I will briefly sketch out what is supposed to happen today, and then tonight (or tomorrow), I can circle back if things went wildly off track. I'm going to run down to Union Station with my son, who is heading back to Ottawa on the train. I will then catch the next bus to Hamilton. I should be getting in close to 2 pm, and ideally quite a bit sooner than that.
I'm going to head over to the main branch of the Hamilton Library to look up books by Chris Pannell. Now this is a bit weird. There was a significant period of time where none of his books were in TPL or Robarts. I remember this, because I actually asked a work colleague who lived in Hamilton to borrow them for me. Pannell is a Hamilton-based poet and might even have been its poet laureate for a year or two. It never worked out with my co-worker, so I decided I should combine a visit to Dundas Little Theatre (to see Lobby Hero) with a trip to the library. I was starting to get a bit bent out of shape when I found out that two of the books I was going to look at were actually in the Dundas branch and not the main branch, and I don't think it is feasible to get to both branches (without a car at any rate). Then I circled back and found that the books in question were in Robarts after all. Weird, thought I. But I put a hold on them, and continued planning. Then this morning I went and checked the TPL, and they had all of Pannell's poetry collections, so I don't really need to go to the Hamilton Library after all. (Though the Sunday matinee was sold out, so changing plans doesn't really make sense at this point.) I know for a fact that none of these libraries had them at the time I was looking, so this definitely seems pretty strange. But good news for poetry lovers in Toronto...
Assuming there is a bit of time, I'll probably run over to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, but I think I'll only go upstairs where the gallery is free, since the paid exhibits just don't hold a lot of appeal. Then I'll catch the #5 bus from downtown to Dundas and get something to eat, and then slowly make my way over to the theatre. I really hope it doesn't rain as much as they expect, or at least not in Hamilton, as I don't think there is anywhere to hang out for an hour before the play starts. I'm feeling a bit anxious, as it looks like it won't actually wrap up until 10:30, and then there is a bus back to Toronto at 11 and then next one after that is midnight. So I will definitely have to have a cab waiting at the theatre door to get me back downtown pronto.
I'm not exactly loving it, but I expect to wrap up Joelle Taylor's The Night Alphabet today, so I can drop it off at Robarts tomorrow when I pick up the Pannell books. Otherwise, I probably would have taken Nicholas Nickleby along. I'm not really sure when I will find the time to read that, though I guess I will just keep chipping away at it, in between other things. In the end I didn't really love Shteyngart's Our Country Friends and I thought the way he "cleverly" name-checked Boccaccio with a character named Dee Cameron but then didn't have the characters tell each other any stories, was actually pretty lame. This review is pretty close to my views on the book. I am finding Naben Ruthnum's A Hero of Our Time to be quite good so far. I do worry that it cuts pretty close to the main throughline of the play about planners that I am writing, though the way that the young but fairly ruthless characters achieve their ambitions are probably different enough. Nonetheless, I will probably find a couple of riffs on corporate life are now off-limits to me (sad), but I'll just finish it off now anyway, and then read the last (for now) pandemic novel, Rosenblum's These Days are Numbered. After this, I suspect I will alternate chunks of Nickleby and the Heptameron, and then Rushdie's Victory City and Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Dawn Powell's The Golden Spur. Somewhere along the way, I think I will tackle Oblomov as well. Unless I take a summer reading break, or do a lot of travel out to California, this may well take me into the fall.
Assuming I am not completely stuck in Hamilton and I get some rest tonight, I plan on taking a few more CDs over to BMV. I was pleased that they bought most of the CDs I brought over last time, even the classical sets!, and I have a fair number of CDs I would really love to clear out of my office space, to help get me moving on cleaning and reorganizing it. I am currently planning on seeing District 9 at Carlton at 1, and then an animated film called Mars Express over at TIFF at 4:15. But I have a bit of other work I should try to wrap up, and I may have to scale back my ambitions a bit. We shall see. As always, I am just a bit too ambitious for my own good. (I did manage to get over to the AGO on Wed., now that the striking workers settled with management, so at least I can cross that off the list! I didn't really love the Making Her Mark exhibit because the time period is far outside the art I like. They are supposed to open up a modernist art exhibit in mid to late May, and that will be much more my cup of tea...)
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