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 inscribed 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.