Best Books of 2023

This year I have returned to form and picked 5 novels, not 3.  What's a bit curious is that all of them are comic novels in one way or another, though Troubles and Grey Bees are both a bit bittersweet, focusing on life during occupation.  Most of these were read quite early in the year, with the exception of Grey Bees, so there was a lull when I wasn't loving much of what I was reading.

Best Books Read in 2023

J. G. Farrell - Troubles
Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees
Kingsley Amis - Girl, 20
W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes & Ale
Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall

Honorable Mention:

Frederick Reuss - Henry of Atlantic City
J. G. Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur
Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl (A SF novel set in a largely post-carbon society.)
Alaa Al-Aswany - The Yacoubian Building  
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Theodor Fontane - Effi Briest (Germany's version of Madame Bovary...)
Naguib Mahfouz - The Search
Georges Perec - Life, A User's Manual (Puzzles within puzzles...)

Jhumpa Lahiri - Whereabouts

Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs (A solid novel with a bleak ending.)

Pandemic in the Metropolis: Transportation Impacts and Recovery ed. by Loukaitou-Sideris, Bayen, and Jayakrishnan  (This is actually a non-fiction book I reviewed for a journal.  Not as entertaining as the 10 fiction books but more directly relevant...)


The best re-read was a bit of a toss-up between Flaubert's Madame Bovary and McInerey's Bright Lights, Big City.  I think I'll go with Bright Lights, Big City.

There were several moderate to severe literary disappointments this year.  I finally read Fante's The Bandini Quartet and didn't like it much at all.  I read a couple of Hemingway novels and didn't like those, though that was hardly a surprise.  (I was expecting to enjoy Fante...)  I was moderately interested in Angela Carter's Wise Children, but the last chapter was so icky that I crossed it off my list of novels I could ever recommend.  I had expected that Conrad's Under Western Eyes would make the list, but it didn't for reasons I go into here.  But I guess you just never know about books, even those you are primed to like, until you actually dig in between the covers.

I do expect to get around to a few key Russian novels in 2024 and will probably reread Invisible Man.  I have relatively high (but hopefully not too high) expectations for McCarthy's The Group, which I'll be starting soon.  I suspect after I wrap that up I might read or even reread some Joan Didion (and possibly some of the Sontag essays I haven't gotten to yet).  And I'm all but certain I'll get to The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams.  So a lot of potentially great reading in the new year.

Book News at Year's End

I am very, very close to finishing up Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs.  I think this will make its way onto the honorable mention list, so it's moderately important I finish this up tomorrow.

I was able to return a fair number of books at Riverdale on my way downtown.  I did pick up W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, so that will join Carol Shields's Swann as books that have bogarted their way into the reading pile.  I actually own Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, though whether I could put my hands on it quickly is not clear.*  I don't have a timeline in my head, but I think I will get through Austerlitz fairly quickly.  Then at some point, I will borrow and read Vertigo.  Then I will read my copy of The Rings of Saturn.  I may change my mind, but at the moment I think I will skip over Emigrants.

I ordered a copy of the Dover reprint of What Maisie Knew.  It is supposed to have the Gorey cover, but I have my doubts.  I was actually able to have it sent up here without too much trouble, so I'll find out soon.

I have the two Conrad books and the Gogol in my shopping cart, but I haven't pulled the trigger just yet.  Maybe next year, which is of course right around the corner.  I suspect before I actually order anything, I'll add Exley's A Fan's Notes to the stack.  This isn't a book Gorey covered, but I'd make sure to get the Vintage Contemporary version.  I actually saw this at Circus Books a while back, but the pages were pretty yellowed, so I passed.  I keep checking whenever I am at BMV, but they don't have it.  A lot of the stores that would have had this (in the distant or even recent past) have closed.  Sad...

I do need to balance out this spending on myself.  I had already donated to a number of causes but made a new donation to the YMCA and a gift to Call Auntie (inspired by the talk-back after Hypothetical Baby).  Call Auntie is a not-for-profit but not actually set up as a charity, so I don't get a tax receipt, making it likely this will be a one-off gift.

I reminded myself that I still haven't ordered Mr. X: Pokerface.  I have a whole post talking about Mr. X and whether it makes sense to wait for Mr. X: Excavations, though that certainly seems delayed.  I'll try to hold out a bit longer.

I think the next book I am scheduled to read is Maxwell's The Chateau followed by McCarthy's The Group, both of which I own in LOA editions.  Now it might take a while to actually get there, given all the library books I still have out.  If I do go to Buffalo in early February, I am leaning toward reading Tim O'Brien's new novel, America Fantastica, on the bus.  For the trip to Ottawa and Montreal, it's a toss-up between Steinbeck's East of Eden and something by Dickens, either Nicholas Nickleby or Dombey and Son.  One thing's for sure, I won't be running out of books to read in the immediate future!

* So the next time I really dig through the boxes in the basement, I need to keep an eye out for the Pushkin, The Rings of Saturn, and a collection of plays by Di Filippo.  I was also looking for my copy of Bright Lights, Big City, but since I reread it recently, it isn't as pressing.  It turns out Everett riffs on Ellison's Invisible Man throughout Erasure (and teaching the two back-to-back would be a great idea), so I might need to reread Invisible Man as well, which means retrieving it from the basement.  (At least I think I know where my copy is.)  It's probably been 15+ years since the last time I reread this masterpiece, and this (Erasure) is a timely prompt.  Maybe I will get to it in 2024.

Edit (01-04): The Rings of Saturn did turn up, while I haven't made a concerted effort on the others yet.

Library Trek

After work, I ran up to the North York Library on the subway.  I've been through North York Centre before, but never stopped in at the library.  In fact, it is tucked behind the main complex a bit, so if you've never been there before it is tricky to find.  Anyway, it is a pretty big library.  I ended up borrowing a bunch of Criterion DVDs, which wasn't my reason for coming at all.

I was really hoping to find Everett's Erasure.  I didn't find that, but I did get Half an Inch of Water, which is a book of his short stories set in the West.  I guess if any branch has Erasure, it's probably Parkdale, but I just don't think I will get out there.

I had better luck finding Carol Shields's Swann.  While this isn't something I'd put at the very top of my reading list, I decided to grab it and read it after I get through the other library books (and then renew it a couple of times as necessary whenever the online system comes back up).

Then I made it over to the art section.

I didn't have particularly high hopes for the Norman Bluhm book.  I'm leaning toward ordering that and shipping it to North Carolina.  (I would likely eventually donate it to the AGO's library.)  I didn't expect another Newark Museum catalog, The Arc of Abstraction, to be in the system.*  Interestingly, the National Gallery of Art Library owns a copy.  I won't be able to go in on my next visit to Ottawa because the library isn't open on weekends and they don't loan books out directly to individuals anyway, but they apparently don't charge for interlibrary loan, so I might try to arrange that as soon as the TPL system is working again.

I then went and looked up Jean-Paul Riopelle.  They didn't have anything recent in the stacks.  I think this is a case where I'll just look at the catalogue when I am up in Ottawa and decide whether to buy it.  While a few copies will probably land in the TPL system, there is just no clear indication when that will be.  Maybe the system will actually be working again before I get to Ottawa in late Feb., which would be nice. 

I wasn't expecting Max Beckmann's The Formative Years (the exhibit I saw at the Neue Gallerie) would be in the stacks, but there was a nice book on Beckmann's landscapes, which I snagged.  I'm fairly likely to buy The Formative Years and probably eventually donate it to the AGO library as well.

I finally made my way over to the section where Keith Haring should be.  I was quite surprised but gratified to see that the catalogue associated with the AGO show was there, so I grabbed that.  This might well have been one of the last things to get into the system before the ransomware attack.  So all in all, it was a useful trip, though of course it would have been even better if I had come home with Erasure.

While on the topic of Keith Haring, I did run over to the AGO on Boxing Day.  It was busy but not as completely crowded as it was on opening weekend.

I'd say Red Room is my favourite piece in the show, but it is hung in a corridor where you can't get a good view of the whole thing, so I had to piece this shot together!  I had wondered if it was supposed to be a direct reference to Matisse, and apparently it was (the fishbowl is certainly a clue...).

