Experiencing Omaha

Somewhat to my surprise, I was in Omaha for 2 and a half days a short while back.  I just have to say Omaha was never on my radar as a place I planned to visit.  Nonetheless, I tried to make the most of it.  I found that there is an art museum there: the Joslyn.  Even better, they had a special exhibit running on American Modernism, which featured a number of paintings on loan from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which is one of the great art museums in America.  So I rearranged my schedule a bit to make sure I had time to make a visit.

One nice aspect of Omaha, not dissimilar to Regina or Saskatoon, is that the airport is a very short ride from the city center.  I think it was a 15 minute trip.  I did find the architecture in Omaha kind of awful -- either completely bland or a concrete brutalism left over from the 70s.  The streets were really wide and not terribly suitable for pedestrians and certainly not cyclists.  On the walk over to the museum, I saw multiple statues of pioneer wagons, cowboys and buffalo (so many buffalo!).  However, these were not treated ironically, and it was all a bit much. 

Despite the wide streets, there was a bit of a traffic jam.  It turned out that the cause of the problem was people coming in for a matinee of Mama Mia!  Overall, my first impressions left me with a sense that Omaha was incredibly square and not a place I would ever feel at home.

The art museum was a welcome change, not least because there was an ironic statue of a pioneer wagon in the sculpture garden.

Admission to the museum was free with a very reasonable surcharge for the special exhibit.  I knew a few of the pieces from the Brooklyn Museum reasonably well, particularly the O'Keeffe and the Stuart Davis, but quite a few seemed new to me and might well not be things that come out of storage all that often.  All the more reason to take a second and third look at the paintings, which I did.  I don't have any pictures of the special exhibit, but here is a Dale Chihuly piece they have hanging near the gift shop.

Even this museum had a bit too much Western art for my taste, but they did have a few nice pieces here and there.

Veronese, Venus at Her Toilette, 1580s

Claude Monet, The Meadow, 1879

Jackson Pollock, Galaxy, 1947

However, there was one major flaw and that is that inside the special exhibit they pointed visitors to a gallery with more American modernism of the 1950s and 60s, such as another Stuart Davis painting.  However, this was closed for re-installation of various paintings throughout the entire last month of the special exhibit.  Unbelievably shoddy planning.  And this is almost certainly the set of galleries that I would have liked the most at the Joslyn, so that was very disappointing indeed.  The likelihood of me going back is very small.

Anyway, this is what I missed out on, among other things.

Stuart Davis, American Painting, 1932-51

George Segal, Times Square at Night, 1970

The Segal is particularly bitter pill to swallow, as the one in Montreal is also in storage and I think even the one in the Albright-Knox was not on view.  I'm having a bit of trouble remembering the last Segal sculpture I've seen in person.  Might it be the bed sculpture in the Art Institute of Chicago?  I see that there is an impressive installation in the National Gallery of Canada, which I may visit this summer, but certainly there is no guarantee it is on view at all.  It is a complete unknown if the AGO will put The Butcher Shop back on display (I vaguely remember seeing it back in the 90s) since they seem to be completely downplaying their (US) modern art collection in favor of fairly bland European art by mostly second-rate artists.  I know I've never seen Segal's Execution which is owned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, but this is supposedly going on display in the fall, so who knows if I will get out there for work.

At any rate, I really am disappointed in their poor planning, and it kind of did spoil the visit.

Another thing that was a huge disappointment, though one that would take more effort to rectify, is how lame it is that they have this park behind the Convention Center along the Missouri River but there is no easy way to access it.  You literally have to walk roughly a mile out of the way to go under the highway (elevated at this point) to connect up with the park.  Truly appalling planning.  Once you are in the park it is fine, and there is even a pedestrian bridge over to Council Bluffs, Iowa, but getting there is a real problem.  It was just one more missed opportunity for Omaha.  That pretty much covers the trip.  I'll be surprised if I make it back, but I suppose never say never.  I never expected to make it out to Salt Lake City either, but I was there in 2005.  You just never know.

