13th Canadian Challenge - 13th Review - Short Talks

Short Talks by Anne Caron was recently reissued by Brick Books as one of its Brick Books Classics.

There are 45 short talks in the book with a very short afterword that was added for this new edition (where indeed the new introduction by poet Margaret Christakos is nearly as long as the rest of the book!).

I guess I would classify the talks as very short prose poems.  Most are quite curious.

Here are a few excerpts:

Short Talk on Mona Lisa - "Every day he poured his question into her, as you pour water from one vessel into another, and it poured back.  Don't tell me he was painting his mother, lust, etc."

Short Talk on Shelter - "You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it's because of the phosphorous..."

These short talks are certainly poetic and intriguing -- and misleading, since they are presented somewhat flatly as if they were non-fiction, though seem wildly fanciful in some cases.

(This review was a bit too short, even for me, as pressed for time as I am, so I extended it slightly.)

There is a bit of a theme running through many of these talks, focusing on artists (Kafka, Van Gogh, Prokofiev) and sadness.  It isn't entirely clear what form the sadness takes -- being unappreciated in a world of philistines, never finding the right word or note until it is too late, perhaps only becoming an artist due to unrelated mental illness (Sylvia Plath).  Ovid is a particularly interesting case, as he was exiled for crossing Emperor Augustus, and indeed Ovid died in exile, writing several long poems during his long exile to try to regain favour, though of course he remains best known for Metamorphoses.

Here is Carson on Ovid: "He sups and walks back to his room.  The radio is on the floor.  Its luminous green dial blares softly.  He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters.  Now Ovid is weeping.  Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing."

13th Canadian Challenge - 12th Review - Basic Black with Pearls

This slim novel, Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig is quite difficult to review (and this is review #12, btw).  The novel was reissued on House of Anansi Press in 2015 and then was brought out by NYRB Classics in 2018, which is the edition I own.

Here is a CBC interview with Sarah Weinman, who wrote the afterword for the NYRB edition, where she discusses aspects of Weinzweig's life and how it fed into the novel.

To return to my review, I find it is, in fact, difficult to know what actually happens in the novel.  I wouldn't say that this novel is spoiler-proof, but it is so hard to know what is going on and what is the ground truth that who can say if the plot was SPOILED or not...

There is another postmodern novel I would put into dialog with Basic Black with Pearls, and that is Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin, which is quite experimental.*  Each entry begins with a physical description of a hotel room - discussion of the door, style and placement of the window, condition of the paint and/or wallpaper, and then finally an inventory of the artwork on the walls, the bed and the ubiquitous television.  Information about the author of these notes leaks through, particularly by the second half of each entry.  He is apparently a secret agent of sorts or an arms dealer and possibly also a famous author (under a nom de guerre).  The footnotes to many of the entries often link back to another entry, creating a bit of a web (not completely different from something Calvino or Cortazar might have attempted).  However, a little of this goes a long way, and I did find myself getting tired of the room descriptions about halfway through the book.

Fortunately, Basic Black with Pearls wasn't quite that obscure, but the narrator, Shirley, is engaged in a long-running affair with a secret agent, Coenraad (or at least that is what she maintains from the start of the novel).  Since he is a secret agent, he can't just call her up and tell her where they are meeting, as all of their phones and computers are bugged.  So instead, he will find ways to plant information in the local newspaper or leave a postcard with some clues that she needs to decipher, generally directing her to go to a different hotel than the one where she is actually staying.

Where things get very odd is that (again she claims but we the readers don't actually see) nearly all of the time she actually encounters Coenraad he is in deep disguise, actually getting enraged if she tries to break his cover.  Apparently, he is so convincing in his disguises that he can portray himself as different nationalities (and I believe different ethnicities and races as well, which brings up unpleasant recollections of blackface, which was in the news not so long ago). 

Given the radical uncertainty over what is actually going on, even Shirley wonders once in a while if she has slept with Coenraad or an unwitting (but generally willing) stranger.  She tries to reassure herself that Coenraad would always intervene at the last moment, if she inadvertently ran across the "wrong Coenraad."

There is some additional tension, on top of the espionage angle, in that she thinks there is pressure on Coenraad's end to break things off, and that is why they are meeting (likely for their final assignation) in Toronto, which is Shirley's hometown, despite their previous rule to never meet on anyone's home turf.  Shirley spends quite a bit of time wandering around downtown Toronto, and I believe she makes it as far as Kensington Market, looking for clues to Coenraad's whereabouts.  At one point, she seems to break into the wrong apartment (not a hotel at all) and has to be escorted out.  There is then a scene of her with her husband and children (who have been completely off-screen ciphers up until this point).  No question by this point I was wondering if the entire novel was the record of a major breakdown (either schizophrenia or some other form of psychosis) and whether Coenraad existed (doubtful) and if she had even left Toronto at any point in the past.  And that's basically how it ends.  It is definitely an interesting but very challenging book.  I will let it simmer for a while and then read it a second time to see how my reactions are different on a second reading, particularly if I will find all the games and mental puzzles between Shirley and Coenraad intriguing or just sad the second time around.


* Just to thoroughly confuse matters, I would definitely recommend the interested reader check out Rick Moody's Hotels of North America, where a somewhat obsessive reviewer gradually reveals his life story through a series of long-form reviews of hotels and motels on a rating site (that is inspired by but is clearly not Yelp or Yahoo).  It's quite droll and melancholy at the same time.  As I am well over my allotted limit for this review, I will point you to this review instead.

13th Canadian Challenge - 11th Review - Sandra Beck

I wanted to like this novel, Sandra Beck by John Lavery, a lot more than I actually did enjoy it, which makes it a major challenge to review.

I suspect at some level, I was blocked because I didn't really know quite what to say about it.  I'm sure I'll still do only a marginal job of it, and I may come back around later to clean the review up a bit more. This blog has quite a bit of information about John Lavery's writing career (he came to writing quite late), as well as the fact that Sandra Beck was his only novel, along with two short story collections.  He died of cancer at the age of 62, and concerns about cancer are rife in Sandra Beck.  I will warn you that the interview with Lavery embedded in the blog do contain SPOILERS.

As does the rest of this review (SPOILERS ahead).

I'm not sure if it should really count as a spoiler if the back cover blurb gives away a major plot point, but so be it.  Sandra Beck is by all (or at least most) accounts a pretty incredible mother, wife, musician and manager at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.  And then people need to deal with the sudden loss of her out of their lives.  Indeed, she is only a very shadowy figure in the first large chunk of this novel, which focuses on Sandra's daughter, Josee, but she is clearly not dead.  Quite a bit of this chapter involves Josee moving between English and French, with her teachers and classmates and so forth.  She has the general spirit, if not quite the anarchic impulse or brattiness of Raymond Queneu's Zazie, so in that sense it did feel like a bit of a retread.  I also really struggled reading about Josee having sexual relations with "Uncle" Danilo, who was the clarinetist in the orchestra.  There are lines I just don't even like to read about being crossed, and this went too far for me and certainly spoiled this chapter.

