Shaw Weekend

The weather was much better on Sat. than on Sun. when I was to head out to the Shaw Festival.  Still, Sat. morning was pretty overcast and even a bit chilly for Aug., so I was leaning towards ditching the company picnic altogether.  I got a late start at the gym and then did an abbreviated workout.  I wasn't too proud of that, but at least I didn't ditch it all together after getting off track last weekend.  (And on Thurs. I did squeeze in 18 laps at the pool.)  I did get on the stationary bikes and managed to skim through the script for Wohl's American Hero, which is a pretty grim comedy about the impact of late capitalism on average workers at a sandwich shop akin to Subway.

But the weather did improve a lot on Sat., and I decided at more or less the last minute I would try to bike up to Sherway Gardens, which was where the company picnic was being held.  Getting up to the Don Valley wasn't that bad, but then it was really unpleasant after that as Laird is a very high speed road without a bike lane.  Just in general trying to bike in what used to be East York (or Scarborough) is so dangerous.  So I wasn't in the best of moods when I finally made it there.  I did eat a bit, and chatted a bit, then had to turn back around and head to downtown on Mt. Pleasant Rd., which was generally better aside from tangling with a bus at one point.

I made it back downtown and had about 25 minutes before The Odyssey.  Some minor SPOILERS if you have been under a rock and not read any reviews of Nolan's version of The Odyssey.

SPOILERS

I decided to go over to Robarts and drop off American Hero and pick up a couple of poetry books on the hold shelf.  I also changed into a different shirt, as the one I was wearing was quite sweaty by this point.  I made it back to Yonge and Dundas and up to the theatre (up on the 4th floor) with about 5 minutes to spare, though of course there were 10 minutes of previews.  I liked the fact that Nolan went into some of the slightly obscure details, including the fact that Odysseus warned the men not to slaughter the cattle of Helios the Sun God, but they did anyway after they had been stuck on the island for weeks (it is much more clear in Homer that Zeus was the one keeping them trapped, but Nolan really, really downplays the gods in his movie (I suppose because he thought making this like Clash of the Titans would be too kitschy, but I do think it was a misstep)).  I also liked the detail that one of the suitors managed to break into the storeroom where the arms were stored and get some over to the rest of the suitors before he was killed.  What I really didn't like was Odysseus taking on all of the suitors on his own, like a superhero almost, whereas in Homer, Telemachus is much more active and kills many of the suitors,* and they also have a lot of help from the swineherd (who is not a blinded bystander) and one more loyal servant, the ox-herder, I believe.**  Nolan wants this ending, as he can't imagine an ending where Odysseus manages to keep his throne without Athena stepping in and putting down the uprising of the suitors' families, as actually happens in The Odyssey.  So Nolan has imposed a far more "realistic" ending on but at the cost of rewriting the Odyssey completely (and not very convincingly as Telemachus still doesn't seem remotely ready to rule Ithaca).  And as I think I mentioned already, this side-steps the whole question of Penelope bringing up the bed riddle as a final test, which in the poem sets the stage for his true homecoming, where here he has no intention of spending any time in Ithaca.  So I didn't like that at all, as I thought it undercut the entire point of The Odyssey.  I also wasn't too thrilled about how he changed the Calypso story around a fair bit, again I think mostly to avoid having to have the gods turn up and force Calypso to give Odysseus up.  He absolutely wanted this to be a human-focused epic, which seems pretty bizarre given the source material.

Afterwards, I went over to this Asian (mostly Thai) festival at Yonge-Dundas Square.  There were very few safe vegetarian options, so I just got some ice cream.  I went over to BMV and looked around a bit, though didn't see anything I really wanted.  Then I biked down to work and did a few hours scanning stuff, then finally went home.

Sunday I had to wake up fairly early, then biked downtown.  It was overcast and sprinkling just a bit, but I was glad to have my bike available at the end of the day.  The bus ride to Niagara-on-the-Lake was smooth, and we got there a bit early.  Almost too early, as the place I often eat at wasn't going to start serving sandwiches for another 45 minutes.  I wandered around downtown a bit, reminding myself why I dislike Niagara-on-the-Lake so much (it is tacky, geared entirely towards tourists (and lower class tourists at that), and there are no safe ways to cross the street in the downtown).  I did find a decent Thai place and ate there, then went to the theatre early to keep reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.  

It's kind of hard to review Heartbreak House.  I will say I thought the director's vision was not a good one, very gimmicky and not at all respectful of the play.  I did enjoy seeing Tom Rooney as the enigmatic, eccentric captain, and his two daughters were entertaining as well, though their parts were shallow (and the pining brother-in-law was not welcome).  

 
But the play itself is just not very good (with much of it taken up with quips about why women shouldn't be just as ruthless in pursuing marriage as men were in ruining others (including their partners) in business -- and one of the final twists in the sphere of romance was truly stomach-curdling), and it was certainly undermined by the director and his decision to have two servants shouting out the stage directions, which reminded me unfavourably of Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice, which I absolutely hated when Canadian Stage put it on.  Shaw wants to be as witty as Oscar Wilde, but most of his witticisms don't land, and he is just obsessed with Shakespeare (and how in his own mind he is a much better playwright than Shakespeare).  We get it G.B., but you simply aren't better than Shakespeare.

I'm very torn because there are four(!) potential plays of interest at Shaw next season, but I don't have any intention of coming back that often (and yet I really don't want to stay overnight in Niagara-on-the-Lake).  They are doing Arsenic and Old Lace, which I've never seen as a stage production; I think I did pass a chance to see it in Hamilton, so I may well pass on it again, given the challenges in getting there.  Then Shaw's Arms and the Man, which I may have seen but it would have been 20+ years ago.  Then the Goblins are doing Pygmalion.  This will surely be fun, but it does seem just an excuse to make an appearance at Shaw.  I don't think Pygmalion is even one of Shaw's five best works...  Finally, Stoppard's Jumpers.  While I think I would prefer to see Travesties again (though I am not willing to go to Raleigh to see it!), I will almost certainly go see this, making the trek out there next year at least once.  If I knew for certain which of these would transfer to the Harbourfront, that would help with my planning, but I don't think they know yet.  My money would be on some musical (South Pacific?) and Deathtrap, but I might get lucky and they bring Arsenic and Old Lace to Toronto.  So most likely, I will go see Jumpers and call it a season, but if I can combine it with the Goblins, I might stay overnight, as much as I would prefer to avoid that.

The trip back wasn't too bad, though we got snarled in traffic (esp. on the Gardiner), and it took 2.5 hours, which is pretty typical, unfortunately.  I made it through all but the last 20 pages of my book, and those I finished up while eating dinner at Union Station (I was pretty famished).  I enjoyed it a fair bit, though it is hardly classic literature.  From the reviews of the sequel (this is part of a trilogy!), there is a huge cliff-hanger at the end, so I probably ought to hold off until the third book is published.  I have a fair bit of poetry to work through, and I think the next books I will read are Thien's The Book of Records, Harvey's Orbital and then Giovanni's Room (whenever it turns up at the library).

Overall, not a bad trip, though I certainly wish the play had been better.  I also managed to ruin yet another backpack, trying to carry too much stuff back home from the grocery store.  Sigh.  It looks like there is going to be a lot of rain this week, and I've decided to pass on Squeeze after all, and I will probably have to move the BBQ (ideally to Friday but if there are too many objections, then I will see about the following week).

