Magazines are driven by their editors, and occasionally personified by them (William Shawn’s New Yorker for example). [Upon Ken Alexander's resignation as Walrus editor, comments have landed in media outlets across Canada. Below is Walrus contributing editor's Don Gillmor's view. ~The Walrus Online]

Magazines are driven by their editors and occasionally personified by them (William Shawn’s New Yorker, for example). The Walrus is Ken Alexander, both in conception and attitude (democratic, wide-ranging, messy). Under his tutelage, the magazine is alive—a forum for both ideas and (more selfishly) writers. Where else could you write a 9,000-word political piece? The long form was nurtured by him. In the ever-diminishing world of letters the response to this is: Who gives a shit? But long form magazine journalism maintains a critical place in the literary ecosystem. It is the logical stepping stone to a book. It gives the writer a chance to explore an idea in a way that isn’t possible at 3,000 words and gives the reader an experience he won’t find elsewhere.

The magazine cultivates the readership that Saturday Night left in the wake of its slow death. It is an enviable readership: national, sophisticated, and astute. As the death of SN demonstrated, to found a literary magazine and keep it going takes heroic energy, dedication, and money. Ken had all three, a rare happenstance. Whoever succeeds him will need those qualities as well.

Apparently, there was turmoil. It was always thus. McClelland & Stewart experienced turmoil under Jack McClelland (descriptions of Jack were eerily similar to those of Ken) as well as one of its most productive (and seminal) eras. From a writer’s perspective, the critical measure of a magazine is the experience with the editor, and in my case it was a wonderfully happy and fertile one. There is also the experience of the magazine itself. Do I want to read it?

It is uneven, as some critics have noted. But everything is uneven. Every New Yorker issue, every issue of the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books. Anything that is even is even because it is standardized into mush. Esquire is enjoying a prolonged period of evenness along with hundreds of other titles on the rack, some of them quite successful as measured by sales. New magazines are launched weekly it seems, all chasing the lifestyle market, hoping to cash in. A book editor once told me that the critical test for any book was: Is it alive? Under Ken, The Walrus is alive—as a voice in public affairs, as a nurturing ground for dozens of interns, as a standard for editorial excellence, as a haven for writers. Finding someone else who’ll donate $3 million and eighty hours a week to those causes will take a house to house search.

VANCOUVER—Congress is over for another year. Plans are now well underway for Carleton in 2009, an exhausting thought. By all measures, this year’s event on the UBC campus was a success, even if the weather was lousy. Having visited learned societies for over a week I have a pretty good sense of the satisfaction levels of congress participants and I believe most were pretty happy with the level of the papers they heard and the service they received. You can’t beat that.

Still, I am always amazed to overhear academics grumbling: the campus is too far from downtown; the taxi lines are too long; food services are limited on the weekend, and so on. Human nature, the very thing these thousands of scholars spend a lifetime studying, will have its way, and even one of the most privileged groups in society will find reasons to complain. It’s not that everything is perfect. It’s that educated people somehow forget to connect their experience to the sheer facts of running an event of this size. The UBC caterer, who has to feed these thousand or so of scholarly souls, was responsible for well over 150 deliveries a day for eight days, scattered all over the vast campus and all designed for different needs. That’s not even counting the daily receptions with hot food, wines, chafing dishes, and other disasters waiting to happen. That everyone got fed their veggie wraps, salads, cookies, and juices on time, between bites of Keynes or Nietzsche, is pretty amazing in itself. But even big-brained scholars can occlude the network of labourers that hums along beside them, efficiently working to serve their higher-paid masters.

Speaking of complaining, there’s a lot of talk about the need to invest in science and technology these days, to build, you know, the knowledge economy. Everyone’s favourite Canadian philanthropist is Michael Lazaridis, who during Congress week donated $50 million to the Waterloo-based Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, topping up the $100 million he has already contributed. In this country, that’s big news, trumping reports of even the most dazzling scholarly papers. Lazaridis’s gift was rightly applauded by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente last weekend, but in praising Lazaridis’s vision of an internationally competitive, innovative Canada, she typically tossed off a supercilious remark about education trends. “Too many of our kids (and I’m saying these things, because Mr. Lazaridis is far too polite),” she wrote, “drift into liberal arts and gender studies instead of engineering and math.”

