11th Canadian Challenge - 10th review - Moral Disorder

I have to assume that Atwood's Moral Disorder and Other Stories was inspired by Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women.  Both are collections of short stories about a single female character (Nell in the case of Moral Disorder) and their immediate families.  However, the connection might actually be closer to Who Do You Think You Are? (also all about one girl -- and her fraught relationship with her step-mother), in the sense that the scrambled chronology allows the authors to move back and forth in time, and in particular showing how the main character must deal with aging parent(s).  One thing that is odd is about half the stories in Moral Disorder are written in first-person perspective and half in third-person. 

I would say that on the whole there is more humour in Moral Disorder, or at least a lighter touch.  That said, there are definitely tense and difficult moments between women, such as when Nell mouths off to her mother (about not wanting to take care of her baby sister) and gets slapped hard or when Oona (Nell's partner's ex-wife) starts making trouble between them.  One thing that I do like about Atwood is that she doesn't sugar-coat the fact that women can be terrible to each other (not that I think the moments I have referenced really rise to that level).  This is a bit of a recurring theme of Lady Oracle and Cat's Eye, though Cat's Eye the focus is on younger children behaving badly.  Munro occasionally delves into this (as in Who Do You Think You Are?) but my overall (perhaps unfair) impression of Munro's work is that she sees male-female relationships as inherently more difficult than female-female ones, and I don't think Atwood would agree with that.

The stories are set in Boomer territory, so Nell comes of age in the 1960s, which means that she benefited from women entering the workforce in a wider variety of roles (Nell is a bit of an itinerant academic who does some work as an editor (and ghost writer?) and instructor) but also from living at a time when the workforce did seem wide open and the cost of living was generally low.  Cultural norms were changing as well, and many marriages were foundering on the rocks of free love.  Indeed, Oona and Tig had a bit of an open marriage (despite having two children) but Oona decided she wanted more freedom, and more or less auditioned Nell to take her place (in "Monopoly").  Not that everyone was completely on board with these changes.  Nell's parents disapprove of her living out of wedlock with Tig.  (Indeed, I can't tell if they ever did officially get married, though it seems likely.)

One interesting aspect of Moral Disorder is that Atwood shows how people can change their minds (which happens a great deal in real life but not always in fiction), and Oona comes to feel she got the raw end of the bargain.  While Oona and Nell have long ago stopped talking, Oona uses the children to guilt Nell into buying a house and letting Oona move in as a tenant ("The Entities").  The story actually goes in quite a different direction than I was expecting, given that Nell is too much of a pushover in general.  This tendency to just be too nice is also on display in "The White Horse," where Nell and Tig are living out in the country and doing a pretty poor job of living off the country and taking in animals that are more trouble than they are worth.  I have to admit that I have so little connection to the country that I was somewhat bored by "The White Horse" and "Moral Disorder."  I was very glad when they sold up and moved back to Toronto.

The last two stories basically focus on Nell's aging parents, though in the case of "The Boys at the Lab" it is more of a memory piece where Nell remembers her father and his work as a biologist, living in the woods.  This is of a piece with Cat's Eye, so I suspect Atwood is writing another tribute to her father, though from a different angle.  The focus is on memory and trying to recover what was known as opposed to what was unknowable.  Her mother is generally not able to answer the questions Nell asks, and her father had passed on several years back.  I suppose more than anything it is a reminder that one should ask these questions while members of the older generation still have all their marbles.

The single biggest surprise to me is how small a role Nell's daughter plays in these stories.  She is an adult "busy with her own life, elsewhere" in the first story in the collection "The Bad News."  Then the next 4 stories are mostly about Nell's childhood and very early adulthood, prior to meeting Tig (with some flash-forwards to the present).  The next three are about meeting Tig and moving to the farm.  We find out that Nell wants a baby in "Moral Disorder", and then she is going to have a baby in "The White Horse."  However, unless I have completely blanked on it, there are no scenes of her with her daughter as a baby or a small child.  The next story is all about Oona coming back into Nell and Tig's life, and then the final two stories jump ahead in time to when Nell is dealing with her parents.  So that is a strange absence at the heart of this book.  Aside from a bit too much time spent in the countryside for my taste, this was an interesting book about an unconventional family, living through a period of significant cultural shifts.

The Clinic

I decided that since it had been a full week, and I hadn't been getting any better, I ought to go over to a walk-in clinic.  It's somewhat harder to do this in Toronto than Chicago, where virtually all the Walgreens have a walk-in clinic, but it is doable.  (I wish Shoppers here had clinics, but I think very few of them do.)  Riverdale is fortunate in that there is a clinic (with Sunday hours) on the very edge (Broadview and Danforth).  After that, you either have to go to the Beach or into downtown.  While I had considered going downtown, I really didn't want to travel that far, particularly as I was still kind of tired.

As a side note, I like my neighbourhood quite a bit, particularly as it is the opposite of a food desert.  We have two decent grocery stores, which is much different than the situation on Danforth or Queen (at least in Riverdale/Leslieville).  There is one overpriced grocery store on Danforth and otherwise, you are picking up stuff at the Shoppers.  I am personally a bit disadvantaged in banks, as there is only a CIBC inside Gerrard Square and a RBC nearby, but that's still not too bad.  And Withrow Park is quite cool, particularly the summer programming (and the sledding hill isn't shabby either).  Only recently I read that Gord Downie moved to Carlaw Ave. so that he could play pick-up hockey games on the ice rink in Withrow.  How cool.  Where my neighbourhood really falls down is in its lack of a post office.  It's really odd that there isn't any store in Gerrard Square that has a small post office tucked inside.  If this were Vancouver, there would definitely be a post office nearby, probably in the mall, but for some reason, Canada Post seems to have cut a deal in Ontario that it gives right of first refusal to Shoppers or something.  I mean there are post offices in other stores, but they are mostly in Shoppers.  If you don't believe me, check out this map to see how you are out of luck if you are in the East Side and are living on Dundas or Gerrard or Kingston and need to walk to a post office (and even on Queen there is a really long stretch between post offices).  Ah well, I guess you can't have everything.

But back to the clinic.  I had expected to have to wait for quite a while, given how few Sunday clinics there are (and how cold/flu season is starting to kick in).  I was pleasantly surprised that almost no one else was there, and I was able to see the doctor in less than 15 minutes!  The good news is that I don't have strep throat and I don't have pneumonia (I didn't think I had pneumonia, but I did catch it last in 2007 or 2008, and I probably do need to take the vaccine against it).  The bad news is that he thinks my suppressed immune system let in some other lung infection, so I am on antibiotics for the next 10 days. 

I was able to fill the prescription at the mall (fortunately quite a few pharmacies in Toronto have Sunday hours).  Then I took a nap.  And then I did some laundry and took another nap.  At some point, I decided that this time around, I could skip Toronto Cold Reads, and then I went back to bed, before finally waking up for a very late dinner.  Now I definitely need to go next weekend, as there is another installation of 3Fest (and I believe my 3Fest plays will be Nov. 12, but that hasn't been completely established).  Here's hoping that I will finally have kicked this illness by next weekend.  I can't have every weekend go by where I get so little accomplished.

Seven Siblings at Attic Arts Hub

It was really a bit of a last minute decision, but I ended up suiting up and biking over to Attic Arts Hub.  While I did enjoy myself, I hope that I don't regret it tomorrow in terms of my throat still being sore and not really healing up.

It was definitely a gamble, as the time had passed to get the tickets on Brown Paper Tickets, but I thought there was a chance I could get in.  I'd say my lifetime record for getting into sold out shows (and/or rush tickets) is about 70%.  And it definitely helps that Attic Arts Hub is about a 10 minute bike ride from my place.  If it had been on the west end, I wouldn't even have considered it.

As luck would have it, there were quite a few extra seats tonight for New World.  The last shows of the festival are all tomorrow, and I've heard that quite a few people are going, so it might be tough getting tickets, but here is the link if you want to see what's available for Sunday.  I talked very briefly to the artistic director, mostly to get a sense if they will do this next year (and in which case I will probably submit an extended version of The Re-Up).