 

* The death of the disloyal maids is strongly hinted at, but we don't see any of them die on-screen, and we certainly don't have Telemachus string them all up.  Again, Nolan wants Telemachus's hands to be (unrealistically) free of blood in order to set up his future rule, and again, I think this does serious violence to meaning of The Odyssey to the point the movie is visually compelling epic but, in the end, it really is just not The Odyssey.

** I certainly can't prove it, but the four of them together slaughtering all the suitors (with Odysseus and Telemachus as the main killing machines) in Homer's version reminded me a great deal of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his tales of the nearly unstoppable killing machine John Carter of Mars.  I really would not at all be surprised if he was borrowing from Homer in those novels.

Fall Reading

I wasn't sure I wanted to reread Station Eleven (even for Book Club), but once I got back into it, it really was quite an engaging read.  I'm sure it helped that I had a lot of time to focus on it in (out to Stratford and back) unlike most of my reading time, which is very broken up.  This may well rank as the best book I reread in 2026, but Under the Net may also put in a strong claim if I actually manage to reread it this year.

I enjoyed Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala more than I expected.  It's a bit of a hard book to spoil.  Taking it's lead from Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reader finds out immediately that the narrator (a Cuban boy named Raul) is also the reincarnation of the Greek priestess Cassandra, so can foresee everything (including his own death in Angola) and yet will never be believed.  It tied together well with my recent foray into Greek literature, but it is much more closely bound up with The Iliad, as well as Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Euripides's The Trojan Women.  It did feel a bit longer than it had to be, but overall it was an engaging and fairly quick read.

I thought I would give up on Montimore's Ooona Out of Order right away, but it's just compelling enough that I plan on finishing it after all.  It clearly is inspired by Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, but comes up with a scheme where our time traveler leaps into a different part of her life every New Year's Eve (which just happens to also be her birthday) and stays there for the entire year, which allows her much more time to be deliberate and learn which stocks to pick and sports teams to bet on, and so becomes incredibly wealthy (and yet very lonely as her relationships don't survive the toll that her leaps through time impose on them).  

Tomorrow I should make a lot of progress in The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, hopefully finishing it up.  I was panicking slightly when I couldn't renew it, but fortunately the person with a hold on the book got a different copy, and I was able to renew my loan, though this will be the last time.  It turns out this is part of a trilogy (slightly undercutting the tension when we know Amina will inevitably triumph, but that isn't exactly a state secret for this type of book).  It looks like the 2nd one just came out, though I will push that off a bit, maybe waiting for the third to be published and read them back to back.

I'm struggling a bit with All That Monk Business, but now that I am through The Odyssey, Station Eleven and The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (soon), I can probably just press on and get it crossed off. 

This is what I said I was reading next, and this is certainly a good (if overly ambitious) plan: McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Amis's The Information, Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.  However, losing some books (my own and my son's) has caused me to reconsider a few things.  I had to replace my son's copy of Baldwin's Another Country (tracking down a cheap paperback at BMV*), and I'd kind of like to read that before he comes home to reclaim it, but I would prefer to read it in order, which means reading Giovanni's Room first (which would have the added benefit of allowing me to listen in to the Secret Life of Books podcast episode on this novel).  Oddly, there is quite a wait list at the library for Giovanni's Room, so I'll see when it turns up.  I do have it in the LOA edition of Baldwin's Early Novels and Stories, but I just find reading on the train so much easier with a stand-alone paperback.  So this may be a limited detour into Baldwin (and I really ought to read some of his essays as well, but that is probably biting off a bit much even for me).  

I'm also a lot more interested in looking into Herodotus and Thucydides than I was before.  I did rescue the Landmark editions of both (and hope I don't regret that), but these aren't the best actual translations, according to many.  I think the Oxford Herodotus is the way to go and will be reordering that soon.  I was leaning towards the Oxford Thucydides as well, but so many reviewers are pointing to a much newer Cambridge edition translated by Jeremy Mynott, that I might go in that direction (though I have put a hold on the Oxford edition just to copy the notes out).  Neither TPL or (more surprisingly) Robarts have this in stock, so if I want to read it, I would need to order it.  I'm on the fence over a copy I found from a Boston book seller.  Given how large and heavy the book is, I think I would have to eat the shipping fees, rather than have my wife bring it back from Chicago.  On the other hand, I am just not that likely to actually read it this year or next, so maybe I should just hold off.  (I would say I am marginally more likely to actually read Herodotus's Histories.

 

* I also had PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep replaced, but it was sent to Chicago.  I'm actually a bit glad it was sent there rather than to Toronto, as I thought I had just misplaced it here in the house...

Life Comes Slowly Back to Order

There are so many things I would like to commit to paper (or the Interwebs, I suppose), but I am pressed for time yet again.  I will say that as I knock off a few tasks (and finalizing the Fringe accounting was a big one), it gets easier to do other things, including whatever I am supposed to be up to at work.

Last week there were quite a few visits from contractors.  I think Friday we had the most people come in, replacing the furnace and then the water heater, though certainly Monday was close.  Monday morning a couple of guys came by to clean out the ducts.  They hadn't been quite clear on what they needed to do, which included blowing forced air down every vent in the house, even in the upstairs bedrooms, and then running this plastic tube out to their truck.  It definitely felt like a scene out of Brazil!  

More importantly, I didn't realize that the front door would need to be open, and I didn't have time to track down the cats and put them in a cage.  I was definitely freaking out, though ultimately we found Rho hiding in a corner in the study and Toby was hiding in an upstairs closet.  Then there was another moment, where we knew where Toby was but Rho had moved to a different hiding place.  But they both turned up.*

Then there was a lot of back and forth over whether the insurer would sign off on the contents list on Monday.  In the end, we agreed on the items on the list, but I would do my best to get the value updated and back to him in a couple of days (which I still haven't managed to do but it is close), and he agreed to sign off on the removal order.  Then I checked and someone did show up with a truck around 3 pm and cleared off the deck and took the refrigerator out of the basement.  (I was a little worried the refrigerator wasn't on the list, but it is there.)  It's getting a bit easier to accept the loss now that I don't have to look at it.

Also, I had really wanted to throw a BBQ for the Fringe cast, and I had set the date for Tues.  So I was a bit panicked that I would have to push it back yet again if the deck was occupied with all my stuff.  Anyway, it all worked out, and I ran off to get more food and drink and some charcoal at the mall.

The BBQ was pretty fun, though people actually showed up early, and I really wasn't ready.  I may discuss this a bit more down the line.  I have just finished the accounts, and we made $5300 from ticket sales and the costs were almost exactly $4300, not counting the stipend I guaranteed the actors.  Taking that into account, I lost $300, but really this is so much better than the last Fringe outing.  I might even be able to get $50 for the table I bought, bringing the loss to $250, which is almost nothing these days.

I've been making decent progress on the scanning of stuff and re-ripping a bunch of data CDs that were salvaged from the wreckage.  It's a bit much though, and my brain makes it hard to move on to the next thing until these tasks are done.  Still, I am finding some ways to entertain myself in the meantime.

Last weekend was incredibly busy.  On Sat. I took the GO train to Stratford to see Guys and Dolls.  It rained most of the day, but it was a fairly light rain and it didn't really spoil my trip, aside from not seeing Art in the Park.  I did, however, see a swan on the river, which I haven't seen in years. 