Keith Haring, Red Room, 1988

I'll probably make it back to the Haring exhibit a few more times before it goes away for good.  I'm not as sure if I'll make the trek back up to the North York Library or just wait it out until the overall system is back up and running and then order my books to come to the Riverdale Library.

* Not quite sure how I missed this (maybe Worldcat was just acting funky at the time), but Robarts has a copy of The Arc of Abstraction.  Better still it is on the shelves, and I should be able to grab that today.  Score!  However, I might need to run up and back over lunch, since I believe they close at 5 pm over their winter break.

Gorey Book Covers

I know that I posted Edward Gorey's cover for Conrad's The Secret Agent on the blog and his Kafka cover here.  I think I talked in very general terms about the many great Gorey book covers.  I will link to another site that features many of the best Gorey covers.  It's kind of cool that most of these books were actually mass paperbacks and not hard covers, so it isn't particularly expensive to collect these books (shipping to Canada aside).

However, I don't actually collect books just for their covers (or almost never).  Indeed, I will be parting with a book that has a reproduction of the famous Lucky Jim cover, simply because I don't like the novel itself at all.

If I happen to stumble across a copy of Conrad's The Secret Agent with Gorey's cover, then I would pick it up, but I'm not actually expecting that to happen, especially since Elliot's books is gone (and I won't be going back to John King Books* in Detroit anytime soon).

I definitely still have Kafka's America.  I used to own Puskin's The Captain's Daughter.  I don't remember parting with this, but I also haven't seen it in a while.  I might look around a bit more and potentially order it, but only if I can't find it and then come across an inexpensive copy.

I'm very tempted by the Gogol story collection but haven't entirely made up my mind whether to order a copy.

What I have done recently is to put in an order for Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times (and managed to have it shipped to Toronto).  In this case it is partly for the cover and partly because I want to compare Nabokov's translation to the more recent Randall translation.

I then put in an order for Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures (which is actually just The Vatican Cellars in a different/earlier translation).  I believe this is actually the very first cover Gorey did for Doubleday Anchor.  Outrageous shipping prices led me to send this to Chicago.  I also ordered The Quick and the Dead and Larbaud's Barnabooth, and they are also headed to Chicago.

I'm wavering but am fairly likely to order Conrad's Victory and even Conrad's Chance (which I do own in a different edition).

I also liked these covers from Henry James books (and What Maisie knew really does look like a classic Gorey set-up), but I think if I ordered them I would be giving in and collecting the books for just the covers; I would generally like to avoid doing that and indulging in another time and money sinkhole.  However, if I happen to stumble across them (with Gorey's covers in decent condition), I will make sure to snatch them up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a book dedicated just to Gorey and his cover art (as well as a puzzle with some of the best pulled into one image).  I think I can pass on the puzzle (at least the book covers one, though the Drop Curtain puzzle is quite intriguing/appealing), but the book on covers has its attractions, though I haven't been compelled (yet) to order a copy.  As it happens, the book is in the OCAD library and I might be able to finagle my way to borrowing it for a week or so, which is a lot more sensible than buying it, n'est pas? 

But I think that is more than enough time on this fairly niche topic.

* I wasn't really thinking of picking up Gorey covers at the time, and I probably could have scored some when I was there.  Instead, I was focusing on Vintage Contemporaries, particularly anything by Exley and Joy Williams.  In the end, I managed to get one Exley (Last Notes from Home) and one Janet Hobhouse (November).  What I really wanted to pick up was Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead, even though that wasn't a Vintage Contemporaries title.  I stopped in at Strand Books at the beginning of the month, getting a different Hobhouse and Joy William's State of Grace, but they didn't have any Exley, which was a bit surprising, nor The Quick and the Dead, which was less so.

Best Theatre of 2023

I use these theatre round-up pages to list everything that was meritorious rather than trying to limit the list to 5 or 10 best productions.  Just compiling the list is useful, as many of these in the first half of the year had slipped out of my memory banks completely.  But with some prompting, some of the details are coming back.  It doesn't appear I saw or did too much in Jan., so this upcoming Jan. is going to be quite a change!

Feb.
Things I Know to Be True (Mirvish)
Yerma (Coalmine)
King Lear (Shakespeare Bash'd @ Theatre Centre)
The Prodigal (Crow's Theatre)

March
The Baltimore Waltz (UT production at Factory Theatre)
“I love the smell of gasoline” by Claren Grosz (Lee Daniels Spectrum)

April
Vierge (Factory Theatre)
Low Pay? Don't Pay (George Brown)

May
Boom X (Crow's Theatre)
The Sound Inside (Coalmine)
She's Not Special (Tarragon)
Sizwe Banzi is Dead (Soulpepper)

June
I went to some poetry events like the Griffin Prize Awards ceremony and a reading at the Tranzac club.  I did see a show at Alumnae that was like a warm up for the Fringe but it doesn't quite make the cut.

July
Toronto Fringe - I saw so very many Fringe shows this year.  One of the better ones was a musical about the Zodiac and then one about a mail-order bride-to-be.  The Gay Agenda was good, as well as Good Old Days and Miss Titaverse.  I wrote up some mini-reviews at the time.

August
Midsummer's Night's Dream (Canadian Stage @ High Park)
Edward II (Stratford)
Les Belles-Soeurs (Stratford) - ok but sadly not as good as a community theatre production I saw in Peterborough!
Grand Magic (Stratford)
Gilgamesh (Soulpepper) - the great musical numbers were the real reason to see this production
Living with Shakespeare (final show out of almost 25 years of Driftwood's Bard on the Bus tours)

Sept.
The Master Plan (Crow's Theatre)

Oct.
Speaking of Sneaking (Buddies)
Spaciousness (site specific show at Fort York!)
Wildwoman (Soulpepper)
A Terrible Fate (Videocab/Crow's)
Doc Wuthergloom's Here There Be Monsters (Eldritch Theatre @ Red Sandcastle)

Nov.
Arden of Faversham (Shakespeare Bash'd @ Monarch Tavern) - a staged reading
The Lehman Brothers Trilogy (Canadian Stage)
Withrow Park (Tarragon)

Dec. 
Arcadia (Bedlam Players in NYC)
Monster/Here Lies Henry double-bill (Factory)
Hypothetical Baby (Tarragon)
Angels in America, Pts 1 & 2 (Buddies)
Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (Crow's)

I did not like a number of "edgy" productions that the critics raved about, particular Fairview and Topdog/Underdog (both at Canadian Stage) and The Land Acknowledgement (at Crow's and later Mirvish), which Karen Fricker just raved about but I found dishonest and fairly tedious.

I truly disliked Howland's production of Heroes of the Fourth Turning.  I can't think of anything I actually liked about this, starting with the fact it was 2 hours with no intermission.  But mostly I didn't want to spend any time, let alone two hours, with a bunch of hard-core Catholic anti-abortion agitators.  I truly don't see any point in understanding their point of view.  I fully get where they are coming from, but I reject their attempts to impose their worldview on others who don't accept their moral precepts.  Understanding them better will not actually lead to some sort of hard-won consensus around abortion and abortion rights.  Instead the only thing to do is reinforce the political structure so that it rejects, with prejudice if necessary, those who claim the right to interfere with a woman's bodily autonomy in the name of religion.  (Incidentally, Hypothetical Baby was a much better piece of theatre that grappled with moral choices around abortion in a way that was thought-provoking and empowering; in other words, the reverse of Heroes of the Fourth Turning...)

I was a bit disappointed in Arcadia, mostly the contemporary scenes, which felt a bit shout-y at times.  But it is such an intricate play that I need to see it whenever it is produced.  Interestingly, it was playing in Raleigh, NC around the same time as the Bedlam production.  I likely would have preferred going to Raleigh and also seeing some relatives down there.  The flipside is I saw world-class museums in NYC, including stumbling across a compact Max Beckmann show at the Neue Gallerie.

