Toronto can’t be a great literary city….

… according to Geoff Pevere, revealing the old Toronto-New York penis envy writing in the Toronto Star.

Of course, all kinds of places aren’t great literary cities; the list includes Wingham, Ontario, Great Falls, Montana, and Kidderminster, West Midlands. The desire to inhabit a great literary city belongs to people greatly enamored of their own navels.

And I was concerned, at first, that Pevere was going to tell me that the problem is that Toronto doesn’t spend enough time contemplating its own navel, which would be so obviously false as to set me off on another long, ill-tempered rant and further cement my reputation as Internet crank.

But no: the problem is that Toronto is too busy contemplating the present state of its navel to consider the history of its navel, and thus has no shared vision of the future of its navel.

That sounds plausible.