I had an incredibly runny nose on Friday, leading me to get an extra strength antihistamine. Sat. was even worse, and I finally decided I was probably sick, not just suffering from allergies. I don't get sick too often, though I vaguely recollect getting sick last summer at some point. It could easily be brought on by stress (and certainly falling off my bike in the middle of the street counts as stressful!) or lack of sleep or almost anything else. Fortunately, I didn't have too much planned,* but I decided not to go to the gym this weekend (particularly on Sat. when my nose was running almost every 10 minutes) or to go up to the library. I think even on Monday, I will take the TTC (rather than biking) and then stop in at the library on the way home to pick up a couple of books on hold.
About the only thing I did manage to do was go to the grocery store on Sat., and then I went back to napping. I am about to run over for another short trip to pick up some baking materials, but even this could wait until Monday.
I was going back and forth about seeing The Winter's Tale at Withrow Park by Shakespeare in the Ruff, but the Now review convinced me that I really didn't want to bother. I didn't really like Portia's Julius Caesar that they did last year, but at least they were fairly clear that they were changing the play around. Here, the director, Sarah Kitz, has seen fit to more subtly add her own monologue towards the end to try to balance the play and talk about the oppression of women in history (and presumably by extension in Shakespeare), but I really don't appreciate this hijacking of a famous work to fit someone else's agenda (and I didn't like it a few years back when someone inverted Glass Menagerie). At least last year Kitz was more honest about what she was up to,** but not so much this time around. I am fairly unlikely to see any further Shakespeare in the Ruff productions as long as she is leading the charge. C'est dommage. And maybe it is a bit hypocritical in that I would accept strategic cuts in Shakespeare (namely Kate's last monologue in Taming of the Shrew) but not these strategic additions. Nonetheless, I find that contemporary playwrights don't do a good job when they add their words to Shakespeare's. (I'm quite consistent in this and didn't like this in Ted Witzel's All's Well That Ends Well in High Park back in 2016.)
So I mostly slept, trying to get over this cold or whatever it is, though I probably do need to get ready for a meeting at work tomorrow, assuming that I do make it in. It probably also true that my current reading has done little to lift my spirits. I'm most of the way through Naked Lunch. I've never read this before, and it certainly comes across as wilfully, overwhelmingly, obscene. If his other novels are quite so unrelenting I probably won't bother, but I'll try to finish this tonight. It does help a bit to think of it as a very, very long prose poem about man's inhumanity to man, further amplified by the raging desire of the addict to score and woe to anyone who gets in his way. The other book I am reading is Ibuse's Black Rain, which is sort of a cinéma vérité-style account of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. Neither of these is particularly helpful at a time when I am very down on humanity in general and Western politicians specifically. Given that Celine's Journey to the End of the Night is coming up fairly soon, I may have to go a bit deeper into the list to find something less bleak. Perhaps a Barbara Pym book or something...
* And it is certainly possible that not having more on my agenda led to the illness in the first place, as I generally get sick only on the few occasions I do attempt to relax.
** Actually, it was Kaitlyn Riordan who reworked Caesar, but my point still stands that I am not very interested in Shakespeare in the Ruff under the reign of Riordan and Kitz. I see that Hart House is going to be staging Portia's Caesar, so it will certainly get a wider audience, but I will not be a part of it...
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