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.

Do I Expect Too Much from Literature?

I'm starting to find it harder and harder to keep a really open mind and read fiction that glorifies terrible people, so for instance I've never once had any interest in reading American Psycho.  I certainly didn't like Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, and I probably would have been better off never knowing it even existed.  I suppose it is true that my echo chamber is shrinking, and I have less and less tolerance for any artist/writer truly on the conservative side of the spectrum (and this even extends to non-ironic portrayals of conservative-types).  At the same time I find straight parodies of the Orange One and his hapless minions to be just a waste of time (shooting fish in a barrel basically).  I just don't want to read anything that gets into the heads of Trumpsters in any way, ironically or not.  I suppose using this logic I would have dropped Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk where the family was pretty much made up of "deplorables."  In that sense, I suppose I am no longer really a reader open to brand new experiences, because I have closed myself off to so much.  Now I don't literally want every character to be a reflection of myself and my worldview, but I have certainly ruled out a lot.*  I guess I might still be willing to spend some time with centre-right characters (and definitely the extinct Rockefeller Republicans) but not hard-right ones or Ayn Rand-type libertarians, but even this wouldn't be my first choice, as I prefer keeping to the company of centre-left types.

And beyond this, I don't like characters that are feckless and expect others to take care of them (most of the artistic husbands in Comyns's novels and it certainly seems that Gully Jimson from Cary's The Horse's Mouth fits this pattern as well).  And I am practically allergic to children who hate school and/or just drop out.  Does that mean I only want to read about people who would only make the same life choices I would?  I hope not, though it is somewhat hard to tell.  I see that a few years back I was writing about characters that I simply hated (and in a few cases I simply dropped the novel -- I can add William Trevor's Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel to that list).

But then there is a longer list of characters that I either despise or just would refuse to spend any time with (in real life certainly) because they make so many bad life choices -- and in most cases then blame others or just "Fate" for their misfortune.  I am truly struggling with whether to push on with Joyce Cary's first trilogy as I am so turned off by both Sara Monday, the narrator of Herself Surprised, and Gully Jimson, the self-pitying artist (or rather enfant terrible**) who gets plenty of screen time in Herself Surprised and then his own novel, The Horse's Mouth.  But it is considered such a classic in the canon that I think I will push through.  I have decided to never read his second trilogy, and I have put Mister Johnson (featuring a foolish civil servant in Africa) so far down on my list I probably will never get to it either.†

I'm finding it harder and harder to take pleasure in the foibles of literary figures.  In a few cases, this could be because I agree it is somewhat ugly to "punch down," and mock a woman from the servant class for instance, which is one way of looking at Herself Surprised, though I should make it clear I don't agree on any blanket prohibition on punching down.  More often, I just think that these characters have absolutely no common sense and very few normal people would end up in such situations and thus this spoils my enjoyment.  Quite a few farces take things just that step too far, though the really clever ones stop just short of the line (and Boeing Boeing was a pleasant surprise along those lines).  So again, I have added some red lines that also kind of restrict what I will really open myself to.  I suppose in the end it really only hurts myself when I keep narrowing the scope of what I want to read, but at the same time I can tell that I will run out of time and I should probably not bother reading novels that really rub me the wrong way.

* One important caveat is that this largely only applies to novels and plays set in North America or Western Europe.  I don't have a great sense of how people would react in different cultures and don't put as many pre-conceived restrictions on non-Western novels.  And novels written before 1900 also get a bit of a pass in that the politics of the day were so different.  That said, I can assure you that if I run across a novel with a pro-slavery slant, I am not going to bother finishing it.

** It probably goes without saying that I don't hold with the idea that just because artists or musicians or actors are talented, this makes up for it if they are deeply unpleasant people.  I might have been a tiny bit more sympathetic to that view when I was younger, but absolutely not now, which makes me think that The Horses's Mouth will be pretty hard going.  I think I'll still watch the movie version, especially as it is only a bit over 90 minutes, and I am curious what Alec Guinness (who wrote the screenplay!) did with the material and how many rough edges did he sand off.

† And indeed after the entire plot was spoiled by Goodreads, I can't imagine spending any time with this book.  I doubt I will ever read more Cary after I get through the trilogy, but if I end up with endless time on my hands (post-retirement), maybe I'll give A Fearful Joy a go.

