Two Trips (and Taxes)

I have been particularly bad about updating the blog, but I had my reasons.  Two weeks ago, I was gone almost the entire week for a business trip.  In fact, I had to leave Sunday evening because the main reason for going was to drop in on the TransLink model users' group, which was Monday morning out in Vancouver!  I also really wanted to see Shakespeare Bash'd do their staged reading of Knight of the Burning Pestle.  So I pushed to get one of the latest flights that I could, which I think was 10 pm.  If the reading had been just a bit shorter or the Dundas streetcar ran a bit more on time, I might actually have run into MOCA, though I'm sure I'll have other opportunities before the new group show closes.  

As it turned out, I had a lot of time to kill at Pearson, so I worked a bit on a bid for the new transit vision for Surrey and eventually read a bit.  It was a game-time decision, but I took Nicholas Nickelby instead of Oliver Twist, in part because Oliver is somewhat shorter, and I thought it might be more likely I could just read that as part of my regular reading (and didn't need the boost of a long train or plane ride).  It might be just as well I did bring that for reasons I'll get into a bit later.  However, I really read very light on any of the plane rides, except for Tues. afternoon when I went off to SFO.  All the other times, I did my best to sleep on the plane.  I wouldn't say it was a wasted opportunity, but I just hadn't expected it to play out that way.

I got to Vancouver just after midnight, but it took forever to get off the plane and then get my luggage from the belt.  I decided not to risk running over to the Canada Line, since the last train was around 1 am.  I took a 5 minute cab ride to the hotel and crashed.  I think in the end, I left around 6:45 to try to get out to Sapperton (in New Westminster) by 8:30.  I actually had to take everything with me, since I was going to transfer to a downtown hotel after work.

The meeting went well, and I saw a lot of consultants I used to work with, though nearly all the modelling team joined since I left TransLink.  I actually managed to eat lunch with them.  Then I had a meeting at 3.  It took a very long time to get the wifi working, since in fact it was a largely virtual meeting.  Then I hung around for another hour or so, and met a former work colleague, since we were going to have dinner together downtown.  (I may have already mentioned that the weather was pretty overcast and in fact rained on and off all day.  Given that the eclipse wasn't going to be that special in Vancouver, no one bothered to go out to see it.  I was really sad to hear that the weather didn't cooperate much in Toronto either, and in fact the sky cleared up after the eclipse was over, though at least it got really dark and eerie.  Just in general, Toronto weather never cooperates for anything like this, though the partial eclipse in 2017 was an exception...)

Tues. I went over to the company offices, and I had a few phone calls to deal with.  I gave a lunch and learn on post-COVID forecasting.  Four people from TransLink showed up in person, and quite a number were on-line.  Then 3 of them were able to grab coffee afterwards, and we chatted about scenario forecasting and their new survey.  The weather was much nicer, and I took the Sea Bus over to North Vancouver and had dinner there.

Wed. I had a morning meeting quite close to the office, and then a 11:15 meeting at Metrotown in Burnaby.  I was a little early, so I just went a bit further on the Sky Train and took photos and videos of the view.  I do miss the views from Vancouver, which are among the best I've ever experienced.  

The second meeting also went well, then I had lunch in Metrotown.  While a lot of restaurants had changed, there was still a fast-food Indian place.  It was good, though certainly much spicier than I remembered!

I had the rest of the afternoon free, so I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Most of it wasn't all that interesting, though the had recently rehung a bunch of Emily Carr paintings.

I still had some time, so I went into the Bill Reid Gallery for the first time.  It's pretty small but focused on his art, as well as rotating through other First Nations artists.

Then I went over to catch the Amtrak down to Seattle.  It wasn't a bad trip, though it definitely shouldn't take as long as it does.  I managed to finish up a shortish novel (Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco).  In general, I was reading a lot more of The Decameron and very little Dickens, but I did want to see if I could just leave this somewhere in Seattle, which I did in the end.

Seattle was a bit more frantic.  I ended up meeting two mobility data reps and someone in our Seattle office.  Then I met up with my brother for an extended lunch at Spice King (an Indian place).  Then I went over to the Seattle Art Museum.  I was moderately excited that I had a second chance to see Jaune Quick-to-See Smith after seeing this massive retrospective at the Whitney last year.  It's possible that some pieces were left out, but this felt a bit easier to get through in one pass.

I think the exhibit only runs through mid May, so definitely check it out if you are near Seattle.  They also had a pretty nice Calder exhibit running as well.  I was a bit surprised that they didn't have any Mark Tobey on display.  I think this is the first time since I've started visiting that they didn't have anything of his on view.

After the museum, I went over to the Target, which is basically next door.  Had I realized that everything over at Pike's Place Market shut down at 5 sharp, I would probably have rearranged my visit slight.  I was a bit bummed that I didn't get a chance to look at any of the used book stores in the market (not that I had much space left in my bag!) and essentially all the restaurants closed up as well.  In the end, I found another Indian place, which was fine, but I would have preferred Thai or Chinese, since I had had Indian twice before in as many days!  After dinner, I grabbed my bag from the hotel and headed over to the airport.  The flight from Seattle to Detroit was uneventful, but in Detroit there was some issue with the plane and we got in an hour late.  At least customs was a breeze.  In an ideal world, I would have just taken the day off, but I had some work to do and to conduct a hiring interview.  Then I was seeing a concert at Roy Thompson Hall (a combination of The Four Seasons and The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires).  It was nice, but I was pretty tired and glad to get home and rest a bit.

In general the weekend was quite busy.  Sat. I saw a matinee performance of George Brown's production of As You Like It, then worked on taxes some more, then saw Shaniqua in Abstraction at Crow's Theatre.  (I wasn't that crazy about Shaniqua unfortunately.)  Then I did more taxes after I got home.  Sunday I met a friend to see El Terremoto at Tarragon, then wrapped up the evening with Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.  I really hadn't planned on seeing this, but I had to move the date from the middle of the next week to that weekend.  It was definitely interesting, and they made Walt to be a right bastard.  One super annoying thing on Sunday was that it appears my printer has died, which then made filing taxes extra complicated.  I had to file the US taxes after work on Monday, instead of around lunch time which had been my original plan.  This is by far the latest I have filed them, but I just wasn't able to wrap them up between all the travel and waiting around on some critical documents from my bank.  Oh well.  Hopefully, next year will be better.  For the Canadian taxes, my wife's are ready to go, and I am planning on wrapping my up this evening.

Monday was a relatively normal day, but Tuesday, I flew off midday to San Francisco.  Again, I got there far too early, and I mostly used the spare time to read.  I had actually managed to get halfway through The Decameron by this point.  Sadly, the flight was fairly delayed, and I had a small child behind me kicking my seat on a regular basis and an infant up in front that was crying a lot.  And we had turbulence for about 3 hours out of a 5.5 hour flight, so people were pretty cranky about not being able to get to the washrooms.  I was supposed to get there before a group of people flying in from Vancouver, but in the end I help them up for close to an hour, which was stressful all the way around.