Max Beckmann, The Bark, 1926

The most ambitious production was surely the two-part Angels in America at Buddies in Bad Times.  I thought they really pulled it off, though not everyone agreed.  Perhaps the single best thing I saw was The Master Plan at Crow's, followed by Sizwe Bansi is Dead and then perhaps Angels in America.  The Baltimore Waltz was surprisingly solid for a student production.  Wildwoman was quite good, and seeing it as a full production (not just the staged reading they put on mid-pandemic) really brought it to life.  I also liked Vierge quite a bit at Factory, and then the back-to-back monologues (slightly tweaked by the author Daniel MacIvor) with Here Lies Henry being the stronger of the two.  In general, I liked almost everything Factory put on (aside from Armadillos where I actually left at the intermission) and most of what Crow's Theatre put on, aside from Heroes of the Fourth Turning.  At Canadian Stage, it was basically a 50-50 split with a few strong pieces and then a couple I really disliked/hated.

I'm sad that Hart House Theatre really hasn't committed to putting on its own season, and I don't really know what the hold-up is.  I also was disappointed that Videocab didn't do The Cold War Part II in 2023, but I hold out some hope that they'll stage this in the summer of 2024.  My biggest personal disappointment is that Sing-for-Your-Supper never actually kicked off again.  There are hints it might restart in Jan., but I'll believe it when it actually happens...

I might circle back with more comments later, but this gives a pretty good flavour of my year in theatre.

Low-Key Xmas

I thoroughly approve of this thought piece on not going overboard on Christmas and Boxing Day.  This was the least effort I've put into Christmas in a long-time.

My son wasn't even coming home until Dec. 23, and my daughter wasn't going to help, so we (or perhaps me unilaterally) decided to forgo putting up a Christmas tree this year.  I was able to find the stockings, and those were hung by the chimney.  I also put out some outdoor lights on a tree in the front yard.  (Half of one strand malfunctioned.  While I will see if it is possible to repair, I may also see if Home Depot has the same brand on sale now that Christmas proper has passed.)

We didn't buy a lot of gifts this year, so I was able to wrap them on the 23rd.  Here they are in front of the fireplace.  (The boxes towards the back are purely decorative...)

While I had bought cards from the dollar store, it was a bit of a scramble to get them signed on Christmas morning, which is also when we bought and exchanged Amazon gift cards, so that was last minute shopping for sure.

My son and his mother mostly watched sports all day.  I have almost no interest in professional sports and certainly don't have the patience to watch on television, so that freed me up to finish up a couple of books and to watch Terry Gilliam's Brazil.  It is actually a Christmas film, just as Die Hard is, though I don't know if I would make it a new holiday tradition.  We'll see.  While it wasn't a secret, it was only this time around I watched some of the bonus features and realized Tom Stoppard contributed to the script.  I also was quite intrigued by a shadowy figure that seems to be following Sam or keeping an eye on the Buttles or both.  I don't think this is supposed to be Jack (Palin's character).  One of these days I will watch the movie with audio commentaries on to see if this is better explained.  However, it might just be a glancing reference to The Third Man or another film noir, as it doesn't actually seem to advance the plot.

I took my daughter for a walk.  I was surprised that several Ethiopian restaurants were open.  We had more than enough food in the house, so I didn't attempt to make this a new tradition (going out for Ethiopian on Christmas Day).

Then I watched Blade Runner (The Final Cut) with my son.  He had never seen it and thought it was a great movie.  I haven't seen it in quite some time.  It still holds up well.  I said maybe on his next visit we'd watch Blade Runner 2049.  This is another film where I probably will want to go through the audio commentary.  There are some other bonus features, including a documentary on how different the movie is from the PDK novel.  In fact, there is apparently some footage of PDK talking about his reactions to the movie!  I had no idea such a thing existed at all.

And that was pretty much it for Christmas.  I did give some money to charities, in a couple of cases getting in on places where gifts were being matched.  And I bought a few books, most getting shipped to Chicago due to exorbitant shipping prices to Toronto.  I'll discuss those in a follow-up post because there is an interesting Edward Gorey connection.  

Now that it's Boxing Day, we're off to the AGO, which is almost a family tradition.  Ciao! 

Random Updates - Late Dec.

So many things to comment on; it's hard to even know where to start.

I have exciting news (to me) about a new job opportunity, but since I am still waiting on the formal offer, I should hold off, aside from saying I'll be back in the private sector by late Jan. (though not in time to justify a trip to TRB -- drat).  The annoyance of time sheets aside (i.e. having to justify yourself to the corporate powers that be), it seems I work better on multiple projects for multiple clients rather than focusing on just one big thing for an extended period of time.  

Let me go back to the 16th (the subject of my last post).  As I was heading out, my front bike tire was pretty flat, which was a bad sign.  I pumped it up and it got me to the downtown office and then over to Buddies for Angels in America Part 1.  (I did decide to skip going to the gym but otherwise wasn't too bothered by my arm fortunately!)  I was so relieved to find out that the whole cast was intact for the last weekend (& no COVID derailments).  I thought it was a very good production, at the same level as the one in Chicago.  I would have liked the Angel to come down from the ceiling and not through the wall, but that's a minor quibble.  I also wasn't quite sure why she should have stumps rather a full set of wings.  (It's almost like she wandered in from the set of Rivera's Marisol -- another play I try to see whenever I have the chance.)  

Anyway, the play ended in 3 hours and 15 minutes, about 15 minutes earlier than I was expecting, which was great.  I rode over to 401 Richmond and saw a few shows there, including the year-end group salon at Yumart.  There were a couple of pieces that I liked by Tim Deverell, including an older piece and this new one:

Tim Deverell, Gambits, 2022

I perhaps could pick one up to celebrate the new job, but again no point in getting too ahead of myself.  Leaving 401 Richmond, I realized my tire was really flat, so whatever puncture I had was pretty bad.  I more or less rode on my rims to get back to Union Station.  I ate a quick dinner, then left the bike there (to collect it on Sunday) and went back for Angels, Part Two at Buddies.  Again, they did not disappoint, though I will say that the Antarctica dream sequence was more impressive on Broadway.  (I vaguely remember dry ice and maybe a couple of stuffed penguins.)  There was one part when Prior visits heaven that I didn't recall but otherwise it's actually a bit remarkable how much I remembered from roughly 20 years ago when I saw it last.  It wrapped up just after 11 pm, so truly a full day of theatre.  While the production seemed pretty well attended, I find it astonishing that the Star didn't review it* nor did Glenn Sumi.  I guess the Globe and Mail did send a reviewer, who gave it a mixed review.  Then there was a totally off-base review from Intermission.  I think only Slotkin felt as positively about the show(s) as it did.  Anyway, definitely one of the best theatre events of 2023.  I'll get to the rest in an upcoming post.

On Sunday, I actually had planned to spend part of the day working at Robarts.  I did accomplish this, although Percival Everett's Erasure was missing from the stacks, which was very disappointing.  I had decided, sort of at the last minute, that I should try to read it after all (despite what I wrote here) before watching the movie American Fiction, which is based on Erasure.  There are probably a few copies of Erasure in the TPL system, but they still haven't fixed any part of the system, not even an internal catalogue, so no one knows where any books are.  The whole library system is next to being completely useless and has been this way for weeks now.  If I happen to get over to the Theatre Centre (prob. not until Feb. for Shakespeare Bash'd) or Assembly Theatre (just possibly SFYS will actually happen for realz this Jan.) I'll stop in at the Parkdale Library, as they might have Erasure.  I'm also probably going to head up to North York to see if a couple of recent art books are in their collection, and I guess I'll look for Erasure while I'm up there.  (I did call to verify you can at least go into the non-fiction stacks, but I had to go to another library website to verify what the Dewey Decimal call numbers would be if they did have the books.  So crazy!) 

I also wanted to stop in at the AGO, but there was an injury on the tracks that had completely shut down that side of Line 1.  I figured it probably would have cleared up after my trip to Robarts, but close to two hours later, the subway was still shut down!  As annoying as that was, I will be going to the AGO on Boxing Day, so it is more a case of art deferred.  I then had to backtrack to Bloor-Yonge and go to work that way.  (Again, none of this even would have an issue if my bike was working.)  I did bring the bike home on the subway, which is extremely rare for me.  The subway stations are certainly not designed for bikes!  Once again, I pumped up the tires and they held on long enough to get me from Danforth to Bain, and I walked to the rest of the way.

Monday I worked from home in the morning and dropped off my bike at the bike shop, which doesn't open until 11 am (and is not open on Sunday).  Then I took the TTC in to work.  I was able to get the bike Tues. after work, just in time for it to get cold, and I only rode in to work on Thurs.  I also went to the gym twice and I snuck in some swimming as well.  While I still have a bit of a cough, it hasn't completely derailed my exercise routines.  Still, it was hard that first time back after close to a two week gap!

