British Comic Novels

I enjoyed Cakes and Ale a fair bit.  I did find it a bit sad that Maugham, who was clearly poking fun at Thomas Hardy and mercilessly lampooning his frenemy Horace Walpole in this novel was so thin-skinned himself, actually taking another author to court to block the publication of a novel that satirized him.  It's not a good look for sure to be such a hypocrite.  I suppose he never really got over the fact that he wasn't a major literary figure, though he certainly produced a few solid novels.  I didn't actually care for Of Human Bondage much.  I liked The Razor's Edge better, though it is probably more of a tragicomedy than a comedy (and I think I still need to sit down and watch the whole movie, though I saw the opening scenes).  One of these days, I'll probably read The Painted Veil, though I'm in no hurry.  I suspect Cakes and Ale will likely remain my favourite of his books.

This dialogue involving Rosie (the somewhat slatternly first wife of the British literary lion (who was so clearly not Hardy, according to Maugham...)) was a bit droll, particularly as Maugham didn't seem to embody it or embrace the philosophy behind it: “Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.”

She put her arms round my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. ...

“You must take me as I am, you know,” she whispered.

“All right,” I said.

While I think the philosophy espoused by Rosie can certainly lead to extreme hedonism, if one also remembers to be kind, then it may not be such a bad way to look at things.  Of course, in today's world, our actions and inactions might well leave the planet nearly uninhabitable for humans in one hundred years, so I personally will probably never adopt such a devil-may-care attitude.

In contrast, I have never read anything by Evelyn Waugh and was coming to him new.  I believe I own essentially all of his short stories and novels with the exception of Love Among the Ruins (a political farcical novel that may not have aged that well) and Put Out More Flags.  I hadn't really been planning on reading Put Out More Flags, but this critic makes a lengthy case that it is in fact a very good novel, so I shall at least consider it.

I'm currently about 25% into Decline and Fall, his first novel, and it is a pretty good, if very broad, satire of English schools and schoolmasters.  (I get the sense that this novel succeeds where (for me) Amis's Lucky Jim never does.)  I have too many other things to read to make a sustained push into Waugh's oeuvre at the moment, but I'll probably get to Vile Bodies next year (perhaps right after I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned).  The fact that I do have them on my shelves and can just grab them as I head out for the train gives them a bit of a leg up.

Yet Another Reading List

It is somewhat absurd, but I am finding having too many reading lists littering the blog is getting to be confusing.  I actually am making pretty decent progress on the lists here and here, but I decided I should just combine them, as there is so much overlap and I added a few books that have been nagging at me to read them.  For instance, I decided I really wanted to try to tackle Fante before too much more time passes. 

So this is to the best of my intentions what I will be working towards over the rest of the year.  I will also be reading On the Nature of Things ✓ at work and will work my way through a copy of Kafka's Collected Stories ✓ that my cousin gave me (and that I will share in my library out front when I am through with it).

Maugham Cakes & Ale
Narayan The Man-Eater of Malgudi
Waugh Decline and Fall
Malraux Man's Fate
Fontane Effi Briest
Flaubert Madame Bovary
A. Carter Wise Children
Mahfouz The Search (maybe skim The Thief and the Dogs ✓ and Autumn Quail ✓ first)
Munro Open Secrets
Saramago Blindness
Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (probably reread The Sun Also Rises ✓ first)
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Kurkov Grey Bees
Perec Life, A User's Manual
Brewer The Red Arrow
Drabble A Summer Bird-Cage & The Ice Age
Martin Amis The Rachel Papers
Maxwell The Chateau
Mary McCarthy The Group
Pym Excellent Women
Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City (reread before watching the Michael J. Fox movie)
Lahiri Whereabouts
Rushdie Fury & Victory City
Karan Mahajan The Association of Small Bombs
Cruz How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Zalika Reid-Benta River Mumma
Steinbeck East of Eden
Fante West of Rome
Dawn Powell The Golden Spur

(By this point, this almost certainly will be 2024...)