I thought the Attic Arts Hub was a decent space, kind of like a loft space, so you couldn't do anything too elaborate in terms of a set, but it was a fairly open space.  Thus I didn't feel claustrophobic or all pressed up next to anyone as at the Assembly Theatre.  I could potentially switch the setting of The Study Group to an attic (rather than a basement) if the guy running the Kensington Market space decides not to renew his lease.  Also, Straying South is all set in a loft, and that could potentially be staged there, so I will consider that more seriously, but really only if I can hook up with a theatre company.  Self-producing is just too much of a gamble these days.

Anyway, on the whole it was worth going out, but now I have to rest up, then see how I feel in the morning.  Being sick sucks...


P.S. Now it appears that I waited too long to get tickets for the Art Bus.  Either it is truly sold out (not very likely) or it is just too late to get tickets through the system.  In this case, though, I think it would be too much of a risk to show up and try to get on the bus.  I will take this as a sign from the universe that I should rest up more, and then in early Nov. I will just rent a car and drive out to Kleinburg (and hopefully the leafs will still be turning their fall colours).  Driving there certainly will give me more control over how long I spend at the McMichael.  All that said, I still hope the Art Bus was enough of a success that they bring it back next summer.

Change of Plans 2

I had really hoped that I would be over this lingering cold/cough/whatever by now.  As usual, I had plenty of plans, starting with taking my daughter to Hoot and Howl, then biking over to Canadian Stage to try to see the matinee of Life After, then picking up my laundry, and the probably seeing the evening performance of one of the Seven Siblings' Future Fest plays.  Then tomorrow I would spend most of the day up at the McMichael Collection.

Well, my daughter was really dragging this morning, so we got to the Hoot and Howl late.  Then she decided midway through that she was having a good time after all (maybe after the candy rush kicked in), so we stayed longer than I expected.

This apple slinky was one of the only healthy options available (though to be fair they had burgers and samosas for sale outside).  But note the candy bracelet in the background...

Still, I'm glad she came around.  This will almost certainly be the last year we go, so it is good to have good memories of it, despite it being quite crowded per usual.  She also made a tie-dye t-shirt, which, assuming it comes out well, will be a more tangible reminder of this fall.

But the bigger issue is that the rain picked up a bit more, and at this point I would have to ride my bike in the rain to Canadian Stage only to find out if I could get one of the last tickets.  I'm pretty sure that would just undo the limited progress I have made to date on getting over this cold.  (In that sense, I was correct that if I was going to go to Life After, I should have gone midweek, but my cold just wouldn't have allowed for that.  Too bad.)

The rain is supposed to stop in a few hours, so I should be able to go get my dry cleaning.  I may also go to the mall to try to fill a prescription.  I have some time still to decide about Seven Siblings, but the theatre isn't too far from my house, so I'll just see how I am feeling in a few more hours.

I am leaning towards heading off to the McMichael tomorrow and taking a lunch and a book, but I haven't entirely decided.  It really depends if it is going to rain or not.  At the moment, the forecast is for overcast skies but no rain.  If that is still the forecast this afternoon, I'll probably order the tickets.  I'm a little concerned that I haven't heard anything about the Toronto Cold Reads line-up for Sunday, but I'll probably go one way or another.

I find it hard, even while a bit sick, to pull back and be reasonable.  Even dropping one event from a fairly packed schedule pains me a bit, but it is definitely worth it if, by not going, I don't let this cold linger on any longer than it already has.  I certainly could use more actual rest, not the "rest" where I end up answering emails and phone calls most of the day (like the last two Fridays where I was officially taking the day off).  I don't know -- maybe one day I will learn to actually rest when I say I need rest...

L'envoi: We stopped over at Hoot and Howl one more time on the way to the mall, since my daughter wanted to see the fire truck pull up.  Also, she scored a hot dog for lunch, so it was a pretty good day for her, despite the iffy weather.

11th Canadian Challenge - 9th review - You Went Away

I hadn't even been aware of this short novel -- You Went Away by Timothy Findley -- until I came across it at a book sale recently.  It seems as if Findley was taking a bit of a breather from the monumental Headhunter, though in fact he also completed The Piano's Man's Daughter prior to You Went Away.

At any rate, the conceit of the novel is that a handful of photos from an old album are on display, and the novel is linking them all together.  As many family members seem to vanish from a number of the photos (without returning later), the overall theme of the book is that loss is inevitable (though some people seem to hasten the inevitable).  Generally, the "going away" in the title refers to someone leaving for another country or dying (the ultimate foreign country, I suppose), though in one case it means someone putting so much emotional distance between another that they become strangers -- and thus are "lost" to each other.

While there are nowhere near as many characters as there are in Headhunter, there are still quite a few to keep track of.  The family at the centre of the novel is comprised of Graeme and Mi, their son, Michael, and daughter, Bonnie.  Graeme's mother, Ellen, is a relatively prominent character at the start of the novel, but less so after Graeme enrolls in the Air Force at the start of WWII.  At first, Graeme goes by himself to Camp Borden (near Barrie, ON) but eventually the family uproots to be near him.  Mi makes friends with the other people at Camp Borden, particularly Ivan, Graeme's roommate, and another couple, Roy and Eloise.  They also get to know the residents of a rooming house where Mi stays (there is no special housing for married men at Camp Borden!).

It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Graeme fails as a father and as a husband, though perhaps somewhat surprising he is a bit more successful as an enlisted man, even if he is a bit too old to be sent to the front (or at least in the early phases of the war).  While the focus is different, there are some echoes of Roy's The Tin Flute, though the war emerges late in that novel, as opposed to right up front in You Went Away.  While the war is only after half over when Findley ends this novel, he still features a number of widows to drive home the costs of war on the home front.  Despite all this suffering, there is one couple who genuinely seem happy and even commit to having a baby (in the face of a world gone mad).  In that sense, this contains just a few more uplifting moments than many of Findley's novels.

Many sections of the novel are told from the perspective of Mi, and the reader can even directly read her inner thoughts.  Findley does just a bit of head-hopping, but the novel doesn't work quite as well when told from Graeme's or Matthew's perspectives.  Fortunately, these forays outside Mi's head are fairly rare.  On the whole this is a fairly melancholy piece, though there are a few flashes of humour or at least dry wit.  One of my favourite passages concerns a nurse who is staying at the rooming house along with Mi: "Just last week, she had come home from the Crazy Wing so tense, she behaved as if someone had handed her the entire war and had said: here -- deal with this."

Overall, I'd say You Went Away is for readers who like sad stories or those who want to immerse themselves in stories about Canada's role in WWII and the impact on the home front.  And of course readers who want to savour all of Findley's novels and short stories.

The Chance at Assembly Theatre

I'll keep this fairly short, as I am fairly tired.  I'm back from seeing The Chance at Assembly Theatre, which was another Toronto world premiere of a George F. Walker play.  I think the review in The Star is spot on.  There is a lot to like about this play, particularly the interactions of the three female actors, but the ending is pretty nonsensical.  I think Walker should have been challenged to come up with a slightly more realistic way out of the jam (or rather I didn't mind how the first part of the climax unfolded, but not the change of heart that allows the second part to play out).  At this point, if you don't have tickets, you probably are not going to be able to see the show.  Even after adding two more shows, they are technically sold out (glad I got mine a while ago), but they probably can get some people in off the wait list.  They probably could have squeezed two or three more bodies last night.

I know just how difficult it is to find space to put on indy theatre in Toronto, but I am not a fan of this new space -- the Assembly Theatre.  As at The Red Sandcastle, Coal Mine and The Box, the restrooms are inside the theatre space itself (actually on the far side of the stage), so you can't go until the house opens.  Unlike these other theatres, they seemed to keep the house closed until very close to show time.  That just causes all kinds of back-ups.  In addition, the seats are small and too close together.  I found myself pressing up my seat neighbour quite a bit (and on my other side was a pillar).  And there is only a single aisle on the far left, so going to the washroom was an obstacle course!  Fortunately, the play was just an hour, so I didn't bother hitting the washroom, and I was able to keep my cough more or less under control.

Still, this is actually a worse layout than Red Sandcastle, Coal Mine or The Box.  And while it wasn't their fault, the TTC service was really bad last night (including even more diversions of the Queen streetcar down to King and back) and I got to the theatre just before the house opened, so I was stressed and had no time to find anything to eat.  So I wouldn't say I would never go back to a production at Assembly Theatre, but it will have to be a very special event or some play that I am just dying to see.

