Library Follies

Oh, if I added up all the time I spent in libraries (and then the reading and the scanning of library materials borrowed), it would end up being a shockingly high proportion of my life.  Not to mention, I volunteered at libraries starting at 14, then worked at my local library for a couple of years before leaving for university, and worked at the University of Michigan Graduate Library in Ann Arbor for a couple of years as well.  So it adds up!

Anyway, I think I briefly mentioned that I went into Robarts looking for one poetry book (Amy Alvarez's Makeshift Altar) and came out with 10!  This would have been bad enough, but I didn't realize at the time, that they were only signed out to me for one week!  I guess this is because it is time to renew my alumni card, and you can only check out books until the expiry date (and I didn't get much notice though, to be fair, I don't check that email nearly as frequently as before).

On Tues., I went into UVic library on the way to work and also dropped off a Moebius collection that was due.  I managed to pick up two Anne Carson collections (The Beauty of the Husband and H of H (about Hercules)) and only then did I realize there was something up with the due dates.  (It also means I need to pause, yet again, Thien's The Book of Records and Baldwin's Another Country for a few more days as I plow through these poetry collections.)

As a very short aside, I was vaguely aware of Anne Carson, this year's Nobel Prize winner, and own (and have read!) Short Talks from Brick Books.  But that's about the extent of my knowledge of her.  Atwood recommends The Beauty of the Husband and Men in the Off Hours.  I'm just about to listen to the Secret Life of Books "emergency" podcast to see what they recommend.  Anyway, I think I am off to a reasonable start.  I put a hold on a few more of her books through Robarts (as this will likely pay off sooner than TPL), including Men in the Off Hours, Float and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which is actually a play and not poetry.  I think after this, I'll be reasonably conversant with her work.

However, I still had to renew my alumni card.  I was able to do this on-line, but then didn't have time to pay the renewal fee, which meant there was a block on my card.  This became an issue almost immediately.

After work on Wed., I got a message from my son that his Megabus back to Ottawa was delayed, so I swung by the bus terminal at Union and had a few moments with him before he left.  I would probably have grabbed something to eat at Union, but the bike parking has gotten so unreasonable and unsafe that I just went straight up to Hart House.  I was actually going to run in to the Museum(s) there, but I realized it was already 6:30, and I needed to get to the Music Library to grab a few things (including the ARC Ensembles Two Roads to Exile CD, which was ruined in the flood and, unusually, I hadn't ripped beforehand).  They were able to find what I was looking for with no issue,* but then really struggled when it came time to pay the fine.  Four of the librarians kept poking around in the system, and they finally decided that the system was broken on their end.  Fortunately, one of them was a senior librarian who was able to temporarily lift the block, and I was able to check out the CDs!  (I did pay the fine/fee earlier this morning...)  While it would have been ideal to combine the trip with the Hart House Museum, I'll be back on campus Sat. to see Richard III at Trinity.

As I was already at the Facility of Music, I then went down to Walter Hall to see a Steve Reich concert put on the by the percussionists.  They did Tehillim, which I don't think I heard before, and Drumming, which I've heard before (and in fact it was a Soundstream concert involving TorQ Percussion Ensemble back in 2023).  

Set up for Tehillim (minus the singers)

"Curtain call" for Tehillim

Setting up for Drumming

"Curtain call" for Drumming

Anyway, Drumming was absolutely mesmerizing, and it definitely partially makes up for missing the Reich concert last week when I was still in Winnipeg.  I was pretty hungry by this point, and managed to get to a Thai place just off Carlton and Parliament right before it closed and ordered some take-out.

 

Edit (10/17): Making decent progress on the poetry books, having read 7 of them (granted 2 were not to my taste, and I didn't press on).  I should be able to get them back in time.  Also, two more Anne Carson books turned up on the Hold Shelf, and I'll have two weeks for these!  I'll be able to grab them tomorrow.

* It turns out that I should have requested the other CDs and the booklet from the Mosaic set The Complete Solid State Recordings of Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, even though I only need a small handful of tracks from the 4th disc.  Oh well.  I'll get to it eventually.

Rainy Day

It looks like it will probably rain all day, which is always a bit depressing.  I had hoped to run out in the early morning and get an extra screw - and nut! - to fix my bike rack, as even the extra long screw shook loose without the nut on it, which is odd, as this doesn't happen on the other side.  Anyway, this will be the third time I've gone to Home Depot to deal with this, so it's getting rather annoying.  I also wanted to pick up my pants from the dry cleaners, but it looks like that will have to wait for Wed.