I thought in general, this would be a little bit like the prismatic view of a missing (or in this case dead) person, like Jack Fuller's The Best of Jackson Payne, first getting Josee to reflect on her mother and then get Sandra's husband's recollections and then some of the musicians to chime in. But it wasn't like that at all, aside from the fact that we never really get a sense of Sandra's interior life (a bit odd for a book named after her...).  As I mentioned Sandra is alive throughout Josee's chapter.  There was sort of a cloud of gloom hanging over P.F. Bastarache or some sort of postmodern finger of God, but then in the end it was sort of explained that this was his happiness gone up in smoke (again, a terrible paraphrase) as he forced himself to think about the fact that she was dead, whereas she is only occasionally in his memory throughout this stretch of the book (possibly because it is simply too painful to think about her).  The vast majority of the book (the sections from P.F. Bastarache's perspective) is almost entirely about him dealing with a police brutality case.  (No question this would feel even more relevant today, but it still has very little to do with Sandra Beck, the namesake of the book after all.)

To add even more to the confusion there is a short story embedded after the novel ends which is a flashback of Sandra and P.F. Bastarche visiting Josee in Bolivia (she apparently went down there after graduating from high school).

I think this is a book that either wasn't as clever as it thought it was or it was in fact too clever for me and I simply didn't appreciate it.  That said, it is a reasonably good example of the Canadian postmodern novel, and if that is your thing, then you probably do want to check out Sandra Beck.

13th Canadian Challenge - 10th Review - Riffs

I'm in a bit of a groove now, so I'll riff a bit on this book and move on.  Dennis Lee is quite an important poet, though one that doesn't get a lot of attention outside of Canada.  Several years back I reviewed Civil Elegies, which is likely his most sustained attempt at engaging with the urban condition.  I admire a lot about Civil Elegies, though I still haven't read it enough times for it to really stick, and I'll have to reread it again soon.  I had actually expected to review Heart Residence, a collected poems that incorporates Civil Elegies, Riffs, most of his poetry aimed at children and some other poetic suites.  However, I made it through Riffs and paused (and I have yet to restart), though I suppose there is always the next Challenge.  At any rate, I wasn't able to get the signed copy of Heart Residence I had wanted, so I ended up ordering a standalone (signed) copy of Riffs, and I'll go ahead and review that now.

I did not carefully compare the revised version of Riffs in Heart Residence to this edition, but I did flip through them both looking for major changes.  I did catch that Riff #86 was completely replaced with a new riff in Heart Residence, but otherwise the changes seemed fairly minor.

Anyway, there are 88 poems (riffs) in the collection, which is supposed to correspond with the 88 keys of a piano.  Overall these poems could be read as jazz-infused lyrics (and occasionally blues-soaked laments) as the poet relates his falling in love with a woman.  Lee doesn't really hold back, alternating poems where he is infatuated and disenchanted, based on what has been going on in this (now highly public) love affair.  Given that these poems are dedicated to his wife, Susan, and that he is still married to her, roughly 15 years later at the time of the publication of Heart Residence, then she is particularly forgiving and/or generous to allow some of these poems into print.  (While there is a disclaimer that Riffs is a work of fiction, I don't think anyone really believes those legal fig leafs, particularly in the case of confessional or semi-confessional poets).  In this specific case, I am thinking of Riff #70 where the poet is bitterly raging after some rejection: "but you know I / never did like your body, / never those porridge thighs the spider crawl around your eyes".

Again, keeping legal disclaimers in mind, the poet appears to be separated from his wife or partner and has "kids" who don't really make an appearance in these poems.  However, the object of his infatuation is married, which certainly complicates matters and sends him into these almost manic phases of joy and despondency, depending on how far he thinks he can go with her (which is often quite far indeed).  Generally, the poet doesn't spend too much time thinking about the morality of adultery, but it does surface in Riffs #55 and 56.  In Riff #55, he writes "I am so utterly / tired of this slimy ribbon of / lies, wound round my / head, my / shame my / too-long life to come..."

After what appears to be a final break (recounted in Riff #77), the poet is despondent, just barely hanging on in Riff #80 and going through the motions in Riff #81: "Get up eat fruit brew coffee, / do work see friends lie down."

Then a reconciliation occurs, but the poet is coy who initiated it.  And before you know it, they are a couple of sorts in Riff #87: "And / then we were home. / Our / breath bunched, the shudder-us / twined-of / (and if the) desire and the / planet / go on ...".  The ending is essentially suspended, but it seems that (adulterous) love has triumphed in a somewhat contingent way, but still hanging in there as the series closes.

This is definitely an interesting collection.  It is not by any stretch as deep as Civil Elegies, but still worth reading and pondering.

13th Canadian Challenge - 9th Review - The Book of Eve

This novel, The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe, is often considered a bit of an neglected classic feminist novel.  Within the first few pages, we see Eva grow tired of the low-level browbeating she has taken from her husband, Burt, for decades.  While there was never much true attraction to Burt (she married him due to the stability he offered and the chance to start a family*), any affection had been worn away by the fact that he unexpectedly became a semi-invalid and retired, and she had to care for him.  Despite the fact that she knows she will scandalize the neighbours and her own daughter, she packs a small bag and leaves Burt to his own devices.  She has no real idea where to go and asks a taxi driver to take her to a part of Montreal where they have inexpensive rooms for let, and she sets off on a completely new and unexpected path.  Such things were just not done in 1973, let alone by a 70 year-old-woman (and pensioner) who had simply had enough.

Every so often, Eva imagines writing a letter to God, sort of standing in for Eve, the mother of all disobedient women.  She basically asks for him to understand things from her point of view, though she suspects that He will not be particularly receptive to her story.

Eva spends a good deal of her time trying to figure out how to make ends meet, as her rent takes a huge chunk out of her pension.  She makes one half-hearted attempt to get some maintenance funds out of Burt (under Quebec law at that time, even though she had paid a very large part of the mortgage on their house, it was entirely his property) before becoming a bit of a scavenger, taking interesting things she finds to the local pawn shops.  Of course, Eva limits her meetings with her son, Neil, who cannot understand her and would be horrified that his mother had essentially become a tramp (in the Chaplinesque sense of the word), though her granddaughter Kim ultimately finds out a bit more about her bohemian way of life and doesn't seem quite as judgmental.

Perhaps the most astonishing turn of events is when she meets one of her fellow tenants, Johnny, who is a bit of a handyman and carpenter and perhaps even an artist at heart.  He helps her fix up her room and its stove, and they end up spending a surprising amount of time together.  There are certainly flashes of Joyce Cary's Gulley Jimson in Johnny, though Johnny does not appear to be an artist of that calibre.

There are a few other interesting turns of the wheel of fate still to come, but I think I'll stop there before spoiling the book any further.  I found The Book of Eve thought-provoking and occasionally exasperating, but usually quite amusing, and I definitely think it deserves to be more widely read.


* And he also caught her on the rebound from a short affair with the principal of the school where she worked.

13th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Tomorrow’s Bright White Light

I am not familiar with the Canadian poem Jan Conn, despite this being her 9^th book of poetry (with 2 previous volumes on the Brick Books label).  Here are a few intriguing facts about Jan Conn: she is a professor of biomedical science (so being a poet is only a side gig for her and she has serious science credentials) and she has done most of her field work (on mosquitoes) in South America, notably Guatemala. Bolivia, Peru and Brazil.  This biographical experience only works its way into a few of these poems (most notably “On the Left Bank of the Itaya”) but was a much more prominent theme in her previous collection, Botero’s Beautiful Horses.  There is a fairly extensive interview with her on the Brick Books' website for those interested.

