Theatre for Book Lovers or Music Junkies

I just saw two completely different plays this weekend.  Boom X is over at Crow's Theatre.  It is a one-person show that delves into music and the main current events between 1969 and 1995.  Rick Miller does a very good job in mimicking the sound of the different bands and occasionally substitutes his voice for political figures on screen.  I will say his George H.W. Bush was more on point than his Reagan, though his take on Thatcher was surprisingly good.  He also interviews four Gen Xers that were part of his life.  It's hard to really describe it, but if you have any interest in the 80s at all, you should go.  It runs for one more week.

Coal Mine's The Sound Inside is a hot ticket over at Coal Mine, and I've read that they just added a few more shows.  The playwright, Adam Rapp, also wrote Red Light Winter, which was about two men and a prostitute.  (Apparently, I just missed seeing this at Steppenwolf, as I had either moved to the UK or was getting ready to do so and wasn't able to get out to the theatre.  But I did manage to see an interesting production in Toronto in 2016.)  Anyway, I appreciate that the plot flipped around in a few unpredictable ways.  While the professor (of creative writing!) ended up in an inappropriate relationship with her student, it didn't turn out the way I imagined it at all.  I did enjoy this, but it felt so aimed at the type of theatre-goer who is immersed in the New York Review of Books (or at least the NYTimes book section) and considers things that happen in books to be just as important as what happens in real life.  The play namedrops Salinger and David Forster Wallace naturally.  At one point, the professor talks about how she collects first editions of great novels.  There are a fair number of inside jokes aimed at audience members who have read Salinger or Dostoevsky or, a bit more esoterically, James Salter's Light Years.  I actually have read Light Years, though I seem to be one of the few who wasn't completely blown away by it.  I may reread it one day, but it is a pretty low priority.  I will say that this play will probably move Faulkner's The Wild Palms up on my reading list a bit and also lead me to add Wharton's Ethan Frome to the list.  One thing that did appeal to my somewhat snobbish nature is that within the novel-within-the-play written by the student, the main character is going to see a Caryl Churchill play in New York, but Cloud 9 (my favourite) and not Top Girls, which is the one that always seems to be revived.  Even from this short discussion, you can probably tell if The Sound Inside is for you or will just feel it is too precious and even a bit pretentious.

Hating on TIFF

I really do have a love-hate relationship with TIFF, both the international festival and then the TIFF Lightbox where foreign films play the rest of the year (and way more hate than love...).  I've seen a few cool things there, but more often than not, the movies I want to see are in a smaller theatre and are sold out.  That happened to me several times last year.  I probably should get a membership, which would cut down on some of this frustration.  However, I really don't feel I can "reward" them with any membership fees when I am so totally opposed to the TIFF board asking the city every year to reroute streetcars away from their precious festival.  In fact, I will boycott the TIFF festival itself until the day that they stop making this request.  This will be an "interesting" year, since the streetcars would have to be sent up from King to Dundas.  I am hoping that the city will finally have the balls to say no.  Not exactly holding my breath though...

But even beyond that, I think I just wish TIFF Lightbox was better.  It is amazing to me how cruddy their website is.  How hard would it actually be to have a true on-line calendar with everything in one place, instead of having to scroll down a huge list of movies?  I'm particularly peeved because the entire building including the box office was closed last Sunday for some private event.  This just reminds me of how ridiculously elitist TIFF is (and so unconcerned with regular folks like those on the King streetcar!)  So I tried to buy an advance ticket or two, but the backend of their website sends you to Ticketmaster!  Completely unacceptable at every level.

I think at the end of the day I don't think TIFF Lightbox is quite as adventurous with the small foreign movies compared to Facets in Chicago, and I think it certainly doesn't really do enough retrospective series compared to the Siskel Film Center (also in Chicago) or Film Forum in NYC.  Basically, I just wish TIFF was better than it actually was, or conversely I wish that more of the Fellini, Truffaut, Tati, Varda, etc. retrospectives played in other theatres.  (The Paradise up on Bloor is slowly getting there, but it seems to only show a few great movies mixed in with concerts and other odd things to try to pay the bills.)  But TIFF is more or less the only game in town, so I'll probably keep going back.