I'm finding that a lot of things are just creeping up on me, so I should sketch out what I plan to do this week and start pulling together the longer-term events, so I don't miss any of them.

Ideally, I am going to stop in a U Vic library on the way to work and drop off something that is due today and see if this Anne Carson book is actually on the shelves.  I did drop off another book at Robarts, and I am a little worried it got stuck in the book drop, so I'll be monitoring that this morning.  If my 4 pm meeting wraps up a bit early, I will see about stopping by The Rex to see the early 5 pm set for about an hour, and then head off to Press Vinyl Cafe* to get what is hopefully the last installment of LPs that I am replacing.  One of the slightly more expensive LPs is this Hal Willner set, Armarcord Nino Rota, celebrating Fellini.  

I suppose I am a bit more open to buying this, even though I have the music on MP3 because I liked Willner's Monk tribute, That's the Way I Feel Now, quite a bit.  I actually picked up That's the Way I Feel Now many years ago (and digitized it) but I have no idea what happened to it.  It wasn't in the stack of records that were "saved," nor was it in the pile that went off to the dump.  It's possible, though it seems unlikely, that I sold it off as I was downsizing for one of the cross-country moves.  Anyway, they had it for a decent price at Circus Books, so I picked it up, along with a Culture Club record.  It's a bit interesting that Circus Books and Kop's Records have very good prices on some 80s groups (Culture Club, Thompson Twins and Frankie Goes to Hollywood), whereas a few are very expensive, namely The Cure and Duran Duran.  And don't get me started on jazz.  There are only a few record stores that have any jazz records under $20, so I have to be extremely selective in what I pick up, though surprisingly I did get Andrew Hill's From California with Love (I think this was from Sonic Boom).  I am finding that for mainstream pop artists like Steven Winwood and Robert Palmer, you can pick those albums up super cheap.  In fact, I will get a couple more of those type of albums tomorrow, assuming that I make it to the store before it closes tomorrow.

Wed. the current plan is to hit the Music Library before 7 and then go see a free Steve Reich concert at Walter Hall.  That should be really cool.  I've invited a couple of people to see if they can make it, but it will probably just be me.  Now Wed. is also the day that the Art Museum is open late, so really I ought to try to get over there first.  It usually only takes about 30 minutes to check out those galleries.

I haven't entirely decided, as it is somewhat weather-dependent, but I am thinking on Sat. to drop by Corkin Gallery in the Distillery (there should be a new show up finally), and then bike over to Trinity and see a matinee performance of Richard III.  I'm glad that the college theatre collectives are starting to be more active again and put on shows in the colleges (rather than only Hart House Theatre, which has really fallen on hard times! or Factory Theatre).**  Then I might see an Ethiopian jazz show at Hirut in the evening.

Sunday, I will try to get to the TMU Image Centre (I had no idea it was open on Sundays, as I definitely could have hit it last week), maybe see Wallace and Gromit and the Were-Rabbit at Carlton, and then do Warm Reads in the evening.  (I just need to check out whether it starts at 7 or even earlier.)  I'm making decent progress on the 3 Witches play, and I should be quite a bit further along if I do make it to The Rex and Hirut this week. 

I need to grab another hour or two of sleep, so I think I'll list the longer term stuff for Oct.-early Dec. in a follow-up post.  Ciao.

 

* Interestingly, I ran out there for the first time a few weeks back to pick up Bill Perkins's Journey to the East, which was the first LP I replaced, but I didn't really do much digging beyond that.

** I may have been a bit optimistic on this front.  The various websites do not have any useful information, and most of the companies that are doing something are mostly renting over at Hart House (which shamefully no longer produces its own season!).  So if there are one-off productions, such as Richard III at Trinity, I will only find out about it by happenstance.  Sigh.

Back from Winnipeg

I was just out in Winnipeg for a conference.*  I was actually speaking twice, including on how to handle fact that university students in residence (1st and 2nd years mostly) will not be captured by the Canadian Census (as they are mostly back at their parents house by the time the Census rolls around) and are generally not present in household travel surveys either, which means that we don't have a very good understanding of travel that happens in the fall (the highest travel season) compared to the spring.  There was a decent crowd, certainly better than my second talk where there were perhaps 10 people in the room (and four of them were the other speakers and the moderator!).