We actually ran into SF for dinner, which was probably wise as there was nothing to eat in San Ramon that late in the evening.  Then we had two days of work, which aren't particularly interesting, aside from a very interesting opportunity that may manifest in LA.  (More on that at a more appropriate time.)  I was able to run by SF MOMA on Thurs.  Someone in San Ramon office was able to just drop me off at the hotel on his way home.  I was able to see almost the entire museum.  However, I couldn't get tickets to Yayoi Kusama's Infinite Love for Thurs.  I decided to shuffle Friday's agenda and go to SF MOMA first (instead of the Legion of Honor).  SF MOMA doesn't open until 10 am, however.  I ended up getting a Muni 1-day pass and took the cable car back and forth a bit, then went over to SFMOMA.  I managed to get a timed ticket for Infinite Love at 11.  I looked at a few rooms that I had hit too quickly on Thurs.  Infinite Love is pretty neat, especially the second room.  I've seen some of her infinity rooms before of course, but it was still worth it, especially the second room even though you don't get more than 2 minutes in each room!

If I had been just a bit quicker on the draw, I would have gotten a great photo from outside the Infinity Room before the door shut.  C'est dommage.  

Then I took the bus way out west to the Legion of Honor.  In addition to some pretty interesting paintings in the permanent collection, they have a special exhibit called Japanese Prints in Transition.

Gustave Caillebotte, Sunflowers along the Seine, ca. 1885-86

 

Masami Teraoka, 31 Flavors Invading Japan/French Vanilla, 1979

I was a bit ahead of schedule, in part because I managed to catch the 18 bus down the hill.  So I went down to Fulton and then into the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.  I didn't pay for the special exhibit this time.  Unfortunately, my phone battery completely died, so I didn't manage to take any photos.  I probably would have taken 10-15.  Oh well.  The ones that I cared the most about are in the books about the de Young that I own, but it is probably just as well that their Stuart Davis was not on view at the moment, as that would have been terribly aggravating (to not take a photo of it).

Because the phone died, I had to retrieve my charger from my luggage (in order to prove I was a member of the AGO with reciprocal privileges) instead of going straight on to the Asian Art Museum.  Well, I also hadn't had any lunch, so I grabbed a sandwich at a French bistro.  This meant that in the end, I got to the Asian Art Museum at 4:15 instead of 3:45 or so.  So I did see the Asian Art Museum, but it was a pretty rushed visit.  Fortunately, I have been there a couple of times before and a lot of it seemed pretty similar to previous visits.  I did snap a photo of Ganesha, as is my habit.

After all this, I didn't feel like walking around with my luggage, so I just caught the BART to SFO.  It was a good if somewhat overstuffed day trip.  Again, I had too much time at the airport, though security wasn't as much of a breeze this time around.  The trip back only takes about 4.5 hours, but I was in the same row as an infant.  The baby was fine for the first two hours, but then was fussy and crying most of the last 2+ hours, and then as we descended another young child across the aisle started crying.  So not an ideal flight, but still better than the flight to San Francisco.

I got through Customs and came straight home.  I actually had to go back way out west to the Theatre Centre to see Mad Madge, which is all about Margaret Cavendish, who was a female author during the English Restoration.  They did take quite a few liberties with her life, but it was quite entertaining.  I also managed to see the cherry blossoms at Robarts, which I generally prefer to making the trek out to High Park.

Then the day ended with a concert by Oumou Sangare.  This was quite a nice concert, very upbeat.  She managed to get the whole audience to their feet by the end, which is no small feat at Koerner Hall! 

I had planned to go over to Hamilton to see Lobby Hero, but I was just worn out with all the travel.*  I ended up going to the gym (late) and getting groceries instead.  No Frills officially closed on Sat. (due to the Ontario Line construction), which is incredibly sad and inconvenient for us.  So I will have to work extra hard to combine trips over the bridge with shopping at Food Basics.  The rest of the day was spent cleaning up computer files and working on taxes (and blogging...).

* It actually runs two more weeks, and I may go the last weekend, especially if I can spend most of the day at the Hamilton Library looking into some poetry books that are in their collection and not in TPL or Robarts!  So that's my tentative plan at the moment, but it may get derailed

Short(?) Post on Poetry

It's possible that I already put up a picture of my "poetry shelf," but I've done a bit of rearranging, and it's as good a time as any to show off a little.

Now in fact these are not all the poetry books in my collection by a long stretch.  What this is is essentially all of the poetry collections that I own published by Brick Books (up through early 2023), the individual Gary Snyder collections (displaced from the downstairs shelves when I picked up the LOA edition of his Collected Poems), Ralph Gustafson (with the 3 volume set of his Collected Poems off to the right with a spare copy of Vol. 1), several books by Lynn Lifshin (2 signed, I believe), P.K. Page's work (also signed) and several chapbooks by rob mcclennan.  Mostly the poetry I have picked up since 2018 or so.  I have a treasured copy of Margaret Atwood's Selected Poems I and II, signed by her at a reading, but they are out of frame in a different book case...  That's the same story with a thick Jim Harrison collection (not signed sadly).

Now the more established poets (at least in my personal canon) are on the downstairs shelves (to the right in the photo below).

So that would be Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Charles Simic, Faye Kicknosway, August Kleinzahler, Paul Blackburn, Philip Levin, Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, Merwin, Creeley, Berryman, Eliot, Lowell, Neruda, Lorca, Paz, etc.

Now I was starting to clean up downstairs, and pulled together a large pile of poetry books not on any shelf.  These are mostly books I picked up at the Strand on a trip to NYC in 2023, or at the Trinity or U Vic book sales this past fall, or books from Brick Books in the second half of 2023.

Sissman's Hello Darkness is indeed at the bottom of the stack, along with Delmore Schwartz, whom I thought I had in my collection but apparently not, so it was fortuitous indeed that I picked this up at the Strand.

I honestly don't quite know where they should go.  I'm not quite ready to start deaccessioning books just yet, so they'll probably just go upstairs for a while until I have a chance to read them.  I do want to start with Jan Conn's Peony Vertigo which has a stunning cover.  Anyway, I'm more likely to try to read them (and maybe restart this poetry project I was working on) now that they are in one place.

I was inspired to post this for two reasons.  First, it is subscription renewal season at Brick Books, and I am likely to reup.  Second, I saw the announcement about the Griffin Poetry Prize award ceremony held on June 5.  Sadly, this time around I hadn't heard of any of them (aside from Ben Lerner, whom I know as a novelist not a poet), so I am going to pass this year.  I did go last year, however, and managed to get signed copies of books by Ada Limón, Fanny Howe and the winning book, Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves.  (He dedicated this book to my son actually, and I am storing the book until he can claim it post-university...)  So I may well go again in the future but not this year.  Or probably not.  Curiosity may get the best of me, but I'm feeling a bit over-subscribed at the moment.

Getting Warmer

The cold snap seems to be over.  I was able to bike to work on Monday, though it was far from great.  There was still a fair bit of snow and slush, particularly near all the streetcar stops on King.  I believe it should rain on Tues., which will hopefully wash most of that away, and Wed. and Thurs. look pretty decent, though I probably won't ride on Wed. either since I need to meet my wife at the theatre.  We're seeing Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which should be a lot of fun.  At least for me.

I was pleased that The Heptameron showed up, and actually I was able to order a replacement for a Krazy Kat book of the dailies that never arrived.  It turned up, and I ordered a couple more, which just got dispatched, so I think I have the full run of dailies from 1921-1928.  I also have the "panoramic" dailies from 1920, though this is buried under a huge stack of art books, so I probably won't be reading any time soon, but at least I know where it is!  

I'm now debating going back in time but most of the collections of daily strips from the 1910s are out of print, and I'd have to get them on eBay and have them shipped to the States.  So possible, but not ideal.

