And Now for Something Completely Atwood

Just a week ago, I had to choose between the Hillary Hahn concert and the Penderecki Quartet concert where they played Schubert's String Quintet.  I ended up switching tickets and saw the Penderecki's, which I think was clearly the right decision.

Yesterday brought a similar dilemma.  I had a ticket to see Anakana Schofield talk about her book The Library of Brothel at the TPL Salon.  And her book indeed looks fairly interesting, and I almost certainly would have picked up a copy for her to sign.  However, I found out that McClelland & Stewart were having a writers' salon over at Paradise.  It was impossible to get tickets to it, and in fact most of the tickets went to book industry insiders or to hard-core followers of Atwood.  Within a few hours of her leaking the fact that she was going to be at the Paradise the tickets were all gone.  I never did get an answer to whether they were going to have rush tickets or not, and in fact I was supposed to be at our Book Club meeting (talking about LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness) until 6, which would have made it next to impossible to get to the Paradise early and see about the rush line (and then bike back to the Reference Library if they weren't doing one).  However, Book Club was pushed when most of the club members got sucked into this after-work event.  

So I biked over to the Paradise (after having gotten my bike back from the shop -- apparently I had a broken link on my bike chain that was causing all the shifting issues).  I got there at 6:15 and was at the very front of the line, but there was no one to talk to about the rush line.  I decided to stick it out just in case, even though I wouldn't find out anything until they opened the doors at 6:30, which meant I would probably be a bit late for the TPL Salon.  (Given that they don't get started exactly on time, and there is a long land acknowledgement, I figured I could still make it work.)

At 6:30, they told me there wasn't an official rush line, but literally the woman in front of me said that she had a spare ticket, so I scampered in.  And indeed, I tried to give that woman $20 for the ticket, but she wouldn't take it.*  It was pretty clear that Atwood wasn't going to sign anything.  I think she is just past the point of wanting to hear from so many people about how her books changed them (and holding up the line for hours), as well as other bad behaviour like bringing 5 or even 10 of her 65 books to be signed (2 or 3 is really the limit).  I did haul out my copy of Paper Boats with the UK cover just in case she saw it and was intrigued, but that didn't happen.  Still, it was a relatively small crowd, and if she was going to break her own rules and do a signing, this was probably the most likely event for it to happen.  I'll just have to settle for the fact that I managed to get two poetry collections signed a bit over 20 years ago when she still did signings.  (I wonder when she stopped doing book signings.  Was it 10 years ago, or it is a since-COVID thing?  She did had some interesting remarks during her conversation with Carol Off about her first terrible book signing in Edmonton.)

Anyway, the first half of the event was to feature 5 writers with newish books coming out from McClelland & Stewart.  I haven't heard of any of them, but decided after some browsing to pick up Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief.  Majumdar is the author of A Burning, which was a bit of a big deal a few years back.  (Here is a feature on her and her book from the Guardian from five years ago.)

In the first half of the evening, the five authors were interviewed for about 10 minutes each by Elamin Abdelmahmoud (who apparently is late delivering his own book to McClelland & Stewart).  

Here he is talking with Sharon Bala about Good Guys, which is a novel about the people behind the scenes of the philanthropy industry (including someone who is a bit a naive about the motivations of donors and someone who is a lot more jaded).

Then he turned to Majumdar and said that he found the ending infuriating (and that he wanted to throw her book against the wall when he finished) but in the best possible way.  While I don't know all the details, it is pretty clear that one of the two families spotlighted in the book experiences a terrible tragedy (though whether it is the wealthier one or the desperately poor one is yet to be revealed).  I suppose this at least is not as depressing as Mistry's A Fine Balance where everyone suffers at the end.  (And I still think that such tragedy porn doesn't really belong on a list of 100 Best Novels of all time...)  While the stakes may be nearly as high in Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us, the characters, constrained by class and particularly gender, don't seem to make the same sort of outsized decisions.  