I took the bus back, managing to finish Station Eleven on the way.

Sunday was a trip out to Sobey Stadium near York University to see Wang Chung and Howard Jones.  I'll write more about that in a separate post.

I am probably going to see Coyote vs. Acme tonight over at Carlton. Then Sat., I think I am going to bail on the work picnic and go out to Vaughan instead to see The Odyssey in IMAX before it is too late.  Sunday I am off to Niagara-on-the-Lake to see a Shaw play, Heartbreak House.  Unfortunately, the reviews make it sound like the director just doesn't know what he is doing (or perhaps more accurately kind of resents the prominence Shaw gets at his namesake festival).  I think there's a pretty good chance I will finish up The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi on the way there and back.

I'm a bit torn between seeing Sheep in the Box at Paradise and going to see Squeeze out at the venue formerly known as Budweiser Stage.  It's not selling that well and there are lots of tickets for $30 each, though they are uncovered seats and there is a 40% chance of rain.  I think I'll check again over the weekend to decide for sure.

Then next Wed., I am planning a second BBQ (and final one of the season) for work colleagues and former colleagues.  It looks like the weather may cooperate.  Anyway, I am truly late and need to get a bunch of other things done today. 

Edit (8/29): I'm making a bit more progress getting through some work tasks, but the insurance list is still not done.  I'll try to work on that another hour this morning and then wrap up tonight.  I am finding that most nights I am simply exhausted from dealing with everything all at once and am falling asleep instead...  Anyway, I did get to Coyote vs. Acme and thought it was pretty good.  Not Roger Rabbit good, but solidly entertaining.  Then I discovered while trying to find out the IMAX times out in Vaughan, that there is an IMAX screen showing The Odyssey just down the street at Yonge & Dundas, which is a heck of a lot more appealing than Vaughan, even though I won't get as much reading in.  I'm planning on making it over to the 3:15 showing.  So this opens up the day, and I think I'll go to the gym this morning, bike up to the company picnic (which will be faster than taking the TTC because they picked such a poor location!), come back downtown, grab a couple of items from Robarts, stop in at work and do some more scanning, then go to Yonge & Dundas, stop in briefly at BMV and then go see this movie.  

I am a bit bummed out about how much rain there is in the forecast for next week.  I'm now leaning towards seeing Squeeze for $30, as the set list is entirely different from last year, though it leans very, very heavily on their new album (which is likely why the show isn't selling out!) and just hoping we get moved up out of the rain, though we'll bring the ponchos we found for the Howard Jones concerts (and didn't really need by the end).  It's probably going to rain a lot on Tues.  It looks like it will even rain most of Wed., but it will probably clear up by the evening in time for my BBQ.  I guess we'll find out.

 

* Interestingly, I was outside late at night last night, checking out the lunar eclipse.  It was cool to see (and the skies were clear for once!), though I should have gone back a second time but fell asleep instead.  I saw some amazing photos of the event, but mine aren't worth posting.  Anyway, I hadn't remembered to close the screen door, so when I opened the door this morning to air the place out, the cats were able to escape to the back yard!  I didn't even realize it for a while, that's how out of it I was...  They didn't go particularly far and came back in, but I don't really plan on letting them be outdoor cats, as much as they seem to want that.

Trade War!

I guess it isn't really a surprise, but Canada and the US could not come to terms, even though the Canadian team had already given far too many concessions to the US side.  I know there are conflicting stories, but pretty much everyone believes the Canadian version, which is Howard Lutnick turned up pretty much at the last minute with a new set of demands, including trying to put limits on Canada's trade deals with other trading partners!  This is completely typical of Trump and his lick-spittle lackeys, and mostly is simply his way of trying to humiliate others.  As painful as it is (and it could get painful indeed, including with services, which would impact my job), I think it was the right call.  I so hope the GOP is pounded in the midterms (and of course I hope even more that Trump vanishes from the scene before the midterms from natural or unnatural causes...), but it is a long way off from them.  And truly I don't see any way for the US to get its house in order aside from a civil war that would actually open things up for meaningful reform of the Constitution (no electoral college, no 2nd amendment, major rethinking of the Supreme Court), which won't happen in my lifetime most likely.

I suppose it's just as well that I ran off to Iowa (and then Chicago) a few weeks back for my cousin's funeral, as I really don't think I will travel to the States until after the midterms and maybe not even then.  On the positive side, my step-brother is improving, so I don't think this will be an issue for future travel (as I was fearing for a while).  Still, it is frustrating not to travel to the States.  There are good reasons for me to go down to North Carolina (including an upcoming production of Stoppard's Travesties I might have checked out otherwise), but it is just not on the table for the immediate future. 

Edit (8/28): Trump actually followed through with his threat to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.  I mean not a single person outside the federal agencies forced to use it and his dwindling idiotic fan base is going to use this, but it is still an embarrassment (I mean really beyond an embarrassment) and it will have a pretty significant impact on costs.  I hope this time around Google Maps tells him to Fuck right off and that they aren't changing it based on his whims.  What a sorry excuse for a human he is, and I honestly don't see how anyone with the federal government can continue to work there and have any respect for themselves.

The New York governor had a good line that instead of spelling HOMES with the Great Lakes, now it was only going to spell SHAME.  And this was a very appropriate cartoon in the Toronto Star that pretty much sums up how everyone feels about this narcissistic credit.

I believe it was in the Guardian that one of the columnists pointed out that Trump was now in the position Machiavelli warned the Prince against the most of being hated but no longer feared.  That's certain where he is now, though no question the other EU and Asian nations need to stand up to Trump as Carney finally did because he is a bully who feeds off dominating others and there is no end to his demands once you give in.  No question is a very ugly mirror for the American people to be contemplating themselves in...
  

Computer workarounds

I have been moaning about how my hard drive keeps losing space, even after I moved at least 3 or 4 GB off it.  It felt like some horrible virus (or another Windows update, even though I have paused those).  I got so desperate, I downloaded something called WinDirStat that digs around and finds what is using up hard drive space.  It turns out that it wasn't Windows for once, but lots and lots of iTunes data, which is frankly ridiculous.  That is one thing that really ought to go away after a restart.  Anyway, I deleted a lot, though I probably will need to make a permanent link to that folder to keep pruning the temp files away going forward.

What I have not been able to resolve is how to get to the Girl Genius website through FireFox.  I kept resetting and clearing the cache, but there is something that it just doesn't like about that website, so I reluctantly have been using Edge just for that purpose, and then closing Edge.  I really ought to be able to figure this out, but haven't so far.  It turns out Disney+ is the exact same thing.  I cannot log in through FireFox, but there are no issues on Edge.  What makes this even more annoying is I have tried for close to a month to get my Roku to load Disney+ but it won't do it at all (even after a factory reset!).  It's probably something my son did.  This is annoying beyond belief (and Roku has probably the worst customer service I've run across yet), so I have given up and will watch the rest of Futurama Seasons 13 and 14 on the desktop in the back room.  But not tonight.

I was able to track down a lot of the missing Girl Genius web comics from a bunch of different hard drives, and that is consolidated now.  I even managed to find the Buck Godot e-books I purchased a long time back.  I do have a DVD with the full run of Dragon magazine, and that is a proxy for What's New?  But I really wanted the physical books (and these were completely ruined in the flood, and the pages completely fused together!).  I found a fairly cheap copy of #3 on Amazon, and then a seller with a pretty good deal on a lot of What's New #1 and 2, though this all has to be sent to Chicago (and at some point my wife will kill me...).

