Update -- from Chicago

It is certainly a good thing that I can touch type, as many of the letters have simply washed off the keyboard at home. The reason I mention this is that I am typing in the dark, trying not to wake up anyone by turning on the lights.  (I'm not in the same room as them or the typing itself would keep them up.  Maybe I could have the lights on, but it doesn't really seem to affect my typing.)

What’s particularly interesting is that I never took any formal typing classes in high school for example, but I simply learned the keyboard in college when I was typing an enormous number of papers and journal entries. I actually remember the process where late at night I would be thinking of some sentence and basically watching it typed out on a keyboard in my head. This was pretty distracting for a while, though it obviously paid off.  (I think I also mentioned that I did pretty well as a temp for a few years.)  I also had this weird thing where I would be thinking of people in the dorm and then start thinking about them as the face cards in a deck of playing cards (I was playing a lot of cards at the time).

Well, it has been unbelievably stressful in terms of work and then cutting it close in getting to the airport. (I really didn’t want to pull the kids out early, since they are already missing a full day of school.)  The cabbie ran into very heavy traffic and it was not even 4 pm. The Gardiner was a total mess, though fortunately he didn’t insist on taking it. Then it turns out the stupid pedestrian bridge to the Island Airport is not open yet (it was supposed to be, but now they are saying it will open in the winter). That added another 15 minutes to the trip. (Thank goodness we had completely checked in on-line.) And for some crazy reason they only had one line open for the security screening for flights to the U.S. Now after we were through security we had close to 30 minutes to sit and relax (a tiny bit). That’s the main advantage – it only takes a few minutes to board a Porter flight, so you really can show up just an hour before and still make your flight.

The flight wasn’t too bad, though I think we ran into some headwinds and it was longer than our last trip. Hopefully going back will be a bit faster then.

It was super stressful trying to deal with the CTA, though I guess we’ve got it figured out, except if I take the kids on Sat. and my wife isn’t around for me to use her Ventra card. Hopefully we can coordinate and leave at the same time. Anyway it wasn’t so bad leaving on the Orange Line, but the Red Line we picked a bad car and to make it infinitely worse my wife sat next to some wino who proceeded to bug her the entire trip. (She has totally lost her street sense...) And whatever the CTA did to speed up the Red Line south of Cermak/Chinatown has failed. It was just interminably slow.

Towards the end of the trip, the wino starting trying to sell these nasty and yet clearly stolen hats. Then he light up a cigarillo and got a bunch of people yelling at him, and then he proceeded to get in a huge argument and claim he was going to pull a knife on this young man. It has been a not-so-gradual process, but now I thoroughly hate the south side of Chicago. I really do not want to stay here on our next visit and am actually thinking seriously of subletting an apartment instead.

Our fears were justified and our daughter threw up on the platform (just mercifully making it off the train). She says it is the long ride and not having the right kind of food in her stomach, though I suspect the stress of the crazy man (and then my stress in being around him) contributed. But it just makes it almost impossible to know whether we can safely travel with her. She throws up in cabs and she often throws up on the second leg of transit trips. But it isn’t all the time, and it frequently doesn’t happen when we are driving ourselves around. If that were the case, we would just not travel. Still, the places I want to try to go to over spring break all have terrible transit connections to the airport. I am so ready for her to be a couple of years older when she should finally be over this. I don’t like the small child phase at all and I certainly can’t conceive of why some people would constantly want babies and toddlers around.

So that was getting here.  I am hoping today goes a bit more smoothly.  The way back should be a little less stressful, since we don't have nearly as much time pressure.  And then I technically have Monday off (Canadian Thanksgiving), though I am sure I will have to do some work to catch up, and perhaps even try to get ahead of the curve with writing this next proposal so that doesn't end up quite so last minute.

Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2014

This post is jumping ahead of a couple of reviews I wanted to do (and owe faithful readers), only because it is easier to pull together and I would like to get it up while it is still somewhat timely.  Last Sat. evening I had a bit of trouble getting downtown to Nuit Blanche, but I did finally make it.  In some sense, I had kind of wanted to start at Union Station, so maybe it was for the best that I ended up on the subway, which took me right there.

There was an exhibit called The 8th Wonder of the World that was in the Great Hall.  Now believe me it wasn't easy to find the Great Hall, given that the station is still under construction and there was a general lack of signage.  But I did find it eventually.  (I actually enjoyed the fact that the little restaurants and a couple of stores in the Union Station concourse were buzzing at 9 pm, as it reminded me of Penn Station in New York.)  The installation was sort of a blow-up tentacled monster with an eye projected onto its top "pod" (perhaps slightly inspired by the one at the end of Watchmen) and there was some electronic music playing.

This was cool, but I didn't stick around that long. I then started heading down York to Bremner to go by the CN Tower where they had some other installations along the way.

I had been intrigued by a piece of a woman rowing in the clouds or in ice or both.  It was called Icebreaker by Diane Landry.

This is the promo shot, but the reality was a lot less magical.  I probably should have taken a bit of video, but I'm still figuring out my new phone and all its features.  This is the best shot I managed to get of the installation.  The physicality of the exhibit definitely seemed exhausting for sure, and they had women from a rowing team taking shifts all night!

 

There were a few things of interest along Bremner, but I generally felt it was the crowds out late that made it a special event.  There was also a totally different feel to the Bremner/Fort York crowds (a few more families and people interested in the art) versus the Queen Street/Spadina crowds where it was basically a street party, very similar to Taste of Chicago, and a lot of young people out for a good time, amused by the novelty of walking down the middle of Queen Street and most of Spadina.  (The Spadina streetcars were running, but not Queen, or they were rerouted somewhere completely different, perhaps up Dundas.)  I was thinking that it would be fun to take my son in another year or two, but that would mean keeping the visit much shorter.

Fort York had a few interesting exhibits, many focusing on light shows or video (there was one where there were male models walking down a runway in female fashions, showing how somewhat gross they looked when hairy bellies were exposed). 

I thought the most successful was a series of doors where the participants would choose one to go through (Past/Present/Future; Truth/Fiction; Lost/Found).  What was kind of cool was at the very end was a monitor where the choices were mapped and you could sit where you fit within your peers.

In general, most of the work was pretty conceptual, and most wasn't terribly artistic, but it is hard to come up with works that display well in the middle of the night!  Installations with participation worked best, like the doors project or a live action version of Chutes and Ladders or the screaming booths (see below).  I honestly just didn't feel I had the time to stand in line (many were quite long, particularly on Spadina), and the one time I actually waited for a performance, it was unbelievably lame.  Someone near me said it looked like the performers were running around trying to put giant slices of cheese onto a cracker (rather than being two people getting into an argument -- obviously).

 

While it was already later than I had planned to be out (about 10:30 by this point), I decided I really did want to check out some of the exhibits on Spadina and Queen, so I braved the streetcar (the Bathurst one actually), and I made it into the heart of Nuit Blanche.  

By far the most intriguing was Walk Among Worlds by Maximo Gonzalez which was a garden of globes where coloured lights changed the appearance of the garden.  Unfortunately, the line to get in was just too long, but even from the outside, you had a sense of how cool it was.

The walk down Queen Street was definitely overwhelmed by younger people.  Apparently, they shifted Nuit Blanche away from Yonge Street due to too many drunk people.  I think there was a fair bit of drunken revelry that still going on along Queen, but for me it was ok.  I heard some people say it was too commercialized or that they were sick of Nuit Blanche, and others who were just entranced by the idea that so many people would come out and take part in this event (even if the art itself was somewhat secondary).  I guess I do fall in the second camp, although I think if I had only seen Queen/Spadina and not Bremner/Fort York, I might have been a bit more negative about the evening.  Certainly one of my co-workers was really put off by it, saying that the art was ugly and not displayed well at all.

