Movies to Watch

So very, very many movies to watch with my son, and perhaps we only have 8 months left if he indeed heads off to Ottawa for university.

I've listed the really early comedies here.

Some of the other stone-cold classics left to see are
Citizen Kane
The Apartment
Bringing Up Baby ✓
His Girl Friday ✓ (I like The Front Page too, but hard to top Cary Grant)

In terms of film noir (and/or Bogart pictures), the most important remaining are:
Gilda
Touch of Evil
Double Indemnity
Anatomy of a Murder
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Dark Passage 

Kurosawa!  There are so many great films, but these are probably the most important as a general starting point:
Ikiru ✓
The Seven Samurai
Ran
Rashomon
High and Low
The Bad Sleep Well (after I take him to see Hamlet at Stratford!) 

In terms of other Japanese films, it's hard to say. Probably Ozu's Good Morning and Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.  Perhaps Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Street of Shame.  Most likely I will catch up on the other Mizoguchi and Ozu on my own after he leaves the nest.

Not much more Fellini, as I don't think he'd have the patience to sit through La Dolce Vita. Probably just Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord.

Hitchcock!

I don't think he's really seen many of these at all.  There are a few I don't care for at all.  But if I was to narrow it down to the truly essential it would be:
Strangers on a Train
Rear Window
Vertigo
North by Northwest
Charade (Cary Grant sort of spoofing his own image)
High Anxiety (probably won't get to this Mel Brooks spoof but you never know)

I don't even known where to start with French film, even if only restricting myself to the French New Wave.  We did get through all the Tati films, the Etaix box set and a couple of Truffaut films, but I don't think he'd really like much of Godard, and I'm not sure he's ready for Rohmer.  Maybe just:
Renoir Rules of the Game
Clair Le Million
Godard Breathless
Clouzot The Wages of Fear
Clouzot Diabolique
Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Varda Cleo from 5 to 7*

Random comedies:
The Horse's Mouth  ✓
Manhattan
Annie Hall
Sleeper
Blazing Saddles
Young Frankenstein
Spaceballs ?
The Breakfast Club
High Fidelity
After Hours
After Life ✓
The Truman Show
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ✓

Random Sci-fi:
Blade Runner
Blade Runner 2049
The Shape of Water
Delicatessen 
The Fifth Element ✓
ET
Close Encounters of the Third Kind ✓
Men in Black
Twelve Monkeys**
Solaris ✓

I'm not at all sure of watching more Satyajit Ray, though he did like The Hero.  I'm tempted to see if we can squeeze in the Calcutta Trilogy:
Pratidwandi (The Adversary) 
Seemabaddha (Company Limited) 
Jana Aranya (The Middleman) 

But I expect ultimately I'll watch these films on my own.

I don't think we'll get through every single film here, and I'll be hard pressed not to add more as I think of them, but this is a good starting point in world cinema, leaving aside some of the darker directors like Fassbinder, Strindberg and even Herzog.  If we had all the time in the world, I would probably add Kieślowski's The Dekalogue and the Three Colors Trilogy.  And for sentimental reasons (i.e. he's leaving the nest soon) I'd watch Boyhood with him.

The reality is that on many weekends, he watches a bit too much sports, and then doesn't have time for a movie.  We've actually reached the end of The IT Crowd with just the "Season 5" special left.  We're at the halfway mark with Sling & Arrows, but those episodes are longer and harder to fit in.  We'll have to find something shorter for most evenings, most likely Red Dwarf, but it could be Futurama as well.

 

* It's been surprisingly hard for me to watch Cleo in a proper theatre.  I was just a day off from being able to watch this in Pittsburgh, but it was not to be.  C'est dommage!

** Maybe just a bit too on the nose for the immediate future.

Tempting Fate? (Culture in 2022)

Planning for anything more than a day or two in advance definitely feels a lot like Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football for realz this time.  I'm almost certain that anything in Jan. or Feb. will be cancelled, with a small chance that this latest wave will be over by March or April (with almost everyone having caught and recovered from Covid), but who really knows.

At any rate, I mentioned that Coal Mine Theatre is doing Baker's The Antipodes and I'd probably see that in very early February and then D'Amour's Detroit in April.  I've seen Detroit.  I wouldn't mind seeing it again, but I mostly subscribed to Coal Mine this season in order to help keep them afloat.

Also, Crow's Theatre is doing Bengal Tiger in Jan.  Then I plan on seeing Gloria in March and George F. Walker's Orphans for the Czar in April.

I don't know if they'll get knocked out or not, but the Bloor West Village Players are putting on something called The Impossibility of Now in late Jan./early Feb.  Their production of Good People was the last live theatre I saw before the pandemic restrictions came down hard.  I don't know if it would be a good omen or just tempting fate to see another of their shows right as things seem to be winding down yet again.

I haven't been too interested in Theatre Passe Muraille in a while (or Theatre Centre for that matter), but I might check out their reworking of Iphigenia in Tauris in January.  Our Place, a play about the struggles of undocumented Caribbean women trying to get their papers in Canada, plays in late March.  This actually resonates with me, in part because I have been reading Selvon on folks from the West Indies living in London (and will likely be reading Lamming again shortly), but also because I have a half-finished script about my fictionalized struggles with an immigration officer (if I had tried to overstay my school visa in the 90s).  I don't know if I ever will finish this, but there are days I think I shall, but I need to figure out a different ending.

Factory Theatre has two more on-line productions in their season which will almost certainly be going ahead, and I have to decide if I want to check them out or not.  And two in-person productions that are at risk.  I was a bit more open to the dramedy, Among Men, about Al Purdy and Milton Acorn, but now am leaning against going.  I'll see how I feel closer to the time.  I think I will try to make it to Wildfire in June, however.

There is nothing I want to see at either Canadian Stage or Tarragon.  There isn't much I want to see at Soulpepper, which is definitely a shame.  I just am not enamoured of their new direction.  I do have a ticket to see The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale (fingers crossed it isn't cancelled yet again), and I'll likely see King Lear in the fall, but I'll pass on Queen Goneril.  I saw a staged reading of it a few months back and I left at intermission, mostly because it was recycling Lear in not very interesting ways (at least not to me) and it was way too long.

It doesn't appear that Nightwood is doing anything in person in 2022, and at the moment they are dealing with the loss of their studio.  Video Cabaret, which does have its own space, seems to have gone completely dormant.  Shakespeare Bash'd is pretty much only doing online acting classes with no real plans in terms of putting on live theatre.  So far there is no word on what Driftwood is doing this summer, but the signs don't look great.  Red Sandcastle is running a few things, but mostly creepy pieces by Eldritch Theatre that don't grab me all that much.  I'll try to keep an eye out to see if anything else crops up there.

Somehow I completely missed Alumnae Theatre doing an odd hybrid performance of Tremblay's Albertine in Five Times (with 2 actors in person and 4 on Zoom) back in November.  I don't think it got any press at all.  Maybe that is just as well, as this doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the production I saw at UT four or five years back.  Anyway, if the fates allow, Alumnae will be doing Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) in April, and I'll try to make that.

Art museums are generally not hit quite as hard, but sometimes their exhibits are derailed.  I did like Robert Houle's Red is Beautiful at the AGO and I'll probably see it again before it departs in mid April.  The next round of exhibitions at the Power Plant open on Jan. 29, and I should make it over there in Feb. or March at the latest.  That actually reminds me that the Albright-Knox in Buffalo is supposedly reopening in 2022 after a very long closure to remodel and expand the main museum campus.*  Very hard to know what the border crossing rules will be in mid to late 2022, but this is something I would consider if the latest (and last?) Covid wave has finally crested.

I haven't really been keeping up on the rock groups coming through in part because I think they'll all decide it isn't worth trying to cross the border and then have the rules change on them.  That said, the Cowboy Junkies are playing Massey Hall on April 7, and I might try to see that (if tickets are even still available at 50% capacity).  Supposedly New Order and Pet Shop Boys are coming through in the summer, and I'd like to see them.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers are also supposed to be coming through, but I have my doubts.  While their December shows were mostly cancelled, for the time being Barenaked Ladies still are selling tickets to their July show out at Budweiser Stage.  I think Toad the Wet Sprocket was going to open for them on this tour, so we shall see.  I will certainly try to make it if the show goes on.  

I should be able to get out to Stratford in the early summer to check out Hamlet.  My biggest concern is whether the Stratford bus is running, and just how I feel about taking that.  Given that I plan on taking my son, maybe I can justify renting a car again.  I'm not so sure there is anything else I would see there, though I'd probably watch Hamlet 9-11 if it transfers to Toronto at some point.  It's a bit more likely that they'll transfer Moliere's The Miser (as they transferred Tartuffe to Soulpepper years ago).  While I hated Tartuffe, I vaguely remember thinking The Miser was better.  Late in the summer or even early fall, I do think I'll head down to Niagara-on-the-Lake to see August Wilson's The Gem of the Ocean at Shaw.  I'll pass on the rest of their shows, however.

