11th Canadian Challenge - 16th review - What We All Long For

I really had hoped to like this novel, What We All Long For by Dionne Brand.  It starts off very well, but quickly devolves into a fairly tedious mess.  I found the characters to be almost uniformly unlikable.  The ending was both implausible and too symbolic.  In fact, I will be going ahead and SPOILING the ending fairly quickly, since it is not worth spending too much time on this review.

SPOILERS COMING

It will definitely be quicker to talk about what I liked about the novel.  It's a bit of a cliche, but Toronto the city is essentially a character, particularly as Brand talks about different neighbourhoods and how they have changed.  This is from the first page: "Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring?  Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing.  Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits--plastic bags, pop cans--the alleyways are cluttered in a mess of bottles and old shoes and thrown-away bed."

If it had continued in this vein, I would have enjoyed it considerably.  However, within the next few pages we are confronted with three young people making a bit of a spectacle of themselves on the subway, disturbing the reveries of the commuters.  While the author's sympathies are with the young people, I ultimately am in the camp of those who don't have much use for Millennials.  I'll come back to this shortly.

The other good thing about the book is that it name dropped Remedios Varo (a surrealist painter) and several of her works, particularly The Madness of the Cat. I'm enjoying learning more about Varo, but I could have stopped reading the book then and there and been better off in the grand scheme of things.

Remedios Varo, Simpatía (Sympathy) aka Madness of the Cat, 1955

As it turns out, it isn't just about three young people, but really four friends (and some graffiti taggers), plus we get the back story of all of their siblings and their parents.  This is mostly done to show how these Millennials are reacting against their parents and their mostly square ambitions (deciding to be an artist rather than work in the family restaurant, dropping out of university, etc.).  However, only one or two of them manage to hold down actual jobs. One is running a small clothing boutique and one is a bicycle messenger, though given how casually she treats her job, it seems likely she'll have to move on to a different company.  So the others beg and wheedle their parents for money.  One gets so upset at her father (who doesn't want to bail his son out of jail yet again) that she keys his car.  It's embarrassing to read.  (This all reminds me of the un-self-consciously spoiled brat at the center of Tiny Furniture.  Oh, look at that, this was where Lena Dunham got her first big break...)  Needless to say, I am not an appreciative audience for navel-gazing by Millennials (or merely about Millennials in this case).

There are two long-ago traumatic events that drive most of the plot of this novel.  (SPOILERS, remember.)  First, Carla, the biracial bicycle messenger is still dealing with the fact that her mother killed herself when Carla's father wouldn't break things off with his wife.  She and her brother were actually raised by her father and his wife, but she has incredibly strained feelings toward him.  Her brother, who she always spoiled and covered for, is quickly embracing thug life (or whatever pale imitation can be found in Toronto).  Second, Tuyen's parent were escaping from Vietnam with their three children, but the youngest (Quy) was lost on the trip.  Tuyen and her brother were actually born in Canada, but cannot escape the shadow of this lost sibling.  Interspersed with the main characters' stories, we find out that Quy is alive and has drifted into a life of crime.  Somewhat astonishingly, Tuyen's brother tracks him down and brings him to Canada.

Now these two plotlines crash into each other.  Jamal joins a crew that starts carjacking cars.  They are off in the suburbs of York because why not (I suppose the cars there might be nicer and the police less likely to try to track down offenders if they think it is Toronto's problem).  But to stumble across Tuyen's brother's car?  Quy is sitting in the car, as Tuyen's brother wants to break the news gently to their parents.  (It actually isn't at all clear what Quy plans on doing now that he is in Canada -- emotionally blackmailing them for all they are worth?)  In any event, he is badly beaten by Jamal, and just then his parents turn up, and the image provided is that he is drowning in the water, and they pull him out.  So is Brand saying that this beating (and rescue) is going to shock Quy into a genuine reconciliation with his family?  Really, that is completely messed up.  At any rate, the novel ends there, so we have no idea of what will happen to Quy or if Jamal ends up serving most of his life behind bars (if not for this crime, for the next one).  If Tuyen can get over her totally creepy obsession with Carla.  And so on.  No resolution to any of these stories, but, that said, I didn't like the characters anyway, so maybe it isn't such a great loss.  All in all, a pretty severe disappointment, making all the glowing reviews even more puzzling.

Random thoughts for late March

I will try to make the thoughts at least somewhat linked.