As Majumdar explained, she wanted to explore how far would someone go to try to save their family in a situation where the pot is already boiling and things keep getting hotter.**  (I suspect this book may well be made into a movie, though from the hints that have been dropped, the ending might well need to be changed...)  I actually am very slowly making my way through The Space Between Us, and maybe I will move that up to my main reading list, and then after I have read it, tackle A Guardian and a Thief (trying to avoid any more spoilers in the meantime).  One of the more interesting elements of the discussion was when they talked about how the boundaries (around whom one loves/cares for and would try to save or at least assist) constantly shifted in the novel, and how it starts with immediate family but can expand or contract to include others.  I was struck that this is the same moral dilemma being faced by the executive in Kurosawa's High and Low.  (Maybe I should have asked her if that film was an inspiration when I was getting my book signed, but it was the end of a long evening, and I kind of just wanted to go and grab something to eat...)

After the break, where we were encouraged to buy even more books, Atwood came on and had a chat with Carol Off.  It was pretty much what one expects from Atwood, a mix of insight into how the spirit of the age made its way into her novels, particularly The Edible Woman, which was the main focus of the talk, and wry comments about how things have changed (or rather not changed enough).  One interesting tidbit is that she said her boss at Canadian Facts was actually a truly nice woman (who was therefore not in The Edible Woman) and that the "office virgins" later on told her that they were pleased to have been included.  I actually read (and reviewed!) The Edible Woman five years ago, so I probably will hold off from re-re-reading it for some time, but I am due to reread Surfacing soon.

It was a good evening, though I was pretty tired at the end.  I stopped by the burrito place near Spadina and grabbed something to go.  I didn't actually make it home and eat until about 10:30!

Tonight shouldn't be quite so entirely crazy.  I had wanted to see Eric St. Laurent at the Jazz Bistro, but I will swing by Alumnae instead to look at the space, particularly our storage area for props, etc.  Then go to the Jazz Bistro for the 8:30 show with Brian Dickinson and Neil Swainson.  So it will probably be another late night, and I'll have to figure out where to eat beforehand, since I don't really like the food at the Jazz Bistro at all.  I was thinking about backtracking to drop off stuff at Robarts, but I could actually do that on Sat. and combine that with seeing Tafelmusik at Koerner Hall.  Which means I have a bit of an opening on Sat. morning, and I should be able to make it over to the framers and then potentially swing by 401 Richmond and/or the AGO.  (Or maybe just nap...)

* There were definitely other no shows, so I think they probably could have and even should have said there would be a rush line, but it wasn't my call.  I am going to try the same technique to get into the poetry reading next week at the Tranzac Club, where tickets have been unavailable since the moment they put the event details up on the website.  (I think having 10 poets reading and likely most of them were given comp tickets made the numbers just not work for the general public...) 

** And in fact the novel is set in a near-future version of Kolkata where climate change is making the place pretty much unlivable, and the middle class family actually has a plan to escape the city, but they just need to wait seven days for their visas to arrive.  So one can pretty much see how this would play out in a movie.  Anyway, complete speculation on my part, but I suspect that the fact that Majumdar was raised in India, next to people with such vastly different life chances, makes her more aware of, if not more accepting of, the fact that there are such very clear winners and losers in life.  Despite all the mounting evidence against it, most middle class North Americans are basically optimists that feel everyone could be a winner (and this is why the ending, whatever the finally tragedy, is so upsetting to so many people).  As an aside, this need for happy endings has implications in the political realm, as "realists" do so poorly against optimists (no matter how ignorant).  Also, urban planners are almost forbidden to talk about anything other than win-win solutions.  They (the public at large, I guess) might as well believe in fairy tales...

Sonny Rollins has Passed

I would not say it is a surprise, but it is still a shame that Sonny Rollins has just died at the age of 95.  He had major lung issues, stemming from living near ground central of 9/11, and hadn't played live in probably at least a decade.  I'm trying to recollect how many times I actually saw him play live.  I think I saw him twice in NYC, including once near Lincoln Center.  And then probably twice in Chicago as part of the Jazz Festival.  One year they brought in Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins.  I saw both concerts (not appreciating when Ornette noodled on trumpet), but I don't think they actually played together.  That is probably just a false memory or wishful thinking.  I will say that I thought it was a real shame that Sonny Rollins put together a band that didn't challenge him at all, and he mostly just coasted on playing calypso-based music.  Entertaining for sure, but it all felt pretty stagnant.  

