10th Canadian Challenge - 18th Review - The Progress of Love

The Progress of Love is Alice Munro's 6th collection of short stories (out of 14 if you don't count selected stories and other recombinations of the original collections).  I'm not quite at the halfway mark, but getting quite close.  Taking this collection as a whole, I found its tone to be generally angrier and closer to Who Do You Think You Are? than The Moons of Jupiter -- the collection sandwiched between these two -- which was a bit more expansive in seeing several sides to each relationship.  That said, it isn't always wives angry at husbands (or vice versa) but there are daughters quite angry at mothers and vice versa.

SPOILERS ahead...

I definitely preferred The Moons of Jupiter to this collection, and in fact, there really aren't that many stories that stood out (for me) in The Progress of Love.  Munro still does a lot of telescoping of time, so for instance in "Miles City, Montana," a story that basically operates in two time periods -- the time of the road trip and an earlier time when this couple was just starting out and spending time with their respective families -- Munro throws in a paragraph noting that the couple has broken up and has completely lost touch.  It is almost the entirely casual way that Munro indicates, well of course they broke up -- virtually all couples in Munroland are incompatible and split up.

Anyway, anger seethes through most of these stories.  In the title story, a woman has never forgiven her father for remarrying and moving out west.  She burns up her inheritance money, even though it could have done quite a bit of good for her children.

"Lichen" also seems a blast from the past where the story features a serial philanderer who basically is getting ready to dump his second partner but wants forgiveness of a sort from his first wife.  There wasn't much insight into his character other than he was a greedy, needy individual.

Munro does turn the tables a bit in "White Dump," where she introduces a woman who ends up having several love affairs.  She tells her (grown) daughter that she finds the beginning of a love affair is (naturally) the best "when it flashes on you what's possible" and before it gets sordid.  It is somewhat interesting that Munro seems to be linking infidelity to the American (here including Canada as part of North America) penchant for self-reinvention and self-realization.

Munro tries to understand the younger crowd in "Circle of Prayer," where a nursing home attendant is quite upset at her teen-aged daughter.  Ostensibly this is because the daughter has taken a valuable necklace and put it in the coffin of a classmate, who had died in a car accident.  But it is more likely just the inability of mothers and teen-aged daughters to communicate, and how this friction lasts until the daughters reach their 20s (and sometimes beyond).

I found the attempted escape from small town Ontario (Gallagher) to Toronto to be amusing.  This is related in "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink."  This story is particularly telescoped, where Munro writes about the three main characters as teenagers and then as retirees.  The middle bits, i.e. the main part of their lives, are almost entirely skipped over.

Finally, "A Queer Streak" is an interesting two-part story, where the first part details how a young woman is forced to give up her career due to having to come home to take care of her family.  It is particularly hard to take when Violet's engagement is also broken off because her finance, who is in training to be a minister, says that his chances of getting on in the church will be thwarted because of her sister's "queer streak."  He is clearly a sanctimonious prig, but it still seems that her chances of happiness have been destroyed because of her sister.

The second half is a bit easier to take.  Violet eventually is freed up from dealing with her family.  Both her sisters grow up and seem to be fairly normal.  When her mother dies, she can sell the farm and move into town.  Violet becomes an manager at Bell Telephone during WWII (when men were scarce) and, despite hints, doesn't give up her job after the men start returning from the front.  She keeps in touch with her nephew, Dane, who is homosexual.  This may be the first homosexual character Munro has introduced.  This apparently doesn't phase Violet, and, aside from a bit of discomfort, Wyck her "gentleman caller" also takes it in stride.  Munro then jumps a few decades ahead, indicating that Violet was finally able to marry Wyck after his wife passed on, but then eventually Wyck dies (during the Grey Cup no less!).  I'd say that Munro is basically showing that life is long and there are many twists and turns.  While Violet was certainly thwarted early in life, she ended up reasonably content.  The second part of the story is vaguely reminiscent of Barbara Pym, though I'm trying to recall whether Pym ever allows an "adulterer" to come to a happy end, as happens in "A Queer Streak."  In terms of the shifting perspectives on life, Tremblay's Albertine in Five Times is really quite good, though he has Albertine zig-zagging between extreme highs and lows in each decade of her life (and Albertine herself may have some mental illness), while Munro is describing a more graduated movement between low and high points.  Taken as a whole, this story is probably the best of the bunch.

