Rough Day

Today was a pretty rough day, but it did get better at the end, so I will end on a slightly higher note.  It's been rainy and dreary for two days straight, which never helps.

We found out that the counsellor who is supposed to turn up and help us through some family drama can't make it until Sunday (yes, really!), so this feels like a wasted week.

Our furnace, which is only two years old, has been acting up and not actually heating the house.  The repairman turned up and, after some poking and prodding, said that the control board needs to be replaced.  This happens to be under the extended warranty we have, but it still means two or three days without any heat.  I suppose better now than in December or January.  

In the late afternoon I had a dentist appointment.  The cleaning was quite involved and more painful than usual.  And a had a small cavity between two teeth that needs to be filled in two weeks.  So that was no fun at all.

Then my wife got a letter from the IRS demanding thousands of dollars.  This really confused and upset me.  When I got home I realized this was related to correspondence I had with them back in August & September.  I have no idea why they wrote to her, however.  I actually filed a 1040X and did pay what we owed in September (and they cashed the check!), so it is probably just crossed communications (and I don't owe any more), but it is still annoying and will probably take a while to straighten out.*  I also have yet another mini-audit from the CRA to deal with, though I didn't learn about it today, but it is still on my mind with all the other tax annoyances.

The bright spot in all this is that I was one of 200 or maybe even 500 Canadians to be selected to get a set of the books shortlisted for the Giller Prize, courtesy of Scotiabank.  I'm supposed to put them out in the Little Free Library, though nothing says I can't browse them first (not that I have the time to read anything not on one of my lists!).

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow will be better.  The weather should be nicer, and I'll plan on biking in to work and perhaps dropping off my bike for a tune-up, which it sorely needs after I have practically ridden it into the ground since the pandemic began...

* While dealing with the IRS is never fun, I found it easier to get things straightened out on the phone with agents in the early 2000s.  This time around, the agent more or less saw things my way, but said it would take 16 weeks for the 1040X to be processed, at which time they would say whether they agreed with my revised calculations.  I said it was fairly silly to pay the money, only to turn around and have the IRS refund it at the end of December.  He agreed to turn off the warning letters, but if the IRS doesn't agree with me, I will be on the hook for even more interest, though probably not a penalty on top of that.  Fingers crossed I got it right this time.  

Shifting Books and Movies

As always, I cannot always follow through on my stated intentions.  I am interrupting my reading plan, which itself is a fairly major departure from my overarching reading list.  I decided I really wanted to read Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita before seeing a musical version, which I am going to this Friday!  Now had I stuck to my original goal, it would only have been 40 pages per night, which is pretty manageable.  However, life intervened as it so often does, and I had about 300 pages to go and only 5 nights left, which is still only about 60 pages.  I did read another chunk this morning and then took the train to work for the first time in many, many, many months (so I could read, which is the main drawback of cycling).  I think I'm now at 200 pages to go and 4 nights left, so that's a little better and definitely doable.  I've actually read this book several times and in three different translations, though it has been a while since the last time (probably 10+ years), but I'm deep enough in that much of the plot is coming back to me.

Then I have Douglas Coupland's latest book, Binge, which is comprised of 60 micro-stories, out from the library.  I pretty much have to read this right away, as I won't be able to renew it.  Then I can return to Joyce Cary and his first trilogy.  I have to say I am not enjoying it much at all.  Once I found out that the artist Gully Jimson was a frequent wife-beater (mentioned several times in Herself Surprised), I knew that this was going to be a challenge, as I usually draw the line at reading about abusers (and I dropped Donleavy's The Ginger Man for precisely this reason).  I'll probably force myself to get through The Horse's Mouth, but already am pretty sure I won't like it, and To Be a Pilgrim is just boring and far too long.  I have no idea why this trilogy is rated so highly.  At that point, I will mostly be trying to read through books that are destined for the Little Free Library out front.  And then I guess I will get back to my main reading list, though still trying to squeeze in a lot of poetry on the side...  It looks like Maxwell's The Château is next whenever I get back on track.