Low-key weekend

In the end, I didn't do a whole lot over the weekend.  I largely read and listened to music (especially The Tragically Hip) on Sat., but I was up and mobile Sunday, so I suppose that's a good thing.  If anything my cough has gotten worse since Sunday, however, and I definitely need to track down some better cough drops.

Anyway, on Sunday I did a short grocery shopping trip, then I took my daughter to Value Village down on Queen to get the last parts of her costume.  And I put up the outdoor decorations, such as they are.

As you can see, we keep it pretty minimal.

It was nice to see the leaves changing.  I took a few photos on the way back from Queen St.  I still haven't decided about the art bus to the McMichael next Sunday, though I am sure it is quite pretty up in Kleinburg.  I'd say right now I am leaning against, but it really depends how I feel towards the end of the week (and also what I decide about seeing theatre and/or Blade Runner).

I did manage to get to the Toronto Cold Reads Sunday evening.  It was a lot of fun, though I was disappointed that only 2 of the 5 playwrights made it out.  I was particularly hoping to meet Anita Majumdar.

Anyway, in the short time before the run-through started (I was doing stage directions for a short piece about frogs in a polluted pond), I decided I wanted to set aside my parody/homage to Waiting for Godot, since if I send it anywhere it will be to SFYS for the December event.  So I started working on the final scene of Straying South.  I didn't get all that far (only about a page and a half), but it was enough for me to think that this is the next project I should return to.

I spent a bit more time Sunday and then Monday trying to track down the first two sections, since I decided with a bit of polishing and trimming, they could go to Toronto Cold Reads, but I couldn't find them anywhere!  I was getting kind of stressed about these missing scenes, since I was absolutely sure I had typed them out.  I finally found them, saved only onto one USB flash drive!  Anyway, after I found them (and breathed a big sigh of relief), I copied the material into a few other locations for safe-keeping.   I'd say I am actually fairly close to 45% done with the first draft of this play, so it isn't that outrageous to think if I focus, I can be done with it by December.  Not to say that there won't be plenty of other distractions.  Anyway, I should probably see if I can get a bit more sleep tonight...

Fitzgerald - all the stories

Apparently, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote something like 160 stories over his career.  For almost everyone except the fanatics, the short story collection edited by Bruccoli in 1989 (just called The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald) will do.  It collects 43 of the best of them, about half the well known stories from the 4 story collections Fitzgerald published during his lifetime and the rest collected from various magazines.  However, this blog is mostly about delving deep and catering to fanatics, so I will try to pull together what I have learned to date.

The core story collections are
Flappers and Philosophers (1921)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Taps at Reveille (1935)

Note that the first two are out of copyright in the U.S. and thus are on the Project Gutenberg site.  They are also part of the LOA Fitzgerald collection.  That said, the Cambridge editions of these collections are quite nice, as they include additional Fitzgerald stories published around the same time.  (I'm fortunate that Robarts has the full set.)

Cambridge also put out a volume called The Lost Decade, which collected stories from 1934-41 that were published in Esquire.  I'm not sure if this included the entire run of the The Pat Hobby Stories or not.  There is a thin stand-alone book of these stories, and that is more likely to be in a general library.  Similarly, The Basil and Josephine Stories was also published as a stand-alone collection.  There are a few posthumous collections, focusing on unpublished stories, most notably Afternoon of an Author (1957) and Bits of Paradise (1974).  I might go ahead and order Bits of Paradise, but Afternoon of an Author will probably just be borrowed from the library.

Then we have The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories (1979).  Note that Bruccoli was the editor of this effort as well, and a few of these uncollected stories made their way into his 1989 collection.  This is available as a two volume set from the UK, and that was tempting, but I ultimately bought a used copy of the hardback with all 50 stories (for $1 plus shipping!).  Incidentally nearly all of Fitzgerald's work is out of copyright in Australia, so take a look at http://www.gutenberg.net.au to see if a particular story of interest is on-line.

While this isn't really about short stories, I was intrigued to learn that there are two versions of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald's last completed novel.  The vast majority of printed books are based on the 1934 version, which was serialized in Scribner's Magazine.  It wasn't a roaring success, however, as the Depression was at its heights, and the novel seemed to be too much of a throwback to the Roaring 20s.  Fitzgerald considered rearranging the novel and rewriting sections.  After Fitzgerald's death, Malcolm Cowley finished this effort and the new version was published in 1953.   A decent academic library will probably have this version, though I am not sure how likely I am to read both.  I'm much more likely to stick with the original.

Finally, in terms of breaking Fitzgerald news, there is a new (2017) collection of truly unpublished stories -- I'd Die For You, And Other Lost Stories.  Note that the other collections drew together stories that had been published in magazines but previously uncollected.  Most of these unpublished stories had been rejected because they were too dark, and Fitzgerald didn't want to revise them.  One of them (The IOU) apparently was set aside because the magazine requested some edits, but Fitzgerald was deep into writing The Great Gatsby and never got back around to it.  The New Yorker was recently able to publish it in its original form.

I don't know if reading every one of these books will actually get you to 160 (or more) stories, but it must be fairly close.  I'm not sure I will get through all of them myself, but I suppose it is something to aim for.  I'm fairly interested in I'd Die For You, so I have requested that from the library.

Edit (11/6): I'm sorry to report back that I'd Die For You, And Other Lost Stories is incredibly weak with perhaps 3 passable stories and a bunch that are very poor indeed.  I honestly wouldn't waste your time.

Reliving the 80s- Psychedelic Furs Tour

I mentioned a couple of times that the Psychedelic Furs were coming to town.  We saw them in a sold out show at Danforth Music Hall.

We got there around 8:15, about halfway through the opening act Bash & Pop (apparently this is a project by the bassist from The Replacements).  It was very loud and not very interesting, so we just hung out in the lobby.  It definitely seemed like something was off with the band, and they ended at 8:30, which is extremely short for an opening act.

At that point we went in and got our seats (we were upstairs with the rest of the "old" people).  My seat was actually quite wet (probably from spilled beer), and I complained about it.  At the very least, I wanted a towel or something to sit on, but they actually got us new seats closer to the front of the balcony, so that worked out reasonably well (though I still had to wash my jeans when we got home...).

I was hoping they would move up the set by a few minutes, but no such luck.  In any case, the show kicked off with "Dumb Waiters" and the fourth song in was "Pretty in Pink," so obviously they weren't going to be playing it coy.  This was a tour that was all about the hits from the 80s.  Indeed, the setlist seems to be pretty much identical at all the venues, though Boston got a shortened version for some reason.

I actually had seen them once before in New York in 2001, and I can't really recall the show, though I'm sure they were mostly playing the hits (and the singer had a purple boa or something that he kept flinging around).

I realized that I basically only know the Furs songs from the compilation All of This and Nothing, which came out in 1988.  In addition to not having anything from their final 2 CDs, it doesn't have "Mr. Jones" on it.  So I simply wasn't aware of some of the songs they sang.  I thought "Mr. Jones" was pretty good.  I think my favorite song from the "newer" albums was "Until She Comes."

Probably the single best performance of the night was "The Ghost in You."

Here is the first encore: Sister Europe followed by India.  Incidentally it was shot much closer to where we were sitting.

I thought that they had put on a great show, but was just a bit bummed that they hadn't done "President Gas."  Just as I was mentioning this to my wife, they ran back on stage for the second encore and belted it out.  So far no one has posted a clip of this, but if it goes up, I'll add that to indicate how the night ended.

Actually, I have found one with terrible video but the audio isn't too bad.

As a side note, throughout their early career, the Furs could play this song knowing that there was a fairly lousy Republican President in the White House.  Then when I saw them in 2001, it was W. (who while not a windbag was a terrible President).  And of course now Trump who wins worst President hands down.
So sad...

Short Story Extravaganza

I've been thinking of pulling together a post like this for some time, where I keep track of the various short story collections I intend to read (or have recently read), thus I am not going to list Donald Barthelme or Raymond Carver as I read those all years ago (or straying further afield Kafka or Borges or Garcia Marquez).  I usually sprinkle a few story collections in with all the other novels on my reading list, though I still favor novels. At some point in the relatively near future (2019?), I may set aside a long stretch of time to go through a bunch of story collections.  Clearly, there are a lot that I would like to go through!

