Moderately Productive Weekend

Sat. I actually got to the gym by 11 or so.  I put in a pretty thorough workout, with even 15 minutes of cardio worked in.  (I restarted All That Monk Business and quickly remembered that I thought Buddy Monk, one of the central characters is an out-and-out jerk, making it somewhat painful to keep reading, but I don't have that much longer to go...)  I then brought the groceries home, getting everything except for tuna, which I forgot.

It was supposed to storm pretty hard, but wrap up by 7 or so, so I decided to risk biking to work, dropping my yogurt and frozen fruit off for the following week, as well as leaving the bike in a nearby underground garage.  Then I hopped on the streetcar to hit 401 Richmond.  Gagne was pretty much the same as the last time, but there was a new exhibit at Red Head Gallery with six artists and their take on modern abstraction.  I then caught the Spadina streetcar up to Bloor.  I decided to stop in at BMV first and actually managed to sell off a couple of books and two of the CDs I had picked up (for very cheap!) in Chicago, so that was a bonus.  It was about 3:15 by the time I got to Bathhurst station, and I was torn between just heading over to Hot Docs and seeing if I could just make it to Bau-Xi and back in time.  (Summertime was playing there at 4.)  

In the end, I went over to Bau-Xi, and made a super quick run through the gallery.  I thought the upstairs exhibition was more interesting with a few photos from Michael Woolf's Transparent City series, so I guess it was worth risking it.  

The transit gods were basically in my favour, with the exception of just missing an express bus on the way back.  I had almost 15 minutes left when I was back on Bloor and Bathhurst, so I stopped into Dollarama, though the lines seemed crazy long.  Then there was a pretty long line for tickets for Summertime, but there was a guy looking to sell an extra ticket, and I paid him $10 (in cash which I had from BMV - sweet).  I didn't love the film.  I did find it took some chances, making it clear that Hepburn's character not only has sex outside of marriage, but that her beau is already married, though separated and estranged from his wife.  So that was risky.  But the film hinges so much on coarse stereotypes of Americans and American morality that I found it painful to watch.  Granted the entire film was shot on location in Venice, and the scenery was often incredible, though also painful in reminding me that I will likely not make it back to Italy.

Anyway, I probably should have gone straight to dinner, but I decided to see if I could pick up some items from the hold shelf at Robarts.  Of course, I got there at 6:08, and the library closes at 6 on the weekend.  It was particularly annoying that two nearby cafes also were closed, despite one saying that it was open until 7!  So I hustled down to Queen and ate at Ginger.  I was extremely upset to find that I had misplaced my debit card, probably losing it either at Dollarama or Hot Docs.  While I was waiting on the food, I logged into my bank and put a temporary hold on the card.  As upsetting as this was, probably losing a debit card is less disruptive than a credit card, where all the auto-pay settings would have to be updated.

I made it to The Hole over at TIFF with 10 minutes to spare.  I had forgotten a lot about this movie, including how crazy it is for this district, which seems under quarantine and practically emptied out, to have a fully stocked mini-grocery store run out of a storage unit of some sort.  (This actually reminded me a bit of some of the stores in Seattle's Pike Place or indeed this Asian mall in Burnaby, BC.)  Only a single customer ever came by, and yet the stock looked like it was constantly being refreshed.  Weird.  I also forgot how little action or dialogue occurs in the movie.  I'm not sorry I saw it again, but I doubt I would make it through a third viewing.

I dropped by work afterwards.  I didn't get a whole lot done, but I did get my time sheet submitted, which is one major stressor every week. 

As far as I can tell, it might have rained a small amount during the movie, but nothing like what they expected, so the people that risked it were able to have a pretty decent time at Taste of the Danforth or Dusk Dances, and the grass should have been fine for Dusk Dances on Sunday.

Sunday started off with my daughter telling me that she was ready for me to swap out the curtains in her room, so I did that.  Then I grabbed a few more things at the grocery store, I went swimming (and the pool was almost empty, so that was great), and I stopped by Robarts to pick up those DVDs and books.  I was hoping to hear back from Hot Docs.  I thought I could probably take the Danforth back until Chester or so, but in fact, the Taste of the Danforth stretched all the way from Broadview to Jones, so I had to divert.

