Culture Worth Waiting For

This won't be about the slow resurgence of theatre and live music, but rather about listing some interesting books and DVDs that have been announced.  Maybe I shouldn't be, but it is fairly impressive that both Criterion and NYRB have such solid backing in terms of customers who buy practically everything they put out that they can plan out release schedules more than a year in advance!  I'm sure they have even more they are working on in the pipeline, but these are the releases they actually feel comfortable in announcing.

I'll actually take a bit of a detour though and mention that Cormac McCarthy has two linked novels coming out in late fall.  The Passenger hits in late Oct. and Stella Maris, which is actually a prequel, arrives in Nov.  Based on what has been released so far, I think I would be more interested in Stella Maris, so maybe I will wait and read that first and then decide if I will tackle The Passenger.  I actually have read very little McCarthy, aside from The Road, and I don't think I've seen any of the films based on his movies.  But it's still nice when announcements like this are still buzz-worthy.

Staying with books for the moment, I do try to check in at the NYRB Forthcoming page every so often.  E. E. Cumming's The Enormous Room isn't that hard to get ahold of, so that isn't nearly as exciting as several of the others.  I guess that goes double for Turgenev's Fathers and Children.  It's a masterpiece, but there is no indication of why this presumably new translation is so essential.  In contrast, they claim that this translation of Cela's The Hive is the first fully uncensored version.  I was actually slowly coming up to The Hive in my reading list (in fact it would be a 2nd reading), but now I'm going to wait until December when this translation comes out.  (The wait is a long one, but I have plenty else to read in the meantime!)

Here are others that have caught my attention, most of which are new to an English reading audience:
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick -- May 2022
Italo Svevo A Very Old Man (Stories) -- August 2022
Victor Serge Last Times -- August 2022
Vladimir Sorokin Telluria -- August 2022
Amit Chaudhuri Sojourn -- September 2022
Maxim Osipov Kilometer 101 -- October 2022
Eileen Chang Time Tunnel (Stories and Essays) -- May 2023

I've not been a huge fan of Eileen Chang's work, but this one grabs me a bit more, so I guess I'll see in mid 2023!

Criterion may just have more releases per month, but at any rate, they only list things coming out between now and late June, so the wait isn't quite as excruciating.  I must say I always get a bit of a thrill when a somewhat obscure movie that I know about gets a Criterion release, as that means its profile has just increased substantially.

I just happened to be thinking about After Life the other day and saw that it had a Criterion release back in August 2021, which I had completely missed.  Still Walking, a later film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, had been out on Criterion since 2011, but After Life never really had such a high profile.  Anyway, this release will likely change that.  I decided to spring for the Blu-Ray, after DVD Beaver pointed out how badly butchered the original film was on DVD, so I guess this will almost like be seeing the film anew.

I don't think the upgrade is quite as remarkable for Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (and this was hardly a little known film), but I'm still glad it got the Criterion treatment a short while back.

Love Jones is a cute romance set in Chicago in the 1990s.  I'm not as happy that it only appears to be coming out on Blu-Ray, as I think that means the library won't carry it, though I don't think it is that hard to find on DVD.  I'm even more worried about Mr. Klein by Joseph Losey, as I am not at all familiar with this film, so I really hope that the library will pick it up.

Other things that caught my eye are Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) by the Esiri brothers and Juzo Itami's The Funeral, which has been out on DVD previously, but this looks like a substantial upgrade.  I might even go for the Blu-Ray version which has some additional bonus material.

So certainly a lot to be looking forward to...

Springier

I certainly hope we have finally turned that corner and there will be no more winter weather.  I read that this is only the third time since 1940 that Toronto has gotten more snow than Montreal.  So history.  Yea...

There were so many days in late Jan. and Feb. that I felt like this:

Maybe it was even worse last weekend when there was just a thin coat of slush that then turned back to snow.  This was so depressing after the slightly warmer weather.  In fact, the slush on Friday felt so dangerous that I skipped going to the gym and went Saturday morning instead.

However, it has been warming up since Wednesday and most, though not all, snow in the yard has melted.  We were actually able to just wear shoes on a quick trip to Ottawa, which I'll discuss a bit more in the next post, and that was a nice surprise.