My son has had a fair bit of homework and applying for scholarships over the past two weeks, so we've very far behind on watching the Britcoms compared to where I expected we would be.  Also, more often than not there is some sporting event on when I want to see a movie.  Nonetheless, we managed to see The Matrix.  (I probably won't bother showing him the 2nd and 3rd in the trilogy.)  Then we finally watched Chaplin's The Great Dictator.  I'm not sure I've ever seen the whole thing.  It did drag a lot, but I liked the parts where Napaloni (a parody of Mussolini) is on screen, and indeed the banter between Hynkel and Napaloni seems very similar to what goes on in Duck Soup.  I tried to get to Duck Soup yesterday, but he felt a bit pressed for time, so we actually watched an episode of Slings and Arrows instead.  On Saturday, I showed him Chaplin's Modern Times, though if I had known he was so pressed for time, I would have substituted in Duck Soup.  Well, we'll get to it fairly soon.  Given that it is fairly short, we should get to City Lights fairly soon.  I haven't decided if I'll watch his later talkies (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York) by myself or with him.  Most likely by myself.  I also had strongly considered watching another Bogart film with him, High Sierra, but I am a bit more likely to try to turn that into a double feature, paired with They Drive By Night, and push it off a week or so.  Yet because we are so close to Halloween, I may pull yet another detour and have him watch Beetlejuice sometime this upcoming weekend.

Edit (10/31): So I did manage to stick to the (modified) plans for once.  We saw Beetlejuice on Sat., and then Duck Soup after the trick-or-treating was over on Sun.  The number of kids was fairly low this year, but at least the weather was quite nice, compared to the many times it has drizzled on us.  Both my kids have aged out of trick-or-treating, though my son went to a Halloween party with some friends and my daughter handed out some candy.  Duck Soup was great.  I think it is my favourite of the Marx Brothers' movies.

Slow Return to Culture

I'll probably end up bundling too much into this one post, as I have neglected the blog for almost the entire month.  This weekend is actually a fairly slow weekend for me.  Two weekends ago, I went off to see Picasso Painting the Blue Period over at the AGO.  I was able to take my son to the members-only weekend, and while it was crowded, I'm sure the following weekends will be even a bit more crowded (though controlled via timed tickets) until maybe mid November, which is probably when my wife will go.  That said, it is quite a good show, and I'll post separately on it fairly soon.  I would encourage anyone interested in Picasso to go obviously.  We stopped in at 401 Richmond on the way back, and he really liked the Brian Harvey paintings at Abbozzo.  I thought they were good but looked an awful lot like the type of artists at street festivals and outdoor art fairs.  I was really taken by the one room with Naoko Matsubara prints.  I probably won't ever buy one, but they are not outrageously expensive, so never say never.

Towards the end of the next week, I stopped by The Power Plant at Harbourfront, which has finally reopened.  I'm glad it's open again, but I have to say the featured artist, Miriam Cahn, leaves me entirely cold and she takes up all 3 galleries!  So I won't bother going back until 2022 when they rotate in another artist (or three).  I was gearing up to go see a couple of plays in the Soulpepper Her Words festival, though in the end it turned out that the theatre was one building further east (where Farm Boy has just opened up in fact).  I saw two staged readings* on Sat. and Sun.: Wild Woman by Kat Sandler and Queen Goneril by Eric Shields.  Both were good in different ways, but thematically they were incredibly similar and Queen Goneril suffered in comparison to Wild Woman (and in fact I left at intermission because the staged reading was longer than advertised and I was just exhausted).  They probably should have been programmed on separate weekends.  I'll try to blog on this separately but may never get to it.  One thing that put a serious damper on Sunday was that I had planned on biking out to MOCA (which has been open for a while) to see their new exhibit GTA21.  In general it has been really windy, making biking fairly unpleasant, and what should have been a 40-45 minute ride turned into a 55 minute epic slog.  When I got there, there had been some catastrophic problem with the doors, and the 2nd-4th floors of MOCA were completely locked down!  I was severely pissed.  While I may go back in November (calling ahead first!), I'm also just as likely to say that this was a sign I should take a pass.

There has been additional music at Crows' Nest but they have pushed it to 9:30 to not interfere with the current show (or rather a lecture on land acknowledgements*) and that doesn't fit that well with my schedule.  I really had been planning on going a couple of times but one thing or another interfered, and I just haven't gone back.  I did manage to get over to The Only Cafe to see live music, and perhaps I'll try to catch Allison Au at The Rex next week, though again I wish the shows started a bit earlier... 

I'm not doing any real culture outings this weekend, though I do need to type up all the pages of my script (most of which was written out in longhand at various jazz shows or in the intermission at the Soulpepper readings), and this should be performed at SFYS on Nov. 1!  So something to look forward to for sure.