Honestly, I am still in a pretty deep funk about the loss of all this stuff, but it's slowly getting a bit better.  On the plus side, I was going to have to go through all that stuff anyway (and most of it is not really all that interesting), so half of the job is already done when I decide to downsize and move to a condo downtown.  But I need to get back to some other tasks now.

Dealing with the Flood

It's been a fairly stressful time, so let me try to put down the main events as I remember them, before I completely forget/suppress this period.

As I said, we didn't get anyone in until Wed. morning.  They put down a bunch of plastic sheets heading down into the basement.  Ironically, most of the time people go straight out the back door, and don't really utilize the sheets on the main floor, though the cats are having a great time trying to get underneath it and generally just messing with it.  They also left some enormous dehumidifiers and driers.

I believe it was Thurs. when I got in the crew to deal with the contents of the basement.  They put all the salvageable stuff out in boxes on the deck, and eventually this was trucked off somewhere (and I probably won't see it for a couple of months).  I have a pretty good idea of which books were saved, as well as the Futurama toys.  I'm not nearly as sure of how much of the quilting material was saved, and whether the half quilt I was working on for my son was saved.  If most of the spare material I needed for the other half was tossed and I can't find matching material (and 5+ years on that is a safe assumption), I probably need to just start all over.  I'd have to cut way back on the work I do on converting music files (and blogging!) and just get back to quilting.  Most projects can be done in a month or two if I just focus.  I think I do owe him a quilt after not delivering for so long!  At least the sewing machine was salvaged, though I do need to sterilize the pedal and power cord.  And I even know where it is, unlike the record player and stereo which got carted off.)

I had really hoped they would be done by 5:45, as I wanted to head over to Carlton to see Sheep in a Box.  In the end, they worked later than that, and I felt I had to keep going, sorting out a few boxes of personal effects and papers and such.  So I missed that movie.  Maybe it's just as well, as it is pretty melancholic, about a family trying to replace a lost son with an android child.

Friday, a new crew came through to deal with the rest of the contents.  This guy was a lot blunter, saying there was no way to salvage the wooden screen or the futon frame.  Sigh.

There aren't too many bright spots, though I suppose because water didn't come through the walls but up from the floor, the paintings down there weren't affected.  They are currently just stacked up in the dining room with some other boxes...  And while I was trying to be pro-active and took things like the records and a small kids' rug from upstairs downstairs where they were ruined, I did bring up the musical instruments (as there was a brief moment when my daughter was thinking of learning them), so those were spared.  But overall, there is a huge loss of personal stuff and mementos, along with lots of junk, which should have been thrown out ages ago.  (I do wish that at some point I moved the Krazy Kat Daily books upstairs to be with the Sunday strips from Fantagraphics.  Oh well...)

I think Thurs/Friday was when we had three separate repairmen looking at the furnace, the water heater, the washer/dryer and a "spare" refrigerator that happens to be down there.  Basically, all of this will have to go, except for the washer/dryer, which were somewhat elevated.

Sat. I went swimming and then biked over to Factory Theatre to see Soft Squishy Things, which was an odd piece where a person, bored out of her mind, either on a space station or pretending to be on one but in her basement, recreated lots of scenes from sci fi movies, like Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and so on.  I believe that she ended by throwing a party for herself with some "robot" friends, which is a scene from Silent Running.  (Again, I'm still a bit annoyed that the Paradise's screening of Silent Running conflicted with something else, perhaps Fringe-related, but I'll watch it one of these days.)  Then I biked back to work and did the first of many rounds of scanning.

Sunday I went to the gym, then eventually made it over to Carlton to watch an anime film (Your Name).  I will say that they have really messed up Carlton yet again for some streetcar repairs.  The street is fenced off, and the bike racks aren't even open!  This is definitely going to make it harder to get there, and this construction is likely to drag on through December.  Sigh.  I went back to work and did more scanning.

I don't think there was a lot going on on Monday, though I did get the report back that the dry wall was relatively recently installed and didn't have asbestos in it.  This was a huge relief, as the entire process would have been pushed off by several weeks if they needed to do asbestos abatement first.  This meant that we could schedule some work on Tues.  After work wrapped, I ran over to BMV at Yonge-Dundas to see if any of the Motter titles were in stock, particularly Condemned, but they weren't.  Then I dropped a few more things off at work, then biked up to Bloor to check out the bigger comics section at the BMV there.  Sadly, I only had 10 minutes to look around, but I didn't see them there in the limited time I had to look around, so when I got home I ordered Condemned.  Then I went over to Robarts and did some research.

Tues. we had the workers come over and start ripping out the carpet and the bottom of the dry wall.  It didn't help my mood that we had no water from 10 to 4:15 because of other city work on repairing a nearby fire hydrant.  I guess the only positive is that I was finally able to view my water meter, which stopped working, so I will try to get that meter reading uploaded fairly soon.

I asked them not to send any workers on Wed., and I went in to work (pretty much the only time all week), and after work, I went to the Rex to see Allison Au.  She decided to bring on a vocalist into her group, and truthfully, I didn't care much for this, and left at the break.  I went back to work and scanned some photos, most of which did not survive the water well at all.  I think the photos in the photo albums generally will come out better, but there are just so many left to be scanned!

The workers are back today and should wrap up the first stage of the demo.  It isn't clear if this crew or a different crew is going to clear out the deck, though they promised it would be gone by the weekend.  I certainly hope so, as I plan on having the post-Fringe BBQ next Tues!  I may need to call and find out what is going on.  I think I will also try to go swimming tonight.

Sat. I head over to Stratford to see Guys and Dolls.  I'm going to see about taking the train over, and the bus back.  I need to get a lot of Station Eleven read, as we are talking about it at Book Club next Wed.!

Sun. I am toying with the idea of seeing The Odyssey up in Vaughan, as the Scotiabank IMAX (which would have been very convenient for me) has switched over to the new Spiderman movie, and the Odyssey in IMAX is only up in Vaughan or over in Square One in Mississauga, which is even harder for me to get to...  Anyway, then I need to make my way back down to York University and meet my wife, as we are going to a concert (Howard Jones and Wang Chung and some other 80s bands).  So it will be an extremely long day.

So things are a long way from going back to normal, but I can at least slip out of the house from time to time to do a few fun things. 

Edit: Well, I was going to go swimming, but around 7:30 pm another work crew showed up to cart away all the debris from the first work crew, and I had to stick around.  I think this weekend will be a total write-off as far as the gym goes. 

 

Life Turned Upside Down (Basement Flood)

We had a fair bit of water in the basement once before after a heavy, heavy rain.  But it didn't really have the same impact.  That time around it still required bringing the huge dehumidifiers and driers, but the damage seemed largely confined to the furnace room, and in the end we didn't even have to change the carpet.  Clearly this should have been a warning of sorts, but what I ended up doing is changing insurance (because TD completely stiffed us on the water damage coverage) and ultimately pulling all of my money out of TD after generally being dis-satisfied with them, mostly related to the insurance business but for other reasons as well.  Maybe if they had covered some of the costs (which were mostly just labour), they would also have required us to put in a sump pump to keep our insurance premiums from rising.  Now I have no idea if a sump pump would have made enough of a difference, but our neighbour has one and didn't have any significant flooding.  I remember thinking at the time that I should have the basement windows treated as that seemed to be part of the problem, but the contractor at the time said the window well treatments were ok, but that I really needed to reroute the rainfall from the gutters, as part of it went straight down the side of the house and connected with some city-owned drain that might cause flooding at some other point, and we did that.  But no one at the time said we really needed a sump pump.  (I'm not even sure if they asked about it when I switched to the new insurance company.)