I am sick and tired of the lingering cold weather, particularly in evenings.  It often chases me to bed sooner than I would go otherwise, which in turn means I am a bit less productive than I would like to be.  On the other hand, I may be somewhat less tempted to eat that 4th meal in the middle of the night (which is probably from whence my weight problem really comes).  The temperature has crept up this week, but it has still been wet, which makes it feel colder.  Today may not be so bad, and Easter probably won't rain, which would be great since there is an Easter egg hunt, but it will be another week before it really gets nice out.

In part due to work and in part due to feeling the chills, it took a week longer than I had expected and/or hoped to get the next draft of my Fringe play together, but it is done.  I think it is getting close, though there are still a few more tweaks needed.  I think this upcoming week I need to wrap up the casting, so I can start thinking about who might direct it.  Fortunately, I did hear from one of the hosts of SFYS, and he will try to send me the name of the actress who I am hoping to cast in the role of Britney.

I am starting to get used to going to the gym, which is good, as it is still fairly cold out and I often have to push myself.  I won't have to push nearly as hard in the spring and the summer, and of course I will be biking much more.  That said, I did skip two days due to not wanting to go out in the wet and the cold (that is a combination that really saps my will power).  But I am heading out now for a morning workout (the gym is just about the only thing open in Gerrard Square today, though it turns out the AGO is open as well, and I may stop in).

I still haven't made enormous progress, but I am making steady progress.  I actually solidified the gains (or rather loss) even on the trip to the East Coast.  I almost always ate a bit less than I really wanted, and most days I walked at least 4-5 hours.  I am quite close to being down 15 pounds from when I got serious and am down one size and 1-2 notches on the belt, though of course it is depressing 1) how far I let myself go and 2) how much harder it is to lose weight as you get older.  My younger self would have lost more by now.  I hope to lose another 15-20 pounds by the late summer and go down at least one more size.  I think this is achievable.  I've definitely cranked up the will-power at work and have started rejecting donuts and even some celebratory cake.  Clearly I should have been doing this all along, but I just wasn't ready to be serious, and now I am.*

I recently wrapped up Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (I started this on the spring break vacation), not that long after reading North and South.  Of the two, I did prefer North and South, which is shorter, but also the characters were a bit more interesting and there were deeper divisions between the two would-be lovers which was harder to overcome.  Molly, in Wives and Daugthers, is not much more than a cipher really, a really good girl who does everything her father tells her (and almost everything her step-mother tells her, despite not really respecting her), who has long lingering illnesses at convenient times (convenient plot-wise, I mean) and basically has all obstacles in the way of marrying her preferred partner swept away without any effort on her part.  It is her step-mother and step-sister who are at least somewhat interesting.  All that said, Wives and Daughters was more congenial to me than Middlemarch, which I didn't care for at all.  It is certainly a shame that Gaskell died with only a single chapter left to write, though she did have some notes and had told family members how it turned out.  Thus, the audience isn't really left hanging a la Edwin Drood.

In any event, between these novels, Trollope's The Way We Live Now and Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, I am a little burned out on really long novels.  I'll be switching to shorter fiction for the next little while.  It probably won't be until the fall that I tackle Rezzori's Death of My Brother Abel and Updike's The Rabbit novels.  Towards the very end of the year, I hope to be reading Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and that will be ambitious indeed.  But in the meantime, the focus will be on shorter novels, as well as on novels that I expect I will donate once I have read them, just to keep making progress on cleaning out the basement.  Oh just so many books...

I was going to write a bit about upcoming theatre, including the fact that I decided to go to the Overcoat after all, but that shall have to wait a bit longer.

* While I am impatient to make progress, I am also trying to set myself up for success.  That means not beating myself up too much for when I backslide and have a cookie or some ice cream (but of course not going out of my way to add temptation to my life either), and to come up with a sustainable plan.  That means going to the gym 3 or 4 times max. per week.  5-6 times per week is not sustainable in the long-term, at least not for me.

Five Bleakest Books

I just wrapped up Malamud's The Assistant the other day, and it was definitely a depressing book in the sense that most of the characters cannot escape their "fate" and better their situation.  Even when things seem to be turning the corner, fate intercedes again and drags them back down.  I actually thought the book probably should have been called Crime and Suffering.  There is a shout-out to Crime and Punishment in novel, but I would say that even though one of the characters does seem to be striving for enlightenment at the end, this still doesn't seem to offer up any significant spiritual release/relief as one might find in Dostoevsky or for that matter Solzenheitzen or Wiesel, but just a broader back, so to speak, for more suffering.  The punchline of course is that the assistant is in training to become a Jew.

Someone on Goodreads said it was the bleakest book they had ever read.  I would say it is close but not the bleakest book of all time.  Incidentally, Dickens's Bleak House does have good things come to some of the characters, so it isn't in the running at all.

