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...

So Much Out-of-Home Time

I have been going non-stop to so many events lately.  I will get a bit of a breather next week, but even then I'll probably be out three days in the middle of the week!

I think this mostly started with the three days of the We Quit Theatre residency at Buddies.  In the end, I really liked I am Not Your Spaniel a lot but didn't care much for the other two.  I tried something new at least.

I saw a few movies reaching back to Taxi Driver (the first time ever!) at Carlton, Exotica at TIFF (with Atom Egoyan in attendance!) and Blow-Up at Paradise.  While Blow-Up was interesting, the main character was a total jerk, and I couldn't believe how stupidly the whole movie ended.  I also was having a bit of trouble understanding how Vanessa Redgrave's character tracked him down in the first place and (SPOILERS) managed to break into his loft and steal every negative he owned in the space of a few minutes.  (More SPOILERS)  Maybe this was supposed to be a bigger plot point as in a more conventional thriller, but I don't recall him actually telling Sarah Miles that the person he saw killed was shot, so maybe she was actually in on the cover-up.  Dun-dun-duuuun. That would likely have been a more interesting plot twist than ending with the tennis scene in the park.  One thing that really spoiled the movie-going experience for me was that some jerk sat next to me and not very long into the movie managed to spill his drink on me!

I ended up moving my tickets for Theatre Rusticle's The Tempest two times.  It was getting a bit ridiculous.  However, I'm glad I did, since Sunday (tomorrow) is one of the only convenient times for me to see Better Living over at Alumnae.  I'm actually meeting a friend for that.

Then I had to switch The Tempest from Sat. to Thurs.  On Sat. I had tickets (that I didn't mark on the calendar!) to see a UT Symphony doing some modern pieces as well as Shostakovich's Symphony 9.  As it turned out I enjoyed that vastly more than Theatre Rusticle.  Basically, they have completely subordinated plot to movements and sound design.  There are five female actors who are playing all the parts in The Tempest, but in fact 2 or 3 different actors play Prospero at different times, 2 or 3 play Miranda, at least 2 play Caliban and pretty much the whole group chants Ariel's lines simultaneously.  I think The Tempest already suffers severely from a real lack of dramatic urgency as Prospero is never actually in any danger whatsoever, but this just drained any interest in the characters as actual bone fide characters as opposed to just symbols or something.  To top it all off, I thought this was supposed to be 2 hours, but then they announced it would be 2 hours and 45 minutes, which is just too self-indulgent.  I wasn't feeling it and I left at intermission, which is still something I rarely do (but maybe should do more often).

I also saw Diana and Casey at Soulpepper.  It was ok, but not really my thing.  I'm not a royalist at heart.*  I also found a few elements of the play to be predictable and/or emotionally manipulative.  That said, the acting was solid.  I had thought I had left my scarf there (and was dreading calling up the box office to go through their lost and found stuff), but it turned up at home.  Whew.

Probably the single biggest downside of being out and about so much is that it makes it very hard to go to the gym and at a time when my commitment to going is already on the low side.  I simply slept in this morning, but I should be able to make it tomorrow morning before I head over to meet my friend.  I think next week, since I decided to pull back just slightly and not go out on Tues. evening, that I can probably get my swimming laps in on that evening.

I am very close to wrapping up Everett's Half an Inch of Water.  I expect I'll get through it Sunday evening.  Unfortunately, most of the stories do not live up to the first one, so this is no longer likely to make my top 10 or 15 books of the year list after all.  I am halfway through McCarthy's The Group.  Sometimes it is interesting and sometimes a bit dreary.  The bit about having to go see a doctor for female birth control feels almost inserted (pun intended) for its shock value.  I am a bit bummed that I was looking up some reviews of the book for something else, and someone went ahead and included a couple of major spoilers, so that was not cool.

I'll be reading Pym's Excellent Women after that and Carol Shields' Swann.  I think Swann will be the last of the library books that needs to be returned.  I really hope that the on-line TPL (and hold system) is working by this point.  It has been a real drag for it to be completely offline.  Anyway, after this, I suspect it will be Rushdie's Fury and possibly Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time.  In the meantime, I'm trying to read more short stories and get through Xavier de Maistre's Voyage Around My Room, which is also on the short side.