At any rate, last weekend, it was supposed to storm (and many people thought the Taste of the Danforth would be wiped out at least for one day), but it really didn't.  Instead, the East End was hit very, very hard with intense showers for about 15-20 minutes.  And it didn't even rain downtown, which just seems incredible.  So if the rain had been spaced out a bit more or ideally just bypassed my neck of the woods entirely, then this entire mess could have been avoided.  I'm pretty sure that the construction for the Ontario Line nearby, which often shakes the house all the way to the foundation isn't helping matters either.

I had briefly toyed with the idea of going to see Sheep in a Box at Carlton after work, but stayed a bit late instead and then came home.  My wife had been trying to call me but somehow I didn't get the message.  (This became a bit of a running theme of the evening.)  She said that there had been a lot of flooding and that the basement smelled terrible, which indicated that the worst had happened and that the drains that backed up were combined water/sewer pipes or something.

I was able to catch someone at our new insurance company just before they signed off for the evening (and I also checked to make sure that we had a water damages rider and that we were up to date on the insurance!).  Unfortunately, the email back from them didn't actually tell me who the contractor assigned to the case was, and this contractor apparently tried to call but the voice mail didn't actually go through.  This was incredibly unfortunate as the contractor had been around the corner on Egan (which is even lower than our street and was hit just as hard by flooding).  

There really wasn't all that much to be done in the evening.  I looked around a bit and pretty much everything in the bedroom downstairs had been impacted.  It was particularly annoying in that I had tried to clear up some space upstairs by taking a crate of LPs downstairs, only a few weeks prior to this, and they all were soaked beyond salvage.  I didn't see it but there had been water 4-6 inches deep pretty much everywhere downstairs, but it had retreated by the evening, though it definitely didn't smell great.  It seems likely that it came through the furnace room, as that seemed to have the highest watermarks and the floor was still quite damp, though the carpet everywhere was quite squishy (and disgusting when one stopped to think about it).

The next morning was spent trying to get the claims adjuster on the phone.  I finally got through to her and then got the contractor's number.  By the time I got through to him, he said he didn't have any crews available and that I should have contacted him yesterday evening when he was nearby.  He said he could send a crew Wed. morning.  I was pretty furious and asked the insurance company to reassign me to someone who could come by on Tues., but she said that seemed unlikely given the large number of flooding claims that they were dealing with, so I had to call back the contractor and eat humble pie and get an appointment for first thing Wed. morning.

I took most of the day to go through and see what could immediately be salvaged and what I wanted to try to salvage (or at least scan) even if it had clearly been soaked in the disgusting water.  One small consolation is that the many CDs downstairs had all been ripped before I took them downstairs, with the exception of two box sets (including a Tafelmusik one) that really seem to have come through relatively unscathed.  I do need to disinfect those box sets a few more times.  So many of the CDs seemed to be above the water, though I did hang onto 5 or so that were signed, and I guess I'll just scan the covers and dispose of them.  The LPs are pretty much a total write-off, though there were more (5 or so) which I hadn't recorded, and then Andrew Hill's Nefertiti, which I had recorded but there was a terrible electrical hum throughout, so it clearly has to be done again.  

I spread a lot of stuff out on the deck to dry out, which I am sure is not really the approved technique...

I can't remember, but I don't think I was particularly careful about wearing gloves on that first day, but I got much better as the week went on.  

In pretty much all cases books on the second shelf were ok.  The books on the bottom shelf near the washer/dryer were all toast.  Interestingly, the damage was fairly limited in the books on the bookcase in the bedroom.  If it had only been water, there would have been no issue.  I decided that I would replace a couple of the Gorey Amphigorey books, but the ones that are really rare (including a bunch of Krazy Kat daily strips and a signed copy of Rushdie's Step Across This Line), I would hang onto after drying them out.  Maybe this is a bad decision I will regret later.  I suspect in the long run, I will scan the Krazy Kat books and part with them, deferring the final decision for a while.  But I have so much scanning of photos and a handful of ultra rare comics to do in the meantime.

 

I'll just post a couple more photos of the progress of emptying out the basement (and even ripping out much of the dry wall), and then I really need to head out.

And this is the back deck, completely full of all our ruined stuff going off to the dump.  Sigh.

Moderately Productive Weekend

Sat. I actually got to the gym by 11 or so.  I put in a pretty thorough workout, with even 15 minutes of cardio worked in.  (I restarted All That Monk Business and quickly remembered that I thought Buddy Monk, one of the central characters is an out-and-out jerk, making it somewhat painful to keep reading, but I don't have that much longer to go...)  I then brought the groceries home, getting everything except for tuna, which I forgot.

It was supposed to storm pretty hard, but wrap up by 7 or so, so I decided to risk biking to work, dropping my yogurt and frozen fruit off for the following week, as well as leaving the bike in a nearby underground garage.  Then I hopped on the streetcar to hit 401 Richmond.  Gagne was pretty much the same as the last time, but there was a new exhibit at Red Head Gallery with six artists and their take on modern abstraction.  I then caught the Spadina streetcar up to Bloor.  I decided to stop in at BMV first and actually managed to sell off a couple of books and two of the CDs I had picked up (for very cheap!) in Chicago, so that was a bonus.  It was about 3:15 by the time I got to Bathhurst station, and I was torn between just heading over to Hot Docs and seeing if I could just make it to Bau-Xi and back in time.  (Summertime was playing there at 4.)  

In the end, I went over to Bau-Xi, and made a super quick run through the gallery.  I thought the upstairs exhibition was more interesting with a few photos from Michael Woolf's Transparent City series, so I guess it was worth risking it.  

The transit gods were basically in my favour, with the exception of just missing an express bus on the way back.  I had almost 15 minutes left when I was back on Bloor and Bathhurst, so I stopped into Dollarama, though the lines seemed crazy long.  Then there was a pretty long line for tickets for Summertime, but there was a guy looking to sell an extra ticket, and I paid him $10 (in cash which I had from BMV - sweet).  I didn't love the film.  I did find it took some chances, making it clear that Hepburn's character not only has sex outside of marriage, but that her beau is already married, though separated and estranged from his wife.  So that was risky.  But the film hinges so much on coarse stereotypes of Americans and American morality that I found it painful to watch.  Granted the entire film was shot on location in Venice, and the scenery was often incredible, though also painful in reminding me that I will likely not make it back to Italy.

Anyway, I probably should have gone straight to dinner, but I decided to see if I could pick up some items from the hold shelf at Robarts.  Of course, I got there at 6:08, and the library closes at 6 on the weekend.  It was particularly annoying that two nearby cafes also were closed, despite one saying that it was open until 7!  So I hustled down to Queen and ate at Ginger.  I was extremely upset to find that I had misplaced my debit card, probably losing it either at Dollarama or Hot Docs.  While I was waiting on the food, I logged into my bank and put a temporary hold on the card.  As upsetting as this was, probably losing a debit card is less disruptive than a credit card, where all the auto-pay settings would have to be updated.

