Quirky Books

I just finished There is Only Us by Zoe Ballering.  This was a book that was being promoted by Powells City of Books (in Portland), which isn't a huge surprise as she is a Portland-based author.  Ballering has written a number of offbeat stories with the final story "Here I Am" being a fable of sorts where as a spin-off of NASA research, scientists have found it is possible to download a human's brain into a mole rat (ostensibly to enable long-distance space travel) with the side effect of no longer feeling pain (or perhaps recognizing it as such).  It isn't even clear to the outsider observers whether this is restricted to physical pain or also encompasses emotional pain, but (not too surprisingly) suddenly a booming industry of private clinics emerges to carry out this surgery on anyone (like the narrator's sister) who finds the pain of living in the world to be too much. 

Many of her stories are like this.  There's also one about an inoculation that wipes out the need for sleep, and the impact that has on the resisters who still crave dreams.  Another fable-like story is about a man who can double inanimate and animate objects.  I thought this one was beyond silly, as the physics are beyond impossible, and the finale didn't work for me at all.  "Luz Luz" also had a premise that was beyond silly.  Some supernatural power, probably "God," was wiping out whole classes of things: keys, all cars, birds, and then humans, except for the narrator who had a name that simply confused God, so he left her alone.  I think this might have worked better in the hands of an absurdist like Donald Barthelme.  I guess I mostly found these stories to have weak SF-type plot contrivances overlaid on deep feelings of loss and loneliness.  Perhaps Ballering might trust herself more and just write in a more naturalistic vein.  I did find "Substances: A School Year" to be fairly interesting; it reminded me of the Hobstown Mystery Stories series, which is itself a dark funhouse mirror-world version of Scooby Doo (or something like that).  

Anyway, I was pretty glad that I was able to grab this from Robarts rather than ordering my own copy and then finding I didn't like it that much.

I felt almost the same way about The Vegetarian by Han Kang, though this one was a bit easier to find in the regular library.  And Arvida, which I slammed in this review.  In the end I decided it wasn't worth reviewing Lalonde's Glorious Frazzled Beings, but I didn't care for her stories either.  I don't think it's just that I don't like short stories, but I prefer them either to be grounded in reality or to be plausible, self-contained SF stories.  I don't care for unrealistic fables, though I have made exceptions from time to time, for writers such as Angela Carter and arguably Donald Barthelme.  That said, I probably will give Double Dutch by Laura Trunkey a shot, though I may be a bit quicker to pull the plug than I used to be.

I have been enjoying Joy Williams's stories considerably more, and I am learning towards picking up a physical copy of The Visiting Privilege to supplement an e-book.  As I have said before, I'm not a Luddite, but I still prefer reading hard copies of books when possible.

I'm keeping an eye on The Quick and the Dead, also by Joy Williams.  While TPL has a reference copy (grrr), Robarts owns a circulating copy, but it is currently out on loan.  It should be back in a few weeks (fingers crossed).  Perhaps I shall see if it is available at some point after I have finished Farrell's The Singapore Grip.

The final book to discuss isn't particularly quirky but rather is Salman Rushdie in a bit of a return to his post-modernist tricks in Victory City, which he had completed before he was attacked last year.

I'd say most of the reviews have been overall positive, though some don't like the framing device of a narrator relating the tale of an immortal or near-immortal queen found in ancient fragments, though I assume this is down to Rushdie not quite have worked all the Cervantes out of his system in Quichotte. Overall, it sounds like a book I would enjoy.  I believe the trade paperback should come out this summer.  I know that Rushdie is in no rush to go out promoting this book, but I will keep my eyes out to see if signed copies will be sold to raise money for PEN or another one of his pet causes.

Long-term and really long-term concerts (2023 version)

I managed to book the RCM concerts for the 2023-24 season.  I'm sort of in their casual subscriber category, so I am able to book before the general public.  (I believe tickets went on sale to the general public yesterday here.)  My main objective was getting tickets to Kronos Quartet's farewell tour in May 2024!  (I'm still toying with the idea of seeing them in another venue/city, but they haven't really put a detailed schedule out on their website, so I'm kind of flying blind at the moment.  I'll probably have to put some sort of a hold in my calendar or even take a vacation day, so that I don't inadvertently agree to travel on that day (not that I do much travelling for work).  I believe Angela Hewitt is performing in Jan. 2024, which is another concert I don't want to miss.  The others are a bit more negotiable...