Regretting one's career path (in fiction)

I have to say I am not enjoying Maugham's Of Human Bondage.  It is very hard for me understand why it is often considered one of the top 100 books of the 20th Century, aside from the fact that there are lots of people who like watching car crashes -- but only if it is sufficiently high-minded (i.e. they wouldn't be caught dead watching reality TV but they'll read books like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or Of Human Bondage).  I really don't like Philip Carey as a character.  He is portrayed as a thoroughly unpleasant young man, who goes out of his way to snub his uncle and generally only hangs out with people he can look down on.  Maugham seems to justify everything because Carey lost both parents as a child and has a physical handicap as well (a clubfoot).  The only section of the book that was bearable (so far) was when he was off in Paris trying to become an artist.  Now he is back in London, doing a fairly poor job of studying to be a doctor.  And he falls hard for a waitress, essentially only because she snubs him, thus instantly becoming forbidden fruit.  I know the heart wants what it wants, and I have to admit that there were times in my youth where I preferred the "unapproachable" women the best.  After all, isn't that the primary reason Dante fell so hard for Beatrice?  He never got close enough to get to know her as a person and see some wrinkles and spots, which would force him (or allow him, depending on one's take) to take her off the pedestal.

So some small credit must be given to Paul for at least speaking to Mildred, the waitress, even though he is acting pretty stupidly in falling for a woman solely because he wants what he can't have.  I think that's still further than Dante ever got, though he certainly put a lot of words into Beatrice's mouth when it came time to write The Divine Comedy.  On a side note, this waitress-customer dynamic is somewhat reminiscent of Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute, though that was a case where both the waitress and customer got entangled and played a bit hard to get at different times, though in the end it was the waitress (Florentine) who fell harder for the customer (Jean), which is the reverse of Of Human Bondage. 

However, as I learned in my 20s, it gets really boring reading about anyone who doesn't have enough self-respect to be treated well.  A mature person doesn't even fall for someone or something just because it is out of reach, and that is a hard standard to live up to.  But most of us can at least manage to have that smidgen of self respect where we would have broken things off after only one or two of the truly terrible scenes that Mildred creates where she tells Paul just how little she thinks of him.  Obviously that would have meant a short book, and Paul is an extremely weak character who keeps crawling back to her.  You really want to shake him and say how hard would it be to find another restaurant and another waitress to ask out.  There are so many other fish in the sea.

It is really hard to fathom how Maugham is going to keep this going for another 300+ pages.  I find it tedious and not at all compelling, and indeed this is exactly why I disliked Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. (In fact, I dislike it even more now, seeing how it is close to a carbon copy of Of Human Bondage.)  I am kind of dreading these last 300+ pages actually, and would not finish the book except I am going to be seeing a play at Soulpepper based on the book in a few weeks.  Though if this book ends the way I think it will, I should probably skip it (the play) and try to get my money back.  I do have to wonder if they are basing the play a bit more on the movie, which I have to assume is a bit better balanced (I haven't seen it).  In the book, Maugham gives a disinterested person (like the reader) absolutely no reason to even want Philip to succeed in wooing Mildred -- she's common, fairly stupid, sickly, a liar and basically an all-around unpleasant young woman.  Of course, I don't like Philip either, so maybe they are meant for each other, just to keep the dating pool clear for nicer people.  (In this sense, it is similar to Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, where I didn't like either of the romantic leads, though Of Human Bondage is 2.5 times as long!)  In the movie, Mildred is played by Bette Davis, so at least one can imagine why there are some obsessive longings on Philip's part.  However, they seem to have tweaked the plot and have him give up his art career due to her, whereas in the novel it was already over by the time he met her.  That may have been the only truly difficult or even semi-noble thing he did in his life -- agree to give up the career of an artist when it became clear he didn't have what it would take to be a great artist.  He is told this (his lack of skill) by an art teacher who actually admits that he wishes he found out when he was younger that he didn't have the raw talent to become great.

I'm having some trouble thinking of comparable cases in literature where a young person gets career advice and then takes it.  (Or even ditches a career and switches to something else unprompted -- Don DeLillo's Americana sort of falls into this category, but not completely.*)  I think part of the problem is that the first 200+ years of the novel, they are written for (and often by) the leisured, monied classes who didn't have to work.  That changes with the Victorian novel, where Dickens and Trollope write about various professions.  I suppose in the States there was never as much of a leisured class to begin with, and Mark Twain in particular knew just how much money meant.  Still, you have books written by Edith Wharton that barely acknowledge that money (and the obtaining of money) is something to be worried about.  However, this is well-balanced by Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and even John O'Hara to an extent.