I'd never been in Winnipeg itself, though we drove all the way around it on the ring road on my epic drive from Toronto to Calgary back in 1994.  I had come in a day early to look around a bit and found the downtown was pretty deserted.  It got a little busier during the week, but not by much.  Overall, it reminded me a lot of Edmonton, though with a more defined urban core.  I learned later at the Manitoba Museum that at one point Winnipeg was the third largest city in Canada, but its growth and prosperity did not survive the Great Depression and other economic slumps.

I managed to get over to the Winnipeg Art Gallery Sunday afternoon.

The collection is weighted very heavily towards First Nations artists and Inuit carvings, though they have a handful of Group of Seven paintings on view.  The most interesting thing there was a special exhibit on Abraham Ruben, who combines Inuit carving techniques with Viking/Norse mythology, apparently in reference to the fact that the Vikings did interact with the Inuit ages ago.

I had considered going back on Tues. during a break in my schedule, but it was closed Monday and Tuesday(!),** so I went to the Manitoba Museum instead.

Another highlight was that the Monday night reception was held at the Human Rights Museum, which is quite interesting inside.  It's sort of like a Cubist re-interpretation of the Guggenheim Museum.

I wandered along one of the rivers, and, as I said, I had a chance to run over to the Manitoba Museum.  (I was skipping the conference lunch, which was dire for vegetarians.)  Overall, it was a pretty decent trip, and I have a better sense of Winnipeg now.

On the trip, I finished Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, which was ok, but I had so many issues with the world-building, esp. how the mother thinks the Klara might "take over" from her ailing daughter (which is super creepy all the way around), but then only a few pages later we hear that AFs (Artificial Friends) go into this deep fade and are essentially useless as apparently solar power is no longer enough to keep them going, so that made no sense to me.  I'm leaning against seeing the upcoming movie now, though I may change my mind.  I also made it halfway through Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which would have made a great 20-30 page magazine article, but is pretty insufferable as a 300+ page book.  I'm skimming large chunks and should be able to wrap this up fairly soon.  I finished it up in fits and starts, but I have now reread Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.  Overall, it's pretty interesting, though I don't think he stuck the landing...

I probably need to switch over to Baldwin's Another Country, as my son returns home for Thanksgiving, and I wanted him to take it back to Ottawa (if he wants it now).  Then I will finally finish Thien's The Book of Records (I'm about 100 pages in).  Then I have a few books out from the library that will be next: Johnson's Train Dreams ✓, Bradbury's The October Country, a book of plays by Daniel MacIvor and Masashi Matsuie's The Summer House, which is another Book Club selection, though not one I am really looking forward to, as it is too long (400 pages); then I will close out November with Thammavongsa's Pick a Colour (which I am looking forward to).  As ever, there are a few books I hope to squeeze in, but this is already a lot of reading to tackle.

 

* Getting there was a huge struggle, much harder than it needed to be, but I'll write about that later perhaps... 

** I did somewhat regret not picking up the Ruben catalogue, as it really is not available elsewhere (even on eBay), but I convinced a colleague who was staying through Wed. that the Art Gallery was worth visiting (fortunately, he agreed with me!), and I had him grab a copy.

Updates on Flood Recovery (The Stuff)

So we finally had the overseer from the contractor that the insurance company wants us to use come over.  He agreed that the stairs also needed to be included, which probably means a small change to the claim, which I guess they are processing; I'll try to call Monday to see if that is working its way through the system.  I don't think I need to do anything.  They think they'll actually be ready to come here and start in about 3 weeks, and it will take 3-4 weeks to do the job.  So about 2.5 months from the flood, and we should have our basement back finally.  Fingers crossed.

I think I mentioned that fortunately, I had brought the musical instruments up.  I am very sorry that I tried to straighten up and took a milk crate of records downstairs, as they would have survived of course if I hadn't bothered.  A lot of them were my wife's actually.  For some reason or other, I had moved one of her Duran Duran LPs (Seven and the Ragged Tiger) and a Power Station 12" single to higher ground.  I don't think she's going to end up replacing too much of this, but I dropped into a record store in Stratford and saw they had the Power Station LP on vinyl, so I grabbed that.  I'll see if I see any of their other singles turn up at Kops or Sonic Boom or even BMV and maybe replace those.  She's extremely bummed out that this Nick Rhodes art book was tossed out.  I do feel terrible, though it was on the list, which she did review, and if she had paid more attention and told me she wanted it, I could have retrieved it.  Or when we were going through things the first time, she was so upset, she really didn't look through those boxes, and I ended up grabbing material (and scanning what was broadly salvageable...).  Of course, since it meant so much to her, I'm really sorry she didn't bring it upstairs after the move.  Well, there's always a lot of second guessing involved with these sorts of situations.

