Lost and Found and Lost and Found and Lost

I had a near escape last week.  I simply couldn't find one of my credit cards.  I was wondering how it wasn't in my wallet, but it just wasn't where it was supposed to be.  I even checked all my jeans and dress pants and even dress shirts (though I had been wearing shirts with no pockets!)  Anyway, I waited a day to see if I had left it at work.  (I did sign in to see if any unauthorized transactions had been made, but it turned out the last use was on Thurs, on the way back from swimming in fact.)  That strongly suggested it was either at the grocery store or somewhere mysterious at home.

I waited for quite some time at the store and finally talked to someone in customer service.  They looked around and asked the manager, but my card had not been turned in.  I came pretty close to cancelling it, but decided to check one last time.  I found it under the futon.  I suppose what must have happened is it was in a pair of dress pants, and I tossed them onto the futon when I changed into jeans after work (and swimming) and then it fell out and landed under the futon.  What a relief.  I don't even have that many auto-payments set up with that card, but it would still be such a hassle to wait on a replacement.

Several months back I had lost my work ID card and then the pass that lets me into my office after hours.  I starting getting them replaced when they turned up under the couch cushions.  I'm sensing a theme here (and yes I did look in the couch first for my credit card).

The card I lost that never turned up is my Presto transit card.  I still have no idea if I lost that at home, at work or somewhere in transit.  I did check and found that no one had been using the card, and it wasn't that hard to suspend the card and then turn on a new one.  It was a few extra steps to get the auto-load feature back on, but all in all not so terrible.  I am glad I had registered the card though, or I would never have gotten my money (already loaded on the card) back.

It does sound like I lose stuff like this all the time, and that isn't really the case, though perhaps I am becoming a bit more absent minded these days (due to stress?).  On the other hand, the work ID and the credit card weren't simply misplaced but had slipped out and ended up somewhere they really shouldn't have been.

Edit: Of course almost immediately after this post posted, I realized I didn't have my glasses as I was sitting down for a concert up at Walter Hall at the Music School.  I turned my bag upside down to no avail, as they were sitting on a hallway table.  Grrr.  Fortunately, Walter Hall is quite compact, and I could see reasonably well even without them.  I will have to remember to bring them on Wed. when I am sitting at the back of Koerner Hall (assuming the concert isn't cancelled due to a snow storm of course).  What's a bit more upsetting is I can't find this jet black USB flashdrive, which is probably at home.  I did look at home this morning, but then left hoping it would turn up at work, which it did not.  So I will have to do a much more thorough search tonight.  I just had a bad flashback that it could have been in my shirt and I did laundry last night, but I don't think that actually happened.  Anyway, it is quite frustrating...

Edit 2 (2/6): The glasses were at home and I have remembered them on a few subsequent outings.  I found the flashdrive buried in a secret pocket in my bag.  Ironically, it started failing almost immediately after I found it.  I was able to salvage a lot of articles I had downloaded at Robarts, but not all of them.  I was so frustrated, I threw it away, then realized I probably should have seen if there was anything else that needed salvaging.  Oh well.  Easy come, easy go.

Hunger Strike

I just finished Hamsun's Hunger.  I think it is a young person's book, and I perhaps would have had more sympathy or identified a bit more with the narrator when I was in my twenties.  Now I just found him an incredibly annoying person who kept sabotaging himself and his life chances.  It wasn't just that he was a never-ending fount of self-pity, but he insisted on dragging all these other people into his miserable state.  (In that way, he was even worse than the narrator of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan, who was also pretty insufferable.)  I really would have preferred Hunger at novella length.  I do hope that I like Mysteries better, as that is coming up pretty soon.

Anyway, I can now return to Dead Souls.  I should be able to make pretty good progress on this next week.  I may make a major push to get through Reuss's Horace Afoot, and I suppose Amis's Take a Girl Like You after that.  I'm scheduled to tackle Baker's A Fine Madness next (another book I rescued from a box in the basement).  I would certainly hope by this point, Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur has shown up in the mail (along with a bunch of Simic*)!  If not, then it is lost in the post, and I'll have to try to get a refund.  I suspect that, even if it turns up, I may need to borrow a standard paperback version for reading on the train...

