John McKnight: Community and Counterfeits Part Three
George Grant: The Moving Image of Eternity
For me, as for many of my contemporaries, Canadian philosopher George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965) was a crucial book. Ostensibly a lamentation over something finally and definitively lost - an independent Canada - the book paradoxically inspired nationalism and patriotism in a younger generation who came to see Canada with new eyes in the light of Grant's book. I continued to read Grant avidly after discovering Lament for a Nation, and many years later, in 1984, I found an opportunity to interview him for a series I was then preparing on the Loyalist roots of Canadian political culture. (Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism, Ideas, 1984) We got on, and I found him open to the idea I quickly proposed of a series devoted to his work. In 1985, along with recording engineer Rod Sneddon, I spent several invigorating days in conversation with him in his living room at 1622 Walnut St. in Halifax. Grant was expansive and spoke freely, sometimes dealing with subjects he had never treated in writing. I shaped three programmes from our edited conversations and presented them on Ideas early in 1986. A letter from Grant written later that year praising the "care and lucidity" with which I had "enucleated" his thought - a very characteristic word - remains a treasure. He died two years later. In 1995 a transcription of the entire interview was published by House of Anansi as George Grant in Conversation and remains available.
A friend remarked to me the other day that Grant is now nearly forgotten among the younger generations of Canadians. His appearance here is not likely to change that fate. but perhaps a few will respond to the continuing power of his witness. Grant wrote powerfully, if sometimes reluctantly, but speech was his glory, and I'm happy to to be able to present him here in full rhetorical flight...
George Grant: The Moving Image of Eternity Part Two
George Grant: The Moving Image of Eternity Part Three
William Blake: Prophet of a New Age
Like many another poetry-loving boy I grew up knowing and reciting the lyrics of William Blake. But it was only much later, during the 1980's, that I ventured into Blake's longer and more involved prophetic poems. One of my guides was the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, whose Fearful Symmetry (1947) was one of the first books to appreciate the scale and the reach of Blake's poetic achievement. Another was the English poet Kathleen Raine in books like Blake and the New Age, from which I would draw my title, and the two volumes of Blake and Tradition. By 1987 I felt ready to share my discoveries, and, happily, both Frye and Raine, along with a number of other Blake scholars were willing to take part. Barry Macgregor read from Blake's work, and Lister Sinclair, who introduces the proceedings, also helped to choose the incidental music. Here are the three programmes that resulted...
William Blake: Prophet of a New Age Part Two
William Blake: Prophet of a New Age Part Three
Crime Control As Industry
Late in 1992, at the recommendation of Ivan Illich, I travelled north on the overnight train from Hamburg to Oslo to meet an old friend of Illich's, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. Through books like Limits to Pain, Christie had helped to create the climate in which prison rates in industrialized countries had consistently fallen between the 1950's and the 1980's. Then the rates made a U-turn and began to rise, in some cases catastrophically. Christie soon realized just how convenient these rising rates of imprisonment were for the new neo-liberal political regimes that were then emerging and consolidating themselves. He perceived the prison boom as an acute political emergency and, when I arrived in Oslo, he was about to publish a book called Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style? (In later editions of the book, the question mark disappeared.) We spent parts of several days in recorded conversation, not just about the new prison economy, but also about the origin and development of his approach to criminology and community. As it turned out, our collaboration would continue through several more Ideas series in the 90's and eventually result in my publishing a book of my own called The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (House of Anansi, 1998.) This joint undertaking began with these three broadcasts in March of 1993...