Update: So I swung by after work.  There was a sign saying the box office was open but there was no one working, and in fact the ground floor was completely empty (even the gift shop was closed).  I waited close to ten minutes and was getting ready to call (probably just to go straight to voicemail) when someone finally showed up.  Of the three movies I wanted to see, two were sold out.  Sadly, this is so typical of TIFF.  She did say that some of the Japanese films would be getting second screenings.  Hopefully this included Spirited Away.  The extra screenings will be announced Wed. and go on sale to the general public on Friday.  So frustrating dealing with TIFF.

Update 2: I ran over to TIFF today right after a lunchtime concert at St. Andrews.  I managed to get a ticket to an extra showing of Tokyo Drifter and then one to The Wind Rises, but the new screening of Spirited Away was already completely sold out!  This was the film I wanted to see the most.  Sigh...  As part of the Ghibli Fest, Spirited Away will be screening at the very tail end of Oct. (perhaps appropriately quite close to Halloween), so I will certainly try to go then but also sign up at Cinemaclock to see if it screens anywhere else locally before then.  Kiki's Delivery Service should be up next in mid-June, and I'll try not to miss that.

Some Book (Buying) Notes

I am trying, generally successfully, to not buy nearly as many books as I used to (and use the libraries more).  I did see a short while back that Jhumpa Lahiri has a new, short novel out called Whereabouts.  I found a fairly cheap copy on-line (with free shipping!) and ordered it.  I'm still waiting on that.  Of course, then a week later I dropped into BMV and found a copy that would have been a buck or two cheaper.  Not quite cheap enough to buy and put in my Little Free Library, however.  I guess if my copy is lost in the mail, I can go back soon and see if it is still there.

I did pick up a copy of Ralph Gustafson's Winter Prophecies, one of his last books.  I also found a signed edition of a different poetry collection, Configurations at Midnight, but with the shipping it was just better to have it sent to the States.

I tried to order a signed copy of one of Joy Williams's short story collections, but the bookseller asked for an extra $20 for shipping to Canada, which I thought was absurd.  Anyway, I may weaken at some point and order it but have it shipped to the States.  (I think what is holding me back is I am still smarting from the idea that I could have picked it up in person if I had made that trip to SF to see the Kronos Quartet...)

There was a bit of a mix-up with my recent order of P.K. Page's The Hidden Room where I had asked for signed copies.  This seemed pretty clear to me from the order, but apparently I should have been clearer with the bookseller.  Now he is going to send the correct order.  At the moment, he isn't asking for the original books back.  I feel badly though and will see if there is some way to return them* (that doesn't cost me too much).

Finally, the last book in this reading list is Koestler's Darkness at Noon.  I'm not entirely sure I have even owned a copy, though probably I did at some point.  Anyway, as I was investigating this, I saw that, quite amazingly, the original German version of Darkness at Noon had been discovered.  There were even a very few edits to the manuscript that hadn't made their way into the translation that Koestler's partner had made at that time, so the entire thing is now available in a updated translation.  Perhaps less incredible but still amusing, the cheapest version I could find was from an English-language bookstore in Tokyo, and this is now winging its way to me across the Pacific.  I'm blanking on it a bit, but there are a few other cases where the late translators can benefit from recent discoveries and generally late adopters (or rather readers) are better off.  I think the argument could be made for the recent Grossman translation of Don Quixote, the new Womack translation of Cela's The Hive (NYRB) and perhaps the Donougher translation of Hugo's Les Miserables.  On the other hand, I wasn't blown away with the more recent Kafka translations and will stick with the ones I grew up with.

* If the weather cooperates, we've agreed to meet up at Word on the Street at the end of the month, and I'll hand over the unsigned copies.

Edit (05/10): I haven't decided if I will update this page or maybe even pin it, but it is starting to feel a little long in the tooth.  I saw 5 upcoming books from NYRB that caught my eye, though I will try pretty hard just to borrow them and not buy them:
Stronghold by Dino Buzzati - a new translation of The Tartar Steppe apparently already out
Ariane, A Russian Girl by Claude Anet
The Limit by Rosalind Belben
Chevengur by Andrey Platonov
The Skin of Dreams by Raymond Queneau

I already read the Buzzati though in the earlier translation.  Still, I would probably consider reading it again.  I'm probably the most interested in the Platonov and the Queneau, though they won't be coming out until Jan. 2024.