* I can report that last week I read Simic's White, Classic Ballroom Dances, Austerities and even Frightening Toys (which is actually a selected volume for the UK market).  Not bad.  One thing that I discovered is that Simic often revised his poems quite extensively when he collected them and then revised them again in Selected Early Poems!  Audre Lorde did the same thing in Undersong.

Reasonably Productive Days

I'm finding that my productivity does taper off later in the week, though I suppose it mostly balances out.  Last Sunday I went to the gym early, then did the grocery shopping.  I was going to see a concert at RCM (Maxim Vengerov, which had been rescheduled).  I was also flipping through Gogol's Dead Souls.  This was the version with Chagall's illustrations, which was due at the Pratt Library.  I had thought I could return it on the way in, but I just didn't have the time.  Anyway, the concert was great, esp. Beethoven's Kreutzer's Sonata and 10 Shostakovich Preludes that had been transcribed to be for violin and piano.  As an encore, they did the scherzo from Beethoven's Spring Sonata and also a long movement from Cesar Franck.  I'm not quite sure why, but I was invited for the reception during intermission.  (Odd mostly because I insist on sitting in the cheapest seats possible...)  Shostakovich and Gogol are a pretty good pairing, and I was already going through Pacifica's Shostakovich String Quartet cycle at home, so that will make good background music, as I finish the two main translations of Dead Souls.

Anyway, after the concert I dropped off Dead Souls, then headed for work and got a few things done.  I hit Robarts Library on way back, mostly using the opportunity to download some academic articles on Covid and transportation.

Monday was supposed to be the only day with sun all week, and I managed to bike it.  Surprisingly, I was also able to bike on Thursday, though it was a pretty grey day.  Overall, this winter feels almost as if we're back living in Vancouver, though it's a few degrees colder.  I'm not crazy about it, though I guess I'd take this over a lot of ice and snow.

I went swimming Tuesday and Thursday, which I haven't done in some time.  I tried to convince myself to go to the gym on Wed. (and then again on Friday), but I didn't make it.  I was also targeting later in the week to put the exercise bike together, but it just didn't happen, so in that sense I let myself down a bit later in the week.

Some Jan. Book News

I was going to add this as a footnote to the last post, but it quickly spun out of control and became too long.  I have had pretty good success in tracking down Simic's early books, though oddly enough Looking for Trouble (which is mostly a selected volume from his early books) is currently missing from Robarts.  I found a copy on Abe Books at a reasonable cost (including shipping to Canada!) so put in an order.  Probably within a few weeks it will turn up at Robarts.  C'est la vie.  What is a bigger concern is if it basically replicates his first Select Poems, which I own, but I just couldn't get a hold of a table of contents, even on Google Books, so I am just flying blind.  

One much rarer book is Pyramids and Sphinxes, which is basically just a 24 page chapbook.  It turns out that SUNY-Buffalo has a copy.  SUNY-Buffalo actually has a pretty solid library with some other poetry rarities, like most of John Godfrey's books.  It's not a high priority but I may write to see if it is possible to get a researcher pass and schedule a visit (after I get my passport back obviously).  I would do this after late May, which is when the Albright-Knox Museum is supposed to reopen. As it happens, the SUNY-Buffalo library isn't anywhere near the Albright-Knox.  It's about an hour by bus.  Even driving between the two takes 25 minutes or so!  I'm not sure if I would actually rent a car to drive to Buffalo or just plan to cab it.  Getting into the spirit of things, I went to see if there was any theatre worth seeing in Buffalo.  Generally there isn't much going on in the spring there, aside from Rapp's The Sound Inside, but I'll be seeing that at Coal Mine and don't have to travel far for that...  Anyway, there is no rush.  I may indeed wait until the fall seasons are announced and/or when Albright-Knox determines their next block-buster show.*

I just finished The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany, with the last 90 pages or so finished while in line at Service Canada to apply for my new Canadian passport!  I saw some interesting parallels to Kurkov's work in that both are describing deeply corrupt societies where all kinds of bad things can happen if one crossed someone with deep pockets.  In some ways, this plays out like a mirror image version of The Milkman in the Night where most of the characters end up in bad places (sometimes deserved, often not) though the final scene is of a joyous wedding.