I can certainly think of cases where an individual is placed in a job they don't like very much.  There are numerous examples of that in American and European literature to say nothing of Russian literature.  There are also examples of people striving to do well or reasonably well at work, even though they have temperaments (artistic or otherwise) that make this a struggle.  I'm thinking of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons for one, but quite a few of the figures in Dos Passos's USA Trilogy are not well-suited for the work they do.

I'm sure I can come up with more after I think about it, though I am blanking on this early career advice angle.  Part of the problem is that professional writers just often know so little about the world of work that it isn't that convincing, and they focus far more on emotional truths and affairs of the heart and not so much on office politics.  This seems even more true of playwrights, with Arthur Miller being an honorable exception and Mamet a partial exception.  Well, if I can think of some other good examples I will list them later, and feel free to add some in the comments.

* I'm struggling to remember the details, but the main character throws away a career as a television executive but to become a film-maker, which is still in the same general category of arts production, even though his economic status is far more vulnerable.  In the same way, in Steven Shirrell's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, the minotaur is going to go from working in a diner to being his own boss at a hot dog stand.  Not exactly a radical career change, even though there is some uncertainty (and potentially some personal growth) involved.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival

I guess I just hadn't been paying that much attention, but the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is in town this weekend.  There is still plenty to do today (Sunday), so check it out if so inspired (some details here).  I actually had seen a few tie-ins like the cover of NOW and a few comic pages in the National Post (which doesn't appear to otherwise run any comics), but I hadn't given it much thought.

However, I was visiting the Pixie Trix Comics* page, and they said that not only would they be staffing a booth, but that TCAF was completely free to enter.  So while Saturday was a busy though productive day, I decided to run down to the Metro Toronto reference library and check it out.  (I had really wanted to go to High Park and check out the cherry blossoms, but the weather really didn't cooperate -- it rained early and scared off my wife and then (while very humid) it didn't rain the rest of the day, so we could have gone after all.  Rats!  On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have had time to get to TCAF if we had also done the High Park trip.  I guess there is always next year (when we won't be packing to move!) to try to go out there to see the cherry blossoms.)

As it happens, my business cards were ready, so I grabbed them on the way to the subway.  I think they came out well, though if I was going to redo them, I'd make my name 2 font sizes bigger to stand out just a bit more.  Still, I will be able to pass these out at SFYS on Monday (I think I'll go even if my piece isn't included), particularly if I run into two of the actors that read my Straying South piece.

I made it over to the Toronto Reference Library and it was a complete zoo.  I don't think I've ever seen it that busy (and I imagine it probably did put some folks there to do actual research into a real tizzy).  Here is the staircase between the two floors that were hosting TCAF.

It was impossible to find anything without one of the venue maps, and even then it wasn't easy (as few booths actually had numbers on them!).  Pixie Trix is at booth 271, which is in the Bram & Bluma Appel Salon on the 2nd floor.

I did get a chance to meet Gisele and Dave in person.  I could even have met Shouri, who flew in quite a distance to be there.  But she was talking with someone else and signing, and I guess I felt shy.  I had no idea that none of them live in Montreal any longer...

While I didn't really need much at the booth, since I got everything through Kickstarter, I did buy some cards and got a cute bookmark as well.  I'm glad I came out, though it was jam packed in the library.

I was pretty good about not spending a ton of money at TCAF, though it would have been easy to do.

On the way out, I took one last look around and happened to see Dakota McFadzean's work at a booth.  It took me a minute to realize that this was the cartoonist who had just started Murray Geister, which I blogged about here. Dakota was actually at the booth, so we chatted just a bit, and then he mentioned he had seen the post, which I thought was a bit odd (as this blog still is a bit under the radar), but he admitted he had been Googling himself and my post popped up.  I gave him one of the new cards, and he thought it was amusing that I called myself an urbanologist.  We talked about that briefly.  It turns out that he actually lives in Toronto and hasn't been in Saskatchewan for ages.  Can't say I blame him. 