15th Canadian Challenge - 3rd-4th Review - The Rez Sisters/Dry Lips Ought to Move to Kapuskasing

Inspired by my recent trip to Stratford to watch The Rez Sisters, I decided to sit down and read these two plays by Tomson Highway.  As noted in many other reviews, the plays are essentially mirror images of each other.  There are 7 female First Nations female parts in The Rez Sisters with a male actor playing Nanabush (a trickster figure) and 7 male actors in Dry Lips and a very female Nanabush.  If anything there is more of a female presence in Dry Lips because the Nanabush character interacts far more often and directly with the men in Dry Lips, because the wife on one of the men turns up at the end and because there is an (unseen) women's hockey game that Big Joey announces on his radio program.  The characters all live on the Wasaychigan Hill reservation and they are pretty much all related to one another.  However, it isn't until Rose (which I will review later) that you really see the men and women interact.  There are two different controversies that surround these plays and make them a bit challenging to put on.  First, there is the very strong notion that only Native actors should play Native parts.  Highway has addressed this numerous times, including writing an essay republished at the back of Rose, where he argues it is just as absurd to only "allow" Native actors to play such roles as it would be to expect Danish actors to play the roles in Hamlet.  That said, feelings around cultural appropriation run very high these days, and most theatrical producers either agree with the angry Twitter mobs or are simply too cowed by the fear of being attacked by said mobs.*  I don't really expect either play to be performed again, in Canada at any rate, unless the cast is entirely or predominantly made up of First Nations actors.  (I'm sure it doesn't help that Highway sprinkles a fair bit of Cree or Ojibway phrases throughout the texts...)   

The second source of controversy is the level of misogyny (overt and covert) and on-stage violence directed at women, though this is more specific to Dry Lips.  While Highway implies in a general way that this ultimately stems from colonization, the fact that this is not a fairy tale with comeuppance for all the sexist males will not sit well with many (and in that sense Rose is even more upsetting).  Generally audiences are not that pleased with stories where the unworthy are not punished in some way, though of course that is a fairly accurate representation of "life."  I'm not 100% sure I would actually enjoy watching either Dry Lips or Rose, but I think I would at least attend if they ever do turn up again in Toronto or nearby.  

To write more about the plays, I'll have to reveal at least a few plot points, so the standard SPOILER warnings apply.

SPOLIERS ahead.

As far as I can tell, the Stratford production was accurate, though I think they streamlined one section where all 7 characters are talking at the same time and insulting each other.  It just seemed completely chaotic.  Also, I think the moment when the band council turns down their request for funding for their road trip to Toronto (to play in the Biggest Bingo Game in the World) was altered a bit, and I do wonder if the original stage directions wouldn't have been a bit more effective.  At any rate, I hope to find out soon when the recorded performance streams, and I'll watch it again.

I think my favourite character is Annie Cook, a relatively uncomplicated music-lover and part-time backup singer who wants to win the bingo so she can buy a ton of records and a huge jukebox.  One interesting thing about her and also Pelajia Patchnose is they have children living in urban centres (Sudbury and Toronto), presumably because there are more economic opportunities of the Rez.

The first half of the play mostly focuses on the low-level conflicts between them and a much more active conflict between Emily Dictionary and the never seen Gazelle Nataways to win the heart of Big Joey.  The second half shows them working together to raise money for the trip and then what happens on the road trip itself.  The bingo game and its aftermath are somewhat compressed into a couple of scenes.  While the dynamic is different (and the ending not quite as deflating), I was definitely seeing connections with Tremblay's Les Belles-soeurs.  I don't think it a stretch that Highway was at least aware of Tremblay's play.  All in all, this is a relatively straight-forward play to produce if one can find enough Native actors.

Dry Lips starts off with a man (Zachary), lying mostly naked on a couch in someone else's house, getting a glowing neon kiss on his behind from the female-incarnation of Nanabush, losing his underwear and splitting his pants, remaining in split pants for roughly most of the play.  It isn't really clear why Nanabush messes with him in this way, as Zachary is generally one of the few men to really stick up for the women, both in Dry Lips and Rose.  It may just be his/her mischievous nature or because Zachary is more in touch with his feminine side (he opposes Big Joey's plays to expand his radio station in favour of his own plans to open a bakery on the reservation).  At any rate, much like Puck, Nanabush seems to set things right between Zacahary and Hera, his wife, at the end.  I almost wondered if the whole play was sort of a fever dream (a  la Bobby Ewing coming back from the dead on Dallas), but in Rose we find that some of the tragic events in Dry Lip s do in fact occur and have lasting outcomes.

