Computer - Good and Very Bad News

As I was jotting down the other day, I have been having severe computer issues that cropped up recently.  I assumed that I would need to get a new computer (and probably that isn't a bad idea, as frustrating as that would be, if I can find one with extra RAM and hard drive space, as well as an internal digital drive).  Anyway, I was realizing that I probably could just use the cmd prompt to copy over the recent files to the new external hard drive and then reformat the C drive if necessary.  All was going ok until I found out that the cmd prompt couldn't even recognize the drive, and that all the Explorer issues were due to a catastrophic failure on the part of the (very new) external hard drive(!) not the desktop itself.

So I unplugged the failing hard drive and the computer went back to normal.  So that's sort of a happy ending.  However, I had been of course been using this failed hard drive to consolidate all the backups over the past month or so.  (And it seems ridiculously unfair that a drive I bought only a month or so ago suffered such a catastrophic failure.)  Now most folders and files are still on another hard drives, so it will be annoying but not impossible to restore.  However, this failed drive is the only place where a lot of videos and concerts from the Rex were stored, as well as pretty much all the museum photos over the past 2 months.  (It's particularly galling as there was no immediate reason to remove the brand-new Xmas2025 folder from this older laptop after I copied it onto the new hard drive, but I did...)

As it just was failing in this past day (and chkdsk can still basically see the drive), there is a reasonably good chance that if I send it off to one of those data recovery centres, they can back it up (for a very large fee).  I'll call tomorrow.  I might as well send another bad drive that a different data recovery centre wasn't able to restore (from over a decade ago, however).  It's also ironic that if this had happened a few days back, I could have had someone who lives in Waterloo run it over to Guelph, but that won't work in this case.

I guess I will take the time to re-evaluate.  I think I need to stop taping so much music off the internet.  I'll probably drop BBC New Music Show and Round Midnight (which really backs up as it is five days per week!) and just focus on Music Planet.  Now whether that justifies keeping the VPN service is a question for another day.

So I am in a pretty crappy, crappy mood.  It could have been worse, in that some of the big files I was working on were also copied over onto a flashdrive for my son, and I can back those up immediately (and I had backed up some Jeff Wall images a few other places, which I would have done for everything aside from just not having enough free hard drive space on the drives that didn't fail!), but it is still a huge drag.  I may toy with the idea of storing more of this stuff in "the cloud," but I really don't want anything else that is going to do weird automatic backups and further degrade this computer.  The constant Windows upgrades are already as bad as a virus.  And most of these services are pretty costly, but the biggest single stumbling block is that none of them actually guarantee the privacy of your data, with Gdrive being the worst, with Google clearly letting AIs have access to data in the cloud.  I had better go off to the gym, as I have already been delayed enough by this setback.

 

Edit (01/06): I managed to get the hard drive sent out by UPS this afternoon, though for 4x what I was expecting to pay!  (To be fair, this included some bubble wrap and them packing it up for me, but still...)  I only hope this isn't a harbinger of what it will cost me, assuming that Recovery Force actually can recover the data.  There will be the cost of a new blank USB stick or hard drive, depending on how much data can be salvaged, plus shipping, and maybe even a disposal fee after they are done.  I saw on the website that they change an additional $500 if the drive was opened by someone else.  I didn't do that in this case, but the older drive that failed was clearly opened by someone at that other recovery centre.  So it is almost certainly not worth it at this point, but if this goes well, I might end up in a bit of a back and forth discussion on what they would actually charge to attempt to recover data off a second hard drive. 

 

Belated Thanks

I meant to get this post out between Canadian and US Thankgivings, and then after US Thanksgiving, and I just never found the time.

It is always worth considering what one is thankful for, particularly in these extremely stressful times.

I am not particularly thankful for the TTC, which has only provided really good service on 2 occasions over the past 20 times I've ridden it, with really dreadful service on a couple of days.  I am definitely not thankful for Ford and certainly not for Trump.  I am thankful that Carney does seem to be governing like a centrist technocrat, though I disagree with his pivot away from climate change initiatives and trying to appease Alberta (which I feel is foolish in the extreme).

I am glad that my health is overall quite good and on the rare occasions I do get sick, I recover very quickly.  I only had actual COVID symptoms for a day or so, and they didn't knock me out.  Indeed, given how well I managed COVID, it's fairly likely that I did have it once or twice before but was asymptomatic.  (Unfortunately, my son seems to have a much more compromised immune system and has caught COVID at least 5 or 6 times, usually needing several days to recover.)  I would like to lose more weight of course, but in general things are decent health-wise, and while I certainly have lost that spring in my step (and walking through museums for hours on end is harder for me now), I still get out and stay very active.