I vaguely remember liking his late albums nearly as much as his classic work from the 50s and 60s.  I'm not sure if I hung onto all of them, but I probably ripped most of his late albums, and hopefully I can turn up those files.  I think I'll start off trying to track down Global Warming (from 1998) and some of the Road Show live compilations.

Anyway, he was one of the last links to jazz's glory years.  Now Herbie Hancock is still around and still touring in his 80s, and I probably will go see him at Massey Hall this summer.  (I should try to just book my ticket soon.)  He also is in a bit of a rut (and plays his keytar long past the point of welcome), but he does bring along more adventurous artists, and this time around it looks like he is bringing Terrence Blanchard, so I should go.

It's not that surprising that artists don't always play what you hope to hear when they tour.  I actually have heard Wayne Shorter at least once and probably twice in Chicago, and was underwhelmed each time.

Totally, off topic (aside from a very untimely death), but Andy Kershaw, the UK DJ and music promoter, passed away a month ago.  He favoured all kinds of music but was really best known for bringing world music to UK audiences (and had a strong dislike of Fela Kuti for some reason).  The messiness of his personal life was a bit of a distraction, but he still was putting together some interesting shows, some of which are still available on BBC Music (if you are in the right region).  I listened and probably have recorded almost everything he did on Music Planet from 2011 on until they changed presenters, and then he had a bit of a comeback with a shorter series, as well as Songs from Andy's Kitchen (or something like that).  And he had a pretty amusing appearance on Desert Island Discs, which I probably have somewhere as well.  (I clearly need to organize my music files much, much better!)  Fortunately, I do know where my copies of Great Moments in Vinyl History Vol 1 and 2 are and have played them a couple of times recently.  

There is also a tribute show up for another couple of weeks on the Music Planet site and this program from Andy's Kitchen may or may not still be available.

Another Day That Did Not Go to Plan

It still was raining Sun. morning but much more lightly (kind of what I expected Sat. to turn into, though it mostly stormed yesterday), so I biked off to the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, which is this massive structure in the Beaches, built in Arc Deco style.  I'm not sure this particular building is featured in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, but other key infrastructure like the viaducts that Harris had the foresight to convince the city to build are in there.  I really ought to try to reread this book, maybe in the fall/winter.

It's harder than one might imagine to photograph water in the holding tanks... 

Then I went down the hill to the pumping station.

While I get a kick out of this, it really was the same as on my first tour, and I probably won't need to go back a third time.

Per usual, I was running a bit late but biked over to Jimmie Simpson to go swimming.  I got there at 12:30, and figured I could rescue the rest of the day.  However, apparently only an hour or so before, they had some huge HVAC malfunction and they decided it was not safe to let people swim.  So that was super disappointing.  I'll have to call in the late afternoon and see if the issue is fixed, or perhaps I will just swim at Matty Eckler.  I'm pretty sure they have evening lane swimming at Matty Eckler tonight.

On the way back, I saw an enormous tree that had fallen across the road and completely blocked off Logan.  No idea how long it will take them to clear this.

Then I started taking care of a few housekeeping items, like registering for a conference.  It's in the fall, but the early bird rates expire soon.  (I probably could have held off on this.)  I also got my time sheet in, which is always stressful, and got a small change in the script to the director.  Then I looked at the clock and it was already 3, and I was probably going to be late to get to Paradise to see Adaptation.  I think at some point it just got so difficult to get anyone to go and use the free ticket I had (I asked at least 10 people) that I lost interest and some part of me decided not to go.*  I actually think had I managed to get the swimming in, I would have made it to the movie, even though they are completely unrelated things.  

Anyway, I changed my plans around and went in to the office and did a bit more scanning of pages from the Hirut show and read quite a bit of poetry, as that is due back at Robarts pretty soon, and I can't renew those books.  I decided that I didn't warn to be late for Warm Reads, so I set out to grab dinner at 5:45.  I went to Dough Box around the corner.  I guess they were really backed up but didn't tell me that.  After waiting 15-20 minutes and getting more and more anxious, I could see that they still hadn't even started my order, so I asked for my money back.  They gave me cash (which means that they kept the tip, which was totally unearned!).  On the plus side, I got one of these new toonies with the CN Tower on it, which is pretty cool.