I got home and saw I had a message from Hot Docs that indeed they had found my debit card, which was an enormous relief.  They were going to be open until 7:30, so I could pick it up on the way over to the Warm Reads thing.  I got a bit more reading in (only 70 pages left in The Odyssey!), then headed out just after 6, again having to divert around the Taste.

I didn't see as many people as I had hoped at the Warm Reads thing, though one of the actors from my Fringe play was there, as well as the director.  I didn't quite get my piece ready for submission, though I think I'll have it ready today.  I also wasn't picked for the Writer's Challenge.  So I definitely wondered if it was worth showing up, though it is good to keep up my connections, I suppose.  I didn't care much for the kick-off piece, but the others were interesting or quite good, and the last piece ("Come Together" by Dave Healey) was just hilarious.  So the evening ended on a high note, and then I had to bike home.

Dusk Dances 2016

Just a very quick note on this year's Dusk Dances in Withrow Park.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, maybe even more than last year. 

It starts off with a guy coming out of the audience and drinking some coffee and then starting to juggle.

 

The next dance was a Colombian-inspired dance with some really striking moves.

 

The third piece was a dance piece combined with ASL.  Interestingly, this was swapped out with a different piece also about deafness, though this was a piece based around an audiology test by an artist losing his hearing.  I didn't see this one.

The final piece is an Indian-inspired dance piece.

I actually went back a second time last night, though I left after the coffee/juggling piece, as my back is hurting a fair bit (and I didn't go swimming afterwards either, unfortunately).

Tonight is likely the last night to see and enjoy the piece.  It's looking like it will rain pretty heavily Friday and Saturday night, and then Sunday, the grass will likely still be pretty wet.  This is probably going to impact the Taste of Danforth as well.*

That's about it for now, though I thought I would celebrate that after many attempts, it looks like I have managed to grow milkweed in my front yard (to draw more monarch butterflies to the neighbourhood).  Let's see if it survives and comes back next year.  

Interestingly, some Queen Anne's Lace has taken root outside the fence, so I will see if I can replant it somewhere inside my yard where it will get at least some sun.

I've got to run now, but probably more later (assuming I'm not too tired from dropping by the Rex, which is the current plan). 

* I've never been a huge fan of Taste of the Danforth, as they don't seem to be able to run it without totally disrupting the 72 bus, which will probably mess me up this weekend.  I definitely wasn't happy that on Tuesday (many days before the start of the Taste) they had covered up almost all the bike racks on Danforth until the Taste was over (almost making me late for Dusk Dances).  They certainly don't do that for the car parking, as the drivers would lose their minds.  Again, the fucking double standards and the extreme deference to drivers in this city, even in Old Toronto, makes me want to scream!  And more seriously to think more and more seriously about moving to one of the bike havens in Europe, maybe Copenhagen.  It won't actually be good enough for cyclists here in my lifetime...

More on Recent Reading

Microserfs was an odd book.  It definitely had some flashes of Coupland's later preoccupations with slogans and gnomic writings, but was filled with working characters (all mostly interchangeable coders, but at least he writes a lot about work, unlike so many contemporary writers) and then a somewhat unearned swerve into melodrama to make the reader feel something at the end.  I'm not sorry I read it, but it certainly isn't in my top half of his novels (I believe I've actually read 7 or perhaps 8 of his books, including a non-fiction book about Vancouver, City of Glass).

I was also taken a bit aback by the plot swerves in The Vendor of Sweets.  Towards the very end of the book, the main character goes back into the memory hole and spends a lot of time thinking about his wife in the early days of his marriage (a little like a rehash of The English Teacher (probably his best novel)); then he sort of leaves Mali, his (barely) adult son, to his own devices to make his own path through life with only a few thoughts towards Grace, the Korean-American girl who followed Mali to India.  I wouldn't say it was a particularly satisfactory ending.  It did have the advantage of bringing the book to a rapid close.  Likewise with Microserfs, this is somewhere in the bottom half of Narayan's novels, though so much better than The Man-eater of Malgudi and somewhat better than Swami and Friends.

I've gotten to the halfway point of All That Monk Business, and there is a major plot twist.  It's intriguing enough to keep going.  However, I have diverted almost all my attention to The Odyssey right now, having just reached Book 5 where Odysseus finally enters the story!

