Holiday ups and downs

Generally things are going fairly well on a personal level; so as long as I don't think too much about the state of the world, I'm ok.  Actually, I just recently found that I have been authorized to go to TRB in a couple of weeks.  I thought that TRB was generally the 3rd week of January, but perhaps every fourth year when there is an Inauguration, they move it up or down to avoid conflicts.  (It's hard enough to get rooms in DC during TRB, so I can't imagine trying to hold the two at the same time!)  I'm still not entirely sure I would have gone to TRB after Inauguration.  It's all still pretty raw, and it certainly looks like Trump is going to live down to our worst fears.  Maybe in a year or two, I'll think more seriously about taking the family to DC, but certainly no time soon.

While I am in DC to present at the conference and network and go to a bunch of sessions, I should have some time to see museums on Sunday.  I'll probably aim to check out the National Gallery (particularly the Stuart Davis exhibition) and the Hirshhorn.  The Freer is closed, and I probably won't go to the Sackler, since the two are sort of a pair.  I often try to get to the American Art Museum, especially as it is open a bit later than the other ones, though I may not this time around.

The Phillips Collection (off DuPont Circle) is always worth visiting, though I am not interested in the special exhibit (I've already seen the Jacob Lawrence migration series).  Depending on how many other sessions I am going to, I may be able to sneak away towards the end of the day Tuesday and just go see the main collection.  The Corcoran Gallery of Art has been taken over and is being remodeled, so I won't be going there.  At any rate, I think this should be a manageable trip, but it will be sort of weird going to TRB now that it has moved to a more central location.

I'm doing a bit of writing (not as much as I should of course), and I've been reading a bit manically (and delving ever deeper into semi-obscure authors).  I'm just about to wind up my best reads of 2016 post, though there might be a late entry if I get through these other books first (and then I have to decide which books comes off, though I think I know the answer already).  I've had some luck with inter-library loan (one of the local librarians will order novels even if they are reference, since she recognizes people want to read books at home, not sitting in the reference room).  Also, unbeknownst to me, the Toronto library ordered a couple of copies of Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, which is a much delayed sequel to The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.  I'm fairly excited about reading this in January once it turns up at the local branch.

As far as holiday things are going, I have the presents and stocking stuffers bought, though I suspect the kids might want a bit more in the way of gifts.  It is a relatively light Christmas for the kids this year, though the relatives are adding to their catch.  Anyway, I am about halfway done with the wrapping, so that tomorrow night won't be too bad.

Probably the biggest single downer is that I waited too long on sending the Christmas card around (basically Friday morning when most people had already taken off).  I also sent almost all of them as bcc's, and I think this year that triggered a warning and my account was blocked (and the emails didn't get delivered!).  Anyway, there wasn't any notification one way or another, and I had a technician reset my password, and I went back in this evening.  I sent off the cards as a smaller batch of specific emails with only one or two bccs.  I think these went out, but it is hard to tell.  When I tried to log back in, I was frozen out again, and the Bell technician said it had to get elevated to level 2, so someone will deal with it in the morning.  I'm actually kind of pissed.  It's not so much that I resent my Christmas card being taken for spam, but a lot of people are sending Christmas e-cards and there ought to be a way to tell the email provider that these are legitimate.  In any event, once they block your account for presumably spamming people, they have to notify you that they did this!  It's not fair to have to try to track them down and get them to reopen your account.

On a more positive note, I managed to get back in the sewing mode.  I never did make the other apples for the children's teachers, as I said I would in this post.  The curtains just took so long, though I finally finished them a few weeks back.  I decided to try another idea I had for a while, and that was to make a stuffed cat.  It took about 4 hours in total.

 

In the end, I would say it came out better than I had any right to expect (especially the tail and ears), but still not quite as well as I had hoped (though seen from the back it is fairly close to what I had envisioned).  The fact that it is homemade and has "character" isn't going to cut that much ice with my daughter, who will probably think it is ugly.  It is nice that the sewing part went really well, with only a few snarled threads, which bodes well for other projects using cotton.