I'm glad we added the kittens to the household.  I think it actually does make me a somewhat more patient person and a marginally calmer one.  I'm also glad that cat litter has improved drastically from the really acidic smell from the 1980s and 1990s, though this clumping cat litter does have a tendency to clog the toilet a bit, and I am not thankful for that!

 
I'm grateful to be employed,* even though I am not in love with my work.  It has always been the case that the best, most rewarding work has been in places that I really didn't want to live, setting up a challenging dynamic.  I do overall enjoy Toronto, particularly its cultural scene, and I take full advantage of that.  However, I am not very happy with the way the generally incompetent and often venal politicians running Ontario make my work harder (or certainly less fulfilling) and they also have had some direct negative impacts on my personal life as well, though I won't go into that at the moment, aside from noting that Toronto really would be better off with charter city powers to insulate it from the terrible policies constantly emanating from Queens Park (with ripping out bike lanes and now forbidding speed cameras being only the latest outrage du jour).

But to put a more positive spin on work, they generally do let me pull together material to submit to conferences (even if I can't put all of this time down as chargeable on my timesheet).  I was not able to go to conferences at Metrolinx after Ford took over and wanted to show there would be no government employees enjoying themselves at public expense...  Anyway, I have managed to go to a few conferences, and I think in a couple of cases, I will actually be able to translate the work into a publication for greater reach.  (This is something I sort of stopped doing after my dreams of becoming an academic died, but I have a list of topics that I think would (still) make good papers, and this seems like a more useful thing to work on in 2026 than many of my other late-night activities, even though I do keep the doomscrolling to a minimum!)  

I also probably don't focus enough on that I am thankful I got out of the US in time.  I had pretty much wanted to leave since 'W' was re-elected, and we did end up in the UK for a time but didn't like it very much (and it has been truly terribly under the Conservatives and now it seems inevitable that the even more dreadful Reform will take over, so that was definitely a good move in leaving that sinking ship...).  I was pretty fortunate in making the move before the immigration policies tightened up (and I simply got too old).  I don't agree with pulling up the ladder after me, though I don't think there is currently a party (I could vote for) that is endorsing unlimited immigration (or only a few limits).  I am grateful in a small way that they did loosen immigration for foreign-trained doctors, so my family doctor will probably get to stay after all.  

Given that immigration is back in the public imagination (as an "issue") maybe this would be a good time to finish up that thing I was writing about my own imagined journey had I actually tried to do an endrun around 1990s immigration policy by marrying a lesbian.  (This was something one of my friends had proposed, though I don't think she was particularly serious about it.)  I have written it up as a play, but I think it would likely work better as a novel.  I'll have another close look at it, but only after I have made more progress on my other creative writing, which is going reasonably well, which indeed is another thing I am thankful for.

I might have to think a bit more if I was going to add any more things for which I am thankful.  It is one of the downsides of my personality that I don't generally see the positive side of things and often can't even point out the positives without also focusing on negatives, which undermines the goal of a post like this.  

* While my work is mostly pattern recognition at heart, there is still enough interpretation that clients don't believe machine learning and/or AI can do it all without some senior people (like me) to interpret the results for them.  This may last another 5 years before the price of this sort of work is driven completely down to the point where I will be out of work.  I guess we shall see.  I am definitely glad that I am towards the end of my career (12-15 years left I suppose) and not a bright young thing, as it is the juniors that will be impacted the most by the AI revolution, not only in not getting very good training but not even being hired to show off their skills in the first place...

Godard/Rohmer

I'm not sure if these two film makers really have that much in common, though I found in the relatively few movies I've seen by them, there was a lot of philosophizing and both were very much aimed at intellectuals, even moreso than other French directors like Demy or Truffaut.  I know for certain that Godard moved even further into this space, mostly working on documentaries of the cinema and away from pure entertainment.  I'm less sure that's the case for Rohmer.  It might be that My Night at Maud's was actually the high-point of his intellectualism.  I am fairly certain, however, that Rohmer ultimately believed entertaining the audience (unlike Godard who frankly had contempt for the audience and his fellow directors by the end).

Anyway, I have an awful lot of these films, and I should just try to track which I have actually watched.

I bought the ultimate Godard box set years and years ago.  So long ago I can't find the invoice, but I recall it was a pretty good deal at that time.

I keep forgetting that it does have A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960) in it.  I actually just requested a copy of Breathless from the library, but this is the Criterion with better special features, so I'll watch that version when it arrives.