Give me a break, Wente. Lazaridis is the last person who would agree with you. RIM employs hundreds of arts graduates, and Lazaridis is on record as saying that Canada needs highly educated personnel to take this country forward, not just techno geeks. Imagine a world without the liberal arts. What would scientists read to their children?

The annual Congress of Canadian learned societies brings together thousands of people who are using their heads to talk, take up, challenge, explore the very ideas Lazaridis is promoting. This country, like all others, needs to educate fully rounded citizens, those who can understand what is human and social about us as well as those who can build the CN Tower out of Lego. Stop complaining, Wente. Come visit us at Carleton next year. We’ll show you vision.

VANCOUVER—Everything is wet here. Richard Florida came to campus. Hundreds of rain-soaked academics crowded into a large UBC lecture hall to hear what he had to say. But they were also there just to see him in the flesh. That’s what you do when someone famous comes to town. Florida possesses that aura of royal jelly some people get when they are constantly under a spotlight or microphone. He’s become the go-to guy for evidence of the economic benefits of the arts. No one has quite managed to put together an argument, backed up with evidence, of how cities thrive as magnets for what he has coined the “creative class.” That’s me and you, yuppies, and gays and lesbians, designers, artists of all kinds—educated people who have acquired a taste of urban cool. It’s not about suburbs and strip malls and the ugly, numbing tedium of sameness. It’s about the aesthetics of hipness.

Of course, Florida is admired but he also reviled because he has emerged not only as a public intellectual, but also as a popular one, and a lot of academics are uncomfortable with that sort of rock-star status. I think his lecture helped them get over it. He’s one of the smoothest presenters I’ve ever seen or heard, highly conscious of the criticisms of his work and quick to admit his flaws, apologize for the weakness of his research, and then move on to a defense of what he has managed to accomplish. It’s a pretty disarming strategy and it worked—on this listener, anyway.

It helps when you begin by telling your audience you’re basically an Italian working-class kid from New Jersey. A big charge against Florida is that he promotes an elitist view of society, that his creative class is a self-entitling one. So when he offers up his own working-class childhood as the springboard for thinking about the benefits of being smart and rooted in family, place, and culture, even the most hardened skeptic has to grant him a little credit. And, man, is he ever sharp about building credit.

It occurred to me that male academics might just be jealous of Florida’s charismatic power. It’s not every day a guy with a Ph.D walks into a party like he was walking onto a yacht, to borrow from Carly Simon. There’s a lot of bad dressing in the academy. Like monks, we’re not supposed to be calling too much attention to our physical bodies.

Florida is the living emblem of the creative class, all about brains and fashion. He wore an expensive black suit jacket with lapels just wide enough to suggest his Italian rat-pack roots. It was buttoned over a gorgeous white shirt with French cuffs, open collar, no tie. His jeans were rich and dark, could almost pass for trousers, and his hair was perfect. He had one eye in the mirror as he watched himself gavotte, sure, but he played to the audience’s belief in the power of the creative life and ultimately validated our attempts to prove the value of the life of the mind. How can you argue with that?

VANCOUVER—Rain is keeping everyone indoors and so the sessions are well attended. When it’s sunny it’s easier to avoid that paper on the metaphysics of milk, or whatever. Margaret Somerville drew several hundred people to her “Research in Society” lecture. It’s not surprising that the woman who has argued the case against same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court of Canada would be described as controversial. The Globe and Mail quoted my designation of her as such, and so she mockingly riffed a bit on that at the start of her lecture. I’m not sure if she enjoys being called controversial or not. Maybe she’s not sure either, although there is very little she isn’t sure about.