I still was running behind schedule, so instead of taking the streetcar, I went up to Line 2, took that to Ossington, then caught the bus south to College.  I did make it just in time.  I didn't read any parts, but I did chat with quite a few people, including the director.  It was a pretty good time, even though the day certainly would have been a bit better if I had managed to follow my original plans.  Gotta run now...

Edit (10 pm): Even this evening wasn't quite to plan.  I had planned on taking a late work call and then catching up slightly on some work tasks, then hitting No Frills (since I didn't have time on the way in to work) and drop off some books at Robarts Library.  But I also wanted to drop off my bike at the bike shop.  I had expected to do that the next morning, but they were open until 7 pm, which meant I could just make it if I went straight over there after the call, and then I would have to get over to Robarts on Tues. morning instead.  So I did that.  That also meant that I would have to go swimming at Matty Eckler rather than Jimmie Simpson because without the bike getting to Jimmie Simpson is a pain.  I guess that worked out because after getting in my laps, I dropped in at Walmart to get a pair of jeans.  The ones that I had sewn up had split all over again, and it just doesn't seem like they can be repaired after all.  So again, none of this was planned this morning...

* At least two people did want to go but had real conflicts, but just in general as more people turned me down, my interest in the movie did diminish.  I probably will have to wait for it to turn up at Carlton before I actually see it now (with my interest reset).

Doors Partly Open

It just rained so much yesterday.  I got completely soaked, and my shoes are still wet, so I have switched to a very old pair of shoes, which incidentally aren't fully waterproof.  Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised but Torontonians were still coming out in droves to see some of the newer Doors Open sites, to the point that the lines were two hours long!

I'm in a bit of a rush, so I'll sketch out the outlines and then perhaps fill in a bit later.

I did manage to get to the gym by 9:30.  It's still not 9, but getting closer!  I decided to skip cardio and managed to get back to the house (with groceries) by 11.  It was raining a bit harder but still seemed manageable (little did I know...), and I decided that I ought to bike it just to make sure I made it to the organ concert at St. Andrew's, which started at noon.  (I probably would have taken TTC if the concert had been at 1.)  I did make a quick stop at the Riverdale Library and dropped off an overdue item (Bunuel's Obscure Object of Desire) and picked up Nabokov's Transparent Things.

I did make it to St. Andrew's with about 15 minutes to spare.  They had had a book sale on Friday, which was supposed to wrap around into Sat., but clearly that was impossible with the lashing rain.  The concert was great.  I'll write a bit more about it later, but I definitely understood where "pulling out the stops," as the organist was just having to work extra time to pull out stops and change the sound of the organ.  There were some sounds I had never heard an organ make!  I also saw in the more elaborate pieces that he was pumping away with his feet as well.  Quite a performance.

I ran into work and got material scanned, including some notes I have made over the past few days at the Rex.  So that is always a relief to get things backed up.

Then I went to 8 Spadina.  I was going to check on two Doors Open events - the Netflix offices and the Toronto Star newsroom.  However, the lines were absurdly long, even with the rain.  So I just had lunch and then biked over to St. Lawrence Market.  They were having a Doors Open event in the gallery upstairs, though they didn't actually have the exhibit up, which seems poor planning.  Instead, they were offering guided doors of the vault upstairs.  Unfortunately, all those slots had been filled.  I talked for a while with my friend Andrea, and in the end they were able to squeeze me in.  

I like this painting over on the right, though I didn't get any information on it.  The painting over on the left, partly obscured, is actually a William Kurelik painting featuring Mayor David Crombie as sort of a civic hero.

I then biked home, though I had to pull over a couple of times when the wind and rain got too terrible.  If I had gone straight home, I perhaps could have made it to the framers, but it really was just too wet out; I was worried about damaging the painting, even though it was wrapped in bubble wrap. 

I made it Jones Library and picked up Cannery Row.  I did manage to get even wetter going through a huge pool of water under the Jones bridge.  So I had to change all my clothes and dry out.

I wasn't sure I was going back out, but I did and saw Gary Versace and Mike Murley at Hirut.  It was a good show.  Of interest, Neil Swainson ended up dropping in.  I thought he might sit at the table at the back but he didn't.  He'll be back in mid June with Harold Danko and Pat LeBarbara for four nights!  I'll go at least once and hopefully twice.  And then right after that, they go into the studio to record an album that will (some day) come out on Steeplechase.  So that's quite cool.  At the break, Allison Au showed up and did join me at the back table and we chatted a bit about upcoming gigs.