The rest of the set is comprised of:
Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961)
Le Petit Soldat (1963)
Le Mepris (1963)
X Alphaville (1965)
Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
Made In USA (1966)
La Chinoise (1967)
Passion (1982)
Detective (1985)
Helas Pour Moi (Oh Woe is Me) (1993)
Eloge De L’amour (In Praise of Love) (2001)
Notre Musique (2004)

I then picked up separately:
X Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Une Femme Mariée (1964)
Band à Part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Tout Va Bien (1972)
Slow Motion/Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) (1980)

So this is fairly comprehensive coverage of his oeuvre, though I don't have Weekend (1967) (which I watched recently and didn't care much for) nor Masculin Féminin (1966), which I have just requested from the library.  I think I decided not to buy these, as they are pretty easy to grab from the library.  Depending on how I feel after getting through all of these, I might add Prenom: Carmen (1983) and Hail Mary (1985).  How's It Going (Comment ça va) (1976) sounds pretty dire honestly, as does Keep Your Right Up (Soigne ta droite) (1987).  I'm pretty sure my enjoyment of Godard films will drop off radically by his mid 1970s work, but I guess I'll find out.

As far as Rohmer goes, I mostly picked up a number of box sets:

Six Moral Tales (Criterion):
The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963)
Suzanne's Career (1963)
La Collectionneuse (The Female Collector) (1967)
X My Night at Maud's  (1969)
Claire's Knee (1970)
Love in the Afternoon (1972)

This first set I actually found used in Chicago, but the rest were ordered, mostly through Amazon.co.uk.

The Essential Eric Rohmer (either very early or very late films):
The Sign of Leo (1962)
Rendez-vous in Paris (1995)
Triple Agent (2004)
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

Eric Rohmer Collection (Arrow), which contains his Comedies and Proverbs and two "bonus" films:
Love in the Afternoon (1972) (duplicate)
The Marquise of O (1976)
The Aviator's Wife (1981)
A Good Marriage (1982)
Pauline at the Beach (1983) 
Full Moon in Paris (1984) 
The Green Ray (1986) 
My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (1987) 

Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons (Criterion Blu-ray):
A Tale of Springtime (1990)
A Tale of Winter (1992)
A Tale of Summer (1996)
A Tale of Autumn (1998)

Between all these sets, I really have all but maybe 3 or 4 mid-career movies, so I just need to work my way through this.

I have no idea how long it would take to watch the Godard and Rohmer listed above.  Only a couple of months if I was diligent and didn't do anything else, but that isn't likely to happen.  I think the next post like this, I will focus on Fellini (relatively straight-forward, though I don't own that much) and Bergman, which is completely tangled, though I think I do have almost all his work one way or another.  Watching this sounds like a project for 2027, however! 

And despite my best intentions, as I was researching this, I was also researching Claude Chabrol (sometimes called the Hitchcock of French cinema).  I own a decent box set of his films from the late 1960s and early 70s, though I haven't watched any of them!  I then came across a good-looking box set of his later films, only to find out it doesn't have any English subtitles!  Fortunately, I hadn't pulled the trigger.  Of his later films, the ones that were of the most interest to me were L'Enfer (Torment) and La Fleur du Mal.  I found a reasonable stand-alone of L'Enfer (where my plan is to watch it and then donate it to Robarts) and La Fleur du Mal.  I almost bought the second one, but found that TPL actually has a couple of copies, so I reserved one.  (I had done a search previously, but somehow it slipped through and fortunately I hadn't pulled the trigger on it, as I was trying to figure out a way to get free shipping!  So I guess you could say my avarice saved me...)

2025 in the Rear-View Mirror

While I certainly kept myself busy and reasonably well entertained, 2025 was a real horror-show in terms of broader trends and political stories, including the surrender of any kind of meaningful Canadian commitment to combating climate change and outright racism, sexism and transphobia taking center stage in the US and the UK.  And one more year of the unthinkable conditions facing residents of Gaza and the Ukraine.  I do find it harder and harder to justify living in a comfortable bubble (though one that continues to shrink!), and when I get in this sort of a mood (fairly often these days) it is really hard to enjoy myself.  What I ought to do is carve out time to volunteer, either at an animal shelter or maybe at Eastview.  Looking over my calendar that seems impossible without giving up a lot of the cultural activities that I engage in, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't continue to work towards doing better.

I didn't donate much of anything during Giving Tuesday, but I did finally get out a bunch of donations right before the cut-off at year's end (with two or three of them matched!).  I ended up donating to United Way of Greater Toronto, the Toronto Star's Santa Claus Fund, YMCA, the TSO, Tafelmusik, Medicins Sans Frontiers (instead of the Red Cross as discussed here), the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Factory Theatre, Coal Mine Theatre, Eastview Community Centre and Shakespeare Bash'd (though that last one doesn't qualify as a charity unfortunately).  These are basically the local institutions that I spend a lot of time with, and it makes sense to put my donations there.  I suppose I have just enough time to get under the wire with a donation to Esprit Orchestra, so let me go off and do that before it is too late.