I’d say that these are poems that creep up on you (or at least the ones that held my attention on a second or third reading).  In addition, at least some (not all) of the poems tap into a bleak vision that all is not as pleasant as it seems on the surface.  “Family Portrait in an Unmarked Car" focuses on a family trying to keep up appearances in the face of some unspecified economic ruin: “in the parking lot where our neighbours dwell-- / new lives in old cars. … / … In winter, we’ll run low on fuel, / station ourselves in the basement of that shrink-wrapped / renovation.  When security insists we move along,  we’ll bark a lot. …”

While the narrator of “Frontier Mentality” has much further to fall, economic disaster seems to be looming here as well, though there also seems to be a strong thread of urban anomie present in the poem: “More and more we turn to urban life where the next big thing / is being created as we speak …  /  … What possessed us to purchase a condo whose / single distinguishing attribute is a view of a reflection / of the Statue of Liberty? … / college loans unforgiven, we’re looking for the scam / that makes the ends crawl a little closer together.”

Bad real estate decisions also come into play in the slightly surreal poem “Melodrama is Foreign to My Name”: “By error I rent the shadow / of an apartment building, celebrating / all the ledges I have never dusted. / … / I’m forced to abandon summer: / the boarded-up lighthouse / blocked my paths to sunlight / one by one.”

I’d say in general, these are fairly challenging poems that never reveal their meaning clearly, but her sometimes sardonic tone and outsized vocabulary holds some appeal to me, so I’ll likely check out a couple of her previous poetry collections.

Partially Successful Sunday

I was a little annoyed to learn that the UT book drop was closed, so it looks like I will be hanging onto The Plague longer than I anticipated.  I had specifically asked about the availability of the book drop, though to be fair, I did ask about this several months ago and obviously things have changed, as the shut-down dragged on a lot longer than many people expected.  As it happens, I didn’t go too far out of my way, since I had planned to check out the Bau-Xi Gallery as well.  They had just hung a new exhibition of Chase Langford's work.  There were several pieces I liked, sort of geometric abstractions, that in several cases were also reminiscent of Lawren Harris’s arctic scenes (perhaps by way of Douglas Coupland’s cheeky paint-by-numbers deconstructions of the Group of Seven).  

Chase Langford, Grinnel Mountain

Chase Langford, Blue Glacier 1

Douglas Coupland, Maligne Lake, Jasper Park after Lawren Harris

At any rate, I’m glad I checked it out (and the photo gallery 3 doors down was also open).  I managed to make it over there to the Michael Wolf exhibit right before things closed down.  The Wolf photos have been rotated back into storage, but they had a number of interesting photos from David Leventi.  

David Leventi, Florent

I’m not that likely to visit the AGO next weekend (probably a bit too packed) but maybe the weekend after (and I might stop in another time or not).  The weekend after that I will most likely be biking over to MOCA, so hopefully the weather cooperates.

I then continued on to Union Station.  I was disappointed but not particularly surprised than the food court wasn’t open.  I put in a few hours at work and came home.  Overall a decent day, though I didn’t really get enough rest.

Stay-at-Home Saturday

This title is just slightly misleading, as I did take a walk up to the Danforth, as I shall discuss shortly, but I didn't ride my bike downtown, which I've been doing most Saturdays for the last 6 or so weeks.  I didn't do this, as the forecast was for a thunderstorm in the afternoon, though this never actually materialized.  I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world to stay home and rest at least a little bit, though in some ways I stayed pretty busy.

The day did not start out particularly well.  I slept in a bit late, and the paper was never delivered.  It was on the late side when I called.  It is worth noting that the local dispatcher wants me to call his direct number rather than have complaints filed against him, which would be fine except he is extremely difficult to talk to, both because of his attitude (of not wanting to be bothered) and his accent is completely impenetrable.  He was very irritable that I hadn't called until 10 am (when his delivery guys had stopped working).  I gave him my address and the near major intersection but then he kept saying something like which row, which makes no sense at all, unless he thinks I have a community mailbox.  I waited an hour and the paper still didn't arrive, so I put in a formal complaint with the Star (and still didn't get the damn paper delivered).  This means I'll have to deal with this route manager again.  I really wish that I would get transferred to a different manager, as I really don't like dealing with him when anything goes wrong, and at some point I probably will just cancel my subscription as it is too much of a hassle.  As it happens, I do get complimentary access to the digital version, so I'll pull up the comics so my kids can read them if they want.  Anyway, fingers crossed that I get the paper tomorrow with no issues.

I mentioned already that I had picked up some books last week and have scheduled another pick up for Tuesday late afternoon.  I'm hoping that some of the books my daughter requested show up soon.  But this does mean that I need to start returning books as well. I had recently wrapped up (and reviewed!) Carrianne Leung's That Time I Loved You, so I decided I really ought to drop it off, getting some exercise in the process before the thunderstorm (that I assumed was on its way).  While I was up on the Danforth, I ran into the Shoppers and saw there was a bit of a line-up at the friendly, neighbourhood cannabis store.

I then ducked into Circus Books.  While basically all my favourite used book stores have closed (including two relatively recent entrants near UT), Circus Books isn't bad if on the small side for a used book store.  I decided it probably might be a good idea to spend a bit of money to try to make sure that this store weathers the crisis.  I ended up getting a copy of Robertson Davies's The Salterton Trilogy and then three books by Josef Skvorecky.  While I assumed that I already had a copy of The Cowards, it turns out that I had a copy of The Divine Game instead.  However, this copy is in a bit nicer condition, and I can put the other one out in the Little Free Library, so that's fine.

It still didn't rain in the afternoon, so I actually watered the plants and then hung out on the back deck reading.  The weather was actually quite pleasant and this was a fairly relaxing part of the day.  As there is no internet in this part of the yard, I listened to music on my iPod (as discussed in the previous post).

I managed to get through Camus's The Plague.  I started this several months ago, right around the time that restrictions were coming in place.  I think I would have finished it several weeks ago if I was still taking transit or, alternatively, if I was still allowed to go to the gym and work out (and read) at the stationary bikes.  At any rate, I did enjoy the book while I was reading it, but didn't make it a huge priority, compared to all the other things I have been doing (including trying to more or less find e-book equivalents for my core book collection).  While we are by no means out of the woods with Covid, things are slowly returning to a sort of normal, which seemed an appropriate time to get to the 5th section of The Plague where plague is brought under control and the quarantine is lifted.  I'm fairly likely to bike tomorrow, and I'll try to hit UT first to drop this book off, then to go over to Bau-Xi Gallery, which has reopened and will be open tomorrow (even though the AGO is closed for one more week to get ready for its grand reopening).  I'm super curious if the food court in Union Station is open and, if so, how many restaurants will actually be operating, particularly on a Sunday.  Of all the food courts downtown, this is the one that will most likely reopen first (possibly even before the Eaton Centre).  I know it is a small thing, but just being able to grab some food at a food court is something that I am looking forward to now...

I probably ought to try to get one or two reviews done, but there is no question my energy is flagging pretty seriously at this point, and I probably ought to just get to bed.

Ode to an Obsolete Technology

A while back, I wrote about digging out my iPod (and the charger!) and loading on a lot of music for the trip to Ottawa.  Then I also used it on trips to Pittsburgh and Atlanta.  In Pittsburgh I was very pleased to see there was an iPod alarm clock/charging station (haven't seen one of those in a long, long time), which was great because I hadn't brought the charger along.