I think I even saw one of the folks from the writing group (the one that was telling the other writer just how much competition there is now in the realm of comics).  I'm sort of sorry I didn't have a chance to say hello, but maybe I will end up going another time and getting to know him a bit better.  I think I need to be done or almost done with the move before I can go back.

So that was my excursion for the day.  After I got back, I did rent a ZipCar and got 8 boxes moved over (and met even more of the neighbours).  It was more of a symbolic than a substantive move, but one has to start somewhere.

* Though I am a regular reader, I have been really hesitant to link to any of these web-comics as most of them are borderline inappropriate for work and Menage a 3 is completely NSFW!  Probably the safest of the bunch is Sandra on the Rocks, though even this would be better read at home...

8th Candian Challenge - 18th Review - Traverse

I came across this recent book of poetry completely by accident.  I was exploring the Toronto Poetry Map, which is a web application hosted by the Toronto Public Library.  It is quite neat: the city is laid out with various dots representing how many poems have been written in various locations throughout the city.  Not too surprisingly, most of the poems they have in their database are from Old Toronto, though there are a few spread throughout the city.  There is also an address to nominate other poems with a Toronto connection.  I didn't see too many specific to Riverdale or Leslieville, though there were a few.  Apparently, according to one poem, there had once been streetcar service up Withrow Avenue.  Who knew?

At any rate, several of the dots were linked back to Traverse by George Elliott Clarke, who happens to be Toronto's Poet Laureate.  Since the library naturally had quite a few copies of Traverse, I borrowed one.  Traverse has an interesting back history.  In 2005, Clarke decided to write an autobiography in poetic form as he was turning 45.  He wrote out the whole thing in one day (41 blank verse sonnets).  Quite a few were published here and there, and then he added 9 more sonnets in 2013 and published the whole thing as Traverse.

I have to admit to considerable jealousy, since I was going to do something similar in sestina format as I was turning 40 and here I am, just turned 45, and I think I have only partially written two -- and still don't have any I am ready to share with the wider world.  I can make plenty of excuses, but clearly I could have done it if I had pushed everything else off my plate.  At any rate, I figured if Clarke could write these poems in a day, I could read them in a day, which I did.

I don't really know how to review the poems, aside from noting that for an autobiography it seems awfully shallow.  We find out who Clarke dated and slept with, we find out quite a bit about various jobs he had, particularly when he showed up complacent white folks to get a plum position, and we hear about him moving back and forth across Canada and occasionally to the States.  He also works references to various cultural touchstones into the poems, name-dropping The Band, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and even Hall and Oates. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of interiority to these poems, or times when Clarke is really telling us something interesting about his thoughts or feelings.  Or maybe I am just missing it.  There are moments when he talks about white-on-black violence and a quiet or not-so-quiet Black pride.  But not much of interest (to me) beyond that.  Almost nothing (that I can recall) about what he was doing or thinking as he wrote the poems that made a name for himself and allowed him to become a professor at Duke and now at UToronto.

Of the poems, my favourite by far is Stanza VIII:
Didn't I freeze, perambulating frozen,
     peninsular Halifax,
North End to South End to North,
...
As intoxicated as Lear, I staggered raggedly,
      taking blows of rain and snow,
or slaps of rain and snow and tears,
      stinging my black face breathless.
Fog and snow and rain and tears....
      Store windows spit neon to bleach me white.
...

I also like Stanza XXIV, which reminds me just a bit of my own journey across Canada, which is finally finding its way into my work:
I bade us execute what we could prosecute,
      negotiating railway mix-ups,
classroom metaphysics, missed-bus fiascoes,
...
      my "Long March" hitch-hiking to Vancouver --
...
      slogging kilometers that were upteen miles long,
snapping pics, thumbing rides, praying, writing,
      hungry, wolfing wild blackberries,
swatting mosquitoes, getting shat on by gulls,
      then kiting from Vancouver straight to her bed in Québec.

If more of the poems had been along these lines, I would have considered it a masterpiece or near masterpiece, but the vast majority just read as Clarke bragging about this thing or that thing that he had done.  I realize this is basically a celebratory autobiography (and one written for a certain kind of performance where modesty doesn't really have a role to play), but I found it quite boring honestly.  While Clarke in person may be a completely different from how he has portrayed himself in Traverse, I would have no interest in meeting anyone so interested in trumpeting all his accomplishments.  I can't honestly say whether my disdain for the content of the later stanzas caused me to sort of disregard them, or I simply didn't find the language as compelling as some of the earlier stanzas.  Nonetheless, for the most part I found myself unmoved by and disengaged from Traverse, with a few exceptions as already noted.

