloverleafs[…]i can hear your beatingcentre will iwill i make itare there maps of youi keep circling imaginingparks fountains your storesback in my single bed i wanderyour stranger dreamingi am your citizen”

Earle Birney, “I Think You Are a Real City”

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The Imagining Toronto Projectwww.imaginingtoronto.com

Amy Lavender [email protected]

416-604-9416

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27 April 2011Lillian Smith Library

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