At any rate, over the next week or so, I will try to get a second set of curtains made, and then I'll make one or two more stuffed animals for friends who have kids, but I think I'll try something a lot simpler, like a fish.  Then I guess I'll make an attempt at a Christmas-themed quilt.  Fingers crossed.

Literature of Boredom

There basically is nothing new under the sun, and there have already been quite a few scholars that have probed the literature of boredom.  Certainly, the most extensive look into this area is Richard Kuhn's The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature.  Despite what it says on the title, he probes a variety of forms of boredom, not only the ostensibly Continental ennui.

If we look at earlier novels and works of fiction, there is clearly a religious connotation: idle hands are the devil's playthings and so forth.  This is basically how Hawthorne and Melville would have conceptualized boredom.  While boredom isn't really a sin, boredom is likely to lead to sin.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary generally would fall into this category as well (of acting badly largely due to boredom), though perhaps there are the seeds of ennui in her somewhat tawdry story.

Anyway, there was considerable effort, particularly by French authors, that went into exploring this state of ennui and lassitude, which in its most extreme forms could lead to suicide.*  In many cases, the dissolute French poets (Baudelaire and Racine chief among them) went slumming to try to dispel boredom.

I have not read them, but if I do feel like making a further dive into ennui and "mal du siècle," these are perhaps the best two texts: François-René de Chateaubriand's René and Alfred de Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Confession of a Child of the Century).

I'm sort of tempted to pull together a shelf of these types of books and call it The Library of Boredom.  In addition to some of the books listed below, I would include the relatively obscure existential novel The Tartar Steppe by Italian author Dino Buzzati.

There seems to be a bit of a split in the literature of the 20th Century.  Relatively few American authors write about boredom at work** (at least I am having trouble thinking of any that write about office work), but quite a few wrote about suburban ennui that took place on the home front: John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Ford (The Sportswriter/Independence Day/The Lay of the Land) and Jonathan Frazen's The Corrections (though personally I found this unstomachable and stopped partway through).  It may also be somewhat cyclical, and in tougher economic times, there may generally be fewer stories centered around boredom, as everyone is just supposed to be so grateful to have a job at all (and the unemployed are too busy surviving to be bored about their situation).  If this is so, then we are about to enter a period where we long for the "golden age" when authors could still write about boredom in a non-ironic sense.

Saul Bellow was one of those writing in this previous age, though I would argue he mostly wrote about people who seem to go to great lengths to escape boredom (I'd put both Herzog and Henderson in this category), and while I disliked the novel, Mickey Sabbath from Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, takes this avoidance to extremes.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to read this paper (behind a paywall - sorry) where the author posits a link between Dostoevsky and Saul Bellow in exploring boredom.

I have to say that seems sort of strange, since I can recall not only Dostoevsky but Tolstoy and Gogol writing at least a bit about the boredom of working in offices, but I don't recall Bellow's characters holding down 9-to-5 jobs for the most part.

Anyway, I can think of far more Russian examples of the tedium of office work, which often did drive the characters to the brink of madness and beyond.  One example from Trinidad is Edgar Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office.  If I've missed any good examples of novels, particularly English language novels, that really delve into the boredom of office work, feel free to add in the comments.

The rest of the post will briefly feature David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.  As I mentioned before, this is a somewhat sad novel with many references to suicide throughout (including people who feel driven to suicide by the tedium of their profession).  I just can't help but feel that this was all an elaborate cry for help, and it's unfortunate he didn't share this material with more people.  Leaving that aside, the novel is an odd, patchy thing where there are long chapters devoted to getting inside a single character's headspace and shorter pieces where arcane bits of lore about the IRS are revealed.  While I'm fairly sure David Wallace didn't actually work for the IRS (as the "David Wallace" character in the book claims), he was boning up on accounting in order to write about an IRS office in downstate Illinois in the 1980s.  (I wonder if he found, as I have, that it can be incredibly difficult to get information about everyday life in the 80s, since it all is just before the dawn of the internet age where everything started to be documented on-line.)  Anyway, here are a couple of reviews that give a pretty good sense of what reading the novel is like: NYTimes and Guardian.