Dupont The American Fiancée
Dickens Oliver Twist (on pause - I read Nicholas Nickleby instead but finally bailed at page 500)
Koestler Darkness at Noon
Sebald Austerlitz
Skorvecky Two Murders in My Double Life
T.C. Boyle Drop City
J. Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain
Edna O'Brien August is a Wicked Month 
Sinclair Lewis Main Street
Maritta Wolff Whistle Stop
Rosenblum These Days are Numbered
Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise
Kennedy Ironweed
Percival Everett Erasure (basis of American Fiction) & Half an Inch of Water (stories)
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Drabble Jerusalem the Golden
Singh Delhi: A Novel
Cela The Hive (NYRB)
Osipov Kilometer 101 (NYRB)
Gide The Immoralist & Straight is the Gate (maybe reread Lafcadio's Adventures)
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green & The Stories of J.F. Powers
Joy Williams The Quick and the Dead & The Visiting Privilege (stories)
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Lampedusa The Leopard
Powers The Gold Bug Variations (gave up on this one about halfway in)
Mavis Gallant The Cost of Living (stories)
Álvaro Mutis Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time
Tim O'Brien America Fantastica & In the Lake of the Woods
Morrison The Bluest Eye & Song of Solomon
Russo Empire Falls
Fante The Bandini Quartet
Mahfouz The Beggar
Faulkner The Wild Palms*
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets & The Painter of Signs
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Carol Shields Swann
I.B. Singer Scum
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Manu Joseph Serious Men
Suárez Havana Year Zero
Welty Delta Wedding

The majority are fairly short, so I should feel like I am making decent progress in checking books off this list, though there are definitely some longer novels as I get deeper in, but also I have some long train rides coming up as well.  

Assuming I really do get through them all towards the end of 2023 or early 2024, I will switch back to the original reading list, but clean it up a fair bit and probably put Atwood's MaddAdam Trilogy pretty high up in there, make sure that I hit more Mahfouz and Narayan, get serious about reading James Baldwin (and Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty), wrap up Gide and try to read one Dickens' novel each year.  Time's marching on after all.

* Interestingly, Agnès Varda said that The Wild Palms inspired her first film La Pointe Courte, so I should probably watch this after I read the novel.

Edit (9/03): While it is tempting to add them here, I think it makes more sense to make further changes to the original long list as I clean it up yet again.  I want to add Russo's Empire Falls and The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos, promote Ondjaki's Transparent City and Victor Serge's Conquered City (which are already reasonably high in that list) and maybe reread Absurdistan ✓ by Gary Shteyngart.  (I'm currently reading Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story ✓, which is insightful and annoying in equal measure.  I think I need to go back and see what I liked about him in the first place before I decide if I should tackle his pandemic novel, Our Country Friends ✓, but I assume I'll try to read it one of these days -- perhaps while the pandemic is still fresh in memory...)

Edit (9/22): I try to strike a balance between hitting the classics and adding in brand-new fiction.  While they aren't on the list (yet), I'm pretty likely to try to shoehorn in Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels, which is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale about a poet confronting an A.I. trained on her work, and River Mumma ✓ by Zalika Reid-Benta, which is a magic-realist quest through the streets of Toronto, drawing on Jamaican folklore.  While I am on the topic of contemporary Toronto novels, I recall putting aside Ghosted by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, as I thought it might influence my own writing too much.  But having read another review of it recently, it is nothing like my own middle-class foibles and there is no danger reading it.  However, I also don't feel quite the same pressure to read it as River Mumma, so it will just go somewhere on that original reading list...

Stratford Visit 2023

I'm just back from a short trip out to Stratford.  It's been many, many years since I actually stayed overnight, but this is the only practical way to see three plays, so that's what we did.  Also, my wife came along, though she only saw two of the three: Tremblay's Les Belles-Soeurs and Di Filippo's Grand Magic.  I saw Richard II by myself.  I've read that there is some additional material inserted into Richard II, but it felt pretty seamless unlike some of these productions where the directors feel they need to improve Shakespeare.  Still, I'll want to sit down and read Richard II soon so I can pinpoint if possible what was added.  If I had to guess, I would assume it is this scene where one of the characters sneaks into the House of Priapus (basically a gay bath house) and then possibly later on when he is struck down by a sort of plague (meant to be the equivalent of AIDS).  That said, some of this might well be in the original.  While Derek Jarman definitely played up the homoerotic elements of Marlowe's Edward II, the bones of it were in the original.  I can definitely understand why a fair number of audience members feel that this is too provocative a take on Richard II (with Richard portrayed as a raging disco queen), but I thought it worked well, adding an additional element (an incipient Puritanism) into the mix for why it was so easy to stir up opposition to the king's rule and have almost all the nobles switch over to Bolingbroke's side. 