I've actually managed to start biking to work on a regular basis, though I'll have to carve out some time to drop the bike off for a tune up.  They told me last time that I needed to replace the chain, but that I might as well try to make it last through the winter, rather than replacing it and having it get rusty right away.

I suspect it will be a bit harder to keep up with my reading, but, on the whole, I'd rather have the exercise (and avoid taking the TTC as much as possible).  On the train ride up and back from Ottawa I managed to read the book on autonomous vehicles (that I am reviewing for the Journal of Urban Affairs) and got to the halfway mark in Crime and Punishment, so that was most excellent.  

While I would have loved to get to St. Petersburg to take a Dostoevsky tour (and even more to visit the State Hermitage Museum), I don't think that is likely to be in the cards.  One of my colleagues in Cambridge went to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2005, and I halfway contemplated it at the time, though even then it was still trickier for Americans to get visas to visit Russia.  Nonetheless, it didn't feel so morally awful (back then) to be supporting Putin in any way.  For me, the red line was the annexation of Crimea in 2014.  All I can really hope for now is that Putin does face meaningful punishment for his global crimes, though the odds of that are slim.  Nonetheless, they are certainly better now than they were 3 weeks ago, given how badly his campaign is going, and it is at least plausible that he will be removed from power within the next 5 years.  One can only hope.  And obviously hope that the next leader of Russia isn't such a monster and may actually allow a freer society, though I think that is an extremely unlikely outcome.  I've reconciled myself to never visiting China, and I imagine Russia will probably essentially be off-limits as well for the rest of my lifetime at least.

Anyway, I'm about to bike home in the last of the daylight.  I should focus on how that will feel so good compared to the winter biking I attempted on occasion -- and I shouldn't let myself get too down over things that I have no control over...

Nearly spring

It really did feel pretty great outside today, and while it was windy I didn't get caught in the rain.  It won't last, and in fact it will likely snow next weekend, but it looks like we'll be at or above freezing for the next two weeks, so maybe no more deep freeze days.  That would be nice!  Because I thought it was going to rain, I didn't bike, though I did bike to work Friday (so cold in the morning!) and downtown on Saturday.

Saturday, I checked out the exhibits at 401 Richmond, including the new show at Yumart by Leon Rooke.  This artist is apparently also a writer, and I reviewed his The House on Major Street here.  I must say I am tempted by this piece, which reminds me just a bit of Lyonel Feininger, though I do wonder if I would get tired of it too soon.

Leon Rooke, 24 Windows, 2021

On Sunday, I was going downtown primarily to see Rear Window at TIFF, but I managed to drop by Bau-Xi.  The art gallery was showing a number of works, mostly etchings, by Hugh Mackenzie, an OCAD instructor who recently passed away.  Several were quite nice, and I think this was my favourite. 

Hugh Mackenzie, Dry 10¢, ca. 1975

Over at the photo gallery, they still had the previous show up, featuring photos of "decay" by Lori Nix and Dan Dubowitz.  I particularly liked Lori Nix's photos which are made from miniature sets she builds herself and lets break down.

Lori Nix, Mall, ca. 2012

I found that she had a book out called The City with many of her best photos.  TPL has a reference copy, though sadly Robarts doesn't.  The gallery didn't have any for sale, and the few available on-line are going for silly prices.  I wrote to the original publisher to see if any are still available.*  It would be unlikely, but you never know.  I have scored a few finds that way.

After dropping in at both galleries, I walked down to King to see about scoring a ticket for Rear Window, which I don't believe I've ever seen on the big screen.  Apparently, it was a fairly hot ticket, and I got one of the last two available!  I wasn't expecting to have to sit right next to someone so soon!  My only issue was that I thought the movie was 90 minutes, but it runs just short of 2 hours, so it did feel a bit long.  Also, for a restoration there were still some weird problems with artifacts on the film and then close to a minute where the sound track was running at a different speed!  But still, quite a good film.