I think that's all I need to cover for now.  I'm kind of getting myself a bit depressed, listing all these things that are probably going to be snatched away again at the last minute.  Frigging Covid...

* Now they are saying first half of 2023, which probably means late 2023, but I'll keep checking back in periodically.

Really Old Movies

I finally broke down and watched some Harold Lloyd shorts (Never Weaken and Haunted Spooks) last night.  I didn't find either of them completely hilarious but they had their moments.  It is wild, knowing that some of these are literally 100 years old.  I think I'm pretty well covered in terms of mid-career Chaplin, and eventually I'll get around to his last few films, i.e. the talkies.*  But I thought I would track some other early stars that I am just not actually that familiar with.  I'll list them in descending order of interest (to me), and I expect that the first two or three in each group, I'll try to watch with my son, while I'll watch the others on my own on evenings he has too much homework or the Bulls or Bears are playing or what have you.

Buster Keaton:
The General  
Sherlock, Jr. ✓
Seven Chances ✓
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
The Paleface ✓ (Not what I was expecting and so terribly cringe-worthy)
Our Hospitality ✓
The Navigator
Go West** ✓
The Saphead (had to stop midway through; surely Keaton's worst feature)
Three Ages

Harold Lloyd:
Safety Last ✓
Speedy
Why Worry?
Girl Shy ✓
The Freshman
Number Please
The Cat's-Paw
The Milky Way

W.C. Fields:
My Little Chickadee
The Bank Dick
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
It's a Gift
You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

(Remaining) Marx Brothers:
A Day at the Races ✓
Room Service
At the Circus
Go West
The Big Store

I'll check them off as I get around to them.  Quite a few of them are longer than I would expect (sometimes pushing 90 minutes!), but some are shorter, which is certainly appealing to me right now when I feel so pressed for time.

* In terms of early Chaplin, ages and ages ago I watched The Unknown Chaplin (probably on HBO), which was very cool, since it went into some detail on how he constructed some of his best gags and stunts.  It looks like this might still be available in the UK, and maybe I will go ahead and plump for it.  I probably should go ahead and watch The Kid, which is essentially feature-length, and I just put a copy on hold through the library.  It appears that most of the other First National shorts are on a DVD called Chaplin Revue from Artificial Eye, but it is a little bit of a crap shoot to be honest.  BFI has a pretty good collection of all the Mutual comedies (either in DVD or Blu-Ray).  I can probably live without the Keystone or Essanay shorts to be honest.

** This seems to be the only Keaton feature I don't have on one set or another.  Fortunately, Robarts does have a copy, so I should be able to borrow that in early January.

Culture Closing Down (Again)

It's not really surprising but it is disappointing that the extreme contagiousness of the Omicron variant and the fact that it easily infects vaccinated people (and that booster shots still aren't that easy to come by*) has led to a bunch of cancellations, with surely a lot more to come.  So this is the unfortunate and sad rebuttal of this post.

In fact, it was just over a week ago that I was tempted by a live music outing -- The Lowest of the Low playing all the songs off Shakespeare My Butt at Lee's Palace.  I knew that it was fairly risky as lots of people would be drinking (and then conveniently forgetting to put their masks back on) and singing along.**  The new rules about 50% capacity and no concessions weren't in place.  And no question this is making a lot of concert halls and movie theatres wonder if it is even worth staying open!  And as I noted, I wasn't able to get my booster shot in time.  But I decided that this likely would be the last chance to do something like this for a while as Omicron lets rip.  The music was great.  I'm a bit sorry I didn't record the version of Gamble they did as part of the encore; maybe someone else did.  I believe this is actually the fourth time I've seen The Lowest of the Low, which means they've pulled ahead of The Tragically Hip at 3.5 shows!  As far as I know, I didn't catch Omicron at the show.  But it was still pretty risky, and I probably shouldn't have gone.  It's definitely safer, though still not safe, going to the theatre or a classical concert where masks do stay on the whole time and there is no singing along...

In terms of what else I have done this fall, I did see Tafelmusik live, a few jazz shows at the Crows Nest (usually with just a tiny audience and very spaced out), a concert at Koerner Hall and two plays at Crows Nest (one of which was definitely not worth leaving the house for).  And I visited a bunch of museums. Note that even a few museums are closing down again!

In terms of the bad news, Mirvish has already cancelled the new Stoppard play, Leopoldstadt.  It could be years before they are able to bring that back.  They had temporarily paused Come From Away, but just decided to shut it down completely.  That's a shame, and I was considering taking my son to see it.  I expect that their entire 2021-22 season will go down the drain.  And this may well push off the return of Hamilton yet another year.

Smaller indy shows can probably go forward, as they have much smaller crews, though for how long is anyone's guess.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to go (as it is a looong streetcar ride out west), but Assembly Theatre was doing a play called Two Minutes to Midnight by Michael Ross Albert.  I liked one of the actors in the production, and Albert's piece, The Huns, was one of the highlights of the last pre-Covid Fringe, so I was leaning toward going.  While this probably could have gone forward (small cast and probably no stage crew other than a stage manager), they have decided to postpone.

As of today, Crows Nest is still putting on Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo and Coal Mine is putting on Annie Baker's The Antipodes in early January, but I have my doubts that either will happen.  I'll probably try to go to both a day or two after previews are over.

Kronos Quartet is pulling out (for the second time) of their January concerts here.  At the moment, the other TSO and Koerner Hall concerts are going ahead, but I expect most of them will ultimately be cancelled.

It's harder to say about late spring concerts and summer concert tours.  I probably won't buy any more tickets, but I'll hang onto the ones I do have.

Somewhat amusingly, the Toronto Jazz Festival just announced Herbie Hancock is coming to town on April 22, though I don't think this will actually happen.  That is certainly an overstuffed day, as Joshua Redman is supposedly playing Koerner Hall (I have a ticket to that) and Bruce Cockburn is playing Massey Hall.  I suspect in the end, Cockburn, being a Canadian, will make his show and the others will cancel or be moved back, but I guess we'll see.

There are a few things of interest in Feb and March at Factory and Soulpepper (including the Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale, which was already rescheduled), but I am not holding my breath.

* I was supposed to have my booster shot 2 weeks ago, but I got there and their shipment of Pfizer hadn't shown up.  It was pretty random, depending on which pharmacist you talked to, whether they offered you Moderna instead or told you to reschedule.  I was told to reschedule.  I probably could have insisted on Moderna, but the study showing its effectiveness still hadn't come out at that time.  Also, while I am not expecting to travel across the border anytime soon, I didn't want to get caught up in that whole vaccine mixing kerfuffle that happened last year.  I have an appointment for my booster at Metro Convention Centre on the 30th, and this one had better not fall through, or I'll be supremely pissed. 

** In fact, I passed on an opportunity to see 54-40 at the Horseshoe a bit earlier in December, partly because I didn't want to stand all night but also because it feels even more crowded and cramped than Lee's Palace.  But the opportunity to hear Shakespeare My Butt in all its glory was enough to sway me.  What's interesting to me is that while they are a group from the 90s that reformed and still lean a bit on nostalgia, their newest CDs (Do the Right Now and Agitpop) are every bit as good as their early albums.  While I do like some of the songs on the new Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker CDs, it isn't quite as sustained a comeback.

Back to the Gym

I don't begrudge them at all, but I remember when I joined Planet Fitness it was open 24/7.  I think they closed early or opened late on Christmas, but that was it.   This time around with all the general exhaustion (and extra cleaning), they were closing quite early on Christmas Eve (2 pm!), and then were going to be closed on Christmas and Boxing Day.  It's pretty rare for me to skip the gym 3 days in a row, and it meant going on Thurs. and last night if I didn't want it to be a four day streak with little to no exercise.  I really wasn't thrilled about going on Thursday as I had actually gone swimming twice in one week (the first time in years!)*, and my arms were sore.  In the end I cut the workout a bit short, but at least I had gone.  

As it happens, it rained most of Christmas Eve, and there was basically no snow left on Christmas Day.  On the other hand, that meant that I was able to bike downtown on Boxing Day.  I'd like to bike today, but we had a bit of freezing rain last night, and I am not sure the roads are clear.

In any event, I went to the gym on Monday and pushed through for a full workout.  I'll probably go swimming tonight or tomorrow and be more or less on track.   It's fairly likely that they'll close the gyms at some point during this latest surge, so I might as well keep going while I still can. 

Edit (12/29): I probably should have gone swimming last night but just wasn't up to it, though I did bike downtown.  I think I will go to the gym tonight and then see if my arm is up to swimming a few laps on Thurs. after I get my booster shot.