Almost all the CDs that were in the basement had been ripped (or I wouldn't have put them in the downstairs listening pile), though in a few cases it took a long time to track down where the files had gone!

I only just found Forth Inversion (Mike Murley and Bob Fenton).  It turns out there is another CD by the same group at the Toronto Reference Library, though unfortunately it doesn't circulate.  Also, the Reference Library is undergoing all kinds of renovations right now, and that collection isn't even available, so I'll see about going in and listening to it in early Nov.

Other rarer CDs where the ripped files have turned up are:

Kenny Burrell is Forever by Yoshiaki Okayasu (and also Ballade for the Night)

Rebirth of Three Blind Mice Records (2 CD set!) 

Toshiko Akiyoshi Just Be-Bop (with Charles McPherson!)

Chris McGregor and Brotherhood of Breath - the self-titled record and Country Cooking

Isao Suzuki Now's the Time (Live session on Three Blind Mice)

George Crotty Chronotope

Bongo Records The Original Sound of Mali

Ambrose Akinmusire Prelude (to Cora)

Med Flory Go West, Young Man! 

And a double album (or rather two LPs on one CD): Duke Ellington's All American in Jazz and Midnight in Paris).*

I think the main thing, particularly for the rare CDs, is to ensure they are copied over to at least 2 hard drives.

As far as the CDs I didn't rip, it looks like Myra Melford's For Love of Fire and Water and Hear the Light Singing are missing.  These are CDs I picked up when I heard her and Ingrid Laubrock playing at a small arts venue in Toronto.  Most of her recordings are on Bandcamp, so I guess that is the easiest way to replace them.

The new Tafelmusik CD of 2 Hadyn symphonies seems to have been skipped over, as well as the ARC Ensemble Two Roads to Exile** CD.

I was quite surprised that I didn't rip Sviatoslav Richter recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.  I decided to just go ahead and replace this, and it should arrive relatively soon.

Even though I still held onto the somewhat damaged vinyl version of Hutcherson's Linger Lane (and recorded off the LP a long time ago), I saw that there was a Japanese import of the album on CD.  There was only one left, and the price wasn't too bad, so I ordered that as well. 

I'm still debating some of the urban (and architecture) books that were on the bottom shelf on the bookcase.  Some of them are in Internet Archive, but a few I'll probably replace where the price isn't too high (and the shipping to Toronto isn't too dreadful!).  So far I have ordered Downtown Chicago in Transition, but I'll surely order a few more.

I'll never be fully reconciled to losing this much stuff, but I am glad I backed up much of it, and that it is possible to replace a lot of it without too much effort or dosh, with a handful of exceptions, of course.

 

* I did find this, though the search took way longer than it should have.  Now oddly enough, the first track off All American in Jazz, "Back to School," is missing as well as the very last track a solo guitar version of Guitar Amour.  (I presume there was some mastering problem that preventing me from ripping the first(!) and last tracks from the CD.)  After a deep dive down the Internet rabbit hole, which I really shouldn't have indulged in this morning, I found an on-line store (which didn't seem too scuzzy) that sold it as a download.  That's probably better than reordering the CD and finding the same problem all over again.  I am super annoyed that because this was the first track and it has some truly horrendous cover art, this seems to be overwriting the actual cover art for the rest of the album, and I can't seem to fix it (and I'm really out of time now this morning).  Sigh.

** If I truly didn't rip this (and it doesn't look like I did), it does appear to be in at the UT Music Library, so I'll investigate that option shortly.

Catching Up on Reading

I ended up taking the TTC over to Skye Wallace's gig on Wed. evening.  I used the time to read a few more chunks of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.  I think I had mentioned I was a bit annoyed at the Secret Life of Books folks for SPOILING the ending of the novel, but indeed, Baldwin has something in mind much closer to a Greek tragedy where the fate of one of the characters is pre-ordained, so we know within only a few pages that the guillotine(!!!) awaits one of them.  The countdown to the fatal blow is very much a recurring theme throughout the novel.