So in terms of what I am actually reading at the moment, it is The Odyssey, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (borrowed from the library and it pairs well with The Odyssey) and wrapping up All That Monk Business.  I'm pretty sure that immediately after this, it will be The Library Cosmic by Ben Berman Ghan (also out from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra, Mahfouz's Adrift on the Nile and Thien's The Book of Records.  I'm debating rereading Station Eleven for Book Club, but am not sure if I'll be able to find the time.

Given my interest in the Secret Life of Books podcast, and my general push to get to 20/20 from the top 100 books of all time, and my general interest in thinking about the books I need to read or reread before I kick the bucket, I've sort of drawn up this rudimentary list of what I really must read or read again in my remaining years:

Jane Austen Emma
James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and as many essays as I can manage
Dickens David Copperfield (and maybe Great Expectations and/or Our Mutual Friend and rereading Bleak House)
Joan Didion The White Album
Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Dostoevsky rereading The Brothers Karamazov
Forster Howards End
Fuentes Terra Nostra (and probably rereading Christopher Unborn)
G.G. Marquez rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude & Love in the Time of Cholera
Grossman Stalingrad and Life and Fate
Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure
Russell Hoban rereading Turtle Diary
Henry James Portrait of a Lady
Lessing rereading The Golden Notebook
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks
Morrison rereading Song of Solomon and maybe Beloved
Nabokov Pale Fire
Rabelais rereading Gargantua and Pantagruel
Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
Tolstoy War and Peace
E. White A Boy's Own Story & The Beautiful Room is Empty & The Farewell Symphony
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (and watching Importance of Being Earnest again)
V. Woolf rereading To the Lighthouse and The Waves

Then a few series that are of interest, most notably Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, Lessing's Children of Violence series, Faulkner's The Hamlet/The Town/The Mansion, Trollope's The Chronicles of Barsetshire, probably Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy and perhaps rereading Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

There are obviously still a few gaps here and there, particularly in terms of French and German literature, which I've never really focused on, but if I do manage to get through this list, I'll have read almost all the truly central books in the British and American canons, along with my many forays into Russian, Indian, South American and South African literature along the way.  It would have been a good (reading) life at any rate.

 

Books at mid-year (2026)

As anticipated, I am certainly reading less now that I am almost never on transit.  The spring was mostly taken up with Nabokov (Ada and then Transparent Things).  On a trip out to Halifax, I started Dickens's American Notes (and made sure to read the parts where he lands in Halifax (and might well have been in a ship wreck, which would have really shaken up British literature) and later on travelled up to Toronto and Montreal!) though it took me a while to finish it up.  I also decided to abandon Hulme's The Bone People. 

I then read Steinbeck's Cannery Row (and am reserving Sweet Thursday for the fall).  For Book Club, I read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in a single day!).  I made it through Thammavongsa's story collection How to Pronounce Knife fairly quickly.  I was going to read her short novel Pick a Colour, but we are reading that for Book Club in the fall, so I might as well read it later, so it will be fresh.  I was struggling with Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, finding it so slow and repetitive and also quite intentionally obscure.  I finally abandoned it.  Given that I abandoned another Dorfman book (about an obnoxious bike messenger!), and I have zero interest in ever watching or reading Death and the Maiden, it's safe to say he just isn't for me.  I am more interested than ever in rereading Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, really hoping that it still holds up for me.

I read quite a few poetry collections in May and June, mostly by Jennifer LoveGrove and Laurie Graham (Rove and Settler Education and Calling It Back to Me), finding that I liked LoveGrove's first and second collections (The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Have Never Have Fired the Sentinel) a bit better than her later ones, though I did like The Tinder Sonnets a bit more than I expected, and I would have been ok picking up a copy at the Tranzac reading (if she had had a square on her).   I didn't care much for Joshua Weiner's The World's Room, though there was a poem at the end about air travel that I might chuck into the travel anthology.  Also, there was a pretty good poem (or section of a poem) about a shipwreck in Gbenga Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea.

 

I also read a lot of graphic novels (the entire Giant Days series), severely cutting into my normal reading time.  And of course, Fringe took up almost all the remaining time.

