Small Frustrations (Continued)

I have a post titled exactly like this from last month, but I suppose it is because so many days are filled with small frustrating things that even I recognize are small potatoes compared to all the truly terrible things going on in the world, like Trump selling out Ukraine or global warming making the planet unlivable for our children.  I am probably feeling even more raw than usual because we are sleep-walking into an election in Ontario where Doug Ford is going to get another sweeping and totally undeserved victory.  About the only tiny good news on the horizon is that at the federal level, we might be looking at another minority government for the Liberals, as Canadians have decided that PP is far, far too much like Trump for their taste.  Here's hoping anyway.  This turn of events might or might not sway me to finally get that tattoo I have been contemplating.  The truth is, not that I am so scared of the pain, but that I might not want to have a Canadian tattoo when I am fairly sure I will be fed up with Canada (as I am with everything else) before too long.  I am, however, wondering about getting a tattoo memorializing The Barbaric Yawp, which was a poetry magazine I was editor of for a few years while an undergraduate.  (I've been thinking about this episode in my life lately because it represents an intriguing road not taken...)  I'll scan a picture of the logo in the near future, since I would need one anyway to take to a tattoo parlour.

To get back to the point, it can actually be a very thin line separating a day that is predominantly frustrating versus one that was overall positive in my mind.  As a recent example, I have been having to work far too long at work with only occasional breakthroughs with far more setbacks lately, which colours pretty much everything.  I have been trying to get over to Carlton to see The Night is Short: Walk On Girl, and it was showing at 7 pm (and then maybe 9:45) Monday through Thurs.  It became fairly obvious that I was going to have to work late on Monday, and I briefly debated going to the late show but just went home.  Now I would likely have tried harder to go on Monday if there was even a chance I could see Mulholland Drive at the Revue on Tues., but the tickets were sold out and I didn't feel like standing in the rush line (like I did for Withnail and I).  So that meant I would shift Night is Short to Tues., though there was another potential snag in that I was roped into a work call with the L.A. office from 6-7, so I tried to find out if there was a place with free wifi around.  It actually didn't look promising at all, as this part of downtown is a Starbucks desert and the nearest Tim Hortons is very much an urban one with essentially no amenities.  I'm not even sure if it has a bathroom...

In the end, I ended up working until 5:50 on something else, so there wasn't any chance of getting up to College anyway, so I just (somewhat grumblingly) took the call from the office.  Fortunately, it wrapped up early (a rare occurrence!), and I had just enough time to make it to the theatre, slipping in during the previews for Mickey 17, which is looking like a movie that I would enjoy, so I'll plan on catching that in a few weeks when it opens.  The theatre was pretty full for a Tues. evening.  This is such a weird movie, but I think it may be my second favourite anime, right behind Paprika, which I'll watch again if it shows up at Carlton in the near future.  I was pretty hungry throughout, but overall the evening was a pretty good one as I managed to snatch some personal time back for myself.  I was even able to get to Bulk Barn, though this was after the show not before.  They were warning people, we are only open for 8 more minutes, then 5 more minutes, etc., but I was lightning fast and picked up some trail mix before they kicked everyone out.

So that made for a pretty good evening, though I did end up going to bed instead of writing up a short story for the Star's contest, and then I had hoped maybe to type it up Wed. over lunch (as the deadline was 5 pm) but ended up working straight through lunch and didn't even eat until 2:30, then went straight back into meetings.  While I did ultimately leave work at an almost reasonable time (6:30),* I never found the time to type this in (and indeed the story probably works better as a playlet than as a short story, not that I have found an outlet for my theatre writing since SFYS went dark yet again).  Anyway, I was still beating myself up a bit over this while I marched over to TIFF -- only to find that the 6:45 showing of Universal Language was sold out.  So incredibly frustrating.  This sort of thing just reinforces how frustrating I find TIFF in general and why I gave up my membership there.  I spent a bit of time going through the schedule of TIFF and The Fox, which is also showing Universal Language this week.  Go figure!  (I was hoping it might turn up at Market Square, which sometimes carries the movies around the same time as TIFF.**  It doesn't have Universal Language, but they are showing Anora, and I suppose I might try to check this out on Sunday, if I don't have anything else planned...)  It looks like the best bet is to try to catch Universal Language on Sat.  Either I can see it at The Fox at 1:45, or at TIFF at 12:45 (in the relatively roomy Theatre 3 where there are plenty of seats) or in Theatre 5 at 3:30, which is a pretty small and sometimes uncomfortable theatre (and it is about halfway sold out already).  If I was confident that I could bike, then I could commit to either 1:45 at the Fox or 12:45 at TIFF, but if I am stuck on the streetcars, it is a lot dicier because they are still diverting the Dundas streetcar, as far as I know.  While it warmed up a lot and the snow is receding, the streets were still far too messy for me to attempt to bike in.  It looks like the temperature is going to drop this weekend, and it will likely snow, so biking is probably out.  I would have to get to the swimming pool by 11 and leave by noon to have a shot at making it to the 12:45 TIFF showing, though I suppose I could plan on going to TIFF for that first showing, but if something went drastically wrong, I could reverse direction and make it to The Fox in time.  So I guess that is a workable back-up plan, though I have to remember that I can only take the subway to Osgoode (Queen) rather than St. Andrew, which is annoying though not a fatal flaw.  It would make going to Anora a lot more challenging, and clearly I would be better off biking or maybe taking the King streetcar than dealing with the subway and shuttle buses.  

Nonetheless, this spoiled my plans for the evening (and I was then feeling too grumpy to drop in at the Rex).  I was only slightly mollified that when I got home, I saw that two things I had ordered showed up.  One was the Blu-ray of La Notte.  I was starting to get a bit worried that it wasn't going to show up, so I'm quite glad it made it.  (I'm now only waiting on Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and a graphic novel called Street Cop.)  The Blu-ray is indeed really sharp.  Now that it is here, the next time I am at BMV, I can see if I can sell off my region 2 DVDs of La Notte and L'Avventura, hoping to get a bit more dosh back if they are sold as a set...  Also, I had decided to order a copy of Tory Dent's Collected Poems.  It wasn't entirely clear from the description if this actually was a collected (and essentially complete) poems or a selected, so I decided to gamble.  I would say in general, Tory Dent is not particularly well known, and if one thinks about poetry about the AIDS crisis, one turns to Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats.  