There are a number of memorable characters in Dry Lips, though almost no one I would care to spend time with, aside from Zachary.  First, we meet Big Joey, who is a philanderer and self-professed woman-hater who plans to use a photo of the nude Zachary in a blackmail scheme.  Then there is Pierre St. Pierre, who is a lush whose loyalty is easily bought, and again this is even more apparent in Rose.**  And Spooky, a former alcoholic who has turned heavily to religion and become pretty insufferable about it.  Finally, there is the mute Dickie Bird Halked who lives with some unimaginable trauma.  At one point in the play, for reasons that are still not very clear to me, he attacks a woman (or rather Nanabush representing a clanswoman) and rapes her with Spooky's crucifix.  All portrayed on-stage.  So you can see why this play would have ruffled some feathers... 

One of the amusing subplots is watching Pierre St. Pierre try to retrieve his skates so he can be the referee in the women's hockey game.  The idea of the women playing hockey generally upsets the men quite a bit.  Though I guess to his credit Big Joey will broadcast the game on the radio in order to boost his ratings.

Neither play ends tied up in a neat little bow.  If there really is a message in The Rez Sisters it might be that female solidarity is hard-won but it can be achieved for certain objectives when goals overlap.  It's even harder to say in Dry Lips, but it is probably that while most Native men, conditioned by their broken home environment, continue to oppress their women, a more balanced and healthy family life is possible, as represented by Zachary, Hera and their baby daughter.

* Indeed it wasn't that long ago that a new movement sprung up demanding that even translators should be of the same race or nationality as the author.  I'm kind of hoping these sentiments run their course and die down when they prove to be unworkable in practice, but sadly it seems that Twitter outage is the closest we've come yet to perfecting a perpetual motion machine.  

** Aside from the questionable loyalty, he reminded me a bit of the rummy, Eddie, in To Have and Have Not.

Passport Follow-Up

Having been on the other end of it and experienced it, I will admit that there will be a lot of anxiety and angst over the passports.  I went over to Crowsnest last Thurs and didn't have my phone (I was letting it charge).  And they wanted to see the proof of vaccination early, i.e. not on the 22nd.*  I was ready to turn around and go home, but it was an extremely slow night, so the guy at the box office had me go sign onto my email and we finally tracked down the email showing I had been vaccinated.  Then he let me in.  But most venues will not have that much flexibility or patience, and thus most people will indeed need their phone on them at all times (and this is doubly true whenever the Provincial app is rolled out).

No question there will be lots and lots of people that argue they aren't aware of the new rules, or the phone battery just died, or who knows what.  Sadly, there is not a lot of compassion or understanding left.  People are just worn out by everything and are quite scornful of those who try to dodge the rules, including the inevitable outpouring of "jailhouse lawyers" that will be springing up over this, as they see them, rightfully, as further prolonging the crisis.  That said, there are also going to be a lot of people caught in very difficult positions, including people that were vaccinated legitimately with the Chinese or Russian vaccines, which are still not recognized by the WHO, and in some cases the Canadian authorities are not being reasonable at all.

At any rate, the next time I went back to Crowsnest to see Harrow Fair, the guy at the door remembered me and waved me through, even though I  was prepared and had my vaccine print-out.  Again, this is the advantage of becoming a semi-regular at a venue that has so few customers right now.  I enjoyed the first set, particularly their cover of Wicked Game (there are several different versions on Youtube, but this is probably the best) and their original song Hangnail.  I've taken a look at the line-up of groups stopping by Crowsnest this week, and I'm likely to go this Thurs. and Sat.  In part, I find I can relax a bit and write fairly freely, though I will admit I write better during instrumental sets...  I've sort of sketched out the main episodes of my planning department comedy and given most of the characters names and some quirks, and I'll just see how quickly I can pound this out.  I'll write more about it in a later post.  I've learned that if you reveal too much early on, then you don't actually get around to the hard part, i.e. writing it out...

The main downside of going to Crowsnest more is trying to squeeze in going to the gym, though I have managed to keep going about three times a week, which is what I did pre-pandemic.  I haven't fit in the swimming yet, but I'll get more serious about that soon.  Also, I'm not seeing quite as many sitcom episodes with my son, and there is a fairly long backlog.  (At the moment, we are alternating Slings & Arrows and The IT Crowd, which I haven't seen in 15 years, so it is almost like coming at it brand new, and I'm sure I never got around to watching Season 4.  But I actually ordered Dreamland/Utopia, though I have also decided I can't watch it until I am finished with my own series.)  Obviously, his school work always needs to come first, and it doesn't help that football has started up, since he can get wrapped up in the games, but we'll eventually get through these shows.