Anyway, it was fortunate that I had checked my calendar before doing all this booking.  I vaguely remember that I already had tickets to some event in Nov. 2023.  As I was adding things into my cart at the RCM site, I added the Danish String Quartet on Nov. 3 (with a pretty interesting program which includes a Shostakovich string quartet and Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet).  Something made me double-check and I had already bought a ticket to this concert!  So that was a close call.  Then the following day, Christian McBride is coming through with much more of a standard jazz show (than his Movement Revisited concert), and I added that to my list.  To top it off, there was so much demand for Depeche Mode in April, that they added a return date on Nov. 5.  My wife was able to score pretty good tickets, apparently because the April date soaked up a lot of the casual demand.

So plenty to look forward to, assuming we don't have another massive wave of Covid all over again.  Nov. is also when a Keith Haring exhibit at the AGO opens.  I find Haring a bit repetitive, but I'm sure I'll swing by a couple of times.

Blog Offline

I had the weirdest experience the other day.  I got an email from Blogger saying that they had taken down a post because it violated their anti-spam policy.  I assumed this was some kind of phishing scam, but then I logged in and indeed my post was hidden from view.  I spent a little time trying to figure out what the problem was.  I think the most likely reason for being called a spam post is that I was encouraging people to go off and read my ancient term paper on Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, which I had uploaded to Dropbox.  However, a couple of years ago, I got so tired of running out of hard drive space that I killed my Dropbox account (and unplugged from utorrent as well...).  So the link is a broken one that I guess could look kind of spammy, though I assume this would have passed unnoticed until someone couldn't get the link to work and reported it.  (Though it would have been far more effective to leave a comment on the page, nudge, nudge, wink, wink...)

I removed the offending link and asked for the post to be reinstated, which it was after a day.  If interested, the review is here.  At one point, this was surprisingly my most viewed post, though it was easily surpassed by posts on Max Beckmann and Kafka.  I guess it was a bit of a nostalgia trip, and I spent a bit of time going through some old posts and fixing them up a bit.  I don't spend a lot of time going through the old posts, but when I become aware that a picture link has broken, I generally try to correct it.  Anyway, I added a postscript to the Headhunter review and cleaned up the cover images in my Lady Oracle review, but otherwise left them pretty much alone.  There's no point in endlessly working over my old material.

One thing I did do was try to find all the posts where I had linked to SFYS scripts (saved on Dropbox) and deleted those broken links, so that these posts aren't taken off-line at some random inconvenient time in the future.  On a side note, I've heard that the in-person return of SFYS was delayed yet again, but should be be happening this April, for realz this time, and I will look forward to that.  If you happen to see a broken link in some other old post, just leave a comment below, and I'll try to relink or just remove the link altogether.  Muchas gracias.

Busy, Busy Days

It's not a huge surprise that I rate days in terms of how much I managed to get done/achieve vs. how badly my plans fell apart.  Last Sat. and Sun. were pretty frustrating in that my brand new work laptop was acting up like crazy (literally giving me the blue screen of death* every 30 seconds).  I also was completely blocked from going to the Power Plant museum at Harbourfront because on Saturday I found out that they had closed the tunnel to the Harbourfront streetcar (with no or essentially no warning) and on Sunday I biked over and found that due to construction and general stupidity on the part of the city and Waterfront TO, they had removed all the bike racks down by the water and the museum.  I still need to write to complain officially.  