As powerful as Gunn's book is, it is written from the perspective of one on the outside looking in.  Gunn was certainly impacted by AIDS, losing many, many friends, but he was HIV-negative (and died of a drug overdose (in his 70s!)).  Tory Dent is one of the only poets I am aware of, and certainly the only female poet, that wrote from the inside on what it was like to be living with AIDS.  As an aside, I would like to find a way to include her in my anthology (to do my part in buttressing her legacy) but none of her poems fit well and her preoccupations were so different that it almost seems insulting to try to pull out a poem that has a transportation angle (rather than about her journey and struggles with the medical establishment).  Anyway, the volume is indeed her collected work, including all the poems in her three collections, along with a handful of early unpublished poems.  

I did have to bump Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero off the shelf to make room, so I will move that up on my brand-new reading list to make up for that.

In general, reading is going fairly well.  I have been reading a lot of poetry lately.  I did sort of give up on Jon Silkin.  I was just not finding his work that interesting even after reading 400 pages (out of about 800 in his massive Complete Poetry).  I finally settled on reading the remaining unpublished poems.  I have to admit that I did like some of his later poems more, but I am definitely not on his wavelength.

I generally am enjoying Wesley McNair, who is a New England poet.  He strikes me as a bit more engaged in the world than say, David Budbill, who is much more in the Gary Snyder vein.  McNair's Late Wonders has a trilogy of long narrative poems conflating his family's travails with the (declining) state of America.  I'm only just starting in on them, but they remind me of the impulse behind Updike's Rabbit novels.  I'm generally enjoying Lynn Emanuel's work as well.  I think I just need a sustained push to get through some Wanda Coleman books, and then I can finally return to novels (Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and then I think Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures immediately follows, though I probably should read Bradley's The Ministry of Time as soon as my copy turns up at the reserve desk at Robarts).  Tonight, I venture over to the Theatre Centre to check out Monks, which I never was able to see at last year's Fringe.  For once I have the tickets to a sold out show...  Given the trip out there is so long, I can catch up on a bit more of my reading.  Unless there is another unforeseen disruption (or they try to force me to work past 6:45 tonight), the omens are generally positive for today (aside from the fact that Ford will be re-elected, which of course is a major, major downer, though there is nothing I can do about it).

* I'm not the only one that is generally working too long these days.  The newly inaugurated book club at work had to push the meeting off by a week because no one could make it.  I suspect this will be a monthly issue, but we shall see

** Still so annoyed that Rumours disappeared after such a short run.  I could have scrambled my schedule a bit and probably saw it at either TIFF or Market Square, though I think that was a week I was travelling for work, which made it particuarly hard.  Rumours has finally come out on DVD, and I put a hold on a copy through TPL, so maybe will get to watch that by the summer...)

Sick of Snow

So very, very tired of all this snow.  It is seriously messing up my life.  Last Sunday, they cancelled The Merchant of Venice in advance.  I mean better knowing it was cancelled than showing up and finding it was cancelled.  That would have been worse for sure.

The view of my back porch, which looks like it won't be clear of snow until April or something.

Actually, snow has been messing up my outings for even longer, since we had the first big snowfall on Wed. (so 10 days or so ago).  I was over at Hart House for a mentorship event.  It became pretty clear early on that most people had bailed.  I think in the end only 3 or 4 mentees showed up and maybe 10 mentors.  I talked to a couple of the staff attached to Hart House, mostly about Toronto (and Hart House) as it was in the early 90s.  All 3 of us lived in the East End, which seems pretty common.  (UT employees that were around since the 80s are more likely to be living in the Annex, but that was already a bit out of reach by the 90s...)  I called to make sure that the jazz show was going on at the Rex.  They thought it was a bit odd I would call, but I vividly recall checking with the Green Mill in Chicago to make sure they were open, only to walk over in the middle of a huge blizzard to find they were closed.  To be fair, that blizzard was several times worse than what we have faced this past week or so.

So I went back to work for about an hour, then went over to the Rex.  It was a sparse crowd, maybe 60% of the front area was full.  I did consider going back on Thurs. but then got caught up with other things.

Anyway, what makes the Merchant of Venice cancellation so upsetting is that they did schedule a make up performance (for today incidentally) but I couldn't move things around to make it work, and the other two nights last week I could have gone, they were sold out (and made very little attempt to shuffle things around and squeeze me in).  Now I don't care much for the Merchant of Venice at all, but I suspect they did a fine job (and Shakespeare Bash'd is down to just a single real performance per season).  So I am feel pretty raw about it.  Just in general all this snow is making me even more surly than normal.

I did debate going to the Rex on Sunday but just stayed home instead.  (Probably the smart choice.)  I think Fantasia was playing at TIFF, and I strongly debated going to that, but decided to skip it.  (I'm not entirely sure whether they went ahead with the show or also cancelled.  An awful lot of venues and museums called things off on Sun.  So I was particularly glad I had been criss-crossing the city on Sat., which I may get around to writing up at some point.)

There wasn't much playing at the movies (or at least that I wanted to see) on Family Day.  TIFF was completely shut down, which I thought was odd.  I was not really sure I wanted to leave the house to get over to the Rex, but I did in the end.  (The bus service was reliably terrible per usual, and I briefly turned around, then trudged on up to Danforth.)  It was actually a CD release party, and the group included Mike Murley, Neil Swainson and Reg Schwager, so I'm glad I went in the end.