Of course, TTC managed to let me down yet again with a subway shutdown for a medical emergency on top of a scheduled shutdown for track work, so I had to take a replacement shuttle bus and then walked down Pape and finally made it home right around 11.

Poetry in 2026

I've written on and off about poetry over the years.  This post talks a little about the core poets (and seeing Gwendolyn Brooks at a poetry reading!).  It's always hard to crack that inner circle of poets, and mostly I have been adding poets in the next ring.  I'd say in recent years, I have added Tory Dent and Barbara Hamby (who is a poet who generally writes humorous poems, which is fairly rare these days).  And I really like Ronna Bloom's Public Works, though her more recent collections don't do quite as much for me.  While I wouldn't say there is anything profound in this post or this post, they do have some comments that will nudge me to keep working on the transportation poetry anthology.  In the back of my mind, after I go through this very long list of books, as well as my (also very long) backlist from Brick Boos, I should just wrap this up and see if I can find a publisher at all interested in taking this on.  (It probably would have to be an academic publisher, but who really knows...)  I have read most but not quite all of the books below.

Anyway, thinking back maybe the latest push to read more poetry was sparked by picking up a few poetry books at BMV, including Queen Rat by Lynn Crosbie and 3 Books by Galway Kinnell (Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; and The Past).  Though also last fall, I dropped in on a couple of poets at Word on the Street (Jake Byrne and Matthew Walsh) and enjoyed them a bit more than I expected.

Galway Kinnell Book of Nightmares
Galway Kinnell Selected Poems
Galway Kinnell 3 Books
Galway Kinnell Strong is Your Hold
Jan Conn Peony Vertigo
Susan Musgrave Selected Strawberries and Other Poems
Susan Musgrave Things That Keep and Do Not Change
Susan Musgrave Origami Dove
Susan Musgrave Forcing the Narcissus
Kevin Killian Action Kylie
Kevin Killian Tweaky Village
X John Barton Compulsory Figures
X Amber Dawn Buzzkill Clamshell
X Amber Dawn Where the Words End and My Body Begins
X Katherena Vermette Procession
X Karen Solie's Wellwater (this set off a long path through Solie's work where I liked her first books, especially Pigeon better than her recent work)
X Karen Solie Pigeon
X Karen Solie The Caiplie Caves (didn't enjoy this much at all)
X Karen Solie The Living Option: Selected Poems
Ariel Gordon Hump
Ariel Gordon Stowaways
X Virginia Konchan Requiem
X Jack Spicer Collected Poems (generally his poetry does not do anything for me, much like Robert Duncan)
Jana Prikryl No Matter
Jana Prikryl The After Party
Kaveh Akbar Pilgrim Bell
X Michael Ondaatje A Year of Last Things
X (Daniel) Jones The Brave Never Write Poetry
Samiya Bashir Field Theories
X Robert Colman Democratically Applied Machine (got this signed at a reading with Ronna Bloom and Christina Shah)
Robert Colman Little Empires
X Robert Colman Ghost Work
X Ronna Bloom In a Riptide
X Christina Shah If, Prey: Then, Huntress
Kay Gabriel Kissing Other People or The House of Fame
Kathleen Wall Visible Cities
Chris Hutchinson Lost Signal
Chris Hutchinson In the Vicinity of Riches
X Natalie Lim Elegy for Opportunity
X Sarah Giragosian The Death Spiral
Robert Gibb The Empty Loom
Robert Gibb The Origins of Evening
Robert Gibb Among Ruins
Robert Gibb World Over Water
? Robert Gibb The Burning World
? Don Coles Where We Might Have Been
Don Coles Kurgan
X Don Coles Anniversaries
Don Coles Sometimes All Over
X Don Coles A Serious Call
X The Essential Don Coles
? Don Coles How We All Swiftly (The First Six Books)
Yoyo Comay States of Emergency
Charlie Petch Infinite Audition
X Joe Fiorito City Poems
X Philip Quinn The Subway (amazingly, I don't think I can extract a poem here that works for the anthology...)
Freda Downie Collected Poems
X Derek McCormack Castle Faggot (completely obscene, very much in the spirit of Kathy Acker.  It was more than a little amusing when reading this on the train that someone said how nice it was to see someone actually reading instead of on their phones, but I simply couldn't share the title with them...)
I picked up George Szirtes's Metro (at a bookstore on Roncy and then read a lot of his work, growing quite weary of his long, rhymed poems -- I could see either excerpting a chunk of Metro or some of his other poems about trains and subways for the anthology)
X George Szirtes New and Collected Poems
X George Szirtes The Burning of the Books
X George Szirtes Reel
X George Szirtes Bad Machine
X George Szirtes Mapping the Delta
X Krisztina Toth My Secret Life: Selected Poems
Joshua Weiner The World's Room (picked up a signed copy of this at the same Roncy bookstore on a follow-up trip)
Nathaniel Tarn Lyrics for the Bride of God
MLA Chernoff Squelch Procedures
Kayleb Candrilli Water I Won't Touch
Tanis Franco Quarry

