Nearly set up

Well, one day too late to prevent catastrophe, but I have the computer set up downstairs (and the internet works, which was a pretty major concern).  I still need to make a few adjustments, as it still isn't very comfortable to type (and the better keyboard needs a bit of repair -- it also was damaged when the monitor fell on it).  Once I figure that out, I should be able to write more (both blogs and some creative writing), particularly as I am feeling that I want to cut way, way back on all other kinds of internet activity.

I kind of wish I had taken some time-lapse photos of filling up the garage and then filling up and emptying this basement.  I do have a few photos showing the process (and progress) that I will try to add in the next day or so.

I'm feeling a little stuck though, as even if I manage to get half of the remaining boxes up on the shelves, I still have a large number that don't have anywhere to go.  We really do need a bigger storage area.  I think what will have to happen is that the random junk will have to go into better, stronger boxes, then that will go under the Christmas decorations under the stairs.  That's about the only thing I can think of.  But it's definitely going to be a challenge.  I think I really do need to commit to getting rid of another box or two of CDs and DVDs -- and to keep working on my plan of reading books and then donating them if they aren't "keepers."  I have gotten only marginally better at not buying new things -- I've slowed down but not completely stopped.

A very dark day

It is almost impossible to believe, but my precariously perched monitor fell this morning (and only one more day before it was put onto a proper desk).  The monitor didn't suffer any damage, but it clipped a portable hard drive, which now seems inoperable.  This had almost all of my recent work files on it, and I don't seem to be able to restore it.  I am just beside myself with anger about the unfairness of it all.  I'll see if I can get the hard drive working at work and perhaps have the IT guy look it over, then take it to one of those data retrieval people who charge an arm and a leg to basically tell you "It's dead, Jim."  This has just ruined my entire weekend and potentially a lot longer than that.  It could be one of those data losses you never recover from.

Update: So the IT guy at work can't help and says I have to contact one of those data recovery places that charges between $500-2000 for this work.  It just seems so incredibly unjust, and that one thing that is close to pushing me over the edge.  The very minor silver lining is that the single most important set of files are the back-up email files, and those are still with my former employer, as are most of the work-related files (from my previous employer).  So I can probably rebuild those.  But probably not all the tifs of things I had scanned over the past year, and some other things that were too recent to be backed up.  I'm really not sure what I am going to do, but there have to be some changes, starting with me ceasing to tape radio off the internet, since I almost never listen to it anyway.  I might as well go cold turkey.  Maybe I'll make some other changes now (even though I suppose anything coming out of such a bad place can't be completely healthy).  I definitely need to cut even further back on visits to Slate.com, and maybe I should go cold turkey there are well.  I'm also cutting back on my visits to this jazz website and discussion board as it is just nowhere near as fun as it used to be.  I'm finding that a lot of on-line stuff is just too much of a headache now, even news sites that I used to visit and now are throwing up pay walls.  I guess the silver lining there is I think I'll start cutting way back on the internet aside from occasional blogging and just try to do more creative writing.  Tending my own garden and all now that I am pretty thoroughly sick of most of what is on-line nowadays.  (Boy, I guess I really am in a tremendous funk...) 

Looking way forward - 2014/15 Season

I know it is ridiculous how I can't quite seem to get around to reviewing a couple of museum exhibits or three Canadian novels (and a bunch of poetry collections).  In my defense, I am still looking for the Modernism in the Pacific Northwest catalogue, which would help me finish up one review.  Second, until I finish putting the desk together, it is extremely difficult to lay here on the floor and type up long blog posts, so somewhat shorter is better.

Anyway, I will use this post to try to keep track of longer term things I'd like to see, both locally and out of town.  (Some of the theatre listings are being brought forward from this post.) I probably won't use it to keep track of TSO concerts unless they are very special (like Yo-Yo Ma coming to town May 29, 2015 -- Holst's The Planets is also on the bill, so I probably ought to get my tickets for that soon).  I'm not sure whether Beethoven Symphony 9 counts as special, but that is coming up  quite soon (late Sept.), so I have to decide if I want to go.  I'm probably going to skip Messiah (again) unless there is a cheaper more family-oriented version, which there sometimes is.  I do like how so many churches are pressed into service by some of these smaller outfits, and I might go to see Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium in such a space on April 3.

