Manifesto | Thierry Chervel
http://www.signandsight.com/service/28.html
“No one in the French media reads the German papers thoroughly, and no scouts are keeping track of cultural trends in Germany. […] Is there a Europe beyond the milk quotas? If so, then only in the form of an angel passing, creating a pause in the conversation, a gap in communication. […] When Jürgen Habermas launched his ‘Core Europe’ initiative, no one joined the debate. Who outside the Netherlands had heard of Theo van Gogh before he was murdered? And when everybody in Paris was celebrating the 60th anniversary of the city’s liberation in August last year, no one was aware of what was happening in Warsaw at the same time. While a few streets in Paris were being named after members of the communist resistance, whose valour is indisputable, Warsaw was fixated on the enduring memory of Stalin’s icy smile as he watched Hitler bomb the Polish resistance into the ground. The end of liberation. The ignorance is greatest in large Western European countries where public debate is little more than self-contented thumb twiddling. Talk is of national issues – political leaders, late night comedy stars and football scandals. The intellectuals might as well be sitting in the cinema, all staring spellbound in the same direction, ignoring their neighbours and gasping in outrage at the latest evil deed of bad boy Bush. […] Is it really the fault of Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg that the French are learning less German, and the Germans less French?”

Lowbrow Lit | Stephen Osborne
http://www.geist.com/notes/issue.php?id=55
“To the generation of writers and publishers who came of age during the counterculture; that is, to me and my friends in the Marble Arch beer parlour, these writers and their works were as goofy as Sergeant Preston of the Royal Mounted. We were readers of Howl and On the Road, by Ginsberg and Kerouac, and La Nausee, by Sartre. Our professors had been British academics who detested Canadian writing, and Americans brought in to replace them who had never heard of Canadian writing; during that period of the sixties and seventies a caste system came into Canadian intellectual life as the expanding universities grew to become the primary site of literary criticism and ‘creative’ writing, with the result that the journalists, the homemade poets, the homegrown novelists who had presumed to rough out a literature, were pushed into the echelons of the lowbrow, the overlooked, the un-Literary (which became also the world of Stan Rogers, whose profoundly un-hip music and lyrics address the same lowbrow mythos, and whose continuing exclusion from the Canadian Music Hall of Fame is another example of the caste system at work).”