I'll just touch briefly on my reading, and then I have to go.  I think I am definitely tougher on books than I used to be.  I reread The Sun Also Rises and hated all the characters this time around.  The casual racism and anti-Semitism are almost unbearable to me.  And the celebration of toxic masculinity is just so painful.  I think it is likely that Hemingway is only going to be remembered for his short stories 100 years from now, as no one will want to read the novels.  A Farewell to Arms wasn't much better, though there was less racism, simply because there weren't as many people of color or Jews in Italy.  The actual dialogue between Frederic and Catherine is so cringey; he talks to her like she's an idiot, and she basically lapses into baby-talk most of the time.  Add in two super-human escapes, and Frederic is little more than a male "Mary Sue."  I did not like it on any level.  It's surely a mistake, but I'm still going to get around to For Whom the Bell Tolls (at some point), but I am going to be quicker on the trigger finger to dump this book.

I liked the first section of Conrad's Under Western Eyes, which definitely does have shades of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but then the perspective switches from omniscient third person to a limited and somewhat unreliable first person narrator, who then peruses the journals of Razumov, and is thus able to fully reconstruct the minute details of Razumov's interactions with the revolutionary Haldin and several other key characters.  I strongly dislike this switching back and forth of perspective, particularly when there is a first person narrator with access to information that never would have been written down in a diary or letter.  This bugged me quite a bit in Proust, and it seemed to me a complete mistake here that fatally damaged the book.  If the book had been simpler, and just an expansion of parts one and three, I would have liked it better, though I still probably wouldn't have liked the ending, but certainly I did not like the novel that Conrad actually wrote.  Too bad...

I did get through Perec's Life, A User's Manual.  More than anything I found it a bit exhausting.  In so many places the mini-chapters just became lists and lists of things, particularly descriptions of every painting in a room or all the items on a workbench.  The structure was clearly inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities with an infusion of Borges's Funes the Memorious.  I'm glad I finally have read it, but ultimately it left me pretty cold.  I never got a handle on most of the characters and the only one that really stood out (Bartlebooth) had such a stupid life goal (to spend his whole fortune creating paintings, turning them into jigsaw puzzles, and then destroying them) that I lost considerable interest in the book.  I did not realize, while reading Life, that this character was supposed to be an amalgam of Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (whom I don't care for for intensely personal reasons) and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth.  I suppose one good thing that has come out of this is that I am spending more time working on a jigsaw puzzle (of Monet's water lilies) that has really stumped me.  My goal is to complete it to ensure I have not lost any pieces (itself no sure thing), and then give it away.

I wasn't thrilled with Martin Amis's The Rachel Paper because the narrator is definitely a creep.  While the second half got better, I really didn't think that highly of Brewer's The Red Arrow.  A couple of the stories in Jem Calder's Reward System are ok, but I find the very flat, affectless writing out-putting (or maybe I just find Gen Z problems so uninteresting?).  Calder reminds me just a bit of Douglas Coupland, but much less entertaining and humourous.  I'm really struggling to think what will be the last book on my best books list, since I haven't like much I've read for a while.  I expect Erasure might have made the list, but it is so hard to get my hands on a copy.

I did not like Alice Notley's Certain Magical Acts, as the poems were just so long and boring. I didn't much care for the short stories in Munro's Open Secrets, as I just didn't find her use of historical fiction compelling or particularly believable.  I was glad that after a long hiatus, I'm finally starting to read through Narayan, but I absolutely hated The Man-Eater of Malgudi.  What a terrible novel.  I'm really hoping the next two are a return to form.

Anyway, yesterday it was a very wet day, though I managed to force myself to the gym and to get groceries (assuming that today would be even more crowded).  Then I walked down and saw the hit musical at Crow's Theatre: Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812.  It was pretty good, though I generally don't care much for musicals with a few exceptions.**  I did like the music, which mixed classical music and electro-pop and maybe even some disco.  The lyrics were generally not as compelling with some exceptions.  I also thought the ending was a bit of a cop out, but I guess there were only so many liberties they could take with the script, as this is drawn from a couple of chapters from Tolstoy's War and Peace!  (Maybe this will finally inspire me to tackle this tome in 2024 or 2025 after I get through those other Russian novels like Oblomov and A Hero of Our Times.)

I guess that gets me mostly caught up for Dec. at least.  I still need to go back and document some trips I took in 2023 and write up my year-end round-ups.  Fortunately, I don't have a lot going on this week other than going to the AGO on Boxing Day and maybe seeing America Fiction.  My son is deciding if he wants to go with me to see The Boy and the Heron in Japanese with subtitles.  I already saw it dubbed and don't plan on seeing it dubbed a second time.  There might be something to check out over at TIFF, but otherwise, I think I will mostly be reading and writing this week and maybe trying to wrap up some key work projects.

Jan. is looking like it might be very busy between going back to Buddies in Bad Times several times, and a few concerts (including Skye Wallace just popping up at Cameron House) and some great acts at The Rex (often with Neil Swainson on bass in support), so I'll be staying pretty busy.  It's probably just as well I'm not heading out to DC for TRB this year after all.  

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2024!

* And I am almost in total disagreement with Karen Fricker's best of 2023 list, though I did like Edward II at Stratford and The Master Plan at Crow's.  Oh, Sizwe Banzi was great as well.

** I do really like The Book of Mormon and may go again in Jan.  Spamalot was also great, and Some Like It Hot was good, though I don't think I'd see it a second time.  (I actually did have the chance to catch Avenue Q here in Toronto.  I thought about it for a while but ultimately passed.)  And how can you go wrong with every Gershwin hit song packed into Crazy for You?  I also was blown away by Hedwig and the Angry Inch and now regret not seeing it before when I had the chance(s).  (I see Shotgun Players in Berkeley are just wrapping up a run.  Based on their past work, I'm sure that would have been great.  There is a company in Chicago that should be doing this over the summer, so I may check back later.  And a company in Buffalo should put Hedwig on in Oct.  That overlaps with the Marisol exhibit at the Albright-Knox, so I might try to make that work, even though it might mean an overnight stay in Buffalo, which doesn't thrill me.)

Incidentally, the rotating stage for Natasha and Pierre reminded me of the Northwestern production of Not Wanted on the Voyage (yes, based on the Findley novel).  I thought that was a pretty incredible show that never quite made it to Broadway, so I wrote Crow's Theatre and recommended they consider tracking down the writers (Bartram and Hill) and putting it on themselves.  I would see that again for certain.  (Crow's wrote back and said they would look into it, not that I really think this will lead anywhere, but I tried.)

A Shot in the Arm

I'm starting to wonder if I miscalculated.  I got my COVID booster shot on Friday at 10 am.  I haven't had any real problem with the booster shots in the past, but I think this time it's taking a bit more of a toll.  My arm is still quite sore, and I was a bit woozy just a few hours ago.  I actually have a completely jammed up Sat., and if I had known that this time would be the time I actually "feel" the shot, I would have done in early next week.  Hindsight...  

Anyway, the plan was to go to the gym and do a short workout, focusing on legs and cardio and not doing heavy lifting.  This is the mostly likely item on the list to get scratched off.

Then I wanted to go in to work and drop off some food for later.  Then at 1 pm, I go to Angels in America, playing at Buddies in Bad Times.  I thought this was maybe 3 hours, but it's actually 3.5!  Immediately afterwards, I'm going to try to cut across the city and drop in at 401 Richmond.  I wasn't able to make it last weekend.  The weekend before that I was just getting back from NYC on Sat.  On Sunday, I was at a double-header at Factory.  There was a bit of a gap, and I had enough time to run over to 401 Richmond and also to grab a snack, but on Sundays very few of the galleries are open.  (If I had more time on Sat. I would stop by Bau-Xi, but I just don't think that will work.  Potentially, I might be able to stop by this Sunday.  I'm not entirely sure what galleries are open on the 23rd, but I assume at least some are closed for the holidays.)