This post is already all scrambled up, kicking off with a review rather than the start of the trip itself.  We took the Stratford bus.  It was fine, though I was definitely nervous about missing it (if the TTC let me down again).  In the end, the driver held the bus 10 minutes waiting for a late-comer.  I think he would only have waited another 5 to 10 minutes, and then the missing traveller would have just been out of luck.  There was construction-related congestion just outside of Cambridge, but generally the ride was fine.  I had agreed at the last minute to take a work call and had, in fact, run over to the mall the night before to get knock-off iPhone headphones which worked pretty well overall.  It's good that I had done that.  The call lasted about an hour and a quarter(!), though most of the time I was just listening in.  I read a little bit of Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence after the call wrapped, though of course much less than I had planned for.

It was raining slightly when we arrived, so we had to run into a thrift shop and buy my wife an umbrella.  We found that a couple of lunch places were too full, so we headed over to the main drag and went to an Italian place (not Fellini's, though perhaps I should have held out for that...).  Then we checked in at the bed and breakfast.  Overall, we liked it a lot and the location was amazing: a 5-10 minute walk to the Tom Patterson Theatre and roughly 15 to the Festival Theatre.  (Here is the website for where we stayed.)  While I don't typically stay overnight at Stratford, I would definitely stay here again, particularly if going with my wife.

I then went and saw Richard II at the Tom Patterson, which I lead off with.

The rain stopped around 5 or so, though it was still overcast.  We went out to Thai for dinner.  One place was very full but the other had a few tables open.  Then we walked over to the Festival Theatre to see Les Belles-Soeurs.  The balcony was close to empty and about five minutes before curtain, they let everyone move to front row centre!  There is a lot of (Canadian) star power in this production: Lucy Peacock and Seana McKenna.  The set is amazing.  But the play itself is such a crabbed vision of the lives of working-class women in Quebec prior to the Quiet Revolution.*  There is no female solidarity at all (or at least Germaine Lauzon is such an unpleasant person at heart that she inspires none).  And then the elder abuse being played mostly for laughs is all but unwatchable now.  The truth is that I enjoyed the semi-amateur production in Peterborough so much more, perhaps because it was a higher energy production, and I think one section on Bingo was turned into a musical number.  I do know that I will skip the Irish version of this play that the Toronto Irish Players are putting on later in the season.

The next morning was clear though crisp; fall is nearly here...  We enjoyed the breakfast, and while I am not an outgoing person, particularly at meals, we chatted with the other guests and found out they were from Hamilton, Ottawa and just outside Detroit.  The breakfast was so filling we skipped lunch, though I did grab some snacks at the snack bar for the final play.  We walked all over downtown Stratford (not that that takes very long) and stopped in at a small art gallery near the Stratford tourism office.  Then we walked along the river.  It had warmed up a fair bit by this point.  (It isn't very clear, but there is a swan just to the left of the bridge in this photo.)

Art in the Park was running, so we took a look at the pieces.  I enjoyed these hand-crafted robots from Triple R Robots.

There was also an artist (Kim McCarthy) that did encaustic work (mostly found items embedded in coloured wax).  My wife picked up a postcard based on this work.  

 

This was quite nice.  We still had close to an hour to kill, so we walked over to Gallery Stratford, which is just to the east of the Festival Theatre.  Because we were skipping lunch, we still had plenty of time to get back to the Tom Patterson for the matinee.  Time does seem to slow down a bit in Stratford.  While I enjoy my annual visits (with my partial exception of watching Hamlet last year, which I thought was a waste of my time), I would probably be crawling the walls in a couple of weeks if I actually moved to Stratford...

Anyway, then we went to see the final play -- De Filippo's Grand Magic.  Stratford is starting to specialize in De Filippo.  They did Napoli Milionaria! a few years back, which I thought was good, though not a comedy at all.  Grand Magic is closer to a true comedy though there are plenty of dark moments, and it doesn't really resolve properly as a comedy should.  Geraint Wyn Davies plays a washed up illusionist who makes a meagre living playing European resorts and gets embroiled in a scheme to separate a man from his wife by means of a magic vanishing act.  The lover who races off with the wife in a motorboat is played by Jordin Hall, a Toronto actor whom I know very slightly.  This is actually a tiny part, and he doesn't turn up in the second or third acts, while the wife does reappear at some point.  (Jordin has a much meatier role in Richard II playing Bolingbroke who becomes King Henry IV.)  The play focuses entirely on the magician and the cuckolded man.  It's definitely an interesting play, and I enjoyed it.  As I alluded to above, two out of three ain't bad.