While the actual technology in the iPod is fine, the economic model behind it has pretty much collapsed.  People basically decided they wanted to stream music rather than pay for downloads, which could then be loaded onto an iPod.  As people stopped carrying iPods around (and mostly streamed music on their phones) all the support structures for iPods vanished pretty quickly.

As it turns out, I actually have an iPod mini with around 4 GB storage.  That's a lot of music, but only a fraction of what some of the other iPods can hold.  While I don't spend a lot of time swapping the music in and out, I have done it occasionally.

Originally, this was my wife's iPod, and it had mostly New Wave music from the 80s, along with some 80s/90s groups.  Then I inherited after she moved over to streaming.

I left on the New Wave music and added 54-40 and the Greatest Hits by the Jam, and probably Paul Simon's Graceland and more U2, including The Joshua Tree, and some classical, most notably Glenn Gould's classic recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  This is primarily what I listened to back and forth from Ottawa.

Somewhere along the way, the settings were corrupted, and I had to do a factory reset.  I assumed that the music would be left on.  Wrong!  So I had to rebuild the library.  This time around, I dropped almost everything but the New Wave hits.  I then added quite a few jazz albums by Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson, plus The 49th Parallel by Neil Swainson.

That gave me very little room to play with, though I added a fair bit of Camper van Beethoven, Local H and some very selected cuts from Depeche Mode, Suzanne Vega and U2.

As I have gotten use to the new order (and I really wish I had the room for any New Order songs!), I decided there were some specific songs I wanted to add: Peter Murphy's Cuts You Up, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, XTC's Dear God, 54-40's Blame Your Parents, Jane's Addition's Been Caught Stealing and Minstry's NWO.  This was pretty solid, though I ultimately wanted to add just a bit more funk: Brick House, Super Freak and Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.  Of course, for every one of these songs I added, I had to pull off an obscure one-hit wonder song.  But I think the balance is pretty good for the time being.  I'll go on keeping on with my obsolete technology until it wears out and just stops working.

13th Canadian Challenge - Double Review - The Nap-Away Motel & That Time I Loved You

It's truly astonishing how long it has been since I've written a full-blown book review.  I had been "on hiatus" several months before lock-down, so I didn't even have the perfectly good excuse of feeling kind of overwhelmed and depressed (and frankly if anything I am working more hours than before the pandemic) that would explain why I wasn't writing my reviews.  But that's water under the bridge now.  I will write this double review (technically reviews 6 and 7) and then wrap up three partially written reviews, which would get me to 10.  That's probably all I can realistically get through by next Tuesday!  (And this still leaves it a bit up in the air when I will finish a review of a Chinese urbanism textbook, but that is definitely on my to-do list for early July.)  Anyway, before I get started, I should say that there will be SPOILERS ahead.

As a general rule, I am very hesitant to supply TRIGGER WARNINGS, but in this case I should, but the Trigger Warnings themselves will SPOIL some of the plot points, which is why I need to indicate to flag a SPOILER ALERT as well.

SPOILERS/TRIGGERS AHEAD

The Nap-Away Motel by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard includes extensive drug use (though not glorification of drug use), violence towards women, a child being run-over by a car and killed (off-page), hate speech directed at a gender fluid character, a death by shooting and the death of a kitten!

That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung revolves around a number of suicides (3 or 4) and then one suicide attempt is discussed midway through the book, bullying, racist slurs being directed at minors and a teacher losing control and hitting a Black student (discussed after the fact).

The Nap-Away Motel (with its deceptively attractive cover) is very much a young adult (YA) novel looking to explore contemporary issues facing children and particularly children who are outsiders due to their race, religion or sexual orientation.  This may well be the only YA novel I've reviewed on this blog.  It is a very, very heavy book and personally I was more emotionally drained rather than uplifted by the fact that the characters persevered through these challenging events.  In fact, there was a strong suggestion that, Tiffany, the youngest of the three rotating narrators, would be harmed (or even killed) by her mother's drug-dealing boyfriend.  If that had happened, I don't think I could have in good faith recommended this book to anyone.

I would say that while most of the stories in That Time I Loved You are focused on children and their experiences in suburban Scarborough, this is more of a retrospective look at childhood in Scarborough (pre-amalgamation).  While broadly appropriate for a YA audience, I think it is really angled more at a Gen X readership, given that the various things that happen are filtered through a 1970s lens (and may be a bit incomprehensible to today's youth...).  Of the two, I certainly felt more connected to That Time I Loved You, as this corresponded reasonably well to my childhood (in the suburb of a much smaller city than Toronto) and it had more light, amusing moments to offset the heavier ones.

I will apologize for not recalling all the details of The Nap-Away Motel, but I read it many, many months ago.  Essentially all the action takes place at a rundown motel in Scarborough.  It may actually be called The Nap-Away Motel (a not-too-subtle hint that this is a place for daylight assignations and thus is kind of a scuzzy place mostly used by hookers and their johns).  However, as is often the case at these urban motels, there are some marginalized people hanging out in the room, mostly trying to avoid the prying eyes of the authorities.  It could have been an interesting (if perhaps too jaded) story if it was told through the eyes of the motel owners, but they are a largely invisible presence in the novel.  The chapters alternate between 3 narrators: Ori, Tiffany and Suleiman.  Ori is a teenager who alternates between presenting as male or female, depending on the situation (generally mostly as male when out on the streets searching for Carter, his older brother, and generally as female when back at the motel and helping look after Tiffany).  Reading between the lines, it is quite clear that Carter has had a major psychotic episode and is running around Toronto without any medical attention and probably without shelter as well.  I'm definitely forgetting some details, but I think Ori and Carter were foster children, which certainly did not help matters.

Suleiman is actually an adult who has moved out of his house due to the stress that followed when his wife, Khadija, ran over and killed their daughter, Amina, in the driveway.  Despite some counselling (and reading some books on how Muslims deal with grief) Suleiman cannot get his anger under control and the remnants of the family are breaking apart.  I probably should pause right here and say that the spin that is put on this is frankly infuriating, particularly the times when the author essentially endorses Khadija's position that it is Suleiman who is in the wrong.  There were several times I came close to abandoning the book over this finding fault with the "angry male" who has every right to be critical of his wife.  I know that I would never be able to forgive someone, even my wife, if they had contributed to the death of one of my children.  Of course, I wouldn't even attempt to make peace in my heart, and the story would have gone in a very different direction.  I think I'll basically skip over the rest of the Suleiman chapters, as they clearly rubbed me the wrong way.

The third, and youngest, narrator is Tiffany.  She lives in the motel with her mother, Shelley, who is frankly a hot mess.  While she occasionally tries to straighten herself out, she is easily brought back into using drugs by her new boyfriend.  Tiffany's older half sister, Nikki, lives with her father and occasionally drops by and tries to help Tiffany out.  One of the ways these different residents interact is by helping raise a litter of kittens (the mother cat gave birth in the parking lot of the motel).  Most of them seem to thrive, even in this unsuitable environment, though one doesn't make it.  It's an interesting book and probably one for readers who thrive on drama, but it really was too heavy for me and the passing of time hasn't changed my feelings about it.