Tearing out the skating rink at Harbourfront

To make matters worse, because I had ridden my bike, I hadn't remembered to switch my glasses from my briefcases to my pannier, so I didn't have my glasses, and I was due to see King Lear over at the Theatre Centre.  I tried to call to see if I could switch my tickets, and just ended up playing phone tag with the box office.  It probably wouldn't have mattered, as I believe the following weekend was sold out.  I decided to head over anyway on the chance that the play was being staged in the downstairs studio.  I stopped by Osgoode Hall to switch to the streetcar and saw the trees that Metrolinx are cutting down, stirring up quite a controversy.  They certainly seem pretty scraggly now and no longer worth saving.  There may not have been a better alternative in the end, but it still seems rushed and premature not to have truly seriously considered the alternative of moving the station entrance further west and narrowing down University Avenue.  

I just barely caught the Queen streetcar and began reading Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.  (And while it pains me to admit it, I only made it with 10 minutes or so to spare, and I probably would have been late if I had visited the Power Plant.)   I was fortunate that Lear was playing in the downstairs studio theatre where they only have two rows of seats and everyone is right on top of the action. This is a quite similar set up to the very first Lear I ever saw -- in Vancouver, put on in a tiny space by a troupe called The Honest Fishmongers.**

I've said before that I don't really care much for Lear, as the old king is so foolishly vain and will not listen to the sage advice that Gloucester gives him.  It's also a bit too convenient how quickly his daughters turn on him.  Given that I went mostly just to support the return of Shakespeare Bash'd, this would be a good capstone performance, and maybe I will forswear seeing any more performances of Lear.  After all, I have seen it four times in Toronto now!  At Theatre Passe Muraille, at Harbourfront, at Soulpepper and now over at the Theatre Centre.  Hard to believe, but Stratford is also putting it on this summer, but I shall pass.  Speaking of Stratford, there is a local actor, Jordin Hall, who has established himself over at Stratford.  I saw him in Driftwood's Othello and then a production of Three Sisters in Kensington Market.  He was in the audience, and I chatted briefly during the intermission.  It turns out, he is going to be in Grand Magic over at Stratford this season, which I'll be seeing in August.  While I would have preferred to have my glasses, I made it through Lear ok (without any headaches) and made it back to work afterwards.  

This may have been the turning point for the week.  Monday went much better.  I biked again, though this time I locked up my bike near the street and walked over to the Power Plant (which is still ridiculous).  I thought one of the artists, Brenda Draney, was ok, but the others didn't grab me.  That's pretty typical of my visits there.  

Brenda Draney, Sleep, 2008

Brenda Draney, Vanity, 2019

I got a fair bit of stuff done on Monday at the office, despite it being Family Day.  I pulled together the rest of the package to apply for my daughter's passport.  I was able to mail that off on Tuesday.  It barely snowed at all on Tuesday, and I probably didn't really need to wear my boots on the way in.

Wed. it did snow a lot, though by the time I left work there still wasn't a lot of snow.  I left a bit later than I wanted, but I still made it up to Robarts to drop off a book and pick up two others.  I ran over to the Hart House Museum.  One of the exhibits was essentially about the social and political construction of whiteness.  One thing that I learned was that Canada passed the Dominion Elections Act in 1920 which allowed women, but white women only, to run for election to serve in the national Parliament.  An interesting and of course shameful stain on Canada's legacy.  Then I ran over to the Music Library and borrowed a few CDs, including Joe Sealy's Africville Suite, which I had heard most of last Friday at a concert (which was actually headlined by Christian McBride performing his The Movement Revisited Suite).  On the way back to Pape, I managed to finish up The Windup Girl, and fortunately there were no significant delays and/or unpleasant/uncomfortable incidents on the TTC.