While I was waiting for the film to start, I finished Garcia Lorca's In Search of Duende.  The poems were fine but the essays were forgettable.  On the whole, this New Direction Pearl series hasn't done much for me, but I have been able to get through several quite quickly.  On the train home, I started The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur.  It was completely loathsome, and I stopped after 30 pages.  

Now interestingly, it looks like I'll be going up to Ottawa in about a week with my son for another tour of the place with a closer look at Carleton (and of course a side trip to the National Gallery).  It would be an amusing parallel if I read Crime and Punishment on the train, as he was reading it on our last train ride up.  However, I have only one more short novel (Sterling Karat Gold) before I dive back into Dostoevsky, so I should be a reasonable chunk of the way into it by the time we leave.  I may just take William Maxwell's 2nd LOA collection instead and of course my iPod.

* As it happens, the publisher, Decode Books, did have a few copies of The City left over at a high but not outrageous price, though shipping to Canada was sheer highway robbery.  If interested, you can contact them and see if there are still one or two in the storeroom.

Edit (3/8): I wrapped up Sterling Karat Gold in about a day and a half.  It is basically a reworking of Kafka's The Trial for the LGBTQ crowd with a fair bit of A Clockwork Orange and Pink Floyd's The Wall thrown into the mix, but then wrap it up in silly (& unexplained) time travel romp like Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine.  It could have been quite interesting, but actually ended up being a very immature revenge fantasy against anyone that ever crossed a queer artist.  While the characters are supposedly in their mid-30s, they certainly act like twenty-somethings out on their own for the first time.  Anyway, I didn't like it, but I will see if the Merrill Collection wants it, as it doesn't seem to have made its way to these shores yet. 

In an interesting twist of fate, this book on automated vehicles I am reviewing showed up just in time for me to read it on the train, so I think I may alternate a chapter of this with a chapter of Crime and Punishment.  Maxwell will just have to wait.

Theatres Back in Business (Fingers Crossed)

We've seen this script before with theatre opening up slightly last fall, particularly Crows' Nest being a bit more aggressive than most only for things to fall apart with Omicron.  It looks as though the Province isn't going to shut down again, no matter what, but theatre is only going to be able to carry on if patrons, particularly the aged patrons that are still the bulk of their customer base.*

Anyway, I just watched Factory theatre's The Year of the Rat, which was digital but performed live.  It was one of the better digital things I've seen.  This week they are putting out an audio play called You Can't Get There from Here Vol. 2.  I haven't generally been too impressed with audio plays, which seems to be Tarragon's entire slate, but it works a bit better when the pieces are conceived as audio-only from the beginning.  After that, they are putting on two live performances: Among Men by David Yee, which is about Milt Acorn and Al Purdy, which will run in late April/early May.  Then Wildfire runs in early June.  I should eat up Among Men, as it is Can Lit squared, but it just doesn't grab me, though maybe I'll go if the reviews are glowing (not that I am on the same page as today's reviewers....).  Wildfire sounds pretty interesting, and I plan on going to that.

Tarragon does have 3 live plays, beginning next week in fact, though none of them grab me.  It's been a really long time since I've been interested in more than one or two of their shows, and this season is no exception.

That's the same with Canadian Stage, where I am completely out of sync with their artistic director, who is into spectacle above all.  What a putz.  Usually about half their season are dance pieces, which seems an unnecessary dilution of their brand.  Anyway, the rest of their season is here, not that I plan on going to anything.  Maybe next year.

Soulpepper is putting their audio plays back up, though I already listened to the ones that interested me. They probably have the most ambitious season of any company in Toronto.  On paper I should like Dominique Morisseau's Pipeline, which is about a Black teacher who is struggling to keep her son out of trouble and finding that trouble follows him to an elite prep school upstate.  However, I actually read the play and found it way too cliched.  Erin Shields' Queen Goneril is basically a prequel to King Lear, showing how Goneril and her sister, Regan, ended up fairly distant to Lear even before the start of that play.  Again, it should work better than it actually does, but in the end I found it disappointing.  It borrows way too heavily from Lear, including a storm scene.  I ended up leaving at intermission during a staged reading last fall.  So I'll definitely be skipping that.  They are doing a fairly traditional King Lear in September, and I imagine I'll go see that.  (I'd like to take my son, though I expect he'll be up in Ottawa at Carleton by that point.)  I may see Ins Choi's Bad Parent, playing at about the same time.  Finally, after being postponed twice, they are putting on The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale in October, so that is something I'm looking forward to.