* Last Monday, I actually swam 20 laps, which turns out to be 1000 yards.  If I had made it to 22 laps that would have been 1 km!  I should be able to make it to that mark at some point, but it will have to be on a day I have the entire 45 minute time slot.  (I usually show up late and lose 10 minutes or so.)

Best Reads of 2021

I should perhaps consider adding poetry to this list, but that might just end up being too confusing.  It is true, however, that between reading a lot more poetry over the past two years, watching more classic movies and not taking transit, I am simply not reading as much as I used to.  That said, I did read Don Quixote (and Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote), Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, though it often felt I was reading things I felt I ought to read out of obligation rather than books I was actually enjoying on their own merits.  

I cut it extremely close with the Bulgakov.  I was rereading this in anticipation of watching a live musical version of The Master and Margarita at Crows Nest.  In the end, I wrapped up all but the last few pages of the epilogue during the intermission!  While I thought the adaptation was done well, I do think it would have been fairly hard to follow if one wasn't quite familiar with the source material.  Several years ago, I reread Melville's Moby Dick before seeing Lookingglass's adaptation.  In that case, I think I finished the morning of the performance.  Of course, I was on holiday and had a bit more time for uninterrupted reading...

Top 3 of 2021
Coupland Binge
Raymond Kennedy To Ride a Cockhorse
Barry Dempster The Outside World

Best novel reread
Bulgakov The Master and Margarita

Honorable mention
Coupland Shampoo Planet
Tomson Highway The Rez Sisters
John Williams Stoner
Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence
Nick Hornby High Fidelity
Shankar No End to the Journey
Patrick Hamilton The Slaves of Solitude
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano 

It's a little hard to tell where I will focus in early 2022, but probably Crime and Punishment, followed by Arlt's The Seven Madmen.  Perhaps Desani's All About H. Hatterr, Beckett's 3 Novels and maybe even some Celine. And presumably some lighter fare interspersed between the heavier novels.

Boxing Day movies

There really is not that much to do in Toronto on Boxing Day, esp. if you don't want to head over to the mall.  I have booked a slot to see the Picasso show at the AGO -- for what surely will be the last time.  While I'm there I will check out the Robert Houle exhibit as well.  It doesn't look as if there are any other blockbuster exhibits on tap for 2022.

I had been planning on seeing The Matrix Resurrections on Boxing Day, despite some decidedly mixed reviews.  But when I dug into them a bit more, the convincing ones said that the action sequences weren't really great, the plot was fairly nonsensical and the only real reason to watch was the love story between Keanu and Carrie-Anne (easily the least interesting element from the original Matrix).  Given that they recast Morpheus (sort of) and Agent Smith and yet recycled lots of footage from the original (and the plot really does make no sense), I think I will have give this a hard pass and essentially pretend it never happened.*  I do wish Almodovar's Parallel Mothers was out, but I don't think that opens here until March.

I toyed with the idea of seeing Drive My Car at Tiff Lightbox, but it's 3 hours long!  Ridiculous.  You could film someone reading the Murakami short story it's based on, and that would take less than 60 minutes.  There's a small but non-zero chance I'll go watch the Summer of Love documentary at Hot Docs around 2.

I certainly have not seen a lot of movies in the theatre in the last two years.  Tenet (and the rerelease of Inception) took place in the summer of 2020.  I don't recall seeing anything this summer at all.  I tried but failed to catch Free Guy (when all the good seats were booked at Market Square).  I did watch Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch when it finally opened here.  It was ok, but it was peak Wes Anderson for sure!  I managed to see The Humans at the Fox (I think only the second time I've watched a movie there).  I preferred seeing the play live, but this was a reasonable proxy. And I think that's it.

In terms of watching things at home, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to get the DVD of Free Guy through the library.  I watched that with my son last week.  I'm hoping to watch Dark City on Boxing Day proper, but sports may well get in the way.

Today we watched Chaplin's City Lights.  I think this may well be the first time I've seen the whole thing.  This means that we've gone through his best films (The Gold Rush, Modern Times, City Lights and The Great Dictator) and I watched The Circus on my own.  I'll probably watch the late Chaplin films (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York) on my own.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera.  We've pretty much gone through the best of the bunch, but I'll probably watch A Day at the Races and maybe Room Service and perhaps Go West with him.  The remaining few aren't nearly as good, and I'll just squeeze them in here and there on my own.

I'm a little surprised at how long some of Harold Lloyd silent films are (often 90+ minutes!), so that makes it a little harder to fit in, around all the other great movies I'd like to watch with him before this fall (and he goes off the college!), but I'll see what we can get to.

We still sometimes watch comic TV shows in the middle of the week (though less often than I would like, due to such things as him having homework to do, of all things).  Currently we are about midway through Season 2 of Slings & Arrows and just starting Season 4 of The IT Crowd (both of which are new to me).  Assuming we get through them by mid January, we can probably make a serious dent in Red Dwarf, but I don't think we'll get through (or indeed even start in on) Futurama, Max Headroom and certainly not Northern Exposure.  C'est dommage.

* I`m sure I would have gone if they had at least brought back Hugo Weaving, so this does feel like an own-goal on their part...

Edit (12/27): In the end I did watch Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions in preparation for Resurrections, and they are generally better than I recall, at least the action sequences.  The dialogue still sucks and the whole Neo as Christ-figure still grates.  

We did end up watching Dark City on Boxing Day, but my copy of the Director`s Cut had a complete malfunction/shutdown in one of the last chapters, and we had to switch to the theatrical version.  That kind of burns me up.  I completely forgot that Dark City actually came out the year before The Matrix, and The Matrix even used some parts of the Dark City set! 

Library Runs

I learned my lesson earlier in the pandemic that it never pays to delay things.  If something is open, and you want to go, you should go.  So I had a very long list of books that I wanted to check out at Robarts (close to 18 months of backlog).  Mostly these were things either completely unavailable in the Toronto system or were reference only.  This fall, Robarts set it up so that alumni could reserve books and pick them up at the circulation desk but not go up into the stacks.  I suppose this was a reasonable compromise, but still was fairly restrictive.  You could only request 10 books at a time, though I think alumni can have 30 or so items checked out at any given time.  So that meant a lot of extra trips to the library.  I actually managed to work my way almost completely through the list by mid-December when they shut it down.  (This seems more to do with UT's winter break and less about Covid).  I think there are only 3 items that I really had hoped to check out and a handful of less pressing books.  I'll see if the reserve system opens back up in mid January, or if Covid protocols mean that Robarts is just out of reach again.  At any rate, I had a pretty good run.

As it happens, I have 4 books still out and they extended the due dates to March 1, so there is no real rush to read these books, though they are relatively short novels by Selvon, so I'll probably just go ahead and read them quickly.

I accidentally returned a Toronto Library book to Robarts.  I went back the very next day, but it was in processing, and I couldn't retrieve it.  It did eventually get returned and taken off of my card, but it was quite stressful at the time.

I've been quite pleased that a number of art exhibit catalogues have made it into the circulating collection (Picasso Painting the Blue Period, Uninvited from the McMichael, and even Surrealism Beyond Borders from the Met), so I have been indulging in those (rather than buying any more art books).

It's nice having access to both systems, though I suspect that if they don't open the Robarts stacks to alumni this fall, I probably won't renew my card there.  It's just that tiny bit too frustrating compared to how I like to use the library.  Also, it is hardly set in stone, but I may be moving offices and the new location is a lot less conducive to running up to Robarts after work.  All the more reason to try to get through everything I want to read at Robarts this summer/fall, as if such a thing were possible... 

Reading Updates

There are so many things on my mind, but I'll start small and perhaps catch up on a few other things over the holidays.  I ended up reading The Lonely Londoners in a couple of days, as I was kind of hoping it would make my best of 2021 list.  While it had some interesting moments, the fact that it was written in West Indian dialect and the men treated women absolutely horribly (mostly their long-suffering wives and girlfriends, often left back home, but also the English women they were always chasing after).  It really felt like looking into an alternative universe where women's liberation never happened and feminism essentially didn't exist.  While Selvon lets up a bit on this theme in his later books,* there is still so much chauvinism going on.  I couldn't really relate to any of the characters, and in that sense I found this a quite inferior work to Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.  That said, I haven't reread that book since my 20s, and I might be just as unforgiving of it.

I was briefly reading Anita Desai's Feasting, Fasting, but I couldn't stand any of the characters, and it was just so boring.  I gave up fairly early on.  What amazes me is that this was considered the runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1999.  While there is a wide variety of reviews on Goodreads, the 2-star reviews (that said the characterization and plot gets even worse when Arun, the spoiled only son, lands in America) convinced me that abandoning the novel was the right decision.  (However, after perusing the plot of Coetzee's Disgrace, the actual winner in 1999, this sounds like another novel I want to avoid at all costs...)