Sick enough to curl up in a hole

In the end I bought a ticket for Rabbit Hole for tonight.  I wasn't feeling great yesterday but I went swimming.  Had I had perfect foresight, I probably could have gone to the play instead and made it through the whole thing.  A couple of hours into work today, I knew I was in no shape to go out tonight (and I should have gone home early, though I was booked into back to back to back meetings).

It's probably just a really intense cold.  (I'm kind of worried that the cold and certainly the cough may not go away until winter breaks.)  This was further reinforced by just how bloody cold it was when I was coming home from the bus stop.  I suspect that quite a few people will bail on the play tonight.

I certainly don't miss too many events due to sickness.  The last one I recall was a trip to see The Iceman Cometh.  That was a very expensive sickness (I think it was actually food poisoning).  This cold only cost me $21 or so.

There is a small chance I will see the play Sat. evening or Sun. afternoon, but it really depends on how I am feeling and the weather.  I kind of feel that the moment to see this play has passed, but that could easily be the general sickness talking.

Anyway, I am off to bed for the evening.

Edit (Feb. 11) I managed to get through As You Like It this afternoon with almost all of my coughing confined to the set change-overs.  Still, I wasn't entirely thrilled when I found out they were doing it uncut -- 2 hours and 50 minutes!  I have to say it was a good performance, and my son felt that he followed along pretty well.  Unlike Shakespeare in High Park, I was able to actually hear the 7 Ages of Man speech without interruption.  As in that performance, Jacques is gender-switched.  What was different was that in this version, Orlando's older brother is female, so Rosalind's cousin, Celia, ends up falling for a woman.  (Celia has a few good moments where she was positively rolling her eyes at Rosalind's infatuation with Orlando, but then falls in love almost instantly with his older sister.)  The wedding scene came together well.  As always, I find the offstage instantaneous transformation of the usurping Duke to be ridiculous, but here it is downplayed as almost a side note, and the banished Duke pretty much waves this off and the wedding celebration remains the main focus.  This is probably the most effective approach I have seen yet to what is a major shortcoming in this play.

I thought very seriously about seeing Rabbit Hole this evening.  I would have had just enough time to run down and see if they had a few tickets left, but 1) I think it is probably better if I don't push myself, 2) it was a bit of a struggle not to cough for 3 hours (maybe if the matinee had been closer to 2 hours I would have been more open to it) and 3) I didn't really want to end the evening on such a downer.  If they had a show tomorrow (Sunday) I would have gone, but tonight is the last night.  Too bad. 

The Bird has landed!

While it wasn't a primary reason for going to SFYS this past Monday, I was hoping to hear some information about the other Storefront Theatre productions.  Benjamin Blais actually did turn up midway through and pitched Deceitful Above All Things, which has been rehoused at Factory Theatre.  And someone else pitched Streetcar Named Desire at The Box, which I'm likely to go see in a few weeks.  However, not having more actors in the crowd meant that a bunch of other productions weren't pitched.  I didn't hear anything about Posner's Stupid F*cking Bird, and then Blais vanished before I could ask him at the end of the evening.

However, I have my answer now.  Stupid F*cking Bird is going to be at a pop-up theatre space on King (not far from where I used to work actually).  I'm so excited, perhaps even more than I was before due to the troupe overcoming adversity (or at least the loss of their space).

The play will run Feb. 28-March 19.  Details here.  I'm definitely going, probably the last week of previews.  It's quite remarkable how resilient the indy theatre scene is in Toronto.  I'm trying to pull together a group of actors that would be interested in putting on my plays and then tapping into this knowledge of how to mount shows on a shoestring.  It will be interesting to see if I can make it happen.

In other interesting news, I found out that Love and Information is going to go up at the Randolph Theatre as part of the Toronto Fringe this July.  Too early for more details or ticket sales, but this is definitely a must see for me this summer.  (Even though the play is generally said not to cohere as a whole, I still want to see what Churchill is up to.)  Now I just need to keep following along and see if Annie Baker's The Aliens actually turns up at Coal Mine in some form or another this April, which it should according to DPS.

Shopping for clothes

I may have mentioned before that I really hate clothes shopping; consequently, I hang onto clothes until they are totally worn through.  This is particularly true of my winter coats, which I believe are coming up on 10 years old.  Somehow I am particularly tough on dress shirts, usually wearing them to the point they rip around the elbows.  It has been a real problem for me with the emptying out of the middle range of department stores (J.C. Penney's, Hudsons (not Hudson's Bay) and Sears, which has been reduced to a ghostly presence in Toronto).  For some reason, Hudson's Bay (and Macy's if I happen to be shopping in Chicago) have decided to cater to the youngest, slimmest customer and 75% of their shirts are slim fit.  I realize there are exceptions, but the younger employees I run across take business casual to a whole new level, and that it is the older, overweight middle managers (like me) who are still wearing dress shirts, so I truly don't understand this marketing strategy.  I guess the contempt that fashion designers have for average women has now crept over to average men as well...