I was actually pretty fortunate with the TTC, and a 72 bus turned up right away and there were no disruptions on Line 2.  I had never been to Burdock Music Hall before.  It turns out it is a space pretty similar to Cameron House, where I saw Skye play once.  It is just past Dufferin on Bloor, so I decided I would grab a bahn mi sandwich at the place near Paradise I eat at when I am in a rush.  I made it just at 8:03, and the opening act (Flora Falls) had just started.  There was actually a free stool right by the wall, so I parked myself there all night.  

The wrist-stamp

 
While I enjoyed Flora Falls and liked their back story (she's from Australia but moved to Berlin, and he was from Vancouver and also moved to Berlin), I took the time to finish reading Patrick Grace's Deviant (on my phone).  As most of the poems in Deviant are about gay life in urban Canada, there were actually some clear parallels with the (sordid) gay demi-monde that Baldwin was describing in Giovanni's Room.  Interestingly, at the time, homosexuality was not illegal in France (while it very much was illegal in the UK, the US and Canada), though it was very much seen as deviant and shameful.

It was an interesting gig, particularly as Skye was featuring completely new material off of a forth-coming album and didn't do any of her hits.  She also didn't do an encore!  It does seem she has truly broken up her band.  She still plays a lot with her bass player, but the guitar player and keyboard player are out of the picture.  Life imitating art to some degree, not that I ever was able to share my short playlet on the same topic with her.  I hung out a bit after the gig and replaced Terribly Good, which suffered some damage in the flood, and is probably my favourite overall album.

I had about 15 pages left in Giovanni's Room, so I just powered through it when I got home.  Tonight, I'll probably have at least a bit of time before the TSO concert (and thankfully my TSO tickets did turn up in the mail!) and at intermission, so I'll start on Harvey's Orbital ✓ and probably skim MacIvor's How It Works ✓.  Then Friday I am taking the Stratford bus and will have a couple of hours more or less between plays, so I should definitely finish up Orbital (in time for Book Club!) and make a very good dent in Thien's The Book of Records.

While I am definitely behind where I would like to be in my reading, I can finish up the remaining library books: Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun ✓ and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams ✓.  At the top of my list after that are Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 ✓,* Baldwin's Another Country, McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores** and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net.

A pretty good list as we go powering into Autumn.

 

Edit (09/28): Of course, I can never leave a good list alone.  I was at BMV, looking for Power Station on vinyl and couldn't resist some cheap Ray Bradbury novels, which then led me to adding The October Country to my hold list at the library, with the intention of trying to read it in October, and gradually reading a few of the Bradbury I just picked up at BMV.

 

* I really dig the Jacobean play he dreamed up -- The Courier's Tragedy.  I kept reading it as The Courtier's Tragedy, though I guess no play by that title exists either...

** I'm fairly sure I will find this disappointing, which is one reason I have delayed reading it, however, I suspect I will still like it better than his "lost" (or rather saved from the scrap heap) novel Until August, which was (as expected) a let down.  I'll have to try to get back to some of his best work next year, maybe starting with some of the shorter pieces like Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Dreary Day

Yesterday was so incredibly frustrating.  We're generally getting bad news on winning the work I really want to do, and I am left overseeing a bunch of projects that don't appeal to me.  My firm never had the best qualifications for this sort of work in the first place (and personal quals don't count for much), and now a bunch of firms are coming in selling snake oil about how AI can harness Big Data and do the same work at a fraction of the price.  It's all a lie of course, but it just muddies things up a lot (and frankly firms that won't embrace the lie get left behind).  I thought there might have been 5 decent years left in this field, but it looks like less than that, maybe just 2 or 3.  I'm a bit too old to retrain for anything else. My back-up plans aren't really any better, so I am in a deep funk today, not at all helped by the weather.

I'll just post this cartoon (by Ben Jennings in The Manchester Guardian) as it certainly fits my mood right now (and it even hints on how in the midst of this shitstorm, we are still distracting ourselves to death -- with apologies to Neil Postman* for stealing from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death). 

There's another cartoon I will get to soon, but it requires a much longer discussion.