I made it to The Hole over at TIFF with 10 minutes to spare.  I had forgotten a lot about this movie, including how crazy it is for this district, which seems under quarantine and practically emptied out, to have a fully stocked mini-grocery store run out of a storage unit of some sort.  (This actually reminded me a bit of some of the stores in Seattle's Pike Place or indeed this Asian mall in Burnaby, BC.)  Only a single customer ever came by, and yet the stock looked like it was constantly being refreshed.  Weird.  I also forgot how little action or dialogue occurs in the movie.  I'm not sorry I saw it again, but I doubt I would make it through a third viewing.

I dropped by work afterwards.  I didn't get a whole lot done, but I did get my time sheet submitted, which is one major stressor every week. 

As far as I can tell, it might have rained a small amount during the movie, but nothing like what they expected, so the people that risked it were able to have a pretty decent time at Taste of the Danforth or Dusk Dances, and the grass should have been fine for Dusk Dances on Sunday.

Sunday started off with my daughter telling me that she was ready for me to swap out the curtains in her room, so I did that.  Then I grabbed a few more things at the grocery store, I went swimming (and the pool was almost empty, so that was great), and I stopped by Robarts to pick up those DVDs and books.  I was hoping to hear back from Hot Docs.  I thought I could probably take the Danforth back until Chester or so, but in fact, the Taste of the Danforth stretched all the way from Broadview to Jones, so I had to divert.

I got home and saw I had a message from Hot Docs that indeed they had found my debit card, which was an enormous relief.  They were going to be open until 7:30, so I could pick it up on the way over to the Warm Reads thing.  I got a bit more reading in (only 70 pages left in The Odyssey!), then headed out just after 6, again having to divert around the Taste.

I didn't see as many people as I had hoped at the Warm Reads thing, though one of the actors from my Fringe play was there, as well as the director.  I didn't quite get my piece ready for submission, though I think I'll have it ready today.  I also wasn't picked for the Writer's Challenge.  So I definitely wondered if it was worth showing up, though it is good to keep up my connections, I suppose.  I didn't care much for the kick-off piece, but the others were interesting or quite good, and the last piece ("Come Together" by Dave Healey) was just hilarious.  So the evening ended on a high note, and then I had to bike home.

Dusk Dances 2016

Just a very quick note on this year's Dusk Dances in Withrow Park.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, maybe even more than last year. 

It starts off with a guy coming out of the audience and drinking some coffee and then starting to juggle.

 

The next dance was a Colombian-inspired dance with some really striking moves.

 

The third piece was a dance piece combined with ASL.  Interestingly, this was swapped out with a different piece also about deafness, though this was a piece based around an audiology test by an artist losing his hearing.  I didn't see this one.

The final piece is an Indian-inspired dance piece.

I actually went back a second time last night, though I left after the coffee/juggling piece, as my back is hurting a fair bit (and I didn't go swimming afterwards either, unfortunately).

Tonight is likely the last night to see and enjoy the piece.  It's looking like it will rain pretty heavily Friday and Saturday night, and then Sunday, the grass will likely still be pretty wet.  This is probably going to impact the Taste of Danforth as well.*

That's about it for now, though I thought I would celebrate that after many attempts, it looks like I have managed to grow milkweed in my front yard (to draw more monarch butterflies to the neighbourhood).  Let's see if it survives and comes back next year.  

Interestingly, some Queen Anne's Lace has taken root outside the fence, so I will see if I can replant it somewhere inside my yard where it will get at least some sun.

I've got to run now, but probably more later (assuming I'm not too tired from dropping by the Rex, which is the current plan). 

* I've never been a huge fan of Taste of the Danforth, as they don't seem to be able to run it without totally disrupting the 72 bus, which will probably mess me up this weekend.  I definitely wasn't happy that on Tuesday (many days before the start of the Taste) they had covered up almost all the bike racks on Danforth until the Taste was over (almost making me late for Dusk Dances).  They certainly don't do that for the car parking, as the drivers would lose their minds.  Again, the fucking double standards and the extreme deference to drivers in this city, even in Old Toronto, makes me want to scream!  And more seriously to think more and more seriously about moving to one of the bike havens in Europe, maybe Copenhagen.  It won't actually be good enough for cyclists here in my lifetime...

More on Recent Reading

Microserfs was an odd book.  It definitely had some flashes of Coupland's later preoccupations with slogans and gnomic writings, but was filled with working characters (all mostly interchangeable coders, but at least he writes a lot about work, unlike so many contemporary writers) and then a somewhat unearned swerve into melodrama to make the reader feel something at the end.  I'm not sorry I read it, but it certainly isn't in my top half of his novels (I believe I've actually read 7 or perhaps 8 of his books, including a non-fiction book about Vancouver, City of Glass).

I was also taken a bit aback by the plot swerves in The Vendor of Sweets.  Towards the very end of the book, the main character goes back into the memory hole and spends a lot of time thinking about his wife in the early days of his marriage (a little like a rehash of The English Teacher (probably his best novel)); then he sort of leaves Mali, his (barely) adult son, to his own devices to make his own path through life with only a few thoughts towards Grace, the Korean-American girl who followed Mali to India.  I wouldn't say it was a particularly satisfactory ending.  It did have the advantage of bringing the book to a rapid close.  Likewise with Microserfs, this is somewhere in the bottom half of Narayan's novels, though so much better than The Man-eater of Malgudi and somewhat better than Swami and Friends.

I've gotten to the halfway point of All That Monk Business, and there is a major plot twist.  It's intriguing enough to keep going.  However, I have diverted almost all my attention to The Odyssey right now, having just reached Book 5 where Odysseus finally enters the story!

So in terms of what I am actually reading at the moment, it is The Odyssey ✔, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (borrowed from the library and it pairs well with The Odyssey) and wrapping up All That Monk Business.  I'm pretty sure that immediately after this, it will be The Library Cosmic by Ben Berman Ghan (also out from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra ✔, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile and Thien's The Book of Records.  I'm debating rereading Station Eleven for Book Club, but am not sure if I'll be able to find the time.

Given my interest in the Secret Life of Books podcast, and my general push to get to 20/20 from the top 100 books of all time, and my general interest in thinking about the books I need to read or reread before I kick the bucket, I've sort of drawn up this rudimentary list of what I really must read or read again in my remaining years:

Jane Austen Emma
James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and as many essays as I can manage
Dickens David Copperfield (and maybe Great Expectations and/or Our Mutual Friend and rereading Bleak House)
Joan Didion The White Album
Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Dostoevsky rereading The Brothers Karamazov
Forster Howards End
Fuentes Terra Nostra (and probably rereading Christopher Unborn)
G.G. Marquez rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude & Love in the Time of Cholera
Grossman Stalingrad and Life and Fate
Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure
Russell Hoban rereading Turtle Diary
Henry James Portrait of a Lady
Lessing rereading The Golden Notebook
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks
Morrison rereading Song of Solomon and maybe Beloved
Nabokov Pale Fire
Rabelais rereading Gargantua and Pantagruel
Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
Tolstoy War and Peace
E. White A Boy's Own Story & The Beautiful Room is Empty & The Farewell Symphony
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (and watching Importance of Being Earnest again)
V. Woolf rereading To the Lighthouse and The Waves

Then a few series that are of interest, most notably Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Lessing's Children of Violence series, Faulkner's The Hamlet/The Town/The Mansion, Trollope's The Chronicles of Barsetshire, probably Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy and perhaps rereading Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

There are obviously still a few gaps here and there, particularly in terms of French and German literature, which I've never really focused on, but if I do manage to get through this list, I'll have read almost all the truly central books in the British and American canons, along with my many forays into Russian, Indian, South American and South African literature along the way.  It would have been a good (reading) life at any rate.