I don't really do resolutions, but I would like to get more serious about getting my weight under control.  I was doing pretty well, even through the early holidays (maintaining if not losing any weight) but these past two weeks I've given in to temptation, not helped by generally cruddy weather and thinking too much about the state of the world (and how 2026 really doesn't seem to offer anything better).  I've managed to get in a few extra swimming sessions so will try to keep that up.  I did skip going to the gym last weekend, but it looks like the gym is actually open on New Year's Day (for all those other people with resolutions on getting fit!), so I'll head out fairly soon and plan to go again on Sunday, and I guess I'll be caught up then.

I do think I should be able to make some progress on my various creative writing projects, starting with finishing transcribing and doing a few immediate edits on my Stratford piece.  Given that I have gotten some positive feedback for the first section, I want to see how the whole piece works.  I will hear on Jan. 9 or 10 if I am picked in round 2 of the Toronto Fringe.  And after this, I want to pull all the various pieces of my planners' opus together and see how long it is and what is missing.  And get it transcribed!  After that, I can decide if it really is a podcast or a novel or something else entirely.

I should try to restart work on this quilt I abandoned many year ago.  Given that I am definitely not doing any more jigsaw puzzles until the cats are a bit older and less likely to chew up the pieces, I might actually be able to make some headway on it.  But I won't beat myself up if it doesn't happen...

One "resolution" that I may be able to stick to is to work my way through all the DVDs that I own before adding even more to the collection.  Of course, that will be a challenge as I just bought an Oshima set and then the Bergman BFI Vol. 4 set (which includes his late films Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata and Fanny and Alexander).  Given that I have had the 3rd box set for some time (with the Winter Trilogy and Persona) and never cracked it, that might be the place to start.

It's probably not hopeless, however.  I already stay up far too late, so it will probably not matter much if I watch a movie now and again.  That's how I was able to watch Almodovar's Live/Flesh early on Christmas Day, and then early this week I watched What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (both with my son in the late evening, not overnight).  I really am extremely close to wrapping up all of Almodovar, and I think maybe I could rewatch Bergman's Winter Trilogy, then alternate through the many Rohmer and Godard films I own, then maybe alternate through Kurosawa and Ozu and even a bit of Naruse (if it isn't something I have just seen at TIFF).  Indeed, I am scheduled to see Flowing on Jan 2 (and I'll have to somehow quickly make it back from MOCA!) and Lightning on Jan 3.

On New Year's Eve, I ended up going in to work, stopping at the Market Gallery on the way, depositing a check at the bank, having some Indian food for lunch (many but not all of the restaurants in the food court were shutting up early), putting in a bunch of insurance claims I had been sitting on and working a bit more on a poster for TRB Crossroads next month.  So pretty busy, even if not that productive work-wise...  Then I went up to Paradise to see Billy Wilder's The Apartment.

 
I'd never seen the entire thing, only a few snippets here and there, and I enjoyed it very much.*  I think I passed on an opportunity to see it at TIFF, as it just would have been too long a day, following that up with a Almodovar film or two.  Anyway, seeing it New Year's Eve in a great movie theatre with a nearly full crowd was pretty special.  (I might go ahead and become a member at Paradise in 2026 now that they seem to have enough movies to make it worthwhile.)

For dinner, I stopped off at an Ethiopian restaurant nearby and settled up a debt I owed the owner, so that worked out well.  I managed to make it home right around 10, and we watched the countdown, and I crashed fairly soon after that.  Again, just hoping that 2026 will be a better year, though I am not really expecting this, based on recent trends (and the uglier aspects of human nature which are all coming out unapologetically these days).

 

Edit (01/01): Somehow I missed the news that Herbert Gans passed away back in April!  I guess because the NY Times and the Washington Post are both paywalled, and it didn't make the news in a lot of other places.  It is sad, but he had a good run (97!).  I met him one time when I was considering applying to Columbia for urban sociology, but he and I weren't on the same wavelength, as I was more interested in archival-based research and less going out and talking to people, which was his preferred research method.  It's a real telling sign of how the commurb listserv has faded into irrelevance (since roughly 2021) that I didn't find out about it there, as he was quite an active member of that.