* After this experience, I have been trying to probe the gym I go to to see if they are starting asking for proof early, as I very rarely bring my phone to the gym.  They basically said that they would start asking for passports in the afternoon or evening of the 21st, i.e. just a day early so they don't have anyone linger in the locker room past midnight and violate the new orders.  Now this may change, but I don't think I'll be caught out unprepared.  While it is a violation of privacy in some sense, I would definitely prefer if my status just gets updated on my gym profile and I don't need to show proof every single time, but clearly this is a work-in-progress, and I'll just try to be patient...

Slow Return to the Arts Scene

I realize there is good reason to be cautious.  Even with the vaccinations, the delta variant is quite contagious.  (How incredibly frustrating that it is so elusive, but at the same time, how childish of these anti-vaxxers to say that because the vaccines aren't perfect, then there is no point in "forcing it" on a reluctant public.)  I think at this point, arts agencies are just going to open up ever so slightly, enforce the vaccine passport scheme that finally came into being and just hope for the best.  They'll still end up bleeding red ink, but better that than going completely out of business.

As far as I can tell, the TSO and Royal Conservatory are running fairly full schedules, starting from the fall.  I haven't booked tickets yet, but saw 5 or 6 concerts of interest in both seasons, so I'll go ahead and subscribe shortly.   And the AGO is pretty much back in full swing, which is really nice from my perspective.

In terms of theatre, I have absolutely no idea what Soulpepper* and Canadian Stage actually plan on putting on.  (Canadian Stage has been running some events in High Park, but hasn't tipped its hand as to the fall or winter.)  Coal Mine should announce something fairly soon.  I'm a little surprised that Video Cabaret hasn't announced anything, as they have a fairly devoted fan base that would come out.  I guess I'll email them later in the week.  

The Bloor West Village Players are putting on Gurney's Love Letters very soon.  As it happens, this isn't my cup of tea, but I hope it goes well for them.  I'll see what else they put on later in the year, and I'll try to make it out to something to show my support.

Tarragon and Factory both seem to be leading off with audio plays for the fall and early winter.  I really didn't enjoy these very much and will probably skip them all, though I may tune in to Year of the Rat at Factory.  Sadly, I don't have much interest in Tarragon's live half-season, but I am moderately likely to watch Among Men and Wildfire at Factory.  Theatre Passe Muraille and the Theatre Centre have been so incredibly woke these past few years that I am hard pressed to find anything to watch there.  In fact, I can't even tell if the Theatre Centre is putting on anything in person any time soon.  TPM is sponsoring a bunch of new in-development productions, but again it is very unclear when anything actually goes live.  Most don't interest me, but I would probably check out Erased and Woking Phoenix if they are actually staged, so I'll keep an eye out for those two.

Interestingly, the boldest season (in terms of doing in-person, indoor theatre this fall) is actually Streetcar Crowsnest, which is awesome for me, as it is just down the street!  I went to their jazz bistro a couple of weeks back and may actually go Thurs. and Sat. to catch some music and just enjoy being out and about...  In terms of theatre, Crowsnest is serving up a George F. Walker play (though unfortunately not one of his Toronto-based plays), Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,** and a musical adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.  So it looks like I may well end up spending the most time at Crowsnest with occasional jaunts to the TSO and Koerner Hall.  Maybe not exactly how I expected to spend 2021-22, but better than last season for sure...

* I'm still not really sure what Soulpepper's long-term plans are, but it looks like they are doing a mini-festival of new works by female playwrights with 4 in-person events in mid-Oct.  I think I may go to two of them, so I'll look into booking tickets for that.  I assume there will be more to come from them, but no idea when.  (Good thing I double-checked as both of these events will actually be at Harbourfront not at Soulpepper's home base.) 

** Slightly off topic, but in one of those inexplicable moves, I had been planning on checking out Ayad Akhtar's The Invisible Hand and then I simply didn't go.  Was this because I was torn between seeing it in Buffalo and Hamilton (and then someone cast a lot of shade on Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton, implying it wasn't really worth the ticket price)?  Or because I saw that a company in Toronto was going to do it, but then it was cancelled due to COVID?  I'm not sure, but now I wish I had gone to see it in Hamilton.  It's yet another one of those frustrating missed opportunities, made even more annoying because I simply can't recall what I was thinking at the time.  (And I mentioned planning to go 2 or 3 times on this very blog!)  But I will probably be a little more inclined to go to theatre now (when I would have been on the fence pre-COVID) just because there is such a strong chance that everything will be locked down again this winter.