This artist (outside Lulumon) was attempting to meditate in a big plastic bubble.  As you might imagine, there were plenty of passersby who argued that this wasn't "art."

But fewer would argue that the palm trees in the cherry-pickers (by David Brooks) weren't art, but there wasn't much more "craft" involved. 

I was pretty thoroughly exhausted by this point, but I had promised myself to end at City Hall (Nathan Philips Square).

There was some exhibit in the fountain where they had turned the water black and had this video about oil pipelines being safe etc. yada yada yada.  Then there two graffiti artists who climbed on these oil tanks in the fountain and painted skulls on them.  Everyone predictably cheered (and then turned quickly back to all their consumer products that are only possible in a carbon-intensive world).  But it was so amusing reading comments in the paper later with people thinking that this was a serious corporate exhibit put on by the energy producers of Calgary, rather than being performance art against the oil sands.  In other words, a lot of people got punked.

There seemed to be another fairly trite performance artist but what was quite amusing was a probably unsanctioned person drawing enormous penises on the sidewalk in chalk right next to the performance artist, possibly making the statement on the quality of works at Nuit Blanche in general or that anyone now can do modern art.  Anyway, I didn't take any photos of that.

I had mostly come to City Hall to see some piece that was supposed to be in the loading docks (Dress Rehearsal by Tor Lukasik Foss).  It was supposed to look something like this.

I think security concerns changed the location a bit and there were some other changes.  It ultimately looked like this, which is still decent but slightly less gripping.

And that wrapped up my long evening of art.  I think I'll still go next year but with slightly lower expectations of the art and more of a focus on just enjoying the communal aspect of it.  And with that, I really have to go, as I am running quite late.

Plan needed

On the bright side of things, I am slowly finding quite a few books (and DVDs) I had misplaced.  One of them (2001) I want to show at least a little bit to my son to see if he is interested in an upcoming screening (of a 70 mm print!) at TIFF Lightbox.  There is only one book that I really wanted back in my hands and that is von Rezzori's Death of My Brother Abel.  I am so tempted to just order another copy, but I have to be sensible.  I am just drowning in books here, and it is in fact in the Toronto library (and can be checked out, which is not always the case).

On the negative side of things, even after I break down all these boxes, there is essentially nowhere to put them, though I will see if I can squeeze another bunch into this small storage room on the 2nd floor.  This is where we just need a garage desperately.  Anyway, I have roughly 1.5 boxes of the books that are supposed to be on the shelves (high-end fiction and poetry) and only half a shelf free.  I have 13 or so boxes of overflow fiction.  I have at least 5 boxes of urban books with nowhere to go (not even counting anything vaguely transportation or planning related, which has all gone off to work).  And I just uncovered another linear foot of art books, where I just have nowhere to stash them except in a few corners of the living room.

So I need a plan for disposal and reorganization.  The main plan of attack is to swerve into the lower reaches of the TBD pile (after the Russians and An Ermine in Czernopol) to get rid of a lot of books.  I even picked a small handful that I will probably never read and I'll try to exchange them at BMV Books after we are back from our mini-vacation.  Even getting 5 or 6 out of here would feel like positive progress.

While I probably should go cold turkey and just get rid of all the urban books, that is probably just a bit too radical.  First, I need to see if the majority of them are at Robarts or the Toronto Public Library.  Second, I'll probably keep at least for the short term the books on South Africa and China, particularly Shanghai.  I still haven't entirely given up on the idea of writing this chapter, and I would want them around at a moment's notice.  And it will be extremely hard to give up books on New York, Chicago, Toronto and even Vancouver.  There are still quite a few books that would purge  -- and many of the others could go into boxes, though I'd still have to find a place for them.  I hope there is somewhere I could get some money for them, but if not, I can just donate them.  Maybe to UT grad students this time around.