I think it is fair to say, this is a novel only for dedicated DFW fans.  Nothing serious happens in the novel, and that was intentional.  Wallace wanted a novel that focused on the boredom and drudgery of being an IRS inspector and that, several times, some big turning point in the plot would arise, and then it would fade away.  Almost like Waiting for Godot blown up to close to 600 pages.  I would say that the fact that the author makes it entirely clear this is a book about boredom (not just once but twice) is a real weakness.  In general, there is just too much drawing the reader's attention to the artifice of fiction throughout the novel (especially the footnotes, which I find incredibly tedious but DFW fans seem to love) and the announcements about boredom are another prime example.  I'm reasonably glad I read the book, but for me it would have functioned better at shorter length, and honestly I liked the earlier material better than the later material (which got more mystical), which suggests I probably would have liked this less if he had lived to finish it...  Anyway, it is definitely the most monumental work dedicated to boredom I am likely to tackle and actually finish.

Edit (1/15/17): This may be unnecessarily mean, but DFW fans strike me as the most insufferable literary snobs out there, insisting that the only thing wrong with Infinite Jest was that "the market" forced Wallace to prune the thing at all.  None of us are worthy to question the great DFW.  I am extremely resistant to such idolatry and generally it puts me off the author in question.  I personally find the footnotes kind of insufferable and certainly the least interesting thing about The Pale King, so I'm pretty sure I will never read Infinite Jest.


* It's been a really long time since I've read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, but if I recall the suicide in this novel is tied to romantic disappointment and not to ennui.

** English authors also seem to avoid writing much about the workplace (probably to avoid boring their readers).  The early comic novels Diary of a Nobody and Three Men in a Boat make it clear that their characters are fairly low-level clerks or office functionaries, but part of the comedy is watching them try to inflate their importance outside the office.  Relatively few scenes take place while they are on the clock so to speak.  Maybe some of Graham Greene's work would qualify.

Ten dollar words

I admit, I have a bit of a weakness for using more obscure words, though I try to use them primarily when they are more precise and get at something specific not captured by the more generic, standard words.  Nonetheless, I normally use them more in writing rather than in speech, at least in part due to the fear that I might be showing off.  I do find this definition of ten dollar words from the Urban Dictionary to be a bit droll yet with the ring of truth: "Using large, difficult words that most people will not understand. Makes you look like an elitist prick that wants to flaunt your advanced intelligence or vocabulary."

Anyway, I mentioned that in my post about the differences between the ACT and the SAT that the SAT used to rely much more heavily on knowing obscure words as part of its English section, whereas the ACT had a different focus, more on knowing and applying the rules of grammar appropriately.  I believe the SAT has cut back on the fancy vocabulary words, but they were very much a part of the test in the 1980s (and I have decided that the best way to stick a few of these words in the dialogue of The Study Group is to have most of the kids be prepping for both tests).

I was actually going to use "glissade" in the play, which is both a verb and a noun, and which means to slide down a mountain or a ballet dance step.  However, I ultimately found the dialogue far too contrived even for me, and I dropped it.  (I shouldn't have to define "contrived" should I?)

There are ten dollar words that still trip me up from time to time, including one that I thought had the exact opposite meaning than it had.  It is right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't recall it right now.  Maybe later.

I'm still learning new words, obviously mostly from reading.  In Yellowknife, one of the characters is described as "gravid," which means pregnant, both as literally pregnant (with child) but also heavy as in "pregnant with meaning."

I only recently looked up "contumely" (I believe it was used in Edgar Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office and then I also came across it in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King -- in both cases, they are probably doing a bit of a meta-riff on Hamlet's soliloquy, which is the most high-profile case of its use).  Contumely is actually a noun, not an adverb, and that is probably what throws me each time.  Anyway, it means insolent or insulting language or treatment, like being roughed up for persistently using ten dollar words.