At any rate, I somehow ended up with a copy of The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai from the library.  I think I am somewhat intrigued by his War & War, but this was easier to request.  It turns out that I brought it along with me on the trip to Stratford.  I also was midway through Offill's Weather, and I also brought along Barry Kennedy's All That Monk Business, which is a quirky novel set in Vancouver's Downtown East Side.  It does have a cool cover.  I can't remember where I picked this up, though most likely either at a Little Free Library or a library book sale.

I alternated through all three books on the bus ride in and when we had some downtime between the plays.  I finished Weather first.  It is a very fast read, with short paragraphs outlining this woman and how she lets caring for her f'ed up brother overwhelm her life to the point where her husband takes off for a while with their child.  There is also a lot of discussion on how to keep moving forward when the future seems somewhat pointless, i.e. the climate crisis will wipe out civilization.  Definitely a novel that is in tune with the gesalt.  I'll probably get around to reading her Department of Speculation, which is an earlier novel in the same vein.

I made a big dent in The World Goes On, finishing it a few days after we got back.  I didn't like this much at all, and I probably would have dropped it, except I didn't have lots of other options on the bus(!), and I had so recently dropped the Dorfman.  I will borrow War & War later to see if it lives up to the hype, but will not give it nearly as much of a chance.

I'm sort of torn on All That Monk Business.  I don't care much for the main character, Buddy Monk, and I don't really find any of the characters plausible.  It's taken 100 pages (a third of the novel) to finally come to the point where Monk's father's will is revealed.  It's not clear if this is going to set off a frantic hunt a la It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or go in an entirely different direction.  I'm mostly plugging along because it does remind me of my time in Vancouver, not that I spent much time at all on Hastings when I could avoid it.  

I am very close to wrapping up Coupland's Microserfs ✔, and the current plan it to bring it along next weekend and give it to my brother, who is in the tech industry.  And I am probably going to finish Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets ✔ in a day or two.  I'm glad that this isn't another repeat of Swami and His Friends in the sense that the boy who decides to abandon his studies carves out another path, but I'm not liking this as much as some of his earlier novels.

The current plan for next weekend is to bring along Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us ✔ and Chandler Klang Smith's The Sky Is Yours ✔, both of which I should be able to leave behind, assuming I get through them on the trip.

 

After this, it will probably be Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (having borrowed this from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Amis's The Information.  Oh, and very likely rereading The Odyssey, almost certainly sticking with Lattimore.

In the late fall/winter, I am considering Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.

As ever, simply too much to read and not enough time... 

Edit (7/27): After going through Queen Books, I added an awful lot of poetry books to my TPL hold list, so I will probably end up with another long diversion through poetry (including Lattimore's Odyssey) before I get back to novels.  I also have become a bit obsessed with The Secret Life of Books podcast, though I think I will draw the line at donating/subscribing in order to join their book club.  They are working their way through Dickens's Bleak House at the moment, and I just don't have the mental energy to return to this opus at this moment.  Maybe if the book club sessions are archived, it is something I would consider next year...  One nice thing is that they largely stick to the classics (and those which I have already read!).  I think the only books I need to read before listening to their episodes are Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and Dickens's David Copperfield.  Interestingly, they haven't gotten to Ellison's Invisible Man yet, and it seems unlikely they will cover Joyce's Ulysses directly (though it was discussed in brief in the legacy of the Odyssey episode), as Sophie Gee is firmly on Team V. Woolf and doesn't seem to care for Joyce much at all.  I belated realized that they seem to be sticking very firmly to literature in English, with a few exceptions, notably Homer's Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh and a couple of episodes on Montaigne's Essays (perhaps due to the connection to Shakespeare), but nothing on any Russian author (and only a few passing references to Nabokov) or Kafka, all of whom inevitably show up in these sorts of canon exercises, so we'll see.  I have just gotten to their episode on literature and trains, and they talk about Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, but it is almost incredible that they have apparently skipped over Dombey and Sons, which is all about how the train ripped up and reconfigured the English landscape.