I just finished Rushdie's Fury.  It's probably in my top 5 Rushdie novels, though the ending wasn't as strong as I had hoped.  There are actually some interesting parallels to Absurdistan (mostly when the main characters get trapped in somewhat pathetic revolutions in Third World countries).  I found it a bit droll that the narrator of Absurdistan, Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, compares himself to Oblomov.  This wasn't enough for me to drop Absurdistan and start reading Oblomov, but I do think I'll get around to Oblomov by the fall.  I'm going to get started on Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times much sooner, probably by the end of the week, at least partly because it is so much shorter.

One nice thing happened on Saturday, despite my having to get my boots out of the closet.  Sigh.  I was returning some books at the Jones library, and I saw a sign about eclipse glasses.  I didn't think they had any but asked anyway, and they were in stock, so I got a pair for me and a pair for my daughter.  Score!  (It turns out I will be in Vancouver on a business trip on the 8th, and the eclipse will be fairly pathetic that far west, not to mention the fact that it will probably be overcast and I don't think there will be an "eclipse break," but I'll bring the glasses anyway.  At least I did see a pretty good partial eclipse in 2017.) 

And I ran into an actor friend, who has a work gig in my new office building!  That was quite a surprise.  I'll see if we can grab lunch one of these days.  I also had heard that SFYS is going to be restarted for real this May (and in person!), so that is also something that cheered me up.  Of course, I'll be even more thrilled if my submission from many months back is accepted, but I'll be happy just knowing SFYS is back in business.

I managed to force myself to go to the gym on Sunday, despite not wanting to go.  Then I had planned to drop by the ROM, since it was free all weekend.  When I wandered by, the line was so, so long.  It was probably moving fairly quickly, but it clearly was going to take 30-45 minutes minimum to get inside, and I was downtown to see a Tafelmusik concert and just didn't have that time to spare.  So I went over to Robarts instead for a while, then on to the concert.

I don't want to write at length about it, but I just saw Canadian Stage announced their season.  This is by far the most interesting (to me) season I have seen in some time.  They clearly are returning to plays and much less dance and multi-media spectacle.  I wonder if they have a new AD.  I recall an interview with their AD from several years back, and he was almost entirely about spectacle, and I stopped going altogether. 

Now do I need to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf again?  No -- but to see Paul Gross, Martha Burns, Mac Fyfe and Hailey Gillis?  I can't pass that up.  I've seen Mac Fyfe in several things, plus some plays he directed.  I saw Martha Burns several years back.  I could have seen Gross as Lear at Stratford, but I was just all Lear-ed out...  Many of the other plays they are doing are tied to Shakespeare, but in interesting ways.  I think 1939 is probably the most intriguing, but Fat Ham looks worth seeing also.  I'd probably pass on Playing Shylock, but we'll see.  I'm even planning on going to High Park to see them do Hamlet, despite the extra hard seats, since the cast looks just amazing.  I will see if I can take my son, though I don't know how often he'll be back in Toronto this summer.

Last summer, I had thought seriously about checking out The Mahabharata at Shaw, but I just couldn't swing it, so I'll go now.  As I said, this season really fits me quite well, which is good, as I am generally not all that interested in Tarragon or Soulpepper these days, with a few honourable exceptions.

Today, after work I was able to switch the bank my gym takes the monthly fees from, which is an important step before I can close down that account and consolidate everything with a new bank.  I dropped off the Keith Haring book, which I've had out for many, many months (since just a short time after the cyber-attack in fact).  Now I just need to juggle the books I have out at Robarts, since I don't want to get hit with any late fees.  Most astonishing, no one was at Matty Eckler pool, so I had the whole thing to myself and got my laps in early.  That was quite nice.

Oh, I almost forgot.  One of the stairs going into the basement had broken.  In fact, we already had a handyman work on this exact riser before, but obviously the fix didn't take.  It took some time, but we finally got contractors over on Friday morning.  In fact, they showed up an hour early, which was quite a surprise, but they said that they could just fix the one riser, whereas other contractors insisted on recapping the whole staircase.  They basically quoted me a relatively low fee for an immediate repair, and I took them up on it, and they had it fixed within an hour.  How long will this repair last is a good question, but at least for now we can go up and down into the basement without peril, which is quite useful on laundry days... 

So generally some good things were happening over the weekend and early in the week, and I will try to hang onto my good cheer as the weather continues to warm up.  Ciao!

Lost Things

Some days I really wonder whether I will ever be able to straighten up.  Fortunately, I have largely moved into the digital realm, buying far, far fewer books and CDs than I used to and almost no DVDs (as it is so rare that I sit down and watch one), but the habit of acquisitiveness is hard to break.  I did buy a couple of CDs (jazz and blues) when I simply couldn't listen to them any other way.  I also have a strong preference for reading books in a physical copy even though I am becoming more and more ok with the idea that the "storage copies" can be digital. But some books just are not available at the library. 

Most recently I ordered a copy of The Heptaméron by Marguerite de Navarre.  I would have thought I owned this already, but after a bit of digging around and checking my Amazon account for past orders, I guess I didn't.  Why am I reading The Heptaméron, you ask?  Obviously because I want to pair it with The Decameron...  It turns out that Boccaccio was writing about the plague, but de Navarre simply had her storytellers escaping from flood waters, so perhaps not quite as apocalyptic.  (In fact, The Heptaméron was directly inspired by Boccaccio...)  After a bit of digging, I did turn up my copy of The Decameron, though not before learning that there was a new edition by the same translator.*  What was a bit droll was that he was revising his previous translation and only found a few lines that really needed to change, but he added close to 100 pages of notes!  While the egotism on display here is a bit off-putting, it does mean that I didn't have to get the new edition, since I am mostly interested in the stories themselves, not the scholarly apparatus.

Anyway, my compulsive side has taken over, and I decided I really ought to get at least partway into The Decameron before I start in on Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and Rosenblum's These Days are Numbered, both of which are set during a modern plague.  In fact, depending on how far I get by April, I might take The Decameron along on my flights out west, to fill in any flying time not taken up by Dupont's The American Fiancée or Oliver Twist.  If it turns out I start having to fly out to California on a semi-regular basis, I'll probably tackle a few of the longer novels left on my list, namely Fontane's Before the Storm and Tolstoy's War and Peace.  There are a few other really long novels I have yet to start, but those are the highest priority.

While I was down digging around in boxes of books in the basement, I found McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City of course, which I had wanted to locate a few months back.  However, I also found (and brought up) Ellington's Invisible Man, which I might read in the late summer, as well as a few non-fiction books including Beyond the Neon Lights, Nights in the Big City and a box set of Stephen Jay Gould books on evolution.  No idea when I will find the time to read them, but at least I know where they are.

Every so often I go to play a CD or DVD, and it is not in its case.  I have a very vague idea where these may be, buried in stacks and stacks of DVDs with back-up data on them.  Not too helpful obviously.  I really need to clean out my office, particularly as this will help with tax season!, and then take a week or two to go through these stacks and stacks of DVDs to put them in some kind of order.  In most cases, these were things I was watching or listening to either in Vancouver right before the move to Toronto or the move to this house, which means they have been misplaced for many, many years.  Sigh.  

I actually decided to buckle down and start watching some of the DVDs I own, starting with documentaries, specifically Planet Earth.  Wouldn't you know that was something I must have started watching with the kids in Vancouver and never got back around to it, so the first disc isn't in the case?  Super frustrating.  I should have better luck with Cosmos, where I know where the new series is, but I might have to find a binder with the original series, which I want to watch first.  I'm hoping that is also the same binder with Connections, which was a very interesting popular science series from my childhood!