Kinglsey Amis
    Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

Margaret Atwood
    Dancing Girls (1977)
    Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
    Wilderness Tips (1991)
    Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)
    Moral Disorder (2006)
    Stone Mattress (2014)

James Baldwin

    Going to Meet the Man

Honore de Balzac
    The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (NYRB)

Ann Beattie
    Park City: New and Selected Stories

Neil Bissoondath
    Digging Up Mountains (1987)
    On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1991)

Elizabeth Bowen
    Joining Charles and Other Stories (1929)
    The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934)
    Look At All Those Roses (1941)
    The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)
    A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (1965)
    (All included in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen)
    The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008)

Jane Bowles
     Stories collected in either Collected Writings (LOA) or My Sister's Hand in Mine

Paul Bowles
    The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950)
    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962)
    The Time of Friendship (1967)
    In the Red Room (1981)
    Points in Time (1982)
    Midnight Mass (1985)
    (In Collected Stories and Later Writings (LOA))

T.C. Boyle
    Descent of Man (1979)
    Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
    If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
    Without a Hero (1994)
    (included in Stories)
    After The Plague (2001)
    Tooth and Claw (2005)
    Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)
    (included in Stories II)
    The Relive Box & Other Stories (2017)

Angela Carter
    Fireworks (1974)
    The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)
    Black Venus (1985)
    American Ghosts (1993)
    (All gathered in Burning Your Boats)

Isek Dinesen
    Seven Gothic Tales (1934)
    Winter's Tales (1942)
    Last Tales (1957)
    Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) (including Babette's Feast)

Deborah Eisenberg
    Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986)
    Under the 82nd Airborne (1992)
    (both collected in The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg)
    All Around Atlantis (1997)
    Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)
    (all 4 collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg)

John Fante
    The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories (including all of Dago Red)
    The Big Hunger: Stories 1932-1959

William Faulkner
     Collected Stories
     Uncollected Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald
     Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Bruccoli)
     (I will write separately on Fitzgerald, but this is a fine place to start)

Ellen Gilchrist
    Collected Stories (2001)

Ernest Hemingway
    Complete Short Stories (Finca Vigia Edition)

Nagai Kafu
    American Stories

Yasunari Kawabata
    Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Jhumpa Lahiri
    Unaccustomed Earth (2008)

Dorris Lessing
    The Habit of Loving (1957)
    A Man and Two Women (1963)
    African Stories (1964)
    Winter in July (1966)
    The Black Madonna (1966)
    The Story of a Non-Marrying Man/The Temptation of Jack Orkney (1972)
    (Essentially all are in Stories or African Stories) 

Clarice Lispector
    Complete Short Stories

Bernard Malamud
    The Magic Barrel (1958)
    Idiots First (1963)
    Rembrandt's Hat (1974)
    (The Complete Stories (1997) also includes Pictures of Fidelman (1969) and various uncollected stories but not the unfinished novel The People)

Guy de Maupassant
    Selected Short Stories (Penguin)

Alice Munro
    Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
    Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
    Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
    Who Do You Think You Are?  aka The Beggar Maid (1978)
    The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
    The Progress of Love (1986)
    Friend of My Youth (1990)
    Open Secrets (1994)
    The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)
    Runaway (2004)
    The View from Castle Rock (2006)
    Too Much Happiness (2009)
    Dear Life (2012)

R.K. Narayan
    There is so much overlap with Narayan's various collections that it is a chore to keep it straight.
    Probably the best approach is to read Malgudi Days (1982) ✓, Under the Banyan Tree (1985) ✓ and The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993).  But that still leaves a handful of stories such as "A Night of Cyclone" and "The Performing Child" and perhaps a few others to track down.

Edna O'Brien
    The Love Object and Other Stories (1968)
    A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974)
    Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978)
    Returning (1982)
    A Fanatic Heart (1985)
    Lantern Slides (1990)
    Saints and Sinners (2011)

Silvina Ocampo
    Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories

Flannery O'Connor
    A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)
    Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

John O'Hara
    Sermons and Soda Water: A Trilogy of Three Novellas (1960)
    The Hat on the Bed (1963)
    The Horse Knows the Way (1964)
    Waiting for Winter (1966)
    The Time Element and Other Stories (1972)
    Good Samaritan and Other Stories (1974)
    (Collected Stories (LOA) contains many but is not in fact "complete")

Katherine Anne Porter
    Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935)
    Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939)
    The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944)
    (included in Collected Stories and Other Writings (LOA))

J.F. Powers
    The Stories of J.F. Powers

Jean Rhys
    The Collected Short Stories

Alexei Sayle
    Barcelona Plates (2000)
    The Dog Catcher (2001)

Carol Shields
    Various Miracles (1985)
    The Orange Fish (1989)
    Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000)

Tess Slesinger
    On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover, and Other Stories

Elizabeth Taylor
    Hester Lilly (1954)
    The Blush and Other Stories (1958)
    A Dedicated Man and Other Stories (1965)
    The Devastating Boys (1972)
    Dangerous Calm (1995)
    (included in Complete Short Stories)

Tatyana Tolstaya
    White Walls: Collected Stories

William Trevor
    The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967)
    The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (1972)
    The Last Lunch of the Season (1973)
    Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975)
    Lovers of their Time (1978)
    Beyond the Pale (1981)
    The News from Ireland and Other Stories (1986)
    Family Sins and Other Stories (1989)
    After Rain (1996)
    Cocktails at Doney's (1996)
    The Hill Bachelors (2000)
    A Bit On the Side (2004)
    Cheating at Canasta (2007)
    (These should all be contained in The Collected Stories and Selected Stories)

Anthony Trollope
    Tales of All Countries (1863)
    Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (1867)
    An Editor's Tales (1870)
    Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices (1882)

John Updike
    The Afterlife
    Licks of Love
    Olinger Stories
    Henry Bech stories
    Collected Stories (2 vol LOA set)

Guy Vanderhaeghe
    Man Descending (1982)
    The Trouble With Heroes (1983) (very sour stories that I didn't care much for)
    Things As They Are? (1992)
    Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (2015)

Evelyn Waugh
    Complete Short Stories

Eudora Welty
    A Curtain of Green (1941)
    The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943)
    The Golden Apples (1949)
    The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)   
    (in The Collected Stories (HBJ) or Stories, Essays and Memoirs (LOA))

Joy Williams

    Taking Care (1982)

    Escapes (1990)

    Honored Guest (2004)

    99 Stories of God (2013)    

    The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories (2015)

    Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (2024)

Edit (Jan 2023)

I'm not sure why I didn't add Katherine Mansfield to the list.  

Katherine Mansfield

    In a German Pension (1911)
    Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
    The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) 
    The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (1923) 
    Something Childish and Other Stories (1924)

Mansfield is generally considered one of the best short story writers of her generation and one of the first modernist writers.  Indeed, she had a somewhat intense rivalry with Virginia Woolf.  I may at one point have owned a copy of her Collected Stories, but it seems to have vanished.*  I recently picked up an e-book edition of her complete stories (and poetry), but I find I'm still a lot more likely to read deeply in a printed book, so I've ordered the Selected Stories from Oxford, which seems fine aside from not listing the source of the stories in a single location, so you have to go traipsing through the notes at the back.

Edit (Aug 2023) * And then Mansfield's Collected Stories turned up of course...

Change of Plans

What a difference a day makes.  I had been feeling just a bit weary at work (and frankly more than a little fed up with the incompetence I was encountering every day).  Also, I haven't been sleeping well, waking up several times a night.  So I thought I would take it kind of easy and work from home today.

After I made this decision, some low-level cold took over my body, as if I couldn't actually enjoy any time off (or at least the saving of the commute time) and I had to actually be sick.  That said, there was still a lot to do today, so I pressed on and got several things accomplished.  Then around 4, I went to bed and slept until roughly 7.