I was able to get pretty much everything I wanted to yesterday, though again no thanks to the TTC.  I went swimming (which I hadn't managed to last Sat. because the 506 streetcar was delayed by 15 minutes).  They actually are rerouting the Dundas streetcar, so I had to walk to Parliament, where I just missed a bus, and the next one wasn't even showing up on the tracker!  So I had to walk over to the Distillery District.  I was not in a great mood by that point, even though the sun was out and it was a bit warmer.  I couldn't believe how terrible the service was at the little bakery right by the entrance to the Distillery, so I stomped out and dropped in at Corkin.  Corkin hadn't changed its displays up at all, so I went over to Thomas Landry.  

I liked this piece a lot, though not quite enough to buy it (at their price), even though it would pair really well with a few other things I own.

Jean-Daniel Rohrer, L'espris des lieux II, 2022

I made it over to Canadian Stage's Fat Ham, which is a reworking of Hamlet, in plenty of time.  Overall I liked this, though there were a few parts that were a bit troubling (almost glorying in how uneducated most of the characters were, and how Juicy was pinning his hopes on a digital degree in Human Resources from the University of Phoenix, when he seems a bit smarter and clued in than that, at least compared to the other characters, particularly when he then launches into a few of the lesser known soliloquys).  But overall it was good, and it was fairly short (90 minutes), which was even better.

Then in the evening we went up to North York to see Dimanche, which is sort of a wordless set of vignettes using a lot of puppetry and special effects to contemplate the end of the world after global warming wipes out all the icebergs and the major cities are all flooded.  Cheery stuff, but a lot of this was really interesting.  It was only 75 minutes, though perhaps 5-10 minutes could have been trimmed, as one or two scenes just went on a bit too long.

Today is all about music.  I have a Tafelmusik and an Esprit Orchestra concert, so I had better run over to the gym and get the day started.  Ciao!

A Few Quick Jottings on Poetry

I am a bit torn between taking the time to write down my thoughts properly, which will probably require a few posts, and just dashing off some thoughts that are top of mind.  I may split the difference: writing just a few things now and then setting up some posts where I track transportation and "vacation" poems.  I think the likelihood of me ever finishing the first project, let alone the second is so slim, but I guess it's worth having a few goals along the way.  (I was really in deep despair just the other day over the state of the world, and I decided I really ought to move some of these projects forward as there is so little else to motivate me when I cannot be consoled with all the usual blather about "how it gets better," when quite frankly the world is getting worse and at a pace no one is ready for...)

Anyway, I have been reading Michael Longley (incidentally I started about two weeks before his recent passing), and this led to John Burnside and even Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk.  I was surprised to find that I not only had read Longley's Collected Poems over 10 years ago (probably right after I hit Vancouver) but had made a list of my favorite poems from that volume!  I certainly didn't remember that, which just goes to show that I really have to write down more of my thoughts before they escape.  In general, I am not a huge fan of Longley's (both because he stuck with rhymed poetry long after it was out of fashion and he is mostly a rural poet*).  Burnside is very much a religious poet (and in a way that irks me far more than it does with Mary Oliver, for example).  That said, he had a few transportation related poems that were pretty interesting.  So far I am finding Goat's Milk** the most to my taste of the bunch.

I will likely go ahead and set up pages where I just start dumping these titles but generally not cross-linking to the actual poems, so I don't forget any others (after I had gone to the trouble of finding them in the first place).  I do recall that Frederick Seidel has quite a few poems about riding motorcycles of all things.  And John Balaban has a number of poems on being in Vietnam (though generally as a soldier, so the theme would have to be stretched to the breaking point and beyond to just include people in foreign places, even if at work on in a war, to accommodate those poems).  But his bicycling poem would fit, though it is only one poem out of a sequence.  And there was a poem from a collection I checked out recently from Robarts, which I believe was just called "Train," which I liked a lot.  I hopefully can track this down right away, but this is why I need a better system obviously.  So anyway, this is just off the top of my head of recent discoveries, and I will go find the original lists from where I have saved them to generate the full lists. 

Transportation poems:

Eileen Myles "PV" from Maxfield Parrish - subway
(She actually has quite a few about bicycling, and I am hoping to find one that is short enough and not completely profane, but that seems unlikely.)

Jack Gilbert "Suddenly Adult" from The Dance Most of All - train

John Burnside "III: Pilgrimage" from "Roads" in The Asylum Dance - bus
(I generally don't like excerpting poems or even one poem from a series, and there may be better examples, but this has several gripping lines.)

The Poet on Vacation:

Jack Gilbert "Worth" from The Dance Most of All

Anyway, several years back I was on a Ralph Gustafson kick.  I eventually picked up all three volumes of his Collected Poems, but I had to order them as Vols. 1 & 2 and  Vols. 1 & 3!  I finally parted with one copy of Vol. 1.  I'm still burned up that the signed copy of Configurations at Midnight was lost in the mail, and I still hope that some day it will make its way to its destination or be returned to the store.  I do have one signed copy of a selected poems, and from time to time I consider buying another.  It turns out there is a bookstore near Casa Loma that has quite a few.  I think I'll wait until spring, and then head over and see what they have in stock.

And with that, I think I need to wrap this up and get back to just reading poetry in order to return these books on time.

* Though for some reason he writes quite extensively on Greek mythology, particularly reworking scenes from The Iliad and The Odyssey.

** Milk keeps cropping up in unlikely places.  There is a new lit. magazine starting up in Toronto called Milk Bag.  I decided to submit something, even though it is pretty clear I am not the target audience, and indeed they didn't take my submission.  Then I checked out Black Milk by Tory Dent; my quick perusal of this volume suggests an affinity with Christopher Smart.  "Black Milk" is also a poem in Almadhoun's Adrenalin (though this may be challenging to actually borrow...).  And Charles Simic has an early collection titled Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk.

The Very Snowy Day

I guess it was Wed. evening that we really got hit with snow.  I feel particularly let down because the weather forecast had been for Thurs. to briefly warm up (above freezing at any rate) and then cool down again over the weekend.  Well, that didn't happen.  Maybe the huge mass of snow in the area kept the temperatures down.