So anyway, I have quite a bit of work ahead of me, but I think getting through taxes will take highest priority.  Double sigh.

* I also have easy access to Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.  I'd like to find the time to read this, after The Decameron and The Heptaméron.  I read this back in university, so it really has been a while.  I got a kick out of it back then, and hopefully I would feel pretty much the same now.  I don't know if I really can get to this in 2024, but certainly by early 2025.  To sort of round out this return to things I read (or should have read) in university (also see this post), I think maybe in 2025 or 2026, I'll reread Chaucer and Malory.

Cranky Again

Last week was generally a pretty good one, and of course I didn't have time to write.  I actually biked in to work every day, and even biked downtown on Sat.  However, the forecasts of late have been getting fairly useless.  There was no indication that it would rain, and rather hard at that, Thurs. evening.  I got completely soaked.  In fact, Friday morning also got off to a very bad start, as I couldn't find my keys for a long time (and was late to work) because I had left them in my coat, which was still drying in the mud room.  Not great.  But on the whole, last week was pretty good.

This week has been a lot colder, and there were even some snap flurries today (again not in the forecast!), though it doesn't look like the snow has stuck around.  I did bike in Monday and Tuesday, neither of which was at all enjoyable, and just in general the return to winter conditions has put me in a bad mood.

I'm also very upset that I had so much trouble with insurance paying for a prescription, though I think this may actually be my fault for trying to use the wrong card.  Still it just added to an extremely frustrating day/evening.  I had tried twice to go to the library to get free "eclipse glasses" and I just missed out by a pair by a few minutes at the City Hall Library.  I also just missed out on ordering a couple of CDs from Dusty Groove, since I really can't conduct non-work transactions at work.  (I mean it's a reasonable rule, but it does make me wonder if I should work from home more so that I could jump on these sorts of opportunities on my break(s).)

But fundamentally I am cold and sick of it being cold when last week it seemed winter was over.  It just makes it that much harder to carry on.

There are some things to look forward to fortunately.  I am planning a few trips that are work related.  I'll be going to Vancouver and then Seattle in April.  Then to California the following week, and I should be able to take one day vacation in San Francisco.  I should be able to connect with a few former colleagues and friends, and I am looking forward to that.  And also trying to carve out a bit of time to see the museums in each city.  (Now I do wish the California trip was moved to late May in part because I have to miss out on an interesting "secret gig" by Skye Wallace but more importantly I'll be missing many of the days that my son is in town, visiting from Ottawa.  Given that he'll be in Ottawa all summer, the time starts feeling that much more precious.)

I haven't actually seen a lot of theatre lately, though that changes fairly soon.  I have tickets for Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead next week.  I had to do a lot of juggling, but will manage to see a Hnath play (on the Death of Walt Disney) at Soulpepper and then some other concerts all fitted around these trips.  I'm just starting to see if I can fit in a few screenings at TIFF.  While in general, I find TIFF does not do nearly enough screenings of the classics, compared to its pre-pandemic line-up, I've managed to see a few things lately.  I'll just have to write about that separately.  While they don't have quite enough films either, I would say that in terms of the overall experience, I prefer going to Paradise on Bloor.  I caught Kurosawa's Dreams there and then High and Low a couple of weeks after that.  In terms of new releases, I saw Drive-Away Dolls and thought that was amusing, though it never was trying to be more than a B-Movie.

I just finished Carol Shields' Swann.  There were parts I liked a fair bit, though I didn't like the portrait of the academic who also happened to be a petty thief, and then the plot of the last chapter descended into pure ludicrousness and frankly ruined the book for me.  It won't show up on my best of list after all.  But I'm enjoying Rushdie's Fury quite a bit, even if I do find the main character's separation from his wife to be largely inexplicable.*  It will likely make the list, and probably I.B. Singer's Scum, which reads almost like a Joseph Roth novel (which is in my view a good thing).  I imagine I will be able to get through some longer books on these West Coast flights.  I'm currently imagining taking Dupont's The American Fiancée and Dickens' Oliver Twist on the April trips, along with a few shorter books I could dispense with along the way.  Then I would tackle Dombey and Son on the next train ride to Ottawa or Montreal, though I am not sure when that might be.

Anyway, I really need it to warm up again before I recover my good nature, which is generally is pretty fragile, even in the best of times.  Hopefully the warmer weather returns next week...

* I had sort of assumed that this was about his short marriage to Padma Lakshmi, but it is much more likely to be about the breakdown of his relationship with wife #3, Elizabeth West, where apparently the split arose because he wanted to move to the U.S. (which is indeed what the narrator of Fury does, abandoning his wife and child).  I guess we can benefit from his messed-up life, as it ultimately results in some fine novels...

Pretty Good Weekend

The weather certainly could have been nicer (it's warm enough for this time of year but very overcast and Sat. was drizzly), but otherwise it was a pretty good weekend.

Sat. I did get back to the gym.  I've barely been able to go once a week (and swimming once a week), whereas weeks I can make it three or even four times to the gym and swimming I just feel so much more virtuous.  I really should have made it over on Thurs., but I was just a bit sick of getting wet, and I guess I feel that because I am biking more than I normally would (in Feb.!), I don't need to really push it.

Then my wife and I went to the AGO to see the Keith Haring exhibit on Saturday.  This is only on for two more weekend (past this past weekend), and I didn't want to go when it was going to be super crowded.  I think I've taken it in enough times, having gone in four times or so.

A friend had told me there was a small exhibit on Rembrandt and his circle, so we asked about that.  It was down on the main floor.

Rembrandt (Attributed), A Scholar by Candlelight, ca. 1628

My wife headed back home, but I had quite a bit left to do on Sat.  First, I went over to MEC.  I had to replace the front light on my bike.  It had been stolen on Friday!  This makes the 2nd time in recent memory I've had the bike light stolen when parked on the street (plus a bungy cord stolen from the garage at work!).  Toronto the Good, my ass!  (Overall, Friday was ok, except for the theft.  I saw Drive-Away Dolls, then headed over to the Rex to see the Botos Brothers for a while.)

Since I was close to 401 Richmond, I ran through there, literally taking less than 10 minutes to pop into a few galleries.  Then I caught the Spadina replacement bus.  I had exactly one minute left in the two-hour free transfer window!  I was a bit worried that because we were on the bus and not the streetcar I would be forced to enter the station through the fare gates (and pay a full fare), which is how things work at Bathurst.  However, Spadina does have connected bus bays, which I guess makes sense for people taking the bus north.  I had just never come through the station that way before.

I got over to the Paradise Theatre with about 15 minutes to spare.  I was there to see Kurosawa's High and Low.  I enjoyed this quite a bit, though I was much more interested in the second half of the film, which is a police procedural where the police are out running around the city.

Then I went for dinner at an Ethiopean place nearby.  This is becoming a bit of a tradition, though normally I eat first, then catch an evening film at the Paradise.  This time I was at a matinee, so ate afterwards.

Typically, I would go home after that, but I was catching a concert at 8 at Roy Thompson Hall!  So I dropped in at Robarts and got about 45 minutes of work in, before it was time to head down to the concert.

The concert was interesting.  It was the combined forces of two orchestras (NAC and OSQ) and then the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir came in for the last movement of Jacques Hétu's Fifth Symphony.  In general, I thought Hétu's Fifth Symphony was pretty interesting, though I didn't care for the last movement much at all.