Then Robarts had a whole display on new poetry books to celebrate Poetry Month, and I picked up a bunch.  

X Omar Ramadan This Sweet Rupture
X Colleen Collins Sorry About the Fire
Dawn MacDonald Northerny
Simon Armitage Kid
X Allie Duff I Dreamed I was an Afterthought
X Samantha Jones Attic Rain (a poetic record of someone with severe OCD)
X Natalie Meisner It Begins in Salt

I had tried to get a book by Yusef Komunyakaa through Robarts, but they reported it missing.  On my next visit, I couldn't recall how to spell the name and ended up getting a bunch of selected and collected poems with City in the title.  Fortunately, I was able to find the mis-shelved book in the end!

Yusef Komunyakaa Magic City
Yusef Komunyakaa Night Animals
Yusef Komunyakaa Neon Vernacular (with such a cool cover, presumably Romare Bearden, but one I don't know)

Yusef Komunyakaa Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems
Yusef Komunyakaa Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems (also a very cool cover)

X Yusef Komunyakaa The Cameleon Couch
Yusef Komunyakaa The Emperor of Water Clocks
Geoffrey O'Brien Floating City: Selected Poems (I very rarely bail on poetry, but this was doing nothing for me, so I abandoned it)
X Tamar Yoseloff  A Formula for Night
Tamar Yoseloff Sweetheart
Tamar Yoseloff  Fun House
Kirby Wright Before the City: Collected Poems & Prose Poems
X Claude Beausoleil Concrete City: Selected Poems 1972-82
Eugene Gloria Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
X Zhang Er So Translating Rivers and Cities
Enda Wyley Borrowed Space: New and Selected Poems
Enda Wyley The Painter on His Bike (should be able to extract at least one bicycle poem from this...)

My last bunch seem to come from articles in the Guardian, such as this one or this one.  (Now I will say they steered me wrong on Wendy Cope, and I also am not really sure about Rishi Dastidar, who seems to be a flash in the pan.  I'm skimming Saffron Jack and it doesn't do much for me.  I am supposed to have access to Neptune's Projects over at Robarts, but this just isn't working at the moment!  As it happens, I did order Dastidar's Ticker Tape, which just arrived.  If I do enjoy this, then I'll order Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak as a download.*)

Sasha Debevec-McKenney Joy is My Middle Name
Harriet Armstrong To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
Colwill Brown We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
X Wendy Cope The Orange and Other Poems
X Wendy Cope Serious Concerns
Wendy Cope Family Values
Suzannah Evans Under the Blue
Seán Hewitt Open, Heaven
Derek Owusu Borderline Fiction

Not that there is ever an end to reading poetry, but this somewhat manic burst will probably come to an end when I read the reissued Fleurs du Mal translation (George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay) from NYRB Poets, comparing it to the Howard translation (from my undergrad days!).

And finally tackling Rimbaud yet again.  (Rimbaud, or rather a modern incarnation of him, was heavily featured in the Howland Company's Take Rimbaud, wrapping up its run this weekend at Buddies in Bad Times, so he is back on my mind.)