So it's not really much of a plan (and doesn't address CDs or DVDs at all), but that's how I think I will be coping in the near term.  It's just hard, as virtually all the books I've brought into my house had some meaning and value to me at the time.  I don't really like saying some part of my mental life is over (like urban studies), but of course, I really am just being silly in the end, since libraries do exist and the books are just leaving my basement.  I can always get a copy again if need be...


And that's certainly a part of the problem, that while the books coming into the household have slowed to a trickle, I am not willing to cut them down completely.  There are still too many books that are of great interest to me.  Even last night, I was pretty interested in following up on George Walker's plays after seeing Escape from Happiness.  (There's definitely a short review coming of that -- eventually.)  And I got his two volumes of East End plays, since I only had his Suburban Motel plays.  Even if I hold out a bit longer, I am almost certainly going to order the von Rezzori, and so forth.  Do I really think the kids will want to inherit these books?  Maybe. I guess at the back of my mind I hope so.

One positive move was that I did break down and get my Robarts library card, so I will be a bit better about checking out books rather than buying them.  After I was done with that, I went up and down Harbord a bit, looking for Atticus Books.  Well, I couldn't find it.  One bookstore I used to visit has become a Tibetan religious center or something of the sort.  Another one has converted over into a science fiction bookstore.  I probably should have gone poking around in the basement, but I didn't feel up to it.  (I am trying not to get sucked into reading another genre right now.)  And there was a bookstore that seemed to specialize in psychology.  Odd.  I was a bit annoyed, since I was sure Atticus had been around there.  When I got home, I did a quick internet search.  It turns out that Atticus has been an internet-only seller for at least 3 or 4 years, so I don't know why I kept getting the physical location mapped at Harbord.  Probably just as well if I don't hang out in as many bookstores, though that hasn't really changing my buying habits.  Higher shipping prices has done more on that score.  But I do think it is sad that that the generation after the Millennials might not know what a used bookstore looks or feels like.  (Reruns of the brilliant Black Books will not be enough...)

The last positive news is that after I devised this so-called plan, I did find that of the urban books, there are in fact quite a number I do not have a burning desire to read, so maybe I will be able to unload a couple of boxes right away and then leave the harder decisions for later.

Over-doing it to death

Well, surely that is a bit over dramatic. But it is a good excuse to link to James Brown and the J.B.s Doing it to Death. As I already mentioned, it is definitely getting harder for me to do as much as I used to, though I still can handle a fair when called for, which was certainly the case this past few weeks.

Last week was a particularly challenging one, as I was still recovering from working on a couple of proposals and quals submittals.  The good news is that we were shortlisted for one project, though that probably means by next week we will be working on yet another proposal.  It is simply a truism of consulting that you spend a huge amount of time chasing work, and the people who win work are rewarded far more than the people who get the work done.  So I've been reflecting on that a lot lately.  Anyway, eventually the work does need to get done, and the smart clients are the ones who become the squeaky wheel, since they get their work delivered more or less on time.  "Reasonable" clients who stay silent and accept project delays end up getting less attention.  Well, TransLink got a new project manager who knows how to play the game, and consequently I had to really buckle down and wrap it up.  I should have a long time ago, but 1) I have a hard time getting everything compressed into model documentation and 2) there is a small piece of me that doesn't want to let go of the TransLink modelling work and was just hanging onto a bit of the work.  Anyway, I have turned in model documentation that covers probably 75% of the model, coming up a bit short in discussions of the model calibration (though honestly that was given short-shrift at TransLink given all the other things we were forced to do) and 90% of the Users' Guide.  So it is a pretty big weight off my shoulders, even if it is not at 100%.  I may actually have a bit more mental space now to think about other things, including this paper abstract I need to wrap up tonight!  I do hope this means I will be able to do a bit more concentrated reading now and certainly more creative writing.  I am even thinking of sneaking in a few DVDs over the next few days, though that may not actually happen.