I got home at 7:05, and had to turn right around to get over to Crow's Theatre to see Prodigal by the Howland Company.  Given that I saw this in such proximity to Lear, it seems pretty clear that the playwright Paolo Santalucia wants to make a number of parallels with Shakespeare, starting with the disgraced son, Edmund.  The other son, Henry, is not the dissolute Hal of Henry IV but a somewhat bland, dutiful son.  The angry daughter is named Violet (which is probably supposed to be an echo of Viola from Twelfth Night).  I've seen the actor playing Violet, Hallie Seline, in most of the Howland productions, most recently Three Sisters.  (That production featured Ben Yoganathan, who was Albany in Shakespeare Bash'd's Lear.)  The mother, Marilyn, was played by Nancy Palk, who most recently played the Fool in Soulpepper's Lear!  I knew I'd seen Jeff Yung before, and he was in Portia's Julius Caesar and Outside the March's Trojan Girls, which was such a highlight of 2022 theatre.  Another actor that is starting to pop up here and there is Shauna Thompson.  She was recently in Orphans for the Czar, also at Crowsnest.  One could imagine the caterers standing in for the underlings that usually provide commentary in a Shakespearean play.  It was an interesting piece, about family secrets and children (largely blaming their parents for their traumas and failures) and redemption and failed attempts at reconciliation.  It probably could still be trimmed back a bit, but it was overall pretty interesting.

We made it back just after 10, and I did one round of shoveling, since the snow had really piled up while we were at the theatre.  I've decided that there really is no reason to go in to work today, so will work from home.  I do need to go in on Friday, however, as I plan on swinging by The Rex right after work.  So back into the saddle again...

* It seems to have stabilized and IT says they can't do a general scan, which seems strange, and that if it happens again, they will replace it (again).  This doesn't give me a lot of confidence in my tools, as you might imagine.

** I'm not sure The Honest Fishmongers survived the pandemic.  Their Facebook page seems pretty defunct.  Here in Toronto, Wolf Manor also seems to have gone dark.  Seven Siblings is still in lockdown mode, but I suspect they'll start putting out green shoots in 2023.  Here's hoping anyway.  I'm not sure it is irony precisely, but back in 2006 or so, I was visiting Vancouver but didn't have time to see Bard on the Beach's production of King Lear, which haunted me for a while, until I caught the Honest Fishmonger's production, which likely was better.  I had sort of assumed this really was outdoor theatre on the beach, which is sort of an incredible if risky venture for Vancouver where it rains so much, though much less so in the summer.  However, Bard on the Beach plays are performed in huge tents and are not outdoor theatre.  I enjoyed most of their productions a lot, though right after the pandemic, their offerings have seemed pretty dumbed down.

Late Feb. reading

I wrapped up Amis's' Girl, 20.  I have to admit, the ending was impressively bleak.  While I still find Douglas, the narrator, a pompous jerk (who feels that the kind of music he likes is objectively better than rock 'n roll*), in the end, this worked better for me than any other Kingsley Amis novel I've read, most of which I haven't cared for at all.  I suppose I'll hang onto his later novels for a bit longer, but I'm still keeping him on a short leash and would like to get him off my shelves fairly soon.  The intro from the NYRB edition suggested pairing this with Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.  That's a good idea, and I'll see if I can track my copy down and somehow slot it in.

Recently, I was writing about how I had a mysterious package to be picked up at the post office.  I wasn't sure if it was Salgado's Africa or the long-delayed The Siege of Krishnapur.  In the end, it was Salgado's Africa.  Better yet, I didn't have to pay any customs charge on it, which is often the case when things are held at the post office.

I had come fairly close to not ordering it because it had this cover:

instead of this one, which is so much more interesting:

Fortunately, I realized in time how silly that was.  A more serious objection is that probably 80-90% of the photos are in his earlier books, primarily Sahel, Migrations, Workers and Genesis.  Still, many of what I consider to be his greatest compositions are here.  Another major bonus is that the landscape orientation of this book means that they don't need to be split over two pages.  In the end, I mocked up a new dust jacket with the cover photo I really wanted, and I am quite happy with my purchase.

That still left the question of Farrell's Siege and whether it was just lost in the mail.  I wrote to the bookseller, and he said that Royal Mail had suffered a pretty major ransomware attack, plus was dealing with an ice storm, and that it was most likely still on its way, but just delayed.  I said I would check back in a couple of weeks before asking for a refund.  I also realized that while I still wanted this Folio Society edition, it was going to be too oversized to actually read on the train, so I'd need to check out a copy from the library anyway!  