So without too much further ado:

August 2014
Tartuffe - Soulpepper

Sept. 2014
The Importance of Being Earnest - Hart House (mostly if my son is interested)
Tartuffe - The Crucible

Oct. 2014
Trip to Chicago to see some theatre and catch the last weekend of the Magritte exhibition at the Art Institute.  (Unfortunately, we would just miss The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,which runs through mid Jan.  In the somewhat unlikely event we go back to Chicago a second time that closely spaced together, I will make sure to go)

Nov. 2014
Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (the Shaw Festival version is being transferred here)

Dec. 2014
Helen Frankenthaler exhibit at Albright-Knox (Buffalo) (I guess I'll give it another chance).  

Jan. 2015
TRB meeting in D.C. (maybe a side trip to Philly this time rather than New York, which has become a bit of a routine)

Feb 2015
Yankee Tavern @ American Blues Theatre, Chicago (though March) -- probably just wishful thinking.  (Apparently the play was produced in London, Ont. last season but hasn't made it to Toronto as far as I know.)
Toronto - East Side Players - Andrew Bovell's Speaking in Tongues (though March)
Brooklyn Academy of Music - O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (through March though tickets will be a bear to get).

March 2015
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit @ the DIA (this runs through mid July and will be a good excuse to go to Detroit if we haven't made it before then -- it might even be the spring break trip).
Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead - Ryerson (not entirely sure I want to see this (I passed up a chance to see it at Langara in Vancouver, but I might go)
Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike - Mirvish Productions (what an odd thing for Mirvish to be putting on; incidentally, Goodman in Chicago is also doing this play this season).
Harper Regan - Canadian Stage Company -- I'll probably pass on this, having seen it in Chicago a few years back.

April 2015
Thomas Tallis/John Tavener - Mendelssohn Choir
Yankee Tavern (in Vancouver) - now this is pretty ironic...

May 2015
Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly (in London, ON) (while I would prefer to watch Fifth of July first, that doesn't look like it is in the cards)

Aug. 2015
ASA meeting in Chicago (I think I will see about making this an extended stay, working out of a satellite office in Chicago.  I'd also like to get to the Milwaukee Art Museum in part to check out the Treasures of the Albright Knox Museum that we didn't get to see last weekend -- ironic.)

Shaw's 2015 season has just been announced and there are a few interesting plays, but the must-see for me is a new play by Tony Kushner!  I'm so there. 

In the near future, I'd like to get back to Ottawa, Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis (with the family if possible to most of these) and Cleveland (basically by myself).  I'm not sure there are any upcoming events that would really inspire me to go to one sooner than the other.  When the kids are a bit older (and more appreciative), we will look into Philadelphia and D.C.

One thing that I just noticed is the these potential trips to the U.S. are spaced out very evenly.  My passport expires at the end of April, so I will have to plan this very carefully.  Right now it looks like if I renewed early (say late October) that might be for the best, but it would mean not seeing my family in North Carolina around Thanksgiving.  Drat.  I'll have to double-check processing times and the fees to expedite passport handling. (It looks like I might actually be able to do this by mail rather than booking an appointment at the U.S. embassy.  That would be sweet.)

A snarl of bureaucrats

Ok, there is probably a real term for a gathering of many bureaucrats, just as a flock of sheep or a herd of cows.  But snarl seems good enough for now.

I may have mentioned a week or so ago that we were in this weird limbo where the work visas had sort of lapsed (at least for the purpose of signing up for new social services) but we still had to cross the border to get the Permanent Residency made official by an immigration officer.  So this meant we had to cross the border (at Buffalo) a lot sooner than I had planned.  It also means roughly a one-month gap from when the BC health care lapses and the OHIP kicks in, which is not ideal.

I may write about the Buffalo experience at more length later, but it was not a positive one.  I think the US border agents were deliberately making life harder for the Ontario residents trying to cross over for the long weekend.  I saw plenty of cars being searched.  Anyway, it was a 3+ hour delay, which seems simply ridiculous.  We never did manage to get to the Albright-Knox Museum, though in the end we did see Niagara Falls.

Coming back was a snap, since we were doing the crossing back Sat. in the late afternoon rather than Sunday evening or Monday.  This was basically the pattern of the trip from hell to Seattle.  It has made me vow never to drive to the US on a holiday weekend ever again.  I've pretty much swore off Buffalo as well, though perhaps I will relent and take Megabus to the Albright-Knox in the late fall for an exhibit on Helen Frankenthaler.