In my view, a bleak book focuses on characters that cannot escape their fate, and in particular has characters that attempt to improve their lot but cannot for one reason or another (often being deliberately pulled down by others jealous of their attempt).  As alluded to above, bleak books don't really offer much in the way of spiritual consolation (even if it is only the consolation of the weak that Nietzsche scorned).  They have a dark or jaded view of human motivations.  They also don't have much to offer in the way of humor (which rules out one or two Faulkner novels that I might have nominated otherwise, as well as Adiga's The White Tiger).  As Americans generally do prefer uplifting stories (even Cormac McCarthy tried to offer a light at the end of The Road), I find European authors are more likely to sort of indulge themselves in writing about the dark side of human nature.

I may come back and revise* this list (and I am certainly open to suggestions in the comments below), but here are my top 5 bleakest books.

1) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (I thought about making Such a Long Journey my number two, but decided that would just be piling on.)

2) This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski (An account of life in the concentration camps written essentially from the perspective of the capos.  It focuses on how prisoners turned on each other.  There is no redemption to be found here, and it isn't terribly surprising that Borowski committed suicide a relatively short time after WWII ended.)

3) A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis (A look at the reach of international Communism)

4) Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (Maybe the most misogynistic book I've ever read, the title character gets his kicks from murdering dozens of women.  There is a very strained humor throughout the book, but it didn't do anything for me.)

5) The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

There are some books I have not gotten around to reading yet, but will most likely be in the running.  This includes Celine (Death on the Installment Plan and Journey to the End of the Night) and Victor Serge (really all of his work, but Unforgiving Years is apparently the bleakest).  Happy reading...

* I did wonder about adding Sinclair Ross to the list.  His short story "The Lamp at Noon" is pretty bleak and is definitely in the running for bleakest short story.  It's harder to decide about As for Me and My House.  I think the fact that it ostensibly has a happy ending disqualifies it, but had he written the sequel where the couple is still inevitably dissatisfied with their lot (finally realizing that they were the authors of their own unhappiness), then that might crack the top 5.

Back bad

Just when I think I have turned a corner health-wise -- no cold, no coughs -- my back gave out.  I could hardly move on Tues.  I suspect this is because I fell asleep on the couch, and the couch cushions are in a very bad state -- extremely lumpy and with springs that have sprung their last sprung.  I need to either have them replaced or just buy a new couch.  I've been meaning to for a while, and this should be the spur to action I need.

It does feel quite unfair in that I have been doing stretches and back strengthening exercises, and my core is definitely in better shape from the weights at the gym.  But apparently my back is not impressed...

I can move around better now (and yesterday I even rode my bike to work for the first time of the season), but my back is still very sore.  I went to a very good chiropractor in Chicago for a few times (I actually had to roll out of bed I was in such pain), and then a decent one in Vancouver.  I was hoping not to have to find one in Toronto, but I suppose I shall have to.

Movies from Books

As many others have noted, many books do not translate particularly well into movies.  Too much usually has to get cut out to keep the movie to a reasonable length,* and the editing or reshaping of material is just too much for most fans of the original work.  That said, I would say that novels that are heavy on action and dialogue and are not about mood or internal monologues or, perhaps worst of all from a cinematic perspective, are about ambiguity can translate well. Perhaps that is why the works of Austen and Dickens have generally fared satisfactorily once on the big screen.

Another viable option is to go with fantasy novels, which tend to me more clearly about good vs. evil than science fiction novels.  And of course, translating Young Adult fiction has often worked fairly well (Holes, Harry Potter and the Hunger Games novels).  Indeed, there are certainly far too many for me to keep track of.

I'll just discuss three movies that I've seen or will be seeing in the very near future.

Brown Girl Begins was adapted from Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring.  This is a very low-budget movie, and the director indicated that because they didn't have money for special effects, the focus was on the first part of the book (where the Ti-Jeanne character learns about focusing her power to channel the spirits) and less about the battles with the Posse that take place in the book.  It may turn out that the movie is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation, as it seems that Ti-Jeanne in the book is already older and more experienced than the one in the movie.  I haven't made up my mind whether I will read the novel or not, but I probably will one day.

