But about the programming: At a party last year the writer M. T. Kelly was complaining to me about a friend of his, a professor of ancient Greek literature, who claimed kids today are unreachable. M. T. argued that there are parallel heroic themes between the Homeric narrative – of Achilles on the blood-boltered plains of Troy – and the lyrics of the gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, gunned down a few years ago in the streets of Las Vegas. So we took him up on it, videotaping him on a brutal literary tear both in the Royal Ontario Museum and the grafitied alleys of downtown Toronto, and then putting the argument together in the form of a scratch music video.

The problem with this outlaw approach to books is that the serious book-set tend to sniff at such lowbrow material. Readers are just as tribal as pop fans, and though you’d think twenty-four hours a day was enough time for everyone, it always seems that Mrs. Teakettle from Flin Flon is tuning in during the musical Marquis de Sade revival hour, and the punks you promised some serious action always find Bonnie Burnard.

In time, there will be a show for everyone. The natural progression of narrowcast TV with its specialty channels heralds the end of the one-size-fits-all book show. At TVOntario I experimented with this as well, creating a show about SF, comix, and graphic novels called Prisoners of Gravity that took the form of an extraterrestrial rogue veejay broadcast. At BookTelevision right now we are developing a show called The Biz, about business writing in books, magazines, and newspapers, as well as an erotica show called Lust. There’s no reason why one day we shan’t have a show specifically for mystery lovers too, for philosophers, for émigrés of war-torn countries.

But meanwhile, if there is to be a show for followers of Derrida or Chomsky or Amiri Baraka, I need your help. Over the years I’ve been, shall we say, impressed by the anger and determination worked up on campuses across the continent over the political ideas contained in literature. At Lakehead University in Thunder Bay one year, before a colloquium of Student Council Presidents, I remember attempting a critique of the word “Holocaust” as it had been used by protestors outside the Royal Ontario Museum’s “Out of Africa” exhibit. To say “African Holocaust,” I argued, was appropriation of voice, for the word derives from the ancient Greek meaning “to be burnt whole,” was formerly used to describe a sacrifice by fire on the altar in Jewish religious practise, and was clearly associated with the agonies of Jews cremated at Auschwitz. For descendants of slaves to convey the agonies of their forbears, and not to invite suspicions of anti-Semitism and competitive suffering, I requested an original and possibly more accurate term be used. One student barked out, “Asshole!” Another demanded to know what right I had to be on stage with a microphone, and was not dissuaded when I replied that the Council of Students had invited me. A third lectured me with ferocious condescension about the “witches” who’d been burned in the sixteenth century – a holocaust, in other words, for feminists. Without a doubt I was perceived as a member of the exclusive white male club, evidently of inherited wealth, power, and influence. But I was appalled at how these little ideologues, so attuned to the plights of Western society’s underdogs, to “otherness,” could be so insensitive to anyone but themselves and their adopted cause. To be fair, they’d all grown up in an era of inaccessible, big corporate TV that never asked them for their opinions. But not one person thought to approach me with ideas for any TV of their own.