Edit to add: And yet, on reflection, he actually reminds me just a bit of this math teacher that I worked with for a couple of years in Newark.  He generally also talked up his accomplishments, but in person it was a bit easier to take (than if I had read them all in one place, as in Traverse).  He might well have said that the broader culture places so little emphasis on Blacks achieving anything, other than as entertainers and athletes, that it is basically necessary to blow one's own horn.  I can understand this perspective, but it still doesn't mean that I respond well to it, particularly when there is the distancing effect from reading all these accomplishments.  The WASP way is to engage in (false) modesty or the humblebrag, both of which I have practiced from time to time.  It kind of stresses me out that I am in an industry where you have to be at the very top of the food chain before you can afford to feign modesty about your accomplishments.

Calling cards

While calling cards themselves are not a "thing" anymore, I've decided that if I am going to be serious about my writing and promoting my work (which I suppose includes the blog), I need personalized business cards.

I thought very seriously about a super plain card that just read Scrivener.

(Yes, obviously it would have needed an email address or phone number at minimum.)

But so few people would have gotten the reference.  And more to the point, a scrivener was more of a copyist and certainly not a creative writer.  Though much of the technical writing (and seemingly near endless re-editing) I do comes closer to this type of writing.

So in the end, I went with a super busy card that ties together the three latest cities I lived in (left to right) Chicago, Vancouver (or Richmond if one wants to be really technical) and Toronto.

It should look very much like this but may be a bit fuzzier.  Unfortunately, I won't know if the email and blog address will look ok until it is actually printed.  The bigger issue is that it is way off-centred and doesn't look professional.  So what exactly is the point here. (The real lesson is not to try to throw all these things together at the last minute, but I generally don't have the time I would like to make a proper job of things.  I'm always trying to see if I can cheat time a bit, and it often does come back around and bite me.)

So I probably would have gone with this, which does look slightly more professional, but so much of the top gets cut off.  And if I push the text down, then even more of it gets lost in the windows of the Kluczynski Federal Building.  So back to the drawing board, for hopefully the last time.

I guess it might look like this, which isn't too bad (though it's still very busy).

I am now torn because I either have to pay too much for one day service or wait 5-7 business days, which kind of defeats the purpose, since they won't be ready to take to Sing-for-Your-Supper, which is this Monday (even though I still don't know that my piece will be selected!).  What I really do need to do if I go this route -- and I am having some second and third thoughts about it -- is to change the header of the blog to tie into the card.  I started working on that, but ran out of time.  While this week I should not be quite as bogged down with work, I will begin painting and moving things into the new house.  We did manage to close and have the keys and everything.  So turning a new page here in Toronto.  Exciting.

Shakespeare in Toronto

Even leaving aside the Stratford season coming up (and I'll be seeing quite a bit of Shakespeare, including Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost), there is a lot of Shakespeare to be seen.

I'm just back from the Bollywood-infused version of Much Ado About Nothing at Tarragon.  I did enjoy it, though I agree completely with the Mooney review that they tried just a bit too hard to remind us that the play was set in Brampton and also Benedict was a fairly minor player in the play, relative to many productions.  But I would still recommend it, and it runs through May.

In the washroom, there were posters for upcoming productions around town for Othello and Macbeth.  So assuming one saw Lear last year at Stratford, one could basically get in all the major tragedies in one calendar year (sort of a Shakespeare Grand Slam).  Now I don't actually care for Othello; I think it relies far too much on coincidence and absolutely nobody revealing what they know in time to avert tragedy, so I will pass on that.  I may go see Macbeth, particularly as I wasn't all that impressed with the version from Bard on the Beach two years ago (basically one of the few productions I thought was a bit of a misfire).  It's also playing at the Alumnae Theatre space, which isn't that far from my house, now that it is biking weather.  However, I am still seeing a lot of theatre and need to scale back in order to actually make this move happen (we close on Thurs!).  For those reasons, I decided not to see Liver at the Storefront, despite the rave review in the Star.