So I am back to The Horse's Mouth.  I also don't really like these characters very much, and in particular I am fed up with Jimson.  It seems he has literally no self-control and is constantly ending up in jail because he threatens former friends and patrons, steals incessantly, breaks windows, etc.  Some people like these cheeky anti-heroes, but I can't stand them.  The only characters that I recall detesting more are Harriet from After Claude and Mickey Sabbath from Roth's Sabbath's Theater, which I definitely should have dropped.  I think the only reason I haven't dropped The Horse's Mouth is that this sits on a bunch of top 100 novel lists, which is a terrible excuse for sure.  I probably will wrestle it down to only 100 more pages by tonight, and then maybe I will be done by the weekend and I can toss it away.

Almost all the books and other presents have made it here, which is great, though I am still waiting on Crime and Punishment to show up from the UK.  That's the next major thing I expect to read, though I do have a lot of poetry to go through and perhaps the rest of Selvon's Moses Trilogy, even though I don't have particularly high hopes for it.  Maybe I'll only have two books on my best of 2021 list.  It has been such a disappointing year in so many ways that is probably appropriate...  Alternatively, I guess I could move Dempster's The Outside World up, though it wouldn't have made the final cut in most years.

* Perhaps only in The Housing Lark does it get muted.  The out-and-out sexism of Moses Ascending is even worse than in The Lonely Londoners to the point I can't imagine this showing up on a university reading list for example.  

Updated Reading

I'm still plugging away at my list.  I mentioned before that I was taking a break before starting in on The Horse's Mouth.  I managed to finish both The Age of Innocence (not really sold on the ending) and High Fidelity today.  (I probably could have biked in today but wimped out, so I had some reading time on the train.)  I'd say there is a reasonable chance I will get though The Horse's Mouth in the next week or so (if I can get past the domestic abuse angle...).  An interesting side note is that all three novels were made into pretty decent movies, as well as Wise Blood, which is fairly high on the revised reading list, but I still may not get around to it for a while.  I might show High Fidelity to my son; I don't think he'd really appreciate the others.

At any rate, I'm waiting on a copy of Crime and Punishment to show up in the mail.  That will likely be the next thing I read after The Horse's Mouth, followed by The Man Who Was Thursday (even though I don't like the ending) and then Arlt's The Seven Madmen (where many critics say there is a very strong connection to Crime and Punishment).

I've been tempted by immigration literature lately (perhaps because I am weeks away from becoming a citizen myself), and I'll probably reread Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.  I vaguely remember reading this and The Emigrants back in my 20s!  I'll skim through The Pleasures of Exile also, which is Lamming's personal critical response to the portrayal of Blackness in literature (Caliban, Queequeg from Moby Dick, etc.).  Right before the pandemic hit, I was going to pick up Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners from the Pape Library, but I never got around to it.  It seems to have vanished from their shelves, but I can request a different copy.  If I like that, I may read a few of his other novels as they are generally pretty short, which is quite appealing to me now.

After that I'll mostly be reading books that are destined for the Little Free Library.  Interestingly, it is really crammed full these days...

Swimming in Circles

No question the gym routine can feel (on bad weeks) as being on an endless hamster wheel.  I don't jog laps at the gym any more, since I haven't had access to track facilities since roughly 2000 (when I was at Northwestern).  I generally have done fairly well sticking to going to the gym every other day though sometimes I do take two days off in a row.  Tonight, I am not going to the gym, but I am going swimming, which is nearly as good.  

I guess it's been three or four weeks that I have finally figured out the new system for booking a swimming lane on the eFun system, and I try to swim once a week.  Before that, I did a bit of swimming at the hotel pool in Ottawa.  But that's it since COVID started.  I'm pretty much back to my previous level of swimming 15 or 16 laps per session.  That's a bit gratifying.  I would like to go back to the Regent Park pool, but because it is free, it is always over-subscribed, so I just book at Matty Eckler (where it costs $4/session) which is usually nearly empty.  That's certainly a better deal than when I signed up for a 3 month pass at Matty Eckler, which I never really took full advantage of.

Anyway, I finally dared to get on the scale at the gym.  It wasn't quite where I had hoped to be, but better than I expected (given the stress eating that I am only slowly ramping down).  I could probably hit my first target (of many!) if I stopped eating cereal in the mornings.  I'm not quite ready for that, but maybe in a few more weeks, depending on whether I indulge too much over the holidays...

Hopefully it won't be so cold tonight than my hair feels like it will freeze off.  That won't help now that I have finally integrated swimming back into my fitness routine.

Graffiti Bridge

There is a pedestrian bridge near my house.  It is routinely tagged up with all kinds of scribbles.  During the pandemic, many of the messages got more political, which is hardly a surprise. Also not a surprise is when a message appeared that was supportive of Black Lives Matter, it was taken down fairly quickly.  

There seems to be one very active tagger in the neighbourhood, and this appears to be his main mark.

I've seen it at bus stops and telephone booths (the few that are left).*  One night he got super ambitious and tagged the windows of an abandoned shop on Pape Ave.

A few weeks back, he put up some new marks (I'm positive it's the same guy).  The first one is quite intricate, but I think I like the cat with big eyes a bit more.  

Supposedly, this bridge will be replaced with a underpass tunnel under the train tracks, assuming the Lakeshore East line is electrified in a few years.  I mentioned this to my daughter, and she said she didn't think she'd like that, though I don't know if it was losing the view of downtown Toronto that bothered her or something else.  I guess I'll believe it when I see them digging the tunnel...

* And on a newspaper box!  How boss is that!?  (I mean to even find one that still exists.)

More Literary Disappointments

I see that I already expounded at great length on how much I hated Faulkner's A Fable, so no point in going on about that again.  I do sort of run hot and cold on Faulkner.  While I have gone through quite a lot of Faulkner (10 novels and a handful of stories) there is still more to go.  I probably should read The Wild Palms next before tackling the Snopes Trilogy.

I do think that Hemingway's reputation will continue to sink.  There are several novels that are going to be completely off-limits in schools due to extensive and gratuitous use of the N-word (and indeed I assume The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (an infinitely better novel than Hemingway's To Have and Have Not) cannot be assigned in most classroom settings or even discussed at most universities given how frequently there are calls to fire white instructors using the N-word no matter the context).  But also so many Hemingway characters embody toxic masculinity in an uncomplicated way and are just not likely to be seen as appealing in the future.  I actually got into a row with someone on an internet chatroom over this.

I wasn't crazy about Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, though the last two chapters were quite good.  I definitely am not sure it deserves being on the Modern Library's 100 Best Books list (at #11 no less!).  I also wasn't crazy about Maugham's Of Human Bondage, which comes in at #66.   I suppose it cut a bit too deep reading about a young man throwing himself at a woman not worth his attention/affections (and at such length too*).

Joyce Cary's First Trilogy isn't on the Modern Library list, but it's on similar lists.  I have mentioned how the the portrayal of domestic violence against women in the first and presumably third novel really make them unpalatable.  And the middle novel, To Be a Pilgrim, is so incredibly boring and far, far too long.  It looks like I will finish Pilgrim in another couple of days.  I'm going to take a short detour and read Wharton's The Age of Innocence and wrap up Hornby's High Fidelity before starting in on The Horse's Mouth, which I don't think I will care for.  However, if you are only going to read one novel by Cary, it probably should be The Horse's Mouth, and it would indeed be perverse to skip it after having read the first two books in the trilogy.  But this will definitely be the last Cary that I do read, as he is just not to my taste at all.

* Now I have much more empathy recalling how I wearied some of my friends with endless emails about a similar situation I went through during my grad school days.  

COP 26 - A Cop Out

Thousands upon thousands of words have already been spilled over COP26 and the fact that these conferences lead to very little tangible improvements.  Certainly there are a few positives, including laying the groundwork for more carbon pricing and shaming most but not all countries into reducing coal burning and deforestation. But the scale of the problem is just too large, to completely transform power generation in less than a generation.  It doesn't help that most (though not all) environmentalists are passionately against nuclear power, which could have met some needs, particularly in countries that don't have abundant sunshine, though this would have had to have been done (carefully) over the past 20-30 years.  Now it is too late to ramp up in any meaningful way.  

Politicians are simply unwilling to face up to the fact that societies have to live within the earth's means and that means far less consumption than we have now, but then that means that a huge swath of the population (and not just the relatively small number of people employed in the fossil fuel sector) will be unemployed or underemployed.  Our political system is simply not geared up for such an outcome, and that's why so much of the discussion ends up being around magic technological solutions that are simply never going to come true.  I do think a lot of environmentalists simply don't see or acknowledge the upheaval that these fundamental shifts will require; it's not just the energy firms that will balk.  Similarly, there are a lot of planners who say switching to electric cars is pointless and everyone has to walk, cycle or take transit.  All I can say is that this will not happen, no matter how much they want this because metro areas are simply not set up in such a fashion to make this truly feasible.