Hamlet also keeps "calumny" in circulation.  This is a fancy term for slander.

Just a few others now before I have to go.

Lachrymose means given to weeping.  The Mock Turtle from Alice in Wonderland is generally described as lachrymose, but Lewis Carroll doesn't himself use the term, at least not in the book.

Scrofulous literally means to be contaminated, specifically by tuberculosis, but is more generally used to mean morally contaminated and/or corrupt.  Many of Shakespeare's villains are scrofulous, perhaps none more than Iago, who has no valid reason to undermine Othello.

Crenulated is to be notched around the border, like a leaf or a coast-line

This is almost the same word as crenelated, which is to have battlements (at the top of a castle), particularly notched battlements.

Convivial is to be fun to be around and generally easy going (i.e "complaisant," which I do use in the dialogue), which is not the case for several of my study group characters, though many of them have internal integrity (and are true to themselves at least).

Sometimes I do wonder if English simply has too many words that basically mean the same thing.  There are almost no shades of meaning or distinctions between convivial, congenial, sociable, affable and amiable as far as I can see.  In any case, it is an entertaining way of passing time to look up some of these words, especially on thesaurus.com.  Feel free to add your own ten dollar words in the comments!

To end, I will bring up "peregrination," which means to travel from place to place, especially by foot.  While I don't travel between cities on foot too often (though I did cross the Golden Gate Bridge on foot, and I did jog from Evanston into Wilmette once), I certainly have journeyed between many cities and uprooted my family along the way.  Anyway, it's a word that speaks to me.

On a tangential note, I am pleased to announce that the blog has hit 100,000 views since its inception, which is pretty incredible.  Thanks for dropping by!

I have decided that I will round up the most interesting posts (but not the art-themed posts due to copyright issues, alas) and compile them into an e-book.  I'll start now and aim to be ready in the summer (around the time that the 10th Canadian challenge wraps up).  It will be mostly focused on book reviews and the theatre reviews that go a bit deeper into the text of the play (rather than the acting, which only lives on in memory).

Naturally, I am thinking of titling my book Peregrinations, which is fairly close to "So Going Around Cities," which Ted Berrigan already used.  More details to come.

10th Canadian Challenge - 13th Review - Yellowknife

I thought I would manage to read Steve Zipp's Yellowknife towards the end of the 9th Canadian Challenge, but in the end I spent that time with Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.  Yellowknife is a novel set in Yellowknife (obviously) from roughly the late summer of 1998 to late spring (?) 2000.  It is set in Yellowknife, NWT.  It sort of emphasizes the weirdness of the city, as well as how a fair portion of the city's economy is based around resource extraction, particularly mining (apparently diamonds were discovered in the Northwest Territories in the early 1990s, but diamond mining didn't really begin until 2003 (see this piece on the Diavik Diamond Mine), so Zipp has telescoped events a bit in the novel).  Also, the diamond mines are hundreds of kilometers away from Yellowknife proper, so I am not sure gangs would really move into the city of Yellowknife to try to muscle in on the action.  In a similar vein of exaggeration, I assume Yellowknife doesn't have underground tunnels all under the city, connecting to the gold mines.  It is very much an ensemble novel, so a large cast of characters come in and out of focus throughout, and indeed several of the characters that the reader probably considers the "main" characters actually leave Yellowknife.

These two reviews capture pretty well what reading the novel is like: here and here.  I've never been to Yellowknife (the further north I've made it is Edmonton!).  I wouldn't say this novel has really inspired me to go, but perhaps some day I will try to get up that way, particularly during one of the periods where the Northern Lights are likely to be seen.  I'm more likely to head north kind of gradually, perhaps starting with James Bay and then a bit further north up to Hudson Bay.