A few days after that, I had some time to kill after the Mirvish show Things I Know to Be True (a fairly standard melodrama but with some very fine acting), so I started walking down Yonge.  I was a bit put out by the fact that this Indian restaurant didn't do any take out at all (really???), but then I spotted ABC Books across the road.  While the other bookstores on Yonge seem to have closed up, particularly Eliot's (and I still kind of kick myself for not going a few more times since I moved back in 2014 -- and missing the blow-out sale!), ABC Books seems to be going strong.  I picked up a couple of books that I'll read and then put out front (Copeland's Hey Nostradamus! and Heather O'Neill's Daydreams of Angels).  I took a quick look to see if they had The Siege of Krishnapur, and they did have it, and at a fairly good price!  So I scooped that up as well.  And then by the workings of ju-ju magic, the Folio Society copy showed up in the mail two days later.  One can pretty much guarantee that if I hadn't bought the back-up copy, the other one would still be lost in the mail...

Now for a quick tangent.  There has been a bit of chatter on whether we start a book club at work.  I think there is some desire to, but the limiting factor is that the manager who really wants to start one has very limited train service and basically can only stay late at work if she drives in, which isn't particularly sustainable (financially or environmentally).  So I don't know if it will truly get off the ground.  I figure that my pick would be one of the fairly new SF novels dealing with climate change, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards.  It's a picture of a fairly grim post-oil world, trying to envision a world without cheap energy.  There are certainly echoes of Blade Runner, but it is its own thing.  I think Bacigalupi pulls it off well, but there are certainly critics who say he is going overboard in exoticizing his setting and characters (shades of Said's Orientalism), or indeed that he doesn't have the right to write about non-Western characters (perhaps a minority position but one that sadly grows louder every year).  I'm finding it really quite absorbing, and read about one-third in one sitting.  I imagine I'll be done by Tuesday or Wednesday at this rate.  I'll probably still recommend it to the group, even with caveats, though I'm thinking there is less and less likelihood we actually do start up a reading group.  Anyway, this is a book I've sort of hoped to read for a long time, and now I finally am in the middle of it.  Other notable climate change fiction is Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, which I have sort of very tentatively pencilled in for the end of the year, and Joy Williams's Harrow, which I can probably squeeze in this summer.

Anyway, I think the next book after The Windup Girl has to be The Siege of Krishnapur, which isn't quite as long as I thought.  After that, it will be Baker's A Fine Madness and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (inspired by Reuss's Horace Afoot).  I probably should put The Moviegoer on hold after I am midway through Farrell's Siege, though there is a copy over at the Jones library, and maybe I can just walk over and grab it, which has a certain appeal.  Then I will wrap up Farrell's Empire Trilogy with The Singapore Grip, which is definitely a longer novel, but hopefully just as good as the rest of his work.  According to this list, I will then read a few Canadian novels (though I have pretty much given up reviewing them) and then reread Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.  All in all, in 2023 I am trying to read a lot of the really good books I've been meaning to but haven't gotten around to yet, so I believe this will be a pretty rewarding year of reading.

It keeps slipping my mind, but I really need to start in on Pandemic in the Metropolis, as I promised to send over my review in April.  I think I'll start in on it, as soon as I finish The Windup Girl, as there are a few thematic similarities.

* Not that I haven't felt the same way about monster truck rallies at the Silverdome-dome-dome or even the way the Superbowl is hyped all out of proportion, but I've also read Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, so I realize this stems entirely from class prejudices, and even more importantly, high and low art can be flipped under the right circumstances.

Recent and Upcoming Concerts (Feb. 2023)

This is a somewhat delayed post, but better late than never.  In mid Jan., Maxim Vengerov had his rescheduled concert.  I already mentioned that the Beethoven and Shostakovich pieces were the standouts of the concert, as well as the generous encore.

The following week I saw an all-Bach program put on by the UT Music School.  What was particularly nice was I showed up early in order to listen to some CDs at the Music Library.  I was not expecting to be able to check them out and was just planning on using their listening stations.  I did flag it with them that I didn't think I could take the CDs, but perhaps the rules have changed (on alumni borrowing).  At any rate, that freed up a lot of time!