* In fact, while this was the most satisfying live theatre I've seen in a long while, it isn't the first.  I went to see the faux production of As You Like It, which was in fact a 90 minute monologue on everything that was wrong about land acknowledgements by Cliff Cardinal at Crows' Nest.  I think Lynn Slotkin let this get under her skin a bit too much and her review was hasty, but it truly was disrespectful to flat-out mislead the audience and tell them they would be getting Shakespeare rather than a long lecture that tried to make them feel bad about themselves, esp. as for so many people it was their first night back out testing the waters.  I'll see how the other plays go this season, but it definitely makes me a lot less inclined to support Crows' Nest.  (If I want to go to theatre that makes me feel bad about myself, I can stick with Theatre Passe Muraille or even The Theatre Centre most nights.)   This could definitely lead to its own post, but I know I don't have the energy for it.  

Soggy Weekend (& Week)

It really looks like Toronto has inherited Vancouver's weather, at least for today (Sunday) and the upcoming week.  I definitely don't like riding in the rain, but I did learn to do it in Vancouver (or I wouldn't have ridden three seasons out of the year).  Now the irony is that last Thurs. and Fri. were quite nice, but Thurs. I didn't have to go to work and just did some walking around the neighbourhood.  I could have ridden in to work on Friday, but I was giving a conference talk and needed access to Zoom (and this is still blocked at work due to some outdated risk assessments from early in the pandemic...).  So I really didn't have any choice but to stay home.  

Now I could have ridden more on Saturday, though I did the grocery shopping early, then helped my daughter build a science project, then went to the gym, then looked one more time at the science project.  So it was a fairly busy day overall, and I actually did take a nap in the afternoon, instead of going off to a museum or the library or downtown.  I did end up taking a quick spin down to Queen to pick up dinner, but that was pretty much it.

I felt somewhat desperate for more exercise, so I biked downtown today, despite the rain.  I just hope that going back it isn't too slippery (or dark!).  Anyway, I'm hoping the forecast is wrong and next week we have a few more clear days than they are projecting right now (or even overcast days where it doesn't really rain).

Meng-opolgy

I guess this could just have easily been titled Michaelopoly, but I wanted to go back slightly further to focus on the fact that the US was playing just as many games with Meng Wanzhou as China was with the "two Michaels."  The fraud case was always weak and should have been applied against Huawei as a firm, rather than trying to detain a specific executive.  It also points out the danger that when the US attempts to enforce its laws (which ultimately goes back the the US breaking with international treaties and trying to punish any firm still doing business with Iran), it opens itself up to other countries trying to enforce their laws on US companies that primarily do business in the US -- and may not even have branches in the other country.  And of course, China has shown no compunction about getting other countries tangled up in what is essentially an on-going dispute between the US and China.  

The Meng case was particularly complicated as the border guards in Vancouver made a number of procedural mistakes to the point that if this were any normal case (and not one where the Trump-infected Justice Department was really leaning on Canada), Meng would likely have had all charges stayed.

Biden and his team managed to use deferred prosecution as a technique to save enough face on both sides to resolve the crisis.  Meng agreed to some "wrong-doing" but the extradition request was dropped and she was allowed to return to China.  Most observers were expecting for China to wait a couple of weeks and then release the two Michael, but in fact they were put on a plane back to Canada on that very deal was announced.  In fact, they may actually have landed in Canada before Meng landed in China!  Later Chinese officials said this was based on compassionate grounds as they had medical conditions, but I'm not sure there is anyone on the planet that believes this.  There has almost never been a clearer case of hostage diplomacy.

At any rate, I do find it more than a bit ironic that deferred prosecution was the key, as Jodi Wilson-Raybould was so opposed to its use in the SNC-Lavalin case.  While the situation was different (and the actual public interest benefit was mostly limited to Quebec not Canada as a whole), using it in that case wouldn't have been completely out of line.  I have to say her holier-than-thou air and refusal to cut deals really made it so clear she should not have gotten into federal politics in the first place...

On a completely different note, it is astonishing how much China is willing to pay for good press.  I knew someone back in B.C. whose mother went on a two week trip to China heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.  (While there are times I think I would have liked to see China, I just can't imagine going while the current regime is in power, particularly after they crushed all dissent in Hong Kong...)  At any rate, I reviewed a fairly poor book by two Chinese academics that was to some extent white-washed by the participation of a scholar from the UK.  But the book itself was clearly funded by China and more or less adopted the Chinese state propaganda line whole-heartedly, which I found appalling.  Where this gets interesting is that since that point, I have been invited four or five times to present my "research" in other journals, which apparently are Chinese fronts.  This would be an easy trap for a junior scholar to fall into...  I can't even imagine what would happen after falling down that rabbit-hole.

Edit (11/19): Today I was asked to join as a guest editor to some journal, which sounds respectable but clearly is just a front for the Chinese government, and then just publish whatever I want.  Crazy!  You always hear about how much effort Russia and China are putting into the disinformation infowars, but it only hits home when you keep getting spammed over and over, just because you publish one review of a book on Chinese urbanization.  It's a strange and frankly depressing brave new world.  I'm not sorry I grew up along with the rise of personal computers, but I'm so glad I didn't grow up with today's internet.