So, as I said, I was working quite late many days over the past two weeks, though I think it finally has paid off in getting on top of a few projects.  I did manage to go to dinner with a former TransLink colleague visiting Toronto for a wedding, and then my wife and I finally had the baby-sitter over and went out for a proper dinner.  I did give up on a handful of concerts, however, due to these time pressures.

Still, I managed to take the kids to the Gardiner Museum last weekend, and this weekend I took my son to the ROM (it was free for AGO members) and then to a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest.  It was well-done, and I have to say I wish I had managed to see them doing Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) last season, which apparently was quite a good production.  Sigh.  (I also managed to miss some college in New West doing this a couple of years ago when it was so poorly advertised, and basically the same thing when I missed The Rez Sisters in New West, though then I was recovering from an illness.)  I'm sure I'll see it live eventually, but it might be quite a while before it comes back through Toronto.  I don't think I would travel too far to see it, as there is still so much else to see.  In fact, assuming I don't just drop off my feet (and I manage to finish cooking this vegetarian paella), I'm off to see a darker Canadian play (George Walker's Escape from Happiness) this afternoon.

Why am I so tired?  Well, after dropping off my son and grabbing a bite to eat, I went back out for Nuit Blanche, which is an all-night art event.  I think this is a direct import from Montreal, which probably still does it a bit better, but I thought it was a lot of fun.  This is my special TTC pass for the event.

And while I appreciate that the TTC tried to get into the spirit of things by running the subway all night, along with the streetcars, there was a bit of a dropping of the ball.  The Queen streetcar just did not show up for 15 or so minutes while there were 7 going the other way.  One finally came by and was so packed to the gills that the driver didn't even slow down.  So I hiked back to Carlaw and took the 72 Pape bus up to the subway and thence to Union Station where I started my exploration of Nuit Blache about 45 minutes later than I had expected or hoped.  I guess I was out and about doing Nuit Blanche from about 8:30 until 12:45 am, which was a lot longer than I had originally planned. This night definitely deserves it's own blog post, particularly if I can figure out how to get the photos off my new phone.  I basically was debating getting off the subway at College and taking the streetcar versus going to Pape.  Unfortunately, I made the wrong decision. I had assumed the buses would be running late, but they stopped many of them, so I was stuck pretty far from home.  I could have walked it, but my feet were just killing me, so I cabbed it that last leg.  Had I known, I would have just stuck it out on the streetcar.  C'est la vie.  It certainly didn't spoil the whole night.  (Maybe when I was younger and had more of an ideological opposition to cabs it would have.)  As I said, the review of the evening will follow as soon as I can share the photos.

One thing that I did manage to get done was read Dostoevsky's The Double.  I found it an interesting set-up and it kind of reminded me of a good way of one of the Black Books episodes where Bernard has basically gotten so drunk that he can't remember why some of his friends are shunning him.  The rest of the book didn't live up to this, however. In the end, I found this really disappointing.  Not so much due to the ending, which I found awfully obscure, but the main character (the "hero") seems so vacillating and really unappealing.  Also, he had these same characteristics even before he encountered his double, and this was for me one of the major shortcomings.  Ultimately, I didn't really care whether he triumphed or not.  It was a bit like one of those SNL skits that goes on far, far too long.  How could no one really focus on the fact that he had an exact twin with the exact same name?  Really?  Gogol can kind of get away with it in a short story (though frankly I've never been that enamoured of "The Nose"), but the longer this dragged on the more completely implausible it seemed.  I basically agreed with the contemporary critics who said it was second-rate Gogol.  Interestingly, it has recently been made into a movie (directed by Richard Ayoade), and I am not sure I want to see it now, though perhaps I will, given that it has a pretty-killer cast.  I would hope that it at least somewhat addresses the incredibleness of finding one's exact double, whereas most people in the novel hardly rate it.  I'll also be interested if they change up the ending at all, which is pretty unsatisfactory.  Curiously, I would say that the cult movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising seems directly inspired by The Double, though I don't see any other people making that connection, so perhaps it is all in my head.*  I just hope that I find The Gambler, a much more mature work, to be more rewarding, even though it apparently was written in a fever pitch.  (The back story of The Gambler is fascinating for sure, but I will have to return to this theme on another day.)