Today I am off to see A Wrinkle in Time with my daughter.  In anticipation of this, I reread the novel for the first time in over 35 years.  I have to say I didn't much care for it.  Aside from the relative ease with which the characters escape from IT, i.e. the Dark One (and apparently the movie makes it even easier for Meg's father to tesser -- just using his mind once he knows the right frequency!), I really couldn't swallow how this was just a Christian allegory.  (I hadn't remembered that at all.)  It was like reading C.S. Lewis without any of the nuance -- or better plotting.  I wouldn't say I am particularly looking forward to it, though I do want to know if the use the term "The Process" for making people into ciphers without distinct personalities.  As it happens, my Fringe play uses the same term, and I may have to come up with something else** (not that that many people are actually seeing this movie...).

Back from the movie, and I would say it was ok, not great certainly, but much better than I expected from the very negative reviews.  The explicit Christian theology has been removed (to some people's dismay), but I just don't think you can have a movie in this day and age (that you want to show in China at any rate) explicitly including former gas stars becoming guardian angels (I mean really, Madeleine?) and telling the children they are following in Jesus's footsteps.  I found this simply impossible to stomach when I read the book as an adult, unlike Ursula Le Guin's books, which still hold up.  (I probably should have been tipped off when in Many Waters she returned to the characters and had them go meet and assist Noah.  Blech.)

I haven't entirely decided about Ready Player One.  I have to agree with the more negative reviewers on Goodreads that it doesn't function very well as a book, as there is just far too much exposition.  (Almost all the good reviews boil down to the fact it was cool seeing 80s references just slammed together with only the figment of a plot to justify this.)  I am slightly more forgiving of these future kids getting obsessed with the 80s as the key to winning the competition, and we pretty much only hang out with the most obsessed gamers.  Most people probably spend a little bit of time on the game, then move on to more prosaic preoccupations, so we don't encounter anyone who thinks it is absurd to spend so much mental energy on the 80s.

That said, I was glad that at least we didn't get a blow by blow account of actually playing the video games or solving Zork.  After just a few pages of intro setting up the situation, the hero solves it and moves on.  Not sure if the movie will show as much restraint.  (As as aside, the quest within this book sort of reminds me of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.  Indeed, it shares the same flaw in that the author tries to come up with something clever, but it isn't as likely to be as uncrackable (except by the hero naturally) as is set out in the book.  Here, the riddle of the second key is pretty transparently obvious to anyone as steeped in 80s games as these kids are, and it should have been solved in a matter of days, not months.)

All that aside, it was entertaining reading about some of my 80s preoccupations, and there was some decent action towards the end of the book.  It's quite possible that the movie can do a lot more showing and a lot less telling, so I am somewhat inclined to give it a shot.  Anyway, I still have a couple more weeks to decide, as I usually don't go to movies on opening weekend anymore.

 

* I still can't get over how Peter Jackson refused to cut anything from The Hobbit and turned it into 3 movies.  I might have been willing to go to 2 films (There and Back Again), but 3 films was so stupidly self-indulgent that I have boycotted the whole mess. 

** The on-line thesaurus suggests The Procedure, The Operation or The Undertaking.  I'm leaning towards The Procedure.  As it happens, the movie doesn't use the term at all, and in fact it implies that all the humans on Camazotz are simply complete figments of IT's imagination, so there is certainly no reason for them to need to undergo The Process when their conditioning is slipping.  I still may switch to The Procedure just in case other adult readers catch the similarity, but I don't feel as obligated.

What Went Wrong & What Went Right

I was looking over the last post and many parts are pretty cryptic, as one would expect trying to cram an entire week's worth of events into a relatively short post.  The whole travel experience into New York was stressful.  I had really wanted to get into New York early, so that we could visit relatives in Brooklyn in the afternoon.  So we were up fairly early to get to Porter for the 9 am flight.  (My wife drew the line at 9 and not trying to catch the 8 am flight, which is definitely just as well, as it was cancelled!)  Getting to Porter and getting through security was a breeze, which is why I will always take Porter if it is a viable option.  That was just about the only thing that went right on Sunday (aside from the time spent with relatives after we finally did arrive).  Though no one got sick, motion sickness or anything else, so that was a major plus as well.

Because the flight landed before 11, border security was incredibly understaffed.  All the international and US passport holders were all put in one line together and only served by three agents, and there were several people ahead of us that seemed to have visa problems, so that took far longer than it should have.  Then the train from the airport to the AirTrain station was incredibly slow, and we watched a NJ Transit train take off, while we were stuck outside the station.  Then the gates to let us into the main station were basically malfunctioning.  My son's ticket would not register, and there was an attendant there who refused to help, just saying over and over, press it hard against the reader area.  Given how slow the handicapped gate was, I finally had my son just walk through (with the agent still refusing to help).  I don't know if there is a general malaise hanging over the East Coast, but the transit agents in New York and Philadelphia were uniformly unhelpful and actually rude most of the time.

