|
|
DON'T APOLOGIZE DUDE
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in frontpagemag.com and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning:
The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada)
was launched at the National Archives in Ottawa in September,
2012. His debut album, Blood
Guitar, is now available.
Canadians
are clearly among the world’s most fortunate people. Compared
to the majority of peoples around the globe, we enjoy a leisurely
and indolent existence. True, we have our delicate sufficiency
of social problems: aboriginals who insist on favored treatment
and hold the government to ransom with hunger strikes, land
claim protests and violent occupation of entire communities,
Muslims engaged in stealth jihad and sporadic terror, high taxation
levels, so-called human rights tribunals that act as kangaroo
courts, and a modest degree of unemployment. But running down
the alphabet from Algeria to Zanzibar, it is plausible to suggest
that we live in halcyon climes, and indeed, Canada is one of
only three countries — Norway and Israel are the other
two — that managed to ride out the recent economic meltdown
and emerge in a comparatively robust posture.
This
may explain why Canadians are naturally prone to grow ludicrously
exercised by relatively inconsequential issues, which can fairly
be described as tempests in a peepot. The most recent such trivial
controversy to raise our pro forma ire has to do with
David Gilmour, the Canadian fiction writer and part-time lecturer
at the University of Toronto. Now it should be noted that Gilmour
boasts a pretty decent reputation among our literary elite,
having won the coveted Governor General’s Award for a
thoroughly undistinguished novel, one among many. (His new novel,
Extraordinary, is about assisted suicide and the relation
between siblings).
Gilmour
is a stock Canadian writer: overhyped, almost unfailingly dull,
and eminently forgettable absent media inflation. But he has
recently leaped into prominence by being guilty of an unforgivable
breach of political — and literary — correctness.
In an interview with Random House’s Hazlitt magazine,
Gilmour said:
I’m
not interested in teaching books by women. I’ve never
found — Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests
me as a woman writer, so I do teach one short story from Virginia
Woolf. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would
teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately,
none of those happen to be Chinese, or women . . . usually at
the beginning of the semester someone asks why there aren’t
any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women
writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down
the hall. What I’m good at is guys . . . very serious
heterosexual guys. Elmore Leonard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov,
Tolstoy. Real guy guys…Henry Miller. Uh. Philip Roth.
In
uttering so insensitive and inexpiable a preference, he drew
down upon his weary, tousled head the unrelenting fire of the
professoriate, administrators and students, both women and men,
the former the shrieking viragos of Canlit and the latter those
blenny-mouthed pram-pushers terrified of violating the feminist
and multicultural bromides of the day. For it is not only a
frenzied band of women who are primed to join the bacchanal
and tear Gilmour limb from limb, the Pentheus of Victoria College
— feminists like Gillian Jerome, chair of Canadian Women
in the Literary Arts (CWILA), for whom Gilmour is proof that
“we live in a deeply sexist and racist culture”;
Angela Esterhammer, president of Victoria College, who regrets
Gilmour’s having “expressed his views about teaching
in a careless and offensive manner”; student activist
Miriam Novick, who declared “we want to make sure the
rest of the university community and the public at large knows
that Gilmour is not representative of our institution or of
the academy, and to encourage Victoria College to seriously
reconsider his continued employment”; and author Anne
Thériault who, according to the report in the Toronto
Star, won’t be letting pass “this kind of blatant
sexism.”
Gilmour’s
U of T male colleagues are equally busy justifying their feminist
and multiculti credentials at his expense. For example, Paul
Stevens, head of the English Department, is “appalled
and deeply upset,” poor fellow, and “will be pursuing
the matter further today.” Nick Mount, the associate chair
of the Department of English, deplores what he sees as false
advertising in Gilmour’s syllabus, since it features only
“dead white guys.” (Pace Philip Roth.) Professor
Holger Syme, for his part, lets it be known that Gilmour is
short of empathy and “does not talk or think like a professor
of literature.” He continues in his blog posting: “So
that’s all a curdled mess of intellectual mediocrity.