At the moment, Theatre Centre doesn't have any scheduled live performances, so I guess I'll just check back later.  Nightwood is also struggling, not least because they lost their offices (and rehearsal space?) over in the Distillery.  They are partnering with Canadian Opera Company to put on The Queen in Me, but that's pretty much it.  However, I simply cannot sit through opera, no matter how many times I've tried, so this is also a hard pass for me.

Video Cabaret still seems dormant, though I don't think they've folded, which is what happened to East Side Players.  Same thing with Shakespeare Bash'd.  The Village Players in West Bloor have come through the pandemic (in better shape than East Side Players anyway) and have a live play (The Impossibility of Now) opening shortly.  I think I'll probably go to this, maybe next weekend.

Red Sandcastle is under new management, mostly hosting eerie theatrical offerings by Eldritch Theatre, but they still book other events there.  I may go to a couple of things in March. 

Coal Mine Theatre has two plays in their truncated season: Baker's The Antipodes and D'Amour's Detroit.  I have tickets to both.  They were more or less sold out, but with the lifting of restrictions, they may now have more available.  These may well be the best things still on this season.

The other main East Side theatre, Crows' Nest, is going to stick to half-capacity shows on Tuesdays and Wednesday and I think Thursday matinees.  For the other shows, it will be at full capacity, which might be a little too much for me.  I'll have to see how I feel.  Anyway, the show I wanted to see the most was Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo, but it has been cancelled, maybe to come back next season but maybe not.  Gloria has already opened, so I should get to that soon, and then George F. Walker's Orphans for the Czar follows immediately after.  I'd rather this was one of his East Side plays, but it should be interesting.  I see that Eric Peterson is in it, which does spark my interest a bit.

Just a few other things worth mentioning, the cancelled Assembly show Two Minutes to Midnight is coming back in April, and I'll almost certainly go to that.

Alumnae Theatre looks like it is still putting on Ruhl's In the Next Room in April, so I'll try to get to that as well.

Basically it looks like there are a few things to watch in March/April, then a bit of a lull, then more in June and over the summer, and then some end-of-season plays going on this fall.  (I'm running late, so fairly soon I'll post on Driftwood's summer tour (back on -- yea!), Shaw and Stratford.)  Not great, but not too bad, given what we have just come through.  Fingers doubly crossed there are no more closures.  Ciao!

* I guess we'll see what happens as the artistic directors continue to get more and more "woke."  I've largely given up on Theatre Centre and Theatre Passe Muraille, as they really want to make a social statement with their work, rather than starting from entertainment first.  And Buddies at Bad Times has completely fallen apart with the entire board quitting along with the managing director and then even the long-time bar manager was forced out.  It's pretty awful to watch this place imploding after caving in to demands of the never-satisfied activists in their midst.

Rolled Up Updates

I'll just pull together my reading and exercise updates, as I just never have time to update on a regular basis.  In fact, I recall thinking I would hit 13 reviews at a record pace this cycle, but that obviously hasn't happened, though I believe I have read at least 13 qualifying books (but I decided to skip reviewing at least two of them).

I've been doing a pretty good job of getting to the gym 3 times/week, since they reopened them in late Jan.  To me this is particularly impressive, as I don't like going on days I have to trudge there through the snow and change out of my books.  The last few times it's been cold but the sidewalks are at least clear.  Tuesday was the first day that the vaccine passport requirements were lifted.  I believe a fair number of theatre and concert venues are keeping the passport in place at least through April, but the gyms (and I think the movie theatres) have dropped this pretty quickly.  That isn't a great feeling, as I could be exercising next to an anti-vaxxer, and it's bad enough that I have seen more than a few on the TTC.  If I had my way, I would prefer that they just drop the mask requirement (as there are so many loopholes associated with exercising anyway) but keep the vaccine passport.  At least the vast majority of people that were there are regulars that I've seen over the past month, so they were vaccinated.  As much as the (Conservative) political leadership hated them, I think the vaccine passports to the gym and movie theatre did motivate a lot of 20 year olds to get their shots that probably just wouldn't have otherwise.  It did feel a bit more crowded than I was completely comfortable with, but it wasn't terrible.  I've been out and about a lot more than many people and have a higher risk tolerance than many people my age.