Depending on time, I am likely to swing by work, eat my dropped-off food and get back to Buddies for a show that starts at 7 and runs until roughly 11 pm!  I haven't entirely decided whether to bike back or leave the bike at work and pick it up Sunday, though I am leaning towards the latter.  This is the last weekend of Angels in America, and I am so worried that someone in the cast will be sick or have caught COVID.  (Actually two people in the cast were missing from Arcadia when I saw that, but they were very minor roles, and it wasn't an issue...)

Sunday is a much lower-key day, though I should run over to the mall and probably get downtown later.  I might check out the Keith Haring exhibit again and this exhibit on British-Caribbean artists that has just opened.  I didn't get to The Rex Friday night (to see Pat LaBarbara and Neil Swainson a second time), and there is at least some chance I go see a different group Sunday evening.  I think a lot depends on how I am feeling by then.

Mixing in Newer Titles

Looking over my current reading list, there are a handful of contemporary novels: Brewer's The Red Arrow, Rushdie's Victory City and Zalika Reid-Benta's River Mumma.  Arguably, one could contend that Pynchon's Inherent Vice and Suárez's Havana Year Zero fall in this category, despite being published 10 years ago.  Knocking at the door but not on the list proper are Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and Do You Remember Being Born?* by Sean Michaels.

In terms of what I am actually currently reading, I'm just over halfway through The Red Arrow.  There are parts I liked a lot, particularly any of the digressions about West Virginia, but the main plot (about an author whose crippling depression left him unable to write) is not very interesting to me.  Maybe it suffers in comparison to Bright Lights, Big City, which I just reread a few weeks back.  Also, the way that everything will be resolved by taking therapeutic doses of psilocybin mushrooms seems like a cop-out, even though this is based on the author's actual experience.  I came very close to bailing, though it has picked up a bit in the 2nd half and it is a relatively short novel, so I'll press on a bit longer.

I have roughly 80 pages left in Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers and 100 pages to go in Conrad's Under Western Eyes, which is good but not as compelling as The Secret Agent in my view.  I'll likely finish both of these by the middle of next week.

The big question is how much I'll be derailed by the new books I saw at the library.  (The website is still totally jacked up, but it is possible to borrow books on display, many of which are newer titles...)  Since books aren't really going to be due until Jan. at the earliest, I borrowed The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (from 2016) and How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, which was published in 2022.

I'm still pretty intrigued by The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, and it turns out there is another novel about female pirates/buccaneers: Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig, though I have to say these look more like summer reading.

I also ran across A Hero of Our Time by Naben Ruthnum, which sounds interesting as well, though if I do read it, I would want to read the Russian novel of the same title by Lermontov first.  And indeed, I would probably also read Oblomov at the same time.  I'd say, leaving War and Peace aside, A Hero of Our Times and Oblomov are two of the key remaining gaps off of my pre-Soviet Russian reading list.  And if I am reading Oblomov, I'd probably also finally read A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, which predates Oblomov.  (You can see how things spiral out of control once I get started...)

Then I just read that there is a new movie, American Fiction, hitting the street next week.  This is based off of Percival Everett's Erasure.  Both the novel and the movie sound like a pretty blistering take on the state of publishing and how "writers of colour" will do well only if they pretend to be homeboys (or gals) from the hood.  As much as I'd like to read the novel first, that just seems unlikely, particularly given that the TPL website still makes it impossible to locate specific books!  Maybe I should cut myself some slack and watch the movie first and read the novel afterwards if it seems worthy.

Finally, I only learned the other day that Paul Auster has a new novel out (Baumgartner) and, even more surprisingly, Tim O'Brien has just published his first novel in over 20 years: America Fantastica.  Apparently, this is a bit of a road trip novel, and in my mind maybe it could/should be paired with Rushdie's Quichotte.  Fortuitously, an advance reading copy of America Fantastica leaded in a Little Free Library box, so I scooped it up.  Now one path would be to reread all the classic O'Brien's (as well as The Atomic Age, which is supposedly not nearly as good), but the more tempting path is to jump to America Fantastica, since it is hot off the press.  I don't think I can justify rereading Quichotte, as I read it in 2020, but just possibly I might listen to the audiobook version.  However, it turns out this is 16 hours long, which does seem a bit excessive!  I guess it depends if I can figure out how to listen on my phone.  Or maybe I could listen while working on this jigsaw puzzle that I can never seem to find the time to work on.

At any rate, it is pretty clear I don't have the discipline to stick to a single reading list, but I do read across a pretty wide range of literatures -- and, in the meantime, I do make incremental progress on the current list.

* This novel about the impact of A.I. on artists & writers will be paired with Jeanette Winterson's 12 Bytes, which is actually a book of essays about A.I.

Still Somewhat Sick

Things could certainly be worse.  I don't have COVID, and my nose isn't particularly runny.  However, I still haven't completely recovered from that cold a couple of weeks ago.  I have a bit of a hacking cough, which is not clearing up quickly enough.  Just in general, I feel in the dumps and low-energy.  On Sunday, I did force myself to go to the gym for a short workout, and on Monday I swam about half the laps I normally swim.  (I guess I am hoping that forcing the issue will lead me to get over the cold/cough sooner.)  I also biked to work on Tues., though I was very annoyed that it snowed on the way home, as that was not in the forecast!  I probably should bike on Wed., though I don't really feel like it.  I'm on a somewhat restricted diet where I am supposed to cut way back on carbs, which I don't appreciate.  

I suppose I am also grumpy because my short trip to NYC last weekend didn't turn out as I had planned, and the weather hasn't been very pleasant lately.  I'm also not pleased that the library system is still so broken.  Very little seems to be going right at the moment.  I think I'll stop there and maybe over the week catch up on the many overdue posts I still hope to write. 

Update: I did bike in but it wasn't too fun.  I think this is as cold out as I am willing to bike (hovering around 1°C) as my hands hurt at this temperature.  It does not help that I have to park 3 blocks away and walk over, which still grates.  It should be a bit warmer on Friday, so I'll plan to bike on that day and see how it goes later in the month.  Once again, I am biking in December in a climate that really doesn't support such activity.

Unwinding After a Bad Transit Day

I have to say I've had a lot of truly terrible transit days in the past year.  I missed a reading that Shakespeare Bash'd was doing.  I missed the first half of a double feature at the Paradise.  The University side of Line 1 shut down unexpectedly, so I had to cab it up to Tarragon during the Fringe and was a few minutes late to a show (though they did let me in).  I am still riled up over the bomb threat that forced me to miss a second opportunity to see the Chagall and the Bible show at UT.  While today I just made it to the start of a concert, it was exceptionally frustrating.  I left at 1:15, planning on going in to the office for a bit, then dropping something off at Robarts, then going to Trinity-St. Paul's (where they had pushed the concert back to 3:30 account for the Santa Claus parade).  The buses seemed somewhat messed up, but I finally got to Pape station.  They were not announcing anything, and instead everyone piled onto the subway, only to be told there was a fire investigation at Bloor & Yonge, so they were turning back trains at Broadview, i.e. not even letting people get across the Don!  What makes this especially frustrating is that because Broadview is still torn up, you can't get a bus or a streetcar south to then cut across.  You literally have to go back to Pape to go south!  When I got back to Pape, I was somewhat unwillingly coerced into helping a blind man get down the stairs, before passing him onto someone going on a train further east, which at least was still in service.  I mean that does help put things into perspective to some degree.

Anyway, it was clear that the 72B was seriously messed up, but I got on a 72A and got to Gerrard and Carlaw to wait for the 506, only 45 minutes after I set out!  It was only a few minutes until the streetcar, but then 50 minutes until the one after that.  How truly terrible the service has been lately.

Then a 505 Dundas showed up, and if I had perfect knowledge, I would have jumped on that.  However, by this point, I was thinking that probably the Yonge side of Line 1 was messed up due to the fire, so I might as well take the Gerrard streetcar past university and then just walk up to Robarts (skipping going to work).  More fool I.  The Gerrard streetcar was slow but steady until we got to Bay, and then it diverted down to Dundas (because of the Santa Claus parade!).  It then was caught in all kinds of traffic, whereas the Dundas streetcar currently goes down to Dundas on Parliament where the traffic is much lighter.  We finally made the turn, and I debated staying on, since it was going to turn north at Spadina, but traffic still looked pretty terrible, so I jumped off and took the university branch of Line 1, which was running ok, but was completely crammed with families with small children leaving the parade!  (I think I only had 10 more minutes before my free transfer would have expired, which would have been the icing on the cake.)  I finally got to Spadina and ran over to the concert with just over 15 minutes to curtain.  It was such an infuriating, exasperating day on transit, made so much worse because the TTC doesn't communicate anything to its customers.  I certainly would have been infinitely better off riding my bike, though I am still several days away from being healthy enough to do that.