… He sounds staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial to
me . . . Gilmour is not a professor of literature. He’s
someone who teaches a couple of courses on an odd assemblage
of texts . . . David Gilmour is not my colleague.”
What
was Gilmour thinking? Did he not realize he had bedded down
in a nest of vipers? According to National Post columnist
Barbara Kay, he was likely just being mischievous, indulging
a “need to épater la bourgeoisie.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps he was merely caught in an off-guard moment,
insouciantly unaware that he was about to usher in the Rapture.
He should have known better.
Globe
and Mail columnist Margaret Wente justly points out, “As
anyone who’s set foot on campus in the past 30 years ought
to know, courses in guy-guy writers are vastly outnumbered by
courses in women writers, queer writers, black writers, colonial
writers, postcolonial writers, Canadian writers, indigenous
writers, Caribbean, African, Asian and South Asian writers,
and various sub-and sub-subsets of the above. But if you’re
interested in Hemingway, good luck. No wonder male students
are all but extinct in the humanities.” She concludes:
“Only in the hothouse atmosphere of the academy would
such opinions be regarded as incendiary, or even controversial.”
In
the same vein, Freedom Press editor Janice Fiamengo mourns the
“vastly diminished moral and mental stature” of
our current crop of academics, “fussing in chorus about
‘diversity’ . . . and exhibiting in their own remarks
no significant diversity at all.” If the multicultural
agenda were true to its lights, one might think, it would permit
the occasional exemplar of the patriarchy to be included in
the curriculum. And one would be tempted to applaud Gilmour
for his courage and his resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy,
however unreflected his remarks may have been.
Such,
alas, is not the case. Gilmour is a typical Canadian and as
much a part of the ideological consensus as his sanctimonious
detractors, judging from his response to the barrage of regimental
pieties to which he was subject. For the Canlit icon cum aspiring
academic is in full apology mode:
I
understand what it’s like to be offended when you read
something, and to those people I’m absolutely sorry .
. . I have one specialty that I’m quite good at and that’s
teaching men writers. And that’s all I mean . . . To suggest
for a second that women writers are in any way inferior, or
French writers are, is just lunacy and I never would have dreamt
of saying that.
Gilmour
resembles those American politicians caught in extramarital
affairs who don’t have the cojones to stand by their freely
chosen misdemeanors. Tearful confessions of wrongdoing, orgies
of self-flagellation, and saccharine promises to reform are
neither as believable nor commendable as an impenitent sticking
to one’s guns or a Gallic Je m’en fous.
Gilmour should have shown himself to be as much a ‘guy
guy’ as the writers he professes to teach, rebuffing the
puritan rectitude and unctuous gloating of his inquisitors.
I can’t see Hemingway or Tolstoy prostrating themselves
before a furious klatch of harridans and their male janissaries.
Surely no upstanding member of the testosterone patriarchy,
so to speak, would backtrack, genuflect and go limp before a
howling pack of pseudo-maenads and their indignant but sheepish
praetorians trailing along in obsequious conformity.
Don’t
apologize, dude. Be a guy guy. But then, admittedly, it takes
chutzpah, genuine conviction, and intellectual muscle to be
a guy guy in a domain ruled by self-righteous prigs and pathetic
fellow-travelers of either gender.
YOUR COMMENTS
Comments
user-submission@feedback.com
Gilmour should not apologise -- he did not say women writers
were no good, simply that he did not love their work. As a Professor
of English, I teach what I love, too, and academic freedom says
that I can. I don't like Hemingway, so I don't teach him. Many
years ago I made a resolution not to genderise my courses, but
to teach what I loved and/or at least considered good literature.
In my case it did include Woolf, Aphra Behn and many other women,
but that was my choice, note a result of pressure. Given what's
happening to Professor Gilmour, I'm glad to be retiring after
this year.
|
| |
|
|
![Canadian Tire Repair Scam [2211 boul Roland-Therrien, Longueuil] = documents-proofs](../2010_v9_n5/./images/mapleleaf.jpg)
