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...