The ride home was not as nice as the ride in.  Congestion was moderately bad on the 401 and was just terrible on the Gardiner (maybe because of CNE traffic?).  I tried not to stress about it and just read my Rushdie novel (and ended up reading most of it, with only 100 pages left).  I also was able to play music on my iPod (still working!), though I had run the battery down to almost nothing by the time we got to Spadina.  Of course, we still had to hop on the TTC to get home, making it back just around 9 pm, roughly an hour later than we had planned.  But I still had Sunday off, which I guess is the advantage of leaving work on Friday.  (And I'll try to cover that in a shorter post soon.)  All in all, a very nice trip.

* Les Belles-Soeurs remains an important play, but I just like Albertine in Five Times quite a bit more.  I would definitely see that again.  In terms of more uplifting plays about working class women, I certainly prefer Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters, which I saw at Stratford in a very good production back in 2021.

Road Trip Books

I'll be making two Via trips out to Ottawa fairly soon, which reminds me that I really do need to book the first one right away, ideally tonight.

I haven't exactly hidden the fact that I thought Austen's Mansfield Park was a dud, or I might be inclined to bring Emma along.  However, that is going to get pushed back at least 6 more months and probably a year or more realistically.

In fact, my next significant road trip is out to Stratford this weekend, which generally works out to two hours in both directions.  We're also staying overnight, so I will likely have some extra reading time between plays and meals.  What I am tentatively planning on bringing is Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, which I have only just started, and Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence.  While Victory City just turned up, I think/hope that I'll be able to make more progress on this under normal reading conditions.

For the first Ottawa trip, I am leaning towards taking Perec's Life: A User's Manual and possibly something short from my TBD pile, possibly Lahiri's Whereabouts.

For the second trip, I haven't really decided, but I am leaning towards Dickens, with Dombey and Son being the logical choice, even though somewhat out of sequence.  I might need to bring something more contemporary in case I find it too hard to get back into a Victorian frame of mind.  (Waugh's Decline and Fall might be just the thing.)

I have three other long novels that I would like to use a long trip to "jump start": Fante's The Bandini Quartet, Fontane's Before the Storm and Steinbeck's East of Eden.  There are quite a few other really long novels that I plan to tackle, but I think these are the most pressing.  I have extremely tentative plans to take the train out to Montreal or the bus to Buffalo or Windsor/Detroit, and if these plans come through, then I already have my reading list ready...

Fall-Early Winter Theatre in the GTA

I'll probably do another post talking about some of the longer distance trips I may attempt to pull off, but that can wait a bit longer.  I thought I probably should try to get the more local stuff together into one place.

Theatre Passe Muraille: They haven't announced their full season, but they have a teaser.  They are co-sponsoring an operetta called Canoe over at Trinity Spadina St. Paul's while they are renovating the main theatre.  I'll probably go, though this only runs Sept. 12-16.

I'm not sure if I already talked about Crow's Theatre.  While it is getting fairly spendy, even with a subscription, this season looks pretty good.  I'm probably going to see The Master Plan on Sept. 17, and I am also looking forward to Heroes of the Fourth Turning (by the Howland Company) in October and A Terrible Fate by Cliff Cardinal (which is actually going to take place at the Video Cabaret theatre just off Queen) also in October.

So far Video Cabaret hasn't indicated if they are doing The Cold War Part 2 in the spring or summer, but I certainly hope so.  So far, they have not been as active as I hoped or expected.

In recent years, Soulpepper has been doing a very slow reveal of their season, which I find very off-putting.  Anyway, I'll probably check out Wildwoman in October, but there is nothing else of interest at the moment.

I have to admit, I am just not that interested in Coal Mine this season, and I am going to skip them completely this year.  While I didn't really need to see Godot again, I would still have preferred that over Hedda Gabbler...

It really is a topsy-turvy year.  I am subscribing to Canadian Stage for the first time in years and blanking Coal Mine.  This season I am planning on checking out Topdog/Underdog in late Sept., The Lehman Trilogy in November and The Inheritance in the spring.

Buddies in Bad Times looks like they have a lot that is of interest to me, so I need to figure out how to piece together a subscription.  Angels in America is back in late Nov./early Dec., and I'll need to see that again.  (I so hope this relatively small company can pull it off.)  I think I mentioned that one of the things that was part of the Summerworks (I am Your Spaniel) is getting a better staging at Buddies in January with a couple of companion pieces I'll probably check out, and Theatre Rusticle* is doing The Tempest in the later half of Jan. (I'll have to fit this around TRB on the off-chance that my paper is accepted and I can finagle my way down to DC, but that's something to worry about later.)  So overall, a very exciting season.