15th Canadian Challenge - 2nd Review - The Postmistress

I've been on a bit of a Tomson Highway kick for a while now, kicked off by finally watching The Rez Sisters over in Stratford.  I'll cover The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips in a separate joint review, and then Rose when I am finished reading it.  Interestingly, both Rose and The (Post) Mistress are basically musicals, but The (Post) Mistress is radically slimmed down.  Rose requires 17 actors, while The (Post) Mistress calls for one actor/singer, a pianist and a saxophone player.  While I find Highway's busy, chaotic plays set on the Rez interesting, I think he is getting much more strategic about writing material with a better chance of actually getting staged.

While there are some Cree (and French) songs, Highway specifies that there should be surtitle translations to assist the audience.  Also, he has written the role of Marie-Louise Painchaud (the post-mistress) as a Francophone with a smidgen of First Nations ancestry (to sidestep the controversy of whether non-Native actors should perform Native parts).  As far as I can tell, Patricia Cano, a Peruvian-Canadian, has been the only actor to actually take on this role, and Highway himself usually plays the piano!  This has played in various places in Ontario: Ottawa, Sudbury, Peterborough and finally Toronto in 2016.  I'm trying to remember whether I missed it or just decided not to go, as musicals are generally not my bag.  Or I may just not have been that interested in the nosy post-mistress going on about the love lives of her customers, and that is pretty much at the heart of all the letters.  The post-mistress has such a connection with the mail that apparently she can read out all the unopened letters.  The piece seems drenched in small town invasiveness that so appalls me.  In a lot of ways this is in the same vein as Spoon River Anthology, though not quite as bitter.

While I won't spoil the final twist, it really turned me off as it led the play/musical in some weird metaphysical direction I didn't like at all.  I'm actually fairly glad that I didn't see this, as I just don't think I would have enjoyed it.  I'd be much more interested in a revival of Rose or seeing if Highway actually writes the next chapter of life on the Rez, so I'll keep my eyes open for that.

Passports

To no one's surprise, after ruling them out (saying he didn't want a split society), the prospects of a fairly dire fall have forced Doug Ford's hand, and Ontario will be getting some sort of vaccine passports after all.  Now no question there are going to be issues with the implementation (and I just read a story that the way they will be implemented completely screws the people who volunteer to test vaccines, so they will start dropping out of the studies), but on the whole this seems completely necessary.  However, it is also going to really motivate the extremists.  Mercifully they are a much smaller (and largely less dangerous) crowd than in the States, but still large enough to cause huge headaches.  The main benefit of the passport is that by applying the rules so broadly to non-essential services, these jerks will stop targeting individual restaurants.  Quite honestly, I have no sympathy with these losers, but the bigger fear is there seems to be no way to re-introduce them into society.  They have absolutely no trust in any government, and at least some of them have really embraced a truly nihilistic worldview.  It's the same question of what to do with the Trumpers that have taken over the Republican Party.  I certainly don't have any workable solutions, and there are far too many of them to simply ignore them...

Back to Ontario (with its more manageable problems), the passports will be required from Sept. 22 to enter gyms, movie theatres, concerts and plays.  It's possible that a few places will start requiring them sooner.  For the first few weeks, I guess we'll just wave around printouts of our vaccination status, but at some point, there will be an official app.  I'll certainly be curious if a few of the gym regulars drop out, and things may be fairly tense for the first week or two, but on the whole Canadians are simply more accommodating rule-followers, so I think the storm will pass.  Apparently, just the threat of the passport coming in has caused some of the people sitting on the fence to sign up for the vaccines, and that is exactly how it is supposed to work.  Getting vaccinated is still largely a personal choice, but there will be more severe consequences if you decide against it, and indeed for people working in health care or teaching, refusing the vaccine will probably lead to losing one's job.  Given that school children will ultimately almost certainly be required to add this to their vaccine list, I wish they would just bite the bullet and do this now, rather than over the winter.  The signals from the Province were so mixed, that universities didn't require students to be vaccinated until just recently when it is too late to salvage in-person learning for the fall.  Certainly frustrating, though I guess it could be worse.  B.C. is being weirdly libertarian around masks and vaccines for universities, and I think they will come to regret this.  (I'm not even going to touch the dumpster fire that is Calgary.  They are beyond hope...)