 

 

* I'm amused by the AI-generated summary that popped up, as I often forget to turn off AI in Google searches, which said many critics turned on Postman for offering "Pessimism Without Practical Solutions."  I am definitely in Postman's camp and think that the search for silver linings or win-win-win campaigns, barf, at all costs has prevented people from realizing that we are in the boiling water, and it is now too late...  In general, people don't like being around pessimists (and especially those Cassandras who are nearly always right), and a lot of times I don't like sitting with my own dark and dreary thoughts.  But maybe even more fundamentally they don't want to be told that their current standard of living is unsustainable and that they have to change their ways and consume less (and it absolutely isn't enough to just blame Big Oil and other corporations -- it actually means delinking environmentally destructive economic growth (i.e. essentially all of it) from modern life).  Almost no one is on board with that, particularly where it means getting less (and probably paying more for it!), so it is easier to just ignore and shun the messengers.

Shaw Weekend

The weather was much better on Sat. than on Sun. when I was to head out to the Shaw Festival.  Still, Sat. morning was pretty overcast and even a bit chilly for Aug., so I was leaning towards ditching the company picnic altogether.  I got a late start at the gym and then did an abbreviated workout.  I wasn't too proud of that, but at least I didn't ditch it all together after getting off track last weekend.  (And on Thurs. I did squeeze in 18 laps at the pool.)  I did get on the stationary bikes and managed to skim through the script for Wohl's American Hero, which is a pretty grim comedy about the impact of late capitalism on average workers at a sandwich shop akin to Subway.

But the weather did improve a lot on Sat., and I decided at more or less the last minute I would try to bike up to Sherway Gardens, which was where the company picnic was being held.  Getting up to the Don Valley wasn't that bad, but then it was really unpleasant after that as Laird is a very high speed road without a bike lane.  Just in general trying to bike in what used to be East York (or Scarborough) is so dangerous.  So I wasn't in the best of moods when I finally made it there.  I did eat a bit, and chatted a bit, then had to turn back around and head to downtown on Mt. Pleasant Rd., which was generally better aside from tangling with a bus at one point.

I made it back downtown and had about 25 minutes before The Odyssey.  Some minor SPOILERS if you have been under a rock and not read any reviews of Nolan's version of The Odyssey.

SPOILERS

I decided to go over to Robarts and drop off American Hero and pick up a couple of poetry books on the hold shelf.  I also changed into a different shirt, as the one I was wearing was quite sweaty by this point.  I made it back to Yonge and Dundas and up to the theatre (up on the 4th floor) with about 5 minutes to spare, though of course there were 10 minutes of previews.  I liked the fact that Nolan went into some of the slightly obscure details, including the fact that Odysseus warned the men not to slaughter the cattle of Helios the Sun God, but they did anyway after they had been stuck on the island for weeks (it is much more clear in Homer that Zeus was the one keeping them trapped, but Nolan really, really downplays the gods in his movie (I suppose because he thought making this like Clash of the Titans would be too kitschy, but I do think it was a misstep)).  I also liked the detail that one of the suitors managed to break into the storeroom where the arms were stored and get some over to the rest of the suitors before he was killed.  What I really didn't like was Odysseus taking on all of the suitors on his own, like a superhero almost, whereas in Homer, Telemachus is much more active and kills many of the suitors,* and they also have a lot of help from the swineherd (who is not a blinded bystander) and one more loyal servant, the ox-herder, I believe.**  Nolan wants this ending, as he can't imagine an ending where Odysseus manages to keep his throne without Athena stepping in and putting down the uprising of the suitors' families, as actually happens in The Odyssey.  So Nolan has imposed a far more "realistic" ending on but at the cost of rewriting the Odyssey completely (and not very convincingly as Telemachus still doesn't seem remotely ready to rule Ithaca).  And as I think I mentioned already, this side-steps the whole question of Penelope bringing up the bed riddle as a final test, which in the poem sets the stage for his true homecoming, where here he has no intention of spending any time in Ithaca.  So I didn't like that at all, as I thought it undercut the entire point of The Odyssey.  I also wasn't too thrilled about how he changed the Calypso story around a fair bit, again I think mostly to avoid having to have the gods turn up and force Calypso to give Odysseus up.  He absolutely wanted this to be a human-focused epic, which seems pretty bizarre given the source material.

Afterwards, I went over to this Asian (mostly Thai) festival at Yonge-Dundas Square.  There were very few safe vegetarian options, so I just got some ice cream.  I went over to BMV and looked around a bit, though didn't see anything I really wanted.  Then I biked down to work and did a few hours scanning stuff, then finally went home.