I'm moderately interested in Alumnae's season: Erin Shields' If We Were Birds (drawn from Ovid) in early Oct., George F. Walker's Better Living in Jan. and Lucy Kirkwood's The Children in March.  I am most interested in Better Living, but if the season subscription is priced reasonably, I will go ahead and do that.

I'll probably pass on the first play that Toronto Irish Players are doing - Brownbread by Roddy Doyle, but I just might see this Irish version of Tremblay's Les Belles-Soeurs (as I am seeing the original, albeit in English translation, at Stratford at the end of the week!).

Factory has an odd season.  They are remounting The Waltz in early September.  I already saw that (at Factory), so I'll pass.  Then in Nov./Dec. they are doing two Daniel MacIvor monologues (but with different actors) and then in March there is a portmanteau play by four authors called In the Kitchen.  I'd probably subscribe to see the other three plays, but I do need to know the cost before I commit.

Tarragon continues in the long tradition of only having a few things of interest to me.  I definitely want to see Withrow Park in Nov., and probably El Terremoto in April.  Most likely I'll rush both...  

There isn't anything currently announced at the Theatre Centre that I want to see, but stuff pops up there at the last minute all the time.  I know that Shakespeare Bash'd will be doing something there, probably in early 2024, and I'll have to try to get to that.

I'm never all that interested in Mirvish, but sometimes the off-Mirvish plays are interesting.  They are doing a transfer of Crow's Theatre's production of Uncle Vanya in Feb.  I'm sure it will be terrific, but I've already seen it, so will pass.  But in March, they are doing Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  I will certain plan on seeing this and will book my tickets the minute they send me a working coupon code...

There are a couple of oddballs where rights have been applied for, but I don't know if the production will actually happen, so I'll just need to keep my eyes peeled.  Apparently Outside the March might put on Hnath's A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney in late April, and then someone else might stage Lucy Kirkwood's Mosquitoes in late April as well.  Hopefully, one of the two (or both) actually pull it off.

Moving slightly further from home, I'm almost certain that Brock is going to be doing Posner's Stupid F@cking Bird the first week of Nov., and I'll try to swing that (once this is actually confirmed).

In Hamilton, Dundas Little Theatre has a pretty solid season.  The only play that I really feel I have to see is Lobby Hero in April/May, but I might decide to see Arsenic and Old Lace in November and/or Bess Wohl's Grand Horizons in January.  It might even be worth just going to one of these shows just to make sure I can figure out the directions before I make the trek out for Lobby Hero! 

Already I can feel the calendar is going to be a little tricky, esp. in October and maybe Jan. and April, but I can probably make it work for plays in and around Toronto.  All bets are off once I start looking at theatre more than an hour away from here.

* I recall that Theatre Rusticle more or less disbanded a few years back, but apparently it is being resurrected, which is great news.

Somewhat Restrained Weekend

Given that the weather was supposed to hold Friday evening (and it was supposed to rain most of Saturday), I decided to try to get over to High Park and watch Midsummer's Night's Dream.  I called up Canadian Stage, which I needed to do anyway to swap my ticket for Top Dog/Underdog in late Sept. (as I will be in Ottawa on the date I originally picked) and then ordered a ticket for that evening.

I then ran home to deal with something.  I set out around 6:30.  I have to say the signs were not at all clear on the closest bus stop, but in fact the 72 bus was rerouted all the way over to Jones (because of Taste of the Danforth).  So incredibly frustrating.  I will say my patience for rerouting transit and generally making life miserable for transit riders is at an all time low, and I don't think Taste of Danforth and certainly not TIFF can justify screwing up these routes.  Anyway, I had to walk all the way up to Pape Station, where it seemed as if Line 2 was recovering from some mechanical problems.  I definitely was pretty stressed all the way out to High Park.  Once I got there it was quite a long walk, though that is nothing new.  I guess I finally arrived around 7:45, and all the best seats were taken.  I did manage to find a spot on top of one of the boulders on the side and it wasn't too bad, since I had brought a seat cushion with me!  I did have a somewhat obstructed view of the stage.  I do think I probably would have had better seats if the 72 had been running like normal, so that was a drag...