I had already decided I wasn't going to be able to go to the Seven Siblings' show tonight (and I am still undecided about going at all).  I am definitely not going to take my daughter swimming on Sat.  There is a small chance that I will attempt to take her on Sunday, but that would require a very quick purging of this cold.  I also will not be taking the McMichael art bus.  If I want to take it, it will have to be next Sunday.  It's also extremely unlikely I will see Blade Runner 2049 or Life After this weekend.  I may be able to see the movie next weekend, but if I want to see the musical, it will probably have to be mid-week (and I am already seeing George Walker's The Catch on Thurs.).

The only thing I am likely to do tomorrow is go over the bridge to the mall, pick up some cold medicine (everything in the house is expired) and maybe a burrito from the food court.  I mostly need to rest up, since I am determined to make it to Toronto Cold Reads on Sunday night.

So if you will excuse me, I am off to bed again.

Gord Downie - RIP

As surely everyone in Canada knows by now, Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip has passed away.  Obit here.

I don't have any funny stories of running into him in a ski shop or anything like that.  I do like their work a lot.  I assume I became aware of the group in 1993 or so, when I moved to Toronto, though I think I had heard the name of the band before that (not that they ever got much airplay on US radio).  I definitely picked up Fully Completely then and fell in love with the album.  Over time I picked up all of their music, though curiously one of the last CDs I bought was Day for Night, which quickly became my second favourite album.

I saw them in Chicago in 1995, playing at Metro (they actually had a 3-night stand, but I can't recall which night I saw them).  I didn't really try to follow them after that, but when I moved back to Toronto in 2014 I had more chances to see them.  They had this short outdoor set, somehow related to the Hockey Hall of Fame, where they played 3 or 4 songs, including 50 Mission Cap.  Then I saw them at the ACC for the Fully Completely Tour, and then I (reluctantly) paid the scalper prices to see them on the last Toronto show on the epic, final tour.  That's probably a fair number of times to see them for someone who didn't really grow up with them as part of the soundtrack to their lives, as many younger Canadians have done.

What impressed me most about Gord's determination to keep creating music and to give back to the fans one last time, even after the cancer diagnosis.  On top of the final tour, he recorded two solo projects -- Secret Path, about the tragedies of residential schools, and Introduce Yerself, a double CD, which is supposed to hit stores on Oct. 27.  It's an awful shame that he didn't live to see it released, but I assume he was happy with the final product.  I've preordered it and should have it soon.  I have no idea if the Hip recorded any material in his final year.  I assume there won't be any of this "Free as a Bird" nonsense where they take rehearsal tapes and other unreleased material and try to shape it into an album.  But it is possible that there is material that would have met Gord's approval for being released, and if so, we'll hear about it soon enough.

I do sometimes wonder what I would do if I knew I had just a year to live.  I'm not sure I could do anything differently to make more of an impact at work.  I've contributed to a number of travel demand models, particularly the ones in place in New York and in Vancouver, but this isn't the kind of thing one person can put on their shoulders and bulldoze through in a year.  I'd probably be better off quitting and travelling to the places I really want to see (or see again): London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Madrid, Prague, St. Petersburg (for the Hermitage).  I suppose I could cut down my reading list to 20-25 stone-cold classics that I just have to read (Austen's Emma, Dickens's David Copperfield, Trollope's The Way We Live Now, Faulker's Snopes Trilogy, Fante's Bandini Quartet and Lowry's Under the Volcano as a start).  And I would probably get more serious about knuckling down and finishing up writing these plays.  Right now, I have this all spread out on the assumption that I have another 30 years or so to accomplish everything, though that is by no means guaranteed.  I'll see what I can do to accelerate some of these things before I hit 50.

Anyway, so long, Gord, and thanks for all the music and the memories.

Art Bus to the McMichael

Somehow this completely slipped under my radar, but this summer the McMichael ran an "art bus" from downtown Toronto to the gallery on Sundays.  Now it did sort of assume you wanted to spend all day at the gallery, since you would have to leave from Spadina and King at 10 and then leave the McMichael at 3:30 (to get back around 4:30).  This was initially only going to be July and August, but it seems it has been extended through October.  Some details here.

I suppose if you pack a lunch, it might not be bad to wander around the gallery and then stroll around on the grounds, perhaps taking time to read or reflect in the woods, and then make one's way back downtown in the mid-afternoon.  I assume the leaves are just starting to change up in Kleinsburg, and it is probably quite pretty now.

It costs $10 for the bus, plus you then need to pay admission to the gallery.  Given that parking alone is $7, and in my case I have to rent a ZipCar, it would still be cheaper for me to take the bus, even if bringing up to 2 more people along.  I'll have to consider this seriously, though I suspect I don't have the time this Oct.  I have no idea whether they will continue to extend this into the winter (probably not) or bring it back next year.  I don't really know if it is such a rousing success as the Stratford bus (and hopefully the Shaw bus).  It is after all somewhat limited if it only runs on Sundays.  Mostly, I don't think people know about this new service, so I thought I would at least mention it on the blog.

Climate change plays at Toronto Cold Reads

I have been out late a few nights in a row now, and I am just catching up on the blog.  Last Sunday, I went out to Toronto Cold Reads.  I mostly go out of curiosity, since I don't have a piece coming up for a while,* and I have not had much luck winning the writer's challenge (only once so far).  The music guests have remained quite good, however.  And I usually am inspired to get a page or two of dialog down in a notebook while waiting for the action to start, so that's a good thing.  (I also seem to write well in jazz clubs, so I may start going on a more routine basis to The Rex, but maybe at this point waiting until the spring...)

I think I mentioned that I sort of got roped into reading a small part on the previous outing.  This time I didn't even sign up, but then they handed me a small part anyway.  Kind of odd.  I can guarantee you that I am not going to get stage-struck and start wanting to be an actor.  I've never had that particular ambition.  I didn't like the piece so much on the read-through, but it actually worked considerably better in front of the audience.  That is actually a useful lesson.  There was one other really strong piece (or at least strongly-acted piece) about a director kind of stuck in limbo (directing children's theatre) while his "discovery" is on the fast-track to success.

At the reading, I also met Brianna, who was on Team Tango with me for the 3Fest pieces, so that was neat meeting up with her.  I'm not sure she saw the full pieces either (I was out of town for the readings at Jarrett's place).  Anyway, it will be quite a surprise when they go up, probably in 3 weeks or so.  After the Cold Reads event ended, there was a sneak preview of the Seven Sibling's Future Fest.  I hadn't really planned on staying, but David Straus was there to do a short scene from his piece (written by Genevieve Adam), so I stuck it out.  Brianna (who is obviously a SF fan), David, Genevieve and I ended up on the same SF trivia team.  We did quite well on the books (no thanks to me) but not very well on the true/false questions.  I definitely cost us a point on the movie trivia, though others cost us more points on the true/false.  We lost by one point to another team, which is unfortunate, as Brianna and I would have scored tickets to the Future Fest.  At any rate, I haven't decided if I will see Genevieve's piece or not.  It actually starts this Friday and there are 5 or 6 shows over the next two weeks, so I have a bit more time to decide.  After this preview event wrapped, I finally made my way home and got a bit of sleep, trying to get ready for Monday.

At any rate, I thought I would mention that next Sunday (Oct 22) looks particularly intriguing, especially for those that aren't part of the inner circle.  There will be 5 shortish plays about different aspects of climate change, written by some fairly heavy hitters of the Toronto scene, including Jordan Tannahill, Anita Manjumar (author/star of the Fish Eyes Trilogy) and Marcia Johnson.  All are supposed to be in attendance, which would be incredibly awesome.  Also, there will be Jarrett Rusnak's TV pilot Humanity.  I'm very curious to see what this is about.  Finally, David Healey, who has a wicked sense of humour, will present his writer's challenge piece.  This looks like an absolutely can't-miss night.  Some additional details here.


* I am nearly finished with my short homage to Waiting for Godot, but I just don't think it would work at Toronto Cold Reads.  I think I will wait and submit it to the December SFYS, since I can't make the November one.  What I might do in the meantime is send off the opening scene of Straying South, which is in pretty good shape.  I also sort of "owe" the writing group a much tightened version of Dharma Donuts, but I just haven't had any time to really think about it lately.  After I do that, I can decide whether to work more on Final Exam or The Study Group.  I think it would be useful to see if they thought there was enough dramatic tension going on or the stakes are simply too low for too long (I guess I kind of already know the answer if I am asking the question...).  Anyway, plenty of things to work on when I can find the time.