That Time I Loved You is also set in Scarborough but a family-oriented neighbourhood (in fact a fairly new subdivision).  This feels pretty familiar to me.  The block I grew up on was more established, but a whole subdivision was built across the street around the time I was in high school.  There are other commonalities in that kids were basically left to their own devices (free-range parenting), which is a real rarity these days.  What is different from my childhood is that most of the new couples and families moving into Scarborough were racial minorities, predominantly Chinese or from Hong Kong, and my hometown was mostly white.  Leung points out there are some significant class differences between these different families.  In many but not all cases, both parents were working (something that was becoming far more common as I grew up in the 70s -- and my brother and I were definitely latchkey kids) but sometimes they worked office jobs and sometimes one of the partners was a nurse or a mechanic.  The book is described as a series of interlocking stories.  The first story sets the tone that not everything as idyllic as it seems in the suburbs by starting right off into a discussion of the many parents who committed suicide in the neighbourhood (hunting rifle, drinking bleach, hanging and then a fourth parent who perhaps inadvertently drank himself to death).  So there is definitely a bit of a pall that hangs over the streets, though the kids, being kids try to ignore it, though they have been taught a lesson early on that adults don't always have all the answers.  It's not a deeply profound message but the stories are generally pretty interesting and definitely do tap into a nostalgic vein.

Five of the ten stories are about June (pretty clearly a stand-in for the author) and her friends Josie, Nav and Darren.  Both Josie and June are interested in the same boy, Bruce, and it is unclear if this will drive them apart at some point.  There is a sixth story about a slightly older girl, Rainey, who moves to the neighbourhood with her mom after her father dies of a heart attack (slightly breaking the pattern).  Rainey is struggling to make connections and, more generally, to care about life.  She does eventually connect with the boy whose mother killed herself by drinking bleach.  The remaining four stories are told by the adult neighbours, though in one case it is narrated by June's grandmother and June and Nav feature prominently in this story as well.  Only one of them really stuck out a bit awkwardly (Fences, perhaps the obligatory story about suburban infidelity), but the collection might have been a bit stronger (or at least easier to market) if the stories had all been about (and narrated by) children.  I suppose  I could unpack a few of the stories a bit more, but I think I'll stop here and not step all over them and give away too much of the plot.

Gradually, Then All at Once

That sort of feels like life here in Toronto.*  We were actually the last remaining highly locked down city in North America (and for pretty close to the longest, though perhaps Vancouver and Seattle locked down a week or two earlier but then went to Stage 2 sooner).  But the indicators are definitely trending in the right direction and Wed. we got the go ahead to join the rest of Ontario in moving to Stage 2 reopening.  And now people are wondering if perhaps we are reopening too fast, though I think most people are so sick of it that they are happy to take at least some additional risks after basically three solid months of this lock-down.

Up until now, we've been able to go to grocery stores and most retail stores (not in malls) and order take-out or pick-up food from restaurants.  We certainly don't order out often (a couple of times a month), but we have kept that up.

I was pretty excited to actually use a bookdrop to drop off some library books (I guess that was two weeks ago).
 

And then I went ahead and made sure that my book holds were in order as they started to gear up for curb-side pick up of books (but no general browsing inside the library!).  Unfortunately, the closest library won't do reserved pick-up (only drop off), but there are two others that aren't that far away (by bike).  It took a while but I have three books ready to be picked up and I reserved a slot for Thurs. after work.  I do appreciate the feature where you can plug in other library cards, so if any of my daughter's holds are in, I can pick those up as well.  On the flip side, I really do need to finish up a few books so I can return them, as the libraries begin to return to normal.  I was able to wrap up Carrianne Leung's That Time I Loved You and probably have just one more hour to go on Camus's The Plague (aside from being too on-the-nose I've enjoyed it when I found the time to sit down and read).

The major thing for my wife is the closed down hair salons.  For me, I think it is missing going to the gym and swimming pool.  In the grand scheme of things, I would say I miss live theatre and music more, but I know that is going to be the longest to come back, so I'll focus on more concrete goals first, i.e. going to the gym.  It actually sounds like outdoor pools might open fairly soon, though I have no idea how they'll handle crowds, but the Regent Park Aquatic Centre is probably a long way from reopening (particularly as people were notorious for hanging out and blocking the ends of the swimming lanes).

I actually was walking down the street (Jones near Strathcona) and saw an open barbershop already, though my wife is waiting on her beautician to give her a call to reschedule.  Supposedly, this Sat. the ferry to the Toronto Islands will reopen (at half capacity) and masks will be mandatory (just as they will be on the TTC starting in July).  It's not that high on my list of things to go, though I am glad it is reopening, and perhaps I will consider making a trip out there at some point (but only if I can bring my own bike on the ferry).  Apparently, food courts can also reopen in Stage 2, so I will be very curious to see whether the Union Station and/or RBC Plaza food courts open up this week (nothing says that they or any other business has to open but the possibility is there at least).  I will likely be downtown this Sunday, and, if the food court is open, I will certainly throw some business their way.

Gyms are in phase 3, so it could easily be another 2-3 weeks (or more if we get an unlucky break and the new cases start going up again) before I can start getting back into a routine.  I can say that the Royal Conservatory of Music has a fairly thought through plan for limiting capacity to only 30-40% of Koerner Hall and ensuring sufficient spacing.  This means of course that most interesting concerts are already sold out, and I joined the wait list for a couple that interested me.  I was a bit surprised that the Kronos Quartet dates in late Jan. were still open, but I went ahead and snatched up some tickets for that.  Now whether I really will be able to bike (or will break down and ride the TTC) in the winter is a very open question, but I can't worry too much about something that is so theoretical at this point (potentially the concerts might be rescheduled to the spring).  I haven't heard nearly as much forward planning at the TSO, and I hope they are busy figuring out something behind the scenes.  Most theatre companies can probably figure out spacing issues, but the finances will not work if they can not sell out any shows more than 30-40%.  The financial side is something that really cannot be ignored for much longer, though I certainly don't have any easy solutions.

Museums and small art galleries will definitely be easier in figuring out the reopening (and indeed there are included in Phase 2).  The AGO has announced it will reopen starting July 2 for members and donors, with quite a few restrictions (including no check room and no large bags, which is good to know in advance so I don't bike over and then cannot bring my pannier inside).  The current exhibits (including the Diane Arbus exhibit) get extended through mid fall.  I've actually seen that exhibit and may not be rushing back, certainly not that first weekend.  Then the Warhol exhibit gets pushed to spring of 2021 and the Picasso exhibit is fall of 2021.  I was really hoping to see the Picasso this summer, but I am glad it was not cancelled completely!  MOCA is going to open July 12 for members, donors and first responders (who get in for free).  It looks like the general public can go starting July 16.  I'll have to see if tickets need to be booked in advance (probably).  I did email them and they were pretty confident that the Mirvishes would extend the loan of the Sarah Sze piece, so I will make it a priority to get to MOCA around the 16th.  Finally something tangible to look forward to!**

* A slight misquoting of Ernest Hemingway, but I couldn't resist as it is so apt.

** I'd actually kind of forgotten about the post-Impressionist exhibit in Montreal, though at one point I was really looking forward to it.  This will be running through mid November, so I have plenty of time to get there if I can figure out a reasonably safe way to do so.  I think I will not be flying anytime soon, and 4 hours by train (wearing masks the whole way) may be a bit uncomfortable, though that is probably the most realistic.  I think renting a car won't happen for a variety of reasons, but I guess I can't rule it out completely.

Happy Bloomsday!