I've generally had a pretty high risk tolerance, since I was double vaccinated, and with the passports, I won't hesitate too much to return to in-person arts activities.  In the next post, I'll probably list a few concerts and plays that I think I'll get to.  Unless of course the next variant changes plans yet again...

Visit to Hamilton

Yesterday we made a quick trip out to Hamilton.  I had been planning on going the previous weekend but got scared off by potential thunderstorms, which never materialized.  However, I think in the end this was a better day to visit, as it wasn't so hot and sticky.  In addition, there was more activity at McMaster, which I'll get to shortly.

We got to the GO Bus station in time and got in line.  There are always quite a few people on the bus, and with it only running once an hour, there were barely enough seats!  In the end, some people had to sit next to people not in their pod, which I'm sure they didn't appreciate.  We even saw a few people miss the bus unfortunately.

Traffic was heavy but improved after the 427 split, then we got snarled again.  I thought it was just cottage country traffic, but then it became clear there had been some accident and basically all the lanes were closed.  The driver was monitoring the situation and was encouraged to get off and take a bypass.  The traffic was still pretty bad, but we eventually made it (and roughly only 20 minutes late, though it felt longer).  I was reading John Williams's Stoner and my son was wrapping up Crime and Punishment from our last jaunt.  Unfortunately, my iPod died only 15 minutes into the trip, so I didn't really have anything to listen to.

We started out looking around downtown Hamilton a bit.  There are some gentrifying bits, but it still feels like a bit of a cross between Buffalo and Cleveland.  We wandered through Jackson Square.  I was looking for the Farmer's Market.  Apparently it is still right there, but I didn't see any signs for it and gave up looking, assuming that it had closed.  (In the second photo, if you look closely, you can see a shopper wearing her mask incorrectly.  There was a fair bit of that in Jackson Square, so I didn't really feel like lingering...)

Then we crossed the street and went to the Art Gallery of Hamilton.  One nice surprise was they extended the free admission for one more weekend, though we did leave them a donation on the way out.  The main floor was a mix of paintings from the main collection and poets commenting on the pieces.  There were even a bunch of Warhol soup cans!  In addition, there was sports-based art by Esmaa Mohamoud, much of which we had seen a few years back at the AGO.

 

The upstairs is a deeper dive into the permanent collection with a healthy number of Canadian artists on view.  I don't drop by the AGH that often, but it is usually worth it, especially when they have a solid show on the first floor.

After this, we jumped on a bus and went to visit McMaster.  Apparently, they were welcoming students back, as well as showing new freshman the ropes.  

I hadn't seen some parts of the campus before and swore that one of the buildings was a clone of Hart House!  Anyway, it was good to ask a few students about living on residence and their experiences at McMaster.  I'm not sure my son will choose a university just based on its campus, but I think McMaster may have moved up the list a bit.  At any rate, I'm glad we had a chance to visit.

We walked over to Main St. to catch a bus back downtown.  We had a bit of time to kill, so we went all the way in to GO Centre, which I think was the right decision, as we boarded an empty GO bus.  By the time the bus hit King and Dundurn, it was quite full and we wouldn't have been able to sit next to each other.  The trip back was considerably smoother, though somewhat surprisingly the driver took the 407 pretty much the whole way.  Maybe the issues on the QEW hadn't cleared up after all.

Train Time

I have to say I was not super impressed with VIA last week.  Leaving Toronto on Thurs., we were delayed 45 minutes, and we never made up any time.  I knew there were likely to be some delays, but this seemed a bit extreme.  Also, if I had known upon getting to the platform that it was going to be 20+ minutes before boarding the train, I would have taken care of a few other things, like buying another mask for my son or getting more snacks or really anything other than standing in line for no reason.  Aside from the delay, the train ride was fairly uneventful.  I had chosen a long book (Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude) as my book.  My son brought along Crime and Punishment!  (And I really do need to tackle the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation one of these days.)

One unbelievably annoying thing happened at the very end when this bag of chocolate-covered raisins opened up and spilled all over the floor.  I could only pick up about half of them (in part because some jerk in front of me was leaned so far back).  Then I threw them in a plastic bag and threw that out, which meant that the water bottles went into a bag with some books (instead of into their own bag), and one of them leaked a bit.  I only saw a very little bit of water damage to Fortress of Solitude, but there was quite a bit more to Crime and Punishment and this art book.  So that was a very unfortunate series of circumstances.  I may even end up replacing the book.  I went round a few bookshops over the weekend, but they didn't have this translation, so I'll probably have to hit BMV and see if they have it.