I stayed out fairly late on Wed. (at the Rex), and I forced myself to shovel when I got back, though it snowed so much overnight that it didn't look like I had shoveled at all in the morning.  I thought I was going to go back in on Thurs., partly because I had a dentist appointment and partly because I had hoped to check out the same group at the Rex again.  But work was really quite intense and the transit system was suffering a mini-meltdown so I ended up staying home and rescheduling the appointment, then working quite late (not helped by the fact that Excel destroyed about 2 hours of work, somehow saving the file into some black hole that it could not retrieve from later, which was really the icing on the cake).

I did go back out on Friday, and conditions still weren't great.  It certainly isn't as fun to have a snowy day when you are an adult and school isn't cancelled.  (Indeed, the TDSB and TCDSB had snow days, which really are only called once or twice in a decade!).

I suppose reality is always bleaker...

Friday I left for work but at a strange hour.  There were minor delays at every leg of my journey, but I did make it in.  I again was working pretty intensely on top of back to back to back meetings, and I finally had a chance to run out to the bank and for food at 3:15, but all the local food courts were closing up, and I didn't have time to get over to Union Station.  Fortunately, there is a Subway nearby, though it wasn't what I had planned on grabbing.

I left at 5:15 and went straight to Bau-Xi, since I was trying to streamline my activities on Saturday.  It was fine, but they really don't update it nearly as often, leaving all the main exhibits to their Dufferin gallery.  Then I went in and checked out the AGO for a while.  There was a small James Tissot exhibit that was mostly prints.

James Tissot, The Thames, 1876

I also had a chance to see some old favourites, as well as the Light Years exhibit, which has some great photos by Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall, as well as several Philip Guston paintings.  This runs through early Nov., so plenty of time to still catch it.

Andy Fabo, The Craft of the Contaminated, 1984

Now what I should be doing is holing up and reading through a huge stack of poetry on loan from the various libraries, but what I will actually do is head out, go swimming, then to the Textile Museum (before it closes for several months!), then try to get up to Bloor for one last shot at getting Lord Vishnu's Love Handles, then down to 401 Richmond, and then if it isn't too late, I'll see a film at TIFF.  I should probably stop by work for a bit.  I guess there is at least a chance I will get over to the Rex, though I think they are sold out tonight.  I will be back to the Rex for a CD release party(!) either Sun. (at seeing Shakespeare Bash'd doing Merchant of Venice) or Mon.  I'm actually running late for all this, so I will circle back and fill in some details later.  Ciao!

New Reading List for 2025 (and well beyond!)

I decided it was finally time to retire this list, and merge it with this list (where I am perhaps 75% through it) and add in the books from the book club at work (which I'll at least try to tackle) and books I've bought in the past year or so or indeed anything that takes my fancy.  I think I mentioned already that Clarke's Lord Vishnu's Love Handles is calling to me for some reason.  I have looked for it at the BMV near Eaton Centre and Circus Books and a couple of bookstores on Roncesvalles yesterday.  Next Sat., I should be able to quickly stop in at BMV on Bloor and Seekers (and presumably the AGO and Bau-Xi and the galleries in 401 Richmond).  Basically, the only books I am looking for at the moment at the Love Handles book, Craig Nova's The Good Son and if there is anything by Robert Coover (though I did order The Public Burning and I supposedly have ordered a copy of Street Cop, but the internet book store needs to confirm this will be shipped), which allows me to be super focused once I cross the store threshold.  In other words, I am the guy looking at the shelves and running back out, not someone trapped in the bookstore line from hell (as in Tom Gauld's cartoon).

At some point in the spring, I will try to get to Peter De Vries Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (which I picked up because I grew up there) and then of course would also want to read Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Novel for good measure.  I have both of the Didion books in her Modern Library collection, but will need to grab them from Robarts as this tome isn't conducive to reading on the train or at the gym...

Just a couple of amusing asides.  It's weird that I seem to have read Hobson's November, but I don't recall it strongly, and then I wrapped it up (again?) on a recent trip to NYC (and left it at the youth hostel where I was staying), but I still don't have a very clear impression of it.  I should probably skim just a few pages to make sure that was the Hobhouse I was reading.  (I am sure I was reading a Hobhouse novel, as someone commented on it on the subway, saying that Hobhouse was out of fashion these days...)  I may or may not still have my NYRB edition of Hobhouse's The Furies.  I will see if I can track it down (likely downstairs in a box) by the time I get to her on the list.  (I think I have time ;) .)  

Speaking of transit book news, just the other day, I saw someone reading something intriguing on the streetcar, and when we went around the bend, I saw it was Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I just mentioned I will try to tackle this spring.  Then that evening I saw someone with what I thought was a deluxe edition of Atwood's Oryx & Crake (and I took that as a sign), but in fact it was Yarros's Onyx Storm, which I have no intention of reading.

Still, I will see about finally getting to the MaddAdam Trilogy this late fall/winter and then Lessing's Children of Violence in 2026.  These are probably stretch goals...

Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time
William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow & Stories from LOA Vol. 2
Dawn Powell Angels on Toast 
Dawn Powell Sunday, Monday and Always (Stories) 
Durrenmatt Once a Greek
Skorvecky Two Murders in My Double Life
Gide Lafcadio's Adventures
T.C. Boyle Drop City & A Friend of the Earth
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Singh Delhi: A Novel
Gide The Immoralist & Straight is the Gate 
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green & The Stories of J.F. Powers
Joy Williams State of Grace & Escapes & The Visiting Privilege (stories)
Lampedusa The Leopard
Mavis Gallant The Cost of Living (stories)
Tim O'Brien In the Lake of the Woods
Morrison The Bluest Eye & Song of Solomon
Bradley The Ministry of Time
Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and It Can't Happen Here) 
Maritta Wolff -- Whistle Stop, Night Shift, Sudden Rain, Buttonwood and The Big Nickelodeon
(intersperse Lewis with Wolff)
O'Nan Last Night at the Lobster
Russo Empire Falls
Mahfouz The Beggar
Faulkner The Wild Palms
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets & The Painter of Signs
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Carol Shields The Republic of Love & Happenstance
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Suárez Havana Year Zero
Conrad Victory & Chance
Welty Delta Wedding
Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities
Aeschylus The Oresteia
Murakami Killing Commendatore
Faulkner The Snopes Family (Hamlet, Town, Mansion)
Mieville The City and the City & Perdido Street Station
Malamud Pictures of Fidelman