I did find it appropriate that I started the novel in the late autumn, and the first few chapters introduce us to Danny, who is a restless soul who comes to Yellowknife in search of a bit of adventure and perhaps a job.  He comes to Yellowknife before the chill sets in, and he has to find a way to survive the winter (fortunately, he gets a house-sitting gig).  Then as I got a bit deeper into the novel, the cold really set in (nothing like a typical Yellowknife winter, but still quite frigid -- on rare occasions Toronto actually can be colder than Yellowknife!)  A couple of days I was reading on the 72B, which actually runs all the way south on Pape/Carlaw, then along Commissioners and finally dropping riders off near Union Station.  (It's sort of a slow and bumpy approximation of the path the Downtown Relief Line would take; it's actually a bit faster to get out at Front St. (near the Hockey Hall of Fame) and walk to Union Station.)  Anyway, this stretch along Commissioners seems to be from a much smaller city, perhaps akin to Yellowknife (though as I said, I've never actually been).  So that helped put me in the mood to finish the novel.

I think it is a little difficult to care deeply about the characters, since the narrative never spends much time with any of them.  Essentially all the characters have some hustle going on, though some are more successful than others.

One of the subplots is that one of these hustlers wants to set up a tourist attraction where the tourists would pretend to search out the remains of the Franklin expedition.  This never really gets off the ground, and indeed the business man, Jack Wool, realizes that if the lost ships are ever found, it will be fatal to this business venture.  Given he doesn't have a lot of luck, if Zipp ever decides to write a sequel to Yellowknife, he should set in 2014 or so, with Jack opening his resort, right before the first of the ships was located (in Nunavut incidentally).  This was actually pretty big news here in Canada, since Stephen Harper was kind of obsessed with the Franklin expedition and was positively gleeful when the first ship was discovered on his watch.  One of the more fantastical elements of the novel crops up here with Zipp sort of suggesting this old dog and a wretched waiter are actually survivors of the Franklin expedition, and elsewhere he suggests that one of the older characters in the novel, Jonah, is well over 100 years old and still going strong.

As long as you don't care too much about individual characters and what happens to them, Yellowknife is an enjoyable ride.  One of the recurring jokes is that, because the Government of the Northwest Territories is getting ready to get cut (due to the splitting away of Nunvat which occurred in 1999), there is constant downsizing at the Wildlife Bureau and eventually the remaining biologists end up more or less hiding out in an office in the basement of the Carboniferous Building, trying not to get laid off or, worse, assigned to some remote territory.  At the very end of the novel, we get some interesting new insights into Pfang, who is brought in as a computer expert by the new boss, but rarely is seen to do any work.  It is a bit too little, too late though, in terms of having to rethink Pfang as a character.  Only one of these scientists, Nora, is really described in enough detail for us to care about her fate.  There is a strange set piece in the middle of the novel where Nora, somewhat akin to Alice in Wonderland, goes off and explores some of the underground tunnels that branch off from this basement office.

Zipp shows no serious concern for his characters, and the novel occasionally has a bit of a slapstick feel to it.  Two of the characters end up sinking in frigid waters and are essentially reborn (sort of like the Egyptian god Osiris or the Fisher King in some versions of the legend).  I personally thought one rescue was enough, though Zipp apparently wanted to leave the novel open-ended and not to end on a really sour note.  I will say I felt the final chapter, in which the reader is taken inside the mind of a large, ancient dog, was probably a mistake.

Whether it was a conscious decision on Zipp's part, I thought there were some interesting parallels to some of Robert Kroetsch's work, particularly the novels that had aspects of magic realism to them.  In Gone Indian, Kroetsch has a character head north and take on a new identity (the second part is somewhat akin to the transformation than Hugo undergoes).  Also, Gone Indian has an interesting set piece at a winter festival as does Yellowknife.  Zipp also introduces Father Brown who usually wipes out the truckers in poker games at rest stops along the winter roads.  It isn't quite the same as the ever-lasting poker game from What the Crow Said, but there are a few echoes.  Also, Freddie, one of the characters that becomes more prominent in the second part of the novel, was apparently raised by ravens, and ravens still do him favors and are presumably acting as spirit guides for him.

Note that it is actually difficult to order a copy of Yellowknife at Amazon, but it is in several Canadian libraries.  The publisher's website is here, and most likely you can still download a copy of the novel.