What I will be seeing, however, is Julius Caesar and The Comedy of Errors in High Park this summer.  The main question is whether I should take my son to see Comedy of Errors.  As far as I can tell, they do not have any matinees, and it would be fairly late for him.  I guess I will decide closer to the time.

I'm sure there are several others that I have missed, but there is certainly quite a bit on offer for those who can't get enough of the Bard.

Short term (May-June) theatre scene

I've been scanning ahead, and I have to admit that next season doesn't look all that thrilling pretty much anywhere.  I don't think I'll be able to piece together a subscription at Tarragon or Soulpepper when I am interested in only one or two plays at each place.  Classical music may end up being a better draw.  Of course I have my own writing to focus on, as well as doing more exploration of the independent theatre scene (and ultimately these two may end up overlapping).  I will say that, whatever may have been the case in the past, the Toronto Star now has started covering indy theatre with some regularity, including this cover (of the arts section) story on RedOne Collective at the Storefront Theatre and Coal Mine Theatre (apparently right at Pape and Danforth).  I'm a bit pleased that I actually have found my way to the Storefront before it became so well known, though I truly had no idea there was a theatre at Pape and Danforth.  Their current offering (Strindberg's Creditors) doesn't thrill me, so I'll probably wait until next year to see what they are up to.  It does seem that Red Sandcastle is maybe just not rising to the same level of competence, but it's worth keeping an eye on them as well.

Anyway, we are back from the George F. Walker double bill.  It was pretty intense, but basically a fairly standard Walker play -- people acting kind of strange under intense stress, all the people in the play hustling to some degree or other, some very implausible events and some very dark moments, ultimately resolving in a perhaps upbeat ending.  (Maybe this isn't entirely true of Problem Child...)  I don't really have the interest in going through these plays in detail, but I agree with the NOW and Star review, which both seem to indicate that the second play on the bill (The Bigger Issue) is a bit stronger (and weirder) than the first one.  It was generally a bit less "shouty," which I appreciated.  I also thought the speech by the principal who dreads having to go back into the trenches and teach (if everything goes south) was very real.  I still remember dreading teaching when I was just out of college, and I have a lot of sympathy for teachers (though rarely teacher union representatives).  There were clearly a few teachers in the audience, and hopefully word of mouth will bring out more before the plays close in about two weeks' time.

I am off to see Needles and Opium tomorrow at Canadian Stage, and I think it is about jazz musicians, refracted through Robert LePage's sensibility.  Not entirely sure what it will be like, but it should be pretty entertaining (I hope).*

There is a play at the Storefront (Liver) where the ad campaign has me really turned off, even a bit sickened, and I had no intention of going, though the Star is giving it a rave review.  I'll have to think long and hard about going, since I think there is only one more week to go.

I am looking forward to the Bollywood version of Much Ado About Nothing.  And in June, I'll go see Soulpepper's remount of Of Human Bondage, which was supposed to be pretty good.  There are two plays in the meantime at Soulpepper that I am skipping.  I never was that crazy about Bedroom Farce by Ayckbourn, which I saw in Chicago.  I also saw Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice in Chicago, and while I wouldn't mind seeing it again, I just don't have the funds.  I guess I would go if I received review tickets (hint, hint).  (The same thing is even more true of The Alchemist at Stratford.  I'd love to see it, though I'd love to see it even more if it gets transferred to Toronto, as I already have two overnight visits to Stratford this summer.  Definitely a record for me.)

I think that covers all the main things I am looking into until the summer, when the action shifts to Stratford and Shaw.  Not much point in belabouring how I am underwhelmed by future seasons, but I'll list a few things I am likely to try to see next season and beyond in a future post.

* It was good but LePage places a much higher value on spectacle than on plot.  I thought The Far Side of the Moon had more plot and even character development.  I guess it didn't help that there was a guy behind me that loudly protested that part of the script was left in French and we had to read the translation in projected subtitles.  I really wish he hadn't been in the audience, as he harshed my mellow.  LePage has reworked this a bit, making the abandoned lover a bit older (and thus more vulnerable.)  As far as I can tell, the script (either in the original or this reworking) has not been published in either English or French.