Edit (8/3): I'm back from Iowa (with a full day spent in Chicago along the way).  I managed to read two full books as I planned, basically wrapping up The Space Between Us as we touched down in Toronto.  I totally forgot that I had read Bombay Time by the same author, which has the seeds of The Space Between Us with fraught relationships between sons, mothers and daughter-in-laws as well as between the Indian middle class and their servants.  I didn't really care much for The Space Between Us, which felt like misery porn, and I thought the ending was a particular let down, sort of celebrating that the poor servant who has been cheated out of everything by many people in her life (and her mistress completely unjustly kicks her out of the house) is still there, just enduring, when in fact she is likely not going to be able to survive more than a few more days after this final betrayal.  It's a complete (middle class) cop-out.  At least A Fine Balance has the honestly to show that almost all the poor people in the novel are completely ground down and are dead or dying.  It sounds like The Museum of Failures and Honor all are variants of how bad things happen all the time in India and are inescapable and all are pretty much misery porn.  I think I am done with this author, even though her writing style is pretty good, all things considered.  But I just don't need to read fiction that upsets me that much when the world is bad enough as it is.

Rereading the Odyssey

I guess it is somewhat natural, but everyone is talking about The Odyssey nowadays.  I haven't booked a ticket yet to see Nolan's Odyssey yet, but I will fairly soon.  Interestingly, Market Square is showing it, but I want to try to see it at an IMAX theatre, at the very least, though I am not going to fly to Regina or wherever to see it in Super IMAX.  There are even podcasts dedicated to the Odyssey this summer (Secret Life of Books Eps. 154-158, in particular), as well as plenty of articles talking about what Nolan left out (the bed riddle and almost all of the sex with Circe and especially Calypso) or added, most notably the ending.  There are in fact some scraps of legends talking about what happened to Odysseus post-Ithaca, so it isn't as if this ending was completely tacked on, but it certainly isn't what is in the Odyssey itself.  His final voyage is discussed in passing in Dante and is actually the focus of Tennyson's Ulysses.  I suspect I will overall enjoy it, though I've heard parts are extra loud and then there are long stretches with people whispering.  I honestly wonder why no one can seem to convince him that his audience would actually grow more if he didn't tinker with the sound balance so much.  I will not go to see Tenet again for this very reason...

I'm debating rereading The Odyssey or at least large chunks of it before I go off to the movie, along with many, many others.  (There is even a piece on how bookstores can't keep up with demand for The Odyssey, The Iliad and other classics (paywalled unfortunately).)  I recall that back in 2019 I read the Fitzgerald and Lattimore translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey back to back, coming down firmly in favour of Lattimore, and fortunately I still have my copies of Lattimore's Homer.  I've only read a very few snatches of the Wilson and Mendelsohn translations.  I'll dig a bit deeper, but am almost certain I will come back to Lattimore as the best translation for what I am looking for in Homer.  (As a bit of a follow-up to this post, I did end up getting Musa's Portable Dante, and I really ought to read that fairly soon, alternating with Ciardi's translations.  I even have Longfellow's translation of Dante!  I don't think anyone finds that a particularly good translation, but it has all of Dore's illustrations, which makes it worth perusing as well.)

Interestingly, Mendelsohn has a memoir or fictionalized memoir (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic) about his father sitting in on his class about the Odyssey and their bonds growing stronger through exploring the text.  This sort of sounds like what Night Journey at this year's Toronto Fringe was going for, though that play was ultimately pretty disappointing.  

I had high hopes for this, but they were dashed.  It's hard to say just what went wrong, though pretty much every critic agreed that the social media influencer who comes in at the very end and tries to stir up trouble was a huge mis-step.  This wasn't even remotely believable.  I would say that it suffers the most from the playwright not actually writing about anything he knows about personally (academic politics) so filled in the gaps from what he pulled from diverse headlines over the years.  It wasn't really clear whether this was all taking place at a university or a college (which in Canada are basically community colleges).  

The professor clearly operates as if he is in a classics department in a university, and the rich heir would never be sent to a college (his character was not remotely believable, which was another major problem).  However, the bizarre under-resourcing, the other three students and the way that the board of regents tried to bend over backwards to pacify a loony social media agitator all reek of college.  Aside from the complete lack of insight into how the college politics would play out, the play just didn't dive into the poem itself enough and show how wrestling with the thorny issues in the poem changed the students' lives.  Most of the character growth (generally not believable) came through interactions that had nothing to do with Homer's source material itself.  And the staging was just ridiculous with so many short, unlinked scenes, making this drag on for too long.  So this really requires a complete rethinking and rewriting.  It was such a missed opportunity.