A bit later in the week, Esprit did an interesting concert with the main piece being accompanied by a troupe of taiko drummers!  The following week, the UT Percussion Ensemble did Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, which has an almost hypnotic vibe to it.  Even better the concert was free, and I also used the trip to return those borrowed CDs.  I went roughly a week later to a free concert by their jazz ensemble, but it was just going to be two long completely improvised pieces, which personally I think is a pretty huge mistake in what is supposed to be a showcase for playing.  As expected, there was a lot of pointless noodling around.  I left at about the 40 minute mark, though I was the 7th or so person to bail, not the first.  Tonight there is another free concert and this one is supposed to feature works by jazz composers from the Music School, so presumably there will be a lot more structure.  I'll still likely leave early if I am not enjoying myself, but hopefully it will be interesting.

One thing that never fails to keep me excited about concert-going is finding out about a concert at almost the last minute and still making it.  This happened when Steve Winwood played Vancouver back in 2012.  Just recently, I was looking over the CD releases from Cellar Live (a Vancouver-based label) and saw that Neil Swainson had a new CD out, called Fire in the West.

Unfortunately, Swainson doesn't really seem to maintain a regular web presence, so it isn't easy finding out when he is gigging around town.  However, I saw that he was going to be at the Jazz Bistro literally the next evening supporting Bernie Senensky!  I spent a bit of time seeing if I could order the CD in time and I even called a handful of the surviving music stores in Toronto, but they have almost all given up on new CDs (though they sometimes sell used CDs) in favour of new vinyl!  Finally, I just went to the gig and asked him if he had brought any for sale, and he had, so I had him sign a copy (as I did years ago with The 49th Parallel).  The music was good, esp. their closing piece, which was Horace Silver's Nutville, but I still dislike the Jazz Bistro.   It was almost entirely empty but they still had me sit at the bar because I was a party of one.  I don't like the layout very much.   Just in general, The Rex is a much better place to actually listen to music, though they pretty much only feature local jazz artists and don't normally get the big names in jazz (though very few come through Toronto in the first place...).

As it happens, Allison Au was given the Friday early slots for the month of February at The Rex, bringing in some synthesizer-heavy project called BaruBaru, so I thought I would check them out last Friday.  It turns out someone couldn't make the gig, so she cancelled that and just brought in a somewhat traditional trio of guitar and bass.  I think I have seen her with this bass player over at Crow's Theatre, though that time she might have had a keyboard player instead of guitar.  I enjoyed her first set, but didn't stick around for the second set, as I was biking back and I didn't want it to get any darker.   (It's quite incredible and yet concerning that I've been able to ride my bike pretty regularly in January and February.)  I can't go this Friday, as I am seeing Christian McBride and Joe Sealy doing a jazz concert celebrating Black heroes, but I'll try to go on the 24th.

I actually had tried to see Anne-Sophie Mutter doing Vivaldi's Four Seasons over at Roy Thompson Hall, but the tickets that were left were just far too expensive.  I am seeing the Toronto Youth Symphony Orchestra up in North York in two weeks doing a quite eclectic program (Beethoven, Falla, Messiaen and Sibelius).

In terms of other interesting upcoming concerts, Amici is playing on March 5 (though I need to go ahead and get those tickets), Bill Frisell is coming to town on March 11, the Takács Quartet is coming to Koerner Hall on March 23 and TorQ is part of a Steve Reich celebration on March 25.  So a lot to look forward to.  Speaking of TorQ, they are doing this piece Invisible Cities by Dinuk Wijeratne on March 12, but it is in St Catharines.  I believe I saw a section of Invisible Cities a few years back but they didn't perform the entire thing, or maybe I was going to go and the concert was cancelled.  At any rate, I am leaning towards going, but I also need to see how the timing works with a MegaBus ride out to St Catharines (and back!).  At least the weather has been such, that I don't think I need to worry about getting stuck in a blizzard on the way back...