* Whoops, somehow I missed this very favourable review of Adoade's The Double which does make that connection. I suppose I will try to get around to the film one of these days.  I guess I missed it playing in Canada (due to stresses of moving) but it might have popped up on Netflix by now.

Dostoevsky's Demons (background)

Sometimes I find it hard to get chronology correct, particularly when I am looking into when an author wrote certain works.  And this gets more muddled the further I am going from my own time and culture.  As a prime example, it feels to me that Demons sort of prefigures Crime and Punishment, and that Dostoevsky was "working up" to Crime and Punishment, though in fact Crime and Punishment was the earlier work and any connections between the two are deliberate or unconscious echoes in Demons.

I suppose I am imposing my (limited) knowledge of Dostoevsky's life onto his work and assuming that the pattern holds -- he got involved to some degree with progressive or utopian groups considered deelpy "subversive," he was caught and went through a mock execution (which many felt worsened his epilepsy), he was exiled to Siberia for 8 years and only later was he allowed to return and granted permission to publish his various works.  Thus, the logical order of the books might be something like Demons (all about the mischief caused by self-proclaimed revolutionaries), Crime and Punishment (where one could argue that Raskolnikov ultimately welcomes being caught and paying for his crimes with exile) and Memoirs from the House of the Dead (a lightly fictionalized treatment of his exile in Siberia).

However, the order is exactly the reverse, so one might say that Dostoevsky was sort of processing through his life traumas backwards, though certainly starting with the painful outcome of his "crimes" (i.e. exile in Siberia) and then moving to the root causes.  While one can definitely see some strong echoes of Memoirs from the House of the Dead in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn doesn't really put forward the idea that there is redemption in suffering, as he never accepted the notion that he was at all to blame, whereas Dostoevsky does internalize his "guilt" to a considerable extent.  After his return from exile, Dostoevsky rejects completely (as far as I can tell) his former political vision.  He actually turns against Turgenev, who was still accepted in progressive circles, and there is quite the poison-pen portrait of Turgenev in Demons (the vain writer Karmazinov).  His works do carry a tinge of mysticism about them and the most foolish characters are generally the ones who continue to reject religion.  This may be why Isaiah Berlin never really takes a shine to him and discusses him only briefly in Russian Thinkers (largely dismissing him*), though he has a lot to say about Tolstoy, who basically strikes me as having the same sort of religious leanings as Dostoevsky and one who suffered far less for his political views.  I still have a ways to go in Russian Thinkers, and I'll certainly be returning to this general theme of how political many of these great Russian novels really are.

This post is going astray to the point that I think I'll break it in half and write the actual review of Demons in the second half, which I should be able to get to tonight (famous last words!).  Anyway, in the introduction, Pevear argues that this is one of the five great novels upon which Dostoevsky's fame rests. (I should note that until fairly recently Demons was more frequently translated as The Possessed.)  The other three are clearly Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot (as it happens I don't rate The Idiot at all but many others do).  I'm pretty sure they don't mean The Adolescent (or Raw Youth).  Despite Pevear's spirited defense of it in their recent translation, it has pretty much always been classified as a minor work. I think he must have meant either Notes from Underground or The Gambler, and probably the former.**  It doesn't really matter, but I am just curious.