Somerville discussed the culture of political correctness on our campuses, and how it has silenced debate and discouraged a democratic exchange of ideas, ostensibly what universities are designed to be about. The ideas she has been discouraged from speaking about, even at McGill, her own campus, have everything to do with an argument for the fundamental right of a child to know who its natural biological parents are. It’s hard not to agree that it’s probably a good thing for a child to know where it came from. It’s easy to feel that there is something alarming for a child to have been produced from some recombinant molecules nourished in a test tube, the way animals are being created in some experimental labs in 2008. But it’s a hard sell to say that a child is better off being raised by a man and a woman than by a woman and a woman or a man and a man. (more…)

VANCOUVER—Congress is now in full swing. Humanities scholars dominate the first half of the week-long event. Besides catching passing references to Nietzsche or Michel Houellebecq in the pizza line, you hear a lot of scholars speaking different languages–Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, Russian, German. These and other languages continue to be taught across this country in small departments. Yesterday an Italian professor dared me to explain why the teaching of languages was given so little attention in our universities. He was disgusted. No one seemed to be doing anything about this erosion of civilization. Surely students are not as well educated as they used to be, he asked. I know. It’s a recurring dirge. It’s hard not to lament the academy’s lack of enthusiasm for its own language programs. True, one often wishes that our students—that we—were, well, more European. But I can’t agree that they are any less educated. A lot of our discussions here are about a new language entirely—Web 2.0 or even Office 2007.

Speaking of language, André Pratte, prominent Quebec author and editorial writer for La Presse, delivered the first campus breakfast address yesterday. The Federation hosts this series every year, inviting congress participants to eat their eggs and bacon while listening to a prominent writer present his or her take on whatever path they are pursing. The French-based breakfasts are usually thinly attended. Most academics find it a bit too hard on the head to listen to a talk in a language not their own, especially at 7:30 in the morning. Frankly, many of us have a hard time finding the right buildings for our talks and sessions on this gorgeously sprawling campus, let alone eat and translate at the same time. (more…)

VANCOUVER—The 77th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences kicks off today on the beautiful UBC campus. Up to 10,000 academics from across the country, as well as many from the wider world, are expected to invade this lush garden, armed with 100 percent recycled-material tote bags and a strong sense of purpose. After more than a year of planning it’s finally coming together—the directional signs, the registration desk, the book fare stalls, and arguably the most important symbol of this scholarly happening: the beer tent. I’ve been here a little less than twenty-four hours and the whole experience reminds me of those moments in the Molson Stadium or the Air Canada Centre before the first face off. It’s minutes before the game and the stands are half empty, but by the time someone starts belting out the national anthem the whole place is miraculously blocked to the rafters. (more…)

Cambridge, MA–It’s been a pretty stellar decade so far in the world’s largest democracy. The economy is growing at nearly 9% a year, GDP per capita has nearly doubled, and its largest multinationals are on a global feeding frenzy, gobbling up anything they can get their rupees on.

From steel makers and aluminum manufacturers to fabled liquor empires and Britain’s beloved Tetley Tea, corporate India is expanding aggressively in its quest to unseat Japan and China, Asia’s two incumbent economic powers. Perhaps not surprisingly, capitalism suits the former British colony well — at least in the aggregate — and with the birth of the world’s cheapest car and a play for Ford’s premium European business, Tata looks set to usher in a new era of Indian industrial leadership. (more…)

Cambridge, MA—The American public has responded in similar and predictable ways to each of the country’s three major conflicts since World War II. At the beginning of each episode, public support was considerable as people rallied around the flag in support of a shared ideal, be it anti-Communism during Korea and Vietnam, or anti-terrorism in Iraq. Subsequently, support has tended to decline with an increase in casualties and the duration of hostilities. Finally, after both the Korean and Vietnamese wars, the party that initiated the conflict was voted out of the White House, with Eisenhower replacing Truman and Nixon replacing Johnson.

