Ashes, Ashes

It feels pretty surreal that these wildfires well north and east of the GTA are causing such air quality issues in Toronto but then also in Chicago and Detroit.  Normally, the wind carries things further east, so it wasn't so much of a surprise when New York was impacted by the Canadian wildfires, but it is quite surprising that the wind is carrying everything due south.  I certainly hope this shifts and/or that the rain this weekend makes enough of a difference.  This is the worst year for fires in Ontario and Quebec in recorded history!  On a side note, Bjørn Lomborg is embarrassing himself yet again by saying things that are demonstrably not true and letting his libertarian friends stick their fingers in their ears and say that everything is going to be alright and that it will all work out in the end if we let markets do their thing...

Anyway, I definitely noticed the haze on Tuesday evening.  I had gone over to the swimming pool (and was extremely put out at how disorganized it was with very slow swimmers clogging up the medium lane).  For some reason they had left the back door open, and it really felt like I had ashes in my mouth while I was swimming!  Not a great feeling, and I left quite early.  I'm sure I should have asked them to close the doors at least, but I was already feeling that these guard were not on top of their game, and I didn't want to get into an argument with how poorly they were handling the overall situation.  Hopefully, next week will be more or less back to normal.

I did ride my bike yesterday (and this started to feel like a mistake once I crossed the Don on the way home -- sadly the East Side seems to be more impact by poor air quality than downtown) and this morning as well, though I am likely to leave the bike at work for a couple of days.  The problem with the really high levels of fine particulates is that it gets into your lungs -- and there really are few alternatives other than just not going outside.  Heavy exercise, like biking, is one of the worse things you can do.  I should have taken a couple of photos of the haze and the orange sun last night but didn't have my camera with me.

Anyway, apparently the Jazz Fest shut down all of its outdoor programming yesterday!  No idea if that will happen today.  it currently looks like tonight will be a bit better than yesterday, so hopefully things will be back on.  Interestingly, the air quality index gets worse on Friday, though if it rains that might help things.  I'm supposed to be off to the movies on Friday evening, so that shouldn't matter one way or the other.  Tonight, however, we are planning on going to see Tafelmusik at the Toronto Music Garden at 7 and then walk over to Budweiser Stage to see Tears for Fears.  (We decided that the opening act is quite terrible so are trying to skip them entirely.)  Tears for Fears is supposed to take the stage around 9, though we will aim to get there at 8:30 just in case there is a change of plans and they start early.  Of course, I will keep monitoring to see if the whole event has to be cancelled, though at the moment that seems unlikely.  We shall see.  It's all quite upsetting in the grand scheme of things.

The Trip in Numbers aka Art Boot Camp

I was away 4 days in Boston and New York City: 1 day in Boston and 3 in New York (with 1 day spent almost exclusively in Brooklyn).

I spent approximately 18 hours in different museums, with the longest individual stints being the Boston MFA and the MoMA at just under 4 hours at each.  I was quite surprised that Van Gogh's The Starry Night was not on view at MoMA, but that was because it was over at the Met as part of the Van Gogh and Cypresses show (shades of Macy's and Gimbel's perhaps...).

The worst time to travel was leaving for the Boston Airport at 4 am (and only catching 3 or so hours of sleep before I headed down to the hostel lobby to avoid missing my cab to catch that 6:20 am flight).

I managed to read 3 books - Shields's Larry's Party, Shamsie's Home Fire and Hamsun's Mysteries, as well as a significant chunk of Thurber's My World and Welcome to It.

I saw Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and the musical Some Like It Hot, both of which did very well at the Tony's yesterday.  (Total Tony's won by these two performance - 8!)  I also saw the 80's group Love and Rockets out in Brooklyn (they were great).  I came reasonably close to catching a movie in Boston, but the timing didn't quite work out, and Past Lives (the one that I almost went to see) didn't seem to have enough action to keep me awake.  I may check it out later now that I am back in Toronto.  We'll see.