Esprit is supposed to be doing several concerts in April, but so far nothing has been announced on their website, so I'll keep my eyes open for that.  What was just announced is the RCM 2023-24 season, and the most intriguing concert is in May 2024 when Kronos is visiting on what is supposedly their last season as a touring group, marking 50 years together as an ensemble.  I've been fortunate enough to see them several times now, and I'll have to make sure to make this concert.  I suppose if the dates work out (and the program is different), I might travel to see them in Chicago or Detroit or elsewhere (tickets in NYC will likely be ridiculously high...) on this farewell tour, but I won't completely distort my schedule to do so.  Also, Angela Hewitt is coming through in Jan. (with a quite varied program -- not only Mozart or Bach this time) and the Dover Quartet will be here in April 2024, playing Brahms's Piano Quintet.  Since this is the piece I failed to see over at TSO through my own negligence, I expect I will go as kind of a do-over, even if a somewhat expensive one...

I don't think I am going to be doing nearly as many summer concerts out at Budweiser Stage this summer, but I did get tickets to see Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.  It was stressful getting those tickets (trying to beat the bots as soon as they were released to the general public).  And I had to do this on my phone, which made it harder.  I probably would have tried to sit a bit further back in the cheaper seats, but I'm glad I scored a ticket at all.  I think I'll enjoy the show quite a bit, but I do wish that I had gone and seen Plant when he played Detroit in 1990.  For some reason I have it in my head that seeing "Ship of Fools" live would be amazing.  He more or less retired the song in 1994, though he played it on a very few dates in 2002.  I think it is extremely unlikely he will work up a version with Krauss, but I suppose hope springs eternal.

Just a couple of days before this, I am seeing Sparks at the Danforth Music Hall.  Again, I managed to get one of the last regular tickets, rather than a jacked-up resale ticker through a scalper.  I am by no means a huge Sparks fan, but I can definitely appreciate how influential they were.  It's a bit hard to believe how energetic they are for 70 year old men (brothers in fact).  They seem to still have it live, so I decided to go support them.  What's interesting is that they don't seem to be playing "Left Out in the Cold" on their recent tour, which is unfortunate.  It's a fairly catchy song and seems to be creating a bit of a buzz, along with this new documentary on the group.  On the other hand, I'll be seeing them in July, so it won't be nearly as topical as if I were catching them now.  One of the weird missed opportunities was that Tati was going to cast them in some film about American consultants coming over and taking over a French TV station.  I do so wish that had come to pass!

Minor Reset

I've been struggling with my work laptop which had been doing the screen-flickering thing for a while.  Then Friday night the screen completely died.  I went into work a couple of times over the weekend, and it still worked while plugged into a dock.  I very fortunately brought a mostly empty portable hard drive and backed up basically everything, except the Outlook pst files, since our company settings are such that it is quite hard to export messages to secondary pst files.

On Monday, the laptop was completely dead, even at the dock.  I was fortunate that the IT guys had some spare laptops and set me up with one right away.  Unfortunately, it is a newer model that doesn't work with my existing dock, so they ordered me one of those, which should turn up next week.  In the meantime, I need to remember to bring the power cord back and forth with me.  (I can almost guarantee that I will forget it once this week...)  I also really wish it had a touch screen like my old laptop.  C'est la vie.

Anyway, the main drag was that I had to reset a lot of passwords, since they were mostly stored on the old laptop, including for my Google account, which allows me to sign in and edit this blog.  It just would not take last night, but I've finally got it updated.  The main positive is that I can now sign on and edit the blog from my personal desktop machine, which I obviously feel less "guilty" about than blogging from a work laptop, even though I restricted myself to blogging outside of work hours.  So that's good, and I'll try to get a few of the shorter posts I have been thinking about up later tonight.

Books in Feb.

So very, very many things I would like to post on, but I'll keep this post to books and then tonight I can probably post on some concerts/theatre I have seen or am going to see soon.

I just wrapped up the core of Gogol's Dead Souls (Book One in the Guerney and Reavey translations).