The next unbelievably frustrating thing happened at the Tremblay station on the Ottawa LRT.  I'm glad it was actually open (and no derailments that weekend), but they have decided to make the stations completely automated and you have to call for video help on the Presto machines if the gates malfunction.  I tapped and it wouldn't accept my card, then said I had already tapped.  So I was separated from my son.  The only advice was to wait 5 minutes for my Presto card to reset, and then to try again!  Unbelievable!  Frankly, they are going to get sued over this completely ridiculous hands-off attitude and derogation of responsibility.  Of all places to not have any staff around to help people get into the system, the train station (with a bunch of new visitors each day) has to be the worst.  Anyway, after waiting 5 minutes, the card still didn't work, so the guy on the other end of the video call had to print me out a temporary pass.  Truly horrible.  Most of the worst transit experiences of my life have been related to transit systems that have over-automated and have no reasonable back-ups -- to the point I am more than a little ashamed of being in the transit business...  This definitely stressed me out, and the trip was not as fun as it should have been thereafter.  In fact, I kept worrying about whether the fare gates would cause us to be late the next morning, though in the end, thankfully, there was no problem.  Go figure...

Tremblay station

We were obviously running late (having missed a couple of trains while dealing with the non-responsive Presto card), so we were later than I hoped in getting to the National Gallery.  On the one hand, I had planned to stay a bit late (Thursdays the National Gallery has extended hours), but I was meeting someone I know through work.  In the end, we chatted for 20 minutes or so before he had to rush off for another appointment, and we went into the gallery.  While the Rembrandt was supposedly sold out for that day, when we showed up with our pre-booked tickets there wasn't any line to get into the exhibit at all, which was nice.  There were a few paintings where we had to wait to get closer, but there really were no significant crowds.  I'm sure in part because the National Gallery really was pretty stingy in terms of how many people could sign up for each time slot.

The exhibit was a little portrait heavy.  There were a few Biblical scenes, but no painting that really featured Rembrandt's characteristic light in the darkness technique.  Having looked through the catalog, there were two paintings that will be on view in Frankfurt (the next and last stop) but not in Ottawa.  One is "The Abduction of Ganymede" which I'm fairly sure I saw at the Met in New York as part of a different exhibit years ago, while the other one () would have been pretty cool to see in person.  Oh well.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat and Two Chains, c. 1642-43

I'd say in this case, there were a few etchings that really were the highlights of the show, at least for me.

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses, 1653-54

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, c. 1650

I'm glad we checked it out, though I have seen stronger Rembrandt shows, though to be fair, mostly in Europe.  

Since we were already at that end of the museum, we then went through the contemporary art rooms, then the European/American art on the upper level and finally the Canadian rooms on the lower level.  Oddly, the Tom Thomson rooms were closed for re-installation, though there were still quite a few Group of Seven paintings on view.

Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pad Boxes, 1964

I'd seen almost everything before on previous trips, though I'm not sure I had seen these two Tissot paintings before, one a recent acquisition and one from a private collection.

James Tissot, The Partie Carrée, 1870

James Tissot, The Japanese Scroll, 1872

We left and found an Indian restaurant, then wandered past Parliament Hill and finally checked into the hotel.  I knew there was a pool, and it actually was open, so I did a bit of swimming before crashing.  I wouldn't say it was really ideal for swimming laps, but this is the first swimming I've done in roughly two years.  Better than nothing...

As I alluded earlier, there was no problem getting on the LRT back to the Tremblay station and we showed up just as they were lining up to board the VIA train, so pretty good timing.  Unfortunately, the snack shop was closed.  You would think they would at least open up before the first train of the day (and on a weekday no less).  The snack cart on the train was equally unimpressive.  They had one bagel with cream cheese, no banana bread, no cookies, etc.  Honestly, why bother.  VIA has always been massively less impressive than Amtrak and seems to have no intention of upping their game.

At least the train left on time, and we got to Kingston with no issues.  I had done a bit of scoping out the lay of the land and knew there was no bus service serving the station!  So we caught a cab.  It was a $20 ride to the Queen's University campus.  Pretty outrageous.

We started at the art museum.  While parts were being reinstalled, we still saw a few rooms of art.  Probably the most interesting thing was a Picasso print that was part of a Art and Humour exhibit.

Pablo Picasso, Le Vieux Roi, 1959

Then we wandered around campus for an hour or so.  We had been tipped off to check out a small cafe right by the water, so we went there.  (It was just as well we ate there, as pretty much everything on campus itself was still closed, as the students weren't back from break.)