Edit (05/18): I have been keeping Saba Sams's Send Nudes in my Amazon wishlist, but then not actually pulling the trigger.  I saw that I could get a fairly reasonably-priced copy from Blackwells.  I then went and did some digging into the reviews.  It is getting decent reviews but not that many raves.  Many of the stories are about young women craving sex, mostly from older men.  This storyline completely icks me out.  Recently, I barely forced myself to finish Mavis Gallant's "In the Tunnel," which was on these same lines.  I think I would still probably read it if it ever turns up in a library over here, but there is no point in buying it, as I would just be too frustrated over the foolish choices of these young women and girls.

TCAF 2023

I can't tell for certain, but I'm pretty sure I skipped TCAF last year when it was largely back to an in-person event though with some virtual components.  But I went this year on Sat. April 29.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend, as I had this sandwiched between My Neighbor Toroto (up at Yonge & Eglinton) and then the TSYO concert at Roy Thompson Hall.  Still, I had time to go around the lower level a couple of times and the upper level once.  I took one look at the line to get into the special room on the 2nd floor and decided to bail on that.  There wasn't anything particularly new or gripping at the NYRB Comics or Fantagraphics booths.

In the end, I only picked up a couple of short comics by OCAD students.  I didn't think the deals were all that great compared to previous years.  In most cases, the comics were selling at face value, and only in rare occasions was the artist around for signings.  In one case, that probably worked to my advantage.  Nick Maandag was supposed to be at his booth but was out wandering the floor when I dropped in.  I likely would have purchased The Follies of Richard Wadsworth or Harvey Knight's Odyssey and gotten them signed.  In the end, both were available from the library, and I borrowed them. As it turns out, neither is really my cup of tea.

I was also able to borrow Sean Ford's Only Skin: New Tales of the Slow Apocalypse.

In the end, I did order The Marchenoir Library by Alex Degen, which is a high-concept thing where the book consists of all the book covers of the adventures of Marchenoir, but then the actual plot of these books, i.e. the filling, is missing.  Some people like this sort of thing.  I may just find it exasperating.

I was able to borrow Degen's previous work: Soft X-Ray Mindhunters, which is similar in not really explaining what is going on and relying fairly heavily on the visual element.

It was a reasonably successful visit to TCAF, and I'll likely go next year to see what else is new in the world of comics.

Short Story Notes

I mentioned before that I now have read Mansfield's Selected Stories.  It turns out that by reading another 5 stories, I will also have read the entirety of The Garden Party, so I'll plan on getting to that soon.

I feel badly about having paused Alice Munro after I got roughly to the midpoint of her story collections.  The next one up is Open Secrets, but I don't think I will actually manage to crack it until the summer.  Still, I will see if I can elevate her back to one collection per season.  That would suggest I will have read everything of her by the end of 2024.

I've read a few individual stories by Mavis Gallant, but I don't think I've made it all the way through a collection.*  That will change soon.  Nonetheless, I find there is so much overlap between the various collections that it is really hard to know where to begin.  I probably should have started with The Cost of Living, which I incidentally do own, but I decided to start with the stories with more of a Canadian focus.

So the order in which I will attempt to read Gallant is:
Home Truths & Varieties of Exile** (there is a lot of overlap between the two)
The Cost of Living
Across the Bridge & The Pegnitz Junction
The Moslem Wife & Overhead in a Balloon
From the Fifteenth District & Paris Stories & The Other Paris
The End of the World & In Transit
Going Ashore (drawn almost entirely from uncollected stories)

And then her two novels - A Fairly Good Time & Green Water, Green Sky

While this certainly looks like a lot, there is quite a bit of overlap, as I mentioned.  After going through these various books, this completely covers The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, though it may ultimately make more sense to read most of the stories in Collected Stories, since I do have this in hard copy. 

After I make good headway on this, I will plan on tackling Edna O'Brien and William Trevor.

* I blush to admit that not only have I already read The Moslem Wife, but I reviewed it!  No idea how that slipped my mind, but it does mean one book down already!