The concert was Amici's The Winds of Time, and they mostly featured different wind ensembles.  They started off with a trio by Poulenc, which was ok, but I was still perhaps too riled up to appreciate it.  I did like Mozart's Wind Quintet, though I wouldn't agree it's his finest piece.  David Hetherington came out after the intermission and did a strange droning piece on the cello, and they ended with Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds, which was probably the stand-out piece from this concert for me.  I don't think that I am going to either of their remaining concerts this season, but I am probably going to the ARC Ensemble this Wed. and maybe again in April, and Joaquin Valdepeñas should be performing.

It was raining pretty heavily by the time the concert ended, but I assume most of the young children got home after the parade ended and before the rain started, so at least their day wasn't ruined.  I decided to bail on Robarts and just went in to the office for a couple of hours.  While the concert was good, I am not entirely sure it was worth it, after my transit travails.  I really do need to get back on the bike as soon as possible to avoid these unbearably frustrating transit breakdowns.

Sick at Thanksgiving

We've more or less stopped celebrating U.S. Thanksgiving, and I haven't eaten turkey in 25+ years.  But I still wasn't very happy that the mild illness that I have been struggling through all week blew up into a full-fledged cold on Thurs.  I still have a pretty bad cough I am trying to get under control for tomorrow, when I am supposed to catch Petzold's Cuba Libre at TIFF and then meet a friend at Tarragon for Withrow Park.  I think I'll probably be ok in time.  I am going to try to take it easy today.

While this is annoying, the timing in some ways worked out.  I wasn't sick (just stressed) on my trip to Montreal, and I should be fine next week when I am due to travel to NYC.  Fingers crossed.

Library Problems Continue

I think I have missed the window to get over to the gym, so I will try to catch up a bit on the blog instead.  It is just too cold outside to get motivated to go back out.  I may regret this later in the week, but I will certainly try to make it to the gym and to swimming.  Last week didn't go over that well either, at least on the exercise front.  At one point, I only had two things on the calendar, but by the end I was out and about doing something every evening, and then heading to Montreal over the weekend.

In fact, Thurs. I found out more or less at the last minute that Roz Chast (the New Yorker cartoonist) was doing a talk at the Toronto Reference Library.  I have to say that if people hadn't been so disgusted with the lack of progress on getting the website up and running, far more people would have signed up for the tickets to the event, which were free!  And it was also the first day of the big book sale.  I wasn't sure I could make that, but I brought some cash anyway.

In the end, the TTC let me down yet again.  I had planned to leave early to pick up my bike from the bike shop (having really struggled to get back from the Toronto Botanical Gardens the previous Sunday where I was seeing Tafelmusik*).  But someone was on the tracks, and they had shut down Line 2 from Spadina to Broadview, so there was no way I could get to the East End in time.  I ended up sticking around (and having a mediocre meal downtown) and then going to the book sale (where I picked up a small number of books and the Mingus (Candid) CD.  Chast's talk was great.  She was promoting a recent graphic novel on dreams.  I got a copy and then waited in the very long line to get it signed.  (It turns out she is left-handed.  I decided not to tell her that once upon a time I learned touch-typing in my dreams -- true story!) 

I was too annoyed with how the evening had went and my arms were sore from carrying around a bike panier, so I didn't go to the gym that evening either.

I suppose things could be worse.  I could have been a current or former TPL employee.  They finally have been more open about the nature of the attack.  TPL decided not to pay any ransom, which is probably the correct call, but apparently a server with a lot of HR info was breached, so any former employee (as far back as 1989!) may have their SIN and personal info sent over to the darkweb.  What a disaster.  They are still worried about turning on the computers at all, so books that have been returned are just sitting in bins.  The library is really close to unusable, as it is entirely hit or miss what is on the shelves at any particular branch, and you can't use the catalogue to locate books.  I'm certainly in no rush to bring anything back.

Just recently, they announced this state of affairs would last through mid-Jan., though realistically it may not be Feb. before service is really restored.  Oh vey.  I'm certainly going to lean a lot more heavily on Robarts.

In terms of what I am actually doing, I had two books out from the Kelly Library at St. Mike's -- yet another Chagall book and McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City.**  Oddly, the person checking the books out messed up and they weren't charged to my account, so I could have kept the books indefinitely.  However, I got both back within the 2 week period.  Then I checked out Kurkov's Grey Bees and the movie Transit by Christian Petzold based on the Seghers's novel.  These ones I will have to get back in time, so Grey Bees is going straight to the top of the reading list, though I only have 90 pages left to go in Perec's Life, A User's Manual, so that will also be top of mind.

Anyway, I have 3 novels from TPL out at the moment: William Brewer's The Red Arrow, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz and The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan.  I would probably only have picked up the Brewer, but with the library all messed-up and books effectively not truly due until January, I figured why not.  (At least these books are fairly short.)  If it is still on display at the Pape/Danforth Library on my next visit, I'll probably check out Shannon Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (which doesn't appear to be in the UT system), even though it will make major distortions in my reading list.

So things are far from great on the library front, but I certainly have more than enough to keep me occupied until things get back to normal.

* This was an unpleasant, nearly epic struggle where the lack of maps in Sunnybrook Park took me in the complete wrong direction and I ended up behind the Ontario Science Centre!  In the end I was 15 minutes late for the concert and frustrated as hell.  The shifter on the bike had been giving me trouble for a week, and it finally gave up the ghost on the ride back, where I also got turned around a couple of times.  I probably won't go to anymore of these Tafelmusik in the Garden concerts, but if I do I will never attempt to bike it again!)

** I had been looking for my copy in deep storage downstairs and finally gave up.  I read this for the first time quite late (45!) and don't have a lot of time for the drug-fueled escapades but overall it's a solid book.  I reread it in order to watch the movie based on the book, which I hope to do fairly soon.

Library Website Down

It's been over a week since the Toronto Public Library website went down.  I knew it was pretty bad, and I suspect it involved a ransomware attack, but it seems even worse than I expected.  I had thought that at the branches themselves, the librarians would be able to access the system, but it was not the case at all.  They are processing all check-outs and returns on paper, hoping to enter them into the system at some point.  But I was looking for a specific book (The Sun Also Rises), and it is a total crap shoot to find it in person at a branch in order to check it out.  That was a major disappointment.  Also, they recently moved away from the old museum pass system to something that was completely centralized on the website, so that was also completely down (and very clearly a poor decision in hindsight).  I am a little disappointed at how hard they are finding it to restore the system from backups, as it is unlikely that paying the ransomware will actually work.  The library really is close to unusable at the moment.  (If I ever get around to it, I think I will have my engineer character call for capital punishment for the ransomware creeps, as well as military strikes against all the server farms supporting cryptocurrency.)  Anyway, had I known how bad it was, I would not have bothered going to a branch to return my overdue DVD and would have just hung onto it until later.

As it happens, I had just checked out three art books from TPL and didn't have anything on hold, so I'm ok for the moment.  However, I was considering putting Chagall and Music on hold, but there was a copy at Robarts, so I got that one instead.  Likewise, I didn't get in line for a hold on the Tom Thomson book (from the McMichael exhibit) but got out a copy from the Pratt Library at UVic.  I would like to know if the TPL is going to order a copy of the Jean Paul Riopelle catalogue for the exhibit that just opened at the National Gallery.  (I'll have to find the time to get up there to see this before it closes next April!)  They had absolutely no way to tell me when I was at the branch.  Sigh...

Since I was returning the Thomson book to Pratt last night, I grabbed a copy of The Sun Also Rises while I was there.  Most of the books on my current reading list are ones I own, though Kurkov's Grey Bees is coming up fast.  That one I can borrow from either Robarts or St. Mike's.  After that, I would hope the TPL is back in business, but, if not, I will see how many of the missing books are in the UT system.  I would suspect most of them.  There are two downsides to moving so completely over to the UT library system, however.  First, it is less convenient, geographically-speaking (particularly as it starts to get harder for me to bike and it is already dark when I leave work!).  Second, they still charge late fees, so I really have to get through the books I do borrow from them, particularly as an alumni borrower I only get 2 weeks and no renewals!  But it beats the alternative...