 

* I'm not really sure why this works and Dawn Powell's Angels on Toast doesn't.  The dialogue is definitely wittier (and would get wittier in her later New York novels).  Maybe there is just less focus on the wives and their points of view (in The Apartment), which generally made the whole thing feel far more sordid in Angels on Toast, even though objectively the male executives in both were lechers.  If anything, the executives in The Apartment abuse their power much more than those in Angels on Toast (where they typically avoid having affairs with women that work for them, though there is one major exception towards end of Angels on Toast).  It could be that the women entering into these love affairs (in The Apartment) are portrayed as happy-go-lucky types that know these are just passing affairs (with a few exceptions).  I guess basically it is the lightness of touch which Wilder has on display here (and Powell would acquire in some of her subsequent novels).

Best Theatre of 2025

This list will have almost everything I saw in 2025 unless I really didn't care for it (both the plot and the acting/direction), and there were a few things like that unfortunately.  I think I only left in the middle of David French's Leaving Home, but I probably should have bailed on Job (at Coal Mine) and Winter Solstice (though this was all in one act, making it hard to do.)  However, I have cut back on the Fringe listings, focusing here on what stood out for me.  I realize that isn't entirely consistent, but I just see so much at the Fringe most summers that I want to raise the bar that much more.  Most of these plays will not be coming back to Toronto any time soon, but there may still be a few SPOILERS in my commentary on the plays.

Jan

Buddies/Common Boots - Last Landscape (an almost wordless piece that was much more about the movement and setting; not really my thing but some people liked it a lot)
Talk is Free Theatre - Cock (an intense piece in a constrained space with a tug-of-war between a straight woman and a gay man over a second man)
Factory - Small Gods: The Musical (a workshopped version of a queer musical set largely in a mall)
Talk is Free - For Both Resting and Breeding (an odd piece set in someone's kitchen in the far future when gender has all but been erased)
Canada Stage - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (another intense piece, somewhat undercut by one of the leads getting ill with his replacement not entirely off-book at that point; it probably would have worked better at the Berkeley Theatre in a less gargantuan space) 

(I was supposed to see Shakespeare Bash'd The Merchant of Venice, but my performance was cancelled due to a freak blizzard and they weren't able to rebook me, which is supremely frustrating, even though this is not a play I actually enjoy...)

Feb. 

Eldritch Theatre/Red Sandcastle - The Strange and Eerie Memoirs of Billy Wuthergloom 
VideoCab - Cliff Cardinal's CBC Special
Coal Mine - People, Places & Things (depressing piece about a women finally kicking her addictions and her family being too burnt out to really care)
Canadian Stage - Fat Ham (retelling of Hamlet with a gay Hamlet who is in love with Laertes, probably the very hardest thing to believe was the Claudius character would prefer to die choking on food rather than allow Ham to perform the Heimlich maneuver.  I found myself incredibly annoyed at the way lower middle class African-Americans were portrayed as so absurdly homophobic, and this was even more blatant in A Strange Loop, which I won't even list here, as I found this trope so offensive...)
Theatre Centre - Monks (brought back by popular demand from Fringe 2024.  So odd, with a plot ostensibly about the two monks trying to find a lost donkey, including a lot of audience participation; I was glad not to have been picked.)

March

Outside the March - Performance Review (a play about the author's best and worst jobs, set in an actual coffee shop)
Crow's - Measure for Measure (basically a small troupe putting on a radio play version of Measure for Measure, with some implied side action between the actors going on)
Factory - Truck (basically about truck drivers being replaced by technology but it ends up also being about the rivalry between a union leader and an average guy driver)
Alumnae - Age of Arousal
Al Green Theatre - Cabaret

April 

Theatre Centre - Red
Crow's - A Public Display of Affection (an older gay actor's memories of gay life in Toronto in his youth)
Canadian Stage - Mahabharata Pt 1 & 2
Video Cabaret - Pochsy IV: Unplugged
Tarragon - Feast (the ending was implausible and the dig at vegetarians at the Feast at the End of the World was frankly uncalled for)

 May 

Shakespeare Bash'd - George Etherege's The Man of Mode (staged reading)
Video Cabaret - Brecht's Three Penny Opera (student production)

June 

EldritchTheatre/Red Sandcastle - Buster Canfield's Apocalyptic Miracle Show
Canadian Stage - Next Time I Die (staged reading)
Canadian Stage - You, Always by Erin Shields (a staged reading of a play going on the main stage in 2026)

July 

It looks like the only theatre I did in July was Fringe, but there was a lot of it.  Here are some of the best I saw this past summer: #1 Clown Show, Shady Arab Ladies, Jimmy Hogg: Potato King, A Canadian Explains Eurovision, The Rhinoceros Collective, The Adding Machine, Adam Bailey: My Three Deaths, Oh! I Miss the War, Mocktails on the Beach, The Perils of Being Born in the Fall, Stealing Home, Things My Dad Kept, The Sexy Pigeon Show and Milk Milk Lemonade.