I also wrapped up Farrell's Troubles this week.  I probably would have finished a day or two sooner but actually rode my bike in twice that week.  While this was an entertaining and often amusing read, I was just struck at how passive the main character, Major Archer, is.  He finds himself engaged to Angela Spencer, though he wonders exactly how this came to pass.  He moves into the Majestic in Ireland, a crumbling hotel owned by her father, Edward.  After the engagement falls apart, the Major unaccountably sticks around despite the fact any sensible person would have left.  Then he falls in love with a completely unsuitable woman and moons over her while often trying to keep Edward out of trouble with his Irish tenants. The end of the novel just feels like one damn thing after another, which is probably a good metaphor for the Irish "Troubles" of 1919-21.  Here is a pretty good, if a bit spoilery, overview of the novel.

I'm partway through a few books, in some cases because I started reading them using Libby on my phone: Frederick Reuss's Horace Afoot,** Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You and a book on highway financing and politics.  I also need to start Pandemic in the Metropolis, as I agreed to review the book in exchange for a reviewer's copy.  Despite this, I  just couldn't help myself and started looking through 4 different translations of Gogol's Dead Souls.  (I decided for my sanity to skip over Constance Garnett's translation.)  So I'll be juggling a few books in January and early Feb., at which point things may be a bit simpler.  Of course, that's probably around the time The Siege of Krishnapur will show up, and I'll be diverted into reading that...

Edit (1/15): I have come to some conclusions on Dead Souls and the many translations on hand.  I have to agree with Nabokov that the Guerney seems to be the best, though I thought the Reavey translation pretty solid as well and the notes and extra material in the Norton edition make it worth sticking with.  I felt pretty neutral towards Pevear and Volokhonsky.  Their translation was maybe a notch below the Reavey, but it would have been fine if it was the only one I had.  (What's odd is that the e-book version I am browsing has very few paragraph breaks except for dialogue.)  The only one I really didn't care for was Rayfield's, which is the most recent (2008).  How unfortunate that this is the one that NYRB is publishing.  As it happens I was able to borrow a scholarly edition that reproduces nearly 100 Chagall illustrations, which are quite interesting.  These sadly they aren't in the NYRB edition, making it even more disappointing.  My new plan is to drop the P&V translation (at least partly because of the ultra long paragraphs), to keep alternating Guerney and Reavey translations, chapter by chapter, and just skim the Rayfield translation while taking in Chagall's illustrations.  When I get to Book Two, Guerney drops out of the race, and at that point I will alternate Reavey and Rayfield.

* The next major exhibition appears to be one on Marisol, which I have been anticipating since they received a huge donation from her estate.  Interestingly it hits Montreal first in the late fall and won't be in Buffalo until mid 2024.  I haven't been back to Montreal in some time, so I might well catch it there.  Anyway, I see that Milwaukee has a pretty interesting exhibition on the Ashcan School, but it closes in mid Feb.; I probably can't make that.  I am moderately likely to order the catalogue though.  More surprisingly, the DIA has what should be a blockbuster Van Gogh show but hasn't publicized it at all.  (Though I guess I don't subscribe to Art in America so who knows how much advertising they did.)  This closes on Jan. 22!  I do wish I had checked their website more frequently and knew about this before I cut up my PR card, as I think I would have made a special trip to Detroit.  I'm sure it wasn't mentioned the last time I looked and the show itself only runs for 3 months or so!  The catalogue is definitely a bit more expensive than I would like, especially as they won't ship to Canada, so I'd have to wait quite a while to get it into my hot hands.  So the whole thing just feels kind of aggravating.  I suspect I'll wait to see if the price drops after the show closes and get it  then perhaps ultimately donating it to the AGO library.  Of course, I burned myself pretty badly with that approach with the Alex Janvier catalogue.  Perhaps the difference being there is just so much more general interest in Van Gogh.