The train from the airport into Penn Station wasn't too bad, but it was still on the slow side (and very crowded), mostly because the train tunnel link between New York and New Jersey was so damaged by Hurricane Sandy.*  We actually ended up backing out of Penn Station Newark to make the connection, which I'm fairly sure added time to the trip.

We were so tired of trains by the time we got to Manhattan that we just walked up to the hotel in Times Square.  I already mentioned how unhappy I was with the Paramount Times Square.  The line in the lobby was ridiculously long.  They of course didn't have any rooms ready, and this was the first time I heard that they added a "facility fee" to the booking.  I suppose it must have been in the fine print on the Hotels.com website, but this was a fairly hefty nightly facility fee (over $30!), and I would have chosen a different hotel had I been fully aware of it.  Live and learn I suppose.  Then the line just to drop off our luggage was quite long.

Finally, we were ready to tackle the subway.  I had been warned just how bad it was and had even gone off to look at the weekend service plan, which clearly said in one location the 2/3 went to Brooklyn and in another said that there might be further service disruptions.  After making it to the 2/3 platform, it became clear that the 2/3 was being diverted to South Ferry (in Manhattan) and that we would have to take a different train (I think we ultimately took the Q), which was further from where we wanted to go, but at least was walking distance to Park Slope.  After all this, we made it to Brooklyn by 2 pm.  And it felt like we only managed to do that with heroic efforts.  Every step of the way took far longer than it should have (and probably it did take an hour longer in total than it would have taken 5 years ago).  It was not a great welcome to New York City, and I do think it will be quite a while before I go back.

The subway during the week was a bit slower than I remembered and often crowded (though it has been crowded as long as I can remember).  But at least it went to the places I expected it to.  If I do visit again, I will have to remember to take the terrible weekend service into account.

The Amtrak train between New York and Philadelphia was full, but it was a smooth ride and arrived on time.  That was probably the highlight of our transit experience.  We mostly walked everywhere in Philly, though I did splurge on a cab to get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but we walked back to the hotel after touring the museum.

I was investigating whether we would take SEPTA from the hotel to 30th Street Station (and then take a train to the Philadelphia Airport) or cab it (either to the main train station or to the airport).  So I walked over to the SEPTA station next to the City Hall.  I saw some police officer run up with her taser drawn, yelling at some homeless guy to get down on the ground.  Another couple of officers backed her up, then a cop car drove right up onto the sidewalk and that officer got ready to intervene.  It really did seem like something right out of the Wire.  After that, I spent some time looking at just how many police cars there were in the downtown (something like 1/3 of all the parked cars seemed to be squad cars) and just how many police there were on the sidewalks.  It really was a pretty daunting show of force.  The follow-up was that I did go into the station and overheard a different homeless guy talking to his buddies about what had just happened.  The underground passage into the SEPTA station was overrun with 8 or so homeless men, most of whom appeared to be strung out on drugs.  And this was 9:30 am, just steps away from the City Hall.  It was very distressing.  There was no way I was going to have my family run that gauntlet.  In general, the poverty in Philadelphia seems to have hit a new high and seems spreading to the city core, and the city seems to be sinking to Baltimore's level (at least those were my impressions).  We had a good time visiting, but I no longer think I could live here, an idea which I did entertain from time to time, 10 years or so ago.  Somewhat surprisingly, I was asking the desk clerk at the hotel about how long it would take a cab to get to the airport, she said that the train to the airport actually stopped just a block away and then it continued on to 30th St. Station and thence to the airport.  In the end, we did take the regional rail, which was super convenient (and only a few minutes behind schedule).  On the whole, the days spent in Philadelphia were a bit more relaxed and generally more fun than the days in Manhattan (and certainly the day spent getting to and from Brooklyn).  Something to consider next time, though I am hoping that Porter restores direct service to Pittsburgh, since I'd like to go somewhere new on our next trip.

* Apparently, the spending bill that Trump so reluctantly signed finally puts some money towards this vital piece of infrastructure, and there are all these conservatives howling about it (as if red states don't get all kinds of direct assistance from the feds).  I'm actually quite surprised at how many people were (foolishly) taking to LinkedIn to complain about this in the comments under an article about the bill.  This is a prime example of how you shouldn't let your outrage overwhelm your common sense.  The fact that you have now strongly identified with one side vs. the other in the U.S. cultural and political "wars" means that potential future employers will screen you out because 1) your values are not in step with theirs, 2) people with very strong views are hard to work with even if those views are more or less aligned with the top people in the company, 3) you are the type of person who spends too much company time on LinkedIn or 4) because you have poor judgement in leaving a very public trail of your online activities, particularly on a platform that is primarily fueled by the need to stay open to new career opportunities due to how many times people change jobs in this era.  So foolish.  With a very few exceptions, I think political rants should be kept off-line because they will trail you forever once you post them on-line. 