This part of the list is basically books I've picked up in the past year (and are queue-jumpers)
Denis Johnson Angels
Dorothy Edwards Winter Sonata
Soseki The Three-Cornered World
Sorokin Blue Lard (NYRB) & The Queue (NYRB) 
Platonov Chevengur (NYRB)
Sunil Gangopadhyay Days and Nights in the Forest
Warren Cool Water
Holmes Go
Plymell Benzedrine Highway 
Sorokin Teluria & Red Pyramid (stories)
Heather O'Neill Daydreams of Angels & The Capitol of Dreams
Ethan Canin Carry Me Across the Water
Engel Sarah Bastard's Notebook
Jelloun The Last Friend
Baker The Fermata
Martin The Consolation of Nature
Erdrich The Sentence & Shadow Tag
George Orwell Decline of the English Murder
Engel Sarah Bastard's Notebook
Wells Love and Mr. Lewisham
Azuela The Underdogs
Matthiessen Far Tortuga
Skvorecky The Bride of Texas (maybe on my second long trip of the year?)
Lightman Mr g
Huxley The Devils of Loudun
Larbaud Barnabooth His Notebook (tipped to this by Perec)
Brink Rights of Desire
Connolly This is It
Vassanji Everything There Is
Drabble The Dark Flood Rises
Kingsolver Prodigal Summer & Animal Dreams
A. Roy The Folded Earth
Marcial Gala Call Me Cassandra
Janet Hobhouse The Furies & Dancing in the Dark & Nellie without Hugo 
Allende Island Beneath the Sea
Vargas Llosa Way to Paradise & The Neighborhood
Talib Smokescreen
Zsuzsi Gartner The Beguiling
Zevin Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This is the start of the long-tail list:
Melville Pierre
Kierkegaard Either/Or 
P. Roth -- Zuckerman Bound, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost
Richard Yates Eleven Kinds of Loneliness  
John O'Hara Waiting for Winter
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
John O'Hara Appointment in Samarra
Ariel Dorfman The Last Song of Manuel Sendero 
Craig Nova Incandescence & The Good Son
Ribeyro Marginal Voices
Will Clarke Lord Vishnu's Love Handles A Spy Novel
Waugh Vile Bodies
Cyprian Ekwensi People of the City & Jagua Nana
Ondjaki Transparent City
Victor Serge Conquered City
Vladimir Voinovich A Displaced Person & Monumental Propaganda
Fuentes Where the Air is Clear
Walker Percy The Last Gentleman & The Second Coming
Vargas Llosa The Time of the Hero
Lethem Feral Detective
Craig Nova The Informer (not really that good)
Robert Cohen Inspired Sleep
Chan Koonchung (Guanzhong) The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver
Elizabeth Bowen The Heat of the Day
Mieko Kawakami Ms. Ice Sandwich
Hideo Furukawa Slow Boat 
Fontane Before the Storm (try to arrange to read Dec. 2025)
Tolstoy War and Peace
Vasily Grossman Stalingrad & Life and Fate
Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Vikram Chandra Love and Longing in Bombay 
Victor Serge Midnight in the Century
Don DeLillo End Zone
Pym Jane and Prudence
Forster Howard's End & A Room with a View
Skvorecky Miss Silver's Past & The Swell Season
Tanizaki A Cat, A Man and Two Women
Bellow Ravelstein
Roth The Human Stain
Ghosh The Calcutta Chromosome
Khushwant Singh Delhi 
Dickens Pictures from Italy & American Notes
Herzen Letters from France and Italy
Bely Petersburg
Victor Serge Unforgiving Years
Kundera The Festival of Insignificance & Ignorance
Soyinka The Interpreters
Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Meera Syal Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Pyong-Mo Ku The Old Woman with the Knife
Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise
Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
Fitzgerald The Beautiful and Damned
Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Dos Passos Adventures of a Young Man
Fitzgerald Tender Is the Night 
Hemingway A Moveable Feast
Fitzgerald The Last Tycoon
John Cheever The Wapshot Chronicle & The Wapshot Scandal
Gloria Naylor Mama Day
Fuentes A Change of Skin
Naipaul Miguel Street
Sontag Against Interpretation
Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem & The White Album
Fuentes Aura
Russell Smith Muriella Pent
Bove Quicksand
Desani All About H. Hatterr
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Chekhov 7 Short Novels
Turgenev Smoke
Turgenev Virgin Soil
Huxley Mortal Coils (stories)
Gissing New Grub Street
Neruda Isla Negra
Fuentes Terra Nostra
Steinbeck To a God Unknown
Cesare Pavese Selected Works
P. Roth American Pastoral
Atwood MaddAdam & The Year of the Flood & Oryx & Crake
Kafu American Stories
J. Roth Radetzky March & The Emperor's Tomb
Walser The Tanners 
Pym Less Than Angels
Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout
McKay Home to Harlem
Don DeLillo Great Jones Street 
Saramago Skylight
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Fisher The Conjure Man Dies
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber
Taylor The Wedding Group
Zaher The Coin
Green Blindness
Perec A Void
Victor Serge The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Kim Thúy Ru 
Malamud The Fixer
DeLillo Ratner's Star
Skvorecky The Miracle Game & Dvorak in Love
P. Roth Nemeses (Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis)
Selvon Moses Migrating
Green Living 
Levi The Sixth Day
Huysmans Against Nature
Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow (& V?)
Scarlett Thomas PopCo & The End of Mr Y & Our Tragic Universe
Pym A Glass of Blessings
Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer
Christopher Isherwood Berlin Stories
Joseph Roth The White Cities/Report from Paris
Ghosh The Glass Palace
Craig Nova The Congressman's Daughter & Tornado Alley
de Tocqueville Democracy in America 
Trollope The Three Clerks
Achebe  A Man of the People
Achebe Anthills of the Savannah
Hoban Riddley Walker
Tunney Flan 
Powys Wolf Soylent
Drew Hayden Taylor Take Us to Your Leader
Lem Tales of Pirx the Pilot 
Lem More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (a lot of Lem worth reading, but I might circle back first to Pirx and then Ijon Tichy (The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a space traveler and The Futurological Congress))
Victor Pelevin Omon Ra
Hardy Return of the Native
Steinbeck Tortilla Flat
Murdoch The Sea The Sea 
Pynchon Against the Day 
DeLillo Players/Running Dog
Murakami Norwegian Wood
Austen Emma
Guillaume Morissette New Tab
Gornick Louisa Meets Bear
DeLillo Amazons
Findley Dinner Along the Amazon
Churchill Cloud 9
Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Lessing The Golden Notebook
Craig Nova The Book of Dreams
Jean Rhys Quartet & After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Didion Democracy
Malamud The Tenants
Forrest Meteor in the Madhouse
Barley The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Trollope Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices
Anna Seghers Transit (NYRB)
Bove Night Departure & No Place
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (uncut version)
Faulkner Sanctuary & Requiem for a Nun
Green Party Going
Woolf Mrs. Dalloway/Mrs. Dalloway's Party
Austen Persuasion
Isak Dinesen Ehrengard
Nabokov The Enchanter 
Elias Canetti Memoirs (The Tongue Set Free/The Torch in My Ear/The Play of the Eye) 
Balzac The Human Comedy/Pere Goriot
Davies The Salterton Trilogy
Trollope He Knew He Was Right
Bissoondath Doing the Heart Good
Rhys Good Morning, Midnight
Engel Lunatic Villas
Mann Buddenbrooks
Blish Cities in Flight
Welty Delta Wedding
Zola The Fortune of the Rougons
Téa Obreht The Tiger's Wife
Ian Williams Reproduction
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
Lessing's Children of Violence (Martha Quest; A Proper Marriage; A Ripple from the Storm; Landlocked; The Four-Gated City)
Muriel Spark The Mandelbaum Gate
John Cheever The Stories of John Cheever
James Purdy The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy
Eric Kraft's Peter Leroy series (Little Follies; Where Do You Stop?; Herb ’n’ Lorna; Reservations Recommended; What a Piece of Work I Am; At Home with the Glynns; Leaving Small’s Hotel; Inflating a Dog; Passionate Spectator; Flying; Persistence; Albertine's Overcoat (aka Peerless Television Service and Repair))
(Saramago detour -- a few of these are listed higher up)
Saramago Skylight
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Saramago Blindness
Perec A Void
DeLillo The Names
Saramago All the Names
Cunningham The Hours
Plato The Republic (special focus on Book VII)
Saramago The Cave
Plato The Symposium
Muriel Spark Symposium
Saramago Seeing
Norfolk The Pope's Rhinoceros
Saramago The Elephant's Journey
Murakami The Elephant Vanishes
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Faulkner The Wild Palms (linked through the palm trees of 'Miami Vice')
(I've already moved just a few up to the tail end of the main list) 