Best theatre events of 2016

While there are a couple of weeks left in the year, I don't have any plans to see more theatre (or concerts for that matter, though I may go see a bassoon concert Monday after work, but it depends if I can leave work early or if I am booked solid in meetings).  Thus, I feel it is fairly safe to put together my list of theatre events I enjoyed over 2016.  It is drawn up the same way as my 2015 list was, which is to say I'm not trying to boil this down to a top ten list.  The best comedy is basically a tie between Boeing, Boeing and Life Sucks.  The most wrenching drama was a tie between Soulpepper's Incident at Vichy and Coal Mine's Instructions (to Any Future Socialist Government Wishing to Abolish Christmas), though honorable mention goes to Red Light Winter, The Circle and The Model Apartment.  Then there is that ambiguous category of plays that mix humor and pathos in equal quantities; the standout shows in this group were Les Belles Soeurs and The Plough and the Stars.

Anyway, it was certainly another really solid year in terms of great productions, both in Toronto and a bit further afield.  Last Feb. I travelled fairly extensively to go to shows -- to St. Catherines to see Goodnight Desdemona and also to Peterborough to see Les Belles Soeurs.  Both were quite worthy productions, though Les Belles Soeurs was actually pretty amazing, easily as good as most of the Toronto shows I saw.  It does look like I'll be going to Buffalo in March 2017 to see A View from the Bridge, so the tradition will be unbroken, and of course assuming we go to Chicago over the summer, I'll try to see something there as well.  As is my way, I'm already collecting events for 2017 and have a few dates circled on the calendar already.

Jan
Red Light Winter (Unit 102)

Feb.
Dalton and Company (Cart/Horse)
Les Belles Soeurs (The Motley Collective)
Goodnight, Desdemona; Good Morning, Juliet (Brock University)

March
Richard III (Wolf Manor)
Boeing, Boeing (Hart House)
Port Authority (Fly on the Wall Theatre)
The Public Servant (Nightwood Theatre)
Galileo (Remy Bumppo)
The Flick (Steppenwolf)

April
The Great War (Video Cabaret)
The Beaux' Stratagem (George Brown)

May
The Model Apartment (Harold Green Jewish Theatre)
The Anniversary (East Side Players)
Sheets (Video Fag)

June
Incident at Vichy (Soulpepper)
Instructions (Coal Mine)
The Heidi Chronicles (Soulpepper)
Much Ado About Nothing (Unit 102)

July
Night Lights (TO Fringe)
The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare Bash'd - TO Fringe)
The Unending (TO Fringe)

August
Father Comes Home from the Wars (Soulpepper)
Sister Cities (The Den Theater - Chicago)
Fefu and Her Friends (Halcyon - Chicago)

Sept.
Old Times (Unit 102)
The Plough and the Stars (Abbey Theatre Company)

Oct.
Hosana (Soulpepper)
Master Harold and the Boys (Obidian Theatre)
The Circle (Tarragon)
Quiver/Mouthpiece (Buddies in Bad Times)
Life Sucks (Lookingglass)

Nov.
Chasse-Gallerie (Storefront Theatre/Soulpepper)
The Realistic Jones (Tarragon)
The Damage Done (Canadian Rep Theatre)

Dec.
Measure for Measure (Red Sandcastle)
Paradise Comics (Ignition)

10th Canadian Challenge - 12th Review - Dressing Up for the Carnival

As I mentioned in my review of Unless, Carol Shields started working on another novel, but in the end only the story "Segue" was extracted from her working notes.  This was included in her Collected Stories.  Several years back I read and reviewed her first two short story collections (Various Miracles and The Orange Fish).  While I knew that her short stories don't usually succeed that well for me, I decided I ought to read through all the stories in Collected Stories, which is how I came to read Dressing Up for the Carnival.

