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...)
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