Random Updates - Late Dec.

So many things to comment on; it's hard to even know where to start.

I have exciting news (to me) about a new job opportunity, but since I am still waiting on the formal offer, I should hold off, aside from saying I'll be back in the private sector by late Jan. (though not in time to justify a trip to TRB -- drat).  The annoyance of time sheets aside (i.e. having to justify yourself to the corporate powers that be), it seems I work better on multiple projects for multiple clients rather than focusing on just one big thing for an extended period of time.  

Let me go back to the 16th (the subject of my last post).  As I was heading out, my front bike tire was pretty flat, which was a bad sign.  I pumped it up and it got me to the downtown office and then over to Buddies for Angels in America Part 1.  (I did decide to skip going to the gym but otherwise wasn't too bothered by my arm fortunately!)  I was so relieved to find out that the whole cast was intact for the last weekend (& no COVID derailments).  I thought it was a very good production, at the same level as the one in Chicago.  I would have liked the Angel to come down from the ceiling and not through the wall, but that's a minor quibble.  I also wasn't quite sure why she should have stumps rather a full set of wings.  (It's almost like she wandered in from the set of Rivera's Marisol -- another play I try to see whenever I have the chance.)  

Anyway, the play ended in 3 hours and 15 minutes, about 15 minutes earlier than I was expecting, which was great.  I rode over to 401 Richmond and saw a few shows there, including the year-end group salon at Yumart.  There were a couple of pieces that I liked by Tim Deverell, including an older piece and this new one:

Tim Deverell, Gambits, 2022

I perhaps could pick one up to celebrate the new job, but again no point in getting too ahead of myself.  Leaving 401 Richmond, I realized my tire was really flat, so whatever puncture I had was pretty bad.  I more or less rode on my rims to get back to Union Station.  I ate a quick dinner, then left the bike there (to collect it on Sunday) and went back for Angels, Part Two at Buddies.  Again, they did not disappoint, though I will say that the Antarctica dream sequence was more impressive on Broadway.  (I vaguely remember dry ice and maybe a couple of stuffed penguins.)  There was one part when Prior visits heaven that I didn't recall but otherwise it's actually a bit remarkable how much I remembered from roughly 20 years ago when I saw it last.  It wrapped up just after 11 pm, so truly a full day of theatre.  While the production seemed pretty well attended, I find it astonishing that the Star didn't review it* nor did Glenn Sumi.  I guess the Globe and Mail did send a reviewer, who gave it a mixed review.  Then there was a totally off-base review from Intermission.  I think only Slotkin felt as positively about the show(s) as it did.  Anyway, definitely one of the best theatre events of 2023.  I'll get to the rest in an upcoming post.

On Sunday, I actually had planned to spend part of the day working at Robarts.  I did accomplish this, although Percival Everett's Erasure was missing from the stacks, which was very disappointing.  I had decided, sort of at the last minute, that I should try to read it after all (despite what I wrote here) before watching the movie American Fiction, which is based on Erasure.  There are probably a few copies of Erasure in the TPL system, but they still haven't fixed any part of the system, not even an internal catalogue, so no one knows where any books are.  The whole library system is next to being completely useless and has been this way for weeks now.  If I happen to get over to the Theatre Centre (prob. not until Feb. for Shakespeare Bash'd) or Assembly Theatre (just possibly SFYS will actually happen for realz this Jan.) I'll stop in at the Parkdale Library, as they might have Erasure.  I'm also probably going to head up to North York to see if a couple of recent art books are in their collection, and I guess I'll look for Erasure while I'm up there.  (I did call to verify you can at least go into the non-fiction stacks, but I had to go to another library website to verify what the Dewey Decimal call numbers would be if they did have the books.  So crazy!) 

I also wanted to stop in at the AGO, but there was an injury on the tracks that had completely shut down that side of Line 1.  I figured it probably would have cleared up after my trip to Robarts, but close to two hours later, the subway was still shut down!  As annoying as that was, I will be going to the AGO on Boxing Day, so it is more a case of art deferred.  I then had to backtrack to Bloor-Yonge and go to work that way.  (Again, none of this even would have an issue if my bike was working.)  I did bring the bike home on the subway, which is extremely rare for me.  The subway stations are certainly not designed for bikes!  Once again, I pumped up the tires and they held on long enough to get me from Danforth to Bain, and I walked to the rest of the way.

Monday I worked from home in the morning and dropped off my bike at the bike shop, which doesn't open until 11 am (and is not open on Sunday).  Then I took the TTC in to work.  I was able to get the bike Tues. after work, just in time for it to get cold, and I only rode in to work on Thurs.  I also went to the gym twice and I snuck in some swimming as well.  While I still have a bit of a cough, it hasn't completely derailed my exercise routines.  Still, it was hard that first time back after close to a two week gap!

I'll just touch briefly on my reading, and then I have to go.  I think I am definitely tougher on books than I used to be.  I reread The Sun Also Rises and hated all the characters this time around.  The casual racism and anti-Semitism are almost unbearable to me.  And the celebration of toxic masculinity is just so painful.  I think it is likely that Hemingway is only going to be remembered for his short stories 100 years from now, as no one will want to read the novels.  A Farewell to Arms wasn't much better, though there was less racism, simply because there weren't as many people of color or Jews in Italy.  The actual dialogue between Frederic and Catherine is so cringey; he talks to her like she's an idiot, and she basically lapses into baby-talk most of the time.  Add in two super-human escapes, and Frederic is little more than a male "Mary Sue."  I did not like it on any level.  It's surely a mistake, but I'm still going to get around to For Whom the Bell Tolls (at some point), but I am going to be quicker on the trigger finger to dump this book.