Oct. Round-Up Continued

Originally, I had planned the Detroit trip around the Pacifica Quartet playing in Detroit.  As it turned out, they were playing in the far suburbs, so I gave up on that idea and actually switched the trip to Friday, which made it possible to stay much longer at the the DIA.  If I had gone on Sat., I would probably had 1-2 hours maximum at the DIA, which wouldn't really have justified the trip.  If everything had gone right, which it certainly didn't, then I should also have made it to the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art.  However, the gypsy cab I took from the bus station dropped me at the wrong museum!  I didn't think it mattered that much, but it turned out the contemporary art museum had some unannounced gala that made the museum off-limits in the evening, which pissed me off beyond belief.  The rest of the evening didn't get much better.  One thing that did work out ok was that I stopped in at John King Books, which was just a block from the bus station.  I spent close to an hour in there, mostly picking up cheap John O'Hara books and Janet Hobhouse's November, which apparently I read before, though I don't recall this at all!  I also got a William Burroughs omnibus and a signed edition of Robert Bly's The Light Around the Body.

I probably didn't bother looking up things to do on that Sat., since I had assumed I would be in Detroit (and indeed it was a reasonably close call that I did make it back to Toronto on the morning bus).  At any rate, I probably could have seen the TSO doing Elgar's Enigma Variations and Vaughan Williams's Dives and Lazarus.  It might have just been too much to try to squeeze that in.  As it happens, on Sunday I saw Tafelmusik in the afternoon and then Esprit Orchestra with a very contemporary program in the evening.  It was definitely a packed weekend!  (This upcoming weekend is even more busy, but I'll go into details later...)

One thing that was a bit of a throwback was going to the UVic book sale, where I mostly picked up some poetry books.  I found out at more or less at the last minute about the Trinity book sale, and I went on the last day (after getting back from Kleinberg in fact).  In this case, going late had some advantages as you could fill up a box with books for $25.  I picked up a number of interesting things, including some duplicates for the Little Free Library.  I kept a copy of Russo's Nobody's Fool for myself, as well as Drabble's The Ice Age as well as several novels by Lawrence Durrell, which will all go outside after I have a chance to read them.

Early in the month, I was supposed to see the Cowboy Junkies, but someone in the band came down with Covid.  They've rescheduled to Nov. 22.  I can make the date, though this is the same time as a Hart House mixer.  (It would have been a much tougher decision, but this year I wasn't assigned a mentee, so I'll just skip the mixer.)  I did see The Lowest of the Low at Danforth Music Hall.  This was actually a CD release party, and I picked up Welcome to the Plunderdome, which is a pretty good CD, though not as good as Agitpop.  I find it really interesting that they have continued making new music, when by all rights they could have stuck to their music from the early 90s, as that is what are known for and their audiences generally expect.  I generally find the classics and the new songs to be equally strong.

On top of all this other music, I did see the TSO.  Most of the pieces were pretty challenging, but they ended with a solid performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony.  Also, I saw Quatour Danel, both in a lecture over at UT where they were illustrating some aspects of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's string quartets.  (He was a contemporary though not precisely a disciple of Shostakovich, and I really should dive a bit deeper into his works.)  Then the next day they performed Weinberg's 16th String Quartet and Mendelssohn's Quartet in F minor.  It was quite an interesting program, and I'm glad I went to both events.*

Kat Sandler's Wildwoman at Soulpepper was the best play I saw.  (The Master Plan at Crow's Theatre was also amazing, but I saw that in Sept.)  I really did not like Heroes of the Fourth Turning for all kinds of reasons, not least of which it was two hours without an intermission, but really I disliked all the characters.  I don't need to spend that much time in the company of Catholic fanatics, particularly now that they have largely succeeded in bringing Atwood's Gilead to life.  Plus, there were some exceedingly stupid elements to the play I hated, including one of the characters channeling a Black woman seeking an abortion (and presumably denied one by the character who worked at one of the those fake pregnancy counseling centres) and then this horrible unexplained screeching that was perhaps supposed to be a demon trapped in the proverbial woodshed.  Anyway, I hated this play and don't think it was worth the effort of staging it.  I didn't have such a strong reaction to Cliff Cardinal's A Terrible Fate, which had some interesting moments, but it definitely ran a bit too long.  (Slotkin agrees.)  The last thing I saw in Oct. was at Red Sandcastle where Doc Wuthergloom of Eldritch Theatre was doing his thing, mixing magic and the occult.  That was pretty entertaining and was very much in the sprit of Halloween (just as Spirited Away will be, assuming I don't have any problems getting out there on Thurs.).  The show at Red Sandcastle runs through this weekend, so catch it if you like magic tricks or the occult.

I did get out to the galleries including MOCA and the Powerplant, which were both ok.  I swung by the KAWS exhibit at the AGO, which I found incredibly insipid and completely unworthy of the venue.  I will definitely avoid those rooms on any future visit to the AGO.

As if this weren't enough, I managed to see a couple of 80s films back to back: Real Genius over at Tiff and Back to the Future at Carlton Cinema.  And I finally signed up for a family doctor, which only took most of a day at the local walk-in clinic.  So aside from a few deeply frustrating days where I was really let down by the TTC, it was a productive, if overstuffed, October.  Let's see what November brings.

* I only went to the Rex once in Oct., whereas I was able to go a few more times in Sept.  I am a little sorry I missed Charlie Ballantine, but he had the late night slot for only two days (and that was Sunday and Monday, and I expect I was doing something else).  I think I'll get to the Rex a few times in Nov., though I am a bit bummed that Neil Swainson doesn't seem to be joining Pat LaBarbera in late Nov.

October Round-Up

The month went a lot quicker than I was expecting.  In some cases that was because I was struggling to catch up on work, after days that were filled with too many pointless meetings and/or I couldn't complete tasks because I was waiting on other people to confirm some key input.  Other weeks, I simply crammed too much in, and then after trying to keep up with my modified workout regimen, I was too tired to write down my thoughts.  I think I'll still get around to writing up the trip to Detroit and a side trip to the McMichael on the Art Bus separately.  I'll see if I can cram everything else into this one post, but it may get too unwieldy.

Work just feels like the death by a thousand cuts. Every week there is some new outrage, and in fact they are starting to gear up to introduce a quite dire open-space concept on us. I have to say I am not willing to live through this again and am accelerating my exit plans. I can't say more than that for obvious reasons. I did find an acceptable but not great workaround for my bike woes. One of the consultants we work with has a bike parking area in their garage and, crucially, you don't need a building pass to access the area, but it is definitely well outside the public view, which was the problem with the bike racks in front of Union Station. Indeed, one of my co-workers had his bike stolen the week after they started cracking down on us to prevent us from bringing bikes into the office!  It's not ideal, as it is about a 10 minute walk to my office, and that will be even worse as it gets colder, but it will do for now.

Working backwards, I was planning on checking out Spirited Away up in Richmond Hill this Monday, but the times would not line up, esp. needing to budget in so much travel time, and I decided I should go on Thursday instead.  I thought I would just come home on Monday instead (and maybe go to the gym), but I got an email from Soundstreams reminding me that I had signed up for this concert featuring Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel.  So I schlepped up to Bathurst and Eglinton after work.  It turned out that it was really more of a teaser for the concert, which is in a couple of weeks at TD Stage (right next to Massey Hall).  Instead, this was a panel by an art historian, talking about Mark Rothko and his art hanging in a chapel in Houston, a musicologist talking about Morton Feldman and his work, the composer of a new work, riffing off both Rothko and Feldman, and a lighting designer (the last talk I could have lived without).  They played moderate length excerpts from both Rothko Chapel and the new work (the name of which escapes me).  I probably would not have gone if I had known exactly how the evening turned out, but it was informative.  It does look like I can make the actual show, and, as a bonus, anyone attending that night's (free) program got a coupon for 20% off the tickets.  Transit actually worked out ok for me, though they did skip Spadina station due to a security incident.  