It was generally a fun production, though it felt like they compressed the action with the lovers a bit and really stretched out the performance of the (marginally competent) play within a play.  They may have cut a few of Bottom's lines, though he definitely had his chances to ham things up.  Perhaps the best moment for me was Titiana's speech chiding Oberon.  I think this may be the only straight Shakespeare on offer this summer, since Driftwood is doing this weird "best of" bits mixed in with personal recollections of what Shakespeare meant to the  Driftwood AD (perhaps not completely dissimilar to Brian Bedford's spoken word CD).  And Shakespeare in the Ruff is doing Richard III meets an alternative universe Richard III.  I'm not entirely sure why, but it will be playing at Withrow Park, and I expect I'll go.

I got back to my neighbourhood and there was just the tiniest sprinkle of rain, so I timed it pretty well, though I certainly had to walk a lot more than I had expected.

I thought it was going to rain much more than it actually did on Sat.  I definitely could have and probably should have biked.  Anyway, I did make it to the gym in the morning (though I skipped Thurs., when I probably should have pushed myself a bit more).  I swung by Robarts Library and dropped off some books and downloaded a handful of papers.  Then I went over to 401 Richmond.  I saw a few interesting things, though the pop-up exhibit on Ontario Place wasn't open, and I may have to go back next weekend.  We'll see.

I decided to skip the AGO, but I did peek into Bau-Xi Gallery.  Then I went over to the Textile Museum.  I think my timing was pretty good.  They were having a fabric sale, and I picked up a few ends for what be a third quilt (if I finally force myself to finish the second one, which is languishing at about 55% done).  They had quite an interesting exhibit on masks created by First Nations' artists, most of which were quite decorative but likely not actually that helpful against COVID.

Towanna Miller, Corona Covid, 2020

Don Kwan, Chinese Take Out Menu Mask, 2020

My transit pass had expired by this point, so I cut through City Hall and stumbled across Taste of Vietnam.  That was unexpected.

I spent some time at work but was a bit run-down by this point.  There was definitely something wrong with the subway, as there were people 5 or 6 deep on the platform at Union Station, but I managed to squeeze on and then jumped off at College, since the Gerrard streetcar was not as messed up as the 72 bus!  I went outside a few times to see if I could see the Perseids, but it was mostly overcast, and then when there was a break in the clouds I still couldn't see any meteors.  Disappointing to say the least...

Sunday I did a very short grocery run.  I had thought I could squeeze in some swimming at Jimmy Simpson, but the timing just didn't quite work out.  I then took my daughter over to the mall and got the first round of school supplies for the fall.  In between times, I wasted more than a little time deciding on what the next quilt might look like (almost certainly hexagons this time) and then whether I needed to order a cutting guide (yes!), and then what project I might tackle after that, given that I will have tons of fabric left over.  Maybe something like this:

I came reasonably close to heading over to the Paradise to see Eric Rohmer's first color film, La Collectionneuse, but the timing was a bit off (it was showing way too early) and I also wasn't thrilled about having to deal with the 72 yet again.  I do think I'll likely go tomorrow evening to see Hirozaku Kore-eda's Still Walking.  Sadly that means I will miss the swimming slot at Jimmy Simpson on Monday, though I should be able to make it on Wed.  (I guess I have to wait until the fall for Matty Eckler to return to a remotely reasonable schedule for lane swimming.  So frustrating!)

I did a bit of reading the rest of the day, though I do feel I probably ought to have gotten a bit more accomplished.  Maybe that is the wrong way of looking at things, however.

Low-Key Day

Yesterday (Sat.) was pretty overstuffed.  I did an almost full set over at the gym (and I did swim 12 laps Friday night), so I am getting pretty close to being back to full health.  Yea!  I then managed to get to the TMU Image Centre just after noon.  It was the last day for two exhibits.  One about water processing infrastructure, mostly featuring the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, which I saw at Doors Open several years ago and is certainly worth the visit.  So I bought the little book associated with that show.  

Katrin Faridani, Island Water Treatment Plant, 2022

The big show featured Jin-me Yoon.  I wasn't blown away by her photos but am still glad I dropped in.  She has a website covering pretty much all her work, including the new post-COVID pieces that were on display at TMU.