I'll probably cry when I finally add all the expenses up, but I certainly economized on my lodgings and mostly ate quite cheaply (food carts, delis and grocery store sushi and even a cup of fruit from a subway vendor).  I also had Vietnamese in Boston's Chinatown and Indian in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and those restaurants were reasonably priced (or at least compared to the alternatives...).  I also got into three museums for free because of reciprocal deals with the AGO (though it seems this has expired with the Gardner Museum in Boston, so I can't count on that next time!).

Money left on my NYCTA Metrocard - $7.25

I took literally hundreds of photos, and I'll post some of the best starting tomorrow.  All in all, a good but pretty exhausting trip.

Time saved at Customs using the tweaked ArriveCan app - 1 to 2 minutes at best.  I won't bother with this on my next trip.

On a side note, I am sure I was exposed to dozens and probably hundreds of people in the museums, the plays and the subway/train, so I took the COVID test when I got home.  Somehow I've come through unscathed again, making this at least 10 times in a row I've self-tested and come back clean!

Poetic Thoughts

I'm not sure how to cover all threads related to poetry that are going through my mind.  I guess I'll go backwards from the most recent events and at some point I'll have to break this off into a new post.

Personally, the biggest news was that I pulled together a manuscript and sent it in to Brick Books for consideration.  While I think the odds of them accepting it are extremely low, they might at least like parts of it enough that they encourage me to keep working on them.  I found that I was simply not going to have enough "Broken Sestinas" ready in time, as there was a hard deadline of May 31.  So I went back to a chapbook I pulled together probably about 20 years ago (not that I ever did anything with this!), which itself was mostly based on a chapbook that I actually did self-publish right after university(!) though it had two new sequences: one called The Palace at 4 A.M. and then there were a bunch of poems about angels, which I called A Rage of Angels.  I still liked most of the Palace poems and picked the best 5 to kick off this new manuscript.  Most I left more or less as is, but I did touch up The View from the Palace.  I was initially only going to include Deliverance from A Rage of Angels, but at some point I realized I was going to struggle to get to 50 pages, even after typing up all the sestinas I had written this year at The Rex.  I didn't want to have a third sequence lurking about in the manuscript, so I thought I would only include one or two more angel poems and scatter them a bit.  While years ago I would have definitely included The Angel of the City, it doesn't hold up as well for me now, so I dropped it.  A few of the angel poems made a bit more sense in a broader collection where there is a cumulative impact.  In the end, I just dusted off The Angel of Porcelain and made a few changes.  I thought I was still a few pages short, so I grabbed three more old poems and spruced them up.  I like The Whale better now.  I'll go ahead and post it soon.  I also took a few lines from an incomplete poem and built a new sestina off of them.  

I think in the end I wrote 10 new sestinas, almost all while at The Rex.  (Perhaps ironically, I would have gotten to 12, but on one aborted visit, I learned that there was going to be a jazz vocalist, and I just didn't think I could write with a vocalist as background music.  Too bad.)  I then had to type up all these sestinas (and read my close to undecipherable cursive!).  In most cases, I made light edits, but this is still pretty close to once and done.  Not quite automatic writing, but definitely trying not to get too hung up on perfectionism, which has been a stumbling block for me before.  Perhaps in six months, I'll reread the sestinas and only like a small number of them.  I guess we'll see.  I suspect I'll write a few more just to keep in practice.  I actually just read another poet who was trying to rescue the sestina.  Of course, I didn't take proper notes, so I'll have to scan a lot of recent collections to find who it was.*  Anyway, I was furiously typing during lunch and work breaks on Wed. and managed to get it turned in at 5:30.  (I probably had until midnight to give it one more thorough edit, but no point in tempting fate and missing the deadline!)  As I  said, perhaps this sustained creative push will convince me to send poems out to literary journals (the few that are left), though I think the next big push will be to revise my transportation anthology and get that ready to submit to publishers by the fall.  I'm sure I'll blog about this later.

Anyway, I stopped by at Word on the Street last Sunday.  I ran into Porcupine's Quill right away and turned over the unsigned P.K. Page books.  Then I found Wolsak and Wynn.  I asked them if Catherine Graham was going to be reading at the Trillium Awards stage, but she had been reading there last year.  In the end I picked up her new collection, Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead, as well as Chris Pannell's Adventurize Your Summer!  It was extremely unfortunate they didn't bring any of Pannell's back catalog (as none of his books are in the library, but it looks like a friend who lives in Hamilton may be able to borrow them from their library).  Graham and Pannell should both be reading at the Tranzac Club on June 13.  I suspect they'll have books for signing and maybe some older books, but I also didn't know if there would be a discount at that event, so I didn't risk it and just got the books right away.  (I'm just wondering if I should have gotten a receipt for the books after all...)