 

Books at mid-year (2026)

As anticipated, I am certainly reading less now that I am almost never on transit.  The spring was mostly taken up with Nabokov (Ada and then Transparent Things).  On a trip out to Halifax, I started Dickens's American Notes (and made sure to read the parts where he lands in Halifax (and might well have been in a ship wreck, which would have really shaken up British literature) and later on travelled up to Toronto and Montreal!) though it took me a while to finish it up.  I also decided to abandon Hulme's The Bone People. 

I then read Steinbeck's Cannery Row (and am reserving Sweet Thursday for the fall).  For Book Club, I read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in a single day!).  I made it through Thammavongsa's story collection How to Pronounce Knife fairly quickly.  I was going to read her short novel Pick a Colour, but we are reading that for Book Club in the fall, so I might as well read it later, so it will be fresh.  I was struggling with Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, finding it so slow and repetitive and also quite intentionally obscure.  I finally abandoned it.  Given that I abandoned another Dorfman book (about an obnoxious bike messenger!), and I have zero interest in ever watching or reading Death and the Maiden, it's safe to say he just isn't for me.  I am more interested than ever in rereading Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, really hoping that it still holds up for me.

I read quite a few poetry collections in May and June, mostly by Jennifer LoveGrove and Laurie Graham (Rove and Settler Education and Calling It Back to Me), finding that I liked LoveGrove's first and second collections (The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Have Never Have Fired the Sentinel) a bit better than her later ones, though I did like The Tinder Sonnets a bit more than I expected, and I would have been ok picking up a copy at the Tranzac reading (if she had had a square on her).   I didn't care much for Joshua Weiner's The World's Room, though there was a poem at the end about air travel that I might chuck into the travel anthology.  Also, there was a pretty good poem (or section of a poem) about a shipwreck in Gbenga Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea.

 

I also read a lot of graphic novels (the entire Giant Days series), severely cutting into my normal reading time.  And of course, Fringe took up almost all the remaining time.

At any rate, I somehow ended up with a copy of The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai from the library.  I think I am somewhat intrigued by his War & War, but this was easier to request.  It turns out that I brought it along with me on the trip to Stratford.  I also was midway through Offill's Weather, and I also brought along Barry Kennedy's All That Monk Business, which is a quirky novel set in Vancouver's Downtown East Side.  It does have a cool cover.  I can't remember where I picked this up, though most likely either at a Little Free Library or a library book sale.

I alternated through all three books on the bus ride in and when we had some downtime between the plays.  I finished Weather first.  It is a very fast read, with short paragraphs outlining this woman and how she lets caring for her f'ed up brother overwhelm her life to the point where her husband takes off for a while with their child.  There is also a lot of discussion on how to keep moving forward when the future seems somewhat pointless, i.e. the climate crisis will wipe out civilization.  Definitely a novel that is in tune with the gesalt.  I'll probably get around to reading her Department of Speculation, which is an earlier novel in the same vein.

I made a big dent in The World Goes On, finishing it a few days after we got back.  I didn't like this much at all, and I probably would have dropped it, except I didn't have lots of other options on the bus(!), and I had so recently dropped the Dorfman.  I will borrow War & War later to see if it lives up to the hype, but will not give it nearly as much of a chance.

I'm sort of torn on All That Monk Business.  I don't care much for the main character, Buddy Monk, and I don't really find any of the characters plausible.  It's taken 100 pages (a third of the novel) to finally come to the point where Monk's father's will is revealed.  It's not clear if this is going to set off a frantic hunt a la It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or go in an entirely different direction.  I'm mostly plugging along because it does remind me of my time in Vancouver, not that I spent much time at all on Hastings when I could avoid it.  

I am very close to wrapping up Coupland's Microserfs ✔, and the current plan it to bring it along next weekend and give it to my brother, who is in the tech industry.  And I am probably going to finish Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets ✔ in a day or two.  I'm glad that this isn't another repeat of Swami and His Friends in the sense that the boy who decides to abandon his studies carves out another path, but I'm not liking this as much as some of his earlier novels.

The current plan for next weekend is to bring along Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us ✔ and Chandler Klang Smith's The Sky Is Yours ✔, both of which I should be able to leave behind, assuming I get through them on the trip.

 

After this, it will probably be Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (having borrowed this from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra ✔, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Amis's The Information.  Oh, and very likely rereading The Odyssey ✔, almost certainly sticking with Lattimore.

In the late fall/winter, I am considering Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.

As ever, simply too much to read and not enough time... 

Edit (7/27): After going through Queen Books, I added an awful lot of poetry books to my TPL hold list, so I will probably end up with another long diversion through poetry (including Lattimore's Odyssey) before I get back to novels.  I also have become a bit obsessed with The Secret Life of Books podcast, though I think I will draw the line at donating/subscribing in order to join their book club.  They are working their way through Dickens's Bleak House at the moment, and I just don't have the mental energy to return to this opus at this moment.  Maybe if the book club sessions are archived, it is something I would consider next year...  One nice thing is that they largely stick to the classics (and those which I have already read!).  I think the only books I need to read before listening to their episodes are Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and Dickens's David Copperfield.  Interestingly, they haven't gotten to Ellison's Invisible Man yet, and it seems unlikely they will cover Joyce's Ulysses directly (though it was discussed in brief in the legacy of the Odyssey episode), as Sophie Gee is firmly on Team V. Woolf and doesn't seem to care for Joyce much at all.  I belated realized that they seem to be sticking very firmly to literature in English, with a few exceptions, notably Homer's Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh and a couple of episodes on Montaigne's Essays (perhaps due to the connection to Shakespeare), but nothing on any Russian author (and only a few passing references to Nabokov) or Kafka, all of whom inevitably show up in these sorts of canon exercises, so we'll see.  I have just gotten to their episode on literature and trains, and they talk about Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, but it is almost incredible that they have apparently skipped over Dombey and Sons, which is all about how the train ripped up and reconfigured the English landscape.

Edit (8/3): I'm back from Iowa (with a full day spent in Chicago along the way).  I managed to read two full books as I planned, basically wrapping up The Space Between Us as we touched down in Toronto.  I totally forgot that I had read Bombay Time by the same author, which has the seeds of The Space Between Us with fraught relationships between sons, mothers and daughter-in-laws as well as between the Indian middle class and their servants.  I didn't really care much for The Space Between Us, which felt like misery porn, and I thought the ending was a particular let down, sort of celebrating that the poor servant who has been cheated out of everything by many people in her life (and her mistress completely unjustly kicks her out of the house) is still there, just enduring, when in fact she is likely not going to be able to survive more than a few more days after this final betrayal.  It's a complete (middle class) cop-out.  At least A Fine Balance has the honestly to show that almost all the poor people in the novel are completely ground down and are dead or dying.  It sounds like The Museum of Failures and Honor all are variants of how bad things happen all the time in India and are inescapable and all are pretty much misery porn.  I think I am done with this author, even though her writing style is pretty good, all things considered.  But I just don't need to read fiction that upsets me that much when the world is bad enough as it is.