Also, there is a lot of disagreement over just what has to be done.  You have some experts calling for a gradual decline in aviation while alternative jet fuel is worked out, whereas George Monbiot is literally telling everyone to stop flying today.  I feel in general I have lived a fairly low carbon lifestyle (for someone in North America that is) with no car for the last ten years, and indeed I have never in my life regularly commuted by car, though I did drive a fair bit in my teens.  I've been vegetarian, though not vegan, for 30 years, which also is lower impact.  But still I think about how hard it would be in my own life to completely give up flying, and I really don't travel that often, trying to take the train when feasible.  Maybe they really will restore the train link between Windsor and Detroit, so that a Toronto-Detroit-Chicago train becomes possible (though still drastically slower than flying).  I'd probably be willing to take that once in a while to lower my emissions, but I wouldn't take the train to Vancouver for instance.  And I would like to make it back to Europe a few times before I die.  So in that sense virtually everyone is a hypocrite and will not do "everything is takes," and it is the same story pretty much everywhere.

I don't think there is any sugar coating the fact that humans will not make the necessary sacrifices.  That's not to say there will be no improvements, but we're going to have to figure out how to live with a planet that is going to overheat.  I think moving to the GTA was probably the right move, as it won't flood (like Vancouver or even NYC) and the warmer weather isn't likely to be life-threatening as it will likely be in much of the US South.  All things considered, Canada will probably come out ahead, but this is only relatively speaking.  If some of the worst predictions come true, then even being up here only buys us another 10 or 20 years.  Of course, it might not be that bad, and perhaps they will magically suck the CO2 and methane out of the air, saving us all, but I don't think that is particularly likely.  I think the next 50-100 years are likely to be pretty grim indeed, at least at the global scale, though there may be places that largely ride out the storm (perhaps Ontario).  For certain, this is one of the few times I hope to be proven wrong.

15th Canadian Challenge - 9th Review - Porny Stories

I thought I would enjoy this book (Porny Stories by Eva Moran) more than I actually did.  While the book blurb called her a modern-day Woody Allen, I thought she was more in the Fran Lebowitz line. I think more than anything it felt a bit too repetitive; Donald Barthelme wrote up a few fake quizzes but it was only a small part of his oeuvre, whereas roughly half or more of these pieces are fake Cosmo-style quizzes.  And it just seems like Moran is shooting fish in a barrel again and again.  Cosmopolitan Magazine quizzes have been mocked for decades, and often the writers do dig into the self-loathing (on the part of single ladies) that enables them in the first place.  What is a bit different is just how sexually explicit many of the pieces are, but, in this day and age, nothing's shocking.

In truth, the only piece that I really liked (without reservations) was a very short story called "Julius Caesar: A Play Review."  It starts out with a high school student attending a "uber-pc" First Nations interpretation of Julius Caesar (perhaps like the Crows' Nest fake-out earlier in the season should have been).  She complains a bit that the author shouldn't have killed off the title character so early.  But she was really at the play to spy on Margaret Atwood, who she deeply admires.  She doesn't hesitate to say that "I definitely do not think she's 'old.'  I see her another way. ...  So beyond time and the age thing."

She then imagines a scenario where after death you arrive at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks you the last book you read.  "You answer with dignified dignity, 'Bear.' "  And presto, you're riding a chute to Hell.  "You barely have time to gasp, 'But it won the Governor's General Award!'"*  St. Peter calls after you, saying that you should have read The Handmaid's Tale.  (Given The Handmaid's Tale's clear attack on the misogynistic aspects of so many religions and their insistence on controlling women's reproductive lives, this does seem an unusual vote of confidence in the book...)

The narrator then follows Atwood around at the reception after the play where she takes one of everything from the buffet, then vanishes.  The narrator imagines she is in the washroom and imagines discovering her there and becoming bosom buddies with the Queen of CanLit.  (As one more amusing aside, the play is premiering at Buddies in Bad Times!)  

The review ends, "Yeah, Julius Caesar's good.  But Margaret Atwood, now she's cool."  Hard to argue with that.  I've seen her a few times in person, and it's always a bit of a thrill.

I wish Moran had written a lot more along these lines and included far fewer mocking Cosmo reader quiz pieces.  But then I guess her collection wouldn't have had such a hook, merited or not.

* And indeed, more than one blog has tackled the incongruity of that...  I also wrote about this in my review of Bear a while back.

15th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Mr. Blue

This was another book that was dropped off in my Little Free Library: Mr. Blue by Jacques Poulin.  Mr. Blue is actually the name of a cat owned (that is, if cats can be "owned") by a middle-aged writer who lives by himself on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.  He is still struggling to get over a break-up, and he also seems somewhat stuck in his latest writing project.  One day he finds someone has parked a boat nearby and appears to be living at least part-time in a natural cave.  He discovers a book (The Arabian Nights) and essentially dreams up an unknown woman ("Marika") that he falls for; she also becomes a bit of a muse for him, though it doesn't seem that he actually gets much further in his writing...  

SPOILERS AHEAD

Other people enter the picture, and while they claim to know Marika, it is just as likely that they are just humouring him in his delusions.  It is left unclear by the end of the novel whether Marika truly existed or was just a figment of his imagination, though my money is on her non-existence.  In a slightly strange twist, he more or less adopts a young woman, as a kind of surrogate daughter.  The writing (or at least the translation) is fairly flat and affectless, and the whole book is sort of infused with a melancholy air.  Here's a slightly longer take on Mr. Blue.

15th Canadian Challenge - 7th Review - Binge

I must have been reading the on-line review of Douglas Coupland's Binge, as when I went to put it on hold at the library the line ahead of me wasn't long at all (as it would be after the print version appeared).  Ironically, it took several days for the e-book version to become available, and I am sort of in the middle of the queue for that.  Why would I want the e-book version, after I have read the book in hard copy?  Well, the book's structure -- 60 very short stories of 4 pages with many shared characters -- makes it hard to keep track of how the characters are linked.  It would be much easier to do a search on "Julie" or "Leah" to see how often they cropped up in others' stories than to flip through the book over and over again.

In some ways, this feels like an even more extreme version of Altman's Short Cuts (where he combined characters from Carver stories that didn't actually overlap in the originals).  The stories aren't particularly chronological, and it doesn't seem as if this is supposed to cohere into some mega-novel (as Cortazar's Hopscotch does, sort of).  It's a bit more like looking a story about a mid-sized city on Wikipedia and then randomly clicking on some of the links to find out more about key characters.  Pretty much everybody gets their minute in the sun, but with only 4 pages we get only a glimpse, either into whatever is preoccupying them at the moment or, just as likely, some major (traumatic) incident from their past that brought them to that point in their lives.  It will make me sense if/when you read some of the stories on your own.

In some cases, two stories just show the inner thoughts of each character as they go through a meeting, such as "Dasani" and "Effexor."  We also have a cynical anti-O. Henry story in the paired stories "Unleaded" and "Lurking Account" where a man starts cheating on his dying wife, while, unbeknownst to him, she is having an affair with one of the hospice workers.  

If this were a novel in (many) pieces, then I think we would have found out more why Ned was recruiting Isaac (after a breakdown partially covered in the stories "Lego" and "Sharpies"), but this thread seems to have been dropped, unless I just missed the connection.

I'm not sure there is enough plot in Binge to really be SPOILED, but just in case, SPOILERS AHEAD.

In the 2nd half, Coupland's peeks into others people's lives gets progressively darker, and we meet up with a woman who has her husband knocked off, and then starts feeding fentanyl-laced drugs to her co-conspirator to cover her tracks ("Oxy") and a disturbing number of people that just happen to have bodies stashed away in their cargo carriers.  I'm still trying to work out why one man was attacked and stuffed into one of these carriers (still alive as the story ended though presumably not for much longer...).  This is where doing an electronic search would come in very handy, as I might be able to cross-reference something in one of the other stories.

Most the characters seem to be on the younger-side of Gen X or Millennials, though Coupland also delves into the lives of their children (Gen Zers), though not always as convincingly.  COVID crops up in a few of the stories, but not really that many.  There is a SARS survivor who can't quite believe he has to worry about yet another pandemic, and one which will almost certain kill him after the number SARS did on his lungs ("IKEA Ball Pit").  This is just as well, as I wouldn't want to read 60 stories about people dealing with COVID in various ways. There were a couple of stories that I could relate to, including getting too caught up in stock speculation and almost losing a bundle ("Risk Aversion"), which will happen to the GameStop investors and probably the BitCoin enthusiasts as well.  Anyway, it is quite easy to get in over one's head...  The other one was a throw-away line in the story "Thong" where the narrator comments on how many people lie about where they were on 9/11.  That is no doubt true, but it is equally true that I was working in Manhattan in Penn Plaza on 9/11.  I heard from some of the others that there was smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers and got to the window in time to see the second plane hit the 2nd tower. It will be something I remember forever, unless Alzheimer's gets me first.