I liked the first section of Conrad's Under Western Eyes, which definitely does have shades of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, but then the perspective switches from omniscient third person to a limited and somewhat unreliable first person narrator, who then peruses the journals of Razumov, and is thus able to fully reconstruct the minute details of Razumov's interactions with the revolutionary Haldin and several other key characters.  I strongly dislike this switching back and forth of perspective, particularly when there is a first person narrator with access to information that never would have been written down in a diary or letter.  This bugged me quite a bit in Proust, and it seemed to me a complete mistake here that fatally damaged the book.  If the book had been simpler, and just an expansion of parts one and three, I would have liked it better, though I still probably wouldn't have liked the ending, but certainly I did not like the novel that Conrad actually wrote.  Too bad...

I did get through Perec's Life, A User's Manual.  More than anything I found it a bit exhausting.  In so many places the mini-chapters just became lists and lists of things, particularly descriptions of every painting in a room or all the items on a workbench.  The structure was clearly inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities with an infusion of Borges's Funes the Memorious.  I'm glad I finally have read it, but ultimately it left me pretty cold.  I never got a handle on most of the characters and the only one that really stood out (Bartlebooth) had such a stupid life goal (to spend his whole fortune creating paintings, turning them into jigsaw puzzles, and then destroying them) that I lost considerable interest in the book.  I did not realize, while reading Life, that this character was supposed to be an amalgam of Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (whom I don't care for for intensely personal reasons) and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth.  I suppose one good thing that has come out of this is that I am spending more time working on a jigsaw puzzle (of Monet's water lilies) that has really stumped me.  My goal is to complete it to ensure I have not lost any pieces (itself no sure thing), and then give it away.

I wasn't thrilled with Martin Amis's The Rachel Paper because the narrator is definitely a creep.  While the second half got better, I really didn't think that highly of Brewer's The Red Arrow.  A couple of the stories in Jem Calder's Reward System are ok, but I find the very flat, affectless writing out-putting (or maybe I just find Gen Z problems so uninteresting?).  Calder reminds me just a bit of Douglas Coupland, but much less entertaining and humourous.  I'm really struggling to think what will be the last book on my best books list, since I haven't like much I've read for a while.  I expect Erasure might have made the list, but it is so hard to get my hands on a copy.

I did not like Alice Notley's Certain Magical Acts, as the poems were just so long and boring. I didn't much care for the short stories in Munro's Open Secrets, as I just didn't find her use of historical fiction compelling or particularly believable.  I was glad that after a long hiatus, I'm finally starting to read through Narayan, but I absolutely hated The Man-Eater of Malgudi.  What a terrible novel.  I'm really hoping the next two are a return to form.

Anyway, yesterday it was a very wet day, though I managed to force myself to the gym and to get groceries (assuming that today would be even more crowded).  Then I walked down and saw the hit musical at Crow's Theatre: Pierre, Natasha and the Great Comet of 1812.  It was pretty good, though I generally don't care much for musicals with a few exceptions.**  I did like the music, which mixed classical music and electro-pop and maybe even some disco.  The lyrics were generally not as compelling with some exceptions.  I also thought the ending was a bit of a cop out, but I guess there were only so many liberties they could take with the script, as this is drawn from a couple of chapters from Tolstoy's War and Peace!  (Maybe this will finally inspire me to tackle this tome in 2024 or 2025 after I get through those other Russian novels like Oblomov and A Hero of Our Times.)

I guess that gets me mostly caught up for Dec. at least.  I still need to go back and document some trips I took in 2023 and write up my year-end round-ups.  Fortunately, I don't have a lot going on this week other than going to the AGO on Boxing Day and maybe seeing America Fiction.  My son is deciding if he wants to go with me to see The Boy and the Heron in Japanese with subtitles.  I already saw it dubbed and don't plan on seeing it dubbed a second time.  There might be something to check out over at TIFF, but otherwise, I think I will mostly be reading and writing this week and maybe trying to wrap up some key work projects.

Jan. is looking like it might be very busy between going back to Buddies in Bad Times several times, and a few concerts (including Skye Wallace just popping up at Cameron House) and some great acts at The Rex (often with Neil Swainson on bass in support), so I'll be staying pretty busy.  It's probably just as well I'm not heading out to DC for TRB this year after all.  

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2024!

* And I am almost in total disagreement with Karen Fricker's best of 2023 list, though I did like Edward II at Stratford and The Master Plan at Crow's.  Oh, Sizwe Banzi was great as well.

** I do really like The Book of Mormon and may go again in Jan.  Spamalot was also great, and Some Like It Hot was good, though I don't think I'd see it a second time.  (I actually did have the chance to catch Avenue Q here in Toronto.  I thought about it for a while but ultimately passed.)  And how can you go wrong with every Gershwin hit song packed into Crazy for You?  I also was blown away by Hedwig and the Angry Inch and now regret not seeing it before when I had the chance(s).  (I see Shotgun Players in Berkeley are just wrapping up a run.  Based on their past work, I'm sure that would have been great.  There is a company in Chicago that should be doing this over the summer, so I may check back later.  And a company in Buffalo should put Hedwig on in Oct.  That overlaps with the Marisol exhibit at the Albright-Knox, so I might try to make that work, even though it might mean an overnight stay in Buffalo, which doesn't thrill me.)

Incidentally, the rotating stage for Natasha and Pierre reminded me of the Northwestern production of Not Wanted on the Voyage (yes, based on the Findley novel).  I thought that was a pretty incredible show that never quite made it to Broadway, so I wrote Crow's Theatre and recommended they consider tracking down the writers (Bartram and Hill) and putting it on themselves.  I would see that again for certain.  (Crow's wrote back and said they would look into it, not that I really think this will lead anywhere, but I tried.)