Summer 2018

It's getting to be that time of the year when Shaw and Stratford announce their summer seasons and begin to try to bring in the subscribers.  Shaw had made an announcement quite a while back, whereas I only recently learned the Stratford line-up.  Actually, this Toronto Star article has more information about the casting at Stratford, so it might be worth checking out.

I have to admit, it is a bit amusing to see Shakespeare being performed at the Shaw (Henry V).  It's sort of an interesting experiment if their audiences will go for it.  I'm not terribly interested in the Shaw plays they are putting on, nor do I want to see Ruhl's Stage Kiss.  I might have made the trek down to Niagara-on-the-Lake for In the Next Room, though probably not.  I assume it will eventually turn back up in Toronto (it was at Tarragon in 2011).  No question the big, hot ticket will be Mythos: A Trilogy — Gods. Heroes. Men, written by (or perhaps rather adapted by) Stephen Fry, and he will playing some of the major parts.  I'm not particularly star struck by him, but this seems like an opportunity not to be missed (even if it might transfer to a Toronto stage at some point).  So I expect I will be on the Shaw bus once this summer, though if there are no matinees of the Mythos piece then that will become a much more difficult decision.  Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when the full season schedule comes out.

Stratford has a few plays of interest or potentially of interest.  At first glance, I wasn't too interested in Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli Milionaria!, despite it being billed a "comic masterpiece."  However, I read a bit more about the play, and it sounds quite clever.  No question I would be happier if George Brown did it, but I'm likely to try to see this, assuming I can find tickets that aren't in the eye-popping range.  I'm also fairly likely to try to catch Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Robert Lepage.  I don't know whether he will tone down the spectacle or not.  This may not be the absolute best way to watch Coriolianus for the first time, but I'm not really that likely to watch a conventional version of the play anyway.

So that might be sufficient for my Stratford needs (to go down for a really long day).  However, I am at least willing to consider The Tempest, directed by Cimolino, with Martha Henry as Prospero.  I'm really feeling the gender-flipped thing is a played out trend that frankly bores me, but the cast is really strong.  I don't know if there will be one weekend where I could catch all 3 plays, but if so, I might try to do that.  I don't think there is anything else at Stratford next season that really grips me.  I'm sure that they will do a great job with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but I saw a very solid production in Chicago, and I'm just not likely to go again.  (Maybe if towards the end of the run, they offer some steeply discounted tickets I would consider it, but I'm not expecting to go.  Again, I retain the right to change my mind after the reviews come in.)  I'm actually more likely to get my O'Neill fix by seeing Denzel Washington on Broadway in The Iceman Cometh (this is a limited run in March/April 2018).  I haven't entirely decided whether to go, but I am seriously considering it.  Anyway, I find it helpful to look ahead to these summer events as we slide into the cooler months of the calendar.

11th Canadian Challenge - 8th review - The Fish Eyes Trilogy

This is another one of those hybrid reviews where I review the published version of a play and the play in performance.  In this case, The Fish Eyes Trilogy by Anita Majumdar is still playing at Factory Theatre.  Only for one more day (Oct. 15), however, so sorry about that, though I did promote the show a couple of weeks ago.  The 3 pieces all sort of fit together, with most events happening over a roughly 2 year span (summer + the last year of high school and one year beyond) in the lives of three young women from Port Moody, BC.  However, there is one high school assembly and one high school dance that are particularly critical.  Once you have seen one play, then you have some sense of what happens in the other two, though each of the women has a different perspective on the events.  I'm really not going to be able to discuss these plays (beyond noting that they deal with cliques, bullying, betrayal and cultural appropriation) without going into some detail about the plot, so turn away now if you don't like SPOILERS.

SPOILERS, like seriously...

The plays are an interesting fusion of theatre and Indian dance (generally performed expertly but in one case a non-Indian performs the dances quite crudely).  The book itself is quite interesting as it has quite a few illustrations, many of which attempt to capture the key dance moves (though they do look a bit odd when frozen) but others focusing on props or other characters to provide a bit more context to the words.  I'm not sure it was entirely necessary to include them, but on the other hand, I did see the plays performed by the author.

Majumdar recently decided to close out the evening with Fish Eyes (it is actually the first one written and the first in the book).  I don't have a perfect memory, but it seems to me that for this current incarnation of the trilogy at Factory, I believe she cut out just a few lines from Fish Eyes where the Aunty figure is somewhat disgustedly preparing for Halloween and calls a trick-or-treater a hermaphrodite and hands over some uncooked rice.  I think this was softened just a bit, but I could be wrong.  I am certain, however, that one plot point in Boys with Cars was dropped where Gustakhi, the adult guardian, is talking about her life back in Punjab where she felt her daughter had besmirched the family name, and convinced her son to kill his sister (her daughter), but he was so weak-willed that he killed himself afterwards.  I guarantee you that I would have remembered that.  I think it was pared out since there is a limit to how much a character can antagonize an audience and then still be used as a "wise elder."  Plus, it may have just seemed like too much mirroring after Naz's parents also abandoned her, as well as Majumdar may just have felt there was already enough talk about honour killings by Indians in the news and she didn't need to add to it.  I didn't notice any cuts in Let Me Borrow That Top, but it was already the shortest piece and the last one written.  I may have missed it while reading, but I think a line or two about how Candice hadn't personally attacked Naz was added in performance to Let Me Borrow That Top (or perhaps this was just something that was discussed during the talk-back).

I'll try to squeeze the events of the trilogy into a bite-sized package.  Again SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS:
Naznin (from Boys with Cars) is dancing at a festival, when she catches the attention of Lucky (one of the very few South Asians to be considered cool and to have white friends, such as Buddy). While Naz is normally self-conscious (when not dancing), she defends herself (verbally) when Lucky teases her, which briefly earns her some respect from the cool crowd and, more importantly, impressed Lucky to the point that he asks her out and they become a couple.  While they are spending time with each other, Meena is having to help out her PE group choreograph a dance sequence drawing on Indian dance moves (as she is also a classically trained dancer). Her group, which includes Buddy's girlfriend Candice, is going to perform a dance to "Survivor"* by Destiny's Child at a school assembly.  When the day of the assembly arrives, Lucky has travelled to Calgary to try to get onto Bhangra Idol.  Naz goes up into the bleachers and sits next to Buddy.  During the dance sequence, he grabs her hand and forces her to give him a handjob of sorts.  She is frozen and blames herself for not doing more to pull her hand away.  After the assembly, Buddy sneaks away with Candice and they have sex in his car, but she has bigger ambitions (to study Indian dance in England) and they break up very shortly afterwards.  (Meena, who has been harbouring a huge crush on Buddy (to the point she turns down an opportunity to enter a dance competition in India) sees them break up, and she tries to swoop in and get him on the rebound, but finds out that he really is a drip.  Fortunately, it isn't too late for her to still go to the competition.)  After the assembly, rumours about Naz start swirling around, and Candice's friends start attacking Naz (verbally and physically).  Then Lucky breaks up with her and skips town.  The adults are worse than useless.  The principal suggests that Naz stay home to not distract the other students during finals, and Naz's parents are so shamed that they sell their house and move to Dubai, leaving her to fend for herself.  Naz moves in with Gustakhi and makes a living doing Indian dances for white people's weddings.  She gets a gig to perform at Candice and Buddy's shot-gun wedding, and apparently agrees to go 1) to see if Lucky turns up and 2) to kidnap Buddy and burn his hand while Candice is forced to watch.  (Even as she outlines this plot, it is clear she is only half-serious and realizes she has been watching too many Bollywood movies.)  She does not see Lucky.  She briefly talks with Buddy, who wants her to understand he didn't have anything to do with how she was shunned.  And she sees that Candice is 9 months pregnant.  She fiercely dances her dance, then leaves the building, stealing a mountain bike (and abandoning her watch over Lucky's abandoned car).  The stage directions say that she is leaving Port Moody, though this wasn't completely clear in the moment.