Undetermined position, or the very long tail, which include books that I purged (unread) but are available in Toronto libraries
Terry Darlington Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
Mulisch The Discovery of Heaven
Husain Basti
Albert Cossery A Splendid Conspiracy (UT)
Albert Cossery Laziness in the Fertile Valley (UT)
Laura Lush Fault Line
Andrew Crumey Sputnik Caledonia
Amy Waldman The Submission
4 poets : Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, Onjana Yawnghwe
Tash Aw Five Star Billionaire
Machado de Assis A Chapter of Hats: Stories
Machado de Assis The Devil's Church and Other Stories (UT)
Machado de Assis Esau and Jacob (UT)
Joseph Roth Right and Left  (UT)
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Cesare Pavese The Political Prisoner (UT)
Trichter Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Ben Winters The Last Policeman & Countdown City & World of Trouble
Frederick Busch The Mutual Friend (UT)
Frederick Busch Closing Arguments
Ken Kalfus The Commissariat of Enlightenment
Ken Kalfus A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Chloe Aridjis Book of Clouds
Sunjeev Sahota Ours Are the Streets (UT)
Rebecca Lee City Is A Rising Tide
Alex Shakar The Savage Girl
Jansson The True Deceiver
M. John Harrison Nova Swing
Richard Ford The Sportswriter (indeed the entire Bascombe trilogy and coda)
Bishop-Stall Ghosted
John Connolly The Book of Lost Things
Rowan Somerville The End of Sleep
Kenny Fries The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (UT)
Hisham Matar Anatomy of A Disappearance
Sergio de la Pava A Naked Singularity
Samuel Delany Babel-17
Samuel Delany Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Samuel Delany Nova ?
David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality
David Deutsch The Beginning of Infinity Explanations That Transform the World
Stephen Graham Cities Under Siege The New Military Urbanism
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot
Michael J. Meyer The Last Days of Old Beijing
Jennifer Egan The Invisible Circus
Joe LeSueur Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara
Clark Blaise The Meagre Tarmac Stories
Josephine Johnson Now in November (TPL - reference only...)
Martin Flavin Journey in the Dark (UT-Downsview)
Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination Essays on Literature and Society (NYRB edition)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Edmund Wilson Memoirs of Hecate County
The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs By Bierce, Ambrose (UT)
Roald Nasgaard The Mystic North
Michael North Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (UT)

Books (& Tariffs)

Virtually everything that I order on-line is used, though once in a while I order a dress shirt or even a pair of slacks, as essentially all of the mid-range clothing stores have closed down in Toronto (and America more generally).  So I probably will not be directly impacted by tariffs in that sense, though of course probably close to half of the produce we buy comes from the States, so our grocery bill will definitely go up.  As you probably know, the tariffs have been "paused" for 30 days, which helps Trump save face, but I suspect he will impose them after all, at least temporarily, in the early spring.