But of everything I hate getting dress pants the most.  I basically can only get the largest size that is sold in regular stores.  (Honestly, I don't even know if Toronto has a Big and Tall men's clothing store, which is where my father often shopped.)  I had been holding off for the longest time, but then my last pair of wearable black slacks developed a "zipper problem," so I had to go shopping last night.  One store had absolutely nothing in my size.  I did find grey and black slacks at Hudson's Bay.  They fit, though they are a bit snug, i.e. I am a bit too fat to really wear them.  But this is as best as I am going to be able to do for now.

I guess this is the sign to finally get serious about exercising again and ideally lose some weight.  I'm going to go swimming tonight and also aim for next week, but I know that I won't really get in a lot of exercise until I start biking to work in the spring.  I still am snacking too much at work, though it is mostly fruit.  I'll just have to make an extra effort to avoid sugar.  I would say that being off soda for a couple of months has helped a bit and that my blood sugar seems to have stabilized a bit, which will make it a bit easier to try to cut back on processed sugar.  But it won't be easy!  I only have so much will power, and I often feel I have given up on so many other things that I go too easy on myself in the food department.  But I can't go on like this, especially if I want to be able to buy clothes off the rack.  It's time to turn over that new leaf...

Update: I did make it to the aquatic centre.  It was pretty crowded and maybe I actually would be better off at Matty Eckler.  I started off in the whirlpool area, waiting for a few people to get out of the medium speed swim lanes.  That was a mistake, since they keep the lane swim area quite cool (definitely colder than Matty Eckler!).  I managed to get in 5 laps, which was pretty good considering that it was still fairly crowded, I am out of shape, not having swum in 6 months or more and I am kind of exhausted in general (on the edge of getting sick again I think).  I also avoided temptation slightly by not buying any cookies at Shoppers even though they were on super sale.  If I can keep moving more and more to confining my work snacking to fruit and perhaps crackers or, better still, rice cakes, and keep up at least some moderate exercise, maybe I'll be feeling a bit better by the time spring hits and I can starting riding my bike more seriously again.

Too much theatre?

I suppose with anything you can overdo it and get sick of it, even temporarily.  I do get that way about the huge list of novels I am going through.  It's not a particularly balanced approach, when I am not able to squeeze in movies (many of which I've been wanting to see for years) and I've basically completely eliminated TV from my time budget.  I basically can squeeze in a bit of time for visiting art galleries (and this becomes a key preoccupation when traveling) but otherwise it is down to reading and going to live theatre and occasional concerts.

In the next 8 days, it looks like I will be at 5 theatre events.  If that isn't too much, I don't know what is.  I saw a very good production of Twelfth Night (one of the more memorable Olivia's and one of the better Malvolio's I've seen).  This was done by Shakespeare Bash'd, and it was definitely worth seeing.  However, everything I've seen by them has fit into the 90 minute time limit of a Fringe show, and I expected this to be roughly the same.  However, they did the whole play and it took 2 1/2 hours.  I know I've seen Twelfth Night done in 90 minutes, but I am wondering what they cut.  Probably some of the badinage with Sir Aguecheek and almost certainly the jester Feste popping up at the Duke's castle.  Maybe a bit of the tormenting of the bound Malvolio.  And they cut the musical cues down, whereas here they were expanded a bit.  I think the only thing that really made us nervous was that the older child was watching the younger one.  It's great that we have finally arrived at this point where they can be left in the house, but it's still not a good idea to leave them for too long...