I guess the real problem today is that so many things have become controversial or political, as there is someone who will take umbrage at almost anything you write.  This is definitely one of the downsides of the internet era, which is magnified by the fact that the press lives for finding someone with an opposite view on virtually anything, so contrarian voices are really elevated now in newspaper articles that are often little more than a rehash of Twitter spats.  (Can you tell that I have basically lost whatever respect I used to have for reporters?)  Somewhat surprisingly, I had some anonymous person comment I was completely ignorant about contemporary poetry because they disagreed with one of my reviews.  Needless to say, I didn't see fit to allow that comment to post as it was just abusive and didn't contribute to any dialogue about the work itself.

Back to Normality

It gives you some sense of how backed I am in this blog that I am finally getting around to announcing that we are back from vacation, only a full week late!  Perhaps I am being unduly paranoid, but I don't like discussing upcoming travel until I am back home.  On a side note, I've long felt that schools should push spring break back by at least two and ideally three weeks.  Most families cannot afford to travel away to warmer climes (not that we went anywhere particularly warm) and, even for those that travel, the odds of snowstorms disrupting travel is quite high.  In fact, we just threaded the needle this time, missing fairly major storms the week before and after our travel.  I'm not sure I can be bothered to actually put a petition together to lobby for this change (see my previous post), but perhaps I shall.

Anyway, I will go into more detail later, but we flew into Newark on Sunday, then did our absolute best to get to the hotel (which wasn't ready for us) and then hustled out to Brooklyn.  It was a real challenge (particularly dealing with the subways on the weekend), and so dispiriting that I am going to avoid traveling to New York City for quite some time.  It's a shame.

Monday was spent visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We went into the lobby of the Guggenheim but didn't actually look at the art (the kids were a bit tired of art).  Then we walked through Central Park.  At that point we split up; my wife and son went back to the hotel (where due to a malfunctioning card and a ridiculous security protocol, they were forced to stay in the lobby -- I can tell you that we will never stay at the Paramount Times Square ever again -- it was quite a horrible hotel!).  I went with my daughter through the American Museum of Natural History, but we did have to cut our visit short after my wife's texts finally got through to me.

Tuesday started off with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian.  Then a trip out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  I'd been to Ellis Island twice, but never the Statue.  No one else had been to either.

Great Hall at Ellis Island

Tuesday evening, I saw Albee's Three Tall Women starring Glenda Jackson and Laurie Metcalf.  Great performances all the way around.  That was probably the only good thing about staying right in Times Square, which we certainly won't do again.

Wed. we got up reasonably early and caught the train down to Philadelphia.  We got in at about 11:30 and had enough time to tour the historic sites, including the tour of Independence Hall and seeing the Liberty Bell up close.  We also saw Franklin Square and the outside of Betsy Ross's house (didn't have time to go in).

Independence Hall

I convinced my son to come along and the two of us went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is open late on Wednesdays.

Thurs. we all toured the Rodin Museum, and then again my son and I wandered through the Barnes Foundation while my wife and daughter did some shopping.  It was still fairly early, so I took the kids into the Franklin Institute (a very cool science museum) while my wife went back to the hotel.

Friday morning we had just a bit of time to kill before heading over to the airport, so we went to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).  I definitely saw the seedier side of Philadelphia on this trip, but I think I'll write about that later.  On the whole, it was a good trip, but we tried to squeeze in a bit too much (even though I cut most of the New York City museums off the list).  At this point, I'm glad to be back into my regular routine.  But I have to run now.

WOT: Writing Outraged Tracts

This title should really be Writing Outraged Letters, but I couldn't pass up on the opportunity to reference this New Wave hit (or blip?): WOT by Captain Sensible.  After listening to that, you can come back and tune in to the rest of my rant.

I have to admit that writing letters to the editor or to politicians has never really been my style.  Usually after the passion of the moment has worn off, I either don't really care enough to bother, I don't think what I write will really make a difference (other than allow me to blow off steam) or I simply have calmed down enough to see things from multiple perspectives and don't think it wise to really put my name out there, advocating some position that I may not hold all that strongly.  That doesn't mean that I didn't consider writing on all sorts of issues.  Back in the day of course, you really had to care, to either send a hand-written letter or a typed one.  I think for a civics course, I had to write a letter to a politician, but I can't recall at all what it would have been about.