** I've owned Reuss's Horace Afoot for many, many years, along with his second novel Henry of Atlantic City, but am finally cracking it open.  I'll definitely want to write more on Horace Afoot as I get deeper into it.  At any rate, I only recently learned that Reuss published several more novels.  Most can be tracked down in local libraries, but, not surprisingly, it gets harder and harder to find the works of midlist authors at the library, and he may not even quite rise to that level.  I've heard him compared to Walker Percy and that seems apt, though sadly/shamefully I haven't read any Percy (and actually purged him from my bookshelves in preparation for a move years ago!).  The main difference is that Percy was writing at a time when libraries were still buying all the midlist authors, and he seems pretty well lodged in the "long tail" of literature.  I will definitely try to read at least The Moviegoer in 2023.  Whenever I get around to Henry of Atlantic City, this year or next, I'll slip in Percy's The Last Gentleman.  In terms of the rest of Reuss, I think I'll skip The Wasties, as I am getting flashbacks of Beckett's Three Novels from the description.  I'll probably read A Geography of Secrets some day, though it isn't super high on my agenda.  I had to order a copy of Maisie at 8000 Feet from Powell's, as no library nearby has a copy.  However, I was fairly restrained and only ordered a copy of Poe's Poetry and Tales (LOA) to save a bit on shipping (out of the thousands of new and used books at Powell's).  I probably don't even want to see if they had any used Charles Simic books.  And of course, the minute I thought that, I had to go see, and indeed one of the only used books they have is Jackstraws, which is essentially the only collection missing from my shelves between The World Doesn't End (1986) and The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (2008).  I'll think it over for a bit, but I'll probably cave, which is exactly why my bookcases are always so full...

Charles Simic, An Appreciation

I'm feeling a bit reflective and melancholy upon learning about Charles Simic's passing.

I'm not entirely sure when or how I became aware of Charles Simic.  I had read a lot of poetry in my twenties, just on my own and through a creative writing professor (though Ken kind of steered us towards the New York School and alternative poets with some ties to Michigan, such as Jim Harrison, Faye Kicknosway, Andrei Codrescu and John Sinclair).  I'm pretty sure I didn't discover Simic until after I had left Ann Arbor.  It may just be that I was reading poetry extensively at that time, casting a wide net, as I was working on an early incarnation of my transportation anthology.  At that time, the poems were only about subways and elevated trains.  Simic has a few poems along these lines, and that may have been how I stumbled across him.  At any rate, when I did start reading him, I was drawn in quickly (a bit like my feelings about August Kleinzahler, who I discovered even later than Simic).  I went to see Simic reading in New York.  (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Poets House but it was a place like that.)  This was probably 1994, and I think he was reading from A Wedding in Hell, which had just come out.  I had him autograph a copy.  I'm not sure if I got it then or just at a NYC bookstore, but I picked up an already autographed copy of his early Selected Poems.

I like many of his poems.  They are generally pretty short, somewhat sardonic and often have a bit of a surrealistic streak.  I generally can't/don't write poems like this myself, but I can appreciate this in others (though I suppose my poems are usually short).  I don't have all of them by any means, but I have most of his individual collections published between 1994 and 2008.  Since then I have relied a lot more on e-book versions of his collections.  In fact, I just got in line for his latest and presumably final collection, No Land in Sight (2022).  I suppose if I love it, I might get a physical copy, but I probably don't need to do that.*

At any rate, I saw Simic read a second time in Chicago at the Harold Washington Library.  I'm pretty sure I did stand in line to get a copy of The Voice at 3 A.M. signed.  What's a little more baffling is I also have a signed copy of The World Doesn't End.  It's possible I picked that up at one of the two readings, but it is quite rare for me to ask for two things to be signed in an autograph line, so it is a bit more likely I just bought it on-line, maybe paying a bit of a premium.  This may just be one of those unsolved mysteries.  

I see that there are still some autographed copies of his books floating about at less than astronomical prices.  One of the cheaper ones is Hotel Insomnia, which is one of his stronger collections, but I managed to restrain myself and will leave that to others.  I did buy a signed copy of Unending Blues, which I don't own.  That will make 5 signed editions of his books, which is a solid number.

Looking over his oeuvre, it looks like I probably should borrow and read Return to a Glass Lit by Milk, Charon's Cosmology, Austerities, Weather Forecast for Utopia & Vicinity, Pyramids and Sphinxes, Frightening Toys and Looking for Trouble: Selected Early and More Recent Poems.**  Fortunately, it looks like all or nearly all of these can be sourced at Robarts or Archive.org.

* I was able to glance through the e-book edition.  It's a pretty good collection, and I might pick it up if it turns up remaindered, but I generally shouldn't be picking up new books, especially when I can get them out of the library!  Anyway, there are quite a few transportation-related poems here, with train travel, driving, bus trips and walking all represented.  I might even see about adding "Everyone is Running Late" to the list of bus-themed poems, as I generally don't have as many of those as poems about driving or even subway riding.

