The CN Tower will always be our home
- Owen Pallet (Final Fantasy)
The jist of my undergrad thesis was that writers put pen to paper in order to share some profound feeling wrenched from a dark corner of their mind, in order to establish a feeling of human connection through these living ideas in those who read their words. And that’s just what makes reading so appealing isn’t it? a feeling of personal familiarity with the situations and sentiments that play out in a great novel. The great thing is, I have no real concept of what Russia was like in the mid 19th century, but reading about Raskolnikov’s struggles morality in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, I feel like I'm right there walking the streets of St. Petersburg, sulking on bridges and visiting overcrowded slums. This is why I always avoided history classes at university, I could never find a satisfying point of reference; I always preferred the literature of the time to the actuality (or whatever approximation history books produce). In addition to Russian literature my passions happen include music, comic books and the city of Toronto where I live. And there is one thing I discovered a couple years ago that combines all of these things (save Russian literature): Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. The problem with these books is that they take me to a place that is oddly familiar, a parody of my life, if you will. You see, there’s my Toronto, and then there’s Scott Pilgrim’s Toronto, and as opposed to 19th century Russia, which lies off to the side from my world, at a different depth, crooked and askew, Scott Pilgrim’s world feels as though it is layered carefully on top of mine- and that’s an unsettling feeling. The characters frequent the same bars as me, engage in the same brand of distinctly obscure self-aware Canadian humour and have the same ambitions and problems as me. And so I found myself in a trance staring out the second floor windows of Sneaky Dee’s last night and again, hungover, riding my bike up Christie past Dupont this morning, transported, of no will of my own to this place where everything follows a zany, clever, heartwarming pattern, where everything is quirkily oddball awesome and Toronto and I are at the center of a story with an unclear but highly anticipated ending.
