Jon Thomas Rowland

I did my B.A. and M.A. at the University of Toronto, my Ph.D. at the University of Montreal (1991). My works include FAINT PRAISE AND CIVIL LEER (originally my Ph.D. thesis), SWORDS IN MYRTLE DRESS'D, PIONEERS OF ALIENATION AND 50s SCI-FI AT THING STREET ASYLUM, THE SUPPORT WORKER OF EMILE DURKHEIM HOUSE, and TROPING THE ASYLUM.

I have lived for many years in Toronto, in an inner city neighborhood called Parkdale. The experiences this affords have been my inspiration. Other influences are the satirists I studied (principally Swift and Marvell) and the satirists I read for pleasure (mainly Celine). There is other information about me on-line, from Gale Research.

PIONEERS OF ALIENATION AND 50s SCI-FI AT THING STREET ASYLUM is a kind of satirical anatomy attempting completeness through many kinds and modes of writing: autobiography (though told in the 3rd person), essay, epistle, history, case history, play, poem, lyric, epic, documentary, history, parody, etc....

While the work has a degree of narrative, this is tongue-in-cheek or obviously implausible, as characters tend to be the loosely-defined straw men and women of satire, reoccurring under the same generic names: Trixie, Bruce, Butch, Max the Butcher, etc....

The most typical narrative naturally occurs in the first volume (Shopping the Titanic), because of its association with the past. Narrative elements are also provided by Johnny's struggles with the Asylum and the Asylum authorities (in many ways a continuation of his struggles with the University), the transformation of the historical asylum into the virtual asylum of the inner city, and conclude with the seizure of his book by the cartel of Praetorius (an Asylum Doctor), and Finkelburgher (a University Official - an Editor).

However these narrative elements compete with the centrifugal pull of the book towards bitter fragments, with the episodic explosive effect of 18th-century couplets. These pieces provide a kind of unity through clustering around themes, through opposition and contrast, and through the prose equivalent of visual rhyming.

Unity is also provided through numerous motifs, and perhaps one central motif - the turbine that produced the world now in its decadence, the alienating inner city littoral on which all our detritus washes up before drifting into farther oblivion, where Johnny sells antiques on Thing Street West, litter to fellow lunatics (you'd literally (or littorally?) be crazy, to buy any of his junk).

The turbine is variously represented as the revolving disk (78s, vinyl recordings, Edison diamond disks, amberols), the swimming fish (the coelacanth), the steam engine, the subway turn-stile, the plant of a great hotel/asylum/steamship, Niagara Falls, power plants, f---ing, the flailing palm of masturbation, the whirl-wind of an explosion, the mushroom cloud of the nuclear holocaust, even the anti-social "centrifugal" drawings on a Tavern wall....

In the late world of Pioneers that turbine is either going dry or getting plugged up with offal (things). Its repetitive motion is futile and meaningless. The materials it drives and that drive it, become totally exhausted or overabundant to the point of surfeit. Either nothing is between the fins, or everything, with the same result. The turbine seizes or blows apart (like the explosion that ends the novel).

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Some (more) random thoughts....

Why PARKDALE novel? With its episodic, tessellated structure verging on incoherence, maybe it should be SCHIZOPHRENIC novel. Then, with apology to the PARKDALE BIA, maybe the terms are nearly synonymous.

Parkdale is a neighborhood that has been verging upon and sporadically merging with incoherence for over a century, and before there even was an official Parkdale there was a Toronto Asylum, whose inmates were arguably the first Parkdalians or Ur-Parkdalians.

The history of PARKDALE must be BOTH a story of asylum as institution and asylum as shelter. Something similar applies to any history of the Toronto Asylum.

I realized this when working on my initial asylum study, TROPING THE ASYLUM, and decided that I could make a more meaningful work about asylum, by expanding and combining and/or juxtaposing it with modern, subjective material. Some of the latter came from painful experiences working in City Shelters and a Parkdale Group Home. Some of this material was published separately as a more or less documentary novella, THE SUPPORT WORKER OF EMILE DURKHEIM HOUSE.

The latter is an especially prevalent and back-handed form of shelter in Parkdale, deinstitutionalization plus gentrification etc., a largely disastrous reversal of the historical processes that created Asylums in the first place. The last part of Pioneers depicts some of this process, which has only been accelerated by the modern day CAMH, with the nearly total disappearance of the old Queen Street institution and its replacement by the virtual asylum of psycho-pharmacology.

Virtual asylums, that is, of alienation - not unlike the old-fashioned cells and sometimes identical. The former superintendent of my current Welfare Hotel - Asylum - was a jailbird and a client; he said being in his so-called apartment in Parkdale was just like being in stir. I rented it after him. He committed suicide last year.

PARKDALE is more schizophrenic than ever, and despite its many supports and services, very alienating. It is one neighborhood where death still has an odor, since many people here live in such isolation that they die alone, their death only noticed by the smell.

PIONEERS, spanning some 150 years, including most of its writer's life, is also more schizophrenic than ever. Amy Greenwood was not off the mark when she observed of some material that eventually found its way into the book, that the author writes like a schizophrenic: "Rowland's deviation from the typical linear narrative structure is reminiscent of the unpredictable, volatile behaviour of a patient suffering with schizophrenia and the reader never really knows what each block of text will reveal," BROKEN PENCIL 41, p. 40. Well, he's lived a schizophrenic life.

It's no accident that this is more book review than biography, since the book is the life (to paraphrase a character in DRACULA). One of the epitaphs, "A Mind that Lost Itself," a sneer at Clifford Beers, is also, probably, literally THE CASE....

P.S. A "thing" was what a grave-robber stole.