The funniest show was Milk Milk Lemonade (edging out Jimmy Hogg: Potato King).  I learned the most (actual facts) from The Perils of Being Born in the Fall.  The best revival was surely The Adding Machine.  The most touching was Things My Dad Kept.

Aug.

Canadian Stage - Shakespeare in High Park: Romeo & Juliet (Juliet and her father were very well acted, but I thought Romeo was rather weak and Tybalt was just terrible)
Summerworks - Le Concierge (an interactive piece where we walked all through a school following a custodian and even cleaning some windows by the end)
Summerworks - The Chains (another hyper-interactive piece where we eventually were sorted into groups (Team Creon, Team Antigone or the Chorus) to act out a production of Antigone!)
Summerworks - Leftover Market
Stratford - Macbeth (I liked Macbeth on motorcycles better than most of the critics)
Stratford - The Winter's Tale (this is a play I simply hate, despite the fine cast, and will never see it again)
Stratford - Erin Shields's Ransacking Troy (very good but not nearly as comic overall as I had been led to expect)
Shakespeare in the Ruff @ Withrow Park - Tiff'ny of Athens (genderbent and time-shifting version of Timon of Athens; while I would like to see a proper production one of these days (I skipped out on one last year at the Theatre Centre), this actually gave me a pretty good feel for the piece)

Sept

Soulpepper - Harold Pinter's Old Times (this makes the third time I've seen this enigmatic play!)
Soulpepper - King Gilgamesh (I saw this before and decided at the last minute to get rush tickets to see it a second time on its final performance; it inspired me to actually read the Epic of Gilgamesh; this play is very faithful to the epic, which is pretty cool)
Crow's - Octet (this started strong but ended oddly, and I particularly thought the bit about the scientist (who used to heckle religious types just as Richard Dawkins did) encountering a godlike figure was inane and essentially ruined the piece for me)
Coal Mine - Beckett's Waiting for Godot (a fine performance, a bit more physical at some points than I was used to)

Oct.

Stratford - Goblins: Oedipus Rex (my second trip out to Stratford and the Goblins slayed)
Tarragon - Bremen Town
Talk is Free Theatre - David Harrower's Blackbird (really hard to take a play about a pedophile who reunites with the woman he seduced when she was 13 or so!)

Nov.

Soulpepper - Jacobs-Jenkins's The Comeuppance (did not like the plot much at all, esp. the ending, but the acting was generally terrific)
George Brown @ Young Centre - Ruhl's Orlando
Crow's Kanika Ambrose's The Christmas Market (an interesting, often depressing, peek into the lives of the temporary foreign workers who keep Canadian agribusiness humming along)
Canadian Stage - Robert LePage's Far Side of the Moon (I saw this years ago in Vancouver with LePage in the role (!), but he wasn't performing this time around; the spectacle is good but the plot is wafer-thin and not really at all memorable)
Coal Mine - Fulfillment Centre (my main beef with this play is that the finance has uprooted her life and yet seems to have no feelings at all for her partner, and maybe even more to the point, two of the characters have extremely troubled lives but the root cause seems personal and not due to the pressures of capitalism, which is what one would have expected from this play; I thought the ending was incredibly weak)
EldritchTheatre/Red Sandcastle - Little Library of the Damned
Icarus @ Theatre Centre -  Dennis Kelly's DNA (dark comedy about teens more or less re-enacting Lord of the Flies but in an English suburb) 
Shakespeare Bash'd - Middleton's Women Beware Women (staged reading)
Alumnae Theatre - New Ideas Festival Week 2 (some good short pieces here with the standout piece about two women talking in a doctor's office before one woman is about to get news if she has cancer)

Dec
 
Factory Theatre - Public Consumption (this conveyed the horrors of the internet much more effectively than Job, which I felt was too gimmicky)
RedOne Collective - The Dishwashers by Morris Panych (the very welcome return of RedOne Collective, this play is staged in an actual restaurant; while I didn't care for the very last scene, overall this was quite good)
Soulpepper/Bad Hats - Narnia (a fun musical for all ages)
Crow's - Michael Healey's Rogers v. Rogers (a one-man show with Ted Rogers and his wife and children all played by one actor, going into the details of the Rogers' takeover of Shaw Communications)

I saw roughly 80 plays, musicals or staged readings in 2025, which is not shabby considering reviewing isn't actually my profession.  