I basically don't listen to radio anymore, but in the past (probably mid 90s) for a few years in a row I would listen to one of the public radio stations out of New York City do an extended reading (4+ hours) of Joyce's Ulysses on June 16.  Now if you poke around there are plenty of similar events, many of which can be listened to on demand (and not just on June 16).  This broadcast from Ireland is a reading of the entire book, though it doesn't appear you can actually skip around in the book, and the podcast cannot apparently be restarted to the beginning, so it isn't quite as enticing as it could be...  But maybe they'll replay it next year...

In any case, I've read Ulysses twice -- once for university (and I admit that it is much easier to understand the book if you have someone to guide you through it!) and then once for fun.  I'd like to think I'll read it a third time, but it certainly isn't at the top of my reading list.  Just a couple of years ago, I saw a staging of Stephen Dietz's Bloomsday, which is basically about an older man (a literature professor) retracing his steps as a young man visiting Dublin and taking a Bloomsday tour and meeting a young woman (the tour guide actually) and falling in love.  Time folds in on itself and the professor actually gives advice to his younger self.  And then at last year's Fringe, I saw a piece that featured four woman portraying different aspects of Molly Bloom, trading off amongst themselves as they read the closing monologue.  Yes! I said Yes!

Speaking of youthful experiences (and prejudices) imprinting themselves on the brain, I still remember that Ulysses: The Corrected Text (published in 1984) was still a bit of a shooting star in the academic world as I was entering university, though there were some whispers that this version (the Gabler edition) didn't quite live up to the billing.  I spent just a bit of time digging into this and decided that I would stick with the Random House/Vintage edition from 1961.  I was fortunate that the professor that was leading the seminar on Joyce allowed us to read either version.  And nothing since then has shaken my original decision.  As this blog argues, despite even more errors having been uncovered, the Gabler is still the version that Joyce scholars use, but the book generally preferred by readers is the Random House/Vintage edition.  And somewhat incredibly it appears that the Gabler edition is out of print, but is still the version that scholars use!

At any point, while it is definitely a bit of a mountain to scale, I would recommend tackling Ulysses at least once in your life.

Poetry Follow-up

A day or two after that last post on poetry, I realized that I had heard one other relatively famous poet: Gwendolyn Brooks.  She was giving a reading in Evanston in 1996, though I'm not entirely sure what she was promoting.  Possibly a new printing of her collected poems, Blacks.  I actually managed to get her to sign my copy of Blacks, so I am a bit chagrined I forget her the other day.

I was definitely more attuned to poetry through my twenties and even early 30s.  While I am definitely doing more play-writing than poetry-writing these days, I still prefer reading poetry to reading published plays.  At any rate, as I mentioned, poetry is generally not available in the various e-book collections, though Archive.org has a fair number of obscure volumes available for 2 week loans.  (I have to admit that Archive.org plays fast and loose with copyright laws, but they do seem to be the only game in town for poets like Paul Blackburn and Maxine Kumin for example.  And there is something a bit unfair about these poetry books (particularly the long out-of-print ones) only being available to readers in large cities or those that have access to a really good university library.)

While I don't really have a lot of spare time for reading, I am going to try to dive into some of my favourite poets over the next few months.  While this list changes constantly,* right now I'd say my top 10 poets are:

• Paul Blackburn
• Anne Sexton
• Frank O'Hara
• Philip Levine
• Adrienne Rich
• Charles Simic
• August Kleinzhaler
• Ted Berrigan
• Audre Lorde
• Sharon Olds neck-and-neck with John Berryman for the last slot

My favourite Canadian poets are George Bowering and Robert Kroetsch, though I like Atwood's poetry as well (and I recently reminded myself that Dennis Lee is not to be overlooked either).

While generally I prefer getting the Collected Works for these various poets, it can be a real challenge for those poets still living, and it generally means that they put out updated Selected Poems from time to time.  In a few cases, it can actually be worth having a Collected Poetry and then a very good focused work.  I'm thinking of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems or Paul Blackburn's The Cities, both of which are often much easier to get into than their collected works.  Here's a short appreciation of Blackburn's The Cities.  I was actually about half an hour away from buying a copy of Blackburn's The Cities, even though I own a copy of his Collected Poems, when I came across it in a box of books downstairs (I had been digging around looking for Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth incidentally, which I did eventually turn up).  That would have been most embarrassing to have two copies of it, though I would have tried to get the spare copy into a deserving library.

I probably will not be able to pull it off, but I hoping that next week I finish reviewing this Chinese urbanism workbook and then wrap up four half written reviews for the Canadian challenge.  That would leave me with 4 more to go to get up to magic number 13.  The only way I could possible do that is if I focus on Canadian poetry exclusively, perhaps sticking with the books I actually ordered in the Brick Books sale.  But most likely I won't have the energy, since I am stretched pretty thin these days between work and stressing over coronavirus.

* Perhaps I should be a bit more embarrassed that Faye Kicknosway isn't a bit higher in the mix, though I think my biggest issue is that her poetic output is on the slim side (5 or 6 chapbooks, 1 slightly longer collection and then 2 selected poetry volumes).  I do have quite a few books by Maxine Kumin and Gary Snyder, but they are much more poets of the wilderness/countryside, and I am thoroughly an urban reader.  Other urban poets that didn't quite make the cut are David Ignatow, Alan Dugan, Aaron Kramer, Charles Reznikoff, Eileen Myles and Jim Carroll.

Missed Connections with the Poets

I apologize for repeating some stories I have surely told elsewhere on the blog, but I thought I would pull them together in one place.

I go to very few poetry readings anymore (well, I mean a few months ago obviously).  I'm sure I could have gone more often when living in Chicago or New York, but the high water mark for my involvement in poetry was while at university in Ann Arbor in the very early 90s.  (Looking at the list of poets who came through in Donald Hall's memoirs, the scene was really something in the 1960s and 70s, with all the major poets coming through on reading tours, but it had really slowed down when I was in university.)  

The most significant poet coming through, that I can recall, was Adrienne Rich in my junior year.  I actually had her sign The Fact of a Doorframe, which was then stolen from my rental apartment, and shortly after her death I picked up a different signed volume off of Bookfinder.com. Allen Ginsberg was supposed to make it out but I think he had a health scare of some sort, so that was disappointing.  Jim Carroll who was the "opener" read for the whole time, and it was fine, but it wasn't Ginsberg.  Actually, now that I think back, I believe Derek Walcott came through, right around the time Omeros came out, and I almost certainly went to that, even though there were some fairly nasty pre-"Me Too" rumours circulating about him (and about most male poets, to be honest).  I'm slowly going through old journals from my undergraduate years, and I expect I should be able to confirm this at some point.

In term of other poets, I've seen Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, though in both cases, reading from their novels, not poetry.*  I did see Amiri Baraka reading once, and Charles Simic twice.  I certainly don't recall Philip Levine coming in from Detroit for a reading, though I may have just missed it.  Later, I believe Robert Kroetsch had been scheduled to fly to Toronto for a literary festival, and I might have made that reading, but then he died in a car crash.  I've certainly seen a few good "regional poets" but I think that is the list of all the really prominent poets I've seen.  Given the general state of poetry, there won't be too many more up and coming poets that become household names.