So that's a lot to unpack.  There is no question that these young women make bad choices, generally in an attempt to win or hang onto boyfriends.  In Naz's case, her entire future seems wrecked due to sexual abuse from a boy and then the inability of adults to place the blame correctly, let alone to protect the victim.  She is doubly or indeed triply victimized, and it seems like she might well have been able to move on sooner if 1) her boyfriend had at least listened to her once and 2) her parents hadn't completely over-reacted.  One interesting fact that Majumdar had mentioned during the talk-back was that there were so few South Asian children in Port Moody that they actually found it better to scatter and not hang out together, and it is particularly odd that Meena seems to have no idea who Naz is, given that they both are so steeped in Indian dance.  Indeed Naz says that Gustakhi isn't a dance teacher, so she must have learned from someone, but apparently not Kalyani Aunty, Meena's teacher.

At any rate, if there were so few Indian families in Port Moody was there so much face to be lost that the parents had to move to Dubai?  And I realize that social services can't be everywhere, but can a family just up and leave their teenaged daughter on the streets of Port Moody and no one finds out about it?  Dramatically, Naz is far more upset over Lucky's betrayal (whereas as an outsider, I can understand his actions, which are consistent with being a teenage chucklehead -- and feel perhaps he is somewhat unjustly vilified for not being as strong/noble as he might have been), but I find her family truly horrifying.  While Meena has much better closure (though much less trauma to overcome), it does seem that at the end of Boys with Cars, Naz is finally prepared to stop blaming herself for what happened and is starting to move forward with her life.  Not that this will be an easy road at all.  (I was saddened but not especially surprised to learn that the author experienced sexual trauma herself and this is certainly the main motivating force behind Boys with Cars.  She states that she has moved on, and thus Naz may as well, though Naz has a much weaker support structure in place.  If Majumdar ever does write a sequel, I would hope that Naz somehow gets it together to get into Langara and then eventually to reclaim her place at UBC.)

I didn't have as many reservations about Boys with Cars as did this reviewer, though I do think it is fairly unlikely that Naz would be performing at Buddy and Candice's wedding.  Even if she did agree to take the job (hoping to see Lucky), how likely would Candice want to see Naz dancing when her own dreams of going to the Coventry School of Bhangra were dashed (and I'll come back to this in a bit)?  She does come to the realization that she should have been mad at Buddy and not Naz, but I still can't imagine she really wants to see her.  Also, Buddy mentions in passing that his parents are punishing him for getting Candice "in trouble."  While this is a fairly pathetic wedding, held in a school gym, just how likely are the parents to hire an Indian dancer, even one as cheap as Naz surely is?  This may have been necessary as a plot-device, but it does seem improbable.

I largely do agree with the reviewer's reservations about Let Me Borrow That Top.  It was interesting getting to hear Candice's perspective.  She is sort of a clumsy version of a Kardashian, and Majumdar did like the fact she is one of the boldest and least apologetic characters in the whole trilogy.  The fact that she has no talent and is just a "stealer" is not really that important.  I also liked the vlog conceit, but I agree it was a little hard to understand why there would be flashbacks, even if she moved away from the laptop to signal that the action was now happening in a different time/space.  Maybe those bits could be rewritten so that the entire piece takes place "in real time" on the vlog.  One thing that wasn't really clear is just how well off Candice was.  She apparently lives with her mom and a bunch of sisters, and the father has cleared out (but is perhaps financially supporting the family).  Her mom is largely out of the picture, and Candice is basically raising herself.  Clearly, one of the biggest questions in this part of the trilogy is did she really get into the Coventry School of Bhangra.  No question she believed she got in.  I wonder if the answer is that this school is just not actually that good (certainly Lucky is portrayed as a mediocre performer), though it may be one step up from a diploma mill.  Mr. Sharma may have been willing to overlook Candice's shortcomings as a dancer if she paid full fees and perhaps the fact that she has a few thousand followers didn't hurt either.  (It's a whole different question whether this school had sufficient accreditation to allow Candice to get a student visa to the UK, but this takes place a few years back before the UK really started to crack down on immigration policy.)  I guess the fact that Candice could just fly off to England and plan to put this kind of money down means that while she talks like an airhead, she must have reasonable financial backing (which sort of undercuts the fact that she and Buddy seem to have nothing in Boys with Cars).

I do hesitate to raise the last point, but Candice seems so determined to learn Indian dance and is even a bit ruthless in breaking up with Buddy that I am surprised that it doesn't seem to even cross her mind to have an abortion when she finds out she is pregnant.  In Canada, it wouldn't even matter if her parents were against it, as her privacy rights and the fact that abortions are covered by MSP in BC would prevail.  Of course, she might have religious objections, but that is a whole piece of her back story that we didn't get.  It just doesn't quite hold together with the other things we know about Candice.  It would obviously change Boys with Cars a lot if she didn't reunite with Buddy, but it does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity not to at least raise the subject.

Anyway, this review has really focused on the heavier and somewhat darker aspects of the plays, but there are quite a few hilarious moments that partially balance the drama, particularly when Naz gets caught up in talking about her favourite Bollywood actresses or when Kalyani Aunty says something outrageous like how she wants to keep the mangoes away from white people.  (Gustakhi is nowhere near as fun and plays a much smaller role in Boys with Cars, particularly when the business about her children dying is cut.)  Meena talks quite a bit about how she wishes she could just have a normal life, but dance is integrated into all aspects of her life, so she brushes her teeth as a kind of dance.  Also, when she imagines Buddy falling in love with her, it is a scene out of Bollywood.  Naz has an amusing moment when she says that watching the CW channel doesn't prepare you for your first kiss.  Even Lucky has an funny line when he says that Miley Cyrus licking a hammer is art, but when he does it, everyone just thinks he's drunk.  On the whole, The Fish Eyes Trilogy is a significant and rewarding achievement, though definitely it is better to see the plays (and the excellent dancing) rather than just reading them on the page.

* It does seem quite cruel that Naz has bad flashbacks of the assembly whenever she hears "Survivor," so it isn't at all an empowering anthem for her.  Her dance routine is set to Chris Brown's "Kiss Kiss" or a remix of it, and indeed, she spends a fair bit of time defending him, saying that "both sides" of the story needed to be told.  Again, sort of another interesting wrinkle if one wanted to follow that thread.

Off-track this weekend

I wonder if I am still trying to recover mentally from the sustained push we had at work to get this huge report out.  There is still some remaining business (like an extensive appendix) for which I am responsible, and yet I am not feeling motivated to begin.  Or rather I start working on it and then am called away on a number of other tasks.  I threatened to work from home for several days to avoid distractions, but that wasn't actually feasible, since I was also needed at public meetings and hearings and there were many small but urgent tasks I was called in on (making new slides and reviewing other documents).  Also, the other senior advisor did work from home several times, and that left me to supervise the juniors.  All that said, I do need to buckle down and take this seriously, though I don't know if I will start this weekend.

I actually feel completely off-kilter right now.  It's the afternoon but I am just wrapping up breakfast, and I need to get to the store and probably to the library before it closes.  That doesn't really give me any time to take my daughter swimming, which I promised to do.  Or to go to the gym (this past week was truly terrible in terms of how late I had to work and also not being able to bike to work).  But there is no point in beating myself up over it.

I think today I will do a quick shopping trip and bike up to the library.  That still should hopefully give me time to take my daughter swimming.  Then I may be able to go to the gym in the evening and hit the other grocery store for the special bread that she likes.*  What I won't do is try to watch Blade Runner or Life After.  That would just be too much, but they should still be around next weekend, which is also when we will get around to putting up Halloween decorations.

I assume I will be a bit more on the ball tomorrow.  The main problem is that it is likely to rain and even storm tomorrow.  What I am thinking about doing is heading downtown (despite the rain) and check out the Ryerson Image Centre and ideally the AGO, since I need to renew my membership.  The rest of the time I could spend at work and then towards the evening, I would go off to Toronto Cold Reads.  At least that is a tentative plan that makes some kind of sense to me, especially if I carry out all the transit using a TTC Day Pass.  (And then looking ahead on Monday, we get to see The Psychedelic Furs, which should be great.)

