Catching Up

Not sure it is really possible to catch up on everything over the past 3 or so weeks.  Work has been fairly intensive.  It got much worse, but lately things are on the upswing.  We're taking our main findings to the Board at the end of the month, so we are sweating a bit over that.

I haven't actually seen all that much theatre.  I did see Hand to God at Coal Mine.  It was definitely different.  I had actually planned to riff on a fairly silly thing that someone in the Coal Mine administration said, but I'm not sure I care that much anymore.

There are some amazing shows like McCraney's The Brothers Size (oops, I guess this recently closed) and Lett's August: Osage County at Soulpepper (for another 3 weeks or so), but in both cases I didn't want to take away from the performances I had seen at Steppenwolf in Chicago.  Still, I would recommend checking out August: Osage County if you've not seen it before (and no, the movie doesn't really count).

I did see The Memory of Water at East Side Players, but really disliked this play, leaving at the intermission, feeling that my time could be spent finishing up (finally!) Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I may discuss this disappointing play in a separate post (though it is somewhat like beating a dead horse).  I somehow missed a George Walker play at Red Sandcastle, and while I probably would have gone, I actually had seen this play from the Suburban Motel series previously, and it wasn't a premiere as the website mistakenly informed me.

At any rate, I did manage to finish Musil, as well as Ed Park's Personal Days (ok satire of corporate drones, but not as good as Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris), Saul Bellow's Ravelstein (started reasonably well, but was pretty shapeless and baggy by the end -- probably would have been better off as a novella), Albert Cossery's The House Of Certain Death, and in a new twist, a couple of novels (The Doomed City and Monday Starts on Saturday) by the Strugatsky Brothers which I had to read on my phone.  It's not my favorite way of reading, and I'll try to avoid this in the future.*  I read a couple of poetry books by Canadian poets, and I'll certainly try to get around to reviewing them this month.  Finally, I ripped through Madeleine St John's The Women in Black in a couple of days.  (It is nice to be reading some shorter and generally less serious works as summer finally gets underway.)

I did catch a couple of concerts at the Bach Festival (held on the Danforth!), even taking my son to one matinee.  Probably the most rocking event I attended was the CD release party for Agit Pop, the new CD from The Lowest of the Low.  That was quite a bit of fun.  I've now seen TLOTL 3 times (and 2 separate CD release parties!), which is quite a bit for a band from the 90s that has only relatively recently reformed and started touring again.

I did make it over to the Gardiner Museum to see the Ai Weiwei exhibit, which was ok but a bit underwhelming.  There was only a relatively small pile of porcelain sunflower seeds and none for sale in the gift shop.  This weekend I finally got serious about checking out some of the Scotiabank photography exhibits around town.  A few had already closed, but I saw 5 or so on Saturday (and one the previous Sunday at Todmorden Mills) and then two more on Sunday.  I'll try to get over to the Hart House Museum before the end of July in order to catch their Carrie Mae Weems exhibit.

Somewhere towards the beginning of all this, I took my son to TCAF at the Toronto Reference Library.  I was pretty good and didn't buy much at all, though I did take notes on things that I thought might be of interest down the road.  I got into a bit of a discussion with the rep from NYRB, who saw I had my Musil tome with me.  We talked briefly about Rezzori's Abel and Cain, as well as the fact that they are publishing a chunk of volume 2 of The Man Without Qualities as Agathe (the Forgotten Sister).  I personally found the Ulrich-Agathe storyline particularly dull, so I am surely not the intended audience. 

I that largely covers things.  I decided to largely bail on Luminato this year (tickets are just a bit too expensive, and I'm starting to get uptight about all my discretionary spending), though I'll probably check out a few Fringe shows.  I'll write about this in a separate post fairly soon.  And of course, like most of the city, I am waiting with bated breath to see if the Raptors pull it off on Monday.  I think that's about as much detail as I want to go into for now.


* In terms of actually deeply enjoying anything I've been reading (rather than just enduring it), Cossery wasn't too bad.  However, I haven't really connected with any fiction since Russel Hoban's Turtle Diary a while back.  Unfortunate.  Indeed, I just started Achebe's Arrow of God.  I had high hopes, but I can tell right off the bat that this isn't really my thing.  I'll try to finish it, however.