The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I was part of something called the New England Literature Program where 30 or so UM students went off to a camp in New Hampshire and communed with nature and read writers with strong links to New England (even reaching as far as Boston...): Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Robert Frost, etc.  There were some contemporary writers as well, like David Budbill, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon.  I suspect that the program originally came about because Hall and Kenyon had strong ties to Ann Arbor (Hall was an English professor at UM for many years and Kenyon was a native of Ann Arbor).  I believe that most years, there was actually a gathering or a party at the Hall-Kenyon residence, but Jane Kenyon had been ill for some time and we didn't go that summer, unfortunately; she died of cancer only a few years later.  So that was an unfortunate missed connection.  I found this video of Hall reading his poem "Kicking the Leaves," which is set in Ann Arbor but looks ahead to the next stage of his life after Ann Arbor.

While I was at UM, I took several poetry writing courses with Ken Mikolowski, who was not only a writing instructor but the editor of The Alternative Press with his wife Ann Mikolowski.  I might have, but I don't remember meeting Ann.  The Alternative Press was quite something.  Each issue came in a manila envelope and was stuffed with postcards and bumper stickers and so on, all with poems printed on them.  There were also usually one or two one-of-a-kind postcards where the poets would do a little doodle or drawing and personalize each one.  More on the Alternative Press can be found here.  I managed to subscribe for two years (4 issues) but then between my perpetual moving from state to state and the poor state of the internet at that time, my subscription lapsed.  Maybe in a future post, I'll reveal some of the hidden gems from those issues.

At any rate, Ken did seem to have connections to most of the active major poets in the US.  He brought Jim Gustafson and John Sinclair in for readings, and I believe he was somehow involved in the Allen Ginsberg/Jim Carroll reading.  I believe that every couple of years Faye Kicknosway came in for a reading, but it was just not to be.  I never saw her read.  The last I heard she had moved to Hawaii and largely given up writing (or at least publishing new pieces**), so the odds of ever seeing her read live are quite remote at this point.  In some ways, she is probably the most interesting poet that I would only have found out about through taking Ken's class. I would eventually have encountered Jim Carroll and Ted Berrigan (another somewhat obscure poet that Ken championed) on my own but probably not Fay Kicknosway.  As I was prepping to write this post, I decided that I probably ought to pick up more of her chapbooks, as she did most of the illustrations.  I already owned A Man is a Hook. Trouble, Nothing Wakes Her and The Cat Approaches, along with her selected poems Mixed Plate. 

I had had an earlier selected volume (All These Voices), and recently I realized there are several poems in All These Voices that are not in Mixed Plate, but I had given All These Voices away to a friend.  Now it's possible that with the individual chapbooks, I am not really missing any poems, but I decided I would go ahead and re-order All These Voices, along with She Wears Him Fancy in Her Night Braid, The Violence of Potatoes and Asparagus, Asparagus, Ah Sweet Asparagus.  In a couple of cases, these were actually signed editions, so I'll have a very good Kicknosway collection when this is all said and done, even though I never did have the chance to go to a reading and have her sign my book personally.  

* And Grace Paley reading a short story or two, though she is not really known for her poetry these days, despite being a fine poet.

** And then I ran across these poems, so I guess she is still in the game after all.

Deadlines Missed

I've definitely been flirting with deadlines for probably as long as I can remember.  I suppose most people do this, but most of my career has been in consulting where your work life is juggling a few too many deadlines and primarily responding to the clients that are the most assertive in reminding you that deadlines are approaching...

Academic life wasn't too different though the stakes for missing a deadline are generally a bit lower.  You miss out on a conference or for applying for a grant (with a low chance of success).  There was a fairly recent deadline that came and went for a virtual transportation conference, and while I would have liked to put in a paper, they wanted the whole paper, not just a strong abstract.  And I simply couldn't do it.  I will see if I can repackage that same idea/nascent paper and turn it in to TRB, which has a fixed deadline of Aug 1.  I think there is a reasonable chance I can make that deadline.

As far as creative writing deadlines, I had a fairly long history of being a day late for Sing-for-Your-Supper, though they usually let it slide.  This past week was the same thing, though they did not take my piece.  I have to admit, I think it was not really the lateness, but they didn't like this new piece as much as the others.  That said, there has been a bit of a changing of the guard and the newer reader has left to be replaced with a reader from several years back.  That's going to be a bit of an issue for me.  I had maybe 40-50% success rate with this reader, but 95% with the one that just left.  Bummer.  And while I mostly write the kind of quirky pieces that they like, I was trying more of a traditional piece (in fact it was half of a TV pilot).  I think I'll clean it up and try to strengthen it a bit more and send to the other cold reads series which in fact does lend itself to TV pilots and such.  So while I was more than a bit frustrated my piece wasn't taken, 3 of the 4 pieces were solid, and it was a pretty entertaining evening overall.

I have more or less given up on book reviewing on this blog.  Never say never, as I have three or maybe even four reviews in draft, but I don't really feel compelled to write them out, and I just don't get as much of a thrill of having them on the blog.  I think the community of Canadian reviewers has pretty much died out, at least as far as I am concerned, and I definitely am not going to sign up for another go around in July.  I have one actual academic book review that is a few weeks late.  This is a case where I was going to do a joint review and one of the publishers never got the book to me, despite claiming it went out, and I frankly don't like the one book I do have in hand (it is more of a workbook than a proper academic book), so I'm really struggling to say something productive about it, but I'll wrap that up fairly soon.

Because everything all more or less blends together while sheltering at home, and I don't have anything remotely fun on the horizon (for months and months and months), it's very easy to forget about the deadlines for on-line shows.  I actually missed out on seeing a friend's piece for a virtual fringe, and I'm going to have to really push myself to get psyched up for Luminato, which is this weekend.  Life is just frankly depressing these days, even with the nicer weather (finally!).  It doesn't pay to dwell on it, but I am deeply unhappy now, and it is hard to muster up much enthusiasm for anything, let along spend the energy to meet a (frequently artificial) deadline.

Outside the Comfort Zone

I sometimes wonder what my 20 year-old self would think of my 50 year old-self.  Aside from being astonished at how fat I had gotten (and saddened but not surprised by the male pattern baldness), he would probably be saddened by all the compromises I have made along the way.  That's just life grinding you down, I would probably reply.  I've stuck to a fair number of principles but not all.  I was much more an avid socialist in my youth, and more than anything else, I've come to realize that there is no democratic path that will lead to a more equal society (for all kinds of reasons, but at root, most North Americans still have a kind of lottery-based thinking that leads them to think that if they hit it rich then they want to keep their earnings, which is then amply reinforced by the money that the actual rich throw at the politicians -- but if the masses didn't fundamentally cling onto their dreams then they could easily vote in socialist politicians).  And then I basically lost interest in trying to change a system that was impossible to change: Don Quixote, I am not.  (Though I have finally launched into reading the newish Grossman translation of Quixote, so that's something.)

I was also much more attuned to racial equality (and anti-police brutality) campaigns in my youth.  I'd say with more experience under my belt, I am just too pessimistic about positive change in this area to be more than a passive supporter of these initiatives.  I am also extremely wary of people with massive white privilege explaining how much they "get it" and plastering a big black square on their blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.  The whole point is to listen and reflect, and not try to interject and show what a woke supporter you are.  But it's obviously a fine line because if you don't say anything at all, then that also looks like you are opposed to the cause of the day.

I'll just stop there to try to keep from interjecting myself even further into someone else's cause, but I will first provide a link to stream Burnett's Killer of Sheep, and then a short discussion of Spike Lee's Pass Over and finally below that provide the links that the Theatre Centre has pulled together.