The Way We Live Now

This novel is widely considered Anthony Trollope's strongest individual novel, that is not one that is part of the Chronicles of Barsetshire or the Palliser Novels, and it is also his longest.  And indeed it is generally noted as one of the last of the Victorian doorstop novels.  It was not fully appreciated in its day, in part because it was such a condemnation of English society, but has grown in reputation since then.  Given the frequency of financial scandals wracking the U.S. (the Savings and Loans crisis of the 80s, Enron, A.I.G., Lehman Brothers, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and so forth), there are always fresh memories of financiers behaving badly and taking advantage of less-informed investors and generally bringing ruin to everyone else (and only occasionally to themselves!).  The somewhat mysterious (and quite likely Jewish) Augustus Melmotte is an appropriate literary forefather of these conniving con artists.  There is a slightly different angle in this novel in that Melmotte really does want respectability (for Marie's (his daughter) sake if not his own) and he tries to buy his way into society.  He comes quite close to succeeding, and indeed it is likely this ugly mirror held up to London society that so upset readers of the day.  I won't go too deeply into the plot (and indeed I have to admit I forgot many aspects of it as I read the novel back in early 2018), but here is a pretty good summary with some interesting interpretations along the way, and I will touch on a few plot points, so SPOILERS ahead...   

In one sense, Melmotte drives a harder bargain than some of the characters in Henry James's later novels in that he isn't willing to support a penniless lord (Sir Felix Carbury) simply for the sake of Marie being established in society, though he most likely could have afforded it.  Sir Felix is definitely not a worthy husband, as is established in several ways, most definitively when he essentially allows himself to be cajoled into playing cards with someone he knows is a card cheat.  But perhaps Trollope over-egged the pudding as it were.  The reader ends up quite relieved for Marie when her elopement with Sir Felix fails, but maybe it would have been more interesting if it wasn't so clear that he was such a poor choice.  I vaguely remember being not terribly interested in the whole Paul Montague-Hetta Carbury subplot.  I suspect that if Marie had to choose between Sir Felix and Paul, that might have been a more interesting dynamic, whereas the actual denouements are perhaps just a bit too pat.  I did enjoy it, and I generally enjoy Trollope after I get back into the rhythm of reading a really long book.  I'd probably not reread the whole thing, however, but I might reread individual chapters, which is pretty much the same way I feel about Vanity Fair.  I thought Trollope had a pretty good take on how important marriage was for the minor aristocrats in terms of trying to save themselves from slipping down further in society if they weren't willing to actually get their hands dirty and work, especially in cases when previous generations had divested too much land or otherwise blown through the inheritance.

Austen's work also really connects with the economic realities driving many marriage proposals or at least the women seeking out wealthy husbands at any rate.  In Pride and Prejudice, she definitely lets Lydia (who pays no attention to such matters and is immature and easily swayed) off far too easily, as in "real life" she would have been completely ruined.  That said, there are few real obstacles standing between Elizabeth and Darcy, other than he is too proud and she finds him annoying (and is justifiably angry that he blocked Jane's marriage, which is itself too easily resolved).  Sense and Sensibility, which actually was written before Pride and Prejudice, has these same themes but more serious difficulties to be overcome by the various heroines.  I think S & S to be a stronger novel overall than P & P.

It's interesting that economic necessity is just as urgent in the mid- to late Victorian novel (say Middlemarch) but it is at least a bit muted.  I can't recall Eliot introducing characters by pointing out the worth of their estates or livings (if in the church), but perhaps she did.  However, then in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, money comes roaring back.  It is front and center of every transaction, romantic or otherwise.  Fathers and sons are at odds over inheritances.  Many minor nobles are impoverished and look to their sons to marry heiresses (also a theme in Henry James's European novels), though there are certainly still poor but genteel women on the make for rich lords (sometimes ending up with land-owners not nearly as rich as they portray themselves).

And then there is a bit of a swing away from this, certainly by mid Century.  Money is not talked about as openly in many contemporary middle-class novels.  The Great Gatsby is one of the last where class played a truly critical role in moving the plot forward, though Dos Passos's USA Trilogy and a lot of Depression-era fiction dwells on people who have been financially ruined.  But if you think about the mainstream novelists (Philip Roth, John Updike, John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, even Saul Bellow), there might be occasional financial difficulties and certainly arguments over how the family budget is spent, but money doesn't seem such an over-riding, all-encompassing concern.  And of course most of the writers in the Brat Pack all seemed to be trust fund kids, whether this was literally true or not.  Obviously, this is a completely reductive literary history, but I'd say it is broadly true that most contemporary fiction tries to sidestep economic realities.  Feel free to present counter arguments in the comments.