I should get through Book Two fairly soon, though I will also see what Rayfield (NYRB) came up with for his reconstruction of Book Two.  I find it an interesting and often amusing book, though not really a great novel.  I find it intriguing that Gogol originally thought this was be the equivalent of Dante's Inferno and that he was working out how to get Chichikov through Purgatory and into Paradise.  Maybe not so much should be made of an offhand remark, but it doesn't make much sense.  Perhaps if Chichikov ended up in prison midway through Book One and really suffered, the analogy would make more sense.  But in fact, the most that really happens is he is scorned by the townspeople and he leaves town.  Not really a dramatic escape...  (There's some film or sitcom that makes fun of an author who invests his or her stories with no dramatic tension.  It's just at the tip of my tongue.  Hopefully, it will come back to me.)

I bailed on Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You about 100 pages in. There were many reasons, but essentially every male in the story was a pretty detestable wolf, always on the make.  

And the female lead seemed to have nothing on her mind more than Cosmo quizzes, i.e. what can I do to make the boys like me (but drawing the line at putting out). It was a pretty dreary battle of the sexes, told by a male author with almost zero insight into the way actual women think.  I simply couldn't care less whether Patrick got into Jenny's pants or not (and apparently according to those who did read to the end he more or less forces himself on her -- this is a book that I don't care if I've spoiled it).  I was reminded of Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, where I was completely uninterested in the main characters and their on-and-off romance, but the secondary characters and plots were interesting, but there was none of that here.

I have decided (probably unwisely) to give Kingsley yet another chance, and am a few pages into Girl, 20.  It's shorter at least, and there is a bit more distancing with the narrator a bit more disgusted at the main character's hankering after younger and younger girls.  Still, I find myself wondering why Kingsley Amis was so popular and often considered one of the better novelists of his generation.  He really does nothing for me, and I'll probably get rid of his remaining works on my shelves (I guess mostly The Old Devils, which is probably somewhat misanthropic but hopefully less sexist).

Now this cover has way more of a Lolita vibe, which apparently is well-deserved.

I'm making good progress on Reuss's Horace Afoot.  I'll write about that separately.  I guess I'll just say that Reuss isn't afraid to make his lead character a bit of a jerk at times.

I've been waiting on Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur and getting a bit nervous about it having been lost in the mail.  It's going to be the next major novel I tackle.  I was about to write to the bookseller to see if there was any tracking info.  Anyway, I just got a delivery slip, so I have to pick up a package from the post office, possibly because I owe some custom duties.  I think it either has to be Siege or maybe Salgado's Africa.  As much as I want the Farrell novel, I'd probably rather it turns out to be the Salgado, which will be considerably harder to replace.  

And with that, I really do need to get going.  Ciao!

White Noise - A Documentary?

I was saddened and a bit shocked to read about this train derailment in Ohio. What makes it more terrible is this billowing toxic cloud of vinyl chloride, forcing the evacuation of local residents. This could easily be a still from the recent film.

Source: Gene J. Puskar/AP

I guess there isn't too much to add.  Carrying goods by train is remarkably efficient and safe, until it isn't.  I hope no one in the area was exposed for too long. If I recall, David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System featured the Great Ohio Desert, which was just outside of Cleveland, roughly 100 km from this derailment.  I'm not saying the two are linked, but it is an interesting coincidence.  White Noise isn't set in any specific location, but it does seem to be set in the U.S. Midwest/Rustbelt, and it could certainly plausibly be taking place in Indiana, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

I recently watched White Noise a second time, but on Netflix.  (The first time was over at Tiff Lightbox.)  I did find the overlapping conversations in the kitchen for example much harder to follow on the small screen.  I think it is a pretty good film and am a bit sad it got blanked for Oscar nominations.  Personally, I would have liked to see Don Cheadle get the nod for Best Supporting Actor and probably the team should have gotten one for Best Adapted Screenplay (certainly over Living, which is essentially just a remake of Ikiru*).  And also LCD Soundsystem for Best Song ("New Body Rhumba").  But it was not to be.

* I do think Bill Nighy has a pretty good shot at Best Actor, mostly because Academy voters realize that in even 5 years, the idea that they gave the Oscar to a guy in a fat suit just won't sit very well.  I do hope Michelle Yeoh gets the Oscar over Kate Blanchette, who is probably the front-runner.