Anyway, the immigration officer wasn't super efficient, but eventually we got through.  So we are landed Canadians now.  What a lot of work, though most of it was in the distant past.  Now there is another gap until the cards come in the mail, but we should be able to travel to the US at least.

Then yesterday we went back to register for OHIP and ended up with a very helpful clerk who got us squared away.  We didn't even have to go back in line for the Ontario drivers licences.  This really was quite a good experience.  The good feelings didn't last, however, as we got the complete run-around trying to get the kids registered for school.  I was told twice to bring them up to the main offices only to find out that no, they said we should just bring them to the local school the last week of August and there should be no problem.  How reassuring.  I actually did fire off a letter of complaint on the school board's web site.  What made this particularly frustrating is that the school board offices are up in North York Centre, so way, way, way out of our way (though at least right on the subway).

Finally, today I am going to try to trade in my old SIN card for a new number.  With that, almost all the bureaucracy is finally out of the way.  What a struggle...

Edit: Getting the SIN card fixed was a snap, less than 15 minutes, though apparently I still need to let Canada Revenue know where I am.  So I guess three out of four wasn't so bad...

Falstaff and his descendants

I probably should have provided this link when discussing Rushdie on Desani in my last post, but it was already quite long.  There is quite a lot of good material there, but I am still wrapping my head around Rushdie passing on some thoughts of Milan Kundera that all English literature "descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy."  In this case, Desani (and Joyce and even Anthony Burgess) are clearly on Team Tristram.  And I can buy that an awful lot of literature really is about a damsel in distress, even if the novels are not epistolary in nature.  However, like all militant binaries, it tends to fall apart when pressed too hard.  Are all bildungsroman (scrambled or not) to be classified as Shandean, even if they are primarily moral in nature?  Anything with a anti-hero is also put into the Sterne column?  I would have preferred it if Kundera had gone back to the classics and said that literature tended to be Apollonian (Clarissa) or Dionysian (Tristram Shandy), as I think that formulation makes more sense.

However, even there things break down when you consider Shakespeare, who really did blend the two approaches, typically in the same play.  Often I consider Shakespeare to be a Dionysian at heart but one who felt obligated to wrap up his plays in a moral fashion, appealing to the intellect and reason, i.e. an Apollonian ending.  And sometimes this just doesn't go over that convincingly.  (As You Like It must have the worst cop-out ending of any Shakespeare comedy.  It's on my mind as they are doing it in Toronto's High Park this summer.  I plan to go but need to remind myself to basically disregard the last five minutes.)  And really both Richardson and Sterne descend from different aspects of Shakespeare.

The influence of Shakespeare on English literature is truly immense, and Falstaff (or Falstaff analogs) being a character that emerges periodically in comedies.  I thought I had already touched on this in this blog, but apparently not.  Most people are well aware of Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.  However, a more obscure novel by a Canadian author (My Present Age by Guy Vandergaeghe) features Ed, who is also an overweight, over-educated and totally exasperating character.  The two are quite similar, but seem to have been derived independently from each other, but from the same root source.  If anything, Vandergeaghe came first, since the Ed character is also in the last two stories of his collection, Man Descending.  I'm not sure if I will reread these "Ed stories" and/or My Present Age, but if I do, I'll post a review.

So why this long digression on Falstaff?  I've finally reached the point in The Tin Drum where Oskar gives us a long description of the jazz musician Klepp.  He is corpulent and basically living in his own filth when Oskar enters his room at the boarding house they share (Oskar apparently sleeps in the tub of a decommissioned bathroom).  The description of the spaghetti dinner Klepp cooks actually made me retch.  Eventually, Oskar gets him out of bed by playing his drum, and soon they are busking in Dusseldorf (at least I think that's where the story is taking place at this point).  Slightly after this, they find a guitarist and are hired on as a jazz trio at The Onion Cellar (in one of the better set pieces of the novel).  Klepp is probably the most disgusting Falstaff yet, with sloth and gluttony overwhelming his lust (though he does get married later to a cigarette girl -- to Oskar's disgust).  It's not a perfect analogy, mostly because characters are supposed to outgrow their Falstaffs; Oskar encounters his quite late in the game and doesn't appear to demonstrate any moral growth at all that would allow him to move out of the orbit of Klepp.  Maybe this is one reason why the novel in general is so unsatisfying: late growth spurt aside, Oskar is essentially unchanging and thus not terribly compelling as a character.  