A couple of times I've actually doubled up, going on Saturday morning and then a shorter session (mostly cardio) on Sunday, at least in part because it allows me a bit more reading time.  I suppose I don't think that much about it, but I was lucky; whatever nerve damage I had after my bike accident has gone, and I am able to lift weights pretty comfortably, though I'm no Charles Atlas for sure...

For quite a while, it was impossible for me to find two evenings a week to go swimming because the time slots were pretty limited and/or other people had booked before me.  This week, however, I was able to swim laps on Monday and Wednesday.  I don't know for certain I'll be able to maintain 3 trips to the gym and 2 lap swimming sessions a week, especially as theatre and concerts open up again, but I'll try.  I may be a little less obsessed by this once I start biking more regularly, which is looking like mid-March at this rate.  Anyway, I got up to 20 laps (crawl) and 1 sidestroke lap.  Wed. I had a slightly late start.  I was planning on settling for 16 laps but managed to squeeze 18 in.  So that was pretty good.  I have a rest night planned for tonight; not coincidentally this is also the night I am watching one of Factory Theatre's virtual pieces.  I think this might be the last virtual theatre piece (especially as SFYS is completely dormant at the moment, which is really sad), as companies pivot back to live performance.  While a bit apprehensive, I've been looking forward to this moment for months, and my next post will outline some of what I expect to check out.

I'll just wrap up with what I've been reading.  I somehow messed up and thought I had one more week on my small stack of Sam Selvon books before they were due.*  In the end, I managed to reread Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, which I thought was quite good and still stands up, and Selvon's An Island is a World, which is a largely about village life but focuses on young adults who in fact leave the island and then return.  I returned the other books unread.  I should be able to wrap up Selvon's The Housing Lark (on my phone!), and after I get through Dostoevsky and some other major novels, I'll probably request Moses Migrating (the last book in Selvon's Moses Trilogy) and Lamming's The Emigrants.  That will probably be more than enough "immigration literature" for 2022.

After these books, I read some shorter novels (and of course poetry) and actually two non-fiction books: Megacity Saga and Smart Cities in Canada: Digital Dreams, Corporate Designs.  Then I read Karasik's Faithful and Other Stories.  The "other stories" were ok, not great.  Faithful is actually a novella and overstays its welcome.  I actually bailed about a quarter of the way in, which is still somewhat rare for me.  I think this one I will review, but it isn't a high priority.  I didn't care for Rob McLennan's Missing Persons, and that one I won't review.  Then I started in on some books from the New Directions Pearls series. Two Crocodiles (a story by Dostoevsky and one by Felisberto Hernández) was pretty good, though I really didn't like Bad Nature by Javier Marias and I stopped halfway into it.  Paul Auster's The Red Notebook was ok, though some of the coincidences he recounts weren't all that spectacular.  So far Cesar Aira's The Literary Conference is just dopey, and I have grave doubts about actually making it all the way through.  I'm glad these are short, but the batting average is way below that of NYRB for instance.  I'm still fairly likely to tackle Bolaño's Antwerp and García Lorca's In Search of Duende.  And then after a veritable smorgasbord of tapas-like books, I will tackle Crime and Punishment, followed by The Man Who was Thursday and finishing with Arlt's The Seven Madmen.  I'm guessing this will take me until May, but it's a bit hard to tell.  There are a few directions I might go after that, including back to my original reading list...

* And they were due at Robarts where I can't renew them.  Sigh.  This is actually the first time in months that I don't have anything at all out from Robarts.  I've finally gotten through my list of books that were only available there, though there is a small stack that I can only look at at the Rare Book Library, which is still pretty restricted.  On a positive note, it looks like the Toronto Reference Library is finally becoming usable again after close to 6 weeks where they closed off most of the stacks and then made it impossible to do book retrieval!