Life Away from Fringe

The Toronto Fringe wrapped up Sun.  I never did get around to posting my Fringe schedule, so I will do it retrospectively at some point with comments on what I saw.  I would say I enjoyed pretty much everything I saw with one unfortunate exception.  I will also post a few thoughts on my show and how things went and what I might do differently the next time.  (Each time at Fringe you learn something new...)  But I'll just write down some non-Fringe thoughts for now.

My son came down from Ottawa (admittedly in order to see my Fringe play).  He was scheduled to leave tomorrow, but with the extreme heat, Via is saying that the trains will have multi-hour delays(!), so it looks like he will stay until Thurs. or maybe even Friday.  It has been quite hot here.  Last week wasn't so bad, but the first week of Fringe there was a massive heat wave.  Which is back now.  I'm still planning on biking to work tomorrow, but will try to set up before the worst of the heat, and then perhaps I'll go swimming on the way home, which might help a bit.

I haven't done too much other than Fringe for the past two weeks.  I had wanted to see Silent Running over at the Paradise.  But it overlapped with Galen's Grocer: the Musical, which was amusing but quite goofy, and Night Journey, so I really couldn't make it.  I also had thought very seriously about catching the first set of Kirk MacDonald with Neil Swainson at the Rex.  This is very similar to the group that I saw at the Jazz Bistro, though Neil wasn't sitting in.  In the end, my wife and son went to an Indian restaurant (after coming back from You Choose), and then I biked off to see 2076 at Sweet Action Theatre.  While I would have enjoyed the set, 2076 was pretty good, and I wouldn't really wanted to have missed it.  I'll probably be going to the Jazz Bistro once or even twice this week, so it's not like I won't get my jazz fix in.

That day I also took them to the AGO (in between my Fringe show and You Choose), so that was at least something different.  The current exhibition is Impressionist paintings on loan from Dallas.  The exhibition runs through mid Oct., so I'll go back several times.  The room with the two Monet's was definitely the most popular, and it was very hard to see the paintings at all.  Here's one of them:

Claude Monet, The Water Lily Pond (Clouds), 1903

My favourite was probably this painting by Pissarro:

Camille Pissarro, The Fish Market, Dieppe: Grey Weather, Morning, 1902

I really have not been able to keep up with my reading.  I did read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in the course of a single day!) for Book Club, but didn't care for it very much.

I am midway through Copland's Microserfs, and this is a bit more to my taste.  It explores a world that I remember, even though I was never particularly into coding in the late 80s or 90s and mostly just used computers for course work.  I'm pretty sure I never took a course in computer science or computer engineering, though by the late 90s I was using quite specialized programs for work (and indeed the need to move back and forth between work and home computers led me away from Macs in the late 90s, as they were not compatible with these programs).

I finally gave up on Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero.  It just felt so incredibly static with all these unborn babies trying not to be born to stick it to the (Chilean) dictatorship, but nothing happened at all even as I skipped ahead.  (In some ways, Midnight's Children also deals with a large cadre of children, albeit those that were born, but then these children get up to all kinds of things in the real world.)  Apparently, there is this whole meta-fictional thing going where thousands of years in the future, they are trying to uncover the truth about the events in the book (not unlike what happens in Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play) but either I didn't reach that stage or more likely I didn't understand what Dorfman was trying to convey.  I just found it all intentionally obscure, and I generally can't bear books like that.  My recollection is that Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, which came out a couple of years before Manuel Sendero, is far more interesting and engaging.  I'd like to try to read it this year, though I am certainly worried that I won't like it nearly as much this time around.

I have started Jennifer Offill's Weather, and this is far more to my taste, so I plan to read this and a few other short books that I am fairly sure I will like, including Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and perhaps rereading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net and perhaps Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (which I am less sure I will like, but it is quite short whenever I can actually get it from the library) to try to get back into my reading habits.  I guess that is enough for now, as I do need to get back to work.  My next posts will probably be those Fringe round-up posts, but I definitely don't have time to tackle them now.