Given the nature of the stories and the way they jump around, a lot of ground is covered in Binge, but it isn't going to be satisfying if you want to follow through on what happened next or even keep following a character that you found intriguing in four pages but then was dropped.  I didn't have time to read through the entire book in one sitting (binge-reading), but I don't think there was a time I stopped with just one either.

Edit (11/15): Having borrowed the e-book version, I can confirm that Coupland leaves the reader hanging in several cases.  We never find out what Ned has in mind for Isaac, and it remains a mystery why one man attacked another in one of the last stories in Binge.  C'est dommage.

15th Canadian Challenge - 6th Review - Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet is Douglas Coupland's 2nd novel.  I mentioned in my review of Generation X that I really didn't start reading Coupland until many years after he had been a major figure in CanLit.  In fact, I probably wouldn't have read him at all, except I was favourably impressed by his art exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  At any rate, I still don't really seek out his work (or written work at any rate), but Shampoo Planet landed in the Little Free Library out front, and I seized the opportunity to read it.

One positive aspect is that it isn't just a rehashing of the themes of Generation X.  While there are a few slacker-types in Tyler's circle, he himself is fairly ambitious, sort of a proto-yuppie, and wants to land a job at the Seattle-based Bechtol and escape Lancaster, the decaying Pacific Northwest city where he was raised.  The interesting twist is that his mother (and biological father) are hippies.  So this is a fairly straight riff off of Family Ties, though there is a moment in Shampoo Planet when Tyler's grandparents fall hard for a multi-level marketing scheme/scam selling KittyWhip Kat Food and even Tyler's mom, Jasmine, gets caught up in the excitement of making lots of money.  The other minor twist (away from Family Ties) is that he has a very abrasive step-father, Dan, who is separated from his mother.  Tyler only visits him a couple of times, though there is an amusing subplot where one of the French foreign exchange students falls for Dan before finding out what a phony he is.

I'll talk a bit about the plot, so SPOILERS ahead.

The plot, such as it is, involves the two students dropping in on Tyler, basically unannounced, leading to a break-up with his girlfriend, Anna-Louise.  After being humiliated by the episode with Dan, one of the student takes off back to France.  Tyler and the other student drive down to L.A., where she eventually gets into modelling (or at least tries to) and brushes Tyler off.  Meanwhile this relatively outrageous pitch* about getting people to take vacations at landfills (by rebranding them as HistoryWorld ouposts) that Tyler sends off to Bechtol gets him noticed by Bechtol's president, and Tyler is invited to fly to Seattle for a job interview.  (This seems almost lifted from another Michael J. Fox vehicle, The Secret of My Success.)  As the novel closes, Tyler has partially reconciled with Anna-Louise.  It does seem like he will escape Lancaster after all.  The Canadian content of the book is fairly low, though I believe there is a comment that Tyler was born in B.C. and he makes a trip to visit his biological father, who lives in a sort of commune in northern B.C.  Tyler is moderately engaging and not completely insufferable like full-blown Yuppies, but he might well become a full-blown jerk after a few years at Bechtol.  Anyway, this was a fairly quick read, and the book fortunately didn't take itself too seriously.

* The same type of out-of-left-field pitch surfaces in "Kirkland Products," one of the 60(!) short stories in Coupland's latest effort, Binge, which I'll be reviewing next.  I guess it is a plot device he likes.

15th Canadian Challenge - 5th Review - Rose

This review will be on the short side.  I only found out relatively recently that Tomson Highway had continued his cycle of plays set on and around the fictional Wasaychigan Hill reservation with Rose.  At one point he had been planning on doing 5 or 6, but his plans may have changed.  The first two are much better known of course (I review them here), though Dry Lips is infrequently staged.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Rose is so triggering that I really can't imagine it being staged again.  (It was done in a workshop at the University of Toronto in 1999.)  

TRIGGER WARNINGS

In addition to having a woman hung up like a slab of beef and tortured, one of the characters is castrated on stage!  And while it is only described, there is discussion on how Emily Dictionary was kicked in the stomach/womb by Gazelle Nataways (talked about but never seen in The Rez Sisters) and miscarried her daughter.

What is interesting is seeing how many of the characters from The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips actually interact, as they don't share the stage in the first two plays.  Pelajia Patchnose, now going by the name Big Rose, has become Chief, while the deposed chief constantly undermines her authority.  Big Joey is so caught up with the idea of taking over one of the community buildings and turning it into a casino that he ends up turning to the mob.  Pierre St. Pierre casts the deciding vote on council to open up the casino and things go downhill from there.  At times, Highway seems to be channeling Quentin Tarantino rather than writing a play that could actually be staged.  On top of everything else, there are numerous musical sequences!  Overall, I found it an interesting, overstuffed play that left me pretty depressed.  I'm sure I would go see if it is ever does return to the boards in Toronto, though I imagine the odds of that happening are pretty low.

Stress Eating

Perhaps ironically, I had gotten through the pandemic without too many breakdowns, perhaps helped by the fact that most of last year I could bike in to the office when I wanted to and most of this year after April or so.  That said, I wasn't really in great shape as this fall rolled around.  However, a combination of being unhappy at work and very stressed at home have led to very bad eating habits recently, and I haven't dared to get on the scale at the gym for a month or two.  I'm not sure if I have hit rock bottom or there is further to go...  

I am still going to gym pretty much every other day (though the last two weeks it has been closer to every third day).  I'm still biking a lot.  Though it is going to be harder to maintain as December is looming, and they say this will be a snowy winter.  Aside from the stress, I just find it quite hard to work while hungry, which is what happens to me when dieting or fasting.  I can ignore this when happy or at least semi-content at work, but when I'm not...  On the positive side, I have figured out how to book the swim lane at Matty Eckler (there are just never any slots at the Regent Park pool), so I'll try to start doing that next week.  And while I've vowed not to eat junk food before, the good intentions usually only last a month or so.  I think part of the problem is that I just don't see enough progress in any reasonable amount of time.

I guess I can start cutting out one thing at a time, starting with visits to the Danish Pastry House in Union Station!  And then after that cutting out chips and substituting popcorn without butter.  And then we'll see what I can do next.  (I actually was moderately good about not eating that much Halloween candy.)  The last time I lost significant weight I was cutting out breakfast as well, though I am not quite mentally ready for that.  

Martha Henry RIP

As noted previously, I try not to dwell on the passing of celebrities or semi-celebrities as there are just so many of them passing on these days.  I will make an exception for Martha Henry, who apparently had Michigan roots, but was so enchanted by the Stratford Festival that she moved to Canada and became an integral part of the company and Canadian theatre more broadly.

I actually saw her twice - once as Prospero in The Tempest on the main stage at Stratford (and I took my son to that) and then in a very intimate setting (the 50-60 seat Coal Mine Theatre) doing a play called Marjorie Prime.  I also saw one of her last directing efforts: Henry VIII at Stratford a few years back.  I briefly considered going to see her in Albee's Three Tall Women this summer, but it was hard enough to get out there for The Rez Sisters.  Also, I saw the Broadway production with Glenda Jackson and Laurie Metcalf, and I thought it would be awfully hard to top that.  That said, Stratford did film this production, and if it is ever released, I'm sure I'll watch it.  

What's so astonishing is that Henry really did go out with her boots on.  She was getting sicker throughout the run, ultimately requiring a wheelchair when she had started out with a walker.  And she died 12 days after the final curtain!  Definitely a life well-lived doing what she loved.

From time to time, I wish I managed to get to Toronto a bit earlier in 2014, as that seemed like quite a good year for local theatre, and I probably would have seen her acting in The Beaux' Stratagem and perhaps even her production of Brecht's Mother Courage at Stratford (along with some Soulpepper plays I missed out on), but I can take comfort in seeing her in very good productions towards the end of her career.

Rough Day

Today was a pretty rough day, but it did get better at the end, so I will end on a slightly higher note.  It's been rainy and dreary for two days straight, which never helps.

We found out that the counsellor who is supposed to turn up and help us through some family drama can't make it until Sunday (yes, really!), so this feels like a wasted week.

Our furnace, which is only two years old, has been acting up and not actually heating the house.  The repairman turned up and, after some poking and prodding, said that the control board needs to be replaced.  This happens to be under the extended warranty we have, but it still means two or three days without any heat.  I suppose better now than in December or January.  

In the late afternoon I had a dentist appointment.  The cleaning was quite involved and more painful than usual.  And a had a small cavity between two teeth that needs to be filled in two weeks.  So that was no fun at all.