** Incidentally, Montreal Stories is just Varieties of Exile but with a different title!

Ghibli Fest

I've known about Studio Ghibli films for what seems like forever, but I've never actually seen any of them (until now)!  I am not sure if this was because they generally weren't coming out in the late 2010s, when I was starting to take my kids to the movies.  So instead I took them to Pixar movies like Wall-E and Up and then later Inside Out and The Incredibles 2.*  I am a little sorry that my daughter missed out on the classic era of Studio Ghibli.  Right now she is far too mature to go see kids' movies, but maybe she will give them another chance some day.

At any rate, I saw that Cineplex was doing a Family Favourites event where the movie price was quite low ($3.50), and they were showing My Neighbor Totoro, which seemed like as good a starting point as any.  There were indeed many children at the screening and probably not all that many childless adults.  But it was emotionally pretty complex, and I thought it was worth seeing (and better in the cinema than just streaming it).

Cineplex was promoting a Studio Ghibli fest.  I think a couple of the films have already been shown, but it is a strong line up, running from this weekend to late Oct.  In terms of this summer, I would probably check out Kiki's Delivery Service running June 11-14.  If I'm around, I'd look into Castle in the Sky on July 10-12.  There are a few more I might check out in the fall, but it is also possible that they will turn up in other venues.  For instance, this summer Tiff is showing 4 animated films directed by Hayao Miyazaki.  One of them is My Neighbor Totoro on May 30, and I think I can safely pass on seeing that a second time.  But they are showing Spirited Away on June 4 and then The Wind Rises on June 17, and I'll see if I can make it to both of those.  If I do manage to make it to most of these screenings and a few in the fall, I would just need to supplement with Grave of the Fireflies and Whisper of the Heart, so I'll see if either of those turn up at one of the few remaining second-run theatres in Toronto.

* I think the most obnoxious thing about Disney taking over Pixar is that the rule against sequels has been completely demolished.  While Toy Story 2 (and maybe 3) and Incredibles 2 can certainly be justified, they are pretty far down the rabbit hole at this point.  I've heard that there will likely be Incredibles 3, which will at least be action-packed and probably Inside Out 2, which I don't think anyone was calling for...  Sigh.

March-April Reading

I think these were all the books I read in March and April.  It's a blur sometimes, particularly as I was really pressed for time, doing taxes and a slightly overdue book review and then pulling together two presentations for a conference!  Anyway, I started off with Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, which was good, though not quite as good as Troubles.

I found Percy's The Moviegoer to be somewhat flat, particularly the last third of so of the book.  I really didn't like Baker's A Fine Madness.  While it is nowhere near as prominent a theme as in Cary's The Horse's Mouth, this novel is about another irresponsible artist who often took swings at his partner, though only actually hitting her when she moved too much.  Charming.  I'm sure I should have dropped it much sooner, but I had been carrying this novel around for so many years, I kind of felt I had to get through it.  I did drop Nutshell by Ian McEwan after only a few pages, however.  Generally, I find him grossly overrated as a novelist.  Nutshell is basically Hamlet but with the Hamlet-figure a near-term baby that can hear everything around him and comments on it liberally.  This is the same basic idea as in Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes.  I thought it was interesting in that novel, but maybe if I reread it today, I would just find it gimmicky and annoying.  Apparently, this is also the conceit of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which I have not read.*  (I was tipped off to this by a one-star review of Nutshell that I think is the most accurate.)

Inspired by Girl, 20, I did read Tom Wolfe's Maumau-ing the Flak Catchers.  I probably did read all or most of Radical Chic, which is about Leonard Bernstein and the party he gave in support of the Black Panthers, and how this got him in trouble with the Beautiful People, and at some point the Bernsteins had to lay low.  Incidentally, I was supposed to see Bernstein conducting in Ann Arbor.  If I recall, he actually did some rehearsals with the UM orchestra but died right before the performance.  Maybe I actually would have regretted this even more had he conducted but I wasn't able to score any tickets.  Still I think I would have managed to slip in one way or another.  But I don't believe I had read Maumau-ing the Flak Catchers, which is basically about the symbiosis of social workers, hired as part of LBJ's Great Society, and militant youth.  There is a great passage on the secret heart of the bureaucrat that I will add tonight.