Killer of Sheep - not free but only $8.50 for a 3 day rental, which is not too steep given what an important film this is.

Spike Lee's Pass Over is a filmed version of Antoinette Nwandu's play Pass Over, which is basically a reworking of Waiting for Godot mixed with discussion of police brutality against minorities.  It should be available on Amazon Prime.  There is a short review of the film in the Guardian.  In fact, Pass Over just played in Toronto a few months ago, basically just down the street from me, and I debated going and ultimately passed.  My younger self absolutely would have gone and doesn't really understand and would have upbraided my older, jaded self for not being interested and open enough to go.  Honestly, I don't really have a good comeback to that.

Theatre Centre links:

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Phoning It In

I think I am still in that phase of being overwhelmed by choice due to all the e-books that are available.  I'm sure I'll eventually get used to this and just focus on the ones that supplemented my previous reading program.  It does look like close* to all of the NYRB Classics (or at least the ones of main interest to me) are available as e-books and are at the Toronto Library.  It is much rarer for Modern Library books to be in the system, and as far as I can tell there are no LOA e-books in the Toronto system.  As expected, they have good to great coverage of Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.  There are certainly some weird exceptions, so only about half of Timothy Findley's novels are available and very few novels by Jack Hodgins or Susan Swann or Morley Callaghan, though virtually all of Callaghan's short stories are available.  Robert Kroetsch is particularly ill-served in the e-book transition.  A lot of George Bowering's fiction has made it over, but almost none of his poetry, which is unfortunate, as his reputation basically will (or rather should) rest on his poetry.  Almost no Earle Birney or Al Purdy is in the system at all.  Basically, with the exception of Atwood and Dennis Lee (and the poets who have books from Brick Books), poetry is extremely poorly served in the e-book system.  This is generally the case for US poets as well with John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley dropping completely out of e-print and Donald Hall only being represented by his essays on aging and not his poetry.  Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath do have reasonable coverage.  It looks like about 2/3 of James Wright's poems are in his 1971 Collected Poems, which is available, but Above the River, which is his "Complete Poems," is not available.  I know this shouldn't be a complete surprise, but it will likely have lasting impacts on their reputations.  Of course I am repeating myself, and there isn't anything I can do about this for the culture as a whole.  I simply have to be willing to remember to go off and seek out the physical books when it comes to poetry or plays.

A few months before the crisis, I finally installed the Libby app on my phone and read a couple of science fiction books by the Strugatsky brothers and Hanif's Red Birds (which I hated) and then eventually Toni Morrison's Home.  I do try (now) to leave one or two books on the phone for when I am waiting in a long line to enter a store.  I managed to get most of the way through Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, though I finished that up at home.  I'm debating starting in on Don Quixote, though I know I won't be able to make it through the whole thing on that tiny screen.

One thing that is interesting in terms of what is available is the mid-list authors that I have neglected.  At one point I owned a complete or nearly complete set of Walker Percy novels, but I never managed to crack any of them, not even The Moviegoer.  I also have neglected Thornton Wilder, though in this case, I have at least seen his major plays, Our Town and By the Skin of Our Teeth.  While I don't want to make any "promises" that I can't keep, I will try to sneak a couple of these books onto my main reading list, though it has been completely derailed by the effort to just get through (and then get rid of) books on the To Be Read and Discarded pile.

I probably won't actually purge most of the fiction books, even when I have an e-book backup, until the next move, but at that point, I will be truly ruthless.  Some of these books have been moved upwards of 10 times (and have survived major purgings of books along the way), and I don't feel like moving them again if I have a reasonable alternative this time around.  That's the plan at any rate...


* One recent Ana Kavan book, Machines in the Head is an exception.  The library is supposed to be getting the newest Krzhizhanovsky volume, Unwitting Street, and I believe I am first in line when it shows up.  I'll just have to keep monitoring if Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk by Nikolai Leskov and The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington show up this fall, but the odds are fairly good.

Christo - Finally Under Wraps

I definitely would not say that I have a particularly close connection to the artist Christo, who passed away just a couple of days ago.  But I have a few near or missed connections, which I may as well share.

I came onto the scene well after his wrapping of the MCA in Chicago back in 1968-69.  This was his first major wrap accomplished in the US.  The MCA website has some interesting details about the project.  As it happens this is the original location of the MCA, on Ontario St.  I managed to make it there twice, including one time for a Andres Serrano exhibit.  In a lot of ways, I still preferred this location, which was much more scaled back and almost a secret just for those in the know, over the large building that now sits just east of the pumping station.  That doesn't mean I have enjoyed some of the exhibits in the enlarged space, but I do feel that there is so much pointless wasted space in the building itself that I just can't approve of it.  The grassy area in back of the new museum is nice though, and I've listened to a few jazz concerts there.

I never really paid that much attention to what Christo was up to, but for some reason or other, I heard about his proposed project in Central Park - the Gates, which apparently took years, if not decades, to finally get off the ground.  I remember being pretty ambivalent about it, feeling that it was a lot of fuss to justify this project, since Central Park wasn't really supposed to be commercialized.  While it does help that Christo and Jeanne Claude did pay for the materials and the installation themselves (and never had major corporate sponsors), I would be surprised if they covered all the security for the project, to say nothing of all the time that city bureaucrats spend dealing with permits and approvals...  

Nonetheless, I actually made it out to New York on Feb. 12, 2005 and saw The Gates for myself, in fact I saw some of the unfurling of the gates and walked along for a while in the "parade" they had going.  (I think given the size of the installation, there were multiple openings.  I'm quite sure I wasn't watching Christo himself unfurl anything.)  It was a bit more interesting in person than I had imagined, and I feel I more or less got into the spirit of the thing.  While I probably did take a few photos, these are not mine.

At this point, I can't remember if I had needed to go to New York on a business trip and conveniently arranged to make out on the opening weekend, or if it truly was a bit random, and I just happened to go at that time, and then decided I might as well head over to Central Park.  In any event, they were passing out small squares of the fabric that made up the "gates," and I still have two of these squares (which almost makes up for not snagging a porcelain sunflower seed or two from Ai Weiwei's Tate London exhibit when they were still letting the public walk through it).  I was doing some cleaning up of my archives and came across one of them last night, which seems especially propitious.  

What's even more amusing, at least to me, is that over the winter they were doing some major reconstruction of the street one street down from my house.  For whatever reason they had to wrap the poured concrete up in orange fabric, so for one night, we had our own personalized Christo experience.

I'm sure he would have approved.

Update (6/5) As I was doing other cleaning, I came across my Northwestern commencement booklet from 1998 when I received my MS degree.  It turns out that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were granted honorary doctorates at that ceremony, though I don't believe they actually spoke more than a few words of thank you.  It doesn't appear that they wrapped anything in Evanston that year, though there was a Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Block Gallery in 2000 (possibly set in motion in 1998).  I was living in New York in 2000 so didn't get around to that exhibit.  So that is another very tenuous connection.  That (1998) actually was a pretty good year for Northwestern with a lot of "catches."  They also awarded honorary doctorates to Tony Kushner and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Justice Ginsberg gave the commencement speech.  I did stumble across the speech as printed in the student newspaper, but I don't have it at my fingertips and oddly it doesn't appear to be in their on-line archives.  If I run across it again, I will scan it and post it on its own page on the blog.