Then my wife got a letter from the IRS demanding thousands of dollars.  This really confused and upset me.  When I got home I realized this was related to correspondence I had with them back in August & September.  I have no idea why they wrote to her, however.  I actually filed a 1040X and did pay what we owed in September (and they cashed the check!), so it is probably just crossed communications (and I don't owe any more), but it is still annoying and will probably take a while to straighten out.*  I also have yet another mini-audit from the CRA to deal with, though I didn't learn about it today, but it is still on my mind with all the other tax annoyances.

The bright spot in all this is that I was one of 200 or maybe even 500 Canadians to be selected to get a set of the books shortlisted for the Giller Prize, courtesy of Scotiabank.  I'm supposed to put them out in the Little Free Library, though nothing says I can't browse them first (not that I have the time to read anything not on one of my lists!).

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow will be better.  The weather should be nicer, and I'll plan on biking in to work and perhaps dropping off my bike for a tune-up, which it sorely needs after I have practically ridden it into the ground since the pandemic began...

* While dealing with the IRS is never fun, I found it easier to get things straightened out on the phone with agents in the early 2000s.  This time around, the agent more or less saw things my way, but said it would take 16 weeks for the 1040X to be processed, at which time they would say whether they agreed with my revised calculations.  I said it was fairly silly to pay the money, only to turn around and have the IRS refund it at the end of December.  He agreed to turn off the warning letters, but if the IRS doesn't agree with me, I will be on the hook for even more interest, though probably not a penalty on top of that.  Fingers crossed I got it right this time.  

Shifting Books and Movies

As always, I cannot always follow through on my stated intentions.  I am interrupting my reading plan, which itself is a fairly major departure from my overarching reading list.  I decided I really wanted to read Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita before seeing a musical version, which I am going to this Friday!  Now had I stuck to my original goal, it would only have been 40 pages per night, which is pretty manageable.  However, life intervened as it so often does, and I had about 300 pages to go and only 5 nights left, which is still only about 60 pages.  I did read another chunk this morning and then took the train to work for the first time in many, many, many months (so I could read, which is the main drawback of cycling).  I think I'm now at 200 pages to go and 4 nights left, so that's a little better and definitely doable.  I've actually read this book several times and in three different translations, though it has been a while since the last time (probably 10+ years), but I'm deep enough in that much of the plot is coming back to me.

Then I have Douglas Coupland's latest book, Binge, which is comprised of 60 micro-stories, out from the library.  I pretty much have to read this right away, as I won't be able to renew it.  Then I can return to Joyce Cary and his first trilogy.  I have to say I am not enjoying it much at all.  Once I found out that the artist Gully Jimson was a frequent wife-beater (mentioned several times in Herself Surprised), I knew that this was going to be a challenge, as I usually draw the line at reading about abusers (and I dropped Donleavy's The Ginger Man for precisely this reason).  I'll probably force myself to get through The Horse's Mouth, but already am pretty sure I won't like it, and To Be a Pilgrim is just boring and far too long.  I have no idea why this trilogy is rated so highly.  At that point, I will mostly be trying to read through books that are destined for the Little Free Library out front.  And then I guess I will get back to my main reading list, though still trying to squeeze in a lot of poetry on the side...  It looks like Maxwell's The Château is next whenever I get back on track.

My son has had a fair bit of homework and applying for scholarships over the past two weeks, so we've very far behind on watching the Britcoms compared to where I expected we would be.  Also, more often than not there is some sporting event on when I want to see a movie.  Nonetheless, we managed to see The Matrix.  (I probably won't bother showing him the 2nd and 3rd in the trilogy.)  Then we finally watched Chaplin's The Great Dictator.  I'm not sure I've ever seen the whole thing.  It did drag a lot, but I liked the parts where Napaloni (a parody of Mussolini) is on screen, and indeed the banter between Hynkel and Napaloni seems very similar to what goes on in Duck Soup.  I tried to get to Duck Soup yesterday, but he felt a bit pressed for time, so we actually watched an episode of Slings and Arrows instead.  On Saturday, I showed him Chaplin's Modern Times, though if I had known he was so pressed for time, I would have substituted in Duck Soup.  Well, we'll get to it fairly soon.  Given that it is fairly short, we should get to City Lights fairly soon.  I haven't decided if I'll watch his later talkies (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York) by myself or with him.  Most likely by myself.  I also had strongly considered watching another Bogart film with him, High Sierra, but I am a bit more likely to try to turn that into a double feature, paired with They Drive By Night, and push it off a week or so.  Yet because we are so close to Halloween, I may pull yet another detour and have him watch Beetlejuice sometime this upcoming weekend.

Edit (10/31): So I did manage to stick to the (modified) plans for once.  We saw Beetlejuice on Sat., and then Duck Soup after the trick-or-treating was over on Sun.  The number of kids was fairly low this year, but at least the weather was quite nice, compared to the many times it has drizzled on us.  Both my kids have aged out of trick-or-treating, though my son went to a Halloween party with some friends and my daughter handed out some candy.  Duck Soup was great.  I think it is my favourite of the Marx Brothers' movies.

Slow Return to Culture

I'll probably end up bundling too much into this one post, as I have neglected the blog for almost the entire month.  This weekend is actually a fairly slow weekend for me.  Two weekends ago, I went off to see Picasso Painting the Blue Period over at the AGO.  I was able to take my son to the members-only weekend, and while it was crowded, I'm sure the following weekends will be even a bit more crowded (though controlled via timed tickets) until maybe mid November, which is probably when my wife will go.  That said, it is quite a good show, and I'll post separately on it fairly soon.  I would encourage anyone interested in Picasso to go obviously.  We stopped in at 401 Richmond on the way back, and he really liked the Brian Harvey paintings at Abbozzo.  I thought they were good but looked an awful lot like the type of artists at street festivals and outdoor art fairs.  I was really taken by the one room with Naoko Matsubara prints.  I probably won't ever buy one, but they are not outrageously expensive, so never say never.

Towards the end of the next week, I stopped by The Power Plant at Harbourfront, which has finally reopened.  I'm glad it's open again, but I have to say the featured artist, Miriam Cahn, leaves me entirely cold and she takes up all 3 galleries!  So I won't bother going back until 2022 when they rotate in another artist (or three).  I was gearing up to go see a couple of plays in the Soulpepper Her Words festival, though in the end it turned out that the theatre was one building further east (where Farm Boy has just opened up in fact).  I saw two staged readings* on Sat. and Sun.: Wild Woman by Kat Sandler and Queen Goneril by Eric Shields.  Both were good in different ways, but thematically they were incredibly similar and Queen Goneril suffered in comparison to Wild Woman (and in fact I left at intermission because the staged reading was longer than advertised and I was just exhausted).  They probably should have been programmed on separate weekends.  I'll try to blog on this separately but may never get to it.  One thing that put a serious damper on Sunday was that I had planned on biking out to MOCA (which has been open for a while) to see their new exhibit GTA21.  In general it has been really windy, making biking fairly unpleasant, and what should have been a 40-45 minute ride turned into a 55 minute epic slog.  When I got there, there had been some catastrophic problem with the doors, and the 2nd-4th floors of MOCA were completely locked down!  I was severely pissed.  While I may go back in November (calling ahead first!), I'm also just as likely to say that this was a sign I should take a pass.

There has been additional music at Crows' Nest but they have pushed it to 9:30 to not interfere with the current show (or rather a lecture on land acknowledgements*) and that doesn't fit that well with my schedule.  I really had been planning on going a couple of times but one thing or another interfered, and I just haven't gone back.  I did manage to get over to The Only Cafe to see live music, and perhaps I'll try to catch Allison Au at The Rex next week, though again I wish the shows started a bit earlier... 

I'm not doing any real culture outings this weekend, though I do need to type up all the pages of my script (most of which was written out in longhand at various jazz shows or in the intermission at the Soulpepper readings), and this should be performed at SFYS on Nov. 1!  So something to look forward to for sure.

* In fact, while this was the most satisfying live theatre I've seen in a long while, it isn't the first.  I went to see the faux production of As You Like It, which was in fact a 90 minute monologue on everything that was wrong about land acknowledgements by Cliff Cardinal at Crows' Nest.  I think Lynn Slotkin let this get under her skin a bit too much and her review was hasty, but it truly was disrespectful to flat-out mislead the audience and tell them they would be getting Shakespeare rather than a long lecture that tried to make them feel bad about themselves, esp. as for so many people it was their first night back out testing the waters.  I'll see how the other plays go this season, but it definitely makes me a lot less inclined to support Crows' Nest.  (If I want to go to theatre that makes me feel bad about myself, I can stick with Theatre Passe Muraille or even The Theatre Centre most nights.)   This could definitely lead to its own post, but I know I don't have the energy for it.  