Taken as a whole, it is fairly similar to the first two collections, and it doesn't really do a lot for me, with a few exceptions.  There are a few stories that draw on fantastical elements ("Weather," "Stop!," "Reportage").  At first it seems that "The Harp" is more of a dream, but then Shields shows how it could be grounded, though it isn't one of the more interesting stories.

One thing that does appear to be a bit new for her is how some of these stories are fragmented, built up around 2 or 3 characters or even incidents that are supposed to be more illuminating than just focusing on one at more depth.  This included "Dressing Up for the Carnival," "Dying for Love," "Keys," and "Invention."  "Keys" seemed like it was inspired by one of those stories in the round (like Tolstoy's The Forged Coupon) and yet Shields doesn't write about a single key passed from hand to hand, which would likely have been a more interesting approach, since it forces the author to be more creative.

Curiously, one of the more interesting and successful experiments is "Absence," which is an oulipian text (that is one that follows strict rules in its construction*).  In this case, none of the words in the story use "I" (ostensibly because the author's computer keyboard is missing a key), and the reader follows the struggle of the writer and the gymnastics involved in not using "I."  Perhaps Shields was reflecting back on this experiment when she started writing "Segue," since the narrator's sonnet society suddenly has to start sharing its space with an oulipian group.  It's certainly possible that Shields would have integrated a few oulipian pieces into the novel had she finished it.

There were a couple of stories that didn't work for me as a whole, but did have amusing moments.  I particularly liked this bizarre claim from the story "Invention": "It might be thought that such a man {a successful cooper} would direct his inventive energy toward improving the traditional barrel or cask, but instead my ancestor invented the hyphen."

I also liked the ending of "Soup du Jour," which focuses on a young boy (10 years old) given the important task of picking up something at the store.  It's a near tragedy when he approaches the store and can't remember what his mother asked for:

He takes a breath, pokes a stick between the squares of concrete, and begins the process of elimination. Not carrots, not onions, not potatoes. As he strikes these items from the familiar list, he experiences the same ponderable satisfaction he finds in naming such other absences as father or brother or uncle, always imagining these gaps to be filled with a leather-fresh air of possibility, just around the corner, just five minutes out of reach.

At that moment the word celery arrives, fully shaped, extracted cleanly from the black crack in the pavement, the final crack (as luck would have it) before the three smooth cement steps that lead up to the sill of the corner store. The boy’s gratitude is thunderous. He almost stumbles under the punishment of it, thinking how he will remember it all his life, even when he is old and forgetful and has given up his obsession with counting. 

In terms of the stories that did work for me as a whole, I enjoyed "Reportage," which discusses the impact on a small town in Manitoba when a Roman ruin is discovered in a farmer's field.  This sparks a major tourism boom.  While the idea is clearly impossible, it was still interesting watching it unfold.  Most townsfolk welcomed the visitors, but one or two wished that the town returned to its sleepy former self.

While I found "New Music" just a bit melancholy, it was a bit of a departure for Shields to be writing about a marriage where the wife does get to pursue her creative ambitions (she writes a well-received biography of the English composer Thomas Tallis and is contemplating a second one on William Byrd).  I probably liked it just because it is fairly unusual in her oeuvre.

Similarly, "Mirrors" is about an older couple who have come through the other side of relatively minor marital problems and are still happily married.  They stay at a cottage every summer where they have no mirrors at all (even the wife's compact has its mirror removed).  While this isn't "the secret" to their happiness, it seems to help.  I don't know if this relatively satisfied couple could sustain interest at novel length, though perhaps they were the seed for the couple in the unfinished novel (though in that case, the wife suffers from significant health challenges which presumably would have given more urgency to the events of the novel).  Anyway, "Mirrors" was probably my single favorite story from the collection.

Shields ends the collection with "Dressing Down," a story of a marriage that had sort of gone off the rails, largely because the husband insisted on starting up a nudist colony where he spent every July.  The wife grimly agreed to go until the year that the narrator (her grandson) was going to join the colony, while his parents were away in Europe!  She stopped going to the colony, and this started an irreparable breach between the two.  I think it is more typical of Shields that she sort of privileges bad or unsatisfactory marriages, but it is my prerogative as a reader to focus on "Mirrors" as my main take-away from the collection.