I've decided I am not going to North Carolina in March, and I don't see how I could go to upstate New York the first week of April.  This one is harder because The Fixx have rescheduled their cancelled concert for that weekend, and I probably could figure out some way to get between Rochester/Syracuse and NYC in time, but I just can't justify it.  The Orange One is too unpredictable, and his word doesn't mean anything,* so no one can count on the tariff threat (and other ways he is bullying Canada) being over by then and he will have moved onto something else, like hunting down minority hires in the government.  (I only wish I were kidding.)

On top of everything else, the uncertainty is causing the Canadian dollar to keep dropping against the US dollar, so I decided I really ought to bite the bullet and buy a few items before the Canadian dollar drops still further.  I had already ordered a Rohmer box set, and a Kieslowski Colours Trilogy, though the latter I had shipped to Toronto.

There are always a few books that catch my attention, particularly if it is particularly hard to find them in libraries or local book shops.  I have slowly been rebuilding my Craig Nova collection.**  I had ordered Incandescence, but eventually Amazon cancelled the order.  As I was searching for a replacement, I found a handful of copies of signed editions, generally of the original hardback edition.

But I have to say I am drawn to the first trade paperback edition, as it fits much better with the other books I have picked up lately, like Turkey Hash and The Geek.  

Nonetheless, I was quite surprised to find that shipping the signed copy (from the UK) was cheaper to Canada than to the States, so I went ahead and ordered that version and hope it turns up reasonably soon.  I'll start going through Nova's books again (just as I did in my 20s!), though I don't care nearly as much for his more recent forays into genre fiction.  I thought Wetware was quite bad, and I think he is trying to channel Eric Ambler in The Informer (which I am currently reading) with this tale of crosses and double-crosses set in Weimar Berlin, but I don't think he is really succeeding.  Anyway, I should wrap this up in another day or so.

I've been aware of Robert Coover for a long time, and actually read a handful of his racier short stories and Pinocchio in Venice.  When he passed away, several of the obituaries said that The Public Burning was more relevant than ever.  I have been looking in the local bookstores for a copy of this with no luck.  (Probably Elliot's books would have had a copy.)  So I broke down and ordered that.  (It does seem that DeLillo's Underworld may have some similarities to The Public Burning, but I am really not sure I want to reread Underworld.  Others have said that McElroy's Women and Men also has some connections to The Public Burning, and maybe this is the prompt I need to crack open the copy on my bookshelf.)  I don't know when I will have the Coover book in my hands, but I'll tackle it at some point and then McElroy in the not-so-distant future after that.

I also ordered a copy of the catalog for Southern/Modern, the exhibit at the Mint Museum, which just closed this past weekend.  At least this was on sale, to help make up for the slumping dollar.

Then I ordered a couple of other signed books by Maxine Kumin: Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief and Where I Live: New And Selected Poems 1990-2010.  I haven't read her work in quite some time, but I'm feeling I am going to be on a Kumin kick soon.

Interestingly, one book I have had in my basket for quite some time was currently unavailable, but the bookstore guy said he would be back on Thurs., and I could put in my order then.  That will likely be the last thing I have sent to my stepmom (in the States).  However, I'm sort of working my way through books that I found out about through libraries.  Somewhere along the way I must have seen a copy of Will Clarke's Lord Vishnu's Love Handles on a recommended read shelf (at a library), but this must actually have been in Vancouver or even Burnaby!  

TPL doesn't have a copy, which isn't a huge surprise, but Robarts doesn't either, which is unfortunate.  I did find a handful of signed copies online, and I thought I had found a copy where shipping to Canada wasn't outrageous.  However, I got all the way up to final checkout, and then the shipping price jumped up $10 or so, so I dropped it from my cart like a hot potato.  Since I actually would like to try to read the book this spring, sending it to the States (where there is no clear path for me to actually visit the States soon to pick my stuff up) seems a bit foolhardy.  While I generally don't like reading things completely electronically (and have fallen out of habit), I probably should just read the ebook in this case.  Still, I will try to remember to take a look for this at BMV and Circus Books and Seekers and maybe She Said Boom on Roncy (since I should get there before it closes this Saturday).

So after I wrap up this very short fable called Once a Greek by Durrenmatt (which seems a bit like some of Steinbeck's really short novels) and Nova's The Informer, I think the next thing to read will be Skvorecky's Two Murders in My Double Life, Gide's Lafcadio's Adventure, Lampedusa's The Leopard, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods.  Oh, and maybe whatever the book club that just was started at work is reading!  (Surprisingly, a lot of Kundera and Murakami.)  That's definitely more than enough, but I also will probably tackle a few more books from the library, including O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster (which seems short) and The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellano (which seems long).

* This commentary by Gaby Hinsliff seems quite on point: "Since nobody voted to Make America Poor Again, maybe ordinary Americans will soon tire of this. But Brexit showed that voters’ reaction to realising they’ve been had is often to double down, because it’s too painful to think they have brought this on themselves."

** I have just decided that I need to put them up on the actual shelves, not in one of several piles of books in my study, so I will probably swap Nova and Alice Munro (where I am fairly unlikely to hang onto her story collections after I read them once for somewhat obvious reasons...).  I also have been very slowly adding Iris Murdoch books on the same shelf.  I think I now have 7 (though I seem to have misplaced Under the Net (which I enjoyed a lot, so I probably hung onto it)), but have no intention of buying all 26 or so of her novels.

Long Day's Journey Into Art

Depending on exactly how you count the week and whether it wraps or not, I have been incredibly busy.

Last Sunday, I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf over at Canadian Stage.  I was not pleased when they said in the program that it was now closer to 3.5 hours (instead of 3), as I had to run back to Union Station and catch the Kitchener train over to Bloor (West) in order to see La Dolce Vita at the Revue.  I only had one regular train I could take, though I guess I probably could have taken the next UP Express, but it would have been cutting it close.  In the end, they got through the play in 3 hours and 15 minutes, so it wasn't that hard to get back to Union in time.  I thought the acting was good (interestingly some reviewers think only Martha Burns was amazing), but it is a hard play to actually enjoy.  Mac Fyfe who was playing the younger academic had some medical emergency, so they brought in an emergency replacement, but he had to carry around a script made to look like a personal notebook.  It is just an actor's nightmare to be thrown into that situation, particularly with a play as long as Virginia Woolf.  I thought he did well under the circumstances, but of course wish that Mac Fyfe was on stage.