Rereading the Odyssey

I guess it is somewhat natural, but everyone is talking about The Odyssey nowadays.  I haven't booked a ticket yet to see Nolan's Odyssey yet, but I will fairly soon.  Interestingly, Market Square is showing it, but I want to try to see it at an IMAX theatre, at the very least, though I am not going to fly to Regina or wherever to see it in Super IMAX.  There are even podcasts dedicated to the Odyssey this summer (Secret Life of Books Eps. 154-158, in particular), as well as plenty of articles talking about what Nolan left out (the bed riddle and almost all of the sex with Circe and especially Calypso) or added, most notably the ending.  There are in fact some scraps of legends talking about what happened to Odysseus post-Ithaca, so it isn't as if this ending was completely tacked on, but it certainly isn't what is in the Odyssey itself.  His final voyage is discussed in passing in Dante and is actually the focus of Tennyson's Ulysses.  I suspect I will overall enjoy it, though I've heard parts are extra loud and then there are long stretches with people whispering.  I honestly wonder why no one can seem to convince him that his audience would actually grow more if he didn't tinker with the sound balance so much.  I will not go to see Tenet again for this very reason...

I'm debating rereading The Odyssey or at least large chunks of it before I go off to the movie, along with many, many others.  (There is even a piece on how bookstores can't keep up with demand for The Odyssey, The Iliad and other classics (paywalled unfortunately).)  I recall that back in 2019 I read the Fitzgerald and Lattimore translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey back to back, coming down firmly in favour of Lattimore, and fortunately I still have my copies of Lattimore's Homer.  I've only read a very few snatches of the Wilson and Mendelsohn translations.  I'll dig a bit deeper, but am almost certain I will come back to Lattimore as the best translation for what I am looking for in Homer.  (As a bit of a follow-up to this post, I did end up getting Musa's Portable Dante, and I really ought to read that fairly soon, alternating with Ciardi's translations.  I even have Longfellow's translation of Dante!  I don't think anyone finds that a particularly good translation, but it has all of Dore's illustrations, which makes it worth perusing as well.)

Interestingly, Mendelsohn has a memoir or fictionalized memoir (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic) about his father sitting in on his class about the Odyssey and their bonds growing stronger through exploring the text.  This sort of sounds like what Night Journey at this year's Toronto Fringe was going for, though that play was ultimately pretty disappointing.  

I had high hopes for this, but they were dashed.  It's hard to say just what went wrong, though pretty much every critic agreed that the social media influencer who comes in at the very end and tries to stir up trouble was a huge mis-step.  This wasn't even remotely believable.  I would say that it suffers the most from the playwright not actually writing about anything he knows about personally (academic politics) so filled in the gaps from what he pulled from diverse headlines over the years.  It wasn't really clear whether this was all taking place at a university or a college (which in Canada are basically community colleges).  

The professor clearly operates as if he is in a classics department in a university, and the rich heir would never be sent to a college (his character was not remotely believable, which was another major problem).  However, the bizarre under-resourcing, the other three students and the way that the board of regents tried to bend over backwards to pacify a loony social media agitator all reek of college.  Aside from the complete lack of insight into how the college politics would play out, the play just didn't dive into the poem itself enough and show how wrestling with the thorny issues in the poem changed the students' lives.  Most of the character growth (generally not believable) came through interactions that had nothing to do with Homer's source material itself.  And the staging was just ridiculous with so many short, unlinked scenes, making this drag on for too long.  So this really requires a complete rethinking and rewriting.  It was such a missed opportunity.

 

Edit (7/27): I spent a bit of time looking into the other translations, and I do not like Emily Wilson's at all.  Far too spare and not really poetic at all.  Am I at all influenced by how she so needlessly ran down Nolan (saying she would be "ashamed" to be associated with it), even after he praised her highly (and certainly increased sales of her translation)?  Perhaps.  I don't really need to justify my opinions.  I thought Mendelsohn's wasn't bad, but still always was a close second to Lattimore, and I don't really see what it adds, so I'll just stick with Lattimore for now.  (I don't have an edition with this cover unfortunately, but at least I have a physical copy at hand.)  I probably will try to flip through Mendelsohn's memoir at some point.

 

Slow Weekend

While two and three weekends ago were completely stuffed with Fringe activities, and last weekend was Stratford and next weekend is the funeral in Iowa, I actually don't have all that much on the calendar for this weekend.  I think it is likely going to rain, but it doesn't actually look like it will at the moment.  Maybe it will wait until tomorrow.

Friday evening I had some spare time, as there really wasn't anything going on that caught my eye at the Rex or Hirut.  As the weather was nice, I decided I should hit the AGO again to simplify Sat. afternoon if it was raining hard.  I passed through the David Blackwell again quickly, as that is closing soon.  Then saw the Enda Tacon exhibit and the Impressionist paintings on loan from Dallas.  (The Monet room was still busy but not as packed as before.)  I even had time to go into the Infinity Room again.

I managed to get this one work task done pretty quickly, using my "unauthorized" copy of SPSS, since work still can't get around to getting my license activated, so I am using a home version.  I still haven't finished my time sheet, but that is a tonight problem...  (I have a pretty major CRA thing to deal with as well, but that is also going to have to wait.)

I was up fairly early this morning cleaning up some computer files.  I have tried a couple of times to get Disney+ working on Roku again but am pretty close to giving up, esp. as Roku aggressively discourages people from contacting them.  What a completely shit company/service provider they are.

I went back to bed for a much needed nap (and much longer than I expected) when I was woken by the house foundations shaking due to Ontario Line construction nearby.  I really am going to have to find that number to force them to do an inspection and take some photos, so they will pay for the damages if the house really does crumble due to their digging and tunnelling.  Sigh.  One more thing I really don't want to have to deal with...

I'm about to go off to the gym.  I think after this I will briefly hit the galleries in Yorkville and 401 Richmond, then come back.  Depending on how I feel and if it has started raining, I might try to weed the front yard which badly needs it.

Sunday, I plan to go swimming at noon, and then meet a friend at Video Cab to see Our Town.  I decided to hold off on getting tickets to see Herbie Hancock at Massey Hall.  There are still quite a few left, the last time I checked, so I'll try to get rush tickets and see what those cost.  So not exactly a restful weekend, but certainly less crammed than usual...

Edit: I ended up dawdling for so long that I went downtown first.  I ate (too much) at an Indian buffet, then hit 401 Richmond and Yorkville.  I'll probably post a few pictures of things I stumbled across shortly.  Then I went to the gym and did groceries.  I'm pretty close to winding down for the day, but I think I'll try to do a bit of weeding in the front yard, so quite an inversion of the way I thought the day would go. 

Edit (7/27): Sunday did go more or less as planned.  I got to Jimmie Simpson just after noon.  The fast lanes were basically empty.  I got my swimming in, wrapping up at 1.  Then did a bit of shopping and window shopping on Queen St.  Saw Our Town with my friend and hung out at a coffee shop afterwards.  I actually managed to clean up the front yard a fair bit.  The main difference was that Massey Hall didn't have any reasonable rush tickets for Herbie Hancock, so I passed on seeing him and went to see Mike Murley at the Rex instead (for $20 instead of $100+).  This does decrease the likelihood that I go back to the Rex tonight, however.