The month went a lot quicker than I was expecting. In some cases that was because I was struggling to catch up on work, after days that were filled with too many pointless meetings and/or I couldn't complete tasks because I was waiting on other people to confirm some key input. Other weeks, I simply crammed too much in, and then after trying to keep up with my modified workout regimen, I was too tired to write down my thoughts. I think I'll still get around to writing up the trip to Detroit and a side trip to the McMichael on the Art Bus separately. I'll see if I can cram everything else into this one post, but it may get too unwieldy.
Work just feels like the death by a thousand cuts. Every week there is some new outrage, and in fact they are starting to gear up to introduce a quite dire open-space concept on us. I have to say I am not willing to live through this again and am accelerating my exit plans. I can't say more than that for obvious reasons. I did find an acceptable but not great workaround for my bike woes. One of the consultants we work with has a bike parking area in their garage and, crucially, you don't need a building pass to access the area, but it is definitely well outside the public view, which was the problem with the bike racks in front of Union Station. Indeed, one of my co-workers had his bike stolen the week after they started cracking down on us to prevent us from bringing bikes into the office! It's not ideal, as it is about a 10 minute walk to my office, and that will be even worse as it gets colder, but it will do for now.
Working backwards, I was planning on checking out Spirited Away up in Richmond Hill this Monday, but the times would not line up, esp. needing to budget in so much travel time, and I decided I should go on Thursday instead. I thought I would just come home on Monday instead (and maybe go to the gym), but I got an email from Soundstreams reminding me that I had signed up for this concert featuring Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. So I schlepped up to Bathurst and Eglinton after work. It turned out that it was really more of a teaser for the concert, which is in a couple of weeks at TD Stage (right next to Massey Hall). Instead, this was a panel by an art historian, talking about Mark Rothko and his art hanging in a chapel in Houston, a musicologist talking about Morton Feldman and his work, the composer of a new work, riffing off both Rothko and Feldman, and a lighting designer (the last talk I could have lived without). They played moderate length excerpts from both Rothko Chapel and the new work (the name of which escapes me). I probably would not have gone if I had known exactly how the evening turned out, but it was informative. It does look like I can make the actual show, and, as a bonus, anyone attending that night's (free) program got a coupon for 20% off the tickets. Transit actually worked out ok for me, though they did skip Spadina station due to a security incident.
Just the day before they didn't tell anyone that they were skipping Bloor-Yonge station due to some other security incident until I had already boarded the train. Otherwise, I could have gone up the University side to St. George. I was able to transfer at College to the streetcar, but it was a fairly slow, annoying trip. It truly has gotten to the point where every single trip I hear about a major breakdown, or some intruder on the tracks shutting down the line or a "security incident" -- and roughly once a week this impacts me significantly. Only the previous week, we had convinced our daughter to take the streetcar to school by herself and there was a major car accident that halted all streetcars on Gerrard going west. If she had been east of Broadview or even Parliament, they might have been able to divert around the accident using Dundas, but she was too far west by that point and the assistance they gave to passengers was next to useless. After a lot of texting back and forth, we finally just got her to come back home on the next eastbound streetcar.
However, that is nothing compared to the day I was trying to get back to UT for the last day of the Marc Chagall and the Bible show. It was always going to be tight, since I was heading over to Soulpepper to catch Wildwoman after that, but I should have had about 20 minutes to take it all in a second time. Instead, some idiotic teenagers called in a bomb threat while on a subway train(!) and they shut down Line 1 more or less completely. This was so infuriating. I ended up going back upstairs and working another half hour, then walked up to King to get the streetcar to the Distillery District. (It certainly did not help my mood that if I had been able to ride my bike to work at that time, none of this would have been an issue at all...) As upsetting as the day was, I will say that I enjoyed Wildwoman quite a bit. I had seen it in a staged reading a couple of years ago, during the pandemic in fact, and while the basic plot was the same, it was faster paced and a bit funnier this time around. And of course the lavish costumes also helped me immerse myself into the world of the play.
Anyway, this episode led somewhat naturally to an interest in seeing how many books on Chagall and the Bible or Chagall and lithographs Robarts has. The answer is quite a few, and I am trying desperately to read them in the two weeks before they are due. Actually, several of the books only had two days on them, not two weeks! I realized that my borrowing privileges had expired and I needed to renew my card. (It would have been nice to at least gotten a warning!) Anyway, after I renewed one of the librarians took pity on me and got me the full two weeks on the books I had checked out. So I have been looking through a lot of art history books. In addition to the Chagall, there is a new Tom Thomson book based on the McMichael exhibit, and I was able to borrow that from the UVic library.
In terms of other books I am reading, I was able to finish the other two books in the Bandini Quartet. Ask the Dust is the best of the bunch. I wasn't crazy about it, but I didn't dislike it nearly as much as the others. I also managed to get through quite a few short novels that Mahfouz wrote in the 1960s: The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail and The Search. I really didn't care for Autumn Quail, as I thought the narrator was a total drip. In fact, I didn't like the main characters of any of these 3 novels. However, The Search actually did have some interesting parallels to Crime and Punishment, which I assume Mahfouz was at least vaguely aware of. I was only moderately interested in the family secrets revealed in Angela Carter's Wise Children, but then I absolutely hated the final chapter, to the point I don't think this will show up anywhere on my best reads of 2023 list, which is fairly thin to date...
One book that was quite different than I was expecting was Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler. I was assuming it was a poetry collection. Instead, it is a book of micro-fiction (most of which were incredibly depressing) with an extended conversation or perhaps conversational poem at the heart of the book. In many ways, this really spoke to me, even though it was pretty bleak. Here is a sampling: "Let's say you live on a planet with limited resources and a complex biosphere, and all your activities threaten the survival of all species including your own. What do you do?" Also "Did we do everything we could?" "Nope." I think someone said this was part of the vanguard of post-hope literature. There will likely be a lot more of this going forward. I think Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead also fits into this category. I've actually been trying to get this from Robarts for a few months now, but whoever has it out keeps renewing it. If it gets to be spring (which is about the time I should get to it according to this list) and I still can't borrow the book from Robarts, I'll probably just order a copy.
It looks like the trick-or-treating is done for the evening. I was a bit stingy with the candy as there were a few more kids than I was expecting early on, though it died down. Actually almost the entire batch of kids came through between 6:30 and 7:30 with only a few stragglers. Surprisingly, these stragglers weren't older teens. I'm really glad it didn't rain, even though it was nippy. A few of the costumes were really quite good. I do like Halloween a fair bit, though I guess it isn't my very favourite holiday. I have just a bit of candy left over, but not enough to feel like a pig, and I'll probably take most of the leftovers to work. I'm going to run to the gym now, and then I'll see if I can wrap up the month-long recap when I get back.
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