The best spectacle was The Mahabharata Pt 1 & 2 at Canadian Stage.  I did find that nearly all the plays had something that kept them from being truly amazing, often some annoying wrinkle in the plot that didn't hold up very well.  Looking over the whole list, I think probably the best play was Ransacking Troy at Stratford, followed by Rogers v. Rogers at Crow's and then Goblins: Oedipus.  However, Measure for Measure essentially done as a radio play (@ Crow's) was very good.  Red at Theatre Centre was also quite good, though it suffers a bit from the fact I've seen it several times before, including on Broadway! 

I was heartened by the return of RedOne Collective, as well as a new company starting up called Icarus Theatre.  And I didn't go to all their shows (as I just am not that interested in Tracy Letts's Bug), but King Black Box is another up and coming company that I need to keep an eye on.  For the most part, the best payoffs of the year were from these smaller theatres or events at Fringe and Summerworks.

But to me the best news of all is that Toronto Cold Reads started up in a new incarnation in Dec., and they have accepted my Stratford piece for either Jan. or Feb.  So that is exciting and gives me more motivation to keep working on my own creative writing!

I will say that given the somewhat lukewarm or hostile reception I gave to some of the critical darlings of the season (especially The Welkin), I am starting to rethink how much theatre I really ought to go to, as I don't seem to enjoy it as much as I used to.  Or maybe I am just feeling bruised at the very high ticket prices of most of these shows (and indeed there were a few shows I decided just weren't worth the $60+ ticket prices) when I often have mixed feelings about the experience.

One thing that stood out to me is that playwrights who decided to use their soapbox to engage in "both sideism" really lost me, and I lost all respect for what they were trying to do.  This was only a fairly small element of Feast where there was some completely decadent Feast for the End of Time where all kinds of endangered species were being eaten by these rich, nihilistic assholes, but somehow the author had to claim that vegetarians would also be there eating rare, ancient grains.  It's such a stupid attempt to knock vegetarians and vegans off their moral high ground (as not eating meat (at the levels indulged in by western societies) is objectively better for the health of the planet than eating (so much) meat).  But this is only a very minor (sour) note in a fairly long (too long) play.  The bit about the anti-religious zealots (like Dawkins) being just as toxic on the internet (as believers of various persuasions) might have some validity, but the way it was introduced in Octet is far from ideal.  Having the scientist dropped into a lengthy (non-musical!) scenario where he encounters a godlike being that his scientific rationality can't explain (and thus he is forced to admit he might have been wrong in the past) is beyond stupid and really made me dislike the whole piece.

Books in 2026

I probably spend nearly as much time arranging and rearranging my lists (mental and written-out) for what I plan to read as the time spent reading.

I actually don't go hunting around for new books to read, though I do look at what the NY Times and Guardian are promoting.  From this Guardian list, I added Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House (though from the write-up her previous novel My Phantom won't be my cup of tea at all).  And if it is truly his last novel/memoir, I will probably eventually get around to Julian Barnes's Departure(s), though I expect it might be a year or two before I get to it, and I am much more likely to reread Flaubert's Parrot beforehand.

I don't track poetry nearly as much, though I probably should pull together a post on relatively new discoveries.  I may have mentioned that I just missed out on a reading that Ronna Bloom did at Queen Books, and that I would probably have been inspired to look her up (in time) had I read Public Works before her other work, as this collection really spoke to me.  She goes to a fair number of readings and book launches around Toronto, so I will probably manage to see her in 2026.  She is starting off with a Zoom reading of In a Riptide in late Jan., and I can probably make that.  I'll see if there are any other in-person readings in the coming months.  (I do see that the Queen Books reading also included John Barton reading from Compulsory Figures, which got a shout out from this CBC story on the best Canadian poetry from 2025.  Sigh.)  As I think I mentioned, I was able to get a signed copy of Public Works, which is the one I wanted the most, and I have a copy of In a Riptide, which I will bring along if I make it to any of her upcoming readings.  It sounds like Who is your mercy contact? was quite a good chapbook, but it is completely sold out and sadly no copies made their way into Robarts or the Toronto Library system.  There was another chapbook that caught my eye (The New Alphabets by Virginia Konchan) but it also was impossible to source.*  I have to say that I do think poets ought to consider more seriously putting rarities like this up for sale as digital e-books after the original run sells out, as these poems usually don't then make their way into later collections, unless the poets are quite famous (which is an oxymoron for sure...).