Do I Expect Too Much from Literature?

I'm starting to find it harder and harder to keep a really open mind and read fiction that glorifies terrible people, so for instance I've never once had any interest in reading American Psycho.  I certainly didn't like Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, and I probably would have been better off never knowing it even existed.  I suppose it is true that my echo chamber is shrinking, and I have less and less tolerance for any artist/writer truly on the conservative side of the spectrum (and this even extends to non-ironic portrayals of conservative-types).  At the same time I find straight parodies of the Orange One and his hapless minions to be just a waste of time (shooting fish in a barrel basically).  I just don't want to read anything that gets into the heads of Trumpsters in any way, ironically or not.  I suppose using this logic I would have dropped Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk where the family was pretty much made up of "deplorables."  In that sense, I suppose I am no longer really a reader open to brand new experiences, because I have closed myself off to so much.  Now I don't literally want every character to be a reflection of myself and my worldview, but I have certainly ruled out a lot.*  I guess I might still be willing to spend some time with centre-right characters (and definitely the extinct Rockefeller Republicans) but not hard-right ones or Ayn Rand-type libertarians, but even this wouldn't be my first choice, as I prefer keeping to the company of centre-left types.

And beyond this, I don't like characters that are feckless and expect others to take care of them (most of the artistic husbands in Comyns's novels and it certainly seems that Gully Jimson from Cary's The Horse's Mouth fits this pattern as well).  And I am practically allergic to children who hate school and/or just drop out.  Does that mean I only want to read about people who would only make the same life choices I would?  I hope not, though it is somewhat hard to tell.  I see that a few years back I was writing about characters that I simply hated (and in a few cases I simply dropped the novel -- I can add William Trevor's Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel to that list).

But then there is a longer list of characters that I either despise or just would refuse to spend any time with (in real life certainly) because they make so many bad life choices -- and in most cases then blame others or just "Fate" for their misfortune.  I am truly struggling with whether to push on with Joyce Cary's first trilogy as I am so turned off by both Sara Monday, the narrator of Herself Surprised, and Gully Jimson, the self-pitying artist (or rather enfant terrible**) who gets plenty of screen time in Herself Surprised and then his own novel, The Horse's Mouth.  But it is considered such a classic in the canon that I think I will push through.  I have decided to never read his second trilogy, and I have put Mister Johnson (featuring a foolish civil servant in Africa) so far down on my list I probably will never get to it either.†

I'm finding it harder and harder to take pleasure in the foibles of literary figures.  In a few cases, this could be because I agree it is somewhat ugly to "punch down," and mock a woman from the servant class for instance, which is one way of looking at Herself Surprised, though I should make it clear I don't agree on any blanket prohibition on punching down.  More often, I just think that these characters have absolutely no common sense and very few normal people would end up in such situations and thus this spoils my enjoyment.  Quite a few farces take things just that step too far, though the really clever ones stop just short of the line (and Boeing Boeing was a pleasant surprise along those lines).  So again, I have added some red lines that also kind of restrict what I will really open myself to.  I suppose in the end it really only hurts myself when I keep narrowing the scope of what I want to read, but at the same time I can tell that I will run out of time and I should probably not bother reading novels that really rub me the wrong way.

* One important caveat is that this largely only applies to novels and plays set in North America or Western Europe.  I don't have a great sense of how people would react in different cultures and don't put as many pre-conceived restrictions on non-Western novels.  And novels written before 1900 also get a bit of a pass in that the politics of the day were so different.  That said, I can assure you that if I run across a novel with a pro-slavery slant, I am not going to bother finishing it.

** It probably goes without saying that I don't hold with the idea that just because artists or musicians or actors are talented, this makes up for it if they are deeply unpleasant people.  I might have been a tiny bit more sympathetic to that view when I was younger, but absolutely not now, which makes me think that The Horses's Mouth will be pretty hard going.  I think I'll still watch the movie version, especially as it is only a bit over 90 minutes, and I am curious what Alec Guinness (who wrote the screenplay!) did with the material and how many rough edges did he sand off.

† And indeed after the entire plot was spoiled by Goodreads, I can't imagine spending any time with this book.  I doubt I will ever read more Cary after I get through the trilogy, but if I end up with endless time on my hands (post-retirement), maybe I'll give A Fearful Joy a go.