We walked downtown and looked around.  This was the first time I really spent anytime in downtown Kingston.  It felt pretty small.  My son thought he probably wouldn't really want to go to Queen's (for undergraduate studies at any rate) as it definitely means learning to drive right away.  We managed get another cab back to the train station and headed back to Toronto.  As one final demonstration of how badly VIA lets its customers down, the cafe in the Kingston station appears to be permanently closed and several of the vending machines were also broken.

On the whole it was a decent trip, though it would have been nicer if the train was a more pleasant experience.  I managed to read 400 pages of Letham's Fortress of Solitude and wrapped it up shortly afterwards.  We saw some pretty nice art, and I had a couple of days off work, so that was all to the good. 

Adjunctland

No question my career has taken a few unusual twists and turns.  One of the more disappointing mismatches was when I finally landed at an agency where I had a lot of responsibility and liked my work, but I simply didn't like the city (or region) and my family liked it even less.  Generally, I am somewhat out of step no matter where I land, at least in part because I am a bit of a Cassandra and always imagine things turning out badly (and frankly most people prefer being around people with a more optimistic outlook).  That said, I have managed to contribute to important projects over my career, with probably the two most notable being developing the first Activity-Based Travel Demand Model for the New York metro region (not single-handedly) and then the overhaul I led of the Vancouver regional travel demand model (which was closer to being a one-man job...).  If I can hang in there, I'll probably be able to make major improvements to the Toronto regional travel demand model.

While the "life of the mind" always appealed to me, and I did try for several cycles to enter the academic job market, my timing was pretty bad.  In general, I missed the window by about five (or maybe 10) years when universities were still largely replacing faculty with other tenure-track faculty.  But this hasn't been the case since at least 1995.  This chart demonstrates the truly astonishing fact that at US universities, over 75% of instructors are part-time contingent instructors usually called adjunct faculty.

Now of course, a small handful of these are professionals in other non-teaching fields that are moonlighting and teaching an evening course or two, which was sort of the original justification of the adjunct category.  Incidentally, I did teach such a course at Northwestern while I was employed as a full-time transportation consultant.  In such cases, the salary probably still is only slightly above minimum wage (when all prep time and grading is factored in), but that isn't really the problem.  The problem is that people with the proper credentials end up piecing together careers with a bunch of adjunct postings rather than true tenure-track jobs and then they never can break through and then are trapped in a cycle of near-poverty.  (The mark of the adjunct seems to be a real thing...)

It's marginally better in Canada, in the sense that the part-time faculty are only 67.5% and not 76%.  In addition, Canadian adjuncts are probably slightly better positioned to benefit from unionization drives whereas they have little chance of success in the States for a variety of factors, most related to the hollowing out of organized labour by the political system (and the enthusiastic dismantling of labour protections by the conservatives on the Supreme Court).  With all that said, faculty have no intention of being forced to promote adjuncts to tenure-track positions, which is usually what the adjuncts attempt to put on the table during their periodic job actions and strikes.

Anyway, here is a truly sobering podcast episode talking about a number of issues related to the exploitation of adjuncts

I'm sure I could have been a bit more clever about my own career and published in better journals (and done less hybrid work, which was sort of encouraged in the 90s but then became a huge stumbling block to getting interviewed in the 2000s).  Also, if I had been less picky about where I ended up, I probably could have gotten on the faculty a few places (including West Virginia University).  But the academic market just never worked for me, and nothing was actually better than what I was doing at the time...

I guess this is on my mind a bit lately because a co-worker with a brand new Ph.D. just managed to get hired as a tenure-track faculty member at Dalhousie in Halifax.  I think it is appropriate to be happy for someone, who kind of hit the jackpot, and still be unhappy about the general situation which seems so unfair for so many bright students.  And maybe I am thinking of my own children, though neither of them seem that interested in following the academic track, which is probably a good thing...  There is no question I would no longer encourage anyone to get a Ph.D., as it sort of seems like a dead end with such low odds of getting a reasonable payoff.

Edit (10/24) And only a few weeks after this posted, I saw a job posting for a position in Mobilities at York University.  If Mobilities had been a thriving field when I was an academic with a newly minted doctorate, it would have been my natural home, but it just never really took off.  Anyway, I was slowly gearing up to apply as a late-career candidate (truly a Hail Mary pass!) when I noticed that it was a minority hire and only applicants that self-identified as Black could apply.  So very disappointing...