 

* I skimmed Ticker-Tape and thought it was ok, so I ordered Cherry Blossom as a download, but it wanted me to completely update my Kindle before I could load it, which is an absolute no-go for me, as it was so hard to get everything loaded onto it in the first place, so I requested a refund due to product incompatibility.  Indeed, one positive outcome of this, was I relinked some of the other Kindle books I had ordered through Amazon, so they are back where they belong.  (I hadn't noticed some of them were missing, which just shows that my digital library is a bit of mess!)  I may see if there are some other options for purchasing the Dastidar book (or ideally borrowing it from a library!), but I suppose I will just have to do without or see if Internet Archive eventually gets it.  C'est dommage, but I tried.

Closing in on 2026 Mid-way Mark (Books)

I'm always running a bit behind where I would like to be (in my reading), and this generally intensifies in the warmer months when I am not riding the TTC and so reading a bit less.  On the other hand, when I have time on weekends (not all that often to be honest), I try to read outside.*  I read a bit outside this afternoon and finished up Azuela's The Underdogs, so I am moving on to the next "short novel," which is Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, which happens to be about writers so rarely living up to their self-professed goal of writing masterpieces of fiction.  Incidentally, Connolly did not set the literary world on fire either, producing only one novel and fragments of others (and mostly wrote reviews and essays), despite his evident gifts.

Anyway, I do try to track the shorter novels separately from the longer ones.  A few other short novels that I plan to get through reasonably soon are Coupland's Microserfs, Alix Ohlin's We Want What We Want, Farrant's Altered Statements, Soseki's The Three-Cornered World, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Erdrich's The Bingo Palace, Gavron's An Acre of Broken Ground, Dickens's American Notes, Plymell's Benzedrine Highway and then slightly longer (but still on this list) Huxley's The Devils of Loudun and Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  And maybe I will reread Edna O'Brien's Night.  As it happens, I did put in a request for Nabokov's Transparent Things, so will tackle that fairly soon.  And it turns out the Jones Library has Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  I own a copy in a LOA volume, but it is just so much easier to read as a stand-alone book.  I need to return some graphic novels there anyway, so I may drop them off and grab the Steinbeck.  Now there is a sequel to Cannery Row called Sweet Thursday (with a pretty awesome cover).  It's a bit longer, so I might see about slotting that in this fall.

Even though I am not reading quite as much now, I managed to get through Ada and then Vera, or Faith, and The Left Hand of Darkness is shorter than I thought, so I should have no problem reading it by next week for Book Club.  That means I can start finally returning to the books I laid out in "tranches" in this post.  So in a bit of a jumble, these are some of the next (longer) books I think I'll be reading: Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets, Thammavongsa's Pick a Colour, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, maybe LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Woolf's The Waves, Offill's Weather, Thien's The Book of Records, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Amis's The Information, Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (on the TPL hold shelf), Forster's Howard's End, McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Kingsolver's Unsheltered and Animal Dreams, O'Neill's The Capitol of Dreams, Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome and In an Antique Land, El Akhad's What Strange Paradise, Waugh's Vile Bodies, Murdoch's Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody, and something else by Edna O'Brien (though I haven't decided what that might be).

I'm sure there will be plenty of deviations from this.  I don't have a lot of long trips scheduled, though I might end up heading over to Montreal more often than usual.  I am, however, making a very quick trip out to Halifax next week.  I probably should see if I can find one or two short books that I expect to leave behind, rather than a long opus (which I won't get as far into as I would like).  On the other hand, maybe I should take Hulme's The Bone People.  I only recently found out how divisive this book was when it won the Booker Prize.  Books prominently featuring child abuse are kind of a red flag for me, and I may well decide this is just not a book I actually want to finish, though I might as well give it a chance before deciding for good.**

Interestingly, this post also seems to be where I set off on a fairly long detour into poetry.  I meant to make a list of what poetry collections I have read and if there are any notes I wanted to make on them, but it is actually far too late, so I'll just have to circle back on that in a follow-up post.

 

* It's actually a bit of a challenge for me to recall which books I largely finished up outside on the back deck.  One of the first was Camus's The Plague (after I finally got over my qualms about reading it during the various COVID shut-downs) and Station Eleven.  Probably at least some of Augie March.  Based on what I was reading last summer, I must have read at least some of Dombey and Son outside and probably some of Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica.  I suppose it doesn't really matter, though I am glad that the weather is finally cooperating, and I can get out more...