* George Perec was probably the most famous member of the Oulipo Group, or at least his oulipian texts are the most widely known (Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino were also members of the group, but I am not sure that Zazie in the Metro or Invisible Cities are classified as oulipian).  In any case, I've been meaning to read Perec's A Void (a novel written -- and translated! -- without the letter e) for some time, and then perhaps I'll finally be able to tackle Life, A User's Manual, which I've owned for decades.

Being a grouch

It's not so easy being the other green, i.e. more akin to a grouch than Kermit's lighter shade of green.

When I was a small child I had an Oscar the Grouch finger puppet, though it is long gone.  (I don't think I was particularly grouchy as a child, but perhaps my parents saw hints that I might develop in that direction.)  Anyway, I saw a few on eBay but didn't feel obligated to pick one up.  My own kids were only incidentally aware of Sesame Street.*

Anyway, six months ago, we had the division picnic on the Toronto Islands, and I enjoyed myself more than I expected to, even though the vegetarian samosas were delayed.  It was a nice day and we could sit and chat with different people.

How much a difference the setting can make.  Last night was the holiday party for the division and we were upstairs at the Rivoli.  I felt cramped.  The finger food for vegetarians was severely lacking.  One other major change was that I have given up soda and I don't drink alcohol, so going to a bar is just not my idea of a good time.  Given that most of our after work socializing (mostly when people are heading off to new opportunities) happens at bars, I will just stop going (and subsequently become a bit of a pariah).  I also felt incredibly constricted in the place (even though there were some seats) and didn't feel like chatting about anything (work or non-work), so I left after 20 minutes.  It's not that I don't have things that might be interesting to discuss (either my writing or upcoming theatre events) but I seem to prefer doing this in one-on-one interactions.

Still, I think under normal circumstances I would have stuck around longer, but I do not want to celebrate anything in this dumpster fire of a year.  I probably still in some shock and denial over all these terrible election outcomes.  While I am definitely glad to be out of the U.S. (though perhaps suffering a bit of survivor's guilt), there is no question if the U.S. continues to decline (and I don't see how things can possibly improve anytime soon), it will drag Canada down with it, so it is sort of like the people of Pompeii partying in the shadow of the volcano.

One of the more difficult aspects of my personality is that it is difficult for me to enjoy myself fully when I think about all the problems of the world.  Of course, this is paralyzing and overwhelming when you really stop to think about it (one of the characters of Carol Shields's Unless is driven around the bend when trying to face up to all the problems of the world).  So I block it out most of the time, as most of us do.  Do I really do much about other people's problems?  No, since the scope of them is so overwhelming.  I do side with liberals who favor state-sponsored approaches (which can still never cope with all the need out there) as opposed to conservatives who tend to help out a few people in a personalized way and are satisfied with those gestures.  (I probably sound more snarky than I intend right there, but it is an interesting point, which is debated at some length here.  It has been shown that there is a form of self-licensing that if we are good in one aspect of our lives (i.e. voting for progressive politicians or commuting by bicycle or even recycling) then this gives us a certain amount of credits that we can use towards being selfish in other aspects of our lives.  This is kind of depressing, though I have seen it in myself at various points.  Here is a pretty decent paper exploring the phenomenon.)  Anyway, while I do feel kind of financially squeezed, I will see if I can increase my United Way contribution from my paycheck before the year is out.  While worthwhile, this is unlikely to put me in a better frame of mind, and I'll probably still skip all the rest of the holiday celebrations this year, since I am feeling deeply Grinchy/Grouchy right now.



* I just didn't like the direction the program took in the 1990s -- while Elmo actually became a recurring character in 1985 he didn't start to dominate until the early 1990s (a veritable nadir for children's television with the parallel introduction of Barney & Friends), and the show's pacing and themes became kind of unwatchable to me after this point, not that I really tuned in until I was deciding whether to let the kids watch the show.