List(less)

[Denis Salter]

For those feeling at loose ends--listless--this weekend, please
note that in Tom Henighan's *Ideas of North: A Guide to Canadian
Arts and Culture* there is a definitive list, after Six Canadian
Culture Heroes, of "The 12 Most Important Canadian Plays," followed
by "A Baker's Dozen of Canadian Paintings to Spend Quality Time
With."  I haven't read Mr Henighan's book, but there's no
doubt, in my mind, that the play list alone will provide hours of
pleasure, disclosing, upon scrutiny, hidden agendas, grand narratives,
universal and timeless values, the naturalisation of everything
we believe so that we don't know we believe it, essentialist assumptions
if not presumptions, and, quite simply, some good ideas about what
to give to friends and foes at Christmas time, when all is celebratory
and all is forgiven.  To expand the horizons a bit, Mr Henighan thinks,
as so many do, that it will be the State that will save culture from
its amateurish ways; "[h]e calls for a powerful, politicised
culture ministry in Ottawa, presumably following the elitist French
model, something that would be entirely foreign to English-
Canadian culture." So, take that Sheila Copps.
Go figure.

DWS


Denis Salter
Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T6
(514) 487 7309
E-Mail  CYWS at MUSICA.MCGILL.CA