Sunday I got a bit of work done, then the grocery shopping.  I made dinner for Monday (or what I thought I would be eating on Monday until I realized I have a concert to go to!) in the slow cooker.  I also just had enough time to go over to Matty Eckler and get my swimming session in, so that definitely made me feel accomplished.  Then I ran back over to Robarts to wrap up some additional work.

I finally wrapped up Drabble's The Ice Age this weekend.  I also finished Steinbeck's East of Eden.  I don't think this is a great book (structurally too repetitive and also people just drop out of the main story when they aren't useful for the plot), but it had some memorable characters, particularly the servant Lee, who was completely written out of the movie apparently!  This is probably the longest book I've read in quite some time.  The longest book (not book series) prior to this was probably rereading Crime and Punishment and then Mann's The Magic Mountain before that.

I would have liked to gotten through a bit more actual work this weekend, so I don't have so much to do on Monday, but on the whole it was a pretty good weekend.

Library Site Back Up

Technically, the TPL site has been back up for a couple of weeks, but it was pretty useless.  You still couldn't check your account info or track down where physical copies of books actually were.  The staff had been told these core features would be restored at the end of the month, though they, like most of us, were pretty skeptical.  However, I am glad to report that the site is back, more or less, though it is still very buggy.  It keeps timing out on different functions, particularly trying to place holds.  But I imagine it will stabilize fairly soon, though of course the latent demand to use the TPL site may keep crashing it for a while.

At any rate, I was over at Pape/Danforth just the other day, returning the Zora Neale Hurston short story collection, which I sadly didn't care much for, and I saw River Mumma, so I grabbed that.  Perhaps ironically, now that the site is back up, there are due dates on books again, though the library doesn't actually charge late fees, so it is a bit toothless.  Still, I will move River Mumma up ahead of Rushdie's Fury, so I expect to get to it reasonably soon.

I was having a lot of trouble putting a hold on Our Country Friends, though I see Pape/Danforth and Jones both have copies, so I probably should be able to snag it fairly soon, but now that due dates are "working" again, I might as well wait at least until I get through Swann and start in on River Mumma.

In terms of other things, I have one DVD out (Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet), which I will try to return after watching the film, maybe this weekend, Swann, River Mumma and the Keith Haring catalogue, which I have had out for months, so I will definitely try to get the Haring back in short order.

Anyway, this was good news for the people who really rely on the library, and hopefully there will not be any further attacks and denial of service!  The downtime was really a drag, even though it impacted me less, given that I have access to books from Robarts.

Edit (3/2): Because the TPL site was lagging so badly, I assumed that my hold on Our Country Friends did not go through.  In fact, the hold was accepted, but I wasn't able to "pause" the hold, so this is already on its way over to Riverdale, and I'll be needing to pick it up shortly.  I'll insert it somewhere into my new reading list, perhaps right after Lermontov but after River Mumma and Rushdie's Fury.

So Much Art!

I haven't decided whether to circle back and add some art to this post or do it properly with a post on each exhibit.  It would be better to take the second route, but that greatly increases the chances I won't get around to it for some time.  At any rate, as I described here, last weekend the trip to Buffalo ran pretty smoothly right up until the very end, when I got stuck in Buffalo for an extra 90 minutes.  This time around the very frustrating aspects of the trip had already been revealed when the Kronos Quartet concert was cancelled,* and I had to rearrange my plans earlier in the week.  But at least that meant I wasn't scrambling like the last time I was in Montreal.  I had managed to get the hotel stay down to one night and I had booked Megabus back from Montreal to Toronto (and I also had figured out where to catch Megabus!).

In general, the trip went very smoothly.  We got to Kingston a bit early and had time to stretch our legs, etc.  We got into Ottawa maybe 10 minutes ahead of schedule.  I managed to catch the LRT over to Rideau station and then ran over to the National Gallery.  I spent the first 30 minutes going through the Riopelle exhibit.  I liked it, especially the fact they delved a bit more into his early career and then had a few pieces from late in his career.  (The Mitchelle/Riopelle show at the AGO was almost entirely focused on the middle of his career.)  Then I went through the other parts of the museum, trying to ensure I still had 20 minutes at the end to go back through the Riopelle for a second time.  Then I met a guy I used to work with at HDR, and we grabbed tea and spent some time catching up.  He was able to drop me off at the Via station where I had a two hour ride up to Montreal.

It was pretty cold in Montreal, so I walked very quickly over to the hotel and checked in.  In the morning, I wrote down a completely wild dream (that was more or less about trying to get tickets to a Fringe show, but I think I must have been in Edinburgh, not Toronto).  I had my (free) breakfast at the hotel, and then walked over to the Museum of Fine Arts.  This time it was open when it was supposed to be open.  I talked very briefly with the guy at the counter about Mahfouz (he had seen my copy of Fountain and Tomb and wanted to know where to start with Mahfouz -- ultimately I recommended Midaq Alley).

Anyway, I headed straight up to the Georgia O'Keefe and Henry Moore exhibit.  I spent close to half an hour just in the first room, which had lots of small, very detailed paintings.  This was a very clever exhibit, even if the pairing was not immediately apparent, and I thought even the organization of the exhibit was very good.  My mother would have just loved it, especially the middle section where they had recreated both O'Keefe's and Moore's studios.  In the end I think I spent an hour and a half going through the exhibit carefully.  I think if there had been any more, I might have felt over-stuffed.  Then I had just about another hour and a half to look at all the other parts of the museum.  The Pop Art exhibit was still on in the basement, and I also had time to look at the Quebec artist wing (including a room dedicated to Riopelle!) and of course the gift shop.  I had been switching between English and my very limited French but was able to conduct the transaction in the gift shop completely in French.  I bought a copy of the O'Keefe-Moore catalogue and the clerk slipped in a booklet of the French translation of all the text in the catalogue.  (The exhibit was actually organized by a US museum, who also printed the books and did not create a French version, so I guess this was their workaround.)  The only really strange thing about the catalogue is that there isn't a checklist of the exhibition, and indeed I can tell that at least one Moore ink drawing wasn't on view, as well as one of O'Keefe's pueblo church paintings.  But I enjoyed my time there very much.

I didn't stumble across any good looking restaurants on my way over to Megabus, so I just ended up grabbing an egg and bagel sandwich, which I think is what I did last time as well, though I vaguely remember finding a hole-in-the-wall place that served pizza.  The bus left on time and got into Toronto roughly on time as well, so that was quite a relief, even though the food court pickings were pretty slim by the time I got there.

In terms of what I read on this long trip, I did get through about 400 pages of East of Eden.  While I think he is probably overdoing it in terms of two sets of brothers who both seem to be embodying the Cain and Abel dynamic, there are definitely some interesting sections.  It does make me a bit more likely to try to read The Grapes of Wrath next winter.  While I expect at some point I'll get to all his shorter novels, if I get through the door-stoppers East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, on top of the several shorter novels I already read, that covers all the essential Steinbeck, aside just possibly from The Winter of Our Discontent.

I would almost certainly have gotten through all of East of Eden, but I actually read three other books as well!  I read William Trevor's Fools of Fortune.  The first half or so is pretty good, but then the resolution of the story is absolutely stupid.  I refuse to belief that a man driven into exile (and only to Italy, not across the world!) would not eventually have sent for his wife (or almost-wife) and daughter to join him.  In general, I don't ever seem to like William Trevor's longer works.  It remains to be seen if I like his short stories, but I am starting to think I won't care much for them, and the shelf space could be given over to any number of other authors...  I actually left Fools of Fortune in the Ottawa train station, though no idea if anyone will pick it up or not.  Had I been staying at a hostel, I would have left it in the common room.