 

Edit (7/27): I spent a bit of time looking into the other translations, and I do not like Emily Wilson's at all.  Far too spare and not really poetic at all.  Am I at all influenced by how she so needlessly ran down Nolan (saying she would be "ashamed" to be associated with it), even after he praised her highly (and certainly increased sales of her translation)?  Perhaps.  I don't really need to justify my opinions.  I thought Mendelsohn's wasn't bad, but still always was a close second to Lattimore, and I don't really see what it adds, so I'll just stick with Lattimore for now.  (I don't have an edition with this cover unfortunately, but at least I have a physical copy at hand.)  I probably will try to flip through Mendelsohn's memoir at some point.

 

Slow Weekend

While two and three weekends ago were completely stuffed with Fringe activities, and last weekend was Stratford and next weekend is the funeral in Iowa, I actually don't have all that much on the calendar for this weekend.  I think it is likely going to rain, but it doesn't actually look like it will at the moment.  Maybe it will wait until tomorrow.

Friday evening I had some spare time, as there really wasn't anything going on that caught my eye at the Rex or Hirut.  As the weather was nice, I decided I should hit the AGO again to simplify Sat. afternoon if it was raining hard.  I passed through the David Blackwell again quickly, as that is closing soon.  Then saw the Enda Tacon exhibit and the Impressionist paintings on loan from Dallas.  (The Monet room was still busy but not as packed as before.)  I even had time to go into the Infinity Room again.

I managed to get this one work task done pretty quickly, using my "unauthorized" copy of SPSS, since work still can't get around to getting my license activated, so I am using a home version.  I still haven't finished my time sheet, but that is a tonight problem...  (I have a pretty major CRA thing to deal with as well, but that is also going to have to wait.)

I was up fairly early this morning cleaning up some computer files.  I have tried a couple of times to get Disney+ working on Roku again but am pretty close to giving up, esp. as Roku aggressively discourages people from contacting them.  What a completely shit company/service provider they are.

I went back to bed for a much needed nap (and much longer than I expected) when I was woken by the house foundations shaking due to Ontario Line construction nearby.  I really am going to have to find that number to force them to do an inspection and take some photos, so they will pay for the damages if the house really does crumble due to their digging and tunnelling.  Sigh.  One more thing I really don't want to have to deal with...

I'm about to go off to the gym.  I think after this I will briefly hit the galleries in Yorkville and 401 Richmond, then come back.  Depending on how I feel and if it has started raining, I might try to weed the front yard which badly needs it.

Sunday, I plan to go swimming at noon, and then meet a friend at Video Cab to see Our Town.  I decided to hold off on getting tickets to see Herbie Hancock at Massey Hall.  There are still quite a few left, the last time I checked, so I'll try to get rush tickets and see what those cost.  So not exactly a restful weekend, but certainly less crammed than usual...

Edit: I ended up dawdling for so long that I went downtown first.  I ate (too much) at an Indian buffet, then hit 401 Richmond and Yorkville.  I'll probably post a few pictures of things I stumbled across shortly.  Then I went to the gym and did groceries.  I'm pretty close to winding down for the day, but I think I'll try to do a bit of weeding in the front yard, so quite an inversion of the way I thought the day would go. 

Edit (7/27): Sunday did go more or less as planned.  I got to Jimmie Simpson just after noon.  The fast lanes were basically empty.  I got my swimming in, wrapping up at 1.  Then did a bit of shopping and window shopping on Queen St.  Saw Our Town with my friend and hung out at a coffee shop afterwards.  I actually managed to clean up the front yard a fair bit.  The main difference was that Massey Hall didn't have any reasonable rush tickets for Herbie Hancock, so I passed on seeing him and went to see Mike Murley at the Rex instead (for $20 instead of $100+).  This does decrease the likelihood that I go back to the Rex tonight, however.

Life Interlude

I was planning on either writing about our recent trip to Stratford (quite fun, even though the plays were certainly on the depressing side!) or the massive Fringe catch-up post.  However, as we were grabbing food at Union Station after the bus ride back in from Stratford, my wife said that my cousin had messaged her and said that the funeral arrangements were underway.  I was very sad, but not totally surprised.  Then I had a second to think about it and wondered why my cousin would be involved at all.  I took another look at the message and realized that it was my other cousin, Adam, and not my step-brother who had just passed away.  This was certainly a shock to me, even though he had not been taking care of himself.  And also was a fairly heavy drinker.  I tried to estimate his age and decided he was about 48, though when the obit came out, it turned out he was only 46!