Anyway, from the CBC story, I picked out roughly half of the books and put in a request for them, including Barton's Compulsory Figures, Amber Dawn's Buzzkill Clamshell, Katherena Vermette's Procession and Karen Solie's Wellwater.  (I have read some of Solie's previous collections, though I hadn't thought about her for a while.)  It turns out that Konchan also has a new collection, Requiem, so I put in a request for that as well.  So I'll be reading a fair bit of poetry in 2026.

I sort of think of my reading for 2026 in tranches, with the first tranche ending in March.  I expect one of the last things to be Nabokov's Ada, which I will start on the train to Ottawa, and then Shteyngart's Vera.

The first things I expect to read in 2026 will be rereading Narayan's The Financial Expert and then reading The Painter of Signs.

Other books that will likely be read between those two markers are Mahfouz's The Beggar, Russell Smith's Self Care, Gide's The Immoralist, Ehateśāma's The Tale of the Missing Man (something from my TPL lists), Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Jelloun's The Last Friend, Offil's Weather, Thien's The Book of Records, Skorvecky's An Inexplicable Story, Amis's The Information and maybe Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y.

In the 2nd tranche, I will probably finally return to William Maxwell and read some of his later short stories, as well as So Long, See You Tomorrow.  And probably Faulkner's The Wild Palms, Reva's Endling, Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Azuela's The Underdogs, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (also on TPL hold shelf), Forster's Howard's End (finally, months after seeing The Inheritance) and McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And perhaps Hunter by Shuang Xuetao and maybe Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and something by Edna O'Brien (though I haven't decided what that might be).

I'm sure there will be plenty of deviations from this (and I need to squeeze Mavis's Montreal Stories in somewhere), but it seems like a reasonable place to start, and it should be a decent balancing of reading stone-cold classics and books that are piled up that just need to be read and released back into the wild.  If I get through these and I'm still in the first half of 2026, I'll pull something else from this list.  If I end up making longer trips, I really ought to consider Fontane's After the Storm.  I think 2026 will be the year when I read Melville's Pierre (which is now the only major work of his I've never read), but I haven't decided on the order.  I am leaning towards the Kraken edition (with the Maurice Sendak illustrations!) and then at some point after that reading the originally published version.

I will say in general, I have been cutting way back on the buying of new books and even used ones, so I don't have lots of books coming in and gathering dust (as in this spot-on Tom Gauld cartoon).  Ah, dopamine!

 

I did make an exception a while back to get Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (which I have at least browsed through) and John Guare's Plays from Library of America (which I haven't cracked, but this seemed like something so niche it would never turn up for less used, particularly given the outrageous shipping to Canada).  However, I still pick up DVDs and Blu-ray sets that I may not watch for years, so this is something I should try to work on more, and not buy these items until I have gotten through more of my video backlog...

 

* Interestingly, I did another search and Konchan's The New Alphabets has ended up at the Fisher Rare Book Library, so I will set some time aside one of these days to read it.  I wonder if her connection to rob mclennan (who also has a new book out that I want to read) lead to this donation.  I managed to contact mclennan a few years back and picked up Konchan's Empire of Dirt and several of his chapbooks, a few of which I ultimately donated to Fisher.  I guess I might as well email Ronna Bloom and encourage her to donate a copy of Who is your mercy contact? to Fisher. 

Best Books (Read) of 2025

Things were a little thin on the ground in 2025, though they improved in the fall.

Top 5 books:
Zevin Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Peter De Vries Slouching Towards Kalamazoo
Russo Empire Falls
Austen Persuasion
Kaysen Asa, as I Knew Him

Honorable Mention:
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa The Leopard
Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Denis Johnson Angels
Sean Michaels Do You Remember Being Born?
Zhu Wen I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China (sort of relentlessly one-note, however...)
Dorothy Edwards Winter Sonata
Rosario Castellanos The Book of Lamentations
Downing A Narrow Time
The Epic of Gilgamesh (English version by Mitchell)
Dawn Powell Angels on Toast (mostly about the sordid affairs of businessmen)

I reread quite a few good to great books in 2025, and I am expecting the same in 2026 where I am probably going to reread Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Narayan's The Financial Expert and Murdoch's Under the Net, all of which are right up my alley (and which I read in my late 40s or early 50s, so my reading tastes won't have shifted as much).  And perhaps I shall get around to Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway's Party and maybe the rest of Joyce's Dubliners (I recently reread 'The Dead').

It's really quite hard to choose between Calvino's Invisible Cities, Carr's A Month in the Country and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.  Calvino is the most interesting thought experiment, but it isn't successful as a cohesive narrative for obvious reasons.  Mrs. Dalloway is probably the more important of these books, but I might have enjoyed A Month in the Country just slightly more.

Best book reread:
Carr's A Month in the Country