I read Jeanette Winterson's Weight (a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles) on the train to Montreal, and indeed I left this in the Montreal train station.  Given the time we came in, this is even less likely to have found a home.  C'est la vie.  I was pretty happy to have divested myself of two short books from my huge pile of books to read.

I finished up Mahfouz's Fountain and Tomb early on the bus ride back to Toronto.  I haven't entirely decided, but this is likely to end up in the Little Free Library out front, even though I did enjoy it a fair bit.  I just can't quite picture reading it a second time...

So all in all, quite a successful trip, and I just need to download (and back up!) all the photos from this weekend and then put some of the best up on the blog.

Edit (02/26): Not that it matters that much, but now my immediate next novels are a bit different.  I need to wrap up East of Eden (which despite its length is pretty darn readable), then Carol Shields's Swann, de Maistre's Journey Around My Room, Rushdie's Fury, Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, and Zalika Reid-Benta's River Mumma.  I have a handful of poetry books to read in the next 10 days, and after that I'm not totally sure.  I am contemplating the newish novel about lockdown in Toronto, Rosenblum's These Days Are Numbered.  If I do read that, I'll probably also read Shteyngart's Our Country Friends.  I'm hoping that in only a few more days the TPL website will be searchable again.  If not, I'll have to put River Mumma and Our Country Friends off to the side, unless they happen to be available at Robarts or at one of the college libraries.  I'll find out late next week I guess.

* I'm definitely having second and third thoughts about not travelling out to Berkeley for this amazing concert where they were doing Different Trains and possibly Black Angels (though I had seen them do Black Angels previously).  Had things moved a lot faster on getting hired at my new job, I would have been able to justify the trip.  Oh well.  I just wish I knew what they were going to perform in Toronto (aside from something with Tanya Tagaq).

Bumps on the Way Back from Buffalo

I am going to try to put together a proper post on the Buffalo trip, focusing on how the Albright-Knox expansion has changed the overall experience, which indeed was the only reason I was down in Buffalo in the first place.  However, I want to use this post to talk about the times trips went wrong, sometimes disastrously so, though not catastrophically (so far).

Early on in my travelling career, I often managed to get home despite bad weather.  In one case (though I have forgotten the precise details), I had to sprint through the airport and just managed to board a connecting flight just as the gate was closing.  Then after moving to Toronto, I had a period where things started going wrong more often.  I got food poisoning, almost certainly from bad yogurt in the Regina airport, and ended up having to cancel a trip to NYC.  I had planned to visit my father with my children in tow, and some freak snowstorm forced a cancellation of that trip.  That was a pretty bad day, and I still to this day despise the school administrators that schedule "spring break" at such a stupid time at the beginning of March or even late Feb.!  When clearly it should be at the very tail end of March or early April.  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  While I am not (exactly) superstitious, that doesn't mean I don't make sure to seek out the statues of Ganesh (the patron saint of travellers) when I am in a museum with an Asian art wing (generally that would be Chicago's Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Fine Arts Museum or of course the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.  I even have a small statuette of Ganesh on my desk at home (and a much smaller version that I have ironically misplaced for the moment...)

Thinking over some recent trips and the way things went wrong, in one case the blame fell on me, in one case the blame could be evenly split between me and Google, and the rest were clearly out of my control.  

The first case was going down to Cleveland in 2015 (not long after relocating to Toronto in fact) to see a blockbuster show about painters painting gardens.  I only hinted in this post at just how stressful it was after leaving the museum and realizing that the main bus line wasn't going to take me back to the Greyhound station.  What I really ought to have done was to get someone at the information desk to order me a cab, but they were a bit busy and I just figured it wouldn't be an issue.  I will not make this mistake again, and I was more than ready to ask for help in Buffalo yesterday, though in the end I didn't need it.  This was quite stressful, and I ended up getting a cab and getting to the station with only a relatively small margin of error.  The main issue was I needed to get back to Buffalo to catch another Greyhound bus to Toronto!

The second case was a relatively recent trip to New York.  This trip in general was a bit cursed.  I went there specifically to see The Fixx in concert.  The keyboard player broke his hand, and the concert was cancelled the day of.  I was not notified through a really strange series of issues, starting with the way that the Newark Airport was incredibly stingy about wi-fi for passengers that had already arrived and were waiting in the luggage area.  Then I couldn't get the free wi-fi in Times Square to work.  And absolutely shamefully, no one at the concert hall could be bothered to stick up a paper sign on the door that the concert was called off (and indeed their electronic marquee kept saying The Fixx was on that evening)!  It was incredibly frustrating.  Then I saw Stoppard's Arcadia the next evening.  It was ok, but not an amazing production, and, had I known everything, I wouldn't have made the trip, despite enjoying the museums and picking up some great books at the Strand.  At any rate, on my last morning in NYC, I decided I wanted to start at Grand Central, then do a bit of an architecture tour, walking all the way down to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and then walking back up to Penn Station.  I suppose if I had another dollar on my transit card, I would have taken the subway for at least one of the legs.  All of this would have been fine, but when I got over to Penn Station, I had missed one of the NJ Transit trains to Newark Airport by 5 minutes and then the next one was about a 40 minute wait!  Google had given me the weekday schedule, but the weekend schedule was quite different!  I was absolutely livid, but really didn't have any alternative but to wait.  The only saving grace was that Porter was all by itself in a separate part of Newark Airport and the security line was very short.  Otherwise, I might well have missed my flight.  Or rather I might have if the flight left on time, but there was a problem with the airplane and a replacement jet had to be found, and I think in the end, we left close to 2 or even 3 hours late.  So definitely not the best trip on many levels.

Now I'll move on to some examples of things that were far outside my control.

When I went to Detroit last Oct. (and it appears I have not done a good job at all of posting anything from the visit to the DIA and only just hint at the outlines of the trip here), the gypsy cab I picked up at the Greyhound station didn't take me to the correct destination.  I wanted to go to the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art first and then would walk up to the DIA.  The "cabbie" dropped me off at the wrong one, and the contemporary art museum, while it was supposed to be open late, actually was closed to the public and was throwing a members' gala, which pissed me off.  Getting to the hotel after wrapping up the DIA visit was quite a struggle.  I had checked the website for where to get transit passes.  One of the stores no longer existed and the other one said that they absolutely did not sell day passes there.  So that was a major issue.  I ended up on this LRT that ran down Woodward Ave., and I only finally figured out that it was free (whether it is always free or this is a temporary promotion isn't clear), so this is another area where the city of Detroit is not doing itself any favors with such poor/flawed communication on the internet.  I made it downtown, and then just missed another bus and so walked to the hotel.  I arranged for a cab in the morning, since I wasn't staying particularly close to the Greyhound station, and the bus was leaving fairly early.  I definitely did not want to spend an extra day in Detroit!  Anyway, the cab simply never showed up.  I asked a few people pulling up into the parking lot whether they were the driver, but none of them were.  In fact, one of them was a hotel employee.  So I went back to the front desk, and they called around, trying to find the missing cab, and finally ordered up another gypsy cab.  Again, I made it back to Greyhound but not by very much.  I'm simply not going to go back to Detroit unless I have access to a car, and most likely I won't be going back at all.  Maybe if the train between Detroit and Toronto is restarted I would consider it again.  At the moment, you have to get back over to Windsor, and, quite stupidly, the Windsor-Detroit tunnel bus doesn't actually make a stop at the Windsor Via station.