Very very sad.  I certainly wasn't close at all to him, and slightly closer to my other cousin, but in small families, you try to go to weddings and funerals, so I started looking into it.  At first, I thought it would be cheaper to break the flight up and buy tickets on Porter to Chicago and then on United or Southwest from Chicago to Moline (in the Quad Cities), but I was reading things wrong and the price was completely jacked up.  (My friend in Chicago tells me that this is Lollapalooza, which I had no idea was even still running, so that's probably why the prices are so high!)  It ended up being cheaper to do it all on United.  What I finally worked out was flying from Toronto to Chicago to Moline next Friday.  The visitation and memorial service and everything will be Sat., and we'll spend time with what's left of the family.  My brother has work trips that he can't get out of, so he's going to try to rearrange things so he can make most of the service and then head back to the airport to go on to his next destination!

I'll leave pretty early on Sunday, fly into Chicago, but then the Chicago to Toronto leg will be in the evening, so I'll have pretty much the whole day in Chicago.  I will say that it is possible if Trump had started his latest ravings about Canada and that the wildfires are our fault and how ungrateful we are and that he is going to try to put more tariffs on our goods and bring us to our knees, I would have told them, sorry I just can't justify going down under these conditions.  (And indeed, if my step-brother passes away in the next month or two, it will be an even tough decision to go down.)  However, as long as I am going, I might as well do something in Chicago to make the trip worthwhile.  I plan on checking out the Art Institute for a few hours and then the MCA and meet a friend for dinner.  I had wondered about theatre, and while there is The Importance of Being Earnest playing, it is in Oak Park, which is a bit of a trek.  And for some odd reason, Tuta is doing Crime and Punishment, but not at all on that one weekend!  The most interesting was Stoppard's Leopoldstadt.  However, it was in Glencoe(!), so I would have to convince my friend to go.  And then I would have to stay over and leave Monday morning.  If it had been in downtown Chicago and it really only involved/inconvenienced me, I probably would have done it.  (My friend is a theatre buff but not quite to the same degree as me and she figured she needed her sleep more...)  If I hadn't managed to see it in New York (after it didn't turn up in Toronto), then I would probably have gone ahead and done it, but I don't have to see it again.  Anyway, I'll get more than enough museums in during my one day in Chicago.

Starting to work through the books I'll take on the trip, trying to prioritize books I can read and leave behind.  I actually should be finished with Coupland's Microserfs by then, and I'll try to pass that along to my brother.  So that's what's on the agenda for next weekend. 

Edit: I had definitely thought about shipping some things to my friend, which I did on my last visit.  It turns out that despite there being a pretty good sale at Radiance this week (to celebrate launching their US site) where the prices aren't too bad, shipping to Canada still sucks.  So I was about to ship a copy of Eiichi Kudo's Yokohama BJ Blues to my friend in Chicago, but it turns out that Robarts has it, and I just needed to search on Kudō instead of Kudo.  Then I took a look at Amazon.com and sure enough they had a pretty decent sale on Blu-rays, including Huston's The Dead.  In this case, shipping to Canada was not so different from shipping to Chicago, so I did that and won't have to impose on my friend at all, which is certainly for the best.  Also, the Rishi Dastidar book I tried to buy through Amazon (Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak) -- but was blocked by file format issues -- is on order at Robarts.  It may take a while for it to end up in the system, but it should get there eventually, which is terrific, as I don't imagine I would read this more than once, making a library copy ideal.

Edit (7/24): I had completely forgotten that I have the following Monday off, so I could have seen the play Sunday evening, stayed over and left at some completely reasonable time on Monday (instead of 6 am).  And while that is sorely tempting, the fact that I would need to convince my friend to go (is Glencoe is way off the beaten path) and also to then let me stay overnight just makes this a bit too stressful, even before trying to rearrange the flight at this point, so I will just let it go, and see if Mirvish ever does manage to bring Leopoldstadt to Toronto.