** I have read the bulk of the poems in these books in various selected editions of Simic's poetry but there is nothing quite like reading the full work.

Plans Going Haywire

I suppose it is a truism that it is simply difficult to plan for things at the micro-level because so much is out of one's control.  I had kind of forced myself back to the gym on Monday, then had planned to go swimming on Wed.  I had it so clearly in my head, getting home in time to go swimming and probably hit the store on the way back home.  What I didn't count on was the unbelievably horrific journey to get home on the TTC.  I made it up to St. George with no real issues, then found that Line 2 was completely shut down.  There was some trespasser on the tracks.  What was unsettling was how they couldn't get the story straight.  Sometimes the announcement said it was St. George to Broadview, but most of the time they said Ossington to Broadview, or close to the entire line and certainly the parts I needed.  There was no timeline on getting service back and they weren't ordering replacement buses either.  So I went back to Line 1 to try to get down to Dundas to catch the streetcar, but now Line 1 was shut down between St. Clair West and Union due to a trespasser on the tracks.  That does seem a bit hard to credit, but at any rate, I was screwed.  Again, they weren't making any efforts to keep us notified on how to deal with the situation.  I realize it is very stressful for the employees, but it is ten times worse for passengers left in the dark (in many cases literally as they shut down the power to some of the trains completely!).  I went out to the street to see if I could find a cab, or in the worst case walk over to Bloor and Yonge, as I thought that branch of Line 1 was probably still running.  It was just pouring.  I haven't gotten that wet in a very long time.  There were only two cabs, both going in the wrong direction and not willing to stop for me.  I got to Bay and managed to jump on a southbound bus.  Fortunately, I remembered that the Carleton streetcar was actually diverted to Dundas, so I stayed on a couple more blocks.  It was still raining hard but starting to let up a bit as I waited at the streetcar stop.  I guess I caught a bit of break in that the next streetcar was continuing on to Gerrard rather than Dundas.  But it certainly caught a bunch of passengers off guard.  It took almost an hour longer than it should have for me to get home, and I was still wet and royally p.o.'ed.  I didn't feel like going swimming any longer, but it didn't even matter.  The pool was going to be closing soon.

I caught one other small break in that I had my daughter's passport photos in my bag, and they were fine, though Troubles was water damaged.  It's the part I've already read, which I guess is preferable, but I still will part with it after I've finished reading it.  I also had a free pass to the Aga Khan Museum.  While it was also water damaged, it was still legible enough that I was able to use it yesterday.

The TTC really has been so unpredictable, though I have found there were major interruptions every ten trips, and now it is closer to every five trips.  I actually forced myself to bike to work on Friday, which is definitely the deepest into winter I've biked in Toronto (or Chicago), but that has its own issues, including the fact that the city plows all the snow on the Gerrard Bridge into the bike lanes, so they are completely impassible if there is any snow at all...  At this point, I am really longing for spring and am pretty much dreading the winter.  Maybe I will start working from home more, though that is less than ideal.

Resolutions? What resolutions?

I generally don't bother with New Year's resolutions.  I used to say things like I would try to be more patient or more kind in the New Year, but I just don't think I can change my stripes.  That doesn't mean I don't stick with things.  I gave up diet cola (and essentially all caffeine except for the rare cup of Earl Grey tea) back in 2016 and have not backslid even once.  I've been going to the gym fairly regularly since Planet Fitness opened up in the mall back in 2017.  I'll admit I wasn't great the 2nd half of December, but I've been going again (and still swimming and biking).  I'll probably make it over there this evening or more likely on Monday.  But this only works when I am reinforcing tendencies I already have and not trying to change (i.e. improve) my base personality.

I certainly don't need to resolve to do more reading or getting out to even more cultural events...  I did say I would like to volunteer a bit more, and I can look into that.  I will try to get back into writing, wrapping up some potential pilots I was working on and maybe even my broken sestina series.  The return or at least putative return of Sing-for-Your-Supper will help with my motivation (as I basically can work to deadlines and not much else these days),  I have been making some progress in reorganizing my poetry anthology (poems involving various modes of transportation). I think by the spring I can pull it back together and then search for a publisher.  Probably will need to be an academic publisher.  That's probably where I went wrong the last time.

I also have two or three pretty solid ideas that I should just get down on paper and try to translate them into journal articles.  I think that is the closest I will get to any true resolutions for 2023.