Literary connections

Well, there are an almost endless number of literary connections, depending on whether one is looking at self-professed connections between authors or only ones that the reader draws from personal (and sometimes very idiosyncratic) experience(s).  I'm generally more interested in the latter than the former, and I'll sketch out a few that have been on my mind lately.  However, one of the more intriguing formal connections is that Joseph Conrad apparently wrote Under Western Eyes under the influence and as a partial response to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  Anyway, I picked up a Dover edition of Under Western Eyes super cheap at a bookstore on Bloor (not the one I used to haunt, I think that one is gone, but it is a reasonable substitute -- I'll definitely have to watch it as the used bookstore scene is just so much better in Toronto than in Vancouver, and possibly better than NYC simply because so many have closed over the years due to high rent).  While I am planning on getting around to Conrad's The Secret Agent (which I've somewhat shamefully never tackled) before Under Western Eyes, when I do get to that one, I'll go ahead and read Crime and Punishment in the newish Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, which I've also wanted to read for quite some time.  So many books, not enough time.  After having tackled quite a few longish books, I think I'll take up some shorter books for the next month or so, even if it means distorting the TBR pile a bit.

While both Two Solitudes and The Tin Flute have WWII in the background, and both have conflicts that are essentially resolved by men going off to war, Grass's The Tin Drum is a lot more drenched in WWII and its suffering, as well as the medium-term impacts of the war.  That isn't terribly surprising: Canada's suffering was an order of magnitude less than that faced by Germany or Russia for that matter.

However, this constellation isn't really the one I want to focus on.  Instead, I am really amazed at how much Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children draws on The Tin Drum.  (I am hardly the first to point this out.  Actually, in a few essays, Rushdie mentions Grass as a major influence on his work.)  The narrator is incarcerated or at least incapacitated, and is looking back over their lives.  For about 1/3 of the book, Oskar has a male nurse that has a complicated relationship with him, not so different from the one that Saleem has with Padma (aside from the occasional sex).  They both have truly prodigious memories (something that bugs me in general in retrospective fiction) and tell family stories/legends from before their births.  They both have odd powers.  They both witness momentous events in their countries, both touched by war.  They even are both unlikely leaders of gangs, and Rushdie's account is a bit more realistic in that Saleem is not able to keep the in-fighting under control.  They are both epic in scope,* and at this point in my life, both exhausted me (I fairly recently reread Midnight's Children and definitely enjoyed it less on the second go-around).  Both novels would have been far better served by being cut down by at least 100 pages.  The Tin Drum is more generally chronological, aside from the switching back and forth to Oskar in the hospital, whereas Midnight's Children jumps around a bit, at least at first.  On the other hand, both feature lots of foreshadowing and the characters sometimes circle back around to key events in their lives, allowing them to be reinterpreted as the reader has more information (honestly, a little of this goes a long way, and both authors are too self-indulgent in this respect).  As far as the really unreliable narrator (in the hospital or madhouse) goes, I would also mention The Studhorse Man as another prime example.

That is the main example I wanted to cover, but I may come back around with another before the week is out.  While I would love to keep going, I have a fair bit of work to do before I can crash tonight.

Edit: Now that I have caught up ever so slightly on my sleep, I have come up with two other linkages.  The first falls in the more formal category, and the second is more of a personal linkage.  I've been somewhat interested in the NYRB reprint series, going a bit out of my way to pick them up if cheap enough, though I've already decided I cannot possibly acquire the whole set.  Anyway, one that came to my attention recently was completely new to me --  G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, which is a bit of a wild ride, somewhat Joycean in its playfulness around language.  Not surprisingly Anthony Burgess was a huge fan, as was Rushdie, though Rushdie seems to imply that he was more influenced by Western literature.  Anyway, on the back cover, it turns out that T.S. Eliot was fairly blown away by the book, and Saul Bellow chimes in that this is one of the few times he agreed with Eliot on anything.  Then the quote continues that Hatterr was one of the few books that Bellow allowed himself to read while working on The Adventures of Augie March.  I wonder if I did read them back to back would I see any meaningful connections.  It's not a bad idea, but it is one that I don't think I can take on until roughly 2016!