As late as 10 years ago, I remember hearing that the staff who actually handle the mail for politicians considered hand-written letters much more serious than typed ones, probably in part because seniors have a much better track record of voting than younger people.  As time marched on, typed letters were fine and counted much more than email.  I suspect now, people taking the time to write an email are taken more seriously than people who just tweet or retweet some "commentary."

At the ramp up to the Iraq war (the one that George W. Bush started), I actually did feel compelled to write to Senator Durbin of Illinois and urge him not to support the war resolution.  I got a nice letter back, though it was clearly a form letter.  He was one of the very few Senators not to vote for the war resolution, not that I credit the public letters he received (from presumably thousands of voters) for really swaying him, though I suppose if 100% of the letters he got had pushed for war, it might have troubled him that he wasn't fully representing the state.  I've really sworn off writing letters to politicians since then, though I do periodically write to city staff about issues when I think I have information that would be useful to them.

There are many things I don't like about society today, but I would say that the way the culture wars have gotten out of hand is pretty high on my list, and I have to think that internet comments on news sites and bulletin boards have contributed to this.  I basically now feel that all news sites should simply disable comments, as they have become so corrosive.  People have plenty of other venues to make fools of themselves, with Twitter being one of the top examples.  It ticks off pretty much all of the buttons for poor communication -- everything is short and un-nuanced, it rewards immediacy and not reflection and second thoughts (especially on the wisdom of sending a tweet in the first place), it is addictive and habit-forming and it spreads so quickly that one's words can't be retracted if one changes one mind.  I definitely feel that on balance Twitter has done more harm than good (and this was even before the Cheeto-in-Chief came onto the scene).  It's a close thing, but I guess I would say that the Web on the whole has been positive, though incredibly disruptive to all kinds of practices and businesses.

Anyway, I have found myself very much out of tune with most of the Toronto Star columnists, aside from the ones that focus exclusively on urban issues or Chantal Hébert, who writes primarily about national or Quebec politics (I would generally consider her as a political reporter and not a columnist who is writing opinion pieces).  There are one or two who I've decided to completely skip, both in print and on-line, but in one case even the headlines are becoming appalling click-bait (like, Churchill -- the barbaric monster).  I wonder whether so many people are avoiding Shree Paradkar's columns that she is reduced to these desperate measures.  For me the last straw was a recent column where she claimed it was perfectly appropriate to shut down campus speakers she didn't agree with, and essentially belittled anyone who disagrees with this celebration of heavy-handed censorship.  I wrote to the Star and basically said how sad it was that their columnist was espousing opinions that reflected so badly on the paper's values (and that the click-bait techniques were appalling).  I certainly don't think the founders of the Star would be proud of the paper in general or their continued employment of Ms. Paradkar (that wasn't part of the letter, however).  There isn't any point in threatening to cancel my subscription, but I did say that if the click-bait got worse (which it probably will), then I would cancel the paper.  Essentially it was a completely pointless gesture, but I felt I had to make it to show them that they weren't living up to their own standards.  I did feel a bit better after I sent it off (just an email rather than a typed letter).  But I don't think I'll make a habit of it.  If there is something that bothers me that much, I'll weigh whether it really merits being posted here or if it is something that won't seem to matter as much to me after a good night's sleep.

The Sugar Shack

While this event is over by nearly two weeks now, I thought I would give a small shout out to the sugar shack that was hosted on Sugar Beach.  I guess I had expected more of a focus on learning how maple syrup was made, but this was more about setting up a number of stalls selling things that were for the most part only the most tangentially related to maple syrup.  I suppose I was hoping for a more sober discussion of tapping the trees, and it just didn't occur to me that since there are no maple trees to speak of in the downtown and certainly not right along the beach, that part of the story would be quite neglected.  When I was growing up, we went to these sorts of events once or twice, but we also lived in areas better covered by maples and the kids could actually see the tapped trees and the lucky ones could carry the full pails of sap into the sugar shack.

I don't want to say that this was completely commercial, as if one really wanted one could learn despite the overall nature of the event, which was mostly about consuming maple syrup (and many other things) rather than making it.  There was a group of people boiling down the sap (and a lot of smoke from this part of the demonstration), and you could even drink the refined sap, which was still only about 1/3 of the way to becoming maple syrup.  So that was cool, and I tried to point these aspects of the event out to the kids.

In general, I think they were more interested in the ice sculptures.  I will admit that these ice trays were neat, and this was where they made maple taffy on-the-spot using freshly-made maple syrup and snow (trucked in from somewhere).