Switching gears almost immediately to another long-form work of art (but one overall more palatable), I forgot just how cynical and awful Mastroianni's character is by the end of La Dolce Vita, once he succumbs to cynicism after the death of Steiner.  He certainly doesn't treat his fiancée well either, perhaps realizing that they are heading down the path of the couple in La Notte.  But overall it is still quite an interesting movie.  I think this time watching it, I felt the most compassion for Mastroianni's father, even though he is a bit of a letch.  Clearly the apple didn't fall far from the tree...

Monday, I was back at the Revue to see Antonioni's L'Avventura.  I wasn't quite sure how long this was.  It's another long film, only about 15 minutes shorter than La Dolce Vita!  I'll cut right to the chase; I didn't like this movie at all.  I never plan on seeing it again.  As I was digging through my DVDs (looking for Huston's The Dead, which still hasn't surfaced), I realized that I have 5 movies by Antonioni: L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert and Blow Up!  I think they are all Region 2 imports from the UK, no less!  Anyway, I will wait to see if the new Blu-Ray of La Notte shows up, and then I will try to sell off the DVD of La Notte and L'Avventura.  BMV will occasionally buy Region 2 DVDs, though you get peanuts for them.  I think it's pretty clear that I just am not on the same wavelength as Antonioni, with the partial exception of La Notte.

Tues. I ran over to the west side of town to see Talk is Free's production of For Both Resting and Breeding.  It's a play set in the future after society has been completely remodelled and made essentially genderless, and then a group of people decide to restore a house from the old days and act out these old gender roles.  I don't think it was quite as profound as it thought it was, but it was interesting, and it was a super intimate space.

Wed. was a heavy movie night.  I had to watch A Traveller's Needs because I wasn't able to see it last Sat.  Then I stuck around to see Blade Runner, which was amazing.  The special effects look like they have all been upgraded.  But it was a long night.

Thurs., I went to see the Jack Quartet doing contemporary pieces, including Philip Glass's String Quartet 5, which I believe was originally commissioned by Kronos Quartet.  I don't think I ever saw Kronos play this, but I did see them play Glass's 6th quartet out in Vancouver.  (It was amusing walking past the Meridian Centre to get to the concert.  The lines to get in to see Taylor Tomlinson were just huge!  I had wanted to squeeze this in, but it was essentially sold out and the few remaining tickets were all over $100, which I thought was just a bit over the top...)

Friday, I went to see the TSO performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and a Vaughan Williams's symphony.  In addition, I had to get there early because they were doing a pre-concert show - Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence.  (It was interesting that Jonathan Crow wasn't performing in the pre-show or in the main concert and Clare Semes filled in for him; she's at the very far left below.)  I enjoyed the Vaughan Williams's symphony.  While I am not going to get obsessed by it, I should try to see more of these symphonies when they come up.  (In fact, I found out the Hart House Orchestra was going to do Vaughan Williams Symphony #1 but because they added a full choir, there were literally no tickets available for the general public which seems incredibly daft.)  

Friday was actually a day that I risked biking because it was supposed to get above freezing.  I think when I left in the morning it was exactly freezing, but I stayed out far too late, and it was -3 on the way home and my hands hurt (and the bike lock kept freezing up!).  So I think I really need for a much longer stretch of warm weather (at either the tail end of Feb. or March before I try biking again).

Sat. was an extremely packed day.  I did get in my swimming, then went over to Carlton and watched Moonrise Kingdom, then went over to work for a couple of hours, then walked very briskly back to St. Lawrence Market to see The Last Showgirl.  Then I made a pitstop at Robarts to drop off a bunch of books on tourism, then headed out west to see Ripcord at Village Players.  I wasn't entirely sold on the play in the first half but the second half was stronger.  One of the actors had come down with COVID and they had a replacement who was reading directly off a script, but much more openly than the "understudy" in Virginia Woolf.  (I suppose two years ago or even last year, just the whiff of COVID in the cast would have caused the whole production to shut down, so I suppose in that sense we're fortunate that life doesn't completely grind to a halt due to COVID any longer...)

Sunday I wasn't quite as successful in squeezing everything in, but it was still a pretty busy day.  I started off going to the gym and getting groceries on the way back.  I got about halfway through making a red lentil dish when I had to leave.  I went over to Spadina to see Tafelmusik, which was incredible, including some Korean pieces to celebrate their successful tour of South Korea.  

After the concert, I ran into BMV (but they didn't have the titles I was looking for), Bulk Barn and then Seeker's Books.  I was able to sell my copy of Maqroll to them.  I made a quick stop at Dollarama, then hopped on the train to Dundas West.  It was back to the Revue to see The Conversation.  This was interesting as they had a Q & A about privacy beforehand.  (About the only thing I didn't get to in the end was stopping by Robarts to drop off Ginzberg's Family Lexicon, which I have just wrapped up.)

Aside from Hackman's very unconvincing miming on the saxophone, this was a very interesting film.  While I'm sure it was largely inspired by Blow Up, particularly the way the main character's evidence is stolen right out from under his nose, I just think it succeeds so much more (at least for me).  It looks like the Revue is showing Rashomon in March.  Now it is going to be another tight squeeze, since it is right after a Roy Thompson Hall concert (in fact it is the Vancouver Symphony on a cross-Canadian tour), so I have to hope that it doesn't run long!

Needless to say, I am a bit weary after running myself ragged this past week.  I don't have quite as much going on next week, but I'll probably run over to Carlton and see at least one TSO concert (and I'm still deciding on another...).  But Sat., I am seeing Linklater's entire Before trilogy in one go!  I guess I just never learn my lesson...  (And I'll probably see if I can make it over to Bau-Xi and 401 Richmond before the first movie.)