Jin-me Yoon, Oasis 1 (Time New Again), 2010

Then I rode over to the Distillery to check out Gilgamesh at Soulpepper.  It was interesting -- a weird hybrid of the story of Gilgamesh, combined with some details (perhaps a bit embellished) from the two lead actors' lives, as the setting kept switching back and forth between the legend and the two main characters in present day Toronto.  But in many ways this was just a vehicle designed to feature the real band, Moneka Arabic Jazz, that Ahmed Moneka leads.  While the other lead, Jesse Lavercombe, plays a mean jazz piano, I don't believe he is actually part of the band, and it isn't clear how often he sits in.  Anyway, it was entertaining and the backing music was excellent, even if the Gilgamesh story was maybe a bit thin compared to all the other elements.  There is a matinee today at 1:30, and then that's it.

I also stopped in briefly at the art galleries in the Distillery.  I saw this piece by Riopelle at the Corkin Gallery.  They didn't list any prices; they were available "Upon Request", which probably means it was close to six months' salary and not worth my time to inquire.  But it's nice to come across these pieces unexpectedly.

Jean-Paul Riopelle, Arche, 1958

I then ran back over to work for a few hours, then came home.  I was a bit weary, but went over to Dusk Dances at Withrow Park.  It's fun being part of such a communal event, even though I didn't do any of the group dancing at the beginning.  I guess more than anything it's events like this (or Shakespeare in the parks) that makes urban life worth the hassle and expense.  

Today, I could have gone to High Park for the Shakespeare event that Canadian Stage is putting on, but I'd like to take it a bit easy for once and will look into going next week once the weather forecast is more settled.  So far I have done the grocery run.  I probably should weed, but it's already feeling kind of warm, so maybe I'll do that this evening.  I think I'll read outside for a bit.  Then I'll probably run into work to deal with something that I can't do from here.  That's probably about it.  For some reason the Textile Museum seems to be closed, so I might go do that next weekend.  I also need to install this Canoo app on my phone and then probably do some weeding.

Tomorrow it's going to rain, so I'll probably mostly stay home and read (I have the day off!).  But then I found out about an intriguing play about autonomous trucks putting truckers out of business over at Summerworks (simply called Truck).  This runs Monday evening, and I guess I may run over and see that after all, though I think I'll try to take Line 2 all the way across rather than dealing with the streetcar.  (I already mentioned that I am going to hold off on another play, to catch it when it shows up at Buddies...)  Anyway, I will decide if I am definitely going to see Truck a bit later on.*  

So it isn't a completely relaxing weekend, but it's a bit less chaotic than most...

* By the time I made up my mind, Truck was sold out.  This is still a play in development, and maybe it will come back around in a more complete form in a year or two.  Here's hoping anyway.

TRB Follies

It's been a while since I've submitted a TRB paper, not least because my (current) job doesn't allow travel to conferences outside the Province.  Last year, I had a topic that I thought merited sending in to TRB Innovations but somehow just missed the deadline.  This time around I had the makings of a good paper, based on work that is going to be presented at TAC, which is hosted in Ottawa this fall, so technically in Province!  But as I dug into it, I realized that there was still quite a bit of work to do, since I hadn't quite cleaned up the data, and it needed a better weighting scheme.  Work and life kind of conspired to keep me pretty busy, and I didn't spend as much time in the evenings as I should have.  I guess going almost every evening to a Fringe show or a concert at Summer Music 2023 in the first half of July didn't help!  As the time to the deadline (Aug. 1 at midnight) ticked away, I then got sick and lost 3 or so days completely, and then there was one weekend my work laptop simply wouldn't start.  (The IT guys managed to jumpstart the battery once (and I backed up everything onto an external hard drive and a flashdrive!), but this has kept happening, and they just set me up with a new laptop that I am breaking in.  Super annoying.)

