No-one advancing the development of Canadian literature?
A lament via Bookninja from This Magazine about the lack of evaluative book reviewing in this country:
…we subsidize CanLit with one hand and then give the CBC more than a billion dollars a year with the other. Why, why, why does the CBC pay people to review Hollywood films that will cost you $13 to see but refuse to tell you whether the $25-$40 books you subsidize are worth your time and money?
Lemon Hound adds this: " The reason Can Lit was so exciting "back in the day" is that people were making bold choices, big bold choices that they believed in, that they promoted and in doing so, created a dynamic literary world"
I’m reading about one of these people. Elaine Kalman Naves’s Robert Weaver (see reviews here, and here). Weaver was for decades, starting in the late 1940s [1948-85], responsible for programming literary content at the CBC. In 1954 he introduced Anthology to the network, ‘a sort of literary magazine of the air.’ It ran for more than 30 years, and goes down as one of the CBC’s most successful radio programs ever. As Kalman Naves puts it:
" Through his work at the CBC and Tamarak, Weaver helped jump-start the careers of Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Timothy Findlay, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and many, many others. He also sustained the writing life of Brian Moore, Al Purdy, Margaret Laurence, Austin Clarke, Marian Engel, Norman Levine, Alistair MacLeod, and a host of others.
By establishing the CBC Literary Competition, Weaver reached out to a new generation of Canadian writers. The list of winners…Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje, Bonnie Burnard, Robert Munsch, Frances Itani, Lorna Crozier, Katherine Govier, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, and Janice Kulyk Keefer are some of the names that leap to mind."
The CBC in its chicken like scramble to attract and appeal to a younger ‘hipper’ audience is sounding more and more like all the other commercial crap on the air; in so doing it is abdicating an important role: nurturer of Canadian literary talent, or as Brian Moore put it in a letter to Weaver, [provider of] "encouragement at that vital stage when such help is – or seems – all important. " I am sure," Moore continues " I am only one of the swelling chorus of writers who are in your debt but, believe me, I have never forgotten those early days."