Next week I am going to tackle The Double for what I believe is the first time (though first reading some of the stories by Gogol that inspired Dostoevesky to write The Double) as well as The Gambler.  Looking over the list of major and semi-major works by Dostoevsky, that would only leave a few left which I have never read before:
Poor Folks
The Landlady (which I may well skip)
Uncle's Dream
The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of the Family)
The Insulted and Humiliated
X The Eternal Husband
The Adolescent

Now I don't really feel I have to read all of these, or indeed perhaps any of them, but if I do, I will probably try to end on The Eternal Husband or The Insulted and Humiliated rather than with The Adolescent (which pace Pevear still strikes me as fairly minor).  In any case, I think my time would be somewhat better spent in rereading Crime and Punishment (tentatively slated for 2015) and The Brothers Karamazov (not yet put back into queue) and certainly reading Tolstoy's War and Peace for the first time, and only then would I consider these somewhat secondary works.  But of course, it is so hard to tell.  I ended up liking Demons quite a bit, though its impact would have been greater had I read it a bit earlier (and certainly at a time when I could have gotten through it in a week or two rather than stretched out to close to a month!).  So the proper review is yet to follow, but I have quite a bit planned for this afternoon, so I have to go.



* I really wonder if it is that fact Berlin is on "Team Ivan (Turgenev)" and not on "Team Fyodor" that makes him appear so dismissive of Dostoevsky.  Anyway, the more typically asked question is Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy.  There are some quite interesting comments here, including the bon mot that Dostoevsky is for adolescence and Tolstoy for adulthood.  This is naturally insulting, but I suppose there is some truth in it.  I did read a fair bit of Dostoevsky in my teen years (and Fathers and Sons) but almost no Tolstoy, and that did shape me (aside from the religious frenzy one finds periodically in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov) to the point where I naturally still side with Dostoevsky.  You get them young, and they can never escape that influence.  It's probably for the best that in my teens I was unaware of the spat between Dostoevsky and Turgenev.

** Upon rereading that is exactly what he means -- that The Adolescent is ranked among Dostoevsky's best 5 novels, though I think this is only in Pevear's imagination.

Before there were blogs, pt. 2 (teaser only)

I guess this is truly just a teaser, but it is so disappointing to find that the scanning is so hit or miss.  On the last attempt it went through pretty cleanly.  This time around -- a quite lengthy discussion of what it was like to be a teacher in Newark as the state was preparing to take over, mixed in with a discussion of a poetry reading I was involved in and some slightly shorter discussions of poets I was reading at the time -- absolutely none of it was processed through the OCR conversion process.  I'm glad I have it down.  I remember doing these things, but through a veil.  Reading what I wrote at the time makes it return so much more vividly (and of course I wish I had written even more about those times). While I can certainly retype all of it, I wonder if it is worth trying to track down the old hard drive that had my Mac files (I was still using a Mac at that time) and if any of that was converted over.  The good news is that I can still read the scan perfectly well, and I'm still a fairly good typist (I actually made a pretty good living as a temp in my summers off and then for a whole year between University of Toronto and Northwestern University).  But it is a lot of typing, and I am definitely not up for that tonight.  I will come back to this in a week or so (if I haven't turned up the old files) and then I'll post the full account from the journal.  So stay tuned.

Beethoven the Revolutionary

I have to admit my thoughts on Beethoven are fairly routine, not going much deeper than he was great.  But in fact he was probably more influential than Mozart in terms of shaping the classical music tradition.  I learned only a year ago that he was perhaps the prime mover in coming up with the orchestral concertos in their current form.  Previously, you had the soloist state a theme and then the orchestra would follow and there was relatively little interaction between the two.  This started to change around his Piano Concerto #4 and really took off in Piano Concerto #5 where the soloist and orchestra may play different themes and certainly play quite different melodies at the same time.  I received these pearls of wisdom at a pre-concert talk last season (when I managed to make the entire Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle).  In fact, over the past 3 years, I've seen his piano concerto #5 three times.  I had yet another opportunity this November, but really something had to give.  I will see be seeing piano concertos #3 and #4 paired with two 2 Nielsen symphonies (#2 and #4), so that should be fun.