Art museum stupidities were behind problems with my last trip to Montreal.  I had everything worked out for an overnight visit to see the Marisol exhibit at the Montreal Fine Arts Museum and then to see a Shostakovich concert that evening.  By the time I showed up (but not when I had booked everything), the museum decided to have their fund raising gala on the Sat. and the entire museum was closed off.  (Honestly, I find this completely inexcusable to not have this in the middle of the week and to disrupt the tourist trade so much...)  That was bad enough, but then they weren't going to reopen until Sunday around noon.  I can't remember all the details, but my train back was 11:30 or noon, so that meant I would miss the Marisol.  As if that weren't bad enough, Via picked that weekend to upgrade its booking software, so it was literally impossible to get through and change reservations!  After the concert (which itself was stressful as the proper venue address wasn't on the tickets), I called and the upgrades still hadn't been completed.  At one point, I was on hold for over an hour only to find that they still couldn't fix my booking as the upgrades still hadn't been completed.  When I finally did get through, the price they wanted for a 1 pm or 4 pm train back to Toronto was ridiculous.  Ultimately, I booked a bus ride back and tried to switch the ticket to a date in February, losing quite a bit of money in the process.*  I enjoyed the Marisol show (and indeed there were a couple of pieces that weren't going to be in the Buffalo edition of the show oddly enough), but the whole thing was annoying and down to the very poor decision making on the part of the museum.

Which brings me to the recent trip down to Buffalo.  In general, it went quite smoothly until the very end.  We actually got down to border and through immigrations a little early, and I had time to catch the local bus up to the Albright-Knox.  I'll write about that part of the trip a little later.  At any rate, it only took 2.5 hours to see everything in the museum, while I had mentally budgeted 4 or 5 hours, so I decided I probably didn't need to cab it back to the Greyhound station and could save money on cab fare.  I actually slipped across the road to check out a small art museum, called the Burchfield Penney, connected to Buffalo State University.  I'd never been in before, so checked that out for a bit over a half hour.  I had planned to eat a late lunch, and in fact the cafe at the Burchfield Penney looked pretty good but was overcrowded.  The Subway where I usually ate before or after visiting the Albright-Knox was gone and the restaurant next to that was also permanently closed, so I ended up walking down Elmwood Ave. for a few blocks.  I found a decent-looking Greek place that also had falafel wraps, so I got one of those.  While I still had quite a bit of time, the bus schedule is particularly crap on the weekends.  The bus only runs ever 40 minutes on Sat., and every 50 minutes on Sun.  If you miss the bus, it is really quite a tragedy.  Even weekday service isn't much better (every 20 minutes), but at that frequency, I would have gone a few more blocks (and run into a few more interesting restaurants) and probably popped into a record store I had seen on the trip up.  Fortunately, once my wrap was ready I ran over to the bus stop, and the bus pulled up in about 2 more minutes, so that was lucky timing.  I got back to the Greyhound station and had basically an hour to kill.  The station was always a bit rundown, but it is considerably worse since COVID hit.  The Tim Horton's has closed, and nothing has replaced it.  

The bathrooms really do appear to be outfitted with prison-style facilities.  The number of street people with nothing better to do than hang out at the station and beg has swelled.  As I was waiting, there was some huge argument, leading to a fight, and the cops finally chased everyone without a ticket out of the station.  At this point, the delays kicked in because the bus back to Toronto had broken down, and they were waiting on another bus from somewhere else before we could leave.  In the end, I think the bus left Buffalo 90 minutes late, and the driver made up about 30 minutes, assisted greatly by the fact that there are no stops on the route after getting through Canadian customs!  So certainly not a major disruption compared to these other disruptions, but still a bit annoying and certainly out of my control.  I spent just a short time walking around downtown Buffalo (it was quite frigid that day), and it seems even more desolate than before, with that rundown mall from previous trips (see the tail end of this post) completely closed and even the Rite Aid near the public library having vanished.  Perhaps surprisingly, I did see one sign of gentrification, as there was a slightly upscale grocery store just a few blocks from the Greyhound station, but overall, Buffalo just feels very rundown and deserted.  I really can't imagine spending the night there, and I was quite happy to get out of Buffalo, even if over an hour late.

I've certainly had my share of airplane troubles recently.  In addition to the problem of getting back from Newark, I was on a flight that tried to take off twice and simply couldn't make it off the ground!  I'm blanking on the exact details, but I think that may have been leaving Boston and heading to New York.  Obviously, I eventually made it wherever I was headed.  In general, these all rank as minor or major annoyances, but so far, knock wood, nothing truly disastrous has occurred during my travels.

* Sadly, lightning is about to strike twice, because I got word a while back that the Kronos Quartet concert in February was cancelled (probably due to low ticket sales astonishingly enough).  There is no point in staying over two nights in Montreal, so I need to cancel one night in the hotel, and then see what Via charges for a late afternoon train (instead of a Monday morning train I have booked).  But I expect at this point, after the change fees, the ticket will have no value, and I'll end up busing it back again.  I need to try to deal with this on Monday (or Tuesday if it is impossible to get anything done on Family Day).

Edit (02-20): I was fortunately able to drop down from two nights to only one night in the hotel in Montreal, even though technically the hotel didn't need to make the change.  Sadly, Via was not as accommodating, and my Monday morning ticket is now completely worthless.  The fare for different trips between Montreal and Toronto on Sunday were all generally over $150, and the ones that meshed with my schedule the best were $200.  (Just not a fan of the variable pricing that Via gets up to!)  So I will end up busing it to Ottawa, taking a very short Via trip to Montreal and then busing it back the next day after seeing the museum.  That is a lot of time spent on buses, so I will bring a particularly long book for the rides (probably Steinbeck's East of Eden) and try to remember to bring a power adapter for my iPod.  Not that I expect to make this exact trip any time soon, but the next really long train or bus ride I will probably take a Dickens novel (possibly Dombey and Son) and the one after that might be Mutis's Maqroll series.

Moving On

I believe I hinted at this in previous posts, but I had been looking to switch jobs for quite some time.  More than anything, I think it came down to disagreements with senior management, which was vastly compounded by the steady degradation of the working environment.  It took a very long time, principally because most Canadian consultancies are pretty risk-adverse and didn't want to make senior hires unless they had oodles and oodles of work lined up.  Of course, now I have to help win new work, though I do have the advantage that this firm is truly organized internationally, so there is no issue of putting a Canadian on a U.S. project and vice versa.  Other companies claim that this is possible, but the reality is that there are massive challenges of working across borders.  So that's quite exciting.  