Today I saw Annie Baker's John.  It finally started getting a bit of attention, including this Star review.and this rave from the Globe and Mail. I have to say that it is a play that is entirely about the journey, not the destination.  (Maybe inevitable for a play that lasts 3 hours 15 minutes!)  In fact, I actually thought the ending was in a way too pat, since it made one person almost entirely responsible for the break-up of a relationship.  (Other viewers might feel differently of course.)  But there are some really interesting stretches along the way, including the opening and closing of Act II.  The events all take place at a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, PA.  The set is quite incredible, almost justifying the ticket price by itself.  While The Company Theatre was supposed to stage The Aliens a year or two back, this is probably a more appropriate challenge for them, and a storefront theatre might tackle The Aliens down the road.*  Baker (and the director) really let the action, such as there is, unfold gradually, even glacially at times.  There are hints at all kinds of odd things that are never completely resolved, such as why does Mertis the inn-keeper think her place is haunted and why is she apparently writing her journal in an unknown tongue?  I felt she is almost always on two planes -- a dotty, bemused inn-keeper and someone with much darker secrets.  She actually calls herself a neo-Platonist at one point.  It is also extremely odd that she reads "The Cult of Cthulhu" to Genevieve, her blind friend.  Genevieve probably has the best set speeches, including one where she talks about how she went mad and thought that her ex-husband John was inhabiting her body.  In many ways, the problems of the couple staying at the bed and breakfast seem almost a bit trivial in comparison.  I think theatre lovers probably should see this play, though it is not a conventional play with a neat ending.  It runs through Feb. 19.

Tomorrow as I mentioned, I have a short piece being read at Sing-for-your-Supper.  I'm pretty excited about it, and I've convinced a few co-workers to come out.  I even got some props for the piece.  I just have to finish wrapping up the fake cash.

I haven't entirely decided, but I'll probably go check out Rabbit Hole at Red Sandcastle Wed. or Thurs.  I've heard it is a tough play, but the acting is very good.

Sat. I will be seeing Shakespeare again, As You Like It, with my son this time.

So that is quite a lot to take in and process.  March also looks busier than I thought, especially if I do head over to Buffalo for The View from the Bridge.

On top of this, I have sorted through a bunch of notebooks and think I have basically turned up all the scraps that need to be typed up (yes, I still write a lot of my scripts in longhand).  This includes one new monologue (possibly for my night of shorts) and a page or so of the new ending of Finding Mr. Mouse.  I have several chunks of The Study Group and I may be up to 20% complete when it is all said and done.  The most interesting or at least most challenging to deal with is two completely separate beginnings to Final Exam.  I don't know how I will fuse the two together.  On top of everything else, I may be convinced to rewrite this so it isn't set in an English private boys school (think The History Boys) but rather a somewhat posh Toronto school with boys and girls.  I think some of the interactions would be a bit different in a mixed class, but I haven't gotten so far in that I couldn't redirect.  I suspect it would just be easier to stage with boys and girls rather than just boys.  I'm going to take some of this downstairs and try to type it up before it gets too late for the evening.  Ciao.


* I've just seen the oddest thing yet at DPS, which is Coal Mine now has the rights to do The Aliens at the end of April, though this would overlap a bit with their production of Orphans.  So they might try to run in rep for a couple of weeks or the rights for Orphans may have fallen through.  I'll keep watching to see what happens there.

Edit: (Feb. 7) I have been writing a bit madly and managed to get endings finished for both The Pitch and Meeting Mr. Mouse.  That's not to say they couldn't be improved with a bit more refinement, but I'm reasonably happy how they turned out.  Two of the pieces still need to be typed up, but I should be done by the time I leave for work.  Then I'll ship off the package to a couple of actors for their feedback on whether to take it to the next level.

Sing-for-your-Supper at Tarragon felt just a bit weird, including how weird it was from them to staff the bar for a single free event.  I'd say roughly half the actors turned up that usually do.  Some may have gotten lost, and some may not have known that a temporary home had been found in the first place.  A couple of people from work turned up, which was nice.  Almost all the pieces were a bit more serious at heart -- a bit about a soldier and a spy, and a clown being interrogated.  The first half all were about criminals in one way or another, but like Les Smattes mixed humour with more serious moments.  It was fun, but definitely less hilarity than last time.  I thought the actors did well with my piece, though the ending didn't land quite as well as I had hoped.  No one knew it was supposed to be a pancake in the briefcase.  To some extent that is what happens when you mix absurd elements with more serious dialogue.  It's kind of hard to sustain.  Thinking everything over, I think my best received pieces were my very first - Straying South and then Finding Mr. Mouse back in January.  But also The Re-Up and The Pitch did well also.  This gives me some hope that I am on the right track and that other people actually enjoy my writing.

I also heard that there will be a very short, 4 performance run of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Box at the end of Feb.  I haven't decided if I will go, but I am fairly sure this is a more respectful version than the inverted version of Glass Menagerie that played at The Theatre Centre a few months back (which fortuitously I didn't actually manage to see).