Soggy Weekend (& Week)

It really looks like Toronto has inherited Vancouver's weather, at least for today (Sunday) and the upcoming week.  I definitely don't like riding in the rain, but I did learn to do it in Vancouver (or I wouldn't have ridden three seasons out of the year).  Now the irony is that last Thurs. and Fri. were quite nice, but Thurs. I didn't have to go to work and just did some walking around the neighbourhood.  I could have ridden in to work on Friday, but I was giving a conference talk and needed access to Zoom (and this is still blocked at work due to some outdated risk assessments from early in the pandemic...).  So I really didn't have any choice but to stay home.  

Now I could have ridden more on Saturday, though I did the grocery shopping early, then helped my daughter build a science project, then went to the gym, then looked one more time at the science project.  So it was a fairly busy day overall, and I actually did take a nap in the afternoon, instead of going off to a museum or the library or downtown.  I did end up taking a quick spin down to Queen to pick up dinner, but that was pretty much it.

I felt somewhat desperate for more exercise, so I biked downtown today, despite the rain.  I just hope that going back it isn't too slippery (or dark!).  Anyway, I'm hoping the forecast is wrong and next week we have a few more clear days than they are projecting right now (or even overcast days where it doesn't really rain).

Meng-opolgy

I guess this could just have easily been titled Michaelopoly, but I wanted to go back slightly further to focus on the fact that the US was playing just as many games with Meng Wanzhou as China was with the "two Michaels."  The fraud case was always weak and should have been applied against Huawei as a firm, rather than trying to detain a specific executive.  It also points out the danger that when the US attempts to enforce its laws (which ultimately goes back the the US breaking with international treaties and trying to punish any firm still doing business with Iran), it opens itself up to other countries trying to enforce their laws on US companies that primarily do business in the US -- and may not even have branches in the other country.  And of course, China has shown no compunction about getting other countries tangled up in what is essentially an on-going dispute between the US and China.  

The Meng case was particularly complicated as the border guards in Vancouver made a number of procedural mistakes to the point that if this were any normal case (and not one where the Trump-infected Justice Department was really leaning on Canada), Meng would likely have had all charges stayed.

Biden and his team managed to use deferred prosecution as a technique to save enough face on both sides to resolve the crisis.  Meng agreed to some "wrong-doing" but the extradition request was dropped and she was allowed to return to China.  Most observers were expecting for China to wait a couple of weeks and then release the two Michael, but in fact they were put on a plane back to Canada on that very deal was announced.  In fact, they may actually have landed in Canada before Meng landed in China!  Later Chinese officials said this was based on compassionate grounds as they had medical conditions, but I'm not sure there is anyone on the planet that believes this.  There has almost never been a clearer case of hostage diplomacy.

At any rate, I do find it more than a bit ironic that deferred prosecution was the key, as Jodi Wilson-Raybould was so opposed to its use in the SNC-Lavalin case.  While the situation was different (and the actual public interest benefit was mostly limited to Quebec not Canada as a whole), using it in that case wouldn't have been completely out of line.  I have to say her holier-than-thou air and refusal to cut deals really made it so clear she should not have gotten into federal politics in the first place...

On a completely different note, it is astonishing how much China is willing to pay for good press.  I knew someone back in B.C. whose mother went on a two week trip to China heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.  (While there are times I think I would have liked to see China, I just can't imagine going while the current regime is in power, particularly after they crushed all dissent in Hong Kong...)  At any rate, I reviewed a fairly poor book by two Chinese academics that was to some extent white-washed by the participation of a scholar from the UK.  But the book itself was clearly funded by China and more or less adopted the Chinese state propaganda line whole-heartedly, which I found appalling.  Where this gets interesting is that since that point, I have been invited four or five times to present my "research" in other journals, which apparently are Chinese fronts.  This would be an easy trap for a junior scholar to fall into...  I can't even imagine what would happen after falling down that rabbit-hole.

Edit (11/19): Today I was asked to join as a guest editor to some journal, which sounds respectable but clearly is just a front for the Chinese government, and then just publish whatever I want.  Crazy!  You always hear about how much effort Russia and China are putting into the disinformation infowars, but it only hits home when you keep getting spammed over and over, just because you publish one review of a book on Chinese urbanization.  It's a strange and frankly depressing brave new world.  I'm not sorry I grew up along with the rise of personal computers, but I'm so glad I didn't grow up with today's internet.

The Way We Live Now

This novel is widely considered Anthony Trollope's strongest individual novel, that is not one that is part of the Chronicles of Barsetshire or the Palliser Novels, and it is also his longest.  And indeed it is generally noted as one of the last of the Victorian doorstop novels.  It was not fully appreciated in its day, in part because it was such a condemnation of English society, but has grown in reputation since then.  Given the frequency of financial scandals wracking the U.S. (the Savings and Loans crisis of the 80s, Enron, A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and so forth), there are always fresh memories of financiers behaving badly and taking advantage of less-informed investors and generally bringing ruin to everyone else (and only occasionally to themselves!).  The somewhat mysterious (and quite likely Jewish) Augustus Melmotte is an appropriate literary forefather of these conniving con artists.  There is a slightly different angle in this novel in that Melmotte really does want respectability (for Marie's (his daughter) sake if not his own) and he tries to buy his way into society.  He comes quite close to succeeding, and indeed it is likely this ugly mirror held up to London society that so upset readers of the day.  I won't go too deeply into the plot (and indeed I have to admit I forgot many aspects of it as I read the novel back in early 2018), but here is a pretty good summary with some interesting interpretations along the way, and I will touch on a few plot points, so SPOILERS ahead...   

In one sense, Melmotte drives a harder bargain than some of the characters in Henry James's later novels in that he isn't willing to support a penniless lord (Sir Felix Carbury) simply for the sake of Marie being established in society, though he most likely could have afforded it.  Sir Felix is definitely not a worthy husband, as is established in several ways, most definitively when he essentially allows himself to be cajoled into playing cards with someone he knows is a card cheat.  But perhaps Trollope over-egged the pudding as it were.  The reader ends up quite relieved for Marie when her elopement with Sir Felix fails, but maybe it would have been more interesting if it wasn't so clear that he was such a poor choice.  I vaguely remember being not terribly interested in the whole Paul Montague-Hetta Carbury subplot.  I suspect that if Marie had to choose between Sir Felix and Paul, that might have been a more interesting dynamic, whereas the actual denouements are perhaps just a bit too pat.  I did enjoy it, and I generally enjoy Trollope after I get back into the rhythm of reading a really long book.  I'd probably not reread the whole thing, however, but I might reread individual chapters, which is pretty much the same way I feel about Vanity Fair.  I thought Trollope had a pretty good take on how important marriage was for the minor aristocrats in terms of trying to save themselves from slipping down further in society if they weren't willing to actually get their hands dirty and work, especially in cases when previous generations had divested too much land or otherwise blown through the inheritance.

Austen's work also really connects with the economic realities driving many marriage proposals or at least the women seeking out wealthy husbands at any rate.  In Pride and Prejudice, she definitely lets Lydia (who pays no attention to such matters and is immature and easily swayed) off far too easily, as in "real life" she would have been completely ruined.  That said, there are few real obstacles standing between Elizabeth and Darcy, other than he is too proud and she finds him annoying (and is justifiably angry that he blocked Jane's marriage, which is itself too easily resolved).  Sense and Sensibility, which actually was written before Pride and Prejudice, has these same themes but more serious difficulties to be overcome by the various heroines.  I think S & S to be a stronger novel overall than P & P.

It's interesting that economic necessity is just as urgent in the mid- to late Victorian novel (say Middlemarch) but it is at least a bit muted.  I can't recall Eliot introducing characters by pointing out the worth of their estates or livings (if in the church), but perhaps she did.  However, then in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, money comes roaring back.  It is front and center of every transaction, romantic or otherwise.  Fathers and sons are at odds over inheritances.  Many minor nobles are impoverished and look to their sons to marry heiresses (also a theme in Henry James's European novels), though there are certainly still poor but genteel women on the make for rich lords (sometimes ending up with land-owners not nearly as rich as they portray themselves).

And then there is a bit of a swing away from this, certainly by mid Century.  Money is not talked about as openly in many contemporary middle-class novels.  The Great Gatsby is one of the last where class played a truly critical role in moving the plot forward, though Dos Passos's USA Trilogy and a lot of Depression-era fiction dwells on people who have been financially ruined.  But if you think about the mainstream novelists (Philip Roth, John Updike, John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, even Saul Bellow), there might be occasional financial difficulties and certainly arguments over how the family budget is spent, but money doesn't seem such an over-riding, all-encompassing concern.  And of course most of the writers in the Brat Pack all seemed to be trust fund kids, whether this was literally true or not.  Obviously, this is a completely reductive literary history, but I'd say it is broadly true that most contemporary fiction tries to sidestep economic realities.  Feel free to present counter arguments in the comments.