I guess five days before the deadline I finally got very serious and said to myself that if I was going to submit a paper, I needed to buckle down.  I did a lightning fast lit. review while dropping off a book at Robarts, then turned back to the data.  I got the weighting done in a day, then estimated a model to predict the respondents' race and/or ethnicity based on household structural factors and where they lived in the region.  I had a functioning model in just a few hours, which was great, but I futzed around with it for a second day (and even now I can see a few more improvements I would like to make).  I then applied this new model to synthesize the racial background of all the respondents of a much larger household travel survey.  The approach worked roughly as well as expected for looking at trip rates, but the mode choice results weren't quite as robust as I had hoped.  In some ways this is a useful finding and will probably lead to some interesting refinements before the TAC conference, but it was a little deflating finding this out on Aug. 1 as I was trying to actually write up the paper -- and make the case for accepting this at TRB.  I started wondering if the line of research on essential workers and their mode choices and decisions around teleworking (if that was even an option for them) might not have led to a more compelling story.  It was far too late to shift at that point, and I didn't have time to pull in anyone else to help on such a paper, so that will have to wait for another time.  So I was actually debating the wisdom of submitting the original paper at all, but I finally decided I might as well put it in, given I had worked so hard (and lost a lot of sleep).  I kind of pushed it all together and wrote up some frankly weak conclusions and got it into TRB format.  By this point, it was midnight Pacific Time.  I think in the end with having to reset my TRB password and deal with the on-line submission process, I went slightly over the limit (but the official limit might actually be three hours later, as it wasn't yet midnight in Hawaii...).  I didn't want to risk it, and went ahead and submitted, rather than doing any more last-minute editing.  I recall years and years ago, I missed the TRB deadline by only a few minutes and was locked out for the year.  That was a bitter lesson.  I think back then the deadline was midnight Eastern or Central Time, but I couldn't swear to it.  I really could have used another half-day to edit and elaborate one point I made at the end, but it's in.  It's not my best work for sure, but it's not bad considering I only fully dedicated a week of real work to it, though the overall approach has been kicking around my mind for some time.

One casualty of this last-minute push was that I had free tickets to Shakespeare in High Park (they are doing Midsummer's Night's Dream yet again), but I had to skip the show.  It's a shame, as the weather was actually great.  I haven't entirely decided, but I might check it out a bit later in August, even though I would have to pay this time around.  On the other hand, the seats in High Park are just so uncomfortable!

I wasn't even able to sleep in much on Aug. 2, as it was still a work day.  I actually biked to work and that made me feel a bit better.  I probably would barely have gotten out of bed had I worked from home...  I had tickets to see the National Youth Orchestra of Canada on their national tour.  I decided to go, though I had kind of expected to leave at intermission.  As it turned out, the piece I was most intrigued by (K. Smith's Glacial Titan) was going to be after the intermission.  I decided to stick around a bit longer and listen to that, and then I stayed for the whole show (including Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).  It was worth sticking it out, as they really played a high-energy version of Pictures that really filled Koerner Hall.  Then they did two choir-like encores.  (This is something I recall them doing a few years back the last time I saw NYOC on tour.)  On some of the stops, they played Morlock's My Name is Amanda Todd.  Given the composer's sudden and shocking death earlier this year, I had some hopes they would go ahead and add it to the Toronto concert, but they did not.  I have heard the piece a few years back, but think it is worth trying to hear it a second time.

I had really hoped to sleep in a bit and work from home on Thursday, but the laptop wouldn't start up at all, so I had to go in and confer with the IT guys.  Again, the bike ride in helped give me a bit of energy to get through the morning.  I thought I might check out the Gilgamesh show over at Soulpepper, but it was sold out.  I'll see about rush tickets over the weekend.  Instead, I went over to The Rex for the early set.  It was fun getting back into that, and I'll likely go see the Dave Clark 4 on a couple more Thursdays this month, though I hope that Alison Au makes the other gigs!  And maybe I'll check out the group with the Friday early set this month as well.  I'm going to try to get back to writing up my urban planning play, if I can track down all the pieces I have written so far.

I then dropped off a couple of books at Robarts and rode home.  For once, it wasn't dark when I arrived home.  I actually went over to the gym for a super short workout, mostly to get back into the habit and also to try to get under the hot water to try to break up the junk in my lungs (as I am still nowhere near 100% healthy).

Friday I will most likely go swimming, but only go for roughly half my normal routine.  Then Sat. I need to get over to the TMU Image Centre, as Sat. is literally the last day to see the spring/summer exhibits.  (I nearly missed them, which would have been unfortunate, but I did remember to look at their website just in time.)   Then I will see about rushing Gilgamesh, but I'm not going to be completely broken up if I don't see it.  I had planned on seeing something at Summerworks, but it turns out it is going to be remounted at Buddies in Bad Times, which is a more logical place to see the show (and certainly vastly easier for me to get to than the Theatre Centre), so that's what I will plan to do.  I'll have a post up fairly soon on my picks for the fall/winter theatre season, and I'll go into more details at that time.

I suppose I really ought to try to rest up this weekend and catch up a bit on the sleep I missed out on while getting in this last-minute TRB paper.  I need to weed the front lawn, and maybe I can pencil that in for Sunday.  Anyway, it's time for sleep.