Why did I get up so late, aside from general malaise?  Last night, I really wanted to push through and finish reading Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel.  This is an odd novel that takes the main characters and structure of the Mahabharata and applies it to Indian/Pakistani politics from roughly 1917-1984.  It's quite clever, but I had to turn to Wikipedia to unravel who the various characters were supposed to represent, since I didn't really know much about Indian politics beyond Gandhi, Nehru and Indiri Gandhi (and even that mostly comes from the movie Gandhi and Rushdie's Midnight's Children!).  But it is also on the long side (400+ pages), and this is following right on the heels of reading Philip Roth's 400 page novel about baseball and politics, The Great American Novel.  I'm quite glad that the next few novels are in the 200-300 page range, just so I can feel I am accomplishing something.  Anyway, nobody forced me to read these books, but I did feel strangely obligated to get through them and onto the next thing.  Now I am paying the price.  With that, I really do have to get going.


* I did manage to square the circle, but only by sending my son off to the library in my stead.  (It is so great that he is finally able to do these sorts of tasks, and he is fairly good-natured about doing so.)  Then I was able to escort my daughter around the neighbourhood, selling raffle tickets.  It's fairly impressive that she can overcome her natural shyness when she really wants something.  She sold far more than I expected (largely because my neighbours are really nice, though of course I will be obligated to reciprocate down the line...).  Then we went swimming and were able to get a few more groceries on the way home.  Ideally after I eat dinner and relax a bit (and digest), I should go back over the bridge to the gym, but I may pass.  Then tomorrow I have a fairly busy but not overwhelming day.

The perfect Hedwig soundtrack

I have to admit, I have become a bit obsessed with the songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  This will eventually pass.  At one point, I was totally obsessed with the soundtrack to Zero Patience (a fairly obscure AIDS-related movie from 1993) and more recently with The Book of Mormon cast recording.  At any rate, I can't believe I nearly missed out on the chance to see Hedwig at Hart House.

While it is possible that the movie version really does reverse the order of the Wicked Little Town songs (starting with the Tommy Gnosis version and ending with the Hedwig version), this doesn't make a lot of sense dramatically.  So I would have resequenced the film soundtrack anyway, but then I got to thinking that Neal Patrick Harris sounds a bit more convincing as Tommy than John Cameron Mitchell, so I decided I would pull together songs from the official soundtrack plus the recent Broadway revival.  And then I went and found that most of the songs from a benefit CD called Wig in a Box are on Youtube (a good thing, since the original CD goes for over $200 on Amazon.ca, though a bit closer to $25 on Amazon.com).  While not all of the covers on Wig in a Box work, I did like Cyndi Lauper doing "Midnight Radio" and They Might Be Giants doing "The Long Grift," plus a couple of original songs were interesting.

Anyway, trying to reorder all the various songs into something closer to the Broadway version, I arrived at this sequence (drawing on the film soundtrack unless otherwise specified):

1. "Random Number Generation" Lena Hall with Tits of Clay (live)
2. "America the Beautiful" NPH in 2014 revival
3. "Tear Me Down"
4. "The Origin of Love"
5. "Deutschlandlied" NPH
6. "Sugar Daddy" NPH
7. "When Love Explodes (Love Theme from The Hurt Locker)" NPH
8. "City of Women" Robyn Hitchcock from Wig in a Box
9. "Angry Inch"
10. "Nailed" 
11. "Wig in a Box"
12. "In Your Arms Tonight"
13. "Wicked Little Town (Hedwig version)"
14. "The Long Grift" They Might Be Giants from Wig in a Box
15. "Hedwig's Lament"
16. "Freaks"
17. "Exquisite Corpse"
18. "Wicked Little Town (Reprise - Tommy Gnosis version)" NPH
19. "Milford Lake" Stephen Trask from Wig in a Box
20. "Midnight Radio" NPH*

* Really both the original and the 2014 revival version are very good, but I gave the nod to the revival, partly because I preferred NPH in the male voice and Lena Hall's backing vocals are pretty incredible.  I also liked the Cyndi Lauper version, but not quite enough to put in on my ideal mix.  I also think Alan Cumming does a solid version of Wig in a Box where he interspersed parts of Wicked Little Town, but that was just too much of a good thing.  I'm actually a bit surprised that no one has done much remixing of these songs.  It appears there is a EP with club and dub remixes of "Angry Inch" and also a remix of "Wig in a Box," but that's it as far as I can tell.  Maybe I should have ended with one of these remixes (the way Zero Patience does), but I came across them too late.

Wet Week

What a difference a day makes.  On Sat., I had been looking ahead to next week, and it looked completely clear.  I then heard on the news that Tropical Storm Nate had turned, barely sparing New Orleans (which is certainly a good thing) but that it will pass through Toronto, dumping a fair bit of rain on us Monday.  That's certainly unfortunate, as I had been considering going off to the movies (I'm curious about Blade Runner 2049).  I mean I can use tomorrow to watch the original (it's been a couple of years since I've seen it), but I'd rather not get stuck inside all day.

It is a bit more upsetting that Wed-Fri now look like they will have some rain, so I'll have to decide if I really will try to bike (I generally have to go to a number of public hearings on most evenings next week, so I probably wasn't going to be biking a lot anyway*).

It wasn't a super productive weekend, though I did find and file away some CDs and cleaned up the desk just a bit.  I also cooked and did the shopping.  The biggest event was hanging around and getting our internet upgraded.  I was kind of skeptical, but the speeds really are 3 times what we had and there seem to be fewer interruptions (knock wood).

I haven't really decided what I will do tomorrow if I don't watch Blade Runner (the original or the new one).  I probably should write more of my report and maybe do some creative writing.  I may also take the time to finish up the sock monkey, just so mentally I can move onto the next sewing task.

I am in just a bit of a lull in terms of theatre.  In a few weeks I'll be seeing a new George Walker play.  I've kind of decided to pass on Seven Siblings Future Fest, but maybe I'll have a change of heart.  I think the biggest question mark is whether I go see Life After, the new musical at Berkeley St. Theatre.  I generally pass on musicals (though I did finally get nosebleed tickets to Come From Away!), but the reviews have been very strong.  The only other thing on the immediate horizon is Bakersfield Mist, playing for a weekend in early Nov. (I believe at the Box).  I have some issues with the script (to say nothing of the Box!), but I know the lead actor and he's worth watching.  It may be that I end up seeing more concerts and holding off on theatre until Jan-March 2018, where things kind of explode (A Delicate Balance, The Humans, Jerusalem, Come from Away, etc.).  Anyway, lots to look forward to, and maybe, just maybe I'll buckle down to do my own writing.  I guess that is something good that might come out from a wet week.


* I'll have to step it up at the gym.  I am still going weekly, but I have cut back when I am biking to work a lot.  I'll definitely have to get back into the habit now that it is starting to get a bit chilly and dark in the evenings.  If I decide it's just too much of a bother to go, I will end up right where I was last spring, feeling gross about having gaining too much weight over the winter.

Quilt Completed!

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had completed the quilt top and I dropped it off to someone in Mississauga that specialized in longarm quilting.  It arrived a few days ago.  I was so excited, but due to attending a bunch of theatre events, I hadn't had a chance to look it over.  I only had a snapshot of what it looked like on the frame.

I talked to my daughter, and her preference was to wait until Christmas!  (I think she gets some of this tolerance for delayed gratification from me.)  Anyway, I thought I really had better take a look at it just to make sure there were no obvious problems.  She reluctantly agreed, and we opened the box today.  Here she is sort of hiding under the quilt. (You can see the pattern much better on the backing, which is the solid blue area to the right.)

While I do see a very few places I'll have to trim some threads and perhaps tie off a few more knots, it does look quite nice.  I did expect it to be a bit fluffier.  I'm sure it will be reasonably warm, but it would just supplement and not replace a blanket in the winter time.  Anyway, I can't even imagine how long it would have taken me to attempt to quilt the entire thing.

I have a few other tasks to do (aside from straightening out my music collection), such as finishing this sock monkey from a kit that my daughter won a few weeks back.  I'm closing in on it, but I haven't been feeling too inspired lately.  (Also, she kind of lost interest in it.  For a while, she was doing a big chunk of the sewing, but now it is all back to me...)

When this is done, maybe then I will cut out the fabrics for my son's quilt and see if it will go just a bit faster (than the first one).  Still I told him there was no guarantee it would be ready by Christmas.  Fortunately, he is understanding and can be patient as well.