The other that is more personal is that it is odd just how many novels have been reminding me of Fuentes' Christopher Unborn.  No question the situation of a child just waiting, waiting to be born reminded me most closely of Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (the parallels gain prominence when the reader realizes that the unborn baby will essentially become Michel Tremblay -- chronicler of the neighbourhood).  Well, it also reminds me of my real estate agent whose baby was roughly a week late.  I mentioned briefly that the street gang that is a bit of a Greek chorus reminded me of the Vancouver gang in Doretta Lau's title story from How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun.  And how could I have forgotten the huge debt that Christopher Unborn owes to Tristram Shandy?  There are other minor flashes here and there, and no question I would like to reread Christopher Unborn some day, but I don't know where I will find the time.


* Actually both are epic in length but The Tin Drum seems to be intentionally anti-epic in scope.  Oskar's story is cramped and not really that interesting.  It's bare outlines could be told in about 10 pages. I still have 100 more to go and can't say I am too excited about reading more about Oskar, though I'll be glad to be moving on to something else (some shorter novels for a while perhaps).

Progress, three weeks in

Unless I am totally off, today is the last day of our third week in Toronto, about to roll over to week number 4.  We've had the boxes from the movers for about 1.5 weeks.  We've had internet and TV for the same amount of time (in fact the movers and the cable guy were here at the exact same time, but managed to co-exist fortunately).  It's worth noting that on top of all this physical work (and real work-related work), I was very occupied in dealing with paperwork and then updating addresses and my email accounts.  That is itself a full-time job.

The kitchen is more or less unpacked, though there are huge piles of empty boxes (here and throughout the house) and a big mound of plastic wrap.  We can get more of the plastic out on Thurs.  But it is usable, though I think we'll end up looking for sturdier kitchen chairs, particularly as the kids grow bigger and are a bit rougher than they should be.  In that, they are pretty typical kids...

The living room is fairly close to being ready, though today I will try to unroll the carpet and see if I can get it situated under the couch and love seat.  There is a kind of neat reading area with an overstuffed chair by the window in the front.  On the front porch itself, I just picked up two cheap chairs from Home Depot, and those have already come in handy.  The main thing left for the living room, aside from getting rid of the spare boxes is to bring up the last of the art books, since two bookcases dedicated to art books are in that area.  Partly because I want to occasionally share them with the kids, and partly because if there is ever a flood, these are the ones that I will be the most devastated if they are water-damaged.  Pretty much all the fiction and non-fiction downstairs could be replaced, though I will make an effort not to put any valuable first editions on the bottom shelves!

The kids' rooms are fairly close to being done, though there will need to be some sorting out of books and games and such.  There are probably two or three more boxes of kids' books to come upstairs.

The top floor (master bedroom) is getting fairly close.  I am nearly done putting together the wardrobe.  We may even need a second one.  The biggest problem with this place is not having enough closets in the right places.  One of the screws is missing, so I do hope to find an adequate replacement and finish the wardrobe.  For the time being, I'll probably have to move my work shirts to my son's closet.  Fortunately, he is an early riser, so it won't be too awkward grabbing things from there in the morning.  But that doesn't sound like a great long-term solution.  Of course, since at the moment I am still living out of a suitcase, anything will be a step up.

The area that needs the most work is the basement obviously, though a fair bit of progress has been made over the past few days.  All the bookcases are in place.  I am trying to get books in the right general place and will worry about a proper sorting later.  Once the file cabinet is in place, I should be able to get six or seven more boxes unpacked.  At that point, I may be able to build the desk and start using the storage space as intended.  And that will mean that the small storage room on the 2nd floor (currently used to hold the computers) can be used for boxes and extraneous stuff.  It's sort of like a real-life sliding puzzle, though also in 3-D.

There are a few important things I am trying to track down.  I know that the movers lost my wife's bookcase-thing, which will have to be replaced.  If I can track down this large box, then I will be a bit more at ease, while I wait for the other things to turn up. (I just found it -- ironically in the box that was being used to hold up the monitor until the desk is assembled downstairs, so literally in front of my nose.  I'm too relieved to feel abashed.)

The backyard will take a bit longer.  We are being visited by three neighbourhood cats, and we need to make this a bit less cat-friendly before we will feel comfortable about putting up the patio furniture.  Sadly our backyard is just filled with gravel and it is a bit too inviting at the moment.  I'm also debating getting a small storage unit for the bikes, which I definitely need if I am to start riding my bike.  But that is something to work on in week four.

I think, on the whole, we have made good progress in these three weeks.