Recent polls have shown eroding support for both the President and the GOP. Less clear is what might be done to halt or reverse that trend. Although more than two-thirds of Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the war, and 54% feel that their country shouldn’t have even gone into Iraq in the first place, 42% still believe that the military should remain until the situation is stabilized — and only 30% believe that all troops should be withdrawn entirely. These figures highlight the challenge of responding to divided public opinion in the face of a protracted occupation and discouraging historical precedent. (more…)

Cambridge, MA—When Einstein first remarked that “Everything is relative,” he didn’t have Stan O’Neal in mind. This week, Merrill Lynch’s top banker was paid $161.5 million to take an early retirement after suggesting, quite acceptably, that the bank ought to consider merging with another global titan of finance to buoy its sagging share price, restore investor confidence, and position the company for growth after the latest shake-up in the credit markets.

To be fair, the bank just announced that it was writing down $8.4 billion in holdings as a result of the recent mortgage meltdown, and Merrill’s stock has underperformed every one of its global banking peers in 2007. But this latest sacking adds yet another ugly data point to the growing debate around executive compensation at a time when even failure, it would seem, can be a sign of success. (more…)

“The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.”
- Robert Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, 1907

The same year Robert Service published his famous poem about the mystery and grandeur of the Far North, Canadian Senator Pascal Poirier was busy staking his country’s Arctic claim in Parliament to a world that largely didn’t care. One hundred years later, a Russian icebreaker led two research vessels to the North Pole to plant a symbolic Russian flag 13,200 feet below the surface, encased in titanium. This time everyone noticed.

It was territorial brinksmanship at its finest: a shot across Canada’s Arctic bow. Past efforts to define the country’s northern frontier have been largely reactive and rarely successful, but this time the Russians are playing for keeps. If Canada doesn’t respond with strength and resolve, there will be more to lose than a few Arctic trails in the land of the midnight sun.

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Two things are absolutely clear about Prime Minister Stephen Harper: he has no hidden agenda and never had one; he is quite desperate for majority rule.

Descriptions of the Conservative government’s Speech from the Throne on Tuesday night as conciliatory are laughable. The throne speech (and subsequent statements made by Harper) had less to do with getting tough on crime (at a moment when crime in Canada, even gun-related crime, is hardly a pressing concern); little to do with undercutting John Manley’s panel on Afghanistan (by indicating the government’s preference to extend the mission beyond 2009); was not really about abandoning Canada’s Kyoto commitments (as the prime minister had already indicated his preference for US President Bush’s self-serving parallel synod on climate change); or any of the other quisling statements made to attract votes. Rather, Mr. Harper’s speech, made after a four month Parliamentary recess — an extended absence designed to prove that Ottawa and Parliament do not matter — was about the reduction of federal spending powers to matters of defence and foreign affairs (that is, weaponry and soldiers and the odd diplomatic mission, at a ratio, probably, of 10:1), granting provinces a veto on all other matters, telling them to create more “tax room” (the subtext of another chop to the GST), and, generally, reversing the flow of Confederation such that Ottawa can never again play a significant role over the commons.
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After a brief grey moment, a weekend to doubt and reflect, Conrad Black is back in the saddle, launching barbs, issuing challenges, regretting nothing. As it must be, his conviction on three counts of mail fraud and one of obstructing justice has become the staging ground for yet another bellicose assault. Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, have manufactured their own particular kind of celebrity and they must now fight to preserve it.

Black’s rekindled engagement in this “long war” (in which he will now “take the gloves off“) is a posture, a necessary stance, if not a necessary fiction. Some time long ago, Black ceased being a maverick businessman, a takeover specialist, a backroom deal-maker, and media baron; he became an icon, a man representative of a way of being, if not of an age or era. In many respects, I sensed, the Chicago trial bored him as much as shareholders’ rights annoyed him: Black had moved on, left the boardroom to write laudatory appraisals of US presidents, to cement his own place in history not as a tycoon but as a man of letters. While worthy in their own right, these biographies cannot escape the subtext of attempts by Black to assert himself within the presidential orbit and as a great man of his time. (more…)