It turned out that Laurie D. Graham was reading at the Trillium Awards stage from her new collection Fast Commute.  It turns out that this is almost entirely about travel across the GTA.  I bought her book and had her sign it after the reading.  We chatted just a bit, including about my anthology project.  So this was sort of a happy accident meeting her rather than Catherine Graham.

I was running a bit short of time and money but I did finally find the Brick Books booth.  I spent some time looking over the 3 for $10 bundles, finally picking one with a book by Julie Bruck.  (Of course it turned out that I already had two of the books in the bundle. Oh well.  I probably can sell them to Circus Books.)  I spent some time debating whether to get Sue Sinclair's Heaven's Thieves (I vaguely remember wanting to get that at the last Word on the Street) and Moldovan Hotel by Leah Horlick (I simply couldn't remember if I had gotten this in a previous subscription).  As it turned out, I didn't have either of them.  By this time, I didn't have much spare cash, so I passed on picking up John Steffler's The Grey Islands for $10, though I later arranged for it to be included when they mail out the 2nd half of the 2023 subscription package.

I was just about done but then happened across George Elliott Clarke wrapping up a reading.  I bought a book (Extra Illicit Sonnets) with my last $10 and got him to sign it.  So a pretty good haul overall.

I've decided I really needed to reorganize these books, so have a new poetry shelf just focusing on recent volumes from Brick Books and other recent enthusiasms, like Ralph Gustafson and P.K. Page and Don McKay.  Most but not all of the signed poetry collections are on this shelf.  I'd probably need another shelf like this or even two if I was to pull all my poetry into a single place, but it's a good starting point, esp. as I try to organize my thoughts around working on this anthology of transportation poetry.

And now it's time to run.  More some other time when I have more time...

* I don't think it was Don McKay.  It was more likely Richard Sanger or Edward Carson.  Hopefully, I can track this down soon, as it's just going to bug me.  I find P.K. Page's glosas in Hologram and Coal and Roses to be quite interesting, and even a bit more impressive than a well-constructed sestina, though I do find some times her rhyming words are more like near-rhymes and once in a while they just don't seem to work at all, though that is quite rare.

TIFF Giveth and TIFF Taketh

I've been more than a little frustrated with TIFF.  The latest thing is that I've been trying to call the box office to follow up on a few points.  Each time, when I got to the computer switchboard and punched '3' (because I wasn't a TIFF member), the automated voice said there was no one available to help and ended the call.  No option to hold or to leave a message.  Very unprofessional...

Fortunately, I work close enough to TIFF that I can swing by after work (or theoretically even over my lunch break).  While I was running a bit late (to make it in time for swimming at Matty Eckler), I stopped in at TIFF.  I found out that, indeed Raiders of the Lost Ark was going to be playing at TIFF for roughly a week, starting June 16.  They didn't have all the dates and times nailed down yet, but this should all go on-line June 7, so I'll check back in about a week.  I'm definitely planning on seeing it and hopefully taking my son.  This would set me up to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny or whatever it is called.

Since I was there, I asked if any tickets to Spirited Away had been turned in.  I certainly wasn't expecting anything, but there were actually 7-10 tickets that had been freed up for the Sunday afternoon show (which is the English dubbed version).  So I snatched one of those up.  If I absolutely love the movie, I will at least consider watching it again in October when it shows up in the regular theatres as part of Ghibli Fest.  Anyway, this ended up being a particularly productive trip over to TIFF unlike my past several trips to the box office when everything was sold out.

I still think TIFF could be a lot better, and I find the Paradise actually punches above its weight, at least for movies that interest me.  (In fact, there are two more Pedro Almodóvar films that are going to be screening at the Paradise, and I think I should be able to make it to both, so that's quite exciting.)