Just the day before they didn't tell anyone that they were skipping Bloor-Yonge station due to some other security incident until I had already boarded the train.  Otherwise, I could have gone up the University side to St. George.  I was able to transfer at College to the streetcar, but it was a fairly slow, annoying trip.  It truly has gotten to the point where every single trip I hear about a major breakdown, or some intruder on the tracks shutting down the line or a "security incident" -- and roughly once a week this impacts me significantly.  Only the previous week, we had convinced our daughter to take the streetcar to school by herself and there was a major car accident that halted all streetcars on Gerrard going west. If she had been east of Broadview or even Parliament, they might have been able to divert around the accident using Dundas, but she was too far west by that point and the assistance they gave to passengers was next to useless.  After a lot of texting back and forth, we finally just got her to come back home on the next eastbound streetcar.

However, that is nothing compared to the day I was trying to get back to UT for the last day of the Marc Chagall and the Bible show.  It was always going to be tight, since I was heading over to Soulpepper to catch Wildwoman after that, but I should have had about 20 minutes to take it all in a second time.  Instead, some idiotic teenagers called in a bomb threat while on a subway train(!) and they shut down Line 1 more or less completely.  This was so infuriating.  I ended up going back upstairs and working another half hour, then walked up to King to get the streetcar to the Distillery District.  (It certainly did not help my mood that if I had been able to ride my bike to work at that time, none of this would have been an issue at all...)  As upsetting as the day was, I will say that I enjoyed Wildwoman quite a bit.  I had seen it in a staged reading a couple of years ago, during the pandemic in fact, and while the basic plot was the same, it was faster paced and a bit funnier this time around.  And of course the lavish costumes also helped me immerse myself into the world of the play.

Anyway, this episode led somewhat naturally to an interest in seeing how many books on Chagall and the Bible or Chagall and lithographs Robarts has.  The answer is quite a few, and I am trying desperately to read them in the two weeks before they are due.  Actually, several of the books only had two days on them, not two weeks!  I realized that my borrowing privileges had expired and I needed to renew my card.  (It would have been nice to at least gotten a warning!)  Anyway, after I renewed one of the librarians took pity on me and got me the full two weeks on the books I had checked out.  So I have been looking through a lot of art history books.  In addition to the Chagall, there is a new Tom Thomson book based on the McMichael exhibit, and I was able to borrow that from the UVic library.

In terms of other books I am reading, I was able to finish the other two books in the Bandini Quartet.  Ask the Dust is the best of the bunch.  I wasn't crazy about it, but I didn't dislike it nearly as much as the others.  I also managed to get through quite a few short novels that Mahfouz wrote in the 1960s: The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail and The Search.  I really didn't care for Autumn Quail, as I thought the narrator was a total drip.  In fact, I didn't like the main characters of any of these 3 novels.  However, The Search actually did have some interesting parallels to Crime and Punishment, which I assume Mahfouz was at least vaguely aware of.  I was only moderately interested in the family secrets revealed in Angela Carter's Wise Children, but then I absolutely hated the final chapter, to the point I don't think this will show up anywhere on my best reads of 2023 list, which is fairly thin to date...

One book that was quite different than I was expecting was Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler.  I was assuming it was a poetry collection.  Instead, it is a book of micro-fiction (most of which were incredibly depressing) with an extended conversation or perhaps conversational poem at the heart of the book.  In many ways, this really spoke to me, even though it was pretty bleak.  Here is a sampling: "Let's say you live on a planet with limited resources and a complex biosphere, and all your activities threaten the survival of all species including your own.  What do you do?"  Also "Did we do everything we could?" "Nope."  I think someone said this was part of the vanguard of post-hope literature.  There will likely be a lot more of this going forward.  I think Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead also fits into this category.  I've actually been trying to get this from Robarts for a few months now, but whoever has it out keeps renewing it.  If it gets to be spring (which is about the time I should get to it according to this list) and I still can't borrow the book from Robarts, I'll probably just order a copy.  

This was our fairly low-key set-up for the evening.  The real pumpkin on the step has a raccoon face carved by my daughter!

It looks like the trick-or-treating is done for the evening.  I was a bit stingy with the candy as there were a few more kids than I was expecting early on, though it died down.  Actually almost the entire batch of kids came through between 6:30 and 7:30 with only a few stragglers.  Surprisingly, these stragglers weren't older teens.  I'm really glad it didn't rain, even though it was nippy.  A few of the costumes were really quite good.  I do like Halloween a fair bit, though I guess it isn't my very favourite holiday.  I have just a bit of candy left over, but not enough to feel like a pig, and I'll probably take most of the leftovers to work.  I'm going to run to the gym now, and then I'll see if I can wrap up the month-long recap when I get back.

Books on the Bus

It was much closer than it should have been (because the cab I had ordered for the morning never showed up and the front desk had to order a gypsy cab at the last minute), but I did catch the bus back from Detroit.  I was glad to visit the DIA again after probably 25 years, but I don't think I'll go again, given how stressful it was visiting the city.  I'll write about the DIA later in the week.

I will say right up front, I didn't read nearly as much as I expected.  I had to tune into two different work calls, though I finally broke when we hit the border.  So that was close to 90 minutes I lost where I wasn't reading.  I was also alternating between John O'Hara's The Farmers Hotel (a very short novel) and Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante.  I guess neither of them were really amazing.  The plotting and dialogue in The Farmers Hotel felt pretty false to me.  But I really didn't care much for Wait Until Spring, Bandini.  I guess it is a minority position, but I find Arturo to be a very pathetic and actually repugnant character (maybe even a "deplorable" one).  It's one thing to be downtrodden (and yet still acting like life owes you something) but another altogether to take this out on women or to try to put other people down, which Arturo admits is his primary motivation (while at his job at the cannery).  In pretty much every book in the Quartet he ends up stealing money or jewelry from his mother and just in general acts like a shitheel and/or a pompous fool (the outsize self-importance without anything to back it up is so similar to Holden Caulfield plus Walter Mitty's dreaming).  He's particularly racist in The Road to Los Angeles (which I really hated) and fairly racist in Ask the Dust.  I suppose it doesn't matter that much, but his family situation and whether he has brothers or sisters is different in each book as well!  I really don't get the appeal of these novels.

At any rate, I managed to read the last page of The Road to Los Angeles as the bus pulled into the depot in Toronto.  I probably should just bail on the other two, but I guess I would just like to read them (as cult classics) and then get them out of the house, never to think of them again.  If I ever do read Catcher in the Rye, I must give myself permission to quit if the writing or more specifically Holden is annoying me, which I strongly suspect will be the case.

I don't have much more left on Madame Bovary, so I think I'll wrap that up next, then Ask the Dust, switch over to Angela Carter's Wise Children and then finally Dreams from Bunker Hill.  I wish it didn't feel quite so much like an obligation at this point.

Sign to Chagall

This is another very good example of where a sign or banner actually gave me useful information about something of interest to me.  I was biking home from Robarts and saw a banner that said Chagall and the Bible.  This is an interior sign and not the banner that I was looking at, but it was similar.

I probably went by several times before seeing it, though I don't believe the banner was up in early May and June, but I could definitely be wrong.

I went home and did some internet sleuthing, and found that Wycliffe College at UToronto was indeed hosting a small art show on Chagall and the Bible.  The core information is here.  I was a bit peeved to find that the gallery was closed that Sat. for a private event, which seemed a bit uncalled for.  I also was not going to be able to go this upcoming Sat., as I will be coming back from Detroit.  However, they did have evening hours on Tues., so I swung by yesterday.

It is a compact but quite nice exhibit.  I'll just post a few of the lithographs that caught my attention.

Marc Chagall, Creation, ca. 1960

Marc Chagall, Ahasuerus Banishes Vashti, ca. 1960

Marc Chagall, Christ in the Clock 1957

Many of my photos didn't come out that well, and I do wish they actually had a small publication with all of these images.  They didn't have any on sale there, but I will poke around a bit and see if they are collected in one place (at a reasonable price!).

In terms of the remaining days to see the exhibit:

Friday,  Oct. 13: 2:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Saturday, Oct. 14: 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday, Oct. 17: 2:00 p.m. – 6 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

And then it's gone.  I may see if I can stop in one more time on the last day.