** I'll give it another few chapters, but I can tell even from the opening that I am not going to enjoy this book, and it is going to end up abandoned in Halifax...

The Day That Did Not Go As Planned

Yesterday did not go as planned at all, and aside from the ending, I guess it generally went ok.

I'm getting better at predicting just long it will take me to bike across the city, but I am not much better at actually leaving on time.  I really wanted to leave at 11:30 to try to make it to Abbozzo Gallery (and Bau-Xi on the way back) and then Howl's Moving Castle at 12:55 (though there is about 10 minute wiggle room due to trailers and so forth).  However, I got a late start at the gym, and I didn't actually leave the house for the galleries until 11:40.  It didn't help that I was riding into a strong headwind, which probably cost me another 5 minutes.

I really find it challenging getting out to Abbozzo, which has moved to a space along the rail path north of the GO Bloor station.  I certainly don't normally bike west of Dufferin (though I biked west of High Park to see the Bloor West Village Players on Thurs., and it took just under an hour to bike home!).  The exhibit did catch my eye, and it was interesting (embroidered elements from cityscapes from foreign cities, mostly Asian but perhaps Islamic as well).  But I might not have gone out there if I had realized quite how long it would take to get there.

Adrienna Matzeg, Late-Night Snack, 2026

Adrienna Matzeg, 7-Eleven, 2026

Since I was already so far west, I stopped at Bau-Xi on the way back.  I have tried two other times to get out there, and both times they closed a bit early on me.  I wouldn't say I saw a lot that was different from what they always have on view, but I saw a few things of interest. 

Casey McGlynn, Navigating the Layers of the Earth, 2024

Casey McGlynn, 11 Horses in the Round, 2024

Michael Woolf, Transparent City 02, 2007

I certainly didn't dawdle, but even so, the clock was ticking, and I had a sense I would be late.  I got to Avenue Road/Queens Park, which ultimately turns into University and saw that it was already 1:01.  There was no way to make it to Carlton in time, so I ended up turning down on Queens Park and then saw the art in Hart House and dropped in at Robarts.  I was trying to track down a misplaced poetry collection by Yusef Komunyakaa and searched up City and Selected or Collected Poems.  I ended up generating a fairly long list of collections to investigate, and then I went up into the stacks.  I ended up finding the missing book (though perhaps ironically Komunyakaa's Magic City is not a selected or collected volume).  I'll write up a different post about this extension of Poetry Month.

Then I dropped off my bike at the garage near work, then took the train back to Yorkville.  I picked up my painting and chatted a bit with the folks there.  I wasn't in the market for anything else (having spent enough on art for a while!), but this Ferron piece was nice.

Marcelle Ferron, Soleil Noir

I then hopped back on the train with my piece to try to get it to the framer in time.  It wasn't to be, however.  The framer closes early on Fridays and Saturdays.  Had I known, I should have used the time to try to call up RCM, as they are going to let me exchange my ticket to Hilary Hahn after all.  I'll just have to do it on Tues.

I was starting to work out all kinds of different combinations to see if I could see Howl later in the day or on Sunday.  (It's a bit tricky because apparently the programmers there think sufficiently highly of the English voice cast that they are alternating the subbed and dubbed version, whereas for Spirited Away they only programmed the subtitled version.)  Then I realized that I could simply go on Monday.  And in fact, the current plan is to go to the gym (and wrap up by noon or so), then head over to Carlton to catch the 12:55 showing.  Then I may stop in briefly at the AGO, though I may skip that as the AGO is only open until 4!  I should get at least a bit of work done and try to do some reading as well.  That's not a bad plan, I suppose, and perhaps I can actually stick to it for once.

At any rate, after I dropped my new painting off (just in the basement for the moment), I had just about an hour to "relax" before heading back out to the Rex.  I was planning on sticking around for the late night set as well.  However, I hadn't booked any seats -- and they were pretty full.  I could have sat in the back, but I didn't really want to.  I also wasn't entirely sure how well I could write, as the group that was on first had a vocalist.  I decided to just bail.  I ate at Ginger instead and read a bit more of Vera, then picked up my bike and rode home.  I ended up reading the rest of Vera that evening.  So it was a bit of a disappointment to not see the show at the Rex, but not such a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.