While the first week has been almost entirely devoted to training and just getting set up with new equipment, I have put in my input on a few leads already and "added value" in raising a few issues that I thought would be important to show the client we had sufficient understanding of the project.  Hopefully, we will win at least a few of these jobs and things will continue to go well.  There are always quirks at new places.  I find it rather annoying that they don't allow transferring files from any USB device, as I have a lot of large, critical files that I do need to transfer over.  There is an IT policy on how to get an exception, so I am following that.  It does, however, mean that I can't rely on listening to music off of a USB, and I also don't want to upload everything onto the share drive, as I am quite sure they have a policy against that.  At some point, I may start trying to listen in to Youtube (and restore my playlists yet again), but for the moment, I am compromising and listening to the many albums I've purchased through Bandcamp.  The silver lining is I hadn't listened to a lot of this music more than once or twice, so it all feels pretty new to me.  I also really hate the whole hot-desking concept.  I have a lot of reference material (books and journals) and there is nowhere to store them, since we are expected to just put our stuff in a tiny locker.  This whole concept just cuts against the idea of deep rootedness that I think is actually essential to succeed, and at some point the organizational experts will realize what a huge mistake they have made, but the damage has been done.  I'm going to keep pushing for a permanent space, i.e. to be an exception to the rule, but it will probably take a couple of months before I can make this happen.  At any rate, the good outweighs the bad, and I hope it stays that way for many years to come.

I did have to stay quite late at my last week of work.  Even now I have a few outstanding items, but I think in general the transition wasn't so bad, at least from my perspective.

I was able to go swimming twice this week, and I actually biked a couple of times (and maybe two or three times the previous week as I was winding things down at my former job), which is pretty incredible, considering it is the middle of February!  Now, we have gotten snow.  Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but enough to be uncomfortable when you are no longer used to it.  One small irony is that I had left my bike at the bike shop for a minor adjustment to stop the brakes from squealing.  I had planned on picking it up after work on Thurs., but clearly wasn't interested in trying to ride home in the super snowy conditions.  I think I will just need to pick it up no matter what Friday after work, even if I just have to walk it home.

I've continued seeing movies on a regular basis.  Frustratingly, I am being shut out of TIFF screenings all the time, and just in general am not impressed at how few older films they show compared to the past.  Being a member does not seem worth it, and I cannot see renewing my membership next year.  Instead, I go to The Paradise a fair bit, though I wish they showed even more movies, and Carlton Cinema for their $5 retro movies.  I don't go to The Fox that often, as it really feels too far out of the way, but I did catch The Holdovers there around the holidays.  I almost never check The Revue website, as that is just way too far out of the way, and I'd rather not know what I am missing.  Anyway, returning to The Paradise and Carlton, recently I have seen Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kurosawa's Dreams and, just last night, Amelie.  A pretty decent run.

Reading is a mixed bag as always.  I'm finding I really don't care for Zora Neale Hurston's early short stories.  I'm pretty close to bailing, though maybe I will read the rediscovered ones set in Harlem.  Veličković's Lodgers was ok.  Almost all the "action" takes place in a museum in Sarajevo where the director and his family have taken shelter from the siege.  While the tone is quite different, this reminded me of one of the few passages I still recall from Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, which also takes place in a museum.  While I likely will never reread The Tin Drum, I might chase down that chapter.  I'm nearly done with Vincen's The Empty Page.  The narrator is (intentionally) kind of tedious, and the closest equivalent I can come up with is Machado De Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner.  But next week I should be able to start in on (and likely finish) Pym's Excellent Women, and I think it will be a combination of Rushdie (probably starting with Fury) and then finishing up whatever is left of Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica.  The plan is to take the bus out to Buffalo on Sat. (to see the Albright-Knox Museum) and read this on the journey.  I'm a little nervous that they will have had more snow, and the roads won't be clear, but in general, it should be fine.  I don't see any more snow in the forecast for Saturday.  Hopefully, all goes well with that, which would be a good way to round out the week.  And I'll have Monday to recover, as it is a stat. holiday (Family Day), and indeed my son is back from Ottawa, so we may be able to do something fun together.

Library News

It would almost be funny if it weren't so annoying.  Just the other day the Star ran an article with the breathless headline that the TPL website was back up.  If you actually read the article, it acknowledged that the website is still almost completely useless, pointing users to things that had never been taken down, like Overdrive.  In fact, the on-site computers are still turned off and the library catalog and hold system (and indeed museum pass* booking system!) are all off-line and will be at least through Feb.  

As it happens, I went into my local branch yesterday.  While I don't really need any more books to divert me from the current reading list, which already has a few last-minute additions (principally Lermontov and Goncharov), I had noticed a fairly new collection of short stories by Zora Neal Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.  What is notable about this collection is that there are 4 lost stories set in Harlem, which is forcing a revision to the claim that Hurston was a purely "country" writer.  It was still on the shelf, so I decided to grab it.  I chatted briefly with the librarian, and she said there had been weekly delays on hitting the internal progress markers.  She didn't think things would be back to normal until mid to late March, which sounds about right.  I guess the only saving grace for a person like me with too many books out (Shields's Swann and now Crooked Stick) is that nothing is actually due until the system is back up and running.  But I do wish it were already back up...

Over at the still functioning library system, i.e. Robarts, I was able to get a few art books back on time.  I decided to check out Lodgers ✓ by Nenad Veličković, which at least is pretty short.  I also borrowed Once Upon a Time (Bomb) by Manlio Argueta.**  I couldn't even really reconstruct how I cam across these books, but it was probably indirectly through the New York Times Book Review.  I'm pretty sure that Lodgers was advertised at the back of Drago Jančar's Joyce's Pupil, though exactly how I came across Joyce's Pupil, I'm not so sure.

Incidentally, this past edition of NYTBR was pretty deadly in terms of adding too much on top of an already teetering pile of books.  There was a piece on the fiction of Lima, Peru (sorry, I know it's behind a paywall...).  From that I took that I really ought to read César Vallejo's Human Poems ✓.  Also, A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón.  All of these are at Robarts, and I think I'll be able to tackle Vallejo's poems, Lodgers and Lost City Radio.  A World for Julius is simply too long for me to try to read in two weeks, so this one will have to wait for me to see if TPL does have a copy somewhere in the system and borrow it that way.  Anyway, certainly enough (reading) distractions for one week.

Actually, that reminds me that I think I'll be able to stop by the Music Library on Thurs. and borrow a few CDs.  It used to be alumni borrowers could only listen to CDs in the library itself, but at some point after COVID that restriction was lifted.  Score!  Obviously, it won't take me nearly as long to get through a few jazz and classical CDs as it would to read a couple of novels and some poetry...

Edit (02/05): I was able to finish up McCarthy's The Group (and I'll write a bit about it later), but I have not launched into Pym's Excellent Women yet.  I had two Robarts books (which still carry hefty late fees!).  They're on the short side, but I probably really do need to hunker down and just read this weekend.  I will technically be between jobs, so that may help.  Anyway, I was able to return a few books back to Robarts this evening, but couldn't help myself and borrowed The Empty Book by Josefina Vicens, which is apparently a quite short novel about the difficulties of writing a novel.  It might be appropriate, though I am a bit more blocked with my drama writing, not least because there is no great outlet for it at the moment.  So I have 3 books from Robarts before I return to Pym and then most likely A Hero of Our Time and then probably a Rushdie novel (and perhaps O'Brien's America Fantastica on the trip to Buffalo).  Always so much reading on the go.

* This one is a particularly bitter blow, since it was only a few months into some new on-line system only a few months before the attack.  They had a system where physical museum passes were handed out that had been in place for years and worked well overall.  I think it was pure stubbornness on the management's part not to revert back to the old system, esp. once it became clear the recovery was going to be a many-month process. 

** While nowhere near as frustrating, Robart's copy of Argueta's Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District is in limbo, or rather has been removed from the shelves and is in an apparently month-long process to migrate it to the Downsview storage facility.  I keep hoping that it will pop up as available at Downsview, but it looks like I have longer to wait.  Not that I don't have plenty to read in the meantime...