This lacerated the soul of every lifer, every line bureaucrat, every flak catcher in the municipal  government . . . There are those who may think that the bureaucrats and functionaries of City Hall  are merely time servers, with no other lookout than filling out their forms, drawing their pay, keeping  the boat from rocking and dreaming of their pension like the lid on an orderly life. But bureaucrats, especially in City Halls, have a hidden heart, a hidden well of joy, a low-dosage euphoria that courses  through their bodies like thyroxin . . . Because they have a secret: each, in his own way, is hooked  into The Power. The Government is The Power, and they are the Government, and the symbol of the  Government is the golden dome of City Hall, and the greatest glory of City Hall is the gold-and-marble lobby, gleaming and serene, cool and massive, studded with the glistening busts of bald-headed men  now as anonymous as themselves but touched and blessed forever by The Power ...  Who else is left  to understand the secret bliss of the coffee break at 10:30 a.m., the walk with one’s fellows through  the majesty of the gold-and-marble lobby and out across the grass and the great white walkways of  City Hall Plaza, past the Ionic columns and Italian Renaissance facade of the Public Library on the  opposite side and down McAllister Street a few steps to the cafeteria ... 

Then I read Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, in part because I was supposed to see the movie version of this over at the Paradise, but it didn't work out.  So I read it (again) and then borrowed the DVD from Robarts.  It was interesting, though I didn't love it.  (I did like it more than Miss Lonelyhearts, however.)  I guess I found the movie a bit more fulfilling, mostly because they showed more of the art and artifice of Hollywood.  There are a few scenes where you see characters moving between different movie sets.  I assume this was a partial inspiration for the ending of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.

I enjoyed Coupland's Hey, Nostradamus!, which is about the aftermath of a mass shooting in a North Vancouver school.  Obviously, this is much more likely to occur in the States, but there is still far too much gun violence in Canada.  I don't know if I will feel compelled to write a longer review.  Probably not at this point.

I mentioned that I read almost all of Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories on the train to and from Ottawa.  I found some of them interesting and some very dated.  While I know she was generally critiquing the very classist and racist views of some of her characters, that still doesn't make it much easier to read...  I wrapped the last of the stories up the day after our return.  I really wanted to pass this along to a friend I was meeting last Saturday.

I finally finished Farrell's The Singapore Grip as well.  I'd say it may have been a bit too ambitious for Farrell, mixing the business doings of one group of characters with a bunch of military types.  And then there is even a chapter or two from the perspective of the victorious Japanese troops!  There are quite a few characters that one would expect to see more of, but who are suddenly shuffled out of the picture.  Most of the women are shipped out of Singapore as the Japanese threat grows more imminent.  Two characters are even married offscreen as it were, which felt a bit anti-climatic.  What I found unsatisfying is that the ultimate fate of several characters who were present in the final moments before Singapore's surrender is simply skipped over completely.  Presumably the majority of them survived and then moved elsewhere, either Australia or India, but it would have been nice to tie up those loose ends.  As it stands, it's an interesting novel but my least favourite of the trilogy.

I also got 1/3 of the way through Guy Vanderhaeghe's Homesick.  It's a bit hard to say what May will bring, but some short stories for sure and most likely Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Desani's All About H. Hatterr.  I've also been reading a great deal of poetry and even writing some (mostly while at the Rex), and I expect that will continue throughout May.  As I have been reading these poems with half an eye out for a transportation-related anthology, I was really struck by Boxing the Compass by Richard Green.  Not only is there a promising poem about a sea voyage, there is a long (20+ page) poem about his epic trek across America by Amtrak and Greyhound in search of Graham Greene's letters in various archives.  While I generally want to avoid excerpting poems in this putative anthology, I would probably make an exception here.

* I suppose it is worth noting in this hyper-polarized world that I simply refuse to be on Team Fetus, which is to say any narratives, such as Atkinson's in particular, that stake out a claim for personhood from the moment of conception are going to get a big thumbs down for me.  I suspect this means I won't enjoy Christopher Unborn this time around, whereas I thought it was pretty great in my 20s.  I may get back around to it someday, but that won't be anytime soon.