On the whole, it was fun and probably the closest urban kids can come to the full sugar shack experience, but next time I'll see if there is a place in the north that shows the whole tree to bottle experience.  I may have mentioned that I think the tree in our backyard is a variety of maple, but I don't really have the patience to boil the sap down after I collect it, so I think it will go untapped for the time being.

Pandas - last chance

Apparently, there is actually a panda countdown clock, with less than 16 hours to go (since you clearly can't go in the middle of the night).  I have no idea how crowded it will be.  While it was fairly chilly two weeks ago (and should be somewhat warmer today), I'm glad we went then and avoided the hysteria.

As promised, here are some photos we took on the last trip.

 

The cubs

So we saw them sleeping and eating.  Which is pretty much all pandas do, but they are cute... 

The Tundra Trek was definitely more interesting, as the animals were more in their native element, so to speak.

Polar bears

Snowy owl

Arctic wolves

I hadn't remembered that the zoo also has penguins, though these are actually African penguins.

As I mentioned before, the Canadian Domain was quite a bust and not worth the walk.  But we were lucky enough to see Kiran, the greater one-horned rhino calf.
 

And that was basically the end of our trip to the zoo.

Pandas - running out of time

I meant to actually put up photos of the visit, but they are stored away where I can't access them right now.  So this will just be a quick note that this is the last weekend that the pandas (and especially the 2 panda cubs) are on view at the Toronto Zoo.  The adult pandas were eating bamboo, and the cubs were sleeping, and that is probably what you would see if you visit.  Anyway, it's best to go fairly early and go to the panda pavilion first.  It might be a bit warmer this weekend, but it's still chilly so bundle up.  We also liked the Tundra Trek, since the polar bears and arctic wolves were in their element.  The excursion to the Canadian animals was not worth it -- the grizzly bear display is completely closed, and we didn't even see the moose.  My guess is this will be our last visit for quite a while, and we are more likely to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo on our next Chicago trip.  I'll see about getting the photos up soon.

I also am planning a post on books turned to movies, but that will have to wait. However, I should mention that there are only two more days to catch Brown Girl Begins (based on Nalo Hopkinson's novel, Brown Girl in the Ring).  It's at the movie theatre at Dundas and Yonge.  Some details here: BGB.  As I said, more later.

Wiped Out from the Weekend

I am getting so far behind in these posts.  At some point, I'll probably just wipe the slate clean and start fresh.  Anyway, I did a bit too much running around on the weekend, which I'll elaborate on in a moment.  I had noticed my cough had come back towards the end of the day Monday.  As it happened I basically had to stay out late to see SFYS (totally worth it to see my parody of Albee's The Goat go up).  Tuesday morning I was in really bad shape, and my director suggested I go home (though I would have just had to work from home since I wasn't getting out of any work obligations...).  I actually skipped going to the gym and got some extra sleep, which helped.  Today, I think the cold portion has more or less passed, but I have a really hacking cough, which I am hoping to get over by spring break!

To back up to the weekend, I got the groceries out of the way fairly early (well, except for tofu, which they were out of).  I had planned to take my son to see Black Panther, and the earliest showing was at Beach Cinema, so we set out.  As it turned out, there was some major water problem.  There was no running water in the theatre, so they had to close down for the whole weekend.  I'm sure the owners were just having kittens, giving up such a profitable weekend.  That didn't help us any, and we went back home, stopping off at the library on the way back.  On the positive side, I was able to take my daughter swimming at Matty Eckler, and it was more productive than usual.  I also bought her some new sneakers in the mall on the way back, though it looks like she might need to grow into them.

After some indecisiveness, my daughter decided she wanted to go to zoo after all on Sunday.  We had to hustle to get the ZipCar, since I wanted an early start.  The drive over was quite uncongested, and we made good time.  We got there about 9:45.  I mostly wanted to make sure they saw the pandas one more time, and in particular the panda babies.  We got a pretty good look at them before it got too crowded.  I'm going to put off the rest of the zoo story (and the accompanying photos) to my next post.  The drive back was in heavier traffic, but actually it moved along pretty well until I got onto the Don Valley South.  Then it was quite slow until maybe Lawrence.  I was just a bit stressed, since the car was due at 1, and the clock was ticking.  I ended up dropping it off with a couple of minutes to spare.  I then headed downtown to drop off some stuff at work and to meet two actors that want to be in the Fringe show.  The meeting went well.  On the way back home, I did stop off at the gym and got in a workout.  So it was a pretty full weekend, all things considered!  Probably best if I sign off now and get more rest.