Greeks and Romans

I mentioned in the post discussing Vanity Fair that I have been inspired to revisit (or more often visit for the first time) a range of Greek and Roman classical authors.  There is no question that my path through university favored the Greek authors, but there are clearly several Roman texts I should take up.  I don't have any particular time frame in mind, though I will try to read The Golden Ass by Apuleius by the summer and Lucretius's De rerum natura/On the Nature of Things by the fall (and probably reread Ovid's Metamorphosis around then).  Depending on how the rest of my reading is coming along, I'll look to start my journey through Homer and Virgil in late 2017 or early 2018.  This will take a bit longer, as I expect to read two translations back to back for all three.  At some point, though probably 2018 or beyond, I will go through the extant Greek plays (Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylus, etc.).  I've read or seen quite a few of the plays, but it's time for a refresher course.

Anyway, this is my idiosyncratic list, mostly so I don't have to keep thinking about which translation I want to get out of the library.  I guess the flip side to having so much lost over the ages is that one really can read most of the core Greek and Roman texts within a couple of years (if one dedicated all one's time to it).  I've occasionally been venturing into the other UT libraries, and Trinity has a strong emphasis on the classics.  But even there, pretty much everything fits on 2 rows of shelves.   

R The Golden Ass by Apuleius (Kenney-Penguin but perhaps also Relihan-Hackett)  Didn't care for Sarah Ruden's more modern translation.
Lucretius On the Nature of Things (Stallings-Penguin)
R Hesiod Theogony/Works and Days (Morrissey-Talon Books but perhaps also Wender-Penguin)
R Theognis Elegies (Wender-Penguin)
Ovid The Erotic Poems (Green)
R Ovid Metamorphoses (Humphries) -- I tried the newish Raeburn translation (Penguin) but didn't like it
Ovid Poems of Exile (Green, 2nd ed.) -- Note Green still hasn't translated the Ibis, so this translation will do for now
R Homer The Iliad (Fitzgerald)
R Homer The Odyssey (Fitzgerald)
R Homer The Iliad (Lattimore)
R Homer The Odyssey (Lattimore)
R Virgil The Aeneid (Fitzgerald-Vintage)  perhaps also Ruden (Yale) or even Fagles (Penguin) but probably not, though I was just tipped off to Rolfe Humphries as well
R Virgil The Aeneid (Humphries-Macmillan)
Juvenal The Satires (Green-Penguin)
Horace Odes and Epodes (West-Oxford)
Horace Satires and Epistles (Rudd-Penguin)  This edition also has Persius's Satires.
Epicurus The Extant Remains (Bailey-Oxford) (on-line here)
Epictetus Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Hard-Oxford)
R Marcus Aurelius Meditations (Grube-Hackett)
Seneca Selected Letters (Fantham-Oxford)
Seneca Dialogues and Essays (Reinhardt-Oxford)
R Petronius Satiricon (Arrowsmith-Plume*)
Herotodus Histories (Landmark edition)
Thucydides The Peloponnesian War (Landmark edition)
Xenophon Hellenika (Landmark edition)
Arrian Campaigns of Alexander (Landmark edition)
Polybius Histories (Oxford, though at some point there may be a Landmark edition -- also see here)
Sophocles (Univ Chicago edition)
Euripedes (Univ Chicago edition)
Aeschylus (Univ Chicago edition)
Aristophanes (NAL edition ?)
Livy The History of Rome (possibly Oxford or just here)
Tacitus The Annals/The Histories (probably Oxford)

* I cannot find this book, but it should be downstairs somewhere.  I'll just have to check it out of the library if it hasn't turned up by the time I'm ready to read it.  I shan't buy it again.  However, I might be convinced to pick up Sullivan's translation (on Penguin), which also includes Seneca's The Apocolocyntosis.

Les Smattes -- on at Feb. SFYS!

As I mentioned in the other post, my piece Les Smattes (a parody of Tarantino films with a Canadian twist) is on the Sing-for-Your-Supper line-up for Monday, Feb. 6, starting at 8 pm. (7 pm if you are an actor looking to read.)  This makes the sixth time I've made the line-up out of 9 or 10 submissions, depending on how you count late entries.  Not a bad hit rate, considering I'm up against Natalie Frijia all the time.

SFYS will take place at the Tarragon Theatre Workspace at 30 Bridgman Ave. (near DuPont subway station). This was really a record turn-around for me -- I heard the next day after submitting.  It's great since it actually allows me to spread the word. Hope to see you there!