The fall arts season has started with a vengeance.  This week is Culture Weekend with a number of free museums open to the public.  (Sadly I'm pretty wiped out from work so I may just rest tomorrow, but I plan on taking the kids or at least my son to the Gardiner on Sunday.)  The following weekend is Nuit Blanche, though I may be so overbooked with theatre, that I skip it.  And then we'll be in Chicago for a weekend! So far I've only gotten my tickets to the TSO, but I'll probably be booking a few other things very quickly before the sell out (the Yo-Yo Ma concert at TSO in late May is definitely going to be one hot ticket).  (Actually, I did get tickets to Stevie Wonder for late November, and they weren't actually that hard to come by.)

So far, in terms of chestnuts, it is looking like 2 Beethoven symphonies (#7 and #9), 2 Beethoven piano concertos, Dvorak's 8th Symphony (getting to the 9th may just be too difficult this year), Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony and probably Vivaldi's Four Seasons.  Slightly less frequently performed, there is Brahms' Double Concerto and Elgar's Enigma Variations, which I heard done quite well last year at the VSO.  It doesn't look like any Prokofiev this year (last season the VSO did a rousing version of Prokofiev's Symphony 5).  And maybe just a single Shostakovich symphony, so maybe the interest in him is fading just a bit from a peak a couple of years ago.  Now I do have the opportunity to see Shostakovich's piano quintet, which I'd like to see but just comes in the middle of a huge number of concerts, so a little restraint is in order.  (I'm pretty sure I saw the Vogler Quartet do this in Vancouver last season -- I mean if I can work it in, I'll see.)  One that is sort of tempting, but a bit overpriced is Tafelmusik doing Beethoven's Symphony 5 (and Beethoven's Mass in C Major).  While I'm sure they will do a fantastic job, it just seems a bit of a cash cow, since it isn't really the music that Tafelmusik really specializes in.  Still, if I want to hear Beethoven's 5th this season, I think it is my only chance (unless the Casa Loma orchestra pops up again).  I do have a more traditional Tafelmusik event on my calendar for April, and that should be fun.

As I was trying to look up some of this information, I found out that the Pacifica Quartet is going to be putting on an awesome concert in Vancouver in mid Jan (2015) with Dvorak's Piano Quintet and Shostakovich's 9th String Quartet, and I would strongly encourage anyone vaguely interested to go.  However, I can't even get jealous -- or regret for a minute that I am here -- as I will probably be in Washington D.C. on that date anyway.  I've also seen Pacifica do both pieces: the Shostakovich as part of their amazing Shostakovich cycle and then the Dvorak all the way back in 2000, just before they really made it big.  (It would be great if Pacifica makes a tour through Toronto, though it won't happen this season.)  I've only seen Dvorak's 8th Symphony 2 or 3 times (last month at Casa Loma and in 2011 the VSO paired it with Shostkovich's Cello Concerto 2!) but the 9th Symphony at least 5 times, including the VSO in 2013, in Prague and 3 times with the CSO!).  So while I do hope to see it again fairly soon, I probably don't have to knock myself out this season.

Ok, so to get back to tonight, I was at the TSO to see Beethoven's 9th Symphony.  I'm pretty sure I've only seen it one time previously, as I've always been scared off by the length.  At any rate, the conductor, Peter Oundjian, gave a few pointers on things to watch for, particularly how the cellos and basses are almost in a recitative with the rest of the orchestra at the start of the 4th movement.  It turns out that Beethoven was essentially the first composer to fuse voices in symphonic form, something later picked up Mahler.  So quite the musical revolutionary.

My seat was kind of strange, basically hanging over the side of the stage and overlooking the symphony, though the sound was still decent and not too unbalanced.  Fortunately, the other seats in my subscription are a bit further back and slightly more centered.  I was right on top of the cellos (I don't know if they will always have them reversed or if this was just for Beethoven) and could really see what Oundjian meant about the start of the 4th.  There was one major advantage in being that far up and that was how close I was to the Mendelssohn Choir, which meant being surrounded by voices throughout the 4th movement.  It's really hard to describe how overwhelming it was (but in a good way).  I doubt I will ever feel the symphony that viscerally again.  It was definitely an experience.  And with that, I think it is finally time for bed.  It has been a super-long week.