Sunday I had to wake up fairly early, then biked downtown.  It was overcast and sprinkling just a bit, but I was glad to have my bike available at the end of the day.  The bus ride to Niagara-on-the-Lake was smooth, and we got there a bit early.  Almost too early, as the place I often eat at wasn't going to start serving sandwiches for another 45 minutes.  I wandered around downtown a bit, reminding myself why I dislike Niagara-on-the-Lake so much (it is tacky, geared entirely towards tourists (and lower class tourists at that), and there are no safe ways to cross the street in the downtown).  I did find a decent Thai place and ate there, then went to the theatre early to keep reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.  

It's kind of hard to review Heartbreak House.  I will say I thought the director's vision was not a good one, very gimmicky and not at all respectful of the play.  I did enjoy seeing Tom Rooney as the enigmatic, eccentric captain, and his two daughters were entertaining as well, though their parts were shallow (and the pining brother-in-law was not welcome).  

 
But the play itself is just not very good (with much of it taken up with quips about why women shouldn't be just as ruthless in pursuing marriage as men were in ruining others (including their partners) in business -- and one of the final twists in the sphere of romance was truly stomach-curdling), and it was certainly undermined by the director and his decision to have two servants shouting out the stage directions, which reminded me unfavourably of Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice, which I absolutely hated when Canadian Stage put it on.  Shaw wants to be as witty as Oscar Wilde, but most of his witticisms don't land, and he is just obsessed with Shakespeare (and how in his own mind he is a much better playwright than Shakespeare).  We get it G.B., but you simply aren't better than Shakespeare.

I'm very torn because there are four(!) potential plays of interest at Shaw next season, but I don't have any intention of coming back that often (and yet I really don't want to stay overnight in Niagara-on-the-Lake).  They are doing Arsenic and Old Lace, which I've never seen as a stage production; I think I did pass a chance to see it in Hamilton, so I may well pass on it again, given the challenges in getting there.  Then Shaw's Arms and the Man, which I may have seen but it would have been 20+ years ago.  Then the Goblins are doing Pygmalion.  This will surely be fun, but it does seem just an excuse to make an appearance at Shaw.  I don't think Pygmalion is even one of Shaw's five best works...  Finally, Stoppard's Jumpers.  While I think I would prefer to see Travesties again (though I am not willing to go to Raleigh to see it!), I will almost certainly go see this, making the trek out there next year at least once.  If I knew for certain which of these would transfer to the Harbourfront, that would help with my planning, but I don't think they know yet.  My money would be on some musical (South Pacific?) and Deathtrap, but I might get lucky and they bring Arsenic and Old Lace to Toronto.  So most likely, I will go see Jumpers and call it a season, but if I can combine it with the Goblins, I might stay overnight, as much as I would prefer to avoid that.

The trip back wasn't too bad, though we got snarled in traffic (esp. on the Gardiner), and it took 2.5 hours, which is pretty typical, unfortunately.  I made it through all but the last 20 pages of my book, and those I finished up while eating dinner at Union Station (I was pretty famished).  I enjoyed it a fair bit, though it is hardly classic literature.  From the reviews of the sequel (this is part of a trilogy!), there is a huge cliff-hanger at the end, so I probably ought to hold off until the third book is published.  I have a fair bit of poetry to work through, and I think the next books I will read are Thien's The Book of Records, Harvey's Orbital and then Giovanni's Room (whenever it turns up at the library).

Overall, not a bad trip, though I certainly wish the play had been better.  I also managed to ruin yet another backpack, trying to carry too much stuff back home from the grocery store.  Sigh.  It looks like there is going to be a lot of rain this week, and I've decided to pass on Squeeze after all, and I will probably have to move the BBQ (ideally to Friday but if there are too many objections, then I will see about the following week).

 

* The death of the disloyal maids is strongly hinted at, but we don't see any of them die on-screen, and we certainly don't have Telemachus string them all up.  Again, Nolan wants Telemachus's hands to be (unrealistically) free of blood in order to set up his future rule, and again, I think this does serious violence to meaning of The Odyssey to the point the movie is visually compelling epic but, in the end, it really is just not The Odyssey.

** I certainly can't prove it, but the four of them together slaughtering all the suitors (with Odysseus and Telemachus as the main killing machines) in Homer's version reminded me a great deal of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his tales of the nearly unstoppable killing machine John Carter of Mars.  I really would not at all be surprised if he was borrowing from Homer in those novels.