* Though I do have to admit as a child, I tried to wake up early and watch Charles and Diana get married in 1981.  I don't know why we couldn't just set an alarm, but for whatever reason I slept through it.  I find it baffling now that I would have cared.  I do remember when Princess Diana was making a visit to Northwestern in 1996, and the campus was just all a-twitter.  Many people tried to camp out to see her walking around, criss-crossing the campus.  I'm sure I would have watched for a while if she had passed by, but I certainly didn't go out of my way to find her.  I was pretty much done with royalty by that point.

The Book Chill

One of the major downsides of this big chill is that I don't even pretend I am going to bike in.  It will warm up a bit next week (hopefully!), but I'm not quite sure how much.  If the forecast is accurate, then Wed., Fri. and next Sat. might all be potential biking weather, though I just hope we don't have slush on the streets, as I don't bike when it is at all cold and slippery.

Anyway, the silver lining, as it were, is that I am reading more on the TTC (to partly make up for cutting my gym time in half where I read while on the exercise bikes).  I managed to get through Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday.  I found myself less interested in it as it went on, since it is so digressive and there are no meaningful breaks at all in the text.  I guess it is marginally easier to follow the dialogue (than Saramago, whose writing style is even more off-putting) but that's only because pretty much the entire book is supposedly an incredibly long monologue by the title character, Austerlitz.  I looked ahead and Rings of Saturn has paragraph breaks at least!

I'm about 2/3rd through Maxwell's The Chateau and I should wrap this up reasonably soon.  There are very faint parallels with Troubles (a large number of people interacting at a guest house) but here the French characters are recovering from WWII rather than heading into the Irish uprising with the troubles still to come.  In some respects this is a very mild version of the Ugly American stereotype with an American couple coming to France and trying to soak up culture and learn the language but constantly getting crossed up in minor cross-cultural understandings.  Somewhere around the 200 page mark I kind of lost interest in this couple (who like all somewhat annoying and clueless tourists have overstayed their welcome) and wish the novel was much shorter.  I should be able to wrap this up in a few more days and then will launch into Mary McCarthy's The Group.  I expect this will be a bit more compelling, but one never knows.

Perhaps appropriately, given the weather, I am just about one-third of the way through Drabble's The Ice Age, which is set in the 70s when Britain seemed to turn inward and the economic forecast was rather bleak. Plus ça change...

When I am at the gym, I am reading Percival Everett's Half an Inch of Water, which is a book of short stories set out in the West, largely featuring Black and Native American characters.  So far the stories are exceeding my expectations.  (I'm not a big fan of "Westerns"...)

Not entirely sure what will be next this winter.  I will get to Pym's Excellent Women soon, but that is quite short and I already read it once, so it shan't take too long.  Probably Rushdie will be after that, and I just need to decide whether to let Victory City jump the queue over Fury.  Maybe O'Brien's America Fantastica, especially on the Buffalo bus trip, with East of Eden reserved for the Ottawa trip in late Feb.  I am hoping we are mostly out of the deep chill by then...

The Big Chill

It has been so bloody cold this week.  While I realize it was much colder in Edmonton and Winnipeg* and even Chicago, it is definitely unpleasant and probably even life-threatening if I stayed out in this long enough.  I have cut my trips to the gym and the swimming pool roughly in half.  I have been able to force myself to go roughly once a week to each, but only barely.  I'm gearing up to head out again, but I'm not looking forward to it at all.  It is supposed to warm up slightly next week.  I certainly hope so!

* It may be worth noting that We Quit Theatre is a company based out of Winnipeg, but they have a one week residency at Buddies in Bad Times, ending tomorrow in fact.  I wasn't crazy about 805-4821, which was literally the actor projecting written text using an overhead projector(!) so that was a crazy amount of reading.  But I Am Your Spaniel was great, a high-low show exploring the text of Midsummer's Night's Dream and throwing in Queer theory, some Marxian concepts and even a huge dog puppet.  I'm off to see Passion Play tomorrow.  I hope it is closer in spirit to I Am Your Spaniel.